Whales may share our kind of intelligence, researchers say after discovering brain cells previously found only in humans and other primates.
They were touted as the brain cells that set humans and the other great apes apart from all other mammals. Now it has been discovered that some whales also have spindle neurons – specialised brain cells that are involved in processing emotions and helping us interact socially.
Spindle cells, named after their long, spindle-shaped bodies, are the cells that are credited with allowing us to feel love and to suffer emotionally. Their discovery in whales will stimulate debate both on the level of whale intelligence and on the ethics of hunting them.
The cells occur in parts of the human brain that are thought to be responsible for our social organisation, empathy, speech, intuition about the feelings of others, and rapid “gut” reactions (see The cell that makes us human).
Anthropomorphic angle
Now it turns out that these spindle cells also exist in the same brain areas in humpback whales, fin whales, killer whales and sperm whales.
What is more, whales appear to have had these cells for at least twice as long as humans, and early estimates suggest they could have three times as many spindle cells as us, even accounting for the fact that whale brains are larger than ours.
“It’s absolutely clear to me that these are extremely intelligent animals,” says Patrick Hof of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and co-discoverer of the whale spindle cells with Estel van der Gucht of the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology, both in the US.
“We must be careful about anthropomorphic interpretation of intelligence in whales,” says Hof. “But their potential for high-level brain function, clearly demonstrated already at the behavioural level, is confirmed by the existence of neuronal types once thought unique to humans and our closest relatives.”
“They communicate through huge song repertoires, recognise their own songs and make up new ones. They also form coalitions to plan hunting strategies, teach these to younger individuals, and have evolved social networks similar to those of apes and humans,” Hof says.
Express trains
As with humans, the spindle cells were found in whales in the anterior cingulate cortex and frontoinsular cortex – two brain regions vital for “visceral” reactions. Such reactions require fast but emotionally-sensitive judgments, such as deciding whether another animal is suffering pain, and the general feel of whether an experience is pleasant or unpleasant.
In addition, unlike in humans, the researchers also found spindle cells in the frontopolar cortex at the back of the brain, and they were sparsely dispersed elsewhere. Hof says he does not yet know the significance of spindles found in areas other than those that contain the cells in humans and great apes.
Exactly how spindle cells function in whales is still under investigation, but Hof believes the long, high-speed connections may fast-track information to and from other parts of the cortex. “The velocity of the signal is faster, and they miss out junctions on the way,” says Hof. “They are like the express trains’ of the nervous system” that bypass unnecessary connections, enabling us to instantly process and act on emotional cues during complex social interactions.
Hof and van der Gucht suggest that whales probably evolved the spindle cells completely independently of humans and apes – a process called convergent evolution. Moreover, they probably evolved them as long as 30 million years ago, twice as long ago as humans and apes.
Spindle cells are most likely to emerge in unusually large brains which need extra circuitry to handle increasingly complex social interactions, Hof says. Cognitive parallels
“The discovery of spindle neurons in cetaceans is a stunning example of neuro-anatomical convergence between cetaceans and primates,” says Lori Marino of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US. “The common ancestor of cetaceans and primates lived over 95 million years ago, and such a highly specific morphological similarity as the finding of spindle cells is clearly due to evolutionary convergence, not shared ancestry,” she says.
“This is consistent with a growing body of evidence for parallels between cetaceans and primates in cognitive abilities, behaviour and social ecology.”
However, many highly intelligent but smaller cetaceans examined by Hof and van der Gucht did not have the spindle cells. The explanation could be that these smaller cetaceans, including bottlenose dolphins, evolved different but equally complex alternatives to the spindle cells. “In this respect, it will be interesting to discover what mental capacities might distinguish humpback whales from dolphins,” says Keith Kendrick of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK.
Journal reference: The Anatomical Record (DOI: 10.1002/ar.a.20407)
We all live on or around a global planet we call Earth.
Since we live all over this planet we must have some GLOBAL opinions.
Here are a few: CHILD ABUSE … WAR … SLAVERY … FREEDOM
In addition to these GLOBAL opinions, there are NATIONAL opinions, STATE opinions, CITY opinions, RURAL opinions, RACIAL opinions. and any other CLIMATE of OPINION that is generated in a society.
It is this climate of opinion that drives Scientists to do Science and Fascists to try to industriously eliminate a religious group, the Jews and ordinary citizens to believe their governments.
This building below is on the Wannsee in Berlin. It is where Hiltler’s men met to plan how to deal with the Jews, after the meeting they went home to play with their kids.
Living in several countries over my life, I can tell you what I have learned.
We will talk about CHILD ABUSE in a separate post.
Autocracies hurt their own civilians.
We were in Athens when the Junta killed 24 kids at the University because they were broadcasting what was going on financially. The 6th Fleet couldn’t mute them, so the Greeks came in with tanks.
In 1968, we left 12 L’Ecluse Lane on Friday the 13th of September. We, my wife Joanne, my daughter Alexis and my son Damon, all flew through Rome on Pan Am to live in Athens, Greece.
Joanne’s father wanted to die in Greece and as a pilot for Pan Am, I decided I could commute.
Airbus 310 took my training at the factory in Toulouse, France
Joined Pan Am on 2/13/1967, and I was trained to fly as a Flight Engineer on Boeing 707 aircraft in San Fransisco. All new Flight Engineers were assigned to Long Range Flights, over 8 hours of flying.
So, while living in Athens, I flew to Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, to Buenos Aires, Argentina or Montevideo, Uruguay.
While we lived in Athens, we discovered that Greece was bring run by the American CIA through the Junta that they established. This JUNTA was the outcome of US and British policies in Greece at the end of WWII.
We will talk about that in a separate post and we’ll talk about Iran and the 1953 overthrow of the civilian government that wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil wealth in a separate post.
There will be another post, some day, about the United States and the CIA in Iraq.
Bob Dylan wrote: What Good am I.….
What good am I then to others and me If I’ve had every chance and yet still fail to see If my hands are tied must I not wonder within Who tied them and why and where must I have been?
Well here’s Ted Pateas trying to tell some of what I saw.
When I told my best friend, Robert Eugene Schulz, of what I had discovered, he couldn’t believe me. In the United States, before the Iraq war and all that horror, it was virtually impossible for intelligent people ito get a climate of opinion that the CIA was doing EVIL in the world.
It couldn’t come into their imaginations. Bob knew I was a leftist and had done acid in SFO and he thought I was crazy. Before he died he recognized that I was telling him hard FACTS.
Here are some of the FACTS I SAW on Earth, where we all live.
WAR
VIETNAM
Saw enough of young kids dying between 1963 – 1966 when I flew the C-130 for VR 3, Naval Air Transport Squadron 3. Young kids were being DRAFTED into the services and many were dying in Vietnam. We went in with 92 kids and took out 76 body bags, before they got caskets out there.
Many US kids got arrested, protesting the deal that was theirs. And we will talk about Chicago in 1968 on another post .
Vietnam veterans turned up to throw their medals on the ground before the Pentagon.
My old friend Lieutenant Commander Thomas C. Stringer, who was my navigator, often, in the C-130s and was assigned to Saigon in the security cellar, helping Kissinger write the withdrawal documents, was among those vetsthrowing his own medals in.
Autocracies hurt their own civilians.
I’m telling you that, that is a FACT. Not a Trump FACT, but a real world in your face kind of FACT. For example:
In the early hours of Saturday, 17 November 1973, Papadopoulos sent the army to suppress the student strike and sit-in of the Eleftheri Poliorkimeni (Ελεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι, ‘Free Besieged’), as the students called themselves, at the Athens Polytechnic which had commenced on 14 November. Shortly after 3:00 am. EET, under almost complete cover of darkness, an AMX 30 tank crashed through the rail gate of the Athens Polytechnic with subsequent loss of life. An estimated 24 people were killed. The army also occupied Syntagma Square for at least the following day. Even the sidewalk cafes were closed.
ARGENTINA
Flying to BA, I got to know an very beautiful Argentine Flight Attendant who told me that her boyfriend was a University student and had been kidnapped and dropped out of a helicopter over the South Atlantic ocean.
As I got into it, I learned that the CIA was in the middle of the Argentine show, too .
In 1967 and 1968 I remember the mothers in Argentina, beating on their pots and pans around the government buildings while their protesting kids were being dropped out of helicopters over the South Atlantic.
Link to ifsw web: International Social Workers
The juntas organized and carried out strong repression of political dissidents (or perceived as such) through the government’s military and security forces, preparing for the implementation of neoliberal policies. They were responsible for the illegal arrests, tortures, killings and/or forced disappearances of an estimated 30,000 people. Assassination occurred domesticall y in Argentina via mass shootings and the throwing of live citizens from airplanes to death in the South Atlantic. Additionally, 12,000 prisoners, many of whom had not been convicted through legal processes, were detained in a network of 340 secret concentration camps located throughout Argentina.
From a Freedom of Information request………. 1977 CIA release
CO2901206 Approved for Release: 2018/10/02 CO2901206 Argentina 44.
Human rights violations remain a serious problem in Argentina, but the frequency and scale of abuses by the security forces and extra-legal rightist mili- tants has diminished noticeably in the past few months. The military government, moreover, has been somewhat more forthcoming in listing the names of those it de- tains and has announced its intention to free some 200 political prisoners. It is difficult to judge what proportion of have now been released or at least accounted for, since the total number of those arrested is not known. International criticism and investigations of the human rights situation in Argentina have generated considerable irritation among the officials charged with putting an end to leftist guerrilla warfare. Though the armed forces have had marked success against the terrorists, the job is still far from complete. If the guerrillas stage re- newed provocations, those in charge of counter-terrorist activities will probably push for a return to the brutal roundups of suspected leftist that were relatively common some months ago.
The distinctive aspect of this conflict was the initiative by the Mothers of the Plaza, a traditional, non-political group of women who were moved to civil resistance by their traditional status as mothers. It is precisely this unexpected nature of the participants that gave them a strategic edge in their conflict with the military junta.
The major tactic that initiated the movement was to meet in the Plaza de Mayo, in the center of Buenos Aires, facing the presidential palace, to protest the “disappearance” of their children. They wore headscarves with the names and sometimes carried photographs of their children who had disappeared, leaving the military junta baffled about how to respond. They began as individuals searching for their children through legal means in government offices, then escalated their tactics by gathering in the Plaza. Government officials at first tried to marginalize and trivialize them by calling them “las locas,” the madwomen, but they were baffled as to how to suppress this group for fear of a backlash among the population. As the movement grew and gathered international attention and widespread sympathy, the junta cracked down at the end of 1977, and fourteen of the mothers themselves were “disappeared.” After a period of careful regrouping, they returned to the Plaza despite the obvious danger in doing so.
International attention to the movement was cultivated as a strategy, facilitated by Argentina’s hosting of the World Cup in 1978, where the international press corps covered the Plaza demonstrations as a corollary to the sporting events, aided by the appearance of players from several European teams at the Plaza in a show of solidarity. Similarly, an international health conference in Buenos Aires was met by the Mothers and witnessed by the international media that broadcast their new slogan: “They took them away alive, we want them returned alive” (Ackerman and DuVall 2005: 276).
The distinctive aspect of this conflict was the initiative by the Mothers of the Plaza, a traditional, non-political group of women who were moved to civil resistance by their traditional status as mothers. It is precisely this unexpected nature of the participants that gave them a strategic edge in their conflict with the military junta.
The major tactic that initiated the movement was to meet in the Plaza de Mayo, in the center of Buenos Aires, facing the presidential palace, to protest the “disappearance” of their children. They wore headscarves with the names and sometimes carried photographs of their children who had disappeared, leaving the military junta baffled about how to respond. They began as individuals searching for their children through legal means in government offices, then escalated their tactics by gathering in the Plaza. Government officials at first tried to marginalize and trivialize them by calling them “las locas,” the madwomen, but they were baffled as to how to suppress this group for fear of a backlash among the population. As the movement grew and gathered international attention and widespread sympathy, the junta cracked down at the end of 1977, and fourteen of the mothers themselves were “disappeared.” After a period of careful regrouping, they returned to the Plaza despite the obvious danger in doing so.
International attention to the movement was cultivated as a strategy, facilitated by Argentina’s hosting of the World Cup in 1978, where the international press corps covered the Plaza demonstrations as a corollary to the sporting events, aided by the appearance of players from several European teams at the Plaza in a show of solidarity. Similarly, an international health conference in Buenos Aires was met by the Mothers and witnessed by the international media that broadcast their new slogan: “They took them away alive, we want them returned alive” (Ackerman and DuVall 2005: 276).
Recommend:
See the film ARGENTINA 1985 to see how it began to end.
Personally, I flew to South America all of 1967 and 1968. I was at JFK on my way to Buenos Aires when Pan Am’s Chief Pilot asked me if I wanted to go to Afghanistan. Those two years I was always in Argentina, Uruguay or Brazil.
Before the start of World War II in 1939, Argentina had maintained a long tradition of neutrality regarding European wars, which had been upheld and defended by all major political parties since the 19th century. One of the main reasons for this policy was related to Argentina’s economic position as one of the world’s leading exporters of foodstuffs and agricultural products, to Europe in general and to the United Kingdom in particular. Relations between Britain and Argentina had been strong since the mid-19 century, due to the large volume of trade between both countries, the major presence of British investments particularly in railroads and banking, as well as British immigration,[1] and the policy of neutrality had ensured the food supply of Britain during World War I against the German U-boat campaign.[2][3] At the same time, British influence over the Argentine economy was resented by nationalistic groups,[4] while German and Italian influence in Argentina was strong and growing mainly due to increased interwar trade and investment, and the presence of numerous immigrants from both countries, which, together with the refusal to break relations with the Axis as the war progressed, furthered the belief that the Argentine government was sympathetic to the German cause.[5] Because of strong divisions and internal disputes between members of the Argentine military,[3]Argentina remained neutral for most of World War II, despite pressure from the United States to join the Allies.[6] However, Argentina eventually gave in to the Allies’ pressure, broke relations with the Axis powers on 26 January 1944,[7] and declared war on 27 March 1945.[8]
Since the establishment of the office of President of the Republic in 1844, during the family dictatorship of the López family (1841–1870), Paraguay had 51 presidents. Between the end of the Paraguayan War in 1870 and the 1954 coup d’état, the country changed 44 presidents; 24 of them were removed from power by force.[2] Eventually, ArmyGeneralAlfredo Stroessner, supported by the Armed Forces and the right-wingColorado Party, seized power in the 1954 coup d’état. Relying on the military and the party as the “twin pillars” of his rule,[3] and ruling in the single-party system until 1962,[4] Stroessner was elected for eight consecutive terms before being ousted from power in the 1989 coup d’état. His 35-year-long rule was one of the longest in history by a non-royal leader.
It is a fact, Pan Am did not want our crews to be on the ground in Paraguay during Stroessner’s rule. We stopped for fuel or diverted to Asuncion, but never laid over there.
COUP in Dallas 1963
The world lived through the COUP in Dallas, when John F. Kennedy was killed by a group that involved CIA officials and Nazi spies.
Was on a flight, while training on C-130s at Seward AFB, when JFK was shot.
John Newman was a National Security Agency researcher. He did the research and H.P. Albarelli Jr. wrote the COUP book. Read them and decide for yourself.
MISSILE LAUNCH against the US 1968
Of course, you don’t have to believe me, but the Russian KGB actually pulled the trigger to launch a missile at Honolulu in 1968. You can do what I did, read the book that tells the story. Pay attention to what NIXON did with the intelligence data he obtained.
Can you imagine the outcome if the KGB had succeeded?
FREEDOM and SLAVERY
We remember the Indians on Wounded Knee and Dan Stanland (a VR-3 pilot who went into smuggling marijuana to the States from Mexico) flying his twin Beech up there, to drop in some food while they were surrounded by the FBI.
from the United Nations:
The latest Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, published by the International Labour Organization, International Organization for Migration and international human rights group Walk Free, revealed that last year, some 50 million people were living in modern slavery: 28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriages.
NY Times has been running stories on migrant kids working in corporate factories in 2023 who are lost to the HHS.
Some of us seek to understand this Universe that we were born into. We SEEK FACTUAL knowledge that we all can agree on and then we spin tales to try to explain these facts.
CIA and Latin America:
From Wikipedia:
Argentina was particularly susceptible to military dictatorship during the Cold War, with ten separate military dictators ruling across four different regimes between 1943 and 1983. Brazil and Guatemala also saw five and six separate military dictators, respectively.[110]
The military dictatorship in Brazil was unique both in that it lasted nearly 20 years and that it allowed elections with competing political parties.[111]
El Salvador became a dictatorship in 1931, becoming a rare example of a partisan military dictatorship.[112] The country was ruled by the military-run National Pro Patria Party from 1933 to 1944, the Revolutionary Party of Democratic Unification from 1950 to 1960, and the National Conciliation Party from 1962 to 1979.[113][114]
Military dictatorship resurged in Latin America in the 1960s, with unstable economic conditions allowing military juntas to take power.[115] Between 1967 and 1991, 12 Latin American countries underwent at least one military coup, with Haiti and Honduras experiencing three and Bolivia experiencing eight.[116]
A large wave of military dictatorships occurred in the 1970s,[20] and most of Latin America was under the rule of military dictatorships by the middle of the decade.[117] Foreign aid to support Latin American militaries was one factor that allowed further military coups, and the political polarization of the Cold War played a role in creating the political instability that incentivized military rule.[118]
Foreign pressure, particularly from the Carter administration in the United States, prompted the end of several military dictatorships in the region in the late 1970s.[29] Several Latin American countries began to democratize by the early-1980s,[117] and the number of coups declined as well.[116]
Military dictatorship had virtually disappeared in Latin America by the end of the Cold War. The Argentine Carapintadas were unable to seize power in 1990 because there was strong public opposition to military rule. By the time of the 2009 Honduran coup, such events were considered unusual in the region.[119]
Shortly after the universe was born, it was plunged into darkness. The first stars turned on when hot gas coalesced around clumps of dark matter, then contracted and became dense enough to ignite the nuclear hearts of infant suns.
As those early stars began breathing ultraviolet light into the cosmos, their photons mingled with primordial hydrogen gas, causing it to absorb background radiation and become translucent. When that happened, those hydrogen atoms produced radio waves that traveled through space at a predictable frequency, which astronomers can still observe today with radio telescopes.
The same process is going on in modern stars as they continue to send light into the cosmos. But the radio waves produced by those first stellar gasps have been traveling through space for so long that they’ve been stretched, or redshifted. That’s how astronomers identified the fingerprints of the earliest stars in radio waves detected by a small antenna in western Australia.
Earliest stars of the universe 
An updated time line of the universe shows the first stars being born by about 180 million years after the big bang. `
Take a look at this SITE to learn about the early UNIVERSE and COSMIC REIONIZATIONS.
KIDDIES here are MY punch-lines from a story written by Bob Dylan:
Half the people can be part-right all of the time Some of the people can be all-right part of the time But all of the people can’t be all-right all of the time I think Abraham Lincoln said that I’ll let you in my dream if I can be in yours I said that …. Bob Dylan
I just flew from JFK to CDG on an Airbus 330 in a first class seat and connected in Paris to an Air France 220. On the AF flight I was on standby and got the last seat available, 28 A. I had a good view of the wing and although it was raining I got some interesting shots of the left wing. Here is what it looked like just before we started taxiing out:
Notice the rear of the wing is all in line. On the way to the runway, the pilots set the flaps for takeoff. Here is an image of that:
You can see that the flaps have been extended.
Later we landed at Berlin Brandenburg and the flaps were extended for landing. You can see the flaps were extended further giving the wing the ability to fly the plane at about 135 miles per hour to help the pilots land and then stop the aircraft on the runway.
In the shot above, you can see the aileron at the left end of the wing. There is another aileron on the right wing and when the pilots want to turn the aircraft, they roll the yoke into the turn. If they want to turn left, the left aileron will elevate, that will reduce the lift on the left wing while the right aileron will be lowered increasing the lift on the right wing and the aircraft will go into a roll to the left. The aircraft will start turning to the left. When they get to the heading they want, the pilots will center the yoke and the aircraft will roll level.
Above the flaps there are spoilers. The two spoilers to the left are in flight spoilers and they can be raised in flight to slow the aircraft down. Using them causes some loss of fuel efficiency because they prevent the aircraft from slowing down by cruising forward with the throttles closed. The pilots in Berlin tried to avoid using inflight spoilers to preserve fuel efficiency.
The spoiler to the right, close to the fuselage is a ground spoiler and comes up on the ground along with the flight spoilers to help force the airplane to slow down.. The image below shows the spoilers up on the runway after landing
Below is a view is a Pan Am plane with flaps extended for landing.
In the shot above you can see the stabilizer, which rotates to trim the aircraft as the weight changes while we burn fuel in flight. That gets set by trim switches in the cockpit. Behind the stabilizer there are elevators that the pilots use to start a descent or a climb. And standing vertically is the rudder and on the back end there is a panel that can be used to trim the aircraft if you loose power on an engine.
So, you now have an idea how pilots control a plane in flight.
Married women were asked how many children they had borne, and children born between January and April of 1950 were tallied on special “infant cards” — another 17 questions long.
The infant cards were not retained. But answers from the census forms were coded onto punch cards and tabulated, for the first time ever, on a UNIVAC I computer, 16,000 pounds and 5,000 vacuum tubes of calculating muscle. Then the census forms were photographed, transferred to nearly 6,400 microfilm rolls and shipped to the National Archives for a 72-year rest.
A “climate of opinion” is established in civilisations, and we will visually demonstrate that it is this climate, rather than direct borrowing or transmission, that is the underlying force guiding intellectual inquiry.
This climate would be, of course, as capable of influencing scientific inquiry as it is of guiding any other conceptualization.
How does this work in the cosmic web?
How did it work in the Big Bang which was neither big nor gave a bang.
That is the WORK of VP Berlin, to visually demonstrate that this “climate of opinion” works in Human history and explore how it can work in the Cosmic Web.
Sitting alone in my home on L’Ecluse Lane, I envisioned what could have come before the “Big Bang” and the thought occurred:
THE DESIRE TO KNOW …. CAME …. BEFORE … THE BIG BANG!!!!!
WE ARE LIVING THE DANCE OF THE UNIVERSE!
We are ALL in the FLOW …
This I-Phone weighs 1/4 of a pound and IT has more than 10 times the computing power of the UNIVAC I, which weighed 16,000 pounds. If we take that process forward 75 years how much will the computer weigh and what will it’s computing power be? We won’t get down to the size of a Proton but it would be a very small and somehow run in Quantum Computing. and that would be astronomically higher in computing power than this I Phone.
“Quantum computing will be a significant advancement in the way we use computers, and will revolutionise many areas of society. This leap from classical computing will be able to be utilised for a massive variety of research and industry tasks, such as weather forecasting, business intelligence (Pandey & Ramesh, 2015), and medical research (Parsons, 2011). All this advancement, however, does not come without cyber security risks, and many cryptographers believe that “we are in a race against time to deploy post-quantum cryptography before quantum computers arrive” (Bernstein & Lange, 2017).
The threat of quantum computing to secure encryption is legitimate, provided that post-quantum cryptography is not rigorously developed and deployed before quantum computers are able to break current encryption.”
But what will they do for Homo Sapiens living on Earth NOW ? Will they help us find ETHICS ? Will they help us in FINANCIAL DISTRIBUTIONS ?
These computer technology changes will lead to what in visual descriptions of place and time?
Will we be able to trace all religions through all time and show the life style that was lived ?
RELIGIONS in all their forms…. :
5 STORY CAMERA at CERN
WEBB 16.5 FOOT CAMERA
THE PERIODIC TABLE
PSYCHIATRY
PSYCHEDELICS
LANGUAGE and POETRY and THEATER
MUSIC and DANCE and PAIN and SORROW
DON’T TOUCH THE THROTTLES UNTIL 700 FEET ABOVE THE RUNWAY AFTER YOU CLOSE THEM AT THE TOP of DESCENT.
How many factors do you have to play:
DESCENT vs MILES over the ground.
RUNWAY in use
WIND
ALTIMETER
MILES and TIME to fly
DO IT ALL BY HAND FLYING THE PLANE, CLOSE THE THROTTLES and touch them again at 700 feet above the ground, just as you put the gear down… you are in the FLOW …..
PS: (Pan Am Internal German Service IGS, never hurt a passenger in 43 years of flying.)
Deduce the existence of something without using any existential premises. Logicians should feel no more ashamed of their inability to perform this deduction than geometers should feel ashamed at being unable to square the circle.
“for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge” (1911, 40). James concludes: “The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy. All of us are beggars here, and no school can speak disdainfully of another or give itself superior airs” (1911, 46).
Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states—no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems—are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields—what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields!
The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t.
And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves.
And none of these poppings—if you look at them aright—amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
It’s 3/20/22, Covid is wriggling, Russia is attacking Ukrainia with more than 4 million people having fled to neighboring countries. On Tuesday there will be a national election in Hungary with Orban, an authoritarian leader who is pro Putin now, running against a small city mayor who is pro NATO and the European Commission and democracy. No free press, the Judiciary in his control, the universities controlled by him, Orban is the favorite. We will see.
With this post I am trying to learn how to use WordPress to help me build this blog. Now I want to send all my readers to a different post/page. Let’s see if I can do that.
Yes, I can do that with a menu. I will create that now.
I created a menu and installed it on the blog. Now you will see CONSILIENCE listed on the home page because of that menu. Aha!!
You may have no idea what this word means, but all the homo sapiens on Earth are headed towards it.
It requires looking at our behavior through the windows of biology, neuroscience, chemistry, electrical signals and cultures. It requires that we look at the environment with historical truths of physical changes and their results.
If you want to get a good grounding in understanding CONSILIENCE, I recommend that you read Edward O. Wilson’s book CONSILIENCE. I have read it several times and it has helped my understanding of complexities.
We want to offer some REAL information into this blog, so here we go.
Here is a schematic of the homo sapien brain. This is the tool through which we view the cosmos.
We will have to USE our brains, with the brains of all the Homo Sapiens who share this Earth with us. To get to CONSILIENCE, we will have to AGREE that there is a Universal Reality that we can examine through Scientific research and through dialogues we can get to a consiliatory conclusion of what this Universe we live in MIGHT look like, if our Science is accurate.
We will NEED to understand that our decisions and our behavior are influenced by our INDIVIDUAL understanding of what kind of Universe we live in, what it’s history has been, how our individual cultures were formed and how our Global Universal understanding is being achieved through Global Scientific research.
Let’s take a look at what the world has so far uncovered, in studying the Universe that we live in.
This an image of the Universe’s Cosmic Background Radiation. There is an interesting story about the two scientists at the Bell Labs who discovered it 1n 1965, but that will have to wait, because in 1992, the Cosmic Background Explorer(COBE) satellite made the first detection analogous to seeing “mountains on the surface of the Earth”: it detected cosmological fluctuations in the microwave background temperature. That experimentation was aided by the (WMAP) Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe that was launched in 2001. When ALL the analysis was done, the scientists discovered a very SMALL difference in temperatures. The hot regions are 0.0002 degrees Kelvin hotter than the cold regions.
That caused Stephen Hawking to say it was the World’s most important discovery, because THAT was the reason we have galaxies in our Universe. WMAP wins the Fundamental Physics Award awarded to Charles L. Bennett, Gary Hinshaw, Norman Jarosik, Lyman Page Jr., David N. Spergel, and the 27 member WMAP Science Team.
Here we can see an image of the timeline of our Universe. Look at the left side and you can SEE the subatomic Flow and the Plank time that occurred immediately after the Big Bang. Notice that the afterglow LIGHT pattern emerged 400,000 yearsafter the BB. The green sliver is the Cosmic Background Radiation.
You can read about this in the Professor Loeb’s web site: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/sciam.pdf Professor Loeb wrote: “I look up into the sky at night, I often wonder whether we humans are too preoccupied with ourselves. There is much more to the universe than meets the eye on earth. As an astrophysicist I have the privilege of being paid to think about it, and it puts things in perspective for me. There are things that I would otherwise be bothered by—my own death, for example. Everyone will die sometime, but when I see the universe as a whole, it gives me a sense of longevity. I do not care so much about myself as I would otherwise, because of the big picture.”
Here is the big picture of the birth of the Universe.
That is my only answer. Start at the Quantum level and climb into the Universe. What other thought can rise to the level of axiology?
Axiology:(Brittanica)
The philosopher asks whether something is of value because it is desired, as subjectivists such as Perry hold, or whether it is desired because it has value, as objectivists such as Moore and Nicolai Hartmann claim. In both approaches, value judgments are assumed to have a cognitive status, and the approaches differ only on whether a value exists as a property of something independently of human interest in it or desire for it. Noncognitivists, on the other hand, deny the cognitive status of value judgments, holding that their main function is either emotive, as the positivist A.J. Ayer maintains, or prescriptive, as the analyst R.M. Hare holds. Existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, emphasizing freedom, decision, and choice of one’s values, also appear to reject any logical or ontological connection between value and fact.
Existentialism:(Brittanica)
In truth, Nothingness is, for the existentialists, possible existence, as the negation of the reality of fact. Sartre wrote: “The possible is the something which the For-itselflacks in order to be itself”; it is what the subject lacks in order to be an object; thus, it does not exist except as a lacking.
The same is true of value, which is such insofar as it does not exist. For even when value occurs or is perceived in certain acts, it lies beyond them and constitutes the limit or the goal toward which they aim. Analogously, knowledge, in which the object (the in-itself) presents itself to consciousness (the for-itself), is a relationship of nullification, because the object cannot be offered to consciousness except as that which is not consciousness. Furthermore, another existence is such insofar as it is not mine; thus, the negation is “the constitutive structure of the being-of-others.”
MEDITATION
Here is a playlist to use in wondering! Copy it and go to it through your browser.
Today, 10 March 2021, there was an obituary for, Allan McDonald, one of the Morton Thiokol engineers, who worked so hard to keep the Challenger from being launched. There was a problem with the O ring design of the missile.
Here is an image of the missile they were using:
The solid-fuel booster rockets whose failure is a cause of the Jan. 28 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger were made by Morton Thiokol Inc. at a sprawling mountain production site a few miles east of Brigham City, and 10 miles from Promontory Point, where the western and eastern legs of the transcontinental railroad were joined in a historic ceremony May 10, 1869.
These solid fuel rockets were transported on railroad cars. And, the tunnels for these cars were built to cover the tracks that were built, the way the English built tracks. The English used the ox-cart tracks left by the Romans when they invaded England. Julius Cesar invaded in 55 BC and the Roman Empire was in England from 43 BC to 410 AD. So, the missiles were built to the width of ox-carts.
These missiles had O ring seals that could not be accurate when the launch occurred after an extended period of cold weather. These seals shrank too much to offer the protection that was needed to keep the missile together. The engineers and the scientists all knew that. NASA knew that.
The scientists and engineers could say what they wanted to say, but nobody was listening. It was like Trump with: “the pandemic will go away”. The politicians wanted that teacher in space so Reagan could show the world how COOL he was.
Because, the REAL cause of the disaster was that President Ronald Reagan intended to speak by radio to the teacher that NASA had placed on the astronaut’s crew, during his State of the Union speech that he intended to give on national TV on January 28th. I know that because WBAI reported it when this disaster struck. You can’t find it in the history of the disaster but the kids know how to do the hacking. They will find it!
The five astronauts and two payload specialists that made up the STS 51-L crew aboard the space shuttle Challenger in January of 1986. Crew members are (left to right, front row) astronauts Michael J. Smith, Francis R. (Dick) Scobee and Ronald E. McNair; and Ellison S. Onizuka, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis and Judith A. Resnik.
Christa McAuliffe—Payload Specialist, Teacher
As the other payload specialist, McAuliffe was a social studies teacher at Concord High School in New Hampshire when she was selected from more than 11,000 applicants to join NASA’s Teacher in Space Project in 1985. She received a bachelor’s degree in history and education from Framingham State College in 1970 and eventually received her master’s in education, supervision, and administration from Bowie University in 1978.
While in space, McAuliffe was planning lessons to teach her students from the shuttle. Among the lessons, she was slated to give a presentation about space travel titled “Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why.” After the explosion and her death, several honors were bestowed on her posthumously.
The most serious impact of Ronald Reagan on education was his failure to affirm public education as an essential need for strengthening the nation. He wanted to talk to Christa McAuliffe on national TV to boost his image.
Ted Pateas' blog ... 