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I guess you can call this, a lecture in love
What’s that thing
They call “crazy” in love?
Apart from theory and hypothesis
An observation:

I take your pulse
And you take mine
Though blood pumps harder
Breath grows shallow

My smile grows timid
As it meets your lips
My pulse surely stops

Recollection

I don’t recall what this poem’s about

I’ve received your demands–How’s it goin’ today (over yesterday)?

And it echoes in my skull,

A cavity warped in the over-abundance of media and memory and meditation

Back and forth and back forever

Through amplification I crack

And I’m in need of recollection

Words # 16

The past doesn’t exist anymore

The future has yet to exist

And yet they still persist

To distract a present mind

The Doldrum

A traditional-style poem written in the moment.

All the world is hell

In this kingdom I have made

All myself is lost

In the people I have played

All guilt becomes my debt

For which I’ve never paid

Beyond the Cosmos: The Engines of Spacefarers

Well I sure want to live in an elliptical galaxy after last Sunday’s episode of Cosmos! Imagine, millions of suns that won’t run out for trillions of years. Like a massive engine, these galaxies could be someday homes of all of the orphan civilizations of the universe. But as Dr. Tyson mentioned, we are still infants compared to what an alien civilization could accomplish. We have enough difficulty just trying to get to Mars, let alone another star. Even worse, we’re limited by the very laws of nature. Light, the fastest thing we know—the fastest thing we know is possible—takes 50 years to reach our nearest star. So how may we ever hope to join our alien brethren who may already be waiting for us? If we wish to go beyond the cosmos, we’ll need some out-of-this-world imagination.

Beyond the Cosmos: The Math Faraday Never Learned

Sorry for the lateness. Finals week be final

There is no scientific story I find more inspiring than the story of Michael Faraday. Bravo to Dr. Tyson for doing justice to the man’s legacy!

What I love most about it is not the man’s humility, or persistence, or even his genius, but simply the fact that he is the only famous physicist I know who couldn’t do math. You’d think given how much I love mathematics that this would actually be my least favorite part about him. But his life is a valuable lesson to young physicists. Physics just isn’t math. It’s so much more.

Beyond the Cosmos: The End of the World Already Happened… Five Times

Dr. Tyson has succeeded again at capturing the kid scientist in me on Sunday by a quick review of the Earth’s history and, in part, it’s future. I’ve always thought ancient species were the coolest thing. Looking at a fossil is almost like looking at an alien, but from our own life. It’s a humbling reminder of both the creative power of evolution and the incredible aptitude of life itself. I remember in 8^th grade Earth science one particular page of our Reference Table. It contained the entire history of the Earth detailing the age of the Earth, it’s continents, major species, and major extinctions. I marveled at the apocalypses these ancient aliens faced, too primitive to do anything about it or even understand what was happening to them, and wondered what’s next for Earth and who will survive. I struggled to imagine an Earth completely covered by water, an Earth completely ruled by trees, an Earth with hellfire everywhere and barren of life; it’s very much an alien world that always changes it’s face. And yet all the history was so easy to find—you just have to dig underground to find the past. Since I didn’t want to look at rocks for a living, Earth science waved goodbye to me back in the eighth grade. But I never forgot about the expansive history of the Earth condensed down onto that half-page Regents Reference Table. With it, I could predict the end of the world.

Beyond the Cosmos: Newton’s Discoveries Re-imagined

Welcome to my very first “Beyond the Cosmos” post!

I hope, if you didn’t tune in Sunday night, that you caught the re-run on Nat-Geo tonight. If you haven’t watched any episodes of Cosmos yet, then why are you even here?

Now that introductions are out of the way, I can start my ramblings!

Episode three of Cosmos was quite different than what I’m used to Dr. Tyson talking about. The first two episodes are evidence of this. A quick two-hour ride on Dr. Tyson’s ship and you’ll find yourself humbled by the massive cosmos around us in space, and overwhelmed immediately after by the cosmos within us in our DNA—those episodes are truly “Space-time Odysseys!” This episode was different, however. It was a history. A history of billions of years of knowledge condensed into one corner of the 17^th century.