No, I'm not going to talk about the US elections. Although I do have a fun observation about the Democratic candidate for vice president. Minnesota governor Tim Walz is a really nice man. How do we know? Because his opponents spend money on research to prove his isn't a nice man – and they're failing miserably at the task.

So far, they've come up with:

• An astonishing scandal involving his going to the dog park with his dog Scout, and petting another dog. Judging by the reaction of our dog when you do that, I'm sure Scout wasn't thrilled, but this isn't going to sway too many voters.
• Walz's horrible inflation of his resume: a campaign staffer claimed the governor had been a coach. He was only an assistant coach! This is stolen high school football valour, or is it? Assistant coaches everywhere disagreed.
• Arguments about what he did or did not do as a member of the Minnesota National Guard. He served for 24 years, retiring in order to run for public office. Many discussions have revolved around exactly what rank he held at retirement: was he a command sergeant major? (Yes, at one time.) Did he retire as one? (No, for technical reasons relating to military rules.) Is he a big, fat liar? No.
• The best one so far: his big brother's statement that he could tell some 'stories' about his brother Tim. Turns out the 'stories' involved kid stuff like Tim's getting carsick all over him. Apparently, Jeff is still sore about that. (Jeff supports Donald Trump.) Their mom says she's trying to stay out of it.
• Speaking of relatives, a bunch of Nebraska second cousins have got t-shirts saying 'Walz's [sic] for Trump'. No comment.

Stop and think: if you ran for public office tomorrow, what would your friends and relatives say about you? I'm thinking about perceptions. For most US people, finding out Tim Walz has relatives who like to argue about politics (and can't spell) makes him very 'relatable'.

But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.

Mark 6:4, Authorised Version

Do me a favour: take a look at this link. (It won't bite: 1 cookie, 0 trackers.) Take the short test. No, Prof, no 'hard questions first.' They don't want your name or anything. Just tell them if what you see is blue or green. After a few colour choices, they will tell you where your blue/green perceptual boundary is – and where you land on the continuum of people tested. It's interesting.

Elektra came out at 175. I came out at 178. So we see green and blue similarly. This is an interesting test. I wonder if it will help the philosophers: they've been arguing about colour since the fifth century BCE. They have more schools of thought on it than there are Christian denominations.

We can't even agree on how we see colour. Or if it's in the thing we're looking at, or in our heads. Small wonder, then, that a family from Minnesota/Nebraska disagrees on politics (or how to spell the plural of their name).

Can consensus about reality be imposed? Ha, by you and whose army? Here's a very funny little video by a linguist discussing pronouns. No, don't click on it now. Save it for later. It's twenty minutes long! Linguists are wordy (you see what I did there?). But he makes some good points about the 'pronoun' controversy from a linguistics viewpoint: most people don't even know what pronouns are, and the real discussion is about how they view each other – which they should do with more love and respect. Nice guy. His students are lucky.

Why do we have so many problems with perception? Why don't we all agree? Well, aside from the fact that if we all thought the same way, the world would be a very dull place and nothing new would ever happen, it's partly because we aren't as aware as we should be of our own prejudices. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. We're like fish in a pond. We can't see the water. We don't even think about it.

Last night, I happened to want to look up the 38th chapter of Job – that glorious bit of ancient poetry where the creator of the universe explains to a human that the reason he can't get a bigger picture of everything is that he wasn't there when the world was made. He's a johnny-come-lately. It's a wonderful passage, and if you like old epics you should take a look at it.

But I wanted to see something. In the poem, the creator lists things he's done that Job wasn't there for:

• Marked the dimensions of space/time.
• Dealt with the issue of large bodies of water. (A very Mesopotamian concern.)
• Created the cycle of day and night.

The poem goes on like that, mentioning things like snow, lightning, stars – some of them by name – and works its way down to a catalogue of living creatures, donkeys laughing at civilisation, ostriches being joyful, etc. But it didn't mention what I was looking for: air.

They took air for granted 4000 years ago. Oh, well: they didn't have the internal combustion engine to worry about. But there was another reason nobody thought about it: like the fish in the pond, we take the medium we breathe in for granted. It affects our perception without our being aware of it.

Recently, NASA have discovered a whole new field around Earth: the ambipolar electric field. 'This field makes the atmosphere taller by lifting and separating the particles of the ionosphere, like blowing up a balloon.' That's NASA, not me. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, but that's a cool thing. Well could the creator say, 'You weren't there when I set that up. You didn't even think about it for thousands of years, you upstart organism!'

Or, as the Fourth Doctor once said about the Big Bang, 'Why didn't he ask someone who was there?'

Do you remember Linus in Peanuts? He went around one day being 'aware of his tongue', and it drove him batty. We take things for granted because most of the time, we need to. Otherwise we'd never get supper made. But it might also be good to stop and think about what you're taking for granted – and to reflect that other people might be seeing the whole gestalt from a slightly different angle.

It's a good idea before you come to blows over what shade of blue or green 'turquoise' is.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

23.09.24 Front Page

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