If you always knew what you were getting into, there would be no real adventures in life. Not too long ago, I fell into an adventure, one of immense importance to a lot of people I never knew before this started. How I got involved might sound downright thoughtless and irresponsible, but I’m hoping it will turn out to be a good thing.

For several years now, my sister and her friend and employer, a breast cancer survivor, have been doing a three-day, sixty-mile walk to support breast cancer research. They live in northern Michigan, and have been doing the walk in Detroit, until last year when they missed the Detroit walk and decided, at the last minute, to do the walk in San Diego. They liked the travel experience and decided this year to try the Seattle walk, which is in my area of the country.

So far, so good – my sister is coming for a visit, and will be serving a very worthy cause, as well. But then I stepped in it. I signed up, too. At the time, I didn’t think much beyond joining in the fun, and serving that worthy cause. Now, the words “worthy cause” slip perhaps a little too easily from a person’s lips these days. They’re used to urge people to donate to a cause, or in statements of support from people who are not donating, or even as a preface to introducing some better, more worthy cause. It takes a shot of real life to give them meaning again.

I don’t know why I hadn’t given breast cancer research more thought. I have an aunt who’s a survivor, and I had a grandmother who was – plus, there’s my sister’s friend who, largely due to my new pursuit, is also becoming my friend. Just the number of people close to me whom this has touched should have told me this cause is different. Still, I registered for the walk and booked my orientation session without giving much more thought to it.

At that session, the group was invited to share reasons why they were walking. The first person to speak up was a woman who had lost her mother to breast cancer when she was young. She had signed up for the walk the previous year, and been diagnosed with breast cancer after signing up. She was unable to go on the walk, because she needed emergency surgery during the actual walk. But, THIS year, she is in remission, and, by God, she’s going. She was also the last person to speak up. Nobody felt up to following up that story. I left that orientation without speaking a word to anybody. I was beginning to see what I was in for.

Some guys may be thrilled to find a group so disproportionately female – not 80-20, not even 90-10, but 95-5, at the very least. But I’m shy by nature, and feel awkwardness more acutely than I should. I also have to work at asking people for money. You can’t walk the Susan G. Komen 3-Day For the Cure on good will alone – you have to raise substantial donations first. I’ll overcome both handicaps. I’ve been on several organized training walks, and the people I’ve met so far are truly wonderful people. Nobody thinks any less of me for being a man. I need to get over that.

The same people, some of whom raise the required funds year after year, have eased my fears there, too. I just have to get out there and do it. I’ll figure out how. If anything particularly noteworthy develops, I’ll be sure to let you know here.

So, is this cause any more worthy than any other cause that saves lives? It might not be. But this cause has many supporters at least partly because so many lives are at stake – hundreds of thousands a year die of breast cancer worldwide. So many, who have lost a loved one, look at new developments today and wonder if their mother or sister, their friend or only daughter, may have been saved by those treatments. How many, whose loved ones die this year, will wonder the same thing in a few years’ time?

The goal of Susan G. Komen for the Cure^® is no less ambitious than a complete cure for breast cancer in all its forms. Such a cure would undoubtedly help in the treatment of other cancers and save even more lives. In the mean time, each time someone’s wife or grandmother or cherished aunt lives even a few extra years, the world is a better and happier place.

Every adventure has its trials and tribulations, as well as its unexpected blessings and benefits. But most of them don’t benefit humanity in such an unambiguously positive way. By the time I’m wearing out a nice pair of shoes over three days in September, much of this work will be done, and the money we’ve raised will already be hard at work giving back life to many whose bodies, for no comprehensible reason, started destroying themselves.

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As I said before, I and my supporters will work out how to raise the necessary funds. I didn’t write this as a direct method of raising money, but mainly to tell others (and, to some extent, myself) what I’m doing here, and why. But who am I to make it difficult for those moved to contribute to do so right now? Anyone who wants more information can start here. To contribute, you can go here.

Remember, the money isn’t going to fund a fun hike and camping trip for an adult who can afford his own hikes and camping trips. It’s going to keep thousands and thousands of deeply cherished and fruitful lives from ending years too soon.

My favorite little girl in the world just asked me yesterday, “When you were negative infinity years old, were you happy?” She’s fascinated with negative numbers now, what you get when you subtract a larger number from a smaller one, say, five from two, and she’s also fascinated with infinity – so NEGATIVE infinity, less than any number, must be doubly fascinating.

Earlier the same day, she asked me, “What do you get when you add infinity and negative infinity together?” Does she have any idea how complex the answers to her simple questions are? I told her you can get anything – from negative infinity to zero, to positive infinity, and anything in between. I was preparing to explain why, but she was already aware of many strange properties of infinity, and was thus willing, for the time being, to take this one on faith. Instead, she asked, “What’s positive infinity?” so I had to explain that this is just another way of saying infinity, that positive meant “not negative”.

She has established in her mind that “there’s no number past infinity”, but I had to clarify that there are different sized infinities. So far, she hasn’t asked for an explanation of this, but I fear I’ll soon have to start figuring out how to explain Cantorian set theory to a six-year-old. How will I approach the diagonal argument before she understands infinite decimals – or is that the next step? Will I have to discuss non-Cantorian set theory, so we can talk about whether or not there are infinities between Aleph Naught and the Continuum? It seems to me she’s dangerously close to asking questions like that – and, if she gets any further, I’ll have to study just to keep up.

So, back to her question, she was reasoning that, since everyone is older than negative infinity, everyone must have been negative infinity at one time – just like every child in her school is older than one, and each was one year old at some point in the past. I guess the concept is that, infinity years ago, we were all negative infinity years old, and we all passed through our negative years, getting older and older, until we were zero, and were born.

I answered that I don’t know if I was happy, but I don’t think I existed infinity years ago. “Was the earth invented infinity years ago?” (She seemed to have made the conceptual shift between an age of negative infinity and “infinity years ago” rather seamlessly.)

“No, the earth wasn’t there infinity years ago.” (I opted not to get into who might have invented the earth.)

“Was NOTHING there infinity years ago?”

“I think that infinity years ago was so long ago, that not even NOTHING was there.”

“Whoa.” Her mind seemed sufficiently blown, and we moved on to a different topic.

I’m flattered that she thinks about my happiness over an infinite expanse of time. Was I happy forever ago? I hope I was. I hope she was, too. And I hope we will be happy forever from now, too. At least I know I’m happy now. How could I have a discussion like that, and not be?

When a long and intimate relationship ends, part of the process of moving it firmly into the past involves taking stock of it, learning from it, and taking those lessons, plus the other blessings of that relationship, into the future. Sometimes this is considered part of the grieving process, even though there is not always real sadness involved. Not every long and intimate relationship involves what I call love, but there’s always a sense of loss when it ends, nonetheless.

Not too long ago, I ended such a relationship. It was a relationship I had started with high hopes: many of my closest friends have a similar relationship, and they could not be more in love. I was always able to appreciate what they loved, though I also recognized that their praise was sometimes overblown. I had an intellectual understanding of what there was to love, and much of it genuinely tickled my fancy, but I just never fell in love. It never really clicked.

When the frustrations and difficulties clearly outweighed the benefits for me, I let it go. I believe there’s nothing wrong with keeping a cordial relationship going, as long as it is mutually beneficial, and expectations correspond with reality. But, in the end, this was a relationship that only true love could keep alive – and that love simply was never there. I am truly happy that my friends remain so much in love, but that love was not for me.

And so, toward the middle of last year, I broke up with my Mac. It was an awkward relationship to start with. First, there was the price – fully three times the price of a comparably equipped PC. But my friends loved their Macs, and many told me the software that came with the Mac more than made up for the price difference. That may well be true for some, but it never worked out that way for me. I never had that much use for all the free stuff that was on the Mac. Some of it was fun, and I was able to use freeware to replace Microsoft Office, but the difference was never made up.

I also had to use Firefox instead of the native Safari, so that WordPress worked right. I seemed to be endlessly encountering software that was less current, or had fewer features, or just plain didn’t exist, for the Mac. There was that famous stability, but even the Mac needs a good reboot now and then. The Mac mail program was adequate at best. But it was good enough that I never sought out a substitute.

As long as I had my mouse, I could right click. But that right button was stubbornly absent from the laptop itself, and I had to use the pesky control button. On the PC, I actually like having both a backspace and a delete key. Eventually, I began to get used to all of this, despite the fact that my work computer was still a PC, and that wasn’t about to change.

None of this is really a big deal, especially if you’re in love – but I wasn’t. What really strained the relationship was the after-market experience. I’m fully convinced that the happiest Mac owners are those who never have to take their Macs in for anything. Easy things, like replacing a power cord you left at a hotel many states away, can be solved within minutes, if you have sixty bucks to toss around. Yes, that’s right. Sixty bucks for a power cord.

No laptop can expect to remain unscathed in the company of a temperamental three-year-old. And my LCD screen got cracked by an angry girl throwing things. I knew I was out several hundred dollars. I did not know I was out six hundred ninety-five dollars. No, I didn’t spend that money. I semi-botched an attempt to put in a new LCD screen on my own, and kept the thing crawling along for another year or so. Toward the end, I was using a separate screen. I couldn’t bring myself to spend the price of a brand new PC laptop on a repair of a Mac I wasn’t in love with, nor could I bring myself to drop another two thousand-plus on a new Mac I also wouldn’t be in love with. Macs and I were through.

So, I went out and bought a new laptop with Windows 7 installed. I added Microsoft Office with Outlook, and was still under the price of repairing the Mac. I got a 17-inch screen, and the webcam works better. The machine is kind of big and heavy, but I’m strong enough to handle that, for as much as I carry it around anyway. Within days, I loved it more than I ever loved my Mac. I was back in the PC world, where I belong.

I have no disrespect for my friends who love their Macs and would never go back to a PC. I wish I could have that kind of unconditional love for a stylish blend of hardware and software. I love my PC, but I don’t think it’s the same kind of love that people have for their Macs. If I truly loved my Mac, I would have gladly put up with all the extra costs and the after-market woes. I would have gladly tolerated the planned obsolescence of a laptop that is nearly impossible for a normal human to work on. It would not have mattered to me, because I would have had my beloved Mac.

As you can see, I’m not one of those mindless Wintel supporters that never even gave a Mac a fair shake. Once you go Mac, some say, you never go back. But some do, even given a full and complete chance of falling in love. It just didn’t work out for me. So, I’m here to tell you it’s okay to be a PC owner. Buying a Mac is not the only way to be cool, and certainly not the only way to leave your comfort zone and push for better things.

I don’t have an angry three-year-old anymore. I have a six-year-old who knows better than to destroy expensive hardware by throwing things at it. There will never be a fair comparison. I don’t intend to break my screen to find out. But my experience with my PC has been, so far, a very satisfying and comfortable return home. For now, and for the foreseeable future, “I am a PC.”

A Fictional Character Speaks Out from His Addictive World

Ever have one of those days?  Not like mine.  Nobody has days like mine.  I’m in a demanding line of work, but that’s not it.  Lots of people have jobs as demanding as mine.  Some have even more demanding jobs – except on Those Days.  I have lots of tough days, and some seem to last for days on their own.  But, once every few years or so, I have a day that seems to last for weeks.  On days like that, the entire universe, or, at least, the whole world, seems to focus on me, and the fate of much of the world seems to rest squarely on my shoulders.  Some days, I can let others take that responsibility – but not on Those Days.

The laws of physics, of time and space, are never broken during Those Days (as far as I can tell), but the human emotional clock runs at breakneck speed.  People fall in and out of love, lose and regain trust for each other, and make life-changing discoveries – all within hours, or even minutes.  It’s not that this is impossible, but so much of it happening in one day, with every life somehow touching mine, makes it all rather uncanny.

During each of Those Days, the action never stops.  In some ways, this is a good thing.  I need the adrenaline just to keep going – I never sleep until the day is over.  I’m always awake for at least twenty-four straight hours, and sometimes far more.  I never know quite when a Day will start.  It might be right at midnight, or early in the morning, or sometime in the afternoon – but, once it starts, the hour hand makes two full circuits of the clock – or would, if an analog clock were involved.  Somehow, I sense that the master clock is digital.

The death toll on Those Days is, without exception, astounding.  Any given hour makes the climax of a Michael Crichton novel seem, by comparison, like a quiet place to spend a pleasant Sunday afternoon.  People I don’t know, people I know, and even some cherished friends, die off at an astonishing rate.  Every once in a while, someone will seem to die, then come back – but most of the death is the regular, permanent kind.  It takes its toll after a while.

I am highly trained, and that is a good thing.  I can be beaten or tortured within an inch of my life, and be chasing a terror suspect, full throttle, just minutes later.  Sometimes I’ll even catch him.  This kind of thing can happen several times during one of Those Days.  For most of the Day, the whole universe seems to conspire against me.  I barely manage to hold onto life and limb, and I seem to take two steps back for every step forward.  Whenever I do make a major breakthrough, it ends up being only a small piece of the puzzle – much smaller than I originally thought.

Then there comes a frenzied moment, toward the end of the Day, where everything comes together, often in a manner no more convincing than all the other times it came together – but this time, for some reason, the issue really is resolved, and the world is safe again.  If I could ever learn to detect the pattern, I could set my watch by it.  But, then again, if I weren’t so completely caught up in this little joke the universe likes to play on me every few years, who knows how it would all turn out?

So, you think you have bad days.  But nobody, and I mean nobody, has days like mine.

“Come,” she told me, “your fun is all done.
Come, study carefully. Your fun is all done.
Exams are coming fast. Your fun is all done.
Good times are in the past. Your fun is all done,
Fun is all done, fun is all done.”

So, I’ll sit and cram. My fun is all done.
I’m under the gun.

Friends, take note now, my fun is all done.
Semester ends, and, pow, my fun is all done.
I have no hope unless my fun is all done.
I can’t afford to guess. My fun is all done,
Fun is all done, fun is all done.

No more games for now. My fun is all done.
There’s nowhere to run.

Time is dwindling, my fun is all done.
I must learn everything, my fun is all done.
I’ve watched my last TV, my fun is all done.
Until school sets me free, my fun is all done,
Fun is all done, fun is all done.

It’s a sure thing now, my fun is all done.
Sorrow has won.

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This is a tribute to exam takers everywhere.  Christmas season isn’t long over, so most readers shouldn’t have much trouble working out the tune.

I’ve been away from ReadSteve for a long time – too long, by any reasonable standard.  A lot of things have happened –and, instead of recording them here as they happened, I let them pile up.  The time has come to get back.  I’ll continue some of my other threads, and I’ll catch you up a bit.  I do not want to make this too much about Steve, and I don’t ReadSteve to ever be reduced to a series of life blurbs too long to be tweets.

But one of the things I’ve been doing is losing weight.  I may cover my move to the Seattle area some other time, but I am now a Microsoft spouse, working my old Virginia job from home.  One of Microsoft’s benefits is a program called 20/20.  It’s a weight loss and management program that many Microsoft employees, including some very high up, have gone through, and I’ve never been in a company that covered anything like this.

I was in the program for a total of 28 weeks – 16 weeks of active weight loss and 12 weeks of “maintenance”, though I still lost weight during maintenance.  When others ask me how I did it, or how they can do it, it’s hard for me to form an answer – hard for me to really put my finger on what the real difference was, apart from this Microsoft-paid benefit, which most of my friends don’t get.

Steve, Before and After -- 60 pounds gone!

As you can see from the photos (I can see it, anyway) it worked.  I went from over 250 pounds to about 190 – over 60 pounds!  It took a lot of time, which may be part of why I let ReadSteve slip – along with moving across the continent, etc.

The program involved weekly dietitian appointments; exercise, including workouts with a personal trainer; counseling, including individual and group therapy; educational programs, including videos; and meal tracking.  It’s all stuff that I’d tried before, on one level or another, but never so close together, and never in such a coordinated way.

Because I was doing so many different things at once, I don’t have the information necessary to pick out exactly what the winning combination was for me.  I do know that there were times when my diet lapsed, and times when I let exercise slip – but I never let everything slip.  There was always something I was doing that helped me lose weight.

Of course, even if I could pick out the winning combination, which I may be able to do over the years as I pin down what it takes to stay fit, it’s still just my winning combination, and everybody is different.  So, next time somebody asks how I did it, I have a ready-made reply.  It may not be a very satisfying reply, but it’s all I’ve got for now.

I was one of the premier watchers of Sesame Street. When it first came on the air, I was just the right age to watch it, and I did watch it – sometimes twice in one day. It was a different show back then. They’ve made it a lot more PC. For instance, there was a song on Sesame Street when I was watching that went something like this:

One of these things is not like the others.
One of these things just doesn’t belong.
If you guessed this thing is not like the others,
Then, you’re absolutely right!

The word “thing” was generally replaced by a more specific noun, such as “shape” or “toy”. But, I think sometimes the word was “girl” or “boy”, and then we were excluding people from groups.

So now the song’s more elaborate, where you look for one of two or three groups to include the thing in question in. I don’t know if anyone will remember the new song 37 years hence, but I kind of think not. Progress must be made, I suppose.

Another disappointment is the disappearance of the running gag about Snuffleupagus, the Wooly-Mammoth-looking character who, for years, was seen only by the children and Big Bird. They’d try all sorts of things to keep him there until an adult arrived, but he always seemed to amble off before anyone over eight could see him.

I heard this gag was dispensed with so as not to encourage imaginary friends, but I don’t know for sure. It kind of seems unlike an enterprise that always encouraged imagination. Maybe it was the adults’ disbelief that didn’t sit right with the SSPB (Sesame Street Powers that Be).

The biggest change in the Sesame Street format, however, was the introduction of Elmo. I hated him. Perhaps “hate” is too strong a word. But he rubbed me so far the wrong way that I could get sent back ten paces just by hearing his voice. The red furball was bubblegum sweet, innocent, and without a single vice to his name, unless not having a vice is a vice. Plus, Elmo never used pronouns, even when talking about Elmo. (This might be my stickler showing again!)

The other Muppet characters all had their vices, but Elmo had only his wide-eyed naiveté. Cookie Monster had his cookie obsession, The Count needed his numbers, Oscar was the anti-Elmo before there was an Elmo, and Ernie and Bert were as mismatched a pair of friends as you could hope to meet. Elmo had none of that. Worse yet, because so many kids and parents loved him, I knew he wasn’t going away.

I’ve finally started to understand the phenomenon. Elmo wasn’t as naïve as I might have thought. Elmo, you see, knew The Secret, hidden from the masses for centuries, and only recently brought to light by author Rhonda Byrne. Long before her book came out, he’d secured about fifteen minutes of the Sesame Street program, or about 25% of the broadcast, and still made regular appearances during the rest of the show. I don’t have the statistics to back this up, but he must have more airplay on a typical Sesame Street show than any other character.

How did he manage this? Well, his end-of-show segment, called “Elmo’s World”, is all about the Principle of Attraction. He starts the show thinking about a topic, and, from there, things just keep happening. The visitors who come by, the email he receives, and even the local cable TV schedule, all cooperate. Elmo does choose the channel to switch to, but the channel always exists, and there’s always a short show, right on topic, starting right when the TV turns itself on.

Elmo’s mastery of The Secret is not complete. He still has perennial trouble with the window shade that gives him access to Mr. Noodle. He has similar trouble opening the drawer, and you have to think that Elmo is attracting some of the negativity to himself by expecting to have trouble. Elmo also tends to associate with people who don’t give him positive results. He asks three-year-old level questions of a baby, and almost never gets a meaningful answer. He also spends an inordinate amount of time working with Mr. Noodle to get a satisfactory result, when small children reliably deliver without any issue.

But you can’t argue with his overall success. Day after day, he starts with a thought, and makes that thought into an educational segment that PBS keeps paying for again and again. He unites people, animals, and animate objects (things that can talk) toward the goal of expressing this thought, attracting elements of the universe and defying probability at every turn. He is a catalyst. The universe works for him.

Finally, I have to admit that he doesn’t irritate me so much anymore. He keeps my daughter occupied, and probably isn’t completely rotting her brain. He may even be good in small doses. He lets other people talk, and they usually use pronouns. Maybe, at one point, he thought about acceptance, and he attracted mine. I still don’t love him, though.

Long, long ago, sometime in the 80′s, I think, comedian George Carlin observed that, in traffic, every driver who wants to go faster than you is a maniac, and every driver who wants to go slower is an idiot. I think something similar is true regarding people’s opinions of correct grammar. Everyone has a standard; and anyone with higher standards is hopelessly pedantic, while everyone with lower standards is borderline illiterate. It helps when I examine my own views in that light.

I’m not a big stickler on things like split infinitives and the conjunctive case. If you use the conjunctive, as it were, most verbs take the same form as the past tense. “If I went”, “If you had”, and, even “If they were”. So, if someone says, “If I was”, who am I to complain? “If I was” can’t mean anything else, and English isn’t Latin.

I feel the same about the insistence that the nominative case be used with any form of the verb “to be”. It’s an academic insistence on the equivalence of the subject and object. If there’s anyone who feels inclined to break that rule, it’s me. I also think that prepositions are perfectly fine words to end sentences with. When I’m being more formal, I sometimes still follow that rule, and I may even use conjunctives correctly — but I’m firmly on the page of those who coined the many and various “up with which I will not put” phrases commonly attributed to Winston Churchill.

I also think that the word “data” has changed from its original Latin meaning. Over the years, common usage has made it a mass singular in the style of “sand” or “glass”. The glass is being melted, the sand is on the beach, and the data is stored on this DVD. You can have a piece of glass, a grain of sand, or a bit of data. The pieces, grains, and bits can be plural, but the sand, glass, and data, in common usage, can’t. I mean, what is a datum in common usage, anyway — a one or a zero? We already have a much shorter word for that. I’m okay with people using “data” as a plural, but I’m not okay with people insisting on it.

Usage does change language. The word “pea” came from the mass singular “pease”, which eventually became the plural “peas”. So, “peas” and “data” are traveling the linguistic road in opposite directions.

So far, I don’t sound like much of a stickler, but I actually am. There are phrases in common use that absolutely make me cringe. If someone writes, “Your to funny”, I’m tempted to answer “My am?” The phrase makes no more sense than “My from stupid” — except, of course, that it does. One makes perfect sense if you speak it, and one does not. Even in written form, there’s no ambiguity in its meaning. So, why do I even care? I just do.

In text messaging done from phones, I understand why abbreviated usage happens. “yr 2 fny” is partly the result of every letter taking multiple keystrokes. In instant messaging from computers, however, where a full keyboard is being used, it’s probably better to spell stuff out most of the time. In either case, “Your to funny” isn’t abbreviated. It’s just wrong.

As a child and teen, I used to refer to “magic marker English”, defined as the type of written English found on handmade signs in small stores. These signs still exist, but many of them are now computer printouts, looking much more refined, until you look at the words on them. It used to be that printing up a sign took some money, so it was less common to see glaring errors in printed signs (not that they didn’t still happen sometimes). But the means of production fell into the hands of the people, and the quality of production suffered.

Signs would typically confuse “there”, “their”, and “they’re”. They’d use quotes for emphasis, where simple underlining would do. A sign might read:

Customers are “required” to where there shoes.

If I exaggerate, it’s only by a tiny bit. In a buffet restaurant in the Tampa Bay area, I once saw a sign that said:

Mashed Potatoes Made From “Scratch”

It made me wonder if they were using “Scratch” brand powdered potatoes — but, if so, I highly recommend “Scratch” brand. I’ve never had better instant potatoes anywhere.

Online classified ads are another place where gut-wrenching errors happen. They’re not all typos. They can’t be. In the absence of editors who take at least a little care with printed classifieds, you get gems like one I saw in my company’s classifieds about a dozen years ago, advertising a used camera.

Perfect for beginner and novice a like!

it boasted. I used to keep a log of these gems, but that one stands out. So, there was an uncorrected typo, or near-typo, along with complete misuse of one of two words (you take your pick). Both made me cringe. I cringed in stereo, and I remember it to this day.

I know I’m not alone in this. I have a friend, with whom I’ve bonded on this for all twelve of these years. This friend has even considered ending relationships over this issue. I don’t think I’d take it that far. Many people who never met a semicolon (or, possibly, even a comma) that they knew what to do with are way better at math than I am. I’m not too bad at math, either — but the point is, we all have our talents. I don’t think I ever struggled with third grade grammar — not even in third grade. It was no accomplishment. So, if someone else did struggle, and finally decided the struggle wasn’t worth it, who am I to judge? But I don’t judge, not intellectually. It’s all in my gut.

I realize I can’t write an article like this without some risk that people will point out errors in it, finding the irony delicious. I welcome your comments. Also, if there’s any linguistic pet peeve you have, or, if you differ from me in your opinion about what’s acceptable and what isn’t, I’d love to hear about it. Am I a hopeless pedantic, or am I a borderline illiterate? I’d like to believe that what I think is okay represents usage common enough that we should accept it as a change in the language, while what bothers me is simply bad grammar that will never be adopted by the people at large — but how can I know that?

Does it help, at least, that I know that my opinions on this subject are arbitrary? Would George Carlin be proud of me?

There’s a special bond shard between mothers and their sons. I’m not sure it’s universal, but I’ve seen many examples of it. There’s one such example I focus on now: a mother, sitting in her living room, intent on her computer, with her loving son at her side, looking on. I say she’s intent on the computer, but mothers can multitask, and it’s clear that her son, not much more than ten years old, also has a share of her attention.

He’ll lean in a little closer, and she’ll turn to him and smile – a small smile, barely more than a grin, yet filled with warmth and unconditional love. He reacts and smiles back. She puts an arm around him, and he takes a closer look at the screen. From a distance, I hear muted conversation. I come closer, to hear what they’re saying. If they know I’m there, I get no indication; they seem oblivious to me.

“You’re totally dead,” he says.

“I’m not dead.”

“Yes you are. There’s gotta be ten of ‘em.”

As the words become intelligible, the computer screen, also, comes into focus. She’s not doing work from home; she’s not balancing her bank statements; she’s not even catching up on her email. She’s playing World of Warcraft.

It turns out her son is right. She battles valiantly, but her foes overpower her, and eventually kill her. And so her soul must make its healing journey back to her body. The game gives the impression that it’s a long journey, but, in real time, it doesn’t take very long. This is, after all, a video game.

And so, as from time immemorial, mother and son share in activity, in conversation, and bond over a shared interest. This is special time, and I withdraw again, giving this private moment back its privacy.

Later, the same small boy is seen logging into the computer on his own. This time, it’s his dad who shares a moment with him. “You are NOT playing World of Warcraft!” he roars. The boy silently and dutifully logs off. We should not be too hard on old Dad. His son IS only ten, and, while he may have no authority over his wife’s addiction, he may yet be able to save his son.

And so, the boy has re-learned a valuable lesson: don’t play when Dad’s around. Like so many addicted people, his desire must be tempered by watchfulness, and his impulse by cunning.

There is one final episode that I’m privileged to witness. He wants his mother’s help. “Play my character,” he begs. This is not one of those stereotypical houses where the kids are the masters of technology. Mother still has a few lessons to teach him.

So, she agrees, standing behind him as he logs in and enters his realm. It’s clear that mother and father are not united regarding this game. But children have always known instinctively how to deal with mixed messages: they pick the messages they like best.

She sits down to play, and reacts almost immediately. “What did you DO?” she demands. “You can’t log out in the middle of a battle,” she scolds. “You’ve got to go somewhere safe when you log out!” There’s more desperate fighting, and another death. Then, she’s free to whip his character into shape.

“You’re carrying too much,” she says with motherly concern. “You’re going to have to sell some of your stuff. The transactions are made. He’s traveling light, and he’s got some extra cash. I presume, at this point, that she worked to develop his skills, took him on a quest or two, and left him ready to play again, more skilled and better prepared than he was before. Isn’t that what a mother’s job is, after all?

That was the last I saw of the mother and son crafting war together. They live far away from me now, and I don’t get to see them very often. But the scene has stuck with me. It seems like, whatever humans are presented with, by nature or by other humans, they continue to react in recognizably human ways.

In 1884, Edwin A. Abbot published a short work of imaginative fiction called Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions.  This book has become famous, and has been referenced in countless books and articles about physics, mathematics, philosophy, and other disciplines where multiple dimensions (or even just multiple perspectives) are discussed.  Generally, it’s paraphrased, because the original language has a Victorian feel, and takes some getting used to.

I’d like to concentrate on one character in Flatland, a sphere that visits the two-dimensional world, where the main character, a square (A. Square) resides.  The sphere does this several times, and, every time it does, the Flatlanders see a circle.  The circle grows from a point, and then shrinks back to a point, as the sphere passes through.  The sphere is able to see inside two-dimensional bodies and locked cupboards, and touch their contents.

The author decided to use the simplest possible shapes to populate his universes — squares, triangles, circles, lines, points, and a sphere.  I don’t know his exact motivation, but my guess is that it was to avoid distraction — stretching the imagination is hard enough without having to picture what a human hand might look like in cross section.  But it might have been interesting to have Flatland visited by a cylinder or a cone segment.

The thing about a sphere is that all its cross sections are circles.  But a cylinder can appear to be a circle (just one size, though), or any number of flattened circles with the same radius, a rectangle, or a D-shaped morph of a semicirle.  The cylinder could change shape dynamically, by rotating at various angles through Flatland’s plane.  A cone segment could do the same, being a circle, ellipse, triangle, or its own semi-elliptical D-shape.  The sphere already appears to be something that it’s not: it appears to be a point or a circle.  But the cylinder adds variety to the paradox.  It can appear to be very distinct and different things that it is not.

In 2-D space, a rectangle and a circle have very little in common.  There is no way in two-dimensional space for a shape to be both a rectangle and a circle.  Choose any intermediate shape between circle and rectangle (flatten out the circle, or round out a corner of the rectangle), and you no longer have either one.  Yet a cylinder, without changing shape the slightest bit, can appear to be either one in Flatland.  It can’t be both at once, mind you,  but it can change freely between the two just by spinning around a bit.

Less than 30 years after Flatland  was published, the world of science was reeling from the implications of quantum physics.  People have different reactions to relativity and quantum mechanics, but the latter was always more difficult for me to assimilate.  It depends on what your world view is all about.  If you feel in your gut that time and space are constants, relativity is going to throw you for a loop.  But, after bending my brain around the concepts for a while, I think I was able to accept it, even if I never fully understood it.

But quantum physics is another animal.  Our smallest bits of matter act as either particles or waves — but never both at the same time.  Some argue that a particle can’t have both position and momentum at the same time, but that comes mostly from the fact that we can’t observe both precisely.  For me, learning about relativity was a radical change of view, but learning about quantum mechanics was like losing my religion.  In my own, unscientific way, I tried with all my might to think of ways it might not be true — but, of course, the scientists who’d made the discoveries hadn’t missed anything that I was about to discover.  They know their turf far better than I do.

Now, anyone who’s had discussions about quantum physics has probably encountered a smug, smirking individual who just loves the fact that intuition is assaulted so violently by the facts.  I’ve encountered several.  Sometimes this person has an agenda to interpret the physics to fit a particular philosophy, and sometimes not.  But the smugness irritated me; I wanted to prove those smug scientists wrong!

But, of course, the scientists weren’t the smug ones.  From all accounts I’ve read, quantum physics came as a shock.  Nobody delighted in the discovery.  Scientists fought it.  Albert Einstein, himself, never stopped fighting certain aspects of it, despite having been instrumental in bringing its basic facts to light.  The smug guys came along later, and latched onto it.  I tend to think (without real justification) that most of them never really lost anything when they made their new discoveries.  If you don’t have a paradigm to start with, you don’t have to shift anything to learn something new.  So, I don’t have to prove anybody wrong.  The smug guys aren’t that important.

I read a lot of books about quantum physics to try and get a handle on it.  Each one, of course, felt the need to lay a foundation of classical physics to build from, so the opening chapters in these books grew tedious after a while.  And a lot of them had very similar things to say, and I found no comfort for a long time.  The book that finally did give me a mental framework was Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics by Nick Herbert.  As you may guess from the title, this book is more philosophical than other titles I’ve read.  What finally hit home is how much of physics, even classical physics, is mathematical modeling.

Magnetic fields  aren’t real.  They’re a mathematical construct that describes how physical objects act when they come together, especially if one or more of them is magnetic.  The same is true of electrical fields, gravity, and even particles and waves.  None of these mathematical models describes reality exactly.  And I knew that much.  But it’s easy to start thinking that a physical object is some kind of imperfect instance of the mathematical model that describes it, or that the mathematical model is some kind of ideal version of all applicible objects.  But it’s not true.  The model helps to serve intuition, and gives us enormous predictive power over the real world — but that doesn’t make them real, at all.

The main difference between these models and the quantum physics models is that the quantum physics models are not intuitive.  They don’t parallel anything we can observe directly.  You are familiar with a magnet picking up paper clips, and with an apple falling from a tree.  But you have never seen an electron, and will never actually see what happens when it is measured as a wave, rather than as a particle.  You may come up with a better guess at it than anyone else, but you’ll never know for sure.

People writing about quantum physics will talk about waves of probability, as if that’s something real — as if the probability that a particle will show up in one place or another can propogate itself through space as a physical wave.  A common pattern in observation is that, if a particle’s position is measured, it acts like a particle from then on, at least until we lose track of it.  If its position is not measured, it continues to act like a wave.  That is, the mathematical model for a wave fits until we observe it — then the mathematical model for a particle works.  But, as we noted before, waves and particles aren’t real, even in classical physics.

So, an electon doesn’t change from a wave to a particle, any more than the cylinder in my Flatland-inspired scenario changes from a circle to a rectangle.  Sometimes you’ll hear the phrase “wave/particle duality” thrown about, but this does not mean that an electron is a particle and a wave.  What it really means is that an electron sometimes seems to fit the mathematical model of a wave, and, at other times, seems to fit the mathematical model of a particle.  The way I deal with this mystery now is to believe that:

1. An electron is not a particle.
2. Further, an electron is not like what we think of as a particle, even when it’s acting like one.
3. An electron is not a wave.
4. Further, an electron is not like what we think of as a wave, even when it’s acting like one.

There are other quantum mysteries, but they can all be dispensed with, to my satisfaction, by similar methods.

When I say “to my satisfaction”, I do not mean I’m actually satisfied.  I’d still like to know what an electron really is.  But I feel at least like the mystery is no longer in the realm of the paradoxical, but in the realm of the unknown.  So, I think an electron is not only something different from anything we see in the macroscopic world; it’s also something we have absolutely no intuitive feel for.  It’s not simply like a bacterium, different from any life form we know in the naked-eye-visible world, but still understandable on many levels using just classical physics.  This is like an object from a different universe, obeying totally different laws.  The mathematics of how electrons behave is well understood and predictable.  But we simply have no good idea what’s behind the mathematics.

So, what we find when we look at a quantum entity depends a lot on what we’re looking for.  If we look for a particle, we’ll find a particle.  If we look for a wave, we’ll find a wave.  If we look for a particle after observing the wave, we’ll find it.  If we look for a wave after observing a particle — well, too bad.  They’re only so flexible.  So, once a particle, always a particle?  Not really.  If we pin down the position of an electron at any point in time, we automatically lose its momentum, so we have no idea where it goes after that point.  We’ve lost track of it, and it can be like a wave again, for all we know.

Our methods of tracking single electrons or photons generally end with recording them on a sensitive plate, which is able to record where it hit the plate.  After that, you can’t get hold of the same particle again.  At least I’ve never heard of anybody doing that, and I think Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle pretty much forbids that.  Record its position, and you don’t know where it went.  Record its momentum, and you don’t know where it was when you recorded the momentum — so you STILL don’t know where it went.

When you hear someone trying to give special meaning to the act of observation, you have to understand that it doesn’t matter whether the observation is recorded or not.  It’s not as if the entrance of data into the human mind is what changes the behavior of a quantum particle.  It’s the mechnanics of taking the observation that changes wave behavior to particle behavior.  A computer can take the observation, and never record or report the observation.  But the particle will still act like a particle after that point — until we record its final position.  Then it’s gone again.  I believe Schrödinger’s Cat is either alive or dead.  There’s nothing magical about opening the box.

So, observation itself does not necessarily affect reality.  The mechanics of observation — that you have to send a photon to intercept or leave a sensitive plate to stop and record the particle is enough.  You find what you set out to measure, but that, again, can be due to the mechanics of the situation.  Like an enzyme can find one protein in a huge, chaotic mess of other chemicals, just by waiting for it to come along, and “fitting” it when it does, perhaps a measurement method will “rotate” the quantum particle into the “position” it needs to be in to act like the intuitive entity being measured.  Whether this is a physical transformation of some kind, a re-arrangement of tiny, tiny component parts, a rotation through other dimensions, or something even further outside our imaginations, I cannot say.  Nobody can say for sure.  There are theories, like string therory, where other dimensions are actually involved.

The point I’m trying to distill from all this is that, when you’re dealing with the unknown and unobservable, even the most precise predictors are analogies at best.  Whatever you think an electron is, you know that it’s certainly something else, something totally outside the realm of your experience.

So my thinking is that the mysteries of quantum physics are no more paradoxical than what a cylinder in Flatland can do.  Wave/particle duality, in my thinking, is akin to circle/rectangle duality.  A cylinder is neither a circle nor a rectangle, but it can have the properties of either (but not both) at any one time, while visiting Flatland.  It can do that because it is actually something far outside the understanding of any Flatlander.

An electron is neither a particle nor a wave, but it can take the properties of either (but not both) at any time, while manifested in our universe.  It can do that because it is actually something far outside the understanding of any human.  But, as A. Square (the main character in Flatland) eventually attains an understanding of the third dimension, maybe we’ll someday have a better idea what electrons and photons are.  In the meantime, the unknown feels better to me than a paradox.