Gravity? I Hardly Knew Her!

Hi blog!

Sorry for not posting on Saturday like I promised, I was busy writing up a long post for my other blog. I hope you can forgive me. If not, too bad, deal with it.

Groundbreaking news time! Scientists announced today that they have discovered direct evidence of gravity waves, which help to prove that inflation occurred after the Big Bang! Inflation is the event that took place very, very shortly after the Big Bang and started off the rapid expansion of the universe, which continues to this day. Gravity waves were predicted by Einstein in his general theory of relativity, but it has taken almost 100 years to find proof of their existence. Now, a group of scientists searching for these gravity waves have found direct evidence of them from their post in the South Pole. Now, until other groups can verify these finds, it is difficult to accept the findings without some trepidation, but if they are accurate, as I suspect they might be, we could be looking at a very big step toward understanding our universe's birth!

From gravity waves to...um, other things. I hate transitions, I don't know what it is about them, but I thoroughly dislike them. Anyways, back on track! Over the last few days I've been feeling rather dizzy out of nowhere. I'm not sure if it's the heat (it really hasn't been THAT bad) or if the house has been stuffier than usual or maybe it's just stress. I'm leaning toward a combination of stress and stale air, since I've felt like it's been harder to breathe at times. It didn't happen much today, but I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Also today: I almost ran over a coyote. Yea, I know, right blog? Crazy! I was driving to physical therapy when I happened to notice a brown bag laying in the middle of the street. I stared at it for a second and then realized something was trotting away from it at a lackadaisical pace. It looked like a dog. My first thought was that it was a stray, but when it turned its head I saw the very familiar color pattern and face of a coyote. I immediately lifted my foot off the accelerator and covered the brakes, uncertain of what the animal would do. It just looked at me though, not with huge, scared eyes, but in a very calculated way. As I drove closer, I started to apply a bit of pressure to my brakes when suddenly the coyote made a break for the side of the road. It sprinted out in front of my car when I was only a couple hundred feet away. Instantly I drove my foot down to the floor and winced as my tires locked up and shoved me forward, a squeal piercing the morning air as I came to a halt not but six feet away from the creature. It hadn't even made it halfway past my car, but it soon disappeared off the side of the road and vanished from view. I sat there for a couple seconds, shook my head, rolled my eyes, and drove on as though nothing had happened. I dunno why it was out in the middle of the road like that, maybe there was food in the bag or it was actually a dead animal, who can say? All I know is that it WASN'T a very wily coyote...

Your punny overlord, Andrew

Revolutionarily Radical Revelations (and hyper-peanuts)

Dear blog,

Well today was a very good day indeed! "Why?" I hear you asking (in my head...I'm not crazy...) Well I'll tell you why! If only you'll listen.

Firstly, you know I've been working on this memoir of mine, with the working title the same as the blog name Life Has No Title. It's been a very challenging effort for me, but some of that difficulty has been alleviated with the help of my friend Nick (his blog is Ultrademus), who I'm sure I've mentioned several times before. He and I try to meet once a week to discuss how our projects are going (he's also writing a memoir) and to talk about all sorts of other things: marketing, publishing, editing, and sometimes just random tangents (I told him about the sodium leeches, he thought it was funny). Today was an especially productive meeting though! I've been having trouble deciding how to finish my book. Do I want to end it on a surgery? On a note I wrote, thinking I wasn't going to survive the surgery mentioned in the previous sentence? Going back to school maybe? Recovery? All sorts of ideas and more floated in my head, and none of them seemed right. Then, I typed into Google "How to end a memoir" and read some of the tips giving by one website. If your book has a theme throughout, try to start and end the book with imagery from that same scene. I mentioned it to Nick and then told him about my prologue, which had a great story in it about how I found the meaning of life in four words. Inspiration struck like lightning from on high! I could break up the prologue into two parts: the new prologue would consist of the first half of the story, and the epilogue could consist of the second half of the original prologue story! At the end of the book I would have my four word meaning of life be the last four words of the book! Several weeks of angst and worry about not knowing how to finish my book were gone! I have an ending now! Huzzah!

Another thing we have discussed, and I have mentioned in brief before, is the use of alliteration to come up with a snappy and memorable term that will really stick in people's mind. Humans are hardwired to appreciate alliteration, it's a pattern, and humans LOVE patterns, our brains can't get enough of them. For those unfamiliar with the term, an alliteration is where a series of words all begin with the same letter or sound. Example: "Alliteration always amazes Andrew." See how the first letter of each word begins with "A?" That's alliteration. The one that has been mentioned before in my blog was "manufactured mortality," a term used to describe Nick's desire to push his body to the absolute limits in his running. It's catchy, sticks with you, and helpful for marketing. Advertisers love using alliteration, as do poets. Perhaps it's not as useful in a non-fiction memoir, but it's fun to use. 

Can you think of a good alliteration? Post your alliterations in the comment section below!

There's a massive star in the Milky Way called HR 5171 A (click the link for a video) that was recently revealed to be 1300 times the size of our sun. That's freakishly massive. To give you an idea, it's 1.1 BILLION miles across. It's one of the ten largest stars ever discovered. However, that's not why I'm writing about it today. It's a peanut. Yes, I know blog, it's not ACTUALLY a peanut, but you'll see. It was recently discovered, along with its true size, that HR 5171 A has a sister star orbiting around it. The two stars are so close that the other star actually TOUCHES HR 5171 A, causing it to resemble a giant peanut...that just so happens to be well over a billion miles wide. 

Artist's Rendition of the HR 5171 system

Yes blog, I know it's incredibly nerdy, but also pretty nifty! (Okay, that sealed my nerddom right there by using the word "nifty," I accept what I am though!) However, I shall make it up to you in a few different ways. Firstly, I would like to announce that I will begin a "Question of the Week" whereupon people will post a question to me, and I will choose one to answer at the start of each week (or the end, if nobody posts a question before then). The questions can be about anything or nothing, but please, feel free to post them in the comment section!

Second, a meme! Okay...TWO memes!

And finally, some beauty to brighten your day! Or night...or whatever time it is when you're reading this.

This is a star cluster at the center of the Rosette Nebula (it looks like a rose when zoomed out), which is a stellar nursery where newborn stars are formed. The colors correspond to different elements. Blue for oxygen, green for hydrogen, and red for sulphur. Wind from the newborn stars sculpts the gas and dust around them and disperses the clouds that helped to form them, blowing away the material around them to create a bubble of space.

I think I've inundated you with enough pictures for today blog, I hope you enjoy them. Take care, your image-happy overlord, Andrew

The Sodium Lamp Mystery

Hi blog,

I apologize for not saying hello to you yesterday. I dislike deviating from our scheduled dates, but I had an extremely busy and exhausting day and by the time I had settled in for the day it was far too late to get anything done. So again, my apologies blog, I'll try to keep that from happening again. 

It's been a tough few days for me. I've been making decent progress on my book (although it has slowed a bit), but I'm in the worst part of my story. It's the most painful to write. Every paragraph grips my chest like a starving anaconda around its next meal, the anxiety floods into my system and threatens to paralyze me and send me spiraling down into endless oblivion. I seem to have some morbid fascination with pushing myself harder and harder to see where my wall is, at what point I'll simple cave in and implode in spectacular fashion. I haven't reached it yet thankfully, but I know I have to finish this section sooner rather than later, because the longer I take to muddle through it, the more risk I'm putting myself at for some kind of breakdown or relapse. And yet I'm having trouble getting up the courage to write, I keep finding ways to subconsciously sabotage myself and get distracted so I wind up not writing. This allows me to avoid the immediate damage from stress and anxiety, but I still feel the looming pressure to finish the book weighing down on me, and I can't allow myself to get mired just because my chest is tight and my stomach twisted up in a series of knots so complex not even Houdini could escape from them. March on writer, tell your tale. I'll let you know how it goes blog, I have a meeting with Nick on Thursday so hopefully I'll have gotten a bit more writing done by then.

And now, space! In case you didn't know, the TV show "Cosmos" (originally hosted by the eminent astronomer Carl Sagan) has been rebooted! It's on Fox on Sundays at 9 pm (in case you wanted to watch).  It's now being hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson (another astronomer) who once met Sagan when he was young. The show talks about our world, the universe, life, science, all that good stuff. The first episode was sort of a basic run-down of science and our place in the universe, giving Earth's "cosmic address" so to speak. Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Local Group (the small group of galaxy immediately around the Milky Way), the Virgo Supercluster (a much larger group of galaxies that the Milky Way is a part of), and finally, the Universe (and maybe the Multiverse after that, but I shan't get into that). For me, it's rudimentary stuff, I know most of it because I'm a massive space nerd (and a nerd in general to be fair), but I'm still very much looking forward to it. The show mostly targets a younger audience (the somewhat cheesy animation belies that fact), but I think the idea of trying to interest this generation's children and teenagers into finding science cool is a very noble one indeed. It's something that we have kind of fallen away from in recent years, knowledge is not "cool." But think of what might happen if we can get people to become interested in science again. One of those kids might become the next Einstein or Sagan, adding a tremendous insight into some aspect of our lives that will change everything around us for the better. Knowledge is power is a phrase that has stuck with us for so long because it is the absolute truth. Try to learn more, soak up the information around you, because we live in a fascinating world that we're only just starting to understand.

And in trying to understand the world, we come to a mystery so vast and enigmatic, that the government has tried to keep the truth a secret for the better part of a century. The mystery? How sodium lamps work. Sodium lamps are most commonly used as street lamps, and have a very strange quality to apparently suck the color out of everything nearby, leaving the world a Twilight Zone gray devoid of a rainbow of color until you step out from under their influence. The government would have you believe that the reason for this has to do with the type of light being emitted, but it's just a lie to cover up the truth. You want to know what sodium lamps REALLY are? They're containers holding...sodium leeches! "What's a sodium leech?" I hear you asking me. A quick search of the internet turns up nothing, because the government is hiding them! These strange creatures live in a glass case filled with a saline solution (hence the name "sodium leech") and live off of certain wavelengths of light, specifically those given off by color! All of this light is "sucked" up into the container held high off the ground, where the leech absorbs it and radiates the extra energy as the harsh orange-yellow glow that you see from the sodium lamp. Sodium leeches are nocturnal, and direct light kills them, so they are kept housed and protected by special glass that keeps out bright lights while still allowing them to absorb the colored wavelengths they need and to release their glow to allow them to light our streets. So the next time you drive past a sodium light, remember...there's a weird little creature glowing in there, say hello and thank you.

Because I failed to write in you yesterday, all of my posts for this week will be shifted by one day. Expect Thursday and Saturday postings. That is all for today.

Your gut-wrenched, anxious, but still in charge somewhat benevolent overlord, Andrew

How Small Mexican Tacos Saved My Sanity

Dear blog,

I met with Nick yesterday for our weekly meeting on our book projects. While we did not do any writing and it was a little shorter than usual, he and I came out of the meeting with several very important things to take away.

1. We discussed ways of making references to each other's work. 
2. We read part of our books to each other and got feedback on them. Nick read to me a very emotionally raw and visceral experience he had that brought an upwelling of anger to him. He's an extremely expressive writer and it gave me a better understand of what he's gone through and what level his writing is on. It was also inspiring, because I have times when I just don't want to write at all, and knowing that I'm not the only one writing about painful times helps give me the kick in the pants (I don't normally wear pants) that I needed.
3. We have a list of assignments to do. Admittedly, we've not been great at some of these, but we're both getting better about it. 

Following up on this whole book subject, I came up with something interesting. Nick was talking about how in his ultramarathoning, he's pushing his body to the limits, getting as close to death as he can without actually being in much danger. I compared it to going to the limit of my body's endurance as well, albeit not very willingly. There's a high that Nick gets from it, a feeling of higher purpose when he's so close to hitting the wall and giving up. It's something that he strives for in his running, he wants to approximate death in some way. I came up with a term for it that I thought both very apropos and kinda catchy: manufactured mortality. I'm curious to get some opinions on the term and if you think it fits with Nick's attempts to push his body to the very limit so he can experience something along the lines that I did to a simultaneously lesser and greater extent. What do you think of the term? Appropriate? Stupid? Catchy? Please let me know, I would appreciate it. I would hate to release this vile, evil, destructive Attack Puppy on you...maybe.

Blog...I'm reaching the hardest part of writing my memoirs. It's going to be a very hard week or two while I shove my way through it. I fully expect a couple tears to be shed and a lot of anxiety and stress to flood into my brain. I finally got past the point when I was put into a medically induced coma (March 2008, six years ago. I was taken out of the common exactly six years ago yesterday), but the worst has yet to come. The very next part describes how I should have died and begins the part of the story that I find the most important: what happens after you survive. For me, trying to adjust to life again after all that has happened to me is almost harder than surviving in the first place. I know I'm not the only one who has these problems, it's a lot more common than most people realize. The whole point of my book is to raise awareness for the side effects of treatment and hopefully to both inspire and help others in similar situations get through it. I also have a very lofty goal of possibly influencing policy in some way to provide a more cohesive and unified survivor program that would help those coming out of radiation treatments or chemotherapy or transplants only to find their bodies radically altered and suffering the side effects of surviving. I feel it's a topic hardly discussed and want to bring it to the foreground so something can be done to make life better for people after they have survived, so that they can better enjoy their lives with the freedom they deserve after such a harrowing and unfair experience. 

Do you know who was one of the greatest and most well respected heros of the American Revolution? George Washington, sure. The Marquis de Lafayette, yea okay. But you probably wouldn't have guessed...Benedict Arnold??? That's right, good ol' Benedict, before he turned traitor and pulled a him, was actually one of the most praised and well-liked of all of the Revolutionary figures. People loved him, his troops would follow him anywhere, and he was a brilliant tactician who was one of the most important for saving the Revolution in the critical early years. After being treated like crap, denied recognition by his superiors, wounded, bankrupted by giving almost all of his money to the cause of freedom, and having his honor impinged upon by politicians insulting his good name by falling him a Loyalist (to the British empire), he got fed up and defected. Luckily, America's first spy ring (Culper Ring, a very interesting group of civilians, read more about it here: The Culper Spy Ring) was able to discover his plans to sell West Point to the British (which would have almost certainly cost us the war) and although Arnold escaped, he would eventually die broke and mistrusted by even the British in England.

And now, I will not address the blog for a moment (sorry blog, I'll get back to you, I promise) and would like to talk to my readership. I've been trying to drum up more views and interest in my blog, as random as it is, and would love to reach a wider audience. So if you have read this blog and enjoy it, please share it with your friends or post it on your Twitter or Facebook. I will be extremely grateful, thank you! As an extra incentive to comment (shifting topic a smidge), I will start taking requests for short stories and plan to write a one thousand word short story every couple weeks based on some of those ideas and will give the person whose story idea I choose recognition for the idea! So if you've ever had a story idea that you thought was good but never got written, here's your chance to see that come to fruition!

Hello again blog! I told you I hadn't forgotten about you. As a show of appreciation for your patience, here's a pretty funny video that Nick made about small Mexican tacos. It's called...Ode to Small Mexican Tacos. I think you'll like it blog, I was cracking up the whole time he was showing it to me during our meeting yesterday. It helped me get through what would have been an otherwise difficult session by improving my mood and decreasing my anxiety. 

Well that's it for this week blog. Hopefully you enjoyed my words, and if not, well, not much you can do it about. 

Your master scribe, Andrew