It's the most wonderful time of the year! Here's a very good summary of the World Jr. Team Canada this year and it might be a dominant one. Because of Covid and the NHL not starting in October as usual, there are some players available that wouldn't be on the team in a normal year. More for Canada than the other squads. This team will have 20 first round picks! That's staggering! Only 2 guys on the team were not chosen in the first round!
Here's a written summary of the team from which I will borrow a lot of my insight. I will leave out a few guys, like Suzuki (who almost lost sight in one eye and although his bro is an NHLer, he might not get to play much) and the goalies, who are the only question mark for team Canada. Any of them should be good enough to backstop this team to gold though. But it doesn't look like there's a star amongst them.
We'll start with my predictions for forward lines. You saw the line combinations projected in the above video. I'll give you the ones I hope for. They're a bit diff. Line one is the same.
McMichael Cozens Dach
I like McMike and Cozens on LW and C respectively cuz they both did well last year and have earned top line status. Put them with the probable point-leader in the tournament on their right wing (Dach) and you're solid.
Krebs Byfield Quinn
This is different. The vid thinks Tomasino should be on the right wing, but I favour the mighty Quinn.
Holloway Newhook Mercer
Why not keep the Holloway/Newhook chemistry and add ANOTHER Newfy? Has Canada ever had a pair of Newfies on a line before?
Perfetti Tomasino Zary/Pelletier
Perfetti shouldn't be a fourth liner, but that's how good this team is gonna be! He got 111 pts. and is the top scorer on the squad! But he is 18. Tomasino looks NHL-ready, particularly his skating, and although Zary and Pelletier may not score the way they do on their WHL and QMJHL clubs respectively, let's see...
But we'll start the individual player descriptions with the D.
Justin Barron. 25th (Colorado) - RH shot. That's valuable on the blue line for one-timers. Missed time last season with blood clots so he should have been chosen higher in the draft than 25th. He showed that in Canada's 4 scrimmages during which he scored 3 times. He's the captain of the Halifax Mooseheads and known for leadership and strong defense, but I'm not so sure that's his best role on this team.
Bowen Byram. 4th (Colorado) - Colorado didn't win the cup last year even though I thought they would. With the addition of Barron and Byram to Makar and Girard, they should have a better chance in the upcoming season. Byram only got 2 assists in 7 games in last year's World Jr. Tournament, but he was young and the older guys got the #1 positions. This year he and Drysdale will be a legendary blueline pairing! Assistant captain for his leadership too.
Jamie Drysdale. 6th (Anaheim) - Same story as Byram. He was young and not played nearly as much as I thought he should have been last year. He got 2 points. Another righty on the blueline, he'll complement Byram's left hand shot hopefully blasting one-timers on the power play on their reverse sides. I bet he'll score a point per game if he gets the power play time I'm expecting. There were times last year when he was the best defenseman on the whole team. This year, he'll get lots of ice and I predict he'll be just as good or better than Byram.
Kaiden Guhle. 16th (Habs) - A big, burly, PHYSICAL D-man. Possibly paired with Barron, but although I'm expecting some bone-crunching hits from this dude, I am not so sure they will be the "shut-down" pairing, or that they'll need to be.
Thomas Harley. 18th (Dallas) - Did't make the team last year. Should be in the 2nd D pairing, but that could change if Guhle/Barron start scoring. He played 11 minutes in the playoffs in 2020 for the Stars.
Braiden Schneider. 19th (NYR) - Big RH shot. Canada has THREE righties on the blueline this year. What a luxury! Some nice hits from this dude hopefully. Probably paired with Harley, who can also hit.
Jordan Spence. 95th (LAK) One of two non-first rounders. I don't think he'll play a lot, but he's interesting. Born in Australia and raised in Japan, so he probably speaks both of those other languages (ar ar) he has dual Japanese/Canadian citizenship.
And now for the best looking team in recent memory and their strongest area: the forwards.
Quinton Byfield. 2nd (LAK) He will probably be the 2nd line center, but if things work out the way I think/hope they will, he could be battling Kirby Dach for the scoring lead all tournament long. He was not played the way he should have been played last year, partly, in my opinion, to get Lafreniere more hype than he deserved, and partly (not just my opinion) because he was only 18. No facemask and no limit to his ice time this year. He'll be lighting it up, especially if he gets the linemates I think he should. This will surprise some people who are saying he was a disappointment in last years tourney. But when you get almost no minutes and a lot of it is garbage time, on a team where you are just as good as the guys getting all the good ice time, you don't play to your capacity. Nobody does! But he showed patience and this year I hope it is rewarded. 6'4, 224 and still growing, he'll rival Dach in looking like a man amongst boys. I hope.
Dylan Cozens. 7th (Buffalo) Generally expected to be playing with Dach and McMichael, two centers on his wings. He SHOULD score a lot, but sometimes when you get these lines with centers playing wings, they don't perform as well as when they're playing their natural positions. This is a common problem for Team Canada. I hope it doesn't happen this year. He got 9 points last year, which tied him for 7th in tournament scoring, so he earned the top line center position even though Byfield might be better. He's NHL-ready and if he does what is expected, he'll be shuffling off to Buffalo after claiming the gold in the Edmonton bubble.
Kirby Dach. 3rd (Chi) - Didn't play in the World Jrs. last year cuz he was in the NHL. This'll be his NHL training camp! He's probably ahead of every player who will be out there as far as his career development and I think that will show. He already showed it in inter-squad games in the Canadian World Jr. camp during which he scored 7 pts. in 4 games. That's against the toughest opposition he's likely to face. Captain Canada this year and is likely to be their (and the tourney's) leading scorer. NO INJURIES PLEASE! I have a habit of jinxing guys like this.
Dylan Holloway. 14th (Oilers) - Will be playing on his future home rink. Showing a great deal of offensive chemistry with Alex Newhook, but may be resigned to a checking role.
Peyton Krebs. 17th (Vegas) - Has looked awesome so far! Would have gone higher than 17th but had an Achilles tendon injury at draft time. Score for Vegas! He's a highly skilled scorer, 60 pts. in 38 games in WHL. He will be playing alongside Byfield and if they can replace Tomasino with Quinn, they have a shot at stealing the top line thunder from McMike/Cousins/Dach. Either could put up Mogilney/Fedorov/Bure stats I think. Or hope.
Jack Quinn. 8th (Buffalo) - A combination of the Hughes brothers in name, he doesn't play like them at all. He's not a center. He's not a playmaker. He's a pure goal scorer. Canada has a problem of overloading its squads with centers because they are the highest point getters and they ignore goal scorers like Quinn that EVERY great center NEEDS. This is why I think with Quinn on line two, they could outscore the first line, which is composed of three centers. He got, are you ready for this?, 52 goals in 62 games in the OHL in '19/'20. That's a goal scorer. That's Hull/Bure/Ovechkin type scoring and he'll be a fan and team favourite if he doesn't end up riding the pine. Insanely, that is a possibility! But since he's a right hander who plays the right wing, I'm gonna predict right now that he replaces Tomasino or Pelletier at some point during the tournament. I bet he'd be deadly on the left side on the powerplay. Much like Ovechkin/Bure/Hull. Hope the coach doesn't waste this guy.
Connor McMichael. 25th - (Caps) Marchand-esque peskiness and scoring ability. Should be on the top line. 3rd in OHL scoring last season. Had 5 goals and 7 points in last year's gold medal performance for Canada. A worthy top liner.
Dawson Mercer. 18th (NJD) - Newfy jack of all trades. He gives 100% every shift and when you combine that with the personality and humour of Eastern Canada, teammates and fans just love this guy.
Alex Newhook. 16th (Colorado) - Missed the cut with the team last year (most likely because he's small). Another Newfy. I'd love to see a Holloway/Newhook/Mercer line, but we'll see...
Jakob Pelletier. 26th (Calg) - Another small guy, but he is a scoring machine in the QMJHL. I have noticed that the QMJHL is a higher scoring league and guys who outscore OHL and WHL players in the QMJHL are not always better. I guess we'll see if he's overrated or not.
Cole Perfetti. 10th (Winterpeg) - Great stick handler! Only 18 so he may get the Byfield treatment on this older than usual squad. But he's the highest scoring player on Team Canada (111 pts. in the OHL) so I can't see him being wasted like Byfield was last year. Let's hope he can bust into a spot on a good line.
Philip Tomasino. 24th (Nash) - May be Canada's fastest skater. 18G, 43pts in 26GP in the Ontario Hockey League. Says he's NHL-ready. We may see...
Connor Zary. Member of the top scoring line in the Wester Hockey League. Will he have linemates as good?
SOOOO there is a lot of interest in Team Canada this year! I'm even more excited than usual! The pre-tournament games are set to begin in a couple of days, although some have already be cancelled and more might be, due to Covid. I just hope this whole tournament can be played. Friggin' Corona 19 has shut down the QMJHL, OHL and WHL and it's postponed the NHL already. Let's hope this year's World Jrs. can be played without any complications!
Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, once commented, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that are familiar with it."
Later, and by no coincidence, in the early 60's, Thomas Kuhn's book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" came out. In it, he explains that science progresses through paradigm shifts, not linearly. The notion of scientific truth cannot be established by objective criteria, but is defined by the consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are "incommensurable," that is, they have irreconcilable accounts of reality. Not unlike my blog fixation of late, the absolute contradiction between seemingly everything in party platforms of the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.
As far back as 1961, a dude named Leon Lederman was doing experiments with neutrinos. The neutrino is highly theoretical. No mass, no real properties, no charge, no radius, it almost doesn't exist at all. Highly "elusive." But Lederman's research provided the cornerstone for what became known in the 70's as the standard model for particle physics. Those efforts were recognized 27 years later with a Nobel Prize. What had taken so long? Nothing had changed the science, it was the scientific community that had changed. The paradigm change, not the science, is what won him the Nobel Prize. We'll come back to Lederman.
The Standard Model describes 3 of Nature's 4 forces: electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. In electromagnetism, particles react with photons, which are bits of electromagnetic radiation. Science has long considered electromagnetism to be quite well understood, but back in the days when it was not, there was controversy. My favourite part of this controversy was the Tesla vs. Einstein battle. You see, the general theory of relativity is essential to electromagnetism's neat fit into the Standard Model, which could be viewed as the modern scientific paradigm. It is all explained in the beginning of this article.
What isn't explained, or very well known, was an experiment that is easily replicable, shows that light going against and with the earth's rotation travels at noticeably different rates, seeming to show that the speed of light is absolutely NOT independent of the direction of its source, which was what Einstein's theory posited. There are stories of Tesla demonstrating this experiment to Einstein, even stories of Einstein speaking about the incident and declaring that his theory was in doubt, but neither gets a lot of publicity. Why? They don't fit the popular paradigm.
The explanation, or theory as to why the speeds of light beams differed in speed when travelling in opposite directions, involved the Ether. What was the Ether? Well, read this definition carefully. Remember it. There's a video coming soon that will sound awfully familiar.
Ether, also spelled aether, also called luminiferous ether, in physics, a theoretical universal substance believed during the 19th century to act as the medium for transmission of electromagnetic waves (e.g., light and X-rays), much as sound waves are transmitted by elastic media such as air. The ether was assumed to be weightless, transparent, frictionless, undetectable chemically or physically, and literally permeating all matter and space. The theory met with increasing difficulties as the nature of light and the structure of matter became better understood. It was seriously weakened (1887) by the Michelson-Morley experiment, which was designed specifically to detect the motion of Earth through the ether and which showed that there was no such effect.
The Michelson-Morley experiment didn't measure light going in opposite directions, but perpendicular directions, therefore, the motion of the earth did not come into effect. This supported Einstein's theory of relativity, it supported the Standard Model and it fit into the popular paradigm of the time.
Here's a big however, however, as recently as 2012, the experiment that Tesla had shown Einstein, was replicated by a guy named Doug Marett. Guess what he found. Normally you would have to guess because I dare say nobody has ever heard of Doug Marett. His work received little publicity being outside the popular paradigm. So, although "Nature" magazine is quoted, I'm not giving you an article from any well respected sciency publication, but Forbes Magazine. Here you go. Good thing for Forbes or I probably wouldn't be able to produce any replication of that study.
As pointed out in the article, this may not disprove the special theory of relativity, but I think if we were objective and unbiased, we'd have to agree that this bears further investigation and experimentation. But it won't get it because... you guessed it, it doesn't fit the current paradigm. Back in his day, Tesla was ignored and dismissed by some as a whackjob who wasn't smart enough to understand modern science. But who was smarter than Tesla? Nobody! The difference between him and others in the scientific community that questioned him may have come from the fact he'd only had 2 years of formal university education, which allowed him to think outside the paradigm, or, think creatively at all. His comment in an interview when he was, I think, 79 years old, was poignant.
"The theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles, and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysacists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions have been proved."
As mentioned in last post, Tesla believed that if science were to investigate the non-physical, like the Ether, it would advance in a decade further than all the centuries before. But at the very heart of the modern paradigm is the secularization of science, an absolute dismissal, denial, even fear of the abstract, spiritual, infinite, etc. that is associated with faith in a divine or theological entity. As we'll see, a lot of theory that requires identical faith, though not in a god, but in highly theoretical, highly jargonized, highly complex explanations of simple things, is roundly accepted by the current scientific paradigm. Tesla, and I believe this has detracted from science. I mentioned that a couple of posts back as well, but let's get into some forinstances.
In a similar way to particles interacting with photons in electromagnetism, weak force describes how W and Z particles interact with electrons, quarks, neutrinos etc. We are told that photons have no mass, whereas W and Z have huge masses. They are some of the most massive particles known. The concept of mass raises inconsistencies with the Standard Model. To address these inconsistencies, physicists postulated that the Standard Model was incomplete.
Let me back up a bit so that I can explain this more bluntly. Elementary particles, such as those listed above, are the building blocks of the world around us. The Standard Model is based on the interactions of these particles, and also fields and symmetries that explain all things. Nicely and neatly. With just one problem: the math behind this model forbids elementary particles from having any mass. "Incomplete" was the scientific euphemism used to explain the situation whereby something the scientific community wanted (desperately needed) to be scientific, had been scientifically proven to be UNscientific. WRONG to the layman. In 1964 some decidedly unscientific science began to happen.
I remember reading an article online about the mathematician who first calculated this equation that was the potential demise of so many years of work for so many scientists. Would people have to give back Nobel Prizes? How could everything their research was based on be wr - wr-wr - wro ...? They couldn't even say it. But math is the king of all science. Math is at the base of the scientific pyramid outlined in Leon Lederman's book about the God Particle. He says it's because all scientists defer to mathematicians. In his words, "physicists defer only to the mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God (though you may be hard pressed to find a mathematician that modest)
I wish I could tell you his name. Or even show you that article. But, the day after I had read it, the article disappeared and I have never been able to find it since. Once again, it doesn't fit into the current scientific paradigm, so it's as elusive as God or the God particle. It mighta been Godel with the two dots over the o, or one of the members of the French Bourbeki group. I'm not sure, but we can be sure that in 1964, because of this disastrous news in the scientific community, some bass ackwards science started becoming a very useful part of the paradigm.
Any experimental scientist worth his weight in primordial sludge could tell you that the most important rule of science, the highest of all considerations is objectivity. Remove bias at all costs. If you start any experimentation with an ultimate goal in mind, you are defeated before you begin. Clear bias is established and objectivity is lost. Start at the beginning, not the end. Well, scientists all over the world had been told about the mathematical doomsday equation and were given personal homework assignments. Not in scientific experimentation, but in creativity. They had to come up with a believable way to explain how something without mass, could have mass. Literally, start at the end and work your way to the beginning. The reverse of good science.
Three groups of physicists almost simultaneously released papers on "spontaneous symmetry breaking." The totally theoretical concept of the "Higgs mechanism." In short, a way for something without mass to gain mass. Yes, they were told to make science where science did not exist, make something from nothing, this was both the assignment and the science. The exact concept they had been rejecting when the concept of God arose, "wrap it in purple clothes, call it science and ram it down the throats of a new generation of scientists until it is no longer questioned."
I believe the scientific community made a huge mistake that will someday be exposed by people more influential than I. That mistake being the recruitment of scientists for a job much better suited to science fiction writers. I feel almost certain that Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury could have come up with something infinitely more plausible, and probably more scientific than the eventual winners of the contest, Higgs and Bose. But before we get to them, and how most people know of them, and accept their Nobel Prize winning ideas, (I contend that most wouldn't if they looked a little closer) there are a few scientific Easter Eggs in their work that almost make me think they WANT to be exposed. But first, before you think I'm creating a conspiracy here, I have another article for you.
Here's a dandy by Charlie Wood, fittingly published in Quanta Magazine. "How Mathematical Hocus Pocus Saved Particle Physics." It's an article about something called "renormalization," which is a "hopes and prayers" technique that carefully concealed infinite quantities in order to deal with the change in physics from the study of particles to the study of fields. Richard Feynman called renormalization "a dippy process." "During renormalization, complicated submicroscopic capers tend to just disappear. They may be real, but they don’t affect the big picture. “Simplicity is a virtue,” Fendley said. “There is a god in this.”
If you think back to a couple of posts ago once again, there was a point in the sciency panel conversation at which I said that Neil deGrasse Tyson blundered his way out of submitting to an infinite number of smaller and smaller particles stating that we just don't have the ability to see them or photograph them. That'd be yer renormalization right there. Still being practiced.
Another example is at the atomic level where motion of atoms has been observed, many, including (believe it or not) Darwin have believed in a higher entity that set the universe and its laws into motion. This entity (being the capital letter N you almost always see when he uses the term "Nature" or "Natural Selection" in his "Origin.") saves his term, "Natural Selection" from being an oxymoron, but that has been ignored, suppressed or misunderstood by the majority of science. As for the motion of atoms, well, as Lederman says, "Motion was simply a given." Richard Dawkins once asked where the matter that swirled into the Big Bang came from. For that matter, where did the swirling come from? His response was a dismissive, "We're working on that." This rather than the Ether, or God, or a Prime Mover. An indelicate choice if you ask me. But maybe Higgs and Bose can come to the rescue.
Let's start with Bose. Not Jaydish Chandra Bose, whose face is featured on the 50 pound note of England and who was besides a large contributor to the scientific community in India, a WRITER of science fiction. Hence, I think he would have been a better choice, along with Asimov and Bradbury. But, no, not him.
Satyendra Nath Bose worked with Einstein in studying a class of particles that obey certain statistics. They were named after him. Bosons. What statistics did they obey you ask? Well the most interesting is probably "spin." Spin, doesn't mean spin as we might understand it. I'd like to say here that the more modern definition of spin applies, as in politics when one knowingly provides a biased interpretation of something, but I don't want to colour your reading with my opinion. Oh dear me! Look what I've done! I've been all scientific and already done that! Tsk tsk tsk. Here's a video that won't make the meaning of "spin" in the boson sense, much clearer at all:
Sooooo... if you didn't watch the vid, brace yourself. Spin is what makes particles act like magnets. Relativity, standard method, and science demands its existence, but we don't know what the hell it is. That's right, that's what the conclusion of this video was. The young narrator goes on to say, "Maybe there are some properties of physics that we can never understand and maybe spin is one of them." Note that in the beginning of the video, the young narrator says she will explain how we KNOW spin exists, but we can't explain it. She didn't explain how we know it exists at all but I think that's one thing (maybe the only thing) about spin I understand. Let me refer you back to the quotes at the very beginning of this blog post. She's the younger generation who has been told something that will eventually be accepted not because it's known, but because its challengers are all dead.
Another of the characteristics of the boson is that, unlike a fermion, there is no limit to the number of bosons that can occupy the same quantum state or place in space. This, I believe to be, the most literary characteristic of it. And a good addition to its story. Obviously, if it has no mass, an infinite amount of these particles could fill an infinitely small amount of space. A lot of the oft avoided infinity talk in this one tiny particle...
For this little bit of science fiction, the wrong Nobel Prize was awarded to be sure. It's not science, it's literature and I'm sure many could do better than its authors. He got the Nobel Prize because his boson fit the prevailing paradigm, in fact was absolutely necessary for it. So I'm sure Bose won't be returning his Nobel Prize or the million bucks it came with. And his was the less important LESS theoretical of the two-part explanation as to how something with no mass can have mass. Let's move on to our second savior of the scientific community in 1964, Pete Higgs.
Like the boson, symmetry breaking is a process we "know" exists, but we can't explain. An auspicious place to start! Electro Weak Symmetry Breaking, EWSB, is considered proven and believed responsible for the mass of fundamental particles, but ask even Peter Higgs to explain it and you'll get analogies and story telling. Not quite as good as Lederman's alien soccer, but we'll get to that at the climax. Here's another video to explain the Higgs Field. Think back to that description of the Ether I gave you, maybe re-read it before you watch.
Oh look at that! Another scientific CONTEST. Explain the Higgs field. Anybody else picturing a couple of tailors trying to sell us a suit of highly fashionable invisible clothes here? If we don't believe these non-explanations, why, we're just not up on our physics. Possibly not smart enough. Tell me how smart this sounds: The Higgs field is everywhere. It's infinite! What the hell, bro? Weren't we just trying to avoid infinity a few seconds ago? Yeah I know but you just have to trust me on this, it's infinite. So what happens, see, is the boson has no mass, it doesn't exist, but it's moving through space and as it passes through the Higgs field it pops into existence, gains mass for about 9 one hundred thousandths of a second, then pops out of existence again. But it leaves residual matter that we can't identify, but assume is remnants of the Higgs field that was the result of the explosion created by smashing two theoretical particles together at high speed.
Now do you see why we needed Asimov and Bradbury? Or maybe just the other Bose. First of all, how do you know the boson is there if it has no mass? It exists but it doesn't exist. Trust me. Okay, how do you know it's moving? Same answer. Trust me. Okay, how did it start moving? Motion is a given. Trust me. Okay, if the Higgs field is infinite and everywhere, how can it be passed through? Uh, we're certain of that because of the boson popping into existence? You don't sound too sure. Okay, uh, it's a lattice. Okay, one more question - but in several parts: 1. A particle has no mass, and no energy - without motion, it would not exist, correct? So while you're somehow measuring the motion of a non-existent God particle (and remember, no measure of a non-existent God has ever been allowed by science) is it the passing into existence or the passing back out of existence that you feel will necessarily, even though you have a highly theoretical particle and a highly theoretical field, leave a telltale remnant that can be assumed to be evidence of the Higgs field? Part two: How do you not know that the new particle you assumed to be evidence of the Higgs field is not actually a new stage in the infinitely reducible nature of all particles. Part three: Isn't the smashing of a particle into other particles more likely to result in a smaller particle and not evidence of some infinite field that that particle must inhabit constantly? And since God doesn't exist scientifically because of His lack of mass, how can you be certain that the new particle you have discovered isn't evidence of the mass of God, or, indeed, God Himself, something you desperately don't want? Why is it assumed to be the evidence of the Higgs field, something you desperately NEED?
I didn't make any of that up. Yet people will try to tell you with a straight face that the Higgs Boson has been discovered. They'll take offense when you call it the God particle, but shouldn't because it is just as, or more, highly elusive to prove. They'll tell you it was discovered in 2012, but it wasn't. They'll tell you it was confirmed in March of 2013, but it wasn't. Not the way science is supposed to confirm things anyway. But this is the new science. The current paradigm chooses theories that they wish to express as facts and then just goes ahead and does so without rigorous testing or evidence. Then they create stories for the public to convince us. Perhaps the best of which was Leon Lederman's alien soccer game. I think the Higgs boson will eventually fall out of fashion by the method outlined in Lederman's book. He wrote, "A new particle is predicted when a synthesis of existing data by a perceptive theorist SEEMS to demand its existence. More often than not, it doesn't exist, and that particular theory suffers. Whether it succumbs or not depends on the resilience of the theorist."
The resilience of the God particle theorists is admirable. Thomas Huxley once said that "The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by and ugly fact." The God particle theorists have kept those ugly facts from surfacing and have placated the masses with "proof" of its existence like the following:
Imagine an intelligent race of being from the planet Twilo. They're basically like us except for one thing: they are unable to see black or white. A contingent of Twiloans comes to Earth on a goodwill mission and are taken to the most popular social even on Earth, a World Cup Soccer match. They watch with polite, but confused looks on their faces. They can't see the ball so they are perplexed by the motions of the players, referee, and fans. They study the players and their motions, make charts, graphs, and rules. They deduce symmetry in that there are mirror players for each player on a team. Then one Twiloan postulates the existence of an invisible ball. His postulation was formed upon noticing a hemispherical bulge in the net moments before the referee declared each new score. The supposition of a ball fits with all of their observations, rules and theories. They conclude there MUST be a ball.
If you consider all of the observations, rules and theories of science and nature, I think this is a gym dandy analogy for God! For something so highly theoretical as the Higgs boson, not so much. But I certainly wouldn't consider it PROOF or declare that the soccer ball or God was discovered absent any concrete data. And that, for both, I am fairly certain we don't have. What's more, I doubt we ever will. But I'm okay with that. I don't need to believe that I understand everything.
I find it fascinating and endlessly entertaining conversation to philosophize and theorize about this sort of thing, as well as other folks' theories about this sort of thing! Why, for instance, is it so easy for people to accept the Higgs field hypothesis, for which there is virtually no experimental data, awarding it prizes, honours and money, yet reject the earlier hypothesis of the Ether and give it no credence even though there is at least one legitimate experiment that makes it seem more plausible than the Higgs field?
I won't even mention the concept of strong bonds, the 3rd part of the standard model we didn't get into. But I know someone, a guy who is an incredibly productive writer for the science department of Forbes Magazine, Ethan Siegel, who will! It's about string theory, something a little more current. Read this article if it's the only one on this post you read. The first paragraph tells you that it requires a lot of assumptions that are not supported by one iota of scientific evidence. Again, don't trust me if you think (and you'd be right if you did) that I'm a conspiracy theorist, trust people who know more about this stuff than I ever will.
The good old Yang-Mills Theory! I recall getting into it, perhaps on this blog, many moons ago. I didn't support it then when it was en vogue, and I don't support it now. Super symmetry. Again, it sounds more like science fiction than science. Each particle has a similar, but more super, superpartner particle? Please! Am I at all surprised that exactly zero have been discovered?
Compactification seems to be another "hand-waving" idea that compels scientists to ignore certain difficult parts of science, much like renormalization.
Why is string theory so attractive? Do I need to say it again? It is the perfect fit for the current paradigm.
So for any of you who read my post a couple posts ago in which I talked about a drunken conversation with a co-worker after both losing our jobs, I got into this a little bit. But, as always, I felt it behooved me to elabourate on the scant details. This'll give even the most intellectual of my readers food for thought. I can't see how this current paradigm can survive much longer. It seems to be losing support, and conversely, a more spiritual, non-physical paradigm might be evolving. We can only hope. I think it would be great for the world!
Updating my scientific view of the world and including some of the info I've availed myself of over the year, is something I tend to do around this time. One other thing I tend to do is talk about the World Jr. Hockey Championships, mostly because it is a decidedly lighter topic than the heavily intellectual science and philosophy you see in this post, and it's more fun. That'll likely be my next post. See you then!
There have been a few books that, because of their pure power, I have been saving until I consider myself worthy to read them. Humility, or possibly my attempt to create its verisimilitude, (in extreme arrogance), has caused me to shelve these books until such time that I perceive myself "worthy" of reading them. The top of the list is, of course, Ulysses. James Joyce has driven many more men into the grave, and/or insanity with this tome, than Canadian author A. M. Klein, I'm sure. I read reviews of Klein from his era that describe him as an up and coming genius in a time when Canadian literature was at its best. And I've read his contemporaries describing what occurred inside his head as bees buzzing in a hive after his obsession with Ulysses drove him utterly mad. For me, I think that's a (short) trip I'm not quite ready to embark upon.
In my salad days, what I considered poetry fairly oozed out of every pore of my skin. I was an unapologetically profuse producer of poetry for many years. I have exactly zero of those poems to offer as proof of this and I thank every muse, inspiration or deity that I can for that fact. I think I'd be embarrassed to read the stuff I was offering, nay bestowing upon the non-poetic souls who knew me in my youth. Who knows? There might be a few that withstood the maturity of my literary taste. But I doubt it.
This brings us to Rainer Maria Rilke. I had the (extraordinarily lucky and) good sense to allay the readership of his Letters To a Young Poet, because, despite my overestimation of my poetic prowess, I actually WAS a person trying his best to live a life of humility at the time. As you can imagine, the two sentiments were like the proverbial angel and devil on my opposing shoulders. But I went with the right one. Until now. At the age of 53, I feel I have had enough wisdom shitkicked into me to avail myself of the advice that is given in the "Letters to a Young Poet." I have read the Tao Tae Ching, perhaps a little prematurely, and I feel it wasn't a bad choice. I accidentally stumbled upon some advanced thinking in the OTHER works of J.D. Salinger when I was young, and although I have re-read them all and continuously gain new insights with age, I don't think I was overwhelmed by reading that as a teen. There are some other examples too, so, while I may not have reached the academic, intellectual, and most importantly, the poetic maturity required to gain maximum edification from this work, I started to read it. Yesterday. I read the first letter. And today, while taking a shit (you didn't have to know that, but it comes to bear) I re-read the first chapter again.
In the first chapter, the first letter, of the letters, Rilke advises Kappus to take refuge, TAKE REFUGE, in our own day to day life. If your day to day life seems shit, blame yourself. There are no poor and trivial places. Especially not in the explosively creative pen of a poet. So back to the taking a shit, I SHOULD be able to, but won't (count your lucky stars) write a poem about that. It is my fate to write. I have (quite obviously) assumed that and am willing to bear it. So it is at this point that I will share with you a poem that arose from a very rich and non-trivial experience I had this very night. I apologize in advance for the undoubtedly OVERexplanation that is likely to follow:
Taped my hockey stick
giving instruction to an
audience of none.
I thank you.
I may sound like I'm kidding, but I'm not. I actually did this tonight and it was an emotionally charged.... see, this is the part where I explain and ruin the whole thing. Let me try to give some background. That won't ruin one of, like, a handful of poems I've written since university, will it?
In fact, no! I'm not going to say any more. I'll let you imagine the longing for home that comes from being forced to work in a foreign country. I will let you contemplate the thousands of hours spent alone shooting tennis balls and pucks against garage doors, or into nets that are patched and re-patched so many times there are scarcely enough original pieces of netting left to make Cheryl Tiegs' bra.
Another image I'm sure is representative of my longing for things not of Korea that has led me to this little poem tonight. But I'm positive there'll be like one or two people who have never seen this image so it won't be shocking to you in the least. I, however, could write several more haiku about this picture! It holds a very special place in my wank bank. Let's move on, shall we?
And it probably won't do my argument any harm when I tell you that I haven't felt a hockey stick in my hands, MUCH less the nose-stiffening, ice crystallizing sub-sub zero temperatures at which I routinely went out to the public (free, yes that's right, FREE) rinks to skate around and blast a few slapshots, maybe have a game of shinny. That right there could be a(n) haiku. Let's see, 5 - 7 - 5
Skate around and blast
a few slapshots and maybe,
a game of shinny.
I thank you again.
If you're like me, I see a long closed door opening up just from reading one letter in this book. If you've read it, please, don't tell me what happens next. I'm probably going to continue on because I see good from reading it, not bad. I am glad I have cracked it open after all these years of waiting. Maybe I AM ready for it. I certainly haven't been improving my poetic skills as a way of preparing, but, who can say it won't still work out? We'll have to see....
I am going to embark upon a holiday season that will include some things that I haven't done (in Korea) ever. I WILL do things that I've done in Canada, but not in Korea. So don't be surprised if you see another haiku or two on this blog.
Not bad news, just inconvenient. You see, I would have had to re-apply for the job that I am finishing up now, and there would have been no guarantee of getting it. Also, they're upping the hours without upping the pay, and I believe they're going to raise the class size as well. Next semester, if the almost 1000 new cases of Coronavirus in Korea today is any indication, will be online again, and although the classrooms at the uni where I teach, can't hold 40 students comfortably, Zoom can. What I DO know is that there will be a writing element added to all classes. That means writing assignments from all your students. Probably weekly. That's a huge amount of my least favourite part of teaching: correcting writing.
At any rate, I won't need to weigh the pros and cons due to the fact that much like many other places around Korea, Gongju University is accepting only advanced degrees next semester. So no master's, no doctorate, no job. This proves they have less interest in quality of teacher and/or teaching, than just ease of operation. People with advanced degrees can get E-1 visas and I've had one of those before, they make things much easier. Even KOREANS are suffering from the mistreatment of foreigners by their immigration laws and workers. I believe they purposely try to make things more difficult for foreign teachers here and it hasn't subsided in any way since my first year, 1997, it has increased. But only for us lowly bachelor's degree holders. In 1997 when I came here for the first time, there was a palpable academic respect that was shown by my adult students, and taught to be shown by my youngsters. That level of respect is what is now only offered to master's and doctorate holders over here teaching English. They are rarely better for the job in any way but the simplicity of getting all the paperwork done to legally hire them. And I suppose less bureaucracy-induced stress. So schools are getting tired of dealing with their shit. Not ours.
So, I went out with the other three teachers on Thursday night after we found out at least three of the four of us won't have our contracts renewed. We sat at a pub and talked for a while. Two of the other teachers left early and two of us stayed late. We continued drinking and talking. One of the issues we stumbled upon in our increasingly philosophical discourse, was a guy he brought up named Claude Shannon, who in the late 40's had a massive impact on technology, and still impacts the tech we use today. Either Kevin had had too many glasses of wine to explain it fully, something a sober person would have difficulty with, or I had had too many beers to understand it fully, something a sober person would have difficulty with. Or a combo of both. But I knew it intrigued me and I wrote his name down on a piece of paper so I could look it up. Fascinating! This is something that remains a fun topic being discussed by physicists, philosophers, writers, scientists, and just regular people who are curious about what the hell we're doing here.
This is gonna get technical, but don't worry, you don't need to understand the technical part. I don't really think I do, myself, but I'm gonna do my best to describe, or at least give the broad strokes about what is blowing everybody's minds about this Claude Shannon and his error correcting source codes. What he did was he took the intuition behind information, formally defined it as a mathematical quantity, then plugged it into the idea of entropy within nature and he came up with what became known as Shannon's Entropy. What is entropy? I'll let Ted explain it.
It's a measurement of disorder, or probabilities of natural, physical processes. Energy in objects is constantly being rearranged inside the containers, the bonds, between particles. These containers are called "quanta," the quantums in quantum physics. It may seem random, but scientists noticed that it tends to happen in patterns which favour high entropy, the spreading out of energy. Low entropy, high concentration of energy (more energy=more heat). Statistically, energy movement can be predicted to an accuracy of close to perfection in most objects with lots of particles, bonds and energy. In this way, Claude Shannon devised a way to theoretically use the notions of entropy as a guide to compressing information into codes (1's and 0's) in the most efficient way in order to enable its recovery without distortion. For example, if a Shakespeare play were to be coded, presumably the letter E would have the simplest code, like 1, and Q might have the most complex code, like 10011010 or something. In actuality, a person could probably work out a system of blocks of several letters together that would be even more efficient, such as "ion" or "tion" or "ing."
Now comes the fun part: Jim Gates. Ever hoid of him? Me neither. But he's the face of the theory that we may be living in a computer simulation. He's finding the exact same kind of correction coding built into natural biological processes! Could our universe just be a giant computer simulation? I KNOW! It's crazy, right? I was joking Thursday night about the Matrix and that I must be some kind of glitch in that computer. Maybe we're all viruses that are eventually deleted. You can imagine where the conversation went.
I actually listened to about half of a 2-hour long rap session between David Chalmers, a philosopher, Zohreh Davoudi, a quantum physicist, Jim Gates, Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist, Max Tegmark another physicist, and the moderator was Neil deGrasse Tyson. I was quite proud that in our drunken state, we covered a lot of the same ground these highly qualified thinkers did while they were, presumably, sober. The arguments I was making were closest to Lisa Randall's. She is the rationalist in the group and began by saying that it's quite an unbelievably audacious assumption that if there were simulators, they'd come up with US. Similar to my glitch comment. She also asked a question I asked in, "Why do we want this to be true?" I mentioned Thursday that it probably goes back to the secularization of science, which many believe began in the 1960's but I'd say it was long before. So would Tesla.
I also mentioned that it was just an update of Rene Descartes' questioning of how one can know if one exists or if life is a dream being controlled by an outside force. His conclusion, of course, was the famous, "I think, therefore I am." I told my fellow conversationalists Thursday night of my favourite philosophical graffiti I scratched on the wall of a Lakehead University toilet stall: "I stink, therefore I am." You gotta up your graffiti game at university. David Chalmers comments that this whole theory is not really new, just Descartes 2.0.
Mixing God and Nature (which I believe to be the same thing) scares some scientists. Zohreh mentioned that if all of this were actually a computer simulation, it would be finite and imperfect. Lisa, and I agreed. So in order to verify a computer simulation, we'll need to find some glitches. Dave commented that, well... any glitches in the simulation could be simulated. Sigh... philosophers!
I found it interesting when she brought up cosmic rays and said they have far more energy, BY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE, than anything they've come up with at the hadron collider at CERN in Switzerland. And she oughta know, she specializes in that sort of thing. I think she believe they won't find any flaws though. She seemed to believe in the irreducible complexity of the universe and infinity both ways. Tyson accepted our infinitely expansive universe, but he didn't explain very well why he doesn't buy its infinite reductability. Because we can't take photos of them there can't be any smaller particles? Haven't scientists been proven wrong several times about that? Atomic, sub-atomic, sub-sub-atomic... who can say it's not endless? Lisa made a pretty snide (but cool) comment about that blunder. Something like, "Oh do you know something we don't know?" I think she was expanding on that point when she commented that in physics, we don't prove theories, we rule them out. We'll never be able to rule out infinity either direction because we'll never have the data. Basically for the reason Tyson gave for not believing there are infinitely smaller and smaller particles, she believes there could be. Here's the diff: I think she's okay with that. I don't think Tyson is. I don't think a LOT of scientists are. And I think THAT'S pretty audacious. And, detrimental to science. The non-physical, the next great frontier in Science. If it ever gets there.
By this point in our conversation, the bar was closed and the owner was drinking and philosophizing with Kevin and me. I brought up something that I think they just might have gotten around to in the second hour of the panel discussion above: The idea that could have a panel discussion all on its own: can there be "soul" in a computer simulation? I brought it up carefully using music as the example, but I believe things like writing, art, love, and laughter are things that can't, and I dare say never will be reproduced artificially.
Other than apes and rats, humans are the only species known to laugh. Why? Author and teacher, David Foster Wallace says that both great stories and great jokes depend on what communications theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is when a certain amount of information is withheld, but evoked in a kind of communication designed to create an explosion of associative connection. Get it?
How about art, music, movies? A good song is a good song. How can you tell? Would it even be possible for something so uniquely human to be mathematized or scientificated? There's art being created and papers being written by computers that LOOK original. But I think the originality is in the programming, myself. Alphago beat the world champ at Go, a highly intuitive game (so I'm told). So is it intuitive or just programmed to appear so? Are our feelings, personalities, hearts and souls, mere lines of code? This is where the whole thing falls apart for me.
We ended the evening downshifting to talk about our common work experience, mostly disgusting work experience. Dirty jobs. Then we all went home. But it was an interesting evening.
One of the main reasons I started writing this blog, lo, these many years ago, was so I could go back and read it once in a while to remember some of the times I'd forgotten, good and bad, and some of the things that were on my mind. I just started randomly picking out posts and giving them a read. I read about a dream and a nightmare I had when I was living in China. A LOT of stuff came back to me about life there. I was surprised to read that I was STUDYING Chinese! I don't remember a word now.
I read a couple of very well written, if I do say so myself, posts that could have been written yesterday, but were written 3 or 4 years ago. One was about the David Letterman interview of Barack Obama on his new, bearded, show. It might have been his first. And the thing that Obama said that stuck with me was how different people can do an online search for the same thing, I think he used "pyramids" or "Egypt" or something like that as an example, and we ALL get completely different stuff. He said that information about us is so well known that we only get fed by social media, the information we already believe and this is going to divide us and ruin our world. We don't share a common baseline of facts. I said in the post that he's exactly right and we are divided over a million secondary issues and it distracts us from the two or three main issues that we all need to be united and fighting against, namely, nuclear war, environmental destruction and the greed that fuels both.
I've gotten away from posting on things that I think will be interesting to read about years down the road and spent almost all my time posting about Donald fucking Trump. Even if I DO decide to read this 10 years down the road, if my blog and I both survive, those will most certainly be the posts I DON'T read. And that's exactly what his purpose was! He was a big distraction. A divisive, polarizing freak show who diverted me from more important topics I should have been posting about.
I watched a documentary a couple days ago called "The Social Dilemma," and it hit me pretty hard. There wasn't much to it really, I just couldn't get it out of my head. It's only been a couple days, but it's been constantly there. Nagging me. What were all these former workers for Google, Facebook, Twitter, NVIDEA, Instagram, YouTube, Firefox, and some other well known web giants saying that was basically the same? What was their common purpose that they didn't really want to admit to themselves while they were doing their jobs? One after another they don't quite exactly come right out and say, but sort of intimated that they were data miners whose job it was to create device addiction to opiate the masses.
This is one of the best memes I've seen in a while. Not just because it's accurate, (Facebook HAS that much information about you!!!), but because this all seems trivial enough to be humourous to us. And it's like that because, what can we do? Without our computers? Without our internet? Our PHONES? Good LORD, we'd never survive! Even those of us who have survived, in fact THRIVED, for YEARS without all our electronic crap, say, think and actually believe this!
I had a bit of an epiphany today while teaching a class. It hasn't happened since my youth that I can remember and that's most likely because of the technology I'm decrying. It's also an epiphany killer, it turns out. I was talking about "soft skills" teaching job interview English to a class today. I had to describe soft skills and what they were so I got into this explanation about how we all do things like problem solving, critical thinking, showing leadership, thinking outside the box, working as a team, conflict resolution, building relationships and such every day. Some of us are better than others at some of this stuff, but we all have these skills and we use them all the time. It's what separates us from the machines, computers and robots. These soft skills are becoming more valuable with increased automation because these are the only skills machines don't, as yet, have. And we improve all of them by just being around other people.
What occurred to me was not how close robots and A.I. have come to approximating things like thinking, creativity and even sensitivity to the feelings of other people, but how the opposite is taking place. I realized that I might be preaching my sermon to the inconvincible. It occurred to me that with "social" media increasing the number of the antisocial, "smart" phones making people stupider, social distancing creating an ever socially distant population, and this ever increasing tribalism decreasing the enjoyment, desire and necessity of human interaction, people just might be becoming more and more like machines at a comparable rate to machines becoming more like people.
Is this intentional and can it be taken advantage of by forces of evil? Obama suggested the Russians could and HAD taken advantage of it already. I wouldn't have narrowed it down that far although Putin is most certainly among those evil few I'm thinking of. Those few entities that make up the last on my list of three pivotal concerns we are being distracted from, namely the greedy.
I woke up this morning and, as I have for about half a year now, wiped two eyes full of caked eye boogers and a few fingerfulls of not yet caked eye boogers out of them. I'll do the same tomorrow. It comes and goes in direct proportion to how much I use my smartphone, but it's never completely gone. It may be permanent for all I know. It is without a doubt caused by my smartphone. I stopped playing the game I play most for a while because I couldn't update it. My eye boogers almost went away. I told an optometrist and two doctors that it's pinkeye and that it gets worse when I use my phone more. Both agreed with the pinkeye diagnosis but pshawed the smartphone theory. This is a country whose largest industry is semiconductors, smartphones, electronics, 5G and things of that sort. Hell, my phone is a Samsung. No doctor is gonna diagnose Samsung Conjunctivitis! (Or should it be called "semiconductivitis?") Not in these here parts! It makes one wonder the extent to which health problems and risks caused by 5G have and will be ignored and/or covered up. I hate like shit to bring him up cuz it'd be so nice to have a post without his name, but since it's already been included in this post already, like Trump reckons, there won't be any 5G health problems or eye problems caused by smartphones IF you don't test for them.
If you knew the Korean collective consciousness like I knew the Korean collective consciousness, you might be as terrified as I am that this is the future of all countries. I have listed many examples of what Orwell might call something like Samethink in Koreans before. It's scary to behold. Fan death. Four season. Dokdo. Scientific alphabet. Dan Geun. No gay people in Korea. Wivestales and myths believed as fact. Christianity! But like aggressively dogmatic Christianity and beliefs that are accepted on faith alone. Even in microcosm they are just so user friendly and programmable! I'll give you a good example. I have 10 classes. We have the same curriculum in every class. And every week I teach the same lesson to all of them. That lesson usually ends with something fun. I do a unit a week and I make a quiz on Kahoot, a game site, for every unit. The students go to the site and put a code in and their names and we all play. In one class every single student puts his/her student number AND name. I never told them to do this. In fact, I don't want them to because I don't know their numbers and sometimes I can only read their numbers. But every single one of them does it. Only a few students did it the first time we played, but within a few Kahoots, all of them were doing it. Nobody told anybody, they just followed the crowd obediently and unquestioningly. I am 100% positive this comes from the antisocial tendencies that are also being obediently and unquestioningly adopted by the entire country. They are becoming more robotic all the time!
And these skills that make us most human are the ones that are being removed. Is it a plan to hasten automation masterminded by the rich and greedy billionaires of the world? I've blogged before about the purposeful dumbing down of many countries, like Canada, that were starting to produce logical, well informed, critical thinking citizens who aren't so easy to robotize. Could it be so that we don't have ANY skills that make us competitive in the job market against mechanization? There could come a point at which robots are so like humans and humans are so like robots that humanity becomes all but obsolete. Is this our future? Is this what the money sickened lunatics who run this planet actually WANT? And can we please take our minds off skin colour, patriotism, religion, political party, or whatever clubs or tribes we subscribe to and demand proper education and employment? Because human obsolescence is NOT what we want?!?!
You don't have to run for office, just visit a friend. I will not say that Covid 19 is a virus created for the purposes of weakening our social skills, but it certainly isn't strengthening them! It's Christmas time. Set up a Zoom meeting with a friend or family member you can't visit in person. Play a game, have a beer, smoke a cigar with someone you CAN visit. Catch up with people, meet new ones. It's just too easy to fall for the defeatism of "people are so ugly to each other!" I believe there ARE a lot of people being awful to their brothers and sisters, but I still don't believe they are the majority. Though it may sound trite, particularly at this time of year, it isn't cool to give up on the concept of peace on earth. Helping one another. Co-operating and getting along is not only the right thing to do, it's the only way we are going to save our species. It's easier and a lot more fun to love the good guys than hate the bad guys, and maybe more than ever, it's also more vital to our survival.
I am setting a goal for myself this Christmas season. Be the change you want to see and so forth. I am going to hug at least one Trump supporter. I don't hate Trump supporters, I just don't agree with them. But I still value their humanity and compassion. At least they're not robots! If it weren't for mail cancellation from Korea to Canada, I'd send out Christmas cards. I still might find a way to do so. But I plan to call some people. Maybe Zoom some others. I've been as guilty as anyone of burrowing down into my protective hole at this time when we need to be doing the opposite. I hope I can encourage others to do the same. Not by this blogpost, but by my actions. I'll keep you... er... posted.
What a BONKERS year! Here I sit after about 5 hours of sleep wide awake 4 hours before I have to teach my first class of the day. The old dilemma of should I try to stay awake or should I go back to bed is the least of my woes this morning. We had a confirmed case on campus. Also, I had a student who got tested for Covid and was absent the next class. No word on whether he tested positive or is just quarantining to be on the safe side. Possible contact with Covid? Who knows? I'll be the last to be sure. I'm actually surprised at the reaction of management. Or the NON-reaction as it were. I thought there'd be a precautionary round of mandatory Covid tests, but no. I thought at least I would have to get tested, but not as yet. THIS time I'd not only do a test, but I'd welcome one (that I didn't have to pay for). The reason I say that is a bit of a meander, but I have a spare four hours so...
Back to last weekend. I enjoyed the birthday of a young sport named Roman who I've grown quite fond of over the years the Peet/Spiwaks and I have spent together in Korea. This is "The Fam"
They're my favourite reality show of all time. Heather, on the left, was the first one I met in the midst of my second year in Korea. Or was it my third? Anything before 2000, and a good deal after, is fuzzy for me. It's a good thing I have Heather to remember those years for me! We worked at Pagoda in Seoul in '98 and '99 probably. I'll confirm with her this weekend... possibly. Getting ahead of myself.
Roman is the tall drink of water center back. Almost as tall as Mike. Maybe he IS by now. This pic was taken when they were younger, although, as one of my favourite comedians, who left us too soon, Mitch Hedberg, would point out, EVERY picture of them was taken when they were younger. Ken (Pap) and Kathleen (Oma), Heather's folks complete the back row. They have visited Korea several times and I feel like they're almost part of our family. Ar ar. The front row left to right is Kelly, Iryna and Reilly.
So we spent Roman's birthday, last Saturday, playing games in their house in Pyeongtaek. We played Coup, Exploding Kittens and Yahtzee. Roman has been notoriously socially distant since the whole Covid thing, so I thought I'd scare him by saying I was going to give him a big kiss for his birthday. Not that he's been unsociable, just careful. He hasn't come with us yet on our semi-regular Sunday outings for Korean feastage. Usually sam gyup sal and kalbi (BBQ) but last time dalk kalbi (spicy chicken mix). We've been packing up leftovers we saved for Roman and taking them home. Anyway, I got him a mini humidifier in the shape of a Hershey's Kiss... to his great relief.
Sunday morning I commented that I must have slept well, because when I sleep well, I snore, and my throat was sore. Not the throat really, but that taint of skin between the throat and nose that's neither and both at the same time. Sunday was pretty low key. I didn't mind missing our feast, most likely because of the bottle of vodka I drank during game night. We lounged and played a few more games during the day. Had pizza instead of Korean and then Mike drove me home. I live in Cheonan, not far from Pyeongtaek by car, but I can't figure out how to go from my place to theirs in less than two hours. So Mike often picks me up and drives me home. We have great conversations (about Trump and sometimes other stuff) on the way. It's a thousand times nicer than taking public transit home! Mike should probably be president really.
So Monday rolls around and I still have the tickle in my throat. But not enough to stop me from getting a lot of marking done and working out. I do aerobics and push-ups and some weights in my apartment. The next day, Tuesday, my longest day (3 two-hour classes back to back to back) the ague took hold. I still had the sore throat, but wasn't coughing. I had a runny nose, sniffles, sneezing, nose blowing and an annoying as all get out leaking eye! NEVER had that before! My right eye, just the one, kept overflowing. I was wiping it constantly during my classes, hoping my students wouldn't think I was getting emotional about tag questions and present perfect verb tense. Six straight hours of Zoom is harsh at the best of times, but I was never happier than Tuesday at 4:30ish when I finished that day!
I made a stirfry and other than a couple of oranges and a lot of liquids, that was all I ate that day. Around 6 o'clock. I was exhausted, but because I get hungry again before I start to digest any meal (which leads to my constant reflux) I stayed up as late as I could hoping I could get a little sleep. I knew that'd be asking too much. I even had a hot lemon cold drink, (ha ha - didn't realize when I was writing that - I mean, of course a hot in temperature cold and flu drink) Theraflu, in hopes of stopping the nose from running and knocking me out for at least a couple of hours. Well it did. For a couple of hours. The rest of the night was spent tossing, turning, blowing nose, tossing, turning, blowing nose, tossing, turning, blowing nose. I was a dehydrated, stuffed up mess in the morning with the added symptom of both ears starting to ache.
I get colds every year in Korea. I remember, even without asking Heather, that in my first year here I had 9 colds! It's all the contact and all the extra people. But that night I had WILD dreams, even when I nodded off for a few seconds! I was startling myself awake with the crazy dreams and with shortness of breath. I dreamt once that night that I was playing NFL football and was at the bottom of a gang tackle. I could still breathe but just barely. Then someone (I think it was William The Refrigerator Perry but who knows with MY dreams?) shifted and my whole face was smothered in flab. I couldn't breathe. I woke up gasping for breath, blew my clogged nose, took a leak, hawked a smoked oyster into the toilet and went back to bed. Not back to sleep. It was like that all night so by the end of the night, the inevitable thought that was startling me awake was, "Do I have Covid?!"
I'm lucky my classes on Wednesday don't start until 1:00 because it took me the whole night and all morning to get enough sleep, a little at a time, to tackle the day. Just barely enough. I felt, and looked like shit. But I sneezed, sniffled and blew my nose all the way through my 4 hours of classes Wednesday. I didn't eat much that day. Just leftover stirfry and oranges. Some nuts. I decided that if I felt crappy the next day, I'd get checked for Covid. But I got up for my 9 AM class feeling fine! Not much of a runny nose and no runny eye. No cough and, aided by another cup of Theraflu, a nice sleep. I finished classes at 3 and went downtown to get some groceries. Then I got home and WORKED OUT! I was LOADED with energy!
SO weird! A 48-hour flu? This morning I'm coughing, but not from a cold, just my requisite morning reflux coughing. My nose isn't running and I don't have that stuffed head feeling. At least no more than usual. I don't feel quite as good as yesterday, but I haven't showered or had breakfast yet. Just a coffee and a lemon tea. I really think I could go to the Thanksgiving soiree at the Fam's place tomorrow if it happens.
Part II of the drama. I messaged Heather and told her of my suffering saying I was not sure if it's be such a good idea for me to go to what they call "Friendsgiving." They do it every year and, God bless Heather and Mike, they make a lot of people, including me, feel a lot better with their awesome Thanksgiving turkey spreads every year! The friends and the taste of home are always a highlight of the year. BUT, this is 2020 in' it?
This was on their poster for this year, and they're already listing the recommended use of masks, 6 feet of separation, glove usage etc. that the military suggest. The US military could even raise the threat level from Bravo to Charlie, then NObody'd be able to go anywhere! So it's by no means a certainty this year. But what HAS been?
And on top of all that, when I chatted with Heather, she told me they all have colds too! Apparently, Iryna brought home a cold and shared it generously. When I was at their place last weekend I joked that their upcoming Thanksgiving party was sure to be a super-spread! Little did I know... With over 300 cases Tue and Wed, and 553 yesterday in Korea, the spike is affecting everyone! I was going to buy a burger at McDonald's yesterday and they stopped me at the door and asked for my passport!
I won't be surprised if 2020 is a year without a Friendsgiving. Another thing Covid has ripped us off of this year. Although I have much to be thankful for this year, I'll be most thankful about this year being put behind us, Thanksgiving party or not. Happy Thanksstealing I guess.
Watch that video all the way to the end. See if it doesn't put you in mind of a certain electile dysfunctional orange hued loser. Eh? Socrates pointed out the biggest flaw in democracy way back when it began in ancient Greece. It took the world a couple millennia and a half to "elect" the apotheosis of Socrates' democratic nightmare. I'm sure you can recall the following illustration of it:
The above video has to be my favourite in a LONG time! It's just dripping with delicious irony! Right from the start when it includes a pic of Xi Jinping in front of the Parthenon when the narrator says, "So many leaders of democracies like to be photographed there." The Adeimantus argument that allowing the uneducated anywhere near a vote is irresponsible, well can we think of any better timing for that argument? And I don't need to mention, but I will, the "trumped up charges" and uneducated jurists that tragically brought about the execution by poison of the greatest thinker of his time! Democracy by birthright, not intellect, leads to demagoguery. Again, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better example than the douche nozzle in chief. The example of Alcibiades, apart from his military talents, is once again apropos exploiting the desire of the people for easy answers. But the best, and most delicious, part of the video is the sweet shop owner running against the doctor in the election saying how the doctors (and by extension nurses) hurt you, give you bitter potions and tell you not to eat whatever you want. I will serve you feasts of sweet and delicious things you want to eat! The doctors' argument that the bitter pill was offered to HELP the ignorant masses, Socrates rightly conjectured, would have about as much success as the above pictured nurse's argument that, "While I agree with your assertion that we are in the land of the free, we are also the home of the brave. It's not brave to go maskless, it's irresponsible, and, yes, stupid." The, "you're stupid" argument, though precise and accurate, has grown less effective over time and may actually serve to strengthen the unfounded resolve of the ignorant.
Here's a good series of 4 (maybe more to come) videos called, "WTF is wrong with Trump supporters?" Even if I type exactly that into Google, or YouTube, these vids don't come up. I had to include oo7 warrior, the poster, before I could hunt them down. Watch all four. You'll STILL get only a tiny cross-section of the millions of Trump supporters, but Socrates accurately measured the pulse of the ignorant masses in Greece long before the internet and mass media. I think we can all do the same today. This is fucking scary!
Two things I've said before: 1. Smart phones and social media are making people stupider and less socially skilled. 2. The stupid are becoming more sensitive about their stupidity and the "Not Me" generation has taught them that they never have to be accountable for it, rather, they can double down, dig in their heels and spin lies and mythology to justify it in their weakened minds. And while doing so, they become more and more defensive and ANGRY. And as this happens, they become ever more attached to their leader and skilled at blocking any logic that would discourage this angry loyalty.
There are over 73 million Americans that voted for Trump. How many of them are like the group in Texas saying that all Trump needs to do is give the word and they'll take up arms? What's going to happen SOON when the unemployment benefits run out? The second relief/stimulus package has been continually blocked and the first one was largely stolen by corporations. Trumpists are upset that their hero lost the election and further upset by the "restrictions to their freedom" the Coronavirus has led to. They continue to ignore the obvious parallels to the 1918 Spanish Flu that was only successfully defeated by overcoming the identical ignorance. Forcibly! Trump mocks mask wearing and the results are obvious, deadly and worsening.
Trump's DOJ sent a request to congress in October to suspend the rules of habeas corpus, which could only expedite a transition into an overt police state. He recently asked about his options on an Iran attack. This supposed great deal maker just can't seem to DEAL with the fact that the election loss is one problem in his life he won't be able to sue his way out of. This is good in a way because what will he set his sights on when he finally gives that shit up? Chilling to think!
I hope the U.S. can some how convince Trumpomania that they need to educate themselves and that their dear leader is frightened of nothing more. That is the very reason for his oft used, "fake news" defense. For a group of people so sensitive about people thinking they're stupid, it only supports that argument that they haven't yet realized their leader is the person who thinks they are the stupidest. He says, "fake news" because he doesn't want you reading the news intelligently. He doesn't want you to and doesn't trust you to. He thinks you're too stupid. And stupid enough to fall for the gambit. Either way, to an intelligent person, NO news is fake news. You can read anything with the knowledge of prevailing biases and get information, ACCURATE information, out of it. Trump doesn't want his supporters to know that and/or doesn't think they're capable of doing that. Hence: "fake news."
But, like many phenomenally spurious defenses the average Trumpy mentality consists of, the "fake news" ploy goes unchallenged. It makes one wonder if the whole works of them really ARE stupid. 73 million plus? Can't be! No way! Really? You think? I just can't believe that.
In fact, I can't believe there REALLY were that many votes for Trump. He strikes me now as a guy who is not complaining about an election loss, but a guy who tried to cheat on the election and STILL lost! Why, oh WHY would we not be absolutely SURE of that? What in his life has he NOT cheated at? I think all the cheating methods he is outlining and suing to search for, are things that HE employed himself. And STILL LOST! We're already starting to find evidence, in fact the ONLY evidence found so far of voter fraud, of that. When he called two people in Michigan who had previously certified the results, and they immediately seek to UNcertify their votes, that's not only pretty fucking obvious, it's a violation of the Hatch Act. Trump should get his "election attorneys" to look THAT up. By the way, were election lawyers a thing before this con man, this sweet shop owner bumblefucked his way into the White House?
Anyway, like Rudy, the head "election lawyer" on his staff, I was bursting with all this shit and just had to let it leak out. Rudy wants 20 grand a day? Get the money up front you dipshit! If not, you'll just be sued later. Hey, maybe the Don will get you to sue yourself!
What a cockamamie, steaming pile of malarkey! Leastaways, that's what I reckon.
I think it's high time for me to get off the Trump bashing and onto something,,, ANYthing else here. How'd you like that triple comma? It's a new punctuation technique I'm trying to make happen. I call it,,, what else???, the tricomma. It's for a pause longer than a comma pause, a,,, pregnant pause if you will. One in which the writer might be searching for his/her next word. Or when the writer has found the absolute perfect word and wants to pause for emphasis just that little bit longer. I think you might see it again.
Today, I'm up late. Even though it's my earliest morning of the week tomorrow. I'm having my second beer too, even though I hadn't planned on having ANY beer tonight. I actually went out and got this beer at 10 PM, a time when I'm usually either finishing a movie or TV show, or hitting the hay. Not today folks. No, today I figured I'd be efficient and mark some of my midterm exams. That's what had me so angrily soliloquizing, I had to sit down and blog it out or I'd be up till 4 tossing and turning. As it is I'll be up till 3, but at least I'll be sitting upright, therapeutically writing all this down. It's how I save marbles. And years of life. The beer is the way I destroy my marbles and shave off years, so it all evens out I reckon.
What, you may ask, could my beloved students have done to get me angrily soliloquizing? See, I live alone. There's nobody to downgrade my angry soliloquies to stifled murmurs. No wife, no kids, no pets, I don't care if the neighbours hear. They probably think I'm video chatting or talking on the phone or maybe even teaching a late Zoom class. I've been outlining to the gods everything I did to explain to my students their midterm group video projects (to the absolute HILT) for over an hour now! And I grow further and further away from any compassionate empathy, and closer to just giving all these boneheads zeros. Oh, nooooo, I can't do that! And actually I see the effort some of them put in and think, maybe they GENUINELY didn't understand! But it's so implausible as to make a mockery of my kindness. Indeed,,, I believe that's precisely what most, if not all of my students who messed this exam up, were trying to do.
The very first day of classes, I gave every one of them a syllabus that included all the assignments, homework, tests, grading, topics, everything they could ever want to know about this class. I went through it with them. When we reached the midterm exam, I told them it was a group video project and that they would probably have fun with it. My students from the previous semester said it was actually fun for them. I then,,, I'm not making this up, SHOWED them one of the best videos that had been made by some of my students from the previous semester as a group project video. It featured a student happily skipping to our university to meet his new classmates. The narrator said how happy he was. There was happy music and some graphics that made him look ecstatic. Then suddenly grey clouds, lightning, and thunder. COVID! No face-to-face classes. The student slouched and turned around to slowly walk home with sad music playing and the narrator explaining how he had looked forward to meeting his classmates but was now disappointed. I explained that the target vocabulary was feelings like happy and disappointed. I also drew attention to the verb tense, which was the target English grammar for the chapter they were illustrating. I said I wanted everyone to do their midterms just like that.
Then assignment one rolled around. It was a 30-second video commercial. Make a TV ad with your group describing your product using the grammar (adjectives) and target language in the chapter. I made a point of telling every class that this was practice for their midterm video group projects. Their midterms were to be exactly the same thing, only longer. Most of them did okay with the assignment. A couple made ads for things you'd never see ads for like guitars or oranges but most were find and even the guitar and oranges ads were using the language I wanted them to in a role play that demonstrated target language usage.
I assigned the midterm to every one of my 10 classes explaining it to the hilt and asking if they all understood and inviting them to ask questions if they didn't. I uploaded the assignment in which I explained it one last time saying I wanted them to show me what they've learned so far. 5 units, 5 people per group. Maybe each person should be in charge of one unit. I told them to do what they wanted. I said I'd be looking for them to use the grammar and vocabulary we learned in each unit and for good teamwork. My final words were, "have fun."
What did I get?
Can you beleee dat shit? Most of the pics, graphics and "vocaburary" were taken directly from the text. Basically, "Here's what you taught us, we learned it, TRUST US." Virtually half of my students did this! I have to believe it was a well organized attempt at the customary Korean gullibility gauge they so often subject the new, foreign teacher to. Mutinous little shits. You know, to see what they can get away with. So I couldn't very well let them get away with it, could I?
So, because I'm so nice, I didn't give them all zeroes, I gave them an extra week and uploaded a video explaining the old, "I don't want you to list the parts of the bicycle, I want you to show me how well you can ride it" speech. I guess it worked. All but one group RE-submitted their videos. What they don't know, however, is the groups who got it right the first time had it marked out of 30. The ones who did it wrong the first time had a max of 25. A couple of them actually GOT the 25 too! But it would have been 30 if they'd followed instructions and didn't try to do it the lazy way. Some of my fellow teachers think I went easy on them. I probably did.
I have finally marked all the vids, almost a month after they were assigned, but I'm still dealing with the students who expend MUCH more effort wheeling and dealing for higher grades than they did making a video that would GET them a high grade. I've found after a coupla decades teaching ESL, mostly in Korea,,, it's par for the course.
I WILL add that their most recent assignments have been excellently done!
