The Wordsmith's Forge

Here's an article about science and spirituality, sort of. It doesn't have a very wide view of either.

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This article asks if geniuses are real. Gee thanks, assholes. It's not enough to be treated like a vending machine, now you want to play the erasure game. So just to be clear, every species has a range of intelligence, and whatever top portion you want to set is "genius." Sometimes it's pretty smooth and you just pick the top 10% or 1% or whatever. Other times there are sharp peaks and you're better off drawing lines based on those.

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Here's an interesting look at values in pop culture television over 50 years. You can see what goes up and down in importance.

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Today is partly sunny, hot and humid.

I fed the birds.  I've seen sparrows, house finches, a squirrel, and a rabbit.

This is an advance announcement for the Tuesday, July 6, 2021 Poetry Fishbowl. This time the theme will be "Reality is stranger than fiction." I'll be soliciting ideas for historians, explorers, partners, housemates, siblings, parents, teachers, clergy, leaders, superheroes, supervillains, teammates, alien or fantasy species, failure analysts, ethicists, activists, rebels, other people who get into unbelievable situations, researching, revising theories, parenting, teaching, adventuring, leaving your comfort zone, discovering things, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cleaning up messes, cooperating, bartering, taking over in an emergency, saving the day, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, preparing for the worst, expecting the unexpected, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, returning home, the forest primeval, liminal zones, schools, churches, sharehouses, kitchens, campfires, libraries, laboratories, supervillain lairs, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, stores, farmer's markets, starships, alien planets, magical lands, foreign dimensions, other places where the unbelievable happens, puzzling discoveries, sudden surprises, travel mishaps, the buck stops here, trial and error, weird food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, intercultural entanglements, asking for help and getting it, enemies to friends/lovers, interdimensional travel, lab conditions are not field conditions, superpower manifestation, the end of where your framework actually applies, ethics, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

An Army of One is unbelievable by the standards of the Galactic Arms, but it works for the residents.

The Bear Tunnels is an unexpected adventure.

A Conflagration of Dragons has unforseen disasters and cultural upheavals.

The Daughters of the Apocalypse has a jumble of past and present, some of it quite strange.

Eloquent Souls presents a setting where soulmarks are common, but some of the results are puzzling.

Fledgling Grace is about people sprouting angel wings, and the unexpected changes that brings.

Frankenstein's Family features two scientists running a valley in historic Romania, along with a pack of werewolves, a couple of vampires, and a mummy.

Hart's Farm is a free love community with a few really exotic characters.

Monster House is suburban fantasy with a diverse household, where the line between truth and fantasy isn't always clear.

The Moon Door explores a women's chronic pain group and lycanthropy.

One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis follows Shaeth as he works on becoming the God of Drunks.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all trying to get along and figure out how to make a functional society.

Or you can ask for something new.

I have a linkback poem, "Generations of Cooks Past" (17 verses, standalone).

If you're interested, mark the date on your calendar, and please hold actual prompts until the "Poetry Fishbowl Open" post next week. (If you're not available that day, or you live in a time zone that makes it hard to reach me, you can leave advance prompts. I am now.) Meanwhile, if you want to help with promotion, please feel free to link back here or repost this on your blog.

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Whales learned evasive tactics to escape from whaling ships. 

Here's a fuss over someone building the Euro bridges, remarking about places that exist in imagination before reality.

People, please. EVERY place created by people, rather than nature, moved from imagination to reality.  That is how building works.

 ... now has more detail, including a model.

Apparently people are bad at estimating how long things will take and then getting them done.  We might want to stop calling it a disorder and just acknowledge that most humans are bad at it.  Then focus on how to improve as much as we can.

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There are two ways to generate the Hubble constant (the rate at which the universe expands) and they disagree.  One uses data from the early universe, another from the late universe.  Has anyone considered that they might both be right, and the rate was different in the early universe than in the late universe?

In general, if you're not sure what to do, try lots of different things and see which works best.  Get different groups of people coming at it from different angles.  Most importantly, offer the problem to young  mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers who are just entering the field and don't have a dog in the fight yet.  They're more likely to find a solution than the old people who already have a strong stance.

And don't worry too much about it.  You're not going to understand everything about the universe even after you solve this bit.  It's just one more step.  An important step, but not everything.  It's not worth freaking out because you don't have the answer.  You will never have all the answers, and that's what makes it interesting.