Category Archives: …and other stuff

miscellaneous postings by Lawrence R. Spencer

...and other stuff, FREE ADVICE, READING MATTER, UNIVERSES

TIME TRAVELING AROUND THE ROMAN EMPIRE

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For ancient history geeks, like me, this video demostrates how to use the “Orbis” mapping system, from Stanford University, is the coolest history study tool invented for want-to-be time travelers.  Here’s the link to the website: http://orbis.stanford.edu/

“Spanning one-ninth of the earth’s circumference across three continents, the Roman Empire ruled a quarter of humanity through complex networks of political power, military domination and economic exchange. These extensive connections were sustained by premodern transportation and communication technologies that relied on energy generated by human and animal bodies, winds, and currents.

Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information. Cost, rather than distance, is the principal determinant of connectivity.

For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.

Taking account of seasonal variation and accommodating a wide range of modes and means of transport, ORBIS reveals the true shape of the Roman world and provides a unique resource for our understanding of premodern history.

...and other stuff, ART, FREE ADVICE, INSIDE THE BOOK, LIVES, POETIC NONSENSE, READING MATTER, SHERLOCK HOLMES, SHERLOCK HOLMES: MY LIFE, THE BIG BLEEP

WORLD AS MYTH

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World As Myth

The Number of The Beast, by Robert Heinlein is a series of diary entries by each of the four main characters who describe their travels through time and parallel universes to The Land of Oz, and to Barsoom, the fictional planet (Mars) created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.  In the novel, the Biblical number of the beast turns out to be, not 666, but (6^6)^6, or 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056, which is the initial number of parallel universes accessible through the continua device. It is later theorized by the character Jacob that the number may be merely the instantly accessible universes from a given location, and there is a larger structure that implies an infinite number of universes.  As in many of his later works, Heinlein refers to the idea of solipsism, but in this book develops it into an idea he called “World as Myth” —the idea that universes are created by the act of imagining them, so that all fictional worlds are in fact real.

Sherlock Holmes: My Life, by Lawrence R. Spencer is based on the same concept.  In my book, Sherlock Holmes is a REAL person, who lived and breathed.  The stories of his real-life detective investigations were published, without his knowledge or permission, in a conspiracy to defraud and deface the greatest detective who ever lived!  With the very able assistance of his brother, Mycroft Holmes — the most powerful man in the British government — a conspiracy between Dr. Watson, the authors of Peter Pan, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and powerful financial interests, is discovered and foiled!

I wrote the book long before I read The Number of The Beast.  However, I am pleased to discover the “great minds” a like-minded!  Why can’t there be a nearly infinite number of parallel universes?  If one can imagine a universe, you have created it.  It exists, at least for you, subjectively.  Is it possible that Sherlock Holmes and Robert Heinlein could be enjoying an adventure together right in this moment, in a parallel universe of their own design?  Now, THAT would be a really interesting universe!

Another book, The Big Bleep: The Mystery of A Different Universe, by Lawrence R. Spencer explores a similar theme.  It is a universe concocted from the universes of hardboiled “film noir” crime novel by Raymond Chandler, a convention of plants who decide to collectively “hold their breath” to prevent new oxygen from being created in order kill off all the evil humans on Earth, and a conglomeration of pulp comic Superheroes, fighting to help the “heroes” of the story Peter, The Potted Plant (a stand-up comic) and a “Public Dick” named Sam Shovel, owner of the Unexistential Detective Agency of America, to solve the mystery of the murder of Carmel Underwood and rescue humankind from extinction!  Simply stated, The Big Bleep is sort of like a Pulp Fiction version of Columbo riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle through the movies The Maltese Falcon, Alice In Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, with a Elvis and bunch of comic book super heroes bouncing back and forth between an X-Rated Universal Studios Botanical Garden Theme Park and a convoluted Las Vegas strip mall in a 5th Dimensional time warp!

The idea that universes are created by the act of imagining them is not new. Every history book in every library on Earth is a fictional universe filled with imagined events created by the conquerors of vanquished nations and extinct species in an imaginary time-line of undocumented fantasy!