Prescience

Often, when I am reading a work by an author I am familiar with, sentences seem familiar, as if I am remembering the sentence. When I watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice, I had the distinct feeling that I was recalling a dream.

I cannot explain this. I can speculate that there is a some string running through the pieces of art I enjoy and they have influenced me greatly. Then I can call that string the human condition. But by simply naming it, I do not explain it. I can further speculate that for something to be so universal and timeless in the products of our species, it–the human condition–must be inherent to some physical process of our biology. If so, I’d consider that process as the fundamentally defining process of our consciousness. Furthermore, I’d be open to the idea that what we call consciousness is, in fact, the illusion of consciousness, since everything our species tries to do is the illusion of what was originally set out to be done. Like our democratic republic. But it could be that I have increasingly narrowing taste in the pieces of art I enjoy and they have influenced me greatly. Like seeding my thoughts and dreams.

China has a lot of weather-modification programs:

China’s weather department includes more than 37,000 scientists, hundreds of cloud-probing lasers and a fleet of airplanes prepared to drop liquid nitrogen into any wayward cloud approaching Beijing. from this article

They claim to be behind the recent first snow fall in Beijing. In an interesting and short article, Scientific American addresses the question: Does cloud seeding work? The conclusion is ambiguous: it can work, it should work, but how do we know it is working?

But one has to wonder, if the overall weather system is global, which it seems to be, and if a butterfly flapping its wings is significant enought to have an effect named after it–not to mention a movie I’ve heard is terrible–should cloud seeding programs be considered weapons of mass destruction with a global-wide reach? That Scientific American article concludes that more weather change is done by burning fossil fuels, so maybe cloud seeding is nothing to lose sleep over and its effects are noise in the overall effects caused by our delightfully naive species, of which, I will remind you, I am a card carrying member.

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