Category: Technology

The Real Reason Why People Sin

11/9/2017

Something that gets lost in the discussion of middot or fixing deep-seated issues in society is the reason why people do the wrong thing.

People sin because something about that particular sin makes them feel good.

When that sin becomes a primary goal and something they engage in frequently (and when not actively engaging in it, they think about it or plan with anticipation how to engage in it), we call it "addiction."

In Torah terms, it’s called a “baal [fill-in-the-blank]”—meaning, the person has become an owner of this negative act: baal lashon hara, baal taava, etc.

(This term can also be used positively, such as a “baal chessed” or a “baal tzedakah.”)

For example, every female I’ve ever met who doesn’t dress in a refined and self-respecting manner does so because the “hot” styles make them feel good.

I once saw a young Yerushalmi Yiddish-speaking woman who was slowly deteriorating in her mitzvah observance. I was stunned to see her show up to a Simcha Beit Hashoeva (Sukkot celebration) in a shocking outfit which included fishnet stockings (!!!). But she obviously had no idea what she represented. She just felt good.

This can be very innocent.

As another example, a woman may genuinely love the color fuchsia and love how she feels when she’s wearing it as a dress, a sequined hair-covering and as nail polish. She’s not thinking, “Ooh, now everyone will gawk at me; I just love attracting stares!”

No, she’s just thinking that wearing her favorite color boosts her mood.

Same thing with long, swoopy eye-catching looks-EXACTLY-like-real-hair shaitels. The wearer simply like how she looks in it. She feels GOOD in that shaitel! Or maybe she also likes the idea of being what her society considers stylish.
A lot of times, just by virtue of being the latest fashion somehow makes something attractive.
I feel it and I can’t help noticing that a lot of people seem to feel it too.

And yes, sometimes it's out of rebellion...which also feels good to some people!

The same mechanism is operating with addictions everyone realizes are bad, like with alcohol or drugs.

But this is also true with behavior.

Why "Scaring" People Doesn't Usually Work

For example, it took me a long time to realize that people who frequently put others down actually enjoy it. Sure, they might feel a twinge of shame, especially if they get called on their hurtful behavior. But a part of them feels good.

Ditto for people who lose their tempers easily. Again, I was shocked to see that they actually feel good and don't even feel so guilty about their loss of control. The fury is a release of tension and they feel powerful, especially when they see how people cater to them because of their temper.

With bulimics, the physiological result of vomiting is similar to having a really good yell at someone. So if a bulimic feels bad or angry, vomiting gets the physiological effect of screaming at someone without hurting anybody or risking confrontation.

This is why scaring people into being good often doesn’t work, especially for the long term. Even if it does work (or the sinner hits bottom), they often just go on to another negative habit.

Why? Because deep down, people can't stand the thought of living what feels like an empty, boring, or miserable life for the rest of their life.

For example, AA meetings are often filled with people who took up smoking when they quit drinking. And a lot of smokers gain weight when they stop smoking.

Another example: I know parents who stopped hitting their kids and started ignoring them instead.

When Nothing Else Feels as Good

When someone I know calmly told a long-time friend that her frequent put-downs were unacceptable, she seemed to stop, but in reality, she just went underground and turned passive-aggressive.

Later, when she went on Prozac and the insulting behavior returned (although now with Prozac-induced exuberance), the other person tried to respond by gently confronting her on the spot each time she did it. Then she gradually cut off contact with her "friend." Later, she decided to speak to her and explain why she couldn’t maintain any further relationship with her (and yes, she did tell her that the Prozac had something to do with her behavior, as a way to give her the benefit of the doubt).

But the errant friend had no idea what the other was talking about and could not think of anything she’d ever done that was wrong. Even as she said this, she still delivered mild put-downs of which she genuinely seemed unaware. (This is called “emotional blunting,” by the way, when you cannot feel how your behavior is impacting another person. It’s another Prozac side effect.)

And the offended party couldn’t push her on the issue because Prozac isn’t foolproof and who wants to be the catalyst if a Prozac-user would end up harming herself in any way?

The truth is, that person can’t get off Prozac. It makes her feel too good. And the friend she kept hurting has nothing better to offer her as far as “feel good” goes. No one does! For her, it’s worth it for her to engage in hurtful behavior of which she claims to be completely unaware and it’s worth it for her to lose a friend. Without the Prozac, she just feels too bad and unhappy and there is NOTHING that makes her feel as good as Prozac.

And I do understand that.

And this is why people can spend too much time on blogs, videos, Facebook, Twitter, the news, or literally anything else. It feels good!

So when you’re trying to influence someone (including yourself!) to change a behavior, it’s important to keep this "feel-good factor" in mind.

And maybe there isn’t anything else in their life that makes them feel as good as…

pizza and ice cream
vomiting
drinking
opium
meds
getting angry
criticizing and nitpicking
sniping
lashon hara
tight skirts and sparkly deeply orange lipstick
secular novels
secular music
shopping
tweeting
podcasts
facebooking
commenting
staring at women
dressing immodestly
watching cat videos
reading the news
talking
workaholism
sleeping
jeering
anything else you can think of

Caught in a Conflict

Then people have a hard time because they sense or may even actively realize what they’re doing is wrong, but they can’t stop themselves because they have nothing else that feels as good.

For example, fat people suffer health problems and shame about their appearance, but find it hard to diet. Angry or snipey people destroy their relationships and they know that halacha exhorts against such behavior, but they don't stop. And the same goes for all the above behaviors.

You can feel bad about your addiction or sin, but stopping it feels even worse.

And even though people like to wax lyrical about:

the beauty of sunsets
spending time with the people you love most in your life
doing what you love (as a hobby or a career) and so on...

...the fact of the matter is that many people DON’T find beautiful sunsets or walks in the woods or their hobby/career or the people they love most as compelling as the above.

Some people even find these things boring. What’s harder is when the people you love most (like your parents, spouse, children, or “friends”) even make you feel bad about yourself or when your career or hobby proves unfulfilling. It depends.

This is why forming a relationship with Hashem is so important. Talking to Him as if He’s your Good True Friend is vital in conquering your inclination for the lesser things in life.
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But having said that, connecting to Hashem can still be a moment-by-moment challenge, especially when the talks feel “dry” or when you’re having a hard time settling your mind and not daydreaming or feeling pressed to do something else.

But I just don’t see another way.
All the lesser stuff has become too compelling and too accessible.

Some of it is even lauded in secular society as a good thing to do.

So it’s really good to just try bonding with God despite all the compelling stuff.

The effort alone is very precious in Shamayim.

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What I Learned about Taming My Email Habits

20/8/2017

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At first, email seemed like one of the most innocent aspects of the new Internet technology. In fact, you could even get email without Internet pretty early on (at least in Eretz Yisrael).

Yet problems appeared as fast as you could press “Send.”

Spam - Traif in a Whole New Way
Spam arose as email’s shadow. Now, spam filters come with your email. But back then, spam could be anything from innocent but annoying ads to filthy forbidden images.

A Whole New Area of Forbidden "Speech"
Then email’s deceptive appearance as regular mail (only in digital form!) plus its immediate response time led to people using it for intimate exchanges or lashon hara that quickly found its way across the Internet. Or if not made completely public, at least forwarded on to the one or two people where it could do the most damage.

The concept of “flame wars” also developed, with the lightning back-and-forth of hot ‘n’ heavy disagreement that was unlikely to develop in a face-to-face exchange and NEVER would have developed through a hand-written exchange of letters or even memos or faxes.

New Hacker Outlet
Hackers continue to hack email even with improved security and strong passwords. Inconvenience, identity theft, and worse continue to plague users.

But I thought I could handle it.

The Sweet Siren Song of Email

I express myself best through writing, so it seemed like the ideal communication tool for me. No more searching out the right-sized envelope or figuring out what kind of stamp and how many, no more dragging myself to inconveniently located post offices to stand in line.

Furthermore, it’s an easier and seemingly gentler way of communicating with people, especially if you want to say something they don’t necessarily want to hear, whether for your own good or for theirs.

And finally, it has proved such a boon to employers and employees everywhere.

As just one of a million examples: If you’re a writer, no more waiting months to receive a reply to your submission. Your submission is received immediately and rejected immediately. No more waiting and wondering for an eternity! (Or accepted without the need for phone calls and stuff.) You can even interact with a colleague for months without ever hearing their voice.

Progress, O blessed progress!

Oops! Delete! Delete!

The thing is, you can find yourself emailing things to people that you wouldn’t say or write to them.

It’s not always conventionally "bad" stuff either. You can get intimate too fast over email, you can give forth too much of yourself via a mechanism that not only cannot be erased (unless the receiver is willing to press “Delete Forever” and even then, only Google knows whether it’s really gone), but can be forwarded infinitely for eternity.

And that’s the well-intentioned use of email.

Despite my best intentions, I’ve found myself guilty of sending emails (for better or for worse) full of content that I wouldn’t have said or written in snail-mail.

In fact, I think I even lost a job due to email, via the actions of a particularly disturbed and devious individual, though I’ll probably never know exactly why or how -- nor even if that individual was actually involved.
But if it did happen in the way I suspect it did, then I deserved it and kaparat ha’avonot.
Better to suffer consequences for negative actions in This World than in the World to Come.

Anyway, there are also altercations you undergo via email that you likely wouldn’t have otherwise.

There are also things you reveal (whether private for you or hurtful for the other) that you might not have revealed otherwise.

(You can also think you’re anonymous with email—and you can be anonymous to a certain extent if you want—which is part of email’s lure and part of its pitfall.)

Via email, I’ve maintained more contact with certain people than I would have otherwise.

But ironically, it took me years to realize that mostly wasn’t a good thing.

After all, if you can’t be bothered to address and stamp a letter or make a long-distance phone call (or they can’t be bothered to do that for you), then what kind of relationship do you really have?

People grow in different directions and compatibilities change (or were never really there in the first place).

What is Email Really Good For?

Yes, email is the ideal option for many business situations and also for some personal interactions.

I have it and will continue to enjoy its convenience.

But what I’m realizing more and more is that a lot of this fast and easy technology is best used for faster and easier business and short tasks, but not more.
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Scrolling and scrolling down a screen to read long, complex messages also ensures that the message isn’t absorbed as well as a printed-on-paper message. Regardless of how habituated you are to reading on a screen, your eyes skip a lot. Even with the specially designed anti-reflection e-ink e-readers, studies have shown that people reading a book on an e-reader understand and retain less than they retain from reading the exact same book in print.

But so far, I can't avoid sometimes producing really long blog posts... ;-)
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So basically, email is good for:

Business back-and-forth
Sending invitations
Thank-you notes (okay, not everyone agrees with me here, but I definitely prefer thank-you emails to handwritten thank-you notes)
Dropping a quick message
Reminders
Unavoidable long-distance communications (i.e., can you imagine blogs if you had to mail your comments?)
Sending someone pleasant thoughts, praise, encouragement, or genuinely helpful and light advice
Certain kinds of photos
Quick and helpful information (telephone numbers, names, addresses, etc)
Many of the heart-warming or funny viral forwards are pretty nice too!

Like I said, I’m not giving up email. I honestly feel its benefits outweigh its disadvantages. And like I said, I feel like now I know how to deal with it in a healthier manner.
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And believe me, I’ve been building up to this healthier manner for MONTHS. Some things are a process and even when you realize the truth of things, it still takes you a while to get there. This is also good because it gives me more compassion and understanding for others who may also struggle with actualizing their realizations. Sometimes, it takes a while for what’s in your brain to travel to your heart and all the other parts of your body.
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And it would be hypocritical to look down on anyone for using it like I used to use it until very recently. I’m really not in any position to judge, trust me.

Furthermore, I still intend to respond in kind to anyone who sends me an email. There are wonderful people out there, and you sometimes end up finding them online.

But for me personally, I’m using email with greatly heightened awareness and newfound self-discipline. That’s all.
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For the differences of absorption and retention on e-readers vs print:
http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2014/02/the-physical-effects-of-e-reading/

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The Venus Effect: Lots of Fun Insanity

12/5/2017

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Infrared map of what Venus possibly looks like under its massive cloud cover

Hi, we’re going to discuss Venus again today.

Why?

Well, a friend lent me a copy of The Velikovsky Heresies: Worlds in Collision and Ancient Catastrophes Revisited, which among other things provides a shocking amount of evidence to support Velikovsky’s theory that Venus is actually a comet caught in orbit between Mercury and Earth.

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Disclaimer: I am not a chasid of Immanuel Velikovsky, and it's fine with me if his stuff is proven dead wrong. I've no vested interest in whether Venus is a planet or a comet, nor whether Venus is old or young.
God's Narrative is more than good enough for me.
But Velikovsky's theories are pretty interesting, more in line with Torah (though not in line enough), and some have compelling evidence, as you'll soon see.
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Because I like to check things out myself, I happened upon pseudo-science regarding an anomaly discovered in Venus’s hemisphere, which led me to write my first Venus post, Yet Another Stunning Discovery: Heck, We Haven’t Got a Clue!

But then I started coming across more weird stuff.

For example, there are mounds of entire articles dedicated to Venus’s surface.

But the thing is...we can’t see Venus’s surface—not with telescopes, nor with specially designed spacecraft put in orbit around Venus, nothing.

The only concrete picture we have of the Venusian surface are a couple of photos photographed by specially designed spacecraft just before they were cooked and pressurized to death by Venus’s hellish environment.

(If you want to see all the photos from all the missions to Venus, including the actual surface in both color and black and white, please go HERE.)

Yet any article on Venus will go on and on about:

Venus’s large and populous volcanoes
its massive lava flows
its total absence of tectonic plates and therefore subduction zones
its surface that keeps “refreshing” itself to look “young”
how its surface is soooo hot and pressurized (around 450 C/850 F and 90 times the pressure of Earth, so it's like standing at the bottom of an Earth ocean)
how Venus has soooo many craters—none of which are smaller than 2 km, oddly enough
and how its ongoing “greenhouse gas” effect is a warning to Earthlings.

(And some of this stuff is contradictory, as you'll soon see.)

And gosh...how do scientists know all this stuff—especially since they can’t see past Venus’s clouds nor can they land a spacecraft easily on Venus’s surface (and when they have done it, it didn’t work as well as it should have and the spacecraft died pretty quickly after landing)?

First of all, the spacecraft that actually landed on Venus measured its pressure and temperature.

Second of all, scientists mapped out Venus’s surface by pinging radar waves all over it from special spacecraft. While they couldn’t ping all of Venus’s surface, they managed to ping the vast majority of it.

Here an oversimplified explanation of how that worked:

A wave that took a long time to bounce back evidently must have hit a low point on the surface (like the bottom of a crater).
A wave that took a much shorter time to bounce back must have hit something tall, like the peak of a mountain.

And while there’s a margin of error in this kind of mapping, it seems to be considered accurate enough.

Very nice, you might be saying. But do pings also tell us whether there is lava? Or erupting volcanoes? Or tectonic plates and subduction zones?
And what are those anyway?

Okay, so first of all…

Tectonic plates
On Earth, the land we stand on is said to be gigantic plates—tectonic plates, to be exact—that are floating on a sea of mantle.

This is called: The Theory of Plate Tectonics.

Tectonic: building, constructing (i.e. moving around to form stuff)

(On Venus, scientists think there are tectonics—they think the ground moves around a bit, which is what formed those rifts and mountains indicated by their radar pings, but their information indicates that Venus’s surface is all one big thing, and not split into different “plates.”)

Divergent plates (they split apart, making small volcanos or shallow earthquakes possible) @Domdomegg

Plates rubbing back and forth against each other (and one way earthquakes occur) @Domdomegg

The above are diagrams of plates on Earth. Venus is said NOT to have these.

Subduction Zones
According to plate tectonics, these gigantic plates of land sometimes start moving around. When that happens, one plate might slip under the other. (This is one of several ways earthquakes occurs.)

Volcanoes and mountain ranges are thought to usually form this way, through this act of subduction. Subduction zones are large areas in which the plates meet and interact this way, by shoving one plate edge under another plate edge.

Subduction in action: One plate getting shoved under another. (Image by Domdomegg)

Super-detailed image of tectonic plates in subduction. (Author: KDS4444 Photo Credit: Subduction-en.svg from Wikimedia Commons - License: CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Scientists state that Venus does NOT have either of these.

Except how do they know?

They don’t!

Why are scientists so sure that Venus has volcanoes?
(I mean, there were no volcanoes nor lava in the Venera photos, right?)

There are 6 reasons:
1) Sometimes, a part of Venus’s clouds really heats up in the way that Earth’s atmosphere does above a volcanic eruption. They don’t know exactly how hot those clouds heat up, so they guess it’s as hot as a volcanic eruption. The area that heats up is also similar to the amount of area that heats up above an Earth volcano.

2) In a place where the radar pinged a map of rifts rising from the ground, scientists detected places where the surface got much hotter, then cooled down again.

3) At one point, they spotted a sharp rise of sulfuric oxide in Venus’s atmosphere, followed by a gradual drop.

4) They spotted lightning in Venusian clouds that reminded them of the kind of lightning produced by volcanoes here on Earth.

5) Venus’s surface doesn’t show much erosion or as many craters as an old planet should.
In fact, Venus’s surface looks downright “fresh” or “young,” which is extremely irritating to scientists because a young Venus is exactly what Velikovsky described and they hate Velikovsky like how ISIS hates infidels.
Also, scientists cling to their faith in an old Universe that takes millions of years to form, and a young Venus shakes this faith.

6) You will constantly read about “mantle plumes” on Venus, which many scientists believe to be the source of Venus’s volcanoes. On Earth, volcanoes are generally (but not always) considered to be caused by tectonic plates shoving one under the other (subduction). Very simplistically speaking, plumes consist of hot stuff that simply rise from the hot inner core to the surface forming a mushroom-shaped “plume” along the way.
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Now, before you say, “Well, that all sounds pretty convincing to me!”, I’d just like to remind you that Venus’s atmosphere is very different than Earth’s. It’s made up of mostly carbon dioxide with some nitrogen and other stuff, moves around Venus faster than Venus can rotate, and its noxious and volatile cloud cover is dozens of kilometers thick.

In fact, all of Venus is vastly different than Earth - except its size and distance from the Sun.

Using Earth as the model for what's going on with Venus isn't very reasonable.

So to answer each belief from above:

1) Venus’s atmosphere is so different and so much more volatile than Earth’s.
If a part of a cloud heated up, even if the area it covered resembles that of an Earthly volcano, that doesn’t prove—and hardly indicates—that a volcano caused that hotspot.
With all those volatile chemicals around, you can assume that hotspots could be caused by the weather.
Really, if you can't know, then the weather is a logical assumption.
What’s more, scientists don’t know exactly how hot that hotspot really was.

2) Jumping to conclusions based on very little evidence
Infrared imaging of one area: “It is the most tantalizing evidence yet for active volcanism,” says Eugene Shalygin from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. (See HERE.)
First of all, they’ve been talking about Venusian volcanoes for decades and this very recent 2008 observation is the best evidence they have?
Then what have they been so sure of all this time?
And remember, they can’t see anything or measure anything.
(Also very important: They don’t know the chemical composition of Venus’s lower layer of clouds...just the upper layer. So maybe there are explosive things in there? See HERE.)
Also, the heat was discovered in only one small area of the entire planet (or comet!).

This is a far cry from assuming that Venus is dotted with active or even once-active volcanoes.

Furthermore, MUST heat mean lava? Does it really have to?

Could it also mean steam?
Or gases?
Plasma?
Or maybe a weather anomaly threw something hot from Venus’s sky (like from that unknown lower layer)?
Or perhaps a not-yet-discovered Venusian dragon belched?

If you read the whole article on hot lava flows on Venus (which was published by the European Space Agency in 2015), I’d like to direct you to the many speculative unscientific statements:

"hot regions on the surface below are probably much smaller"
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"the team calculate that the feature may only be around 1 square kilometre in size, with a temperature of 830°C"
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"Rift zones are results of fracturing of the surface, which is often associated with upwelling of magma below the crust. This process can bring hot material to the surface, where it may be released through fractures as a lava flow."
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"Some models of planetary evolution suggest that Venus was resurfaced in a cataclysmic flood of lava around half a billion years ago."
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"Although changes in wind patterns could have caused this, the more intriguing possibility is that episodes of volcanic activity..."
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"This heat has to escape somehow, and one possibility is that it does so in the form of volcanic eruptions."
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"is likely to have an internal heat source, perhaps due to radioactive heating." [Emphases mine - MR]

(But to my mind, the most intriguing possibility is the belching-dragon possibility.)

Anyway, this is incredibly pathetic.

3) Using Fiction Plot Techniques as Science
Most unscientifically, they state the following regarding the rise and drop of sulfuric acid in Venus’s atmosphere:

“Although changes in wind patterns could have caused this, the more intriguing possibility is that episodes of volcanic activity were injecting vast amounts of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere.”

[Emphases mine - MR]

Okay, so based on everything they know, there are two possibilities for a rise and drop of sulfuric acid:

Changes in wind patterns
Volcanic activity

So rather than researching which possibility is more realistic—or even provable (remember, they can detect wind patterns to a certain extent)—they go for the possibility which is more intriguing. Basically, they say, “Volcanoes are more fun than wind, so let’s go with volcanoes.”

How rational! How objective! How scientific!

4) They didn’t actually spot lightning.
Instead, they detected “visible flashes in the atmosphere” and “localised emissions of radio waves”…which could just as easily result from sulfuric acid droplets because they are extremely and electrically charged. (See HERE.)

5) Making Stuff Up
Rather than taking whatever handful of actual facts they possess about Venus and running with that, we see that scientists start inventing “facts” out of thin air.
Many articles about Venus blather about how Venus’s surface “refreshes” itself via lava flow even though there is no hard evidence for lava or even volcanoes—except for some interesting spots of extreme heat in certain areas of Venus, which lie about rifts in ways that sometimes Earthly lava does.
Rather than considering the idea of a young Venus (which is what the evidence they DO have actually points to), scientists turn themselves inside out to make up stuff with absolutely NO evidence.

For example, even if there is volcanic activity on Venus, it doesn’t mean there is so much that it “refreshes” the entire surface of this Earth-size object.

6) Scientists aren’t even sure whether “mantle plumes” even exist.
No, really!
It’s just a theory.
Isn’t that shocking?
You read about mantle plumes all over the place, but there is no proof. In fact, The Geological Society of London organized The Great Plumes Debate in 2003.
Gosh, how did we miss that one?
Anyway, the prestigious Nature magazine published a whole paper dedicated to the possibility of mantle plumes on Venus. See a detailed summary of that HERE.
Yet we don’t even know if mantle plumes are real.
Seriously. Do a search on "mantle plumes" and see what comes up.
Notice that the entire experiment took place in a laboratory using nano-sand, water, and a heating plate. (Just like Venus!—sarc) The little they know about Venus was too much to put through their computer.

Please also note the following quote from the article:

“The team believes that a phenomenon underlying plate tectonics on Earth also creates Venus’ coronae: mantle plumes.”

See what they did? They declared mantle plumes an Earthly phenomenon when it is only an unproven theory, then they based their belief on that.

More on Tectonic Plates
It took me a lot of searching to figure out why scientists are so bothered by Venus’s lack of tectonic plates.

In fact, Venus’s lack of plates seems to be one thing that all scientists agree on as fact, but I couldn’t find out how they got that information. However, I did discover why they are so bothered by it:

Lack of tectonic plates indicate a young Venus.

According to science, tectonic plates take 1 billion years to form. And after those 1 billion years, it takes even more time for the plates to form subduction zones (which would then lead to volcanic activity).

So the fact that Venus lacks tectonic plates hints at Venus being VERY young and new, relatively speaking—which is exactly what Velikovsky said it was.

Okay, I’m going to quote now from one of the most recent reports on Venus, a Nature abstract, published in April 2017:

“Why Venus lacks plate tectonics remains an unanswered question in terrestrial planet evolution.”

Maybe because Venus is young!

“There is observational evidence for subduction—a requirement for plate tectonics—on Venus, but it is unclear why the features have characteristics of both mantle plumes and subduction zones.”

Okay, but I thought you needed actual PLATES in order for, well, plates to be shoved one under the other—AKA "subduction"? And what is the deal with mantle plumes?
We don’t even know if they really exist!

Anyway, the abstract goes on to described some fun laboratory experiments they conducted to see if what they propose could even be possible.

Then it says something very cool at the end:

“Scaling analysis suggests that this regime with limited, plume-induced subduction is favoured by a hot lithosphere, such as that found on early Earth or present-day Venus.”

“…early Earth” eh? (In other words, Venus seems young.)

Oh, and this one is funny. Also published in Nature in April 2017:

Planetary Tectonics: Sinking Plates on Venus
“Unlike Earth, Venus lacks discrete, moving plates. Analogue model experiments suggest that observed hints at plate recycling do indeed indicate current, localized destruction of the Venusian surface.”

The abstract contradicts the title.

Actually, the abstract kind of contradicts itself from one sentence to another.

I thought that Venus had NO plates.

You can read thousands of articles online stating that Venus has NO TECTONIC PLATES.

Notice also that this isn’t a real discovery. It is just a bunch of model experiments that merely indicate destruction/recycling of Venus’s surface (which remember, scientists MUST believe in...or else! Or else they must admit that Venus’s surface is pretty new).
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Electric Venus

There is at least one really cool and fairly new fact (an actual fact!) about Venus:
Venus is electric.

When the European Space Agency is not pretending that wind currents are volcanoes, they are able to actually detect real stuff—like the fact that Venus is the only planet with a strong electric field. (Maybe because Venus is actually a comet?) They estimate it at 10 volts.

In contrast, Mars and Earth’s electric field is estimated at less than 2 volts.

(Actually, they don’t even know this! They can’t detect the electric field of Earth or Mars, so they ASSUME it is less than 2 volts. All they seem to know is that Venus’s field is 5 times that of Earth’s.)

Scientists are very happy about this 2016 discovery because now they can go back to their beloved Old Ancient Venus belief, postulating that Venus indeed had oceans and all that fully-developed-planet stuff, but then its electric winds stripped that all away.

Note: It could be that the original researchers writing up the papers would like to be completely forthright about everything, but their papers won’t get published unless they invent suggestions and turn things away from anything Velikovsky proposed. After all, science is and has always been highly politicized. Furthermore, there is a lot of nasty cutthroat competition for prestige and funding going on within the Ivory Towers.
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OTHER COOL STUFF ABOUT VENUS

It looks like the atmosphere (all its clouds and stuff) rotating around Venus has sped up. (In 2006, everything in Venus’s “sky” moved at 300 kph, but later the atmosphere whizzed around at 400 kph. Sometimes it takes 3.9 days to complete one journey around the planet, other times it takes 5.3 days.)

It looks like the rotation of the planet itself has slowed down by 6.5 minutes.

There are massive wildly spinning vortices at the poles of Venus.

Despite its nearness to the Sun, Venus’s poles are even colder than Earth’s poles: -157 C/-251F

In fact, the entire “line” around Venus dividing it between the day section and the night section (officially known as a "terminator") is extremely cold: -175 degrees C. (Could it be global warming? sarc!)

At least, I think that’s the temperatures of the poles and the terminator. It could be that the articles got the order of the “7” and the “5” confused.
Maybe the poles and the terminator are actually the same temperature.

Venus spins in the opposite direction of the other planets in our Solar System.

A year on Venus is shorter than a day on Venus: 225 Earth days and 243 Earth days respectively

In contrast to the rest of the atmosphere, the winds closest to the surface are slow and gentle.

There is more cool stuff about Venus, but I'm going cross-eyed from needing to read between the lines of every single article in order to ferret out the actual facts.

So that's it for now!
_________

SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONS

Here’s a fun quote from Astronomy Magazine:

“While Venus lies in the habitable zone of our solar system, something happened in its past to take it from a more lush, verdant world into a dry planet with a runaway greenhouse effect from the abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

Gosh, how does he know that Venus was once a lush, verdant world?
He says is as a statement of fact.
And then something happened—for SURE!
There is no evidence, not even the remotest indication, that Venus was ever a “lush, verdant world.”

Yet he states it has if it actually happened.
_______________________
This has been such a shocking and disappointing journey for me.

Even stuff I learned as fact as a little girl aren’t really true. Or haven't been proven.

Basically, what scientists have done in the Venus field is to believe with their faith in an Extremely Old Universe - and with no hard evidence - that Venus is millions upon millions of years old.

Then every time they run up against indications that Venus is actually a lot younger (and maybe not even a true planet), they twist around and actually MAKE THINGS UP OUT OF THIN AIR to match their Ancient Venus Theory.

And they say things as FACT. They don’t even tell you all the time “we assume.”

They tell you as FACT:

Venus WAS as Earth is now—“lush” and “verdant”—but then self-destructed in a “runaway greenhouse effect.”
Venus has volcanoes.
Venus has erupting volcanoes.
Venus recycles/refreshes/destroys its own surface.
Venus has mantle plumes.
Venus is millions upon millions of years old

There. Is. NO. Actual. Proof.

In fact, there's even very little evidence - or no evidence at all. And the evidence they do have indicates the opposite conclusions than those which the faithful scientists reached.

Apparently, scientists will do anything to twist science away from the theories of the infidel, Immanuel Velikovsky.

And why are Velikovsky’s theories so threatening?

Because they lead down the road to a Torah narrative.
(They don't actually make it to the Torah narrative, but they do support it much more than other scientific theories.)

Science is No Longer Just For Left-Brains! Creative Right-Brains Finally Have an Equal Shot!

So I think I’ll also become a scientist of Venus. I'm certainly creative enough to become one! I look forward to publishing my research paper in the top science journals.

My abstract will read like this:

"Unusually thick-skinned dragons (whose skin we assume may operate similarly to the same anti-pressure suits found on Earth) may populate the surface of Venus, possibly living in the rifts detected by radar pings.

We suggest that these dragons exhale - and sometimes even belch - electrically charged plumes, which account for hotspots and flashes of light observed by the Venus Express orbiter.

In addition, very tiny yet powerful ice fairies seem to have vastly lowered the temperature in the terminator layer around Venus.

Experiments conducted with detailed SIMS simulations indicate that there could be dragons and fairies of this nature. Also, we’ve been inhaling a lot of laboratory chemicals and spending entire weeks playing extremely sophisticated video games. So that helps too."

__________________
P.S. Just for knowing, recent research into Mercury is also showing evidence a being fairly “young” for a planet. For some reason, Mercury scientists are much more open about saying the Mercury seems young.
Perhaps it’s because they don’t have a Velikovsky controversy to quash regarding Mercury.
Or perhaps it’s because people who study Mercury are actually less mercurial (ha!) than those who study Venus.
_____________________

Well, if you've stuck around till the end of this way-too-long post, then you deserve a prize!

Here's a funny comic strip:

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Yet Another Stunning Scientific Discovery: Heck, We Haven’t Got a Clue!

10/5/2017

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Venus

One of the greatest difficulties for the layperson in finding accurate information is the chest-puffing inherent in reporting.

Headlines blare some version of: READ THIS AMAZING ARTICLE—NOW!!!!!

And then the article itself must satisfy the reader’s emotional needs.

After all, no one wants to read an article that basically says, “Here’s something out of the ordinary, but we have no clue what it is nor do we understand a darn thing about it!”

Combine this with the human (this includes scientists) need for certainty, plus the human (this includes scientists) need for honor and acclaim, plus the tremendous competition for grant money to fund projects, and you can get a very skewed view of the Universe.

Let’s take Venus, for example.

It's a Very Large and Prominent...Something!

In January 2017, various news sources picked up on a December 2015 discovery:
For more than 5 days, Venus had a 10,000 km/6214 mile-long swath running through its atmosphere.

Bizarrely, the swath remained stationary amid a riotous, fast-moving atmosphere. (Venus’s atmosphere rotates around the planet much faster than the planet itself rotates.)

If you look up articles on this swath, you’ll see declarations of it as “a gravity wave,” accompanied by copious explanations and images describing gravity waves and how grav-i-ty waves differ from grav-i-ta-tion-al waves.

You’ll also see a lot of quotes by scientists saying, “We think it might be this, we think it might be that,” along with statements declaring that the gravity wave must somehow be linked through the crazy atmosphere to Venusian mountains.

Even the original article in the highly regarded Nature magazine features the headline:
Large Stationary Gravity Wave in the Atmosphere of Venus

But then you read the actual abstract:

“Here we report the detection of an interhemispheric bow-shaped structure…”

Structure.

Why call it a “structure”? I thought it was a gravity wave!

“We suggest that the bow-shaped structure is the result of an atmospheric gravity wave generated in the lower atmosphere by mountain topography that then propagated upwards.”

Suggest? Ah, so the “gravity wave” is just a suggestion. That’s pretty subjective and non-scientific. But don’t we want facts and proofs?

(Also, notice that within the actual abstract, they correctly continue to call it a “structure,” and nothing else. Why? Because they have no clue what it actually was.)

Then the article states that “numerical simulations” lend credence to their proposed suggestion.

However, simulations are not proofs. Or even indications, necessarily.

Furthermore, despite hoopla to the contrary, much of Venus remains a mystery. So what are these simulations based on? After all, there is nothing to stop scientists from just feeding a computer the “right” numbers to make things add up. After all, it’s a simulation.

Then the abstract admits:

“…but the formation and propagation of a mountain gravity wave remain difficult to reconcile with assumed near-surface conditions on Venus.”

Assumed? You mean you guys don’t know the near-surface conditions?

(BTW, I’m starting to gag on the number of times I hear or read the word “assume” within scientific discussions, especially regarding complex theories built on the phrase, “Well, we assume [fill-in-the-blank], so it stands to reason that…”)

Anyway, if you’re dealing with assumed conditions, then really, how are you calculating "numerical simulations"?

Within the body of the article, they state that the knowledge available regarding Venus's atmosphere don't really allow mountain-caused gravity waves.

This means that even their best guess isn’t possible under all the data currently known about Venus.

The article’s abstract concludes with:

“We suggest that winds in the deep atmosphere may be spatially or temporally more variable than previously thought.”
[Emphasis mine - MR]

Suggest.

Assumed.

May be.

In other words, they don’t know. They don't really even have a clue.

All anyone knows is that a very big “something” hung around against all odds in one place within Venus’s atmosphere.

That’s it!

Now, the scientists behind the article deserve credit for their honesty and precise language. They’re not presenting anything but the facts of their research and they even rightly refuse to slap any kind of definitive label to the “structure.” (Likely, the headline was picked by editors and not the authors.) They’re also very clear that they are offering suggestions and assumptions. They don’t pretend to know.

And yes, many reports quote this abstract correctly, state that these were suggestions, and so on.

However, because of the massive filler in all the reports, you the reader will come away from any of these reports certain that a gravity wave anchored to Venusian mountains was hovering in Venus’s atmosphere.

And you’ll also feel smart now that you know the difference between "gravity" waves and "gravitational" waves.

But it's all just not true.

There was no mountain-propagation of anything.
There was no gravity wave.
There is no further knowledge or information about this "structure."

And by the authors own admission, all suggestions appearing in the article are impossible.
They outright state that a gravity wave in Venus's atmosphere is impossible.
(Well, impossible based on what is currently known—or assumed!—of Venus.)

And gravitational waves have nothing to do with anything on this subject! In fact, it’s doubtful whether gravity waves could have anything to do with this!

So why does every single report on this Venus anomaly dedicate most of the report to gravity waves and gravitational waves when there was

no gravity wave
no evidence of any gravity wave
and there was no possibility of this "structure" to have been a gravity wave!

So reading these reports just gives you a whole brainful of—well—fake news.

And this kind of thing happens all the time.

(For a fun summary of the Nature article, please see Scientific Anomalies Continue to be Discovered on Venus.)

I'm ASSUMING this is an artist's impression of what it MAY BE like to stand on the SUGGESTED surface of Venus. Pretty cool image, eh?

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When E-World Means "Empty World"

9/5/2017

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Another bizarre thing about email is the Silence-Delete factor.

Have you ever sent an email that received no response?

Of course!

Have you ever read an email and deleted it without responding?

Of course!

When people forward me emails (including group emails that they forward to twenty other people in addition to me) that I find interesting or helpful, I always try to respond with some kind of thank you.

Once, someone laughingly told me that I don’t need to do that.

“What do you mean?” I said as I wondered, Why is she calling me just to tell me this?

“Remember when you said you wanted me to tell you when you were doing something outside the norm?” she said.

(Well, yes. In an idealistic burst of self-improvement, I’d decided to take a leaf from the original mussar school and picked a couple of friends to tell me if they thought I was “off” about something. This was her attempt to help me.)

“Yes,” I said.

“Well,” she continued pleasantly, “people don’t generally reply to forwarded mass emails.”

“But why not?” I said. “If I found it useful, why not let the person know?”

She giggled. “Because people just don’t do that. It’s nice of you, but it’s not necessary. It’s unusual.”

“But why bother sending stuff out?” I said. “You have no idea if people appreciate it, were offended by it, received it or didn’t receive it…”

“That’s just how it goes,” she said. “And that’s the expectation. No one expects you to respond. It’s nice, but it’s not the norm.”

Of course, I ignored her "constructive" criticism and I still respond to useful forwarded emails, but I did see that she was right.

People often don't respond at all.

When You're Just a Meaningless Blip on Someone's Screen

Like everyone else, I’ve sent:

holiday greetings
useful or inspiring links
invitations
elegant e-cards (with an option for the recipient to reply immediately and free of charge)
useful or inspiring forwards
heartfelt insights
photos or documents or information at the urgent request of the receiver
direct questions
and even heartfelt apologies with the sincere invitation for the other to open up to me about how they feel I've hurt them (which really puts you in a position of vulnerability)

...and received no reply at all.

(Or sometimes a general reply, but one that did not at all address the issues or questions within.)

Ironically, I’ve also ignored all the above when it was sent to me! (Okay, that's not completely true. I've never ignored an apology or heartfelt insights. Well, not as far as I know, anyway...) Why? Well, usually because I found the email problematic or offensive, and occasionally because I forgot or overlooked it.

But picture the same happening in a verbal conversation...

What if you call someone to say “Happy Passover!” and there is dead silence on the other end of the line?
What if you walk down a street and say Shabbat Shalom to your friend and she keeps right on walking without even looking at you?
What if you would share your thoughts with someone (either about yourself or about them—whether positive or negative) and they just sat there staring straight ahead without acknowledging your existence?
What if you asked someone a direct question and in response, they just hung up the phone

It would make a funny comedy sketch, right?

But in real life, you’d wonder if that person was upset with you, right?
You’d feel invisible.

The truth is, these things do happen in real life.

And when the other person is confronted, they either apologize and explain that they were so distracted or stressed that they simply didn’t hear or see you, or you get into some kind of a confrontation (hopefully, a useful and mild confrontation).

What email does is it habituates us to being ignored and feeling invisible.

We all just send each other stuff back and forth, and nobody responds.

Or maybe we respond, but it's a short response that doesn't acknowledge whatever was in the email.

There's a feeling of keeping in touch and connecting, but there's no actual relationship or communication going on.
_______________________
In parallel, email also fractures relationships due to misunderstandings and being too quick to press the Send button.

So it fractures human communication either way. Either you:

get too involved in a way that ends up being unhealthy and you send messages that you really shouldn’t have sent

you get used to the fact that what you share and contribute is of no interest to others—your existence doesn’t matter to them.

As time went by, I really thought that I understood how to use email in a healthy manner.

But I kept on stumbling into email potholes.

I guess I haven’t found the right balance yet.

I feel I need it to keep up at least minimally with certain people. There is a lot to be said for basic courtesy, civility, and pleasant relations.

And you do need it for business stuff, and for dealing with online stuff, like the Help desk for whatever service you’re using, sending documents and the like.

So I am going to keep trying to work on myself with regard to email usage. And there are some messages from Hashem in all that, too, with regard to how I need to improve myself and generally improve the way I relate to others.

But a lot of things like depression and loneliness have been rising in parallel to the rise of online communication.

And why wouldn’t it, logically speaking?

If you reach out and are ignored—or if you reach out and are slapped back—why wouldn’t you recoil into yourself?

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Problematically Progressive Communication

8/5/2017

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Years ago, I sat in a class in which one participant enthused, “Communication has really improved today! There are so many ways to communicate—email, fax, telephone, cell phones—in fact, email is amazing!”

(This was before Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, texting and the rest.)

“No,” said the rebbetzin with uncharacteristic insistence. “I totally disagree. I think we’re using email and all the rest because we don’t know how to communicate anymore. And using all these other avenues to communicate is making things even worse—and making them worse faster.”

But at that time, I wasn’t sure.

Email was enabling me to stay in contact with people I otherwise either would not have stayed in contact or would have had only sporadic contact.

Cell phones have proven so convenient in so many situations with my husband and kids.

Faxes also have been incredibly helpful.

I don’t have any other social media, so I have no personal experience with Facebook and the like, but so many other people love it. It’s almost like having your own web page and blog, but a bit more intimate.

People love being able to post updates and photos one time in one place instead of having to go through the digital drag of attaching photos (which is pretty time-consuming if you have more than one) and sending off a group email. In fact, I remember the stress of taking pictures with a regular camera and then having to go out of my way to develop all the photos, and then arrange them later.

Think of me what you will, but my oldest kids have a lot fewer pics and no videos of when they were little simply because it was too inconvenient and stressful with everything else that was going on.

Also, people have found long-lost loved ones via Facebook.

But with years of experience with email and cellphones, plus reading and observing a lot with all the other social media, I’ve come to think she is right.

Email: Fast 'n' Furious Correspondence

Let’s take email. I feel I express myself best through writing, so I prefer to communicate that way. This makes email a desired form of communication for people like me.

But do the advantages of email outweigh the disadvantages?

Because email feels like writing an intimate letter, you can end up pouring out your soul—which can stay on the receiver’s database forever.

And then:

Hackers and viruses can access it and send it around.
The receiver can also keep it, then send it to whomever they choose until the end of time.

Ethical people won’t do this, of course, but it can and has happened.

And sure, it can and did happen with hand-written letters, too, but people tend to write less then they type. And while personal letters have been used against the writer (or photocopied and used against the writer), it’s not as easy. Because you need to either be physically present to show another person a letter or because you need to go through the hassle of finding an address and buying a stamp to send an incriminating letter and then getting it into a mailbox, it happened less.

Furthermore, a lot of unpleasantness occurs through email.

Apologies can be more easily given via email, but controversies can get more easily ignited, too.

Because it feels like writing a letter, it seems like the ideal way to gently let someone know they’ve hurt your feelings or to express your sincere concern about a direction they seem to be going—yet these things often backfire.

We’ve all heard of “flame wars,” in which an email exchange gets hot and heavy, with emails blasting back and forth with continuous urgency.

If you wouldn’t write them a letter or call them or talk to them face-to-face, maybe you shouldn’t email it, either.

Certainly, there's no black-and-white rule about whether to email or not.

I'm just saying that I learned that email is truly a different category than hard-copy correspondence and needs its own rules.

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The Real Reason Why People Sin

Why "Scaring" People Doesn't Usually Work

When Nothing Else Feels as Good

Caught in a Conflict

What I Learned about Taming My Email Habits

The Sweet Siren Song of Email

Oops! Delete! Delete!

What is Email Really Good For?

The Venus Effect: Lots of Fun Insanity

Electric Venus

OTHER COOL STUFF ABOUT VENUS

SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONS

Science is No Longer Just For Left-Brains! Creative Right-Brains Finally Have an Equal Shot!

Yet Another Stunning Scientific Discovery: Heck, We Haven’t Got a Clue!

It's a Very Large and Prominent...Something!

When E-World Means "Empty World"

When You're Just a Meaningless Blip on Someone's Screen

Problematically Progressive Communication

Email: Fast 'n' Furious Correspondence

Myrtle Rising

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