Saturday 24 October 2009

Old Smoky

make me laugh sometimes. I am also a fervent smoker.
I did harbour delusions of producing a range of 'Outdoor Smoker' designer label garments.  Featuring lots of pockets for lighters; ashtrays; one of those pen-knives for scraping our old pipes - or is it horses hooves? A BIG hat for th rain, with closable side flaps.




http://www.shorpy.com/

Falling Behind Already sitrep

18:53 24/10/2009

Where does the time go? Tempus blinking fugit.

One of the benefits of living alone is to be able to dispense with the TV.
No more 'reality' shows (reality?), no more talent contests, soap operas, infotainment, modern 'humour,' modern 'music,' and no more 'celebrities.'
Most of all, no more adverts and no more News.'
So, no TV now, for about six years. But i still indulge in 'escapism'  in a big way. I love a good movie or even more a good tv series,some of which I will list at the end of this bit.
If i am not actually at the computer i am usually reading a book, drawing or writing. The less i have to deal with 'reality' the better as far as i am concerned.

As an experiment i decided to cut myself even further off - if i could - and now i refuse to read/listen to/watch any 'news' bulletins, avoiding the radio most of all, bye bye auntie Beeb.
I am curious if
a) i will go completely mad at some point ands even if I will notice it
or
b) it makes absolutely NO difference to my life whatsoever.

But this has been much harder to acheive than i ever imagined: 'the News' STILL gets in somehow.

I read in a book recently that 'chat' -or 'gossip' - which is also chat - accounts for 80%+ of all human conversation and it is how we learn most of what we need to know for daily survival.
Living as a recluse my ability to 'chat' is limited, yet the news still gets through despite my desire to ignore it all. Bits of news i must subconsciously rate as important and relevant, still get filed away in my short term memory. Amazing to me.

So next year i must see if i have the nerve to go the next step - and cut off this broadband connection too.
If i do, i can almost guarantee some form of madness for next year.
:D

Wednesday 21 October 2009

Ostrich (US Mail Box idea)


picture: Boston Globe's Big Picture gallery

Heaven & Earth

Christians surely believe, in aliens.

Have you taken a look at some of the Hubble telescope photos of deep space?
The bulk of astro observations in modern times have been concentrated looking INwards, so to speak. For many decades, the search has been on to pinpoint our origin, the so-called 'big bang.' By studying stars ever more distant, astronomers are in fact looking back in time. This is because the light of stars takes years to reach us, mostly it takes millions of years, because the stars are so far away. While we all 'know' this, we still cannot even begin to comprehend just how far that actually is!

So now they are looking for stars that are around 60 billion years old, (*?*) which is the estimated age of the universe. They do this by looking for stars that are about 60 billion light years away; they measure the distance by all sorts of arcane equations, -including something called 'candlepower'- as well as data from a large spectrum of radio and electromagnetic radiation.

Nasa's APOD (Astronomical Picture Of the Day) gallery has some cracking huge pictures, including what they term 'star nurseries,' -where cosmic dust and stars and hard radiation rage on a colossal scale and over aeons of mortal time. Where star systems are crushed and born again in super-novae events; a world of mega black holes and galaxies of stars dancing and colliding and ripping each other to shreds in the throes of their own gravitational forces.

Many of these wonderful photos could never be seen by the merely human eye. the eyeball only captures a tiny part of the entire spectrum; special cameras can detect x-rays and ultra-violet as well as microscopic increments of heat, and exotic gases. NASA combine these 'pictures' along with visible light pictures to show what is really going on aound these stars, which otherwise only God would see - or of course, aliens.

So Christians seem to believe that God made the heavens and the earth, and placed man on the earth - and thats it.
God also made all these billions of stars - billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars even. He put them in the heavens, but as far as anyone knows, that's it.
He put them so far away that it is 99.9999% sure we will NEVER get anywhere near another star.
Even sending men to Mars would almost certainly kill them: once outside the earth's atmosphere, there is nothing to protect human tissue from the continuous storm of hard radiation particles - from our own star and all the others too. Even the shortest (6 months each way) trip to our nieghbour Mars would probably be fatal to man.

So from a Christian perspective it should seem almost obvious that God must have created other lives too: alien lives. Why else would he create so many many stars and suns in such a monstrously, inconceivably gigantic space? And who else IS there anyway, to create aliens, if not God?

The distances involved are totally insane to grasp: there is nothing you can scale it against to make sense.
Eg: To the NEAREST STAR: [4 light years away and light travels at 186,000 miles per SECOND. You do the math!]
IF we could develop fast rockets (assume it has tons of lead shielding) that could travel at 186 miles per second - that's a mere 670million miles per hour* - Even at that speed it would take 4000 years. ( 186 m.p.s. may seem a ludicrously fast speed but it is exactly 1/1000 of the speed of light, making the math obvious)

And that's just to the NEAREST star.
-A star which is, anyway, not likely to have life bearing planets. Only a tiny percentage of a percentage of stars are thought likely to have life-support capacity.

( * That would have to be the average speed - spaceships would accelerate for half the trip then decelerate for the second half)


image from Nasa's Astronomical Picture Of the Day