The Council of Nicaea and Subatomic Physics

 

Today was he opening day of the Council of Nicaea, during which St Nicholas (Yes, that St Nick) punched Arius in the chops as part of a scholarly discussion on the nature of the Son. Was he a Man or was he God? The Council decided Yes. He was both. At the same Time. And not a diluted blend of one in the other, but fully each and both. If this seems screwy -- How can He be both? -- ask yourself whether an electron is a particle or a wave.

So I Nicaea paved the way for modern subatomic physics. Who knew.

TEA WORMS OF DUNE

My daughter has suggested that some of the money spent filming DUNE in Jordan could have been spent learning from locals the correct pronuncialtion of Shai al-Hulud. Pronounced as SHAY Hulud it means "eternal Thing". Pronounced as SHY Hulud, it means "eternal tea." [Think as in Russian 'chai']

The Tatooine Cycle

Alerted by the wise man Brandon, The O Flainn has obtained a text of the Irish epic The Tragic Death of Cenn Obi and the Destruction of Da Thféider’s Hostel. This is part of the Tatooine Cycle. It begins thusly:

What was the reason for the Tragic Death of Cenn Obi and the Destruction of Da Thféider’s Hostel? Not difficult that.

There was once a great queen of Alt Da Rann and Leia was her name. War had sprung up between her people and those of Da Thféider. She sent messengers to ask for aid from the wildman, Cenn Obi. He lived in the wilderness far to the west. These were the messengers she sent: Síd Tríphe Óg, who knew all the languages of man and beast, and the dwarf, Artú.

The remainder can be found here, as all men know. In addition the footnotes to this epic relating what not all men know can be found here. For example:

(4) Finn, as the name for Luke, is just a calque. Luke comes from Greek leukos meaning ‘white’, Finn also means ‘white, bright’ in Irish. It also helps that Finn is the name of the hero of the Fenian Cycle, Finn mac Cumaill.

(7) The epithet Aenfer is taken from Art mac Conn. He was called Aenfer (literally 'one man') because in Echtra Chondla his brother, Connla, was taken away to the Otherworld. So he was left alone, or aenfer, or “solo”.

The Feast of St. Thomas

Celebrate the feast

The TOFian Grandson is a Genius

TOF and the Snow

When TOF was a mere TOFling, his father took him one day to visit the GrandTOF. An elderly man of perhaps more than 50 years. When he was a child, the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. Before he died, he would watch on his TV while men walked on the Moon. His first job as a kid involved taking care of rented horses. Two years later, it was rented automobiles.

TOF was complaining, as TOFlings were wont to do, regarding his interminable walk to school -- in the Snow. Now this walk was six blocks, but that is a much longer distance when the legs are shorter. It must have been a mile, at least. TOF especially bemoaned the last four blocks coming home, which were up a hill steeper than El Capitan, or so it seemed, and the snow piled higher than the Matterhorn.

Mon Pere listened to this and shook his head. "That's nothing," he instructed TOF. "When I was your age, I had to walk in snow up to here, indicating with his hand how high it had been piled, or was being piled. School was at least two miles away and the hill down Stockton St. apparently needed ropes and pitons.

The GrandTOF listened to all this and then commented in his basso profundo, chopping his right hand tomahawk-fashion, as was his wont, to time his words. He looked at Pere and said, "Are you crazy? You kids had it so soft! Why, when I was a kid..." And so the school receded farther away and the snow (or something) grew ever deeper. What his father would have said, we shall never know.

As near as TOF can reckon from these data, the previous Ice Age ended about a hundred years ago, just as the world began shrinking. 

The Numbers Racket

A Taxonomy

h/t Gary Armitage

Coincidence? We Think Not

Visitors from the stars???  Lots of aliens visiting New Hampshire these days.

h/t Gary Armitage

Be a Follower, Not a Leader

Blogspot keeps track of how many "followers" a blog has.

TOF has noticed this number stuck at 145 for some little while now and wonders, Can't I get just five more to make it a nice round number? 

Let's see.


UPDATE:
One day later: We're at 148. Woo-hoo. C'mon, gang! Just two more. We know you can do it!

UPDATED UPDATE
On 8/8 we have 150! (That's not 150-factorial, alas.) Apparently, y'all are now "members," not "followers." I would have preferred "minions" or "lackeys," but life is full of little disappointments.

There's a button on the left for receiving feeds, and another at the bottom for Google Friends. TOF is unsure of the exegesis of these things. It may be two distinct things.

Consistency is a Jewel

Why?  Because it is rare.

SCOTUS recently ruled that a person possessing a right in one state has that right in all states. Yay.

In Arizona citizens can carry guns without permission from the bureaucracy. Yo, New York, California, you got that?

The Journeyman

"In the Great North Woods," having been trimmed from 42,000 words to a mean and paltry 24,300th, has been resubmitted to Analog. It's fate lies in the balance.

Meanwhile, the Dialogue on the Inner World System, a spare 2900 word fact article has been reviewed and is nearly ready to be sent off to do or die.

And TOF in an uncontrollably whimsical moment, has converted some opening paragraphs in "Nexux" into a sestina. Or part of a sestina. These might not be quite the right six words on which to build. The first sestet, so far runs thusly:

Alien life, we are told, would be unlike our own;
True enough for trivia: for species, body, form,
Or appetites and senses nameless to ourselves.
(What lusts do bats endure when squeaks they place,
What pleasures from the echoes they receive?)
Our human mind can't see what bats survey.

But TOF has not reviewed syllable counts and such fine tweakings; nor is he happy with "ourselves," which is a difficult word to place in the following sestets. He has not thought to replace it with "...nameless to our soul." because he thinks he can work soul into the others sestets more easily. "Survey" may also prove a problem.

TOF in Örnsköldsvik

A fair number of years ago, TOF awoke one May Day morning to the sound of a brass band tuning up outside his hotel window. However, said window was in Örnsköldsvik, Västernorrland County, Sweden  while TOF's brain was somewhere over mid-Atlantic, so however welcome the sound of brass bands might be in the early morning, it was not so much so under the jet-lagged circumstances.

Now the Swedishly challenged among TOF's readers may have noted an unconscionable concatenation of consonants in the name of the town Örnsköldsvik (which means "Ox-shield-bay"); to wit rnsk and ldsv. These might challenge even a Russian, the mightiest consonant cruncher this side of Polish. So even the Swedes care for their tongues by calling the town Ö-vik.

TOF does not say that the town is remote, but there is not much north of it except lots of north. On the road out of town -- TOF is not making this up -- there was a sign with an arrow pointing north reading "Santa Klaus".

But TOF, I hear you say, what were you doing in such a remote location as Örnsköldsvik, Västernorrland County, Sweden on such a nice May morning?

This Little Light of Mine

...I'm gonna let it shine.  For 112 years.

Bulb-cam keeps live watch on world's oldest light bulb

The longest-lived light bulb is in a fire station in Livermore CA. Live more in Livermore?

From the site:

First installed at the fire department hose cart house on L Street in 1901. Shortly after it moved to the main firehouse on Second. In 1903 it was moved to the new Station 1 on First and McLeod, and survived the renovation of the Firehouse in 1937, when it was off for about a week. During its first 75 years it was connected directly to the 110 Volt city power, (subject to the power outages) , and not to the back-up generator for fear of a power surge. In 1976 it was moved with a full police and fire truck escort, under the watch of Captain Kirby Slate, to its present site in 1976 at Fire Station 6, 4550 East Ave., Livermore, California. It was then hooked to a separate power source at 120V, and UPS according to Frank Maul, Retired City Electrician. There was one interruption in May, 2013, when the UPS failed and it was off for at least 9 1/2 hours. When it was plugged back in it shined at 60 Watts. It is still brighter, months later, than it's former 4 Watts. 

Odds and Ends

Here are the minitopics for today's tab clearance:

1. The Obamarama Roll-out
2. There Are People Who Write Like This
3. A Novel Proposition
4. The New Phrenology
5. Government of the zombies, by the zombies, for the zombies
6. Ancient critters you never heard of
7. Diversity in Your Fiction
8. The Pope Reads Science Fiction

At the Gates of Gath

A poem.  Something like the first line of this occurred to me when I lay in delerium after suffering toxic shock a while back.  I recollect composing a mighty fantasy epic while sundry doctors of the medical arte punched shunts in my right kidney and pushed catheters up where catheters ought not go.  That epic was a serious affair and ended with a pun of intolerable cruelty, all of which, save for the first line, whirled down the memory hole as my mind returned.  Recently, as that line reoccurred to me, sundry other lines also popped up, and I have arranged them here as a sort of rough draft of a rough craft.  The meter is a bit shaky as is the stanza structure, but it might serve for whimsy. 

The Hermeneutics of Perry Mason

These are the rules, gleaned after a weekend-long Perry Mason marathon on cable.

A Passing Comment

TOF ran across this comment in a comm box during his morning Internet run-through:

gxxxxxreader101
From what I hear in the mainstream media, and what I hear from scientists themselves, they and their adherents are pretty certain that science is the only sensible way of looking at the world.  Scientists may believe that there is an infinite amount to discover, but they are absolutely certain that it can be discovered through science...and nothing else.

The which neatly summarizes the coherence problem. 

Peggy Lettermore

and I defy anyone to disagree.

Merry Christmas to All