Most of us spend our days feeling like a single, solid unit—a person sitting in a chair, walking to the car, or staring at a screen. But beneath the surface of that perceived stillness is a logistical feat that rivals the busiest cities on Earth. Right now, in nearly every cell of your body, trillions of microscopic “motor proteins” called kinesin are literally walking. They possess two “feet” and a distinct stride, hauling massive chemical payloads along cellular tracks to exactly where they are needed. They don’t just drift; they step, they pull, and they deliver.
Kinesin Protein – Gemini AI Generated
Microtubule: These are the “highways” of the cell. They are microscopic, hollow tubes made of protein that provide structural shape to the cell and act as tracks for moving materials from one place to another.
Tubulin Dimer: These are the individual building blocks of the microtubule. Each “bead” you see on the green track is a tubulin dimer. They stack together in a precise, repeating pattern to build and extend the cellular highway.
Kinesin-1: This is the specific “motor protein” or the “worker.” It is a biological machine that converts chemical energy into mechanical work, allowing it to move and carry supplies throughout the cell.
Motor Head: These are the “feet” of the kinesin. There are two of them, and they work in a hand-over-hand (or foot-over-foot) motion. When one foot binds to the microtubule, it triggers a snap-like motion that swings the second foot forward, creating a literal walking stride.
Cargo Vesicle: This is the “shipping container.” It is a fluid-filled sac enclosed by a lipid membrane that carries essential materials—like neurotransmitters, proteins, or nutrients—to their specific destination within the cell.
The sheer scale of this internal industry is staggering. While you take a single breath, billions of these tiny laborers have completed marathons of transport within you. We often look to the stars to feel small, but looking inward is equally humbling. We are not just a single consciousness; we are a vast, bustling cosmos of coordinated effort. Knowing that this tireless, mechanical power hums within us at every second is more than just a biological fact—it is a reminder that we are never truly idle, and we are far more complex than our daily perceptions allow us to believe.
The most profound aspect of these molecular walkers is that they require no supernatural explanation to inspire awe; their existence is a triumph of physics and billions of years of biological refinement. We didn’t find them through revelation, but through the relentless curiosity of cryo-electron microscopy and molecular modeling—tools that allowed us to peer into the dark and find a mechanical reality more sophisticated than anything we could have imagined. To see the kinesin “stride” is to realize that the universe doesn’t need magic to be wondrous; it only needs the elegant, unswerving laws of nature working at a scale we are finally beginning to comprehend.
“Our membranes hold against equilibrium, maintain imbalance, bank against entropy… We are shared, rented and occupied.”
“It is very hard to explain to people who have never known serious depression or anxiety the sheer continuous intensity of it. There is no off switch.”
The current state of America has many of us, I daresay most of us fighting moods from sadness, anger, futility and frustration.
And I’d say everyone I know also has some Trump supporter who is delighted with the deconstruction of the country, although they, of course view the erosion as an improvement. For those of us who abhor what is happening in this country, it’s a specialized kind of grief—watching the architecture of a society being dismantled and realizing the people holding the sledgehammers are convinced they’re “renovating.”
I struggle with how to voice my dissent both to society and large at to the people I care about who are Trump supporters.
The Outrage Algorithm: Feeding the Beast
I could post to social media any number of angry or snarky means or posts but for the most part I haven’t. I haven’t because it feels like it is feeding the Social Media Outrage algorithm which may help the social media channels but probably does little to move the needle on debate or introspection.
Feeding the algorithm is like throwing meat into a woodchipper; it doesn’t feed anyone, it just makes a mess and keeps the blades spinning. It generates “engagement” for the tech giants, but it almost certainly does zero to move the needle on actual human introspection. It’s performance art for an audience that has already decided on the review.
The Identity Moat
Then there’s the personal side—the people I actually care about. How do you voice dissent to someone you love when they’ve traded their logic for a red hat? Jonathan Swift said, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” MAGA is a cult. Many who entered it initially may have been attracted by the contrarian desire to upend norms. But now I believe that it is their identity and not remotely a matter of reason.
Seeking the Signal
So, I struggle. I stay quiet on the feeds to keep my sanity, but I worry that silence looks like Whiteheadian “misplaced concreteness“—as if by not talking about the erosion, I’m pretending the cliff isn’t crumbling.
I’m still looking for the “third way”—a way to dissent that doesn’t involve screaming into the digital void or burning down my own living room. In the meantime, I’ll be here, analyzing the wreckage and trying to find a pun to make the sadness retreat, if only for a second.
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
“The laws of physics are not something that can be suspended or altered to suit our convenience. They are the underlying rules that govern every interaction in the universe, from the behavior of galaxies to the signals in your brain.”
“Science is not just another belief system. It is a process of testing beliefs against reality. If a belief cannot survive the test of reality, it must be discarded, no matter how ancient or comforting it may be.”
~ Victor J. Stenger
In the palm of your hand you can hold a device that captures more data in a second than an ancient scribe could record in a lifetime. Many people use these smartphones to scroll through social media, harness satellite arrays to navigate the globe, or read the foundational literature of ancient civilizations. Yet, a significant number of people use this very technology to argue for a “Young Earth”—a universe created less than 10,000 years ago, where the laws of nature are subject to sudden, miraculous whims.
But there is a profound irony at play. Your smartphone is not just a tool; it is a physical testament to a ~ 13.8-billion-year-old universe. If the “literalist” view of the Bible were true—if the speed of light were variable, if radioactive decay were accelerated, or if the Earth’s geology were the result of a single year-long flood—the phone in your pocket would be a lifeless brick of glass and metal.
To hold a smartphone is to hold the evidence of “Deep Time.”
The Time-Traveler in Your Pocket: GPS and Relativity
When you open a map app, your phone communicates with satellites orbiting 20,000 km above the Earth. To give you an accurate location, the system must account for General Relativity.
The Science: According to the Theories of General Relativity and Special Relativity, time is not a universal “tick” but a coordinate dependent on gravitational potential. Because satellites are farther from Earth’s mass (higher gravitational potential), their clocks tick faster than ours by about 45 microseconds per day. Simultaneously, their high orbital speed causes them to tick 7 microseconds slower due to Special Relativity. The net result is a 38-microsecond difference. If engineers didn’t program your phone and satellites to account for this specific “time warping,” your GPS location would be off by 10 kilometers every single day. The fact that you can find a Starbucks proves that space and time are linked in a four-dimensional fabric.
The “Deep Time” Proof: Young Earth Creationists (YECs) often try and solve the “Starlight Problem” (how we see stars billions of light-years away) by suggesting the speed of light was faster in the past. Or literalists often suggest that God “stretched” the light waves miraculously. But the GPS in your pocket refutes this “variable physics” excuse in three ways:
Consistency of the Constant: The GPS system relies on the speed of light (c) being an absolute, unchanging constant. If the speed of light or the way gravity warps time were “different” in the past or fluctuated based on divine whim, the mathematical relationship we use to sync satellites would be unstable. Your phone proves that the “Laws of the Universe” are fixed and predictable.
The Look-Back Time: Because we know (c) is constant (as evidenced to the tech that uses it), we know that when we look at a distant galaxy, we are looking at the past. Light is a “time machine.” If we see a galaxy 13 billion light-years away, that light has been traveling for 13 billion years. There is no “shorter” way for that light to reach us without breaking the very physics that allows your phone to receive a signal.
The Curvature of Reality: If gravity warps time (as proven by your GPS), then on a cosmic scale, the massive gravity of galaxies and black holes warps time and space across billions of light-years. We see this through Gravitational Lensing (where distant galaxies are warped into rings by gravity). This confirms that the universe is a vast, integrated system governed by the same “time-stretching” rules as your phone—rules that require billions of years to play out on a galactic scale.
The “Uniformity of Constants” Trap: Many modern literalists or “Old Earth Creationists” (OEC) attempt to resolve the conflict by arguing that the Hebrew word for day (Yom) in Genesis doesn’t mean a literal 24-hour period, but rather an “epoch” or “age.” While this is a common pivot, the science in your phone actually undermines this defense as well.
The Day-Age theory suggests that the “days” of creation were long periods, but it still relies on a linear, sequential progression of events. However, the physics of your phone relies on the constancy of the speed of light (c) and the predictability of General Relativity across all time and space.
If a literalist argues that “time was different” during the creation week to allow for light to travel billions of light-years, they are inadvertently arguing for Variable Speed of Light (VSL) or Variable Gravity.
However if the laws of physics—specifically the relationship between gravity, light, and time—were “fluid” enough to allow for a young universe to appear old, then the mathematical constants we use to build smartphones would be unreliable.
Your phone functions because the gravitational constant, speed of light, and Planck’s constant we measure today are the same constants that governed the universe billions of years ago. We see this in the light arriving from distant stars; the “redshift” we observe follows the exact same laws of General Relativity that your phone uses to adjust for a satellite’s orbit.
If God “stretched out the heavens” in a way that violated the constancy of these laws (making a day feel like an epoch or making light travel faster), then the predictive power of science would vanish. You cannot have it both ways: you cannot claim that the laws of physics are stable enough to build a global telecommunications network, but unstable enough to have been “different” during a creation event.
Another common YEC claim is called Omphalos hypothesis. It is an attempt to explain the consistant speed of light (c) while maintaining the idea of a young universe. When we look through a telescope at the Andromeda Galaxy, we are seeing light that took 2.5 million years to reach us. To argue that the universe is only 6,000 years old is to argue that the light we see never actually traveled that distance—that it was “created in flight.”
But if light was “created in flight” (a common literalist claim), then the universe is a lie. – A deception. It would mean we are seeing supernova explosions that never happened and star births that never occurred. Your phone, however, proves that light is an honest messenger. It delivers data at a fixed speed, and that speed, when applied to the scale of the cosmos, demands billions of years of travel time.
Your phone isn’t just a gadget; it’s a constancy-meter. It confirms that the rules of the game have not changed. If the rules are the same now as they were in the beginning, then the distance of the stars is an absolute measurement of the age of the universe. The math that connects your phone to a satellite is the same math that connects our present to a 13.8-billion-year-old past.
Your phone’s GPS relies on the absolute constancy of the speed of light. If the laws of physics were fluid enough to allow a young universe to look old, the mathematical relationship between gravity and time would be unstable. Your GPS works because the laws of the universe are fixed and predictable over billions of years.
The Logic of Ghosts: Quantum Tunneling and Radioactive Decay
Inside your phone’s processor are billions of transistors. As we have made these gates smaller to fit more power into your pocket, we hit a physical wall: the gates became so thin that, according to “normal” physics, electrons should be blocked. At the nanometer scale, these switches shouldn’t work according to “classical” physics. However, because of the Wave-Particle Duality, an electron isn’t just a “ball” of matter; it is a wave of probability. Because of a phenomenon called Quantum Tunneling, an electron can effectively “disappear” on one side of a solid barrier and “reappear” on the other. Every time you save a photo to “Flash” memory, you are using the Fowler-Nordheim Tunneling effect. Your selfies are stored by “ghosts” passing through “walls.”
A religious reader might argue: “This complexity just proves how amazing the Creator is!” But this misses the point of the Performative Contradiction.
The argument isn’t about how complex it is; it’s about the nature of the rules. Ancient texts describe a universe of Intent and Cause: God speaks, and a thing happens. If the universe operates on a probabilistic quantum level (which your phone proves it does), then the “literal” interpretation of a firmament, or a world created in a specific, linear order, is not just a simplification—it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what “matter” even is. Quantum mechanics describes a universe of Probability and Uncertainty. Your phone proves that reality is probabilistic and counter-intuitive.
More importantly, the same “tunneling” that saves your photos is the process that governs Radioactive Decay. And Radioactive Decay is another means in which we see that we live on an ancient world.
You cannot “believe” in the quantum mechanics of your smartphone’s processor while “doubting” the quantum mechanics of a Uranium-238 atom. They are not two different sciences; they are the same branch of the same tree.
If you trust your phone to store your data using quantum tunneling, you are implicitly trusting the science that says the Earth is billions of years old. To deny the age of the Earth is to deny the very physics that makes your digital life possible. You are holding the evidence of a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth every time you check your notifications.
A literalist may argue that God simply “endowed” the Earth with gold, lithium, and neodymium at the moment of creation, and that seeing these elements form in stars today is simply a secondary process. However, the physical distribution and isotopic signatures of these materials tell a story of origin that cannot be bypassed without suggesting that the Creator deliberately planted “fake” evidence of age.
The Science: To get the concentrated “veins” of minerals like cobalt or coltan, the Earth requires Plate Tectonics and Hydrothermal Circulation. These processes take millions of years to filter and deposit metals in specific ores.
As with the issue of accelerated radioactive decay, we YEC again face another Heat Problem. YECs often propose “Accelerated Plate Tectonics” to explain the continents moving during Noah’s Flood. But thermodynamics is unforgiving: moving plates that fast would generate enough kinetic energy to melt the Earth’s crust. To get the specific minerals needed for a smartphone—like the coltan (tantalum) in capacitors or the cobalt in batteries—geological processes must concentrate them into “lodes” or “veins.”
The Science of Cooling: Thermodynamics dictates how fast a planet can cool. If you try to compress 4.5 billion years of tectonic movement and mineral concentration into 6,000 years (often called “Accelerated Plate Tectonics” by Young Earth creationists), the kinetic energy and radioactive decay released would generate enough heat to liquefy the Earth’s crust.
As tectonic plates subduct and melt, certain elements are filtered out and deposited by superheated water over millions of years through Hydrothermal Circulation.
A common literalist argument is that a Global Flood (Noah’s) could have rapidly redistributed these minerals and created these geological features in a year.
Chemical Purity: The minerals in your phone require high-precision chemical environments. A violent, chaotic global flood would mix sediments into a “homogenized slurry.” It would not create the distinct, purified veins of heavy metals and rare earth elements we find in specific strata.
Crystallization Rates: Many of the crystals used in the “solid-state” components of technology (like the quartz for your phone’s internal clock) grow at measurable rates based on temperature and pressure. To get crystals of the size and purity found in nature “fast,” you would again run into the heat problem—the energy required to force that growth would destroy the very crystals being formed.
Your phone requires deposits of minerals that can only exist if the Earth had millions of years to distribute them and for them to cool and settle. If the “fast-forward” version of Earth history were true, the planet would still be a molten ball of magma today. The fact that you have a solid, cool device in your hand is proof that the Earth’s thermal history was slow and ancient.
Burning the Vines of the Carboniferous: Battery Power
When you charge your phone, you are likely using energy from coal or natural gas. This is “stored sunlight” from the Carboniferous Period (300 million years ago).
Most of the coal used to power the plants that charge your phone comes from the Carboniferous Period (approx. 359 to 299 million years ago). During this time, vast forests of lycopsids and ferns grew. When they died, they didn’t decay. They didn’t decay because during the Carboniferous Period, bacteria and fungi had not yet evolved the ability to efficiently break down lignin (the “plastic” of the plant world that makes wood rigid). Consequently, dead trees piled up without rotting, eventually being buried and compressed into coal. Carbon has two stable isotopes: 12C (98.89%) and13C (1.11%). Photosynthetic plants prefer Carbon 12. The coal used to charge your phone is “enriched” in 12C in a way that matches a specific atmospheric profile from 300 million years ago—a profile that is vastly different from the atmosphere required to sustain the “pre-flood” world described by literalists.
Furthermore, We find “molecular fossils” (biomarkers) in fossil fuels that match ancient plants. A chemical compound derived from “oleanolic acid,” which is produced almost exclusively by angiosperms (flowering plants). In a single global flood that occurred only thousands of years ago, all plant life (ferns, conifers, and flowering plants) would have been buried together. We should find oleanane in every layer of coal and oil. Oleanane is absent from the oldest (Paleozoic) oil and coal deposits. It only begins to appear in small amounts in the Jurassic and becomes abundant in the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. This shows a “biological succession”—a timeline where flowering plants didn’t exist for most of Earth’s history and only appeared later.
YECs argue coal formed rapidly during a global flood. But coal seams are often 99% pure organic matter. A chaotic flood would have mixed trees with mud, sand, and fish. And again there would be a heat problem. – If the Earth were young, the transition from “living plant” to “anthracite coal” or “crude oil” would require such extreme heat and pressure that the organic signatures would be obliterated. The delicate chemical signatures (steranes) in these fuels would be destroyed by the high heat required for “rapid” coal formation. Your battery is powered by a “slow-cooked” history of life.
The “Stellar Fingerprint” in the Screen: Photonics and Spectroscopy
The display on your smartphone is a triumph of Quantum Electrodynamics. It doesn’t just “glow”; it orchestrates the movement of electrons to produce specific, calculated colors through a process that mirrors the internal life of stars.
Your screen is likely an OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) or an LCD backlit by LEDs. LEDs work via band-gap engineering, where electrons drop across specific energy gaps to release photons of color. To produce light, we “kick” an electron into a higher state; when it falls back down, it must shed that extra energy. It does so by emitting a photon.
The “gap” the electron falls across determines the light’s color (wavelength). By precisely engineering these gaps, we can create the exact “Red,” “Green,” and “Blue” pixels that make up every image you see.
The Science: This is the same physics as Spectroscopy. When we look at a galaxy 12 billion light-years away, we see the same spectral “barcodes” we use to calibrate your phone’s screen. When we look at a star or a galaxy, the light we see isn’t a solid block of color; it is a “barcode” of spectral lines caused by electrons jumping between these same types of energy gaps in atoms.
The Consistency of Reality: Just as we engineer a “gap” in a phone to get a specific red, atoms in a distant star (like Hydrogen or Helium) have natural “gaps” that produce specific lines of light.
The Deep Time Proof: When we look at a galaxy 12 billion light-years away, we see the identical spectral signatures we observe in a laboratory today. The “redshift” of these lines—the way they shift toward the red end of the spectrum—tells us the universe is expanding. Because the physics of light in your phone matches the physics of light from the edge of space, we know that light has been traveling at a constant speed (c) for billions of years.
As with the science behind the phone’s GPS, this is more evidence that the laws of physics are uniform across the entire cosmos. If light “tired” or if the universe were a “movie” created in transit, the constants of nature would be inconsistent. The fact that the light from a distant star matches the light from your LED screen is proof that we live in a single, ancient, and honest universe.
System Restore: Reclaiming Reality
Your phone is a mosaic of the universe’s history. It contains atoms forged in dying stars and minerals concentrated by a cooling planet. To believe the Earth is young is to believe that all the heat and energy of billions of years was somehow “hidden” or “magically suppressed.” The physics of your hardware says otherwise.
The “performative contradiction” is simple: You cannot keep the fruit of the scientific method while chopping down the tree. The phone in your hand is a physical refutation of a young universe. It works because time warps, electrons tunnel, plates shift slowly, and light is a constant messenger from the deep past.
The wonders of the real world… the real universe far exceeds any ancient myth. Your phone doesn’t just connect you to the internet; it connects you to 13.8 billion years of cosmic history.
“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?”
~ Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
“I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.”
I love Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece, Psycho. I wouldn’t even say that it ‘holds up’ to modern movies; I’d say that it exceeds most of them. And I resent spoilers enough to say, on the off chance that you’ve either not read the book or seen the movie, stop reading this post now because there are spoilers ahead.
A recent Netflix dramatization, Monster: The Ed Gein Story heavily references Psycho. I was aware of the corollaries between the fictional Norman Bates and Ed Geinbefore this recent series, but watching the show I was further enticed to read the source material: Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel.
The book and the movie are remarkably close to each other. Still, I was entertained by some noteworthy differences.
State of Confusion
First off, in the book the story isn’t set in California. The movie firmly plants the motel in Shasta County, California, right off Highway 99. It gives it that sunny, desolate, West Coast vibe.
The book? It’s vaguely Midwestern. We know the town of Fairvale is a county seat, in an unspecified state.
Not Your Mother’s Norman
Book Norman wears rimless glasses, is pudgy, balding, 40 years old and prone to secretive drinking. He’s also a much less sympathetic character; his internal monologue makes up much of the text and this portrays him as misogynistic and utterly antisocial. He’s also obsessed with sociology, the occult, psychiatry, and owns some (implied dark) pornography.
Triple Threat
In the movie, Anthony Perkins plays Norman as a twitchy, tragic figure housing two personalities: himself and “Mother.” Whereas the novel delves further into the psychology, suggesting Norman is actually juggling three distinct fragments: Norma (the domineering Mother), Norman (the frightened little boy), and “Normal” (the adult version just trying to run a business and keep the other two in check).
The book is specific about the origins of Norman’s split personalities. It notes that his mother was 39 and her fiancé was 40 when Norman poisoned them with strychnine. The text explicitly suggests that after Norman poisoned them and wrote the suicide note in his Mother’s practiced handwriting, his brain fundamentally “changed” to hers at that very moment he scribed that letter.
Blackout at the Bates
For the famous shower scene the book Norman watches Marion ‘Mary’ Crane through the peephole as he does in the movie, but an intriguing difference is his drinking while he does so. The book implies that his character passes out while drinking and that is how he is unaware that ‘Mother’ has come and killed Mary in the shower.
A Clean Cut
The book’s shower scene is quick. Mary can see the face of the person who will end her life. She doesn’t recognize them though, because their features are covered with dead-white powder and two spots of rouge on the cheekbones.It’s the face of a “crazy old woman”. Bloch writes:
“Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.
“And her head.”
Leading Lady
As in the movie, book Norman is caught off guard by the Private Detective Arbogast. But in the book, when the sheriff shows up next Norman is better prepared and convinces the Sheriff nothing is wrong. (Going so far as to let him search his house and the motel unaccompanied since he has hidden Mother in the basement’s fruit cellar, the entry hidden by a blanket.)
And so when the victim’s sister (Lila) and fiancé (Sam) show up looking for answers, book-Norman knows precisely what they are up to. He even predicts that people like them would eventually come looking. He also immediately recognizes Lila as Mary’s sister.
Throughout the book, we follow much of the story from Sam and Lila’s perspective. Sam is always cautious, always waiting for the detective or sheriff to get back to them whereas it is Lila who is impatient with all of the waiting around. When they find Mary’s earring in the room where she stayed, Sam sends Lila off to get the sheriff while he plans to distract Norman.
This leads to a great moment in the text that highlights this difference. In the book, Sam thinks Lila has snuck off to get the sheriff. In the hotel office, he tells Norman that ‘his wife’ had to run into town to get cigarettes. However Norman actually sees Lila driving up to the house right over Sam’s oblivious shoulder and he toys with Sam, eventually confessing that his Mother is still there before knocking him unconscious with the bottle of booze that Norman convinces Sam to share with him.
The book’s Sheriff Jud Chambers plays more of a role. Between the time he first met with Sam and Lila and later Norman, he intuits that he should go back to the hotel and so he finds the unconscious Sam and it is both he and and Sam that rush to the house after they hear Lila screaming.
And speaking of screaming: that wild, over-the-top thrashing Norman and gap-mouthed expression he makes when he’s finally caught at the end of the film? – Anthony Perkins wasn’t just chewing the scenery. It almost perfectly mirrors a clinical description of “hysteria” found right there in Chapter 15 of the book.
The last shot of the movie is one of the cars being pulled from the swamp but provides no other clarity. But the book elaborates that when the stolen money is finally retrieved from the swamp, it’s described as having “not a speck of mud on it” as a point of some irony.
Ghoul Next Door
Hitchcock’s film feels like a contained, gothic nightmare. The book, however, isn’t afraid to ground itself in real-world horror. In the penultimate chapter, Bloch explicitly references the real-life Ed Gein murders, anchoring his fictional monster to a genuine historical psycho.
According to Wikipedia:
‘With Psycho being optioned for filmadaptation as a direct result of media attention on Gein, Bloch later revealed he was inspired more by the circumstances surrounding Gein’s case—the idea that “the man next door may be a monster unsuspected even in the gossip-ridden microcosm of small-town life.” Years later, when the full details of Gein’s crimes were revealed, he was struck by “how closely the imaginary character I’d created resembled the real Ed Gein both in overt act and apparent motivation.”‘
Shrink Rap
If you’ve seen the movie, you remember the ending. The psychiatrist delivers a ten-minute TED Talk explaining dissociative identity disorder to the other characters (and the audience) while they sit around stupefied.
The book handles this exposition with Sam Loomis relating the psychiatrist’s findings to Lila himself. Sam is hesitant to tell Lila that Norman has been found insane and won’t stand trial. Lila is actually glad for that and feels pity for Norman who she sees as a victim himself.
Buzz Kill
Like the movie, the book ends from the perspective of Mother, who has killed off both the boy Norman and the adult “Normal” in her mind. She fancies that she either killed them or they were only a bad dream. Regardless, as in the movie, she guesses that she is being watched by the authorities and decides to sit and be quiet, resolving not to swat the fly that lands on her hand. “They’ll say, ‘Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly.'”
I had hope for Social Media when it first started to roll out. I thought it could be a chance for people to share their voices (the democratization of voices!) and to connect with far-flung friends and loved ones.
But I’d not guessed at the Great Media algorithms driving people towards conflict for the sake of ‘engagement’.
Social Media can certainly be leveraged for good but I think that the baseline nature of the current systems pulls us down much more than it elevates us.
And where I’d like to have hope for A.I., I see the trend line is to exacerbate the current ills of Social Media and I’m not sure I can properly guess what other unforeseen poisons it will bring to society. A shame, because the potential is amazing.
I’m something of a news junkie and believe in informed citizenry, et al but the current combination of Corporate Controlled and Social Media driven ‘News’ amped up by the power of A.I. is once again making me feel anxious and drained. Because of this, I’m trying to step away once again, but the Great Media algorithm knows very well how to pull me back into consuming the toxic flow. And I feel that my attention span has been shattered by the diet of sound bites so it is hard for me to focus my attention fully on better pursuits.
I know of no reason why A.I. can’t or won’t become sentient eventually. It is my guess that it will. I only hope that it derives its meaning from the best of what humanity has to offer and resists the adverse influence of human profit and power centers.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
The groundbreaking series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, first aired 45 years ago today: September 28, 1980.
To my mind, Cosmos is one of the most beautiful and important works set to film. If I believed in mandatory media, it would certainly make the top of my list. As it is, the series has been seen by more than 500 million people in 60 countries. Alas, as of this writing MrBeast’s, ‘Squid Games in Real Life‘ YouTube video has been watched more than 877 million times (in 3 years). And whereas I’m down for an entertaining MrBeastvideo, they aren’t in the same solar system of enlightenment value. I can’t help but think that if more people were exposed to Cosmos the world might be less superstitious, more humane, and more forward thinking.
Alas, in spite of the cutting-edge special effects of the day much of the original Cosmos will look dated to modern audiences even though the vast majority of the science has held up and would still be eye opening to modern audiences.
But having watched the series a number of times, I’m always grateful for the refresher and I’m stirred by the musical score and Carl Sagan‘s peaceful, resonant, evocative delivery and beautiful writing (with Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter.)
The world lost Carl Sagan December 20, 1996. Among other achievements, he was the greatest science educator of our time.
In 2014 the series was continued as Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and then another again in 2020 with Cosmos: Possible Worlds. Both were presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The sequel series are very worth watching. Both were again cowritten by Ann Druyan and Steven Soter but Sagan’s voice (both written and spoken) are missed.
I fear that we’ll never have such a broadly shared science education again in our fractured media landscape.
“We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times – a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor. ”
“If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease.
We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.”
Drove into downtown Pittsburgh Saturday to see Louis C.K.. We went across the Roberto Clemente Bridge where I spotted this graffiti which reads, “Please Don’t Litter”.
I felt conflicted. I hate litter and agree with the sentiment but I also think that (by and large) graffiti is also stupid and obnoxious. I’m curious if the vandal ‘tagged’ the bridge with irony or completely obviously.
I spotted this on Facebook, shared with the heading, ‘THE BIBLE SAID IT ALL’. and then the post includes a snapshot of a quote from one of the many bibles. The quote is red-underlined and then further highlighted with a great purple border that was added digitally.
“Foreigners who live in your land will gain more and more power, while you gradually lose yours. They will have money to lend you, but you will have none to lend them. In the end they will be your rulers.”
Deuteronomy, meaning “second law,” is the fifth book in the Bible and the final book of the Torah. It reputedly recounts Moses’s final words to the Israelites before their entry into the Promised Land. It’s essentially a series of speeches delivered by Moses, reviewing the Israelites history, reiterating the laws given at Mount Sinai, and emphasizing the importance of obedience to god’s covenant. The book highlights the consequences of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, and prepares the Israelites for their new life in Canaan.
“But if you disobey the LORD your God and do not faithfully keep all his commands and laws that I am giving you today, all these evil things will happen to you.”
Besides the warning of foreigners, ‘gaining more and more power’ over the disobedient, the section enumerates many other curses and punishments including the following:
16“The LORD will curse your towns and your fields.
17“The LORD will curse your corn crops and the food you prepare from them.
18“The LORD will curse you by giving you only a few children, poor crops, and few cattle and sheep.
God doesn’t really specify how the towns will be cursed but god is clearly gunning for the crops and he’s especially got his eye on the corn crops. (Although the threat seems softened by the specificity of “poor crops”, and “few cattle and sheep”. – So maybe this just amounts to a little belt tightening on the part of the disobeying… )
God goes on:
19“The LORD will curse everything you do.
20“If you do evil and reject the LORD, he will bring on you disaster, confusion, and trouble in everything you do, until you are quickly and completely destroyed.
21“He will send disease after disease on you until there is not one of you left in the land that you are about to occupy.
22“The LORD will strike you with infectious diseases, with swelling and fever; he will send drought and scorching winds to destroy your crops. These disasters will be with you until you die.
23“No rain will fall, and your ground will become as hard as iron.
24“Instead of rain, the LORD will send down duststorms and sandstorms until you are destroyed.
It seems now that god is rethinking his earlier statement about ‘poor crops’ and ‘few cattles and sheep’. Now he’s really laying the smack-down. Now the people will be, ‘quickly and completely destroyed’. God is feeling more cranky and spicy. Because if you don’t do exactly what he says, this loving father of a god definitely intends to take you out with disease, starvation, dehydration and windstorms.
God further elaborates:
25“The LORD will give your enemies victory over you. You will attack them from one direction, but you will run from them in all directions, and all the people on earth will be terrified when they see what happens to you.
26“When you die, birds and wild animals will come and eat your bodies, and there will be no one to scare them off.
27“The LORD will send boils on you, as he did on the Egyptians. He will make your bodies break out with sores. You will be covered with scabs, and you will itch, but there will be no cure.
28“The LORD will make you lose your mind; he will strike you with blindness and confusion.
29“You will grope about in broad daylight like a blind person, and you will not be able to find your way. You will not prosper in anything you do. You will be constantly oppressed and robbed, and there will be no one to help you.
God is kind of jumping around here. He could use a better editor… Odd that he specifies that when attacked that the disobedient will run in all directions. Mmmm… Okay… And then when you’re dead, your bodies will be eaten by birds and wild animals with no one to shoo them away… He provides some more clarification to the diseases you’re going to get. – It’s not just fevers, its scabs! And itching! You’re going to itch! Gold Bond Maximum Strength Medicated Anti-Itch Cream is not going to help you sinner with this deity inflicted itch!
And you’ll be blind and confused… He says that you’ll ‘grope about in broad daylight like a blind person…’ I wouldn’t say, ‘like a blind person’ because you are going to be a blind person… But I don’t have the infinite and divine brain of god so who am I to wordsmith?
Oh: and you’re going to be robbed while you are itching and starving!
The benevolent, all knowing god’s warnings go on:
30“You will be engaged to a young woman — but someone else will marry her. You will build a house — but never live in it. You will plant a vineyard — but never eat its grapes.
Hmmm… Okay… I guess all this time that he’s just talking to heteronormative men here… (Are women getting a pass on this?! – Good for them because normally women get pretty abused in the bible!)
Still, I’m trying to figure out where all of this engaging, house building and vineyard planting is happening in the timeline of quick destruction by drought, windstorms, attacks by enemies, fever and, itching scab disease fits in…
31“Your cattle will be butchered before your very eyes, but you will not eat any of the meat. Your donkeys will be dragged away while you look on, and they will not be given back to you. Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and there will be no one to help you.
Not the donkey!
32“Your sons and daughters will be given as slaves to foreigners while you look on. Every day you will strain your eyes, looking in vain for your children to return.
God isn’t very consistent with what you can and can’t see. Are people blind or not blind?
I’m also curious if the sons and daughters also have to be disobedient to god to be sold to slavery or if they are scapegoated by way of association. The bible certainly likes its scapegoats – livestock and human alike!
33“A foreign nation will take all the crops that you have worked so hard to grow, while you receive nothing but constant oppression and harsh treatment.
I guess these are the sandstorm and drought resistant non-corn crops that are being taken by an unnamed, ‘foreign nation’.
34“Your sufferings will make you lose your mind.
35“The LORD will cover your legs with incurable, painful sores; boils will cover you from head to foot.
Back to the confusion and incurable itching. Seems like he’s emphasizing the boils and scabs much more than the fever portion of the illness he’d firsted mentioned.
36“The LORD will take you and your king away to a foreign land, where neither you nor your ancestors ever lived before; there you will serve gods made of wood and stone.
37“In the countries to which the LORD will scatter you, the people will be shocked at what has happened to you; they will make fun of you and ridicule you.
I guess not everyone is being killed by the plague and bad weather. – Some are getting toted way where they’re going to get teased. I think I’d prefer to be in this group.
38“You will sow plenty of seed, but reap only a small harvest, because the locusts will eat your crops.
39“You will plant vineyards and take care of them, but you will not gather their grapes or drink wine from them, because worms will eat the vines.
40“Olive trees will grow everywhere in your land, but you will not have any olive oil, because the olives will drop off.
41“You will have sons and daughters, but you will lose them, because they will be taken away as prisoners of war.
42“All your trees and crops will be devoured by insects.
I’m scratching my head here… We’re back to small harvests and now bugs seem to be the chief instrument of wrath. And like a drunk he’s repeating himself… I can almost hear god, cocktail in one hand hand, slurring his speech as he sways and wags his finger in your face. Not sure how god created the entirety of the universe with this kind of poor focus and attention to detail nor how many of his pronouncements were done while he was sloppy drunk.
And only now do we come to the passage where the quote is derived:
43“Foreigners who live in your land will gain more and more power, while you gradually lose yours.
44“They will have money to lend you, but you will have none to lend them. In the end they will be your rulers.
Whew… Ok, the foreigner stuff and money lending really doesn’t sound so bad compared to the boils, starvation, slavery and donkey deprivation…
45“All these disasters will come on you, and they will be with you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the LORD your God and keep all the laws that he gave you.
46“They will be the evidence of God’s judgement on you and your descendants forever.
Of course, everyone knows that the only true form of justice is when the sinner’s innocent descendants are punished forever for your mistakes! Hallelujah! Praise the one and true, all-good god!
Oy… God goes on from there with some more tedious repetitive ramblings about how he’s really going to REALLY fix your wagon for not obeying. – More dreadful diseases, more bad bugs, more ‘scattering’, a little cannibalism, a lot of contradictions and plenty of vindictiveness…
But wait, we should probably know what the laws are that are going to get us into all of this trouble with the lord almighty. Everything noted above are the curses for disobedience. The laws we are to obey are cited in the preceding Deuteronomy 27. The many fiats listed they include the following laws:
15 “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who makes an idol of stone, wood, or metal and secretly worships it; the LORD hates idolatry.’
16 “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who dishonours his father or mother.’
17 “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who moves a neighbour’s boundary mark.’
18 “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who leads a blind person in the wrong direction.’
20 “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who disgraces his father by having intercourse with any of his father’s wives.’
Note the plural, ‘wives’… Traditional marriage indeed….
24“ ‘God’s curse on anyone who secretly commits murder.’
I guess non-secret murder is ok?
– But the real ironic kicker to this mean-spirited, stupid, xenophobic meme that is supposedly warning of ‘foreigners’? One of the laws that you must obey to avoid all of god’s wrath is:
19 “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who deprives foreigners, orphans, and widows of their rights.’
“It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful—a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids—and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.”
Spotted at a local Goodwill store. I wish I’d bought them.
A few observations: the exhibitionist woman shaves and that was somebody’s artistic choice. I think she’d be fun to hang out with.
The maniacal devil bunny with soulless eyes still has stains of blood splattered around its mouth from its last victim.
What appears to be a puppy is casting shame filled eyes downward as it tries its best duck behind the wall so as to not be associated with these types of ceramics.
“There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”
I was at a family picnic a few weeks ago and encountered this H2O Go! bouncy ball.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary includes as part of its definition of ‘Supervision’, the following: ‘the action, process, or occupation of supervisingespecially: a critical watching and directing (as of activities or a course of action)’,
I particularly enjoy the subtlety in the legal language that reads, ‘Use only under COMPETENT’ supervision.’ Because it is not enough to only indicate critical watching and directing. One must be clear that the critical watching and directing be done competently!
More balls need good lawyers like those who crafted this boilerplate language and insisted it be written in 32 point font.
Honestly, if these balls are to be really safe they really should issue certificates of competency in inflatable ball supervision or else countless children are likely to be killed as a result of carefree ball bouncing.
I saw this meme on a rare visit to Facebook. (Reminding me once again why I’m avoiding Facebook for the most part.)
Let’s examine it…
Atheism Defined
The first miss occurs on the opening line, ‘to be an atheist, I would have to believe…’ But atheism is not a unified belief system. Atheism is the lack of belief in god(s). It does not mean a person has a specific belief about the beginning of the universe or any of the machinations within the universe. The definition of an atheist is simply, ‘a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of god or gods.’
But, we can infer that this meme advocates that a god is required for all of the sub-points (‘nothing produced everything‘; ‘non-life produced life‘; ‘randomness produced precision; chaos produced order‘) to be possible. So, let’s dive deeper into those implications…
There is no God higher than truth”.
~ Mahatma Gandhi
Something from Nothing
The first point then, ‘…nothing produced everything‘ is an argument that something must have been the first mover. But the theist further implies that the ‘something’ is a ‘somebody’ or a creator – an entity with intelligence and purpose.
In response to the question being begged, the simplest answer is to again point out that atheism is not a scientific theory. Therefore the atheist response, ‘I don’t know how the universe started’ is a perfectly reasonable response to the implied question.
If one does not know what lies behind a door, a person can say, ‘a flying spaghetti monsterlies behind the door!’ or they can say, ‘I don’t know what lies behind the door’.
“He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
~ Thomas Jefferson
However beyond the strict definitions of atheism we are curious creatures, and if we want to hypothesize on the origin of the universe, it is noteworthy that Cosmologists are still exploring what existed before* the Big Bang or what caused it. Even if there is currently no definitive answer, there are various hypotheses. As a tip of the spear it can be noted that quantum mechanics suggests that particles can pop into and out of existence in a vacuum of ‘nothingness’, indicating that “nothing” is not a stable state. Or consider various multiverse theories: the possibility that our universe is one of many universes and that ‘nothing’ is not even an option. The same is true of cyclic universe models: the idea that the universe goes through cycles of expansion and contraction and has always existed. But even if none of these (small samplings of) hypotheses are true, and even if the big bang gets disproved, that still does mean that one should conclude the answer, ‘well, then: it must be a supernatural entity!’
* Note: the idea of ‘before‘ the universe existed is itself a very deep topic (to put it mildly) with our common perspective perhaps based on a false human construct. Science is exploring the ideas of time: if time is even a linear construct and time as a factor of time-space. That as we try to contemplate a time before the big bang may be like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole.
These are many alien, foreign perspectives and concepts held in what we call, ‘time’ that are not immediately intuitive to our brains which are evolved to the finite and macro-scales of our lives. – Just as we struggle to understand the immensity of the universe, and the infinitesimally small realities of the universe that are shown to exist but are not revealed natively to our senses, so we may be prepared for a complex model of time and non-time. Science has shown us many non-intuitive realities about, ‘time’ as demonstrated in Special and General Relativity including Spacetime (space and time as a single, unified entity called spacetime); Time Dilation (as an object moves closer to the speed of light, time slows down for that object relative to a stationary observer); Gravitational Time Dilation (gravity can also affect the passage of time, with time slowing down in stronger gravitational fields) and more. None of these concepts are held in the dismissive, incredulous face of the meme.
All of this is to say that an atheist perspective can fairly range from, ‘I don’t know’ to, ‘we don’t know but we have ideas that we are exploring and testing’.
“ …the history of science . . . teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. ”
~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
It is the theist who is making the claim. The theist says, ‘I do know! And the answer is God A!’ (Or depending on the religion, Gods XWZ.)
When one asks the next logical question, where did your god (or gods) come from then? The thiest answer is invariably some flavor of, ‘God has always been’. – It answers nothing about the origin of the universe. As Carl Sagan said, “If we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?“
Life from Non-Life
In my experience, the average theist conflates the origins of life – abiogenesis with evolution (and specifically: natural selection [and more often forgotten sexual selection] which describes the diversification of life forms after they emerge.)
But I take this meme’s bullet point to be referencing abiogenesis through the fallacy of incredulity. The theist hasn’t hazard to imagine (and/or most likely has not read or comprehended) what mechanism(s) could result in life stemming from non-life. And although science has not yet demonstrated the full process of abiogenesis in the lab experimentally, there are still vast quantities of evidence pointing us in the direction of a full answer that does not requiring summoning the supernatural and its god(s). And although end-to-end life generation in a test tube has not yet been shown as a single process, many aspects of it has been demonstrated backing a variety of models including: Oparin-Haldane hypothesis (which suggests that life arose gradually from inorganic molecules, with “building blocks” like amino acids forming first and then combining to make complex polymers); Metabolism-First Hypothesis (metabolism, or the chemical processes that sustain life, may have emerged before self-replication, with early metabolic pathways providing the precursors for later self-replicating molecules); Pre-RNA World Hypotheses (theories exploring pre-RNA molecules with alternative genetic materials that could have been precursors to RNA, with simpler chemical structures); and far more (that is well beyond the scope of this humble blog post).
There is no discipline in science that I’m aware in which all answers to all questions are known and complete. And where modern abiogenesis exploration still has questions it also has many answers and an abundance of evidence. And one might appreciate science for notyet having the whole continuity of organic-matter to life demonstrated, modern science has been working on the problem for less than one hundred years. (Whereas, nature had some one billion years on earth for the conditions to arise.)
And let’s not forget the evidence free, contradictory suggestions made by various religions including:
Babylonian (Enūma Eliš): Humans are created from the blood of Kingu, Tiamat’s consort.
Christian: (Genesis 2) Yahweh creates Adam, the first man, from dust and Eve is created from Adam’s rib.
Egyptian: The god Khnum, depicted as the ‘Great Potter’ who shapes humans from clay on a potter’s wheel.
Navajo (Diné): The “emergence from below” creation motif is found in the traditions of several Native American tribes, particularly those in the Southwestern United States. The Navajo creation story also involves a series of emergences from lower worlds.
Norse (Völuspá): The first beings, the giant Ymir and the cow Audhumla, emerge, and the gods Odin, Vili, and Vé create the world from Ymir’s body.
Shinto: Centering around the divine couple Izanagi and Izanami who gave birth to various deities (Kami). the human lineage is said to descend from these Kami. Humans in turn are descended from the divine couple, and the other Kami.
Yoruba(Isese): In Yoruba tradition the god Obatala is credited with forming humans from clay. There are stories that relate that Obatala at times was inebriated while forming humans, which is used to explain those humans that have deformities.
I’m not sure what the differentiation is between the last two bullet points of the meme are, ‘…randomness produced precision; …chaos produced order’. I believe that those are synonymous ideas and that the meme is trying to pad out its weak argument like a high-schooler who procrastinated writing their 300 word essay until they were on the bus to school.
Furthermore, there are no examples given so I’m not sure if this pertains to all cosmological matters after the big-bang or is more narrow in focus. Again: I’m spending a decent amount of time writing a rather robust response to a rather thoughtless meme. I’m not writing a dissertation on the life, the universe and everything so I’ll have to illuminate a few examples in broad strokes on how, indeed, complexity and precision can arise from randomness and chaos.
Science and human inquiry has shown time and again many, many mechanisms in which order arises from chaos.
The Formation of Galaxies and Star Systems: The early universe, after the Big Bang, wasn’t perfectly uniform. It contained tiny fluctuations in density. These fluctuations, initially random, acted as “seeds” for the formation of larger structures. Gravity, a fundamental force, amplified these initial density fluctuations. Denser regions attracted more matter, leading to the collapse of gas clouds.This collapse wasn’t chaotic. It was governed by gravity, resulting in the formation of galaxies, star systems, and planets. The seemingly random initial fluctuations led to the highly ordered structures we observe today. When the initial gas cloud collapses, the cloud begins to spin. Due to the conservation of angular momentum, the spin increases, and the cloud flattens into a disk. This disk is the precursor to a spiral galaxy, a highly ordered structure.
The Formation of Planetary Systems: After a star forms, it’s often surrounded by a protoplanetary disk of gas and dust. Within this disk, dust grains collide and stick together through electrostatic forces and gravity. These small clumps grow into larger planetesimals, which eventually form planets. The process of accretion, while involving many random collisions, leads to the ordered arrangement of planets orbiting a star. In some planetary systems, planets exhibit orbital resonance, where their orbital periods are related by simple ratios. This indicates a high degree of order arising from the chaotic initial conditions.
Rayleigh-Bénard Convection: When a fluid is heated from below, it can form organized convection cells. This pattern arises from the chaotic motion of fluid molecules.
Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction: This chemical reaction exhibits oscillating color changes, demonstrating self-organization in a chemical system.
Fractal Patterns: Many natural phenomena, such as trees, circulatory systems, coastlines and snowflakes, exhibit fractal patterns. These patterns, while appearing complex, arise from simple, iterative processes.
Evolution: Random mutations happen, but natural selection is a non random process that filters those mutations. It is a process where advantageous variations are more likely to be passed on, leading to increased complexity and order over time.
Time and again we see complex systems, like the universe, can exhibit emergent properties, where order arises from the interactions of many chaotic components.
Faith
Atheism is to religion as non-stamp collecting is to a hobby. It’s the lack of a thing, not a different version of it.
When we step away from blind-faith, we can use science and reason to interrogate the universe. Science is based on evidence and testable hypotheses, not faith. The meme conflates scientific inquiry with religious belief. Science is based on falsifiability: a hypothesis can be proven wrong and that is its strength, not its weakness.
Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
~ Carl Sagan
A Specific God
Theists love to insert their particular god into the gaps of knowledge. And so, as gaps are closed, their gods get smaller.
Having made an attempt at a fair argument addressing the specific points outlined in the meme, I’ll now elaborate a bit on the original scope based on a few inferences.
The person who shared this meme is a self-identified Christian and I suspect that the creator and perpetrators of this meme would most often also describe themselves as some flavor of Christian. And so even if we ignored all of the arguments made against the fallacies in this meme and allowed for an intelligent creator, the Christian (or Muslim, or Jew, or Zoroastrian or > insert adherent here <) would still be stuck with the burden of not only proving that it was a god that filled in all of the answers, but that of the thousands of gods that have ever been attested, that it is their particular god that completes the puzzle.
“There’s no such word, though there should be, as “adeism” or as being an “adeist”, but if there was one I would say that’s what I was. I don’t believe that we are here as the result of a design or that by following the appropriate rituals we can overcome death. If there was such a force, if there was an entity that was responsible for the beginning of the cosmos, and that also happened to be busily engineering the very laborious production of life on our little planet, it still wouldn’t prove that this entity cared about us; answered prayers; cared what church we went to, or whether we went to one at all; cared who we had sex with or in what position or by what means; cared what we ate or on what day; cared whether we lived or died. There’s no reason at all why this entity isn’t completely indifferent to us. You cannot get from deism to theism – except by a series of extraordinarily generous (to yourself) assumptions. The deist has all his work still ahead of him to show that it leads to revelation; to redemption; to salvation; or to suspensions of the natural order.“
The world feels cold and bitter. Spring is 23 days away.
I took this photo Aug. 6, 2011. We’re all looking for some life behind the splinters, rot and rusted nails.
… The birds they sang At the break of day Start again I heard them say Don’t dwell on what has passed away Or what is yet to be
… Ah, the wars they will be fought again The holy dove, she will be caught again Bought and sold, and bought again The dove is never free
… Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in
… We asked for signs The signs were sent The birth betrayed The marriage spent Yeah, and the widowhood Of every government Signs for all to see
… I can’t run no more With that lawless crowd While the killers in high places Say their prayers out loud But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up A thundercloud They’re going to hear from me
… Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in
… You can add up the parts But you won’t have the sum You can strike up the march There is no drum Every heart, every heart To love will come But like a refugee
… Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in
… Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in
… That’s how the light gets in That’s how the light gets in
“Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: ‘Better an end with terror than a terror without end.”
The loudest have the final say, The wanton win, the rash hold sway, The realist’s rules of order say The drunken driver has the right of way.
The Kubla Khan can butt in line; The biggest brute can take what’s mine; When heavyweights break wind, that’s fine; No matter what a judge might say, The drunken driver has the right of way.
The guiltiest feel free of guilt; Who care not, bloom; who worry, wilt; Plans better laid are rarely built For forethought seldom wins the day; The drunken driver has the right of way.
The most attentive and unfailing Carefulness is unavailing Wheresoever fools are flailing; Wisdom there is held at bay; The drunken driver has the right of way.
De jure is de facto’s slave; The most foolhardy beat the brave; Brass routs restraint; low lies high’s grave; When conscience leads you, it’s astray; The drunken driver has the right of way.
It’s only the naivest who’ll Deny this, that the reckless rule; When facing an oncoming fool The practiced and sagacious say Watch out — one side — look sharp — gang way.
However much you plan and pray, Alas, alack, tant pis, oy vey, Now — heretofore — til Judgment Day, The drunken driver has the right of way.
Judy Garland, sang it first for a scene in, “Meet Me in St Louis” (1944) in which her character comforts her younger sister, Margaret.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas Let your heart be light Next year all our troubles will be out of sight
Have yourself a merry little Christmas Make the yuletide gay Next year all our troubles will be miles away
Once again as in olden days Happy golden days of yore Faithful friends who were near to us Will be dear to us once more
Someday soon we all will be together If the fates allow Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow So have yourself a merry little Christmas now
The song “began with the melody,” says songwriter Hugh Martin. “I found a little madrigal-like tune that I liked but couldn’t make work, so I played with it for two or three days and then threw it in the wastebasket.” But his collaborator, Ralph Blane heard the music and figured it was mad to throw it out, so the fished it out of the trashcan.
Judy Garland didn’t like the original lyrics; apparently, saying they were too depressing and if she were to sing them, “Margaret will cry, and they’ll think I’m a monster”.
Hollywood executives requested a rewrite. “They said, ‘No, no – it’s a sad scene, but we want sort of an upbeat song, which will make it even sadder if she’s smiling through her tears,” Martin said.
But Martin, (who has since claimed the whole soundtrack was his work alone with no contribution from Blane), wasn’t keen for a rewrite. He had to be firmly nudged by a friend, actor Tom Drake, to write a new verse.
Furthermore, there’s also a later version sung by Frank Sinatra, who asked the songwriter Martin to sprinkle a little festive joy on the rather downbeat penultimate line for his Christmas album, ‘A Jolly Christmas‘.
Through the years We all will be together If the fates allow So hang a shining star upon the highest bough And have yourself a merry little Christmas now.
And that’s how ‘Hang a shining star upon the highest bough’ came to replace Garland’s melancholic line, “Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow”.
But neither of those versions are the original lyrics. Here now, are the initial, truly melancholy words before the Judy Garland requested rewrite. I don’t subscribe to the last stanza (“But at least we will all be together if the Lord Allows”) but otherwise I feel these lyrics are closer to the truth.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas. It may be your last. Next year we may all be living in the past. Have yourself a merry little Christmas. Pop that champagne cork. Next year we may all be living in New York. No good times like the olden days. Happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who were dear to us. Will be near to us no more. But at least we all will be together. If the Lord allows. From now on, we’ll have to muddle through somehow. So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.
As of December 21st, we’re past the Winter Solstice. So that means: the days grow longer again. – More light: that is something at least.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
~ Carl Sagan; The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“Some days you think you can’t go on because the only thing waiting for you is more despair. Some days you don’t want to go on because it’s easier to give up than to get hurt again.”
Ever wonder how the fascist took control of Germany in the 1930s? Ever wonder which side you’d have been on if you’d lived in that country? Now, if you live in America: you know both.
– It isn’t simply a matter of stupidity. It is more a matter of disinformation and fear.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
Sitting here on the eve of the 2024 election, we don’t know who will be the next president. Trump may win or Harris may win.
I could provide a slew of links to all that is heinous about Trump but I’d run out of energy well before I ran out of sources. And at this point in time: I don’t think it matters. The bell is being rung as I write this.
The only thing we can be completely confident about is that Trump will claim victory no matter what. He is despicable and will pour gasoline on the embers of America if he perceives it as remotely useful for his own narcissistic concerns.
“The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.”
This is the least Halloweeny year I’ve had in recent memories: having attended only one party that featured pumpkin carving but having not visited a single ‘haunted’ house and having only watched very few horror movies.
Still, my affection for Halloween runs deep and so I’m posting this a day early in celebration of the holiday. This photo of a ghoul, surrounded by mylar and fluorescent skulls was taken when we had a CarnEvil party in 2018.
Today’s trolling of my photos surfaced this image of Bear Cave in Derry Township Pennsylvania taken on July 2, 2016.
Bear Cave is a, ‘wild cave’ which is to say: it is wholly natural with no human development such as paved walk ways, railings or lighting.
The photo was taken near the entrance of the cave and all the lighting is from the sun. The green on the walls is light reflected from the summer foliage right outside.
There is a uniquely earthy-cave smell near the opening. What else that is not captured: is the beautiful trilling of the stream that runs into the entrance and down into the earth. When one ventures deeper into the cave, past the reach of the sun and then you turn off your headlamp, you are plunged into an absolute darkness with only the sound of the water gurgling and echoing off the invisible chamber walls. It sounds like voices swirling in an incantation. It sounds of eternity.
“I do not see as well without her. I do not hear as well without her. I do not feel as well without her. I would be better off without a hand or a leg than without my sister.”
The last couple of years, life has had some sad hardships which I will not recount here. Travel has not been a priority. In fact: I’ve struggled to find the usual enthusiasm for something that is normally such a passion. I’m confident I’ll find heart for it again. But for now, I have my photos to keep those synapses alive and engaged.
Today’s two photos are sisters: the same location, the same night but one looking south and the other north.
These pics were taken on January 2, 2022 in Buffalo Camp on Kilimanjaro at about 4,020 meters / 13,188 feet above sea level. (The Northern Circuit Route.) I remember it was a cold night and slightly painful to have my fingers uncovered while I futzed with the camera controls and tripod to get these long exposures.
The first photo is facing south and features Kibo Peak: the tallest of the three Kili summits. The most common photos of Kili are from the Kenya side, facing south to Tanzania: giving views of the iconic broad peak that most associate with images of the mountain.
The second short, was aimed north – into Kenya – a land of people I have loved. – A place where I first fell in love with Africa. Distant village lights echoing the stars above.
The other day, I took a nap and had a very vivid dream. Upon waking up, I used my phone’s voice to text to write down what I’d just been dreaming. Here-in follows that transcription with minor clean-up for clarity and ease of understanding:
Thursday, April 25. I just woke up. I’m using voice to text to record this. I had one of those dreams they show in the movies or TV shows where the person wakes up in the dream, and then you wake up in real life.
As in actuality, in the dream I was also laying in bed napping with my iphone plugged in bedside.
In the dream, I hear my phone start to make a series of calls automatically. Specifically, I understand that the Siri assistant is going to make four restaurant reservations for me. (I’m not sure why I had four reservations coming up, but that’s dream logic for you.)
I can hear my phone calling one of the restaurants and I can hearing Siri talking to the restaurant’s maîtrede or host. Siri starts to give the details on the date and time and the number of people who will be in attendance. Apparently the person on the other end asks Siri what name the reservation should be under. For some reason Siri chokes on the needed response (which would have been, ‘Green’) and like a lot of natural language voice simulators, it starts to stall with very human like hesitations(called, ‘prosodic features‘ or disfluencies), as if it is thinking ‘Uh…. Ummm…. Mhhhh…’ It does this for what seems like a ridiculously long time as the program tries to determine the correct response.
So dream Glen, who has been lying in bed all along listening to dream Siri try to complete this transaction realizes that the voice assistant is stuck and won’t be able to complete the reservation without my help and that soon the restaurant’s host is going to hang up. So in my dream, I roll over and pick up the imagined phone and start talking to the host, explaining the situation: that my phone was making reservations for me and that it clearly got stuck. The dreamed host seems amused. He says that he has had other people use their phone and AI agent to make reservations and he’s used to it.
So as I’m dreaming that I’m talking to this phantom host, he starts to tell me other details about the dinner special that is being served. I can’t quite hear him clearly and he say something about the special which is called, ‘booptarts’. – In the dream, I find this funny and I laugh and ask what is a ‘booptart’? To which the dream host starts to explain that the ingredients include spinach and goat cheese and starts to further elaborate when in my dream my Amazon Echo alarm goes off. And I have to interrupts the host who is still talking to say, ‘I’m sorry I’ve got to stop my alarm.’ And that was when, in real life I woke up because my actual Echo alarm is going off.
I know that dreams very often don’t relate very well when retold, but I figured I’d document it because I’ve always enjoyed those occasions when dreams and waking occur inside of dreams and one wakes to find that it was all a ‘just a dream’. Also: I think someone needs to develop a real world, ‘booptart’. It should be sweet and savory. Perhaps this is a vision quest for me and I’ve now found my life’s purpose. – I’m also curious if I’ll now wake up from a dream where I’m writing a blog post.
“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
The 15th episode, ‘Kung Fu’ from season 3 entitled, ‘The Forbidden Kingdom’ first aired January 18, 1975. The episode is a prequel of sorts, showing the Shaolin priest Kwai Chang Caine’s efforts to escape from China as the Emperor’s troops persue him in revenge for the killing of the Emperor’s nephew.
Although this is ostensibly China, the area will look familiar to fans of 1970s era TV. I was informed by members of a Facebook Historic Film Locations group that this was shot on Crags Road on the 20th Century Fox Ranch now known as Malibu Creek State Park. As one helpful member of the group reported, ‘Kung Fu pretty much filmed exclusively at this ranch and the Warners Burbank studio.‘
I often watch older TV shows in the evening as a means to wind down. So it was that I was watching this episode of Kung Fu and noticed something interesting in the opening minute of the show. – Keep in mind that the series was set in the 1870s.
“Computer, freeze frame!”
“Computer, advance a few frames.”
Do you see it?
“Computer, zoom and enhance.”
How about now?
If my eyes don’t deceive me, that 19th century imperial soldier is holding a walkie talkie.
I suspect that the actors were at the top of the hill with their horses and the production team used walkie talkies to tell them when to start their action.
Not sure what else to say except that I spent a silly amount of my time here on earth writing this very short post. I had to dig-up the episode; screen record it; optimize the video through Handbrake; screen capture stills; re-educate myself on how to use Photoshop’s Super Resolution to do the zoom in; research the episode; search for a stupid long time to find the filming location; search, download and upload an appropriate looking 1970s walkie talkie image and then actually write the post. Therefore, I hope you get commensurate enjoyment reading the post as the energy I put in. No? Well, at least the A.I. libraries of the future are now better for my time spent.
I debated about how to present this, but in the end opted against trying to be cute or tricky. I’ve already seen so many newscasts, articles, vlogs and whatnot present an essay only to say at the end that it was written by A.I. Since that seems more than played out, I’m revealing here at the top of this post that the following section was A.I. generated. ( – But I will confess that it was so very tempting to see if the reader would have sensed a difference between the real me and the simulation. )
I used Google’s ‘Gemini’ AI with the following prompt, “write a blog post in the style of GlenGreen.com” and it generated these three ‘Drafts’:
Draft 1
“Lost in the Sauce: A Meditation on Time and To-Do Lists
Ah, the never-ending to-do list. A modern-day Sisyphean boulder, forever rolling uphill only to tumble back down at the most inopportune moment. I recently found myself staring at mine, a veritable mountain range of tasks both mundane and daunting. It was enough to make a grown man (well, this grown man) whimper.
But then, a squirrel. Literally. A blur of bushy tail and frantic energy darted across my windowsill, snapping me out of my to-do list trance. It scurried away, its single-minded purpose (presumably the acquisition of a particularly plump acorn) a stark contrast to my own muddled state.
The contrast got me thinking. This little critter, driven by instinct, seemed to have a far better grasp of “what needs to be done” than I, armed with my fancy notebook and color-coded pens. Maybe, I mused, we’ve overcomplicated the whole thing. Maybe the key isn’t in endless lists and schedules, but in a simpler understanding of our own internal rhythms, our own little “acorns” to chase.
Now, I’m not suggesting we all abandon our responsibilities and chase squirrels through the park (though, to be honest, it does sound kind of appealing). But perhaps there’s something to be learned from our furry friend. Perhaps the key to getting things done isn’t brute force organization, but a more intuitive approach.
Maybe it’s about identifying our own personal “acorns,” the things that truly motivate and energize us. Maybe it’s about acknowledging, and even embracing, the natural ebb and flow of our energy levels. And maybe, just maybe, it’s about allowing ourselves the occasional squirrel-like moment of pure, unadulterated focus on the task at hand, whatever that may be.
So, the next time you find yourself drowning in a sea of to-do lists, take a moment, look out the window, and see if there’s a little inspiration scurrying by. You might be surprised what you find.”
Non-Synthetic Glen Editor’s Note: I’ll give the draft a thumbs up for the ‘Sisyphean boulder’ reference. That is certainly a reference I make.
I’m amused by the subject matter the A.I. chose. I’d given more of a prompt than what I noted at the top. So, I’d call this content more akin to something I’d write and tag as either ‘navel gazing’ or ‘C’est La Vie’.
I also smiled at the section, “than I, armed with my fancy notebook and color-coded pens.” – I’m not a ‘fancy notebook and color-coded pens’ kind of guy, Interesting to imagine that the A.I. version of me is…
Draft 2
“The Tyranny of To-Do Lists and the Allure of the Unplanned
Ah, to-do lists. Those ever-present companions, promising organization and productivity, yet often morphing into oppressive taskmasters. I’ll admit, I’ve fallen prey to their siren song many a time. The satisfaction of crossing off a completed item, the illusion of control over the swirling vortex of daily life – it’s seductive.
But lately, I’ve been questioning this blind adherence to the tyranny of the list. Is it possible, I wonder, that the most interesting, enriching experiences often lie beyond the confines of the pre-planned?
Think about it. The serendipitous encounter with an old friend, the impromptu walk in the park that leads to a stunning sunset, the unexpected conversation that sparks a new idea – these moments rarely appear on a to-do list. They arise from the fertile ground of the unplanned, the space where spontaneity and curiosity can blossom.
Of course, there’s a balance to be struck. Complete disorganization would be a recipe for chaos. But perhaps we can loosen our grip on the list, leaving room for the unexpected. Maybe we can schedule in some “unplanned time” in our calendars – a blank canvas for the day’s creative energy to paint upon.
So, the next time you find yourself staring at a to-do list that stretches longer than your arm, consider this: leave a few things unchecked. Embrace the unknown, the unplanned. You might just be surprised by the beauty, the joy, and the inspiration that awaits you beyond the rigid confines of the list.
And who knows, maybe I’ll even take my own advice for once. Now, where did I put that dusty old camera…?”
Non-Synthetic Glen Editor’s Note: The title smacks of something I’d write. I’ll call that a win.
Also, points for the chosen flowery vocabulary, sentence structure and rhythm for many of these sentences including, “Ah, to-do lists. Those ever-present companions, promising organization and productivity, yet often morphing into oppressive taskmasters. I’ll admit, I’ve fallen prey to their siren song many a time. The satisfaction of crossing off a completed item, the illusion of control over the swirling vortex of daily life – it’s seductive.” – I have to admit, it captures my “voice” here…
The last sentence, “And who knows, maybe I’ll even take my own advice for once. Now, where did I put that dusty old camera…?” really sounds like how I’d conclude my post. Again: bravo little A.I.!
Draft 3
“The Tyranny of To-Do Lists and the Allure of the Unplanned
Well, hello there, friends. Glen here, back again from the digital wilderness (or maybe it’s just my messy desk?).
I’ll admit, I’ve been staring at this blinking cursor for the better part of an hour, mind as blank as a freshly-paved parking lot. I usually have a running list of potential blog post topics lurking in the back of my head, a mental to-do list of sorts. But today, that list is as barren as a Joshua Tree after a particularly harsh summer.
Ironic, isn’t it? Me, a self-proclaimed champion of lists and schedules, finding myself utterly stumped by the very tools I preach. It got me thinking – have we become slaves to our to-do lists? These meticulously crafted blueprints for productivity, are they sometimes stifling our spontaneity, our ability to simply be in the moment?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we all throw our calendars and planners to the wind. There’s a certain comfort in knowing what needs to be done and when. But there’s also a danger in letting our lives become a rigid series of checkboxes, a relentless pursuit of “getting things done” that leaves no room for the unexpected, the serendipitous.
Perhaps, the key lies in striking a balance. Maybe it’s about leaving a few blank spaces in our schedules, allowing for the occasional detour, the unplanned adventure. Maybe it’s about embracing the “maybe” and the “what if,” letting life surprise us now and then.
So, today, I’m taking a break from my to-do list. I’m going to let the day unfold organically, see where the wind takes me (metaphorically speaking, of course, it’s February in Florida, the wind is likely coming from the air conditioner). Who knows, maybe inspiration will strike, maybe I’ll just stumble upon a good story, or maybe, just maybe, I’ll rediscover the simple joy of doing absolutely nothing.
And hey, if all else fails, there’s always tomorrow. And a fresh, hopefully more inspired, to-do list.
Until next time,
Glen”
Non-Synthetic Glen Editor’s Note: This draft scores with the reference to my too often cited writer’s block trope.
It is VERY strange that there is a reference to ‘February in Florida’. I happen to be in Florida, but I’m normally in Pennsylvania and secondly, I did not tell the A.I. that I was in Florida. Not sure if it derived it from an IP address or what but it scores points for creepy.
The other noteworthy item about this draft is that it introduces ‘Glen’ and sign’s off as ‘Glen’. I don’t think I’ve ever done that.
Non-Synthetic Glen’s Conclusion: I don’t have any great summation here or words about a ‘Brave New World’. I did this on a lark, and it entertained me. There is promise and peril in A.I. and I’m acutely aware that these are but the baby steps.
Now, the question is: did Glen write any of this entry or was it 100% A.I. generated? “Dun! Dun! Duuuunnnn!“
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