The many realities:
A few minutes ago as I write this, I was at the grocery store picking up wherewithal to make a peanut butter sandwich, and there was a woman pushing a line of grocery carts, something over a dozen of them. There was a sloping apron for the carts to roll up. Not a large woman, she seemed to want to get a running start so I stood back to watch the feat.
In a sane world, of course, chivalry would have required me to push the carts up the incline for her and her to accept my help so that she would be pleased that her womanhood had been saluted and I pleased to show off my manhood. But those days are going away, and she was on the clock so I just stood back.
When she was done I remarked that from the time I stopped to when the carts were secure there were five people who had cut her off. Not to worry. Each was in his or her own little world. They were not ignoring her; for them she simply did not exist.
We get lots of practice jumping around from universe to universe thanks to the television. Edit: you are in a pirate world where Douglas Fairbanks, pursued into the rigging leaps to a great sail, thrusts his knife into the fabric and uses this to glide down to safety; edit: you are in a happy household, where hot cereal prepared by a smiling mother is eagerly eaten, and the sprit of the cereal rises from the bowl and follows the child outside to play in the snow; edit: you are on the slopes of Everest, where a mountaineer glides down a snow bank using an ice ax for all the world like the dagger of Fairbanks (although perhaps the Alpinist keeps control by adjusting the depth of the blade while the pirate twists his) and so on. Each world has different tastes, different rules and indeed different laws of nature.
Don’t blame entertainment. Measure the wavelength of light, and light has to be a wave; edit: measure the energy of a photon and light has to be particles; edit: a photon is boiled off a filament, and the light expands in all directions but all gathers instantaneously when the light is absorbed, and it’s locality has shrunk from far and wide to something like a wavelength; edit: observe light from the sun at an eclipse and it behaves according to the laws of relativity, which do not permit it to exceed a base speed that is a lot slower than crossing the universe in a fraction of a second. Again, and so on, although these are my best examples. Protest that this makes no sense and you can expect a gentle reprimand that, honestly, makes no sense either. Run to the church and learn that there is a God, who embraces, who understands and permeates all of reality so that there is only one reality, the one perceived by God, and all apparent contradictions are illusory. Run back to science and be told by its exponents – who generally know little about science and less about religion – be told that nay it is God that is illusory, commune with Him as you will, it’s not an Observation.
Got it? You are highly expert at dropping one reality and plunging into the next with no carryover; nothing in the forsaken world can possibly affect the new. And I would be doing you no favor by demanding that you do routinely otherwise; usually this skill will serve you well. In our society it has survival value.
But this time, just this once, get a grip on yourself. Go back and read
http://www.nobabies.net/TNS%20meeing%20Orlando%202916.html
Then don’t let it go. It will serve you anywhere. Think about it:
History, politics, technological advance, love, social status, natural history, the Cambrian explosion, divorce rates, war, domestic violence, the economy, birth rates … that’s just a list off the top of my head. You cannot – although many try to do it – understand any of them without taking the information on that web site into account. Yet now having addressed four highly expert audiences in this year alone, when I look into their eyes I see not, “Oh, dear. We need to work on this,” but, “Edit:” and it’s gone as attention turns away.
There have been 127 visitors over the past month and Youtube has run “Babies triumph over evil” 273 times.