messiestobjects

The Anti-Elvis Says, Abeo, Las Vegas, Abeo!

*My pictures from Las Vegas are up over on my smugmug page.

Sometimes my work sends me to some pretty cool places which is what I love about the job, enjoying travel as I do, and for the most part travel in the US is not something I'd likely do much of on my own. My very first assignment with my company was to Wyoming, where I was able to squeeze in enough time to see the Devil's Tower, Yellowstone Park, Mt. Rushmore, and Deadwood. That was cool. Or the time I went to Florida and got to do all of the awesome NASA stuff. There's loads of others. It's been a fun year. But there's a backside to the cool travel, which is all of the not so great places they've sent me to. Virginia a few times, Maryland (Which was cool the first time because I got to check out DC but once is enough) and I spent a night in Philly a few weeks ago. Philly is actually a cool city though, and had I been able to treat it as a new place and take lots of pictures, I'd have had a good travelogue about it. But I lived there for a while (blogged about that once way back) and I've spent lots of time there anyway over the years, so it was hard to really get into it. Had a cheesesteak on South Street and ice cream in the Old Town.

Anyway, this isn't about Philly. The latest place I got sent to for work is one of those places I NEVER would have chosen to go to on my own, and while it's a place I'm glad enough to tick off my checklist, still, ugh. Las Vegas. For three nights. I know right? Can you imagine a worse place? You might think I'm being sarcastic, but mostly I'm not. I don't like to gamble (except for in the stock market) because I always lose (that's true in the stocks too, unfortunately) and I don't find it to be a fun way to pass the time. I don't like all that fake fun and I resent the way they try to overwhelm you with bright blinky blinky lights, loud noises, big outrageous buildings, and the doodley-doodley-doo sound of a kajillion slot machines begging me to lose twenty dollars, just one little twenty dollar bill, on a little obsessive compulsive fun. I resent having to see the pathetic old sallow people staring slackjawed at a slot machine with a cigarette falling off their pale lips and six or seven tumblers that once held whiskey or vodka. Often, they haven't shaved or cleaned themselves in like a week and it doesn't look like the unshaven laziness of a holiday, it looks like the unshaven look of a man who hates his crappy job and his stupid life.

But ok I'm done complaining now because despite the ridiculousness of Las Vegas, I did in fact manage to enjoy myself. Mostly by getting out of the city. I took a morning trip down to the Hoover Dam and I have to say, it's dam cool. Yuk yuk I totally just made that joke up. But in reality, I wasn't prepared to be quite as wowed by it as I was. Of all the places I've traveled and of all of the man-made wonders I've gotten to see, other than the particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland, it's the most incredible feat of engineering I've ever seen.

I won't waste your time with descriptions of it that are better written on wikipedia, but suffice it to say it was a massive undertaking to divert the Colorado River and build what is actually a system of capturing energy using enough concrete to cover Pennsylvania with a four foot layer, and standing there looking at it really brings home what that must have taken, and how cool it is that people can do things like that. It also made me think about possible engineering feats of the future as I talked about a few posts back, and it gave me hope that if we ever put our minds to it, we can still accomplish great things for humanity. I mean, not to get too dramatic, but the immensity of Hoover Dam readily inspires such philosophical musings. Here's an upper canyon shot.

And here's a shot of the topside as the Colorado river gets dammed. You can also see here from the waterline how low the water is this year.

 

I also went on a helicopter ride over the canyon and got a few nice aerial shots. So, you know, here's one.

The helicopter ride was super fun. It was really windy out and we were getting buffeted all over. I love helicopters... this was my second time in one. My first time was a 45 minute ride in a Blackhawk from Baghdad to Balad, Iraq and then back for work, which was much more fun and exciting than this one, so you know, it was easy to remain calm and enjoy a few Photo ops here.

The rest of my time in Vegas was spent on the strip. One evening I walked from the Luxor hotel where I was staying (the one shaped like a Pyramid) all the way up to Fremont Street, where the main strip of Vegas was in the old days. I discovered quite a few things along the way. For instance, Prostitution is legal in Vegas. Didn't know that; I thought that was only at that Ranch out in the desert somewhere. But in fact, they have Girl Delivery trucks that bring ladies of the night right to your hotel room. Think about that for a minute. Girl Delivery Trucks.

Talk about Human Trafficking. Icky. I also discovered that most of the Vegas strip is constantly under construction. They're always tearing down old casinos and building newer, more insane ones. A cab driver told me that they do that because that's the best way to get people to come back. Regular Vegas goers get bored of the same old places, so they constantly have to be getting rid of the out-of-fashion casinos and re-sucking in the crowds with new attractions. It's amazing to me. It's like you know, upgrading your laptop, because your old one is from like 2003 and hopelessly slow and out of date. But in this case it's a city upgrading entire blocks of casinos. Wasteful, shocking, depressing, and impressive all at once.

I stopped in at The Bellagio on Miss Luongo's suggestion to see the Dale Chihuly sculptured glass ceiling, and I gotta say, it's pretty damn cool. Very impressive and beautiful. Here's three different views of it.

I have to say though that my favorite part of the Vegas strip was in fact the oldest part, Fremont Street. It's where all the old legendary cool stuff happened in the early days of the city, but really I could care less about that. The problem with the main strip of Vegas is that it's a maze of insanity. Ridiculously oversized buildings that they make you walk through at every opportunity. Countless escalators and moving walkways for the terminally lazy escort you from casino to casino, letting you outside for a glimpse of the streets only grudgingly. And it can be difficult to find the exits of those places, because really they don't want you not stopping for a quick slot machine loss. Doodley-doodley-doo, doodley-doodley-doo, doodley-doodley-doo, doodley-doodley-FREAKIN' DOO!!! So what's nice about Fremont street is that when you finally make it there, it actually takes on the feeling you often get in the old part of a European city. All quaint and small and relaxed. Relatively speaking, of course. They apparently did some revitalization there a few years back, and made it a covered street, although in pure Vegas style; the cover is a huge arched video screen stretching for like four or five city blocks long which plays loud stuff periodically, such as a Queen montage that assaulted my senses while I was there.

Plus you know, tons of other noise and blinky blinky lights, but compared to the monstrosity of the main strip casinos, it was quite tolerable. And it was a pedestrian only street which was very nice because at last you could just sort of meander in a straight line amidst a crowd of fun seekers with out having to think too much about how to get to the next point on the strip. And my favorite part were of course the religious proselytizers. They're always good for a shot or three. This guy seems a bit like he's involved in a lost cause, huh?

So if you're the religious type, you might think that this guy is being brave, a real witness for the lord, right? I mean, he was arrested for sharing God's word! (Even though it's obvious that he's not telling the whole story. People don't tend to get arrested for simply sharing God's word. My guess is he was doing something invasive while sharing God's word, such as blowing up an abortion clinic to kill an abortionist or some such. Just a guess.) Well, if you still think that after reading the back of his sign, we need to have words.

And here's another great one. And you can see the video screen cover over the street here that I was talking about.

So now I can say that I've been to Vegas, and I never ever need to go back. Whew.

A Dream Of Germany And All Points Nostalgia. Ugh.

I had a dream the other night which, when I woke up, left me with that bittersweet feeling of joy and loss that only dreams can evoke. Not to sound gay or anything. But it was a pretty simple dream; I was in a hallway, and people started arriving. They were people I'd known from Germany. More and more showed up until we formed a very crowded circle in the hall there, and everybody was chattering away, laughing, telling old stories and old jokes from our time at Chiemsee. Nothing can be as nice and comforting as an old joke retold between friends you haven't seen in years. Like the time Bailey caused Deutsche Bahn to cancel the 11:10pm train route from Munich to Bernau because he got a bit too toasty and kicked out a train window, uh, accidentally. Disco night at the Windjammer.

Or when a rogue storm came up on the lake during a sailing class that Danielle and I were in together, capsizing our sailboat, losing my glasses to the bottom of the Chiemsee while trying to right it. Or Nimmer catching the train by his teeth as it was pulling out of the station during an unscheduled church points stop at 2am. Or Scott... well, he wouldn't want me to tell that story. But it's a funny story. Seth playing Frogger on the autobahn. Dirk tying a kite to his rear bumper, lighting it on fire and going for a ride on the hotel strasse, then waking up the next morning cuddled contentedly next to Josh in the Summerhaus kitchen. Dirk, Josh, Lauren, Dave & I seeing Foetus in Salzburg and getting locked out of the car, then driving up to Dirk's Dad's historical German hunting lodge for a weekend of too much rich food and cappuccinos, causing unspeakable trouble in my bowels. Dumpster diving. Charlie's. The Bernauer Stuben. Krampus fest. Al Harms! Bus Olympics. Absinthe parties after Absinthe runs to Czesky Krumlov. What was Matt's roomate's name who Scott made up all those stories about? Windjammer Halloween parties. "Stealing" the maypole from the Badehaus. Radlers on the German beach. That last summer on the dive shop dock. Volleyball Tuesday. Singing The Yellow Submarine in German. Rosenheim. Munich. The Bernau Bahnhof.

Anyway, I could go on and on, each one of those memories spawning a hundred more. Forgive me; wistfully reminiscing about Chiemsee is a pathological pastime for those of us who were there, annoying and boring on a regular basis our friends who were not. Suffice it to say it was a bittersweet dream, laughing with old friends whom I'll never see all together in one room again. I spent three years in Chiemsee, but I also spent three years in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a ski town near the Austrian border in the Alps. Garmisch tends to take back seat in my memories of Germany, as it was so much longer ago and the dynamic at Chiemsee during the final year of its operation was rather show-stealing. But coinciding with my dream, a good friend of mine, Marc, from the Garmisch days recently got back from a vacation with his wife whom he'd met there to revisit our old stomping grounds. He posted some pictures on his Facebook page from the trip and I of course found myself looking through them with a renewed sense of old days gone. He has loads of great pictures of our favorite German food and beer. Nostalgia, that's the word. Yuck. I had had a really great time there as well, and I think that it is perhaps one of the most beautiful spots in the world.

Marc reminded me of a historic night on the town. On the week prior to the night in question, we had been at the Santa Fe, otherwise known as the local American Bar. When the Santa Fe closes, there's only one other bar that stays open later (Well, except for the Evergreen, but that's another story) named Peaches. It's a horrid place. Fruity girl drinks and obnoxious party beat music. But at 3am, all pretense of discernment tends to fade. So we walked over, and the doorman wouldn't let me in. It was rather unbelievable for a bar that catered to the 3am crowd. He said my pants were too baggy; he thought I looked like a snowboarder. And I was a snowboarder in fact, but so what? He said, in middling English, that they'd had trouble with my kind. "They, they come in here and cause trouble and drink too much and, and they snowboard," as though it were an unspeakable crime. Weird, right? So I glumly turned around and went home, while Marc & Lenny got inside. The next week, for whatever reason, they let me in. I was dressed the same, I had actually gone snowboarding that day. It was ironically funny, but I was bitter. Last week had been inglorious. I felt wronged. Marc was retelling the story to Lenny, Sabino, and Rio. They laughed, the flavor of wormwood remained with me. I had never caused trouble, I was not one of "those" snowboarders. I had never come to this bar and... snowboarded... I cheered up. I wasn't thinking clearly, but I was thinking.

If I'm going to be accused of sinning, I might as well sin, right? I happened to have my snowboard strapped to the roof of my car right outside, having in fact, as I said, gone snowboarding that day. I ran outside to my car. The same doorman who had not let me in previously, but had inconsistently decided that I was okay on this night was working. I told him I'd be right back. No problem. I grabbed my snowboard and ran in. He didn't try to stop me from bringing my snowboard in, I think he was too confused. Perhaps the hand of God restrained him. In the back of the bar where we were seated, we were on a raised platform table with two or three stairs leading down to the main floor. Here, Marc took a picture of the very spot on his recent trip:

I strapped on my snowboard, gave a drunken rebel yell, and snowboarded down the stairs. Now Mr. Bouncer, you won't be lying next time when you say that snowboarders; "They, they come in here and cause trouble and drink too much and, and they snowboard."

Of course, the joke was really on me because I scraped the crap out of my nice new snowboard on those granite stairs and I had to pay a sweet 50 Deutsche Marks to get it re-waxed. But you know, in the annals of Drunken revelry, score one for me and the snowboarders.

And Along Came A Transrealist

I picked up this book relatively randomly a few weeks ago. Stuff of this nature always piques my curiosity because I like both science fiction and popular science. (Also, I saw it sitting next to a new book of transcripts from some lectures that Carl Sagan gave in Scotland in 1985 which has recently been published by his wife, which is what originally caught my eye.) It's a book of essays by various pundits about what humanity could possibly look like if we were still around in, well, Year Million.

It's not overall a great book; I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed it but it's a bit stale in many ways. Naturally, it's difficult for anyone to guess what even the very near future is going to look like. For instance, go into a Starbucks on lunch hour in any major city, listen to a conversation that the nerdy computer types are having about the drudgery of their IT jobs, and try to imagine what that conversation would have sounded like to you back in say, 1985. I'm sure even Carl Sagan would have been like, "What the crap are you maniacs talking about?" Words that mean one thing back then have taken on whole new meanings in light of technological advances, so to a 1985er, the words might even sound familiar, but the ways in which they were being put together might remind him of a conversation in a particularly dire lunatic asylum. For instance: "I was trying to download some music files onto my cellphone, but Apple's damn proprietary iTunes system keeps messing me up. I've got to figure out a way to hack that shit." Think about what that sentence could possibly mean in a pre-home computing world. It's English, but it's nonsense.

Stanislaw Lem actually wrote a really excellent book on that subject called "Return From The Stars", which in a nutshell is about a Spaceman who returns to Earth after a 100 year mission only to find that he doesn't understand anything that is going on. Looking at the problem in reverse, I just re-watched that fabulous David Mamet movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, which is about the cutthroat business of real estate sales in, I assume, the late 80's early 90's. These salesmen kept having to make telephone calls to potential sales leads via pay phone, and in one Scene Jack Lemmon is calling his family and telling them he won't be able to be reached later and I kept thinking, what? Why are they bothering with pay phones? Can't he be reached by his cell? Major plot hole. It's amazing to me how anachronistic those pay phones seemed, and that it took me a beat or two to catch on to the time frame. I think it was the combination of familiarity and a decade of perspective... I've seen that movie before and all the actors in it are pertinent to my adolescent movie experience, yet give it ten years and whammo, weirdness.

So you can see, the idea of trying to look a million years into the future seems at first glance a bit useless. One major technological advance and wham, everything changes. But in a weird sort of way, looking a million years into the future might actually be easier than looking a decade into the future. You have to ask larger, less precise questions such as, Will we have colonized other planets, or entire galaxies by then? Will our energy source be entire suns, entire star clusters, or dark energy itself? Will we be human, something more evolved, or will our personalities be downloaded into huge programs in which our thought processes will be in effect immortal, and capable of computations greater than our current meat-brains can presently conceive? Well, all of these possibilities are addressed, of course. Some of the essays are more successful at getting the points across than others. But here's the reason I really loved this book:

There are about 14 essays in this book, and the first 10 are all asking questions along these lines. Futures are spun out for us that to a Borg seem like heaven. We have deconstructed entire planetary systems and turned them into so-called Dyson Spheres: technological monstrosities made of "computronium" which would make the Death Star run away with its tiny little tail between its legs. We turn ourselves into gigantic computer minds, more capable of exploring the infinite Universe than in our present, limited meat bodies of mortality. All of which are not necessarily impossible ideas, they just seem to us now as that airplane seemed to those people from the last of the uncontacted tribes in South America. Or perhaps they are impossible; it's a book of speculation, after all. But then, along comes chapter 11. And who is it written by? Why, none other than the greatest speculative mind of our time, Rudy Rucker. I haven't said it enough lately; I love that guy. He is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Not that that matters; his own body of work is genius. He's a well respected mathematician and philosopher in his own right. But I've written enough about him in the past, so I'll spare you.

Except that, his essay in this book is why I love the book and why I think he's the greatest, in a nutshell. All these impressive, impossible to fully comprehend, yet fundamentally bleak views of the future of humanity, and along comes a transrealist. His essay is about how all of that mechanical technology is a real downer and totally beak. It's a great book because it shows the real value of genius, standing him up next to the more mainstream and dull views of the status quo. I'm going to quote him now:

 "Ultrageek advocates of the computronium Dyson-shell scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth [or any other structure] is pulped into computer chips. Supposedly the resulting computronium can run a VR (virtual reality) simulation that's a perfect match for the old Earth. Call the new one Vearth. It's worth taking a moment to explain the problems with trying to replace real reality with virtual reality. We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don't fully match the richness of the real world. What's not so well known is that no feasible VR can ever match nature, because there are no shortcuts for nature's computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the "principle of natural unpredictability," fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires using a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don't allow for drastic shortcuts."
Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer-simulated world that's smaller than the physical world, the simulation cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain, linearized fluid dynamics, or cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish simulated worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/ Disneyland environments populated by simulated people as dull and predictable as characters in bad novels."

So basically what he's saying is, the physical matter of the Universe is already the most complicated calculation there is, and that any desire on our part to harness it for our own small needs is rather ugly and in the long run diminishing. Not that he doesn't predict amazing possibilities for our future. Due to the high calculation potential of every bit of matter, he predicts something he calls Hylozoism, from the Greek, hyle, matter, and zoe, life. He believes that, given a million years, we'll find a way to wake matter up. As in, making it conscious. So that we can communicate with it. You'll actually be able to talk to walls, and it will be more productive than talking to politicians. He even has a plan for it, involving bending certain spatial topologies utilizing the extra dimensions of space. The benefits of waking matter up are enormous, and too much to go into, but they involve the possibility of teleportation, matter duplication, etc. This is a book report, not the Cliff's Notes. Suffice it to say, Rudy paints a much more incredible, surreal, no, transreal, view of the future, and on top of it, shows how it's just as conceivably possible as the deader versions of the typical futurist. If I could buy stock in Rudy Rucker, I'd grab every share I could, because I have a feeling that his ideas are going to be around for a long long time.

"Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation."

"It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end."

"It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable."

"If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!"

"Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way."

"Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons."

  -Rudy Rucker