Cogito, ergo sum!

The modern equivalent might be "I blog, therefore I am virtual." Virtual reality has displaced objective reality for millions of lonely souls (souls in the greater non-religious sense).
The virtual presence will long outlive the physical objective presence. There is no virtual death - just a long stasis of presence that is unchanging but still there to those who happen upon it.
Perhaps we need a type of virtual death (or for those who want to ape reality even more closely, virtual suicide or even virtual murder).
The virtual world is still in its infancy and the thought of death seems so far off.

UFO

2 am left the Bulman bar and walked up the road from Summercove to Kinsale. It was a clear moonlit night and the air temperature was below zero but the air was completely still on this the first few hours of 2010.
After walking for some minutes I noticed something in the sky and looked up. What I saw was beyond belief. A bright orange globule shape was moving at a fast constant velocity across the sky. It was oval in shape and was about a third of the size of the moon. It made no noise but moved across the sky at a constant height and as it passed away in the distance after maybe three or four seconds it became a small star like white speck and then disappeared.
My wife who was with me saw it all too. As it almost disappeared I gestured to a passing couple to look and they too saw the speck.
I spent some time today checking the internet to see if there were any other reports of strange sightings but there were none.
I am one of the most skeptical of people and am not one to embrace the non-normal but this was weird in the extreme.
The UFO sites on the internet are mainly of dubious quality or just plain loony and not for a moment would I want to be associated with such stuff. Yet the experience forces me to report same in some form and to try and understand the source or origin of the object.
A possible explanation could be a meteorite entering the atmosphere at a very low angle of approach causing it to heat up and glow. The fact that it didn't descend to the horizon and turned white as it got smaller may mean that it passed through our atmosphere and escaped again to space - a near miss event??
I am still trying to seek explanations.

Timeline

There are similarities between a line as a sequence of points and movement of an object as a succession of positions. A line is a space transformation whereas a moving object is called a time transformation defining the concept of time. Yet we can view the three dimensional object as being just a point (taking a point of view sufficiently distant) and the movement appears as just a space transformation.

Time and space are equivalent when the correct view is taken. When we view objects at great distance we see them as moving in space when in effect they are moving in time. The views of distant galaxies are events of time yet we see them in ordinary space.

When we look at the quantum scale the opposite occurs - what are events in space appear as event in time. Energy the prime concept of all science is seen as a frequency - as something intricately linked to time.

The funny thing is that this fourth dimension that we call time is really a space dimension but one that is so small that it is not appreciable to us but manifests as time. What's more there may be an infinity of such rolled up infinitesimal dimensions each labeling a time. Time may be a property of matter that heretofore we thought was singular.

Life may be more complex than we ever imagined!!

Musing on Time

I sat in the weak winter sun today for over an hour. My eyes were closed but yet I sensed the countryside around me. I heard the sound of crows in nearby trees and the cries of the gulls over the creek. A bee had appeared out of season and was buzzing around the flower pot beside my chair. I started to muse on some of the ideas that I had been striving to write about in my latest novel. In particular I struggled over the concept of time. It became clear to me that time really only exists as the present - the continuous present of the living. The future does not and will not exist except as a construct of the past. The past has existed but it represents a part of spacetime that can only be reached by the complete reversal of the expansion of the entire universe. We cannot go to the past without carrying the whole of existence with us and in so doing we actually destroy our present. Time travel to the past is theoretically impossible. Time travel to the future has had many outings in the musing of those acquainted with Special and General Relativity. If I set off in a rocket at a speed close to the speed of light and return after some time then I expect to see the earth in a distant future to the time I set off. The flaw in this thinking is that I am not going into my own future but only that of what would be a very distant earth. For me time is always the same.
Out of all this I see that time is just the continuous present. The memory of the past has an impact and causal relation to the present but there is no memory of a future that doesn't and will never exist. The continuous present is orchestrated by the laws of science both dynamical, physical and biological. Our acquired understanding of these laws that we have gleaned from analysis of our memories, allows us as cognitive beings to shape our present by using these laws to change our otherwise determine path. The non-living parts of being are forever bound determinately by these same laws.
The goals of science and philosophy are to understand these laws to better shape our present.

The invisible

Here is a very interesting and wryly witty TEDtalk for your amusement:
http://www.ted.com/talks/john_lloyd_inventories_the_invisible.html

Epublishing

News Alert!!

New ebook published this December on Smashwords. They are available to download on a variety of formats to suit your particular reader. They are particularly suited to the epub format that Sony readers use.

Details:

"Couples" - a novel set in the world of the Celtic Tiger.
Available as multi-format ebook from www.smashwords.com/books/view/6400
See my profile at www.smashwords.com/profile/view/desgreene

Thought for the day

Our body is a pitiful support to our intellect.