Real

 

We Are All Made of Stars

Excerpted from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ©2003:

They (atoms) are also fantastically durable.  Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around.  Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.  We are each so anatomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-- up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-- probably once belonged to Shakespeare.  A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.  (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.)

 And that reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

7

There is an internet trope that every atom in your body is replaced every seven years, and I looked it up to see if it is true.

The short answers is, as I expected, "No," but they are rotated fairly frequently.  Atoms in your skin and hair are replaced fairly quickly, atoms in your muscle and organs can sit there for a decade or so, atoms in your brain and teeth remain stagnant for your whole life. (source)(source)

What made me think of that was the recent death of my father.  We took his body and put it in a box with his name on it, but that was really only his final form.  Seven-year-old Lloyd, forty-year-old Lloyd, even eighty-year-old Lloyd, had mostly already moved on.

If you think about it, your body changes with every breath.  Atoms that had been a part of you-- carbon, water vapor, perhaps alcohol if you had a fun night-- are all swapped out for something new with each inhale and exhale.

And this is a bit of a tangent here, but since the human body is mostly water,  when a body is cremated most of it is released upwards into the clouds, where it then it rains down everywhere.  My parents are now part of the grass, part of the trees, part of the rivers and streams, and part of all the life within them.

That comforts me.

It Doesn't Matter

 "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."  ~Richard Feynman

Clutching

 Excerpted from The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano, ©2008:

Mathematicians call them 'twin primes':

They are pairs of prime numbers that are close to one another, almost neighbours, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from really touching.  Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43.  If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer.  You encounter increasingly isolate primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of numbers, and you become aware of the distressing sense that the pairs encountered up until that point were an accidental fact, that their true fate is to remain alone.  Then, just when you're about to surrender, when you no longer have any desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching one another tightly.

Pi Isn't Even a Real Number

Scientists say they have calculated pi to 100 trillion decimal places (source).

I don't see how this in any way makes my life better, and I don't think there's even any real way to verify it.  You have to take their word for it.  Maybe they're off by a digit 98 trillion places in; how would you ever know?

It just seems like there are far more useful things they could be doing.

A Secret Chord

 Excerpted from a review in The Spectator of Richard Mainwarings book Everybody Hertz: The Amazing World of Frequency, from Bad Vibes to Good Vibrations:

Imagine that all the frequencies nature affords were laid out on an extended piano keyboard. Never mind that some waves are mechanical, propagated through air or some other fluid, and other waves are electro-magnetic and can pass through a vacuum. Lay them down together, and what do you get?

The startling answer is a surprisingly narrow piano. To play X-rays (whose waves cycle up to 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 times per second), our pianist would have to travel a mere nine metres to the right of middle C. Wandering nine and a half metres in the other direction, our pianist would then be able to sound the super-bass note generated by shockwaves rippling through the hot gas around a supermassive black hole in the Perseus cluster – a wave that cycles just once every 18.5 million years.

Closer to home, how big do you think that piano would have to be for it to play every note distinguishable by the human ear? You’d have to add barely a single octave to either side of a regular concert grand.

And that, of course, reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE. Full review HERE.

Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things

 You're not really all that different from a plant.

Excerpted from the article "Plants Feel Pain and Might Even See:  It’s time to retire the hierarchical classification of living things" by Peter Wohlleben in Nautilis:

After our first cup of coffee, we were soon deep into our main topic: trees and plants in general. Coccia argued that our biological classifications are not grounded in science. They are strongly influenced by theology and are dominated by two ideas: the supremacy of the human race and the world as a place humans must bend to their will. And then there is our centuries-old compulsion to categorize everything. When you combine these concepts, you get a ranking system that puts humankind at the top, animals in the middle, and plants way down at the bottom.

I listened, fascinated by what he had to say. Here was a man of my own heart. I would prefer it, I told Coccia, if science categorized species one beside the other. That would still allow an order, a system of sorting, without imposing any kind of a hierarchy. He immediately agreed. He reiterated his belief that the ordering system we have today is not scientific but rather influenced by cultural, historical, and religious values. For Coccia, the hard boundary between the plant and animal world does not exist. He believes plants can experience sensations and even reflect on them. And he is not the only one who thinks this.

You can read the whole article HERE.  It's fascinating.

Within You Without You

"The biggest development of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored." ~J.G. Ballard, in 1962

Recreating

"It’s a question of removing the clouds, rather than recreating the sun."  ~Chögyam Trungpa

Luna

You can read more about Luna 2 at Wikipedia.

You can visit XKCD on the web HERE.

An Aside

"Astronomers know what stars are, but astrologers know what stars are for."

I don't really believe that, but it's a fun thing to say just to judge people's reactions.  I bet it'd get quite a rise out of Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The Outer Fringe

Americans: A Book of Lives ©1946 by Hermann Hagedorn has been really fun and informative.  In this excerpt, he shared horticulturist Luther Burbank's concept of life, the universe, and everything:

"Life," Burbank wrote, "is not material… the life-stream is not a substance. Life is a force-- electrical, magnetic, a quality, not a quantity.” He saw a universe which was “absolutely all force, life, soul, thought, or whatever name we may choose to call it.” The time would come, he predicted, and the world of science caught up with him a generation later-- when there would be no line left between force and matter. A dead material universe moved by outside forces, seemed to him “highly improbable. A universe of force alone,” he declared, “is probable, but requires great effort to make it conceivable, because we must conceive it in terms of our sense experience… All life on our planet is, so to speak, just on the outer fringe of this infinite ocean of force… We get discouraged with the material, but, if we could think of the force, we should see how steadily and surely it is impelling us all toward a better and higher and nobler destiny…”

The punctuation seems a little suspect, but I left it as I found it.  Maybe standards have changed over the last 70 years.

Burbank's books are in the public domain, but they are very hard to come by.   Google Books has most of them available HERE,  but unfortunately they require you to have an account and use their app to access them; it's a cumbersome process, the scan quality is poor, and frankly I decided it just wasn't worth it.  I'm looking for better sources.

You can read more about the life of Luther Burbank at LutherBurbank.org.

 

Phonograph

In this excerpt from Americans: A Book of Lives ©1946. Hermann Hagedorn describes the moment Thomas Edison first tested his new invention to record and play back sounds:

Three weeks after his interest had first been stirred, he (Thomas Edison) handed his chief mechanic a rough sketch of a queer-looking instrument, including a metal cylinder spirally ground and mounted on a long shaft, running in two upright bearings.

The mechanic wondered. Most of the apparatus he head hitherto constructed had been electrical, but this one called for no coils, no magnets, no wires. He kept his mouth shut and followed the sketch. The instrument he subsequently brought to Edison for his approval was a cylinder covered with tinfoil and turned with a hand-crank. "What's it supposed to do, chief?" asked the mechanic without enthusiasm.

"The thing must talk," answered Edison.

The mechanic smiled dubiously. The bookkeeper, standing near, offered to bet a handful of cigars in support of his skepticism, whereupon the mechanic laid two dollars against the chief's faith. Edison, lacking the two dollars, matched his bet with a barrel of apples.

Thereupon he turned the crank and in a loud voice recited, ("shouted," he told Henry Ford):

"Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go."

He adjusted the reproducer, restored the cylinder to its original position, and again turned the crank.

"Mary had a little lamb…"

came the words in a strange voice, unlike his own, but unmistakably clear.

The mechanic nearly fainted for fright. Edison himself admitted that he was "a little scared"; partly of the machine he had created, partly because success had come so easily. "I was always afraid of things that worked the first time."

It's hard to imagine a time when hearing a human voice coming from a machine would inspire fear and awe.  The incredible has become commonplace.

The Empathy Circuit

[embed]https://youtu.be/a_732-H1CUY[/embed]

via JoshKornbluth.com.

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."  ~Stephen Jay Gould

Solitary Wanderer

Excerpted from The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle, © 1957:

It is curious in how great a degree human progress depends on the individual. Humans, numbered in thousands of millions, seem organized into an ant-like society. Yet this is not so. New ideas, the impetus of all development, come from individual people, not from corporations or states. New ideas, fragile as spring flowers, easily bruised by the tread of the multitude, may yet be cherished by the solitary wanderer.

 

Fossilized Compassion

This made me happy.  Excerpted from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ©2003:

Also found at Lake Turkana by (Kamoya) Kimeu was KNM-ER 1808, a female 1.7 million years old, which gave scientists their first clue that Homo erectus was more interesting and complex than previously thought.  The woman's bones were deformed and covered in coarse growths, the result of an agonizing condition called hypervitaminosis A, which can come only from eating the liver of a carnivore.  This told us first of all that Homo erectus was eating meat.  Even more surprising was that the amount of growth showed that she had lived weeks or even months with the disease.  Someone had looked after her.  It was the first sign of tenderness in hominid evolution.

Ernest

Another excerpt from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ©2003:

For all his success, (Ernest) Rutherford was not an especially brilliant man and was actually pretty terrible at mathematics. Often during lectures he would get so lost in his own equations that he would give up halfway through and tell the students to work it out for themselves. According to his longtime colleague James Chadwick, discover of the neutron, he wasn't even particularly clever at experimentation. He was simply tenacious and open minded. For brilliance he substituted shrewdness and a kind of daring. His mind, in the words of one biographer, was "always operating out towards the frontiers, as far as he could see, and that was a great deal further than most other men." Confronted with an intractable problems, he was prepared to work at it harder and longer than most people and to be more receptive to unorthodox explanations. His greatest breakthrough came because he was prepared to spend immensely tedious hours sitting at a screen counting alpha particle scintillations, as they were known – the sort of work that would normally have been farmed out. He was one of the first to see – possibly the very first – that the power inherent in the atom could, if harnessed, make bombs powerful enough to "make this old world vanish in smoke."

This is the sort of person kids should be reading about in school. Tenacity and open-mindedness are skills we can all cultivate.

We are stardust...

Excerpted from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ©2003:

Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-- up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-- probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.)

And how could I read that and not think of this? ↓

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