Nat Arem's Blog

I just got back about a day ago from a mid-week trip up to Miami to get a car to ship down to Cayman.  I did a bunch of research online and I found a place that had what I was looking for so it was a pretty painless process while I was up there.  The car should be shipped down in about a week and I’m pretty excited to get it on the island.  For a variety of reasons, I bought a used car (2007 though, still pretty new) so I’m hoping it holds up okay.  The main reason, however, is that the Cayman Islands impose significant import duty on cars and I wanted to buy a car in the “smart” range (ie, the lower tax bracket).  The thought of importing a 50k car then paying 40% tax on it (in addition the shipping fees and all of the other fees you have to pay) only to drive the car a few times a week for just a few miles at a time — well, that didn’t appeal to me.  So I am the proud new owner of a 2007 G35 coupe.  Pics to come assuming everything goes smoothly with the shipment.

Other than the car trip, I’ve still been trying to get everything I need to live here.  I think I’m definitely on the FBI’s shit list now because I opened up a local bank account to make various local payments easier.  I somehow don’t think the FBI likes Americans having bank accounts in the Cayman Islands (at least, not in movies) so hopefully I don’t get into trouble for it.  I’ll definitely be reporting it to the treasury (as required by US law!). I’ve done a few other small tasks too (like signing the lease on the place I’m moving into in late June/early July).

A few other random comments:

• Miami drivers are batshit insane. I would fear for my life if I had to drive on I-95 rush hour every day.
• I’m loving this season of Lost. Every week is so freakin good. I can’t get enough of it.
• I’m sad that Flight of the Conchords is over for good.
• I’m even sadder that Battlestar Galactica is over for good. Great series finale imo. I won’t write more just in case some people haven’t seen it.
• Go Nova. I’m not really a fan of Villanova especially but I did grow up about 15 minutes from the campus and I really like to see Philly-area teams do well. I hope they can knock off Pitt.
• Boring NCAA tourney imo. I know there have been good games and now everyone gets to see big-time teams matched up but I really like to see some 8+ seeded teams make the elite 8. It always makes for a better tourney than having 3 or better in every spot. Oh well.
• I want to get Lasik surgery done in June in the Philly area. Anyone have any recommendations? Or at least recommendations on the best way to find a good eye doctor to do it?

Guess that’s it for now, have a pleasant weekend.

I’ve made a few bits of progress thus far. I picked up a Cayman driver’s license yesterday. I also went grocery shopping two nights ago. And I started the car shopping process. Right now I think I’m leaning towards an Audi A3 but it isn’t an overwhelmingly perfect car. I need to see exactly what I can pick it up for and then evaluate the situation from there. I am pretty sure that I’m going with a car though (see comments on my previous post).

I also took a few pictures. I don’t really have any of the general island yet because I haven’t had my camera with me on my few trips out around the island. These are of the apartment.

This is my TV setup in my room. It’s a 23″ Apple cinema display that I brought from Costa Rica hooked up to a Mac mini and some hard drives.

This is my current “workstation” although I admittedly haven’t gotten a ton done yet. It’s pretty hard to work in that setup so I’m hoping to find a better solution soon. There isn’t a good spot for me to put a desk. However, I am moving into my permanent apartment in a few months so it should get better by then for sure.

That’s a picture of the grounds looking off the porch. It’s pretty spectacular in my opinion. I need to go get goggles so I can swim some laps in the pool.

I’m currently in south Florida for a family thing.  My father’s side of the family is mostly in this area and he grew up in Miami so there are a lot of people to visit with.  Some of whom I haven’t seen for quite awhile.  I actually didn’t even realize that it had been five years since I was here last.  That was while I was still in college and before all of this poker business stuff.  I was actually playing a decent amount online at that point.  Anywho, it’s good to see family and I’m going to make an effort to visit here more often than once every five years.  I shouldn’t have let it slip that far in the first place.

In other news, we’re staying at this golf course/hotel place.  It really isn’t much of a hotel.  More like a low lying typical Miami motel on a low quality golf course.  But it’s the closest place to where the rest of the family is so my parents often stay here simply out of convenience.  It definitely isn’t nice on the inside but it looks way worse on the outside.  I can’t stop thinking that it feels like I’m on a Dexter crime scene set when I’m here.  Here’s a pic:

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with Dexter. Or how many of you know what Miami is like. But this place is totally straight out of Dexter.

Also, Hertz gave me an utterly ridiculous rental car. I have a huge maroon Cadillac Escalade. I took a picture of it:

I actually laughed out loud in a front of a bunch of people when I saw it at the pickup location. I’m sure they thought I was weird. But this thing is just LOL. It’s got all sorts of goofy features (such as “approach lighting”) and it’s freakin enormous. It’s surprisingly easy to drive and the engine definitely has a good kick to it when you need some power. But it’s incredibly cliche to roll around in Miami in a maroon Escalade covered in chrome while listening to 99.1 (local hip hop station).

I am actually certain that I’ve been quasi-racially profiled by a cop at least once. I was driving north from the Miami airport and a cop pulled up behind me at a stoplight. I proceeded to follow all rules strictly for the next ten minutes or so until I got back onto a highway. The cop followed me in a very deliberate manner the whole time (ie, changed lanes behind me just as I changed lanes, etc) and then finally pulled up next to me on the highway. Then I think he saw I was white and then he shot off. I couldn’t believe it was that obvious but I guess you hear about racial profiling all the time. And I always knew it was real in many situations. But it’s still kind of shocking when it actually happens to you. Even though I suppose this is more like “car profiling” as a pre-cursor to racial profiling. I wonder if it’s even illegal to profile a vehicle? Like to take a closer look at chromed-out Escalades and Navigators as opposed to a Toyota Prius — assuming the cop hasn’t seen any occupants yet. Anyone know?

Either way, my very first thought when I saw the car was this picture:

I’m definitely stuck on internet culture aren’t I?

I’ve spent the last few days trying to understand the theory of relativity.  And by that I mean the theory of general relativity and special relativity — both put forward by Albert Einstein.

I’m sure some of you read in the news about the new spacecraft that was put into orbit in order to look for earth-like planets.  That event has spurred a few days of heavy astronomy reading for me.  I’ve read about pulsars, black holes, nebula, supernovae (not the PokerStars kind), white dwarfs, red giants, main-sequence stars, Hubble Ultra Deep field, galaxies, local group, dark matter, dark energy, messier objects, Voyager missions, New Horizons, clusters, redshift, etc, etc.  The list goes on and on.  I think I get the basics behind most of it.  Of course it all inevitably led me to Einstein’s theory of relativity.

First, I understand the equivalence principle perfectly well.  It simply states that gravity is exactly the same as being accelerated while in outerspace.  The example often used to illustrate it is the following:

Let’s say you wake up one day in an elevator and you don’t remember ever getting in so you want to try to figure out where you are.  In the process you drop something.  It falls to the floor as you would expect it to so you say to yourself “I must be on earth and this elevator must be suspended somewhere”.  The thing is — Einstein says you don’t know that.  What’s to say you aren’t accelerating in space at the same rate as Earth’s gravity (9.8 meters per second).  Einstein drew from this that gravity and acceleration in space are the same thing.

It’s too long for me to explain all of this stuff but the eventual conclusion is that gravity is not a “force” as we believed it to be.  It’s actually a curvature in space produced by mass.  When we “fall” towards something or “orbit” something we’re actually following the shortest path in space left by the curved space and we’re being accelerated the same as if we were in space.  They actually refer to it as “spacetime” (combination of the three spatial dimensions and the fourth temporal dimension — see Lost for examples).  And the earth is actually pushing up on us to stop our acceleration.  Remember the elevator thing?  You can feel your feet on the ground.  But if you’re in free fall in, say, orbit then you don’t feel any force.  The difference is the earth pushing up on your feet.

Anyway, to get to my point.  I’ve found the theory of relativity to be extremely confusing.  It’s been very hard for me to understand and I’ve been frustrated by it.  I’m still not sure that I really get it.  Here’s what confuses me the most:

If gravity is not a force but a curvature in spacetime, what determines the directionality of our acceleration?  Einstein says that we’re in an “accelerated reference” while on Earth (I think).  What is it about the curvature of spacetime that makes us all go in the same direction (towards earth’s core) no matter what side of the earth we’re on or what time of day it is.  I am reading that it’s the “shortest path after spacetime is curved by the large mass objects in our vicinity” but I am confused by that.

Can anyone explain that part?  I would great appreciate it.

This is the from the Wikipedia page about red giant stars:

The Sun is expected to become a red giant approximately 5 billion years from now. It is calculated that the Sun will become sufficiently large to engulf the current orbits of the solar system’s inner planets, up to Earth, and its radius will expand to a minimum of 200 times its current value. The Sun will lose a significant fraction of its mass in the process of becoming a red giant, and there is a chance that Mars and all the outer planets will escape as their resulting orbits will widen. Mercury and most likely Venus will have been swallowed by sun’s outer layer at this time. Earth’s fate is less clear. Earth could technically achieve a widening of its orbit and could potentially maintain a sufficiently high angular velocity to keep it from becoming engulfed. In order to do so, its orbit needs to increase to between 1.3 AU (190,000,000 km) and 1.7 AU (250,000,000 km). However the results of studies announced in 2008 show that due to tidal interaction between sun and Earth, Earth would actually fall back into a lower orbit, and get engulfed and incorporated inside the sun before the sun reaches its largest size, despite the sun losing about 38% of its mass. Before this happens, Earth’s biosphere will have long been destroyed by the Sun’s steady increase in brightness as its hydrogen supply dwindles and its core contracts, even before the transition to a Red Giant. After just over 1 billion years, the extra solar energy input will cause Earth’s oceans to evaporate and the hydrogen from the water to be lost permanently to space, with total loss of water by 3 billion years. Earth’s atmosphere and lithosphere will become like that of Venus. Over another billion years, most of the atmosphere will get lost in space as well; ultimately leaving Earth as a desiccated, dead planet with a surface of molten rock.

I suppose, however, that humans are extremely unlikely to exist anywhere near 1 billion years from now.  As I understand it, humans have been around for between 3 and 5 million years* depending on when you considered an evolving monkey to be a “human”.  So we’d need to multiply our total existence by about 250 times to even get to that point.  Still though, I find the ultimate fate of earth to be quite interesting.  And that has nothing to do with my dedication to watching Battlestar Gallactica every week.

*EDIT: I read more about this and on Wikipedia it says that “modern” humans have been around for 200,000 years but the general species has been around for 2.something million years.  Either way, not that long in relation to the amount of time still left before the sun destroys earth.