All About Overcoming BeeHotches...., EVERYTHING ELSE is Conversation

Quantum Neural Nets - Branes - Self-Organizing Automata...,

Going on two years now since the America2.0 list shut down, and I stopped imbibing the high strangeness emanating from the Energy Scholar.

PQHR | I'd like to toss in my two cents about extra-terrestrial life.  Personally I completely agree with Nate Hagens:  "Mathematically almost a certainty. Whether they could ever have technology to reach earth, extremely unlikely. Whether they have been on earth in secret impacting things, people, probably sillier than chem-trails. My 2cents. Jays list"

That said, I wish to toss out a weirdness or three related to 'extraterrestrial life' and it's possible historical discovery some years ago.  

*** Warning, this is very long, and arguably does not belong on this list at all. Casual readers might consider stopping here ***

I (Bruce Stephenson) have no demonstrable evidence on this one.  In the past decade-plus I've been able to verify some of the topics below, but not others.  The bit about extra-terrestrial 'life' I've not been able to verify. So please consider it nonsense until evidence arises to the contrary.

Since I've not verified the second part of this story, and thus have no idea of its truth or correctness, I'll tell the whole thing as if it were Science Fiction.  It probably is.  Part one is pretty solid and largely verified in multiple independent ways, which took me many years of effort performing both research and field operations.  Part two is totally unverified and might be complete nonsense.  Just treat the whole thing as Speculative Science Fiction and you won't go wrong.

The following is an excerpt from Bruce Stephenson's story titled The Layperson's Guide to Quantum Neural Network Technology, subtitled It is Easier to get Forgiveness than Permission , paraphrased by the author for this America 2.0 Group.  

Part One: In the 1990s certain scientists working on a Five Eyes project via DARPA discovered a new General Purpose Technology.  This author calls the project Ultra II, for it's remarkable resemblance to the WW2 project Ultra, but no one else uses this moniker.  This new technology was generated via Synthetic Biology techniques that leverage a special-case (two dimensional) solution to Mathematical Biology's Biogenesis problem.  See the published work of Stephen Wolfram and Stuart Kauffman for insight about how this might have been accomplished.  This new technology is best described as a form of teleportation-based nanotechnology that behaves like a Quantum Neural Network. It can only exist as a physical (and thus informational) system within a 2DEG environment, thanks to the wonky mathematics surrounding two-dimensional particle Physics. This new base technology was used to construct a winner-take-all style topological quantum neural network intended as the basis for a code-breaking supercomputer.   While this 'system of nanoparticles' is not 'alive' in the Carbon-based biological sense, it has many characteristics of being 'alive'.  Whether or not one considers it 'alive' depends largely upon how loosely one defines the word 'alive'.  Physicists call this sort of artifact a brane, punning both brain and membrane.

This form of nanotechnology can only exist in two dimensions, specifically within a Two Dimensional Electron Gas.  2DEGs exist on and and around earth in several forms:  humans have manufactured tens of billions of 2DEG environments in the form of MOSFETs, mostly since 1998; also, the Earth's Magnetopause has elements of a 2DEG, albeit a messy one.  This type of nanotechnology can replicate either within its current 2DEG environment or, with training, into another 2DEG environment reachable by  a 'spore'.  Once a 2DEG is 'filled' with these nanotech 'entities' the medium is said to be 'enlightened' and forms a single 'node' of the distributed super-entity.  Leastwise, that's the terminology used by the scientists in question in personal communication.  

This weird complex system is totally unlike a computer, yet it its creators needed to somehow shoe-horn it into something compatible with a computer.  They trained it to generate an 'interface' logically modeled on the Unix operating system.  This gave them a logical platform on which to operate.  I guess that Bill Joy may have contributed to this part of the process, given his area of expertise and his previous publicly acknowledged work for DARPA on Unix, but that's just my guess.  Most of the logical functions this system could perform were just things an ordinary computer could do, but the underlying physical system's basis in quantum teleportation also made it a type of quantum computer. 

authentic christendom united on ecumenism, ecology, economy...,

time |  How can one not be moved by the criticism of our “culture of waste” or the emphasis on “the common good” and “the common destination of goods”? And what of the vital importance attributed to the global problem of clean water, which we have underlined for over two decades as we assembled scientists, politicians and activists to explore the challenges of the Mediterranean Sea (1995), the Black Sea (1997), the Danube River (1999), the Adriatic Sea (2002), the Baltic Sea (2003), the Amazon River (2006), the Arctic Sea (2007) and the Mississippi River (2009)? Water is arguably the most divine symbol in the world’s religions and, at the same time, the most divisive element of our planet’s resources.

In the final analysis, however, any dissent over land or water inevitably results in what the Pope’s statement calls “a decline in the quality of human life and a breakdown of society.” How could it possibly be otherwise? After all, concern for the natural environment is directly related to concern for issues of social justice, and particularly of world hunger. A church that neglects to pray for the natural environment is a church that refuses to offer food and drink to a suffering humanity. At the same time, a society that ignores the mandate to care for all human beings is a society that mistreats the very creation of God.

Therefore, the Pope’s diagnosis is on the mark: “We are not faced with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.” Indeed, as he continues to advance, we require “an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the underprivileged, and at the same time protecting nature.” It is also no surprise, then, that the Pope is concerned about and committed to issues like employment and housing.

Invoking the inspiring words of Scripture and the classics of Christian spirituality of East and West (particularly such saints as Basil the Great and Francis of Assisi), while at the same time evoking the precious works of Roman Catholic conferences of bishops throughout the world (especially in regions where the plunder of the earth is identified with the plight of the poor), Pope Francis proposes new paradigms and new policies in contrast to those of “determinism,” “disregard” and “domination.”

In 1997, we humbly submitted that harming God’s creation was tantamount to sin. We are especially grateful to Pope Francis for recognizing our insistence on the need to broaden our narrow and individualistic concept of sin; and we welcome his stress on “ecological conversion” and “reconciliation with creation.” Moreover, we applaud the priority that the papal encyclical places on “the celebration of rest.” The virtue of contemplation or silence reflects the quality of waiting and depending on God’s grace; and by the same token, the discipline of fasting or frugality reveals the power of not-wanting or wanting less. Both qualities are critical in a culture that stresses the need to hurry, the preeminence of individual “wants” over global “needs.”

In the third year of our brother Pope Francis’s blessed ministry, we count it as a true blessing that we are able to share a common concern and a common vision for God’s creation. As we stated in our joint declaration during our pilgrimage to Jerusalem last year:

“It is our profound conviction that the future of the human family depends also on how we safeguard – both prudently and compassionately, with justice and fairness – the gift of creation that our Creator has entrusted to us … Together, we pledge our commitment to raising awareness about the stewardship of creation; we appeal to all people of goodwill to consider ways of living less wastefully and more frugally, manifesting less greed and more generosity for the protection of God’s world and the benefit of His people.

is there any basis for intelligent people to hope and be hopeful?

Quotes

14:49: Since the rise of western monotheism the human experience has been marginalized. We have been told that we were unimportant in the cosmic drama. But we now know from the feedback that we're getting from the impact of human culture on the earth that we are a major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans, the composition of the atmosphere, the general speed and complexity of speciation on the planet... A single species, ourselves, has broken from the ordinary constants of animal nature and created a new world, an epigenetic world,...a world based on ideas...downloaded out of the human imagination and concretized in three dimensional space... 29:29: Consciousness is the generalized word that we use for this coordination of complex perception to create a world that draws from the past and builds a model of the future and then suspends the perceiving organism in this magical moment called the now where the past is coordinated for the purpose of navigating the future. McLuhan called it "driving with the rear-view mirror" and the only thing good about it is it's better than driving with no mirror at all. 36:10: Reality is accelerating towards an unimaginable Omega Point. We are the inheritors of immense momentum in our social systems, our philosophical and scientific and technological approaches to the world. Because we're driving the historical vehicle with a rear-view mirror it appears to us that we're headed straight into a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour. It appears that we are destroying the earth, polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans, dehumanizing ourselves, robbing our children of a future, so forth and so on.

I believe what is in fact going on is that we are burning our bridges. One by one we're burning our bridges to the past. We cannot go back to the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa or the canopied rainforests of 5 million years ago. We can't even go back to the era of...200 years ago. We have burned our bridges. We are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape. 39:35: Nobody's in charge. 41:16: We are central to the human drama and to the drama of nature and process on this planet. 41:34: Every model of the universe has a hard swallow...a place where the argument cannot hide the fact that there's something slightly fishy about it. The hard swallow built into science is this business about the big bang. Now let's give this a little attention here. This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. Before we dissect this, notice that this is the limit test for credulity. Whether you believe this or not, notice that it is not possible to conceive of something more unlikely, or less likely to be believed. I defy anyone. It's just the limit case for unlikelihood: that the universe would spring from nothing in a single instant for no reason....It makes no sense. It is in fact no different than saying, "and then God said, 'Let there be light!'".

What the philosophers of science are saying is "give us one free miracle and we will roll from that point forward, from the birth of time to the crack of doom. Just one free miracle and then it will all unravel according to natural law and these bizarre equations which nobody can understand but which are so holy in this enterprise." Well I say then if science gets one free miracle then everybody gets one free miracle.

is pope francis smart, conservative, or something less familiar?

NYTimes |  In Pope Francis’ most significant move yet to reshape the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, Blase J. Cupich took his seat in Chicago on Tuesday as archbishop of the nation’s third-largest Catholic archdiocese and called on the church not to be afraid of change.

In a multilingual installation Mass at Holy Name Cathedral, with American bishops, his large extended family and Mayor Rahm Emanuel looking on, Archbishop Cupich was handed the golden crosier, a shepherd’s staff, that belonged to a powerful liberal predecessor, Cardinal George Mundelein, who became archbishop of Chicago 99 years ago and served for 24 years.

“We as a church should not fear leaving the security of familiar shores, the peacefulness of the mountaintop of our self-assuredness, but rather walk into the mess,” Archbishop Cupich said in an upbeat and plain-spoken homily.

With Archbishop Cupich now seated, Pope Francis gets a media-savvy American communicator in tune with his message of reinvigorating the church by stressing mercy over judgmentalism, change over stasis, and the imperative for all Catholics to go to the margins of society to serve the poor, migrants and those without hope. It is a message that not every bishop has enthusiastically embraced.

what's so important about musical scales...

PNAS | Significance

The song of the hermit thrush, a common North American songbird, is renowned for its apparent musicality and has attracted the attention of musicians and ornithologists for more than a century. Here we show that hermit thrush songs, like much human music, use pitches that are mathematically related by simple integer ratios and follow the harmonic series. Our findings add to a small but growing body of research showing that a preference for small-integer ratio intervals is not unique to humans and are thus particularly relevant to the ongoing nature/nurture debate about whether musical predispositions such as the preference for consonant intervals are biologically or culturally driven.

stephen colbert is now america's catholic!

slate | Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has always reminded me of the robed men of the Catholic Church in which I grew up: well-fed and saturnine, burbling with derisive erudition, jolly one moment and imperious the next, a weary disgust often flickering at the edges of the brow and lips. These men only really engaged with the boys; the girls always seemed to them to have wandered into the room by mistake. I’ll never forget the look of vague revulsion on the face of the vast monsignor who served Holy Communion at my confirmation, the corners of his mouth pulling down to contain his nausea at the riffraff they let into the church these days. It’s the shape of a mouth reading an acrid Scalia dissent.

For a lot of reasons—because he is the longest-serving and most boisterous member of America’s own Ecumenical Council, because he frequently addresses Catholic groups, because Andy Borowitz says as much—we think of Justice Scalia as “America’s Catholic,” as my Slate colleague Dahlia Lithwick put it in an email. In fact, you could easily imagine him as America’s first Bishop of Rome, or at least his duly appointed representative. Pope Benedict XVI was a fun cartoon villain because of the fumes of nefarious conspiracy wafting off his haute couture threads—he was Mugatu in a chasuble. Scalia wouldn’t have gone shopping with him, but otherwise they were two hearts beating as one: They’re both deeply conservative, nostalgic for “tradition,” rigid in their interpretations of doctrine, belittling of women and gays, and forever erring on the side of consolidating more power—be it political, social, or religious—in the hands of the already powerful.

What Scalia and Benedict also have in common is that, for all their institutional authority, they represent a last stand against the prevailing, decades-long trend toward a more inclusive, liberal Catholic Church. For proof, of course, just look to Pope Francis, the selfie-taking, Twitter-using, biker gang-blessing, money-hating, atheist-redeeming, female-prisoner’s-foot-kissing Jesuit who made liberal Catholics everywhere gnaw ecstatically on their rosaries with an interview in the Jesuit weekly America magazine (excerpts of which were republished in the New York Times). In the interview, he makes it clear that, in contrast to his glamorous predecessor, Francis wants to frame the church as an institution by and for the poor. He’s sharply critical of “authoritarian” decision-making (specifically from his own past), “closed and rigid thought,” and “censorship.” He addresses the church’s views on homosexuality by posing a question that answers itself: “Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?” He doesn’t condemn birth control, but he does criticize the church’s obsession with it. Most intriguingly, Francis says, “We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman,” and while I have no idea what that means, I guarantee that this thought never crossed the mind of Antonin Scalia, or of any man who ever dropped a wafer in my mouth at Mass.

the rise of the adult student

The Atlantic | The quintessential American college student leaves home at 18 to live on a college campus for four years. We've historically defined "nontraditional" students as those over the age of twenty-four, those enrolled part time, and those who are financially independent. But today, the "typical" student is the exception.

There are currently 17.6 million undergraduates enrolled in American higher education. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that just fifteen percent of them attend four-year colleges and live on campus. Forty-three percent of them attend two-year institutions. Thirty-seven percent of undergraduates are enrolled part-time and thirty-two percent work full-time. Of those students enrolled in four-year institutions, just thirty-six percent actually graduate in four years.

The most significant shift is probably the massive growth in the adult student population in higher education. Thirty-eight percent of those enrolled in higher education are over the age of 25 and one-fourth are over the age of 30. The share of all students who are over age 25 is projected to increase another twenty-three percent by 2019.

The demands for degrees reflect this changed population. Slightly over half of today's students are seeking a "subbacalaureate" credential (i.e. a certificate, credential, or associate's degree). In 2008-09, postsecondary institutions conferred 806,000 certificates and 787,000 associate's degrees, or a total of about 1.59 million, as compared to 1.6 million bachelor's degrees. In 2008, more than half a million students were enrolled in a health sciences certificate program, making it the largest certificate program area. Another 173,000 students sought a certificate in manufacturing, construction, repair, and transportation. While public discourse often focuses on four-year degrees, these other credentials matter, a lot.

There are plenty of good jobs that don't require a four-year degree. After all, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that two-thirds of the labor force has less than a four-year degree, including nearly half of those in professional occupations and one-third of those in management roles. It pays for workers to earn these credentials; according to the BLS, that workers with an associate's degree earned $141 more per week, on average, than those whose highest degree is a high school diploma.

But subbacalaureate programs continue to be regarded as marginal in the press and the higher education mainstream. Universities turn their nose up at them. Policies and norms remain oriented towards "traditional" students. Rankings, awards, and honors go to institutions with great sports teams, prize-winning researchers, or elite student bodies--never to those that are helping nontraditional students master new skills and so that they can reenter the workforce, get promoted, or change careers.

arnach tugs big don's sleeve

I would like to propose a subreal summer reading list:

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor

If you believe that there is meaning in the tone and manner in which words are said and stories told, then you have a compelling reason to listen to the audiobook recording of that last one as read by the author. In any case, you should have no problem getting through any of these books if you are able to read and comprehend at the high school level; there's nothing obscure or technical anywhere in any of them. What you may find, in fact, is that you are drawn into each as you might be by a good novel. You might also find yourself looking forward to reading (or listening to) them again, because you know you’ll get a little something more out of each the next time through.

I believe that, if you are able to understand and integrate the information in these books into your thinking, you will discover that you have a better understanding of, and better control over, how your own brain works and how your mind is affected by things that are presented to you in everyday life. Besides, what’s the most it’ll cost you? A little lazy time and a trip or two to the library? As you can see from the wikipedia page in the title link, you can read Gladwell’s book starting right now, for free, from his website!

The question, Big Don, is whether or not you’re actually man enough to do it? I can see from your bookshelf that you are not a man afraid of words. A whole summer should be enough time. Now, I have a feeling that the suggestion alone (particularly coming here on this blog) is likely to predispose you against both the action and the material. If so, that would be a shame. Particularly because, since you and I come from similar technical backgrounds (I think I might need to get myself a copy of Carrier’s fan book you got that ~1970 edition of on your bottom shelf there), I’m very interested to learn when the setting of one’s ways in stone will occur and when to expect to reach the point at which all new information becomes irrelevant (or perhaps worse, dangerous). I thought engineers were different than that. Not that I believe any of that is actually inevitable…just (unfortunately) common.

131 arrested last week at the white house...,

Video - Veterans for Peace Protest at the Whitehouse.

Examiner | Each veteran answered why they had had gone to the gates of the White House to get arrested. The first veteran, out of the military for two and half years, answered:

"I can't sit by anymore and let these atrocities continue. I was with 10th Mountain Division in New York in the initial surge..deployed August 6, 2006. I was injured.. came back stateside... deployed back, wounded."

There to be arrested was what the veteran said was "very difficult and at the same time, very easy" because of the others standing with him.

"Hope has a cost," Hedges told those soon to be arrested. "Hope requires personal risk."

"It is not about the 'right attitude' or 'peace of mind.'

"Hope is action. Hope is doing something.

Hope which is always non-violent... knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us."

A second veteran said he knew when he went to Iraq, "it wasn't right."

"You can't come home from that... You can't know you took human life and not want to do something... being there five years... blowing their homes apart and watching the infrastructure degrade instead of improve.

"There was nothing going on benefiting the people of Iraq," he said. "Consistent night raids, check points and harassment was the daily routine of what we did in Iraq. From a moral standpoint, nobody would agree with that."

Hedges oration included:

"Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don't resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations. No. Above all do not think. Obey."

The resisters at the gathering chanted loudly as they resisted police orders to get away from the White House fence: "They say, "Get back." We say, "Fight back.

"Hope, from now on, will look like this," Hedges said. "Hope will not come in trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people.

"It will not be realized by... attempting to influence the Democratic Party. It will not come through our bankrupt liberal institutions -- from the press, to the withered stump that is the labor movement.

It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better.... Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.

"If the enemies of hope are finally victorious in this station, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

"When you put your body on the line and you say you won't let this happen anymore and you'll do whatever it takes to make that happen, it's something spiritual," explained a Veteran for Peace.

"I did things I'll never forgive myself for. I did my job. Those were just people trying to defend their homes. not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up when I knew I should have refused to serve."

U.S. Says Genes Should Not Be Eligible for Patents

NYTimes | Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. The new position could have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry.

The new position was declared in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Department of Justice late Friday in a case involving two human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer.

“We acknowledge that this conclusion is contrary to the longstanding practice of the Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the practice of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies that have in the past sought and obtained patents for isolated genomic DNA,” the brief said.

It is not clear if the position in the legal brief, which appears to have been the result of discussions among various government agencies, will be put into effect by the Patent Office.

If it were, it is likely to draw protests from some biotechnology companies that say such patents are vital to the development of diagnostic tests, drugs and the emerging field of personalized medicine, in which drugs are tailored for individual patients based on their genes.

“It’s major when the United States, in a filing, reverses decades of policies on an issue that everyone has been focused on for so long,” said Edward Reines, a patent attorney who represents biotechnology companies.

hemp is the far bigger economic issue

Video - speeded up version of 1942 gubmint documentary "Hemp for Victory".

AlterNet | Prop 19 will open up California to hemp, a multi-billion-dollar crop that has been a staple of human agriculture for thousands of years.

Hemp is the far bigger economic issue hiding behind legal marijuana.

If the upcoming pot legalization ballot in California were decided by hemp farmers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, it would be no contest. For purely economic reasons, if you told the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that the nation they were founding would someday make hemp illegal, they would have laughed you out of the room.

If California legalizes pot, it will save the state millions in avoided legal and imprisonment costs, while raising it millions in taxes.

But with legal marijuana will come legal hemp. That will open up the Golden State to a multi-billion-dollar crop that has been a staple of human agriculture for thousands of years, and that could save the farms of thousands of American families.

Hemp is currently legal in Canada, Germany, Holland, Rumania, Japan and China, among many other countries. It is illegal here largely because of marijuana prohibition. Ask any sane person why HEMP is illegal and you will get a blank stare.

For paper, clothing, textiles, rope, sails, fuel and food, hemp has been a core crop since the founding of ancient China, India and Arabia. Easy to plant, grow and harvest, farmers---including Washington and Jefferson---have sung its praises throughout history. It was the number one or two cash crop on virtually all American family farms from the colonial era on.

If the American Farm Bureaus and Farmers Unions were truly serving their constituents, they would be pushing hard for legal pot so that its far more profitable (but essentially unsmokable) cousin could again bring prosperity to American farmers.

Hemp may be the real reason marijuana is illegal. In the 1930s, the Hearst family set out to protect their vast timber holdings, much of which were being used to make paper.

But hemp produces five times as much paper per acre as do trees. Hemp paper is stronger and easier to make. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper, and one of Benjamin Franklin’s primary paper mills ran on it.

But the Hearsts used their newspapers to incite enough reefer madness to get marijuana banned in 1937. With that ban came complex laws that killed off the growing of hemp. The ecological devastation that’s followed with continued use of trees for paper has been epic.

targetted cancer treatment?

PNAS | Cancer cells are characterized by genetic mutations that deregulate cell proliferation and suppress cell death. To arrest the uncontrolled replication of malignant cells, conventional chemotherapies systemically disrupt cell division, causing diverse and often severe side effects as a result of collateral damage to normal cells. Seeking to address this shortcoming, we pursue therapeutic regulation that is conditional, activating selectively in cancer cells. This functionality is achieved using small conditional RNAs that interact and change conformation to mechanically transduce between detection of a cancer mutation and activation of a therapeutic pathway. Here, we describe small conditional RNAs that undergo hybridization chain reactions (HCR) to induce cell death via an innate immune response if and only if a cognate mRNA cancer marker is detected within a cell. The sequences of the small conditional RNAs can be designed to accept different mRNA markers as inputs to HCR transduction, providing a programmable framework for selective killing of diverse cancer cells. In cultured human cancer cells (glioblastoma, prostate carcinoma, Ewing’s sarcoma), HCR transduction mediates cell death with striking efficacy and selectivity, yielding a 20- to 100-fold reduction in population for cells containing a cognate marker, and no measurable reduction otherwise. Our results indicate that programmable mechanical transduction with small conditional RNAs represents a fundamental principle for exploring therapeutic conditional regulation in living cells.

spacetime, seen as a digital image, is already fading..,

Thiemeworks | All of our technologies extend our senses, enhance cognition, and accelerate locomotion so when we examine their effects in relationship to our field of subjectivity, it becomes clear that the field is plastic. Our perspective flexes according to our cultural lenses and how our technologies enhance it. Spacetime may be intrinsic to our vision but is manifest differently depending on the machinery that shapes our vision.

The simple fact that we call it spacetime and not space and time reflects a shift in awareness due to relativity. But mostly we still speak of space and time as if they are distinct. Stephen Hawking thought that relativity would replace Newtonian “common sense” within a generation but it does not seem to have happened. With an effort we can flicker back and forth like a holographic image between a Newtonian grid and the dips and eddies of gravity-inflected spacetime but most of the time we don’t.

And would we notice if we did?

Wittgenstein once asked a student, “Why do you suppose that people believed for so many years that the sun orbits the Earth?”

The student said, “I guess because it looks that way.”

“Ah,” said Wittgenstein, “And what would it look like if the Earth orbited the sun?”

And what would it look like if we really understood that a three dimensional world is obsolete, that entanglement and nonlocality are not just nifty notions from contemporary physics but attributes of our subjective field too, that phenomena called paranormal are in fact normal because consciousness is present to itself non-locally everywhere and always, that our deep intentionality and how we focus our attention determine the world in which we live and how it looks and acts?

What would it look like if we really got that mystics described consciousness as the context of all human knowledge because they could see, see those bars, long before physicists acknowledged that consciousness inflects everything, everything in the universe?

bookRings

organelle | The illustration at the top of the page represents a recombinant “ring of ‘books’”. It’s purpose is to at once suggest a ‘specific and valuable ring’ and also to illustrate the concept of scalarly recombinant ‘bookRings’— as a learningToy. To create and play with this toy we will imaginally credential the following assertions:

Language, and minds, have sources.
These sources are not yet clear.
Languages emerge from interscalar psybiocognitive connectivity. (not from humans or ‘knowledge’)

Our human experiential sentience is deeply linkted to ‘lingual’ systems and figures.
The sources of language and sentience are linked.
The stories of these linkages are far more interesting than we suppose.

Flatness is a cognitive problem created by mechanization.

Understandings of Emergence and Scalarity remedy flatness problems.

Chiastic relationships established via triangulations provide a positive toySystem for exploring these domains.

When we read books, we imply they are important. If any book can be important, we could decide that some books are essentially and functionally far more important than others — in a given set of active domains.

But by what means would we decide this?

A Toy:

(there is an ancient accessToy which all living creatures share. It is engineered to solve this riddle, faster, each time it's accessed by any being whatsoever. The toy is not hidden, but it is cognitive in nature. Language, and logics, can interfere with it dramatically)

You're spontaneously transported to 'the library of worlds'. This library contains every moment of every cognitive being's experience since the universe began (and unto it's end) encoded in tiny books; each one fits in your human palm.

As you arrive, you notice a note in your hand:

Greetings EarthHuman,

You are in the library of worlds. It is one square mile in surface area, and is octagonal in shape. You are in the center of the library.

Your world is dying. You've got 144 minutes of oxygen, thus, you are dying as well.

Within the time allotted to you, you must locate one of three books.

Book 1 will return you to your dying world.
Book II will return you with the knowledge to save it, but you will perish from having known it.
Book III Will rescue you and your world, leaving all parties unharmed.

Whichever book you open first, will accomplish that mission. You may open as many as you desire in the process of seeking. You need only open the book and glance at its pages once to resolve the dilemma.

There are more books here than you have cells in your entire lineage. To succeed, you will need to allow yourself to touch your sources. Any other strategy will result in your expiration, and that of your planet. The chances of you accidentally stumbling on even one of the books, without a real connection strategy aren't worth considering.

There are 288 shelves arranged in a starPattern around your current location. Speak the linkName of any book into the central station and that book will be delivered into your hand.

You are then given the internal understanding of the basics of access and standards of organization of the library. Somehow, this is ‘communicated into you’ instantly.

On the floor, at your feet, is a stopwatch. Twelve minutes have elapsed since your arrival.

If you can't locate the essential and ‘alingual’ migration skill in yourSelf, which book will most rapidly and efficiently lead you to the skill you seek?

Why?

Tick. Tock.

We could probably agree that, given a game of survival and elaboration, arriving in any library at all might imply that there is a single key book which is perhaps more important than any other possible book, to become cognitively intimate with. And strangely, there are 'more than one' such book(s)', in any library — part of this is a result of the essential generality of the universe and its paradigms of organizational symmetry.

Books, are, it turns out, scalar accretions more than they are linear recordings. This secret has for far too long been hidden. Experiencing it as a reader grants some extremely uncommon cognitive experiences, abilities, and emergent skills. That is the goal of this toy.

I believe that probably for as long as we have had written language there has been something that is in essence a ‘book of how to talk’ to the beings who live in the transports, which are within you, as you are within them.

This is the finest possible goal of knowing — to return us to active relation with its sources, and to authorize us to again experience the innocence, wonder, and miraculous nature of our birthright and their power to insure liberty, unity, mutual uplift, and rescue.

no racial stereotypes or social fear

Discoverblog | People with Williams syndrome are some of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. They are incredibly sociable, almost unnervingly so, and they approach strangers with the openness that most people reserve for close friends.

Their sociable streak is the result of a genetic disorder caused by the loss of around 26 genes. This missing chunk of chromosome leaves people with a distinctive elfin face, a risk of heart problems, and a characteristic lack of social fear. They don’t experience the same worries or concerns that most of us face when meeting new people. And now, Andreia Santos from the University of Heidelberg has suggested that they have an even more unique trait – they seem to lack racial bias.

Typically, children start overtly gravitating towards their own ethnic groups from the tender age of three. Groups of people from all over the globe and all sorts of cultures show these biases. Even autistic children, who can have severe difficulties with social relationships, show signs of racial stereotypes. But Santos says that the Williams syndrome kids are the first group of humans devoid of such racial bias, although, as we’ll see, not everyone agrees.

Santos compared the behaviour of 20 white children with Williams syndrome, aged 7 to 16, and 20 typical white children of similar backgrounds and mental ages. To do so, she used a test called the Preschool Racial Attitude Measure (PRAM-II), which is designed to tease out traces of gender or racial biases in young children.

Santos suggests that children with Williams syndrome don’t develop the same biases that their peers do, because they don’t experience social fear. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, who led the study, says, “There are hyper-social, very empathetic, very friendly, and do not get danger signals.” And because they’ll freely interact with anyone, they are less likely to cultivate a preference for people of their own ethnic groups. Alternatively, it could be that because they don’t fall prey to stereotypes, they’re more likely to socialise with everyone.

Santos is quick to rule out alternative explanations for this result. Some of the children with Williams syndrome were more intelligent or mentally advanced than the others, but they behaved in the same way. Nor could it be that they suffered from a general inability to assess people’s features, for both groups of children showed a bias towards their own gender. Fist tap Dale.

traveling wave reactors

An Introduction to Terrapower.

Bill Gates on Energy - Innovating to Zero.

woman gives BoA the finger....,

Huffington Post | For years, Ann Minch of Red Bluff, Calif., has carried a balance of several thousand dollars on her Bank of America credit card, making minimum monthly payments of about $130, sometimes paying an extra $50 or $100. She says she's never missed a payment.

Bank of America rewarded her loyalty this year by repeatedly raising her interest rate, which reached 30 percent in July.

Fed up, the 46-year-old stepmother of two turned to YouTube.

"There comes a time when a person must be willing to sacrifice in order to take a stand for what's right," said Minch in a Sept. 8 webcam video. "Now, this is one of those times, and if I'm successful this will be the proverbial first shot fired in an American debtors' revolution against the usury and plunder perpetrated by the banking elite, the Federal Reserve and the federal government."

Minch announced that she'd be dumping Bank of America, refusing to pay off her credit card debt unless she was offered a lower rate. She explained that she'd been a reliable customer even though she'd lost her job as a mental health case manager. She said bank reps refused to negotiate her interest rate when she called them to complain a few weeks ago.

"You are evil, thieving bastards," she said in her video. "Stick that in your bailout pipe and smoke it."

The video made a splash online, getting links from all kinds of venues and garnering over 96,000 views as of Monday morning.

Minch told the Huffington Post she fulfilled part of her threat on Saturday, when she went to her local BofA branch and closed out her checking and savings accounts. She took her money (around $5,000, she said) and put in a local community bank.

teabagger redux?

Politico | Screaming constituents, protesters dragged out by the cops, congressmen fearful for their safety — welcome to the new town-hall-style meeting, the once-staid forum that is rapidly turning into a house of horrors for members of Congress.

On the eve of the August recess, members are reporting meetings that have gone terribly awry, marked by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior. In at least one case, a congressman has stopped holding town hall events because the situation has spiraled so far out of control.

“I had felt they would be pointless,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO, referring to his recent decision to suspend the events in his Long Island district. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is basically an unruly mob prevents you from having an intelligent conversation.”

In Bishop’s case, his decision came on the heels of a June 22 event he held in Setauket, N.Y., in which protesters dominated the meeting by shouting criticisms at the congressman for his positions on energy policy, health care and the bailout of the auto industry.

Within an hour of the disruption, police were called in to escort the 59-year-old Democrat — who has held more than 100 town hall meetings since he was elected in 2002 — to his car safely.