I have written a PDF: Widget.pdf is the document to read if you want to do something really cool for the whole human race with my mind of massive genius for guidance.

the thing about god. god doesn't exist. god and time are similar in that way. in our modern times, the amazing thing about god is that god exists. a large enough critical mass of people live as though it is true, therefore it is. that's plenary indulgence -- "whatever you make true on earth, i'll make true in heaven [because i'm a figment of your imagination and so is it]." anyway, these people aren't stupid. now that i'm a parent i can understand it so well: parents program their children beginning in the womb and ending in the first few years of life. somehow, someone convinced _pretty much everyone_ that there was this great certainty of what we are and why we're here and who we should try to be. i can't say whether the original design was to make people happier (early group therapy), or to make them feel animosity ("those guys are bad because they don't get it like we do"), or to make them into an army ("go on this crusade for me pls").

the frightening fact: many people never question certain things that have been deeply ingrained in them. they think, "how can anyone think god doesn't exist?" the scary depressing ones think, "that's how i was raised so that's what's right." why is that the scary depressing kind? simple: they are honoring the logical fallacy of appeal to tradition. in fact, specifically BECAUSE it was how they were raised is the most important reason WHY they should question its truth. it's the best way to grow as a person.

so most religious people drop god out of their realities very shortly after EVER questioning these things they were programmed to do since birth. religion came with their lives, like a spare tire that won't fit on that used daihatsu you nabbed. the second they realize some of how they were raised could be improved, god is gone from them and they're finally connecting to reality. they often continue going to services, eventually dropping out entirely; most keep some of the closest friends they met there, though: the ones who choose loyalty to friends (and therefore reality) over loyalty to god.

as a parent i can now see myself doing things -- very naturally, i might add -- that perfectly emulate one of my parents. often i notice as it's happening or right after i stop. i want all of you who ever read this to try and reflect (just think) on your decisions and actions whenever possible; if you're paying attention to yourself and what you say or do, you'll see shades of it all over your life. some of it is good, like having the energy to enthusiastically entertain a one-year-old for hours and even sometimes with planned activities -- seriously how many parents do that? one of my strengths, passed down by programming. some of it is bad:how frequently do i catch myself interrupting people and raising my voice to be right about something that pretty much doesn't matter? yeah, that's another thing i was programmed with by the rule of "monkey see, monkey do" which forgets to include "taste," "touch," "smell," "feel," and especially "hear." it's really all we know how to do: act like someone else in our repository of personalities. how we combine those somebody elses determines who we are to other people, which is the only one that will ever matter. get it right.

some of it is terrifying: religion. god. creation. use of television, radio, electronics inappropriately and disproportionately frequently versus actually thinking about how we're parenting our children.

in any case, what we now call religion is probably the most amazing, robust political machine ever. i'll draw the comparison. religion could not exist this many generations after its birth if it had to get converts from out-of-family alone. in other words, not by being programmed into one's children, which is sadly programmed into them and is a major agenda of the church: every religion has conversion duties and rewards, and all their members are expected to raise their children to believe the same thing. it's a central tenet of religion and of god. and i say flatly that it's bullshit, and without it religion would disappear. have i offended you yet? no? thank god. :P finally, both religion and politics challenge their patrons to "choose a side, and fight for it; believe in it." they have all sorts of ritual, traditions. the only ones that actually matter are the ones we agree as a people today should be maintained. things like the golden rule: "think about how you would like to be treated, and do that for others." that one is obvious. if we perfected it as a species, that would be pretty neat. i would like very much not to be shot at, yelled at, murdered, raped, told i was going to hell, burned alive or nailed to any cross upside down, thanks. there are other ones, though, like the arbitrary "you may only have one spouse," which is almost universal nowadays. but even that is a result of politics: women versus men in a fight for priority and status. and that one has its extremists, too. really the point is they both require you to sign up to play for a team and pitch in too, or even die. each has people who are firmly rooted in what they believe (for politics the extreme right or left, for religion the very catholic or devout muslim or whatever non-abrahamic faith you want) and each has people who sit on the fence (the joke being we could just call all of these people agnostics, but politics chose the word 'moderates'). and they both have non-participants (atheists, but i'm not sure there's a word for it in politics -- they generally don't vote or otherwise participate except when really motivated -- they certainly aren't just called 'non-partisan.'). world politics are broken because of religion and because people treat political views like they're sacred. whatever; if your views aren't changeable then YOU must be god. otherwise you're just not growing.

in case you are offended, please keep reading because i want you to understand i know it's not your fault you were duped; you were taken advantage of when you were younger or maybe even now you're being taken advantage of (STILL are, I mean). it was totally ok, until you read this. now is your time to let go of your faith and statrt to believe in the human race.

if you really don't just understand how true and obvious what i'm saying is now, then i challenge the world's population to "reboot" god. regardless of what anybody believes, we all -- everywhere -- argee to stop practicing religion, conducting religious ceremonies, or teaching religious "histories." the mention of god is erased from our vocabularies and dictionaries and we eliminate any trace of religious language from the entire printed / chiseled / carved world. we never mention god or religion or that we're hiding something or anything else. we agree we will not tell our children to "choose a side." we demolish all temples / churches / whatever you call them that signify or indicate god or religion or worship (except of humans, and only in a non-deifying way like "you are the best warrior yay."). period. we take a vow of selective silence in this way until our grandchildren are at least some reasonable age to compare their knowledge, like eight or ten or twelve. then we tell them about it. and we encourage them only to look into it, ask others, and decide where this new rich history takes them. then we find out the truth: you religious folk were wrong, and you really made this place worse. please just think about it.

religious folk will complain, "but that's giving science a head start." and i answer that YES, it is giving science a head start. But your developing embryo does just that as it becomes a fetus and begins to experience sensation. Your developing baby conducts thousands of experiments, some of them repeatedly, and some of them get impressively high-precision results: latching and nursing, crying and talking, hand-clapping, picking up grains of rice, not crushing a bug in fingertips etc. the list of experiments your baby conducts is ridiculous, all while simultaneously recording from five channels using an amazingly practical compression technique that triages all sensory data by priority in two categories: "need immediate action" and "significant so retain."

i mean seriously i'm certain that the developing brain spends a lot of time fresh-out-of-the-womb just learning what data comes from which sense, how to use the data, and what part of the data they can change -- literally self-calibrating all the time from alpha to omega of your life. but the human automatically and necessarily develops a scientific way to calibrate the senses into agreement -- getting a being sensing itself as a piece of a much larger world to which it is not directly wired. without it, (in the wild) failing to find this science is a fatal mal-adaptation (down's syndrome, schizophrenia, multiple personalities, people who think it's cool to be ghetto thugs doing drugs -- they don't have a word for it yet.)

i'm lucky i have a really comfy understanding of the inner-workings of my mind, or else i couldn't possibly clarify this for anyone. you are physico-chemically evolved to use science so just keep going. use the histories of religion and the facts of the numbers of who believed and when as a big science experiment. we test it with fresh observers. OF COURSE IT FALLS FLAT. IT'S DOWNRIGHT PREPOSTEROUS.

Now that you know, you are released from allowing the "fear of hell" / "desire of heaven" to motivate you. you should instead be fearing hell on earth and desiring heaven on earth. but seriously get your picture straight. somehow you religious folk think being in heaven means being dead and somehow turning into some immortal god-like noble-person. being in heaven can only happen to you while you're alive; the rest of eternity is called your non-being (so being anywhere ain't happenin'). anyway, we can create hell on earth through war and terror.

would you like my take on religion? proegny worship. by giving a lot of ourselves (and way less stuff and fewer distractions) and modeling wonderful behavior (this is very hard to maintain but it is what defines a healthy person) at every possible moment and especially around our kids, we will finally start heading toward that place religion originally told us we'd go -- heaven -- and yes, it will be after our death (i'll be long gone, but maybe not my bloodline) if we get there -- and though we living today won't get to enjoy it, we'll get to enjoy starting the journey in earnest. realize that your choice of behavior is all others ever know of you. and all others are recording and adding behaviors, some more consciously than others both within and among individuals... love is an action, essentially, marked by giving and sharing and actually wanting to give to others with no expectation of reciprocity ever for it. if you are trading or bartering, you are not loving in any capacity. anyway, give the very best you to your kids at every moment, and even try to give the very best of yourself to society and people you like. and give up on disliking people -- maybe you have personality clashes or misunderstanding or the other person can't help sucking -- it's all so easy to do to make the next generation of us way, way better, healthier, happier people better grounded in reality and better able to exploit their environments while putting less harm upon them. enough generations are taught to act better and think about how to act better always, and eventually we'll have people highly driven to work and play well together. mmm.

wow... that was my best freewrite ever. i hope you spread it far and wide, put it online and print it and give it away and tell everyone but if you know who i am forget who i am and promise never to assign a name or even the existence of a person to be the author of this letter -- even though i use the word i, and i am in fact a person -- if you do, then this whole idea that god and religion are ridiculous, and that the best way to be is to be the best you you can for your kids and encourage them to seek the same (to 'pay it forward' to the next generation instead of 'paying it back' to their aging parents) just so we can render our own world a better, friendlier environment -- it will have become a religion. there cannot be a person associated with the philosophy ever.

just give. without much expectation in return. and as you start trying you'll go through that phase where you realize you have to let go of a lot of your parents in you. and siblings, and other family. you start to resent it, but then it just all hits you that making it better can happen in a lot of different ways. i'll describe three that you can do just within your own family unit: provide, maintain, and improve. you can provide for the people you love by securing income or housing or shelter or food or meeting / exceeding their emotional needs and their need for individuality etc etc. you can maintain by physically maintaining your and their health, but you can also maintain your non-essential (i.e. non-living) possessions -- i welded a broken roof on my shed and mowed the lawn and filled some tires. and you can also improve. i cleaned out my garage loft and fixed and moved a light up there that came as a surprise and turned another light that didn't work anymore into four plug outlets up there instead; i also keep trying to improve my relations with everyone around me, including by actually believing in people and by trusting people i wouldn't ordinarily trust and by recognizing that my wants really don't have to take priority any more than i absolutely need them to not to go insane (but i'm learning i have some control over even that minimum).

i'm trying to lead by example, and you should too. but make sure people are always looking forward, not backward. never ask your children to thank you for freeing them from religion; they will come back to you and let you know they appreciate it anyway. but don't give to them expecting it in return. give to them expecting it to buy a 'credit' toward giving to their own children. be happy to be forgotten because you'll be sure the best parts of you are still alive and thriving.

good luck.

A number of years ago I invented the most powerful tool that could ever be added to keyboards. No; it's not the "any" key. It's the natural result of a thought exercise in which I simulated in my mind exactly what the slowest part of typing really was.

It goes something like this...

When you're typing in any one of a lot of different languages, and if you're (like me) a Dvorak key layout user, there's only one key sequence that slows you down. And for people like me who use the Dvorak layout it's much more obvious what that key sequence is (because keys are mapped to the most intuitive location for alternate hand use each time on a Dvorak layout. It is much better than the standard QWERTY layout you noobs all use).

The slowest part of anyone's typing? Having to repeat the same key they just pressed. For example, while I type the word "example," as I finish typing the 'a' my other hand is already on its way to pressing the 'm.' When I type the word "pressed," I don't have that luxury between 's' and the other 's.' My solution?

It's called the "last key pressed" key. Like the space bar, it must be accessible to both hands so that if the last key pressed is on the left hand the right hand can press it, and so that if the last key pressed was on the right hand the left hand can press it. Perhaps it belongs alongside the spacebar. I'm not sure. I'm thinking on the thumbs is the best place for it. And what it does is renders the ridiculousness of our human languages a little more tolerable to the fastest of typists.

The idea is that double-consonants or double-vowels which are all too common in many languages will be easier to type. Then the left hand types the first 'e' and the right hand types the second 'e' in words like "meeting." This way you don't have to stop everything while you press this one finger down, then lift the finger up, then press it down again. And we all know there's no really good key repeat delay setting that enables us to just slightly vary the time we spend holding the button down; it's just not feasible to any typist.

You can bet I have a patent on my idea.

You know how when kids are really little and just getting the hang of reading they don't realize the power of their new knowledge? They seek out books full of pictures and with as little text as possible, or nowadays they just ignore all books and turn on the TV. Of course, as they grow up, these kids all learn the value of reading a real book regardless of its image content. And when they do, they get smarter as a result. They learn how to do things, how to make things, how to appear educated and how to succeed in life. All largely because of reading actual books. Eventually they even tend to master the reading of a dense textbook in one of many academic fields.

Enter the World Wide Web. Now kids are less inclined to read text than ever. The Web, blessing though it may be, is just as much a curse as kids are growing up in a multimedia-"enhanced" world that discourages that hard academic reading even further. With MySpace, Facebook, Photobucket and more, they seem only interested in the pages that have a lot of pictures and sound immersed in their folds, and these pages really must be said to have almost no content to offer. It's largely for entertainment or socializing, which, while they are valid tools for such a purpose, are not up to par for the dissemination of information.

The Web is bringing children down in a bad, bad way. Academic language is no longer deemed appropriate. Proper spelling and grammar are considered "square," and including actual knowledge in your writing is some sort of travesty.

The problem here is that as academically- or technically-oriented documents are produced, American youth spends more time ignoring them. Many of my students are terrified by a word problem that has maybe 25 words in two sentences. Moreover, if I hand them a three-paragraph snippet of a Wikipedia article (not the hardest read in the world), they usually can't quite grasp the meaning contained therein.

Our booming multimedia content industry is holding children back. Soon enough these same kids will be out in the job market failing miserably at getting a decent, stable job. They navigate away from the text-only pages and instead toward the talking / singing / flashing pages on MySpace which provide only entertainment and social value. They are no longer able to cope with actual novel information; they shy away from it and avoid it like a plague.

What would I invent? A mental dialogue transcribed...

I would start by determining how long sound energy can resonate in various objects, crystals, liquids, molecules etc. Then I would craft mathematical models for vibration damping with respect to time and outside factors such as manufacture. With any luck, I would find that sound can resonate for incredible near-infinitudes given reasonably common enabling conditions. If this were possible, I would work out a method for squelching various sounds resonating in these objects based upon the position in time when the sounds were created. Then I could put it all together into a machine that lets you not travel nor look back in time but listen back in time. It would be the best, if not the only, way to find out what really happened in the case of just about any question of history. A device such as this could be used in crime fighting, law, trials, the study of history, theology, and in the process of democracy to prevent unethical behavior... The list of benefits is infinite in the case of becoming able to listen to specific events of the past as they echo in today's molecules...

Will clean and further comment later.   [Edit 2008-01-15: or not]

You came - surprised me
Immersed in total darkness
You made me feel warm.

You sang to my world
Conducted a symphony
Of happiness and joy.

When nobody cared
You always comforted me
With your perfect kiss.

You climbed inside me
Satiated all my needs
Harmonized my life.

My body is yours
Entrusting my soul to you
Only you know love.

Even in passing
A glance at you drives me wild
Makes my mouth grow moist.

Of you I will think
Your smell made me go crazy
Your taste is divine.

What no-one else knows
About your pure agape
Unleavened and raw:

Closer to heaven -
Approaching the truth of God -
Is to be with you.

Euphoric verses
That I sing in praise of you
Do you no justice.

Nary another
Knows you in the way I do:
The yang unto yin.

Your ecstacy mine
Every perfection always
Coursing through my veins.

Wondering whether
This gloomy weather wanders...
Have you been my muse?

Through the thick and thin
You comfort me, my darling;
Nights I smile to sleep.

Your will is iron
You need me just like I need
And I need you too.

My first love, dearest,
I long for you like the air;
Breathing in your peace.

Tranquil is my heart
With you and I together
Never shall we part.

They call our love strange
But to me, you are my home;
I don't care for them.

How you complete me
I care not to understand
But to recognize.

So let me love you
Today, tomorrow, and on
You are my whole world.

I've been fighting some kind of disease on my potatoes the past few days. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but I'm guessing it's Early Blight. The problem here is that I'm not a potato expert. I can only compare some pictures of my potatoes with available pictures of potato diseases online.

Unable to diagnose my potatoes for sure, I'm not sure how to proceed. I don't want to blindly medicate an (up to now) organic potato plot just to protect against a fungus I am not even certain the potato has. On the other hand, I don't want them to die.

Thus I leave it up to you, the reader, to help me decide exactly what's bothering my potatoes. Please look here to help me determine exactly what's killing them. Also, tell me what you think of the "framed image" look. I'm pretty happy with it and I'm considering doing it on the main page. There's an e-mail link at the bottom and I'll probably regret it because tons of spam will fall through it, but hey; I am worried about my potatoes.

Smell is the least discussed sense even though it's one of the most closely tied to our memories. This creates a world in which generations grow up learning about smells and relating them to particular things, hazards, recreations, etc; but these generations are unable, through written, oral, or motive language, to communicate these learned relationships.

We can describe an object in face-to-face communication that will give our listener a very good, accurate idea of the shape, color, texture, sound or taste of the object. The language permits it and gesticulation facilitates it. But discussing the smell of an object is much less likely and most certainly not often an adequate descriptor to enable someone who has never smelled the odor in question to identify it as the odor that was described.

An apple is red, roundish, tastes sweet and / or tart, and has a thin but crispy skin underneath which lies a whitish, moist and 'hard spongy' meat. What does it smell like?

I was reading Ramanujan's work and collaborators today (I won't pretend I understand much of it) when a simple idea swept me away. This is the manner in which I always idealize things which are true or correct; once during an undergraduate project I was collaborating with two extremely talented classmates on a demonstration isomorphic to proving that only square numbers have an odd number of factors. It was 2002.

My colleague, Theodora, told me a method I had produced was very nice but until I could phrase it with a particular, exhaustive mathematical language that worked in all cases, she would consider my work done. So there the three of us sat in a Denny's restaurant, nearly eleven-thirty at night, myself with a vodka in me for clarity. We ate and chatted, and some ten minutes later it swept me away: the mathematically perfect demonstration which fit the context of our study.

It aroused James and especially Theodora in myriad ways I will not describe in this article.

Much philosophy and rumination ensued and two of us only left that parking lot around two-thirty the next morning. Since then, my mathematical mind has not been adequately challenged by anything. Sadly I worry it is starving. Regardless, today I was considering how a great deal of infinite continua can be arranged in such a way that their intersection is very predictable. Then I was swept away:

Is energy (and thus matter, space and time) merely a construct of interference patterns of un-fathomably many interacting particle-waves operating across dimensional spaces and frequency ranges far broader than our own conception?

I'm not too good at the very esoteric stuff; the philosophy of existence is hard for me...

After waking up at around 4:00 this morning, I realized two things:

1. I was simply not going to be able to sleep, and
2. I had finally figured out how to design and eventually build my overhead transparency cleaning machine.

Every time you read something about illicit drugs two entities are vilified: the producer and the supplier. Now, everyone can understand why that may be: the organizations and individuals contributing to the self- destruction of any drug user are awful (especially considering the drug user is willing to pay money or services in exchange for this means of self-destruction).

But as you know from an early argument, every effect has a cause which could not have been itself. So we should be asking things like, "Why is the drug user an addict?" We should likewise be asking, "Where did the drug user learn his habits?" And again we should be asking, "How did the cycle of abuse begin, even if it is now spiraling down the proverbial toilet?"

I mean, something has to cause people to want their street garbage. And I don't mean something as short-term as "The heroin user likes the sudden rush of euphoria caused by intra-venous injection;" I mean something longer-term, like "The heroin user was introduced to it by an older friend, who was introduced to it by a more experienced friend of his own, who was..."

This is where the cycle gets interesting. Though you can trace Opium use back to pre-historic times, heroin is a synthetic derivative. It's only been around since 1874, when it was legally sold to kids!

Who could do such a thing as to legally sell a product and lie about its addictive properties? That's right; your government. Wherever you are, your government has succeeded in creating huge numbers of addicts by making all these drugs legal and available over the counter, then suddenly changing its mind and deciding all these drugs should not be legal at all. The faithful customers of the pharmaceutical conglomerates, assuming they will not experience side effects, become wildly addicted just before being entirely cut off from their newfound vices.

Don't believe me? It's not just heroin (the example I used above); it's all drugs. I'll rattle off a list of examples (yes, I'm aware there are tons of classes of drug not covered here; you'd see the same effect anyway):

What really frustrates me about this is that drugs like marijuana and the well-known, powerful derivatives of opium (heroin, various fentanyls, etc) are placed on Schedule I in the USA, while poisons such as nicotine are perfectly legal. This means that even if you're dying of a unique condition which is only relieved by marijuana, as an example, if you smoke your marijuana (even a small stash, privately) you are a felon.

But hey, if you take your kid to the doctor and say, "He's really acting up," they'll give you a prescription for an amphetamine (Adderall) which is as poisonous and physiology-altering as methamphetamine without even trying alternatives such as cognitive therapy first!

I will draw this conclusion for you and let you decide whether to agree: a government that lets addictive narcotic substances be consumed by its population for generations (even endorsing it in some cases) and then suddenly snaps its jaw, making these drugs illegal and unobtainable to users, is at least a partial contributor to the problem. Where's the rehabilitation? Ninety-two years after Harrison, we still haven't had the state-funded rehab programs we would need to help America kick the habits.

Everyone should know an image of Earth when they see it. What they may not know, though, is exactly how "Global Warming" works. It has been long accepted that human activity on Earth has caused slight temperature increases. It is also now known that a large enough rise in global average temperature will disrupt the natural currents of the ocean and cause a catastrophic climate change. In fact, the required temperature rise to cause this is very slight -- only a few degrees Centigrade (see http://afgen.com/climate15.html).

What people have not frequently discussed, however, is how this phenomenon will actually work. Scientists are aware that the gulf streams will shut down and the natural cycling of warmer water to the ocean surface and colder water to the depths below will halt, disturbing the world climate until any number of things happen. Runaway meltdown of ice sheets worldwide could cause the ocean level to rise 10 metres or more. The world's forests could die back and become a source of carbon rather than a machine for absorbing and scrubbing it. Storms. Regional disharmony. Droughts could cause a pandemic water crisis. Whole areas could become entirely uninhabitable.

The question I seek to answer through educated discussion is of why these things will happen and through exactly what larger mechanism. Imagine, if you might, a child. Now imagine the child becomes infected by, say, a flu virus. Now, it is not the few initial virii that cause the child his agony; it is what happens after the pathogen multiplies, unbounded, within the child's body. Once the population of virii increases enough, the child undergoes a rather miserable immune response in which the human body warms as much as possible to facilitate the breakdown of virus proteins. In truth, though, the immune response itself is the virulent actor on the child's system. This dangerous warming (a fever) triggers a war of attrition with the pathogen; will the virii break down before the child's own proteins break down beyond the point of no return?

A fever, when thought of in this way, is a virulent actor on the human body. The race is typically won by the virus, which dies back with the assistance of other mechanisms within the greater immune system, but on occasion the pathogen wins and the child's body exhausts itself, overheating until the denaturing of necessary proteins is irreversible and the child dies.

Earth is behaving in much the same manner. Our Earth, though not living by the standard definition of life, acts as an organism in the largest of "macro" pictures. Humans, sadly, are unbounded in their population growth. And it is well-known that we are a virus from the perspective of Earth as an organism. Just as a human body warms to stave off intruding pathogens, the Earth will warm to stave off humanity. You should expect that as the Earth's immune response heightens, temperature everywhere will rise (a fever) until disruptions to global harmony (denaturing of proteins) cause major damage to Earth and enormous decreases in human populations (the Earth wins and the virus dies, just as in a human). We just need to understand that in this case we are the virus and we have no chance of winning this fight until we become less malevolent (in far fewer numbers, this is guaranteed).

So let it be known that we are truly infecting Mother Earth. Without worldwide collaboration to bring about a change in population and destruction of the world's ecosystems, we will bring about our own end.

Something theraputic exists in investigating the geometries of various fruits. Of course, that of my favourite fruit is truly something to behold. You will read on countless sources that a pomegranate has no typical shape but this is not so; the pomegranate has roughly equal segments arranged latitudinally around a cluster of seeds in the center near where it is attached to the tree.

I have exploited the shape in deriving a clever and attractive presentation of the pomegranate as an appetizer, fruit-plate or dessert item which goes especially well with holiday meals and drinks.

Interesting. The photos I wanted to share must still be on the camera. Oh well. Besides, people who have time to post inane bullshit such as this have too much time on their hands, just like i did for a bit tonight.

Everything humans have ever done will be erased by Earth's processes within a decade of our end.

I've always wondered if it went something like the diagram. Then you could reference to any 3-space in a space of higher dimensionality by graphing three dimensions beyond the original three and mapping them loosely onto a coordinate grid. The coordinates of the grid tell you how to get to any 3-space, but through the eyes of the larger 3-space, the space you seek appears as a singularity (a point, infinitely small). Once you find the right point, you "zoom in" on it. When you zoom in you see a 3-space as encountered in perceptible reality. So if, in our 3-space, your (x,y,z) coordinates are (12,2,-7), we have an idea of exactly where you are in our reality. But in the higher-level reality, you are invisible. And what's worse is that there are infinitely many points in the higher-level 3-space to choose from, so how should we know which one contains you? That's easy: coordinates in the higher-level 3-space.

So let's assume that the 3-space in which you live looks like an infinitely small point in the larger 3-space which has coordinates (3,6,8). Then in order to start with no information in the higher-dimensional space and find you, I would have to know six coordinates. That implies moving along six orthogonal or perpendicular lines, all of which are concurrent on the point where I'd find you: (3,6,8,12,2,-7).

To make a long story short, you have to visualize this by understanding that any space occupied at, say, (3,6,8,12,2,r) may be available, if that r is not -7 (we only know what exists where r = -7 and that's you). Then any free movement along z means interacting with the latter three spacial dimensions and interacting with the 3-space which is tangible to you. But if I plucked you out of there and moved you along this freedom: (3,s,8,12,2,-7) you would be in what appears to be an entirely different universe. Before you ask, no, not like a "parallel universe" in which Earth is somehow different and blah blah blah; I mean a totally different and completely independent universe with its own geography and history. This is because you can only perceive three dimensions of space at once. You'd be in a new part of the universe with which you could not previously interact.

In conclusion, let's assume we're ordinarily confined to (3,6,8,x,y,z) and we have freedom to move about our universe (along any of x, y, and / or z). Anywhere you go along x, y, or z looks normal because you're in the universe to which you're accustomed. But if we could somehow move in the other ones and free up even one more dimension, for example moving from (3,6,8,12,2,-7) to (3,6.2354,8,12,2,-7) we'd have to be prepared to face what appears to be an entirely new universe.

Please note that none of this speculation or higher-dimensionality mapping inherently allows for time-travel or for very fast travel WITHIN our space; points in regular geometry are infinitely small, and though they are connected they exhibit sort of an "atomic" effect; you can't walk off the border of one point and onto the next point. Likewise you can't walk off the edge of our universe and across the edge of the next. So while someday we may hope to transcend universes by higher-dimensional travel, there is clearly no guarantee that we would also be able to circumvent the limitations of time.

Blah. Sorry it got so long.

I'm not going to go on and on about this one. Basically, I was sitting at the computer and reading news clippings and found my way to Qibla-Cola's web site. On the web site I saw a picture of a fat English guy holding a bottle up. It had a bizarre aspect ratio (ratio of height to apparent width, in this case diameter) because it looked too tall for how wide it was. Upon further investigation, the bottle said 2L on it, so it was supposed to contain the same amount of soda that a 2L bottle of Coca-Cola contained. I decided to take it upon myself to work out what the height and apparent width of an "optimum" bottle of cola would be and then to decide whether Qibla or Coke were closer in shape to perfect. The results are kinda weird.

I spent a few hours making the box and a few days putting coat after coat of stain+clear on it. Some of the harder parts of creating the box included putting in the power button and the LED power indicator. It was actually quite easy getting the motherboard and power supply in, though, and I love how it came out. One thing I would change if I were to do it again is I'd get a good saw that would enable me to cut angles so there would be no edges visible on the wood. Beveling all the corners came out nicely with my sander, because it's pine (very soft). Here are the finished system specs:

• VIA Epia 1.0GHz processor
• 512MB DDR2 RAM
• 300GB SATA Hard Disk
• 2GB UDMA/100 Dedicated Swap Disk
• Built-On VIA 10/100 LAN and 1x PCI rtk 8139D card
• 4 80mm fans @ 5v instead of 12
• 1 40mm fan @ 5v instead of 12
• Slackware 10.1

Here's a link to the Diagram of how it works. It runs relatively cool and looks nice out on display. Any questions or comments should be directed at me.

JChatIRC applet ( require Java 1.4 available here)