Tuesday - Hurricane Ida crushed Louisiana and loser Trump was upset. A few photos of things I see

 I wish Donald Trump would just go away. It's always about him and never about us, the people of this country. A headline taken from TheHill.com, a slightly right of center website covering politics read, "Trump complains about media coverage of Hurricane Ida."

The article goes on to report on an interview this hyper-egotist, this vain LOSER and liar gave to a very Conservative radio station on Saturday night, just hours before a category 5 hurricane was going to slam into the Louisiana coast. The former asshole-in-chief, yes, that idiot and LOSER donald trump of the small hands, was upset because the news didn't go on about his ultimately failed negotiations with the Taliban, which legitimatized them and undercut the Allies efforts to leave something stable behind. He said, and I quote theHill.com quoting the LOSER trump, "'The level of stupidity — and we had a great agreement,' Trump said, referring to the 2020 deal his administration made with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops by May 1."

Yes, the withdrawal was a messed up operation, but the three presidents before Biden built this mess up to an irredeemable point. 

My point is that Donald stupid lying egotistical, pathologically vain Trump was upset because the weather was more important than him.

The regularity of my bowel movements is more important than him.

I deliberately chose theHill.com's coverage because they aren't a liberal site.

Enough.

A few photos of things I see.

Saturday - No politics, no science - tourists drifting back to NYC

No musings tonight on the nature of the universe, of whether scientific theories or mathematical proofs are invented or discovered, and no politics except to say don't be a fool, your liberty is not at stake when you act like a citizen: get vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus.

Thursday - Random photos vs. quantum probability

 I spend a lot of time thinking about quantum mechanics - sort of obvious if you've been reading my blog entries the past few months. One of the questions I've been pondering is about the quanta of the macroscopic world. Nothing so deep as quantum gravity - that's a problem I haven't been wrestling with - but more along the lines of myself as a quantum and how I exhibit some of the same phenomena in my daily life that should not be impactful even if all the phenomena described by quantum mechanics do happen at the human scale.

The physicists I've been listening to - Dr. Brian Greene, Dr. Erica Carlsen, Dr. Sean Carroll, Dr. Leonard Susskind, and more, caution me to be aware that at the scale where I can detect phenomena without the aid of very sensitive instruments, there is too much going on to solve the problems, that the phenomena I might want to solve for is too - and I hesitate to use this word - entangled with too many other things going on, to be able to distinguish the answers.

And yet, as I mentioned not too long ago, I can seem to someone who wants to know where I am or where I am going and about when I might get there, in a sort of superposition. I am told that the quantum wave function is real yet describes where a particle might be found when I look for it, and that the particle does not know where it is or where it will be found until it is observed.

I won't ascribe consciousness to a particle. An electron, a quark, a photon can't know where it is because as solitary particle its properties have been measured and quantized. Yet the question of what the outside world saw of me when I was alone, in my car, without any tracking devices, essentially unmeasured and undetected until I arrived at my destination, remains with me.

From inside that car, knowing where I was and where I was going, I'm pretty sure I wasn't in superposition.

Tuesday - The storm's passed, back to the city tomorrow

 We were lucky where I live. Hurricane Henri didn't come this way. Hardly any wind, little damage but a lot of rain, and I mean a lot of rain. It went on into the early afternoon. From what I heard, NYC had a record rainfall.

Meanwhile, parts of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts got hit hard. 

Hurricanes are not gentle things. They are fierce, dangerous and overwhelming. You can't stop a hurricane by spitting in the wind.

Saturday - Waiting on the weather

As I sit here writing, Hurricane Henri is a category 1 storm moving in a northerly direction, about 335 miles south of Montauk Point at the eastern end of Long Island. With hurricanes, nothing is certain until it's gone past and even then, some have turned and hit places that thought they were out of harms way.I am about 10 miles north of Long Island Sound, which is far enough to not worry about a storm surge but not far enough to not be affected if the storm comes this way. I lived through Hurricane Sandy which clobbered New Jersey, New York and Connecticut and from which some infrastructure is still under repair. I was in NYC the day before the storm and I noted that the litter baskets not secured had been removed, shops taped their windows to prevent flying glass, and everyone was hunkered down, as well they should've been. The storm brought down enough trees where I live to isolate us for a few days and then to leave us without power for 10 days, and we were lucky. No serious property damage, nobody hurt and not having running water was probably the biggest inconvenience.

I remember Hurricane Belle in the summer of 1976. It was aimed directly at the New York Metro area and came ashore on Fire Island, a barrier island with lots of summer communities about 60 miles east of New York City, and cause serious damage there. Manhattan, where I was living then, was blasted by the western edges of the storm, and it was still seriously intense. I put on an army surplus poncho/shelter half that I used in very wet weather and went for a walk. I lived on the Upper West Side and I started my walk along Riverside Drive, thinking I'd see some interesting things across the Hudson. What I remember was the wind was strong enough to drive water through every opening in the poncho, that walking into the wind was impossible, that I was soaking wet within minutes of entering the storm, and that parked cars were shaking up and down and trees were groaning and shaking violently, shedding leaves and small branches that were hurtling through the air, larger branches crashing down on top of parked cars and blowing into the middle of Riverside Drive. 

I think I walked two blocks. I realized that I was being stupid and putting my life at risk. The wind lashed debris in my face,  my clothes were so soaked under my poncho and the poncho too much like a sail, that I sheltered in the entryway of an apartment building, took it off and folded it up as compactly as it would go. I could not stay where I was because debris was flying all around me, windows were crashing out of their panes above me, and all of this not even close to the center of the storm! Out on Long Island the winds were stronger than 100 miles per hour and it would've been horrific to be in them. Where I was, on the west side of Manhattan, I don't know what they measured but they felt stronger than the winds felt when I'd stick my hand out the window of a car traveling more than 60 mph.

Global climate change is affecting the strength and number of ocean born storms every year. I'm a lot older now than that brash young man in 1976, and where I live the danger of falling trees is far greater - there are many more trees and they are much larger - so I won't go out in the storm. But afterwards I marvel at the how strong nature is and how puny we are in comparison.

Thursday - Not knowing what to write I write about history and Afghanistan. More Beacon photos.

Sometimes I don't know what to write and I don't know what I will write, but write I will. Today I've been thinking about history and how ignorant of it most of us are. At best we have a superficial smattering left over from high school and perhaps university. If only the latter, more than likely what was learned was mostly forgotten and that would be for the best since pre-college history is less about understanding how we got to where we are and more a matter of making us proud of who we are. Teaching civics is well and good but calling it history is malpractice and leads to disputes  such as the one going on now regarding how and whether to teach the history of racism in the United States.

More current is how we are absorbing here, in the USA the sudden fall of Afghanistan. The the recriminations come from the same people who wanted us in then out of Afghanistan. 20 years ago we sought to punish the Taliban without every trying to understand who the enemy was, how our enemy fought and how their military was inspired by the same intensity of faith that drove them to never give up despite being chased from power. Don't blame George Biden alone, blame George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump for never trying to take the measure of the enemy. Blame Ronald Reagan for supporting anti-Communist terrorism around the world, and blame George H. Bush and Bill Clinton for continuing these failed policies. Supporting terrorism in a war against terrorism only generates new terrorists and more terrorism.

And if there was a failure of intelligence, it goes back to our support for the Anti-Soviet Islamic Mujahideen beginning in the early 1980s. We armed them but never really got to know who they were and what their supplanting the Soviet backed regime in Kabul would lead to.

I don't know if it's apt to quote George Santyana here, but he famously said,“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Considering I didn't know what to write, I ended up writing more than a little.

Here's a few more photos from last Saturday's stroll along Main Street, Beacon NY. 

The firefighters in the first pair were on duty, alert and ready to roll. Luckily, there were no fires in Beacon that evening.

The next one is shot from across the street from the Hudson Valley Food Court. The banner is for Shmuck's Sweet Stuff. What I wonder is whether that's the owner's name or did the proprietor not know how to spell schmuck?

We got our sweets further east on Main St. at Gourmetibles where the proprietor was mixing Sunday's fudge. Would've been even cooler if she was mixing Sunday's sundaes. Sadly, no website so I've linked their facebook page. As you might know, I am off facebook for many reasons. The ice cream was excellent.

On the east side of Fishkill Creek - or should that be FishCreek Kill or Fishcreek creek or Fishkill Kill - near the waterfall, there was an event going on. Probably a wedding from what I could tell.

And the man with the flip phone(!) was selling a variety of interesting used goods outside the former Matteawan Train Station but though there are tracks there are no trains. 

And last, lots of fossils from an ancient sea bed embedded in matrix with some sort of protective, clear  coating. If anyone can tell me more about it, post a comment.

Permalink: https://kayester.blogspot.com/2021/08/thursday-not-knowing-what-to-write-i.html

Tuesday - more thoughts on the fall of Afghanistan / Stopping at the Clutter Gallery in Beacon, NY

Was there ever a chance that an Afghan government supported by outsiders, NATO this time, would survive the departure of the outsiders? Was there any sense to using military methods to replace an unwanted government deemed undesirable? My initial thought was that all these invaders of Afghanistan, going back through all of history, were like Sisyphus and the stone, when it rolled back down, rolled right over them.

I am concerned for the fate of those Afghans who tried to change the way Afghanistan is ruled and the way it deals with the world, will suffer retribution from the Taliban for not being Islamist enough, for collaborating with the enemy, and just because they are in the wrong place or look the wrong way. The Taliban leadership is speaking with a conciliatory tone and I wonder whether it is a change after 20 years out of power or a ruse to get people calm and ready to accept their leadership before dropping a weight of dictatorial fiat rule and theocratic jurisprudence on a docile population.

I suspect conciliation is a short-term policy and theocracy the ultimate goal, but short of another invasion, which is highly unlikely, we will have to wait it out and see what direction the Taliban takes.

The failure of nation-building was predictable if not inevitable. Under three Presidents, Bush 2, Obama and Trump, we saw the situation remain unstable, the Taliban determined to not surrender, and no resolution in sight. Once Trump decided to cut the cord last year by making a deal with the Taliban that we could not enforce, the stone began rolling down hill.

That the world and the people of Afghanistan have to wait to see what the Taliban will do is nerve wracking, especially for the Afghans.

Could NATO have done more? I think more would've depended on significant resistance to the Taliban from within Afghanistan, as the Taliban presented significant resistance to NATO and the NATO backed government, and it just wasn't there. Perhaps in the future, but not now.

I'll quote from Pirkei Avot, the Sayings of the Fathers, an ancient Jewish text. Rabbi Hillel is reported to have said, "If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self [only], what am I? And if not now, when?"

This seems apt right now.

Monday - The Republicans lie about the fall of Kabul and A Dinner at the Yankee Clipper Diner in Beacon, NY

 Kabul fell to the Taliban and what was before we invaded is once again the state. 

Here's the headline from the BBC News website, dated 2/29/2020:

Afghan conflict: Trump hails deal with Taliban to end 18-year war

Published 29 February 2020

President Trump says it is "time to bring our people back home" after the US signed a deal with the Taliban aimed at bringing peace to Afghanistan.

Mr Trump said 5,000 US troops would leave Afghanistan by May and he would meet Taliban leaders in the near future, without specifying where.

The US and Nato allies have agreed to withdraw all troops within 14 months if the militants uphold the historic deal.

Friday - Trump is still a LOSER and my hummingbirds don't get much love.

I read that 2/3 of Republicans still have their foolish belief that Ding-dong Donald The Loser Trump really won the election last November. Well, these folks make P.T. Barnum a rosy optimist. He supposedly said, "There's a sucker born every minute." Anybody who believes The Loser Trump, a liar of truly epic proportions - probably the only thing epic about him is his incredible mendacity - is playing the fool, and possibly dangerously so.  And then there are those who meant to donate to the Lying Loser Trump once, but found themselves locked into paying monthly. Well, as it says in Proverbs - and I'll quote the King James Version of the Bible for all those Christians out there who claim to lead sanctified lives but don't, "There is treasure to be desired and oil in the dwelling of the wise; but a foolish man spendeth it up." In plain English, "A fool and his [or her] money is soon parted."

Well, today is Friday, August 13 and according to the false prophets of Trump the loser and liar, by now he is supposed to be reinstated as President, yet he remains a loser, a liar, a thief and a former President of the United States. For him, we can only hope he gets locked up.

My hummingbirds don't get much love. I admit I'm not a good bird photographer but I figured there'd be at least a little interest in my catching a few shots of them feeding at a feeder and in a flower, as well as on the wing. It turns out that I get about 1/3 fewer views that I do of stuff or people. 

So it goes. I'll keep practicing taking photos of them in my backyard, and maybe I'll get better at it.

I was back in Manhattan yesterday. It was the first time in a couple of weeks. It was a very hot day but that didn't keep everyone indoors, enjoying the comfort of air conditioning. It was nice to see people mostly wearing masks indoors, and when in close contact with others outside. NYC is somehow saner than some other places in the country.

The JPMorgan Chase building is rising and it's a favorite photo topic for me as well as passer-byes. I saw this woman taking shots of it with he phone on Madison Ave., and I mentioned to her how popular a subject it is, and that she should've been around to see its predecessor coming down. 

Her name, I believe, is Abby, she's visiting from Arizona and enjoying the city.

A shot of her taking a pic, checking it out, posing for me and moving along, along with the construction site from a different direction.

This was one of those perfect NYC moments, a little story unto itself.

I love being in Manhattan with my camera.

Permalink:

https://kayester.blogspot.com/2021/08/friday-trump-is-still-loser-and-my.html

Tuesday - Hummingbirds in my yard

There are two hummingbird feeders and a lot of flowers blooming and these attract the little self-propelled darts to our backyard.

I don't know a lot about birds, but I do know there are two types of hummingbirds normally seen in this area, the ruby throated and the rufous hummingbird. I am pretty sure both have visited. The past few days I've taken some time in the backyard with my camera handy and got a few shots. They aren't very good as far as bird photography goes, but I'm not a bird photographer or even a nature photographer, neither by practice nor by inclination, so I will settle for what I get.

I think these are mostly females since they aren't very colorful, but I also think it's very cool that I've been able to capture them at all. The move quickly, changing directions and elevation faster than I can snap a photo. Yet it is those activities, and the amazing dance that two will perform, that makes them so much fun to watch. 

There are three sets of photos. In the first group there is  a hummingbird flitting among the flowers.

In the other two sets a hummingbird is visiting each of the feeders.

I don't know what sort of hummingbird this is.

Permalink: https://kayester.blogspot.com/2021/08/monday-hummingbirds-in-my-yard.html

Sunday - Some people say, "just saying." I say, "just thinking."

 I've been told that I see things other people don't. I'm not talking about ghosts or ghouls, things not of this world. I'm talking about the mundane things people just walk past. I don't know why someone walking about with me doesn't see them until I stop to comment or to photograph whatever it is that's caught my eye. You would have to ask them. All I know, I keep looking. A friend of mine once said of me that, "I would notice if the light's in an elevator were changed."

Of course there's plenty I don't see. When I am driving I try to be aware of what's going on around me, within the limits of keeping my eyes on the road. I often miss the deer on the side of the road, for instance. Walking through the city, looking at people, the facades of buildings, the cracks on the sidewalk, I am sure there are many things I simply don't see, and being alone, without anyone to call attention to them, I never know what I missed.

So what do I see? These photos are a few examples. They were shot around Easton PA in July 2021 but Easton isn't the reason, only a location. I could have easily seen the same things or very similar in any urban setting, large or small.

Working on these photos is a welcome distraction from studying aspects of quantum physics. This week I finished watching the first season of the Disney/Marvel Cinematic Universe show, "Loki." I won't get into some of the issues I have suspending disbelief. This show left me feeling some of that but I let myself go to enjoy the fantasy. What struck me was the way some of what was central to the plot is the theme of many worlds. I've been struck by the way some very reputable quantum theorists have come to embrace the many worlds as a solution to what happens in quantum physics. What happens in "Loki" isn't the same, but there are parallels, strong ones, especially with the Time Variance Authority's struggle to "prune" variant timelines. If the many worlds hypothesis is valid, the TVA struggles uselessly but I was amused nonetheless.

There are some excellent discussions and short lectures on the many worlds hypothesis. If valid, I can't know since I write this in the one that I live in.

These photos are of this world. Some are mundane, some odd, but all are things I saw and stopped to take the photo.

Permalink: https://kayester.blogspot.com/2021/08/sunday-some-people-say-just-saying-i.html

Thursday - Not Yet Ready for Prime Time

Appropriate to the previous post, in which I do not have a mobile phone of any sort, here is a very short story I wrote a couple of years ago. It was published in Public Illumination Magazine no. 63  - Devices, under the title:

Gregor

One morning Gregor awoke to discover his hand had become a smart phone. It was his left hand, which was good because he was right handed. And it was a rather generic Android, which was also good because Gregor despised the cult of Apple.

He stared at the screen and without thought, tapped gently on an icon where once was the ball of his hand. The screen flashed and the app spread across it. How wonderful, he thought, and for a moment, Gregor was filled with a serene glow. He would never have to worry about misplacing the phone, or dropping it, ever again. He was in love with his phone, a deeply passionate love though he never thought of his relationship to the device in quite those words and now, he felt, for the first time, it loved him too.

“How will you charge it,” Mendel asked him when Gregor showed off his hand. “And is it waterproof?”

“I don’t know. I think it doesn’t need to be charged and well, I hope it’s waterproof. Let’s find out.”

He filled the kitchen sink and rolled up his sleeve.

“Wait,” Mendel shouted. 

Too late. Gregor plunged his hand into the water. 

“What hath god wrought!” he shouted.

His hair, previously brown, suddenly white, stood on end, his eyes bulged out, a smell of ozone and burning flesh suddenly filled the room. Gregor collapsed to the floor, his arms and legs twitching, his tongue hanging out. Smoke seemed to come out of his ears. 

Before Mendel recovered from the shock of witnessing his friend’s collapse, Gregor lie still. He was gone. 

The hand-phone, it seemed, was not yet ready for prime-time.

End of story.

I told you it was very short.

Also appropriate to the previous post, though for a different reason, are some photos of people taken in and around the International Fusionism Museum (IF Museum) in Easton PA. These were all taken at the opening of Michael Zwicky's installation on July 30, 2021.

Permalink: https://kayester.blogspot.com/2021/08/thursday-not-yet-ready-for-prime-time.html

An odd thought on superposition

 I've been spending too much time thinking and not enough time writing, not enough time choosing and prepping photos for my blog.

It's a shame because some of my thoughts might make good writing and many of my photos are worth posting.

A few weeks ago I was hanging some of my photos at the IF Museum in Easton, PA when the museum's founder, Shalom Neuman asked me to pick up at the bus station two poets, Ron Kolm and Sparrow who would be reading that evening at an opening along with other NYC based and Lehigh Valley based writers.

I drove to the bus station but Sparrow and Ron weren't there, so I drove back to the IF Museum where they were just arriving, having decided to walk after all. Ron came over to the car and told me he hadn't heard back from Shalom whether I was coming, and he tried to call me but wasn't sure which number was the right one. He'd forgotten that I'd  liberated myself and given up carrying a mobile phone.

At that moment it occurred to me that though I always knew where I was, to Ron and Sparrow, and anyone else, I could've been anywhere. In a manner of thinking, I was in superposition until observed by someone looking for me. I wonder, does the particle know where it is, where it is going and what its momentum is, even if an outside observer can only know the wave form or cloud of possibilities until he/she/they look for it?

A few photos from around the IF Museum that afternoon and evening during the opening event.

Permalink: https://kayester.blogspot.com/2021/08/an-odd-thought-on-superposition.html