Marilynne Robinson

Jan Cox once said, in the 1970s, that religion, that which ordinary talk refers to by that word, was putrid. It was not always that way. He said at times in history the church "had sheltered," the work. He wouldn't have had any reason to refer to Marilynne Robinson, if he knew of her.

At the link there is an essay by this writer which places the way religion is used in political life in a context which values religion.  I sway into her words, and am thankful someone can speak with her authenticity. I have no idea how viable this 'edge of the ordinary' is.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/awakening?utm_source=Main+Reader+List&utm_campaign=8ebfda6509-August+11_Now_at_Commonweal8_11_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_407bf353a2-8ebfda6509-92372181

Suddenly we know what quasars are!?

Suddenly we know what quasars are!? When did we figure that out.


http://phys.org/news/2015-09-converging-black-holes-virgo-constellation.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=splt-item&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter

....

A supermassive black hole about to cannibalize its own can be detected by the mysterious flickering of a quasar—the beacon of light produced by black holes as they burn through gas and dust swirling around them. Normally, quasars brighten and dim randomly, but when two black holes are on the verge of uniting, the quasar appears to flicker at regular intervals, like a light bulb on timer......

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-09-converging-black-holes-virgo-constellation.html#jCp

Lithium stellar quantities still a mystery

Our title is not the one used by this article:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/29/us-science-nova-chile-idUSKCN0Q314920150729?

The Reuters title is "Lithium find in exploding star could help solve astronomy puzzle."

My point is the skew to presenting the physical sciences in a particular light. Why NOT present the gaps in our ignorance more boldly in articles popularizing scientific progress?

We quote from the article:

":If we imagine the history of the chemical evolution of the Milky Way as a big jigsaw, then lithium from novae was one of the most important and puzzling missing pieces..."

Actually this article is fairly fair compared to many I read. So the fact they say---lithium from novae was one of the most important and puzzling missing pieces... supports my point. In fact, the lithium quantities still are a mystery, as the end of the article makes clear. And what if our progress is not just filling in empty pre-shaped spots in a grid? What if what we don't know defines the whole puzzle?

How do scientists synchronize themselves

Fascinating article on how things synchronize in nature. My interest though is how science popularizers talk.  The whole buildup is this old mystery and how it gets solved. Then the last paragraph walks it all back. This is typical. Read the article from the link -- I only excerpted a bit. 

Quoting from a Smithsonian article...

Christiaan Huygens was a busy scholar. Among his many achievements, the Dutch scientist figured out the shape of Saturn's rings and discovered that planet's largest moon, Titan. He founded the theory that light travels as a wave, and he invented the pendulum clock. Huygens, it seems, couldn't even turn off his scientific mind when he was under the weather.

In 1665 he was ill and stuck in bed, watching two pendulum clocks that were attached to a beam in his house. He noticed the pendulums started to swing in time with each other, no matter whether the clocks had been started or stopped at different times or what position the pendulums started in. Huygens was baffled. There had to be some way the clocks "spoke" to each other, but he lacked the precise instruments necessary to measure interaction between the clocks. So he chalked it up to mysterious movements transmitted by the air or the physical connection in the beam, and there the matter rested for more than 300 years.

Now, physicists revisiting the 17th-century conundrum think the answer may lie in sound waves. ......

Jonatan Peña Ramirez, a researcher at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, has also published studies of the Huygens' clock phenomenon. He says physicists like to study this system because it mimics other cycles in nature. "Similar phenomena can be observed in biological systems, where some cycles inside the human body may synchronize in a natural way," he says.

However, he isn't yet convinced that sound energy is the culprit for the clocks. "If you replace the driving mechanism in the clocks by a smooth mechanism, i.e., a mechanism that does not apply [discrete] impulses to the clocks, still one can be able to observe synchronization," he says. As far as he's concerned, "Huygens' synchronization … is far from being solved."
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-sound-explian-350-year-old-clock-mystery-180956022/#9ekmf3VpK0pO95pB.99
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Is the cat saved or multiplied even more

Some scientists think the relation of macro and micro reality is elucidated by time dilation. Not that I actually understand the math or anything, but it does seem to me that instead of micro and macro realities, you might just have many more gradations between quantum and macro realities --- but that is not what we experience -- I don't think.

Mysterious cold spot in the universe

There is a mysterious cold spot in the universe and an empty spot according to The Independent.

The concluding paragraph:

The Hawaii scientists said that while “the existence of the supervoid and its expected effect on the CMB do not fully explain the Cold Spot, it is very unlikely that the supervoid and the Cold Spot at the same location are a coincidence”. The team will continue to study the cold spot using extra data, they said.

Is 'extra data' just an infelicitous expression? It suggests people scooping up some chads from a laboratory floor. Popular science is the point where sloppy thinking meets something that could be interesting.

AND AN UPDATE to this story-- comparing the Guardian version of this story we find a void in the Independent's reporting----

The Guardian says:

....The supervoid is not an actual vacuum, as its name suggests, but has about 20% less stuff in it than our part of the universe – or any typical region. “Supervoids are not entirely empty, they’re under-dense,” said András Kovács, a co-author at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

And this quote compares instructively with the below,  from The Independent article cited at the start of this post:

The ‘supervoid’ is 1.8 billion light years wide, ‘the largest individual structure ever identified by humanity’ and full of absolutely nothing.

We at least know this: they are not both quoting the wikipedia source.

More light on dark energy

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-universe-fast.html?


and meanwhile, at Fermilab--
"Absence of gravitational-wave signal extends limit on knowable universe"

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-absence-gravitational-wave-limit-knowable-universe.html?


So all our measurements are off, and, there are no cosmic strings close by. Something's moving faster. All I can say is that "chipping away at the universe," is bad writing.

Great book on Heidegger just published

Heidegger's Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in "Being and Time" and Beyond (2015) . Ryan Coyne.

I really hope it gets the attention it deserves for illuminating Heidegger's methods of analysis. The recent revelations of the extent of Heidegger's ghastly prejudices, which for instance have led to the resignation of the German head of a society to study Heidegger, were made after this book went to press, may make many just want his work to disappear. Still we need to understand the role he played. An sense of disdain for this thinker does not mean his effect on European thought can be ignored.

Ryan Coyne was a student of Amy Hollywood. Enough is available to sample at gbooks to get a sense of the quality of this book.

A link to the formation of the moon

Fascinating read, didn't quite understand the point, but it is nice to think physics is getting a scenario of how the earth and moon formed.

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-view-moon-formation-crucial-difference.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=splt-item&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter

Mad and mad

I am just kind of tucking this away here: an article about how kids in foster settings are drugged. What I know that most don't is how this is functional in a larger context. But I don't know how to express this so that something is communicated that does not seem heartless.

http://www.madinamerica.com/2015/03/drugging-children-foster-care/

Good and bad and ....

quoting the headline from an Aeon article

The fault in our design

We tend to think that technological progress is making us more resilient, but it might be making us more vulnerable

Colin Dickey

The point of this brief mention is that above is a great example of binary thought. " Technological progress" is GOOD, OR is BAD. Wait though, it is both, of course it is both. Technological progress is good and it is bad.  This obviousness is hidden because we see above our rational, ordinary mind at work. Our binary mind--- everything has to be this or that. Two choices. Both/and is ignored. 

Is not both/and also binary? But it points to a greater complexity, and really, considering the point of this post, we have to say reality surely is either/or AND, it is at the same time, BOTH/AND.

I can't help this reality--- I didn't make this planet.