Rico Penguin

They say
Diamonds never change
Endless in beauty and shape
I say shenanigans
as I watch them change
again and again

Crumble quickly
to dust before me
how do rocks
differ from life
at our base
all is not alive

They say
waters will run
bringing in the new
and washing out
the old
but I wonder who
they should have told

Sickle celled
crystalline
turtle shelled
Endless in beauty and shape
Diamonds never change
They say

She was one of my best friends and easily the sweetest cat I’ve ever known. You will be sorely missed Cleo. It is always the best that leave first, entirely unfair.

  I often wonder about pain. As someone who did very poor on his rotation during a few years of martial arts training I have a pretty consistent pain in my knees. Top that with the seemingly endlessly pinched nerve in my hip and I have all sorts of pain being sent to my brain.

  But I’m left with questions, my pain tells me that something is wrong, but it is so vague that I cannot discern what operation would be best. Should the region be kept active to accelerate healing or should it be relaxed to lessen damage till the healing finishes. Is this pain likely to become a life threatening condition or is it merely a discomfort. I am left with an endless flow of data that makes no effort to cease and yet provides me with no new information.

  Basically the cheapest car you’ll ever own will be able to tell you what is wrong with it, even if it is one of a few things it’ll still be specific enough to get it fixed. If this simple mechanic can be dropped into even the crappiest of cars, why on Earth has it not made it to organisms?

  To me this would be one of the most helpful evolutionary traits one could possibly have. If you knew exactly what was wrong with you then you would have the best opportunity to fix the issue. Admittedly it would only be helpful with primates and humans since most other animals couldn’t articulate well enough to heal their injuries most times.

  However it is a blaring issue I have with the ideas of humans being sculpted, if personal computers were so poor at articulating their problems (giving you the exact same report for absolutely any error possible) nobody would own one. Even when we joke and say they are vague a single google search can help even the most inept person figure out what is wrong and even how to fix it. However you can only wildly guess what is wrong with you through tools such as webMD. We essentially have ‘dull pains’ and ‘sharp pains’ and that is it. It is the most useless binary to ever exist that I’ve known.

  How completely inept would a being have to be to develop such a terrible system of data transfer? Our brains can defuse insanely complicated puzzles and yet the simple information of “bruised vein” can’t travel from my arm to my brain through (essentially) the same electrical processes.

  Pain is a failed experiment and serves very limited service, if the damage isn’t on the surface you can roll a dice on what is wrong with you. Is that a random chest pain or are you having a heart attack? Well we’ll know in about 10 minutes now won’t we.

  Nonsense I tell you…utter nonsense.

Darkness crawls along
Serenading Sirens Song
Cat calls tricking
all listening

Ether Escher
peaking threshold
bursting blackness
ink palms press

Gripping tightly
beneath the soul
pulling you down
by your sole

Enter the abyss
darkness incarnate
light loves no one
here

  So I learned something a bit shocking today on Discovery channel. It turns out that when you flush a toilet you create a circulation of air in the bowl of the toilet that creates a mushroom cloud like collection of microscopic fecal matter (known as fecal chloriform I believe), this cloud will then (if not concealed through various manners) stretch across the entirety of your bathroom, dousing your towels, your brushes, your toothbrush, your doorknob and heck even you in tiny conventionally invisible specs of poo matter.

  So the next time you flush your toilet perhaps it would be in your best interest to first put the toilet seat down, sure its not going to kill you but the less poo on your toothbrush the better I say.

  Hope this was an insightful tidbit of info. Again brought to you by Discovery channel initially.

  It is a good thing that today is a holiday. Given how unenthusiastic I am about everything I need a day off to get my energy back. I blame this off and on sickness. At any rate I’ll be back to do some fruitful updating tomorrow, might discuss more about the book or perhaps North Koreas interesting little foray into nuclear weaponry testing.

  I’m quite certain at this point the next country to drop a nuclear weapon on another country will disappear off the face of the Earth so fast (from non-nuclear bombardments) that we will question whether or not they exist. Too many nations have too many people with too much power to allow another smug nut job ruin it all, I think WWII was the last time we’ll ever see a charismatic warlord raise an army of such scope.

  Although if you WERE going to do it, the middle east looks like prime ground to try. That is all for today. Hope you all are enjoying your day off.

  ADIOS (Aka a Day in the Isles of Scion) is the occasional post about some random aspect of the Isles of Scion Universe, this time around we will be discussing the wonders of the Wyrd Mages. For those of you out of the loop the Isles of Scion is a universe I’m developing through a series of books that should sometime in the next 3 years see their first release. Until then these posts will be helpful for me and those interested in getting ideas out. I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum (that being said if you read further than this expect to learn something you might not want to know when reading the book.

(continue reading…)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30890934/

  Now it isn’t an isolated incident, there are nations that have been battling for hundreds if not thousands of years merely because of a disagreement in literature. I know people say that even without faith we will still have conflict but I tend to think that once people are fighting over which is better, star trek or star wars, we’ll be able to step back and stop it much easier.

  In my mind I wonder though, what benefits do religion give you that you couldn’t acquire by simply being a positive human being? Neither is necessary to have the other so this is not a case of parsing how you could do one without the other.

  Just how much dependency on a belief is too much is another thing I’d be interested in knowing. When you ignore simple medical care and allow your child to die, when you rush to develop nuclear weaponry simply to attack another group of people who disagree with you on a single aspect of your life. At what point do we step back and just say “Whoa”…likewise just when will I start using question marks again to end my questions?

  That’s where I stand though, I’m just not grasping the gain. The benefit of glorifying death over life. For now I just read the newspaper and see event after event that is pretty upsetting. Taking course after course where there is a single theme that holds true.

  However amidst it all I’m pretty positive about life, that to me is what counts. In case you were curious .

  “There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.” – Donald Rumsfeld

  For those that peeked up from their sessions of WoW the above quote might be familiar. From what I take from it, there are things that exist that we know exist, there are things that exist that we don’t know exist, then there are things the we don’t know that we don’t know they exist. Which to the casual reader might come off as “Oh so you basically said the same thing twice.”

  So is there actual unknown unknowns? Or is this a case of poor labeling. Modern astronomers might ask the question “What will you find at the end of a black hole?” However if you go far back enough people didn’t even know black holes existed. This would classify to Rumsfeld as an unknown unknown, but to me it is just a further stripping back of your basic everyday unknown.

    Essentially knowledge is not a light switch, we do not suddenly know something is true one day, things gradually become more and more understandable as we dig deeper and deeper into the make of them and their interactions with the universe around them. At no point is anything absolutely certain on a scientific level. You can make literally trillions of subjective statements that appear to be objective and think you’ve proven something absolute but in the end it all comes back to your 5 senses, your language, and the true meaning behind everything involved with that postulate.

  Honestly once you are done parsing just about anything you once thought was rock solid it falls apart, as stated in a very early post here, if it explains in absolution it is absolutely wrong (I used different phrasing before, I thought this sounded swanky though).

  The existence of a non-existent thing is a paradox of language and should be treated as such. Throwing on unknown onto unknown is redundancy and should be treated as such (if you ask me…which you didn’t). Sure one could argue that god is a nonexistent existence, a being that doesn’t exist by the laws of the universe (thusly being nonexistent) however does exist outside of those laws (thusly being existent) however to that I would slap myself in the head, head butt my keyboard, and likely take a nap. Because once again once you start parsing and digging deep just about anything sounds absolutely stupid.

  But who knows, perhaps with further understanding of quantum physics and all these theoretical particles we will find out that indeed in the physical world there exists a non redundant case of unknown unknowns, about that time though I assume we’ll have mixed the genetic makeup of Pigs with Albatross so that we will have simultaneously dealt with an old and abused saying and proved a currently nonsensical modern one.

  One can dream.

  While I imagine absolutely anyone reading this already knows I thought it was a fascinating tidbit to point out just how destructive petty prejudices can be. Case in point with the ever vocal homophobes in our country (which is beyond me, I don’t see what homosexuality has to do with anyone outside of those who are homosexual).

  For whatever reason a vast amount of the Arabic translators in the US military are (or I suppose I should say were) homosexual. Prior to the 9/11 attack the US intelligence agencies had received plenty of non translated material that all told could have quite easily raised our chances of preventing the attack to levels that are almost disgusting. Indeed even now the US has mounds of Arabic material that has either been poorly translated or not translated at all because they got rid of all the men and women who were willing to put their lives on the line for a military so prejudice that it would kick them out for something as unrelated as their sexuality.

  So what is the cost of Homophobia? 2,740. That’s how many people that died in the 9/11 terrorist attack, that’s almost three thousand people who likely all would have much as many talented people working in the military and intelligence agencies as possible. Not only this but the aftermath of the event has cost the lives of thousands more US soldiers, I’m pretty sure a few dozen reporters, and that doesn’t even count all the people who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq that aren’t related to these organizations that have died in the cross fire or shrapnel. Likewise the war itself could have been avoided (since its very hard to invade a nation if you aren’t already at war or have good reason to get going there).

  So the next time you see two men holding hands, or two women hugging and kissing before going about their day, and you feel a sickness in your stomach try to remember that that feeling cost the lives of thousands of people and for what? Because of some dark disgusting misinformed preconceptions you have about homosexuals? I hate to sound overly passionate about the topic because it might take away from my point but I am hard pressed to understand.

  People might think that prejudices are harmless when not directly hurting people, but in the end they cost the lives of far more people. It only takes a little nationally supported prejudice to cost the lives of tens of millions of people. Few people deserve to die and even that is questionable, in the end it is never the fault of one person for the actions of that one person, there are many variables that come into a strong collaborative image to make each and every one of us. However you can be certain in a country of dissension and judgmentalism, you will generate many many people who are destined for an early death.

Notes:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE1DD1038F933A15752C0A9639C8B63 – 2005 Article on the topic, there are literally 10’s of thousands of them on the internet. Have an adventure and go google surfing, it’s an enlightening endeavor sometimes.