I'm still reeling from that Matisyahu concert last weekend. It was definitely the best show I've been to in a long time, and I've been listening to Live at Stubb's over and over again at work. Definitely can't wait for Youth to come out. Also, the opening act, Trevor Hall was pretty tight. I bought the CD on a whim after deciding I liked the guy's sound, and it was definitely worth it. Listened to it at least twice yesterday.
I convinced my boss to order a bunch of nerf guns for the office right before we moved and a delivery came today, so I was pretty hyped, thinking they had arrived. Instead, it was just a bunch of wooden blocks that he got for all of my coworkers who have children. Man was I pissed--I wanted toys for me, not toys for real kids. Oh well.
Lorenz attractors are pretty damn cool. The idea of chaos being the dominant force in a system, but the system nonetheless maintaining a high degree of order always impressed me, and I've been thinking about it a lot more lately. The weird thing about self-organizing systems, though, is that the systemic order is always contingent on the right conditions to create the attractors. Small changes in the rules or environment will lead to either uninteresting patterns of completely predictable order(i.e. boring stability, like a checkerboard), or the outright chaos of background noise or brownian motion. Of course there's always the possibility that changes could lead to a new, different set of attractors and an equally unique self-organizing system, and I think that when we talk about creating an evolution in social consciousness or the international politicial landscape, that's the sort of change that people usually want to create. But by their very nature these systems are unpredictable--I find myself... not exactly worrying... but at a sort of low level of constant anxiety over the future of civilization. I know it's kind of a huge thing to be concerned with, and furthermore so abstract as to be almost meaningless, but I guess when you read the news as much as I do that's what you end up thinking about a lot of the time. What's gonna happen as the focus of power shifts away from the US, the world's long-dominant superpower? How are environmental degradation and overpopulation going to affect policies and economics? Will new technology step in to counteract all the negative effects of previous technologies? What the fuck are we gonna do if Iran gets nukes? Lots of of questions, no answers...I guess we'll just have to wait and see if we get another self-organizing chaotic and beatiful attractor, pure chaos and anarchy as extremism prevails and it's polarizing effects spread unchecked, or the 'boring stability' of total annihilation.
Damn I wish I wasn't such a downer.
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