Taomeow

If you are stuck in traffic, make the Kali Mudra, point it at the cars in front of you and proclaim, solemnly, Om Tat Sat! In 9 cases out of 10, the traffic will start dispersing.

Yeah, don't know about the poles -- been hearing talk about them flipping any minute now for the past 20 years so to me it's like flipping a coin... or not flipping it. Who knows. As for daylight saving time, I like what a Native American chief said about it (quoting from memory): brilliant science -- take a blanket, cut a piece of it on one end, sew it onto the other end, and voila -- you now have a longer blanket. People with small children and dogs are particularly 'excited' every time we switch the clocks... and us bazi readers hate it for an additional reason -- every time you do someone's chart you have to go check if DST was in effect that year, that month, that day at that location... ugh. It's different from year to year, country to country... and in the US, a couple of states don't switch and neither do some territories, but there's no guarantee they never did in the past when someone was born, so, still extra work even if it's a Zonie's* chart. *Zonies are people who come on vacation to San Diego from Arizona. A local phenomenon.

Not just wearing them, having the Sun's production line reliably supply them. Circa 1968 the Sun entered a flat maximum reaching into the 1970s, i.e. instead of the erratic flares we all know and hate today, we got a sustained stream of energizing photons consistently nourishing yang creativity on which physics as we know it depends. Contrast it with the biggest flare ever recorded, out of the blue in 2001... That was in April and we all know what happened in September of that year. It's been like that since the 1970s -- the Sun transmitting some Morse code, which no one really bothers to try deciphering.

That's speciesism, no? Animals only interesting in what they can do for us, not for their own sake? Yes, some felines, specifically Felis Catus known as domestic cat, have been our companions for quite a while, but most don't want to have anything to do with us if they can help it... I like the shinto view - - no species is thought of as superior to any other, they are all perfect in their own habitat, on their own terms, and people are part of this arrangement, not some special case. Unless we are bent on climbing on top of the Pyramid of Extinction... I shamed myself into thinking I was too judgmental, so I decided to doublecheck and went back to the video. And the first word she uttered was "hello..." -- and my whole life's experience screamed -- "no need to listen to the rest, someone who says hello like this is a bitch." So I stopped right there the second time around. I never had spaghetti from a can so I can't be a reliable judge of it... and my quantum mechanics education is limited to extended lectures on the subject which a family member professionally in the know used to give me during long car trips (they were superb, by the way) for educational entertainment (sic) purposes. But I seem to recall that those loops on the right are sort of wrapped around the non-loopy ones on the left. If you have both varieties, you could conduct a scientific experiment, string the right ones onto the left ones, see what happens. Whether the procedure begets a universe, maybe even a better one if we're lucky, or... well, experimental evidence will tell.

Yes, there's this tough guy (occasionally gal) type who's in it for a chance to hurt someone, but luckily I was spared those encounters with my TKD peers. I loved taekwondo but didn't get far -- had to quit due to family circumstances. My master was the product of the Korean army and handled training his students the way he was taught himself -- mercilessly. But my mood at the time was something like, "let's challenge this lazy cat, i.e. me, who'd rather spend her life on the sofa with a book," so I didn't mind. And later, when the great tao sent my taiji teacher, the first thing he said to me was, without me disclosing it, "ohhh... I can see you did taekwondo... that's OK, I'll get it out of your system." And did, in no time.

This is also what we use in Chen style taiji, the corkscrew motion in the spine with upper and lower parts going in the opposite directions, which is part of what you do to generate a specific kind of power we call peng. I also remember in TKD it was used to teach us to fall on all fours in a hypothetical situation where, e.g., the opponent throws you face down onto an obstacle, a boulder or curb or a glass coffee table: when landing on all fours you twist the upper body sideways to at least save your face. Master Ho had us fall like that onto a pile of soft mats, but it was still scary physics.

And biophysics, and... One of my favorite quotes ever, by an evolutionary biologist Haldane (I think), in response to the question -- --You have studied creation all your life, what have you learned about the Creator? --That God has an inordinate fondness for beetles. Not sure anthropology covers "all" the territory worth covering... in fact, it chiefly concerns itself with the antics of the species Plato called "the featherless biped" (based on the fact that we walk on two legs like birds but unlike birds are, well, featherless). And what about cats? To say nothing of beetles? So... I actually meant taoist sciences which meet the requirement I consider a sine qua non -- a unified theory underlying all of them. But today they are not viewed as science by the popes of the church of modern western science -- and are woefully lumped together, by assorted quacks, with assorted woo-woo... just like quantum mechanics. Unified theory... That physics woman in the video (I may have been too harsh in my assessment, but am too lazy to list all the reasons why) mentioned superstrings (something she apparently doesn't like) in the context of "it was mostly an American thing, not a European one." That's what we have for a unified theory... an American physics and a European physics. Or is it anthropology, sans physics?..

Thanks for clarifying. Looks like in physics "the argument from naturalness" also had (and we can only hope will have again) its champions who hardly meet the criteria for "a clear example of pseudoscience." E.g., Paul Dirac, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist regarded as one of the great ones, expressed this sentiment in a 1960s article titled "The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature": "A theory with mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental data. God is a mathematician of a very high order..." He often reiterated it in his lectures as, ""If a theory is not beautiful, it is probably wrong."

It depends on who those "us" are. Real science, if it existed*, would be based on a unified theory and nothing in the universe would be left out in the cold (however cold) or crash and burn encountering that phenomenon (however hot). I don't just mean a unified theory physicists are pining for (those who care about physics among them, that is, rather than grants and tenures and publications). I mean science as a whole -- where physicists and geologists, biologists and chemists, astronomers and linguists would have an underlying common ground, a common base whence to have a meaningful dialog, a meaningful set of shared fundamentals so they could actually communicate and -- unbelievable as it presently seems -- understand what it's about. Understand it on the level of that unified view, unified theoretical premise they would all share. A science that would have that would be self-consistent across the spectrum of all human endeavors -- not self-contradictory, not weaponized against itself by having skipped that crucial initial step of harmonizing its countless branches by tracing them to a common root. Funny thing is, technology would never be as all-powerful if this kind of science existed. There would be deterrents built in... *It does. It just takes a much longer, much more dedicated study, is not part of any current institution's curriculum, and has empirical outcomes not readily caught by currently accepted/available methods and models. Its time will either come or we're toast. I miss him too.

The first thing she offered as "a clear example of pseudoscience" is "arguments from naturalness."