Must We Breathe?

Do people have to inhale with the lungs to get oxygen to the tissues? No. It has been proposed more than once that, for various reasons, oxygen could be directly entered into the bloodstream (which is where it goes, anyway, through alveoli in the lung tissues) by various methods. Interesting concept.

Frog larvae (tadpoles) are herbivores that eat algae with small teeth while the adult frog eats invertebrates with a specialized tongue; the tadpole locomotes in the horizontal plane by undulating a tail while the adult includes a vertical dimension of movement by activating muscles fixed to a rigid skeleton; the tadpole's main sense is olfaction whereas the adult frog's is vision...and other transformations...What can we learn about these phase-shifts that can feed wisdom? More than we can imagine, I imagine.

When polar explorer Borge Ousland first reported swimming across gaps between frozen sea ice in the Arctic--taking his example from the polar bear--everyone said he was mad; today, nobody goes up there without an immersion suit because swimming across is infinitely better than trying to paddle across atop an unstable sled full of equipment. In the 1830's one scientist toyed with the 'crazy' idea of using gravitational assist to fling spacecraft through space; today the Galileo probe is visiting the moons of Jupiter coutesy of half a dozen gravity assist maneuvers, allowing it to carry 60 times less fuel than if it did not use gravity assist.

'Crazy' ideas must be given room to breathe!

Extraterrestrial Life?

I won't be able to print, read, and contemplate this for another couple of weeks...but what a thing it will be to sit in the morning at the cafe and devour the evidence: NASA Scientist Claims Evidence for Extraterrestrial Life.

I will have to wear a sign around my neck while reading: 'Do Not Disturb' !

Starship Farms

Ultimately, starships will be grown, not built. The staggering information content and capacity for building macro structures from molecular code--currently known to us only in the DNA molecule--will not be ignored. As DNA grows life from inanimate matter, starships--entire self-contained, human-population-supporting ecosystems--will be grown from inanimate matter, raw materials harvested from asteroids, comets and planetary moons, grown into systems that can take humanity on interstellar voyages.

If no...well if not all human works go up in flames when the Sun burns out, and that is not _if_ but _when_, because the Sun is a simple chain reaction with a limited chemical fuel source. Long before that happens, though, it is much more likely that a 'civilization killer' asteroid or comet will strike the Earth. The 'safety' of Earth is a modern illusion cobbled together from a 5,000-year written human history that represents only 1 1/000th of the Earth's actual long and calamitous life, in which at least five times more than half of all Earth life has perished in one mass extinction event or another.

So -- it is time to get moving! It is time to learn from Nature how to survive extinction, and how to build systems that can sustain us outside our cradle Earth.

Choir Practice

Choir practice recorded in Durham Cathedral on my audio recorder. It settles down after a minute or so when I take my seat. This is in WMA format, I can't translate it to others while I'm traveling. When I was an undergraduate here, 20 years ago, I didn't spend much time in the cathedral; too busy. The other day, though, I spent half an hour at the crypt of St. Cuthbert and another half at the crypt of St. Bede, the two at opposite ends of the 1,000-year old cathedral.

The cold and dark atmosphere, with a glint of gold here and there, stone underfoot, a candle in a blood-red glass...I remembered a lot of this, deep down from so many cathedrals visited over the years, and here I realized this cavernous space and atmosphere are deep in my bones. They soaked in a long time ago. It seems I have been carrying the essence of this cold, darkling and immense void for a long time, somehow, inside, and I have sought to replicate it while exploring the world outside. It is not entirely welcoming in any conventional sense, but it is in some way home.

Link to WMA audio file.

La Valse & Book Cover Concept

I've been looking for this for some time, and have finally found it! Ravel's 'La Valse';



...and a cover currently being worked with;



Book cover (and book) design is an art in itself; I'm mainly working with Evan to select the cover image on which the text is placed; text font, color etc. decisions are in the hands of the Springer production department.

Huanuco Pampa

Plan view of the architecture of Huanuco Pampa for my textbook; the site was an Inca administrative and military center with a large central plaza for public participation in state ritual and nearly 500 buildings. Among the facilities are nearly 40,000 cubic meters of storage space in the form of state granaries called quollcas. These numbers mean very little for a general impression of things, so for comparsion on the right I've added plan views of Edinburgh Castle, the citadel of Mycenae and a Boeing 747. These give a much better impression of the size of Huanuco Pampa.

Mexica

A Mexica (Aztec) warrior; my copy, in pen and ink on vellum, from the Florentine codex. After scanning the b & w image I worked a bit with color.

The warrior bears a small wicker shield and a wooden club with black obsidian blades inserted on two edges; he wears a jaguar skin costume and wooden helmet with a feather headdress. The military elite, otomi, vowed to never step backwards in battle.