Abruptness

When somebody dies unexpectedly, people say things like: 'but I was just talking to them, the other day!' It's this notion of death as an unplanned interruption in an ongoing conversation that is the most heartbreaking.

Gods poem

The machinic sea;
the supreme depths;
the porous sky.

Gods without moral attributes;
Beauty that has
no place for beauty.

Ockam's Phaser

Yes: "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem). Very nice. But a razor isn't quite what we want, here, now is it? The razor can slice away superluous entities, but they'll still be floating around, complicating our worldview. Better would be a device that fired a beam of sfnal energy at the superfluous entities, vaporising them so that we need not concern ourselves with them ever again ...

Locke

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689; IV:18) Locke laments that 'Religion, which should most distinguish us from the beasts, and ought most particularly elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts.' But this is puzzling. Locke obviously knew Psalm 104:

21 The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God.

22 The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens.

23 Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.

24 O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.

25 So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.

26 There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.

27 These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season.

28 That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good.

29 Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust.

I suppose the point of this (an elaboration of the Psalmist's more famous assertion, about the heavens declaring the glory of God) is that is portrays the holiness of beasts to be a kind of purely unselfconscious worship: at once unrelective and passive. I suppose Locke's point, accordingly, is that the rational worship of homo sapiens is, or should be, the opposite of that: it should be self-reflective, and it should define itself actively in opposition to, its object. But that's quite a radical claim, if you think about it.

Black plants

Interesting new theory, gleaned from the latest New Scientist:

Why aren't plants black?
Plants are green because they don't absorb green light. The question is: why? Why let these wavelengths go to waste? No one can say for sure, but the most intriguing explanation was proposed by Andrew Goldsworthy of Imperial College London (New Scientist, 10 December 1987, p 48).

When photosynthesis evolved, Goldsworthy suggests, the oceans were full of a purple pigment called bacteriorhodopsin. Some simple cells make this so they can exploit light energy in a primitive way, and it looks purple because it absorbs green light. In fact, chlorophyll absorbs precisely the wavelengths that bacteriorhodopsin does not. So plants might be green because photosynthesis evolved in bacteria that had to make do with leftover light.

Because photosynthesis is so complex, by the time these cyanobacteria started to dominate the oceans, it was impossible to make major changes to chlorophyll without breaking the system. Some plants, particularly marine algae, have evolved extra pigments that can capture other wavelengths, but most remain stuck with the wavelengths chlorophyll can absorb.

It looks like our green world is a fluke; and that science fiction stories, to be consistent, really ought to fill their distant jungle planets with purple and black vegetation. I know I shall, in future books.

Forced

'Faith is like love, it cannot be forced,' according to Schopenhauer. I suppose he means 'the true feeling of faith and/or live, in the heart' ... because as an empirical fact in the world it's hard to deny that genuine faith and genuine love are forced all the time: children are forced through religious educations that leave them, genuinely, believers. People talk themselves into relationships, or marriages are arranged by third parties, that result (not always, but often) in genuinely happy set-ups.

End of Summer Poem

The colour blue, the shade of heat.
The odour of hot tarmac, which smells
of borderlines, and fences, and the future.

Breeze, breeze, breeze, and
the water's surface is gooseflesh.
The sky does not lack circles.