Fridge Thought Fully Like, Twenty Years Later, When Thinking About The Concept In Young Wizards About

Finally! A black hole that you can visit and survive!

Want a trip through a black hole without having to experience that pesky death? You’re in luck. There’s a special kind of black hole that’s not just survivable, but might get you to another time, or another universe.

Black holes are, traditionally, the scariest things in the universe. Huge, mysterious, inescapable, they wander through the universe and eat everything that gets too close. “Too close” is defined by their event horizon. This is the point at which they go dark, because it requires so much energy to escape them that not even light can get away. Since not even a photon can cross the barrier, no event that happens inside the horizon can ever have an effect on people outside.

Unless, something very odd was going on in the center of the black hole. Most black holes spin - this is something that was discovered way back in the 1960s by physicist Roy Kerr. It wasn’t exactly a shock, because most of the material that collapses into a black hole was already spinning. Sometimes, however, the spin on Kerr black holes goes a little above and beyond. Ever spun a glass of water, or soda bottle, so that the liquid inside swirls? Sometimes, if you spin it enough, the liquid actually parts, leaving a clear center and a spinning ring of water around it. The same kind of thing can happen in Kerr black holes. Instead of a singularity at the center, there’s a ring. And you can go through the open portion of that ring without touching the gravitational crush.

What’s on the other side? A lot of people have wondered. Some people think that these kind of black holes might be our key to time travel. They might be wormholes that let us hop between different points of the universe. Or they might be portals to different universes entirely. First we’ll have to find a few, and then we’ll need a few volunteers to go through. Preferably ones that haven’t seen Event Horizon.

Top Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Second Image: Dana Berry/NASA

Via NASA, Astrophysics Spectator, Discovery.

I’ve got another question for you (sorry for asking so many questions about the young wizards series). The concepts of the Wizards Manual and the Speech. Let’s say, for instance, a wizard isn’t mathematically minded and has a natural bent towards poetry and literature, could the Speech take the form of poetry and could the Wizard’s manual be a mixture of modalities (pen and paper, laptop, and headphones)?

Well, this question has to be handled in two parts.

Can a wizard use something besides the Speech to do wizardry? No. There's only one language in which the Universe was built (though numerous recensions of that).

But that said: want to do spells in which the Speech is structured like poetry? Well, sure, why not? Poetry (when it's not free verse) is some of the most structured stuff there is: it'd work perfectly. (As long as you were really careful with the scansion...) And other forms of artistic structure could also work.

As regards the math end of things: you could make a case that both Nita's and Kit's Manuals (maybe more Nita's...) are mathematically- or scientifically-aligned because both their mindsets lean (or leaned) that way. But are there wizards constructing spells that look more like artwork than equations? Almost certainly. (There's at least one reference in Games Wizards Play to wizards dancing spells in the Speech rather than speaking it. Not to mention one of the wizards working with the event organizers for the Invitational, a graphic designer who was embedding the Speech into fonts...)

Secondary to all this: can the Manual be used in more than one modality? I don't see why not. The master project of "porting over" the Manual into more modern and easier-to-manage instrumentalities is first mentioned in The Book of Night with Moon—where Ehef, one of the feline wizards living and working at NYPL is a supervisor on the project. And this would almost certainly be a continuing effort, resulting in items like the WizPhone that Nita trialed at Kit's urging some while back. (And of course Spot, who started out with Dairine as a desktop and upgraded to a laptop along the way.) The attitude of the Powers that Be would certainly be that they want to make doing wizardry easier for qualified people, not harder. So, mix and match among modalities? Sure. (And at least you'd never have to worry about them staying in synch...) :)

...As for pen and paper: it's likely enough that the Speech was for many centuries in writing-centric cultures most routinely written longhand (after it broke out of cuneiform and hieroglyphics...). Probably there are even now wizards who prefer to do their spell structuring longhand—who knows, maybe even with fountain pens. (In fact, now I've managed to make myself suspicious about the work habits of a couple of people I know...) :)

Anyway: HTH!

Thing I’ve been mulling over for a while: some really good YA fantasy novels of my childhood (Young Wizards - no one who knows me is surprised by this) really emphatically gave me tools to understand and dismantle my own “white supremacist delusion,” as Sonya Renee Taylor puts it. The construction of the cosmos in these books formed my worldview at a really early age. They have helped me, decades later, to believe deeply and truly in both my own ability to support and uphold Evil in all of its guises, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘nice’ I may inherently see myself to be - and my own power to dismantle Evil in all its guises, within myself, as well as in the world beyond myself.

I was watching this IG live video where Taylor powerfully explains how important it is to shift from seeing whiteness as something intrinsically ours to possess rather than as the result of a dehumanizing system that we can - and in fact are ethically called upon to - uproot. I understand Taylor to be saying that I, as a person assigned power by whiteness, have a duty to continually identify and reject the delusions of whiteness starting with myself. 

There’s an image Taylor uses, in this video, of searching inside of yourself for the spaces where this toxic ideology of whiteness has taken hold - and to find and uproot it. And immediately I saw a climactic moment from High Wizardry, one where Dairine has a realization about how intimately entropy has its hold upon her:

She stopped, as the answer rushed into her mind from the manual. Where entropy is, it said, there its creator also is, either directly or indirectly…

I’m a product of this universe, after all, she had said to the mobiles. It’s in me too…

Her heart turned over inside her as she came to know her enemy. Not a Darth Vader, striding in with a blood-burning light-sabre, not something outside to battle and cast down, but inside. Inside herself. Where it had always been, hiding, growing, waiting until the darkness was complete and its own darkness not noticeable any more. Her Enemy was wearing her clothes, and her heart, and there was only one way to get rid of It…

She was terrified. Yet this was the great thing, the thing that mattered […]

I’d hazard a guess that many of us have a primary conditioning to see evil precisely as “something outside to battle and cast down.” I say this about evil in general; I think it’s probably extra true for the ways that white people approach the evil of white supremacist delusion. I see it a lot with the teenagers that I now teach: the actively anti-racist white kids who really want to march, to have hard conversations with other people, to change laws, to show up at city hall meetings…and who don’t understand that, while those are all good and important things to be doing, if they are all you are doing, they will not be enough. They are all ways of seeing the problem as “something outside to battle and cast down” instead of as something that is LITERALLY “wearing [your] clothes, and [your] heart.”

The good news - also from High Wizardry - is the possibility of full and complete liberation on the other side of the recognition, and the reckoning that follows. The snatches of it glimpsed within this life, the work of widening the ground… The belief (which Duane’s world offered me, and which my Christianity never did) that even the one who dreamed Evil into being can be liberated and redeemed from it…and that that, and no less, is the scope of the work. 

(YW also taught me, perhaps most importantly of all, that this work is collective and done best when part of an ever-widening family / network / team.)

gUYS VOYAGER 1 IS CONFIRMED OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM WE’VE BROKEN OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM THIS IS REALLY COOL

Epic map reveals Mars’s geography in unrivalled detail

I’m like halfway through GWP and so far Mehrnaz is my new fav. I’m loving the character diversity, I mean I can’t remember the last time I read a book with a Muslim girl character where the whole book wasn’t centered around her being Muslim, thank you DD <3

(cont) Are these timeline issues fixed in the New Millennium Editions? And if you have a corrected timeline, could you post it here? Thank you!

Fixing the timeline issues was one of the main purposes of the NMEs. So I think it’s safe to say that yes, those issues have been fixed.

No, I don’t have a timeline as such. The general progression of the New Millennium editions, though, is given in the “time fix” at the start of each book. So it goes like this:

So You Want to Be a Wizard: May 2008

Deep Wizardry: July 2008

High Wizardry: August 2008

A Wizard Abroad: Mid-July through early August, 2009

The Wizard’s Dilemma: Late September, 2009

A Wizard Alone: January 2010

Wizard’s Holiday: April 2010

Wizards at War: Late April / early May 2010

A Wizard of Mars: Late June 2010

…Hope that helps. :)

Parallel universe theory

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (via cynicsdream)

Some magical sisters from my absolute favorite book series of all time: the Young Wizards series! It’s really under-appreciated tbh and I, 10/10, recommend it!! Anyway, even if you haven’t read it, you still can appreciate the art I guess  ◕ ‿ ◕