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Good Day, Everyone!
I’ve had the most fun putting together this ezine! StumbleUpon, an add-on to the Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers, is a feature that filters only the photos and texts that are my cup of tea. I’ve stumbled upon an array of fascinating videos very nearly matching curiosities, opinions, and sensibilities of this incurably nimble snoop.
You are likely aware gawking is one favorite word of mine to describe Earthlings. The word Earthling is a most endearing term for a species that’s too similar to a high speed car driven with quick presses on the brake pedal. After millennia of civilizations, our hooligan species, laden with curiosities and intuition, has behaved as if to appear properly constrained yet discombobulated. At any time, and with little notice, our species’ societies are quickly tossed to and fro by patriarchs’ sanctimonious detours.
However, whenever or wherever possible, humans are also persuaded to gawk around the clock with entertainments and experiments, and expressive stories about societies eventually driving too fast toward their decline, while brakes put on imperial patriarchs’ hypocrisies had apparently failed.
Gawking is what we do best as well as attending the creation into which we’ve shown up. Hand in hand with gawking is neoteny (nee-ah’-teh-nee), and here’s its simple definition.
Some developmental biologists explain neoteny as a process by which a species’ adults tend to retain traits observed only in juveniles; physiological, psychological, or somatic development of an animal or organism can be slowed or delayed. Refer Wikipedia
All other animals know exactly what to do—their instincts are written into their DNA. Most animals living in forests will flee as fast as possible from a massive fire, but human animals’ neotenous curiosity allows us to walk up and get as brazenly close to the blaze as we can. Another way of explaining neoteny is humans possess a fearlessness that shows up in what some rascally Earthlings feel they can perpetrate without detection or punishment.
Our neotenous fearlessness also allows us to explore whatever there is to discover in the space between us and our Sun and beyond; to explore and discover new rocks and species in oceans’ depths; to unearth and make up stories about civilizations unwritten in traditional histories.
Surprisingly, we modern humans have gawked our way into the 21st century, and can describe our own dazzling, stellar trait, the tendency for stupefaction: a glorified sense of satisfaction while at best only marginally conscious. We already know our evolved brain, such as it is, cannot allow most of us to walk through walls nor rapture an inch off the floor, but…
Our real problem is: what is the goal of education? Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from preschool age throughout life?
~ Jean Piaget (b 1896), Swiss philosopher, natural scientist, developmental psychologist, pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing (in epistemology, one of the three philosophies that comprise metaphysics)
Ready Sunspots
There are millions of science-friendlies like us who are ready and willing to hear and read—to educate ourselves—to refine our personal cosmologies; we want to hear what solar scientists want to tell us. Their current studies and experiments, and their theories and predictions about our Sun’s influences on Earth would be too fascinating! ¹
After months and months of anticipation, on March 25, 2008, one of three ready sunspots unleashed an M2-class solar flare. It hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space, but the billion-ton cloud missed Earth. While the CME was still plowing through the Sun’s atmosphere, an amateur radio astronomer heard a heaving sound coming from the speaker of his short wave receiver in New Mexico USA. The pulsing sound was a solar radio burst generated by shock waves at the CMEs leading edge.
If that’s not exciting enough, you may actually hear the heaves or pulses, which, to this guy, is the music of the physical Universe: rhythms of heat expanding and contracting. Listen here or Science@NASA. Duration 60 seconds. Patience may be necessary for download of the audio via QuickTime player.
Whether or not ready sunspots are flinging flares our way, the Sun billows hydrogen, its predominant element, with an unimaginable outward force into all directions from around its sphere. In every instant, Earth’s diet for life depends on four to five billion tons of hydrogen, which are only one billionth of the hydrogen the Sun billows every instant.
Without Universe’s turbulent nature of explosive stars, there would be neither Sun nor Earth. If the size of Earth had been smaller or larger than itself, there’s no telling how creation would have appeared out of infinitesimal rearrangements of balanced energies: you and I, as we know humans, might not have been created at all.
Earth’s thin crust upon which we live is what an apple’s skin is to the apple. One way to imagine our semi-liquid planet’s constant churning beneath the crust is to warm some milk, then watch the quivering skim that lies atop the heated milk. The skim part is the same as raft-like continents floating above vast, turbulent, boiling dynamos generating gravity.
Imagine how much scientific and philosophical concentration has developed over millennia for embracing the revelation that our physical Universe is an unfolding of the music of itself to itself, stirring within humans’ deep curiosity a listening for and measuring of melodies the Universe sustains for its Nature.
As indigenous peoples do, we industrialized ones may remember to gawk, dance, sing, and tell stories of the exquisite Earth out of which we were birthed. The Sun has always been our amazing, conspicuous, eminent provider of harmony. We just forgot.
To Our “Surprise!”
My jaw drops at how susceptible to wonderments we Earthlings are, and gawking is the evidence. When a moment comes our way that takes us off our guard, to our surprise, we are caught in a moment of “Surprise!” And that’s similar to hearing guests yell “Surprise!” at the start of an unexpected birthday party for someone very special.
Surprise moments helped spring Staying Awake into budding a publication. I wanted to remind readers of barely noticeable ‘pop in’ nudges. Rather like being half awake or momentarily dulled, we too often put “Surprise!” nudges into imaginary files marked ‘take for granted,’ ‘forgettable’, or ‘secrets.’
Early Earthlings’ “Surprise!” satisfaction was likely realized when they discovered they were hearing the flapping of wings, the splashing of water, the birthing of kids, the quaking ground beneath their feet; they watched each others’ snickering, sniggling, talking, walking; they heard drum beats and danced and sang at the same time around something they discovered, and we call it fire; they nurtured seeds for flowers and food, and gawked at the soil for its magical wonderments. Those hooligans discovered they could paint characters on walls of caves and other peoples’ tombs; they beheld as guardians the Sun, moon, and stars, and deified swells of superstitions. Today, we build bridges, walls, tunnels, superhighways, pyramids, skyscrapers, coliseums, cathedrals, mega church buildings, super jets, humongous telescopes, and spaceships shipping thermonuclear armaments. And we’ve not stopped gawking at the stuff we build.
A brilliant and fun experiment demonstrates to our “Surprise!” the ease of causing groups of Earthlings to stop and gawk—eyebrows raised, jaws dropped, fingers pointed, hands applauding, voices laughing—in moments of persuaded curiosity in Grand Central Station, New York USA. Duration 2:16.
| Sometimes click videos twice to begin. | |
| After viewing, it might be necessary to refresh your screen by pressing the F5 key on your Windows keyboard, or clicking refresh on your browser. |
Unseen Remembrances
Witnessing other people’s “Surprise!” moments focuses on Earthlings’ nature to gawk. Deeper still, unseen remembrances are those beautiful sounds occurring subliminally when we see a harp in a shop window. I remember lovely young women wearing tee shirts while the unseen remembrances are the word zoo printed on blue shirts. Don’t you remember images of gorgeous, naturally grown red tomatoes you saw in the local market? Are you persuaded to remember their scent and tasty juices, too?Those who work in advertising are masters with persuasion, as well as estimating how long we’ll remember certain slogans and logos, which are subtly woven everywhere, all the time, into our daily lives. More than we would imagine, we register much unconsciously, because when we walk into a supermarket, we tend to sense familiarity for products we assume we’ve never heard of. Advertising is brilliantly calculated—we all fall for it!
We easily imagine ourselves having done
what we’re observing others doing.
During this video, I gawked flabbergasted, feeling tingles up and down my arms, nearly falling out of my chair as I watched the tables turn on the advertising experts. Masterful creative artists in advertising are just as susceptible as all other Earthlings to “Surprise!” They too gawk at unseen remembrances, those superbly detailed subliminal persuasions.
Two highly imaginative members of MBA, a London advertising agency, part of Omnicom Group Inc., were collected and delivered to a secret location for an unusual artistic proposal. ² Duration 6:48
| Sometimes click videos twice to begin. | |
| After viewing, it might be necessary to refresh your screen by pressing the F5 key on your Windows keyboard, or clicking refresh on your browser. |
Synchronizing Artistry
Are we connected by energies synchronized into “Surprise!” out of which we feelingly gawk? Or is that too much a stretch of imagination?
Mathematical cosmologists are helping us ponder a possibility that our connection with one another is a synchronizing artistry, a creating of all things, unceasingly everywhere, all in the same instant: energies connecting one Earthling to another—interconnecting one life form with the next—creating colossal spherical webs; already pulsing one attosecond of synchronizing artistry into the next; already layering upon unimaginable layers of energies around our planet. See Orders of Magnitude in the right column, above.
Two thousand years ago, a group of Greek philosophers called Pythagoreans worked out the laws of harmony while observing resonances in a vibrating violin string. They realized resonances could be matched with numbers, then hypothesized that the Universe could be explained by laws of harmony. Today, string theorists presume to revive thoughts of early Pythagoreans for explaining the physical Universe in terms of vibrations in infinitesimal strings in hyperspace. ³
Vibrations—without which the Universe would not exist—escort us, ever so gracefully, to the performing arts. We marvel at Earthlings’ capabilities for synchronizing patterns of dance, stepping to syncopated vibrations in musical phrases, while listening to harmonious tones in rhythmical vibrations from an accompanying orchestra of Earthlings.
This troupe of skillfully trained humans dancing in costumes, with a conductor conducting, a chorus of humans singing, an orchestra playing, stage lights beaming, cameras filming, and film editing create an exquisite artistic performance of the Universe displaying itself: its being is creating, synchronizing fascinating artistry.
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