Skip to content

Monthly Archives April 2006

singularity

Which refers, in physics, to a point where the physical description of events you happen to be using simply doesn’t work anymore. Maybe you end up dividing by zero at x=1, or you end up with infinite mass. Its an evocative word, though, and like all evocative words, it gets adopted by everyone coming and going to describe some phenomenon that the user in question thinks it might refer to.

It finds a good usage in technological sociology, where it describes a point at which things change so much we can’t predict what the world will be like after the change. It is a barrier we can’t see past, and such a radical change that all our current ways of looking at the world will be useless. This kind of technological/sociological singularity comes on (we are given to believe) suddenly, and many people predict we are approaching one now.

Certainly the pace of technology is rapid (does it hit infinity if we extrapolate a few years into the future?) and changes to the way we see the world are correspondingly quick to propogate. When do we say we’ve had a singularity, though? Where do we draw that line? Surely where we are now and where we were 200 years ago constitutes a divide that none of the founding fathers could have seen across. Did we undergo some singularity between then and now? When?

Posted 19 April 2006 § Philosphy ‡ Comments (1)

onions as they relate to life

In The Onion this week an editorial which seems to sum up something profound about the human condition. A statement about Free Will, perhaps, though you don’t look in the mood for a detailed analysis right now.

In Hero, the 1992 Dustin Hoffman movie (not to be confused with Ying Xiong, which had very little Hoffman in it, just the one cameo where his nose is sliced off by “Flying Snow”, a scene that was cut and can only be found in the DVD special features), Dustin Hoffman’s character (it was Hoffman, right?) explains to his 12 year old son about life: (paraphrasing) “Life is like an onion, layer after layer of bullshit. You keep peeling away layers of bullshit only to find more layers underneath. So you find a layer of bullshit you can live with, and thats where you stop.”

In Hawaii (perhaps also Vidalia, Georgia and Walla Walla, Washington) the Maui sweet onions are planted by placing the seed practically on top of the soil, so that the onion, instead of growing in an elongated fashion down into the earth, spreads out into a wide fat bulb. Consider this when you find your ideas recieved by shallow people, perhaps depth is not everything.

Lastly, a culinary note: they don’t make you cry as much if you use a very sharp knife, and get it wet first.

Posted 19 April 2006 § Personal ‡ Comments (0)