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Complex Numbers
Complex Numbers
A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number.
The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi.
Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary.
Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty.
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I thought I should put the last entry into perspective.
Yes, having a cold is a pain in the ass. It's nasty and miserable, and the only thing keeping me smiling is the knowledge that I probably gave it to someone who deserves it more than I do.
I'm not really bitching about it, though. Just making a gross and, hopefully, funny (to someone) blog entry.
See, on Sunday I found out that my ex-wife is in the ICU at a local hospital. She's been diagnosed
| funny how I just now noticed that "diagnosed" has "nose" in it |
I can't even get in to see her because I've been, well, sickly, and one of us might infect the other. Not that it matters so much, because people who have gone in to see her have said that she's so knocked out on sedatives and such that she's completely unresponsive. Just lying there motionless, kind of like when she and I - no, not even I will go there now.
I'll let you all in on a little secret. Most of you know I've said some nasty things about my ex-wife here, and in my previous blog. It's too easy a target, ex-spouse jokes. The secret, though, is that we've put all the nastiness behind us, and we get along okay. My wife gets along okay with her. Hell, a girl I dated between wives gets along okay with both of them. So to hear that she's in Critical Care, her prognosis uncertain...
Uncertain. That means she might not make it, right? Yeah. That's what it means.
Not funny.
I need her to live. Public figures aside, I don't speak ill of the dead. I want her alive so I can continue to make ex-wife jokes. Dammit. The fact that she's a single mother with a 9 year old kid
| NO he's not mine; why do people keep asking me that? |
My grandfather died of pneumonia, long ago before I was born. His son, my uncle, did too - 15 years ago.
So please take my kvetching about having a cold as mere comic relief - I consider myself lucky. |
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I'm sick.
Also, I have a cold. It's been going on since Friday, and migrated from my throat to my chest, back into my throat, and up into my sinuses. I'm currently producing more fluid from my nose and lungs than I am taking in. Every time I drink a glass of water, or a can of Coke Zero, I go through an entire box of Kleenex.
Can someone please tell me why tissue boxes feature pictures of FLOWERS? I mean, I don't really care - allergies aren't my problem (I make up for it by producing rivers of snot every time I get a cold, which fortunately, isn't that often these days), but I'd imagine that people with allergies see the flowers and get triggered.
Of course, that could be a conspiracy on the part of Kleenex and Puffs to sell more tissues.
Periodically I have to clean the snot off my computer screen. No matter how careful I am, Old Faithful exceeds the capacity of the tissue to contain it.
Why am I putting in a blog entry guaranteed to gross everyone out? Well, because I don't believe in being miserable alone. Since I can't give y'all the cold, I'll have to settle for making you mildly nauseated.
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How many of you have wanted to do something similar to this:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/49542/funniest-exit-interview/
?
You know, I haven't had to search for a job since 1989. I went on a couple of interviews just to see what the field was like, but I wasn't serious about them (at least, unless they started offering me oodles and boodles of cash, which hasn't happened yet). When I finally did switch jobs, it was to work for a guy I'd known for 15 years. And then when that didn't work out, I bypassed the whole game by starting my own company.
Am I spoiled? Probably. Would I trade my life for the above link? Hell no. |
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At least, according to this story:
http://www.accesshollywood.com/news/ah5356.shtml?dst=rss|general_rss
My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that.
Okay, so I never actually met Foul-smell, so I don't know for sure, but as it stands I can't think of one "characteristic" about him that I "like." My mother told me never to speak ill of the dead, something ingrained in me from an early age, so yesterday's blog entry was rather difficult for me to write.
However, Flynt's next words pretty much say it all:
I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in
California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling. [Emphasis mine]
And that's what it comes down to for me, folks. Whatever you may think of the porn industry, it doesn't try to hide behind some nebulous concept of greater good or try to justify its actions on shaky moral grounds. Lots of people want porn, and people like Flynt sell it. Period. Everyone involved, from the producers to the talent to the consumers, are completely aware, every step of the way, that it's all about selling the illusion of sex (or intimacy, as I would argue) in return for money. There's no "it's good for you;" there's no "buy our porn and all your sins will be forgiven." At best, the likes of Flynt can invoke the First Amendment, as he did in that landmark case, arguing that pornography (which is NOT what that case was about) is protected free speech. Still, that doesn't pretend to justify porn; all it does is prove they can sell it legally.
Falwell, by contrast, sold a scrawny pig in an intolerant poke to naive consumers, all the while also invoking the First Amendment (in his case, the part about separation of church and state).
And if you want to know who was the better American, well... consider that Falwell's business never had to pay taxes. |
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I'm not even going to TRY to be "politically correct" on this one.
I'm glad Falwell is dead, and I would hope he's roasting in the same Hell to which he repeatedly condemned me, except that it gives me great comfort to know there's no afterlife for him to experience. I'd say "I told you so," but he can't hear me.
I'm betting there are some PARTIES down Lynchburg way tonight. |
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I'm sitting here listening to some old Steely Dan ("Deacon Blues"). You gotta love a band that can put this in a song with a straight face:
I crawl like a viper
Through these suburban streets
Make love to these women
Languid and bittersweet
My wife has a power that I don't: she can decide, within about three seconds of listening to a song, whether it sucks or not. Me? I have to listen to it a few times, and maybe a few times more, before I can make up my mind about it.
I think music listeners are conveniently divided into two major categories: lyric listeners, and tune trackers. Of course, life isn't binary, and most people are some mixture of the two. I know where I fall on the spectrum, which is heavy on the lyric end of it. If the lyrics suck, I don't want to hear the song. A good example of this is Pretenders' "Brass in Pocket":
Got rhythm I cant miss a beat
Got new skank it's so reet
Got something Im winking at you
Gonna make you, make you, make you notice
I mean... what the ever-lovin' FUCK?? Y'know?
I'm not sure where my wife falls on the spectrum (though we share a deep, abiding hatred of that Pretenders song), but I suspect it's more on the "tune tracker" end of things - not that she doesn't appreciate good lyrics, and not that I don't appreciate a good tune. Still, there's a Golden Rule for me, and it's rarely been proven wrong:
If it's danceable, I can't listen to it.
It's not that I don't have rhythm; people say I'm a fair drummer. In fact, there's a picture somewhere of me drumming while Kirstin dances (thus distracting me). I'll post it one of these days, but like all pictures of me, I don't like it. I think it's more that when people are writing songs, they don't care what the words are if they're trying to make a dance tune. You know, like, "Come on baby, do the locomotion." Bleh.
There was a movie a while back called "Eddie and the Cruisers" (1983, for you sticklers). The title guy hires a guy (the narrator) to write the words. He puts two fingers together and says something like, "Words and music, man. They're like this."
Deep.
Now I'm listening to Brandi Carlile. There were a couple of Springsteen songs in there. I love "shuffle" buttons.
I always thought Bruce was a major influence on "Eddie and the Cruisers." The fictional band was from Jersey, too.
Anyway, this power of Kirstin's to declare within a few moments of hearing a song whether it's cool or it sucks (there's rarely an in between) really gets on me sometimes. I mean, it shouldn't, right? You like a song, or you don't, and what's the point in trying to change her mind? But sometimes it makes me feel like she's not even giving it a chance - especially when it's a song I really like, such as Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" or Billy Joel's "Summer, Highland Falls."
And, of course, that lessens my own enjoyment of it. Illogical? Yeah, but there it is - it makes me feel like there must be something wrong with the song, when there's patently not.
Another thing I've noticed that makes me different from most people about music is that whether or not I like a song is irrespective of how old it is, how new it is, or how many times I've heard it. I'm of the firm opinion that good songs are timeless, and I never get sick of them. Oh, maybe if it got stuck on infinite repeat (I knew a guy who can't listen to Eagles' Hotel California because it kept playing while he was trapped in the wreckage of a car... and playing... and playing... and playing...)
The result of this is that there are songs from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s (very few), 90s and 00s that I like (and probably from before then if I happen to hear it), and I can't stand listening to Top 40 radio.
In fact, I've pretty much decided that ALL commercial radio sucks ass, and listen exclusively to WFUV from New York City. I can do this because of this thing called the Internet, upon which they stream their programming. If you're interested, check out http://wfuv.org/
And for the next few days I won't need the Internet to listen to it, because I'll be in NYC. Don't know if I'll have Web access from there - if I do, I might check in from time to time 
Oh... and a happy 58th birthday to Billy Joel. Rock on!
It comes down to reality
And it's fine with me 'cause I've let it slide
Don't care if it's Chinatown or on Riverside
I don't have any reasons
I've left them all behind
I'm in a New York state of mind
-Billy Joel,
New York State Of Mind |
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Robert, this is going to be a whiny entry. I don't know if you noticed, but I mentioned you as one of my favorite writers on wdc when I was "Center Stage.". I love your writing and these one sentence entries make me want to whine. Do you want to be responsible for that? I didn't think so! -susanL 
The item to which Susan refers is another in a long line of strokes of genius from my good friend and loyal Minion, terryjroo:
| |  | Invalid Item 
This item number is not valid.
#1231865 by Not Available. |
Now, Susan's glowing praise of me has been archived for posterity at "Invalid Entry" : "His fiction is not always "people friendly" but he writes so very well; no reader could have trouble picturing what he writes because it's so descriptively clear, yet he doesn't spend too many words doing it."
Fortunately, that's exactly the effect I strive for with my writing. I'll point out here that susanL is no slouch, herself, and is a far more accomplished writer than I (hell, she's been published and I haven't, at least not paid). Still, I appreciate the compliment, even though it made it so my hat didn't fit for a few weeks.
Well, I told Susan by way of email reply that I'd "write something pithier (or at least pissier) soon." I'm not in a pissy mood, so I'll be pithing you off instead. Incidentally, be sure to check out this week's upcoming Comedy newsletter; all my writing energy went there and not here, this week.
So, yeah, I've been pretty busy, which has served to keep my blog entries to quick "weird news" stuff - which I find amusing, anyway. Here's a couple links I found today, in fact. The first is an in-depth article about how a Christian right-wing extremist actually thought about the whole homosexuality thing, rather than reflexively thumping the Bible; the second, from a whole different philosophical basis, is a story about how some scientists have managed to convince themselves that people can see the future:
http://www.alternet.org/sex/49912/
and
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/925987/many_scientists_are_convinced_that_m...
Why the hell are people still using "man" to stand for the entire human race, anyway? I thought that kind of went out with free sex and chivalry. I mean, I wouldn't like it if people used "woman" as the collective noun for humanity. Besides, China's birth-control and post-natal abortion policies notwithstanding, there are still more women than men on Earth - by a wide margin. So, single girls, if you're wondering where all the men are? They're not. And yet we keep sending them off to get killed in wars. Come on, folks, we're a diminishing commodity. Stop the war so my single female friends can get laid, mmkay?
Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Taking a pith.
I had a long, philosophical discussion with the office cleaning lady the weekend before last.
I was in the office, supposed to be working - and I was, but then Mindy came in and started asking me about religion.
Mindy's a short, waifish woman who's struggling with like three jobs because she's trying to save money for an education. Her family has disowned her - they are, she said, members of a fringe religious group (a cult, really) that had her completely brainwashed, cloistered and secluded from the rest of humanity. Home-schooled, even. Strict dress code, learned to believe that the world was divided into the Group (who simply called themselves "Christians") and Everyone Else, who were all going to Hell. And, of course, since she started questioning everything she'd been taught, she's now in the latter category.
Well, her mind opened up, and she's eager to learn about different philosophies, different religious practices, different beliefs. So she asked me - and this is what made me take an hour break from work - "How do you know what's true, what's fact, when there's so much conflicting information out there?"
"Why, you look on Wikipedia, of course!"
(Not really. I just threw that in there to see if Lorien is reading.)
What I really said was, "It's hard, but here's some ways to spot bullshit..."
Which is what took me so long. Being quite a bit older, and having grown upspent my childhood in the completely opposite environment (that is, an atmosphere that fostered learning and curiosity, rather than dogma and rigidity), I like to think I have a reasonably well-tuned bullshit detector. Besides, I spent my childhood on a farm; while we didn't raise much cattle ourselves, the next farm over did, and I got to be able to spot bovine feces a mile away. But, faced with someone who had grown up with a certain set of beliefs forced into her like they were facts... well, I'm amazed she's as open-minded as she is, but sometimes when you open your mind, it's possible that your brains fall out... and I was kind of at a loss.
I was faced with the knowledge that, when you don't have the comforting arms of faith, you encounter a lot of uncertainty. Me, I thrive on the uncertainty. I love it. It helps my writing. It lets me consider things from all different perspectives. Some people can't handle the uncertainty; it's chaos, and they'd rather get all their "facts" from one source, like the Bible or Wikipedia.
Once, I tried to track down information about the artificial sweetener aspartame. I found out a lot more than I ever wanted to know about it, including the utter certainty that aspartame isn't especially good for you. But - here's the problem - there's a lot of conflicting information out there as to whether it's just run-of-the-mill crap, or if it's actively bad for you, as in causes cancer or Republicanism. Many of the websites I found asserted that, while it's non-nutritive, it's better for people to eat or drink aspartame than sugar - obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, etc. Others, however, asserted the "truth" that aspartame is carcinogenic, unsafe in any quantity, and makes your penis shrink.
Now, I strongly suspect that the latter category of web page is, if you really do your research, the product of shills for the sugar, saccharine and Splenda manufacturers. Still, how do you KNOW?
Well, you could drink a whole lot of aspartame, and when you don't get cancer, you can thumb your nose at the shills. Or you can just eschew the stuff altogether; it's not like it's especially good for you, like I said (the problem with this is that I require caffeine to get through the day, and I've never acquired a taste for coffee, so it's Coke Zero for me).
Point is, it's hard to know what the real truth is. Kennedy assassination? 9/11? The missing Watergate transcript? There's a lot of speculation out there, and believing the government line is usually a lot harder, taking more suspension of disbelief, than believing the fringe conspiracy theorists.
In the end, I find it doesn't really matter what the truth is.
Oh, put down your eyebrows.
No, it usually doesn't matter. What matters, what affects the world around us, what affects our own lives, is what people believe the truth to be. People can spend a lot of time and money and energy (all the same thing, really) tracking down facts, but no one really has the big picture - except, theoretically, God. In fact, the best definition of God I've ever come up with has been "that which knows all the relevant facts." Actually, I just came up with that, but it works for me. And speaking of God, God only proves what I just asserted about truth: some people don't believe in God. Most people do, in some form or another. The people who do tend to be the ones who set policy, and said policy is often set based on their belief (or lack thereof) in a supreme being. God may or may not affect us directly - I'm not going there today - but it can be demonstrated that an individual's belief in God does affect you directly.
If that's not enough, consider a child who accepts the existence of Santa Claus. That child's reactions near Christmastime revolve around her belief in Santa Claus. She's good because Santa wants her to be; when she's not, she feels regret at letting Santa down or that she won't get as many presents. Santa may or may not exist, but in that child's world, he is the motivator, and his existence is what defines, in part, her reality.
When, as most children do, she finds that Santa is a myth, she will likely go through all the stages of grief: disbelief, anger, etc., etc.
My cleaning lady has a perfectly understandable distrust of Christianity. I spent much of the time I talked to her convincing her that most Christians aren't like the cultists who raised her. I honestly don't know if that's true or not, but she was going on as if it weren't, as if Christianity itself is suspect, as opposed to the fringe group that was the only home she knew, and against whom she had to rebel. And anyone who knows me knows I'm about the most unlikely apologist for Christianity out there.
I've said before: reality is that which affects other people as well as yourself; imagination, in contrast, affects only yourself. But the point there is that imagination - beliefs, assumptions, and so on being included in imagination - does affect you.
And that's enough philosophy for one day. |
© Copyright 2025 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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I'm more than happy with Carrion Luggage, however.
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