what a strange and gruesome way
for your loved ones to say
that they’ve loved you all these days,
but to put you in the ground!
“he thought we loved him quite a lot,
but now in the ground he’ll rot,
he’ll finally have some friends, the sot,
amongst the worms and grubs and bugs.”
and it isn’t really clear,
the message we should hear,
when our dearest friends adhere
to the tradition of cremation.
“with her we spent our days
for she shared our saintly ways
only in death do we betray,
through fiery cineration!”
well not for me, hear me now,
i’ll shout it out quite loud
I will not be amongst that crowd,
It’s into space for my remains.
sling shot my cadaver
‘round the icy rings of saturn
in a tube of glassy matter,
and into the deep abyss.
better to be eaten by a hungry star
than to fill the tank of a future car,
to go forth and travel far,
than to be locked into this pattern.
mankind has been on earth,
for a time with certain gerth,
and the ends have not been worth
the endless strife that’s been endured.
i wish not to remain
where my atoms won’t abstain
from taking part in cyclic pain,
becoming just another kind of evil.
This morning I signed my entire family of four up for a trip to the Moon later this year! Isn’t that exciting? It will be myself, my wife, my daughter Payton, and my son Hunter—and 1.5 Million others, give or take a few thousand. The best part of it is, my tax dollars are paying for the whole thing! Talk about getting your money’s worth.
No, I’m not being sarcastic about the money, sending the one and one half million space geeks to the Moon will cost a nominal amount of money, because we’re all hitching a ride aboard NASA’s LRO by way of microchip. Since the LRO is going there anyway, adding the microchip couldn’t cost us too much, right? Our names will be installed on the lunar satellite and will remain in orbit of the Moon for roughly 5 years.
Now my kids can say that they have stars named after them (Parum Lux Lucis of Payton, Parum Lux Lucis of Hunter) and that they have been to the moon! NASA even provides a printable or PDF formatted certificate as proof of your participation in the “Send Your Name to the Moon” campaign.
My only regret is that I did not learn of this sooner. You can still get your name included on the chip with the rest of us space pioneers (Maybe in fifty years NASA will grant all 1.5M of us a claim on the moon?), but not for long. In fact, the deadline for inclusion is 27 June 2008—tomorrow. If you do happen to read this and decide to sign up, please come back and leave a comment to let me know! Maybe we can work a deal: I’ll give you my roasted peanuts if I can sit by the window. I want to watch as the earth shrinks away into the distance.
I’ve completed as much of my video about infinity as I possibly could in one week. I made it through five of six sections, but the last one is probably going to be very visually intensive and I’d like to spend about as much time with it as I have spent with this one. This brings up an interesting point about me that only really applies when I’m creating video.
As with any creative sort of project that I might undertake, I exploded into this one, animating nearly half of it in a single day. But when it comes to video, my commitment to the project declines rapidly in each following day. For some reason I lose my fervor after a day or two, but only when doing video. Writing, websites, or other projects are able to command my attention for as long as it takes, but with video I have yet to maintain a driving work ethic.
By now I should known better than to undertake a project like this, which could be really nice if done properly, knowing that I’ll do around 90% of the work on the first day and then abandon it all together if it takes more than a week. You’ll notice that this video has potential to be more than it is, but because I did it all so quickly it comes off a bit weak. And yet, if i hadn’t done it so quickly it might never have been completed!
Anyway, without further adieu, here is my video:
Infinity
So there you have it. There is one part missing from this, which I intend to complete by next week. Basically though, the point is simple. If the Universe is infinite, then everything would exist every where at all times. As such, time travel, or travel through large areas of three dimensional space, would be as simple as figuring out how to “be” there instead of “being” here.
Anyway, this whole concept really just hit me one night while I was feeling bored. I had been reading a lot of Albert Einstein and Popular Science at the time, so that may be part of it. Anyhow, as the thoughts occurred to me I saw fit to record them. The original type-written documents were created in MS Word on a government computer. One day my entire drive was wiped clean. When they restored it from a system-wide backup, many of my documents were missing. Among the missing items was a training manual that I had been typing up for incoming analysts. I had the blessing of my supervisor to do it though, so I’m not sure why it was seized. But along with it went my typed up copies of this proof.
Lucky for me I had already printed a hard copy of it before all of this happened. Though this was technically illegal, the material taken was of my original creation. I felt I had every right to it and, because i suspected a possible attempt to suppress it, I felt I had an obligation to hold onto the information. It made little to no sense to me then. Now it seems more like the childish musings of an amateur. Either way, now it’s “out there” for others to interpret.
This week, as I mentioned in the radio show, I’m going with a loose theme of Infinity. I’m a fan of the theoretical and as such it’s hard for me to look away when I stumble upon something truly interesting on the topic of everything. When I found the video “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” I sat grinning like a young teen who had stumbled upon his father’s smut collection.
Though it’s not directly about infinity it does describe the setting for the potential of the infinite. If you watch the part about the 7th Dimension you’ll note that the director states that every possible outcome for every possible universe exists in a single point which we normally call infinity.
The video inspired me. As soon as I publish this post I’ll begin work on my own animation about my thoughts on an infinite universe. The script for my video will be a “proof” that I wrote late at night while on watch in the Navy. I had just read “Ideas and Opinions” by Albert Einstein and my mind was on things much bigger than myself.
It started with me just staring off into space. I began to imagine what it would be like to live in an infinite universe. Before I knew it there were diagrams and examples floating around in my head. I quickly opened up Microsoft Word and began recording what I was imagining. I’m not sure where that surge of thought came from or if it was even logical.
I could be completely off the mark with my ideas, but I wouldn’t know because I’m not a mathematician, nor am I a physicist. I only know that as these thoughts occurred to me that night, I felt that they were important enough to write down. After typing the whole thing up I printed it out and had two colleagues take a look at it, but neither seemed very interested. The document has sat on a bookshelf ever since.
That is, of course, until the above video came into my life. Now I plan to take it from text to animation and then illicit the opinions of a larger audience (the Internet en mass). If you have your own thoughts, theories, or questions relating to infinity, please leave a comment!
Thanks for reading.
JMK
P.S. I have not yet read the accompanying book, but it is on my list. You can find it below:
