“What do I do in the winter when there is no baseball? I look out the window and wait for spring.”–Rogers Hornsby
I have previously posted this picture. This is how I feel when spring has finally sprung. (That’s not me in the picture, I have no idea who it is. My camera timing was just perfect, and more than a bit lucky.)
Pura Vida. Copyright Mark Sackler, 2008.
Cosmic Quote #21
April 22, 2013 by 1 Comment
Time out: I am not a twit–er, am I?
April 19, 2013 by 18 Comments
“Twitter is the devil’s playground.”–Albert Brooks
Twit–Verb, to taunt or tease. Noun, an insignificant, silly or bothersome person. Neologism-any dork who uses twitter.
Mwahaha
I have finally done what I said I would never do: use twitter. The vanity urgency of my posts herein require I find ways to seek more lemmings a wider audience. And seeing I am far too cheap modest to take out a billboard on I-95, I had to do something. So if you can’t stand get enough of my inane profound rantings pronouncements, @MarkSackler is the place to avoid like the plague be.
[Note: To fully understand the gibberish in the above paragraph, read it with the crossed out words and phrases and without the italicized ones.]
Cosmic Quote(s) #20
April 16, 2013 by 5 Comments
“The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.”–Albert Einstein
“The income tax has made more liars out of Americans than golf”–Will Rogers
“Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors…and miss.”–Robert Heinlein.
Hahaha. I can laugh now. It’s April 16. It’s all over….except the crying.
1001: A Blogging Odyssey
April 4, 2013 by 20 Comments
“Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining ‘blog’ is a fool’s errand.”–Michael Conniff
“Blogging is pure vanity.”–Unknown
Let’s not get all misty eyed here, but yesterday The Millennium Conjectures™ passed the 1,000 subscriber threshold. This presents an opportunity to wax poetic on the nature of blogging itself. Oh, wait, I forgot–you don’t care, and my poetry stinks. I’ll spare you the agony; if you are one of my followers it is probably because of the humor, satire or metaphysics. Thanks for being here. Thanks for liking my posts and commenting on them. The onus is now on me to keep delivering–with a little help from my friends, of course. 😉
Cosmic Quote #19
April 2, 2013 by 10 Comments
“Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.”–Alan Kay
Image credit: Andy Singer
http://www.andysinger.com
Gee, the world hasn’t changed all that much in my lifetime, has it? It’s not like people were still communicating with smoke signals in my infancy. Let’s see–what didn’t exist when I was born? Color TV. Stereophonic sound. Jet airliners. Solid state circuitry. NASA. Computers smaller than a log cabin. Ouch! Mark! Don’t remind yourself how old you are. See folks, technology has me talking to myself. I know… I know… that’s what blogging amounts to in the first place. Now, back to the salt mines…
Time In: Play Ball!
March 31, 2013 by 18 Comments
“The baseball mania has run its course. It has no future as a professional endeavor.” — Cincinnati Gazette editorial, 1879
“A man once told me to walk with the Lord. I’d rather walk with the bases loaded.” — Ken Singleton
Ah, Spring! Instead of spending my leisure hours indoors, drinking beer and watching old movies, I can spend them outdoors, drinking beer and watching baseball.
For years we had a little wooden plaque hanging on our kitchen wall that my wife found at a craft fair, inscribed with the missive “We interrupt this marriage to bring you the baseball season.” Today? It’s not that the more things change the more they stay the same, it’s that some things never change. At any rate, my wife will be out riding her horse every weekend while the weather is nice, so who’s ignoring whom? We interrupt this blog to bring you the baseball season…
Hope springs eternal.
Conjecture #4: Quantum Consciousness
March 28, 2013 by 25 Comments
“You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometime, well you just might find, you get what you need.”–The Rolling Stones (Jagger/Richards)
“I’m-a get medieval on your ass.”–Marcellus Wallace (character, Pulp Fiction)
I conjecture: In a quantum multiverse, one’s consciousness is a composite of the many worlds.
You’ve been warned folks: I’m-a get metaphysical on your asses. What’s worse, it’s a personal, almost solipsistic metaphysics. Hell, it’s my blog, why can’t I? I might also add that the next couple of conjectures will be the most controversial, and to some extent they might contradict each other. Consider it an appropriate quantum superposition–both simultaneously half true.
Few subjects in the sciences are as controversial as the notion of quantum consciousness, as it meets at the junction of theoretical physics and cognitive psychology, and manages to merge the two phenomena that puzzle scientists the most. Oh, we understand what quantum mechanics is in terms of what it does, but have no freakin’ idea how and why it does it. You can say pretty much the same for consciousness.
Credit: http://www.savagechickens.com
The concept of quantum consciousness is nothing all that new. Without getting too technical–because hey, then I wouldn’t understand it either–the notion of a quantum mechanical basis for human consciousness was first directly proposed by Roger Penrose, in his 1989 book, The Emperor’s New Mind. Built on his earlier work with Stuart Hammerhoff, Penrose asserted that the human mind can perform functions that are not computable and could only arise from quantum superpositions occurring within the brain. Max Tegmark, an MIT cosmologist with no shortage of his own controversial ideas, became the most vocal opponent of this concept, for reasons I won’t go into here, as this is not exactly what I am advocating. Or maybe it is.
What I am advocating, whether the mind is a quantum computer or not, is that our conscious experience represents a composite of all the universes, or potential universes suggested by quantum theory. The distinction between potential and actual alternate universes implies the distinction between the Copenhagen and Many Worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics. And the former seems to make more sense in concert with this conjecture, as it asserts that there simply is no objective reality on the sub-atomic level until we measure it; there are, effectively, only statistical probabilities. From that it would be easy enough to make the philosophical assertion that our consciousness is essentially a composite of all the possibilities.
But it might not be. As we only appear to be conscious in one reality at a time, it is certainly within the realm of feasibility to assert that consciousness is a composite in the Many Worlds scenario as well. If the Many Worlds interpretation is willing to accept that these universes can interact with each other on the sub-atomic level to produce the wave interference pattern described in Quantum Weirdness 101, why not accept that our consciousness does the same thing? Therefore, consciousness would be a composite across actual, physically real worlds. David Deutsch, in his book The Fabric of Reality, makes the case that the quantum multiverse is the enabler of free will; from this I would infer he means consciousness as well. But the Many Worlds interpretation suggests something perhaps darker and more sinister, even frightening. I’m bound to get flamed to no end for even bringing it up–it will be the subject of Conjecture #5. I call it quantum solipsism.
My bottom-line position on the composite consciousness conjecture: It’s a strong possibility. I see evidence of it in my own life; but it would take a volume, let alone a blog post, to fully recount. The best way to sum it up? The Rolling Stones quote above. It seems I rarely get exactly what I want, but often get what I need, and just in the nick of time. What? You say you don’t get what you need? Well, read the next conjecture. It seems that may not be my problem!
Below, Stuart Hammerhoff discusses the notion of quantum consciousness and related issues.
Cosmic Quote #18
March 25, 2013 by 4 Comments
“Quantum mechanics is magic.”–Daniel Greenberger.
Image credit: Matthias Giesen http://matthiasgiesen.wordpress.com
Quantum mechanics. Niels Bohr said if you’re not shocked by it, you don’t understand it. Richard Feynman said nobody understands it. Albert Einstein said god does not play dice. Stephen Hawking said god does play dice and sometimes he hides the results. I say who the hell cares, as long as they give me fodder for my blog. Or my wife’s horse. Or my accountant’s newt. It all fills space, thus proving the vacuum is not empty. Isn’t physics fun? [Note: vacuum is one of the few words in the English language containing “uu.” But it’s not as cool as muumuu, duumvir or menstruum, proving that linguistics is fun, too.]
Tales of a Veterinary Spouse, Episode 2: It swallowed what?
March 21, 2013 by 31 Comments
“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”–Peter Steiner.
Dharma Sackler
“I prefer horse poop.”
It was 8:30 AM on a Monday morning and my car’s FM radio was blaring the “oldies” station out of Hartford. I was about to switch channels and look for some jazz, when the DJ’s voice blared out a challenge I simply could not resist.
“This morning, we are asking our listeners to call in and tell us what outrageous or funny things your dog has eaten or swallowed, and we’ll play back the best ones on the air.”
I never call radio stations. Never. Well, hardly ever. This had to be an exception. I am so getting on the air, I thought, I have a professional advantage.
I did, and the DJ had a field day with it. Below are my three favorite “I can’t believe it ate the whole thing” stories. The first two were used on the air, the third one Cheryl contributed for this post.
1. Clean insides make great doggie colonoscopy prep. The owner was panicked. The dog ate an entire box of Brillo pads! No kidding. What to do? Believe it or not, they were not toxic in the least to the mutt, and they were simply passed within a couple of days. A freak occurrence, you say? Well, my wife insists she has seen this at least twice. Keep your Brillo pads safe–they are very afraid.
2. I now pronounce you dog and wife. It was an emergency call on a Sunday evening: “My diamond engagement ring is missing,” the dog’s owner lamented, “I laid it on the table and it disappeared a few minutes later. Do
you think the dog could have swallowed it?” Maybe. My wife instructed the owner to bring the dog in Monday morning for an X-Ray. There it was, square in the middle of its abdomen. The extrication solution? Choice A: megabucks for surgery. Choice B: follow him around with a pooper scooper for the next few days. They chose the latter and eventually got the ring back, stinky but none the worse for wear. My daughter, ever on the uptake with this stuff, took the x-ray to school for the one of the greatest “show-and-tell” stories of all time. Oh, and by the way, the dog was a schipperke, just like our little imp in the first image above. Unfortunately, with ours, the horse poop caption is quite literally true.
3. This too shall not pass. The obvious question, then, for Dr. Sackler, would be to identify the most outrageous thing a dog swallowed that could not pass. What has she removed surgically that was almost beyond belief?
Answer: An entire rhododendron bush. Well, all the leaves and small stems, anyway. It seems dogs can stomach Brillo Pads and diamond rings, but rhododendron is quite toxic. I can’t imagine what that stuff looked like coming out of the dog’s gut. Check that, I mean I won’t imagine.
Anybody out there have any good stories along these lines? While I wait for responses, I’ll work on my next actual Millennium Conjecture. Like that diamond ring, it seems to be lodged in my gut and will likely stay there until I can figure out how to pass it.
Cosmic Quote #17
March 11, 2013 by 11 Comments
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”– Carl Sagan
Ponder this. If Carl Sagan had not existed, would we have to invent him? If I didn’t exist, would I have to invent me? If Spandex didn’t exist, would we have to invent fat people in trailer parks to wear it anyway? [This is where you figure I either need psychiatric help or at least have to get outside more in the winter.]
The Millennium Conjectures™ 