Sort by Date

I've been in the mood all day for sappy '90s indie rock. I listened through this list, but it wasn't enough. So I decided to see what albums I had that I could put on. Toward this end, I went to my player and sorted my album list by date.

My mind was immediately blown. In the decade or so that I've been using QL, I don't think I've ever sorted my albums by date. I suddenly found that all these albums which had occupied completely different spaces in my head were right next to each other.

So, I've decided to scroll through my collection and point out any sets of albums whose temporal proximity strikes me as surprising, interesting, or odd.

• 1979: The Clash's London Calling and Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures.
• Seminal punk and post-punk albums, although obviously both those labels can be debated.
• 1991: My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Nirvana's Nevermind, Temple of the Dog's Temple of the Dog.
• The start of so many different trends in rock music.
• 1992: Pharcyde's Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, Dr. Dre's The Chronic, Beastie Boys' Check Your Head.
• The early nineties had a vibrancy in hip hop that we probably didn't see again until the early '10s.
• 1994: Green Day's Dookie, Pavement's Crooked Raid, Crooked Rain, Cake's Motorcade of Generosity, The Mountain Goats' Zapilote Machine.
• Just weird for me to think that Cake and Green Day basically started out in the same year, although to be fair Dookie was huge in '94, and Motorcade didn't really hit it big until '95. Still, two bands I'd never think of as being listened to in the same time or place. Fun note, The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets released their first album (on cassette), Cthulhuriffomania! this year.
• 1995: Ani DiFranco's Not a Pretty Girl, Radiohead's The Bends.
• An album I love and one that apparently everyone else loves. But again, just two albums that I would never think of as coming from the same year; not that they evince any particular style which makes them unlikely to be contemporaries, but it's almost like there are two different histories of music, and each fits into a completely disjoint one.
• 1996: De La Soul's Stakes is High, Belle & Sebastian's Tigermilk & If You're Feeling Sinister, Beck's Odelay.
• Almost too many albums from this year to really pick. Belle & Sebastian put these two masterpieces out within six months of each other, while De La Soul and Beck each produced probably their finest albums as well. Honorable mention goes to Dar Williams's Mortal City, Weezer's Pinkerton, Beastie Boys' The In Sound From Way Out, Cibo Matto's Viva! La Woman, and Silkworm's Firewater.
• 1998: Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Pearl Jam's Yield.
• Though I love Pearl Jam, they've never been innovative or particularly musically daring. And Yield, while a brilliant refinement of their style, doesn't exactly move the state of pop music forward very far.
• 2001: System of a Down's Toxicity, Tool's Lateralus.
• Tool have always been in their own little world of massively popular metal, a world a few tiers above that occupied by System of a Down.
• 2003: The Dresden Dolls' The Dresden Dolls, Canibus's Rip the Jacker, Mars Volta's De-Loused in the Comatorium.
• Again, three albums that I do not for a second imagine as existing in the same metaphorical space, despite having listened to each countless times. (Also, today is the first time I have noticed that it is, in fact, "Comatorium" and not "Crematorium".)
• 2004: Franz Ferdinand's Franz Ferdinand, Death From Above 1979's You're a Woman, I'm a Machine.
• Franz Ferdinand seem unable to escape from their moment; DFA remain timeless, however. It's probably the noise.
• 2008: Girl Talk's Feed the Animals, DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist's The Hard Sell (Encore).
• Two completely different takes on sampling and mashups, each brilliant in its own way.

I think any further and things are too fresh, too familiar to notice anything interesting. Maybe none of my comments make sense. I've been up for 22 hours at this point. I should probably just re-sort my albums by artist.

P.S. I ended up listening to the Breeders.

Agape, Pragma, and/or Eros

I made some valentines. That is all.

Why Did Einstein Let Time Go All Wibbly-Wobbly?

Today I watched through the rather delightful youtube series Things You Might Not Know. This video in particular, along with currently reading through Greg Egan's Orthogonal trilogy, made me wonder something about Einstein's Special Relativity: how did it occur to Einstein to set the speed of light as a constant and then allow time and space to change instead? There is no a priori reason to think that the speed of light isn't variable, and certainly not one to think that the dimensions of space and time are variable (time spent bored in waiting rooms notwithstanding). Of course, it could have been that Einstein just decided to mess around with various combinations of variant and invariant parameters; but what actually caused him to think that a non-variable speed of light and variable time had any relation to the physical universe?

So I went on the internet and I found this. And here is my sophomoric, not technical, probably completely wrong interpretation of that thread, in the way it made sense out of my question:

Everyone assumed that Newtonian mechanics, with its absolute and invariable time frame, was correct. After all, it agreed with every experiment they had thought to put it to until then. Everyone also assumed that Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism (once they thought to combine electricity and magnetism, a development I need to do a lot more reading on) were correct. The problem was that there were certain situations in which these two systems were incompatible.

Another assumption at the time was that the universe operated under something called Galilean invariance. This stated that the laws of physics were the same under all inertial reference frames. That is, if you got an experimental result while at rest, you would get the exact same result if you were on a train moving at 100 miles an hour. Or in a space ship moving at a million miles an hour. This worked perfectly for Newtonian mechanics. However, this did not work for Maxwell's equations. (Here I am very fuzzy  — read: entirely ignorant — of the actual math and physics; see disclaimer above.)

Here's what happened: imagine you were floating in an empty void with a space suit, flashlight, and notebook, and you noticed another experimenter flying past you at 100,000 meters per second with same. Under the Newtonian/Galilean view that space and time are absolute and not variable, you would see the following. When you measured the speed of light shining out of your flashlight, you'd get some number n meters per second. The person flying past you would measure the speed of the light coming out of their flashlight and get n as well. When you then looked over and measured the speed of the light coming out of their flashlight you would, naturally, measure 100,000 + n. That is, just like someone throwing a ball on a moving train, its apparent speed would be different depending on ones frame of reference.

However, Maxwell's equations demanded that the speed of light be the same under all reference frames. That is, they contain a quantity called c, the speed of light, which appears in them independently of the inertial reference frame of the observer (for mathematical reasons I am not nearly smart enough to figure out). So if one follows Maxwell's equations instead of Newtonian mechanics, then you should measure the speed of your light as n, the other experimenter should measure theirs as n, and you should measure theirs as... also n! But clearly this doesn't make sense! Therefore, some assumption is wrong. Einstein spent a while trying to figure out how to make Maxwell's equations work with Newtonian mechanics and its Galilean relativity.

However, a Dutch physicist named Handrik Lorentz had a jump on Einstein. He wondered what the world would look like if we ignored the implications of Galilean invariance and assumed that the speed of light really was constant for all observers. This had various strange implications such as clocks running at different speeds, distances shrinking as speed increased, and general chaos and malarkey. However, Lorentz was only interested in electromagnetism, and looked at all these effects as quaint mathematical tricks to get Maxwell's equations to make some sort of physical sense. It wasn't until Einstein took Lorentz's work and really thought through its implications that we arrived at Special Relativity.

An 1887 experiment by Michelson and Morley had attempted to detect variance in the speed of light moving through space. The theory at the time was that EM waves were just like any other wave, and had to be propagated through a medium, just like sound propagates through air, or a ripple propagates through the surface of a pond. One of the consequences of waves moving through a medium, though, is that an observer moving through that medium will measure wave fronts as moving slower away from it in front of itself, and faster away from it behind itself, and at some in between speed orthogonal to its motion. This implied that it should be possible to detect a variation in the speed of light from the Earth because the Earth would always be moving through the "aether", the medium which pervaded space and allowed for the propagation of light. This experiment showed no such variation. Light traveled at the same speed regardless of which direction you measured it from.

Although not the main motivation for Einstein to adopt the views that would lead to Special Relativity, it was a strong impetus for him to take the concept of a physically invariant speed of light seriously. Once he did so, it was obvious that Lorentz's thought experiments could be interpreted literally, and that if one did so, time dilation and length contraction would fall out as real phenomena that happened as one approached the speed of light. Such phenomena, though, were completely at odds with the orderly, stable Newtonian view of the Universe. Part of Einstein's genius was the willingness to provisionally jettison Newtonian physics and its Galilean relativity, privileging Maxwell's equations and Lorentz's mathematical view, and trying to rebuild mechanics based on that. He, of course, succeeded. And once you had a mechanics that explained all the same experimental data that Newton's had and also agreed with Maxwell's equations, that was clearly the theory to pick. Hence, the 1905 paper called, fittingly, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".

I'm sure much of what I said above is confusing, muddled, or just plain wrong, despite it taking far longer than I expected for me to write. But part of the point of this blog is me finding topics that interest me, and writing about them such that I am forced to actually clearly understand them to my own satisfaction. Very easy to convince yourself that a soup of vague ideas in your own head is understanding. Much harder to do when you serve that soup to an audience.

Newb Log

I decided I want a place to blog random things that I think about, do, or read about. Nothing super serious business like Cognitive Discourse was supposed to be, although don't be too surprised if I go on equally long and idiotic rants about philosophy, anarchism, and science I know way too little about. But I also just wanna talk about stuff I watch and read, news articles, life events, that sort of thing.

Mostly the point is to get stuff I think about all the time down in writing to make it obvious how absurd it is. But then, I also think I'm smarter than everyone, so maybe some of it will be worthwhile. Who knows. I at least wanna post something on a regular basis; a few times a week, if not daily. And I'll try to keep each post limited to one topic.

Let's start off in the life event category.

I wanna get a cat. For seriously this time. Been looking online the last couple days at various shelters. Thinking I'd adopt a tom, probably 1-3 years old.

My parents' cats are all toms, so I grew up with these big, super-mellow cats around. Then when I moved in with Kelsey, I lived with a female cat for the first time, and it was totally different. Very hard to clearly explain what makes it so, but female cats are definitely a lot more temperamental and picky than toms. Or, more likely, it's just Josie being the lovable dick that she is. *looks at permanent scar an forearm* Neutered toms, though, should essentially be kittens so long as they're not crazy or territorial.

Kelsey suggested that we'd have to keep whatever cat I get separate from Josie for a while, which makes sense. So, my cat would be in the living room while Josie's locked into Kelsey's room, and then vice versa for a while, until they get used to the idea of another cat's smell around. Then, slowly, heavily supervised introductions. Josie lived with another cat at Kelsey's old place that was apparently a completely non-tenable relationship, meaning that Josie basically just always stayed in Kelsey's room. And I think it took her a very long time to come to terms with the idea that other people/animals (besides Kelsey, e.i. me) could be friendly. Hopefully that mellowing will extend to her meeting a new cat.

However, if it doesn't, I'm not going to keep whatever cat I get. I live with Josie and Kelsey first, and, sad is it would be, I'd def have to pick them over my own cat in a two bedroom apartment. I definitely wouldn't adopt a cat somewhere that didn't have a clear policy allowing me to return it to the shelter if it didn't work out. From what I can tell, though, all the places I've looked at have exactly such a policy over 30 days. However, my goal will be to pick a very friendly, chill cat who will at worst leave Josie alone, assuming she doesn't act like a dick.

Next I've been thinking about where to put a cat box, and I think the only option would be to clear out stuff from under my table and put it there, facing away from my bed. Not ideal, since my room is tiny and my bed is on the floor, but I think it'd be the best I could do. Nowhere else, really to put a box except, like, what, the living room? Don't think we really want cat boxes out there, although it could probably work pretty well if we had them in the corner behind the TV. We don't use that space for anything else anyway, and it would give us impetus to actually clean up/get rid of all the shit back there.

I'm pretty excited. I've definitely had vague thoughts about maybe getting a cat at some point, but this is the first time my brain's actually prodded me hard enough for me to suspect that I'll follow through with it. And, I mean, with guys like this out there, how could I not? Seven pounds, people.