Date: 11 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: That Long, Long PDF

   I have tried out the Russian brides. Ken, it's all a rip-off hype! I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on a woman named Helga who said she really, really loved me. She said that she had her children when she was twelve and thirteen years old, and that they were both now Ph.D. economists with the Pope of Europe, and she was a billionairess. I don't mean to disillusion you, or anything ...

   Your article is well written. Thanks.  Somebody did a good proofreading job (but of course the interesting writing is because of you). It's good, and it sounds professional. Write that book.

    I'm now trying to describe the clothing that the male Vikings are wearing when they first get off the boat at Yukatan in the hurricane -- I have about ten thick books that tell me about this -- and then, I have to describe the first time the semi-god Kozepalkuli descries the simi-goddess Dylla. What shall she be wearing? I just received in the mail yesterday and today two new books about women in the Viking/Nordic age (i.e., the time of my novel).

     I spent over three hours on the phone the last two days with CompUSA and Microsoft. I still don't know if I have resolved the simple problem of being charged twice for one product -- which I still have not received and which I need badly to apply for jobs.

    This is how I spend my time.

    Oh ... Dylla said to tell you hi, you handsome bear, you. (Dylla likes Germanic-Celts.)

    Back to Dylla's clothing ...

    Charlie

Date: 12 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion 

Subject: more of the endless more

     And who is that slender chick longingly stroking Long Meg, the twelve-foot-high monolith in Cumbria, which aligns with the midwinter solstice setting sun and the nearby large circle to the northeast? Does she have a sister that's not married?

>Yes, she does. She owns her own house in Fairbanks, AK, teaches math at a military base, and has a doctorate in bi-lingual studies. She graduated from high school at 16 and from Texas University in about 3 years, and had a teaching certificate after two years at Texas U. She is in good health...she is still only 81 and not a big woman.
>She would put up with no nonsense so that might be the deal- breaker.

>Yes, Bettie is still a slender chick, I guess. I could tell you some stuff about Bettie but it might not be prudent. Do you remember me saying about being a kid and the hypothetical question about sleeping with a 73-year-old woman and that the idea to an 18-year-old guy would have made us/him sick. This one that I know has never been better and 30 years ago, she was danged good.

     She's not my type. I like 'em like Dylla. Mid twenties to mid forties: slim, muscle-toned, tall or short, blonde or brunette, olive or off-white skin, long hair falling long across the eyes, full soft lips, perhaps with a slight cute overbite -- any eye color will do, as long as they have eyes. And no chicken legs like the sub-Sahara African women have. I want legs that look like those of Angelina Joli. I want them to be extremely intelligent and yet, oxymoronically, completely feminine. They love like a purring pussy cat, and they will swipe back like a lioness when necessary.

    She takes just like a woman

<

    She fakes just like a woman

    She makes love just like a woman

    But she breaks just like a little girl.

   See? The Minnesotan jew understood.

    Ah ... as I told you before, it's all rear-view mirror for me from here on out. But you know ... It is really amazing to me -- dumbfounding, really -- that my last year or two in New Orleans I "picked up" or " found" or "took home and had multifarious sexual unmentionable relations with" so many truly beautiful women. I was pushing 50, and I was just raking the women in without even trying. They were, of course, all deeply flawed, and in some cases truly dangerous. But I, during those two years, had repeated, deeply unhinged sex with some women that looked like models -- no kidding. And they were anywhere from 23 to 36. I guess that was my last gasp. Ha ha ha.

     Did I tell you why when elephants go to Paris, they never wear sunglasses?

     Because they don't want anyone to know that they're tourists.

     I have a great deal of respect for women -- and a great deal of problem, too. But Dylla is everything that I admire in a woman. She is, really, the star of my novel.

>Charlie, you wrote -- I have already tried out the Russian brides. Ken, it's all a rip-off hype! I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on a woman named Helga who said she really, really loved me.

>Charlie, you also wrote -- She said that she had her children when she was twelve and thirteen years old, and that they were both now Ph.D. economists with the Pope of Europe, and she was a billionairess. I don't mean to disillusion you, or anything ...

>That is very interesting Charlie, if you had a bank account and money and ATM password, I could tell you about the trillion dollars I have in a Trinidad bank, and for the above information, I could transfer to your bank about half of it. (I am really an albino son of the King of Beturwatchit ... a small but diamond-rich ex-country in the old Belgium Congo. Really! I wouldn't lie to you.)

    "Beturwatchit" ... I'll have to google that. Was your mama a jungle bunny?

>You wrote: Oh ... Dylla said to tell you hi, you handsome bear, you. (Dylla likes Germanic-Celts.)

>I had hair down near my shoulders when I was in Mexico for the eclipse.  They called me "Osso Negro."

>You wrote: Back to Dylla's clothing ...

>Learn to have the guys chanting...(in Norse) "Take it off! Take it off! Take it off!" Or, considering your New Orleanian background, "Show us your tits! Show us your tits!"

      Oh, Ken. Really! This is NOT a porno novel!

    Here is the beginning of one of my NYC chapters (in the novel), which is NYC, Christmas Eve, in something like 2046:

*************** beginning of excerpt *********************

      It was Christmas Eve in New York. Manhattan was already deeply sunken into a premature, cloud-darkened dusk. Howard was so weary of remembrances and celebrations. Each one was just another onus. There had been the celebration back in July honoring the two-hundred-seventieth anniversary of the birth of the United States of America, though it was plain to see that nothing at all was left worthy of celebration or honor.

     Now, here at the close of the year, once again there had befallen on the just and the unjust this recurring Eve: this eve of the anniversary of the birth of the bastard King of kings and Lord of lords to a virgin Jewess in a cowbarn on the west bank of the Jordan River during the Iron Age. Howard wondered: Was their bloody Savior looking out tonight on Desolation Row?

     All day long, cirrus-cloud filaments had streaked the purple cathedral ceiling of the troposphere like strands of grey-white, windblown hair. But now dark, low-hanging clouds were moving in from the north. A high-pressure cell luxuriant of CO, CO₂,O₃, CH_4, and SO₂, viscous with the stench of poison vapors and airborne hydrous silicate minerals and gale-swept, carcinogenic detritus was oozing down from New Canada, crawling southward down the Eastern Seaboard like a giant, torpid amoeba with pseudopods that hemorrhaged grit, ash, fumes, radioactive snow (third-world air-testing of nuclear weapons since the War), sulfurous acid, chlorobenzene, microscopic filaments of silicon and amphibole (blasted into the wind by terrorist bombings of old buildings), pesticides, exotic noxious bacterial spores, wind-eroded dirt, feces and urine in aqueous solution swept up from the glutinous, swill-thick waters of Lakes Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario by frequent storms with hurricane-force winds. America’s air, which in summer was a hot, ripe, pungent poisonchurn, coagulated in these wildy bitter northern winters into an odorless but deadly cold fluid, flocculent and syrupy rich with chemicals. This frigid air did not stimulate olfactory nerves; it simply froze them, if you were stupid or stoned enough to breath the air straight.

      An anaemic December sun was sinking into the horizon somewhere behind the haze. Yet, still, the sunlight, together with the help of gravity, was enough to keep the Arctic jet stream streaming southeastward down the eastern seaboard to collide with the warmer stream up from Mexico; it was enough to roil the lower atmosphere into the turbidity from which spring the great vertical pinwheels of air and ice.

       Sunlight and gravity were assisted by the phantom force of Coriolis — the geometric-inertial illusion that seems to tug at all swirling spheres, and which bent the whole noospheric brouhaha of grime-and-poison pinwheel tumult down toward the south, down across New York City.

       This Christmas Eve, Manhattan was getting drenched with a freakish, furious frenzy of wind-crazed, howling, freezing muck. The ice-rain blew sideways between bridges and skyscrapers, between brownstone row houses and empty ice-crusted parks, between cathedrals and warehouses, Greek delis and Irish pubs. It swirled in menacing, yellow-grey ice-swarms in the glow of the few street lamps that were still shining. The ones that were not shining stood in darkness, their glass panes long ago broken by bullets and metal pipes. Now, there they stood, filling up with ice. The freezing rain was like swarms of angry insects. It was aggressive. It spattered on sidewalks and streets and ticked against storefront windows, against broken, angular-dangling, wind-thrashed flapping awnings, against taxicab roofs and shivering, abandoned, broken umbrellas thrown across subway grates.

************* end of excerpt *********************

       Yes, that's the world your grandsons and granddaughters will inhabit.

      I never got any bleedin' credit in the first grade while all those little suck-ass, teacher's pets did! Just for knowing their numbers! What good are numbers anyway? My uncle couldn't count past five and HE had a job in a grocery store! Well, at least I was fastest in finding which chicken only had one leg!
     Well, screw them! I don't need no stinkin' teachers to give me gold stars! I am rich now and they are all dead! Ha Ha! I can buy me a ton of gold stars if I want them. (I don't want you to think I was marred by any of this patently unfair system...I am over it now. Still...at night I lay in bed and think....)

     I would complain if I could, but you know? I was the teacher's pet so many times that it's embarrasing. And I didn't even try. I just hated everything. I never studied. I never paid attention in class (except the time I discovered poetry in the 11th grade, and the time I discovered Shakespeare in the 12 grade -- that's all I ever learned in pre-college school).

      There were classes in which I had a grade of deep, deep F where the teacher(s) gave me a D just so I could pass. They knew that I was the smartest bloke in the class, and that I just hated everybody and everything. So they "passed me". (Hey, I'm not bragging or nothin' -- remember, this was southwest Jackson, Miserysippi.)

      Did I ever tell you about my 12th grade "advanced math" teacher? I flunked every test she ever gave because I didn't bother (indiscriminate hatred) to memorize the trigonometric and analytic-geometric equations required to solve the questions on the test. I knew more about the subject than the teacher did -- really, I did.

      What I would do is, presented with a test question, I would answer it by deriving the equation that I needed, since I had not memorized it. The derivations were not even given in the textbook. This was college-level mathematical derivations. Problem was, it took me so long to write out the two-page derivations that I was not supposed to know how to do -- and which the teacher did not know how do do -- that I never had time to finish answering all the questions on the test ... so I'd get a D or F. But she "passed me" anyway.

      This is the same teacher who pronounced "Rene Descartes": "Rainy Des-kar-teeze". When I told her, privately and respectfully, that his name was pronounced "Ren-NAY Day-KART" she laughed at me and said, get outa here, stop messing with me. She didn't believe me.

     Now look at me. I have an M.S., and I'm unemployable in my field.

     Except maybe for teaching. We'll see about that soon ...

     More later ... Charlie

Date: 15 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: April 15, 2008...

      I've fallen behind in my communication. I've been busy, and spent two days in bed sick. What have I been doing? Well, reading about Vikings and in particular Viking women; I spent a week trying to get Office suite from Mickeysoft, got sent two wrong shipments, and yesterday spent three hours on the phone making 10 calls and being given five wrong phone numbers and hearing every person I spoke with tell me the last person was wrong (MS is peopled by idiots); I have spent two or three hours trying to Install MS Word (yes, it doesn't work) then spending several more hours trying to figure out how to use it -- they have changed it so much in the newest version that it is unrecognizable and extremely counter-intuitive; I have spent several hours emailing WordPerfect files of cover letters and resumes from my laptop to the desktop, loading the files into a newer version of WordPerfect on the desktop, saving the files in MS Word format, e-mailing them back to the laptop, opening the MS Word files with my new version of MS Word, then trying to figure out how to correct the glitches (MS Word is literally almost unusable), and then convert the corrected Word file to PDF to send to the colleges where I want to teach. The above procedure is the only way I have to convert my WordPerfect files to Word and PDF. Now that the conversions are done, I will just have to use Word for all my professional stuff. I'm force to by the world -- why in the name of Jesus does everybody in the world insist on using Word? It is awful.

>And here in Southern Deep-South, it is 4° ...yes, FOUR degrees above freezing. There is pretty thick frost on all the roofs and Bettie is not wearing a sweater this morning as she leaves on dog business -- she is wearing a coat.
>This is probably our third coldest morning this winter.
>I normally don't pay attention to that temperature stuff but with last year's Earth temperatures and now these, it becomes interesting. There was a time when the Hudson and East Rivers froze so solid that iron shod wheels bearing bronze cannons were wheeled across it and this was down river just above Newark...Bayonne?
>I never expected Global Warming to cause these low temperatures but what do I know? I am not the climatologist Al Gore is.  But I got all the guitar finished yesterday!

     Al Gore is not a climatilogist -- but I know that you just jest. These yearly fluctuations in the coldness of winters and the hotness of summers are, as you know, indicitative (if you look at long-term graphs) of the little cycles inside longer cycles which lie inside longer cycles, and so on. The global warming question is: What are the even longer cycles, over tens of decades and tens of centuries, or millennia? Is the current trend more of a short-term one, or is it indicative of a longer, or very long term? That is very, very hard to answer, although in the last two to three years there has come in an astonishing amount of new evidence that implies that the current is not short-term, and that it is largely anthropogenic. If you were truly as interested in atmospheric and ocean science as you are in many such things such as history and anthropology, I could send you reams of material compiled and written by the most elite scientists in the world.

      But I suppose that all of us believe what we choose to believe, and then ignore whatever facts are inconvenient. I do it all the time ... but I do try to reign it in. Really, I do. How successful I am in doing this I'm not sure. (For example, I admit that research on animals can sometimes be useful and that some conservatives are very, very bright persons of integrity and are worthy of respect -- but I still choose to believe that all those people that got abducted in UFOs and the ones who saw Hindu yogis levitate are lying, no matter what evidence they claim to have.)

>Women have not changed since they learned that if they cried some, they wouldn't have to gut the boar with their teeth...any more.

      Hmmm ... I wonder when they learned this. In recent times, or did the Viking and Celtic women already have it figured it out. I know the Latino and Arab women have yet to figure it out.

     In one of the Iclandic Sagas (I think you would really like the Sagas, if you haven't read them) a Viking, for some reason, slapped his wife on the face one day. She said, "Ill remember that." (Viking women weren't like fluttering-eyelash southern peaches.) So some time later this Viking and his wife were being attacked by ten or fifteen guys with grudges and some things to settle with axes and swords and bows and arrows and daggers, and the Viking inside his house fought all of them off bravely for a long time until he broke his bow string. He turned to his wife and said, "Give be a lock of your long hair that I can use as a bow string, because if I have my bow I will never be defeated. She looked at him and said, "Remember that time you slapped me?" She did not give him the lock of hair, so he ended up getting killed.

      Charlie 

Date: 18 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Slept Too Late

>You wrote: With a beautiful, young Irish bartender with the prettiest smile (she would absent-mindedly flick her lips with the tip of her tongue).

>Oh, my, don't you just hate that! That gets to me more than anything. I have discussed this sort of stuff with three hookers and about five loose women...pros in the former case and amateurs in the latter. We agreed that sex takes place "down there" and we live "up here." This is why hookers don't kiss as a rule, and a woman can let a man have his way with her but no affectionate displays.

      Yes. There is in a certain kind of wry, sideways glance that speaks wordlessly: You just don't know, and I know it's killing you. And a certain kind of slight pouty puckering of lips with head tossing back which speaks wordlessly: Don't you wish. And that certain way a lock of hair falls across one eye, and the one unveiled eye keeps looking at you wordless, expressionless as the moon veiled by a cloud, with the rising plume of cigarette smoke in you and the wordless eye; or the way two delicate, ivory-soft fingers absent-mindedly twiddle a glimmering silver ring in an earlobe while the eyes gaze a Louise Brooks hypnotic gaze into the tiny colored lights in the rafters. These things are the beauty of the specter of woman as she comes to man through his senses and stages a coup de grace on his seething mind. Nothing Penthouse or Playboy ever published compares to this kind of beauty. But then, he marries her. Too late, he realizes he was tricked. His princess turns into a sow and a shrew.

By the way, some hookers do kiss.

>That will involve her mouth, eyes, and nose...when in truth, they are for the most part trying to ignore the guy and think about themselves...or in the case of Victorian, Edwardian, etc., when they there thinking about the Queen and Empire.

    That's funny. You should write a book.  I knew this woman with blue eyes and black hair falling across her breasts inside a bright-orange tee shirt. She and I were the only ones there except for a bad, bad drunk who was giving her a hard time, and I deftly played the role of chivalry. I protected her. When the guy left she gave me a free beer, When some friendly locals came in who she knew, I said to her, well I guess I can leave now. She looked at me with those blue eyes, and her mouth blossomed into a big grin. A beer and a sweet smile. That was my reward.

>I knew a woman who did that sort of thing and it made me feel special...and then I realized that she did all the guys that way. And then she said an incredibly stupid thing and that bothered me. When I realized that she was rather dumb, she wasn't attractive to me any more.
>This doesn't make me shallow or chauvinistic at all.
>I told a woman about this and she said I was chauvinistic. I told her that was impossible because if I had been chauvinistic, I wouldn't have cared if she was smart or stupid because her body was still something to kill for. Then I added, "Like in your case. If you say something else stupid like you just did then I am going to think you are hideous." She didn't know to laugh or run.

      That's even funnier. I'll remember that one to repeat at appropriate moments. Every time I re-read it I re-laugh. It sounds like a cross between Seinfeld and Rodney Dangerfield.

      As (I think) I told you, I am still doing research into the online teaching world before I actually take the plunge and flood the market with resumes and cover letters. It could take months to get a response (if I do get responses at all), and then you have to train for anywhere from a week to a couple of months. I'm also about to apply to some local traditional colleges to see if I can get a physics-instructor position like I had at Delgado and Hinds Community Colleges. Meanwhile, I need money to survive. I'm living with an old friend from way back, and we are barely making it. (She has hit upon one stroke of bad luck after another. And she, unlike me, didn't even do anything to bring it on herself. She just got some really bad breaks.)

     So I am going out tomorrow morning -- and other subsequent mornings as necessity dictates -- to look for a plain old job, until I get my real job. I will work in a bookstore, an art gallery, I will tend bar ... I don't care what it is, I just gotta get something to carry me though. So what I've been doing the last day or two is seeking out people who know me simply through knowing me, not through professional relationships, people -- like you -- who I have known for a long, long time and who might give me permission to write their names down on a plain-old-low-paying-job application. I was wondering if you would mind my doing that with your name. Of course, these people almost certainly will never get in contact with any name I list, because it's all just silly BS. I would give a name and an e-mail address only. I will not give out anyone's phone number. It's no big deal. I ask you because I've known you for 28 years, but I already have asked others who said sure, use my name. If you are not comfortable with it, just don't respond, and everything's just fine.

       I now need to go now and tweak my cover letters and resume for the real jobs, and send the requests for references to the Ph.D.s and IT professionals I have worked with -- even though they have already said it is OK in the past, I must ask them again out of courtesy.

      Why do people request references? Doesn't everybody know somebody who will say, yea, this guy always wipes after he shits, and he does not molest young boys. It's a game.

     More soon ... Charlie.

Date: 19 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Slept Too Late

    Looking back, it seems that I did almost everything right. They said that physics and mathematics were in great demand. I got my degrees in those things. Then, since no one was hiring in physics and mathematics (ha ha) I worked for over 20 years in impressive IT environments. My resume is impressive. (Just look at dekalbtutoring.com and click "About Us" and look at the resume. It is impressive, until recent years.) And here I have no career. But there are so many other people I know that still have careers at my age. I have a friend from college who is a successful architect, I have several friends who are six- and seven-figure-income people in the financial industry, I have a friend from high school who is a nurse, The ex-wife is in medical records administration, my former roommate in college has a Ph.D. in English and teaches at a college, and so on. I can't figure out where I fucked up. Oh well ... you just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

>Do what best serves your interest. Remember Honoriuses' letter to the marooned Romano Britains..."Look to your own defence." This is always good advice; marooned or not.

    Remember that in Bobbie Gentry's song "Fancy" her mother gave her a locket that said "To thine own self be true". (Bobbie took that advice; when she was about 25 she married a billionaire who was 80, but she swore to the press that she was marrying for love.)

     But it's hard to philosophize about what is in "the greater interest of my highest inner self" or to believe that "if you believe you can make it happen, it *will* happen" and such claptrap as that when you are looking at not being able to pay rent and buy groceries, and your savings are going going gone. Hey, maybe I'll take of six years and get a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science or biochemistry! That's what I really want to do! ... Oh, I forgot ...

     Later ... Charlie

Date: 23 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Read this news story

>We have legislated the Renaissance to a stand still. The basis of the Renaissance was the rejection of the medieval Roman Church and it was done with four words; "Does this make sense?"
>People had never asked each other that about anything, much less about everything.

    I used to stand in front of my physics class and hold up over my head a small piece of chalk in one hand and a big book in the other hand, and I'd say "Watch this. Aristotle said that the big book will hit the floor before the little piece of chalk will. Now watch." I would drop them simultaneously, and they would hit the floor at the same time.

    Then I would say, "It took almost two thousand years of human civilization for someone to think of doing the experiment I just did. For two thousand years, no one ever did that experiment, until Galileo. Now THAT is what science is."

    And then I would tell them that my experiment demonstrates the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass, and that Einstein's recognition of that (which came to him like a thunderbolt as he was sitting in the Swiss patent office -- he said he almost fell off his stool with the impact of the revelation) which led to the general theory of relativity.

>So now we have a nation that started into what I call, "The Dim Ages", in the mid-60s.

     That's good. Work it into one of your books somewhere.

>Before then, it was good to be a discriminating person, one who looks at the circumstances and evaluates choices and judges possibilities.
Now we must not discriminate.

      One of Dillingham's maxims is: In order to understand the world one must -- and very, very few people are able to do this -- be able to discriminate, and be able to associate. One must be capable of discerning the differences between things that appear to the sloppy thinker to be the same, and one must be able to see the connections between things that to the sloppy thinker appear to be unrelated.

     Another of Dillingham's maxim is that the two greatest causes of the failure of most people to understand the world and their failure to behave in a proper, reasonable manner are their ignorance of simple Aristotelian logic and their ignorance of simple statistics. Most people "think with their feelings" and the inside of their heads is filled with sloshing mush which cannot maintain any kind of structure or establish any conception of the linearity of cause and effect.

>We must not evaluate. We must never, ever judge.

       One of the dumbest things anyone ever said (and almost everyone says it) is, "You have no right to judge." Ergo, holding down a sub-Saharan 12-year-old girl and cutting out her labia an clitoris with a piece of broken glass, and the sawing off of a person's head with a dull knife, and the specter of a 95-pound, anencephalic, iPod-weilding, 11-mpg me-me-me-me-me little neo-Nazi blond housewife walking, blithely cluleless of what she is doing, into the yawning Moloch's mouth of a WallMart, or a dull, clueless, endomorphic TV ruminant drooling the grease of a Burger King patty that was inefficiently produced from the wastage of the thin, eroding top soil of of what just two weeks ago was an Argentine rain forest -- it's not right to judge these people. Not only do I have no right to judge. I have no right to discriminate. I have no right to make connections. I'm just causing hurt. I'm just being mean. As the Colorado congresswoman said to the guy who mentioned "illiterate peasants": "How dare you!" That congressman had no right to say that awful thing.

>Calling an illiterate peasant, an "illiterate peasant" is culturally wrong. "Illiterate" is thought to be condemning. One cannot condemn without judging...which we must never, ever do. <G>

     And to discriminate is considered to be judging.

>Si! All this, I have read, is Adolph Hitler's fault and is now perpetuated by the Jews. They must obsess on their history.

    Yes, they probably do. However, the fact remains that the holocaust was indeed Hitler's fault.

>There will be a second Renaissance and this one will not come from the elitists, the educated, or the sophisticate. It will come from the bottom feeders. They will say, loudly, in print, and have on Tee shirts, etc., "Political Correctness is as full of SHIT AS A CHRISTMAS TURKEY." And "DON'T BE A CHRISTMAS TURKEY. Tell it like it is!"

      This would be a wonderful thing to happen, if only the bottom feeders were capable of discrimination and association. Alas, they are not. They don't understand the difference between a Limbaugh and a W. Buckley. They don't understand the difference between the Latin Quarter of Paris and the suburbs of south Houston. They are not able to see a connection between, on the one hand hog farms and pesticides and nitrogen fertilizers, and on the other hand the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River the size of the state of Maryland. Declaring war on political correctness would be in and of itself insufficient.

>I believe that the "n" word is coming back in the south...among Caucasians. It never left among Negros. (Since we are talking about Races, I thought I would use anthropologically correct terms.) I could have said "Colored People" but not all of them belong to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

     Hey, but you have to spell it right: "Negroes". And also, you're allowed to write "nigger". I don't like that "n-word" thing. How ridiculous that a word can be censored -- by self-sensorship, no less.

>Recognize my sarcasm.

      Since I e-mailed you last, I've been looking into another source of income: Online tutoring. There are some very legitimate online tutoring sites. They screen and test their tutors (the tests are pretty rigorous in the math and science areas), and they have all kinds of goodies -- paid training sessions, interactive whiteboard, electronic pen and pad, two-way voice, video, monitoring of tutoring sessions by the tutoring-site people and by parents ... For a given tutoring place you can choose to tutor anywhere from five to 30 hours a week, and choose which hours and days you will be available. I haven't found out what the pay is yet, but it's gotta be a lot more than minimum wage. And I wouldn't have to pay for transportation to a Burger King each day twelve miles away to make money.

     I could get used to this working at home thing. Unfortunately, the summer is very slow for the tutoring business. I'll still be looking into the online teaching, too; however, between waiting to hear from somebody and then going through the training for online teaching, it could be months before I actually start working. So I may still have to get a job in a bookstore or a manure recycling plant, or something, to get through the summer.

     It's ironic ... If I had 18 hours in graduate English courses, I would be much more marketable in the online teaching world. I was looking at the course descriptions for the courses offered at Georgia State (in downtown Atlanta just a short train ride from where I'm at) in the English master's program with an emphasis in creative writing: prose. These courses are so fascinating to me they make me salivate and cry. But I cannot take them. You cannot get into a graduate program without a bachelor's degree in English, which would take a year or more, full time, to get (which I cannot afford), and they won't let you take more than 6 hours or so if you're enrolled as non-degree status. I could be the best student they've got -- I have this inexplicable knack for the English language -- but I cannot get in. Oh well. Next life, I'll get a triple Ph.D. in English, mediaeval northern-European history and mythology, and the philosophy of mathematics and physics, all from Harvard. I'll be damned if I'll throw away another lifetime! (Hey, don't we get to learn from our mistakes?) 

Date: 27 Apr 2008

Subject: Wow! I almost found a practical use for a googleplex!

    There are 6.6 billion people on Earth. A very useful question occurred to me: If you lined up everybody in the world in a row, in how many different ways could you order them (in how many ways could you permute them)? You know like, with 1, 2, and 3, you can get 123, 132, 213, 231, 312, 321. There are six permutation, because

3! = 3 x 2 x 1 = 6

     So the number of possible permutations of all people on Earth is

(6.6 billion)! = (6.6 x 10 ^ 9)!

    Now, given that my Mickeysoft calculator tell me that a number as paltry as 100,000 give a very large factorial: 100,000! = 2.8242294079603478742934215780245 x 10 ^ 456,573. This is a number that contains 456,574 digits. That's ridiculously big. But the Mickeysoft calculator is dumb, because it just sits there and computes 100,000 x 99,999 x 99,998 x 99,997 x ... x 3 x 2 x 1. It took a couple of minutes to compute 100,000!. So how long would it take it to compute 6,600,000,000! ? It can't. But I can, because I am smarter than Mickeysoft. I used the following modification of the Sterling approximation:

log (n!) = 1/2 log [ (2n + 1/3)pi ] + n log(n/e)

      For large n, this is accurate to many, many decimal places. So the number of permutation of 6.6 billion people is found by plugging 6.6 x 10^9 into the equation above, which gives (rounded to four significant digits -- the 6.6 is only two significant digits):

log [ (6.6 x 10^9)! ] = 6.194 x 10^10, and therefore

(6.6 x 10^9)! = 10 ^ (6.194 x 10^10)

     This is NOT saying that the number of permutations is 6.194 x 10^10; that is merely an 11-digit number. This is saying that the number is 10 raised to the 6.194 x 10^10 power -- the number is 1 followed by 61,940,000,000 zeros. It's a number that, if you were to write the numeral down, would be a 1 followed by about 62 billion zeros. If you typed that many zeros on your keyboard at a rate of 5 zeros per second, it would take you 9,428 years to finish.

     My father used to say to me over and over and over for many years, much to my annoyance -- and even though every time he said it I tried to explain to him why it was incorrect -- but he never stopped saying it: That the number of songs (or symphonic compositions, etc.) that could be written is just infinite. It's just infinite! I told him, no, it's not. No ear can detect a frequency change smaller than a certain tiny amount, no brain can detect a variation in meter smaller than a certain tiny amount, and no ear can detect a difference in dynamic level smaller than a certain tiny amount. (And besides, if the frequency differences get small enough, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle would kick in and it would be impossible even theoretically to distinguish the two frequencies.) A simple way to put an upper limit on the number of songs that could be written is to assume (and it is a correct assumption) that anything than could possibly be heard as a distinct sound or melody or chord, or the sound of a freight train or a lion's roar or the roaring of the surf or white or pink noise -- anything that could possibly be heard be heard as unique to the ear can be captured on a CD recorded in a twenty-million-dollar studio with ten-thousand-dollar microphones.

     The digital sampling for a music CD is done at 44.1 kHz with 16 bits per sample, so that it can reproduce 0 to 22,000 Hz with 65,536 possible dynamic levels. So we can select from 65,536 amplitudes choices 44,100 times every second, and if we arbitrarily limit the length of the piece of music to one hour, we get to choose from 65,536 possibilities 44,100 x 3600 times in the course of the song. So there are 65,536 ^ 158,760,000 possible hour-long pieces of music we could write we could write.

log (65,536 ^ 158,760,000) = 158,760,000 x log (65,546) = 764,664,353.7858.

65,536 ^ 158,760,000 = 10 ^ 0.7858 * 10 ^ 764,664,353
= 6.1066 x 10 ^ 764,664,353

     That is approximately a 6 followed by 765 million zeros. OK, it's not as big as the people-permutations number, but hey, that's a lot of songs. But it's still not infinite.

    By the way: The number of orderings, or permutations, of all the atoms in the universe (based on the belief of physicists that there are at least 10 ^ 79 atoms in the universe) is (10 ^ 79)! This turns out to be: 10 ^ (7.86 x 10 ^ 80) unique arrangements. This is a number containing 10 ^ 80 digits. Think about that. It's not that the number of permutations is 10 ^ 80. 10 ^ 80 is a number that contains only 80 digits. You could write that numeral down in under a minute. The numeral we have here is not an 80-digit number, it is a 10^80-digit number. If you write down the numeral which represents this number of permutations, the numeral is approximately an 8 followed by 10 ^ 80 zeros. That's a 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000-digit number.

    But damn it, it's still not a googleplex: 10 ^ (10 ^ 100) -- or a 1 with 10 ^ 100 zeros after it. Maybe if I computed the number of all the different possible ways all the quantum interactions in the universe could occur every second, thereby determining how many different ways (according to the "many worlds" hypothesis) the universe can split in to two parallel universes every second, I could come up with a googleplex-ish number. Or if that doesn't do it, I'll calculate the number of possible ways the universe could have split over the entire history of the universe. That would do it! I'll be sure to keep you apprised.

     I got into all this because I have to figure out, for my novel, the following: If you have a population of a million people containing only 100 type-A people, with the rest of the population being type-B people, and you randomly pair every member of the entire population with one other person, then what is the probability that at least one of the random pairings will result in a type-A person being paired with another type-A person? This is non-trivial, and I have not been able to figure out how to compute it. It's easy to calculate the probability that any one pair randomly drawn from the population will be two type-A's. That's just

(100 choose 2) / (1,000,000 choose 2)
= ( 100! / (98! x 2!) ) / ( 1,000,000! / (999,998 x 2!) )
= (50 * 99) / (500,000 * 999,999) = 9.90001 x 10 ^ -9

or approximately one chance in 100 million. However, this is for only one pair selection. I need to draw 500,000 pairs, and I don't know how to compute the probability. But, no problem.  

      Another Dillingham maxim is: When you run head-on into your own dumness and ignorance in a world where your $400 PC is effortlessly doing many megaflops, then just swallow your pride and use brute force. So I downloaded a free C compiler with IDE from the Web, and it works just fine. I'm gonna write a simple program to do a Monte Carlo simulation to find out what the probability is. It shouldn't take more than a few hundred million runs to get a good number. See, this is how computers can be SOO fun. But not many people want you do do this kind of stuff for money.

     I am still doing research into the online teaching and online tutoring. I am looking into numerous tutoring (brick and mortar) schools in Atlanta which are commute-toable, and I'm going to apply to a couple of local colleges. I haven't applied anywhere yet, because many of my references have disappeared and I have been trying to hunt them down. There's still one, my thesis adviser, who I have not yet located.

     Now, back to the coal mines ...

     Charlie

Date: Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Wow! I almost found a practical use for a googleplex!

>And what would you do with them after you have them lined up? I would assume you'd rate them so you'd have "good" people at the very back/or end where you were.
>So you could have the worst guy at the front slap the next worse guy and say, "Pass it on!"
>It wouldn't take long for this to become an avalanche ionization of slappage. >Pretty soon there would be some killings and the population would be getting reduced at the bad end.
>This would all be over by the time it got to yours and the good people's end, and they know to just say "pass."

     Excellent point. I'll keep it in mind.

    My father used to say to me over and over and over for many years, much to my annoyance -- That the number of songs (or symphonic compositions, etc.) that could be written is just infinite. It's just infinite! I told him, no, it's not.

>Why would you tell him that? He is right. <g>

     No, he is wrong. I explained why in the sentences that followed.

>Intuitively (in my math deprived mind), I believe that "no infinity can grow where only finite numbers are sown."

      As a mathematical intuitionist or constructivist, I claim that there can be no actual infinities. To speak of them at all is meaningless. There can only be "potential" infinities. And finite numbers can be sown, and these can "grow toward" infinity, but they never actually get there. The infinitude is a potential that can be approached for ever, but you never arrive.

>There is, however, one thing that is not that way. There is so much potential for variation in human animals (particularly the female hybrids) that it is possible to have an infinite understanding with a finite population.


      It is not possible to have an infinite anything. Between the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the finite lifetime of a human being and of the human race and of the sun and of the universe, and the limits to the ability of the human sensory system to detect sufficiently tiny differences in sensual inputs or imagined quantities, you really cannot hope to have an infinite anything.
But damn it, it's still not a googleplex:

>I understand that Disney is putting in a Googleplex.

      I wish I had thought of that. By the way, I made a common mistake. The words are properly spelled "googol" and "googolplex". The "google" as in the search engine is a misspelling. I stand guilty as charged.

>Charlie, you wrote -- I got into all this because I have to figure out, for my novel, the following: If you have a population of a million people containing only 100 type-A people, with the rest of the population being type-B people, and you randomly pair every member of the entire population with one other person, then what is the probability that at least one of the random pairings will result in a type-A person being paired with another type-A person? This is non-trivial, and I have not been able to figure out how to compute it. It's easy to calculate the probability that any one pair randomly drawn from the population will be two type-A's.

>This is the slippery slope...do you remember when I had a practical application for this and it had to do with Type A male and Type A female (Cro Magnon) producing viable progeny and Type B male and Type B female (Neanderthal) producing viable progeny, but no Type A and Type B producing viable progeny...progeny yes, but not breedable.
Now we can say that Type A society is large, complex, interdependent across of Type A populations. Type B society is small, simple, and has a very small critical mass. For instance, two breeding women, two breeding men, two old worker women, two old worker men, two youths. This is getting critical. A female producing a child in winter, will mean the mother can't help provide food, will need more food herself, and the elements would work against the child's survival.
Knowing people would kill the child. The group could cease to exist otherwise. Guys don't live long and one accident, and they are in deep auroch doo doo.
Now lets throw in the ringer or THE RINGER. Make one of the Type B kids a hybrid but sterile.
One of these in Type B could do the entire group in.
One of these in Type A might get him looked at funny. or cause her to frustrate a lot of Type A guys just trying to do the birds and bees bit.
I thought this would be easy to figure.
It wasn't.

       I know what would happen, if you really want to simplify things with a little reality. The Neanderthals guys looked at the Cro-Magnon girls and thought, boy, I'm gonna get some of that when the other Cro-Mags aren't looking. The Neanderthal girls looked at the Cro-Mag guys and thought, wow, they are so cute. I wanna make babies with them when my Neanders aren't looking. The Cro-Mags would of course accomidate the Neandergirls, because I guy will boink anything that has a pulse. There would be enough boinking going on between Cros and Neands that this would accelerate the Neaders' demise. Yep, it's kinda hard to compute. But you know, I could write a computer program to simulate the scenario. Really, I'm not kidding. It is quite doable. (Do I have the time? I doubt it.)

>This is the way I started telling them as soon as I started the first class --
"This COURSE is unlike the other two courses."
"This CLASS is unlike the other classes of THIS course."
"The FIRST HALF of this CLASS is different from the 2nd half of this class."
"But the SECOND HALF of this class is like the rest of the classes of this course."
"Any questions so far?" <g>
I love good writing. I never had anyone drop that course again.

    Yea, especially when you can use it to walk around inside people's heads with dirty feet. That's so fun!

    Back to work ... Charlie.

Date: 30 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Wow! I almost found a practical use for a googleplex!