full moon tonight..

thoughts of my beloved reaching out, and tucking her in… the sweetheart is so tired after this and last week’s heavy workload. I hold her in my heart as she sleeps, and trust she’ll wake refreshed and happy. I adore her so much.. I hope that her dreams are bright, and we get together in the sandman’s realm shortly.

I spoke with brother tonight, and I think he’s on the right track… he’s aware of the dangers at hand, and knows I’m around to hlep if he wants or needs it. Heh… he exchanged the guide to GTA3 for a fishing game for PS1, and is really digging the DVD player. He lives right next to the library, so free movies, five at a pop. I wonder how long it’ll be before he runs the library dry, and has to resort to inter-library loan?

Kirstie Ally doing those Pier 1 commercials is disturbing to me. Some of the gears are slipping, somewhere.

120 gig HD, video card, dvd drive and extra cabling all arrived today… I estimate the happy machine will be assembled, and ready to rock and roll inside of a week if time allows. Also bargained with my ride home, and I’ll be saving 25% of my travel expenses in the evenings now, which will be better spent on other things.

speaking of cool gizmos – Future Horizons
They don’t have the Oscillation Overthruster, but they’ve got plans to build just about every dang thing else, including the Flux Capacitor and the amazing Cosmic Diode, the Ion Ray Gun, the Hiller Flying Platform, and even complete schematics of a Maglev Superconducting Train. No, not movie props – real working stuff, or so they claim. It’s like reading the inventory of the storage room in the Baxter Building. Excelsior!

with that, nigh nigh from Han Scotto and Newtbacca, dear journal.

before bed –
What do roving bands of intrepid Vikings and a legendary lost city of gold have in common with something as prosaic as baking powder?

Him That Hears The Voice of Big Nuknuk gazed worriedly into the sky for the tenth night in a row.

How had he displeased Big Nuknuk? The rituals had been followed and the sacrifices made following the dreams: The dreams that had shown great destruction and hardship and strife for the tribe.

He had gathered the tribe before Big Nuknuk, and for a day and a night chanted and drummed and made offerings to Him, so that He might show them favor, show them mercy. Him That Hears The Voice of Big Nuknuk had spent days prostrate before the idol, forsaking food and water that he might hear the Will of Big Nuknuk more clearly.

But still Big Nuknuk was silent, glaring balefully down at him from the night sky.

Each night a little more brightly, more full of rage and menace.

Coming closer.

*pan to sky*

Were the meteor possessed of intelligence it would have known of its imminent death, drawn to its doom by a force it could not comprehend.

Were it possessed of will, it would have raged, frustrated, pulled from its flight by a force it could not control.

Possessed of humor, it may well have appreciated the irony that it’s own death would bring about life.

Possessed of emotion, it would have drawn malicious pleasure from the chaos this new life was to unleash.

But it wasn’t.

Simply:

The meteor fell.

It burned.

It crashed.

And from its impact ripples coursed, as it bounced and twisted and tore its way across the land. Plates shifted and the land bucked and heaved. Cracks and fissures clawed their way across plains and through forests tearing asunder all in their path and allowing fire to fountain forth from deep in the wounds they left.

And as it finally rolled to a stop, all was still.

For a while.

Have you ever been around blind folks “speed-reading” books on tape? I had a professor (of psychology) in college that was blind, and he used a special tape player with a variable playback speed for skimming recorded texts. It sounded like mosquitoes humming to me, but he said that he was so used to it that it sounded normal to him. Now, that’s what can be done consciously, the nervous system is even better at training itself without your conscious interference in the process. Consider the “cocktail party effect” and other audio tricks your nervous system learned without any conscious effort. There is a lot more ambient sound going into the ear and along the auditory nerves than ever gets to the conscious “hearing” centers in your brain. Most of the unnecessary input is evaluated and discarded before bothering “headquarters.” This is a subconscious, or pre-conscious routine, and is probably essential for living in an urban environment.

What you see and hear is not literally what comes in through the nerves. It is processed and interpreted. The literal image on the retinas is upside-down, it is the brain that turns the image 180 degrees for you to “see.” The flashes you “see” when your eyes are closed are not the result of light striking cones and rods. What you “hear” is not literally the waves striking your eardrum, but a condensed report of the important input made by the nerves. Prior to the activity in the brain that is your sensation of hearing, a lot of editing has been done by the nerves. But, in order to do the editing some evaluation of the message is made at a subconscious level to determine whether it is something that should be passed on to the conscious hearing.

This all sounds a little out there. The best way to get a visceral feel for the difference between the raw input and your perception is to try out the Blind Spot exercise. Prove to yourself that you actually have a blind spot on each eye, and your brain automatically fills in the missing part of the picture so that you have to do weird exercises on the Internet to detect them at all. What you see is not what you get. What you “see” is a phenomenon happening in the brain, not what is out in the world.

I wonder what could be missed or hidden in that spot, or how two different people see the same thing… or even the same person at different times.