2,913,873
Do you know why this number is significant?
Apparently its the number of days my computer can look into the future. It knows that in 2,913,873 days from now it will be Friday December 31, 9999 and we'll all be having soylent green for breakfast.
But anything I enter into Excel that makes it look at the year 10000 or beyond it just goes into a coughing fit and fills the cell with infinite # signs.
Oh well. I thought you should know. Maybe your computer is smarter than mine.
What does STI stand for?
According to Wikipedia it could mean:
I've chosen to start this whole pre-draft exercise with the cosmic stuff which creates a slant on things. I am not a space creature but a very terrestrial one, so, although it is appropriate to have an idea of what is going on out there, it is hard to glean from personal experience. And the whole nature of what I'm doing leans heavily on the solidity of personal experience; personal experience which is well observed and well reflected upon (more on all that later) so as to form the most solid dogma for use in logical extensions in cases like these. So the hitch here is that the cosmic stuff depends so heavily on logic. For that reason, the cosmic stuff was maybe a bad place to start. I did have at least one other option but it would have been less tidy.
The job of turning 90 segments that interrelate in a very busy web of connection, into a linear path so as to treat them one at a time, was achieved by separating them into 11 separate chains of related material and capturing a hierarchy of the most vital prerequisites. The Cosmos chain (actually titled "The World" in my plan) is the only chain in which no pre-requisites exist outside of its own chain. The chains were ordered in such a way that they can be completed from start to end without jumping to other chains and back again. By allowing "inter-jumps" I could have started in the "Dialogue" chain (Part 3) with the "Testimony" segment which, like the "Cosmology" segment, has no prerequisites. Well... no official pre-requisites. Every time I've said "more on that later" it reveals subtler prerequisites which I must let slide.
Why am I explaining all this? Oh yeah - because the tidiness of starting with the world-stuff means starting with the heaviest of logic-not-experience-based stuff which sets a poor impression.
In terms of the actual journey which began in my 30's, it basically started with segment 3.2 "truth and honesty" which doesn't work well as a start point here because it heavily depends on prerequisite 2.1 as well as 3.1.
Has this been a horrible long-winded explanation? I don't know if anyone should be reading this! But it helps me get my thoughts together. At some point I want a book that is readable, useful and publishable!
Okay, planets...
Given the earned reputation of scientists, and photographs and logic - and I must say that much of the logic around scientific testimony involves the inconceivable length that parties would have to go to to sell lies in the matters of science, and the inconceivable numbers of parties which would have to be involved, when you fully consider the amount of evidence available to us which support mainstream claims. Generally the plausibility for such conspiracy hovers around the tiniest fraction of a per cent mark. No honest flat-earther (in other words, discounting all the trolls and folks who are in it for the comedy) has ever processed enough logic to even just get by the implausibility of the conspiracy factor. Absolutely guaranteed they have not. You would literally need millions of people in on the conspiracy in order to sell it to the modest remainder of the population. In the final draft I might even quantify all that with as much of the math as I can muster. On top of all that I have said in this paragraph is the supporting evidence that we can glean from personal living experience such as gravity and the pattern of star "movement" available to our eye and telescope.
And on that note we can understand why planets and most cosmic features are round, oval or spheres. Planets accrete closer to spherically than any other shape because that is by far the most likely in a 3d random environment, with components coming from all directions. This is simple math within our living experience. Other components are shaped similarly for similar reasons.
Science explains why planets have a life cycle; how they are born, evolve and die in conjunction with star systems which themselves are born, evolve and die, as fuels burn low, densities intensify, etcetera. Our ongoing big bang explosion is old enough to have manifested composite little bangs along the way.
The universe is a consistent system of matter accreting, intensifying, exploding and accreting (or orbiting) again; of gravity trying to negate the bang by drawing everything together and finding success only in separate realms and tiers. On one hand you can look at this simple, almost homogenous structure of the cosmos but on the other, one tier at a time, thus the interpretation of cluster systems, galaxies, star systems, planets, moons... But it's all the same thing, flavoured by tier and by the variation of molecular structure (and is even that just another tier of gravitational bonding in a sense?)
So I think we understand why the Earth is round, how it was created and how life forming (or at least existing) here is rare as it's a matter of rare factors in terms of molecular variety and of special proximity of orbit; most prominently the presence of "land" and of water in both gaseous and (pooling) solid states per goldilocks distance from the sun.
But in concert with that proximity is the death sentence of the planet, or at least its biosphere and population. When our sun eventually blows - we're screwed, but quickly and fairly mercifully at least. Earth will be made a barren rock right quick.
Which strongly suggests a ceiling on organic life; certainly mammalian life, without migration to a safer planet; Mars being a rather convenient next stop. Peculiarly convenient, one might say. Almost suspiciously convenient! And with Elon Musk and his ilk now dabbling in the Martian endeavor, I must explore, no matter how distasteful I find it, the argument (in my mind if nowhere else) that the ungodly inhumane corrupt distribution of wealth we have perpetrated, and the atrocities committed against our biosphere, may be necessary in order to make Mars rockets possible and thus potentially remove the ceiling on human duration, albeit at the expense of tremendous human misery on those left behind (almost everyone) and drastically crunching the mortality of Earth humankind. Yes, all this requires finer explanations.
Much more on organic life, and intelligent life, to follow.
Is anyone actually reading this long-winded prattle?
Am I using the word prattle corrently?
These are the questions.
Now I must get to bed for a direly needed nap. Tonight is D&D night and we may have to go to battle with a flock of killer bunnies!
zzZZZzzzzzZZZZZzzzzzZZZzzzzzzzz
So this Thursday Thoughts deal is meant to be a preliminary brainstorm exercise; a way to start assembling first-draft material for the book I have tried several times to begin writing before becoming a little overwhelmed by the bloody expanse of the thing. The term first draft almost feels over-reaching. I almost want to say pre-draft! After all, these pieces, per Wikipedia-speak, are really just stems.
I'm putting them into the blog for several reasons: It's the right material for the ultimate purpose I want this blog to take on, as well as for those readers I would ultimately regard the target market. Also this blog needs more material frankly. I'd like to hit the point where people know I'm posting daily and it's safe to drop in, and maybe even get to know the themes for certain days of the week and therefor know which days to personally visit or on the other hand, to skip!
I'd also like the possibility of comments being generated as I begin percolating this stuff. I'm certainly open to help!
I do hesitate though, to post these pieces because for now they can seem like little but introductions to topics. The purpose of these earliest chapters is generally to assemble basic presumptions for later use in drawing conclusions. On their own they can seem rather pointless maybe?
Right now I am finding the discipline to do this particular work as part of a greater structure where I have some accountability and this operates on a specific timetable. As a result, I ran out of time last week and so I must add a few words now on the topic of the nature of the universe: The matter of life versus death.
The only life we know of for sure is here on Earth. It's looking fairly evident we're not going to find it on the other planets of this system, and the lack of interaction with intelligent extra-terrestrials also supports the view that life is critically rare in the universe. The incredibly short duration of life for every living organism on Earth also supports its rarity in a universe billions of years old. And saying its billions of years old is a fairly safe assumption (a useful idea and not certain truth technically) because the science community; a reliable community by any human standard, are consolidated in their support for this observation, whether astronomers or paleontologists etcetera.
Claims of UFO sightings, abductions, Area 51 artifacts etcetera, in their current volume and level of evidentiary support, seem logically right where they should be in a world where none of them are valid, given the volume of misunderstandings, delusions, dreams, mental illness and outright scams that a seven-billion population of human beings are capable of producing and concocting.
If the outer space community was nearly as busy as this accumulation of stories would suggest, would the evidence not be overwhelming? And if only a fraction of the stories are true, suggesting that alien interaction is a rare commodity, then this also supports my understanding of life in the universe: that it is rare. So intensely rare it can be thought of as miraculous. Sort of like winning the lottery is miraculous; it being so unlikely. So I propose that the natural state of the universe... is dead. And life is an exception.
So there. Have I made a point, and given this little piece justification? I'm gonna hit the Publish button!
Preliminary thoughts which should one day turn into a chapter, after a lot of expansion and qualification:
Neither gravity or causality are officially considered forces by the science of the day, as far as I know, though gravity formerly was. But I would link them up with space and time as being the inescapable constraints which rule existence in this universe. We all experience space as we move around, and the passage of time. We all feel gravity's hold on us any time we care to. And as far as I know, because no one has ever made much of an effort to convince me otherwise, we all experience causality the way I do: Every observable thing or event I have ever regarded, is both an effect of multiple causes and the cause of multiple effects. I have seen no evidence in my 53 years that anything can exist or happen outside of the paradigm of causality. And a closer examination of causality in a later chapter will reveal it to be omnipotent and a web of connectedness which unites all things ever, and makes all things inevitable in essence.
We have the word random which teenagers have co-opted to replace the word arbitrary, but for those of us who remember its origin, a generation of something unpredictable, seeming without cause, we should realize that all randomness exists only within the limits of perspective, but that in reality all apparent randomization is generated through causality, but a system of causality beyond the control of the witness and without trackability. Lottery ball activity aligns strictly with forces of physics but the permutations are just too complex for anyone to conceivably control. Hence the appearance of randomness. So this concept is no threat to the reign of causality.
As for the meat of the universe; the stuff these constraints play upon, we are familiar with matter. We see and feel material everywhere, but also the evidence of energies.
Well time is literally up for today. I have commitments on my agenda. Perhaps it would be pointless to publish this. It doesn't amount to much relevance yet
I did not choose this topic. I have about 80 or 90 of them to address for reasons I will spill at a later date. Maybe next week.
Cosmology
Well... according to Oxford:
Is the bang theory really a theory? Perhaps it is rather an observation. It seems that we are observing the expansion of the universe; that we are still banging; not quite done exploding. To surmise that the objects in the universe came from the place at the rear of their direction of travel... seems fairly obvious? Are we not still experiencing the big bang as we speak?
Do I personally witness this motion; this travel? I'm not sure I do. I would have to rely on the testimony of the astrophysics community, along with their other conjectures.
Or do I? I know for sure that something is "true" if I consistently experience it, or if I very carefully, without error or omission, assemble logic built from guaranteed (personally experienced) truths and/or other items of assembled unerring logic, which we can collectively call dogma.
Testimony: noun
I'm defining testimony as anything I've heard which I have not personally verified through experience. In other words, the above definition but without formal/informal differentiation. Is there some other word for that which I should be using instead?
Dogma: noun
I'm defining dogma as any assembled truths which we can, going forward, rely upon without re-analyzing or re-proving, because we have completed all the work. In other words, our own clean database is the only authority, which is infinitely more reliable than the words of priests and politicians, who make the newspapers every day for their scandals, and whose unreliability is in fact inconvertible for their failure to agree with one another on what the clean facts are.
I'm suggesting that these Thursday articles represent a clean new database of information, unlike the internal databases which most of us carry around, full of the "dogma" which we inherited through church and parents and teachers and everyone else of influence, and of course the dreaded media, much of whom, are extremely suspect, and owned and operated by power-mongers with known agendas.
So the big bang must remain testimony, and shall not be filed as truth, but rather as useful testimony, because the sources which provide it are those possessing a very good reputation all around, and provide much other testimony or dogma which we can, and have, consistently verified in our living experience. Concepts such as gravity for instance.
So we have spilled that most dreaded word here, the one I try to never use if possible: truth. There are always ways of questioning truths, no matter how reliably; how integrally; how courageously formed, because one can always find ways to question reality.
And I propose to define truth as the unvarnished facts which exist in reality.
And reality is the bonified state of things, as applies to our living experience. Meaning this: one can question such things as time for instance. Physicists might say that time is an illusion; that spacetime is something different than what we perceive, but here is what's important to me:
The reason we need truth is to fix the problems which riddle our living experience, and hear this testimony from me: that their are solutions for everything, but don't believe that yet. We are many steps away from turning that into dogma! Now, in my living experience there is a proven consistent perception of time: a linear inertia from which there is no known escape. In order to solve problems relating to our living experience, the truths will be those "proven" to be consistent in our living experience. Thus time is exactly what we all know it as. Time is true for all intents and purposes (at least so far).
Understanding the physicist's view of spacetime is not going to help you get to work early enough to placate your boss.
In order for the most basic general cosmological testimony to be untrue, meaning the reliability of scientists' own reliable personal experience, rather than our own, there would have to be a very wide-scale conspiracy at work, one too large and too long-running to be logically plausible. So such basic cosmology as the accretion of stars and moons and planets, all the same thing really, different in size and composition, is not truth, not proven to me, but reliable enough to me as unproven testimony to be useful (ah useful. Such a useful word!) because of the earned reputation of science, because of the support of my own observations through my own senses in all applicable matters of physical science, and also because of the lack, at least so far, of importance. The origin of the cosmos is not necessarily, as yet, critical to our solving the great problems of society here on Earth, and making our lives better.
And that is what it's all about for me. Why I write, research, contemplate, discuss... in order to pursue better lives.
Now Eckart Tolle might ultimately disagree with that; the relevance of the cosmos, but we are not there yet. One step at a time!
We know that diversity is king.
We know that genetic diversity produces the healthiest offspring in mammals.
We know that diverse interests produce the most intelligent minds and emotional health and neuroscientists understand why.
We know that biodiversity is key to the biosphere and the potential survival of every doom-pointed mammal (all of us) on this crippled paradise of a planet.
We know that cultural diversity breeds cultural health and understanding and shines light on the darkest bleakest xenophobic redneck minds.
And I know - I know - how diversity in personal style avails joy and celebration in living every day. As such I don't care what you do with your clothes and your hair and your skin paint and your bits, bobs and bangles. Just do what you want, regardless of your sex. Whether you look like a boring traditional male or traditional female or somewhere in between, just please follow your inklings and be original. Be yourself. I won't judge you. Why the hell would I? What could I possibly have to lose?
We know that little girls and little boys are virtually identical in their gender-role-based interests until such a time as adults begin to impart arbitrary traditional roles upon them.
So if you want to "identify" as a male or female or neither or something in between then please do! Think of yourself the way you are inclined to think of yourself, by all means! And express it any way you're inclined.
And I will think of you how I am inclined to think of you, by all means, though I won't care about it.
For goodness sakes try to be a strong. I know it must not be easy sometimes, but looking for help by dictating pronouns is a dangerous game. If you're a close friend and you talk about yourself in such a way that my instinctive view of your gender changes then I will fall into line. I have a friend who went through a full surgical transformation and I no longer think of her as "he" and I instinctively refer to her as she. It just happens. She is very feminine in appearance. And I have other friends whose appearance does not convey to me one role or another very strongly, and so I think of them as I always have since my first impression when we first met.
I don't actually give a damn about the label; it's just instinctive and the only reason it comes to light whatsoever is because of language. There is no genderless form of the words he or she. Them is plural in most contexts. And pronouns are not words we think about when we talk. They pop out instinctively. But he and she means the same damn thing. Can we please learn to think of them as interchangeable? Instead of using them as affirmation? They are a shit tool for affirmation. Can we please not use them to test people? Trying to constantly think about pronouns when speaking is a matter of exhausting mental gymnastics.
When I say he or she it is not a reflection of what you are. It is a reflection of which way I instinctively interpret you lean. And if my interpretation differs from yours, so what? It's just me being honest about something completely void of importance to me. It is not an insult. That doesn't mean that your struggle isn't important to me. There are just other ways I will demonstrate that.
Our language has flaws. It has always been imprecise. We must do our best to communicate effectively, clearly, accurately prior to using language as a tool to show how nice we are.
Diversity is king.
Help rescue LGBT+ students persecuted by Turkish police
Another aid which is now helping me sleep on occasion, such as those in which I expect significant dog and house noise, is the delightful website mynoise.net; the Cadillac of white noise providers.
It cites various focuses and maps each to a collection of worldly (and some other-worldly) sound environments for which high-quality sound recordings have been gathered. For instance, weather and wildlife sounds and many body-of-water effects. There are also random melodic generators.
Among the focuses are treatment for ADHD and tinnitus; aids for sleep, meditation or for focus in places too noisy or too quiet, and accompaniment for meditation or to spawn inspiration. There are even background soundscapes for roleplay gamers.
Every individual track has its volume control. With an upgrade purchase you can even control frequency. I like to open multiple environments in separate tabs and choose a variety of tracks to produce my own custom environments.
Here is an example from the I Need To Calm Down focus. Japanese Garden features such tracks as wind, stream, waterfall, birds, cicadas, windchimes, rustling bamboo leaves and a Shishi Odoshi.
This is a fun site and useful to almost anyone for at least one reason or another. I hope you check it out: https://mynoise.net/
