Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts

Monday, June 6, 2016

The Dead Can Speak


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_quantum_laws

For most European Americans, the idea that the dead can speak from beyond their actual time on Earth—in other time-frames than our own—is a story told to them solely though pop culture, in cheesy Hollywood movies about evil Ouija boards or haunted houses rife with demonic possession. But, if you delve just a little deeper into better content than the kind offered on generic prime-time t.v., you'll find a lot more varied factual accounts of our relationships with our ancestors, as told in our very blood and bones.

Forensic science, in the duel branches of forensic pathology and forensic archaeology, can uncover the brutally violent truths behind the deaths and oppression writ upon our ancestors bodies (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/), ones that that were denied life in the history books and textbooks of our mutual pasts, as white America sought to exploit their often weaker economic poverty through a cultural dominance that's extremely one-sided, because cultural assimilation often goes hand-in-hand with bloody wars for land and other precious resources, which means your kind of reminiscently Asiatic eyes are a most inconvenient feature to be dealt with evenhandedly. You are that which they wanted to destroy.

And so, with the now-modern inconvenience of genetic testing and cultural databases, it doesn't really matter what an opportunistic liar or an immoral cheat says or does, because the truth will come out in your blood work, whether you like it or not (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3122205/White-NAACP-leader-pretended-black-pictured-time-scandal-broke-responds-atatcks-saying-don-t-two-sh-ts-gusy-think.html). There's no hairstyle or skin tone that a wack-job looking to exploit white America's guilt about race can play, because science has made gaming the system obsolete. If you are just 25% Native American, you can get money from the state for college, just like a person of partial African-American descent can score pricey contacts and seed money for businesses from the NAACP, making your genuine ethnicity a very lucrative thing of the past. 


With your latest genetic test in hand, your reality changes, or, as the case with me, it becomes the history of your name (as my name) as it is written on the features of most modern Americans, now as your factually-verified claim laid to rest. It simply is so. But, it's way more than ancestral land rights or fishing claims, important as those are to indigenous people. Enter into the scene every carnival barker of yore who proclaimed their psychic ability to contact the dead, looking to take advantage of that ever-grieving parent who lost a teenager too early to a drunk driver, or a car accident of any type, or perhaps a grisly murder/suicide. So many questions to ask them...are they happy? What actually happened?

Then, the mystical arts of speaking to the dead become the fodder of anyone with an open question or hard emotional case that needs solving, especially if it involves child rape and/or murder, in our bids to relieve the extreme pain of a parent lost to grief. It's hard not to imagine what avenues we would not explore for them as a culture, in an attempt to alleviate such anguish. So what if she's a crazy housewife from "Lawguyland" (that's "Long Island" for the uninitiated) with a harsh accent and a phonily exaggerated appearance who "reads" people in an audience really well through their "tells"? We want to believe. I was no stranger to the allures of a good ghost story as a kid, buying book after book about poltergeists, only to be disappointed by a complete lack of supernaturally spooky life experiences. So, where the heck are they anyway?

And then the people I loved the most in this world died, my beloved grandparents, and with them, my tether to their pasts, as our ethnic stories and personalities that we had so lovingly clung to in each other, now together again in this new land of hope, faith, and promise. I started visiting my grandfather's grave alone, just to see what I would feel. At first, it was small but beautiful experiences, like a young stag grazing alone in the cemetery's grass with new moss on his antlers, looking up at me at the exact same time I reached my grandfather's grave stone, or hearing his distinctive old New York voice so clearly that I knew I had connected with him in my mind's eye with a searingly accurate recollection.

After that, it was game on. It was no longer a process driven internally by me and my strong memories, however great they were at alleviating my profound sense of loss. No, I could hear my grandmother laughingly explain to my maiden aunt living with her that now I was splashing around like a little girl in my bathtub, and then she would say the date and time in a future that held a middle-aged me alone in an old Hudson Valley home without her actual physical presence. It was so cheerfully normal, that I knew our sound waves were actually reaching each other in a way other people could hear, too, which is a discovery that's not without a rather extensive scientific past. 

Lots of audiophiles have sworn that they connected with their loved ones through a radio tuned to a particular frequency, like a son hearing his father (now deceased) talking to his grown son in the future using the same old device, ham radio aficionados both. Lucille Ball famously told the story of her dental work transmitting radio broadcasts through her mouth on live television back in the day (http://altereddimensions.net/2014/lucille-ball-picks-up-morse-code-radio-through-dental-work-fillings)! Hollywood made a sensationalist version of it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_%28film%29) by skirting around the real physics behind radio frequencies and audio signals that bounce around the earth's atmosphere, coming back around again and again after the earth's rotation is complete. 

What was once wacky science fiction becomes our reality with time, backed by real hard science (http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/k-4/features/F_Hearing_Voices_From_Space.html). Your grandparents and mine would no more have believed that you could hear voices from space anymore than my grandmother thought she would live to see the day we bought water from plastic bottles, free as it was for her in the city, the source of some of the best water on earth. It would have been unthinkable that such a vast resource as readily available clean water would be sold back to us through superficial hacks like "beverage companies", but such is the case as it is now. Why would anyone drink from harmful plastic bottles when the minerals of city water have amazing health benefits that come straight outta the tap? And my grandparents were right.

The same goes with our digital imaging advances and microscopic investigations. What was completely unbelievable a few short years ago is now our day-to-day reality. Computers and the Internet? When was the last time you went a full day without your smartphone or tablet? When was the last time you didn't have Internet access? Contemplate that, and you're already more than halfway there. The far-out astrophysicist who launched the best photographic lens we developed at the time weren't just looking for space dust out there. They were looking for the Eye of G-d and His Creation of the Universe we live in, beyond time and space, in this here-and-now for all times, because our real natural phenomenons come from the source of all life itself. Welcome to the space age, kids. It's a groovy place where we're one, even you there, that curmudgeonly old guy afraid of average machines like the common PC. This galloping mechanized horse engine now as wings to fly. See you out there! Now I can hear it.





Friday, May 13, 2016

The Physics of Faith

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/9/9c/Balok_first.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110425202334&path-prefix=en

Back in the 80s, we still found it fun to believe (somewhat) in aliens, spaceships, far-away galaxies, and groovy shows about star-trekking explorers from famous 60s-era t.v. shows. In fact, it was still so popular, one enterprising professor at Oneonta State decided to capitalize on the infamy behind such grand delusions by advertising a physics class with "Star Trek" placed cleverly in the class title. Aha!

Me, my friend "Weeg" (Hi, Kirk!), and my boy "DutchBoy" (Esse!) decided to take the class together, and we swore before the semester started that we would attend every class "high", meeting before each class to smoke a joint. As far as stoner's plans go, you can imagine that we did not adhere to a strict schedule of attendance or party planning, but we were there for the very first class sitting together, wasted and ready for our next alien encounter to begin. Beam us up!

Our professor was a rather modest, drab-looking older man in his late 50s, bald, with a droopy pocket-protector full of pens to go with his plain white button-down shirt and saggy black pants. Here we go! Game on, friend. He introduced himself to us with a bit about his background: he used to work for S.E.T.I. (right on right on, we gave each other encouraging smiles), now defunct as an organization, which he laughingly explained as to his presence at our small upstate New York college in the Catskill Mountains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catskill_Mountains). Okay, that explained why he was here. But, like, how many times has he been probed on-board "The Mothership"? You know? Some key data was missing, here.

We met after class to talk it over, using our childish fantasies to explain away his bland demeanor about our starry-eyed dreams of space exploration. Okay, like, maybe he's just burnt-out from teaching all year (yeah, yeah) or getting kicked out of the space program? Nah! He's probably just scared that they'll come back for him and take him away for more testing because he talked to us about it. Yeah! That's it! That's totally it! You could imagine his hesitance about having more invasive anal procedures done by unfeeling mutant aliens. I mean, that would freak out anyone, right?


Yeah, I don't know...our whole pot-smoking-in-space vibe was quickly coming apart at the seams, confronted by the real science of scanning the skies in a vast universe too big for our calculations. This wasn't the sexy "Barberella" movie version my boys were looking for. As the semester progressed, we tenuously clung to our rapidly evaporating faith in all things alien, but we continued to bolster each other up in rather a adolescent fashion that belied our need for supportive theories. Maybe he's, like, an alien come here to gradually introduce his culture to us, and, like, he's gonna rip off his human face mask to reveal his gnarly reptilian face to us at the last class! No way! That's totally it.

We grooved on the belief that our teacher was really a visiting alien in disguise—but, like, totally friendly and stuff, 'cause he's teachin' us about his ways and all at this school, so he's cool, he won't eat us at the end of class, right?—but it was becoming rapidly apparent that we were actually taking a real physics class, with tests and equations and stuff. Oh, shit...my boys tapped out of future classes a bit more on the regular, as I did, though DutchBoy stayed true to the faith, because he wanted to believe, man. So did we all, but after awhile, the coursework replaced our past delusions, to create a real interest in working with the stars, which was the whole point behind the class.


It's easy to make up a fictionalized account of the world then it is to accept the truth sometimes, and as young adults, we were clearly moving towards reality faster and faster. We were leaving behind our childhood forever, and that was scary at times. What will we be like as adults? Will we suck like most people? That was more horrifying to us than a people-eating alien reptile; losing the core of our identities to the workaday world of office drones and typical assholes who cared more about their cars than life itself. We never wanted to be like that, and with one very special class taught to us at just the right time in our lives, we saw a way out, to a life of the mind that was more fascinating than some cheesy fantasy concocted by Hollywood. I mean, who the fuck were they anyway? Actor-types! No, thanks.

I wanted to in "the real" with them during class, and I found that the abstract quality of our calculations were just as silly as some of the early paintings and psychedelic scribblings that I did to entertain myself back then, as a teenager attending college. Instead of dressing up in stupid space costumes, I wanted to become more like the scientist leading the class. That's where the real entertainment was for us, as scholars. Besides, I wouldn't be working with fantasists after graduation. I'd be working with real people right here on Planet Earth, and it was that very down-to-earth quality that marks excellent teaching that drew me into the class and kept me there for an entire semester, when other kids dropped out in the face of math and science and the vastness of the stars.

I loved it, and I was surprised at how easily this language spoke to me. Maybe I'd already been to the stars and back as a time-traveler? Who knows? Suddenly, it seemed more plausible than anything I'd ever seen before. I replaced the fuzzy visions in my head based on t.v. show toys with wormholes hidden into the very fabric of space, vaulting through Horsehead Nebulas and planets that rained bright red rubies, because all of that seemed more possible to me than tentacled purple space aliens with ray-guns. Outer space became tangible and real to me, much closer than the obstructing view of popular culture, and way more plausible, even practical, given the right math.

For our very last class of the year, our Prof gave us our final assignment, based on the formula they used (and discarded) at S.E.T.I. to calculate that amount of possible Earth-like planets in the universe. We were suckers for it immediately, as we put it off for its daunting task. He really asked us to solve the question of all life in the universe, and is that even possible? We looked at the math with downcast eyes. I'd always found most everyday math problematic for me, but this was different. I needed to keep my grades up for my last semester at Oneonta, locking in my transfer to RISD to keep that process going smoothly. What if I sucked at this? I'd get a bad grade that'd put my entire future in jeopardy, like an astronaut quickly calculating his re-entry on the fly, with all instruments down.

As we turned in our paperwork for that last class, I nervously sat forward in my seat. As our teacher took the last paper from a rather Lawngisland-looking girl with huge 80s hair, my heart pounded. Uh, oh. This is it. We'd talked with enough students to know that, as a class, we were totally fucking lost as to what the "right" numbers could be. It was anyone's guess, and that's exactly what our teacher said next. As he leaned on the last stair of the front row, next to the girl's desk, he told us the truth that they discovered at SETI, when they finally closed the program due to a lack of finding and findings: there is no way to calculate how many Earth-like planets may exist in the universe.

We breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn't going to grade our papers. Cool! Maybe this is his "big reveal", Dutchboy wondered to me. Nah...but, what is it? He told us the truth about all of his work in the field of astrophysics thus far, and that's what the real bombshell of his class was about: there is no math to explain our universe that's provable, just as there is no equation that disproves the existence of G-d, and with one last look downward, he finally gave it up to us in that classroom. He believed that our life on Earth was miraculous and unexplainable in the extreme. There was no other way to put it. He'd found faith.

We felt kinda bad for him. They must have ostracized the poor guy at Trekkie conventions after that particular admission. Boy...some class, huh? We  looked at each other for awhile, outside of the lecture hall. And that was it. The was the end of my college career at Oneonta. There were absolutely no little green people floating in a spinning space disk, so improbable that it was laughable to a real scientist. There wasn't any weirdly surreal space dust that grabbed you and flung you inter-dimensionally. No, we had something far greater. We had each other. We had us, right here on Earth, and that turned out to be the best alien scenario, yet. Tough act to follow, right? I finally walked away from the carelessness of my young mind towards a much sharper, brighter future. I had everything to look forward to back then. Still do. 



Friday, March 4, 2016

Space Station


Scott J. Kelly.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kelly_%28astronaut%29

We had exciting news this week! Astronaut Scott Kelly broke the record for living in space, among many other big discoveries that will surely move forward at great speed our continued space explorations. He grew two inches taller than his twin brother during his year living in space, because gravity compresses our spines here on Earth, but he's already back to his normal height upon returning to our atmosphere.

He took beautiful photographs of Earth from space, and he gave many awesome interviews to professional journalists and schoolchildren alike. He made funny videos for us to watch, too. He's a really cool dad! Thanks for everything. We're glad you're home safe.


Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Nature: Orange Moon


Full moon and clouds.

My mom told me about the big, orange moon outside, so I went outside to look at it. There was a beautiful halo around around the moon, which peaked in and out of passing clouds. I didn't get the actual color with my iPhone's camera, but I did capture some of the magic and mystery of a low hanging full moon looming over head. Enjoy the sights while you can.