Forget Rubik's Cube:

By removing the colour stickers I've created a Schrödinger's Cube.

It is, despite observation, forever solved & unsolvable at the same time.

Nuclear fusion, one of the few things I get genuinely excited about....

There's been some talk recently of advances in the quest for controlled fusion:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/12/1136887.aspx

http://www.americanantigravity.com/articles/682/1/Dr-Robert-Bussards-Fusion-Breakthrough/Page1.html

http://www.emc2fusion.org/2007-3-5%20DefenseNews.pdf


When I expressed my excitement concerning this to my friend Mike (the smartest human I've ever known personally) he was nonplussed, or at least uninterested.

I suspect his dismissal of the news was based partly on the 'cold fusion' debacle of the '80s, and an unfortunate ignorance in our culture of the difference between fission reactions, which power our nuclear plants, our big bad bombs (sorry Nagasaki!), & will poison the planet for another 10,000 years, and fusion, which powers the stars.

I later sent him this email, which I decided would also make a decent blog:


Just to give some idea of the ridiculous magic controlled fusion offers us, I (finally) worked through some calculations:

Our sun is essentially a giant gravity-driven fusion reactor, converting hydrogen into helium (and a few other elements, if only briefly) and in the process spewing out massive amounts of energy. It's been 'burning' for roughly 5 billion years, the earth (such as it was at the time) has been here for about 4.5 billion years.

There's so much energy in matter that, if converted efficiently enough, a glass of water would provide enough to destroy this planet. The sun, as a massive fusion reactor, is so efficient it's 'burned' only about 120 times the mass of the planet earth in the last 5 billion years. Think about that. The sun is something like 95% of the mass of our solar system, but provides a ridiculous amount of energy (and has done for the last 5 billion years) by so efficiently converting matter to energy it's only used 120 time the earth in all this time.

I get giddy when I think we'll somehow be able to control that type of energy production. Can you imagine limitless free energy on this rock? With no messy radioactive leftovers to deal with?

We'd probably have a hundred years of anarchy as our old version of society destroyed itself, but the humans that survived could do whatever they fucking wanted. Whatever they could imagine. It freaks me out & makes me giggle to think I might see it in my life. Talk about the fucking dawning of a new age....

What it means to be human, in 11 paragraphs.

Newspaper clipping I found in High School. Don't remember the exact year, but roughly late '80s. I kept this because it perfectly displays almost every aspect of the human condition. It is obviously a tragedy by any rational standard, but still fascinating. Enjoy.


Woman found guilty in womb-ripping murder for baby

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP)
A former Oregon woman who a prosecuter said had an "obsession to have a child" has been found guilty but mentally ill of first-degree murder in the death of a pregnant woman whose baby was crudely cut from her womb.

The state District Court jury also found Darci K. Pierce guilty but mentally ill of kidnapping and child-abuse charges. The jury returned the verdicts yesterday after about six hours of deliberations over two days.

Mrs Pierce, 20, formerly of Portland, Ore., had pleaded innocent by reason of insanity in the death of Cindy Lynn Ray, 23. Mrs. Ray was 8½ months pregnant when she was strangled July 23.

Authorities said Mrs. Ray was abducted from the parking lot of a Kirtland Air Force Base health clinic and was driven to the Manzano Mountains east of Albuquerque, where she was strangled and a key was used to cut her unborn baby from her body. The baby survived. [Emphasis mine.]

Mrs. Pierce was arrested after she went to an Albuquerque hospital with a newborn girl and doctors determined she had not given birth.

Mrs. Pierce and the victim were married to airmen at the Kirtland base.

District Judge Richard Traub set sentencing for April 29. Mrs Pierce could receive life imprisonment on the murder conviction, an additional 18 years on the kidnapping charge and 18 months on the child-abuse charge.

Under New Mexico law, a jury finding of guilty but mentally ill means the person does not meet the legal test for insanity but had a substantial mental disorder that impaired judgement at the time of the crime.

The defendant is subject to standard sentences but the state Corrections Department is required to provide counseling and treatment "as it deems necessary."

Bogren said an appeal will be filed.

Mrs Ray's husband, Samuel, has returned to his home state of Utah with the infant girl, named Amelia, and her 2-year-old brother.


-The desire to have an offspring so overpowering it leads to such a feral-style murder.
-The unfortunate youth of those involved, and their imagined condition as young military families.
-The regular folk (Judges, doctors, lawyers, the jury) who had to deal with these events in a professional & public way.
-The dispassionate, objective reporting done by the AP writer. (There's no emotion in this article, the facts are provided in the standard lead-info first journalism; the decending order of relevance should the article need trimming.)
-What's not said in the line; "The baby survived."
-That we publish, read, and share 'news' of this nature as a society.
-That our advanced society had a judicial system in place with standardized sentencing guidelines that fit this event, and medical assistance ready & automatic.
-The error in editing that left the orphaned line; "Bogren said an appeal will be filed."
-The off-handed final paragraph showing the young father/widower going on with life.
-The fact that an airman named his daughter 'Amelia', the same as the most famous female flyer, who disappeared mysteriously.

This article is a poem to the human condition.

I wrote this in 2006, but never posted it. Found it in some old folder.

About two weeks ago I was a passenger in a T-bone collision with a very mis-handled taxi. I wasn't hurt, but my friend Jamie was, and her car was totaled.

Saturday night at about 2:30 am I was roused from my gentle slumber (gin- & weed-soaked couch-nap) by a tremendous IMPACT. Turns out a car traveling very fast had slammed through a row of parked cars out front, off of a tree, and into what's left of the outer wall of apartment #8.


I don't know the condition of the driver or his passenger, but there was a lot of shiny meat carried away on long spine boards sporting c-collars.
[I’ve since learned they both died.]

Accidents are a dime a dozen. The background noise in any daily news report. There were so many car accidents and car-related deaths on Saturday night/Sunday morning I could only find one mention online to our late-night apartment remodeling:
http://www.komotv.com/news/story.asp?ID=45142

Everything changes with an accident. Life becomes divided; ‘before’ and ‘after’. Every day after has a different flavor, and a long time is spent processing the event.

If it's an accident you're directly involved in, you end up replaying it, over & over. It's like having a bad song stuck in your head you can’t shake, except it comes with very bright pictures and the (gorgeous) sound of breaking glass.

I've been in my share of accidents before, most of which I have caused (often intentionally). So far I've skidded through unscathed, unscarred, unbroken.

But what really has caught my attention in the last couple of weeks is the very instance of the accident itself. Maybe it’s because I’ve been an observer to both accidents. They happened near me, not to me. After any accident; shock, processing, replaying, coping, moving on. Occasional pangs of ‘before’.

But the accident itself. The very instance of impact. The fulcrum of ‘before’ and ‘after’. Somehow I never noticed it. In a split-second your world is lifted up, shifted an 8th of a degree, and set down in an entirely new configuration. It looks exactly the same, if briefly brighter. But your world’s ever so subtly different now.

There’s purity in it, this silent click. A switch is thrown, lost in the thunderous conversion of so much kinetic energy. Then an instant of pure awareness. But only for a moment, and then it’s gone, and you’re left dealing with the ‘after’.

It’s very tantalizing, that moment.

"You can't have bad taste without good taste."

Tuesday evening as part of this year's SIFF John Waters did a Q&A before a showing of his 2000 flic "Cecil B. Demented"

What follows are a few of the more memorable quotes I jotted down. Try to imagine them said with that great voice he has, sort of an East Coast gay drawl....


[Referencing the locally made documentary "ZOO" about the Enumclaw zoophile killed by a ruptured anus from being penetrated by a horse.]
"That movie taught me a whole new set of words. 'Are you ZOO?' 'Yeah I'm Zoo.' That was a great movie!"

"You can't have bad taste without good taste. I thank my stepmother for teaching me which fork to use for the salad."

"I don't watch TV. I watch it for porn. It's good for watching war. And porn."

"People send me free porn all the time. I write reviews, thank-you notes. Thank you for sending me Schindler's Fist."

"Best headline the New York Post ever ran: IKE BEATS TINA TO DEATH"

[When asked why some innocent characters had to get gunned down in "Cecil B. Demented".]
"They got in the way of the shot! There's some reasons people need to die!"

"The first 10 minutes of your script gets the money people, the last 10 minutes get the audience to love your movie."

"I don't trust anyone who hasn't been arrested at least once."


And the final thing he added just before leaving the stage: "If anybody in the audience liked even one of my movies, thank you very much."

Class act, and a fucking funny interviewee.