Is There Anything Weirder Than.......

[Zinjanthropos]

I think pi is weird.  

For example, if you tie a string around a beach ball, and you want to add enough string to make it one inch away from the ball all the way around, you have to add about 6 inches (pi times the increase in the diameter, two inches) of string.

If you tied a string around the entire earth, and you wanted to add enough string to lift it one inch off the ground everywhere, you would have to add the same amount of string -- about 6 inches!

I like that, never considered that scenario.

Speaking of decimals,  maybe it's just me that's weird but I used to wonder in math class why it was that I could divide one pie into three equal slices but if I divided 1 by 3 then the quotient repeats onto infinity. Probably I missed something there but I thought it was kind of weird.

[Secular Sanity]

Speaking of decimals,  maybe it's just me that's weird but I used to wonder in math class why it was that I could divide one pie into three equal slices but if I divided 1 by 3 then the quotient repeats onto infinity. Probably I missed something there but I thought it was kind of weird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_decimal

Speaking of pie, I better get busy baking.

[Zinjanthropos]

I'm getting hungry. Apple or strawberry rhubarb? 

Anything weirder than driving for a few kms and then realizing you don't remember anything about the trip, as if time stood still. Obviously you were driving okay but for some reason you weren't really paying attention, where does the mind go? Is it temporary amnesia or is it like hearing your wife/girlfriend talk but not really listening, being selective?

[Zinjanthropos]

...... something ironic. I was trying to find word for the fear of extinction when I found this curious phobia. It's defined by a word that if you were afflicted by it then you'd be scared to look at it. Apparently it's no joke but something tells me this is intentional. I wonder if you are saddled with this phobia whether reading the word is therapeutic. 36 letters....wtf?

The fear of long words phobia or Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

Oh I almost forgot..... couldn't find a phobia listed for fear of extinction. Anyone know of it?

[C C]

Oh I almost forgot..... couldn't find a phobia listed for fear of extinction. Anyone know of it?

It's probably synonymously subsumed under something like thanatophobia (fear of death, dying) rather than room made for a more general anxiety over eradication or going out of existence. But that doesn't prevent creating one's own informal term; Word Info offers a bevy of combinational word-units for that.

Or simply label it "extinctophobia"; nothing wrong with a provincial choice from the standpoint of everybody easily recognizing what it means. Plus, informal attempts to introduce it have already been made: http://www.sundaytimes.lk/050717/plus/let.html

[Zinjanthropos]

..... thinking you're doing some good and the opposite happens. 

In an effort to keep bird feed dry this winter and for easy access, we put a large tray of sunflower seeds under a covered deck (open on 3 sides) close to the house where we could easily observe. Up to 50 birds at a time would go in there and eat, even the occasional squirrel. Then just this past 7-10 days there were no birds or squirrels. Until today when 2 finches showed up. I decided to add some seeds to the tray in the hope of attracting more. What a surprise I got when I saw a kestrel in the rafters gnawing on one of the finches held tight in his talons. 

Looks like in our efforts to help the small birds survive that we inadvertently were setting the buffet table for a predator. I'm ok with the kestrel just doing his thing but not ok knowing that we didn't think it through. The roof provided perfect cover for the raptor enabling him to get real close before the birds noticed. I see kestrels and other hawks all year round and they rarely if ever grab a bird from the exposed feeders. The only reason I can think of is that with many eyes and open skies the little ones see it coming sooner than later.

Nature is great, the predators learn, the prey learns. The kestrel survives and the surviving prey animals are those that stay away from danger or are too quick. A lesson to be learned from our prospective.

[Zinjanthropos]

....being told that a photograph shows an aura of light surrounding my body. Don't get me wrong, I've heard of this kind of stuff but because I'm naturally skeptical I need some real hard evidence to convince me. Unknown to me, the photo was taken while I was relaxing on my deck at the cottage. One of my neighbors took the shot last summer. Of course she is into all that's paranormal. Apparently I glow what looks like a shade of bluish green. 

At the same time she took other pics, but only this one showed my radiance. I'm not as stupid as I seem and I did look some googling. Plenty of articles and vids claim auras are real energy fields. Supposedly, all living things have this energy field but isn't everything we see an energetic field of vibrations? If so, shouldn't everything have an aura? Why not a machine or a rock, what's the difference? 

Why one pic out of a half dozen? What were the light conditions that time of day, at twilight time? I remain unconvinced.

[Zinjanthropos]

The coincidences keep happening to me. Took the wife out for breakfast in Niagara Falls this morning and we took a table near the front overlooking the parking lot. While I'm sitting there gazing out the window I see a BMW pull up to the parking space on the other side of the glass. I look at his Ontario licence plate and then said to my wife that his tag number looked at lot like ours. In fact it turned out that his number was the next in line after ours. Ours is (not real #) CHEX 671 and this guy's was CHEX 672. What are the odds? We bought our car in 2013 and had the dealer get us new plates. 4 years later we 're in the same lot as the guy who got the next one.....friggin' weird.

[Magical Realist]

Synchronicity abounds when we are least looking for it. But why is a question I have never answered. Maybe we are all quantum entangled thru symbols (numbers, words, images, objects) Maybe magick is the manipulation of those symbols.

[C C]

The coincidences keep happening to me. Took the wife out for breakfast in Niagara Falls this morning and we took a table near the front overlooking the parking lot. While I'm sitting there gazing out the window I see a BMW pull up to the parking space on the other side of the glass. I look at his Ontario licence plate and then said to my wife that his tag number looked at lot like ours. In fact it turned out that his number was the next in line after ours. Ours is (not real #) CHEX 671 and this guy's was CHEX 672. What are the odds? We bought our car in 2013 and had the dealer get us new plates. 4 years later we 're in the same lot as the guy who got the next one.....friggin' weird.

It's remarkable just to be able to discriminate events and connect them together as components of patterns of any kind (whether folk beliefs / customs or critical-technical conceptions). All made possible by a brain's quasi-systematic storage of information (with language acquisition and its role included in that, and some innate tactics and sensorimotor responses joining in) that are used to identify, sort / arrange, and understand incoming new information.

There are brain-damaged or cognitively deprived people limited to experiencing a meaningless jumble of sensations that are never or seldom coerced into a template or framework of organization. The very idea of those feelings and manifestations even being "present" may be absent. An empty uniformity missing the judgemental discernment of breaking into individual "things" of differing visual, aural, olfactory (etc) qualities which are then ascribed to being members of larger, more general thought structures and rules (most especially the concept of "world" itself).

It's a self-referring marvel, our being able to conjunct, entertain, and justify that _B_ and _C_ are either a random coincidence with false significance or product of a governing natural order that does have practical (utile) significance. An ability dependent upon cognition of its own presence just to so appreciate / value itself in that manner (a marvel).

This is why "commonsense realism" is a kind of subliminal belief in partial panpsychism. We reflexively project our perceptual "showing of existence" and its phenomenal contents -- along with our intellectual divisions and subordination of such (the descriptions, theories, and apprehensions of reasoning underlying that) -- onto our metaphysical idea of a mind-independent reality. Even though such an empirical and understood version of the world disappears when non-consciousness ensues (i.e., the "not even nothingness" that a mindless type of be-ing would normally be to itself, which returns as the case after the death of a human or other experiencing organism).

It's a subliminal belief in partial panpsychism from the standpoint that if we are backed into a corner we would deny that we fancy anything like that: That the universe as independent of psychological affairs is still manifesting, identifying / classifying and making associations among its components as its representation in our conscious activity does. But once removed from that rare or unusual situation of being backed-up into a philosophical corner, we return right back to our reflective habits of treating existence as it is in the mind's experiential and intellectual representations. Because we can't do much with oblivion or "the absence of everything"; it's not useful stumbling about in the unfeeling dark; we still (in everyday habits) want to regard an extra-psychological realm as if it is teeming with the "showing" and "thinking" characteristics of a mind.