Cloudscape

Almost every moment, we keep letting almost each moment and all its wonders slip away through our fingers, so stuck in our cyclical patterns that we have forgotten to live, or what it is even like to really be alive. If you want to awaken from this ignorance, then NOW is the time to do so - NOW, when you're with one leg in your trousers, yawning as you're looking at your watch; NOW, when you've got only three minutes left to catch your train; NOW, when you're fighting your way through rush hour traffic; NOW, when the the bell and the phone ring at the same time when you're trying to eat at a table with three noisy children; NOW, when you're confined to bed with 40 centigrade of fever.
Don't have mercy for your own ignorance of the marvels around you, lest the day comes that they will be gone forever. Hold the current tight and never let it go; and no matter what troubles may come, keep holding on. It doesn't matter what time will bring; accept it gratefully, and you will see that even its curses are gifts.

This entry in a few words: being love is often seen as merely hormonal because it lasts only for a few months once we are in a relationship. However, exactly the same is observed in friendship. This is merely because people seem more interesting when we first meet them, at least if we take to each other.

Many scientists see being love as something purely hormonal, arguing that it does not, after all, last for long. They often point at the chemicals released in our brain and compare it the effects to drugs. However, the chemicals involved in romantic love - dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, phenylethylamine - are all some of the same chemicals involved in social interaction in general, as well as in other emotions. We should not forget, however, that neurotransmitters are not our emotions; they are the paint in which our experiences and emotions are made. Sometimes, the result is just a big splotch of paint, as in the use of narcotic drugs or physical sex; sometimes, the result is a child's drawing, as in the thousandth repetition of a superficial conversation; sometimes, the result is a beautiful canvas, as in the contemplation of nature's wonders or true love.

Usually, after a few months we are no longer in love even though the person and often our relationship with them has remained the same. However, in this they make the crucial error not to take into account psychological factors.
Falling in love is an emotional reponse which comes from a deep and often subconscious need for a soulmate. Someone with whom one can connect to the roots of the soul, with whom one can share all one's feelings that lie deep within our core, someone with whom you can together discover who you really are. It's the need no no longer to be, alone, but to be, together, to find someone with whom one can live as one, someone who forms the missing part of oneself.
Often, even when we aren't fully aware of what this inner longing really means, and yet sometimes we can no longer live with it and tell ourselves that we have already found whom we were looking for. We fall in love. But we idealize the person we think the other to be, thinking that we have found our soulmate -- until a few months later, our false hopes lead to a letdown.
This becomes quite evident when one realizes that the same is observed in friendship.
When we meet someone and we take a liking to them, we're a lot more interested in them, and our hopes of our friendship are higher. We are more hopeful about the congeniality of the other's personality because we have not yet explored it in detail. At first we may seem more similar than we turn out to be later on because we broadly seem to understand each other - but it's those details which tell most of all about oneself, and only by paying attention to those details can one find out who someone really is.
Basically, friendship is a scale model of love.

I am aware this entry is in contradiction with one I've written earlier, but that's just a view from another viewpoint, and that viewpoint can be just as interesting.

With enough energy, nanorobots connected to a nanoscale knife could cut through almost anything because in their small size they would meet little resistance. Of course, the effects of this would normally be unnoticeable macroscopically, but suppose that as the nanorobots would cut through the material they would secrete a kind of lubricant, this would allow the microscopic slit to become larger as the parts of the material could slide off one another. For some materials, another method could be to heat it, so that part of it melts or vaporizes so as to lubricate it itself. If the material would be a metal, the nanorobots could instead use magnetism instead of a lubricant to repel the metal.

Love does not always croon. Sometimes, it roars.

If we think that something is good, it is hard to avoid that we'll also think that the opposite is bad, which creates fear of losing whatever it is that we think good. Instead, let us then feel that the thing in question is not "good," but instead enjoyable.

We must realize that in the here and now we cannot have lost anything: we could as well have started to live our lives now, and picked up in this moment ashave lived our lives since our birth. It makes no difference to the here and now what our past once held. Even when the surface of the sea recedes in the ebb, there are still oceans below them.

There is a fallacy in this argument, however: it treats the past as if it still exists when one goes back to the past. In fact, this turns the past into the present. This means that the past would actually have followed the present; in this way, it is impossible to be in the past because one is always in the present, but one could assume that one could make the present turn into what it used to be. "The present" just means whatever we are experiencing right now.
Thus, if one would go back to the past, meaning that one would change whatever there is in the present into what it was in the past, and then change the past, then whatever one would do in the past would cause the future to be altogether different (due to chaos theory), so that there would be no future to return to - or it would be an altogether different one. However, since you yourself would be part of the future, then you as well would be altogether different, actually meaning that you wouldn't exist. If you would therefore return to the future, you would just pop into existence from nowhere, just as you had when you went back to the past, and the only history you'd have was that you'd have travelled through time.
In short, there is no other time than now, and only by changing now can one make it like the future or past, although that doesn't mean that it is the future or past. It is just the present being as the past or future would have been, had it been future or past.
If one would travel through time by travelling to a parallel universe which is how your own universe used to be in the past, however, nothing in your own universe would be changed by whatever you would do in this parallel universe.
I don't actually believe in time travel at all. But it is an interesting concept in fiction; but when it is used in fiction, it aught not to get tangled in false logic.

Imagine a diffuse jelly of very large macromolecules which, while large in surface area, take little volume; these could, for instance, be very large macrocycles (macrocycles being large molecular circles), made large enough to let plenty of oxygen and other small molecules through. Suppose that, like most macrocycles, these would contain a great deal of aromatic molecules, and that through pi-pi interaction ( which occurs in the "stacking" of aromatic molecules), so that these would be weakly bond. Just how solid the whole of macrocycles would depend on how many pi orbitals there would be in the aromatic molecules and how many of these molecules there would be.
Now suppose that these macrocycles would be bond strongly enough to temporarily sustain the weight of an object or even a person, upon which the macrocycles would slowly break their bonds with one another. This would be reversible because the bonds are intermolecular, and after the object or person has sunk deeper into the jelly of macrocycles, they would stack again. If whatever sunk into the jelly would be a person, he or she could still breathe because the macrocycles, having such a large cavity, would allow enough air to pass through. The aromatic molecules could be so arranged within the macrocycles that they would bind to one another in a regular pattern, and above the cavity in every macrocycle there would be another.
Such diffuse "jelly" of macrocycles could be used as a kind of chemical elevator, although it could only go down. The advantage of such an elevator would be that it could be created very quickly, and could even be transported. This could prove to be very useful during emergencies. For instance, a helicopter could bring a kind of tube-formed plastic "bag" to a high story of a burning skyscraper, upon which it could be pumped full of such macrocycles from the ground (which would be far too heavy to escape from the top). Given that the helicopter would then keep the bag from toppling, people who would be trapped in the skyscraper could safely, slowly "fall" to the ground.

People, and perhaps even animals, will often seek out partners who are similar to themselves. This is, of course, quite understandable from a psychological viewpoint, but it also happens to have evolutionary implications: if our partners are similar to ourselves and therefore have similar genes or memes, this makes it more likely for them to be preserved in offspring, increasing the chance of these genes' or memes' survival. This is significant because it means that sexual selection does not necessarily favor the fittest specimen, but the fittest most similar specimen.

Since a specimen's genotype is basically a collection of genes, this means that if it is to keep its genotype alive as long as possible, it will also keep its genes alive as long as possible; this doesn't have to be solely in the specimen itself, but can also be in other specimens, especially in social species such as ourselves. This is partly why similar people tend to associate in groups, based on the genes and memes they appear to have in common.

Artificial bacteria have been engineered to change in color in response to light. Suppose that another species of artificial bacteria could be engineered to either harden or cause their matrix to harden in response to light in a photochemical reaction, this could be used as a form of solid freeform fabrication.