the resurrection of the archives of orbis quintus

Orbis Quintus is back on Wordpress, the archive of posts is up, and so are the comments. The categories are missing, but to hell with them. I'll retag them in the coming months. The search engine works just fine for digging up old articles.

Don't pay any mind to that badgerminor.net URL that the site defaults to. That's going away. I'll fix it later. I've felt like garbage all day, but managed to sludge my way through uploading most of the database bit by bit.

Yep. Only six months late....

remember the Martian banyan trees?

I sure as hell do. I loved those damned things. It irked me that there seem little interest in the serious scientific community to follow up on what the hell those things were. They were some Martian organism analogous to plant or fungi in my mind. Arthur C. Clarke looked at them and saw the same thing.

Ha! Screw you, "serious" people.

Now it seems that those lovely Martian banyans are probably like those other weird, but explainable, phenomenon on Mars, these spider-web patterns created by what seems gas escaping from the ground.

My heart's kinda broken. I'm 99.999% convinced. I still cannot let go of poring over those photos looking for anomalies though.

Mircea Cartarescu

I just stumbled across of Mircea Cartarescu in this year end wrap-up on Sight and Signal. The description sounds fantastic:

"Sometimes I explain my book as a mystical butterfly or a flying cathedral," says the author. Critics are overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of content, as well as the variety of genres Cartarescu masters, yet they still can't agree on how to classify the book. The NZZ calls it a "masterpiece of literary mannerism" - "as if de Chirico and Kafka, H. R. Giger and Bruno Schulz had got together and written a novel."

It points to a feature that they did on Cartarescu as well. Yep. Very interesting. I'm not so keen on the strong homosexual themes, simply because i'm heterosexual and am not into books at the moment that has sex as their primary themes in the first place. Still, i'll pick up a translation if it ever appears in the U.S.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem likely. This post by Thomas McGonigle, who reviewed Cartarescu's short story collection Nostalgia, released by New Directions in 2005, notes that only 500 copies of Nostalgia have been sold, so New Directions is not likely at this time to release any other books by Cartarescu.

I'll definitely buy Nostalgia in the coming months.

Barbara Forrest has long experience debating ID hucksters

Bah, i was trying to leave a comment over on the Panda's Thumb, but the site doesn't like my HTML markup.

She appeared on the letters to the editor pages for years back in the '90s in the local paper, the Daily Star of Hammond, LA. The creationists have been trying to introduce their agenda into the classrooms of Tangipahoa and Livingston Parishes for quite a long time. Dr. Forrest and several other professors at Southeastern Louisiana University did their absolute best to counter the assault on science. Her experience here is possibly what galvanized her to take action nationally.

She wrote an article about some of her experiences back in 1997, here and here.

Dembski is probably well aware of this. The man is a known dissembler.

She was my history professor when i was a freshmen in 1989. She was also my professor in philosophy, where i wasn't so crazy for her. (I hate Plato.) However, i'm extremely proud of her efforts to keep evolution in the schools. She's been fearless.

“And that’s it, more or less.”

Daniil Kharms has been on my To Read list for too long. George Saunders has cast him as a bit of a prankster Bartleby, in the fashion of Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co.

retro-blogging

Tom has put up a bunch of old links on Freaky Trigger, revisiting a strange Golden Age of music and culture blogging from the turn of the millennium. I quite miss it actually, even in this day of RSS feeds of hundreds of blogs. There are quite a few blogs and sites that seem to be missing on there, but it's going to take awhile to see what he missed, although most of it seems to be revolving around the NYLPM axis. Hopefully i have an old bookmark file stowed away.

I only started blogging in the aftermath of that, in 2000, during the election recount. For a few years before that, i'd been putting music fansites up every few weeks. The blogging thing didn't make a connection until later. My old site was Fighting Against Making the Pie Higher. Until a couple of weeks ago, i wasn't even sure if it was still online. I didn't look it up out of embarrassment.

No matter how much any of it makes me wince, it will be rescued.

The real Orbis Quintus must come back soon too. Blogger ain't my style. Wordpress is missed immensely.

mineral deposits of Martian hot springs unearthed: prime location to search for microbial fossils

The broken wheel dragging on the Martian probe Spirit unearthed a patch of mineral deposits that is normally created when hot water contacts volcanic rocks. On earth, areas like this are teaming with microbial life. Although it seems that the rover is not suited for analyzing what has been found, it looks like we may have hit paydirt.

Not only do we get yet more evidence of liquid water on the Martian surface, but it would have been the perfect habitat for life.

boiling the ionosphere for fun and profit

Wired has a post on recently released documents on HAARP. I'm brokenhearted that there's nothing in there connecting HAARP to barium sulfide and chemtrails.

Neglected to mention a story about barium sulfide in the environment suspected to be from chemtrails up in Shreveport last month.

humans evolving faster

"History looks more and more like a science fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans." John Hawks is one of the authors of the study and has the abstract up.

Yeah, i don't know where to begin. i love this kind of broad statement.... "7 percent of human genes are undergoing rapid, recent evolution"... How can you not get a wide, hysterical grin at that?

precisely what is meant by "video tapes"

With all of the stories that i've read about the destruction of the torture videotapes that i've read, it feels like something is missing. It's hard to be motivated to do this, as this scandal will come to nothing just like every other scandal in the Bush administration. However, it feels necessary to track down the original request for these tapes and to examine the statements about the destruction of the tapes more carefully.

After the way that the Bush administration has handled the Iraq War, and the NIE on Iran's nuclear program, and the way that they have deleted all of their own emails, I suspect that the actual video of the events still exist. All of the stories talk about the destruction of video tapes. These bastards are so deceitful that they very well could have just transferred them to a digital file, or to film, and refuse to hand them over because they are not VHS.

It sounds preposterous, but how far away is this from their usual tactics? Absolutely nothing they say has any bearing on reality.

the bacteria made me do it

I'm lifting this directly from a post that i made in another forum. Otherwise, it'll sink, and i'll forget where it went, like the stories of the destruction of the CIA torture tapes that i know are out there, months or years old

Considering that humans carry more bacterial cells in their bodies than human ones and infection with certain bacteria has been shown to alter behavior in the possible attempt to preserve the host from predators, could it be possible that aspects of our personalities may have nothing to do with our genetics, but are the output of various groups of bacteria working in symbiosis?

It's an old theme in sci-fi i think, but with each passing year, it seems more credible.

prelude to 2007 music list

In my downtime, i was trying to hammer together a year end list of some kind... top albums, top songs... something like that. It's quite enjoyable to do sometimes. It's driven me a little over the edge though, as i want to be accurate and honest... reexamining out albums that i dismissed initially, making sure albums that i swooned over are still any good if they fell out of rotation.

Uh, i kinda got lost along the way. I'm still working on it. A detour into listening to a lot of familiar droning rock, first some Neu!, Can, and Faust, and then Spacemen 3, has put me into a writing burst. It's not the kind of writing that goes in a blog though.

hydrogren sulfide and longevity

I haven't quite wrapped my brain around this story about dosing nematodes and mice with hydrogen sulfide to increase their life spans. If it induces hibernation, and this is what leads to longevity, is this hydrogen sulfide fix only useful for purposes such as space travel, or is there a better means to have it affect metabolism.

majority of NBCC ambivalent to works in translation

Only five works in translation appeared on the National Book Critics Circle's longlist of recommended books in 2007? I haven't figured out how many titles are on the longlist, but there were over 800 people polled. That's sad.... very sad.

Scott Esposito fought the good fight for Enrique Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady though. He has a great essay on Vila-Matas titled "The Fruits of Parasitism" up on the Quarterly Conversation

How often do dictators lose elections?

Atrios nails it on the recent election in Venezuela. The fact remains that there was an election, and Chavez didn't get his way. Good. This is the way democracy is supposed to work.

Something is weird going on in the U.S. media when in recent years, they were supporting military coups against him. The U.S. no longer believes in democracy.

It was not a referendum on socialism itself by any means. Chavez almost got what he wanted, as the proposal only won with 51% of the vote. What beat Chavez was some people knowing that democracy is not to be trusted to a single man, especially not Chavez. Unfortunately, this is not the true majority, as that 51% also contains people who have no love for the ideal of democracy, and only want to install their own brand of dictator, one more business friendly.

Tom McCarthy interviews

I'm only halfway through Part Two right now. Great, great stuff, although he has yet to mention anything about the INS declaration on inauthenticity back in September. (Is there any transcript of this online?)He's talking re-enactments and patterns all of the way back to Don Quixote. It was a little jarring to hear him declare Warhol a greater artist than Michelangelo, but why the hell shouldn't he?

Lots of talk about Ballard too, and i admit that i have yet to read anything by him.

Oh yeah... part one of the interview and part two.

mummified hadrosaur

It's only the fifth mummified dinosaur body found to date, and seems to be the best preserved. It has the best preserved skin tissue known, and possibly muscle and internal organs as well. The find is in North Dakota. Awesome.

connection between helium-3 in Nevada and Yellowstone?

Why is it that i choose to read this story about the newly discovered helium-3 leaks in Nevada not as good news in the arena of clean, geothermal energy, but as a sign that something major happening underground in western United States?

This helium-3, which they say is normally associated with volcanoes, in the Basin & Range Province, just seems that it could be related to the rise of activity of the supervolcano lurking beneath Yellowstone.

Nope. I don't like this news at all.

not a skeptic

In the past several years, i've moved away from a lot of the fringe stuff that i loved in my youth, because it bugs me that established, verified science is dismissed. I'm not really a skeptic, but i align myself with them because i fear the mad dogma of religious zealots.

Nope. No great essay or confession. It's just that i was hanging out with my friend Damien the other night, discussing agnosticism, atheism, fundamentalists, science, and phenomenon that seem to be beyond the explanation of currently accepted conventional science, to realize that i've straitjacketed myself in a sense.

I'll try to explain this better in the weeks to come, to reason out some reconciliation my affinity for obviously batshit insane fringe stories with rejection of both organized relgion and New Age quackery.

defending science fiction yet again

My favorite bit of this article about how unloved science fiction is this:

The literary snobs will say it’s badly written, which most of it is. So is most “literary” fiction. Badly written literary fiction is, however, wholly unnecessary. There’s a lot of badly written SF that is driven by an urgent journalistic desire to communicate. That is necessary.

Othwerwise, it's preaching to the choir, although i didn't know that story about Salman Rushdie and Grimus.

As often as i have sneered about American slavish obsession with "realism," perhaps it's certain species of formalism masquerading as realism which is really what pisses me off.

Index Translationum

Literary Saloon breaks down the numbers from the Index Translationum, which i was unfamiliar with. Even though i believe the number of books translated into English is shamefully low, i just haven't been able to trust any column that makes that argument using percentages. Literary Saloon seems to be as well, and while they try work through the years the data was gathered, as well as the numbers of speakers of each language in question, they find that there is definitely a problem with the collection of the data from countries like China. It's strange that obvious questions like these cannot receive definitive answers in an age like this.