Psithurisma

There is the continuous whisper in psithurisma,
The shuffling of atmosphere through empty forests,
Winding the unheard sounds of the dead and gone,
Across The Steppes, up through the lost lands,
And into the endless, treeless deserts of ice,
Where all the mix of souls find ghostless peace,

Remember on days of no weather, the trees calling,
Like screwed-up, torn-out pages, dead biography,
Bent by time and elements to fragments of talk,
Long forgotten by humans but saved in air,
Until brought back and decoded by the movement,
Of cyclones, anti-cyclones, turning the words again,

Until they leave you with no more than a guess,
As to what the argument was actually about,
Or how it was resolved in making up that day,
It's all just history, everything that ever happened,
Running headlong to the absolute end of entropy,
Where the universe is nothing more than this,

And how this sky-seen manifests is moot in black,
Its mechanism all bright thought and nothing else,
No thing of mindfulness to see or hear its end,
A scrap of hydrogen and what goes for white noise,
In it, where the storms abate to long-lasting eons,
With nothing but cooling and all time imprisoned,

We are watching for the last moving particle of light,
And finding it, watch it slow and end this murmur,
All things and time ending in this quadrillionth second,

But Time still passes .....

Time still passes ....

And now the hiss of ideas has coalesced, repeating,
The whole, evolving, eternal show reconstructing,
From a whisper through a tree.

The Jazz Age

It's a wall that hits you here,
Your own noise back at you,
A room-sized plate echo,
The reverberation of architecture,

Brought to you by no one,
This is the noise of the future,
The past and all in between,
Dissonance in red and grey,

Where the ore of all that's precious,
Sweats astronomy into the air,
Stealing the humidity,
To make the dry air sing the more,

Unobstructed by pollutants,
This wail and thump and screech,
Will reach you unattenuated,
Raw and free of the dirty world,

Where the work day ends,
And the dead of politics fails,
The sexless group will fill the space,
The jaded empty mind of gods,

The bandwidth fully occupied,
By frequencies in wide ranks,
Ejecting the unreasoning voices,
With skip and scratch and jump.

Spiral Arm

Weather is just the child of tilt,
A season made cruel by angles,
Arbitrary physics and accretion,

We brought no shelter with us,
And fell to sleep in a bitter wind,
Which raced itself across the dunes,

Bringing singing, stinging sand,
In graceful curves to landfall,
To drift like snow immune to sun,

And the speakers crack the air,
With all that is approved and true,
Bouncing the grit in resonance,

Twisting it to dry, bleak graphs,
Of how society is constructed,
In the ministries of maths,

It's just statistics to them now,
A section of us labelled red,
And sanctioned to despair,

And so the world orbits more,
One further arc of history,
Spitting the river in our faces,

It is bleak for those forgotten,
Those dropped like dry ballast,
To let some ascend without thought,

In another quarter turn in space,
They'll be no more than dust,
And memories.

Starling in the Garden This Afternoon

Light Cone - A Talking Therapy

Even machine-listed,
The Nine Billion Names of God,
Do not include this man,

And we give thanks,
The stars continue because he is omitted,
Restricted in his fantasy,

Confined structurally,
In the bubble of the new universe,
His space expands forever,

And we can only know,
Not prove the vacuum that surrounds,
His desultory communication,

He's settled in his orbit,
Supplied and fed eternally,
Forever separate,

In myriad idols he claims,
One God juggles morals and belief,
But like his argument,

This poem is full of holes.

The Notepad Men

It's cold today, the wind has China on its breath,
Shards of a thousand years of culture,
Wrecked by the crossing of the border,

This country will not scan for poets,
Like me, the proscribed and unapproved,
Its name rolls out and jolts us all,

The DPRK is formed from blanks,
The dreams of nana's nursery thugs,
Crushing the trash they pass off as toys,

He's a flat, grey man with flat, grey minders,
The dead eyed Notepad Men of Juche,
Fearful of hunger and re-education.

The paper is un-lined, non-aligned,
Government Issue stationery,
Locally produced for fear of empty space,

That would import a dangerous idea,
A whole white page to fill with freedom,
A page to let you think and be.

He talks, they walk and note verbatim,
Policy and doctrine, rocket drill,
Fisheries protection, isolationist redress,

The poetry of those considered artists,
Taken down in quadruplicate or more,
The white sails of charisma.

At night the Dear Leader wakes alone,
Calling for these men to note ideas,
The border smashed with ideology,

But in the low-rise bunkers to the south,
Autonomous machines and men are blinking,
It's fissile here and futile to imagine victory.

Blood Art

They fail and yet proclaim success,
Those who would deny a dirty peace,
For all necessary peace is flawed,
The future requires it to be so.

Mixing dinosaurs with men,
All the righteous floating,
In one empty, glorious day,
Away into the void of tolerance.

Years ago, old before the end of youth,
They walked in maths and envy,
Through the mad crowd of artists,
Superior in perceived maturity.

They regret now, not "going into finance",
All those red-faced, failed engineers,
Missing the wet money of banking,
Through lacking wider intellects.

Thinking theft a laudable career,
They moved outside of left or right,
Into the icy heights of avarice,
Above the tree lines of morality,

Heads down in sophistry and slime,
Apt redress from The Inferno,
They seem to revel in this lake,
This sewer of fire and foul intent.

It's just a form for filling in,
Stealing from a million mouths,
To feed a million lines of grace,
And graceless favourites.

They feel for nothing but themselves,
Hearts racing at the extreme edge,
Of hatreds built on empty space,
On the shades of skin and creeds,

These are the grey bombardiers,
We'll pen their "Blood Art" poem,
On the walls of shining steel and glass,
A hymn to The City and all its fears.

For it takes no more than paper,
Under the arches with derelicts,
Copied along the fibre optics,
Killing us all under the sky of black,

All our dreams of art are cheap,
Lost songs ,poetry and Craquelure,
All just history to those dead inside,
No more troubling than dust.

Philosophy Poem

Define yourself with numbers and it is all calculus,
Beyond all the necessary, existential force,
Confined deep in the blurry, chemical soup,
Of eyeless sight and endless, crushing hunger
Temporarily staved off with monochrome.

Mum - This Border Collie is Ending Sentences With a Preposition!

I had one more thought on the whole eyeball-shrinking thing. I calculated (well some clever person on The Internet did) yesterday that the focal length of a lens shrinks in exact proportion to the radii of focus of the eye. I didn't bother with the variability of the refractive index of the lens. The RI of a substance describes how light is affected when it travels through that media- and is the relation between the speed of light in a vacuum - c - and the speed of light in the substance - v. So RI = c/v.

Now, for our diminutive heroes, the refractive index of their tiny lenses will depend on how they were shrunk. Discussion of these methods is obviously beyond my intelligence but I can see that, as the light is not shrunk and the matter in the lens is, there is distinct possibility that light travelling through a shrunken lens will have a speed lower than that of light in a full-sized lens. And this does indeed change the focal length not in proportion to the radii of curvature because it changes the refractive index. 

It could be even worse. Any mechanism we might develop to shrink things will probably involve some technique rooted in the mysterious and badly-behaved realms of Quantum Theory and other, as-yet-undiscovered physical theories - possibly manipulating mass after harnessing the power of The Higgs Boson - humour me - I know this is all tosh - like questioning the grammar of a talking dog. This might result in complete changes to the properties of the matter affected - transparency may be changed to opacity and we would not be able to see at all. Though if matter was affected to that extent I suspect that shrunken life might not be viable at all. What about the viscosity of the liquid in blood. Would the heart be unable to provide enough pressure to keep the blood flowing?

Enough of this rubbish. It's the weekend. Let's dance.

James Burke Would be Proud

An eyeball yesterday. Are you bothered that it's looking to the right? I am.

Well that was a lot of connections. This article deals with a lot of science facts (and some fictions) but tangentially it refers to the author's own book -  Infinity Drake: The Sons of Scarlatti - which involves the shrinking of humans to small size. Ever since seeing Fantastic Voyage I have been wondering if there was a serious flaw in the premise or small people, in that the focal length of the human lens would not be reduced in proportion and would require a great deal of adjustment to let the puny humans actually see clearly. I am afraid that the bit of physics required to check this was retained only for the length of time it took me to regurgitate it for the exam and the question raised by the film was strangely not on the paper.

Well just as The Internet solved my question about the line from The New Millionaires - "Just like Arbogast on the top two stairs." (look it up) - I have also clarified this optical issue. In fact I didn't even need to do any longhand calculations. This website does it all for me - a quick googling for the radii of curvature for the human lens - heck it's so easy - it's in The Abstract for goodness sake - and hey presto it is clear that the focal length shrinks in exact proportion to the radii of curvature. So an eye ten times smaller than normal would have a focal length a tenth of the full sized organ and Raquel Welch wouldn't need bottle-bottom glasses.

I suspect that somewhere an optician, astronomer or slightly precocious toddler will be saying that this is obvious. It probably is but at least it's now proved. I say proved. I suppose for absolute proof I should derive the focal length formula from some empirical data but hey - I only have lunchtime.

Next one to think about is whether the view of a galaxy which appears tilted from Earth, is distorted because the light from the far side takes many thousands more years to reach us than the light from the near side. I've probably mentioned it before but does the continuum of variance in how long the light takes to reach us from  across the whole disk cancel out any strange distortion or is there a measurable increase or decrease in the apparent density of stars? I suppose that this one will again be obvious when I eventually find the formula.

On and on.

Philosophy for Dummies

Wow! It actually exists - Philosophy for Dummies.

Alain de Botton's latest book - The News: A User's Manual - got a right Hislop-style slating in Private Eye and that review has indeed put me off reading it - I already have Religion for Atheists to get through anyway. My reading has suffered through a) having a shiny, newish tablet and b) not switching the Internet off during what should be reading time. However, one thing which has come out of that review is the new website from the shiny-pated, big, Swiss Cheese called The Philosopher's Mail which both pays homage and takes the mickey out of the Daily Mail right down to its horrible, click-baited side-bar which I think goes down beyond The Mohorovicic Discontinuity. Check it out and let its randomness suck you in. I thought at first that it was designed to propagate good news but it's obvious that it is aimed at making its readers think about the news differently. Doh! I of course mean philosophically dude!

There is one thing it's not duplicated from The Daily Mail - there are no comments - and having seen some of the below-the-line rantings and ramblings that populate that paper's interaction with its users - sorry - readers, this decision is of course, a good thing. However rational you may think your thoughts when someone is wrong on The Internet, bear in mind that whatever you say in the comments section will make someone think you are a wibbling, raving lunatic. I'm not sure why I'm on Twitter to be honest.

Oche-a-vay.