Mindfulness and Habit

I did not bother to read the article entitled: Forget "Mindfulness": Habits Make Us Human. 

The link is below. I submit it as a great example of binary thought. Either we are human because something in us seeks, or we are a mound of habits. We are one or the other. I suppose the conclusion of this article says something about both being true. Standard scientistic jargon. The point is the way the rational mind works, and that is to see with a binary function that defines everything as this or that. When in fact an awareness of inclusiveness is an aspect of any real personal growth. Both and more, and either/or. You start with trying to see what is going on, inside and out. So read the article and see how close I came.
http://bigthink.com/wikimind/forget-mindfulness-habits-make-us-human

Reading the chemicals on the wall

A writeup in ArsTechnica suggests a star recently studied has an anomalous abundance of elements [when did abundance stop meaning just lots and start to also mean some measurable amount?] which can be explained by this star being just one generation removed from the earliest stars from the big bang. If correct, this star is hugely more ancient than the other observable stars, which themselves are many cycles on in the birth, death and rebirth cycle which typifies all the stars we can study.

Dog research reveals a lot about people

This article on dog research tells us a lot, a lot about how humans think and design experiments. Reading the results of their experiments on how one dog can control 80 sheep, one thing jumps out. For an animal that relies most on its nose, the researchers can only come up with models that test their visual talents. Which would be okay, except -- the researchers think they have answered the question.

It is possible they have provided a glimpse of what makes sheepdogs smarter --- maybe they do rely on a visual sense which most dogs do not --- I have no idea really --- but the point is, even if their research is valid, at most, it should make us aware of the question, what part of the dogs talent is visual, and what part olfactory. The people doing this research are helpful in illustrating human intelligence. 

Puzzle Pieces

Koberlein has an interesting post this morning. Our favorite astrophysicist discusses how the hologram universe idea does NOT mean our world is a hologram, but that the research in this area may help us grasp how quantum mechanics and general relativity are combined. So here I am hanging on by a fingertip to his arguments, hardly able to understand his prepositions,  when he writes that:

The holographic principle states that the information contained within a region of space can be determined by the information at the surface that contains it.

Nothing daunted by a passing woozy feeling, I thought--- that could be consciousness he's talking about. That could be words, verbal abstractions.   Somebody else probably thought of this -- the hologram could be a model for consciousness, -- but the extrapolation is not one Koberlein made. I do get one thing Koberlein probably does not--- even if this holographic principle is verified, it explains nothing.  But my approach is, you dance with the jigsaw puzzle that brought you, at least til you get out on the patio. 

Higgs finding did NOT solve all the problems

Interesting article in Wired, reprinted from Quanta: an outline of an alternative to super symmetry theory. This means that there is a nice, no doubt superficial, mention of the defects in this and other theories. The problems with current theories are often hard to come by for an outsider.

Mentation which strangles insight

An interesting science article includes this summary paragraph:

"The typical way that plants communicate is through chemicals that they release through their leaves and roots," says James Westwood, a plant physiologist at Virginia Tech and a co-author of the study. "So to find out that there is an exchange of RNA" — the intermediary form of genetic information that fills the gap between DNA and proteins — "is a new concept that hasn’t been explored at all."

The headlines of this article demonstrate a reliance on binary thought:

Scientists think they've discovered an entirely new mode of plant communication
And parasitic species might be using it for espionage

Rather than conceiving these plants are already mixed up, we start with the idea that the plant species are separate. This gives rise to metaphors of hacking and espionage. If the plants are actually both part of something else at the start, the options for understanding change. But the narrowly understood rational mentation, which assumes everything is isolated, then can only imagine one of two options. I can only guess at an alternate vista, which I do merely to make my complaint clear--  What if these two plants are actually collaborating on something new which will become apparent in a different climate. Whatever.

My point is the thinking process of the scientists, not the, also quite fascinating, plants in question.

Larger structure mysteries

From arstechnica we quote

Large galaxies such as the Milky Way appear to have been built by repeated mergers of smaller ones, but not every small galaxy has ended up being swallowed completely by a large one. The Milky Way is orbited by dozens of dwarf galaxies, some of which have been disrupted and stripped of stars, while others may have slipped into orbit largely intact. Similar dwarf galaxies orbit our nearby neighbors, including Andromeda.

Based on what we know about these mergers and computer modeling of galaxy formation and growth, the collection of dwarfs should be an unruly lot, having approached the galaxy they orbit from directions that are essentially random. Yet the dwarfs orbiting the Milky Way largely inhabit a single plane, orbiting in a manner analogous to moons around a giant planet.

....

and also the concluding paragraph--

Overall, the disks of dwarf galaxies probably play a significant role in the physics of the local environment. The authors estimate that their collective angular momentum is roughly the same as all the stars in the main galaxy. As for how they got there, that's less clear. The fact that the orientation of these disks is correlated with the nearby galaxies suggests that it may be dictated by the larger-scale structural organization of the Universe. But how large-scale structure can influence the dwarfs isn't obvious, and it will be difficult to determine until we can start getting our models to reproduce it.