Friday, April 17, 2009

Photos from my trip

If you want to see photos from my trip, you can follow this link to Anitas photo stream.


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Monday, April 13, 2009

My Travels

A few weeks ago I flew to visit my friend Anita, who spent over a year living, and working as an english editor in Taipei. I loved biking around and exploring Taipei. A bustling city of winding crowded alley ways, and high rise buildings with balchonies tangled with plants. the streets are completly green, but the buildings unpolished and showing their various ages. the roads are filled with not just cars but scooters and bikes as well.

When Anita finshed her job, we went travelling around Taiwan together. we rented a car and she drove us into the mountains. we went on a 3 day hike to a meteor lake, which was beautiful, excilerating and tiring. We stayed in an Bunan village, one of the aboriginal groups that live in Taiwan. there we met a some folk who were having a big party, including slaughtering two pigs, they invited us over and gave us a lot of alchol. it turns oiut they had lead a bunch of school kids on the same hike we had donw and this was the celebration party. the next day we hiked down a canyon, where we waded through a fast flowing river, and scrambled over rocks till we got to a sulfur hotsprings, completly isolated and magical there, time seemed to disappear on us as we sat in the hot springs. This was an amazing leg of the trip, and because Anita has a reasonable amount of manderin we were able to go to some places that aren't easliy accesses by folk who are not from Taiwan.

Anita has written on the first and second days of our hike in more detail on her blog. and I wouldn't be surprized if she keeps writting about our trip so you should check out her blog to see if she posts the rest of the story.

After that we split up for a few days. I took a ferry to an island of the coast of Taiwan, Lyudao Island, or Green Island. I rented a scooter and found a campsite. and spent the next few days exploring. the island has a bunch of caves, rocky and sandy beaches, wild animals like oxen, dear, and goats, the views were pretty much breath taking across the board. The road around the island is about 18km all the way around so it is not that big, but I really liked exploring.

After that I went back to Taipei. kept exploring that city. I am now in Hong Kong, taking it in for the first time, and will soon be leaving for Beijing. I will write more on my travels soon.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

The Flat Lake Conundrum

A MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE PART 1: THE FLAT LAKE CONUNDRUM


This is the first part in a series of pieces I plan to write, that will combine towards explaining one of my ideas for understanding the universe and hoe it may work. I am going to start this series by writing out some concepts, that I will later weave together:



The Flat Lake Conundrum


Picture a world very much like our own. Brimming with life. Circled by one moon. On one of its continents there is a very large, generally a very still lake. One of the creatures that lives there are something a kin to lake striding insects, they live exclusively on the surface of the lake. They are highly intelligent creatures, at least as intelligent as humans, and with an equally advanced form of civilization. However, despite their intelligence their brains have not evolved to comprehend the idea of three dimensions. In a way it makes sense, they live completely on the flatness of the lake, so why should they evolve to comprehend anything but flat.


They can feel the ripples as pulses of motion. They notice that the lake is light in colour when the sun is up, and dark when the sun is down. The many trees that surround the lake cast shadows, but they perceive the change in colour, and heat, not the object casting the shadow.


By measuring shadows at different times of year they can tell that the brightness of sun does not exist on the surface of the lake but is originating somewhere else. Some say the light of the Sun emanates from beyond the edge of the lake. However, being advanced in philosophy, math and physics, some of these creatures have deduced that there is another dimension. They they theorize that the sun does not exist beyond the shores of the lake but rather on another plane altogether, in a third dimension.


Now here is the important question: As their society continues to advance in questions of cosmology how far can their understanding reach? Can they deduce what eclipses are? Can they figure out that the moon circles the earth and that the earth circles the sun? What about the existence of other planets? Or stars? Could they ever deduce the existence of quasars, black holes, or the big bang?


How far can you go towards understanding the universe if you can only perceive two dimensions? The question helps illustrates a point: If our universe is made up of lets say 4 or 5 or even more spatial dimensions, how close to understanding it can we get if we only perceive three of those dimensions. If our abilities to comprehend the world are limited by this lack of perception, how should it influence the ways we look at and think about the universe?



Tuesday, April 7, 2009