23.5 Degrees: Pro Fide, Pro Utilitate Hominum - Oct 12, 2008 - 01:21pm
... I don't know the answer to Professor W's question, but I read this in a book when I was young man: "...the Grail serves the Grail King...Translated, this means that life serves what a Christian would call God, Jung calls the Self, or and we call by the many terms we have devised to indicate that which is greater than ourselves..." [From "He" by Robert Johnson] Perhaps, it means that now may not be the best time to be buying expensive sports cars, even blood-red models! Maybe a global economic collapse wouldn't be such a bad thing... A time to rebalance?

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23.5 Degrees: Interlude: Bless the Bobbies! - Sep 20, 2008 - 06:02am
... since this article encourages us to think about undervalued professions, I thought Maniacs would appreciate the chance to read about Sir Bob Geldorf's latest appeal for perhaps the most undervalued profession of all at this sad time for the tragic victims of the current disaster... http://newsbiscuit.com/article/geldof-launches-bank-aid-as-markets-plummet-370

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23.5 Degrees: Unaccelerated Observers - Sep 15, 2008 - 03:50pm
I'm with you. My problem with SETI is i don't know how we'd recognise the ETI if we found it! ... and in some parallel universe, just assuming that the little green men/women/whatever had their own SETI-equivalent, wouldn't they just pass by earth and continue their journey. As a much-missed Sufi once wrote about our planet, "This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." Wouldn't it be cool if we used happiness vouchers as our main form of currency? I know all the economic arguments for why we need real money, but just humor me here. For example, I'll fix your roof, if you, say, play me a piece of music that means something to you... The problem arises when we treat the Sufi"s "small green pieces of paper" as a surrogate for happiness and assume that having three pieces of green paper makes us happier than having just two. That thinking leads to today's problems on Wall Street. My guess is that the whole financial system may be a sub-zero-sum game. All the pieces of green paper created over the last 7/8 years will have been burnt up in the past twelve months (and then some) and no-one ends up happier than they were when they started. On the contrary. I think we'd fail our own SETI criteria. (And before anyone tells me, I know that "Imagine" was inspired by Pol Pot's money-free Cambodia!) MMS' Committee would be doing us a favor by helping us with this and then we could think about what really matters. Me, I'm off to buy a get-rich quick book now...

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