Thursday, March 27, 2008

Tid Bits

Man, I have been off line for weeks. Nothing changed in the blogger area. Dovetalers and Mental Blog supporters are not exactly suffering from blogger mania, are they?

Tell you about my cat Yona. I discovered him to be my protector watch cat. He sat on the kitchen window sill, looking out. Being not quite there, I heard this deep, and threatening growl. I looked up. It came from Yona. I look out, a stanger was coming up the driveway. Wow, my cat was alerting me to danger!. It was only a postman, but not our regular one. Yeah Yona!!!

Simon who was outside, knocked on the door to come in. I let him in. Thought he'd stay. But he ran into the living room, picked up his rawhide bone, and wished to be let out again, to lay on the snow and chew.

My friend told me about a family in her church. the grandmother had died. They told the children that she had gone to heaven. Later they visited the funeral home, and viewed the body in the coffin. The youngest child, piped up, "Mommy, are we in heaven?"

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Star Dust

Our body is a composition of atoms that were once cooked in the Big Bang and the furnace of our sun. We are literally star dust.

Our sun threw out materials of superheated gases that revolved around our star. Eventually these gases cooled to form a mass. After billions of years rain filled some crevice in a rock. The stagnant pool of chemical soup was then supercharged by lightening. From that rare combination of a spark of charged chemicals life began.

Just the right combination of chemicals held that charge allowing it to begin the first steps in writing the history of life in DNA code. A code that has evolved into three billion characters carrying with the message of a universal will to be.

bobby bacon

Monday, March 10, 2008

Am I Certain?


Every measurement or observation carries with it uncertainty. If we require unequivocal certainty to make a decision about anything, we simply wouldn’t make any decisions.

Am I certain about that? Smiles, of course not.

Uncertainty is okay though. We can be certain about uncertainty.

In the late twenties and thirties much of the development in physics was lead and influenced by German institutions. It was an uncertain period of time where colleagues are friends one day and then sworn enemy the next day.

"The more precisely the POSITION is determined, the less precisely the MOMENTUM is known" WERNER HEISENBERG (1901 - 1976).

And no one will ever be certain of Heisenberg’s motives or intentions during the war. Perhaps his motivation was merely to survive.

In more recent times Colin Powell, I believe had good intentions. Mr Powell was unique in the sense that there was a high degree of confidence worldwide in his character as a man who spoke the truth compared to any other member of the Bush administration. He was given evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Likely a trusting man that couldn’t imagine that evidence was being manufactured for him to present to the UN. He was certain he was presenting credible information.

Perhaps the next US administration could be kinder if they are less certain and self-righteous. A scientist, a theologian, a politician or a reporter would have a greater degree of credibility if they expressed more doubts.

We don’t require certainty to make a decision. In that regards we would look at potential outcomes of decisions in terms of prediction and probabilities. Our concerns about the probabilities should contemplate whether an action would cause more harm than good.

Any planned action that may cause harm to people or to the planet lacks credibility.