A nice place to visit

Mommy, the universe
is such a big scary place,
says the little girl with red hair.
Oh, yes, it is such a big scary place,
says the red-headed mother
of the little girl with red hair.
But don't worry, dear,
we're not going there.



Overhead while exiting the Hayden Planetarium, New York City. Submitted by J.R. Solonche.

Fossil

In this quiet inlet,
some eddy has collected
and drowned at the bottom
of the mire, now turned into marl,
enormous heaps of shells
of every shape and size.
It is a molluscs' burying ground
with hills for tumuli.

I dig up oysters a cubit long
and weighing five or six pounds a piece.
One could shovel up in the immense pile,
Scallops, Cones, Cylheridae,
Mactridae, Murices,
Turretellidae, Mitridae
and others too numerous,
too innumerable to mention

You stand stupefied before the vital ardour
of the days of old, which was able
to supply such a pile of relics
in a mere nook of earth.



Taken from an account by Jean-Henri Fabre on fossils in The Faber Book of Science edited by John Carey (Faber & Faber, 1995). Submitted by Taidgh Lynch.

Trinity Tanka

I am become Death
We made a terrible thing
Destroyer of Worlds
What are you moping about?
We’re all sons of bitches now.



A collection of quotations from Manhattan Project physicists on the occasion of the first ever atomic explosion, the Trinity Test in Los Alamos in 1945. Lines attributed to Richard Feynman, Bob Wilson and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Submitted by Daniel Galef.

Sticks and stones

Unfortunately it is far from true…
The power of words to affect
your emotions and actions
is well demonstrated in science.

A word is not a crystal,
transparent and unchanged;
it is the skin of a living thought
and may vary greatly in color and content
according to the circumstances and time
in which it is used.

Majority Floor Leader Jim Stamas, R-Midland,
determined Lisa Brown's comments
violated the decorum of the House,
"What she said was offensive" said Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville.
“It was so offensive, I don't even want to say it
in front of women.
I would not say that in mixed company.”

Lisa Brown called a press conference, today.
She defended her use of the word "vagina"
saying it is the "anatomically medically correct term.”

Her English teacher even told her
you can’t get wet from the word water.




Each stanza from a different source: Susan Smalley, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr; Detroit News, June 2012; Detroit Free Press, June 2012; and Nin Andrews, Sleeping with Houdini (BOA Editions Ltd, 2008). Submitted by Joanna White.

The corrugator supercilii

is a
small, narrow
pyramidal muscle

located at
the medial end
of the eyebrow.

Its fibers
pass upward
and laterally.

Regarded
as the principal
muscle of suffering

the muscle is
sometimes severed
or paralyzed with

botulinium toxin
as treatment for migraine
or for aesthetic reasons.



From the Wikipedia entry for Corrugator supercilii muscle. Submitted by Dawn Corrigan.

Scientific American

You sink into their brains
a little socket with a screw on it
and the electrode can then
be screwed deeper and deeper
into the brainstem,

and you can test at any moment
according to the depth,
which goes at fractions of the mm,
what you're stimulating,

and these creatures are not
merely stimulated by wire,
they're fitted with a miniature
radio receiver so that they can be
communicated with at a distance.

The technique is very ingenious.
I mean you could press a button
and a sleeping chicken would jump up
and run about, or an active chicken

would suddenly sit down and go to sleep,
or a hen would sit down and act
like she's hatching out an egg,
or a fighting rooster would go into depression.



Taken from Aldous Huxley's speech "The Ultimate Revolution", given on 20th March 1962 at Berkeley Language Center. Submitted by Howie Good.

Semenology

fructose sugar
water
ascorbic acid
citric acid
enzymes
protein
zinc

and more!



From Semen Health Benefits: It Really Does Have All The Nutrients Of A Protein Shake, Huffington Post, 5 June 2013. Punctuation changed. Submitted by Richard Eno.

Life With Only Its Head Out Of Water

Why should we
tolerate
a diet of
weak poisons, a home in insipid
surroundings, a circle
of acquaintances
who are not
quite
our enemies, the noise
of motors with
just enough
relief to prevent
insanity?

Who would want to live in a world which is just not
quite
fatal?



Taken from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962), p 12. Submitted by Wesley Brown.

Poets say

science takes away
from the beauty of stars –
mere globs
of gas atoms

Nothing is “mere”.
I too see the stars
on a desert night
and feel them.

But do I see less or more?

What is the pattern,
or the meaning,
or why?

It does not do harm
to the mystery
to know a little more about it.

Far more marvellous
is the truth
than any artists
of the past
imagined it.



From The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964). Submitted by Lisa Oliver.

Jammy

Consider
the fact
that
for 3.8 billion years,
not one
of your pertinent ancestors
was squashed,
devoured,
drowned,
starved,
stuck fast,
untimely wounded
or otherwise deflected
from its life’s
quest
of delivering a
tiny
charge
of genetic material
to the right partner
at the right moment
to perpetuate
the only
possible
sequence
of hereditary combinations
that could result –
eventually,
astoundingly,
and all too briefly –
in you.


Taken from Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003). Several words have been omitted between "3.8 billion years" and "not one". Submitted by Ailsa Holland.

But if the water becomes deeper still

Positioned in the water in an uncomfortable pose,
afflicted with a relatively high mean density,
suffering from substantially high frictional drag,
and unable to raise and lower its neck
and hence unable to adopt a synchronous gait,
we conclude that giraffes would be very poor swimmers,
and that it might be assumed that they would avoid
this activity if at all possible.



Testing the flotation dynamics and swimming abilities of giraffes by way of computational analysis in the Tetrapod Zoology section of scienceblogs.com. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

Petrifaction

This happens to bone marrow
in the hollow
bird-y
dinosaur bones,
it’s very pretty.
it’ll seem like a solid
black fossil but
if you accidentally
break
it
you see it looks
like it’s filled with crystals



Taken from a comment on a blog post about petrification, written on the 21st December 2011. Submitted by Haley Patail.

Faster than the speed of light

It is something
nobody
was expecting.

The constancy
of the speed of light
essentially underpins
our understanding
of space and time and
causality,
which is the fact that
cause
comes
before
effect.

Cause cannot come
after effect
and that is absolutely fundamental
to our construction of
the physical universe.

If we do not have
causality,
we are
buggered.



The words of Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, in the news article Faster than light particles found, claim scientists. Submitted by Ailsa Holland.

Into what is the universe expanding?

Our universe
is all of space-time,
and space-time
is all of our universe.
Our language,
with the possible exception of mathematics,
is rooted in space-time,
and we have
no language
for that-which-is-not-space-time.
There is no what
that the universe is expanding into
because what,
where
and when
are properties of space-time,
not that-which-is-not-space-time.

So where does that leave us?

Unfortunately,
it leaves us with Wittgenstein:
What can be said at all
can be said clearly,
and what we cannot talk about
we must pass over
in silence.



From a submission by Jim Ford of Watford to the Guardian's Notes and Queries column, 13th April 2011. Submitted by Ailsa Holland.