Passing through Quantum?

Happy first Saturday of the year. Listening to the weather gurus it’s Armageddon at the doorstep. Our energy and internet providers have already prepped us by Messaging many paragraphs of dire ‘possibilities’, i.e. “warnings”. So, what did Marcia state was an absolute necessity? A haircut!

Now that she’s moved another year further into adulthood it’s also apparent that one gets both older and colder quicker. Hence, as a prep, should the weather types prove accurate, she’s testing out her wearable blanket, a “Comfy”.

Thursday, we celebrated Marcia’s Birthday at the Element eatery. We all gathered for a good time and three hours of good food, fine talk, with live music. Even burned a candle, sang Happy Birthday, and closed out with individual little Cheesecakes.

Just wondering – whether everyone’s head has cleared after the New Year’s celebrations. If still ‘foggy’ or headachy you should have lived in Kiribati (island nation in the central Pacific Ocean and formally the Gilbert Islands and not too far from Tonga) on this day in 1994.

See, that year, Kiribati skipped New Year’s Eve Day altogether. What? It made sense. Turns out the International Date Line cut right through this nation. The net result being that the Eastern islands of the nation were 24 hours off from that west of the Line. The net result was that there were only three days a week to conduct business.

So, a ‘carve-out’ of the Date Line was made to place all of that nation into a single time zone. To accomplish this, voila, the western islands of Line Islands and Phoenix Islands skipped the last day of December 1994. Now, don’t you feel better? If not, pour yourself another coffee.

Public Domain Day – Every January 1st is Public Domain Day, books published in 1929, and movies distributed in 1954 are now free for anyone to share and reuse. My favorites, Tintin and Popeye the Sailor Man, are now such classics, as is the art created by Matisse and Frida Kahlo. In music we find works of ‘Fats’ Waller (“Stormy Weather”) as well as Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and an “American in Paris”. Even some older, classic, movies:

U-Haul – trucks are swarming the ‘hood. It’s an end of month thing and we’re used to it. Leases are up and, musical-chair-like, there is a wild dash from one apartment to the new. This means that almost everything U-Haul has available is on the road or in a driveway. We see tiny 8 footers all the way to the largest box trucks available – with a few trailers thrown in for good luck.

What makes it all novel in these parts are the industrial sized, black plastic, trash bags. The trucks are loaded to the gills with bags of clothing, bags of shoes and boots, bags of kitchen items, most everything in a plastic bag. Moving is a grand shuffling of trash bags. Marcia enjoys watching it all to the point that I suggested she begin maintaining a spread sheet on their movements.

Quantum Theory insights – Death in a Timeless World – A number of years ago, at an after-wedding gathering I met up with an old acquaintance, Bryan. As these ‘after-the-event’ things can move along with a certain level of boredom, he and I got caught up quite a discussion. See, Bryan is a (now) retired tenured Professor of Physics, and at that time was heavily into research on Quantum Theory.

Ever since that discussion I perk up whenever things under the rubric of Quantum Theory pop into my arena. With that as backdrop, I’ve been reading on the subject. If interested, type the above heading into Google and a world will open. Anyway, ponder on the quoted couple of paragraphs below; I find them fascinating:

“Our current way of thinking goes on to assume that the world has an objective existence independent of the observer. However, numerous experiments have suggested otherwise. We view life as the activity of carbon and other molecules: we live for a while and then decay into the ground. This belief leads us to accept the concept of death, primarily because we identify ourselves with our physical bodies, which eventually perish. However, biocentrism, a theory proposed by Dr. Robert Lanza, argues that if we incorporate life and consciousness into the equation, many scientific puzzles can be explained, including why the universe appears fine-tuned for life.”

“In a timeless, spaceless world, the idea of death does not hold. In this context, immortality wouldn’t imply a perpetual existence in time but rather an existence outside of time altogether. This idea aligns with recent experiments showing that light particles can communicate instantaneously as if there were no space or time separating them. Such findings suggest that our understanding of time and space-and, by extension, life and death-is deeply flawed.”

https://tinyurl.com/fw8snvma or https://tinyurl.com/preview/2bcyzkb

Quote: So, now that we’ve learned so much more about us, the Universe, and our relationship in it; I think it’s summarized perfectly by Mel Brooks – “Humor is just another defense against the universe.”

Sun – Tied into this little-bitty Quantum Rambling I thought I’d pass along another subject of interest to ‘Moi’. Back in 2018 NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe to explore the Sun’s outer corona. After placing a bunch of heat shielding the probe, adding a couple of swings around Venus to build up speed (430,000 mph), and this past week it successfully touched the sun as it swung by and observed the corona from a ‘mere’ 4-million miles out. I found this stunning first picture – hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Life is AMAZING!

Meilleurs vœux (French for: wishing you well)

Dirk

BONUS POINTS:

Which of these animals change their color to white in the wintertime?

1)   “ptarmigans”
2)   “Arctic lemming”
3)   “Peary caribou”
4)   “least weasel”
5)   “Stoat”
6)   “mountain hare”