I’m sorry to report that Pluto died this evening of sudden illness. He lived to the ripe old age of 10 hours and 30 minutes (life expectancy for an everage norn being anywhere from 10 to 15 hours), having spent most of his adult life in the Grendel Tree with his friends John, Frank, and Quasar. His ladyfriend Nebula died some time ago. Seeing as how norns are quite promiscuous, kisspopping anything in sight, it’s hard to tell exactly how many kids he will have, but I’ll know for sure once the eggs hatch.

I’ve been in favour of Pluto’s demotion from a planet to something inferior for some time, but lest people say I have no sentimentality about it, I’d just like to let it be known that I’ve named a newborn baby norn in recognition of the forgotten planet. Pluto, a 10th generation norn, was born this evening at 11:05 to parents Olga and Rick, in the world of Albia. He is a mixed breed, having the hair of a Devil or Horse norn and the body of the more common Brown Mouse. He likes to read Encyclopaedia Nornica and has currently taken residence in the treehouse with Volume Two, although I hope he’ll get out more and meet some ladies to make sure his rare Devil genes continue on in the gene pool.

What else am I supposed to do on my week off?

I hate these days, these Sunday afternoons between finishing a major project and starting a new one. Days between my membership at the Aquatic Center and another at the McGill athletics center. Days between one life and another.

My penchant for obscure melancholy tunes about unfulfilled dreams, saying goodbye, and lost love is bringing me down lately. Not that I have any particular unfulfilled dreams, people to say goodbye to, or lost loves to dwell on, mind you. They’re just nice songs to listen to.

Let me sing you a waltz
Out of nowhere, out of my thoughts

It’s times like these when I least know what to do with myself, for now or for ever. What do I have to do in the next week? Burn some files to DVD, and do some webpage design for my dad. Read some books. Mentally prepare myself for string theory and moral philosophy, if indeed I can finally decide whether I’m taking those courses or not.

I’m very much a homebody at times. I just like to stay at home and watch a movie. The last episode of Fraggle Rock, perhaps. Something sad and happy and quiet and melodic with which to fall asleep. Wouldn’t it be nice.

Sometimes I think that I’m still in Montreal… and then I actually see just how bustling our Peel Street is in comparison. And yes, this is part of downtown Saint John.

A moth is not a butterfly
And I know why, I know why
It kind of makes you want to cry
That a moth is not a butterfly

CBC Radio’s Shift has a nice little habit of playing music that fits with the discussion of the moment. Hawskley Workman’s tune “A Moth is not a Butterfly” was up today. The moth today is Pluto, and the butterflies are the other eight planets. Correction — the only eight planets.

The International Astronomical Union has finally set down in writing what the definition of “planet” is and Pluto doesn’t make the cut. The general public opinion on the matter seems to be, “Aww”. Everybody loves the underdog.

The problem was that there are other objects in the solar system which are bigger than Pluto, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that there will be dozens more in years to come. Astronomers had a decision to make — either make all these new objects planets, or else bite the bullet and demote Pluto.

The little guy still gets to be called a dwarf planet, along with the (former) asteroid Ceres and its neighbour in our solar system’s Great White North, UB₃₁₃ (aka Xena). There are dozen or so more candidate dwarfs on the list — Sedna and Quaoar among them.

So although everybody seems to love Pluto and wanted to see him stay among the planets, he’s got a lot of company out there near the Kuiper Belt. (That’s why he can’t be a planet anymore — planets are, by definition, loners, unlike the asteroids and the snowballs beyond Neptune.) You can all still cheer for him as the poster-boy for those ancient icy trans-Neptunian objects.

As an off topic side note, the lyrics of “A Moth is Not a Butterfly” seem awfully hard to come by on the web, so here they are, transcribed by me, in their entirety. Apologies for any mistakes.

A moth is not a butterfly
And I know why, I know why
It kind of makes you want to cry
That a moth is not a butterfly
But some are happy in the bluest sky
And others search in the dark of night
And sadness is a silent right
A moth is not a butterfly

A stone is not a grain of sand
It’s hard I guess to understand
Both broken parts scatter the land
A stone is not a grain of sand
And one has lived for longer still
The other longs to break until
The wind can lift it in its hand
A stone is not a grain of sand

A desert’s not a mountain side
And I know why, I know why
Cause one is vast and one divides
A desert’s not a mountain side
Cause one has need for open space
The other’s simply in its place
It must be known far and wide
That a desert’s not a mountainside

A moth is not a butterfly
And I know why, I know why
It kind of makes you want to cry
That a moth is not a butterfly

“Beer”

“Beer”

“Beer”

“um… water for me, thanks.”

It’s bad enough that I’m as socially awkward as I am. Not drinking just makes it more obvious.

It’s difficult to put into words how much I abhor alcohol. I can understand it on a small level — a drink at a wine and cheese, or a glass of champagne to celebrate something — where I will generally at least hold a glass and pretend to sip it. Still I wonder what’s so great about this vile tasting stuff when some tea would do just as nicely.

Meghan called me an old man yesterday because I ordered Earl Grey at the Route One.

Once I said to somebody that I just didn’t like the taste, to which he replied, “Buddy, it ain’t about the taste.” Well, more accurately “budddaaaae, i’ ainnn aboo the taast”, through glazed over eyes while tripping over a chair. At least that was my impression.

Considering anything with alcohol immediately costs twice as much as any other drink you care to name, tastes infinitely worse, and does nothing but embarrass people when it does anything at all, why would I want to drink it?

In the interest of full disclosure, there was one bottle of champagne a certain somebody and I shared that has the distinction of being the only alcoholic drink I have ever had that was, actually, not bad. I maintain that it was a complete fluke.

The reason I bring all this up is that there is a particular person running in the current provincial election who I once had to drive home, drunk off their ass, from a neighbour’s party. My mom claims that having the sense to ask for a lift should give them some points, but to me the impression is bad enough that I just don’t think I can bring myself to vote for them. Harsh, maybe, but such is the nature of my discontent.

In every wood, in every spring
There is a different green

from “I Sit Beside the Fire” by JRR Tolkien

I’m always reminded of the above whenever anybody irritates me by saying “If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all,” but today I’m reminded of it for a different reason.

Charley mentioned to me a while back that some cultures don’t differentiate between green and yellow, instead calling them different shades of the same colour. I realised that we do it in English too. Most of the time the only people differentiating between mauve and puce — both weird purplish colours — are paint companies. (Did anybody else know that all sorts of colour names have specific numerical definitions, at least according to wikipedia? Puce is #CC8899.) This begs the question, how many colours are there?

The first obvious problem is that you have to define what a colour is. Ask a web designer and they’ll say about 16 million, while a kindergartener might name a dozen. Someone who thinks they’re very clever might say there’s only three primary colours. I can’t help but suspect that the three fundamental colours are biological. We have three types of cones that detect light in our eyes, but some animals have 4 or 5, effectively giving them 4 or 5 primary colours. Birds, for example, have a cone which can see ultraviolet light.

Further complicating things is that there’s no way to see what colours another person is seeing. While two people may say a ball is red, the mental image one person assigns to that particular combination of light that makes “red” might actually be “green” to the other person. Somewhere in our brains there’s a translation between input from our retinas and a mental image of a colour, and there’s no reason to think everybody has the same translation, even though the English word attached might be the same.

Now this point about colour being arbitrary is often used as an example to support some idea that reality is subjective — I think that was Charley’s original point in bringing this up. However, colour is special in that there is no second sense to confirm what we see. Two people see a ball, and since both can touch it and confirm it’s there, they know that they both see the same ball, but there’s no way to compare mental pictures.

The strangest artefact of this conversion of wavelengths or energies into a mental image is the twisting of a linear scale into a circular one. Why should the end of the spectrum wrap back onto the other end? Red goes to orange goes to yellow goes to green goes to blue goes to purple goes to red. This I can’t find a biological explanation for, but if anybody knows I’d like to hear.

Granted, the underlying physics of light is quantum so there is a specific number of energies of light that a person’s eye can see, but human perception muddies it all up. Trying to understand the resultant continuous perception in a discrete kind of way doesn’t seem informative to me, as convenient as it might be. The problem of discretizing continuous variables plagues psychology, philosophy, and all the social sciences. I think we’d get a lot more from these disciplines if we made a habit of conceptualizing them in continuous terms.

The best free visitor counter service around has got to be StatCounter, and this map is the icing on the cake. I may only be able to plot the last 25 or so visitors, which doesn’t even cover a single day, but it’s still fun. The only purpose I can see is to stroke my own ego, but who doesn’t enjoy a good stroke now and then?

The greatest thing about StatCounter is that I don’t have to put a tacky little counter anywhere on my site, nor do I even need to display their logo. Since you don’t see that logo plastered everywhere on the web, I’m sure a lot of people don’t even know they’re out there. I figure I should give them a shameless plug every now and again to make up for it, especially since I haven’t upgraded beyond the free service level.

Now, for those of you concerned about privacy, first of all I say get over it. Any respectable website out there is recording much more than your IP address, which is how the map above is made (yes, IP addresses can be traced to a general location). What do you have to hide anyway? If you don’t agree, and even if you do, you should see my recommended reading for the day: Robert Sawyer’s article “Privacy, Who Needs It?“. It’s one of my two favourite articles of all time, and has a permanent place in my browser bookmarks.

Sometimes Amazon.com does a good job at making recommendations for me, but other times… well I just don’t know how they come up with this stuff.

I think I just don’t buy things from them often enough, and so when I finally do they latch onto any random thing that falls in a similar category — television comedy, in this case — and play it up hoping I’ll bite.

I also have a habit of getting sidetracked. I’ll go in looking for the new Robert Sawyer book and end up at cheap rugs by way of the chocolate truffles. Amazon is just too big for my own good.

I get the impression that when people mow their lawns, they start at one end and go along in straight lines, back and forth. It occured to me last Friday that I go about it in a completely different way.

I want to know what I’m up against, so I start off with a big wide line around the edge, scoping out where the trees lie, what branches are lying around, and where the bugs are hiding. Then I circle around, moving my way inward. In this way I imagine I’ve got all the bugs and spiders and whatnot surrounded, painting them into a corner, as it were, with deadly whirling blades.

Mowing the lawn is like a battle with me. On Friday, the spiders got me twice right in the face, which I think is unavoidable when you have a lot of trees on your property. There were at least three others but I managed to get around them, using a stealthy move of pushing the mower forward under their web with one arm and pulling it back again, then walking around the tree to do the other side.

Ant hills require a similar strategy of standing well back and pushing the mower on top of them, then pulling it off and watching as they all go running for their lives. We have very big ant hills in our yard.

So now my lawn is split up into sections of concentric circles, with little areas of small back-and-forth motions as evidence of my battles with nature. Luckily a large part of our yard isn’t even grass anymore so I can get away with cutting a few corners. I’m going to start advocating the replacement of grass with one of either the clover that covers the north, or the moss in the southwest. There’s a patch of tiny little plant in the southeast corner that looks like miniature evergreen trees, but that probably wouldn’t be as nice to step in with bare feet.