Rone

The song of the day is Bye Bye Macadam from the album Tohu Bohu by French electronic music producer and artist Rone (Erwan Castex). The music video is by Dimitri Stankowicz.

When Rubber Meets the Road

As you drive your car down the highway, your tires are slowly being worn down. Where does the rubber go?

The road abrades particles of rubber off tires. Large particles fall to the road and rain washes those particles off the road and eventually into streams and lakes. Small particles become airborne. In Los Angeles, the 13th most common air pollutant is tire dust. A 1980s pollution study of the Los Angeles basin concluded that 5 tons of breathable tire dust were released into the air every day. The total amount of tire dust released into the environment in the U.S. every year is estimated to be 650,000 tons.

If you live in a large city, you’re breathing tire dust. If you live in a small town, you’re still breathing tire dust, just less of it. Some tire dust gets stuck in your lungs, but the smallest particles can enter your bloodstream. Tires are made of natural and synthetic rubber. About 40% of the rubber is natural – made from latex. What does this do in the human body?

Latex allergies are increasing, possibly due to exposure to tire dust. People who have a latex allergy can usually avoid contact with latex, unless they’re breathing the substance.

Tire dust also contains hazardous metals like copper, zinc, nickel, chromium, and cadmium. These substances can leach into water and are toxic to small life forms that live in lakes and streams.

But until the day that we’re all driving hovercraft, what choice do we have?

The War on Drugs

The song of the day is Under The Pressure from the album Lost in the Dream by The War On Drugs. Two members of the band, David Hartley and Adam Granduciel, contributed to Sharon Van Etten's album, Are We There. Other members of the band are Robbie Bennett, Charlie Hall, Jon Natchez, and Anthony LaMarca.

First Aid Kit

The song of the day is My Silver Lining from the album Stay Gold by Swedish folk duo First Aid Kit. Klara Söderberg sings and plays guitar. Her older sister Johanna sings backing vocals and plays keyboards.

Leap Second

If this June seems longer than usual, that’s because it is longer than usual. They’re adding a leap second to the end of June. I don’t know who this mysterious “they” are who tinker with our clocks from time to time, but when I’m in doubt I blame Bernie Horowitz.

Just kidding. The Time Lords who tinker with our clocks are actually the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, IERS. They measure Earth’s rotation and decide when a leap second is needed. The leap second is needed because the atomic clocks which keep our time are extremely accurate and consistent in their timekeeping, even as Earth’s rotational speed is slowing and the length of an actual day is getting longer.

An Earth day is officially 86,400 seconds long, but the last time an actual day was that length was around the year 1820. Due to gravitational tugs between the Earth, Moon, and Sun, Earth’s rotation is slowing by approximately 1.7 milliseconds per century. The mean length of a day is now 86,400.002 seconds. In one year the amount of “extra” Earth-day time compared to atomic clock time will theoretically accumulate to 365 multiplied by .002 seconds, which amounts to 0.73 seconds.

In reality, things are not so tidy. Earth’s rotation is affected by earthquakes, volcanoes, atmospheric disturbances, and even what is happening in Earth’s core. Leap seconds occur at irregular intervals and are unpredictable. When the IERS decides a leap second is needed, they will add a leap second to the end of a month. It can be any month, but June and December are preferred. The atomic clocks will stop for one second between the end of June and the beginning of July to allow actual (astronomical) time to catch up with atomic clock time.

Because of Earth’s variable rotation, in theory a leap second can be negative as well as positive. In other words, the atomic clocks could be programmed to skip a second. That has never happened in any of the 25 leap seconds added thus far, and with Earth’s rotation slowing it is unlikely to happen. 

The last leap second was added at midnight on June 30, 2012. A number of computers around the world crashed because their software wasn’t designed to handle the extra second. The Amadeus airline booking system, Hadoop, and Linux servers around the world were caught in the mini-Y2K bug. This is why space missions don’t launch on the day a leap second is added to international clocks. Scientists don’t want to gamble that a leap second might crash the multi-million dollar mission that is carrying their lifetime’s work.

Supposedly, the bug has been fixed. Supposedly, the problems won’t happen this time. Still, when June changes to July, I wouldn’t care to be flying on one of those new jumbo jets with a “fly-by-wire” control system where everything is handled by computers – just in case the software guys and gals overlooked something. It would be too weird to have my epitaph read, “Killed by a leap second.”

Sharon Van Etten

The song of the day is Every Time The Sun Comes Up by Sharon Van Etten. Rolling Stone ranks this song 8th on the list of 50 Best Songs of 2014.

Cris Cab

The song of the day is Liar Liar from the 2014 album Where I Belong by Cris Cab (Cristian Cabrerizo) featuring Pharrell Williams.

Consciousness

Consciousness is strange when you stop and think about it. And thinking about it is consciousness trying to understand itself.

The dictionary says consciousness is “the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings.” But that is a tautology. What is “awake and aware” if not the state of being conscious?

We all have consciousness so we all know what it feels like to be conscious. Still, that’s different from knowing what consciousness is and how it arises out of the brain’s billions of neurons. I define consciousness as a phenomenon that allows us to know what we are thinking and, in fact, that we are thinking.

When we are awake, we are aware of ourselves and the world around us. When we are asleep, we are not. And yet, people may perform surprisingly high-level tasks while asleep and unaware. They may sleepwalk, remove food from their refrigerator, eat, and return to bed. They may even operate a motor vehicle while asleep. This requires open eyes, coordination, reflexes, and some kind of mental access to driving rules, all while asleep. Obviously, some parts of the brain can be awake even while the part of the brain that gives us consciousness is asleep.

Something similar happened to me. In a blog post called Losing My Mind I described how all the clocks in my house were mysteriously changed from Daylight Time to Standard Time one night while I was asleep. It was mysterious because I was alone in the house.

Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella and co-workers have spent over ten years developing the "Passive Frame Theory" of consciousness (published online June 22 by the journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences). According to this theory, consciousness is “a passive conduit rather than an active force that exerts control.” In the Passive Frame Theory, unconscious mental processes make decisions and impel our actions, not the conscious mind. Although it seems to us that our conscious minds are processing information, making decisions, and acting on them, that is an illusion.

Consciousness seems to be something that observes. The brain receives nerve signals from our retinas and assembles them into pictures but it is consciousness that sees the pictures. The brain receives nerve signals from our inner ears but it is consciousness that hears the sound.

We could build a robot and give it an advanced computer programmed to mimic human reactions, and it will appear to be conscious. But it won’t be conscious, it will only be a machine running a very complex program. Consciousness is more than a very complex program. Consciousness is the internal observer that views the output of this very complex program.

The problem I have with the Passive Frame Theory is that it removes free will. It says we don’t choose our actions in life, we merely have the illusion that we are doing so. That may be how our brains work, but I suspect consciousness is vastly more complex than we have imagined. So far we’ve only scratched the surface of understanding consciousness.

Flo Rida

The song of the day is Whistle from the album Wild Ones by rapper Flo Rida (Tramar Lacel Dillard). The song was written by Flo Rida, David Glass, Marcus Killian, Justin Franks, Breyan Isaac and Antonio Mobley. Several critics have called Whistle "the least subtle song ever". However, Flo Rida has said that “blow my whistle” means “get my attention”. The music video for the song was filmed in Acapulco, Mexico.

Embattled Flag

I was born in a southern state, I grew up in a different southern state, I have worked in southern states, and I live in a southern state now. I have southern roots going back as far as I’ve been able to trace my ancestry. And I’m perfectly fine with not seeing the Confederate battle flag outside of a museum. If some of our citizens are disturbed by it and view it as a symbol of racism or slavery, then why would anyone want to wave it in their face?

Slavery was an evil institution. There were many good people in the antebellum South, but they took a wrong road when they decided that owning human beings was worth fighting a devastating war to preserve. The Confederate battle flag should be displayed in museums as a part of Southern history, not proudly displayed as a part of “Southern heritage.” The battle flag has too much baggage. Get rid of public displays by government. Then get over it.

We live in a democracy. If the majority wants to be callous toward the feelings of a minority, that is unfortunately the way it will be. Sometimes a large number of people have to “see the light” before change can happen.

Fall Out Boy

The song of the day is Thnks fr th Mmrs from the album Infinity on High by Fall Out Boy. The band consists of vocalist and guitarist Patrick Stump, bassist Pete Wentz, guitarist Joe Trohman, and drummer Andy Hurley.

One-Off

When I was a newly minted engineer I sometimes heard, and occasionally used, the phrase one-of to indicate an object was one of a kind. “That test set is a one-of.”

In recent years, I’ve seen one-of being replaced by one-off. I used to think one-off was a solecism, a corruption of one-of. But it’s not. A little research revealed one-off is a British expression that has crept into American English. Furthermore, one-off is likely the original and one-of is the eggcorn.

World Wide Words says this about one-off:

It comes out of manufacturing, in which off has long been used to mark a number of items to be produced of one kind: 20-off, 500-off. This seems to have begun in foundry work, or a similar trade, in which items were cast off a mould or from a pattern (“We’ll have 20 off that pattern and 500 off that other one”.)

So one-off means one of a kind, used especially to refer to a prototype. From manufacturing, the phrase spread into general usage, becoming applied to things that are not manufactured. “John is a character, a genuine one-off.”

To my non-British ears, one-of will always sound more natural – more one-of-a-kind-ish – and one-off will always sound a bit odd. And I’m okay with that.

Christina Perri

The song of the day is Human from the album Head or Heart by singer-songwriter Christina Judith Perri.

Cruising The News

I was at my computer and the TV was on. I was reading articles on the Web while half-listening to news on the TV. (Why not? I have a left-brain and a right-brain and they often multi-task. My left-brain reads while my right-brain listens.) As I scanned news articles on my computer monitor, over on the TV a journalist was describing a conversation he recently had with Stephen Hawking, the British physicist and cosmologist. Hawking had stated that “they” (meaning physicists not named Stephen Hawking) might do something that would destroy the Universe. His exact phrasing, as nearly as I can recall hearing it, was something like, “blah blah blah boson particle blah blah destroy the Universe blah blah blah.”

What?! Well, I just can’t worry about that. I don’t have the time or the mental energy to worry about things that will absolutely never happen. So I resumed scanning the headlines and I saw this one:

Inside Exotic Dead Stars Are Piles Of Waffles

Unless I’ve been teleported to Bizarro World, I’m pretty sure that there are precisely zero waffles inside dead stars. There are no Belgium waffles, there are no regular waffles, nor are there pancakes, hotcakes, or flapjacks inside dead stars. The headline seemed to be one of those designed more to entice you to click it than to inform you. Should I click it? I pondered that and decided: okay, sure, I’ll bite. I began reading the article (it was about neutron stars) and right away I encountered this:

The strong nuclear force and the electrostatic force … fight over the packed protons and neutrons and drive them into strange configurations, collectively dubbed "nuclear pasta".

Nuclear pasta? Wait, I thought it was waffles. Now it’s pasta? They’re pulling a bait-and-switch here. The words “nuclear pasta” were linked to another article titled, “Does Pasta Lie At The Heart Of Pulsars?” (A pulsar is a type of neutron star.) So is it waffles or pasta? The first sentence of the second article stated,

Pulsars and other neutron stars may be composed of a 'new' form of matter which forms spaghetti-like strands and lasagna-like sheets, according to researchers based in Denmark.

Spaghetti-like? Lasagna-like? That is definitely pasta-like. How did waffles get in there?

I cruised on through the news to this headline:

10 Things You Never Thought You'd Do With A Pumpkin

Really, only ten? That’s not very imaginative. I could list hundreds of things I’ll never do with a pumpkin. Like, I’ll never watch TV on a pumpkin. I’ll never make a phone call on a pumpkin. I’ll never replace a flat tire with a pumpkin. Of course, those statements are equally valid when applied to apples, oranges, raisins, coconuts, and even Brussels sprouts. I don’t know why they chose to pick on pumpkins. Pumpkins get no respect. Look at what happens to them at Halloween.

Then the news turned grim. I read about a Georgia police chief who claimed he accidentally shot his wife. And after that, he shot her again. And again, it was an accident. He says. If he shot his wife twice, and it really was an accident both times, is this the guy you want running a police department? Should this guy even be allowed to carry a gun around other people?

Next I read about a man who had a 7-inch turn signal stalk removed from his arm. It had been in his arm for over 51 years, ever since he wrecked his T-bird in 1963, but he didn’t know it was in his arm until he set off a metal detector about 10 years ago. Only recently did he have it removed. Maybe it had begun to bother him. Or maybe he just couldn’t get through airport security. I suspect it’s a major hassle trying to explain to skeptical TSA security personnel that you have a turn signal stalk in your arm.

I can empathize: I have a sewing needle embedded in the bottom of my right foot. It’s probably been there since I was little. I never knew about it until I had my foot x-rayed after an industrial accident. (A robot fell on my foot. The robot weighed about 500 pounds.) There it was on the x-ray, clear as day; you could easily see the eye of the needle. The doctor and the x-ray technician were quite surprised, even though I’m sure they were accustomed to seeing weird stuff. But the needle wasn’t hurting me, so I decided to leave it be. Always let sleeping dogs lie – they may bite you if you wake them up.

Florrie

The song of the day is Little White Lies by English singer, songwriter, drummer and model Florrie (Florence Arnold).

Summer Solstice 2015

Today, June 21, is the summer solstice for the planet’s northern hemisphere. It arrived at 4:38 AM Universal Time. Today will be the longest day of the year and the sun will reach its highest point in the sky. Going forward on the calendar from today, days will grow shorter and the noonday sun will begin its slow retreat to the south.

Although today is the first day of summer, daily high temperatures in my central Virginia city have been in the 90s for weeks. The heat index has been climbing past 100° every day, hitting 108° on some days. But with the arrival of summer, central-Virginians can anticipate even hotter weather. That’s when the actual temperature hits 108° and the heat index climbs to 120°.

NOAA and the Japan Meteorological Agency both have May as the hottest month on record. (The second hottest May on record is last year’s May.) There has never been a hotter start to the year than the past five months. Around the globe there were a few spots that were colder than average, but most of the globe was hotter than average.

The day may come when mid-Atlantic coast residents look back with fond nostalgia on those summer days of the early 21st century when daytime highs were always below 120° and the heat index was always below 140°. Just as residents of Beijing are often seen wearing face masks because of the terrible air pollution the city often experiences, future central-Virginians may wear white “space-suits” and carry personal air-conditioners to protect themselves from intolerable heat. And they’ll still argue over why it’s so hot.

Rae Morris & Fryars

The song of the day is Cold from the album Unguarded by English singer-songwriter Rachel “Rae” Morris featuring Fryars (Benjamin Garrett).

Tweety

I watched this video on YouTube and thought it was nice. The bird is a European goldfinch named Piolín (Tweety) and he has his own Facebook page as well as his own YouTube channel. This is one pampered bird.

Marina and the Diamonds

The song of the day is Primadonna from the 2012 album Electra Heart by Welsh singer-songwriter Marina Diamandis, known professionally as Marina and the Diamonds.

Thomas Rhett

The song of the day is Crash and Burn from the album It Goes Like This by Thomas Rhett (Thomas Rhett Akins, Jr.).

Max Q

Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson peers out the windows of the cupola of the International Space Station. She has flown to the ISS on the space shuttle Endeavor and on the Russian Soyuz TMA 18 crew capsule. During her two flights she logged over 188 days in space, including more than 22 hours in three spacewalks. She is conversational in American Sign Language (ASL) and Russian.

Dyson also sings lead vocals for the Houston-based all-astronaut rock band Max Q. (Maximum Q or Max Q is an engineering term meaning the point at which aerodynamic stress on a vehicle in atmospheric flight is maximum.) There are several bands named Max Q. The astronaut band performs at the Kemah Boardwalk in Kemah, TX, in this 2008 YouTube video.

Wrabel

The song of the day is Ten Feet Tall by LA-based singer-songwriter Stephen Wrabel.

Rendezvous With Pluto

This year, 2015, is “The Year of Pluto.” On July 14, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly past icy dwarf planet Pluto, taking photographs and scanning Pluto with scientific instruments. Humans have sent exploratory spacecraft into regions of the solar system that contain terrestrial planets and gas giants, but this mission is the first flyby of an icy dwarf planet.  Icy dwarfs are a third class of objects that are located in the Kuiper Belt, a region of the solar system beyond the planets. Very little is known about icy dwarfs. NASA has put together a video about the New Horizons project called The Year of Pluto. If you lack the time to watch the entire 58 minute video, the first two minutes are an introduction to the video that is both interesting and entertaining. Click the full-screen button to view it in HD.

At its current position, the New Horizons spacecraft is 2.95 billion miles (4.75 billion kilometers) from Earth. It is approaching Pluto at 13.79 km/sec (8.57 miles/sec). The round-trip time for a radio signal to travel from Earth to New Horizons and for a reply to travel from New Horizons back to Earth is almost 9 hours, so the spacecraft will be on its own during its encounter with Pluto.

Vance Joy

The song of the day is Riptide from the album Dream Your Life Away by Australian singer-songwriter Vance Joy (James Keogh).

Sex With A Stranger

A website called whatever.com has posted a video of a hidden camera social experiment in which an attractive young woman asks 100 random men on the street if they would have sex with her. Thirty of the men said yes, and seventy said no. They also ran an experiment with a man asking random women for sex. Zero of 100 women said yes, and two of 200 women said yes.

The outcome of this experiment was laughably predictable. Does it surprise anyone that 100 of 100 women declined to have sex with a stranger? The thing that does surprise me just a little is that, when approached by an attractive female, only 30 of 100 men said yes. I would have expected the numbers to be the reverse, with 70 men saying yes and 30 saying no. But given that the experiment was done in a college town and most of the men were young and probably having sex with girlfriends, seventy no’s are understandable.

What do we conclude from this experiment? One possibility is that 30 out of 100 young men are naive at best, dummies at worst. Think, guys: in your entire life, how many times has a good-looking female you’ve never met – who is not a prostitute – ever approached you on the street and offered sex? I suspect the number of times that has happened to most men is zero. Yet the thought doesn’t appear to occur to any of the men who said yes that maybe something else is happening – that maybe there’s a camera on them, maybe the woman is setting the man up to be robbed by her drug-addicted boyfriend, maybe the woman is being coerced into doing this for some nefarious reason, or that maybe the woman has mental or emotional issues. No, 30 out of 100 young men apparently thought: a hot chick I’ve never met wants me for sex: totally normal!

Another possibility is that these hypothetical explanations did occur to the 30 men and they just didn’t care because they’re all horndogs. (Women can be horndogs, too, but apparently it’s only 2 out of 200.)

These 30 men – are they naive dummies, or just desperate to get laid? Either way, it’s not their finest moment.

Nico & Vinz

The song of the day is Am I Wrong by Norwegian duo Nico and Vinz (Kahouly Nicolay "Nico" Sereba and Vincent "Vinz" Dery).

Race

In the news lately: a story about Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who was head of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP. For years she has publicly maintained that she was black. Regardless of why Ms. Dolezal chose to identify as a black woman, she seems to have been a competent leader of her NAACP chapter, and no one has said otherwise. But the fiction caught up with her and in the ensuing controversy, Dolezal chose to resign as president of the Spokane chapter rather than let the distraction continue to escalate.

The ironic thing is that race isn’t real – at least not in the way that one’s biological sex is real. Sure, there are white people and black people and yellow people, but those are references to physical traits. At the level of genetics, race doesn’t exist. There is much more genetic variation within a racial group than between racial groups.

In fact, defining race as a set of physical traits is a fairly modern idea. Ancient people did not divide people by physical differences but by religion, status, class, or language. Later, race referred to one’s nationality. Winston Churchill used this sense of the word when he said of the World War 2 Battle of Midway, “… the qualities of the United States Navy and Air Force and the American race shone forth in splendour.”

The modern concept of race began with European imperialism and colonization and the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. America’s Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal” and yet slavery existed in the colonies when that document was written. Race was used to justify slavery, further tying the word to a set of physical traits.

Race is a social construct that is used to divide our population into groups such that some groups have advantages relative to others. It ensures that people are not born with equal opportunity.

We have trans-gender persons who identify as a different sex than their birth sex. Ms. Dolezal is perhaps trans-racial, identifying as a different race than her birth race. The US Census Bureau now asks people to self-identify their race. Respondents can choose multiple racial groups and can have any ethnicity. This seems to be an acknowledgement that race is a social construct rather than a real thing. If one parent of a child is black and the other parent is white, is the child white or black – and why?

This nation will have made great progress when a citizen can identify as a member of the race with which they feel an affinity, or no racial group, and everyone is ok with that.

Antares

I can almost hear this being said in a meeting somewhere: “Let’s use old Soviet-era rocket engines which have been in storage in Siberia for four decades. We’ll buff off the corrosion and weld the cracks and they’ll be good as new. What can go wrong?”

Ask Orbital Sciences what can go wrong. I’ll bet they have a real good idea this morning.

Last night, Orbital Sciences’ Antares rocket blew up 10 to 12 seconds into its flight. Or as NASA would say, “experienced an anomaly.” The Antares first stage is powered by two Aerojet AJ-26 engines, which are modified Soviet-built NK-33 engines. The NK-33 engines were built in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Soviet Union had hope of going to the Moon. When the Moon program ended, the government ordered the engines to be destroyed. But a bureaucrat decided to store 150 engines in a warehouse. Thirty years later, word of the stored engines leaked out to America. One of the engines was taken to America and demonstrated on a test stand. In the mid-1990s, Aerojet bought 36 of the engines, fixed them up, and renamed them AJ-26.

Why does Orbital want to use the NK-33? What’s so great about it? The NK-33 has one of the highest thrust-to weight-ratios of any Earth-launchable rocket engine. In fact, it’s second only to the SpaceX Merlin 1D engine. SpaceX is Orbital’s competitor.

This morning, the Russian Space Agency launched its own Progress cargo vessel from Kazakhstan. The spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station six hours later with 3 tons of food, fuel, and other supplies. The launch and flight went smoothly. Turns out, the Russians don’t use antique rocket engines. They sold their antique engines to us.

Major Lazer & DJ Snake

The song of the day is Lean On by electronic music group Major Lazer and French DJ, rapper, and producer DJ Snake (William Grigahcine) with vocals by Danish singer-songwriter MØ (Karen Marie Ørsted).

Martin Garrix & Tiësto

The song of the day is The Only Way Is Up by Dutch DJs and record producers Martin Garrix (Martijn Garritsen) and Tiësto (Tijs Michiel Verwest). Garrix is best known for the track Animals – a top 10 hit in more than 10 countries, peaking at #1 in Belgium and the UK. Tiësto won a Grammy for his remixed version of John Legend's Top 40 Hit All Of Me at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards.

Naxxos

The song of the day is New Orleans by Austrian deep house DJs Naxxos (Max Laurent & Chris von Schla).

Muffaletta Dreams

I’m up at 4 AM. It’s dark outside and inside except for the glow of my computer monitor. I check Astronomy Picture of the Day, I read the news. I check Skype and see a friend is online. We chat for a while; the chat wanders from home chores to Southern style breakfasts: grits with butter, grits with redeye gravy, country ham and eggs. Suddenly I’m hungry. I eat a bowl of cereal, but it doesn’t relieve my hunger. I open the fridge, remove the remaining portion of muffaletta, nuke it to room temperature, and eat it in the semi-dark room. I feel better. Shortly afterward, I am overcome by a nap attack. I lie on the sofa and pull a serape over me. I fall asleep. I dream.

In my dream, I live in an apartment and I have a visitor: Congressman John Boehner. John Boehner?? That’s probably my brain grappling with unpleasant TV news. A dog follows me from room to room, looking at me expectantly, until I realize I need to feed the dog. I begin packing for a trip and discover my shoes are falling apart. On and on it goes, weird dream stuff.

I wake up. I feel drugged. I’m too groggy to drag myself off the sofa. I can’t move. Once in a while I open my eyes for a second. I see daylight. Wow, remind me not to sleep after eating a muffaletta.

This wasn’t my first mufflaletta dream. A few nights ago I ate a muffaletta before bed and had an even more outlandish dream. I dreamed I stepped into a machine and it sent me 1000 years into the future.

I found myself with a small group of people. I didn’t know them, but they seemed to have been expecting me. They lived in a home with rooms – bedrooms, living room, bathrooms – not unlike homes today, though I didn’t understand how the appliances worked. I didn’t even understand how the bathroom fixtures worked. Everything was familiar and different at the same time.

And everything was voice-commanded. Rooms were “virtual” – they could be switched off with a spoken word, or rearranged with a word. We went onto a balcony and I was disconcerted to see it had no railing around it. At each corner of the balcony was a small metal thing, and somehow I knew a “force-field” was projected around the balcony. No one could get through it to fall off the balcony.

We went to a place that looked like a shopping mall without stores. I rode something that looked like an elevator, though I knew it was more than an elevator. (Imagine someone from even a hundred years ago trying to describe our world.) Everything was like that: superficially familiar, but deeply unfamiliar. It was one of those dreams that sticks in your mind.

If you want my recipe for the muffaletta, you can find it online but I won’t tell you where. I will not be responsible for what happens after someone eats it.

Lykke Li

The song of the day is FlicFlac’s remix of I Follow Rivers from the album Wounded Rhymes by Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li.

Lilly Wood & The Prick

The song of the day is Prayer in C (Robin Schulz remix) by French duo Lilly Wood & The Prick (Nili Hadida and Benjamin Cotto). The song was a chart-topper in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Israel, Lebanon, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Anamnesis

In philosophy, anamnesis is the idea that humans possess knowledge from past incarnations and that learning consists of rediscovering that knowledge within us.

Sometimes I will wake up and remember I dreamed during the night. I may remember the dream in detail. I may remember only a part of the dream, but with the knowledge there was more to the dream even if I can’t remember it.

And sometimes I wake up and know that I dreamed a dream, but I can’t recall anything about it. As I think about it and try to recall it, it seems that the dream is on the verge of remembrance. But in the end, all I know is that I dreamed a dream.

When I was young – no more than six years old – that is how I felt about my existence. I was certain my existence did not begin with my birth. I was certain I existed somewhere before I was born. And when I thought about it, I seemed on the threshold of remembering that previous existence, but in the end all I could ever access was the certainty that I had existed somewhere before my present life.

Though I could not do so, some children are able to tap into a past life memory. For example, there is this news story about a boy from the Midwest who claims he had been a movie extra and, later, a powerful Hollywood agent. He provided many details of this previous life.

And there is this news story about a five year old Ohio boy who remembers details from a previous life in which he had been a 30 year old black woman named Pam who died in a fire. It is normal for these previous-life memories to fade as the child grows older.

Childhood recollections of past lives are not uncommon. Dr. Jim Tucker, associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, has studied the cases of more than 2,500 children, usually between the ages of 2 and 6 years old, who say they remember a past life. In his book, "Return to Life," Tucker details some of these cases.

The eighteenth century French novelist and philosopher François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name, Voltaire, said, “It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.” I agree; being born once is a mystery, so why not twice? Why not a hundred times or a thousand times? There is much we do not know about consciousness. We cannot dismiss the possibility that consciousness is immortal and that the majority of us are born with an amnesia of those prior existences.

In Buddhism, the cycle of rebirth is called samsara. I knew the word long before I knew its meaning. My encounter with samsara is described in a previous post you can read here.

Fountains of Wayne

The song of the day is Valley Winter Song from the 2009 “No Better Place: Live in Chicago” concert by rock band Fountains of Wayne. The band was named after a lawn ornament store in Wayne, New Jersey.

BC Jean

The song of the day is If I Were A Boy written by singer-songwriter BC Jean (Brittany Jean Carlson) and LA-based German music producer-songwriter Tobias “Toby” Gad. Jean’s record label rejected the song, but it was later recorded by Beyoncé and achieved worldwide commercial success. Listen to Jean sing her song here.

Guns and Jesus

Recently I met a man I hadn’t seen in many years. He was driving down my street and saw me outside talking to a neighbor, and so he stopped. We talked for a while and he enthusiastically told me he had “found Jesus.” He wore a gun on his right hip. He said he needed it for protection.

That night as I sat in my darkened living room, I pondered my chance encounter with this man I knew from long ago. In particular, I pondered the incongruity between his ebullient connection with Jesus and the firearm he felt he needed to defend himself.

It has always been my understanding that Christians (and Jews) are instructed to not kill people. As in, “Thou shall not kill.” That’s a solid statement. There are no exceptions mentioned.

If Jesus were walking the highways and byways of today (and maybe, somewhere, he is), would he wear a gun on his hip? Would Jesus kill someone in self-defense?

Were I a Believer, I think I would be more concerned about losing my soul than losing my life. As for my life, the Believer’s Handbook – the Bible – has a few things to say about that:

"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me..."

“fear not, for I am with you”

“no weapon that is fashioned against you shall succeed”

“The Lord will keep you from all evil; He will keep your life.”

If you choose to be a Believer, then one of your beliefs should be that protecting your life isn’t your job; it’s God’s job. But if you choose to be a Believer who doesn’t trust God to do His Job and run His Plan, then maybe you should wear a sidearm. Because a part of you thinks maybe God has become distracted, maybe He has forgotten about you, maybe He doesn’t even exist. Trust in God, but carry a Glock. Just in case God drops the ball.

Madilyn Bailey

The song of the day is See You Again by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth, covered here by Madilyn Bailey.

Robin Schulz & Jasmine Thompson

The song of the day is Sun Goes Down from the album Prayer by German DJ and producer Robin Schulz with vocals by Jasmine Thompson.

Dreck

In his 1890 novel The Light That Failed, Rudyard Kipling wrote, “Four–fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake.”

In the 1950s, science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon said, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” That phrase has become known as Sturgeon’s Law.

In a 2013 article in the National Post, journalist Clive Thompson described blogging, Facebooking, Twittering, and similar self-published thoughts as “an ocean of dreck, dotted sporadically by islands of genius.”

As my long-time readers know, I’m not one to hold back the dreck. As a blogger, you never know when you’ll pop out an island of genius. Still, genius is a very high bar to aim for. It would be fantastic if some of my blog posts could be described as genius, but that possibility seems unlikely. I will aim for captivating, spellbinding, or riveting, but I’ll be happy with interesting, thought-provoking, or readable.

When it comes to dreck, I like to think this blog is, at the least, the cream of the dreck. And on some days it might be, if not an island of genius, a small lifeboat on that ocean.

Writing a blog is like panning for gold. You have to create a lot of dreck to get to the occasional nugget.

How much dreck is created every day? Clive Thompson says if you count emails, tweets, blog posts, Facebook comments, and text messages, the total comes to at least 3.6 trillion words, the equivalent of 36 million books every day. That is more books than the Library of Congress holds.

Frankly, I would not count all those things as content. But consider blog posts alone. According to torquemag.io, there are 1.5 million blog posts published each day on the Wordpress network, and that doesn’t count the sites for which Wordpress cannot collect statistics. According to builtwith.com, Wordpress is used on about 47% of websites that use a content management system. It’s safe to say at least three million blog posts are published daily.

That is a lot of dreck. I have a lot of competition. Fortunately, I also have a lot of experience – I’ve been writing dreck since I was a kid. My readers should know that when it comes to dreck, they can count on me. I won’t let them down. Best dreck on the Web!

Twitter Me That

I consider myself to be of at least average intelligence. Or I was, at one point in my life. So why is it so difficult to understand how Twitter works? The main problem I have is remembering who sees my tweets. For some reason, I have trouble keeping straight the few simple rules of tweeting. As I understand them, the rules are:

A tweet from someone else that starts with @YourName will appear in your timeline if you follow the poster (or in your @Mentions tab if you don’t), and in the poster’s timeline, and in the timelines of anyone who follows both the poster and you, and in Search, unless the poster has a protected account, in which case only the poster and the poster’s followers will see it; however, if someone merely includes @YourName in their tweet (for example, their tweet starts with “.@YourName” – note the ‘.’ before the ‘@’), making it a @Mention, their tweet will appear in your timeline if you follow the poster (or in your @Mentions tab if you don’t), and in the poster’s timeline, and in all of the poster’s followers’ timelines, and in Search, UNLESS the tweet was created by pressing the Reply button, in which case only anyone who follows both of you will see it, unless the poster has a protected account, in which case only the poster and the poster’s followers will see it. Conversely, a tweet from you that starts with @AnotherName will be visible in your timeline and to the person you direct the tweet to (in their @Mentions tab) and anyone who follows both you and the person you’re tweeting to (in their timeline) and in Search, unless you have a protected account, in which case the person you’re tweeting it to will only see it if they are following you; however, a tweet from you that merely includes @AnotherName (for example, your tweet starts with “.@AnotherName” – again, note the ‘.’ before the ‘@’), making it a @Mention, will be visible to you, and to the person mentioned in the tweet, and your followers including those who don’t follow @AnotherName (in their timelines) and in Search UNLESS the tweet was created by pressing the Reply button, in which case only anyone who follows both of you will see it. As for direct messages: A direct message from someone to you will appear in your @Messages tab as well as the @Messages tab of the sender and NOT appear in Search; however, they can only send you a direct message if you are following them. Conversely, a direct message from you to someone else will appear in your @Messages tab, and in the @Messages tab of the person you sent it to and NOT appear in Search; however, you can only send someone a direct message if they are following you.

Just to be clear, a ‘.’ (or anything else) in front of a @Reply turns it into a @Mention. So, “@VirtualWayne your tweet mystifies me” could be a reply to my tweet, but a reply like “I’m mystified by your tweet, @VirtualWayne” is a @Mention. And as I wrote earlier, a @Reply is seen only by those who follow both you and the person you replied to, while a @Mention is seen by all your followers (in their timelines). Obviously, when I tweet a @Reply, it’s a public tweet and anyone can see it in my timeline or in the timeline of the person I send it to.

There are other subtleties. For example, the metadata for a @Mention is slightly different from the metadata for a @Reply, and this affects such things as the ability to follow a conversation backward in time to its beginning.

There are two problems here. I’m not really sure about anything I just wrote (see paragraph one). And once in a while Twitter changes the rules.

Gnarls Barkley

The song of the day is Crazy by soul music duo Gnarls Barkley, composed of producer Brian Joseph Burton (Danger Mouse) and singer-songwriter Thomas DeCarlo Callaway (CeeLo Green).

Artist

If you take photographs, you might be a picture-taker or you might be an artist. If you are an artist, your art “speaks” to you. It may mean nothing to anyone else. If your art becomes well known, many people to whom it meant nothing may decide to place a copy of your art in their homes simply because it is valued by people whom they do not know and will never meet. Popularity doesn’t make you a better artist.

If something mundane or commercial has a special appeal to someone or to a small number of people, and it wasn’t created by someone who calls herself an artist, is it art anyway? Who decides what is and what isn’t art?

A painting is a solitary work of creativity. The painter requires only a blank surface and pigments. (Brushes are a nice option, however.) A photograph is a collaboration; it involves the photographer and the engineers who designed the optics and other camera mechanisms, and (on modern cameras) the computer chip in the camera that augments the picture to get the “best” photograph of which the camera is capable. (Note my quotes around “best”.) Is it art if hundreds of strangers work behind the scenes to help create it? And if it is, who is the artist?

I’m a part time picture-taker and (maybe) a part time artist. With every press of the shutter release, my small camera does it’s best to take a “perfect” picture. Then I look at all the photos and pick one that has special appeal and I try to make the photo even better. To me, that may mean forsaking realism for things like beauty and meaning. Many a photograph has been enhanced in the darkroom or airbrushed later. Today's photos are digital and the darkroom is software. It is still the artist who transforms the photograph in pursuit of a vision.

Vincent van Gogh is one of the greatest and most beloved artists of all time. He produced more than 2,100 artworks, including 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. Yet he sold only two paintings during his lifetime (a popular legend says he sold only one painting). He committed suicide at age 37, thinking himself a failure.

Are you an artist if you’re the only person who thinks so? Are you not an artist if you’re the only person who thinks so? Who gets to decide? And does it really matter?

Anya

The song of the day is the 2010 single Beautiful World by Anya Marina. This song has been remixed by a number of DJs.

Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash

The song of the day is Girl from the North Country, written and recorded by Bob Dylan in 1963. Since then, the song has been recorded by many artists. This 1969 version was performed by Dylan and Johnny Cash. In the 2012 movie Silver Linings Playbook, Pat and Tiffany (Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) danced to this song.

Many Worlds

Shine sunlight through a prism. The result is a spectrum of colors. As schoolchildren learn, a prism diffracts white light into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, plus all the shades and gradations that are created as each color merges into and becomes the next color. How many colors are created? The spectrum of sunlight is continuous so there is a virtual infinity of colors.

Quantum mechanics (QM) is the science of the very small. It mathematically describes the behavior of matter on the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. There are several interpretations of QM which seek to explain how QM informs our understanding of nature. My favorite interpretation of QM is Hugh Everett’s “Many Worlds Interpretation” (MWI). MWI happens to be the favorite of most physicists, including Stephen Hawking and Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynmann, and Steven Weinberg. In fact, L. David Raub’s poll of 72 "leading cosmologists and other quantum field theorists" reveals that 58% said they accept MWI as being correct. What does MWI say about the world?

According to MWI, when an event happens that could have two or more outcomes, the universe splits into two or more universes so that all possible outcomes happen. Each universe gets one of the possible outcomes. The resulting universes don’t interact again, so we can’t detect them and we can’t prove the split occurred. However, QM has some disturbing issues that are resolved easily if we assume the split happens.

Perhaps it might be easier to accept the idea of multiple universes if we stop calling them universes and, instead, refer to them as realities. An event is to a time-stream as a prism is to light. An event diffracts our reality into multiple realities. Each reality then experiences another event, and the split occurs again.

This seems like a prodigious “waste”, but a waste of what? Is it a waste of light to create all the colors of the rainbow by sending that light through a prism? These other realities exist, though we can’t touch them or see them or interact with them. At least, that is what MWI’s interpretation of the math implies. Perhaps they exist only in potential – ghost realities awaiting a visit by a conscious mind to bring them into being.

There is much we don’t know about our own reality: how it originated, where the laws of physics and mathematics came from, where physical constants such as the speed of light came from. The more we learn about our reality, the bigger the questions become.

If we could visit them, many of these alternate realities would appear almost identical to our own. Some of them will be significantly different. Drop a loaded pistol onto the floor; in one reality it fired and shot you dead, but in this reality it hit the floor and bounced harmlessly, so here you are: alive and well and being more careful. That’s a significant difference … at least to you.

In some realities, you died at birth, or you were never conceived. In others, you’re rich and famous now. Everything that could have happened, did happen, somewhere. That is the consensus among quantum physicists, most of whom don’t want to discuss it because it is too bizarre.

Some say that if MWI is correct, it is irrelevant because there is no way to visit or interact with these other realities. I disagee. There is no conventional way to visit them. You can’t visit another reality by flying there in a spaceship or contact the inhabitants on a shortwave radio. But I think there is a way to visit those other realities and even to live in them. And the key to that is consciousness.

We don’t understand consciousness. We experience it, but we don’t know how or why we experience it. We may one day build a supercomputer that mimics consciousness, but that is not the same thing as being conscious. And there is something very special about consciousness as it relates to QM and our reality.

Another interpretation of QM, called the Copenhagen Interpretation, says that certain elements of our reality, such as the spin of a quantum particle, do not exist until we measure them. Our measurement of the property creates the property we are measuring. This is alluded to in the famous thought experiment called Schrödinger’s Cat, in which a cat in a box is both alive and dead until we open the box and observe the cat. The Copenhagen Interpretation says that our act of observing the cat causes the alive-and-dead cat to become one or the other: alive or dead. According to MWI, our act of observing the cat splits our reality into two realities; the cat is alive in one and dead in the other. Either way, consciousness seems to create reality at a fundamental level.

Assume for a moment that MWI is correct and that our thoughts can move our consciousness this way or that way among an infinity of possible realities. The realities “closest” to ours are so similar to our own that you would be hard-pressed to find any differences. Maybe you came home one day and tossed your keys onto a table next to the front door. And maybe when you wanted to leave home, you couldn’t find your keys. You had to hunt for them and finally found them on the dining room table. But you were so sure, so positive, that you had put them on the table next to the door, so how did they end up on the dining room table? You shrug and go on your way, a minor mystery soon forgotten.

But what really happened? Could it be that your consciousness slipped from one reality into a slightly different reality? The new one is very much like the old one, there being only minor differences, such as your keys being in a different place. And maybe these slips happen all the time and 99% of the time we’re not aware of it.

Random thoughts tug us this way and that way. But suppose you spend a significant amount of time every day in thoughts about a certain thing, be it money, love, cars, movies, sex, or whatever. Just maybe, over some period of time, you might find that your world has changed and now you’re in a different reality from where you used to be; you’re now in a place that you perhaps never expected to be. Be careful what you think, because the totality of your thoughts is the engine that will drive you to a different reality.

“You are given the gifts of the gods, you create your reality according to your beliefs. Yours is the creative energy that makes your world. There are no limitations to the self except those you believe in.”  -- Seth (As channeled by Jane Roberts) in “The Nature Of Personal Reality, Chap. 22, Session 677”

Carly Rae Jepsen

The song of the day is I Really Like You by Canadian singer and songwriter Carly Rae Jepsen (live on SNL). The official video with Tom Hanks is here.

Jamie Woon

The song of the day is Night Air by British singer, songwriter, and producer Jamie Woon. This 2010 single brought widespread acclaim to Woon, even if the video has a certain “ick” factor to those viewers who happen to not be entomologists.

The Evolution of Language

I recently read a book that was published in the 1920s. I noticed certain common words were spelled differently at that time. Canyon was spelled cañon. (The Spanish word for canyon is cañón.) Boulder was spelled bowlder. This was not a typo; bowlder is actually an old spelling of boulder.

We know the English language has evolved over centuries: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Modern English. But it doesn’t take centuries for a language to evolve. The word transistor didn’t exist until around 1950. There are many words that have been invented far more recently: bling, bromance, d’oh, frankenfood, grrrl, hater, mankini, mini-me, muggle, OMG, sexting, unfriend, woot, to name a few.

English is always inventing new words, but what is happening with our old words? When I was young, I had a teacher who drilled into us kids the fact that the first ‘c’ in Arctic and Antarctic was a silent ‘c’. The words were to be pronounced as though they were spelled “ar-tik” and “ant-artik”. In fact, arctic used to be spelled artik. Later the ‘c’ was added (restored, actually, but that’s a longer story), but at first that new ‘c’ wasn’t pronounced. Then people started pronouncing it – because it was in the word – and now everyone seems to pronounce that first ‘c’. Everyone except me. I used the silent ‘c’ pronunciation for too long – the silent ‘c’ is automatic. And it’s still an accepted alternate pronunciation – for now.

Or consider the word fiat, meaning arbitrary order or decree, as in government fiat. I was taught that the word rhymes with riot. Fiat, spelled with a capital ‘F’, is pronounced fee-aht and it’s the name of an Italian car maker. But now fiat is always pronounced like Fiat.

Homage. The word is pronounced hom-ij according to the dictionary. But it seems everyone wants to pronounce it as though it were a French word: oh-mahzh. Or maybe that’s just an LA thing.

Cache. It’s pronounced like cash. If you pronounce it cash-ay, you are speaking a different word that is spelled cachet. Cache and cachet have completely different meanings.

Forte. It has several meanings. Two common meanings are: something at which a person excels, and a loud passage in music. I was taught the first was pronounced like fort and the second was pronounced like for-tay. But now, both meanings are usually pronounced for-tay.

I can understand changing cañon to canyon. After all, how many North American typewriters, back in the day, had a Spanish letter Ñ? None. So people used a combination of letters that sounded like the Spanish letter. That made sense.

Many changes in the language are made out of ignorance. People don’t know the correct pronunciation, and so they guess it from the word’s spelling or they hear someone else, who also doesn’t know the correct pronunciation, speak the word. After a while the mispronunciation becomes so widely used that it becomes the correct pronunciation. Then the people who really do know the pronunciation sound ignorant when they use the pronunciation they were taught in school. There’s irony in that – deliberately mispronouncing words you know so you won’t appear uneducated to the under-educated. It’s evolution in action. But evolution, like many things, can go backward as well as forward.

Gorillaz

The song of the day is On Melancholy Hill from the album Plastic Beach by English virtual band Gorillaz.