pkn vol 7

pkn

i've been attending and presenting at the pecha kucha nights sponsored by the abundance foundation here in pittsboro and around. the format is simple: 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide to talk about whatever.

i find it suits my deficient and inattentive mind very nicely as i do have a hard time concentrating on any one task for very long, especially if i find it to be uninteresting, in the long term.

right now there is a list waiting for me upstairs and a trip to the hardware store but it's nearly 100 degrees out there and i really do not want to listen to the brakes on the wagon as they let me know that they are going to give way some time soon.

saw lyle at the last event a few weeks back and he again reminded me that he is interested in my help with a particular project. i'm very intrigued, but mortally afraid of taking the leap over to the next rope swing. there's a net down there somewhere, i think.

staring at the screen for hours each day, scrolling through the classifieds. enrolled for a class, then unenrolled. books to the left of me, books to the right. i know this is a crossroads but i've got the following:

1. can't see the road
2. can't see the trees
3. can only hear traffic approaching and receeding
4. looking for the roadsign that says "your passion"
5. can't see that, either

so i'm accumulating a nice collection of photos that i have taken in my garage, the floor makes a rich canvas.

perhaps a section of text from the last presentation?

QUANTA

1 rocks

Quanta: In physics, a quantum (plural: quanta) is the minimum unit of any physical entity involved in an interaction. An example of an entity that is quantized is the energy transfer of elementary particles of matter (called fermions) and of photons and other bosons. The word comes from the Latin "quantus," for "how much."

How much has the auction that I put on eBay last Saturday been bid up to? I'm clicking over to the auction now, no wait, I'll just open up another window.

Behind this, one finds the fundamental notion that a physical property may be "quantized," referred to as "the hypothesis of quantization".

I really need to get these rocks into the planter upstairs. If that damn cat pees in there one more time, it's going to kill the banana.

This means that the magnitude can take on only certain discrete numerical values, rather than any value, at least within a range. There is a related term of quantum number.

2 pumpkin seeds

How many seeds are in this bowl? It took me the better part of an hour to clean these. They came from a beautiful green and orange pumpkin I received from a local farmer that we buy produce from each week.

The opposite of quanta is qualia.

"Qualia" (pronounced /ˈkwɑːliə/ or pronounced /ˈkweɪliə/), singular "quale" (pronounced /ˈkwɑːleɪ/, roughly KWAH-leh), from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the redness of an evening sky. Daniel Dennett writes that qualia is "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us."

3 the clock

I think time is an excellent example of these concepts. Here we have a continuous stream of something which so completely envelops us, defines our every proverbial waking moment, seems to come from nowhere are leaves by the same door, taking that part of us which others most need with it.

That old devil time, sliced up into seconds, minutes, hours, and lifetimes. Each slice as powerful and impossible to pin down as the next.

It takes two double A batteries, I think. Makes a god-awful ticking sound, right out of Peter Pan.

Twenty seconds, twenty discreet bits into which I am cramming as much as possible to convey something. One rock in a grid of rocks, waiting for a soft landing, waiting for the cat to enter the room.

4 a rut

The thing about Pan, was that he was in a rut, of sorts. Never growing old, never growing up. Living with the Lost Boys in Neverland, thumbing his perfect thumbs at that old Devil just as often as it pleased him and

the next slide is coming on fast, looking over the 15 pages I just printed out on the antonym of quanta, think I might have something, it's a shame I did not use the bat instead of the snake

the branches in the rut looked to go off into new and exciting packets of space and time, but they all bent back on Neverland in the end. At least that's how I would write the story.

5 snake skin

Talking about something often involves a great deal of discussion about its opposite. A paper by Mr. Thomas Nagel entitled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” is often cited in debates over qualia.

Subjective character of experience. Nagel writes that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there us something that it is to be that organism – something it is like for the organism.”

How is or was this snake, a snake? More importantly, where is it now? I found this in my backyard and am a bit curious.

6 ruler

Quanta refer to discrete packets. The concept of irreducibility. Smallest possible somethings. In physics, these are the elementary particles and their building blocks. Light is quantized into packets called photons. Discrete, measurable.

In math I learned that no matter how small a slice you take out of a number line, there are an infinite amount of points between the two ends of your cut. 0 to 1 has the same number of points in between them as do 0 to ½ as do 0 to 1/1,000,000^th as do 0 to any arbitrarily small number you can come up with.

Some mathematicians went insane.

7 sunflower seeds

Out in the garden things are looking brighter and lusher after the past welcome rains.

The seeds that the f***ing squirrels in their careless and mannerless way leave in their destructive wake have been washed into pockets in the garden. They may germinate, they may just rot.

Saw a scarlet tanager the other day. Redness is an example of a quale. What does it mean to be red?

It's hot right now. The storms yesterday blew out the a/c unit upstairs. Waiting for the electrician to show up.

8 rope

How much do you need? I was never very good at know tying and I get frustrated when the ends of my ropes begin to fray. I do not like losing length, who does?

Excellent for heavy jobs, nylon, I think. Have to go let the electrician in. The heating contractor cannot be here until tomorrow. Last night wasn't so bad, with a few windows open while cooking and the fans on at night.

Coffee refill, back at my desk. Where was I?

9 caps and corks

The things that we ingest become a part of us through a fabulous and complex series of reactions, from the first smell (what does fired chicken smell like?) to the final purge of waste product. I'm fond of certain alcoholic beverages from time to time.

Something very measurable, quantifiable i.e. a 4 ounce glass of wine (6 is better) or a pint of lager able to produce through the miracle or ancient chemistry a series of very non-quantifiable states within the mind and body.

The room is not spinning and neither am I, really. What is spinning?

10 $17.24

There's this book for sale at the Bookshop up the street and I really want it.

Currency equals book. No structural isomorphism whatsoever. It's not as if there is a correlation between the size of the pile and the size of the book. No hard and fast rule for value in the marketplace. It is what it is made of, or some similar tautology.

Even in a barter system the rates of exchange vary according to their users.

11 coffee

Possibly my favorite thing in the world. I did not discover the pleasures of real caffeine until college, when, like every other average student who would rather get laid than study for a statistics quiz, I found myself in an empty classroom in the English building on campus at 4 in the morning with my 8^th large Styrofoam cup and a pile of worthless information (to me anyway, did not know it then, know it now) waiting for my hand to stop shaking and my vision to clear.

This many beans makes about 4 cups of coffee. About what I now drink in a day.

I missed the quiz as it turns out as I was sleeping off the coffee buzz gained the night before.

12 kickball

The Greeks gave us the word “atom” meaning that which is indivisible. That sufficed for 3,000 years or so.

This ball was in my garage. I cannot recall when it was last kicked. My dog tries to bite it every time I take it out and I'm afraid he'll pop it.

If Pan was not stuck in the late 19^th century, he would probably have a regular game of kickball organized for the boys. They would not have to go home when the gas lights came over the street corners, I bet you that. Hook would not be allowed to play.

13 nails

At some point, complexity comes in to it. A measurable quantity of water and clay and limestone and gravel and wood and metal and glass and gypsum and fiberglass and plastics and all of a sudden you have a house.

If the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts and if organization can arise out of randomness and complex systems given a the right amount of energy input, then can we not say that a continuum is possible from the aggregate quanta collected?

It's like the limit concept in mathematics. The calculus is founded upon it. Infinite sums and products, continued fractions, esoteric and hardly believable equalities. Premature dementia. Headaches like the second day in a row without coffee.

14 chain

Links in a chain. We are only as strong as our weakest link. Hold on tight. Chain of fools.

Weighing anchor, Hook and his band of bungling brigadoons sets sail for the south seas where Pan was reported to have come upon the Ark of the Covenant. Little do they know that Han Solo is hiding on board their mighty vessel and he has brought along a crocodile droid with a faulty alarm clock.

One link leads to another unless it's the last one on the chain and then it just takes you back from whence you came.

15 hammers

Organizational invariance. If it looks like a hammer and feels like a hammer and does the work of a hammer, then is it not a hammer?

I do know that there is a reason why hammers are bought and sold and that a brick is a poor substitute for the real thing.

Time for lunch, need to check email. Have not gotten a call back from the hvac guy about our unit. I think its a drain line problem. There was standing water in the pan under the blower.

16 hands gloves grasping

The fact that Hook was without a hand always scared me as a child. As I came to understand how important these ends of our arms are in the day to day navigation of time's rut, I felt some sympathy for the old fool. I also came to understand how cruel Pan was and I saw that cruelty mirrored in some of the children (and adults) in the real world around me.

Don't get me wrong, Hook was a bad guy, I get that. But there's no such thing as pure evil. Even that Old Devil Time is nothing but a neutral player.

17 tinkertoys

The building blocks of matter and light have quantum numbers: for the electron they are n, l, m sub l, m sub s. These numbers describe the location of the electron within the atom and its spin.

It must be very dark at this level of organization.

We can describe the struts and wheels that connect and frame but we cannot tell you what it is without telling you what it is. It's like charades, you cannot use the word to describe the word your's describing, something like that.

18 motion

Throughout it all, time has kept us all in motion. Even though the past 6 minutes have gone by excruciatingly slowly for some if not all of you, there is a chance that the disconnected images and words I have thrown at you have registered somewhere.

I think we create our own archetypes over time, but not without some serious external influence. The Jungian cohort are always there, but these others are more directly felt, more measurable. And they do not require us to dream.

19 light

In physics, a photon is an elementary particle, the quantum of the electromagnetic interaction and the basic unit of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation. It is also the force carrier for the electromagnetic force. The effects of this force are easily observable at both the microscopic and macroscopic level, because the photon has no rest mass; this allows for interactions at long distances.

No rest mass, like a fictional schooner sailing across an uncharted water. Like a dream.

20 time's arrow

The trick is not worry overmuch over the wound, but to avoid the arrow completely. If life is to be measured out for us in ways beyond our enjoyable control, we should at least take advantage of those indefinables around us, soak up the experience the arrow shows us up until the moment of its impact. Look past the first row of houses. What's on the other side of the ditch?

Life is not a bumper sticker. It's not a monopoly board. It's not just red and green. It's bananas and coffee and pumpkins and sunflowers and keyboards and cameras and books and hooks and ropes and chains and hammers and hands and clocks and rocks and boxes of yesterdays and everything you can stuff into HERE (point at your head).

***

those are the notes for each of the 20 slides i spoke in front of over at the flyleaf bookstore in chapel hill. it was fun, i think folks enjoyed themsleves.

more soon

geo