Author Archives: tacit

The wonder of the physical universe: Naica, Mexico

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Naica, Mexico is home to a number of lead and silver mines. It is also home to a geological formation that appears to be unique in all the world: the Crystal Cave of Giants, discovered accidentally by mine workers in 2000.

The Crystal Cave is a gigantic underground formation containing the largest natural crystal formations ever recorded. The cave is superheated by a pocket of subsurface magma, and until recently was entirely flooded with water that was supersaturated with gypsum and other minerals. The combination of high temperature, superheated and supersaturated water, and time (lots of it–about 500,000 years, to be exact) produced one of the most mind-bogglingly beautiful things on earth:

The cave has been pumped dry by mine workers, who accidentally broke into it while mining for lead. It’s still superheated by magma; the temperature within the cave is a steady 122 degrees F with a humidity of over 90%. Explorers in the cave use special chilled suits and breathing masks, and even with this equipment can only remain within it for 15-45 minutes at a time.

The cave is doomed; when the mines are played out over the next few years, the mining companies will stop pumping the water out, and the influx of new, non-supersaturated water will destroy the crystal formations. There’s more about the cave, and more pictures, here.

I love the physical world. There is not a single day of my life that goes by when I am not boggled and awestruck by how magnificent this universe is. Should I live to be ten thousand years old, I will never, ever stop being awestruck by how awesome all of this is. Take a handful of basic particles, make them obey certain fairly simple rules, and the things you end up with are beautiful and magnificent beyond comprehension.

We, as self-aware entities, are the part of the universe that understands itself, and that one simple fact gives us incalculable value. I will never understand the tendency of some people to turn away from the wonders of the physical world into a tiny, feeble make-believe universe that’s a paltry six thousand years old and soon to be rendered obsolete by some invisible man with magic powers who lives up in the sky and spends a great deal of time worrying about what kind of clothes we wear and how we have sex.

The universe is incomprehensibly large and incomprehensibly fine-grained, ancient and mysterious and filled with so much beauty that it’s hard to imagine any person seeing it without being filled with reverence and awe. The more we learn about the physical universe, the more beautiful and magnificent it is. The desire to turn away from understanding the world around us and retreat into an imaginary bestiary of little gods and demons is the desire to turn away from the greatest beauty we can ever hope to bear witness to.

Link O’ the Day: Stark Audio

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A good friend of mine from way back, who is (among other things) an awesome musician, has released an album! You can find out more, and listen to it, on his Web site. He also wrote the music that was on the (short-lived) CD-ROM version of my game Onyx.

DragonCon!

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ZOMG. I’m trying to think of a balanced and reasonable way to describe the past several days. I’d say things like “best con ever” and “the most amazing five days a human being can ever hope to imagine in this life or the next,” but I don’t know if they really convey quite how I feel.

Unfortunately, I’m still totally exhausted (despite about twelve hours’ worth of sleep), and I’m nowhere near cogent enough to be able to write about Dragon*Con. So instead I’ll do something I generally don’t do, and just re-post messages from my Twitter account. The following text is probably not safe for work

Urban Decay: Seattle’s Gasworks Park

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Several weekends ago, zaiah and I went up to Seattle for the weekend. One fo the hilights of the trip while I was there was visiting Gasworks Park, a large public part down on the waterfront, built on the site of an old and long-abandoned coal gasification plant.

We met up with peristaltor while we were out there (and as a side note, if you don’t read his journal, you should–it’s one of the smartest reads on LiveJournal).

The old gasification equipment is still there, slowly crumbling into rust. Some of it is now fenced off, which is a damn shame–I’d love to spend an afternoon with a couple of models and about forty feet of rope out here. I’m told the fences are new; and to some extent, I can kind of understand it–if some damn fool falls off one of these things and busts his head open, I guarantee the first thing he’s going to do is retain a lawyer to sue the city, before he even gets stitched up, even though it’s not “the city” what put his ass up there in the first place.

Anyway, I spent a good bit of time taking pictures, because that’s what I do, and now I’m going to bust your bandwidth, because that’s also what I do.

Clicky here to see more!

Group Sex Meets Information Theory

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A while ago, I got to wondering, as I sometimes do, exactly what makes an orgy. For example, if fifteen people are all in a room having sex, but only within existing partnerships, and there’s no “extra-partner” sex happening, is it an orgy? If four people are all fucking each other, is that an orgy, or is it just a foursome?

As it turns out, the dictionary is of precious little assistance with answering questions like this. I consulted a number of different dictionaries, and got a number of different answers–one said an orgy is five or more people having sex, one said more than two, one said an event dominated by “excessive” sexual activity (whatever the hell that means), and so on.

Now, to me, three people having sex is a threesome; four people having sex is a foursome; it doesn’t get to be an orgy until you’ve got five or more people.

But is a play party an orgy? Clearly not all orgies are play parties, but is a play party an orgy? What about a play party where people aren’t having penetrative sex? How about a mutual masturbation event…is that an orgy? My impulse is to say “no;” it isn’t an orgy unless there are five or more people and there’s fucking going on, so mutual masturbation doesn’t count. (Edit: There are many kinds of sexual activities that aren’t penetrative sex that I would consider to be an orgy, so I’m still not quite sure exactly where the borderline for the definition of “orgy” is.)

From there it was a short intellectual hop to wondering how many different kinds of group sex there are1, and what the relationship between them is.

So I started working on a Venn diagram of group sex. Then I started enlisting the help of all the people around me.

Then I started realizing that some of the potential overlaps are complicated beyond what you might at first think. For example, not all swing parties include group sex, yet most folks would probably think of a swing party as a group sex event.

And it soon became clear that certain rules of geometry2 precluded doing this as a traditional Venn diagram, because it’s not possible to show all the overlaps and exclusions with circles.

So the project got a little more complex.

Anyway, here’s what I came up with: Where group sex intersects with information theory!

Some assumptions I’ve made for this chart:

1. An orgy must involve penetrative sex of some kind (including manual sex) but can not involve all the participants being sexual with one and only one person; a gang bang and an orgy are exclusive, non-overlapping sex.

2. An orgy can never bee a threesome or a foursome.

3. If penetrative sex happens, it is no longer a puppy pile; ergo, orgies and gang bangs exclude puppy piles.

I have the feeling I missed some categories of group sex, though, and I don’t know how universal these assumptions are.

1 As opposed to how many different kinds of sexual activity you can have in a group sex situation, which is a completely different question altogether.

2 Specifically, group theory, about which I know less than what would fit in the white space of a postage stamp.

Yet Another Side Project

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I know there are quite a few Macintosh folks on my flist. The rest of you can move along; nothing to see here.

A lot of folks in the Mac community are familiar with MacFixIt.com, a long-time Mac troubleshooting and forum site that’s been with us for about thirteen years. I have been a MacFixIt forum user for nearly that entire length of time, and managed to rack up just over 12,000 posts during my stay there.

Alas, all good things1 must come to an end; recently, Cnet News bought MacFixIt and closed it down.

Which is a damn shame, because the forums there represented what was arguably, minus a few hiccups, one of the best Macintosh communities on the Web.

So I opened my mouth, which is often foolish, and said hey, wouldn’t it be cool if some enterprising person set up a forum to replace it and we could all move over there? And other folks said hey, great idea, Tacit, when will you have the new place ready for us?

So I am pleased to announce the formation of a brand-new Mac community, Fine Tuned Mac.

Anyone out there who’s interested in a Mac community, I invite you to join us! We don’t bite2, and if you need any troubleshooting help, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more knowledgeable bunch3.

1 Except me, and many of my friends and partners, I hope.

2 Much.

3 Well, us and TechSurvivors, another Mac troubleshooting forum I like and recommend.

Art meets sex

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Back when i was still living in Atlanta, zaiah came out to visit a couple of times. During her last visit, I ended up with what I thought was a nasty cold but which actually turned out to be antibiotic-resistant pneumonia.

Now, I don’t know if you have had any experience with pneumonia, Gentle Reader, but in the likely and fortunate event you have not, I can inform you that it will cause certain biological urges of a licentious nature to wither in much the same way that a snowman wilts under a flamethrower. Which is a damn shame.

Anyway, while I was miserable in bed and sleeping most of the day, zaiah started drawing on me with Magic Markers, and took a picture of the result with my iPhone.

Since then, it’s become something of a standard part of our sex lives. She loves drawing on me, and I love being drawn on…and yes, it is sex. Many things other than the insertion of Tab A into Slot B are sex, legions of horny teenagers who’ve taken Purity Pledges but still want to get their funk on notwithstanding (“you mean if you do me in the ass I’ll still be a virgin? Oh, okay then!”).

I have quite a collection of iPhone photos now, which are all kinda fun and cheerful and which you can see if you don’t mind looking at possibly not-safe-for-work images that might include some portion of my butt

Wow. Just…wow.

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From ashbet…

Artist Kseniya Simonova tells the story of the Nazi invasion of Ukraine, and the effects it had on two young lovers, using nothing but sand and a light table.

The words at the end are variously translated as “You will always be near” or “I’m waiting for you”.

Life in Oregon: Das Beach

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Last weekend, gidget23 invited me to go out to the beach and hang with the local goth/industrial crowd.

Now, I’ve been to beaches before. In fact, I used to live in Tampa, Florida, so I’ve been to beaches that are claimed to be the best beaches in the world before. So I think I can be forgiven for believing that I had some sort of idea what “going to the beach” is like.

I’m not much of a beach person, so the internal dialog went something like “-1 for beach, -27 for getting up at 10 AM to make it happen, +10 for meeting the local goth/industrial peeps, +30 for spending time with gidget23, -1 for not knowing where the place is, +2 for iPhone GPS win, -10 for ‘it’s going to be really cold, dress warmly!’…that adds up to a net positive, so what the hell. Sure!”

Little did I know.

You see, Gentle Reader, they do not do beaches here in the Pacific Northwest the way they do beaches in Florida.

The Pacific Northwest is all about rugged natural scenic beauty. It’s a little silly, in fact, just how beautiful this place is. Imagine, if you will, a temperate rainforest that comes right up to the coast, and stops at the sheer cliff face that marks the beginning of the beach, and…

Yeah. Not like Florida at all.

I sadly neglected to bring my real camera, and had to content myself with the camera in my iPhone. The iPhone camera does a pretty good job with even lighting, but struggles hard with unusual or challening lighting conditions, like backlighting.

Anyway, this is a rock. A big-ass volcanic rock just jutting up out of the beach. It’s probably about two and a half or three stories high at the uppermost point, and my god, is it gorgeous.

   
   

The rock has this really cool planar stress geometry, and fractures in these really interesting cleave patterns. When pieces break off, they’re a bright red rust color inside, which fades to a darker color when it’s exposed. Rich in iron, I reckon.

I hear there’s a big future in iron, though I don’t know why we have to keep changing things all the time. I mean, bronze has been good enough for me, and it was good enough for my father, and this newfangled iron stuff is dangerous and hard to work with, and…

Ahem. Anyway, this chunk of rock is so friggin’ cool that if I had unlimited time, I can see myself dedicating three or four years to learning about geology and chemistry and materials science just so I could understand it better.

And CAVES! Did I mention this beach has caves?

Yes, that’s the entrance to a cave. Not a very big one, but still… Caves! At the beach! How cool is that?

The view from another opening on the other side of the outcropping. This particular cave is underwater at high tide, which is also pretty cool. The 10-year-old me would have been absolutely delighted, dreaming of pirates and lost treasure; the adult me is, if anything, even more delighted.

Caves! At the beach!

This narrow crevasse fissure opens up into a larger chamber beyond; it was a fairly difficult scrabble, but totally worth it. Too dark to get any pics inside; the iPhone camera has no flash.

The view looking down from the top of that big chunk of rock.

The 20-year-old me used to free-climb buildings, which kind of makes the current me shiver sometimes. The 20-year-old me was definitely laughing at the current me with the amount of effort it took to get to the top, but no matter. The current me has a laptop computer and the Internet and a cell phone that’s also a computer, so I think the current me wins.

I like the sand castles arranged like a line marching to the sea.

Okay, seriously, a waterfall at the beach? That’s just scenic beauty overkill. At this point, the landscape is just showing off.

Upstream of the waterfall, and it’s still ridiculously gorgeous.

If I live to be ten thousand years old, I will never stop being awestruck at how awesome life is. One tiny little insignificant speck of a universe vast and magnificent beyond human comprehension, and even that little speck is able to blow my mind with the beauty of the physical universe. How can life ever be anything but a constant celebration of wonder?

I saw a tiny little plant growing up between the stones that tend to litter the base of the cliffs around northwestern beaches, and I just have to say:

More on George Sodini

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My sweetie figmentj has written a well-considered rebuttal to my last post, which I think deserves more attention than being buried in a very long comment thread, so I want to point people at it here.

Edited to add: It was a locked post, but it’s unlocked now.