the day magic dies

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961 (Clarke’s third law)

One day technology will seem more magical than the myth of magic. In fact, the very idea of magical power will seem weak, unimaginative and one dimensional compared to what is ahead. It will be the faded equivalent of a 100,000 year old print of a hand on a wall. Things that we cannot yet imagine are just beyond the horizon.

From our current early 21st century understanding looking at future progress, physical reality itself will be the tool of choice commanded at the whim of awareness. Religion and myth will be cherished ornaments and magic will be replaced with a series of unfathomable miracles seemingly from nowhere. I could call this miracle science, math, or technology but our current ideas of what those things are will not apply; for it is something closer to what magic is supposed to be.

Only futurists, inventors and brilliant mathmeticians have been able to catch a glimpse of the coming revolution. Some have been driven mad by its implications (ted kazinski), some driven to fear the future and others call it the Singularity (Ray Kurzweil).

Technological Singularity - The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence.

When the singularity comes, infinity will be our collective bitch!

If human consciousness can really leave the body and operate without a brain then everything we know in neuroscience has to be questioned. If people could really gain paranormal knowledge then much of physics needs to be rewritten. This is what is at stake. Add to that the fact that most people in the population believe in some kind of life after death, and many desperately want it to be true, then you have a strong case for this research – even if the chances of success are vanishingly small. — Susan Blackmore (guardian)

I’ve got great news!! Science now knows for an absolute fact that we are the only intelligent life in the universe (so we are the center of the known universe), there is absolutely NOTHING faster than the speed of light, we know the exact moment of the big bang, there is no God, and you have no “soul”. Isn’t that awesome! There are no mysteries!

Whoo-hoo! Now I can sleep at night. All knowledge has been acquired.. our quest it over. Charles Darwin & Einstein figured it all out so we can now build churches in their names. ha!

All sarcasm aside, as awesome as science is We (the human race) don’t know shit! We really really don’t. We don’t even know 1% of shit.

Don’t jump to conclusions, I am not a creationist and I don’t’ subscribe exclusively to any ONE religion or philosophy. I am someone who believes that there is some value in religion, philosophy and science. I respect and use each of their strengths in all parts of my life where they are relevant (i.e. I don’t use science to help me explain philosophy or religion to help me explain how light works.

The great thing about science is that is grows and evolves despite the conservative establishment that see it as some sort of dogma. What I like about science is that it gets better. The theories no matter how great continue to develop the complexity and order needed to describe more of what we do know. Intrepid mavericks like Galileo, Descarte, Newton and Einstein challenge the status quo and go off the beaten path and into the previously unknown.

I think there are a lot of unexplained phenomenon that deserves our full attention and funding. One thing that bothers me about mainstream scientists is there dogmatic response to the improbable. It makes them sound as one-dimensionally boxed in as your average religious fundamentalist.

I suppose we all have our limits of what we can accept as real. Even Einstein fought the fundamental (probabilistic) ideas of quantum mechanics that are now not only fully accepted but proven and used.

For me the mystery is the beauty of our 99.999999 percent unknown universe. The conquest of each piece of this infinity puzzle is pure orgasmic rapture.

To that unknown, I say bring it on! When the singularity comes, infinity will be our collective bitch!

Energy Crisis self inflicted

“Mother F@$%, Bastard!!”

That is what I said when I saw the Exxon Regular gas prices for the first time while driving around in Sacramento, California. I was angry, shocked and wanted amazed that there were no riots. I glanced over at the docile faces in the cars and SUV to my left and right. “Are they seeing these prices,” I thought. Every seemed to have the same complacent cattle-like expressions of business as usual.

Then it dawned on me that my state, Colorado, and the rest of the country was next. Indeed, $4.00+ a gallon gas was already happening all over the country. Its ironic that everyone talks shit about California, but don’t notice that as the most populace state (over 33 Million+ about 10% of the US population), most mass social issues happen there first. Examples include: Environmental issues, rolling black outs, serious immigration issues, gay marriage ect. Those issues then follow California’s lead or are able to hedge challenges as they develop.

The energy crisis really make me upset. Mainly because I believe that there are solutions RIGHT now to this “problem”. In fact, I believe we had solution decades ago. Moreover, the writing was on the wall in 1973 when member of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) decided that they would no longer ship oil to nations that had supported Israel in its conflict with Syria and Egypt. These countries were: Parts of Europe, Japan and the U.S.). Europe and Japan were smart enough to adjust their dependence on foreign oil, but for some reason the Unites States did NOTHING but beg, borrow and threaten. We sent Henry Kissinger to beg and lie to the Saudi’s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

Months later Project Independence was born. It was the definition of “fucking pathetic”:

Project Independence was an initiative announced by U.S. President Richard Nixon on November 7, 1973, in reaction to the OPEC oil embargo and the resulting 1973 oil crisis. Recalling the Manhattan Project, the stated goal of Project Independence was to achieve energy self-sufficiency for the United States by 1980[1] through a national commitment to energy conservation and development of alternative sources of energy.[2] Nixon declared that American science, technology and industry could free America from dependence on imported oil. [3]

Some of the important initiatives to emerge from Project Independence included lowering highway speeds to 55 MPH, converting oil power plants to coal, completion of the Trans-Alaskan pipeline and diverting federal funds from highway construction to mass transit

They planed on reducing oil dependency by “lowering highway speeds to 55MPH”! That nor anything else they did got us off of foreign oil. With some of the greatest scientific minds in the world, the most daring innovative thinkers on EARTH “lowering highway speeds to 55MPH” is the best that we could do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence

As the richest most powerful nation in the world, I find it hard to believe we are in this crisis by accident. I don’t know why this would be by design and I am skeptical of “conspiracy” to break the US economy, but a collusion of super rich global countries to make more money by suppressing REAL alternatives seems about right to me.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

When you look at the death of the electric car in California (where it started to happen first), its easy to see greed as a serious motivation behind keeping the status quo at all costs. Why would multi-billion dollar automotive companies, oil and gas companies allow their money tree to wither & die? Why would they support a new technology that might cut into their profits? Why would they take a chance on such a volatile market? How could they have known there would be this kind of crisis today?

Water 4 Fuel – Urban Legend or Epic Historical Tyranny

One legend you can see all over the web is water for fuel mythos. The story is that a brilliant man created a machine that run a car for miles and miles on nothing put water. Its seen by main stream science and engineering as a ridiculous myth that is believed only by those would have no understanding of basic scientific principals. Its one of those odd ball fringe fascinations that are immediately dismissed and categorized with Alien encounters and Big Foot sightings. But What if..? What if it were real? Imagine for a second that this technology has been around since the 70’s. Imagine that it could be put in almost any automobile engine to convert tap water into hydrogen.

Well there are a couple of people who have say that this is not only true but have working prototypes. Their names are Stan Meyer & Dennis Klein. How is this possible without being all over the national news?! Such a discovery would change the world. The oil industry would die out fast. Stan Meyer claimed that the Saudis and others attempted to bribe him to simply sit on the invention or allow him to purchase the device for about 1 billion dollars. He also claims to have been silenced by certain government agencies. He later poisoned. Is this story true? You be the judge. If it is true, humanity has suffered a great, great injustice. Such an invention could have taken us in a whole new direction of less war for resources, a weaker set of oil baron tyrants and war profiteers. Less poverty due to an invention that is powered off of the most abundant element in the known universe (hydrogen) and less famine and death world wide.

Instead, we must suffer at the pump as prices go up and up with no end in sight. And there is seemingly nothing we can do about it but work more to pay more on everything as the dollar is inflated away from its previous value causing us to work more for less and less and less. One must wonder, what is the end goal of a fiat monetary system and what is the meaning of life according to capitalism? To work? Is our life then measured by our networth? Is Fiat paper money’s market value more important that human life?

I question any system that puts an imaginary value over the worth on living breathing sentient souls. “To be” is an immeasurable worth that can NOT be captured by any monetary, political, religious, or philosophical system.

Dean Radin: Why I’m not a Skeptic

Why I’m not a skeptic

No, not why I’m not skeptical, or critical-minded, because those traits are essential in science. Rather, I don’t consider myself a “skeptic,” as in a card-carrying member of a skeptical society, because most (not all) of the people I know who belong to such societies are loud, arrogant, angry, and cynical. I prefer to spend time with people who are quiet, humble, calm and hopeful.

This came to mind after reading one of Steven Novella’s blogs. In it he parrots skeptical mantras that are known to be wrong. I won’t bother to address them here because they are addressed in detail in Entangled Minds. But I will respond to two comments —> More at Radin’s Blog

I’ve got his book Entagled Minds and can’t wait to read it.

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. “Being poor sucks,” Lisi says. “It’s hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you’re trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month.”

Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

More @ Telegraph.co.uk on surfer’s e8 universe

“For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online.” –lisi

E8, Sahasara and Quantum Theories of Dimensionality

DK Matai has made the correlation between the E8 and the thousand petaled lotus on Deepak’s Intentblog in March 07 DK in-tun thanks a guy named Mieke van der Poll from Holland for noticing the similarities. DK and others have started a Socratic Dialogue on Holistic Quantum Relativity (HQR).

*notes for me: Avtar Singh, author of The Hidden Factor: An Approach for Resolving Paradoxes of Science, Cosmology and Universal Reality

We only Detect 4% of the Universe

Evidence of a Parallel Universe?

Paternity Testing Labs

Last August, astronomers working on the analysis of data being acquired by NASA’s WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite announced that they found a huge void in the universe. A void is a region of space that has much less material (stars, nebulae, dust and other material) than the average. Since our universe is relatively heterogeneous, empty spaces are not rare, but in this case the enormous magnitude of the hole is way outside the expected range. The hole found in the constellation of Eridanus is about a billion light years across, which is roughly 10,000 times as large as our galaxy or 400 times the distance to Andromeda, the closest “large” galaxy.

The dimension of the hole is so big that at first glance, it results impossible to explain under the current cosmological theories, although scientists put forward some explanations based on certain theoretical models that might predict the existence of “giant knots” in space known as topological defects.

However, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill physics Professor Laura Mersini-Houghton made a staggering claim. She says, “Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole” and goes further with the ground-breaking hypothesis that the huge void is “… the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own“.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19626311.400-the-void-imprint-of-another-universe.html

IN AUGUST, radio astronomers announced that they had found an enormous hole in the universe. Nearly a billion light years across, the void lies in the constellation Eridanus and has far fewer stars, gas and galaxies than usual. It is bigger than anyone imagined possible and is beyond the present understanding of cosmology. What could cause such a gaping hole? One team of physicists has a breathtaking explanation: “It is the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own,” says Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It is a staggering claim. If Mersini-Houghton’s team is right, the giant void is the first experimental evidence for another universe. It would also vindicate string theory, our most promising understanding of how the universe works at its most fundamental level. And it would do away with the anthropic arguments that have plagued string theorists in …

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulations God Helmet Meets a Psychic

At the 2006 International Remote Viewing Associations conference, in a rare speech by remote viewing phenomenon, Ingo Swann responded to an audience member’s blurt about Dr. Persinger’s research on the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation machine known as the “God Helmet”. Unfortunately, the IRVA took the video down. They are now selling it. In the video, Ingo mentions something that lingers on in my mind. He says the Persinger is locked out of his lab because of certain discoveries. As the father of “remote viewing” and a onery, straight shooter, Ingo is a bit of champion for me, but I couldn’t help but be skeptical. I started to research his statement.

A bit more about the God Helmet. This is a device that allows 80% of its participants to have “spiritual” experiences. They feel a presence, hear voices, have visions etc. Some have taken this to mean that all such phenomenon are artificial.

I have been very much interested in the God Helmet and Persinger’s research so when Ingo Swann talked about being apart of Dr. Persinger’s experienment, I had to search it. What I found was a very interesting set of comments from Marcos Ferreira and others regarding Dr. Persinger’s perspective on paranormal phenomenon on the blog of author Micheal Prescott.

Comments from Michael Prescott’s Blog:

I came across this 2001 paper by famed neuroscientist Michael Persinger (he of the notorious “God Helmet”, and cited approvingly by Dawkins, Blackmore, and the JREF crowd).

The paper is about neural correlates of paranormal experiences. Under the section “Special Cases”, he tests a psychic (Sean Harribance) and a remote viewer (Ingo Swann). Both tests give statistically significant results under double-blind conditions. Persinger casually ignores the implications of this (”The neural mechanism … remains to be identified”) in order to spend time discussing the EEG readings…

Did this generate a controversy which I’ve missed, or has this just been quietly ignored? I can find plenty of squabbling about the supposed experimental failings of Gary Schwartz and the SRI researchers, but no real mention anywhere of this replication by “one of their own”. Is anyone aware of any responses or discussion of these results?

Posted by: marcos ferreira | September 17, 2007 at 01:13 PM

No surprise on the Persinger data: once a science becomes attached to a particular theory, data which contradicts that theory tends to disappear without effect. Has anyone ever been able to reproduce Persinger’s reported results with magnetic stimulation of certain brain areas, especially the temporal lobe? His widely trumpeted claims that temporal lobe epilepsy was responsible for NDEs and OBEs hasn’t, to my knowledge, been corroberated. I know that changes in temporal lobe functioning have been found in NDExperiencers, but it isn’t known whether the changes produced the experiences or vice versa. I’m looking forward to Carter’s book. It promises to be a good follow-on after “Irreducible Mind”.

Posted by: Kevin | September 17, 2007 at 05:22 PM

I corresponded with Persinger a few years ago about Dr. Andrija Puharich’s book “Beyond Telepathy” — a must-read!! Puharich emphasizes the magnetic momentum of the proton-electron resonance being altered through increased potassium and decreased sodium intake. Puharich then ties this physiological transformation to his “psi-plasma vortex” model for bending spacetime.

Persinger knew Puharich fairly well and Persinger told me that he thought very highly of Puharich’s psi-plasma model. When I asked Persinger about Puharich’s CIA work I received no response. haha.

The Persinger’s paper only talks about the phenomenon in the Special Cases section of the paper. It sounds like he does not doubt that such abilities exist. The data indicated that these “remote viewers” and “psychics” are more sensitive to the TMS device.

Interesting cutting edge stuff.. to say the VERY least, but I am still not sure what Ingo was talking about.

Lorentzian Space to Euclidean Space (Really Strange Stuff)

O.k. this is strange (from the physics arxiv blog found on Slashdot):
It don’t get much weirder than this. The universe is about to lose its dimension of time says a group of theoretical astrobods at the University of Salamanca in Spain. And they got the evidence to prove it.

The idea comes from the study of braneworlds: the thinking that the universe we see around us is a 4-dimensional cosmos called a braneworld embedded in a multidimensional universe. The “signature” of our universe is the number of space and time-like dimensions it has: in our case we got 3 space-like dimensions and one time-like dimension. It’s what astrobods call a Lorentzian universe. So far so good: lots of astronutters think the same thing.

But our universe may not always have been like this. Some theorists think it may once have had a Euclidean signature meaning that all the dimensions were space-like. Now Marc “Bars” Mars and a few pals in Spain say that the Universe’s signature might be about to flip from Lorentzian to Euclidean. In other words, our dimension of time is about turn space-like. Gulp!

This ain’t entirely bonkers and here’s why. Bars Mars has calculated what it’s like to be an observer in a universe that is about to flip and get this: it would look as if it were expanding and accelerating away from us. Sound familiar?

Yep, it’s exactly what astrobods have been observin over the last few years, a phenomenon they attribute to dark energy. If Bars Mars is right, dark energy ain’t got nothing to do with it and we’re all starin’ down the barrel of a cosmic catastrophe.

Still, maybe four space-like dimensions will be better than three. Who needs time anyway?

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0710.0820: Is the Accelerated Expansion Evidence of a Forthcoming change of Signature?

http://arxivblog.com/?p=71

Bonus:

Erin Pavilina’s Dream:

Mainly catastrophic disasters like meteors, lava, tidal waves, a total shift of the planet’s alignment or something that causes the same type of reaction. Most people die, but some are taken aboard vessels and rescued.

But I’ve also seen something else. A phasing into a different dimension. It’s really hard to explain, but it was not pleasant. I want to say there was a reptilian race involved and they kept humans in this strange state of being phased between the 3rd and 4th dimensions and were feeding off our energy.

The vessels people boarded were of the “light” and the reptilian thing was definitely of the “dark” and it is unclear who will prevail.

I don’t know if this is true or not but it would make a hell of a story.

Physicists Discover Inorganic Dust With Lifelike Qualities

Science is beginning to sound like mysticism and shamanism. People of ancient times and even some to this day (i.e. shintoism) believed that everything has a living ‘spirit’ associated with it. It was simplistic, but maybe there is something to it.

Science Daily — Could extraterrestrial life be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust? Intriguing new evidence of life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space have been revealed in the New Journal of Physics. The findings hint at the possibility that life beyond earth may not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building blocks. They also point to a possible new explanation for the origin of life on earth.

Could extraterrestrial life be found in particles of interstellar dust (like that which obscures the giant molecular cloud DR21, shown here in an infrared image taken recently by the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope)? (Credit: A. Marston (ESTEC/ESA) et al., JPL, Caltech, NASA)

Life on earth is organic. It is composed of organic molecules, which are simply the compounds of carbon, excluding carbonates and carbon dioxide. The idea that particles of inorganic dust may take on a life of their own is nothing short of alien, going beyond the silicon-based life forms favoured by some science fiction stories.

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