Home
The Road
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 1003
Day off, late start but I go for crystal mountain again. The road - it's a lot worse than I remembered - more rockfalls, trees down, and the hardscrabble portion to the top - well, I surprise myself even. But I made it, only to be besieged by mosquitos - a pitiless whine, hundreds of them, I manage a couple of hours of unfocussed digging, some new pockets, tiny crystals, there's about 15 or 20 tons of overburden to be removed before I can start finding the good stuff, and with the bugs - mosquitos, black-fly's, deerflies and midges it might just have to wait until fall. They are maddening. A weeks digging to expose where I should be digging - but it will pay off.
Anyways - completely raw, hand-held phone out the window footage of the drive down the mountain (2 videos, missing about half the drive where it got boring) - I really should be a brand-ambassador for jeep, you see all the fancy Wranglers, lifted with the big tires and paint jobs that tell you they've never left the pavement. This jeep, if it could talk, well, it's been there. This is the same road I rolled the jeep down last year with the boy when the radiator blew.
I'll need a GoPro and a gimbal stabilizer, mount it to where the CB antennae would go, and then be off. Jeep Brand Ambassador, free gas, maintenance, jeep (of course), maybe a 6 figure salary (why not?) and I could provide 12 hours footage like this a week, of all the places Google Maps can't go....
Note: Sorry for the shaky footage, rough road and if it's any consolation it faithfully reproduces the nausea that every single prospecting partner has reported.
The Wolfpack
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 728
This looks worthwhile. When winter comes I'll have a lot of movies to catch up on.
Stephen Fry on God
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 512
Recalling an interview with Stephen Fry, in which he denounces the existence of God because what God would allow a child to (...die of leukemia, suffer abuse, etc, etc).
And - on first reflection you would agree with him. Certainly it's fashionable to disagree with God - at least the God of Roman Catholicism - and even as such it's less the "God" than the interpretations and intermediaries they've appointed on the subject.
But - here I disagree - to even name "God" is to anthropomorphize him - make him in our image. This so that we may more readily understand him (or her).
This is by it's very nature absurd.
We can imagine - albeit poorly - what it would be like to be an ant. If we err it is more than like that we project too much of our own consciousness into the ant - imagining it capable of a bigger portion of consciousness than it has. Think of a popular cartoon starring Woody Allen. But an ant has a finite relationship to us - we can measure the difference in size, in our brains, in our relative scope of duties and perceptions.
No one would believe for a moment that an ant could in any way imagine what it would be like to be ourselves. The difference is too gross, if an ant could imagine being anything other than being an ant, most surely it would become that.
Now, compared to the breadth of the universe as we have perceived it - and the breadth, spanning billions if not trillions of light years, the age - billions of years - and these - to be sure - are no crude approximations of it's size or age, merely the upper bounds upon which we are able to measure them. It is most certainly much vaster and older than we can comprehend. Yet - in our arrogance - we think that we can understand it.
Understanding it, being able to predict and control it would make us Gods.
Clearly we cannot.
The difference in consciousness between us and the universe as we have so far perceived it is of an infinitude of orders of magnitudes greater than that of the consciousness of an ant versus ourselves.
If you take the universe to be conscious, a living organism of sorts - and if this is in fact this is the case, then are there other organisms out there on a similar scale? And - how would we know?
People know that they are a part of society (Most people. No, many people. Some people.) Do your cells know that they're a part of the ecosystem that is your body? Do your cells grieve the deaths of neighboring cells, and if so, of what business is it to you? Certainly no one pays attention to the deaths of their cells, which happens millions of times per day, nor could they be expected to and continue at the level of functioning expected of their organism. A certain callousness must accompany any increment in evolution, the countless daily deaths of my cells is of little to no consequence to the well being of the organism as a whole - in fact - take cancer for example - the death of your cells may be crucial to the well being of your organism.
In any event, while I appreciate his arguments against "God", I don't think they're valid. I don't argue that there is or isn't, only that if there is a God, or higher consciousness, than by necessity it's intelligence and motivations must lie beyond our comprehension.
Another day of ...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 1227
Scorching heat, followed by unpredicted windstorms, heat lightning, storm clouds, power outages, credit card failures, torn up beach, pagodas, umbrellas, "The new normal".
This is not normal. Not in the least, not by a long shot. From 119 Fires yesterday up to 175 today, they're getting closer to home...
Page 224 of 1021