We’ve been hyper-vigilant since the beginning of the pandemic. No friends or family in our home since late February. But we have had a couple of service people in to repair broken appliances. No way to avoid that. Fortunately, our house has a big-ass attic fan so we opened a couple of windows and turn the fan on high. It sucks a huge volume of air (and virus) out of the house.
Fall Sky
Reality
My current view of Reality is a jigsaw puzzle with an infinite number of pieces, scattered across a table of infinite size. I can see only a few nearby bits of the puzzle’s image. Pieces snap into place by some unseen cosmic hand but I only see those close to me. I am overwhelmed by the number of pieces and the impossibility of finding where each fits. But they do and, in time, a little more of the picture can be made out. And I think, “Of course. It couldn’t have been otherwise.”
I voted!
Historic Land Rover
From Land Rover aficionado John Middleton:
My daughter and I had the rare opportunity to view and ride in the Oxford 1955 Series One that was used in the Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition from London to Singapore. It was found on the Island of St Helena by a man from Yorkshire and rebuilt. I drove from Singapore to London in 2019 and is currently finishing up a tour of the US we drove to Memphis, TN to see it. Tim Slessor wrote a book about the expedition called First Overland and there’s a movie of expedition on YouTube.
Electric log splitter
We don’t heat our home with firewood but Barb and I love a good fire. So I’ve been splitting logs for a lot of years. I used an axe until someone told me about splitting mauls. It’s hard work but good exercise (I told myself). But I’m done with the maul. Barb bought me an electric log splitter. She’s awful good about researching stuff like this and chose a very inexpensive splitter by WEN. At less than $300 it might be the cheapest electric log splitter sold. But set-up was simple and I was splitting logs in no time.
Took about an hour to split enough wood to last us the winter. We keep a rack on the deck and the rest in a big stack out back.
Goodbye big old log
Waiting on my AI buddy
I’d like to live long enough to have a chat with an AI that:
- Has “read” my 5,700 blog posts
- Has read my 4,000 Mastodon posts
- Has watched/analyzed my 525 videos on YouTube
- Has “read” the 858 books in my LibraryThing
Because there is no one who has or will get to know me that well. What would it be like to interact with an intelligence that “shares” those experiences? I cannot imagine.
Found photos
Taken in the Peck’s backyard in Kennett, MO. Buddy Peck, Joanne Peck and Jan Miltenberger on the left; Pam Pylant and Alan Johnson in the middle; Barb and Steve getting frisky; Richard Peck looking at the eclipse.
This was taken after one of the sad little promotions at the radio station. A watermelon seed spitting contest, as I recall.
Time: Do past, present and future exist all at once?
Near the end of the video there’s a reference to presentism and eternalism.
“Philosophical presentism is the view that neither the future nor the past exists. In some versions of presentism, the view is extended to timeless objects or ideas (such as numbers). According to presentism, events and entities that are wholly past or wholly future do not exist at all. Presentism contrasts with eternalism and the growing block theory of time, which hold that past events, like the Battle of Manzikert, and past entities, like Alexander the Great’s warhorse Bucephalus, really exist although not in the present. Eternalism extends to future events as well.” (Wikipedia)
Most of my reading (and many hours of meditation) makes me lean toward presentism. It’s always now. But –as suggested in the video– physicists insist the math argues for eternalism. And I’d kind of like for that to be “true” as well. Perhaps both can be true, depending on what time it is.