Hunting of the Snark - Fit the second

Hunting of the Snark - Fit the second - The Bellman's Speech  - by Lewis Carroll

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies—

   Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,
   The moment one looked in his face!

The Best of all Possible Worlds.

The Best of All Possible worlds - by P.K.Odendaal - September 2013. 

I have added another part to this original article of last month (The Perfect World) and tried to answer the questions the first part of this article begged.

I have added yet another part at the end setting out a scientific interpretation of the Many Worlds Interpretation concept. (October 2013)

Taken from the idea of The Perfect Storm - which was not so perfect.

If there is something I will definitely not like, it would be a perfect world. I cannot imagine the boredom and lack of creativity that will accompany a perfect world. In a perfect world there will not be any improvement, development, creative space or new ideas possible, because by definition it is perfect and cannot be improved.

I shudder at the thought.

The Perfect World

The Perfect World - by P.K.Odendaal - August 2013 

Taken from the idea of The Perfect Storm - which was not so perfect.

If there is something I will definitely not like, it would be a perfect world. I cannot imagine the boredom and lack of creativeness that will accompany a perfect world. In a perfect world there will not be any improvement, development, creative space or new ideas possible, because by definition it is perfect and cannot be improved.

I shudder at the thought.

Asking the right questions.

Asking the right questions - by P.K.Odendaal - August 2013 

And all the time we thought that the most clever man was the one who gave the best answers to the most difficult questions asked!

False.

It is the man who asks the most clever questions. That is how we got to all our inventions. Someone somewhere knew which questions to ask - but knowing that does not come easily.

Hunting of the Snark . Fit the First .. continued

Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll 
 
Fit the First .. continued
 
“His form is ungainly — his intellect small —”
 (So the Bellman would often remark)
“But his courage is perfect! And that, after all,
 Is the thing that one needs with a Snark.”

He would joke with hyenas, returning their stare
 With an impudent wag of the head:
And he once went a walk, paw-in-paw, with a bear,
 “Just to keep up its spirits,” he said.

I am from the Chain Gang

I am from the Chain Gang - by P.K.Odendaal - August 2013.

You are now used to my favourite quotation by Jean Jacques Rousseau: 'Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains'. It takes some thought before we will realise that we are in chains. Apart from chains as physical things we are also bound emotionally and spiritually as we are in bondage and victims of somebody else's war.

The idea of the Chain Gang is as old as man himself, but it has been more vividly portrayed in the book of Victor Hugo: 'Les Miserables'. In the book a person called Jean Valjean must serve his jail term in hard labour as part of the Chain Gang, because he stole bread for his sister and her family. In the Chain Gang he had to do hard labour like the breaking of stones.

Two is a crowd

Two is a crowd - by P.K.Odendaal - August 2013

I have dwelt on solitude somewhat in my previous series named 'Death in the Afternoon', but I wish to revisit it here, being very important to our anti-social needs - if anti-social rings a bell for you somewhere. For me it is important.

Privacy.

It is so that the person who has the least privacy in the world - a non-commissioned soldier - is called a Private. I wonder why, because, in all earnestness, he should be called a Public. Apart from his public duties, his work is also open to public scrutiny.

The limits of Free Will

The limits of free will - by P.K.Odendaal - July 2013 

If you are still unsure whether you have free will, this is probably not for you, but read on - you just might be surprised. In previous articles I have elaborated on that and the gist of the argument is as follows:

 

Argument 1

God cannot make a mistake or error. I make mistakes and errors. I therefore do things for which only I am the author.

QED

Oh, the ignorance of these learned people!

Oh, the ignorance of these learned people! - by P.K.Odendaal - June 2013

 In my previous blog I have spoken of the strange and unknown activity called THINKING, and I quoted George Bernard Shaw who once said: 'Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week'.

My experience is that the more you know, the less you think, and that learned people have stopped thinking. One would have thought that it worked the other way round, but now that I THINK about it, I find it to be so. The reason is that people, who get very skilled in anything, later do things mechanically, and that must then also be true for people skilled in letters and science.

Nothing is quite what it seems

Nothing is quite what it seems - by P.K.Odendaal - June 2013 

There is a saying that one cannot judge a book by its cover, and yet that is exactly what we do every day.

I think that the thing we do most every day is judging some item, thought, person or action and that is our life. At least it is mine, but I am sure it is the life of many other people as well. And then some people have the nerve or audacity to say that we should not be judgmental. That is like saying we should not live. I can, off the cuff, think of at least over a hundred judgments, even if they are only value judgments, which I make every day. I judge whether the things I, or people around me, or in the news, are valid, morally correct, politically correct, true, good, bad, expedient, prudent, important, considerate, enjoyable, fattening, equitable, life threatening and a host of other things.