Ted Robinson

Area54 said, re: commas inside quotation marks: “I shall be interested to see which grammatical textbook Ted cites to justify his position (and that of the comma).” Tub the Quark already answered that: http://www.grammarbook.com/ zapatos said: T. Robinson said: “My staff practically made a profession out of insuring correctness in these matters and grammatical textbooks became our Bible.” -- What did your Bible say about using "insure" instead of "ensure"? That’s the one thing that keeps me from being perfect.

Zapatos wrote the Ted Robinson wrote “Incidentally I notice that a number of submitters use the word “it’s” as the possessive form of “it,” which is like fingernails on a blackboard to namby-pamby nitpickers like myself.” -- Shouldn't the comma have been placed outside the quotes? Not according to my education as a master’s degree in Journalism and experience as editor-in-chief of the Daily Bruin. My staff practically made a profession out of insuring correctness in these matters and grammatical textbooks became our Bible.

After all the bumps and breaks my weathered hide absorbed during this journey, reaching the far side of 83 comes as a welcome surprise. I once thought people this age were supposed to go someplace and expire, but here I am, still walking straight up, about as physically able as ever, still cogitating with passable mental functionings and now gunning my new metallic-Bordeaux Maserati down long stretches of highway. I plan to use my post-80 years as what, to my mind, they are. Bonuses. After 80 we play with house money, age-wise. Even so I no longer buy any green bananas, since ancients like myself have to consider the reality of their mortality about now. Karmic questions arising from that reality began to surface awhile back from my smattering of physics, ranging from forever dimensions at quantum quark-levels up through the Newtonian yikes-size universe. The formation of trillions of similar sun-dependent planets, popping up from a speck the size of nothing, is just one of the clues that we've only peeked at through the keyhole toward layers of discovery yet to be uncovered behind those rigid scientific doorways. Nonetheless a "Higher Intelligence" just cannot be? Pshaw, considering mysteries like our popped-up existence, entanglement, multi-dimensions and dark matter that must be there but isn't, what's beyond belief? These could be the tells of our poker-faced Cosmos, I suppose, although I doubt if the predictions they might lead us to regarding any next-phase after we shed these husks would be anything like the humanized Elysiums described in our religions. Each True Religion carries its own version of multi-virgins and golden calves to salve the need for soul sanctuary, apparently, creating cocoons of communal ritual, woven together with oftentimes confusing beliefs. Trouble is, the providing of such needs, though comforting and often beneficial, occasionally breeds dreadful masters. Once control centralizes, both democracies and religions can devolve into depravity and suppression with an intensity that would make Caligula wince. Until recently I had little time for these musings. I was busy stumbling through life trying to become competent at a variety of disciplines, even achieving more than that at a few of them. Unfortunately accomplishments both big and small, except for the shadows that remain awhile in a few memories, fast-fade into flyspecks within the tumbling continuum. Getting accepted into intellectual societies was gratifying, though, except as an old commercial developer my personal perspective and interests may or may not be well-fitted into hi-Q or professional groupings. I intellectually flop around in them like a landed tuna, but, eh, at the age of 83 you can still write an autobiographical/philosophical sketch like this, since it now falls within the forgiving penumbra of old-guy doddering. My background for all this introspection includes a scrambled beginning, a bouncing around in kidhood after my father died of TB while I was still in the low single digits, then getting raised with my sister in various places on our widowed mother's waitress income, interluded for awhile by a mean-drunk stepfather. Sometimes we lived in noisy little rooms of tired old brick hotels and once, circa WWII, even in a converted chicken coop with oil lamps and no inside plumbing. But don't get me wrong about that part. The coop was not bad at all, being located next to a trout stream and near a corral of elderly horses that we kids were free to exercise with bareback rides into the back hills and bat cavelands of New Mexico. A childhood Nirvana, it was. Kind of. When we came back to the city I couldn't follow a nagging inclination to go out for sports for the first couple of years in high school because money was needed for the family. I instead spent most of my sophomore and junior years sleeping in an enclosed back porch and working after school in a shop retreading truck tires, which required two or three hours a day of pretty heavy weightlifting. When I did go out in my senior year I made the football and basketball varsities with those years of heavy lifting as a possible advantage, and being over 6'5" with acceptable running speed and ball-catching hands the size of baseball mitts, I became a first string end on both offense and defense in football. But I had no real experience in football or basketball and don't recall doing anything special in either sport. My mother never actually saw me play football, though. She came to a game once and left almost immediately, because those were the days of leather helmets and no face guards. There was blood on our faces and a player was being carried off the field, and she of Scottish birth and upbringing did not understand this game. She did not want to watch it. I could see her point there, but then I would catch and run with the ball and hear the crowd yelling and see my teammates trying to keep the opposing players from bringing me down. The cheering crowds and the existence of teammates were experiences both new and uplifting for me, a sort of reattachment with society. I went on to play football at UCLA but when injured too seriously to stay with it I ran for and won the editorship of the Daily Bruin instead, and luckily met and married beautiful Jean Mahoney the Prom Queen. Then began the raising of two well-adjusted kids, acquiring two masters degrees at night, and writing "The Godhead" while going through the usual mundane jobs, layoffs and wrong turns. Eventually I found my footing because of two good friends, the first one talking me into joining him in commercial real estate sales. Since it required just a decent amount of thought and effort, this kind of work seemed akin to finding money, but then the second friend, twelve years later, convinced me to follow him into commercial development. His name was Brian Bertha, he of the wild-man reputation and the only full business partner I ever had. But on February 28, 1983, at the age of 42, Brian went down with his Beechcraft Baron into the Sierra Nevada mountains and, despite a massive search, was not found until five months later, after the snows had melted and some hikers came upon the wreckage. Anyway it's been a life full of rough negotiators, strong family and friends, precipitous risks. I've been in projects where any number of variables could have wiped us out. I've also been alone and adrift in the Pacific Ocean on a broken sailboat for seven days, gotten beaten up as the sparring partner to a professional heavyweight boxer, and served two years as a draftee Army grunt on Okinawa with the reactivated Merrill's Marauders. I began working at the age of 11 selling newspapers on a corner in a place called Atwater and ended up owning a number of commercial properties with no loans on anything, gotten written up a few times in Money Magazine, taken my family – now 13 strong with the addition of new grand-spouses – all over the world, and now have a 400-yard commute across the bay from my home dock on Lido Island to the office building and marina I built and own over the water in Newport Beach for my headquarters. So I've sufficiently survived and, in the end, considering all this material stuff, thrived. We're now closing in on 60 years of a great marriage and close-knit family and all the extraordinary people we've met in every socioeconomic phase of our path through this lifelong diorama of passing faces and places. Now I'd like to imagine that when the time comes to discover whether oblivion or something else be our end-destinies, I could don that young mantle again. I'd like to catch one last ball and feel that uplift once more, running with boundless energy toward whatever it happens to be, again wearing an old leather football helmet. And I'm not sure I care how that final revelation turns out. It'll be a new adventure, and this should be the way we look at it. Otherwise we're just crew on the Pequod here, fussing over some unknown fate that we're all being steered toward. Do these latter-day reflections, this life review, accomplish anything? Or for that matter, matter? Well they do to we seekers of context who want to tidy up, maybe even make sense of, our unfettered beginning-to-end stories. But those need to be so clean and honest that when it comes time to write the epitaph for our headstones, all the honors and ornaments can be pushed aside and we'll instead carve into that stone just the one all-embracing truth of our experience here. It would read, simply, "I have lived."

Sorry for the delay in response. Stuff gets in the way, but I actually didn’t understand the part about logic and structured mathematics coming out of chaos which then led into our universe’s description set. Do understand the error-correction algorithm, how chaos could accumulate into a singularity and geometric reality. Didn’t grasp what mathematical bulk, seed information, imaginary number system or first identifier are and am not sure how anthropomorphic (try saying that fast) words like logic and error can be applied to the universe. In other words I pretty much got lost right after the words “there was a void” from which came chaos -- that part I get. Age might be a factor here, though. I need a nap. Incidentally I notice that a number of submitters use the word “it’s” as the possessive form of “it,” which is like fingernails on a blackboard to namby-pamby nitpickers like myself.

First time I've heard the word Orthography, but no proof-reader needed. One of my master's degrees is in journalism, and I was editor-in-chief of the UCLA Daily Bruin, etc., and so needed to discipline myself in the written word. But as to real life, I spent most of it developing and acquiring real estate, mostly shopping centers, and became a zillionaire who now looks around for intellectual mischief to get into. Happily so, having spent part of my adolescence with my Scottish immigrant family who during WWII needed to live in a converted chicken coop.

Re: Klaynos response: The smartest people work with entanglement as a scientific phenomenon, but I see its instantaneity as a tell that fundamental space-time doesn’t exist. Thus the “unpicturable” nothingness that would deny any origin at all, which leads into metaphysical areas where real scientists prefer not to tred. But this kind of theory does not lend itself mathematical quantifications of course. Very incidentally, Mensa, ISPE and the Triple Nine Society differ in that the latter two limit their membership only to those who would qualify in the highest 5% of Mensans (99.9th vs. 98th percentile). · Re: Studiot response: Thanks very much to both of you for the responses and the thoughtful comments. The definition of the word speculations might be, probably is, different than mine, but my mission statement, if it could be called anything that grand, would be to have those involved in such things to consider nothingness as the basis of existence. The problem being that it might be almost impossible to imagine nothing – the elimination of all possible origins, the elimination of everything. Unfortunately this leads into metaphysical areas, but I’m not at all sure whether that’s where all science will end up if we’re relentlessly logical. Crazy idea, maybe, but when you’re 83 you get to say stuff like this.

I see the problem. Intended to respond to Alex's comment on nothing (nothingness?) and ended up writing a treatise. Will study the rules more thoroughly.

I’m spanking new here and don’t know exactly where to start, but I’m 83 now and don’t have time to learn anything, so I’ll just leap in by noting beecee’s comment: “that because there are many unqualified people that come to a science forum to tell everyone participating, how mainstream science has got it wrong, and they have the answer!” Well, by gum, I’m undoubtedly one of those, but then I’m a Life Member of Mensa, a member of ISPE, and was once Regent of the Triple Nine Society, so I must be smart . . . I think. Anyway I can’t help responding to alexcouch’s observation “You can't really have nothing, cause if there is nothing, then why is there something within this nothing? There is matter within this void and that honestly doesn't make any sense.” My personal thoughts on this might be uninteresting and ill-informed, but at least they’re long, and involve my take on nothing that is evidenced by entanglement. Any self-respecting physicist would be reluctant to take this quantum business to some logical, albeit bizarre, scarily metaphysical, and, maybe for me personally, fairly original conclusions. But bizarreness calls for thinking outside the scientific box, so it falls to we who are already outside that box to venture into the breach and follow those dots, then gird up for the guffaws that will follow. But guffaws are not a problem if you don't need the acceptance that is otherwise necessary to stay inside the box. Being guffaw-proof, I can take an uncompromising look at the weirdness of the origins that all these investigations seem to be pointing toward, except, what we might find is, there are no origins. To understand this requires doing what is possibly impossible – to imagine Nothing, because therein lies, maybe, the origins from whence we stem. We need to start a possible new path in the middle of nothingness. Trying to imagine nothing, though, usually ends up in frustrating visions of airless vacuums, or maybe just total blackness -- something along those lines. Wrong approach, I believe, because those concepts still require space for them to exist within. In nothingness space does not exist, right along with its companion, time, and those who spend their time pondering abstrusities, like what exists beyond our universe, need mental reconstruction in order to imagine nothing. A Buddhist priest might come close to doing this during his cessation-of-thought sessions, one can’t really know, but that’s doubtful. Nothingness is, for lack of a better word, or to invent a more exact word, unpicturable. I think we need to understand nothingness before we can understand how a universe that wasn’t there suddenly was there, because anything could exist, and happen, within complete nothingness, where nothing really happens and nothing really exists. Non-existent inclusions would also take in dimensions outside our own, some of whose own mass and energy could spill into ours and provide weight and push in our universe which, being in separate dimensions, can't be seen or felt beyond these influences and are therefore called dark things. Dark matter and energy might be explainable when, if, we can find a way to detect other quantum dimensions, provided that they're actually the cause, to determine their influence here. Whether or not there is a Higher Intelligence is above my pay grade, but the energy and mass from interacting dimensions would probably not have been put here by anyone or anything in order to keep the celestial mechanisms spinning and the universe from imploding. Although it matters not if these necessary implements arise from multi-dimensions, primordial black holes, massive interactive particles or whatever. They all simply fall within the unlimited default possibilities that would avoid cosmic meltdown, although in an infinite number of other possibilities within nothingness, it actually does melt down. No space, no time, nothing. Blank. Small quivers can start, or not. The quivers beget illusions that can beget great landslides of anything and everything, including illusory existences. But again, such quivers are only part of illusions that otherwise would require time and space that do not exist in fundamental nothingness. The illusion of quivers, in scenarios like ours, bounce against each other and bunch into sudden -- sudden by our measurement of time -- cataclysmic explosions of existence, among a lot of other things that can happen, because within nothing there are of course infinite possible quivers. In some dimensions, like ours, once separated those assembled quivers cool, get less agitated and split into different combinations and dimensions. In other words they become the stuff of macro-physics, i.e.: the study of macro-on-macro interactions, interacting bubbles of nothing which we call particles, molecules, quarks, whatever. Structures of molecules reacting to other molecular structures. Bubbles of nothing reacting on bubbles of nothing, bringing forth its own observer-structures whose interactions with object-structures range from staring at the universe to running into brick walls. Space and time are total illusions? Our attention might need to be directed toward entanglement for an answer, where two companion particles react instantly to each other. But it shouldn’t be a mystery that they can communicate instantly if it is understood that in underlying nothingness space does not exist for it to travel within. Entanglement is the necessary stabilizing constant within the macro world of Albert Einstein’s local realism, which confines cause and effect within a world governed by the speed of light, itself bending and varying within its external environments. The basic particles remain entwined and fixed in the opposite complementary polarizations needed to hold together these fundamental building blocks of our pseudo-material existence. Accordingly, the illusion, to exist, requires that the bubbles of nothing, particles, cannot be further divided at some basic level because eventually they would have to divide impossibly into nothingness. They would divide down into the quivers of illusion that might be what physicists give the term "waves," and from there further down perhaps into vibrating strings that have no substance. Quivers of nothing, in other words. Waves are created from the quivers within nothing that collapse into bubbles of illusion, or particles, if someone’s around to observe them, which observers, as mentioned, are interacting structures of bubbles of nothing. Further divisions are not possible in an illusion that depends on their indivisibility at some point to avoid disappearing into nothing, so fundamental particles only seem to be able to be divided further, but actually aren’t. Entanglement tells us this, communicating instantly no matter how far apart they are, whether one is standing still and the other is on Einstein’s time-warping speeding train. Einstein once described entanglement as “spooky action at a distance, but it isn’t spooky at all if quantum theory is carried to its logical conclusions, where time and space are not really available for anything to travel within. From kleptoseconds to eternity, our standard conception of time is often carried into both secular and religious beliefs that do not make sense. If one dies and goes on to eternal life, or when lovers are joined together for eternity, wouldn't one get tired of doing whatever they do for a thousand years in an eternal afterlife? How about a trillion years, when our solar system has long since imploded and the expanding universe has left the skies black, which amount of time is still only an indistinguishable dollop within the concept of eternity. Hanging around that long would bring a grander meaning to the word “tedium.” Anyway, if the fundamental element of macro physics is nothing, what keeps the whole complex from falling apart? As multi-worlders hypothecate, it actually does fall apart, all the time, in every way, every moment of every existence. We continue on within the macro structure that we call the world, or the universe, that holds together by discarding its way through a gazillion or so probabilities, but we know only those that distill into our continuity in space-time. Things like dark matter and dark energy are included in the probabilities necessary for macro physics and therefore they simply exist within the probability that works. It’s up to the scientists to figure out how this came about through the distillation of all workable complexes, because without the filtered result that includes dark stuff the universe implodes and/or cannot perform its celestial gravitational dance. Like the necessary weakness of gravity being the result of the intertransitioning of gravitons between this and other dimensions, other dimensions may or may not be the necessary inclusion for our particular dimension to function. The end result, as we can see from the world around us, is that the distilled illusions come together, hold together and move forward together, and it all works, even though its base consists of nothing. The quiver-waves collapse into functional illusions while all the possible non-functional scenarios are filtered out. Life, as a result, carries on.