desperance

Other people's dreams are dull, but I seem to have dreamed a world where understanding was an artefact, which came as it were with its object: so that you could only be a nuclear scientist in the presence of the reactor, go home and you'd leave all that precious knowledge behind you for someone else's use. (This was not, you understand, the way the dream presented itself. It was actually a dream about serial storytelling, info-dumps and retcon, how you couldn't explain this crucial bit of worldbuilding in this episode because you needed the explanation for that one instead and there was only the one explanation, like a talking-stick being passed around the circle; but I made the fatal mistake of thinking about it once I'd woken up, and the conclusion was inescapable. And a little more interesting than average dreamwork, I think.)

In other news of not-quite-scientifictional experience, Gail and I went to a concert last night where the Houston Symphony Orchestra played The Planets below a big-screen sequence of images from NASA, fly-bys and landings and computer simulations, our best current notions of what the actual planets are actually like. I did love that. Though I did also inevitably go home earwormed with "I Vow To Thee, My Country", and still am. (Also, I had forgotten that Jupiter is "The Bringer of Jollity". By Jove, yes. Ho ho ho.)