You Got That Right!

When we were kids, there was a lot of talk about how the use of tools was what distinguished man from the "lower" animals. Then they discovered that chimps were using tools, so they said that man was the only creature that can make tools. Then it was discovered that chimps and even ravens could make tools too. Nobody has to teach them how, they just figure it out by themselves. Of course no animals can make tools of anywhere near the complexity of man made tools, and that's probably because no animals can communicate with each other with anything close to the complexity of human language. When animals learn from each other, it's mostly a case of "monkey see, monkey do". Of course, people learn that way too, but they can also explain things to each other, and even discuss abstract concepts like math.

Is math really an abstract concept though? It starts out with simple counting and measuring techniques, but then it goes off into the wild blue yonder about things that have no relation whatsoever to the material world. Is math a human invention, or was it always there, waiting to be discovered like fire and gravity? I think that music was always there but, of course, humans have developed it far beyond it's natural expression in bird songs and thunderstorms. Maybe math is like that too. Of course, there is math in music, but you don't have to know the math to produce the music. A bird doesn't need to know math to sing, and neither do we, yet the math is there underlying the whole process, whether or not we recognize it.

I don't know how they came to the conclusion that all electrons are created equal. I don't even know how they discovered electrons in the first place. All the instruments that measure electrons run on electrons themselves, so they are using electrons to measure electrons. But how did they discover and capture their first electron? I seem to remember from my high school physics that there was a whole theory of electricity before anybody knew exactly what an electron was. They still don't know what an electron looks like, do they? Maybe it doesn't look like anything, maybe it's just pure energy or something.

New subject: As little as I watch the news, I can't help but notice that there has been a lot of talk about ISIS lately. They are acting like it's a whole new thing that popped up out of nowhere. I thought it was just another chapter in the continuing saga, but apparently not. It looks like our guys are going to make the same mistakes they have previously made in similar situations: Just a few surgical air strikes, no boots on the ground, except for the couple thousand "advisors" who are already there. Then they want to form a coalition with several other powers that have been proven to be unreliable in the past, some of which have openly declared their dislike of us. This coalition is supposedly going to be led by the United States. What makes them think that any of these guys are going to do what our guys tell them when they don't even obey their own leaders now? If I didn't know any better, I would say that nobody can be that stupid, so they must be screwing up on purpose, but that would be just paranoid.