Author: WarpedChild

Thoughts on Jupiter

I sit on the Southeast porch where my grandfather sat long ago after the day’s work was done and night began to fall. Through the silhouetted treetops I see Jupiter rising in the southeast sky. I know it is Jupiter because I looked on a sky map last night. My grandfather would have known. He knew a fair amount about astronomy and the planets. He sat where I now sit many nights close to seventy years ago. He was a farmer. My Aunt once told me that he wanted to grow corn on Venus. In 1950 we didn’t know much about Venus other than it was about the same size as the earth and closer to the sun. It was easy to imagine a world much like our own, with oceans, jungles, rivers, wildly growing foliage and who knows what animals and other creatures all hidden by the clouds that set free our imaginations. How disappointed he would have been to learn that Venus is closer to our visions of hell than a beautiful, fertile world ripe for farming.

September thought on a Tuesday morning.

Freedom means being free to make choices. It means being free to make choices about your life, about what you want, about where you want to go, about how you want to do it, and freedom to to pursue those choices. It does not mean freedom from responsibility. That would be responsibility to yourself, to your family, to your friends, to your neighbors, and to the world, and possibly to the universe and God. That has never worked and never will work.

Young love

I’m at the farm. I’ve been here for three weeks now. I’ve noticed a pair of Robins who spend all their time together. They look to be male and female, with the colorings of one being more vivid than the other. They roost together on wires and hunt for bugs and worms at the same time together on the lawn. One morning I looked out the window up at the unfinished ceiling joists of the outside porch and saw them roosting side by side in two of the three nests birds have built there over the past years. Then they suddenly flew off together into a nearby tree. God bless them. I’m so happy for their joyful fling at life and love in the springtime morning air! It saddens me though to have the somber realization that one day, it will end for them. One or the other will fall by the wayside. That is the nature of this world. Into every life tragedy will fall. So go flit through the morning sunshine beautiful little birds while you are young, filled with joy, and have forever in front of you.

Bell’s Theorem

If I am to understand Bell’s theorem correctly, then I must suppose that if we are running a Stern-Gerlach experiment on entangled pairs of electrons and I measure one with spin up then I can be assured that if you measure its entangled partner its spin will be down against a given magnetic field direction. However, I cannot therefore do any physics or build any device that depends on that outcome if only I make a measurement. What does that even mean?

Pandemic question

After a year of masks and social distancing and lockdowns, the pandemic seems to be raging up over and over again with apparently more and more contagious mutations appearing. Could it be possible that what we’re really seeing is a consequence of a weakening in general of everybody’s immune system due to mask wearing? If we’re not exposed on a continual basis to pathogens our immune system lets down its guard so to speak.

Rainy November day thought on a sad anniversary

I’m hearing a lot of talk from even more and more Republicans these days about how Trump should man up and concede defeat and just quietly let the country move on and such. Suppose however, the election were tipped in the same way towards Trump, which it’s not unreasonable to imagine. It was after all a highly charged election with maximum support from both sides. Did not Hillary Clinton herself advise Joe Biden not to concede in such an eventuality? He has every right as well as the permission of Hillary Clinton to proceed with his challenges.

The last leaf

The last leaf. I feel more and more anymore like the last leaf. My infrastructure is disappearing. My web of lifelong connections is falling silent. I am becoming the last leaf.

https://poets.org/poem/last-leaf

I learned a couple of weeks ago that the drummer in one of our long ago bands has passed. The jarring thing is that he passed 6 years ago in 2014. Just a year or so ago I was thinking I should look him up and get together. Now I know that he was gone. He died in 2014, six years ago and I didn’t even know it. Friends, relatives, siblings, bandmates, classmates… one by one they drop. My world is shrinking. I am becoming the last leaf.