Saturday and Sundry Shank o' the Year Bits & Bobs

Beginning with an update to my Christmas post - a new family gathering photograph from Monday evening. There are a couple of absentees due to distance, but most are there, somewhere. Your friendly neighbourhood blogger's head is the white haired one peeking around back mid-photo. Anyjazz, said blogger's husband is far left, after running back to group having prepared camera to do its stuff automatically. (Clicking on image should bring up a larger version.)

We're back at the shank of the year once more, some of us a tad bloody but unbowed. This is a time when I often dust down my bookmarks, disposing of any items which no longer serve a purpose. In doing so yesterday I came upon the following, fairly recent links to articles about which I'd intended to scribble a few words, but didn't get around to doing so.

The Hippies Were Right: It's All about Vibrations, Man!
A new theory of consciousness
by Tam Hunt.
(Tam Hunt is a practicing lawyer (renewable energy law and policy) by day and by night a scholar (affiliated with the University of California Santa Barbara's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences) in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of physics.)



SNIP:

All things in our universe are constantly in motion, vibrating. Even objects that appear to be stationary are in fact vibrating, oscillating, resonating, at various frequencies. Resonance is a type of motion, characterized by oscillation between two states. And ultimately all matter is just vibrations of various underlying fields.

An interesting phenomenon occurs when different vibrating things/processes come into proximity: they will often start, after a little time, to vibrate together at the same frequency. They “sync up,” sometimes in ways that can seem mysterious. This is described today as the phenomenon of spontaneous self-organization.

Examining this phenomenon leads to potentially deep insights about the nature of consciousness and about the universe more generally.


Stephen Strogatz provides various examples from physics, biology, chemistry and neuroscience to illustrate what he calls “sync” (synchrony) in his eponymous 2003 book, including:

Fireflies of certain species start flashing their little fires in sync in large gatherings of fireflies, in ways that can be difficult to explain under traditional approaches.
Large-scale neuron firing can occur in human brains at specific frequencies, with mammalian consciousness thought to be commonly associated with various kinds of neuronal synchrony.
Lasers are produced when photons of the same power and frequency are emitted together.
The moon’s rotation is exactly synced with its orbit around the Earth such that we always see the same face.

Resonance is a truly universal phenomenon and at the heart of what can sometimes seem like mysterious tendencies toward self-organization....................

The piece ends with:

It is all about vibrations, but it’s also about the type of vibrations and, most importantly, about shared vibrations.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it … man.

After reading that piece I wondered if, perhaps, astrology could be linked to vibrations - somehow. I'm convinced that one day something like this will come along and lights will go on in some scientist's head and shine so brightly until he/she is forced to day "Well, that's funny - maybe there is something to that astrology rubbish!"

A similar thought followed my reading of this piece:

Leonardo da Vinci & The New Biology

by Sayer Ji

SNIP (need to scroll down):

"Biological Science has been under the spell of Newton’s atomistic view of the universe since the late 17th century. Yet revolutionary new discoveries in molecular biology reveal a connectivity and proportionality embedded within our bodies and the biosphere as a whole reminiscent of ideas once held by visionaries like Leonardo da Vinci.?"

"The concept that the body, along with many other natural phenomena, contains proportions and geometries found in the universe as a whole is already established in Fibonacci series (a series of numbers in which each number ( Fibonacci number ) is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The simplest is the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.), also known as the golden ratio. From fingers to faces, flower petals to seed heads, pine cones to galaxies, the pattern is the same.

The idea, of course, relates to the age old concept that “as above, so below,” or the quasi-holographic idea that the part reflects the properties of the whole. Previous to the discovery that there is horizontal gene transfer and reversibility of information flow in cells from the outside in (environment > nucleus), the reductionist view of biological atomism precluded there being a mechanism to connect the part to the whole. Now we see that the kingdoms of life are no longer hermetically sealed off in endless competition with one another. They participate with and in one another, in a type of network which speaks to the oneness and openness of life as a whole."

Here's a fun quiz to do:


Do you have a hidden Hugh Grant or Highland Scot inside?
Take our quiz and we’ll pinpoint what part of the UK you most sound like you’re from – even if you’re not British.

I took the quiz and was accused of coming from Middlesbrough! To be fair that is in roughly the correct ballpark: in the north of England, towards the east - half correct, kind of. A ball would have to travel around 90 miles south to hit the places where I lived most of my years until aged 60+. I truly do not have a Middlesbrough accent though. I know that accent well, having worked reasonably close to the city for a season, long ago.