Thoughts and Ideas
Just what the title suggests (often more like a Rant).
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The Greatest Show on Earth?
Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey is closing down its circus after 146 years. They claim its a changing climate, that children no longer have the attention span to sit through a multi-hour show, not when video games and cellphones beckon. For years they have been harangued for how they treat animals in their shows,…
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Age as Gift
“Ever you desire to appear lordly and gracious as a king of old.” – Denethor to his son Faramir (great line for men who like to look nice) There is something fascinating about aging, about the long, slow decay of your flesh. The less rejuvenated, the more interesting we become. Gray hair, saggy skin,…
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Idols of the World
There are idols in the world. The dark, churlish lurkers, the bright and shiny golden calves, the multi-headed monstrosities of ancient times; unambiguously different yet they all share the same origin: made by the hands of humans. It is almost impossible to express the reason for this type of work. Why do people create gods…
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What is the Numinous?
What is the numinous? Why do I use this word as a byline for my personality and view of the world? The classical definition from Webster’s Dictionary is “having a mysterious, holy, or spiritual quality.” I certainly do not believe in the holy or the divine, but I do feel that there are elements of…
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Old Editions Live
While walking through a bookstore, new or used, I always stop and look for my favorite authors. I idle by their alphabetical presence and run my eyes hungrily over the spines of their books. I am always looking for first editions, or copies of works I do not possess. But sometimes I find a unique…
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ET Calls Collect
This essay is in response to the open letter recently published by several luminaries in many diverse fields regarding active attempts at communication with ETIs . You can read the open letter here: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/meti_statement_0.html First contact. This two word sentence can birth evocations broad and diverse: horror, fear, hope. The meetings between one society less advanced than another have…
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2015: A Choice of Futures
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book titled 1984, Spring: a Choice of Futures, similar in format to his earlier nonfiction book Profiles of the Future about mankind’s options for that hallowed, once future year. I yanked the title for my essay as it is most apt to describe our current state of flux here on planet Earth. We have…
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What Really Happened…
Eve looked slightly suspicious, “You’re telling me that eating something as simple as this fruit would give me, and by extension, all of my decedents-the knowledge of good and evil; notions which at this point I certainly have no conception of?” Lucifer looked her over from the crown of her wavy brown hair, looked into…
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An Appeal
We are standing on the edge of a rapidly eroding sea-cliff. Battered by pounding waves it crashes into the ocean piece by piece, chunk by chunk. The danger of us falling into the churning water is there but it dimly registers in our minds…we think “all we need to do is take a step back”…
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Cosmos Again
The finale of the new Cosmos series filled my heart with the purest sense of the numinous. Out there, in the gaseous clouds and the cosmic background radiation, among the billion billion chunks of ice and rock and the equally enormous numbers of other worlds, exists the wide universe. We are just toddlers come onto…
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Earth Day 2014
Earth Day 2014. While we imagine that we live on a vast world with unlimited resources, we have to remember that this is not the case. In the 4.3 billion years that our planet has been orbiting the sun, we have gone from single-celled organisms that ate sunshine, to sending our technology into space so…
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Two Years On
It is now the second anniversary of the Numinous Cosmos! I wanted to thank all of the people who have taken time to read my work, comment, and subscribe. What started as a way for me to share some ideas and artwork, has evolved into a very serious endeavor. I have some really cool things…
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What Does God Need With a Starship?
The plot of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is that a charismatic religious leader hijacks the starship Enterprise in order to fly to the center of the galaxy and literally meet God in the alien equivalent of Eden. The movie is widely considered the least entertaining in the Star Trek canon, one where the…
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The Unlived Ones
The fear. It’s a striking piece of information that lands in your lap and causes more obscene gesturing than would a cup of scalding hot coffee. People go through life with the deeply held notion that there is somehow meaning behind it all. The sharp, full bodied scent of life fills the nostrils and…
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Ink and Flame
I It was a pleasure to read. The black letters scattered across yellowing pages like ants on a lemon cake, each receding line swallowed whole with a cursory chew. The rain echoing on the plate glass and rat-a-tatting on the thin metal roof was a joyous cacophony to peach fuzzed ears in the early evening.…
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Contact: An Appreciation
Words can barely describe how much I love the book Contact. Carl Sagan gifted the world a vision of the human experience in the cosmos where it could find a place, a home, in the grand scheme of nearly infinite space. He understood that we reach out to touch each other through love. Love is…
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Watched
Watches don’t tell the time, they manifest it. The various little voices that tick out speculative moments: the second, the minute, the hour, all accordion noise to waltz through the seasons of our lives. Where the passing of time is measured by the heat of the summer sun, its mercurial reflection on winter…
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Evolving
I hate it when people say they don’t “believe” in evolution, as though evolution was a silly suggestion and not a law of nature. The path that evolution has taken us is to one of being able to comprehend this vast and awesome cosmos without resorting to fairy stories or magic books. The world is…
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Paul Simon: Note Perfect
PAUL SIMON THE ONLY LIVING BOY IN NEW YORK There was a young boy in Queens, New York City, who played baseball and grew up to create beautiful music. His father and mother listened to jazz and classical music and made sure to share it with their son. This boy was Paul…
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Getting Warmer
“It’s been hot lately, the weather reports coming out of the San Francisco desert are surprising. 137 in the day, 24 degrees or lower at night! Old Evans said that the concrete shafts of the Trans-America pyramid are starting to expand and contract so much that you can hear cracking off in the Oakland shelters.”…
The Numinous Cosmos 