In the spirit of Talk Like a Pirate Day, I’m finally posting photos of my wedding.
All Hallows Eve, 2007. Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas.
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. – Charles Bukowski
We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves. – Annie Dillard
Ancient religion and modern science agree: we are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention. Without us, the physicists who have espoused the anthropic principle tell us, the universe would be unwitnessed, and in a real sense not there at all. It exists, incredibly, for us. This formulation (knowing what we know of the universe’s ghastly extent) is more incredible, to our sense of things, than the Old Testament hypothesis of a God willing to suffer, coddle, instruct, and even (in the Book of Job) to debate with men, in order to realize the meager benefit of worship, of praise for His Creation. What we beyond doubt do have is our instinctive intellectual curiosity about the universe from the quasars down to the quarks, our wonder at existence itself, and an occasional surge of sheer blind gratitude for being here. – John Updike
No why. Just here. – John Cage
So, what are your thoughts? What’s the meaning of life?
[ source ]
This planet is a hot Jupiter, meaning it’s a massive gas giant that orbits in tight proximity to its star. That may not sound like home, but its star could double for our Sun… if you ignore its location.
This artist’s conception depicts a newly discovered solar system in the Beehive Cluster, a conglomeration of over a thousand stars that all seem to move around a shared gravitational center. This particular cluster is still newly formed, relatively speaking, and it’s the type of cluster where all the stars formed at the same time from the same giant cloud of dust and gas. A huge number of stars form in clusters such as these, so it’s been a crucial question for astronomers to determine whether stars in clusters like the Beehive could support planets.
Before this new discovery, we had detected a pair of planets orbiting stars in clusters, but these stars were super-giants. These two newly found planets, which have the catchy names Pr0201b and Pr0211b, were discovered around a pair of Sun-like planets. They’re both hot Jupiters, which means they’re completely incapable of supporting life. But if an Earth-like planet formed around either of these stars — and the presence of the hot Jupiters suggests that’s not an impossible proposition — then the view of the star from that world would be much the same as our own daily view of the Sun. But the night sky would be an explosion of starlight unlike anything we can easily imagine.
And while that’s a pretty amazing thought, it’s not all that these two new planets have to teach us. NASA researcher Russel White explains:
“The relatively young age of the Beehive cluster makes these planets among the youngest known. And that’s important because it sets a constraint on how quickly giant planets migrate inward — and knowing how quickly they migrate is the first step to figuring out how they migrate. Searches for planets around nearby stars suggest that these metals act like a ‘planet fertilizer, leading to an abundant crop of gas giant planets. Our results suggest this may be true in clusters as well.”
[ sources: io9 & nasa / jpl ]
I love my little girl.
Surely this isn’t really a shock to anyone. If there’s one thing that Willard has been consistent on, it’s his contempt for anyone that doesn’t come from wealth and privilege, and his gross ignorance of the realities of living in the lower and middle classes.
He’s not backpedaling, either, and neither is the RNC. Reince Preibus feels Romney is perfectly on-message with this.
All of this notwithstanding — should Willard really be talkin’ taxes? I’ll show you my tax returns if you show me yours.
Today, Lilith pretended we were all camping at Mt. Vesuvius. It was the strangest thing. We were in the car, driving out to run errands after picking her up from school. She told us that she wanted to pretend we were camping, and for me to pull up the camping place on a map. (We zoom the nav to somewhere green when she asks for this; I usually choose Griffith Park.) Then she starts telling us that we’re camping in Mt. Vesuvius, and she describes it to us: there are statues everywhere, and the fountains are all black. There are butterflies, too. And caterpillars. And the flowers grow large and beautiful.
I’ve never mentioned Pompeii or Mt. Vesuvius, and I don’t imagine that she’s learned about this in preschool. I haven’t been watching much tv, so I don’t think she picked it up that way. It’s all very strange and weirdly lovely. At the risk of sounding goofy — is this a past life memory?
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
― H.P. Lovecraft
