believe it
To Sir With Love
13 years ago
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
lonely in deep space
If you think that isolated farmers on the great open plains of the 19th century frontier were lonely, imagine what it's like for the space pioneers of the 22nd century.....they shoot you out as close as they can get to the speed of light, and tell you to tend the ship....that's your job, for which you will be well paid....but there's no way to get back home to ever collect your rewards....you are already lost in space and time, whether you like it or not.....the fancy quantum entanglement devices give you contact with the SolorWeb, you can do virtual social networking....but you can never touch those people, or see them face to face.....Your dedicated life support systems provide you with air and water and food and light and heat....but they cannot provide actual human contact.....that is lightyears away and agone.....and your virtual "friends" bloom and fade at great speed, for they are not whizzing along like you are....your time goes much more slowly than theirs....somebody has turned up the speed on the playback of their lives, or turned down the speed on yours....which amounts to the same thing anyway.....and then there are things on the news about how stressed the space pioneers must be, so lost and lonely.....well what the f**k do you expect, you stupid already dead reality-bound idiots!
Sunday, June 28, 2009
entanglement (not intinglement)
More recently, from the beginning of the nineties, the field of quantum information theory opened up and expanded rapidly. Quantum entanglement began to be seen not only as a puzzle, but also as a resource for communication. Imagine two parties, Alice and Bob who would like to send messages to one another over a distance. In 1993, Bennett et al. showed that if Alice and Bob each hold one of two particles which are entangled together, a quantum state can be transmitted from Alice to Bob completely by sending fewer classical bits than would be required without the entanglement. This process has been called 'quantum teleportation'. It involves not only bits for sending information, but 'e-bits', or entanglement bits, which consist of a maximally entangled pair of particles. (For details on how teleportation works, see thispage]) Other ways in which entanglement can be used as an information resource have also been discovered, for example, dense coding, cryptography and applications to communication complexity. Entanglement was found to be a manipulable resource. Under certain conditions, states of low entanglement could be purified into more entangled states by acting locally, and states of higher entanglement could be 'diluted' to give larger numbers of less entangled states.
Investigation of quantum entanglement is currently a very active area. Research is being done on measures for quantifying entanglement precisely, on entanglement of many-particle systems, and on manipulations of entanglement and its relation to thermodynamics. Er, anyway.....they have been fussing about the entanglement of quantum something-or-others since around 1935.....what interests us here is how Old Iron Heart and his cousin the Lady Dierdre might be "of one mind" regarding the affairs of Iron Hill, even though they are far apart in terms of miles of forest travel.....well, it is speculated that mental states are in essence quantum variations....so perhaps these cousins are entangled?
Saturday, June 27, 2009
I only know what I read in the papers.....
from the Philadelphia Inquirer....."But what really surprised him was McDermott's thalamus, a tiny region of the brain that regulates the processing of sights and sounds and other data. Newberg, who has scanned thousands of human brains, including meditating monks and nuns both Christian and Buddhist, told Hagerty that he has found asymmetrical thalami to be a kind of "spiritual marker," often associated with "spiritual virtuosos." Those asymmetries are typically in the range of 3 to 5 percent. McDermott's thalamus was 15 percent asymmetrical, the most pronounced Newberg had ever seen." This is in an article about "neurotheology." Hagerty expresses a sense that "the instruments of brain science are picking up something beyond this material world." Of course, in Stoic metaphysics, we don't have to posit that the spiritual is in fact something beyond this material world.....the Stoics taught the doctrine of the Material Soul. So we don't need any supernatural explanations, you see? Natural explanations can, indeed must, recognize soul power, baby!
Thursday, June 25, 2009
a breakfast of oysters
"Arthur himself showed an example by first embracing Sansum, and afterwards Melwas, the dethroned Belgic King whom Arthur had exiled to Isca. Melwas submitted with a lumbering grace to the kiss of peace, but he died a month later after eating a breakfast of tainted oysters. Fate, as Merlin loved to tell us, is inexorable."----from Enemy of God (a novel of Arthur) by Bernard Cornwell. What moral do we learn from this? Frankly, I don't think much of a seafood breakfast anyway....except maybe kippers and scrambled eggs. Hopefully pickled kipper won't kill you. Or, at College, sometimes you would get trout and eggs....the Commons also had the sausages cooked with apple slices of fond memory......the Ancient Dean doesn't eat often at Commons, but does so once or twice a week, since it is customary. Usually the staff he brought with him serves him in Quarters.....there is a good trout pond not far away.....but the trees are bare now, and soon the pond will freeze over.....under the leaden sky, some riders are on the Eastern Road....their arrival has been awaited for some months......
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Old Iron Heart
Many at the College found it strange to have the Ancient Prince as the new Dean.....it was like legend had come to walk the campus. As children we had all heard the tale of the young prince who had done his four years study, been awarded his Bachelor of Arts, and then left College Grove.....not to return to his ancestral home, but to ride off escorted by a dozen Knights of Elfheim, to be the groom of a High Fairy bride. They had ridden under the hill to the Court of the Fae Queen. There the Prince had wed and sired a son and a daughter, and performed deeds of both warlike and magical nature, which we have heard sung by the bards in halls and in village greens.....Eleven Summers passed for the Prince and his in Elfheim, when one came carrying word that the High Prince of Iron Hill was dead. Duty called Iron Heart away from the glories of the Fairy Court, and away from his sweet wife and their children....he came one morn at dawn to Iron Hill, and sat himself down on the Iron Throne....and the Sacred Sisters brought the Dragon Crown, and set it on his head. Eleven Summers had passed in Elfheim, while in our mundane realm seven times that count had sped. The Old Prince was past four-score and ten when he left....his Crown passed to man who looked to be perhaps thirty years old, but who had been born in this same Castle almost a century agone. At College, the curious could read his name on the rolls, alongside the names of some of their grandfathers....for it was now twenty years since Iron Heart returned to Iron Hill. One historian had pointed out that a similar Ancient Dean had held tenure five-hundred years before, when the Old Tribes still fought long and bitter war with the Eight Princes......
Sunday, June 21, 2009
iron and dragons
With an Iron Heart and an Iron Throne, how does the clan survive with any fae blood at all, since iron causes fae blood to either freeze or boil? Special dispensation of the Old One, who owes a large debt to our family....
Summer's almost gone.....
Summer's almost gone, and the students and faculty have begun to gather in College Grove....our High Prince Iron Heart of Iron Hill stands in the middle of the muddle and hustle as servitors take various items out of his new quarters, and load them into the carts heading to Old Merrymont. And other servitors unload his own carts and mules and carry items into the ancient pile .....Back home at Iron Hill, his dear cousin the Lady Dierdre, Eldest Sister of the Sacred Order, tends the Iron Throne, and the affairs of the Realm....there is no worry there...her mind is like his mind, and what she knows, he does also, in the mystic fashion of their ancient blood. She is half-fae, and half-mortal, as is our High Prince. The leaves are beginning to turn on some trees, others will wait.....Iron Heart holds tight to his runestaff, focusing his powers on the feel of the place, on the mood of the College.....it is always a sort of a homecoming, when a Fellow returns to the Grove....and now it is his College, his to guide as the new Dean....an honor every Bachelor might dream of at some point in his career.....chance and time have brought him to this pass....chance and time and tradition....and Duty. The old oaks shimmer and rustle softly to the breeze, the dark gowned denizens of the Grove go to and fro, on their own various duties....the sky is blue, and full of birdsong.....the cold clear water splashes and gurgles in the fountains of the quadrangle, it is indeed a homecoming......
the delegation
The delegation from the Ancient College arrived in the courtyard round about lunch time, and all was ready as the Designate and the two Bachelors were shown into the Little Hall. The other half-dozen armed riders were to be entertained in the mess of the Castle Guard.....the High Prince stood just inside the door, holding his runestaff, smiling and greeting his old friend and acknowledging politely the younger scholars, the apprentice Bachelors. The Housekeeper had spread a very nice cold lunch on this almost muggy early Summer noon, with cider chill from the snow cellar, and smoked ham,sheep cheese, rye bread, coarse mustard to spread, a garden salad, melon wedges, and what all. The travelers fresh from the road fell to with gusto, and the conversation remained light and trivial, as is proper at table. But after the board was cleared, and it was time to retreat to the Conservatory for whiskey-and-water, the High Prince must at last listen to what the delegation had come to say. "Prince Iron Heart" began Earl Stonebridge, "Our present Dean of College, Prince Merrymont, has asked me to talk to you regarding his retirement." Iron Heart nodded his understanding, sipped his whiskey, and waited....Stonebridge resumed...."Our Dean, referring to tradition, wishes me to point out to your Serenity that when Merrymont retires or otherwise vacates, then the Chair falls to Iron Hill, to yourself, in this instance, it would be?" Time seems to slow as it all riots through his head....Iron Heart, Prince of Iron Hill, pictures himself leaving the comforts of his own Castle, to ride the forest roads to College Grove, to establish himself in the Dean's Quarters in that rambling mass of oak and granite that is the College, to deal with pomp and circumstance and faculty back-stabbing and undergraduate duels and other hi-jinks.....he feels weary already.....Stonebridge seems to be waiting for some response.....what response is there? Merrymont is correct; tradition dictates that Iron Hill assume.....it is simple Duty. How can we argue with Duty?
The Faculty Designate
The Faculty Designate of the Ancient College of Arts and his outriders were nearing Pine Log Ford, on the South Road.....even sitting in his dim study with his eyes closed, the High Prince could see them. A Full Fellow of the Ancient College should have sufficient second sight to accomplish this feat. The Prince opened his earthly eyes to the familiar details of his favorite room in the castle......the mid-morning light through the heavy leaded glass picking out glints of dazzle off of the rich polished furniture, and objects of art, and arcane devices....and the light settles softly also in the fine tapestries and deep carpets.....a solid and restful room. But there can be no avoiding that which is on the road and near.....The Prince stands up slowly, grasping his runestaff, and making towards the door.....he must find his Stewart and his Housekeeper and advise them to be ready for the guests.....as if they don't know already, the sly old dogs. The Designate will want to talk politics and rumor and speculation....three things the Prince thinks little of, or at least as little as practical.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
noumena, ancient and modern.....
there's more to it than meets the eye.....there's more to anything and everything than meets the eye....the ancient world understood this of course, and saw the hand of unseen powers behind human events.....agents, demons, angels, godlings....whatever their nature....they hid in the shadows and watched, and interfered in our lives with judgment and wisdom, or merely at random, for a lark, for a laugh. Fairies and goblins and trolls .....spirits of rivers and woods and specific locales.....the witch of the well, the geist of a mountain....throw the last crust of your bread on the lawn for the gods, for good luck. We are silly to think that we know it all, that just isn't possible.....And modern science bears this out....when we look at an object, we can't see the atomic structure we know is there....this proves that there is more to it than meets the eye.....we often can feel the unseen looking over our shoulders.....we sit in despair sometimes and know that we are mocked by our betters for our foolishness.....sit in silence when you can, and let the good graces of your particular time and place soak softly into your tattered soul....and be glad that you are merely human and mortal, and do not have to keep their eternal vigil.....
Thursday, June 18, 2009
through the little gaps in the blinds
you could see the birds eating something off of the mimosa bush....little seeds, or little bugs? This late in the afternoon, the sun was on the blinds, and it is a relief to have the old brass and dark wood of the ceiling fan pushing some air down into the room. Outside, the old lizard lounged one block long, but he is not our problem. The City has to take care of things like that....that's why we pay taxes, right? I mean, when you live somewhere "betwixt and between" you can expect some strange things, right? Realities get loose and shaky when not everybody can agree on the definitions....and then the City is at the crossroads of three highways and two railroads....what the Devil do you expect at the Summer Solstice? Everything nice and easy? I don't think so.....the ice cream truck plays a sinister song....the kids on skateboards make arcane signs....the lizard rolls his tongue out onto the street, and pants like a dog.....thunderheads pile up South of town, moving this way....and the last of the icy gin is already in the shot glass....what's on tele tonight, do you imagine?
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
damned reality leakage
Sacred Geometry, MerKaBa star tetrahedron fields : crystalline body of light still 3, originally uploaded by rick_says.
messing with my mind again....
trans-dimensional leakage....
That could be one explanation....all those variant feelings and strange thoughts that sometimes haunt us from some off angle edge of apperception are just signals bleeding through a little off of the carrier wave we call normal reality. Like sitting in a space-station in orbit around a neutron star down near the center of the Milky Way, thousands of years after the race abandoned Earth, you can still pick up Sixties music on a cheap transistor radio.....how does that work? You would have to study postmodern physics, I guess....I'll never forget that guy on the Wandering City who actually had a ball of superstring in his pocket....claimed it was a whole little rolled up discrete bit of the Multiverse.....sure blew my mind when he unrolled the damn thing, and we had to spend seven years fighting Viking Crabs in some sort of a medieval Hell of a reality.....learned my lesson, I'll never joke around with that kind of stuff again, please and thank you. If only everything was as neat as Einstein thought, but it just plain ain't. I mean, Relativity works fine for most folks, but once you get hooked on Irrelativity, it's hard to go back....if you use it once, you've already screwed up big time, because then you can't go home again, no matter how hard you try. You burned your bridges when you left your "proper" space-time plot point.....you became galactic static, is what happens. And then you might as well forget about things like causality and common sense.....the trip becomes unto itself, as it were.....mind you, it's pretty cool in that you can evade old death-and-taxes as long as you keep one beat ahead in the dance.....aye, but there's the rub!
Sunday, June 14, 2009
a girl's voice
A girl's voice says..."I want you to teach me stuff.." Man's voice...."What should I teach you....information, or wisdom?" Girl's voice..."Both." This is a sound bit snippet heard between songs on the radio on Sunday afternoon....a late Spring day in the mundane realm. Meanwhile, back at the Dragon and the Owl, we have had a few whiskeys, and decide to go pay our respects to the Dragon. We go behind the bar and out through the happy kitchen, down the back stoop, and up the path towards the cave mouth. The very air swarms with magic and fey glamour....a vast coolness and a sharp metallic smell pass over us as we enter the dark passage, and press on into the cavern.....Most people would have more common sense.....But we are not known to be common or sensible, I'm afraid. Cool and dry near the entrance become warm and dank the deeper we go into the lair of the ancient lizard.....a baleful red light flares and recedes somewhere ahead in the gloom, our Dragon snoring fire, as is his wont sometimes? Soon we hear the deep rumble of the fire-breath....hmmm...would it be wisdom the wake the Dragon?
"where will is the shape of the world"
"Bard's tales shape history as much as history shapes the tales. Especially here, where will is the shape of the world."----Morgan le Fey --- You will perhaps remember that our friends Diedre and Freddy are hanging out at the Hotel Del on a different plane of reality....a more rarified realm,where will shapes the world? It seems plenty real when it's the only reality you've got at hand....just like ours. But let's step through Dream Land for a while, to the borders of Spirit Land. Down a forest track, we come to an ancient inn, huddled up against a hill of oak and granite...a spring burbles a rill alongside the inn yard....a tow-headed boy sits on the porch edge, whittling a reed whistle....the breeze causes the heavy old inn sign to swing on it's bronze hoops, green with verdigris, softly squeeking....the venerable sign of the Dragon and the Owl. Enter the cool dim big room, with a scattering of knights and knaves hunched over heavy oak tables, drinking mead, playing at tossing the bones...the light glints off the gold and silver coins they gamble, and off of golden sword hilts and silver riding spurs. The heavy-set old innkeeper sizes us up, and decides that we need the best of the rye whiskey, thrice distilled, liquid amber. The huge barn owl on his perch behind the bar swivels his head round, blinks twice profoundly, and says..."Hello and welcome back, Prince Iron Heart. How fare you and yours?"
Thursday, June 11, 2009
gene pool
Two man-sized toads sat on the porch swing, swaying gently. The thunder crashed, and the rain came down like a waterfall in the springtime. "Say, Frank..." one toad croaked to the other..."Do you think the humans will leave these nice front porches here when their whole colonization project goes bottoms up?" "Do you think it's all headed for the crapper, really, Bud?" responded Frank. "Well, they came in here great guns, but things seem to be petering out lately. They got all those empty lots over in the new sub-division, and nothing going up but weeds. Been, what, a year almost since any new folks arrived? I wish they would leave the force-field fences up too....they give us a place to get away from the feathered serpents." Frank flops out his meter long tongue and snags a good one kilo firefly out of the air, swallows it, and burps. Then he puts in his two cents worth...."I think the humans have invested enough here that they aren't just going to walk away....I can see the crowd that's already here staying on to raise up their tadpoles, just coasting along on welfare and food stamps....I don't think their government is going to fly them across space to any place new, and their old place must have been full up, or they wouldn't have sent them here to begin with." ponders Frank. Bud, a biology major, thinks for a few minutes and then observes..."Not much of a gene pool for the long haul, is it? In a couple of generations, there won't be anybody left but some kind of cousin to get hitched to." Frank says..."I don't care what they do inside behind closed doors, as long as they leave up these nifty porch swings....and keep that sewer plant running....things smell a lot better around here since that came online." Bud nodded agreement to that point, as more lightning flashed, thunder hammered, and rain sleeted down. Inside the house, a daddy human and a mommy human were playing peek-a-boo with their single tadpole after dinner, waiting for Galactic Idol to come on the sensory array.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
suitable for habitation
They said that the planet could support human life, but you still had to suit up before you could go outside. There were things in the air that would get in your lungs and start eating them if you weren't careful. The too big sun beat down relentlessly on the little town, and the humidity of the swampy lowlands was off the chart. You couldn't see anybody stirring in the meager downtown....everyone was hunkered down in the carefully maintained artificial atmosphere of their offices and homes. Space pioneers, proud first settlers of a new world.....they might as well still be up on the space station in orbit, or on one of the system ships, prospecting for anything worthwhile.....they hadn't found much worthwhile yet.....the robot systems found minerals and organics and the chemicals they needed to keep life support working, but the economics of the whole thing looked lousy. What did they have that anybody else would want? There was plenty of land.....swamp land mostly....crawling with very large toad-like creatures, that spent most of their time eating very large bug things, and trying to avoid being eaten by really large feathered serpent monstrosities. If you did go outside, past the force-field fences, you had better have your blaster powered up, and you better know how to use it.....So you sat inside and prayed that the commlinks stayed up to speed, so you could at least maintain the illusion that the lonely town was part of the rest of humanity. In the afternoon, dark masses of raincloud would appear, and sheet lightning would flash, and the power would glitch and jitter.....and the thunder could be heard booming, even through the bubble metal walls. On the news, there was talk of budget over-runs, and of bills in the Assembly that might effect the whole Expansionist agenda. Maybe they had come out here for nothing...maybe they would all be shipped back to the teeming and tension-filled planets they had escaped just a few years before. Here at least you got a house on a street in a town, instead of a tiny box in a habitat deep underground or off in orbit somewhere....but somebody had better figure out how to make it all start paying for itself, or maybe the ships would just stop coming....Outside the thunder rolled, and the big frogs pulled themselves up on the front porch, adapting the human intrusion to their own purposes.....
Thursday, June 4, 2009
alcohol jeepster
After an hour or so we had a sort of a buzz on, and Death says.."Come on, check out my new ride. It's cool." So, draining the last beers, we went out and up some stairs and through a sleazy dark lounge of a bar and out to the street. At the closest parking meter to the bar door, there was a really trick looking old CJ it looked like to me. The sucker had dual quads on a V8 that had HEMI stamped on the valve covers. Cheater slicks on the back, and those skinny funny car wheels and tires on the front....We jumped in, fastened our seat belts, and took off towards the Strip....Death popped it onto the freeway and put the pedal towards the metal easy like. The sidepipes burbled in satisfaction as the Torqueflite dumped power to the custom rear end....what a trip! Excuse me, getting carried away....where was I?
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Death was hungry
So we ordered some thick cut ham on sourdough, light on the mayo.....and an icy bucket of long neck brewskis....so we munched and drank and played draw poker for matchsticks, and he filled me in on the blue jade virus thing....Seems like a while back it all started with just a pesky spam problem....everyday you would get invitations to click on Blue Jade something or other....and the spam blockers didn't work on it, it just kept turning up where ever you went.....and then it morphed into really nasty malware in critical programs....horrible stuff started going down, like milk started coming out of scotch dispensers in fancy bars, causing the robobartenders to spin their heads wildly in frustration, smoke pouring out of their ears. Low-fat milk, if you can imagine.....and the lights would keep going on and off....and the monorails would grind to a halt at rush hour....and the garbagebots would dump their loads in the koi ponds in the park....crazy shit like that going on all the time.....it started to upset the economy....spaceships would steer clear of the Wandering City, not wanting to risk the virus.....Authority really had egg on it's face big time....there were not very many happy campers spinning out between the stars anymore, let me tell yuh.....
in the beatnik quarter
"Howyuhdoin'?" asked Death, as he shuffled a greasy deck of cards. "Er, I'm pretty good, thanks." I replied. "Sit down." he says, motioning towards a chair. I sat, and waited. Death came to the point pretty quick...."Word is on the street is that somebody is looking for a certain article....a blue type of article." Death spoke in sort of a tortured growl of a whisper....I leaned forward to try to hear better, and was struck by his rank breath. "Yes," I admitted..."A client is seeking a small blue jade figure....of a geisha." He stopped shuffling the cards, tapped them once on the table, and cut the deck, to reveal the Ace of Spades. "Do you know what happened in this lovely City of ours the last time there was a blue jade type problem?" Death asked politely. "No, not really." I confessed. "Well, it just about all hit the fan big time, back when the Blue Jade Virus showed up in City Systems." The burning eyes glowered across the table. "What does an art figurine have to do with a computer virus?" I puzzled. "That's the $64,000 question, ain't it, binky?" responded the grim one.
on the case
Happily, the parrots of the Wandering City do not feel obliged to talk like pirates, so I was able to understand quiet clearly when the green feathered one landed on the cafe table as I was taking some breakfast at the sidewalk cafe a little way down Baker Street. "Mr. Dodge" the bird began.."At the corner of Apathy and Guile, in the Downside beatnik quarter, at eleven this same morning, someone will await you, tokened by a yellow rose in his lapel. This person has information he might be willing to sell, regarding the whereabouts of a article of a certain hue."I tried to read something from the parrot's expression, but that's hard to do with a bird face. They are great at poker. It was just now eight in the morning, so I had plenty of time to get there. "Very well" I replied to the bird..."I will be glad to keep the meeting." The bird nodded politely and flew away. I knew my partner had a horrible hangover, so I went by myself. The invitation was to me alone anyway, I took it. To get to the Downside beatnik quarter, first you got to go Downside...so around nine-thirty, giving myself plenty of time as is my habit, I set off on the tram to Hellsgate Station, so I could catch the Underground through the gravity reversal to Stygian Station, where I could get a local down Apathy Avenue. I was at Guile Street twenty minutes early, but there was already a shifty looking creature looking furtive and anxious all at once standing in front of the corner taproom, with a yellow bloom in the lapel of his shiny and slightly too small dress jacket. I sidled close to him....he eyed me nervously....when no one else was near, I muttered "The bird sent me." "What?" said the character with the flower....it was some sort of extreme ectomorph biot...it was like talking to a bare skull...."What did you say?" the creature asked. "Well," I said, speaking up a bit..."I was told to meet someone here who might have some information about the Blue Ja...." "Hush" I was interrupted..."Not here on the street! Come with me to a place with some privacy! he advised. Down Guile we went, to a narrow alley entrance. I was beckoned on by a bony finger into the dim alley, and I followed to what looked like the back door to shady establishment (I've seen a few of those in my time, I am not proud to say)....Bony knuckles rapped a complicated sequence beneath the peekhole of the door. An eyeball glared through said peekhole, and the door swang open. "Quick." someone said....we hastened inside....my skinny companion grinned horribly, and pointed me down a narrow hallway. The door at the end of the hall swung open as I neared it, and I entered a low-ceilinged room with no windows....a striking figure was sitting behind a poker table....dark cloak, burning embers for eyes in the depths of the cowl, a scythe leaning against the wall. "Damn" I thought "Looks like I've kept an appointment with the Grim Reaper himself!"
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