So I am a new father. I have a beautiful daughter. Both my wife and I are home, full-time taking care of her and it is exhausting. She does sleep quite a bit, but she also cries a lot and we do not know why. We have tried a variety of things, some help for awhile, others not at all.
But this post is not about her, but rather me. Or rather, my project desires. I was washing some cloth diapers by hand(!) and I began to think about my projects that I have wanted to pursue. Thankfully, the parsing project has mostly left my bones. I did enough of it, I think, to get it out of my system. To be honest, I think the easiest thing is to learn a programming language and use it as a domain specific language rather than writing a parser. The JSON format can deal with data and the language, particularly JavaScript, can deal with whatever crazy setup you want. But, most of my other projects still remain.
It started, in the cold soap plunging, with my thinking about programming math. This is something I have wanted to do, in one form or another, since high school. To learn mathematics by programming. And now we can do it. Currently we are about halfway through the foundational pages for learning JavaScript. They are pretty good, if I do say so myself. The latest one is defining functions. But we have so much more to do. And when I think about all that can be done, well, it seems immense and makes me yearn to work on it. Which I hope I will soon.
But then good old Mord calls to me during the hot soap plunging. Mordblog is probably 3/4 done. So close, and yet so far. I see the stories, there is no writer’s block, but I have yet to finish it. So it goes. But it would be nice to do that. And then pursue further fantasy tales, RPG stuff, etc. I enjoy creating such stories. I like the broad outline, the quick zoom-in, and then the fade out. That is, I am not a big fan of detail after detail. I like epic, I like sweep, I like personal.
So far, so good. I knew these I would keep with me: full throttle on programming math, finish Mord. Clear goals. None of it happening anytime soon. I love my daughter and it is amazing to be with her, but I wish I could do some work on the others. Soon, I keep telling myself.
But then, as I plunged away in the cold vinegar rinse, the thought of Bohmian mechanics came to me. I had started a website dedicated to it. Made some decent progress, and then, again, I sputtered. But that is not what bothers me. There are these ideas about it that I wish to still pursue. Or rather, I wish someone would pursue. And no one else seems to be doing so. They are pursuing their own ideas, naturally enough. My thought is a simple one: quantum field theory which has at its core the creation and annihilation of particles is just an approximation to a theory of a fixed number of particles whose types change under the normal dynamics. There is some good evidence that this is at least possible, but it has never been pursued to see if it does work. My biggest problem is that I don’t know QFT and I find every book I approach on the subject to be rather unhelpful. So it is not a quick project. And I would probably work on various other things in BM along the way. It just sort of explodes with time and effort. There is no particular hurry about it, but it tugs at my heart.
Great, so two projects that I can work on and one to dream about. But that is not all. There is a project I have wanted to do since I was about 10. I used to play these gamebook adventures, and my favorite was Lone Wolf, an epic tale, actually. I would love to write a program to analyze all the possible paths in the books, probabilities of successes, characteristics such as minimun number of combats/maximum number, etc. And then the ambition kicks in to design a play-along companion webapp and then that turns into leaderboards, tournaments, challenges, whatever. Though the stats I think is what I am most curious about. This is not a project that should take too long, but it seems the most derivative, least creative, of all my other projects.
And then? Well, now I was spinning the diapers dry, and I thought about trigger points. First, these are little muscle knots that irritate the nerves. Or so they say. I have successfully treated my pains, such as “carpal tunnel syndrome” like symptoms and random teeth pain (dentist: nothing wrong with teeth). I just massage certain knots away and the pains go away. I would love to write a webapp that helps train people to self-diagnose and treat their triggers. Seems reasonable. Again, not too hard, but just long enough to be put off.
Then I was thinking, you know what would be really cool? A site that tracks “alternative medicines” and ranks them from certainly implausible (homeopathy–just water!) to plausible but shown placebic (acupuncture, apparently) to plausible but not rigorously tested (my favorites?: coconut oil, trigger points) to the I-have-no-idea status (fish oil, allergy drops, allergy connection to epilepsy, gluten/food intolerances). This project is just pie-in-the-sky.
Hanging up my diapers, I reflected on how much diaper washing freed my mind to think. And this led to my final project, a religion for atheists. The basic idea is that of a Bohmian universe (a single wave guiding particles–that’s science) in which the wave takes on a spiritual role of essentially God. The wave is evolving into a conscious being, doing so through us. I love this idea. I see no potential for it to catch on as reason is a bad foundation for faith, but it works for me. This idea was most passionate in me when I was surrounded by some religious people. But they have faded out of my life and I am surrounded by atheists, entirely. They do not yearn for spirituality.
I had hoped my daughter would lead me to this again. That staring into her new eyes, her simple beauty, would give me a direct connection to the divine, much as the natural world usually does. But that has not happened. Rather, the reverse. I feel that I offer her a glimpse into the divine. She is so physical, so raw in the material world. It makes me realize that we grow into a relationship with the divine, if we choose. We are not born that way. Original sin, indeed, though hardly sin, I would say. If we are the emerging consciousness of the wave, of God, then the baby is far from that. The baby is just after the big bang, universally speaking. It takes time to get to our stage. So if I want to pursue the divine, I need to summon the desire to do so. Normal life would not do so.
At this point, as I put away the laundry equipment, I decided to write this post. And here I am, late at night, typing away at my new fatherness. Being a father is incredible. I think one needs to believe that, given how much energy it takes. But I also think it is true that it is the most profound contribution to life I can make. Still, the desire to create in the mental realm continues unabated. The conscious mind wants to express and create.
Becoming a new father was like becoming a butterfly after being a caterpillar all one’s life. But apparently I still crave the leaf even as I soar on the winds of fatherhood.