#A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff

[luxe-pauvre]

To stop this from happening again, I have come up with a personal Theory of Stuffness, a way to structure and understand my local stuff ecosystem, especially the digital stuff. I divide Stuffworld into the Object (drum machine), the Enhancements (all the extras), and the Experience (sick beats). Another example: The Object is the phone. The Enhancement is the Spotify app. The Experience is that of listening to music. In the past, you might buy a record player and spend 10 years curating a collection of really good jazz albums. You'd read the liner notes and learn new things over time, boring your friends in the process. Now you pay a fee, and some approximation of every bit of recorded jazz is just there on every device that plays sound. It used to take a lifetime of reading reviews and trips to the record store, or going to jazz clubs, and a ton of money. Now the cost approaches free. This is the Great Stuff Discontinuity. You just parachute in, like my kids playing Fortnite. What I was doing with my drum machine was trying to skip learning, attempting to buy talent and accomplishment by configuring my workstation. That's the promise of buying stuff for your stuff: The Enhancements will make the Experience so much better and give you more of the power of the Object. (Am I serious about all this? Well, I was desperate for a grammar to understand what I was doing on Amazon and eBay.) The Object did not give me the Experience I wanted, despite all the Enhancements. But let's not waste it, right? It does no good if it joins the rat king of USB cables and old laptops in the closet. So I've limited myself to one sample and one track, trying to figure out how music works. And doing that—going into student mode, humbling myself before the task of making just one passable beat without using a ton of reverb—has almost instantly made me a better listener, a greater appreciator of the talents of others. I've started to pick songs apart as I commute, suddenly aware of filter sweeps across the drum loops or where they cut the bass before the chorus. If I can't buy talent, at least I can understand its supply chain.

Paul Ford, A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff

[aestheno]

It's a Sunday and I'm looking down at the length of Gower Street stretching northwards towards Euston, the pedestrians below me more likely than not being students of the various University of London constituent institutions that populate much of Bloomsbury. I feel that, if you are going to be a student in London, being one in this neighbourhood can't be too bad. I say that as an alumnus of a London-based institution which, in fact, was not in Bloomsbury.

I shouldn't be buying books. I have one in my bag with me, unfinished, that I intended to read while I'm out. But I made some extra cash DJing the other night, and the lure of the words on those pages is practically an opiate - and I am only human.

The world is really big. It's so big. There's so much about it to know and tell, and so many perspectives to digest. When people speak in an informed manner about something, they spill pieces of the world out in front of them, but permutated in an order as yet unseen in our universe's billion-year history. And that's not even considering what's beyond just our world and the limits of our perception: how do we even begin with the holes in the Standard Model, Grand Unified Theory, consciousness and memory, religion, infinity? That's not to highlight the existential nature of *stuff*, but to highlight the incredulity I have for those who lack the desire to actively keep learning.

There's a lot of theory in what I want to do. The methods of acting adopted by performers across the world, many of which were borne from observations around politics, psychology, and relationships. The keys to songwriting, production and performance that govern music. The stories told in the modes, rhythms and lyrics. The truth is that art is just the journalism of the world perceived through different eyes. It is an academic pursuit. When I construct a song that commentates a particular slice of society, I am describing the state of the world just as I did in university, when I'd use degenerate perturbation theory to paint a picture of an electron's behaviour. As I look down on Gower Street and privately lust after the educational experiences these students are getting, I should really be remembering the breadth of the academic exploration of the world I get to have now - not just what I'm paying for, but simply, whatever I want.

[52booksproject]

Book 28 The Skeptics Guide to Conspiracies

The RNG threw out 366 which is Secret Societies such as the Freemasons or Knights Templar. A book of conspiracy theories about them seemed interesting, so I went with Monte Cook's The Skeptics Guide to Conspiracies since I'm a skeptic myself.

Well, the book seems a little more credible than I am since they rank each conspiracy by believability and wackiness, and their ratings were often higher than I would have put them.

Take the Kennedy assassination. I actually was a believer back as a young, impressionable teen right when the 30th anniversary hype happened. I think I actually cried in frustration when Quantum Leap said they thought Oswald did it alone. However I've moved away from that and now do believe that Oswald did it and all the mystery surrounding the assassination comes from the bungling investigation that followed. There is one conspiracy about it I rate plausible- that a secret service agent in the cars ahead of Kennedy slipped and accidentally delivered the fatal headshot. They don't mention that one in the book- just the standard mafia/CIA/Castro stuff. There is the curious coincidence that 3 future presidents were in Dallas that day (Johnson in the motorcade, Nixon playing golf, and Bush skulking around being CIA-y). It added up to a 7/10 plausibility, which I disagree with, but agree it is more likely than some of the other conspiracies in the book. Incidentally, while I also don't believe in an RFK conspiracy, I do actually buy a conspiracy against Dr. Martin Luther King, they didn't get extensively into it, but there does seem to be some substance there.

They give alien abductions a 6/10 which, to me is just crazypants. Sleep paralysis seems a good explanation for the lion's share of the stories and kookiness the rest. The book rounds out with conspiracies on Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, Elvis, and the moon landing. Incidentally, apparently Stanley Kubrick directing the faked moon landing started out as some wag's joke, but now some people actually believe it!

BEST LINE: This is why conspiracy theorists have decently adopted the term "parapolitics" to describe what it is they research and write about. We've yet to see that term catch on, however.

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: If you want a breezy overview of many different conspiracies then this isn't a bad choice. It includes resources to go more in depth on any of its subjects and except for a little credulity here in there is mainly a sensible book with a good dose of humor.

ART PROJECT:

The last conspiracy was called the octopus and it essentially is a grand unifying theory trying to cram all the conspiracies together in one elegant theory. So here's an octopus gathering the mafia/freemasons/UN/and Kennedy assassination all together.

[just-jammin]

>>y’all can go on anon, say any fucking thing you want, and sign with a name<<

So back in the decade of the 1980s, tabletop pencil and paper roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons were growing in popularity. Video games were still in their infancy. The internet did not have its present form. People would actually get together, gather around a table, and pretend to be elves and wizards trying to slay a dragon.

So the two major American publishers of superhero comics licensed their superhero universes for publication as RPGs. Marvel licensed their superheroes to appear in a game published by TSR, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons. DC licensed theirs to a company called Mayfair, and I don't know what their flagship product at the time was.

So, here's the thing I want to say: If a player tries to create an original character using Mayfair's DC Heroes game, it involves a budget of points to buy Powers, Skills, Attributes, and the like. Buying a power involves two costs: a base cost, which is a number of the points to just have the power on your character sheet rated at zero, and a factor cost, a price to buy each point that would make the power do something.

And Growth, the super power of getting bigger and stronger and tougher as you get bigger, like Scott did in the second Ant Man movie; has a negligible base cost of 10, but has a factor cost in the highest category, also 10 but the 10 means something different there. It's the same category for factor cost that Continuum Control is in. Continuum Control is a super power that combines a death ray and time travel and the ability to bring back people killed by the death ray. It's a power that only Darkseid has. The major difference is Continuum Control also has a base cost of 500, so it costs a lot more points overall to do that well than it does to get really big.

I don't know why this is the stuff I think about. If I could put this much energy and attention into physics, I'd have created a grand unified field theory. Instead, I think about how a fight between Colossal Boy and Darkseid would go.

Cheers,

JustiN

this is. something—

[abaditya]

A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff #LinkBlog

A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff #LinkBlog

Years ago, I asked a friend what kind of case she planned to buy for her shiny new flip phone. She paused, a little offended. “I don’t like to buy stuff for my stuff,” she said. Those words drilled directly into my hippocampus, never to depart. She’s right! I thought. Source: A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff – https://bit.ly/3FGWGSa (via Pocket & IFTTT)

[bderw]

5 Articles | 01-007

The Tragedy of Macbeth: Palace Intrigue (American Society of Cinematographers)

Fossils that 'clearly foreshadow' modern humans are 30,000 years older than we thought (Inverse)

The anime 'Dune' DAO learns about copyright (Garbage Day)

A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff (Wired)

'World first' vegan violin created using berries and pears in Malvern (BBC News)

- 30 -

[acaseforpencils]

Karen Green, Curator for Comics and Cartoons at Columbia University.

Who are you and what do you do? My name is Karen Green, and I was hired as Columbia University's Librarian for Ancient & Medieval History back in 2002 (I had done my graduate work in medieval history here at Columbia).  A love of comics, and a recognition of their absence in our collections, caused me to propose that we begin to buy graphic novels in 2005; what was then 3 titles (Maus, Persepolis, and Palestine, for those keeping score at home) has grown to 14-15,000 titles in over two-dozen languages.  In 2010, my role expanded when Chris Claremont offered us his papers, and I began collecting other creator archives, with a focus on the NYC area and the history of publishing.  This became a prominent enough part of my brief, that in November 2016, the libraries created the job of Curator for Comics and Cartoons, and moved me up into our Rare Book & Manuscript Library with the other curators.

Portrait of Karen by Drew Friedman

What is your goal as a curator for comics and cartoons? There are more archives of comics history than you might think, with the largest and most prominent probably being the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University in Columbus OH.  I'm not trying to compete with Billy Ireland--I couldn't really, even if I tried, as they have a 35-year lead on me!--but what I try to do is create an array of materials that fits well with other strengths in Columbia's Rare Book & Manuscript Library: specifically, the history of publishing, NYC history, the Pulitzer Prize archives (including 95 years of editorial cartoon winners), and illustration.  I want to build out those areas, make the material accessible, assist scholars in their research--and to further solidify comics studies as a proper academic discipline.  And I want to try to preserve a snapshot of the 21st-century NYC comics scene.

Learning about the history of cartoons can be a bit daunting. Where would you recommend a novice start? Gosh, there's no one starting place, I think.  I found THE SMITHSONIAN COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPER COMICS when it first came out, back in 1978, and that grounded me in newspaper strip history.  Other useful resources are Brian Walker's two books about comics, before 1945 and after 1945, and Jerry Robinson's history of the comics.  Comic-book history is a bit more challenging, but Gerard Jones' MEN OF TOMORROW lays out a lot of the players and the process, and the two big Taschen 75 YEARS OF... books, DC Comics by Paul Levitz and Marvel Comics by Roy Thomas, provide narratives for the two dominant mainstream publishers.  Mark Estren's history of the undergrounds is still probably the best there is, and Tom Spurgeon's history of Fantagraphics, WE TOLD YOU SO: COMICS AS ART, offers an oral history of one of the larger alternative publishers.  But there's no unified field theory for the medium's history, and just going to panels and listening to creators talk can be the most interesting and entertaining way to dig in.

A piece of original art from STUCK RUBBER BABY, showing marginal notations; the Howard Cruse papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

What do you wish artists knew about curation? I wish they realized that we're not just looking for their original art.  Don't get me wrong--we love original art!--but it's not the whole story, and we know that it can often be a crucial revenue source for cartoonists.  We're interested in process materials (sketchbooks, first drafts, tracings), too, because they demonstrate the creator's thinking.  But we love correspondence (between creators and publishers, creators and editors, creators and family, creators and other creators), we love business records and contracts, we love ephemera.  Often a creator won't even understand the research value of little things--I went to visit a major comix artist once, who was getting an external appraisal, and in one drawer was a pile of address books going back decades.  My excitement was met with surprise, but those things are snapshots of creative networks over time: invaluable!  On a different note, for artists who work digitally, I just pray they're preserving all their versions and their layers, so that researchers of the future can analyze their process.

Oliver Cesare, cartoon about the impeachment of NY governor William Sulzer, impeached after tangling with Tammany Hall; Dennis Ryan editorial cartoon art collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

Tools of choice:  The Grand Comics Database for comics runs and covers; Poopsheet Foundation for minicomics; and Wikipedia--you probably won't be surprised to learn that comics fans create meticulous and thorough entries, including publication histories.  And WorldCat, to see how others have cataloged some of the rarer items.

George Herriman, hand-colored drawing from archy & mehitabel, given to his Doubleday editor; Daniel Longwell papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

Tools I wish existed: Oh, this tool exists: a processing archivist.  We just don't have enough of them for the number of archives we bring in!  Oh, and a bigger budget, especially for programming.

Tricks: Still looking for those! But while it isn't a trick, I'm happy I work in city that has such a long and storied comics history, and which still has a relatively vibrant comics community, despite the ravages of NYC rents.

Charles Saxon, NEW YORKER cover proposal; Charles Saxon papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

George and Sarah Booth, accompanied by Bob Eckstein and David Borchart, visiting the archives to look at Charles Saxon's paper. [Editors note: all of these wonderful people have appeared on Case!]

Misc.: Sometimes I think that Columbia isn't well-known enough as a comics archive for creators to think of us when they're figuring out what to do with their files.  It's true we've only been collecting archives for about seven years now.  I go to cons, both mainstream and indie, and I've been an Eisner judge, a Pulitzer Prize judge, and moderated panels around the world.  But I'll still meet creators who'll be surprised to learn that Columbia even has an interest in comics.  I'd like creators to think about the context in which their work could be studied here, too--we have a tremendous historical children's literature collection, with movable books and Big Little Books and all sorts of comics-related stuff, and we have a terrific illustration collection, with the largest collection of original Arthur Rackham drawings and watercolors in the US, and original Caldecotts and Rowlandsons and Cruikshanks as well as Rockwell Kent and Boris Artzybasheff and more.  I think this allows us to provide a context that a comics-only archive might lack.

Website, etc. A guide to our collections, and to research

My old ComiXology columns (2009-2012) 

Books for which I've written prefaces or introductions:

THE LEANING GIRL

WEIRD LOVE vol. 3

MORE HEROES OF THE COMICS

Enjoy reading A Case for Pencils? Consider becoming Twitter, Instagram, and Patreon buds with the blog and/or Twitter buds with its creator, Jane!

[luxe-pauvre]

FEBRUARY 2023

Read:

What public philosophy is, and why we need it more than ever

Great books are still great

A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff

The world feels fragile, but we can recover from the blows we’ve suffered

Hedonism is overrated - to make the best of life there must be pain, says this Yale professor

The Spacing Effect: How to Improve Learning and Maximise Retention

Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?

I Am a Meme Now - And So Are You

The Beauty-Happiness Connection

Are Screens Robbing Us of Our Capacity for Deep Reading?

I Feel, Therefore I Am

Exercise boosts the brain - and mental health

Everyone Is Grotesque and No One Is Turned On

‘One billionaire at a time’: inside the Swiss clinics where the super-rich go for rehab

Life After Food?

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission that Changed our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

How We Learn: The New Science of Education and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols

Watched:

time is a social construct

Happy Valley (S3)

Marie Antoinette (BBC/Canal+)

The Gold (BBC)

The Good Shepherd

Listened To:

The Strokes’ The New Abnormal

Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories

How Social Media Could Be Making You Ill with Cal Newport

Change Your Brain: The Power of Neuroplasticity and Braincare - Dr Tara Swart*

Went To:

Seminars, meetings, MDTs, nothing of note

[davidsilvercloud]

Terry David “Butch/Butch Naked” Silvercloud

“Step aside!  I shall perform the necessary heroics”  Comic Book Guy/The Simpsons

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” - T. S. Eliot

12.6 Million photo views, to date at http://ButchNaked.com.  Thank you.  At this time I’m getting about 100,000 photo views a week.

Again… thanks for the visits.

TELL EVERYONE.  Free photo downloads at

http://BUTCHNAKED.COM

http://Flickr.com/David_Silvercloud

“That’s a great title.  It jumps out at you like a rat in your underwear drawer”   Moe Sizlack/The Simpsons

My homepage is http://ButchBoard.com

I’m not your average drop of rain.

“I’ve come to hate my own creation.  Now I know how God feels.”  Homer Simpson

Now keep reading.

THE DAILY GRIND… ARE WE THERE YET?

Tuesday, 19 Dec. 2017.  Snowy and cool and grey in Vancouver, today.

I wuz up early after going to bed by 11pm.  A bit achy.  Had a coffee, mincemeat tart, and a Diclofenac... trying to do it in the morning, now.  I have to take it with food which is hard for me because I'm not, even, slightly hungry.  Had a T3, as well.  Watched some news then had a snooze until nearly noon.

Got some painting and exercises done, a few selfies.  Went over to Commercial Drive at 6pm to buy some pot then downtown to the library.

It's not enough that we have to worry about Climate Change, a World Wide Shortage of concrete-making sand... yup, there's a dwindling supply and you need a particular kind of sand to make concrete.  Islands are being dredged up.

BUT... dat's not wut's I'm on about today.  As if there isn't enough to worry about, now we need to begin seriously worrying about the pesticides being used in the manufacture of our clothing.  It's there for all kinds of reasons.  Sometimes it's to keep bugs from eating da goods while they are in shipment but, another more insidious use we fail to notice is the rise of anti-microbial materials.  Just how do you think they do that, huh?  Like, is there some kind of special material.  Well, sometimes, but we need to be asking what pesticides are being used in our clothing, particularly kid's clothing and young adults who's hormones are already off the rails.  The Romans had no idea that adding Lead to their wine was a pretty bad idea...  better taste, earlier death.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/health-canada-pesticides-environment-consumer-toys-textiles-sofa-toxic-1.4445227

“it’s time to go home.  The insurance company said you’re as well as they’re going to pay for” Doctor Hibbert/The Simpsons

THIS IS THE END OF THE DAILY GRIND.

IF YOU HAVEN’T BEEN HERE, BEFORE, HERE IS MORE STUFF TO READ…

"People who have never seen a movie say it's a great movie"  Apu/The Simpsons

"There is no God, Ned.  It's just an empty meaningless void"  Maude Flanders' ghost/The Simpsons

I repeat myself, a lot, because I know humans are really bad at paying attention, and understanding much of anything they read.  Quite, bluntly, I consider most humans to be walking, talking idiots.  I'm doing as best I know how to save you from your stupidity.

I’m a bit OCD and ADHD and go on, and on, like a dripping tap.  Think Sheldon Cooper, if that rings some kind of bell.  I gather it’s some kind of need I have to be, constantly, in complete control of everything.  I quite simply assume everyone around me is a complete idiot.  The humans aren’t doing a very good job of convincing me otherwise.  You must prove yourself to me.  Seriously, I mean it.  I expect to be disappointed.   Show me what you’ve got and back it up with proof.

http://DavidSilvercloud.com (Blog)    (http://David_Silvercloud.Tumblr.com)

http://ButchNews.com (Video)     (http://YouTube.com/ButchNews)

http://ButchNaked.com (Photo Stream)    (http://Flickr.com/David_Silvercloud)

http://SeriousThunder.com (Art)

http://ElectronSpeed.Tumblr.com     The Electron sets the speed of light… yup.  Physics… The Speed of Light, Grand Unified Theory, Gravity, Dark Matter, Dark Energy… how the physical size of the Electron is the clock that sets the speed of light.  Gravity is motion and a product of the fact that nothing ever sits still, combined with the magnetic properties of Dark Matter/Energy.  Nothing can ever move in an absolute circle and rest is a relativity illusion.

The ENTIRE universe is based upon a simple fact... it must have TWO parts.  It can not be otherwise and is impossible to be otherwise.  This is because of what a physicist calls "spin".

If you had only one substance to make the universe with and it could be broken down to as small as it needed to be at any time... i.e. it could be so small it barely exists, at all, there will STILL be TWO different types... that is because one can choose to spin LEFT or RIGHT in space.  Even turning yourself upside down will not change that fact because there is no up, nor down, in space.

The fact that everything SOLID must have spin, either left or right, introduces opposite forces.  Things which spin the SAME way repel each other, those that spin the OPPOSITE way attract each other... clumping begins and so does a universe.  Another thing comes into being... what we term magnetism.  There MUST be opposite POLES... magnetism comes into being with spin.  Spin creates opposites, including North/South polarity.  In Atoms, any atom that isn't in balance... has an equal number of left and right spinning Electrons, will be affected by magnetism... and radio waves.

Absolute rest is not possible… ever.  The universe can not end.  Time is change and is an illusion.  It is always now, everywhere, all at once, all of the time. Proof of that is that ANY object MUST be HERE and THERE at the SAME time, no matter how large… even a Galaxy.  It is always NOW on both sides… here and there, in space,  of the Galaxy… all galaxies, everywhere.  Waves can be either physical or electronic.  The duality of the universe keeps it ongoing.  DNA is the battery of life.  When the chains can no longer co-operate, life ceases in the body.  Life, itself, is a duality.  Time measurement is a relativity convenience.)  Time travel is impossible because time is not a place and nothing stays where it was.  One year from now the Solar System will have moved about seven BILLION kilometres through space and will NEVER return to where it was… ever.

Earth travels through space like a long wave… it has NEVER, ever made an actual circle, nor ellipse, in space.  The circle/ellipse is an illusion of relativity.  Nothing can ever travel in an actual circle in space… NOTHING.  Nothing can ever go backward.  Backwards motion is an illusion of relativity.  Time is a repercussion of change and has no fixed rate… things explode or move like a glacier.  At best we can only compare rates of change.  Our rate of change is called the second/minute/hour/day/month/year system.

NOTHING CAN EVER MOVE IN A TRUE CIRCLE.  THE EARTH HAS NEVER MADE A LOOP IN SPACE… EVER.  YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW.

WATCH VIDEO FOR EXPLANATION OF THE PATH OF EARTH THROUGH SPACE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPjohZCMwmI

Earth moves about 7 billion kilometers through space, each year… in a long wave.  Earth NEVER returns to where it was before.  Earth is NOT an island in space… one of the reasons why time travel is impossible.  If you take a trip through space, outside the Solar System, Earth will NOT be there when you return… it will be far, far away.  You will have to return to where it will BE when you arrive… remember, it’s moving very, very, very fast through space in a long wave… never a circle, or ellipse.

http://The-Shape-Of-God.Tumbler.com   Manuscript of my book… The Shape of God.

Butch, himself.  Visual Artist, Photographer, Physicist (Particle, Sub/Atomic Physics/Relativity)

Inhibitions are just so inhibiting, I avoid them.

I’m a friendly, but pretty blunt, kind of guy.  No time for beating around the bush.  I like to say what I mean and mean what I say.  I’m 73 years old.  Time is not on my side.  You don’t have to like me.  I’m a social recluse, anyway.  I share my life, in photos, video, and words, to let you into my life and hope to inspire you to be a productive and useful human.  I have old age issues but will continue to post, here, while I’m well and able.  I talk a lot… I’m told it’s part of my OCD and ADHD.  Come direct at http://ButchNaked.com  Sign in if you wish to see me naked.

If you don’t know me, the following might help you get to know what kind of person I am.  I don’t expect you to understand me.  I can be a bit OCD and ADHD.

“They’ve already got more blowjobs than we’ll ever get”  Steve Smith (American Dad), talking about college jocks.

“Now let us touch testicles and mate for life”  Alien on The Simpsons

“It never hurts to have a second set of prints on a gun”  Nelson Muntz, The Simpsons.

I’m here to teach you things.  While I appreciate other people’s opinions, I really don’t much give a crap what anyone thinks.  Until you prove your worth, I will be nice but you have to earn my respect. The moment you say a word, I’ll be figuring you out really, really fast.  You should assume that I don’t trust anyone.  I’ve not met a single trustworthy person in my entire life.  I’ve met lots of nice people who aren’t too bright… well-intentioned folk who know little about anything, people who are nice, most of the time until you say something that offends them.  Honourable people agree to disagree.

Look up the phrase “CRITICAL THINKING” then learn to practice it.  Most people leap before they look and judge before they listen to the facts.  Most don’t have enough knowledge, nor experience, to be experts in much of anything.  You don’t know what you don’t know.  I like to remind you of that, often.

The only other REALLY IMPORTANT thing to know about me is that I, totally, despise all religions, the teaching of religion, and religious institutions… I despise them as the evilest things on the planet.  If you follow a religion, you CAN NOT BE MY FRIEND.   THAT’S THAT.  You are an ignorant idiot who is an ever-present danger to yourself and everyone and everything around you.  Nothing, absolutely NOTHING, is eviler than religion.  I don’t stand for, nor sing, our National Anthem because it praises a fictitious and superstitious being called ‘God’.  Only a brain dead moron bonehead ignorant idiot would believe such a thing.

If you have a religion, I will not associate with you… period.  You are a danger to be around.  Yes, I insult religions… they are extraordinarily evil.  I said it, I mean it.  You have a right to be an idiot, but not around me.  I have a right to defend myself against the horrors of religion and I will.  Religion is evil.  People who are into religion are, either, brainwashed or extraordinarily ignorant, not very intelligent, a danger to themselves and everyone around them, and must be avoided.  I can’t say it enough times.  If you have a religion you are brainwashed or too fucking stupid to associate with.  Brainwashed, or stupid… either way you are too dangerous to be around.  Religion is the number one problem in the world.

http://The-Shape-Of-God.Tumblr.com

I keep a homepage at http://ButchBoard.com

My main video page is http://YouTube.com/ButchNews  

go direct at http://ButchNews.com

You may come directly to my photostream at http://ButchNaked.com You may download and share nude photos of me… go nuts.

I have zero inhibitions about nudity and sex.  You must sign in to see me naked.  I talk, openly, about sex.  You may download and share nude photos of me… go nuts.

[jareddillian]

After 20 Years of Trading, You Learn That You Actually Know Nothing

You ever notice—

That some memories tend to be stronger than others?

What sort of things do you remember?

You remember events in your life that had a lot of feelings associated with them.

You remember the death of your pet like it was yesterday. All the nights spent sitting on the couch watching Wheel Of Fortune—it’s just a blur.

Researchers have studied this in rats. They found that rats remembered things better if they experienced a rush of adrenaline.

In those moments with strong memories, it feels like time slows down. Time doesn’t actually slow down—time is linear. But human beings experience time as flexible. Time also speeds up when things are boring.

I’m fond of saying that all of finance, or at least the interesting part, is about human behavior. I find the daily fluctuations of stocks and credit spreads less interesting the older I get. And I think finance is more depraved the older I get. But the human behavior part fascinates me.

Miller’s Planet

The fact that time stretches and compresses isn’t news to anyone who’s traded options.

In the world of options, time and volatility work in opposite directions. As time passes, options decay. As volatility increases, options increase in value. All stuff you learned in class.

But if you think about it, volatility increasing is another way of saying that there’s a lot of s--- going on. Things are crazy. Options increase in value—which is really like saying that time is slowing down.

Which is exactly how we experience it. Of all my days trading on Wall Street, what are the times that I remember most? The financial crisis, naturally. There was a lot of adrenaline associated with that.

We all have strong memories of it. And while we experienced it, it seemed like time was slowing down—which was reflected in options prices. They were the highest in recorded history.

Finance is simply human behavior.

If I think back over the last 10 years, what do I remember?

The European crisis

The US debt downgrade

The Ebola scare

The yuan devaluation

The vol-splosion

All the crazy times. Nobody remembers the stuff in between. Old-timers like me remember all the way back to 1997 and 1998, with the Asian Financial Crisis and LTCM and the Russian debt default. It’s the accidents that help us mark our time in the markets.

Perspective

We all perceive things differently. As I just demonstrated, we all perceive time differently.

We also might perceive color differently—we just don’t know. There is no way to know that the red I see is the red you see.

We all have different perspectives, especially when it comes to financial markets. I might find a stock attractive that you find unattractive. Happens all the time.

A lot of financial analysis is searching for some objective truth in the markets. This is what the value people try to do. They try to identify the correct value of a security and then buy it if it’s underpriced.

But there really is no objective truth in finance—just a set of ever-changing perspectives. Some examples:

Target is up over 90%, year to date:

Is Target’s business 90% better? Is it earning 90% more revenue? Of course not—more people find the stock attractive and fewer find it unattractive.

Pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers is up 48% in the last couple of months:

Again, is their business 50% better? No.

People have created several models to explain stock market behavior. Keynes’s beauty pageant is at the top of the list. I will always catch a beauty pageant if it’s on TV. The goal isn’t picking the most attractive contestant. It’s picking the contestant that the judges will find most attractive. It’s a great exercise.

But I don’t think that’s the right model.

I came up with my own model and gave it to the world on the Bloomberg Opinion page. You can read about it here. But I feel like it’s incomplete, too.

Sentiment also plays a role—big turning points are always at sentiment extremes.

I’m not sure what the answer is—or if there even is an answer. I think about it all the time.  People smarter than me spend even more time thinking about it.

Maybe there is no Grand Unified Theory—maybe there are regimes in the financial markets, and sometimes some things work and sometimes other things work.

Maybe the rules change all the time and there is nothing we can do about it.

I am not even sure buy-and-hold and dollar-cost averaging will work going forward.

And that’s what you learn when you have 20 years of experience—that you actually know nothing.

That said, one thing I do know is that the adrenaline rush reckless traders get throwing money at “hot stocks” is not something to aspire to. It’s much better to even out your odds with a diversified, balanced portfolio and a long-term view.

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Jared Dillian writes The 10th Man, a free weekly newsletter for contrarian investors. Every Thursday, he delivers a torpedo of incisive commentary that crushes consensus thinking and exposes the true workings of “Mr. Market.”  Subscribe now!

[thehighastronomer-blog]

Pigeon poop (and one of the most important pieces of data in cosmology.)

Before I get into this post I need to make a point.  Close your eyes.  Picture every image of the big bang you’ve ever seen in modern media.  I am fairly certain you just saw a bright point of light, then everything flying out of it, into the void.

This is wrong. Terribly, horribly wrong and it leads to a bunch of questions/misconceptions.

What did the big bang expand into?  Nothing. The big bang created the universe, which was itself, which expanded.  There is no way to be “outside” looking in.

Where did the big bang start, like can we point to a place in the sky where everything came from? No. The big bang happened everywhere, all at once.  Again, space ITSELF was created and expanded.  There’s even a clear cut observational explanation for this: we can fairly accurately, using spectral line red shift, figure out the radial velocity (how fast towards or away from us something is flying).  If there WERE a center of the universe, things on the far side would be flying away from us faster than things near us.  But that’s not what the data shows.  Velocity is proportional to distance in all directions. This means either we are the center of the universe and completely static, or that the space between everything on large scales is expanding and everything, including us, is flying away from everything else.

The last part of that image that is wrong is that there was nothing, then there was *stuff* almost immediately afterwards, flying apart.  And this is somewhat reinforced by media on theoretical physics, because really short timescales (10^-36 to 10^-43 seconds) our current understanding of physics breaks down and the “Buy my book to read about my grand theory of everything” authors come out of the woodwork (Looking at you Kaku, Greene, Smolin, et al).  Its an enigma, but the science is largely unsettled.

I want to share a part of the science that IS fairly settled, that goes against the image you have from above, and has an impact on nearly every part of modern cosmology. And it started with pigeon poop.

So, to set the stage, it is the middle of the 1960s.  Big bang cosmology is relatively well accepted, but vital information about the theory (including the value of the expansion rate of the universe, the Hubble Constant) is very much in the air.  Microwave astronomy was nascent, and one of the early tools used in the field was something called a Hogg Horn.  One of these receivers was installed by Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey to help NASA detect passive radio waves from communications satellites.  Our protagonists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were working at Bell with this instrument, and their challenge was to try to pick out this remote, reflected microwave signal from the background. They managed to subtract out every ambient source they could find, from RADAR and radio broadcasts to the thermal radiation of the horn itself (they tried cooling it with liquid hydrogen to 5K). And no matter what they did there was this signal (similar to TV static) that could not be stamped out.

New hypothesis: Pigeons were roosting near the horn, so their droppings must be causing the signal! So they grabbed some mops, and spent a weekend scrubbing it clean.  When the anomaly persisted, they were convinced that they had eliminated all possible sources of error, and therefore the evidence had to be real.  It had to be extraterrestrial in origin, because they had eliminated all local sources.  It had to be extragalactic because it could be detected at all times, from all directions.  Simultaneously, a team of astrophysicists around the corner, in Princeton, were looking for evidence just like this pervasive microwave signal.

At this point I will swing into the modern narrative of that epoch in the universe’s development, as it largely agrees with the work of those researchers.  They got in touch with Penzias and Wilson, and the data matched their predictions to a high degree.  Its notable that both Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel in 1978 for this work, not the researchers (Dicke et al).

In the beginning, the four forces were unified.  Temperatures, pressures, and densities were so high that the format of the equations we use to describe them become symmetrical.  There is no practical difference between gravity and electromagnetism.  Strong and weak nuclear forces.  As the universe expanded in that first 10^-43 seconds enough for gravity to make an early break for the exit, becoming an independent force.  The three forces of the quantum standard model remained unified until later (10^-32 seconds when strong force splits off).  Inflation happens, and inflation is another post in the writing.  By about 10^-12 seconds the weak and EM forces separate.  The energy density is still stupendously high, but this is about as far as the LHC can probe with it’s collisions.  By about 1 second the quark/gluon plasma has cooled enough that things we recognize as hadrons (protons and neutrons) can exist individually. The universe was a plasma, with electrons refusing to get cozy with the hadrons, and critically, photons could not travel far without interacting with something.

The next 300,000ish years were spent in much the same highly ionized state.  The universe, everywhere, was opaque.  If you could somehow travel back in time and park your lawn chair and watch the festivities, besides being cooked to a cinder, you wouldn’t be able to see further than the material immediately in front of you.  The photons were going through Brownian Motion (or as computer scientists call it, the drunkard’s walk) where they travel a short distance, hit something, are absorbed and re-emitted in a random direction.  This happens in the middle of stars in the modern day, and it is why a photon, from creation to emission from the star, can take tens of millions of years.

So at 300,000 years the universe was getting bigger and cooler (the concepts of the ideal gas law are appropriate here), and the electrons decided it was time to settle into a nice hydrogen or helium atom in the suburbs.  The photons were allowed to travel in free space. And they did so, in every direction, all at once, from every point in space.  And this critically hinges on the understanding from above that the big bang was a phenomenon EVERYWHERE.

So what’s the connection to our pigeon-poop horn detecting microwaves?  Doppler shift.  Remember, Hubble established a linear relationship between the distance between distance from us and radial velocity.  Far things are going away from us faster than near things.  And the primary way to measure radial velocity, as I mentioned before, is with Doppler red shift.  If we have light that was emitted very far away (and a long time ago), in the intervening time the space it propagates through will have expanded, and this stretches the light from higher wavelength infra red rays to microwaves. Just at the frequency that Penzias and Wilson were picking up in their horn.

So how best to picture the CMB:  It is an opaque curtain around the entire sky, in every direction, beyond which we can never detect any light (because it was still coupled in the plasma).  As the universe ages, we will still see it, but we will see the particular photons emitted from further away than the points that emitted the photons we see now.

What can it tell us? Seemingly everything.

Hubble was right.  It is a very, very strong line of evidence for the big bang hypothesis.  Steady state universe theories would struggle to explain the sudden release of photons, in every direction, of fairly uniform energy.

Planck was right.   At the turn of the 1900’s people could not seem to match the predictions of the relationship between light frequency and intensity and increasingly precise measurements.  Their error, that Planck started a revolution by overturning, was that light must be emitted in discreet packets, called quanta.  His black body equation matched quite nicely to the data of the day.  At this point, Planck doesn’t need the CMB to chalk up a win, but it IS notable that the frequency vs intensity graph for the CMB matches his theory so precisely, the error bars look more like points than a range of error.  That graph is a beautiful graph.

We can find the age of the universe.  We know that electrons and protons decouple at a minimum temperature of 3000K.  The black body curve of the CMB today is just a copy of the 3000K curve, slid down the EM chart with redshift.  Since Hubble was right about the universe itself expanding, we can infer the distance traveled by the CMB to be around 13.8 billion light years.  Since it was light making that journey, the release happened about 13.8 billion years ago.

We can find our relative motion.  You are on a planet that’s spinning on its axis, orbiting around the sun, moving within the disk of the galaxy AND rotating around the center of the galaxy, and that galaxy is moving within our subsection of the galaxy cluster.  So how do we keep ourselves straight with regard to motion in the universe? The CMB, naturally.  Remember, it is a nearly uniform spectrum covering the entire sky in every direction.  So if we are heading more towards, say, the constellation Leo (which we are, by the way) then the CMB on that side will have a slightly lower redshift than the opposite side of the sky.  You just need to look for two poles in the CMB data where redshift rises to a peak on one side and falls to a low on the other.  

There are some things that it can’t answer, but can inform.  For example, why is there matter? This seems like an obvious question (and again, in honesty deserves its own post) but the laws of physics show absolutely no bias towards matter vs antimatter, yet observationally we can only see matter.  The fact that matter exists is a problem.  And the CMB can put constraints on the type of matter that existed in the early universe, from which we can infer what that opaque soup was like.

The CMB can tell us how the largest scale structures came to be, the superclusters, filaments, and voids. The areas of the CMB that are slightly warmer than average generally correspond to where the “stuff” is, and the cool spots correspond the large voids.  So the structure of the universe 13 billion years later is evidenced by tiny fluctuations in that image.

So that’s what the CMB is. The universe’s first picture, from when it was a baby.  It shows us where we came from, and what our potential future is.

[hennyjolzen]

How did it all get here? And who are we? How did we get here too? What is going on? Why a universe at all? Why stuff? Why stations of consciousness? Why a pebble, an igloo, a croquet ball? Why anything? Why space? Why shape? Why gravity? Why ground? Why heat? Why worlds? Why time? Why matter? Why? Why? Why?How did all this trash and treasure get dropped on everyone's doorstep? How does anything emanate from anything else? How and why did it become this?

And, while I'm at it — why not something else? Something else entirely? Anything else entirely? Why not nothing? Why not nothing forever? Why creatures? Why private views? Why ego identities? Why now? Why should anything wake into radiance? Anteaters, shrews, snakes, wasps, and all the rest — to what purpose?

Everything in this world has a context, in fact many contexts. We deal only in contexts. There are big contexts: hunger, pleasure, survival, sex, shelter, profit, America, Christ died for my sins, romantic love. These drive not only behavior but meaning. Then there are small contexts: putting together a chair from parts, following a soap on TV, playing a chess match, supporting a candidate, an uncle's birthday bash, yoga class, stylish clothing, downtown, the sales and marketing team, the gun collection, plans for a holiday, being a hottie, tickets to a play, losing weight, the World Series, O. J. Simpson, Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian. Money is context, war is context, bribery is context, police are context, the Bloods and Crips are context, jihad is context, mathematics is context, public transportation is context, trying to find a soulmate is context. There are mega-contexts too: mortality, the dead, the universe.

But there is no context for the whole, for the entirety, the state of existence (at least in contemporary American culture). There is no context for us. The closest to a context is God, or matter and energy, or DNA, but that is all outsider buzz. "Being" comes down to what "being" feels like.

Since the human species manifested in the Stone Age, each of its members has been confronted with the same astonishing blaze. Reality in its naked presentation, shining and bristling from within and across proximal space while penetrating absolute space, is flat-out shocking and profound. Realer than a motherfucker! It is more profound than all the profundities conjured by science and philosophy. Along its most deepening seam it is subtler than anything in it. Cars traveling down the street on some planet, probably but not necessarily this one, not even cars, are not profound when viewed by everyday mind; however, in the vast unacknowledged scheme the fact that they exist at all and are piloted in orderly fashion is profound and weird beyond conception.

Scientists now explain the existence of nature (and mind) by equations of heat, entropy, surface tension, binary coding, and differential survival. They scan substance to where its gauze is most distended (the sky), most discrete (the subatomic nucleus), and most quantifiable (the algorithm), as they try to excavate condition and origin. Fat chance!

Philosophers buy this prognosis hook, line, and then some; they extract "being," meaning, and values from it.

Psychologists overlay ego, psyche, personality, and behavior-thermo- dynamic and chemical vectors traveling inside membranes. They replace the philosophical mind with the biological mind and neurotransmission.

Shamans, priests, and clerics set nature under sacred sovereignty. Psychics tune to energies and planes not measurable or acknowledged by science. None of these gets to the bottom of the weirddom.

Among depictions and rationalizations of reality, twenty-first-century upper-tier denizens are most familiar with the West's sanctioned brand: the survival-of-the-fittest, you-only-go-around-once market economy. Their lives occur on its mean streets amid its hemorrhaging urbanization, in progressively more acute cycles of crisis and cataclysm, clinical anxiety and depression, plus urgency in the context of ever dwindling time and possibility, incessant craving for more, endlessly more: more life, more goods, more thrills, more validation, more anything.

In towers and operating rooms of the corporations and academies, professional scientists continue to address reality as a riddle in forensics, a cold trail left in the galactic sky and in the cyclotron of matter, evidence quasi to a crime. Dismissing its phenomenal aspects, they stalk it to the Big Bang and subsequent fusion, fission, and differentiation in stellar cauldrons ignited by the blowout. Comparing indices and refining their assays, they dowse and test the "splatter" in hopes of exposing the weapon used, the nature of an unwarranted slash on the void.

But there is no such smoking gun. The stuff that broke through from beyond time and space is out of play, forever. This is a spill zone not a construction site — everything in it has been used before and as something else. Or not: same difference.

The universe is simply too deep, too old, too frayed, too insouciant to be explained. That is why grand unified theories of All That Is are, to a one, pretexts and vanities. Inquiry is limited to what came after the Big Bang, which is all that we can get at. Just about every item, every primo seed is missing from dossier and file.

Science supposes that creation was merely statutory — no design behind it, no rationale or impulse, no hint of an absentee landlord, only the absence of sufficient obstacles to prevent or impede its splay.

Imagine a malefaction without a motive, that begins with its commission — absolutely — no assets or adjuncts of any kind.

Materiality is the present idol of our manifestation; it guards Entry and Egress; it decrees: "Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me." And we don't.

Creek and Ainu philosophers, Australian Aboriginal elders, Tibetan shamans, and the Aegean cosmologists understood (and still understand) the engine better than do most citizens of modernity — and that includes sophisticated particle physicists. They understood it in the moment and bowed to its omneity: a light arising from darkness, a wind from stillness.

Once upon a time, the universe was sacred and unfathomable by simple emanation. Humans accepted the operations of nature as the mirror and counterpart to their own existence, surrendering to its primacy and innate dignity. They ceded a vast and absolute design and conducted a ceremony whose goal was adoration not interrogation. Before quarks and Big Bangs, they called it Spider Woman and Corn Mother and zoned its tiers by Chameleons, Swimming Turtles, Bouncing-Stick-Player-Toads, and Hyenas' Eggs. These are neither contrivances nor mere fables; they are not raw primitivisms either. They are hard-won intuitions of something before form:

"Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, a disk surrounded by the river Oceanus and floating upon a waste of waters, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind…."

Eros before matter, always. Listen carefully and you will hear the rustle and trickle of an actual universe, an inviolable presence, not a working factory.

"The Ground Squirrel said, ‘I think day and night ought to be divided like the rings on the Coon's tail.'"

Contrast and discrimination-on fur as among the rings of Saturn.

"A very long time ago there was nothing but water. In the east Hurúing Wuhti, the deity of all hard substances, lived in the ocean. Her house was a kiva…. To the ladder leading into the kiva were usually tied a skin of a gray fox and one of a yellow fox. Another Hurúing Wuhti lived in the ocean in the west in a similar kiva, but to her ladder was attached a turtle- shell rattle."  

How was this possible before there were either foxes or turtles? It is because these stories encapsulate construction of a universe of events inside a prior universe of meanings.

"The Sun also existed at that time. Shortly before rising in the east the Sun would dress up in the skin of the gray fox, whereupon it would begin to dawn…."  

This is it! It might slip by as a pretty-boy metonymy if you overlooked its ontological cred: Everything arose from nothing. Concretely and explicitly. This is what it looks like if you peer inside this very minute: gray foxes and self-emanating light.

Viewing electrons, atoms, and chromosomes in the scientific manner as they shape-shift and deliver payloads doesn't alter or encroach upon their identity. For being exposed like a burlesque dancer, a mitochondrion is no less or more immaculate a riddle than it was inside Stone Age hunters. Western reality has no prerogative or supremacy over other brands. It may be the present operating system for modernity on Earth, but its roots are no more rooted, its arising no more fundamental or absolute. No one species's or planet's deposition has primogeniture or is endorsed by the universe. The same claims are made implicitly by the spider and the mouse.  

Through the entitlement of its birth, each entity places its lien on existence. Albert Einstein and a 1930s sea squirt each expressed a sincere and desperate truth, equally confronted the fact of their being and rendered a coherent paradigm of it. They fed the universe's eyes, ears, and brain.

There is Bushman reality, Navaho reality, Aranda reality, Cherokee reality, Xhosa reality. Within each of these sprout countless personal realities. And these barely scratch the surface. Cat reality, snake reality, whale reality, wolf reality, worm reality, bacterial reality all are "real" too.  

The osprey with its wingspan and talons, the owl with its judicious eyes and motion-detecting granules, geese with their star- and sun-maps, were knighted long ago by vanished gods. Currents of air, below and above feathers, fins resisting waves through rippling flow-these are sciences too. "Even the trodden worm…," declared philosopher William James, "contrasts his own suffering self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear conception either of himself or of what the universe may be." Amen, and God have mercy on us all.

Science as we know it is not science anyway, not by standards of worlds or biting Rigel, Antares, and the Dog Star or, if not there, then somewhere. The Big Science of the Milky Way provides an impartial jury for claims of truth by experimenting parties on separate worlds. The Meta-Science of the Universe alone knows everything (or anything) about any thing. Earth Science, endowed by private and corporate interests, offers only space-time audits from the perspective of deputies on one planet in one small capillary.

Alligator crocodile reality, dragonfly damselfly reality, realities on the billions of inhabited planets in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — there are more stars and skies, more heavens and earths than are dreamt of in our philosophies and operas.

Each entity gets born, lives, and dies on the universe's terms, and the universe is one serious mutha. We don't get to choose our own operating system or paradigm indefinitely. The universe owns all paradigms and systems — and it is running a far bigger game than science.

So get off your high horse! Physics is not king of the universe. Earth is not the only game in town. Three dimensions are not the sole platform. Stranger realities arise continually on worlds in other solar systems, close to here and unimaginably far. We know their presences intuitively and unconsciously because, like hydrogen, consciousness is singular — we know them as something else. We know them at all.

Reality is the state in which we participate with everything else in the universe, a living fire that keeps emerging. And again at this next moment, and so on … in every creature in every crack and cranny, every tidepool and volcanic vent.

Yet scientific laws operate with impunity, as if official, as if someone other than us made them up and enforces them, as if they were cast in something more than the breccia of metaphor.

In its act of establishing a jural reality, science has detoured from honest inquiry into institutionalized ideology, using a bogus authority to enforce its sponsors' products. Our bodily existence and minds are now arbitraged in a futures market. Queued into motor pools, creatures are encouraged to trade in existence for algorithms, to refute their own beingness.

What used to be pure scientia — neutral knowledge — is a combo dictator, morality squad, and hanging judge. When doctors confer cures, they must do so under a regime of terror, unacknowledged and reduced to muzak, falsified documents, and profit-and-loss statements. The Fates still decide how, when, and why each creature is born and dies. Clotho spins the thread onto her spindle. Lachesis measures it by her rod. Atropos cuts it with her shears, Charon receives it with a coin in its mouth. By usurping this province, by making DNA the oracle, a Taliban-like authority commands and deludes us (and itself) into thinking it is rolling the dice and cutting the cloth. Meanwhile it recruits us for its jihad: consumers all.

Body-mind is not even the sole frequency of intelligence. Beyond the charm of a matter-on-matter universe, other entities coalesce in untold dimensions of hyperspace. However divergent from our embodiment and shibboleths here, they are sordidly and viscerally real wherever they are because they are rooted in primordial awareness of their own existences and the common substratum from which they are arising. From their perspective today's local blue sky is the ultimate surreal backdrop.

For that matter the Earth is a planet that even we should never have seen, one that we were-yes-forbidden to see.

So I come back to my original question: Why us? Why here? Why now?

Why this gaudy manifestation, each granule, bump, and surly or succulent intent of it? How could you ever take it — your own existence, the warrant of "life"-for granted?

Just look around you at what has formed and stuffed itself into every gap. Witness pure existence arising, creating space and direction, lighting its own canopy, pouring through its own portal, filling the void with objects, shading its own light!

Empty yourself of preconceptions. ‘I don't know what I am. I don't know what this is.' Like the gentleman songsters of the Whiffenpoof, "We are poor little lambs who have lost their way./Baaa, baaa, baaa!"

Let this confession fill your mind, roll across your skin, dilate into your chest and sockets, sink down below your shoulder blades, open your diaphragm, reverberate in your belly and lungs, drop into your genitalia. Answer the unanswerable question by an affirmation at your core.

Sense how deep and thick and omnipresent and sensational the universe is. Feel its silent stream of semblance. Hear its gurgle at a frequency so immediate, scrupulous, explicit, and snug that it is nonexistent. Watch its liquidity flowing from and to everywhere-the ground of yourself filling with a fulgent gleam. How is this possible? How is such an impeccable state of being and knowing allowed?

The moment you let go of your habit addiction, you explode in all directions. An intimidating audit, but not half-bad. At least it is happening at all.

Staring at surf, I am struck by the interplay of gravity, mass, and cohesion under lunar pressure, as rocks carve waves into glyphs.

We are sustained by foam as wide and precisioned as gravity, written by styluses as fine and hieroglyphic as air. What is spelled in our own minds is what was once written dumbly in the sea, in the calls of seabirds, welling up through ganglionic stations into sequestrations of self.

Mind is in constant dialogue with the intelligence of its own formation.

An imperative had to begin somewhere. Each motif indicates a source; otherwise there would be nothing at all.

What Sigmund Freud posited vis à vis dreams — that every entry and instance has an energetic prerequisite necessitating and providing it-is true as well of the waking dream, the simmering fog. Each item exists because it must. And there is no bottom or break to the ring of proxies engendering and sustaining it.

Where else would or could it come from?

Beavers gnaw down trees many times their size, pile up mud, dam rivers, store vegetation in cold houses under snow, patch holes in their dams. The semi-aquatic rodents permit muskrats to co-occupy their underwater huts and eat from their larder-why? From where does the symbol come to render and allow the gift?

Muskrats pay a "rent" of grasses and vines as they swim into and out of the communal refrigerator. Under what compact do the beavers monitor this transit?

What future and eternal meaning is synopsized in the screech, the caw, the yowl? Barking seals, baying hyenas, chittering moles, shrieking gulls — these metabolic packets don't merely provide meanings prior to language. They are meaning. Wild turkeys crossing a field at sunrise are screeching raw existence, intentionality, wonderment, and individuality back to the universe.

North American squirrels, though color-blind, discern a dissimilarity between acorns from red and white oaks, consuming the white ones which, by sprouting before spring, quickly lose their food value, while burying the slower-sprouting red ones for sustenance during late winter.

How does such information, at its every level of designation, get through the cables into molecular space?

In years when there is a shortage of red acorns, those same squirrels munch just enough sludge out of the white acorns to disable their sprouting capacity, and then they bury them.

Australian lyrebirds imitate car alarms, doors opening and closing, men with chainsaws cutting trees. Urban crows drop nuts into traffic in order get them cracked; they select streets with red lights because movement periodically stops there, allowing them to fly down and retrieve the meats unscathed.

Various species of birds pick up twigs in their beaks, then poke with them at grubs in tree trunks, agitating them to move in their dream of succor, to come out and be consumed. Standing in shallow water, other birds make their wings into shade to trick fish to come to the surface.

The symbol is always and ever being born.

[davidsilvercloud]

Terry David “Butch/Butch Naked” Silvercloud

"Step aside!  I shall perform the necessary heroics"  Comic Book Guy/The Simpsons

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T. S. Eliot

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THE DAILY GRIND... ARE WE THERE YET?

Wednesday, 7 Dec., 2017.  Remember Pearl Harbour?

Today is chilly and quite foggy in Vancouver.  I wuz up at 8am and decided to stay up.  Have had a coffee and T3.  Worked on my art, did some exercises, some selfies... been doing more shots of my penis and testicles for some variation... see how many ways I can photograph my dick.

Went over to Commercial Drive about 5pm to buy some pot... 1/2oz for $80 at the Pain Society vending machine.  They sell pot from Vending Machines.  I bout some jar stock special.  They will also weigh out the expensive stuff... from the jars.

I'm in the middle of my hormone replacement cycle and feeling really well.  Hormone replacement is getting a shot of Testosterone every 12 days.  My body has damage and is not making enough on its own.  The therapy works great, for me, but not for everyone.

The trick is finding the right dosage and it varies considerably from person to person.  Not enough and you don't quite 'get there'.  You will know what I mean if you ever do it.  It changes you physically and emotionally.  Because it's a shot, it is a bit wavey... up/down in cycle, but that up/down will be minimal, or not at all if the dosage is 'just enough'.  I find that I need to get a shot a day early, from time to time... 11 days instead of 12 days, because I, physically, can feel the difference and I, definitely, prefer more, not less of the stuff.  The catch is, too much can cause a high red blood cell count which increases blot clot and stroke risks.

If you are a male over 50 years old and experience extensive hair loss on your legs along with festering hair follicles that refuse to grow, or heal, and/or have a lot of skin issues that heal slowly, or not at all, and have impotency issues, new and unusual weight control problems... gaining weight rapidly and easily, you may have a hormone imbalance and should tell your doctor and ask for a hormone spectrum test... test your major hormones such as testosterone and HGH and Cortisone levels.  If they are all off balance you will be referred to an Endocrinologist for more exams, or be prescribed Testosterone.

I have lots of time on my hands... I'm retired and there is no place I have to be and I don't have to go to work.  I don't have much money but I get by.   I'm a retired photographer and love taking photos... experimenting constantly, so I shoot a lot of selfies and will keep doing so while I have the time and desire to keep doing it.  I take a lot of photos and do a lot of naked selfies because I know it attracts attention and views... you want to see my weenie.  I'm always available.  I used to shoot other male nudes when I was much younger but meeting guys is harder now that I'm older.  There are far fewer younger men around, now that the Baby Boom is over.  Most of the population is older men, these days... older people outnumber younger people now.  My interest is in young, fit, men and I have zero interest in photographing men who are not in shape or overweight.  They are of no interest to me.

I have no shame, nor embarrassment about being naked, or showing off my boner.  Sex is a hugely important part of our lives and being sexual is normal.  I promote healthy living, a respect for the beauty of the body, and love the sight of a beautiful male body... look after your body, it's the only one you have.  I know people like seeing my boy parts so, go nuts.  Enjoy and feel free to download and share nude photos of me.  I'll keep shooting nude selfies and other photos and will keep posting them while I'm able to do so.  I'm not getting any younger... I'm 73, now.

THIS IS THE END OF THE DAILY GRIND.

IF YOU HAVEN'T BEEN HERE, BEFORE, HERE IS MORE STUFF TO READ...

I'm a bit OCD and ADHD and go on like a dripping tap.  Think Sheldon Cooper, if that rings some kind of bell.  I quite simply assume everyone around me is a complete idiot.

http://DavidSilvercloud.com (Blog)    (http://David_Silvercloud.Tumblr.com)

http://ButchNews.com (Video)     (http://YouTube.com/ButchNews)

http://ButchNaked.com (Photo Stream)    (http://Flickr.com/David_Silvercloud)

http://SeriousThunder.com (Art)

http://ElectronSpeed.Tumblr.com    

...(Physics... The Speed of Light, Grand Unified Theory, Gravity, Dark Matter, Dark Energy... how the physical size of the Electron is the clock that sets the speed of light.  Gravity is motion and a product of the fact that nothing ever sits still, combined with the magnetic properties of Dark Matter/Energy.  Nothing can ever move in an absolute circle and rest is a relativity illusion.

Absolute rest is not possible... ever.  The universe can not end.  Time is change and is an illusion.  It is always now, everywhere, all at once, all of the time. Proof of that is that ANY object MUST be HERE and THERE at the SAME time, no matter how large... even a Galaxy.  It is always NOW on both sides... here and there, in space,  of the Galaxy... all galaxies, everywhere.  Waves can be either physical or electronic.  The duality of the universe keeps it ongoing.  DNA is the battery of life.  When the chains can no longer co-operate, life ceases in the body.  Life, itself, is a duality.  Time measurement is a relativity convenience.)  Time travel is impossible because time is not a place and nothing stays where it was.  One year from now the Solar System will have moved about seven BILLION kilometres through space and will NEVER return to where it was... ever.

Earth travels through space like a long wave... it has NEVER, ever made an actual circle, nor ellipse, in space.  The circle/ellipse is an illusion of relativity.  Nothing can ever travel in an actual circle in space... NOTHING.  Nothing can ever go backward.  Backwards motion is an illusion of relativity.  Time is a repercussion of change and has no fixed rate... things explode or move like a glacier.  At best we can only compare rates of change.  Our rate of change is called the second/minute/hour/day/month/year system.

NOTHING CAN EVER MOVE IN A TRUE CIRCLE.  THE EARTH HAS NEVER MADE A LOOP IN SPACE... EVER.  YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW.

WATCH VIDEO FOR EXPLANATION OF THE PATH OF EARTH THROUGH SPACE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPjohZCMwmI

Earth moves about 7 billion kilometers through space, each year... in a long wave.  Earth NEVER returns to where it was before.  Earth is NOT an island in space... one of the reasons why time travel is impossible.  If you take a trip through space, outside the Solar System, Earth will NOT be there when you return... it will be far, far away.  You will have to return to where it will BE when you arrive... remember, it's moving very, very, very fast through space in a long wave... never a circle, or ellipse.

http://The-Shape-Of-God.Tumbler.com   Manuscript of my book... The Shape of God.

Butch, himself.  Visual Artist, Photographer, Physicist (Particle, Sub/Atomic Physics/Relativity)

Inhibitions are just so inhibiting, I avoid them.

I'm a friendly, but pretty blunt, kind of guy.  No time for beating around the bush.  I like to say what I mean and mean what I say.  I'm 73 years old.  Time is not on my side.  You don't have to like me.  I'm a social recluse, anyway.  I share my life, in photos, video, and words, to let you into my life and hope to inspire you to be a productive and useful human.  I have old age issues but will continue to post, here, while I'm well and able.  I talk a lot... I'm told it's part of my OCD and ADHD.  Come direct at http://ButchNaked.com  Sign in if you wish to see me naked.

If you don't know me, the following might help you get to know what kind of person I am.  I don't expect you to understand me.  I can be a bit OCD and ADHD.

"They've already got more blowjobs than we'll ever get"  Steve Smith (American Dad), talking about college jocks.

"Now let us touch testicles and mate for life"  Alien on The Simpsons

"It never hurts to have a second set of prints on a gun"  Nelson Muntz, The Simpsons.

I'm here to teach you things.  While I appreciate other people's opinions, I really don't much give a crap what anyone thinks.  Until you prove your worth, I will be nice but you have to earn my respect. The moment you say a word, I'll be figuring you out really, really fast.  You should assume that I don't trust anyone.  I've not met a single trustworthy person in my entire life.  I've met lots of nice people who aren't too bright... well-intentioned folk who know little about anything, people who are nice, most of the time until you say something that offends them.  Honourable people agree to disagree.

Look up the phrase "CRITICAL THINKING" then learn to practice it.  Most people leap before they look and judge before they listen to the facts.  Most don't have enough knowledge, nor experience, to be experts in much of anything.  You don't know what you don't know.  I like to remind you of that, often.

The only other REALLY IMPORTANT thing to know about me is that I, totally, despise all religions, the teaching of religion, and religious institutions... I despise them as the evilest things on the planet.  If you follow a religion, you CAN NOT BE MY FRIEND.   THAT'S THAT.  You are an ignorant idiot who is an ever-present danger to yourself and everyone and everything around you.  Nothing, absolutely NOTHING, is eviler than religion.  I don't stand for, nor sing, our National Anthem because it praises a fictitious and superstitious being called 'God'.  Only a brain dead moron bonehead ignorant idiot would believe such a thing.

If you have a religion, I will not associate with you... period.  You are a danger to be around.  Yes, I insult religions... they are extraordinarily evil.  I said it, I mean it.  You have a right to be an idiot, but not around me.  I have a right to defend myself against the horrors of religion and I will.  Religion is evil.  People who are into religion are, either, brainwashed or extraordinarily ignorant, not very intelligent, a danger to themselves and everyone around them, and must be avoided.  I can't say it enough times.  If you have a religion you are brainwashed or too fucking stupid to associate with.  Brainwashed, or stupid... either way you are too dangerous to be around.  Religion is the number one problem in the world.

http://The-Shape-Of-God.Tumblr.com

I keep a homepage at http://ButchBoard.com

My main video page is http://YouTube.com/ButchNews  go direct at http://ButchNews.com

You may come directly to my photostream at http://ButchNaked.com

I have zero inhibitions about nudity and sex.  You must sign in to see me naked.  I talk, openly, about sex.  You may download and share nude photos of me... go nuts.

GOOGLE my name (Terry David Silvercloud or David Silvercloud) for more information.

[davidsilvercloud]

Terry David “Butch/Butch Naked” Silvercloud

“Step aside!  I shall perform the necessary heroics”  Comic Book Guy/The Simpsons

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” - T. S. Eliot

12.7 Million photo views, to date at http://ButchNaked.com.  Thank you.  At this time I’m getting about 200,000 photo views a week these days.

Again… thanks for the visits.

TELL EVERYONE.  Free photo downloads at http://BUTCHNAKED.COM

http://Flickr.com/David_Silvercloud

“That’s a great title.  It jumps out at you like a rat in your underwear drawer”   Moe Sizlack/The Simpsons

My homepage is http://ButchBoard.com

I’m not your average drop of rain.

“I’ve come to hate my own creation.  Now I know how God feels.”  Homer Simpson

Now keep reading.

THE DAILY GRIND… ARE WE THERE YET?

Be Prepared... Naloxone Training and Kits, British Columbia.  Free. Free is a very good price.

http://www.naloxonetraining.com/

Thursday, 21 Dec. 2017.  Grey and cool in Vancouver.  I wuz up early.  Been painting away, did some selfies, exercises... the regular kind of day.  Went downtown a bit early to buy my Doctor a bottle of liquor for Xmas.  I'm really thankful I have the doctor I have.

"My little Eric can be, sometimes, a bit dramatic"  Eric Cartman's Mother/South Park

“it’s time to go home.  The insurance company said you’re as well as they’re going to pay for” Doctor Hibbert/The Simpsons THIS IS THE END OF THE DAILY GRIND.

"He who controls the stuffing, controls the Universe."  Alien Pilgrim transported through a worm hole to Earth/South Park.

IF YOU HAVEN’T BEEN HERE, BEFORE, HERE IS MORE STUFF TO READ…

"People who have never seen a movie say it's a great movie"  Apu/The Simpsons

"There is no God, Ned.  It's just an empty meaningless void"  Maude Flanders' ghost/The Simpsons

I repeat myself, a lot, because I know humans are really bad at paying attention, and understanding much of anything they read.  Quite, bluntly, I consider most humans to be walking, talking idiots.  I'm doing as best I know how to save you from your stupidity.

I’m a bit OCD and ADHD and go on, and on, like a dripping tap.  Think Sheldon Cooper, if that rings some kind of bell.  I gather it’s some kind of need I have to be, constantly, in complete control of everything.  I quite simply assume everyone around me is a complete idiot.  The humans aren’t doing a very good job of convincing me otherwise.  You must prove yourself to me.  Seriously, I mean it.  I expect to be disappointed.   Show me what you’ve got and back it up with proof.

http://DavidSilvercloud.com (Blog)    (http://David_Silvercloud.Tumblr.com)

http://ButchNews.com (Video)     (http://YouTube.com/ButchNews)

http://ButchNaked.com (Photo Stream)    (http://Flickr.com/David_Silvercloud)

http://SeriousThunder.com (Art)

http://ElectronSpeed.Tumblr.com     The Electron sets the speed of light… yup.  Physics… The Speed of Light, Grand Unified Theory, Gravity, Dark Matter, Dark Energy… how the physical size of the Electron is the clock that sets the speed of light.  Gravity is motion and a product of the fact that nothing ever sits still, combined with the magnetic properties of Dark Matter/Energy.  Nothing can ever move in an absolute circle and rest is a relativity illusion.

The ENTIRE universe is based upon a simple fact... it must have TWO parts.  It can not be otherwise and is impossible to be otherwise.  This is because of what a physicist calls "spin".

If you had only one substance to make the universe with and it could be broken down to as small as it needed to be at any time... i.e. it could be so small it barely exists, at all, there will STILL be TWO different types... that is because one can choose to spin LEFT or RIGHT in space.  Even turning yourself upside down will not change that fact because there is no up, nor down, in space.

The fact that everything SOLID must have spin, either left or right, introduces opposite forces.  Things which spin the SAME way repel each other, those that spin the OPPOSITE way attract each other... clumping begins and so does a universe.  Another thing comes into being... what we term magnetism.  There MUST be opposite POLES... magnetism comes into being with spin.  Spin creates opposites, including North/South polarity.  In Atoms, any atom that isn't in balance... has an equal number of left and right spinning Electrons, will be affected by magnetism... and radio waves.

Absolute rest is not possible… ever.  The universe can not end.  Time is change and is an illusion.  It is always now, everywhere, all at once, all of the time. Proof of that is that ANY object MUST be HERE and THERE at the SAME time, no matter how large… even a Galaxy.  It is always NOW on both sides… here and there, in space,  of the Galaxy… all galaxies, everywhere.  Waves can be either physical or electronic.  The duality of the universe keeps it ongoing.  DNA is the battery of life.  When the chains can no longer co-operate, life ceases in the body.  Life, itself, is a duality.  Time measurement is a relativity convenience.)  Time travel is impossible because time is not a place and nothing stays where it was.  One year from now the Solar System will have moved about seven BILLION kilometres through space and will NEVER return to where it was… ever.

Earth travels through space like a long wave… it has NEVER, ever made an actual circle, nor ellipse, in space.  The circle/ellipse is an illusion of relativity.  Nothing can ever travel in an actual circle in space… NOTHING.  Nothing can ever go backward.  Backwards motion is an illusion of relativity.  Time is a repercussion of change and has no fixed rate… things explode or move like a glacier.  At best we can only compare rates of change.  Our rate of change is called the second/minute/hour/day/month/year system.

NOTHING CAN EVER MOVE IN A TRUE CIRCLE.  THE EARTH HAS NEVER MADE A LOOP IN SPACE… EVER.  YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW.

WATCH VIDEO FOR EXPLANATION OF THE PATH OF EARTH THROUGH SPACE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPjohZCMwmI

Earth moves about 7 billion kilometers through space, each year… in a long wave.  Earth NEVER returns to where it was before.  Earth is NOT an island in space… one of the reasons why time travel is impossible.  If you take a trip through space, outside the Solar System, Earth will NOT be there when you return… it will be far, far away.  You will have to return to where it will BE when you arrive… remember, it’s moving very, very, very fast through space in a long wave… never a circle, or ellipse.

http://The-Shape-Of-God.Tumbler.com   Manuscript of my book… The Shape of God.

Butch, himself.  Visual Artist, Photographer, Physicist (Particle, Sub/Atomic Physics/Relativity) Inhibitions are just so inhibiting, I avoid them.

I’m a friendly, but pretty blunt, kind of guy.  No time for beating around the bush.  I like to say what I mean and mean what I say.  I’m 73 years old.  Time is not on my side.  You don’t have to like me.  I’m a social recluse, anyway.  I share my life, in photos, video, and words, to let you into my life and hope to inspire you to be a productive and useful human.  I have old age issues but will continue to post, here, while I’m well and able.  I talk a lot… I’m told it’s part of my OCD and ADHD.  Come direct at http://ButchNaked.com  Sign in if you wish to see me naked.

If you don’t know me, the following might help you get to know what kind of person I am.  I don’t expect you to understand me.  I can be a bit OCD and ADHD.

“They’ve already got more blowjobs than we’ll ever get”  Steve Smith (American Dad), talking about college jocks.

“Now let us touch testicles and mate for life”  Alien on The Simpsons

“It never hurts to have a second set of prints on a gun”  Nelson Muntz, The Simpsons.

I’m here to teach you things.  While I appreciate other people’s opinions, I really don’t much give a crap what anyone thinks.  Until you prove your worth, I will be nice but you have to earn my respect. The moment you say a word, I’ll be figuring you out really, really fast.  You should assume that I don’t trust anyone.  I’ve not met a single trustworthy person in my entire life.  I’ve met lots of nice people who aren’t too bright… well-intentioned folk who know little about anything, people who are nice, most of the time until you say something that offends them.  Honourable people agree to disagree.

Look up the phrase “CRITICAL THINKING” then learn to practice it.  Most people leap before they look and judge before they listen to the facts.  Most don’t have enough knowledge, nor experience, to be experts in much of anything.  You don’t know what you don’t know.  I like to remind you of that, often.

The only other REALLY IMPORTANT thing to know about me is that I, totally, despise all religions, the teaching of religion, and religious institutions… I despise them as the evilest things on the planet.  If you follow a religion, you CAN NOT BE MY FRIEND.   THAT’S THAT.  You are an ignorant idiot who is an ever-present danger to yourself and everyone and everything around you.  Nothing, absolutely NOTHING, is eviler than religion.  I don’t stand for, nor sing, our National Anthem because it praises a fictitious and superstitious being called ‘God’.  Only a brain dead moron bonehead ignorant idiot would believe such a thing.

If you have a religion, I will not associate with you… period.  You are a danger to be around.  Yes, I insult religions… they are extraordinarily evil.  I said it, I mean it.  You have a right to be an idiot, but not around me.  I have a right to defend myself against the horrors of religion and I will.  Religion is evil.  People who are into religion are, either, brainwashed or extraordinarily ignorant, not very intelligent, a danger to themselves and everyone around them, and must be avoided.  I can’t say it enough times.  If you have a religion you are brainwashed or too fucking stupid to associate with.  Brainwashed, or stupid… either way you are too dangerous to be around.  Religion is the number one problem in the world.

http://The-Shape-Of-God.Tumblr.com

I keep a homepage at http://ButchBoard.com

My main video page is http://YouTube.com/ButchNews   go direct at http://ButchNews.com

You may come directly to my photostream at http://ButchNaked.com You may download and share nude photos of me… go nuts.

I have zero inhibitions about nudity and sex.  You must sign in to see me naked.  I talk, openly, about sex.  You may download and share nude photos of me… go nuts.

"Wow!  THAT had what I really like in a story... an ending."  Homer Simpson.

[davidsilvercloud]

The Daily Grind, 28 Nov. 2017

Terry David “Butch/Butch Naked” Silvercloud

"Step aside!  I shall perform the necessary heroics"  Comic Book Guy/The Simpsons

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T. S. Eliot

....... The DAILY GRIND.....  what's up today.

11.5 Million photo views, to date at http://ButchNaked.com.  Thank you.  At this time I'm getting about 100,000 photo views a week.  Again... thanks for the visits.  Tell everyone.

My homepage is http://ButchBoard.com

Now keep reading.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced an official apology, in the House of Commons,  to the LGBTQ community and all those who were affected by a secret government campaign to seek out and kick out homosexuals from the government services from the 1950's to the 1990's.

I left the Navy, in 1968, because I couldn't reveal that I was gay.  I was a trained submariner and a Lieutenant in the Canadian Forces.  I had signed on for seven years but was offered a discharge when they found out I wasn't taking the permanent commission they had offered to me several times.  They paid me the agreed upon separation payment of seven months pay and allowances and an honourable discharge, after having Military Police track me and try to frame me for being seen in areas unbecoming an officer.  I told them I would see them in court.  They backed off and got real nice.

I've done video of Justin Trudeau...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsCR3hutjuk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVL6g2lpUbc

Tuesday, 28 Nov., 2017.  I wuz up about 7:30am.  Cool, grey and wet out there and starting to get bright.  I had a T3 and watched the news and wrote a bit.  Went back to bed around 10:30am and slept for another couple of hours.  Now it's 1:30pm.

Had a regular kind of day... painting, coffee, smoking pot, watching TV, exercise, selfies.  I fucked my sex toy around 6pm and had a shower after I blew my load.  Headed downtown about 6:30pm to get online.

Sorry for any typos or spelling errors.  My ASUS Transformer doesn't have spell check and my near eyesight is the shits,  and I'm a terrible speller.  Turns out geeks can be good with numbers and ideas, but terrible spellers.  I moved a lot when young... different schools, so my spelling skills suck.  I've been working hard to improve them the past 30 years.  My grammar is excellent... just can't spell well.

I hate being old...never did like getting older.  I'm one of those people who always looked about 10-15 years younger than they are, and I tended to associate with people in their late teens or early 20's most of my life.  The reality is I didn't socialize a lot... I had a boyfriend and I'm not a party and play kind of person, nor do I enjoy drinking, so bars and clubs were never something I cared for.  Most people I knew were very casual acquaintances, not close friends.  I was surrounded by drinkers and smokers and I don't do either.  I smoke a ton of pot... about 1 1/2 oz a month.

My boyfriend died in 1994 and it's been pretty lonely since then.  I've not found any way around that.  I still find most adults extremely ignorant and immature, or just plain stupid... dumb as a fucking rock.  So I keep to myself.  I no longer have any quite young friends... they grew up and moved on, or died from sickness or accident.  I've found that, since I began looking more my age... that age discrimination is rampant and I don't much fit in anywhere, now.  So, here I am, in my 74th year trying to keep busy and useful and amusing.  I tire more easily but expect you won't be able to keep up with me and I don't wait up.  I like being in charge and the boss... get used to it, you'll be much happier when you do.

Not sure how much longer I'll keep doing the selfie thing and blogging.  I take things one day at a time now.

Personal possessions are important.  Owning some nice 'stuff' makes one feel more secure and provides some personal pleasures.  What is important is to live within one's means and to realize that possessions will not bring happiness by themselves.  That said, possessions help.  I have a few things that mean a lot to me... I really enjoy looking at them and having them and would feel very empty and betrayed if I lost them.  We work hard to gain what we have and should not take it for granted and we should dismiss the boneheads who say possessions don't matter as brain dead idiots.

Humans have advanced because of trade and barter.  We can't make or produce everything, and we can't trade for everything, so the invention of debt and money came into being.  Money and debt are related... the note is a promise to pay/receive an agreed upon value... but you never do.  You just trade the piece of paper to somebody else who ads it to their promises to pay.  It's a very useful and progressive idea.  Like all ideas, it's prone to abuse and smart people who take advantage.

Money may not buy happiness, but it definitely makes life better.  Poor totally sucks.

Money came into being a long time ago as coins.  Paper money was more dependent upon the invention of the Indian number system... from India, the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc. that we know today.  They were introduced to the west by the Knights Templar who discovered that number system and used it in their secret notes after the 12th century.  One could deposit one's cash at a Templar temple in exchange for a note written with secret numbers (the ones we know today) then go on Crusade to Jerusalem and exchange the note for cash there... avoiding robbery on the way to the Crusade.

Trade is changing rapidly, again.  Online shopping is outpacing mortar and brick stores.  I mention this because shopping took a big turn in style about 100 years ago... in the late 1800's and the early 1900's.  The store that made the largest impact was the department store, in London, called Selfridges.  When it opened it was a TOTAL revolution in retailing.  Even today there are reminders of how department stores can be successful.  Selfridges catered to women's shopping... something new in those days.  Women, suddenly, had in store washrooms, and the main floor and entrance to the store were totally devoted to perfumes and make-up.  Walk into any large department store, today, and you will see that the formula is still being followed.  Also, the idea of store displays was invented by Selfridges.... the customer could, actually, touch the merchandise.  Selfridges was the first department store to pay a high enough wage that the poorer employees didn't have to room and board IN THE STORE.  Yup.. employees actually slept and ate at the stores, before Selfridges.

Meanwhile, don't fret about acquiring possessions.  Life is very, very short and you should attempt to enjoy it.  Just remember that you don't need everything.  Possessions will not take away loneliness.  Old man Selfridge, after becoming immensely wealthy, lost it all to twins... the Dolly Sisters.  They bled him dry with their gambling debts when he was in his 70's and lonely.  He lost the store, his fortune, and died a poor man.  The Selfridge Department store is still doing well and in the hands of the Weston Family of Canada.

He had it all... and lost it.  When you arrive you don't get to stay.  Possessions have to be protected and cared for.  Life is hard.

THIS IS THE END OF THE DAILY GRIND.

IF YOU HAVEN'T BEEN HERE, BEFORE, HERE IS MORE STUFF TO READ...

I'm a bit OCD and ADHD and go on like a dripping tap.  Think Sheldon Cooper, if that rings some kind of bell.  I quite simply assume everyone around me is a complete idiot.

http://DavidSilvercloud.com (Blog)    (http://David_Silvercloud.Tumblr.com)

http://ButchNews.com (Video)     (http://YouTube.com/ButchNews)

http://ButchNaked.com (Photo Stream)    (http://Flickr.com/David_Silvercloud)

http://SeriousThunder.com (Art)

http://ElectronSpeed.Tumblr.com (Physics... The Speed of Light, Grand Unified Theory, Gravity, Dark Matter, Dark Energy... how the physical size of the Electron is the clock that sets the speed of light.  Gravity is motion and a product of the fact that nothing ever sits still, combined with the magnetic properties of Dark Matter/Energy.  Nothing can ever move in an absolute circle and rest is a relativity illusion.

Absolute rest is not possible... ever.  The universe can not end.  Time is change and is an illusion.  It is always now, everywhere, all at once, all of the time. Proof of that is that ANY object MUST be HERE and THERE at the SAME time, no matter how large... even a Galaxy.  It is always NOW on both sides... here and there, in space,  of the Galaxy... all galaxies, everywhere.  Waves can be either physical or electronic.  The duality of the universe keeps it ongoing.  DNA is the battery of life.  When the chains can no longer co-operate, life ceases in the body.  Life, itself, is a duality.  Time measurement is a relativity convenience.)  Time travel is impossible because time is not a place and nothing stays where it was.  One year form now the Solar System will have moved about seven BILLION kilometres through space and will NEVER return to where it was... ever.

Earth travels through space like a long wave... it has NEVER, ever made an actual circle, nor ellipse, in space.  The circle/ellipse is an illusion of relativity.  Nothing can ever travel in an actual circle in space... NOTHING.  Nothing can ever go backward.  Backwards motion is an illusion of relativity.  Time is a repercussion of change and has no fixed rate... things explode or move like a glacier.  At best we can only compare rates of change.  Our rate of change is called the second/minute/hour/day/month/year system.

WATCH VIDEO FOR EXPLANATION OF THE PATH OF EARTH THROUGH SPACE.  Earth moves about 7 billion kilometers through space, each year... in a long wave.  Earth NEVER returns to where it was before.  Earth is NOT an island in space... one of the reasons why time travel is impossible.  If you take a trip through space, outside the Solar System, Earth will NOT be there when you return... it will be far, far away.  You will have to return to where it will BE when you arrive... remember, it's moving very, very, very fast through space in a long wave... never a circle, or ellipse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPjohZCMwmI

http://The-Shape-Of-God.Tumbler.com   Manuscript of my book... The Shape of God.

Butch, himself.  Visual Artist, Photographer, Physicist (Particle, Sub/Atomic Physics/Relativity)

Inhibitions are just so inhibiting, I avoid them.

I'm a friendly, but pretty blunt, kind of guy.  No time for beating around the bush.  I like to say what I mean and mean what I say.  I'm 73 years old.  Time is not on my side.  You don't have to like me.  I'm a social recluse, anyway.  I share my life, in photos, video, and words, to let you into my life and hope to inspire you to be a productive and useful human.  I have old age issues but will continue to post, here, while I'm well and able.  I talk a lot... I'm told it's part of my OCD and ADHD.  Come direct at http://ButchNaked.com  Sign in if you wish to see me naked.

If you don't know me, the following might help you get to know what kind of person I am.  I don't expect you to understand me.  I can be a bit OCD and ADHD.

"They've already got more blowjobs than we'll ever get"  Steve Smith (American Dad), talking about college jocks.

"Now let us touch testicles and mate for life"  Alien on The Simpsons

"It never hurts to have a second set of prints on a gun"  Nelson Muntz, The Simpsons.

I'm here to teach you things.  While I appreciate other people's opinions, I really don't much give a crap what anyone thinks.  Until you prove your worth, I will be nice but you have to earn my respect. The moment you say a word, I'll be figuring you out really, really fast.  You should assume that I don't trust anyone.  I've not met a single trustworthy person in my entire life.  I've met lots of nice people who aren't too bright... well-intentioned folk who know little about anything, people who are nice, most of the time until you say something that offends them.  Honourable people agree to disagree.

Look up the phrase "CRITICAL THINKING" then learn to practice it.  Most people leap before they look and judge before they listen to the facts.  Most don't have enough knowledge, nor experience, to be experts in much of anything.  You don't know what you don't know.  I like to remind you of that, often.

The only other REALLY IMPORTANT thing to know about me is that I, totally, despise all religions, the teaching of religion, and religious institutions... I despise them as the evilest things on the planet.  If you follow a religion, you CAN NOT BE MY FRIEND.   THAT'S THAT.  You are an ignorant idiot who is an ever-present danger to yourself and everyone and everything around you.  Nothing, absolutely NOTHING, is eviler than religion.  I don't stand for, nor sing, our National Anthem because it praises a fictitious and superstitious being called 'God'.  Only a brain dead moron bonehead ignorant idiot would believe such a thing.

If you have a religion, I will not associate with you... period.  You are a danger to be around.  Yes, I insult religions... they are extraordinarily evil.  I said it, I mean it.  You have a right to be an idiot, but not around me.  I have a right to defend myself against the horrors of religion and I will.  Religion is evil.  I can't say it enough times.

http://The-Shape-Of-God.Tumblr.com

I keep a homepage at http://ButchBoard.com

You may come directly to my photostream at http://ButchNaked.com

You must sign in to see me naked.  You may download and share nude photos of me... go nuts.

GOOGLE my name (Terry David Silvercloud or David Silvercloud) for more information.