Romanesco Broccoli

Romanesco broccoli, or Roman cauliflower, is an edible flower of the species Brassica oleracea, and a variant form of cauliflower. The broccoli's shape approximates a natural fractal; each bud is composed of a series of smaller buds, all arranged in yet another Logarithmic Spiral. This self-similar pattern continues at several smaller levels.

The spiral shapes of the florets describe a Fibonacci Mathematical Series, one in which each number is the sum of two previous numbers. For example: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on. This series was discovered by Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci (1170-1240) and many natural patterns can be described using it.

Plan B

I am at point A. I want to go to point B. I don't have a plan or a map. There are many roads that lead from point A to point B, but right now, i can't see which. My only plan is to get to point B. I keep walking. On rare occasions while i walk, i can briefly see with absolute clarity, the reason why the road i am walking on couldn't possibly lead to point B. I stop, I have a cup of tea, I mark the road as "No Way!" and I change course. I keep walking. Hoping that someday, one by one, i will have eliminated all the roads that do not lead to point B. If i can still keep walking then, i will be on one of the roads that lead from point A to point B.

"Hydrogen is a light, odourless gas, which, given enough time,
turns into people."
~ Edward R. Harrison (1919-2007), Cosmologist.

Be Lief

Click Image to Distance.

Beloved. Be Loved.
Be Dear. Be Agreeable.
Be Willing. Be Ready.
Be Lief.

Liege & Lief

Harder to Dig

We have managed to reach and explore places beyond our planet much further than we have managed to reach and explore what is just below our feet. Of the average 6400 kilometers that lies between us and the center of the Earth, we have only peeped into about 0.2%. Only once, through a 9-inch wide keyhole.

And that was way back in 1992, when the Russians after 22 years of trying to dig the deepest hole into the ground, concluded they could go no further. The maximum depth of about 12.3 kilometers that they had reached in 1989, continues to remain the deepest journey ever made by humankind towards the center of the Earth.

They would have had to dig 22.7 kilometers more just to penetrate the Earth's Crust, a layer of onion-skin compared to the overall depth. Among many other unexpected discoveries, which would go on to challenge existing Geological knowledge, temperatures at this depth turned out to be 80° higher than the expected 100°C, which combined with the extreme pressure made further drilling unfeasible.

Thanks to our little hole, rocks and fossils from as far as the Archaean age, saw the light of day for the first time in 2.5 billion years.

The Deepest Hole

Messier 78

Click Image to Enlarge.

Image of Messier 78
a Reflection Nebula about 1350 light-years away
in the constellation of Orion.

Recorded by the Wide Field Imager camera
on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope
at the La Silla Observatory, Chile.

Reflection Nebulae are clouds of dust
which are simply reflecting the light
of a nearby star or stars.

~ ESO / Igor Chekalin

Flow

what must a caterpillar do
so that it may one day
become a butterfly

~ unknown

OMG

you can love God
only to the extent that
you can love Life

you are the only Life
you are Conscious of

Desire for dinner

This is how it is with us. We desire. Even though none of our desires can ever be fulfilled. Be it for a thing, a person, a quality or an experience. In between the inception of the desire and its eventual fulfillment, the nature of our desire assumes unpredictable variations of theme and form, and so does the object of desire itself. To no end. What we end up with, is almost never what we started out to get. And even i we if do, it doesn't somehow feel like we thought it would. And even if it does, its is surprisingly fleeting, before the thought starts gnawing at the back of our mind: What Now? The only way for us to conclusively fulfill any desire is to completely posses the object of our desire. To consume it. To swallow and assimilate it into our very being. EAT IT. Decimate it in the fire of our bellies. And belch and burp and churn to break it down to it's very substance, till no boundaries remain between us and the object of our desire. And when that has happened, we then look at what we have done. We reminisce about the things we ate, and about how whole they were before we ate them. We wonder whether the aftertaste was worth the destruction. We lament, we cry and we curse the duality within our nature, for the fecal matter that remains. The aftermath of lunch. And then we call up our friends to go out for a change of scenery. And dinner.

In Somnis Veritas

All those conversations
you have in your mind

With people known
or imagined

They are real

Why Way8

~ The Cool Hunter

Responsibility and Discipline

De
is a latin prefix indicating reversal

Spite
is feeling a need to see others suffer

Responsibility
is the ability to respond to others
with your self, despite your self

Discipline
is the ability to change your self
with your self, despite your self

De Spite Your Self

Yearn

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900 – 1944) (attributed)

Love Iris

Love is the extremely difficult realisation
that something other than oneself is real.

~ Dame Jean Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999)

Monkey Mirror

Monkeys are superior to men in this:
when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.

~ Malcolm De Chazal

Tablespoons

Question:
How many Tablespoons of water
does every person on Earth
need to contribute
to take care of the water requirements
of all the 21.7 Million people
of the country of Mozambique
for an entire Day?

Answer:
Two and a Half

approximately about 2.43979753 if:
One US Tablespoon = 14.7867648 ml ****
Population of the Earth = 6,821,060,063 ****
Population of Mozambique = 21,669,278 ****
Water consumption of Mozambique = 3 US Gallons/Person/Day ****
One US Gallon = 3.78541178 litres ****

Catch 22

until the two become one
and the outside is as the inside
and the inside as outside

until what is above is below
and what is below above

until the eye is seen as the eye
the hand as the hand
the foot in place of the foot
and an image as an image

until the male
and the female become one
that the male not be male
and the female female

thou shall not enter
the kingdom of heaven


~ interpretation of saying attributed to Jesus/Yeshua.
22: The Gospel of Thomas; The Nag Hammadi Library.

RainBowIcon

Click Image to Enlarge.

Unconcluded Continuance

what is it about yesterday
that makes me
more of who i am
than who i am today

it wasn't today that i went to sleep
when i wake up it won't be yesterday
just the unconcluded continuance
of a living dream that i call my self

everything around me is happening
for the first time, the only time, and the last time
being born, being and dying
to become the dream

someplace, sometime in my dreams
the reality that i live through
becomes a dream in my reality
without my knowing

why do i even wide awake
return to places i have already been
making choices that i already regret
to remain who i was yesterday

as if unable to wake up from a dream
parts which i can remember
and parts of which
can only be dreamt about

Epistemic Threshold

what if the laws of the universe aren't absolute
in fact, is there any reason to believe
that there are any laws at all

what if the laws are evolving just like us, with us
in fact, is there any reason not to believe
that it's we, that are evolving the laws
that we are making the laws

that the earth was actually flat until we
gave it the possibility of not being flat
and then dug into our own imagination
to find, as to what else it could be
and so it became, to the extent
to which we could believe

that elementary particles
actually, were actually quite content
with performing their newtonian chores
until the moment that we said
that it's not alive enough, it's too simple

that as soon as we know and understand a law
it becomes too banal for our epistemic threshold
and we need something deeper and more complex
to worship the unknown with

that we are not reaching deeper into the fabric of reality
and discovering something more fundamental than its precedent
but it's actually our desire for there to be
something more fundamental than laws
that is fundamental

that it's because there is no way to quest for something already known
that we are always driven, to explore the extent of our unknowing
and hence forever be in quest

because an absolute knowledge of the object
would mean becoming the object itself
and inseparable from it

is it not that in all that we search for
we are searching for the extent of our boundaries, our frontiers
and rejoicing in our failure to breach them
as they evolve ever slightly further with every conquest

in the end, is it not that in all that we search for
we are searching for our selves, for our noumenon

They are so happy

SANDY: Not to this mechanist. The way I see it, consciousness has got to come from a precise pattern of organization - one that we haven't yet figured out how to describe in any detailed way. But i believe we will gradually come to understand it. In my view consciousness requires a certain way of mirroring the external universe internally, and the ability to respond to that external reality on the basis of the internally represented model. And then in addition, what's really crucial for a conscious machine is that it should incorporate a well-developed and flexible self-model. And it's there that all existent programs, including the best chess-playing ones, fall down.

CHRIS: Don't chess programs look ahead and say to themselves as they're figuring out their next move, "If you move here, then I'll go there, and then if you go this way, I could go that way ..."? Isn't that a sort of self-model?

SANDY: Not really. Or, if you want, it's an extremely limited one. It's an understanding of self only in the narrowest sense. For instance, a chess-playing program has no concept of why it is playing chess, or the fact that it is a program, or is in a computer, or has a human opponent. It has no ideas about what winning or losing are, or -

PAT: How do you know it has no such sense? How can you presume to say what a chess program feels or knows?

SANDY: Oh, come on! We all know that certain things don't feel anything or know anything. A thrown stone doesn't know anything about parabolas, and a whirling fan doesn't know anything about air. It's true I can't prove those statements, but here we are verging on questions of faith.

PAT: That reminds me of a Taoist story i read. It goes something like this. Two sages were standing on a bridge over a stream. One said to the other, "I wish i were a fish. They are so happy!" The second replied, "How do you know whether fish are happy or not? You're not a fish." The first said, "But you're not me, so how do you know whether I know how fish feel?"

PARTICIPANTS: Chris, a physics student; Pat, a biology student; and Sandy, a philosophy student.

~ Selection from "Metamagical Themas: A coffeehouse conversation on the Turing test to determine if a machine can think." Scientific American, May 1981, pp. 15-36.