Giving thanks
What some Boston bloggers are thankful for today (most are thankful for more than one thing, so click on the links):
Jenny Frazier: Family and friends.
Angela: New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick for being so friggin awesome.
Red: That Don Zimmer charged Pedro Martinez and I was alive to see it happen.
NaturalBlog: Official Red Sox caskets, which you can get at the Magoun-Biggins Funeral Home in Abington, Mass.
Deb Geisler: My bluer-than-blue state, where men and women have choices about who they may formally bond to.
Amy Derjue: Not having to put up a $50,000 bond.
David Cutler: The hyperlink.
Steve Nadis's six-year-old: Martin Luther King and all that he had done.
Just Giblets: Having given up smoking.
Finally, we have Othniel77, who isn't thankful for anything today, because she refuses to acknowledge the holiday: I do not celebrate holidays that I find have no merit to the nature of my spirit or the spirit of those around me.
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Wow, that othniel person
Wow, that othniel person sounds like a self-righteous turd. Happy Thanksgiving, all.
Against holidays that are
Against holidays that are "just manmade."
Ohhh-key-dohh-key....
Any non-manmade ones?
Hmm, do we have any holidays that are not man-made?
Hey, to each his own, but what's wrong with being thankful one day of the year? You don't even have to have a nice big dinner with friends and family, celebrate however you want, but really, seems like any of the Thanksgiving traditions would be good for even a grouchy spirit like Othniel77's!
Solstices and equinoxes
are not man-made events. Maybe that's what she was trying to say, though she didn't say it very well.
Schrödinger and quantum MANifestations
Events need observers.
Do we create solstices and equinoxes by observing them, such that they are man-made anyway?
It's a tough time to be a pagan :(
Planetary dynamics unaffected by human observation
Ouch. I bet you were probably just being coy, but you should understand that Schrödinger's wave equation (and the alternate but mathematically equivalent explanations of Quantum Mechanics by Feynman and Heisenberg) do not say that events occur only if there are observers - quite the opposite! QM actually requires the existence of all possible outcomes (this is called the "universal wavefunction"). But for a specific observer, the act of observation 'collapses' this wave of possible outcomes for that observer into one specific solution/event.
So, yeah, equinoxes and solstices still occur if no one is around to observe them - the universe, according to QM, acts deterministically (like a clockwork) until observed. Randomness (at the quantum level) is only introduced by observation.
(Yeah, I know, it makes my head hurt too. But QM is literally the only mathematically valid explanation that accounts for (and has predicted) things like semiconductors, lasers, etc. And believe me, there are a gazillion physicists that have been trying to find some working alternative to QM for decades - it makes a lot of their heads hurt as well, and physicists hate headaches.)
****
Fwiw, I have observed that neopagans (in this part of the world) are likely to find the weirdness of QM less threatening to their personal traditions and beliefs than do members of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Perhaps not coincidentally, there's many neopagans in the academic and scientific community here in Eastern MA.
So, if you stick your head in a box...
...does that mean that the equinox is both happening and not happening?
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
But you still need some people
Given all that - I'm pretty sure you need people to turn those events into holidays!
Hey, lay off gothniel!
She controls 11% of the underground music scene!
(Stupid inside joke that only people who post on b0st0n are going to get...move along now.)
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
I'd like to see other
I'd like to see other people's thanksgivings here, or links to blog entries on same.
Thanksgiving:
Had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends right in Boston. Great food, wonderful conversation, lots of warmth, fun and laughter. Just what the holidays are all about. We all got to state what we were thankful for this Thanksgiving. While a number of the people at the dinner table referred to politics and the election, I stated that I was just happy to be alive.
I thought this news story was really sweet
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_11090999
That was a sweet story.
What a rare occurrence, especially in today's dog-eat-dog ratrace of a world.
Uhhh...
Miki, why are there dogs eating one another in a rat race? :o)
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
And can you bet on the rats?