Photo feedback from my friends.

Tags

Bend Oregon, Coffee shop conversation, deschutes river, Mirror photos, Photos of Deschutes River, Storm sewer photo

My spouse bought herself a new Canon Selphy dye transfer printer last week and I had to try it out. It makes 4 x 6-inch prints, actually slightly smaller, but they have wonderful print quality. I printed up several to show to my coffee shop dudes, and dudettes to get their opinion.

When I got to our usual meeting time and place, which because of Covid is now outdoors in a park-like setting along the Deschutes River, they were already deep into conversation about Braque and had a fine old picture book for a conversation helper. Lately, we always have a big picture book by a well-known artist to aid in exposing our opinions. Thus, our conversations are more rooted in actual visual memories rather than rambling on about our former now vague opinions. The French call it an aide de memoire, or something similar.

Another view of Mirror Pond on the Deschutes River a few steps from where we have our discussions. The Sisters mountains are seen in the distance.

The dock on Mirror Pond. Our coffee today was at the Looney Bean garden about 80 steps to the right.

They liked this view of the path as it rounds the point in the river seen above.

Here I am looking into a storm sewer but my friends saw me as trying to get out of prison. (Click the photos to enlarge the photos.)

I like this picture in the storm sewer because of the multilayered visual complexity, especially of the penetrations and reflections of light on and in the water. While the half dozen photos were circulating around the group the “path around the point” photo got turned upside down. We all liked it that way just as well as right side up. It is another mirror image on water so it works.

This is an abstract I made, but people these days see it as a parade of multicolored protesters carrying signs. Artists might see a Nude descending a staircase.

I try to get by with a little help from my friends.

 

How would Marcus Aurelius respond to us?

Tags

Candide, Coping with China, Coping with Covid, Coping with death, COVID-19, End of the American Century, Humanities goal?, Marcus Aurelius, Pangloss, The American Century

Go to the Index of 120 Philosophers Squared

Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) was a stoic philosopher and last good Emperor of the Roman Empire. The epitome of a philosopher-king as described by the Greeks and a personality sought for by every nation. “He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.”

Marcus Aurelius, Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor

Quote from Marcus Aurelius

The first rule: keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look at things objectively and know them for what they are.

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A man’s worth is measured by the worth of what he values.

By that reasoning if a man’s highest value was money, then the more money he possessed the more worthy he would be. If he valued controlling other people, then to have an accepted position of authority, or of command over others, he would seek military rank or business title. If he valued the physical dominance of other individuals, he would seek a sporting award in some event, boxing, wrestling, swimming. Or being a part of a winning team like in football or basketball. Or perhaps a technical ability such as the fastest auto racing title. These types of athletic events have a single winner, and therefore everyone else is a loser, but there is the option of being a supporter and then having remote personal status based on the success of one’s team.

People who chose these kinds of personal values would also be attracted to patriotic behavior toward their nationality, religion, and ethnicity of people with whom they identify. They would value the symbols of their groups and wear emblems of support for their chosen groups which would increase their status with others of similar proclivities, and even their competitors and enemies.

There are some who seek their worth in their accomplishments and not in the monetary reward of them. Scientists seek to discover things, and their reward is in the feeling of discovering the secrets of nature and the respect of other scientists for finding a new aspect of reality. Some entrepreneurs seek to create a business, and some of these men move on to creating other businesses. It is the creation of a working business that they value. Some of the self-made billionaires whom I met when in Berkeley stated very clearly they just wanted to make something of value to others that worked. That really worked! There were others of that billionaire status who just wanted to make money. Period.

These Probaway posts have been aimed at a very different set of values. Earlier they had the underlying intention of helping humanity to survive and prosper. A long series of posts called the Life Haven Project for saving representative DNA of disparate groups of people so we could recover our civilization after modern wars had killed nearly everyone. There was a parallel set of posts aimed at saving all of the species of the world called the Earth Ark Project which was based on people from all over the world collecting seeds from all local plants and sending them to a storage site located high in Antarctica. The recent posts went even further in saving humanity by creating a computer-based replica of us which created a universal intelligence with morality that would last for billions of years.

These are the highest goals that are conceivable at the moment and I postulate them as the ultimate goal for humanity.

You can’t cheat Mother Nature

Tags

A thank You to Mother Nature, Hallucination, lies, Mother Nature, Nature's morality, True believers, truth

From what part of the Universe are you interested in getting special treatment? Do you want special treatment from gravity, so when you accidentally drop something gravity stops working for a moment so you can retrieve the item in midair before it falls and possibly gets broken? Or perhaps you would like time to give you special breaks occasionally so you can get something you want or prevent something you don’t want. Perhaps you would like to age more slowly than other people. How about a special relationship with matter so you can create gold as the Medieval alchemists were fond of attempting and occasionally claiming success? Perhaps they used a little sleight of hand.

A more common aspiration is to ask the higher beings for special favors, such as being given better health, or friendlier relatives, or a better job, and of course, the big one is eternal life in some heavenly place, where you are always happy and everything always works perfectly for you and turns out badly for those people you don’t like.

But, since Mother Nature is often remiss in her delivery of these things, therefore, many people turn to God! There is the greater power that can never be challenged and is too profound to be understood, and therefore it must be right and obeyed without the hint of questioning or disbelief.

Joining a group of people who claim to believe things that are impossible for Mother Nature to provide makes it much easier for a person, perhaps a bit like you, to believe these impossible things. Of course, these true believers can regale you with the many times that their profound belief brought the special benefits they asked for. They are like the alchemists creating gold by a sleight of hand, but in this case, it is a sleight of mouth.

What they are saying must be true, or a hallucination, or a lie, and probably a warm blend of the three. When these true believers are telling their stories, there doesn’t seem to be much reliance on ordinary reality, and when a fantastic lie is asserted with enthusiasm there will be a warm rush of joy spread through the listeners.

Perhaps it is difficult to create much enthusiasm for gravity or time, or simple honesty and the obvious behavior of nature, but that is where exuberant life functions best.

How to be constantly happy.

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How to be happy, Make every act a good one, Proceed toward goals, Seek worthy goals

Everyone seems to believe that happiness is the prime emotional quality to seek and possess, and therefore they spend their lives in pursuit of what appears to them to be elusive. When in my twenties one of my friends had a high paying occupation for a couple of years and was buying a fully-loaded Porsche every year while his good fortune lasted. After a couple of years, he said that he really enjoyed each new car for a couple of weeks, but after a month it was just a car. It was just a way to get wherever it was that he had to get to, but after a year it was annoying driving an old car, even if it was a Porsche. The simple fact was that a thing acquired, even a very nice thing, soon becomes a possession you have, just a thing, and it no longer is a source of pleasure.

That observation has been known for thousands of years and yet people pursue ownership of transient things. There are things that are worth owning even for a moment, but most of them are free, such as the basic processes of the Universe, and their derivatives, such as the ever-reliable gravity and the air we breathe, and the sky, with its cloudy weather and its sunsets. Owning the place you call home is worthwhile because being a renter always puts you in a place where you can not control staying. You can be forced to move on even though you have been a perfect tenant. Imagine  not owning the clothes you are wearing and that the legal owner could come along at any time and take them away from you, and leave you naked wherever you stood.

There is a consistent way to have happiness and that is to be in pursuit of a worthwhile goal where every action brings you closer to it, and for that goal to be embedded in the pursuit of an even higher and more ideal goal, and so on forever.

For example, going to the garden to get pick some strawberries can be a worthwhile activity, so you and your companion can have a healthy dessert, and that can be embedded in the two of you each having healthy lives, and that can be embedded in each of you having worthwhile goals for your lives, like constructing highways, or cars, or computers, or blog posts, so other people can have opportunities to make their lives happier. Every moment can bring you closer to accomplishing something you value being done.

Make your every action a goal-directed act that moves toward something you consider worthy of being done, and you will be happy.

Seek and you will find, … something.

Tags

Alternate realities, Challenges to invent, Make it work!

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. Matt, 7:7 NKJV

“Where observation is concerned, chance favors the prepared mind.” – Louis Pasteur

Bring a gun to your shoulder, take aim and targets will appear.

To a hammer, the whole world becomes a field of nails.

To the right ship, the whole ocean is a highway.

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To reveal a new truth, think about it, and then do each of the following: I take an idea and,

Ask, beg, demand, grill, seek, try, observe, postulate, intend, investigate, study, analyze, details, speculate, generalities, review, facts, meditate, consequences, compare, similarities, weigh, differences, test, qualities, challenge, powers, rack, deficiencies, stretch, assumptions, squeeze, facts, magnify, details, shrink, lists, endeavor, heroically, attempt, impossible, begin, fresh, explore, peripheries, choose, core, cope, quit, struggle, upward, endure, downward, long-view, short-view, alternate, realities, substitute, fantasies, reproduce, unique, generate, identical, equivalents, outcomes, precursors, findings, practical, useful, functional, effective, works, fails, propose, suggest, submit, recommend, develop, assemble, produce, promote, exploit, expand, encourage, boost, enliven, hoist, cheer, help.

Now go seek, find, go in, and do it.

It was a beautiful day in this best of all possible worlds.

Tags

Absurdity, Candide, Optimism, Reality versus Absurdity, Voltaire

Debbie and I finished Voltaire’s book, Candide, as our bedtime reading last night, and I had hoped it would cheer me up during these gloomy days of human distress. Hmm … a little.

This copy was published in 1946 and I think I read it in the summer of 1955 when I stayed in Pullman, Washington, for the summer. I don’t think I ever read it again, but I remembered its general storyline and had fond memories of that summer of reading classic books. Well, sixty-five years later it is still good bedtime reading about overindulgence in optimism. It probably influenced my behavior ever since that time because I don’t remember being skeptical before then about optimism or people who were optimistic.

Since that time, when I was twenty years old, I have become increasingly hesitant to put much trust or faith in people who believe in impossible things. I am willing to extend a lot of support to people who are pursuing unusual creative things, but I limit it to things that have a physical result. Hopefully a worthwhile result. But a positive result isn’t essential, because when one pursues a truly new idea the outcome is always in doubt.

Every new idea is absurd, and every old idea put to new use is heretical.

Natural selection isn’t dominant selective force at the moment. Moles to humans.

Tags

Catastrophe selection, Eveish Selection, human survival, Natural Selection, Social Selection

Moles living underground may have been our ancestors who survived the K-T extinction event 65 million years ago. But today the selective force isn’t the gradual evolution of species to fit new environments, nor those changes being adapted to new uses and stimulating a whole new direction for the survival of the fittest, nor the species’ luck of having spread far and wide and having some members survive catastrophic events, and not even Eveish selection in which females choose their mates based on their abstract abilities rather than their healthy appearance. No.

Today human selection is based on what women want. That is the greatest question and most obscure problem facing young men seeking young women, and humanity in general today. In the older cultures that are still present women have some say in their mates, and their parents may have as much and even more influence. But here in modern democracies women have a nearly total choice of their men, and with our ever loosening laws they have the right and ability to move on when their men don’t measure up to their present needs, or hopes, or whims.

Nowadays, what women do want changes with the fashions of the media. The proof of that seemingly absurd assertion can be found in the names they choose for their children. The heroes of the days’ public fashion are what influence their choice of names for their children, and that is what is in their minds and expectations when young women are getting pregnant and having those children.

There is a feedback loop between what the women want and what the media produces. The media wants to sell their wares and make money, and so they provide what they believe these young women want. Thus, they produce TV, music, movies and other media that these media producers believe will cater to that abstract and vividly portrayed desire. The young women become involved in the part of the media that best illustrates what they want and buy into the current fashion. They may personally desire those media archetypes, which aren’t directly available, but those ideals are what are subconsciously determining the inclination to the choices of their real mates.

The most popular media is an easily observed conduit of what is hot and what is not, in these young women’s conception of their ideals.

Today’s children are born not of natural selection of survivors, nor the healthiest survivors, nor of the ablest in public skills, but of the closeness to current media ideals.

What is the cause?

Tags

Pre-adaptation, Wisdom

A key factor in human wisdom is cultivating the habit of observing the things that precede happenings. With most things most of the time, simple inertia is a good indicator of the immediate future. But occasionally there will be catastrophic events and everything will suddenly change. Punctuated equilibrium is a theory that evolution occurs primarily through short bursts of intense speciation, followed by lengthy periods of stasis or equilibrium. The model postulates that nearly 99% of a species’ time on earth is spent in stasis, but with a powerful disruption, change will happen quickly. Events such as the Chixulube meteor that killed the dinosaurs and permitted the ascent of mammals are classic examples. Also, in the statistical analysis of monetary investment, there are rare and thus largely unpredictable events that change the market in a day as much as years of normal predictable actions. Nassim Taleb has created a theory of behavior he named Antifragile, which incorporates actions that pre-respond to what he calls Black Swan events. He suggests that the wise person spread his assets widely in such a way that when catastrophe strikes it will wipe out competitors, but leave the Antifragile person with enough resources to survive and recover quickly. When these events happen, he will then be able to achieve a very robust relationship to the previously limited resources and thrive.

To answer “What is the cause?” we now have an insight that will help. In the first place, that is in times of stasis, which is what we call normal times, we play the social games that everyone knows will be beneficial, such as getting a good education, a good job, and performing well. But ultimately, in the bigger view, that means don’t take chances that have little potential for benefit and high risk for serious injury or death if there are likely to be complications. An easy one to avoid is drinking alcohol to relieve stress, instead of drinking for pleasure and social entertainment. In the second condition, the preparation for the unknowable catastrophic risk is to have instantly available backup places in time, space, matter, and energy where the catastrophe can be totally avoided. For a species or a tightly integrated social group, that means to have enclaves in every conceivable habitable location. When severe problems arise you have a new home or you have a home for one of your group’s members.

Wisdom is seeing potential futures and preadapting to them to maximize the potential for a thriving life.

Never do anything for the first time.

Tags

Arctic survival

I just finished reading Neil Shubin’s book The Universe Within, Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People.

When beginning my second reading, on page 7, a statement leaped out at me and clicked!

Never do anything for the first time.

“I learned plenty of lessons that first year in Greenland, ones that were to become useful when I began running my own Arctic expeditions eleven years later. By bringing leaky leather boots, a small used tent, and a huge flashlight to the land of mud, ice, and the midnight sun, I made so many bad choices that first year that I remained smiling only by reciting my own motto, ‘Never do anything for the first time.'”

That sentence which I read a few days ago had been forgotten until, when reading it again, it took on a much deeper meaning for me.

I feel like everything I do is being done for the first time, and it is to be expected that a new thing won’t work properly in the first embodiment. Whatever it is that I’m doing is not right from the beginning and must be reworked.

For example, the Covid face mask based on a 1.75-liter plastic bottle has been modified at least a hundred times with significant improvements. They were tiny improvements but significant. And, usually, each improvement is overwritten with a slightly better solution and that one is reworked too.

I am not a perfectionist! I just want things to work well enough for a first-time user to get the expected results.

On deconstructing this concept, it became obvious that to get something to work right requires experience with the component actions. Any new thing will require some learning, and if it’s a totally new thing, that means learning a new set of skills. And then weaving these sometimes contradictory skills into a functioning pattern of habits. Then when the totally new thing is worked on, it is with similar skills to what you have already developed, and the task isn’t totally new.

All of this is obvious when it is picked apart, so when you are aware that you are beginning something new, you should discover the separate skills needed and get experience using the equipment to be used in the wilderness, where there is no backup, in similar situations where a problem is easily rectified.

When Shubin was dropped off an airplane for a few weeks in the high Arctic wilderness to do archeology, he was wearing leaky boots and was trying to sleep in a cheap second-hand tent in 24-hour sunlight. It didn’t work out well.

“Be prepared!” is the Boy Scout motto, but being prepared means having a good idea of the problems that will be encountered and having the right equipment and the well-practiced skills to use it properly.

Getting things right the first time requires preparation.

Is Covid going to kill you?

Tags

Combating Covid with baby shampoo, Covid comedy, Sniff a little soapy water, Wash your face every day.

Covid is a potentially deadly disease, but if it is limited to the sinuses it is like a common head cold and clears up in two weeks. Sometimes the symptoms are so mild the person doesn’t realize they are sick.

The real problem occurs when a person with a Covid sinus infection inhales some sinus mucus and it gets into their lungs. This inhaling of sinus mucus becomes a greater problem as a person ages past sixty and their muscles grow weaker and their flesh saggier.

The epiglottis flap at the back of old people’s mouths lets saliva and post-nasal drip get past the closure to the trachea and the viruses move on into their lungs. The Covid viruses have evolved a way of penetrating the cell walls of mucus membranes where they co-opt the living cell’s processes to reproduce more Covid virus particles. The Covid virus is really only alive while it is in other beings’ living cells. To be alive means to be metabolizing energy and reproducing, neither of which it does while outside of other beings’ living cells. Coronavirus particles exist on doorknobs and on hands and in human sinuses, but they don’t begin living until they penetrate a cell wall, and that usually happens first in the sinuses.

Soap kills exposed viruses and that is why I have been promoting any mild soap, and baby shampoo in particular, to wash your face every day and sniff a little of the sudsy water into your nose.

I have been writing this message in various ways trying to find a way of saying it that will make sense to people. There may be a time, say about two years from now, when nearly everyone has been vaccinated against Covid, but before that time there will be millions of people who develop a serious sickness and already there have been 334,000 deaths attributed to Covid.

It is my opinion that if everyone was using my face washing technique and wearing my high-efficiency face mask, the infection rate would drop greatly, and there would be far fewer deaths by the time the vaccines became available. What I propose could become widely known and used within a few weeks if the media would promote the simple ideas proposed in this blog. But instead, the comics have a wonderful time making money out of their silly comedy routines ridiculing the people who are trying to end this pandemic.