Music

KMFE: Hey, how about we play that one that goes like...
He hummed a few notes.
EKA: Yeah, that's a good one.

Jo: You mean you play that song together and you don't know what it's
called?
KMFE and EKA looked at each other. KMFE shrugged and shook his head.
KMFE: I don't know. I don't know if anyone ever told me the name. I
learned it from listening.
EKA: Yeah, me neither.

When they started playing Jo interrupted.
Jo: That's called Sausuma.
EKA: Oh. Cool. Now we know.

Later that day,
EKA: Hey, how about we play that one again, that one that Jo had some
name for?
KMFE: Right, that one. Sure.
From then on they called the song "that one that Jo had some name for".

KMFE: This song has too many notes in it.
EKA: It goes faster if you play them all at once.
KMFE held down the sustain pedal and smashed his foot on the quiet pedal.
KMFE: True, that was a lot faster.
EKA: It had a lot of different harmonies. Some interesting dissonance.
KMFE: Yeah I think we've run out of ideas.

SIRS

I said to AR "I confessed my love to someone in an instructional rating
survey"
"Oh god I hope it wasn't me"
I looked at her and said nothing.
AR laughed a horrified laughter.
I told her it was for expos.
That means that the professor knows you. I wonder if she'll know that
it's me who wrote it?
"I hope not." AR said. "I don't like it when my professors know too much
about me"
"Well I'm sorry I ruined that"
AR tried to say something that started with "That's ok" but there was no
honest way to do that. She gave a few false starts and asked "What did
you write?"
"I wrote that I admired you, that I enjoyed knowing you this year, that
it was too bad you were so happy to see the semester end because I would
miss you. And I wrote that I do miss you, because when she reads it you
will be far away. But even after writing all those papers I still
couldn't say what I really liked about you, or how I really felt. So I
left that out."
"Yeah I really was happy for this semester to end - but not because of you"
"I know - but it still hurts a little bit"

Communism

KMFE set up the Committee for a Reasonable Communist Revolution (CRCR)
because it was the best thing he knew how to do at the time. He
explained their purpose at the first meeting.

KMFE: People are not particularly enthused with communism.
Brian: I hope this was not some sort of a trick for you to say
everything you don't like about communism.
KMFE: All economic systems are out of fashion these days. Capitalism has
taken the hardest hit, but really people won't trust something new and
dramatically different.

KMFE: The goal is to tie the goals of this revolution to a fight against
corruption. People can see the harm corruption does.

KMFE: I don't really buy that communism is an economic system. It's
really a way of thinking about things. It's a social concern. And
honestly, when capitalism enters the debate, it too is more of a social
concern than an economic system. At heart, every society is capitalist,
even the most oppressively controlled.

KMFE: So that brings us here, basically. And where else are you gonna
find a communist revolution committed to free markets?

The discussion then turned to what the specific goals of the revolution
should be. KMFE made it clear that the protection of free markets was
not for efficiency (in fact, he admitted he didn't really care about
efficiency). It was for peace. Free markets may be the most viable
defense against war.

They decided that before spending too much time figuring out the goals,
they ought to put some limitations on what the revolution could and
could not do. The problem with so many revolutions is that they are
tainted – sometimes irreparably – by actions counter to their original
goals. So it was thought necessary to lay out some strict rules:

Freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly, and all other
freedoms currently granted by the US constitution will not be restricted
in any way, including through legal action or intimidation.

The basic function of the economy necessary to sustain life in this
country will not be interrupted.

No one will be killed or threatened.

No action will be taken that has a good chance of causing anarchy.

All actions that affect the country as a whole will be decided in a
manner as democratic as possible.

No revenge will be taken on parties that oppose or resist the revolution.

While the goals of the revolution were still unclear, they all agreed
that they had one of the best set of prohibitions. This was an
encouraging start.

The Mermaid

So I was impressed by a few things. I was impressed that
xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx had written a coherent story entirely through Twitter
over the course of 7 months. I don't generally think of people named
xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx as having that kind of attention span. I was actually
even impressed by the content of the story. But what really piqued my
interest were the things the story didn't say, the gaps in between the
tweets.

So I'll spare you the juicy details (you can go read them for yourself
if you want. This is the internet, after all) and say that it was a
fairly straightforward first-encounter-to-culminating-sex-scene romance
between a man and a mermaid. The man's boat had been smashed apart on
the rocks near the Orkney Islands and left him stranded. As he's sitting
on the rock at sunrise, head in his hands going over his miseries and
wondering what can he possibly do next, he hears the mermaid, who
happens to be sitting on the same rock behind him, playing a harp.

The next tweet is what caught my eye and got me to actually keep
reading. It read simply "she was playing good day sunshine". Then the
story moves on, no further comment. That's a Beatles song. It's not some
eerie mermaid tune. But if you think about it, if mermaids actually
exist, and if they can have harps and play music, it's not any harder to
believe that they can play Beatles songs. So I was impressed that
xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx trusted her audience to realize and accept this fact
with no further explanation. This story was meant as a mutual exercise
between author and reader.

The story allots 23 tweets to describing the man. xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx
tells us every detail of the man's physical characteristics. And he is
beautiful. The mermaid gets only one tweet: "she was blond". Since this
is fiction, the man could have had this romantic story with any woman on
earth. xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx chose to involve a mermaid, a creature known
for its beauty, and then make no use of it. From this I can only
conclude that xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx saw herself as the mermaid, but why that
would be so, and even then why she would give herself no defining traits
beyond hair color, is still to me a mystery.

The next couple of months aren't as good. So far xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx had
given the narrative a sort of melancholy bite that made it sound like
she was two weeks away from suicide. The enigmatic "she was blond"
preceded a two week pause during which xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx apparently
cheered up quite a bit, and it just wasn't the same. It didn't get good
again until the scene with the kiss.

The kiss itself warrants no more words than "he kissed her", but it's a
really big deal for the mermaid. The man sees she's so pleased and
surprised that he asks her if she's ever kissed before. "You mean it has
a name?" she asks, presumably shocked. She decides it must be "some
silly ritual from New Jersey" (which is where the man is from). She's
quite hurt, because she thought it was something new and special the man
had made up, and it's just part of some game they play back home.

The rest of the story isn't interesting until the end. Specifically, how
abruptly it ends, just at the close of the first and only sex scene. The
man's still stuck there on the rock. He has no food or fresh water, no
phone, no clothes at this point, no transportation. xxnucl34rk1tt3nxx
has been with this man in fiction for 7 months now, and she leaves him
there. Leaves him either to die there, as things are set to happen, or
be rescued in a plot the reader must dream up.

Rereading the story before I wrote these comments I noticed that the sex
scene itself is a bit rushed, like she's trying to get it over with real
fast. I suspect the motivation to ditch the fictional man existed long
before the story actually ended. But then in Twitter everything seems a
bit rushed, and I might be imagining it.

True Statements

JL: Everything is determined.
KMFE: Can you elaborate on that?
JL: For every thing that happens, there is a true statement that says
that that happens. You take this set of true statements, and it
describes everything. So everything is predetermined.
KMFE: Ah, so, if, say, thing 'x' happens, you say there is a true
statement that says that 'x' happens?
JL: That's
right.

KMFE: And what is that
statement?

JL: 'x' happens, for whatever 'x'
is.
KMFE: That's not a
statement.

JL: Yes it is. 'x' happens, where 'x' is some event. How is that not a
statement?
KMFE: Because you didn't say what 'x'
is.
JL: 'x' could be anything. If 'x' were 'it rains today', the statement
would be 'it rains today happens'.
KMFE: Ah, but you see the key there is you had a way to describe what
'x' is. If you can't do that, you can't form a statement. Now give me a
chance to explain something, because you happen to have wandered into
one of my favorite philosophical
traps.

Now, I don't know much about the real world. So I'm going to start by
talking about abstract things. I want to convince you that it's naive to
assume that "x happens" must be a statement.

Do you know about cardinal numbers? Or countable and uncountable sets?
JL: Yes, I do.
KMFE: All right, good. So let's talk about the real numbers. Because
there are more real numbers than integers. Now we form statements out of
symbols, and we have at most countably many symbols. So the set of
statements is at most countable. That means that there is a real number
about which there is no statement.

It goes deeper than that, in fact. Our brains have at most countably
many thoughts. So there is a real number that it is impossible to even
think about, even given an infinite amount of time.
JL: But you're assuming you have countably many
symbols.
KMFE: Well, it doesn't actually matter how many symbols you have. You
take the power set of the set of symbols, and you've got something too
big. So no matter what there are some "things" you can't form statements
about.

JL: So how does this apply to the real
world?
KMFE: Now, I don't know whether everything is really determined. And I
don't know whether there really are countably many things in the real
world. I suspect you don't either. So at the very least your argument is
inconclusive. But I would like to show that while these true statements
might, in some universes, determine every "thing" that happens, they
wouldn't... really. Not the way we think of things. They wouldn't get
every interpretation of every thing, which is what we really think about
when we think about a thing.

So, say thing 'x' happens, and we have (because we're lucky, mind you) a
statement P that basically says"x happens". And say we have lots of
statements like this, P0, P1... etc., for every thing at every timeand
place.

Now another way to interpret the event at P0 is "not P1", which is
guaranteed to be a statement. Or, if P1 happens to be true then, too,
you could say "P1" instead of "not P1". It's not important, really. The
point is that's another way to interpret what goes on. For example,
you're sitting on the grass. Another way to interpret that is "you're
not eating potatoes". Makes sense, right?

In fact, for every subset of the statements P0, P1... you have a
corresponding interpretation. (Note that if the subset is infinite the
interpretation cannot be phrased as a statement, yet it is clearly still
a distinct way of looking at it). So the number of interpretations is at
least as big as the power set of the number of statements, so, again,
too big.

JL: This all sounds very abstract and contrived.
KMFE: It is, but I don't think it's any more abstract or contrived than
a true statement for every thingthat happens. Mind you statements are a
very human construction. They don't lend themselves to defining the
universe. And if you try to use them that way you have to expect to run
into mathematical problems. And if you're dealing with a mathematical
concept anyway, it's not fair to say that those problems don't matter.

Classroom

AR looked up from her desk and saw KMFE. He was resting his head in his hands and was still wearing a thick coat. His pockets were filled with newspaper and books. She took out an mp3 player she had bought two days ago. Set it on her desk in front of her. Pushed a button. Jumped back. KMFE watched and wished she weren't distracted so he could talk to her. MK walked in looking tired and sat down in front of AR. He turned around. MK: Hi AR AR: Hi MK. Did you finish your essay? MK: I'll start it tomorrow. AR: It's due tomorrow! MK: I know. I'll do it before class. AR: I finished mine. I did it over the weekend. KMFE got out Das Kaptial and started reading. Then he took off his coat and went back to reading. He glanced at AR for just a second. He'd try and say hi to her later. David and Chris walked in with takeout. It made the room smell like food. AR was hungry but she didn't want to eat anything. MK asked for a fry. David said something in a faux-cocky voice and handed one over. KMFE wouldn't have time to eat before his next class. David and Chris hadn't started their essays either. They weren't worried. KMFE had several pages of stream-of-consciousness thoughts. He didn't understand his strategy, but somehow it worked. It was more about thinking than about writing. David and Sonali started arguing about whether there had been a police officer in the dorm the previous night. More people came in and not everyone could sit where they wanted to. The professor set lots of stuff on her desk and started moving papers into piles. She took a drink from her gallon seltzer bottle. Everyone wanted to get out of there for some reason. The professor didn't enjoy this class. The students were all in the engineering school and didn't like writing. AR wanted to go back to her dorm room. It was nice and peaceful there and people didn't ask you to do things. You didn't have to talk there. But KMFE thought it was worth it to be there because AR was there. She even lived on the same floor as him but he'd never see her in the dorm. Here he could at least talk to her. Though he didn't. He wished she didn't want to leave, but if he could have got her out of there, he would have. KMFE put away Das Kapital. David and Chris finished their takeout and threw away the styrofoam trays. AR put away her mp3 player and got out the New Humanities Reader. KMFE decided to say hi to her after class.

Semantic Externalism

On October 21 Robert Varley was arrested for seeking to sell weapons to terrorists. Over the past three months the FBI had conducted a sting, posing as a representative of Al Qaeda. Mr. Varley, who owns a manufacturing business in West Virginia, was approached by an undercover FBI agent seeking to purchase a large quantity of "dual-use" equipment. The FBI agent informed Mr. Varley on 8 separate occasions that the supplies would be used as weapons in anti-US terrorist attacks. Semantic Externalist Russel Nguyen will defend Mr. Varley. Mr. Nguyen argues that because Mr. Varley had never been approached by actual terrorists and only by FBI agents, when Mr. Varley expressed approval of selling dual-use equipment for use in terrorist attacks, he was actually expressing approval of selling equipment to an undercover FBI agent. The meaning of Mr. Varley's statements, which were recorded and will be used as evidence in the trial, must be interpreted in the context in which they were expressed, and their meaning is partly determined by external reality. Mr. Nguyen claims that Mr. Varley is guilty of nothing more than cooperating with a US government agency. The FBI is not impressed by Mr. Nguyen's argument. They argue that since the mental state of Mr. Varley was identical to that of a person approached by actual terrorists, within Mr. Varley's own reality a crime has been committed. Since no experiment performed by Mr. Varley revealed a distinction between an FBI sting and actual terrorists, the two situations are one and the same. Solopsist Michelle Clunn argued that the FBI's argument does not go far enough. No experiment performed by Mr. Varley could reveal that he was not a brain in a vat being dropped from a three-story building on a passing pedestrian. According to Ms. Clunn the Justice Department should be prosecuting Mr. Varley for all crimes that experiment cannot rule out. In response to criticism from Mr. Nguyen that this would be "a mockery of innocent until proven guilty", Ms. Clunn said "we cannot rule out" the possibility that someone has proven Mr. Varley guilty of all these crimes. The case has been dubbed a "philosophical judgment day". "The federal courts of the United States will have to decide, once and for all, whether statements derive their meaning only from the mind of the speaker, or in part from the external world" said Louis Patmos, a lawyer familiar with the case. Mr. Varley will be tried by a federal district court in West Virginia.

Honesty

Jo: You don't want to admit that you really want to know about n. KMFE: I want to know about ll way more than n. Jo: You want to know about other people, not you or her. That's why you don't want to be specific. She asked if you'd like to clarify, but you're not going to do that, are you? KMFE: I'll have to give it awhile. Maybe I should give an example. About ll. But that would sound like I'm accusing her. Jo: She's not your spy, however much it may have seemed that way once. KMFE: How am I going to complete the stories if I don't know... the stories? It's like taking statistics from a biased sample. If you don't know how it's biased you can't get a good result. Jo: That's really how life is, isn't it? You never get an unbiased story. Ever. There will always be mysteries. KMFE: I am a curious person. Jo: That is becoming increasingly obvious KMFE: A long time ago I came up with a trick to aggravate my curiosity. I would avoid finding out what the color puce looks like. It worked well because it's a little detail I could have looked up any time I wanted. MC liked that idea. Other people tortured me about it. Jo: Did you eventually give up? KMFE: No. But honestly I lost interest. It's enough work for me not to figure it out based on context. But the story about n, that bothers me. And with that one I don't have a choice. Nobody knows the answer. The answer doesn't exist. Jo: Did you ever ask PL the answer? KMFE: I might have. I don't remember. Did I ever tell her what n means? I've honestly forgotten so much. Jo: She might know. KMFE: I don't want her story. Jo: You should, though. She'd want yours. KMFE: No she wouldn't. She doesn't like my story. Jo: It looked like she did in that last email. KMFE: I don't know what the deal with that was. It was late. And she avoided the question. Jo: She didn't understand the question. You hid the question on purpose. KMFE: She tried to make it about her. Jo: As well she should have. And it should have been about her. KMFE: That email did actually make me feel a little better. Jo: I don't think the scary story is true. KMFE: It is, though. Maybe not with the real n, who I don't even know. It's true somehow. Or I'm scared of change. Jo: Well, I don't mean to criticize your whole way of thinking. Just have some faith in what PL told you. I think she meant it way more honestly than you will ever admit.

Snowman

I pushed snow around into a large ball and watched David do the same. We hauled the snow together into amessy stack. I gouged out three cavities to make eyes and a mouth. Then I stepped sideways to a door, turned the knob, took out some white rope, and tossed it to David. We pushed stakes into the ground and wound the rope around them, tying it into a loop. The rope made the pattern of a five-pointed star around the snowman. I waved to a face staring out of a window in the chocolate factory. More faces accumulated at the windows. Orange gloves threw a stick over the fence and I pointed at it when it landed. David picked it up and threw it at the snowman, knocking off a piece of snow. I picked it up and threw it again. We repeated this over and over again until the snowman was obliterated. A truck drove by with a picture of the dead snowman on the side. A dark cloud came overhead and Orange gloves went inside as snow began to hit my head. The snow pushed me around and it was heavy. David and I ran inside as the sky turned black and it became night. Looking out the window at the chocolate factory I saw there were new people there, with torches lit on poles and laughing and talking. They were there all night. In the morning the house was surrounded by snowmen. I felt sick and didn't want to go outside. It was still snowing.

Steam

Solomon lumbered into the steamy room. David hadn't shown up yet so Solomon took off his backpack and sat down in front of the table. He wiped an inch of slippery soot from the surface with his arm, clearing a spot for him to write. The table shook at the cacophonous bellow of David's steam bike outside the window. Gravel blasted up by the studded tires drew fresh scars in the glass panes. Two minutes later David trudged into view, hair sopping wet, with plumes of steamy vapor rising from his soot-encrusted clothes. He spat a mouthful of grit into the floor and sat down across from Solomon. "Like a chip?" Solomon offered, fishing a limp sodden potato chip from the bowl in front of him. It tore apart, and Solomon plunged his fingers in to fish it out, trying futilely to separate the potato from the gravel. "No thanks, I just had some steamed kale" replied David, shaking the murky water from his tangled mane onto the chips. "All right, let me give you the story" began Solomon. "It started like this. In the middle of conquering New Vaporia, King Pistonio interrupted an alien invasion, which has triggered their wrath upon our kingdom of Turbineilles. Consequently Pistonio has asked us to redesign the steam car factory for weapons production. Here, let me sketch the factory in its current layout for you." Solomon removed the cap from his pen allowing thick billowing clouds of steam to escape and fill the room, blocking out all the light. The pen whizzed into action with a jack-hammer rattling, spraying David's face with a speckled display of ink. Solomon waited for the mechanism to heat up, then proceeded. "The perimeter has a U shape, like this." He ran the needle-sharp stylus over the page, tearing the limp paper and wadging it up in a crumple. He tried to piece it back together with chain-link brass tape, but this only made the problem worse. "Perhaps we could go there now and you could show me" David suggested helpfully. "Sure, let's do that!" Solomon coughed through clouds of amorphous undulating vapor. They went outside and hopped on David's steam bike. It was a marvel of technology and art. The exquisite brass-plated gears rolled over each other in perfect harmony, turning chemical energy to swift, linear motion in a kind of elegant dance. Or rather, it could have done that if the whole thing weren't covered in a thick gelatinous ooze, marked and scratched from grit, sand and the occasional projectile sledge hammer, and tragically equipped with a noisy, shaking, belching steam turbine, the heat from which warped and deformed the mechanism from its manufacturing specifications with startling enthusiasm. David and Solomon both wore goggles, helmets and thick leather coats to protect themselves from the onslaught of engineering. They rode into the heart of the city's manufacturing district. Massive rotating shafts carried power from the coal generating plants to the jigsaw puzzle of factories. These phallic symbols of industry, progress and raw, untamed power walled in David and Solomon on either side. Just under two miles form this mess a man named Benjummun Frankly was busy preparing a kite and a key in a way that would transform the industrial jungle beyond recognition, but for now that was just a far-off wisp of steam in the sunset. Against all odds they finally reached the factory, where they arranged a meeting with King Pistonio. "Let me tell you what the real question is" said Pistonio steamily. "Steam is the blood in the veins of our society. But where does the steam come from?" "From burning coal" answered David. "Exactly. But where does the coal come from? From organic matter, whose energy comes from the sun. It's one big orgy of thermodynamics. But the real question is, how did we end up in a low entropy state? Does it derive from the Big Bang, or was it a random fluctuation?" "Well, since low-entropy is by definition unlikely..." David thought allowed. "Ah, but you've forgotten the anthropic principle" the King pointed out femptoseconds before the aliens blew up the building and everything in sight. "Since then philosophers have debated whether it is appropriate to measure that interval in femptoseconds, given that the prefix fempto was not adopted until some decades later." KMFE was explaining to EKA. "But we know what the real moral of the story is." "How can you have a moral to a story that ends with a nihilistic discussion followed by demolishing everything in sight?" KMFE held his teacup in between their faces and let faint wisps pass before their eyes. "Steam, EKA. It's all about steam."