23/1 – 29/1/23 – The Moon and The Joker

Welcome to Monday’s News on the March – The week that was in my digital world.

The New Science of Moon Formation
Video presentation at PBS Space Time

I wrote in a new card entry recently for my AnkiDroid Collection about the origin of the Moon. It goes something like this:

The standard giant-impact hypothesis suggests that a Mars-sized body, called Theia, impacted the proto-Earth, creating a large debris ring around Earth, which then accreted to form the Moon. This collision also resulted in the 23.5° tilted axis of the Earth, thus causing the seasons. The Moon’s oxygen isotopic ratios seem to be essentially identical to Earth’s… 

This video expands on the fascinating topic of the formation of the moon.

Einstein once asked whether “the moon exists only when I look at it?”. It was rhetorical objection to the idea that measurement in quantum mechanics causes reality to become real. But there was a time when the moon didn’t exist, and then hours later suddenly did. At least, according to the latest simulations of its formation. (View the full presentation here)

Alan Watts – The Joker
Audio presentation at Positive Vibes

One of Alan’s most popular seminars, and for good reason—in The Joker, listeners will find out why every society needs fools in order to remind itself not to take life so damn seriously.

…the function of the fool became more sophisticated than that, and he became a person whose function was not simply to make jokes and to be a funny man, but to remind the monarch of his humanity so that he would never, never get too stuffy. You’ll remember, perhaps, the lines in Richard II, where the king says:

Within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his watch and there the antic sits,
Scoffing at his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a little time,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
And then at the last comes death, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

See, that was, in a way, the function of the fool. He was reminding you of your finitude; of your mortality; and death, at the end—in somewhat the same way as monks used to keep, on the desks in their cells, a grinning skull. And all this is, of course, nowadays thought very morbid, because today we repress death very, very strongly. (Listen to audio presentation here)

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand