20200608M Day 160: Is this the end of the pandemic wormhole?

20200608M-2317 Austin, TX – I spent today going to Terry Black’s Barbecue for lunch and shopping at Whole Foods. I found myself buying food like there was a shelter-in-place order. I don’t remember the last time I spent so much at the grocery store. I have enough nuts and dried fruit to last for at least a few weeks.

Lunch at Black’s BBQ was an experience I haven’t had since the pandemic shelter-in-place rules went into effect. As I ordered, I found myself surprised by the question “Is this order to eat here or to go?” Tables were six feet apart and there was indoor and outdoor seating. The place started to fill up as I ate.

Terry Black’s Barbecue “Our Dining Room is Open” – Austin, Texas – June 8th, 2020

I’m beginning to notice differences in people. There are some people who seem to be from the “no pandemic fear” universe and others who are definitely in the “pandemic fear” universe. It seems that the coronavirus is going to spread as it will. What seems different is how much attention people pay to it and how much they react to it’s spread.

I’m still having a bit of congestion and a mild headache on the right side of my forehead. It comes and goes throughout the day. I’ve been sleeping poorly – like being jet lagged. It’s interesting to me to note that on the day I had decaf coffee instead of caffeinated, I thought I had caffeinated and my Aunt didn’t realize it mattered, so if the universe worked on the “your mind controls your reality” method, then it seems that I would not have gotten a caffeine headache. Likewise, ignoring a novel coronavirus will not prevent one from being infected by it. However, it may affect the bodies response to the infection. If someone is fearful of becoming sick, then that fear itself can weaken the immune system and make it more likely that the get sick if infected.

While I imagined being able to eat at Black’s BBQ by now, I think for most people the fear of the pandemic is going to continue. We are going to enter an interesting time in which life will begin going back to normal while the novel coronavirus is still circulating the globe.

20200607u Day 159: CoViD19 Symptoms in Austin, Texas

20200607u-2329 Austin, TX – About 48 hours ago, I arrived at my home in Austin, TX after driving 2 long days from Santa Cruz, CA. I slept quite well the first night, but last night I didn’t sleep most of the night. I had a bad headache all day yesterday and sinus congestion, both on the right side of my head. I finally got to sleep around 5am and slept almost until 11am. I felt a bit better but then had a new symptom – diarrhea.

Googling “covid19 symptoms” right now gives this list with the note that “Symptoms may appear 2-14 days after exposure to the virus. People with these symptoms may have COVID-19:”

  • Fever or chills
  • Cough
  • Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
  • Fatigue
  • Muscle or body aches
  • Headache
  • New loss of taste or smell
  • Sore throat
  • Congestion or runny nose
  • Nausea or vomiting
  • Diarrhea

Luckily, I only have 3 symptoms from this list and I can imagine other reasons for my symptoms that seem more probable to me than being due to COVID-19. I partially blame my Aunt for my headache. She graciously offered me coffee yesterday morning and neglected to tell me it was decaf. Apparently, my caffeine intake the previous few days involved more than my 1 cup/day limit. This, along with possible dehydration, likely caused my headache.

That said, I did drive through a number of states, including Arizona which is second to California in having the most number of new daily cases of COVID-19 at 1438 yesterday (CA had 2763). The other states I drove through were Nevada (189 new cases), New Mexico (140 new cases), and Texas (935 new cases).

There were a couple of different universes I was feeling as I drove through Arizona. In one universe, I got a hotel in Flagstaff and then stayed at an AirBnB in Lubbock the next night. I had confirmed the AirBnB room was available but didn’t reserve it. In the other universe, I drove past Flagstaff and then drove another long day to Austin the next day. When I was an hour from Flagstaff around 7pm, I noticed highway signs “Emergency Curfew 8pm – 5am”. I assumed this was due to the recent protests against police brutality. As I entered Flagstaff at 8pm, I exited to look for a hotel. I didn’t see any hotels at the exit and saw the road was carrying me to downtown Flagstaff. I made a split decision to u-turn and get back on the highway instead of going downtown. About an hour later, I saw a large number of police car lights on the highway. As I approached, I saw that the opposite lane of traffic driving towards Flagstaff was blocked and there were miles of mainly 18-wheelers stopped on the highway. Luckily, the road out of Arizona was not blocked and I made it safely into New Mexico by 10:30pm. I was thinking of stopping at the Rest Area just across the state border, but it was closed. I ended up staying at a hotel in Gallop, NM. Masks were required at the hotel (and all of New Mexico). This was different as most people were not wearing masks at all of the stops I made for gas that day.

I have a slight headache and a bit of congestion now. I’m looking forward to sleeping well and feeling better tomorrow.

20200523S Day 144: BC and AC, Before and After Coronavirus

Sign at Capitola Village Beach – May 23, 2020.

One benefit I gain from having a small number of followers and viewers of my blog is that the odds are large that major news sources are not getting their story ideas from me. If I read something randomly in the news that I feel generates an event in my past, it’s synchronistic.

As an example, I just read a CNN article discussing how the recent WHO vote around China shows that geopolitics is changing post pandemic. What felt synchronistic to me, was the following words from the article starting with “five months into 2020”:

“Five months into 2020 and it already feels like a new era: now there is only BC and AC — before and after coronavirus.” If I imagine that time can go backwards too, and that when we act in the present, it is also affected by our potential futures as well as our potential pasts.

Then I can understand how me reading this quote randomly in this moment is one of the possible futures that I felt in my past when I started writing my blog posts with “Day 1”, “Day 2”, etc. And then added “Day 0”, “Day -1”, etc.

The CNN news article that I started reading this morning was this one: https://cnn.com/2020/05/23/world/pandemic-world-order-trump-intl/index.html

Oh wow! I’m looking back at my day 0 post, which was the first one I searched for to find a link, and it is also about the WHO! Even feels more synchronistic to me!!

https://surfingtheuniverse.com/2020/05/07/20191231t-day-0-pneumonia-unknown-etiology-detected-in-wuhan-city-hubei-province-of-china/

As the link confirms, I started writing Day 0 and Day -1 posts on May 7th, which was 128 days after Dec 31st. 128 is significant to me because of its binary conversion. I remember struggling with whether to call Dec 31st Day 0 or Day -1.

I have had this blog for a while. It stated as mainly a place to post the pages of the first and only book I’ve written: Surfing the Multiverse: Finding Happiness One Universe at a Time by J. Sands Loch

The book is a very lightly edited copy of the original journal entries I wrote as I had my first experience of noticing that the world is not as it appears – that reality can be viewed through a lens of parallel universes and things make more sense.

Writing the book felt partly like writing a personal diary and partly like channeling words from another source of knowledge. I’ve never had such a strong urge to write and have never written with such regularity. After writing it, I told few. But I began using the knowledge.

When I viewed the world through a lens of multiple parallelish worlds all going on simultaneously and interfering with one another, the world as I experienced it made more sense to me and I could understand cause and effect in a timeless manner.

So now, while it is still a bit surprising and somewhat against my scientific method training to believe that my reading of a CNN article today affected my blogging in the past, I suspend my belief in the unidirectionality of time and accept what flows from there.

This allows me to understand why I suddenly started almost daily blogging at the beginning of this year:

https://surfingtheuniverse.com/2020/01/01/2020-day-1-seeing-is-believing-good-morning-new-universe/

And why 9 days later I was blogging about coronavirus infections in Wuhan:

https://surfingtheuniverse.com/2020/01/09/day-9-new-strain-of-coronavirus-found-in-wuhan-china/

And why 80 days later, I was still blogging on the novel coronavirus pandemic and felt as if I had universe surfed into a pandemic wormhole.

https://surfingtheuniverse.com/2020/03/20/20200320f-day-80-first-80-days-of-surfing-into-a-pandemic/

I’m curious how this thread will appear and be read in parallel worlds. When I wrote the first post, I had to correct it because the first time I wrote it, I wrote “odds are small” instead of what I meant to say “odds are large”. Luckily the words have the same number of letters.

20200522F Day 143: The Beginning of the End

Today is the beginning of a long Memorial Day weekend. It is also the End.

Here are some of the Universes in which it is the End:

  1. It is the Beginning of the End of our social liberties.
  2. It is the Beginning of the End of our flattening of the curve, and now infections are going to go up.
  3. It is the Beginning of the End of our fear of this novel coronavirus.
  4. It is the Beginning of the End of our belief that social distancing is necessary to stop the pandemic.
  5. It is the Beginning of the End of social distancing and shelter-in-place rules.
  6. Is is the Beginning of the End of the stock market crash.
  7. It is the Beginning of the End of requiring mask wearing.
  8. It is the Beginning of the End of high unemployment.

20200521h Day 142: Spacetime Independent Probabilistic Blockchain

My how time flies when you’re surfing through the multiverse. (Natural Bridges State Beach, May 21, 2020)
This thought is staying with me, that when we are moving “parallel”, then our experience of time is distorted.
Reading this quote again makes me smile. It would be interesting if science is able to detect parallel universes. If there is interference between parallel universes, then this should be detectable. If not, then it’s just a mental model. I find that even as a mental model, it’s a helpful for me in understanding reality.
This was just word association from Danielle’s original “spacetime on a hashtable” tweet.

20020526T Santa Cruz, CA: I took a break from blogging, so plan to revisit some of the tweets I made on each day that I didn’t blog. The above are from May 21st.

Spacetime Independent Probabilistic Blockchain: Blockchain is today used to permanently capture/guarantee a sequence of events in time. I was imagining blockchain used to capture changes in the probability of events occurring in a time and space independent manner. So the blockchain would store the current answer to the question “in a random universe within a distance of my current universe, what is the percent chance that EVENT occurs”, for a particular EVENT.

Whenever a probability was updated, then it may cause a change in other probabilities. The “proof of work” would be to come up with which probabilities would change the most and the amount of change in these probabilities. Perhaps it would be enough work to just determine whether a probability goes up, down, or stays the same.

The benefit of this over traditional cryptocurrency proof-of-work would be that useful work would be done to continuously update the probabilities stored in the blockchain and this information would be of great value to many people.

One issue would be coming up with the algorithm/system to compute the updated probabilities.