http://lucy-chronicles.livejournal.com/147670.html

http://lucy-chronicles.livejournal.com/147396.html

The weird strange thing about these beautiful photographs is that I've seen that place, trains and all, in quite a few of my lucid dreams, but I've never been to Nevada in all my life. Not once. Just California, Oregon, Washington, Michigan, and New York.

Click twice on image to see version with highest resolution.

I just saw an article headlined "Against Global Warming?" Now, either global warming exists or it doesn't. Either way, you can't take a vote on it, any more than you can an earthquake. Nor will polls affect it one way or another. Neither can Al Gore. Yet numerous people on both sides of the debate over global warming talk as if votes, polls, opinions of any kind, or idiots determine whether or not global warming exists. That this is occurring on both sides of the debate strongly implies that way too many Americans are illiterate in their own language, i.e., don't know how to use it (e.g., using "Against global warming?" instead of "Don't believe that global warming is real?"); that they are delusional, in that they believe that polls or votes can influence large-scale, naturally occurring processes and events; that they somehow never grew up past the age of 3; that they are stoned on one recreational poison or another; or that they just aren't paying attention these days.

This is rank stupidity, people. Be aware that Mother Nature gives out Darwin Awards with a generous hand, and that God does nothing to stop her. And stupidity is the # 1 cause of reception of a Darwin Award. Whatever the hell your stance on the existence of global warming, can you at least refer to it intelligently?

The arguments which many Creationists and believers in "Intelligent Design" use to try to prove the thesis that the universe and all in it were created by directed intelligence fall down fatally in several places. Above all, if you accept the things required to prove what the Creationists aer trying to prove, you end up proving gravity doesn't exist:



(Go to Youtube to get the other installments of this production.)

That -- that gravity doesn't exist -- can be disproved anywhere on Earth by simple demonstration, such as throwing a rock off a balcony. And so it goes through everything I've ever run across used by Creationists and believers in Intelligent Design to try to prove the existent of a Designer of the universe and all in it, including our world and us.

But there are some little things that send chills down my back, as much for the fact that they aren't well understood as for any other reason. One of them is the fact that humanity has been living in a very fortunate time as far as eclipse-chasers are concerned. The Moon is just far enough from the Earth, and the Earth from the Sun, that both the Moon and the Sun on average subtend an arc of about 0.5°. This means that when the Moon seems, from our point of view here on Earth, to be between us and the Sun, a Solar eclipse, or, rather, occultation of the Sun by the Moon, occurs. Sometimes such as eclipse is not total; a bright band of sunlight surrounds the Moon at totality. This is because that during a partial eclipse, the Moon is slightly farther from the Earth than at other times, hence its disk does not entirely cover the Sun. At other times, however, there is a total eclipse because the Moon is slight closer to the Earth than at other times, and therefore its apparent size is somewhat larger than average -- large enough to cover the whole of the Sun.

Similarly, during a lunar eclipse, the Earth's shadow is cast on the Moon by the Sun. If the Moon is slightly closer to the Earth than usual, Earth's shadow doesn't cover all the Moon, so that we see the center of the Moon as much darker than the outer portions. At other times, the Moon is slightly farther from us than usual, and the whole of the Moon is cover by our shadow. (In such case the Moon takes on a distinct reddish tinge, even a deep, dark red tint. This is due to sunlight from all around the edge of the Earth as seen from the Moon; that edge is Earth's sunset line at the time, and because the sunlight comes through more layers of atmosphere wherever the sunset line is than it does at other times of day, the wavelengths of light that make it through to the Moon are longer than average, i.e., toward the red end of the spectrum.)

Now: isn't it fortunate that we came to be at a time when the Moon's distance from the Earth and the Earth's from the Sun are both coincidentally such that the Sun and Moon have the same size disks as seen from Earth? Millions of years from now, the Moon will be much farther from the Earth than it is now, which means that there will no longer then be any total eclipses of the Moon by the Earth, or total occultations of the Sun by the Moon. All such will be partial only. Likewise, millions of years before our time, the Moon was much closer to the Earth than it is now, and every occultation of the Sun was total, while no eclipse of the Moon was ever total. The former were all total, the latter all partial. That we happened to come into existence at this most fortunate of times for astronomers is both strange and wonderful, and there are no theories as to why it happened that way.

On the other hand, looking at the relationships of the orbital mechanics of Earth, Venus, and Mercury, we find that "A curious aspect of Venus's orbit and rotation periods is that the 584-day average interval between successive close approaches to the Earth is almost exactly equal to five Venusian solar days." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus) and "This is because, coincidentally, Mercury's rotation period is almost exactly half of its synodic period with respect to Earth." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)). It isn't know why these resonance relationships among these three worlds exist, any more than we understand why humanity came into being at just the right time for total lunar and solar eclipses to occur. All we know is that the resonance relationships among the innermost rocky planets are as they are, and that total lunar and solar eclipses have taken place as long as humanity has been on this Earth.

We can now record the light of supernovae so far from Earth that they happened less than 2 billion years after the Big Bang, some 12 billion years ago. From that we deduce that "dark energy" is making the universe expand even faster than the Big Bang itself could account for. We are beginning to get a good handle on how galaxies form and how the universe will die. We've discovered some 300 planets orbiting relatively nearby stars now, and may soon begin to image quite a few of them using our space telescopes. We know how long ago the non-avian dinosaurs became extinct, and when trilobites preceded them into the darkness.

But we don't know why these strange relationships among various Solar System bodies, including Earth, exist, and what relationship we have at least to those of the Moon and Sun. And those are the type of things that send chills up my back. Not because I'm sure of what they prove. I have no idea what, if anything, they prove. But unlike the grand, sweeping phenomena the Intelligent Design people use to try to prove their thesis, these little things, so very little in the face of a universe now thought to be more than 50 billion light-years in diameter and, possibly, part of an infinite multiverse, point to mysteries we still haven't cracked and perhaps never will.