Space Gnomes

Gnomes are our enemies. Anyone who does not know this is dangerously deluded. Consider this: when was the last time a gnome did anything but steal your possessions and make you late for work? Space gnomes are particularly odious. One thing about space gnomes I will never understand is their objection to relativity.....both general relativity and special relativity piss them off, presumably because it interferes with their plans for interstellar dominion.

Here is a space gnome trick, repeatedly tried, to circumvent relativity. Gnome 1 departs from a stationary object, in deep space, with no other point of reference. Gnome 2 stays on the stationary object. Gnome 1 accelerates, reaches a speed of 95% the speed of light, stays at that speed for ten years, turns around, and returns after accelerating to 95% the speed of light in the other direction. Gnome 2 stays put. When gnome 1 returns to the stationary object, usually someone's yard, it talks shit about how the YARD was not stationary at all, and that to think of it as such violates the entire principal of relativity. There ARE no privileged frames of reference. AND YET, gnome 1 has aged many more years than gnome 1, enough time to drink a great deal of beer. Gnomes are assholes for even bringing this up. In fact, the garden is never stationary, it is moving with respect to the rest of the universe, whether the gnomes choose to observe stars, planets, silver surfers, or not. There is no such thing as a stationary object. So, why the fuck was it gnome 1 did all the aging? This REALLY happens to gnomes.
I finally get it, what gnomes do not understand when they gripe like that.
It is the acceleration, both ways, and the deceleration, all of it, that broke the symmetry between the gnomes. In fact there was no symmetry to begin with. Not in this case. The gnomes usually try a new trick after pulling this one.

The next trick is to go to very distant points, with respect to each other, using their long lifespans as an aid to space travel, then accelerate to a good fraction of the speed of light, and cruise past each other, not accelerating, so that their combined velocities are greater than the speed of light. They do this because relativity pisses them off and they are trying to fuck with it. This trick is never really satisfying though, because from the perspective of each gnome, the other is receding at less than the speed of light. The Lorentz contraction of space, in the direction of movement, and time dilation, make it so that, to each other, they are receding at just shy of the speed of light. They can add a third observer, gnome 3 to the mix, as a stationary point between them, and this third gnome sees them receding from each other at greater than the speed of light, but this is not a violation of relativity and all three gnomes know it.

I remember a time when two gnomes, in separate spacecraft, accelerated to 99% the speed of light, using an enormous amount of fuel. They cruised at the same rate, relative to each other, one of them trailing a bit, and turned on their headlights. Both were annoyed because the light was not blue-shifted at all, since both were not moving with respect to each other. They even tried using a mirror, the one in the front turning around and shining its headlights on the gnome in the back, who was holding a mirror. Nothing, because from their perspective, noting in particular was amiss, even though, from the perspective of the rest of the galaxy, as they cruised, clocks were running SLOWER both aboard the gnome ships, AND in every distant planet (not faster there unless they mess it up by turning around and accelerating home), also, everything aboard the ships was very short in the direction of motion, from the perspective of distant planets, and all the distant planets were squished really flat in the direction of their apparent recession away from the gnomes....but none of this was apparent to the gnomes on the ship, even though it was happening, and that pissed them off.

The truth is that relativity pisses off gnomes because they have a belief that there is one, single, center of the universe that is NOT part of cosmic expansion, that is totally still in the absolute sense, and that they can put a planet, and a nice green lawn there, and sit, unmoving, forever.

snowflakes

Slither slither smell the air..through the withered wood over treebranch and under henbane between stone after stone, like the world serpent swallowing its tail like an electron vibrating in an S orbital high above an atomic nucleus slither smell the air dance the survival rhythm sense the mouse sense the footfall fear the avian menace avoid open space at all costs avoid outer space with its vacuum energy and freezing temperatures cosmic rays and vastness stay snuggled up in the core of a lifeless asteroid under a pillow of plasma in the fractal geometry of methane snowflakes falling on a dark moon sun set another setting universe expanding always expanding and somehow the same size always a fragment of it experiencing itself somewhere typing done with coffee.

Quarks

Quarks. They come in flavors. The flavors are paired though, by color. UP pairs with DOWN-one color. CHARM pairs with STRANGE-another color. TOP Pairs with BOTTOM-a third color. Quarks have a spin of one half, which means if you rotate a quark half a turn, it is the same as it was before you started rotating. They are not physical objects though, and they do not actually rotate. These three colors actually stack by ontogeny. Top and Bottom are thousands of times heavier than Charm and Strange, and a thousand times more unstable. Likewise, Charm and Strange are heavier than Top and Bottom, and unstable. Each color of quark has a corresponding lepton, and a corresponding neutrino. There are electrons, muons, tauons. Muons, as you might guess, are heavy, tauons are alarmingly heavy...electrons are light. Every particle has an antiparticle. There are positrons, for instance. Everything arranges itself by color. A proton is composed of up and down quarks (two of one, one of the other), neutrons have the inverse (two down quarks, one up quark). This explains their charge, by the way, because an UP quark has a +2/3 charge, and a DOWN quark has a -2/3 charge. Three quarks together somehow invoke the existence of a massless gluon, like a photon, except they only exist within a proton, holding it together, forever, though it can switch to a neutron, by changing the status of one of the quarks. This process releases a neutrino. Neutrinos are massless too, by the way. They are not exactly within protons, but changes in quarks invoke their existence, to conserve angular momentum. You can make mesons out of two quarks, by the way, but mesons are not stable. I do not know what happens when mesons decay though, into gamma rays, neutrinos, and antineutrions, lone quarks are impossible for some fundamental reason, more like why you cannot have just the inside of a basketball without the outside, somewhere, rather than why you cannot have half a cat, which in fact, you can, but it decays into a dead cat quickly and bisected cat is not really half the whole. None of this stuff is either there, or not there, in the sense you might think, because there are an infinite number of virtual quarks, and virtual other particles, that do not exist at the moment, whose existence can be invoked by the right set of conditions...in coming into existence, energy is transferred into matter, the opposite of the destruction of matter that occurs when fission or fusion occur. You can make a hydrogen atom from two up quarks, and a down one, a gluon, and an electron. For good measure, throw in a neutron-a gluon and two downs plus an up. Now, if you really want to, you can replicate an age of matter that probably existed for a few hundred years after the big bang, or less, maby. Make mater out of strange and charm quarks, and surround it with muons. You could do it. You could even make matter out of top and bottom quarks. Surround it with tauons. This matter would be superheavy, superunstable. The quarks would decay into charm and strange, then the charm and strange would decay into up and down. It would be great while it lasted. In the end, matter, not antimatter. If there were no top and bottom, there would be no assymetry, and antimatter everywhere, colliding with matter, releasing gamma rays. In the end, no matter. But I am composed of both matter and energy as I type this. The math actually makes sense in five dimensions, spacetime and a fifth, strange and bounded and not infinite. Therefore, it is significant that top and bottom quarks once existed.
There are approximately 140 types of mesons. A meson has a quark and an antiquark. Two normal quarks will not stick together. You can make a meson, called a K meson, out of a strange quark and an anti-down quark. It is unstable, decaying into a pion. A D meson, by the way is composed of an anti-up and a charm. D mesons, apparently, can flip into an antimatter state, composed of up, and anticharm. Antimesons. Pions are the lightest mesons, the normalest ones, composed of up and antidown down quarks, or down and antiup (an antipion). No meson is really stable. They decay into neutrino plus antineutrino. Kaons are heavy and surprisingly stable, composed of strange and anti-up quarks. A very heavy one is the upsilon, a bottom quark and an antibottom.
This fifth dimensional space, which is bounded, has a top and a bottom, one spin is at the top, one spin is at the bottom, of this domain. Top and Bottom, Up and Down, Charm and Strange, opposing walls, opposite spins, of one half. In the middle, all hell breaks loose, matter is obscenely heavy and not real in the usual sense. You can flip through a dimension like this, but not really ever be there.
Spin, parity, and angular momentum, are conserved during all the flipping. They are the parameters within which the particles exist, and we only think we know the particles are there because we infer their existence from the rules.

The Morning of a Fierce Battle...My Thoughts

Listen to the drums in the distance. Skin stretched over bone of ancient beasts. Bronze shields reflecting the morning sunrise. The smoke of extinguished campfires. Our swords are sharp and our archers have the high ground. Elms sway in the distance. Earthworks have been built. Ready for battle. Their armies will come no closer to our homeland. Horses snort, their masters holding the reigns and speaking words into the beast ears of the nervous creatures.

In the distance, giants, their knees taller than the men they camp with. You can make out their crested helmets, their axes glint in the sun, the skulls of men strung around their necks like beads, a necklace, a warning. They are not immortal, though, giant, though they eat the flesh of men and drink beer by the keg instead of by the pint. An arrow between the eyes will kill one. On our side, we have witches, their black tresses falling to their shoulder, they pass one eye among them and take turns seeing, but with a word they can pronounce a giant dead, or a man, and the victim has no choice but to obey and die.

I fear one of them has put a charm on me because I cannot stop looking at her, her white shoulders, the curve of her hips, her strange and wonderful lips. Yet, where her eyes should be, there is nothing but smooth indentation. Sometimes, I dream of this creature and it is terrifying.

Horns blast. Dust clouds from a thousand hooves. The archers wait till the enemy cavalry is within range. The battle begins.

Doom

Doom. Under the weeping wood. In the gloom. In the darkness. In the cloudy twilight. The smell of sulfur-a finger pointing to another world, in the wisps and hollows, a volcanic spring. Strangeness. Nihil. Stillness. The nightbirds, their cries a forlorn compass, counting corners, marking time, circle like ghost ships. The nightmare visits, drops from the vine like an overripe plum. Abomination. Life reflected in its opposite-unlife. Nightshade. Atropine. Fire. Jimson Weed, its flowers open in the twilight of morning. Wolves cry in the distance. A stranger dies.

Apoidea

The day before yesterday, I identified a Halictus parallelus from WI. This is a social bee, though it lives in small colonies, not the metropolis hives of Apis, the honeybee. A lifelong beekeeper tells me that the reason Apis is getting so many diseases is that it never evolved to stay in the same place for year after year. Apis swarms at the drop of a feather in summer, and yesterday, Mr. Beekeeper was pulling a swarm off the cyclone fence. It escaped, a rare thing nowadays, feral bee colonies. My Halictus queen never got to found one. Sandy country out there in WI where I caught her, and hopefully her distant realatives are doing well. Six or eight workers, maybe more by now. It will all be over in August or Sept, the whole set of workers having spent their lives to produce a dozen or more queens and a similar number of males. Sand, not wax. Tunnels, not hives.
In my garden, Agapostemon viriscens, on my sunflower, and Megachile georgica. The first a beautiful green halictid bee, like halictus, but only quasisocial. They share nests as an incidental effect of their construction activities, and tolerate each other, but do not truly cooperate. I see big females and smaller ones though, a big one was foraging earlier this year, and I am beginning to conclude that this species leans toward eusociality. I read that eusociality, queens and workers, evolved over and over, and has been lost as many times, in that family, the halictids. Tattoo on my arm reads...I serve no queen. Entomology joke. Speaking of kinky, Megachile georgica practices bondage. The males have enlarged tibia to block the female's vision during mating. Another Megachile, Ashmeidella, very tiny, ID'd my first one only recently. Also, a strange parasite, probly torymid, from a trap nest I set out behind the greehouse. How the thing found a host, in Chicago, amid such uncertain surroundings, I cannot comprehend.

Summer Bee Update

Weird year for bees. Wet weather. Favors some and hinders others in a way I do not yet understand. Bees are complex in their population biology-always going extinct in one place and growing to abundance in another. There is a study of bees in Carlinville IL, the most famous bee study ever, in the late nineteenth century, by a man named Carson. There is a return study that concludes that, despite changes, most of the same bees are still there. In my yard, everything has speeded up to a ridiculous degree. Male Megachile georgica swarm and lek about ornamental sunflowers. Agapostemon viriscens, not early at all, but back from a long hiatus, forages there.