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Kottke & Futility Closet
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 9
Now my web-rounds have mostly consisted of doom-scrolling reddit and the news, which is no way to achieve mental health. Especially given the news as of late...
You know what I mean.
But - recalling better days here's a couple of links I've probably posted in the past.
The first is Jason Kottke - Link: https://kottke.org/
Who's good, because while he's as well agonizing over the state of the union, he's also got other things going on. And it's important to remember there are other things going on, this news cycle can be paralytic.
The second is Futility Closet - Link: https://www.futilitycloset.com/
Which is updated daily, and a respite from the day to day assault on our attention spans.
The Weekend
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 13
Ha! And - finally I have done it; at the restaurant we've hired some new staff and I've wrestled weekends off. Saturday and Sunday, specifically, and if I'm fortunate I'll be able to dovetail my other days into doubles meaning that I'll have 4 1/2 days off per week.
Which would suit me just fine.
The Saturdays off, well, I'll be able to attend the theatre, develop a better (and healthier) social life, get up to all sorts of things...
Starting today. Yayy!
Now - at the library, blogging and having done some maintenance on the database, the back-end, front-end, mentioned my uneventful and rather boring life it's time to read a bit my book of the moment - Richard Hakluyt - "Voyages and Discoveries" - rather abbreviated from it's original million and a half words to a comfortable 150, 000; a sixteenth scholars thorough documenting of all of Britains sea-voyages, often in the first person, descriptions of distant times and lands when the world - to Britain largely - was still a vast and unexplored place.
Anyways, it's great reading...
Hoard of Glass Bracelets found in Ukraine
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 12
A thirteenth century hoard of Glass Bracelets found near Volodymyr, Ukraine. While treasures are abundant this was not found with a metal detector (those are found daily, world wide) - and the fragile nature of them, make this treasure rather unique.
Problems in Modern Cosmology
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 49
My YouTube videos lately have been of Sir Roger Penrose and Lectures by Richard Feynman.
The Feynman Lectures, excellent explanations that only serve to befuddle me more, and I can listen only to so many before I begin to get unsettled. They're synthesized from his notes, audio clips of him speaking, audio, it's the "Uncanny" feeling - that AI can resurrect you from the dead and have you do whatever it wants - listening to these for some reason builds up a pit of anxiety in my stomach.
So back to Penrose. I'm liking him; 94, still lucid and he disagrees with the standard Cosmological Model.
I; as well; disagree, the difference is that he does from a position of a lifetime commitment to studying physics and observing the universe and doing the math (ie: education) - mine simply a deep seated intuition that something is wrong. Not with the Universe - you have to love Feynman's quote "The Universe doesn't owe us an explanation" - but something deep and fundamental with our understanding of it.
A few examples: The expanding, or inflationary universe - (Big Bang Theory) - which are somewhat validated by the red shifting of stars and galaxies but then undermined by the supersized galactic rings and super structures that of necessity predate the "Dawn of the Universe". Even Eddington, whose idea it was - later came to reject it.
Why is the speed of light what it is? What of the Hubble tension?
And those pesky time-travelling Positrons, Dirac's equations, so many other questions -
Then there's the problem of an infinite, unbounded universe, which if left unchecked would see another me at another time perfectly incarnated, doing exactly what I'm doing right now - that all things of necessity would occur again, and this is also intuitively wrong. What I can imagine is that the laws of the universe will change as itself "evolves" to avoid this repetition
But - and the more I understand (which is really less) the more I can get on board with a whole host of spiritual teachings that explain it on a human scale - which, really, is going to have to be good enough.
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