People in the know around the world recognize today – May 25th – as the day that made clear to all the importance of carrying a towel with you at all times.
Google is certainly aware of it
as is your’s truly
One thought I want to give to you on your way to life from now on. Ponder the question how you learn to fly…
… and get the mind-boggling answer: You throw yourself to the ground – – – – and miss!
Blows all your accepted reality to bits – doesn’t it?
DAVID BOHM: “Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.”
Nothing I can take credit for – mostly for me to remember at some point and enabling me to find it again.
Capturing a moment and freezing time has always been fascinating for mankind. It always required a skill to turn a moment into a lasting image. Cave drawings are the first known attempts to do just that. Over the millennia many great, and not so great, artist practiced this skill.
With the invention of the camera and film the game changed. It was suddenly much easier to trap the moment and make it last. The first photographers still had to be very skilled because you could not go to a store and buy a role of film – the first photographers made their own plates for their box cameras.
But by the 50s and 60s photography had become so easy that every American tourist traveling the world took his or her camera along. And in the recent years the prevalence of digital cameras has brought picture-taking everywhere.
The main areas in which photography is used today are snapping memory shots, documenting events and facts, and artistic expression.
Probably the most pictures take are from the first category – capturing memories. Here is the camera, especially the latest very small models, which can go everywhere and that fit into your shirt pocket. As there is, beside the initial cost for the camera, no cost involved in photo-taking, many, many photos are taken, many of which might only be looked at once before they are forgotten on a hard drive or deleted.
The second use of the camera for the documentation of events, facts and objects requires a much bigger skill level of the photographer if he really wants to create an image that tells a story or shows a situation. Point and click does not work any more. The photographer has to have the ability to isolate something specific from a sea of distraction. A wide-angle shot where, way in the background, you see the dog biting the kid while there are more prevalent objects in the foreground will not document the dog attack.
Artistic use of the camera requires a total synergy of camera and photographer. Just like the painter knows exactly how the brush will apply the paint to the canvas, so does the artistic photographer know every nuance of his tool of the trade – the camera. But just as a great painter will paint a great picture with an expensive brush or a cheap pencil, so is the great photographer able to even use a cheap camera to take great pictures.
The camera, in all three fields of application, has opened up the entry into the respective area to nearly everybody. But it still remains true that to create great pictures, great skills are required. Today’s advertisement tries to make it appear that if you spend bundles of money to purchase the latest and greatest camera, you will automatically take perfect pictures. This is certainly not the case as the photographer and not the camera takes the pictures. Lowering the bar to enter the field allows many more people to get started but only the person who sticks with it and trains himself in the art will obtain stunning results.
TAKE ONE
Two engineering students were walking across campus when one said: “Where did you get such a great bike?” The second engineer replied: “Well, I was walking along yesterday minding my own business when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. She threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, ‘Take what you want.'” The second engineer nodded approvingly: “Good choice; the clothes probably wouldn’t have fit.”
TAKE TWO
To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
TAKE THREE
A pastor, a doctor and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers. The engineer fumed: “What’s with these guys? We must have been waiting for
15 minutes!” The doctor chimed in: “I don’t know, but I’ve never seen such ineptitude!” The pastor said: “Hey, here comes the greens keeper. Let’s have a word with him.” “Hi, George what’s with that group ahead of us? They’re rather slow, aren’t they?” The greens keeper replied: “Oh, yes, that’s a group of blind fire fighters. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime.” The group was silent for a moment. The pastor said,: “That’s so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight.” The doctor said, “Good idea. And I’m going to contact my ophthalmologist buddy and see if there’s anything he can do for them.” The engineer said, “Why can’t these guys play at night?”
TAKE FOUR
There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multimillion-dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small “x” in chalk on a particular component of the machine and stated: “This is where your problem is”. The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges. The engineer responded briefly: “One chalk mark: $1.00. Knowing where to put it: $49,999.00.” It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.
TAKE FIVE
What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers? Mechanical Engineers build weapons, Civil Engineers build targets.
TAKE SIX
The graduate with a Science degree asks, “Why does it work?” The graduate with an Engineering degree asks, “How does it work?” The graduate with an Accounting degree asks, “How much will it cost?” The graduate with a Liberal Arts degree asks, “Do you want fries with that?”
TAKE SEVEN
Normal people … believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough Features yet.”
TAKE EIGHT
An architect, an artist and an engineer were discussing whether it was better to spend time with the wife or a mistress. The architect said he enjoyed time with his wife, building a solid foundation for an enduring relationship. The artist said he enjoyed time with his mistress, because of the passion and mystery he found there. The engineer said: “I like both.” “Both?” Engineer: “Yeah. If you have a wife and a mistress, they will each assume you are spending time with the other woman, and you can go to the lab and get some work done.”
TAKE NINE
An engineer was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said: “If you kiss me I’ll turn into a beautiful princess”. He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said: “If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I’ll Stay with you.” The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out: “If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I’ll stay with you and do ANYTHING you want.” Again the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket. Finally the frog asked: “What is the matter? I’ve told you I’m a beautiful princess, that I’ll stay with you and do anything you want. Why won’t you kiss me?” The engineer said: “Look I’m an engineer. I don’t have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that’s cool.”
I ran into the following article today and just have to share it:
As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions — sights, sounds, textures, tastes — are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it — or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion — we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like…
Continue reading at The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality
It doesn’t seem like many people in neuroscience or philosophy of mind are thinking about fundamental physics. Do you think that’s been a stumbling block for those trying to understand consciousness?
et cetera.
On my way from San Fernando to the High Desert I took the scenic route up the Big Tujunga Canyon and stopped briefly at the reservoir to see if El Niñjo had done any good…
… not so much.
Now let’s get our dancing shoes on and do long rain dances so that we get a lot of rain during the next few weeks, months, years.
This interesting piece from the BBC came across my desktop the other day…
and I feel compelled to comment.
One interesting science-historical fact is from the days before the discovery of atomic forces, before we ‘knew’ that the energy produced by the sun is based on nuclear fusion where two heavy hydrogen atoms are fused into one helium atom. The energy contained in the one helium is less than that of the two hydrogen and the energy difference makes our days bright and life possible on earth.
But it is not, that before the discovery of these processes, scientists just sat there and agreed to wait for the discovery of nuclear fusion – no – they used what they knew then to explain the sun. Lacking nuclear fusion to generate heat they turned to coal, which they knew well to generate heat. So they came up with the idea that the sun is a big ball of pure coal – and it burned. They already had a good idea how big the sun was so, commandeering all the scientific methods at their disposal, they calculated how long we could depend on the sun to give is light and life. I don’t recall what the number was they came up with, but it was considerably lower that the now estimated ten billion. It did not matter too much, as other branches of science also did not know too much about the time it took for the current state to develop to what they could observe. And the creation of the world in five days was still a well accepted possibility.
We might smile just how cute – and wrong – science was then. But I can not help imagine scientists in a century or two who unearth this BBC video and have a good laugh.
I wonder where the humility of science has been lost so that it can now tell us with utter conviction “How the Solar System Formed.”
