What do you believe in your life?
Are these things true? Are they really true?
Have you ever even thought about it?
Do you even care if what you believe is actually true?
Getting Real
As I take some time off from the economic world and find myself experiencing a pseudo-sabatical I can't help but fall prey to my mind as it observes and tries
to make sense of life around me within this slower pace. |
Vegans. Vegetarians. Meat eaters. Bug eaters. Weed eaters.
What can morality say and dictate about what we choose to put
into our stomachs or not?
Can what I choose to eat make me a bad person? A strange person?
A good person?
Morality and Eating Meat
-George Carlin-
Here is a little essay I wrote about some Einstein physics.
I call this one a little E=mc2 on the Mind
Here's some useless party-chat information for you to interject into the conversation while you're standing there swaying back and forth with a drink in your hand, trying to think of something clever to say... |
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I'm a bit of a 'probability' fan.
I've written a lot of articles about it in the past.
Some articles I've long since lost and I regret that a bit.
A few of my posted essays were read from time to time and over the years I've gotten the
odd emails about them; arguing, agreeing, discussing, all kinds...
But I was once specifically asked about, and then decided to investigate, the actual odds of playing and winning at the game of Craps, a Vegas standard. Well, it turns out it's much more involved than a giddy holiday-person might think.
So, as you plunk another 20 buck bill down and exuberantly scream out, "Momma needs a new pair of shoes!", here's some things to keep in mind...
Crappy Chances? |
A young guy and girl were married in Winnipeg back when Canada was still a new country. They heard of good farm land up in northern Saskatchewan and decided to move out there, set up a homestead and start a new life.
The trip was incredibly slow and arduous. They crawled along in a horse drawn cart over rough, rutted fields, dense brush, creek and river crossings, mud when it rained and blistering heat when it didn’t. The young lady wasn’t used to tough conditions like this and was of a rather delicate disposition. During the journey the mosquitoes tormented them unbelievably. As she rode on the cart she tried to cover herself with blankets but they still managed to get to her body and sting and prick her over and over, hundreds and hundreds of times a day. In the evening and during the night they were even worse. |
He’d laugh at this to try to lighten the situation and apologize that things were so uncomfortable. He told her to hang in there, they’d be at their new place in a few more weeks. So they continued on and each day was like the one before and the poor girl was soon covered head to toe with bites and sores from the ravaging insects.
One morning the guy got up as usual after camping for the night to get ready for another day’s journey. He reached over for his gun and holster and found the pistol missing. He then noticed his wife wasn't around and went looking for her. He found she had taken the revolver in the night, went over a rise and had shot herself in the head. She couldn’t take it anymore and she was finally out of her misery I suppose.
That little hill is called ‘Bride’s Hill’ to this day and she's buried beneath it. . .
Have you ever been called flighty?
A dreamer?
Unrealistic?
Too much of an idealist?
Strange? Unusual? Different?
Consider them compliments.
I think you're doing something right in your life if people conclude these things about you.
After all, we'd be nowhere without the dreams and visions of a few, odd individuals...
"Dear Diary, |
You can't predict what might happen in your day to
cause you to go off on some unexpected tangent or other.
Today I think Gravity Sucks!
(I might be a bit hyperbolic here... but I'm not so sure)
Some of my neighbor’s
kids were once building a project for school.
One day while I was
visiting their dad, a friend of mine, they proudly showed me their model of the inner solar
system. They had a basketball for the Sun, a golf ball for Mercury, a
tennis ball for Venus, a baseball for Earth, and a racketball for Mars.
They had them all painted up and mounted on a black 4’ by 4’ piece of
plywood with the orbits painted for each one in nice silver
circles.
They were so happy with their efforts. —— I hadn't the heart to point out that the scale was all wrong. They didn't have any idea that the Earth would only be the size of an apple seed and be more than 85 or 90 feet away from the basketball if everything was done to scale.
That's the trouble with our universe.
It's so unimaginably huge it
doesn't translate easily to models and I don't think too many people
actually envision just how big it really is. We see a nice picture of the
solar system in a book, for example, and think that's what it's like. But in
fact, there is no way to accurately represent the scale of our solar system on any page in a book.
The planets would be too tiny to see on a page or/and all of them would have to be
positioned so very distantly, right off that page to begin with, to be right.
Perspective.
How do you give people insight into such things? It made me think...
I decided, on a lark, that I wanted to try to build a little model like the kid's but I'd use my computer instead and I'd make it to the exact scale of things out there in our solar system. I also wanted to somehow include the concept of light speed which in turn would introduce a sense of the passage of time to the model. (I think we don't see the significance of distances in models of the cosmos when we stand over them like giants and are able to move and shift our focus and attention across them at speeds that would violate the laws of physics in real life).
It turned out to be a fairly quick undertaking, but I think it kind of helps one get a feel for the vast distances out there.
Here's another tool I thought up years ago.
You can use it to help visualize things when playing around with the vast distances of our solar system. It'll help you when trying to realize the huge scales of and between, objects in our existence....