— Hi guys — what’s with all the thoughtful faces?
— Hello Sophie — well, don’t you look thoughtlessly happy today!
— Yeah, I feel like celebrating: solved my solitaire three times in a row, yippee! But you didn’t answer my question — You guys are looking, well, kind of —
– You’re right. Indeterminate. Thing is, we’re not quite sure whether to congratulate or commiserate with our friend here, the esteemed professor Balthus, who is equally indeterminate. Right now, he’s on what seems to be the other side of an emotional Möbius strip.
– You’re not making sense. Even lil’ ol’ me knows that a Möbius strip has only one side. It’s just twisted into joining both sides into one, so they, wait…
– Ah, you’re inadvertently stumbling on the very conundrum we’re facing here. Let me explain the momentous situation that transcends the flat-world simplicity of the Möbius-stripped-down topological imagination we have gotten used to. While your friends here are recovering from their conundruminations that stunned them into silence for, lets see, more than three minutes already. Unheard of!
– Your speech is getting darker by the minute. KInd of spaced out?
– Okay. Let me see if I can summarize it for you. See, our dear professor has applied a series of analogical reasoning inferences to the phenomenon of the Möbius strip flatness, a flatness persisting even into the curved ‘ring’ figure of the familiar Möbius strip armband we know. A device he once suggested as a campaign device for a friend who was running for some public office — with the inscription ‘we are all on the same side’. Sadly, the friend’s political advisors did not think much of it, so it wasn’t used. But the friend lost the election; what can I say.
– Is that the reason for the long-face aspect of the current mood here?
– No. Sorry, that was long ago. We’ll get to the two-faced mood later. Now, the professor suddenly encountered a reminder of ol’ Einstein’s edict that space is curved. Cleverly putting things together, he embarked on the following line of reasoning:
* A Möbius strip, for all its ‘global’ one-sidedness, does have the ‘local’ property of being two-sided. In any short-sighted locality, it patently does have two sides.
* So, could it not follow, when we extend our imagination to the third dimension, that space has an analogous property of being two-sided, or should we say ‘two-spaced’? So that we, in our old Cartesian habit, ‘locally’ describe our location with the three coordinates, blindly find ourselves on just one ‘side’, I mean space, of the location? That there might be, as it were, ‘another ‘space-side’ to where we are?
– I get it. And that our ‘location’ is just on the other ‘side-space’ of the location of the place just on the other ‘side’ of space? Like any point on the Möbius strip has that close neighbor on the other side of the paper, that is really on the same side? Close by?
– You got it. I think. As close as the thickness of the space-membrane separating the two sides, but separated from it by the distance you’d have to travel if you were to stay on ‘your’ side to get there. This has, of course, profound implications — even practical ones, — that haven’t even been explored for the Möbius strip itself, surprisingly.
– Explain, please. I’m getting a touch of space travel sickness already…
– Well, look at all those network and systems diagrams. Say, communication networks. They are all flat, representations smashed flat against a two-dimensional environment whose other side isn’t ever even entering the oft-invoked superior whole-system awareness of the systems thinking analyst. The flatness of paper on your ‘desktop’, so unthinkingly adopted by the computer folks onto the monitor screen, does not make it easy to visualize and explore this amazing möbiousness. Even if they did, the flat-screen diagrams would have to extend half the distance around the round of the Möbius ‘band’ to reach that point on the other side of the paper. When the point is just ‘on the other side’ — so if we could find a way to punch a hole in the strip — we’d be right there!
– Well: that’s weird enough for the strip — what about space?
– Ah Sophie, yes: Now remember: If space is curved, as Einstein proved: could it be that space itself is a kind of Möbius space? That has ‘another side’ — but being quite spacious, you’d come back to the ‘point’ on the other space-side’ only after a long journey around the universe? Impossible? No — if it’s a Möbius-space, we’d still be on the same ‘space-side’, wouldn’t we? And if there’s such a thing, wouldn’t you want to know what’s there — what it looks like, on the others side?
– So?
– So? Oh ye of little curiosity! Now think: That point on the ‘other side’ — it’s right there, so close, on the other side of space! And what if we could find a way to ‘poke a hole’ in that wall, we’d be right there? Might that not be easier than trying to travel light-years around ‘our side’ of space?
– Sure, if you put it like that. But how?
– Well, Sophie: that would take some research, wouldn’t it? A whole new domain of scientific investigation, think about all the new university departments and independent think tanks: The new Science of Möbius-Curved Space Membrane-Drilling? A whole new meaning to the old ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’? Or ‘Poke, Baby, Poke’?
– You’re getting too excited, Vodçek Poke-man. You’re rousing our friends from their temporary stupor. Hi, Professor: Congratulations to your discovery! So you think you’ll land a new job as Director of the Department of Curved Space-Membrane Research?
– Oh Sophie, no, sadly: I am getting too old for that, some young whipper-snapper will be hired to research all my notebooks on the matter and getting all the glory. But Vodçek, I think you have been feeding Sophie only half of the story.
– How so, Professor?
– By Abbé Boulah’s Untimely Curved Straight-edge Ruler! You’ve forgotten what Einstein said about space — it’s not just space — its space-time! So the other space-side of your möbius membrane — if you were to travel to it the ‘long way’, properly staying on ‘your’ space-time-side of the thing: what time would you be getting there? And what time do you think you’d be if you just ‘poked a hole’ in the space-time membrane? That hole, my friend, is a black time-hole, if I ever saw one. I’m not sure I’d want to be poking holes in that.
– But if you say that the ‘next-door’ point is ‘right there’ on the other space-side — would the black hole open up only when you start poking? Is it there all the time?
– Beats me, Vodçek. Pour me some Zinfandel, will you? But don’t use that Klein bottle we gave you for your birthday — Im not sure it’ll hold any wine? What’s the matter, Renfroe? Some Zin?
– No thanks, I think I need some of that Bog-Huber’ts Spatial, I mean Special, dammit, you’ve got me talking that funny talk too. The one without the label in the corner.
– Here you go. Go easy though. So what were you trying to say?
– Well, Jus’ thinking’, man. If’n you could poke holes in that thingamabrane, yeah, I don’t believe anybody can do it from this side yet — and that may be a good thing for all I know — but what if somebody has figured out how to do it — from the other side? Wouldn’t that explain it?
– Explain what, Renfroe?
– Well, all them alien sighting’s! It’s them aliens! What if they been poking holes in the screen to come see what’s on our side?
– Interesting idea. So why don’t they come in here, have a drink and communicate? Why do they just pop in for a sec up in the air and then disappear again?
– Good question. Mebbe its ’cause of the time being bent too, like the professor said — they’re just zipping by in a time window, like? From the future, or the past?
– Yeah, And maybe they just take a look at what’s going on here and get so scared they get the hell out again as fast as they can?
– I’m cutting y’all off, guys. This is getting out of hand.
– See? that kinda thing? Even scaring the bleepin’ timespace outta them aliens!
Abbe Boulah's Weblog 
The ‘typo’ in the headlines is intentional, referring to the aspect of the Tavern regulars’ remembering something from a different time across the Möbiusian timespace membrane…
In a way, isn’t it all just perspective? Perception is reality. And presumed intention? What do you see in it? Does anyone else see it the same way? Maybe there is a difference between intentional and natural (unintentional) holes.Intentional holes are always “artificial” holes.They just look like holes, until nature fills them in, or wears them down. Nature, according to our perception [things get recursive here], can support mobius strips and torus formations that turn themselves inside out. Try that with a 3D printer. But it works as a visualization of things that don’t exactly have form in physical space, but they do in abstract thinking space. How many Space-Time formulations hold true in physical, abstract, or both? Force exists in physical and abstract form. So does gravity. Do they correspond? Architecture is not tied to physical. Genes are physical. Culture is abstract. We, humans, individual people, “carry” both, transformed, and evolved through generations of mixing of both side in a bonding “human spirit” … it’s our understanding of geometry that is going through a metamorphosis, maybe, as we head from global and physical worker beings, tied to a planet; to autonomous abstract thinking beings taking aim at the stars … better make a plan.
General Outline of Master Plan: It’s one shot off the planet, rest, expand outward horizontally for a period, and plan again; then get out of the solar system before the furnace explodes.
What’s true is what’s real? What’s real? What’s true is what’s not NOT TRUE. At least, that’s what’s possible. Contrary to what your mother may have told you, not everything is possible. Everything that wasn’t David was removed from the marble, and David was what was not NOT David. Then, some Vatican hammers removed additional parts that nature had not considered not NOT David. What’s done is done. Can’t undo the past. We put a fig leaf on our errors and ignore things that need to be addressed and confessed, and examined for what they are, so we can all figure out for real, together, how we want to view the situation, and what we want to do about it.
PDSS starts with well defined process around serious subject at a discussion level between individuals, and individuals in groups. Open, honest dialog. Hopefully we won’t need all of the criterion functions to be perfected.
I heard they discovered a new batch of galaxies recently on the latest survey mission. Is that new “matter”? How does that work? Or is that someone on some other side blasting new stuff into “our space”? Somebody in the planning department needs to log this stuff for reconciliation with what we already know, and update the planning models. The surface is getting hotter, and more erratic and needs more triage at the same time. People are getting restless all over. 2020 is looking like some major decision time for the planet. An inflection point? Asteroid dust coming back for examination and analysis!
Perspective: yes. The word means ‘looking through’, doesn’t it? So looking through the holes in the möbian time space membrane — is the perspective different depending on which side you’re on? Or, since we’re really on the same side, the view is the same either way? So that new galaxy they think they found, could be we’re just looking at ours from behind.