From Spike Jonze’s new film, Where the Wild Things Are, based on the classic Maurice Sendak book. Neither the book nor (apparently) the movie are pablum. Via io9 (spoilers at that link).
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Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
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October 16th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Oh, man. Never mind kids, kind of dark for *adults*.
October 16th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Definition of die includes:
1 : to pass from physical life : expire b : to disappear or subside gradually —often used with away, down, or out
2 a : to pass out of existence : cease
Our sun:
A t the end of the Sun’s life time it will begin to fuse helium into heavier elements causing it to swell up. It will ultimately swell so large that it will consume the Earth. During this phase of its existence the sun is known as a red giant. A billion years later it will collapse into a white dwarf which is the final end product of a star like ours. It will take as much as a trillion years to completely cool off.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Say, what does come after dust?
October 16th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Fear.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
After dust?
Reunion with the infinitely infinite universe, i.e, nature.
Of course we were never really separated from nature in the first place, but rather just taking a temporarily finite form.
Fear is the product of a lack of understanding.
Yours in nature,
RLO
http://www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw
October 16th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
- TS Eliot
October 16th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
‘The man who understands nature thinks of nothing less than the topic of death, especially his/her own.’
Spinoza
See Stuart Hampshire’s book “Spinoza and Spinozism” for a philosophy that is not based on fear or tooth fairies.
RLO
http://www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw
October 17th, 2009 at 9:15 am
SPINOZA VERY WELL BUT MARX AND ME BEST
WAEL MOREICHEH
POET
October 17th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
What comes after Dust?
Consciousness, of course.
(Couldn’t help throwing in another literary reference.)
October 17th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Like Woody Allen said (more or less): I don’t want to achieve
immortality by shedding my finite form and reuniting with the
universe.
I want to achieve immortality by not dying.
October 18th, 2009 at 12:19 am
How is it that Sun is going to die ? Was not it bought by Oracle?
October 18th, 2009 at 5:18 am
The Sun is going to die!!!…. Does Phil P. know about this?
October 18th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Yes, the sun is going to die. Slowly and painfully, shedding bitter tears from puppy-dog eyes. And it will be our fault.