My god, I thought Tylor’s Animism was bad…. That was until I started reading Frazer’s Sympathetic Magic. Yikes.
If I have to read the phrase “the lower races” or “savages” one more time, I might just have to conjure them up and kick their stale, pretentious, lily-white asses.
I totally agree, but keep in mind, it was a very different time then.
Oh, I know. But the ungodly pompousness of academia just draaaiiinnns me.
My god, I thought Tylor’s Animism was bad…. That was until I started reading Frazer’s Sympathetic Magic. Yikes.
If I have to read the phrase “the lower races” or “savages” one more time, I might just have to conjure them up and kick their stale, pretentious, lily-white asses.
Just a quick sketch and color of the woman from my trance work. Because I know I’ll start forgetting it as time goes on.
It began in blackness: a sort of tacky darkness that clung to you like tar or molasses. It began taking shape into leaves and heavy jungle foliage. The soil was black earth and I could feel the life in it. Ahead, in a clearing, I could make out a stone temple – stepped, like those of the Hindu or the Maya/Mexica. As soon as I saw it, I was immediately at the foot of the great stairs, which fell away as I seemed to fly upward to the top-most platform. The sky seemed to be caught between day and night. The horizon was red on all sides, but above, the night sky glittered with constellations.
At the summit, there was a woman, short and young, with dark, sienna-toned skin. Her eyes were painted black with ash and soot that ran down her cheeks and her irises (also black) were lined with silver rings. But the most striking feature was her curious hair: it hung long, but there was section that was draped across her forehead and wound around her head (presumably fastened in the back). There were marbled green plugs in her ears and her clothing seemed nondescript, as though it weren’t really there at all, but merely a shroud of rough, textured smoke to cover her. Without saying a word, her hand reached into my chest and ripped out my heart, which looked rotten and diseased. There were wide gashes, which she quickly took to repairing with a needle (I remember putting my hand into the open cavern and feeling the damp, warm air within and the smooth wet surface of my exposed ribs). Once she had finished, she placed it into my hands and silently watched as I took a deep breath and hammered it back into my hollow the cavity.
Everything went black again.
And the black began to take shape, I could feel the coarse, wet grain of it and began digging my nails into it, tearing my way up through the same black earth as before. I surfaced, transformed into the woman, and followed my instinct – running barefoot over the earth, in pursuit of something I could not yet see. But then I did: a proud stag running through the canopy, colored the most peculiar shade of blue-grey. I caught up to it, leaping toward it and securing its antlers in my hands. We crashed to the ground together, but I was already back up, turning its neck as it fought against me until it snapped. But I didn’t stop, I kept turning until its eyes looked into mine, the neck turned all the way around like that of an owl. The eyes began to glow and everything around us fell away until I was left standing fact to face with a tall figure.
Over his head was the hollowed skin of the stag, which sat erect as though it still had life, but I knew it didn’t. The eyes were hollow and from its parted mouth came the men’s muffled voice. Around was was nothing but void, and the Stag-Man’s clothes seemed almost to mimic it: a long black, tattered cloak or solid piece of fabric with only a head poked through. In the gnarled hand was a forked, wooden staff and we seemed to float toward one another.
From the parted lips of the Stag-Head came a long tongue, like a serpent, that slithered into my mouth and down my throat. I could feel it moving down my trachea, but just as I began to panic, a strength swelled in me and I felt my own, serpentine tongue snake around his like a constrictor. He placed his hands on my shoulders, trying to pull away, but it was too late. I began to grow, laughing as he seemed to shrink until he was nothing. Then the jungle did the same, followed by earth, and the planets until even the universe seemed to shrink into nothingness, at which point my form fell away and I swirled around all of creation, laughing. Then there was nothing.
WHY!?!??
THE BIGGEST SPIDER I HAVE EVER SEEN JUST FELL OUT OF MY HAIR. THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME AND I DONT UNDERSTAND HOW THEY KEEP GETTING IN THERETo clarify, I love spiders: when I can see them and have a mutual understanding with them. What does not jive with me is when FUCKING TARANTULAS are riding around in my MOP without proper CREDENTIALS. Web weaving spiders ride for free, but those giant ass hunting spiders can catch the next train. Miss me with that.
They weren’t riding. Your hair is a portal to an entire spider universe#. So far, only the adventurous teeny tiny ones have managed to pass through. Some of the actually big ones have begun watching this new portal with curiosity, however.
I dunno if washing your hair extra would clear the portal, or enlarge it.
(# Similar to the jumpgates at the end of web funnels that spiders routinely spin)
If you’re suggesting I have a hell-gate for a scalp, I can completely get behind it. The question then is do I even have hair or just discolored spiderwebs masquerading as hair?
Also, is it just me or does this sound like a Junji Ito manga?
Researchers at Princeton University have begun crystallizing light as part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about the physics of matter.
The researchers are not shining light through crystal – they are transforming light into crystal. As part of an effort to develop exotic materials such as room-temperature superconductors, the researchers have locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they become fixed in place.
“It’s something that we have never seen before,” said Andrew Houck, an associate professor of electrical engineering and one of the researchers. “This is a new behavior for light.”
The results raise intriguing possibilities for a variety of future materials. But the researchers also intend to use the method to address questions about the fundamental study of matter, a field called condensed matter physics.
“We are interested in exploring – and ultimately controlling and directing – the flow of energy at the atomic level,” said Hakan Türeci, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and a member of the research team. “The goal is to better understand current materials and processes and to evaluate materials that we cannot yet create.”
The team’s findings, reported online on Sept. 8 in the journal Physical Review X, are part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about atomic behavior by creating a device that can simulate the behavior of subatomic particles. Such a tool could be an invaluable method for answering questions about atoms and molecules that are not answerable even with today’s most advanced computers.
In part, that is because current computers operate under the rules of classical mechanics, which is a system that describes the everyday world containing things like bowling balls and planets. But the world of atoms and photons obeys the rules of quantum mechanics, which include a number of strange and very counterintuitive features. One of these odd properties is called “entanglement” in which multiple particles become linked and can affect each other over long distances.
The difference between the quantum and classical rules limits a standard computer’s ability to efficiently study quantum systems. Because the computer operates under classical rules, it simply cannot grapple with many of the features of the quantum world. Scientists have long believed that a computer based on the rules of quantum mechanics could allow them to crack problems that are currently unsolvable. Such a computer could answer the questions about materials that the Princeton team is pursuing, but building a general-purpose quantum computer has proven to be incredibly difficult and requires further research.
Another approach, which the Princeton team is taking, is to build a system that directly simulates the desired quantum behavior. Although each machine is limited to a single task, it would allow researchers to answer important questions without having to solve some of the more difficult problems involved in creating a general-purpose quantum computer. In a way, it is like answering questions about airplane design by studying a model airplane in a wind tunnel – solving problems with a physical simulation rather than a digital computer.
In addition to answering questions about currently existing material, the device also could allow physicists to explore fundamental questions about the behavior of matter by mimicking materials that only exist in physicists’ imaginations.
To build their machine, the researchers created a structure made of superconducting materials that contains 100 billion atoms engineered to act as a single “artificial atom.” They placed the artificial atom close to a superconducting wire containing photons.
By the rules of quantum mechanics, the photons on the wire inherit some of the properties of the artificial atom – in a sense linking them. Normally photons do not interact with each other, but in this system the researchers are able to create new behavior in which the photons begin to interact in some ways like particles.
“We have used this blending together of the photons and the atom to artificially devise strong interactions among the photons,” said Darius Sadri, a postdoctoral researcher and one of the authors. “These interactions then lead to completely new collective behavior for light – akin to the phases of matter, like liquids and crystals, studied in condensed matter physics.”
Türeci said that scientists have explored the nature of light for centuries; discovering that sometimes light behaves like a wave and other times like a particle. In the lab at Princeton, the researchers have engineered a new behavior.
“Here we set up a situation where light effectively behaves like a particle in the sense that two photons can interact very strongly,” he said. “In one mode of operation, light sloshes back and forth like a liquid; in the other, it freezes.”
The current device is relatively small, with only two sites where an artificial atom is paired with a superconducting wire. But the researchers say that by expanding the device and the number of interactions, they can increase their ability to simulate more complex systems – growing from the simulation of a single molecule to that of an entire material. In the future, the team plans to build devices with hundreds of sites with which they hope to observe exotic phases of light such as superfluids and insulators.
“There is a lot of new physics that can be done even with these small systems,” said James Raftery, a graduate student in electrical engineering and one of the authors. “But as we scale up, we will be able to tackle some really interesting questions.”
Explore further: Extending Einstein: Researchers demonstrate a new kind of quantum entanglement
More information: Observation of a Dissipation-Induced Classical to Quantum Transition, Phys. Rev. X 4, 031043 – Published 8 September 2014. journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.031043
Journal reference: Physical Review X
Provided by: Princeton University
Read more at:
http://phys.org/news/2014-09-solid-previously-unsolvable-problems.html#jCp
This is absolutely fascinating.
There’s just something so nice {naughty} about smoking and listening to The Kills in the Catholic Church parking lot next to the Mother Mary statue. I recommend it.
The Qedavian Apocrypha 