It started with “nothing in particular”.

 I like that expression because it’s actually used in the complete opposite way than it would seem to indicate. We typically use it to mean “nothing specific”, when the words themselves seem to indicate “nothing specifically”. When you speak about Nothing In Particular, you should be talking about the vast spectrum of Nothing-ness, the Unimaginable Thought, rendered impossible by it’s own existance.

Boring Person A: I think I’m gonna go check out a movie.

Literal Person B: Oh yeah? No shit.

A: ….

B: …so what were you thinking about seeing?

A: Oh, nothing in particular. I heard that the new-

B: HOOOOOOOOOOW!?!?!?!?!?!

  Listen: no one seems to talk about things like Nothingness anymore. It’s not the kind of thing you can bring up at parties (trust me!), you just get looked at like the guy who was in a band throughout college that was on the precipice of getting signed, but then things fell apart and his dream faded away so now he overcompensates by getting kinda too drunk and way too intense in low-key situations, making everyone uncomfortable. Or so I’ve heard.

 What’s frustrating about it is that in days of yore (nee Olden Days), it’s exactly the kind of thing that was encouraged to pass the time. To sit around a fire while chewing on rabbit gristle and contemplating the vast and mystifying boundaries of the Universe, or the lack thereof, was seen as a mark of a challenging mind. Emperors and Kings would hire Philosophers to just sit around and think. I mean they also hired Wizards and Bards and Concubines, which have also fallen out of vogue, but still!

 ANYWAY I bring this all up because today the Nerd Newsworld was all abuzz with Stephan Hawking’s prediction that not only do aliens probably exist, but that they should probably be avoided (because they’ll be violent, technologically-advanced, desperate nomads) lest they kill us all and steal the Earth. And name it something dumb.

 Hawking is awesome. Adulturous and probably morally empty, but awesome. A brilliant mind and a tribute to the spectacle of a Human Ability to reinvent how we perceive reality, even in the modern age. It’s just… really? He basically described the plot of V. Or Dune. Or an episode of Torchwood I just watched.

 It doesn’t matter whether he ends up being correct or not, of course, his prediction is given a certain amount of creedence having simply emerged from his mouth squawk-box. I guess I’m happy that a smart person is being listened to, but I’m also slightly bummed that anyone who isn’t the (capital S capital P) Smartest Person doesn’t have the same ability to affect the public consciousness. Do you have to be a genius to have an original thought? Write a series of books, finish (go to) college to have something to contribute?

 I guess everyone’s probably right though. I mean this is Stephen “Fucking” Hawking we’re talking about.

-diggy

 Way back when I was living in Minnesota, I wrote this terrible series of sci-fi/comedy shorts with my writing partner lover ROOMMATE at the time. One of them was about the notion of fatalism, and it had one character explaining to the other character that magic died out (no, really) because it was ACTUALLY part of a larger arcane structure of understanding causality paradigms and logarithms which were based on the finite consequence of physics (really). See if every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then even a sub-atomic level there are no random paths, everything is a reaction to a previous thing and that means we live in a completely fatalistic reality, until quantum-mechanics came along and mucked everything up by being able to generate random numbers for the first time in human history. With that disorder came the destabilization of an entire unpracticed school of thought, namely Magic, which retroactively deleted itself from human understanding and memory.

 See, here’s the other thing about when I was living in Minnesota: I was doing things like sleeping 4 hours a night, and drinking nothing but milk mixed with Vodka (no… really.). It was terrible and exists buried on the hard drive of an increasingly outdated laptop, which when it’s outlived it’s usefulness will probably be thrown into the East River without backing anything up. Things from the past or good to learn from, but nihil sanctum est, and sometimes you gotta move on. What the fuck was I talking about?

 Oh! Right! Turns out that that shit was kinda true! Not the crazy part about magic and all that, but today I learned that for the first time in history, cryptologists (or as I call them ‘cool scientists’) were able to use quantum theory and mechanics to generate the first ever completely random numbers. And wouldn’t you figure, the number of, well, numbers they were able to generate before crapping out: 42.

 No, really.

-diggy