“One Of The Hardest-To-Imagine Tenets Of Ptolemaic Astronomy”

When I read stuff like this I always have to take a time out:

5. Whatever motion appears in the firmament arises not from any motion of the firmament, but from the earth’s motion. The earth together with its accompanying elements performs a complete rotation on its fixed poles in a daily motion, while the firmament and highest heaven abide unchanged.

This axiom, which marks what is usually called the rotation of the earth, dealt a coup de grâce to one of the hardest-to-imagine tenets of Ptolemaic astronomy: the claim that the entire immense stellar sphere makes a full revolution every twenty-four hours.

Dennis Danielson

If something is “hard to imagine” should we find it suspect? Should we seek to replace it with something that isn’t hard to imagine?

Is this a general principle?

If we accept this even as a working principle and use it to weed out kook-ish beliefs—like geocentricity—what happens when modern science itself is measured against it?

• If I put my Sea Monkeys in a box and cover the box, is it easy to imagine the shrimp enter a state of quasi-existence, neither dead nor alive, until I lift the cover and look at them? Does any book about physics not try to ‘wow’ people with a discussion of Schrödinger’s Cat?
  
  
• What about tunneling? Is it easy to imagine that a particle can be here and then—magically—be over there?
  
  
• What about relativistic time dilation? Is it easy to imagine that a particle’s half-life correlated to higher energy levels is equivalent to time itself slowing down?
  
  
• And entanglement? Is it easy to imagine that a photon three thousand miles away will become polarized if this photon in front of me passes through a filter?
  
  
• Is there anything at all easy to imagine about arbitrary dimensions and branes and other string theory kinds of thoughts?
  

Kook-ish beliefs often involve one or two howlers, bizarre aspects which must be accepted on faith, but then they typically surround those bits of the bizarre with rigorously logical and acceptable, common-sense thinking. “Mainstream” science in the modern world, however, seems almost entirely composed of howlers, with none of that messy “common” sense to trouble it.

It’s interesting that the Establishment—whatever and whenever that is—always seems to create a fringe, a kind of conceptual Siberia, defined largely by appeals to common sense and the every day imagination of the hoi polloi. But at the same time that Establishment always expects everyone to clearly understand that its own activities, its own pronouncements, its own conclusions, must never be judged by common sense or the imagination of the masses or any other such bourgeois triviality ...

Has Science Proven That The Earth Is Stationary?

Maybe the most startling (and amusing) claim of the believers in a geocentric cosmos (geocentrics? geo-eccentrics?) is that “mainstream” science itself has already proven that the Earth doesn’t move. (For instance, at GEOCENTRICITY AND CREATION.)

They mean the Michelson-Morley experiment!

This experiment is so well-known that there is a Michelson-Morley Experiment Wiki Page, so I’m not going to review the details of the experiment here. But I do want to discuss some of that experiment’s assumptions because looking at the experiment backwards—the way geocentrics do!—is an example of the intriguing logic and creativity kooks employ to further their beliefs.

It’s not crazy, it’s just weird!

The designers of the Michelson-Morley experiment wanted to test for the existence of the “aether.”

In the 19th century scientists believed that throughout space and even permeating our atmosphere was a mysterious, ephemeral fluid-like substance called the “aether.”

Because this belief was built on a “common sense” metaphor, it has never really gone out of fashion with people who rebel from Establishment beliefs.

In a nutshell, the thinking goes like this: Ocean waves manifest in a medium called water. Sound waves manifest in a medium called air. Light waves, therefore, must manifest in a medium of their own since we know light waves travel through outer space and there is no air or water in outer space. Scientists called this proposed medium for light the “aether.”

The designers of the Michelson-Morley experiment accepted axiomatically the belief that the Earth moved around the Sun and attempted to use the Earth’s motion to prove or disprove the existence of the aether. They designed equipment to measure the compression and attenuation of the aether which would occur ahead of the Earth and behind the Earth as the Earth moved around the Sun.

The Michelson-Morley experiment didn’t find any compression or attenuation of the aether and that was pretty much the beginning of the end for belief in the aether. The motion of the Earth was the key factor in disproving the existence of the aether. Of course, disproving the aether has created the need for all manner of modern theories to explain how light propagates without a medium. Instead of common sense metaphors we now have relativity and the whole quantum mess and beyond...

Geocentrics reverse the logic of mainstream science and say, well, if you accept axiomatically (based on the buttoned-down logic of the metaphors of known wave propagation) the existence of the aether then since the Michelson-Morley experiment didn’t find any compression or attenuation of the aether, that proves the Earth is not moving! It also spares physicists from having to create convoluted and counter-intuitive mechanisms for the propagation of light since the aether is still accepted.

Parsimony!

The Windmills Of PHYSICS TODAY

It is very tempting to regard someone like Robert Sungenis as a kind of ersatz Don Quixote, a Don Quixote who not only sees imaginary monsters in windmills but whose imagination first conjures up imaginary windmills and then converts those fantasy windmills into imaginary phantoms. But the surprising truth is someone like Sungenis actually can find real windmills waiting to be transmogrified by a suspicious imagination.

Take, for instance, the current (July) issue of a science magazine called “Physics Today.”

If you look through this month’s issue of Physics Today you’ll see articles with titles like, “Whiskers Of Tantalum Trisulfide Twist In Response To An Electric Field.” That’s certainly the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a physics magazine. You’ll also see an essay titled, “The Case For Extra Dimensions,” describing how the new Large Hadron Collider will help string theory investigations. Again, the kind of thing you’d expect in a physics magazine. But in the book review section you’ll find a review of Dan Hooper’s, “Dark Cosmos: In Search Of Our Universe’s Missing Mass And Energy.” The review is written by Daniel Holz, an astrophysicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and contains the following passage:

“The study of cosmology has led to a steady diminution of humanity’s importance. We’re not at the center of the solar system. We’re not at the center of the galaxy, and our galaxy isn’t even unique. We’re not at the center of the universe, because there is no center. And now we’re even entertaining the possibility that our universe is only one of many—and a grossly atypical one at that. As if these indignities weren’t enough, cosmologists are now confident that everything we touch, see, or feel is a tiny fraction of what’s out there. All the stars and planets and people are just a minor frosting on the true elements of the universe: dark matter and dark energy.”

Now that’s a pretty weird thing to say.

I don’t live or work within the world of modern science, but when I was younger I often spoke with astronomers and I still, now and then, speak with physicists and other science professionals and I’ve never heard even one science professional speak of his or her emotional response to science as “diminution” of their importance, or of the results of some investigation as “indignities” visited upon them. Quite the opposite, if there is one commonality among the science professionals I’ve known it’s the sense that understanding the world around us is energizing, that figuring out how something works or why something is the way it is, is the coolest thing a person could do. In fact, the physicist who wrote the essay about the Large Hadron Collider in Physics Today (the physics babe Lisa Randall) once characterized her own emotional response to science this way: “As I learned more science, I grew to love it. ... Engaging with the unknown is irresistibly exciting. I found it thrilling to find connections between apparently disparate phenomena and to solve problems and predict surprising features of our world.” [from “Warped Passages”]

Scientists, in general, in real life speak of science using words like ‘excitement’ and ‘fun’ and ‘thrilling,’ not words like ‘diminution’ and ‘indignities.’

However, in the media, in contexts defined by editors and publishers, this other rhetoric is actually not uncommon. Editors and publishers seek out the tiny minority of scientists who for psychological reasons of their own use such rhetoric or, more likely, are willing to use such rhetoric to fulfill the constant academic imperative of getting published.

People whose only experience of the world of science comes through the media—magazines and books—react to this media creation rather than to the real world of science. Media fashions, range-of-the-moment demographic appeals, convenient cliches—these kinds of things create an artificial reality and some people live immersed in the artifice. For people interested in science and religion, the unreality is every bit as unreal. It is almost understandable that people like Robert Sungenis might come to envision dark machineries of pernicious conspiracy theory ticking away behind the scenes.

Catholic Apologetics International

Right now, my absolute favorite tin-foil wacky fringe conspiracy theory is that of Robert Sungenis and his promotion of the geocentric belief, the belief that the Earth is essentially stationary at the center of the universe and everything in the heavens revolves around us. Sungenis also believes that when mainstream science promotes a more typical view of the heavens, that more accepted view is not so much science at work, but rather an attack on the Catholic faith.

Now, the internet is full of oddballs and oddball beliefs. But Sungenis is not some anonymous internet oddball who lives with his mother and gets on the internet using free computers at his local library. [coughs] Sungenis has a doctorate in theology, consults actively with scientists, and has published quite a few reasonably erudite books on Catholic doctrine. (However, it’s worth noting that in the grand tradition of internet oddballery, the “news feed” section of the website of Catholic Apologetics International features links to Lew Rockwell [!] and anti-Israel USS Liberty activists [!] and just about every anti-Jewish conspiracy theory that crosses any wire service, mainstream or otherwise.)

Is the Earth motionless at the center of the universe? Have three or four hundred years of mainstream science been a vast conspiracy theory against right-thinking Catholics?

I don’t think so.

But it’s fun to speculate about it and I’m going to devote a few days this week to this topic. Today is just the introduction.

Catholic Apologetics International Website

Galileo Was Wrong Website

Robert Sungenis Wiki Page

Modern Geocentrism Wiki Page

Signs And Symbols Of Jung

Jung believed that symbols are created spontaneously by the psyche. Our dreams are constituted entirely of symbols, which Jung differentiated from signs. Signs include names, emblems or images that point to something known. For instance, the name ‘wife’ is a sign that points to a known person, to this man’s marriage partner. But symbols operate on a different plane, and point to something as yet unknown. The ‘wife’ in a dream points to an interior, psychic reality that does not correspond with outer reality. For Jung, the same word can function as a sign or a symbol, depending on whether or not it is being used by the unconscious to point to internal realities.

A sign is obvious, manifest and can be understood by reason. A symbol, however, is mysterious and can only be discerned by intuition or poetic understanding. It is symbolic knowledge that Jung is concerned with, and he is attracted to what is deep, profound and obscure. The study of signs leads to semiotics, linguistics and discourse analysis. The study of symbols leads to mythology, religion and philosophy. For Jung, the unconscious is not speaking about the external social world, but about the internal psychic plane, which cannot be known directly. It is real in its own right, though not in the sense that we usually designate as real, and symbols are the nearest we can get to approaching this unknown realm.

David Tacey




Jung’s Wiki Page

Overture! Curtains! Lights! Cue The Dog!

Every morning I go for a walk to get a newspaper and some exercise.

A house I sometimes walk past in the morning has a large back yard separated from the sidewalk by a waist-high chain-link fence. Yesterday a BIG German Shepherd was in the back yard. As I approached, the huge dog crouched low, snarled and began growling. As I walked along the sidewalk, the German Shepherd prowled alongside me on the other side of the fence. Its constant snarl kept its teeth visible. Its body was tense, all of its muscles hard. Its growl was throaty and loud.

In my mind’s eye, I could see the huge dog uncoiling and leaping over the low fence to sink its teeth into my neck.

At that moment, however, instead of leaping to attack, the German Shepherd straightened up, looked sharply away from me to its right, and yawned. The dog yawned deeply and long, stretching its long jaws wide. Finishing its yawn, the dog stood still for a moment and licked its muzzle. Finally, as if suddenly remembering me, the German Shepherd crouched back down into its prowling stance, snarled to bare its teeth and resumed its menacing growl.

I almost laughed out loud.

It was a real life moment lifted directly out of one of those old Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoons, where an animated dog (or wolf!) steps wildly out of character, engages in some slapstick and then jumps back into its role, its performance.

After watching the German Shepherd yawn, I no longer saw the dog as a scary guard dog looking for a victim, but rather as a tired old house pet putting on a guard dog performance. I continued walking. In my mind’s ear I heard music like this:


My whole reaction to the dog had changed so much that I almost felt like reaching over the chain-link fence and trying to pet the dog.

Almost.

The German Shepherd might have been giving a performance, but he was taking his performance seriously. My part was just to walk past and I did.

But inspired by the dog’s performance, my steps were now much more animated.

Amateur Science--Strong Tradition, Bright Future

Contemporary science has its roots in the achievements of amateur scientists of centuries past. Although they lacked what we would define as formal scientific training, they deciphered the basic laws of physics and principles of chemistry. They invented instruments. And they discovered, documented, sketched, and painted planets, comets, fossils, and species.

An editorial in a leading science journal once proclaimed an end to amateur science: "Modern science can no longer be done by gifted amateurs with a magnifying glass, copper wires, and jars filled with alcohol" (1). I grinned as I read these words. For then as now there's a 10× magnifier in my pocket, spools of copper wire on my work bench, and a nearby jar of methanol for cleaning the ultraviolet filters in my homemade solar ultraviolet and ozone spectroradiometers. Yes, modern science uses considerably more sophisticated methods and instruments than in the past. And so do we amateurs. When we cannot afford the newest scientific instrument, we wait to buy it on the surplus market or we build our own. Sometimes the capabilities of our homemade instruments rival or even exceed those of their professional counterparts.

The term amateur can have a pejorative ring. But in science it retains the meaning of its French root amour, love, for amateurs do science because it's what they love to do. Without remuneration or reward, enthusiastic amateurs survey birds, tag butterflies, measure sunlight, and study transient solar eclipse phenomena. Others count sunspots, discover comets, monitor variable stars, and invent instruments.

Many amateurs have contributed observations and data that have been incorporated into papers and books. Some are accepted as colleagues by their professional counterparts. They present their findings at conferences and publish papers in peer-reviewed journals. For each of these, hundreds more devote their spare time to making observations, measurements, sketches, photographs, and reports without receiving direct recognition. Although some are retired, others are taxi drivers, photographers, civil servants, pilots, or missionaries, the latter group having an especially impressive record of achievement. And some, like my grandmother Leitha Mims, do not even think of themselves as amateur scientists. Yet through years of careful gardening she cultured a new variety of amaryllis.

Then there are the student scientists. Each year more than half a million science fair projects are prepared by students in the United States. Although most projects are required learning assignments, a surprising number of students do original work, and some even make discoveries. Many alumni of the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) and the Science Talent Search are now working scientists, and at least five are Nobel laureates.

Amateur scientists identify with student scientists, perhaps because we often don't realize that some of our experiments are not supposed to work. When my son Eric wanted to build a novel optical fiber seismometer, a professional seismologist said it would not succeed because our Texas house rests on soil and not bedrock. Eric proceeded anyway, and his supersensitive seismometer detected many earthquakes and two underground nuclear tests in Nevada, an achievement that won him college scholarships, science fair awards, and trips to the ISEF and the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. An atmospheric scientist said my daughter Vicki's attempt to detect solar x-ray flares with a Geiger counter would not work. Remembering Eric's experience, I excitedly told her this meant her project would succeed! And succeed it did, for Vicki detected six X-class x-ray flares. Her project won science fair awards and was recently published in a book.

The journal Science itself was begun by a famous amateur scientist and inventor. Although his methods were sometimes ridiculed by some scholarly scientists, their names are long forgotten. But everyone remembers Thomas Edison, who began Science as a private venture in 1880. Expelled from school at the age of seven for being "retarded," Edison was taught at home by his mother. His life changed forever when he found an old copy of Michael Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity and promptly built every project in the book. Thus the self-taught English amateur scientist, who was also schooled at home, passed the torch to the young American.

Astronomy has traditionally been among the most fertile fields for serious amateurs. Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto ranks among the best known of their comparatively recent achievements. In recent years, hundreds of other amateur astronomers have filled a wide range of niches left behind when many professionals graduated to fully automated observatories dedicated to a limited range of tasks. They discover new supernovae, comets, and time occultations; patiently count sunspots; photograph meteor trails; and measure the fluctuations of variable stars. More than 100 members of the American Association of Variable Star Observers have logged from 10,000 to more than 100,000 observations each. The record is held by South African Danie Overbeek, who has logged more than 188,000 variable stars in some 40 years of observing.

Many serious amateur astronomers have worked closely with professionals, even coauthoring books and papers with them. A paper on massive storms on Saturn that appeared in Science (2) was coauthored by Donald Parker, who discovered the storms and who is famous for his detailed planetary images. Although astronomy is his passion, Parker earns a living as an anesthesiologist for Mercy Hospital in Miami, Florida.

Although thousands of amateurs observe the solar system and beyond, many more thousands monitor Earth. More than 10,000 citizen volunteers make daily observations for the U.S. National Weather Service. Several years ago, the Weather Service honored Earl Stewart, who in 75 years provided nearly 28,000 daily readings from his station in Cottage Grove, Oregon.

Thousands of amateur naturalists participate in the Audubon Society's Christmas bird count, providing vital data for studies of bird migration and population trends. Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology has collaborated with thousands of amateurs to survey bird populations and identify food preferences.

Many other amateurs pursue science on their own. French taxi driver Pierre Morvan is a self-taught entomologist who for more than 20 years has spent his vacations collecting, drawing, and studying Asian ground beetles, especially those of the Himalayas.

Johan Gjefsen Reinhard used his own funds to finance a 2-year investigation of ancient ceremonial centers in the Andes, the highest archaeological ruins on Earth. An important aspect of Reinhard's work is diving in high-altitude lakes once viewed as significant by the Incas.

Roger Baker has contributed projects to "The Amateur Scientist" column in Scientific American and to the amateur science magazine Science Probe. He used one of these projects, a simple means of measuring ground-level ozone, to compare his results to those from a government instrument. Baker found that the latter was malfunctioning, a fact acknowledged by the responsible agency. Among his many scientific pursuits, Baker grinds lenses from window glass and has made instruments that measure the oxygen in water and the turbidity of what appear to be perfectly clear fluids.

Although many prizes, awards, and honors are given to student and professional scientists, there are only a few major prizes for which amateurs are eligible. Among these few is the Rolex Award for Enterprise, a prize that has been received by several amateur scientists, including beetle collector Morvan and Inca researcher Reinhard. Aside from occasional commendation letters, most amateur scientists are never recognized for their achievements.

For some amateur scientists, the most important recognition is the opportunity to work alongside their professional colleagues or to be sent by them on field assignments. NASA has sent my instruments and me on field trips to measure various atmospheric and ecological effects of smoke from biomass burning, twice to Brazil and three times to major forest fires in the western United States. Several publications have come from this work, which has been the most fulfilling of my experiences as an amateur scientist. Among the findings is that the survivability of nonpigmented, potentially pathogenic, airborne bacteria is enhanced during the burning season in Brazil, a phenomenon that is highly correlated with diminished ultraviolet B (UV-B) caused by thick smoke.

A few scientists refuse to take the work of their amateur counterparts seriously. In 1990, Jerry McDonald, who was working on a Ph.D. in sociology, found hundreds of beautifully preserved tracks of reptiles, amphibians, and insects in Permian sandstone in southern New Mexico. In 1 year alone, McDonald carried on his back more than 18,000 kilograms of footprint-bearing slabs on 240 trips along the 1-kilometer trail between the excavation and his jeep.

Professional paleontologists were unimpressed by McDonald's claims, because Permian trackways had never been found in southern New Mexico. Undaunted, McDonald drove some of his specimens to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The paleontologists at these museums were so impressed that they asked for samples to display. Nevertheless, some paleontologists continued to reject McDonald's find. "Scientist wins world acclaim but is snubbed in New Mexico," read a page-one headline in the El Paso Times (3). When New Mexico politicians learned that McDonald's trackways were being acquired by major museums back east, they came to his rescue. Soon thereafter the U.S. Congress authorized a study of McDonald's discoveries and how to protect them.

Fortunately McDonald's experience is unusual. In this era of big science, the most important lesson to be learned from his discovery and the achievements of countless other amateurs is that scientific observations and discoveries don't necessarily require giant government grants and huge teams of researchers with specialized degrees. Small science still works, and it often works during off hours, weekends, and holidays when professionals are generally at home or on vacation.

As we enter the next millennium, the future of amateur science has never looked better. Amateurs built some of the first home computers, and today many us own systems that far outclass what was available to our professional colleagues only a few years ago. It no longer matters that I can't do a nonlinear regression with a calculator, because economical software does it automatically, and an inexpensive printer then produces plots as crisp as any published in Science.

Computers have greatly expanded the capabilities of professionals and amateurs alike, but the Internet has become the great equalizer. Several years ago I measured record low ozone over central Texas. Thanks to e-mail, I quickly notified scientists at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency and then organized a quick paper for Eos with them as coauthors. No one asked if I had a degree in the field; all that mattered was the significance of the event and the quality of the data. When I measured large spikes in UV radiation caused by the scattering from cumulus clouds over Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory, I e-mailed the results to UV specialist John Frederick. I then incorporated Frederick's comments in a communication we jointly sent to Nature. Frederick, the editors at Nature, and the peer reviewers never asked to see my credentials. Instead, they judged the work on its merits.

I could write much more about amateur science, but the allowed space has run out. Besides, the data logger connected to the UV-B radiometer in the field outside my window is beeping to be downloaded. I always enjoy writing about science, but doing science is much more exciting. At noon, the ozone layer measured a thinner-than-normal 240 Dobson units. I wonder if today's hazy sky reduced the UV-B enough to balance the increase expected from the reduced ozone?


References

A. Sanchez-Lavega et al., Science 271, 631 (1996).
D. E. Koshland, ibid. 257, 1607 (1992).
El Paso Times, 12 March 1990, p. 1.

Forrest M. Mims III

Science 2 April 1999:
Vol. 284. no. 5411, pp. 55 - 56
DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5411.55


Forrest M. Mims III’s Website


Forrest M. Mims III’s Wiki Page

2007 2nd Quarter Index

June Archive


Friday, June 29, 2007 -- Wild Randomness

Thursday, June 28, 2007 -- A Real Hawk Scares A Fashion Swan

Wednesday, June 27, 2007 -- Venus In The Office At Night

Tuesday, June 26, 2007 -- No Croakers, No Nervous Lubbers

Monday, June 25, 2007 -- The Golfing Animal


Friday, June 22, 2007 -- The Leisure Class(es)

Thursday, June 21, 2007 -- Michael Lau: Freedom, Fun And Quality

Wednesday, June 20, 2007 -- What Is A Toy?

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 -- Rise Of The Almost, Sort Of, Kinda Silver Surfer

Monday, June 18, 2007 -- The Beginning Of The End (Of Cicadas)


Friday, June 15, 2007 -- Inca Roads: Bassoon And Marimba

Thursday, June 14, 2007 -- Inca Roads (Introduction)

Wednesday, June 13, 2007 -- “It’s More Fun If It’s A Monster”

Tuesday, June 12, 2007 -- Ugobe’s Pleo: A Re-Engineered Camarasaurus

Monday, June 11, 2007 -- New Species Of High Fashion Frog


Friday, June 08, 2007 -- Gender Terror And Reality Revisionism

Thursday, June 07, 2007 -- Star Trek And Reality Revisionism

Wednesday, June 06, 2007 -- Pirates And Reality Revisionism

Tuesday, June 05, 2007 -- Trickle Down Paris Hilton

Monday, June 04, 2007 -- A Paris Hilton Jailhouse Review


Friday, June 01, 2007 -- Card Players As An Occult Metaphor?



May Archive


Thursday, May 31, 2007 -- Chance And God

Wednesday, May 30, 2007 -- Gambling And Synchronized Oscillators

Tuesday, May 29, 2007 -- Roulette And The Magic Of Math


Friday, May 25, 2007 -- Dumpling Kaiser #5: Thinking About It Now

Thursday, May 24, 2007 -- Dumpling Kaiser #4: Clouds

Wednesday, May 23, 2007 -- Dumpling Kaiser #3: Jack And Jill

Tuesday, May 22, 2007 -- Dumpling Kaiser #2: Dumpling Rising

Monday, May 21, 2007 -- Dumpling Kaiser #1: Dumpling


Friday, May 18, 2007 -- Computers, Language And The Goblin Universe

Thursday, May 17, 2007 -- Do you need an operating system?

Wednesday, May 16, 2007 -- A Fourth Generation Computer Language

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 -- Design Of A [Computer] Language

Monday, May 14, 2007 -- Two Schools Of Thought About Computer Science


Friday, May 11, 2007 -- Britney Spears: Death By Dinosaur

Thursday, May 10, 2007 -- My Favorite Dinosaur Book

Wednesday, May 09, 2007 -- Dinosaurs And Low Gravity

Tuesday, May 08, 2007 -- Dino Rat

Monday, May 07, 2007 -- Loch Ness Toad


Friday, May 04, 2007 -- ‘Lost Horizon’ Versus ‘Camelot’ — #5: Shangri-La

Thursday, May 03, 2007 -- ‘Lost Horizon’ Versus ‘Camelot’ — #4: Fie On Goodness!

Wednesday, May 02, 2007 -- ‘Lost Horizon’ Versus ‘Camelot’ — #3: Two Different Worlds

Tuesday, May 01, 2007 -- ‘Lost Horizon’ Versus ‘Camelot’ — #2: It’s May!



April Archive


Monday, April 30, 2007 -- ‘Lost Horizon’ Versus ‘Camelot’ — #1


Friday, April 27, 2007 -- My Favorite Book About Freud

Thursday, April 26, 2007 -- Freud For Ten Bucks

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 -- Freud Through Ayn Rand Colored Glasses

Tuesday, April 24, 2007 -- Will Freud Finally Slip?

Monday, April 23, 2007 -- Freud And Cake


Friday, April 20, 2007 -- Columbine

Thursday, April 19, 2007 -- The Ax Ismail/Holden Caulfield Connection

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 -- The Videogame Contradiction

Tuesday, April 17, 2007 -- The Copycat Effect

Monday, April 16, 2007 -- Romance, Terror And The Word ‘Piss’


Friday, April 13, 2007 -- Peter Gave Himself Up For Lost

Thursday, April 12, 2007 -- God In “A New Kind Of Science”

Wednesday, April 11, 2007 -- Underwater This Is The Cathedral Sea

Tuesday, April 10, 2007 -- A Mainstream Sports Reporter Meets Evangelical Beliefs

Monday, April 09, 2007 -- My Little Cthulhu


Friday, April 06, 2007 -- Enchantment And Notan

Thursday, April 05, 2007 -- Distortion And Notan

Wednesday, April 04, 2007 -- The Solid And The Fluid In Notan

Tuesday, April 03, 2007 -- Notan


Monday, April 02, 2007 -- 2007 1st Quarter Index

Wild Randomness

In history, modernists argue that the course of human events is shaped by many trends, economic and social, enacted in the lives of millions of forgotten individuals; the historian’s task is to trace these trends. By contrast, traditionalists, now coming back into fashion, contend that history was shaped and dominated by a few great men, Caesar or Napoleon, Newton or Einstein, for example. In the first, mild view, the birth or death of no single individual is crucial to the story of mankind; in the second, wild view, it most certainly is. Another example: Under a microscope, the edge of a sharp razor blade looks a bit ragged. It has random pits and bumps, but they appear to be minor imperfections on an approximately straight edge. You can easily spot the dominant trend. This is mild variation. By contrast, consider the rugged coastline of Brittany: Does it really have an “average” outline, like that of the razor blade? Only from the very great height of a satellite, where the familiar map shape can be imagined; but from closer up, in an airplane or from a tower, the tortuous, random details of promontories and bays, crags and hollows obscure the image. This coastline is wild. Yet a third example, this time in electronics. If you run a steady electrical current through copper wire, you can “hear” it on a loudspeaker as a steady, white noise—the static of mild variation, due to the thermal excitation of the electrons. But if you try to run computer data down a very long wire, you will pick up irregular, intermittent “pops” and crackles on the line. Engineers call this 1/f noise, and it is the bane of computer communications, causing transmission errors. It cannot be predicted or prevented; it can only be accommodated, with error-correcting software. That is wild variation.

Wild randomness is uncomfortable. Its mathematics is unfamiliar and in many cases remains to be developed. It looks difficult, often requiring elaborate computer simulations rather than a quick punch on a calculator. Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians. There is much in economics that is best described by this wilder, unpleasant form of randomness—perhaps because economics is about not just the physics of wheat, weather, and crop yields, but also the mercurial moods and unmeasurable anticipations of wheat farmers, traders, bakers, and consumers.

Benoit Mandelbrot
and Richard L. Hudson





Benoit Mandelbrot’s Wiki Page

A Real Hawk Scares A Fashion Swan

Q. You really did look like a swan in that dress.

MARIA SHARAPOVA: Thank you. I'm glad you got the point. I hope everyone else did (laughter).

Q. Do you identify with swans in some way?

MARIA SHARAPOVA: In what way?

Q. You made a point of it being a sort of a swan inspired dress.

MARIA SHARAPOVA: It is, yeah.

Q. Do you feel some sort of kinship with the bird?

MARIA SHARAPOVA: I don't think that was the initial inspiration with the dress. Originally it didn't have as many pleats in the back. I wanted there to be more of a pleat effect in the back, and I think the end result made it look more like a swan. Even on a hanger, it doesn't look as swan-ish as it does on me (laughter).

I don't know. I just put reference to it because a swan is usually white, right, unless it's weird.

Q. They are a protected bird here.

MARIA SHARAPOVA: Was that really necessary (laughter)?

Q. Do you think they have a hawk here?

MARIA SHARAPOVA: A hawk? It's a swan.

Q. They have a real hawk patrolling the grounds every day at 9:00.

MARIA SHARAPOVA: Does the hawk usually bite the swan? I don't know, does it? Jesus, I might have to cut those pleats away.

Wimbledon Sharapova Interview, 06/26/07

Daily Mail Story On The Swan Dress, 06/27/07

Venus In The Office At Night

There’s a short, romantic interlude near the beginning of the movie “Ghostbusters,” in the fire station when Janine is sitting at her desk and Spengler is kneeling at her feet wiring up her computer:

Janine: You’re very handy, I can tell. I bet you like to read a lot, too.

Spengler: Print is dead.

Janine: That’s very fascinating to me. I read a lot, myself. Some people think I’m too intellectual. But I think reading is a fabulous way to spend your spare time. I also play racketball. Do you ever play?

Spengler: Is that a game?

Janine: It’s a great game! You should play some time. I bet you’d be good. You seem very athletic. Do you have any hobbies?

Spengler: I collect spores, molds and fungus.

“Ghostbusters”

I don’t collect spores, molds and fungus like Spengler, but I have grown spores, molds and fungus sometimes like houseplants because the colors and shapes—in miniature—can be really beautiful. I’m also not as convinced as Spengler that print is dead, however I do believe monthly magazines as we have them today are dead. Most monthly magazines are printed many months before they appear on news stands to get the best deals from printers. With the internet updating news second by second in real time, who needs magazine content that was interesting three months ago?

But there are some magazines that I still routinely glance through when I see them at news stands or libraries. Once or twice a year they surprise me with something I never expected to see. This month I was surprised by a magazine called, “The Artist’s Magazine.” They have an article about the making of a classic contemporary painting. In brief, the story is:

Just before world war two, an art gallery in New York hosted an exhibition of classic European paintings. One of the paintings on display was Botticelli’s “The Birth Of Venus:”


A young painter named Edward Hopper and his wife attended the exhibit and the young painter was very impressed with “The Birth Of Venus.” The next day, Hopper told his wife he wanted to “meditate” on what they’d seen and get started on a new painting of his own. He walked around New York, and spent hours in the evening riding elevated trains and looking in the windows of office buildings the trains passed. His meditation led him to a series of test sketches and, finally, Hopper asked his wife to pose for a painting. He instructed her to wear a short, tight skirt that would show “a lot of leg.” He then created the painting, “Office At Night:”


Looking at these two images, I never would have imagined a connection between them. Heck, even knowing the Botticelli inspired Hopper, I do not see any correspondences between the images.

This strikes me as intriguing counter-point to my “Inca Roads” posts about coincidence. When we experience a coincidence we sense that there should be some kind of connection between two things but we can’t conceive of any. In the case of artistic inspiration, even when we know there is a connection between two things, the complexity of human consciousness and the infinity of ways concepts and images interact with consciousness creates a situation where, for all practical purposes, the connections are unfathomable without guidance from the artist himself.

Is the universe conscious? Are “coincidences” examples of the universe itself reacting to flashes of inspiration?

Botticelli’s Wiki Page

Edward Hopper’s Wiki Page


Inca Roads (Introduction)

Inca Roads: Bassoon And Marimba

No Croakers, No Nervous Lubbers

There is a peculiar charm in the indefinable feeling of undivided responsibility to which the single-hand cruiser becomes a willing slave as he roams over the high seas in his wee barkie, free from care, far from the harassing annoyances of the world’s artificial life, his own master, in close relations with a boon companion, his ever-ready, trusty little ship. Though friends be left behind in dusty cities, he finds a fresh and congenial substitute in the intimate acquaintance of his boat, for soon he learns to invest his floating home with a personality, causing the boat’s character to appeal to his appreciation as though being endowed with actual life. He discovers the brave, sturdy qualities his ship may possess, and approvingly recounts them over and over to himself. He finds she is not perfect, and seeks to correct her weaknesses and caprices. He handles her tenderly and with care. She becomes the apple of his eye. There are no “guests” forever asking to be put ashore, wanting to catch an impossible train or boat, nuisances who no sooner board the yacht than their selfish thoughts are concentrated upon the best method of fetching up where they came from. There are no croakers, no nervous lubbers chafing at a few hours’ calm, fretting about getting somewhere in the least possible time, as though the yacht were a tiresome prison, and the sea and its ever-changing attractions tasteless for heroes of the barroom, billiard cue, or for the dandy knights of the carpet. There are no sideshows underway, no cards down below, no boisterous skylarking under the lee of the mainsail, no store clothes to mar the ideal of amateur life at sea, nothing to interfere with the devotion to the cause and the realization of the dream fancy has perhaps depicted to the longing tar through dreary months of waiting. His ship, his world—the rest of the world, his convenience.

That’s the opening paragraph
to an article that appeared
in 1887, in a magazine
called, “Small Yachts”

The Golfing Animal

Some people suspect

there’s a disproportionate

number of werewolves


among pro golfers

because the conscious person

in non-werewolf form


remembers the fun

they had running wild around

the golf course at night


under the full moon

as a werewolf. Balls and sticks

let the human part


beat back the beast part.

Sunlight shines on the numbers,

pars, distances, scores...

The Leisure Class(es)

Alan [Burgess] remains the consummate lowballer, a grand master of the art of getting by, living proof of Eric Beck’s oft-quoted dictum, “At either end of the socioeconomic spectrum there lies a leisure class.” Alan, observes his ex-friend Gordon Smith, “has no visible means of support; he never seems to do any work, yet somehow he always scrapes by. It’s a bit of a mystery how he manages it, really.”

One way he manages it is to spend most of his time, even between expeditions, living in Nepal with Sherpa friends. “I suppose I average about six or seven months a year over there,” Alan says. “It’s a lot cheaper to stay in Nepal between trips, living on three dollars a day, than to fly back to the West. Of course, to get by on that you have to be willing to eat the same things the Sherpa’s eat, and eating potatoes and lentils and kurd three times a day can get a bit boring. And that kind of money won’t allow you to drink beer...”

Jon Krakauer
“Eiger Dreams”

There aren’t two leisure classes—one among the rich and one among the poor—because there are lazy people with money and lazy people without money. Well, that’s not the whole reason. The more important reason is there are people passionately committed to various so-called “leisure” activities both among the rich and the poor. Such people don’t want to work a day job fifty weeks a year and then take two weeks vacation and devote themselves for just two weeks to the activity they love. Such people want to devote their whole life to the activity they love.

Of course, the traditional, “Establishment” advice is to get a degree in something “marketable” and then try to devote your life to whatever you love and you’ll always have your degree to fall back on when you need a “real” job. As “sensible” as such advice sounds—and actually might be—it seldom works out in the real world. Once a person has made the educational and financial commitment to getting a degree, it’s so much easier to take a serious day job than scrape by at the kind of low pay, grunt work that leaves you a lot of free time to pursue your dream that almost everybody ends up taking the serious job with the intention of pursing their dream in their “off” hours.

And for every Charles Ives who wrote great music while being a successful insurance executive there are hundreds—thousands?—of sad, failed musicians who discovered that there are only so many hours in a day and only so much energy in even the most passionate human being.

And for every Wallace Stevens who wrote great poetry while being a successful insurance executive there are hundreds—thousands?—of sad, failed writers who discovered that there are only so many hours in a day and only so much energy in even the most passionate human being.

So you get the two leisure classes, rich people with no jobs who use their freedom to pursue whatever their dreams might be. And poor people with no jobs who FIND WAYS TO SCRAPE BY while pursuing whatever their dreams might be.

The poor people who succeed always make great “success stories” in the pop culture press. So, mountain climbers like Alan and Adrian Burgess become legends among mountain climbers. Writers like Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick become legends among writers. Heck, entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs become legends among business people.

But there’s a dark side to the poor leisure class. Among the rich, even people who fail have a safety net of capital that will catch them. William Burroughs wrote “Naked Lunch” after living a life that someone without the Burroughs family fortune almost certainly wouldn’t have survived.

Philip K. Dick wrote extensively about the dark side of the second leisure class, the poor who fail, the poor who make bad choices, the poor who don’t have a safety net to catch them and give them a second chance. He wrote with his eyes wide open and made no excuses and it’s all the sadder for his honest commentary. This is PKD’s afterward to his novel, “A Scanner Darkly:”

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. “Take the cash and let the credit go,” as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.

There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people that I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.

If there was any “sin,” it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I love them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:

To Gaylene - deceased
To Ray -deceased
To Francy - permanent psychosis
To Kathy - permanent brain damage
To Jim - deceased
To Val - massive permanent brain damage
To Nancy -permanent psychosis
To Joanne -permanent brain damage
To Maren - deceased
To Nick - deceased
To Terry - deceased
To Dennis - deceased
To Phil - permanent pancreatic damage
To Sue - permanent vascular damage
To Jerri - permanent psychosis and vascular damage

... and so forth.

In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The “enemy” was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

Philip K. Dick
afterword of “A Scanner Darkly”

Michael Lau: Freedom, Fun And Quality

“There are not many people in the world who like my work. The market is not that big. I am not a large company like Playmobil or Nike. I’m very underground—not many people know about what I do. This is all my own work. I do not have any assistants or anyone helping me. So my productivity is very limited because of my resources.”

Lau refers to himself as a one-man band who not only creates the original design for his figures, but also does the sculpting, checks the factory models, designs the packaging, and organizes distribution. He has found that this is the only way to ensure that his vision remains pure and undiluted, and that he gets exactly what he wants at every stage of the process. “A lot of people fail to pick up on this point. It’s very, very important. If you want to create anything in your own style, this format is the best process for making things happen. And also, don’t be greedy. There is only so much money in the world and you cannot have all of it. Never. And you cannot spend it all either. Enough is enough. The most important things are freedom and fun. And quality.”

Woodrow Phoenix





Michael Lau’s Wiki Page

What Is A Toy?

A toy is an abstraction distilled into concrete form. A drawing that becomes real, that enters our three-dimensional world and leaves the two-dimensional surface behind. Our response to this solid expression of hypothetical concept is a powerful one: at a deep instinctual level our imaginations recognize a dream made corporeal—a magical translation of idea into object. The more faithful the translation, the stronger the toy. The ability of a toy to reduce, whether by being a scaling down of a much larger real thing, or by being a representation of an idea that couldn’t exist, is what makes it powerful: a hypothetical concept has become a tangible symbol you can hold in your hand.

Sometimes that means the most generic toy—baby, soldier, dinosaur, spaceman—is the most satisfying, because it is the closest to an ideal or essential state: it has been boiled down to its key identifying marks. The original, prototypical ur-toy.

The power of toys is not about regression or infantilism. It is the recognition of possibility. Toys are symbols that have a figurative power to embody thoughts and emotions that may have their origins in childhood, but are not childish. We recognize parts of ourselves—our secret, wishing selves—in toys. The part of us a toy touches is our unexpressed, dream(ing) self.

If a toy is a solidified concept, a journey from wishspace to reality, it also acts on the imagination to pull the user in the other direction, to complete the circle from real to unreal, by making the user identify with or through it. To play with a toy is to enter a representational space; the toy becomes an avatar—the embodiment of an idea.

Woodrow Phoenix

Rise Of The Almost, Sort Of, Kinda Silver Surfer

(This post contains spoilers. If you want to see “Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer” without hints, don’t read further.)


Imagine some film company released a re-make of the movie “Jaws.” In the re-make, you never actually see the shark and, toward the end, when something under the water is banging away about to destroy the Orca, Quint grabs his machete, dives into the ocean, and single-handedly kills whatever is down there.

Changes like that would be so bizarre that instead of being angry probably most people would react with a kind of consternation: What the hell would prompt anyone to make changes like that?!

That’s pretty much what’s going on in “Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer.”


The Silver Surfer story is one of the most famous and most loved sagas from the silver age of comics. More than just being famous, however, it is actually interesting.

The original creators of the saga, principally legendary artist Jack Kirby along with Stan Lee and others, were aware at the time that they were crafting a story with a strong biblical subtext. (They were twisting it, of course, but that’s comics!) Jack Kirby, in fact, very actively sought to include elements of what he thought of as the “old” religions and re-work them into a modern mythology within the context of comics.

The original three issue story arc succeeds very well in dealing with abstruse “cosmic” and spiritual issues in terms of very human stories involving not just the Fantastic Four and their superpowers but also “normal” humans who become involved in the events.

The current movie release does away with all that.

The “cosmic” and spiritual issues are reduced to idiotic platitudes mentioned en passant. The interesting human stories are removed entirely. And the whole notion of sub-text—of any kind—disappears behind flashing lights illuminating nothing and squabbling voices bickering over inanities.

The audience I saw the movie with applauded at the end, and the film was the box office leader last weekend.

I often get the feeling that some real-life super-villain is succeeding at destroying the modern world and nobody is even noticing...

Seven Characteristics Of A Supervillain


The Other Way Of Making A Frankenstein’s Monster


Pirates And Reality Revisionism

Star Trek And Reality Revisionism

Gender Terror And Reality Revisionism

The Beginning Of The End (Of Cicadas)

Yesterday I saw two live cicadas!

There’s a famous “special” effects scene near the end of the giant grasshopper movie, “The Beginning Of The End,” where half a dozen obviously normal-sized grasshoppers wander around on what is obviously a photograph of downtown Chicago and viewers are supposed to believe they are giant-sized grasshoppers invading the city.

Every seventeen years when the cicadas come out many people around Chicago hope to see real-life scenes similar to that with the bugs-from-space looking cicadas standing in for the special effect grasshoppers.

This cycle has been a bust in my suburb. I’d seen one cicada husk and two or three smashed on the sidewalk but not only had I seen no “outbreaks” where thousands of the creatures cover a tree or sidewalk, but I hadn’t even seen one live cicada.

Until yesterday.

I didn’t see any live cicadas in the forest preserves south of my suburb. I didn’t see any live cicadas in the trees along our local creek. And I didn’t see any live cicadas in the shrubbery along our local railroad tracks.

But walking past our local Radio Shack store on 95th and Cicero something big flew past my face, circled around and landed on my leg. I looked down and it was a cicada! There wasn’t a tree or grass lawn anywhere in sight yet there was my first live cicada of this cycle. I reached down to grab it intending to walk it over to a side street where I could put it on a tree, but it evaded my hand and flew up to the top of the Radio Shack window. I left it there, staring in at the electronics with its big red eyes.

Ten minutes later, a few blocks west of there, I was walking through the west parking lot of our local library when another big shape flew past my face, circled around and landed on my foot. My second cicada! I reached down, carefully, and grasped it by its wings and put it on one of the trees alongside the parking lot.

Our local news is saying this cycle’s “outbreak” is almost over. I don’t feel completely cheated. I didn’t see any science fiction type infestations. (A relative of mine who lives far to the southwest says his back yard had “thousands” of the creatures “completely covering” one of his trees.) But I have heard them, seen them and touched them. It’s not as cool as witnessing an invasion, but it’s cool enough. They’re pretty freaky looking.

Cicada Wiki Page

UConn scientists map mass emergence of cicadas in Midwes

Inca Roads: Bassoon And Marimba

...you have roads which start and end nowhere. Figures in the middle of nothing. Patterns with no context. And I believe that is the point. I believe the builders were expressing the belief—held either explicitly or implicitly—that real and meaningful ‘locations’ and ‘connections’ occur in the mind, in consciousness, and not in the three dimensional world around us.

“Inca Roads (Introduction)”

A couple of weeks back, a young woman I know acquired a bassoon. You can see it here.

Now, a bassoon is a pretty cool instrument. But these keyboard and guitar days a bassoon is an unusual instrument. A young woman who plays bassoon got me thinking of other women who played unusual instruments. And that got me thinking immediately of Ruth Underwood.

Ruth Underwood was Frank Zappa’s marimba player.

The legend as I remember it is that Ian Underwood auditioned for Frank Zappa and Frank was impressed with his musicianship. Ian said, “Heck, you should see my wife play the marimba!” Frank had always loved percussion and had his own vibraphone. Frank said, “Well bring her on! Let’s hear what she can do!” So Ruth went in, auditioned and quickly became not just part of Frank’s studio band but also part of his touring ensemble. Ruth not only played Frank’s music, but became something of his percussion muse. Frank wrote specific pieces to showcase Ruth’s incredible skill, most notably, “Inca Roads,” off “One Size Fits All.”

So Angie got a bassoon and that made me think of Ruth Underwood.

I hadn’t thought of Frank Zappa or Ruth Underwood in many years but now I found myself wondering what Ruth was up to. I knew Frank passed away in 1993, but I hadn’t heard anything about what Ruth was doing. When I moved from the near north side of Chicago to a south suburb about ten years ago I’d sold almost all my CD’s to a used record store. Looking through what remained, I found I still owned only one Zappa CD, the double album, single CD, “Apostrophe/Over-nite Sensation.” I got fresh batteries for my Walkman and listened again to Ruth Underwood’s great marimba work.

And I wondered what Ruth Underwood was up to.

This wasn’t a strong imperative to me. The question wasn’t in the forefront of my consciousness. I didn’t write myself a note to search the web for her. I didn’t Google her or look up her Wikipedia entry. But I was curious. And for a few days I kept the Zappa CD in my Walkman and listened to the songs.

A few days in to this, listening to Zappa after many years, wondering about Ruth, I walked to our local library and checked out the new arrival shelf in the audiovisual section. There among the newly arrived slasher movies and full-season collections of old TV shows was a new arrival documentary. It was Matthew Longfellow’s documentary about the making of Frank Zappa’s double album, “Apostrophe/Over-night Sensation.”

Yikes.

So I took it out.

The main program featured Zappa’s family, friends and former musicians reminiscing about Frank in general and that double album in particular. And there, featured prominently among all the interview excerpts were long and interesting interview excerpts of Ruth Underwood!

Yikes.

Not only was Ruth featured throughout the main program but the DVD’s bonus features include an extended interview with Ruth where she recounts how Frank talked her into getting her marimba electrified.

So. Angie gets a bassoon. That makes me think of Ruth Underwood. I’m listening to a CD of Ruth playing and wondering what’s up with Ruth. Then a documentary about the album I’m listening to and featuring interviews with Ruth appears at my local library. (I was very tempted to write in that preceding sentence, “... magically appears at my local library” but I restrained myself.)

I’m not sure what to make of something like this. I’m not sure there is anything to make of something like this. It’s a coincidence. It’s a road which starts and ends nowhere. It’s a figure in the middle of nothing. It’s a pattern with no context.

(Reviewing things, I am struck by how I took no direct, active part in the sequence of events. I didn’t try to find out anything. I didn’t look for anything. I just indulged my curiosity by listening to some songs and letting my curiosity persist of its own accord. And somehow it resolved itself of its own accord, too. I wonder if there’s a gambling lesson here: Perhaps a key might be to acknowledge a desire for a jackpot and allow that imperative to persist of its own accord without attempting to create direct action, complex math solutions to the imperative myself. Hmmm.)

At the very least, however, something like this strikes me as a reminder that whatever the universe is—causal, associative, something different—there is something at work which presents all the appearances of magic. If we keep our eyes and ears open and let our conscious sense-of-wonder keep wondering.

Ruth Underwood’s Wiki Page

Angie’s Blog: Sentimental Small Talk

Inca Roads (Introduction)

Everybody experiences coincidences. When we experience one, most of us think about it for a moment or two, maybe talk about it for a moment or two, and then move on.

But people interested in the Goblin Universe—or its variants—often have trouble letting go of coincidences. These people often make coincidences the center of theories about existence itself.

For instance, Paul Kammerer and Carl Jung researched coincidences extensively and created the notion of synchronicity. Synchronicity is the belief in an acausal connective principle. Reality is governed not just by cause-and-effect, but also by ephemeral and invisible linkages which generate effects without causes in the traditionally understood, three dimensional model of reality.

More recently a computer scientist turned UFO researcher named Jacques Vallee put forward the notion that we live in an associative universe. A computer recalls data by putting a pattern of ones and zeroes on a sequence of wires called the address bus and that pattern causes an associated pattern of ones and zeros to appear on a different sequence of wires called the data bus. Vallee and others suggest that perhaps reality is typically ‘ordered’ along temporal lines, but consciousness can sometimes, somehow put forward a pattern of some kind which acts as an index into reality itself and calls up, again somehow, an associated pattern. We become aware of these moments as ‘coincidences.’

I suspect that something like this will eventually come to be understood as the ‘real’ meaning behind the Nazca Lines. I believe they were an ancient culture’s understanding and expression of the associative nature of reality. So you have roads which start and end nowhere. Figures in the middle of nothing. Patterns with no context. And I believe that is the point. I believe the builders were expressing the belief—held either explicitly or implicitly—that real and meaningful ‘locations’ and ‘connections’ occur in the mind, in consciousness, and not in the three dimensional world around us.


Tomorrow I’m going to tell a story about a bassoon player and a marimba player and a walk I took along one of those Nazca Lines in my mind to a very weird coincidence.


The theme song for today’s post and tomorrow’s is Frank Zappa’s “Inca Roads:”

Did a vehicle
Come from somewhere out there
Just to land in the Andes
Was it round
And did it have
A motor
Or was it
Something different

Did a vehicle
Fly along the mountains
And find a place to park itself
Park it
Self

Or did someone
Build a place
To leave a space
For such a thing to land

Did a vehicle
Come from somewhere out there

Did a vehicle
Come from somewhere out there

Did the Indians
First on the bill
Carve up the hill

Did a booger-bear
Come from somewhere out there
Just to land in the Andes
Was she round
And did she have
A motor
Or was she
Something different

Guacamole Queen
At the Armadillo in Austin Texas
Her aura
Or did someone build a place
To leave a space
For Chester's Thing to land

Did a booger-bear
Come from somewhere out there

Did a booger-bear
Come from somewhere out there

Did the Indians
First on the bill
Carve up her hill

On Ruth
On Ruth
That’s Ruth!

Frank Zappa
“Inca Roads”
from “One Size Fits All”

“It’s More Fun If It’s A Monster”

See monsters?
Champ and his aquatic brethren are hot right now


When strange blobs of rotting animal flesh wash ashore, Sidney Pierce usually gets a call.

Pierce, a University of South Florida biologist, has analyzed "sea monster" samples from Chile, Tasmania and Bermuda, plus one piece of carcass found on a beach in St. Augustine, Fla., that spent more than a century in storage at the Smithsonian Institution. But in every case, DNA analysis has revealed the mystery mush to be highly decomposed whale blubber.

"It's getting a little tedious now because it's always the same thing," Pierce said. "I keep hoping for it to be a monster, but it hasn't so far."

Sea monsters may or may not exist, but they definitely have captured people's imagination.

An amateur scientist caused a stir recently with his video that purports to show the Loch Ness monster.

Last year's South Korean film "The Host," which features a sea monster that emerges from Seoul's Han River to terrorize the city, became the country's highest-grossing film to date.

In October, National Geographic will release an IMAX film about sea monsters that lived in western Kansas millions of years ago. U-Haul has decorated the sides of its moving trucks with colorful images of a giant squid, a 15-foot-wide marine turtle from the time of the dinosaurs, and Champ, the resident sea monster of Lake Champlain.

The lake, where sightings date back to the 1600s, is just one of the many bodies of water that have their own sea monster myths. The Chesapeake Bay has Chessie, whom witnesses claim is dark gray, humped and about 30 feet in length. The Kraken, which had a cameo role in last year's film "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," is a giant squid thought to be 150 to 200 feet long and lurking in the waters off the Bahamas.

Cadboro Bay in British Columbia claims Caddy, or Cadborosaurus willsi, a serpent-like creature that to this day remains the only monster ever described in a scientific journal. And, of course, there's Nessie, the famous monster of Loch Ness, whose existence many scientists consider doubtful, but which still attracts tourists to the remote lake in the Scottish Highlands.

"From a scientific standpoint there has never been a shred of proof for any of these things," says Robin O'Keefe, an assistant professor of biology at Marshall University in West Virginia and an expert on plesiosaurs, sea monsters that lived during the age of dinosaurs.

As for all the sightings, "After a few beers, if you're not a marine biologist and don't know what your looking at, it could be anything," O'Keefe says.

Still, monsters can be good for business. At Burlington's Centennial Field, you might see the Vermont Lake Monsters' furry green-and-purple mascot skydive onto the field or be pulled in by huskies while riding a wheeled sled.

Fans of the single-A baseball team can snack on the Monster Dog, a quarter-pound hot dog. At the team's gift shop, Champ piggy banks, kickballs, foam visors and bobblehead dolls are all for sale.

"Baseball is boring," says C.J. Knudsen, the team's general manager. "One way for us to market toward families is Champ."

The team, not wanting to reveal Champ's true identity, instead refers to the person inside the mascot's costume as "Champ's trainer." For the past 11 summers that job has gone to 35-year-old Jeff Moulton. "The job is pretty fun," Moulton says. "You can act as goofy as possible."

Ellen Marsden, a fisheries biologist at the University of Vermont, has become the default expert on Champ, but she says that most of the more than 300 sightings can be attributed to something else. Possibilities include oar fish, giant eel-like ocean animals that could have gotten lost and ended up in Lake Champlain. Sturgeon are common to the lake and can grow up to 6 feet in length and look strange when breaking the surface. Groups of smaller fish like carp can darken the surface when swimming together, making schools appear like one large creature when seen from afar.

"The (sightings) that disturb me," Marsden says, "are when it's the ferry captain, because you think he would know something."

And just what have the ferry captains seen?

"I've seen some big fish," says Heather Stuart, a skipper with the Lake Champlain Ferry Service who has more than 20 years of experience, "but I've never seen Champ." However, she says another company, Lake Champlain Shoreline Cruises, has reported sightings of the monster. Their skipper was unavailable for comment.

Marsden has had her own experience with an unusual sighting. She once momentarily mistook a spinning illuminated sign at a grocery story for a UFO.

"It's more fun if it's a monster," Marsden says. "I would be thrilled if somebody came up with something completely unknown to science that's living in this lake. I think the probability is close to zero."

JUSTIN NOBEL
“See monsters?”
Times Argus, Columbia News Service

Ugobe’s Pleo: A Re-Engineered Camarasaurus

INTRODUCING PLEO




THE WORLD'S FIRST LIFE FORM

Can a long-extinct species be resurrected? UGOBE designers and engineers studied the long extinct Camarasaurus, a dinosaur from the Jurassic period. Pleo, a UGOBE Life Form is the authentic recreation born from that study. UGOBE's designers and engineers recreated Pleo's physiology from the fossils of the original. His height and weight are consistent with that of a one-week old infant Camarasaurus.

Pleo is a 'designer species'. He incorporates all the basic traits of autonomous life. He is specifically engineered and enhanced to mimic life and relate to his owner on a personal level.

Pleo is equipped with senses for sight, sound, and touch. He learns as he explores his environment. He will exhibit genuine reactions to sensory stimuli. Every Pleo begins life with certain tendencies but, interaction with his environment has subtle effects on his behavior. Every Pleo eventually exhibits a unique personality.

Pleo is capable of expression. He can feel joy and sorrow, anger and annoyance. When Pleo is tired, he will become drowsy and go to sleep—even dream. Two or more Pleos will recognize one another. Be careful though. They can transmit colds to each other. Achoo! Pleo even sneezes!



FRIEND AND COMPANION

Pleo is a one-week old infant Camarasaurus from the Jurassic period. Camarasaurus were born and raised in giant fern forests. They evolved camouflage that allowed them to blend with their environment of ferns, moss and ruff, the detritus that littered the forest floor. The first Pleo created is a Fernback. His markings help him to survive by hiding among the giant fern fronds in his habitat.

Pleo is an authentic Life Form. Treat him gently like any other living thing. Your Pleo will let you know how he feels at any moment. That's because he is capable of actual emotions including joy, aggression, sorrow, and fear. He can also yawn, sigh, sniff, sniffle, snore, cough, hiccup, and sneeze.

Pleo wants to explore his environment. He will be cautious when he walks to the edge of a table. He may cry when he is frightened. Pleo will stretch when he first wakes up. He may stomp his foot for food when hungry.

When Pleo grows tired, lay him down and attach his 'dream cord' so he can sleep, dream, and gather energy for more exploration.



MORE ABOUT CAMARASAURUS

CAMARASAURUS (KAM-ah-rah-sawr-us) "Chambered Lizard" (Greek kamara = chamber + sauros = lizard, referring to the holes in its vertebrae)

Also Known As: Morosaurus
Description: Herbivore, Quadrupedal
Order: Saurischia
Suborder: Sauropodomorpha
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Camarasauridae
Height: 23 feet (7 meters)
Length: 60 feet (18.3 meters)
Weight: 40,000 lbs (18,144 kg)
Period: Late Jurassic

Camarasaurus is the best-known sauropod found in North America and the most abundant of fossils in the Late Jurassic. It also lived in Europe, where it survived into Early Cretaceous times. A complete, nearly perfect skeleton of a juvenile, 17-feet (5.2- meters) long, was found in Utah. Its head was short and box like with nostrils set above the snout and in front of the eyes. The weight of its backbone was lightened by holes in its vertebrae. Its neck was shorter and thicker than most sauropods and it possessed a short and somewhat flattened tail. The fore limbs and hind legs of Camarasaurus were about the same length.

ugobe home