Clockwork Closing

Posted on March 2, 2022 by Professor Taboo

About three weeks ago in Clockwork, I asked my blog Followers and any visitors to select one of four statements that best represents yourself, life around you, and within our Universe. Those four choices again were:

I am a cog in a Clock.
I am a Clock among Clocks.
I am my clock Winder & Minder.
I am the Time Guardian.

I also asked that you explain why you chose the statement, and then explain why not the other three statements as your choice. There were several good answers and elaborations, a few were comical and lighthearted, and others very intriguing and that I would not have expected.

It is probably wise for me to say “there isn’t a correct or wrong selection.” That might disappoint one or two of you, and others not at all. Think of it this way: Do we witness any of the four statements and their implied meanings in other humans we know? I know I do, regularly. In fact, I’m bewildered to the point of chuckling when I hear or read (essentially) #4 by someone!

I don’t care how wealthy or famous—or evil, or megalomaniacal(?)—or intelligent they might be or they think they are, but “no man is an island, entire of itself” as John Donne famously coined. And furthermore, we did not enter this life from the womb completely independent of anyone or anything, did we? And at some point late in our life—hopefully a very fulfilling, whole life at that—we will return to an existence of dependence. Perhaps complete dependence on family and/or friends. In this, none of us has a choice; embrace it we must! Therefore, I personally think #3 is quite audacious to claim and not entirely true, at least not at birth nor in our final weeks alive. And with that said, I personally might even say #2 is pretty bold to assert, but not as much as #3 or near as omnipotent and omniscient as #4.

As I mentioned in one or two of my replies to comments, this came about when a dear friend of mine told me, pompous and quite full of herself, that “You create your own happy successful world, life, and experiences.” We had known each other intimately for over five years. During that time both of our lives were effected in large ways by not only each other, but also by several others in our spheres including immediate and extended family members. Some of those events and family were effects on us in massive ways which changed the course of life/lives, personally and in extended external ways! However, none of these events I allude to include severe weather phenomena that wreaked havoc on us, some of it permanent, nor do they include how COVID-19 effected our lives, obviously. None of us can choose our biological parents or the zip code(s) they’re born into; maybe all throughout their life. Many humans, through various forces, are propelled into painful, unbearable situations in life, impossible to avoid.

These many varying life conditions I mention still must abide in every way by Laws of biology, physics and Quantum Mechanics within our entire Universe, which certainly effect this “tiny Pale blue-dot of a planet,” to borrow Carl Sagan’s iconic prose, that we much tinier beings must coexist with, but not as commander or Time Lord, and maybe only as a clock Winder & Minder, temporarily as it will be.

From COSMOS: A SpaceTime Odyssey

Hence, for me personally, I’m not completely comfortable asserting number two. I have some reservations with it. If I’m perfectly honest, today March 2, 2022, I am much more comfortable simply with #1, and I am very fine with that. In Somewhere I Have Never Travelled,Gladly Beyond, the fourth stanza, E.E. Cummings speaks of a lady or lover, but what about life, our individual lives (clocks, cogs?) as the Lady or ourselves?

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing.
-- e.e. cummings

For those of you who participated previously in Clockwork, any final thoughts? Any final questions? I won’t promise I have the answers, but I promise to wonder, contemplate, and be a travel companion with you. 😊

Live Well – Love Much – Laugh Often – Listen Close – Learn Always

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://professortaboo.com/contact-me/.

Clockwork

Posted on February 17, 2022 by Professor Taboo

I am curious and would be grateful for you indulging my curiosity.

Choose one of the four statements below that best represents yourself, life, and the Universe. In your comment at the bottom explain why you chose it, and then please explain why not the other three statements as your choice.

I am a cog in a Clock.
I am a Clock among Clocks.
I am my clock Winder & Minder.
I am the Time Guardian.

*Brain activity on an EEG monitor **before** physiological & muscular action*.

Live Well – Love Much – Laugh Often – Listen Close – Learn Always

Current Projects

Posted on January 26, 2022 by Professor Taboo

For a few months now my blogging time has been at the mercy of situations at home, as many of you know. Some of you are probably grateful. Some of you may be ecstatic. Still others are perhaps undecided, contemplating if the world is a better place without my regular ranting, raving, and splendidness. And there are two or three I know are being driven mad without their weekly dose, their fix of my penmanship and sheer foolishness. 😉 I know, I know. But there’s only so much of me to go around! And a few have my best parts, others have the not-so-good parts (always yelling at me are those), and several have curiously returned other parts of me as defective, dysfunctional, or in need of some sort of ~~overhaul~~ major repair—your refund check is in the mail… if I had your address. If I didn’t and you want your refund, call 1-900-932-4668, or with the letters on your dial pad: 1-900-YEA-H-NOT 😁

Seriously, don’t call that number. I have no idea if it’s a working number.

*What tha hell have you been doing? GET BLOGGING Professor!*

To briefly let you all know what I’m working on, here’s a rundown of a few, oldest to newest drafts:

Cheating Death —
Aubry, Pat, and Terry —
Kinshasa-Leopoldville —
He’s A Cannibal! —
Black Underworld Inc. – Appendix —
Transparency: A Double-Edged Razor —
Marx and Nietzsche Today —
Heterosexual Humble Pie —
Christian Apologetics: Land of Oz – Pt I —
A Bright Future for Our USMNT —
Social Compassion, Plus —
A Newer Constitution —

It’s a bit of a laugh isn’t it, this list? This is only 12 of 37 drafts I have awaiting completion. Yeah, now you can laugh and joke. I deserve it. For more chuckling, ask me when I will finish these and the other 25 drafts. HEY! I am not a terrible procrastinator. Life has lots of curveballs, some of them miss you by millimeters, others hit you smack in the sack-ticles!

Besides, most all of my last seven therapists have all told me, A procrastinator? Nah, you are like fine wine with time. Just don’t lose the homing-device for my whereabouts, bring a jolly attitude and more Malbec, preferably from the Mendoza Valley, Argentina. That is my medicine, my go-go juice 🍷 …or a smooth tequila. 🙃

Live Well – Love Much – Laugh Often – Listen More – Learn Always

“C-God” 13.8 Billion Years Old

Posted on July 22, 2020 by Professor Taboo

Yes, it has been confirmed: 13.8 billion years old.

That is the age of our entire known Cosmos (C) or Universe from the very first millisecond it exploded into existence until today. Or for the hard-line Faithers out there, “Yahweh” or “God” or “Allah” or whatever your personal supreme being is named, it is without question 13.8 billion years old.

There have been several techniques to calculate and estimate the age of the Universe. Over the last century four methods of approximation have been used:

The Hubble Constant
Decay of radioactive elements/objects – can also be applied to gases, but with less accuracy
Age of White Dwarf stars, locating the faintest/oldest
Age of ancient star clusters/globulars

Fortunately, and for all prosperity and posterity, science has a fifth and final method ending any debate about the Universe’s age. It is remarkably accurate to within less than 1-percent.

Incorporating method #4 above with the compiled data of NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) launched in 2001, and the European Space Agency’s Planck-satellite launched in 2009, we can determine exactly how long our known, visible Cosmos has been around. Watch NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) two-minute video here explaining in layman terms just how this measuring and time-dating works.

NGC 3603, an open star cluster and starburst region in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way around 20,000 light-years away from the Solar System

∼ ∼ ∼ § ∼ ∼ ∼

If those four common measurements are not enough to convince you or other doubters, then perhaps Cosmologist and graduate of Yale and Rutgers Universities in Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy, and Astrophysics, Dr. Neelima Sehgal, currently Associate Professor in Physics & Astronomy at Stony Brook University, NY, can assist your unlearned hesitation. From Stony Brook University’s research journal:

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) team in Chile confirmed previous measurements of ancient light-clusters extracted from the Planck satellite data.

[…]

Dr. Neelima Sehgal, ACT and Stony Brook University

Obtaining the best image of the infant universe, explains Professor Sehgal, helps scientists better understand the origins of the universe, how we got to where we are on Earth, the galaxies, where we are going, how the universe may end, and when that ending may occur.

[…]

The new ACT estimate on the age of the universe matches the one provided by the standard model of the universe and measurements of the same light made by the Planck satellite. This adds a fresh twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community, says Simone Aiola, first author of one of the new papers on the findings posted to arXiv.org.

“Now we’ve come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree,” says Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City. “It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable.”

Eternal is Not So Eternal

Oddly enough, it seems now there is actually a beginning and an end to eternal. The Greek words and concept the Alpha and Omega (Rev 21:6; 22:13) are in purely astrophysical terms seemingly truer than ever. Maybe. So it follows then that there is no such thing as forever, timeless, or Eternal. From the above five methods of dating the age of the Cosmos, we now have other fascinating inferences and deductions by astrophysicists, cosmologists, astronomers, and advanced mathematicians about the end or death of our Universe or Creator-God. There are three or four probabilities.

The Big Freeze
This is the death of all differences in heat, or thermodynamics. As the Universe/Cosmos continues expanding at an increasing rate, eventually all forms of energy (heat) will dissipate over time until everything—all celestial bodies, i.e. stars/suns, galaxies, planets, etc.—are just a fraction above absolute zero degrees. The universe will be so spread out over millions, billions, then trillions of light-years, and continuing, that it will become deader and emptier with every millenia.

The Big Crunch
If there is enough or too much stuff in the Universe, i.e. celestial bodies with mass, the expansion of the Cosmos will slow then stop. More stuff means more gravity. The more mass all the bodies gain means more stronger gravity, which means everything gets pulled back in, contracting inward until the Universe becomes so compact, so dense with mass that an astounding inferno occurs, the Big Crunch.

The Big Change
If our Universe is expanding and its expansion is accelerating as most scientists today agree, then matter and energy as we normally understand them could not allow the Universe to continue behaving in this basic manner. In 1998 teams of astrophysicists examining Type 1A supernovae for the Hubble Constant discovered that expansion wasn’t slowing down, but actually accelerating.

Even more bizarre was the expansion had been decelerating, as once thought, until 7-8 billion years after the Big Bang. At that point, for reasons yet to be learned, a puzzling “anti-gravity force” began to dominate, taking over the gravity-induced contracting placed on expansion and then reversed the slowdown and began accelerating. This was dubbed Dark Energy. This energy pulls everything in the Universe apart, and turns it upside down. The basic building blocks of fundamental particles like electrons and Quarks could be entirely different, radically overhauling our rules of chemistry and maybe impeding the formation of atoms and molecules. It would be quite an inhospitable Big Change. If that were to happen, then plants, animals, humans, even planet and stars would be destroyed. Dark Energy currently makes up about 68% of all energy in the Universe and that percentage is growing each day.

Accelerating Universe - Big Change & Rip

Different possible fates of the Universe, with our actual, accelerating fate shown at the far right. After enough time goes by, the acceleration will leave every bound galactic or supergalactic structure completely isolated in the Universe, as all the other structures accelerate irrevocably away. (NASA & ESA)

The Big Rip
The Big Rip is a more remote, unlikely ending, but nonetheless cannot yet be ruled out. Dark Energy could be more destructive, more powerful than scientists know right now. Here’s the very weird part.

While the Cosmos is expanding, Dark Energy’s (DE) density remains fixed. What this also means is that with increasing volume, more DE pops into existence over time in order to maintain the constant density. What’s even more extraordinarily freaky is that if the density of DE increases as the Universe keeps expanding, then what would happen if DE enlarges faster than the Universe is expanding? In other words, DE’s speed of growth surpasses the speed of light! 😲 This theoretical model is called phantom dark energy and its mechanism is called the Big Rip. Fortunately for our super distant descendants, if this rip were to happen, it would be a horrifically instant death occurring so fast our brains could not process anything that was happening. Woosh! Gone.

And So the Purpose of Consciousness and Life

Everything we mortal humans eventually learn is that all things in life have a beginning, a middle, and an end. All experience, all evidence we have and understand of life indicates a start and a finish. Nothing, not even an original cause or imagined “Creator” is timeless or eternal. It too was born 13.8 billion years ago. He/She/It is growing obese, quicker than before, and will die a final death. Not only is the word eternal fictitious and conceived from ancient, mortal Earthlings’ crude ineptitude passed on transgenerationally, but it is also fruitless, unrewarding for the present. Therefore, I think James Oppenheim had much to say about our life, existence, and the human condition: “The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.”

There are countless forces that we know dictate our individual lives, significant portions of our lives at the start, most of all with our biological parents. Theirs was also significantly dictated by their biological parents or guardians, and family members. No one has any control whatsoever about who and what their ancestors would be. Earth too is fated to follow external forces. She is just one planet of nine gravitational bodies within our one tiny solar system among billions and trillions of galaxies with millions of other star systems. Our Sun and Jupiter are heavy, major influencers upon Earth’s condition! At the risk of sounding silly and stating the obvious, no one, let alone the entire human species, has the ability (yet?) to make our Sun or Jupiter do anything we wish. And as we’ve now learned from interdisciplinary science, particularly cosmology and astrophysics, the clock is ticking. There will indeed be a final, universal end that not even our man-made God(s) can escape. Is that the Coup d’état of ultimate nihilism? Or is it, as I believe, the epitome of liberation and empowerment, here and now? A tranquility from accepting our place and definitive demise of us, of all things then, now, and that will ever be?

I exist as I am, that is enough. If no other in the world be aware I sit content. And if each and all be aware I sit content. One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself. And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait. — Walt Whitman

————

Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always

This work by Professor Taboo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.professortaboo.com/contact-me/.

Cyber-status: Self-Reminder

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Professor Taboo

Surprise! This is a quicky shorty.

In my previous 4-part series Games of Unknowledging, one of the general classifications of ignorance, or in this case so much information ready, available at your fingertips or just a mouse-click away, practically every hour of every day is a prime example of Time and Mental Constraints. It means that given how quickly information is available in our high-tech modern world, we online users, computer geeks, iPhoners and Androiders “cannot possibly study and understand all things. We must leave some alone, select what subjects deserve our needs and attention. As a result, this form of ignorance is a product of inattention and can be lost for a period of time or forever.“ Being the eternal student and lover of broad education in as many areas of life and disciplines as possible, I really struggle with these constraints! After almost 8-years of blogging here and 40+ blogs I’m following, one of my recurring restraints is now my inability to keep up in a timely fashion with all the WordPressers that post/publish every 1-2 days, or sometimes multiple posts per day!

Should I feel negligent, a sense of remorse? Have I committed the horrible offense of biting off more than I can possible chew, let alone digest? Do all our fellow bloggers go through similar questions, doubts, and feelings of disappointing? Do hyper-frequent bloggers expect every single follower to have 20-, 35-, 50-minutes per post multiplied by whatever number they follow — in my case 43 for a total of 43 x 35m = 1,505 minutes, or possibly 25.1 hours — if all 43 posted a new post per day!? When would I write and compose blogs? When in the hell would I sleep? Is this the avant-garde definition of internet obesity? 😵

Back at ground control, there is a problem
Go to rockets full, not responding
Hello Major Tom, are you receiving
Turn the thrusters on, we’re standing by
There’s no reply

Que the perfect song for this insanity…

Earth to Professor. Come In Professor!

Now of course, more realistically and suspending my incorrigible tendency for satire, all our bloggers we follow do not publish every single day, I know that. Why not? Because they do realize (correct?) that all regular bloggers that not only write and post, but also READ other blogs, can’t possibly be in front of the monitor or on their iPhones/Androids 14-hours, 18-hours, or 25-hours straight per day, right? After all, WordPress is NOT setup like that popular, non-stop, 25/7 social-media platform with only a 140-character limit that even the President of the United States uses tweeting international and national headlines, and political, legal, religious, sporting, or scientific personal opinions that aren’t original from his half-functioning brain, right?

No, WordPress isn’t like that. WordPress is for intelligent, well-considered and planned blog-articles of more than 140 (or less) kindergarten characters that have good original stimulating content from various genres of life, right? These types of blog-posts illicit (demand? require?) quality valuable time and attention from their readers, yes? Thus, my struggle to manage well even my fond favorites of 10-12 blogs, much less 40+ blogs! Hahahaha, who am I kidding? My head and body scream at me if I sit in front of my computer monitor for 3-hours straight a day! There have been times when I pushed that beyond 4-hours — I won’t share details what bodily function became painful before I realized the time spent! I can get very, very focused when in that mode. My personality is such that I try hard to give someone my undivided attention. I was raised that way.

We’re Only Human

Well “informed” or overkill? A bed of roses or hate-cultivator? The debate has been presented before and raged since 1991. Is a hyper-library of all imaginable information-on-steroids good or bad for society? It is a never before seen colossal-version of our U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. Free-speech is a legal right here, sure. But it does also involve concurrent responsibility, that is to say that the speaker/writer has as much accountability for their content as the listener/reader has to understand, filter and scrutinize before judging its value. When the topic is serious, impactful, or even life-saving or life-risking, I believe this interchange should NOT be a fly-by-night 5-second operation. With the advent of internet this accountability has exponentially swelled and it’s only growing in size as billions upon billions of people are given a microphone or camera to a global audience. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, naming only two, lit up the Pandora Paradox™ that perhaps outshined (and outburned?) the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.

My round-about point with all this is to say I have been having a difficult time kindly and responsibly following all your blogs I’ve liked and selected to read and follow. I think maybe 15-20 could be better manageable; anymore than my current 43-45 I just simply cannot get to everyone if several publish daily. “I’m only human“ afterall — as he hums The Human League song — and only capable of limited time to read, comment, and willingly indulge in WordPress conversations or parleys, while simultaneously finding some limited time to compose and publish my own blog-posts. Hah! I have a total of 13 drafts, unfinished posts currently going back to February 2015! What tha hell? 😲

What does help my time and mental constraints for keeping up with all of you is that over the 8-9 years I’ve been blogging, numerous blog sites I selected, for whatever unknown reasons, have vanished, been deleted/deactivated, or have become lethargic. I see these cyber-deaths as a positive for the living! Their end provides the opportunities for new or active, yet to be discovered and exciting blogs and bloggers. A fluid circle of life! These song lyrics from one of my all-time favorite bands, lyricist, and drummer, have been slightly modified to protect the slightly heathen innocent: