So Long

"When you're settled in your ways
love does come, but never stays."

So you said
one day
Anne.

You drove
and it was spring
and you were kind
and air rushed in
through the window.

Monitos perejiles

Somos monitos todos
perejiles y salvajes
sumidos hasta los codos
en pueriles nimiedades.

ana

quizás mañana ya no haya ana
ana que es luz y es ventana
ana que es sábana y cama
ana que es charco y es rana
ana que es ana en mañana
aunque mañana ya no haya ana

A Doomed Expedition

He caulked his skull with bulky words,

His tongue a swirling sword,

His mouth a stormy sea he could not cork.

Both conqueror and conquered world,

He set his sails towards us.

Our inner groans and wails at his approach

Were wind against those sails;

He turned creakingly around

While behind his back blew wild

A hurricane of ridicule:

Our air of so called cool.

Another One by Langston

Young Sailor

He carries
His own strength
And his own laughter,
His own today
And his own hereafter-
This strong young sailor
Of the wide seas.

What is money for?
To spend, he says.
And wine?
To drink.
And women?
To love.
And today?
For joy.
And the green sea
For strength,
And the brown land
For laughter.

And nothing hereafter.

- - - - - - - - - -

I love this poem. The image of the sailor is youth itself, as it often is: sure of itself, defying conventions, full of energy and life, a little self-centered. My favorite part, though, are the last three verses.

"And the brown land for laughter, and nothing hereafter."

Sublime.

New niece or nephew

L. & S. are expecting, again. They found out about it last Friday, January 14th, the day before Consuelo turned 8 months old.

They were both pretty shocked. L. got understandably emotional, and she cried a little, she told me. She was instantly afraid that complications might arise, she would be given absolute rest, and she wouldn't be able to pick up Consuelo. Of course they are both happy and they were planning to get pregnant pretty soon, anyways, but they hadn't really started trying.

Anyways, two days ago what L. feared happened: she started bleeding and it turns out she has some kind of bruise in her uterus, so she has to have absolute rest. She has to stay in bed and won't be able to pick up Consuelo for a while...

This must be terribly hard on her. Luckily she has her two sisters, her mom and mine who live nearby, plus my brother who can work from home, most of the time. I hope they will all be well.

In spite all of this, I am happy for the new arrival to the family. S/he will be surrounded by our love.

Nieve

Nieve, no me mueves.
Moverme nadie puede
ya. Un día me fuiste nueva
pero el tiempo rueda
y yo no. No puedo más.
No veo y no vuelvo
atrás. Antes podía y vivía
y volaba con el viento;
hoy es poco lo que siento.
Caí y me asenté y soy tú.
Me veo por la ventana
y no se me mueve nada.

Not exactly a clone...

I had a strange dream tonight. Slipping away, but i'll try to write down the part that remains. Setting and plot are all gone, but there was this idea: an unfertilized ovum was emptied of its nucleus, and replaced by the nucleus of a man's sperm. Then the ovum was fertilized by a sperm of the same man.

It just occurred to me that if two men wanted to have a child that was genetically both of theirs, this would be the (a?) way to do it... Of course, gene combination would have to be controlled in some way. Otherwise the child might end up with two Y chromosomes and no X, for instance, and I doubt that such combination is viable.

Strange thoughts to be having this early on a Saturday morning.

A Poem by Langston Hughes

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There's nothing more to say.
The poem ends
Soft as it began-
I loved my friend.

Idea para guión cinematográfico o novela

Idea general: qué pasa si en vez de ponerse unos en contra de otros, los vecinos y los okupas se ponen de acuerdo y van a protestar juntos frente a la casa de gobierno?

Escenas varias:

-- Un okupa ve todos los días, al volver de su trabajo como encargado de la limpieza en una biblioteca, a un vecino que lee en su balcón. Desde abajo ve el título de los libros, que después busca en la biblioteca y lee él también. Son libros con ideas socialistas y de cooperación. Un día se encuentra con este hombre, cuarentón ya, que está barriendo su vereda. Se le acerca y charlan, y eventualmente surge una relación (cómo desarrollarla?), pero originalmente el vecino tiene prejuicios, a pesar de sus lecturas. Espera que este okupa le robe o lo estafe, o le pida cosas... Todo lo cual no queda completamente descartado por el okupa, al cual le parece injusto que este hombre trabaje tan poco y tenga tanto tiempo libre como parece tener, y pueda darse el lujo de tener sus ideas de mejora social pero no haga de veras nada por ellas.

-- Diálogo (en un bus): "No puedo darte nada porque hay muchos como vos a los que darles, y si les doy a todos, voy a terminar viviendo como ustedes, y no quiero, me he roto demasiado el culo para tener lo que tengo. Son otros los que tienen que dar, y vivir un poco más como vos y yo."

La historia debe ser desarrollada del punto de vista de ambos personajes, con todos los estereotipos/realidades sobre ambas clases: que los de abajo son vagos, que no quieren trabajar, que son ladrones y resentidos, etc.; que los del medio no se comprometen socialmente, que son ganado, que no son solidarios, etc.. En algún momento transmitir las ideas de que para trabajar por chirolas, mejor no trabajar; que hay que organizarse; que hay que cooperar. Que hay que ser responsables por la propia vida.

Spoons

I was born with a stainless-steel spoon in my mouth, in 1974. By that time stainless steel was the new silver.

En el aeropuerto de Miami se arman colas tremendas para entrar al país. Colas que duran horas. Luego te entrevistan minuciosamente y te toman fotos y tus huellas dactilares.

Mientras esperas a que llegue tu turno, la distracción principal para tu cuerpo cansado de tanto volar es un video que se recicla constantemente en varias pantallas frente a los mostradores. Imágenes de libertad y maravilla, salpicadas de banderas y multicolores caras sonrientes que te dan la bienvenida a esa tierra bendecida, se suceden una y otra vez ante tus ojos.

Despista un poco, la verdad.

Idea for a set of books

Scattered

Beginning of 21st century, extrasolar planets discovered. Many that support life. Even evidence of life.

Of course, unattainable by any kind of rocketry or spaceship: space simply too big, human life-spans extendable, but only to a certain limit.

Scanned humans already exist in VR medium, but transmission is not possible. Not only uncertainty of reception, but signals degrade.

Only way found: time travel.

Not time travel really, but space-time displacements. Became possible when quantum microscopy and therefore quantum wormholes were discovered. Method for sending people through: focus on such a wormhole inside or near a person's body and then revert the polarity of the microscope, which with the due calibrations, will produce the displacement of the defined volume in one direction, and the appearance at the place of transmission of the same volume from the other side.

If you focus on a destination place too tightly, the time variable cannot be adjusted.

If you focus on a destination time too tightly, people might end up anywhere in the universe.

So, best possible bet: focus on an area the size and shape of a whole planetary atmosphere, and you get a range of +/- several hundred years.

Since large masses are not only an aid in calculating this kind of displacement but also an asset when effecting the "jump", this method is the best bet for colonization of extrasolar planets.

- - - - - - - -

Maybe first book could be about the development of all of this technology, and the first colonizers. Would have to be a very large group, so that in spite of the scatter effect there is some assurance that some will survive, meet and reproduce on the target planet.

They are all quipped with some kind of stasis equipment (a quantum microscope set on "looping"?) in case they materialize in a non-viable volume of the planet, as well as other gear (nanotechnology for parachuting, digging out, etc.?).

Settlement is of minimum impact. As soon as they get there, begin building digital systems and interact with native ecosystem only virtually and only rarely nanorobotically.

- - - - - -

Given this setting, there are several possible dramas:

Ending up underground.
Ending up alone for centuries.
Arriving millennia after first colonization.
Alien life.
Digital system failure, must interact with real universe.
Interpersonal conflicts.

- - - - - - -

Must give it more thought!

What We Do

It's 4:24 a.m. and i'm sitting in Oslo airport, waiting for time to pass. At 7:25 a plane will erase me from here and rematerialize me in Spain a few hours later.

I lay down on a hard bench and managed to sleep for a few hours; then discomfort overcame tiredness, i suppose, and i got up and went for a walk. Now i've been sitting on a lounge chair in the arrivals hall for the last hour and a half, reading and chatting with friends on facebook.

The chair is right in front of a cordoned-off area, inside which a guy is polishing the floor, sitting atop a machine that looks like a massive, movable throne. He controls it with a joystick under his right hand and the throne inches forwards at about a meter per minute, trailing behind it a thick power chord. Once in a while the guy climbs off, repositions the chord so as not to have to drive over it, and then climbs back up again.

The floor is covered in a beige dust that looks very fine, and i wonder how much of it is getting into my lungs. The guy is not wearing a mask, though, so it's probably alright. His face is impassive as stone, and he yawns once in a while.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

My job drives me crazy sometimes: too much excitement, too much personal drama, too many crises. But looking at this guy i feel grateful for it.

Or maybe i don't. The previous comment may be interpreted as disparaging under a certain light, but i don't mean it to be. Apart from the fact that everything would eventually crumble to pieces if jobs like this weren't done, i see on a day to day basis that maintenance people are some of the unsung heroes of the modern world. They work hard, and we others tend to take what they do for granted.

This last is a bad habit i've observed in a great many areas: only obvious innovations or novelty projects are celebrated, but the everyday, all-pervading and absolutely indispensable struggle against inertia goes unnoticed. This is a great flaw in our educations.

Anyways, what i meant to comment on is the seeming boredom and repetitiveness that pervade this man's job. Granted, it's nighttime and we humans do tend to feel naturally sleepy at this time, but the machine he is driving goes so slowly that sometimes he closes his eyes for many seconds at a time.

And yet, imagine all that time to think and build new worlds in your head, listen to music, chew over an idea...

More on the way

L. and C. called me this afternoon and gave me the news: the in vitro insemination of November 11th was a success, according to a trusty Evatest. The result became visible extremely quickly, said L., which might even indicate a multiple pregnancy... Thing is, these home pregnancy tests are sensitive to the presence of hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) in the mother's urine, where its concentration can grow much faster if there is more than one embryo present. We will know for sure on Monday, when C. has an appointment at the clinic. I haven't asked them what kind of examination will be given her (I imagine some kind of ultrasound) but they have been told that they will be able to see exactly how many of the implanted embryos --originally three-- took root.

The only reason I am being able to force myself to write about my future nieces and/or nephews using the word "embryos" is that we don't even know how many they are, yet. Otherwise I would find it even more fake and impossible.

But there they are now, growing inside C., this very instant: mis sobrin@s. I accompanied L. & C. to the clinic the day they were conceived, so I will truly be able to tell them, someday, that I was there the day they were conceived... I suppose that, coming from an uncle, would have seemed more than a bit out of place in times past, but of course, technology changes even this.

These babies spent the first two days after their conception in glass containers, outside their mother's body! At the time of transference they were each already made up of two to four cells... No more, but no less.

So, time of arrival: August 11, 2011... But probably before!

pUniversing again

A chilly -5.5C outside, went out to the balcony anyways, for a breather (been writing records of progress all afternoon). Hazy sky tonight, and the moon is full or thereabouts but still, the Big Dipper came through. Pointed pUniverse at it and up came the names: Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth, Megrez, Dubhe, Merak and Phecda. Alkaid I already read about some weeks ago, so my eyes landed on Alioth, somehow.

Here's a summary of what wikipedia had to say about it:

Alioth or Epsilon Ursae Majoris (ε UMa, ε Ursae Majoris) is the brightest star in the constellation Ursa Major (despite its Bayer designation being merely "epsilon"), and at magnitude 1.76 is the thirty-first brightest star in the sky. Its traditional name Alioth comes from the Arabic word alyat, which means "fat tail of a sheep".

It is known as 北斗五 (the Fifth Star of the Northern Dipper) or 玉衡 (the Star of Jade Sighting-tube) in Chinese.

It is the star in the tail of the bear closest to its body, and thus a star in the handle of the Big Dipper, the one closest to the bowl.

Alioth is 81 light years from Earth. Its spectral type is A0p, where"p" stands for peculiar, as the spectrum of its light is characteristic of an Alpha Canum Venaticorum variable (must figure out what that is!).

Alioth, as a representative of this type, may harbor two interacting processes. First, the star's strong magnetic field separating different elements in the star's hydrogen 'fuel'. In addition, a rotation axis at an angle to the magnetic axis may be spinning different bands of magnetically-sorted elements into the line of sight between Alioth and the Earth. The intervening elements react differently at different frequencies of light as they whip in and out of view, causing Alioth to have very strange spectral lines that fluctuate over a period of 5.1 days.

With Alioth, the rotational and magnetic axes are at almost 90 degrees to one another. Darker (denser) regions of chromium form a band at right angles to the equator.

A recent study suggests Alioth's 5.1-day variation may be due to a substellar object of about 14.7 Jupiter masses in an eccentric orbit (e=0.5) with an average separation of 0.055 astronomical units.

Alioth has a relatively weak magnetic field, fifteen times weaker than α CVn, but it is still 100 times stronger than that of the Earth.

Lo dijo Aura:

"Es bueno tener cara y acento de serranitos, porque la gente se cree que eres un ignorante y puedes salirte con la tuya." (no descontectualizar)

"A quién descartaría de la competencia por las becas? Pues a mí misma, porque no puedo hablar por los demás, pero de mí sé que, me la den o no, algo voy a hacer con mi vida."

"Se habla mucho del respeto, pero siempre del respeto que les debemos a otros, o que los demás nos deben a nosotros, pero poco se habla del respeto que nos debemos tener a nosotros mismos."

"Que qué haría si me tocara compartir la habitación con un ateo? Pues nada, no se lo creería a menos que me lo jurara por dios."

Aura viene de un pueblo bastante aislado y conservador en medio de los Andes. Con 10 años logró que un oficial del gobierno lo visitara para que se les hicieran los DNI a más de 500 chicos del lugar. Con 8 le puso una demanda a un profesor que le pegó (práctica muy común en la zona, menos común desde entonces), y tuvo que enfrentarse al ostracismo no sólo de sus maestros, sino de sus compañeros, cuyos padres la consideraban "una mala influencia". Con 13 se fue a vivir a la capital, con un tío, para poder ir a la escuela secundaria. Con 17 se buscó su propio cuarto desde el que asistir a la universidad.

Su padre nunca la obligó a hacer nada, pero siempre la impulsó para que creyera en sí misma y tuviera el valor de hacer lo que ella creía correcto. Le narró la historia de un político al que le tiraban tomatazos, pero que igualmente iba sonriendo y sacudiendo las manos en símbolo de victoria. "Ese tipo de confianza en uno mismo hay que tener", le decía.

The Time Traveler's Wife

Beautiful vision of lifetimes embedded in time, like bits of a forest in amber.

On the terrible ambiguity of religion

Most of the Christians and Muslims I know maintain that their Gods are all about love. They say only extremists who misinterpret The New Testament and the Quran are intolerant and violent. Yet here we go:

"Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come." (The New Testament, Matthew 12:32)

"He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned." (The New Testament, Mark 16:16)

"He may reward those who believe and do good works with equity; while, as for those who disbelieve, theirs will be a boiling drink and painful doom because they disbelieved." (The Quran, Yunus 3)

How can one interpret this as the pronouncements of a god of love? And if we are going to pick and choose what we like from these books, why not make our own principles, and leave the holy books aside once and for all???

A beginning

When the bubble formed I happened to end up too close to its outer edge, which sliced through both my legs and part of my right arm. I had a computer on my lap and was sitting on a sofa, typing away, and so I lost the outer half of the arm, including most of the shoulder and elbow joints, with my humerus being almost perfectly halved along its length. The curvature of the bubble wall meant that the upper part of my ulna was left behind, too, although my wrist was not compromised. As for my legs, I lost part of the right hip, most of the right leg except for a flap of flesh in my inner thigh, and my left leg, some five centimeters below my knee.






The cocoon I was in was one of six that contained human genetic material, albeit minus a few parts. That's because w