Orbitals
I’m twenty miles off the coast of Belize diving next to Turneffe Atoll. The Atoll is a string of mangroves blocking an otherwise wraparound view of the Atlantic. It’s hot enough to fry eggs and the water offers about 1 degree of respite by washing away sweat.
The 2023 annular eclipse has started.
You can tell because everything is bright and yet somehow in shadow. Like the volume on the music has been turned down but you can still hear the beat. It will be fifteen or so minutes until the peak and we will while away the time by sitting in the boat doing nothing much at all.
Haud aze pikni go dah market twice.
Belize Museum is in a glorious Georgian-looking (to me, anyway) building in the quieter northern side of Belize City. It used to be a prison to be escaped, but now is a destination as it has air conditioning. It’s small and functional and grants entry for $7.
Something bugged me to go here starting months ago when planning the trip. Most visitors to Belize avoid the city entirely. I’d been there before and didn’t have any particularly positive memories.
Yet for some reason I just had to go to the museum.
Walking upstairs you can feel the temperature rise as you escape the cooler (and therefore lower) air. There are two exhibits for each of the two floors. Upstairs there are local paintings and a collection of birds in life-like poses. I remember one online comment - “some birds someone ran over with a car”. This isn’t fair, but it is funny. The other comment was something like “if you’re trapped in Belize City the museum is something you can do for an hour with air conditioning”.
The ground floor focuses on the distant past and then modern founding of Belize, which comes down to slavery and George Price.
Price is a bigger figure than Wikipedia lets on, being instrumental in the founding of the country and managing the transition to independence. The linked article is both thinner and more circumspect than the average founding figure might deserve. His parents seem to be lost in time, neither Wikipedia, the internet or even GPT4 know where they came from.
The slavery section is eye opening even for someone versed in its horrors, and, attempts to link that past with today by showcasing creole sayings with roots in Africa.
The sayings are cataloged in a book and some adorn a wall. Each has the original, a translation and an interpretation thus:
Haud aze pikni go dah market twice.
(hard of hearing children go to the market twice.)
If you don’t pay attention/are absentminded, you may have to do the work twice.
Suddenly I know why I’m here.
Feynman said that if he had to pass one piece of knowledge to a post-apocalyptic society (who had, somehow, lost all knowledge) it would be that everything is made of little things called atoms. From this you can get very far and perhaps try to skip a lot of guessing, like 1,000 years believing there are 4 elements or something.
Sayings have a similar and more human compression of knowledge. They’ve been whittled down and beat to death by the evolution of language and memetic forces to be something that helps you rather than hurts you. Something that rhymes and sticks.
And here was a whole book of them from 1980. A book unobtainable on amazon or google and, incidentally, outside GPT4’s training data.
As we gain knowledge, like the orbits and mass of distant star systems, we’re also throwing a lot away. At first glance you might think it’s unimportant information like how many Gods some civilization worshipped but it turns out to be much closer to home.
Example: There are almost no tribes left that know how to run down an animal. Many herbivores will just lay down and die of heat exhaustion before the hunters ability to chase them expires. We literally just chased them to death.
Related Example: Most people don’t even know how to run any more.
Today, knowledge is actively fighting you.
Seahorses have nothing to do with horses in any way but description, you know it when you’ve seen one. Or put another way, we don’t call a burrito a nighttime breakfast burrito.
One of Jason Fung’s books makes the point that on the surface there is no negative effect of artificial sweetners - the academic papers are neatly balanced on the issue. That is, unless you remove those papers funded directly or indirectly by food companies then the data is starkly clear, and negative.
In between now and the distant future a lot of people will die and the memes will evolve toward better ones that reflect reality more closely. In theory, anyway. But here and now, we’re surrounded by enormous amounts of useless and negative information.
The question is how to escape it and make good decisions today, here and now?
This is vastly harder than it looks, because often even the language is fighting you. Example: Galactose is an isomer of Glucose, but you can’t detect that in the language (or maybe someone with latin or greek training can?). Glucose is fine, fructose is literally a poison. But again, you can’t detect that. On the other hand, things that sting you tend to be yellow and black. That clear signal is lost, often on purpose, in language.
Most people don’t read books. If you read a book on a topic (say, clouds, or Italian furniture), you can now only communicate on that topic with 1 in 10 to 1 in 100 people. Not because they aren’t interested, or unknowledgeable, but they literally lack the language. So many things in public discourse are intuitive (if some of something is good, then more is better). But books are mostly about things that are unintuitive and non-linear, which is why you should be frightened of smart people who don’t read. They’re the ones that build Jurassic Park, or send all the dentists to build a dam.
This ratio compounds, so if you read three or four books on a topic you may as well live in Andromeda, as you have nobody to talk to.
Empty crocus bag kant stan up.
(empty sacks can’t stand up)
You can’t do proper work if you’re hungry.
It’s getting darker on the dive boat.
Annular eclipses are kind of boring and annoying because the moon is too far away to block the entire sun. It’s not a real eclipse. The sun, being ridiculously bright, is still too intense to look at even with 99.something percent of it blocked. (fun fact, the moon is departing the Earth at about 4 centimeters a year which doesn’t sound like a lot until you multiply it by the time since the dinosaurs).
Luckily a cloud appears and the sun is visible to the naked eye with a chunk bitten out of it. Normally you don’t want clouds during an eclipse, but none of us is carrying welding masks or special disposable eclipse glasses, we are set for diving not daytime astronomy.
Despondent, I start to get ready for the next dive, then have a spark of an idea. I collect sunglasses from the other divers and stack them upon each other to make an improvised lens. With three or four sunglasses held together, we can again witness the ring of fire.
"if yuh noh stack sunglasses, yuh wahn miss di eclipse."
(if you don't stack sunglasses you will miss the eclipse)
It’s important to look around you for solutions instead of accepting the current unavailability of options.
(with thanks to GPT4)