Posts by dyan campbell
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Cats are the best species for reforming pet-curmudgeons. My boss of many years ago, Brian, an active cat-hater, lived with a small cat who belonged to his flatmate. Brian said he was never outright cruel to David's cat but wouldn't feed her, would see her peering in the glass at the side of the door meowing to get in and he'd ignore her, and if she were sleeping on a chair he'd tip her off sharply, just to give her a fright. He hated cats.
One night he came home badly injured - he'd been beaten up outside a club, and was too shaken up to go to the hospital until the sun came up, so he went home. He sat in an armchair because if he lay down he was afraid he'd drown in his own blood - so as he sat there mopping the blood with a towel and shaking violently, as you do in shock, his flatmate's cat jumped up and sat on one of the wide arms of the chair, looking concerned, meowing softly. He didn't say anything to her. She tucked her paws under her chest, started to purr and watched him all night. When he would drift off to the sound of her purring his head would drop and the cat would sit up, apparently startled, stretch out a paw and touch him softly on the arm and meow. He's say, "no, it's okay, I'm not dead" and she'd lie back down on her chest and tuck her paws under again, watching his face the whole time. He went to the ER the next morning and got patched up, but felt the cat had really helped him through the night.
Brian said he felt incredibly grateful for her attention, and humbled because he'd spent a year being pointedly unpleasant to her. After that he became a devoted cat-fan, kept a picture of her on his desk.
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I can't claim to have had supernatural experiences of my own, but I have a sense of spirituality. There are lots of people who use their intuitive as well as their rational faculties. IMO each is part of an integrated whole.
The thing is, I don't have much of a sense of spirituality at all. I was raised by atheists as an atheist, and when I experience things like I describe, I do my level best to simply ignore what I'm experiencing, though I tend to muse on it out loud, which certainly helps me but seems to bother those around me, especially when it turns out to have something in common with something that either happened or eventually happens. But like the French writer Gabrielle Colette, replied to Marcel Proust, full of fulsome praise for her soul at some literary dinner in Paris (when they were both either still in or barely out of their teens) "my soul is full of haricot beans and little strips of bacon". I'm nothing if not pragmatic.
I don't know why I feel the stuff I do. The cases when I can't ignore it, well... that's what denial was invented for. Occam's broom, Richard Feynman called it.
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Don't you have a cat or something?
Schrödinger had one. I think it was rather grumpy, being half alive and half dead. (That all makes psychics look a bit less weird).
Ah, the point at which physics became indistinguishable from a Zen Koan.
Norbert Weiner notes "it was neither Heisenberg nor Planck, but Willard Gibbs that first proposed the universe was contingent - as opposed to deterministic" - that it is predictible only within statistical limits - which disproves determinism. Gibbs was describing billard balls, and the behaviour of these is difficult enough to predict with any certainty, and provided a pretty convincing argument for the challenging the concept of determinism. And by corollary, god.
Weiner states "in a probalistic universe we no longer deal with the quantities and statements which concern a specific, real universe as a whole, but instead ask questions which may find their answers in a large number of infinite universes. Thus chance has been admitted, not as merely a mathematical tool for physics, but as part of its warp and weft".
This radical shift from a causal universe to a statistical one created enormous controversy.
Erwin Schrodinger ran up against the mathematical problem of indeterminism as he tried to develop physical experiments that described the properties and effects of all the variables in quantum theory: energy, position, velocity, angular momentum etc - and the parallel task of the physicist is to formulate mathematical laws that appropriately describe the physical properties of these particles and
their respective relationships with each other and the rest of the universe.Schrodinger came up with an equation that describes a beam of particles of a beam of particles passing through a slit. Once the properties of the variables involved are known, a prediction can be made about the pattern of distribution.
The cat is trapped in a box with a Geiger counter and enough radioactive material that there is a 50% chance that one of the nuclei will decay, which will cause the Geiger counter to go off, which in turn will cause a specially attached hammer to break a flask of prussic acid, causing the cat to die.
According to Schrodinger's equation describing wave function, the particle will be predictable only to a point, and then it will describe two equally possible outcomes for the same particle. On paper, as well as in observation, no reason can be given for the particle's varying behaviour. The equation seems to have a point at which it cannot seem to decide which outcome to choose.
At the end of an hour only one observable outcome would occur, leading Schrodinger to feel that the mathematics creates a paradoxical and unacceptable description of reality.
The indeterministic nature of physics was challenged - unsuccessfully - by Jon von Neumann, who tried to devise alternate equations to ascertain Schrodeinger's error, but his equations also showed a contingent universe. His subsequent equations became known as "von Neumann's catastrophe of infinite regression". The conventional interpretation of this was the "Copenhagen Collapse" which proposed that when the equation divides into two, the vectors in configuraton simply collapse. Instead of a multitude of outcomes, the equation reduces to a single result. Proponents of the Copenhagen Collapse thought quantum theory was strictly indeterministic.
Indeterminism remained impossible for many phycists to accept ("God does not play dice with the universe") and in an attempt to maintain the existence of objective reality and still describe the puzzle of the wave function, Nobel prize winner Eugene Wigner proposed that consciousness itself is the hidden variable that decides which outcome of an event actually occurs. Wigner pointed out that the paradox of Schrodinger's cat only occurs after the entry of the measurement signal into the human consciousness. In other words, the paradox only occurs when human observation intervenes.
According to Wigner, all that quantum mechanics purports to provide is probability connections "between subsequent apperceptions of the consciousness". He asserts that "it is impossible to to describe quantum mechanical processes without explicit reference to consciousness". Wigner proposes that a search be made for other effects that consciousness may have on matter.
Jeez, that took me more than an hour to write. With thanks to: John Gribbin, Isaac Asimov, Heinz Pragels, Peter Coveny and Roger Highfield. And I'd just like to say, Stephen Hawking was of absolutely no help whatsoever.
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Surely most people have had some exposure to an event that can't be explained by any conventional means. In my family, my great-aunt fainted in the middle of a conversation, then woke up crying, insisting her son (who was a pilot in WW2) was dead. She got a telegram saying he was missing a while after that, but already knew the moment he had died, she had seen him standing in front of her, wearing his flight suit and surrounded by flames.
This is pretty similar to the account my father-in-law gave of his mother - who dreamt that her eldest son came and stood at the end of her bed and said "I've come to say good-bye Mum, and I love you" except he wasn't wearing a flight suit, he was in his dress uniform and was holding his hat.
A friend of mine here interruped an attack on her daughter by one of NZ's most notiorious rapists - who had stolen her daughter's school bag, which meant he had her address and housekeys.
My friend was on her way to a late afternoon meeting, and had left her daughter in her bedroom doing her homework. Part way into town she had a terrible feeling of dread, turned back to her house. She said by the time she got out of the car she was running up to the house, to find the rapist at her daughter's bedroom doorway. She bashed him once, and he ran, but after he was caught all this came out in his confession. He had been stalking her daughter for weeks, and had let himself into their house on more than one occasion.
The thing is, my friend had had a bad feeling of dread for several months, and had inexplicably - in middle age - taken up body building and kick boxing, and when she delivered the punch she was 10 kg heavier and a whole lot faster/stronger than she had been a few months previous to this.
My Mum dreamt of the grim reaper, complete with scythe and hooded robe, chasing her mother around a bed, waking to a (correct) feeling of certainty that her mother had died.
And I have been scaring the daylights out of anyone whose known me since as long as I can remember. When we moved into the house where I grew up I was 3. We went downstairs into the basement - the house had been around a stone foundation of a much older house - and I burst into tears. My parents picked me up and asked me what was wrong, and they tell me I said "oh, it's alright, it's not me that's crying, it's just somebody crying trough me."
Surely others of you out there have had similar experiences?
My sister Shirley once had a terrifying nightmare about a woman's body being cut into pieces and hidden in the hull of a boat. She could see the body parts wrapped in newspaper and black plastic, she could see the orange tarp and the metal grommets. She described the boat shed, on the left side of a long curving driveway of white gravel, with big conifers on either side and a house way up at the top of the driveway.
She was really frightened and upset when she woke from the dream (she had been seeing the cutting and wrapping of the body)
and her husband had to spend a while comforting her and convincing her it was just a nightmare before they both went back to sleep.When he came in with the morning newspaper that had a photograph of the driveway, boatshed, conifers etc, and a description of the horrendous discovery that was exactly as Shirl described it.
I've only dreamt things a few times, but am more likely to just feel things. The Bay of Islands nearly killed me when we first went there, in 1984 on a holiday. Pretty as it was, I was in pretty acute distress the whole time I was there and we cut short a holiday there. I still have no idea what happened there, so maybe that was just a feeling, but it's the most intense and unpleasant of that nature I've ever had, and I've had these feelings ever since I can remember. And I've never worked as a psychic. In fact I've tried really, really hard not to feel like a psychic. My background is science.
I'll tell you one instance where I was absolutely correct, though one detail - which is the one of which I am most sure - was never confirmed. Victoria Park Market was used as a crematorium, I think.
Driving by it, I asked if it had been used for that purpose, but Paul was pretty sure not. I asked if maybe it was used for a morgue? He was pretty sure not.
I was very reluctant to use any food purchased from there but it was the only place in town where we could get ingredients for Mexican food, when we first moved here, so we shopped there, which really, really bothered me. I kept trying not to breathe in the air, complaining I had a sense of disease in the place, that there was some contagion. I also had a sense of many, many corpses being stored there - stacked even - and I could tell you where they were and which end the feet were pointing. I was not happy about breathing there, much less eating food from the place.
A couple years later we found that the place had been used as a makeshift morgue ("__And__ crematorium?" I suggested) but no, it is claimed the bodies were only stored there to be shipped to a mass grave at Waikumete cemetary. But I can tell you with some certainty that that part is not true, or not wholly true. Perhaps they shipped a few bodies out, but I would bet my house on my hunch that the bodies were, for the most part, cremated on the premises. That's what I could feel before I even set foot there.
Interestingly a lot of the taboos that are merely nutball beliefs and deeply neurotic behaviour on my part (and for all practical purposes, I don't believe myself) but interestingly many of the things I feel are very much in synch with Maori beliefs, and one of the things that freaked me out the most in the Bay of Islands was the sensation of the blood still in that sand, after so many years. There is a picture of me and Paul on the beach with our shoes on, standing on the beach. I wouldn't take my shoes off, and begged him not to either, as it seemed very bad, as did stirring up the sand and inhaling the blood that way. I didn't - and don't - believe it will do any actual harm, but it's taboo that I can not ignore or even keep silent about. And I neither understand it, nor fully believe it. But I sure wouldn't cross it.
Paul's white Dad had a ghostly visitation from Paul's Maori great-great grandfather, the paramount chief of the Ngapuhi, Atama Paparangi. This was after Paul's Mum had died, and some cousins were trying to challenge family ownership of some land in the Hokiangia, saying Atama never would have given it to his daughter Neta as she married a white man. It was known that Atama was friendly with his son in law, but there was some doubt cast over the ownership of a parcel of land, so my father-in-law, Frank, went to archives to see if he could find a deed or some sort of proof that the ownership was transferred. He spent a few hours searching in the stacks, coming up with bits here and there that confirmed the friendly nature of the relationship, but there was nothing concrete.
But when he took the stack of stuff he'd found to the librarian's he knocked a volume off her desk by accident and it fell with a deafening BANG to an open page - on one side a list of the guests at Neta's wedding, top of the list her father, Atama, and on the other side a list of the wedding presents - top of the list, the parcel of land.
Frank said all the hair stood up on the back of his neck, and he said "Thanks Atama" out loud, took the photo copy and scurried out of there.
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Taste is the enemy of art
No, taste is the enemy of humour. Fear is the enemy of art.
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Re that link of I/O's: that's my future sister-in-law's story, pretty much in a nutshell. Except she's been living in Chch for years, and I think that everyday racism is actually taking a toll on her mental health. It's pretty sad because she's acculturated enough that she doesn't get on when she visits Japan either - New Zealand has trained her to be too aggressive for a Japanese woman and to forget her mandatory happy face.
Dunno if Christchurch is really any worse than any other city though.
That link described the experiences of every member of my family who's come to visit me (in Auckland, from Vancouver) so far - except my Dad, who is lily-white. Though he was offended on his wife/daughter/niece's behalf and said that the attitudes and manners were like rural Canada in the 1930s and 1940s.
My cousin, who appears to be Chinese (she's half white and purebred Canadian) said that she thought Canada was just as racist under the surface, it was just that "it's kosher to be racist and out in New Zealand". I think this is a very insightful and accurate observation, but my Dad argued that the social requirement of not appearing to be a pig-ignorant bigot generally raised the tone of any society, and felt Canada has progressed in a way that will take NZ several more decades.
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Tze Ming, you have no idea how much I'm going to miss your writing. You're smarter, funnier and more savage than anyone who's ever tried to take you on.
Good luck in your... um... new position, but do come out of the... shadows to dazzle us and skewer a few racists with your wit.
Do you blog for bribes?
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I have never heard "touch of the tar brush" used in any NZ context. I think of it as old American and even older British usage. It's not part of my working vocab and I can confidently say there is no crossover in my mind.
I would have suspected "tarring with the same brush" is a nautical term from
Oxford Dictionary gives the origin as Sara Noble - from the old punishment of tarring and feathering, and the origin is Old English.
I'd never heard the term "touch of the tarbrush" until I came here, and heard my husband Paul's friends using it - referring to him, his Mum's Maori obviously Maori ancestry and his apparently white appearance - in that jokey-jokey way that is called 'funny' here. It was always uttered in the same jokey-jokey breath with the phrase "nigger in the woodpile" and I was really, reallly shocked by both phrases, shocked at them for using it and Paul for not reacting - despite being made very uncomfortable - because 1) it would encourage them to do it more and 2) it was "only a joke".
The open - if "jokey" racism here made it very hard for me to adjust in my first years here, as I would argue with anybody who spoke like that... though it endeared me to my mother in law, who, like Paul, had been quietly and politely taking that kind of shit all her life.
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Heh. Reminds me of my favourite from that joke email that used to do the rounds about the best words that could be made by replacing, or adding a single letter to create a whole new meaning.
The one that I liked the best was Ignoranus (someone who is both ignorant and an a$$hole).
This reminds me of a philosophy prof I had who used to refer to the masses as "the massholes".
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a wake up call to some people who just don't have a clue that emergency services don't run on moonbeams and warm fuzzies. Since Dyan mentioned his brother, I suspect the bill for aviation fuel alone was not paid out of petty cash
In Canada the search and rescue (on the water anyway) is handled by the Coast Guard, which is not military (as it is in the USA) but a government agency, under the Ministry of Transport. They are also responsible for marine forecasts, maintaining weather stations, keeping the icebreakers moving through the frozen sea etc.
Of course all this is paid by taxes, not run as a charity, but that doesn't really make any difference at all. It's expensive whoever picks up the tab.
But the search and rescue people (as well as the ER clinicians and firefighters) are less concerned with the cost of their time and attention than the fact that their time and attention is turned elsewhere.
Ask anyone who works in any emergency response capacity, and they will tell you this kind of time wasting is inncredibly irresponsible.
The kind of prank that puts other people's lives at risk is very serious - and whether those pranksters intend harm, are unable to
understand the harm they could be causing, were just kidding or are very sorry afterwards, their actions should be prosecuted.