A Tale of Twin Cities

The 1992 Ice Palace (via)

This Saturday, [Львица] and I went to the St. Paul Winter Carnival's opening parade, officially the King Boreas Grande Day Parade, which was a long time coming, because it was something I suggested we do last fall, but, because I am not a very good planner, it didn't happen last year. Anyways, we went this year, and it was fun. The parade was better than I expected and, while it was cold, it wasn't the unbearably bitter cold that tends to occur around this time in January, so it was possible to sit outside for two hours and only have numb toes (which is a success in Minnesota in January). Add some food and cannolis, and it was an altogether pleasant afternoon. I'd never been to one of  the Winter Carnival parades before, so it was cool to see all of the groups associated with it: the winds, the Klondike Kates, the Vulcans (sadly not of the Spock variety), the Royal Guard, and others that I don't recall at the moment and am too lazy to look up.

I feel like I don't really know all that much about the Carnival, given that I grew up practically in St. Paul (yes, I know that Falcon Hts. is not technically St. Paul, but it's in a St. Paul ZIP code, the border is half a block from my house, and it's much more like St. Paul than the other neighboring city of Roseville, which is much more suburban, so I'm going to round up), but then I try to talk about it with people from other parts of the Twin Cities, or Minneapolis, and they have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, so I guess knowing anything about it makes me a real St. Paulite (St. Pauler? St. Paulian? St. Pauliot? Why are there so many options?!?). My family never really got into the Carnival, but I had a couple of the buttons, and when the Ice Palace was in Como Park, we got to watch it's construction, and then went to it when it opened, and I went medallion hunting one year with [Not a Hipster?]. I think that it's a shame that they stopped building the Ice Palaces, even if they were destroying the planet, because they were so unique to St. Paul, the festival as a whole is as well, but the castles were the most visible part of it, which is so often overshadowed by Minneapolis.

I love both cities, for very different reasons, but I have often found myself caught between the two, because I grew up in St. Paul (adjacent), but went to school in Minneapolis. I grew up going to Como Park and being traumatized at the Como Zoo, got on family outing to Grand Avenue, and driving down Summit looking at all the cool mansions. While my neighborhood was smack dab between the two down towns, we went into St. Paul much more often than Minneapolis, although that was mostly because of the Science Museum in down town St. Paul (which is still awesome).

I went to high school in Minneapolis, right between down town and Northeast (the hipster, trendy neighborhood), and my school mostly drew people from Minneapolis, so I spent a lot more time there, and got to know the city a lot better. I also got really defensive about St. Paul, because while I love Minneapolis, I got really sick of people saying that it was better, complaining about confusing street names, a lack of nightlife, and it being generally small and boring. The first two are true, although I don't think your ability to navigate should end at the river (seriously people, maps are a thing, you can even get them on your phone now, it's not hard, besides, there are only about 4 major cross streets in St. Paul). The third is something I don't think people from Minneapolis really grasp. St. Paul is indeed smaller than Minneapolis, with about 100,000 fewer people, but Minneapolis itself really isn't that big by anything other than Upper Midwestern standards, with only about 385,000 people if Wikipedia is to be believed. It's the 48th biggest city in the US. 48th.

What I'm trying to say here, is that Minneapolis needs to get over itself. It's an awesome city, I love it and I loving living in it and going to school in it, but I have met far too many people from Southwest Minneapolis who are such snobs about it (well, snobs in general), who seem to think that nothing and nobody interesting comes from anywhere except Southwest, and nothing cool every happens anywhere except Uptown. They wouldn't dare to set foot in St. Paul lest they be contaminated. Granted, there are people in St. Paul who think that if they cross the river they'll instantly be murdered, but I haven't met as many who are so vocal about it.

Take that Minneapolis! (via)

I love both cities, having lived in (or near) both, and both have their merits, although they are very different. More like fraternal twins than identical. St. Paul is older, more stately, quieter, and more residential. Minneapolis is trendier, bigger, with more business and nightlife. There are parts of both I wouldn't want to go, and parts of both that are positively stunning, albeit in different ways. The best way I've heard it put is that Minneapolis is where you spend your twenties and St. Paul is where you settle down and raise your kids. That seems to sum it up fairly well, I think.

The Church of Evolutionism

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I'm finishing up my liberal education requirements this semester by fulfilling the Civic Life and Ethics theme with a class called Understanding the Creationism Evolution Debate. It's through the biology department, and it came highly recommended, looked interesting enough, and wasn't public speaking or political theory (which constitute most of the classes fulfilling this particular requirement), so I thought that I'd fill half of my lib eds for my last semester of not exclusively taking science classes with a science class. Although, I would like to take more liberal arts classes, because I generally enjoy them and it's fun to learn about something outside of the sciences (except feminist/social theory, because I do like what I learn to have a purpose), I just don't think I'm going to have time in my schedule after this semester to take any more.

A couple of days before term began, the professor sent out a survey for us to take, which consisted of detailed questions about evolution to test both our knowledge of it and our views about its validity. It is a biology class technically, so it does make sense to get a feel for how much knowledge we have on the topic, as well as gathering data about public schools teaching evolution and creationism.

The first thing the professor did on the first day of class was to point at people and ask why they took the class. People's answers were pretty much what you'd expect from what seemed to be primarily bioscience majors: they wanted to know more about the creationism side of the debate and why people are so passionate about not teaching evolution, a proven scientific fact. Right away atheism got mentioned as well as liberal religious backgrounds. When he got to me, I mentioned by Catholic education and being taught evolution in biology and a form of creationism (the type that includes evolution) in religion class. My point was that I'm interested in seeing why the debate has become so polarized because I was educated in a system where they aren't mutually exclusive, but because the professor launched into a lecture about the Catholics and how in the state of Minnesota you are more likely to learn a comprehensive form of evolutionary theory in a Catholic school than in public school, I'm pretty sure all anyone took away was that I went to Catholic school and thus must be Catholic.

This sort of bothers me, and always has, which is why I don't often bring up my educational background with people, because they automatically assume that either a) I am a religiously conservative Catholic or b) I must have hated high school because it was an ultra conservative environment (I have gotten the "I'm sorry" response to telling people I went to a Catholic high school far too many times to count). The fact is, I am about as far from religiously conservative as it is possible to get without actually considering myself an atheist, partially because I'm just not wired to blindly believe what people tell me I should if it doesn't make logical sense to me, and partially because the best way I have seen to discourage practicing Catholicism is a Catholic education. I liked my high school, and chose to go there because I liked the academic environment, not because my parents forced me to. They made me go to a parochial grade/middle school, but they gave me free reign to pick my high school. The school I went to was more liberal than a lot of public schools in this country, and was fairly accepting of everybody. Yes, we had mandatory theology classes, but they included things like Intro to Philosophy and Comparative World Religions, which were both fairly interesting. And yes, we had to wear a uniform, but they only part of it they really cared about was having our shirts tucked in, and they let me wear ties to school on a regular basis. I liked my high school, even though I didn't enjoy religion classes most of the time, and I don't like that people automatically assume that Catholic schools are really conservative and/or I must be a conservative Catholic because I went to one.

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Anyways, today in class we discussed the idea of Intelligent Design and why it's such a popular concept. The comments that people made about it, as well as about Creationism in general, seemed to me to convey the idea that they thought that people who believed in it were stupid, or just didn't understand the science well enough or something. And so, attempting to argue the other side of it, I made a comment about how I think ID is so popular because it allows people to reconcile science with faith in a way that acknowledges both. There is nothing mutually exclusive of evolution and creationism, excepting Young Earth Creationism, and I think that people who fervently argue on the side of evolution and science, tend to equate all forms of Creationism with the Young Earthers, who do deny most of biology and good chunks of geology as well. But the fact is that a lot of people believe that something set life on Earth in motion and gives it purpose, because it brings meaning to the chaos and randomness that is the physical world and keeps people sane in the face of the meaningless abyss that is the universe. Most of these people aren't stupid, and many of them understand and accept evolution and the age of the Earth and really all of science.

And now I think most of that class thinks I'm a creationist, because I went to Catholic school and had the gall to defend Intelligent Design, which is funny when I think about it. Personally, I accept all of evolutionary theory as fact, although I don't claim to understand the origins of life or if there is some soft of creator/designer. Religiously, I consider myself agnostic, because I have no idea whether a God exists or not, and I think it's kind of a meaningless question to ask because it is so far outside of the realm of anything we can ever hope to understand. There is no way to prove or disprove the existence of a supernatural deity; if there was, it wouldn't be supernatural, it would just be natural. Frankly, hardcore atheists annoy me just as much as religious fundamentalists, but I try to respect everyone's right to believe whatever they choose to.

I'll see how this class goes, because it seems really interesting so far, but I may not do a very good job convincing people that I'm not a creationist, because I don't think that they're stupid, just that they have a different value system than I do. Theirs puts religious faith over scientific evidence, which isn't wrong, just different. I certainly don't think Creationism should be taught in public schools, but that's a completely different issue.

First Impressionists

A new semester has once again begun, and after nearly a week, I still feel like I'm catching up with people after the break, or at least the few people I actually talk to on a semi-regular basis. Finals and the the break plus changing schedules mean that there are people I talk to in class or just around on a regular basis who I haven't seen in the better part of a month, some of whom, like the people I talked to in physics last year and then my engineering classes last semester, I will probably not have classes with again because of changing majors. I wasn't particularly close with any of those people, but it was nice to have people to talk to in class, because then I don't go entire days at a time without talking to anyone.

I ran into [Nice Vest] and [The Cool CA] tonight and talked to them for a bit, which was nice, because I really don't see them enough, even though I live in the same building as [The Cool CA]. During the course of our conversation, [Nice Vest] told me that the first time she really remembers meeting me, she thought I was a total bitch because I wasn't a fan of our floor being Lord of the Rings themed for the Spring semester last year, which was mostly her idea because she's a huge LotR nerd.

It is true that I don't enjoy Tolkien's work other than The Hobbit all the much, in both book and movie form, but I have read the books and attempted to stay awake through the movies. I have a lot of respect for them, and I can understand why people like them, I just don't. I've never been much of a fan of fantasy, and I don't find Tolkien particularly readable. That being said, as an avid nerd myself, I get annoyed that people tend to get offended, or are surprised, when then learn that I'm not a LotR fan. I have my opinion, and I don't think the books are bad, I just don't like them, and I respect the opinions of people who like them, so I don't appreciate it when people automatically assume that I am attacking them by not enjoying them. I respect your opinion, and as such, I expect my opinion to be respected in return. Just because you love something doesn't mean I have to also.

According to Google, this is what pretentious people look like

All ranting aside, this is not the first time I have failed to make a good first impression on someone who I later became friends with. In fact, it seems to have become a somewhat disturbing trend lately. I know for a fact that [Fuckin' Magnets] thought I was 'the most pretentious person ever' for a while after we met, although I do have to admit it was over a game of trivial pursuit which does tend to bring out my know it all side. And [Type A, Likes Baseball] admitted to hating me for the majority of the fall semester last year because I sat next to her in Calc and was 'pretentious in calc' although I don't think knowing the answer in class counts as pretentious. Now it's become kind of a thing for my friends to refer to me as pretentious, which I don't think I am really. I'll admit that I'm a smart ass, and that I have a tendency to correct people, argue semantics, and speak with authority about things I know nothing about, but I don't think any of that counts as pretentious. I never assume that I'm smarter or better than anyone, and I know I'm usually not the smartest person in the room. I know that my friends aren't being mean, and they don't really mean it, but I'm starting to get tired of hearing it from some people.

Anyways, tangents aside, it seems that I have a first impression problem. I know that I'm more reserved when I first meet people, and for some reason the more guarded I am the more I feel the need to correct people. I'm also not the type to make friends right away. It takes me some time to get comfortable with people enough to start spending time with them. I met all of my current friends at the beginning of last year when we all moved into the dorms, but I didn't start hanging out with them until at least a month into the Spring semester, and even then it took me a couple of weeks of just hanging around the lounge doing homework, which is where they always were, before I felt like part of the group at all. This probably makes me seem aloof and distance or something like that, which isn't the best for first impressions, but it's really just that I'm scared to talk to people.

This may be one of the reasons why I have problems meeting people, because apparently people don't like me at first. But I swear I'm not a bitch or really pretentious (at least I don't think so; please let me know if I am) and I don't hate you. I'm just socially awkward and I don't know what to say, especially if I'm in a large group of strangers who all seem to have no trouble meeting people. So, if you ever see me standing in a corner looking uncomfortable in a social setting, come talk to me about X-Men or redheads or anything really, and if you walk away thinking that I hate you, I probably don't, in fact, you probably just made my day.

Scardy Cat

My friends and I were attempting to sort out housing for next year last night, as college students are wont to do, when [Keeper of All Knowledge] ran across a listing for a house with a fireplace, a possibility which immediately had everyone talking about curling up in front of a fire on a cold winter night (I'd make a joke about there being no other type of winter night, but this year seem to be proving otherwise). But for me, this idea immediately brought back a vivid memory of a nightmare I had as a child of a column of fire shooting out at me from my family's fireplace. I'm not sure if I had that particular dream more than once or if it was just particularly vivid, but it was one of those nightmares that, as a child, I had a hard time distinguishing from reality (or maybe I was just bad at telling if things were real as a child, because another dream that I was convinced was real had to do with zoo animals escaping and a gorilla entering my room through my ceiling fan).

All this got me thinking about fear, and all of the seemingly random things I have been afraid of at one point or another (which is quite a few, because I was a very anxious child). As an exercise in my neuroses, I though I would outline some of the one's I was most affected by (read: can remember) here, because I don't have homework yet and am bored, also personal growth through dealing with my fears or something. They are sorted into various categories, because they are not all on the same level of importance, and I'm not including things that are either relatively universal (e.g. my fear of rejection) or things that are somewhat existential, by which I mean things that are nearly impossible to have nightmares about (e.g. my fear of my feelings). Note: I am not actually afraid of teeth; they just gross me out and I don't want to look at them for too long.

Phobias:
These are the things that I have always been irrationally afraid of, to the point of affecting my life, and still have an irrational, over the top fear of. These are the things that I have nightmares about and make me want to hide/cry in a corner.

Fire: As mentioned above, I am a pyrophobe. There is no specific reason for this that I am aware of; no traumatizing incident that put me off of it, but as a child I had recurring nightmares about my house burning down, to the point where for several years in grade school I couldn't have the candles on my birthday cake lit. It's not quite so bad anymore, as I can use lighters and matches and be at bonfires, I am just hyper-aware around fire, and I really hate it when people play with lighters because it makes me really anxious.

Tornadoes: This one is a little more specific, and it tends to manifest itself as a fear of any bad thunderstorm/severe weather. Again, I don't know why I'm afraid of bad storms, but I did have some nightmares about tornadoes as a child, although it wasn't as common a theme as house burning. The one time I went to summer camp, there was a day with really bad weather, and I remember having to be taken out of first aid class (it was school patrol camp because I'm a nerd) because I couldn't stop crying while attempting to learn how to tie a tourniquet. There is a direct correlation between the severity of the weather and the amount of anxiety I have. Storms make me want to go hide in a basement while jumping up and down in a circle so as to not be sitting still, which is really just how anxiety makes me feel.

I don't mind having phobias, because everyone does to one extent or another, but I don't like that the things I am most afraid of, while not completely crazy, are things that many people love. It makes me feel stupid to have to admit that I don't like fire or storms when people start talking about how awesome they think they are. Everyone wants to go outside and watch the funnel cloud form, while I want to go find the basementyest place available and go hide there until the the severe weather warning has expired. People's reaction to this is usually to explain to me about how you can tell if it's tornado weather and this isn't it, which usually makes me feel worse, because I don't like being patronized, and also because I know all of the indicators and how completely unlikely it is to be injured/killed by a storm, because I thought that would help, but phobias are inherently irrational, and calmly explaining why I shouldn't be afraid doesn't do anything, because if it did, I wouldn't have phobias.

Assorted Childhood Fears:
These are the things that scared me as a child, but I have since outgrown. Now they mostly serve to illustrate how anxiety filled my childhood was. There are probably more that I can't remember anymore because they were so specifically random.

Chickenpox: I have no idea why I was so specifically afraid of the chickenpox as a child, particularly since I was vaccinated against it as a baby, but I was afraid of getting it. It was probably an early manifestation of my slight hypochondria, but all through grade school, every time I had a slightly itchy spot, I was convinced that it meant I was coming down with the chickenpox. Yes, I was afraid of a completely innocuous childhood disease. I am just that cool.

Gorillas: This one has a halfway decent reason: when I was a baby, [MaternalUnit] took me to the Como zoo, and while we were there, Casey, the largest Gorilla the zoo has ever had, escaped, and, according to [MaternalUnit], came up to the glass door we were on the other side of, and pounded on it until tranquilized by zookeepers. I have no memory of this, but, growing up, I heard the story so many times that I convinced myself I could remember it. This lead to a fear of gorillas which manifested as an avoidance of the ape enclosures at zoos and later a general distaste for zoos (which may also have to do with sad animals in cages).


Things I Have a Healthy Respect For:
I am not actually afraid of these things per se, but I make it a policy to generally avoid them for the sake of my health. Or at least that's what I tell myself.

Things That Can Kill Me: By this I mean thinks like venomous snakes, spiders, and insects, decrepit building, and hospitals. I'll kill a spider with the best of them and feed your snake while you're out of town, but I'm not going anywhere near a snake or spider I know to be venomous, such as a rattlesnake or a camel spider. Also, Africanized honey bees and giant Japanese hornets. As for hospitals, they are the best place to contract antibiotic resistant diseases, so I am not going to voluntarily spend any more time in one than I have to.

Australia: This is the place with the largest concentration of things that can kill me. They have a huge percentage of the world's deadliest snakes/spiders/insects, including spiders that are common in the cities and can hide in swimming pools, and even the fish are deadly (see: the lionfish and the blue ringed octopus). Also, there's a hole in the ozone layer over it during the summer and skin cancer qualifies as a thing that can kill me. I would go to New Zealand (because sheep! and it's where Xena was filmed) but I am not planning on ever going to Australia.

There you have it: a not so comprehensive list of things that scare me/have scared me and a little bit of a glimpse into the tangled mess of my subconscious. Make of this what you will.

10th of January Resolutions

Exactly! (Except it's the 10th of January and I am making resolutions...) (via)

I know I'm a little bit late, but I'd thought I would tackle some New Year's resolutions, or I guess, 10th of January resolutions at this point. I've never really been one for resolutions, not because I think I don't need to make them (I'm the first to admit that I'm quite far from perfect), but because they end up being a yearly reminder of how bad I am at willpower and follow through. Also, they have always reminded me of having to give something up for Lent for some reason, although they are two quite different things, which is an activity (or lack thereof) that I have always hated. (I was always the smart ass in Catholic school who was 'giving up giving up things for Lent for Lent.') Anyways, after that brief digression, on to my 10th of January resolutions with appropriate commentary:

1. Start going to the gym again.

I am well aware that this is a fairly standard resolution, as evidenced by how much busier my local YMCA always is in January than in December, but I really need to start working out regularly again. I was bad this past semester and basically stopped working out, after doing so regularly for several years. I feel better both physically and mentally when I work out regularly, which is something I could really use after these past couple of months.

2. Start being more proactive.

I know this is rather general, but I do mean it in a general sense, as it really does apply to multiple aspects of my life. I am not proactive about things, and I have a tendency to sit back and let things come to me rather than going out and finding what I want. I know I do this because it's easy and I'm lazy, and good things have occasionally come my way, but I can't help wondering how many things have passed me by for every good thing I have managed to stumbled into. I want to actually have experiences that don't involved going to class or sitting at the library, and I know that won't happen nearly as often as it could if I continue on my present trajectory.

3. Relax

I have this tendency to over analyze every single thing that happens, to the point where I have very little perspective on some things because I have over thought them to death. This accomplishes nothing except for feeding into my cycle of general worry. I would like to be able to take a step back sometimes and stop being hyper aware of everything I do and say and just feel. So I'm going to try and just be, to shut my brain off and just relax. I don't know if this is possible, but I'm going to try at least.

4. Talk to people about stuff

This one is more of a continuation of the things I have been working on with regards to handeling my emotions in a healthy way, but it's worth mentioning/resolving, because it is the piece of self improvement  that I am most aware of needing to work on at the moment. I have people in my life right now that I really trust, and I should utilize that resource.

5. Be a productive member of society

I should probably get a job at some point this year and start paying taxes and voting and all that (although I have already voted (in the 2010 midterm elections)).

Fill in a blank (via)

That's mostly it for now. There are other things I am/should be working on, but they haven't really coalesced into an easily conveyable idea at this point, or they aren't really something I want to talk about yet (both of which may be the same thing), or I just can't remember them right now. My main goal for 2012 is to attempt to be a fully functioning adult, which I'm not quite convinced I am yet. Hopefully I can gain some traction towards that goal with this batch of resolution and those pesky things like a general lack of will power and follow through don't get in my way. Maybe I should have made a resolution about those things...

Of Bosons and Paradigms

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Last month scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (which is probably a front for supervillany; think about it: it's a large mysterious underground science facility that some people say could destroy the world; sounds like a Batman villan to me) announced that it may have possibly seen the first observable evidence of the Higgs boson, the theoretical elementary particle responsible for mass.

The LHC, which was built specifically to find the Higgs boson, is anticipating that it will be able to claim discovery sometime within the year, which would be huge for theoretical physics because it would validate the last half century of work in quantum mechanics, which has been really important to theoretical and particle physics for the past century. But I think it would be way more interesting, and have much more profound implications, if they didn't find the Higgs, or if they found evidence that it didn't exist.

I'm no expert on theoretical particle physics, or really anything at all, but I have taken enough science classes to understand that most of what we think we know about the universe at any given point is usually wrong. Sometimes, all the equations work out, and we think we finally understand what is going on, provided we ignore some of the nagging problems that the theory can't explain, and we still turn out to be wrong. The most enduring example of this is Newtonian gravity versus general relativity. As a complete outsider to physics, that where it seems like we are standing right now with quantum mechanics. There are a lot of things that work out really well, and many more that it is most likely correct about because we have things like advance electronics that work based on the principles of quantum mechanics, so it must be mostly correct. But still, we don't have a unified field theory, and there are other problems, meaning that there are still pieces missing. Those pieces may not be in the current directions of research, they may be in the complete opposite direction, or in a direction that we haven't found yet. Not finding the Higgs, could completely overturn a lot of the research and theories from the last fifty or sixty years of work, and it would force a paradigm shift the likes of which we haven't seen since the development of quantum mechanics at the turn of the last century. And just maybe, the answers we have been searching for would be found the new paradigm that would be generated.

That's one of the things that I find so exciting about science: there's always something we don't know, and it's always possible that what we think we know is wrong. It illustrates the difference between knowledge and understanding. We know the equations and the experimental facts and what we have observed, but we don't always understand what they mean on an intuitive level, or even any level at all. That's the gap we are constantly trying to bridge.

Skeptical scientist is skeptical (via)

I have no idea what the future of scientific research holds, and what the coming discoveries will mean, and I suspect that no one does. Who knows what finding the Higgs boson will mean in terms of future research (assuming they find it), and what doors it could open, in terms of both research and technology. I could be incredibly significant or it could only matter to the people writing scientific papers and never have a wider impact. (Equivocation much?).

We have this need to explain the world around us, whether it has the potential to improve it or not, but we can't seem to settle on an explanation that we are happy with. So, we settle for smashing protons into each other at near the speed of light just to see what happens. I don't know about you, Imaginary Readers, but I'm okay with that.

Interlude: Flying Cars

It's 2012! Weird. Where are the flying cars you ask? Actually, that's a dumb question because smart phones exist. Think about how crazy that is. Your phone (assuming you, Imaginary Readers, have a smart phone) can communicate with dozens of satellites which function based on the principles of special relativity, is a more powerful computer than a PC from five years ago, and is also a really nice camera, phone, and musical device. It is also more advanced than any communicator ever shown on various Star Trek series which are all set three to four hundred years in the future. I think that is absolutely amazing. And that's just consumer technology. Think about all the crazy shit that must exist in labs and for military and academic use right now that we, as consumers, won't see for several year if at all. We are living in the future (except not really because then it wouldn't be the future and we as of yet have no evidence of time travel that I, as a random mid-westerner who would never be told of it's existence outside of seeing something posted online, am aware of).

This will never happen

Also, the sheer amount of energy required to generate enough lift to make a car fly precludes the possibility of having "flying cars" because they would never be efficient enough to be economically viable (which is saying something because stretch Hummers exist). All current concept cars, based on a brief Google image search for "flying cars" seem to operate based on the idea of having a small plane with foldable wings whose cabin has road wheels. The problem with this is that it is essentially an airplane, which requires a decent amount of space for take-off/ landing, as well as not being able to hover. Anyone who has ever driven a car on an actual road (racing notwithstanding) knows that driving requires a good deal of standing still waiting in traffic or at a light or stop sign. There is a very good reason why there are no plane equivalent of a stop sign: much like sharks, planes cannot stop without dying (in this case falling out of the air). (I should probably say at this point that I actually know nothing about the logistics of flying or planes, I just like to talk about things with authority about things I know nothing about and back it up with some intro physics level physics knowledge.)

Additionally, driving is difficult enough with only two dimensions to worry about. Think about what it would be like if you also had to worry about what the people above and below you were doing. And the existing infrastructure would never be able to support flying cars. We would need three dimensional lanes/streets, which would require some sort of holographic technology or the ability to paint lane lines on the air.

Realistically, flying car technology would be nothing like in the movies where one or two zoom around sky scrapers or just overhead in an establishing shot. There would be just as much traffic, probably more, but it would completely encase you in a three dimensional cage of cars. Like in that Doctor Who episode "Gridlock."

Currently, when you drive, you have eight distinct positions around your car that you have to worry about, shown in Figure 1, which form a square of immediate spaces around your vehicle where various obstacles could be. This is just the immediate spaces that your car can occupy in the next instant, and does not include the ever extending 2D disk of space you need to worry about and keep track of.  Now extend that to three dimensions. That means that you know occupy the center of a cube rather than a square and have 26 distinct spaces surrounding you to worry about, plus a sphere extending to infinity of possible obstacles and whatever the flying equivalent of pedestrians are to contend with. That means that in heavy traffic, you are surrounded by 26 cars, with little to no visibility. Think of the mirror system required to cover the blind spots alone. How do you keep track the cars/lanes directly below you? At what point does the human neck reach it's craning limits? These are questions that proponents of fly cars have yet to answer (and by proponents I mostly mean science fiction because no one cares about futurists).

Figure 1: Or: I Should Stop Ranting And Go To Bed (also that double colon is somewhat questionable)

It seems I have spent far too much time thinking about why flying cars aren't viable, because what started as a "I have nothing better to do tonight than to attempt to post with a time stamp from midnight on New Years" post turned into a rant about flying cars including diagrams and some math. It's possible that I am just a little bit bored during break. I should probably try to find something a bit more productive to do...

Anyways, Happy New Years! Here's hopping that the Mayans didn't really have it all figured out and that the world doesn't end this year! (Spoilers: It doesn't). ((Double Spoilers: I know this because I'm a sane, rational human being, and not because I'm a time traveler, but bonus points to anyone who thought that last comment was because I'm a time traveler.)) (((Also, double and triple parenthesis are definitely questionable punctuation, and I'll stop now.)))