I write this just after Juneteenth, and in the midst of Pride Weekend. And, just a couple weeks before July 4th.

Now, the observation that follows is, I'd not be surprised to discover, unlikely to be original to me. Still, there's an interesting symmetry I see here, between these freedom celebrations and the 4th coming up.

Mardi Gras, Carnival, isn't a single-day celebration. Both actually begin at Twelfth Night. The balls begin, the celebrations, in ones and twos, building little by little, until the parades begin some two weeks before Ash Wednesday. Each ball, each parade, celebrates a different group, a different view, a different story.

Freedom has many aspects, she is no monolithic creature. My story is not yours, yours is not your neighbors. This is a beautiful thing, where I stand. And to have a celebration in many parts is, I say it, a wonderful thing. Let us tell stories, let us dance and sing and grill and drink and find out what this new world means. To those who've passed their stories on to us, and to those we tell our stories to. 

noodlings of a day:

grand slam season, especially Rafa in the finals, and we get to test whether the sleep timer on the electronics can beat out Rafa's match. The vast majority of the year, two hours is plenty, until it's F1 season, or racing season, or tennis season...

I've a handful of thought balloons on this article, about the universe, cosmology, and a couple of old ideas dating back to at least Feynman and Gell-Mann (M G-M just passed away about two weeks ago as of this writing):

1. Always with the unanswerable questions. If he did nothing else, one of Hawking's most useful contributions, in my observation, was to have recognized cosmological imaginings can be connected to real predictions, at least around black holes (Hawking radiation, if you're following along). Most of the rest of these sorts of things in this end of the pool are a long, long way from finding their way to testability. Well, except for those of us who write science fiction... 2. Ok, now a question. Hawking and Hartle were interested in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, most especially "What's the simplest solution that looks like something we can all call a universe?" And they came up with one. With a boatload of assumptions, sure, but there's no question the solution they generated has a vaguely recognizable utility with respect to the thing we look out into the night and gasp over. How then the Turok et al (TFL) paper, which says "No, we like our approach much better" and then go on to show that Hawking/Harle's solution doesn't show up for a different set of assumptions? And, in the TFL assumptions, we find a solution that doesn't appear stable, doesn't even vaguely resemble a universe we experience... here where we're just us theorist chickens, gang this is fun, but I'm not seeing why I shouldn't default to "interesting but not useful, yet." 3. Related: I have to cry foul on the use of imaginary here. We're out here where the isomorphism to the matrix algebra (or at least a Wick rotation?) should be inherent; dragging "i" back into it smells like drifting to anthropomorphism. That it leads to what looks like a dynamically unstable long-term solution with unrealistic density distributions makes me wonder if we've gone too far here. Summing over all histories should mean summing over all histories, not just the ones that "look" or "feel" "right". I'm not saying HH didn't have a similar issue, but now we're into the realm of counting "who's used the least assumption" and that's where we can only come back to comparing against the empirical observation...

Completely different note/observation. Our daughter is taking a couple of extra classes this summer. She's trying to line up her regular schedule over the rest of high school. The math class she's taking is "the one". That is, the one that every budding mathematician runs into, the one that makes you work.

It goes like this: early classes, disciplines, and the young math geek can "see" the solutions easily. So she writes them down, and enjoys the experience. Dad nods along, waiting for the moment... when the solutions she sees don't make any sense. And she has to learn to work through the algorithms anyway. That's the tough part, because she's now having to learn habits Dad has been years pointing to, saying "You'll need to be careful, these tools will help." And now it's come. Easy becomes hard, and hard-headed now gets in the way.

It's short term but delicate. I went through it, from observation it happens in all disciplines, not just mathematics. The key is navigating the short term storm in such a way that she doesn't spend years "hating math" because of it. Which can happen. I don't think it'll be an issue here, she's only showing simple frustration. But I'll get to do some extra homework this summer, as well.

Theorem: science is two-sided, rational map and empirical map. The two go together. Yet, from observation, one or the other tends to get ditched. Get too married to the rational argument, the beautiful logic, without murdering your darlings, and it's amazing how easily one can ignore that you're having your nose rubbed into it by the universe.

Or, on the flip side, only "results" matter. And if you've never seen this one go wrong... one failure mode here is to jump from "result" to result and not realize the incidental successes are essentially random until you hit the wall.

I put empirical results in quotes there because data is noise unless there's an a priori rationale. Hypothesis and measurement are iterative, and skipping over one or the other just makes a mess.

No clues, here, except that learning to be humble in the face of uncertainty is often key to complex endeavors.

This is a reminder to self, a question to ask Slash if I ever get the chance.

Slash: have you ever considered annotating your pix and your mom's pix into a collection? I love imagining the stories. You get pictures, and your mom (I'm assuming, given what I've read from your autobiography about your mom, about the pix of say, Jimi Hendrix or Clapton and Dylan and Townshend and all the rest) took pictures of the music and entertainment industry, from a point of view that no one else in the world has.

Certainly not when you take into account the sheer breadth of time and people your and your mom's collection appears to cover. Your instagram is a treasure. Just by seeing these pix, I get glimpses of your world.

I just can't help thinking that, if you were interested in the project, a little detail on the photos as a collection would make some future historian's life. Call it your retirement gig, maybe, but I'd pay good money for the coffee table book you could build. Music, movies, all of it.

Hell, make it two volumes, the music world and the movie world. The behind the scenes pix from the movies it looks like your mom worked on would make, say, fans of The Shining drool, if I read those pictures correctly.

I also can't help thinking I'm not the only one who's ever asked you this, so please ignore this if it feels like I'm trying to obligate you to something. I'm just a fan and admirer who's fascinated by the stories your pictures hint at.

It's always hard to lose family, isn't it? Kin, chosen, born to, we're interwoven threads. When a thread is gone, the weave continues. Just with something missing. And something added. Memories. Don't forget those, they're the part that, I find, makes the whole. Illumination comes in many forms, after all.

It's difficult to talk of family with outsiders. Have you ever stood at a funeral, or the wake, listening to some distant cousin tell a story, and asked yourself "Where was she for all the weekends? Sunday dinners? Shitty diapers and chicken pox and..."

I know that's not fair. We are all of us weaving our own tapestry, trodding our own path. It just hurts in the moment sometimes. Me, I have to put aside talking about family in those moments. Too close to it.

So I can't talk about Dr. John, who left us. Probably late for a gig, a session maybe. Piano duel, with Professor Longhair and Fats Domino.

Ellis Marsalis is, maybe, the last of that branch of the family. The stride and the roll and the keys.

I'm not blood kin to Dr. John. Not that I know of. But musically? Yeah, Doc's family. The Neville Brothers, the Marsalis family, Dr. John. Professor Longhair and Fats, and later Harry Connick, Jr. Pops, aka Louis Armstrong, and Allen Toussaint. Family. If you knew what to listen for, going back home, you'd look for a flyer, maybe, or listen to the wind, and Allen might be playing Tipitina's, or the Professor would be at the Jazz Fest, or there'd be a Halloween party and who knows who'd show up.

Find the right parade at Mardis Gras, when I still went, and there before he climbed up on the float Dr. John might be holding court.

When I saw him there, he did that by listening. No big stories or personality, just ears and eyes and the songwriter's observation.

Go on Doc, play it for us. We'll dance you on, and you sing us home.

The way my wife describes Melissa Etheridge and KD Lang singing You Can Sleep ( here) is that their harmonies woke her from a dead sleep.

Mostly, it's just one of those perfect moments, for me. How they got the recording and the voices that clean... combination of the hall and the crew and the voices. They hit the harmonies and the song just about as perfectly as could be.

I get a kick out of watching Melissa. She's not ignoring KD... she's about as close to just closing her eyes and listening to the lady over her left shoulder as you can get, that's all.

Another one where you can hear Melissa's voice in harmony is with Jewel, singing Foolish Games.

These performances I've known about for years. But then today, my wife and I stumbled across Latifah and Melissa... singing The Chain. Oh my.

That face when you've found just the right level of uncomfortable for supporting jowls and neck twist...

Reflections on a moment

All the same, no.

Similar, yes. Permutations and quantum separations. Distinction without a difference. Passing from this to that.

Valleys of thou shall nots. Or maybe so's. Fall into that valley, or perhaps climb down between the yucca and the spines. Watch out for the donkey.

Go west and you've entered that which is different. Here the rain and the water, too much or too little, determines all. This is not that. The pine trees tell you when you've passed that line. Cedar is everywhere, except where it isn't, and does anyone carve these things anymore? Is there a knife that can work this stuff?

Or if mesquite, a damned axe because the fool's wood is hard enough to drive you to go find something else to do.

Tuna move into the gulf, the big ones, they spawn and move on and tempt a different kind of fool to run for days and chase the big dream. And then another generation will grow up and laugh at the stories, no one comes here to fish for bluefin in warm water. Besides all that, the hurricanes are on the way.

And through it all... here the green there the red, and the enchiladas are different in every town. Don't go for the stuffed peppers until you get west of 35? It's a rule, and it'll change I'm sure.