Quail are fascinating birds. The quail in my neck-of-the-woods are Gambel's Quail. They are among the most garish of birds, excepting the peacock and possibly flamingo, with their ostentatious crest, their black face, red scalp, and painted breast and speckled wings. They are truly a beautiful, wonderful creation. Although adept at flight, they prefer to stay on the ground, even evading their terrestrial predators on foot, rather than taking to the wing. Quail parents can be seen with their fledglings crossing open spaces in a single file with one parent at the head of the column and the other bringing up the rear. I’ve no idea if they are monogamous, but mating pairs do appear to cooperate until their offspring are self-sufficient. Furthermore, they are exceedingly flavorful game birds. The breast meat is very dark, compared with livestock poultry, and we all know that darker meat is more succulent and flavorful.
Qualia is a plural word which is difficult to define- in fact, a quale is fundamentally impossible to express between individuals, so this should not be surprising. These are experiences that we have, but they are kind of raw experiences; purely subjective and essential. It deals with how a color looks, what a sound is like, what a food tastes like. We may assume that these are similar, identical, or wildly different between individuals. That makes me feel a little bit lonelier, truth be told. But it is a fascinating concept. It got me thinking about all the various qualia that humans may experience, and that made me want to list some of the qualia that stand out to me as being especially beautiful, terrible, primal, or otherwise noteworthy. Here is a sampling:
The warm sun on bare skin.
Wind blowing through long hair.
The weight of your relaxed body, pulled toward Earth, and pulling back.
Making passing eye contact with a stranger.
Exchanging smiles with a stranger.
Bare toes curling in warm sand.
The first taste of a cold beer on a hot day.
Reaching my hand under a cool pillow on a lazy morning.
Watching a baby utterly content in a mother’s arms.
The fury of a howling storm in the night.
The brush of a lover’s soft lips against my neck.
A dog reclining at my feet to nap.
A panhandler approaching me in a parking lot.
The acoustics of an instrument vibrating through a room.
The euphoria at the end of a hard workout.
The knot in my stomach when I talk to a pretty girl.
The sight of my own crimson blood, pumping out of a wound.
Realizing there is a spider in the shower with me.
A cat jumps onto my lap.
A shooting pain, and the subsequent realization that a scorpion has stung me.
Walking out on a stage to speak before strangers.
Finding out my lover has no use for me.
The realization that my body is deteriorating.
Plunging into a very cold lake.
This list could go on and on and on. What are some of your favorite qualia?
Quasars are some of the most powerful, impressive, energetic, and destructive engines in the universe. I am grossly simplifying here, as I am not an astronomer, but quasars are essentially supermassive black holes which are in the process of devouring their parent galaxy. They exist in terms of scales which are utterly foreign to those of us who are not mathematicians or astronomers. Our Sun is massive, approximately 332,946 times the mass of Earth. It will throw off incomprehensible amounts of energy for a total lifespan of perhaps eight billion years. The brightest known quasars consume the equivalent of one thousand suns per year, or according to Wikipedia, 600 Earths per minute. So next time you sit down and watch your 30 minute sitcom, reflect that somewhere a quasar has just obliterated nearly twenty thousand Earth masses in the same period. And we are aware of about 200,000 quasars in the known universe. And this may be a tiny fraction of the entire universe. I don’t know about you, but my perspective is definitely altered when I consider such things.
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