Hi,

My blog is now at:

http://www.markjamesmurphy.com

I won't be posting here anymore...

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

Wrap your brain around this.  Or watch American Idol.  Your choice.

-Mark

SWIMMING TO PRIMORDIA:
Robert Wright interviews Brian Swimme on cosmic evolution (Slate)

Brian Swimme is a mathematical cosmologist on the graduate faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. [...]

Wright: And and and this this gets at a question I have... now you definitely with this story you want to do some things that religion has traditionally done, orient people, inform their values and so on... one thing a lot of religions have done is give people a sense that things were meant to be you know... there was a God that designed the universe or there were some supernatural order that imbues their own life with purpose. And there, as I read you, you are kind of teetering on the edge of that but not quite doing it. Right?

Brian Swimme: Yes. That's right. Teetering is not a word I'd use but it would certainly... there I guess it's trying so hard to get a feel for the way in which there is a random dimension to the universe without question.

Wright: Let me give you let me give you an example ...

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: ... of you talk in "The Universe Story" about several kind of parameters of the universe that were just quite exquisitely fortuitous from our point of view. If they had been off a little in either direction, things would have collapsed, life could have been impossible or something. Here's just one example, you're talking about the curvature of space time which I can't quite imagine clearly but anyway ... the curvature of space time: "Had the curvature been a fraction larger the universe would have immediately collapsed down into a massive black hole. Had it been a fraction smaller the universe would had exploded into a scattering of lifeless particles. Thus the curvature of the universe is sufficiently closed to maintain a coherence of it's various components and sufficiently open to allow for a continued creativity." Now a lot of other you know...

Brian Swimme: Yes. Yes.

Wright: ...gravitational constant whatever I don't know if you mention that one but there are various things you do mention...

Brian Swimme: Right.

0:09:27.000

Wright: Now some people conventionally religious people have looked at these things and have said clearly the universe was designed for a purpose it's just too good to be true. What's what's your view on that?

Brian Swimme: Well I guess first of all it'd be the word design because as soon as you use the word design at least for me it then you're talking about a designer and so you have you have someone sort of outside the universe, Newton's idea was tinkering with it so you set the universe and kind of run run and tinker with it but I think what is what word discovers something way more exciting that is that universe is finding it's way, the universe is you know probing and exploring and it is from the beginning it's it's in search of something. Now I mean that I'm personifying by using that...

Wright: Yes.

Brian Swimme: ... and that is that does make it hard I think...

Wright: Well but how literally do you mean the the personification. I mean is the you know... you do think the universe is a living system?

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: And now living systems do have purposes though in the sense I mean even evolutionary biologists would say that an animal you can say is "designed by natural selection" and that's why it pursues goals like getting it's genes into the next generation and and and and goals that are subordinate to that I mean when we think of a living system we think of something that is the result of at least a process of design even if it's a kind of impersonal process like natural selection and something that has it's own little set of goals, right?

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: Is that what you mean to imply?

Brian Swimme: I do...

Wright: About... you do? So the universe does have a purpose.

Brian Swimme: I would not call it it's own little set of goals.

Wright: No. Well if it's the universe it's big goals. Obviously.

Brian Swimme: Yes. I think that the universe does have purpose it does have direction in the sense that but they're not in my own way of thinking they're not fully formed. There are I think something like, go back early in the universe, I think there are literally an infinite of things that are possible but out of all those universe is always striving to give birth to the to the richness that's there potentially that'd be one way of how I'd talk about it so that it it could be that the universe would be very very different than it is right now, but it would still have something like life and something like a kind of rich inner-connected world of our planet. That'd be how I'd look at it. Those those those aims are present somehow, darkly, and then how are they present? Well. I don't know. I mean, we just found this out. We just discovered all this.

0:12:32.000

Wright: You mean by "all this" you mean?

Brian Swimme: I mean the the discovery of the big bang cosmology...

Wright: Right.

Brian Swimme: ... is extremely recent. We've been humans for 150,000 years.

Wright: Right.

Brian Swimme: And now just just just like yesterday we discovered some of the details of this happening we call the universe and so I it's going to take us time to to sort out really what's going on. When... to talk about designers... I think I think that's unfortunately collapsing back into a previous way of thinking that isn't... it's more exciting than that.

Wright: But but purpose is a word you are willing...

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: ... to use.

Brian Swimme: Yes I am.

Wright: So the universe has a purpose?

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: And you don't exactly what it is but you got a feeling that sentient life is part of the point.

Brian Swimme: Yes. Yes I do. Right. Sentient life and and and display of all kinds of energy constellations. So that the universe starts off so simple really in terms of of of it's structure and yet over time it just it throws out all this exotic stuff. So I think that is part of one of the main aims of the universe...

Wright: To display...

Brian Swimme: Yes...

Wright: ... beautiful stuff...

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: But there wouldn't be much point in displaying beautiful stuff if there weren't creatures capable of apprehending beautiful stuff. I mean who is it showing off for?

Brian Swimme: Well, that's a good question. But it may it may just that alone may be what the universe is about... it doesn't happen without...

0:14:20.000

Wright: This is kind of it reminds me of kind of Whitehead a little bit.

Brian Swimme: Oh yes I would say that the three thinkers...

Wright: He was a process theologian, right?

Brian Swimme: Process... yes.

Wright: And and and do you have a good thumbnail definition of that or should we pass over that? What what what does process theology mean?

Brian Swimme: He would be a he would be a you know the first process thinker that gave birth to process theology. He was really doing cosmology. And his his I give you here's a thumbnail sketch of Whitehead... His idea was that we have in science exhausted the mechanistic metaphor and it it took us places but it was it was no longer viable in terms of what we learned but especially the quantum world so he was attempting to give a framework for understanding the universe with organism as the fundamental concept not machine. That would be one way to think about it. And then his idea of organism would be that that the fundamental reality of the universe is an experience in subject so his phrase is outside of experiencing subjects there's nothing nothing just bright nothingness. So not only would ... he would say it's not just display but it's the richness the intensity of the experience that would be what the universe is aiming at.

0:15:42.000

Wright: Ok. The so really I'm a little surprised because you're being more explicit than I think you generally are in your writing about the idea that the universe has a purpose. Maybe I mean I haven't read every word you've written but but but I'm a little surprised and what I was going to ask you was isn't this one thing that religions have traditionally done that you're world view doesn't do... that is to say by suggesting an over-arching purpose imbue people lives with a meaning from beyond in some sense... I mean would you say your world view has a transcendent source of meaning in it?

Brian Swimme: You see when you words like beyond then I start to loose my confidence because I'm really working out of primarily the scientific data so also like the word beyond or also transcendence I get a little bit uneasy...

 

This piece came from the following blog:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/2006/04/oughtnt_we_dig.html

It's based on some bleeding edge quantum cosmology outlined here:

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/mg19025481.300.html

http://www.thenewcars.com

I'm just about in geek heaven, because The Cars have re-formed.  Greg Hawkes and Elliot Easton added three new members to replace the reticent Ocasek and Robinson, and the deceased Orr.  Normally this would set off 'suckage' alarms, but the three new Cars are three of my favorite musicians in the world, Todd Rundgren, Kasim Sulton and Prairie Prince.  Not only that, but their single 'Not Tonight' manages to update, refresh, honor and validate the classic sound of The Cars.

Power pop is back!!!!

"The brain is a three-pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred-billion light-years across". - Marian Diamond

In every human brain, there are as many neurons as there are galaxies in the known universe about 100 billion, drawn from 10,000 different cell types and woven into a three-dimensional tapestry, with threads of neural interconnections that number in the trillions.

Each one is tinder for the spark-of-life experience.

Memories are made of this gray matter. So are inspiration and imagination.

Electrochemical currents of intellect and emotion race though living labyrinths of neurons at 200 mph. When they are blocked, diverted or damaged, abilities atrophy. Personality disintegrates.

By exploring the life and death of these cells, researchers hope to learn how biochemistry becomes thought. - link

59 Things a Man Should Never Do Past Age 30

1. Coin his own nickname.

2. Use a wallet that is fastened with Velcro.

3. Rank his friends in order of best, second best, and so on.

4. Hacky sack.

5. Name his penis his name plus junior.

6. Hang art with tape.

7. Hang The Scream, unless he stole it from the Munch museum in Oslo.

8. Ask a policeman, "You ever shoot anybody with that thing?"

9. Ask a woman, "Hey, you got a license for that ass?"

10. Skip.

11. Take a camera to a nude beach.

12. Let his father do his taxes.

13. Tap on the glass.

14. Shout out a response to "Are you ready to rock?"

15. Use the word collated on his resume.

16. Hold a weekly house meeting with roommates.

17. Name pets after Middle Earth characters.

18. Jokingly flash gang signs while posing for wedding photos.

19. Give shout-outs.

20. Use numbers in place of words or locations, such as "the 411" for information, or "the 313" for Detroit.

21. Hug amusement-park characters.

22. Wear Disney-themed neckties.

23. Wake up to a "morning zoo."

24. Compare the trajectory of his life with those of the characters in Billy Joel's "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant."

25. Request extra sprinkles.

26. Air drum.

27. Choose 69 as his jersey number.

28. Eat Oreo cookies in stages.

29. Volunteer to be a magician's assistant.

30. Sleep on a bare mattress.

31. End a conversation with "later skater."

32. Hold his lighter up at a concert.

33. Publicly greet friends by shouting, "What's up, you whore?"

34. Wear Converse All Stars with a tuxedo.

35. Propose via stadium Jumbotron.

36. Decide anything based on the ruminations of Howard Stern.

37. Call "shotgun" before getting in a car.

38. Dispute someone else's call of "shotgun."

39. Whine.

40. Mist up during Aerosmith's "Dream On."

41. Purchase fireworks.

42. Google the word vagina.

43. Ride a pony.

44. Sport an ironic mustache.

45. Hit 13 against a 6.

46. Organize a party bus.

47. Say "two points" every time he throws something in the trash.

48. Buy a novelty postcard in another country of topless women on a beach and write, "Wish you were here" on it.

49. Keg stands.

50. Purchase home-brewing paraphernalia.

51. The John Travolta point-to-the-ceiling-point-to-the-floor dance move; also that one from Pulp Fiction.

52. Put less than ten dollars' worth of gas in the tank.

53. Keep a minuscule amount of marijuana extremely well hidden.

54. Read The Fountainhead.

55. Watch the Pink Floyd laser light show at a planetarium.

56. Refer to his girlfriend's breasts as "the twins."

57. Own a vanity plate.

58. Whippits.

59. Say goodbye to anyone by tapping his chest and even so much as whispering, "Peace out."

http://lifestyle.msn.com/men/default.aspx

The complete article is here:

http://paulgraham.com/say.html

What You Can't Say (excerpts)

January 2004

Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it-- that the earth moves. ...........

............It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.

Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.

It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.

The Conformist Test

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.

Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn't do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.

If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.................

.....................Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking..............

.............So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label-- "sexist", for example-- and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?

Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think.

In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. [3] They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.................

.................When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to.

The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas.

To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. ................

.................When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.............

................Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot................

.............The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders.......................

................When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be "i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto." Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking. This was wise advice. Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. But I think the difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of degree. Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction.................

..................The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky........................

.............The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know................................

..............It's not just the mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance. That's not a radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between children and adults. When a child gets angry because he's tired, he doesn't know what's happening. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say "never mind, I'm just tired." I don't see why one couldn't, by a similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions.

You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly. But it's harder, because now you're working against social customs instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society's bad moods.

How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why?

http://paulgraham.com/say.html

Dear Juliet,

Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun?

The answer to these questions is "evidence." Sometimes evidence means actually seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling..... ) that something is true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The "evening star" looks like a bright twinkle in the sky, but with a telescope, you can see that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing ( or hearing or feeling..... ) is called an observation.

Often, evidence isn't just an observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots or other observations which may all point toward a particular suspect. If a person's fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it's joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realise that they fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.

Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess ( called a hypothesis ) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: If that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started.When a doctor says that you have the measles, he doesn't take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: If she has measles I ought to see...... Then he runs through the list of predictions and tests them with his eyes ( have you got spots? ); hands ( is your forehead hot? ); and ears ( does your chest wheeze in a measly way? ). Only then does he make his decision and say, " I diagnose that the child has measles. " Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-Rays, which help their eyes, hands, and ears to make observations.

The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called "tradition," "authority," and "revelation."

First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited because they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by "tradition." Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like: "We Hindus believe so and so"; "We Muslims believe such and such"; "We Christians believe something else."

Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite right and proper, and he didn't even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn't the point I want to make for the moment. I simply want to ask where their beliefs come from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over the centuries. That's tradition.

The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn't true, handing it down over a number of centuries doesn't make it any truer!

Most people in England have been baptised into the Church of England, but this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different things from each other go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But actually, their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.

Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted bodily in to Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don't talk about much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they don't call her the "Queen of Heaven." The tradition that Mary's body was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The bible says nothing on how she died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't invented until about six centuries after Jesus' time. At first, it was just made up, in the same way as any story like "Snow White" was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as and official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950, when I was the age you are now. But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented six hundred years after Mary's death.

I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another way. But first, I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority and revelation.

Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.

When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950, the pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that that pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he was the pope, you should believe everything he said any more than you believe everything that other people say. The present pope ( 1995 ) has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people follow this authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases, and wars, caused by overcrowding.

Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence ourselves and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't, with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like "authority." But actually, it is much better than authority, because the people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary's body zooming off to Heaven.

The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called "revelation." If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary's body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been "revealed" to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling "revelation." It isn't only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?

Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and you'd probably say, "Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?" Now suppose I answered: "I don't actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have a funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead." You'd be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you'd know that an inside "feeling" on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don't. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.

People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise, you' d never be confident of things like "My wife loves me." But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't a purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.

Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn't even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can't trust them.

Inside feelings are valuable in science, too, but only for giving you ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a "hunch'" about an idea that just "feels" right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they are supported by evidence.

I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish to be good at surviving in fresh, water, while lobsters are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals, too, and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of ..... other people. Most of us don't hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters; we buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We ''swim'' through a "sea of people." Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.

You speak English, but your friend Ann-Kathrin speaks German. You each speak the language that fits you to '`swim about" in your own separate "people sea." Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way . In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or more true than the other. Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at "swimming about in their people sea," children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional information just means things that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children.) The child's brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child can't be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.

It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what the grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence, or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly, or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that, too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it can go on forever.

Could this be what has happened with religions ? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into blood - not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this because they were told to believe them when they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything.

Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers , Mormons or Holy Rollers, and are all utterly covinced that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and Ann-Kathrin speaks German. Both languages are, in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can't be true that different religions are right in their own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can't be alive in Catholic Southern Ireland but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.

What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: "What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

Your loving

Daddy

If you're familiar with Alex Tew's Million Dollar Homepage

 http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com

then you know that it has kicked off a slew of similar brilliant ideas such as http://www.therecordbreakingdomain.com

One of the coolest new ones is an attempt to make a mile-long webpage, the longest in the world...

I've purchased a spot on the mile wall - it's at 5'6" and you should check it out!

The great thing about the Mile Wall is that it's only $1 per square inch to get on there and it will generate web traffic forever...

http://www.themilewall.com

(KAI KRAUSE, answering a question posed on Edge.org) (my emphasis added)

Anty Gravity: Chaos Theory in an all too practical sense

Dangerous Ideas? It is dangerous ideas you want? From this group of people ? That in itself ought to be nominated as one of the more dangerous ideas...

Danger is ubiquitous. If recent years have shown us anything, it should be that "very simple small events can cause real havoc in our society". A few hooded youths play cat and mouse with the police: bang, thousands of burned cars put all of Paris into a complete state of paralysis, mandatory curfew and the entire system in shock and horror.

My first thought was: what if any really smart set of people really set their mind to it...how utterly and scarily trivial it would be, to disrupt the very fabric of life, to bring society to a dead stop?

The relative innocence and stable period of the last 50 years may spiral into a nearly inevitable exposure to real chaos. What if it isn't haphazard testosterone driven riots, where they cannibalize their own neighborhood, much like in L.A. in the 80s, but someone with real insight behind that criminal energy ? What if Slashdotters start musing aloud about "Gee, the L.A. water supply is rather simplistic, isn't it?" An Open Source crime web, a Wiki for real WTO opposition ? Hacking L.A. may be a lot easier than hacking IE.
 
That is basic banter over a beer in a bar, I don't even want to actually speculate what a serious set of brainiacs could conjure up. And I refuse to even give it any more print space here. However, the danger of such sad memes is what requires our attention!

In fact, I will broaden the specter still: its not violent crime and global terrorism I worry about, as much as the basic underpinning of our entire civilization coming apart, as such. No acts of malevolence, no horrible plans by evil dark forces, neither the singular "Bond Nemesis" kind, nor masses of religious fanatics. None of that needed... It is the glue that is coming apart to topple this tower. And no, I am not referring to "spiraling trillions of debt".

No, what I am referring to is a slow process I observed over the last 30 years, ever since in my teens I wondered "How would this world work, if everyone were like me ?" and realized: it wouldn't !

It was amazing to me that there were just enough people to make just enough shoes so that everyone can avoid walking barefoot. That there are people volunteering to spend day-in, day-out, being dentists, and lawyers and salesmen. Almost any "jobjob" I look at, I have the most sincere admiration for the tenacity of the people...how do they do it? It would drive me nuts after hours, let alone years...Who makes those shoes ?

That was the wondrous introspection in adolescent phases, searching for a place in the jigsaw puzzle.

But in recent years, the haunting question has come back to me: "How the hell does this world function at all? And does it, really ? I feel an alienation zapping through the channels, I can't find myself connecting with those groups of humanoids trouncing around MTV. Especially the glimpses of "real life": on daytime-courtroom-dramas or just looking at faces in the street. On every scale, the closer I observe it, the more the creeping realization haunts me: individuals, families, groups, neighborhoods, cities, states, countries... they all just barely hang in there, between debt and dysfunction. The whole planet looks like Any town with mini malls cutting up the landscape and just down the road it's all white trash with rusty car wrecks in the back yard. A huge Groucho Club I don't want to be a member of.

But it does go further: what is particularly disturbing to see is this desperate search for Individualism that has rampantly increased in the last decade or so.

Everyone suddenly needs to be so special, be utterly unique. So unique that they race off like lemmings to get 'even more individual' tattoos, branded cattle, with branded chains in every mall, converging on a blanded sameness world wide, but every rap singer with ever more gold chains in ever longer stretched limos is singing the tune: Don't be a loser! Don't be normal! The desperation with which millions of youngsters try to be that one-in-a-million professional ball player may have been just a "sad but silly factoid" for a long time.

But now the tables are turning: the anthill is relying on the behaviour of the ants to function properly. And that implies: the social behaviour, the role playing, taking defined tasks and follow them through.

What if each ant suddenly wants to be the queen? What if soldiering and nest building and cleaning chores is just not cool enough any more?

If AntTV shows them every day nothing but un-Ant behaviour...?

In my youth we were whining about what to do and how to do it, but in the end,all of my friends did become "normal" humans, orthopedics and lawyers, social workers, teachers... There were always a few that lived on the edges of normality, like ending up as television celebrities, but on the whole: they were perfectly reasonable ants. 1.8 children, 2.7 cars, 3.3 TVs...

Now: I am no longer confident that line will continue. If every honeymoon is now booked in Bali on a Visa card, and every kid in Borneo wants to play ball in NYC... can the network of society be pliable enough to accommodate total upheaval? And what if 2 billion Chinese and Indians raise a generation of kids staring 6+ hours a day into All American values they can never attain... being taunted with Hollywood movies of heroic acts and pathetic dysfunctionality, coupled with ever increasing violence and disdain for ethics or morals.

Seeing scenes of desperate youths in South American slums watching "Kill Bill" makes me think: this is just oxygen thrown into the fire... The ants will not play along much longer. The anthill will not survive if even a small fraction of the system is falling apart.

Couple that inane drive for "Super Individualism" (and the Quest for Coolness by an ever increasing group destined to fail miserably) with the scarily simple realization of how effective even a small set of desperate people can become, then add the obvious penchant for religious fanaticism and you have an ugly picture of the long term future.

So many curves that grow upwards towards limits, so many statistics that show increases and no way to turn around................

............I believe we need to clean house, re-evaluate, redefine the priorities.

While we look at the horizon here in these pages, it is the very ground beneath us, that may be crumbling. The ant hill could really go to ant hell!............. 

................This was not meant to sound like doom and gloom naysaying.  I see myself as a sincere optimist, but one who believes in realistic pessimism as a useful tool to initiate change.

http://www.soundclick.com/therazzles

Go here, become a part of history.

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Undoubtedly George W. Bush is the worst fuck-up in the entire history of fuck-ups. Never in US history has there been a politician who has so completely, devastated the economy of the United States and imperiled so many future generations of American citizens as this war profiteering scum, George W. Bush.
Never in the history of the world can one find a single world figure who was as blustering and blundering an idiot as this colossally blundering retard, George W. Bush.
In fact even Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin ladin have never proven to be as incredibly inept to the point of near certifiable retardation as the globally hated retard, George W. Bush.
Try to name just ONE SINGLE THING in George W. Bushes ENTIRE LIFE that he didn't completely fuck-up. You cannot. And do you know why? Because there has never been a single venture or business or political office or anything in his life in which he has done anything other than completely fuck it up.

Starting in 1975 when Osama Bin Laden's older brother Saleem financed the young George Bush in his very first business with his very own oil company, Arbusto Energy Inc. Which the young Bush promptly drained of all it's cash and drove straight into the ground while extracting delirious profits for himself, to the present day where he exhibits the same pattern of sneaking in, then looting and driving the thing straight into the ground - George Bush is consistent about one thing - He fucks things up big time, and loses money for everyone else, yet extracts delerious profits for himself and key buddies of his. It's what the Bushes are designed to do - it is all they have ever done.

George Bush Jr. was designed from the beginning to fuck up, and fuck up BIG TIME and rip everyone off - and cash in. Oh there is one other fuck-up who comes in a close second place to Bush Jr. His dad. Remember that fuck-up? He's the fuck up who didn't finish the job in Iraq the first time. He's the fuck up who thought that it would be a great idea to not harm Saddam - presumably so that his retarded son could come along years later and have have another four year stint at US Treasury looting just like his dad did.

HOLY SHIT - THESE TWO GUYS ARE THE WORLDS TWO BIGGEST FUCK-UPS EVER. Hands down. No competition.

But wait a second though - These two fucking reptiles are both descendants from Prescott Bush, who it took an act of Congress to get to stop HELPING THE NAZI WAR EFFORT. And even after the congressional act to stop Prescott from trading with the enemy, he still continued to trade with the enemy.
Remember this - ONCE A NAZI, ALWAYS A NAZI.

But wait there's more...

Apparently the ELITE secret society that is at the core of the Bush family, the Secret Scull and Bones Society, was founded on money from Americas largest OPIUM TRAFFICKING SYNDICATE.
It was founded by the Connecticut opium trafficking kingpin William Harrison Russell in 1832. And considering George Bushes Sr. sneaky sociopathic yuppiesque history it becomes very suspicious considering his nick name for decades - "Poppy."

Just what, "Poppy" really means considering the history of Bush, the origins of their fortunes and their contempt for the law and their elitist daring to thumb their nose at all but the elite few, should have raised alarm bells long ago. But there is no one to investigate them. For George Bush Senior, being the Director of Central Intelligence, then Vice President, then President - there is simply no one who can even touch him.

But thank god that as every generation proceeds these Bushes, like all spoiled little shits, are getting dumber and dumber and more pathetic with each passing generation. Now, it seems they are all alcoholics and/or drug attics. Lets hope they finish themselves off. But we will probably not be so lucky.

Americans must storm the White House with massive waves of protest - Unrelenting protest day and night, unceasing and unyielding, until the White House is surrounded day and night and we demonstrate to the world that the American people are very definitely not united with this murderous war profiteering scum - This little sociopathic daddies boy.

And then we need to turn our enmity to the scum in the US media who forced little retard on us, for it is the scum in the US media who might actually be most to blame for opening the gates to this human scum.

And remember this, there are companies out there with names like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Grumman, Carlyle, Bechtel, Wackenhut and many others who will KILL AMERICANS who get in the way of the Bushes. These companies are lethal killing machines and they LOVE the Bushes. The Bushes have a long term plan of terror and theft of power that I fear will last many generations to come. And these power hungry terrorists will always find eager accomplices in these military, intelligence and defense corporations who will execute strategic terror attacks on Americans so that once again a Bush can step up to be a hero and, "protect us." - Then loot the treasury as usual.

This fuckin' retard, Bush, thought he could loot BOTH the US treasury AND the oil-fields of Iraq - achieving a pirate's double whammy. Well he was right about the US Treasury. And it's a job well done. The entire wealth of this nation has been looted from the US Treasury and transfered to a few key industrialists linked to his dad, George Sr.

But boy did this fuck-up, (George Jr.) fuck up big time and miscalculate thinking he and his buddies could cash in and loot the oil fields of Iraq as well as the US Treasury. It looks like it's not going to happen. Looks like he fucked up just like his dad did over a decade ago. There's no way that Bush and his team of oil looters could loot those oil fields when practically every man woman and child (Freedom Fighters) are firing rocket propelled grenades at the looters. It's one thing for this asshole Bush and his daddies pet reptile, Rumsfeld, to pay their old buddies down at the Hill and Knowleton public relations firm (Lie firm) to hire some poor shiite kids to throw flowers at the troops during carefully orchestrated staged media fake outs with the cooperation of CNN and all the other American Lie News organizations in order to FAKE OUT the American people into a feel good mood to trick us into thinking that we are "Liberators" (While Bush and his dad would presumably be 'Liberating" Iraq of it's oil wealth). But when the reality sets in that it was all a trick and that the looting plan failed what should the penalty to George and his fuckin' evil father be for all the US blood spilled and all this American wealth wasted on their little "fake out?"

I believe we need to start talking about punishment for George W. Bush and his father. I believe we need to start talking in terms of a trial for TREASON.

It is important to remember this fact: That re-election is not so important to the Bushes - it never has been. For, the Bushes have always known that they could accomplish their real objective (which is to plunder the US Treasury through the provocation of a few key middle east wars.) in only one term. But now with the windfall kickbacks from that 87 billion in place coupled with those NEW AND IMPROVED REPUBLICAN MANUFACTURED ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES INSTALLED THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY re-election is even less of a concern - It is a sure thing. But one has to ask themselves why would Bush want another term - there will soon be nothing left to steal from the American people. They have already sucked this generation dry and two future generations as well.

The real objective all along is and always was: to get at the money in the US Treasury. For that is the prize above all others. For the US treasury is the biggest treasure on the plant earth...

Well, not anymore.

And it would be one thing if that money was looted to build infrastructure here in America or to build and expand the information superhighway so that we can finally learn the truth about reality and free ourselves from the archaic communications modalities of the TV paradigm, which reduces populations to fearful obese shitheads cowering under the very filth who exploits them, completely obliterating their mind, body and spirit all under the shallow pathetic rubric of "The Free Market."

But instead all of Americas wealth was transfered to Bushes dad's buddies in the defense industry and wasted spent bombing wedding parties in foreign countries and blowing off the arms and legs of little children in Iraq and Afghanistan and earning the hatred of the entire planet, and causing PERMANENT damage to America's credibility, stature and future. And even though there is a total blackout, by the scum of the American Media, of the images of this American caused holocaust and this reality of a world united against America, this is not the case everywhere else. Everywhere else, the photographs of the little children who's arms and legs have been blown off, or whose, whose lives have been snuffed out, are on the FRONT PAGE. Bush and his gang of treasury looters and war profiteers pseudo (fake) religious scumbags, have used the wealth of this once great nation to piss off the entire planet. America is now HATED throughout the world and your taxpayers' dollars paid for it. And your American media (scum) made it a reality by keeping the truth about what is really happening buried beneath a mountain of lies, lies, lies. America has become a lie, at least the official America. Everything on the television is a lie. And all the major newspapers are lies.

Someday if it is ever possible to clean the current scum from the White House our problems with the Bushes will not be over. For as long as ANY male progeny of George Bush Sr. is alive and breathing air, America will be under the threat of the terrorist schemes of the military, intelligence and defense industrialists. For there is no other family in America who is such an attractive magnet for evil than the Bushes. No other family name can symbolize and represent the evil military, intelligence and defense industrialists so fully and completely than the name Bush. These industrialist profiteers will never rest until they suck every last drop of blood from every man woman and child in America. And when these lizards have sucked each and every American dry, the sucking will still not stop there. For these lizards represent the very purest form of evil anywhere on the planet earth - they will suck on every dog and cat and rat and tree and rock and river and mountain and any and all things that move or don't move and they will keep sucking and sucking until they consume and obliterate the earth. They are not human beings - They are the very essence of evil. Until George Bush the senior is in his grave, and unless George Jr. is in prison, the United States is forever in jeopardy of continued inside terrorist attacks. So we must unrelentingly track and follow every single male offspring of the Bushes. Their activities and whereabouts must be microscopically scrutinized. The Bushes represent the masthead of all that is evil in the United States of America. Remove the Bushes from the scenario and America goes a long way towards healing and getting back on track.

Know your enemy
Fight the big fight
Smash the TV
And get the fuck off your knees

voxfux