2002

Tue, Oct 22

<22:36> What kind of a sick architect would design a building whose top floor consist solely of a single, small flat? Much smaller than the width of the building, that is. Functionally it's like a large constant plus a top hat.

The matter isn't made any less surreal by the fact that the top cube is where Emilia lives, in central Tampere. I spent the weekend in the city after family matters unexpectedly had brought me to the nearby Hämeenlinna, and it was a great excuse for Milja (my sister) and Jussi to relax from their work as I stayed with them.

Among other stuff we enjoyed some Thai food, including Tom Yam Kung soup for starters, and saw the film Insomnia. Contrary to the title, some scenes were rather sleep-inducing and originality went missing here. Not all bad with great actors and stuff, and it certainly makes me want to see the original.

Overall the trip had a positive effect on me, getting to meet up with people in a bigger city. I admit having felt pretty kewl when Emilia brought us into a bar/cafe with antique armchairs and couches.. just like where Morpheus is sitting when he first meets Neo, and I had the real coat on and offered her some authentic looking red candies.

On Monday I did the sensible thing of stopping at Jyväskylä and chatting with my supervisor. One of the problems I've encountered with DU and GR is this: Gravity works in three dimensions IFF the curvature of space(time) is only intrinsic. The contrary situation leads to interesting possibilities and new problems.

What really freaked me out last night was the discovery that W.K. Clifford, one of the genii behind Geometric Algebra, also came up with a geometric theory of gravity and electromagnetism before his untimely death in 1879. With spatial curvature only and no relativity, it sounds awfully lot like the Dynamic Universe.

Fri, Oct 18

<03:31> Rencently there was another Finnish first novel I read and enjoyed, again thinking it was merely a short novella and many ideas needing more space. Kirottu Maa, or Terra Damnata it was called, by Marko Hautala.

I'm also getting 'deeper' with Everything2 which is one of the single best things on the Net, IMHO. It looks like an online encyclopedia project where everyone can register and write. It's the necessary community aspect -- related to voting and other interaction for the sake of better content -- that makes it so much more. It makes me humble, being a small part of a huge emergent thing, a novice amongst the priests.. yet there are topics to be written where I can truly rule. :-)

Thu, Oct 17

<18:04> It's snowing and I'm feeling like the bear that's tired and longing for the winter-long sleep. And last night I experienced natural antialiasing as my brain got too tired of focusing on the pixels.

David Lynch's films are like a koan. They can derail your ordinary thoughts and open it up for more fruitful processing. One night I saw Lost Highway and I just about understood everything in it, it's probably the best Lynch movie I've seen. Even though it's easily interpreted as having a time loop, the physical basis of which is still questionable. I've yet to fully comprehend Mulholland Drive which I saw early this year.

Sat, Oct 5

<23:57> I've been working on the port of Electromagnetism to Dynamic Universe for a while now. Well, more like pondering with intuition than working. So just now I got a bit closer with actual math. In fact there are plenty of details to smooth out, but it seems that my intuitive "del^2 A = mu_0 * J" agrees with Maxwell's equations. That formula looks identical to the Special Relativity version, but here A (vector potential) and J (current density) are vectors in 4D space, not 3D space + 1D time.

That's right, there's no time dependence! In DU, the universe is expanding at decelerating c in the fourth dimension which is not accessible to us. That gives a time dependence proportional to c. Along with the usual DU way, electromagnetic phenomena are weakened in the aging universe.

Proceeding with nerd matters, last night I saw Revenge of the Nerds and enjoyed every bit of it. A true classic including characters such as Arnold Poindexter. In fact the film made me feel very mindful and I did some psychedelic meditation, only to go back into DU's EM later.

The other day I discovered a rare goodie of Finnish SciFi, Katajanukke by Pekka Virtanen. His writing quality is outstanding and the story fits well into the Finnish scenery. I had a couple of moments of awe and respect when his phrasing seemed just perfect. My only criticism, not surprisingly, is quite positive: the novel has outstanding ingredients, but the mixing proportions could be better, in fact there's enough good material for a Rama-style epic.

Wed, Oct 2

<01:11> The slight synchronicity of three events on Tuesday was not interesting. Its content, however, is. Before waking up I had a dream of order more than one: in the dream I was going half asleep and having an unusual experience, with slight connections to hypnagogic and hypnopompic states. So it wasn't quite a dream of order two, because I wasn't totally asleep within the dream. There's a lot more what happened and I'm planning to use the idea in a fictional work some day. In fact it's somewhat related to Jostein Gaarder's ideas in which a writer's creation is materialized in some level of reality, possibly their own.

The second event was an article on the importance of sleep in a magazine. While it didn't touch the more interesting issues of sleeping and dreaming, it was a nice coincidence. Later in the night there was an excellent episode of The X-files which included second order dreaming.