Monthly Archives: April 2018

Tim Walker’s Moons

This year the 1st of April produced not just the internationally recognised ‘Fools Day’ it displayed the first of April 2018’s two full moons.

Manifesting only once in every two or three years, the occurrence of a second full moon across a calendar month – a Blue Moon – this year, will take place April 30th.

The full moon is synonymous with peculiarity; apparent strange happenings mingled with a supposed relaxing of peoples’ inhibitions, ultimately it sounds like a good time for all involved – still, not surprising it only usually takes place once a month.

Astronomy is a topic that I have long found intriguing and – the planets, the stars; the immeasurable, the incomprehensible vastness of space along with all its eternally drifting matter – it’s a topic that I believe ought to warrant anybody’s interest.

Despite the name I do not believe, come the 30th, the moon’s colouring will appear any more ‘blue’ than it ever does.

Our moon is widely thought to have come to existence around 4 billion years’ ago, when a collision with a ‘wandering planet’ sent gargantuan chunks of earth/Earth hurtling out into space, then with time becoming compressed into a spherical shape, and with more time being drawn in to Earth’s gravitational orbit, so became The Moon; part of Earth yet not exactly.

On the surface of it, Earth’s moon is essentially a floating lump of dead matter, however through pressure the Moon does generate its own heat; it’s just that this heat is not adequate to create the quantity of magma which lies under Earth’s crust – hence an absence of surface heat or substantial tectonic movement – yet like Earth the Moon is said to have an iron core while unlike Earth, there is no significant atmosphere and no magnetic field.

Given the Moon’s comparatively slender tilt – 1.54 compared to Earth’s 23.45 degrees – it endures much greater extremes of weather than Earth, in fact with some portions of the Moon’s surface remaining untouched by sunlight.

That marvellous segue right there permits us to touch on a number of interesting and perhaps scarcely understood points: the fact is that our Sun, our gargantuan flaming mass, so much larger than human comprehension will even allow (also, incidentally, said to consume around 600 million tons of hydrogen every second, yet is so very large that this massive consumption of its own mass is tantamount to the evaporation of a mere water droplet in a swimming pool), is simply one of a potentially infinite number of similar, also largely unremarkable, stars. (When one gazes unto to the Milky Way for example, one sees millions of the aforementioned, largely unremarkable, celestially flaming masses.) Of those countless, largely unremarkable stars, as a result of aeons of gravitational compaction of space-dust and other floating debris, most are orbited by Solar Systems (planets that have come to existence through similar channels as our moon), not unlike the planets in Earth’s Solar System. Thus of those potentially countless stars’ potentially countless Solar Systems with their potentially countless planets, it seems unrealistic to imagine that with all that potential, there is no other planet with a proximity to its respective sun which, given a similar duration to Earth’s purported lifespan thus allowing for millions of years of evolution and such, might just afford it life-bearing capabilities.

The question therefore, ‘Could intelligent life exist on other planets?’ I believe is a query that is best answered with one word – potentially.

Blue Moon on April 30th – don’t miss it.

 

 

Article by Tim Walker

Edited by E T Gahume

Photography by Blue Mooney

Tim Walker’s Trolling

Ask most 21st-century-born people their opinion of Facebook and chances are they will come out with some kind of comically ignorant response such as, ‘God’s greatest gift to man since the wheel’.

Probably the majority of the above demographic would struggle to even comprehend life before this social networking institution, and now that basically the entire planet’s population rests at our fingertips, fair to say Facebook has changed the way the world communicates.

Seems almost counterintuitive though, that amid a time where an individual’s privacy has become such an apparently sacred aspect of life that people would wilfully divulge/post personal information/data to a public forum accessible to practically every other person in the world.

Back in 2004, with the corporation that would soon become world-renowned as ‘Facebook’ still in its infant stages, the network’s founder (plagiarist) and CEO (having paid off the concept’s genuine brainchild and now free to make his fortune – also be forever remembered – as ‘Facebook Genius…’), Mark Zuckerberg, at the age of 19, became the subject of published transcripts, (reportedly) depicting him in discussion with a school chum:

 

‘Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS.

What? How’d you manage that one?

People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They “trust me”. Dumb fucks.’

 

Interestingly most people are compelled, when prompted, regarding a questionnaire or other inquiry-related form, to fill out a box, ironically, without question.

A pertinent question therefore, might indeed be, ‘While remaining hysterically sensitive about the shifting of personal information by a Government’s hand, when did people decide they had no issue with the disclosure of the aforementioned data by their own hand, providing it was restricted to a forum called Facebook, where they could then delude themselves into believing that it would only be seen by close friends and relatives?’

Remarkably many Facebook profiles contain enough personal information (also intimate photography) about the subject that through those Facebook profiles alone, one could easily come to feel they ‘know’ that person.

Virtually any person can see the face of, also discover a plethora of personal information about, virtually any other person through Facebook’s social networking platform which, given the liberal nature of this 21st century tool of personal inquisition, not surprising is the fact that its otherwise wholesome intentions are being abused.

Among other forms of Facebook abuse, online bullying is arguably the most severe; ‘arguably’ because opinions are still spread regarding the severity of cyber-abuse.

While much of the world seems to maintain an online bully or troll can be escaped simply by logging off and/or walking away, personally, if a person takes their kicks from demeaning, devaluing, or denigrating another – for whatever reason and in whatever form – that person is obviously still struggling to understand what it is to be human.

I read a newspaper article the other day in which the columnist was encouraging people to ‘drop Facebook’, citing the simple explanation, ‘Facebook is ruining society’.

Incidentally, other than posting the occasional excerpt, I don’t use Facebook; however in the course of my research for this particular article I did find myself stumbling over profile after profile of ‘Aren’t I pretty?’ selfies, ‘Hey everyone, look at me,’ pleas for attention, ‘Don’t I look hot in this?’ shots, and ‘I have just spent hours in the mirror working on this face but if I casually hold my tongue like this, kind of in but kind of out, you don’t know that,’ looks (which, when poring over the profile of a young man, is genuinely disturbing), leading to my unequivocal assessment.

Facebook is breeding a generation of youth whose greatest/only source of validation is a ‘like’, ‘comment’, or ‘notification’ on their profile; thus validation which they have really done nothing to earn, validation for which they have certainly achieved nothing, validation therefore which is shallow, hollow, and ultimately meaningless.

Ten, twenty years from now we are likely going to be met with a generation of hunch-backed, affirmation-seeking, weak-spirited, soft, superficial, insecure, insincere, pathetic excuses for adults, and we are only going to have ourselves to blame.

 

 

Article by Tim Walker

Edited by Fas Bik Trawl

Photography by Hunch Buck/Dame Notre