Commencing countdown, engines on.

[greygirlbeast]

I'm sitting here, trying to wake up, and David Bowie's singing "Planet Earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do," and that sent me straight back to the continental-drift dream (see yesterday's entry), and somehow that got me thinking about James Lovelock and his Gaia Hypothesis (and really, hypothesis here should appear with quotation marks),

Comments

[jlundberg]

Hear hear. For the bio that appeared at the end of one of my stories, I think it was for Lone Star Stories, I included the throwaway line, "His favorite color is blue, and no, he's not Jewish, but thanks for asking." The first part seems very adolescent to me now, and the second part was too much of an inside joke. With a last name like Lundberg, which is Swedish, I got asked many times when I was younger if I was Jewish, or people just assumed I was and then got upset when I didn't match up to their expectations. In one case, believe it or not, this led to the end of a friendship.

But then when that story above with the bio was published, a few of my Jewish friends emailed and said it read as slightly anti-Semitic, and they were offended by it, which was not my intent at all. When I want to offend people, I do it on purpose. :) So I don't include that line anymore in my bio.

[jlundberg]

Oh, and if you're interested in plate tectonics and so forth right now, I'd suggest Clare Dudman's remarkable novel One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead, which is a fictional account of the life of German scientist Alfred Wegener, who developed the theory of continental drift.

[greygirlbeast]

Speaking of which, have you seen this?

I had not. Thank you.

Still, it means humanity might be wiped out by a big space rock containing organic material that has existed since before humanity, before life on Earth, and before fusion ignited in the sun.

And that would just be so damn cool.

[sovay]

ultimately, I find transhumanism such a generally loathsome, damn near idiotic -ism, almost completely at odds with my deepest beliefs, that I feel I owe the whole world an apology for ever have included myself among them.

What has transhumanism come to connote?

My soundtrack of Bowie at the moment appears to be "Life on Mars?" so with that in mind:

And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, the thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where the volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents of mud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land, leaving mud-silted ruins, and the earth littered like a storm-worn beach with all that had floated, and the dead bodies of the men and brutes, its children. For days the water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees and houses in the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out Titanic gullies over the country side. Those were the days

[greygirlbeast]

What has transhumanism come to connote?

The Wikipedia article is a halfway decent summation (and saves me the time of doing it myself, and also getting angry about transhumanism all over again when I need to be writing). So, transhumanism.

Thanks for the Wells quote.

[sovay]

Thanks for the Wells quote.

You're welcome. I was in a coffee shop yesterday that had a rack of take-one-leave-one used books, most of which looked terrible, but slipped in between a murder mystery and a romance novel was a Dover Thrift Edition of H.G. Wells' short science fiction: "The Country of the Blind," "The Star," "The New Accelerator," "The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes," "Under the Knife," and "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper." I had only read the first of these before; they are wonderful.

As I receded faster and faster from the strange white sun in the black heavens, and from the broad and shining earth upon which my being had begun, I seemed to grow, in some incredible manner, vast: vast as regards this world I had left, vast as regards the moments and periods of a human life. Very soon I saw the full circle of the earth, slightly gibbous, like the moon when she nears her full, but very large; and the silvery shape of America was now in the noonday blaze wherein (as it seemed) little England had been basking

[tagplazen]

I used to think that 'the rapture for nerds' was the most annoying thing around, then I discovered that all the aging boomers on the island have their own version of the rapture, peak oil. Same declerations, just replace 'and then I'll upload my conciousness' with 'and then my bio diesel will still be running'. I kid you not, there's one guy that walks around going, "When peak oil hits, you'll be thanking me that I had the foresight to raise turkeys, I can feed the entire island."

Someone hasn't heard of kyaks. The sound isn't that big.

[greygirlbeast]

I used to think that 'the rapture for nerds'

Oh, how I wish I'd thought of that phrase myself! The parallel is quite apt.

Someone hasn't heard of kyaks. The sound isn't that big.

*snork*

[docbrite]

If you were a stripper, do not say you were an "exotic dancer."

Actually, don't say either, because twenty years on, when you are old, saggy, and crippled, it will still be the only detail of your biography that anyone ever wants to hear about. Trust me on this.