102218 curiously, it’s not the most expensive or new hotel that has thje swing around room. it dates back to a time when more people had access to technological wonders, even if not everyone fully understood them. But a surprising number of people (so i’m told) did actually understand more of them than merely the basics of how to pull the lever and make it go. the swing around room goes off twice an evening, at 4:40 and 7:15. It makes way for a train to pass. it interacts in a complicated way with traffic patterns of the roadways as well. But why? Is there a civil-engineering or city-planning reason for it? Is it some kind of metaphysical statement? an elaborate art project, from when art was just as important as technological wonders, and also as elevated in the minds of the populace? or does it just not make any sense at all in the coherent logic of the waking world? Dream logic-- Oases or nodes of dream logic pervade this land. Like fey lines, or force lines that streak invisibly across a fantasy novel’s setting, there are leftover pockets of dream logic. They settle like larvae-rich flood waters in low pockets, in misty valleys, in the crannies and alleyways of cities; they angle as impudently as railroad tracks across farmers’ fields and mountain ranges alike. They accrete like cosmic dust into planets of unreality. Their borders are fluid; you can’t simply go into one and be assured that you’ll stay there; it’s impossible to know sometimes where one begins and whre another ends. They follow the improbable geography of the mind. well, anyway, back to reality. So many possibilities died this morning. when the swing around hotel room swings, it’s fast enough to make your stomach lurch if you’re not used to it! Visiting my brother there, I was like holyshit! You mean this happens twice EVERY SINGLE DAY!? he was blasé about it but kind of enjoyed my consternation. How do you sleep? Well, it happens before I go to sleep anyway. His king sized bed took up most of the room; we were leaning back against the heavy curved window when the room started moving the first time. at 4:40, right as the train was screaming towards us on the track that parallels the low mountains at the southwest edge of town. i felt my weight pushed back into the great pillow against the great window. so many little universes of possibility died this morning. one died when the alarm went off. one died when i hit snooze. repeat that a few times. there was something about thunderstorms. There was a girl with thunderstorms in her hair. she had a checklist and was checking things off--but i don’t remember; the immediacy and therefore reality of it is lost. there was also one that died when endicott texted me about how to link a PDF in a google doc, for fuck’s sake, and i told him and he was like, oh, so a workaround? I don’t understand how that’s a workaround; to me it just seems like the work. Like, that’s exactly what you were asking, wasn’t it? Whatever, I don’t know what he’s thinking half the time. But the point is, it was the death of another reality. It was a chain reaction, a domino effect, a pandemic exponentially expanding of the deaths of mighty universes. All because I was “tired” and wanted to go back to “sleep.” Dude, you can always go back to sleep! Why does it seem as if you can’t, in that moment? I was so worried about technology. Social media this, staring at your phones that. But that’s not even the point. The point is this: > NIST scientists have designed a vacuum gauge that is small enough to deploy in commonly used vacuum chambers. It also meets Quantum SI criteria, meaning it requires no calibration, depends on fundamental constants of nature, reports the correct quantity or none at all, and has specified uncertainties that are suitable for its application. The new gauge tracks changes in the number of cold lithium atoms trapped by a laser and magnetic fields within the vacuum. The trapped atoms fluoresce as a result of the laser light. What?? I can almost guarantee that you (whoever you are; probably just me) have no fucking idea what way more than half of that means. I mean, yes, like a middle school student who’s not “at grade level” in reading class, you can decode the individual words. You can even define the individual words. But unlike with the words “two-by-four” or “screw” or “hammer,” you can’t *make anything* with those words. I can’t buy one of those, I can’t build one of those, I don’t have access to one of those, I wouldn’t be able to repair one of those, I don’t know how to read one of those, I don’t know how to adjust the settings on one of those, and I wouldn’t know how to interpret or what to do with the results it produced if somehow I were able to get to one and figure out how to turn it on. But some people can do all of the above. Right? Still? Or at least, they can write the unpredictable programs that lead the AI to help them make one, etc. Maybe that’s why AI is so promising. But it’s promising in the way that the Internet was promising. Instead of making everyone equally fluent and intelligent and communicative, it made the loud louder and the clueless just got a more riveting, addictive way to watch TV. Right? No, not quite right. There were some benefits but the grubby are still grubby. So if the grubby are convinced to support (either by enthusiasm, by voting, by money) the development of AI, then the ones who are actually in a position to build the AI are convincing them (us) by selling us this vision of everyone having access to this wonderful interconnected higher mind. YOU TOO CAN HAVE SUPERPOWERS. Why do I think it’s not going to work out that way? After the Internet, we are as unequal a society as we’ve been in millenia, aren’t we? Probably not. That’s probably bullshit. But I mean think about it: how far is your average teacher, your average passionate artist, your average well-meaning normal person away from a tabletop cold-atom vacuum standard (CAVS) that will be used to make measurements of fundamental atomic properties? Look at your web browser history-- Isn’t it mostly shopping and maps and dumb questions about everyday shit? Even if it’s about quantum computers and artificial intelligence and chemistry, do you have a quantum computer? Will you be one of the people who gets one and understands how to make it do something interesting, something that you have to figure out, before everyone has one and it’s just another cool multi-dimensional TV set with extra busy box controls to make you squeal with delight and *feel* powerful? Face it! While a select few are building our world with complicated mathematics and information science and actual rockets, they are also throwing literal toys at the rest of us, to humor us, to keep us out of their hair while they do the real work. And we’re eating it up, cuz it’s free! with in-app purchases. What’s the answer to this? Get mad? Tear the factories and laboratories down? Burn it all to the ground and eat a paleo diet because cavemen or whatever the fuck? Basically be a grubby, ignorant, rioting mob of maniacs that level the playing field by burning it all down? I guess that is certainly one way it could possibly go. Is there an alternative to the us vs them technocracy? What is your mind capable of understanding, of interacting with? What is REAL education? Are there ways to interact with all this technological wonderment even if not everyone is a scientist? Or should everyone be at least a little bit of a scientist? What is art, and what does it have to do with all this? I’m not sure, but one thing I am pretty sure of: art is useless unless it comes out of your (my) own mind and connects with other people’s minds. There are probably plenty of mathematically and technologically enlightened minds out there that actually WANT to share, WANT to expand their learning and their inspiration and their knowledge to as many other people as possible. Seems like it’s up to US to go find them, talk to them, listen to them, and see how we can help. But how do we tell the difference between the ones whose side we would be on if we understood what the hell they were talking about, and the ones who want to sell us a protection scheme, or make all our decisions for us, either for “our own good” or because it’s just easier or because it never occurred to them that anyone could ever possibly disagree with or need more serendipity than can be afforded by, say, Google Photos deciding and telling me what all my photos are “of”? Yes, serendipity finds a way. It sees fixed categorical classifications as cute nonsense, and routes through and around them; surprises and unforseen connections can be found anywhere. But still. Maybe nobody should be allowed to use an app until they’ve written one. You can’t read without writing nor write without reading. Fuck, dude. I don’t know. Everyone should be allowed to learn whatever they want. But everyone should have to learn SOMETHING.