In my view the objective of life is to increase one’s awareness, making it as accurate as possible and as wide ranging as possible in both time and space.
If this is the goal of life then studying cosmology and astrophysics is the most devout activity possible.
The greatest sins are to limit your horizons, to confine your knowledge and experience to a small place, or to maintain (or even aggressively promote) an untested and ill-founded belief.
I have been preparing some fractal pictures for printing. They will appear in a local exhibition of local artwork.
I have been getting hot and bothered by the many, mutually-inconsistent layers of software I have had to deal with. The worst element is the very last bit of the process – the great big print machine at the local print works. It seems to need an instruction in the graphics file for the dots-per-inch scale. I think I’ve figured out how to give it the right data, but it took ages of experimenting and trying different packages.
Oddly, the problem is partly caused by the huge number of “features” available at each step of the process. There are so many options the chances of picking the right combination is not very high.
It is a feature of our current technology that though it gets cleverer, it requires you to know odd little bits about the inner workings if you are to get the result you want. Maybe it will soon be easier to use, but I’m not very hopeful.
I still remember the sixties, though for various reasons my memory may be unreliable.
There were a lot of programming languages available then. I think there were at least three – Fortran, Cobol, Algol. So IBM decided to simplify matters by producing a single language. It would combine the best features of all the rivals and be a veritable Esperanto of computing. It would be so good that no one would ever need another language. We would all speak the same digital tongue.
They called it PL/1.
I remember thinking, at the time, that this implied there would also be PL/2, PL/3 … PL/Aleph-null.
This is Babel, nor am I out of it!
Two things: living bridges and share prices.
An interesting item on Deskarati describes people in Northern India who build bridges across mountain streams using living tree roots. It works well in an area where streams run as a trickle for most of the year and as raging torrents in the monsoon season. Such a bridge will last for half a millennium, but several generations of careful husbandry are needed before it is strong enough to be useful.
What a far sighted investment to make: building a bridge which, if your children and grandchildren work on it with care, will be useful to your great-great-great-great grandchildren!
By contrast, thinking about the current market turbulence, I Googled for “long term FTSE” and got several sites all based on the assumption that 12 months is the “longest term” anyone would be interested in.
No wonder our markets are in such a mess. It takes more than a year to build a new factory, or a school, an office block or a ship.
But the people of Meghalaya think centuries ahead. For them, “the long term” is far longer than the life span of one human.
Instability is the lifeblood of surprisingly many professions.
No wonder our lives are so unstable – it isn’t in the interests of these powerful groups to let things settle down.
I have a second reason for thinking about Chondritics. I live in a stable society (one of the affluent bits of the Naughty North of England) and I appreciate that stability.
I don’t think stability is widespread – it may be taken for granted in England, but in many parts of the world stability has been absent for generations. And even in England, the Queen’s Peace seems a fragile thing at times. (As I write, London is clearing up after widespread riots.)
Quakers, like any other value-based community, need stability for long term survival. Just as we need a system to decide ‘who will shovel the shit’, we need a way of responding to people who use violence and intimidation to run the world.
Do we defend ourselves – like the monks who developed Judo?
Do we rely on others, who may have unacceptable ways and standards?
Do we trust to the spirit and hope a peaceful approach will earn respect and foster survival?
Do we simply accept that, in a turbulent world, a non-violent approach will be risky?