Great Exploitations - Relative obscurity

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It's been a good 4 months since the last update of the serial novel. I know I said once a week, but it's easy to get caught up with other things. One of those things is my suspicion that I've committed the sunk cost fallacy.

 

The sunk cost fallacy is the belief that you should continue an economically infeasible endeavor just because you have invested so much into it. I have invested plenty of time into writing this novel, but I suspect that my writing is not of publishable quality, so why continue? Is there any good reason?

 

Regardless, for those who haven't seen this before, these entries make the most sense when read in chronological order. So I suggest that you read the first three parts before this one.

 

1. Trails and trials

2. To Tahoe we go

3. A vicious cycle

 

The following text is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5.

However, the images are not covered under the Creative Commons license. All images are copyrighted and may not be copied, reposted or reprinted in any way without written permission.

 

Please contact me if you wish to use any part of this novel in a manner consistent with the license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ for more information.

 

Day 4:

Before dawn the next morning I am awakened by a horrible wail coming from an adjoining campsite. I hear the someone yell, “shut up!” but it does no good. Then I hear a loud slapping noise and the wail intensifies briefly and suddenly stops. I lie motionless on the ground, paralyzed partly by fear and partly by an instinct to stay quiet while I listen intently for more. After what seems like forever, the sun begins to rise and I hear other campers stirring. I soon realize that sleep is not going to happen anymore, so I get up.

 

Schrödinger is outside the tent. He looks a little disheveled and seems weak, so I carry him to the Jeep and pour him some food, which he wolfs down.

 

I pack up and I try to head east. I soon enter the Nevada desert, but the road heads dead south. After a while I pass an unmarked, single-track dirt road heading east, so I decide to see where it goes.

Sometimes you need to go a little off course. The lonely roads can sometimes be better. Of course, you accept the risks when we do this; you don't know where the road goes. There's no navigator to tell you if you are going the right way. The roads are not mapped. That's not to say that you can't find adventures by only going down the well marked, well lit and crowded interstates—but these roads do not always go where you want to be.

 

This road is very rocky and bumpy, so much so that if I go more than 20 miles an hour I can catch air. Eventually the road seems to smooth out, or more likely I acclimate myself to it. Before long, the shaking and shimmying seems to have a meditative effect.

 

My life has went off course a few times. I was raised in a small town where certain religious tenets were accepted as implicitly true. The tenets were as unquestionable as the belief that the sun would rise tomorrow. It wasn't until I was a young adult that I came to realize that some of the stories in the Bible couldn't possibly be true. The evidence for this was in my mind for some time before that; it just took until adulthood for it to occur to me. And science, which I've always loved, was at odds with some of the core dogmas. I couldn't push the thoughts away, as I had an uncontrollable urge, a hunger even, to reach a resolution.

 

Some suggested I seek a compromise, but to me, consolidation was like mixing oil and water. My mind began to slowly loosen its grip on the dogmas. For a while I became a silent heretic; I could no longer accept what was being preached to me but I tried to pretend I believed because there are consequences for disbelievers. That was the last stronghold. After some time even that passed, as I stopped believing in God and an afterlife, and I stopped attending church altogether.

 

It was a sad parting. As a believer, you think you have all the answers. Everyone wants this. But now, I knew that I knew nothing. Before, I was in a fancy tropical resort drinking Mai Thais, but one day I woke up naked in the middle of the desert, and realized that everything was just a mirage. My hand didn't hold a glass of refreshing liquid. It was just sand.

 

I see a family in a pickup truck coming the other way. I pull off of the road, and as they pass they all give me a friendly wave and continue on their way.

 

Soon I pull into a ranch. The road seems to end here. I stop for a minute and wonder if this road is just the family's driveway. But if it were, why would they be so friendly and not question what I am doing?

 

I decide to drive around the ranch a bit. After I round one of the outbuildings, I see stream running behind it and another road on the other side of the stream. I also see some tire tracks heading right across the stream. I decide to follow them. All seems well as the water is less than a foot deep, until I near the opposite bank. I get caught up in some loose soil and the rear wheels of the Jeep start spinning. I stop and shift into four wheel drive, and once I hit the accelerator, the Jeep lunges forward and I successfully ford the stream.

 

The road gradually gets better as it turns to a two-lane gravel road. I soon pass a river and notice a large group of people fly-fishing in the stream. Some of them wave at me as I pass. Every mile or so, another vehicle comes the other way and each gives me the same sort of friendly wave as before.

 

I've always wondered if fishing is overhyped. Sure, millions of people seem to love the activity, but I have not quite figured out the appeal. I don't like the taste of fish, but even if I did, it's easier and cheaper to buy one at the store. Also confusing to me is that there are plenty of fishermen who release the fish once it's caught. Fly-fishing is also odd, since instead of sitting in a boat, watching a bobber and drinking beer with your buddies, you are standing waist-deep in a cold river all day, casting your line non-stop.

 

Maybe fishermen find solace in communing with nature. It could have something to do with getting back to their primitive roots. Maybe they don't even consciously know why they fish, but they get some sort of fulfillment. Maybe through all the natural smells and sounds and the endless casting and reeling helps them enter a meditative state. Maybe it's a Zen sort of thing.

 

I never understood Zen Buddhism, but that's not from a lack of trying. I spent a few years trying to see what eastern philosophy is all about. Taoism did not sit well with me – I dismissed it completely. It struck me as being fundamentally similar to other religions, whereas it relies on unprovable interpretation of scripture, and followers still practice, often for money, ancient traditions that science has shown to be quite dubious. Zen is a little different. It does have ancient writings, but they are not generally considered to be scripture and not generally held to be true. It seems to me that Zen refuses to define itself. I was taken by the ambiguity for a while. Everyone knows what Zen is, but nobody knows what Zen is. The more I read about it, the less I understood. At first the weirdness was alluring, but after a while it seems more suited for the type of discussion you have after passing the fourth joint back to your college roommate.

 

Before long, the road starts to climb and wind up a mountain, and soon I see what I believe is the summit. The summit is a perhaps a quarter-mile off of this two-lane gravel road, and it lies at the end of a footpath. I still have four-wheel drive engaged in the Jeep, so decide to drive up the path. The Jeep starts to bog down a little, so I press the accelerator to the floor and all four wheels kick up rocks and sand for a time, but they finally get a grip and the Jeep inches up to the summit.

 

I get out and look at the view. It is magnificent. I can see that the road is paved just ahead, and it leads to a small town with what appears to be a small airport.

 

I haven't looked back at religion of any kind for years. For all practical purposes I am an atheist, in that I don't really have faith in anything supernatural. But I know that the non-existence of anything supernatural can never be completely substantiated, so in this sense I will always retain some level of agnosticism. The road to religion was alluring, but it turned out to be bumpy and rough. The road to science may not be quite as alluring, but it appears to be quite smooth and reliable.

 

I turn the Jeep around on the small summit, doing a 15-point turn so I donÂ’t run a tire down a steep slope. When I begin heading down, I lose traction as I press the brakes, and I slide all the way down to the road. I hit the road rather hard, but I'm not worried, as the Jeep was designed to be driven like this, at least once in a while.

 

The going is easy toward the town. Once there, I find a gas station and fill up my tank and head south US highway 95. The speed limit is 75 miles per hour and the road is almost perfectly straight for many miles at a time, so I figure I can go a little faster without too much trouble. Furthermore, lurking highway patrol officers will be revealed thanks to my radar detector. Out here in the desert, you can usually drive as fast as you want, and frankly, almost nobody cares. Before long my speedometer needle hits a peg placed at 100, and the Jeep picks up a little more speed until it is going as fast as it will go.

 

Even at this high rate of speed, driving in the desert is boring. My current velocity of a hundred miles an hour may sound fast, but it is extremely slow compared to the speed of light. Light travels at 670 million miles an hour. Albert Einstein postulated in the early part of the twentieth century that nothing could ever travel faster than light. This is part of his Special Theory of Relativity. Many people stop listening at the mention of this theory just as if they were sitting through a boring church sermon. The theory is actually not some ivory-towered abstraction that you can only understand if you have a Ph.D. and an IQ of 180. I think that itÂ’s not too difficult even for the average person to understand. Perhaps the theory is never presented to them in an understandable way because it often is presented with a bunch of math. There is some math involved, of course, but even the mathematically challenged can understand most of it.

 

Relativity is derived from a single postulate. Galileo predicted the postulate hundreds of years prior but Einstein was the first to point out its significance in a famous 1905 paper. The postulate is that the laws of physics are the same in every reference frame.

 

A reference frame is just an arbitrary time and place in the universe where you are either sitting still or moving smoothly at a constant rate compared to some other point in space. For example, the laws of physics inside this speeding Jeep are the same as those on the side of the road.

 

I've just finished a can of diet soda, but since my Jeep has no cupholder, I decide to toss the empty can onto the floor in front of the passenger's seat. Despite my high rate of speed, the can does not change direction, fly to the back the Jeep and stick to the rear window; it responds to my throwing motion in exactly the same way as if I were parked on the side of the road.

 

Of course this is not a revelation in itself until you consider, as Einstein did, that the properties of light are included in the laws of physics, and the intrinsic meaning of this is quite subtle and amazing. But the evidence that light was anything special wasn't found until 1881, some 20 years before Einstein's paper.

 

In 1881, two scientists named A. A. Michelson and E. W. Morley were trying to find something called ether that was supposedly the absolute standard of the universe. They tried to show the existence of the ether by measuring the speed of light coming from the sun at six month intervals. Their thought was that as the earth changed its direction relative to the sun, a change in light speed would be observed. Their experiment showed that the speed of light does not change at all. A subsequent experiment done in 1887 produced the same results. In this regard these experiments were actually failures, but they were a success for Einstein. He looked at the results and saw something else, namely, that the speed of light is the same in every reference frame.

 

Without thinking deeply, this conclusion sounds quite pedestrian until you consider that it seems at odds with common sense. If a quick-witted hitchhiker happened to see me toss the empty soda can, he might be able to measure the speed of the can. If I am traveling 100 MPH and I threw the can at 5 MPH, he would measure the can's speed at 105 MPH. But since the speed of light is always the same no matter who measures it, we would both measure the light from the Jeep's headlights to be equal. In other words, you cannot add to the speed of light.

 

Of course, we can't really measure the speed of light with wits alone. But suppose the speed of light were much slower, such as 200 MPH. If we ignored Einstein's theory, this would mean the hitchhiker would see light from the front of the Jeep racing ahead at 300 MPH. Suppose the hitchhiker down the road wants to cross the highway. He gets part of the way across before he suddenly sees a speeding Jeep approaching him, so he dives out of the way. Strangely, the unwitting hitchhiker was not even close to calamity. What he would have seen was just the image of the Jeep from reflected light. An observer in a helicopter flying above would see a man jumping away from nothing. This may sound strange, but the truth is even stranger.

 

Since we cannot add to the speed of light, this means that both the hitchhiker and I would measure the speed of light coming from my headlights to be 200 miles per hour. But I am already going 100 miles per hour! How can this be? Either 200 miles to the hitchhiker is not the same as 200 miles to me, or one hour is not the same. As strange as they may sound, they are both true. There have been a countless experiments done to test Einstein's theory, and all have confirmed it.

 

So an object that is moving actually has a shorter length than one that is sitting still. This is called length contraction. And time slows down when you speed up. This is called time dilation. Since light is so fast, the theory is usually tested with tiny particles in a linear accelerator, in which it's possible to attain high speeds. But the theory has even been tested with real-world objects.

In 1975, an atomic clock was loaded onto a plane while another was left on the ground. An atomic clock is so accurate that it would take 30 million years for it to lose just one second. So the plane was flown around for a while, and when it landed, the clocks did not read the same time; and the difference confirmed Einstein's theory down to a tiny percentage.

 

This is not just some harebrained idea from a scientist with a perpetual bad hair day. The theory of relativity is one of the most successful scientific theories ever. But in the Jeep I am well within the limits of EinsteinÂ’s laws. Since I am traveling at 100 miles an hour, I wonÂ’t be able to feel the effects of relativity too much. Even if I somehow could be in the Jeep, traveling at 100 miles an hour, non-stop, for the next eighty years, the eighty years would feel like eighty years and 1/20000th of a second to everyone else. So 100 miles per hour is extremely slow from a relativistic point of view, but it's not slow for an old Jeep.

 

Suddenly I hear an explosion, and the Jeep is handling as if the rear axle has come loose. I barely maintain control amidst the violent shaking. Schrödinger jumps straight up, then flails to grip the top of the seat with his claws extended as far as they go. Smoke, dust, and debris are flying out from under the Jeep. The vibration subsides somewhat as I slow down, so I think that I must have a flat tire. I pull off of the road, get out, and notice that all four tires are inflated. But some trim near the right rear wheel well is gone and there is a new dent in the body just behind the tire. Upon examining this tire I see that most of the tread went south, flying off so fast the pieces dented the body of the Jeep. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to drive so fast.

 

Since the tires are all inflated, I decide to pull back onto the highway to see how the Jeep drives. At even 35 MPH I find that the vibration is intolerable so I pull off of the highway. I realize that I need to change this tire if I am going to get anywhere, so I drive on the soft shoulder of the highway until I find what appears to be a small dry lakebed, which is almost as hard as asphalt. This is an ideal place to change a tire.

I seem to have forgotten how worn my spare tire really is. The tread is almost completely gone and some of the steel belts are sticking out. I am 250 miles from Las Vegas and I doubt that the tire will last that long.

 

After 60 miles, I enter a small town. It is Sunday evening, so I do not hold out too much hope of being able to find a spare tire here, but I check every gas station anyway, and my efforts are in vain. I could stay here and check again tomorrow once more businesses open their doors, but for some reason I have an unsettling feeling about this place. I decide to take my chances and move on.

 

After two hours of slow, uneventful motoring, I pull into Beatty, Nevada. I see what appears to be a motel, but as I get closer I see three lighted signs on the side of the building that say, “cathouse,” “bordello,” and “whorehouse.” I guess subtlety is not needed, as prostitution is legal here. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with legalized prostitution, but I have no desire in partaking in it. Furthermore, I’m more interested in just sleeping than sleeping with someone. Though the latter hasn't happened in a very long time.

 

Eventually I come across a hotel-casino. I get a room, then I go back to the Jeep and I wrestle with Schrödinger so I can get him in my duffel bag to smuggle him past the hotel clerk. Most hotels don't allow pets, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and the scratches will heal. I head upstairs, let Schrödinger out, and I fall asleep within minutes.

 

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