Sic Semper Tyrannis

The Great Ice Storm of 2007

Like most of my readers I spent the entirety of last weekend couped up in my house due to the Great Ice Storm of 2007. (Strangely, here in Oklahoma City we didn’t get much ice, more sleet and snow. Guess I can safely return my generator to the Home Depot. Damn you, weathermen.)

I don’t know what I was thinking watching two sad movies while bored out of my gourd—Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Moulin Rouge. I also watched disc 1 of King Crimson’s Eyes Wide Open-a live concert from 2003, awesomely mixed in 5.1.

In addition to all of the boob tube watching I also read an interesting little book loaned by Lance-Flatland by Edwin A Abbott. This is a book written around the 1800s-early 1900s, all about perception. The premise is a guy who lives in a two-dimensional world, somehow visits a world of three dimensions, and returns unable to convince his fellow 2D inhabitants of a larger reality. There is much food for thought contained in this book. This brings to mind a lot of “what ifs.” What if we are like the folks who live in flatland, unable to even perceive a larger reality? What if there are actually five or twenty dimensions and we just don’t know about them?

Usually I loathe questions of epistemology, but this book kept me engaged, thinking about geometrical concepts I haven’t heard since Miss Weaver’s eighth grade math class. Too bad I didn’t know all that was riding on that information back then. I would have paid more attention.

posted by Mike @ 10:43 AM