COTTON THISTLE CLEARANCE
Random musings from the noggin' of Knolltrey (Best viewed on a monitor running Mozilla Firefox, with a brain running on a case of Grolsh...)
Tuesday, 18 December 2007
When I type in a flash-movie link I'm always tempted to put in a ".sfw" instead of the correct extension of .swf (quite ironic, too, since many flash files are certainly not "SFW".
No worries: this .swf is SFW, but it'll probably take forever to load on ya' (and if you don't even have flash, then you're SOL on viewing this .swf, for which it is absolutely SQN, regardless of its SFW...)
Right, I need to stop, now...
And, just like that, no more pictures for some time.
The next multimedia thingy I bloody friggin' post damn well better be the next chapter. And, as a matter of fact, it will be ;)
During the cutting of the cake Mister 2001 rattled off a list of wishes, and among them was the desire to live to see first contact with an alien species.
...yeah... good luck with that, Arthur.
I think that, if we're lucky (or, perhaps, unlucky!) then my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren will have a fairly good chance at making contact with someone in another goldilocks zone. (let's see: what is that? About 1000 years?... carry the one... factor in the 20th 'great'... uh...)
Well, it'll be a f**king long time, put another way.
What do you wanna do, huh? We've got a century's worth of electronic transmission currently hurtling through the void of space (so we've managed to cover, liberally, about 100 light years distance, but given signal degradation and everything else... well...)
So an alien race detects our broadcasts (being supremely optimistic and ignoring many of the tenants of the Drake Equation, the ones that depress me...) and then what? Assuming we haven't developed the power to hear THEIR broadcasts, then we'd be waiting for however many hundreds of years it would take them to send a focused, detectable signal in our direction.
(BTW: my grasping of general relativity is ridiculously shallow, but given the evidence, I don't see any way of surpassing certain limits as far as travel is concerned... sorry, but 3e8 m/s/s seems to be the limit for us)
Yeah, yeah, yeah: in my own (fictional) books I insinuate that raw data (energy) can be 'skimmed' out from point A to point B in an APPARENT violation of relativity (ie: about 60 to 100 times faster than light, give or take...) but, first of all, TYPERS is fiction, and second of all, the 'skimming' I describe in the book relies upon (fictional) interdimensional issues, so again: the data is only APPARENTLY going faster than light...
...that (fictional) plot point is the one I hate the most about my books' scientific rigor... (at least objects with detectable MASS do go much, much, much slower than the speed of light when they 'skim'...)
Fictionally speaking, of course.
(and don't rag on me that my own books detail an 'alien invasion war': ain't no alien invasion, since the BYDO are as home-grown as ma's vine-ripened tomatoes... probably don't taste as good, though...)
Back to the point at hand:
The romantic in me has always indulged the idea that, millenia from now, some alien race that's been listening to an odd smattering of organized data streaking though their territory (ie: Earth noise) goes out into the night and stumbles upon one of the Pioneer probes...
...I could see them hauling it back home and then getting to work; after several generations of toil and study they'd possibly be able to decipher the Pioneer plaque itself...
We could've made it easier, I think. Something like this:
And, after another 1000 years or so, something of theirs could possibly reach our home turf.
What the hell would they find in this Solar System after that amount of time?
I couldn't imagine.
But Mister Clarke did, once, and while that story ain't likely to pan out in the long run (remember all the people still using typewriters in '2001'?) here's to a legendary, visionary, and intellectually brilliant writer who dared to dream......
Hacks like me can only marvel at his work, and if we really try, we can learn as well.
Lazy Sundays, huh? Time for sloth, time for rest.... Who can get anything done, eh?
Well, today I figured out how to export Photoshop layers into flash movies, so there:
Hehehe: gives the illusion that I actually drew the pictures. Nah: it's all just Poser poses, of course. But the idea of 'breathing life into the lifeless' is kinda the name of these characters' games: the nature of the beast, yadda, yadda, yadda...
The mug-a-trois rendering is for a picture I was toying with. It didn't come out exactly as I thought it would, and I couldn't cut down on the sense of clutter within it (that's kinda generous: in many respects the thing's a mess). The color scheme is a little bit putrid, too, but given the low amount of time I devoted to it and all the things that COULD'VE gone wrong, it gets the Knolltrey Seal of Approval (which, in most cases, is usually a finger to the eye...)
Teh Caption: "Babes in the Woods" (...natch')
The faces themselves work well enough: undersized Mehta between comparatively taller/more-developed Quint and Ever, with Ever looking directly at the viewer (THAT little touch is most intentional, given that Ever is a full-fledged Bydo Core- while Quint and Mehta are merely cultured flesh from Ceresland- Ever has infinitely more potential power to develop, though she's limited by the interface with her own pilot: a limitation that Quint, on the other hands, does not share...)
And if you don't like it, well: you know what they say about "Styx and stones"...
It's a funny story, and my, oh, my is it rife with nanny-state musings. Nowhere do I see concerns about such topics as 'Drunk Driving' (public enemy no. 1 in the US), or even 'alcoholism' in general, but instead just an ominous warning rife with fear-mongering over the fact that blood-red wine has a few more proof-points (...link for the UK-ers...) in it than some beers or other fare.
*(Smoking is, BTW, a filty and disgusting habit; I only depict it in TYPERS 'cause I assume that within a hundred years there'll be adequate genetic safeguards in place to prevent and/or destroy those resulting cancers, et al. But hey, in the meantime: unless you wanna outlaw smoking outright, just f**king let people puff away in peace, eh?)
I shouldn't judge, after all: why, even here in the US-o'-A we've got some states with certain restrictions on smoking a fag...
...sorry...
Well, if the prevailing winds out of parliament (and not the smoke out of Parliaments!... sorry...) is towards a more prohibitionist state, here's hoping it works out better for you guys than it did for us...
Sometimes I do wonder if Europeans understand that they're more capable of making life-decisions for themselves than their omnipresent governments are. Eh, the Brits I don't worry so much about: they're an alright bunch...
It's really the rest of that EU-setup that's come up pear-shaped ever since then end of the Colonial Era...
Not surprising, really. Especially when one considers the scale of the planet and all. Most of those big ol' planets actually do have rings, even if the rings on some of them are fainter than a mosquito on a hog at sundown...
...sorry...
Anyway, take the Earth: the prevailing science at the moment says that the Earth was friggin' smacked by extrastellar debris and that, as a consequence, the Earth itself was a ringed planetary body for awhile (...actually, an infenitesimally short period, geologically and/or astronomically speaking) however if you factor out all the variables in Saturn, and its propensity to create resonant-stablized rings (through a process I neither understand nor care to try to elaborate upon) it's small wonder that those ridiculously beautiful discs would be products of birth, and not of recent construction.
I finally found a better name for 'Legend of the Novanjo'. The subjectmatter of the chapter is the same, but I f**king hate that title...
Now I'm calling it "Terra Incognita"...
that's a little better, I think (a flashback in the chapter to Mister Grey-Hair/Ainsworth/whoever-the-f**k-he-is provided the dialogue that gave me inspiration: it's a much better way to tie-in everything as a tight, cohesive, knot of plotty-goodness...
Evolving Standards of Decency... Mood: a-ok Topic: Random Political Diatribe
Follow the dots:
Marine biologist is hired on to a respected institute...
Marine biologist is put on with a group examining the evolutionary aspects of zebra fish...
However, marine biologist dissents, based on his flat-out rejection of the process of evolution (not just Darwin's theory of natural selection, mind you, but the whole God-d@#ned process...)
Yeesh. I love the tenants of religious freedom as much as the next guy, and as a matter of fact this guy is being fired for his religious beliefs...
but I absolutely, positively gotta side with the institute on this one, based on the facts as I know them (ie: based on the info I got from briefly scanning this article...)
Look: what are you gonna do, huh? This is like that fiaso a while back with those self-righteous Muslim checkers at Target who won't handle ANY pork products (in wrappers and packaging, mind you...) or the (again...) Muslim cabbies who refuse to transport people in their cabs if they're carrying ANY alcohol in their luggage...
Of course, I needn't point to just these examples: should a PETA activist be greenlit for a job in a slaughterhouse? (Wherein they might poison the meat with some noxious chemical... I'm serious...) Or should His Humble Lord of Lucidity Richard Dawkins be appoited to serve in the Vatican? For that matter: should a Catholic priest be appointed to host a Boy Scout retreat?
...hehehe: kidding, kidding...
...yeah... *sigh*
anywho: my point is that an acceptance of the process of descent with modification and the tenants of the Central Dogma of Biology seem to be a REQUIREMENT for this job. In every other example I've cited, the person in the job should be fired forthwith, as their attitudes or actions clearly are incompatible with carrying out the job that THEY WERE CONTRACTED TO PERFORM.
...my only caveat is that this IS a firing based on religion, and one I support. However, in many of the above examples (mostly the Muslim ones...) the perpetrators were not fired, but coddled:
If your religion goes so far as to make you incapable of performing a certain task that is REQUIRED of you then you must, I repeat MUST, seek employment elsewhere.
For the record: Shane wholeheartedly accepts the scientific research on evolution (and if YOU don't, then you deserve to have an old-line antibiotic the next time you go into the hospital... then we'll see where you stand...)
...I'm smart enough to know that the poetic Hebrew words used to designate a 'day' in Genesis mean anything from an hour to an aeon.
I suggest you go take a Bible study class, prof...
"Deo Optimo Maximo"! Mood: cheeky Now Playing: The Rolling Stones' "40 Licks" Topic: Pseudoscientific Musings
Just throwing this out here... but has anyone ever considered giving a retroactive Nobel Peace Prize to the Benedictine Monks?
It might be sacriligeous to mention canonization, too, but still: some inventions are, undoubtedly, worthy of sainthood.
(and yes: I'm aware that it wasn't the monks who decided to blend the stuff with strong brandy to kill its wicked sweetness, but still: I can't argue for a multinational corporation to recieve the Nobel, can I?)
I shouldn't be arguing any of this at all, really...
celebratory
a-ok
caffeinated
cheeky
crushed out
