№ 780. Perception versus Reality

Gurong Arkitekto

 

№ 656. Truth, Reality & Illusions

 

№ 618. Science & Reality

Erik Petri

 

In Labatut’s telling, Heisenberg then comes to recognize that the parameters of any given quantum object can never be identified with certainty. If the position of an electron is determined precisely, “arresting that particle in its orbit like an insect impaled on a pin,” then it becomes impossible to know its momentum, and vice versa. The variables are mathematically complementary, so that the more clearly we bring one into focus, the more it blurs our understanding of the other — as if, Heisenberg explains, “reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.”

With his slippery hybrid of fact and fiction, Labatut slyly applies the uncertainty principle to the human pursuit of knowledge itself. Abstraction and imagination, measurement and story coexist in a multidimensional reality containing infinite destinies and interpretations. At its furthest reaches, reason and scientific inquiry lead into the unknowable. As Labatut puts it, in words he ascribes to Schwarzschild: “Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.”

№ 596. Sunday Thoughts

 

 

The principal problem is to offer a viable theory as to what truth itself consists in, or, to put it another way, “What is the nature of truth?” To illustrate with an example – the problem is not: Is it true that there is extraterrestrial life? The problem is: What does it mean to say that it is true that there is extraterrestrial life? Astrobiologists study the former problem; philosophers, the latter.

This philosophical problem of truth has been with us for a long time. In the first century AD, Pontius Pilate (John 18:38) asked “What is truth?” but no answer was forthcoming. The problem has been studied more since the turn of the twentieth century than at any other previous time. In the last one hundred or so years, considerable progress has been made in solving the problem.

№ 511. Zombie Preparedness. Since 2018.

The CDC, yes, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a Zombie Preparedness page. 

For real. 

Its says:

"So what do you need to do before zombies…or hurricanes or pandemics for example, actually happen? First of all, you should have an emergency kit in your house. This includes things like water, food, and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp (or in the event of a natural disaster, it will buy you some time until you are able to make your way to an evacuation shelter or utility lines are restored). Below are a few items you should include in your kit, for a full list visit the CDC Emergency page.

• Water (1 gallon per person per day)
• Food (stock up on non-perishable items that you eat regularly)
• Medications (this includes prescription and non-prescription meds)
• Tools and Supplies (utility knife, duct tape, battery powered radio, etc.)
• Sanitation and Hygiene (household bleach, soap, towels, etc.)
• Clothing and Bedding (a change of clothes for each family member and blankets)
• Important documents (copies of your driver’s license, passport, and birth certificate to name a few)
• First Aid supplies (although you’re a goner if a zombie bites you, you can use these supplies to treat basic cuts and lacerations that you might get during a tornado or hurricane)."

 

   

№ 431. Black Mirror Reality

Globalization and the internet may have made the world smaller, but now we're experiencing a counterattack, the regionalization of truth.

№ 305. Waking Up to Binary Dreams 3

Layered Realities

Are we real? What if we're just a dream? A meme? Or looped replay of a song created by a civilization long gone? What if we’re living in a computer simulation?

№ 299. Six Degrees of Reset

After the Oscar mix-up, following the Brexit vote, FBI Investigation, Fukushima meltdown and the series of surreal events, will we finally witness some normalcy (please supply definition here)?

№ 217. Laminated Realities

What are you looking at?

Bouroullec

What are you really looking at?

№ 108. Reflections On Photography

"Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own." — Susan Sontag 

"Simply stated, photography is taking pictures. But more than that, it involves the eye and the soul of the photographer using a mechanical tool to record both a physical reality and an inner reality. As a religious photographer, I try to reveal to the subject I photograph an inner dignity of which the subject may not be aware.

№ 85.Habits of the Mind (2)

Anxious. Here's a balm: "Making Paper Boats with Papa".

Open publication - Free publishing

№ 84. Habits of the Mind

It's the climate change on a planetary scale, for starters. Then there are the rabid monsoons. Did we mention the floods thick with our sewage and rich with our possessions? How about the waste segregation floating on our dead rivers?

It's all the irresponsibility and ineptness in this vast urban sinkhole.

"Anxiety: a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease
about something with an uncertain outcome."---David Mansaray

And talk about another habit of the mind---anxiety. Anxiety because of and amidst all of these.

Thankfully, it's one that can be cured by a simple smack or noogie. Thankfully, the cure is mainly mental not planetary. But if you wish, it could also be physical, a break from an unproductive helplessness that's fast becoming a pattern, or worse, a cycle. It's this loopy possibility that can be self-defeating.

Daniel Smith says, "Anxious thoughts — the what-if’s, the should-have-been’s, the never-will-be’s — are dramatic thoughts. They are compelling thoughts. They are thoughts that have no compunction about seizing you by your lapels and shouting, “Listen to me! Believe me!” So we listen, and believe, without realizing that by doing so we are stepping onto a closed loop, a set of mental tracks that circle endlessly and get us nowhere. This makes the anxious habit very hard to break. Over time those mental tracks deepen and become hardened ruts. Our thoughts slip into grooves of illogic, hypervigilance and catastrophe."

So here's a smack! Figurative, for now.

--------

"One day last year, I called my brother Scott in a state of agitation, self-hatred and incipient despair. Scott was at work and short on time. I got straight to the point. 'I’m in a state of agitation, self-hatred and incipient despair!' I cried.

'Tell me more,' Scott said. 'What is it?'

'I'm anxious — again! I’m anxious day and night. I wake up anxious and I go to bed anxious. I’m a total wreck. And I’m not doing anything to help myself! I know what helps and I’m not doing it! What’s wrong with me? Why am I not doing the things I know full well will make me feel better?'

Vice Grips and Some Such

'Oh,' Scott said. 'That’s an easy one. It’s because you’re an idiot.' Then he said he’d call me after work. (NYT Opinionator)

№ 82.God of Carnage

"In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers." The New Yorker

 

All huddle in midnight vigil.
They wait for paid violence to awake.

Dark menace finally rises up
To uncoil out of the silver pages.

Then bullets litter the air.
Special effects, they think.

Fire metals pierce
Flesh, bones and fiction.

Cellphones ring unanswered
In the pockets of dead children.

Popcorn kernels litter the exodus
While Gotham reels empty after the carnage.

Pilgrims welcome the refuge outside.
Almighty Bruce redeems his masses back to reality.

Bento Box: 

"It is the implicit bargain every moviegoer makes. You buy your ticket, you go into an auditorium full of people you don't know, you look toward the front of the room, the lights go down -- and in the darkness, you are safe. The movies promise us a happy ending, a return to the familiar world we know" (When it's not 'only a movie'). 

Alas, no more of that fiction beyond the film.