Quantumly entangled in the Mercurial holidays . . .

It's Freya's day . . . and Loki has unloaded a back of tricks into the mailbox . . .

Two birthdays emerged from the entanglements of today's date:

It's the birth date of Roman Emperor Nero. The stepson and heir of the emperor Claudius, was born on this day in 37 CE, Antium, Latium

And, the theoritical physicist/mathematician Freeman Dyson was born today in 1923, Crowthorne, Berkshire, England

That said . . .

We are amid the last Mercury retrograde of the year which began two days ago and will span to Jan. 1, 2024 … just in time for the holidays.

To help with some of the shiftings going on under Mercury's unbrella, consider:

We don’t learn much when things go right. It’s when things go wrong that we learn the most. – Simon Sinek

And . . . Humans are slow, sloppy, and brilliant thinkers; the machine is fast, accurate, and stupid. – jab

When to stop AI: Drawing redlines where the ‘capability ladder’ of intelligent machines can’t be allowed to go further. – Nathan Gardels, Noema Editor-in-Chief

Quantum Experience.

The theory of quantum mechanics forces us to question our intuition about the physical world. Matter seems solid. Light seems ephemeral. But really, both are both ... What really distinguishes these cases is not the thing we're looking at, but us who is doing the looking .... There's a lot that we cannot hear or see in the world at a given moment. Quantum mechanics asks us to question the definiteness of the reality of all that we have not seen or heard.

Try this: look at an object nearby – pen, coffee cup, doesn't matter – now, close your eyes for a few seconds – five will do – and then open them. Yes, the objects are still there, but were they when your eyes were closed? Could a cat have walked out of your coffee cup, picked up the pen, wrote a novel, put the pen back and disappeared back into the coffe cup? No way to know.

When we look, we see what we call the “real” world. When we don't look, there is no objective-definite reality There are only possibilities. We are the center of that subjective reality. What we can see or hear we call “particles” everything else is imagined as “waves” on the ocean, undulating and changing form. This is called wave-particle duality. It's a fundamental part of every interpretation of the theory. – adapted from “Reality of the Observer” by Sky Nelson-Isaacs posted online 12.13.23

From the Zen perspective, that “no objective-definite reality” is nonetheless real and influencing the totality of existence. Each of us is a metaphor, a drop of water, in a wave, on an ocean, changing form in each and every moment by moment instant, inclusive of our cells and thoughts and interconnected with every grain of sand and the quanta of stars.

Level the playing field: take your knife to the woods when hunting wolves.