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It's odd dealing with people whose word means nothing to themselves or anybody else. Particularly if that person is me. But, it's something that happens and the results thereof gotta be dealt with as reasonably as possible or pretty soon there is nobody left to hoodwink. Even though I live alone I am is not alone in the world or upon the Earth, yet, but the situation requires caution. It's not easy to live a life of no blame.
One of the Scientism fanbois (who is a retired nobody like me) posted a link to a publisher's commercial site where one of his personal gods, the non-stepping Stephen Hawking, has published another gaudy science book. This one seems even more desperate than the last one if the title is any indication. He has decided there is no God. Hardly original, but since the whole idea is merely to make some money off his famous nayme. History shows that the more radically he rouses the rabble, the more money he'll put on his hip.
A lot more people probably know Stephen Hawking by sight, if not by name, than many common folk might figure. The image of him sitting askew in his special wheelchair with a crooked grin and thick glasses on his face gets flashed on the screen a lot in the last decade or so, because it's probably unusual that people in wheel chairs get to be as famous as he is. FDR, maybe, but he pretended he didn't need a wheelchair. I bought and read Hawking' previous book because I thought I owed it to myself to keep up a little on science, but no mas, and my decision doesn't have anything to do with Stephen Hawking or his new book. It's about my own sense of ti-me. I don't go to the movies anymore either.
Just now I had to pause in my writing for a few moments while I booted up the web browser and looked through yesterday's browsing History to help me remember Hawking' name, which I'm as familiar with as the palm of my own hand. This sort of forgetfulness is sort of typical for my age. It's worrisome, but not as worrisome as it might be because I can easily use my computer to help me find words and names and familiar expressions when I lose them on the tip of my tongue.
It's true that if I just relax and wait a few moments then the stuff I can't remember momentarily will eventually come to me, but with my computer sitting right in front of me it's too easy just to stop and look it up right away.
If I didn't have the computer to assist me, and I had to just sit here and suffer some horrible angst that I have Alzheimer's or dementia, that inevitable suffering might cause me to get depressed and to give up on living from sheer frustration. It's not like I haven't confronted this many times even as a boy, well, in this particular body, but home computers hadn't been invented for a good while yet.
The eventual, inevitable, penultimate, all-conquering depression hasn't happened yet (at least, I don't think it has), and it may never happen. Instead, I might get run over by a big truck or have an airplane fall out of the sky right on top of my house, and kill me faster than I can realize I'm dead. That might be a groovy way to croak. Unexpected, and over with before what happened can even be keened.
The publisher's publicity announcement for the new Stephen Hawking book is about all that's available on the internet presently. The content that is designed to attract Hawking' regular readers is only a fat paragraph long, and the same paragraph shows up as "news" on hundreds of blog sites, but the "news" is never really "news" anymore, is it?
My initial reaction to reading that redundant publisher's teaser was to agree with what I understood about it from so brief an introduction. They want you to buy the book, and they ain't giving the plot away so that you don't have to. I may have played around with the idea of minuscule black holes as a reaction to reading Hawking' last tome. I won't deny his influence upon my thinking in this arena. His arena. Not mine. I seemed to have equated my pearl-like original form to a teeny tiny black hole whose event horizon is so-me-ti-me mes taken for "the white light" of enlightenment fame. I might be wrong.
The publicity announcement mentions that Hawking may have concluded that no God is needed if the universe as we understand it self-assembles with natural tools like gravity. The expression "self-assembly" rightfully gets a lotta press in the last couple of decades. Go ahead. Google it up. "self-assembly". Read some of the text headers that show up with the links on the Results Page. Big buzz word for the new millennium.
That expression is used a lot especially, it seems, in nanotechnology where the entire point of some digital firmware designs can only be assembled by it happening automagically by self-assembling. Humans self-assemble from the initial conjunction of the sperm and the egg to the finished product at birth, when the umbilical cord is cut to make humans wireless automatons. '-)
In the last week the geniuses over at MIT announced that they have invented a self-assembling array of solar panels that imitate the behavior of chlorophyll in plants. The important part of that announcement is that they have a prototype that proves the concept is valid. Previous to this invention the most efficient solar panels converted maybe 26% of the available sunlight. This relatively clumsy prototype starts out at 40% efficiency, and it can be manufactured using the same process as it's predecessor on the same assembly lines.
I don't think I could write an adequate description of how how the self-assembly part of this new invention works, but if you're interested you can Google up "new MIT self-assembling solar panel", and read all about it. Practically all the resulting links will lead you back to the PopSci article that forwards you to a site that requires a paid subscription. Bummer. Capitalism is hard on the great unwashed.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
