Reattaching fingers…

Back in January I started teaching myself to use the Dvorak layout on my keyboards instead of the standard qwerty layout. I’ve struggled for three months, but yesterday I gave it up as a bad idea.

I could never get faster than 35 words per minute and when I wanted to type my thoughts directly, if I started to speed up, my fingers would revert to qwerty. The wiring was just too wired into place.

I got a copy of Mavis Beacon to help me transit back to reality, and today I can once again type without having to think of where to put my fingers. I feel like I’ve been a castaway for months and now have returned to civilization.

None of this is a knock on the Dvorak layout. I think it makes a lot of sense and that it is easier on the hands and fingers. But trying to rewire fifty-five years of neural qwertyness just doesn’t work, at least not for me.

My hands at this point have pretty much taken up where they left off three months ago, with an occasional reversion. I suspect I’m back to my normal 75 words per minute, or close to it, which, given that I only went back yesterday, is pretty amazing. All that newsroom typing  must be seriously engraved on my brain.

I feel free again. Wheeeeeee!

The Zen of motion, or possibly the motion of Zen

Today I’m back to physics, specifically Chapter 3 of Conceptual Physics, Linear Motion.

Here’s the skinny: Motion is relative. All motion.

If you’re riding a bus going thirty miles per hour your motion relative to the bus is zero. But your motion relative to the surface of the earth is thirty miles per hour.

When you’re standing on the sidewalk, not twitching a muscle, you’re still moving at tremendous speed relative to the sun and relative to the center of the galaxy.

The rest of the chapter goes on about speed, velocity, and acceleration, but since I was on only my first cup of coffee I naturally started down the path of motion relative to self.

Relative to itself an object can never move, according to the criterion for motion: Motion is relative.

So I, in fact, have not moved since I was born, since before I was born if you want to get snitty about it. I have never remained in the same place and I have never moved. Take that, Aristotle!!

When you hear one of those Zennish sorts say something like, “Wherever you go, there you are,” you now know he’s just spitting out some basic physics.

My fingers have lost their tongues…

Lately I seem to have been on a masochistic streak, the best evidence of which was my decision to switch from standard keyboard to the Dvorak keyboard for typing.

In the past I have tried this switch a couple of times because Dvorak is a simpler typing system, considerably less stressful on the hands and fingers, and offering the potential for greater speed. However, at those times I was also out there in the world of work and everybody was stuck on QWERTY keyboards. It is extremely difficult to use both layouts simultaneously, as I quickly discovered. Now that I no longer have to worry about QWERTY world I decided to give Dvorak another try, and have done so for several weeks.

I feel as if the tongues have been cut out of my fingers. Using QWERTY I was a fast typist, 70 to 80 words a minute, and able to keep up with my thoughts. That is no longer the case. I can type now between 15 and 25 words a minute on a Dvorak layout, but it is a struggle. If I try to go faster I find my fingers reverting to the old layout, but at least I recognize the error when it happens.

Essentially, I’m trying to rewire an old brain that’s been doing the same thing for some 50 years and is not so keen on learning something new. On the other hand I think my neurons appreciate the challenge. Or, so I tell myself… In any event it’s frustrating but I do hope that in the long run it will be worth it. If nothing else I can always tell myself that as I got older, I wasn’t afraid to make a change in something important.

I have also added a couple of other challenges in the form of computer programs. One of them is called Scrivener, a Macintosh program being rewritten for windows. It is a writing program, focusing on gathering and organizing materials for virtually any kind of writing. It’s fascinating, it’s challenging, and I’m actually working in a beta version, which is not something I would normally do. But I do like the program.

Another new (to me) program that I like, well enough to have paid for, is called ConnectedText. It is essentially a personal wiki located on your desktop computer (or a laptop). I like that it uses markdown language for formatting and I like that it is really very flexible, as well as offering another challenge to my brain to learn something new.

Of course there is another challenge in all of this, which is that I have to consider the possibility that all of this may simply be a way to delay doing anything particularly useful or constructive. I seem to spend a good part of my life preparing to do things but not actually doing very many things. These new challenges could simply be an expression of that pattern.

However, all is not lost! I am dictating this post using speech recognition software from Dragon, thus giving my finger tongues and brain neurons a bit of a rest, as well as giving myself a little thrill by cheating. (Hey, I’m sort of human…)

Uh-oh…the universe is fuzzier than we thought….

I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (the illustrated version – though not exactly a comic book). It’s a fascinating tale of the history of science, well-written and interesting.

But this morning I found a disconcerting paragraph in Chapter 11, Muster Mark’s Quarks, a chapter in which we’re treated to the history of subatomic particles and the struggles physicists and cosmologists have suffered to understand the very tiny and the very large universes in which we dwell (and which apparently dwell in us). At the end of the chapter, Bryson writes:

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

Uncertainty rules! Apparently what we have taken for fact out here in the normal world might be a little loosey-goosey. Bryson notes that when an astronomer says that galaxy M87 is sixty million light years from New York, he really means it’s between forty million and ninety million light years from Boston.

And on the subatomic level, there are so many particles and so many interactions and so many unknowns that uncertainty not only rules, it rocks. Take the Higgs Boson, for example. If you can find it. The scientists and engineers at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have got about ten billion dollars tied up in looking for the Higgs, which may or may not exist, depending on who you talk to. It’s supposed to be the particle that gives mass to other particles. Which leads to the mind-bending question of why a particle needs another particle to give it mass? At least that’s what bent my mind a bit this morning. A person more humorous than myself might ask if a person could go on a Higgs Boson cleansing diet to lose weight. But I am a little strange, so let that go by the boards.

On the positive side, it’s good to know that those guys know that they don’t know but they keep digging and peering and poking and prodding and theorizing. It’s a fun job and somebody has to do it. Hell, I’d be happy to sweep floors at CERN.

Physics and the aging mind (and body)…

I’m plowing through the exercises at the end of Chapter 2 in Conceptual Physics, the chapter on Newton’s first law of motion, which defines inertia. There’s eighty one questions and problems, and a kind note from the author saying that he offers so many in order to give the instructor a ‘wide choice of assignments’.

Me being my instructor, as it were, I’ve assigned myself all of them, though without a deadline. Hewitt notes that the Exercises portion, comprising forty-eight problems, is designed to stress thinking rather than recall. If that doesn’t get the information into my head, nothing will.

All in all I’m excited about this book. It brings the science of Physics within my grasp, doesn’t torture me with math (though it may stimulate an interest in math), and offers a way to keep my aging brain active in a way different from my forays into Philosophy (which once upon a time was Physics).

The other night, as I was doing nothing in particular again, a thought rumbled through my head out of nowhere. "Oh my god I’m sixty-six years old. What the fuck am I doing? What in hell am I doing?" I’ve let that rattle around for a couple of days and still have not got a useful answer. I can, however, answer in part that I’m sometimes doing Physics, or learning it anyway. Which is something.

Part of the charm of Physics, so far, is that understanding Physics puts me in touch with reality. Not the dicey reality of the psychologists and the spiritualists and the ideologues, but the reality of a world that has weight and mass and dimension, a world that is discoverable and predictable and yet still full of mystery, a world that holds no evil, no good, no ego, a world that simply, without apology, without boast, is and which simply does not care.

That’s a good thing for an old mind to know.

The inertia of inertia: bowling in space

My friend Shorty, from down South, bought me this marvelous textbook on physics for my birthday. It’s titled Conceptual Physics, by Paul Hewitt. It’s a marvelous big ol’ textbook that takes a learner from the very basics all the way into relativity, does it with minimal equations, a nice human touch, some cartoon work by the author, and lots of questions and exercises.

Which brings me to inertia, which I started reading about today, or more specifically, Newton’s First Law of Motion. (Newton’s stuff gets capitalized a lot.) Anyway, NFLOM says, "Every object continues in a state of rest or of uniform speed in a straight line unless acted on by a nonzero net force."

Hewitt notes, in a sidebar, "Inertia isn’t a kind of force; it’s a property of all matter to resist changes in motion."

He also notes, "We don’t know the reason for objects persisting in their motion when no forces act upon them."

Now here’s the thing. If you roll a bowling ball across a rug it will soon stop due to friction with the rug. If you roll it down a shiny bowling alley it will go a lot farther and if you’re lucky do some damage to a structure of tenpins before it stops. But if you were to take that ball out into space, beyond the gravitational influences of, say, a solar system, two things can happen.

If you just let go, applying no force, the ball, perhaps a bright red one, will sit there forever until something, some force or other, does something to it. Or, if you give it a push it will move at the same speed in a straight line, barring outside force, until the end of time.

As a practical matter, things will happen to disturb the ball’s inertia. It might run into a star, or pass by a planet, or get hit by a comet or asteroid. It might travel undisturbed for a trillion years except for hitting an atom head on once a year and thus be brought to a stop eventually.

But here’s the thing. Think about that ball’s motion. Out there in deep space all you did was give it a little push, using your arm muscles. That’s the only force applied to it. If nothing gets in its way, if no other force ever acts on it, the ball will just keep moving at the same speed in the same direction forever. If you gave it a five mile per hour push, it will cross the universe at five miles an hour.

How can that be?

The physicists say, "We don’t know."

How can that be? How can they not know? But I’ll take their word for it.

But I still feel mindboggled. My brain keeps asking the question, "What keeps it going?"

And comes up with strange answers, or questions. For example, did the initial push impart sub-atomic particles that carry force and that then react with the quantum fabric of space-time as constantly recycling drivers? Particles carry other kinds of forces, why not inertial motion?

See what I mean?

Part of the problem is that our frame of reference is so earthbound. Here, friction rules. Bowling balls slow down and stop because they constantly fight opposing forces like friction (and tenpins). Friction is in the blood of our brain’s synapses. It is a Law of Nature: bowling balls slow down and stop.

We don’t live in deep space. Stuff acts differently out there. Inertial motion is just too alien. Too out there. Too cosmic, if you will. The human brain will accept the theory, but the fact of an infinitely traveling bowling ball, no, neurons will not wrap themselves around that in a cocooning embrace. They will fight it, synapse by synapse, until the last synaptic soldier lies dead on the beaches of time.

Newton could really tick off an average brain. I can hardly wait to see what else this book is going to do to get my synapses in a twist.

How to be a philosopher…

An intriguing title, no? If only there were simple lessons in the matter, lessons that would turn one into a philosopher with certificates and everything.

Perhaps the full title might be a little more intriguing: How to be a Philosopher: or How to Be Almost Certain that Almost Nothing is Certain.

Better?

That’s the full title of a new book by philosopher Gary Cox, who has done the hard work to gain a prestigious piece of paper identifying him as the holder of a Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of Birmingham in Britain. He’s written a few books, including How to Be an Existentialist: or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses. I sense a theme developing…

Anyway, if you have pretensions to Philosophy, as opposed to philosophy, you could do worse than read Cox’s stuff. It’s clear, snarky, and introductory, and encouraging. And if you’re something of a used up rag of an old man like I am, his stuff will be helpful. Who knows? I might even go back to college someday and hunt down a degree or two in Philosophy for myself. After all, it’s not like I’m partying all the time or chasing wimmens or getting big offers from Goldman Sachs (though I bet they have a few people trained in philosophical methods thinking things through for the big money boys…)