SLOW

I rarely have intense dreams that I can remember, but since I moved house, two weeks ago, I've had two.

The second dream, last night, was about me as a fugitive, hunted by the cops all through Johannesburg. I'm not sure what I did, but it wasn't too serious, seeing as there weren't a lot of people after me and I managed to escape several times using different strategies each time. I was hiding in friends' houses, in their gardens, I ran around, ducked and weaved, changed clothes, wore disguises, kept to the shadows, deceived the authorities, tricked them into allowing me access to resources that would help me escape again and again.

The first dream was more intense. There was a greater feeling of futility. It was about the move itself. Similar to what actually happened, just exaggerated. I had to move all my boxes and stuff from one house to another, just down the road. But the more stuff I moved the more there was to move. Rooms appeared out of nowhere, filled with other items to move. It was getting more and more impossible. So I enlisted the help of almost every person I could think of. Just so I could make some progress. Offering them bribes, but all for naught. The more people came to help, the less they helped, and stuff just piled up in the evergrowing house.

I even tried waking up, having a smoke, but I just fell back into the dream.

Times will change. The move is almost finished. I must just figure out why the authorities are after me!

No, I'm not talking about Jacob Zuma. I'm refering to our fellow mammals that didn't make it past the last ice age. Seeing as we've had about 10 millenia of relative warmth, and the next ice age can't be far away, especially at the current levels of human planet interaction, perhaps it would be auspicious to remember those that only left behind faint traces of their existence.

The most famous of animals that became extinct at least 10000 years ago must surely be the mammoth. They came in various forms, including woolly and pygmy, and so many have been found that some have even been eaten (frozen food) by contemporary hungry mammals.

Another extinct favourite is the smilodon, better known as a sabre-toothed cat. With teeth reaching 17 cm, a body weight twice that of a lion, they must have been impressively nasty characters. And, like those that now live in Los Angeles, they seemed to have a fondness for tar pits.

I suspect smilodons might've needed their ferocious teeth to crack the shell of the glyptodon. This carsized herbivore had an armourplated turtlelike shell, a protective skullcap and a useful proboscis. Related to sloths, they had a top speed of a few kilometers per hour.

The megatherium was a giant sloth, that, due to its gigantic claws, had to step on the side of its feet when it walked upright. They weighed about as much as elephants and are rumoured to still be in hiding in the Amazon jungle.

There are numerous others other extinct mammals that I won't list here, but I would like to suggest that we hurry up and start cloning and breeding them - before the next ice age hits and we sunloving mammals find ourselves, like we found them, encased and preserved in death for the amusement of the next age.

It seems as though there is increasing tolerance of the concept of longlost civilisations, the most famous of which must surely be Atlantis. What I find most interesting (at this point in time) is the origin of the legend.

The first respectable author to note the mythical island's existence is Plato in his text Critias, which consists of a dialogue between Critias, Socrates and two others. Although this work is unfinished it has formed the basis for the explosion of interest in the possibility that there might have been reasonably advanced civilisations long before our time.

Project Gutenberg provides an English translation of Plato's text. The text is written in Plato's regular conservational style and, being an unfinished and short text, should be read by anyone with an interest in classic civilisations, deluges or unsolved mysteries.

Have you ever wondered how astronomers can just look at a star, or any other distant object, and know exactly what combination of elements it's made of? The trick of how this is done was partly explained to me in John Gribbin's Deep Simplicity, and completely elucidated by Simon Singh in the equally excellent Big Bang.

The answer lies with spectroscopy: All you do is take the light wave you captured, spread it so you can see the whole spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet, and look for the missing bits. Every element has a unique bunch of lines that are missing that identify it precisely. For example, one element might miss a bit of red and a bit of green, whereas another might miss a bit of red and a bit of violet.

These missing lines are known as Fraunhofer lines or absorbtion lines. They provide clues about a multitude of the properties of the object being observed. The reason these lines are missing is because the elements absorb or decrease the intensity of a particular part of the spectrum.

Follow this link for a good visual illustration of spectroscopy.

Anyone looking for interesting meta-scientific reading will be well advised to seek out the books of Gribbin and Singh. And next time you look at the sun, know that some hydrogen and helium have already been filtered out and if you look really (really!) carefully, you might be able to notice it.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that I have just completed my 10000th move on RedHotPawn as Sl64w, with 218 victories, 19 draws and 95 losses, since joining 4 years ago.



This is by far my favourite chess site and I would like to thank and applaud the creators for their vision and commitment.