Farewell, Farewell

This post marks the conclusion of this blog. In a weeks time I'm shutting off the lights. That's right. Lights off. While I appreciate the brevity of the blogging experience, and the community-based aspect of the overal design, I feel whenever I write within the context of a blog I always feel as though something is amiss, that I forgot something, or that I'm not necessarily one for regurgitating information. I don't know. Maybe I'm different. Weird, even, due to my predisposition for writing in lengthier, more exploratory modes.

Don't take this as criticism, I can appreciate the clockwork of blog-posting, but I enjoy playing with other types of clockwork, cockwork that typically includes 1) drama 2) characters 3) utter disfunction or 4) any combination of the aforementioned.

Does anyone else feel the same about blog posting? Am I just being a technological scrooge?

New Site

You can check out my site here (I will get the link up and working when I get home late tonight). It's entitled the Hydra Project. I know I stated in a previous post about my interest in physics, specifically centripedal force, but my mind (the ever-tangling spiderweb it is) has jumped tracks.

You can see the result of my non-linear project here:



I'm satisfied with how it turned out.

Ridiculous dancing aside, my brain now turns to a script (the Hydra Project) I was working on for class (I'm continuing to work on this script outside of class, due to my interest in it). Many aspects of the script itself, as well as the technology required to run what I'm pushing for, deal with another of my obsessions: Neuroscience.

The progress of my script is going to require some neurological devices to read the familiarity of a participant. The term "familiarity" runs under the term "Familiarity Heuristics" in psychology and Neuroscience arenas.

So, what do you think about the possibility of gauging someone's familiarity of images/subjects? Scientists have already conducted studies to indicate a difference in brain process when the participant is introduced to familiar/non familiar environments.

Busy, busy.

I will have a full post up within the next few days. I've been busy with a device I've been constructing for my 3D design class. The solution for the project deals specifically with centripetal force, and this has me thinking my next post is going to search for questions pertaining to basic physics...

Hauling Trash

Alright, so waste management doesn't sound too exciting? Well, you're right and wrong. While the trash itself proves as appealing as attempting to spit on flies, the development and distribution of said waste is more important than most understand. To us regular Johns and Janes, the thought-process associated with "trash" is reduced to either the crap we see on daytime television or to a big black bag filled with disgusting "stuff" that we toss into some receptacle hiding out somewhere on our lawn or driveway.

After that, we forget about it. Just remember: it does continue to exist. Those garbage trucks aren't feeding the trash to black holes or blasting it off to the sun, it is being transported to your city's backyard. And that requires land. A lot of land.

Also, we can consider waste management, in many ways, an issue that humans chose to tackle within the past hundred years. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act passed in 1976, to give you a sense of how recent we considered laws to govern our trash!

What if this was your front yard?

Prior to these laws and discussions, our society had limitations on where it placed its trash. Without a place to store it all, such as landfills, the trash always accumulated in the same place anyone without a sliver humanity left in them would suggest: in the working class slums. They simply "pushed" all the trash towards the outer circumference of the city, where the lower classes lived (the higher social tiers lived nearer to the factories, the city centers, due to a closer commute). This caused innumerable deaths due to disease and infection from exposure to growing bacteria, dead carcasses of horses, dogs and pigs, and discarded chemicals.

Suddenly, the three R's (Reduce Reuse Recycle) coded into our brains in childhood comes to make sense, it haunts us, even. By investigating the past, we witness the consequences of the logic that runs contrary to this set of  moral and cultural assignations. 

Check out this site.

Trash is important. And even more important, where we put it and how we dispose or recycle it.

Yeah, we've come a long way.

The Mystery of Fat Free Cheese

Alright, so this week's blog consists primarily of...a rant. I never thought myself to stoop to the level of taking shots at dairy products, but seriously, this stuff is gross. It looks like plastic. It doesn't melt. And it tastes as though it came out of a Lego's factory.

I am writing about Fat Free cheese.

What's in it? Primarily cheese, one would think, but no. It contains over 15 different ingredients, half of which are starches of some form. Two notable ingredients, which are not included in regular cheese, are sodium citrate and modified corn starch. These ingredients must do something to the cheese to make the texture equivalent to chewing on tires. Actually, after tonights casserole, I'd prefer nibbling on tires to the alkaline aftertaste this crap leaves behind. It doesn't go away either, it settles in the recesses of the mouth, only to resurface every few minutes reminding you of what you shouldn't have eaten. Its like a culinary Montezuma's Revenge, packaged and pristine on the grocery isle shelf.

Does diet food have to taste so bad?

Nobel's Blasting Powder

A little known fact is that Alfred Nobel, the Swede creator of the Nobel Prize, invented dynamite.

Is it ironic, then, that such an award associated with peace and betterment for humanity was initially funded by what has often been construed as a weapon?

Nobel never invented dynamite with the intention of it being a weapon. Dynamite allowed safer distribution of explosives to carve out tunnels, shell out reservoirs, and push away large chunks of land. The usage of dynamite as a weapon came later.

Prior to dynamite, humans had no means to safely harness the awesome powers of nitroglycerin. Many people died due to its instability. Dynamite helped solve the issue, but not without problems and regrets.

Nobel’s own dynamite factory happened to blow up, as did many others.

And, the final negative, whether Nobel wanted it to happen or not, his invention helped drive forth the R&D for military weapons. 

Delayed.

This weeks post is going to be delayed for a few days...I've had a severe sinus infection all weekend and am now working to catch up on other obligations. If your curious as to what the topic will be, lets just say it deals with history, chemistry, and things that blow up.

Horses: The Storkless Generation

Hyracotherium (more popularly known as eohippus) is not your garden-variety house-pest.

Alright, so I'm attempting to condense 50 million years of evolution into a blog. Absurd! Ridiculous! This weeks exploration began with the question "Where do horses come from?" Now, obviously they don't come from storks.  No, the storks have written the project off due to a failing distribution department and the complication of carrying a baby horse without unwarranted sags and dips mid-flight.


So, where do they come from?


See above. This strange horse/rabbit/moose-looking hybrid may look birthed from some bored geneticists beaker, but the Hyracotherium, also known as "Eohippus" or the "Dawn Horse," represents the ancestor of the modern-day horse. They sure have grown up, haven't they?


Anyway, check out the Horse Evolution Over 55 Million Years site for a quick overview of the creatures evolution. 


Some interesting facts:


The Hyracotherium's diet originally consisted of meat and vegetation. That's right, horses once ate meat, too. I suppose they enacted a strict raw foods diet. They even visited an orthodontist (and probably loved it as much as we do) to exchange those canines for flattened teeth suitable for chewing grasses.


They had toes rather than hooves. Look at the picture. Horses later developed hooves, but still retain the splint bones, remnants of these now half-removed toes.


These fox-sized creatures once roamed the hillsides of long-ago Paris, scavenging and devouring anything they could grasp with their little paws. Not exactly what I would call an adorable beginning, but one can't help ponder a different reality where people dressed these up in cashmere-knit sweaters, and called them...Moosy? Perhaps we would stroll up and down along the Paris marketplaces, this creature following in pursuit, still contemplating what animal to be.


For more info:


Evolution of the Horse - Basic Synopsis


Horse Evolution - Trends of Horse Evolution in Science

The Evolution of the Horse: A Record and Its Interpretation - I love reading old books as much as I do looking at them. This dates 1926 and is from The Quarterly Review on Biology.

Sharpening My Angle

So, I've been thinking how I "should" utilize this blog. The internet is the sharing of information, an interconnected network of many otherwise impossible connections, and, due to this I'm contemplating taking this idea of "obscurity" and refastening it; resetting its engine to boost its horsepower.

Here it is: The idea of "obscurity" as a subject is too abstract. The word floats amidst a sea of other words while the meaning flounders in this ocean vocabulary, drowning on its own premise. In other words the angle of which I've positioned myself is too broad, and to alter this I've decided to now restrict myself to questions.

Henceforth, this blog will answer direct, concrete questions relative to the world around us. They can (and will) consist of seemingly basic questions such as: Where do horses come from? (This one I'm using next week). What happened in the year xxxx in the region/country xxxx? You get the idea.

And, for this blog post, I decided to dissect the meaning of obscurity.

From Merriam-Webster's Dictionary:

¹ob·scure

 adj \äb-ˈskyu̇r, əb-\

Definition of OBSCURE

1

a : dark, dimb : shrouded in or hidden by darknessc : not clearly seen or easily distinguished : faint <obscuremarkings>

2

: not readily understood or clearly expressed; also :mysterious

3

: relatively unknown: asa : remote, secluded <an obscure village>b : not prominent or famous <an obscure poet>

4

: constituting the unstressed vowel \ə\ or having unstressed \ə\ as its value

— ob·scure·ly adverb

— ob·scure·ness noun

One could take a magnifying lens to each of the above definitions, ala Derrida-like, and burn away their significance in respect to this blog, but I, having a liking for "codes of honor," choose to adhere to a policy of doing something other than simply acknowledging something (and that something happens to be obscurity). It is one thing to acknowledge it, another to attempt to explain it. By attempting to explain the subject of obscurity, I feel I can share what I learn as opposed to establishing juvenile proclamations. (See post about the deep sea--missing details are we?)

I would also enjoy it if readers proposed questions (about anything) for me to investigate (something I enjoy doing). That way, the blog detaches from the egocentric orb that blogs often are (and why I loathe reading most of them) to become an interactive experience, like a chain where reader and writer learn through cooperation.

J.

Swimming the Deep Sea

I recently streamed a Netflix show "The Blue Planet: Deep." Wow. Simply wow. The deep ocean, though swarming with scientific absurdities and fascinating creatures, continues to puzzle oceanographers and chemists alike. For one, deep sea creatures use bioluminescence to communicate. This excites scientists due to the possibility of manufacturing energy through biological means.

I've oft thought about floating amid this unequivocal darkness, the ever-black tangle of jet streams and towering ocean floor juts that dwarf our land-based mountain ranges. Wandering through these thoughts, suddenly one realizes that anything is possible. Yes, light can be biologically generated. Yes, creatures can survive off toxic gasses and lava-high temperatures. These thoughts of the deep sea symbolize human impossibilities and how human beings are arrested by the limitations of their knowledge.

Praise obscurity, for it reminds us what little we know.

 

Embalming Deceased Words

The Obscure Word of the Week

artigrapher: (taken from The Phrontistery)

n 1753 -1753 writer or composer of a grammar; a grammarian

Obscure Words Want Immortality, Too

What happens to words when they are dropped from a languages vocabulary? Do they linger on as ghost-words with hope of resurrection centuries later by some grammarian nerd? The answer is no...and yes. I thought the most appropriate "first post" for a blog like this, one that deals with the "obscure," is acknowledging the existence of Lost/Obscure words.

So, Where Do They Go?

Linguists, those aforementioned grammarian nerds, research and compile databases (literally) full of largely unused, unknown, and, in some cases, extinct words. I pulled the Obscure Word of the Week from The Phrontistery, a site dedicated to preserving forgotten words as well as providing lesser known words, that, while not yet extinct, are uncommon in daily language. For those out there that enjoy creative writing in the science fiction/fantasy spheres, they also have a compendium of nautical terms, scientific tools, and phobias, so you can call your friends cathisophobics while penning your next epic space opera.