The Holiday Lush Decorations Must Come Down!

I saw this yesterday on a walk through my neighborhood, an entire
wreath made of corks at the doorstep of a local charity resale.
Finally, the Christmas decorations for alcoholics are coming down.
(We've been busy, dammit! And sick!) Maybe it's time to start on a
brand new cork wreath, which means spending less on screw top bottles
and maybe dipping a little more into our dialysis money. I wonder if
they found a use for the bottle tree and the beerstletoe.

On a side note, Brandi and I bought a bunch of wine on our trip to New
Buffalo, MI, which apparently has winery tours where they drive you.
Wow. A frozen paradise, we stopped into the supermarket for snacks and
toothpaste and walked out with six bottles of wine and no toothpaste.
The only thing standing in the way of drinking, womanizing and writing
like Hemmingway is that I am no Hemmingway, since I never received the
requisite turtleneck. Some fantasies must remain forever that.

And some, like a wreath made of corks, are blessedly within reach.

Me and Tuxedo Cat

Patrick and I try a Photo Booth shot together. I think it turned out well, particularly because he's always so well dressed.

I deliberately cut off the top of my head because my hair has gotten too darn long. It's a protest against cold weather and snow. I don't think winter got the message.

Mammal

Brandi and I are on our writer's retreat at the southwest corner of Michigan. We came in last night, taking off from work early and braving the beginning of rush hour traffic and sub-zero temperatures that caused the windows of our car to not only fog but ice up. It's always particularly frustrating in winter to put on all of your layers, hop in the car, and then struggle to get the top layer off while you're sitting at a traffic light or, worse, driving on the highway. I've grown quite skilled at yanking my gloves off with my mouth.

Of course, even if you get down to just a t-shirt in front of vents pouring out heat like jet engines, you've still got the long underwear and pants, and, if you're like me, the pajama pants you added in between because, hey, it's not layering unless you're having trouble flexing your knees.

Oddly, I'm starting to get used to the weather. Today, it warmed up to ten degrees and on our trip to the grocery store, Brandi and I couldn't stop remarking about how warm it felt. Is it warm when a can of soda will freeze so hard it pops the top for you? Warm when you can't get the car washed but have to settle for brushing the salt off the windshield with your glove? Warm when the icicles on the house across the street stretch practically roof-to-ground? Compared to yesterday, my body somehow says "yes."

This is the crazy part of being a mammal.

I made the choice Thursday to walk from a train stop up to a Polish restaurant where Brandi and her work friends (but good work friends, Diane and Ryan) planned on tucking away the heaviest potato-and-veal-based foods Eastern Europe has to offer. It was about minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, and I had the option of waiting for the bus, but Chicago bus drivers have the same "meh" attitude you saw in the Soviet Union.

"It's not as though they have to stand out in the open," they might say, and they would be right, because the CTA saw fit to provide shelters every mile or so with roofs and walls that only leave a two foot gap at the bottom, so the wind chills only your feet, ankles, knees and lower thighs. Most have advertisements that you can read over and over again while you curse your god and wait for the bus that never seems to arrive.

I walked about forty minutes and saw a bus come only once, when I was about a half a block away from the restaurant. True irony? or just the Alanis Morisette style of terrible events that nobody wants to happen to them? By that time, the cold had killed the battery in my iPod, which went from a 50% charge to 20% to dead in the span of about a minute after I took it out of my coat pocket. If you're like me, you never pay attention to the optimal operating temperatures of electronic devices when you buy them because you so rarely come close to them. Next time, I'll probably keep it on the inside.

Of course, I didn't realize that cold had killed the little music player at the time, so when I got to the restaurant--first, as the rest of our small party was running late--I pulled it out, trying to figure out how I could plug in my USB to charge it. It was so cold, the glass on the front began to acquire condensation, and then that condensation began to ice up. Remembering what water can do to electronics, I treated the player like a hypothermia victim and stashed it close to my belly. It worked. The little guy is still alive and kicking to this day.

This is the great part of being a mammal: saving electronics with your own belly warmth.

I look forward to the springtime, when my antlers begin to grow and I am forced to spar with my fellow males over the attentions of the females who will bear our young. Luckily, unlike some species I don't care to mention (spiders), they will not eat our heads when we mate.

This, too, is the great part of being a mammal.

Testing the Limits of the Unknowable

I read an amazing article in New Scientist recently, about scientists searching for gravitational waves and possibly finding something much more important. This is kind of a neat by product of good science, where the person doing the testing finds something went wrong and says, "Oh, that's interesting..." before going on to, for instance, invent the microwave oven, penicillin, or the flying machine.

You can pretty squarely blame Stephen Hawking's brilliance. Once again studying event horizons , he theorized that information from an "evaporating" black hole does not get lost when it disappears, but is mapped onto the virtual quantum particles at its edge. That edge, kind of like a shadow, is a two dimensional form that exists in our three dimensional universe, and that information has to make a weird transition from the inside of the black hole, where it's 3D, to the outside, where it's 2D. Another good example of 3D information mapped onto a 2D surface is holograms, hence the title, "Our world may be a giant hologram..." which is slightly inaccurate, since the set of things that might be holograms include every particle in the universe, of which our world is only a tiny, tiny part.

They go on to connect more dots. The event horizon of a black hole is roughly analogous to the the Big Bang, when everything in the universe was packed into a segment of space smaller than an atom. What blew it apart is a complete mystery still, but the behavior of all that mass in that tiny amount of space is exactly like a black hole. Even more amazing, if you were able to travel faster than light, 13.7 billion light years in any direction, you would reach the edge of the universe, where you would see an inside-out version of the mapping going on at the edges of black holes. In fact, all of the matter in our universe would have the information of the big bang mapped onto it.

All of this really gets my science and science fiction juices flowing, so I'm going to subject you to some of my thoughts. Here goes:

• As a black hole evaporates, the event horizon grows smaller, since the mass inside of it no longer has the ability to capture light as far away from the singularity inside of it. Our universe is different, though, since it's basically a black hole turned inside out. And evidence has shown that the energy inside of our universe is increasing, as matter is pushed farther apart as the result of "dark energy," which might, uncounted eons from now, result in space flying apart so quickly that even atoms are unable to hold together. This would be called "the Big Rip." (Which is the opposite of what scientists expected when they made up "the Big Crunch.")
  
• Does this mean that the total amount of information in the universe is increasing? And can an increasing amount of information result in the one-way temporal direction known as entropy?
• What caused the expansion of the universe in the first place? This is beyond the scope of the article, but I'm dreadfully curious. Since the force is so mysterious, almost any speculation is useless, but I wonder if I can spin another analogy with atomic nuclei. Put two protons near each other and they fly apart, but include a neutron and they stay together, forming a helium nucleus. Put two neutrons and it's a helium nucleus in a special case known as an alpha particle. Three neutrons and it's unstable again. Move up the periodic table of the elements in order of neutrons and protons and you see this happen again, with the more things packed into the nucleus, the more unstable they become. Except... as humans experiment with energies not found in nature, there is some evidence that there might be what some call "islands of stability" hidden in the far recesses, well after Thorium and Einsteinium and Yourmomium. What if the universe is the inverse of that, with a lot of stability in relatively lower masses ("lower" being a relative term, since we're talking masses smaller than galactic superclusters), but explosive when enough mass is reached.
• Given that quantum mechanics means almost anything can happen if you wait long enough, and virtual particle-antiparticle pairs appear and disappear constantly at a scale impossible for us to detect, eventually in a very, very long timeframe, it is possible that a particle could appear that is the mass of the entire universe. The challenge is that it's impossible to test, except in very, very long timeframes, and I just don't have that kind of patience.
• One result of the above is that an antiparticle would have to also have been produced, which is interesting, because I always wanted to have an evil twin. And now I've got one.
  

Normally, I like to include a picture with a post, but the photographer I sent outside the universe to take a snapshot is bound by the laws of spacetime, and promises to return in 27.4 billion years, which is well below the time constraint for "the Big Rip," but too late for this post to have any relevance. I'll do better next time.