I've grown disenchanted with these social websites (LiveJournal, MySpace, FaceBook, Buzz, Yip Yap Yelp Yodel etc). I don't find any value in visiting them. I believe i will be able to stay in touch with my friends quite easily without the need for this sort of interface. There are far more enjoyable ways (for me) to spend my time on my computer. I have my own website where i can post my own diary entries (not that there's anything important happening in my life lately) and all my friends already have my email and other contact information. So i'm going to depart from these Web2.0/ blogging/ SocialNetwork places, with great alacrity.

There was a tremendous amount of pressure as the two protons behaved as ions and atoms of hydrogen are wont to do when they find themselves at the center of our sun, and so they fused to become part of some helium. This caused a photon to be released, with no apparent mass but a velocity which is apparently the limit to which nothing can be quite accelerated, even when in a vacuum. It travels at approximately three hundred million meters per second, but that number is difficult for me to imagine clearly on these scales. So here's the best i could do lately:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-minute
Approximately 8.317 minutes later, the photon passed our planet, Earth, and in particular the area of Schenectady. It might even have had the chance to be one of the first photons ever seen by my new eyeballs. But it wasn't absorbed by the new me, and instead the photon continued racing through space. A few hours later it had passed all the other planets, and was racing beyond the Trans-neptunians and past the Kuiper Belt through the inside of our solar system where almost all the interesting bits have been seen. After a few days, it was mostly only passing lonely particles of the Oort cloud; and so the photon flung itself for months, until a couple years were whiled away, and it left our solar system entirely. Well, arguably the gravity of our system extends with the inverse square of distance in three dimensions, but the orders of magnitude allow us to point out that a few years makes our system's influence somewhat negligible to a photon strolling through the neighborhood of Schenectady. You've probably all seen some pictures which give you a scale of our inner solar system (in radii of light hours) and the outer solar system is thus a few hundred times greater in magnitude of distance, as we consider other light-calendars.

solar_system.jpg


Light Year: a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, which is 9.4607 × 10^12 km (nearly 6 trillion miles).

About a year ago i was happy to be alive, having miraculously recently survived opportunistic rotavirus with Alinia or whatever (because AIDS isn't just a hobby or a part-time job, it's a lifestyle choice); Tony hadn't even had his myocardial infarction yet, that wasn't until last spring. When i was one year old, and the calendar was done showing the 1970 designs on its pages, i probably had some interesting utterances but i did not show signs of clear speech formation nor were my other developments particularly remarkable, as far as i recall. What's a year, a calendar page, a list of three hundred sixty-five point two-four-something-something days among the thousands of years since we noticed the sun and the moon were rocking and rolling in a pretty good rhythm around the stars and planets, and we could write it down (so that's a pretty nifty idea of how to decorate these enormous rocks)? How many hundreds of decades or thousands of years went by since Stonehenge was first erected and positioned exactly perfectly for the timing of my amblyopic snubbing of the supposed hypothetical wavicle whose anonymous journey as a photon had nothing to do with calendars once extended beyond a few thousand of those millennia?

I'm about 39.67 years old. Back when i was a non-photon detector in Schenectady, the Americans had only recently landed on the Moon. What's forty years? About forty years after being snubbed by my surgically-corrected lazy eyes (shifty amblyopic layabouts and ne'erdo-wells) the photon was heading well beyond the nearest stars around Proxima Centauri and Beta Centauri, well out of the neighborhood where a dozen other solar systems have reigning influence in nearby regions. That's a four-decade lifetime (half a lifetime? twice a lifetime? generations?), a human-sized span, a trip of light in the realm of our known places, where the gravity is quite the way we expect.

neighborhood_of_our_sun.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#Sun.27s_location_and_neighborhood


Five thousand years ago, humans were developing cities and alphabets, because domestication of plants and animals had already come along to most places around Schenectady, and songs are more fun when you have a clever poem or joke in each of the melodies and rhythms and spontaneous renditions. Sixty thousand years ago the last ice age would have smushed out the lakes around there under a mile of snow before retreating and leaving a place on this continent for people to live north of the subtropics. This happens regularly, i suppose, and this continent of the Americas has been grinding and thawing and freezing and eroding and drifting and erupting and swirling for so many millions of years there are whole mountain ranges which have come and gone; and we know only vaguely of their existence through analysis of a few sedimentary rock layers which are currently exposed by the passing of a glacier here or there near Schenectady, in the Americas, on the planet where we can live in our solar system where the sun hurtles photon byproducts of nuclear fusion out past the other local suns into the other local clusters of solar neighborhoods in the local spur of the local arm of our galaxy.

mily_way.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#Spiral_arms


Twenty-five thousand years is almost enough time for a photon to travel from our sun to a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy where it may or may not be caught beyond the event horizon and may or may not continue to travel away from our cities. After five thousand years (which is how long ago there were some seasonal fishermen in Schenectady who were learning which berries to eat and deciding how to pluralize a few noun declensions for the first time), or sixty thousand years (thousands of generations of people) and the Great Lakes had appeared when the continents were (repeatedly) separated, we could think of how the photon might be wandering away from our galaxy; or a few hundred thousand years would get the photon theoretically out of our galacic realm and beyond the Large and Small Magellanic clouds which are influenced by our galaxy. People have evolved technologies, fires and wheels and maths and languages and arts and multiple ways to insert their fists and loves into each other, the neanderthals disappeared while cro-magnons developed, and the hominids evolved from the great apes and the chimpanzees to become what we find we are today. A million years could pass, and the photon could still be flinging away from the local galactic group which includes the Andromeda Galaxy. The Andromeda appears to possibly be the largest in the Local Group, although the Milky Way might have more dark matter, and could have slightly more mass overall. The third largest is the Triangulum Galaxy, followed (i believe) by the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy#Mass_and_luminosity_estimates

A million years, a human-race-sort-of-scale: a photon gets away from the Milky Way in time for a human race to race from its distinction among other primates in Africa to a point in time where puritans were in Schenectady (they killed most of the lake-dwellers who were there during the centuries before my eyeballs ignored the photon, but that's another story).

galactic_realm.jpg


A few million years ago, before monkeys learned how to harness fire, conjugate verbs, build thermonuclear bombs to ignite the power of atomic fusion on each other's pretty little cities, or even distinguish themselves from the other creepy-crawlies on the continent of Africa, the sun was almost the same as it is now and the earth was almost as close to the sun as it is now. But people weren't people yet. If the snubbed photon from Schenectady leaves our solar system at the speed of light in a near-vacuum, and a train leaves Bellingham on Thursday but Daylight Savings goes in effect for Pacific departures on alternating routes (which our hybrid highways don't handle because neo-quasi-monkeys profited by destroying the electric streetcar systems) and they travel in parallel but opposite directions for a few million years, they won't even stop to bat an eyelash at the local galactic blob in the direction of the constellation of Pegasus the Unicorn because that's just the way people and trains and photons roll, Baby; that's just how they roll. At 3.0x10^8 meters per second in a vacuum. Thursdays.

local_group.jpg


One hundred fifty million years went by and the continents as we know them formed from their previous tectonic arrangements. Mammals evolved and developed self-awareness and nuclear fusion technology; dinosaurs came and went; photons came and went; and if you could roll as fast as a photon (with no noticeable mass, and i am *not* fucking anorexic because it might be chic, i just have a touch of the AIDS for the past couple decades, i think 160 pounds for a six-foot-two-inch dude is just fine, despite the fusion of chic and conveniently inexpensive) then you and the photon could roll out of the local supercluster of galaxies.

supercluster.jpg


A few hundred million more years puts the photon and all things so far beyond the capacities of my imagination, i have difficulties. A billion light years gets us into such unclear regions of space, and a few billion years is long enough for planets to accrete around a star in a solar system and churn up some lifeforms to build pretty cities and miss the view with their amblyopic (but surgically-corrected) eyeballs while criticizing the bomb-builders with his mouth full. Et cetera, and so forth, as brevity is the soul of something something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxies
Paraphrasing the encyclopedia:
There are probably more than 100 billion (10 to the 11th power) galaxies in the observable universe. Most galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter and are usually separated by distances on the order of millions of parsecs (or megaparsecs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec
"The parsec (parallax of one arcsecond) is a unit of length, equal to just under 31 trillion kilometres (about 19 trillion miles), or about 3.26 light-years."

I was doing pretty well 3.26 years ago, despite a couple of AIDS-lifestyle decades; i am feeling even more satisfied and happy now, i suppose. I'm alive, medicated, and able to write about my silly daydreams between rides on my cosmic dildos. When i was 3.26 years old i was learning to read, but i still couldn't write a sentence nor tie my shoes. What's a human scale when applied to a photon's journey from our sun? What's a pair of boots when used to protect one's ankles from scraping the edge of the quasi-surfboard to which the suction-cups stick perfectly and keep our dildos positioned for perfect rides on the waves and wavicles of fusion and music and dreams? Cosmic boots, i suppose, but i *do* take a lot of the aforementioned drugs on Thursdays while hallucinating.

Paraphrasing the encyclopedia:
"Intergalactic space (the space between galaxies) is filled with a tenuous gas of an average density less than one atom per cubic meter. The majority of galaxies are organized into a hierarchy of associations called clusters, which, in turn, can form larger groups called superclusters. These larger structures are generally arranged into sheets and filaments, which surround immense voids in the universe. Although it is not yet well understood, dark matter appears to account for around 90% of the mass of most galaxies. Observational data suggests that supermassive black holes may exist at the center of many, if not all, galaxies. They are proposed to be the primary cause of active galactic nuclei found at the core of some galaxies. The Milky Way galaxy appears to harbor at least one such object within its nucleus."

The Andromeda appears to possibly be the largest in the Local Group, although the Milky Way might have more dark matter, and could have slightly more mass overall. The third largest is the Triangulum Galaxy, followed (i believe) by the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

Our planet has been circling around our sun a few billion times during its existence; our sun's neighborhood has been around the spirals of our galaxy for perhaps a few dozen times (orbiting its hypothetical supermassive black hole while my massive hole theoretically orbits a surfboard of suction-cup dildos), for about one-third of the age of the Universe since the time of the Big Bang, if *that* was about thirteen and a half billion years ago. There are galaxies which we can barely see in our telescopes a few billions of light years away, and the photons from the suns in those galaxies are so dim, so old, so *bent* (ha! take that, FermiLab!) by their travels past Schenectady, they are redshifted and barely detectable beyond the cosmic microwave radiation background which is the last loud echo of the Big Bang fading away from an era when the Universe was only a fraction of a million years old and Schenectady was still billions of years from existence. I don't have a good imagination for getting all that in my human-scale brain, but i suppose i can read a map and a calendar. I try to think about the photon, but Division By Zero errors keep interfering with my whole gedankenexperiment, and i can think of more fun things to occupy my neurons while the light wavicle is snubbed and Schenectady's fusion bomb factories (General Electric: "We bring good things to life!") are rusting away. Surfboards and cosmic dildos, to name some examples.

When the microwave background echo was bouncing away from the original galactic superclusters, chemistry was becoming interesting because molecules and atoms and ions had developed from the proto-plasm of more energetic stuff which had been there earlier. It was all very cozy until all the photon-racing and galaxy-swirling and planet-accreting and monkey-evolving and language-refining and eye surgery took place, and all of the ions and particles and photons were squeezed into a Universe which was smaller than the current size of our galactic neighborhood. Before that, we have speculations about the first few millennia, the first few weeks, the "first three minutes", the first moments, the first nanoseconds, the first blink of the cosmic eye which was quite the Bang, or so i've heard.

http://www.amazon.com/First-Three-Minutes-Modern-Universe/dp/0465024378

I met the author of the First Three Minutes when he was pitching for funding for a superconducting supercollider; we were in the Rose Garden at the White House and a doddering Reagan was being shepherded by handlers and militants who outnumbered us students and scientists and authors and fund-seekers. C'est la vie. It's not always cosmic, but it's sometimes interesting, as long as you keep considering your senses of scale and other perceptive (or imaginative) experiences. Science experiments intended to explore cosmology are more fun to fund than bomb experiments, in my not-so-humble opinion.

It's nice being thirty-nine-point-something on the human scale. I look forward to forty-something with relish. I'll be over here, riding a magic wavicle away from the crazy monkeys and farther out into the ridiculously unexplored cosmos. I'm keeping my teleportational transdimensional teledildonic transponders tuned to the lovingest frequencies of photons and monkeys and fusion and dildo factories in the neighborhood of Schenectady (no, wait, maybe the neighborhood of Bellingham, or of Earth, or something in that area where the real estate isn't primo but it's known for good weather). I just wanted to say "Hi" and i hope there is love among the waves of fusion and light, and i hope there is music in your lives and loves, and i wish you all a wonderful human-scale day, year, life, millennium, supercluster, membrane, brane, N-brane, cosmology, spacetime, or festivity of your choosing. Peace!

xoxoxoxoxo

http://tinyurl.com/glastonburymix *particularly at the 27minute mark thru 38min= Jose James, then Andy Bey's incredible cover of 'Riverman'

My latest remixes of Tarot trumps games are designed to be cooperative instead of competitive. For explanations of how to play HyperSpace Sorcery, visit my diary page which has links for more information.

http://tinyurl.com/tarotremix
=
http://homepage.mac.com/teledildonix/tarot.html
= mental masturbation, simultaneous orgasms, magic symbolic poetry play, calculation, negotiation, faith, hope, love. My latest webpage about my "remixes" of games which are designed to become cooperative instead of competitive.