Wednesday, December 31, 2008

divided by zero

mysterious and quiet
tendrils of foggy mists
dance down the street
sighs on angels wings
creep in on devils feet

do they go somewhere
to meet others of their kind
who knows the way there
a place out of time and mind
whisper secrets in my ear

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Our Blue Marble




Photo taken by astronauts on Christmas Eve in 1968 of Earth rising over the lunar surface.
Apollo 8, the first manned mission to outer space.

Frank F Borman II, Commander
James A Lovell Jr, Command Module Pilot
William A Anders, Lunar Module Pilot

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Happy Solstice


what have you done what did you do
you gave it all up now didn't you
why don't you think again dear one
sometimes it's hard to let it all go
sometimes it's hard to start anew
what will you do what can be done
if sometimes it's hard
to really understand
here is there everywhere under the sun
and sometimes it's hard to let it all go
just let it all go as the sun comes 'round again

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Ilmatar

when a spirit aches
and has been broken
time and time again
silent tears etch trails
of aether sadness
in faint smile lines
lost in the way it happens

cold and bitter winds
howl like one forsaken
frozen rain beats
out the time of pain
with no rhyme nor reason
still perhaps
beauty's found in madness

and so the wanderer goes on
as if it matters
as if she cares
a follower of moon and sun
aware of the rare chance it does


found this link while on a search for a title to the poem, then the vid
http://www.sibelius.fi/english/musiikki/ork_luonnotar.htm




warning - it's opera, but the music is awesome

Sunday, December 14, 2008

The Three Fates

in the flux and illusion of matter
fate is both deceiver and teacher
relativity and transience
are not absolute
earth rolls and turns
from distaff to spindle
and time is circular

woven threads of life
which may appear flat
as the line of time
we stand on to watch the past
turn into what has become

Wyrd of destiny
that primal weird word
thus became earth manifest
defiant of our ability
to understand debt
fate becomes necessity



Orlog (The Norns' Chant)

In the midst of darkness, light; In the midst of death, life;
In the midst of chaos, order. In the midst of order, chaos;
In the midst of life, death; In the midst of light, darkness.

Thus has it ever been, Thus is it now, and Thus shall it always be.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

lakeshore

snow and sand art




confectioner's glaze




bito'blue




waiting for summer

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

matters

reach for the light
under a sky cold and gray
spiderweb wires come away
colors silver brown white
tinted dark purple night
bruised you could say
by a matter of a second
seeking the way of gravity
electric energy
situated in deep ground
uncounted unpossibility
all most profound

Monday, December 8, 2008

light

the speed of light stays the same in all frames


mathematically, distance moves with your speed

lengths change and clocks run at different times in different frames -- for real


the time between...as we measure...



an electromagnetic wave

light - time varying electric and magnetic fields

EM radiation carries energy and momentum, which may be imparted when it interacts with matter.

A wave consists of successive troughs and crests, and the distance between two adjacent crests or troughs is called the wavelength. Waves of the electromagnetic spectrum vary in size, from very long radio waves the size of buildings to very short gamma rays smaller than atom nuclei.

the closer together the waves are, the higher the frequency


1 hertz is the approximate frequency of a human heart (Herz in German language)



Einstein thoughts on special relatity:

if you run alongside the e-wave, the electric and magnetic fields will be static (not changing in time) but the wave shape will be varying with where you are.

Maxwell's equations (Maxwell's Electromagnetic Theory) do not allow such a solution, if the fields are varying in space, they also must vary in time.

Einstein therefore concluded that nothing he could do could put him on pace with the light beam. From this he concluded that the electromagnetic wave was a special kind of wave in nature, one which does not require a medium in which to move, and therefore that all observers must see it moving with the same speed, regardless of their own speeds; this is the fundamental postulate of special relativity.




http://www.music.sc.edu/fs/bain/atmi02/fusion/index.html


Saturday, December 6, 2008

rant

i don't vote, not since i realized my one vote does not, and probably in my lifetime, ever will count, and yeah, i know black men got to vote before any women did, and women fought and probably died for the right to vote, but what's the point until the US gets rid of the two-party good ole boy system?

Obama's election makes it appear that the US is not as prejudiced as it once was
and, as we all know appearances are everything (ask any advertiser)

change

*from here to * cribbed from http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/924/in1.htm, an Egyptian newpaper

Not one of the 23 Senators and 133 House Representatives who voted against the war in Iraq are on Obama's transitional team or even on a short-list for an important post in his Cabinet.

Obama's keeping on Robert Gates as secretary of war, despite the continued slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan under his capable mismanagement, his uncompromising position on missiles for Poland, and his shady past (including Iran-Contra).

Transition Economic Advisory Board: Anne Mulcahy and Richard Parsons, both of whom were Fannie Mae directors when the company fudged accounting rules. Mulcahy and Parsons were executives of their respective companies, Xerox and Time Warner, and were charged with accounting fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Also on this team is Robert Rubin, who per Bloomberg was "chairman of Citigroup's executive committee when the bank pushed bogus analyst research, helped Enron cook its books, and got caught baking its own. He was a director from 2000 to 2006 at Ford, which also committed accounting fouls and now is begging Uncle Sam for Citigroup-style bailout cash."

Larry Summers, who was Clinton's treasury secretary, will head the National Economic Council -- the president's senior economic adviser. It was Summers who forced through the deregulation of financial markets in the 1990s and imposed disaster capitalism on Russia. Considering that he is a chief architect of the current financial meltdown, we should be wondering why Obama isn't preparing an arrest warrant for him, instead of offering him the most powerful economic role in the world. As chief economist for the World Bank, Summers wrote a memo saying the WB should actively encourage the dumping of toxic waste in developing countries, particularly "under- polluted countries in Africa," since poor people in developing countries rarely live long enough to develop cancer, making him a particularly bizarre appointment for Obama.

Summers, Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, and Peter Orszag as budget director are all protégés of Robert Rubin, who held two of their jobs under President Bill Clinton. All three advisers are believers in what has been dubbed Rubin-omics: balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation, a combination that supposedly was responsible for the prosperity of the 1990s.

The list of establishment appointees to his transitional team devoted to "change" goes on and on. Is this really the best he could come up with?

How about Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, or James K Galbraith, for starters? Someone who represents labour such as Arlene Holt Baker, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO?

Something to suggest that change is really what this administration is about?

*

the bail/sell/out
Obama seems to think it's a good idea
keep redistributing the wealth
among the wealthy
$700 billion is what the gov't is telling us
so far

what's that trickle-down theory again?

just this week the government admitted we were in a recession
and, oh by the way, a recession
since Dec 2007!
okaay, what's the word on depression?
national or personal?
we are not as bad as during the 1930's
but the FDIC does not reassure me
how many trillions of dollars is the US in debt already?

a government report showed employers in the U.S. slashed 533,000 jobs last month, the biggest decline in 34 years.

Since the start of the recession, the economy has lost 1.9 million jobs, the number of unemployed people increased by 2.7 million and the jobless rate rose by 1.7 percentage points.

Job losses were widespread, hitting factories, construction companies, financial firms, retailers, leisure and hospitality, and others industries.

The few places where gains were logged included the government, education and health services.

what is money?
seriously
can you eat it?
can it keep you warm?
what can you trade it in for?
less and less

cept all of a sudden gasoline
what's up with that?


oh yeah, Obama's public works construction program
the infrastructure definetly needs to be rebuilt
bridges
roads
public buildings
water/sewer?
levees?

and the request for input from 'all of us' on health care

where's that money coming from?
more taxes on middle income folks?
-the bailouts are already coming from there

print more (monopoly) money?

from the next superpower
- China?

from FTdotcom (Financial Times): Chinese bargain hunters are preparing to descend on American cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, where homeowners have suffered some of the steepest price falls in the US.

SouFun, the biggest real estate website in China, is organising a trip next month to look at properties in California and possibly Nevada. Liu Jian, the company’s chief operating officer, said about 300 people had expressed interest in the idea in the three days since it was advertised, though the company would take only a small group on the first trip.

'SouFun'?
doankno how that translates in Chinese, but can think of several in English


if something doesn't change it is no longer alive


k, so, i'm trapped in a land that looks and feels like Antarctica, and have cabin fever already, and am sick of the preponderance of political and economic news, and/or my attention to it, so c'mon cool science news, any weird/cool news, and/or a good online free chips limit hold'em poker game, something i find funny, or really, any miracle


If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you. - Paul Newman

Friday, December 5, 2008

humour humors

well that's just not humorous
was all i could say
as i shook my head with a sigh
in fact it's somewhat tortuous
when all your words deliquesce

if humour
realizes everything happens
later or sooner
why didn't i remember to fly
and i wonder 
if there's ever an answer to why


Since the time of Galen to the dawn of modern medicine, the human personality was regarded as a balance among four humors - blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy.

Humor, from the Latin word for liquid (still used for the fluids of the human eye:  aqueous and vitreous humors), referred to the four liquids that supposedly formed the chyle, or digested food in the intestine just before it entered the body for nourishment.

The chyle arose from a range of choices in the food we eat and from constitutional differences in how various bodies digest this food, the totality coming from both innate and external factors.  An equivalency can be seen in the modern claim that both genes and environment influence our behavior.




blood:  hot wet - sanguine, ruddy, cheerful, whimsical, arrogant, indulgent; Spring ; air

phlegmatic:  cold wet - stolid, calm, kind, shy, lazy; reliable, compassionate; Winter; water

choleric:  hot dry - angry or irritable; energy, passion; (yellow bile) Summer; fire

melancholic:  cold dry - sad, pensive; creative, perfectionist (black bile) Autumn; earth