Finally, someone takes Sir Isaac Newton to task. Leave it to PZ to expose Mr. Gravity’s true nature.

Newton was a wild-eyed lunatic, cruel and inconsiderate to his peers (actually, he was so arrogant he seems not to have regarded anyone as his peer), and he documented in excruciating, obsessive detail the behavior of falling objects, which includes the falling of living, breathing, caring people. He plotted mathematically and with complex formulae the rates that objects, including people, would fall, and the force with which they would strike the ground — it’s hard not to imagine him cackling with glee like a psychopathic child pulling the wings off flies as he calculated the trajectories of objects, like people, flying through space. He was a horrible man.

Panic has set in at PetermanDotNet World Headquarters! I sent a silly picture to Phil Plait (aka the Bad Astronomer) and it sounds like he’s going to post it to his blog… along with a link back to here. Dammit, I’d better tidy things up before all those sciencey people head over here and start snooping around.

The truth is, however, that I don’t update this site very often and even when I do it’s usually relevant to a very small audience. So sorry folks, but if you came here from the BA site expecting to find even more cool science and space stuff, you’ll be disappointed. In fact, I’m quite surprised that you’re still reading.

I know! I’ll show you my pictures from the last few years of Amazing Meetings!

Perhaps you’ve noticed a rather glum look on Oprah’s face recently. Perhaps you’ve seen the groups of crying children, huddled on the playgrounds. And perhaps, just perhaps, you’ve asked yourself, “Why is the world so sad?”

As usual, I am responsible, and this time it’s because I have officially killed PlayaChicken.com.

Longtime followers know that for many years, PlayaChicken.com was the place to head to in order to view heaping piles of fresh Burning Man pictures. Each year, I’d return home from the playa and immediately get to work processing hundreds upon hundreds of images… and if I didn’t get to them fast enough the “when will the pictures be up?” emails would start flooding in. But in the end, the pictures always went up and the masses were always happy.

But before I explain why the site is now dead, I thought it would be an absolute delight to recount some of the memorable moments of this grand adventure.

• Our first trip to Burning Man was in 1996 and I captured the moments with a cheap point-and-shoot film camera. Upon returning, I had the film developed and scanned the prints. The company I was working for at the time — Starwave — gave the employees some web space for their own personal sites, so I uploaded the images to my area and thus began what would eventually become PlayaChicken.com
• A year later I registered the domain peterman.org and moved my site from the Starwave servers. Good thing, since I left the company a short while later. The Burning Man section was expanded to include more scanned prints from the 1997 event.
• I went digital in 1998 and the number of pictures I brought back from the event went way up. Way, way up.
• In 2000, I decided that it was time to separate the Burning Man pictures from my personal site, but what-oh-what should I call this new space on the web? That was actually a rather easy question to answer, as I had always been a fan of the legend of the playa chicken. Those of you who are relatively new to Burning Man may never have heard this legend, as it seems to have died out a bit in recent years. But in the earlier days, newbies were often told of the only animal indiginous to the barren wasteland: the playa chicken. The chickens could often be seen racing across the crackled landscape, and since they were federally protected, it was against the law to interfere with them in any way. Anyway, I registered PlayaChicken.com and created the new site.
• I decided to present PlayaChicken.com as the home of Playa Chicken Industries, a worldwide economic powerhouse that controlled many aspects of our daily lives. Oh, and showed Burning Man pictures. I also periodically issued press releases, most of which threw some taunt at the Church of Mez, a local group of evildoers. My not-so-hidden agenda was to simply get invited to their parties.
• In 2002, I had an idea for a remarkably simple web prank that turned out to be remarkably effective. All I did was clone a page from cnn.com and rewrite it with a story about how Burning Man had just struck a deal with MTV. I hid it behind a slightly spoofed URL and sent it out to a small email list I was on, thinking it would generate a few laughs. Well, it quickly went beyond that list and around the world. By that afternoon, the Burning Man offices were being flooded with phone calls and emails from angry burners, some of whom said they were going to tear up their tickets. After a very polite Andie Grace called me to let me know what they were dealing with, I added a disclaimer to the bottom of the article, which seemed to calm most people down. I recently resurected that prank page and posted it here. Note: It looks a bit funny because it used to link to CNN’s style sheet, which has sinced changed. The original content is intact, though.
• Somewhere in here I started an Ask the Chicken column on the site, where people could write in and ask for advice. It was while doing this that the “voice of the chicken” emerged, and we learned that she was a very rude, surly beast who hated pretty much everyone and everything. It wasn’t long before the media picked up on this sensation and I began channeling the chicken to write a column for the Black Rock Gazette and then later the Black Rock Beacon.
• The whole corporate Chicken thing existed for a couple years before I got tired of sustaining it. At some point (2003?) I revamped the site to simply be a repository for images. Yes, there was occasionally some other conent (for example, when we would do the ticket scholorship giveaways), but for the most part the focus was on pictures pictures pictures.
• Things hummed along for a couple more years. But by 2006 I knew that things were changing. The number of pictures I was taking on the playa was starting to decrease, with a whopping ZERO in 2007.
• In October 2007, I canceled my hosting account for PlayaChicken.com and archived the pages on this site.

I guess that second-to-last bullet pretty much sums up why I killed the site. My interest in taking pictures on the playa had waned and the site was in danger of stagnating. Rather than let that happen, I figured it was better to just pull the plug… but I certainly didn’t want to lose all the images and comments that had been gathered over the years.

So who knows… the chicken could very well rise again some day. Or she could stay dead and buried for the rest of eternity. Just to play it safe, I’m keeping the domain name.

The big news out of Burning Man 2007 was the torching of the man several days early, which you can read about at length here if you’re not already tired of the story. While at the event I was rather neutral on the whole thing; yeah, it’s good to shake things up, but destroying something that doesn’t belong to you is never a good idea. After reading a few interviews with the alleged arsonist, however, I’ve decided that it’s more interesting to ignore whatever intent he might have had and consider the eventual outcome. From my vantage point, which admittedly is very limited and distant, I see two things:

1. Mr. Flame-o just bought himself a world of legal trouble.

2. Aside from some increased Ranger presence at various installations, this will have absolutely zero impact on Burning Man.

Personally, I really can’t see how it will end up being worth it for him.