Moonstruck

The brightest full moon of the year, the newspapers proclaimed. So how could it be missed?



One more



Mars was close by, so here's a shot of the good war god as well




More photos on Flickr ...

De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum

Requiescat in Pacem, JD Salinger.

Y forever!

A couple of years ago a study purported to show that the Y chromosome, and hence men, are doomed to extinction. Merely coincidentally, it was authored by a woman.

Thankfully, that has now been demonstrated to be incorrect. Phew!

Poor poor Y chromosome. What contortions it must go through to stay viable. Just like the men that bear it, one might be tempted to say.

Thank Goodness for Deepak Chopra

The Mad Hatter isn't really a fan of what the West has done to India. You know, colonialism, slavery, looting our diamonds, and that sort of thing. We don't really talk much of that in polite company these days, but the Hatter's always felt there must be a way we could extract a wee bit of revenge for all that. Just a wee bit.

And that's why he's thankful for the existence of Deepak Chopra. One of our most famous experts, a guru trusted by the likes of Oprah herself, who's established himself as a very influential thinker - for want of a better word.

For example, this article of his, warning against the perils of skepticism.

Apparently the ill tempered guardians of scientific thought cannot tolerate speculative thinking.

Precisely, that's exactly why they came up with such wonderfully conformist ideas like quantum theory, relativity, evolution and the like.

Statistically, cynical mistrust is correlated with premature sudden death from cardio vascular disease.

A lesser mortal may object that cynicism and skepticism are entirely different, and uncorrelated, or that the typical religious view that we're all natural sinners who need a sky-headmaster to prevent all of us from going out and robbing and pillaging to glory is incredibly cynical. In short, cynicism is believing the worst about everyone and everything. Skepticism is not believing anything, good or bad, without evidence. However such minor logical trifles are mere pebbles in the path of the good Dr. Chopra.

No skeptic, to my knowledge, ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others.

Indeed. Progress has been due to such wonderful conformists like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein who believed exactly what people told them, without bothering to check. You know, Einstein, who said (in Autobiographical Notes)

a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections.

It never occurs to skeptics that a sense of wonder is paramount, even for scientists. Especially for scientists. Einstein insisted, in fact, that no great discovery can be made without a sense of awe before the mysteries of the universe.

Uh oh! We are in the presence of genius. To claim Einstein for the anti-skeptical camp, is a feat of single-mindedness that we must bow to. Einstein, who said, in a letter to Eric Gutkind,

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

And a sense of wonder, no skeptic ever had one, right? Perhaps one can ask Richard Dawkins, the skeptic they all love to hate. What does he have to say about a sense of wonder? Oops, he's filled with a sense of wonder. Perhaps he's an exception? How about Carl Sagan? Oops again, he made a whole TV series filled with a sense of wonder at the universe. Hmmm, we'll have to fall back on our legion of Chopra-ites unconstrained by mundane issues like factual correctness.

Skeptics know in advance -- or think they know -- what right thought is. Right thought is materialistic, statistical, data-driven, and always, always, conformist. Wrong thought is imaginative, provisional, often fantastic, and no respecter of fixed beliefs.

Actually, skeptics would object that they do not pre-judge thought. That's the whole point - one judges after evidence is in, and goes with it. Even when the evidence tells us that spacetime is curved, and that time goes at different rates depending on your path through it, or that matter is neither particle, nor wave, but both, and neither. None of those were conformist ideas. And how more imaginative, provisional, or fantastic can you get than "dark matter" or "dark energy"? The only caveat is that skeptics insist ideas must be verifiable . That seems to worry the good Dr. Chopra. I'm sure he worries that if he had to provide evidence of all his "ideas", he'd be found wanting. But not to worry, his legion of followers don't really care.

At this rate, Deepak Chopra will leave the west a wasteland of woo and wipe out all traces of rationality by the time he's done. He can count on the Hatter to cheer him on.

But not, if he decides to peddle his stuff (or shall we say, non-stuff) in India. We've got enough crazies here, we don't need more. He's getting too close for comfort.

He said the real universe could be viewed through Jyotish (astrology) but not through the distorted lens of perception.
...
"Every cell instantly knows what is happening in every other cell, in fact, in the whole universe," Chopra said

The Hatter's cells have no clue as to what Chopra means by all that, or how he comes up with such ideas that are not just wrong, even way beyond wrong. Perhaps he ought to go cast a horoscope to find out, that might help.

Seize the Day!

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting ...
So what if it hasn't been your day, your month, even your year?
Tomorrow is another day.
Seize it!

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