W O R D S 1

I read Joss Whedon's stab at X-comic work, Astonishing X-Men #1. John Cassaday, one of my favorite comic artists, handles pencils. I wasn't always a Whedon fan. It all started the week before the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They aired the season finale of the previous season in order to re-whet everyone's appetites for the new season. Willow had become this very powerful witch and was MAD AS HELL because her girlfriend was killed. She decided she was going to murder the world to end its suffering. The power of friendship is what stopped her, when Zander "talked her down." The poignancy and the fantasy so closely intertwined I guess is what drew me in. The sort of mundane and the fanatstic. I have subsequently bought all of the first 5 seasons of Buffy on DVD and think they're amazing. Comedy, drama, fantasy, horror, science fiction all in one. Fun.




I have to say it may take some time for the synergy between Whedon and Cassaday to really take form and reach its full potential between this team (interestingly, this is the subject matter of Whedon's first story). With Warren Ellis and Cassaday, for example, there seems to be a real profound understanding of one another that isn't quite there yet with Whedon and Cassaday. But maybe that has more to do with Ellis' tendency toward fantastical landscapes and crazy creatures. I do have to say that the pacing set by Whedon is taut and evocative. The opening panels were wonderfully dark and the the end got a bit dizzying, but a quick re-glance (one of the luxuries of comic reading) made it all clear.

Mutants the victims of genetic disease? I don't know why no one came up with it before.

Grant Morrison I fell in love with when I somewhat recently read the old trades of Animal Man that came out originally in the 80's, I think. I read them quickly and voraciously and when I was finished I mourned. I've started on more than one occasion to read his Invisibles, but keep losing interest. Whenever this happens, I tend to think it's that I'm not ready for it, since I have an established trust for the writer in question. This is certainly true of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which I just know I will love once I'm ready.


Anyway, Sea Guy is the newest Morrison work coming out on Vertigo. The first issue seemed silly to me. I know it was supposed to be, but I wasn't seeing the irony, either. I know Ellis mentioned Sea Guy among some other accolades in an otherwise desolate comics culture, but after reading it, I felt like it wasn't much more than lip service. I was reminded briefly of Brian Michael Bendis' Powers, though I can't say for sure why. I know I was at first turned off by the cartoony art, but after a while grew to appreciate its moodiness.

My jury is still out as to whether I'll buy issue 2. It's only a three issue series, so I'm a little concerned that my attention wasn't fully grabbed after 1/3 of the reading.

Brian posted at 11:05 AM.

Man, am I behind on reading. Been busy lately in other modes of living.

Over the weekend I re-read Alan Moore's Promethea, book III.


I have to say that it is one of the greatest comics I've ever read. In terms of fully utilizing the medium, it's just great. There's one moment when Promethea and one of the past Prometheas, Barbara, are walking with a sort of heavenly character. He is talking about the nature of reality and during the conversation he looks directly out at the reader and as he's talking about reality, you feel the line between fiction and reality bend slightly. It is eery and compelling.
Throughout the book, the artist, J.H. Williams III, uses varying colors and styles, from hard primitive scratchy art in red to smooth, cartoony art-nouveau style. There's symbolic imagery all over the place and all these references to occult and scientific history. It's just so rich. It's definitely something you can read several times and still glean more information out of. If you're a fan of the comic book medium, I highly recommend this book. Starting, of course, with book one (books two and three aren't yet available on Amazon and book four hasn't come out at all yet, though I'm eagerly awaiting it.

Brian posted at 10:25 AM.

Ten years ago, if you would have told me that in ten years I would be reading books about math and science purely for enjoyment, I would not have beleived it. It still seems strange to me as a reality. I've never been much of science person other than pretending to be a mad scientist as a child and mixing household cleaners together. And since high school, following year after year of progressively worse grades in my math courses (algebra I = "A"; Geometry = "B"; Algebra II/Trig = C and D second semester; even without math as a strong suit, I could see a mathematical pattern) I shied away from anything to do with math until relatively recently. I think I lack the basic desire to grasp minutae that is required by math. Anyway, here I am, regardless of reasoning.

Right now I am reading Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and another book called Imaginary Numbers: An Anthology of Marvelous Mathematical Stories, Diversions, Poems and Musings, which is a collection that is pretty good. Interestingly, I read one of the short stories by the famous Phillip K. Dick, called "The Golden Man" and didn't fully grasp the mathematical meaning of the story until I read about particle physics in The Elegant Universe. In Dick's story, we see our world in the possible near-future. In this world, there are beings not unlike the mutants in Marvel comics' X-Men, evolutionary upstarts who have strange and fantastic powers. The governments of the world, out of fear, have systematically destroyed all such creattures, out of fear for humanity's survival. In the story, almost all of these creatures have been wiped out. The protagonist finds one, however, and cannot figure out its power. It turns out that it can tell the future, in a manner of speaking.

In particle physics, subatomic particles, such as electrons, exist not in actual locations, but actually exist in many locations at once and are only ever some "place" that is "probable" at any given moment. Electrons sort of theoretically traverse infinite different paths simultaneously, but only ever actually are at any given point sort of after they've already been there. I'm sure I'm not explaining this the best I can, but what's interesting is that Dick explains it by anthropomorphing probability field particle physics into this evolutionarily advanced creature in such a way that I sort of "got" probability theory. The creature was a sort of precognitive being that would "live out" several possible futures in his head in order to choose what his next best option for self-preservation would be. And that's somewhat how probability fields work, in that sometimes particles can behave in extraordinary ways because they "choose" to do something very unlikely, but at the same time, "probable."

I talked about what was giving me trouble about this book in my last post, which was the nature of light and its speed and how even if you're going REALLY fast in a spaceship, indeed, no matter how fast you go, light will always be coming to you at the speed of light. This is still pretty hard to fathom and what's the most important thing is that physics, as it works in our worldspace, is not the same physics as it is either at subatomic levels or at high speed OR even at points of extremely high mass. Another thing to remember is that time, energy and speed are all very relative. In fact, at any given point, one's speed or mass actually dicates it's relationship with time. In other words, someone moving very very very fast experiences time very differently from someone who is moving at the rate at which we normally (or even occasionally abnormaly, say, at the speed of sound, even) move. And similarly, if something were to be extremely massive, like if there were a black hole two and a half million times as 165 of our sons squeezed into the area of Manhattan (which is not unheard of), time would also act differently. Pretty weird huh? Does any of this make sense? It's a really good book, I promise, but it IS a little dry if you're not interested in how the universe "works."

Brian posted at 10:54 AM.

Ten years ago, if you would have told me that in ten years I would be reading books about math and science purely for enjoyment, I would not have beleived it. It still seems strange to me as a reality. I've never been much of science person other than pretending to be a mad scientist as a child and mixing household cleaners together. And since high school, following year after year of progressively worse grades in my math courses (algebra I = "A"; Geometry = "B"; Algebra II/Trig = C and D second semester; even without math as a strong suit, I could see a mathematical pattern) I shied away from anything to do with math until relatively recently. I think I lack the basic desire to grasp minutae that is required by math. Anyway, here I am, regardless of reasoning.

Right now I am reading Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and another book called Imaginary Numbers: Stories, poems and musings about mathematics, which is a collection that is pretty good. Interestingly, I read one of the short stories by the famous Phillip K. Dick and didn't fully grasp the mathematical meaning of the story until I read about particle physics in The Elegant Universe. In Dick's story, we see our world in the possible near-future. In this world, there are beings not unlike the mutants in Marvel comics' X-Men, evolutionary upstarts who have strange and fantastic powers. The governments of the world, out of fear, have systematically destroyed all such creattures, out of fear for humanity's survival. In the story, almost all of these creatures have been wiped out. The protagonist finds one, however, and cannot figure out its power. It turns out that it can tell the future, in a manner of speaking.

In particle physics, subatomic particles, such as electrons, exist not in actual locations, but actually exist in many locations at once and are only ever some "place" that is "probable" at any given moment. Electrons sort of theoretically traverse infinite different paths simultaneously, but only ever actually are at any given point sort of after they've already been there. I'm sure I'm not explaining this the best I can, but what's interesting is that Dick explains it by anthropomorphing probability field particle physics into this evolutionarily advanced creature in such a way that I sort of "got" probability theory.

I talked about what was giving me trouble in my last post, which was the nature of light and its speed and how even if you're going REALLY fast in a spaceship, indeed, no matter how fast you go, light will always be coming to you at the speed of light. This is still pretty hard to fathom and what's the most important thing is that physics, as it works in our worldspace, is not the same physics as it is either at subatomic levels or at high speed OR even at points of extremely high mass. Another thing to remember is that time, energy and speed are all very relative. In fact, at any given point, one's speed or mass actually dicates it's relationship with time. In other words, someone moving very very very fast experiences time very differently from someone who is moving at the rate at which we normally (or even occasionally abnormaly, say, at the speed of sound, even) move. And similarly, if something were to be extremely massive, like if there were a black hole two and a half million times as 165 of our sons squeezed into the area of Manhattan (which is not unheard of), time would also act differently. Pretty weird huh? Does any of this make sense? It's a really good book, I promise, but it IS a little dry if you're not interested in how the universe "works."

___________

This morning, I read about “walking DNA” in an article from the New Scientist Online Journal. The article is pretty interesting and the discovery is a breakthrough, but it seems really strange that scientists are trying to get DNA to replicate probably the least efficient form of locomotion there is. If you look at the diagram, it looks like the nanites would take forever to move a micrometer, but if they were to create a sort of circle of the same “feet” that could roll along a chain of DNA, it seems like it would move much faster. Of course, I’m not a scientist and maybe my interpretation is based off an oversimplified illustration and analogy, but it’s pretty understood that wheels move faster than feet.

Brian posted at 8:31 AM.

Since I was going on vacation and several of the books I'm reading haven't been holding my full, unwavering attention, and since this book just arrived and when I left the office it was sitting there like a cat in heat, it's labia red and swollen, I decided to read it because it was fluff, and when mentioning it to my co-worker, Thomas, I laughed at my choice of words because I think most people would not classify a book about superstring theory and quantum mechanics as "fluffy," but I really do, though not in the way most people would. Specifically, we were talking about my reading, as another option, a book about web development, which, to me, seems much more labor intensive, mainly because while reading about it, I will be constantly be thinking of real-world applications to the knowledge, whereas with the physics book, all that is required of me for understanding is pure abstract thinking (well, ok, not pure, there's some analogies that refer to the physical world - strictly for the reader's benefit, I assure). I get to focus on the information in a more daydream-like way, and therefore it seems less of an effort.

It's probably this same phenomenon that caused me, as a young student, to suffer agonizingly slowly through school-assigned reading while at the same time breezing through 30-page comic books in three minutes or several-hundred-page fantasy novels in less than a week. Perhaps it's the anxiety of having to assimilate the information, rather than just enjoy it.

The Elegant Universe is written by Brian Greene. Greene is a specialist in "string theory," which (at least as far as I can tell so far) basically posits that subatomic particles such as quarks, muons and taus are all actually 1 dimensional loops, or "strings." This theory, supposedly, reconciles quantum mechanics (the science of small things) and Einstein's theory of relativity (the science of big stuff), which were up til now at odds. Apparently, this is what Einstein was trying to do for most of his life.

I eventually may add a "science" page to my hub. A statement in this book sort of solidified the reasoning behind my impulse: "When science is widely seen as an integral part of what makes us human, our own connection to the cosmos will be significantly strenghened; truly, science is the thread that weaves us all into the fabric of reality." Although, because of my own spiritual beliefs, I agree much more with the first phrase than with the second.

Speaking of which, I am reminded of yet another quote from the book which I think I've heard echoed in another book (perhaps it was in the preface of The Essential Kabbalah by Daniel C. Matt?): The [subatomic particles] are the 'letters' of all matter. Just like their linguistic counterparts, they appear to have no further internal substructure." This whole concept touches on quite a few topics that have been of especial interest to me over the last few years or so. Particularly, 1) Kabbalah, and it's intimations of the correlation between language and spirituality; 2) Ken Wilber's discussion of the nature of the nature (or ontology) of universe (including spirituality) with regard to evolution and holarchies and; 3) quantum mechanics/science, which, it seems to me, to be moving a bit more into the forefront of cultural awareness; and, 4) how these different topics seem to increasingly be related in surprising ways.

"Time dilation" and "Lorenz Contraction" are terms used to describe aspects of matter with regard to Special Relativity. These two are among those cool-sounding phrases like "Munchausen's by Proxy."

One thing I'm definitely grappling with is the fact that light supposedly always appears to behave the same way, regardless of the other objects' relative movement, meaning that if you were in a spaceship travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light, say 5/8ths, light would still approach you at the speed of light. This makes NO SENSE to me. I feel like I'm misunderstanding it, but the book's telling me that it doesn't make logical sense, so maybe I just need to keep reading to get the gist of it.

At every turn, I would feel like I got it only to again not get it. So far, I'm at about page 150. More to come...

Brian posted at 1:49 PM.