atheism

Happy very monumentally important arbitrarily chosen date marking the anniversary of the Bris Mila of the Made Up Son of the Great Imaginary Friend, even though the Big Book of Made Up Stuff kind of hints at, and history records, that the census Joe was bringing himself and his Mysteriously Knocked-Up wife Mary...

News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today.

Quite a big update today, lots of interesting things...

If the world were reduced to the size of an apple, the crust of the earth—the solid ground and seemingly immutable mountains that we take for granted—would be thinner than the apple's skin. Below that, a seething sphere of liquid rock diabolically roiling at a searing 1,000 °C (give or take 300 °C.) In reality our "solid ground" is the pudding skin on fiery death. When it skids a tiny bit or slight wisps of nearly nothing breathe through, these are the disasters that level cities and the magically minded point to as the power of omnipotent gods.

The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time.