Truth is, there is None. (a short essay)

The only real truth is that there are none. Or rather, that there are many, and none of them are true. It's all in the perception, and no matter the protestations and complaints of the coterie, truth is entirely subjective and not something to be bandied about extravagantly without regard for the hypocrisy its use implies. Placing the phrase "This is truth" before or after a statement does not automatically validate the preceding or following, and wanfully crying "I only speak the truth" is almost a guarantee that one does not.

Actually, one's views on "truth" wholly depend on one's views of "real", as it were. Since the question of what exactly is real vesus unreal is one that is as yet unanswered (and likely to remain so for quite some time), this path is best left untrod for now. Though, perhaps a quick jaunt is in order: "Reality" depends on perception, and perception varies from one mind to another, often from day to day, hour to hour, within the same mind. Example: the idea of what is a "sad" event (an abstract feeling, at best) to one may, in fact, be considered the opposite to another. If two minds cannot agree on the reality of a statement/action, then how can it be determined to be real? And if its reality is questioned, would not its truth be then brought under suspicion? Thusly, (if this logic is sound), reality and truth are wholly dependent on the subject, and there can be no one reality/truth. And so it goes on, every statement can be proven both real and unreal, both true and false, occasionally both states existing concurrently. Often, abstract concepts are ascribed as real or true, but their very abstraction defies the labels; describe the color "blue", the feeling "happy", in a way that someone who has never experienced it would be able to understand. There lies the wall between abstraction and truth.

This leads, naturally, to the concept of "self-truth", or what one considers to be true to one's self, one's own nature. As this is an even more personal and singular version of the "real" fallacy, one can see where the breakdown of truth begins. If one cannot hold up his own thoughts/feelings as true/real, then the whole of existence is laid bare as suspect. This leads down the path to Nihilism and the statement of Aleister Crowley's "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." If such a belief were to become widespread, the consequences on human society would be to have, in Yeats' words, "mere anarchy . . . loosed upon the world." Society, and human culture as a whole, survives based on what can be termed a "mututally agreed upon delusion", a universal lie, if you will, that there are some truths held as unassailable. This does not mean they are exempt from the preceding argument, the argument is just ignored or not acknowledged. This is reflected in a line from (of all things) the television series Seinfeld. A show from the 1990's, Seinfeld purported to be "about Nothing", both in the literal and the philosophical sense, and it was as close to a nihilistic portrayal of modern life as was widely available at the time. The line, spoken by the character of George Costanza, is "It's not a lie if you believe it." A more concise way of saying that the truth depends on one's belief, and that once one ceases to believe in something, it ceases to be true. As before, perception equals reality equals truth.

The nature of truth is fickle, and the surface can scarce be scratched as to the definition and delineation of it as both abstract concept and concrete formation of logic/belief. The perpetuation of the mutually agreed upon delusion will keep it as such for the forseeable future, though one can certainly hope that someday people will realize the essential meaninglessness of declaring things true or false based on the whims and vagaries of society, mass culture, and their own peculiar brain chemistrys and predjudices. The continual reliance of politicians and their brethren on statements such as "I'm a straight shooter", "I do not lie", "I only deal in truths", or "Everything I say is true" only point out the shallowness of the speaker and the inherent fallacy of their arguments, not to mention the implied falseness of their statements. The only truth one can trust, it seems, is one's own. And even that can be a lie, truthfully.

Constellations.

Jack says the planets are misaligned, and thats why people die. I don't believe him, but he says it so convincingly.

"Death is inevitable," I counter, "and the position of Jupiter relative to Pluto holds no bearing on this." But I am unable to change his beliefs.

"We are all at the whims of a cosmic ballet that went awry the moment the sun solidified and the proto-planets began to swirl in aharmonic swirls around it." He likes using the big words, he thinks it will confuse me and cause me to drift into logical fallacies, or even worse, into his line of thinking. But I am not one to drag myself down into these meaningless conjectures on the nature of the universe.

"There are more pressing matters," I say, full of hot air and the TRUTH, "And we have much to do, in the time allotted us on earth." He does not debate me on this point, only nods and continues driving.

We are going to a funeral, for the late Christine Doran. I never knew her that well, which makes the fact that she is dead slightly at odds with what I normally associate with the event. Whereas in most cases a death of an acquaintance brings tears, and fond memories, and reminisces on what the person was like, in the case of the recently departed Ms. Doran, it is like the disappearance of a background character in a movie. She was an extra, in so many words. Not to be missed to any great extent, but her absence is noticeable, if you saw her there in the first place.

Jack rolls down the window. (Well he doesn't roll it, per se. He powers it down. We need new verbs, to keep up with the technological advances in car design.) He tosses out his half-finished Camel unfiltered. "It is bad form to smoke amongst the dead, and a funeral as well." He makes pseudo-profound statements like this often. On first listen they sound clever, but they don't stand up to repeated inspection. The gem of the bunch has always been "We are in love with who we pretend to be."

I glance behind us, but there's no one else on the road right now. Its 6 am, on a Sunday, but we're still an hour away from the place we need to be.

I have never liked funerals anyway. I don't know why anyone would. Other than pseudo-goth teenagers, elitist art types, and people who are in love with the idea of death. I'd prefer to be spending this morning asleep, and then doing something. And it would most definitely not be something involving a dead background character and a manic-depressive astronomer. Meaning Christine, and Jack, respectively.

"We are the living impaired," he begins intoning again, "we go from routine to routine and lay the tracks for our demises slowly through each day, never giving thought to the cosmical joke that has been played on us."

"I'm fairly sure that Neptune had nothing to do with the car that ran Christine off the road, Jack." I am glaring now. I don't glare often, it is uncomfortable. But I'm doing it now.

"Ah, but, you see, dear sir Matthew, he DID have something to do." Oh he was really on a roll now. "If not for the exact position of the aforementioned blue-green planet in the sky of that fateful evening, perchance young Ms. Doran would never have been in the path of the oncoming vehicle which struck her so violently."

"Your hypothesis is unprovable, 'Sir Jackson', so I'd appreciate it kindly if you would just drop it." I think I put too much anger in the statement, it sounded much harsher than I meant to.
Jack stares at me for a brief moment. "Very well." Yes, I definitely hit some nerve, because he keeps quiet for the next 45 minutes.

We arrive at the cemetery at 7:23 am, and I can see the small group of mourners already gathered near the site. Jack parks, and as I reach to open the door, he stops me by grabbing my arm quickly and gently.

"Matt," he says quietly, "I didn't mean to offend or upset you in any way. If I have, I'm sorry. I am afraid of death, and all it says about the human condition and our accomplishments. We are a species who works all our entire short lives to build something or discover something or create something with which to outlive ourselves, but we all end up in the same position in the end. Confronting this head-on is a hard prospect for me, as I am concerned with distances and measurements and physics, and there is no place in them for conjectures on an afterlife or the persistance of memory. I am frightened of the thought of leaving nothing behind but a small gathering of people who view me as a sideline in the cinematic of their lives."

He lets go, and I nod, because I am unsure how to respond to his confession. We both get out of our respective sides of the car, and adjust our jackets and ties. Before we head up the hill, we take a second to collect ourselves. I grasp his shoulder briefly, and he says without looking at me, "We are the living impaired, Matt."

I reply, "Yes we are, but there is hope. We're not dead yet."

OK Computer.

Radiohead's OK Computer is often thought to depict a dystopia, and its artwork contains references to George Orwell's novels, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four. The band have cited Orwell several times throughout their career. However, singer Thom Yorke said, "Loads of the music on OK Computer is extremely uplifting. It's only when you read the words that you'd think otherwise." A notable aspect of the album is an apparently circular narrative. In the opening song "Airbag", someone survives a horrific car crash, while the final song "The Tourist" contains the line "they ask me where the hell I'm going / at a thousand feet per second" and ends with a chorus of "hey man, slow down". However, the band said this had not been intentional, but they had noticed it after finalising the track listing.

core-collapse supernova

The core collapse of sufficiently massive stars may not be halted. Degeneracy pressure and repulsive neutron-neutron interactions can only support a neutron star whose mass does not exceed the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit of very roughly 4 solar masses. Above this limit, the core collapses to directly form a black hole, perhaps producing a (still theoretical) hypernova explosion. In the proposed hypernova mechanism (known as a collapsar) two extremely energetic jets of plasma are emitted from the star's rotational poles at nearly light speed. These jets emit intense gamma rays, and are one of many candidate explanations for gamma ray bursts.

newspeak

It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.

"The Piano Lesson"

Discovering manifold artistic movements that coexisted or succeeded one another on the dynamic Parisian artistic scene, such as Neo-Classicism, Realism, Impressionism, and Neo-Impressionism, Matisse began to experiment with a diversity of styles, employing new kinds of brushwork, light, and composition to create his own pictorial language.

Gatling gun.

The Gatling gun may have been the first "machine gun", depending on how machine gun is defined, as it was capable of firing continuous bursts of fire. Unlike designs like the Maxim gun, which operate the mechanism using a fraction of the power of the fired cartridge, the Gatling gun relies on external power, such as a hand crank, or motor. Some later Gatling-type weapons diverted gas from the barrels to spin the rotating barrels.

Crab Nebula

A significant problem in studies of the Crab Nebula is that the combined mass of the nebula and the pulsar add up to considerably less than the predicted mass of the progenitor star, and the question of where the 'missing mass' is remains unresolved.