streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 12:53 pm on February 6, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: EVOLUTION ( 21 ), founder effect   

  It’s a law of nature that a male keeps as many females as he can service. 

  One guy gets the harem; everyone else gets the hand. Lions do with brute force what men do with money, extrapolate themselves and their line into the future, and create the world in their own image and likeness. This genetic selfishness also inadvertently strengthens the species. The strongest stud propagates the new generation. This is the ‘founder effect’: “I found her; you can’t have her.” Cloning would not only take all the fun out of it, but would weaken the species by separating it from the usual trials of natural selection. Love is finished when there is no forward movement, just up and down, in and out. Evolution appreciates motivation and inspiration, punctuated equilibrium.

   

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  hardie karges 2:46 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: EVOLUTION ( 21 ), Hippos   

  Hippos shit with a little automatic butt-wiper 

  of a tail flicking off the poop steadily. Otherwise it’d be drooling down their legs, I guess. I can’t imagine one getting into a crouch. It’d never get back up. Natural selection never rests. If it’s difficult to envision the transition of land mammals to sea mammals, one only has to look at the hippo to see the transition, overweight and water-logged, gliding through the water, bouncing on all fours, incapable of swimming. They’ll learn. You watch them fight with their mouths and compare to the methods of some of the sea cows currently extant and you realize that this is something not likely to happen, but something that has already happened, though still in progress. Some of the different varieties of current sea mammals might as likely have resulted from different waves of evolution from the same branch stock rather than evolution of unrelated stocks, evolution differentiated by time as well as space.
   
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  hardie karges 8:42 am on February 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  The cat goes upstairs while the dog stays down. 

  It’s a class system based on ability. The puppy can’t yet climb the stairs, so the kitten gets a break. Otherwise the kitten gets to play the role of chew toy for a growing puppy eager to flex his jaw muscles. This is the law of the ‘hood’; big dog bullies little cat. It’s different on the open savanna. There, the cats rule. Dogs don’t even show up, unless you want to count the scavenger hyenas. Dogs do better up north with their big bad ass cousins, the bears. Bears are a further evolution of the same family which produced the dog, like apes and monkeys, bigger and badder. Given their ability to function on two legs, it makes you wonder if they might not have become the most intelligent animals if apes hadn’t got there first. We talk about dinosaurs with awe and reverence as if that were a historical freak that could never happen again, given the modern tendency of land-based animals to be smaller, more adaptable, units. Whales are as big or bigger than dinosaurs ever were, but not quite as glamorous, their big blubber butts washed up on beaches in helpless prostration to the gods of ignorance, having made a wrong turn down a dead end or their sonar failing them. Everything seems more romantic in retrospective, though I doubt a couple of brontosaurs nibbling ferns were really so astounding. Could humans have co-existed with dinosaurs? Would we have driven them to extinction like all the others?

   
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  hardie karges 12:46 pm on February 2, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: creation, EVOLUTION ( 21 )   

  I refuse to believe that man’s skeleton, optimal for erect posture, 

  
  didn’t somehow derive from his distinct preference for an erect posture in preceding generations, and his decreasing need for a four-legged stance or even the intermediate knuckle-walking. The same would hold for distinct hands and feet, two of each, as opposed to four feet or four hands, as found in other species, arising from a new preference for savannas as opposed to forests. The only question is: by what mechanism would something like that occur? What would stimulate imperceptible evolutionary changes in a specific direction toward a general goal? A quantum mechanic must look for a transfer particle. Darwinism invokes mutation, without ever proving a single instance in which a specific mutation caused a specific trait to be selected for long-term adaptation. Darwinism has merely been accepted, not proven. The mechanism I’m looking for must have something to do with memory, re-programming, visual basic, feedback, something similar to creativity, without invoking creationism nor ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’. Genetic drift must be inherent to the process of evolution, itself to be selected or rejected for usefulness, and re-directed in another direction. Evolution must be inherently directional, whether or not purposefully, adrift in a sea of probabilities.

   
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  hardie karges 1:11 pm on February 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  The Big Bang created a universe like a big balloon, 

  the outer surface right here right now as far as the eye can see; the past occurred somewhere inside, now physically inaccessible. The outer edge that we inhabit is the thin green line where heat meets cold, where lava meets the sea, where past meets the future. We reside on the outer edge of the balloon, looking in, at the past, all we can see. If we resided on the flip side, then maybe we could see the future, probably wouldn’t have much choice, actually. If you could see far enough in any one direction, you’d see yourself, back to the lens, staring off into space. In the future will be the past staring us in the face demanding an explanation. In the future we’ll have to start all over. The only thing certain is the past; the future is pure abstract logic, mathematical probability. An old person leaving this world of space and attraction is even more beautiful than a new pink blob of consciousness coming in, the same thing really, though the unformed future can hardly compete with a well-formed past. Everything’s different now: logic is suspended, reason waits its turn in line. We stand at the crossroads of our lives and history. There’s no going back without re-booting. The moment past is accessible only in memory, measured by the half-life of mental images. The future is Heaven; the past is Hell, a Hell of your own making.

   
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  hardie karges 5:37 am on January 31, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Astro-physicists think that maybe the universe is in the shape of a torus, i.e. a doughnut. 

  This is known as the Krispy Kreme theory of the universe. This would satisfy the need to have time travel perpendicularly to space, and allow space to still be curved, all of which apparently is necessary to allow for a flat universe without folds and ripples. Albert the prophet taught us better, but we didn’t listen, still treating time and space like plumbing and wiring, sharing the same continuum but diametrically opposed, constantly at odds, still treating gravity like a Newtonian force, commanding the troops and craving attention. With all due respect to the many Cambodians in the business of frying ring-shaped doughy fritters in order to feed their families, I remain skeptical. I tend to view Nature as a unit, as in microcosm so in macrocosm. I see many more spheres in Nature than rings, and even fewer aspiring to such. I think the universe is round like a ball, albeit a lumpy one. The only question is, are we on the edge looking out to the future or looking back to the past?

   
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  hardie karges 10:59 am on January 30, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity 

  has been called one of the most brilliant artifacts of human imagination ever devised. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s right. The universe is riddled with black holes; the hard part is solving them. If our brains worked faster, maybe we could see the gaps in our false solidity. Anything faster than fifteen frames per second, we see as continuous motion. Anything much slower, we see as discontinuous. We need telescopes and microscopes to show us the world as it really is, almost infinitely large and almost infinitely small. We need theories and technology to give us a clue to the things that surround us. Fizzicists talk about gravity as a force now more than ever, despite Einstein, so score one for uncommon sense. Biologists still talk about Nature selecting a trait ‘because’, when all you really know is that the possessors of that accidental trait produced more offspring than the others. Astronomers still scour the skies for intelligent life even though the odds for it down home are diminishingly small.

   
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  hardie karges 5:28 am on January 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Earth ( 3 ), solar system, Sun, three-body   

  The three-body problem is more difficult in physics than it is in nature. 

  Fortunately, it’s never been all that much of a problem in my life, because nothing is harder to predict. One woman at a time is usually enough for me, maybe too much. Scientists had described the tiniest components of an atom long before even something as basic as continental drift was accepted, but has never been able to predict the effect of three celestial bodies on the movements of each other, or turbulence of any kind, for that matter, including weather. It’ll take some more powerful computers, I guess. The problem, of course, is that there are nine planets, most with multiple moons, not to mention many other transient bodies, so the equation gets more complicated. For better or worse, most stars are not like our good ol’ Sun. Over a hundred so-called ‘earth-like’ planets have been discovered by now, but nothing like our solar system, splayed out like a prism of light and color, solid and liquid and gas, gravity and inertia, all held in delicate balance and suspension, a heavenly symphony about which we know very little. Find another Sun-like solar system and you just might find another truly earth-like planet.

   
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  hardie karges 7:46 am on January 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Big Bang   

  The Big Crunch is not a candy bar. 

  The Big Crunch is the opposite of the Big Bang. Unless somebody can find an awful lot of dark matter with enough gravity to hold all this universe together, then neither eternal expansion nor a steady state is probably sustainable. In other words, “catch you on the rebound” might take on new meaning. Corpses will be removed from their graves and taken to funeral parlors to be prepared for birth. The light from distant stars will become blue-shifted. Babies will die and be buried in their mothers’ wombs in one section of the hospital as old people are brought to life in another. Of course some corpses will go straight from the funeral home to be born at home, while others will be taken from the hospital to unique locations where guns will suck the bullets out of them to effect their birth. The sun and the moon will both rise in the west and set in the east of course, and people will walk backwards. The interesting thing is that this will probably all seem perfectly natural, with logic simply unconsciously retro-fitted to match the new circumstances. Still some interesting questions remain. Whether you fly, walk, or drive, will you have no idea where you’ve been, but know exactly where you’re going and what will happen when you get there? Will sex still be enjoyable knowing that you’re going to be stressed afterwards? Will death be more enjoyable as a child? Logic is capable of explaining anything. Truth is another matter.

  Moe Tamani is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Moe Tamani 12:38 pm on January 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply

    Well people can make such ponders as they really don’t know the theory behind it and more over we don’t have fool people with big bang……..

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  hardie karges 7:39 am on January 27, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Motion is the natural state of the universe, 

  everything in continual orbit, gravitating between free fall to an unknown center and the outward expansion of the Big Bang. Maybe the dead don’t really die; they’ll just stop moving as the universe expands beyond them. Should the universe ever contract, they’ll stand up and go right back from where they came. And before anyone starts appealing to common sense, remember that we wouldn’t have reached the moon with common sense. Common sense only goes so far. It certainly isn’t common sense that the Earth revolves on an axis instead of a Sun God making daily rounds. Even common 3-D reality is largely an illusion, a matter of convention. In a flat land of cubic structures, it describes much. In a universe of irregular spheres in irregular orbits, it describes almost nothing. Accordingly, modern mechanics uses the dimensions of mass, length, and electrical charge, in addition to time. There may not be a light barrier, as Einstein implied, but you might have a hard time measuring anything faster, in this dimension at least. This is the dimension of light/electricity/magnetism. Gravity itself may be little more than something like static electricity doing spooky things at a distance. If only we could find the transfer particles. Common sense only applies in the narrow wavelengths and frequencies in which humans operate.