Channel Mike

More driving, today. We got up around 7 rather than 6, which was nice, but we still had to drag kids to breakfast. Audrey and Emma both love the waffles many hotels allow you to make. They were happy with that. Jak did not want anything to do with going down to breakfast, but after I required it, he ate three muffin sandwiches. Jak took over driving duties and drove us out of Oklahoma City.

We left home shortly after 6:00am, Audrey and Emma still in nightclothes. By 7:00, Emma had become carsick and thrown up on the side of the road. By 9:00, Audrey had thrown up her Ritz bits into a grocery bag. The outlook was pretty grim for driving 20 hours in two days. Luckily, that was the end of the sickness. Everyone was fine after that. We traversed the Mississippi delta 5 miles on one road, 10 miles on another, 5 on another, etc. until we crossed the Mississippi River near Greenville. Then the rain came. It was pouring as hard as I have ever seen rain pour.

We got up, packed up, and left the Gaia resort to visit Lassen. Before going anywhere, we had to visit the local Redding Wal-Mart for snacks and water and ice and things. We gassed up the car. Eventually we were heading east into the mountains. As we rose in elevation, we went from Utah-style scrub brush into thicker and thicker trees. We had to wait for a construction crew building some new huge road near the park, then got to the northern boundary after about an hour on the road.

Today was basically another travel day, but gave us more time and less distance so we were able to explore and have a little fun.

As we left our hotel, we swung by a local South San Francisco yacht club just to see the boats and the sights. There was a Miata owners club barbecue going on. The kids thought it was funny to see all the same model cars all parked in a row. The sight of the masts all reaching into the air with the San Francisco Bay in the background was nice.

It's better than it used to be traveling with kids. It still gets pretty miserable by evening, though. We left Jackson at 2:00pm CDT, spent a couple of hours in Dallas, then flew from Dallas to San Francisco from 5:30pm CDT to 7:00pm PDT. It's now 10:30, past midnight for the kids' internal clocks, and they've been ready to crash (though they wouldn't admit it verbally) for several hours, now.

We're staying in the Radisson near the airport. It's nice, seems comfortable. The indoor pool's open 'til 11.

Douglas Hofstadter wrote a book a few years ago entitled, "I Am a Strange Loop." I've been reading and enjoying it. He suggests that consciousness is a strange loop existing a level up from the physical reality of the brain. I'm wondering, however, if strange loops, as a mathematical construct, can explain everything in the universe that we have troubled ourselves over with beginnings and ends and finity. What would it mean to physics if all of our experience was exhaust from an underlying strange loop. Could we use the signature of the exhaust to explore the underlying reality?

In the spirit of helping Google save those searching for help with cancer, I'm linking to the following blog entries that explain in more detail how Andreas Moritz is a quack. He's also probably an outright liar and exploiter; if not a liar, a well-meaning fool. Perhaps this is the difference between murder and manslaughter.

See more at:
Andreas Moritz at Respectful Insolence
Andreas Moritz at Pharyngula.

Post your own links to support truth and to prevent victims of cancer from being victims of Andreas Moritz.

I had a thought the other day that struck me as containing a lot of depth and wisdom. I've had the same thought many times before, and I'm certain that many others have had it before I have, but perhaps it struck me in a different context this time around.

Imagine winning a billion dollar lottery today and retiring tomorrow. Where would you live? What would you do with your time? Can you live there now? Can you be doing that now?

Several months ago, I was spending a lot of time taking practice tests for the MCAT. When I took tests online, all was good. But when I was going through tests in books, things slowed down. I'm now studying for the GRE and finding that I spend half my time logging my answers to paper and marking down times so I know how long each question is taking me. I decided to spend a day building a simple little app that will log the times and answers for me. I call it Test Timer. It doesn't have the functionality to be a commercial application, but as a simple little utility, it does a fantastic job.