Mystery & Perfection: The Sombrero Galaxy

Sometimes things just work out right. We’ll never understand all the reasons, and sometimes there’s no need to. Mystery and perfection…  Happy Holidays!!   RT

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Photo: The Sombrero Galaxy; Source: Hubble Telescope, NASA; WikiCmns; Public Domain w/ attribution.

Language is the Art of Community

I’m sure most people have heard some variant of this before, but it bears repeating: language is the primary means by which we establish our identities and humanity with other people. You can show up looking like a hairy stone-age guy who badly needs a shower, but if you reel off a quote from, say, Romeo and Juliet, at least some people will be willing to forgive you your appearance.

In other words, nothing says more about you than the way you speak.

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The thought may have particular importance as the school year revs up. It has always astounded me how little attention we pay to language skills in the United States. Everyone is worried about buying new computers and building science classrooms, but no one seems to understand that unless we cultivate English and a knowledge of languages generally, our community’s cohesion is at stake. It’s not simply a matter of being understood, it’s also a matter of what you know and the impression you make.

And it’s clear that we aren’t trying hard enough: when many colleges teach their Freshmen remedial English, our High Schools are failing to teach even basic language skills. Not to mention things like Latin and Greek, which not only help students develop a better mastery of their everyday speech, but also open up the possibility of reading the gospels, Thucydides, and Cicero in their original languages.

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I know that many schools are maxed out just trying to integrate students whose families have come to America from all over the globe, but let’s not forget that it pays to get our young people past the basics and give them some mastery of the culture that they are inheriting.       RT

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Image: The Rosetta Stone; WikiCmns; Christian Theological Seminary; Public Domain.

Ferrofluid!

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A ferrofluid is a carrier fluid in which magnetically sensitive particles have been suspended. This image was selected as a Wikimedia Picture of the Day on 9 November 2006. Author: Gregory F. Maxwell. Licence: GNU Free Documentation Licence 1.2 only.

Amazing!

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So, It Does Get Better!

Saturn's moon Mimas seen against the planet's rings, 2005.

 

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This has got to be one of the most sensational photos ever taken in space, so good that words really can’t add much to the experience. Taken by the Cassini space probe–sit back and enjoy!

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Photo–Author: NASA/JPL; Source: WikiCmns; License: Public Domain w/ author acknowledgment requested.

The Heart Asks

Emily Dickinson, inscrutable or not, has been on my mind lately. She is the author of some of my favorite poems, but I’ve been making my way through her work slowly over the years. Maybe it’s time to read a good biography. Anyway, here is one of her best:

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The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain;
And then those little anodynes
That deaden suffering,

And then to go to sleep
And then, if it should be,
The will of its Inquisitor
The liberty to die!

—Emily Dickinson

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Photo: Week-end Pleasure, Lili Melo, France. WikiCmns, CC2.0.

Distances

yellow arrow=1 light day; red=voyager1; green=pioneer10.

I was a boy when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon; in those days, my most fervent ambition was to become an astronaut. A couple of reality checks later, I’m writing this blog, but have never lost my enthusiasm for the manned exploration of space.

Back in the salad days, I believed we would reach the stars in my lifetime. I’m not so sure of that now, mostly because my understanding of the distances involved has improved considerably.

Let’s start with some numbers.

• It takes light 1 second to travel just under 300,000 kilometres. Put another way, light travels 186,282 miles in a second. Which in turn means that the average distance between the earth and the moon is 1.3 light-seconds (ls).
• The average distance between the earth and the sun is known as an astronomical unit (AU). 1 AU = 499 ls.
• 1 light-day (ld) is the distance light travels in a day–about 16 billion miles. Sedna, a recently discovered trans-Neptune object that is one of the most distant bodies in the solar system, is currently about half an ld away from the sun.
• 1 light-year (ly) is approximately 6 trillion miles long.

Chew them beans. Now things get more interesting:

• Voyager 1, the space probe launched by NASA in 1977, is currently the most distant man-made object. It has been traveling for 33 years, and its speed at the moment is 10.5 miles/second. Voyager 1 is not yet 1 ld from the sun (in October 2010, it was 16 light-hours away).
• At its present speed, it will take Voyager 1 well over 10,000 years to travel 1 ly.
• The star Alpha Centauri A (ACA) is 4.3 lights years from the sun. If we used a meter stick (about 3 feet long) to represent 1 AU (which is actually 93 million miles across), then, on that scale, ACA would lie 169 miles away from the sun.

 

OK, this post may appear to be off-topic, but the distances of space have long inspired deep emotional response. Like the great distances of time, the universe has always been a topic for poets.

The distances are mind boggling. But still, people are plotting ways to get us across them…   RT

image source: WikiCommons; artist, Paul Stansifers

information source: articles on the light-second, alpha centauri, and interstellar travel on Wikipedia.

The Thinker as Hero

Portrait of Louis N. Kenton

Postscript to my previous post:

Sometime during the last two centuries, thinkers seem to have been condemned to the hell of uselessness: belly-button contemplating, quiche munching, disrespectful, drug-crazed space cadets. No family, no friends, no assets, no plans, no future.

Could it possibly be that the future of the world is in the hand of such as these?

The problem with ordinary work, from the perspective of a thinker, is that it involves commitments other than following the voice at the back of their head that keeps suggesting new ideas and reminding  them of their one true belief: we have an obligation to make the world better.

Someone has to offer the alternatives & point out the problems. This is not a popular or easy role, but it is one that should not go unrecognized.

Of course, the role of thinker has it rewards, too. But sad to say, not even these are understood…could the thinker be the voice of the neglected & the powerless?   RT

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Image: Src: WikiCommons; Licence: Public Domain

What do we owe intellectuals?

Folks:

Some thoughts inspired by this morning’s foray into the blog jungle:

1) intellectuals are in a sorry state these days: the very laws meant to protect them often work against their well-being. It’s outrageous that some of the most prolific inventors have had to spend much of their time in court protecting their property rights.

2) why does everything have to be connected to property? Granted that property has its uses, why can’t we come up with some other foundational concepts for our society. Is freedom really just the actualization of property rights?

3) the core reality may be that creation is not fundamentally a selfish act. In what sense do parents “profit” from their children? Any labor of love is undertaken for the intangible joy it gives the laborer–just look at childbirth.

4) Maybe childbirth might be a good paradigm: creators create because they have to, not because they want to. more than a few have been mentally ill, or just plain crazy. Look at Van Gogh: saint and madman. How do we help these people–or more accurately, how do we help support them, give them the basics that everyone needs.

Any ideas about how to improve the situation? RT

the radical nature of the word

another late night thought:

I am more and more convinced that the world’s cultural conflicts are rooted in the differences in language…the Q’uran can’t be translated into English: Jesus’ deepest insights are locked up in Aramaic; how many westerners have mastered Pali to gain access to the Buddha (though no doubt the number has been growing).

and i mean rooted, as in radix–the roots of our words buried deep in our childhood minds, immature & growing upwards. What we are dealing with in language is the flower of these roots, perched atop the stem of meaning and the deep soil of the animal mind.

it may be that children (and our hominid ancestors) do (and did) not possess language, but something i think of as speech.

Here are some of the differences between language & speech:

1) language is more precise and complex than speech–it strives to bring its topics into sharper focus. think of language as a microscope. in contrast, speech is more holistic, providing the big picture. speech aims at impressions & is more intuitive, improvising and inventing connections.

2) language cannot be learned; it develops out of speech. Little children, on the other hand, are famous for their ability to begin speaking (imitating?) whatever language is being spoken in their surroundings. After about the age of eight, children lose the ability to pick up speech spontaneously–their thinking is maturing into language. And adults have a  notoriously difficult time learning a new language; in essence, it’s nearly impossible for them to ignore the units and patterns that were hardwired into their brains during late childhood. English speakers, for instance, are incapable of learning the tones involved in speaking Chinese or another tonal language. Likewise, adult speakers of tonal languages cannot master the multiplicity of sounds involved in speaking a western language.

3) I’m going to propose that the difference between speech and language is that in speech, sound and meaning are experienced and recorded as a single unit–the sound’s  inflections and emphases are “meaning cues” that help a child to understand the word’s meaning. In adult language, sound and meaning are separate–adults can no longer pick up the cues and make the associations necessary to begin speaking the language spontaneously.

4) A different way of putting the previous point: speech developed out of emotion. Emotion leads to sound that is heard and evokes the same emotion in the hearer. Emotion that is more focused and articulate leads to a more nuanced feeling or response in the listener. Emotion become speech, which later becomes language.

OK, enough said. But I’m becoming convinced that words are deeply rooted in the mind & brain.   RT