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.

This entry is highly speculative even by my standards, and might be more of an interesting idea for science-fiction fans than a futuristic view. However, seeing how it is impossible to foresee the future, it is possible after all that we would find a means to realize the following.

If the axis of electron orbitals in an object could somehow be decreased, and this process would happen at a sufficiently slow speed, the atoms inside the object would steadily rearrange themselves as its electron orbitals steadily shrink.
Causing an electronic orbital to shrink would require a sophisticated insight into quantum mechanics, which we're still far from having. We know, however, that the distance of an electron from its nucleus depends on two important factors, much like with planets around the sun: the outward centrifugal force keeps the electron from colliding with the nucleus, while the Coulomb force keeps it from escaping from it. These can be mathematically equated as:

kZe2/r2 = mv2/r

where the first member of the equation is the Coulomb force and the second is the centrifugal force, and

k is the Coulomb constant
Z is the atomic number
e is the elementary charge
r is the atomic radius
m is the mass of the electron
v is the speed of the electron

Thus, the radius of an atom equals:

r = kZe2/mv2

k and e are universal constants, so unless we can locally manipulate the laws of the universe, these are impossible to change. However, recent evidence suggests that physical constants are perhaps not as constant as we believed: for instance, in a natural nuclear reactor in Gabon, the Sommerfeld constant was shown to have changed. However, changing physical constants might prove to involve such advanced quantum physics that this would perhaps not be the easiest way.
By increasing the momentum of the electron, however, its orbital radius would have to decrease too. However, increasing its momentum could instead cause the electron to escape its atom. Both increasing the momentum of the electron and keeping it in its orbital could theoretically be done by radiating it with energy from the right angle. This is simply the opposite of bremstrahlung ("braking radiation"), in which a charged particle (eg an electron) emits energy as it is slowed down by another charged particle (th emitted energy being its lost kinetic energy).
Now the real challenge would be: how can we know when to radiate the electron?
We can't. We can't even know where the electron is in the first place, not without knowing every interaction it has with other particles in its environment. At most, we can conceive of how this could hypothetically be done with even more hypothetical technology. That, in this case, would be picorobots, a subatomic version of nanorobots, which could collectively calculate where the electron would manifest macroscopically and based on this radiate it from exactly the right angle so as to slowly bring it closer to its nucleus as they increase its momentum - it would require astronomical computation power and technology we are today unable to clearly envisage.
Suppose, anyhow, that with science yet unknown to us today, somehow we could find a way of compressing atoms, be it by somehow manipulating the laws of physics or some other esoteric method, there could still be other problems involved. For instance, manipulating atoms would also manipulate the way they would interact with one another, so that if the process went too fast, the molecules they comprise would disintegrate; in addition, if the atoms would collide with one another, they could disrupt the process.
Supercooling the object may prevent atomic collisions from damaging its structure, although if the object were more complex, such as a person or even a single tissue, supercooling it may not be an option except with advanced cryonic technology; the necessity of this would depend on the speed at which the atoms would shrink.
If this would happen instantaneously, then certainly the chemical composition of the object would be profoundly damaged, and possibly all that would be left would be an amorphous heap of matter - this as well might be useful if the matter to be atomically compressed is already amorphous, such as a resource, in which case this might have other, indirect applications. Atomically compressing matter would NOT make it easier for transport because the atoms kinetic energy is retained, however, and therefore so is the outward pressure, but it might make it possible for it to permeate other material easier, even material which is normally very impermeable such as concrete; if the atomic compression were somehow temporary, this could also destroy the material in question, as the atoms' decompression throughout it would cause tremendous internal pressure in it. It might also allow it to pass through a pipeline faster, for instance, as more atoms could fit in it, or it could be easier absorbed by the body, perhaps even through the pores of the skin. This could also be used to create ultrasmall versions of nanorobots.
If the atomic compression could happen gradually so that it could be applied to a complex object despite the entropic force this process would involve, the result would be that the object would become a perfectly identical smaller version of its original. The possibilities such technology might involve would be endless, such as espionage, nano/picotechnology, and simply entertainment. Ironically, a human or object could safely be small without having to fear of be killed: being walked upon, for instance, would have the same effect as it would have if someone walked on you if you were of normal size, because you still have the same number of atoms and therefore the same energy holding them together as they would have if you were of normal size: in fact, because whatever force you would experience would be more diffuse, it would be less dangerous. Of course, unpleasant accidents such as being kicked against might be more frequent, but not any dangerous than at normal size.

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.