Time to Think

Today, I remembered having read something about the shortest event ever measured. I don't remember the event, but I remembered that it lasted 2 attoseconds. I knew that an attosecond was quite short. I thought that an attosecond was to a second as one second is to a million or maybe a billion years (although I really doubted the latter). I'm not sure why, but I looked it up today and found out that one attosecond is to one second as one second is to the time the universe has existed. How can one possibly live in "the moment" when discrete actions begin and end in such an infintesimally small amounts of time?

The Egyptians and Proclus may indeed have been right when they said that "god" was not to be found "out there somewhere", but in the eternal present the eternal now. "God" or whatever you want to call the Source of Being may indeed "exist" in all the way down outside the very bottom of time and bring all creation about with actions infinitely small and infinitely short. It's just a thought.

Mayberry

We all have images in our minds of bucolic small towns where everyone knows everyone else and all the people get along for the most part. A place where most are disposed to help anyone in the town in almost anyway they can. It does not matter whether it's Mayberry, Lake Wobegone, or the suburb of "The Wonder Years." These places are part of the American Identity and what makes these places such a persistent idea is that they exist and existed- not as perfect as the myth, but closer to it than one might imagine. These places are rapidly disappearing due to a number of factors and one of these is chrystal meth. According to Walter Kirn, writing in today's New York Times Book Review, Methland - The Death and Life of a Small American Town by Nick Reading gives the reader a very effective and engaging account of how, why, and by whom these towns are being destroyed. Reading also describes how meth is a symptom of the diseases destroying the towns - it is not the cause. Finally, he also shows how one town began a process of recovery that appears to be working. I have placed this book high on my reading lst and I hope you will do the same. The unending "Dateline", "60 Minutes", et al reports will not bring about the political action needed. The only thing that will lead to political action is us. Our leaders will not act until we force them to - with letters, emails, phone calls, demonstrations, etc. There are solutions out there and it is up to us to make the politicians find and adopt them.

Minds and Gods

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This is a fantastic book that in the world I wish and even pray for everyone would be intensely interested in. The author, Todd Tremlin, demonstrates through cognitive science that various neural structures and programs that came about as a result of evolution function together to actually predispose us to believe in divine agents as long as these agents have a limited number of "unbelievable" attributes and that these "unbelievable" attributes are somehow acceptable. The book is a fascinating tour of the mind. One might expect that a book such as this would have as one of its messages that our cognitive predisposition to attribute phenomena to divine agents argues against the existance of such agents. However, Mr. Tremlin makes it very clear that this is not a conclusion with which he would agree. He does, though, make it very clear that an understanding of these predispositions is essential as they can create unconscious and subconscious assumptions about our God or gods with which our conscious mind would not agree. All-in-all, whether you are agnostic, athiestic, or very religious, this is a book that you should definitely read.