aug 18-19 vlog, where i decided not to waste the weather by essentially wasting the night.

to be clear: modern physics has obvious engineering applications, and that's fine. but, i really don't care about that.

what i care about is an epistemology - a way to understand the universe. as mentioned, i realized quickly that i'm not a scientist: i don't think like one. the few friends i had were always musicians; i never got along well with the kids in these science classes i took through high school, but i guess i thought things would be different when i got to university (they weren't). it's not like i found a group of like-minded people in the math department, either, but there were at least a couple of hopeless social outcasts in the math program at carleton that i could smoke and make misanthropic wisecracks with.

the reality is that i would have probably found more like-minded people in the philosophy department if i had bothered to go over and look, because i was approaching science as a philosopher rather than as a scientist - i wanted all the knowledge to myself, with little interest in actually doing anything with it.

i mean, people asked me what i was going to do with a math degree, and it always struck me as a stupid question: as though the purpose of going to school is to prepare yourself for your place as a cog in the system, or to better the world or something. it didn't even cross my mind. i didn't have an answer, because i'd never really thought about it. i just wanted a search for knowledge.

at the end of the process, i resigned myself to existing in too primitive of a space in human evolution to get the kind of answers i want. so, just hand me my guitar, instead.

but, i'm not going to deny the engineering applications of modern physics. it works well enough from that perspective, even if i think it's up against a really hard block in the near future.

but, as a way to actually understand the universe, modern physics really fails terribly in producing satisfying conclusions - and that's all i ever cared about.

but, let's say high school physics was all modern physics - let's say i went through a curriculum that didn't even mention classical physics. no apples falling on people's heads, just straight to relativity in a curved universe and god playing dice at the subatomic level. would i have enrolled in a physics program in the first place?

emphatically: no. i enrolled to study a newtonian universe.

i'd be a lot less cynical about physics if they had just told me the fucking truth in the first place. but, i would have probably studied biology, instead.

put simply: they lied to me three times, then they put something completely preposterous in front of me and asked me to believe it, and i simply didn't - instead, i walked away.

and, i've never regretted it.

but, i need to be explicit: i didn't believe it. well, how many times do you expect you can lie to me before i tell you that?

there is an underlying theory. give me a call when you work it out.

i don't know if they still teach kids classical physics or not, but i can tell you that i didn't want to let go of something i understood well for something that struck me as past the point of absurd and into the point of dystopic disinformation. i mean, i realized pretty quickly that i wasn't a scientist. i never had that quest for discovery that i guess a lot of kids had; i didn't have this zeal to fix the errors or solve the mysteries, i was just frustrated that i had to take the same course every year because it was wrong last year. rather than take the information as it was presented, fully cognizant that i'd eventually be told most of it is wrong, i found myself trying to get ahead of the program and figure out what they were going to tell me is actually wrong. the intent may have been to foster skepticism, but it instead left me unable to even take any of it seriously. i went for the assumptions nobody touches: photons obviously have mass, but you're assuming they don't, so then what?

a scientist would look at all of this as a challenge to work through. i wasn't remotely interested. what i wanted was to understand the truth, not to spend my time doing experiments and guessing what assumption was useful and what wasn't.

math offered me something that modern physics couldn't: it let me search for truth, rather than leave me guessing at approximations. but, i could have switched into math and taken physics courses on the side. i didn't. and, the reason i didn't was that i hated doing the labs; i hated using my hands, i hated doing the actual science. my electives were actually mostly math courses.

i've never fully shaken the idea that what they're teaching at the universities is a distraction, and that the government is carefully pulling kids out of classes to teach them the actual science. that's how little sense that quantum physics made to me: it struck me as a conspiracy against reason.

i don't want to live in a world defined by random probabilities. i want a theory of physics. and, i'm not interested in learning about the quantum theory, for that reason - whether it is true or not.

i've never claimed to be a physicist, or to have any expertise in physics. in fact, i've stated repeatedly that i abandoned physics very early because i thought that the quantum theory was absolute bullshit. and, i still think that. i exist in a largely classical reality.

i have never taken any advanced courses in physics.

my degree is in mathematics.

http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/caivano-and-elliott-warning-a-new-nafta-could-prevent-vital-medicines-getting-to-millions-worldwide

the legally correct way to have this discussion is to frame it around property rights, and extend concepts of speech that exist in real life into the digital world. it's not as difficult as you might think, except that there's a piece missing - we don't have any publicly owned spaces on the internet. in real life, it is the public square that protests take place in for the precise reason that nobody can clear them out - and we have constitutional rights that ensure nobody can clear them out. this just doesn't currently exist on the internet.

further, having the backbone of the internet run by private companies is a lot like having privately owned roads - it's not sustainable in the long run. the actual internet is of course run by the military; in the long run, it's inevitable that this will be maintained as a part of municipal, regional and national infrastructure. i've long argued for the nationalization of transmission lines and dns servers - and, yes, that means the cops can pull you over if you're drunk, but there should be constitutional protections that prevent them from stopping you from marching down the street. having all of the streets in private hands is a kind of technological feudalism. it may perhaps be when they abolish net neutrality and start charging tolls that we stand up and reclaim the lines.

WHOSE BROADBAND SPECTRUM?

the internet itself is then arranged into sites that exist on privately owned servers. the owners of those sites rent space on these privately owned servers, which is like a business renting space in a commercial complex. of course, some businesses own their own buildings, too. when you go to the forum on the site, it is like entering into a coffee shop or bar and chatting with the people in it.

so, who is going to throw the patron out? the owner of the shop/site - entirely at their discretion. that doesn't need to change, much.

and, who is going to evict the tenant? the owner of the property - in accordance with existing law. this law needs to be written, but my analogy should make it clear how it should be written.

the missing piece is that space for public expression, which is protected by constitutional rights. it's up to people to agitate for it and then keep it truly free....

...but you can't be arguing that you have the right to go on to a private server and say whatever you want, then accuse a private business of a speech violation. that's like walking into a bank, taking a shit on the counter and claiming it's protected - then arguing that the bank is not upholding the constitution. it's completely incoherent.

what should happen here, then? well, the government should be policing the roads. they would need to declare the site an unlawful assembly. and, the site would have access to due process.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/charlottesville-neo-nazis-white-supremacists-tech-hate-1.4253406

some kind strangers watched over me in a point of weakness last week.

i returned the favour last night.

universe: we even?

i'm not one to hold on to monuments of the past for the sake of it; if a historic church is in the way of a new development, and the new development is a useful allocation of space, i'm generally going to be in favour of tearing the church down. in that sense, i'll be the first to argue for tearing down monuments to failed ideologies - whether those monuments be to the confederacy or to the church or to any other institution that has held back progress.

but, i realize the importance of maintaining history where it's warranted, as well; i'm not a member of the taliban.

there's lots of reasons to be careful about this. the statues and monuments are, after all, public art. sometimes they're representative of a certain style that existed in a certain period, and have value in their maintenance for studies of art history. others have inscriptions that should be maintained for the historical record. generally speaking, statues of this sort experience the end of their lives, which can exist in debilitating lapses into dementia, in the retirement homes of art museums - and often to protect them from looters or vandals. it seems like it's time to put some of these statues away.

but, again, it's important to listen to what people are saying, and be leery of voices that want to destroy history, outright - and make sure they do not come into positions of power.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/protesters-arrest-confederate-statue-durham_us_5995b749e4b0acc593e5ef8b