LifeItself

I meant to write on the subject of chaos for a while, because the roof is caving in on our burning global house made of cards, dead bodies, and withered land and plants. The Oxford dictionary defines chaos as Complete disorder and confusion.  The property of a complex system whose behavior is so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions. In my favorite  Greek mythology , the only religion that puts a smile on my face, Chaos was the origin of everything and the very first something that ever existed. It was a primordial void, from which everything was created, including the Universe and the Greek Gods. In ancient Greek, Chaos is translated as ‘the gaping void.’ The first deities that emerged from Chaos were Gaea or Gaia (Life), Tartarus (the Underworld) and Eros (Procreation). Later Erebus (Darkness) and Nyx (Night) also emerged. Gaia, the eternal Mother Goddess, emerged first from Chaos and gave birth to the Earth and the Uni...

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others have been touting the multitudinous advantages of colonizing the Moon and Mars. The scientific idiocies of these proclamations are so outlandish that I will not bother commenting on them. But, at the same time, Stephen Hawking's name has come up in the context of Mars colonization. Dr. Nate Hagens uses Hawking's ideas about Mars colonization in his Reality 101 course at the University of Minnesota to illustrate the point that human society is composed of tiny islands of high competence floating in a vast sea of narratives. Let me start from quoting a recent email by JDW on the subject of human escape to outer space: "Without a synthesis which shows how different narratives relate to one another, people are free to use “verbal logic” to create properly-constructed sentences which don’t correspond to possible realities. “Verbal logic” is nearly an oxymoron, because there’s not much in the way of error-correction built into it. Anyth...

We are in the western part of Turkish Anatolia, which in Greek means "East" or "Sunrise."  Suddenly, we are inside of many of the oldest human stories that are particularly dear to my heart. The ancient city of Troy is here.  Around 1300 B.C., when Troy was almost 4000 years old, the mother of all Greek wars was fought there, and immortalized by Homer five centuries later in probably the most important oral stories and later texts ever conceived by rational men: The Iliad and Odyssey.  Some of the Greek Gods were born here, many other dueled with one another for power and revenge, or gave birth to the heroes and heroines who determined fate of Troy and future of mankind. My favorite scary goddess, Nemesis, who is reputed to have been conceived by the primordial Goddess of Night, Nyx, played a pivotal role in the fate of Troy. Her name was derived from the Greek words nemêsis and nemô, meaning "dispenser of dues." This full size statue of beautiful Nem...