Inertia

 ...I have these thoughts about gravity and time and so on. 

Doesn't the fact that things move at all weird you out, at all? The thing we just take for granted? I mean we explain things in terms of subatomic particles, such as electrons. But we never explain simple mechanical motion. I'm not talking about strange quantum vibrations. I'm talking about, how come there can even be the illusion of mechanical motion, if it is indeed an illusion? And so on. 

We even explain mass using the Higgs boson, but not this. I'm talking about things moving in space and the feeling of time passing, yeah that feeling. There's a physicist at Imperial College, I don't recall her name, she's also obsessed with that. She thinks that we shouldn't just explain away the regular every day taken for granted feel of time passing. 

I like that because it's really Heideggerian. Examine the most incredibly obvious seeming thing in the room, the elephant. 

So let's talk about a basic basic fact of movement called inertia, the fact that things keep on moving. 

In short, when something is moving through outer space and it just keeps moving until it's stopped. What is that, actually. What the fuck is it. 

So I'm crowdsourcing this idea because I think it's quite strange. There are lots of parts of it, but here's one. 

In a supercooled fluid, the electrons are all over the place, and it's a superconductor. 

If there are gravitons then spacetime is a supercooled fluid, mostly ("the vacuum of space"--it isn't one really). The gravitons are all over the place. So things can slip and slide easily until something stops them. 

Movement in a vacuum is pretty much because spacetime near to its ground state is superconductive.

Discuss. 

(There's a whole bunch of these speculations, all related, and I'm going to start sharing them here, because I don't know how else to talk to physicists.) 

No Fly

 I shan't be flying to give lectures and etc etc anymore. 

It's the 2020s, and as I observed on Twitter, it's time to get extremely real. 

Italian Dark Ecology Came Out Today and Here's Something from It

 I'm very happy with how the press has handled this book. 

I Think You Will Enjoy This New Yorker Piece about Me

 Morgan is a brilliant writer--you'll see what I mean at once. Something very very actually "me" was captured here. 

Want to Sponsor My Friend?

 My dear dear friend Carlyle. Grief counselor, hospice chaplain, so much more. He's walking for water and it would be great if you supported him. The organization was started by his mentor Sobonfu Some. 

Dublab Desert Island Discs (You Can Listen Now!)

 ...this was such a good thing to do. An hour and a half of talk and lots of music as well. If you've ever heard Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 you will have heard something like the format here. But this was so much more in depth. Really nice to hear afterwards for me. 

Clap for Carers

 I was yet again getting angry at the leaf blower in my street and very sad for the poor worker who had to use it. I could smell the fumes two hundred feet away. 

They were exploiting him the Sunday before a holiday. Must keep those driveways free of bits! 

Then I thought oh, we exploit nonhumans every Sunday. 

Then I thought oh, most nature writing is basically Clap for Carers. 

Yeah? 

YES: Report this News at Planet Scale

 Great piece in the New York Times, that finally makes all the eco actions not look like piecemeal, weird, unique events but aggregates them all into one thing. 

This is exactly how this news should be reported. Black Lives Matter and MeToo issues should be reported like this too. 

All three are something new: something as big or bigger than global corporations and religion. 

Nice Interview

 For those of you who didn't hear it, it will be archived soon. It was a sort of "Desert Island Discs" one if you have ever heard that show on BBC Radio 4. I liked doing it very much. 

Recombinant

 I've realized that I haven't written much if anything of my many coronavirus thoughts here. So here's part one of me making up for that. 

When I got the vaccine, I had a lot of side effects. I felt feverish, that was the main one. When I checked my temperature, it was totally normal. Yet I felt as if I had a virus! What was happening? 

By the way, if you have a fever, and this is me speaking as someone from four generations of atheists whose mum's friend was a doctor, the thing to do is not, I repeat not, to wrap yourself in blankets. That will only drive your temperature up. My brother was once hospitalized because he had all these hot showers and blankets and drove his temperature up to 105! 

It sounds stupid, until you try it, but cool things. Take off that blanket. Soothe your wrists with a cloth soaked in cold water. Your wrists have prominent veins. The cool water will cool your blood. Cool cloth on your forehead and upper arms too. It works! 

So I had this side effect and I got thinking about recombinant RNA. Basically it's one level below a normal vaccine. That kind of thing is bits of dead virus. This is stuff that's telling your RNA to make the "vaccine" as it were. So it's causing a very very intimate part of you to do some different work. 

So it feels like you have a virus. 

Israel-Palestine Podcast

 I've made episode 31 all about it. Join us and donate to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. 

New Podcast Episode

You'll find it if you go to my Patreon page. I hope you like it. Right now we're donating $850 a month to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. To give you an idea of how the site has been growing, that figure was $300 in December. 

Vsauce Says Hyperobject

 I don't quite know who YouTubers are. Of course I do, but not like my kids do. So I'm not sure quite why they got so excited about this chap talking about my book about four minutes in. But he does appear to have about 17 million followers and this got about 2 million hits when I saw it just now. 

The word hyperobject is great I think, because it makes you feel like a cool scientist. And we need more people feeling that way. 

All Art Is Ecological Final Cover

 Look look! This is the first book that acknowledges my non-binary-ness! 

My Grandfather, My Role Model

 This is a great website about one of the most important political actions in the UK in the early twentieth century, the Cable Street riots. My grandfather, a communist who is my role model, was part of it and talked Marxism on a soap box! They used marbles to deter police horses and they won! I mean the Jews, Communists and anarchists. 

This is the real reason Britain didn't become fascist. And this is the level you have to go to--I use the present tense for a reason. 

My children are now proudly learning about their ancestor... 

George (my grandfather) refused to go on the boat with the other officers to the front (North Africa in his case). He went with the privates. 

The officers' ship was sunk by a U-Boat. 

You are reading this because my grandfather was a communist.