juggling and yoga and hugs

[alexr_rwx]

- This is a really good article about brains and brain chemistry and the mind/body problem and chronic pain and feedback and stuff (on the NYT, from metafilter)

- Juggling and frisbee in the Other Park is pretty awesome. Yay for hanging out with Lisa pyrona and JD yourusername and Ross rheavatarin and Martin samarin for the afternoon! JD has non-sharp juggling-knives, and Lisa's getting into contact juggling, hooray!

- Also awesome: Bikram yoga. Thanks to Jacquie fluffyevilbunny for taking me. It's yoga, but done in a really hot (105 degrees) room, for great stretchiness and sweating. Yoga rocks pretty hard, and I really enjoyed the Bikram-style school over in Decatur. You should try it; you might enjoy.

- *hugs* Really. Calm down. It's going to be okay, oh world. Either we're in for eventual heat death, or maybe it's a closed universe and time and space stretch out infinitely in all directions and it's a giant perpetual motion machine. So relax, have a cookie, do a pushup, give somebody a hug. That is all.

Comments

[gtv42.livejournal.com]

I thought a closed universe was the one with time and space finite and/or an eventual heat death. An open universe is the negative-curvature thingy with (for all intensive porpoises) infinite space and time, right? Right?

But you are entitled to your own opinion of the grand unknowable.*

I'm too close to bed to read that article now, but earlier today I was Wikipedia stumbling and read about Fibromyalgia. Interesting stuff! I'm glad my only chronic pain is existential. Woe.

___
*Except I saw that nod to the steady-state hypothesis. Thermodynamics is all like "Hell naaw bitch!"

[gtv42.livejournal.com]

Argh. I had too many beers last night.

Heat death != Big Crunch. Damnit.

I take back all the mean things I said about you. I mean it, man. You're in the clear.

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

*hugs* We all still love you, Gregg :)

And a big crunch would imply a pretty hot death for just about everybody...

[reality-calls.livejournal.com]

I never personally felt the whole "heat death" idea was all that scientific...  I mean, it takes the laws we know at this point in time and extrapolates to something that will only become apparent many billions(if not trillions) of years in the future assuming nothing else is discovered in the mean time outside our current body of knowledge that may affect the course of events...  Isn't that sort of extreme speculation generally frowned upon in other fields?

But that article was awesome.  I'm going to have to get myself an MRI machine so I can train my brain not to feel pain.  I wonder what else you can train yourself to do?  Could you improve your ability to focus?  Regulate your heartbeat?  Increase your IQ?  Seriously exciting stuff, that.

      "Live from the People's Republic"

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

*thinks* It is a really long-term extrapolation, yes... and the predictions are very difficult to verify. I see what you're saying here. Don't you want to know the answer, though? While it has very little bearing on everyday life, I think I'd want to know whether there's enough mass to slow down, stop, and reverse the universe's expansion.

It's a poetically nice thought, if that's true -- I think I'd rather live in a continuously bouncing universe than an increasingly entropic one.

Anyway, I saw this article a while ago:

Under his theory, published today in the journal Science with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University in New Jersey, the universe must be at least a trillion years old with many big bangs happening before our own. With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it. "I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though," said Prof Turok. "There doesn't have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large."

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1768191,00.html)

It was linked from Slashdot (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/05/1232220), so it's got to be good!

Maybe unitvector will speak up about this issue. She knows about that kind of thing. She's an astrophysicist, for cryin' out loud!