Don't come here often - nice thread.

Connection between top predators perhaps
I'm appalled that so many people think "dumb animals"......far from it. Fellow intelligences more like. Some of course on a very similar plane while others very alien.

Sharks would certainly fall into the "grey zone" pardon the pun.

I assume you were hand feeding the groupers rather than the subway variety

Lance wrote:Does friendship count?

This is my good friend, Spot.
He is named after his dorsal mark.



Ran into this guy when I was scuba diving the Kermadec Islands. A galapagos shark. He came up to me when I was hand feeding some groper, and wanted his own gift of food. I was rather rude, and pushed him away with my fins, but he kept coming back, and was a regular companion for the rest of my diving holiday.

Such companionship arouses very strong emotions.....

of various kinds!

Lance, can I please persuade you to go to this thread and tell this story? Not that you considered him a pet, but it's the wonder of interactions with humans.

I had something similar once in a busy London park. I was having lunch there with a friend. We were sitting on the ground eating sandwiches, and this black bird came up to me and sang a song for a bit of my sandwich! Seriously: you know how beautiful blackbird song is. Anyway of course I gave him a bit and he hopped happily away.

I had one the first time I saw a Wilson cloud chamber demoed at school. All I'd seen up to then where shitty little drawings in books of particles shooting out of atoms. But to see them going puff.....puff. Absolutely amazing. Tingle down the spine.

Rumraket wrote:.. and getting that sense of incomprehensible depth, time and distance. Or contemplating deep geological time and life's evolution through it, the formation and erosion of continents and mountainranges. Or when looking at vast stretches of landscape from a great viewpoint and trying to "take it all in".
And interestingly, lately, I seem to be able to manifest it in myself when I'm in a particular mood and I watch the opening to the first episode of Cosmos with Carl Sagan(his delivery is perfect).
I had a particularly vivid one a few weeks ago when I was a bit depressed, very tired, had ate too much dark chocolate (seriously ), watched the opening of Cosmos and went to bed, I couldn't sleep because of this overwhelming emotional state of feeling alive and being part of existence, trying to think about it's inherent "mystery"/fundamental nature, the possibility of life elswhere. Feeling humbled at the size and age of the universe etc.

Anyone else have them? What would you describe it as? If you'd been religious, would you consider it a 'religious' experience?

I get them all the time. If I allow myself I can stare up at the night's sky and begin to cry. It's as strong a feeling as being at a huge gig (or I'd imagine being in church) and feeling this connection with hundreds or thousands of other people, only I'm having it with the universe. I've experienced this since I was a kid, but it really took off when I started camping with friends and began taking drugs...

The quote in my signature explains these feelings quite successfully.

“And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.”

I am much happier solving a problem.

You might want to catch Koestler's Act of Creation to see the biological underpinnings of that Eureka experience - it crosses a lot of disciplines from poetry to problem solving to joke telling.

Nebogipfel wrote:I've been trying to get the kids to watch it. Alas, they have never known television without CGI, so their first reaction is, gee, Dad, that's so fake...

Isn't Neil deGrasse Tyson working on a remake of Cosmos with Ann that should shore up its dated appearance so the kids of today won't be so turned off by it?

LarianLeQuella wrote:An extreme sense of wonderment and outright awe is what I feel when I contemplate both my insignificance and connection to the universe.

I feel a pain in my neck.

When I'm on night-shift in the steelworks, and have to climb to the top of a container, I can actually see a surprisingly high number of stars, a few hundred, at least. And I always gaze up at them til my neck gets stiff.

I think this video is quite appropriate. Enjoy!

Wow!!!

If we ever need something like a creed, that vid fits the bill! Pretty much sums it up.

LarianLeQuella wrote:

Nebogipfel wrote:I've been trying to get the kids to watch it. Alas, they have never known television without CGI, so their first reaction is, gee, Dad, that's so fake...

Isn't Neil deGrasse Tyson working on a remake of Cosmos with Ann that should shore up its dated appearance so the kids of today won't be so turned off by it?

Ooh - I must keep an eye out for that. I hope so. I thought Brian Cox's Wonders of the Universe was a step in the right direction, but it was a bit waffly for my taste. He seemed to take ages to get to the point!

Varangian wrote:If we ever need something like a creed, that vid fits the bill! Pretty much sums it up.

Hmm... Not to be contentious but I was enjoying it all the way up until the end, when he did his parade of the 'best and brightest' and there was only one woman in the mix and she floated by so quickly I couldn't even see who it was.

I'm sorry but that put me right off!

Nora_Leonard wrote:

Varangian wrote:If we ever need something like a creed, that vid fits the bill! Pretty much sums it up.

Hmm... Not to be contentious but I was enjoying it all the way up until the end, when he did his parade of the 'best and brightest' and there was only one woman in the mix and she floated by so quickly I couldn't even see who it was.

I'm sorry but that put me right off!

I noticed that too, Nora. Frustrating. (It was Marie Curie, incidentally. First person to receive two Nobels - in physics and chemistry.)

Two possible mitigating factors: first, there have been comparatively few female top scientists throughout history. For horrible sexist reasons which are changing - thank FSM - but history is what it is. So he had few to choose from. Second, since this bit at the end was preceded by "there are too many people, too many moments to thank", it seemed less a hit parade and more a list of people and moments from films that he personally had been influenced by. All such lists will perforce have gaps, and be lopsided, and be only partially under our own control. (We can't decide for sure in advance which people or moments will be special in our lives.)

That doesn't entirely excuse it, of course.

Aside from that, I found it a very powerful video. Especially the very end, with Feynman (pioneer of the very, very small) playing the bongos while in the background we see images increasing to the very very largest structures in the universe. The implied all-encompassing sense of scale really gave me a shiver. And It helped to place us humans in the universe: we're in the middle size-wise. Also, it humanized the whole thing in a wonderful way: reminding us that we humans are lucky enough to be alive for a few decades each, and during that time we can explore all this and experience some of that incredible joy Feynman exudes.

Well put^^^

Onyx8 wrote:Well put^^^

I agree. But like I said it was still all too familiar a 'men-only' show and so it ended with me feeling really let down rather than inspired...which I had been up to that point.

See, Orpheus, you—and several other men on this forum, thank heaven—would also notice that. But far too many just wouldn't 'get' that.

But this isn't the thread for this discussion. Like I said, before that point I was inspired...

I can't see the video here at work, so I will have to make it a point to watch it when I get home. I look forward to it.