I woke up this morning remembering that i had quit puttering at my desk when i rolled the dice and got the task to write my grandfather. I complained to myself that my desk really wasn't set up for pen and ink. Use the clipboard box, i answered. I stared at my imagined helpful-self in the dark.
It's November 2009. The clipboard box is full of ephemera from the end of 2008.
So, i sifted through, found the ticket stubs and small ephemera bits that triggered memories, shoved that in the ephemera book from that time period, and shoved it all in the box with little art books and scrap books. I discarded the redundant, obvious, or already forgotten. Done.
Well, somewhat done.
( Talking myself into more decrufting )
***
Last night we watched a third season episode of Wire in the Blood, Synchronicity. It was wonderfully done, although i don't know how well it would work if one hadn't been following the characters through previous episodes. The horror of random chance: a sniper who was choosing victims apparently at random and the development of a brain tumor in profiling psychologist Tony Hill's brain. What did he do to deserve the tumor? What did the victims do to deserve their deaths? Odd to watch after i had waled away from my game of "Dungeons and Desk work," odd to watch after the dull malaise of Thursday and Friday and my sense of guilt at my inability to be as strong and reliable as i want to be. As Tony and Carol (the DCI) try to figure out a strategy, they touch on our human* desire to see pattern. Tony goes from quoting Jung and Stalin, asserting there are no coincidences, to accepting the randomness. There's so much in the eighty plus minutes yet it is sketchy and impressionistic. There's a comment on randomness by the drinking of one of the staff inspectors (it's hard to cope when faced with the randomness), and another, harder to decipher, comment by Tony's visit to a church and Carol's later questioning of a bishop. Did the victim deserve it? No.
There's an echo of something i've been discussing with![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
laugingrat: that desire to assert that there is a pattern, that when bad things happen to a person, somehow they deserve it. A side of the "nurture" argument: one's life choices causes one's illness and if one just changed diet, thought patterns, (desires, identity) one would be well. And there's the side of the "nature" argument: an attempt to trace the bad things to genetics, DNA (sins of the fathers, original sin). Both arguments insist a pattern. My understanding** of the mathematics that leads to chaos theory doesn't deny that there is a pattern, but points out that the models of the patterns are so sensitive to the multiplicity of input that repeatability is impossible. One of the classic stories in chaos theory is how repeating a weather model by leaving out some trailing insignificant digits caused a dramatic shift in the model results. We want patterns, but unless you have a precise, accurate, and complete model of all the boundary conditions, the iterative results will be unpredictable. It's not the same as randomness, but my understanding, but it's not very different in practice.
*yikes, late, must dash*
*mammal? Chordata?
** is decades old and out of practice
It's November 2009. The clipboard box is full of ephemera from the end of 2008.
So, i sifted through, found the ticket stubs and small ephemera bits that triggered memories, shoved that in the ephemera book from that time period, and shoved it all in the box with little art books and scrap books. I discarded the redundant, obvious, or already forgotten. Done.
Well, somewhat done.
( Talking myself into more decrufting )
***
Last night we watched a third season episode of Wire in the Blood, Synchronicity. It was wonderfully done, although i don't know how well it would work if one hadn't been following the characters through previous episodes. The horror of random chance: a sniper who was choosing victims apparently at random and the development of a brain tumor in profiling psychologist Tony Hill's brain. What did he do to deserve the tumor? What did the victims do to deserve their deaths? Odd to watch after i had waled away from my game of "Dungeons and Desk work," odd to watch after the dull malaise of Thursday and Friday and my sense of guilt at my inability to be as strong and reliable as i want to be. As Tony and Carol (the DCI) try to figure out a strategy, they touch on our human* desire to see pattern. Tony goes from quoting Jung and Stalin, asserting there are no coincidences, to accepting the randomness. There's so much in the eighty plus minutes yet it is sketchy and impressionistic. There's a comment on randomness by the drinking of one of the staff inspectors (it's hard to cope when faced with the randomness), and another, harder to decipher, comment by Tony's visit to a church and Carol's later questioning of a bishop. Did the victim deserve it? No.
There's an echo of something i've been discussing with
laugingrat: that desire to assert that there is a pattern, that when bad things happen to a person, somehow they deserve it. A side of the "nurture" argument: one's life choices causes one's illness and if one just changed diet, thought patterns, (desires, identity) one would be well. And there's the side of the "nature" argument: an attempt to trace the bad things to genetics, DNA (sins of the fathers, original sin). Both arguments insist a pattern. My understanding** of the mathematics that leads to chaos theory doesn't deny that there is a pattern, but points out that the models of the patterns are so sensitive to the multiplicity of input that repeatability is impossible. One of the classic stories in chaos theory is how repeating a weather model by leaving out some trailing insignificant digits caused a dramatic shift in the model results. We want patterns, but unless you have a precise, accurate, and complete model of all the boundary conditions, the iterative results will be unpredictable. It's not the same as randomness, but my understanding, but it's not very different in practice.*yikes, late, must dash*
*mammal? Chordata?
** is decades old and out of practice
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