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Yoga Limits

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The constraints of my professional life have driven me to yoga twice. Both times, I was suffering from back pain that constrained my ability to sustain my focus while sitting at my desk. I recognized that the problem was tight hamstrings and a weak core, but I channeled my need for exercise into jogging, which didn’t address either condition.

The first practice was held in the meeting room of a spirituality bookstore. The instructor was an Indian lady, and I was the only man that showed up consistently. As I got stronger in the practice, I eventually found myself with thirteen women hitched to my wagon. At the time, I didn’t have the energy to manage the load, so I quit.

I was able to stay away for a few years, and then I discovered the Bikram yoga studio in Agoura Hills. I have to admit that it’s been a struggle for the owners as much as it has been for me. I am a tall string bean with a large chest.

The relative narrowness of my frame results in transmission of stress into the stabilizing muscles in the hips and lower back that are supported by bones that provide limited leverage. This means that muscle balance is absolutely essential not only to achieve postures, but to avoid overuse injuries. As I strive for that balance, I’ve been developing muscle groups that had always taken a free ride in the past, which means that I become exhausted doing postures that are often placed in the “warm up” or “recovery” category.

After four years I’m finally able reliably to stay in the 105 degree room for the full ninety minutes. While the owners were often frustrated by my bailing out in the middle of class, some of the instructors are impressed by my persistence. Several have observed that the practice is not designed for my body type.

The attraction to me is a feature that many find intolerable – the dreary repetition of the practice. The Bikram formula is a series of twenty-six postures that the instructors describe with a rote dialog. Fortunately, the more difficult postures are progressive. This means that we aren’t expected to achieve full expression, and so I have the latitude to focus on trying to figure out how to get my muscles to work together. It’s a process that has caused my to look in the mirror on occasion and burst out in laughter in the middle of class.

This opportunity to focus on my physical self has been critical to my peace of mind over the last four years. While not typical, I have dreams in which people show up seeking help to keep societies and ecosystems glued together. There’s not much I can do except to offer them the sanctuary of my heart as a place of restoration. It’s frustrating and grievous to me.

So I should have intervened early today when the instructor continued reading his story during the srivasanas that punctuate the exercises of the floor series. Although I realized that it was interfering with my ability to focus on aerobic recovery, I was fascinated by the enthusiasm that filled the room, . The diversion provided some relief from the normal thoughts – people struggling with the urge to escape the room.

The story contrasted the experience of two caterpillars. The humble yellow caterpillar (which I’ll call ‘she’) encounters a grey caterpillar spinning a cocoon. While uncertain about the possibility of becoming a butterfly, the yellow caterpillar finally chooses to try, and discovers comfort in the realization that spinning a cocoon is a natural skill.

The second, striped caterpillar (which I’ll call ‘he’) has chosen to climb a pillar of caterpillars, symbolizing the struggle for social success. As he nears the top, stepping on those below, he is finally unable to penetrate the clinging mass, and becomes trapped. He looks out and sees a field littered with caterpillar pillars, and realizes that his struggle is meaningless – with so many pillars, attaining the pinnacle of one signifies nothing.

As he weighs his options, the yellow butterfly arrives to rescue him. She attempts to pull him out of the pillar, but he draws back, and sees this terrible sorrow in her eyes.

It was at that point that I walked out, the class laughing at my explanation. I laid down on the couch in the lobby, crying “Oh, God!”

I live this every day, and it’s not that simple. They don’t just refuse assistance.

They pull off your wings and drive nails through your hands and feet.

One of the students told me, as I was passing him after class on the way out the door, that “I had missed a good story.” Really? I don’t come to yoga for a spiritual fill-up, or for entertainment. That’s supposed to happen at church or the movies. I come to focus on keeping my body strong enough to bear the burdens that I carry. If I can’t focus on that, then I’m going to have to quit again.

Fun? What is this ‘fun’?

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Greg got a great laugh out of it at the time. He called me over to the computer and said, “Hey, Dad, you should try this game.”

“What is it? Run-escape? What’s that?”

“No. RUNE-scape.”

He's just a farm(ing) boy.

My Runescape avatar, Trichronos, watching the plotted mushrooms grow.

It started off as something for us to do together on weekends, and the chat channel let us stay in touch while they were away at their mother’s house. When I was forced to surrender my custodial rights to take a job up in Livermore in 2004, the game became a stress breaker. Runescape involves a lot of mindless, repetitive skilling activities. I would sit down with The Economist and mouse away, half the time without even looking at the screen.

My avatar, Trichronos, was once a negative image of me. Now my hair is mostly white. The original Runescape was pretty raw, with a lot of adult language, misogyny and racism. I chose the character as a reaction to the last, and have been called a ‘nigger’ more than once. And when others complain that they wish there were more female players, I always trot out my original error, “Well, it’s because girls parse the name as ‘Run! Escape!'”

On the flip side, I have observed over the years that Runescape does grow player communities consisting of disabled vets, students, the chronically unemployed and the elderly. They follow each other’s lives and often provide support in solving real-world problems.

One of the draws of a fantasy game is that you get to chose what kind of hero you want to be. Combat is a big draw to some, although the tactics and visual effects in Runescape are tame compared to those in games that focus narrowly on combat. I do enough combat to be able to do the quests, but filled up my time with skilling.

As the ecology in California began to collapse, I felt compelled to focus on the farming skill. It was my first “max” skill two years ago. Changes in the game mechanics made it easy to max out on the other skills since, but also introduced rewards for further achievements. So while I don’t have an interest in the other skills except as they factor in quest outcomes, I am trying to complete the farming achievement. It represents a bounded but not insignificant draw upon my energies: logging in for twenty minutes four times a day to harvest patches and plant new crops. I estimate somewhere between 120 and 200 days to achieve my goal.

“Trichronos” is obviously not a name I would give to a child, but has specific meaning to me. “Tri” is obviously the prefix “three,” and Chronos is the Titan of time in Greek myth. The choice references both my model of physics, in which I posit additional time dimensions, and my sense of my deep past, as in “third time is the charm.” It’s not time to explain that second one yet…

Is ‘God’ Low-Entropy?

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When I was in college, my professor in Introductory Physics rebutted an argument for God that touted life as a violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics. The devout claimed that life preserved order against the inevitable tide of entropy. My professor responded by asking us to consider the poop vs. net body weight ratio for babies. Life does increase entropy – (male) physicists just tend to hide from the fact.

Now researchers are discovering that “funny” words, such as those invented by Dr. Seuss, have a “low” entropy – they use combinations of unusual letters. It strikes me that ‘God’ may be one of those combinations. There’s the old atheist snipe “‘God’ is ‘dog’ spelled backwards.” And of course we have Sam Beckett’s intellectual tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot.” Are these funny simply because the letter combinations in ‘god’, ‘dog’ and ‘Godot’ are risible?

Maybe there was something in the old convention: “Elohim”, which became “Allah.” As “‘Allah’ Akbar!”, I may be allowed to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens: as a designation, “‘God’ is not great!”

Or maybe the low-entropy proof for God has simply eluded us. Maybe a low-entropy name is just what God would want – you know, bring smiles to our faces?

Disabused by Revelations

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I’ve been beguiled by synchronicity between my posts and news from the outside world.

Here the New York Times reports on how ISIL and other terrorist organizations are being scammed by those peddling the mysterious and deadly “red mercury.”

Wasn’t that popularized in a recent movie concerning a bunch of old-fart destabilizers of third-world states? Come to think of it, I wouldn’t put it past the CIA to feather-bed their retirement accounts by propagating this kind of doomsday-meme.

Bronze Age Atheism

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Stephen Colbert, practicing Catholic, missed a fat, slow one over the plate in his interview of acerbic atheist Bill Maher. In response to Stephen’s invitation to return to the Catholic Church, Bill spouts the usual “myths invented by people who didn’t know about germs” critique of the Bible.

Well, Bill, that’s a Bronze-Age mentality all right, but practicing Catholics have a lot more material to draw upon, material that focuses on finding a redeeming human purpose in the amoral universe of the scientist. That material was produced as early as St. Augustine in the fifth century, and includes the writings of others such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Miguel de Unamuno, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton.

Bill, you might try reading some of it, and giving us an honest critique of modern Catholicism. No, it’s not always what you’ll find in the homilies on Sunday, but homilies are offered to ensure that everyone, no matter their level of education, walks away with something of value.

Our Extraterrestrial Saviors

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Astronomers tout a “high-frequency” (every couple of years) flickering in the light emanating from the star KIC 8462852 as possible proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. The extent and frequency of the flickering rule out the normal cause of such variation: temporary occlusion of the star by a planet in its orbit. This leaves open the possibility that the occlusion is due to a planetary-scale artificial structure.

The possibility of such structures was first popularized by Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” novels. However, the stresses on a ring encircling a star are inconceivably large – no material imaginable would be able to sustain the strain.

Exotechnologists thus turned their attention to another possibility: the spread of huge tree-like lifeforms rooted in Jupiter-size planets. Natural seasonal cycles would cause the density of the canopy to vary over time, thus explaining the flickering.

Given the huge quantities of carbon dioxide transferred to the stellar wind from such growth, CO2 sequestration, long pooh-poohed as prohibitively expensive, now appears to have long-term market potential. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is leading commercialization efforts, beginning with leasing of the world’s largest radio telescopes in the hope that CO2 deliveries can be arranged before global warming exterminates life on Earth.

The SETI program, in reaction to this plan, reasons that “extraterrestrial intelligence must exist, because it is impossible that intelligence not exist somewhere in the universe.”

Tea Party Bluish on the Future

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Incredulous regarding claims that the Koch Brothers could be savvy enough to run the nation’s largest privately held corporation but still stupid enough to ignore the onrushing debacle of global climate change, this blogger delved deep into the records of Heartland city council meetings to discover the true goals of the freedom fighters in the Tea Party.

Tired of dominance of federal politics by the high-density “blue” states on the nation’s coasts, the Tea Party reflects the unification of the jealous red states to enjoy all the privileges of their coastal neighbors. Trained to literalism by generations of fire-breathing bible-thumpers, the freedom fighters seek to accomplish their goal in concrete terms: actually flooding the coastal states with the rising oceans generated by global climate change.

The Koch brothers, leading financiers of fundamentalist libertarians, were inspired in their childhoods by the title of their paper products company: Georgia-Pacific. The geographical oxymoron inspired a whimsical vision of uniting their lumber empires. The climate scientists in their pay have produced detailed projections of the final outlines of the US coast once Greenland and Antarctica have shed their ice.

These projections are mirrored in the placement of fracking installations across America. Confronted by the daunting barrier of the Rocky Mountains, Koch geoengineering specialists realized that accomplishment of their vision would require significant lowering of the nation west of the Mississippi.

Deep-well extraction of oil through fracking is a major part of the engineering effort. Not only is it intended to allow the Pacific to breach the Rockies, it is also being conducted to shape the coastline to ensure that the heartland states share equally in the benefits of their future status as coastline states.

This blogger, eager to relocate to friendlier climes, is now considering opportunities in the neo-coastal “blue-to-be” states.

Getting Taken to Cleaner

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Volkswagon, the world’s largest automobile manufacturer, issued a software patch for the 11 million vehicles sold with “clean diesel” motors. The patch links to Android and iOS smart phones, enabling the driver to replicate the acceleration profiles used during EPA emissions testing.

In announcing the patch, Volkswagon’s CEO said, “Those already taking directions from their smart phones will be perfectly comfortable with the new feature. Instead of ‘turn left in 200 yards’, the phone will command ‘release the accelerator by two millimeters in five hundredths of a second.'” When asked whether that was a practical solution, the CEO enthused: “That’s the beauty of the engineering! Do you know how hard it was to coordinate the voice announcement to end just in time to allow the driver to take action?”

Facing the prospect of billions of dollars in fines from environmental regulators across the globe, the new VW software prioritizes emissions above collision avoidance. As an explanation, the CEO offered, “Any deviation from the commanded – I mean ‘requested’ – acceleration sequence will cause the exhaust to belch a huge cloud of poisonous particulates. So the driver might as well run over the children in the cross walk.”

In a parallel, ISIS announced the availability of a new freemium game based upon the “Hit-and-Run” scoring system adopted by American teens to vent their frustration with dawdling pedestrians.

The Real Deal: Towering Ambition on Mars

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Having seen the Trump stump rhetoric on the Iran nuclear deal evolve as predicted in earlier de-porting (as “re”-porting is to offer again the truth, “de”-porting must be to claw it back), this blogger was emboldened to follow the communications links that tie the Trump real-estate empire to the Iranian mullahs. New revelations expose the growth of the Trump ego from global to interplanetary dimensions.

With suspicions (and hackles) raised by Trump’s refusal to promise to place his holdings in blind trust, records of real estate transactions in the Washington, D.C. area were examined to expose the true cause of the Chinese stock-market crash: profit-taking by Chinese investors buying up huge swaths of the Washington landscape. It appears that Trump has arranged for multi-billion dollar Chinese support for his PAC with promises to lift the height limitation on Capitol Hill development, which by federal law is constrained by the cap of the Washington Monument.

In fact, PR documents in development attempt to paint the Monument itself as a hidden Iranian ICBM, similar to those revealed to have been concealed in the minarets of Iranian mosques. The Monument is slated for demolition during Trump’s first hundred days in office, to be followed immediately by construction of a huge Trump Tower complex on the Capitol Mall.

As if that was not sufficient outrage, it appears that the pull-back of the Obama-Islama resort complex announcement in Kenya is related to plans for Mars hinted at in a bizarre exchange between Elon Musk and Stephen Colbert on the late show. Mr. Musk suggested that Mars might be made habitable by liberating water and carbon dioxide trapped in polar crust using nuclear explosions.

It appears that Mr. Trump has promised to have NASA let a contract to SpaceX, the private rocket company owned by Mr. Musk, to design and construct a system to relocate the Iranian uranium enrichment complex to Mars. Rather than launching nuclear missiles from earth to Mars, the bombs will be manufactured on Mars itself using the transplanted Iranian machinery.

As a quid-pro-quo, the Republican majority in both houses of Congress will be expected to grant to Trump right of first refusal on all development deals as habitable terrain evolves on Mars. Support for the legislation is expected to be sealed with authorization of a “climate change exchange” that will allow fossil fuel companies holding land on both planets to average hot days on Earth against cold days on Mars.

In related news, the Bush nominating campaign is targeting a narrow climate-conscious fringe of the Republican party with a study of the correlation between local temperatures and Trump campaign rhetoric.

This blogger awaits further developments with basted breath.

Zmed Brothers

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Played at Twisted Oak tonight. They actually are brothers, on electric mandolin and guitar, both with soaring reverb that carried up and around. The tension of the week was left behind, and I feel really relaxed right now.

Eclectic mix of covers, ranging from Kentucky Old Timey to Simon and Garfunkel to Hip-Hop S&M. When not soloing, the guitarist laid down the chord progression and offered edgy lead vocals. His brother sang with a far more polished alto voice, the contrast matching the tone of the instruments.

Much of what I was hearing was electronic tone generation, but there’s a definite skill in knowing when not to play as well. That was evident in their original numbers, the voices slipping around each other like sea-otters in the pool of sound. I stood up and drifted on my feet for the last two numbers, doing some floating myself.

As I noted last month: definitely a spiritual experience.