Writing on a Kelvin Scale
So, katskradlexx sent me this youtube video, a “dramatic reading” of a self-published book called, The Haunted Vagina. It is a longish video, so I’ll give a choice quote:
“I’m haunted,” she said, smiling and touching her vagina.
“How did a ghost get in there?”
“I don’t know. It’s been in there for a long time, now.”
Now, katskradlexx suggested that the writing sample above, “reminds me of that horrible book you and your friend had to edit.” I posted excerpts of that book, Twisted Love, a few months ago, but here is a refresher quote:
“Oh, yeah?”Crystal asked, as she also smiled, as she moved in closer, as he body was close to him, while he embraces her tighter, as they both felt the excitement grow between them.
I said, “Yes, I thought of the same thing, though this one [The Haunted Vagina] had sentences.”
katskradlexx replied, “Horrible sentences.”
I said, “Yes, but sentences. You have to think of [The Haunted Vagina] as bad writing on a Kelvin scale.” (It is important to know that katskradlexx did not have the above exact quote from Twisted Love available. Sadly, I was all too familiar with it.)
So let’s talk about Kelvin. The Kelvin scale starts at Absolute Zero, the point at which everything freezes, or where all thermal activity ceases. The freezing point of water is 0.01 degrees Celsius, which is 273.15 degrees above Absolute Zero, or 273.15 Kelvin. The boiling point of water is 100 degrees Celsius, or 373.15 Kelvin.
Now, applying that scale to literature, let’s define what we will call litKelvin. Absolute Zero litKelvin would be represented by total illiteracy, no recognition at all of any letters or numbers. The freezing point of water (0.01 degrees Celsius) would be analogous to the Twilight Series, or 273.15 litKelvin. The boiling point of water (100 degrees Celsius) would be analogous to anything by Vonnegut, or 373.15 litKelvin, where clean sentence structure puts forth the story into the realm of bubbling genius.
Given this scale, I told katskradlexx that The Haunted Vagina would be closer to Twilight Series litKelvin, where writing freezes into stupidity, and Twisted Love is closer to Absolute Illiteracy, where all attempts at writing should bring down an indictment and mandatory jail time.
Darkness in a Sea of Stars
What you’re looking at it is the most mysterious phenomenon in all of science. It is the entrance to a Cosmic Cave, within which lives a dragon ten light years long, whose fire can destroy worlds with amazing speed. Woe to all who transgress, and bring the wrath of the great beast upon their civilization!
…Kidding. But wouldn’t that be something?
This is an image of Bernard 68, an absorption nebula about 500 light years away, in the constellation Ophiuchus. It’s a very interesting object, being totally opaque to visible light due to high density. It’s a massive, misshapen bubble of dark and extremely cold material which blocks the view of some 3,000 stars due to its half-light year diameter.
Now Devin, you sexy devil (you’re probably thinking), what makes this thing all that interesting? Well, equally sexy reader, I’ll tell you. The object has very well-defined edges for being essentially a giant cloud of material. This would seem to indicate that gravity is starting to win a struggle with the outward forces within the cloud itself. This is not an insignificant struggle: the outward forces, which cause continuous wobbling in the cloud, have been raging against the gravitational machine for eons, but in astronomical terms, the war is all but over. It’s predicted that within 100,000 years the cloud will undergo gravitational collapse, and fusion will begin, and a new star will be born.
The cave of the great space dragon will close, leaving a bright and shining egg in the stellar ocean.
(Can you tell I’m a nerd?)
-Devin
A Discussion on Meaning
Absurdism concerns inherent meaning, and as I read through this, you have a lot of examples of personal meaning. When it comes to the idea of inherent meaning, cubs may be meaningful to a particular bear, but not all cubs are meaningful to all bears. In fact, Bear A doesn’t give a shit in the woods for Bear B’s cubs and really wishes she would stop showing her the cubby pictures. Because a cub is meaningful to a bear does not mean cubs are intrinsically meaningful either in and of themselves, or to the universe as a whole. Absurdism is the idea that, to all appearances, meaning is arbitrary because the universe is just not in the business of handing out hard evidence of an inherent transcendant version of the stuff. We will only know for sure if there is higher meaning when we die, so we can 1) commit suicide, or 2) have faith like Kierkegaard that there is meaning beyond the Absurd, or 3) double-down like Camus on the Absurd, reject God and intrinsic meaning and realize that there is absolute freedom in the Absurd to build one’s own personal sense of meaning.I kind of like the idea of Camus: I don’t need your fucking meaning anyway, Universe. I’ll tell you what meaning is: bears! I like bears, so fuck you, Universe.
You know what is absurd? A bunch of monkeys walking around wondering what their meaning and purpose in the universe is. But the question is not universal to all the monkeys. The Buddhists never bothered themselves about meaning, only being.
If you really want to argue about meaning, talk to the nihilists.
I don’t think it is accurate to call the meaning of Bear A’s cubs personal meaning. Perhaps that is individual meaning. I agree; a cub means nothing to the universe, but it doesn’t follow that the universe is meaningless due to that fact or a series of similar conclusions. Nonetheless, I cannot conclude that the universe has no inherent meaning. That isn’t to say that I need a transcendent being to add meaning. To the contrary, it is to speak solely on the possibility of meaning and nothing more. I can continue to defend the intrinsic meaning of the Sun, the Earth, the galaxy, and other celestial objects within the universe. I can continue to assert that if they’re meaningful then it follows that the universe is meaningful. Nevertheless, that would not settle in some of our minds. I can’t entirely disagree with anyone who posits that meaning is perhaps a construct of language and that before language, meaning didn’t exist. Again, I can assert that the inability to express meaning isn’t tantamount to the absence of meaning. Though the assertion is sound, it isn’t necessarily self-evident — not even for me and yet I make the assertion; but it is a bolder assertion still to positively and in the case of some people, absolutely consider the universe a meaningless place. That is my issue with Absurdism in a nutshell.
I do like Camus’ approach. If I were ever so naive as to embrace an Absurdist point of view, I would also embrace his approach concerning the Absurd.
Some of us do think we have a meaning or purpose in the universe. However, that is another matter entirely. I agree; such a notion is absurd because it is based in arrogance and naivete. As far as nihilists are concerned, would a discussion on meaning mean anything to them? Consider that a mild attempt at a joke, but it is no less true.
I’m interested; what is your take? Are you an existentialist, an absurdist, or a nihilist? I fundamentally disagree with each view and for different reasons. Unfortunately, that leaves me in a philosophical dark. There is no appropriate title for someone who disagrees with the aforementioned views — assuming a title is appropriate in and of itself.
First, I think it is important for me to point out that I don’t pose myself as a well-versed or even amateur philosopher on this subject. This is only what I, in my limited sort of way, understand about Absurdism.
If we have God, then there is transcendent meaning. Yay! But, even in the case of an existing God, we are not equipped to absolutely know or arrive at the specific nature of that transcendant meaning, or even whether it exists, so it is absurd to pretend we can, short of death. The best answer, according to Mr. Kierkegaard then, is to have faith that there is both God and transcendent meaning, regardless of the lack of empirical evidence, because we can’t be sure either way. I believe a lot of Theists are unaware that this is a school of Absurdism, because it has been culturally overtaken by Mr. C’s Atheistic view.
In the absence of God, we no longer have a mast to tie on the sail of transcendent meaning, comforting meaning that we can apply to every one and every thing. Science reminds the atheist again and again that, at least according to its methods, the universe and its workings are not in the business of meaning, transcendent and otherwise. Without either science or faith to help us be certain of meaning, or its lack thereof, it is absurd to think we can be certain that meaning (outside our own personal view) either exists or does not. Mr. C says, hey embrace it, the uncertainty, and through it discover your personal meaning if you wish, but don’t forget that that meaning can never be conclusively demonstrated as either transcendent, empirical, intrinsic, or, conversely, non-existent.
You, Mr. Sagan and Mr. Tyson, describe a beautiful sense of meaning, but since it cannot be proven outside of the particular view of each, it must be considered personal meaning. A physicist in a book I once read said something like the universe is under no obligation to make sense. For Atheistic Absurdism, I’d say, the universe is under no obligation to have a meaning; that’s up to you.
I’m not necessarily saying it is my view, only what I understand about Absurdism
A Discussion on Meaning
I just don’t think one needs the concept of meaning to motivate motherhood, or the transference of the instinct on another species. Instinctive feeling is not the same as meaning. Maybe you could give me a definition of meaning that you are going with because meaning as far as I know is supposed to imply an objective point for existence. To some, meaning comes from God. Why am I here? God made you with a plan in mind. On the other hand an atheist might say, well there is no pre-existing plan from an objectively existing God, but the existence of this single instance of myself in the vast history of the universe is so rare and beautiful that a sense of meaning comes from experiencing it to the full. On a more pedestrian level, there is the guy who works a crappy job all his life, but he finds meaning and a reason for his existence in just looking at his kids. My understanding of meaning is that it is a conscious process that arises from a question that not all peoples in all cultures are given to ask. I’ve never heard of a concept of meaning that requires no reflective consciousness, only a fact an experience of it, or the fact itself. That can be meaning to you personally, but it does not exist apart from you. At least not in most understandings of the word “meaning.”
The following definition is from Merriam-Webster and it is the closest in the sense of the word I’m using: significant quality; especially : implication of a hidden or special significance <a glance full of meaning>
However, I’m not implying a hidden significance — perhaps a special significance that makes x or y valuable to us or other living things. I agree; motherhood isn’t motivated by meaning, but parenthood leads to meaning or at the very least, it is supposed to. How many parents begin to take better care of themselves after having children? Can one conclude that the experience of parenthood influenced the parent’s decision and in turn, added value and/or meaning to that person’s life? I agree with all of your assessments. Meaning can be actual or imagined. One can find meaning with or without god; one can find meaning via one aspect of their lives, namely the kids you mentioned above. Again, and I stress this point, the inability to express meaning isn’t tantamount to the absence of meaning. Can we safely conclude that the cubs meant nothing to the lioness? Can we extend that conclusion and say that all cubs mean nothing to their respective mothers and/or parents in the wild? Can we extend that even further and say that the Sun meant absolutely nothing to the 99.9% of species that existed before us? Perhaps many of those species were incapable of recognizing value to then assign meaning; however, that doesn’t mean that the Sun has no value and thus, has no meaning.
In the case of respective cultures, I don’t believe a question is required (i.e. what is the meaning of life? Is there meaning in life?). Finding value in life or in variables capable of adding value to our lives seems natural. It seems that humans naturally seek meaning. May I remind you, philosophers argued over such questions and their possible answers; some argued whether the questions were necessary. This, in turn, led to existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism. I would conclude that a question isn’t required. I’ll use myself as an example; I was never asked a question concerning the meaning of life or the meaning of and/or in my life. Nonetheless, I’m not blind to the value of certain factors in my life that in return add meaning to my life. My friends and family have value and undoubtedly add meaning to my life.
I can also agree with a statement that says: something that has no value can have meaning. That is to question the truth value of said object. God(s) are a good example of that. For me, god has no value for I do not believe in god. I take that further and conclude that it is meaningless to believe in a god and that having one will add no further meaning to my life. Others hinge to their faith and find meaning through it. This discussion could go a lot further if we start discussing true meaning versus imagined or even false meaning; or, whether all meaning is imagined and if there’s a such thing as true meaning. Nonetheless, my point in the original post is that it is quite the stretch to conclude that the universe is meaningless. That is a conclusion I dare not subscribe to.
Absurdism concerns inherent meaning, and as I read through this, you have a lot of examples of personal meaning. When it comes to the idea of inherent meaning, cubs may be meaningful to a particular bear, but not all cubs are meaningful to all bears. In fact, Bear A doesn’t give a shit in the woods for Bear B’s cubs and really wishes she would stop showing her the cubby pictures. Because a cub is meaningful to a bear does not mean cubs are intrinsically meaningful either in and of themselves, or to the universe as a whole. Absurdism is the idea that, to all appearances, meaning is arbitrary because the universe is just not in the business of handing out hard evidence of an inherent transcendant version of the stuff. We will only know for sure if there is higher meaning when we die, so we can 1) commit suicide, or 2) have faith like Kierkegaard that there is meaning beyond the Absurd, or 3) double-down like Camus on the Absurd, reject God and intrinsic meaning and realize that there is absolute freedom in the Absurd to build one’s own personal sense of meaning.
I kind of like the idea of Camus: I don’t need your fucking meaning anyway, Universe. I’ll tell you what meaning is: bears! I like bears, so fuck you, Universe.
You know what is absurd? A bunch of monkeys walking around wondering what their meaning and purpose in the universe is. But the question is not universal to all the monkeys. The Buddhists never bothered themselves about meaning, only being.
If you really want to argue about meaning, talk to the nihilists.
A Discussion on Meaning
What meaning did the stars have? What Sagan and Tyson describe is not meaning without their own added feelings. The facts themselves are just facts. Science is not designed to arrive at meaning, only facts. Meaning is a particularly human pursuit. Even the most intelligent animals show no sign of needing meaning. The idea of meaning itself is probably relatively recent in human history, and possibly particular to certain cultures.
I agree; they did state the facts and science isn’t meant to assign meaning. However, it is safe to say that the stars had meaning before we were able to assign them meaning. Because of the stars, complex chemistry has led to sentience. Some physicists posit that the laws of physics are favorable to life — this is known as the anthropic principle. Therefore, that implicates a universe that is favorable to the same and far from meaningless.
Meaning isn’t a mere human pursuit. Why did this bear kill herself and her cub? Doesn’t that show that the cub meant something to her? Why did this lioness care for an antelope calf after losing her cubs? Doesn’t that imply that the cubs meant something to her — something so profound as to change her predatory nature — if even temporarily? These examples show that meaning isn’t a human endeavor. Furthermore, the inability to express meaning isn’t tantamount to the absence of meaning. As I stated previously, the Sun meant light and energy for 99.9% of species prior to our existence and it means the same for all existing species. The Sun was meaningful prior to human language — the very thing that now assigns it meaning after the fact.
I also disagree on meaning being particular to certain cultures. Motherhood is a generality that verges on universality. I learned of a culture that doesn’t seem to value motherhood; however, it isn’t an absence of meaning concerning their children, but rather, economic pressures that face them in their society. Due to these pressures, these mothers are forced to abandon their children at home in order to work. They do this when the children are infants and many of these infants die. They are taught not to mourn for them who are supposedly taken to become angels of god, but some mothers mourn notwithstanding. Even in such a brutal society, meaning is applied where necessary. Therefore, meaning is a universal human endeavor for even the worse amongst us assign meaning to something.
I just don’t think one needs the concept of meaning to motivate motherhood, or the transference of the instinct on another species. Instinctive feeling is not the same as meaning. Maybe you could give me a definition of meaning that you are going with because meaning as far as I know is supposed to imply an objective point for existence. To some, meaning comes from God. Why am I here? God made you with a plan in mind. On the other hand an atheist might say, well there is no pre-existing plan from an objectively existing God, but the existence of this single instance of myself in the vast history of the universe is so rare and beautiful that a sense of meaning comes from experiencing it to the full. On a more pedestrian level, there is the guy who works a crappy job all his life, but he finds meaning and a reason for his existence in just looking at his kids. My understanding of meaning is that it is a conscious process that arises from a question that not all peoples in all cultures are given to ask. I’ve never heard of a concept of meaning that requires no reflective consciousness, only a fact an experience of it, or the fact itself. That can be meaning to you personally, but it does not exist apart from you. At least not in most understandings of the word “meaning.”
Absurdism: Why it Fails and Why it isn’t Related to Atheism
In a nutshell, the Absurd is the conflict that arises when we search for meaning in a universe that seems meaningless. To prove the existence of such a realm, one has to prove that the universe is meaningless — a bold statement coming from a primate species born via natural selection roughly 200,000 years ago. We cannot prove that the universe is meaningless; to the contrary, we can prove that it has meaning. Follow me here. Let us begin with the stars:
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
The stars had meaning before our ancestors gave them meaning via astrology and other ways of worship. [edited for brevity]
What meaning did the stars have? What Sagan and Tyson describe is not meaning without their own added feelings. The facts themselves are just facts. Science is not designed to arrive at meaning, only facts. Meaning is a particularly human pursuit. Even the most intelligent animals show no sign of needing meaning. The idea of meaning itself is probably relatively recent in human history, and possibly particular to certain cultures.
The Male Australian Marsupial Mouse
Heading into the Australian winter, roughly 10 months after birth, the small creatures…enter an intense, two-week mating season…. Over the course of that season, the marsupial mice engage in mating sessions of five to 14 hours and, of course, copulate with as many females as possible. By the time they reach the end of the breeding season, stress hormones lead to immune system collapse, internal bleeding, infections and an inevitable death. Before the end of their first year, Antechinus males will die.
Life on Earth
I was trying to do the math the other day. Life has been knocking around this planet for 3.8 billion years. We’ve got about a billion more before the sun eats the earth. I’m not that great at math but if life were a life, maybe it’s a woman in her mid to late sixties, which was how old my wife was when she died. Humanity has arrived at the beginning of life’s retirement years. We are a belch she had in her kitchen one day, a thought she had for ten seconds before getting distracted by something more lasting, more substantial. Maybe the next contestant on one of those game shows she used to like.
These are the busy thoughts of my Western mindset, I guess. The people around here don’t care about that stuff and don’t need to. They do what they need to do to survive each day. They play with their kids, screw and make more kids. They fight about things, but mostly they smile. They smile even though their kids sometimes get sick and die from simple stuff. They sing a lot. That seems to work for them more than anything.
When I came home from the war, I didn’t fit in back where I came from in the States. I can’t explain it, except to say that I was there, looking in on my own culture as an outsider. War does that to you. I did what most vets do, just tried not to think about it, get on with my life. I did, but I never could quite get the hang of it. I fit in back home about as well as I fit in here, but I like here better. It gets pretty hot here, and I don’t like the bugs, but I am on an island that is far away from everywhere. Since my wife died, I think that’s all I’ve wanted. Hell, she was the only thing that had brought me back to the States at all, and now that she’s gone, I can do without it.
There’s not much in the way of places, here, where you can learn more neat items like the birth and life expectancy of life on earth and such. I got plenty of that right up in my head if I’m feeling for that sort of thing. There are hills in the center of the island, where tall grasses are always waving in one direction or another. It’s like the hills are moving, waves on waves. The birds are loud and just brilliant. Did I tell you I like birds? I’m pretty satisfied, I guess. It’s so green here and something about that does it for me.
I’d like to learn to sing, though, I guess.
— I have a book, it needs love — Clint
On the Importance of Screwing Up
It is beginning to look like some physicists made a mistake in 2011. Their claim was that test results indicated neutrinos might move faster than light. It might seem particularly embarrassing if it turns out that the whole thing may have come from a loose cable. It was no small claim. The idea of anything moving faster than light in physics might be comparable to the Vatican announcing, “Sorry, it turns out Jesus was not the Son of God, just a rather interesting fellow who ran into a bad day in Jerusalem. You can all go home, now.” But this is not religion, it is science. Where religion strives for perfection, science is driven by mistakes. In religion, a contradiction to doctrine is suppressed, while in science it prompts exploration. The claim immediately resulted in testing, testing, re-testing and new proposals. If the data could be shown to be above reproach, then a central tenant of physics would have to be abandoned, no matter how impossible it might seem. In science, a new idea is an invitation to tear it down. If it still stands no matter how much evidence you throw against it, then and only then is it a good idea, which may still be abandoned at any point for a better one. Mistakes are good for science, and this one is no exception. Even if it resulted from something so silly as a loose cable, it is a great lesson in what separates science from religion.
To me this is larger than science or religion, though, because I see around me a society that is terrified of making mistakes. You have to be a big hit on the first try. You can see it in helicopter parents hovering over their kids in desperation to prepare their “genius” child for the right preschools, and all the right schools following that point until they graduate. You can see it with women and girls throwing around the words “perfect” and “flawless” when they are looking at magazines full of models and interior decors. You can see it in the profound neurosis most guys experience in approaching a girl, because they are supposed to come up with the absolute perfect thing to say at the right time. Kids should roll around in mud. Girls should look whatever the hell way they want. Living rooms should look lived in. Guys should say dumb things. Mistakes make life interesting and learning from them makes life better. You never really love somebody for their perfections, and you never learn much from getting something right the first time.
I don’t think it is any coincidence that the most religious places are those where the punishments for making mistakes are the most harsh, like the Deep South. By the time they are locking someone up for life or putting them to death, a lifetime of mistakes has gone by. How many little things in childhood were elevated to crimes with severe penalties until becoming a criminal was just meeting the expectations that were formed at the beginning? Southerners are still pretty solid spankers, major proponents of consequences over solutions. Maybe it would be fine if it produced high rates of achievement and low rates of crime, but the Deep South leads the nation in the opposite direction — in poverty and murder, for example. Harsh punishment produces fear and shame, which makes one inclined to displace blame for a mistake, rather than own up to it and learn from it. This very Southern way of doing things explains someone like George W. Bush, a man whose blunders were epic, yet he is still incapable of seeing almost any of them. As the nation continues to become more religious and more punishing toward mistakes — more Southern fried, you might say — the bad cables and botched neutrino-counts of science become ever more important as object lessons in the most productive way to deal with problems. Embarrassment and imperfection are a part of life and no mistake is ever as bad as the way it is dealt with. The difference is that between reasonable acceptance of the facts and a sober move toward solutions, or the dead end of denial, displacement of blame and suppression. Learn how to make things better, or never learn anything.
Most of dust is not death
but what is launched by life in a house.
It is sloughed-off skin cells, pet dander,
and the tiny mites that ply their living from them.
It is fibers rubbed from couches and carpets and clothes.
Most of all,
it is dragged in from outside,
with doors opening and closing to feet of all sizes.
No lovers’ stains to mar immaculate beds.
No sweat or soil of exploration to sass
the pristine shoes of children.
The cleanest house is a dead house,
sealed like a tomb.
Evolution: A Game of Chance | Observations
One of the toughest concepts to grasp about evolution is its lack of direction. Take the classic image of the evolution of man, from knuckle-walking ape to strong, smart hunter:
We view this as the natural progression of life. Truth is, there was no guarantee that some big brained primates in Africa would end up like we are now. It wasn’t inevitable that we grew taller, less hairy, and smarter than our relatives. And it certainly wasn’t guaranteed that single celled bacteria-like critters ended up joining forces into multicellular organisms, eventually leading to big brained primates!
I’m glad to finally know that I am not the only one in the world trying to explain this. I was beginning to think I was alone. If you want to think of a “highly evolved” form of life in terms of being able to adapt to just about any condition and survive just about anywhere, try bacteria. If you want to talk about vertebrates with a long survival rate, try crocodiles. Their ancestors survived not one but two catastrophic extinctions. Think about it. When shit was good, there was plenty of meat, and when shit was bad, there was still plenty of meat. They have been working this system for over 150 million years and they are dumb as a bag of door knobs. By comparison our smart asses just showed up about ten minutes ago. No, we were not inevitable and show plenty of signs of low shelf life right now.
Our hearts are stupid, our blood, our bones and even our brains. There is no wit in a brain cell. It takes billions of them, stupid and automatic, to add up to a consciousness, which has no idea why it works, or even what it is. My collection of brain-cell functions keeps reminding itself tonight of the moon and the odd skim of life on this planet. Brains on limbs like me walk around in tiny spots on a thin, outer layer of the earth, dazzled, puzzled, baffled at the ubiquity of life around them and the beauty of the dead moon in the sky.
Altogether, the earth really is as dead as the moon. All of earth’s life bundled together is hardly worth counting as a percentage of its mass, all that cold stone and molten iron. Even when it comes to the progress of their lives, the bipedal brains are largely automatic. Lust impulses extract offspring, chemical love facilitates their growth, mechanical work feeds one end of these descendants of worms and soils the other. Why? A pointless question. A byproduct of stupid cells which, massed together, can appreciate art, the sublime nature of cats, guys kicking around a ball in a stadium, kissing and architecture.
Why? It walks around trading dried sheets of pulped plants for Hello Kitty backpacks and bottles of poison, which it uses to temporarily kill its awareness. To the increasing dismay of its pets, it spends an inordinate amount of time staring into glowing boxes. It tells itself fairy tales about little pigs, big bad wolves, grassy knolls and healing lepers with a touch, arbitrarily dividing them into categories of true and false. It invents punk rock and argues whether it is a better form of noise than classical music. It trades back and forth trillions of pieces of paper for assets it believes it will have, then is shocked and horrified when some other brain somewhere else suddenly decides the value of those assets in terms of those same pieces of paper is imaginary. It flings hunks of metal at the stars in its desperate search for a friend beyond the solar wind, hoping to receive some sign that it isn’t all just a fluke. It can conceive of a black hole, but not a universe where it is totally irrelevant. “There must be a reason,” it insists, especially when things go wrong in its tiny life. It expects things to go well and to see the intervention of the cosmos when they don’t.
Why? On this and other matters, the universe is as mute as the moon.
Strategy of Numbers, by Clint Irwin: Available now for $2.99 on Kindle and all other ebook formats. In print: $14.95 on amazon.com
Fucking humans…
So, they create a virus stuffed with all the killer apps in virusland until it’s Hollywood super-deadly apocalypse. Now they are debating not so much whether it should have been created at all, but what they should do with it and how much of the “recipe” they used to make it ought to be published. The question isn’t should we, say, KILL IT WITH FIRE, more like how much of this do we want Julian Assange to end up publishing on Wikileaks? Somebody needs to take the toys away from these boys, because right about now, somewhere in the Congo, a chimp is shitting in its hand, eating it and looking much smarter than us.
Strategy of Numbers, by Clint Irwin: Available now for $2.99 on Kindle and all other ebook formats. In print: $14.95 on amazon.com
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS (by Michael König)
Yes, “WOW” is the word. I have seen many maps of the world at night, the cities abright in the pitch, and the aurora borealis is well documented, but the storms, that common thing in all of our lives, so vast in our perception, caught exploding from so far away, so small, yet close enough to feel its charge; that is what caught me, even startled me. And I love the panel of the spacecraft caught lurking, as if we are travelers looking through the viewscreen. This is why I reject that the end of the space shuttle means NASA is dead. NASA’s probes now spin beyond the limits of the solar wind, more eternal than the pyramids. This was from the space station. What matters is that humanity is there. This is the space we must occupy, and occupy for all humanity we will, or at least insist that we exist.
