Fireworks are simulated war, and war is death

Pop quiz, hot shot: Where in the world was this photo taken?


BZZT! London. The London Eye, in fact, during a recent New Years celebration. Quite spectacular, for stuffy olde England!

As pretty as fireworks can be, never lose sight of what they represent: War. A simulation of war, and simulations are almost always steps in the right direction - better to shoot off a bottle rocket than a mortar, eh?

But there's no good lesson here - no one learns anything about the horrors of war from a fireworks celebration, except occasionally for a burned fireworks technician. So, more work to be done!

Also, fireworks - that is, DRAMA! CONFLICT! CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT! is really the defining aspect of our reality. Without conflict, and the inevitable destruction that results, not much of anything would happen, ever. All would be balanced.

But with imbalances, pressures build up on one side and then demands an outlet. BOOM! Big excitement. And thus, the real benefits of fireworks, and other Breads and Circuses: Pressure releases.

The Story (as of today)

Here it is:


A long, long time ago there was something like a point, but not really, of infinite mass and zero space. And then it began to expand, and then really expand (Inflation Theory), and in those first few moments, all the building blocks for our Universe were created in a crescendo of matter-antimatter collisions, with but .00001% of matter surviving, and that small remainder is everything. 


With ever further expansion came cooling and with that matter condensed out of energy, and then matter joined with matter to make a nucleus, which caught an electron, and an atom was born. Hydrogen and Helium filled the universe in great clouds, swirling and twisting with the currents of energy rippling through space, and over hundreds of thousands of years these great clouds condensed down into hot swirling points and BAM! The first stars were born, giant monsters living and dying in a few thousand years and then BAAAMMM! A massive explosion, and the first stellar Black Hole is born, and begins eating, pulling everything towards it. And this relentless pull pushes more clouds of hydrogen and helium to condense, creating stars and stars and ever more stars, some of these giving birth to more Black Holes, which start to merge, growing ever larger, ordering more and more clutches of stars in orbit around them, and the first galaxies were born.

Stars of hydrogen and helium create ever heavier metals, like carbon and oxygen, nitrogen and lithium, and this second generation of stars creates ever more heavier metals, like Iron, and in the biggest explosions of stars, everything denser than Iron is created in an instant - gold, silver, uranium, etc.  And we - life - is made up of these heavier metals. Iron courses through our very blood, and there is only one place in existence where Iron is created: A star.


Life spawned on one planet orbiting one star in a vast sea of billions of stars in billions of galaxies in maybe billions of Universes, and spread from the sea to the land. Evolution relentlessly shaped forms and functions through success and many millions of years later, here we are, you and I, contemplating it all. Brains made of up of hundreds of billions of neurons communicating electronically over a galaxy of connections, producing these very words that I type, you read, you and me - made of this very Universe, with a mind able to wonder why.


We live in an infinite sea of realities, dimensions and times beyond our comprehension and yet still, we can strive and imagine, this fantastic existence we call ours: Blessed to live in this, the Golden Era.


For our future is grim; the earth will be burnt and destroyed hundreds of times over; our galaxy will merge with Andromeda, sending each into a chaos lasting a billion years, and many, many billion more, space will be so stretched out there will be no stars in the night sky, as all matter is so far apart from other matter that there is, nothing. Stretched to infinity, cold and dark and eternal, as time will stop, motion will stop, the credits will say: Fin.


But that is all meaningless other than in a poetic way: We are here, now, alive and able to ask, Why? And "Why?" is the most powerful force ever released in this grand play.

Large Hadron confider

Here's an older pic - but still awesome - of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at the CERN institute. For my money, CERN is the most excellent place on Earth, since its a pure research endeavour aimed at pursuing the biggest questions. Funded mostly by the EU, but with some American aid. Alas, most of the USA R&D budgets these days go to one thing and one thing only: WAR! And military research.

For you wags: A hadron is the name given to a subset of composite particles, made up of baryons and mesons. You in fact now some baryons right now - the proton and the neutron. 

The idea behind a particle accelerator is quite simple: You send some particles one way, and some the opposite way, around a loop. Spin them up faster and faster till they get close to the speed of light, then smash them together. The energy released by this collision creates - for an iota of time - particles that we can never normally see. Particles that would have been created in the early Universe, before it cooled and spread.

Thus, the importance of LHC experiment (please note there are many more experiments going on at CERN than just the LHC, though the LHC is the big one): It's the biggest collider in the world, and thus can generate more speed; more speed equals more energy, and with more energy comes the brief creation of particles closer and closer to the Big Bang.

Thus, it's an attempt to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.

I mentioned below the importance of the Higgs Boson in all this - to wit: Theory states it is this Higgs Boson that gives mass to everything. Think of the Higgs Boson as a field of grass - some objects pass through the grass like it's not there. In this analogy, these objects have no mass - like Photons; other objects get slowed down by the grass, and we call this slowing down "mass". You, for instance.

Hitherto, the Higgs has never been detected. Theory only. It is the LHC which will allow us for the first time to see it. Or not.

Now, you may have heard the doomsayers declaring the LHC would destroy the world by creating a small Black Hole, which would quickly grow and then consume the Earth, then the Solar System, etc.


But this is patently ridiculous, as there's not nearly enough energy to do so; plus, if microscopic black holes do indeed exist, than they exist right now, all around us, and haven't seemingly destroyed us yet. So, pshaw to that theory! Though it would make a fun Sci-Fi disaster movie.


But I suppose it is possible that not only will the LHC discover the Higgs, but microscopic Black Holes as well. 

in the middle of it all

Perhaps I misspoke earlier, when stating there is no middle - no center of the circle. We're not it, and nothing we could ever know is it. But rather, the middle is found at the Black Hole - the endpoint of gravity. And that's all a Black Hole is - an extreme point of gravity. And like fusion, like feezing, like gas, it's a phase change in reality - our reality.

I've gone on and on about Black Holes before, so I'll keep it brief - Black Holes are the shiznit, man. The end all/be all. Perhaps there are micro-black holes all around us as matter/antimatter in the quantum fizz annihilates and for a brief moment, a super tiny Black Hole.

Black Holes mostly come in the size of twenty or so NYC blocks. But they can merge with other Black Holes and grow larger, and larger, and ever larger. And in the early Universe, with the first massive stars exploding were born the first massive Black Holes, and they grew, and drew all the random gas and whatnot around them, in an orbiting embrace, and thus was born the first galaxies, our reality to this day.

As I've said in previous posts, gravity slows down time. Dig it, for it's true. And a Black Hole is the ultimate point of gravity - in fact, the Black Hole, the Singularity, is defined by infinite gravity in zero space. For now.

And so time stops at the Black Hole - it ceases to exist as a moving reality. So, if we were able, somehow, to launch a probe to a Black Hole, and it were able to survive the incredible ripping forces around the Black Hole and fall into it, we would see it enter the Black Hole and stop, forever.

All information is frozen on the surface of a Black Hole, never to change. Like a hologram.

And so, in conclusion for now, a Black Hole sits in the middle of our reality - existing at a macro scale and shaping events at scales beyond our feeble minds. Yet at the same time the master of the small, taking all energy and matter and shredding it, adding it to its mass, a frozen hologram of information breaking the very fabric of quantum space.

It's deep, brutha.

Beneath You

If I were to ever get a tattoo - willingly, and of sound mind - which I would never do - I think a science tat would be a good bet. I like this particle collision one, though of course it's totally stupid and hideous. But anyways! Everything I described below is at a macro and uber-macro level - that is, bigger than us. Way, way bigger. But of course something very similar is happening for things smaller than us - in fact, we sit in the middle of an endless progression from big to small, a spectrum, or wave, if you will. Not the exact middle, because - where's that? But a middle. Everything does, since, what is the middle of an infinity? Everything is, basically. Further anyways, also (WARNING: Gonna get super sciency!):

 This little chart shows the interactions of the various elementary particles we believe make up our reality. You can get an idea how pivotal the Higgs Boson is by looking at it's relationship to the other particles - it imparts mass - and thus how important the work being done at CERN right now to try and discover the Higgs Boson. If discovered, it validates 30 years of Quantum Mechanics. If not discovered, well, either they need a better machine, or better testing method, or the Standard Model (as it's called) was incorrect and needs to be changed.

 Click for big - this is the Standard Model, in poster form. Super sciency, beware, but also dive on in. It won't bite. I can summarize it by saying it's basically a model for how the most fundamental particles we know of today interact, and how they also contribute to the basic Forces we know and feel, like electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. It was the principles enshrined in the Standard Model that allowed us to crack the atom, so discarding it would be a major deal. It's important to note - as with ALL theories and "laws" of science - that everything discussed here is subject to change. For example, there are many theoretical physicists working in area called "String Theory", which if proven to a sufficient degree, would overwrite much of the working knowledge in physics - as in above, the quarks would be made of tiny strings, and extra-dimensions might contain a mult-dimensional gravity, etc, etc. It's all quite fascinating, but the biggest point to get across is: Everything's temporary. Even the most established fact. All "truths" are subject to revision if new evidence present itself. And so with that in mind:

A representation of an atom. It's important to grasp this concept: Even the most basic block of what we consider reality is not what we think it is. The blue surrounding the red dot in the center is the electron probability cloud, which means: Electrons don't truly exist in our reality until definitively measured/observed. Till then, they're kinda here, kinda there. That is the basis of our reality: Uncertainty. Temporary. Ephemeral. Miraculous and Mysterious. And no one does, or can ever, know it all. 

And thus a true scientist is humble, and operates with a wondrous mind straddling two worlds: Current, operational facts that have proven successful to date, but always open to the idea of new facts, new ways of being, that are truer, better, more close to the real than before. And one needs to adapt at any time to these new facts. Some people can't do this, it seems. Some can.

Which are you?


Also too, for scale purposes:

So small that it's beyond our minds. So, consider this in the larger view: Above us, galaxies and galaxies and maybe even Universe upon Universe, so vast that I can't possibly describe it accurately; and beneath us, smaller than us, an equal vastness that is ever driving down to smaller and smaller realms. And perhaps completely separete dimensions. One of my favorite theories at this scale is called "quantum fizz", and it means that at the quark level, quarks and anti-quarks pop into existence all the time, to quickly annhiliate, in a manner similar to the fizz in a soda. Random, spontaneous, and short lived. But this fizz is our reality, at least one level. There's many others.

Or, as Granny said:

It's turtles all the way down.

Stop: Corroborate and listen

Here's some evidence to many of the points I made below, from real life Science types. From highest/biggest to lowest/smallest:

Simple drawing show one concept of the multiverse - and remember: The part we can see might just be a smaller part of a bigger Universe, but even that larger Universe is just one bubble in an ocean of bubbles, which in turn might just be one bubble in an even bigger multiverse, and so on, forever. However, this is purely theoretical, since, how can you test for it?

Our bubble (artist's representation). Looks like a cell, right? The white lines would be matter/energy, and the blue would be the expanding sphere of spacetime.

A close up into the pic above - partly artist representation, partly real photographs. Consider in the above as we zoom in closer and closer, you finally see a galaxy.  Thus, what you're looking at here are strings and strings of billions of galaxies - they make a structure unto themselves, a structure we are part of. Here's some real proof:

Click for big - an actual photo of 1.6 million galaxies, which in the scheme of things is a drop in the bucket. But you can see the filament like structure they're arranged in. Now, each and everyone of these point of light is really this:

A galaxy. This is M31 - Andromeda - our nearest big galactic neighbor. Bigger than us in fact. But just one galaxy among the countless billions and billions, all filled with:

Stars and planets. This is an actual photo of a star with three exoplanets orbiting around. There's probably many more, and at this point, everyone's coming to the tentative conclusion that almost every star has planets, and even other weirder things like neutron stars have planets. There's planets everywhere.

That covers section 2 below, in which I tried and show the Universal gravity well which defines our reality - going back up from the planet to the star to the galaxy to the collection of galaxies and so on is to go ever deeper down into that gravity well. Whilst simultaneously....

Our entire Universe - our bubble - is expanding. Above shows 4 possible outcomes of this expansion, and the answer is dependent on the speed of the expansion versus the pull of gravity. In each of these examples you can see the entire universe displayed, but make no mistake - it's always there, expanding. Option1 (Big Crunch) makes a lot of intuitive sense, but the data is pointing to option 4 instead, which would leave us - trillions of years in the future - in a universe of no energy or matter. Nothingness.
And finally, imbalance:

Here's the famous pic from the WMAP satellite  showing temperature variations in our very early universe. The other examples show how this variation plays out on smaller scales. Now, important to note - the actual variance from one spot to another was incredibly, incredibly minuscule. But it's enough to measure, and it was enough to produce everything you see or could ever see around you.


And us? We're a dream, I think - a fizz of energy that arises and subsides. Life - all life - fits into this model, somewhere, and I think it's entirely as a chemical process. Making us a darn smart chemical reaction, I tells ya:

From the diary of a madman

I scribbled this in between Rummy 500 games, and it reflects my take on the current thought in physics on the shape of the local spacetime bubble we live in (click for big). And remember: this is where we live, our home, our reality. There are also, no doubt, other spacetime bubbles, both separate from ours, and so far apart they can't ever be seen. And that too is our environment, our reality - our entire Universe might be just a bubble in sea of other bubbles in a higher dimension. But let's just focus on our Universe, our bubble.

In the picture above, 1. represents our expanding spacetime bubble, our Universe. From a conception point of infinite density and almost zero space, no time, all was born in an "explosion", then vast inflation. This expansion continues, and on the largest of scales, all matter is spreading apart. Give or take a trillion years and our Universe will be a vast bubble of emptiness, with all matter/energy degraded to it's least energetic, least dense form. Nothingness.

Simultaneously, in 2. above, as a subset of 1. gravity creates vast spiral depressions in spacetime, and at the largest scales these depressions encompass billions and billions of galaxies, and perhaps even more. Everything falling down, always orbiting something deeper in the hole. From the Earth we live perched on the edge of a Universal whirlpool, swirling ever further down - this is the inherent reality to all spacetime we could ever exist in. And remember, that with increasing gravity is slowing time, and thus time stops somewhere in our reality. But where....

Leading to 1a., purely hypothetical, which shows that at every black hole - and they get ever bigger and bigger - a new Universe is "Big Banged" out the other side, and thus expanding and creating stars and other black holes and galaxies and thus other Universes that "Big Bang" out of these black holes, so and such forever. This, too, is our reality, our environment, what we exist in. We are part of it all.

2a. is just a more basic illustration of the gravity well we're all and everything perched within, and you can think of it exactly like a great whirlpool in the ocean, and we're all spinning along at some level of it. Except of course this whirlpool exists at all points, all times in space. It's everywhere and everything. Falling.

The middle section graphs some divergent relationships - and that's what our reality, our very existence is all about: Imbalances. We exist because of imperfections, flaws in a perfect design. Because one side is hotter than another, because one little bit of space is denser than another, because there were basic imbalances at all levels of reality as we "Big Banged" these imbalances expanded as the Universe itself expanded, and became our reality of Motion - imbalance creates motion, as hot seeks the cold, less dense seeks the dense, high frequency seeks low... everything seeks the perfection of balance, I suppose. But if we ever get there, it will be in that trillion years hence when all matter/energy is spread out, completely and evenly throughout a vastly larger Universe. Nothingness. So who needs perfection? Embrace the imperfect, as it is the very reason we're here.

And thus we reach the end of a 40 minute quickie. I don't claim to propose anything new with this, just a summation of what I've gathered is current thought on "our reality".

Which, again, is just one of many. It's mind boggling to me when I consider the truth of our existence - so ever small, and yet, here we are, talking about it. Big big.

You're welcome, local star systems

Next time you wonder what we're doing here, what's the point, what could we ever accomplish, rest easy! Look above at all the great TV programming we're sharing with all the stars and planets around us. And we're just giving it away, for free, out of the kindness of our big, big hearts. 

And for a laugh, imagine some three eyed alien waiting for the next episode of The Brady Bunch and if the Bunch will find Cindy and Bobby, lost in the Grand Canyon. Spoiler Alert ZOG: They do. :(

You spin me right round

Deep thoughts Brahs and Brahettes: There's no "up" in space, no "down". These directional words are only meaningful in the presence of gravity, and strong gravity at that (for instance, these ISS astronauts are still technically within Earth's gravity, and would fall back to Earth eventually if not corrected for). 

So, in the last two posts, quite simply I think, I've shown how gravity is necessary for time, and for orientation. Think about the 4 dimensions we live in: 1. Up/down, 2. Back/Forward, 3. Side/side, and 4, and newest, Time. 

All are defined by gravity. Hmm...

Upside down you're turning me

Pic from the ISS, our last bastion of space travel, and a near complete waste of time and resources - little will ever be accomplished on the ISS other than possibly space endurance records and the like. In most other regards, it's fairly useless. A symbol, pretty much.


Also, and I suspect I will be going on and on and on about this in the days to come, but here's a thought: Everything you see exists in the past. Everything - even if you look at your own hand. Why? Well, the only way we can see something is by light striking it (or coming from it) and then traveling to our eyes. In that travel, time passes. It's minuscule, microscopic to be sure, but real. And the effect gets more pronounced with more distance AND/OR less gravity. Gravity slows down time - weird, but true.


And thus, to conclude for now, quite literally, this guy floating around on the ISS playing with his beverages, is in THE FUTURE.... that is, his internal clock is going ever so slightly faster than ours.

Ponder that for awhile and let it sink in. It's a rather revolutionary concept.

Caught between the Moon and Sun

Lookee real close here - that's a sunspot, and an International Space Station (Click for big). Did you know that a full solar eclipse is entirely co-incidental? That is, a full solar eclipse depends on three factors: The size of the moon, the size of the sun, and the distance between the eclipser and the eclipsee. That is, the moon, right now, is the perfect size at the perfect spot to completely eclipse the Sun, perfectly. In a couple of hundred million years, as the moon moves ever further away, full solar eclipses will no longer be available on Earth. As a matter of fact, we - right now - might be one of the only, if not the only, spots in our galaxy that experiences full solar eclipses. Cool, huh? Maybe it was Jeebus.

Anyways, theme:

ISS in front of the moon. What's big is small, what's small is big. Size is 100% relative.

Both these photos were taken by the same guy - Theirry Legault. And he got both pics in the span of a few weeks, traveling the world to do so. Ultra cool!

Precious Little Snowflakes

As I've said many times in many ways, the closer you look at something, the weirder it gets. In fact, when you focus on anything directly, it's always weird - you ever really look at your ears, for instance? Anyways, some fun lovin' scientists - in the name of Science - started collecting snowflakes under a high powered electron microscope, and here are the results. They've got a website! In the picture of above, we're going smaller and smaller. But we can always go smaller still:

Go Saints! The Seahawks don't deserve to be in the playoffs.

 Further magnification - and gosh darn, it's hard not see these pictures and think someone was building these structures. They look incredibly man-made like.

Speaking of - look at this incredible microscopic ice crystal. Damn! As you can see in the chart below, with decreasing temperates/water saturation, the crystals take a variety of different shapes:

 Which leads me to my conclusion: Ice 9. Remember that? Read "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut if not. One of my favorite - perhaps THE favorite - book ever. But in sooth, there are different types of ice. Imagine a world where ice is as hard as granite, and methane flows like water - no need to imagine, as it really exists: Titan. Sirens of.

Getting Smaller All The Time

 Two recent examples of insect sized robots - flying ones at that. The limiting factor as of now to how small these types of robots can get is the power supply - in fact, power and batteries are the limiting factors in all kinds of different areas these days.


Now, in the scale of things, even these robots are big - still "macro". In fact, it's likely the first major breakthroughs will be with insect sized robots, and specifically, robots acting in a swarm.

The model to these swarm bots are ants, not people. Like ants, any one of these robots is not terribly bright, capable of only a few basic tasks. But link them up, and allow them to communicate certain types of information, and the swarm becomes much smarter than the sum of the parts - this is how ants and bees and other types of swarm lifeforms are so successful. In fact, they can be so successful that it might be helpful not to think of the individuals as individuals, but rather as nerves, or sensor points, to a larger organism - the swarm itself.


But this is still very big. Scientists are hard at work getting these robots into your body:

And no doubt, robots that can navigate your blood stream, and, for example, help clean out blocked arteries, will be very useful. But here, still too big.

Now we're getting somewhere - check out these four little robots operating at microscopic levels. But this arena - nanobots and the like - is still brand new, and there's not much real to show you yet. Just a matter of time though.

But we are beginning to build things at the microscopic level - simple machines for now, like so:

A working machine at the molecular level. At this juncture, most such nanomachines are toys for scientists, proofs of concept. But it won't be long before we actually have machines working - nonstop - at the microscopic level, and once you wrap your mind around the possibilities this would open, you'll quickly understand how revolutionary this will be: An entire new reality to conquer, really. And we'll conquer it, or die trying.

I find this to be a big deal on a metaphysical level, since our reality is divided neatly (in our minds) between what we can see with our eyes, and what we can't. For example, we're all made of atoms, but you'll never see an atom with your own eyes, and thus, that level of reality is conceptual, whereas the solid objects we see around us (composed of billions and billions of atoms) are the reality we can interact with. Same for things that are too big - like galactic clusters. It's beyond our minds.

Well, with these types of machines, it might be a true "technology as magic" moment - imagine something being created from thin air, or surfaces covered with atomic robots cleaning every inch of material, or weapons you breathe in, and then they kill you from inside your own blood.

It's all coming! Be prepared.

11 Love

WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME?
GAME OVER! NEXT!

Seriously: A ping pong playing robot. Fairly impressive.

In fact, this entire storyline is impressive: Mankind, in a dialectic feedback loop, will create ever more impressive robots AND robot minds, no doubt till the day one of these creations does experience real sentience - and at that point, will these robots be alive?

And a key definition of life is self-preservation. Do the math from there.

It might all work out awesomely, with humanity re-creating itself in more robotic forms; or it could end with HK's patrolling the skies 24/7, shooting at the rat like mammals who still inhabit the bombed out tunnels and underground structures. Who knows? But rest assured, we - you and me and all of us - are going to find out whether you like it or not. Nothing can stop this progress. So, as with many (most) things: Might as well enjoy the ride.

I wanna sexx U up

Say hello to the latest creepy invention of Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro - who excels at making creepy robots. It's his "thing", I suspect. Go on and look it up. This is a "telepresence" robot, meaning, for example, I could be talking to you through the robot, and the robot's facial expressions would match mine. The obvious end to this technology are surrogates, wherein copies of me would speak to copies of you, while the original is safely stored in a Cyro-Ark, bound for Vega. Or something to that effect! And of course, there would be plenty of opportunities to either A. Confuse the copy with the original, or B. The copy thinks it's the original.


Now, Prof. Ishiguro is not selling or presenting any of his robotic creations as sex toys. But... c'mon! It's technology 101: If it can be used for sex or to provide titillation, that will be the first widespread use of the technology; in this same rule, if it can be used for killing or destruction, that will be the first use of the technology. Sex and Death - they power everything.


It's going to be a wondrous Tomorrow....

Pimpin' is actually fairly easy, thanks for asking

If you lack or have learned to lose a certain sense of shame, pimpin' is certainly easy. Here's an expert:

Mike Damone: I mean don't just walk in. You move across the room. And you don't talk to her. You use your face. You use your body. You use everything. That's what I do. I mean I just send out this vibe and I have personally found that women do respond. I mean, something happens.
Mark Ratner: Well, naturally something happens. I mean, you put the vibe out to 30 million chicks, something is gonna happen.
Mike Damone: That's the idea, Rat. That's the attitude.
Mark Ratner: The attitude?
Mike Damone: Yeah! The attitude dictates that you don't care whether she comes, stays, lays, or prays. I mean whatever happens, your toes are still tappin'. Now when you got that, then you have the attitude. 

 Clearly, Riker's got the attitude, the moves. Or should I say, had:

ComiCon represent!

It doesn't have to make sense

It's from the intertube - it doesn't have to make sense. Which made me think: The absurd is funny because our brains recognize that it doesn't make sense and we don't have to try and figure it out, and this provides a great relief to our brain since it spends so many countless hours trying to figure out why all kinds of stupid stuff is happening (stupid stuff that is probably absurd yet we won't accept that). This relief translates as laughter, which has other beneficial effects as well - indeed, one could view laughter as the mind self-medicating.

Not to say we can't derive meaning from the reality around us, just that, rather, perhaps we need not try and find meaning in everything. Like the bumper sticker says, sometimes shit happens, and that's all that can really be gleaned from the event. 

Two Knights and a Knighting

Say what you will about the Queen, and royalty in general, but she knows how to handle a Bat'Leth pretty well. Look at that forearm strength! A real WARRIOR!

Consider, much like with Sir Alec Guinness, these two Knights of the Empire will probably be best remembered as wizards, starship captains, or mutants - all creative descendants of Tolkien.

The Traveler

"Odin the Traveler", (1886) by Georg Van Rosen.  Santa Claus like, but also like the hobo down at the 7-11, picking through trash. OR, of course, a distinguished old gentleman on a stroll through the countryside.

"Odin disguised as a Traveler", (1914) Artist Unknown. Note the awesome, Adidas like kicks.  This should of course remind you very much of the representation of Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movies, and book (to a degree). Tolkien made no bones about borrowing from all kinds of source Myths for his characters, background, language, etc. He was an awesome scholar after all and one can assume knew everything there was to know about the subject of Northern European (including England) Myth.

Also too:

- Internet, 2011, no other idea. Kinda cool, kinda cheesy.

I often bad mouth religions and I feel pretty strongly anti-religious in most regards, it's true. But I love Myth, and if it weren't for the Holy Rollers and Assorted Flandererssss.... I'd like Christianity just fine. As a myth, as a collection of tales from older times? Love it.

Infallibile word of God from on High and any who speak or go against it deserve to burn in everlasting HELLFIRE? Fuck off!

And as far as Myth goes, Norse mythology is some of the best. So much tragedy!

Dispatches from Gondolin

What I find fascinating about this somewhat cheesy drawing: JRR Tolkien basically invented these genres of Swords and Sorcerers, Dungeons and Dragons, Worlds of Warcraft, etc - the entire Fantasy genre, for all tents and porpoises. And this genre spawned, also,  the Sci-fi we know  and love today: Star Wars is nothing but Fantasy with robots and spaceships rather than swords and horseback. 

Tolkien set out to do just this - create a new mythology, made up of bits and pieces of all sorts of existing myths. He succeeded extravagantly, I'd say. He and L.Ron have to go down as two of the greatest writers ever if for no other reason than the numbers of people who swear allegiance to the fake religions, histories, and stories they created. One of them on a bet; the other during a lifetime of deep scholarship and research. Who's to say who'll be more successful in the end?

The end - what's that, anyways? Just a new beginning, always. Nothing ends, just transforms into other things, somethings else to play a part on this grand stage of pretending - ACTING!


Also, too: The Geo-Thermal is kicking ass.

Also also as well: You can try and justify those giant eagles in LOTR all you want. They are literal Deux ex Machinas flying in to save the day, only when it makes little difference to do so.