Flying saucer cockpit

I had a dream last night which I hadn’t planned on posting about, but the sync fairies had other ideas.

In the dream, I had been attacked by an unseen aircraft while parasailing over a lake on “the eleventh” (the date was mentioned several times) and had gone back to the lake the next day (which would be the twelfth) to investigate. On this second visit I saw what I described in my dream notes as “a 1950s-vintage flying saucer, the kind with a dome-shaped cockpit on top.”

The afternoon after the dream, I found this in a weekly meme post:

That’s a saucer of the exact type I was trying to describe in my notes, accompanied by the number 12 and the word cockpit.

The saucer in the dream, by the way, turned out to be carrying perfectly ordinary-looking White people in their thirties, in business garb, who later came out of the saucer and chatted with one another about politics and fashion. They spoke with American accents but had odd word choice and always used were instead of was. For example, one woman commented on a man’s clothing by saying, “His garb were unsightly.” This same woman later apologized for not saying thee and thou more often, saying she found it a bit much, and it was my impression that they were making a deliberate effort to use archaic North-of-England speech patterns, though delivered in an American accent.

Classifying Silmarils, and the seven gospels

The night before last, as related in "Inanities with Elon," I dreamed about having to do a bizarre "worksheet" with Elon Musk and some of his employees, which combined extremely easy exercises with extremely confusing ones.

The very next night, I had another dream that took that theme to another level. I was in a church with my wife and a lot of other people when representatives of the Taiwanese government came in and distributed a questionnaire that they said everyone had to fill out. While Elon's worksheet had been a single page, this one was a War and Peace-sized tome which would obviously take a very long time to complete.

"Excuse me," I said. "Are we required by law to complete this?"

"This is for everyone to take. It's to determine who is qualified to become a pharmacist and so on."

"But if I don't do it, what will happen?"

"Someone will be sent to your house to discuss it with you."

"And?"

"And torture you."

As the dream progressed, I grew increasingly angry about being forced to do this questionnaire, and in the end decided that, torture or no torture, I just wasn't going to do it. I did finish a few of the questions, though, on the first page.

There was a simple line drawing of a bungalow and a short paragraph that said something like: "Imagine yourself in this situation. You live in this house in Yilan. You wake up one morning, look outside, and see that the weather is very nice."

There followed three questions. Here they are with the answers I gave. I was deliberately giving the simplest, stupidest answers I could think of as a form of passive resistance.

• What would you say in this situation? It's a nice day.
• Where would you say it? At home.
• Why would you say it? Because it's a nice day.

Those are the only questions I actually finished. After that, I just flipped through the book to see what else was in it. Here's what I remember:

One page had drawings of several different species of cicada and said, "Write the scientific names of these cicadas."

Another page said "Classify these Silmarils." It had drawings of several gems that all looked the same to me, and there was a table with different categories in which to put them. One of these categories was Isilmarils, and I don't remember the others, but I know the form of the names reminded me of the those used in the USDA soil taxonomy system. (In Tolkien, of course, there are only three Silmarils, so it would make no sense to "classify" them.)

Another question was, "Which would you rather watch -- a movie about humans killing and eating humans, or a movie about zombies killing and eating zombies?" Then, apparently concerned that this question wasn't clear enough, it added, "For example, these Aegeans?" -- under which was a very graphic picture of ancient Greek soldiers slaughtering one another -- "Or these zombies?" -- under which was a cartoony, AI-looking picture of a zombie biting another zombie's arm.

The page I spent the most time looking at said, "Complete these famous quotations," and then had a list of quotations with most of the content words blanked out. For example, it would give you "The _______ of _____ is not ________," and you would have to fill in "The quality of mercy is not strain'd." It was my impression that most of the quotations came from Shakespeare or the Bible.

One of these began, "Jesus, pondering the seven gospels, saith" -- followed by a series of blanks interspersed with prepositions and conjunctions and such. I didn't know what Jesus was supposed to have said as he pondered the seven gospels, but the whole thing struck me as ridiculous. Everyone knows there are four gospels, not seven, and that none of them had yet been written in the time of Jesus.

The next page had an illustration of Jesus pondering the seven gospels. Jesus was sitting cross-legged like a Buddha, and spread out in front of him, placed neatly side by side, were seven closed books. I thought this was very strange -- what's the point of having the books in front of you as you ponder them if they aren't open? A caption under the picture said, "From Christ to Cartomancy." I understood this to be suggesting that the cartomancer's practice of laying out a "spread" of cards side by side, face down, before turning them over one at a time somehow developed out of this story of Jesus contemplating a "spread" of closed books. I thought of my own habit of trying to perceive the face of a face-down card psychically before I turn it over, and I figured that if I could do that, maybe Jesus could read a closed book.

⁂

The morning after this dream, I read a few more pages in Ian Stewart's Why Beauty Is Truth -- which I've been reading very slowly on account of reading lots of other things concurrently. On p. 216 (the second page I read today), I found this:

In 1926, [Wigner] was contacted by a crystallographer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute who wanted a research assistant. . . . The first major application of group theory to physics had been the classification of all 230 possible crystal structures.

The Silmarils were crystalline jewels, so this reference to classifying crystal structures seemed to tie right in with the "Classify these Silmarils" exercise in the dream. On a hunch that the date might also be relevant, I ran a search for tolkien 1926 and found that, according to Wikipedia,

The first complete version of The Silmarillion was the "Sketch of the Mythology" written in 1926.

Having had that dream brought back to mind in this way, I decided to search for "seven gospels" just to see what would come up. I was expecting something about non-canonical gospels maybe, or perhaps some New-Agey stuff. Instead, I found that most of the search results were for this book:

I had no idea that such a book existed prior to my dream. What are the odds that it would be about the Book of Mormon? I've read the BoM a time or two, and it doesn't contain seven or any other number of gospels. Not having read the book, I can only assumes Seven Gospels refers to some of the BoM's brief descriptions of the life and work of Jesus, most of which (in Nephi's vision, for example) would be prophecies, written before Christ and thus in principle available for Jesus to ponder.

[Update: A preview on Amazon shows that the "seven gospels" are found in 1 Nephi 11, Mosiah 3 and 15, Alma 7 and 19, Helaman 14, and Ether 3 -- all before Christ.]

The authors are Adam S. Miller and Rosalynde F. Welch. The first thing I noticed about these names, due to the dream's juxtaposition of "seven gospels" with Shakespeare, was that Rosalind is a Shakespearean name, the main character in As You Like It, and that that play also includes a character named Adam. Then I realized that the name Rosalynde Welch was vaguely familiar. Wasn't she someone from the early "Bloggernacle" Mormon blogs back when those were a thing? Which one was she with? Times and Seasons? Is Times and Seasons even still around?

I checked and found that not only is it still around, but it's most recent post is quite synchronistically interesting:

The difference between Joseph and Brigham

Joseph Smith spoke with God face to face.

Brigham Young didn't know him from Adam.

Inanities with Elon

I dreamed that I was for some reason spending the day with Elon Musk. We stopped by a field where ridiculously low-tech “rockets” were being tested, and my impression was that all of his employees were weird, grossly incompetent, and just not very smart. Elon went to elaborate lengths to play not-very-funny practical jokes, often involving the cooperation of dozens of his employees, and I wondered how they ever got anything accomplished. When Elon wondered aloud why his crew hadn’t yet reached the level of NASA in its heyday, I tactfully declined to comment.

In my conversation with Elon, we both pretended to be acquainted with former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, even though Elon got his name wrong and referred to him as Doug Christie or something like that until I corrected him. We both held forth at some length about Mr. Christie's character and told unflattering (and completely made-up) anecdotes about him. I characterized him as a blowhard, while Elon criticized his habit of trying to seduce every woman he met with an extremely stupid pickup line which I unfortunately no longer remember. I think we both knew we were both talking complete bullshit, but I just accepted that this was the way small talk was done in Elon's circle.

Later I was with Elon and about 40 of his goofy employees on some form of transportation, perhaps a bus or a boat. As soon as everyone had taken a seat, each person was given a photocopied worksheet in a plastic sheet protector. In order that the transportation time not be wasted, everyone was to spend the journey completing the worksheet as a way of keeping the old cognitive apparatus limber. Elon had to do one, too, to show that he was just one of the lads, nor was I as a guest exempt.

Some of the exercises on the worksheet were so extremely easy that I did a double take. I remember one of these was just the word rectangle with a couple of the letters omitted, and you had to fill in the blanks to complete the word.

Pointing to the rectangle exercise, I said, "Uh, Elon, what exactly is the point of this?"

He answered with a single word of Chinese: 循例. This is not actually part of my productive vocabulary, but I can understand it in context. Without context, I had to look it up after the dream. It means something like following rules or conventions, sometimes with the connotation of a meaningless perfunctory performance. As he said the second syllable, I had a mental image of the homophonous character 力, which means force or power. 循力 isn't normal Chinese, but it might be understood to mean "following power," with the same syntactic ambiguity as in English. I had the idea in the dream that he might actually have meant 流力, which is not pronounced the same and is also not standard Chinese, but which I understood to mean the "power" of acting quickly and automatically, without engaging conscious thought. In other words, the value of this sort of exercise was just that it was extremely easy and could thus be done quickly without thinking.

(Side note: According to my post-dream research, Elon Musk does in fact speak fluent Chinese. I hadn't known that before.)

Some of the other exercises were newspaper comic strips (mostly Calvin and Hobbes, I think) with some of the speech balloons blanked out, and you had to fill in appropriate things for the characters to say in the context given. Some of these were badly photocopied so that the top part of the strip was cut off by the edge of the page. I found these perplexing and didn't know what to write.

Others were complete one-panel comics that didn't make any sense. You were supposed to read them and try to "get" them, and if you couldn't, you could look down at a footnote that explained the joke. One of these showed a man walking through the woods with a smartphone, being confronted by an angry anthropomorphic deer. The deer said, "Hey, who said you could use my Wi-Fi?" to which the man replied, "Why don't you read your own sign?*" If you looked down at the asterisk at the bottom of the page, it said: "No hu-nt-in-g witho-u-t [i.e., you have] a pass" -- printed just like that, with the boldface, italics, and brackets as I have reproduced them. The joke -- and it's a real knee-slapper! -- was that the deer had put up a sign (not pictured in the comic) that said "No hunting without a pass," but in the man's clever interpretation, the string ntin meant "Net in" and referred to getting "in" to the Internet, while the letter u in the word without implied that "without a pass" actually meant "you have a pass." Thus the deer had unwittingly put up a sign that meant "You have permission to use my Wi-Fi to access the Internet." Haha, hoist on his own petard!

⁂

My first thought upon waking was that this dream had made me stupider.

My second thought was that it symbolized some of the pitfalls of religion: talking confidently about Christ when you've never actually met him; doing easy mindless things and calling it "the power of obedience"; looking at fragments of text in isolation and extracting meanings completely unrelated to anything the author intended.

Let him who is without any of these sins cast the first stone.

The reality of the genius famine

In 1998, a mysterious stranger with no name (though there are some who call him Tim) told Whitley Strieber that the man who “would have unlocked the secret of gravity” was never born because the couple who would have been his parents were murdered by the Nazis. I posted about this three years ago on my Strieber blog. Just yesterday, a_probst left a comment on that old post saying this hypothetical never-born genius “might have been a boomer,” which “would rankle with a certain subsequent generation.”

This observation stopped me dead in my tracks with the realization that neither the Boomers nor any subsequent generation has produced a single world-historical scientist. Not one.

The greatest living scientist is unquestionably James Watson. Runners-up might include Roger Penrose, Alan Guth and, using “scientist” in a broader sense, Rupert Sheldrake and Noam Chomsky. If we include the recently deceased, we can throw in Stephen Hawking and Francis Crick. All were born before the postwar baby boom. Online top-tens of the Greatest Living Scientists pad out the list with the likes of Tim Berners-Lee (a Boomer), Jane Goodall (pre-boom), and a bunch of people who changed the world so much that I’d literally never heard of them.

During the War, on the other hand, we had Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Fermi, Feynman, Salk, Turing, Tesla, Fleming, von Neumann, and — lest we forget — George Washington Carver. I could easily make the list longer.

That’s not a gradual petering-out of genius. It’s a sudden cataclysmic extinction.

I’m not sure how best to explain this fact, but one hypothesis that springs readily to mind is that the wrath of God rests upon us.

Blue butterflies are literally everywhere

So apparently the sync fairies are doing their own version of this meme now:

The other day I ran across a post on 4chan somewhere that said something like “YouTube is allowing straight-up softcore pr0n now. Just put in [this search term], and you’ll see.”

Wait, so you mean if you search for it, you can find pornography on the Internet? Stop the presses!

Nevertheless, being kind of stupid and reactive at times, I proceeded to go straight to YouTube and put in the search term given, I suppose with some vague excuse that I was doing it in the name of science. You know, just keeping up to date on the latest developments about what YouTube is and isn’t allowing, as any responsible citizen must.

At the very beginning of the very first video that came up, I found this:

That confounded blue butterfly again! There’s just no escape from it. And, I’m happy to report, it was just as effective as that bust of Trajan, making me snap out of it and realize that scholarly research into YouTube’s censorship or lack thereof is temporary, but the mysteries of synchronicity are forever.

Cat and mouse

From Jerry Pinkney's illustrations for Aesop's  fable of the Lion and the Mouse:

From a children's book I found today, telling the story of the Chinese zodiac:

Are lions and cats really interchangeable, though? As it happens, I also ran across this meme today: