Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category
THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END!…
…well, maybe not.
We hear at Chaos Seeds believe the world, as we know it, will come to an end.
However, two of the thirteen voices in my head seem to disagree on how or when exactly this is going to end. The current and most popular date for the apocalypse is December 21, 2012. However, when it comes to mankind trying to figure out when it’s going to die, well golly gee, the track record doesn’t exactly speak well.
One of the oldest doomsday dates is 2,800BC, when, on an Assyrian clay tablet is written:
“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.”
Sounds like something you’d hear around the old folk’s home, isn’t it?
Then in 1284, Pope Innocent III decided that the world would end that year. You may ask yourself, did the Good Lord illuminate him in a golden aura and whisper in his ear this Divine Truth?…Well, no. He took the date the Muslim religion was founded and added 666. Not in the least bit racist, thankyouverymuch.
Jumping ahead a bit, in May 18, 1910, Halley’s Comet came ’round our neck of the woods and for some reason everybody got caught up in a tizzy. Jehova’s Witnesses decided that the coming of the comet would portend our doom. While the death of misunderstood genius Mark Twain is certainly tragic in of itself, nothing else happened.
Then, as we all know, the world was supposed to end in 1999 with the Y2K catastrophe shooting off nuclear missiles and dropping planes out of the sky and computers coming to life to eat our young…but again, we’re still here.
Notwithstanding our excellent track record at predicting our doom and then being shown just how crazy we are to predict our own doom, let’s see what’s going to happen on December 21, 2012.
God…
…is in the mind.
<!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>
A thought experiment:
Let’s say a Christian is walking down the street. He’s broke, having a hard time of it financially, and is in desperate need of money. He has no money to go to work tomorrow, as he is out of gas.
Breaking down, he bows his head and prays desperately to God for just a little bit of money to tide him over until he gets his next paycheck. Done, he heads a few blocks down where he suddenly spies a crisp fifty dollar bill.
Russell’s Teapot
Brilliant.
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
- Bertrand Russell
Fractals, Weirdness, and Science
I would never pretend to be smarter than what I actually am. While I enjoy reading about fractals and Chaos Theory, most of my readings come from popular science books that just a little ironically leave out the math part of this mathematical science. (And the odds are against my understanding the math even if it was left in…)
Thus I won’t presume to attempt to explain what I know about fractals. Instead, I’ll let others do the talking, and I’ll also give you a sneak peak into this inherent natural weirdness.
Enjoy.
“I conceived and developed a new geometry of nature and implemented its use in a number of diverse fields. It describes many of the irregular and fragmented patterns around us, and leads to full-fledged theories, by identifying a family of shapes I call fractals.”
- Benoit Mandelbrot
Absence of Evidence and Evidence of Absence
Gin Rummy: I always say the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
Riley: What?
Gin Rummy: Simply because you don’t have evidence that something does exist does not mean you have evidence of something that doesn’t exist.
Riley: What?
Gin Rummy: What country are you from?
Riley: What?
Gin Rummy: ‘What’ ain’t no country I ever heard of! They speak English in ‘What’?
Riley: What?
Gin Rummy: English, motherf*****! Do you speak it?
Riley: Yeah.
Gin Rummy: So you understand the words I’m saying to you!
Riley: Yeah.
Gin Rummy: Well, what I’m saying is that there are known knowns and that there are known unknowns. But there are also unknown unknowns; things we don’t know that we don’t know.
Riley: What?
Gin Rummy: Say what again! Say what again! I dare you! I double dare you, motherf*****! Say what one more time!
The Boondocks – A Date With The Health Inspector
We’re a couple of weeks into the site being up, and I’m more or less pleased with how it’s coming along. There are several Badass Links posted, full of trivial entertainment and articles detailing both hope for the future and the hopelessness of the future. I finally got the advertising up and looking not-so-horrible, and the Amazon store is up and ready, full of books I heartily recommend. Good food for the neocortex.