This is the end my friend...

[TheGreenGoblin]

The end is all a matter of the speed of degeneracy.

[boing]

Frankly I am almost fed up with it and looking for a change. I know people always seem to think that they lived through the best of times, well I do and I am heartily ready to leave this mess to those that created it.

.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Frankly I am almost fed up with it and looking for a change. I know people always seem to think that they lived through the best of times, well I do and I am heartily ready to leave this mess to those that created it.

.

In the grand scheme of things man has existed on the earth for +- 200,000 years. The dinosaurs survived for over 170 million years. I doubt whether we as a species will make another 1000 years. As for the time it takes for the elementary particles of dead stars to degrade, the number of years is so huge as to be incomprehensible to the human mind, but it will come to pass and darkness will sit upon the face of a potentially infinite but dead universe.

We are as nothing on such long time scales. It is a strangely comforting thought to me.

[ian16th]

Being as old as I am, when talking in years, I only think in single digits!

[boing]

As Bert said:

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”

.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Being as old as I am, when talking in years, I only think in single digits!

Measured in years rather than seconds I hope ian16th.

[boing]

It's all relative.

.

[Boac]

Like incest?

[boing]

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

Chairman Lao

[TheGreenGoblin]

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

Chairman Lao

You owe me a new shirt, as the one I am wearing is now begrimed from searching through my dusty attic for that battered copy of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!

I shall read it again for the first time in about 30 years...

Maybe my addled noodle has learned something in the intervening years....

[boing]

Daoism in China was considered to be the preserve of older men, often eccentric, who had lived beyond their obligation to be responsible to the community.
Antedeluvian hippies, like ON members really.

.

[TheGreenGoblin]

battered copy of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!

I shall read it again for the first time in about 30 years...

Maybe my addled noodle has learned something in the intervening years....

Bought in a shop very similar to this... I kid you not.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Daoism in China was considered to be the preserve of older men, often eccentric, who had lived beyond their obligation to be responsible to the community.
Antedeluvian hippies, like ON members really.

.

Well put. ops-normal the web-site at the end of the universe!

[boing]

Pretty funny.

I love odd bookshops. Laying over in a new city my first action was to open the Yellow Pages, when they had them in hotel rooms, and find the all bookshops I could visit. My daughter has first choice on my books after I no longer need them, I think she will be able to open her own bookshop with the leftovers.

The really great thing about books is, as you reinforced, that you can read them, lay them aside for 30 years and then come back to them and discover something new that you may not have been tuned to understand in the first reading. This does not happen with "electronic" media.

.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Pretty funny.

I love odd bookshops. Laying over in a new city my first action was to open the Yellow Pages, when they had them in hotel rooms, and find the all bookshops I could visit. My daughter has first choice on my books after I no longer need them, I think she will be able to open her own bookshop with the leftovers.

The really great thing about books is, as you reinforced, that you can read them, lay them aside for 30 years and then come back to them and discover something new that you may not have been tuned to understand in the first reading. This does not happen with "electronic" media.

.

Agree entirely. A book is an old friend, meant to be greeted with an ancient smile and a dusty handshake when you meet years after your last encounter!

[llondel]

The universe will end due to a malfunction in a Large Hadron Collider which will create a discontinuity in space-time, causing the entire universe to be sucked into zero space in zero time, precipitating a Big Bang.

[Undried Plum]

The universe will end due to a malfunction in a Large Hadron Collider which will create a discontinuity in space-time, causing the entire universe to be sucked into zero space in zero time, precipitating a Big Bang.

But the DJ30 and the S&P500 and the FTSE100 will still go up, supported by a plasmajet of eternal puffmoney in the infinite vacuum of investor intelligence.

[boing]

This means, of course, that based on Fleming's Left Hand Rule and Newtonian physics (near enough for the purpose) the people with low brain activity will follow a different trajectory than people with high brain activity. So, whichever group I am in I will be separated from the other obnoxious crowd. I can live die with that.

.

[TheGreenGoblin]

I thought that investor intelligence constituted the black hole at the centre of most galaxies...