Flat earth or Wheel? Which Came First not really which are you?

 Do You Feel Like You are Just Spinning Your Wheels?

So starting tomorrow pay attention to how many times you see something with wheels on it.  Let’s include bikes, trikes, strollers, cars, trucks, trains, planes, and well of course suitcases which are a relatively new wheeled object.  Did we overlook skateboards, rollerblades, roller skates, and those funky shoes with the wheelie the heels?  Yep count them too and then think about the invention of the wheel.  

According to an AI source the wheel as we know it was “invented in about 4,000 BCE.  However, in some ways it is hard to believe that prehistoric—don’t we really mean before  we wrote stuff down?)  Certainly the first people on the planet had histories?  They couldn’t have mastered living in the moment all the time—right?  Okay back to the wheel.. or the grindstone now there’s a wheel.  It seems reasonable that some folks used an old log to help move heavy things by sitting the heavy thing on the log and pushing?  Okay so they didn’t draw a sketch of it in their cave.  They were busy hunting huge buffalo and running from grizzly bears and didn’t have time to scrape stick figures on the cave with berry based paint every night.  Plus circles are hard to draw—you don’t think so grab an etch-sketch  and give it a whirl.  

Alright let’s say the wheel gets invented  sometime back in Summary or Egypt or china or someplace that gets credit for all the ancient stuff… and all of the sudden one of the clans in the tribe has a thing they can use to move stuff and these people soon find they can build a cart for hauling people.  Can you imagine the stir that created?  Little boys sitting at the mouth of their caves and huts see their neighboring clans rolling past and there you have it the first time in history one. Family started comparing their wheels with someone else’s and now it’s Ford Vs. Chevy, and all the rest.  It wasn’t long and we were starting to use wheels for all types of things.  However, what if we hadn’t decided to trust the wheel?  How would planes take off or land?  Instead of saying “It’s like learning to ride a bike” would we be saying “It’s like learning to hop around with a stick between our legs?Would we pack far smaller suitcases—well maybe, however, where would we be going I mean everything  would be by horse or on foot?  Oh and how boring would office chairs be?  

What’s the SekkingPeace and Joy connection?  It seems like there are some choices in life and they include using the wheel to do different things in different ways knowing it won’t always work just like wheels that were made of wood or stone.  I mean what if you had some wooden wheels and parked near a beaver dam? Oh and until the first part of the 20th century wheels weren’t filled with air so that created some challenges.  Anyway the point is the wheel has changed and we have adapted and changes what we do with it.   But it is not only choosing to use something with wheels, it choosing to be a wheel.  

Seeking peace and joy, especially in a community, can mean trying to help others move their heavy stuff in life over obstacles and over the course of a long. Journey.  We can choose to hold things and people up while we stay grounded.  We can choose to carry far more weight than we might be on our own and risk getting a nail and becoming flat, ruptured,  and getting thrown on a pile to be tossed into a grinder or worse onto a fire.  Yet if you make the choice to be a wheel you might get admired and taken places all around the world and might make little children very happy as they get their first whiff of mobility-based freedom.  

Maybe the point here is that we all might have a fuller life if sometimes we use the wheel and sometimes we become the wheel and when we need a moment to relax and regroup then maybe we should  just be sitting’ here watching’ the wheels go round and round. 

Modifying the laws of physics?

 Gravity and Laws of Motion —They’re Heavy Man

If you are reading this on the day it was posted, then it’s the 319th anniversary of the day in 1705 that Isaac Newton became “Sir” Isaac Newton.  This was sort of a big deal for someone who had a couple of obstacles tossed in his 17th Century path including his father passing away about three month before he was born.  The source that provided that fact didn’t say how Newton’s father met his demise, however, it adds a little comic relief to imagine his papa was struck down by a torrent of walnuts as his father failed to recognize the universal power of gravity and due to inertia couldn’t rise up and move fast enough to avoid the pounding.  Nonetheless (this blog has included “nonetheless” far too many times lately providing evidence that vocabularies standing still tend to continue to stand still.  

So Newton provided the empirical/scientific community with three basic “laws of motion and some principles concerning gravity that guided most of our traditional study of physics until Einstein brought up that pesky e=mc squared idea which led to the invention of the flux capacitor  by Doc. Brown (Take that AI.  

Anyway what were these three laws of motion?  More importantly is there modern day evidence showing they were both reliable and observable?

1. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.  Well when you drop. A round object off a counter matter how slowly you were moving when you bumped it.  The earring back will roll all the way across the bathroom floor passing the rug and your towel from today’s shower and only come to rest when it finds it’s way to the tile directly behind the exact center of your toilet.  Secondly, Once you start eating potato chips your hand continues dipping into the bag over and over until pretty much all that is left is a salty bag and some crumbs on your navy blue shirt.
2. 2. Objects at Rest Tend to stay at Rest (unless a tremendous force is place upon them?  So once you set your remote to binge watch four entire seasons of The Golden Girls or Law and Order, you tend to sit on the couch and not move for episode. After episode until, in fact, the 64 oz. Diet soda you drank about 5 hours ago has filled your bladder and then you will become an object in motion headed toward the before mentioned toilet where many people then become an object at rest again.  
3. 2. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The evidence for this is overwhelming.  Every time you make a little more money, everything.  You need to survive will go up in price, your car will break down, a filling will fall out etc.  

You see these are useful rules or laws, however here are a few that Newton didn’t anticipate and are important to people living now. 

For Example

1. Every time you leave your smart phone in the bedroom when you are going to get something out of the kitchen that phone will ring, however it will stop when you are spilling your drink and are only one step away from your phone.
2. When you have less than three minutes to put your shoes on and get to the bus even though you live less than 20 yards away from the bus stop, your shoe string will break as you tie the second shoe meaning you have to deal with changing or fixing both shoes.
1. Whenever you really really really want some obnoxiously chocolate and sugary  cookies all that will be available is some sort of stale prepackaged “fig” chunks.  Thank you Sir Isaac Newton. 
1. So the Peace and Joy take aways?   You can make up rules to live by, however over. Time they are liable to need. Some updates or modifications. 
2. Your rules might not be respected or fully agreed upon and 
3. Somebody smarter than you or different from you is likely to come up with some entirely novel ideas about how the universe and you should act under all conditions and a whole lot of people may work hard to prove they were right—and in the grander scheme of things that’s okay.  . 

If you carry over that “every action has an opposite reaction does that mean you should make yourself miserable if you want other people to be happy?  That doesn’t seem reasonable.  If my enemies eat too much will my friends get really skinny?  Now science tells us this whole opposite reaction thing is about “conservation of energy” and you’ve used just about enough energy reading this far… so let’s forget the “opposite thing for now and just keep seeking some peace and joy with the hope that when we come across some… we keep seeking and having peace and joy cross our paths.  

Oh and maybe we’ll find some better cookies—some Nilla Wafers at least? 

Can artificial intelligence teach you to play with the cards you were dealt

 What’s in the Cards?

So last night we were sitting around the table and teaching a new player a card game.  Now euchre is much like life.  You know it goes by pretty fast.  You have some things that are pretty certain yet depend upon things others are thinking and doing.  You have other things that neither you nor your partner or partners ever know nor do you expect until the game seems to change.  Even when we know how the game is played sometimes we get horrible cards and thus we feel powerless while others seem to get a winning hand that they cannot mess up.  So if you want to learn about someone teach them a card game and help them learn that they will have to make choices that will have uncertainty involved some of which will work out and some that won’t, so it’s probably a good idea to mostly surround yourself with people who won’t kick you too hard when you are down and people who will respect you for taking a risk or two and counting on a little help from time to time.  

Now learning to play with a table full of friends and family is a neat event to be a part of, however, of course you can learn by downloading the app and playing with robots, however will the phone smile and laugh when a good move turn bad or a bad play gets to be okay due to some luck?  You see what we discovered last night is that. AI can’t hand you another beer and say “you’re getting it..hang in there.”  Your phone can’t slowly roll the ace on top of the queen to save the day and nod to the other phones playing along.   You see… humans win!

New phones that can do new things are nice…. And yet?—here’s an 8 liner… Welcome to Tuesday or whatever day it is  Days don’t matter until we make them.

Is this the most amazing thing?

This phone will rumble buzz and ding

At anytime for everything

There’s movie clips and memes to bring

The stream’s a never ending string

But does it smile when children sing?

Smell like Lilacs in the spring?

Or just addict us to it’s ring? 

Life is taxing, but common sense could work

 Life is Taxing

It would seem that most people most of the time can find some reason to complain about taxes.  This is partially and sometimes totally because most. People are fairly unaware of what their world might look like without the use of collective dollars to perform collective services.  For example, imagine. Your regular life in a world where there were no regulated places for you to drive or park?  Let’s say roads, any portion of them, were constructed and maintained by private citizens at any level we might choose?  Now let’s do the same with building materials, the quality of food, the distribution of water, and let’s toss in the education of our children which is controversial sometimes, however, we. All know parents who have no place whatsoever in teaching their kids only what they know with the reading or educational materials they own.  

Yet as April 15th (known as Tax Day in the U.S.) approaches it’s probably inevitable that we contemplate what we pay unto Caesar.  Depending upon which state we lived in during which tax cycles we have put tax funds in the hands of our fellow citizens to perform   some fairly strange tax tasks. 

For instance, although cookies crumbling in certain circumstances should be considered a crime, spending tax dollars to determine if gingerbread houses would hold up in earthquake conditions was probably a stretch.  While gingerbread structures might  or might not hold as California floats away from the western Rockies, did other snacks get tested?  Like slightly moist Jolly Ranchers left in the sun for a week would probably stick to each other and the ground in almost any context Mother Nature has to offer.  

In the “high-tech tax spending category we have two winners.   We used money to have people stare at Barbie dolls and then used simulated scenarios to determine if staring at dolls helped people recognize faces in video evidence.  This facial recognition study proved that staring at Barbie didn’t improve a. Thing, but did they try ogling Ken or maybe G.I. Joe? Data man, we need data!

The second hi-tech tax task was a study where we set computers in front of television sets hoping to help the computer learn language and get insights  about human speech.  The study results showed that your television can’t teach your computer much of value without adult supervision—so maybe any kindergarten teacher or responsible parent could have clued us in on that—just saying.

Finally, tax dollars went to study whether frat kids drink more and sleep later than other students when events are related to campus recreational activities such as big time college football etc…Guess what?  They do—shocked?

So we make some crazy decisions about how tax money is being spent and yet it may be time to take a common sense. Look at taxation, therefore here are three proposed new taxes that might move us toward “domestic tranquility.”which was mentioned in one of those pesky founding documents.  

The Noisy Toys Tax Ac-  Every toy that makes a noise must either be taxed at the point of manufacture or contain a permanently powered bluetooth chip thatch blinked to a smart phone volume switch.  Toys can have sound they just can’t be unending and loud.  Also kids can make the sounds on their own…I’ve heard them..I’ve been them….we don’t need loud sounds that burn batteries.

The “Childproof” Cap Tax Act—It’s okay to have safety measures to protect kids, however, if adults can’t open 3 out of 4 of the caps you put on medicine, food, or hygiene products, then. Bam! Big pharma should be paying a tax because not being able to open things creates stress, stress raises blood pressure, and yep.. you know it…strokes, heart attacks, and really nasty gas in elevators  will be the outcome.  A lot of people use their fingerprint to buy “who let the dogs Out” on i-tunes why can’t our medicine come in containers that a fingerprint will open?  And while we’re at things that should either be built differently or be taxed let’s consider the 

No tile in the earpiece tax—Yes.. we know that there are slim “tile” type devices that can be tracked by our phones.  All glasses that include prescriptions lenses should have to come with a tracker.  Why does it take people so long to find their glasses?  Hint—what are glasses for?  Seeing better perhaps?  So wouldn’t it make sense to have some way to locate glasses that did not depend upon them?  

Prescription glasses cost a ton and vision insurance costs a ton.   It seems that this little change could help a ton?

Anyway—these are just a few thoughts, however, don’t worry about new or old taxes all that much, to date I’ve never seen a bank. Truck follow the funeral parade—you can’t take it with you.  

As the clock ticks forward to tax day the words of Grandma “Murphy”  linger heavily in the air

“Life is not fair”  and “There will be no whining!”    

Spring Cleaning?—Start Here Finish Where?

 Spring Cleaning and Other Possible Mistakes

So earlier today it seemed somehow the right thing to do to continue a project in scrolling through the wasteland of once current computer files to determine one of three things: 1) What in the world is in a file named blank 1377, 2) is it anything that has even marginal value now? And 3)what can it teach me about things I think are so important at one moment  and then at some other moment make me shake my head?

After sorting through about 30 files it became evident that each one seemed pretty important at the time they were created and it seemed okay to “save.” Some of the files deserved a “real” name so that it would be possible to find them in the digital junkyard on this computer and a few were prompts for crappy memories that important or not needed to be sent to the place where half your socks go when you do laundry.  Face it we don’t know where those socks go and you don’t know where those files really go—-perhaps in Area 51 there’s a huge warehouse where the government trades socks to some ancient race of aliens for insights on how to become more inefficient in finding reasonable people to run for elected office?  

Nonetheless, a few files were sorted through and. Became a “history” of sorts.  There were some files/events that highlighted great moments—some documents about children getting accepted to college for example, there were some job/work related documents  mostly drafts of things that  were concerns about events that never happened or didn’t happen as predicted, and there were a couple of documents that inspired  thoughts about how to spend some time in the future (and served as a reminder that there is no future—there is only now).  

There was a song lyrics file part of which will be shared below.  In short it seems all this pile of electronic data forms some sort of history of everyday events real and imagined.  Looking back upon these “events”provides some food for current learning (again see the song lyrics below). It also prompted some wondering about the value of “spring cleaning”. 

Do we get rid of some things because, although they have value they remind us that we haven’t made the changes  we were thinking of and therefore there’s no real place for this or that object?  Does Spring Cleaning remind us that we often use energy in ways that unintentionally leave tiny piles of stuff that we move around about a thousand times because  we never quite. Had time to change in the first place?  Which leads to the question—do we just clean it now or do we get angry with ourselves  and get overwhelmed and say “well we cleaned up 30 files, we took a shot at one of those cupboards etc..?  Or perhaps  did we conclude ‘what kind of experimental change in actions will it take so that these. Little piles aren’t here next Spring?”  It seems the third  response won’t leave us thinking about the “mistakes and flaws that might have left us cleaning today and feeling sort of awful about the day when that little mess started.  For in the end every single day has events that seem horrible, seem triumphant, and seem to leave a lot to be decided at some point in the future.  April 12th for example is the day the U.S. Civil War started and that happened because of a mess and left a. Mess we are probably still cleaning up.  The pharmaceutical cure for Polio was deemed safe and became a method for diminishing the impact of that disease.  So looking at those two things—one caused a lot of grief and one prevented a lot.  Also the Russians/soviets sent a man into space on this date and this event spawned all kinds of scientific efforts like makingTang grabbing some rocks from the moon, and providing speculation for conspiracy theories galore.  

The point here I that things happen—some good, some not, and in the case of space…we’re just getting started.  Almost everything that we remember will go through some “Spring Cleaning “ Spiritually anyway and as long as we focus on the current status of the “cleanness or the lesson of the mess and the ability to use decisions to change—well we can avoid feeling the mistakes last forever and that is a valuable part  in seeking peace and joy.  Life changes.. it’s Spring.. Clean a Little..  and Remember. (Song Lyrics)

The wiser I get the more that I’ve found

My body just carries my spirit around

And there’s a new circus around every turn

The best thing to do is pay attention and learn

And pass all these lesson to the next travelers by

Try to enjoy life and understand why

But if why eludes you  don’t wallow in frets

Don’t let your butterfly wings get weighed down with regrets  and 

Breathe and stretch and dance your own dance

And laugh and smile when life gives you a chance 

There’s more to this song, however , it seems appropriate to offer some additional lyrics from a song that I modified (thank you Mac and Reha) way back in 2013 this is  the very long chorus

Life is a set of changes

From time to time they will rearrange us

Sweep us between safe and dangerous 

As the wheel of fortune spins to name us

Cracks our lenses then reframes us

We can walk with saints but no one’s blameless

We can take the raindrop and make the golden ray

Take the magic from the moonlight bring it to the light of day

Find each and every promise lying out there in the fray—

But when we can’t we must make peace with the fact my friend 

That life is just that way.

Hey… what’s this under the couch?  Part of a candy cane?

The Eclipse-Trump Bible-Dark Side Conspiracy? Stop and Think?

 In Honor of the 2024 eclipse

The “Darker” Side of the Moon

So here on the big blue marble or the little blue dot depending where your ego stands on the whole space thing, we just had a chance to pay attention to the dark side of the moon as it passed in front of the moon—well sort of.  We actually saw the same side of the moon we always see, however, the moon got itself directly in between us and the sun on Monday.  Even so this seemed to be a good opportunity to revisit a “moon”  related blog entry that may prompt some reasonable thoughts.  There are a few revisions as this was offered a few moons ago… so to speak.  Enjoy!

So… those among you who are real music history  experts will find mistakes here.  Some of them are probably  important, yet read for the spirit of this okay?  

Today, or someday that looked a lot like today except it was 50 years ago—holy crap  this entry is featuring something that. Was  a half century  ago which is like a high school senior of my generation writing about something that happened before the depression, the invention of television, smart phones, YouTube, the internet, and yes even before shopping malls remember them?  So if there are some slippery inaccuracies  put them in the same category  as things we don’t know about dinosaurs and get over it.

anyway about fifty years  ago today more or less the Dark Side of the Moon climbed  up the billboard chart and well it kind of stayed there not for a week or three but for  930 some weeks it has appeared  in the top 200.  Now these were non-consecutive, but this still merits a ‘stop and think about it” moment.  That’s 18 years… so if Dark Side hit the charts when your child’s was born in 2006 it would still be there.  

also Dark Side. Has sold  over 45 million copies and some of the money it made was used to finance Monty Python’s classic  “Holy Grail.”   Some other things most people don’t know… it was recorded  at Abby road.. yep that place where some quartet  from Liverpool was known to do some fooling around.  Also  unlike  a lot of efforts today the entire content of the work was performed live on the road before the studio albums were pressed.   

However… this entry. Isn’t really about the music…it’s about the moon.  

The moon  and the things we use to put things into space have  been in the news in recent days due to the fact that a Japanese  mission to deliver stuff to the moon crashed  instead of landed there and a privateers test rocket experienced a malfunction  and blew apart in the sky.  This happened again recently and these “events were called “rapid unscheduled disassembly events.”  Now … here’s what has. To make folks wonder … why are we giving so much attention to the rockets that blew up instead of the new pile of trash  we just put on the moon?   Well maybe there’s an answer..

There’s already  a all kinds of stuff  we have left up there.  

Okay we left a flag or two.  There are some golf balls up there.. We have of course left some moon cars up there because they don’t have a place in the trunk for a big subwoofer  and no cup holders or heated seats.  

We needed to reduce the weight of lunar landers in order to relaunch and meet the mother ships so astronauts  tossed  all kinds of stuff  some of which had meaning..like a  bible left on the dash of one of the moon cars—(now you can get a “Trump Bible for $60, but what would you pay for a “Moon Bible??” Unfortunately,  some of the stuff?—can we really be proud of this?   

Like… 96 sealed bags of astronaught crap.. Yes there is moon poop and we left it there.  Now in order to  see this in context we pick oup  our own pet dog crap and dispose of it  in a civilized way… So how do we justify leaving  bags of stuff all over the night sky?  Well NASA  actually has claimed they might go pick up these bags at some later date in order to study  it.    Don’t you want to hear that conversation?    “No Eugene, you stay here for a second….…Thomas and Claire are going to study the geologic samples and Harmony is looking at the atmospheric data… we’ve got 96 bags of 100 year old diarrhea  sitting on the table  in your lab and the world needs to know  how space impacts the digestion of Tang and freeze-dried burritos.” 

Okay.. with the crash of the Japanese  hauler there is  about 400,000 tons of stuff  that mankind has left on the moon.  Are we really ever going to go back and are we going to clean up this stuff?  Will we wreck our own planet enough  so that we absolutely have to use the moon and if we really think that maybe we should send some things up there worth going back to get.   Here are some suggestions..

Let’s send a hundred new and classic cars  (they weigh about 4 tons). So guys would stare up there and devise ways to get  a 68 Charger or a 73 Corvette.  

How about we send 165,000 cases of beer … some folks will go to almost any limit to get beer.  

or maybe before we send anything.. we should stop and think about why… 

Did we plant that flag up there to say ….. we own the moon or did we do it to say… we let our curiosity drive our science and our human need to  seek new knowledge?    If we can be proud of seeking new knowledge and wisdom can we take a bit  of time everyday to seek that right here  on earth?  And while we’re. Doing that  can we help each other seek some peace and joy too?  … or are resigned to have a bad moon risin’?  (With a bag of crap to stare  at tonight?  

Thanks for revisiting this entry and as a very small reward we have thrown in a “Lovely Little Limerick”

When it was all said and done

The Moon slipped in front of the Sun

We might not know why

We all stared at the Sky

But the fancy sunglasses are fun