cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No Punchline So Tiny Tim and Ebeneezer Scrooge walk into a bar. I have no idea where I was going with that. Somebody please finish the joke for me. I got some belated birthday presents yesterday. FINALLY I have a copy of Hemingway's 'Green Hills of Africa.' And a promising-looking book about a Confederate Navy ship that captured 34 Union ships and then made an unplanned circumnavigation after the war in order to place themselves at the mercy of the British rather than face whatever fate the US had in mind for them. Interesting stuff. Both books will accompany me this weekend for reading in camp. Tomorrow morning I leave for my camping/scouting/hunting trip. For those who somehow missed what this is, I am going on an elk hunt in November. Because this will be an unguided hunt along a remote mountain range where I have never been before, I need to have a couple of scouting trips in advance of the actual deer/elk hunting season. Which is what I'm doing with my Labor Day weekend. 3 days of canoing, hiking and camping while I learn all about the habits of elk in this area. While I am there I will be hunting small game for food. By the way, I'm most of the way through 'Voice of the Fire.' It's very good. Arguably it's more of a series of interconnected short stories than it is a novel per se. But I really don't care what anyone wants to call it. I was blabbing about morphic fields in an email to Melinda today and it got me thinking. Between that and the whole silly magic thing, in another 20 or 30 years or so I might very well arrive at some sort of rationally functioning cosmology. Some basic idea of what the universe is all about and how it does or doesn't go tick. Not to say that I will actually be right in some empirical way. Just that I will have a complete and functioning theory that I should be able to convince myself of. What a wonderfully comforting thing that must be. To have a clear idea of exactly what the deal is with the universe, why we're here, where we are going, what the invisible relationships are between different events and times. I'm not even talking about whether that model is actually right. Just the comforting experience of being quite sure that one has a handle on such things. Religion is good for a few things after all. In this sense, I wonder whether modern Westerners are less at ease than our ancestors of 1,000 years ago. They at least were firmly convinced of something. So many modern people go about with these competing models of the world fighting it out in their heads. Claiming total faith in the Bible while knowing perfectly well that evolution is a scientific fact. It is quite a miracle that we are alive at all. We are really so frail. Weak, brittle lumps of flesh which require this incredibly narrow range of circumstances in order to survive. A range of temperatures within a range of only about a hundred degrees or so. Most of the gases that are plentiful in the universe would kill us in any meaningful concentrations within the air. We cannot survive the interstellar radiation that bombards most of the galaxy and presumably the rest of the universe. Most of the universe seems to be a lot of nothing interspersed with extremely hot, radioactive, violent spots where most of the matter is concentrated. It's all either near-vacuum or firey death. Our luck is phenomenal. 10:56 a.m. - 2007-08-31 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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