The Who's "Amazing Journey"

As many of you know, i'm a Who obsessive. As such, when Dangerous Minds posted links to the Amazing Journey video, I dove right in. I haven't watched the entire thing yet, but what I have seen is another reminder that this group of talented individuals created glorious noise - something larger than the sum of their parts.

Really looking forward to seeing Pete n' Roger play Quadrophenia at the Garden this November.

Sublimity From the Silence of the Night

“At the dead hour of the night, when the world is hushed in sleep and all is still; when there is not a sound to be heard save the dead beat escapement of the clock, counting with hollow voice the footsteps of time in ceaseless round, I turn to the Ephemeris and find there, by calculations made years ago, that when that clock tells a certain hour, a star which I never saw will be in the field of the telescope for a moment, flit through and then disappear. The instrument is set; the moment approaches and is intently awaited—I look—the star mute with eloquence that gathers sublimity from the silence of the night, comes smiling and dancing into the field, and at the instant predicted even to the fraction of a second, it makes its transit and is gone. With emotions too deep for the organs of speech, the heart swells out with unutterable anthems; we then see that there is harmony in the heavens above; and though we cannot hear, we feel the ‘music of the spheres.’”

— Matthew Fontaine Maury, in an 1849 presentation to the Virginia Historical Society. Maury was superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory.

H/t Boing Boing

One of Those Divine Fools

"At this point, Si roused himself, and his voice captured the travelers at once. He spoke in the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales--one of those divine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs strung with drips of dew."

- Stephen King, The Wastelands, page 242

Book Review: Brian Greene's "Hidden Reality"

The sub-title of Brian Greene's Hidden Reality is "Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos."  It's advertised as an accessible examination of the physics behind parallel universes (both the multiverse and the many-worlds theory of Quantum physics). The subject it covers is fascinating, if complex: Greene details nine actual theories that detail the existence of other universes in addition to the one we know and love. The most basic of these theories claims that if the universe is infinate, since there's only a finate number of ways that you can arrange matter, then logically patterns of matter would repeat, leading - somewhere out there - to duplication of our universe. The more complex of the theories rely on very abstract theoritical frameworks like the probability of Quantum Mechanics and String Theory. For another taste of this, get it straight from the man himself:


Greene is a good writer, and does his best to simplify the science behind these complicated theories However, it's a daunting task: string theory in particular is so abstract and antithetical to our everyday life that it's very hard to follow - particularly if you're reading the book in segments. For example, here's an interview where he attempts to explain the brane multiverse:

...the brane multiverse, in which our universe is envisioned to reside on a giant membrane, an ingredient that comes out of string theory. It’s actually a three-dimensional membrane, but thinking in two-dimensional terms is easier. Think of our universe as if it were a huge slice of bread, with all the stars and all the galaxies sprinkled across its surface. The math of string theory suggests this picture, along with the possibility that there are other universes, other slices of bread, all constituting a big cosmic loaf.  

In the book, he expands upon the three-dimensional idea by stating that "...few of us can picture two coexisting but separate three-dimensional entities, each of which could fully fill three-dimensional space." (page 130) His loaf analogy is a nice attempt, but he has to keep revisiting it whenever new details arise, until the whole thing gets incredibly complicated - just like the theory. For that reason, I can't recommend this book to the layman; it's just not an easy-to-grasp, high-level explanation of the concepts behind parallel worlds. It is an interesting book on a fascinating subject, but in my opinion it couldn't get over the hump that simply grasping the meaning of theoretical physics can be difficult, much less following them to their logical conclusion.

Note for the Kindle edition: I found the footnotes and graphics to be problematic, mainly because you can't jump back to where you were without making note of the page number and manually entering it in. Would it really be that hard to make the footnote a two-way street? Also: there was obviously no color in the graphics. These two factors combined made me wish I had purchased the dead-tree edition of this book.

Unadulterated Genius

Well, maybe a little bit adulterated:

John was the rock (or the Ox) on which the Who's music lay. His bass swoops in the context of the song are incredible.

The Shadows of Vesta

Check out this spooky picture of the giant asteroid Vesta, as taken by the Dawn spacecraft. Pictures like this send shivers down my spine, not only because it shows the deep shadows of a lifeless eerie rock but also   accurately captures the static silence of space.

Dawn is in the process of leaving Vesta - a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter - to travel to another huge asteroid called Ceres. What's interesting bout Dawn is that it uses xenon ion propulsion, which I didn't even realize was a live technology. You hear a lot about them in SciFi, but now they're in use in everyday life. Amazing.

First Lines of "The Wastelands"

"It was her third time with live ammunition, and her first time on the draw from the holster Roland had rigged for her."
- Stephen King, The Wastelands

Reading The Wind Through the Keyhole showed me how much I had forgotten about the Dark Tower universe in the 10-something years since I read the original seven novels. I remember the first one pretty well and remember not liking The Drawing of the Three very much (I wasn't much of a fan of his work in the 10-year period of time between the incredible It to Bag of Bones), so I'm rereading the third volume. Mixed bag so far, but the ideas in the overall series are a lot of fun to fall back into.