In control

Now here's a guy who's clearly in control of his life:

Letraset markers on A4 Brisol Board

Krystal 5 x 7 portrait

Acrylic on canvas

A Question of Cosmology

I'd like to offer this question up to the search engines that may do the amazing job to which they were designed and find this page.

Considering the speed of light, or "c" as is the common denotation, is 299,792,458 metres per second, it does not travel fast enough to give us an accurate visual representation of where very distant objects in space actually are. The usual example is that where we see the sun in the sky is actually where it was about 8 minutes ago as it has taken that long for the light from it's surface to reach us. Saturn is seen where it was 84 minutes ago (at least at time of Cassini's arrival, this changes with it's orbit) and the moon 1.3 seconds in the past. Our nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is seen as where it was a massive 2.5 million years ago!

The Hubble Telescope's "Deep Field" picture taken in 1995 is an image that fascinates me due to the amount of "stuff", i.e. thousands of galazies and their contents, packed into one area. More food for thought is that due to the distance of these objects, what we are seeing is an image going back closer to the time of the Big Bang, almost 13 billion years ago!

One more important thing to consider before my question is that we know that the Universe is expanding and has done so ever since its creation. Not only is it expanding, but so too is the rate of expansion. Earlier thought would have it that it would gradually lose momentum from the Big Bang and possibly condense back together, but this would seem is not so. Without going into the reasons of why the expansion of the Universe is speeding up by plunging the topic of this text into the world of Dark Energy, I'll leave it there.

My question then, is that if the trajectory of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is known, could we then look back, deep along that trajectory to where it has been, to see our Galaxy in the distant past, possibly even to it's point of creation?

Discarded Illustrations

Weep with me, my dear, dear strangers. For these are various illustrations deemed too stylish for Welsh speaking pre-school children. The very glimpse of their vectorized splendor will make the babbling little Tafflets explode with confusion. Fortunately for them, the said pictures were simplified, twice, until they were much safer for their retinas to absorb.

So for you, the more seasoned and probably non-Welsh language TV watching general public, I present the discarded penny makers:

A letter from Jonesy

I found a document containing some literary brain farts I used to make in the form of diary entries of a fictional madman named Jonesy. Maybe I should make a blog for him, or compile all this crap into a book. I could sell possibly TENS of copies.

Anyway, I wrote a new one:

(BEGIN)

To anyone who would like to learn to read,

It was amidst a plethora of tintillating ponderings this morning that I entertained the notion of writing a short novel. It would mainly be about a dwarf, sorry, "little midget", and only contain words that exceed no more than four letters. My favourite letter of the English alphabet coincidentally is four letters long. It is the well known "Ellemenoepee", the letter proudly following "K". My novel will, although not necessarily in this oder, feature a beginning, a middle and hopefully an end, permitting that I do not exceed my word count, which is dismally low. All of this, of course, will exist solely in the depths of my fertile imagination, an asset nurtured through excessive procrastination and atom counting on the bedroom carpet.

In the time it takes to move to a new paragraph I have totally discarded the ambition to write a novel. In it's place I have decided to build an inflatable water bathtub, for when one wishes to bathe in the sea, not using the same water. Such is my nature, to lose interest in one pursuit only to jump joyously to another without hestitation. So, my friends, once I have built my toilet-copter, (I have already tired of the bathtub), you will be the first to know and possibly receive a prototype, providing that is that I first finish my novel.

It would be rude of me not to say goodbye.......

(jonesy)

(END)

John Locke Caricature

Ladies and Gentlemen...

John Locke!

Lost is such an amazing show and Locke is one interesting character. Usually, at this point in a post, I would attempt some flamboyant retort, but it is late and my brain has fallen over.

For this picture I mainly used pencils.

Sharp ones.

Please stop writing "LOL"!

Once, in the days when I used to use Messenger (before the realisation that it sucks up your life), I was busy 'conversing' with a friend of mine who had his webcam activated. He made a comment, ending it with the seemingly oligatory 'lol'. What caught my attention was that his stone-faced expression on his webcam was anything but 'Laughing Out Loud', in fact the only 'lol-ing' happening was myself at the lack of 'lol-ing' on his end.

Why is it that we feel the need to add this little abbreviation? It's initial intention was to help portray the true feeling of the author where the text may not be enough, the same way that smilies are used. Quite often it acts as the little nervous laugh people do when in conversation, while either being polite or saying something they don't want to offend with.

Stop using it, especially in critiques! Lest we fall even deeper into a world of Orwellian Newspeak. It is ungood.

I was speaking to Krystal about this and we came up with another version of what it stands for. Whenever you feel the need to type 'LOL' (or even, I shudder to think, say the word) ask yourself, is the context actually funny? If not, remind yourself it could also stand for:

Low On Linguistics.

I'm actually in a really good mood. Lol.