Imagine of Songs

Here in Hawaiʻi we are busting it out (like these killer wahines) every day in ways you can’t even imagine. Half my nā hoahānau play like this!

In any other movie, Raleigh would’ve spent 90 minutes being like MY PAIN IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOUR STUPID WAR, and instead, he snaps back into action as soon as he meets Mako. That’s awesome. But what floors me is that he uses his own grief to help Mako survive hers. He knows how awful it is to lose your family. He knows what she’s going through. And instead of whining or thinking his pain makes him entitled to opt out of his responsibilities, he empathizes with Mako, supports her, and encourages her.

Raleigh’s greatest strength is his compassion. And that’s the kind of male hero I’d like to see on my screen, please.

Wintergatan - Marble Music Machine (2000 marbles)

Sirens are born from violent, watery deaths. Drowning, being murdered at sea, their bodies being thrown in to the water shortly after their deaths, stuff like that. They are the ones that sing to sailors (or anyone) and drag them to their deaths when they get too close. They are born anytime.

The premise of The Galileo Seven really hasn’t stood the test of time, but I can see why it seemed plausible in the 1960s.

As I touched on yesterday, quasars were only discovered in the 1950s and they seemed pretty weird. They were first discovered by radio telescopes (hence the original name, “quasi-stellar radio source”), but there was nothing visible in optical light at the position of the radio detection.

Eventually - in the early 1960s - optical counterparts to these things were detected, which enabled astronomers to measure their spectra (i.e. splitting the light into its constituent wavelengths). This also enables you to measure how quickly something is moving, because light gets shifted towards the red end of the spectrum if the object giving off the light is moving away from you. This revealed something very weird: the spectra of these objects implied they were moving *very* quickly: something like a third of the speed of light.

It was already known in the 1960s that the Universe is expanding. This means it looks as though everything’s moving away from us, and the most distant things are moving away more quickly. So the usual explanation for something moving very fast is that it’s very far away.

The problem with this is that quasars are very bright, and far away things look faint. So if quasars really were far away, they would have to be really incredibly bright close up. Incredibly as in not credible: there was no way anything could produce that much energy. So quasars had to be something new and weird and unknown. Hence, I assume, the standing order to investigate them, which implies someone involved in this episode was pretty well up to date on contemporary astronomy research.

Fast forward 50 years and we’ve learned a whole bunch about the Universe, including that you really can produce that much energy if you have a whole bunch of stuff falling into a black hole. The Universe is pretty amazing like that.

This presents two problems for the premise of The Galileo Seven: 1) there’s really no urgency to investigate these things, they hang around a while and there are a fair few of them; and 2) they are way too far away for the Enterprise to pay them a visit. You can probably do a much better job with a telescope on (or near) the Earth.

Sometimes it’s frustrating. I’m learning it because I love anime and want to be able to engage with the culture, but all the shounen I-belive-in-my-friends inspiration can’t help you when you’re faced with a list of 1000 kanji to learn before you’re at the reading level of a five-year-old. Sometimes I wish I’d picked a language with a writing system that made sense. 

But then once in a while something comes along that makes it all worth it. 

Now this. This is the kanji for ability.

It’s a nice enough kanji, has some radicals of its own but isn’t too full of itself. Learning all about it isn’t too important, what you need to know is that this is the character for ability. 

Now. 

This. 

This here is the kanji for bear. As in the animal, not the verb.

That’s right. According to the Japanese language, a bear is ability