“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.” –attributed to Albert Einstein

Our subjective experience of how fast time is passing depends on the situation we are in. Waiting for a pot to boil while you watch it can feel like a frustratingly long time, and watching a clock as it ticks down the last minutes of a long meeting or class can be excruciating. (In fact, studies consistently show that we perceive a watched clock to slow down or stop briefly when we first look at it, an effect known as chronostasis).

On the other hand, when immersed in enjoyable activities, we often lose track of time and are surprised to find out just how much time has really passed while we were so engaged. Time flies when you’re having fun, as the expression goes.
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The funeral was hard, just as it had been for Grandma Deanie (a quick descent following stroke) and just as it would be later for Grandma Etta (Alzheimer’s again). I had to face the reality that I would never see these people again, that all I had left were the memories.

My mom, Bill’s daughter, is an ardent Christian and strongly convinced she will see her dad again in Heaven. Being convinced of that fact doesn’t make everything better for her – she took it all so hard – but it means that she can wait for a time when she’ll be with him again, for eternity, along with all the other relatives who’ve died or will die. I can tell it’s a comforting thought to her, as it is to most everyone who believes in a Heaven.

In the famous song ‘Imagine’, John Lennon asked us to imagine there’s no Heaven – it’s easy if you try, he said. What’s long been more difficulty for me is imagining that there is a Heaven.

How would it work, I wonder? Which Grandpa Bill is in Heaven? The most recent version, with dementia and sadness and confusion? Surely not, if Heaven is the wonderful place it’s supposed to be. So perhaps an earlier instantiation of him? But if a younger Bill is in Heaven, then we’re deprived of the memories and personal development (for better or worse) that happened in all those intervening years. We’re faced with the opposite problem: again it doesn’t feel like the Grandpa Bill I remember from childhood, if he’s just a young man who hasn’t had a fraction of the life experience that older fellow had.
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It’s easy to think of them as ‘not you’, as little Others along for the ride on your body. They are parasites and symbiotes that feed off of us, help us digest food, might even protect us from infections – but they’re not part of me, right?

Enter Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan parasite that infects all sorts of mammals but really loves getting into cats (the only place it can reproduce). In fact, its talent is finding its way from other mammals into cats. How does it do this?

By altering the behavior of intermediate non-cat hosts. If a mouse is infected, it starts hanging out in open areas. An infected rat actually seeks out cat urine, rather than running from it. Then, presumably, the mice and rats get eaten by hungry cats. In other words, T. gondii changes the behavior of its hosts in order to maximize the chance of finding its way inside a cat.

Of course, T. gondii doesn’t just find itself inside rats and mice on its way to cats. Often it gets into humans, through exposure to pet cats or from eating uncooked meat (a report in the UK discovered that up to 38% of stored meat was infected). Some infected people develop flu-like symptoms, but most people develop no symptoms and the infection remains latent and apparently inactive. For a long time, it was assumed that latent infection in humans had no real effect on the host.
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”There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” –Camus

Let’s start by acknowledging that it is a serious question, a serious problem. The answer is not simple. We cannot get away from this issue by blanket affirmations against suicide because it is cowardly or because it is hurtful to others. These things may be true, but they do not answer the question.

Those with the benefit of an airtight faith in some religion or creed that prohibits suicide may seem to escape the problem; but only because they never really address it. To eschew consideration of suicide because it is against the laws of a god or against the imperatives of a philosophical system is to have already given up the reigns of your own life to an outside authority. Rather than face the question yourself, it is side-stepped; in removing that one threat to your life, you have given up claim to that very life.

No, we must deal with the question head-on, on its own terms, for and by ourselves.
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“Once the decision has been made, close your ear even to the best counter argument: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

We live in a world of many choices: the foods we eat, the careers we choose, the relationships we foster, every consumer good we buy. We tend to have more than a binary yes/no choice, but rather many options, often with complicated trade-offs involving many dimensions. I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but which peanut butter should I get: Crunchy or creamy? Reduced fat, normal fat or normal fat with extra omega-3’s? All-natural or not? Store brand or name brand? Which jelly: strawberry, grape, apricot-pineapple, or countless other fruit choices? Jam, jelly or preserves? Low sugar, low sugar with other additives, or normal? Relative balance of cheap, healthy and tasty?

Even simple decisions like this can present a crippling array of possibilities, over which we may feel some pressure to maximize and find the “right one”. But there’s a fine line between giving a little thought to decisions here and there, and agonizing over labels and minor cost differences at every choice.

Unfortunately, it’s not just minor matters that present us with myriad options. Buying a car: New or used? Lease or purchase? Cash or finance? Make, model, color, options, all of which we can easily find extensive information about. Presumably the more information we have — the better informed our decision is — the better our choice will be. This is what I might call the naive rationalist assumption.
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Thinking in terms of more than the familiar three spatial dimensions can be challenging. In the late 1800’s, Edwin Abbott used his novel Flatland to show us how a 2-dimensional being could eventually come to recognize its world as being contained within a higher-up 3D world, and to suggest we three-dimensionites might have similar trouble recognizing higher dimensions that contain our own.

Of course, mathematicians have long dealt with non-Euclidean geometries, including those of higher dimension, and cosmologists today continue to debate the possibility of even more dimensions actually existing. For example, some string theorists are now investigating M-theory, which posits 11 dimensions of space-time, and may involve multidimensional objects called ‘branes’. In this theory, our universe would be considered a 4-brane (with its three spatial dimensions and one time dimension), but there could be other branes of different dimension.

Building off of this (still-nascent and controversial) field, John Smythies over at The Psychological Channel presents what a “new paradigm” of consciousness he calls extended materialism.
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Some limited personal DNA profiles are now available for under $400 and people are worried that as this information becomes commonplace, it may be used against them. That is, we may find job discrimination based on genetic makeup: “Well, this candidate appears a good fit, but her profile shows a predisposition toward anger problems and a high chance of developing health problems that impair her ability to work or stay with the company.” Likewise, insurance companies may refuse to insure those with risky genes, or to make their coverage exorbitant. If someone has an allele that makes them 87% likely to develop M.S., an insurance company may deem them too risky to insure.
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Abbie Hoffman was a smart kid born in 1936 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family that was assimilating into a somewhat anti-semitic America right before World War II broke out. Kicked out of high-school, he was a trouble-maker and a hustler early on. His parents managed to get him into a fancy academy to finish high school, which brought him to college at Brandeis.

There he ran into some big name teachers, like Abraham Maslow for psychology, Herbert Marcuse for political philosophy, Leonard Bernstein for music, Eleanor Roosevelt for foreign affairs. He ended up getting his masters in psychology, coming out of Berkeley right at the birth of the 60’s. He saw Castro speak. The CIA had just been born and was already pulling dirty tricks abroad. Students were demonstrating. Allen Ginsberg was composing poems right across the bay (they later would become friends).
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“The inability of the Colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the revolutionary war.”
–Benjamin Franklin

The video below, by Paul Grignon, is a superb animated history of money, explaining how our current system of Debt as Money came about, and how it affects and traps us (and our government) today. It makes a strong case against the banking system, and suggests that our own ignorance of how money actually works leaves us in a hidden slavery we don’t even realize.

Some interesting points from the video:
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When asked to imagine intelligence in the animal kingdom, it’s unlikely that the critters coming to mind would be octopuses, fish, birds or insects. But as a recent Scientific American article on comparative cognition points out, some branches of the tree of life that don’t normally get a lot of attention for their smarts have actually demonstrated some pretty impressive abilities.

In the sea, cephalopods (octopuses, squid, cuttlefish) are the mental badasses of the invertebrates. Octopuses, for example, are not only great problem solvers, but can learn to solve a problem simply from watching other octopuses do a task. Fish may be smarter than we give them credit for. Goldfish, for example, can orient their way through mazes (more efficiently than slime-mold, even). So can reptiles like turtles.
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