Tag Archives: ted

Where is Everybody?

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You all know this story. In the summer of 1950, Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist and atomic pile-builder, went to lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory and joined some colleagues there and asked them a question. “Where is everybody?” This confused his colleagues, obviously, because they were sitting right there with him, and then he had to clarify that he wasn’t talking about them. He was talking about the space aliens.

You see, this was only a few years after the supposed flying saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico, and even though that turned out to be nothing, nothing AT ALL — Merely a downed weather balloon piloted by small hairless men with slits for mouths — still, America had gone saucer-mad, even famous scientists who were eating lunch.

Fermi’s reasoning, if I may paraphrase badly, is that the universe is so vast that it stands to reason there should be other intelligent life out there, and the universe is so old, that unless we were the very first civilization ever to evolve, we should have some evidence of their existence by now, and yet, to the best of our knowledge, we are alone. “Where is everybody,” asked Fermi, and his colleagues had no answer.

Fermi then went on with the same blunt logic to disprove fairies, Sasquatch, God, the possibility of love, and thereafter, as you know, Enrico Fermi ate alone.
– John Hodgman, A Brief Digression on Matters of Lost Time

Zoe's First Narrative

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On Saturday, Zoe had a busy day. It was my dad’s birthday, and there was a family get-together planned at a park in Corvallis. She spent the morning with me while Annie ran errands. Then her cousin Leilani came by with Ryan and Dad to pick up Sean. She was really excited to see Leilani. After Annie got back, we got in the car, and she took a nap on the way to the park, and then played with her older cousins all afternoon. When we got home, she kicked a ball around the backyard with me and Sean before bedtime.

Frequently, while she slowly drifts off to sleep, she will go over her vocabulary. She’ll repeat words she knows or has just learned over and over again, almost chanting to herself. Annie’s gotten used to a bit of random chatter at bedtime, so she didn’t think much about it when Zoe started talking during bedtime that night.

“Papa, Papa?” she said, and Annie nodded and said “Yes, Papa just said night-night to you.” Zoe smiled and went back to nursing.

A minute later she popped back up. “’Lani! ’Lani ’Lani?” Annie said “Yes, we saw Leilani today.”

“Grampa? Ryno?” Zoe continued. “Yes, Grandpa and Uncle Ryan, too.”

Satisfied, Zoe returned to nursing. As she got more sleepy, she talked about the Car (beep-beep!) and Going, and each time Annie smiled and said Yes, and got her to focus on the task at hand again.

But after that, when Zoe started talking about the Ball! and Kicking! and Sean and night-night, Annie realized that she had just recapped her entire day.

Maybe it was just a fluke. As I said, she likes to practice her vocabulary when she’s sleepy, and those are most of the words she knows — but she covered all the major events of the day in chronological order, and I’m inclined to think that she was telling her Momma all about her big day.

I am Superman

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“I am, I am Superman, and I can do anything.”
– REM, I think

Oog. Dead Week. It sucks. The end of the term, when suddenly you become painfully aware of just how much work you have to accomplish and just how little time you have to do it in. A week full of nights with 3 hours of sleep, caffeinated beverages, and occasional breaks to watch Star Trek and X-Files just to relieve your brain of thinking for a bit. The kind of week where you call your girlfriend and you’re so braindead that you just sit, and say nothing to each other because you can’t think of anything other than the exact details of the life of the average peasant in 13th century England. But the best part is that neither one of you minds, because its reassuring just to share a few minutes, even in silence.

I downloaded the new version of ICQ the other night, when I should have been working, and I like it. It’s got all sorts of new toys worked in, like the ability to send color messages. That’s great. I need more toys. I like buttons and knobs and dials and switches. The more the better. If they have to put on extra buttons that do the same thing as another buttons somewhere else, that’s fine by my. I feel the same way about pockets. You can’t have too many.

Hee hee… I just spellchecked this… and it tried to replace “braindead” with “brandied”. My spell checker is verbing.

I was at Annie’s house, and I realized that I had left a note on Dave’s door 7 weeks ago, saying “I can see you perfectly through my rifle scope.” It was a reference to some joke we had been telling that weekend. I can’t remember the joke. I still laughed at it, because I remembered it being funny, but I couldn’t repeat the joke to you… It’s lost… Maybe my brain is full.

I think this is short attention span theater. I’ve been working all day writing short term papers and now I’m burned out on proper grammar and logical sentence constructions and stuff. You get the flotsam and jetsam of my brain. Which is what this is all about, really.

A few months ago, KT was playing Diablo at our apartment. Now the other week, I just got Annie reading a comic book (the Maxx!). I think I’m a bad influence on people. I’m spreading my geek-ness around.

I realized that it’s hereditary. My family sat down to eat dinner at a nice restaurant in Seattle (with Annie) and Sean ordered yakisoba. When the plate of noodles arrived, my dad looks at it, and then looks at Sean and says “look, Sean, they brought you a plate of Gak!”, and we all chuckled. All of us, my mom, dad, Sean and Ryan, and me… Annie might have too, but I don’t think she caught the Star Trek reference. So it runs in the family. Chromosome 40K – The Star Trek Gene…

My tax return got here today. It rocks to get a check in the mail. :) I’m going to buy a coat, pay my parents off, get a Monster card for my computer and maybe a CD burner.

Blah Blah Blah. The End.