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Wednesday, September 24, 2014

The creator


Despite the headline, this post isn't about god or God. I just started thinking about my job and my life and wondered when I stopped being creative. Because that is one thing I always clung to as being my identity in life. I was creative.

Being creative to me means creating something...something original. Creative writing is original writing, not regurgitated prose or hackneyed plots. And even though I studied Journalism (which frowns on creative license in telling a story), I always held onto the belief that my writing was different from others. And in retrospect, maybe it is different, just not in a good way.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Fake Blood



I finished binge watching all of the seasons of The Sopranos and I've moved on to the HBO series True Blood. There are seven seasons and 80 episodes. I figure I can watch about three a day between my commute and my daily workout.  So I figure I should have watched them all by Halloween.

Unlike The Sopranos, I had only watch a couple seasons of True Blood before being distracted by life. So, also unlike The Sopranos, the final episode (which only aired last month) should surprise me and not jump to a black screen with Journey playing in the background and everyone saying WTF happened.

Sorry if I spoiled The Sopranos finale for anyone who hasn't seen it.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Schrödinger's cat


An explanation of Schrodinger's cat experiment from whatis.com: 
Here's Schrödinger's (theoretical) experiment: We place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. There is, in the chamber, a very small amount of a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill the cat. The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Since we cannot know, the cat is both dead and alive according to quantum law, in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (dead or alive). This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox: the observation or measurement itself affects an outcome, so that it can never be known what the outcome would have been if it were not observed.
Why am I dredging up quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox again? You (whoever you are) may have recalled me posting about having my cat of 17 years euthanized back in July. A few weeks later, we received a call from the vet that I we could pick up her ashes. I numbly drove to the vet and waited as the same assistant who had put the IV to administer the drug to end my cat's life went and retrieved a small cardboard box housing the container with her ashes.