Oh, my Dawg!

When people argue about the question of God or no god they usually do not know what the argument is about. Mostly they just keep repeating the same misunderstandings over and over, not reaching understanding or peace.

The atheist says there is no god.
What God is he referring to?
If it is the current media version of God who looks like Santa Claus on steroids and acts as if he’d need Thorazine as well, he probably is right.

As to the Old testament and Holy Qu’ran versions of God, I’d be very, very surprised of any proof of their existence could ever be presented, either.

Modern man knows so much about history, laws of physics and the dimensions of the universe that he cannot possibly take the campfire stories of the ancient Middle East shepherds seriously.

In fact, man has gained knowledge of so many unrelated details of the world that he has been forced to invent psychotropic drugs, professional sporting events and satellite television to rescue him from anxiety.

In the deluge of these irrelevant facts he has managed to forget the old truth: God is a concept, a feeling that is needed by the human being to feel whole and well.

Let’s take an analogy: Democracy.
Most people do believe in democracy but few know what it is. Nobody knows where it is or what it is made of. Still people crave for it and are ready to suffer, starve and kill in the name of it. They believe, they have felt its effects and seen what life is like without it. They have seen the doings of democracy and believe.

Can democracy exist without the human mind? What about God, can he?

Man is the only species able to have the human feeling of divinity. The entity inducing this feeling can be interpreted totally differently in a hypothetical species lacking the “God-sense” that appears to reside in the prefrontal cortex of the human beings.
Whether animals have religious feelings or not, I really do not know. If I’d make a guess, they live it all the time but how can I tell for sure.

I am made of God and God is made of me. Is there a “me”?

Let me try to explain what God is to me. I have scientific training and I do support the efforts of sceptics all around the world where they go about catching magicians thriving on defenceless suckers. To me, Galileo, Keppler, Newton, Einstein, Bohr Darwin, Pascal and Jung are holy men.

I love the planets.
Looking at the moons of Jupiter gives me the kicks. It takes me thinking about Galileo. How he kept observing the planet and its moons with his telescope: “Whatever the priests might say, they cannot stop the moons orbiting Jupiter and all the planets orbiting the Sun.” The priests refused to look in “the Devil’s tube”.

Keppler, Galilei and after them thousands of astronomers gradually assembled the big picture about how the universe is organized. With the help of the Hubble and digital processing of serially coupled radio antennae our sight reaches ever further. We can observe stars being born. We can see planets vanishing in black holes with nothing but radiation left behind. We can listen to the symphony of the stars for, analyse the spectra of the energy and calculate the age of the universe from the basic hum.

Definitely something more than a whimsical bearded patriarch was needed to bring about all this, n'est pas?

I love life.
The greatest moments in my job are the ones when I see a baby being born. How he just is there, all of a sudden, brought about by physical chemistry, millions of years of evolution and the energy of the Sun.

There were the strands of DNA, some Life Magic and the result is there, screaming his head off to the blinding light and coldness of the world, trying to get hold of his mama with his unseeing eyes.

Yes, I am familiar with some biochemistry and biology and genetics. But the heaviest volume of Obstetrics textbooks cannot take away the feeling of awe and wonder of birth.
To me, new life represents a miracle.

I love energy.

All the life we see on this planet is powered by radiation from the nuclear reactions of the Sun. Green plants and some plankton are equipped with molecules that resonate with the wavelengths of the sunlight and capture its energy in the bonds of their molecules: Sugar, cellulose, starch and fat. Some forms of life use the deep-sea volcanic energy for the same purpose but I was talking about what we see.

Animals feed upon the plants and each other. We see how food chains are organized in the struggle of the energy. Life recombines its structures under the pressure of the struggle of survival. The weakest get eliminated in the game of selection. The blueprint of the genome is varied by mutations and the selection gets more material to choose from.

All of a sudden, there is sex.
Sex provides the living beings with a means of producing new variations of their genome far superior to anything else. The remarkable thing with sex is that it produces offspring determined by the preferences of the parents. This is quite unlike the blind mutations. The effect of sex would be a subject of many more books than already written about it.

I try to fathom how our search for the perfect sexual companion is related to Darwinism. There seems to be a very important role for archetypes there.

Now could the nomadic God of our books or in any other book create the chain of life sketched above?

Or could it ever be reconstructed by man? Could man ever figure out all the laws and their interferences and reverberations in all the possible variations that occur in the universe?

Could man ever in his head have picture of the entity that has produced the universe, microcosm and macrocosm, the laws of conventional and quantum physics and the probabilities that seem to control the occurrences in a way that definitely simulates the doings of a subject with a will.

My impression is that the entity is way too great for us to see. Looking at it, we might see some aspects of it or the boundaries of our understanding, if we are lucky. But definitely not the boundaries of the entity I call God.

I am made of God because me being here is an expression of the laws of physics and probabilities that govern the universe. God is made of me because it is I with my limited understanding, with my archaic animal senses and quite recently developed rational thinking that is trying to define God.

The best I can do is to carve a piece of God my size and show it around.

Of course, I can encourage other people to do the same, if they are lost and lonely in their worlds.

Is there a “me”?
I feel, therefore I am.
Eat that, Descartes!

Reliscience

Science originated from human curiosity. Gradually, the methods of observation developed to such an extent that their structures were able to provide a view of reality much less related to the personality of the observer than anything else.

It would not be much of an exaggeration that with scientific method man has been able to stand out of himself to observe his own workings in the world.

Science is striving to get information about the material, measurable world as impersonal and impartial as possible.

Art, again, is an expression of the human experience. True, it can be regarded as exploration of the mind and the soul of man. True, it creates objects that can be observed and experienced by other people who might or might not “understand” it or share the experience of the artist.
Then again it might not. Both the creation of the piece of art and the way it is experienced is highly subjective and focuses on depicting the ways our “operating system” uses symbols to convey different states of emotion.

Art is striving to share information and about the phenomenological, subjective world and cause emotional and highly personal experiences in its audience.

Here I must add that the feelings of a scientist making a discovery that allows him to project his inner harmony on measurable reality without a discord can be quite similar to those of an artist finding the perfect blue for the morning sky or the perfect line that pulls “it all” together.

Art and science are both about harmony and aesthetic experience but methods and apparent goals are vastly different.

Religion can be serving the need for harmony as well. A French theologist said that the only way to join religion to science is the love of God. This can be interpreted that religion has been constructed to make up answers where answers cannot be found with art or science.
Our human mind refuses to believe in the “here” or the “now”. Rather, it goes about creating history and making up future with logic that has evolved for thriving in a flock of monkeys in the African plains. If something happens, there is something with a will making it happen. If something is, there has to be somebody that created it. Such an idea that things just might happen because the circumstances allowed it to is alien to our thinking. We need reasons; we need active subjects with a will to make sense of the world.

Our mind is a flock-animal mind though upon and slightly outside of it we have developed a sort of a rational segment capable of introspection.

Flock animals do as they see the next one doing. They follow their congenital subroutines in a blind fashion. With a little thinking one can find hundreds of examples of human primate flock animal behaviour. Unfortunately, we can explain it to ourselves only by assigning it to a causative factor outside of ourselves. Instead of saying: “Hey, it is my animal operating system running wild”, we say we have been addressed by God or possessed by Devil.

So basically what we need religion for is to explain away things we do not understand because of lack of knowledge, honesty or courage. We need it to assign causative factors to the awesome feelings our consciousness weaves together from external sensory material and electrochemical subroutines programmed by eons of evolution into our operating system.

We need religion to bridge the cap we observe between our animal and our rational self.

Which really does not need to exist at all once we accept our own animalism and see ourselves not as a spirit in a body but as a body making the spirit. Not being or existing but happening.

Much like the rainbow.

no go

If you make a list of four things to do up town you run a chance of getting two of them done. My Nokia N81 8GB broke again. Something with the navibutton, cursor jumping back and forth like crazy. Still under guarantee so...except that today SFR, the local "service provider" (HA!) had closed its Service Aprés-vente. Usually on has to wait at least 45 minutes to get service and now it ceased totally.

There is a packet in mail since two weeks but it does not exist. I called and a friendly guy explained that they have about 6 weeks of waiting in the customs. If you ever have something to send to France, use DHL, UPS, Fedex or whatever but DO NOT USE FRENCH POST!

None of the mechanic shops were open so I could not have my register plates changed.

On the way home I spent half an hour in traffic jam. The road was blocked for no obvious reason "Travails en cours".

This island is a training course of frustration tolerance.
The worst part of it is that it works. You know that there is no such thing as tomorrow, only "not today for sure". You assume the same style little by little. It has been a month since I wore real shoes. My mail is gathering in piles unanswered. Reminders of different colors. Even uncashed checks. Nobody's taking out garbage and it stinks.

This is scary.
How to fight Island Idiocy?
Or should I just go fishing.

holidays coming to an end

Monday it is workworkwork again. the way of repeating the word three times to emphasize that there is a lot of something there or going on is a local habit. If multiplying verbs and nouns is not enough to cover all the threatening stretches of silence, you can say "bla-bla-bla et comme ça" and "le voilà". People hate silence. The seem to be stuck on oral phase: They have to talk, kiss, smoke, eat or drink incessantly. 

They drive me nuts.

As for my HDR experiment, I have now noticed that there are pictures that are correctly exposed and well within the contrast range and they number increases dramatically as one brackets the exposure with ±1.67 stops. Then there are some shots that "justify" the use of HDR but the end result is not necessarily better than the middle orginal.

And then there are shots that improve. 

I am not talking about making unnatural "creative" shots just for the heck of it. I am after a natural rendition, something that we subjectively experience with the help of our magnificent image processing grayware. We do color correction, 3-D rendition, histogram flattening etc. at a fraction of a second without even appreciating what is going on. Cameras are not like that at all. Yet.

So I took off after 6 to catch some morning light in the nearby marsh. I was not very impressed, it was quite dull with clear skies. But I shot 1GB CF-card full anyway. Bracketing!

Normally one walks 3 hours and takes (old habit) about 35 shots of which 4 turn out OK.

So I got home, uploaded my catch on my Mac and got three pictures that I liked.

I did HDR transformation on one of the shots but I am not going to tell which one.

All I can say that it took quite a while to mix the three shots together and even after all the effort I am pretty sure that no one could tell the manipulated shot apart from the others.

Not better, not worse, not more or less synthetic than the others.

Playplayplay.

GOOD!

going HDR, thanks to Catalunia

Got the idea from fellow blogger.
What you need is Photoshop CS2 or higher on your computer and two photos that are similar except for the exposure.

Obviously, things are easier if you take the pictures with HDR conversion in mind in the first place. Your digital SLR knows how to bracket the exposure automatically if you tell him so. One needs the operating instructions, though.

On my first attempt I can see that instead of just taking two photos with different exposures I should have pretreated the other one's rocks and the other one's clouds to get a result.

My photo is just another picture, no drama.
Which is (sort of) how I want it but not quite as bland as this.

Got to keep on trying.

after Nissan X-trail, the deluge

on rrrroule!
by garbidz

I have to confess, I do not have a bad conscience of driving a 4x4. It is not because I am ignorant; I am not. Our beautiful fragile planet is overheating, drying up, flooding and getting increasingly toxic.

Too many people like me. Too many people commuting, air-conditioning, eating deep frozen delicacies and buying stuff we don't need wrapped in stuff that kills sea mammals. Too many people like me flying jet planes and defecating in water.

I even use diesel-generated electricity. Now is that a no-no or not! I never buy bio stuff because I like to know that what I eat or put on my skin has fulfils ISO norms. I do not mind manipulated genes or stem cell research.

And I like the 4x4. Our bikes and picnic gear goes to the back.
We drive around, park the car, ride a little, eat a little and take a little siesta somewhere on the mountains or the seaside.
Life is beautiful, delicious and good.

Meanwhile elsewhere we have the Chinese starting up 5 coal plants every day. We see the Indians multiplying like drunken rabbits and pretty soon getting a car, each one of the 1.2 billion of them.

We see the americans (5% of the world population) burning about 30% of the world fossile fuel consumption.

Plus, plus, plus.
So we do our little sins here on our little island with not too much soul-searching. While it lasts, it is very nice.
It won't be for long. I would gladly suffer to change it. But I cannot, in this matter I am powerless. 

BTW it is true that women are better drivers, doing about half of the kilometers but causing only one sixth of the accidents.
(I also like her smile)

carnivore!

young fine lion
by garbidz

This is a young lion I met in South Africa about one year ago.

I like his expression, it is as if he was approaching the punch line of a raunchy joke.

What DO lions joke about?

Cocky gnus? Zebra's tempers? Tipsy giraffes?

fears of dying, getting old

Lava rock is not the easiest surface to walk on. Or it depends. If it is level and dry, OK. But at the beach where the molten stone has boiled and bubbled with sea water, it gets very uneven. And very, very slippery when wet. The thing is, one does not see the difference. All of a sudden you just lose grip and off you go. It is the algae.

This morning, decided to capture the (overly magenta) morning light again I headed to le Gouffre, a lava rock formation about 10 minutes walk from here. With my Loewepro on my back and the tripod in hand as a walking stick I negotiated down the slippery rocks. Shot some photos of which I am not very proud artistically. Technically they are so about there. 

Climbing back up I was thinking all kinds of things. FLIP-CRASH! there I was, sitting in a pond of seawater, my knee twisted. Feeling like an idiot I took a deep breath, packed up my gear and -as I was sitting down already- took a pause.

These are the kinds of things you get when you do not appreciate your age.

You get carried away in you daydreams for a  split second and you get hit by the forces of gravity.

Some of the pictures turned out OK. But my leg hurts...