Thursday, February 3, 2005

How many of you have dreamed about Bill Clinton? I want to know. A few years back Claire Danes was the dream figure du jour; half the people I knew had dreamed of her at least once. It was a phenomenon. But Clinton turns up in my dreams at least a half-dozen times a year. The last few times--and last night--he's just outrageous Dionysian. Hillary's always scowling around cleaning up messes, but he's always making more, and laughing and laughing. And throwing parties. And having babies. Lately my dream Clinton is fathering dozens of children--always girls. I often get to babysit. Last night I held a little squirmy 6-month-old with silky brown hair and a jammy face. And the party was an inaugural ball. And Bill went from room to room telling jokes, and he sang the most wonderful song. I wish I remembered the words. And he just smiled and smiled. The segue into this dream was a stunner for me--I was flying around in the atmosphere (the richly and thoroughly life-sustaining dream version), higher and higher. And just above where the last hazy layer met the lifeless vacuum of space, I reached into the sack I carried and began sowing... in the dream, honest to God, they were little sparkly sperms, finer than dust, and they hit that layer and spread on it like the rainbows motor oil leaves on street puddles, only goldenly, and generated a further haze above it, as if they fertilized something that extended the life-sustaining layer deeper into the void. It was a joyful procedure, and I enjoyed floating around tossing fairy dust, and then, hey, I'm dressing for a big bash at Bill and Hillary's. I really didn't want to wake up this morning.... 2:09:27 PM    comment []

Exciting news! Scientists Find Missing Matter Amit Asaravala writes in Wired: For years, astrophysicists have been boggled by the fact that the grand sum of all the known "normal" matter in the universe -- that which makes up the stars, the Earth and even our own bodies -- only amounts to half of what should exist based on computer simulations. Given that multiple simulations have continually yielded the same result, they theorized that the rest of the normal matter, known as baryons, must be hiding somewhere in the space between galaxies. However, they haven't had much evidence to support the theory until now. A new study conducted with the help of the Earth-orbiting Chandra X-ray observatory has revealed the existence of baryons in at least two giant, intergalactic clouds of super-hot gas 150 million and 380 million light-years from our planet. The study, which appears in the Feb. 3 issue of the journal Nature, shows how certain wavelengths of X-rays emitted from a distant galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major are being absorbed by the two clouds. The absorption pattern, as detected by Chandra, is consistent with interference caused by carbon, neon, nitrogen and oxygen ions -- in other words, baryons. When the study's authors extended the number of baryons in the two clouds to account for the volume of all the intergalactic clouds in the universe, the resulting figure equaled that of the missing matter from their computer simulations. ... Even with the new evidence, they plan to keep looking, said Nicastro. That's because intergalactic baryons not only fill a gap in scientists' understanding of the universe, but they may also lead to a better understanding of "dark matter," a mysterious and unseen form of matter that has so far only been detected by the gravitational pull it exerts on other bodies in the universe. "If we are right, each single one of these filaments is connected to a cloud of dark matter," said Nicastro. "If there wasn't dark matter there, or something with strong gravity that pulled on the matter in these filaments, we wouldn't have galaxies or filaments." Rather, the baryons would be pulled into galaxies and the galaxies into each other. Whereas baryons account for 4 percent of the total matter and energy in the universe, dark matter is thought to make up 23 percent. The remaining 73 percent of the so-called matter-energy budget consists of what scientists call "dark energy." This energy acts like an anti-gravitational force that, in theory, is causing the universe to expand rather than contract. ... Read the whole story here. [Photo: Chandra's lonely halo, http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/2004/04-253.html.] 10:33:00 AM    comment []