North Pole - South Pole - There's two for you

Listening to - Limbo - Throwing Muses

I tried to find something short to read yesterday so that I could drop straight into The Teatime Islands whenever my wife finishes it. I came up with The Best of Isaac Asimov - 1959 - 1972 which starts with a very short story called The Fun They Had which describes how children in 2157 are intrigued by finding a real book. The kids have mechanical teachers that are stand-alone instruction devices and appear to be very mechanical requiring visits from an engineer who says things like "The geography sector was set a little fast." It intrigued me that Asimov completely missed the ideas of computers in their current sense. The computers we were using ten years ago were more sophisticated that the mechanical teachers.

This contrasts with the wonderful snap-shots of the future of human kind which Asimov provides in the next story - The Last Question, which details the development of humanity up until the heat death of the universe when all that is left of mankind is a Cosmic computer with all human minds melded into it. The various computers used by man over the years have each been asked the question of whether it is possible to reverse the entropy of the universe and each time it replies that there is insufficient data to give a meaningful answer. The computers develop their own replacements until the whole thing exists only in hyperspace. As the universe dies the consciousness eventually works out a solution and says "Let there be light" - guess the next and last line. This gives an interesting view on the circularity of the universe. Maybe if time is unbounded as well as space then the intelligence that arises in the universe will actually create the universe in which it exists. Don't forget that the Universe is like it is because if it wasn’t we would not be here to wonder why the universe is like it is. Extend this to why is the universe like it is? Because we are here to create it! I think some wacky cosmologists actually believe this is the case; our beady eyes looking back in time to the big bang actually cause it to happen or something like that.

I have been trying to write a happy poem. My wife says that the recent efforts (not posted) are depressing. My attempt to address this resulted in a comment regarding how we get upset by the 20 seconds of a news report of some atrocity or natural disaster and then go back to our meal without a continuing thought for what has happened. This reminds me of how much newspaper space was devoted to the death of a corgi when there were 50,000 people lying under the rubble in Iran. (No comments about how the Earthquake was less powerful than the one in California that killed two people and the consequent implications suggesting a corrupt Iranian building inspection service).

There is no point trying to write poetry along a particular mood line. I have written more poems in the last year than in any previous year and yet I don't set out to write them. Maybe I need to rigorously define themes write about. Or maybe just a very loose topic for a set of poems.