...is never easy. Always having to stay on top of the latest and greatest technologies while not letting the old ones go to rust may be the thing that drives more people out of the field of technology than anything else (offshoring and downsizing are probably right up there with it, though).
So, after my bicycle and I got banged up back in August, I decided it was time for me to get out of any job that required me to lift greater than 50 pounds of metal and silicon over my head on a regular basis. My company was "re-on-shoring" at the time and building out a new software development team in my office so an opportunity as a Systems Engineer for the product development group opened up and I took it.
Many of the skills and much of the knowledge that I have from my old IT days comes in handy on a very regular basis, but there's so much more on top of that stuff that I need to add to my repertoire. I learned Java back in 1997, but haven't used it much since, so a refresher is due. Websphere, SOAP, DB2, MS SQL, Weblogic...all of these things need to fill my head in some meaningful way - and quickly! - in order for me to succeed at my job.
Luckily, I am the sort of masochist that likes this type of challenge, so I'm digging in deep and fast. As I begin to form some coherent thoughts and put them into words, some future posts are sure to follow on the world of J2EE architectures....
Until then, try not to die. ;)
2.23.2008
2.03.2008
While I'm Silent Here...
I've been awfully busy elsewhere. Check out Manitou Art. It's my first Flash site, which I'm building for my wife (she designed it all in Photoshop and I'm publishing it with Flash). While I find Flash pretty intuitive, things can take a lot of time. I can sit down and start work on a gallery, feel like things are going smoothly and quickly, only to turn around and find that while I've been working my cat passed away from old age, wife left me for another man and I've grown a beard that's touching the floor. Gotta watch out for that in the future....
1.10.2008
Infinite Horizons
I've recently developed quite a distaste for the Big Bang theory. "Why?" you may ask...well, it's all about the dots. I don't like them, at least not in astronomy. They're not anywhere else in the world of physics - even our "elementary particles" keep telescoping down to smaller and smaller bits of matter and energy, each made of yet smaller bits, so why should there be a single point in time where IT ALL BEGAN? This question comes up in different guises from time to time:
"So what was there before the big bang?"
"If there was nothing and then there was something, where did it come from?"
And similar. The scientific establishment typically casts these sorts of questions away by saying that the beginning of time (t=0) may have been some sort of vacuum fluctuation or other anomaly, but we can never know because it's not observable, blah blah blah. I have another thought that I like better, so I thought I would share.
I will start by describing a common experience we can all relate to in some way or another. Imagine you are a child sitting in the back seat of a car, looking out of the back window as you depart for a long roadtrip. Staring down the highway behind you, the city that you were once in becomes a distant amalgamation of buildings drifting further and further away. As the city tends towards the horizon, it begins to look more and more like a blob, no longer with any clear distinctions between buildings, etc.
This appears to be a fundamental element of perspective - zooming out from anything causes it to look increasingly like a point. Zooming in on any apparent "point" in the universe, causes an increasing amount of complexity to be exposed. Similar in some ways to fractals and beautifully shown in the timeless (save the outfits on the couple in the park at the beginning!) Powers of Ten movie made for IBM 30 years ago, this is the basis for viewing the apparent Big Bang that I've been using recently.
There are dozens of intricacies that I have been playing with around this model and maybe one day I will get around to writing them down or blogging them out, though I won't do much of that right now. I will blab on a bit about one though....
A common reason for supposing a big bang is because there seems to be a time around 14 or 15 billion years ago when a TON of concentrated energy seems to have started dissipating rapidly. All of our known universe appears to have since been expanding out from that concentrated energy zone. According to the Big Bang theory (notice how they always capitalize it...so theological!), an expanding sphere of matter/energy has been radiating from t=0 ever since.
Given this vision of the universe and my own infinite time vision, I have tried some reconciliations, both theoretical and visual. From a theoretical standpoint, I've been thinking of the Schwarzchild Wormhole model - essentially, every black hole has a sort of matter/energy geyser (sometimes called a white hole) spewing matter and energy out of the other side. The basic model is shown below and I think the explanation on how it relates is pretty self explanatory....
On the more visual and technical tip, another model I've been playing with goes something like this (work with me here, you'll have to use your imagination some, but I will try to supplement it with an image to help you along). Einstein found that massive objects in the space-time continuum created gravity wells - areas around large bodies where space and time distort. As a matter of fact, all matter creates a gravity well, the strength of which is directly proportional to the mass of the object. Imagine a thin sheet of rubber being held by one person in each corner. Now place a bowling ball on it to get something like this:
Einstein's special relativity theory describes how time and space have no absolute measure, but only measure in regards to other objects. Thus, if time is a dimension represented by a dimension depicted in the squares and rectangles in the grid above, you can see how it would distort around the mass of the object forming the gravity well. From one of the non-affected grid areas in the outside area of the image, the grid points inside the well would appear larger - thus time is perceived to slow down as you approach the massive object. This has been the basis for any number of science fiction stories (ie, boy leaves family for a space voyage that, from his perspective lasts 2 years, returns home only to find that his family all grew old or died a jillion years ago).
So, considering this element of special relativity theory, I've been wondering how the fact that more matter / energy appear in the distance ("past" if you want, but space and time are all tangled up together under the sheets) than up close affects our perception of time. That is, we think that 14 billion years ago there was some explosion of energy, but really that may be just a simple mathematical calculation of the fact that the further back we trace our trajectory, the more all of what we're measuring collapses into a horizon, therefore looking like a single point. If we could imagine ourselves zooming our point of reference back 10 billion years, would everything actually appear any closer or would we actually find that the same mass that we've been measuring appears to collapse into a single point some 14 or 15 billion years BEFORE THAT POINT, ad infinitum.
This may seem a strange thought, but it's really no stranger than when horizons were found to be illusions to sea-faring people. There was no edge of the world that led to a giant waterfall dumping into the void, just more water leading to yet another apparent horizon. Taken to an extreme, extending this analogy into the larger universal space-time continuum, one may conclude that the universe is torus-shaped (that is, like a donut) and that continuing further and further back into space would eventually wrap back around into the present. Another extreme would be much more complex and transfer into nested dimensions, passing through matter geysers and into the black holes that live in other universes in a larger tapestry of infinitely knotted multiverses. It's a veritable mental playground.
So I've been curious what others have thought along similar lines. I'm pretty tired of reading fantastic transgalactic-space-empire SciFi, so I've been scrubbing the internet to find good, similar thought. Unfortunately, even in the age of monkeys tending towards the infinite, all banging on their keyboards and publishing to the web, there is surprisingly little to be found out there. Or I need to refine my searches. Not sure which yet. Here's a little interesting linkage I found along the way, though:
http://www.byteland.org/cosmology/infinity.html
http://scienceline.org/2006/08/21/ask-snyder-bang/
If you find or know of more, please let me know and I will add more as I find it.
"So what was there before the big bang?"
"If there was nothing and then there was something, where did it come from?"
And similar. The scientific establishment typically casts these sorts of questions away by saying that the beginning of time (t=0) may have been some sort of vacuum fluctuation or other anomaly, but we can never know because it's not observable, blah blah blah. I have another thought that I like better, so I thought I would share.
I will start by describing a common experience we can all relate to in some way or another. Imagine you are a child sitting in the back seat of a car, looking out of the back window as you depart for a long roadtrip. Staring down the highway behind you, the city that you were once in becomes a distant amalgamation of buildings drifting further and further away. As the city tends towards the horizon, it begins to look more and more like a blob, no longer with any clear distinctions between buildings, etc.
This appears to be a fundamental element of perspective - zooming out from anything causes it to look increasingly like a point. Zooming in on any apparent "point" in the universe, causes an increasing amount of complexity to be exposed. Similar in some ways to fractals and beautifully shown in the timeless (save the outfits on the couple in the park at the beginning!) Powers of Ten movie made for IBM 30 years ago, this is the basis for viewing the apparent Big Bang that I've been using recently.
There are dozens of intricacies that I have been playing with around this model and maybe one day I will get around to writing them down or blogging them out, though I won't do much of that right now. I will blab on a bit about one though....
A common reason for supposing a big bang is because there seems to be a time around 14 or 15 billion years ago when a TON of concentrated energy seems to have started dissipating rapidly. All of our known universe appears to have since been expanding out from that concentrated energy zone. According to the Big Bang theory (notice how they always capitalize it...so theological!), an expanding sphere of matter/energy has been radiating from t=0 ever since.
Given this vision of the universe and my own infinite time vision, I have tried some reconciliations, both theoretical and visual. From a theoretical standpoint, I've been thinking of the Schwarzchild Wormhole model - essentially, every black hole has a sort of matter/energy geyser (sometimes called a white hole) spewing matter and energy out of the other side. The basic model is shown below and I think the explanation on how it relates is pretty self explanatory....
On the more visual and technical tip, another model I've been playing with goes something like this (work with me here, you'll have to use your imagination some, but I will try to supplement it with an image to help you along). Einstein found that massive objects in the space-time continuum created gravity wells - areas around large bodies where space and time distort. As a matter of fact, all matter creates a gravity well, the strength of which is directly proportional to the mass of the object. Imagine a thin sheet of rubber being held by one person in each corner. Now place a bowling ball on it to get something like this:
Einstein's special relativity theory describes how time and space have no absolute measure, but only measure in regards to other objects. Thus, if time is a dimension represented by a dimension depicted in the squares and rectangles in the grid above, you can see how it would distort around the mass of the object forming the gravity well. From one of the non-affected grid areas in the outside area of the image, the grid points inside the well would appear larger - thus time is perceived to slow down as you approach the massive object. This has been the basis for any number of science fiction stories (ie, boy leaves family for a space voyage that, from his perspective lasts 2 years, returns home only to find that his family all grew old or died a jillion years ago).So, considering this element of special relativity theory, I've been wondering how the fact that more matter / energy appear in the distance ("past" if you want, but space and time are all tangled up together under the sheets) than up close affects our perception of time. That is, we think that 14 billion years ago there was some explosion of energy, but really that may be just a simple mathematical calculation of the fact that the further back we trace our trajectory, the more all of what we're measuring collapses into a horizon, therefore looking like a single point. If we could imagine ourselves zooming our point of reference back 10 billion years, would everything actually appear any closer or would we actually find that the same mass that we've been measuring appears to collapse into a single point some 14 or 15 billion years BEFORE THAT POINT, ad infinitum.
This may seem a strange thought, but it's really no stranger than when horizons were found to be illusions to sea-faring people. There was no edge of the world that led to a giant waterfall dumping into the void, just more water leading to yet another apparent horizon. Taken to an extreme, extending this analogy into the larger universal space-time continuum, one may conclude that the universe is torus-shaped (that is, like a donut) and that continuing further and further back into space would eventually wrap back around into the present. Another extreme would be much more complex and transfer into nested dimensions, passing through matter geysers and into the black holes that live in other universes in a larger tapestry of infinitely knotted multiverses. It's a veritable mental playground.
So I've been curious what others have thought along similar lines. I'm pretty tired of reading fantastic transgalactic-space-empire SciFi, so I've been scrubbing the internet to find good, similar thought. Unfortunately, even in the age of monkeys tending towards the infinite, all banging on their keyboards and publishing to the web, there is surprisingly little to be found out there. Or I need to refine my searches. Not sure which yet. Here's a little interesting linkage I found along the way, though:
http://www.byteland.org/cosmology/infinity.html
http://scienceline.org/2006/08/21/ask-snyder-bang/
If you find or know of more, please let me know and I will add more as I find it.
From my own ashes....
At some point I realized that since my accident in August, my personal and professional interests and priorities had shuffled around so much that I had started to repress my poor blog - a simple avoidance of wanting to deal with the Lessons portion of the blog, which is no longer really relevant to my work, was making me not update at all. Thus I've decided to remove the PostgreSQL lessons and continue in other directions. I hope you enjoy!
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