Even in absurdity, sacrament. Even in hardship, holiness. Even in doubt, faith. Even in chaos, realization. Even in paradox, blessedness
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"Life expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage." ~Anain Nin
Cool: Tropical Stonehenge May Have Been Found
The 127 blocks, some as high as 9 feet tall, are spaced at regular intervals around the hill, like a crown 100 feet in diameter. On the shortest day of the year - Dec. 21 - the shadow of one of the blocks disappears when the sun is directly above it. "It is this block's alignment with the winter solstice that leads us to believe the site was once an astronomical observatory," said Mariana Petry Cabral, an archaeologist at the Amapa State Scientific and Technical Research Institute. "We may be also looking at the remnants of a sophisticated culture." Anthropologists have long known that local indigenous populations were acute observers of the stars and sun. But the discovery of a physical structure that appears to incorporate this knowledge suggests pre-Columbian Indians in the Amazon rainforest may have been more sophisticated than previously suspected. "Transforming this kind of knowledge into a monument; the transformation of something ephemeral into something concrete, could indicate the existence of a larger population and of a more complex social organization..." jaybird found this for you @ 20:23 in History, Civilization & Anthropology | | permalink
North Carolina's mountaintop homes stir debate (as well they should) "It's almost heaven," says Ms. Erickson, a retiree who spends half the year in these mountains, the other half in Naples, Fla. She has been drawn to the Smoky Mountains since she visited in her childhood. The price range for these mountaintop homes? $225,000 to $1.5 million. But these scenic views come with other costs: Ridge-top building may cause downstream water pollution and wreck trout streams by causing too much silt to pour off denuded slopes. Others worry that as rooftops, decks, and greens poke out from the ridges, this pursuit of the perfect view may ruin the view for others - and compromise the region's most precious asset: its beauty. "These mountain communities face a dilemma where they've got an eroding economic system and the only choice is to take in things that are going to damage the environment and change the culture," says Charlie Derber, a sociologist at Boston College. The western North Carolina mountains have attracted wealthy outsiders since the late 1800s. More recently, many of them have come from Florida, says history professor Chuck Watkins at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. Today, the mountains are seeing a "perfect confluence" for mountaintop development, as hurricane insurance costs have tripled in Florida over the last year due to the hurricanes and Americans are looking for more security post-9/11, says James Chung of Reach Advisors, a consumer research firm in Boston. As the overall real estate market slowly cools, high-end resort development is booming, experts say. For example, in 2000, just over 500,000 vacation homes were sold. That figure tipped 1 million homes for the first time last year, according to Reach Advisors. The trend of mounting homes onto ridge tops also results from lax zoning laws, a culture that values property rights, and the skill of savvy resort developers who can easily influence local communities hungry for tax revenue and job opportunities, experts say. jaybird found this for you @ 14:15 in Local- Western North Carolina | | permalink
THE FUTURE OF FUSION
On May 24, the US, EU, Russia, China, South Korea, Japan and India signed on to help build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Cadarache, in the south of France. ITER is the largest fusion research project to date and one of the biggest international scientific collaborations ever. Its budget is 10 billion euros over 20 years, more than three times that of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The reactor is scheduled to be functional by 2016. "[ITER] is not only a scientific and technological experiment aimed at demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy, but it is also an experiment in international relations," said Ned Sauthoff, the U.S. project manager for ITER. "Never before have the governments representing more than half the population of the world gotten together and tried to solve a global problem." Theoretically, fusion is an ideal energy source. It releases no carbon into the atmosphere and is fueled by hydrogen atoms, which can easily be derived from water. jaybird found this for you @ 08:10 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
 jaybird found this for you @ 21:02 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
I love what you've done with the place: Womb environment 'makes men gay' A man's sexual orientation may be determined by conditions in the womb, according to a study. Previous research had revealed the more older brothers a boy has, the more likely he is to be gay, but the reason for this phenomenon was unknown. But a Canadian study has shown that the effect is most likely due to biological rather than social factors. The research is published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Anthony Bogaert from Brock University in Ontario, Canada, studied 944 heterosexual and homosexual men with either "biological" brothers, in this case those who share the same mother, or "non-biological" brothers, that is, adopted, step or half siblings. He found the link between the number of older brothers and homosexuality only existed when the siblings shared the same mother. The amount of time the individual spent being raised with older brothers did not affect their sexual orientation. jaybird found this for you @ 14:59 in Gay, Lesbian, Queer & Free | | permalink
On the trail of quantum pulp We've all seen it: Humphrey Bogart in black and white, chasing crooks through shadows and down dreary alleys. The moody, hard-boiled noir that Bogie personified defined an age of wartime anomie in Europe and the US, and made for gritty, stimulating film and novels. Today, the chiaroscuro tone of pulp is not only found in repertory theaters and airport bookshops: Detective narratives are turning up in efforts to solve the deepest mysteries of quantum mechanics. Creative fiction is a powerful device for elucidating complex quantum phenomena, both for informing the public and among physicists themselves. Whodunits are natural fits for the portrayal, for example, of the duplicity of light: In the infamous double-slit experiments, photons seemingly change properties to avoid detection of their true nature by playing both sides of the wave-particle duality. jaybird found this for you @ 08:41 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Sexual Success And The Schizoid Factor Ever wondered why uncouth, scruffy rock musicians are pursued by legions of doting, lovelorn female fans? Or why women threw themselves at Pablo Picasso? Well, a new study suggests that creativity may confer an evolutionary advantage in finding a mate; indicating that creative types have increased sexual appeal. But paradoxically, people who have certain traits predictive of schizophrenia - a condition not normally associated with evolutionary fitness - also have a higher propensity toward artistic ability. This creative ability, say some evolutionary experts, is far from being a disadvantage, as creativity is highly attractive when it comes to mate choice. Like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller considers sexual selection to be right up there in importance with natural selection. Advocates of sexual selection argue that competition between members of the same sex drives the evolution of particular traits that mates of the opposite sex find attractive. Miller, author of The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, claims that traits like morality, art, language and creativity, influence the way in which the human mind evolves. It may sound like a stretch, but recent studies show that reliable predictions of mate choice can be made using these kinds of traits as a guide. Before looking more closely at these studies, however, it's worth first considering whether creativity is actually quantifiable. Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran's musings on savants, who display exceptional skills in a very specific field, is illuminating in this respect, as he "unashamedly speculates" that a savant's talents may stem from an enlarged section of the brain called the angular gyrus. "You can imagine an explosion of talent resulting from this simple but 'anomalous' increase in brain volume," says Ramachandran, adding: "The same argument might hold for drawing, music, language, indeed any human trait." Ramachandran explains that this theory is at least in part testable, and points to examples where damage to the right parietal cortex "can profoundly disrupt artistic skills, just as damage to the left disrupts calculation." Ramachandran also considers possible the idea that these esoteric human traits can be attractive to mates in the way that a male peacock's plume is attractive, as exceptional ability in music, poetry or drawing may be an "externally visible signature of a giant brain." Citing Dawkins, Ramachandran argues "that this 'truth in advertising' may play an important role in mate selection." Despite what seems to be logically valid reasoning, Ramachandran stresses that the talents and specializations associated with the savant are not enough. They will not become a Picasso or Einstein, because they are missing one vital, ineffable ingredient: creativity. "There are those who assert that creativity is simply the ability to randomly link seemingly unrelated ideas, but surely that is not enough," writes Ramachandran. We may have a fantastic grasp of language, and think that we can knock out a half decent metaphor on call, but it is actually harder than most people think. Yet when we come across something truly creative, it speaks volumes to us, "In fact," says Ramachandran, "it's crystal clear once it is explained and has that 'why didn't I think of that?' quality that characterizes the most beautiful and creative insights." But if creative juices are responsible for an evolutionary advantage, there must surely be some aspect of this seemingly ineffable trait that can be identified as heritable. jaybird found this for you @ 20:20 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
MONKEYS MONITOR WEATHER, TOO The Weather Channel reaches over more than 89 million households in the United States, but it might soon find its way to a whole new demographic: monkeys. In an article published in the June 20th issue of Current Biology, a team of Scottish researchers reveal that monkeys may be able to remember past weather trends and act on this information when searching for food. A team of researchers from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland monitored a group of gray-cheeked mangabeys (medium-sized monkeys that live in the rainforests of central Africa) over a period of 210 days, as the monkeys traveled from tree to tree in search of fruit. A Mangabey's diet is high in figs, which ripen faster when the weather is warm. Since figs ripen intermittently, mangabeys will return to trees that previously held unripe fruit in order check on the fruit's progress. "There is a lot of competition for fruit, so it would pay to be able to arrive first," said primate researcher Karline Janmaat, the study's lead author. Janmaat and her fellow researchers discovered that after a period of warm and sunny days, monkeys were more likely to revisit trees where they'd previously found unripened fruit than after a stretch of cool and cloudy days. They also seemed to return sooner to the trees that had the most fruit if the weather since their last visit had been consistently warm. jaybird found this for you @ 14:18 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
The spiders of my apartment  jaybird found this for you @ 08:41 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Singing (ritualistically) in public, etc. You may have noticed that on Sunday, I Honestly, though, the most profound aspect of the experience was the wave of music that I bodysurfed on... hearing three hundred people singing back to me, doing the hand gestures, and transmitting a powerful signal of acceptance was overwhelming and intoxicating. I ceased being "me" for fifteen minutes and just focused on the moment exclusively. It was unlike any other organic, holistic, nondogmatic ministerial experience I've had thusfar. Word. In other news, last night I skinnydipp'd with a slew of relative strangers after an incredible meal. The lightening bugs in the trees were downright selacious in their luminescent burlesque. Meanwhile, the high energy drink I just drank (synonymous with a rufous masculine bovine) is not helping me to "fly" but seems to be fucking with my ability to stay awake. What the hell? Have I bottomed out on caffeine so completely that these single servings of motivation are not little more than placebos in a can? What's next? Resorting to hourly trips to the electric outlet with tongue outstretched? Smoking espresso beans in covert, jittery tokes behind art galleries? A trip to Gitmo for wakefulness training? I have two cases of the shit and two hours to get some serious work done. I'm tempted to see if one more will do anything to keep me from yawning my way into another night of being highly unproductive. jaybird found this for you @ 20:13 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Some (atomic) fundamentals may change as time goes by
A new study in the journal Physical Review Letters suggests that over the lifetime of the cosmos, some fundamental things may not be so fundamental. The study, led by physicists Wim Ubachs and Elmar Reinhold of the Free University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, suggests that "mu," the mass ratio of two atomic particles — the proton and the electron — "could have decreased in the past 12 billion years." At that's an interesting notion to physicists, who rely on this fundamental constant to understand the structure of the atoms inside stars, planets and people. In more technical terms, mu sets the scale of the "strong" nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces in the universe (gravity, electromagnetism and the weak force that governs radioactivity are the others.) The strong force binds the sub-atomic particles called quarks to one another inside protons. As fundamental stuff goes, that's pretty fundamental. Measured today, the ratio indicates that a proton weighs (just roughly speaking here) 1836.15267261 times more than an electron. The study team compared the value of mu measured today to the value measured in the light from a pair of quasars, thought to be super-massive black holes sucking in huge amounts of gas and star dust. The quasars' light was measured by study team members at a European Southern Observatory telescope in Chile. Since the quasars are about 12 billion light years away, it has taken 12 billion years for their light to reach Earth, making them indicators of conditions when the universe was only about 1.7 billion years old. By combining today's mu measurement with the mu measurement from the chemical spectrum of light from the quasars, the European team suggests that mu has dropped by 0.002% over the last 12 billion years. Not much of a drop, but it may have big implications, says astrophysicist Michael Murphy of the United Kingdom's Cambridge University. "If we find that the fundamental constants are in fact changing, then they must not be numbers set into the fabric of fundamental physics — rather they are dynamical quantities which change according to some deeper laws of physics that we are yet to understand," he says. "Those deeper laws are likely more fundamental than our present ones and may even point the way to a Grand Unified Theory which brings together the four known forces of nature." jaybird found this for you @ 14:09 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Four and a half billion years ago, the earth was formed, and it was utterly without life. And so it stayed for perhaps as long as a billion years. For another billion years, the planet's oceans teemed with life, but it was all blind and deaf. Simple cells multiplied, engulfing each other, exploiting each other in a thousand ways, but oblivious to the world beyond their membranes. Then much larger, more complex cells evolved--eukaryotes--still clueless and robotic, but with enough internal machinery to begin to specialize. So it continued for more than two billion more years, the time it took for the algorithms of evolution to hit upon good ways of banding these workers together into multi-cellular organisms composed of millions, billions and, (eventually) trillions of cells, each doing its particular mechanical routine, but now yoked into specialized service, as part of an eye or an ear or a lung or a kidney. These organisms (not the individual team members composing them) had become long-distance knowers, able to spy supper trying to appear inconspicuous in the middle distance, able to hear danger threatening from afar. But still, even these whole organisms knew not what they were. Their instincts guaranteed that they tried to mate with the right sorts, and flock with the right sorts, but just as those Brazilians didn't know they were Brazilians, no buffalo has ever known it's a buffalo. In just one species, our species, a new trick evolved: language. It has provided us a broad highway of knowledge-sharing, on every topic. Conversation unites us, in spite of our different languages. We can all know quite a lot about what it is like to be a Vietnamese fisherman or a Bulgarian taxi driver, an eighty-year-old nun or a five-year-old boy blind from birth, a chess master or a prostitute. No matter how different from one another we people are, scattered around the globe, we can explore our differences and communicate about them. No matter how similar to one another buffalos are, standing shoulder to shoulder in a herd, they cannot know much of anything about their similarities, let alone their differences, because they can't compare notes. They can have similar experiences, side by side, but they really can't share experiences the way we do. Even in our species, it has taken thousands of years of communication for us to begin to find the keys to our own identities. It has been only a few hundred years that we've known that we are mammals, and only a few decades that we've understood in considerable detail how we have evolved, along with all other living things, from those simple beginnings. We are outnumbered on this planet by our distant cousins, the ants, and outweighed by yet more distant relatives we share with the ants, the bacteria, but though we are in the minority, our capacity for long-distance knowledge gives us powers that dwarf the powers of all the rest of the life on the planet. Now, for the first time in its billions of years of history, our planet is protected by far-seeing sentinels, able to anticipate danger from the distant future--a comet on a collision course, or global warming--and devise schemes for doing something about it. The planet has finally grown its own nervous system: us. We may not be up to the job. We may destroy the planet instead of saving it, largely because we are such free-thinking, creative, unruly explorers and adventurers, so unlike the trillions of slavish workers that compose us. Brains are for anticipating the future, so that timely steps can be taken in better directions, but even the smartest of beasts have very limited time horizons, and little if any ability to imagine alternative worlds. We human beings, in contrast, have discovered the mixed blessing of being able to think even about our own deaths and beyond, and a huge portion of our energy expenditure over the last ten thousand years or so has been devoted to assuaging the concerns provoked by this unsettling new vista. If you burn more calories than you take in, you soon die. If you find some tricks that provide you a surplus of calories, what might you spend them on? You might devote person-centuries of labor to building temples and tombs and sacrificial pyres on which you destroy some of your most precious possessions--and even some of your very own children. Why would you want to do that? These strange and awful expenditures give us clues about some of the hidden costs of our heightened powers of imagination. We did not come by our knowledge painlessly. jaybird found this for you @ 08:06 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Addicted To Knowledge Neuroscientists at the University of Southern California have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix. According to researcher Irving Biederman, the "click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances. Writing in American Scientist, Biederman suggests that in seeking knowledge, scholars are almost like junkies. "While you're trying to understand a difficult theorem, it's not fun," said Biederman, a professor of neuroscience. "But once you get it, you just feel fabulous." Interestingly, Biederman says the brain's craving for a fix motivates humans to maximize the rate at which they absorb knowledge. He hypothesized that knowledge addiction has strong evolutionary value because mate selection correlates closely with perceived intelligence. Only more pressing material needs, such as hunger, can suspend the quest for knowledge, he added. And apparently, the same mechanism may be involved in the aesthetic experience, providing a neurological explanation for the pleasure we derive from art. jaybird found this for you @ 14:53 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Bring me a God helmet, and bring it now One of the biggest disappointments of my so-called adult life is the sad realisation that I can neither fly nor move objects with the power of my mind. This sucks. But for all their broken promises, as the prison ships become more and more crowded, when I am prime minister of the One World Government, the psychics will be left well alone. They're just too much fun. Up in Scotland, the Evening Mail has been teasing "Angela's Live Psychic Line": the adverts say their psychics are the "real thing" and "truly gifted" at only 75p a minute. Apparently Angela was recruiting, so one cheeky scamp at the Evening Mail thought she'd apply for a job: this is the great British sport of "moron baiting", and it's a game we can all play. After a gruelling 10-minute phone interview the reporter had a new job. Psychic Angela asked her for a test reading; the reporter told her she was "at a crossroads but on the brink of success", and was hired immediately, despite being neither "truly gifted" nor, more importantly, "the real thing". "Her crystal ball must have been on the blink when she signed up our reporter to dupe gullible punters," said the Evening Mail. But of course, there is a natural human drive to seek out the transcendent. A "neurotheology" researcher called Dr Michael Persinger has developed something called the "God Helmet" lined with magnets to help you in your quest: it sounds like typical bad science fodder, but it's much more interesting than that. Persinger is a proper scientist. The temporal lobes have long been implicated in religious experiences: epileptic seizures in that part of the brain, for example, can produce mystical experiences and visions. Persinger's helmet stimulates these temporal lobes with weak electromagnetic fields through the skull, and in various published papers this stimulation has been shown to induce a "sensed presence", under blinded conditions. There is controversy around these findings: some people have tried to replicate them, although not using exactly the same methods, and got different results. But however improbable or theologically offensive you might find his evidence, because it is published and written up in full, you can try to replicate it for yourself and find out whether it works. In fact, you really can try this at home: the kit needed to make a God Helmet is fabulously rudimentary. jaybird found this for you @ 08:46 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Meditation: A journey home to the soul Every morning before I make my tea, I brace myself as I turn on the radio to groggily hear what matters most at the top of the hour: “From Galactic Public Radio on Planet Earth, I’m a human being. In today’s news, a mockingbird sang late into the night in Asheville, while a cacophony of fireflies lit up a field with bioluminescent abandon. A waterfall in the Pisgah National Forest formed countless rainbows, through which children dove and butterflies flew. The sunset was reportedly a honker, while a weird little man watched in awe and realized that the soul is not some hackneyed daydream but a real manifestation of our quest to experience fullness of life. And politicians worldwide have determined that they are no longer relevant to an emerging paradigm of personal spiritual evolution, and the weather’s fine.” If only, right? If only soul stirring moments were the headlines, and soul deadening institutions took a hint and folded. We can only dream, and in the dreaming, possibly catch a shimmering momentary glimpse of that elusive concept we call “soul.” Everyone struggles, at one time or another, to define the thing, which as an enterprise is as daunting as a cat finally catching its own tail. Yet we all in our own way seek out the soul within ourselves and each other in a mythical odyssey to at last Know Thyself. Breathe deeply. The word ‘animal’ is derived from the Latin anima, which is defined as soul. Anima itself comes from the Latin root “ani,” which translates to ‘breath’ or ‘wind.’ In my line of work, I must occasionally remind children that we are animals, and their reply is typically defensive. “Animals stink.” Actually, we all stink (some more than others) and anyone who denies it needs a nasal recalibration. “Animals can’t talk.” I truly believe otherwise when I hear a wren defend its perch or my cats chew me out for coming home too late, and who can forget Koko, the sign-language gorilla? “Animals can’t build spaceships.” True, but you, my young friend, can’t rollerskate in a buffalo herd. But, as Roger Miller sang, “you can be happy if you put your mind to it.” At which point the kids look at me funny, walk away, and seek more validating conversation with toy robots. Ancient wisdom tells us that the soul is the animating principle in all living things, while science tends to beg difference. Science has articulated a mechanical approach to understanding life, yet hasn’t devised a theorem to say why we exist at all in the first place. It is in that ‘why’ that I find sweet mystery, a refreshing lack of answers, and creative wiggle room. Perhaps diving head first into that ‘why’ one may catch a clue to that self-referential spectacle of purpose that confounds us when we attempt to define it. In quantum physics, it’s been demonstrated that when a particle is under observation, its behavior changes. The soul seems to operate in a similar manner. Averse to being boxed in, the soul plays hide-and-seek when you have the dictionary and magnifying glass out, yet it makes itself known when you’re nowhere near the ‘record’ button. Right now at the very least, most of us are awake and conscious, or as much as we can be for a Sunday morning. Consciousness is for psychology what the soul has been for mysticism; consciousness forms the seat of awareness, while the soul connects our awareness to something vaster. Like the soul to the seeker, consciousness remains a mystery to researchers. Thousands of pages in scholarly journals are written about consciousness each year, just as thousands of napkins are scribbled on by yearning poets journeying to understand the breath within them. The readings today tell of feats of magic and faith which transform inert, dead matter into life sustaining flesh. How may these parables inspire consideration for our own bodies, awareness, and stories? What about them ignites an inmost tickling of our reckonings with the soul, body, and the subatomic entanglement of it all? Breathe deeply. Being a bit of a self-proclaimed metaphysical wing-nut and card-carrying member of the Wacky Ideas Club, I have had my own theories about the soul. They began with a rather inventive cosmology as a young child, in which I believed every person had a little Casper the Friendly Ghost inside them who sent a daily celestial telegram of misdeeds to God, who weighed them against the amount of guilt you should feel for the rest your life. Fortunately, I was exposed to transcendentalism early on and we tweaked that just a tish. I can’t recall the first time I truly sensed of the soul, but I’d like to think that it was a night that, as an nine year old rug rat, I stayed awake in my bunkbed all the way through to the purple light of morning, mentally overheating while attempting to grasp the idea of the infinite, and the sheer terrifying size of the Universe. While feeling so utterly small, I recalled feeling a ripple of interconnection, a weird sensation of safety and connectedness within it all, a nearness to the eternal. I felt that sensation within the scrubby woods of youthful summers, touching leaves with hopeful fingers, rope-swinging over dark water and hidden bullfrogs, and in willful surrender to the drenching daring-do of passing thunderstorms. As a child yet unjaded by the minutiae of routine and responsibility, the freedom of forest and sand was exhilarating. By virtue of being alive, we are all entitled to experience a harboring within holy moments which illuminate a sacredness unique to us, within and throughout. Call it the soul, the mind, or the silent whirring of mitochondria, do you think these conscious experiences of closeness might just be one way the cat finally catches its own metaphorical tail? The words and music are by Dougie McLean… CHORUS: I feel so near to the howling of the wind And yet, as you can imagine, getting to know the absolute core and essence of the self is not entirely a joyful romp through huggy-kissy happy land. As beings whose range of experience is not bounded (!), we at times must endure great despair in order to comprehend the magnitude of our being here, the repercussions of consciousness. Indeed, as innocence passed beneath my little troll feet, the world of youthful awe became grittier, discovery and surprise became harder won. I forged my way through foggy and dead times, sloughing off wonder for the quick fix. I had never felt the soul as a vividly essential part of self as I did in the aftermath of my greatest failure, lying there one gray morning in pain, loneliness, in my own reckless crucifixion. It was that feeling, there, within and around the hardened earth of my own body, which forced me to sit up, forced me to breathe through the miseries of my own decisions, to come to life again and transform. VERSE: So we build our tower constructions CHORUS: I feel so near to the howling of the wind Anima, spiritus… “Young man, I say unto thee, arise…” Anam Cara, soul friend… “…and the soul of the child came into him again.” We have the remarkable good fortune of being cosmically allowed to be shocked out of our stupors and into realization of our presence within the eternal. We rent a framework of muscle and bone that, as aspects of the Universe and ongoing expressions of the Big Bang, can arise, breathe, laugh heartily and love big for the blink of time we’ve won. It would seem that the gift of our being here is easily distracted by the mundane, yet why can’t it all be a vehicle for self-awareness? In “Wings of Desire,” a film by Wim Wenders, Peter Falk tells an angel considering giving up the business of merely observing the world beneath him that “on a cold day, you can rub your hands together, and you can drink coffee, and it’s good.” What he describes is a holy moment, a firing of the senses for the conjuring of spirit. In one of his last and certainly shortest sermons, the Buddha lifted a flower, laughed, and just walked away. Simplicity. Directness. Presence. The soul won’t be summoned by pedigree and pontification, but by doing something purposefully, by breathing with the wholeness of the body, and by savoring the unpredictability of each passing minute. CHORUS: I feel so near to the howling of the wind So these holy moments of realization can come cheap, if not free. For adults, it may take practice, but for children still living within a world as yet unfettered by deadlines, those wide eyes and intense curiosities are symptoms of the adventure of knowing thyself, of the journey home which decades later is still unraveling as a map marked by a miraculous topography. The journey to the soul, down sunset trails, passing through rivers of deepest magic, is our birthright, and quite possibly, our purpose. CHORUS: I feel so near to the howling of the wind Oh yeah.  [delivered today at the Jubilee Community, Asheville, NC]
jaybird found this for you @ 14:25 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Superstition (OMFG) Amazing Stevie Wonder on Sesame Street, circa '73 [via mefi] jaybird found this for you @ 01:20 in Art, Music, Theater & Film | | permalink
A big tacky event At present I'm chaperoning a 450-person event that is quite gaudy. Cute, but gaudy. This time tomorrow, I will hopefully be lying flat after Gotta go, I think the burlesque performers are getting antsy. jaybird found this for you @ 14:21 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Social Isolation Growing in U.S. Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States. A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two. The comprehensive new study paints a sobering picture of an increasingly fragmented America, where intimate social ties -- once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits -- are shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people appear to suffer alone. "That image of people on roofs after Katrina resonates with me, because those people did not know someone with a car," said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who helped conduct the study. "There really is less of a safety net of close friends and confidants." jaybird found this for you @ 20:15 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
New research is blurring the species boundary, forcing us to rethink what it is to be human. We now understand that all vertebrates, and it is argued even some invertebrates, share many biological structures and processes that underlie attributes once considered uniquely human: empathy, personality, culture, emotion, language, intention, tool-use and violence. Furthermore, we are able to see beyond species differences in ways we have never been able to before. Neuroimaging advances such as PET and fMRI can help map more elusive subjective qualities—such as emotion, states of consciousness and sense of self—to specific regions of the brain. In conjunction with a rich legacy of observational data and theories on animal behavior and human psychology, neuroscience is bridging long-standing conceptual and perceptual gaps. Whether or not this paradigm shift conforms precisely to science philosopher Thomas Kuhn's definition, its potential effects on science and society are revolutionary. The idea that humans share a psyche with other animals is enormously challenging. First, it alters the basic model around which biomedical and other disciplines have organized theory and terminology. Concepts like sense of self, empathy and intention have largely been considered exclusive to humans, and have therefore defined what animals are not. Such perceived dissimilarities have shaped theory, practice, law and custom for centuries. The human-animal gap influences how we live, how we formulate scientific questions, how we practice science and even what we eat. Today, in contrast, models of species' similarity are replacing models of difference, and the lines between species have become increasingly blurred—blurred to the extent that many insist on limits to stem cell-chimera research to avoid mixing the neuronal and psychological capacities of humans and other species. jaybird found this for you @ 14:11 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
'UFO Hacker' Tells What He Found WN: Did you find anything in your search for evidence of UFOs? McKinnon: Certainly did. There is The Disclosure Project. This is a book with 400 testimonials from everyone from air traffic controllers to those responsible for launching nuclear missiles. Very credible witnesses. They talk about reverse-(engineered) technology taken from captured or destroyed alien craft. WN: Like the Roswell incident of 1947? McKinnon: I assume that was the first and assume there have been others. These relied-upon people have given solid evidence. WN: What sort of evidence? McKinnon: A NASA photographic expert said that there was a Building 8 at Johnson Space Center where they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. I logged on to NASA and was able to access this department. They had huge, high-resolution images stored in their picture files. They had filtered and unfiltered, or processed and unprocessed, files. My dialup 56K connection was very slow trying to download one of these picture files. As this was happening, I had remote control of their desktop, and by adjusting it to 4-bit color and low screen resolution, I was able to briefly see one of these pictures. It was a silvery, cigar-shaped object with geodesic spheres on either side. There were no visible seams or riveting. There was no reference to the size of the object and the picture was taken presumably by a satellite looking down on it. The object didn't look manmade or anything like what we have created. Because I was using a Java application, I could only get a screenshot of the picture -- it did not go into my temporary internet files. At my crowning moment, someone at NASA discovered what I was doing and I was disconnected. I also got access to Excel spreadsheets. One was titled "Non-Terrestrial Officers." It contained names and ranks of U.S. Air Force personnel who are not registered anywhere else. It also contained information about ship-to-ship transfers, but I've never seen the names of these ships noted anywhere else. jaybird found this for you @ 08:04 in Conjecture & Speculation | | permalink
Curses, foiled again! I've let time slip away from me like a cloud of starlings, and I don't really have the time to post right now. It might be like this for the next few days, so bear with... jaybird found this for you @ 06:48 in Misc. Babble | | permalink
♫Going back to Cali, Cali, Cali♫  Hovering over the "Purchase Tickets" button was agonizing. Do it?, not do it?, ad infinitum. It was in fact a muscle spasm in my left index finger that caused the rather spontaneous ticketing, and now I am two months away from accidentally gallivanting through San Fran, Big Sur, the Esalen Institute, with mi amigos Gustav and Casey. I'm actually flying on that recently minted "ominous" day, Sept. 11th, just because that's how things worked out. No doubt, it will be a safe day to fly. Anyhoo, it's not only a day off, it's also the twentieth anniversary of my first official Day of Rebirth, June 21st. The story is long, and you can read it here. Today, I'm taking off for Max Patch for some soul stretchin' and revitalization at the top of the world. As always, the lessons of this day are unpredictable. We shall see... jaybird found this for you @ 13:59 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Crime as Asceticism This comes by way of an email from Joshua: They steal from the rich and give to the poor. And just like Robin Hood and his men, a gang of Hamburg activists are proving difficult to catch despite the fact they dress as superheroes when they raid swanky stores. A bunch of egalitarian criminals who go by such names as "Spider Mum" and "Santa Guevara" are being referred to as modern-day Germany's version of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. And just like the Sheriff of Nottingham in the legend of Sherwood Forest's most famous outlaw, the Hamburg police are at a loss when it comes to stopping them. jaybird found this for you @ 08:38 in High Weirdness | | permalink
Aloha, Shalom, Loveya. A few days ago, it was time to say my 'goodbyes' to my soul friend Gustav, who was returning to Californa, from whence he came. I found the actual act of uttering that word difficult, so the best I could do was mutter 'aloha' into his shoulder. The word which comes far from my cultural sphere is defined as both hello and goodbye, love, peace, and all that jazz. Goodbye implies such a severing of continuation, a closing, rather than the open perpetuity to which I cast my love and friendship. 'Aloha' initially conjures up images of Hawaiian shirts, tiki torches and schmaltzy luaus with Don Ho crooning late into the night, spilling to VFW parking lots all across America. Hello, Hawaii. Yet on a whole other level, subbing 'so long, farewell,' with the Polynesian homage to 'shalom' blasts a tearful moment with a tish of blazing sun, open heartedness, and a bit of a mystical acknowledgement that it's all the same damn thing... the soul is somewhat learning disabled when it comes to the human, limited perception of time. The soul understands that time doesn't quite flow the way we think it does, and once two conscious beans meet and groove into a friendship beyond weather reports and water cooler dialectics, we click on a cosmic level and stay connected no matter what. Aloha is a little easier to prepare in the subconscious kitchen of language. My best friend Joshua beautifully takes things a step further and assures that even the most casual conversation ends, if it really ever does, in 'I Love You,' which is even more blunt than the pineapple-scented syllables from the Pacific. Goodbye is for wimps. So long is for wussies. Aloha, and its subsequent transcendent spirit, forces us to open to all possibilities, and to worry not about the farewell, but to bask in the love and to glisten in the coconut oil of gleaming opportunity. So, to Gustav, here's to transformation, and a lifetime wave of friendship so large you could surf an elephant through it.  jaybird found this for you @ 19:49 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
"Doomsday vault" on Arctic isle would protect world's seeds The high-security vault, almost half the length of a football field, will be carved into a mountain on a remote island above the Arctic Circle. If the looming fences, motion detectors and steel airlock doors are not disincentive enough for anyone hoping to breach the facility's concrete interior, the polar bears roaming outside should help. The more than 100 nations that have collectively endorsed the vault's construction say it will be the most secure facility of its kind in the world. Given the stakes, they agree, nothing less would do. Its precious contents? Seeds — millions and millions of them — from virtually every variety of food on the planet. Crop seeds are the source of human sustenance, the product of 10,000 years of selective breeding dating from the dawn of agriculture. The "doomsday vault," as some have come to call it, is to be the ultimate backup in the event of a global catastrophe — the go-to place after an asteroid hit or nuclear or biowarfare holocaust so that, difficult as those times would be, humankind would not have to start again from scratch. jaybird found this for you @ 14:58 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
Food for thought: Crop diversity is dying José Esquinas-Alcázar regards the corn laid out in rows with the love and admiration that sommeliers reserve for bottles in a fine wine cellar. To the untrained eye, it is a collection of misshapen ears: Long, short, blue, yellow, white, spotted, covered in dirt. jaybird found this for you @ 07:55 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
Bare Ass Nekkid As a silly stunt after swimming the other day, I walked bare ass nekkid in front of my friends. Casey said "Yay, he's finally getting over it!" and the wonderful loon ran and hugged me in my state of still being quite bare ass nekkid. It was a sweet moment of celebrating being a fleshy animate aware and living organism. I've never seen a wiggle worm in a turtleneck, nor an otter in an evening gown, so it seems alright, if daring, if I am suddenly "as I am" among the wide eyes of compadres. Perhaps it's just as silly as getting born into a world of clothing, anyway. Isn't everything around us covered in something else? jaybird found this for you @ 20:41 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Crows Have Human-Like Intelligence  Crows make tools, play tricks on each other, and caw among kin in a dialect all their own. These are just some of the signs presented in a recent book that point to an unexpected similarity between the wise birds and humans. "It's the same kind of consonance we find between bats that can fly and birds that can fly and insects that can fly," said Candace Savage, a nature writer based in Saskatoon, Canada. "Species don't have to be related for there to have been some purpose, some reason, some evolutionary advantage for acquiring shared characteristics," she added. Savage's book, Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys of the Avian World (October 2005), explores the burgeoning field of crow research, which suggests that the birds share with humans several hallmarks of higher intelligence, including tool use and sophisticated social behavior. The shared traits exist despite the fact that crows and humans sit on distinct branches of the genetic tree. Humans are mammals. Crows are birds, which Savage calls feathered lizards, referring to the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs. "I'm not positing there's anything mythological about this or imagining crows are in any way human," she said. "But whatever it is that has encouraged humans to develop higher intelligence also seems to have been at work on crows." [more...] jaybird found this for you @ 14:57 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Study finds attitudes about aging contradict reality Back when he was 20 years old in 1965, rock star Pete Townshend wrote the line “I hope I die before I get old” into a song, “My Generation” that launched his band, the Who, onto the rock ‘n’ roll scene. But a unique new study suggests that Townshend may have fallen victim to a common, and mistaken, belief: That the happiest days of people’s lives occur when they’re young. In fact, the study finds, both young people and older people think that young people are happier than older people — when in fact research has shown the opposite. And while both older and younger adults tend to equate old age with unhappiness for other people, individuals tend to think they’ll be happier than most in their old age. In other words, the young Pete Townshend may have thought others of his generation would be miserable in old age. And now that he’s 61, he might look back and think he himself was happier back then. But the opposite is likely to be true: Older people “mis-remember” how happy they were as youths, just as youths “mis-predict” how happy (or unhappy) they will be as they age. The study, performed by VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and University of Michigan researchers, involved more than 540 adults who were either between the ages of 21 and 40, or over age 60. All were asked to rate or predict their own individual happiness at their current age, at age 30 and at age 70, and also to judge how happy most people are at those ages. The results are published in the June issue of the Journal of Happiness Studies, a major research journal in the field of positive psychology. “Overall, people got it wrong, believing that most people become less happy as they age, when in fact this study and others have shown that people tend to become happier over time,” says lead author Heather Lacey, Ph.D., a VA postdoctoral fellow and member of the U-M Medical School’s Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine. “Not only do younger people believe that older people are less happy, but older people believe they and others must have been happier ‘back then’. Neither belief is accurate.” The findings have implications for understanding young people’s decisions about habits — such as smoking or saving money — that might affect their health or finances later in life. They also may help explain the fear of aging that drives middle-aged people to “midlife crisis” behavior in a vain attempt to slow their own aging. jaybird found this for you @ 08:44 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | |
A grouping of granite blocks along a grassy Amazon hilltop may be the vestiges of a centuries-old astronomical observatory - a find archaeologists say indicates early rainforest inhabitants were more sophisticated than previously believed.
It's hard to take fusion energy seriously when its proponents employ descriptors like "power of the Sun" and "energy from a star" to explain it. This kind of hyperbole—and the fact that scientists have never created a sustained fusion reaction capable of generating more electricity than it soaks up—make fusion sound like a fantastical scheme devised by Lex Luthor. But in the wake of the current energy crisis, new money and political support may finally channel enough resources into fusion to make the elusive process a reality.
"The fundamental things apply, as time goes by," sings Sam, the pianist in Casablanca. But maybe Sam didn't mean that to apply over 12 billion years.