Time and a Word

In the morning when you rise,
Do you open up your eyes, see what I see?
Do you see the same things every day?
Do you think of a way to start the day
Getting things in proportion?
Spread the news and help the world go ’round.
Have you heard of a time that will help us get it together again?
Have you heard of the word that will stop us going wrong?
Well, the time is near and the word you’ll hear
When you get things in perspective.
Spread the news and help the word go round.

There’s a time and the time is now and it’s right for me,
It’s right for me, and the time is now.
There’s a word and the word is love and it’s right for me,
It’s right for me, and the word is love.

Have you heard of a time that will help get it together again?
Have you heard of the word that will stop us going wrong?
Well, the time is near and the word you’ll hear
When you get things in perspective.
Spread the news and help the word go round.

There’s a time and the time is now and it’s right for me,
It’s right for me, and the time is now.
There’s a word and the word is love and it’s right for me,
It’s right for me, and the word is love.

– Jon Anderson, David Foster

Ten Million Years

Not taking into account the first 1,000,000 years, the following events make up a very brief overview of the next 10,000,000 years:

• [+1,450,000] Galactic Near Miss: The star Gliese 710 will pass about 1.1 light years from the Sun. Close enough to perturb the Oort cloud, triggering penetration of comets into the inner solar system.
• [+4,000,000] Pioneer 11: The probe will pass the Lambda Aquilea system, 125 light years from Earth.
• [+5,000,000] Men Extinct: The Y chromosome will have weakened to the point of crumbling – making men impossible.
• [+7,200,000] Mount Rushmore: Mount Rushmore will have eroded away.
• [+8,400,000] LAGEOS Re-entry: The satellite’s orbits are programmed to decay and re-enter Earth’s atmosphere carrying messages and maps to future descendents of humanity.
• [+10,000,000] New Ocean: The Red Sea will flood, dividing the continent of Africa.
• [+10,000,000] Earth Irradiated: Star T Pyxidi, 3,260 light years away goes supernova. Close enough to bathe the planet with gamma radiation, triggering mass extinctions.

See other: Events of the Far Future

Power of Prophecy

‘Christians regularly assert that the Bible predicts future historical events. For instance, Deuteronomy 28:64 says, “And the LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other.” Jesus says, in Luke 19:43-44, “For the days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time of your visitation.” We are meant to believe that these utterances predict the subsequent history of the Jews with such uncanny specificity so as to admit of only a supernatural explanation.

But just imagine how breathtakingly specific a work of prophecy would be, if it were actually the product of omniscience. If the Bible were such a book, it would make perfectly accurate predictions about human events. You would expect it to contain a passage such as “In the latter half of the twentieth century, humankind will develop a globally linked system of computers—the principles of which I set forth in Leviticus—and this system shall be called the Internet.” The Bible contains nothing like this. In fact, it does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century. This should trouble you. […]

Why doesn’t the Bible say anything about electricity, or about DNA, or about the actual age and size of the universe? What about a cure for cancer? When we fully understand the biology of cancer, this understanding will be easily summarized in a few pages of text. Why aren’t these pages, or anything remotely like them, found in the Bible? Good, pious people are dying horribly from cancer at this very moment, and many of them are children. The Bible is a very big book. God had room to instruct us in great detail about how to keep slaves and sacrifice a wide variety of animals. To one who stands outside the Christian faith, it is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.’

– Harris. S. 2006. Letter To A Christian Nation p. 20

On Control

“To control your cow, give it a bigger pasture.”

– Roshi Suzuki

Speak to us of Beauty

‘And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.

People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.’

– Gibran. K. 1923. De Profeet [The Prophet] Den Haag, The Netherlands: Mirananda (2000) p. 72-73

25/vi mmxv

The Amarekaire cannibals of Peru have 17 distinct recipes for cooking a human head.

Charismata is the plural of charisma.

In the King James Bible, Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first word is shake and the 46th word from the last word is spear. It is an homage to England’s foremost man of letters; the King James translation was finished in the year of Shakespeare’s 46th birthday.

Before mating, the female giraffe will first urinate in the male’s mouth.

In 2009, a retired policeman called Geraint Woolford was admitted to Abergale Hospital in north Wales and ended up next to another retired policeman called Geraint Woolford. The men weren’t related, had never met and were the only two people in the UK called Geraint Woolford.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

Benefits of Hunter-gathering

‘So fifteen thousand years ago, humans were foragers and hunters. Foraging meant gathering fruits, nuts, also wild grains and grasses; hunting allowed for a more protein-rich diet, so long as you could find something with meat to kill.

By far the best hunting gig in the pre-historic world, incidentally, was fishing, which is one of the reasons that if you look at history of people populating the planet, we tended to run for the shore and then stay there. Marine life was A) abundant, and B) relatively unlikely to eat you.

While we tend to think that the life of foragers were nasty, brutish and short, fossil evidence suggests that they actually had it pretty good: their bones and teeth are healthier than those of agriculturalists. And anthropologists who’ve studied the remaining forager peoples have noted that they actually spend a lot fewer hours working than the rest of us, and they spend more time on art, music, and storytelling. Also, if you believe the classic of anthropology, Nisa, they also have a lot more time for [sex].[1][2] […]

It’s worth noting that cultivation of crops seems to have risen independently over the course of millennia in a number of places – from Africa to China to the Americas – using crops that naturally grew nearby: rice in Southeast Asia, maize in in Mexico, potatoes in the Andes, wheat in the Fertile Crescent, yams in West Africa.

People around the world began to abandon their foraging for agriculture. And since so many communities made this choice independently, it must have been a good choice, right? Even though it meant less music and [sex].’

– Green. J. (2012, January 26) The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1

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[1] Shostak. M. (2002) “Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman”.

[2] John Green refers to sexual intercourse here as ‘skoodilypooping’, further stating “What? I call it skoodilypooping. I’m not gonna apologize.” The authors unanimously oppose the use of this icky euphemism and have therefore removed the term; in doing so, the authors have replaced it with the common epithet ‘sex’.

Ramification [Noun.]

A branching out, an offshoot of a decision, fact et cetera; a consequence or implication, especially one which complicates a situation.

Also consider the verb ramify which means ‘to divide into branches or subdivisions; or figuratively speaking, to spread or diversify into multiple fields or categories’.