Waking with something in my head....

Ok, woke up this morning with verses from the poem Gunga Din by Rudyard Kipling running around in my head. The line in the poem where the narrator is saying "He'll be squatting on the coals, giving drinks to poor damned souls, and I'll catch a swig in hell from Gunga Din." I haven't read that poem in almost 20 years, (maybe longer) and I'll be damned if I know why it showed up now. (Has it been bubbling around loosely in my brain for 20 years, just waiting for the right moment to vex me.) After I climbed out of bed more of the poem came unbidden to my memory, the last line of the poem which is the part most people remember, "though I've belted you and flayed you, by the living gawd that made you, You're a better man than I am Gunga Din." (Kipling spelled god that way, don't look at me.)I have supplied a link to the poem here. It's a short one, I recommend you read it, then maybe you too will wake up with this thing in your head. The human mind is a strange contraption. For example, the spot where your nerve endings go back through your eyeball has no rods or cones in it, which means there should be a big black spot in the middle of all of our vision, but our brain sees the area around the black spot and fills it in for us. Or when we see color for example, if you are looking at an object and it is blue, it is because the object is absorbing the light in the blue wavelength and reflecting all others. So we see blue. But think about this, what you see as blue, and what I see as blue could be completely different things, after all, we have been trained all of our lives that what we are looking at is blue. But I have know way of knowing what you are really seeing, our perceptions of the world could be completely different. And no matter how I try, I can't show you the world I am seeing. And you can't show me. We could trust that the make up of the human mind is standardized and therefore what we see could be standardized. But all we need do is look at a cloud, and some will see the face of Jesus, some a ducky and a horsey, it is simply a matter of perception and paradolia (mentioned in an earlier blog). The mind sees what it wants to see. And our brain interprets the world the way it was taught to do. For example, the air we breathe is made up of molecules that are moving constantly, (at about a thousand miles an hour) yet we don't see them, feel them, or taste them. Yet we need them to survive. The floors we are standing on, and the ceilings over our heads are made up of innumerable molecules that are constantly moving, protons and photons are passing back and forth to hold it together. In constant motion, yet we perceive none of it.
(Maybe that's for the best, imagine if you could see it and you were hung over.)
Sir Arthur Eddington (English astronomer 1882-1944) said it best, "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." (Italics mine) Or as the Greek philosopher Democritus said "Nothing exists, but atoms and empty space. All else is conjecture."
(Don't ask me how a man who died in 370 BCE (Before current era) knew about atoms.)
What's the point of all this? I don't really have a point, I'm just trying to get that Gunga Din thing out of my head. In the words of an unknown philosopher, "We thought we knew the answers, but it was the questions we had wrong" Just a little early morning philosophy to start the day. Entirely unrelated but also interesting is a quote a news reporter once said "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila" which isn't really philosophy, but it's funny. Ciao for now.

History is written by the winners...

We at the crazy love to read, pretty much anything we can get our hands on. (Although the reading of novels has declined recently. It is summer after all.) So in a bleary eyed, coffee slogging attempt to wake up this morning we stumbled across a couple of little known historical facts. These are things you won't find in your history books, (at least most history books.) For example we have all heard "Remember the Alamo." But a lot of us are unaware of the cause of the battle. You see Texas wanted to be independent of Mexico. (Understandable, as the Mexican government treated most Texans rather harshly.) But the main reason Texas wanted independence is because Mexico had just abolished slavery, and wanted Texas to do the same. And Texas wanted none of that as slave trade was profitable. We are not denigrating the fine men who fought and died for liberty. And Santa Anna would surely have overun Texas had the battle at the Alamo not taken place. But the Mexican Army freed the remaining slaves held at the Alamo after vanquishing the Texans. (Including a slave named Sam who was owned by James Bowie, and Colonel Travis Slave Joe.) We at the crazy do love our country, but don't agree with the phrase "Our country right or wrong." As all conquerors we took this nation by force.
The indigent people who resided here for centuries were simply moved, or wiped out.
Do we want to give it back to them, No, But reparations are being made and we at the crazy agree with them. Destroying the culture of the previous residents of this country will come with a cost. And that is a bill we should pay without question. As a civilization we are learning, we are less likely to destroy a culture when we stumble upon it. (Recently we discovered a tree dwelling tribe in the Papua New Guinea, and a few years ago another in the Amazon jungle, the local governments are doing everything they can to preserve the lifestyle of these people.) So maybe there is hope for us yet. (That is unless an advanced Alien race perhaps lands on Earth someday and decides we need to live like them.) Just a little non-revisionist history. We are Americans and as such we should take responsiblity for our failures as well as our successes. Have a good week, ciao for now.

Windy with a chance of melting....

Another hot day here in the U.P. (Upper Peninsula of Michigan if someone other than the few people we know are reading this.) And again we here at the crazy are doing our best to deal with it. Kenton is hiding in the house sitting in front of the fan and trying not to melt. Wolfie is laying on her bed upstairs and eating a little, while playing solitaire on the computer. Connal is in his air conditioned room watching Angry Beavers on T.V. According to the weather report we are going to get a little wind today so perhaps we can all get outside before the rain hits. (Rain is forecast for this afternoon. About 20% chance around noon to a 100% chance around five. But meteorology is an inexact science so we aren't counting on it. (Our garden needs rain.)
Still, all in all it's been a decent weekend. Wolfie and me stood on the front step for a while and watched the Ishpeming fireworks display. We could see them first, then hear the boom, then hear the ooohs and aaaaahs of the crowd while the next one was launching. (They were about 2 miles distant.) If my math skills were better I could have timed the difference between the sight and the sound and told you exactly how far away they were, but as my math skills are sorely lacking, (and my brain is in the process of melting) it's not going to happen. Anyway so far it's been a good summer, we have suffered the scourge of the chipmunk in our garden, the birds have taken all the cherries as we did not protect the tree this year. (Ok, it was my job but I was busy and it slipped my mind.) Our yard is looking a little better than it did last year, and all the new peonies we planted look like they are coming up, next year they might bloom. Now if only we had money so we could do some things to our house. (I don't know? an indoor pool in the basement.) Actually just some more insulation in the living room would be good, and possibly some roof repair. It's budgeted in for late summer and if nothing goes wrong we should be able to get it done. Anyway that's about it, not much to talk about today, just another day in paradise. Everybody enjoy your summer, and we shall enjoy ours. (I wonder what chipmunk tastes like?) Ciao for now.

Happy 4th of July.... (er ok 3rd then.)

Here we are at the seminal event of the summer, the 4th of July in which we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. (Although in a letter that John Adams sent to his wife he mentions signing it on the 2nd of July, and many signed it on August 2.) When John Hancock signed it with huge letters he said, "There, I guess King George will be able to read that." Benjamin Franklin said, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately." Which was the truth, they were committing an act of treason against the King of England at the time. And of course Thomas Jefferson who insisted they place the right to bear arms as one of it's tennets later said "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." We have included a link to the Declaration of Independence HERE. (We would also like to point out that although God is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, Christ is not. As our founding fathers were not Christians in any sense of the word.) It should also be noted that neither God nor Christ are mentioned in the body of the Constitution either. (God is only mentioned in the date as in the Year of our lord.)
Our forefathers wanted the people of this nation to be free to practice any religion they chose or no religion at all if that's what they so pleased. Okay, we got that off our chests. Everybody have a happy 4th. Ciao for now.

Whoops, error, error, norman coordinate...

In our last blog we mentioned that our solar system is moving about 530,000 miles per second, that's per hour folks. Just thought I should correct that if anyone read it.
I also corrected in the post itself, but trust me it was wrong yesterday. Ciao for now

The longest day of the year and you missed it.

For anyone who's interested Jun 21st was the first official day of summer, also the longest day of the year with about fourteen and a half hours of sunshine. You might be interested in knowing that although it's warmer in the summer here in the northern hemisphere the planet is actually farther from the sun at this time of year. So we are about three million miles farther from the sun in the summer than in the winter. (the distance change is about 3% of the total distance and has almost no effect on earth's temperature) The reason we are warmer up north in the summer has to do with the tilt of the Earth's axis during this season. Also although the earth moves around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour it moves faster in the winter than in the summer, why? because the path around the sun is elliptical not circular. (think egg shaped for those of you with math skills similar to my own.) I would tell you how fast we are moving around the sun at this particular date but in attempting to do so my brain would melt into a puddle of pink goo somewhat reminiscent of bubble gum on a hot sidewalk. Let's just say we are all speed demons and leave it at that. Scientists can easily tell us how fast we are traveling around the sun as we have a guidepost to measure it against. (The sun of course.) After that, measurement of our speed gets a bit iffy. We know our solar system is orbiting the center of our galaxy. (The good old Milky Way) Estimates put the speed at 560,000 miles per hour. (It takes about 230 Million years for our solar system to orbit the center of the milky way galaxy, so I think we can guess from these numbers that space is fricken huge.) Measuring the speed of our galaxy is a lot harder as we have no frame of reference, everything out there is moving, there is nothing standing still to measure against. But some genius scientists have used the Cosmological Background Radiation as a starting point and calculated we are traveling around 900,000 miles per hour. And moving toward the constellations Hydra and Centaurus. But the constellations Hydra and Centaurus are in our galaxy so it's a lot like saying that the passengers in a bus are moving toward the driver. Why don't we feel all this speed? Because we are so small. Infinitesimally, unequivocally tiny. ("A mote in god's eye." As Larry Niven once said.) All the grains of sand in all the beaches of the world are as nothing compared to innumerable stars and galaxies that spin over our heads (or beneath our feet depending on your point of reference.)Let me just close by saying this. The universe is a big place, so get over yourselves. Ciao for now.

And it didn't come to pass....

In one of our earlier posts we mentioned a number of end of the world predictions that didn't come true. (obviously, as we are all still here.)And the research department here at the crazy, (which works for free by the way.)stumbled across another series of predictions we would like to share with you. These predictions are not religious in nature but are extremely relevant in our daily lives. For example "Theoretically, television may be feasible, but I consider it an impossibility--a development which we should waste little time dreaming about." by the inventor of the cathode ray tube, Lee Deforest in 1926. Or how about this one, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas J. Watson, 1943, Chairman of the Board of IBM. (By the way we were recently asked what the letters IBM stand for and if anyone has forgotten it's International Business Machines.) Here is another computer prediction by Popular Mechanics in 1949 "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." or how about a prediction in 1939 in The New York Times that said the problem of TV was that people had to glue their eyes to a screen, and that the average American wouldn't have time for it. Another interesting one by H.M. Warner of the Warner Brothers in 1927 who said "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" Ok, we'll give him that one. So we guess the lesson to be learned here is don't make predictions. Or if you do, don't tell anybody about them. Just a short note, ciao for now.