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Kurt on climate change

America has produced humorists, literary giants and all and I think Kurt Vonnegut must be included in that pantheon. In A man without a country, he writes

I don’t know if there are men on the moon, but if there are, they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum.

He continues to write

We are killing this planet as a life support system with the poisons [] and practically nobody cares. I think the planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of us with AIDS and new strains of flu and tuberculosis and so on. I think the planet should get rid of us.

But it is the epitaph that I find most beautiful

The good Earth- we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.

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news from here and there

this weekend i discovered how unfit i have become after riding 190km of the 240km I had set to do when I woke up on Saturday morning. The ride was to take me from Nairobi to Meru but my legs kinda gave up at https://www.strava.com/activities/3121547435/embed/745532c392192c46d4fd392eb98c9c869c7c321f“>Runyenjes then I rode back to Embu and took a van back to Nairobi.

In other news, race science seems to be back on the limelight.

When will the Amish see the light?

Have a pleasant week everyone and keep fit. It’s good for the sack and all.

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about time

by Paul Davies

I finished reading this book. I think it had been suggested by Mary a while back.

I must confess I am now very confused about time than I was at the beginning. If you have read a little philosophy, you will know what they say about time and space and our cognition. Then you read Davies and there are questions of whether there are universes where time is reversed. Whether faster than light travel is possible. Wormholes. Black holes. White holes. And many holes in between.

The book is accessible to even anyone with an elementary understanding of physics and mathematics. He is such an engaging author, the book is almost conversational.

Something Davies mentioned in passing that I thought interesting is our lack for a “time organ” like say we have a sight, smell or even sensory (I mean touch) organs.

Do you think if we get to answer the question of what is the nature of time our understanding of the self will change? Or it will remain unaffected by this knowledge and discovery into the nature of time. Does time exist always? Did it have a beginning and will it have an end?

Can we conceive of time without events?

In other newsworthy stories, there is Sabisky in the UK and then this story on eugenics and Dawkins.