The Unbearable Politeness of Being
Free-floating photon
Fired along the optic fiber
Reflected ad infinitum
An EM-wave sea diverPulses pushed in pairs
Concentric overlapping spheres
Emergent lumen patterns
The space that neither clearsUnfiltered filigree
Now rotate and repolarize
Refraction iterated
Until homogenizedThe only way to shade the glare of everything you know
Is be absorbed and re-emitted in diffusive glow.
Monitor Hum
Today’s NaCreSoMo post isn’t about a Creation but a Distraction.
I have plenty of distractions, of course. Most of my Creations are made at my desk in my bedroom, or perhaps out on the couch in our living room. Right now at 11AM on Sunday I can hear my neighbors playing pop music, it looks like a nice day outside, and I have Facebook open in a background window. Distractions, right?
The one that drives me crazy, though, comes from right here on my desk. My setup at home has my laptop in front of an external LCD; I use…
"How to Travel Between Star Systems"
Interstellar travel is problematic for a number of reasons, but the main one is the sheer distances involved. Most species cannot conceive of such distances in any natural way, and have to resort to analogy or concrete examples to have any hope of placing astronomical numbers into our day-to-day life.
A “light-second” is a unit of distance, rather than time: the distance light travels in a single second when unimpeded by a medium. Even a light-second is ridiculously large on an everyday scale; it’s not until we consider a light-nanosecond that we find something tractable. A light-nanosecond is…