Earthlings

A couple of months ago, in the middle of December last year, just before "Mayan doomsday" on the 21st, my favorite text editor asked me to approve its regular update. I clicked the link to see what's in the new package, and it immediately redirected me to the page describing new features and fixes. My fellow software developer of great Notepad++, Don Ho*, conveniently named the update "New release (v6.2.3)—End of the World Edition". It brought a series of chuckles to my face that simultaneously morphed into a big smile when I read the description below the title. Referring to the Mayan prophecy, he wrote exactly this: "Even though I don't believe this bullshit, I'm not against resetting our shitty world". Well, I don't know what exactly he meant with the word "reset", but certainly there are days when I can completely agree with him and describe our world exactly the same way.

Viktor and his 6th Earth Day

Anyway, today is another edition of "Earth Day", and at least today we should try and put away all the pessimism (or realism, if you will) and remember those other days capable of filling our lives with at least a small amount of happiness and try to find all the optimistic thoughts we can pack into a message for the future world that will have no need of rebooting itself every now and again. Those who follow my blog probably know that my son was born on Earth Day, so I have another reason to celebrate today. He is turning 6 years old, and recently his childhood has been successfully extended with his first year of school, lots of new friends, and his first new obligations. I can see he is exiting with all the changes, and I truly envy him. Childhood is something special. Every day is bringing something new, and the empty bucket in his head is permanently filling slowly and inevitably. Also, a child's mind is pure and not burdened with adult stuff. I can't remember exactly in which episode, but I think Yoda once said, "Truly wonderful the mind of a child is", when he was trying to explain how children perceive reality very differently and sometimes much better than adults. We simply tend to complicate the world around us without any possible need.

Just to prove my point, let me add a small glimpse ofone of our annual things we do. My wife is a schoolteacher, and with other teachers, every year she is taking her class to the nature resorts, usually mountains, for one week. Viktor and I hook along every year and spend wonderful time with hundreds of other children. Believe me or not, these weeks recharge my batteries better than any vacations at the seaside or any holiday days off. During these weeks, the adults are severely outnumbered, and you can feel it. The air is always full of joy, optimism, happiness, and pure enlightenment. This week is one of those weeks. I took days off and drove six hours to this distant mountain in western Serbia to join the class, and the feeling is again there. Even at this very moment while I am writing this sitting alone in our hotel room, children are loudly singing in the discotheque situated a floor above, and I don't mind at all. Just the opposite. Silence would be disturbing.

Neil deGrasse Tyson**

Sometimes I truly wonder what goes wrong with people when they grow up. Why do they change that much over time? I don't know. Is it in our genes, written somewhere, how to spoil all the magic happening in the first decade or two of our lives, or is the society we live in the one to blame? I don't think anybody has a valid answer, so I will just quote my favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who once said, "Children do not read horoscopes. Children are perfectly happy counting through the number 13. Children aren't afraid to walk under ladders. They see a black cat cross their path, and they say, 'Look! Kitty, kitty,' and want to pet it, not run in the other direction. Children are not the problem here. You say you’re worried about children? I’m not worried about children; I’m worried about 'grown-ups'. Kids are born curious. They are always exploring. We spend the first year of their life teaching them to walk and talk, and the rest of their life telling them to shut up and sit down." Keeping all those optimistic words like this one in mind and also all those pessimistic tales like the one from the beginning of this post, I decided to use suitable wallpaper I found online and put it as the background of the montaged image honoring this year's Earth Day and, of course, Viktor's 6th birthday. The image represents two very distant parts of humanity, or, metaphorically speaking, the dark and Jedi parts of the world as we know it. Of course, in the middle is one of Viktor's most cheerful recent photos with a clear message representing the innocent childhood of all Earthlings out there.

This year Earth Day 2013 is themed as "The Face of Climate Change". I am sure our planet, looking at her as a living organism, has her own cycles and climate changes that are sometimes simply unavoidable events, but humans over the years have grown up to the point of being a big player, fully capable of selfishly contributing and producing climate changes of their own. Following the motto where one picture is worth a thousand words, please see the official video:

"Climate change has many faces. A man in the Maldives worried about relocating his family as sea levels rise, a farmer in Kansas struggling to make ends meet as prolonged drought ravages the crops, a fisherman on the Niger River whose nets often come up empty, a child in New Jersey who lost her home to a super-storm, a woman in Bangladesh who can’t get fresh water due to more frequent flooding and cyclones… And they’re not only human faces. They’re the polar bear in the melting arctic, the tiger in India’s threatened mangrove forests, the right whale in plankton-poor parts of the warming North Atlantic, the orangutan in Indonesian forests segmented by more frequent bushfires and droughts"

I've already posted about this topic, and if you are eager to learn more about Earth Day and Biodiversity, please follow the blue links. The problem is not only complex, but also, even though awareness is there, the solution seems to be as far as the distance from here to the horizon itself.

Divčibare, Crni Vrh, 1098m

Are we too late to act and already stepped over the edge? I don't know, but like today when I am in the company of one hundred and thirty children visiting the highest peak of the mountain 'Maljen' near to the small ski settlement called 'Divčibare' and looking at the world with children's eyes, I have little faith.

*Don Ho
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/contributors/author.html

**Neil deGrasse Tyson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDFgLS3sdpU
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson

Earth Day 2013: The Face of Climate Change
http://www.earthday.org/2013/about.html

Divčibare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divcibare

Celestia, Campfire and Astronomy

I remember every little detail from that weekend trip. From the very first moment when we stepped into the bus that took us to the mountain base, throughout the rest of the first day when we climbed down into a small cave with narrow hallways toward the small chamber at its end. I vividly remember the glorious, endless, and hard-to-find second cave we stepped in the very next day, followed by an overwhelming feeling and little fear when we passed through cave chambers, cutting the darkness with handy tools and small flashlights. I will always hate myself for not having a camera to capture the surrounding scenery when we traveled by train later that afternoon, which looked like it came right out of the 19th century with wooden benches rolling the railways slower than Usain Bolt. All those rock formations and abandoned train stations were slowly losing their battles with nature and were looking exactly like a background from Sergio Leone's spaghetti western movies.

Viktor at Rundetårn observatory, Copenhagen

But what I will remember the most is the first camping night between the caves. It was an extraordinary experience only a campfire can provide.

It was the hot middle of the summer, and the forest was mysterious and kind at the same time. I don't remember the exact year, though, but it surely was during my late teenage years, most likely in July or August of 1987. Along with a couple of my peer friends, I was lying down in the middle of a forest clearing on top of my brand-new sleeping bag, hypnotically staring toward the nightly sky. I glimpsed the watch and saw that midnight passed just an hour ago. The campfire was vividly glowing around the small glade surrounded by dark trees. It was the perfect time, and soon it was about to begin. As planned, the first one came on schedule, leaving a straight line in the sky for a millisecond or two. Shortly after, another one fractured the nightly sky, then another one and another and another...and then it was a shower. The Perseids. The icy fragments entering the Earth's atmosphere every summer are body parts of the comet Swift–Tuttle, which travels in this neighborhood every 130 years, providing lots of meteors for our camping TV. That particular year we planned our adventure by the moon's motion, or, to be precise, we wanted to go on the trip when there was no moon in the sky most of the night during its crescent phase. Without light pollution from the Earth and the Moon, the sight was amazing—perseids, thousands of stars, nebulas, galaxies and planets, the Milky Way in the center of our view, planes, and artificial satellites passing by throughout constellations with their leader of the time—the Russian space station "Mir", which was probably one of those brightest moving dots we saw that night. If you didn't see such a sight, you would be surprised how the night sky is actually dynamic. If you add to the scene strange sounds coming from the surrounding forest made by sleepless birds and wild animals, you get perfect entertainment for the big portion of the night. It was our first camping trip, and the fear of the unknown a little spoiled the event, but in our defense, without any experienced guides or team members, I can assure you that every suspicious sound that came from the forest sounded like the ultimate wild predator hungry for young humans. Anyway, little because of the fear and much because of active heavens, we finally fell asleep a little before dawn and successfully slept for an hour and a half, ready for the next day.

Space station Mir (1986-2001)

That really was one great summer, and this trip would stay on top of my adventurous history, from many perspectives. But it wasn't the one that triggered my interest in science and astronomy. I couldn't say what it was for sure, and probably, among many things, at the very beginning, it was one scientific toy my parents bought for me when I was really young. It was one toolkit box**—an optical set of plastic parts and various lenses allowing you to build different gadgets such as a microscope, binoculars, a spyglass, a kaleidoscope, a diapositive magnifier, prism tools, etc. It was my favorite toy for many years. The other equally important trigger is my failure to comprehend the word "infinite" and my everlasting desire to understand its meaning. It was bugging my mind ever since I started to look up at night. Even today, after dozens of courses of various mathematics I had to pass during my high school and university education, infinity is staying the biggest unknown, lying right there, far beyond my scope. There were years in my youth when I was convinced that infinity actually doesn't exist at all. I loved the idea that the cosmos is curved to 360° in all directions. I desperately wanted to believe that if you go with your spaceship straight up, eventually you will reach the same spot only from the opposite direction, just like the surface of Earth and its two-dimensional fully closed curve. Of course, today within the mainstream scientific thought there is much evidence that the expansion of our universe is real, but still it doesn't solve the infinity of it. At least in my mind. Even though the probable fact that our universe is just a part of a multiverse neighborhood where our cosmos is expanding into something bigger, to me it is only stretching the infinity out, only this time far beyond our borders. Maybe one day we will find the definite answer.

From the other perspective, if we are looking at the 'infinite' trouble only from our rational mind, we have to admit that the human race is extremely young, evolutionarily speaking. The real handicap is that we are living in a 'finite' world. Everything that surrounds us has its beginning and the end. At least it seems so, and even though we today learned a great deal about our position within the celestial realm, we only scratched the surface of it. We only managed to set a foot or two (or 12 to be exact) on the Moon, and we only started to explore our own solar system. Due to our own limitations in the form of our unwillingness and hesitations to deal with the unknown and/or our own animosities for each other in the form of militant behavior throughout our history, this is still a very slow process, but inevitably, one day, in the not-so-far future, the time will come when, lackingenough energy to sustain humanity as we know it, we all will have to start looking up, not for searching for the divine but for our own pure survival. Then our own evolution will speed up and skip some gears toward answers to many inconceivable questions.

Night Sky and Perseids by Brad Goldpaint (Goldpaint Photography)*

Anyway, astronomy is one of few scientific playgrounds simply because it contains many unanswered questions. There are plenty of proposed theories that will surely stay in their theoretical phases for many years until we finally get ultimate proof. It is entirely based on studying electromagnetic radiation we are picking up on the surface of Earth and several instruments in orbit. All possible frequencies within electromagnetic radiation are telling us many stories from its origin point and the path it is traveling through. Of course, studying full spectrum requires big and even large instruments in both size and money needed for their manufacturing. Especially if they require being lifted into orbit in order to avoid atmospheric disturbances. Secondly, it is amazing what must be done in order to look up one particular spot in the heavens simply because everything in the cosmos is in motion. We need to solve the rotation and revolution of the planet and, if posted in orbit, compensate for the extremely fast speed of the spacecraft carrying the instruments. As the monitoring object is farther away, the less amount of radiation is picked up by the sensors, so astronomy is one of those indirect or asynchronous sciences where we need to collect the data for some time, which could be years or even more time, and then for an equally considerable time analyze the data, compare the resulting images, and conclude science out. For example, take the Kepler orbital space laboratory. It orbits the Sun following the Earth in order to get a clear view toward the monitoring stars, and it is simply continuously taking images of 'nearby' stars (about 145,000 stars) and sending the data to the Kepler team for analysis. Over time, the team and their sophisticated software measure slight brightness changes during possible orbits of potential planets, and only by these small changes in brightness of the main star is it possible to roughly determine the size and orbit of the planet causing the dimming of the light from the star. However, in order to get all those facts out of the data, Kepler must take lots of images and cover the planet's full orbit. That means in order to confirm the planet, Kepler must take at least two images separated by time in order to confirm the revolution time of the planet. It's a slow process, and considering lots, and I mean LOTS, of received data, I am sure we will hear about more and more planets found by this technique.

Among all possible wavelengths within the full electromagnetic spectrum, the coolest one is the one situated between infrared and ultraviolet waves. The greatest visible light. The one we can see. Even though it is just a tiny portion of the full spectrum, this is the one we can enjoy with our own eyes. This is the one we see every night we look up toward the amazing heavens. Thanks to relatively cheap optical instruments, we are able to enhance the view and zoom it in and see further. Some time after I enjoyed my optical set toy I mentioned earlier, I got my own first refracting telescope. It was small without any tripods and fully mobile, but looking at the moon for the first time was something I will always remember. Discovering the fact with my own eyes that Venus, like the Moon, also has phases and seeing it in its crescent shape was the next best thing I experienced. I still have it, and every time I grab this small piece of optics, I can't help myself and instantly remember the times when I was fixing it on the ladder positioned on the top of our garage and spending hours looking toward the stars.

Transit of Mercury over Sun by Sky-Watcher 150/750

Today I have in my possession an educational reflecting telescope with a respectable mirror size and focal distance mounted on an equatorial tripod along with a motion tracking system capable of fixing the spot on the sky for hours. Unfortunately, amateur astronomy requires lots of free time, which I regretfully don't have enough of. In addition to a lack of free time, watching the heavens requires an unpolluted environment, and life in big cities is beneficial for everything but astronomical observation. Sometimes I feel like that character from the Michael Keaton movie—I don't remember the title now, but in the movie he found a way to clone himself in order to get finished various tasks in his life... Similarly, I would like to have one me for work, one for astronomy and science, one for family and writing... Simply, the day is too short, and to support the family and life, the work is always number one. But it is a good thing to have spare moments and spend them in the most enjoyable way. Even today, from time to time, I point the scope up and peek a little. Sometimes I take photos out, like this one of Mercury transiting the Sun disc.

To conclude with some short 'observations', if you want to do some amateur astronomy, you will need star maps. Before they were black and white and printed in the form of atlas books. Today all that changed with the speed of the internet and graphic tools on the average personal computer. They are all online, and you can access them with many apps. I recommend 'Celestia' and 'Stellarium'. Even without a real telescope, they provide endless fun.

Image refs:
https://amsmeteors.org/2017/08/viewing-the-perseids-in-2017/
* https://goldpaintphotography.com/

Kepler project:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fnbJ1hZik

** Toolkit box (~1978):


Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
http://www.stellarium.org/

Aegean Sea

Before I start writing about this amazing sea, first of all, I have to say that this story is equally about Greece, the oldest European country and the first known civilization in Europe. Surrounded by three seas, Greece is probably the most interesting place in the Mediterranean basin ever since it was formed and filled with water many millenniums ago. The Aegean Sea keeps the most important part in the history of mankind, being a natural barrier between civilizations independently developed over the west, east, and south. Once in those past times, today known as B.C., this was the center of the world. It was also the place where many amazing things were born that we know today as science, democracy, philosophy, mathematics, culture, and sport, along with all those "other inventions" like modern armies and wars, dictatorships, religion, divine beings...

Aegean Sea

Today, after two millenniums, looking at this part of the world from my point of view and my own relations to the Aegean Sea, it is all about geography, really. I actually live in southern Serbia, where four different seas are more or less equally distant from my current location, and in the past four decades, in one way or another, I visited all of them. Before, with my parents, and now with my own family, every summer vacation is reserved for spending up to two weeks at the zero-level elevation of the nearby seaside. After I spent several vacations on the Black, Ionian, and Adriatic Seas, I decided that those simply are not comparable to the Aegean. Don't get me wrong here, all those three seas have their good sides and charm, but the Aegean is something special for me. Who knows why? Maybe my inner being is somehow attuned to it, or I am simply connected with it on some lower level of understanding, but whatever it is, I calculated that when I sum up all the time I was there, I got about 400 days of vacation time spent in Greece. If I spent all those days in a row, you would probably read this post in Greek instead, but the truth is, due to my perforated time spent there, I only have a basic understanding of probably the most beautiful written language in all of Europe. I can't be sure, but I think my first vacation in Macedonian Greece was at about the age of 2, more than 40 years ago, and until today I have probably visited about the same amount of different towns, fishermen villages, and tourist settlements all around the northern Aegean. I literally watched Macedonian Greece grow from a modest, unexplored country to the prestige destination for anyone expecting a great time for a short vacation during summer break. I might have spent lots of days in Greece, but my son already reached one "Greek" record—his first encounter with Greece was a couple of miles under the Olympus mountain when he was only a couple of cells old, if you know what I mean. He was also learning to walk and swim there, and I am sure you would agree that those are pretty big milestones in anybody's life.

The history of Greece is one of the most colorful tales of them all. Not many nations in the world survived and built their history for that long period of time, starting millenniums before Christ. The ancient Greeks came to Europe almost three millenniums B.C., but maybe the common origin point when it all started is back in the 8th century B.C., when they started to build a civilization known today as a cradle of Western civilization or the world we live in today. This post is too small to carry all the history of the region, so I will let you browse them all in the below links, and instead I will focus on just one period of time known as Classical Greece that flourished for a couple of hundred years, starting somewhere in the 5th century B.C.

Alexander the Great

It was the time when artistic and scientific thought rapidly evolved and shaped humanity as we know it today. If you ask me, this was the period of time relatively free of violence and conservative influences like religion or politics. It started after the fall of the last Athenian tyrant, or, if you will, after a series of dictatorships ruled the ancient Greek cities back in the 6th and 7th centuries before Christ. Aristotle defined the tyrant as "one who rules without law, looks to his own advantage rather than that of his subjects, and uses extreme and cruel tactics—against his own people as well as others". Looks familiar? Hmm, it seems to me that ancient Greeks gave dictatorships in heritage as well. It also looks like Classical Greece is just a period of time where Greeks tried to recover from hundreds of wasted years, and it was the time that they really wanted to change their society for the better. In a way they did just that, and in a whole period of the next 200 years, they created a foundation of modern society and planted scientific thought deep into future generations. Sadly, this period ended with the rise of military societies shaped in the form of the Macedonian empire and Alexander the Great (and his father, Phillip II, before him), who suddenly decided that their land was too small in size and the best way to defend it was to conquer the neighbors, and by neighbors, sometimes this meant thousands of miles away from Greece, as far as India. Sounds familiar again? It definitely resembles some of today's governments that defend their countries far away from their borders. Military societies are a direct product of development in science and engineering, and it was not much of a surprise that the rise of the Macedonian and later Roman empires were byproducts of inventions of new state-of-the-art armory and transportation in both land and sea. The better an army is armored and organized, the more dangerous it becomes for the region. Same as today, only with different actors and more lethal weapons.

Carl Sagan, in his famous COSMOS series, in episode VII, "The Backbone of Night", described the birth of science in these Classical Greece times in the northern Aegean by telling a story of Democritus and his understanding of atoms and matter. Democritus posted his atomic theory somewhere in the 5th century B.C., and like many other famous scientists of the time, he is a direct descendant of the Ionian School founded by Thales, establishing critical thinking as a foundation in modern scientific thought.


History is always fun, and not because it teaches us about ourselves and how to fix errors from the past, but sadly, it also shows us the future. Nothing changes overnight, especially human behavior, and although we are living in a modern, technologically superior time, the inner core of our social being remains the same. We still have wars, dictatorships, bullies, cold wars, and borders of many kinds. Well, it is time to stop with all that, at least in this post, so let's continue the main story and see how the Aegean Sea survived the centuries.

Geographically and also touristically speaking, the northern and southern parts of the sea look very different, and it is caused by one large cataclysmic event. It was the late Bronze Age, a couple of millennia before Christ, when one of the most powerful volcanoes literally exploded under the island of Thera, nowadays Santorini, in the middle of the Aegean. It is now well known as a Minoan eruption, and by recent study, seismologists tend to classify this explosion as four times more powerful than the well-known explosion of Krakatoa Island. This eruption probably caused the volcanic winter in the 17th century B.C. recorded in China by the "Bamboo Chronicles" with "yellow fog, a dim sun, then three suns, frost in July, famine, and the withering of all five cereals". It also caused the devastation of Minoan civilization, the complete reshaping of Aegean geography, and the birth of many myths, including the one of sinking the entire island of Atlantis "in a single day and night of misfortune", recorded by Plato.

Reconstruction of the Santorini Supervolcano (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)*

Whatever happened, the Aegean is filled with many islands south of Athens compared to its northern counterpart. Our vacations are always targeting the northern part simply because it is located less than 1000 km from southern Serbia, and it is cheaper and easier to get there by car in less than 10 hours of driving. If it is a family vacation, this is also the best route. However, spending vacation on some Greek island is a completely different experience. There are only two major (in size) islands on the north, Thassos and Corcyra. I visited both of them several times, and their crystal-clear beaches, small fisherman villages, and unique people are simply totally different from the coastline where the tourism over the years almost destroyed small towns and turned them into hotels, clubs, discos, and loud streets. Don't get me wrong here, they also have their unique charm, but the vacation for me is more book-reading silence, wave sounds, and seagulls and less loud music and football match atmosphere. However, there are lots of islands in the southern Aegean left for me to explore. Plenty of time. I also need one thing to confirm there: once we indeed visited the southern Aegean, but from the eastern, Turkish side of the sea, and we felt a couple of small tremors that originated from the middle of the sea, according to our Turkish guide. I am wondering if this is really the truth, and if it is, how bothersome this is on the Greek islands lying exactly there in the "Santorini" area. After all, there are no dead volcanoes, just dormant ones, and we are still living on a very live planet, especially here where African and Eurasian tectonic plates are kissing each other at regular intervals.

Today, Greece is facing a big economic crisis, affecting millions of people, especially in large cities. Greece is probably on top of several European countries affected by the world's recession(s) initiated after the 9/11 event a decade ago. Greek misfortune mainly happened because of the organization of the Olympic Games back in 2004. The extremely large cost of this giant event forced Greece to take many credits and loans in order to fix infrastructure and build new arenas. The Olympics went well, but now, almost a decade after, Greece is facing bankruptcy and an empty state treasury. To be completely honest, I am not very good when it comes to understanding world economics. I am also not good at reading between the lines, so I am not sure what really is at stake here, but speculatively speaking, the major loans happened after the world's recession could be easily predicted, and I can only state a big amount of skepticism that bankers and international fund keepers who actually financed Greece at the time couldn't predict the world economy in the next decade. I mean, if there was even a shadow of doubt that something would happen, why provide credits in the first place? I am really not one of those who believe in conspiracy theories, but something is not really right here. Whether or not the world crisis is manufactured or this is just one natural financial wave of recessions, I am sure Greece will survive, just like in the previous three or so millenniums. Elegant bankers who loaned the money in the first place will survive too, and I am sure there will be no need to exclude caviar and champagne from their menus. After all, this is just another man-made crisis, not a natural disaster. It will pass.

Aegean Sea - Marble beach, Thassos

You know what else will survive? Aegean Sea. It doesn't care for all human stupidities. It ironically smiled two and a change millenniums ago when Alexander the Great fought Persians in wooden galleys, and I am sure it is smiling today when EU officials debate on excluding Greece from the monetary eurozone.

It will stay crystal clear, perfectly reflecting the mother star from sunrise till sunset.

Image ref:
* https://www.7reasons.net/?dt_portfolio=der-supervulkan-von-akrotiri&lang=en

Refs:
http://www.egeonet.gr/index_en.html
http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/history/greekorg/greekorg.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Greece
http://www.thebigview.com/greeks/democritus.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_Annals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_eruption
http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/santorini/eruption.html
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/118706-Ye-gods-Ancient
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/alexander_the_great.shtml

Childhood

I am watching my son grow up every day, and from time to time I can't stop thinking about how childhood occupies a special place within all memories acquired in everybody's life. I tend to think that this is not because we memorized childhood better than any other period of life; it's more that, compared to adolescence and later times, those moments are pure and clean, with not much tension, conflict, or seriousness of adult life. This is all about playing, learning new things, and enjoying pleasurable moments and events, and we are simply programmed to maintain nice memories better, while others not so pleasurable are stored deep in remote regions of our brains with a tendency to be quickly forgotten.

Hairdresser Shop

Today one small visit to the hairdresser triggered the extraction of some really nice memories from my childhood. This morning I took a walk downtown for some errands and decided to take some shortcuts through a couple of blocks where we lived most of my childhood. It was an old house my grandfather and his father built a decade or so after the Second World War, where we lived in a ground-floor apartment while my grandparents were situated a floor up. It was a house with a very nice front yard full of trees and flowers, and in the back were small ancillary buildings, garages, a workshop, and a miniaturized chicken roost where my grandmother produced nice, fresh, domesticated eggs. Chickens too. She was a master of preparing chicken soup from prime ingredients, meaning killing the bird, taking off all the feathers, taking out all the inner organs, and cooking the dish at the end. I remember once I had to catch a runaway chicken that slipped out of my grandmother's hands and escaped to the front yard—all that without its head. Ok, that wasn't one of those nice memories I wanted to share in the first place, but still a proud boy's experience not everybody can share. That said, let's get back to the main story. Our house was, not so long ago, torn down, and a new residential building was built on its foundation. This morning, following my route to downtown, I walked into the street where our house was and saw a new hairdresser shop in front of a new building along with a new bakery shop next to it. My hair doesn't require much maintenance, but yesterday was also the summer solstice, also known as the day when I cut my hair to summer length, so after little hesitation, I decided to stop by.

The main room was located (coordinately speaking) in the same spot where our living room was 40 years ago when I was the age of my son now. All the memories all of a sudden started to emerge, even those vivid images of the room back in time. I was the only customer, and I sat on the chair in the same spot where our old black and white TV set was placed, and perhaps one of the immediate emotions was created by the memory of the day when my parents bought a brand-new, state-of-the-art color TV set. I remember it barely fitting the old TV spot in the large living room cabinet. This was a change comparable with nowadays switch from old small CRT television sets to large flat LCDs, only with more enthusiasm simply because today we take modern innovative gadgets for granted more than was the case in the past.

Then and Now

In the middle of the haircut, the hairdresser was interrupted for a couple of minutes, and instinctively I glimpsed the rest of the room in all directions, and maybe even for a moment I was able to see the past. All the mirrors, the hairdresser gear and tools, chairs, waiting room, and photos on the wall started and faded out in front of my eyes and morphed into our small table, two armchairs, and a couch my father made along with many other pieces of furniture in other rooms. I also saw the kitchen, the big dining table, the old big telephone in the corner of the hallway, and the iron bunk bed for my sister and me, positioned exactly 5 meters away from my current position and located in the bedroom or within the next-door bakery shop, as in today. I was proud of my upper bed, where I spent lots of time as a boy, especially during winter times. This was also the playground for us kids, where we were doing homework and also performing Johnny Weissmuller's jumps from the upper bed down to my parents double. Summers were different; almost every suitable moment we spent outside in the front yard garden, where we used to have dinners and meals at the big round stone table under the cherry tree higher than the house itself. I was able to cross from one tree to another like a small monkey, and later, when I got a little older, this was my clubhouse where I used to read comics and magazines. I remember once I twisted my ankle in school and got myself a leg immobilizer for three weeks, which I spent entirely under the cherry tree in the special temporary bed my mother made for me. I was deeply touched when my complete class from school came to visit me the first day of my school absence.

We moved to a new house when I was about 11 years old, but that first decade of my life will always stay the most memorable of them all so far. The plot where the front yard was located is still intact next to the new building, but all the trees are long gone along with all the magic I experienced in there. One of the events I also remembered today was a night we spent in the open in that very front yard after a big earthquake happened in Romania back in the year 1977. There are lots more memories of that period in time, but I will stop here. After all, this is not a book of memories or anything; just a small flashback popped out of my head today. I also didn't include many covering photographs in order not to spoil the words, just these three portraying the place now and then. The first image above is the hairdresser shop taken by my smartphone, and I am sorry you can't see my state-of-the-art and ultra-fashionable haircut because of the flashlight, but I kind of did that on purpose. However, I will be returning here and not just for memories from my past but also because of great service, and I mean it fully when I let somebody carry scissors and sharp tools so close to my head. Seriously, I once had a bad experience with a sharp razor having a close encounter with my right ear, and from that time I am always having chills and goosebumps when I need a haircut. The second photo I made out of two images of the same spot. Left is me around the year of 1972 (perhaps a year or two later, but I can't be sure), and in the background you can see part of the house with two windows that are now hairdresser and bakery shops (shown on the right).

Batteries not included

So there you go, I might have been a little bit emotional in this post, but having a public journal like this is maybe why I started this blog in the first place so I could be able to remember and write about interesting events in my life I stumble upon from time to time.

Déjà vu

In the writers' world, titles are extremely important. If they are strong enough, the stories are practically writing themselves. So to speak. According to MarketingProfs research, more than 2 million articles, posts, and stories are published online every day, and lots of people read no further than the title. Opening lines capable of forcing you to perform the actual click are nowadays a rarity, and I am not talking about those behind daily politics and current worldwide affairs. It's about all those titles that don't expire with the next election or season. I am talking about all those powerful enough to coin new words.

The one on today's menu is exceptional. Simply, "Déjà vu" has it all, with the potential of diving into the mysterious and unexplored world of the human brain. It always comes with a great glimpse into fabulous quantum mechanics we are still pioneering to understand, tons of speculations of various kinds, including spiritual experiences, subconscious networks of living beings, bugs in divine intelligent design, telepathic experiences... You name it. But I'll stop right here because this post is not going to be about speculations. It will be just a teaser of my hopefully rational but also skeptical mind. Also, a couple of theories as well.

But, let me start with my first and probably the strongest déjà vu I still remember a vivid scene from yesterday's movie I watched on cable. Hmm, "cable", an interesting word, as this was exactly what I was doing when it happened. The year was 1985, and I was the main technician in the school play back in my early days of high school. It was probably the best year of my school days thanks to this play because it lasted a couple of months during winter, and we were extremely enthusiastic about it, and there were lots of stories left from that period of us growing up. Well, in short, I was mounting cables on the stage for the borrowed, old-fashioned even for that year, tape player, as I was the one who was in charge of audio effects for the play, and in a brief moment I glimpsed the scene: two actors rehearsing the main dialogue, and in the background I could see a couple of the first rows of the school's musical hall with our teacher sitting in the first row and a couple more viewers and friends watching from the back. I remember I froze. It was like I pressed a pause key in my head, and for a moment I couldn't hear a sound, just stared at that one photo moment of my surroundings. At first, it was like a moment that I had already experienced in the past. Only not quite, as I wasn't able to identify the moment, and perhaps the better explanation would be that this was the moment comparable to a computer reboot - like the computer in my brain rebooted itself in a microsecond, and the image that appeared first in the memory was the same one from the moment before rebooting, or the brain's CPU froze for a couple of moments while all senses were still on, and this image appeared in multiple memory locations and was therefore more intense than others. However, this is how I felt after that night, and ever since then I have had more similar déjà vu experiences, but this first one was, for some reason, more memorable than all the others.

I can't be sure, of course, but whatever it is, it must be related to how the brain works, and it is either a brain feature or a bug. Scientifically speaking, we still don't have working knowledge of a human brain, and therefore it is hard to tell, but we could say with high accuracy that the human brain is not a digital computer. More plausibly, it functions in some sort of analog form where all data stored in brain neurons are not comparable to memory chips we are using today. Perhaps they operate like quantum qubits, where one qubit could have unlimited states instead of just two, like modern memory circuits have today. That way the same arrays of qubits could be used to store different images, and to pull out the one you need, quantum computers only need to set the patterns and form the image out of current states of qubits. However, I am not saying that the human brain is a quantum computer, only that as soon as we learn more about its functionality, we will have more skills to explain the "déjà vu" phenomenon as well.

However, what we can do even without a scientific background is to use something else, and that's the "Occam's razor" principle. In short, it advises us not to use complex explanations, and instead the right one is usually the simplest one. So if we try that and reject all complex ones, like multiple universes or dimensions, quantum entanglements, and invisible forces able to connect two human brains in the subconscious realm, what is left is a simple explanation, and that one would be that the "déjà vu" moment is really the image acquired in our brain that really resembles some other image we experienced before. Only in that particular moment does the brain fail to recognize it. It is a really great explanation. Just think how much data we acquired in our lives. We watched hundreds of movies during our lifespan, watched television daily, traveled, encountered different people and situations, and participated in various events. So, in short, there must be tons of data in our heads, and there is no wonder we are unable to see the difference or to recognize them all instantly. Remember these moments when some smell reminds us of some event, even those distant in our childhood? This is the same with images and moments. Sometimes some similar settings or moments remind us of something, but we are simply unable to resolve what.

By recognizing the fact that I am not really that great a presenter within my blog stories, I decided to ask for the help of one of the great thinkers today. The following video is how Michio Kaku explains déjà vu" in Big Think's series:

However, science works by proving theorems. So, there is nothing wrong if we post a couple of theories for future validation. But we have to be careful here, as every theory must be built on solid ground; otherwise, it is only a speculation at best. I guess it is valid to claim that the human brain is a sort of quantum computer, but it is hard to prove it at this point in time, as we still don't have working quantum computers other than experimental ones. If, in the future, we develop and industrialize quantum-based systems and servers, then we might have the tool to examine the brain in such a fashion and then confirm or reject the "brain quantum computer" theory. On the other end, speaking of a solid ground base for establishing theories in addition to quantum computers, to me one thing is clear, and you probably heard it in the media in the form of a short phrase: "We all are made of stars". It is complete truth, and I mean this literally: all atoms you, I, and Michio Kaku are made of originate from exploding stars, and such violent explosions are a great source of quantum entangled particles. We still don't have full knowledge of quantum entanglement, but it is proved that entangled particles share the same properties on both short and long distances, maybe even in time. So, based on current research, and if entangled particles are able to survive long lives without breaking entanglement, it is not far from common sense that two individuals can share two such particles that connect them in some way. Plausible? It is still years too early to tell, but it is certainly something worthwhile exploring. It would explain a lot. Especially the famous so-called 6th sense and even those common situations in everyone's life when you, during walks, all of a sudden start thinking about a friend of yours without any reason, and then a couple of blocks later you meet him in a flash. It happened to me a couple of times. I love science, and I am sure this will not be my last post about yet unexplained phenomena.

Every now and again I stumble upon titles and articles about the greatness of scientific thought and why we must never stop pursuing it. I also have a short personal story to add additional value to the topic: when I was a boy, I remember I asked my father why both the sky and the sea are blue. He didn't think twice and said that the sky is blue because we can't see how high it is, and the sea is also blue because we can't see how deep it is. He pointed to my head and said, "One day you will learn that eyes are not the ultimate tool of perception. Your brain is."

A couple of years later, I stumbled upon one great article about optics, Isaac Newton, and prisms in my favorite magazine and learned all about visible light and its wavelengths. Ever since then, I know exactly why the sky and sea are blue.

References and story follow-ups:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Déjà_vu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks_UHmaZcSg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
http://skepdic.com/occam.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
http://www.healthkicker.com/754397472/whats-up-with-deja-vu/