WhimsyLand

This is one of the funniest things I've seen all week:  a series of ads run by Toto, the Japanese manufacturer of "porcelain conveniences".  The S400, their top-of-the-line model has "automatic and remote control open-and-close lid and flush, five cleansing modes, adjustable wand, warm air dry, automatic air purifier, heated seat and wireless remote control".  God, I don't even want to know what you do with the wand.

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I was thinking about metaphor this morning.  Specifically, I was thinking about how we come to use words as tokens, moving them around, obeying rules of syntax, grammar and logic.  Often, however, we never get much beyond that.  Take, for example, the crop of NeoCons who spend decades in universities and think tanks dreaming up military schemes of domination.  Not one of the current batch had ever been in the military (by avoiding the draft, mainly), and most had no military education whatsoever. It's not unlikely that many had never even seen a dead person.  This did not keep them from planning adventures about which they knew nothing.

Junie gave me a book on astronomy and cosmology on the last trip out.  It was wonderful to read, and I quickly found out that my one course in Astro 35 years ago was even more out of date than I had realized (I should have called the only poet-cosmologist I know to explain it all).  Still, I thought I already knew most of what I was reading:  the Hubble Constant, the Big Bang, red shift, the age of the universe, standard candles, black holes.  Then I got to actually thinking about it.  Question:  If the most distant galaxies are, say, 15 billion years away then the light took 15 billion years to get here.  But, wait.  15 billion years ago was close to the time of the Big Bang and the universe was a lot smaller.  In fact, that galaxy must have been right next door, cosmologically speaking, so didn't they take some time to get out there and weren't they emitting light all the time?  OK, the universe used to be the size of a tennis ball, and now it's unthinkably large.  The space between everything and everything else has been expanding like that fabled example where the universe is an expanding raisin cake and the raisins are galaxies.  Pondering that, I switched into Google mode and started thinking about the Hubble Constant, which says that a distant object is moving away from us (and everything else) at a speed that is proportional to how far away it is.  That made sense in a sort of "la la la, I'm not going to think about it very hard" NeoCon way.  But, then I started thinking:  wait, why would that be?  Well, suppose the galaxies were all race cars arranged like the petals of a daisy at the Big Bang, pointed out with you standing in the middle of the daisy.  If they all took off at different speeds, then sometime later, we would see that the ones the furthest away were also traveling faster.  I looked hard at the Hubble Constant, which I had just let my eyes blur over at:  20 kilometers/second per mega-light year.  So a galaxy a million light years from us would be traveling away from us at 20 kilometers per second, and one two million light years from us at 40 kilometers per second, and so on.  So M106, the (not terribly distant) galaxy shown on the left that is about 25 million light years from us, would be traveling about 500 kilometers per second from us.  Back to Googling.  Hah.  Einstein never said that space couldn't expand faster than the speed of light – only energy and mass has that restriction.  OK, another question:  if everything is that rushed out at the Big Bang, and they were all close enough that you would think (sharing a common Hubble's Constant) they shared the same velocity, when why aren't all the galaxies (racecars) at the edge of the universe?  Well, I suppose, again, it's because it's the space between galaxies that is expanding – not galaxies that are running like crazy away from Ground Zero of the Big Bang.  And besides, there's probably nothing like an "edge" to the universe anyway.  So, I'm back to my original question.  If there is no center to the universe, and everything is moving away from everything, and (no matter where you are) more distant things are moving away faster, then  . . .  how did that happen?  Are they accelerating at different rates?  No, because, wherever you are you can look out a million light years and find something moving away from you at the same seeming velocity.  More Googling.  Oh, the Hubbard Constant isn't really constant, it has changed over time.  Goodness, there are lot of things I don't know, and I haven't even read enough to understand Einstein's cosmological constant, Friedman equations and dozens of other things. I guess that just goes to show you that you should actually think and research and work on something before coming to conclusions.  And get some observational results before jumping to conclusions.  Otherwise, you're just moving the words around, which only works for ideologues.

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A noted poet and friend of mine recently mentioned that if I keep reviewing Poetry, he might actually have to read a copy.  I have to admit that a lot of the poetry in there isn't to my taste, but a decent amount is, and besides, I get the thing 10 times a year and literary journals are a bit thin on the ground in the summer.  The current issue is called Summer Break, and is filled with summery stuff.  It's a big issue chock-a-block with poets, editorialist, and reviewers including Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, Bruce Smith, W.S. Merwin, Rick Moody, John Updike, David Orr, Al Goldbarth, Campbell McGrath, Dean Young and others.  There's a really funny/poignant section called Poets I Have Known where, for example, Bill Yankee relates some memories about training James Merrill at his gym. The back cover has a excerpt from Naeem Murr describing his relationship with his Poet-Significant Other:  "The reason poets are able to read so much is because they spend more time waiting than writing. . . . What a bizarre concept.  Reading, taking walks, debating whether an autumnal oak leaf is really red ochre  . . . all the time twisting their miserable wire coat hanger of their souls ..."  Here's a few poems I liked:  Patricia Smith, Hip-Hop Ghazal:  "Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, / decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bring them woo hips".  Dean Young, Flamenco: "The sexual gasps coming from the garden shed / of my friends turning twenty, tipsy / droll joke of my friends turning thirty, lost / ..."  Joanie Mackowski, One Afternoon:  "A woman stepped outside, crumbled / into a loose particulate, and, as the breeze / blew up from the east, she scattered:  her handful of heard, volcanic ash, spiraled the highway, / ..."  Alice Friman, Arts & Science:  "In chemistry, what's severed / looks to latch on to any other / severed thing:  orphaned electrons / zizzing in your wires race to embrace"  There was a short Q&A session after some of the poems, here's a response by Dean Young:  "Duende is an animating spirit of everything I write, particularly in the spirit of of Lorca's definition of knowing that any moment one could be devoured by ants".  All in all, a lot of fun.  Don't turn in your post-AG credentials though, just go to the library and read it when no one is looking.

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Zelda Update:  I'm fighting the Boss in Sky City.  My cheat-sheet walkthrough says that All I Have To Do is grapple a tower with the hookshot, then grapple adjacent ones to get to the top, then grapple around a set of floating pods until the dragon gets tired of spitting fire at me, then grapple the heart on his back and give it a few good whacks with my Master Sword.  THEN, I have only have to do that two more times.  Sheesh.  I really need one of my boys.  I just want to walk around the next dungeon and trip over stuff.

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I'm beginning to understand why Einstein was the Time Man of the Century.  When he cooked up his view of the universe and the laws that governed it, everyone thought that the the universe was the size of the Milky Way, ignoring the hundred-plus billion other galaxies that we now know exist.  He derived his formulae from pure mathematics, and in some cases, didn't live to see them verified.  He was wrong about some things.  He threw tantrums at times, and was occasionally pig-headed and had mistresses.  Good for him, I wish I had the opportunity to shake his hand.  Lest your eyes glazed over in the Science Part of this post, I leave you with words from Albert:

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty… The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. … We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Einstein, 1954)