If you need God to explain your science, you're doing it wrong.  The world is all around you to be experimented with, tested and explored.  Whether or not God created it, it can be understood, even if every new understanding leads to ten more questions.

If you need science to explain your God, you're doing it wrong.  If God is anything, it is ineffable, unreachable and unexplainable.  If science can either validate or invalidate your image of the Divine, dig deeper.


The name that can be named is not the eternal name.  -half-assed paraphrase of the Tao te Ching.

Be the first to laugh at your own misfortune.

Change Blindness

Thought Moments

Watching faces up close and intimately.  This is a pretty amazing video.

Thought Moments

Hypnosis and neurology article.

Interesting article on some contemporary research on hypnosis.  As with any article on hypnosis take a lot of the conclusions stated as suspect as it's hard to find corollary studies.  The part about "10% of the population" leads me to wonder exactly how large a research group they used for said study.  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/sep/30/hypnosis-neuroscience-psychology

It amazes me how spending only twenty-four hours at Valley View leaves me with a sensation of dislocation when I come home.  Denver looks a little brighter, but a little less like home.  I feel like I had a week long vacation and yet I was only gone from Sunday morning to Monday afternoon.  Ashley and I decided to go at the very last minute, at eleven o'clock on Saturday night.  We packed up and headed out on Sunday, and called the office to reserve the room (that opened up miraculously) about five minutes after the office opened.  We drove through two snowstorms on the way there, and once there the wind was cold and the weather somewhat uninviting.

It was amazing.  There is no place else that I have been anywhere that leaves me feeling like this.  The feel of clothing is currently foreign.  It's not unpleasant, just foreign.  I will have to remind myself for the next few days that I can't go stand on my porch in the buff.

Trees and rocks, birds of every kind (especially noisy jays, jaunty magpies and a one lone bald eagle flying off to the north as we drove down the dirt road into the hotsprings) a tiny, white ermine and most of all the water.  It's not the hottest water ever, but that means I can stay in it for hours.  Getting out of the water can be excruciating for a second until I can get my wool cloak wrapped around me.  It's even more excruciating when I back into a snow covered tree. 

But really... I just feel different after spending time there.  I've never been for more than two days.  I can only imagine that after a week I might not ever come back.

'Tis the season.  Worked my first fire show in quite a long time.  The show went well, despite some rather serious moments in the middle.  Having Ashley on hand and ready to grab a wet towel when not asked was a fantastic thing.  I've never done Boo at the Zoo with Doug before.

I did get a small burn, myself, but I didn't realize it until we were headed out.

Took Ashley to Pete's Kitchen which apparently reminds her of The Phoenix which is a coney island in Michigan that she's fond of.  All in all it had the elements of a good night.

I'm not feeling much like being social of late, something I need to push through I suspect.  I have no real ideas for costuming or anything and part of me would rather work at Terry's tomorrow morning and spend the afternoon and evening working on my large pile of financial shit so that it will smell less come January or so.  I do plan to go out, likely to the gathering I was invited to through the session at the Snug.

People scare me though, they really do, and when I'm not feeling particularly strong in the head I get twitchy around them.  I don't like passive aggressive behaviour and I like it even less when it's directed at me.  People want to believe they're rational but if there really are stable, calm, thoughtful, rational people out there, I've yet to meet 'em.  I know plenty of people who think they're on the ball and quite honestly the saner someone claims to be, the further away from them I want to be.  It's not that I mind my friends being crazy, I just mind when the crazy runs their lives.

I feel like there's an angry hum underneath almost all social interactions of late.  It's where the crazy people trying to run me off the road come from.  It's why we have the Tea Party and why packages are being shipped from Yemen to blow up synagogues in the US.  It's a feeling that I can't shake, even on the good days and it seems to affect a lot of people other than just me.  Some get depressed, some get belligerent some just go catatonic.


Me, I just want to run off again.  I won't, at least not like that, but I want to.  It was so much easier when I didn't stay anywhere for very long.