I Don't Remember

The moment came and went, 
A singularity of words, 
Black hole of shock, 
Obliteration of the shell. 
What you told me isn't true, 
It can't be, he loves me, 
He told me every day, and you, 
Love to hatred turned. 
Denial built a cave, 
Glittering buttons of hope 
Fading to darkness, 
The years growing cold, 
Memory lost in despair. 
Cause is irrelevant, 
It doesn't matter, 
I must go forward, 
Forget him, forget everything, 
It's the only way. 
I don't remember, I don't care, 
Let it burn, let this moment burn. 

Scale, Geoffrey West

 Scale should be essential reading for any scientist.  It opens the door to new concepts that could lead to a paradigm shift in the 21st century, such as big data and the science of networking.  Yet these are only peripheral to the main thesis.  Geoffrey West's premise is that there are biological axioms that scale according to size, which can be applied to things not usually considered alive, such as cities and companies. 

First, he provides the hard biological evidence for axioms of scale.  Metabolic rate is one of many examples that are best described as intangible biological fractals pervading the universe.  Other examples are heart beats, white/grey matter, insect/colony biomass, longevity, and neural and circulatory systems.  Remarkably, the size of these systems scale at multiples of 1/4, no matter what animal is being referenced. 

Things that typically aren't thought of as being alive are considered, such as vehicles, cities, and companies.  Did you know that the average car combusts roughly a billion times during its lifespan, which is only slightly lower than the typical number of heartbeats of any mammal?  I certainly don't consider this evidence of cars being alive, but I am open to there being universal laws that describe lifelike systems such as a car. 

Likewise, I think it's a mistake to call cities and companies alive because they can't reproduce.  In my mind they better serve as a metaphor for body systems.  I used to think the ability of something to resist entropy was the only thing that defined it as being alive; but reproduction is critical too, because not doing it effectively ends the chain of life.  There can't be life if there's no way to pass down the information needed to reconstruct itself. 

Another interesting thing he covered are called Dunbar’s numbers, which are limits to group sizes in social interaction.  Social connectivity in cities scales at 1.15 for a number of metrics, including cell phone usage (think of conference calls and social networking).  However, invariance was measured in the number of friends, meaning it doesn't scale- someone in a small town would have just as many friends as someone in a city.  It means that Dunbar’s limits apply; that the diversity in cities makes it easier to identify with people we have things in common with. 

What does this mean for the future of science?  It means that big data is taking over.  It's getting harder for scientists to test and prove theories, because there's so much data now that algorithms are getting more efficient at discovering natural laws.  It would take a human all day to sift through 100 pages of data, but a computer that could "see" it automatically is more likely to find the right information: probably information the scientist wasn't even looking for.  The ideas in  Scale  are so big that only computers can simplify the complexity of comparing systems in humans, cities, and companies to formulate cohesive principles of growth. 

The Shack, William P. Young

 I don’t normally read religious fiction, but on principle I like to keep an open mind on reading material, so this fit the bill.  The Shack  begins with a terrible tragedy that befalls a father of three, Mack, an ordinary man of faith.  Drowning in grief that is severe enough to threaten his faith, he goes on a mystical journey to heaven, or a place like it.  He encounters several personifications of religious beings who offer their wisdom, including God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and Sophia, who is somewhat out of place as a Greek Goddess.         

A book like this has the power to change one’s faith; it’s that good.  It didn’t change mine, however it did inspire me to write a couple poems that I’m deeply proud of.  I walked away from the book feeling moved by the story, like it made me a more complete person- the best sign of any book worth reading.  You don’t have to be religious to enjoy the adventure, or to relate with the stages of grief, or to benefit from the insights, which any religion could probably provide.  It only means you'd relate to it more.  Highly recommended for anyone dealing with grief and loss. 

We Are Colors

Out there in balmy glassland  
The senses are quantized, coded,  
Filtered through prisms, short-waved,  
Dialed into thought, purified of hope.  
Electric phases of feeling spectral,  
Absorbing others, emitting ours, 
Reflecting choices magnetized,  
Fission of dreams, pulses of scale,  
Blindness a virtue for the dispossessed.  
We talk in frequencies, long-waves  
Scattered through motionless time,  
Acoustic billiards, the nebulous song, 
Intercepted by receivers of love. 
We are the energy, the light,  
Children fractalized by white,   
The colors escaping, mixing, diluting,  
Sequences of experience broadcast  
Through mighty Kalachakram,  
Ommmm, the divided we stand,  
We the distracted, we the perverse,  
We the souls iterated by each transform,  
We born of white, we children of light, 
We are spectral, we are colors. 

Phosphene on Venus

Before Venus turned into a toxic wasteland, it's entirely possible that life was abundant on it.  Many computer models show that for nearly three billion years the planet was covered by ocean, only drying up in the last 700 million for reasons unexplained.  I recently wrote a fictionalized version of the possibility that an intelligent species destroyed its own planet, kind of like the way we're doing.  

The recent discovery of phosphene in Venus' atmosphere could further support the theory that life was abundant there.   Phosphene is thought to only come from organic matter, however traces of it have also been found in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, which clearly aren't habitable, even by bacteria.  Scientists think the presence of phosphene on Venus is either a sign of life or a chemical process we aren't aware of yet.    

Despite my flight of fancy in the Venus story, the philosopher in me remains skeptical about there being life on our sister planet.  Though it would be an exciting discovery, the fact that phosphene can be found on some of our gas giants indicates there's an inorganic process we aren't aware of yet. 

This event is markedly similar to the discovery of supposed fossils in a meteorite from Mars back in 1997, which ignited the field of astrobiology.  Dubbed the Allan Hills 84001, many scientists were quick to hypothesize that the rock contained fossilized Martian life.  Later it turned out that the structure of the meteorite could be explained by processes that didn't involve life.  I fear the same will happen with these Venus findings; man's search for first contact will likely continue.