26.07.2010 - 4:38 p.m.

There are people who spend large portions of their time wondering, pondering even, about the reality we inhabit. Some ponder about the realities of reality, others ponder the intangibles of reality. In contrast there are people who wonder why they don't have a sandwich in their hand, and further to this, who is going to make one for them.

I like pondering, not too seriously though, i'm just not cut out for an academic trajectory hence i'm sat at my desk job, skiving work, typing these words and not leading university classes on Abstracts in Greco-Roman Derived Philosophy, even though i just made up that example i'm not sure what it would entail, and i'm damn sure i don't want to sit through four months of it. The pondering myself and my pondering brother (pondering's always better in groups) get into usually turns into stuff like this which at the time looked like a towering success of logical thought processes.

Anyway the inverse of the perpetual ponderer is the numpty, they also go by many other names although to list every regional variation here would be a waste of electrons, which aptly enough is the judgment most of us come to upon encountering said person. I've noticed that the one feature common to all is that they don't read books, it's entirely possible they don't even have a book in their house and no, magazines don't count as reading and neither do instruction booklets for the tv.

Had i chosen for myself an academic career i'm pretty sure i'd have ended up in geology or cosmology, both subjects would have given me the scope to grow a really gnarly neckbeard, my beard doesn't actually grow down my neck but i'm convinced that repeated exposure to geology seminars would change my DNA fundamentally for the better.

it's like a chin strap of manliness

Both subjects are also interesting, instead of wondering where the next sandwich might be coming from, wonder instead on the titanic forces which shape the earth, give rise to the landmasses, led the development of the species and allowed the less fortunate members of our population to wonder about sandwiches.

While geology is good because you can actually go out, climb up a volcano, pick bits of it up and throw them at your colleagues while shouting "hot potato", for me cosmology has the edge because of the scale of the situation. You can fly round the earth in a suitable aircraft in a day, but you can't fly to anywhere interesting in the universe in anything less than years.

Everything in cosmology's so big they have to measure it in light years, one light year is roughly six trillion miles (or 250 million times round the earth's equator), and a light year in the greater universe is a pretty marginal distance anyway. Our whole solar system is about 40 light hours in diameter for all the interesting stuff, and there�s about eight thousand six hundred hours in a year. The nearest star to us is 4.5 light years away which equals thirty nine thousand light hours.

In an ideal situation i'd transfer my mind into the body of an interstellar creature with a lifespan measured in thousands of millennia and surf the gravitational gradients and stellar winds of the galaxy looking at interesting things and marveling at the truly exquisite beauty of the universe. Actually in a perfectly ideal situation i'd also transfer J's mind into a female version of whatever i am so we could travel together, wouldn't want to get lonely and sightseeing is always better with company, and there's always the chance of us siring a whole family of trans-stellar creatures, oh yeah.

I've noticed that a key difference between us and them (non readers not inter stellar space creatures) is an appreciation of scale, or more precisely, the ability to render really large scales into something the human mind can actually comprehend. If you point at a mountain and say 'that's really big' you're not wrong, and even the sandwich wonderer will agree because they can see the mountain and stand on it and know it's bigger than their lunch bag so it = big. If you then take a real thing but in the abstract, like an asteroid, and say it's big too they will agree with you because you told them it's ten miles across and they know ten miles is like, a really long way.

However the further into the intangible you go the more likely you are to lose them, example time. The sun is big, it's the biggest thing around for years, scoot the earth next to the sun and it would fit inside the natural arc of a sun wang (i've started a petition to get 'solar prominence' changed to 'sun-wang' which is so much more evocative, and besides it looks like a big orange knob ejaculating horny plasma into the waiting void)

no dick jokes please

But as big as our sun is, it's pretty tiny compared to some greedy fat bastard suns out there, here comes a bit of science nicked from Wikipedia :

"If the Earth were to be represented by a sphere one centimeter in diameter, the Sun would be represented as a sphere with a diameter of 109 centimeters, at a distance of 117 meters from the earth. At this scale, VY Canis Majoris would have a diameter of approximately 2.3 kilometers"

Put our sun next to VY Canis Majoris and stand back and you wouldn't be able to see our sun because it's so teeny weeny tiny, much smaller than the earth is in the picture above. If you have access to a school playing field and happen to be a teacher, get out a measuring tape and some rope and put the little snoflakes to work. But aside from this bloater being really huge can you shut your eyes and actually appreciate how big it is ?

Further evidence of this scale blindness occurs when talking about time. Everyone knows what a long time is, it's the amount of time waiting for a watched pot to boil or a heating engineer to arrive at a preset hour, or for that double glazing salesman to get to the fucking point.

'sign here and i'll get out of your hair'

It's taken about 4 000 000 000 years for homo sapiens to appear like biological ejectum from the ongoing froth of cellular evolution that started with small piles of biochemical snot. Anyone with an appreciation for the rambling hodgepodge that is evolution knows that there aren't a queue of fish waiting at the shoreline, impatiently looking at their watches and wondering when they'll turn into monkeys because they've got an inexplicable hankering for a piece of fruit.

The time between our ancestral tree splitting with one branch heading towards modern chimps and other towards modern humans happened approximately 5 000 000 years ago, in the intervening time period our branch produced further splits, none of whom survive today as extant species, although it's believed that we hold within us remnants of neanderthal dna, the neanderthals didn't die out, they were absorbed into the gene pool.

There are those who disagree that macro evolution is viable, bizarrely this doesn't mean they don't agree with micro evolution if pushed hard enough, but such is the mind of the fundie. So if we propose a thought experiment, take 200 people from a sinkhole estate, take an average (generous) pregnancy age of 17, and split them 100 each on two very different islands too far apart to be reached from the other, and then leave them for 295 000 generations (about 5 million years), how similar do you think each population will be to the original 200 people ?

The key here is the environment on the islands, if both islands were very similar and remained static over the five million years, then the differences between the two populations wouldn't be so great, but if you put enough different selection pressures on the two populations then each population will change to meet those pressures and over time little changes will add up and it's more than likely that even after a few tens of thousand generations that neither population would be able to breed with the other, that's speciation in action and the reason why an elephant can't fuck a horse and have baby horsophants or eleorses, even though they had the same ancestor, in the intervening time they've lived and bred apart so now they can't now interbreed.

This is the same problem god-bothering creationists have, they can't appreciate the amount of time that has passed which has allowed biology the scope to do it's stuff, since the dinosaurs finished their party while tiny proto-mammals ran around their feet it's been 65 000 000 years, and the mammals are now having their party, the therapod and tetrapod dinosaurs who survived the various environmental pressures are now birds and reptiles respectively in all their many forms.

People like to cling to certainties, if the thought that we're all thoroughly insignificant motes living in a giant, uncaring universe upsets you, then believe something else. Humans hold illogical suppositions very well due to our oversized brains and they protect us from harsh realities we'd rather not deal with, like �it can�t be me, I�m awesome I know I am, it must be them� and �I can�t smell it so it must be someone else� so why not believe that we were poofed in existence 6 000 years ago by a magic supra-temporal mega-being who loves us with all his heart, instantly you're no longer alone in the cold dark desert of the mind, phew, that's ok then.

So getting back to the nub of it all, if you don't read books there's something wrong with you, end of. If you do read books avidly but exclusively non-fiction then maybe you're missing something in your life and you're subconsciously trying to plug the gap ? If you're normal and have a healthy appetite for fiction then welcome to the imaginarium club, if you've at least one bookshelf in your house bowing under the weight of works then award yourself a celebratory cake.

It should be pointed out that just reading books doesn't stop all your aggregated and inherited neuroses, inhibitions and emotional baggage from turning you into an irritating, unstable fuckwit, and fuckwittery has a proven eroding effect on normal acceptable behaviour, i've met several people i'd happily shoot in the neck who had been known to read books, so don't think you're in the clear just because you've got a couple of dan brown books stashed away somewhere.

And if you do own some dan brown books you better have some proper books to compensate.

Just saying, thats all.