Be forewarned. This is another post that probably won’t make a lot of sense. Then again, you may be used to that by now. You see, I’ve started writing without a clue what I’m going to write about. I had an inkling of an idea, as you can see by the title, which I wrote first. Still, no idea. Let’s see how this goes.

So, anyway, who watches the watches? Does an unwatched watch keep time? Is it running when you’re not looking? If you look, does it, in a fraction of a millisecond, jump to the current time (or whatever time your watch shows–maybe you don’t keep it current) so that you’ll think it has been keeping time or has it actually been keeping time? And, how would you know?

Oh, you say it’s because someone else could see it. Well, if someone else sees it, that counts as being watched, no? What happens when no one is watching it?

You can hear it tick? Well, that is a form of observation. It’s not visual observation but it is aural observation, so it is still being observed. And, anyway, that only tells you that it is making a clicking noise. It doesn’t mean the hands are moving, does it? How would you know? If you flip it over to look at it, well, you’re back to observing it again, so how do you know it was keeping time otherwise?

What happens when you stick it in a box and stick that box in your drawer? Now, you can neither hear nor see it. Is it keeping time? How do you know? When you open it up to look at it, how do you know it didn’t just suddenly skip ahead to the current time? Are you sure the current time is really the current time? Time is relative, you know?

So, you say that’s just baloney. It’s keeping time. It has to. It just has to. Well, in that case, how do you know that it isn’t residual observation that is forcing it to keep going? You may not be directly observing it but there are forms of indirect observation which could force the watch to keep going not because it just keeps going but because it only goes when it is observed, even if observed indirectly.

For example, consider the watch is boxed up in your drawer. You can’t see or hear it, right? But, the ticking sends out sound waves, which impact the box and filter through. Those, in turn, bounce off the drawer walls, or whatever else is in the drawer. Those sound waves bounce around. Now, you may not be able to hear them, as they may be so muffled they don’t make a sound loud enough to register in your conscious mind, but that doesn’t mean the muffled sound wasn’t picked up by your ears, but the sound was so soft you effectively didn’t hear it. Yet, you were affected by it, indirectly, softly, pretty darn imperceptively. But, that was still a form of observation. The sound waves did make it; they just weren’t loud enough to hear.

Oh, you’re crying foul now, saying that’s not really observation, but are you sure? Sound waves cause vibration; vibration is motion; motion causes friction; etc. So, the box containing the watch is made to vibrate, ever so softly. Yet, that motion has an effect. Eventually the vibrations will cause the box to wear down over time. It may take a long time. The paper itself may disintegrate from age rather than the sound waves, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the sound waves are having some small, very tiny, very miniscule effect on the box and, in turn, the drawer itself. And perhaps even you!

Now, that may be imperceptively small, but it’s there. And because it’s there and affecting you, it is a form of indirect observation. You may not register it, but it’s there. And so it cannot be known for certain whether an unobserved watch keeps on going, because that watch can never be completely unobserved.

Thus, we have solved–perhaps–a physics conundrum. Maybe. At any rate, the question remains, who watches the watches?

Who, indeed.

Well, JD says my comments are blog posts disguised as comments, so I decided maybe I ought to try to make a blog post out of them.

But, since you’ve already (maybe) read them, I have to mix things up a bit. Literally.

The last time I had a shot, I think it was like two weeks, maybe one, before the injection site stopped hurting. So, you know, I don’t believe them when they say it won’t hurt. Oh, it’ll hurt. It’ll hurt going in. It’ll hurt coming out. It’ll hurt for the next several days.

You could always freeze them. Maybe rent a freeze-drier, and freeze-dry those puppies, er, pupaes. Then, coat them in chocolate. Maybe dark chocolate? What sort of chocolate do you think goes with pupae? Maybe chocolate mixed with a dash of cayenne pepper. There we go. Freeze-dry the pupae, dash some cayenne pepper on them, cover them with chocolate and chow down!

Never trust anyone who says “This won’t hurt a bit.”

If you don’t want the expense of renting a freeze-dryer, maybe you could just cook them up. Maybe dry roast them. Then sprinkle on the cayenne pepper, cover in chocolate and enjoy.

I remember one particular needle, long ago, that was about six inches long. I swear. It was going in my foot. I asked how much of it was going into my foot. The doctor said the whole thing. I swear it should have come out the other side.

I wonder if there’s a box of mixed chocolates that has nothing but chocolate covered insects? There’d be a surprise in every box, I bet! No one will be complaining about getting coconut or that one kind of fudge that no one likes but there’s always two of except you think there’s only one, so when someone else got it, you thought you were safe until you wound up with one stuck in your teeth too, and you worried you might just pull out a tooth chewing on that thing, but you didn’t have any other choice but to chew it, so you just had to kind of hope for the best and maybe take a drink of something to water it down, but make sure it was a dark drink, otherwise you want to be extra careful not to get any backwash, because that would be disgusting to see chocolate fudge colored saliva floating around in your 7-Up, so then you finally chewed it all up and went for another candy to get that taste out of your mouth.

But, at least it kept me out of gym class for a while. Could have been a while longer if I had been willing to let the doctor write the note for longer than it needed to be, but, no, I decided to be honest. Why? I ask, why? It’s not like gym class is doing me any particular good right now. I don’t even remember that gym class, so what life lessons did I learn there? Instead, I could have had some extra time not participating in things I didn’t particularly care to participate in and don’t even remember these many years later. I could have spent more time doing whatever it was I was doing during that period where I couldn’t participate because of the doctor’s note. But, I don’t remember that either. So, what was the point of gym class? I don’t know. I think it was so that some politicians could pat themselves on the back, thinking they’re doing something good for us. So much for that. Crooked politicians.

And then you wound up with the coconut.

It’d be like that, except you’d end up with grasshopper stuck in your teeth and instead of coconut, you’d get the pupa.

You can read the original comments here and here.

Did you see Little Too in her Halloween outfit?

She didn’t like it.

First off, thank you for making October the second most viewed month on this blog for 2009, so far. (In terms of unique visitors.)

As you can see, summertime had a big drop in traffic.

And both January and October of 2009 beat out last year’s most trafficked month (out of those months for which stats were available, which is the latter half of the year).

On top of that, Google is coming to its sense, and has taken me from PR0 back up to PR2. Not quite at PR3 where I was, but a step in the right direction. So, maybe Google is taking note.

Note that I was a PR0 for most of September and October. Perhaps in August as well, but September was when I found out, so I don’t know how long I was PR0 as I don’t remember when I last checked and I was still PR3. Anyway, you can see the impact being a PR0 had on the traffic.

What does that tell you about Google PageRank?

Anyway, since November is sweeps month, we’ve gotta break October’s traffic stats. Last November (that’s 2008) had a sharp decline in the number of unique visitors from October. So, we can’t let that be a trend this month, this year!