(cache) Slate Star Scratchpad — K: “I remember when I was young I asked my mom if...

K: “I remember when I was young I asked my mom if I was adopted, because I was nothing like the rest of my family. See, they were all pink squishy fleshy beings, and I was a consciousness of pure light and reason. She said ‘Your father used to say that kind of thing too.’“

conversations with friends

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Me: Sorry, but I’m never going to visit your family in Tasmania. The whole place sounds horrifying.

K: No it doesn’t! Why would you say that?

Me: Well, between your stories about venomous snakes killing your dog, and bats flying into your bed while you were sleeping, and the shrieks of Tasmanian Devils keeping you awake all night as a kid -

K: No, that part is better now. The Tasmanian Devils were all killed by a weird contagious form of facial cancer.

Me: YOU’RE NOT HELPING YOUR CASE.

conversations with friends

Friend: Sometimes cuddling can be scary.

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: I stop wanting to move and I stop thinking so much about things, and then I get this heavy feeling all over. I worry that I might be dying or something.

Me: Wait…do you just mean that you feel relaxed?

Friend: I guess that could be it.

Me: Well, at least for you it’s a self-limiting problem.

conversations with friends

Me: Should I drive or do you want to drive?

Friend: I don’t think I’m a very good driver

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: Like, sometimes I’ll just go blank and forget which one is the brake and which one is the accelerator and have to derive it from first principles.

Me: You mean, like, cogito ergo sum?

Friend: Maybe second principles.

Me: How do you derive the location of the brake from second principles?

Friend: I don’t know, at that point I crashed.

Me: Okay, I’m driving.

conversations with friends

K: Nate Silver was right again. Is he single?

K: (a few minutes later) Oh, he’s gay. I wonder if he’s flexible about it, though. Maybe I could just invite him out to lunch or something?

K: (a few minutes later) Wait, I’m looking at a picture of him, and I think I actually did have lunch with him a few years ago. A friend took me along to meet this guy who he said was doing some kind of politics thing, and I didn’t pay much attention, but he looked exactly like that.

K: (a few minutes later) Okay, I checked my emails, and that was definitely Nate Silver I had lunch with. I feel kind of stupid now. It was back in 2010, so maybe he wasn’t famous at the time?

Me: Dear, Nate Silver was named one of the “100 Most Influential Men In The World” in 2009.

K: Oh.

K: Well, one thing I like about you is that you don’t take me out to lunch with one of the 100 most influential men in the world and not tell me about it.

K: Do you?

K: Wait, that professor we had lunch with in Lansing wasn’t one of the hundred most influential men in the world, was he?

Me: https://twitter.com/Clathrus0/status/795669961373061120

K: Oh dear.

conversations with friends

K: Wait, I thought Charlemagne was the Pope.

Me: Huh, no, Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Emperor. The Pope was the Pope.

K: Yeah, but I heard they were in cahoots, which I figured doesn’t really happen in this world unless you’re the same person.

conversations with friends

Me: And the ruler during this period was Antigonus Monopthalmus. Can you translate ‘Monopthalmus’?

@worldlypositions: Hmmmm. One…head?

Me: You think he was called Antigonus The One-Headed?

@worldlypositions: Sure!

Me: That’s not a very imposing epithet.

@worldlypositions: Sure it is! If you called yourself ‘Antigonus The Two-Headed’, it would be scary, but not too scary, because there’s only one two-headed guy. But if you call yourself Antigonus The One-Headed, it suggests everyone else in your country must have more than one head, which is even scarier.

conversations with friends teaching k history

Elissa: That church over there, the one that’s kind of falling apart? It’s always bothered me.

Me: Why?

Elissa: It’s called “The Church By Jesus Christ”. And Jesus was a carpenter, so I think linking him to that kind of shoddy work is kind of insulting.

Me: What kind of a name is “The Church By Jesus Christ”? Is it supposed to be, like, next to him or something?

Elissa: I think it’s supposed to be started by him, or inspired by him.

Me: Seems a little implausible. I mean, Catholicism, maybe. Greek Orthodoxy, maybe. But a random Protestant church in Ohio?

Elissa: I mean, technically if Jesus is God, then everything is “by Jesus.”

Me: “The Holocaust By Jesus Christ”?

Elissa: I mean, technically, yes.

Me: I don’t think the people who made that church would endorse that Jesus caused the Holocaust.

Elissa: It’s not that he caused it. Just that he deliberately gave humans free will, knowing that it would happen. And that church is the same way.

Me: “The Church That Jesus Christ Failed To Prevent.“

conversations with friends

K: I was trying that FaceApp thing earlier today with photos of everyone we know. It looks pretty good. Except for some reason when I try to do the “hot” filter on you, it replaces you with a totally different-looking person.

Me: Ha ha, very funny.

K: No, I’m serious. (she shows me, and this turns out to be 100% true)

conversations with friends

TIL: JRR Tolkien’s great granddaughter, Ruth Tolkien, is the only blind person in the UK to be a competitive fencer. She is currently ranked the #186th best fencer in the country.

(at a lecture on the Oedipus complex)

Lecturer: Oedipus was a character from Greek mythology. He was the son of Laius and…uh…um…

Me: Jocasta?

Lecturer: No, that was his wi…wait, I’m an idiot.

worldlypositions

Los Alamos

July 8

Los Alamos was one of my favorite places on this trip so far. Which you might say tells us something about the measure of various sensory pleasures next to cultural significance in one’s own culture. But Los Alamos also had a Starbucks and a bunch of evocative mountain cliffs in a stormy sky. So it was really cultural significance and delicious green tea frappe and views that would have really been something on their own (though not to die for—attention whoever is in charge of highway signage).

But I really do like it for the atmosphere of what it was. The exciting parts of history I know of are mostly fierce warriors conquering exotic empires for alien reasons. Which is interesting, but doesn’t feel like part of the same world that I live in, so it doesn’t feel like our real past.

World War II is also pretty far from my experience in general. But the part where thousands of smart young nerds leave their normal lives to work on an absurdly ambitious and speculative project—to defend against a newly apparent technological risk to civilization—feels much more like an extreme and epic entry in the genre of story we find ourselves in.

And the other parts, where someone was running a successful school for sickly youths which had to be acquired by the government, and where Robert Oppenheimer used to go walking near here and so suggested it when they needed a location, and where Leslie Groves was pretty good at making things happen, are familiar enough kinds of details—I can imagine my own acquaintances doing those things.

I also enjoy that many of the buildings there are log cabins fairly reminiscent of where I grew up, and not at all reminiscent of where one expects cutting edge physics to go on. One Los Alamos building and one Gowrie Park building:

I have always liked the city, but imagining Los Alamos as an isolated vista of concentrated intellectual activity and concomitant socializing, in these surrounds, made me imagine something like that might be pretty nice.

los alamos actual travel

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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Los Alamos