Gemütlichkeit

Hello to anyone who still checks this blog! Your perseverance is laudable indeed. I apologize for my radio silence of late; I came back from a week with little to no internet access and entered two weeks of term papers. Having finished those, I will attempt to reconstruct a picture of my travels.

I also apologize because this is going to be a very poor entry comparatively. I have had much greater adventures of late, and these images will have to suffice for now. I may add to this later for posterity's sake, but look out for an actual entry about things I've done recently.

If God Were Italian

Bonsoir.

Lately I've been reading writings from the Italian Renaissance, Petrarch and the like, as well as ancient writings from such artists as St. Augustine. As I am reading these and learning more about the culture of Europe from the Dark Ages and through the Renaissance, especially insofar as it is intertwined with Christianity, I am struck by the many eloquent ways that people find to complain about the world. They find some kind of fulfillment in talking about how their world is a terrible place, and they have a grand old time comparing their lives on Earth to a place they called Heaven, The City of God, the afterlife [etc. etc. whatever.] and so on. Words such as "squalid," "torment"and even "excrementary" are thrown about, while the City of God is graced with loving words like "blissful" and "pure."

These beliefs, though somewhat tempered by the changes in everyday life and collective thought processes, endure in some forms in today's world.

People whose beliefs follow these guidelines maintain that God created the world and everything in it, and also that this universe was God's sole creation. They also hold that to insult God is heresy, which was punishable by death back in the day.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

God did not create Heaven. Heaven is the part of existence that God did not actively design. I, for one, would be extremely insulted if my crowning achievement, my grand masterpiece, my life's work, and the only piece of creativity I produce during my eternal career was slandered and vilified in the way that Christians vilify the Earth. Adding injury to insult is that "I" created the very people who are insulting me as well; I even dedicated all of my work to them, just to have it thrown back in my face!

One would think that these devout believers would take more time to appreciate God's wonderful handiwork than to praise God Himself, who, being eternal, had no hand in His own creation. He doesn't even influence his own being, and so by praising Him, you are not actually praising Him, you are praising the forces of reality at work at maintaining His existence.

To make the absurdity of this a bit more clear, I will place it in analogy. You wouldn't walk up to Leonardo da Vinci and say "Oh Leo, thou art so wonderfully awesome, please bestow upon me thy holy autograph," then go burn his paintings, say they were pieces of bullcrap anyway, then get down on your knees and vigorously ... praise him some more. Our friend Leo put his mind, heart and soul into his works; they are who he is, they define him. By destroying them you are horribly censuring him, but then you turn around and look him in his broken, enraged eyes and adulate him profusely for simply being.

Then, to extend the metaphor, when he takes you by the neck and slams you against the wall of his lovely stone villa near Florence and starts screaming at you in Italian, you shake your head in bewilderment and say "da Vinci works in mysterious ways. Who are we, mortals, to dare attempt a guess at what he may be trying to tell us?"

However, the analogy begins to falter at this point. Signor da Vinci was very prolific as an artist and as a scientist. According to popular belief, our world was God's sole creation (though I suspect that other planets were also involved). We, or those whose beliefs fall into patterns such as these, are totally throwing rotten veggies at poor Jehovah's only work ever. How do you think He feels about that?

"Mysterious ways." Bah!

Love thy planet.

DJ

A Canterbury Tale

Good Evening,

I apologize for the long space between now and my last entry. There was a temporal rift, and... long story short, I had no time. But now that I'm sitting here buried under two glorious two feet of crystalline oxygen dihydride, I feel that there is sufficient time floating around in my arena for me to give you all a decent post.

The truth is, I'm writing a story.

It's a fiction, though it is very rapidly morphing of its own accord into a science-fiction. I had absolutely no idea until last night just where the story was headed, and though I am still mostly in the dark, I do have one or two of the main plot points figured out (or at least started).

No, I will not be posting any teasers or any part of this story. Not, at least, until it is closer to having a point, or it is digitized, as it is currently written in pencil on about 2o double-sided sheets of lined paper. At the point at which these criteria are satisfied, I will consider posting it online, though it may be on one of my other sites, with a link posted here.

It is because of this story that I am writing this post. While I was flailing around my workspace with a pen trying to find places to write all of my rampant ideas down, I realized that I needed (and was clearly missing) information that will be vitally important to the universe I am endeavoring to create in this brainchild of mine. I am going to take a leap of faith here: I am going to ask you, my readers, for this information.

1: Have we (well, scientists) located and verified other planets in the local cosmos that have Earth-like properties?
2: Which stars are they near, if indeed they have been found?
3: Can a Blue Giant star have an Earth-like planet? How about a Red Dwarf? What type of star is the Sun?
4: Why do most Earth plants have green chlorophyll? Does it have something to do with the solar electromagnetic spectrum of light emission?
5: How important is it that hemoglobin be based on a transition metal? What is the connection between that metal and the composition of the planet the creature lives on (hypothetically speaking)?
6: Is it possible for a humanoid species to evolve without the presence of trees? I would think not...

If you have answers to any of these inquiries, please leave a comment on this blog, or send me a message on any of my other sites.

Oh, also, I'm on LiveJournal now, username "perpl3xity," though there is not much on there. I will probably only be using LJ as an outlet for any latent fangirlery... But if that interests you at all, don't hesitate.

Peace,
DJ

The World Needs More Skateboarders

Happy Holidays, readers.

I would like to acknowledge the growing respect that I hold for the sport of skateboarding. I am not saying that it is an especially sophisticated sport, nor is it mainstream or flashy. However, as I was watching a skateboarding competition a day or so ago, I noticed something that is seen in few other sports, especially in exhibitions as competitive as those that I have seen. I saw, in each participant, a great awe and respect for every other player in the competition. When they were being interviewed by journalists on the scene, they mentioned the other competitors without fail, and said how honored they were to be in competition with them. They would mention that yes, they had been working hard and they would really like to win the competition, but it would really be OK if they didn't because they would have been fairly beaten by someone with greater skill who had also worked hard. When they were not being individually interviewed, they showed solid comradery and unparalleled sportsmanship.

In skateboarding competitions (and in similar sporting competitions such as surfing and snowboarding) there is always an extremely diverse group of competitors. They hail from all around the planet in a patchwork of accents and ethnicities, always showing great respect for one another as athletes and peers, and a great admiration for the sport to which they devote their time and talent. Also, skateboarding is one of the few sports that allows people of all ages and both genders to compete and be successful as equals. As skateboarding is a technical sport involving very little brute force, men and women compete together, and children as young as eight or nine years old are doing the same tricks that their 25-year-old co-competitors, sharing the same ramps and high-fives.

You could see that the people that were not actively competing or were waiting their turn were watching the competitors and enjoying it immensely. When someone did something especially good, they were thrilled for them, as if they were watching their favorite athlete or even their sibling doing something amazing. In other sports, this would never happen. The other competitors would be watching to find ways to take them down, and would see them as obstacles in their path to greatness. Skateboarders seem to be just as happy to see other people in their sport succeed as they are to see themselves. Even so, there is always a winner, and every competition brings forth winners and great successes for most people who participate.

If the whole world were run in this way, I wonder what it would be like. Very different, I suppose.

Peace,
DJ

Shameless Self-Promotion

Some links to my other frequented sites.

www.twitter.com/i_am_dj

www.lardbars3.deviantart.com

This Could Get MAD Interesting... Guest-Starring AJ

HOWDY.

Ok, so there is this concept I was introduced to a few weeks ago that really caught my attention. It is called the Higgs boson, or "the God Particle." In the way it was explained to me, the Higgs boson is a massless particle comprised of pure energy (read: string theory) that somehow causes things like quarks, electrons, protons and neutrons to have the property of mass. Supposedly, it is truly the smallest particle; its lack of mass makes it so that it does not have any smaller components that make it up. That means that every tiny particle that makes up the entire universe is completely suffused with... God.

That also means that such things as thoughts are divine, because they involve the interaction of particles in the nerves of the brain, through the movement of neurotransmitters and potassium and sodium ions, all of which are made up of hundreds of thousands of Higgs bosons.

Complex things such as music are as holy as the deity himself in that they involve so many different forms of the divine reality working in symphony (pun intended) to exist. First, the nerve impulses of the musician, then the movement of their holy muscles to the movement of the instrument, which produces vibrations that move through the air, knocking the gas particles together in patterns until they get to the human ear, a complex contraption in itself, from whence the human brain detects it through a series of nerve impulses, at which point conscious thought takes over, interpreting the sounds into a song, provoking thoughts of aesthetics and beauty, that are in themselves heavenly. All of these parts involve hundreds of trillions of Higgs boson particles.

This brings to mind extremely complicated questions as to the nature of consciousness. Are these not-particles self-aware? Do they have something to do with life and death? Maybe they are connected to the fact that all animals are born with knowledge: instincts. They are built into the animal’s genes based on the behaviors and such that worked for their parents and ancestors ad infinitum. Genes are made of sugars and phosphates and nucleotides, which are made of atoms, which are caused by our friend the boson.

Also a consideration is that maybe the parents aren’t the ones that give the instincts to their progeny- maybe it is the childrens’ own boson-thoughts coming back to them by way of the parents, such as when the mother eats when pregnant. She takes in material containing bosons, and those that were “part” of the child in a “past life” are integrated into the new child, along with those of millions of other beings, which allows them to process new information that enters the mind after birth. Therefore it appears that the environment molds who you become, on the physical and emotional level, from the time you are a zygote.

If everything is completely MADE of God, then does that mean we’re already IN heaven? Should we be like the aborigines and worship Mother Nature? [hail yea]
If exfoliation is us removing dead skin cells, then does that mean a hurricane is like Momma Nature taking a shower?

Obviously, should the Higgs boson be discovered and verified beyond any objective doubt, it would have enormous religious implications. Having “God” be “proven” as an object, omnipresent in all things, neither male nor female, would be a revelation for some religious sects, but for others it would be devastating. Here is a sampling of the possible reactions of modern religions.

Quakers and Shintos: HA! I TOLD YOU SO! Nature is God, balance is God, that of God in everyone! OH. I mean…love thy neighbor :)

Hindus- well um…we were kind of right, right? Technically…there is more than one god…right? And Reincarnation! BAM. I was once a heifer, I’m not taking this bull! (LOL)

Christians, Muslims, Jews- …shit. Well there goes everything.
Christians- does that mean Jesus WAS God and that he never left earth?
Muslims- that means so was Mohammad. Bitch.
Jews- and that means everyone you killed in the Crusades was also God.
All- God DAMMIT!

Wicca and Pagan- Well sure… Lots of Gods.

Scientologists- Cool.

Unitarian Universalists- AAAHAHAHAHA! There it is, right in our name! UNIVERSALISTS. AAAAHAHAHA!

Buddhists- well now that we know this much, I guess we’re ALL enlightened. Everyone is the Buddha. Huh.

Satanists- We’re based on Christianity, so we’re done… crap, no one goes to hell because hell is god…craaaap.

Communists- COMMON PROPERTY, bitches. That includes the hi-def TV in yo’ family room! That thing is GOD. And SO AM I. so hand it over. In the name of God, hand it over!
Everyone- But you don’t have a religion… And I’m God too.
Communists- Let me reiterate. I AM GOD. This IS SPARTA!
Everyone- o.0

So think about that for a bit. Let me know what comes up.

Peace,

DJ

Co-Authored by AJ

Human Nature...*sigh.*

Oh hai gaiz.

Yesterday I was channel surfing before bed (so I could record things on the DVR to watch in moments of boredom. You get it.) and I saw a Nova program about weapons in outer space. I went to watch it today, and even though it was a perfectly high quality production and splendidly informative to boot, I simply couldn't bring myself to finish watching it.

It was about the development and theory of high-efficiency weapons to be used in outer space and on nearby celestial bodies such as the moon once they are colonized.

And it got me to thinking...

We haven't even reached space yet. We have scratched the surface of orbital technology and landed people on the moon, and we're working on landing Mars. With the exception of the International Space Station, we have no way of sustaining human life outside of Earth's atmosphere for any useful length of time. We have no way to transport people or freight out of the atmosphere or through space. We have light-years of growth ahead of us before we can achieve any serious space missions...

... And yet we are working diligently at finding ways to wage bloody warfare in the void.

I really think we need to grow up as a species. Our system of using warfare for achieving ends seems extremely infantile to me, like a squabble between toddlers over who will use the soccer ball first.

This also reminds me of when I saw District 9 this summer. Are humans really as dumb as they seem in that movie? I mean come on.

A sentient, intelligent species comes to earth. They don't hurt anyone. They don't cause trouble. They keep to themselves and achieve their goals quietly and without fuss. They clearly know tons more than us about engineering and space travel given that they traveled from another star system and got here in a year and a half (they have achieved extended space flight and we haven't). All they really did wrong was look like giant shrimp.

And instead of setting up talks with them, allowing them some unused space to camp, and attempting to learn as much from them as possible before they leave, we confine them to squalid concentration camps, place unfair laws on their insectoid heads, and kill them off wherever we can. And get them addicted to cat food.

Really now. Are we really that bad?

I really hope not.

What if WE'RE the Klingons in the Star Trek episode of life??
*sigh*

Peace,
DJ