The music is a bit disjointed and the ending is a bit weak but if you want to go for a ride of what some people are doing this is ten minutes well spent.
If you are 91 today then you were probably born in 1925.
That would mean you were born when the USA only had electricity in it's cities where rural areas and many small towns didn't have electricity.
That would mean you were born just 40 years or so after indoor plumbing started being available where cities like Chicago began spending money on water and sewer systems starting around 1885.
That could mean you grew up without a telephone which began spreading out in the 1870's, fifty years before you were born.
It means the idea of using traffic lights and having rules cars must follow was still being shoved down peoples throats against massive resistance to those ideas.
It means the idea that doctors should wash their hands hadn't been around more than a few decades where the idea of germs was quite new.
Looking forwards, it means you lived long enough to see telephones become obsolete and electricty being able to be taken directly from the sun, where the idea that free trade was ideal began to end (starting in January), and where humans became aware they are the most powerful force on earth surpassing even what all weather and all geological events does. Humans now move more earth around than all such events combined.
Learning that absolutely everything changes all the time where now no generation lives the world of the generation before or the generation after and that the primary force on this planet has become us, is the millennial generation's lot. Living their whole life knowing that's true is what their children will experience.
Subsequent generations will know you can't just take more water, fish more, dig more, cut down more trees, or add more fertilizer because you still turn soil into sand and still wreck the water within a few generations.
It's in the 21st century that humankind learns it must manage the full cycles of things and must find sufficiency within those limits - or die because there is nowhere new to expand to.
That is the most hopeful and optimistic thing I can imagine for all the generations that follow the learning of that truth.
Here's the last one in this particular story line of our earth. All of the parts I posted here were produced by different people. Only you will experience the narrative in exactly this way.
This one tells the story of how we are just right in the goldilocks zone of this system (where water can be present in all three states).
The mind might ask how such a set of circumstances could be created without intent but that just proves you can never underestimate the sentient being's mind to see things in terms of themselves. The truth is that only where such circumstances exist, would there be a sentient being asking the questions.
Long ago I wrote a bit about two people looking at the stars. "Look at all the stars out there. Do you think there could be life on any of them?", asks the first one. "Well lets see we know of one star and it has life on it." Answers the other. Sentient beings are aware of themselves in the thing and it's likely no matter where they are they would largely interpret their existence as something special and important going on. It's wired in self perception that continued existence is the primary goal.
The truth as I've explained is that no sun anywhere can turn hydrogen into anything more than iron. That is a limiter determined by physics which I've also explained is universal in it's application across the known universe. But you have copper in your blood and that simply must come from an event of immense power such as a super nova many hundreds of millions of years before our solar system began.
It's when we get outside our base programming that we come to the understanding that we are not and the earth is not made up of unusual stuff nor of stuff that is unique to here. We are not children of the earth. We are children of the universe and have bits of earlier universe within us. When a super nova goes, it obliterates dozens and hundreds of sun systems around it, turning many of them into dust. That dust is blown light years across that galaxy until circumstance causes an area of dust to start attracting and as more and more dust gravitates together, the center heats up and often ignites. The hydrogen atoms fuse into helium and a new star is born. Look up nebulae and stellar nursery. We are tracking new star formation in them as we speak.
I've told your future. Our solar system won't explode. But there are dozens of potential super nova stars around us with the potential power to start us around again and with luck some of your future molecules will end up on another star system and maybe it will have a stable goldilocks planet and perhaps one day a sentient being will look at the stars and wonder if there is life out there and then if the molecule you once used could speak - then you could tell that being their future.
Earth Story - A World Apart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1kd5njxX_w
Optional - look up a periodic table. Find Iron in the upper middle (Fe for Ferrous) and take a look at all the stuff that with certainty doesn't come from around these parts.
Well, I would say it's time to bring all the geology programs and the talk of astronomy together into the most beautiful journey of our milky way galaxy.
Remember that since we're inside our galaxy, when we look at a dark sky and see the thick wavy stripes running across the sky, we are looking through our own galaxy edge on. Above and below our spiral plane, we can see in our own view that there are less stars above and below the plane of our galaxy.
Also, when we look at the pictures of other galaxies and of nebulae inside our own, there are some bright big stars in the picture. Those stars are between us. In the case of other galaxies we're looking past the stars in our own galaxy, then across a vast distance of largely empty space, and then way out there is the other galaxy we're looking at.
This is an hour and a half long. It's as beautifully done as it is informative. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
I've been thinking about time and myself and what all this means. What kind of vitality and exuberance is in life that it does all this? I sit in Ontario talking to someone in Florida sending some thoughts and music knowing we've been in the same war, are looking into the same night sky, and speaking at least for myself, don't have a clue what's going on.
I think of Sidney Carton who didn't exist except in the mind of Charles Dickens who wrote him changing places with his brother even though he had not previously been a noble man and taking his place at the guillotine in the aftermath of the French revolution saying, "it is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done". In ways I never dreamed of, I understand more of what he meant. The hardest thing of my life is the best thing I have ever done too. Not as artsy, but I'm willing to bet not something Sidney Carton could have done. A sacrifice yes; but not one that takes years of persevering pain to accomplish.
I'm including a song. I debated putting it up. I heard it in the background of a car commercial and looked it up. The structure is odd until I thought about what it is to live with an old yearning and what defines that experience. Repetition. Do-si-do, around we go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yRFWlztwrY
Asaf Avidan and the mojos - Reckoning Song
One of the most powerful ways this kind of thought was expressed was by Johnny Cash who re-did a punk rock band's song his own way. It is a strong thing but it goes against my own grain in one way. He is angry that his empire of dirt is ending and is ripped up by everyone going away in the end. I visited that place and spent some time there but I did not stay. I know that feeling and I get that feeling. It's a waste of time. When it looks for me it will find me; that was always true; and no effort on my part is required.
The things I lose that sear right through my heart and soul makes me family in all of life and not a singled out victim. Every person who has ever lived and who lives now and who will ever live all share this with me. It's the way of it. And only the fortunate truly suffer at the thought of it all ending; a testament of truth like no other that the life we otherwise struggle in, is actually dearly held.
A flashmob as I've explained before is a group that surprises an unsuspecting audience with an unanticipated performance. It's one of the things people do.
Friedrich Schiller was a poet around 1800. He wrote one that he later felt was 'detached from reality' and wasn't very good. In English it's translation is this:
Joy, beautiful spark of divinity, Daughter from Elysium, We enter, drunk with fire, Heavenly One, thy sanctuary! Your magics join again What custom strictly divided; All people become brothers, Where your gentle wing abides.
Who has succeeded in the great attempt, To be a friend's friend, Whoever has won a lovely woman, Add his to the jubilation! Indeed, who calls even one soul Theirs upon this world! And whoever never managed, shall steal himself Weeping away from this union.
All creatures drink of joy At nature's breast. Just and unjust Alike taste of her gift; She gave us kisses and the fruit of the vine, A tried friend to the end. [Even] the worm has been granted sensuality, And the cherub stands before God!
Gladly, as His heavenly bodies fly On their courses through the heavens, Thus, brothers, you should run your race, As a hero going to conquest.
You millions, I embrace you. This kiss is for all the world! Brothers, above the starry canopy There must dwell a loving Father. Do you fall in worship, you millions? World, do you know your creator? Seek him in the heavens; Above the stars must He dwell.
It's not very good as poetry really and we can see why he thought it would never amount to anything.
Except a local composer liked it and even though he was by then stone deaf, he used it in his last full symphony, his ninth.
Here is a flashmob in Minneapolis playing a shortened version of Beethoven's ninth in part, "Ode To Joy":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIiTdsvCjYo
Beethoven wrote the music but he used Schiller's poem for the words in what has become the planets most widely loved piece of music.
The entire Beethoven's ninth symphony played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. One hour and five minutes.
The Beatles last album was Abbey Road. It has a medley in it that speaks to my story; Golden Slumbers ("once there was a way back home"), Carry That Weight ("boy you're going to carry that weight a long time"), and The End ("and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make"). This is the remastered version. The visuals are the day of the photo shoot crossing Abbey Road back and forth until they got that shot that became an icon.
In reply to posting your video on the May 2017 thread:
Very well done. That's your best production so far I believe. I saw the sad version. This is good although I like the artist of the sad version. The footage is so self teaching, the music and the words of the music in the final version blend perfectly into promoting ideas and thoughts about life. That's a quality piece of work I might have put up here if I had seen that version first.
When we let ourselves get out of the way and see that all of this phantasmagorical kaleidoscope, all the things and all the colors and all the sounds, all the silliness and anger, the love and the worship, the selfnessness and the insatiable greed - are all what space dust does when it has a chance.
The vitality and the expression and the humor and the love are in the atoms themselves just as the anger and the hurt, the disappointments and the achings are. Whether the creation of this universe is caused by exactly how we see things or whether things work quite different from what anyone has realized so far, the creator used a coherent set of physics when the dust became us and danced and cried for a time.
The bear knows that the crow is there and is ignoring it. The crow looks at the bear exhausted and gets it. He probably could have flown away but he didn't. This was where he was safe to recover for a minute. That crow will remember that bear. You can bet the farm on it.
We underestimate how similar the first person, intensity being alive in space and time, experience is. We don't need conceptual thought or self awareness or language. Being alive on this planet is an intense first person experience for every one of us and far more similar in experience than it is different because we're human beings and not bear beings.
Whether it's a bear helping a crow out or it's Liberace in sequins wishing his brother George were here, it's all the same thing. Dust from a supernova billions of years ago that came together here for a while and made a video. The bible knows that. From dust to dust and that's exactly right. So it is, so it was, and so it ever shall be, amen, and pull my finger because there's a lot of completely unnecessary funny stuff going on around here and it's only us space dust that is here.
My greatest privilege in life isn't Dianne although she's the privilege I loved. It's that I get to be here. I'm meant to observe; I've always known that. I watch more than do although most of the great moments were when I did - not when I thought. One of those great moments came when Dianne was in the nursing home.
I drove to the convenience store and as I shut the car off it started to rain really hard. There was a young lady, not attractive at all, standing there at the bus stop. It was summer and she didn't even have a jacket. I reached back for the folding umbrella Dianne and I took everywhere and as a voice inside asked "do you really want to do this?", I grabbed it and undid it running towards her in the hard rain. I got it open and handed it to her. She took it like a life line (it looked like she may have been going to work) and I turned running into the store. "Thank you!" she called out. "Keep it!" I yelled back without stopping to get into the store.
It's not hard to understand why I like that memory. Tell me how we were so different from that crow and that bear. For no reason the bear and I helped some foreign creature out. Life is space opera acted out over time - and over time what becomes apparent is the nature of the writer of that opera. God in his yet unknowable form if you will, nevertheless, also God's body of work which IS known at least locally.
In that body of work while most of it is the heavy lifting of keeping things going, penguins trip each other on the ice, animals hide and jump out to scare the others, porpoises play and go surfing, parrots talk, animals become family, a horse and a chicken become best friends or an emu and a pig - once you don't have to kill or starve, it turns out most every living thing would prefer to just have an ok time and maybe a yuk or two along the way.
Next time you see the theatre masks where one's crying and one's laughing remember to give them these lines. "We're all going to die I'm afraid." says the crying face. "Yah, but look what I can do with this." says the laughing face. I look but I can't find any hint of an element of punishment anywhere. I'm afraid hades is going to more like some equivalent of endless mediocre comedians or something in that vein.
Judging by His MO, I also suspect the pearly gates aren't going to be as advertised in the brochure either. Judging by the zebra stripes, the neon tangerine and lime fish, the eye sketches on a peacock, that look every lemur everywhere gives you, an ostriches face, and the completely weird things we all get up to - I'm going to take a guess it's even wilder than this place is.
It might be an endless party where someone hands you a drink and people are talking and someone tells you there is a big show on tonight and you should come and God walks by telling a joke because he invented them and they keep coming so he obviously doesn't mind them. "I didn't realize it was casual" you explain in your hairshirt. God is wearing a gaudy hawaiian shirt in tangerine and lime green, completely unmatching bermuda shorts and sandals. "It's not a problem", he explains gently, "I prefer Rayon now that there's plenty of plastic." There's a twinkle in His eye you can see the universe in. "I actually prefer cotton." you answer explaining. "Cotton was a good idea", he agrees, "I was going to do it in colors but there wasn't time so we dyed it instead." You smile but no one really gets God's sense of humor. They just live in it thinking it's them.
note - the reason it mattered that she wasn't attractive was because it was unmotivated by anything but the act itself same as the bear
Wolf, I had the same problem as Myrtle, and the new link produces this: Your search - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKa6X2i_w0c&feature=youtu.be - did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
Make sure that all words are spelled correctly. Try different keywords. Try more general keywords. Try fewer keywords.
Wolf .......... I've been reading what you have posted here about that Crow Rescue video. https://youtu.be/zKa6X2i_w0c You certainly are an expert at putting the thoughts that enter your head into written words. And what beautiful thoughts they are. I just wish that I could somehow show them to the bear.
George, I have no idea what's going on and all I know is that it's certain I'm going to know exactly what's going on just the minute I either pass into my normal state so far in eternity, which is Lego bits the universe uses to make stuff, or my entry into what comes next. I'm not worried about it. I don't take responsibility for being here in the first place either. Nobody asked me or ever offered me a choice.
I can see it now. I die and after some fuzziness I arrive at some huge throng of people where Bob Barker is up there at the microphone. Someone hands him the envelope which he opens and looks at. "And the winner is....Buddhism! Will all the Buddhists please step forward! The rest of you thank you for playing!" And the lights go out again and I'm Lego bits the universe uses to make other stuff with. I can say whatever I think. We're all going to know the answer anyway.
All I can tell you is the next time I find myself coming out of a womb, I'm going to slam the door shut and refuse to come out. I can see that scene too. The doctor's big head trying to peek in and help pull me out. "Let go of me! You weirdo!!" I would shout trying to pull my way back on the placenta rope (don't do that it doesn't work). "I never agreed to this!" I protest resisting, "I'm on the wrong planet!" I cry out but I don't know the language and this giant is spanking me to make sure I cry out, as a taste of what's coming no doubt.
I'll tell you what I know. If I'm all powerful I don't make the mice go through the mazes or teach them to sit up and beg or judge them on how much they want to do what I want them to do. I don't even do the nose twitch that Mary Montgomery did in Bewtiched. I don't come as a burning bush warning to do what I say or bad things will happen. I just change it to the way I want without all the ascribed personality disorders. "Bow." I say to the thing I made and it doesn't do what I say so I turn it into a pillar of salt. That can get old in a hurry with eternity on my hands. If the thing I made doesn't do the thing it's made for that's on me - not the thing I made.
Whatever else, this planet has been remarkable in it's ability to stay in life sustaining balance for a long, long time. It's frozen over into a giant iceball several times, it's been bombarded by massive asteroids (look up a map of Quebec. pull WAY out. look above the St Lawrence river just before it starts widening a lot. look up an inch or two. see that perfectly round lake the size of Connecticut? Manicouagan. The rock that cut that into granite is estimated to have been 3 miles wide). Yellowstone national park is sitting on a massive hot spot just like Hawaii and Iceland are. It erupts about every 640,000 years and it's due. If that goes I'm done up here in Ontario. Don't worry about it because there are 20 such spots where one in Italy is making noises right now.
There is no end to things that could happen. They're not all bad. An ice age is due to start and I doubt it's going to because of the cubic miles of carbon dioxide we put into the air every year. But it really is a mugs game to worry about what won't change or what unknown things things do to unknown things. We're not turning off the grid and walking away from our cars to become subsistance farmers. That's not going to happen.
One unknown thing is solar storms. We don't know how often a big one hits earth. We do know they hit it. We learned that in 1859 in something called the Carrington Event. That was the first massive solar storm we experienced because it happened after we invented electricity and were using morse code along the wires to send messages. If there had been one 150 years before that it would have been in 1709 and no one would have noticed because there wasn't anything for the charged particles to interact with. Hair might have become less manageable. The only reason we noticed is because we had electricity which was still a luxury then. Now we are dependent on electricity. We store all our records electronically. Our electric grid would take well over 10 years to get back up. No records. No debit or credit cards. No electricity for 10 years. Think about that.
The trick is not to worry too much about uncontrollable things. I try not to worry too much about the controllable things either so that I'm in game shape about the uncontrollable things. I stink at all of that so I use a lot of distraction instead. You may have noticed. It's true that nobody asked me if I'd like to be here. It's also true that I wouldn't miss it for anything. Or maybe that should be it's also true I would miss it more than anything. After all, humans react more if it's a negative threat than a positive we already have.
(My mom wouldn't be upset about my womb jokes. She would get that it's humor. Someone once said "what's the difference if you're born in Germany/" at a family gathering. "The difference.", I announced, "Is zat zhere you have to show your payyy-pers.")
note - Germans don't say the 'th' well. 'Those things there' is hard for them to say. You stick the tip or your tongue against the back of your teeth and vibrate for just an instant and then pull the tongue away and open your mouth a bit. When you say 'those things there' your tongue has been at the back of your top teeth and pulled away three times. If I stick my tongue out past my teeth and say 'those things there' the 'th' sound is still working but everything else sounds off and you'll notice the 'r' suffers the most. That sound comes from the back with the tongue away. Say 'there are' three times and watch. I observe as I said. It's what I do when I'm not getting the stuffing kicked out of me by life. Quick shout out to the spouses. Sorry you're missing all this.
George, I had said George Washington had wooden teeth. It turns out that was wrong. He had famous problems with his teeth and many attempted solutions but none of them were made out of wood.
Exactly. I got there by the route of verifying a comment on American Pickers that Jefferson's dentist filed the first patent for a coffee grinding machine. In hunting that down I tripped over Washington's teeth which, it went to pains to explain, were not wood. That dentist's name was Thomas Bruff where I have just read a letter he wrote to Jefferson about his inventions. I'm pretty sure I told George he did have wooden teeth. Uh uh.
This is a one hour BBC documentary about Andrew Wyeth. That's the person who painted Christina's World which has become a world famous painting. It's by Michael Palin who has done numerous documentaries well in my opinion. This is a trip worth taking. It takes you directly inside one of the more famous families in painting always keeping it's eye on the man, his story, and his world. I hope you find it as fascinating as I did.
Thanks Wolf. I just watched it. I live about 12 miles from Chadds Ford PA and recently visited the Brandywine River Museum which is devoted mostly to the Wyeth's paintings. I found the documentary well worth watching. I have been interested in the Wyeths for many years but learned a lot from this.
I went back and read your first post Marty keep enjoying life you are a lucky man. We are all different and must work our own way through this journey.
I enjoyed re-reading that post, Marty. My life after AD is different--no hot dates with any dudes, ha-ha--but life is good. New experiences and happy times keep unfolding. It takes a while, but there is definitely life after AD--lots of joy and happiness is still out there, that's for sure.
I really shouldn't post anything first thing in the morning before I've had some coffee. Now it is several hours later, and I'm thinking that the above sentences probably sound annoying and Pollyanna-ish to caregivers who are still in the trenches. Let me shade the sunshine a little by saying there are always those times when nostalgia hits with a poignancy that is so sharp it stops me in my tracks. When I came back to the Heartland nine days ago after 14 weeks away, and woke up the next morning and pulled my NYPD mug out of the cupboard, it just hit me like the roof fell on my head. I stood there and looked at that police department mug and just...well...stood there, almost stunned for a moment with the memories. It wasn't exactly sad...hard to explain. He was a huge, mostly positive part of my life, and I will always be grateful that I had him for twenty years. He is always with me, in my heart and sometimes standing right there behind my shoulder. Having said that, I am genuinely looking forward, not backwards...but I don't think anybody can have the powerful experiences--long-term, relentless, exhausting, miserable--that AD caregivers do...and not be affected by it.
I think that this disease adds layers to the caregiver's character and personality that I don't even know how to define. I think there is a lot of joy waiting for us as we flounder through the mists and struggle to come out of the other end of the tunnel into the light. There is a new life out there for us, but I think our nightmare years give us deeper and more complicated feelings than most "civilians" have, who have not endured what we have, and seen what we have seen.
Marty, that is excellent. I'm very happy for you. You are living proof that life can be great after AD. Frank has had a really hard road but he seems to have found that too. I don't mind that people are rich. I like that people can get rich.
My thoughts on this topic are that if I ever do feel the pull of that string, I'm going for it. In the meantime carnival knowledge as a pursuit is somewhere below my interest in my stamp collection. I'm being greedy. I want to spend some time with me where in complete honesty, I really am just getting to know myself. This time reminds me of the time I spent with my father. I gave him a key and told him he could set up his model trains in our rec room. I sometimes took work home and might walk in at three in the afternoon and he would come up from the eight by ten plywood platform with the million wires and the little telephone poles and lit up houses - and we would talk over a coffee. We had a tempestuous relationship and we both yelled and cried sometimes, but I value that time greatly. We talked about everything and we both understood each other better because of that.
He beat me. Not that often but also not because I had done anything that wrong. He lost his temper. I swore as a little kid that one day I would be the strong one and he would be helpless and on that day there would be retribution. That day came. I had to go into the public stall with him and help him pull his wiener out so he could go to the bathroom. While we concentrated he looked up at me and said "I bet you never thought you'd be doing this." I remembered in that moment that I was supposed to be beating him up. He had vascular dementia by that time and I was transferring him from the nursing home near me to the one near my sister who had also taken our mother in by that time. She wanted mom to be around the grandchildren.
There are a million moments like that that are the story of my life and I'm a kid who's just beginning to enter my own undiscovered country. Yes there is life after AD. All kinds of it.
....
John Wayne was on some comedy show at a time when Carnal Knowledge came out. He was in a skit which involved him being a parent and talking about his concerns that the kids would be alone. "They might have carnival knowledge of each other." That was his line.
The story of Hubble, the greatest advance in optical astronomy since Galileo. The most beautiful images that opened the minds of hundreds of millions to what is out there. It's well done, it tells the story, and it shows what the American culture gets done. Microsoft is the global platform. Facebook is the global frat house. Google is ubiquitous. Twitter is the global nerve network. Fracking is American freedom from the middle east. If I sound pro USA, I'm not. I'm just not blinded by partisianship or predisposition. Watch this. It's another place the USA changed everything. I love Hubble deeply and I lived through the time hoping they could fix it because it really is life changing in what we know about everything. I've been passionate about it for many years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr5ZWaKtjfw
edit - if the link is a problem it's on utube and it's called
George, I've talked about space dust and supernovae and time and the creator using a coherent set of physics and that the universe is so gigantic that we haven't been able to detect an end to it in any direction.
And we may come from the contemplation of all that with awe - but, that would be wrong. That's not the message pouring out of the medium of the universe. The actual message is in our faces all the time, every day, in every way like an endless cornucopia overflowing with vaudeville and chaucer and slide guitar and peacocks and black jaguars and hornbills and swordfish and flying fish and flying squirrels and parrots that talk and imitate people and beethoven's ninth and hula hoops and top hats and white after labor day and soldiers in gay attire marching for the joy of it and ballet and druids and kibuki theatre and dressing in costumes and singing songs...
If you don't believe anybody knows the answers and you're just looking at the universe, it is an endlessly fascinating place. I'll tell you something I believe is certain. Wherever life gets a firm foothold and breaks out - it's dancing and expressing itself and shedding off a joyous vitality that can't be fathomed unless you watch it right in front of your face.
That's the thing that unites us all, whatever our religious beliefs may be or not be, that everywhere in the trillions of trillions of suns in this one universe, the laws of physics and so the stuff of the universe is the same. That you can take the basic chemistry in any icy rock anywhere, mix it with some energy, and you get amino acids - the basic building blocks of life. And universally, in such a consistent universe, when life gets a foothold, it's going to dance - just like on this very, very ordinary rock.
We're finding thousands of planets around stars now. Do you know why? We're looking and have sufficient technology to notice them. Maybe one day someone will answer back. It won't matter. That is God's supreme joke. We can talk to each other but visiting is such a logistical, bankrupting effort even with someone next door like Alpha Centauri - that aliens visiting us and building pyramids is just one more example of the rocks having fun.
....
So here's another example. Long ago on Saturday Night Live, Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan did a 'cool guys' skit and so some wag looped part of it into ten hours - that's ten hours - of constant "What Is Love" head bopping.
And almost nine million people have watched it - including me. Enjoy a couple of minutes and if you ever wonder what's going to happen in the universe - the answer is everything and anything given just half a chance.
I read your story three times and I think I'm getting the point you are making. You are causing me to do some powerful thinking which is very difficult for me.
I never thought much about thinking until I had to watch my Dear Helen loose her ability to think, Although she tried so hard at it. I can tell from your writings that you're very good at thinking and also very good at expressing your thoughts.
I've read a lot of Einstein's thoughts about our universe but he uses a scientific language that is difficult to understand.......... I like yours better.
Anyway .......... I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts. They give me something to think about. I didn't watch the Jim Carrey video for ten hours but I did watch the end of it. I found it very meaningful. And now I'm wondering how you find that stuff. I think I'll have some fun sending it to some of my friends.
Also wolf ......... You're absolutely right..... and thanks for telling me..... I should quit saying "I feel like an old man. Just, taking up space". I can still have some fun.
Thanks Again .......... GeorgieBoy
..................................Now I'm thinking again ...... Should I click "Add your comments?" .................................Oh well ....... What have I got to loose?
George & Wolf, It is a scientific fact that "just taking up space" is a useful contribution. If you think about the axiom, "Nature abhors a vacuum," you'll realize that if you do not fill the space allotted to you, someone else will and chances are that the other person would be a deranged, murderous sociopath. So, just by taking up space, you are preventing nature from filling a vacuum with a dangerous troublemaker. This is the reason behind the saying, "They also serve who only stand and wait."
Very funny in a Stephen King kind of way where the one thing you always knew was that anything coming in the book was worse than the things already there. By this reasoning it is assumed we stand and serve by taking up the space that something worse would like a murderous sociopath - except that is one directional in it's goal orientation and we could be taking up the space that would be used by a Mother Teresa/Einstein type.
There is of course no set number to the souls on this planet at any one time, nor is there a modifier that moves the number back to some ideal range. This is clear when we see that there are more people alive today than there have been in the entire history of the planet.
We live, breathe, and move inside an ocean which is close to the gaseous state of water. That's why when we move our arms fast enough we can actually hear the air being displaced - and why we can hear anything at all. Sound does not travel through outer space because all of outer space is virtually a vacuum.
Vacuum itself is a relational concept. You might find one single atom in a cubic inch of outer space. Yet the rock we consider solid is outer space to a neutrino where they reliably pass right through the 7900 miles of earth without hitting a thing. I can guarantee you several neutrinos have zipped right through you while you read this sentence.
This ocean of air only weighs some .08 pounds per cubic foot - but it exerts a pressure of 14.7 pounds per cubic inch. A new bar of soap might be 4 cubic inches for example. So every cubic inch of air pushing down on your head and shoulders and spine 'weighs' the same as 3 bags of sugar. Think of a single cubic inch of air isolated from all the rest. That chunk of air actually has many miles of more cubic inches piled on top of it going right up into outer space. All of it has a weight and all of it is being pulled down by earth's gravity. Those miles of more cubic inches of air on top of the one at the ground is what creates that pressure on us on the ground.
That is the reason why airplanes cannot reach outer space. Jets need enough pressurized air to make the wing design create lift. Jets can break the sound barrier but that has nothing to do with this. Sound travels around 768 miles per hour through our atmosphere. When the jet goes faster than that, sound can't keep up and instead builds up a shock wave of air following behind.
A rocket has no wings beyond small stabilizers and doesn't use the atmosphere to fly - instead it bulls it's way through much like a jet does. That is until it gets to the upper atmosphere where the jet can't reach because it doesn't have enough horsepower and needs it's wings. The rocket is relying on the physical principle that every force creates an opposite force and is steadily gaining speed going 'straight' up until it is going seven miles per second. That's how fast it has to go to reach escape velocity because that is what's required given the mass (not the weight) of the earth. The escape velocity of every planet or moon is unique.
Whatever it is, if it's moving at 7 miles per second or faster, it's got what it takes to escape the gravity well of the earth and is free to leave. That's the ticket required. It has to get up to 25,200 mph (7 * 60 seconds * 60 minutes). If something with wings can do that, wings are not a problem until re-entry. Re-entry into the atmosphere again is different.
It's different because once you're going 25,000 mph and make it to outer space, you're in the 'vacuum' of space going that speed and you just keep going that speed which now feels like you're standing still. Without local reference points there's no way to assign the caveman mentality of 'speed' to anything because speed is just a relational reference between two things. We might see ourselves going around the earth and judge speed that way; but, if we were way outside the solar system, the concept of speed would be without function.
This can be demonstrated by the fact that if you were way outside the solar system, you could turn your engines off completely and just keep right on going. That's how we use satellites. We put them up there in an orbit where the speed matches the pull of the mass of the earth where the satellites don't even have an engine. They are the 'payload' which means that's the weight of the thing we got to escape the gravity well of the earth. We could launch a bus and if we get it out there, we could insert it into a stable orbit and have it circle the earth for years.
The thing about that bus and re-entry is that it's going 25,000 miles an hour already and if we try to come back into the ocean of atmosphere we start at that speed. If we can lose speed, we will change the balance of the orbit to where the earth's gravity well is winning and it will draw the bus back in, but, at these speeds you have to have an insertion angle (steeper) or the bus will bounce off the ocean of atmosphere. Not that dissimilar to bouncing a rock off the water which is also entering a small heavy object from a lighter medium into a heavier medium with a defined boundary. Change the insertion angle (steeper) and the rock will enter the water without bouncing every time. Ditto here.
One day we may design rocket fuel solutions that allow us to slow down the bus during re-entry. We can't right now. We depend on the ever increasing density of the ocean of atmosphere to slow us down which produces a lot of heat.
Colony on Mars they say. But children born on earth are born in 14.7 pounds of pressure per cubic inch. Humans are designed to grow at that 'depth'. I won't be around to hear how big children on Mars get. They will be using growth mechanisms designed specifically for our gravity well and our ground pressure. We're going there - you can put that in the bank. And then we'll find out more about the evolution of cause and effect. After a few generations, I'm quite sure no 'Martian' human will be able to visit earth where they would weigh almost three times what they're used to and probably have adapted to.
The minute we're self sustaining on two rocks - we survive what happens to one of them.
What was the topic again? Oh right, filling a vacuum. Like this previously empty space now populated by this.
EDIT - I need to clarify one point. A jet engine sucks in air to create it's forward momentum. That isn't the same as a rocket which I implied earlier. A rocket has no intake of air required. It is a controlled explosion expanding and that expansion is focused in a downward direction. A rocket does not use a medium to fly which a jet engine does. It uses Newton's third law directly regardless of what medium it's in. Submariners know this. They launch rockets from under water into the atmosphere and the rocket doesn't care.
George, there's something about the 11th of December and the last day of the year that is identical. It's not just that the 19 days in between are the only days of the year that are shorter than all the rest - it's that those two days are the same length, being ten days before and ten days after the winter solstice.
Most people don't notice things like that but have some fun and mark down what moment your local information says sunrise occurred because at that moment you will know what they report for the last day of 2017.
This doesn't work in the southern hemisphere. There it works in reverse because of course what we call winter they call summer and vice versa. So those days are identical but the 19 days in between are all longer than the rest of the year. Just like June 11 and July 01.
When you measure accurately from the real winter solstice, you begin to notice the errors in the awkward calendar of having 365 days, but using much closer to 365 and 1/4 days to actually complete what we call a year (once around the sun).
The rhythm is like this - accurate, one quarter day out, one half day out, three quarters of a day out, back to accurate (leap year), one quarter day out...and so on. We fiddle to try and keep it close which is why all millennial years SHOULD be leap years, but none are. One more fine tuning adjustment we make every thousand years.
And the very day that winter starts up here, the days just keep getting longer right up to when summer starts. When summer starts the days just keep getting shorter.
If you live in Australia for example, you understand that christmas is in summer. Look up the temperature of Bethlehem and you'll see that it doesn't snow there at christmas either.
If you play this game, you have to mark down both the sunrise and sunset times given and just track those differences over the 21 days. You don't have to do it every day because you can calculate any days you missed. Add up the difference at sunrise AND at sunset and you start getting that it's actually a couple of minutes a day on average. The earth orbits in an ellipse - not in a circle - so it varies. But it varies like a Swiss watch wannabee because the universe at work is a study in precision.
There's a quick way to understand this rhythm. Look up the longest day and the shortest day of the city you live near. Divide the year in two which is how long it takes to get from one to the other (182.625 days) and subtract the shortest from the longest day. Now divide that and you get how many minutes each day changes on average where you live. The latitude at which you live changes the answers where the equator is the smallest variation and the north and south poles are the largest variation - and here northern or southern hemisphere don't matter because they each get an equal but opposite half of the earth's orbit to bask in their latitude's weather.
(The easiest way - mark down sunrise and sunset on Dec 11, mark down sunrise and sunset on Dec 21, mark down sunrise and sunset on Dec 31 and look.)
Wolf, you might wish to check your references about sunrises being the same time ten days before and after the solstice. The lengths of the days will be the same, but my sources say that we won't see the latest sunrise (here in Florida at least) until sometimes in early January, although we've already passed the earliest sunset more than a week ago. Earliest sunset and latest sunrise dates evidently vary with latitude and surprisingly (to me) aren't symmetrical relative to the solstice -- having to do with the earth's 23.5 degree inclination and its elliptical orbit, but I'm too lazy to try to follow the math!
You guys are way over my head with this scientific stuff but it's interesting for me and I enjoy reading it. Since I only had a High School education, it's difficult for me to understand it.
I once needed some mathematics help. I knew that in computer language, there is 256 ways to arrange 8 bits ...... but how about 10 bits? I asked my nephew who is a university math professor about it and he emailed me a full page about combinatorics.
I'm kind of proud of myself since I learned how to calculate how many ways there are to arrange a collection of things. ........ I play word games on a little tablet computer ........ like they give me 4 letters and I'm supposed to see how many words I can make out of those 4 letters. ....... Now ...... I can't remember how to do it but Ithink I could look it up ...............
There's a blue moon coming on Jan 31. That may be because we made February a runt month. A blue moon is of course when the moon is full twice in a single month.
Right now at 7:45pm EST, the gibbous waxing moon is just a sliver of a crescent. When we were in high school they taught us arcs, and tangents and if we look at that crescent and divide it exactly in half like a cake, and extend a line down that center, it will dissect the sun. A crescent moon always tells you where the sun is.
That's understandable because the moon is round and so it reflects exactly where the sun is, even though it's night time and the sun is well below us, or, since it's now 4:45 in California, it should be close to setting on the horizon if you're standing on the shore of the Pacific Ocean.
The moon orbits the earth every 27 days approximately. With the sun, it's us orbiting the sun which is standing still compared to every other thing in the solar system. So there is no relationship between the sun and the moon because even though they both appear to be orbiting around the earth - only the moon is actually doing so.
If we wonder how these planets and moons can be orbiting around so predictably, it helps to know that the sun is 99.8% of all the mass in the solar system. Jupiter and Saturn and Earth and Venus and all the asteroid belts, kuiper belts, oort cloud, are nothing even in total compared to the sun and it's effect on the tiny bits around it. All of us bits are moving around inside the sun's world. The sun is moving around in the milky way. It's orbiting the massive black hole that is near the center of every spiral galaxy of the billions of spiral galaxies.
Black holes are easy to understand. It's not a hole. We mean it looks like a hole. It's an extremely dense blob of matter that draws more matter into it by gravity and at some point that gravity becomes so strong that the photons of light can no longer escape from it. The super dense 'black hole' is very much there in time and space and sooner or later the misnomer will be corrected. There is no hole. There are only idiotic names.
Anyway, blue moon this month on the 31st, if you use the Gregorian calendar, just another full moon right on schedule if you don't. All that of course if you're in the right areas because the full moon viewed from other locations on the planet isn't - full. Ask a New Zealander on the 31st how they liked the full moon and that never happened.
btw - when you slice the cresent moon exactly in half like a cake and extend that line - you've bisected the arc and drawn a tangent, in this case to the sun below the horizon even in the dead of night. We do complex math all the time but we do it the same way we throw a baseball.
And finally there is no such thing as no moon. It crosses in the daytime which means it's inside the sunlight from our point of view as it crosses. New Zealand again, at the same time, not so much. So the next time you spot the moon up there in broad daylight say to yourself "oh, no moon" and you will be right in every accepted way outside reality. It will eventually be called 'day moon' or something. Just another misnomer.
In a similar way 'caregiver' may one day be called the two sided coin it is. 'Care not getter while giving - please help.'
"I'm here too!" said George today and Louie, the dog, some indeterminant number of decades earlier. That's a wonderful thought on this quiet, moonlit evening.
That's not quite why the planet is littered with pyramids and monuments, but it's close. For some it's going down in history, although what that means exactly isn't clear. I'm sure it's not like water going down a bathtub drain or a rabbit going down his hole. For some it's desperation to live forever in some way which generally means being dug up centuries later with the same consistency as leather.
Take Richard III. In writing this I learned he wasn't the king who took a stray arrow in the eye and ended up being dug out from under a parking lot a few years ago. He was hacked to death in Bosworth Field and ended up being dug out from under a parking lot a few years ago. It was Harold, he on the Bayeux Tapestry, that took a stray arrow in the eye.
"I'm here too!" cried the Vandals, a goth tribe in northern France I think, that the Romans hated fighting so much their despise survived the centuries and entered the english language. A vandal is not a good person. Thank you for that Rome.
Then there's Ötzi man, also known as Iceman who was crossing the Alps over 5,000 years ago and instead became a block of ice preserving him, what he was carrying, and even some of what he ate last (red deer with herb bread along with roots and fruits). His cloak was made of woven grass, and he had leggings, a belt, a coat, and shoes that were waterproof all made from various leathers. He also had a fire starting kit in his pouch.
"I'm here too" probably wasn't what Galois was thinking when he wrote some of his most important mathematical theorems down the night before he was killed in a duel at the age of twenty, although I can't be sure of that.
I'm pretty sure that wasn't what Alexander The Great was thinking either. With his gay lover beside him, he conquered and conquered and conquered long after he cut off his own supply lines. The problem was he didn't want to own anything or run anything - just conquer, conquer, conquer. Not the brightest bulb on the street.
"I'm here too" is what the lantern lighting guild screamed when Edison wrecked their lives. It's what the Luddites screamed when automation (steam) took their jobs. It's what the French screamed when Marie tried to make them eat cake.
It's what the serfs screamed for centuries until the black death created a labor shortage so severe that it greatly improved their lives. (yes, those that survived but it's always those that survived - also known as the living)
"I am here too!" is what the citizens of Whoville shouted and shouted until Horton heard them.
It is why two Voyagers are long out of the solar system and moving through interstellar space. We still communicate with one of them, but the remaining battery power that runs the eight track programming is slowly and steadily draining. It takes 17 hours at the speed to light to communicate one way. It's just 8 minutes to the sun. The sun is about 93 million miles away. Voyager 1 is about 12 billion miles away. That's a B as in billion.
That's the ship with the famous plaque and recording "Greetings from the planet earth" said Kurt Waldheim (I think) on The Golden Record now going out there where no person has gone before. Or now really. But that's us barking into the night sky saying "I'm here too!" to anybody else that might come along and find it.
In my own recordings, there are millions of moments all recorded flawlessly and all retrieved faultily that are the accurate life and times of Dianne with Wolf. All the sounds and even the smells and tastes are all there like that Golden Record on Voyager. I don't have the playback machine but I carry every single moment of her, including every moment and every thought about her when she wasn't there because she was in the next room or somewhere.
I never saw me in any of those moments all of which are recorded in my memory because I was the camera you see. I only saw her.
You are not forgotten and I thought of you just a few days ago. Good to hear from you. I am here too.
Very old film has always been herky jerky in how everything moves because of the film speed differences. Lately it's become easier and cheaper to correct that which makes a world of difference in being able to see the world then naturally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aohXOpKtns0
- New York city in 1911, speed corrected with sounds added