Portland Proud

Homeless tents along the strand. The trash as repulsive as the social emergency it represents.

Graffiti along the highway. Tagging all of us with anger and despair.

 

Storefront windows smashed for ? 

Portland’s answer? Tax the ‘rich’ exclusively to throw money at it all by having the public vote for a tax 98% of them will not have to pay - metro's supportive housing services program. Oh well Portland, let me wipe my tears of awe at your generosity and giving - of other people’s money.

Meanwhile please keep pretending you actually care. 

Our homeless, the trash and disarray, our graffiti, our broken store front windows, police brutality, government indifference, and our willingness to force others to pay for it are all reminders of societal decay. We are losing a sense of community, compassion, yes even I dare say it - pride. Hard to feel prideful when marginalized, and when you know few care. 

Let the ‘rich’ pay for it so beautifully exemplifies what is increasingly becoming a narcissistic, compassionless society. 

Portland Proud 

Love Uncomparable

Love is neither hierarchal or comparable for that implies two dimensionality. Love is multidimensional, each and ever instance unique, a world unto itself. And beautiful.

Is This Some Sort of Joke?

If you took all eight billion people in the world and removed all the space inside and outside their atoms, forming a single cube, what size would it be? Something slightly larger than a sugar cube.

When you sit down on a chair you feel the chair's hardness pressing on your clothes and your clothes pressing on your skin. Well, no. Your clothe's atoms do not actually touch the chair's or your skin's atoms / you are never really in direct contact with any of it.

Your vision is limited to a tiny part of the entire electromagnetic energy spectrum - what we call light. If we could see the entire spectrum or even just infrared or ultraviolet, our 'reality’ would be completely different from what we experience now, we would be completely different from what we are now.

We exist in at least a four dimensional space/time universe but our brains are incapable of directly experiencing that.

We live in a universe so large and so old and so full of things that our brains are incapable of truly comprehending. Visualize a billion. Can't. A billion years, a billion miles, a billion suns - we simply can't do it. Visualize a trillion atoms that never touch, all grouped into you. Can't.

We live in a universe with a speed limit - 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light - nothing can travel faster than that. On even just a galactic scale that is painfully slow, let alone on a universal one. The nearest sun with planets (stellar system) to us is 4.3 light years away, Alpha Centauri. A light year is the distance light travels in a year at 186,000 miles per second. Sending a radio message at the speed of light to Alpha Centauri would require 8.6 years for an answer to our hello. The fastest manmade object ever to have left the earth would take hundreds of thousands of years to arrive there. Unless we find a way to circumvent the limitations of the speed of light to travel vast distances we have no hope of exploring even nearby stars let alone the 100 billion just in our galaxy alone. Intergalactic travel? The nearest galaxy to ours is Canis Major dwarf - a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way - is 25,000 light years away.

We were clearly designed to survive the plains of Africa. We did a good job of that. But we are clearly not designed to fully experience, or fully comprehend on a gut level, our universe. It appears we can't even explore or colonize beyond our solar system. Are we doomed then to only gaze outward, trapped in this tiny speck of space isolated from nearly everything else, limited by brains and senses meant for earth, knowing we can never experience almost all that there is - our universe - directly - or even fully comprehend it?

Why then did intelligence powerful enough to be able to come to realize that, even evolve?

Is this some sort of joke?

Intelligence For Dummies

Neil DeGrass Tyson recently confessed that he wonders at times if humans are smart enough to figure out the universe.

Sounds like an argument to augment human intelligence to me.

Rapist Dumb Dumb

An ex-president found guilty of sexual abuse and liable. The jury had three choices: rape, sexual abuse, and forcible touching. To choose sexual abuse means they believed Trump raped her but since there was no physical evidence they went with sexual abuse. 

Rapist

He is also dumb. He just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Had he just kept quiet she would not have sued him for liable. 

Dumb

As is his latest CNN outburst, again calling her a liar even after the verdict. She can sue him again for this latest liable. And again, and again, and again, until he figures out he needs to get himself under control. 

Dumb 

Oh yea Trump supporters a lying rapist who cant control himself, can’t shut up. Great choice for the leader of the free world. 👍🏻

Occam's Razor and Multiverses

Our universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. We have no idea why. To explain it we have had to add in dark energy and dark matter to our description of the universe - inventions to explain observation.

Dark energy comprises about 68% of all the mass-energy of the universe. Dark matter is 32%, with normal matter - everything we are and have experienced - comprising only 4% of all the mass energy of our universe.

To explain the accelerating expansion of the universe scientists have invented dark energy as a repulsive force exerting a negative pressure contributing to Tμν, the stress-energy tensor, and behaving as a force against gravity - causing the universe to expand. It is 68% of all the mass-energy of the universe and yet we really have no idea what it is.

Several leading theories include the vacuum energy of space - space/time expands as a result of particles popping in and out of existence in empty space. Some think an extra-force in addition to the four described by the standard model of physics- gravity, weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism — the so called "fifth force" - is responsible.

Others have proposed a low-energy field dubbed "quintessence," or fields of tachyons  —  hypothetical particles that travel faster than light and thus back in time, or that dark energy results from the decay of ‘dark’ matter particles called erebons causing them to emit a form of energy that is driving the expansion, or it is a remnant energy that made it through previous iterations of our universe, among other ideas.

With all of these theories abandoning or at least significantly altering the standard model of physics is required. But there is one explanation that does not.

Dark energy is not energy at all - rather it is geometrical distortion of our space-time by forces lying outside of our universe. Our universe exists in a multiverse and our nearest multiverse neighbors - external universes to us - are pulling our universe outwards in all directions at once.

If we are to follow Occam's razor - of all the theories put forth to date - this seems the simplest. And if true it gives us a window to study the multiverse, something that exists outside our own universe. Pretty cool.

Multiverses and Balloons

Our universe is expanding. That expansion is accelerating. To explain this we look within our universe and say there must be some sort of repulsive energy we do not understand that is causing this expansion = dark energy. 

I am drawn to the word expansion. I think there is a big clue here. Our universe is expanding - into what? 

I’d guess into a multiverse containing other universes. Furthermore I’d suggest our multiverse neighbors are acting on our universe in a manner that is causing it to stretch outward in all directions. 

If true then “dark energy” is really geometrical distortion -resulting from the effects of extra-universe forces. 

As example imagine our universe is a balloon floating in the middle of a room. The pressure in the balloon is the same as outside it, and therefore the balloon is static - neither expanding or contracting.  

Now imagine the air in the room outside the balloon is being withdrawn at an ever increasing rate causing the pressure surrounding the balloon to drop. The balloon would then expand at an ever increasing rate, everywhere, into something we could not directly experience.

Since we could not directly experience what is occurring outside of our balloon universe we would look for repulsive energy within - our dark energy - to explain our expansion.  But in reality our universe would be expanding due to changes occurring outside of our universe = no dark energy required. 

If true, despite not being able to experience anything outside our universe,  we could still detect the effects a multiverse has on our universe - telling us a great deal about the nature and structure of the multiverse, and explaining our own expansion.