The World Needs More Skateboarders

Happy Holidays, readers.

I would like to acknowledge the growing respect that I hold for the sport of skateboarding. I am not saying that it is an especially sophisticated sport, nor is it mainstream or flashy. However, as I was watching a skateboarding competition a day or so ago, I noticed something that is seen in few other sports, especially in exhibitions as competitive as those that I have seen. I saw, in each participant, a great awe and respect for every other player in the competition. When they were being interviewed by journalists on the scene, they mentioned the other competitors without fail, and said how honored they were to be in competition with them. They would mention that yes, they had been working hard and they would really like to win the competition, but it would really be OK if they didn't because they would have been fairly beaten by someone with greater skill who had also worked hard. When they were not being individually interviewed, they showed solid comradery and unparalleled sportsmanship.

In skateboarding competitions (and in similar sporting competitions such as surfing and snowboarding) there is always an extremely diverse group of competitors. They hail from all around the planet in a patchwork of accents and ethnicities, always showing great respect for one another as athletes and peers, and a great admiration for the sport to which they devote their time and talent. Also, skateboarding is one of the few sports that allows people of all ages and both genders to compete and be successful as equals. As skateboarding is a technical sport involving very little brute force, men and women compete together, and children as young as eight or nine years old are doing the same tricks that their 25-year-old co-competitors, sharing the same ramps and high-fives.

You could see that the people that were not actively competing or were waiting their turn were watching the competitors and enjoying it immensely. When someone did something especially good, they were thrilled for them, as if they were watching their favorite athlete or even their sibling doing something amazing. In other sports, this would never happen. The other competitors would be watching to find ways to take them down, and would see them as obstacles in their path to greatness. Skateboarders seem to be just as happy to see other people in their sport succeed as they are to see themselves. Even so, there is always a winner, and every competition brings forth winners and great successes for most people who participate.

If the whole world were run in this way, I wonder what it would be like. Very different, I suppose.

Peace,
DJ

Shameless Self-Promotion

Some links to my other frequented sites.

www.twitter.com/i_am_dj

www.lardbars3.deviantart.com

This Could Get MAD Interesting... Guest-Starring AJ

HOWDY.

Ok, so there is this concept I was introduced to a few weeks ago that really caught my attention. It is called the Higgs boson, or "the God Particle." In the way it was explained to me, the Higgs boson is a massless particle comprised of pure energy (read: string theory) that somehow causes things like quarks, electrons, protons and neutrons to have the property of mass. Supposedly, it is truly the smallest particle; its lack of mass makes it so that it does not have any smaller components that make it up. That means that every tiny particle that makes up the entire universe is completely suffused with... God.

That also means that such things as thoughts are divine, because they involve the interaction of particles in the nerves of the brain, through the movement of neurotransmitters and potassium and sodium ions, all of which are made up of hundreds of thousands of Higgs bosons.

Complex things such as music are as holy as the deity himself in that they involve so many different forms of the divine reality working in symphony (pun intended) to exist. First, the nerve impulses of the musician, then the movement of their holy muscles to the movement of the instrument, which produces vibrations that move through the air, knocking the gas particles together in patterns until they get to the human ear, a complex contraption in itself, from whence the human brain detects it through a series of nerve impulses, at which point conscious thought takes over, interpreting the sounds into a song, provoking thoughts of aesthetics and beauty, that are in themselves heavenly. All of these parts involve hundreds of trillions of Higgs boson particles.

This brings to mind extremely complicated questions as to the nature of consciousness. Are these not-particles self-aware? Do they have something to do with life and death? Maybe they are connected to the fact that all animals are born with knowledge: instincts. They are built into the animal’s genes based on the behaviors and such that worked for their parents and ancestors ad infinitum. Genes are made of sugars and phosphates and nucleotides, which are made of atoms, which are caused by our friend the boson.

Also a consideration is that maybe the parents aren’t the ones that give the instincts to their progeny- maybe it is the childrens’ own boson-thoughts coming back to them by way of the parents, such as when the mother eats when pregnant. She takes in material containing bosons, and those that were “part” of the child in a “past life” are integrated into the new child, along with those of millions of other beings, which allows them to process new information that enters the mind after birth. Therefore it appears that the environment molds who you become, on the physical and emotional level, from the time you are a zygote.

If everything is completely MADE of God, then does that mean we’re already IN heaven? Should we be like the aborigines and worship Mother Nature? [hail yea]
If exfoliation is us removing dead skin cells, then does that mean a hurricane is like Momma Nature taking a shower?

Obviously, should the Higgs boson be discovered and verified beyond any objective doubt, it would have enormous religious implications. Having “God” be “proven” as an object, omnipresent in all things, neither male nor female, would be a revelation for some religious sects, but for others it would be devastating. Here is a sampling of the possible reactions of modern religions.

Quakers and Shintos: HA! I TOLD YOU SO! Nature is God, balance is God, that of God in everyone! OH. I mean…love thy neighbor :)

Hindus- well um…we were kind of right, right? Technically…there is more than one god…right? And Reincarnation! BAM. I was once a heifer, I’m not taking this bull! (LOL)

Christians, Muslims, Jews- …shit. Well there goes everything.
Christians- does that mean Jesus WAS God and that he never left earth?
Muslims- that means so was Mohammad. Bitch.
Jews- and that means everyone you killed in the Crusades was also God.
All- God DAMMIT!

Wicca and Pagan- Well sure… Lots of Gods.

Scientologists- Cool.

Unitarian Universalists- AAAHAHAHAHA! There it is, right in our name! UNIVERSALISTS. AAAAHAHAHA!

Buddhists- well now that we know this much, I guess we’re ALL enlightened. Everyone is the Buddha. Huh.

Satanists- We’re based on Christianity, so we’re done… crap, no one goes to hell because hell is god…craaaap.

Communists- COMMON PROPERTY, bitches. That includes the hi-def TV in yo’ family room! That thing is GOD. And SO AM I. so hand it over. In the name of God, hand it over!
Everyone- But you don’t have a religion… And I’m God too.
Communists- Let me reiterate. I AM GOD. This IS SPARTA!
Everyone- o.0

So think about that for a bit. Let me know what comes up.

Peace,

DJ

Co-Authored by AJ

Human Nature...*sigh.*

Oh hai gaiz.

Yesterday I was channel surfing before bed (so I could record things on the DVR to watch in moments of boredom. You get it.) and I saw a Nova program about weapons in outer space. I went to watch it today, and even though it was a perfectly high quality production and splendidly informative to boot, I simply couldn't bring myself to finish watching it.

It was about the development and theory of high-efficiency weapons to be used in outer space and on nearby celestial bodies such as the moon once they are colonized.

And it got me to thinking...

We haven't even reached space yet. We have scratched the surface of orbital technology and landed people on the moon, and we're working on landing Mars. With the exception of the International Space Station, we have no way of sustaining human life outside of Earth's atmosphere for any useful length of time. We have no way to transport people or freight out of the atmosphere or through space. We have light-years of growth ahead of us before we can achieve any serious space missions...

... And yet we are working diligently at finding ways to wage bloody warfare in the void.

I really think we need to grow up as a species. Our system of using warfare for achieving ends seems extremely infantile to me, like a squabble between toddlers over who will use the soccer ball first.

This also reminds me of when I saw District 9 this summer. Are humans really as dumb as they seem in that movie? I mean come on.

A sentient, intelligent species comes to earth. They don't hurt anyone. They don't cause trouble. They keep to themselves and achieve their goals quietly and without fuss. They clearly know tons more than us about engineering and space travel given that they traveled from another star system and got here in a year and a half (they have achieved extended space flight and we haven't). All they really did wrong was look like giant shrimp.

And instead of setting up talks with them, allowing them some unused space to camp, and attempting to learn as much from them as possible before they leave, we confine them to squalid concentration camps, place unfair laws on their insectoid heads, and kill them off wherever we can. And get them addicted to cat food.

Really now. Are we really that bad?

I really hope not.

What if WE'RE the Klingons in the Star Trek episode of life??
*sigh*

Peace,
DJ

Howdy Fellow Cerebralists,

So one particular issue has been poking at me recently, and it coincidentally pertains to time, like my last posting.

Contrary to popular belief, the average day cycle of Earth is 23 hours, 56 minutes long, and not the exact 24 hours that has been canonized through the centuries. That means that the calendar is thrown off four minutes for every day that passes. This adds up to exactly 24.35 hours, or 24 hours and 21 minutes per solar year, or 365.25 days.

Where does the extra time go?

Obviously, this is why we have to reset our clocks every so often, regardless of their accuracy: they are set for a 24 hour cycle, not a 23.934 hour cycle. It's like the Flat Earth theory of knowledge: in the short term, it is easier and more practical to assume that the earth is flat, as it's curvature over short distances is negligible. However, gaps eventually start to form, and the tiniest details become very real as those kilometers (or minutes) begin to stack up.

You might look at Daylight Savings Time and breathe a sigh of existential relief, but any time saved during DST is used up after it ends in October. Also, the International Date Line: cross it in the right direction and you get to live a whole day over again, as you technically land before you took off. Go the other way, and you will completely miss an entire day, as you technically land the day after you take off, even if the flight was only a few hours.

Makes ya think, doesn't it?

Peace,
DJ

Warp Factor Two, Mr. Sulu...

Good afternoon, thinkers.

One particular issue has been nagging at me lately, on the subject of physics. Albert Einstein determined that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, or about 300 million meters per second. He also determined, by way of his Theory of General Relativity, that as an object approaches the speed of light, time begins to affect it less: in effect, time slows down in relation to that object. For the sake of argument and the future salvation of humankind, let's assume that he was mistaken, and that it is possible to surpass the speed of light (It's only logical, isn't it? I mean, why should 300 million m/s be the cap on the speed scale? In a total vacuum, the size of the object really should not affect its velocity: it just seems so arbitrary, or even naive to assume that nothing can go as fast as light. But I digress.).

As one approaches the speed of light, time slows. Logic would dictate that as the speed of light is reached, time halts completely (no?). Assuming this is the case, what happens as the speed of light is surpassed? Does time stay at a standstill, or does it reverse?

If this is the case, it would start by going slowly in a backwards direction, and as the object reaches Warp 2 (or twice the speed of light, using vocabulary from Star Trek) it would proceed backwards at "normal" speed, or the relative speed to someone standing still on Earth. But then, what would happen as Warp 3 is reached, or Warp 4? Does time reverse again to it's accustomed direction, or does it increase flow in it's opposite direction? If this is the case, then paradoxes would pop up everywhere, because the object would reach point B before it left point A, once Warp 2 is surpassed. The Laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy would have temper tantrums, and the Universe would collapse. *sigh.*

Alternatively, when the speed of light is reached, time ceases to flow around that object, and as the speed of light is surpassed, it stays paused until the object drops below 300 million m/s once again. This would mean that the object would reach it's destination in zero time plus the time needed to accelerate to and slow down from light speed. For the sake of future space travel, I sincerely hope that this is the case.

And finally, a simple question: why is the speed of light so tightly linked to time flow? Is it simply the fact that light is the fastest moving natural phenomenon? I think that is the answer.

Please present your opinions on this subject: I really want to know about this.

Peace,
DJ

The Very First Beginning

Bonjour, tout le monde!

Here I am, at the very beginning of the very first entry in this blog. Some would say that this is the place and time to tell you, the ( as yet hypothetical ) reader, about myself: who I am, my goals in life, my every habit and idiosyncrasy. However, I choose to disregard the mumbling masses on this point, because this writing is not about me, per se. This publication's purpose is to explain my thoughts as a modern thinker in an ever- expanding universe; to organize them for later examination, for review by any readers who might choose to do so, for discussion and refinement, and possibly for refutation, where necessary.

I am looking for readers: readers who think and rethink, guess and second guess, and take the entire world with a grain of salt. I want a forum of philosophers, scientists, Cartesians, solipsists, writers (I welcome criticism), skeptics, and people who are simply perplexed with the world of thought and are looking for order in the chaos of existence. If there comes to be a time at which I find myself with readers such as these, I would like nothing more for people to present counter-arguments to my musings. There's nothing quite like playing Tug-of-War with oneself, especially on issues such as the ones I intend to bring to the proverbial table. They will be varied and, hopefully, many.

Peace,
DJ