Cubilone – Page 31 – Cubilone's Dimension

QUIXOTIC CALENDARS

Have you ever noticed that our calendar has some glaring faults, some design issues that would keep it from ever leaving the drawing room if it were to be made today?

How many times have you stopped to wonder if May or October have 30 or 31 days? I recall always having trouble with that when I was little… Or, how about this: if I ask you what day of the week it’s going to be precisely six months from now (November 22nd 2014), how long would it take you for you to t… – hey, put that phone down, I can see you!

I’m not sure why, but we have been handed down a weird model that might be precise but is neither efficient nor elegant, and as with many inefficient, disingenious or clunky systems – just look around you for ideas -, habit is the only factor preventing us from coming up with a better system; “why fix something which ain’t broken?”, you might ask. I don’t necessarily disagree with that, especially when it comes to practical, physical things, like having a bottle support the fluorescent lamp over the kitchen sink which would otherwise collapse, or using a table fan to cool your lidless desktop computer, but there are some things that, to me, are almost divine in the depth of the meaning they carry, they represent the foundations of human culture. We should therefore strive for optimisation, even if that means a radical restructuring of what we’ve come to know and love.

Here are two ideas for new calendars I came up with while chatting with Daphne and later built upon when I was travelling on the bus back to Sofia. By the way, being with Daphne and travelling in general are both very good for letting my creative juices flow.

The criteria these two calendars must meet are the following:

The year must have 12 months; the number is perfect because it is the lowest common denominator of several other commonly used numbers used in time-keeping, namely 2, 3, 4 and 6. That is to say, if you want to be able to precisely split the year in terms, semesters and quarters – this last one is extra important because of the four seasons – having the year split in 12 is the easiest and most intuitive choice.

So far so good – our calendar already has this feature and other calendars across many cultures and eras seem to have had it also.

Every month must have the same length; that some months have 30, some 31 and one has 28 days feels wrong and messes up the periodicality of the shortest circle, the week.

Every month of the year must start on the same day of the week; doesn’t it feel good when January 1st is a Monday? Wouldn’t it be even nicer if every month of the year started on a Monday, too? This way we could instantly and easily calculate what day of the week any day of the year would be.

Quixotic Calendar I

12 months of 28 (4×7) days each = 336 days + 29/30 days split into four weeks, one placed before each season to mark the equinoxes.

January (28 days)
February (28 days)
March (28 days)
Vernal Equinox Week (7 days)
April (28 days)
May (28 days)
June (28 days)
Summer Solstice Week (7 days)
July (28 days)
August (28 days)
September (28 days)
Autumnal Equinox Week (7 days)
October (28 days)
November (28 days)
December (28 days)
Winter Solstice Week (8 days, 9 days if leap year)

The calendar would be set in such a way that the equinoxes and solstices would be roughly placed at the end of their namesake weeks – it’s impossible to be precise because the exact days are moveable even in the calendar we’re using today. In this way, the Quixotic year could end on the Gregorian Calendar’s December 22nd/23rd (we’d have to go with one and stick with it), with the new year starting on what’s now Christmas Eve. It would be possible to adjust the calendar’s starting day so that New Year’s Day could coincide with what’s today Christmas Day, but that would mean that the equinoxes and solstices would roughly be on Day 4 or 5 of their respective weeks and not at their end, for what that’s worth.

The four spare weeks “outside the calendar” would serve as holiday periods, sets of time for getting together, enjoying nature, all that.

A strength of this calendar is that each month of the year would start on the same day, including the transition weeks, with a standardised form of procession which would make it easy to calculate what day of the week any day of any year would be: the week cycle would move one or two days from one year to the next, depending on if it’s a leap year. So, if in 2014 all of the first days of the month were Fridays, in 2015 it would be Sundays, in 2016, which is the next leap year, it would be Mondays, and in 2017 the two-day jump would make them Wednesdays.

This proposal would also solve the disagreement on when the seasons start once and for all! No more people telling you that spring has come on March 1st!

The calendar’s main problem is that the seasons have all moved forward a single month (under this system, June would squarely belong to spring and March to winter, for example), which could mess up our concepts of the seasons, but if you ask me, this is already being messed up because of climate change, so there’s not much to lose really.

Quixotic Calendar II

12 months of 30 (3×10) days each = 360 days + 5/6 days at the end of the year (similar to the Egyptian Calendar).

The main point of interest of this calendar would be the 10-day week, which would split each month into three neat parts. We would have to find new names for the days of the week; how about the names of the planets plus the sun and moon, like in romance languages, which all together make a nice round ten, but using words for the planets from different languages? It would be similar to a calendrical Calling All Dawns.

Just like in the first calendar presented here, the even months and weeks would help with periodicality. The extra five/six days would fall in at the end of the year, which is a holiday period anyway.

These suggestions don’t take lunar cycles into account but our Gregorian calendar doesn’t fare much better in that respect.

You can have a look at more proposed reforms here.

POLYGLOT DIARY – 21/5/2014

Пффф вече има 4 дни от последен път че пишах в моят полиглот дайяри и тези е най-трудно от всички езиците койте мога да говоря – горе долу – о да пиша.

Пиша изречени вземе повеце от 20 минути… Моят Цел №1 за сега е да съсредоточавам се на български езикът. Радвам се че има творчески начни за да се прави го.

тези малки до сега.

REVIEW: AN EXCURSION INTO THE PARANORMAL

An Excursion Into the Paranormal by George Karolyi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the paranormal. The term itself is almost taboo among scientists and people who have devoted themselves, whether knowingly or not, to the High Church of Materialism, an idea and its implications beautifully explored by Rupert Sheldrake in The Science Delusion. It’s been connected with very specific things and phenomena, such as extrasensory perception, telekinesis, auras etc, which have all been discredited and/or completely rejected by what you’d call mainstream rationality; bad science, Tricks of the Mind/hallucination or outright fraud have been strongly suggested as the cause of the above phenomena and more. Nevertheless, according to the book’s definition of the word:

Paranormal phenomena do seem to occur, it’s just that the tools our current level of understanding of the world provide us with are insufficient to explain the why. Fraud, bad science etc. as explanations would constitute those phenomena normal, not paranormal, which by the way is the dominant narrative at this point in time. Perhaps things are not as clear-cut when the “definite proof” of these phenomena being normal is placed under scrutiny.

George Karolyi, in this book, did what in my opinion every scientist – or at the very least more of them – should be doing: he didn’t accept or dismiss observations based on what he assumed was true; rather, he put observations first and attempting to build a theory on the results second.

Apparently (and I’m using this word in particular because according to Google this man doesn’t exist), when Karolyi wrote the book, he was a researcher in the University of South Australia with a background in electrical engineering. This explains the absolutely rigorous methodology he seems to have followed. I’m serious: he begins the book with a Physics 101 on electricity, waves, EM fields and quantum mechanics, all of them fields of physics which were either completely unknown, very poorly understood or deemed magical/supernatural as little as 150 years ago. It even has a section on probability and statistics for readers to get a basic grasp of what significant, as opposed to chance, results mean when conducting experiments.

The book then goes through human auras, psychokinesis, Kirlian photography, ESP and survival-related phenomena (among others), describing what experiments have been done on each inquiry – some by the author himself -, often going into extreme, virtually unfollowable by the layman, technical details on the methodology thereof. What genuinely surprised me? The author, to his credit, included negative results. For example, his experiments on aura perception did not lead to anything more than chance results, yet there they were for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions on.

The majority of the rest of the phenomena, though, did in fact produce significant, sometimes even highly significant, statistical results, even when some of them generally either don’t lend themselves well to controlled laboratory experimentation due to the apparently unconscious nature of their induction, as is the case with telepathy, or proof of their existence would not be easily quantifiable, such as in the case of survival-related phenomena e.g. apparitions or reincarnation. Imagine where we could be going if we let this research guide our curiosity, instead of the misguided skeptics the world over.

On an interesting side note, I thought it was funny how at the end of the book Karolyi started making conjectures to explain the paranormal, such as the existence of parallel universes or dimensions (see 10 Dimensions Theory) which would “carry” the non-physical, conjectures which he then used as a platform for closing the book by going on a moral tangent – how people ought to live in order to make the best of their lives. It came into stark contrast with the extraordinarily detached point of view which preceded it, given the material at hand, but I thought it was more interesting than inappropriate.

The main point of all this is that it’s very unfortunate that we have limited ourselves in such a way so as to not be able to even imagine, for the most part, what we could be doing with this frankly liberating information. Maybe in 150 years people like Rupert Sheldrake, Charles Fort (whose Book of the Damned I’m in the process of reading) and even George Karolyi and other researchers whose work I’m trying to hunt down will have found their place in future History of Science books (or their equivalents) as forerunners of the coming paradigm shift, the next renaissance. We can only hope.

This review is of a copy of the book recently donated to the English section of Sofia City Library.

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HIGH EXISTENCE AUDIOBOOK ONE

The HE Audiobook: 26 of Our Best Articles For Your Personal Evolution

3 months ago we set out to gather the best articles we’ve ever written and transform them into an audiobook.

We compiled a huge stash of inspiring, thought-provoking, ego-breaking, magical content and re-created them with the mesmerizing voice of Simon from SpokenMatter.com.

The result is a whopping 5-hours of audio content that transforms the way you absorb our articles.

You get our best 26 articles for less than two cups of coffee.

You can listen to them while commuting or use them to get your grandma interested in DMT 🙂

They’re also DRM free so you can share them with anyone.

This is our first attempt at supporting HE through original content. Rather than ads or affiliate links, this audiobook further empowers us to do what we love without sacrifice.

This is where I, qb, come in. I bought and download this several months ago and it was quite worth it. I uploaded it on my server for sharing with anyone who might be interested but wouldn’t know where his or her $5 would be going. This is valuable info and each one of the 26 articles-cum-sound files are wonderful partners for walking and/or running.

Get it now.

THE MYSTERY OF GO, THE ANCIENT GAME THAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN’T WIN

Go-01 — Remi Coulom (left) and his computer program, Crazy Stone, take on grandmaster Norimoto Yoda in the game of Go. Photo: Takashi Osato/WIRED

Wired article on the state of things in developing a Go-playing program that will beat the grandmasters, something that apparently might not only be farther off than we thought, but also more difficult.

I was surprised to hear from programmers that the eventual success of these programs will have little to do with increased processing power. It is still the case that a Go program’s performance depends almost entirely on the quality of its code. Processing power helps some, but it can only get you so far. Indeed, the UEC lets competitors use any kind of system, and although some opt for 2048-processor-core super-computers, Crazy Stone and Zen work their magic on commercially available 64-core hardware.

[…]

Many Go players see the game as the final bastion of human dominance over computers. This view, which tacitly accepts the existence of a battle of intellects between humans and machines, is deeply misguided. In fact, computers can’t “win” at anything, not until they can experience real joy in victory and sadness in defeat, a programming challenge that makes Go look like tic-tac-toe.

POLYGLOT DIARY – 16/5/2014

Ich schreibe aus Aegina. Ich bin hier mit Dafni, wir besuchen fuer eine Nacht. Ich hatte mein Vater und seine Frau ueber 4 Monate nicht gesehen.

Heute war’s ein echt komischer Tag. Ich habe immer geglaubt, dass Leute, auch wenn sie aelter als 40 oder 50 Jahre sind, noch aendern koennen. Ich habe gedacht, dass auch andere Leute das Leben wie ich sehen koennen: als eine ewige Entwicklung. Na ja, ich weiss schon, dass nur manche Leute wirklich ihr Leben geniessen versuchen, aber der Schock war groesser, weil dieses Mal die Situation so in der Naehe von mir war. Manche Leute einfach aendern sich nie, auch wenn sie 22 Jahre zwischen Scheidungen haben.

Meine Familie ist, besonders wenn man erinnert sich an wie klein sie ist, sehr kompliziert. Zu kompliziert. Und ich bin alein in der Mitte, ganz allein. Immer bin ich allein gewesen, damit meine ich, dass ich keine Geschwister habe, von Eltern die so viele Male heiratet geworden waren.

Ausserdem, der Nachthimmel ist sehr schoen wenn es wolkig und mondig ist und wenn man die helle Wolke reisen sehen kann… Aegina ist oft hart mit meinen Fuehlungen, aber wenn ich lass mich entspannen, die Schoenheit ist schwer zu vermissen.

POLYGLOT DIARY — 15/5/2014

Buenas tardes a todos! Disculpa mi omision de tildes y los significadores exclamativos y preguntativos (pronto voy a descargar una claviatura inglesa internacional, no solamente de los EEUU, pero por ahora no la tengo y es que de momento tengo prisa)! He prometido a mi mismo en forma de un challenge 7×7 de escribir algo cada dia; algo creativo, algo que me haga practicar poner mis pensamientos en papel – o pantalla – incluso si es algo pequeno! En otro post escribire algo por todo eso.

Bueno, estoy en Atenas estos dias, hace calor, es la semana antes de los eligos regionales (anadi esto solamente porque desde aqui en nuestra pisa podemos oir todas las hablas que suceden en la plaza central). Acabamos de ver uno de los ultimos capitulos de la temporada cuatro de Breaking Bad con Dafne y antes de eso me sali para correr. Hoy corrio una hora en punto en el Alsos de Nueva Smyrni – unas 12 vueltas – pero no exactamente 10km como queria. Es tambien que el Alsos tiene esta inclinacion de muerte, asi que quizas vale. En Sofia corria menos frecuentamente los dias previos pero ahora siento que tengo mas motivacion.

Ayer tambien salimos con Mario, y recordamos un nuevo podcast. Encantaria departirlo con todos vosotros pero hay mucho que debe hacerse, quizas una explicacion de que tiene que ver todo esto. 🙂 Ademas, me he puesto en una posicion que leo y acabo libros mas rapido de que peudo escribir criticas por ellos. Hm, creeis que estoy exagerando, quizas, o que cosas asi no son problemas importantes. Una tempesta en una taza de te, como dirian en ingles…

Si no hablais espanol, no os preocupeis. Pronto sеguiran otros idiomas. :Л

Things you don’t mention when people ask you what your day was like

You absent-mindedly stick your pinky finger in your ear to scratch it, happily chilling in Slaveikov Square, when a middle-aged colleague from the library passes you by and whistles at you to catch your attention and greet you. You essentially just nod a hello back, finger still firmly lodged in your ear. You’re left thinking that she greeted you just to let you know that she was there to witness you with digging for gold with your pinky.

There is a Dutch princess – apparently the patron for libraries or something similar to that – visiting Sofia City Library’s Children’s Department to present the fresh Bulgarian translation of the children’s illustrated book she recently finished writing. You tremble at the idea of actually having to meet her, because you’re simply clueless about how it would be proper to address her: “would Your Highness be too strong?”, you think to yourself. “Would shaking her hand without, err, kissing it or something, be too… normal?” It even occurs to you that, maybe, if you greeted her in just her first name, no titles or anything attached, you would do what no-one had ever dared to do before; talk to her normally, for what she really is; just another human being. For that she would deeply admire you – just like in the movies. In the end, you don’t get within 5 metres from her.

You see in the distance the guy who met one of your roomies in a big party the previous night, with whom he stayed out for the whole night and with whom they apparently hit it off quite well. He’s probably waiting for your roomie, judging by the three red carnations in his hand. By coincidence, it’s the same spot you’re supposed to meet another, completely unrelated, friend. You pretend you don’t see him; the least you want is an awkward exchange in the spirit of :

-“Hey, how are you?”
– *obviously aware of the fact that you noticed the flowers and still at the stage of deciding whether he should address the small scarlet-coloured elephant in the room* Good… eheheheh, good. And you?”
–“….”

Good. You avoided that. For half a minute or so all he can see of you is your back. You doubt he can recognise it as it being yours or, even if he can, if he would be willing to make the fact known to you. When you discreetly turn around, your roomie has already arrived and met up with the guy, is holding the flowers and is vividly exchanging with him whatever it is you’re supposed to say in such situations – I don’t know what it is, sorry. You pass them by and greet them both; now there isn’t just a single person sitting there, it will finally be both socially appropriate and desirable by everyone for you to just say hi and continue walking with no further questions, exclamations or general interaction. You start moving towards them but not exactly; you know, in an angle from which you they can see you but you’re not actually walking in the middle of the air holding them apart.

Neither of them notice your very briefly outstretched hand somewhere in their vicinity.

You do not change your course of bipedal locomotion.

All of your groceries have run out and you’re too bored to actually buy more. But is it really all of them or was that just a matter of speech? Not quite – you still have eggs and potatoes left. Your hate for eggs has been stuff of legends before, but you’ve somehow been forcing yourself to eat them in the past few months. It begun when you needed extra protein in order to hopefully see that exercise you’ve been putting your upper body through have some tangible results. ~~That dream has been left in the orphanage of abandoned dreams~~ (that was a horrible image, I’m sorry); you don’t life your weight around at a rate where extra protein would be of any use anymore – let’s just put it like that – but the “fake it till you make it” part has paid off at least psychologically speaking and now eggs don’t sicken you as much as they used to.

The frying pan is hot. You reach for an egg but your fringers go through the shell as if it was yogurt. You curse everything that’s holy (and not so much) that made it normal for people to eat chicken menstruation. You empty the contents of the egg spilled in the carton into the pan. You check on the potatoes that you fried before and left wrapped in paper in order for it to soak the excess oil, the way you’ve always seen your mother do and you yourself do but your flatmates strangely mocked. You immediately decide it wasn’t such a good idea to use toilet paper instead of the normally used paper towels: the majority of the potatoes are now covered in filmy, greasy tree pulp. You spend the next 10 minutes removing chewy stuff from your food. The sensation of futility is comparable to peeling apples with your bare hands – no, not normal apples, that’s not so bad – maybe the candied ones you’d buy at the πανηγύρι. You resign and end up eating maybe half of them, paper and all, and throwing the rest out, something for which you are not at all proud.

While writing these lines you’re still unconsciously picking out little pieces of paper from between your teeth with your tongue.

Review: Mort

Mort by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First, I’d like to mention that this particular edition of the book is pure, distilled class. I found it in Гринуич (Greenwich, written “green witch”), one of Sofia’s largest bookstores. Happily, there’s also “Guards! Guards!” from the same line of beautiful 2014 hardcover editions of the Discworld series on that rotating shelf waiting for me to get my hands on it… All I have to do is swallow shelling out another seemingly-cheap-but-it’s-what-I-should-be-paying-for-my-nourishment-with 20 лв so soon after I did it for Mort with this particular expression on my face.

Anyway, I wanted to include quotes from Mort in my review to yet again share just how witty, pertinent and, well, funny Pratchett’s writing has proved itself to be, but I decided to just put links to lists becase this would grow out of any sort of proportion and my reviews in general need more words like my back needs more hair. The lists of quotes: [1] [2].

Many discheads count Mort as one of the best books in the whole series, and I remember my friend Garret pestering me to read this book in particular for years. My time did come, now that my disc is spinning – you may interpret that analogy at will, by the way. I would say that, compared to Small Gods, the Discworld entry I read before this one, Mort was funnier but lacked part of the punch; Small Gods made me think “hey, Pratchett’s onto something here”, but no such internal exclamations were had with Mort, and rather missed they were. However, I did have to think (relatively) long and hard to decide whether or not I should give Mort 5 stars all the same as a reward for it managing to crack me up so systematically. The end result of that painful procedure you can see before you; nevertheless, let it be known that Mort is funny and that you should read it, even if you’ve never read a Discworld novel before.

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Review: Naoki Urasawa presenta: 20th Century Boys, Libro 1: Amigo

Naoki Urasawa presenta: 20th Century Boys, Libro 1: Amigo by Naoki Urasawa

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Manga + Kindle + aprender idiomas = ¡Win! (¡Victoria!)

Estoy enamorado de verdad de la idea de leer manga en mi Kindle, ¡y gratis también! El primer que he probado es 20th Century Boys de Naoki Urasawa, creador de Monster, que me avergüenza decir que nunca lo acabé. Algún día, quizás, quizás… Por lo que conseguí entender, porque una de las razones que lo leo el manga en español es para aprender palabras nuevas y practicar y por eso es claro que no entiendo todo, esta obra se ve muy prometedora. Solo espero que esta vez la leeré hasta el final. No tengo nada de paciencia con series muy largas…

A propósito, no sé qué es la mejora manera de escribir críticas para mangas. No voy criticar todos los libros, ¡eso significaria 22+ criticas por solo un manga! No, debe que haber otra manera… A ver.

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