The Map of the Universe in Your Head

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So, you get born, born as in popping out of your mommie’s tummy. Your little earsies hear some noise, your whole little body is wet and cold, and, if you were born long enough ago, your little butt hurts and you’re dizzy, because some one has dangled you by your feet and smacked your little bottom.

But what is your eensie, teensie, but rapidly growing and developing brain doing, the brain in which your mind is hiding? Why it’s busily trying to assemble all this noise and wet and cold and aching little butt into a map of the universe.

Look in your head. Now. Do it. Don’t pick up a hammer or a drill, use your mind’s eye, use your sense of self, the ability to focus your attention outwardly through your senses, or inwardly on your mind. Look in. What is going on in there? Probably too much at one time, but look, down under that, there’s map!

It’s a map in the sense that, while you grew up, as you had all that sensory input, all those experiences you have had, have been assembled into a map of those experiences. You usually don’t think of it that way, but you have linked all that sensory data into mass of memory, with connecting bridges, overpasses, underpasses, cloverleaves, sidewalks, escalators, stairways, hallways, and short cuts, all to make a coherent map of your world.

And it’s not a 3-D map, it’s fully four dimensional! The past is known and the future is under construction, but you’ve started working out that future road in your imagination, haven’t you?

And what was the way you made the map, starting right from that wee baby brain? You did it, usually unconsciously, by hypothesis. You still do it. Your mind groups the data, makes an assumption, tests the assumption, and you get your little fingers burnt when you assume that the pretty light is so pretty it can’t hurt you, and you stick your hand in the fire. A few years later, you stick it in the light socket to see what makes the lamp turn on. Your hypothesis has been tested. You either revise the hypothesis, test it, and redraw that part of the map, or mama finds you toasted to a crisp when you stick your whole arm in the fire, or finds you lying on the floor needing a defibrillator for your little heart.

This is the basis of science. You just have to start consciously testing and improving that map in your head, and presto change-o, you’re a scientist!

This is assuming, of course, that you weren’t born with your head up your ass. If that is the case, your map will be quite small and provincial, and very self centered. Observing almost any politician will prove my point.

 

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

Sasquatch responsible for headless corpses in Canada – SLP4-23

We See the Wee Folk and They Ain’t that Wee

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Way back in high school, some friends and I went to hang out at a coffee house that was only open on Saturday nights. They always had one local folksinger or another performing. It was in the basement of a convent.

A few hours after we got there, one of us went out for a bit of fresh air. A few minutes later, he came rushing back in, all oddly excited and perturbed. He said we had to go out in back, where the parking lot was, and look at the trees at the back edge of the property. He wouldn’t tell us what we were going to look at, he just wanted to see what we thought was going on. There was a good singer wailing away on his guitar so we said no. Our friend sat down and fidgeted until the song was done, and then compelled us to get outside.

It was dark, there was no moon up. It was summer, but no special day. We got to the back edge, where there were some trees. We all stood there quietly, looking at the trees, because our friend said that was where he saw it. It looked like a very dark grove of trees.

Gradually, though, the scene changed. Just past the trees you could see a meadow, with a pond in it. The area was lit up as though the moon was full and high. Wisps of fog drifted about. You could hear music playing, a bit like bagpipes, but much sweeter and enchanting. A drummer was playing, a medium quick beat, sounding a bit like an Irish bodhran.

A few minutes later, next to the pond, a circle of dancers appeared, not fully visible, but like a misty, foggy, circle of dancers, dancing in long diaphanous robes. The dancers and robes were indistinct, but had the glowing, blue-white color of the full moon. They appeared taller than us and slender.

We watched, gob smacked speechless, for maybe five minutes. I then started to walk down toward the dancers. Suddenly, a fear began to rise up in us. It felt like something off to the right of us, in very dense woods, just noticed us being able to see the dancers and was very pissed off about it.

We turned tail and ran to the car, jumped in, and hauled ass out of there. For several miles it felt like something very tall and dark was watching from the convent grounds, looming toward us, making unclear but very dire threats as to what would happen should we come back.

Now, we had only ever gone to the coffee shop after dark, so we never had really seen what the property behind the convent looked like. A few weeks later a couple-three of us convinced each other to go have a look at the forest and pond in broad daylight.

There was no pond. There was a narrow thicket of trees and then a farmer’s field. There was no dense forest off to the right, where the guardian of the fairy dance had stood guard.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEYgLxAEH-M

Schrödinger’s Cat and the Trousers of Time

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At the end of last week’s quasi-theory, I made the mistake of mentioning Schrödinger’s cat. I have been told by a higher authority, i. e., the Reverend Jeff, that I should somehow expand on Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment, even though I specifically said that, and I quote, “I refuse to explain Schrödinger’s cat.”

Erwin Schrödinger devised his thought experiment in 1935 to illustrate a problem in applying a quantum mechanics idea to larger, complex systems. The idea was, that at the atomic and smaller level, quantum systems, like electrons, atoms, protons and such, the actual state of the system is a sort of superposition of all possible states that that system could possibly have. It isn’t until an outside observation is made that the superposition of all possible states collapse into one specific state. The observer can be anything from another quantum system getting close enough to interact with the system under consideration, to a real experimental physicist, who does real things, and doesn’t just play around with mathematics all day. Schrödinger named this weird ass connection between the observer and the observed, “entanglement”, although, being Austrian, he actually named it “verschränkung”, which means, oddly enough, entanglement.

So, Schrödinger thought that this whole entanglement thingy was absurd, especially since it surely didn’t seem to be happening to anything in the normal world. He took, purely in thought, his cat and stuck it in a box. He put a mechanism in the box with the cat, presumably in way that the cat couldn’t play with it and thereby muck up the thought experiment. The mechanism had a bit of radioactive material, a Geiger counter, a trip hammer, and a vial of hydrocyanic acid. When the Geiger counter detects the decay of an atom of the radioactive material, it triggers the trip hammer to smash the vial, the hydrocyanic acid evaporates and becomes cyanide, and presto change-o, the cat is dead. There’s only a teensy bit of the radioactive stuff, so there’s only a small chance at any moment that the cat will be killed.

Now, if the whole quantum entanglement theory works on big things, too, the radioactive decay, will, or won’t, happen, until we open the box. The cat is therefore both dead and alive until we take a peek in the box.

Here’s where it gets weird. Quantum entanglement has been experimentally shown to be real. It has been shown to be real in experiments using around ten million electrons, as well as ten million photons.

And here’s where the trousers of time enter the scene.

We have all become familiar with the idea that, at any given instant, when we make a decision to do one thing or another, our timeline splits, like the legs of a pair of pants, thereby producing an alternate universe. There’s a timeline where we had chocolate instead of vanilla. There’s a timeline where we chose strawberry instead. If we are picking from amongst Ben and Jerry flavors, with Baskin-Robbins thrown in, the legs of the trousers of time become more like pants for a millepede.

Schrödinger’s cat had only two choices: alive or dead. I ask you, is that poor kitty therefore a zombie?

My thanks to the late Terry Pratchett for the beautiful trousers of time metaphor.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

Rerun on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbQwDu7hXDY

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

https://youtu.be/Qw_F1YjI6_Y

Flatland is an Event Horizon

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The Reverend Jeff, of Squatcher’s Lounge Fame, suggested that I do a quasi theory on the idea that the event horizon of a black hole is two dimensional, an idea that was initially proposed years ago, but has somehow popped up again in various news feeds of those of us who have gone and liked, as in Facebook “liked”, a number of science related Facebook pages.

After spending a good deal of time yesterday researching the proposed two dimensional flatness of black holes, researched as in Googling the bejesus out of black hole related words and phrases, I have come to the conclusion that the mathematical physicists doing the research mean one thing by two dimensional, and the people writing the articles popping up in news feeds mean another.

What I mean is that black holes are, in point of fact, spherical. They are not flat, as such. The two dimensional surface being discussed is the flat surface of a sphere, which is flat only if you are a flat being living on the surface of the sphere and can’t look up, but only sideways along the plane of the sphere.

Of course there aren’t any beings, as such, living on the surface of a black hole, because a black hole has no surface, as such. It has what they euphemistically call an event horizon. Matter, light, what have you, disappears almost utterly when it passes the event horizon, giving a last gasp of breath, or maybe sort of a fart, known as Hawking radiation, named after Steven Hawking.

I know that if I were being crushed by a black hole, I’d be hawking up everything, too, so the name is quite appropriate.

Hawking radiation is defined as a virtual particle. A virtual particle is neither here nor there. A Hawking radiation virtual particle only gets to here, or there, if it gets to escape the event horizon. If it does that, it becomes the radiation that lets us detect the black hole. Apparently a lot of these virtual particles escape black holes and head our way because we have detected black holes. This seems like circular reasoning to me, but that’s mathematical physics for you. Neither here nor there, much like Schrodinger’s cat, who is neither dead or alive until you open the door of the box the cat lives in.

I refuse to explain Schrodinger’s cat, but I have often wondered if Schrodinger put a litter box in with his cat.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:
Bigfoot captured stalking girl in Tatra Mountains – SLP4-19
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXXCo_sYnls

More About Astral Hells

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Because my theory concerning the afterlife possibilities for money grubbing televangelists and similar hucksters went over so well last week, this week I’ll list some of the astral hells the Buddhists believe in. I have swiped most of the list from Wikipedia’s entry on Buddhist hells, so there’s your necessary attribution. Wikipedia swiped it from various other sources, so what the hell, here goes.

The primary source is the Dīrghāgama, a Buddhist sutra, from the “Chapter on Hell”, within that sutra.

The generic Hindu and Buddhist name for hell is naraka, which means hells. The Hindu hells all have individual names and tortures which vary from sect to sect, but they’re pretty much like the Buddhist ones.

The first major Buddhist hell is called Thoughts. The second is called Black Rope. The third is called Crushing. The fourth is called Moaning. The fifth is called Great Moaning. The sixth is called Burning. The seventh is called Great Burning. The eighth is called Unremitting.

The Hell of Thoughts itself contains sixteen smaller hells. The smaller hells are 500 square yojana in area, or a little over 500 square miles. The first small hell is called Black Sand. The second small hell is called Boiling Excrement. The third is called Five Hundred Nails. The fourth is called Hunger. The fifth is called Thirst. The sixth is called Single Copper Cauldron. The seventh is called Many Copper Cauldrons. The eighth is called Stone Pestle. The ninth is called Pus and Blood. The tenth is called Measuring Fire. The eleventh is called Ash River. The twelfth is called Iron Pellets. The thirteenth is called Axes and Hatchets. The fourteenth is called Jackals and Wolves. The fifteenth is called Sword Cuts. The sixteenth is called Cold and Ice.

The names of these hells are pretty descriptive. I leave it to your imagination to further illustrate what goes on in them. Remember, these sixteen are just the sub list of hells in the Hell of Thoughts. The other seven hells have their own sub hells, too. But, since Wikipedia didn’t quote the Dīrghāgama on them, I won’t either.

Most of the sinning I do is bad thoughts, which is true of most humans as well. There just aren’t enough hours in a day to put all our thoughts into deeds.

Originally presented on The Squatchers Lounge Podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBthL9YsNrQ

Hucksters and Hell

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A friend of mine sent an email to me with a video for me to watch and comment on. The video is of an investigative reporter examining the lifestyles of televangelists, Christian televangelists, to be precise. If any of you out there are fans of televangelists, well then consider the rest of this to be what I think to be the fate of whatever huckster lives a very large and lavish lifestyle by conning poor folks out of their money. On the other hand, the following somewhat continues on my last theory, offered several weeks ago, concerning twelve spheres and the influence of them on our lives, only with a different set of spheres and no geometry.

While I do not believe in any thing like eternal damnation, I am quite sure there are what the Hindus and Buddhists call astral hells, where particularly bad people can spend time after shuffling off this mortal coil. What a pleasant Shakespearean metaphor for kicking the bucket!

The astral world, which in Sanskrit is called “anda”and means sphere, is a higher order sphere than our earth. It is where our lower emotions and desires originate. There’s way more to the astral world than that, but that’s all you need to know for now. That it is a real thing is illustrated, I believe, by all those itsy-bitsy particles experimental nuclear physicists detect popping out of nowhere and then popping back to nowhere. They’re popping in and out of the astral plane.

When stripped of the physical body at death, the conscious attention of your self moves into your astral body. You are technically always in your astral body, but your attention is focused in your physical body. The physical body actually dampens down the intensity of our desires and emotions. Those who are consumed by lust for physical things, money, food, sex, or what have you, build up an immense sort of force, that then burns in them intensely when they pass over, because they are unable to satisfy these physical passions. The force eventually exhausts itself and they move upwards, to a yet somewhat higher sphere, until they reincarnate.

Hopefully the experience of burning in an astral hell purifies the hucksters enough that they won’t pull the same bullshit in their next life. They will, of course, owe great wads of compensatory karma to all those they duped. They won’t remember what they did here, or what happened when they died, but the sort of seed impressions of it remain with their spirit.

The general structure of a reincarnating being is: body, soul, and spirit, or sarke, psyche, and pneuma, in Greek. That’s pneuma as in pneumatic or pneumonia. You die from the body, then die from the soul, but the karmic impressions are remembered or stored in the pneuma or spirit. When you reincarnate, a new psyche or soul is made, which then receives a new sarke, or physical body, so you don’t normally remember past lives. New soul and body combos are made based on your previous screw ups and/or good deeds, as per the spec sheet for your new incarnation, the specifications whereof are worked out between you and the Norns, the three goddesses who wove threads of fate for the old Norse peoples, the three Morai, the weaver goddesses of ancient Greece, who wove the cloth of your destiny, or the karma devas of Hinduism, who do pretty much the same thing.

Once again, it’s that simple.

Originally presented on The Squatchers Lounge Podcast:

 

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

Beach Balls

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What’s the Big Deal About 12?

Summer is coming and a lot of us will head to the beach. Beaches imply beach balls. When you go to buy your beach ball this year, which you will need to do because last year’s will inevitably leak when you try to blow it up this year, buy a baker’s dozen of them.

Yup, thirteen, because you will then be able to demonstrate to yourself, the kids, and everyone else at the beach, exactly why there are twelve signs in the zodiac.

Take those beach balls and blow them up, but not so much that they are tightly inflated. Then get the wife, kids, and maybe some other beach goers to help you put one ball in the middle and the other twelve around it, so that each ball is touching the one in the middle. Now mush them together a bit more tightly. If you squint down between the 12 outer balls, you can just make out that the one in the middle has become a Platonic solid, specifically, a dodecahedron.

The dodecahedron has twelve sides. Each side is a pentagon with equal sides and angles. Of the five Platonic solids, the dodecahedron was the highest. It represented the cosmos, the beautiful order of the universe. Aristotle later claimed that it represented the ether, but then there were other members of Plato’s academy who claimed that Plato would say, when Aristotle would enter a discussion, “Here comes the ass.”

Now Plato also said that he came up with nothing really new and he’s right. He did not invent beach balls, for example. He did say, though, that the universe was organized and influenced by demons.

In Greek, that word was pronounced “daimones”, which meant intelligent influences, much like the theoi, or gods. They were not evil as such, but were lower emanations from the creative source of the cosmos, which the Greeks called the logos, or reason.

The later Christians, who applied the word pagan to all the older religions, converted the word daimones to mean something evil. But then the word pagan originally meant something like, hillbillies, bumpkin, and local yokel. Christians are so disrespectful to us pagans.

So some of these daimones had spheres of influence which moved with seasons, and therefore could be kept track of. The cosmos being twelve sided, there had to be twelve main influences. You can’t easily keep track of twelve spheres sliding around in the sky, not with just paper and pencil, or clay and stylus, as the case maybe, so they invented the zodiac. It’s a circle. It is very easy to divide a circle into twelve pie shaped segments using only a compass, and then chart you’re zodiacal observations and calculations onto your astrological pie chart.

There you go then. Twelve as a basic number of the universe. Throw in the fives sides of the pentagon and five times twelve equals sixty. Sixty minutes, sixty seconds, three hundred sixty degrees. It’s that simple.

This has been Dean Cooper, quasi-scientist, enlightening you with my quasi-theory of the week.

Originally presented on The Squatchers Lounge Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS-_GJ5TQp0

Two Comets Plus a Hopi Prophecy Do not Equal Doomsday from a Twelfth Planet

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So, two comets are visible in the night sky this past week. This occurrence has resulted in an over stimulation of the residual gray matter left in the skulls of Zecharia Sitchin fans. These poor souls believe that ancient aliens roamed our planet early in human history, mucking about with our DNA, building pyramids for us, and generally edumacating us in all skills useful in becoming civilized.

I have seen any number of posts, sharings, news alerts, and what have you, declaring that a Hopi tribal prophecy says that when two comets appear in the sky at the same time, the planet Niburu will begin its return to the inner solar system, Niburu being the twelfth planet that Sitchin declared to be the home planet of our alien masters. The Annunaki will thenceforth wreak havoc upon us.

It is well known that Sitchin pulled his theory out of his butt. It is also known that the Hopi’s knew nothing of a twelfth planet, let alone one named Niburu.

Which brings me to the whole Niburu being the home planet of the Annunaki aliens concept.

Niburu is an ancient Sumerian word. It is one of the many names of the Sumerian sun god, Marduk. Sun god, as in the god of the sun. Not the god of an unknown planet out there in the Kuiper belt, but the sun around which earth orbits, you know, that big bright shiny thingy up in the sky that causes what we scientists call day time.

The Annunaki are the Sumerian pantheon of gods, of whom Nibiru was one. Annunaki is a compound word. Anu is the god of the heavens. Ki is the goddess of the earth. The Annunaki are, collectively, the gods of heaven and earth. The Sumero-Babylonian mythology is essential the same as the mythology of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Celts, and it is very comparable to Hindu and Zoroastrian mythology. None of these ancient peoples thought of their gods as physical beings, alien or not.

As the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell wrote:

“Fortunately, it will not be necessary to argue that Greek, Celtic or Germanic myths were mythological. The peoples themselves knew they were myths…”

Sitchin, von Daniken, and all their ancient alien silliness, is becoming a sort of modern mythology. The difference between now and way back then, is that the ancient mythologies actual make sense, when you know how to understand them. And they are to be understood as myths. The ancient gods had no interest in anal probes, and they needed no saucers to fly about in.

This has been Dean Cooper, quasi-scientist, enlightening you with my quasi-theory of the week.

Originally presented on The Squatchers Lounge Podcast

Ah, Easter!

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Easter surely scoots about, calendar-wise.

The reason is obvious: it is always on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring. Not expecting that were you? The key to it is in the name Easter itself.

The name came into English from an old Germanic goddess named Eostre, the goddess of the dawn. Her holiday was celebrated at the spring equinox, when the path of the sun, or the ecliptic, crosses the celestial equator, and the length of day and night are equal. She was also the goddess of fertility, therefore eggs, bunnies, and lambs were associated with her. She is cognate with the other Mediterranean fertility and love goddesses like Astarte, Ishtar, and Aphrodite, who were all considered aspects of the one mother goddess. There’s some scholarly arguments about all this, but I’m the quasi-scientist around here and this is my quasi-theory.

Now, how do we get from the equinox to the correct Sunday for Easter and what does it have to do with the moon and what all?

Many forms of the mother goddess had sons and the father was usually a sun god and the son was equated with the father. Many of these sons of gods died, and resurrected, for the sake of their followers, and they did it on, or near, the spring equinox. The path of the solar ecliptic and the celestial equator make an x where they cross, both in the spring and fall. These various sons of god, many of whom were crucified, died, in the spring, at the point when the sun is at the center of that big x mark in the sky, the big cross in the sky. Having your son of a sun god resurrect on a Sunday is highly appropriate. Most of these goddess mothers of a son of god were moon goddesses, so you had to get the moon involved, and the full moon has been associated with regrowth and fertility in many cultures.

On the other hand, officially, Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring because the bishops at the Council of Nicea voted to make it so in 325 AD. On the third hand, that council was ruled over by the Emperor Constantine, who had a hard time distinguishing Jesus from Solus Invictus, the form of the Persian god Mithras that he previously worshiped. Go figure.

Originally presented on The Squatchers Lounge Podcast:

Some Observations On My Beard

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A recent preliminary study has found that men’s beards, when allowed to grow to at least an inch or two, grow a species of bacteria, Staphylococcus epidermidis, that has anti-bacterial properties, possibly even against the dreaded Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA bacteria.

This has induced me to examine my own beard. I have not the facilities for proper bacterial culture, so I limited myself to visual observations. Here are my conclusions:

Firstly: It is almost all white, but there are a few dark brown and a few gray ones left.

Secondly: it is not as long as it looks. The longest individual whisker I could find is about 6” long, it is at the bottom of my chin. I had allowed all of them to grow as long as they wanted to, a couple of years ago, but I had to stop that experiment when they reached ZZ Top length and would get stuck in my armpit when I rolled over in my sleep.

Thirdly: here’s a fact that is little known among those who can’t or haven’t grown a beard: yanking on a whisker is like yanking on a pubic hair. They have large roots and it can hurt like the devil. Getting my beard caught in my armpit would literally yank me awake. Whence forth its current length.

Fourthly: not all whiskers grow to the same length. For example, the little inverted triangle just under the lower lip, the ones the hipsters grow these days. Those grow to only a couple of inches long and rarely need trimming. The ones on the upper lip seem to want to grow forever, and mine want to grow straight, forming a classic soup strainer. I therefore trim them short.

Fifthly: having a longer white beard, coupled with long white hair, will get one mistaken for a number of other people. Santa Claus, of course, or a wizard. I have heard background comments, when out in public, of a fat Gandalf being in the area, or a Hogwarts professor. I prefer to be thought of, by Terry Pratchett cognoscenti, as being employed at the Unseen University, where all us wizards never actually practice magic much, due to the widespread destruction that occurs when we fight. Pogonophobes would be justified in their fear.

Boy, I enjoy being obscure.