.  :  |  A R C H A I C  |  :  .     ______________
           .  :  |   N E T W O R K S  |   :  .

As a note, here’s the original “lamp base” that I’m finally converting into a lamp:

Here’s how the lamps are coming along so far:

After finishing up more in the office and working on the dishwasher, tonight, the kitties come home!

Well, July’s almost over. It’s been eventful. I am, for those of you not keeping track, of course, back from the Experimental Economics seminar at Bryn Mawr College. That occured Friday the 14th late in the evening (especially after fighting O’Hare traffic). Fortunately, the seminar was quite interesting, and aided me in further developing ideas on what I would like to pursue in the future. Unfortunately, the “extra time” I was hoping to use for teaching myself Calc II simply didn’t exist, and I’ve been subsequently behind on both that and sleep. Of course, packing up everything on the 15th, as the air conditioning in my apartment failed, and moving on the 16th did not help either. My back, too, is still recovering. Due to those and other mitigating factors, my “catching up” on Calc has occured right after it would have been most useful… we’ll see how I do. Then there’s always trying to get the financial situation under control - summers can be rough, especially jobless pre-grad school summers where costs of moving are incurred.

Unfortunately, this means I am also far behind on my reading, and doubtfully will get much more done. I’ve got other projects, too. My beloved home theatre speakers took a turn for the worse when one of the mains fell off the speaker stand during furniture rearrangement and ripped off one of the posts on the terminal, so it’s in the shop while I wait for a replacement part - which includes the post, terminal, and even the crossover, so who knows what it will run me in the end. I miss them already! I also miss a real TV, not that I watch much. The old one was much better as a living room monitor! Luckily, my new TV might be coming in sooner than the August 15th expected restock date. We’ll soon be adding to our household, too… two new kitties! There’s also magnitudes of orders of magnitudes of orders of magnitudes of things to do around the new apartment, both project-wise and organizationally - I have to throw SO MUCH out if I’m ever to move again. There’s the corrent stand/audio rack/functional furniture to choose for all the living room gear. There’s the wooden sculpture things that my aunt brought from Thailand to finally make lamps out of that I “borrowed” from my parents years ago. There’s also the dreaded and never-satisfying organization of the bookshelves to perform… I need more bookshelves!

All in all… I’ve been busy. And will remain so for the forseeable future. If I made any money, I’d consider paying to have time-consuming projects performed by other people so I could focus on what I do better, but some of us have no such option!

As for the seminar… I’ve decided one of the things I enjoy is industrial organization. Game theory is fun, too… I’m going to have to pick up the classic text as well as a few others when I get the chance to pursue it further. The game theory analysis I have had proved very useful in attempting to explain and illustrate things for other seminar participants. A few more observations: I was relatively quiet, but nonetheless may have been found out. I was detrimental to my group in the sessions which had the purpose of coming up with questions for the seminar faculty - I was often suggesting potential answers to other’s questions. While in some cases this helps clear up confusion or makes a hazy topic more solid and mature, it does run against the purpose of producing quantities of questions.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Time for more Calc II.

One of the ideas of Nietzsche that I find most problematic is that of “Eternal Recurrence of the Same.” I have no issue with this as a thought experiment, which is, I think, Nietzsche’s intention (rather than the pseudo-Protagorean formulation, “If matter is finite, and time is not, then the combinations of matter are finite and will recurr in time as a necessity” - i.e. that history literally repeats itself). I once wrote about 3-4 pages analysing “Eternal Return” in order to satisfy my own crisis, involving its falsity based upon the concept that part of the “formulation” of matter must itself take into account history - i.e. no “state” can be exactly the same as a previous state, because each state will have a type of “memory” of previous states - inherent in “state” is what has already happened.

Regardless, the ending to Rebecca Goldstein’s Incompleteness startled me. Apparently, Gödel was working upon a theorum that much disturbed Einstein, the one discussed in his seventieth-birthday-commemorative collection of essays, about a cyclical model of time which conformed itself to Einstein’s field equations in general relativity. I’m not quite sure what to make of this. Gödel was always interested in philosophy throughout his life. One wonders if a parallel can be drawn (all jokes about Euclid’s fifth postulate aside). Gödel was a dedicated Platonist, and I would argue that Nietzsche was the greatest commentator on Plato coming from the age previous. While the Vienna circle and Wittgenstein’s analytical tradition which followed completely ignored Nietzsche, and Gödel was active in the Vienna circle, Gödel did not share their metaphysical assumptions.

Perhaps it is not so unlikely. Perhaps, also, Nietzsche wasn’t far off the mark.