Fascinating reflection Alfredo. Perhaps more of a rationalist (or a mistaken "common sense" realist) than I know, I found myself reacting in two distinct ways to your suggestion of correlation between solar cycles and human political choices. (I have to confess from the start that I am not entirely sure what solar cycles or sun spots are.) One was in a quasi intuitive religious way in which human behavior, including at the mass or the social level, would be shaped by cosmic (or at least solar) forces of which most of us are totally unaware. That is, for all our advancing understanding, we live in a mystery that may lie beyond any plausible human understanding. For the record, I use "shaped" instead of "determined" advisedly, but did also wonder quietly all the same that if such large and pervasive forces do indeed shape human behavior at different levels, then stacked with the other environmental factors that act on us closer to home, human behavior really is determined to an almost strait-jacketed degree. For its part, free will, already hanging by a thread, is an illusion. I note that you never use the word "determine" and only suggest (provide evidence for?) a correlation between these unseen cosmic forces and human political behavior at the collective level. Interesting to ponder.
Substack makes it quite difficult to engage with comments. This is the way I found to answer your note, Alexis.
You are not alone when it comes to figuring out about solar cycles and sunspots. The sun displays magnetic imbalances that show as spots on its surface. Those spots can be several times the Earth's diameter and they appear darker because they are cooler. Over centuries of observation we have come to know the number of sunspots waxes and wanes over a period of about 11 years. As important, those spots tend to be the places from there the Sun ejects a phenomenal amount of magnetized plasma which when pointed at the Earth, it can cause havoc with telecommunications and other. I am more interested in the "other" bit of the havoc. There is plenty of evidence of that havoc having impact on measurable rates of cardiovascular infarction, and homicide rates, for example. Of late, I have focused on how those impacts may affect us in our political choices, because if they can facilitate the enaction of homicide, they may have other impacts as well. That is what I show in the graph in this post: agentic leaders tend to cluster around high level of sunspots, while communal ones around low level of sunspots. Could an average of 100 sunspots/year be a threshold? Too early to know. Partly because I have suggested we respond not only to the volatility of any one solar cycle but to a sequence of them. Very much as I have shown that, despite very different homicide rate baseline: US and Canadian yearly homicide rates have varied in tandem for over six decades with a correlation of 89%! But that is a different story! Thank you, Alexis.
Fascinating reflection Alfredo. Perhaps more of a rationalist (or a mistaken "common sense" realist) than I know, I found myself reacting in two distinct ways to your suggestion of correlation between solar cycles and human political choices. (I have to confess from the start that I am not entirely sure what solar cycles or sun spots are.) One was in a quasi intuitive religious way in which human behavior, including at the mass or the social level, would be shaped by cosmic (or at least solar) forces of which most of us are totally unaware. That is, for all our advancing understanding, we live in a mystery that may lie beyond any plausible human understanding. For the record, I use "shaped" instead of "determined" advisedly, but did also wonder quietly all the same that if such large and pervasive forces do indeed shape human behavior at different levels, then stacked with the other environmental factors that act on us closer to home, human behavior really is determined to an almost strait-jacketed degree. For its part, free will, already hanging by a thread, is an illusion. I note that you never use the word "determine" and only suggest (provide evidence for?) a correlation between these unseen cosmic forces and human political behavior at the collective level. Interesting to ponder.
Substack makes it quite difficult to engage with comments. This is the way I found to answer your note, Alexis.
You are not alone when it comes to figuring out about solar cycles and sunspots. The sun displays magnetic imbalances that show as spots on its surface. Those spots can be several times the Earth's diameter and they appear darker because they are cooler. Over centuries of observation we have come to know the number of sunspots waxes and wanes over a period of about 11 years. As important, those spots tend to be the places from there the Sun ejects a phenomenal amount of magnetized plasma which when pointed at the Earth, it can cause havoc with telecommunications and other. I am more interested in the "other" bit of the havoc. There is plenty of evidence of that havoc having impact on measurable rates of cardiovascular infarction, and homicide rates, for example. Of late, I have focused on how those impacts may affect us in our political choices, because if they can facilitate the enaction of homicide, they may have other impacts as well. That is what I show in the graph in this post: agentic leaders tend to cluster around high level of sunspots, while communal ones around low level of sunspots. Could an average of 100 sunspots/year be a threshold? Too early to know. Partly because I have suggested we respond not only to the volatility of any one solar cycle but to a sequence of them. Very much as I have shown that, despite very different homicide rate baseline: US and Canadian yearly homicide rates have varied in tandem for over six decades with a correlation of 89%! But that is a different story! Thank you, Alexis.