A11.Inglish BCEnc. Blauwe Kaas Encyclopedie, Duaal Hermeneuties Kollegium.
Inglish Site.11.
*
TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
*
Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
*
This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
*
Index.
49.Grant Morrison.
50.Diamond.
51.Exolinguism.
52.Revolution vs. Rationalization: The Militarization of the Police and The Death of Rebellion.
*
49.Grant Morrison.
Many years from now, we may have to explain to the comic-crazed children of the world that, originally, the term geek had no superheroic connotations at all. Back in the day, we'll explain, geek referred to one who, finding no communion in the jockish world around him or her, turned inward, to comics, games, coding, the guitar, et al.?infinitely expanding personal pursuits with built-in arcana decipherable only to fellow initiates. To be a geek was to be an outsider, or rather, an insider of an implicitly miniscule community of peers. Today's geeks, on the other hand, are the Iron Man übermenchen of popular culture and heroes of Hollywood blockbusters. And one of those responsible for the shift, for switching the geeks' self-image from that of meek, powerless introvert to their present rock-star-of-the-real-world reality, is Grant Morrison.
Morrison's comic series The Invisibles, which debuted in 1994 and is now considered by some to be the greatest of all time (and cited as an inspiration for, among zillions of other things, The Matrix), tells the story of a secret society of misfits bound together to fight an evil force in a time- and space-spanning continuum, sometimes stopping in contemporary London. Weaving together voodoo, fairy tale, magic, the Marquis de Sade, and more, The Invisibles made a grand synthesis of Morrison's many personal inspirations and beliefs?and made a cult hero of its then 34-year-old author. By injecting himself and his own experiences into a kind of punk rock superhero story, as The Invisibles' bald-headed yogi badass leader, King Mob, Morrison broke the fourth wall, and broke through the format of his medium?just as he'd famously broken through multiple dimensions of space and time during a spiritual reverie on a rooftop in Kathmandu in 1994 that inspired much of the series?to become a kind of sage, a guru, the king of the geeks.
Morrison was born in Glasgow in 1960 and as a boy often accompanied his activist father on protests and illicit sorties onto nuclear missile bases while his father sneaked photos for underground newspapers. While at the all-boys Allan Glen's School in Glasgow, Morrison turned to comic books and relished the way in which their superhero protagonists functioned as surrogates for his own fantasy life. In short order, he began creating his own strips, and by age 17, was getting hired to write his first stories professionally. In the 1980s, Morrison gave up on another early love, playing in a punk band, only to go on to become a charismatic frontman of the comic world with his outré series and his runs writing superhero comics, from Animal Man and Swamp Thing to All-Star Superman and Batman, as well as 1989's Arkham Asylum. From The Invisibles on, Morrison, along with a revolving gang of illustrators who bring his scenarios to life, has put together as wild and as singular a body of work as any writer in any medium?and produced some singularly dark visions of humanity, of which his two newest series, Nameless (Image) and Annihilator (Legendary), may be the darkest yet. "More nihilism," he says, laughing, from which he hopes to yield his optimistic "poetry."
But even if he has created some of the bleakest dystopias in pop culture, Morrison the man is driven by a kind of impish humor and humanism. He half-jokingly believes the dawn of superhumans to be upon us, and he seems to have an insatiable, almost evangelical, need to transmit some of his hard-won hopefulness to the world. This past August, Morrison got on the phone with his friend and fellow comic fiend James Gunn, director of summer's huge hit Guardians of the Galaxy, to talk about fans, films, and that rooftop in Nepal. ?Chris Wallace
JAMES GUNN: Hey, Grant, how you doing, man? Are you in your castle right now?
GRANT MORRISON: Yeah, I'm looking out the window. Scotland is beautiful today. The water is blue. The sky is blue. The sun is shining. It's unbelievable; it's like Disney.
GUNN: When I was a small child, I partially learned to read with comics, in particular with Scamp, about the Lady and the Tramp's male child. That was the prime comic that made me fall in love with comics as a kid. Was there that prime comic for you as a child?
MORRISON: They had this thing, Marvelman, which Alan Moore eventually did a deconstructed version of [later know as Miracleman]. It was just all these weird stories, but with superheroes. That one stays with me forever, from when I could barely read.
GUNN: That's a lot cooler than Scamp.
MORRISON: It's cool at least. [laughs]
GUNN: And then you started writing comics professionally when you were 17 years old?when I was doing beer bongs and riding around on the backs of cars in Missouri. What gave you the balls?
MORRISON: You were living, you were gathering material. I was sitting in the house. I went to boys school, a little, working-class kid from a pretty bad part of town. And I won a scholarship to this really prestigious boys academy. When you're 12 years old, that seems cool, and then when you're 14, you're crying in the fucking walls, and you're thinking, "Where are the girls, where are the girls? Oh, Jesus Christ." But the thing I loved about the boys' school was the sense of rebellion. It was really cool. It was like Lindsay Anderson's If.... [1968]. We climbed out of windows. We destroyed property, and that rebellion was thrilling?it kind of took the place of sexuality.
GUNN: I went to a boys school too. And, for me, it allowed me to put humor at the center of everything.
MORRISON: Absolutely. I don't think people realize that, together, boys just try to make each other laugh all the time. Boys put on silly voices and pretend to be characters. Girls talk about serious shit and relationships and all that stuff. Boys are actually quite primitive; it's really funny and creative.
GUNN: I went to co-ed grade school, and it was really about who excelled in athletics. There's a sort of sexual heat that comes with that. And I didn't give a shit about that by the time I got to high school because I wasn't good at it. [Morrison laughs] But you put yourself out there at 17 as a comic book writer. How did you get discovered?
MORRISON: I was growing up in Thatcher's Britain, and I was desperate. I was a poor kid; my father had been to jail for demonstrating on his political beliefs. So I just wanted to earn a living. And I found a way to use my meager talent to tell stories to earn a living. I got into it really quickly, honestly. It's like punk rock?I was 17 years old and comics were waiting for me. It was a great time to be doing this stuff. I was getting work from a kind of underground Scottish magazine called Near Myths, and then doing some commission work for [Scottish publisher] D.C. Thomson's Starblazer series. I was coming out at the same time as Alan Moore, Peter Milligan, and Bryan Talbot. And everyone was kind of primed?all these British guys had grown up reading American comics and were so primed to get in there and take over and say what they felt about that stuff.
GUNN: When I went to your place in L.A., you were showing me one of your scripts in which you had drawn out all the comic book panels. Every other comic book script I'd seen?Alan Moore's stuff, Marvel stuff?was written out. Is that something that only you do?
MORRISON: I can't speak for the other guys, but I always come at it from the image, from the page, and from the layer, the construction of that thing. When you're writing scripts, do you see the movie? Do you come at it through words or through your vision?
GUNN: When I write a screenplay?and I think it's one of the reason's why it was frustrating for me just to be a screenwriter?I'm not thinking of it in terms of words on a page, I'm thinking in terms of visual images, basically a comic book. I'm thinking of it in a series of shots.
MORRISON: I think that's how David Lynch feels. All of us, we start with an image. We start with this weird subconscious feeling that summons a certain emotion, a certain state of mind ...
GUNN: Writing a comic book series, you're so reliant on whoever the artist is. It truly is collaboration. Is that something that restrains you, or do you feel it frees you up in certain ways?
MORRISON: It depends. I've always been lucky to work with people who are very good. I try to choose my artists when I can. But even when you can't do that, it's someone's take on the story. Remember William Burroughs talked about the "Third Mind"? It's the idea that, when two collaborators come together, they make something more than the sum of their parts. Even when the collaborator isn't exactly on your wavelength, there's always something new conveyed. So I'm not interested in a finished product, I'm interested in the ongoing developmental feeling of projects. Which is why I can never finish anything, really.
GUNN: One of the big reasons that I'm attracted to your work is that it has this through line of meta fiction and postmodernism. Some of the big influences on me have been people like [Jorge Luis] Borges and [Thomas] Pynchon and Donald Barthelme. Are those people you look towards?
MORRISON: Definitely Borges. I haven't read the other guys at all, but I grew up with the idea of the author coming up as a character in his own work. I grew up on [The Singing Detective dramatist] Dennis Potter's television dramas for the BBC.
GUNN: Yeah, he's amazing. He's one of my favorites.
MORRISON: Potter was always putting himself on the front line of his writing. So that was my thing. I don't believe that the fucking Marvel universe exists. But I do believe that in this world we can conjure the most amazing things in two dimensions. So I'm kind of in a reaction to reality: What are we doing here? What's a comic? What's a story? I'm not trying to pretend Peter Parker exists somewhere.
GUNN: In a way, metafiction breaks down the story and makes it less real. But in another respect, by that very breaking down, it actually makes things feel more real than they would to begin with.
MORRISON: I think it acknowledges the power of story to change people's lives. I was quite excited to discover [through personal conversations and comments online] that, in my All-Star Superman ["All-Star Superman #10"], the scene where he saves the little goth kid from suicide has actually saved real lives. That's the only virtue of these ridiculous stories: You can pull out people's feelings and point out how they can get better.
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50.Diamond.
In mineralogy, diamond (/da?(?)m?nd/; from the ancient Greek ?????? ? adámas "unbreakable") is a metastable allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at standard conditions. Diamond is renowned as a material with superlative physical qualities, most of which originate from the strong covalent bonding between its atoms. In particular, diamond has the highest hardness and thermal conductivity of any bulk material. Those properties determine the major industrial application of diamond in cutting and polishing tools and the scientific applications in diamond knives and diamond anvil cells.
Because of its extremely rigid lattice, it can be contaminated by very few types of impurities, such as boron and nitrogen. Small amounts of defects or impurities (about one per million of lattice atoms) color diamond blue (boron), yellow (nitrogen), brown (lattice defects), green (radiation exposure), purple, pink, orange or red. Diamond also has relatively high optical dispersion (ability to disperse light of different colors).
Most natural diamonds are formed at high temperature and pressure at depths of 140 to 190 kilometers (87 to 118 mi) in the Earth's mantle. Carbon-containing minerals provide the carbon source, and the growth occurs over periods from 1 billion to 3.3 billion years (25% to 75% of the age of the Earth). Diamonds are brought close to the Earth's surface through deep volcanic eruptions by a magma, which cools into igneous rocks known as kimberlites and lamproites. Diamonds can also be produced synthetically in a HPHT method which approximately simulates the conditions in the Earth's mantle. An alternative, and completely different growth technique is chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Several non-diamond materials, which include cubic zirconia and silicon carbide and are often called diamond simulants, resemble diamond in appearance and many properties. Special gemological techniques have been developed to distinguish natural, synthetic diamonds and diamond simulants.
A diamond is a transparent crystal of tetrahedrally bonded carbon atoms in a covalent network lattice (sp3) that crystallizes into the diamond lattice which is a variation of the face centered cubic structure. Diamonds have been adapted for many uses because of the material's exceptional physical characteristics. Most notable are its extreme hardness and thermal conductivity (900?2,320 W·m?1·K?1), as well as wide bandgap and high optical dispersion. Above 1,700 °C (1,973 K / 3,583 °F) in vacuum or oxygen-free atmosphere, diamond converts to graphite; in air, transformation starts at ~700 °C. Diamond's ignition point is 720 ? 800 °C in oxygen and 850 ? 1,000 °C in air. Naturally occurring diamonds have a density ranging from 3.15?3.53 g/cm3, with pure diamond close to 3.52 g/cm3. The chemical bonds that hold the carbon atoms in diamonds together are weaker than those in graphite. In diamonds, the bonds form an inflexible three-dimensional lattice, whereas in graphite, the atoms are tightly bonded into sheets, which can slide easily over one another, making the overall structure weaker. In a diamond, each carbon atom is surrounded by neighboring four carbon atoms forming a tetrhedral shaped unit.
Hardness.
Diamond is the hardest known natural material on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, where hardness is defined as resistance to scratching and is graded between 1 (softest) and 10 (hardest). Diamond has a hardness of 10 (hardest) on this scale and is four times harder than corundum, 9 Mohs. Diamond's hardness has been known since antiquity, and is the source of its name.
Diamond hardness depends on its purity, crystalline perfection and orientation: hardness is higher for flawless, pure crystals oriented to the <111> direction (along the longest diagonal of the cubic diamond lattice). Therefore, whereas it might be possible to scratch some diamonds with other materials, such as boron nitride, the hardest diamonds can only be scratched by other diamonds and nanocrystalline diamond aggregates.
The hardness of diamond contributes to its suitability as a gemstone. Because it can only be scratched by other diamonds, it maintains its polish extremely well. Unlike many other gems, it is well-suited to daily wear because of its resistance to scratching?perhaps contributing to its popularity as the preferred gem in engagement or wedding rings, which are often worn every day.
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51.Exolinguism.
Exolinguistics (also called xenolinguistics and astrolinguistics) is the hypothetical study of the language of alien species. The nature and form of such languages remains purely speculative because so far no search for extraterrestrial intelligence projects have detected signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. The possibility of future contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life has made the question of the structure and form of potential alien language a topic of scientific and philosophical discussion.
In addition to creating academic debate, the potential nature of an alien language has also been tackled by science-fiction writers. Some have created fictional languages for their characters to use; others have circumvented the problem by proposing translation devices like the universal translator, or by creating universal languages that all involved species can speak.
Academia.
The question of what form an alien language might take, and whether humans would recognize it as a language if they encountered it, has been approached from several perspectives. Consideration of such questions form part of the linguistics and language studies programs at some universities.
Life on Earth employs a variety of non-verbal methods of communication, and these might provide clues to hypothetical alien language. Amongst humans alone, these include many visual signals such as sign language, body language, facial expression and writing (including pictures), and it is possible that some extraterrestrial species may have no spoken language. Amongst other creatures, there are some which use other forms of communication, such as cuttlefish and chameleons, which can alter their body color in complex ways as a method of communication, and ants and honey bees, which use pheromones to communicate complex messages to other members of their hives.
Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal in a 1960 book described Lincos, a constructed language which includes a dictionary that uses basic mathematics as "common ground" to develop a working vocabulary. Dutch mathematical astronomer and computer scientist Alexander Ollongren defined in 2013 in a book new Lincos as an astrolinguistic system based on constructive logic.
Philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that "if a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him". This is on the grounds that language only acquires meaning through a community of speakers using it as part of their 'form of life' (way of life). Hence beings with a radically different way of life would not be able to make sense of the others' utterances. Later philosophers have similarly argued that the world might be described using radically different and mutually incomprehensible 'conceptual schemes'. In particular, Willard Van Orman Quine considered radical interpretation, that is, how we would go about understanding an unknown language in practice; from this he derived his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, according to which translation gets less and less determinate the more abstract the concepts being translated are.
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52.Revolution vs. Rationalization: The Militarization of the Police and The Death of Rebellion.
Revolution vs. Rationalization: The Militarization of the Police and The Death of Rebellion.
Considering my audience, I started reading up on classic poets and philosophers and found myself revisiting some of my favorite English Philosophers to get a handle on America?s current events. One of these sages, the Philosopher Jagger once said in 1968 that ?in sleepy London town there?s just no place for a street fighting man.?
That was 44 years ago. That sleepy London Town is now the entire American landscape, and the street fighting man has not been displaced by some massively oppressive police force, totalitarian government, private death squad or even overfunded espionage tactics. It was us. We are so afraid of true revolution, or even change, that we have conditioned ourselves to shrink back from any indication of it. Our intrepid philosopher goes on to say that ?where I live the game to play is compromise solution.? In these darkening days we?ll be lucky if we get that.
The most visceral evidence of this has been the aggressive, blatant, and mostly unnoticed Militarization of the Police. People criticized Boston PD when they rolled out armored vehicles and SWAT teams in the wake of the Boston Bombing of 2013, but there happened to be a clear and present threat to the security of the city. I remember because I was there. The feeling of unrest, of panic, that dizzying discomfort of sitting in a chair with one leg that?s just too short. Fast forward to Ferguson in 2014. Tear gas, Molotov Cocktails, riot gear, assault rifles trained on unarmed civilians, rubber bullets fired into crowds that included children? All of this because yet another policeman murdered yet another unarmed young black man in the street and gave no real answers and made no real effort to rectify the situation. The people of Ferguson, to their credit, were having none of it. Peaceful protests were met with armed officers and things escalated into all out madness in the streets. The eyes of the nation were fixed on Ferguson, and what did we see?
?Those people need to stop making trouble.?
?Why would you loot from your own community? How stupid.?
?How come when a white person gets killed by the cops it never makes the news??
?I wish they?d stop making this a race issue.?
No one wonders why the police department is armed well enough to march into Fallujah, or why they?re pointing loaded weapons at unarmed civilians, or why a town like Ferguson needs armored vehicles and tanks in the first place. We don?t blink because they?re the police. The uniform represents authority and no one here wants to rock the boat. As not only a citizen of this country, but a veteran of the ?War on Terror,? I find it absolutely disgusting that the organization meant to ?protect and serve? private citizens is being given War Machines designed to maim and kill and drive people into caves.
In January of this year the Pentagon gave away 13,000 armored trucks. 13,000 trucks each worth $500,000 out the gate. One department that snatched one up was the Ohio State University Campus police in my home state.
MRAP vehicles are also being given away to people who don?t even remotely need one. In High Springs, Florida the police department received one of these Christmas Presents and can you guess how many officers are on the force there? 12.
Not only are these men using military equipment, but they don?t have the military training to use it in the first place. The more I talk to police the more I find them discontent with the way things are run. Officers instructing firearms classes who have never been in a live-fire situation, desk jockeys who happen to have a hard-on for violence and noise. The saltier cops who have been on the beat (and more likely to be streetwise and rational) are slower to be promoted, and like anywhere office politics rule the day. It is almost a universal truth that military veterans are consistently disappointed with ?more of the same? in their jobs as cops. A lot of the police know that there is a deep and troubling flaw in our system, and a vast number of citizens know it too, so why are we all so goddamned mousy and quiet about it?
Where is our sense of pride? The fire in our bellies that allow us to join together and rise up against forces we know to be a threat to all that is good in the world? It has been extinguished by years of subversion and cowardice.
Rebellion has to be appropriated by Hollywood to look like James Dean or Steve McQueen, all leather jackets, sunglasses and engine maintenance. We are so pacified by thinking that THAT is rebellion that we?ve lost the true meaning. Anyone who truly rebels against our delicate tendencies is broken, fucked, and scattered across the earth in quick succession. Rebellion isn?t a sense of being ?cool,? rebels hit the books before they hit the streets. We have to be well read and informed in order to take truth to power, it?s more than just posing on a silver screen or bitching about the patriarchy on social media. That is not social combat. The Great Failure of the 1960s is that we were afraid to go on. No real reward came after so much blood and sacrifice. But we can be great again, through knowledge, understanding, will power, and the strength to take no shit from anyone.
I hear too many people talk of war who have never been and will never understand what it really is. Too many of my fellow servicemen and women have seen its horrors, and the last thing we need is that military mindset and use of force here at home. We sacrificed so much so that it didn?t come to that. With Fallujah back in the hands of terrorists, and tanks rolling down suburban streets in the US, some of us ask each other ?was all of it for nothing??
So what can a poor boy do? He can read. He can take the lessons of Thoreau, of Thomas Paine, of Che Guevara, of Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Aaron Swartz, Julian Assange, and Muhammad Ali. He can arm himself in the best way possible: with knowledge. Understanding of facts and truth are the only way to ensure the survival of what we hold dear in this country and in every country around the world. Armed men can kill flesh, but not ideas. Ideas don?t bleed, they don?t get tired, they never surrender under any circumstance, they survive for generations and become more powerful as they go on. In order to re-evaluate how we police ourselves, we must first recognize ourselves and value ourselves instead of making excuses for our oppressors. A revolution can start anywhere. In a garage, in a bedroom, in a courtroom, a library, a basement, a computer lab, a stage a boxing ring, anywhere! The time is now. Don?t post it, live it. Change takes place on concrete.
*
Inglish Site.11.
*
TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
*
Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
*
This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
*
Index.
49.Grant Morrison.
50.Diamond.
51.Exolinguism.
52.Revolution vs. Rationalization: The Militarization of the Police and The Death of Rebellion.
*
49.Grant Morrison.
Many years from now, we may have to explain to the comic-crazed children of the world that, originally, the term geek had no superheroic connotations at all. Back in the day, we'll explain, geek referred to one who, finding no communion in the jockish world around him or her, turned inward, to comics, games, coding, the guitar, et al.?infinitely expanding personal pursuits with built-in arcana decipherable only to fellow initiates. To be a geek was to be an outsider, or rather, an insider of an implicitly miniscule community of peers. Today's geeks, on the other hand, are the Iron Man übermenchen of popular culture and heroes of Hollywood blockbusters. And one of those responsible for the shift, for switching the geeks' self-image from that of meek, powerless introvert to their present rock-star-of-the-real-world reality, is Grant Morrison.
Morrison's comic series The Invisibles, which debuted in 1994 and is now considered by some to be the greatest of all time (and cited as an inspiration for, among zillions of other things, The Matrix), tells the story of a secret society of misfits bound together to fight an evil force in a time- and space-spanning continuum, sometimes stopping in contemporary London. Weaving together voodoo, fairy tale, magic, the Marquis de Sade, and more, The Invisibles made a grand synthesis of Morrison's many personal inspirations and beliefs?and made a cult hero of its then 34-year-old author. By injecting himself and his own experiences into a kind of punk rock superhero story, as The Invisibles' bald-headed yogi badass leader, King Mob, Morrison broke the fourth wall, and broke through the format of his medium?just as he'd famously broken through multiple dimensions of space and time during a spiritual reverie on a rooftop in Kathmandu in 1994 that inspired much of the series?to become a kind of sage, a guru, the king of the geeks.
Morrison was born in Glasgow in 1960 and as a boy often accompanied his activist father on protests and illicit sorties onto nuclear missile bases while his father sneaked photos for underground newspapers. While at the all-boys Allan Glen's School in Glasgow, Morrison turned to comic books and relished the way in which their superhero protagonists functioned as surrogates for his own fantasy life. In short order, he began creating his own strips, and by age 17, was getting hired to write his first stories professionally. In the 1980s, Morrison gave up on another early love, playing in a punk band, only to go on to become a charismatic frontman of the comic world with his outré series and his runs writing superhero comics, from Animal Man and Swamp Thing to All-Star Superman and Batman, as well as 1989's Arkham Asylum. From The Invisibles on, Morrison, along with a revolving gang of illustrators who bring his scenarios to life, has put together as wild and as singular a body of work as any writer in any medium?and produced some singularly dark visions of humanity, of which his two newest series, Nameless (Image) and Annihilator (Legendary), may be the darkest yet. "More nihilism," he says, laughing, from which he hopes to yield his optimistic "poetry."
But even if he has created some of the bleakest dystopias in pop culture, Morrison the man is driven by a kind of impish humor and humanism. He half-jokingly believes the dawn of superhumans to be upon us, and he seems to have an insatiable, almost evangelical, need to transmit some of his hard-won hopefulness to the world. This past August, Morrison got on the phone with his friend and fellow comic fiend James Gunn, director of summer's huge hit Guardians of the Galaxy, to talk about fans, films, and that rooftop in Nepal. ?Chris Wallace
JAMES GUNN: Hey, Grant, how you doing, man? Are you in your castle right now?
GRANT MORRISON: Yeah, I'm looking out the window. Scotland is beautiful today. The water is blue. The sky is blue. The sun is shining. It's unbelievable; it's like Disney.
GUNN: When I was a small child, I partially learned to read with comics, in particular with Scamp, about the Lady and the Tramp's male child. That was the prime comic that made me fall in love with comics as a kid. Was there that prime comic for you as a child?
MORRISON: They had this thing, Marvelman, which Alan Moore eventually did a deconstructed version of [later know as Miracleman]. It was just all these weird stories, but with superheroes. That one stays with me forever, from when I could barely read.
GUNN: That's a lot cooler than Scamp.
MORRISON: It's cool at least. [laughs]
GUNN: And then you started writing comics professionally when you were 17 years old?when I was doing beer bongs and riding around on the backs of cars in Missouri. What gave you the balls?
MORRISON: You were living, you were gathering material. I was sitting in the house. I went to boys school, a little, working-class kid from a pretty bad part of town. And I won a scholarship to this really prestigious boys academy. When you're 12 years old, that seems cool, and then when you're 14, you're crying in the fucking walls, and you're thinking, "Where are the girls, where are the girls? Oh, Jesus Christ." But the thing I loved about the boys' school was the sense of rebellion. It was really cool. It was like Lindsay Anderson's If.... [1968]. We climbed out of windows. We destroyed property, and that rebellion was thrilling?it kind of took the place of sexuality.
GUNN: I went to a boys school too. And, for me, it allowed me to put humor at the center of everything.
MORRISON: Absolutely. I don't think people realize that, together, boys just try to make each other laugh all the time. Boys put on silly voices and pretend to be characters. Girls talk about serious shit and relationships and all that stuff. Boys are actually quite primitive; it's really funny and creative.
GUNN: I went to co-ed grade school, and it was really about who excelled in athletics. There's a sort of sexual heat that comes with that. And I didn't give a shit about that by the time I got to high school because I wasn't good at it. [Morrison laughs] But you put yourself out there at 17 as a comic book writer. How did you get discovered?
MORRISON: I was growing up in Thatcher's Britain, and I was desperate. I was a poor kid; my father had been to jail for demonstrating on his political beliefs. So I just wanted to earn a living. And I found a way to use my meager talent to tell stories to earn a living. I got into it really quickly, honestly. It's like punk rock?I was 17 years old and comics were waiting for me. It was a great time to be doing this stuff. I was getting work from a kind of underground Scottish magazine called Near Myths, and then doing some commission work for [Scottish publisher] D.C. Thomson's Starblazer series. I was coming out at the same time as Alan Moore, Peter Milligan, and Bryan Talbot. And everyone was kind of primed?all these British guys had grown up reading American comics and were so primed to get in there and take over and say what they felt about that stuff.
GUNN: When I went to your place in L.A., you were showing me one of your scripts in which you had drawn out all the comic book panels. Every other comic book script I'd seen?Alan Moore's stuff, Marvel stuff?was written out. Is that something that only you do?
MORRISON: I can't speak for the other guys, but I always come at it from the image, from the page, and from the layer, the construction of that thing. When you're writing scripts, do you see the movie? Do you come at it through words or through your vision?
GUNN: When I write a screenplay?and I think it's one of the reason's why it was frustrating for me just to be a screenwriter?I'm not thinking of it in terms of words on a page, I'm thinking in terms of visual images, basically a comic book. I'm thinking of it in a series of shots.
MORRISON: I think that's how David Lynch feels. All of us, we start with an image. We start with this weird subconscious feeling that summons a certain emotion, a certain state of mind ...
GUNN: Writing a comic book series, you're so reliant on whoever the artist is. It truly is collaboration. Is that something that restrains you, or do you feel it frees you up in certain ways?
MORRISON: It depends. I've always been lucky to work with people who are very good. I try to choose my artists when I can. But even when you can't do that, it's someone's take on the story. Remember William Burroughs talked about the "Third Mind"? It's the idea that, when two collaborators come together, they make something more than the sum of their parts. Even when the collaborator isn't exactly on your wavelength, there's always something new conveyed. So I'm not interested in a finished product, I'm interested in the ongoing developmental feeling of projects. Which is why I can never finish anything, really.
GUNN: One of the big reasons that I'm attracted to your work is that it has this through line of meta fiction and postmodernism. Some of the big influences on me have been people like [Jorge Luis] Borges and [Thomas] Pynchon and Donald Barthelme. Are those people you look towards?
MORRISON: Definitely Borges. I haven't read the other guys at all, but I grew up with the idea of the author coming up as a character in his own work. I grew up on [The Singing Detective dramatist] Dennis Potter's television dramas for the BBC.
GUNN: Yeah, he's amazing. He's one of my favorites.
MORRISON: Potter was always putting himself on the front line of his writing. So that was my thing. I don't believe that the fucking Marvel universe exists. But I do believe that in this world we can conjure the most amazing things in two dimensions. So I'm kind of in a reaction to reality: What are we doing here? What's a comic? What's a story? I'm not trying to pretend Peter Parker exists somewhere.
GUNN: In a way, metafiction breaks down the story and makes it less real. But in another respect, by that very breaking down, it actually makes things feel more real than they would to begin with.
MORRISON: I think it acknowledges the power of story to change people's lives. I was quite excited to discover [through personal conversations and comments online] that, in my All-Star Superman ["All-Star Superman #10"], the scene where he saves the little goth kid from suicide has actually saved real lives. That's the only virtue of these ridiculous stories: You can pull out people's feelings and point out how they can get better.
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50.Diamond.
In mineralogy, diamond (/da?(?)m?nd/; from the ancient Greek ?????? ? adámas "unbreakable") is a metastable allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at standard conditions. Diamond is renowned as a material with superlative physical qualities, most of which originate from the strong covalent bonding between its atoms. In particular, diamond has the highest hardness and thermal conductivity of any bulk material. Those properties determine the major industrial application of diamond in cutting and polishing tools and the scientific applications in diamond knives and diamond anvil cells.
Because of its extremely rigid lattice, it can be contaminated by very few types of impurities, such as boron and nitrogen. Small amounts of defects or impurities (about one per million of lattice atoms) color diamond blue (boron), yellow (nitrogen), brown (lattice defects), green (radiation exposure), purple, pink, orange or red. Diamond also has relatively high optical dispersion (ability to disperse light of different colors).
Most natural diamonds are formed at high temperature and pressure at depths of 140 to 190 kilometers (87 to 118 mi) in the Earth's mantle. Carbon-containing minerals provide the carbon source, and the growth occurs over periods from 1 billion to 3.3 billion years (25% to 75% of the age of the Earth). Diamonds are brought close to the Earth's surface through deep volcanic eruptions by a magma, which cools into igneous rocks known as kimberlites and lamproites. Diamonds can also be produced synthetically in a HPHT method which approximately simulates the conditions in the Earth's mantle. An alternative, and completely different growth technique is chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Several non-diamond materials, which include cubic zirconia and silicon carbide and are often called diamond simulants, resemble diamond in appearance and many properties. Special gemological techniques have been developed to distinguish natural, synthetic diamonds and diamond simulants.
A diamond is a transparent crystal of tetrahedrally bonded carbon atoms in a covalent network lattice (sp3) that crystallizes into the diamond lattice which is a variation of the face centered cubic structure. Diamonds have been adapted for many uses because of the material's exceptional physical characteristics. Most notable are its extreme hardness and thermal conductivity (900?2,320 W·m?1·K?1), as well as wide bandgap and high optical dispersion. Above 1,700 °C (1,973 K / 3,583 °F) in vacuum or oxygen-free atmosphere, diamond converts to graphite; in air, transformation starts at ~700 °C. Diamond's ignition point is 720 ? 800 °C in oxygen and 850 ? 1,000 °C in air. Naturally occurring diamonds have a density ranging from 3.15?3.53 g/cm3, with pure diamond close to 3.52 g/cm3. The chemical bonds that hold the carbon atoms in diamonds together are weaker than those in graphite. In diamonds, the bonds form an inflexible three-dimensional lattice, whereas in graphite, the atoms are tightly bonded into sheets, which can slide easily over one another, making the overall structure weaker. In a diamond, each carbon atom is surrounded by neighboring four carbon atoms forming a tetrhedral shaped unit.
Hardness.
Diamond is the hardest known natural material on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, where hardness is defined as resistance to scratching and is graded between 1 (softest) and 10 (hardest). Diamond has a hardness of 10 (hardest) on this scale and is four times harder than corundum, 9 Mohs. Diamond's hardness has been known since antiquity, and is the source of its name.
Diamond hardness depends on its purity, crystalline perfection and orientation: hardness is higher for flawless, pure crystals oriented to the <111> direction (along the longest diagonal of the cubic diamond lattice). Therefore, whereas it might be possible to scratch some diamonds with other materials, such as boron nitride, the hardest diamonds can only be scratched by other diamonds and nanocrystalline diamond aggregates.
The hardness of diamond contributes to its suitability as a gemstone. Because it can only be scratched by other diamonds, it maintains its polish extremely well. Unlike many other gems, it is well-suited to daily wear because of its resistance to scratching?perhaps contributing to its popularity as the preferred gem in engagement or wedding rings, which are often worn every day.
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51.Exolinguism.
Exolinguistics (also called xenolinguistics and astrolinguistics) is the hypothetical study of the language of alien species. The nature and form of such languages remains purely speculative because so far no search for extraterrestrial intelligence projects have detected signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. The possibility of future contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life has made the question of the structure and form of potential alien language a topic of scientific and philosophical discussion.
In addition to creating academic debate, the potential nature of an alien language has also been tackled by science-fiction writers. Some have created fictional languages for their characters to use; others have circumvented the problem by proposing translation devices like the universal translator, or by creating universal languages that all involved species can speak.
Academia.
The question of what form an alien language might take, and whether humans would recognize it as a language if they encountered it, has been approached from several perspectives. Consideration of such questions form part of the linguistics and language studies programs at some universities.
Life on Earth employs a variety of non-verbal methods of communication, and these might provide clues to hypothetical alien language. Amongst humans alone, these include many visual signals such as sign language, body language, facial expression and writing (including pictures), and it is possible that some extraterrestrial species may have no spoken language. Amongst other creatures, there are some which use other forms of communication, such as cuttlefish and chameleons, which can alter their body color in complex ways as a method of communication, and ants and honey bees, which use pheromones to communicate complex messages to other members of their hives.
Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal in a 1960 book described Lincos, a constructed language which includes a dictionary that uses basic mathematics as "common ground" to develop a working vocabulary. Dutch mathematical astronomer and computer scientist Alexander Ollongren defined in 2013 in a book new Lincos as an astrolinguistic system based on constructive logic.
Philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that "if a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him". This is on the grounds that language only acquires meaning through a community of speakers using it as part of their 'form of life' (way of life). Hence beings with a radically different way of life would not be able to make sense of the others' utterances. Later philosophers have similarly argued that the world might be described using radically different and mutually incomprehensible 'conceptual schemes'. In particular, Willard Van Orman Quine considered radical interpretation, that is, how we would go about understanding an unknown language in practice; from this he derived his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, according to which translation gets less and less determinate the more abstract the concepts being translated are.
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52.Revolution vs. Rationalization: The Militarization of the Police and The Death of Rebellion.
Revolution vs. Rationalization: The Militarization of the Police and The Death of Rebellion.
Considering my audience, I started reading up on classic poets and philosophers and found myself revisiting some of my favorite English Philosophers to get a handle on America?s current events. One of these sages, the Philosopher Jagger once said in 1968 that ?in sleepy London town there?s just no place for a street fighting man.?
That was 44 years ago. That sleepy London Town is now the entire American landscape, and the street fighting man has not been displaced by some massively oppressive police force, totalitarian government, private death squad or even overfunded espionage tactics. It was us. We are so afraid of true revolution, or even change, that we have conditioned ourselves to shrink back from any indication of it. Our intrepid philosopher goes on to say that ?where I live the game to play is compromise solution.? In these darkening days we?ll be lucky if we get that.
The most visceral evidence of this has been the aggressive, blatant, and mostly unnoticed Militarization of the Police. People criticized Boston PD when they rolled out armored vehicles and SWAT teams in the wake of the Boston Bombing of 2013, but there happened to be a clear and present threat to the security of the city. I remember because I was there. The feeling of unrest, of panic, that dizzying discomfort of sitting in a chair with one leg that?s just too short. Fast forward to Ferguson in 2014. Tear gas, Molotov Cocktails, riot gear, assault rifles trained on unarmed civilians, rubber bullets fired into crowds that included children? All of this because yet another policeman murdered yet another unarmed young black man in the street and gave no real answers and made no real effort to rectify the situation. The people of Ferguson, to their credit, were having none of it. Peaceful protests were met with armed officers and things escalated into all out madness in the streets. The eyes of the nation were fixed on Ferguson, and what did we see?
?Those people need to stop making trouble.?
?Why would you loot from your own community? How stupid.?
?How come when a white person gets killed by the cops it never makes the news??
?I wish they?d stop making this a race issue.?
No one wonders why the police department is armed well enough to march into Fallujah, or why they?re pointing loaded weapons at unarmed civilians, or why a town like Ferguson needs armored vehicles and tanks in the first place. We don?t blink because they?re the police. The uniform represents authority and no one here wants to rock the boat. As not only a citizen of this country, but a veteran of the ?War on Terror,? I find it absolutely disgusting that the organization meant to ?protect and serve? private citizens is being given War Machines designed to maim and kill and drive people into caves.
In January of this year the Pentagon gave away 13,000 armored trucks. 13,000 trucks each worth $500,000 out the gate. One department that snatched one up was the Ohio State University Campus police in my home state.
MRAP vehicles are also being given away to people who don?t even remotely need one. In High Springs, Florida the police department received one of these Christmas Presents and can you guess how many officers are on the force there? 12.
Not only are these men using military equipment, but they don?t have the military training to use it in the first place. The more I talk to police the more I find them discontent with the way things are run. Officers instructing firearms classes who have never been in a live-fire situation, desk jockeys who happen to have a hard-on for violence and noise. The saltier cops who have been on the beat (and more likely to be streetwise and rational) are slower to be promoted, and like anywhere office politics rule the day. It is almost a universal truth that military veterans are consistently disappointed with ?more of the same? in their jobs as cops. A lot of the police know that there is a deep and troubling flaw in our system, and a vast number of citizens know it too, so why are we all so goddamned mousy and quiet about it?
Where is our sense of pride? The fire in our bellies that allow us to join together and rise up against forces we know to be a threat to all that is good in the world? It has been extinguished by years of subversion and cowardice.
Rebellion has to be appropriated by Hollywood to look like James Dean or Steve McQueen, all leather jackets, sunglasses and engine maintenance. We are so pacified by thinking that THAT is rebellion that we?ve lost the true meaning. Anyone who truly rebels against our delicate tendencies is broken, fucked, and scattered across the earth in quick succession. Rebellion isn?t a sense of being ?cool,? rebels hit the books before they hit the streets. We have to be well read and informed in order to take truth to power, it?s more than just posing on a silver screen or bitching about the patriarchy on social media. That is not social combat. The Great Failure of the 1960s is that we were afraid to go on. No real reward came after so much blood and sacrifice. But we can be great again, through knowledge, understanding, will power, and the strength to take no shit from anyone.
I hear too many people talk of war who have never been and will never understand what it really is. Too many of my fellow servicemen and women have seen its horrors, and the last thing we need is that military mindset and use of force here at home. We sacrificed so much so that it didn?t come to that. With Fallujah back in the hands of terrorists, and tanks rolling down suburban streets in the US, some of us ask each other ?was all of it for nothing??
So what can a poor boy do? He can read. He can take the lessons of Thoreau, of Thomas Paine, of Che Guevara, of Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Aaron Swartz, Julian Assange, and Muhammad Ali. He can arm himself in the best way possible: with knowledge. Understanding of facts and truth are the only way to ensure the survival of what we hold dear in this country and in every country around the world. Armed men can kill flesh, but not ideas. Ideas don?t bleed, they don?t get tired, they never surrender under any circumstance, they survive for generations and become more powerful as they go on. In order to re-evaluate how we police ourselves, we must first recognize ourselves and value ourselves instead of making excuses for our oppressors. A revolution can start anywhere. In a garage, in a bedroom, in a courtroom, a library, a basement, a computer lab, a stage a boxing ring, anywhere! The time is now. Don?t post it, live it. Change takes place on concrete.
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