YOU KNOW YOU’RE GETTING OLD WHEN

it’s a real effort to peel off your support hose. Give me credit for this one!

MON AMI MACLANDIA

In the Mon Ami today, my favorite espresso drinking shop, I noticed that 4 of 5 laptops being used were iMacs.

BUMPER STICKERS—AN EVOLUTION

We’ve all seen the bumper sticker “Have you hugged your kid today?” Today I saw a variation on that theme on a small grey car before me: “Have you tugged your kite today?” Immediately, I thought of another sometimes overlooked person who might need a bumper sticker on which to be commemorated. Mine would read something like this—“Have you groped your wife today?” Of course, that is the toned down version.

DANCING WITH WU LI MASTERS

Much like Going Inside: a tour around a single moment of consciousness opened my head wide open and dumped a whole new world into my consciousness, so reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters has made another huge gash in my forehead. Though the book has been around since 1979, I only heard about it several years ago and only bought the book recently when I found it at a used book store in my newly adopted coffee zone, The Uptown Village, in Vancouver. So those of you far ahead of me can just ho-hum all you want—I’m going to quote from this book.

[SNIP]
We have come a long way from Galileo's experiments with falling bodies. Each step along the path has taken us to a higher level of abstraction: first to the creation of things that no one has ever seen 
(like electrons), and then to the abandonment of all attempts even to picture our abstractions.

The problem is, however, that human nature being what it is, we do not stop trying to picture these abstractions. We keep asking
 "What are these abstractions of?", and then we try to visualize whatever that is.
[PASTE]

I can’t help noticing that the human brain has evolved something like seven, or nine, layers also—I believe—changing from a collection of adapted mechanisms grounded in perceptions of the physical world needed to avoid predators and find food into a mechanism that can put together synaptical language patterns that allow us to discuss “justice”, a thoroughly abstract concept, almost as if, as Wu Li would suggest, it prepared us to not be able to “see” the real world anymore that lies inside Einstein’s unopenable watch. If the brain continues to adapt to the world of abstractions running through it, continues to add “layers”, the world it perceives is bound to alter too. Perhaps someday human’s will be able to see the 11 dimensions that string theory suggests are “out there”—that is, if there is really any “out there” out there! But I would like to suggest something else—that perhaps the real world is out there, but, because our brains have added those extra layers, we are getting farther out of touch with the physical world because of the mathematics that science has given us to cast falsely over the “out there”.

Whatever! The dance itself is fun enough. You should read the book!