Here in the southern city of an antipodean continent, the weather has been too clouded to see the partial lunar eclipse, the full moon and the sun - let alone Venus transiting across it (which one cannot see unaided anyways). But here's a picture that astronomer Ian Musgrave has prepared earlier...
Yesterday, I had a funny little gremlin in my computer. Each time I tried to dial-up my internet connection (that's right...dial-up), the icon would disappear off the desktop, then all these other programs would open, do a rolling cascade thing until the computer said WTF? and shut itself down.
Hmm...curious.
So I contacted the IT chappie who built this new computer for me back in August 2011 and, funnily, he didn't want to know about it. Especially after I told him that some software he had loaded on kept prompting the antivirus software to say: Warning! Warning! Suspicious software.
Long story truncated, I flipped through the phone book and called another IT chappie who came this morning and chased all the gremlins out of my computer. Except the gremlin that prompted me to call him in the first place, wasn't a gremlin at all, but something funny that was going on with the telephone lines that gave my computer the hic-cups (and lots of other people's computers as well).
The thing I like about my new IT chappie is that he didn't talk to me like I was a cashed-up ignoramus who he could take advantage of - like the previous IT chappie did when he overcharged me by a few hundred bucks for this computer.
For sure, I'm not as savvy on the IT front as I would like to be, yet I am way savvy about certain matters that other people are dimly aware of and I also know that there's a wyrding phenomenon that sorts out people who do the wrong thing by me. An example was when my ex-husband wished cancer on me. Less than three years after verbalising that wish, he was diagnosed with an especially aggressive and nasty strain of mouth cancer.
People who are ignorant of the threefold rule have a greater tendency to fall foul of it. I've known about the threefold rule since I was a child, which isn't to say that I don't experience a desire for revenge or to enact a little Machiavellian payback: I do. Rather after 50 years of walking in this world, I have learned that most, if not all, people who aggravate me have received enough attention from me already; enough of my time, energy, money and consideration. When folks talk about their mispent youth, they really mean the Youth they missed and which was spent by others.
Back in 2004, when Venus trotted across the sun the first time this century, my inner and outer landscapes began to shift and morph. I suspect I swallowed the whole bottle of red pills - greedy thing that I am.
I thought they were Smarties.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. (long pause, sighs) Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
(In his left hand, Morpheus shows a blue pill.)
Morpheus: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. (a red pill is shown in his other hand) You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. (Long pause; Neo begins to reach for the red pill)
Early in the morning on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb blast was detonated at the Trinity Site. The actual explosion produced a blast equivalent to eighteen thousand tons of TNT. The resulting fireball that scorched the desert formed a depressed crater 800 yards in diameter, glazed with a light olive green, glass-like substance where the sand had melted and solidified again. The following excerpt is from Time Magazine, Sept. 17, 1945: “Seen from the air, the crater itself seems (looks like) a lake of green Jade shaped like a splashy star, and set in a sere disc of burnt vegetation half a mile wide. From close up the lake is a glistening encrustation of blue-green glass 2,400 feet in diameter, formed when the molten soil solidified in air.”
Yesterday, I had a funny little gremlin in my computer. Each time I tried to dial-up my internet connection (that's right...dial-up), the icon would disappear off the desktop, then all these other programs would open, do a rolling cascade thing until the computer said WTF? and shut itself down.
Hmm...curious.
So I contacted the IT chappie who built this new computer for me back in August 2011 and, funnily, he didn't want to know about it. Especially after I told him that some software he had loaded on kept prompting the antivirus software to say: Warning! Warning! Suspicious software.
Long story truncated, I flipped through the phone book and called another IT chappie who came this morning and chased all the gremlins out of my computer. Except the gremlin that prompted me to call him in the first place, wasn't a gremlin at all, but something funny that was going on with the telephone lines that gave my computer the hic-cups (and lots of other people's computers as well).
The thing I like about my new IT chappie is that he didn't talk to me like I was a cashed-up ignoramus who he could take advantage of - like the previous IT chappie did when he overcharged me by a few hundred bucks for this computer.
For sure, I'm not as savvy on the IT front as I would like to be, yet I am way savvy about certain matters that other people are dimly aware of and I also know that there's a wyrding phenomenon that sorts out people who do the wrong thing by me. An example was when my ex-husband wished cancer on me. Less than three years after verbalising that wish, he was diagnosed with an especially aggressive and nasty strain of mouth cancer.
People who are ignorant of the threefold rule have a greater tendency to fall foul of it. I've known about the threefold rule since I was a child, which isn't to say that I don't experience a desire for revenge or to enact a little Machiavellian payback: I do. Rather after 50 years of walking in this world, I have learned that most, if not all, people who aggravate me have received enough attention from me already; enough of my time, energy, money and consideration. When folks talk about their mispent youth, they really mean the Youth they missed and which was spent by others.
Back in 2004, when Venus trotted across the sun the first time this century, my inner and outer landscapes began to shift and morph. I suspect I swallowed the whole bottle of red pills - greedy thing that I am.
I thought they were Smarties.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. (long pause, sighs) Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
(In his left hand, Morpheus shows a blue pill.)
Morpheus: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. (a red pill is shown in his other hand) You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. (Long pause; Neo begins to reach for the red pill)
Remember -- all I am offering is the truth, nothing
more.
Your Manipulative Mind
Have you ever, against your better judgment, nurtured a belief in the paranormal? Or do you believe that gifted rock singers are more likely to die at the age of 27? Maybe you just have the sneaking suspicion that you are smarter, funnier and more attractive than the next person.
If you buy into any of these beliefs, you are probably suffering from confirmation bias - the mind's tendency to pick and choose information to support our preconceptions, while ignoring a wealth of evidence to the contrary. Consider the idea that rock stars die at 27 - a fallacy that crops up time and again in the media. Once you have heard of the 27 Club, it is easy to cite a handful of examples that fit the bill - Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse - while forgetting the countless other musicians who survived their excesses past the age of 30.
The confirmation bias is just one of a truckload of flaws in our thinking that psychologists have steadily documented over the past few decades. Indeed, everything from your choice of cellphone to your political agenda is probably clouded by several kinds of fuzzy logic that sway the way you weigh up evidence and come to a decision.
Why did we evolve such an apparently flawed instrument? Our irrational nature is very difficult to explain if you maintain that human intelligence evolved to solve complex problems, where clear, logical thought should offer the advantage. As such, it has remained something of a puzzle.
An elegant explanation may have arrived. Hugo Mercier at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and Dan Sperber at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, believe that human reasoning evolved to help us to argue. An ability to argue convincingly would have been in our ancestors' interest as they evolved more advanced forms of communication, the researchers propose. Since the most persuasive lines of reasoning are not always the most logical, our brains' apparent foibles may result from this need to justify our actions and convince others to see our point of view - whether it is right or wrong. "You end up making decisions that look rational, rather than making genuinely rational decisions," says Mercier.
The flip side, of course, is that we also face the risk of being duped by others, so we developed a healthy scepticism and an ability to see the flaws in others' reasoning. This ability to argue back and forth may have been crucial to humanity's success - allowing us to come to extraordinary solutions as a group that we could never reach alone.
Here we have a radically different idea that stands apart from the common wisdom in psychology, cognitive science, and even in philosophy. In Western thought, for at least the last couple hundred years, people have thought that reasoning was purely for individual reasons. But Dan challenged this idea and said that it was a purely social phenomenon and that the goal was argumentative, the goal was to convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.
And the beauty of this theory is that not only is it more evolutionarily plausible, but it also accounts for a wide range of data in psychology. Maybe the most salient of phenomena that the argumentative theory explains is the confirmation bias.
Psychologists have shown that people have a very, very strong, robust confirmation bias. What this means is that when they have an idea, and they start to reason about that idea, they are going to mostly find arguments for their own idea. They're going to come up with reasons why they're right, they're going to come up with justifications for their decisions. They're not going to challenge themselves.
Sourced from The Edge: The Argumentative Theory and "The Argumentative Ape", New Scientist, 26 May 2012, author Dan Jones.
Red pill. Blue pill.
Neo: Okey dokey... free my mind. Right, no problem, free my mind, free my mind, no problem, right...
Early in the morning on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb blast was detonated at the Trinity Site. The actual explosion produced a blast equivalent to eighteen thousand tons of TNT. The resulting fireball that scorched the desert formed a depressed crater 800 yards in diameter, glazed with a light olive green, glass-like substance where the sand had melted and solidified again. The following excerpt is from Time Magazine, Sept. 17, 1945: “Seen from the air, the crater itself seems (looks like) a lake of green Jade shaped like a splashy star, and set in a sere disc of burnt vegetation half a mile wide. From close up the lake is a glistening encrustation of blue-green glass 2,400 feet in diameter, formed when the molten soil solidified in air.”
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