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Rainey Knudson

Zeitgeist Now (224 words)

Patterns I'm noticing:


1. Walking for health (no audio or dogs or other people)

Forget physical well-being, walk for mental health. Something we bipeds have done for hundreds of thousands of years helps our brains to function. As legendary 1980s Houston DJ Moby used to yell at us every morning, "get your lazy asses out of bed!"

Related: Julia Cameron's Walking in the World is 10 years old this year—walking makes you happier and stimulates ideas!


2. John Milton / Paradise Lost

“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.” - William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (1790)4


Just received the new Heaven, Hell, and Paradise Lost, by Ed Simon. Can't wait to dig into it.


3. Quantum mechanics / astrophysics in popular culture

Speaking of Paradise Lost, Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials is one of the most obvious and compelling examples of science entering mainstream storytelling. Dust = Dark Matter. Note also the multiverse of Marvel and the geometric fractal of a daughter's bedroom in the movie Interstellar. Science is giving us new ideas about time and space—it's not linear; it's not geometric. (Some scientists find this annoying.)


Dafne Keen as Lyra with her daemon Pan in the HBO series His Dark Materials

Happy long weekend!



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