NAMU AMIDA BUTSU

Cats share the quiet better than dogs,

They live in a world of shapes and smells and lairs of underbrush,

Dogs clamor through, mouth open, tongue lolling,
letting their presence be known,

It's better to be invisible,
In free-fall,
Tracking the path of least resistance,

As God and Nature intended.

TIME SHIFT

Wielding the heavy black rock found protruding from the wall of their cave, its narrow edge chipped to utter silence, Gorg easily rended the belly of the long-toothed beast. Blood and viscera spilled onto the gravel-strewn outcrop; carried aloft by the gentle breeze, the smell filled the air. After returning the rock to its leather pouch, he proceeded to tear back the hide and skin with his strong bare hands.

As on an unspoken signal, Noz moved in; using his stone knife effortlessly and without pause, he deftly cut broad swaths of meat from the beast's chest and sides. They worked quickly and quietly without the need to think or converse; years of hunting together had honed their skills and choreographed their partnership. Soon the cats and mountain wolves would come, and their home-cave was over a day's walk through mostly unknown country.

While packing the meat into skins made from a brother of the beast, they heard a faint cry to gather coming from the trees far to the west. Frozen momentarily, they eyed one another, then hastened their pace, wasting no movements. As they loaded the packs of meat onto their backs -- stout leather cords wrapped over shoulders and under arms, spears in right hands -- they moved off to the east. The sound of high-pitched keening could be heard closer. Need had driven the two hunters further afield than they'd wanted to go to find quarry. Now, they were the quarry.

As they neared the foothills, the calls of the predators seemed to come from ahead. They stopped to consider, communicating with their peculiar mix of sign language and grunts. Why did their pursuers not stop at the fallen beast, they wondered, most of it was still there? Could they be hearing things out of fear, or were they actually surrounded? Gorg and Noz decided that the creature sounds were coming from their mountain, their home, a place of mystery for which no questions were necessary or had ever been asked. But before the broad expanse of tall golden reeds could be reached, darkness would be upon them. They didn't have the heart to risk it.

A stand of giant wanaba trees ranged the slope a short trot to the south; they knew not what dwelt therein, but sometimes the unknown is the lesser of two evils. This was one of those times. Just beyond the first row of trees light faded quickly, but other senses held them in good stead. One massive tree had a peculiar darkness at its middle, near the ground. With spears at the ready, they examined the curiosity to discover a small aperture at the tree's base leading to what appeared to be a cavern within. Gorg, almost half again as large and strong as Noz, dropped his pack and stepped through decisively, motioning Noz to remain. Lightly touching the inner skin of the great tree with the fingertips of his left hand, not daring to breathe, keeping both spear and head focused towards the center blackness, he stealthily circled the unknown hollow. Crouching outside in the night, sweat lubricating all but the palms of his hands, Noz, poised like a bird of prey, feeling the unnatural silence, hovered ever so lightly between sound and emptiness.

After a time, Gorg scraped his spear across the dirt within. Dragging the other pack, Noz entered, easily finding his friend in the dark. Almost casually, Noz let his burden of fresh, blood-soaked meat fall next to Gorg's at their feet; no sense trying to hide anything; no secrets now. Besides, they were just meat themselves at this point, and they knew it.

What followed was an elaborate yet brief discussion as to strategy: They hoped to guard the small opening to their sanctuary until daylight, when at least they'd have a chance. If necessary, they'd throw the meat out, maybe it would satisfy the creatures, maybe. But that desperate act was a last resort almost worth dying for; their people had not been doing well hunting of late.

Noz removed from his neck-pouch the talisman he had carved from a tooth of one of the larger beasts they were fond of hunting; it was his charge. Sitting cross-legged near the center of their fortress in the bowels of the wanaba tree, he placed the tooth-figure on the ground before him, sliding it gently back and forth in the dirt until it found rest. Then, in a low, dark, somber tone, he sang, letting himself feel the earth under him, the strength of the tree about him, and the spirit of their mountain, the spirit that ran through him and his friend, Gorg.

Suddenly, close-by, they heard footfalls, many footfalls. In one motion Noz stood, spear in hand, leaving the figurine where it lay. Feral with caution he approached where Gorg was kneeling -- a silhouette of stone against the portal. Without the need to sign or grunt they knew that to let a single one of the creatures inside was death. The air was pungent with the smell of cat saliva; they were very hungry. Noz thought they may also be angry; his people had taken many long-tooths for food. But this was no time for sympathy. Snarling broke his reverie. The two hunters could sense the shadows moving in the liquid dark a few spear-lengths outside the small hole, a hole that now seemed much larger than when they came in.

"Frank, Frank, wake-up, man; time to get to the airport. Johnson and Murray 'll be waitin.' This is the big one, man, the big Kahuna. You worked hard on this deal, Frank; now we need to nail the hide to the boardroom wall. So c'mon, let's hit it." With that the bossman left Frank's office for the elevator.

Frank, blurry-headed, sat up at his desk, wondering, feeling pulled apart in time and space. Against the dark mahogony of the desktop, he could feel the tension in his arms. Sweat oozed down his neck, the hairs standing on end; his back and shirt, damp. For a quantum length of time, as though through a wormhole, he flitted back, then forth; being there, then here. His jacket was draped across the back of his chair; his tie hung loosely around his neck.

The fish tank bubbling soothingly against the nether wall drew his attention; above that was a painting of the Serengeti Plain, wildebeast running from lions in a neverending grassland, a few trees off to one side. On the desk, he studied the pictures of his wife and two children; next to that a framed document, his award for marketing achievement; and his heavy leather briefcase zipped and locked lying on its side.

Frank stood, wavered a bit, then steadied himself by placing his fingertips lightly on the surface of the cool, smooth wood. After a deep breath, he reached around to grab his jacket. Mechanically, in one motion, he put it on, leaning forward as he did so. Lifting his briefcase and shifting it from left hand to right as he moved, he stepped out towards the portal. Just there, a shock of awareness and memory froze his stride abruptly, the floor seemed to fall away. Overwhelmed by shifting emotions, focused on the shimmering blackness that enwrapped him, he whispered softly, "Noz, Noz, stay back."

After a long moment listening to the shearing sound of time streaming away, Frank resumed breathing. A rush of loss and sadness, twined with a wild pride, raced through his chest and bones and soul. Bowing his head slightly, bemused and yet certain, he closed the door behind as he walked methodically towards the elevator.

***** 30 *****

Red Supergiant V838: Monocerotis

Supernova -- 1987A

1987A in Large Magellanic Cloud

The Chandra X-ray Observatory Center

NASA's Chandra Sees Brightest Supernova Ever

SN 2006gy

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Astronomy Picture of the Day

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Blatte's Fractals
Not related to the above, but you gotta check this out!

IPCC
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The Changing World
[A weekly series of documentaries]
A special collaboration between the BBC World Service,
Public Radio International and PRI's The World.

International Rivers Network
Linking Human Rights and Environmental Protection

UNEP -- Great Apes Survival Project
UNEP-WCMC -- World Conservation Monitoring Center

Public Library of Science

The Dinosaur Art Gallery
of Joe Tucciarone

Astrophotography
by Robert Gendler

The Phillips Collection
[History and 'Who's Who' in the painting.]

Richard Thompson Gallery
A Modern American Impressionist

There are 350,000 species of beetle
(one-fifth of all species on Earth).

Can carry 850 times its own weight.

*************

The Anatomy of a Differential Equation

Shorts, Episodes, and other nonsense...

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Gravity, residing as potential in quantum space, is an effect of this interaction and as such is not fundamentally a quantum phenomenon.

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Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America is the nation's first and largest group dedicated to the Troops and Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the civilian supporters of those Troops and Veterans. IAVA is a 501c(3) nonprofit organization.

American servicemen and women have a voice that deserves to be heard; the issues and hardships troops face merit attention. Additionally, American troops have a distinct and important perspective that can influence the American political scene in a powerful way.

On September 12, 2006, the much-anticipated literary anthology Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, was published by Random House. Drawn from the acclaimed National Endowment for the Arts program and edited by the best-selling author Andrew Carroll, the anthology includes nearly 100 letters, poems, stories, and memoirs of service and sacrifice on the front lines and at home.

***********************

From "The Art of the Novel" by Milan Kundera (author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"), page 110; published 1988, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union:

"Totalitarian society, especially in its more extreme versions, tends to abolish the boundary between the public and private; power, as it grows ever more opaque, requires the lives of citizens to be entirely transparent. The ideal of life without secrets corresponds to the ideal of the exemplary family: a citizen does not have the right to hide anything at all from the Party or the State, just as a child has no right to keep a secret from his father or his mother. In their propaganda, totalitarian societies project an idyllic smile: they want to be seen as "one big family.""

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Benjamin Franklin

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"He accepts the world as is, he will never die."

Henry Miller

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The Office of Janna Levin

Author of "How The Universe Got Its Spots"

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Harvard Physics Department Faculty: Lisa Randall

Author of "Warped Passages"
"Unraveling The Mysteries Of The Universe's Hidden Dimensions"

***********************

The Christopher Hitchens Web

Author of "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything"

***********************

"Why seek the miraculous and supernatural beyond life?"

P. D. Ouspensky

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Ralph Waldo Emerson	Henry David Thoreau	Walt Whitman
American Transcendentalism Web

*************

E. E. Cummings

Jack London

Billy Collins

*************

Professor Glipter peered skyward at the stars, a clear night in the Rockies, shooters streaked across from every direction. His friend waited for her answer, glass of wine in hand, staring off in the same direction. He said softly, "I believe that if the other six spatial dimensions -- purported -- had expanded when the three we know plus time did, there would be no quantum superposition, and hence the universe would be in a single or singular state. No spontaneous symmetry breaking, no transmutation, no fusion into anything heavier than hydrogen, no beta decay, no shifting of electron energy levels, no orbits, no black holes."

He paused to take a sip of wine to ward off the slight chill. "There would be no life or planets on which it might come into being and thrive. There would be no forces to act on anything. There would be no quantum fluctuations, no energy, no suns."

He looked down at the grass, illuminated by the silver starlight, sadness creasing his weathered features. "All we'd have is a vast, inert sea of free floating hydrogen atoms, the quarks of the proton locked in a fixed net, the electron bobbing along at the end of a string, not held by attraction, yet not able to drift off either -- all would be continuum -- there would be no quantum reality. A dead universe."

He turned to her, a broad smile stretching from ear to ear. "So, apparently, compacted balls of energy dimensions are required. Does that answer your question, my love?"

"You are an incorrigible flirt, Hans." She breathed deeply the crisp, sweet smelling air. "Such a way with words. What's a girl to do?"

*************

The boundary, or surface, of any figure of any dimension represents the limit of what may otherwise be considered unlimited [The two end-points of a one-dimensional line segment are its boundary, for instance.]. This limit acts to give definition to the unconditioned.

For example, the infinite 2-dimensional plane can have embedded in it a closed path of any imaginable design: a circle, a square, a pentagon, plus completely irregular shapes. When done, unlimited factored by limit [unlimited/limit] takes on a unique identity, in time and space.

A 3-dimensional solid ball or sphere is contained by its 2-dimensional curved surface or boundary. If we think of this ball as a collection of free-floating atoms or molecules, its surface, necessarily, is composed of these interior elements, but nonetheless has an identity all its own by virtue of its special role as limiter, separating the inside from the out.

Increasing the dimension of the 'interior' to the fourth, we can talk about, although not properly imagine, a 3-dimensional 'surface,' a surface of a hypersphere of four dimensions. In this context, instead of free-floating somethings, we consider the homology group of 'all living things.' We can define the individuality of these separate 3-D living objects by their boundaries, that which stands out from, or emerges from, the group of all possible cycles or waves of matter, their state of superposition. These cycles, or 'closed chains of vertices,' give expression to the fourth dimension, wherein the elements of the class of 'all living things' are essentially connected and undifferentiated.

How can that be, and what does it mean, vis-a-vis self, any self, the very idea of 'self'?

It is composed of three essays, each of which is a separate HTML document.

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"All in good time, please. First, Doctor Golgachev, our paleohistorian, has some interesting facts concerning the larger picture. I would like to introduce him at this time."

An imposing man with bushy eyebrows and a stern face, his voice was nonetheless disarmingly cordial and engaging. His large hands resting on either side of the podium, he casually scanned the roomful of reporters. Then, he began: "I would first like to thank Doctor Tolstoy for his leadership during this time. For, what we have discovered thus far has been, ..., deeply disturbing and profound." He turned to nod towards Doctor Tolstoy, who nodded back. We were waiting; but not for long, he started right in.

"My name is Alexi Golgachev; I am a paleohistorian -- the history of old Earth. Doctor Tolstoy has requested that I present a brief overview of background material relating to Earth events leading up to and immediately following, geologically speaking, when the alien structure evidently either first, or last, made contact where it now rests. Major geologic and biologic transformations occurred during this time period. A whole new order of biology emerged simultaneously all over the world. One threshold after another was crossed as life reformed itself, as evolution shifted gears and discovered original ways to express itself, ways that were previously unknown. No one just considering organic life prior to 600 million years ago, the time the alien craft is determined to have landed, would or could conjecture the forms life would take afterwards. My lecture will be brief, so please bear with me.

CONTINUED...

• "confrontation with the strawman", and,
• "a cafe, saturday morning, winter, two friends"

My Hero

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