I had a conversation with someone a while ago. I'm a geek and my circle of friends are usually geeks. And we got into the subject of Star Wars.

Of course there was the usual criticisms of JarJar and the acting and the plot. But he just seemed a bit more angrier. I could see it in his eyes. "Fuck George Lucas!" was his every fifth or sixth sentence. He said it with the same fire as woman scorned. "He doesn't care about the fans!" And he went on and on about the Star Wars franchize and it made me feel uncomfortable. --"he should've done this" he said, "he should've done that."

Getting tired and somewhat afraid of this man, I believe I said something along the lines of "Why don't you make your own Star Wars?"

"huh?"

--I said something like, "You're an artist, too. You have an imagination, you have talent. Why don't you tell your story and make your own Star Wars instead of pretending George Lucas owes you. Why don't you do the work and write a script, then get investors, then get actors and special effects guys. How about finding a distributor and a studio. How about dealing with executive producers and Hollywood types. You know, the ones who don't understand your vision."

..."oh, wait a second! you don't have one. You expect fan dome to fill your life instead of hard work.-- How about this: fine, criticize Lucas's work. But how about criticize the artist until you've actually finished your novel or your film or something."

If you're going to be a bitter fan, why don't you be a bitter artist and make something that might be good?

Labels: blog

Vatican City, Dec 19, 2009 / 12:23 pm (CNA).- The Vatican made a declaration on the protection of the figure of the Pope on Saturday morning. The statement seeks to establish and safeguard the name, image and any symbols of the Pope as being expressly for official use of the Holy See unless otherwise authorized.

The statement cited a "great increase of affection and esteem for the person of the Holy Father" in recent years as contributing to a desire to use the Pontiff's name for all manner of educational and cultural institutions, civic groups and foundations.

Due to this demand, the Vatican has felt it necessary to declare that "it alone has the right to ensure the respect due to the Successors of Peter, and therefore, to protect the figure and personal identity of the Pope from the unauthorized use of his name and/or the papal coat of arms for ends and activities which have little or nothing to do with the Catholic Church."

The declaration alludes to attempts to use ecclesiastical or pontifical symbols and logos to "attribute credibility and authority to initiatives" as another reason to establish their “copyright” on the Holy Father's name, picture and coat of arms.

"Consequently, the use of anything referring directly to the person or office of the Supreme Pontiff... and/or the use of the title 'Pontifical,' must receive previous and express authorization from the Holy See," concluded the message released to the press.

I need to finish writing God(tm) because it seems that reality will write it for me.

Labels: God(tm), religion

I was also interviewed about the project. Check it out!


http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2009/12/unbound-elan-trinidad-on-god-tm/#more-29247

Labels: blog, God(tm), my work, review

Okay, this theory has been in my head for a few days. I got to get it out!


Do you know that a baby's perception of numbers are very different from ours? Babyies think of numbers and quantity COMPLETELY different than adults. And children have to be taught how to count. If they are never taught how to count, they would experience numbers logarithmically. The way we think of numbers is sort of... artificial.

Honestly, instead of me trying to explain how babies and an Amazon tribe thinks logarithmically, I'm going to stick this link to RadioLab.

Take a few minutes to listen from 04:00 to the end in order to understand what Robert Krullwich, Jad Abumrad and Lulu Miller can explain much more elegantly than I.

So, almost all children in the world learn this world of numbers from their parents/school/culture. But how did we come to count like this in the first place? Did the gods teach us? Aliens?

First off, let's dance.... with a bird.

A study was done on a bird to figure out if a bird was dancing (moving its body to the rhythm of a song) or just moving to noise or other ques so it just looks like its dancing. It showed that birds can indeed dance because it takes nerves and muscles control in order for a bird to create noise to communicate, dancing might be a side-effect. Sound effects muscles.

Again, I'm not the best to explain this study, Adena Schachner and Bob MacDonald are better at it, so here's a link to Quirks & Quarks. Or just listen to the mp3.


So, imagine the first tribes of man trying to make sense of the world. A shaman has the power to talk to the gods by doing a certain dance. If the shaman, most likely high on the autistic spectrum, does this dance that he created, the rains will come, the hunt will be good, the winter will end.

But the shaman is getting old and knows that some day he will die. If there's no one to do the dance, then the world will end. So he has to teach the next generation to dance this dance properly.

Now, I have personally done stage performance. I loosely call it "choreography" but I did need to learn a few acts.

And what's the easiest way to memorize a specific dance?

one - two - three - KICK
five - six - seven - TURN
nine - ten - eleven - STEP

So, through dance, early man thought of numbers as a sequence in time than as logarithmic quantity. And counting the beats "five - six - seven - eight" we were able to make the abstract connection between quantity and sequence.

And now we have math. The kind that eventually charted the stars and the days and the years. And then we got into measurements and geometry and calculus and physics.

I wonder if it would be easy for mathematician to learn the Cha-Cha?


...okay. I'm sure there might be a good argument against the "Dance Theory" because I wouldn't be surprised if that Amazon Tribe mentioned in RadioLab could dance. BUT dance is temporal. Time is, at least to us, sequential. So counting days might have also been a factor in the way we think of math. Think of it. Early man may have noticed that the Moon goes through its cycles. When the moon is full, its easiest to hunt at night. Then someone might have realized that it takes 28 days for the moon to cycle.

Anyway, these are just theories that might sound interesting in a comic or things I use to sound smart to my friends at a bar.

P.S. If any real scientists think I actually have something here, then put a link to my webcomics on the scientific paper you'll eventually write. www.theorofeverythingcomics.com If some other scientist had already written a paper on this, then it would be cool if you posted a link in the comments.

Labels: blog, lecture, philosophy, podcast, science

At Webcomic Beacon they celebrated this week, their 2nd year of podcasting. They also featured my interpretation of their mascot, Becky, as this week cover image.

Check out their gallery to see the complete image.

Over the last year or so, they've been supportive of Theory of Everything Comics, so check them out.

Labels: comics, my work, podcast

help us make this video viral

Labels: holiday, RayRay