Eclectic Images

(2002)

Colin Fahey

2002.12.22

My web site features articles on various subjects, but I have accumulated a lot of photographs and images over the past few years that are too eclectic to be a part of their own articles. 

2002: Irvine: Dartmouth Court: Missile test at dusk.  My friend Greg Moulton called me one night and said: "Go outside, right now!!" I dropped the phone and ran out of my apartment without even closing the door.  I ran around outside, searching the area around my apartment, and then I started searching the skies.  Nothing.  What the heck was he talking about?  I jogged back to my apartment.  Huh!  That was weird!  I called Greg and asked for more information.  Ah, so it was something in the sky...  I ran outside with my camera and searched the sky closer to the horizon.  It was the trail of a missile test.  I saw a few others over the years while living in Southern California, always at dusk, and always beautiful. 

(Once, in Hermosa Beach, I briefly entertained the idea that the unidentified brilliant white spot in the sky was Jesus returning to Earth. That's the kind of effect this awe-inspiring, rare spectacle has.) 

My friend Sam Robertson was walking on a bike trail in the Upper Newport Bay (ecological preserve) and saw the missile test from the very start. 

A woman told Sam that she wondered if we were under nuclear attack! 

When Sam told me that story later that night (over dinner at Steelhead Brewery with Greg Moulton), I said that he should have taken advantage of that moment, with a pick-up line like: "We may not have long to live, so..." 

I laughed when Sam told me that his brother (I think) made the same exact comment over the phone when he heard Sam's story. 

Deus Ex (video game): Pile of tranquilized UNATCO guards. 

It was very difficult, but I played the entire Deus Ex game from the beginning (for the second or third time) without killing any humans. 

There were a few organic creatures that the game required you to kill to advance (like three of your fellow agents) in the plot. 

But I think I achieved the theoretical lower limit on killing to complete the game. 

In fact, I made sure that I minimized all enemy and friendly casualties that might otherwise occur if I didn't intervene. 

For example, by tranquilizing all guards, even those that you can easily avoid or flee, you prevent their deaths at the hands of UNATCO soldiers when they come in to "clean up" the remaining rebels after you complete your mission objectives. 

Other people get themselves in to deadly situations (attacked by creatures or other people, usually helped along by scripted logic), so you have to act fast to mess with destiny. 

Anyhow, I tranquilized every guard in a critical building, and carried their bodies to the roof.  At no point did I let a guard see a tranquilized body, otherwise they'd start fighting me, and that might result in them getting hurt (often from friendly fire).  I tranquilized EVERYONE in the entire level, and it was really weird to walk around the city without fear. 

Deus Ex (video game): Game recognized the fact that I eliminated (tranquilized) all guards. 

I knew that when I entered this room and triggered a radio transmission I would be discovered as a traitor of UNATCO.  There is no way around this; it's part of the game plot. 

However, when the "Walton Simons" character (of FEMA) contacts you via voicemail, and announces his discovery that you are a traitor to UNATCO, his dialogue includes the comment that: "Corporal Lewis isn't responding, so I guess you took care of the troops."

There were points in the game when the game logic wasn't prepared for EVERYONE to be merely tranquilized (and not killed). 

There would be dialog like: "Why did you kill Mr. X?", or, "I KILLED him, so you don't have to worry anymore." 

But if I walk over to the body of the person in question, and use the mouse to point to the body, I get the indication: "Unconscious". 

I worked so hard to have a perfect non-lethal record, and the game dialog sometimes didn't have the proper words to acknowledge the true status of my victims. 

It really bugged me when the game had spoken conversation (with subtitles) that claimed that my character killed people when he hadn't. 

I even did my best to make sure that unconscious people did not come to harm by other incidental events around their bodies. 

For example, explosions or carnivorous creatures can kill unconscious people lying on the ground. 

I owned this sleeper sofa (which I bought new in 1998 for $1200), but I gave it away for free to a friendly Japanese family that lived only a couple of blocks away from my apartment. 

I gave it away when I decided to shrink my lifestyle and move to a room in someone's house.  Until I can sustain income with my own projects, I'm going to live cheap so I'm not forced to work continuously on other people's projects just to pay rent. 

I got a junk e-mail message with a link to an online I.Q. test. 

The test itself was actually not easy, but there were a few questions that I thought were flawed or depended heavily on our culture. 

Anyhow, the gimmick was that you had to pay $20 to see a report with the "correct" answers and an analysis of your responses. 

I wonder if the act of ordering the report automatically subtracts 20 I.Q. points from the reported score.  It would be really funny if they itemized the factors in determining your score on the report, and they actually listed something like "Paid Money To See IQ Report: -20 points" in the summation. 

The junk e-mail that I received from the web site after taking the IQ test characterized me as a "Visionary Philsopher". 

They had funny euphemisms for all IQ levels, like "Creative Thinker" or "Lover of Words".  Even the thought that they are trying to soften the blow of discovering that you have an IQ of a rock is funny. 

I think it's pretty obvious that each human being has diverse talents that cannot be summarized in a single number.  When I meet a new person and learn about his or her life, I always get the impression that there is something that this person can do that is way beyond my comprehension or abilities.  Unless something radically alters my brain and body, like me getting converted in to robot form, I get the feeling that I will NEVER reach another person's level of skill in some area.  That's a weird feeling: the sense that there is a certain experience that will forever be out of reach. 

Some people are good at: chess, Rubik cube, foreign languages, typing, paino playing, realistic drawing and painting, remembering people's names, expert driving, meeting strangers and having conversations, telling stories, or martial arts....but not me! 

Junk e-mail with a really insane combination of images and text.  The tag line is straight from the movie "The Matrix", when Morpheus convinces Neo to take the Blue pill to escape the illusion of the Matrix.  Even the image of the customer service person in this advertisement is bizarre and inhuman, like some composite of various face parts.  Is the person male or female? 

My friends and I were pondering photon diffraction and interference while eating dinner at Steelhead Brewery.  It bothers me that teachers rarely describe Q.E.D. (Quantum Electro-dynamics), the basis of photon self- interference and interactions of light and matter, until graduate school! 

Anyhow, we were wondering how various radio and optical interference effects really worked, and one of our amateur theories involved photon-photon interaction.  But...it turns out that the effect of photon-photon interaction is only really observable when the photons involved are at insanely high energies (like X-Rays)!  Who knew?!  The diagram above shows a pair of photons interacting by exchanging virtal particles.  Anyhow, forget you ever saw this diagram, because this kind of interaction might only be relevant to nuclear blasts and supernovas. 

So, observed interference effects of light and radio waves must be due to two things: (1) photon wave-function self-interference; (2) cumulative effect of successive absorptions of individual photons at the observation points. 

Philip K. Dick: I'm a big fan of his writing. I read maybe six of his novels, and three compilations of his short stories.  When I have more free time I will get back to reading his other novels sitting on my shelf. 

I stopped reading VALIS after a few chapters because I was convinced that it was making me lose my mind, and that reading it to the end would make me insane! 

I honestly felt I had to protect my mind against the VALIS novel. 

Some of Philip K. Dick's other novels made me feel weird after reading them, but his final novels have a really powerful effect on me. 

I really get the sense that he perfected his communication skills over his writing career, and that he was going insane for various reasons, so his final novels were such perfect expressions of insanity that the ideas enter the reader's mind easily and leads to a similar mental torture. 

VALIS was more than a nutty book to me; it was a very real threat to my mental existence.  If I ever finish reading VALIS, maybe I'll see God via a pink LASER! 

Apparently you can cause a hard crash (reboot) of your computer just by executing a simple user-level application that just repeatedly prints a particular string (a tab followed by several backspace characters).  I don't think Microsoft ever officially acknowledged or explained this bug, but some patches fix this bug. 

"Progress Quest": A unique video game that does not require any user (player) input!  Progress Quest takes the work out of playing role-playing video games.  Here I am running five instances of Progress Quest to make five times as much progress in a given amount of time. 

On 2001.09.01, I bought the book "Natural Language Understanding (2nd ed)" [1995, James Allen] from the Border's bookstore in the base of one of the towers. 

The book is very interesting, and I consult it from time to time, but my copy has a creepy significance. 

I also saved ATM receipts from my frequent visits to the WTC Border's bookstore while staying with my brother for a week ending in early 2001.09.