Project Asshat*

Between the open heart and the whisper goodbye, there’s a perfect teardrop in your eye. Between the lover’s moon and the trembling sky, there’s a broken dream in your mind.

Wow. When this particular state began to collapse (or already did, but that info hadn’t propagated to there yet) I was mentally composing…well, a patch of sorts (isn’t that how we get from where we are, to where we want to be? Behavior modification, or knowledge applied), but also some documentation to go with it. Ever written a blog/LJ entry in your head because there was no computer around when you thought of jotting something down? It was to document the outcome of information received via live human (Google confirms it) – a systematic approach to acquiring the ability to be a jerkus to someone who completely doesn’t deserve it. (Being a dick to someone who DOES deserve it is easy, but not particularly useful; if they consistently deserve it, you would not bother associating with them, ne?) Apparently this is a brokenly worthwhile trait, particularly as far as the opposite sex is concerned. The entry would be called Project Asshat. Initial testing confirmed my ability to be an asshat successfully for approximately two seconds ;-) (a pothole on Unnamed One-way Two-way Alley confirms it) on the very first attempt; assuming a geometric growth rate it could easily be four seconds on the next attempt, and eight on the next…I could be an all-day asshat in one month’s time. But as circumstances would have it, as I was contemplating finding my inner asshat, an outer asshat was contemplating finding me.

So a slight change of topic: all right, maybe the asshat patch is good to have in one’s toolbox, but I won’t be writing about that today. More of an involuntary pattern-matching exercise that just hit me in the nose.

I have observed (haha!) in the ol’ blog-writing some recurring themes of late… themes are just noise bubbling its way to the surface… state–the hard cold facts of reality reduced to their raw essence, information, at a specified moment in time–and the collapse thereto from superpositions thereof; decision, the outcome of those collapses; and the biggest and recurringest one, observability – the ability of state to be known….or to step back a bit, the possibility of any one piece of state can affect any other, and the route(s) by which this influence is possible. I know as well as the next guy that such a thing is coincidental at best, but it’s funny how eerily some random bullshit noise can sometimes so closely parallel reality. For the past few weeks I’ve been kind of thinking about observability for some reason. Given any physical (in the realm of neutrons, gravity and such) situation, all the information necessary to define that state must be contained in its own matter. In other words, it must be physically encoded. Therefore, any such state should theoretically be visible if you know where to look (it might take an electron microscope, or equipment that hasn’t been invented yet, but it’s in there somewhere). Further, a lot of the time such physical properties encoding a thing’s state may affect what that matter has contact with, which in turn affects its own neighbors, and so on, in some measurable way. You know when the vibrator in your phone shakes because its mountings shake, then the phone casing shakes, then your pocket shakes, then your skin shakes, then your nerve endings pick it up. How does this apply to arbitrarily more complex systems?

Sorry, rambling. What does it have to do with the price of coffee in Boston? Oh right, the asshat thing. I guess the upshot (downshot (shot across the bow)) is that a (too-much) observability problem caused a chain reaction that forced some up-in-the-air state to collapse into decisions (not mine), and probably more substantial state changes that I can’t see, and…on the bright side, at least (if any), means I no longer have to worry about learning to be a jerk for a while.

I think it probably collapsed a lot of things.

*This written a few days ago…held off on posting it, ironically due to the “recurring themes” I noticed – should have written down the original datestamp, but didn’t…


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