Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

November 8, 2013 · 10:04 pm

Six Philosophical Questions

I quite like things like this, where complicated philosophical and scientific principles are explained in a couple of minutes with cute illustrations and maybe a bit of a joke, because that’s the only level I’m going to understand them on, and I do want to understand when I’m at a party and somebody starts talking about the difference between the grandfather paradox and the multiverse theory, or some such.

It’s kind of like I explained to my son this evening, when he asked if I thought Archeologist was a good job (I should have just said yes, because he currently wants to be a sports commentator, which I’m O.K. with, he’s 10, but I’d like to encourage him in a more intellectual direction) and I said “Well, I sort of see it in the same category with Astronomy.  These are things that I like talking about, and writing about, and watching shows about on discovery channel, but if you want to actually  do it as a profession, there are a lot of long, boring hours of tedious work involved.”

I took Astronomy 101, that cured me of the bug right there.

Anyway, back to the 6 famous thought experiments.   Some of them were interesting but the only two that were new to me were the infinite hotel and the Chinese room, which definitely puts a new spin on the old Turing test.

Just cut a hole in the damned box! Problem solved.

Just cut a hole in the damned box! Problem solved.

The one with the runner and the turtle I’ve heard as the paradox of the arrow, which can never reach its target because it always has to cover half the distance. Nonetheless, it does, so there’s some flaw in the logic somewhere.

The Twin Paradox isn’t so much a paradox as just an illustration of the theory of relativity, and the Grandfather Paradox we’ve all heard before but I never get tired of it.  Saw that the other day on an episode of Haven.  That’s a good show, for people who like concentrated weirdness.

Schrodinger’s bloody cat, though. I’d just like to see that removed from the canon of philosophical questions. The cat is either alive or dead and the fact that we don’t know which is entirely irrelevant to the cat’s aliveness or deadness. It is NOT both at the same time, it is one or the other and to think otherwise is plain stupid.

I don’t know who Schrodinger was, but I think he was a pompous dumbass.

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November 7, 2013 · 10:44 pm

Choice of Words

I just saw this article where cosmetics store Sephora was forced to pull a shade of lipstick called “Celebutard,” and I’m not surprised, although personally I think the name is kind of funny.  26409_113173505369561_100000307353453_171514_2671245_n

Earlier, in response to this post on my facebook page, in which they said Obama was born in Indonesia and was a big High School homo who used to dress in a flamboyant green stripper outfit, I wrote “retards” and at least one person  said I was a horrible, disgusting person for it.

Actually, I can see the objection and I probably should expunge the word from my vocabulary but I mean no harm to people with Down Syndrome or other mental handicaps, and sometimes it just seems so darned appropriate.

If I said cretins, that would be offensive to people from Crete (by the way, people from the island of Lesbos aren’t happy with the use of the word lesbian, either) and if I said dipshit, or dumbfuck, or asshole, I could be criticized for using vulgarity.  I suppose douchebags is an acceptable term, but I really don’t get that.  A douchebag is a feminine hygiene product.  Are we opposed to feminine hygiene?  I think not.

Morons is O.K., I suppose, or Numbskulls although those are a bit mild, and fools is not nearly strong enough.  I know lots of fools, but they are not stupid enough to think Obama was secretly  born in Indonesia and had an incestuous relationship with his grandfather.

Twats would  be both  crude and sexist, and schmucks is too cutesy and Yiddish and therefore not what I mean at all.

So, I’ll try to be more creative in my vocabulary in future, but (and I apologize in advance) I still might say retard now and again.  Because they are.

p.s. if anybody has any suggestions for altenatives, I’d be happy to hear them.

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November 6, 2013 · 10:05 pm

Things We Didn’t Know We Didn’t Know

Just a little bit about a few different things tonight.

Congratulations to Terry McAuliffe, I hope you turn out to be a halfway decent governor.  Time will tell on that but at least you’re better than that other bozo.  Speaking of that, two percentage points is not a very impressive win, especially against a guy whose main platform was that kinky sex should be illegal.  If Tuesday’s elections proved anything, they proved the Tea Party is not dead.

Obviously, a stoner

Obviously, a stoner

There was an article up on the Hissy Fit Post about how marijuana causes acne.  Actually, the article was a little more balanced than that, it included the point of view that it probably doesn’t actually cause acne.

But still, this is beyond ridiculous.  The hysterical anti-marijuana people have lost their argument that marijuana is more addictive than heroin, that one puff will turn you into a wild eyed lunatic, that it will turn your  brain to mush and give your children birth  defects, so now they are falling back on acne.

There were a couple of other news articles today that really surprised me.  I’m not sure what significance it has to the politics of the Middle East today, but forensic examiners have determined that Yasser Arafat was murdered.  I had no idea.  I didn’t even have a conspiracy theory on that one.  The man was 75 years old and nobody had a real logical reason for wanting him dead, except for hating him, so I’d just assumed he died of natural causes.

It makes me wonder who else was murdered.

The other article that really set me back was that scientists have discovered a new body part.  Seriously.  They are discovering new planets all the time around suns that are trillions of miles away, and they didn’t know what all the parts of the body were?   Anyway, it’s a little ligament somewhere around your knee, and I’m sure this information will prove extremely valuable to the makers of artificial knees.

Oh, and Rand Paul’s “leave me the hell alone” defense is just absurd.  If you want the press to leave you alone all  you have to do is retire, go home, and make no public pronouncements forevermore.  They will soon forget about you.

That’s it for me tonight.  See you tomorrow.

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November 5, 2013 · 8:41 pm

Why Doesn’t Anybody Ever Visit Us?

In calculating the likelihood that there are intelligent, space-faring civilizations on other planets, a key factor has always been figuring out if there are other Earth like planets.  That is somewhat smaller than Jupiter, solid, orbiting around the right kind of sun and within its Goldilocks Zone (not too hot, not too cold), and having an atmosphere and water.

Leaving aside for a moment the questions about atmosphere and water, a new scientific study puts the number of such planets in the Milky Way at between 8.8 billion and 40 billion (40 billion if we’re counting Red Dwarfs, and why shouldn’t we?)  If even 1 in 20 of those planets has water, and I reckon that’s a conservative estimate given that water throughout the universe seems to be as common as water on Earth (Jupiter has an entire moon that’s covered with ice, and most comets are composed mostly of that sacred substance) that still leaves a couple of billion, and probably half of them have an atmosphere.  Breathable or not is one more question, but there’s no doubt hundreds of millions where conditions are ripe for life.

So, why hasn’t anybody  ever contacted us?  I can think of several possibilities.

Given the vast distances between stars, even the most evolved species won’t have explored everywhere.  Think of the Pacific Ocean.  Even in our modern times, Tom Hanks can still find an island out there where no man has ever gone before.

There’s no real attraction on Earth for them.  If they can travel through space, they are not going to be very impressed with a species that still can’t build a halfway decent flying car.

Mostly, It's a Comedy

Mostly, It’s a Comedy

Perhaps they  have contacted us, and our governments are keeping the information from us.  I can’t imagine why, but governments lie to their people all the time about everything anyway, so it wouldn’t surprise me.

Perhaps they have contacted us, and we were just too stupid to realize it. (Nazca lines, crop circles, Stonehenge, and so on)

Perhaps they live among us, and they are the ones in control.  If so, I think they’re doing a lousy job of it, but who knows?  Maybe melting the ice cap and killing all the honeybees fits their master plan quite nicely.

Or perhaps, and this is my pet theory of the day, we are the Truman Show of the universe, a planet where life has been planted and allowed to evolve in isolation just for the  entertainment/education/voyeuristic pleasure of some alien species, or some group of alien species.  Purple, tentacled beings tune in once a week or so to see if we’ve started another war, or screwed up in some other comical way.

They probably even place bets.

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November 4, 2013 · 11:38 pm

Thoughts After the Poetry Reading

I spend more and more time on line so less and less I  deal with the mess out there that’s real.

Just came from a poetry reading and the thought on the way home on the tram, because quite often when I come away from these things the thought I come away  with  is the germ of the next poem, was that if everything is a metaphor for everything else, which is a bit of hyperbole or perhaps, better stated, phrasing something in a poetic matter and thus rendering it meaningless, but lets say if everything is a metaphor for something else, which it must be if anything is to be a metaphor for it, then it should be possible to come up with a string of metaphors that eventually includes every aspect of our existence, from the physical universe and matter and anti-matter, down to why  does everybody  like bacon so much, and is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable, it’s got a bit of an identity crisis going on there and is thus a metaphor for confused youth  who don’t know what they want to be in life or someone with gender issues, and all fruits and vegetables can serve as metaphors, the peas, of course, smooth or dimply, are a metaphor  for the science of genetics, or would you even call that a metaphor, can something become a symbol without ever being a metaphor? and I think, oh, yes, an apple for the  symbol of New York which could  never have been a metaphor because New York is not crispy and sweet, the food metaphor for New York City has to be the  strictly commercial, time is money don’t give me no shit hot dog or a thick, gooey, cheesy pizza with extra Italian sausage.  Los Angeles is the city of Angels, which is a bullshit metaphor, if ever there was a city without any angels, that’s it, it’s like Greenland, sometimes the metaphor is just a big, fucking lie,  poetry can lie, a sonnet has to have 14 or 18 lines of iambic pentameter and it should rhyme, a Haiku has 5 syllables, then 7, then 5, a Limerick has two rhyming lines then two different rhyming lines and then a 5th line that rhymes with the  first two and is generally about somebody who can fuck themselve’s in the ear, but nobody’s  ever written  anywhere that you can’t lie, that would  be a totally unreasonable restriction on a poem.

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