“I often said that writers are of two types.
There is the architect, which is one type.
The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All of that stuff before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint.
And then there’s the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up.
The gardener knows certain things. He’s not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower.
He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth.
No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of writers, but many writers tend to one side or the other.
I’m very much more of a gardener.”WRITING BONER!
This is a pretty cool take on Writing from George R. R. Martin… I tend to be a gardener as well.
Cards Against Humanity wants you to have their game and official theme song by the Doubleclicks for free! —->
Debunking Doomsday 2102: Solstice Conjunction
I’m not sure if there is an official name for this theory other than “DOOM!” but I’m calling it the Solstice Conjunction theory, for reasons that will be apparent soon. This theory is similar to the Planetary Alignment theory that I posted last week. They are similar simply because there is an alignment (also known as a conjunction) that happens in both of the theories. This alignment doesn’t involve any other planets, it is an alignment of the Earth, Sun and the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. From what I’m reading on several sites and blogs, this myth is more highly revered by the doomunity than is the Planetary Alignment myth, which is interesting considering the Planetary Alignment theory has more chutzpah than this one. It is far more rare, as well, and has that sciencey sounding “gravitationally pulling apart the Earth” thing. Way more fun than the Solstice Conjunction. #Bleh
I recently posted about a series of coronal mass ejections that occurred around Thanksgiving and was, according to some bloggers, the beginning of the end. I did that post as the beginning of a series of posts debunking the “Doomsday 2012” predictions. I have a couple more of those posts coming before December 21st, but I found this and wanted to post about it. While I was working on the research for this series of posts, I meandered into a YouTube video (shown above) that was a short audio interview with a representative of an organization known as the Flat Earth Society. This group is a long-standing organization that believes that the Earth is, actually, a flat disc, rather than the spherical globe that science has proven it is. As a huge proponent of science and a big fan of space exploration and the frontiers of scientific discovery, I was struck by the claims that this group makes on their website! —->
No matter what the date or the state of the cosmos, there always seems to be at least one theory about how the “end is nigh”. These theories always make me laugh a bit, as I have seen many of these “doomsday predictions” come and go in the relatively short time that I have had on the Earth. I remember the Halley’s Comet people who believed the comet (which has a very predictable orbit and can be seen gracing our skies every 75ish years) was being followed by a race of aliens that were going to rain down destruction, in some form, on the Earth and take the few believers away with them. When Halley’s Comet was overhead in 1986, this group of people (known as the “Heaven’s Gate” cult or “bugfuck crazy” people) committed suicide simultaneously in hopes that the aliens would save their mortal souls. I also remember the doom criers of 09.09.1999 and 01.01.2000, as well. I know I’m skipping over a bunch here, but I want to speak on the upcoming doomsday scenarios on 12.21.2012. It should be noted that if you happen to believe in any of these scenarios, this post is not an attempt to assuage your beliefs. There are plenty of people who are unaware of the scientific proof debunking these myths and are unsure as to what the facts are surrounding these theories. This article is meant for those people. I am fully aware that some people can not/will not be convinced that these theories are completely unfounded, but, to be honest, those people aren’t interested in the science anyway as the persistence of belief that these theories are real is proof that these same people have chosen to either ignore the science or haven’t been introduced to it. I’ve heard several theories about the upcoming end of the world. I’ve done one post about solar flares and coronal mass ejections hitting the Earth (Click Here for that Article) and I plan to do a couple more posts about a couple more theories. This post has to do with the Planetary Alignment theory. —->
I was meandering about the internet doing research for some of my “Doomsday 2012” posts when I happened upon a piece of open source software called BOINC. BOINC is a project that’s being put on by University of California, Berkeley to help compute very large amounts of data at super fast speeds. I know, everyone has heard the term supercomputer, but this is a very interesting case as these calculations are not being performed by a single computer, but by a vast network of computers found in residences, offices and classrooms around the world. —->
