SepiaCaturday

Have a Harrowing Halloween!!

Three years ago today,

a honeybee was contemplating the cosmos

Four years ago,

it was Trump and Mrs. Clinton, slugging it out. The general feeling over here was that Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in. Indeed, her supporters called her "the only qualified candidate." But while she was certainly the most experienced candidate, I wondered at the time whether her experience would disqualify her, in the minds of a lot of the voters. Would they not feel that her two terms in the East Wing meant that her standing for president went against the spirit of the Constitution (amendment 22)?

Suppose that it had been Mr. Clinton in the East Wing for eight years, and that he had won against Trump (suppose that Mrs. Clinton only lost because she was a woman). If Mr. Clinton went on to win a second term, what would stop him divorcing Hilary at the end of his second term and marrying someone who became president for two terms? What would stop him continuing to remarry people who became president for two terms? The voters would: they would surely regard it as unconstitutional for him to stay indefinitely in the White House (as the traditional head of the presidential household).

As it is, of course, Trump won. "Will the same thing happen again this time?" the liberal elite wonder. I don't see how it could: neither Mr. nor Mrs. Biden have been president before. Nevertheless, if the liberal elite of America do not even know how America thinks about the unity of married couples, then how qualified could any of them be to embody America as its necessarily short-term president?

Five years ago today,

this Painted Lady butterfly was drinking from this butterfly bush:

Five years ago today,

this duck was ducking for pond-weed in the village duck-pond:

 

Six years ago this month

we had the coldest August for twenty years. It was like Autumn.

On the plus side, there were lots of clouds for me to photograph

Gusty Auguries

Unstoppable force shatters immovable object

By July bejewelled

Variant of Clark's Third Law

Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, page 235, observed that cargo cults were an example of Arthur C. Clark's third law, which is that: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It seems that [...] the islanders were bowled over by the wondrous possessions of the white immigrants to their islands [...] The islanders noticed that the white people who enjoyed these wonders never made them themselves. When articles needed repairing they were sent away, and new ones kept arriving as 'cargo' in ships or, later, planes. No white man was ever seen to make or repair anything, nor indeed did they do anything that could be recognized as useful work of any kind (sitting behind a desk shuffling papers was obviously some kind of religious devotion). Evidently, then, the 'cargo' must be of supernatural origin.

The islanders' culture included belief in the supernatural, but did not include much technology, and so they developed a cargo cult. But our culture includes knowledge of technology, and disbelief in miracles. So, if aliens arrived from another planet, we would be more likely to explain what they were capable of doing in terms of their superior technology. Clark's third law has not been true for a while now.

And what if the aliens had also developed superior social structures to ours? Who knows what such things might actually be like. We all have our political views, which we take to be true, but science has shown how different the truth can be from our expectations. So, such alien explorers might, just possibly, be saintly missionaries, who could perform miracles.

Of course, Dawkins would hardly believe that to be possible; but he should not forget Clark's first law, which is that: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

I suppose that we would try to explain such miracles in terms of the aliens' superior technology, as though it was now true that: Any sufficiently advanced spirituality is indistinguishable from technology. Some evidence for that variant of Clark's third law is von Däniken's infamous Chariots of the Gods: Was God an Astronaut?

The Way of Things

1. Introduction

    the lie of the land | low expectations

2. The Way of Things

    infinities | sets | proofs | explanations

3. Extraordinary Evidence

    many things | impossibly many things

4. A God Hypothesis

    the shape of time | authorial authority

5. Exceptional Logic

    heaps | Russell's paradoxes | truth

Duckling!

July's jewelry

Time waits for an island

June's Tunes

Purplicious Caturday

Photo of a cat in my village, a few years ago (processed via sepia in the old Windows' Photo Gallery)

Six years ago today,

two young squirrels in the garden

Six years ago today,

in my back garden, the starlings were busy feeding their young:

Six years ago today,

there was a red rainbow.

I was at the edge of my village, photographing a cloudy sunset (first 2 photos)
when it suddenly glowed orange (3rd photo) because
I was photographing it through approaching rain. As the rain passed,
there was a very red rainbow behind me (4th photo).

High Q

Intense she came round
and hence he has found immense
                her background absence.