August 18 2021 - World's Silliest Questions

 It popped into my head:  what are the silliest questions we might ask?  We've looked at life's unanswerable questions.  Is there an overlap?  Not according to the Thoughtcatalog.com website.  And typically, the internet portrays questions as "silly" or "crazy" while they often fall into ignorant and stupid.  I expect that the majority likely come from children using the internet as an encyclopedia.  And the minority come from people posing to be stupid so they can ask such outrageous things.  the questions that are circulated come from Yahoo Answers.  Here are a few stand-outs that made me laugh:

• Should I tell my parents I’m adopted?
• Do midgets have night vision?
• If I eat myself will I get twice as big or disappear completely?
• Does it take 18 months for twins to be born? Or 9?
• Do you think NASA invented thunderstorms to cover up the sound of space battles?
• How big is the specific ocean?
• Why are the holes in cats fur always in the right places for their eyes?

The questions I consider non-silly and no laugh happens move over to the list of ignorant and stupid,  Most often grammar and spelling are deficient, punctuation is ever-present, and swear words  limit the content significantly.

There is an entry in Wikipedia about stupid questions.  It begins with Carol Sagan's words: "There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism.  But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question".  

Carl didn't experience the full force of the internet and Yahoo Answers, did he?  He died in 1996. Since then the pile of stupid questions has grown large enough that they've been classified: 

• Those questions that have already been answered, but the asker wasn't listening or paying attention.
• Questions that can be answered on one’s own with complete certainty. After all, information found online or from other sources can be wrong, so it never hurts to check.
• Questions of which the answer should be painfully obvious to any person with a pulse who has lived on this Earth for more than a decade.
• Questions that include ridiculous or hypothetical assumptions.
• Questions asked by someone who already knows the answer but is trolling the person they are asking.
   

So I moved on, and went cherry picking in the list of silly/stupid questions and to find these two and think we might move them to unanswerable /existential questions:

• What would happen if I hired two private investigators to follow each other?
• If the world is going to end, do you buy, sell, or hold stocks? 

On to our picture of the day: we're again visiting the Grimsby Beach Painted Ladies today.  This is 13 Fair Ave. Here's the story of the area's houses:

In 1846, Methodists gathered on the shore of Lake Ontario on land owned by J.B. Bowslaugh in a ten day temperance rally that evolved into a significant Chautauqua site.   
 
Grimsby Beach continues to echo with the charms of its storied past. In fact, these cottages built for the summer residence of a temperance camp, remain the most prominent connection to the rich history of the area. Now, the intricate fretwork and colors of the cottages inspire a vibrant mood at the beach which is a reminder of the spirit that inhabited the area.

 

Feb 9 2021 - Alien Driveby?

  

It has recently occurred to me that there are unanswerable questions that I don't want or care about getting answered. Take a look at just a few of the dozens of unanswered / unanswerable questions:  How exactly did life begin?  Why do we dream? Is there a pattern behind prime numbers?  Can we travel through time?  Is our universe the only one?  What exactly is consciousness?  Where is all the antimatter? As soon as you ask for "exactly" something answers then it is going to get difficult to answer.  A question I don't consider important the unanswerable realm:  Where did I come from? But then I see a NY Times article and my curiosity is engaged. Did an alien life-form do a driveby of our solar system in 2017? The particular circumstance is a cigar shaped thing out there that was given the name Oumuamua — Hawaiian for “scout” — it was first noticed by a telescope on the island of Maui on Oct. 19, 2017, when it was already on its way out of the solar system, having passed closest to the sun a month before. It had come from outside the solar system, from the direction of the star Vega. Author of the book The First sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Avi Loeb argues that it is no more preposterous to suppose that Oumuamua was a lightsail, a thin material that gets its propulsive boost from sunlight or starlight, either launched in our direction or anchored like a buoy in space, where we ran into it on our planet’s travel around the galaxy. In which case the age-old question — are we alone in the universe? — has been answered. The NY Times quotes from Loeb's book “But the moment we know that we are not alone, that we are almost certainly not the most advanced civilization ever to have existed in the cosmos, we will realize that we’ve spent more funds developing the means to destroy all life on the planet than it would have cost to preserve it.” The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth  By Avi Loeb   Here are more montage images - I didn't have to bury the pictures in salt and vinegar potato chips to get the blue green copper verdigris colour.  Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Don't be Blindsided by the Future

What a great headline this is today.  It comes from Google's top rated futurist speaker, Thomas Frey.  The query I entered was 10 unanswerable questions.   Here's how he views things.  His headline is: 10 of Life's Most Unanswerable Questions...that neither science nor religion can answer.   Here are his 10 questions: 1. Why are there exceptions to every rule? He says everything has exceptions and that exceptions matter because nothing comes with 100% predictability. 2. Why do logic  and reason fail to explain that which is true? 3. Is the universe finite or infinite? 4. Why does anything exist? 5. Why does time exist?  He quotes Albert Einstein's comment:  "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." 6. Why do humans matter? 7. Why are humans so fallible? 8. Do human accomplishments have long-term meaning? 9. Why is the future unknowable? 10. What is the purpose of death? Find all the details on the 10 questions  HERE.  Then hop over to his articles on drone taxis/mini airports, morphing mannequins, 20 common jobs in 2040 and so many more topics about the future.  Tom Frey's view of the future is fascinating.  He outlines the opportunities ahead with an inventor's mind.  And our pictures today?  A wedding couple at Longwood, smiling into the future.