Stellar encounters also make occasional fireworks, which are noteworthy because they're superimposed on such a cold and endless night. A pair of white dwarfs can collide or merge to make a supernova explosion if the combined mass exceeds the threshold for violent detonation.This time the math is: ember + ember = firework. An even rarer event sees a pair of neutron stars or a pair of black holes (or a neutron star and a black hole) colliding to emit an intense burst of high-energy radiation, the flash briefly outshining the rest of the universe. When these dense objects merge they also distort space-time and unleash a spasm of gravity waves.
The last fizz of stellar fusion is a slideshow in a circus completely run by gravity. In the era of stars, life was kept interesting by a battle of competing forces—radiation released from the creation of elements versus gravity. By 100 trillion years after the big bang, gravity may have lost some battles but it has won the war and has nobody left to play with but itself. Gravity playing solitaire turns out to be pretty interesting.
Working from an ancient Christian calculation that the world, from Creation to Judgment, would survive for 7,000 years, he concluded that "there are lacking about one hundred and fifty-five years for the completion of the seven thousand at which time the world will come to an end." Signing his name as Christoferens―Christ-bearer―Columbus saw his expedition as just a part of a final crusade that would destroy the Muslim empire and usher in the Day of Judgment. By sailing west, he planned to open China and the Orient to Catholic missionaries, who would seal off the Muslim empire of Gog from its rear.That's a brief passage from Martin Ballard's The End-Timers: Three Thousand Years of Waiting for Judgment Day. The belief that we are in or near the End Times can make Christians and other religious people abandon their faith's morals, and indeed all ethics. Catholic St. Augustine and Protestant Jonathan Edwards both pushed back against apocalyptic thinking, perhaps for this very reason. They were moralists whether you agree with their lessons or not.
Things are far too staid in late night, musically and otherwise — which is the opposite of how it should be, and yet reflective of how culture generally feels right now. We live in a time where there are more media outlets serving a wider range of people than ever in the history of human civilization. And yet, those outlets feel more homogenized, sanitized, centralized, and corporatized than ever. Whether the driver is ratings, web traffic, or algorithms, the pull of culture now is always toward the familiar, fatuous middle of franchise reboots, comic book adaptations, and pop music “perfection.” This inevitably influences how we see that world — the middle assumes outsized importance, and the margins are further, well, marginalized.In a sense this is a trend that's been going on for some time. There doesn't seem to have been a major new subculture created since the 1980's, for instance. But the current atmosphere tends to exacerbate the problem. A combination of massive wealth inequality and sometimes violent nationalist movements rising all over the place can make music and other cultural expressions seem like a lower priority, and certainly doesn't foster trust. The question is when and where this course will reverse.
No better example can be found than the controversial subject of how many words the Eskimo have for "snow." A Google search for "Eskimo snow words" yields more than 10,000 hits. Deriding this as an example of bad science run amok has become somewhat of a game among linguists. A leading academic in his book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax stated unequivocally that the Inuit people of Alaska do not have many words for snow, and in fact have only about a dozen basic ones. The debunkers rely on this count to show that the Inuit snow words are neither prolific nor special. This stance feeds into a more general agenda of asserting that all languages are equal and equally interesting to science.
Proponents of this view became so intent on debunking it that they spawned a new term―"snow clones"―to mock all such statements that "The so-and-so people have x number of words for y." Entire Web pages are devoted to listing such mock Eskimo snow words that have imaginary meanings like "snow mixed with husky shit" or "snow burger." Even Steven Pinker took up the issue in his book The Language Instinct, stating: "Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston's meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling."
Sadly, the snow-cloners have missed the point. They have grossly underestimated the number of words by relying on very limited modern accounts and thinking that just because the number was inflated in the past by people who should have known better, the true count must be unimpressively low. As we will see, the number of snow/ice/wind/weather terms in some Arctic languages is impressively vast, rich, and complex. Furthermore, they have missed the forest for the trees, failing to see the importance of how words encode knowledge. Beyond the sheer numbers of words for natural phenomena like snow and ice, these languages demonstrate the complex ways in which words package information efficiently.The preceding passage is from K. David Harrison's The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages. Harrison is a linguist who puts his money where his mouth is. And if his writings contain a trace of J. Peterman-style cosmopolitan bragging, there's also a passionate insight into the speakers of endangered languages.
Sheriff Watson interviewed the vigilantes, all six of whom admitted to the lynching. Perhaps they thought it wouldn't be a problem; hanging a male rustler, after all, was something the law often forgave. The six cattlemen were, moreover, respected ranchers and businessmen, members of the powerful Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA). What they didn't realize, though, was that hanging a woman - no matter what her crime - was almost unthinkable to most in the West. Each of the vigilantes was required to post a $5,000 bond, a hefty sum in that day.For context, the woman hanged was small but successful rancher Ellen Watson, posthumously known as "Cattle Katie." Her husband Jim Averell was killed as well.
(In fact, I've often suggested that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority - the corrupt and ill-managed agency responsible for keeping the whole system running - should use Walter Hill's 1979 low-budget street-gang fantasy The Warriors as a public relations tool. No other film in recent memory more loudly sings the praises of the near-Germanic efficiency and reliability of the New York subways. Whenever you want a train, the film promises, there'll be one waiting for you.)I remember The Warriors, and I always thought of it as a science fiction movie, although no one else seemed to consider it one. It's about one of the most heavily populated cities in the world, but the gangs never run into shopkeepers or winos. Just other gangs. Oh, and there's a foxy black chick spinning records at a radio station. So are these people the only ones who were immune to radioactive fallout? Did aliens scoop up 90% of the city but left all the old-looking teenagers? What?
Our experience on Earth is probably repeated endlessly in the cosmos. Life develops on planets but it is ultimately destroyed by the light of a slowly brightening star. It is a cruel fact of nature that life-giving stars always go bad.Has anyone ever worked that last sentence into a country song?
