Loose Leaf Notes

1. I see other people.

2. Joe and I ran into an old friend at Outer Space Friday night. We had some beers, listened to some good music and played an impromptu game of Scrabble at the very table that I play on with my Tuesday Scrabble group, which made me ask ‘is this cheating?’

3. Earlier that day we had creative cocktails created by our grandson. Non-alcoholic, exotic, tropical. This one was called Dragon Fruit Delight and consisted of Dragon Fruit Plum Diabolo sparkling lemonade, rose concentrate, cherry juice and grenadine, topped off with slices of Dragon Fruit.

4. Not only does my grandson make great drinks with names like Liam’s Luau and Cherry Limeade, he is becoming our go-to phone tech support.

5. There Goes A murder of Crows… HERE. 

6. Now I lay me down to sleep / to dream 10,000 things / to spin in orbit / along with the planets / to rest in the Tao / of the milky way… Read A Prayer for Everything in its entirety HERE. 

7. “Is the Universe Conscious?  For centuries, modern science has been shrinking the gap between humans and the rest of the universe, from Isaac Newton showing that one set of laws applies equally to falling apples and orbiting moons to Carl Sagan intoning that “we are made of star stuff” — that the atoms of our bodies were literally forged in the nuclear furnaces of other stars. Even in that context, Gregory Matloff’s ideas are shocking. The veteran physicist at New York City College of Technology recently published a paper arguing that humans may be like the rest of the universe in substance and in spirit. A “proto-consciousness field” could extend through all of space, he argues. Stars may be thinking entities that deliberately control their paths. Put more bluntly, the entire cosmos may be self-aware. More HERE.

8. Excerpt from favorite poem of the week written via a prompt about bucket lists: “… I do like eating good food / and seeing beautiful gardens; / I just don’t want to be the one / to have to create these delights… It’s lovely to sit back, relax / and contemplate all the things / I never have to do, / tossing them blithely / out of that damn bucket.” -From Buck(et)ing the Trend by Rosemary Nissen-Wade… More HERE.

9. What’s the first thing you think of when you get a crossword puzzle clue “a couple of bucks?’ I was thinking money, dough or cash, but the answer was “deer.”

10. Time is “elastic”: Why time passes faster atop a mountain than at sea level: Place one clock at the top of a mountain. Place another on the beach. Eventually, you’ll see that each clock tells a different time. Why? Time moves slower as you get closer to Earth, because, as Einstein posited in his theory of general relativity, the gravity of a large mass, like Earth, warps the space and time around it. The differences were tiny, but the implications were massive: absolute time does not exist.” More HERE.

11. In talking to my very busy eldest son who has a birthday coming up, we jokingly decided a gift certificate for more hours in the day would be the best birthday present this year.

12. “So, why do we perceive time as flowing forward? Carlo Rovelli, physicist and author of The Order of Time, notes that, although time disappears on extremely small scales, we still obviously perceive events occur sequentially in reality. In other words, we observe entropy: Order changing into disorder; an egg cracking and getting scrambled. “Entropy growth orients time and permits the existence of traces of the past, and these permit the possibility of memories, which hold together our sense of identity. I suspect that what we call the “flowing” of time has to be understood by studying the structure of our brain rather than by studying physics: evolution has shaped our brain into a machine that feeds off memory in order to anticipate the future. This is what we are listening to when we listen to the passing of time. Understanding the “flowing” of time is therefore something that may pertain to neuroscience more than to fundamental physics.”

13. Thoughts reverberate / Mind is a bell / I look to hold the clapper / to match my breath with the mantra / But moonlighting at night
takes a toll / I follow the echo / of thoughts that ring hollow / and those that strike a resonance / and warrant attention… More HERE. 

__________Thirteen Thursday