surreality

Today I ran down to Madera for a meeting. Now, Madera is not exactly a hop skip and jump from Sacramento, its a 2 1/2 hour drive if you stick to the limit, don't hit a lot of traffic on I-5/CA 99 (you eventually have to cut over from I-5 in the Stockton vicinity or just take 99 all the way, but since 99 isn't Interstate standard you're better off to stick to "The 5" (a Californiacation is to drop the prefix for a road designation and just refer to it by number rather the entire designation - i.e., Interstate 5 becomes "The 5" (as if the road is a living creature, and considering how bad the traffic congestion can be in some parts of California, with all the poor bastards sardined in their cars and gridlock that's probably an appropriate term)) and forego the potty stops (which are usually oddly paired with getting a Giant Cheap Fountain Drink w/Humongous Straw at the convenience store/gas station you hit for the potty stop... liquid out, liquid in, universal equilibrium must be maintained).

The meeting itself wasn't that long, and I won't bore you with the details or the post-meeting details (which was actually longer than the meeting itself), but given that my job entails watching over a tiny portion of the transportation planning process that's a happenin' in the San Joaquin Valley (sans Bakersfield, but that could change at any moment, job assignments are always in a state of Brownian motion), as an escapee from the Rolling Hills of Iowa (its not flat people - drive across Iowa sometime and you'll get it), I find it fascinating (at least when the AQ is good, and it was OK today considering that Summer Got Turned On About A Week Ago) to see the Coastal Ranges on either my right or left (depending on whether I'm going south or north) and the Sierras on either my right or left (north or south). Its weird to think I'm driving down this vast central valley - that is almost as big as my home state (a hair shy of 40K square miles vs. Iowa's almost 60K square miles) and is # 1 in agricultural production and grows all sorts of cool stuff that would never grow outside in Iowa (like avocados and walnuts - California produces most of the planet's walnut supply. Did you know that?) with mountains on either side of it.

(I sure am using a lot of ( ) in this entry).

Now, if I stare straight ahead - its much flatter than Iowa (and most of Kansas, which I have driven through enough of to know that Kansas is flllllaaaaaaatttt) I don't see the mountains and I can almost pretend I'm back home, but when you catch a snow-capped Sierra peak in your peripheral vision, it pops the illusion. Not a bad thing, because seeing snow capped mountain peaks - particularly when we are a third of the way to July and these aren't the tallest peaks in the Sierras - its just way cool.

But it still doesn't seem quite real. Of course, if the cosmologists are correct, according to the math of string theory, everything we see and perceive is actually frighteningly similar to a 3-D hologram - we are part of that hologram, and that hologram is based on a matrix of two-dimensional information that is stored beyond the edge of our universe where we can access it. In other words, the entire 13 billion light year wide universe that we can detect is just one honkin' big simulation being run on a serious network of Linux boxes, possibly begging to be converted to iPads to increase Apple's bottom line. All those obsolete winsh*t boxes aren't very environmentally friendly and ergo design pretty much sucks.

Of course, how can we take ourselves seriously - or *anything* seriously, for that matter, if we are all holograms? Well, I wish being a hologram wasn't so serious, because it really shouldn't hurt all that bad when I drop something heavy on my toes, or, I should be able to will myself into being handsome, rich, and at least as good looking as I think I really am in my mind.

(And I should be able to instantly transform this 13.3 Macbook into a 17, with all of the upgrades for free. Its only fair, if my body is in The Matrix, I want to be rich, and someone important - like an actor).

The string theorists are probably wrong. Every time they Think We've Got It All Figured Out, Woo Boy, something new comes along and smears the dry erase board of cool math equations about 6 people in the world understand sort of.

Those fake mountains sure are pretty though, and they need to clean up the programming code so they'll look clearer, don't you think?