Spider-Man capping, Plutarch and Herodotus’ BS, WWI beginnings, and scale invariance.

The motive of the stoics.

This won’t be another list of obscure facts about these two influential figures. You clearly enjoy learning about the past, so you know these same fuckers keep appearing in various subjects. Greeks and Romans make up a ton of the source material, just think how many times you’ve casually heard the names: Xenophon (401BCE), Aristotle(340BCE), Socrates(420BCE), Plato (400BCE) etc?! When I’m researching it is always a greek or roman source telling you about some other people’s accomplishments, culture, or most likely utter destruction by their Home Team  aka the Empire aka Rome and to some extent Greece. (Rome was the militaristic-popularizers that were inspired by the Greek progenitors of  what is known as the Greco Roman culture)

Herodotus was writing live production most likely to be performed as opposed to taken as source material.

Plutarch was giving a list of moral standards or something, some kind of code to live by or aspire to… not literal source material.

Factor in Alexander The Great and his PR team, Julius Caesar writing all his own commentaries, and then just go down the line to modern day leaders running their own propaganda empires via the social media of the day, it’s a thing- the powerful shape what future generations will learn about us. One can see clearly the threads that are laid down, and has to be willing to accept that those threads are not in fact pure truth. This idea is exemplified by a pair of quotes that were introduced to me by the storyteller Mr. Dan Carlin: “History is a pack of lies agreed upon” (attributed but doubtful he actually “said” it) to Napoleon Bonaparte and that “…even if ancient history isn’t true you have to believe in it anyways” -Pierre Briand.  These concepts are things that seem to only percolate in petri dishes of the academically accelerated as we can all clearly see the ramifications of more literal interpretations of past events being acted upon by those responsible (and clearly; all be it, ironically* not in the aforementioned saucer of smartness) for the socioeconomic, diplomatic, and environmental landscape we inhabit in 2025.

*side tangent-  At any point throughout history is it ever the smartest folks that are making the decisions/shaping the future’s perception? Easy to assume, but perhaps we can reduce from our own lifetimes that many factors account for the loudest voices that echo throughout history. Undoubted there were plenty of folks in the Incan Empire that knew that the Spanish were bad news and raged against the machine in Cajamarca, whole factions of Carthaginians that would have been fine abandoning Hannibals obsession with Rome, lots of French youth were protesting in the streets over Napoleon trying to make everybody march to Russia in gd winter, had to be at least a few organized groups of Southern Song that knew aligning with the North against the invading Steppe people was a better idea, a few assyrians that felt maybe diplomatic ties in their region could be less bloody… it is just that if you were someone that had lets say a critique of Stalin, Ashurbanipal, the Pope, or Genghis Khan for most of history you’d have been properly silenced. It is easy to think that bc I can sit here and publish this blog or write a comment on an online post arguing for my most heartfelt agendas, and that everyone else with the privilege of internet access can do the same; that we are the first society that will have a generation of POVs to base future assessments on. I argue that we should be careful counting on a system that we don’t control to protect, nurture, preserve, and then disseminate these nuanced outlooks. This may sound paranoid, but imagine only hard copies of written records existed from our society for something to study in 500 years. Not even bc of some Dino-killing-astroid-type-event or even bc of some malicious totalitarian regime brainwashing the masses, or not even some mad max style post apocalyptic scene has played out.. but simply just bc the best intentions of those in charge no longer aligns with the “truth” of those present in the “now” of our special moment in space time? Slowly the ways our actual feelings are taught to the future masses could so easily be regulated to the forgotten parts of history… spiraling… Dammit now I need to write all this down with pen and paper and keep my comments on Kendrick Lamar/Drake somewhere in a hole in the ground with a sign written in Binary Code/English/Mandarin on the ground above and arrow pointing down, “Big animal bones here” or some shit.

WW1, fate in The Black Hand

Gavrilo Princips, The Black Hand, and other Slavs were over what was happening in their part of Europe at the time, being ruled by a non-slavic nation was not something these folks in Serbia were interested in. When the Austro-Hungarians (non Slavs) who were ruling over Serbia decided it would be a good idea to come visit during military maneuver GP and his crew of highly motivated Serbian/slavic nationalists decided it was time to off the dude. Why did the Archduke not have anyone on his team that could “read the room”? Well probably bc their government didn’t have the ability to spy on everything every person that wanted to organize something amongst their peers could do. Wait what, the governments of today are totally trustable and just keeping us all safe by collecting and quantifying all of our data. The Archduke’s route had been changed after the first assassination attempt but for some reason still landed right in that exact spot to spark a world war.

Now there were lots of geopolitical motivations, alliances, and vendettas that led to the actual war (Serbia/Russia and Belgium/France/UK), but the above incident is what gets the blame for being the jumping off point. To me the whole thing boiled down to a German (the Kaiser’s) inferiority complex that led to overly ambitious objectives and put victory beyond reach. Easy to see that Serbia’s position on the map makes it desirable but with having already been allied to Bulgaria, Romania, and Austro-Hungary it was really unnecessary to establish a route to the sea, and reaching all the way to Belgium just seemed again gregarious given the allies Germany already had.

Scales and webs

Spider-Man wasn’t able to walk up walls bc of anything he learned from an arachnid. If a spider or other insect were scaled up to our human size they’d lose their wall crawling abilities. Gravity impacts objects differently depending on the size of the object. Friction forces not radioactive spiders.

Scale invariant- a term that describes observable data that can be proven no matter the size of the system. “This works no matter how you scale it.”

I wondered why if our intragalatic matter isn’t expanding like the Cosmological Constants say that it should be.. ie stuff isn’t moving further and further away from me daily or hell even yearly then are they actually that legit? This kind of thinking, if pursued can lead one to discover their own ignorance, and then, if one proceeds unperturbed..  all new realms.

Scientists believe the expanding universe is scale invariant largely bc of the semi “smooth” nature of the CMB. The CMB is the Cosmic Microwave Background and it is leftover from the Big Bang and gives scientists something to examine to get ideas as to the origins of all we observe. The fact that this CMB is not totally smooth allows for the idea that the original plasma ball of matter that existed before the big bang contained all matter in the universe and that once this matter started expanding there would be uneven clumps that coalesced into the nice pretty galaxies and stuff we have today. Also that bc of this uneven nature, the expansion of the universe is not happening at the same rate. Bc we have the dense matter clusters called galaxies in which local gravity is holding them in place the scale invariance of the Hubble expansion does not apply. Just like our human size bugs can’t scale the living room walls; the size of the galaxy in which we currently live for example is just so infinitesimal compared to the grand Cosmic structure that the forces don’t act the same on us, but this doesn’t mean that the laws of nature aren’t scale invariant.

Side tangents: a)I freaking love the idea of an uneven plasma ball being what it all started as, bc then the obvious question is… “from where did the plasma ball originate?” .. which leads to the even better answer… “nobody freaking knows”.. which leads to the even better scenario: you can make up whatever you want, and as long as nothing in it goes directly against the laws of nature we observe then nobody can tell you you are wrong… per science. b)every time I hear a scientist use one of the 26 Cosmological Constants as reasoning for a “who, what, when, where, why” for the universe my BS radar goes off, turns out that radar is valid bc its like an early warning signal that implies some deeper digging is needed, but, unfortunately I’ve come to realize that physicists would’ve loved nothing more than to come up with something new and “better” but they can’t just roll with any old idea bc science has to somehow explain what we observe AND simplify things based on a (preferably)very simplistic initial state. Essentially I have to accept that these 26 Constants are there and unless I can think of a simpler way from an observed earlier state that falls in line with current reductionist thinking then I’m left to play around with the stuff we got. I do not however believe that there will ever be an answer to it all bc we will just keep setting new ceilings for “all” with every new intellect-floor we climb.

Intel plugs: Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder and Dan Carlin