First Blog

Well now. Here it is. I've allowed the whole thing to become so mundane that it's almost without value, but gotten in early enough that I'm in just before the trailing edge drops off the face of the earth into the world of the unfashionable. Just in the nick of time. Perhaps it will take me with it.

The meaning of the blog's title, I suppose, would be a good subject for the first post. I'm not one to tease potential readers with an origins issue later on in the series while the hero (as such) hangs from a cliff, agitators and crocodilians snapping at his heels. The title comes simply from my assertion, completely without basis in fact and uncorroborated, that everything in the universe is either arbitrary or subjective. By this I mean that either a thing has been described or experienced qualitatively (it stinks) or quantitatively (it scores a 15 on the Planck Institute's Gag Reflex Scale). If qualitative, the thing is understood subjectively. If quantitative, the numbers used to describe the thing were chosen and assigned using an arbitrary process. Neither way of understanding things is meaningless, and I don't always have a strong preference, but reminding myself of their relative weaknesses (or are they strenghts) is helpful to me. Well, sometimes it's extremely damaging to me, but that's another story.

I suppose what I mean by all that, and by naming my blog after such a subjective and arbitrary declaration, is that I intend for this to be a repository for my thoughts and opinions, and a stable record of things I might like to remember by measuring them over time. Maybe those two things are the same.