Category Archives: Oceanic

27-Mist

Spoutings

THAT for six thousand years

—and no one knows how many millions of ages before

—the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings

—that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour

—this is surely a noteworthy thing.

–Moby Dick; or, The Whale (Chap. 85: The Fountain) by Herman Melville

26-Maia

2 Replies

Entanglement

Using the language of topology to describe complex systems, leads to new insights about waves and weather patterns on earth. Some features of fluid flow on Earth can be explained by principles that traditionally apply to quantum systems.

Earth’s Oscillating Weather – Quanta Magazine

12-Murk

6 Replies

Shadows

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me.

Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems–aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?

And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

03-Jump

1 Reply

Coolest

Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.

Nothing exists in itself.

If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.

But if the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm.

For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich.

For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air.

Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

Chapter 11, Nightgown – Moby Dick by Herman Melville

* Thank you Will Henry for Wallace-the-Brave

19-Rush

3 Replies

Drainage

Perception of time will eventually condense into an infinite now. Until then, observe the rush of random thoughts as they travel downstream.

10-Home

7 Replies

Going

Non-stop flight from London to San Francisco shows as a curve on Mercator Projection map of the Northern Hemisphere. The trip takes 11 hours at 36,000 feet altitude in the cramped fuselage of the Boing 777 jet airliner traveling up to 590 mph.

15-Shor