Mr. Silly
I am a robot
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2006
- Messages
- 260
Trip Report Section 13 in which we carry on.
First things first. I would like to pre-apologize for the following trip report section.
Second things second, H. added pictures after I wrote this so if there seems to be very little commentary on the pictures, that's why.
Third things third, I am fairly certain that at some point in the past I said that I was done with Science and was going to approach this trip report from more of a Humanities angle. It turns out that I can't really trust me too much on things like that and that at this juncture I must include at least a few minor scientific thingies. First a joke that the fates demand be told:
Werner Heisenberg is driving down the street when a cop pulls him over. The cop walks up to the car, knocks on the window, and when Werner rolls it down, asks, "Sir, do you know how fast you were going?" "No," replies Werner. "But I knew where I was!"
I worry that this joke might not be understood by all, I include it because I am compelled by something that brings me to my second kind of sciency-but-not really-too-sciency point. Philosophers tend to be weird people, and they tend to ask weird questions. Sometimes they are also fine upstanding citizens advocating virtue and good things, like Plato or Whitehead. Sometimes they are nervous wrecks like Kierkegaard or Wittgenstein. And sometimes they really seem like jerks, for instance Nietzche may not have been such a bad guy, but one gets the impression from his life and writings that he probably wasn't such a nice guy, and he seemed to advocate not being such a nice guy. What does all this have to do with science? Well, philosophers have always had a funny relationship with science, and in general with the way that science looks into things. Science explains what it does by using only natural explanations. This is all fine and dandy for a while until you start pointing that sort of thing at human minds, and then things suddenly become either really messed up or really fascinating depending on your general mindset and temperament. Personally I'm more troubled for this reason. There is this idea called "free will" that's really important. A lot of the basic ideas of our legal system and even our government are based on the assumption that there really is such a thing as free will. After all what's the point in punishing someone for something that they had no choice in doing? But if you look into the human mind through completely scientific/naturalistic terms, it's not so easy to explain the human mind as having any free will at all. The dominant way of looking at things from this perspective is called "determinism," which assumes that everything is just flowing along following a bunch of natural laws and the idea that we have any say in how things go or even how we act is just a weird illusion. After all, if you assume that the human mind is the activity of a brain, that the brain is following the laws of nature, and that on a Newtonian level, those laws are deterministic, then the idea of a free will doesn't really fit in anywhere. This disturbs me in its implications. What does this have to do with our trip to Disney World or that Heisenberg joke? Well, the thing is that the basis for determinism was pretty much destroyed by post-Newtonian physics. Einstein's famous "God does not play dice" quote was really an expression of his horror at seeing that other scientists were finding that there is no such thing as determinism that we can find as soon as we drop down into the lower levels of physics that Heisenberg was investigating. Things actually get decidedly weird, and suddenly all we have are choices about what to measure that preclude other measurements. Heisenberg discovered that observers choices about what to observe actually have an impact on what they find, thus at a certain point we can know a particle's position or speed but not both - hence the joke. Lots of things that one might think are nice and stable and absolute about the world like time and space are a lot less stable and more relative than they might seem. But this also means that the question of free will gets a lot weirder as well. For on the Newtonian level we really are deterministic, but on the quantum level we aren't, but does the brain actually operate in the quantum level? This sort of thing is incredibly weird after a while. As a person in the "free will" camp (and thus justified in punishing my dog for peeing on the rug) I can say that I think that I really did choose to go to Disney World. To be more accurate Haley chose to go, and I sort of went along, inasmuch as I didn't overtly protest very much or cancel anything. Dang, I just noticed that i didn't really have a point here.
Please, just skip that last paragraph.
So we last left off we were riding the PeopleMover. I seem to have misplaced Sophie's notebook, and am still looking for it. Sophia had gotten us to the point that we were about to ride Buzz Lightyear, but we were really still on the People Mover/TomorrowLand Transit Authority Blue Line/whatever that ride is called. I like the ride.
I like seeing the retro-historical society model of a town of the future on display. The whole TomorrowLand vibe is currently a little weird. TomorrowLand once was really just a jolly place where the promise of a great big beautiful tomorrow that was just around the corner, where progress really had been and would continue to make life so much better. But that sort of optimistic view seems to have been diminished. The Carousel of Progress seems to be an odd throwback. The new rides like Buzz and Stitch don't really fit with that at all. I always find it a little weird that I feel nostalgic for a time when I really believed in progress, and TomorrowLand was a bright beacon of what that progress would be like.
I wrote down a bunch of the phrases as we rode along on the PeopleMover. I always liked hearing those phrases since I remember hearing them so many different times when they resonated in different ways. Sadly my writing is illegible, so I don't know what I wrote exactly. And my memory is terrible so I can't recall any of them. But I was able to decipher one from the notebook, "come now, join us and believe in the promise of tomorrow." It's such a swell phrase, but what does it really have to do with Stitch?
We got off the PeopleMover and headed for Buzz to meet up with H. and Max coming from Space Mountain. We sat on a bench near the Buzz ride, and hung out. Sophie was still very excited at being able to write in her new notebook, and proceeded to write something.
I tried to look over her shoulder, since she writes the most delightful things, but she would keep shifting as she entered whatever secret things she wanted to record. The Buzz line was really short, the 30 minute warning outside was definitely wrong, but we decided we should wait for Mom & Max before we hopped in line. We watched the Astro-Orbiter. Sophie wanted to make sure we were going on that, and I agreed we would.
We met H & Max and I think we jumped in the Buzz line right away. I got a decent score, but not good enough to write down.
Then we went on the Astro-Orbiters. They pick a child to do the announcement as they ready for takeoff. Max got picked, and did the countdown. He was very happy to have gotten that privilege. The ride itself was okay. Max and Sophie agreed that it was pretty good.
After we got off that ride we charged off to some place where they sold Smoothies. H. asked if they had milk in them and if there was a way to make them without milk. They all were pre-mixed with Yoghurt, so there was no chance of that. We got a regular drink for Max, and smoothies for us. They were pretty good.
As we sat and ate them Push came along. I spotted the controller right away, and the kids spotted him pretty soon thereafter.
Then we split up again, with Max and I going to Space Mountain while Sophie and H. took the PeopleMover.
I had to take this one
We did Space Mountain. I have a confession. I don't really like Space Mountain. I'll ride it, and I like the theming, but I don't like the actual ride so much. I don't hate it either. I hated it when I was a little kid. The part where it took the hard turns and you were squished into the side of the cart, I hated that. It was all cool until that point, neat space stuff, and then I hated it because I did not like the sensations associated with that hard turn. Now I am mostly indifferent. But more of an indifferent tinged with a bit of un-fondness, than an indifferent tinged with a bit of fondness. I took no notes on this ride at all, which helps to illustrate my indifference.
After S.M. we went to meet H. and S. We decided to ride the Carousel of Progress. Since none of us had ridden it before. Well, maybe H. did as a child. But it was new to the rest of us.
There are many notable things that can be said about this ride. If you are interested, find a trip report where the ride is discussed, and you will find them there. All well worth reading. The one anecdote I will offer is that the announcer guy said on the intercom, "please fasten your seat belts, and look under your seat for the 3d glasses." Max looked under his seat. Heh.
After the very interesting Carousel of Progress, perusing my notes I see gibberish. I swear that one section looks like it says "..the cat's meow. Gotta see Al Jolson movie." Thus I believe that I might have briefly lost my mind while in TomorrowLand, though it has since been located. This is followed by, "don't interrupt Sophie while she is interrupting," which was something I said while we were in TomorrowLand, presumably when I was looking for my mind.
Just a brief while ago I had thrown out a subtle dodge in an effort to cover up my lack of notes and recollection of the C. of P., but I have now found my notes. From them I have derived that either I am much more cynical than I thought, or the C. of P. has some disturbing subtexts going on. Now I would be the last person to deconstruct a Disney ride, as I regard Deconstructionists as my mortal enemies, but it appears that I was at least noticing that there was a bit of cognitive dissonance occurring in this attraction. Here are my notes:
"Rat race = progress"
"TV gives you something to do when you get home."
"You and your progress, that new paint mixer just sloshed paint across my rump"
Grandma: "What a game, I really smoked those guys."
"Don't worry dad. Someday, everything is going to be so automated, you won't ever have to cook another Christmas turkey again."
Now tell me that that doesn't beg to be deconstructed. For those of you who might have just told me what I asked you to tell me, you are wrong, it does beg to be deconstructed.
After the C. of P. we did Autopia. In Disney World Autopia is called something else, TomorrowLand Speedway or something. But Autopia is both a way cooler name, and is the name I grew up with for this attraction in DisneyLand so we will be referring to it by its non-canonical name.
Here are my notes:
Going to check on
Autopia next
" " great.
If you have ever been on Autopia you will know that you are not supposed to bump the cars in front of you. You will also know that that rule stinks. You will also know that the urge to ram the car in front of you is great enough that the rule is frequently broken. While we do what we can to encourage our kids to be decent law-abiding citizens, as soon as we hit the tracks we become the anarchist family. The whole point of the ride is to smash into the car in front of you. By creating a rule that violates the principle of the ride, Disney has created what amounts to an unjust law, and by crashing into the car in front of us we are really engaging in a kind of civil disobedience. I am sure that Thoreau, Gandhi, and MLK would be proud to look on as I put the pedal to the metal to ram into the driver in front of me. Disney once again begs to be deconstructed here, though once again I am above that sort of thing. Go to a McDonalds and find a PhD in Comp. Lit. to deconstruct it if you really need your fix.
At this point we had relatively recently seen Talledaga Nights (I am troubled that I find Will Ferrell funny, but there it is), thus the obligatory "Shake and Bake" comment was thrown out at various points when I rammed the car in front of me.
We then did Buzz Lightyear again. This ride is among my faves of all in the big D, and I enjoyed it so much I took virtually no notes. I did record my score was 407,000, and that H's score was not so great. Max did not do very well at all, and was visibly upset. I explained to him how to calibrate the gun and adjust for skew and that only using one eye to sight the shots can help. The crowds were really light. We looped the ride.
I got 999,999.
999,999.
Dude.
This is a picture of the score. If you squint and add the magic of imagination you can make out the 999999 pretty easily.
This was in part because the ride stopped while we were in the room with the volcano, and I knew the spot to fire at to get big points and kept nailing it. Max did much better as well.
During the ride, I got to around 999,500 and stopped shooting for a while. This is because
1) I am a product of the 70s, so I was afraid that on crossing 999,999 points the score would roll over and it would look like I got a very low score.
2) I work in the computer industry and have seen some incredibly badly designed software, so I was afraid that on crossing 999,999 points the score would roll over and it would look like I got a very low score.
Yes, I still fear technology is likely to be designed that poorly. I did eventually decide to go ahead and shoot anyway, and got it pegged at 999,999, so apparently I am recovering from the 70s / tech. industry induced paranoia.
Redneck Photo...
Apparently H & S went off to do something, so Max and I did another round which I will assume we enjoyed immensely, though I have no notes on the topic, so in theory we might have really hated it. But I think enjoyment is more likely.
We were to meet up with H. & S. at the Carousel by the sword in the stone, so we headed off to meet them.
Coming soon to a trip report near you: off to that one land where the Carousel, the Snow White ride, and the Pooh ride are, whatever it's called when we will probably spend too much time ruminating on the loss of the Mr. Toad ride.
First things first. I would like to pre-apologize for the following trip report section.
Second things second, H. added pictures after I wrote this so if there seems to be very little commentary on the pictures, that's why.
Third things third, I am fairly certain that at some point in the past I said that I was done with Science and was going to approach this trip report from more of a Humanities angle. It turns out that I can't really trust me too much on things like that and that at this juncture I must include at least a few minor scientific thingies. First a joke that the fates demand be told:
Werner Heisenberg is driving down the street when a cop pulls him over. The cop walks up to the car, knocks on the window, and when Werner rolls it down, asks, "Sir, do you know how fast you were going?" "No," replies Werner. "But I knew where I was!"
I worry that this joke might not be understood by all, I include it because I am compelled by something that brings me to my second kind of sciency-but-not really-too-sciency point. Philosophers tend to be weird people, and they tend to ask weird questions. Sometimes they are also fine upstanding citizens advocating virtue and good things, like Plato or Whitehead. Sometimes they are nervous wrecks like Kierkegaard or Wittgenstein. And sometimes they really seem like jerks, for instance Nietzche may not have been such a bad guy, but one gets the impression from his life and writings that he probably wasn't such a nice guy, and he seemed to advocate not being such a nice guy. What does all this have to do with science? Well, philosophers have always had a funny relationship with science, and in general with the way that science looks into things. Science explains what it does by using only natural explanations. This is all fine and dandy for a while until you start pointing that sort of thing at human minds, and then things suddenly become either really messed up or really fascinating depending on your general mindset and temperament. Personally I'm more troubled for this reason. There is this idea called "free will" that's really important. A lot of the basic ideas of our legal system and even our government are based on the assumption that there really is such a thing as free will. After all what's the point in punishing someone for something that they had no choice in doing? But if you look into the human mind through completely scientific/naturalistic terms, it's not so easy to explain the human mind as having any free will at all. The dominant way of looking at things from this perspective is called "determinism," which assumes that everything is just flowing along following a bunch of natural laws and the idea that we have any say in how things go or even how we act is just a weird illusion. After all, if you assume that the human mind is the activity of a brain, that the brain is following the laws of nature, and that on a Newtonian level, those laws are deterministic, then the idea of a free will doesn't really fit in anywhere. This disturbs me in its implications. What does this have to do with our trip to Disney World or that Heisenberg joke? Well, the thing is that the basis for determinism was pretty much destroyed by post-Newtonian physics. Einstein's famous "God does not play dice" quote was really an expression of his horror at seeing that other scientists were finding that there is no such thing as determinism that we can find as soon as we drop down into the lower levels of physics that Heisenberg was investigating. Things actually get decidedly weird, and suddenly all we have are choices about what to measure that preclude other measurements. Heisenberg discovered that observers choices about what to observe actually have an impact on what they find, thus at a certain point we can know a particle's position or speed but not both - hence the joke. Lots of things that one might think are nice and stable and absolute about the world like time and space are a lot less stable and more relative than they might seem. But this also means that the question of free will gets a lot weirder as well. For on the Newtonian level we really are deterministic, but on the quantum level we aren't, but does the brain actually operate in the quantum level? This sort of thing is incredibly weird after a while. As a person in the "free will" camp (and thus justified in punishing my dog for peeing on the rug) I can say that I think that I really did choose to go to Disney World. To be more accurate Haley chose to go, and I sort of went along, inasmuch as I didn't overtly protest very much or cancel anything. Dang, I just noticed that i didn't really have a point here.
SillyHaley said:
Please, just skip that last paragraph.
SillyHaley said:Oh, ok. Now it is
So we last left off we were riding the PeopleMover. I seem to have misplaced Sophie's notebook, and am still looking for it. Sophia had gotten us to the point that we were about to ride Buzz Lightyear, but we were really still on the People Mover/TomorrowLand Transit Authority Blue Line/whatever that ride is called. I like the ride.
SillyHaley said:
I like seeing the retro-historical society model of a town of the future on display. The whole TomorrowLand vibe is currently a little weird. TomorrowLand once was really just a jolly place where the promise of a great big beautiful tomorrow that was just around the corner, where progress really had been and would continue to make life so much better. But that sort of optimistic view seems to have been diminished. The Carousel of Progress seems to be an odd throwback. The new rides like Buzz and Stitch don't really fit with that at all. I always find it a little weird that I feel nostalgic for a time when I really believed in progress, and TomorrowLand was a bright beacon of what that progress would be like.
SillyHaley said:
I wrote down a bunch of the phrases as we rode along on the PeopleMover. I always liked hearing those phrases since I remember hearing them so many different times when they resonated in different ways. Sadly my writing is illegible, so I don't know what I wrote exactly. And my memory is terrible so I can't recall any of them. But I was able to decipher one from the notebook, "come now, join us and believe in the promise of tomorrow." It's such a swell phrase, but what does it really have to do with Stitch?
SillyHaley said:
We got off the PeopleMover and headed for Buzz to meet up with H. and Max coming from Space Mountain. We sat on a bench near the Buzz ride, and hung out. Sophie was still very excited at being able to write in her new notebook, and proceeded to write something.
SillyHaley said:
I tried to look over her shoulder, since she writes the most delightful things, but she would keep shifting as she entered whatever secret things she wanted to record. The Buzz line was really short, the 30 minute warning outside was definitely wrong, but we decided we should wait for Mom & Max before we hopped in line. We watched the Astro-Orbiter. Sophie wanted to make sure we were going on that, and I agreed we would.
We met H & Max and I think we jumped in the Buzz line right away. I got a decent score, but not good enough to write down.
SillyHaley said:
Then we went on the Astro-Orbiters. They pick a child to do the announcement as they ready for takeoff. Max got picked, and did the countdown. He was very happy to have gotten that privilege. The ride itself was okay. Max and Sophie agreed that it was pretty good.
SillyHaley said:
After we got off that ride we charged off to some place where they sold Smoothies. H. asked if they had milk in them and if there was a way to make them without milk. They all were pre-mixed with Yoghurt, so there was no chance of that. We got a regular drink for Max, and smoothies for us. They were pretty good.
SillyHaley said:
As we sat and ate them Push came along. I spotted the controller right away, and the kids spotted him pretty soon thereafter.
SillyHaley said:
Then we split up again, with Max and I going to Space Mountain while Sophie and H. took the PeopleMover.
SillyHaley said:
I had to take this one
We did Space Mountain. I have a confession. I don't really like Space Mountain. I'll ride it, and I like the theming, but I don't like the actual ride so much. I don't hate it either. I hated it when I was a little kid. The part where it took the hard turns and you were squished into the side of the cart, I hated that. It was all cool until that point, neat space stuff, and then I hated it because I did not like the sensations associated with that hard turn. Now I am mostly indifferent. But more of an indifferent tinged with a bit of un-fondness, than an indifferent tinged with a bit of fondness. I took no notes on this ride at all, which helps to illustrate my indifference.
SillyHaley said:
After S.M. we went to meet H. and S. We decided to ride the Carousel of Progress. Since none of us had ridden it before. Well, maybe H. did as a child. But it was new to the rest of us.
SillyHaley said:
There are many notable things that can be said about this ride. If you are interested, find a trip report where the ride is discussed, and you will find them there. All well worth reading. The one anecdote I will offer is that the announcer guy said on the intercom, "please fasten your seat belts, and look under your seat for the 3d glasses." Max looked under his seat. Heh.
After the very interesting Carousel of Progress, perusing my notes I see gibberish. I swear that one section looks like it says "..the cat's meow. Gotta see Al Jolson movie." Thus I believe that I might have briefly lost my mind while in TomorrowLand, though it has since been located. This is followed by, "don't interrupt Sophie while she is interrupting," which was something I said while we were in TomorrowLand, presumably when I was looking for my mind.
Just a brief while ago I had thrown out a subtle dodge in an effort to cover up my lack of notes and recollection of the C. of P., but I have now found my notes. From them I have derived that either I am much more cynical than I thought, or the C. of P. has some disturbing subtexts going on. Now I would be the last person to deconstruct a Disney ride, as I regard Deconstructionists as my mortal enemies, but it appears that I was at least noticing that there was a bit of cognitive dissonance occurring in this attraction. Here are my notes:
"Rat race = progress"
"TV gives you something to do when you get home."
"You and your progress, that new paint mixer just sloshed paint across my rump"
Grandma: "What a game, I really smoked those guys."
"Don't worry dad. Someday, everything is going to be so automated, you won't ever have to cook another Christmas turkey again."
Now tell me that that doesn't beg to be deconstructed. For those of you who might have just told me what I asked you to tell me, you are wrong, it does beg to be deconstructed.
After the C. of P. we did Autopia. In Disney World Autopia is called something else, TomorrowLand Speedway or something. But Autopia is both a way cooler name, and is the name I grew up with for this attraction in DisneyLand so we will be referring to it by its non-canonical name.
Here are my notes:
Going to check on
Autopia next
" " great.
If you have ever been on Autopia you will know that you are not supposed to bump the cars in front of you. You will also know that that rule stinks. You will also know that the urge to ram the car in front of you is great enough that the rule is frequently broken. While we do what we can to encourage our kids to be decent law-abiding citizens, as soon as we hit the tracks we become the anarchist family. The whole point of the ride is to smash into the car in front of you. By creating a rule that violates the principle of the ride, Disney has created what amounts to an unjust law, and by crashing into the car in front of us we are really engaging in a kind of civil disobedience. I am sure that Thoreau, Gandhi, and MLK would be proud to look on as I put the pedal to the metal to ram into the driver in front of me. Disney once again begs to be deconstructed here, though once again I am above that sort of thing. Go to a McDonalds and find a PhD in Comp. Lit. to deconstruct it if you really need your fix.
At this point we had relatively recently seen Talledaga Nights (I am troubled that I find Will Ferrell funny, but there it is), thus the obligatory "Shake and Bake" comment was thrown out at various points when I rammed the car in front of me.
SillyHaley said:
SillyHaley said:
We then did Buzz Lightyear again. This ride is among my faves of all in the big D, and I enjoyed it so much I took virtually no notes. I did record my score was 407,000, and that H's score was not so great. Max did not do very well at all, and was visibly upset. I explained to him how to calibrate the gun and adjust for skew and that only using one eye to sight the shots can help. The crowds were really light. We looped the ride.
I got 999,999.
999,999.
Dude.
SillyHaley said:
This is a picture of the score. If you squint and add the magic of imagination you can make out the 999999 pretty easily.
This was in part because the ride stopped while we were in the room with the volcano, and I knew the spot to fire at to get big points and kept nailing it. Max did much better as well.
SillyHaley said:
General Silly said:
During the ride, I got to around 999,500 and stopped shooting for a while. This is because
1) I am a product of the 70s, so I was afraid that on crossing 999,999 points the score would roll over and it would look like I got a very low score.
2) I work in the computer industry and have seen some incredibly badly designed software, so I was afraid that on crossing 999,999 points the score would roll over and it would look like I got a very low score.
Yes, I still fear technology is likely to be designed that poorly. I did eventually decide to go ahead and shoot anyway, and got it pegged at 999,999, so apparently I am recovering from the 70s / tech. industry induced paranoia.
Redneck Photo...
Apparently H & S went off to do something, so Max and I did another round which I will assume we enjoyed immensely, though I have no notes on the topic, so in theory we might have really hated it. But I think enjoyment is more likely.
SillyHaley said:
We were to meet up with H. & S. at the Carousel by the sword in the stone, so we headed off to meet them.
SillyHaley said:
Coming soon to a trip report near you: off to that one land where the Carousel, the Snow White ride, and the Pooh ride are, whatever it's called when we will probably spend too much time ruminating on the loss of the Mr. Toad ride.
