A Writer’s Block: NBA, Mars and the Future
it has been ages since i last posted a blog. thanks to the many preoccupations i had the past months. certainly, i know, i have been preoccupied. so ask me, what has kept me busy? i don’t know. i don’t freakin know. lol. well, the problem is, i have had this what they call a writer’s block. a hump. something i just can’t get over. because i keep on asking, why should i, in the first place? there is nothing much to write about since my thoughts are scattered most of the times, so why bother typing the words. just kidding. yes, i feel the need to write. i only write when there is a need. and it seems like the past months, has been a loss for words by me, the events turned so suddenly. so i don’t freakin know how to get over this. but i think i can try. so let me try. so i’ll just write whatever random thoughts come by tonight.=)
i bet my basktbell instincts on the lakers during the nba finals since i have always loved underdogs. well, vujacic and lamar odom dint came up big, when they were needed. and the los angeles lakers succumb to a game 6 exit.
vujacic should have at least made a general rule to himself that even a 2 second separation on defense against ray allen was a mortal mistake. ray allen, one of the greatest jump shooters in nba history, i mean the greatest, ate the slovenian alive, live and raw. lamar odom, should have at least worked on his field goal percentages. kobe on a given night can pour in the 30’s or 40’s. too bad, the support cast was ailing for big time performances. now shaq’s rapping, “kobe can’t win it without me..” lol. next year, i’ll watch marco belinilli of the golden state warriors (if my instincts are correct) shoot the lights out, the way peja did with sacramento. derrick rose, the first pick can be attuned to the chicago bulls, but michael beasley obviously was the best player of the 2008 draft. and luckily he was selected by miami. i dint understand why kevin mchale of minnesota traded o.j. mayo, a kobe bryant in the making, to the grizzlies in exchange for kevin love of ucla and mike miller? what was he thinking? well, they might be rebuilding the timberwolves for the years to come and an impact player like mayo isn’t needed at the moment. i believe, portland will be ferocious next season with oden playing. well, these things has been circling my mind for the past weeks since the monumental collapse of the lakers in game 4 of the nba finals and the nba draft held in new york.
for the past weeks, i have been following the phoenix mars mission through their official website, http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/, and several other sources. phoenix lander touched down on planet mars, 68.35 degrees north latitude - the equivalent of earth’s northern alaska - and 233.0 degrees east longitude, on may 25th, 16:53 Pacific. personally, my interests lie on these things, astronomy and astrophysics, and as soon as i watched on cnn, that the lander survived the 7 minutes of terror, while entering the martian atmosphere (which is considerably thinner than the earth’s air blanket, making it harder for any spacecraft to land easily in a calculated manner, less air molecules, less friction, greater momentum as it lands, thanks to the chute the lander had during entry). the phoenix lander was concieved to find evidence of water on the north polar caps of mars. and the good news is, scientists confirmed a week ago that water-ice is indeed found on mars. water, as we know it, is an essential ingredient of life, as they say, what appeared to be whitish chunks embedded on martian soil, where phoenix landed, is indeed water-ice. and green beans should love it, even microbes. well, for the sake of my pathetic outcry, i am certainly delighted to know these things. after all these centuries, humans thought, the stars and the chunks that floats with them in space are barren as the desolated deserts of the earth, yet now we have confirmed, that beyond our little home, there is another place which is comparable to it. and to think that there are other planets now being discovered which are earth-like, light-years away from us, it is plausible, that water exists in them too, and possibly, life. making the ultimate question if we are alone in this universe certainly verifiable and thus, will take our society, into our most needed reforms in thoughts and views.
so is it still obvious that i am still curing this hump? i want to write more. ” a writer’s block is a phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to begin or continue writing, usually due to lack of inspiration or creativity”. if that is the case, then i need to be inspired. i need to be creative. well that might be true, if i’ll admit that i have been creative in the past, or was ever inspired when i wrote my previous posts. lol. so, i just won’t admit it, so i can actually prolong this situation. and i have to write more random thoughts and see if i can be spontaneous again.
well, a couple of months of staying silent might have been caused by my changing priorities in life. well, i needed to overhaul my perceptions about life. yes my views which have been embedded in me for 2 decades. principles which i needed to strengthen and ideals to be emulated. so this requires a lot of thinking. lots and lots of silent moments. because i can’t fathom deeply in the absence of silence. maybe, that is why i haven’t written even a single sensible sentence in the past two months, because, i was trying to find some sense for me, in me.
but i think i’m carrying on pretty well. and the future is brighter as ever for me now, well my confidence meter tells me it is.
i am set to embark on a new journey, i mean literally. a new job. a very interesting one. and a new path, which i rightfully consider to be a product of my silence the past months that led me to this writer’s block thing, when i had to make big time choices. and i am glad, i have corrected the direction of my sail, just when i thought, i’d be shattered by the spiralling winds of these passing years.
one thing, i’ve realized is, we all need to take the necessary risks, and they should be not less than a calculated risk. and it is good, if we stop for a while, and listen to our own thinking, that no matter how fast this life has become for all of us, we should never lose grip of our goals and learn to correct them if we must.
we should never consider ourselves losing in a battle we’ve always thought we could win.
No commentsGod is Dead
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort
ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all
that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe
this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals
of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of
this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear
worthy of it?”
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125
“God is dead” is not meant literally, as in “God is now physically dead”; rather, it is Nietzsche’s way of saying that the idea of God is no longer capable of acting as a source of any moral code or teleology. Nietzsche recognises the crisis which the death of God represents for existing moral considerations, because “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident…. By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. This is why in his book, “The Madman”, the madman addresses not believers, but atheists — the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order.
The death of God is a way of saying that humans are no longer able to believe in any such cosmic order since they themselves no longer recognize it. The death of God will lead, Nietzsche says, not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic or physical order but also to a rejection of absolute values themselves — to the rejection of belief in an objective and universal moral law, binding upon all individuals. In this manner, the loss of an absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism. This nihilism is what Nietzsche worked to find a solution for by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. This meant, to Nietzsche, looking for foundations that went deeper than the Christian values beyond which most Christians refuse to look.
Nietzsche believed that the majority of men did not recognize (or refused to acknowledge) this death out of the deepest-seated fear or angst. Therefore, when the death did begin to become widely acknowledged, people would despair and nihilism would become rampant, as well as the relativistic belief that human will is a law unto itself—anything goes and all is permitted. This is partly why Nietzsche saw Christianity as nihilistic. To Nietzsche, nihilism is the consequence of any idealistic philosophical system, because all idealisms suffer from the same weakness as Christian morality—that there is no “foundation” to build on. He therefore describes himself as “a ’subterranean man’ at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines.”
Nietzsche believed there could be positive possibilities for humans without God. Relinquishing the belief in God opens the way for human’s creative abilities to fully develop. The Christian God, with his arbitrary commands and prohibitions, would no longer stand in the way, so human beings might stop turning their eyes toward a supernatural realm and begin to acknowledge the value of this world. The recognition that “God is dead” would be like a blank canvas. It is a freedom to become something new, different, creative — a freedom to be something without being forced to accept the baggage of the past…
3 commentsPlanets Orbiting Other Stars and Heresy
March 19, 2008. The epical passing of the visionary sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke on that day (the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Expedition to Earth) seemed to have set the universe ablaze with a number of five gamma ray outbursts recorded across the nightsky. the most prominent of these cosmic bursts was recorded at 2:12 EDT by NASA’s Swift satellite. it was an afterglow of GRB 080319B. interestingly, the gamma ray outburst happened 7.5 billion years ago, half of the present age of the universe. gamma ray outbursts are the most luminuous explosions in the universe since the Big Bang and this happens when a star runs out of nuclear fuel and collapses into a black hole or a neutron star, emitting intense jets of gamma rays and energetic particles. the afterglow was 2.5 million times brighter than the brightest supernova explosion ever recorded. it was visible to the naked eye.
amazing! it took 7.5 billion years for that light to reach us. such an astounding cosmic event for a civilization, with an average life span of 70 years, to witness. that event happened when the universe was still younger; current observation suggests that the age of the universe is about 13.73 billion years, with an uncertainty of about 120 million years.
i am a passionate admirer and follower of astronomy, astrophysics and their interdisciplinary branches. news and breakthroughs like, gamma-ray outbursts, black holes, parallel universes, afterglow of the big bang, cosmic neutrino background, etc. deals me an astonishment that can almost be equaled to the excitement a little boy feels when he is opening up a present on his fifth birthday.
the first news of planets being detected orbiting around other stars (other than our own Sun) in the 1990’s such as the published paper which suggested that a planet orbited the star Gamma Cephei offered me a glimpse of the interesting future of astronomy.
“if only giordano bruno were alive today, he would not have to be the first martyr of science, dying in such a tragic death”, i thought back then.
giordano bruno was an italian philosopher, a cosmologist, and a priest in the 1600’s who was sentenced to death by execution by Pope Clement VIII as a punishment for the numerous charges against him - blasphemy, “holding erroneous opinions on basic doctrines of philosophy and cosmology”, immoral conduct and heresy. he was offered a way of saving his life through a full recantation of his beliefs, but he refused.
giordano bruno claimed “the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity”. he believed there were “other worlds” in the vast emptiness of the nightsky, planets like the earth orbiting around other stars. the Church overlooked this to be a form of heresy. he was burned to death, naked, his tongue in a gag, at the center of Campo dei Fiori in Rome on February 17, 1600.
To date, there have 277 extrasolar planets found (or exoplanets) orbiting other stars across the universe. Now, exoplanet research is centered more on whether these extrasolar planets can support life.
On March 20, 2008, a paper was published in Nature announcing a breakthrough in the attempt to detect signs of life on planets beyond our solar system. Methane, composed of hydrogen and carbon, which has been detected on most planets in the solar system but never on a world outside the solar system, has been detected in the atmosphere of Jupiter-sized planet HD 189733b located 63 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula. it is virtually impossible to find life(as we know it) on planet HD 189733b for its orbit to its star is nearer than the orbit of mercury to our sun. traces of methane on the atmosphere of a planet is indicative of biological or non-biological processes occuring on the surface of the planet itself.
modern-day astronomy have gone a long way since the time when early astronomers thought that the basaltic plains of the Moon were bodies of water or seas.
even if takes 7.5 billion years for the knowledge coming from the stars to reach us, like the famous gamma ray outburst a few days ago, our search for truth and the purpose of our existence in the universe will always fuel us. and we have to keep moving on. afterall the question of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe is a “verifiable hypothesis” and therefore is a “valid scientific inquiry”.
somehow, we know we will get there. we must get there, or else.
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