June 16 2020 - Pandemic Existentialism

I haven't seen the term existential used this much since my literature classes in University. Here are some of the headlines: The existential crisis you should be having... Triple crisis of pipelines, pesticides and pandemic is an existential threat to... The response to the coronavirus pandemic holds some critical lessons for the other existential crisis facing the planet: climate change. California public transit services face existential crisiswith COVID-19 pandemic... The MBTA faces "existential" long-term budget challenges as the pandemic's impact on revenue... NYC's urban model faces existential crisis in post-pandemic world Pushing mid- and small-sized hospitals into existential crisis .. We hear the term so much, but what is an Existential crises? It is when individuals question whether their lives have meaning, purpose, or value.  There are four key areas:  death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness, according to definitions.   Perhaps it is mostly death and isolation that has taken centre stage in the pandemic. However, there's a second word showing up a lot:  Nihilism.  This is the philosophy where all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.  The definition says that it is associated with extreme pessimism and radical skepticism that condemns existence.  A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.  We know who is being associated with this philosophy: Trump Toys With a Let-Them-Die Response to the Pandemic ...Do we embrace therapeutic nihilism and just shrug our shoulders in the face of a pandemic, hoping that it will quickly extinguish itself? The nihilism of Mitch McConnell ... more money to state and local governments as they are dealing with the fiscal catastrophe of the pandemic. I think that the Police Brutality/Black Lives Matter movement has overpowered the pandemic existentialism crisis.  I interpret this to be a war for freedom and meaningfulness.  So while I thought existentialism might drift off, it now seems it will be more and more in the news.  We're back to Marion Jarvie's garden in Toronto, with a few more views.

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June 15 2020 - Moon vs Luna

Where does the name Moon come from?  Why do the moons around other planets have names and ours is just Moon? Can you imagine finding out that Jupiter has four moons?  That's what Galileo discovered in 1610 - he'd only gotten a telescope in 1609.  Then astronomers discovered five moons around Saturn.  All of these newly discovered moons were given names to identify them -typically named for Greek myths - Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.  The name Moon comes from Old English: "mōna, which (like all its Germanic cognates) stems from Proto-Germanic *mēnōn, which in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European *mēnsis "month" (from earlier *mēnōt, genitive *mēneses) which may be related to the verb "measure" (of time). Am I right to imagine that the name stuck because things were written down and archived in libraries and so we have a reference.  Ancient peoples had names for the Moon before the Romans and Greeks, but their culture and languages are lost to us.  I wonder what they would have called it. Would it have been named in relation to time similar to the  Romans and Greeks? It is Luna in Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Russian and Bulgarian.  Why don't we call it Luna?  I assume the answer has to do with how old 'Old English' is.  The many groups that made up Anglo Saxons had various dialects that are referred to as Old English - around 550 - 1066.  Then Middle English evolved from the 8th to the 12th century.  Then we're into Early Modern English 1500 to 1700.  Galileo lived from 1564 to 1642.   My curiosity of whether Galileo used the term luna leads me to a Galileo manuscript showing his observations of the Moon, Jupiter, Venus and the Sun.  Is anyone able to translate to find the reference to the Moon?   Yesterday our image was Butchart Gardens, and today our images are Marion Jarvie's garden in Toronto. We visited it yesterday. There seems a great similarity in design style between the two with the beautiful complex compositions.

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