I was reading a news article yesterday and came across the following comment:

“The best way to save the Republican Party now is to destroy it. In the marketplace of ideas, social conservatism is a viral infection contaminating the GOP. It represents an evolutionary dead-end whose logical conclusion is fascism if not outright totalitarianism. Is it not obvious that the imposition of the evangelical ideology–any fundamentalist ideology for that matter–lies in direct opposition to a free people in a democratic land? Our Constitution, specifically the separation of church and state, no longer serves as a bulwark against the morality police, who seek to impose faith-based notions such as creationism upon those of us with rational minds. Social conservatives aim to constrain freedom of thought, freedom of choice, freedom to pursue happiness. These freedoms live at the heart of an entrepreneurial and economically strong America. No doubt, the diktat the social conservative movement wishes to impose upon ALL us Americans is antithetical to a free market system, and therefore exists as hypocrisy within the Republican platform. Privatize profits, socialize losses, and make religion the opiate of the masses. Indeed, this has been a dark eight years of Orwellian doubletalk. Enough! I’m a Reagan Republican and I’m voting for Libertarian Bob Barr.”

I really agree with Mr. Smart American and I thought I’d share.

This is old news but I’m just getting around to blogging about it.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a news story about information loss in black holes. One such story is here.

I’ve always had a problem with the information loss theory of black holes. The basic tenets of the law of conservation of energy states that it is neither created nor destroyed. Light, being energy, is absorbed by a black hole and either must be added to the energy of a black hole or, my new thinking, change state.

The idea of energy being converted to a different energy state by a black hole brings up many interesting questions. The biggest, in my mind, is what state does it enter? My thoughts then drifted towards dark energy and matter. Could black holes be the key? Do black holes convert the light into dark? Are black holes the gateway to the darkness?

The biggest reason I was drawn to this conclusion is the unseemingly drastic end of energy once it enters the black hole’s event horizon. Almost nothing in our universe is a singleton. Everything changes state, phase, shape, mass, etc. Conserving the mass along the way. For a photon to drop into a black hole and become nothing infers that it’s either being wisked away to the other side of our universe (perhaps fueling a white hole in our adjecent universe) or, more likely, being converted to a different energy state. Occam’s razor is a beautiful thing.

In any case, since I’m an uneducated closet astrophysicist poser, I’ll let the geniuses figure this one out. But that’s just my $0.02.

A truly sad day in entertainment. Harvey Korman, a true comedic genius, died from complications of an abdominal aneurysm. You will be missed.

Go rent High Anxiety tonite in tribute to Mr. K.

I found this picture last night on MyConfinedSpace.com and laughed pretty hard. Being a lolcat and Cthulhu fan, I just found it hilarious.

So I’ve been pondering some theoretical physics and astronomy lately and have had some thoughts on the matter.

For those of you who don’t know, the universe is enormous. But the mass we can see only accounts for a small portion of the mass we expect the universe to be. Scientists have dubbed this missing mass as dark matter. Dark matter has a counterpart called dark energy. It’s energy and matter that is invisible to our current technology.

I find all of this fascinating and for the life of me cannot understand why dark matter and/or dark energy would exist. I have another explanation that I will try to verbalize.

Astrophysicists have discovered that the universe, since the big bang, has expanded. This inflation is not uniform. Thus space must be expanding in between objects as well. This is the only way that objects can speed up as they move away from the singularity of the big bang. That’s all well and good.

The interesting thing is that the universe is very ordered. Gasses coalesce into solids. Solids coalesce into planets, asteroids, comets, and stars. These all coalesce into galaxies. Galaxies coalesce into clusters. What scientists have found is that these clusters fall into what they describe as the cosmic web.

This web of galaxies and matter are held in place by the elusive dark matter and dark energy.

When I hear scientists talk of this dark stuff, I am reminded of how we (humans) used to think the air was the ether. And stars were close, and so on.

So I have two thoughts/theories on this:

1. Dark matter and dark energy is/are a dimensional phenomenon. Since it is, we won’t, as four dimensional creatures, be able to ever comprehend its nature. Just as a point cannot comprehend a cube. It may be forever elusive.

2. Dark matter and energy are a force that is exerted upon our universe by the structures on the other side of the fabric of space time. This theory is a little more complicated in my mind. It really boils down to anti-gravity. If the fabric of space time is like a sheet. And objects with mass distort the sheet thus causing gravititational pulls on other objects (they fall into the holes) then it stands to reason that there may be an equal and opposite force being exerted upon the fabric from the other side to balance it out. In my mind I think of the cosmic web tendrils as tube socks. The mass of the contents distort the outside of the tube. Perhaps the dark stuff is merely the universe balancing back.

Nature always seeks a balance. Where is the balancing force for gravity?

Anyway, it’s quite clear in my mind and I thought I’d share.

If you haven’t heard, Charlton Heston died yesterday at the ripe old age of 84. While I don’t revel in his death, he did kind of sort of go nutty with the whole NRA thing.

While most of the world remembers him for Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments, CH will always be remembered by me as Taylor, the wayward astronaut lost on the crazy mixed up ape planet. Talk about monkey love…

Anyway, I guess we can pry that gun from his cold dead hands now.

I apologize for being remiss in my duties of blogging lately. But I’ve been busy a few other projects.

So, as you may or may not know, I live in Georgia. There is a mess of a water crisis here right now. We’ve got less than 90 days left by some estimates. Mainly the drought has been bad in the southeast. Our fine government officials have scrambled to do something about it. As we all know, crisis management doesn’t work well.

So what has our find Governer Sonny Perdue decided to do? Yep, you guessed it, pray for rain.

I’m truly frightened that the leader of our state is putting his eggs in the “God will save us” bucket. I want to move so badly!

Read about it here.

So I was reading about the puppet master retiring at the end of August and checked my portfolio to see how much money I’ve lost from my retirement fund today and saw this:

 My Microsoft position was up a total of $666.01. It just kind of made me chuckle. Karl Rove stepping down, Microsoft up $0.03 which, times $222 is $666. I won’t even go into the number of 23’s in there. I think you get where I’m going with this…

I’ve long believed that the economic situation in this country hasn’t been right for some time. Yes, I know the Bush administration continually says it’s strong and that everything is great. But I live outside of the bubble in which they live. I see, every day, the people of this country. I witness the disgruntled attitudes and the lack of interest. I determined long ago that we were still in a recession but we refused to admit it. Yes America, you are in denial!

Yesterday’s 311 point plunge in the Dow Jones is a reality check. Sure, technically, it could be massive profit-taking in an over bought market. However, I think more the fundamentals are at play here. We’ve got a crumbling housing market and that whole sub-prime lending thing is a house of cards. Remember when Donald Trump’s empire came crashing down twenty years ago? Well, that’s what’s happening here. We’ve got too much built up on nothing.

Holy shit do I love seeing the number 666. Not only does it instill fear in the hearts of mindless idiots who subscribe to organized superstition, but it’s such a cool number! Ah, the endless numerological possibilities. Anyway, today I noticed that the NASDAQ was down $6.66 so I thought I’d capture the moment.