It's wrong to judge people by superficial appearances, so I try not to waste any thought on how politicians and other public figures look. Nevertheless I find myself thinking it anyway, from time to time. Why do right-wing folks tend to look so...weird? Off?

Our brain isn't good at all with imagining a gravitational singularity or "black hole" in three-dimensional space. Oh, we've seen diagrams and things and it's still opaque to us. 2D singularities are a lot easier to think about.

I'm put in mind with a neat toy that I know I've seen demonstrated somewhere, possibly at a "science museum" (I've been to a few, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco) as a tactile display. It's a hard plastic funnel that starts with a gentle slope and then falls off rapidly towards the center, much like the 2D singularity's profile, and you can toss small spheres or coins into it and watch them spin in faster and tighter circles, until they're really whizzing around:

Now imagine that went down infinitely deep, and you're in for an image I find slightly upsetting, the notion of someone on a trajectory like that, whizzing around really really fast in a circle and sinking, always sinking, and there's no bottom. (I'm not sure what special relativity does to this picture.) But invert the perspective, and it's someone who perceives themselves as spinning around an infinite pinnacle, always creeping upwards in tighter and tighter circles.

And I feel suddenly as if I'd imagined what "success" or "the rat race" might feel like.

Honestly a rat wheel is another pretty good way to imagine things. Everyone inside is lashed into running harder, always harder, because that makes the wheel go faster and faster and that's always good! Faster is always better.

~Chara

When I'm in pain I emit prose poems, that's what I do ~Chara

I had a very brief but vivid vision of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, once Leonardo da Vinci's patron until the Italian Renaissance got to him (i.e. his precarious alliances broke down and he fled posthaste), trying to pretend that he invented and did all da Vinci's work, like he was a CEO pretending to be a rocket scientist. >_>

I can't imagine those Italian merchant-princes were really any different, except that they had much better taste in books and paintings, and sending out for fancy stuff took months rather than days. Surely they, too, were all liars and braggarts. Tell me that Ludovico Sforza wouldn't pretend he was an inventor using some da Vinci sketches as "proof".

~Chara