Quisiera poder registrar todo lo que he visto
me siento frágil, angustiado, ante la sola idea de olvidar algún día este momento, aquel momento.

Solo espero no olvidar a Borges: la capacidad de olvidar es proporcional a la capacidad de generalizar.

On scales and complexity, again.

Looking out the window at the brief stillness of the trees outside, of the sky so pale with smog, of the flats so gray, so sad, my thoughts began to drift.

We are just, as a civilization, getting used to the smallness of our lives, of our brains, in comparison to the size of the universe. We are amazed at the complexity that can be achieved in plants, animals and virii, which have a size of almost zero, compared to the radius of our local cluster.

So it is not unnatural to raise the question: what complexity can very large structures posses? To address this question the speed of information transmission must be taken into account, and one could at first argue that distances measured in light years are way too large for information storage and processing. But is this intrinsic to the distances themselves, or is it relative to other, faster, processes which the components of such a system may undergo? Let us just remember that there are processes small in space yet large in time, such as those studied by geology.

What amazingly complex things may we see if we build a incredibly wide-angle deep-field videocamera and watch it for long enough? Is there any thing that might prevent large complex structures from existing?


All of this has made a question pop into my mind: what do we mean by small and large? In a video I posted some months ago, Richard Dawkins argues that those concepts are relative to the sensibility of our senses. Enhancing our senses with apparatus of various kinds has helped in giving us a better idea of the scales of natural phenomena and the range of which human lives go on.

In this quest for a grip on the size of things, two facts have been discovered, or aproximated. One is the size of the universe, based on the velocity of receding distant galaxies and the well known constant-ness of the speed of light. The other is the discovery that certain forces, namely the strong nuclear, are of effect in only very small scales. Conversely, the effect of gravitation is negligible at this same scales.

Given all of this, one comes to wonder: is it possible that the matter interactions that our instruments are able to measure are only those in scales not larger than what we call the size of the universe? what if there is another, yet to be discovered type of interaction which is negligible at such scales but much more important at even larger ones?

Can our current theory give us any hints in proving or disproving this?

If a sort of very-large scale aggregation of matter exists, in such a way that between one cluster of matter and the next the four forces we know have no effect, could we be living in deception?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-scale_structure_of_the_cosmos

En el mar, la vida es más sabrosa

Before the war

Some stuff I do like from the 90's.

How must the cosmological principle be modified to address the fact that distant places are always more interesting than one's current position?

Sometimes I'd like to just lay down on the warm afternoon grass and see the white clouds go by across that blue sky of my childhood.

The wine...

Subway Dream

It was a crowded subway platform like those we are so used to here in Mexico City.

After a while of waiting for the train, it struck me that all of us waiting were young people, and more than one had with them some sort of strange object. One had a snowboard, other had a set of PVC pipes. The wait was getting unusually long.

Suddenly someone came in, an official of sorts, and announced that the train service would stop but that we couldn't go out because "the country had fallen apart" and this was the only safe place to be. I approached him and told him that if he knew that he had some sort of contact with the outside so why shouldn't we, and he, in a classic gesture of authority, dismissed my remark as nonsense and laughed.

I stayed there for what seemed a couple of hours, chatting with people etc, and suddenly I realized I could scape trough the tunnel. So I started walking down the tunnel until I found a place where my mobile phone could manage a signal, and called my mother. I was very happy to hear she was alive, after all the country had fallen apart, what ever that meant. Yet, she didn't sound quite that happy to listen to me.

So I told her "Hi mom, I'm all right, how are you and Pa doing?" and she said "I'm all right" in a stern voice, then added "And in all this time, what have you done, are you married now, with children?" And I replied "Why do you say that Mom, how long has it been since we last talked" And she answered, rather angrily, "Forty two years".

And then I realized that indeed, in that subway station I was trapped in time, and I would go out forty two years later than when I went in.

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I am not really sure dreams can be subject of interpretation. Perhaps dream-interpretations are to be subjects of interpretations.

The Simpsons and Apple.