20210118

Mon Jan 18 06:00:01 EST 2021 ======================================== Slept from ten-thirty to seven, but was awoken around four-thirty by somebody loudly scraping ice of their car windows. Cloudy with a 40 percent chance of snow showers. Highs in the lower 30s. West winds 5 to 10 mph. Work ---------------------------------------- - Walk early to avoid maskless cleaning ladies Done. - Follow up on Entrata ticket No. - Change backup media? No. Randy had a bad weekend. His pregnant wife had to go to the hospital and is on bed rest now, and his furnace died. Thirty-minute walk at lunch. Light snow, but not too cold. Saw a pair of mourning doves, a couple blue jays, and a cardinal. Home ---------------------------------------- - Take out trash Done. - Laundry Done. https://singularityhub.com/2021/01/10/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100000-years/ > Many cultures around the world refer to the Pleiades as “seven sisters,” and also tell quite similar stories about them. After studying the motion of the stars very closely, we believe these stories may date back 100,000 years to a time when the constellation looked quite different. > In Greek mythology, the Pleiades were the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas. He was forced to hold up the sky for eternity, and was therefore unable to protect his daughters. To save the sisters from being raped by the hunter Orion, Zeus transformed them into stars. But the story says one sister fell in love with a mortal and went into hiding, which is why we only see six stars. > A similar story is found among Aboriginal groups across Australia. In many Australian Aboriginal cultures, the Pleiades are a group of young girls, and are often associated with sacred women’s ceremonies and stories. The Pleiades are also important as an element of Aboriginal calendars and astronomy, and for several groups their first rising at dawn marks the start of winter. > Close to the Seven Sisters in the sky is the constellation of Orion, which is often called “the saucepan” in Australia. In Greek mythology Orion is a hunter. This constellation is also often a hunter in Aboriginal cultures, or a group of lusty young men. The writer and anthropologist Daisy Bates reported people in central Australia regarded Orion as a “hunter of women,” and specifically of the women in the Pleiades. Many Aboriginal stories say the boys, or man, in Orion are chasing the seven sisters—and one of the sisters has died, or is hiding, or is too young, or has been abducted, so again only six are visible. > Similar “lost Pleiad” stories are found in European, African, Asian, Indonesian, Native American, and Aboriginal Australian cultures. Many cultures regard the cluster as having seven stars, but acknowledge only six are normally visible, and then have a story to explain why the seventh is invisible. > Why are the Australian Aboriginal stories so similar to the Greek ones? Anthropologists used to think Europeans might have brought the Greek story to Australia, where it was adapted by Aboriginal people for their own purposes. But the Aboriginal stories seem to be much, much older than European contact. And there was little contact between most Australian Aboriginal cultures and the rest of the world for at least 50,000 years. So why do they share the same stories? > Barnaby Norris and I suggest an answer in a paper to be published by Springer early next year in a book titled Advancing Cultural Astronomy, a preprint for which is available here. > All modern humans are descended from people who lived in Africa before they began their long migrations to the far corners of the globe about 100,000 years ago. Could these stories of the seven sisters be so old? Did all humans carry these stories with them as they traveled to Australia, Europe, and Asia? > Careful measurements with the Gaia space telescope and others show the stars of the Pleiades are slowly moving in the sky. One star, Pleione, is now so close to the star Atlas they look like a single star to the naked eye. > But if we take what we know about the movement of the stars and rewind 100,000 years, Pleione was further from Atlas and would have been easily visible to the naked eye. So 100,000 years ago, most people really would have seen seven stars in the cluster. https://nautil.us/blog/can-you-treat-loneliness-by-creating-an-imaginary-friend > Over the last several years, a community of people, interacting mostly in online forums, like Reddit, have discovered a way to create something like imaginary companions as adults. This process is known as tulpamancy, and the people who engage in it call themselves “tulpamancers.” > The term “tulpa” seems to originate from Tibetan Buddhism. Samuel Veissière, an anthropologist and cognitive scientist at McGill University, describes tulpas as “imaginary companions who are said to have achieved full sentience after being conjured through ‘thoughtform’ meditative practice.” In other words, this is a benign hallucination. But unlike typical childhood imaginary companions, creating (or “forcing”) a tulpa often requires months of hard work. Tulpamancers imagine talking to the tulpa, sometimes for more than an hour a day, and eventually, perhaps after several months, the tulpa will start talking back. > The techniques of forcing a tulpa have not been scientifically validated, and now exist only as collected advice and recommendations from practitioners communicating on the internet. What many aspiring tulpamancers do is imagine their tulpa in a paracosm, an imaginary world, in as vivid detail as possible. They might ascribe things to the tulpa, by saying “You’re creative,” or “You like mambo music.” But you are not supposed to make the tulpa say anything in your imagination—when the tulpa is “ready,” it will speak to you. Watched some anime. Explored unix/linux C library with man pages and gcc, with some success. Servings: grains 6/6, fruit 1/4, vegetables 3/4, dairy 2/2, meat 1/3, nuts 0.5/0.5 Brunch: banana, cucumber, taco with beans, coffee Lunch: wrap with egg and avocado Dinner: cheese curls, ramen

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