August 17, 2001

The soundtrack for this entry is Scannerfunk "Wave of Light by Wave of Light" who are a very cool, somewhat experimental Dutch electronica (ambient) band I picked up in Amsterdam. Very Nice.

Today my lower back started to hurt really bad. I've thrown it out in the past. Once when cleaning the litter box. Once when picking up my fat cat. Once when I had the flu and bent down to pick up a piece of paper. Once when I deadlifted the Apple Dumplin' Gang. The whole damn gang. But today, it happened for no good reason at all. At least give me a goddamn reason. Why have you forsaken me, back? Moses and the Hebrites could not escape my back pain. Moses and the Real Number System could not escape my back pain. The Real Number System and Chisumbop could not escape my back pain.

Do you remember, are you old enough to remember Chisumbop? Or however it's spelled. It was a method of calculation using your fingers. You could move your fingers in a certain pattern and find out the result of 7 times 9. Or 12 time 5. Or even 1 times 1. As long as you knew the patterns. Chisumbop is the Dodo of math education. I wonder why they never made a Broadway show about Chisumbop? There is an inherent drama in the multiplication of numbers with your fingers. Will 7 times 2 really turn out to be 14? What if, this time, it turns out to be something else?

I read an incredibly interesting news article recently. It said that according to a recent astronomical experiment it appears that certain constants of physics such as the speed of light of Planck's Constant may actually vary with the age of the Universe. This could be caused by the expansion of the Universe. This discovery would cause the need to revise many known "laws" of physics. Scientists won't be able to confirm (or find inaccurate) these results for a couple years, but the experiment (involving tests of light from Quasars billions of light years away) seemed fairly conclusive. Boy, if you can't count on the speed of light, what can you count on?