I dragged the rocks and burlap out of the barn and I found the tongs that Don made last time. They were good enough for that time, so I guess they will do for this time too.

Here's the hole:Not me! The thing I'm standing in.I think it is done. That's what my muscles say right now, anyway. What do you think, Bill. Is that big enough for an 80 pounder? As you can see from the yardstick, it is about 3 feet deep.

I talked to Bill last night. His Dad is still planning to come.

We talked about the "greens" for the roast (typically banana stumps and leaves). We don't have any yet. The purpose of the banana stumps is twofold. First it provides moisture to make steam that does the cooking. Second, it provides a more or less fire resistant buffer between the hot rocks and the pig. We decided to use cabbages. We will have to see if Costco sells cases of cabbages.

It has been challenging to keep the yard up these days. The hot weather is wilting everything but the weeds. The weeds are growing like crazy.

Luau plans so far:
The pig has been ordered. 80 pounder ready for luau with the head on from Dayton Meat Company. I started digging the hole. It is near where the old one was. Ways to go still. I got 4 80" square burlap pieces from Home Depot and some chicken wire. Don't know what we are going to do about sealing the steam in. At this point, the fallback is to do what we did last time, which was to use a canvas painters tarp as the first layer and then put a poly tarp over it. Polypropylene is flammable, but I think if we wet down the canvas tarp first it should be OK. I still need to think up something to use as tongs. We have a friend with treed acreage who said he will supply the wood. The rocks are still in the barn.

DD says he can bring some chairs. Bill, do you have any? I might see if we can borrow some from Richard.

Dirk, Andreas and Rainer are coming to help cook the pig. Andreas is riding his bike out here and is going to set up his tent in the yard. My sister's family will be here then, along with my mother.

Dirk is bringing rice. Alan is bringing drinks. I think there are a couple of fruit salads on the sign up also, but it is at work and I can't exactly remember. DFH is bringing a veggie dish.

I got two cases of beer, and a case of Thomas Kemperer soft drinks and a case of snapples at Costco today.

The theme of Robert Laughlin's A Different Universe is that we are moving into an age in which applying the principles of emergence are more likely to enhance our understanding of how things work than the staid practice of applying reductionist principles. But just what are the principles of emergence, anyway? They must be the ones found in the standard textbooks on emergence. I keep hoping to find something that qualifies as a standard textbook on emergence, and I hoped when I read about this book that it might provide some of the necessary framework that the future standard textbook will contain.

Laughlin knows emergence when he sees it. He recognizes it as a pervasive phenomenon that describes how the interactions between different systems results in relationships that have no meaning if considered in an environment with just one of the participating systems. He describes it as being the basis for new properties, which is a point that I think is lost on a lot of people. You don't get something for nothing, you get new properties for nothing.

On the other hand, Laughlin's book isn't the basis for some forthcoming standard textbook. While it has lots of interesting ideas and perspectives, Laughlin doesn't seem to have much patience for people that don't get what he already gets. His explanations are often quite abbreviated, and on occassion he alludes to things that certainly were lost on me. It's not that they were too complicated for me, I don't think. They just were too obscure. Here is an example. When explaining the basis for the proverbial Schroedinger's cat paradox, Laughlin starts by making clear that the idea of having a simultaneously alive and dead cat is ludicrous, and that Schroedinger intended it thus. He then states that it is a paradox only because something is missing from the argument. "The missing idea in the case of quantum measurement is emergence, specifically the principle of symmetry-breaking required for the apparatus to make sense." Instead of next making clear how emergence results in an apparent paradox, though, or what the principle of symmetry breaking is, he throws in several humorous analogies and then alludes to it being obvious that the problem is one of scale. The measurement apparatus must inherently be too large to detect a quantum property. This never really tied back to the assertion that the paradox could be readily understood by considering emergence.

My favorite chapter is the one on "baubles". I think nearly everyone can relate to the urge to collect interesting things. The degree to which this urge distracts us from focusing on meaningful things probably is not so obvious to most people.

Some topics that I have in mind are:

• The upcoming Luau in August
• My trip with Marissa to Alaska
• A review of A Different Universe by Robert B. Laughlin
• More thoughts about emergence

Just for practice, Here is a picture of 8 of two of my daughters at Joshua Tree: