Spring Song This time of year/place—springtime in the northern hemisphere—easily brings to mind the theme of resurrection. But first it comes to the senses: the warming temperatures and steadily lengthening days; the sight and scent of fragrant blossoms; the lime-green newness squeezing out from seemingly dead branches. It’s glorious! Here’s a poem by Lucille Clifton that—to my …
Science & Spirit
Art & Science
Flames Wow - What a shock of disbelief and sadness, to see images of the Notre Dame cathedral engulfed in flames. Now of course we know that any phenomenon that appears is destined—at some point—to disappear. But in all kinds of relative contexts, there’s genuine value in preserving/reproducing certain things—and (imo) the Notre Dame cathedral is one of these. In the Hindu triumvirate of …
Return Of The Geese
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. ~ William Blake Returning to writing from a previous time can be an interesting exercise, and tends to clearly highlight which essays, poems, etc. have an evergreen quality—some kind of value that does not diminish with the passing of time—and which ones, not so much. Here's a piece that, imo, falls …
As If
Wave-Particle In a fascinating article—Does The Universe Exist If We're Not Looking?—that's based upon an interview with (the late) physicist John Wheeler, I learned something new about the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment, which is that it originally was a thought experiment involving a pair of distant galaxies and an even-more-distant quasar. It was only later that a table-top version …
Practice Notes: The Causal Potency of Wisdom vs. Ignorance
Dueling Hypotheses Let’s consider two hypotheses—both of which pertain to the relationship between (1) the subtle, internal and generally private realm of thoughts/feelings, and (2) perceptions of a presumably shared “external world.” Taken individually, each of these hypotheses makes sense to me: my inclination is to agree with them both. Yet when they’re placed side by side, they seem to …
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Happy Pi Day!
3.14 Well, π (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter) has now been calculated to 31.4 trillion digits. That's a lot of digits! And represents significant progress, I suppose, towards the completion of an ultimately impossible task (viz. the decimal representation of an irrational number). But fun nevertheless. Estimates are that it would take somewhere in the neighborhood of …