I finally got my 7″ record of “A Glorious Dawn” today in the mail. If you haven’t seen the video, you must watch it now. It’s a wonderful song composed of auto-tuned voice clips of Carl Sagan speaking in Cosmos. It is a moving song I mus say. You can get the 7″ records from Third Man Records for $6 each including shipping if you’re in the US. “A Glorious Dawn” was created by John Boswell for The Symphony of Science a “musical project…designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.”

Here is what the record looks like. Click the image to see the large version.

Here are the lyrics:

[Sagan]
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has its own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

[Hawking]
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas

[Sagan]
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we’ve waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting

Yesterday, my good friend sent me a Google Wave invite. Excited, I quickly checked my Gmail in anticipation for an invite e-mail. There was no such e-mail. Turns out once you get invited it takes awhile for Google to actually send and activate the Google Wave invite. Needless to say, I’m going crazy. I’ve been anticipating this for so long. Drooling over demo videos has been a recent pastime of mine. Where is my invite already!?

Currently, I am reading Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins. A long while ago I read it once, but I fail to recollect much of it.

Here is the passage the book’s title comes from:

What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?
What for the sage, old Apollonius?
Upon her aching forehead be there hung
The leaves of willow and of adder’s tongue;
And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.
John Keats, Lamia (Part II), 1818

Have you ever seen your pupil dilate and contract from up close? I highly recommend you try it. While very close to a mirror, shine a light into your eye and turn it off. Then turn it on again. Then turn it off. Observe your pupil expanding and contracting. Look at your eye muscles move. At times it can be unsettling, but it is worth it. I highly recommend it.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

I don’t know if this is my favorite picture ever, but, I always manage to enjoy it when I see it. The composition is just wonderful. The original was color but I can’t find it. The copy of this image was corrupted to the thumbnail preview is in color, but when actually viewing the file all I get is black and white. It’s still a lovely image though. It is by Talin Gharibian, an acquaintance of mine and currently an art student at UCLA.

From June 25 to June 28th I will be in Amherst, NY (next to Buffalo) attending the Center for Inquiry Student Leadership Conference. I’ve attended the last three confrences and they have all been a blast! For this year’s conference, I will be attending not as a student, but as a speaker! My talk’s title will be Optimal Online Outreach Opportunities (my amazing alliterative abilities are astounding). In my talk I will discuss the best ways to use the internet to gain group members and various methods to accomplish this. I hope it turns out well!

I just updated and upgraded the BASS site. The BASS site, like this site, runs on Wordpress. Wordpress is a joy to use. It is a great CMS for greating a student group website. The many plug-ins, themes, and user inerface make it the best blogging CMS out there. You can read a post on the BASS site detailing some of the technical aspects of the update process here

For the past year or so the only shoes I have bought were asics. Specifically, I’ve been buying asics Budokan. They are friggin’ amazing shoes. They look fantastic and feel great. Not to mention they’re really sexy too. I have three pairs. My first were the ones I bought are pictured here. I still have them after more than a year of wear. They look old and beat up, but they do their job.

And so I did.

I was walking up to the UCLA dorms and saw this girl and her backpack and it really did make me cheer up. I should have thanked her. Alas, I am a shy man.