Top posts
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Timelessness
Winterberry Each new work is destined, in the mind of its author, to correct the preceding one, to complete a thought -- which will not be completed. He does his work over and over again, wherever his sensation or thought was rendered imperfectly in the...
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The Conservation of Ontology
Cosmic Dawn by Harley Katz/University of Oxford Our planet is still ploughing through the debris of ancient supernovae, and I can’t help but wonder whether a muon shower might have enhanced our ability to see violet midway through the 19th century on...
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Motion and Communication
Taking the roads less traveled, the little acrobat goes on reading a book by Ed Yong, The Immense World. Communication alters perception — both its own and that of others. Every uttered thought, written word, and encounter it has shapes the Dialogue between...
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Taming Infinity
Mayapples Some flowers shy away from light, hidden at the ground level under the thick leaves of the mayapples. Others at the tip of the stems compete in their rush to rise above all. The mind, on its toes, steps into every breach. It crawls through every...
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Cosmic Sense
Poetry whispers sounds of freedom, transcends rules, turns ideas upside down, builds connections in the dark holes of one’s mind, and waits for the emergence of new ideas on the horizon. The full moon shined so brightly last week as if she was trying...
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Blended Forms
if the universe is a three-torus, one of the distant galaxies. we observe may be our own. The possibility would be hard to verify because the image of our galaxy would be formed from light that left its source billions of years ago and spent the intervening...
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Universalis Cosmographia
I am the statistician of insomnia, under my eyelids tallies grow. In recent additions an armada of icebergs invades the slow speed of night and leads the counting to calculations of length, width and projected direction. This new territory travelled does...
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The Questioner
The Questioner thought that time moves forward, but these days, she eerily feels that time moves backward. From the standpoint of her inner feelings, she struggles to understand why they say time is uniform . From D.C. to San Francisco, from the Carina...
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Dreamings
Animal immune systems depend on white blood cells called macrophages that devour and engulf invaders. The cells pursue with determination and gusto: under a microscope you can watch a blob-like ... While science aims to understand what fundamentals are...
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The edge of knowing
When the shadow with fatal law menaced me A certain old dream, sick desire of my spine, Beneath funereal ceilings afflicted by dying Folded its indubitable wing there within me. Luxury, O ebony hall, where to tempt a king Famous garlands are writhing...
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In search of Time
Thirty spokes share one hub to make a wheel. 三十辐共一毂， Through its non-being, 当其无， There is the use of the carriage 有车之用 We carry in our bones a foundational understanding of time, space and gravity. I picture them as three lines emerging from a single...
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Asteroids
Sometimes even writers who dwell too much on earthbound things feel a celestial pull, an invitation to a loftier perspective. Astérix and the Falling Sky, Goscinny & Uderzo Although the sky falling on our heads is not of immediate concern, fragments of...
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Resilience
Great egret The Questioner thought that time moves forward, but these days, she eerily feels that time moves backward. From the standpoint of her inner feelings, she struggles to understand why they say time is Back on Earth, the little acrobat is set...
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Subtleties
Chamaeleon I molecular cloud viewed by Herschel and Planck (ESA/Herschel/Planck; J. D. Soler, MPIA) This blog flows like a river. Posts are waterfalls where words get caught upstream while others go over. Julian Barbour writes that the best way to conceive...
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The process of Becoming
Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk I have found inspiration in myths and folktales. According to a legend , so “many moons ago” Native American tribes lived underground in total darkness. One of their animals, a ground mole, one day crawled...
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The Reign of Bubbles and Particles
The legend says that since Portland’s founding, sightings of small green archers have been reported throughout downtown. Along with the archers, a celestial stag, a phantom building, and a huge tree have been spotted, time-to-time, throughout Old Portland. A...
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On the nature of metaphors
As we envision the possibility of a human mission to Mars in a not-so-distant future, we are waiting on the spacecraft InSight to send out all the data on the planet's vital signs after its landing on November 26th of last year. ESA's Mars Express captured...
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CrossOver
Like a cast listed in the order of appearance, we wonder whether time or space comes first. Or do the two main actors appear in tandem in the first scene? An ancient philosophical debate mirrors the current scientific discussion. If indeed, the Universe...
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Causation
The playful chipmunk with a mind of its own has come out of its burrow. Does a cicada know when it’s time to break out of its shell? Does a star know when it’s time to burst out of its collapsing cloud? In the Garden of Forking Paths, a game forbids the...
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All the many layers
Titan's many layers (NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute) Very well, you may smile at this; but you must admit that the model of the world developed here is at least a possible one… It also gives an incentive, not only to speculation but also to experiments… I...
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Nothingness and the Quantum Universe
I was a poet once... I lost the Moon the other night behind a blanket of clouds. She was confused about how exactly the universal organism was planning its every step behind the scene. The togetherness of Nothingness and the Quantum Universe infers the...
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The Little Acrobat
Merging Galaxies Arp 273 The little acrobat travels far among stars through colliding galaxies as their ballooning bubbles of wavicles stretch and expand. It turns around and jumps over the Moon to reach its home base where it grows wings and flies high...
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Death as Resonance
... death is as much a part of life as the dark side of the moon is a part of the moon Hampered by a cloud of confusion, my moon-like mind can’t see the forest for the trees. An inexpressible feeling hangs off the tip of my tongue, a story I can’t convey...
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Prologue to all the possibles
The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book, and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned...
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Transitional thoughts
As time passes, an increasing number of praying mantises are spotted in the native plant garden. A friend of mine said the other day that it is a sign of a healthy ecosystem. “ Whenever I want to feel humbled,” writes Thomas about the ecological collapse,...