Liu Xiaobo, Chinese dissident and anti-party activist received the Nobel Peace Prize on the 10th of this month.
In his acceptance address, Liu espouses the usual high-minded views that one would associate with a Nobel-winning dissident: free expression is a right of all men, democratic reform is coming to China, social diversity is better than a master-planned autocracy, etc.
What was most surprising to me was the poetic description of his love for his wife:
I am serving my sentence in a tangible prison, while you wait in the intangible prison of the heart. Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body, allowing me to always keep peace, openness, and brightness in my heart, and filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning. My love for you, on the other hand, is so full of remorse and regret that it at times makes me stagger under its weight. I am an insensate stone in the wilderness, whipped by fierce wind and torrential rain, so cold that no one dares touch me. But my love is solid and sharp, capable of piercing through any obstacle. Even if I were crushed into powder, I would still use my ashes to embrace you.
It’s not often that one mentions Wordsworth and science fiction in the same
sentence, yet his famous line kept coming to mind as I read this oddly moving
and beautiful report from NPR
which muses about what sorts of life may be wandering out in the Universe now
that our base assumptions have forcibly been widened by our discovery of
arsenic-based life forms.
Says the author, Krulwich:
Imagine a cloud of stellar dust several light years across quietly drifting through space. Powered by its own bursting stars feeding it oxygen, carbon, life-giving chemistries, could it not become a slightly lonely but vastly oversized life form? An enormous space traveler?
Accompanied by this sentiment is one of those beautiful, extravagant, lush space pictures that makes me thankful that the government wastes my tax dollars keeping NASA (barely) afloat.
The article goes on to remind readers that if there are extraterrestrial life forms they are, by definition that is easily forgotten, going to be extra-terrestrial and will have evolved on a planet not like Terra. As such we should be prepared for life that looks like intellgent slime mold, or beings that have latticed themselves into meteors, or gigantic Water Bears who have mastered tricks like enduring the vacuum of space in a self-induced stasis before returning to a life-friendly region and getting back to the usual things like eating and reproducing.
Thanks to Frank Herbert, the notion of intelligent gas-based creatures is no foreign idea to yours truly. Herbert’s work The Jesus Incident describes a generated, theocratic society that subsists on a distant, rocky planet where wandering (seemingly) indifferent gas-blimp creatures called “hylighters” tack and jibe though those stranger skies with the aid of the rocks and outcroppings befitting such a harsh surface. Ulitmately the diety of the society (an AI ship) watches the humans grow to understand that life as an ecosystem is stranger, more beautiful, and more important than their own short-sighted avaricious and political plans.
In one moment of rumination the ship remarks that the great void of space has the capacity to surprise even him. And perhaps that is the beauty of being the intelligent, wandering cloud fed by stars, that it could wander slowly across the cosmos beholding the folly and beauty that is the panoply of life and lives across the heavens.
One of the problems with gem authorship is that the various tools for gem
generation all seem to stomp upon one another and seem to have varying states
of freshness. Toss into this the questions about whether a given
gem-generation framework eases the sharing via Gemcutter (or is it still
pointing to Github?) and it’s a confusing start for the uninitiated.
I will detail the process that ultimately got me to re-structure some old code of mine as my first gem.
