I want to be considered a rationalist but I find it very hard to defeat the hormones that often provoke me to irrational responses. I don’t want to be accused of being an alarmist but there really are some cataclysmic things we should worry about.
richard dawkins
Plenty of Times II
Gamma ray bursts are flashes of gamma rays that hit our planet quite regularly. They can last for fractions of seconds or minutes. They can be detected from enormous cosmic distances.
Back in April 2010, a satellite detected a 10 second GRB burst. That’s ten seconds of gamma rays that we now know travelled 13 .7 billion years to reach us from a supernova in a galaxy that occurred about 630 million years after the Big Bang.
K SerraSara
I like the illusion of free will. That’s not to say that I suffer from the delusion of it. I’m not a solipsist nor am I totally convinced that reality exists. I base that uncertainty on some hallucinations I experienced, the most recent were in a hotel room in Venezuela. My brain overheated with a fever from pneumonia and my perception was that the objects in the room changed shape and perspectives. Or perhaps my brain malfunctioned and failed to re-create the reality I am used to.
Bathroom Tableau. 
Dublin Bus. 
Demolition Exposure. 
Grey Reflections.
Saturday Thinking
I decided to conduct a thought experiment today. I had looked over the wall of books that defends my desk and decided to chose one title to seed some thoughts.
So now I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty what I was doing on the 7th of November 2010 at the time of 19:03:53. I was buying a book in Dublin airport. Indeed, yes, a sales receipt fell out of the book I chose. I have the book in hand though no memory of purchasing it.
Foggy Sunrise Woodlands Texas 2010 
Uffington White Horse Under Snow 2013
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense is an interesting insight into some of the modern mysteries and challenges in science. A thought provoking study by Michael Brooks from 2009. Think placebo effect, free will or the missing universe. And if you want to know more, I recommend a read.
[Read more…] about Saturday ThinkingInfluences
0600 Benedict’s Newsletter: No. 335 arrived yesterday and I scanned it on my phone. 15% of global internet traffic is Youtube and 11% is Netflix – more than a quarter of the traffic. Then I read his essay Covid and cascading collapses. You should too. Ever seen a soufflé collapse when the oven door opens? Technology collapses don’t happen the way you think or remember. And that makes them hard to predict. But what does seem useful is to know is Lenin’s astute observation that you can get a decade of inevitable in a week.
Fence Texture.
© Simon Robinson 2014