Another Random Childhood Memory Arisen at the Hour of the Wolf

In the dark basement, my father's professional-grade whetstone. (He was a professional carpenter and shipwright after all).  It sat in something that looked a bit like a dirty butter dish.

The whetstone became wet only when he spat on it, after which he would use a forefinger to spread the spittle all around the top surface as, perhaps, his own father taught him to do.

 

The Unfortunate Demise of Tinkerbelle

I tried to articulate an overarching theme for the UFO course that I recently led in a town that neighbors my own.  It was a simple one -- It is easy to get on the UFO train, a/k/a "the Woo-Woo Choo-Choo," if one is not led astray by prejudices, but it is very hard to know where to get off.  That is, there are anomalies in the atmosphere that are impossible for a reasonable and informed person to dismiss, but if one follows the rail line from there, it soon leads to very high strangeness indeed, and ultimately to the three pressing questions that followed Paul Gauguin all the way to Tahiti, inspiring the masterpiece that hangs in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts -- "D'ou venons-nous? ..."

And now comes a budding ufologist from Australia, a young man who, in his latest Youtube segment, tries to borrow credibility from his late grandfather, who was a hero of the Battle of Britain, as if that lineage will protect him from skepticism.

"R" was nine or ten years old, sitting outside in a teaching circle next to his female friend "A," when she pointed with wonder and horror at his right foot.  Stuck to the bottom of his shoe was a fairy or sprite that he had crushed to death, inadvertently.  (He knew about the look of death because a venomous snake had lately dispatched his dog.)

The sprite was stereotypical -- tiny, slender, with no gender markings, but with dragonfly wings sprouting from its back.  R examined it closely enough to remark on little wrinkles on its eyelids.  After a time, it disappeared, but A always affirmed that this happened in conversation with R, and R has never fully escaped the ontological shock that the incident caused him.

There are many more than 10,000 such tales.  If this one is in any sense true, then what kind of world do we live in?  And "Ou allons-nous?"

 

Say It Ain't So Sabine!

Sabine Hossenfelder, the somewhat celebrated public-facing German theoretical physicist, has announced to the world via Twitter/X that she is optimistic about the future, for several reasons.  One reason is that we need not be concerned that Artificial Intelligence will stage a mutiny, perhaps enslave us or even kill us all.  Why not?  Before technology progresses to a point that makes such an eventuality possible, says Sabine, we humans will have "merged" with AI.

Raise your hand if you want to live in a world where man and machine are one.