Glendon's Daemon

The movie adaptation of the Golden Compass comes out in December this year. At the movie website, you can find out what your personal daemon would be.

Here's mine:


My daemon is Desra, and it coalesced into a raccoon.

The His Dark Materials books are popular with older children and adults, and would be enjoyed, I think, by most Harry Potter fans. The author, Philip Pullman, is an atheist, and the books are fantasy with some science fiction thrown in. There are witches, talking blacksmith polar bears, and discussions of dark matter and quantum entanglement.

The first story, The Golden Compass, was originally published as The Northern Lights. The two sequels, which take you places you'd never thought of in the first book, are titled The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. There is also another book featuring main character Lyra Belacqua that followed, called Lyra's World.

The daemons are a mystery if you are new to the story. Without too many spoilers, they seem to be people's souls or conscience, on the outside of their bodies in the form of animals. Until puberty, the daemons can change into any animal shape at any time. They can speak out loud, and it is considered to be the most heinous of acts to touch another person's daemon, and act which even causes physical shock. Daemons, though regulary touch and interact with each other.

I love these books, and the movie looks like it will be excellent.

Glendon's Atheism Quiz Results

Here we go...

You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future. Scientific Atheist 92% Spiritual Atheist 67% Militant Atheist 58% Apathetic Atheist 58% Angry Atheist 50% Agnostic 33% Theist 25% What kind of atheist are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Interesting....Scientific Atheist is nice. I wonder if Spiritual is a reflection of being an artist somehow? And equal parts militant & apathetic eh? That kind of cancels each other out. This was fun to do. The questions actually required a moment's thought.

Hopefully internet quizzes will never be part of job interviews or school applications. "We're sorry Mr. Mellow, we were looking for more of a 'Captain Jack Sparrow', at least 75%, and well, uh, you scored as Captain Malcolm Reynolds'. You're too comfortable being naked in the desert. Sorry, York University is not for you. Try the military."

Shiny.

Knowledge Pupates Part 3: how I left paganism for science

Part 3
(Read Part 2 here about my reasonable University days.)
(Read Part 1 here about my pagan-ish High School days.)

Back in my coffee-slinging days, a co-worker of mine pointed out how some customers never change their style. You know the type; they are stuck in the seventies, tucked-in plaid shirt & jeans, kind of shoulder-length hair that's not long enough to be committed to being long hair. Or they are stuck in a sixties-hippie earth-mother look, lots of swinging beads and mismatched patterns on layered clothing. You observe them with a fashion-forward eye, and think, "if they just tweaked it, it could be very retro-cool". But fashion is passing them by, and they are content, or at least oblivious.

The painting at left is kind of like that for me. I hadn't finished developing a look, and maybe it was over before I began this painting. I was still elated by the final product of Symbiosis that I kept painting these figures in sap green and naples yellow. This painting resides inside an antique black box with wire wrapped around it through the lid to evoke threads and wrapping.

I have blogged briefly in the other two parts of Knowledge Pupates about how I began to find reason & science more appealing than superstition and old fairy tales. And my thoughts continue to develop. I don't want my learning to stop, I want to keep learning throughout my life, and right now, I hope I always feel that way. One can no longer contain the sum of all human knowledge in a lifetime; we have access to so much information, the mind reels. I wish I could live a thousand years, a million years just to keep learning, and to see how humanity develops, how I would develop. Instead, I am content with my lifetime and its abundant opportunities to develop myself.

My fashion continues to evolve, from hip-hop lite teen, to gothy university days, to a general darker aesthetic now. My art feels different now, still dark, but maybe a little less cluttered. And my beliefs have altered, and I have sought out different positions to sort out how I feel. 9/11 changed things for a lot of people. I can remember the confusion it caused. A few years later, I read Richard Dawkins essay, Time to Stand Up in A Devil's Chaplain and I was amazed at the strength of his statements. They cut right to the heart of the harm irrational religious thinking can do.

And religious thinking worries me. I plan to have kids, and there are children I care about in my family, and I want them to continue to be little questioning machines their whole lives, always asking "why? why?" after each statement. Religious thinking can carry on with the "why"'s for a bit, and then it comes down to trusting "God said so" or having faith that irrational ideas will work out in the end. In sci-fi authour Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Green Mars of the Mars Trilogy there is a classroom scene where the kids play a game to have their science teacher keep regressing into finer and finer explanations by asking "why?" until the game comes to a triumphant end: the teacher stammers and replies "we don't know", to the childrens' delight. In this time and place in the universe, I can think of no greater purpose for humanity than to continue to ask questions.

I started this blog with the intention of showing my artwork, self-promoting, and generally giving myself a weekly challenge. I don't want to stop looking at the bagginess or fitted-ness of men's pants each season, and I don't want my art to play out the same couple of techniques and images over and over. I don't want to stop developing my opinions on the politics and religions of the world, because although themes re-occur, the situations are still developing.

I think I have painted enough creepy green people for now.

Random News & Made-Up Hominid

-The Flying Trilobite is now on Fish Feet's blogroll!

Fish Feet is a fascinating site by Sarda Sahney, and she has added The Flying Trilobite to her blogroll. Sharks and Tyrannosaurs! Sweet!

-Next, may I introduce our drawing this evening, a made-up hominid I drew when I really felt like drawing some sciency (sciencish?) anatomy. Note the nifty cranial ridge for enlarged jaw muscles. It was fun to smudge the graphite for the skin on the lower left and draw really tight lines for the muscles next to it. Juxtoposition plays with you.

-While reading the May 21st 2007, edition of Maclean's today I note with sadness that The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is sadly, no longer in their Top Ten Non-Fiction. Yes, lads & lasses, hang ye heads low. Lower. Ok stop.
Maclean's is kind of like Canada's answer to Time magazine, and I have been agreeing or disagreeing with their articles very strongly, which is what I look for in a magazine. The God Delusion hung on to a Top Ten spot for at least 28 weeks here in the Great White North.

-In other news, God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens has debuted at #1 on the Maclean's Top Ten Bestsellers, Non-Fiction. Way to carry that torch! Check out an exclusive excerpt here at Slate Magazine online.

-For fans of astronomy, I have been fascinated all week by a few pictures from the Cassini probe of a strange hexagon cloud system on the pole of Saturn. It's so creepily hexagonal, I'm sure conspiracy theories will run rampant over this. My vote is that the Saturnians are harboring weapons of mass destruction. Check it out over at the Jet Propulsion Labs' site.

My Life With Trilobites

So I did it. I finally decided to register as a Bright.

I was up late and looking at www.the-brights.net and the different comments by people who joined, and I decided I would too. I was happily surprised to see an entire section for people who join somewhat reluctantly.

The idea of declaring yourself as a Bright is that you are saying you believe in a natural (not supernatural) worldview. That's it. That's all I'm saying.

All the other possible baggage (being

a skeptic, atheist, agnostic, Darwinist etc.) fits under the umbrella term "A Bright".

Some people think the term "I'm a Bright" sounds arrogant. I see their point. But come on, saying "I'm a Bright" is not really the same as declaring "I'm a Super-Genius". That would be arrogant.

I guess I wanted to register as a Bright also to be for something, rather than announcing myself as excluding something. Saying "I'm an atheist" is kind of loaded, like declaring verbal war on another person's beliefs, because it's all about the disagreement. Being a Skeptic is kind of the same thing, because of the cynical overtones most people associate with it, (despite Skeptic magazine's definition as an embodiment of the scientific method). And saying I'm a neo-Darwinist doesn't help when discussing gluons or pulsars.

So I'm a Bright. Hopefully it's a bit more of a conversation starter at dinner parties than gluons and pulsars.