The Model

More god. From The Strange Rise Of Daydreaming (Nautil.us)

THE MODEL:

Reality depends on interpretation which depends on a learned conceptual Model. We learn the model from our parents and later from other people. For example how and what to eat, what talk means, what not to touch, and how to define "cool" and react to certain stimulus.

The model defines the world and contains everything we know. Some things are products of the model itself: like the concept of society, space travel, time & gravity. Someone thought the stars looked like campfires on distant islands, and wondered if they could go there. "I'll need a ship ..."

The model contains the concepts of similarity, opposites, and negative values (in fact any thing you can think of). But that allows the possibility of things we can't think of. Like magic & ghosts, that can affect the "real" world.

The Model is always in control. Without it, there's nobody home. Social concepts like "cool", responsibility, & guilt predefine an appropriate response (to those situations that require it). Summoned in some reverie without possibility of action, become a stress, PTSD, the model turning on itself like cancer. But it's the model, and the model, like science, is never complete.

It's my opinion that religion is a primal form of science & government that was/is meant to be a psychological process to homogenize a society. Probably going back before the Homo genus evolved, it used the best science available at the time. A map of ones self & a plan of how & why people & animals behave the way they do, why things work out, or don't, etc. With no authoritative reference, it was (& is) prime soil for multiple (self serving & expedient) interpretations.

Saying hallelujah, Allah akbar & so forth as in "praise god" must have (IMHO) originally been an affirmation. That gives a different meaning to the gesture (other than "please don't hurt me"). So then what's praise? It's encouragement and recognition. Admonishments to "fear god" mostly reflect the attitude of the advisor. If a person focusses on strife & contrariness, the model becomes that way too.

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Chimney Draft Fan

I bought a wood stove for my tinyhouse. The best place to put it has a bathroom drain directly above and a stovepipe through the shower floor is unconventional, begs for burns while showering, and also hard to seal. So I put a Chimney Tee through the downstairs wall to rout it outside. Alas, the extra routing made it draw badly before the flue got hot. Too much smoke is bad for lungs and stinks up the house, so I mounted a little fan under the Tee to push the smoke through, but it worked poorly. Cold stagnate air in the flue has enough weight to push fan draft back out through the fire door & into the house bringing smoke with it. The fan hole also let cold air into the bottom of the chimney which diluted the draft the chimney pulled even when the fire got hot.

Aiee! another dismal failure. What to do? ~ Capitalism to the rescue! ~ I bet a lot of people have smoky stoves in the morning and they'd send me money for designing a chimney fan that works, so I perservered and made the dandy design below.

Well they didn't because people using wood for heat typically don't have a lot of money, but it's still a working plan so this is how to make one for free (if you scrounge parts).


To get around the heavy cold air plugging the chimney, I put a fan on top the chimney that pulls a vacuum in the flue and draw air from inside the house. It even pulls some escaped smoke back into the stove. It takes a couple of seconds to build the vacuum so I wait a bit and open the door slowly. It works (yay). The fan is only necessary before the stovepipe warms up, turn it off once the fire is burning well.

For the venturi housing, I used a 24 inch section of Metalbestos cut down to 18 inches. The chimney drawing below shows 6 inch inside pipe dia, 8 inches outside. The cut section is 10 inches long, that might be too short because there needs to be some room for the air to flow smoothly. Turbulence wastes energy. Metalbestos is expensive but people throw it away if the insulation gets waterlogged (there's probably a reason but I don't know what it is, my suspecision is it's caused by chimney salesmen), and you can probably get sections for free if you ask around, because the shops have to pay to throw them away. Ask chimney installers, chimney sweeps, swap shops, etc. You don't need the (presumably waterlogged) insulation anyway, that space it occupies is where the Venturi goes. Still a good idea to check it for holes. You need to cut the outer tube in half to remove the insulation.

Metalbestos sections are designed to tolerate uneven temperature expansion. The inside tube is only connected at the top and the tubes can slide to accommodate heat expansion stress and let moisture out, so cut the outside tube using a surface grinder with 1/16 thick blade, go all the way around and pull the two halves apart. Hold it over a garbage can or sack because it's messy and contains asbestos. Do it outdoors wearing a Covid mask, and wash up immediately afterwards. Later, you put them back together by cutting slots and forcing the top over the outer tabs so it sheds rain water. Secure the tabs under the upper overlap with automative hi-temp gasket glue, and pop rivets or screws, to make it airtight.

Then cut the inside tube in half the same way, about an inch from the top, and cut a one and 1/2 inch ring off the piece that you just removed to allow for the overlap tabs and also leave an inch gap for the forced air from the fan to enter the flue pipe directing the airflow out the top (that gap is the Venturi). Secure eight spacers, shown red in the drawing, to the outside of that tube with rvits, sheet metal screws, or spot-weld. The spacers are "L" shaped, four are about 2 inches long with a one inch leg (the width of the insulation cavity) and four are one inch long.

The short brackets (red) are connected around the bottom of the inside tube so it will sit on top of the (outer tube) flange and won't slide down. This maintains the width of the gap at the top of the inner tube where forced air from the fan enters the flue pipe and creates up draft.

The long "L" pieces are attached around the top of the inside tube to hold it centered. They also probably reduce any tornado/coriolis vortex that might get started (Vortex = turbulence). I don't know if that's important here but having made wind generator blades for 15 yrs, my rule of thumb is laminar flow: good, vortex: bad.

Cut a square hole in the front of the outside tube that's as wide as the tube itself so it looks like a Mr. Coffee maker. Then make (or have made) some kind of metal box (stainless or galvanized) to hold the fan on the front with folded tabs around the curved surface of the outside tube, pop rivets, and hi-temp automotive gasket glue to keep it air & water tight, good to 700°F (beats solder).

Once the chimney is drawing, cold air is drawn in through the fan when it's not running, so it doesn't get hot enough to affect the fan or wiring. If you still worry, a fuse on that wire would simplify troubleshooting.

The Venturi fan has worked well for 3 or 4 yrs. This is the fan I used, $46 from Amazon. It has a speed control that's unnecessary, I just leave it on the highest setting.

Bill :)

A Card Carrying Atheist

To be a card carrying Atheist, you'll first need to acquire a felt tip pen, some scissors, and a piece of cardboard. Write anything you like on the card, but it should somehow refer to the topic of being an Atheist.

Late reflections on god after considering ones precarious mortality (it's only precarious when you think about it), lead me to conclude that most (but not all) memory depends on physical matter, such as the juxtaposition of objects or string of events inside our brain, matched with something similar on the outside.

I'm saying "not all" memory is recorded that way because I occasionally have remembered things that hadn't yet happened. As a teenager, my mom sold tickets at the Senator Theater in Chico. She told me several times that when watching old movies she knew what was going to happen next, probably, she said, because she'd seen it years before. I'm not too sure that's always the case because I sometimes recognize some piece of a movie plot even when I haven't seen the movie (40 yr car gypsy w/ no computer or access). It might be some kind of deja-vu but other times I've definitely remembered the sequence of having the information and wondering what it was about, sometimes years before the event occurred (odearodear 1 Jan 2017). I further doubt that I'm the only person who does that.

The point of this is whether thinking exists without physical support. Some say that thought creates the world. Well yes it does in a way, I imagine something before I draw it out before I start to build it, but that's part of a feedback loop that starts with having a physical agency first, not through thought before the agency.

If thought could realize physical stuff before agency, I'd be surrounded by hot babes. But duh! Nope it's something else.

But to continue about thinking w/ no physical reference: There's a patriarchal god in heaven and then there's hot babes on earth. Medieval monks said god existed before hot babes, but I doubt that's true. It's more like an entirely cerebral statement of tribal status quo among a bunch of guys that aren't allowed to act when they're horney. Their accommodation and survival depends on avoiding SIN. The brother superior says it'll be like that when they're dead (eternal bliss) but only if they confess regularly & don't get excommunicated (booted out of the church). What's the point of that? Eternal bliss is 'no thinking' which might be accessible through other means than the church (cough, lots of drugs), but scriptures don't talk about it.

My conclusion is that without hot babes, thinking evaporates by itself. We need a physical stimulus to form imagination. This article says memories are made (Nature magazine) by the action of repairing DNA, a physical thing.

OK now that the plausibility is sort of established, I need to know how I can have a memory of something before it happens. Maybe a wormhole in the Akashic record(?) but that sounds like bull, so how about some kind of quantum entanglement where the same proteins entanglement extends through time, whatever happens takes place in more than one time/place. OK, that sounds like bull too but it's what I have for now. If you can do better, please write it in the comments. :)

Update, next day:

Quantum Weirdness Now a Matter of Time (QuantaMagazine)

"... These correlations seriously mess with our intuitions about time and space. Not only can two events be correlated, linking the earlier one to the later one, but two events can become correlated such that it becomes impossible to say which is earlier and which is later."

The authors are trying to entangle a secure message that cant be read before a certain date, but a side effect seems to be that an entangled temporal event can happen at a different time. In my case though, one is the event, the other is a perception of the event in a dream. I don't know what's actually happening but the pieces seem to go in the right direction.

About Witches in Society

There are stories about people riding on broomsticks and casting spells that have since been discredited in this age of objectivity where, as more people agree, the more valid it sometimes becomes. That's a hard point to argue against because you're bucking public opinion, when you might have objective evidence that they're all wrong, like this. Then it's your side against the non believers, a war of faiths, complicated by intolerance and the perception of intolerance.

Objectively speaking, the term "witch" has become a derogatory way of describing the result of an apparently universal human tendency to get wasted drunk or stoned and then try to convince straight people that the hallucinations are real, while trying to avoid responsibility for violating social courtesy.

Before the Middle Ages that term didn't have the same meaning. In fact Norsemen would sometimes prefer to kidnap witches. Why? Because in Ireland they were brewers and curers. The trend was widespread enough that rumor had it that most women in Ireland were witches, and they really were a positive addition to beer drinking communities in Norway.

In this reguard, the Vikings were enlightened and tolerant of people with differing opinions and background. Or maybe they just didn't care about things that couldn't be turned into wealth.

Irish witches used cauldrons, they also used a kind of watertight stone trough, probably for fermenting or steeping ingredients. The cauldrons are seldom found but the stone troughs are all over Northern Europe, especially Ireland, probably because they're not portable. Their number gives an idea of how widespread the practice was. DNA tested residue from the troughs indicate a wide selection of plants, some of which had medicinal properties, and some were (probably) for flavor.

Later, during the witch trials, the solution was mandated by the church and state to control the social effects of popular drug "abuse", much the same extreme way as Reagan, and Duterte handled it, when it began to infringe on the official version of reality.

Not that the Official version of reality is a bad thing, It helps people get along and settles disputes (unless it causes a war). There was an American Indian culture (in Ohio?) around the 12th century that some say apparently fell apart at the same time as (because of) their state sanctioned (over)use of bufotenine, a narcotic derivative of some species of toad skins that causes hallucination. The chiefs used it and stopped caring about the people.

Beer hasn't always been made with Hops and Barley. Sometimes poisonous plants like monkshood and henbane were added for alchemical or apothecary properties. Without FDA inspectors, toe of toad & eye of newt could likely have had regionally recognized pharmaceutical properties, though their use in Macbeth was recognizable for the implied innuendo by association with stupid, greedy and ignorant creatures. Vikings intentionally took Henbane concoctions to make them more fierce and immune to pain. Vikings also imported pharmacology from other countries too. Medicine has always been a big trade item. The legal definition of Rum, Pepper, and Cocaine changes by region and government, for example Portugal and Singapore promote opposite solutions to subjectivity: Portugal makes all drug use legal with social support to re-direct drug users toward objectivity. While Singapore gives the death penalty for the same thing (change or die druggie, not the state's responsibility).

In Andean countries there is a drink called Chicha made from fermented corn. It's a lot like corn mash used for moonshine but is never distilled and has to be consumed within a few days because it's said to be poisonous if it spoils. It's traditionally made in big round 15 (+/-) gallon pots (like big cauldrons). Which are ordered several weeks ahead of some occasion, party, or for Indian bars called Chicharias. By coincidence (maybe) a skeleton was found in a Viking cemetery in Norway with six vertebra in his neck. People usually have seven vertebra, except in the high Andes where six is a local (and defining) genetic trait. Not saying that guy was kidnapped from South America in the 10th century to make hooch in Norway, but he was. The tradition of getting whacked with your friends goes way back, still the same problem. Try to be objective.

Wish I could write about weird stuff as clearly as this guy:
Shooting Down Souls (good luck with that) Some paradoxical thoughts on the UFO phenomenon from a historian of religions.

From my position I suppose better writing is about motivation (that means it's your fault). In 23 yrs I've received 10 comments that weren't spam, but the blog still averages around 200 hits /mo., Some of the hit scores from the earlier posts were either inflated at the time or deleted later. At least before 2010, they were higher than it now shows. So maybe 300+ /mo? I guess I could get other email addresses to comment on myself (every serious blog does it), so I could legitimize whatever opinion I'm selling.

We're all bored. So, what's on your mind? Seen any weird stuff lately?

Here in the woods things are pretty dull, been rainninng a lot. Except hey, I recieved positive results for bowl cancer, that's always exciting! Mortality gets real. Stay tuned for the hospital report (whenever they get around to it).

Terminal stage Junk

In 50 yrs there'll be 9 billion people on earth (or something like that). They'll all be loaded up w/ precious socially relatable representations of their ego (online junk). A few years later the population will start to drop and capitalism will have to compete for our attention w/ it's own cheap or free detritus, we'll not only have our own load of valuable crap, but there'll be crap inflation too and (with landfills full) no where to get rid of it. The only thing that won't tank is real estate because while we might have an excellent supply of proven gizmos, we'll still need somewhere to keep them. Luckily we'll be able store our stuff in the (still) abandoned building boom cities in China, or in hidden caches buried in the Mojave desert. :)

Webinars

For the benefit of the more ardent Atheist readers: This is a notice of an upcoming series of five webinars for atheists of every stripe, given by secularstudents.org/webinars, between Jan 24 & May 8 2024.