Tender Discoveries in a Brutal Life

For over 1,500 years, the above-pictured Roman-era skeletal couple have been holding hands--or to be more precise, bones, they've been holding bones, digits, carpals, joints--defying the unassailable wrath of time and decay in tiny but no less significant ways, through the only measure we small human animals can: through symbols, through metaphor, and through sheer obduracy. To read the full story of the archeology dig, check it out here. Of course the full story is not, is never, cannot even tap into the full story. The people who buried these two thought, at the time, that it was important, for whatever symbolic or metaphysical reason, to arrange them as such, to signify to others at the time that while death may have its way with everyone at some point, while it may obliterate and decimate everything substantial in this world as we conceive of it, the honoring and placement of these two is meant to signify that there was and still is, long after they've ceased to exist and disappear into sheer nothingness, long after submitting to the influence of time, something remarkable and brave about the way they lived and they way they died, i.e. together, in union, a force of two individuals pitted against the eroding shoreline of the world, staring oblivion directly in the face, hand-in-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder. The woman, wearing a bronze ring, is set with her eyes staring at her male companion while her partner, whose head was once turned in the direction of the woman, has since rolled and lolled over to the opposite direction. But originally, they were positioned so that they were staring at each other from behind dead eyes. In these times--times of disease, plague, antiquated times where health was a complete and utter crapshoot--it wasn't uncommon for couples or family members to die at proximal, similar, or even at the exact same time. This finding occurs five years after another couple, this time 5-6,000 years old, found in Mantua, the site on which the old bard's Romeo et Juliette is set, also locked in a similar if not even more loving and intense embrace. This burial, much, much older than the one with which this post began, was plenty more rare and intriguing, at least at the time, as double burials in the neolithic period were considered rare. The caveat here is one of those "as far as we know" sort of deals, where our knowledge on neolithic burials is based on an embarrassingly thin lot and, for all we know, double burials were as frequent as ever. Nevertheless, pace Voltaire, doubt is preferred to certainty (with which I agree) and those speciations of humans who existed 5,000 years ago couldn't possibly have known the cultivated, advanced, and sophisticated forms of love, ardor, intimacy, obsession, and romance in which we dabble now in our cosmopolitan epochs, and they couldn't have possibly with all their primal, tribal, prehistoric characteristics found any use with passionately developed relationships and sustained feeling, they couldn't have possibly felt like we feel about our loved ones and the need to symbolically concretize those feelings long after death, the emotions they felt couldn't have been as complicated and nuanced as my own (with which I virulently disagree). It's embarrassing, egocentric, and insensate to think others could not have loved as hard and as longingly as you, could not have been as afraid as you, and could not have needed the hand, the torso, the shoulder, or the body of another to pad the abrasive pain we must endure in our regular per-diem lives, even if those people happen to be from millennia ago. It is, in fact, that kind of arrogance, a denunciation of all that from which we come and a gross example of ingratitude at the wonderful examples of simple living done by those whom came before and paved such exemplary paths, that ensures our futures will be more difficult than they need to be and situates a yawning, negligent distance between us and our historical antecedents, from whom we can learn much.

Wealth in Rain

Insects, bugs, crawlers, and the like are still, to my mind, some of the most fascinating creatures on the planet, a dizzyingly spinning geodesic globule planet full of, I admit, engrossing, enrapturing creatures. But it's the insects (not to mention a few reptiles, lizards, and animals, but only a few) which retain a kind of primordial, dinosaurian, prokaryotic look about them that makes them so richly present and reminds us, as people, how far the planet has come, from where it has come and where we have thus arrived (not, however, to imply that we have arrived at anything permanent or fixed), from where we have come, and where, potentially, it (the planet) and we might be going (let us hope against the evidence that this direction is auspicious). Miroslaw Swietek recently captured a slew of macro images of rain-sprinkled insects, taking the photos early in the morning when the dew was still clinging to the insects in his native village in Poland, when the insects are still torporous and immune to the intrusion of the camera. The result is simply gorgeous and can be found at the link provided. A few images have been provided by moi for interest-piquing purposes only. 



Notice how the water magnifies the numerous high-powered lenses of the dragonfly's eye, showing how honeycombed and clustered they are. More lens = more pixels = better and more blisteringly precise vision.

The dragonflies, thanks to their compoundness and complexity, are consistently awestriking. The subtle goat-tee of bubbled waterdrops is lovely.

The bejeweled beetle!

Wholesome Imagistic Goodness

The sad truth is you can't rely on televised news to usher forth anything remotely interesting or educational or anything to remind one that not everything is completely falling apart from the ground up these days. And maybe they can't, maybe they don't have the time. You'd think in the cushiony, consequence-free ether of existence in which 24-hours news syndications thrive they could somehow manage to fit in something that wasn't entirely doom-and-gloom-related, but I suppose not. Instead they toss (more like sneak) these stories onto the Science or Space or Technology sections on their websites, as if anyone who wasn't already interested in those topics was going to take a peek. In any event, this weekend was the first Total Solar Eclipse of the new year. And while those of us in the States couldn't see it, that didn't stop others from chasing after it and snapping some incredible photography in the South Pacific on which the eclipse set its gleaming, electric stage. While the total Solar Eclipse was exclusive in visibility to Easter Island, Cook Island, and surrounding areas of Southern Chile and Argentina, other parts of the Eclipse, like the crescent phase pictured below, could be seen from a large portion of Western South America.

Valparaiso, Chile

Moving from the sunkissed beaches of the Pacific Isles to the cold chambering frontier of the cosmos, where the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe has since February of 2004 been commissioned deep into the universe to ultimately rendezvous and study the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, while in the meantime grabbing as much photographic data on its passings and mishaps as possible. On Saturday, Rosetta flew by the asteroid Lutetia and managed to capture what might be some of the most detailed images of an asteroid to date.

The crater-pulverized, pockmarked irregular shaped rock is likely leftover from the birth of the solar system. "Tonight we have seen a remnant of the solar system's creation," Holger Sierks of the Planck Institute said.

The Rosetta probe passed by the eccentric and rotating rock at the dizzying speed of 9 miles per second and inched within 1,965 miles of Lutetia in the asteroids orbital path around Mars. 6 years and 4 months into its mission thus far, the hope with Rosetta is that it will help unlock the secrets of how our solar system looked before planets formed, 4600 million years ago when nothing other than teems of comets and asteroids surrounded the sun. If things work out as predicted, the Rosetta probe will meet with the Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, upon which it will place a lander and the two will then journey together piggybacked, harpooned to each other; they'll speed through space for several months as they approach Jupiter's orbit and then head for the sun, on which Rosetta will finally touch down after many years of intergalactic voyaging to take samples of our solar system's governing star, by far its chief component and its centerpiece, one of our main sources of light as well as many of our problems--the same sun without which we would not even exist.


Just as I was writing all that I received an update with another picture. An even more beautiful one, in my opinion, thanks to its scope and distance and frigid emptiness. The European Space Agency website has the rest of the images and a remarkable video to boot.

Lutetia--soaring, peeling layers through space--with Saturn way off the in the background, just hanging out, keeping it real.

This Month in Space: June

I've no qualms admitting that when one month ends and another begins I get downright childishly giddy with feverishness and anticipatory glee, knowing full well that another batch of sinewy and insanely-precise gorgeousness from space will be put together by a handful of websites, MSNBC's Science and Technology's oftentimes one of best and most comprehensive.

Clouds skitter above Papua New Guinea's Manam Volcano while thin white vaporous volcanic discharge issue forth from the mouth itself

Hot young stars--and not in a celebratory way. Here's a fecund star-forming region whose subzero, frosty glow is reflected and re-directed by the surrounding gas and clouds.

An aural pyrotechnic show put on display overtop the South Pole. Ethereal and tender.


And maybe I'm just a major sucker for chiaroscuro, but I adore this one, the light and dark composition. Fucking haunting and bare and solemnly moving.

Saturn's ice-composed, crater-hammered, and wisp- and dust-covered moon (and 15th largest moon in the entire Solar System) Dione shown in stark, almost unreal precision against the lazy, blurry backdrop of Titan, one of Saturn's other moons. And the void of space around it, that freezing void, in the center of which Dione is suspended like a levitating yogi.

There's plenty more where these came from, all of which are worth taking in on their own right. Check them out here.

Alcohol & Art

Just in time for the weekend, right here. And no, this has nothing to do with the stupid mythopoeia regarding mostly-in-the-minority self-destructive artists and addiction. Florida State University chemistry labs has been whipping up some gorgeous work for a company called Bevshots, whom quite literally ferment art out of your favorite alcohol and/or cocktail. Below, for instance, is what a little bit of Chablis would look like hung up on one of your walls. Pretty, huh? Right. And tasty. So now you can sip on some Chablis whilst admiring your hung mural of Chablis, discussing with friends both how good this Chablis is in your hand and also how you managed to procure an artistic expression of Chablis, getting all meta in the 21st century and subsequently blowing the rickety minds of everyone within thirty feet of you. 

How they do it: taken at 1000x magnification on old school 35 mm. cameras, this is a labor of love, folks, one in which patience goes beyond virtue into simply a part of the process. In order to get the perfect shot, this can take up to three months and upwards of 300 camera clicks.

Your standard red table wine, looking like fluorescent stems of some kind of beautiful faunal growth.
What we're seeing here are basically crystallized carbohydrates. Now that they've crystallized, they've become full-on sugars and glucose. After squeezing from a pipette a droplet of liquor or cocktail or lager onto a slide, the liquid is then allowed to dry on this airtight container, the drying of which can take up to four weeks alone; once dry, it's then placed for examination under a high-powered microscope with an old school 35 mm. attached. Depending on the number of impurities (pure vodka, for instance, has very few impurities, as compared to a pina colada, which is naturally chockfull of them), the dried constituent parts may fall apart or not dehydrate properly, which accounts for some samples requiring so many attempts.

The Piña Colada, due to its inherent complex sugars and citric acids, behaves like a doll and dries out well, thus it looks spectral when glimpsed through a microscope--winding up here resembling a very alien, very twisted, and very trippy butterfly pattern. Check out how there's almost an origin of left-to-right movement here, the dark brown spot in the top left-hand corner from which the rest of the image sprawls out.

The intense, florid, breezy, wild shapes and kaleidoscopic colors come from the chemists shining light on top and through the bottom of the slide, both of which seem to ignite these potent samples into a whole other realm of colorization, a sinewy world of molecularly psychotropic pigments capable of pleasing both your Fink Floyd-fan friend of your abstract art-fan friend. 
A tasty and refreshing White Russian, languid-streaked and bleary; a devastatingly disoriented image of a planet and its outer atmosphere.

The Irish pale lager is traumatizing in a way, alien and raining apocalyptical brecciated coal.

Check out the rest of them, and there are plenty more fascinating ones, here at Art. Distilled. Oh, and I hope wherever you are you were able to catch the lunar eclipse tonight. I was hoping for the fog to keep away for one night but no such luck. It's a dense topo of ghosts out there right now, murky and pale, foghorns and all. Major solar eclipse coming up in about a month, though, so let's keep our eyes on the skies. 

The Art of Science (And How Oil Kills)

Nick Bax's optical trap, a wound up laser beam able to hold microscopic particles stable in three dimensions.

Every year Princeton University holds its Art of Science awards, and MSNBC's Science and Technology department has posted some of the award-winning images, most if not all of which are pretty damn wondrous. The above image, Bax's laser beam, is in actuality a failure of what he was trying to do. He was attempting to get the beam to appear as round and cylindrical as possible, but what he wound up with was this gunmetal gray embossed, ripple-effected cardiod surrounded by molecular-life-looking silica beads. Failure has never looked so beautiful, so hopeful. 

A spherical object submerged in viscous silicon oil and the striated flow patterns caused by this; Princeton's Shelley Chan, Josue Sznitman and Alexander Smits.
This might be one of the more splendidly disturbing--and timely, given what's going on in the southeast--images. Silicon oil is 5,000 times more viscid than water, and though that may result in some stunning patternistic imagery here (think of extremely tiny interlayers of chromospheric gas) but one can't help but be reminded and think immediately of the oil spill off the Gulf. You can visually see here, in a kind of clarity and depth not often seen, just how thick this stuff is by looking at the flow pattern and the miniscule layers formed after something as small and tiny as a sphere puts a tincture in, not even it's middle, but just the oil's surface. Imagine, for instance, a brown pelican submerged in this; or rather, imagine your own head plunged beneath this surface (which might be an arguably just comeuppance for a few of these promulgators of oil). Stepping down now from the moral soapbox, aesthetically, I love the gradation moving from yellow to red to blue, three of my favorite colors especially when thrown together. 

For my favorite out of the sixteen award winners, though, it's a toss amongst the two pictures above and this last dazzling muralesque color-emulsion right below, which almost manages to look like some recently-unearthed drippy Fauvist piece or maybe even an early print of Picasso's. There's even small shades of a certain Dutchman's Starry Night in there, or just his skies in general. A total, sheer pleasure, this one right here.

Magnetic reconnection converts magnetic energy into particle energy, with the magnetic field being confined to the small red islands and the high energy particles as yellow sperm-like squiggles swimming around the blobs. It's astrophysics stuff, but it looks almost identical to biological structures and the same bursts of energy found there. Princeton's Lorenzo Sironi and Anatoly Spitkovsky.

Check out the rest of the images here; they're all pretty arresting.

We Are Made of Stars

20 years seems to be an ongoing theme these days; in a world of fleeting trends and fads and impermanence, 20 years is indeed a benchmark of sorts. This was a confusing and capricious time for beginnings, '89 and '90, as we prepared to enter not just simply another decade but the terminal decade of the century, after which nobody was quite sure what would happen. The Cold War dragged on to its exhausting (and exhausted) end; the Gulf War rose its ugly head; Ireland was awash with sectarian violence; and the first McDonalds in Russia turned on its Golden Arches. Happy 20th Russo-Micky D's! Also celebrating 20 years in orbit: The Hubble, which since its ascension into space has captured and divinely sent back to us hundreds of thousands of images, many if not all of which have led to innumerable papers and research topics (age of the universe, how to detect planets out of our solar system, etcetera), topics that would have been nearly impossible to tackle without the aid and interstellar reach of Hubble's panoptic line of vision. Hubble's journey hasn't been all smooth sailing, though, and were it not for its (and NASA's) resiliency in escaping a few near-death experiences and other unceremonious moments, we'd be on the short end.

This image below is one smaller excised image of an assortment of stars belonging to the much larger globular cluster Omega Centauri. In this sample alone there are over 100,000 stars. The entire Omega Centauri contains nearly 10 million stars. This is just one cluster of stars in one small fraction of space 16,000 light-years away from us. Between 10 billion and 12 billion years old, these stars have witnessed plenty. Think of them like our great, great, great, great, great (multiplied exponentially) grandparents, under whose placid eyes we are allowed to dance and stare up in awe. 

Here: the full star cluster to which the above sample belongs, with the sampled portion outlined in blue.


In honor of its 20th year, a new batch of images has been released from which the above two are samples, along with some other beauties. These are arguably some of Hubble's most probing, precise, and dismaying images, as the satellite has just begun to hit its stride in strength. One image in particular is quite possibly the most wondrous and exciting yet, the world in which it depicts a seemingly unreal vista taken right out of the pages of science ficiton. Also, a list of Hubble's most classically iconic and important images has been compiled, all for our viewing pleasure. Take these fuckers in.

Of the top images over the past two decades, this is easily one of my keepers: the stately and pristine Sombrero Galaxy, whose center is a brilliant and luminous orb, shown like never before.


There's nothing magical about the planet in which we live. But its sheer gorgeousness is pretty fucking stupefying and jaw-dropping nonetheless.

Euclid's Illusion

I'm reading a fantastic book on art theory, scientific theory, and the strange, often untold union between these two called Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light . Overloaded with corollaries, probing insights, and thought-provoking speculation, the book is a wonderful tug at the imagination. For a master in neither physics or art, the author demonstrates a firm neophyte's understanding. The idea presented here in this book is that art and physics are more interrelated than the two know, something I've always thought myself. Both are ostensibly concerned with the nature of being, with our existence, and with trying to assist in the understanding of our existence. Their methodologies may differ, but their goals are the same. 

In an early passage, the author is discussing Aristotle and Euclid and how through them so much of what we now know of in terms of space and logic is stable, how we've managed to craft a linear understanding of our world and time; yet, the author writes, we mustn't overlook where they erred. "Everyone learns this system," he writes, "of thinking so early and it works so well that is is very difficult to see its deficiencies. But, if truth is the correspondence between appearance and reality, then there are some glaring inconsistencies in this system. Straight lines are strikingly absent in nature. If you take a walk in the woods, it is apparent that there is virtually nothing that is ruler-straight.  Instead, all naturally ocurring forms are curved and arabesque...Only tree trunks and the perpendicular alignment of the human form standing upright upon the earth offer a commonly seen vertical that approximates a plumb line. Despite this direct evidence of our senses, we continue to connect everything with straight lines." And here's my favorite line: "The nineteenth-century Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix once speculated, 'It would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains.'" 

And 

he

continues...

"The Western adherence to the illusion that the link between objects space and events in time is a straight line is similar to belief in a religious dogma. Just as all the major religions of the world begin with the assumption that beneath the flux of our sensations there lies a unifying principle, so science had discovered in Euclid's rectilinear system its corollary..." He then goes on to clarify a little bit: "To say, however, that nature does not contain any perfect obvious straight lines is not entirely correct. To most peoples' vision, there is one: the uncluttered meeting of sea and sky--the horizon as seen upon the water. The horizon is the central orienting line in our experience. Pilots and sailors who are lost in a fog and cannot see the horizon frequently report a strange disorientation regarding up, down, front, back, right, and left. This naturally occurring straight line is so important that I speculate its ready visibility had a powerful effect on seacoast civilizations. Perhaps the reason that linear alphabets, linear logic, and linear space have championed principally by the seafaring empires of classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Renaissance Venice, and Elizabethan England is that their inhabitants continually had nature's straightest line in plain sight. This sharp crease was missing from everyday experience in the land-based civilizations of ancient Egypt, Asia Minor, and China. Perhaps its absence is the reason these empires failed to develop a widely used alphabet, or to organize space and time in a linear fashion."

Okay. The point is: as an artist and a writer, time is a spectral interest to me, thus why I felt it apropos to cite such lengthy and verbose passages. But I find them excessively interesting. We consider time linear, but it simply is not. Not here and especially not outside of this planet. Leave Earth and time all of a sudden gets warped and twisted and beat the fuck down. Yet we demand our novels to be linear, chronological; we demand the time demonstrated within, if not linear, to make sense, whatever that means (when did time or anything about our lives "make sense"?). Do we want our works to "make sense" in pedestrian terms or do we want to demonstrate our characters' truth, per whatever is necessary to the story? If a story demands fragmentation and jump-cuts through time and it can be done with aplomb, well then why the hell not? If time is essentially not linear, what's the pressing urge to represent it as such, other than stubbornness and tradition and pandering? Our brains don't even work that way. If you think you think linearly, consider more deeply. Our brains, small time-machines on their own, transport us almost constantly from the past to the present to the future. We exist, if not in body then at least in brain, in all three of these realms. There is no singular space from which we sit for all of our adult lives. 

And I suppose this always comes down to what we want or what I want fiction to be? Is it a mindless escape rife with predictable melodrama that can be read while cooking dinner or is it an elegant, engrossing, and maybe sometimes complicated art that demands attention? These things need not be mutually exclusive; we've made them so. I don't know why they can't be the same thing, why things that are complicated, difficult, and perhaps even educational can't be considered a good time. Aren't our actual lives mindless and escapist enough? Cannot our art be simultaneously challenging and entertaining? 

10,000 Feet Under the Sea

Two kinds of stories I'm an irresistible sucker for: those that deal with prehistoric life and those that deal with the ocean, especially the bottommost regions. This explains why the recent discovery of animals living healthfully, consistently, and quite happily without oxygen way, way, way below the Mediterranean Sea has grabbed my attention with the kind of intense clench that it has. 

This is the first time a life form like this has ever been found. Ever. It's truly remarkable. Yes, an array of single-cellular organism who've been able to subsist without oxygen have been found but never before has a multi-cellular, complex organism of the same kind been rounded up. Until now. 

More fascinating, the findings were not simply evidence of former anaerobic life, but life that is brilliantly alive now, this instant, going on living without oxygen, deep below, while we prattle about above, doing this whole inhale/exhale thing (so pedestrian). Some even contain eggs. The investigators were only expecting to find viruses and bacteria; imagine their excitement at finding actual life! Less than about 1mm. in length, these things resemble the tiniest of jellyfish, which makes them extraordinarily creepy. 

What's wonderful about a discovery like this is that it sheds--more like pours--light upon what life might have been like on this crazy planet of ours when oxygen levels were much, much lower, a time when--quite brazenly--animals only like this could have survived, animals to which we respectfully owe our very existence. Without life so formidable in the face of a planet so inhospitable to aerobic-based life at the time, how wonderful that these little grotesque guys worked for us? And what about the possibility, then, of other Metazoan life forms living or having lived at some point in history in other anoxic or low-oxygen settings on other planets? The questions this finding opens up are too great to detail.

Oh, Neil

"I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people in the street and say, "Have you heard this?" Neil deGrasse Tyson, oft-known planetary murderer of Pluto and brilliantly charming and wise astrophysicist. 

I could listen to Neil wax scientifically for hours and, in fact, have done just that on numerous occasions. He coined the word Manhattanhenge. He's a notable speaker on The Universe series and is now the host and brainchild behind PBS' NOVA scienceNOW. The work he's doing, not just for actual scientific development and research, but for making science exciting (which it always has been) and approachable to laymen is extraordinary. The sheer beauty and ingenuity of someone like deGrasse Tyson is that he seems equally at home on the Colbert Report trading jocular barbs with Colbert as he does on The Science Channel, discussing the unfathomable intricacies of string theory; it is this duality of his that makes him such a consummate scientist. He breaks barriers. Also, you listen to this guy talk about his work and it's just infectious; this is a man who truly loves this world, this life, this planet, this everything, and if we can obtain even a small fraction of his enthusiasm and hope for this world and our species, we're all better off. 

To simply keep up with the prolific dude, who seems to work just about as constantly as the same universe to which he devotes himself: Tyson Explains Life & the Universe

Brand New Views of a Universe That Gets Prettier With Age

Two months ago, NASA launched their Wide-field Infared Survey Explorer (WISE for short) 325 miles up from earth, where by design this probing telescope scans the sky for objects and matter that is typically hard to see: asteroids, comets, galaxies, as well as objects that might potentially pose a threat to our dear (if somewhat mismanaged) planet. Since then, it's sent back somewhere in the likes of 200,000 plus images, some of which NASA has recently been so kind as to publish for our astonishment. The images give us a new and comprehensively stunning perspective on the immensity of the Andromeda Galaxy, the burnt infared path of a comet hurling through space, as well as a bird's eye view of stellar chaos. We're so lucky (and arguably unworthy) to live in such an amazingly beautiful world that if you let it will ignite your curiosity and imagination all your life.

I could stare at this one for days; the detail is absolutely mind-boggling. You can actually see the dusty arms of the spiraling galaxy! The blue denotes new mature stars while red and yellow represent dust from large, newborn ones. Lovely. So lovely.


This one too. Well, all of them to be honest, but this one foremost. Quick story about this comet found first in 2007: after spending billions of years spinning around in one of the more cold spherical clouds within our solar system, it was suddenly knocked out of its orbit and sent loose in a new direction closer to the sun.

Get Thee To a Sink & Slake!

Monthly Explorations. January 2010

Every month MSNBC Technology & Science puts together a slideshow collection of the month's most stupefyingly beautiful photographs taken of space. This one might be my favorite: Saturn and its immensity dwarfing Rhea, one if its uncanny sixty-one moons. The shadow of another moon is visible to the bottom left of Saturn's ring at the edge of the planet's disk, a small dark dot. 

This too: a painfully detailed and intense image of the Tarantula Nebula, the largest stellar nursery considered to be part of our "local neighborhood" of galaxies. The Tarantula Nebula has such magnitude and ferocious luminosity that if it were any closer to us--as close as, say, the Orion Nebula--the nebula would indeed cast canvassing shadows down on Earth. Contained within this nebula (those blue sparkles) is a star cluster, the most massive of which have already long since exploded. Taken here is arguably the most detailed image ever of Tarantula.

And for a quick rundown of recent news: Obama's budget dastardly crosses off any hopes for near-future trips to the moon, giving Russia and India the go-ahead as we direct our focus elsewhere despite the sizable chunks of money already spent in Bush's ill-conceived 2020 return to the moon plan; dinosaurs (yet again boosting dino to bird linkage) had slight red plumage; nuclear fusion is looking more and more possible; and I for one don't give a damn about an iPad or any further extraneous developments in too much technology. Go for a walk, people. And to quote the Jack Forkheimer, "keep looking up."

Drawn-Out Intervals of Engrossing Boredom

New Scientist recently wrote an excellent piece on the  truth behind the excitement commonly associated and expected in scientific exploration.  The inside scoop revealed? It's boring. Astonishing discoveries aside, "Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring." 

What immediately struck me in these opening paragraphs and caused me to reread them and by extension the rest of the article in a different mode of thought, was how analogous this was to art, to writing, fiction in particular (but only in particular because that's where my preoccupations are aimed by default and obsession). Books, like the scientific discovery (aren't books discoveries?), like the new knowledge or insight into humanity gained (can't and don't books provide both of these?), are the embodiment of stimulation, intellectual hunger and sated curiosity, filling those fortunate enough to read with a sense of the thrilling exploration of self, society, and world. Behind the pages and behind the covers and behind the sentences, for the artist, things aren't quite the same.

Sure, there is excitement in the process; there has to be, there must be. If there isn't exhilaration somewhere in the process, the praxis of writing daily, then you're doing it wrong. A colleague of mine recently put it this way: "process must be fun." One must find a way to adore and take from that boredom and frustration a kind of hunter's patient anticipation, hungry for the find, constantly searching. Without a doubt, though, the process can be a painstaking one filled with, as the article pointed out, dead ends, revision, confusion, bad coffee, long and plodding journeys marked with precipitous highs and hollow, lonely lows; on the other hand, when things are rolling, the adrenaline soars, pulls down clouds, a world-birthing joy. But it is, to use a well-worn cliche, a labor of love. Like science, all good art is an exploration, an experiment with the unknown that may or may not prove successful. Before an author can even begin to worry if his or her book will be critically successful or commercially successful, or even published, the author must worry whether or not everything will come together, whether the variables will add up and work, whether the experiment (because what is a book or a poem if not an artistic experiment?) will come to fruition, at least to the artist's designs. Characters come into the story that never spark to life the way they were envisioned and are axed; the point of view isn't working so it gets changed, a solitary sentence receives a day's worth of assiduous care just to make it sounds right and (one can only hope) carries the intended meaning. Hemingway wrote some of his endings thirty to forty times.

Somehow, the idealism behind this idea of a finished product and unleashing a glossy-covered book upon the world needs to meet with the blue-collar reality that it requires tireless work and effort; and it's not always going to be constant flood of intellectual breakthroughs, philosophical and human revelations, and worldly candlelight.That only comes by way of going through this "boredom", which isn't quite the same kind of boredom as, say, watching celebrities dance on television; that's an existential, purpose-questioning boredom. Much different. Boredom isn't even quite the right word. It's more of a murkiness that grabs hold of its victim, containing both moments of unharnessed wonder and seemingly impassable hardships. 

A few description in the article regarding astronomers as being most familiar with this kind of drudgery resonated with me. Astronomers, famous for "the long stare", pry patiently into the cosmos, waiting, waiting, waiting all with the hopes of snagging a glimpse of something spectacular, a supernova, looking through the lens of telescope to spot an exploding star, the wispy tail of a meteor burning across the sky, anything, without ever knowing if they will in fact ever be so fortunate.Metaphorically, this sounds similar to the job of an artist - except the artist doesn't have to wait. They can succeed where the astronomer is helpless; they can create their own supernova, their own galaxies, their own cosmic vibrations and electromagnetic spectra of whatever it is they want to shed light upon. 

None of this is to imply that science and art are complete equals; obviously, science serves to us certain things that art can never hope to do. Art won't cure any epidemics. The two do, however, stem from a similar root: an unquenchable thirst for knowledge; an endless series of questions about the world and our place in it and all that is entailed with us, our emotions, our aspirations, our fears, our morals, our decisions, our politics, our endeavors, everything; and a tenacious curiosity. In short, to push the envelope ever further so that we may better understand us, this heart-stopping perplexity we find ourselves thrown into, life. Together, they are a twin-chambered lantern with which we rifle through the folds, layers, and dark corners of the universe, our planet, and its people. The article, and Marie Curie, sum things up nicely:

"But here's the surprise. The Curies actually enjoyed their work. 'We were very happy," Marie wrote. "We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream."

You Are Here:

Tiny, vast. A beautiful dark heartbeat on a scale too cosmically immense to fathom. And that is good enough. 

Cosmic Porn

Sometimes I try to imagine worlds worse than this one. Now that came out terribly pessimistic but that isn't how I intended it. What I mean is I try to imagine awfully shitty scenarios. Yes, I'm a barrel of fun. I try to conjure up worlds in which I don't think I could bear to live in. Of them all, one of the worst would be a world without a night sky. Nothing. Nothing at all. Maybe clouds. Maybe a solid color, one for day and one for night, both octaves of unimpressive blue. But other than that, imagine a sky made up of nothing remarkable. Imagine a drab and hollow sky that droops down sullenly on us rather than dives deeper into itself, plunging away into a world and a scope of time we can barely comprehend.

I couldn't bear that. I need a moon to stare at, planets to emerge to the naked eye at various points through the year. I need stars to crackle like tiny little bonfires roaring silently. I need burnishing strings upon strings of constellations, most of whose names escape me. I need deep, pulverizing cosmic abyss. What gives me such profound amazement is to simply contemplate how old everything is and our relation to that. How some of those stars are in fact dead and gone, but here where we are they appear vibrant and effulgent. How when I peer towards the sky it's as if I'm looking down a massive telescopic widescreen lens through eons and eons of time. All this gives me a dual sense of microscopic unimportance and a small but no less vital role in something monstrous. The sky is a mostly illegible cosmic timetable that tells the longest story in the world, one that involves us. And the story keeps getting older, keeps getting deeper, keeps getting interesting. For small creatures such as we, Sagan once said, the vastness is bearable only through love. 

With that in mind, I'm obviously ecstatic when there's new astrological photography released, especially NewScientist's Award Winning Series', which are time and time again breathtaking. The photo near the top of this post is my favorite. Below is a close second, Mars shining in the top left-hand corner. 

On the Topic of Lists and Roundups

One of the strikingly fascinating features of this wet planet of ours - one of the innumerable wonderful things - is its sheer biological diversity and how little we know of it. We still, to this day and every day thereon, are discovering and will continue to find new species that shed light on perhaps as much of our pasts as our future. Each year, The International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) takes a look at everything gathered in a given year, which is certainly no short list, and arranges them into a Top Ten. 

Last year's winners included a one of the most venomous snake on the planet, a 75 million year old duck-billed dinosaur, and my favorite, a rhinoceros beetle that looks like Dim, the blue rhinoceros beetle from A Bug's Life, recalling the age old question brought up by the likes of Oscar Wilde and as far back as Ovid of whether life imitates art or art imitates life. 

Of this years winners, the Deep Blue Chromis, pictured at the top of the page, gave up its long bout of reclusion in the deep reefs of the Pacific Ocean near Palau, reminding us how very little we know of our oceans, especially in the abyssal reefs. Considering the Earth itself is roughly 2/3 water, it's rather stunning when you think that we haven't even explored half of our own oceans; meanwhile we're still learning about and discovering new histories and species on dry land. Space exploration aside, we've got plenty of discoveries to be made here to add a little bit of breadth and depth to our diminutive knowledge of our own planet.  Speaking of diminutive, two of the top species, one of which also made Wired's Science's Cutest Thing Ever rankings, are downright lilliputian: 

the world's smallest snake and the world's smallest seahorse. The Barbados threadsnake measures about four inches long and can fit itself on top of a quarter, while this pygmy seahorse isn't even half an inch. Not everything was about being smaller than its peers. On the other side of the spectrum, the world's longest insect comes in at a gun-wrenching 23 inches and resembles a thin, spiny branch. 

But given my proclivity towards Palm Trees, my favorite and most tragic would have to be the rare Tahina Palm, found in Madagascar. With no direct relation to any of the other 170 palms found on the island, the gigantic sixty-foot palm lives a lonely life of about 30-50 years and works itself to death by producing a spectacular show of flowers and fruit, going out in a colorful blaze before drying up, dying and collapsing. What accounts for this is the flowering process itself. When it flowers, the stem tip grows a giant inflorscence that bursts into branches of hundreds of small flowers like these on the left.Each of these then can be pollinated and develop fruit, soon producing a nectar that turns this behemoth into one of the more popular gathering spots among local birds and insects. As a final act, this taxing performance results in a massive drain on the palms nutrient reserve and after several months of depleting itself it can no longer survive. Perhaps if I was more of a coffee drinker, particularly of the caffeine free variety, I would be more enthusiastic about scientists also coming across the first ever caffeine-free coffee plant, producing all-natural beans devoid of caffeine. But I'm not, and so the Tahina Palm's story, its already scarce population of 100 or so and its own self-destruction, wins me over.