Real People

Fun fact! Actors are actually real people and not the roles they play in TV and film, though some actors have indeed perfected the art of playing themelves in TV and film.

Also, not pictured, C3-P0.

There has been an error

An error of some sort was required to create everything you see. For, there was matter and antimatter, and theoretically these two should cancel each other out, and yet they do not. By like 0.000001% for reference. But that 0.000001% was enough to create our entire Universe. Every star, every galaxy, every black hole, the sum remainder of an unfinished math set.

Imperfection is the source of Creation.

This being true, should we judge those who make mistakes? Or systems that crash?

Like this digital billboard with a Windows error in the fog?

What is "real"?

Who's to say my love for this RealDoll is not equal to your love for another person? Hmm?

Illusion is Reality

His meritorious achievements are vast;
His wisdom is deep and sublime.
His light, with awe-inspiring glory,
Shakes the universe of a thousand million worlds.
I resolve to become a Buddha,
Equal in attainment to you, O holy king of the Dharma,
To save living beings from birth-and-death,
And to lead them all to emancipation.

Reality is an Illusion

It appears the stars are spinning through the night. There's nothing your senses can detect that says otherwise. You also know the sun moves, and have built a monument to showcase this movement - every Winter and Summer the sun will shine precisely so.

But this is all illusion.

It is we who are spinning, though you could never tell - do you feel like you're spinning at a thousand miles an hour?

So here's the amusing truth of it: You must have faith that science is true, or at least is the path of truth. That it is not the stars or sun spinning, but us, goes against your common sense. It goes against all intuition. It goes against our language - we say the sun rises and sets, when in truth it does no such thing. But you can't tell, you can't feel or see or hear the Earth whirling around in space.

And so you must have faith. In Science. Amen.

Bow Shock

I like to think of stars as the basic building block of the Universe. Not sure if this is an accepted opinion, but I think it works. Everything revolves around stars - planetary systems like ours, and all life here on Earth and maybe on the 1000+ exoplanets discovered to date (there's billions more - current consensus is just about every star has planets).

Here, you see a star in its larger environment - ginormous gas clouds. Stars are born from these clouds, they shape and influence these clouds, and their death creates new clouds. Above you see a star affecting a larger gas cloud environment, creating a bow shock in the clouds - just like a boat creates a bow shock in water, or a wind turbine creates a bow shock in the air, stars are shaping the larger environments in which they find themselves. Here's another example.

Anywhere there are stars and gas clouds, you'll see bow shocks.

We exist in a sea of gas - we come from this gas. Gas!

These clouds are primarily hydrogen, but also contain everything that would make up a star and its planets - iron, silver, gold, carbon, everything.

Big Sis

Say hi to our big Sister, the Sun. And it is our Sister (or Brother if you like) and not our parent, as the Sun and the planets all formed from the same ginormous cloud of gas. The Sun took up most of that cloud, but every single planet, moon, comet and asteroid came from the same cloud. Even you, roundaboutly.

Like all "things" - stars and planets and you included - the Sun is the result of a series of reactions held in balance. In the case of a star, this balance is composed of the inward pressure of gravity, and the outward pressure of fusion. As such, the heart of a star is quite small compared to its overall size, thanks to this simple process:

Fusion. Just a couple of atoms bouncing off one another with enough energy (because of the inward pressure of gravity) and kabloom! Fusion, the heart of a star, and thus the heart of all life. Fusion releases enormous amounts of energy, and that energy is the star, and all its light, in all frequencies.

These frequencies are the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to microwaves to visible light - what we see - to ultraviolet, x-rays, and finally gamma rays. All seen here. Each frequency reveals different information, and thus astronomers use a variety of detection methods to learn not only about the sun, but everything.

We exist in a living miracle. It's pretty cool.

The Motion

Click for big, as always.

Hey! Motion is a funny thing - everything is in motion. EVERYTHING! Whether you're sleeping or sitting or even dead, you're in motion. The Earth spins, the Earth rotates around the Sun, the Sun rotates around the galactic center, the Milky Way galaxy rotates around a shared gravitational spot with Andromeda, the Local Group rotates around a larger cluster of galaxies, and so on. So on... forever! And of course it goes down as well, as electrons rotate around nuclei, and quarks rotate around each other, and it's true: Reality is motion. There is not one thing standing still - it's literally impossible, in the literal sense.

Above, a truer view of our Solar System - as the planets rotate around the Sun, the Sun is speeding along on the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way, a backwater place far from the bustling galaxy core.

Also, I just drove across America in a huge truck towing a 67 Mustang. What a country! Always in motion!

Eggs within Eggs

Eggs within eggs within eggs. How far down (and up) does it go?

Question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The answer is: Egg. The answer to everything is: Egg.

Shells

Let me drop some more perspective on you. Here's our old friend, the Oort Cloud. Picture billions upon billions of icy little comets tumbling around in a vast sphere, such that our entire solar system is enshrouded in a cloud of ice. A shell, like the electron shell.

It's big - extending almost a light year in all directions from the Sun. And then as you see, far closer in, is another sphere, or shell, of icy bodies, but also rocky bodies too - like Pluto. The Kuiper Belt, another shell - also like the electron shell.

So again picture this from far away in space, looking towards the Sun. First a giant cloud of white ice, floating lazily in a vast sphere. And another sphere of ice and rock far within that, and then tucked inside that shell are planets, and a star.

Every star with planets probably has something similar. And so now look up into the dark sky and picture every star you see as a white egg of ice shells, within beats the bright nucleus of a galactic atom. Together these atoms join with vast clouds of gas to create galaxies, and galaxies join other galaxies strung along in necklaces of dark matter, grouping in vast clouds of millions of galaxies, stretching.... forever?

Is a shell forever?

America the Fantasy

Take a close look, behold the inner mind of a person living in multiple fantasies. Know that there are many people who think this is realistic art, depicting the founding of America. Christian America. White, but specifically, English. No Irish! Not sure about Scots. I assume they're OK. For who else to fight the English wars?

It's funny. I am afraid, today, of the Republican Party for their Orwellian impulses to total control - domestic spying, trumped up wars used for political purposes, doublespeak, etc, all the while using a cult like religion as the binding material - you wouldn't want to burn in Hell, would you? And yet here, in this art, you see a Wingnut's take on Orwell - the Liberal Nanny state, bent on total control through liberal agendas like peace and safety. It's ludicrous, though there's a point, I suppose. Authoritarians come in all kinds of different flavors. But one thing's clear about gun nuts, which this artist obviously is (or seeks to inspire), and that is

Your typical gun nut is a loser, scared of the world, of himself, and so he buys guns and swims in fear and is ready for the first attack, or so he thinks. Swimming in fear makes you jumpy, and error prone.

To wit: Despite attempts to create alternate realities (white Christian America defended with guns against the scary foreign hordes come to take all your stuff), there is such a thing as a more objective reality. One that can be agreed upon by a majority of folks. Here's the facts:

1. America was not founded as a Christian nation, though indeed many of the founding dudes were Christians, or - GASP! - Theists.
2. While America was very English/Scottish for the first 100 years or so, it quickly assimilated many immigrant populations such that even the Irish were welcomed to the cool kid's table.
3. Guns can be used for needed work, and sport. Owning an arsenal is not needed, and the possession of one marks the person as a lunatic.

Questions?

Everything is Information

Think about it, really. Stop whatever it is you're doing (when you read the end of this paragraph), and think of this: Everything you see, touch, hear, know, think, remember, feel, is but some form of information. But more! Everything that is or could ever be - every atom, every molecular gas cloud, every star, every planet and person and even dog that has ever or will ever live is but a collection of information - ones and zeroes. Dots and dashes. Numbers on scales. Literally. Consider vision - an important human sense. Witness above how the human eye gathers light. Once focused, it strikes a collection of differentiated cells of the optic nerve, and that nerve transmits data to the brain. The data? Lightwave frequencies. The brain takes this data and transforms it into red, or green, or blue, or some combination thereof, and that in turn is what we see. And remember. It's a wicked cool trick!

Colors exist because the material through which light passes and strikes differs. Water is different than stone, a tree different than a car. Low different than high, hot different than cold, and so on. These differences give birth to all color, as the light is reflected, refracted, blocked, twisted, or otherwise changed in different ways based on the conditions. Above you see the spectrum in part, based on the density, temperature, and speed of the water, coupled with the differing angles of light. Below,

an amalgamation of movie poster colors by year - oldest at the top. Notice the color shift! And consider it - you see this shift through a screen over the internet, clearly nothing but data which comes alive with meaning in your mind. Hence!

False color astronomy. Defined as the addition of color where there was no color in the original image. This is an X-Ray shot, after all, and alas! We humans cannot see in X-Ray. The original image is greyscale, but in that scale is revealed the different frequencies of X-Rays, and if you follow the following logic: Low end of frequency equals red and high end equals blue than here you are - false color, but real in its way. It represents something very real and meaningful - especially meaningful to us, viewers of color, as we can tease meaning out of an image in color that we cannot in grey. For the best example:

The CMB: Cosmic Microwave Background. These globes represent the temperature of the UNIVERSE at approximately 300 million years old, which is a trifling number when you consider the estimated age of the Universe (14Billlion give or take). It is near this point that light first escaped the cosmic creation soup and traveled freely across space. And thus the map - different areas of hot and cold. Where the differences are like miniscule but enough over time to shape the infinity of galaxies that make up our ever expanding reality - red areas represent places of higher density and thus matter was attracted and here was built, everything. Blue less dense areas, now representing interstellar space, and it is vast and only getting ever vaster.

Once again, but numbers, which we translate into colors, shapes, texture, form. We are the creators of everything, since everything is but a bunch of numbers and long ass formulas n' shit. Consider in closing this image - our star, "The Sun"! In neutrinos, captured by a "telescope" buried deep under a mountain. You see, neutrinos don't care about our matter so much, and pass right through. Right now there are trillions upon trillions - seriously! - streaming right through you. Yet we found a way to measure them, and so here's the sun in False Color, neutrino style. Pretty dang sweet, science. Also too, eyes!

Finally, yay art! Previous post photo setup - not my picture, but alas I don't know who to credit. Whoever you are, rock on!

It's awesome what people can make out of all this information.

A Wizard Did It

The Wizards of ancient alchemy might be scoffed at today, but they were scientists of their times. Limited, mostly wrong, yet engaging in trial and error, documentation, additive/subtractive experiments, accumulated knowledge of compounds and elements, etc. To wit - turning lead to gold. Ironically, this is possible! Simply remove two protons from lead and voila! Gold. Not that any wizard of yore did that. But what if? What if a Wizard so grand and wonderful created, everything?

The Multiverse! With each bubble a pod budded off a black hole in some other dimension - a for real theory! Not proven, but it's discussed. It's infinity upon infinity and near impossible to conceive of in the slightest. But do! Consider each of these candy universes filled with

multicolored kayaks spinning madly, and in each kayak

a brightly dressed Indian woman, and hidden among these Indian women

is another wizard, but this one way less cool than the First Wizard. 

Huh? What if, man?

Screaming Trees

All things fade in time. You, me, Rome, Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, the entire Universe, some trillion trillion years from now. Not my fault, nor my picture. Lovely though, is it not? The power of entropy?

An abandoned factory in Japan, nature reclaiming the space. As entropy is nature, all order will be deconstructed, torn down, eaten up, broken into pieces and spread all about. Entropy is the way of things. All our deeds are but acts holding back the tide, so ever briefly.

Our end is inevitable. The only true questions are when and how. Probably asteroid, sometime in the future. But there's so many other options! Nuclear bombs, earthquakes, global warming, solar radiation, magnetic shift, name your apocalypse, and you'll find the likelihood is not insignificant. Ignore the possibility we do at our own peril. Life is fragile, we exist on the surface of a reality of harshness. Prepare yeself, mortal!

Springs Falls

More redshirt originals. The spot on the horizon where Spring and Fall are defined - by the setting sun. It's been a remarkable experience - I was vaguely aware the Sun "moved" throughout the year, but I now see it defined every day on a line of mountains stretching from the North through the West to the South. I've been watching the Sun move back and forth across this mountain range like a pendulum, and I'll tell you the experience has been nigh holy. Once you see the pattern in nature, you tap into this "divinity". Worship here, Northerners:

Look see in the center of this picture, at the unmoving star - Polaris, the North Star. The center of our existence, since we spin around this point and spinning is everything, seriously. Everything is spinning around something else which in turn is spinning around something else, so on and such to infinity. It provides a clear definition as to the structure of reality: Spinning. So feel no shame in dizziness.

Elemental Art

Thin slices of a meteorite, seen through different filters. Or a Warhol piece or knock off. Either way, I'd hang it on my wall. Fun gift idea - framed science pics! Astronomy! Genes! Microscopes! There's a lot of beautiful images. Like this one:

Call me an enormous nerd, sure, but the Periodic Table is a thing of beauty. Its elegance is stunning, and the meaning behind it is profound. The numbers on each element represent the number of protons in the atom's nucleus, and thus also the number of electrons orbiting the nucleus. Dig it: Each new row represents a new electron shell - the orbital paths of the electrons. Hydrogen and Helium have one. Lithium and all the elements in row two have two, Sodium's row has three, and so on. The columns are called Groups and each column has the same number of electrons in its outermost shell, giving each element in the column similar properties, despite the difference in number of electrons. For it is true! All matter is made up of elements - you, me, the tree, the oceans, the Earth, the Sun, all the stars, the vast clouds of gas spanning hundreds of light years, and so on - all just collections of elements. And each element is an atom that becomes the thing we know as Gold or Silver or Oxygen simply based on its number of protons and electrons. Hydrogen has 1 electron, Helium 2, Lithium 3, Iron 26, and so on. And thus our reality is fashioned. It's incredible! And all presented cleanly here in this awesome chart. Awesome work, Dmitri Mendleev!

Bonus element pic:

Earth and our Moon as seen from Mercury. All but vast collections of different elements bound together by gravity.

Begin the Begin

This was the picture in my first ever post on this olde blog, so many (4.5) years ago. I post it again because it fits the theme, it's awesome, and as a symbol of the new year.

Opportunity spotted this almost pure iron/nickel meteorite near its landing spot, and so dubbed "Heat Shield Rock" by NASA wags. Lame. But the meteorite itself is incredible - consider that iron meteorites are far, far rarer than stony meteorites, for the simple reason that an iron meteorite only comes from one place: The core of a differentiated planet. This planet of course was destroyed, a small piece of its core sits on the surface of Mars, right beside Opportunity. The odds!

Longtime fellow redshirts might recall that I have a bit of a love affair with Iron - the chemical substance. Fe 26, yo. It is only created in one place - a star. Either in the core of a huge star and as that happens, the star soon explodes, spreading the Iron hither and yon. In that explosion even more Iron is created. And every bit of Iron you know of - including the Iron in your blood (think about that, man) - came from an exploding star. This Iron now scattered to the four corners coalesced with clouds of hydrogen and helium and other gases, which if lucky began spinning fast enough to create a new star, with new planets - all of which will have Iron cores. Iron lies at the root of all creation, and destruction.

For it's true! Stars happily chug along creating all the elements up to Iron, glowing and casting their life giving light across space, and onto many, many exoplanets and exomoons, but then as soon as a star produces Iron in its core, it's doomed. So Iron is the end of the fusion line, and literally poison to stars. And yet, on the other side of the scale, all the higher number Elements - like gold, silver, plutonium, uranium, etc - all decay, over time, to Iron, and in so doing cease being radioactive. In fact, a definition of "radioactive": anything higher than Iron on the Periodic Table. This decay will take trillions of years, but eventually there will be a time when all higher elements have decayed to Iron, and lo, that will truly be the Iron Age.

Iron is literally - and figuratively - the balance point of creation, of our very reality. Everything we know of is made up from Elements (which in turn are made up of combinations of electrons, neutrons, and protons, which in turn are made up of combinations of quarks, which in turn, current theory posits but has not proven, are made up of combinations of preons, and I'm sure there's some other turn to be discovered in the future), and Iron sits in supreme harmony among them, destroyer and creator, ultimately, of all.

Yay, Iron!

Also, kudos to you Opportunity - you rule. But let's also pour one out for Spirit:

NASA lied to the rovers, of course, the cold hearted bastids.

Bonus Spirit pic, snapped 3/8/04:

Earth, as seen from Mars by Spirit. I'm on "Team Spirit" in case you couldn't tell. Opportunity's awesome and all, but too obsessed with being cool and down with the "in crowd". Spirit would talk to goths, for example. Also understands mortality, as any good redshirt should.

And so with that, I begin again. As we all do, every day. But some days more so than others.

Artist's Representation

Did you hear the big nerd news? Disney bought LucasFilms, and so now the Mouse owns The Force. I don't like it in principle cuz "Monopoly" but creatively, hell yeah! Lucas was space drunk on his own fame/wealth and turned to crap. But he only got 4 billion for it, which, combined with the many other billions he's made off Star Wars, heh. You win, George, you win. Here's a cosmic Ring:

A spiral of death, a sun-like star expelling outer shells in its old age, prelude to star's end. Fitting for the finger of such a creative titan. But here's an industry secret: False Color

Mighty Orion, most beautiful of all nebula. But this picture, and pretty much every awesome astronomy picture you've seen, is a 'shop of sorts. In some form or another, astronomers take the raw data of their images and "translate" these images into colors. Since data is just numbers, in this case, the redshifts of various elements. These redshifts are numbers, these numbers are translated to colors, the colors you see above. What you might see with your eye could be quite different. Who knows - you'll never get a chance.

But isn't "False Color" what our brain is doing with all color anyway? Without eyes to see, there's no blue, or red, or green. Just frequencies of radiation. It is the seer that defines color, and thus, all of life is "False Color".

Or at least creatively enhanced.

Born Again

Congrats! We all survived the apocalypse and now reside in a higher vibrational reality - can you feel these good vibes? Try - you can make it so.

Any idea when our next apocalypse is scheduled? My calendar is wide open.


Above, from bottom - Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter at dawn. Loverly.