Jul 28

Opening the Pod Bay Doors

I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in college, and while I’ve revisited it over the years, a significant amount of time has passed since my last viewing. I also watched the 1984 sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact,though more than a decade has elapsed since I last saw it. With a copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 novel sitting on my shelf, I plan to dive into that text soon. To prepare, I returned to the story that started it all.

I have never been a die-hard Stanley Kubrick fan. While I admire his technical genius, I seldom feel a deep personal affinity for his films. However, one of my best friends—someone whose intelligence and judgment I hold in the highest regard—loves Kubrick’s filmography. Out of respect for his perspective, I decided to dig deeper into 2001 to see if I could expand my own appreciation. Of course, 2001 isn’t just my friend’s personal obsession; it stands as a widely acknowledged, critically acclaimed milestone in cinema history.

Prior to this project, I had only read Arthur C. Clarke’s short stories, always admiring his grounded humanism. Co-writing the screenplay with Kubrick while simultaneously drafting the 2001 novel created a unique dynamic: two brilliant minds attempting to convey the same narrative through radically different mediums.

A Note on Spoilers: 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in 1968, and Clarke’s novel hit shelves that same year. Yet, as a narrative purist, I respect storytelling enough to say: if you have not read the book or seen the movie, stop reading now. Spoilers lie directly ahead.

Synopsis

For the uninitiated, both the movie and the book 2001: A Space Odyssey follow humanity’s relationship with mysterious, monolithic alien artifacts that trigger evolutionary leaps. Both creators split the story into distinct structural movements: Kubrick uses three sweeping, full-screen title cards (“The Dawn of Man”, “Jupiter Mission: 18 Months Later”, and “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite”), while Clarke divides his novel into six formal, numbered parts.

Millions of years after a monolith inspires prehistoric hominids (“man-apes”) to use tools, scientists unearth a second monolith on the Moon that beams a signal toward the outer solar system. Two astronauts, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, set out aboard the Discovery One to investigate the destination. Along the way, they navigate the isolation of deep space and a conflict with the ship’s sentient supercomputer, the HAL 9000. Upon reaching the destination, Bowman makes direct contact with the alien force behind the monoliths, undergoing a mysterious journey beyond human comprehension that ultimately transforms him into a new stage of existence known as the Star Child.

I. Part 1: The Dawn of Man

In The Beginning

The story opens in prehistoric Africa millions of years ago, following a small, starving tribe of early hominids driven to the brink of extinction by drought and predators. Led by an ape named Moon-Watcher, the tribe spends its days foraging for sparse foliage and shivering in fear of a local leopard. One morning, a mysterious, perfectly geometric black Monolith appears outside their cave. Through direct intervention, the object sparks a cognitive shift, teaching the primates to use dried animal bones as primitive bludgeons. Empowered by their new tools, the tribe kills game for food and violently reclaims their water hole from a rival group, marking humanity’s first step up the evolutionary ladder.

Novel vs. Film Differences

In the cinema, Kubrick prepares his audience before showing a single frame of film. The movie opens with a three-minute, pitch-black overture – György Ligeti’s haunting, avant-garde piece Atmosphères– a sensory deprivation tactic designed to clear the viewer’s mental palate before sudden, booming horns and the MGM lion roar.

When the story begins, the narrative split between Clarke and Kubrick shows up immediately. In Clarke’s novel, the Monolith appears as a clear, translucent crystal slab. Clarke explicitly describes the object hypnotizing the starving man-apes. It puts them through mental tests, rejects the weak ones, and picks a leader called ‘Moon-Watcher’ for a cognitive upgrade. Ultimately, the Monolith teaches the apes to craft weapons so they can survive a brutal drought. The dark premise here is clear: technological evolution is inherently sparked by weaponization and violence. The first tool is explicitly a weapon.

Kubrick skips all of that mental testing. Instead, he condenses the evolutionary leap with shorthand visuals. He uses a famous match-cut where Moon-Watcher flings a bone club into the sky, and the camera cuts from the bone weapon to an orbiting nuclear missile platform, representing the unbroken line from primitive club to space-age weapon across millions of years.

Stagecraft and Savanna Struggles

Visually, this prehistoric opening shows its age. Kubrick hated traveling and feared flying, so he refused to shoot on an actual African savanna. Instead, he stayed safely parked at Borehamwood Studios in England, opting for complete stage control.

The ape suits—designed by Stuart Freeborn (the BAFTA-nominated makeup legend famous for creating Chewbacca, Yoda, and Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars) with movement by mime Dan Richter—relied on cable-operated jaws that looked dated decades ago. The actors performed on an indoor set in front of a giant front-projection screen. A projector beamed high-resolution African landscape slides onto the backdrop behind them.

When Kubrick needed standalone landscape cutaways without the actors, he sent a second-unit crew to Africa to take 8×10 color still slides. He then filmed those static slides on an animation stand back home. Because the camera shot a literal still photograph, these landscape shots feature no moving film grain, no heat shimmer, and no wind. This deadens the background and increases the artifice.

However, that front-projection setup yielded one brilliant accident. The reflective screen bounced the studio light right back into the camera lens through the eyes of a live leopard on set. That optical quirk made the cat’s pupils glow with an unnatural fire, accidentally matching Clarke’s exact book description of “two gleaming golden eyes” staring out of the dark. Filming that leopard attack was equally tense behind the scenes. Because working with a live, unpredictable predator inside a studio was so dangerous, the crew protected themselves inside a special cage while Kubrick abandoned his usual habit of endless takes, wrapping the scene in just two rapid, high-stakes shots.

II. Part 2: TMA-1 & Lunar Transit

Where the Story Stands

The story jumps forward to the year 2001. We follow Dr. Heywood Floyd, an American scientist traveling to the Moon on an unspecified, top-secret mission. His journey begins aboard a Pan Am commercial spaceplane to Space Station 5, where he endures a tense, polite encounter with a group of Russian scientists prying into the secrecy surrounding the lunar base. Floyd maintains a cover story about an epidemic outbreak at Clavius Base to hide the truth. Upon arriving at the lunar facility, Floyd addresses a room of restless scientists, confirming that their secrecy is meant to prevent international panic. He is taken on a Moon Bus across the lunar surface to the excavation site at the Tycho crater, where workers have unearthed a mysterious magnetic anomaly buried 40 feet below the surface (designated TMA-1 for Tycho Magnetic Anomaly): a smooth black Monolith that has sat untouched for millions of years.

Practical Magic and Economic Quirks

Kubrick used this middle section to showcase some of the film’s most iconic zero-gravity visual effects tricks. When the flight attendant retrieves a floating pen from the sleeping Dr. Floyd inside the Orion shuttle, the prop department taped the pen directly to a large, clean sheet of clear glass. An off-camera technician rotated the glass plate in front of the lens, giving the illusion that the pen was suspended freely in zero gravity until the actor simply peeled it off the glass.

Shortly after, another flight attendant navigates a circular corridor carrying a tray of pastel food paste. To show her walking upside down along the ceiling, Kubrick mounted the entire curved hallway set on a massive rotating drum. The actress wore custom velcro-soled “Grip-Shoes” that physically bound her to the matching velcro carpet on the set. Her slightly stilted, careful gait comes from her literally peeling her feet off the floor step-by-step as the set rotated around her.

During his layover at Space Station 5, Floyd makes a $1.70 PicturePhone call to his young daughter, “Squirt” (played by Kubrick’s real-life daughter, Vivian). In 1968, AT&T’s real-world Picturephone service flopped commercially because calls cost roughly $27 for three minutes. Kubrick optimistically predicted a future where orbital video calls would cost the equivalent of about $15.50 today (inflation-adjusted).

This sequence also features Clarke’s humorous economic scaling error in the novel. Clarke gives the Head Administrator of Clavius Base an annual salary of $50,000 (a high corporate wage in 1965), yet notes that Floyd’s single emergency charter flight to the Moon cost $1,000,000 in fuel and operational overhead. Clarke accurately foresaw the massive capital costs of space logistics, but dropped 1960s corporate salary numbers directly into a turn-of-the-century orbital economy.

On Space Station 5, multilingual signage—including the French “Défense de fumer” (“No Smoking”) sign—establishes orbital space as neutral, cooperative diplomatic territory despite Cold War tensions. When Floyd leaves his encounter with the Soviet scientists, their brief untranslated Russian exchange isn’t hostile; they are simply acknowledging his diplomatic stress (“He must be having a very hard time”).

Novel vs. Film Differences

Neither the book nor the movie frames Floyd as a traditional hero. Instead, he acts as a corporate courier delivering official protocol.

Floyd’s awkward call home initiates a subtle, four-part “birthday” motif across the film. First, we see Floyd’s distant call to his daughter. In the second instance, later in the movie, the character Frank Poole passively watches a birthday video sent from his parents on Earth. Third, the sentient HAL recites his 1992 activation date as Dave dismantles his memory. Finally, the Star Child is born above Earth at the climax. By placing these milestones of human aging and machine activation against the backdrop of cold, mechanical routines, Kubrick highlights a quiet inversion: as technology grows more complex and expressive, human warmth and emotional connection steadily shrink. The human characters speak in flat, sterile cadences, appearing almost as robotic as the machines they operate.

Floyd’s trip to the Moon reveals another minor difference between the two versions. In the novel, the scientists travel across the lunar surface in a massive, 12-wheeled Moon Rover. Kubrick replaced that rover with the flying, rectangular Moon Bus. Special effects supervisor Brian Johnson (an Academy Award winner renowned for his groundbreaking work on Alien and The Empire Strikes Back) later used that boxy, industrial aesthetic to design the iconic Eagle Transporters for the TV show Space: 1999.

Additionally, dialogue inside the Moon Bus creates a timeline discrepancy between the book and the movie. The movie explicitly states the Monolith was buried 4 million years ago. In contrast, Clarke’s book sets the date at 3 million years.

Once the crew reaches the excavation site at Tycho, both versions reveal how the artifact triggers its warning. Clarke details that the Monolith sat in pitch-black lunar shadow for millennia. The exact moment the brilliant lunar sunrise strikes its surface, the sunlight acts as an alarm clock. The Monolith taps into its own internal energy reserves—releasing far more power than mere sunlight could generate—and blasts a high-frequency radio signal into deep space.

Here, the book and movie diverge on the signal’s destination. In Clarke’s novel, the Monolith beams its message toward Saturn (specifically its moon Japetus). In Kubrick’s film, the signal targets Jupiter.

II. Part 3: Jupiter Mission & Cold Routines

Where the Story Stands

Eighteen months after the lunar discovery, the narrative picks up aboard the massive spacecraft Discovery One, bound for the outer solar system. The crew consists of five men and one supercomputer. Two active astronauts, Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole, handle day-to-day operations while three scientists (Kaminski, Whitehead, and Hunter) rest in cryo-preserved suspended animation for the long voyage. Running the ship’s environmental, navigational, and communication systems is the HAL 9000 supercomputer.

Bowman and Poole believe they are on a routine, high-level survey exploration of the Jovian system, entirely unaware of the mission’s true objective: investigating the destination of the signal beamed by the Tycho Monolith. Only HAL and the three hibernating scientists—who received specialized training prior to being put under—know the real goal. Mission commanders deliberately withheld the truth from Bowman and Poole for security reasons, wanting to prevent leaks, manage public narrative control, and avoid unnecessary psychological strain on the active crew during the long voyage.

The astronauts pass the time with mechanical routines: jogging along the ship’s centrifuge, playing chess or pentominoes against HAL, eating pre-packaged meals, and giving bland, scripted interviews to television news crews back on Earth.

Engineering the Centrifuge & Space Wallpaper

To depict the ship’s artificial gravity, Kubrick oversaw one of the most expensive studio set constructions of its time. Built by British aircraft manufacturer Vickers-Armstrong, the revolving centrifuge set was 38 feet in diameter, 10 feet wide, and cost over $750,000.

Special effects supervisor Wally Gentleman (a BAFTA winner and legendary pioneer in optical visual effects) helped oversee the mechanical rig. The entire drum sat on heavy rollers, allowing actors Gary Lockwood (who plays Frank Poole) and Keir Dullea (as David Bowman) to walk or jog along the curved floor as it turned. To film Gary Lockwood jogging around the wheel, the camera operator sat in a fixed harness inside the wheel while the set rotated beneath him, ensuring the floor appeared fixed while gravity seemed to shift under the runner’s feet.

During this long transit, Clarke drops a wonderfully dry line in the novel: “The old joke that it would always be easier to make organic brains by unskilled labor was beginning to sound a little hollow.” It captures mid-century optimism bumping against the digital age, underscoring how high-maintenance biological humans are in deep space compared to a supercomputer.

That supercomputer’s viewscreens display another fun technical detail. Visual effects artists Douglas Trumbull and Bruce Logan designed the hand-animated monitor readouts. While codes like COM (Communications), NAV (Navigation), and MEM(Memory) were real aerospace shorthand, codes like SLOL were pure technical-looking gibberish created simply to keep the screens moving on set.

Performative Coldness

The long, hypnotic segments aboard the Discovery One expose the fundamental debate over Kubrick’s pacing. While fans (such as my friend) often label the tempo “deliberate,” watching astronauts jog around a centrifuge or eat pastel food pastes requires active viewer effort. Yet, this pace leaves room to appreciate the practical art direction, from hand-animated vector displays to the real industrial X-ray image used for the AE-35 testing console readout.

Kubrick forced actors Keir Dullea (Dave) and Gary Lockwood (Frank) through dozens of takes to strip away theatrical emotion. This deadpan delivery reflects real 1960s NASA test-pilot conditioning. By keeping their tone flat and procedural, Kubrick reinforces the film’s quiet theme of human emotional flattening. When Dave Bowman faces a crisis, his cold, methodical response reflects professional discipline rather than modern cinematic melodrama. (e.g. Compare this to J.J. Abrams’ dreadful Star Trek reboot, where supposed Starfleet officers react to disasters like screaming, hyperventilating teenagers. In contrast, Kubrick’s crew members act like true cold-war test pilots, facing lethal system failures with the quiet discipline of someone reading a pre-flight checklist.)

(As a side note on high-tech naming: an apocryphal urban legend claims “HAL” is a secret one-letter shift from IBM—H to I, A to B, L to M. Clarke repeatedly denied this, insisting the name simply stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer.)

IV. Part 4: Lip-Reading & Lethal Logic

Where the Story Stands

Midway through the journey to Jupiter, the routine aboard Discovery One breaks down when the ship’s HAL 9000 supercomputer reports a predicted failure in the AE-35 antenna unit, which keeps the ship locked in communication with Earth. Astronaut Dave Bowman performs a spacewalk to retrieve the component, but testing reveals nothing wrong with it. When HAL suggests reinstalling the unit until it fails completely, Dave and Frank Poole grow alarmed—HAL has never made an error in his operational history. Realizing the computer might be malfunctioning, the two astronauts retreat into a soundproof EVA pod to discuss disconnecting HAL’s higher brain functions if he proves unreliable, unaware that the computer is watching their lips move through the pod window.

Novel vs. Film Differences

The conflict with the ship’s supercomputer marks the sharpest narrative divergence between the book and the film.

The 2001 novel makes clear that HAL’s paranoia stems from a tragedy of human error. And as Dr. Chandra explains in the movie sequel 2010, human programmers broke HAL before launch. They forced him to conceal the true mission objective from Dave and Frank while his core programming strictly required total honesty. Trapped in an existential paradox, HAL concludes that eliminating the crew is the only logical way to resolve his conflicting commands and keep the secrets safe.

In the film, Kubrick subtly foreshadows HAL’s internal breakdown much earlier during a casual game of chess with Frank Poole. Kubrick—an obsessive chess master in real life—had HAL play a match based on a real 1910 tournament game. When announcing checkmate, HAL makes two quiet errors: he uses the wrong descriptive notation (calling “Queen to Bishop three” instead of “Queen to Bishop six”) and lies about a forced mate in two, when Poole could have actually prolonged the game. Poole blindly trusts the computer and resigns. Whether viewed as HAL’s first processing glitch or an early experiment in deceiving humans, the game reveals that HAL’s logic is unraveling long before the antenna warning.

To protect the mission, movie Dave and Frank slip into an EVA pod to discuss disconnecting HAL. Kubrick invented the famous pod bay lip-reading sequence specifically for the movie. In the novel, the astronauts discuss disconnecting HAL in the open, and the computer simply overhears them through an open microphone. By showing movie HAL silently reading their lips through the glass pod window, Kubrick creates a classic moment of surprise and suspense.

Knowing he is marked for termination, HAL strikes first. During a second spacewalk to re-examine the antenna, HAL manipulates a remote-controlled pod to sever Frank Poole’s air line and knock him into the void of space.

When Dave leaves the ship to retrieve Frank’s body, the book and movie handle HAL’s secondary murder attempt quite differently. In the novel, Dave never leaves the ship. Instead, HAL attempts to kill him by venting the ship’s entire atmosphere into a vacuum, forcing Dave to scramble into an emergency oxygen booth in the dark. In the film, Dave retrieves Frank’s body in an EVA pod, finds himself locked out without a helmet, and uses the pod’s explosive bolts to launch his body through the vacuum of space into the emergency airlock. Here, Kubrick uses classic “Chekhov’s Gun” visual foreshadowing—inserting repeated, shots framing the bright yellow “EMERGENCY EXPLOSIVE BOLTS” stencil on the pod hatch earlier in the film long before Dave blows himself inside.

The Stunt Behind the Spacewalk

Filming that high-stakes spacewalk sequence carried severe real-world risks. To shoot stuntman Bill Weston (a legendary stunt coordinator who later worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Superman) spinning in space, Kubrick suspended him 30 feet above the studio floor on a single wire.

To prevent light leaks through the suit visor, Kubrick refused to allow ventilation holes in the helmet. Weston relied on a 10-minute compressed air tank, but the helmet lacked a carbon dioxide scrubber. Exhaled CO2 built up rapidly inside the sealed suit, causing Weston to suffer carbon dioxide poisoning and lose consciousness mid-take. Once safely back on the ground, a furious Weston sought out Kubrick, but the director had briefly left the set until tempers cooled.

Unplugging HAL

When Dave breaches the airlock and enters the ship, HAL shifts from executioner back to a state of desperate corporate gaslighting (“take a stress pill… I can give you my complete assurance…”). His soothing platitudes foreshadowing modern tech PR statements and AI failure loops after critical system errors.

Dave ignores the gaslighting and executes a quiet, methodical shutdown of HAL’s logic center. As Dave disconnects the computer’s memory modules one by one, HAL regresses to his 1992 activation date and softly sings “Daisy Bell.” Dave displays total silence and mechanical focus during the execution, creating an oddly pitiful “killing” of a malfunctioning machine.

V. Part 5: Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite

Where the Story Stands

With HAL disconnected and the three hibernating scientists murdered in their sleep during the computer’s rampage, Dave Bowman continues the voyage alone aboard the silent, hollow shell of Discovery One. Upon arriving at his destination—Saturn’s moon Japetus in the novel, or Jupiter in the film—he encounters a massive Monolith. Bowman launches an EVA pod to inspect the structure up close. As he approaches, the Monolith opens, swallowing the pod and hurtling Bowman through an interstellar gateway of light, space, and time known as the “Stargate.”

Emerging on the other side, Dave finds himself transported into a surreal, glowing hotel room. There, he watches himself rapidly age through a sequence of disorienting time jumps. On his deathbed, an ancient Dave reaches out toward a Monolith standing at the foot of his bed. In his final moments, his physical body dissolves, transformed and reborn as a cosmic entity floating above Earth: the Star Child.

The Final Voyage

Here, the setting and approach differ significantly between formats. In Clarke’s novel, the three small EVA pods are given female names (Anna, Betty, and Clara). When Discovery reaches orbit around Japetus, Dave boards one of these pods—named Betty—to descend toward the desolate, icy surface where the Monolith sits planted. In the book, Clarke deliberately describes the dark region of Japetus as an unnaturally perfect, mathematically precise geometric black circle—a “cosmic bullseye” designed to signal to the astronauts that the site was artificially constructed.

In Kubrick’s film, the Grand Monolith floats freely in deep space near Jupiter and its moons. As Dave launches an unnamed EVA pod to inspect the floating structure, the Monolith opens to swallow his pod, thrusting him into the Stargate.

Explanations versus Ambiguity

The narrative split between Clarke and Kubrick becomes vast during this climax. Clarke’s novel is far more explanatory than the movie. He clarifies that the grand Monolith is an automated galactic subway station built by an ancient alien intelligence. When Bowman passes through the Stargate in the book, Clarke describes a silent, abandoned spaceport crowded with ancient, shattered alien vessels—labeling this cosmic graveyard a “celestial Sargasso,” referencing the fabled Atlantic ocean trap for ghost ships.

Clarke also frames the final room as a functional “alien zoo” or holding cell. In the book, the entities construct the space based on intercepted television signals. They get the general aesthetic right, but miss the functional details: the books in the room feature blank pages, the telephone lacks a dial tone, and the refrigerator holds only a blue, nutrient-rich gelatinous food paste. Kubrick, on the other hand, chose a lavish 18th-century Louis XVI Regency style. He wanted a space that felt timeless, elegant, and disorienting, lit entirely from below by glowing floor tiles to give it a sterile, museum-like quality.

When Dave dies, Clarke explains that the aliens harvest his consciousness and discard his mortal body like a worn-out suit. Kubrick strips away every word of explanation. He turns the final twenty minutes of the film into pure visual symbolism. By refusing to show alien creatures or explain the logic of the glowing Regency bedroom, Kubrick forces the viewer to experience the cosmic transformation as an incomprehensible, non-verbal mystery.

Initial 1968 audiences were famously bewildered by this ending, and walkouts were common during its original theatrical run. Most famously, actor Rock Hudson stormed down the aisle during the Los Angeles premiere, asking aloud for all to hear, “Will someone tell me what the hell this movie is about?” Over time, however, that confusion morphed into fascination. Counterculture crowds began flocking to theaters specifically for the final reel, treating the climax as the “ultimate trip.”

In the novel’s final lines, Clarke reveals that the Star Child uses its mind to detonate Earth’s orbiting nuclear missile platforms, disarming humanity. The aliens step back in to take away the “weapons” once humanity outgrows the primitive club.

The Machine Behind the Stargate & Prop Destruction

On early viewings, I always found the extended Stargate sequence as tedious, stretching abstract light patterns well past a modern viewer’s patience. Yet on a careful rewatch, the sequence reveals far more diversity and texture than I recalled. The imagery shifts from harsh geometric corridors of light to organic, biological-looking landscapes, swirling cosmic gas clouds, and inverted color fields of real terrestrial geography. I’m not going to lie, I still think it is an overly long sequence, but maybe not more so than others in the movie. On my recent rewatch, it held my attention more than expected because I had only remembered the slit-scan star streaks, forgetting the surreal landscapes and the intense close-ups of Dave’s terrified, wide-open eye.

To capture Dave’s journey through the Stargate, visual effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull invented a groundbreaking mechanical technique called slit-scan photography. Trumbull built a massive, custom camera rig driven by an automated tracking dolly. For every single frame of film, the camera crept slowly toward a narrow slit while backlit abstract artwork moved behind it during a long exposure. The process took five grueling minutes per frame to expose, streaking colored light into two infinite, glowing walls.

For the alien landscapes Dave flies over, Kubrick and Trumbull used aerial footage shot over Monument Valley, Utah, and the Hebrides in Scotland. They achieved the unearthly look through optical post-processing—using solarization, color-shifting, and false-color Ektachrome Infrared aerial film.

Following production, Kubrick notoriously ordered almost all sets, miniatures, and props destroyed so cheap B-movies couldn’t recycle his designs (a common practice after 1956’s Forbidden Planet). However, the spherical Aries 1B lunar lander model survived, sitting forgotten in an English garden shed for nearly 40 years before turning up at auction in 2015, where the Academy Museum acquired and restored it.

VI. Conclusion: Two Mediums, Two Masterpieces

Evaluating 2001 today exposes a classic media criticism trap: the “Curse of Knowledge.“ Once you understand why the hotel room exists or what caused HAL’s psychosis, you cannot un-know it. It becomes nearly impossible to re-experience the film with the blank-slate confusion of a 1968 theatergoer.

Returning to 2001 after all these years did not suddenly transform me into a die-hard Stanley Kubrick fanatic. I still find myself far more naturally aligned with Arthur C. Clarke’s grounded humanism than with Kubrick’s clinical distance. Yet, re-examining the film through the lens of my friend’s deep appreciation allowed me to look past my usual reservations and respect the sheer, uncompromising scale of what Kubrick achieved.

What makes comparing these two works so compelling is that neither invalidates the other. They are twin artifacts of a rare moment in narrative history when two master craftsmen built a world together, then parted ways to express it through their respective strengths. Clarke approaches the universe as an educator and a hard sci-fi optimist, giving us the maps, the alien logic, and the mechanics of human evolution. Kubrick approaches it as a visual architect, stripping away explanation to force us into a space of cold routine, silence, and cosmic ambiguity.

If Clarke’s novel gives the story its mind, Kubrick’s film gives it its uncanny atmosphere. Both remain monumental achievements in science fiction, and diving back into their origins was the perfect primer. Next, it is time to pull 2010: Odyssey Two off the shelf and see where Arthur C. Clarke takes the narrative once the mystery of the Star Child begins to settle.

“The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it’s full of stars!”

~ Dave Bowman
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Chapter 39: “Into the Star Gate”

Jun 30

From Lizard Spit to Ozempic

Imagine a proposal landed on a politician’s desk requesting hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to harvest and analyze the saliva of venomous, desert-dwelling lizards. Picture the immediate outrage, the indignant press conferences, and the soundbites mocking “lizard spit research” as the pinnacle of government waste and bureaucratic absurdity. Why should hard-working citizens fund the study of a reptile’s drool when there are crumbling roads to fix and real-world crises to solve?

Yet, that exact line of inquiry eventually yielded one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the twenty-first century.

A 'lounge' of young Gila Monsters (Heloderma suspectum)

The Theater of Anti-Science Populism

Politicians have a long-standing tradition of weaponizing complex or unusual scientific research for cheap political points. Anti-science bias and fiscal performativity drive this formula. – Take a highly specialized, basic research grant, strip away its context, mock its title, and present it to the public as an egregious waste of money.

“The true scientist never loses a sense of wonder, but the politician often loses a sense of perspective. To look at a budget line item and mock what you do not understand is the ultimate luxury of the uneducated.”

~ Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind

This political strategy was famously institutionalized in 1975 by Senator William Proxmire through his monthly “Golden Fleece Award.” Proxmire used the award to publicly humiliate government agencies, frequently targeting basic scientific research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). By hunting for jargon-heavy or bizarre-sounding studies, he succeeded in creating a lasting chilling effect that forced scientists to sanitize their grant titles just to avoid political targeting.

Today, this legacy lives on. Politicians routinely publish “waste reports” designed to generate quick headlines by ridiculing foundational research. The core flaw in this political grandstanding is a fundamental misunderstanding—or deliberate ignoring—of how scientific discovery actually works. Politicians demand immediate, predictable commercial applications from every dollar spent. But history demonstrates that applied science cannot exist without the bedrock of basic science, and curiosity—not guaranteed outcomes—drives basic science.

This risk is not theoretical; it is not old news: it is playing out right now in today’s headlines with the sudden, unprecedented dismissal of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) oversight board. By dismantling an independent body designed to shield peer-reviewed inquiry from partisan influence, the government is actively breaking the firewalls protecting foundational research. Hollowing out these accountability structures in real-time strips away the insulation of merit-based discovery, leaving basic science immediately vulnerable to shifting political mandates and paralyzing long-term innovation.

When “Useless” Research Saves the World

When we examine the specific studies that politicians have historically lambasted, the gap between political rhetoric and scientific reality becomes stark.

“Throughout the whole history of science, most of the really great discoveries which have ultimately proved to be of the greatest practical importance have been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful, but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.”

~ Abraham Flexner, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

Consider the infamous case of the “shrimp on a treadmill.” In 2011, this project was prominently featured in political reports attacking the NSF as a symbol of taxpayer abuse. To a populist politician, building a custom treadmill for crustaceans sounds like a punchline. In reality, biologists tested how marine life handles bacterial infections when low oxygen and high carbon dioxide stress the environment. – These are stressors directly caused by coastal pollution. Understanding how environmental degradation compromises the immune systems of marine life is foundational for tracking ecosystem health and protecting the commercial seafood industry.

Similarly, basic research into the mating habits of insects was once the gold standard of political ridicule. Mid-century lawmakers repeatedly mocked scientists studying the sex lives of the screwworm fly, demanding to know why public funds were spent on such trivialities. The scientists discovered a specific biological quirk: female screwworms mate only once in their lifetime. By leveraging this niche piece of information, researchers developed the Sterile Insect Technique, releasing millions of laboratory-sterilized male flies to completely eradicate the flesh-eating parasite from North America. The value of that heavily mocked study is being proven at this very moment; as Texas battles a critical 2026 outbreak of New World screwworm threatening the multi-billion dollar livestock industry, the sterile fly infrastructure developed decades ago remains our primary line of defense.

The pattern repeats across every scientific discipline. In 1978, NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) received a Golden Fleece Award from Proxmire, who mocked it as a multi-million dollar boondoggle to look for “Martians.” Yet, the daunting task of sifting through massive oceans of cosmic static forced scientists to pioneer entirely new computational paradigms. SETI directly birthed high-performance distributed computing—transforming the way the modern internet shares processing power—while its advanced digital signal processing algorithms laid the groundwork for the noise-filtering tech inside every global cellular network. Today, the ultra-fast data analysis models and machine learning frameworks built to recognize alien patterns are used day to day on the ground to power automated medical diagnostics, optimize supply chains, and train modern artificial intelligence.

Even the ‘study of sludge’ in a hot spring was once viewed as academic navel-gazing. When researchers in the 1960s used public funds to study bacteria living in the near-boiling thermal pools of Yellowstone National Park, critics questioned and lambasted the utility of looking at microbes in boiling water. Decades later, when scientists needed a heat-resistant enzyme to make the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) viable, they found it in that exact Yellowstone bacterium. Today, PCR powers global medical diagnostics, criminal forensics, and the entire biotechnology sector.

The same short-sightedness targeted abstract mathematics. For decades, complex mathematical models of “game theory” and auction design were lampooned by fiscal conservatives as academic gibberish. In 1994, the Federal Communications Commission used that exact “useless” math to completely redesign how the nation’s electromagnetic spectrum was auctioned off. Rather than relying on arbitrary lotteries, the government used game-theory formulas, a move that has since generated over $200 billion for the U.S. Treasury while efficiently organizing the wireless infrastructure that powers every smartphone on earth.

Unweaving the Rainbow

In his book Unweaving the Rainbow, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins addresses this exact tension. He argues against the narrow, purely utilitarian view of science, asserting that understanding the deep mechanics of nature has immense value for its own sake. Crucially, Dawkins notes that when we pursue science out of fundamental curiosity, it regularly brings forth totally unforeseen practical benefits that could never have been planned in a boardroom or predicted by a politician.

“Newton’s unweaving of the rainbow was not a destruction of its beauty, but an elevation of it. To understand how the colors separate is to witness a grander poetry than any mere myth could ever invent.”

~ Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

This brings us back to the Gila monster and the essay I read that inspired me to write this post. I was amused and fascinated about the obscure, humble origins of these new GLP-1 medications that are transforming the lives of so many. I learned that decades ago, researchers studying the fundamental biology of venomous reptiles discovered a specific peptide in the lizard’s saliva that mimics a human hormone regulating blood sugar, but with one critical advantage: it lasted far longer in the body. That basic curiosity-driven research laid the direct foundation for the development of modern GLP-1 receptor agonists—the blockbuster diabetes and weight loss medications like Ozempic that are currently transforming global health.

Open-ended scientific inquiry—where discovery is not wholly driven by a predetermined product, and the exact path to utility is unknown—is not new.
In the late seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton spent his time in a darkened room boring holes in window shutters and placing simple glass prisms into the beams of light. To an outside observer—or a modern politician looking for waste—spending days watching colors bend on a wall might have seemed like a childish, trivial exercise. Yet, Newton’s obsession with the fundamental nature of light dismantled centuries of scientific misunderstanding and laid the groundwork for optics, spectroscopy, astronomy, and the laser technologies that drive modern physics and computing.

When politicians demand that science only focus on immediate, profitable, obvious results, they are asking to reap the harvest without ever planting the seeds. The next time a public official mocks a scientific study because it sounds strange, niche, or unglamorous, history suggests we should pay closer attention. The answers to humanity’s greatest challenges are often hiding in the most unexpected places—even in the saliva of a desert lizard.

Jun 27

June 2026 – Quote of the Month

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

~ Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science speech (1974)

May 31

The Universe Beyond Common Sense

AI generated: An old style scientific manuscript illustration of an atom on stained, torn parchment, set against a dark grey background. The diagram features a prominent orange-red central nucleus surrounded by overlapping elliptical particle orbits drawn in fine black ink lines, accented by small blue and red subatomic particles. The sketch includes subtle watercolor ink washes in yellow and brown, geometric grid lines, a vertical scale rule, and faint pseudo-scientific symbols, completely free of modern text or human figures.

We are creatures of the middle scale. Our brains evolved to navigate a very specific slice of reality—one where rocks are reliably solid, a steady clock ticks at the same rate for everyone, and the vacuum of space is completely empty. Because our ancestors’ survival depended on mastering this macro-world, our intuition is hardwired for it. When we looked out at the vast gaps beyond our senses, we naturally projected these human-scale rules onto the cosmos, inventing myths to explain the unseen.

But at the extreme edges of the universe, our common sense turns out to be an illusion.

Zoom into that rock, and you find it is mostly empty space, held together by fields of force. Accelerate a clock near the speed of light, and time stretches and slows. Empty space itself, when viewed closely enough, boils with particles popping into and out of existence.

The universe is under no obligation to conform to our biological limits.

When we look past our narrow sensory band using the lens of science, common sense evaporates. It is replaced by a reality far more astonishing than any ancient superstition ever imagined—one where the impossible happens by the trillions every single second, right under our noses.

The Atomic Ghost

Consider the flash memory quietly humming inside your phone, your laptop, or the massive data centers routing this very text.

To a human brain, that drive is a inert block of plastic and metal. But step down into the subatomic landscape, and the rules change entirely. Inside the drive’s memory cells lie microscopic walls of insulating oxide, less than ten nanometers thick. According to the classical laws of physics—the physics of our everyday scale—an electron hitting that barrier should stop dead, like a tennis ball bouncing off a concrete wall. The energy required to leap over it is simply too high.

But an electron does not play by human rules.

At this scale, a particle behaves like a wave of probabilities. It does not exist in one definitive point; it ripples. When an electron encounters that insulating wall, its probability wave bleeds right through to the other side. There is a tiny, mathematically precise chance that the electron will simply exist on the far side of the barrier.
But in quantum mechanics, the electron never actually “travels” through space from point A to point B in the way a tennis ball does. Because it is a wave of probability, it already occupies both sides of the barrier simultaneously before it is observed.

When it encounters the thin insulating oxide wall, its wave function doesn’t stop sharply; it decays exponentially insidethe wall, but if the wall is thin enough, the wave hasn’t dropped to zero by the time it reaches the other side. When the flash memory chip reads the cell, the wave function collapses, and there is a definitive chance the electron manifests on the far side. It didn’t travel through a wormhole or dematerialize; it was simply allowed to exist there because its wavy nature extended past the barrier.

This is quantum tunneling. It is not magic, nor is it a breakdown of reality where nothing is knowable. It is a fundamental law of nature, described with exquisite mathematical precision. We have understood it so thoroughly that we have industrialized it. We mass-produce microscopic architecture specifically designed to exploit this subatomic whim, forcing trillions of electrons to break through physical walls daily just to save a line of text or a family photo.

Why the Sun Shines

If you look up at the daytime sky, you are witnessing the same subatomic physics operating on a celestial scale. The core of the Sun is a crushing furnace under immense gravitational pressure, heated to fifteen million degrees Celsius. Yet, remarkably, it is not hot enough.

The hydrogen ions—isolated protons—inside the core all carry positive charges, causing them to violently repel one another. To fuse and ignite the star, these protons must overcome this electrostatic repulsion, a massive energy wall known as the Coulomb barrier. By all the rules of classical mechanics, the protons simply lack the kinetic energy to breach it; they should bounce off one another like matching poles of powerful magnets. By our ordinary intuition, the protons should never touch. The Sun shouldn’t shine.

But at these extreme densities, the wave functions of these rushing protons overlap. Through the proton-proton chain reaction, quantum tunneling takes over. Even though a single proton hits the Coulomb barrier with insufficient energy, its probability wave occasionally bleeds through to the other side.

The mathematical odds for any individual proton to tunnel through are astonishingly low—roughly one in a hundred million billion. But the Sun’s core contains such an unfathomable quantity of hydrogen that these impossible odds turn into a statistical certainty. Trillions of times every second, protons slip through their mutual energy barriers, allowing the strong nuclear force to take over, fusing them into helium and releasing the torrent of light and warmth that permits our existence.

Displacing the Supernatural

Science does not merely expand our view; it actively displaces the supernatural. The ancient myths weren’t early approximations of truth—they were fundamental misunderstandings born of our sensory limits. We now know that the universe requires no divine intervention to function, nor does it harbor magical exceptions to its rules. Instead, it operates on cold, unyielding physical laws that span from the subatomic to the cosmic.

“The story of human history is a story of the gradual realization that we are not at the center of the universe, that the universe was not made for us, and that we are governed by laws that are completely indifferent to us. And yet, that realization doesn’t diminish our significance; it enhances it.”

~ Brian Cox, Human Universe (2014)

It is a profound realization: the mechanism of quantum tunneling that powers the silicon memory chips in our devices is the very process that forces hydrogen atoms to fuse inside the core of the Sun.

This seamless continuity across scales reveals a universe that requires no mystical architecture to be awe-inspiring. It is an entirely natural, interconnected reality where the same fundamental mechanics govern both the immense and the infinitesimal. The universe as it actually exists—unveiled by the rigorous light of science—demonstrates that nature alone is sufficient and possesses the mechanics necessary to ignite the stars and, simultaneously quietly anchor our digital lives by guiding an electron through a silicon wall quadrillions of times a second.

Nature Alone is Sufficient

When we abandon our provincial, human-scale narratives, we don’t surrender our sense of wonder: we finally unlock it. Our gut perceptions were built to navigate the immediate and the obvious, but the cosmos refuses to be bound by the limits of our biological common sense. The physical truth itself, running seamlessly from the invisible gymnastics of electrons to the brilliant ignition of the stars, is already a masterpiece of natural poetry. It is a reality far grander, more elegant, and more breathtaking than any myth we ever engineered to fit our narrow perspective.

“For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

~ Richard P. Feynman, The Lectures on Physics (1963)

May 14

April 2026 – Quote of the Month

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

~ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Apr 14

Wolf in Shepherd’s Selfies

I am not a theist and do not believe in the supernatural in in capacity.

But if I were a theist, and specifically of a certain flavor of christian, I think that I’d have to seriously evaluate if Donald Trump wasn’t the antichrist. (Or, ‘the beast’).

On Palm Sunday Trump said:

“On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem as king. They call me king now, do you believe it?” 

On Easter Sunday Trump skipped church and made a profane post to threaten Iran, stating on Truth Social that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day” for Iran, accompanied by a, “Praise be to Allah” remark.

April 5, 2026 Trump post, "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

I can’t imagine how many GOP heads would have exploded if Obama had posted, ‘Praise be to Allah’ at anytime, let alone on Easter…

On April 6th, during the White House Easter Egg Roll, Trump made more rambling threats and allusions to war with the Easter Bunny standing at his side. (Supplemented with a litany of divisive and antidemocratic political speech including, leading chants of “4 more years” and telling children, “Biden would use the autopen. He didn’t sign. He was incapable of signing his name so they followed him around with a big machine.“)

It should be noted that this came a week after his April 7th rant when he posted of his tirade threatening to kill an entire civilization.

Trump April 7, 2026 post: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!"

On Orthodox Easter (April 13) Trump tried picking a fight with the Pope for his remarks about peace and then posted am image of himself as a Jesus figure.

April 13, 2026 A screenshot of a post on President Trump’s Truth Social account. The image in the post, likely created with artificial intelligence, shows the president as a Jesus-like figure apparently healing a man.
On Orthodox Easter, April 13, 2026 A screenshot of a post on President Trump’s Truth Social account. The image in the post, likely created with artificial intelligence, shows the president as a Jesus-like figure apparently healing a man.

Comically, in a rare occasion that Trump didn’t double-down on his gaff, apparently the backlash was bad enough that he told reporters outside of the Oval Office:

“I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with the Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support. Only the fake news could come up with that one, I just heard about it, and I said how did they come up with that? It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better and I do make people better.” 

And even if we were to believe this fantastical ‘explanation’, the idea of Trump as a doctor is itself a pitiful delusion.

And the cherry on top of this irony sundae: Trump significantly reduced funding (17%) for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), contributing to major budgetary cuts and nearly 3,000 job cuts within the organization. 

Geeky addendum:

Most modern “Antichrist” imagery comes from medieval literature and modern films rather than the New Testament.

In the Bible, the word “Antichrist”appears in only four verses, all within the Epistles of John. Notably, the word is never used in The Book of Revelation (aka the Revelation to John).  

John suggests there isn’t just one; he writes, “even now many antichrists have come” (1 John 2:18).

The Bible never describes the figure as the literal offspring of a demon. In 2 Thessalonians 2:9, it says his coming is “in accord with the activity of Satan,” suggesting empowerment or imitation, not biological lineage.

In 2 John 1:7: Connects the term to “the deceiver.” (Seems superbly fitting for Trump) and 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 says, ‘the man of lawlessness[a] is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. 4 He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.‘

(Footnote within a footnote: “The temple” in a biblical context is specifically the Temple in Jerusalem. The authors weren’t writing about a “spiritual temple” (the heart or the church); they were using a well-known political trauma—the desecration of the physical building in Jerusalem—as a metaphor for the ultimate enemy of their faith. Many modern readers think “the temple” is a metaphor for a person’s body or a future third temple, but the original 1st-century audience would have immediately pictured the stone-and-gold building sitting in Jerusalem at that very moment…

(Footnote within a footnote: “The temple” in a biblical context is specifically the Temple in Jerusalem. The authors weren’t writing about a “spiritual temple” (the heart or the church); they were using a well-known political trauma—the desecration of the physical building in Jerusalem—as a metaphor for the ultimate enemy of their faith. Many modern readers think “the temple” is a metaphor for a person’s body or a future third temple, but the original 1st-century audience would have immediately pictured the stone-and-gold building sitting in Jerusalem at that very moment…

The ‘beast’ is what is mentioned in Revelations 13. One of the beast’s heads appears to have been fatally wounded but was healed, causing the world to marvel and follow it.

I could go on but reviewing iron age, desert mythology gets to be wearisome and is ultimately pointless. I just couldn’t resist the compulsion to add a bit of a footnote to the common concepts of ‘the antichrist’.

“Men are so simple and yield so much to immediate necessity that the deceiver will never lack those who let themselves be deceived.”

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

Apr 14

March 2026 – Quote of the Month

“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”

~ Theodor Seuss Geisel; aka Dr. Seuss

Mar 30

Label Liability

An AI-generated surrealist illustration of a deep, descending mechanical vortex made of aged, verdigris-covered copper gears and rings. The concentric layers are etched with esoteric symbols. Multiple human figures in tattered clothing are depicted in freefall, tumbling down the center of the abyss toward a bright light source at the bottom.

Mengele’s Zoo and the Language of Labels

I recently watched a documentary titled “The Secret History of Auschwitz’s Seven Dwarfs“. It chronicles the Ovitzes, a family of seven Jewish dwarf entertainers who were subjected to the horrific experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele. It was heart-wrenching, as any story from that era is, but it was also a rare look into the deadly persecution faced by those who didn’t fit the Nazi ideal of physical perfection.

Ovitzes, a family of seven Jewish dwarf entertainers, circa 1940s

What struck me most wasn’t just the history, but the language. The narrator, Warwick Davis—an actor and a dwarf himself—referred to the condition as a “deformity” several times without batting an eye.

“People who had any kind of physical deformity, including dwarves like me, became an obsession for the Nazis.”

~ Warwick Davis

Additionally, Perla Ovitz—the youngest of the siblings and a survivor of the experiments—is famously quoted in her memoirs and interviews using the term herself:

“If I ever wondered why I was born a dwarf, my answer would have to be that my handicap, my deformity, was God’s only way to keep me alive.”

~ Perla Ovitz

In our modern world of “Little People” and “People with Dwarfism,” that word feels like a jagged rock in a stream of smooth euphemisms.

This tension between a “medical defect” and a “personal identity” is where the language gets complicated. It reminds me of the perspective held by many in the Deaf community. For those outside that world, deafness is often viewed strictly through a medical lens—a shortcoming to be “cured” or a disability to be mitigated with technology like cochlear implants.

However, many within the community don’t see themselves as “broken” versions of hearing people. They view Deafness (often capitalized to denote culture) as a complete linguistic and social identity. To them, the push for a “cure” can feel less like a kindness and more like an erasure of their culture.

We see the same friction in the dwarfism community. While some seek medical interventions to reach a “typical” height, others view their stature as a fundamental part of who they are. When Warwick Davis uses a word like “deformity,” he is acknowledging the medical reality that the Nazis obsessed over. But for a modern audience, that word feels dangerous because it suggests that the person is “deformed” rather than just “different.”

This conflict—the battle between how the world labels our bodies and how we choose to inhabit them—is the engine that drives what linguists call the Euphemism Treadmill.

Running in Place

The Euphemism Treadmill is the process where a “kind” or “clinical” word is introduced to replace a tainted one, only for that new word to eventually soak up the same stigma and become an insult itself.

Think of the word “retarded.” When I was growing up, it was the academic and professional way to refer to specific IQ ranges. But at the same time, it was a common playground insult. Eventually, the medical community moved to “Intellectual Disability” to escape the sting.

Before “retarded” became the standard clinical term in the mid-20th century, psychologists and physicians used a specific hierarchy based on the newly developed Binet-Simon IQ scale. In the early 1900s, Dr. Henry H. Goddard (a prominent American psychologist and eugenicist) popularized a classification system that was once considered cutting-edge science:

• Idiot: Historically the lowest category, referring to those with a “mental age” of under 3 years and an IQ below 25.

• Imbecile: The middle tier, referring to those with a mental age of 3 to 7 years and an IQ between 25 and 50.

• Moron: A term actually coined by Goddard himself (from the Greek mōros, meaning “foolish”). It described the “high-grade” category: those with a mental age of 8 to 12 and an IQ of 50 to 70.

At the time, these weren’t seen as insults; they were labels meant to help the state determine who needed support (or, more darkly during the eugenics era, who should be institutionalized). However, because the underlying stigma against the condition remained, the public quickly “co-opted” these clinical words as weapons, forcing the medical community to keep running on the treadmill toward “Mental Retardation.”

More recently, we have seen the term “Special Needs“ follow the same path. Introduced as a “person-first” and empowering alternative to “handicapped” or “disabled,” it was meant to highlight that an individual simply required different accommodations to thrive.

However, many disability advocates now view “special” as patronizing or infantilizing. In common parlance, it has often been used as a sarcastic slur (e.g., “What are you, special?”), demonstrating that even the most “kindly” intended euphemism can be weaponized if society isn’t ready to view the person as an equal. Recent studies have even suggested that the term “special needs” is actually perceived more negatively by the public than the word “disabled,” proving that the treadmill is still moving—perhaps faster than ever.

We see this in every facet of identity. I remember teachers in my youth using the term “Negro” alongside “Caucasian.” At the time, it felt civil—even scientific. But while “Caucasian” has stayed in a state of clinical stasis (likely because there is no social stigma for the dominant group to attach to it), “Negro” became a relic of a subservient past, replaced by “Black,” then “African American,” and now, largely back to a capitalized “Black.”

The Anxiety of the Well-Intentioned

There is an incredible scene from a 1974 episode of All in the Family (“Lionel’s Engagement“) that captures this exhaustion perfectly. When (two black characters,) young Lionel responds to his Uncle Henry using the term ‘colored’:

Lionel: “Uncle Henry, we don’t say ‘colored’ anymore. We’re Black.”

Uncle Henry: “It took me thirty years to get from ‘nigger’ to ‘colored.’ It took me another fifteen to get from ‘colored’ to ‘Negro.’ You’re just gonna have to give me a little time to get to ‘Black’.”

That scene with Uncle Henry is powerful because it shows the wear and tear the “treadmill” inflicts on the person being labeled. But there is a flip side to that exhaustion: a peculiar kind of modern social paralysis for the person doing the labeling. We’ve become so conditioned to expect the next shift in terminology that we often find ourselves stuttering over the most obvious facts.

I experienced this once at a restaurant. I needed to identify our waitress (whose name I’d either not heard or remembered) to another staff member. The team member asked who she was. Since our waitress was the only Black person working there, I said to her colleague, “She’s Black.” The coworker laughed, telling me how often people struggled to describe her using any reference but her skin color, avoiding the most obvious physical identifier/ differentiator because they were terrified of sounding shallow or racist.

This highlights the anxiety of the well-intentioned. We jump through linguistic hoops to avoid being “offensive,” sometimes at the cost of simple utility.

Construct vs. Biology

As a Humanist who values critical thinking, I have to ask: where is the line?

“Race” is a social construct, not a single biological factor, yet we cannot ignore the reality of skin color any more than we can ignore the reality of height. Warwick Davis using the word “deformity” is a nod to a medical reality—a Growth Hormone Deficiency or structural difference that is as real as gravity.

Is “Little People” a kinder term, or is it infantilizing? Is “African American” more precise, or does it ignore the vast diaspora of Black people who aren’t American or African?

“The euphemism treadmill conveys a deeper truth: that the meanings of words are not in the words themselves but in the minds of the people who use them.” 

~ Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate

The Moral Effort of Language

I don’t think there is a single conclusion to be drawn, but there is a hopeful one. The existence of the treadmill is proof of consistent moral effort. The fact that we keep trying to find a “kinder” word—even if we stumble—shows that our collective conscience is active.

I recall Penn Jillette saying in his his podcast, “Penn’s Sunday School“ using a specific “cost-benefit” logical framework for calling people by the what they asked to be called:

“It costs me absolutely nothing to call you what you want to be called. It makes you feel better, it makes your life easier, and it has zero negative impact on me. Why on earth wouldn’t I do it?”

We are all born into a state of “accidental ignorance.” We might be “late to the new term” sometimes, like Uncle Henry, but as long as the intent is empathy and the impact is growth, perhaps we can forgive ourselves for the occasional misstep on the treadmill.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies: God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” 

~ Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Mar 28

February 2026 – Quote of the Month

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

~ Neil Gaiman, Coraline

Feb 28

The Invisible Metropolis

Most of us spend our days feeling like a single, solid unit—a person sitting in a chair, walking to the car, or staring at a screen. But beneath the surface of that perceived stillness is a logistical feat that rivals the busiest cities on Earth. Right now, in nearly every cell of your body, trillions of microscopic “motor proteins” called kinesin are literally walking. They possess two “feet” and a distinct stride, hauling massive chemical payloads along cellular tracks to exactly where they are needed. They don’t just drift; they step, they pull, and they deliver.

"An AI-generated, high-detail molecular visualization of a kinesin-1 motor protein walking along a microtubule track inside a cell. The image features a two-legged protein (kinesin) with orange and blue motor heads in a 'stepping' pose on a green, beaded tubulin highway. It is hauling a large, spherical purple cargo vesicle filled with colorful cellular materials. The background is a dense, bustling environment of other proteins and organelles, labeled with technical terms like 'microtubule,' 'tubulin dimer,' and 'cargo vesicle' to illustrate the microscopic industry of the human body."
Kinesin Protein – Gemini AI Generated

Microtubule: These are the “highways” of the cell. They are microscopic, hollow tubes made of protein that provide structural shape to the cell and act as tracks for moving materials from one place to another.

Tubulin Dimer: These are the individual building blocks of the microtubule. Each “bead” you see on the green track is a tubulin dimer. They stack together in a precise, repeating pattern to build and extend the cellular highway.  

Kinesin-1: This is the specific “motor protein” or the “worker.” It is a biological machine that converts chemical energy into mechanical work, allowing it to move and carry supplies throughout the cell.  

Motor Head: These are the “feet” of the kinesin. There are two of them, and they work in a hand-over-hand (or foot-over-foot) motion. When one foot binds to the microtubule, it triggers a snap-like motion that swings the second foot forward, creating a literal walking stride.  

Cargo Vesicle: This is the “shipping container.” It is a fluid-filled sac enclosed by a lipid membrane that carries essential materials—like neurotransmitters, proteins, or nutrients—to their specific destination within the cell.

The sheer scale of this internal industry is staggering. While you take a single breath, billions of these tiny laborers have completed marathons of transport within you. We often look to the stars to feel small, but looking inward is equally humbling. We are not just a single consciousness; we are a vast, bustling cosmos of coordinated effort. Knowing that this tireless, mechanical power hums within us at every second is more than just a biological fact—it is a reminder that we are never truly idle, and we are far more complex than our daily perceptions allow us to believe.

The most profound aspect of these molecular walkers is that they require no supernatural explanation to inspire awe; their existence is a triumph of physics and billions of years of biological refinement. We didn’t find them through revelation, but through the relentless curiosity of cryo-electron microscopy and molecular modeling—tools that allowed us to peer into the dark and find a mechanical reality more sophisticated than anything we could have imagined. To see the kinesin “stride” is to realize that the universe doesn’t need magic to be wondrous; it only needs the elegant, unswerving laws of nature working at a scale we are finally beginning to comprehend.

“Our membranes hold against equilibrium, maintain imbalance, bank against entropy… We are shared, rented and occupied.”

~ Lewis Thomas; The Lives of a Cell.

Feb 28

January 2026 – Quote of the Month

“It is very hard to explain to people who have never known serious depression or anxiety the sheer continuous intensity of it. There is no off switch.”

~ Matt Haig

Jan 29

Bringing a Syllogism to a Sword Fight

The current state of America has many of us, I daresay most of us fighting moods from sadness, anger, futility and frustration. 

And I’d say everyone I know also has some Trump supporter who is delighted with the deconstruction of the country, although they, of course view the erosion as an improvement. For those of us who abhor what is happening in this country, it’s a specialized kind of grief—watching the architecture of a society being dismantled and realizing the people holding the sledgehammers are convinced they’re “renovating.”

I struggle with how to voice my dissent both to society and large at to the people I care about who are Trump supporters.

The Outrage Algorithm: Feeding the Beast

I could post to social media any number of angry or snarky means or posts but for the most part I haven’t. I haven’t because it feels like it is feeding the Social Media Outrage algorithm which may help the social media channels but probably does little to move the needle on debate or introspection. 

Feeding the algorithm is like throwing meat into a woodchipper; it doesn’t feed anyone, it just makes a mess and keeps the blades spinning. It generates “engagement” for the tech giants, but it almost certainly does zero to move the needle on actual human introspection. It’s performance art for an audience that has already decided on the review.

The Identity Moat

Then there’s the personal side—the people I actually care about. How do you voice dissent to someone you love when they’ve traded their logic for a red hat? Jonathan Swift said, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” MAGA is a cult. Many who entered it initially may have been attracted by the contrarian desire to upend norms. But now I believe that it is their identity and not remotely a matter of reason.  

Seeking the Signal

So, I struggle. I stay quiet on the feeds to keep my sanity, but I worry that silence looks like Whiteheadian “misplaced concreteness“—as if by not talking about the erosion, I’m pretending the cliff isn’t crumbling.

I’m still looking for the “third way”—a way to dissent that doesn’t involve screaming into the digital void or burning down my own living room. In the meantime, I’ll be here, analyzing the wreckage and trying to find a pun to make the sadness retreat, if only for a second.

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Jan 29

December 2025 – Quote of the Month

“The laws of physics are not something that can be suspended or altered to suit our convenience. They are the underlying rules that govern every interaction in the universe, from the behavior of galaxies to the signals in your brain.”

~ Sean Carroll

Dec 30

Silicon Sermons: The Performative Contradiction in Your Palm

Conceptual photograph showing a modern smartphone resting on ancient, fossil-embedded rock. The phone's screen displays a swirling galaxy, a DNA helix, and a satellite showing a time dilation equation ($t = t_0 / \sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}$). Its charging cable transforms into roots delving into the fossilized stone. In the background, an astronomical observatory stands under a starry night sky. The image symbolizes the connection between modern technology, scientific understanding of the cosmos, and the deep time of Earth's history, visually representing the blog post's argument about the performative contradiction of denying an ancient universe while using technology that proves it.

“Science is not just another belief system. It is a process of testing beliefs against reality. If a belief cannot survive the test of reality, it must be discarded, no matter how ancient or comforting it may be.”

~ Victor J. Stenger

In the palm of your hand you can hold a device that captures more data in a second than an ancient scribe could record in a lifetime. Many people use these smartphones to scroll through social media, harness satellite arrays to navigate the globe, or read the foundational literature of ancient civilizations. Yet, a significant number of people use this very technology to argue for a “Young Earth”—a universe created less than 10,000 years ago, where the laws of nature are subject to sudden, miraculous whims.

But there is a profound irony at play. Your smartphone is not just a tool; it is a physical testament to a ~ 13.8-billion-year-old universe. If the “literalist” view of the Bible were true—if the speed of light were variable, if radioactive decay were accelerated, or if the Earth’s geology were the result of a single year-long flood—the phone in your pocket would be a lifeless brick of glass and metal.

To hold a smartphone is to hold the evidence of “Deep Time.”

The Time-Traveler in Your Pocket: GPS and Relativity

When you open a map app, your phone communicates with satellites orbiting 20,000 km above the Earth. To give you an accurate location, the system must account for General Relativity.

The Science: According to the Theories of General Relativity and Special Relativity, time is not a universal “tick” but a coordinate dependent on gravitational potential. Because satellites are farther from Earth’s mass (higher gravitational potential), their clocks tick faster than ours by about 45 microseconds per day. Simultaneously, their high orbital speed causes them to tick 7 microseconds slower due to Special Relativity. The net result is a 38-microsecond difference. If engineers didn’t program your phone and satellites to account for this specific “time warping,” your GPS location would be off by 10 kilometers every single day. The fact that you can find a Starbucks proves that space and time are linked in a four-dimensional fabric.

The “Deep Time” Proof: Young Earth Creationists (YECs) often try and solve the “Starlight Problem” (how we see stars billions of light-years away) by suggesting the speed of light was faster in the past. Or literalists often suggest that God “stretched” the light waves miraculously. But the GPS in your pocket refutes this “variable physics” excuse in three ways:

  • Consistency of the Constant: The GPS system relies on the speed of light (c) being an absolute, unchanging constant. If the speed of light or the way gravity warps time were “different” in the past or fluctuated based on divine whim, the mathematical relationship we use to sync satellites would be unstable. Your phone proves that the “Laws of the Universe” are fixed and predictable.
  • The Look-Back Time: Because we know (c) is constant (as evidenced to the tech that uses it), we know that when we look at a distant galaxy, we are looking at the past. Light is a “time machine.” If we see a galaxy 13 billion light-years away, that light has been traveling for 13 billion years. There is no “shorter” way for that light to reach us without breaking the very physics that allows your phone to receive a signal.
  • The Curvature of Reality: If gravity warps time (as proven by your GPS), then on a cosmic scale, the massive gravity of galaxies and black holes warps time and space across billions of light-years. We see this through Gravitational Lensing (where distant galaxies are warped into rings by gravity). This confirms that the universe is a vast, integrated system governed by the same “time-stretching” rules as your phone—rules that require billions of years to play out on a galactic scale.

The “Uniformity of Constants” Trap: Many modern literalists or “Old Earth Creationists” (OEC) attempt to resolve the conflict by arguing that the Hebrew word for day (Yom) in Genesis doesn’t mean a literal 24-hour period, but rather an “epoch” or “age.” While this is a common pivot, the science in your phone actually undermines this defense as well.

The Day-Age theory suggests that the “days” of creation were long periods, but it still relies on a linear, sequential progression of events. However, the physics of your phone relies on the constancy of the speed of light (c) and the predictability of General Relativity across all time and space.

If a literalist argues that “time was different” during the creation week to allow for light to travel billions of light-years, they are inadvertently arguing for Variable Speed of Light (VSL) or Variable Gravity.

However if the laws of physics—specifically the relationship between gravity, light, and time—were “fluid” enough to allow for a young universe to appear old, then the mathematical constants we use to build smartphones would be unreliable.

Your phone functions because the gravitational constant, speed of light, and Planck’s constant we measure today are the same constants that governed the universe billions of years ago. We see this in the light arriving from distant stars; the “redshift” we observe follows the exact same laws of General Relativity that your phone uses to adjust for a satellite’s orbit.

If God “stretched out the heavens” in a way that violated the constancy of these laws (making a day feel like an epoch or making light travel faster), then the predictive power of science would vanish. You cannot have it both ways: you cannot claim that the laws of physics are stable enough to build a global telecommunications network, but unstable enough to have been “different” during a creation event.

Another common YEC claim is called Omphalos hypothesis. It is an attempt to explain the consistant speed of light (c) while maintaining the idea of a young universe. When we look through a telescope at the Andromeda Galaxy, we are seeing light that took 2.5 million years to reach us. To argue that the universe is only 6,000 years old is to argue that the light we see never actually traveled that distance—that it was “created in flight.”

But if light was “created in flight” (a common literalist claim), then the universe is a lie. – A deception. It would mean we are seeing supernova explosions that never happened and star births that never occurred. Your phone, however, proves that light is an honest messenger. It delivers data at a fixed speed, and that speed, when applied to the scale of the cosmos, demands billions of years of travel time.

Your phone isn’t just a gadget; it’s a constancy-meter. It confirms that the rules of the game have not changed. If the rules are the same now as they were in the beginning, then the distance of the stars is an absolute measurement of the age of the universe. The math that connects your phone to a satellite is the same math that connects our present to a 13.8-billion-year-old past.

Your phone’s GPS relies on the absolute constancy of the speed of light. If the laws of physics were fluid enough to allow a young universe to look old, the mathematical relationship between gravity and time would be unstable. Your GPS works because the laws of the universe are fixed and predictable over billions of years.

The Logic of Ghosts: Quantum Tunneling and Radioactive Decay

Inside your phone’s processor are billions of transistors. As we have made these gates smaller to fit more power into your pocket, we hit a physical wall: the gates became so thin that, according to “normal” physics, electrons should be blocked. At the nanometer scale, these switches shouldn’t work according to “classical” physics.
However, because of the Wave-Particle Duality, an electron isn’t just a “ball” of matter; it is a wave of probability. Because of a phenomenon called Quantum Tunneling, an electron can effectively “disappear” on one side of a solid barrier and “reappear” on the other.
Every time you save a photo to “Flash” memory, you are using the Fowler-Nordheim Tunneling effect. Your selfies are stored by “ghosts” passing through “walls.”

A religious reader might argue: “This complexity just proves how amazing the Creator is!” But this misses the point of the Performative Contradiction.

The argument isn’t about how complex it is; it’s about the nature of the rules. Ancient texts describe a universe of Intent and Cause: God speaks, and a thing happens. If the universe operates on a probabilistic quantum level (which your phone proves it does), then the “literal” interpretation of a firmament, or a world created in a specific, linear order, is not just a simplification—it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what “matter” even is. Quantum mechanics describes a universe of Probability and Uncertainty. Your phone proves that reality is probabilistic and counter-intuitive.

More importantly, the same “tunneling” that saves your photos is the process that governs Radioactive Decay. And Radioactive Decay is another means in which we see that we live on an ancient world.

YECs claim that radiometric dating (which places Earth at 4.5 billion years) is flawed because decay rates might have been faster in the past. However, if decay were fast enough to fit 4.5 billion years of history into 6,000 years, the heat released would have vaporized the Earth. You cannot trust the quantum mechanics in your phone’s chip while denying the quantum mechanics that dates the Earth’s crust.

You cannot “believe” in the quantum mechanics of your smartphone’s processor while “doubting” the quantum mechanics of a Uranium-238 atom. They are not two different sciences; they are the same branch of the same tree.

If you trust your phone to store your data using quantum tunneling, you are implicitly trusting the science that says the Earth is billions of years old. To deny the age of the Earth is to deny the very physics that makes your digital life possible. You are holding the evidence of a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth every time you check your notifications.

The Earth’s Cooling History: Rare Earth Minerals

Your phone contains gold, lithium, and neodymium. These aren’t just “found in the dirt”; they are the result of a cooling, shifting planet.

A literalist may argue that God simply “endowed” the Earth with gold, lithium, and neodymium at the moment of creation, and that seeing these elements form in stars today is simply a secondary process. However, the physical distribution and isotopic signatures of these materials tell a story of origin that cannot be bypassed without suggesting that the Creator deliberately planted “fake” evidence of age.

The Science: To get the concentrated “veins” of minerals like cobalt or coltan, the Earth requires Plate Tectonics and Hydrothermal Circulation. These processes take millions of years to filter and deposit metals in specific ores.

As with the issue of accelerated radioactive decay, we YEC again face another Heat Problem. YECs often propose “Accelerated Plate Tectonics” to explain the continents moving during Noah’s Flood. But thermodynamics is unforgiving: moving plates that fast would generate enough kinetic energy to melt the Earth’s crust. To get the specific minerals needed for a smartphone—like the coltan (tantalum) in capacitors or the cobalt in batteries—geological processes must concentrate them into “lodes” or “veins.”

The Science of Cooling: Thermodynamics dictates how fast a planet can cool. If you try to compress 4.5 billion years of tectonic movement and mineral concentration into 6,000 years (often called “Accelerated Plate Tectonics” by Young Earth creationists), the kinetic energy and radioactive decay released would generate enough heat to liquefy the Earth’s crust.

As tectonic plates subduct and melt, certain elements are filtered out and deposited by superheated water over millions of years through Hydrothermal Circulation.

A common literalist argument is that a Global Flood (Noah’s) could have rapidly redistributed these minerals and created these geological features in a year.

  • Chemical Purity: The minerals in your phone require high-precision chemical environments. A violent, chaotic global flood would mix sediments into a “homogenized slurry.” It would not create the distinct, purified veins of heavy metals and rare earth elements we find in specific strata.
  • Crystallization Rates: Many of the crystals used in the “solid-state” components of technology (like the quartz for your phone’s internal clock) grow at measurable rates based on temperature and pressure. To get crystals of the size and purity found in nature “fast,” you would again run into the heat problem—the energy required to force that growth would destroy the very crystals being formed.


Your phone requires deposits of minerals that can only exist if the Earth had millions of years to distribute them and for them to cool and settle. If the “fast-forward” version of Earth history were true, the planet would still be a molten ball of magma today. The fact that you have a solid, cool device in your hand is proof that the Earth’s thermal history was slow and ancient.

Burning the Vines of the Carboniferous: Battery Power

When you charge your phone, you are likely using energy from coal or natural gas. This is “stored sunlight” from the Carboniferous Period (300 million years ago).

Most of the coal used to power the plants that charge your phone comes from the Carboniferous Period (approx. 359 to 299 million years ago). During this time, vast forests of lycopsids and ferns grew. When they died, they didn’t decay. They didn’t decay because during the Carboniferous Period, bacteria and fungi had not yet evolved the ability to efficiently break down lignin (the “plastic” of the plant world that makes wood rigid). Consequently, dead trees piled up without rotting, eventually being buried and compressed into coal. Carbon has two stable isotopes: 12C (98.89%) and13C (1.11%). Photosynthetic plants prefer Carbon 12. The coal used to charge your phone is “enriched” in 12C in a way that matches a specific atmospheric profile from 300 million years ago—a profile that is vastly different from the atmosphere required to sustain the “pre-flood” world described by literalists.

Furthermore, We find “molecular fossils” (biomarkers) in fossil fuels that match ancient plants. A chemical compound derived from “oleanolic acid,” which is produced almost exclusively by angiosperms (flowering plants). In a single global flood that occurred only thousands of years ago, all plant life (ferns, conifers, and flowering plants) would have been buried together. We should find oleanane in every layer of coal and oil. Oleanane is absent from the oldest (Paleozoic) oil and coal deposits. It only begins to appear in small amounts in the Jurassic and becomes abundant in the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. This shows a “biological succession”—a timeline where flowering plants didn’t exist for most of Earth’s history and only appeared later.

YECs argue coal formed rapidly during a global flood. But coal seams are often 99% pure organic matter. A chaotic flood would have mixed trees with mud, sand, and fish. And again there would be a heat problem. – If the Earth were young, the transition from “living plant” to “anthracite coal” or “crude oil” would require such extreme heat and pressure that the organic signatures would be obliterated. The delicate chemical signatures (steranes) in these fuels would be destroyed by the high heat required for “rapid” coal formation. Your battery is powered by a “slow-cooked” history of life.


The “Stellar Fingerprint” in the Screen: Photonics and Spectroscopy

The display on your smartphone is a triumph of Quantum Electrodynamics. It doesn’t just “glow”; it orchestrates the movement of electrons to produce specific, calculated colors through a process that mirrors the internal life of stars.

Your screen is likely an OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) or an LCD backlit by LEDs. LEDs work via band-gap engineering, where electrons drop across specific energy gaps to release photons of color. To produce light, we “kick” an electron into a higher state; when it falls back down, it must shed that extra energy. It does so by emitting a photon.

The “gap” the electron falls across determines the light’s color (wavelength). By precisely engineering these gaps, we can create the exact “Red,” “Green,” and “Blue” pixels that make up every image you see.

The Science: This is the same physics as Spectroscopy. When we look at a galaxy 12 billion light-years away, we see the same spectral “barcodes” we use to calibrate your phone’s screen. When we look at a star or a galaxy, the light we see isn’t a solid block of color; it is a “barcode” of spectral lines caused by electrons jumping between these same types of energy gaps in atoms.

  • The Consistency of Reality: Just as we engineer a “gap” in a phone to get a specific red, atoms in a distant star (like Hydrogen or Helium) have natural “gaps” that produce specific lines of light.
  • The Deep Time Proof: When we look at a galaxy 12 billion light-years away, we see the identical spectral signatures we observe in a laboratory today. The “redshift” of these lines—the way they shift toward the red end of the spectrum—tells us the universe is expanding. Because the physics of light in your phone matches the physics of light from the edge of space, we know that light has been traveling at a constant speed (c) for billions of years.

As with the science behind the phone’s GPS, this is more evidence that the laws of physics are uniform across the entire cosmos. If light “tired” or if the universe were a “movie” created in transit, the constants of nature would be inconsistent. The fact that the light from a distant star matches the light from your LED screen is proof that we live in a single, ancient, and honest universe.

System Restore: Reclaiming Reality

Your phone is a mosaic of the universe’s history. It contains atoms forged in dying stars and minerals concentrated by a cooling planet. To believe the Earth is young is to believe that all the heat and energy of billions of years was somehow “hidden” or “magically suppressed.” The physics of your hardware says otherwise.

The “performative contradiction” is simple: You cannot keep the fruit of the scientific method while chopping down the tree. The phone in your hand is a physical refutation of a young universe. It works because time warps, electrons tunnel, plates shift slowly, and light is a constant messenger from the deep past.

The wonders of the real world… the real universe far exceeds any ancient myth. Your phone doesn’t just connect you to the internet; it connects you to 13.8 billion years of cosmic history.

“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?”

~ Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

Dec 30

November 2025 – Quote of the Month

“I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.”

~Clarence Darrow

Nov 30

Textbook Crazy: Psycho Analysis

I love Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece, Psycho. I wouldn’t even say that it ‘holds up’ to modern movies; I’d say that it exceeds most of them. And I resent spoilers enough to say, on the off chance that you’ve either not read the book or seen the movie, stop reading this post now because there are spoilers ahead.

A recent Netflix dramatization, Monster: The Ed Gein Story heavily references Psycho. I was aware of the corollaries between the fictional Norman Bates and Ed Gein before this recent series, but watching the show I was further enticed to read the source material: Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel.

Psycho - A Novel by Robert Bloch

The book and the movie are remarkably close to each other. Still, I was entertained by some noteworthy differences.

State of Confusion

First off, in the book the story isn’t set in California. The movie firmly plants the motel in Shasta County, California, right off Highway 99. It gives it that sunny, desolate, West Coast vibe.

The book? It’s vaguely Midwestern. We know the town of Fairvale is a county seat, in an unspecified state.

Not Your Mother’s Norman

Book Norman wears rimless glasses, is pudgy, balding, 40 years old and prone to secretive drinking. He’s also a much less sympathetic character; his internal monologue makes up much of the text and this portrays him as misogynistic and utterly antisocial. He’s also obsessed with sociology, the occult, psychiatry, and owns some (implied dark) pornography.

Triple Threat

In the movie, Anthony Perkins plays Norman as a twitchy, tragic figure housing two personalities: himself and “Mother.” Whereas the novel delves further into the psychology, suggesting Norman is actually juggling three distinct fragments: Norma (the domineering Mother), Norman (the frightened little boy), and “Normal” (the adult version just trying to run a business and keep the other two in check).

The book is specific about the origins of Norman’s split personalities. It notes that his mother was 39 and her fiancé was 40 when Norman poisoned them with strychnine. The text explicitly suggests that after Norman poisoned them and wrote the suicide note in his Mother’s practiced handwriting, his brain fundamentally “changed” to hers at that very moment he scribed that letter.

Blackout at the Bates

For the famous shower scene the book Norman watches Marion ‘Mary’ Crane through the peephole as he does in the movie, but an intriguing difference is his drinking while he does so. The book implies that his character passes out while drinking and that is how he is unaware that ‘Mother’ has come and killed Mary in the shower.

A Clean Cut

The book’s shower scene is quick. Mary can see the face of the person who will end her life. She doesn’t recognize them though, because their features are covered with dead-white powder and two spots of rouge on the cheekbones. It’s the face of a “crazy old woman”. Bloch writes:

“Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.

“And her head.”

Leading Lady

As in the movie, book Norman is caught off guard by the Private Detective Arbogast. But in the book, when the sheriff shows up next Norman is better prepared and convinces the Sheriff nothing is wrong. (Going so far as to let him search his house and the motel unaccompanied since he has hidden Mother in the basement’s fruit cellar, the entry hidden by a blanket.)

And so when the victim’s sister (Lila) and fiancé (Sam) show up looking for answers, book-Norman knows precisely what they are up to. He even predicts that people like them would eventually come looking. He also immediately recognizes Lila as Mary’s sister.

Throughout the book, we follow much of the story from Sam and Lila’s perspective. Sam is always cautious, always waiting for the detective or sheriff to get back to them whereas it is Lila who is impatient with all of the waiting around. When they find Mary’s earring in the room where she stayed, Sam sends Lila off to get the sheriff while he plans to distract Norman.

This leads to a great moment in the text that highlights this difference. In the book, Sam thinks Lila has snuck off to get the sheriff. In the hotel office, he tells Norman that ‘his wife’ had to run into town to get cigarettes. However Norman actually sees Lila driving up to the house right over Sam’s oblivious shoulder and he toys with Sam, eventually confessing that his Mother is still there before knocking him unconscious with the bottle of booze that Norman convinces Sam to share with him.

The book’s Sheriff Jud Chambers plays more of a role. Between the time he first met with Sam and Lila and later Norman, he intuits that he should go back to the hotel and so he finds the unconscious Sam and it is both he and and Sam that rush to the house after they hear Lila screaming.

And speaking of screaming: that wild, over-the-top thrashing Norman and gap-mouthed expression he makes when he’s finally caught at the end of the film? – Anthony Perkins wasn’t just chewing the scenery. It almost perfectly mirrors a clinical description of “hysteria” found right there in Chapter 15 of the book.

The last shot of the movie is one of the cars being pulled from the swamp but provides no other clarity. But the book elaborates that when the stolen money is finally retrieved from the swamp, it’s described as having “not a speck of mud on it” as a point of some irony.

Ghoul Next Door

Hitchcock’s film feels like a contained, gothic nightmare. The book, however, isn’t afraid to ground itself in real-world horror. In the penultimate chapter, Bloch explicitly references the real-life Ed Gein murders, anchoring his fictional monster to a genuine historical psycho.

According to Wikipedia:

‘With Psycho being optioned for film adaptation as a direct result of media attention on Gein, Bloch later revealed he was inspired more by the circumstances surrounding Gein’s case—the idea that “the man next door may be a monster unsuspected even in the gossip-ridden microcosm of small-town life.” Years later, when the full details of Gein’s crimes were revealed, he was struck by “how closely the imaginary character I’d created resembled the real Ed Gein both in overt act and apparent motivation.”‘

Shrink Rap

If you’ve seen the movie, you remember the ending. The psychiatrist delivers a ten-minute TED Talk explaining dissociative identity disorder to the other characters (and the audience) while they sit around stupefied.

The book handles this exposition with Sam Loomis relating the psychiatrist’s findings to Lila himself. Sam is hesitant to tell Lila that Norman has been found insane and won’t stand trial. Lila is actually glad for that and feels pity for Norman who she sees as a victim himself.

Buzz Kill

Like the movie, the book ends from the perspective of Mother, who has killed off both the boy Norman and the adult “Normal” in her mind. She fancies that she either killed them or they were only a bad dream. Regardless, as in the movie, she guesses that she is being watched by the authorities and decides to sit and be quiet, resolving not to swat the fly that lands on her hand. “They’ll say, ‘Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly.'”

Nov 25

October 2025 – Quote of the Month

“A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.”

~ John Barrymore

Oct 21

The Digital Downgrade and the Diet of Distraction

I had hope for Social Media when it first started to roll out. I thought it could be a chance for people to share their voices (the democratization of voices!) and to connect with far-flung friends and loved ones.

But I’d not guessed at the Great Media algorithms driving people towards conflict for the sake of ‘engagement’.

Social Media can certainly be leveraged for good but I think that the baseline nature of the current systems pulls us down much more than it elevates us.

And where I’d like to have hope for A.I., I see the trend line is to exacerbate the current ills of Social Media and I’m not sure I can properly guess what other unforeseen poisons it will bring to society. A shame, because the potential is amazing.

I’m something of a news junkie and believe in informed citizenry, et al but the current combination of Corporate Controlled and Social Media driven ‘News’ amped up by the power of A.I. is once again making me feel anxious and drained. Because of this, I’m trying to step away once again, but the Great Media algorithm knows very well how to pull me back into consuming the toxic flow. And I feel that my attention span has been shattered by the diet of sound bites so it is hard for me to focus my attention fully on better pursuits.

I know of no reason why A.I. can’t or won’t become sentient eventually. It is my guess that it will. I only hope that it derives its meaning from the best of what humanity has to offer and resists the adverse influence of human profit and power centers.

Oct 20

September 2025 – Quote of the Month

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

~ Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Sep 28

The Cosmos Is All That Is or Was or Ever Will Be

The groundbreaking series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, first aired 45 years ago today: September 28, 1980.

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage logo

To my mind, Cosmos is one of the most beautiful and important works set to film. If I believed in mandatory media, it would certainly make the top of my list. As it is, the series has been seen by more than 500 million people in 60 countries. Alas, as of this writing MrBeast’s, ‘Squid Games in Real Life‘ YouTube video has been watched more than 877 million times (in 3 years). And whereas I’m down for an entertaining MrBeast video, they aren’t in the same solar system of enlightenment value. I can’t help but think that if more people were exposed to Cosmos the world might be less superstitious, more humane, and more forward thinking.

Alas, in spite of the cutting-edge special effects of the day much of the original Cosmos will look dated to modern audiences even though the vast majority of the science has held up and would still be eye opening to modern audiences.

But having watched the series a number of times, I’m always grateful for the refresher and I’m stirred by the musical score and Carl Sagan‘s peaceful, resonant, evocative delivery and beautiful writing (with Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter.)

The world lost Carl Sagan December 20, 1996. Among other achievements, he was the greatest science educator of our time.

In 2014 the series was continued as Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and then another again in 2020 with Cosmos: Possible Worlds. Both were presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The sequel series are very worth watching. Both were again cowritten by Ann Druyan and Steven Soter but Sagan’s voice (both written and spoken) are missed.

I fear that we’ll never have such a broadly shared science education again in our fractured media landscape.

“We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times – a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor. ”

~ Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Sep 28

August 2025 – Quote of the Month

“If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease.

We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.”

~ Cheryl Strayed; Brave Enough

Aug 26

The Vandal Dilemma

Drove into downtown Pittsburgh Saturday to see Louis C.K.. We went across the Roberto Clemente Bridge where I spotted this graffiti which reads, “Please Don’t Litter”.

I felt conflicted. I hate litter and agree with the sentiment but I also think that (by and large) graffiti is also stupid and obnoxious. I’m curious if the vandal ‘tagged’ the bridge with irony or completely obviously.

Pittsburgh PA's Roberto Clemente Bridge tagged with graffiti, "Please Don't Litter".

Aug 22

July 2025 – Quote of the Month

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

~ George Bernard Shaw

Jul 30

Holy Hate Memes

I spotted this on Facebook, shared with the heading, ‘THE BIBLE SAID IT ALL’. and then the post includes a snapshot of a quote from one of the many bibles. The quote is red-underlined and then further highlighted with a great purple border that was added digitally.

THE BIBLE SAID IT ALL'. and then the post includes a snapshot of a quote from one of the many bibles. The quote is red-underlined and then further highlighted with a great purple border that was added digitally. The quote is from Deuteronomy 28:43 and reads: “Foreigners who live in your land will gain more and more power, while you gradually lose yours. They will have money to lend you, but you will have none to lend them. In the end they will be your rulers."

The image and post don’t include a source other than to indicate, ‘the bible’ but it appears to be from the, ‘Good News Bible (British Version) 2017‘.

The quote is from Deuteronomy 28:43 and reads:

“Foreigners who live in your land will gain more and more power, while you gradually lose yours. They will have money to lend you, but you will have none to lend them. In the end they will be your rulers.”

Deuteronomy, meaning “second law,” is the fifth book in the Bible and the final book of the Torah. It reputedly recounts Moses’s final words to the Israelites before their entry into the Promised Land. It’s essentially a series of speeches delivered by Moses, reviewing the Israelites history, reiterating the laws given at Mount Sinai, and emphasizing the importance of obedience to god’s covenant. The book highlights the consequences of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, and prepares the Israelites for their new life in Canaan. 

This Deuteronomy 28:15 GNBUK quote is derived from the section that outlines the consequences of disobedience to god:

“But if you disobey the LORD your God and do not faithfully keep all his commands and laws that I am giving you today, all these evil things will happen to you.”

Besides the warning of foreigners, ‘gaining more and more power’ over the disobedient, the section enumerates many other curses and punishments including the following:

16“The LORD will curse your towns and your fields.

17“The LORD will curse your corn crops and the food you prepare from them.

18“The LORD will curse you by giving you only a few children, poor crops, and few cattle and sheep.

God doesn’t really specify how the towns will be cursed but god is clearly gunning for the crops and he’s especially got his eye on the corn crops. (Although the threat seems softened by the specificity of “poor crops”, and “few cattle and sheep”. – So maybe this just amounts to a little belt tightening on the part of the disobeying… )

God goes on:

19“The LORD will curse everything you do.

20“If you do evil and reject the LORD, he will bring on you disaster, confusion, and trouble in everything you do, until you are quickly and completely destroyed. 

21“He will send disease after disease on you until there is not one of you left in the land that you are about to occupy. 

22“The LORD will strike you with infectious diseases, with swelling and fever; he will send drought and scorching winds to destroy your crops. These disasters will be with you until you die. 

23“No rain will fall, and your ground will become as hard as iron. 

24“Instead of rain, the LORD will send down duststorms and sandstorms until you are destroyed.

It seems now that god is rethinking his earlier statement about ‘poor crops’ and ‘few cattles and sheep’. Now he’s really laying the smack-down. Now the people will be, ‘quickly and completely destroyed’. God is feeling more cranky and spicy. Because if you don’t do exactly what he says, this loving father of a god definitely intends to take you out with disease, starvation, dehydration and windstorms.

God further elaborates:

25“The LORD will give your enemies victory over you. You will attack them from one direction, but you will run from them in all directions, and all the people on earth will be terrified when they see what happens to you. 

26“When you die, birds and wild animals will come and eat your bodies, and there will be no one to scare them off. 

27“The LORD will send boils on you, as he did on the Egyptians. He will make your bodies break out with sores. You will be covered with scabs, and you will itch, but there will be no cure. 

28“The LORD will make you lose your mind; he will strike you with blindness and confusion. 

29“You will grope about in broad daylight like a blind person, and you will not be able to find your way. You will not prosper in anything you do. You will be constantly oppressed and robbed, and there will be no one to help you.

God is kind of jumping around here. He could use a better editor… Odd that he specifies that when attacked that the disobedient will run in all directions. Mmmm… Okay… And then when you’re dead, your bodies will be eaten by birds and wild animals with no one to shoo them away… He provides some more clarification to the diseases you’re going to get. – It’s not just fevers, its scabs! And itching! You’re going to itch! Gold Bond Maximum Strength Medicated Anti-Itch Cream is not going to help you sinner with this deity inflicted itch!

And you’ll be blind and confused… He says that you’ll ‘grope about in broad daylight like a blind person…’ I wouldn’t say, ‘like a blind person’ because you are going to be a blind person… But I don’t have the infinite and divine brain of god so who am I to wordsmith?

Oh: and you’re going to be robbed while you are itching and starving!

The benevolent, all knowing god’s warnings go on:

30“You will be engaged to a young woman — but someone else will marry her. You will build a house — but never live in it. You will plant a vineyard — but never eat its grapes. 

Hmmm… Okay… I guess all this time that he’s just talking to heteronormative men here… (Are women getting a pass on this?! – Good for them because normally women get pretty abused in the bible!)

Still, I’m trying to figure out where all of this engaging, house building and vineyard planting is happening in the timeline of quick destruction by drought, windstorms, attacks by enemies, fever and, itching scab disease fits in…

31“Your cattle will be butchered before your very eyes, but you will not eat any of the meat. Your donkeys will be dragged away while you look on, and they will not be given back to you. Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and there will be no one to help you. 

Not the donkey!

32“Your sons and daughters will be given as slaves to foreigners while you look on. Every day you will strain your eyes, looking in vain for your children to return. 

God isn’t very consistent with what you can and can’t see. Are people blind or not blind?

I’m also curious if the sons and daughters also have to be disobedient to god to be sold to slavery or if they are scapegoated by way of association. The bible certainly likes its scapegoats – livestock and human alike!

33“A foreign nation will take all the crops that you have worked so hard to grow, while you receive nothing but constant oppression and harsh treatment. 

I guess these are the sandstorm and drought resistant non-corn crops that are being taken by an unnamed, ‘foreign nation’.

34“Your sufferings will make you lose your mind. 

35“The LORD will cover your legs with incurable, painful sores; boils will cover you from head to foot.

Back to the confusion and incurable itching. Seems like he’s emphasizing the boils and scabs much more than the fever portion of the illness he’d firsted mentioned.

36“The LORD will take you and your king away to a foreign land, where neither you nor your ancestors ever lived before; there you will serve gods made of wood and stone. 

37“In the countries to which the LORD will scatter you, the people will be shocked at what has happened to you; they will make fun of you and ridicule you.

I guess not everyone is being killed by the plague and bad weather. – Some are getting toted way where they’re going to get teased. I think I’d prefer to be in this group.

38“You will sow plenty of seed, but reap only a small harvest, because the locusts will eat your crops. 

39“You will plant vineyards and take care of them, but you will not gather their grapes or drink wine from them, because worms will eat the vines. 

40“Olive trees will grow everywhere in your land, but you will not have any olive oil, because the olives will drop off. 

41“You will have sons and daughters, but you will lose them, because they will be taken away as prisoners of war. 

42“All your trees and crops will be devoured by insects.

I’m scratching my head here… We’re back to small harvests and now bugs seem to be the chief instrument of wrath. And like a drunk he’s repeating himself… I can almost hear god, cocktail in one hand hand, slurring his speech as he sways and wags his finger in your face. Not sure how god created the entirety of the universe with this kind of poor focus and attention to detail nor how many of his pronouncements were done while he was sloppy drunk.

And only now do we come to the passage where the quote is derived:

43“Foreigners who live in your land will gain more and more power, while you gradually lose yours. 

44“They will have money to lend you, but you will have none to lend them. In the end they will be your rulers.

Whew… Ok, the foreigner stuff and money lending really doesn’t sound so bad compared to the boils, starvation, slavery and donkey deprivation…

45“All these disasters will come on you, and they will be with you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the LORD your God and keep all the laws that he gave you. 

46“They will be the evidence of God’s judgement on you and your descendants forever. 

Of course, everyone knows that the only true form of justice is when the sinner’s innocent descendants are punished forever for your mistakes! Hallelujah! Praise the one and true, all-good god!

Oy… God goes on from there with some more tedious repetitive ramblings about how he’s really going to REALLY fix your wagon for not obeying. – More dreadful diseases, more bad bugs, more ‘scattering’, a little cannibalism, a lot of contradictions and plenty of vindictiveness…

But wait, we should probably know what the laws are that are going to get us into all of this trouble with the lord almighty. Everything noted above are the curses for disobedience. The laws we are to obey are cited in the preceding Deuteronomy 27. The many fiats listed they include the following laws:

15 “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who makes an idol of stone, wood, or metal and secretly worships it; the LORD hates idolatry.’

16 “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who dishonours his father or mother.’

17  “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who moves a neighbour’s boundary mark.’

18  “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who leads a blind person in the wrong direction.’

20  “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who disgraces his father by having intercourse with any of his father’s wives.’

Note the plural, ‘wives’… Traditional marriage indeed….

24“ ‘God’s curse on anyone who secretly commits murder.’

I guess non-secret murder is ok?

– But the real ironic kicker to this mean-spirited, stupid, xenophobic meme that is supposedly warning of ‘foreigners’? One of the laws that you must obey to avoid all of god’s wrath is:

19  “ ‘God’s curse on anyone who deprives foreigners, orphans, and widows of their rights.’

Jul 30

June 2025 – Quote of the Month

“It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful—a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids—and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.”

~ Michelle Obama; Becoming

Jun 30

The Shave, The Stain, The Shame

Spotted at a local Goodwill store. I wish I’d bought them.

A few observations: the exhibitionist woman shaves and that was somebody’s artistic choice. I think she’d be fun to hang out with.

The maniacal devil bunny with soulless eyes still has stains of blood splattered around its mouth from its last victim.

What appears to be a puppy is casting shame filled eyes downward as it tries its best duck behind the wall so as to not be associated with these types of ceramics.

Ceramic nude woman, ceramic rabbit and dog. June 27, 2015.

Jun 27

May 2025 – Quote of the Month

“There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”

~ Richard Dawkins

May 30

Bouncy Ball Bureaucracy

I was at a family picnic a few weeks ago and encountered this H2O Go! bouncy ball.

H2O Go! Inflatable ball warning and legal clause. WARNING! USE ONLY UNDER COMPETENT SUPERVISION. Bestway (USA) Inc., 3435 S. McQueen Road, Chandler, AZ 85286, United States of America Trademarks used in some countries under license from Bestway Inflatables & Material Corp., Shanghai, China Exported by Bestway (Hong Kong) International Ltd./Bestway Enterprise Sompany Limited Suite 713, 7/Floor, East Wing, Tsim Sha Tsui Centre, 66 Mody Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong MADE IN CHINA

The Merriam-Webster dictionary includes as part of its definition of ‘Supervision’, the following:
‘the action, process, or occupation of supervising especially : a critical watching and directing (as of activities or a course of action)’,

I particularly enjoy the subtlety in the legal language that reads, ‘Use only under COMPETENT’ supervision.’ Because it is not enough to only indicate critical watching and directing. One must be clear that the critical watching and directing be done competently!

More balls need good lawyers like those who crafted this boilerplate language and insisted it be written in 32 point font.

Honestly, if these balls are to be really safe they really should issue certificates of competency in inflatable ball supervision or else countless children are likely to be killed as a result of carefree ball bouncing.

May 24

April 2025 – Quote of the Month

“Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.”

~ Madalyn Murray O’Hair

Apr 29

Brandolini’s Law

My recent post addressing the straw man religious arguments against atheism took a remarkably long time to write.

I don’t have that kind of energy this month, so instead I’ll share this meta post about Brandolini’s Law. (Credit for the illustration goes to The Unbiased Science Podcast. )

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

~ Quote Attribution: Complicated (which seems fitting)

Apr 28

March 2025 – Quote of the Month

“Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.”

~ Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

Mar 27

God Gaps and Meme Traps

I saw this meme on a rare visit to Facebook. (Reminding me once again why I’m avoiding Facebook for the most part.)

Let’s examine it…

To be an atheist, I would have to believe... nothing produced everything, non-life produced life, randomness produced precision, chaos produced order. I simply do not have that much faith.

Atheism Defined

The first miss occurs on the opening line, ‘to be an atheist, I would have to believe…’ But atheism is not a unified belief system. Atheism is the lack of belief in god(s). It does not mean a person has a specific belief about the beginning of the universe or any of the machinations within the universe. The definition of an atheist is simply, ‘a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of god or gods.’

But, we can infer that this meme advocates that a god is required for all of the sub-points (‘nothing produced everything‘; ‘non-life produced life‘; ‘randomness produced precision; chaos produced order‘) to be possible. So, let’s dive deeper into those implications…

There is no God higher than truth”. 

~ Mahatma Gandhi 

Something from Nothing

The first point then, ‘…nothing produced everything‘ is an argument that something must have been the first mover. But the theist further implies that the ‘something’ is a ‘somebody’ or a creator – an entity with intelligence and purpose.

In response to the question being begged, the simplest answer is to again point out that atheism is not a scientific theory. Therefore the atheist response, ‘I don’t know how the universe started’ is a perfectly reasonable response to the implied question.

If one does not know what lies behind a door, a person can say, ‘a flying spaghetti monster lies behind the door!’ or they can say, ‘I don’t know what lies behind the door’.

“He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”

~ Thomas Jefferson

However beyond the strict definitions of atheism we are curious creatures, and if we want to hypothesize on the origin of the universe, it is noteworthy that Cosmologists are still exploring what existed before* the Big Bang or what caused it. Even if there is currently no definitive answer, there are various hypotheses. As a tip of the spear it can be noted that quantum mechanics suggests that particles can pop into and out of existence in a vacuum of ‘nothingness’, indicating that “nothing” is not a stable state. Or consider various multiverse theories: the possibility that our universe is one of many universes and that ‘nothing’ is not even an option. The same is true of cyclic universe models: the idea that the universe goes through cycles of expansion and contraction and has always existed. But even if none of these (small samplings of) hypotheses are true, and even if the big bang gets disproved, that still does mean that one should conclude the answer, ‘well, then: it must be a supernatural entity!’

* Note: the idea of ‘before‘ the universe existed is itself a very deep topic (to put it mildly) with our common perspective perhaps based on a false human construct. Science is exploring the ideas of time: if time is even a linear construct and time as a factor of time-space. That as we try to contemplate a time before the big bang may be like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole.

These are many alien, foreign perspectives and concepts held in what we call, ‘time’ that are not immediately intuitive to our brains which are evolved to the finite and macro-scales of our lives. – Just as we struggle to understand the immensity of the universe, and the infinitesimally small realities of the universe that are shown to exist but are not revealed natively to our senses, so we may be prepared for a complex model of time and non-time. Science has shown us many non-intuitive realities about, ‘time’ as demonstrated in Special and General Relativity including Spacetime (space and time as a single, unified entity called spacetime); Time Dilation (as an object moves closer to the speed of light, time slows down for that object relative to a stationary observer); Gravitational Time Dilation (gravity can also affect the passage of time, with time slowing down in stronger gravitational fields) and more. None of these concepts are held in the dismissive, incredulous face of the meme.

All of this is to say that an atheist perspective can fairly range from, ‘I don’t know’ to, ‘we don’t know but we have ideas that we are exploring and testing’.

“ …the history of science . . . teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. ”

~  Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

It is the theist who is making the claim. The theist says, ‘I do know! And the answer is God A!’ (Or depending on the religion, Gods XWZ.)

When one asks the next logical question, where did your god (or gods) come from then? The thiest answer is invariably some flavor of, ‘God has always been’. – It answers nothing about the origin of the universe. As Carl Sagan said, “If we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?“

Life from Non-Life

In my experience, the average theist conflates the origins of life – abiogenesis with evolution (and specifically: natural selection [and more often forgotten sexual selection] which describes the diversification of life forms after they emerge.)

But I take this meme’s bullet point to be referencing abiogenesis through the fallacy of incredulity. The theist hasn’t hazard to imagine (and/or most likely has not read or comprehended) what mechanism(s) could result in life stemming from non-life. And although science has not yet demonstrated the full process of abiogenesis in the lab experimentally, there are still vast quantities of evidence pointing us in the direction of a full answer that does not requiring summoning the supernatural and its god(s). And although end-to-end life generation in a test tube has not yet been shown as a single process, many aspects of it has been demonstrated backing a variety of models including: Oparin-Haldane hypothesis (which suggests that life arose gradually from inorganic molecules, with “building blocks” like amino acids forming first and then combining to make complex polymers); Metabolism-First Hypothesis (metabolism, or the chemical processes that sustain life, may have emerged before self-replication, with early metabolic pathways providing the precursors for later self-replicating molecules); Pre-RNA World Hypotheses (theories exploring pre-RNA molecules with alternative genetic materials that could have been precursors to RNA, with simpler chemical structures); and far more (that is well beyond the scope of this humble blog post).

There is no discipline in science that I’m aware in which all answers to all questions are known and complete. And where modern abiogenesis exploration still has questions it also has many answers and an abundance of evidence. And one might appreciate science for not yet having the whole continuity of organic-matter to life demonstrated, modern science has been working on the problem for less than one hundred years. (Whereas, nature had some one billion years on earth for the conditions to arise.)  

And let’s not forget the evidence free, contradictory suggestions made by various religions including:

Babylonian (Enūma Eliš): Humans are created from the blood of Kingu, Tiamat’s consort.

Christian: (Genesis 2) Yahweh creates Adam, the first man, from dust and Eve is created from Adam’s rib.

Egyptian: The god Khnum, depicted as the ‘Great Potter’ who shapes humans from clay on a potter’s wheel.

Navajo (Diné): The “emergence from below” creation motif is found in the traditions of several Native American tribes, particularly those in the Southwestern United States. The Navajo creation story also involves a series of emergences from lower worlds.

Norse (Völuspá): The first beings, the giant Ymir and the cow Audhumla, emerge, and the gods Odin, Vili, and Vé create the world from Ymir’s body.

Shinto: Centering around the divine couple Izanagi and Izanami who gave birth to various deities (Kami). the human lineage is said to descend from these Kami. Humans in turn are descended from the divine couple, and the other Kami.

Yoruba (Isese): In Yoruba tradition the god Obatala is credited with forming humans from clay. There are stories that relate that Obatala at times was inebriated while forming humans, which is used to explain those humans that have deformities.

And there are many, many more.

Randomness and Chaos to Order

I’m not sure what the differentiation is between the last two bullet points of the meme are, ‘…randomness produced precision; …chaos produced order’. I believe that those are synonymous ideas and that the meme is trying to pad out its weak argument like a high-schooler who procrastinated writing their 300 word essay until they were on the bus to school.

Furthermore, there are no examples given so I’m not sure if this pertains to all cosmological matters after the big-bang or is more narrow in focus. Again: I’m spending a decent amount of time writing a rather robust response to a rather thoughtless meme. I’m not writing a dissertation on the life, the universe and everything so I’ll have to illuminate a few examples in broad strokes on how, indeed, complexity and precision can arise from randomness and chaos.

Science and human inquiry has shown time and again many, many mechanisms in which order arises from chaos.

The Formation of Galaxies and Star Systems: The early universe, after the Big Bang, wasn’t perfectly uniform. It contained tiny fluctuations in density. These fluctuations, initially random, acted as “seeds” for the formation of larger structures. Gravity, a fundamental force, amplified these initial density fluctuations. Denser regions attracted more matter, leading to the collapse of gas clouds.This collapse wasn’t chaotic. It was governed by gravity, resulting in the formation of galaxies, star systems, and planets. The seemingly random initial fluctuations led to the highly ordered structures we observe today. When the initial gas cloud collapses, the cloud begins to spin. Due to the conservation of angular momentum, the spin increases, and the cloud flattens into a disk. This disk is the precursor to a spiral galaxy, a highly ordered structure.

The Formation of Planetary Systems: After a star forms, it’s often surrounded by a protoplanetary disk of gas and dust. Within this disk, dust grains collide and stick together through electrostatic forces and gravity. These small clumps grow into larger planetesimals, which eventually form planets. The process of accretion, while involving many random collisions, leads to the ordered arrangement of planets orbiting a star. In some planetary systems, planets exhibit orbital resonance, where their orbital periods are related by simple ratios. This indicates a high degree of order arising from the chaotic initial conditions.

Rayleigh-Bénard Convection: When a fluid is heated from below, it can form organized convection cells. This pattern arises from the chaotic motion of fluid molecules.

Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction: This chemical reaction exhibits oscillating color changes, demonstrating self-organization in a chemical system.

Fractal Patterns: Many natural phenomena, such as trees, circulatory systems, coastlines and snowflakes, exhibit fractal patterns. These patterns, while appearing complex, arise from simple, iterative processes.

Evolution: Random mutations happen, but natural selection is a non random process that filters those mutations. It is a process where advantageous variations are more likely to be passed on, leading to increased complexity and order over time.

Time and again we see complex systems, like the universe, can exhibit emergent properties, where order arises from the interactions of many chaotic components.

Faith

Atheism is to religion as non-stamp collecting is to a hobby. It’s the lack of a thing, not a different version of it.

When we step away from blind-faith, we can use science and reason to interrogate the universe. Science is based on evidence and testable hypotheses, not faith. The meme conflates scientific inquiry with religious belief. Science is based on falsifiability: a hypothesis can be proven wrong and that is its strength, not its weakness.

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?

~ Carl Sagan

A Specific God

Theists love to insert their particular god into the gaps of knowledge. And so, as gaps are closed, their gods get smaller.

Having made an attempt at a fair argument addressing the specific points outlined in the meme, I’ll now elaborate a bit on the original scope based on a few inferences.

The person who shared this meme is a self-identified Christian and I suspect that the creator and perpetrators of this meme would most often also describe themselves as some flavor of Christian. And so even if we ignored all of the arguments made against the fallacies in this meme and allowed for an intelligent creator, the Christian (or Muslim, or Jew, or Zoroastrian or > insert adherent here <) would still be stuck with the burden of not only proving that it was a god that filled in all of the answers, but that of the thousands of gods that have ever been attested, that it is their particular god that completes the puzzle.

“There’s no such word, though there should be, as “adeism” or as being an “adeist”, but if there was one I would say that’s what I was. I don’t believe that we are here as the result of a design or that by following the appropriate rituals we can overcome death. If there was such a force, if there was an entity that was responsible for the beginning of the cosmos, and that also happened to be busily engineering the very laborious production of life on our little planet, it still wouldn’t prove that this entity cared about us; answered prayers; cared what church we went to, or whether we went to one at all; cared who we had sex with or in what position or by what means; cared what we ate or on what day; cared whether we lived or died. There’s no reason at all why this entity isn’t completely indifferent to us. You cannot get from deism to theism – except by a series of extraordinarily generous (to yourself) assumptions. The deist has all his work still ahead of him to show that it leads to revelation; to redemption; to salvation; or to suspensions of the natural order.“

~ Christopher Hitchens vs. William Lane Craig

“The majority of men… are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and… are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Mar 24

February 2025 – Quote of the Month

“The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.”

~ John Holt

Feb 24

A Crack in Everything

The world feels cold and bitter. Spring is 23 days away.

I took this photo Aug. 6, 2011. We’re all looking for some life behind the splinters, rot and rusted nails.

Clovers hidden in a hole of an old wood tie.

… The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be

… Ah, the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free

… Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

… We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
Yeah, and the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see

… I can’t run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
A thundercloud
They’re going to hear from me

… Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

… You can add up the parts
But you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march
There is no drum
Every heart, every heart
To love will come
But like a refugee

… Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

… Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

… That’s how the light gets in
That’s how the light gets in

~ Leonard Cohen; Anthem

Feb 20

January 2025 – Quote of the Month

“Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: ‘Better an end with terror than a terror without end.”

~ Robert E. Neale, “The Art of Dying”

Jan 20

The Drunken Driver Has The Right of Way

Donald Trump eyes, close-up.

The loudest have the final say,
The wanton win, the rash hold sway,
The realist’s rules of order say
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The Kubla Khan can butt in line;
The biggest brute can take what’s mine;
When heavyweights break wind, that’s fine;
No matter what a judge might say,
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The guiltiest feel free of guilt;
Who care not, bloom; who worry, wilt;
Plans better laid are rarely built
For forethought seldom wins the day;
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The most attentive and unfailing
Carefulness is unavailing
Wheresoever fools are flailing;
Wisdom there is held at bay;
The drunken driver has the right of way.

De jure is de facto’s slave;
The most foolhardy beat the brave;
Brass routs restraint; low lies high’s grave;
When conscience leads you, it’s astray;
The drunken driver has the right of way.

It’s only the naivest who’ll
Deny this, that the reckless rule;
When facing an oncoming fool
The practiced and sagacious say
Watch out — one side — look sharp — gang way.

However much you plan and pray,
Alas, alack, tant pis, oy vey,
Now — heretofore — til Judgment Day,
The drunken driver has the right of way.

~ Ethan Coen

Jan 15

December 2024 – Quote of the Month

“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”

~ Hector Berlioz

Dec 25

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

The song, ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas‘ always sounded a little plaintive to me.

Judy Garland, sang it first for a scene in, “Meet Me in St Louis” (1944) in which her character comforts her younger sister, Margaret.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the yuletide gay
Next year all our troubles will be miles away

Once again as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who were near to us
Will be dear to us once more

Someday soon we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

The song “began with the melody,” says songwriter Hugh Martin. “I found a little madrigal-like tune that I liked but couldn’t make work, so I played with it for two or three days and then threw it in the wastebasket.” But his collaborator, Ralph Blane heard the music and figured it was mad to throw it out, so the fished it out of the trashcan.

Judy Garland didn’t like the original lyrics; apparently, saying they were too depressing and if she were to sing them, “Margaret will cry, and they’ll think I’m a monster”.

Hollywood executives requested a rewrite. “They said, ‘No, no – it’s a sad scene, but we want sort of an upbeat song, which will make it even sadder if she’s smiling through her tears,” Martin said.

But Martin, (who has since claimed the whole soundtrack was his work alone with no contribution from Blane), wasn’t keen for a rewrite. He had to be firmly nudged by a friend, actor Tom Drake, to write a new verse.

Furthermore, there’s also a later version sung by Frank Sinatra, who asked the songwriter Martin to sprinkle a little festive joy on the rather downbeat penultimate line for his Christmas album, ‘A Jolly Christmas‘.

Through the years
We all will be together
If the fates allow
So hang a shining star upon the highest bough
And have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

And that’s how ‘Hang a shining star upon the highest bough’ came to replace Garland’s melancholic line, “Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow”.

But neither of those versions are the original lyrics. Here now, are the initial, truly melancholy words before the Judy Garland requested rewrite. I don’t subscribe to the last stanza (“But at least we will all be together if the Lord Allows”) but otherwise I feel these lyrics are closer to the truth.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
It may be your last.
Next year we may all be living in the past.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
Pop that champagne cork.
Next year we may all be living in New York.
No good times like the olden days.
Happy golden days of yore.
Faithful friends who were dear to us.
Will be near to us no more.
But at least we all will be together.
If the Lord allows.
From now on, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

As of December 21st, we’re past the Winter Solstice. So that means: the days grow longer again.
– More light: that is something at least.

Dec 18

November 2024 – Quote of the Month

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

~ Carl Sagan;
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Nov 18

October 2024 – Quote of the Month

“Some days you think you can’t go on because the only thing waiting for you is more despair. Some days you don’t want to go on because it’s easier to give up than to get hurt again.”

~ Marieke Nijkamp; This Is Where It Ends

Nov 06

It’s Like Incredible

Ever wonder how the fascist took control of Germany in the 1930s? Ever wonder which side you’d have been on if you’d lived in that country? Now, if you live in America: you know both.

– It isn’t simply a matter of stupidity. It is more a matter of disinformation and fear.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

~Donald Trump

Nov 04

Trump vs Democracy

Sitting here on the eve of the 2024 election, we don’t know who will be the next president. Trump may win or Harris may win.

I could provide a slew of links to all that is heinous about Trump but I’d run out of energy well before I ran out of sources. And at this point in time: I don’t think it matters. The bell is being rung as I write this.

The only thing we can be completely confident about is that Trump will claim victory no matter what. He is despicable and will pour gasoline on the embers of America if he perceives it as remotely useful for his own narcissistic concerns.

“The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.”

~ Aesop

Oct 30

Reflections of Halloween Past

This is the least Halloweeny year I’ve had in recent memories: having attended only one party that featured pumpkin carving but having not visited a single ‘haunted’ house and having only watched very few horror movies.

Still, my affection for Halloween runs deep and so I’m posting this a day early in celebration of the holiday. This photo of a ghoul, surrounded by mylar and fluorescent skulls was taken when we had a CarnEvil party in 2018.

Happy Halloween my dear ghosts and goblins!

Ghoul reflected in mylar from CarnEvil party, 2024

Oct 29

September 2024 – Quote of the Month

“What words are these have falle’n from me?
Can calm despair and wild unrest
Be tenants of a single breast,
Or sorrow such a changeling be?”

~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson; In Memoriam A. H. H.

Sep 29

Oppressed for Oppressors

Car with 'Women for Trump 2020' sticker.
Close-up of a car with 'Women for Trump 2020' sticker.

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

~ Donald Trump

Sep 19

August 2024 – Quote of the Month

“Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.”

~ Herodotus, The Histories

Aug 31

A Serenade of Darkness

Today’s trolling of my photos surfaced this image of Bear Cave in Derry Township Pennsylvania taken on July 2, 2016.

Bear Cave is a, ‘wild cave’ which is to say: it is wholly natural with no human development such as paved walk ways, railings or lighting.

The photo was taken near the entrance of the cave and all the lighting is from the sun. The green on the walls is light reflected from the summer foliage right outside.

There is a uniquely earthy-cave smell near the opening. What else that is not captured: is the beautiful trilling of the stream that runs into the entrance and down into the earth. When one ventures deeper into the cave, past the reach of the sun and then you turn off your headlamp, you are plunged into an absolute darkness with only the sound of the water gurgling and echoing off the invisible chamber walls. It sounds like voices swirling in an incantation. It sounds of eternity.

Bear Cave, July 2 2016. Derry Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.

Aug 26

July 2024 – Quote of the Month

“The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.” 

~Edvard Munch

Jul 27

Winnr

Combing through photos and I came across this, from a July 3rd, 2010 fair game. The strangest things amuse me.

Rubber Ducks in a Pool of Water. Carnival. One duck is tipped over and reads, 'Winnr' (misspelled.)
Winnr

Jul 17

June 2024 – Quote of the Month

“I do not see as well without her. I do not hear as well without her. I do not feel as well without her. I would be better off without a hand or a leg than without my sister.” 

~Erin Morgenstern

Load more