just fyi, there's no such thing as the 'eldest' of two boys; there's just an elder and a younger. superlatives are reserved for groups of three or more.

as i'm a midget among giants here, i'm afraid that's all i have to add. :)

Reality is very large - just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across.

bah.

a poster above has already noted the irony here: the term 'reality' is just as susceptible to equivocal use as is 'sound' or 'art'.**

what is reality, after all, if not 'the part we can see'? (by 'see' i am of course including all means of detection, from literal sensory awareness to circumstantial inference.) indeed, it's dicey to posit the existence of any 'reality' independent of our own consciousness. as richard dawkins has said, even the most seemingly incontrovertible truths - like the heat of the desert and the hardness of rocks - are only so because of our own evolutionary adaptations. i.e., we feel rocks as hard only because our brains have created 'hardness' as a way of rationalizing our quantum interactions with rocks.

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on a separate note, it's amazing how much bigger northern california (and that means northern california - the cold part with the big trees) looks when one flips the map of california so that south faces up. (i will not commit the fallacy of referring to this orientation as 'upside down'.)

**er, sorry, i meant 'that which is deemed to have value unrelated to practical utility'