Even in absurdity, sacrament. Even in hardship, holiness. Even in doubt, faith. Even in chaos, realization. Even in paradox, blessedness
links open windows | email me at lightenin' speeds
Hey, original t-shirts for sale!
|
bird on the moon
weblog
books
all the pictures
call me moonbird
Donate: |
"Life expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage." ~Anain Nin
Ribbit. 1955 was a busy year for the Children of Dagon, amphibious bipedal creatures that are said to dwell in the Ohio River and it’s tributaries. In May of that year, a man driving home at 3:30 AM in Loveland OH, located northeast of Cincinnati, pulled over his car on the shoulder of the road when he sighted three frog like reptilian creatures, one of which was waving a wand device that shot sparks out of it. The driver notified local police authorities of what he had witnessed in those three minutes of terror before the mysterious beings disappeared. No substantial proof for the creatures was ever found and the witness was labeled an imaginative quack. Three months later the Children of Dagon struck again during the sweltering heat of a hot August 21st day in Evansville, Indiana. Mrs. Darwin Johnson had decided to cool off by taking a refreshing swim in the polluted Ohio River. From out of the murky depths her aquatic assailant gripped at her knee with its menacing claws, pulling her under. Struggling with this unseen fiend, she managed to fight her way out of its horrible grip. Yet not soon after her first gasp of air was she dragged down below into what almost became her watery grave. With a stroke of heaven sent luck Mrs. Johnson was able to reach out her hand and grab onto the inner tube of a nearby friend. The thumping noise she made when pulling herself up and landing on it, amidst her wailing splashes and screams, seemed to have scared her attacker off, sending it back down to its underwater lair where it still may be hiding to this very day waiting for other would-be victims. The creature left a green stain on Mrs. Johnson’s knee, along with a few scratches where the beast had groped at her, for which she sought the advice of a medical doctor. [via corpus mmothra] jaybird found this for you @ 12:28 in Forteana, Phenomena & the Bizarre | | permalink
Catastrophe: Arms still pouring into Sudan's Darfur Arms are still pouring into Sudan's embattled Darfur region in violation of a U.N. arms ban, U.N. experts said on Thursday. The arms come from neighboring countries as well as nations outside the African continent, the panel of four experts said. They urged the Security Council to strengthen the embargo and better enforce it. Their latest report mentioned by name only Chad as an arms source, but earlier reports have also cited Eritrea and Libya. The council imposed an arms embargo on all non-government forces in Darfur in July 2004, to help end a civil war that has raged in the region since February 2003. The conflict has pitted Sudanese rebels against government forces and allied militias, who have killed tens of thousands and driven 2 million people from their homes into miserable camps in Sudan and neighboring Chad. jaybird found this for you @ 08:24 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
The root of language is everywhere (look around) If there is one quality that marks out the scientific mind, it is an unquenchable curiosity. Even when it comes to things that are everyday and so familiar they seem beyond question, scientists see puzzles and mysteries. Look at the letters in the words of this sentence, for example. Why are they shaped the way that they are? Why did we come up with As, Ms and Zs and the other characters of the alphabet? And is there any underlying similarity between the many kinds of alphabet used on the planet? To find out, scientists have pooled the common features of 100 different writing systems, including true alphabets such as Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and our own; so-called abjads that include Arabic and others that only use characters for consonants; Sanskrit, Tamil and other "abugidas", which use characters for consonants and accents for vowels; and Japanese and other syllabaries, which use symbols that approximate syllables, which make up words. Remarkably, the study has concluded that the letters we use can be viewed as a mirror of the features of the natural world, from trees and mountains to meandering streams and urban cityscapes. The shapes of letters are not dictated by the ease of writing them, economy of pen strokes and so on, but their underlying familiarity and the ease of recognising them. We use certain letters because our brains are particularly good at seeing them, even if our hands find it hard to write them down. In turn, we are good at seeing certain shapes because they reflect common facets of the natural world. jaybird found this for you @ 21:08 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Identity and Violence : Why we can't get along. One might have been tempted--had one been consulted--to suggest a renaming of this latest book by Amartya Sen. "Identity and Violence" is much too lurid. "Sen and Sensibility," by contrast, would have been a perfect title, reflecting better the author's exquisite concern for everyone's personal feelings and his desire to make large-hearted accommodation for every political and social bent--except, notably, the religious and nationalist kind. Mr. Sen, now a professor at Harvard, was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics for his contributions to the field of welfare economics. He has a CV so seriously good that everyone, surely, knows of his being (in his previous post) the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, the apex of the British academic pyramid. Everyone, that is, except a British immigration official at Heathrow Airport a few years ago who, on looking at Mr. Sen's Indian passport and then at his home address on the immigration form--"Master's Lodge, Trinity College, Cambridge"--asked whether Mr. Sen was a close friend of the Master. This question made Mr. Sen enter into a private contemplation, rather self-indulgent in the circumstances, of whether "I could claim to be a friend of myself." As the seconds ticked away without answer, the immigration officer asked whether there was an "irregularity" with Mr. Sen's immigration status. And can you blame the man? Yet Mr. Sen--in his amused-but-chippy recall of the episode--says that the encounter was "a reminder, if one were needed, that identity can be a complicated matter." jaybird found this for you @ 17:04 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
That dang bang: The First Few Microseconds For the past five years, hundreds of scientists have been using a powerful new atom smasher at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island to mimic conditions that existed at the birth of the universe. Called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, pronounced "rick"), it clashes two opposing beams of gold nuclei traveling at nearly the speed of light. The resulting collisions between pairs of these atomic nuclei generate exceedingly hot, dense bursts of matter and energy to simulate what happened during the first few microseconds of the big bang. These brief "mini bangs" give physicists a ringside seat on some of the earliest moments of creation. During those early moments, matter was an ultrahot, superdense brew of particles called quarks and gluons rushing hither and thither and crashing willy-nilly into one another. A sprinkling of electrons, photons and other light elementary particles seasoned the soup. This mixture had a temperature in the trillions of degrees, more than 100,000 times hotter than the sun's core. But the temperature plummeted as the cosmos expanded, just like an ordinary gas cools today when it expands rapidly. The quarks and gluons slowed down so much that some of them could begin sticking together briefly. After nearly 10 microseconds had elapsed, the quarks and gluons became shackled together by strong forces between them, locked up permanently within protons, neutrons and other strongly interacting particles that physicists collectively call "hadrons." Such an abrupt change in the properties of a material is called a phase transition (like liquid water freezing into ice). The cosmic phase transition from the original mix of quarks and gluons into mundane protons and neutrons is of intense interest to scientists, both those who seek clues about how the universe evolved toward its current highly structured state and those who wish to understand better the fundamental forces involved. The protons and neutrons that form the nuclei of every atom today are relic droplets of that primordial sea, tiny subatomic prison cells in which quarks thrash back and forth, chained forever. Even in violent collisions, when the quarks seem on the verge of breaking out, new "walls" form to keep them confined. Although many physicists have tried, no one has ever witnessed a solitary quark drifting all alone through a particle detector. jaybird found this for you @ 12:58 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
"What Is Occurring Today Is a Mimetic Rivalry on a Planetary Scale." The error is always to reason within categories of "difference" when the root of all conflicts is rather "competition," mimetic rivalry between persons, countries, cultures. Competition is the desire to imitate the other in order to obtain the same thing he or she has, by violence if need be. No doubt terrorism is bound to a world "different" from ours, but what gives rise to terrorism does not lie in that "difference" that removes it further from us and makes it inconceivable to us. To the contrary, it lies in an exacerbated desire for convergence and resemblance. Human relations are essentially relations of imitation, of rivalry. jaybird found this for you @ 08:51 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Uh-oh, thanks Windows! My tower bluescreened and passed out this morning, and its now waiting patiently for some loving care from the compu-surgeon. This after installing the latest Windows upgrade that appeared in the toolbar this morning. BEWARE OF THIS UPGRADE. So posting today will be eratic (or this may indeed be it) as I'm now at work and about to be swamped. Regular posting will resume tomorrow, regardless. In the meantime, if you are a friend and regular correspondant, please send me your email address via the contact link, as one of the things not backed up is my address book. Thanks! jaybird found this for you @ 08:55 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Better living through heresy: The Knights Templar The real Templars bear little resemblance to their fictional re-creations. They were founded in the Holy Land in 1119 by two French knights, who swore to devote themselves to the protection of Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem and the holy places. Crusaders had captured Jerusalem in 1099 and then struggled to establish an effective military and political structure to protect their conquests. The contribution of these founding knights was tiny, but they quickly captured the imagination of the Western Christian world. Soon, they were given a base in the al-Aqsa Mosque, which Christians believed had been the site of the Temple of Solomon. They received papal recognition at the council of Troyes in Champagne in 1129, where they were described as a "military order," a quite unique institution at the time, for they not only swore the usual monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience but made a fourth key promise—to defend the holy places from the infidel. From then on they grew rapidly into an international order, receiving lands in the West that they developed into a great network of preceptories. This enabled them to supply men and money for the cause of the Holy Land, as well as to offer a range of services to crusaders, most important help with finance, a role that they expanded into something like a modern banking service. Such an order might seem invulnerable, but by the early 14th century, the Knights Templar faced a serious crisis. In 1291 the Christians had been driven out of Palestine by the Mamluks of Egypt and were thus obliged to wage the holy war from their remaining base in Cyprus. This expulsion was particularly serious for the Templars, whose prestige and functions were so closely identified with the defense of the sites associated with Christ's life, death, and resurrection. They were desperate to see papal plans for a new crusade take concrete form. In 1307, in response to a request from Pope Clement V, James of Molay, the grand master, therefore traveled to the West to advise the papacy and gather support in the courts of Christendom. It was thus that on Oct. 12, 1307, James of Molay was present in Paris, holding one of the cords of the pall at the funeral of Catherine, wife of Charles of Valois, brother of King Philip IV, "the Fair," of France. But the master had no idea what awaited him. Without warning, royal officials, acting on secret orders from Philip, fell upon the Templars living in France, in a coordinated operation that took hundreds into custody. The order for the arrests said that the Templars were not a force dedicated to the defense of the Holy Land, willing to endure martyrdom for their beliefs—they were in fact apostates who denied Christ, spat on crucifixes, engaged in indecent kissing and compulsory sodomy, and worshipped idols. Although rulers outside France initially found the allegations difficult to believe, and the pope was outraged because he had not been consulted, at first sight the charges seemed justified. Most of the Templars confessed to one or more of the allegations, including Molay himself, who repeated his admissions in public in the presence of a select gathering of university theologians. In the end, neither the papal attempt to take over the trial, nor a robust defense of the order led by two Templar lawyer-priests, could shake the impact of these first confessions. jaybird found this for you @ 20:26 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Growing popularity of Sufism in Iran The lights are dimmed in a home in northern Tehran. The men, women and teenagers gathered in the large living room close their eyes and rock back and forth to the beat of live music. As the tambourine and drums beat louder and faster, some members of the group climb to their feet. They begin to swirl slowly in circles and raise their hands to the ceiling. A few fall into trances. "You can somehow touch relaxation," says 22-year-old Mahsa, who believes that music and dance can provide a direct route to Allah. "It's a very good sensation, and you think your soul is flying, that somehow you're not in your body." These Iranians consider themselves Shia Muslims, as do most Iranians, and look to the first Shia Imam, Ali, as a spiritual guide. But they also call themselves Sufis. Sufis believe that at the core of all religions lies the same truth and that God is the only reality behind all forms of existence. They also believe that the individual, through his or her own efforts, can reach spiritual union with God. jaybird found this for you @ 16:24 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
Lost at sea on a flotilla of enlightenment I guess what we're on now is an island. A drifing island. The abbot says the drift was the closest they could get to sovereignty, so they accepted it and went back to their prayers. We have no rudders or giant sails, though sometimes a robe will flare up and catch a breeze, sometimes twenty robes at once, and the island drifts a little faster. This is what nostalgia feels like, like I have borrowed the ocean in a small squeeze bottle, squeezed the salt water up my nose twice a day so I can feel the tide, whoosh, back and forth, inside my head. Somewhere between the Pacific currents, I'd like to think the island has a purpose, that it wants to find its way back to its natural latitudes, but I know we can't control it. jaybird found this for you @ 12:21 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
Dark Star: Evidence mounts for sun's companion The recent discovery of Sedna, a small planet like object first detected by Cal Tech astronomer Dr. Michael Brown, provides what could be indirect physical evidence of a solar companion. Matching the recent findings by Dr. Brown, showing that Sedna moves in a highly unusual elliptical orbit, Cruttenden has determined that Sedna moves in resonance with previously published orbital data for a hypothetical companion star. In the May 2006 issue of Discover, Dr. Brown stated: "Sedna shouldn't be there. There's no way to put Sedna where it is. It never comes close enough to be affected by the sun, but it never goes far enough away from the sun to be affected by other stars... Sedna is stuck, frozen in place; there's no way to move it, basically there's no way to put it there – unless it formed there. But it's in a very elliptical orbit like that. It simply can't be there. There's no possible way - except it is. So how, then?" "I'm thinking it was placed there in the earliest history of the solar system. I'm thinking it could have gotten there if there used to be stars a lot closer than they are now and those stars affected Sedna on the outer part of its orbit and then later on moved away. So I call Sedna a fossil record of the earliest solar system. Eventually, when other fossil records are found, Sedna will help tell us how the sun formed and the number of stars that were close to the sun when it formed." Walter Cruttenden agrees that Sedna's highly elliptical orbit is very unusual, but noted that the orbit period of 12,000 years is in neat resonance with the expected orbit periodicity of a companion star as outlined in several prior papers. jaybird found this for you @ 08:17 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Murtha: Nobody can believe these guys anymore U.S. Rep. John Murtha, continuing his criticism of President Bush's handling of the Iraq war, said today it would take more than Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation to restore Bush's credibility in the Middle East and with the American public. The only way Bush can show he is ready to seriously change direction and pursue a diplomatic solution to the war is if he makes "substantial" changes in his administration, Murtha told about 100 people attending a luncheon sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh at the DoubleTree Hotel, Downtown. "Nobody can believe these guys anymore," Murtha, D-Johnstown, told reporters after his speech, in which he listed the reasons he believes the Bush administration has "mishandled, mischaracterized and misrepresented" the planning and management of the war. Whether it's Bush's fault or not that things are going badly in Iraq, Murtha said, "he's getting blamed for it, so he needs to make some substantial changes" in his top staff. "He's got to let loyalty and friendship take a subservient position to the good of the country." Unless "we replace the people responsible for the failed plan" the U.S. will not be able to get the international help and cooperation it needs, Murtha said during his half-hour speech. He also again criticized Rumsfeld, saying he andBush "were wrong when it came to Iraq" but "won't admit it." Though the president touts the elections in Iraq as evidence of success in the war, Murtha said in reality "we have lost the hearts and minds of both the Iraqi people, and as the polls indicate, of the American public and, obviously, of the world." jaybird found this for you @ 21:03 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
Indian tribe, downwinders: Stop Nevada blast Members of an Indian tribe and two nuclear fallout "downwinders" are asking a federal court to halt plans for a huge non-nuclear explosion that is expected to generate a mushroom cloud over the Nevada desert in June. "This is a worst nightmare come true for downwinders," said Robert Hager, a Reno-based lawyer representing four members of the Nevada-based Western Shoshone tribe and two residents of Utah. He said the June 2 detonation of a 700-ton ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb at the Nevada Test Site would kick up radioactive fallout left from nuclear weapons tests conducted from 1951 to 1992... The 21-page request for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction predicts a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud, and calls the blast a "clear and present danger" to the health of people living to the east, or downwind of the vast Nevada Test Site. The document names as defendants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Linton Brooks and James Tegnelia, the directors of two federal agencies planning the test. Defense Department, National Nuclear Security Administration and Defense Threat Reduction Agency officials each declined comment Thursday, saying they had not immediately seen the court documents submitted to U.S. District Court in Las Vegas. The court filing claims the test, dubbed "Divine Strake," would irreparably desecrate land the Western Shoshone tribe has never acknowledged turning over to the U.S. jaybird found this for you @ 16:59 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
John Dean: If Past Is Prologue, George Bush Is Becoming An Increasingly Dangerous President Bush is following the classic mistaken pattern of active/negative presidents: As Barber explained, they issue order after order, without public support, until they eventually dissipate the real powers they have -- until "nothing [is] left but the shell of the office." Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon all followed this pattern. Active/negative presidents are risk-takers. (Consider the colossal risk Bush took with the Iraq invasion). And once they have taken a position, they lock on to failed courses of action and insist on rigidly holding steady, even when new facts indicate that flexibility is required. The source of their rigidity is that they've become emotionally attached to their own positions; to change them, in their minds, would be to change their personal identity, their very essence. That, they are not willing to do at any cost. Wilson rode his unpopular League of Nations proposal to his ruin; Hoover refused to let the federal government intervene to prevent or lessen a fiscal depression; Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam while misleading Americans (thereby making himself unelectable); and Nixon went down with his bogus defense of Watergate. George Bush has misled America into a preemptive war in Iraq; he is using terrorism to claim that as Commander-in-Chief, he is above the law; and he refuses to acknowledge that American law prohibits torturing our enemies and warrantlessly wiretapping Americans. Americans, increasingly, are not buying his justifications for any of these positions. Yet Bush has made no effort to persuade them that his actions are sound, prudent or productive; rather, he takes offense when anyone questions his unilateral powers. He responds as if personally insulted. jaybird found this for you @ 12:44 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
Further Proof: "The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy..." What did this high-level source tell him? [more] jaybird found this for you @ 08:40 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
The Move Ceremonially Begins  -thumb.jpg) This weekend, the first symbolic object made the move to the new home. As per tradition (mine), the space from which the dragon came was cleaned to the nines, and the dragon left to sit in the new space for a week prior to anything else... to clear, cleanse, purify and introduce my energy to the space. This week, the home I've known for just about two years will begin the process of emptying into boxes or into curbside giveaway piles, and a new place will begin to accumulate the objects which hold my memories. Good times. jaybird found this for you @ 21:58 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Outrage, again: The Billion-Dollar Baghdad Embassy  That's the estimate, though only half of it has been appropriated so far, a billion dollars to build a new embassy in Iraq . It will be the largest on the globe, the largest the world has ever seen, the size of Vatican City in Italy . U.S. embassies typically cover ten acres. This one, a 104-acre complex, will be comprised of 21 buildings, its own water wells, an electricity plant and wastewaster-treatment facility that makes the huge compound completely independent of Iraq , whose "interim government" sold the land to the U.S. in October 2004. Terms of the agreement do not appear to be readily accessible. The massive compound will include two major diplomatic office buildings, homes for the ambassador and his deputy, apartment buildings for staff, and a recreational facility that will provide a swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and American Club. In this case, the devil is less in the details than in the monumental size and cost of the endeavor. The likeness to a small fortified city is frightening to those who object to a permanent presence of the U.S. in Iraq, already destroyed by American bombs and depleted uranium, and the core of such fear lies in the question of WHY the U.S., already dangerously in debt back home and dangerously despised in Iraq and most of the mideast, is pounding its chest with such a noisy bravado. Is this the finale of "Shock and Awe"? Those working in the embassy-city are protected by extraordinary security, overseen by U.S. Marines. Structures will be reinforced to 2.5 times the standard. There will be five high-security entrances as well as an emergency entrance/exit, according to a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report. Foreign relations? Presumably the hope was at some point to look for olive branches, the U.S. and Iraq shaking hands and agreeing to go back to "go" and start all over. So from whom is such vast and expensive protection necessary? Were we ever within even shouting distance of being "liberators"? What kind of thinking would pour so much into a country that the White House says we want to turn over to the Iraqis as soon as possible? After all, we're the folks who brought "freedom" to Iraq . So why this elaborate expenditure at the same time that the people of the U.S. have finally awakened and turned against the invasion and occupation of a country that we now know never posed a threat to the U.S. or anyone else? It's a hair past income tax time. Shouldn't those of us who filed have a word to say about where our checks are going? We've said, "No more. We want out as soon as possible." And yet the building goes on, about a third completed as of this writing. Shall we take comfort in Mr. Bush's reassurances and hope he has a secret plan? Shall we look at the bright side and wonder how this impressive compound of compounds would work as an orphanage for the children whose parents we've blown to bits? jaybird found this for you @ 20:54 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
'When we turn the current on, the patients report the emptiness suddenly disappears' Sufferers from depression who do not respond to existing treatments could soon benefit from a new procedure in which electrodes are inserted into the core of the brain and used to alter the patient's mood. Later this year, scientists at Bristol University will conduct the first trials of the so-called deep brain stimulation method on sufferers from depression. They will use hair-thin electrodes to stimulate two different parts of the brains of eight patients who suffer from an extreme form of recurrent unipolar depression - where mood only swings in one direction. If the trials are successful, deep brain stimulation could be extended to the estimated 50,000 people in the UK who suffer from depression but cannot be helped by drugs or electroconvulsive therapy. "There are thousands of people in this country who have depression who are not responding, who are disabled by it," said Andrea Malizia, a consultant senior lecturer at Bristol University's psychopharmacology unit. He will lead the experiments with David Nutt, head of Bristol's psychopharmacology research unit, and Nik Patel, a surgeon at the nearby Frenchay hospital. Deep brain stimulation is already used to treat people suffering from Parkinson's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that results in uncontrollable tremors and affects mobility. Thousands of people worldwide have benefited from the surgery, which involves implanting the electrodes several centimetres into the brain. Brain scans are used to pinpoint which parts of the brain are acting incorrectly, and the electrodes then interfere with the electrical activity there, blocking the signals and easing the symptoms. Currently, last-resort measures to help people with intractable depression have included cutting out or lesioning parts of the brain. Deep brain stimulation would largely give the same results, without the need for such drastic surgery. jaybird found this for you @ 16:53 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Take this down: Thoughts Trigger Mental Typewriter A computerized typewriter that translates electrical impulses from brainwave signals into letters and words could be available in the next five years. In the short term, the technology will allow its developers, from the Fraunhofer Institute and the Charité Hospital in Berlin, Germany, to watch a thinking and behaving brain function in real time. But in the long term, such a brain-machine interface could replace the joystick in electronic gaming or serve as a communication tool for people unable to speak or sign. "We are dreaming of something like a baseball cap with electrodes in the cap that can measure the brainwaves," said one of the scientists behind the project, Klaus-Robert Mueller of the Fraunhofer Institute. "People could just put on the cap and have a wireless connection from these electrodes to a computer and they can play video games." jaybird found this for you @ 12:45 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Clap off: Watching the brain 'switch off' self-awareness Everybody has experienced a sense of “losing oneself” in an activity – being totally absorbed in a task, a movie or sex. Now researchers have caught the brain in the act. Self-awareness, regarded as a key element of being human, is switched off when the brain needs to concentrate hard on a tricky task, found the neurobiologists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The team conducted a series of experiments to pinpoint the brain activity associated with introspection and that linked to sensory function. They found that the brain assumes a robotic functionality when it has to concentrate all its efforts on a difficult, timed task – only becoming "human" again when it has the luxury of time. Ilan Goldberg and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of nine volunteers during the study. Participants were shown picture cards and told to push buttons to indicate whether or not an animal was depicted. The series was shown slowly the first time, and at three times the rate on the second run through. On its third showing, the volunteers were asked to use the buttons to indicate their emotional response to the pictures. The experiment was then repeated using musical extracts, rather than pictures, and asked to identify whether a trumpet played. Goldberg found that when the sensory stimulus was shown slowly, and when a personal emotional response was required, the volunteers showed activity in the superfrontal gyrus – the brain region associated with self-awareness-related function. But when the card flipping and musical sequences were rapid, there was no activity in the superfrontal gyrus, despite activity in the sensory cortex and related structures. “The regions of the brain involved in introspection and sensory perception are completely segregated, although well connected,” says Goldberg, “and when the brain needs to divert all its resources to carry out a difficult task, the self-related cortex is inhibited.” jaybird found this for you @ 08:41 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
A Quantum Blender: Life, the Universe, and Everything Q: You've jumped from working on quantum computers to saying, oh, by the way, the universe is a gigantic quantum computer. Q:What is the universe computing when we are not hijacking it for our own purposes? Q:Um, how many times have you seen The Matrix? Q:When did you first start having these visions? Q:How do you explain Programming to your kids? Q: Do they believe you? Q:I've just put on your magic glasses, and looking around I see that, oh my gosh, everything is computing. Is this just fashionable? jaybird found this for you @ 20:12 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Ours: Beyond Property (scroll down) If we humans are going to solve our fossil fuel energy/global warming crisis, it will require that we take action. We can expect no help from big government and big business. They created this crisis and they have no interest in solving it. Big government's only goal is to be re-elected so they can retain political power, and the only goal of big business is to make money. These two forces have combined to create the present law of society one dollar = one vote. If we humans with no political or economic power want to solve our problems, then we will have to take charge of our society. What is our authority for taking such action? We must begin by seizing the moral highground. And, taking the moral highground requires that we face the truth. The possession of an object does not mean that the possessor has a moral or rational claim to ownership of the object. The political, economic, and social structures of our present world are all based on our concept of ‘property’ and property rights. Recall from the Basics section, my discussion of the shifting of human values as humanity evolves from adversary processing to neutral processing to synergic processing. Adversary wealth is physical force. Neutral wealth is money. And, synergic wealth is mutual life support. Therefore adversary ‘property’ is property obtained by force or fraud, and then held with physical force. Neutral ‘property’ is property purchased in the fair market, and held by right of law enforced by neutral government. Remember Neutrality was an evolutionary advance from Adversity, at the time of Neutrality’s inception most possessions were adversary. They had been obtained through force or fraud and held with physical force. The new institutions of Neutrality never made any attempt to correct what by the new values of Neutrality would be past injustices. Neutral values would prevail in future, but the past was left alone. This resulted in the legal precedent wherein possession is 9/10 of the law. In other words, at the time Neutrality was institutionalized, all existing ‘property’ whether adversary or neutral was made legal ‘property’. However, all new ‘property’ was required to be neutral ‘property’–that is ‘property’ acquired by paying a fair price in a free market to the rightful owner, or that ‘property’ which is created directly by the mind and labor of the owner. Most of the founding fathers of Neutrality were beneficiaries of ‘adversary’ property and in no hurry to give it up. They also believed that in the long run these injustices would slowly be corrected, and all property would eventually come to be ‘neutral’ property. We will see later that this was not the case. While synergic ‘property’ is not yet defined, it would have to be property that was obtained without hurting or ignoring anyone, and even more importantly, it would have to be property that was mutually life supporting–that is it would have to be property that had a beneficial effect for self and others. If humanity is to advance to Synergy, our concept of ‘property’ and property rights must change radically in the future. How this could work will be explained in the Future section, but now let us examine ‘property’ as it exists today. jaybird found this for you @ 16:09 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Nanoparticles armed to combat cancer Ultra-small particles loaded with medicine - and aimed with the precision of a rifle - are offering a promising new way to strike at cancer, according to researchers working at MIT and Brigham and Women's Hospital. In a paper to appear the week of April 10 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team reports a way to custom design nanoparticles so they home in on dangerous cancer cells, then enter the cells to deliver lethal doses of chemotherapy. Normal, healthy cells remain unscathed. The team conducted experiments first on cells growing in laboratory dishes, and then on mice bearing human prostate tumors. The tumors shrank dramatically, and all of the treated mice survived the study; the untreated control animals did not. "A single injection of our nanoparticles completely eradicated the tumors in five of the seven treated animals, and the remaining animals also had significant tumor reduction, compared to the controls..." jaybird found this for you @ 12:03 in Health, Medicine & Bio-Happiness | | permalink
A new way of approaching the subject of Nirvana has come to my mind which may be helpful in clarifying certain difficulties relative to the nature of this State. The usual idea of Nirvana seems to be that It is a sort of blissful State produced by an extinguishing of life through the elimination of the will-to-live and the desire for enjoyment. Since ordinarily men find themselves unable to conceive of consciousness unrelated to personality and the various cravings associated with sentient life, Nirvana appears to be something like an absolute nonexistence or an annihilation in the full sense of the word. If, on the other hand, it is granted that Nirvana is some sort of State of Consciousness, it is often thought of as something undesirable. There is much misconception in all this. Anyone who has ever touched even the hem of Nirvanic Consciousness would not regard It as an undesirable State and most certainly would Know that It did not imply the cessation of Consciousness, although It is a kind of consciousness quite different anything to be found within the relative field. Now the difficulty seems to me to grow out of a misunderstanding of what is meant when we say 'I,' and I believe I can say something that will make this matter clearer. Approached from the usual standpoint of relative consciousness, the T seems to be something like a point. This 'point' in one man is different from the T in another man. One T can have interests that are incompatible with the interests of another 'I,' and the result is conflict. Further, the purpose of life seems to center around the attainment of enjoyment by the particular I-point which a given individual seems to be. jaybird found this for you @ 07:59 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
L-Ron-Unit: "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars he should start his own religion." Posing as an interested disciple, I first call into the Scientology Centre on London's Tottenham Court Road where I fill out an Oxford Capacity Analysis Test, designed to measure emotional state in order to highlight areas that Scientology can improve. Although the test is free, I am encouraged to purchase a copy of Hubbard's Dianetics (for £6.99) and to contact them when I finish reading it. My results apparently prove that I am depressed, nervous, critical, anxious and unable to communicate. I am told that I am in dire need of spiritual enlightenment and that only Scientology can help me. I telephone the Church of Scientology's headquarters at Saint Hill, claiming that I am concerned by my test results. I am invited to attend a "church" service, a "group processing session", and to have a guided tour by a "recruitment expert" of the building and grounds at Saint Hill, known to those inside as "The Castle". Two days later, I am standing on the manicured lawns of the beautiful Jacobean building that is home to Scientology's version of the civil service - the Sea Organisation. My guide for the day, Ron, appears. He tells me has been a member for seven years and sold his home in Norwich six years ago "to be closer to the Sea Organisation". He works at Saint Hill every evening and weekend. He has a day job as an electrician and seems surprised when I ask him if he has time off. "Why would I want to do that?" asks the 33-year-old. "I love it here." jaybird found this for you @ 20:30 in High Weirdness | | permalink
Rumsfeld Potentially Liable for Torture
jaybird found this for you @ 16:22 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
How Bush's Bad Ideas May Lead to Good Ones If, like me, you are in the business of ideas, the presidency of George W. Bush is a dream come true. That is not because the president is fond of the product I produce; on the contrary, he may be the most anti-intellectual president of modern times, a determined opponent of science, a man who values loyalty above debate among his associates. But governance is impossible without ideas, and by basing his foreign and domestic policies on so many bad ones, President Bush may have cleared the ground for the emergence of a few good ones... It is beyond my powers to know whether America's next president will be a Republican or a Democrat. But I do know that some future president will be faced with undoing the damage of a man sufficiently lacking in intellectual curiosity to question the bad ideas upon which he built his administration. Academics and intellectuals with an independent cast of mind — whether liberal or conservative — have played little role in the Bush administration, given, as it is, to reiterating talking points and insisting on absolute loyalty to the man in charge. But that is all the more reason why academics and intellectuals will find themselves in great demand when the leaders of this country eventually decide that their foreign and domestic policies will have to confront the real world around them, not the imaginary one bequeathed to them by their ideology. When that happens, future historians will look back on the Bush years as paving the way for a golden age of intellectual inquiry. jaybird found this for you @ 12:12 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
Thunder and Mockingbirds  Sweet rain, jaybird found this for you @ 07:59 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Zinn: America’s Blinders If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him. But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials. We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil,” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico. We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that. President Woodrow Wilson—so often characterized in our history books as an “idealist”—lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers. Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.” Everyone lied about Vietnam—Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent. Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States. The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country. And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991—hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq’s taking of Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil? jaybird found this for you @ 21:02 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
 Concerns about weather are part of what’s sending us to sea in the first place. By studying the ocean’s chemistry, which affects currents and, in turn, weather, Curry hopes to better understand how we humans might be affecting the critical elements of our own life-support system. Data from physical oceanography, marine biology, meteorology, fisheries science, glaciology, and other disciplines reveal that the ocean, for which our planet should be named, is changing in every parameter, in all dimensions, in every way we know how to measure it. The 25 years I’ve spent at sea filming nature documentaries have provided a brief yet definitive window into these changes. Oceanic problems once encountered on a local scale have gone pandemic, and these pandemics now merge to birth new monsters. Tinkering with the atmosphere, we change the ocean’s chemistry radically enough to threaten life on earth as we know it. Making tens of thousands of chemical compounds each year, we poison marine creatures who sponge up plastics and PCBs, becoming toxic waste dumps in the process. Carrying everything from nuclear waste to running shoes across the world ocean, shipping fleets spew as much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as the entire profligate United States. Protecting strawberry farmers and their pesticide methyl bromide, we guarantee that the ozone hole will persist at least until 2065, threatening the larval life of the sea. Fishing harder, faster, and more ruthlessly than ever before, we drive large predatory fish toward global extinction, even though fish is the primary source of protein for one in six people on earth. Filling, dredging, and polluting the coastal nurseries of the sea, we decimate coral reefs and kelp forests, while fostering dead zones. I’m alarmed by what I’m seeing. Although we carry the ocean within ourselves, in our blood and in our eyes, so that we essentially see through seawater, we appear blind to its fate. Many scientists speak only to each other and studiously avoid educating the press. The media seems unwilling to report environmental news, and caters to a public stalled by sloth, fear, or greed and generally confused by science. Overall, we seem unable to recognize that the proofs so many politicians demand already exist in the form of hindsight. Written into the long history of our planet, in one form or another, is the record of what is coming our way. jaybird found this for you @ 16:51 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
Tzaddikim: The Thirty Six Unknown In later Kabbalistic (Kabbalah) folklore, the thirty six hidden ones have the potential to save the world, they appear when they are needed, and one of them might be the Messiah. They come at times of great peril, called out of their anonymity and humility by the necessity to save the world. Because they can, and because we need them. Who are your Tzaddikim? [via mygothlaundry] jaybird found this for you @ 12:47 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
|
A December 20, 2005 Army Inspector General’s report, obtained by Salon.com this week, contains a sworn statement by Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt that implicates Secretary Rumsfeld in the abuse of detainee Mohammad al-Qahtani. Based on an investigation that he carried out in early 2005, which included two interviews with Rumsfeld, Gen. Schmidt describes the defense secretary as being “personally involved” in al-Qahtani’s interrogation.