Bride of Tab Dump

Who has time to write up thoughtful reactions to all of the cool things out on the internet? Isn't it easier just to throw you some links and let you read what you want? Enjoy!

• A collection of excellent old SciFi Illustrations by Shusei Nagoka. Although it's incongrous to see cool spaceship art side-by-side with cheezy 70s band cover art. 
• Los Bros Hernandez are continually singing the praises of Bob Bolling's Little Archie comic books as the inspiration for their work on Love and Rockets - in particular the awesome "Lil Kids" segments. Big Blog Comics shows us an example of his work, and it's as fun as you expect.
• Thinking of working in some fartlek work into my running, but haven't actually done so yet.
• Cool footage from Pavel Klushantsev's The Road to the Stars film, an inspiration for 2001
• Miles Davis: Genius, Hustler, and Superstar.
• David Byrne recently published what sounds like a fascinating book: How Music Works. Brain Pickings has a synopsis, while Smithsonian published an excerpt that includes his interesting thoughts on silence:

  In 1969, Unesco passed a resolution outlining a human right that doesn’t get talked about much—the right to silence. I think they’re referring to what happens if a noisy factory gets built beside your house, or a shooting range, or if a disco opens downstairs. They don’t mean you can demand that a restaurant turn off the classic rock tunes it’s playing, or that you can muzzle the guy next to you on the train yelling into his cellphone. It’s a nice thought though—despite our innate dread of absolute silence, we should have the right to take an occasional aural break, to experience, however briefly, a moment or two of sonic fresh air. To have a meditative moment, a head-clearing space, is a nice idea for a human right.
  John Cage wrote a book called, somewhat ironically, Silence. Ironic because he was increasingly becoming notorious for noise and chaos in his compositions. He once claimed that silence doesn’t exist for us. In a quest to experience it, he went into an anechoic chamber, a room isolated from all outside sounds, with walls designed to inhibit the reflection of sounds. A dead space, acoustically. After a few moments he heard a thumping and whooshing, and was informed those sounds were his own heartbeat and the sound of his blood rushing through his veins and arteries. They were louder than he might have expected, but okay. After a while, he heard another sound, a high whine, and was informed that this was his nervous system. He realized then that for human beings there was no such thing as true silence, and this anecdote became a way of explaining that he decided that rather than fighting to shut out the sounds of the world, to compartmentalize music as something outside of the noisy, uncontrollable world of sounds, he’d let them in: “Let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for manmade theories or expressions of human sentiments.” Conceptually at least, the entire world now became music.

• What successful people do with the first hour of their work day. 
• Warren Ellis awesome talk on on "How to see the Future" A must read, filled with interesting stories and facts. My favorite is this:
  

  The Olympus Mons mountain on Mars is so tall and yet so gently sloped that, were you suited and supplied correctly, ascending it would allow you to walk most of the way to space. Mars has a big, puffy atmosphere, taller than ours, but there’s barely anything to it at that level. 30 Pascals of pressure, which is what we get in an industrial vacuum furnace here on Earth. You may as well be in space. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you could quite literally walk to space.
  That’s actually got a bit more going for it, as an idea, than exotic red deserts and canals. Imagine living in a Martian culture for a moment, where this thing is a presence in the existence of an entire sentient species. A mountain that you cannot see the top of, because it’s a small world and the summit wraps behind the horizon. Imagine settlements creeping up the side of Olympus Mons. Imagine battles fought over sections of slope. Generations upon generations of explorers dying further and further up its height, technologies iterated and expended upon being able to walk to within leaping distance of orbital space. Manufactured normalcy would suggest that, if we were the Martians, we would find this completely dull within ten years and bitch about not being able to simply fart our way into space.

A Black Hole: A Dam

Never thought of it in this way, but in Tess Taylor's review of Caleb Scharf's Gravity's Engines, the case is made that a Black a dam:

On earth, in a dam, there is pressure on one side and a lack of pressure on the other. Water forced through spillways, driven by gravity, generates enormous energy that we harvest as electricity. In a black hole, there is the universe on one side and a void on the other. And as stars and particles rush towards black holes, they pick up speed, sloshing in much the same way water does heading towards a dam or drain. Just as sloshing water represents lost energy we hear converted to gurgling sound waves, stars and gasses rushing towards the brink of a cosmic drain lose particles that can be "seen" translated into other forms of energy. The edges of black holes are thus always spewing matter, a kind of cosmic splatter paint. Although things pulled towards black holes are mostly swallowed, over time the sloshing of nearly swallowed stars spews the universe with a mess of Jackson Pollock-like cosmic goo.

Warp Speed, Mr. Sulu

Space.com gives nerds everywhere hope: perhaps warp speed isn't impossible after all:

An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.
Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all. 

I love reading about developments like this - it makes me happy to know that there are still irrational dreamers out there. My understanding is that travel in this way is impossible, but i'm glad someone is trying nonetheless. Although I had to laugh at the vague “exotic matter” reference: I'd like to know what kind of exotic matter could protect someone from a distortion in space/time!

The Most Terrifying Fact About the Universe is not that it is Hostile but that it is Indifferent

“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism – and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

- Stanley Kubrick, from a Playboy interview, 1968

First Lines of "The Stand"

"Sally."
A mutter.
"Wake up now, Sally."
A louder mutter: leeme lone.
He shook her harder.
"Wake up. You got to wake up!"
Charlie.
Charlie's voice. Calling her. For how long?
Sally swum up out of sleep.
...
"Sally, honey, don't ask questions. We have to get away. Far away. You just go get Baby LaVon and get her dressed."

-Stephen King, The Stand.

I'm hoping to burn out my current Stephen King obsession by finally tackling the last major novel of his I haven't read: his famous  plague novel from 1978 (although i'm reading the Complete and Uncut version published in 1990 since that's the copy my wife has). I'm about 416 pages in and so far it's really, really good, if a bit too long winded at times. The guy really knows how to get your blood moving!

Last-minute Desperate Solutions to Impossible Problems

This is how I feel at work sometimes:

Casey Ryback: What made you flip like this?
William Strannix: I got tired of coming up with last-minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other fucking people.
Casey Ryback: All of your ridiculous pitiful antics aren't gonna change a thing. You and me, we're *puppets* in the same sick game. We serve the same master, and he's a lunatic and he's ungrateful. But there's nothing we can do about it. You and me, we're the same.
William Strannix: Oh, no. No. No. No. There's a difference, my man. You have faith. I don't!
[a knife fight erupts between them]

From the classic Stephen Segal flick Under Seige

Graphic Novel of "A Wrinkle in Time"

Hope Larson has created a graphical version of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. It's a fantastic book, and the example pages not only look great but appear to be a very honest adaptation.

I recently re-read A Wrinkle in Time and came away very impressed yet again. Part of that is that I have such fond memories of the book from my youth, but most of it is just that it's very well written.