A Storm on Saturn

In Saturn's North Pole sits a spinning red storm, whose outer edges form an octagon. As seen here by our friend, Cassini. A close up:

It looks like fire but it's not fire, because there's nothing to burn. Some combination of water and ammonia and other gases, each reflecting light differently, giving us color:

Amazing color. Cassini took this photo while stoned, for the record.

Lunar Coda

Luna and Venus - they're old friends in the sky. By David Cortner.

From the ISS. Look how thin our atmosphere is! All it would take is a big gust of solar wind from the sun to blow it all away, and there's nothing we could do to prevent it. We'd know it's coming a few days in advance, so I suppose bunkers could be stocked and whatnot, but surely, t'would be our doom.

Hurricane Emily, also from the ISS. Wouldn't it be awesome to be the official photographer on board - like, that was your job? All the other astronauts gotta turn nobs and shit while you just snap sweet pics all day/night - which occur like every hour.

Behold the power of the storm - precisely the same form we theorize blackholes to possess, if you could imagine it in 3 dimensions rather than the 2 here (A sphere as opposed to a plane). All points rotate towards the center due to the enormous change in pressure - low pressure, man. Real low. The lowest - and so all things fall towards it, increasingly fast as you get closer to the center. Speed causes heat and heat is energy which does work. Or, in this case, flip a ton of shit over.

Also, yay President Barack Hussein Obama!

In the fight against insanity and outright nihilism, Bronco Bamz is our greatest fighter, and deserves all our support. As you can see, even Luna supports BHO - so should you! That is, if you stand against nihilism. Some don't. They suck. 27%

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.

Just a sip

Surprisingly, water tornadoes don't suck up to much water. Who knew? Science, that's who. The cloud you see in a water vortex is condensation due to the extreme pressure/temperature difference within the vortex and without. It does kick up a lot of water on the outside of the funnel, and so too any poor water creature caught in the path - hence raining frogs. But just a sip of water upwards, as the tornado is a downward event.

Imagine you were a sailor some 10,000 years ago, in a small craft of handmade design, and you came upon a waterspout. Angry Gods, right? And that's where science precisely sets us free - what was once mysterious and full of evil portent can be explained naturally. Anything and everything can be explained rationally if the eye of science is turned upon it. Eventually. And it is confidence in this process - science - which sets us free from all prior dogma and belief. This belief - in the scientific process - is our salvation. Ramen!

The Same Shape

A fire vortex. Wicked metal. And it is the vortex that repeats at all levels of our reality, from the very small to the large beyond comprehension. It is one of the, if not the, default shapes of reality. Gravity follows the vortex, and in it creates almost everything, via stars, and galaxies of stars. Here, heat rising rapidly in cooler surrounding air creates a vortex of fire whirling up the compressed space, as with all things: Imbalances creates motions, motions bring change.

The spiral is the symbol of the vortex, and should be our symbol of understanding.

It's not a coincidence

I've long been obsessed with the spiral, for no other reason than its ubiquity. It truly is everywhere. Here, above, in the form of a galaxy, and a hurricane.

Here's a spiral you may not have considered before:

The good old double helix of DNA - a double helix being two 3D spirals, intertwined. DNA is, ultimately, the building block of life, and in fact, life could be defined as "DNA replicating itself".

This process of replication - a miracle - happens when the double helix unwinds itself, with one strand heading off to the new cell, where it is rebuilt into the same double helix by proteins. Thus, one cell becomes two, two become 4, and this how we grow.

It only recently occurred to me that the spiral is not only emergent in all life, indeed, most systems, but is the very basis of life. 

When something keeps repeating itself, over and over in all manner of situations, there's something to it. Clearly, the spiral is a default form in our reality. Perhaps the default? I'll think about it more.

Why a spiral? I have an answer! Because, as I've said before, everything is falling.

Symbols everywhere

From a certain point of view, everything is a symbol. Since nothing you see is actually as it is, but rather a representation of something else. But perhaps that's too much - an example! Every letter in this sentence is a symbol, right? Nothing here means anything OTHER than what you've been taught it means. If you didn't read English, or the latin alphabet, this would all be pure gibberish. 

Another example: I KNOW matter is essentially (99%) empty space. It's nothing. And yet, a hammer - made of matter - hitting my thumb will hurt. Two separate realities, operating simultaneously (and that's the just the start).

So, for a Monday lesson: Accept that everything is symbolic of something else, and you take meaning from it - whatever it is, whatever the time - as needed at that time; another time, a different meaning.

So, as far as this goes: I like spirals. The best symbol!

It all spirals down

One guess as to what these spirals are made of.

Always Falling

Gravity could be described as "the perpetual state of falling". As you see above, the Relativistic concept of Space-Time is an actual medium which is bent by mass, causing distortions in space. These distortions are what we call gravity - Jupiter creates a much, much larger indentation in space than Earth, and thus has much, much higher gravity.

The Sun is well off the chart here, but the sun too orbits something - and to orbit something is simply to be falling towards it. Our sun orbits the supermassive black hole in the galactic center of the good old Milky Way; our supermassive black hole and thus our galaxy orbits around a central gravitational spot we share with the Andromeda galaxy, or in fact the supermassive black hole at the center of Andromeda; together, along with dozens of small galaxies, we all orbit a far, far larger central gravitational spot along with clusters of other galaxies; and so on and such until we are talking about vast mists, spider webs of millions and billions of galaxies swept along the ever expanding bubble which is our reality.

And everything that is not in the center of that bubble - which is everything - is falling, always falling. And spinning.

Defined by Nothing (and Everything)

This is a brand spanking new simulation of how scientists think quasar jets behave. First, some definitions: It's now believed that quasars, blazars, and radio galaxies are all actually the same phenomena: Jets of matter streaming away from the active black hole at the center of the galaxy (as pictured above). We give this phenomena different names due to where in relation we are to this jet - head on, and it's a blazar; at an angle, it's a quasar; at 90 degrees, it's a radio galaxy. A nice analogy is the old saw about blind men describing an elephant - each will have a different description for the same thing.

Anyways, black holes are no longer thought of as simple engines of destruction - as shown above, not only do they spit out a great deal of matter, but they are active agents in the creation of not only stars, but galaxies of stars. Come back with me, to the beginning of time.....

It's a little bit after the Big Bang. Shit is hot, and dense, but uniformly blah. Stuff keeps spreading out and cooling down bit by bit, until the first atoms form (hydrogen and helium). Cooling and spreading continues, and now we have incredibly large clouds of hydrogen and helium, which begin to form denser pockets. These dense pockets continue to get denser as gravity draws matter to matter, until POOF! A star is born (consider: There was a 1st star), and another, and another, and so on. But these early stars lived fast and hot, and died young. Not long after they started forming, we enter the era of the Supernova, which must have been extreme. All these young stars exploded, creating all kinds of new elements in the process, but also, and most critically, creating the first black holes.

This is still not long after the moment of creation. Black holes start doing their thing - sucking down matter and energy. In so doing, many, many, many more stars are created, and some of these explode, forming more black holes, which merge with other black holes, and so on and so on until we have a supermassive black hole, and with this, we have our first Galaxy, which is really nothing but a collection of stars in orbit around a central black hole.


So, in conclusion for now, everything about our reality was formed in large part during this era of black hole creation. We owe our existence to this phenomena of apparent absolute destruction, which has "nothing" lurking at its core.

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Also, more spirals.

Imbalance seeks balance

Premise: Nothing is ever created or destroyed; rather, all that we witness, all that we are, could know and ever will know, simply represents energy in a continual state of transformation.

Thus, everything - and I mean everything - can be described in very simple terms, as "imbalance seeks balance". For instance, the wind exists because areas of the earth achieve uneven temperatures - winds are the means for these imbalances to be evened out. For instance, Plutonium is radioactive because it has an imbalance of electrons, and sheds them, seeking out a balanced state (which is Iron, if you recall). Nature abhors a vacuum, they say. On and on....

However, balance, if it ever can be achieved, is a fleeting state, soon to be filled with more imbalances - the wind won't ever stop blowing, in other words.
Consider then, if you believe this, what this means for our lives, our existence, our very reality.
Finally, the spiral is THE symbol to describe this relationship - of unending transformations.

Made of Motion

This is a microscopic close up of an ovary, from some type of sea-creature (I forget which one). As you can no doubt see, it's a spiral. That is all.

Beauty in the mundane

Spiral is the shell, the motion is the matter.

Glinda is your villain

Next time you watch The Wizard of Oz, watch it from this perspective: Glinda is the secret villain, and everything that happens in the movie is at her directive or imperative (even the Wizard tasking Dorothy to retrieve the Witch's broom, for example).  By the end of the movie (SPOILER!), Glinda has, through Dorothy, taken out all of her rivals in Oz, and is in complete control. Are these not the works of a master villain?

Spirals are Viral

The spiral shape appears everywhere in our reality - toilet bowl, galaxy, sunflower, seashell, so on and etc. You know this to be true, yes? How do you explain the fecundity of this pattern?

I have a crazy theory: The spiral is the result of gravity spread over multiple dimensions.


Seriously.

Also, seriously: The Spiral is Holy, as we humans understand Holy, or, as I understand Holy, which is the state of being in complete harmony.

We'll define Harmony later.

Not a UFO

I don't know what it is. No one does, yet. I'm sure it's not a UFO - well, actually, it technically is an Unidentified Flying Object, I suppose, but not of the Li'l Green Man variety. 

This strange spiral in the sky appeared in Norway and has a ton of documentation. I'll be interested to hear if they ever determine what it is. My bet: Weather Balloons. Green (AHHHHHHHH!)