Strange Horizons

Virtual Multiverse

2012-02-13T18:50:00.000-08:00

In the course of writing this post, I have spun off as many as eight different timelines and universes. The number is probably higher than that but I stopped counting.

Through my various fumblings through the Internets, I have found a theory of free will called "The Virtual Multiverse Theory" developed by Ben Goerztel, an author and researcher in the field of transhumanism. While he is not exactly the first person to ruminate upon these ideas, his "virtual multiverse" concept is rather innovative and bears inspection.

As I understand it, this concept is tied in heavily with the idea of the subconscious and with free will. When acting wisely, we think about what we are going to do and the decisions we are going to make. In considering options, the brain creates various future timelines in order to model the possible outcomes of each decision. These are different "realities," universes unto themselves that never existed in our physical sense but were very real in our own minds. No matter how mundane the decision or inane the situation, a line branches off as the world would be different even in just a small way as the result of the decision.

Goertzel invokes Jorge Luis Borges for the basis:

"The notion of a “multiverse” here is motivated by quantummechanics (DeWitt and Seligman, 1974). However, the theory I am proposing here is not a quantum theory ofconsciousness; it is compatible with both quantum and classical physics. What I mean by a multiverse is a model ofreality like the one explored by Borges in his famous tale The Garden ofForking Paths (see Borges, 1999). Borges portrayed the world as consistingof pathways defining series of events, in which each pathway eventually reachesa decision-point at which it forks out into more than one future pathway. Borges’ “paths” are the “branches” of themathematical “tree structures” used to model multiverses; and his decisionpoints are the nodes or “branch-points” of the trees. Actual reality is then considered as a single “universe” which isa single series of events defined by following one series of branching-choicesthrough the mathematical tree. Themany-universes interpretation of quantum physics posits that the multiverse isphysically real, even though we as individuals only see one universe; and thatan act of quantum measurement consist of a choice of direction at a branchingpoint in the multiverse tree. On theother hand, what I am hypothesizing here is that we perceive a psychologicallyreal multiverse – independently of whether there is a real physicalmultiverse or not – and that free will has something to do...with the choice of directions at branch-points in this psychologicalmultiverse."

Think of it. Each thought a virtual universe contained within the multiverse of your mind. Is consciousness itself a multiverse? If we extend this theory to its logical conclusion, then the answer would appear to be "yes."
Over at Kurzweil.net, a post was made regarding a related concept known as "virtual transcendence":

Virtual Transcendence- augmented minds discover that programming reality is too difficult or impossible- but the virtual multiverse will now be far richer and larger than physical reality- this growing difference will cause all societies to see physical reality as an information desert and we will all begin to shift into virtual space- transforming the physical world into a physical plant and substrate to support the expanding Virtual Multiverse."

Falling further and further inward. Endless permutations. That doesn't really bother me but it's not exactly an exoteric notion and I'm quite certain it gives many the heebiejeebs. It shouldn't. The human brain is a computer. What's described by Goertzel et. al. is the mind modeling outcomes, in other words, thinking. As Goertzel emphasizes, the brain even models itself. Really places the idea of free will into perspective, closing the gap on any real doubts that it exists. We have the potential to create a multiverse with our minds.

Gives new meaning to what Ghandi once said, "A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes."

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Here Right Now

2012-02-12T15:07:00.000-08:00

The pic above is from the Here Right Now web site in response to the prompt, "View" by Pop Trash Beauty.

Duran Duran and The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts have launched a new art initiative entitled Here Right Now.

The objective, it might be summarized, is to promote cultural understanding through art. Here Right Now is a visualization project that invites all, yes that means everyone, to upload their "now" and to illustrate patterns of perspective. Once you log on to the Here Right Now site, you will be given a single word prompt. These words will be connected to Duran Duran music, such as "sunrise" or "information" or "red." The result is a series of narrative postcards connected by the shared experience of the prompt. These postcards are shareable on Google+ and Facebook. From the band's web site:

"Gray Area Researchers Gabriel Dunne and Nik Hanselmann designed the project by combining location data and user-submitted art, giving meaning to simple, but engaging ideas.

Duran Duran keyboardist, Nick Rhodes, said of the project “The idea evolved from discussions we’d been having within the band about how to visually represent what different people around the world thought about certain things at different times – what they needed, what they wanted and how that changed over time. So we started looking for a team to help us bring the project to life and were introduced to GAFFTA – who were the perfect partner. We would love to think that perhaps some patterns will emerge, that will tell us something about what people are thinking and feeling – but part of the appeal of this project is that we have no idea what will come out of it. What we do know, however, is that it will ultimately become a shared, global initiative that will be constantly evolving, and that in itself is very exciting to us.” "

While I know that it may be easily argued that I am biased, I happen to believe that this is a brilliant idea and one that the art world should readily embrace. The varying visual representations of what the same words mean to different people all over the globe...wow, this transcends my love of Duran Duran, goes far beyond my affinity for art, and ties in deftly with my passionate study of the word, composition, and variant meaning. I really do want to participate but I'm struggling to come up with an image. As usual, my muse is a fickle one. I hear that Leonardo da Vinci shared the same difficulty, but alas I have yet to design a flying suit.

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Free Form Friday

2012-02-10T20:53:00.000-08:00

I would like to welcome you to a new feature here at Strange Horizons. I call it "Free Form Friday."

What can you expect here? Well, anything. My own metaphysical musings on whatever is either philosophical or tropical or anything else in between. For the inaugural post, I thought I would take on a subject topical to the days ahead. Love.

My thoughts on this emotion have been almost everywhere you can conceive. It's just a reaction of biochemicals and I don't need it. It's amazing, it makes everything worthwhile. It carelessly cuts you and laughs while you're bleeding.

I can't help but think of Leo Tolstoy on this subject. He and his masterpiece, Anna Karenina. The novel is not only held up by many scholars as the highest accomplishment in literature, it is also gut-wrenching in its exploration of love. How love can make you miserable without it. The agony of sheer longing. Yet there is also the cruel irony of how having can be nowhere near as pleasurable as longing...and the socially unacceptable, no-win scenario of being in love with two or more people for different yet equally valid reasons. Take it, Leo:

"He knew she was there by the joy and fear that overwhelmed his heart."

"Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete realization of what he had so long desired, was not perfectly happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires. For a time after joining his life to hers, and putting on civilian dress, he had felt all the delight of freedom in general, of which he had known nothing before, and of freedom in his love — and he was content, but not for long. He was soon aware that there was springing up in his heart a desire for desires — longing. Without conscious intention he began to clutch at every passing caprice, taking it for a desire and an object."

That's how Tolstoy called it. Social workers sometimes call it "co-dependence." Bono calls it "With Or Without You."

William Shakespeare...or the any number of people who might or might not have been responsible for his work...was certainly no stranger to love's agonies and ecstasies. Romeo and Juliet is all about that.

"Benvolio: What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?
Romeo: Not having that, which, having, makes them short.
Benvolio: In love?
Romeo: Out-
Benvolio: Of love?
Romeo: Out of her favour, where I am in love."

Juliet: "My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!"

So many books, stories, movies, and plays...all of them trying to explain this thing called love. A lot of it is sickly sappy, other views are terse and pitch black. As with any set of extremes, neither viewpoint gets it completely right. The truth is in the middle. Yet it's a muddy, murky, and confusing middle. So in light of all of this, why the hell do we do it?

Like other aspects of nature, it just seems to happen. Even the lonest wolfs among us find things ultimately go easier with someone else to share the load. For love need not mean romance or sex. It can mean solid ground to walk on and bright light to steer by. It can mean deep sacrifice and utter altruism. It's that magic moment when you find someone who knows you better than you even know yourself, someone who will quarter no pretending as to do so would be pointless. Someone who sees the ghost in you.

That's when love, in my opinion, is at its best. Then it gets ugly. There's that insidious tendency in us to want to change the other person. To tweak them to our precise liking no matter who perfect they might be for us. There is a sense of ownership in that. Might sound sick, but we actually stop treating the object of our love as a person at that point. When ownership enters the picture, they become a possession. I'm no angel. I've been both victim and offender in this regard. I am fortunate to have someone who has gone through those times with me, those ugliest of moments where the darkness of love can make you say the worst of words, yet has chosen to remain with me.

Regardless of the reason, I don't think it's an accident that Valentine's Day falls smackdab in the middle of February. This is a winter month in many parts of the world. It is gray, it is dreary, it is at times snow-covered. I love winter but even I can grow weary of Norwegian-styled skies. Valentine's Day paints a wide splash of red across the entire month. Bright. Fiery. Passionate. Like the glow from inside a house in a Thomas Kincade painting, loathe as I am to use him as an example. But it's that light within. Who we love, for better or for worse, helps define who we are.

I was asked just recently to name my top three favorite love songs. I honestly don't know if I could come up with a ranking. But for sheer lyrical quality, it's hard to top this line: "If God has a master plan that only He understands, I hope it's your eyes he's seeing through." Can be taken any number of ways. Can be interpreted in many views. Each of them valid.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

No warmth for cold fusion

2012-02-09T19:40:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about cold fusion today.

Seriously, I don't know where this shit comes from. Don't you just love my mind?

I think the thoughts of cold fusion are due perhaps to the time of year. Back in 1989 at around this point on the calendar, I was in my physics class in senior year of high school. I have just horribly dated myself with that statement of disclosure but I shall press forward. During that time, two scientists announced wide to the world that they had enacted cold fusion in a laboratory.

Fusion, for the uninitiated, is the process of two or more atomic nuclei merging to form a heavier nucleus, such as deuterium and tritium fusing to form helium. When this happens, an enormous amount of energy is released. Nuclear fusion is the process by which the stars burn. By contrast, when you hear about a nuclear reactor, the process involved is fission and yields a significantly smaller amount of energy. One frustrating hurdle that prevents man-made fusion on a large scale is the enormous temperatures necessary to bring it about. Think "core of a sun." Then in 1989, two men named Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann proclaimed that they had created fusion at room temperature.

Their experimental apparatus produced, they claimed, excessive heat anomalies as well as the presence of neutrons and heavy water. This would be indicative of a low-level nuclear reaction. Hopes soared. It seemed as if we might be on the cusp of finding a vast source of clean and cheap energy. Pons and Fleischmann published their screed on the topic and other scientists attempted to replicate what the duo had done. And that's when the trouble began.

Other researchers had extreme difficulty in achieving the same results. Even with the direct help of Pons and Fleischmann, the results kept coming back as negative. Hopes fell. There were discoveries of flaws and experimental errors in the original process and many in the scientific community withdrew any interest or support in the matter of cold fusion. In fact, I can remember the phrase itself being used synonymously at the time for something that was either poorly thought out or just pure hokum. While sitting in that aforementioned physics class, we would watch a satellite TV program on physics that was of an almost cable access quality. The physicist host of the program held up a newspaper article claiming the Pons-Fleischmann experiment to be complete shit (well, not in so many words but you get the picture) and urging the budding scientists out there...which I turned out not to be...to not "rush into theories half-baked." Those words are exact as I remember them for whatever reason...even though most everyone seemed to forget about cold fusion after that brief moment in time.

It's still a controversial topic today. There are those that argue that cold fusion is possible. There are even those who are asserting that it has already been carried out and the information is being suppressed by the academic intelligentsia or by forces more greedy and nefarious. Just check this article from Forbes magazine, detailing NASA announcements that seriously downplay hopes for cold fusion, or Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) as they are now called...perhaps in an attempt to shed the cold fusion stigma of 1989. It's not going away. In fact, columnist Forbes Mark Gibbs says of the buzz around a video recently released by NASA:

"Amongst the many staunch LENR boosters and the redoubtable believers in Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat device (which this blog covered last week and in several previous postings), this video has been hailed as somehow irrefutable proof that NASA, as a whole, is admitting to the existence of LENR as a practical technology for energy generation while others see this as a breaching of the misinformation and suppression campaign conducted by Big Physics (specifically the hot plasma researchers) and Big Energy (the oil, natural gas, a nuclear industries)."

That's right. It's conspiracy time again, folks. Just reading the comments to the article will give you a sense of the combative attitudes on the topic.

One point I will concede is that I can see how Pons and Fleischmann might have met initial resistance in the form of academic snobbery. Nuclear science is thought to be the domain of physicists. Pons and Fleischmann are chemists. There tends to be an undercurrent in the scientific community that chemists should stick to inventing new forms of hair gel and laundry detergent and leave "higher science" to the physicists. It's a disgusting attitude but it's present in the academy and not just in the fields of science. Would this sense of pride go so far as to stifle a discovery as momentous as cold fusion? I doubt it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the two men in question encountered it.

So the consensus is...the jury's still out. If cold fusion, LENR, or whatever you want to call it is going to make any headway in the world, someone's going to have to come up with irrefutable evidence. Don't get me wrong, I hope someone does. The sooner we have clean, cheap energy for the world the better.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Superman: science fiction hero

2012-02-08T18:35:00.000-08:00

It seemed only fitting to me that I begin this series on science fiction with the character that started it all.

To my way of thinking, Superman is the science fiction comic book hero. He himself is an alien; a “strange visitor from another world.” Devotees of “harder” science fiction would no doubt lament the fact that for an “alien,” he looks an awful lot like us. Not to worry, there are ways of explaining that and those of you who have seen the “panspermia” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation are probably still with me. Biomorphic features not withstanding, Superman is an outsider to us.

Superman arrives as a child via spaceship after his homeworld is destroyed. Traveling with him are technological wonders from the advanced civilization of Krypton, items that will one day aid him and bedevil him. In his Fortress of Solitude, he will attempt to reconcile his human upbringing with his Kryptonian origins. He is the ultimate immigrant. And this is not by accident.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, were two geeky Jewish kids longing to create a superhero that would not simply be a manifestation of who they’d love to be but also someone who personified the concept of an immigrant in a new culture, trying to make good. Just look at the baby in the rocket who is raised by those who find him and how the baby grows to be a man who will bring salvation to an entire people. Obvious shades of Moses and Siegel and Shuster have never argued otherwise (to the best of my knowledge). Later, DC Comics would take this biblical inspiration and make the character more Christ-like. This was especially so in that dreadful Bryan Singer film. But I digress…

Something else was going on in the creation of Superman, another sensibility was infused into his persona. “Science fiction fandom was born in the 1930s,” comics writer Marv Wolfman said in the introduction to The Last Days of Krypton by Kevin J. Anderson (Wolfman might be off by a few years, but we’ll keep going.) “Two such fans were Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster…from their singular passion came the ultimate science fiction creation, Superman. Superman was born out of this love for science fiction.”

Blogger Tom Floss takes an in-depth look at this birth on his blog, Fortress of Soliloquy. He begins with the daily newspaper strips of Superman, an aspect I originally…and stupidly…failed to even consider. When the daily strips began, they told for the first time the origin of the character. Think of it as one of the first prequels done for an established, popular character a la Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode I fracas. The origin story itself was something relatively new in comics. No crooks or super bad guys involved. Instead it was a classic science fiction theme of a doomed planet and a “space ark” (there’s that biblical meme again) to carry at least one inhabitant offworld. This tiny young survivor would be the seed of hope for a better tomorrow. More than just science fiction, this origin is steeped in Greek tragedy. After all, Krypton’s destruction might have been averted or at least blunted if its leaders had listened to the brilliant scientist, Jor-el and not succumbed to human…err Kryptonian pride, vanity, and hubris.

The origin is far from where the science fiction aspects of Superman stop. There is of course the extraterrestrial android, Brainiac, a living computer who became one of Superman’s greatest…and one of my favorite…foes. There’s the bottled, miniaturized city of Kandor, the alien being Doomsday who killed Superman (he got better), and I could go on and on with the references. Suffice to say, whenever an otherworldly threat accosted the Earth, Superman was the comic book go-to guy.

That, I believe, is the very character attribute that has kept bringing me back to read more Superman stories, even if he is no longer deemed "cool" or "edgy." The origin story and science fiction aspects are fun but it is his sense of values and his inexhaustible will to defend others that make Superman so enduring.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Matter from beyond the solar system...

2012-02-07T19:35:00.000-08:00

For the first time ever, matter from beyond our solar system has been conclusively detected.

A NASA probe known as IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) found the particles of hydrogen, neon, oxygen, and helium at the very edge of our solar system. Well out in space past the orbit of the former planet Pluto. One interesting point discovered, there are 74 oxygen atoms for every 20 neon atoms in the interstellar void. By way of comparison, there are 111 oxygen atoms for every 20 neon atoms within our solar system.

"These are important elements to know quantitatively because they are the building blocks of stars, planets, people," David McComas, IBEX principal investigator, said. "We discovered this puzzle: matter outside our solar system doesn't look like material inside our solar system. It seems to be deficient in oxygen compared to neon."

That quote comes directly from the linked article. Just so everyone knows I'm not cribbing.

The IBEX craft also detected that interstellar wind is also traveling at a different speed and in a different direction than previously suspected. This is all in addition to a 2009 discovery by IBEX of a mysterious "ribbon" of charged particles, moving at millions of miles per hour away from the Sun and out into interstellar space.

I shall now address the omnipresent "so what?" factor. Why should we care about any of this?
First of all, findings of this kind give astronomers and other scientists a clearer overall picture of the formation of matter in the universe. For example, what is the significance of the greater oxygen density in our solar system? Is this a unique feature of our tiny corner of the cosmos? What greater role does neon play? More data on these various facets will go a long way towards solidifying the theory of the "big bang"...or perhaps disproving it altogether. If that doesn't float your boat, try contemplating the sheer "wow" aspect of finally finding (proven) material that originated elsewhere in the galaxy. Though it is mere particulate matter, it is by very definition, "alien." Through discoveries such as these, we may finally form concrete understandings of star systems beyond our own. I'm also rather curious. Exactly how fast were these particles moving as they seem to have been traveling against the solar wind? What kicked them into such motion? Are they supernova remnants? I find this kind of thing fascinating but then I'm not exactly tuning in to the Kardashians or Jersey Shore every night, so what do I know?

If space is your kinda thing and you're still reading, check out these amazing images of auroral activity brought on by last month's massive solar flare.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Good thing Global Warming is a myth or I'd be scared

2012-02-06T20:05:00.000-08:00

Like most Americans, I was enthralled by the Super Bowl yesterday. Took my mind off of the fact that things are about to get really, really hot.

An 18-mile fissure was discovered in Antarctica. This crack will eventually cause a 350 square-mile block of ice to break off into the ocean and float northward. That's one heck of an iceberg. While scientists who study Antarctica admit that this kind of thing goes on all the time, they say that they have never seen a fissure of this magnitude before now. This crack in the ice is likely due to melting.

In spite of this, we can all be reassured by the conservative Right's claims that nothing critical is going on. The greenhouse gases in our atmosphere have nothing to do with the disruption of climate cycles.

Disagreements abound, obviously. Even in the scientific community. The disagreements, however, are increasingly more over the true culprit of Global Warming rather than "Global Warming: true or false." Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find climate scientists who would disagree with the reality of temperatures increasing across the world. Both polar caps are losing ice as temperatures rise. And regardless of whether you believe the change is due to pollutants or just plain nature, rising temperatures are a fact. We will soon have to deal with the consequences of this fact. Climate change denial is growing more and more difficult to justify.

But we'll keep on keeping on, won't we? It won't matter to us until our personal bank accounts are somehow affected. Either that or Global Warming intrudes upon our ability to watch a Super Bowl. WTF, people. WTF.

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Film Review--I, Robot

2012-02-05T13:51:00.000-08:00

I, ROBOT
starring Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, James Cromwell, Alan Tudyk, Bruce Greenwood, Chi McBride, and Shia LeBeouf as The Beav.

Del Spooner (Smith) is a cop in a future Chicago. He doesn't much like "robot cases," but he's got one. A scientist (Cromwell) has been killed and a robot might actually be the culprit. Working with another robotics expert (Moynahan), Spooner delves further into a plot that may place all of humanity at the mercy of the machines.

Given that this film was only "inspired by" the book I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, I approached the movie with apprehension. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed.

While I'm not certain if the "action-thriller" aspects of the film would have appealed to Asimov, the heart and thoughtful meditations of the writer's work remain. In fact, I, Robot has more than a few concepts in common with Blade Runner...and that is not detrimental by any stretch of the imagination. Like Blade Runner, this film asks questions about what might happen if robots or androids develop emotional responses through a natural course of evolution. What is the definition of "life?" For that matter, what are the definitions of "thought" and "reason?" Cromwell's character asks "Why when in the dark do robots always seek the light? When stored in containers, why do robots almost always stand together?"
I also liked the depiction of the future city of Chicago. It's akin to Metropolis or once again the Los Angeles of Blade Runner in that above there are aerial vehicles and shiny skies pied with color. Beneath, where the working class dwells, it is dirty, dingy, and all-too real.
Aside from the potential liberties taken with the Asimov book, I also harbored trepidations that the film would be propaganda for the neo-Luddite set. Kip Haggis and all such effluvium. Then I needed to remind myself that Asimov himself wrote about the possibility of an age where humanity might be obsolete in the face of robotics. There are things that might go wrong as we progress technologically and they need to be considered. The detonation of the first atomic bomb brought about the science fiction films known as "Atomic Horror" that were filled with cautionary tales regarding what we were doing with nuclear energy. Films such as I, Robot are an update of that for the Digital Age, cautioning us about the pitfalls that might be ahead.

All in all, this was an exciting film that was well-acted and still retained high concepts that made you think. I recommend it.

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The Spy, The Priest, and The UFO

2012-02-04T20:45:00.000-08:00

I came across a most exciting and fascinating story while reading my latest issue of UFO Magazine. Unfortunately, that is just what it will have to remain: a story.

The UFO article is attributed to only "Case Officer X," an author who refuses to give (I'm assuming the gender here) his name as he once worked for one of our nation's intelligence agencies. He makes a reference to "the HQ lobby in Langley, Virginia." That would of course indicate CIA but in the end it really means nothing. So this spy, for lack of better term, was given a mission in the 1990s dealing with a college archeology professor. This academic was involved with a shadowy, non-governmental agency that was researching the "otherworldly origin" of things here on Earth. This archeologist excavated a highly sensitive artifact in Egypt but did not hand it over. Case Officer X (hereafter referred to as COX) was sent to acquire the professor and the artifact before the man could turn it over to enemy intelligence...read, KGB, I'm thinking.

You can see why this had me hooked. It's James Bond chasing after Indiana Jones because the latter may be in possession of a piece of a UFO. Awesome.

Under a false identity, COX met the professor in France and lured him outside to a car. A US special ops team was waiting inside the car. They drugged the professor and drove him to a safe house. Once they had the man restrained "for his safety" with a few strips of duct tape, they began to go through his belongings and found what looked like an optical disk with hieroglyphic markings on it. The professor explained that he had found the disk within a 2,000 year-old dig site...and that he was convinced it was extraterrestrial in origin. COX and his fellow team members, each former Navy SEALs according to him, tested the durability of the disk. The flung it about, stomped on it, held it to a lighter. Absolutely nothing seemed to damage this artifact.

The professor alleged that the hieroglyphic writing on the disk was similar to symbols found on the secret Nazi project called The Bell. In World War II, the Nazis supposedly created this device that was capable of any number of rumored things such as anti-gravity flight, time travel, or other activities more occult in nature. The UFO said to have been recovered in the Kecksburg UFO Incident was purported to have been approximately the same shape and size of The Bell. Like The Bell, the Kecksburg UFO had odd, hieroglyphic symbols around its base, the kind that the professor in COX's story seemed to have knowledge of.

A retrieval team for the professor and the disk arrived. One of the men was an Irish priest by the name of Malachi Martin. In addition to being a clergyman, Father Martin had a background in archeology, history, and was conversant in numerous languages. He was also an exorcist, involved even in the Amityville Horror case.

This guy sounds straight from an H.P. Lovecraft story. Are you following this? It...keeps...getting...better.

What Fr. Martin's purpose for being there that day in France was and still is unknown to COX. COX did seem comfortable enough to write that Martin was working with the same agency that had originally hired the professor. Additionally, Martin "died in 1999 under suspicious circumstances." Was the disk a piece of alien technology? That remains unknown.

Great story! Yet as I said, that's all it is at present. It's a story told by anonymous author with not a shred of solid evidence to corroborate it. Father Martin, on the other hand, was a real person. A simple Google search confirms that. He was the author of numerous books of theology, was friends with M. Scott Peck, the author of The Road Less Traveled, and was even a guest on Coast-to-Coast AM with Art Bell. In one of his books, Martin asserts that Pope John Paul I was murdered. The final book Martin was working on, entitled Primacy: How the Institutional Roman Catholic Church became a Creature of the New World Order, was not completed before his death. Cue ominous music.

I know. If COX is indeed who he claims to be, then there would be no evidence that he could offer even if it existed, at least not without forfeiting his life. Of course that begs the question, why is he writing about it in the first place?? Another check mark in the story's favor is that Bill and Nancy Birnes usually do a pretty good job of vetting their stories for UFO Magazine and seldom print a story out of caprice. That's all there is, though. Not enough, in my humble opinion, to substantiate this as a bona fide incident or evidence of a worldwide UFO cover-up or ancient aliens or the like.

That said, it remains a great story. And I love a great story.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

The Art of auto-correct and Warhol hits the stage

2012-02-03T19:27:00.000-08:00

On the way home this afternoon, I heard NPR promote a performance scheduled for this weekend at the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. An eighteen minute video of animated art will be shown set to ESS' considerable archive of sound recordings. A series of related art prints will be on display at the same time. In the NPR piece, I heard a spoken word performance featuring words remade via auto-correct, a sort of cut-up technique for the iPhone set. Would be interesting to see the prints that accompany the audio/video. The one above is from ESS' web site. I like the montage aspects of it, especially the layering of the piece on the left.

Meanwhile in New York City, a theatrical team called The Gob Squad has managed to excogitate a stage performance based on Andy Warhol's film, Kitchen. The performance, entitled "The Gob Squad's Kitchen (You Never had It So Good)," takes place as an original interpretation of the Warhol film that featured Andy's muse at the time, Edie Sedgewick. I must admit, I almost always think of Warhol as a canvas and silk screen artist first, churning out art in his mass production, pop style at The Factory. What I tend to forget is that he was also a filmmaker, directing movies almost as quickly as he made his other works of art. I can remember staying up late to watch Night Flight on the USA network and see Andy Warhol's Dracula. Well, that and the uncensored version of the video for Duran Duran's "Girls On Film." Ahem. Excuse me.
The New York Times review has this to say about the stage production:

"It’s a live magic act of sorts, and one of the most enjoyable such feats I’ve ever seen at the theater. It’s also complicated to describe. After touring the studio on the stage, the audience takes its seats in front of a large movie screen on which the action being filmed behind the screen is projected. At center is the humdrum set of “Kitchen,” where most of the wayward behavior — chitchat, some groovy dance moves, the eating of cake and an existential discussion of its metaphorical meanings (that’s from the Warhol original) — takes place."

I really wish I could see both of these performances. Alas, time, money, and geography preclude that as a possibility.

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Stuck up aliens give Earth the cold shoulder

2012-02-02T19:59:00.000-08:00

We are all alone. Or we are an astronomic rarity.
Or E.T. just doesn't care.

At least that's what mathematician Thomas Hair says. He has recently presented a paper that asserts through mathematical evidence that aliens should have contacted us by now. Hair operates from what he terms a "conservative" premise in that even if they traveled at 1% of the speed of light, even a distant civilization should have visited us long before now. As he puts it:

"They've either passed us by, or they stay around their home star systems and contemplate their navels."

Yeah. Good one, Tom.

It just seems faulty to base a conclusion like this on the absence of (proven) alien contact. After all, isn't one of the main arguments from SETI that interstellar travel is at best impractical and at worst impossible? "Can't get here from there?" That alone should negate the presence of (proven) visitors. On the other hand, someone of Hair's way of thinking might point to SETI's lack of success in detecting an alien signal as further evidence that humanity is all alone in the cosmos.

Still, Hair does make a few solid points in the linked interview:

“Any ancient civilization is probably not biological. They don’t need a place like Earth. They don’t need to come here and steal our water. There’s plenty of it out in the outer solar system where the gravity is not so great and they can just take all they want.”

Yeah? Then if these civilizations have already gone through their Singularity...as I am inferring from the use of "not biological"...wouldn't they have the technology to mask their presence from us?

Anyway, Hair points to the fact that NASA has discovered over 100 extrasolar planets just using the telescope technology we presently have. An advanced civilization should have no trouble detecting us.
“I’m sure they’d be able to detect if this planet had life on it. Just the CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) in our atmosphere would give us away,” he said.

This just doesn't sit right with me and not because I believe in an extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs. I'll be honest, the more I read, the less I have any idea what the hell they are so you can spare me any kind of preoration on the subject. It is the idea that we are all alone in this universe that I find to be ridiculous. However, this does not negate Hair's alternate proposal that aliens are ignoring us or simply don't see us as worth their time.

After all, would you?

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Downside of The Singularity

2012-02-01T20:04:00.000-08:00

We are continuing on the transhuman trend today.

I’ve never been one to be blind to the drawbacks and possible pitfalls and perils of The Singularity. What I have been opposed to are the ridiculous, ill-informed “what-ifs” posed by neo-Luddites afraid of losing the experience of “being human”…whatever that means these days. So if you want to have a serious discussion about legitimate potential ill effects of transhumanism, this list posted at The Singularity Weblog is a good place to start.

You can read the list for yourself. I’ll give a brief description of each point here and add my own thoughts.

Brain state issues at time of upload—if you choose to have your brain frozen or otherwise preserved at death and then transferred to a computer, you might be stuck in your last moment while conscious, meaning a state of pain, fear, and hopelessness. Or delirium. Remember the last words of Steve Jobs? “Oh wow. Oh wow!” If we progress far enough to upload human consciousness, I feel fairly assured that we would likewise have the technology to correct this issue. That and my hopes are for The Singularity to occur before my death and to never even have to get to this point.

Apathy—if no one cares about Singularity issues before it happens, will we be stuck dealing with the aftermath? Knowing us, it’s likely.

Corruption—building on that last point, Singularity technology might be tools for dictatorship. Lord knows Alex Jones (yes, him again) has been harping about Singularity supporters and that we are helping to bring about a “scientific dictatorship.” It’s extreme, but there might be a small amount of truth to this.
I’ve always wondered about the economics of all of this. Transhuman enhancements would likely go to those who could first afford them. Just like William Gibson says, “The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” That means the rich and the elite would get it first. The 1%. If you have had your life extended and much of your body replaced by cybernetics, would you care about the plights and concerns for those people who are still “meat?” I doubt it. Additionally, looking at the continual “dumbing” of America. The truly powerful in the future will be those who understand Singularity technology and are in control of it. Computers are already “the new literacy” and this will only increase by logarithmic magnitudes. If you don’t understand and control the technology in life, you will be controlled by it. Just a question of if the new world would look more like 1984 or Brave New World.

Unfriendly robots and AIs—fodder for any number of fictional works. I can understand the apprehension. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else,” said Eliezer Yudkowsky. An intelligence that operates on pure logic yet is bereft of human ethics and compassion. Unfortunately, that form of AI is easier to create than the kind that would have its own emotions. While I don’t dismiss this entirely as potential threat, I also don’t find it to be an overly likely one. Again, knowing the technology will help you control it.

Loss of identity—will humans be forced to continually interface with cloud computing in order to control devices or become more efficient? Will we then transform into something like the Borg with a “hive mind?” Since the advent of the Internet and social media, you can find out more about a person than you ever could before. Secrets are fewer and farther between, just think of what could happen if our own thoughts were no longer private? I scoffed at this one at first but with Internet privacy and security already being topics of major concern, I can see how they will only become more problematic in the future.

Yes, these are not exactly trivial concerns. There are always a million reasons not to do something, aren’t there? “What if” fears should not hold us back. We should be mindful of them but not at the expense of advancement.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Neural interface technology

2012-01-31T20:04:00.000-08:00

I love it when readers inspire me.

Yesterday, 4n4log K1d said in his comment, "If we can figure out how to snapshot our conscious minds, we have a path to immortality." It's closer than you might think.

In passing, I had heard about an organization called The Society For Neural Interfacing. In attempting to attain any further information on the group, I only ran into a series of dead links. I'm uncertain as to whether or not they are defunct as the most I can ascertain is that they were at one point affiliated with the University of Zurich. Nevertheless, I continued on the path of researching neural interface technology.

Neural interface simply means direct connection between the brain and a computer. Or perhaps more broadly, an interface between the human nervous system and any outside device where data is shared between the two said points. Bioelectric signals are detected by a computer or other such device through the use of neural implants in the brain. It's not a terribly new concept. Researchers have already developed systems where artificial limbs can be controlled by thought and the same with wheelchairs. In 2001, Stephen Hawking said that we should "develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it." (InformationWeek Sep 5, 2001 Stephen Hawking Warns of ‘Terminator’-Style Menace by David M. Ewalt) Indeed, that neural interface technology has evolved since then to a point where people have been shown to control cursors on computer screens and to even play video games using only their thoughts. Neural implants are even being explored as an avenue towards treating depression. Such implants would act as a "pacemaker for the brain" in the generation of serotonin. Good news for people who suffer from that insidious condition, for people who are confined or impaired by disability, or for anyone who simply wants to augment themselves and their natural capabilities.

As is always the case when discussing topics like this, not everybody is thrilled at the prospects of neural interfacing. Our buddy Alex Jones at InfoWars has a piece on it. It's done with the explicit warning of mind control prospects and Satanic Nazis brought over during Operation Paperclip. Idoneous for the site. "Do not accept a Neural Interface for 'enhancement' purposes," he cautions. Gee, if you don't want yours, I'll take it, Al. Indeed DARPA has been experimenting with brain interface technology and doubtless there are military applications being considered if not already implemented. Whether or not this is all part and parcel of an elaborate mind control plan concocted by the New World Order is still up for debate. Still, the linked InfoWars page does have well written summary of neural interfaces as well as sobering and disgusting images of cybernetic experimentation on animals. Ready or not, this technology is here and it's only going to get bigger.

So that "snapshot of our conscious minds" might only be an upload away.

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Electromagnetic lifeforms

2012-01-30T19:46:00.000-08:00

Pic above is from Modernartimages.com

Intelligent, sentient, electromagnetic lifeforms. Now there is a concept that I have been pondering. It is an activity of pure conjecture, composed of equal parts of science and philosophy.

This is not my own neoterism. I'm certainly not the first to think of it nor will I be the last, but hopefully I can keep myself strategically placed to read more information on the topic as it arises. The concept is that of an intelligent lifeform composed entirely of electromagnetic energy. I'm not saying that these lifeforms would be prevalent by any means nor do I think that they would even come close to being as frequent as carbon-based lifeforms given the stability of carbon or even silicon, I am simply wondering if they might exist.

What would such a lifeform look like? Again, totally guessing here but I would surmise a gaseous form or maybe even like crackling lightning. We've seen that life tends to fill certain voids here on our own world, an electromagnetic intelligence might inhabit a nebula or another such "stellar nursery" where energies abound. Would we even recognize it as intelligent life if we came across it? Could we communicate with it? I'm going to say it's doubtful on both counts but what the bleep do I know?

Then there are those who postulate that the entire universe might itself be a living being, similar in concept to the Gaia Hypothesis which states that the Earth is essentially one single living organism. The universe would operate much the same way with electromagnetic energy serving as "blood." The chain of logic for this might be, and I stress might:
We have a consciousness.
We evolved from the universe.
Therefore the universe might have a consciousness.

This all ties in with even greater questions of "what is consciousness?" Could an electromagnetic lifeform have both intelligence and consciousness? Could what we term as either "intelligence" or "consciousness" be approximated by the interactions within an electromagnetic form? But would that really be intelligence or just the clockwork movements of the mechanisms of physics?

Think about it, though. Wouldn't such lifeforms explain a great many things? Such as occurrences here on Earth that many of us otherwise ascribe to the paranormal? The fleeting presence of an intelligent electromagnetic lifeform might account for the elusive nature of evidence for paranormal activity.

Yep. These are the meandering thoughts that keep me up at night. Pray for me.

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The Outsider

2012-01-29T15:54:00.000-08:00

A few posts back, I described the book Alien Dawn by Colin Wilson which had just come into my possession.

Wilson, however, was responsible for writing a book that sounds far more influential. That is to say, if I am comparing descriptions. The name of the book is The Outsider. The Outsider examines just what effect people termed "outsiders" have on the rest of society. An "outsider," as defined here, means someone who has little to no interest in the Status Quo, what is marketed to the masses, or what fashions or societal norms are required to fit in with the rest of the herd. Those who choose this path or have it biologically chosen for them are termed "outsiders" by the rest of the herd.
Here is a partial list of the outsiders whose lives and works help make up the bulk of Wilson's book:

H.G. Wells
Albert Camus
Franz Kafka
T.S. Eliot
Hermann Hesse
Vincent Van Gogh
George Bernard Shaw
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Friedrich Nietzche
G.I. Gurdjieff

A thorough study indeed. Upon publication, Wilson was bashed by many critics. Here was a 24 year-old author with no PhD who claims to have written a text that examines human alienation and how the outsider influences society. In fact, Wilson wrote the book in the reading room of the British Museum during the day while he was spending his nights in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath.
Sigh. This is a side of academics of which I am not very proud. This kind of attitude fails to consider the fact that the men who wrote the influential texts that Wilson examines did not have, for the most part, any kind of higher degree. Yet the books and works are nevertheless considered part of the academic "canon."

I am excited to read this book. I enjoy literary criticism and this book has the additional dimension of being perhaps therapeutic, just as it seems to have been for several readers in the Amazon comments section (linked above). I see myself in much what Wilson describes. I certainly do not place myself among the writers above in terms of the quality of my work. Not by a long shot. What I do share is their view of society, the absent need to fit in with everyone and everything else. The knowledge of there being others like me makes me feel less alone.
Now how is that for literary irony? "Outsider seeks same in order to not feel alone in rejecting society."
So The Outsider goes on the to-read list. Yes, that list seems to expand by the day. I will get to these. Perhaps it would help if I didn't fall asleep for three hours in the afternoon as I did today.

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What the frak did I eat to cause this dream?

2012-01-28T16:15:00.000-08:00

Last night saw one of the most bizarre experiences ever to befall my subconscious.

In the words of Lionel Richie: "I had a dream, I had an awesome dream." Yet it was only "awesome" in the sense of its weirdness.
I was in New York City. Mind you, I have never been there in my life, despite my yearning to visit. Anyway, I was roaming about the city for reasons that I sensed related to my day job, something to do with a medical center or some such. I was lost. I had no sense of where I was going. As I went through the city in my dream, the innumerable highrise buildings gave way to an open expanse. Exasperated, I let out a cry of "where the hell am I?"

That's when I realized it. I was where the World Trade Center once was. It is impossible to convey the birr I felt in the air, the somber, eerie energy. It was as if I could almost sense the human remains beneath the ground that were never discovered and forced to remain entombed in obscurity.
I got out of there. I descended a massive concrete stairway that truly looked like it did not belong in the landscape. Down I went to a shoreline vista that looked out at Ellis Island and the waterways to the Atlantic. I noticed the water growing dark and sludgy, garbage sluiced out of drainage culverts and then floated downstream. An open air eatery lay ahead of me. Quite a crowd there, too. I smelled deep fried delicacies.
In this crowd, consuming various victuals, were so many people that I knew. Family members, distant friends, Tweeps even. They all moved in and out of the scene at a great pace. I was asked what I wanted to drink. I ordered a beer.
"You can't drink beer anymore!" they all gasped, holding their colas. "The government doesn't allow it!"
I could feel my transgression. At that point, arc lightning of the most spectacular blue crackled in the air. Massive machines descended from the sky. There was a flash and everything turned red. I just knew a nuclear explosion had taken place. The next thing I knew, all around me was transformed into a surreal, post-apocalyptic wasteland. I'm talking a Mad Max meets Kandinsky. I was separated from everyone I knew. I was alone.

I had the sense that they were all deeper in the city...or what was left of it. The center of Manhattan was now sealed off by castle-like walls. I hefted up what was left of a signpost and carried it with me. For protection. As I approached the wall, I found myself in a field of mushrooms and in this field sat a container that was the size and shape of a casket. For whatever reason, probably the same reason that causes people to unwisely open doors in horror films, I approached the coffin-like, oblong box. When I was next to it, the lid opened. Out popped...well, suffice to say someone that I don't like very much. Except they were more skeletal now in form. And they could shoot laser beams from their eyes.
I was pretty sure I was toast. I kept hopping around. They kept shooting. Nevertheless, I knew I needed to get back to the people who mattered to me. I took cover behind a fragment of shiny metal. This caused the laser beams to reflect back to their origin...destroying this person. As they died, they handed me a key that went to the gate of the wall.

And then I woke up.

Psychologists, armchair or professional, the ball is now in your court.

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Aliens will attack! It's in the Bible

2012-01-27T20:17:00.000-08:00

Unrelenting in my dedication to hunting The Weird, I take to the highways and by-ways of our super information conduit, the Internet, meandering and wandering to wherever strange currents might take me. This time, I've come upon a real classic.

Aliens are going to attack Earth. How do I know? It's in The Bible.
No, seriously. Err, at least a few people seem to think so. I visited this web site called www.fillthevoid.org and they had this to say about strange visitors from other worlds:

"Have you noticed the recent attractionto UFOs and aliens? They seem to be a part of everything, everywherea person goes. They are seen regularly on TV, and there are manypopular movies and books written about them. There are stuffedanimals and balloons made of them, also cups, stickers, and evenguitar picks that have their faces on them. There are bumper stickerstelling us to believe in them. Everywhere we go and everythingwe do, we usually end up seeing their faces somewhere. Why isthis? Especially when we hear that they abduct people againsttheir will and perform experiments on them. Still, they are verypopular. What had started out in fear years ago has now turnedto faith in them among our society. They have become a new religion."

That's right folks. The whole idea behind alien contact is to sucker us, to lead us away from Jesus. Nosing around, I found a forum site where a poster outlined the whole scenario...including biblical passages to back it up. In their mind, anyway.

Apparently, the idea is that our world come under the threat of imminent alien invasion. Due to this crisis, the nations of Earth will unite as one unified force...a "new world order" if you will...and appoint one man as supreme leader of our planet. This Earth President or whatever will declare that any alien craft entering our atmosphere will be destroyed. For by pooling our resources, we will then build laser cannons that will shoot down any alien spaceships that approach our big blue marble in space. The alien leader will be so in awe of our UN President, read antichrist, that the ET will surrender and pledge to molest Earth no more. All us humans will worship this UN President, again read antichrist just to make sure you're following...and I'm flippin' positive that there are certain precincts who will tell you we're talking about Barack Obama here...and bestow him with thanks, praise, and all of our rights as human beings.

The author of this forum post cited the following Biblical verses to support his/her claim.

Revelation 13:4 says, "And the world worshipped [sic] the beast
(antichrist) saying, who is like unto the beast? Who is able to
make war with him?"

Luke 21:11 says "there will be terrible earthquakes,
famine and plagues everywhere; there will be
strange and terrifying things coming from the sky (UFOs)."

Jeremiah 10: 1,2 (GNB) "People of Israel, listen to the message that the Lord has for
you. He says do not follow the ways of other nations, do not be
disturbed by unusual sights in the sky even though other nations
are terrified."

Can I say that this isn't true? Of course not. This is all predicated upon a book that is itself an exercise in faith. I am not about to tell anyone that their faith or their spiritual belief is wrong. I don't even do that to the evangelists that come to my door, attempting to conciliate me into returning to a church. I will say, however, that I fall on the skeptical side of all of this, especially when citations of the Book of Revelations are used as evidence. I'm of the opinion that you can infer damn near anything you want to out of Revelations. Best way to wash your car, a damn good fried chicken recipe, it's all in there somewhere I'm certain if you just choose to look for it.

But I got to tell ya, there is one thing about this that offends me, that makes me feel angry and betrayed. I made it through ten years of Catholic school and three years of CCD. Not once did they ever mention cool stuff like this.

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What's at the bottom of the Baltic?

2012-01-26T20:19:00.000-08:00

This is an old UFO story, really. Why it showed up on Yahoo's front page this morning is anybody's guess. Must be a slow news day.

Last August, it was announced that a Swedish underwater salvage team discovered something very odd at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. The Swedes were searching for old shipwrecks that might have valuable treasure still in the holds. The men had been at sea for nine days and were packing it in for home. As they did, they made one last sweep with their sonar fish. That last sweep was enough to convince them to hang on for a bit.

They found an object at the bottom of the ocean. It is a nearly perfect circle and is 60 meters across. That's about the size of a 747. But wait! There's more! Another object, smaller in size but about the same shape, sits near the larger anomaly. Both have drag marks behind them on the sea floor that stretch back 400 feet. Given that their livelihood is based on plundering sunken treasure, these salvage men know their stuff but even they didn't know what the hell it is. They are, however, mustering their mettle and planning to dive down to the objects when seas are calmer, perhaps in May.

Naturally, there has been much talk about the objects being UFOs...or USOs might be a more apt term at this point. That's Unidentified Submerged Object in case you don't know. I've blogged about those before but suffice it to say, it's very much the same principle as a UFO just underwater. While the open recovery of alien spacecraft would be welcome news, that's not the only game in town when it comes to explanations. Not by a long shot.

The salvage team is correct in pointing out that the size and the shape of the objects seem to preclude any kind of conventional sea-faring vessel. They are correct. And The Novgorod was not a conventional ship.
The Novgorod was a Russian ironclad battleship built in 1871. It was almost completely circular. However, the dimensions seem to be about half that of the object found by the salvage team and from what I've read, it sounds like it saw the bulk of its action on the Black Sea, not the Baltic. The Novgorod had a sister ship, The Rear-Admiral Popov, which was nearly identical in design, so it may stand to reason that there were more ships of this ilk in different theaters of operation. These ships proved to be a very unsuccessful design for the Russian Navy, so they might have used them as target practice and sunk them. Maybe there's a really big one at the bottom of the Baltic.

What else could it be? The former Soviet Union dumped all kinds of nuclear mishaps into the ocean, although the Baltic Sea would be an odd location for such a thing. Was there a UFO-shaped Nazi wunderwaffen that crashed into the drink? That might be almost as cool as a UFO. Or it could be indications of cryptoterrestrials, another race of humanoids living secretly on our planet beneath the ocean and this thing is their version of Stonehenge.

Or it could just be a natural formation in the seabed. That would be the simplest explanation and no doubt Mr. Occam would approve of it. It does unfortunately have a couple strikes against it, namely the shape of the objects and the drag marks behind them. That doesn't rule out regular rocks, not by any stretch of the imagination. But it is odd.

Whatever they might be, there is almost certainly going to be a mundane explanation for them. After all, even if on the off chance they were crashed UFOs, would we even be told about it?

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"The Artist"

2012-01-25T18:04:00.000-08:00

While I have long since ceased to care about what films are nominated for Oscars, one title has managed to capture my interest: The Artist.

From what I have read and the clips that I have seen, The Artist is an homage to the era of silent films in Hollywood. In it, a 1920’s actor (Jean Dujardin) fears for his own relevancy as widespread release of talking pictures looms on the horizon. During this time, he meets a dancer looking for her first big break. And yes, this really is a silent film.

I became further interested in The Artist by an opinion piece on CNN today written by A.S. Hamrah, a film critic at n+1. In it, Hamrah asserts his own rationale for why this particular film seems to have struck a chord. One reason he seems to claim is that of nostalgia and sentimentality:

“Do these movies smuggle the past into the future or just use it as pastiche? In an era where airports feature bizarre signs reading "Snow globes are not allowed through the security checkpoint," these movies insist on the physicality of silent cinema, a memento mori in the age of the delete button.”

While I am certainly not one for longing for a “simpler time,” especially ones that really weren’t all that simple once their veneer is stripped away, another point Hamrah makes is well taken.

We need silence.

As I have said before, of all the weird things I research, people are by far the weirdest. I am surrounded by people, both in the media and in real life, who seem to want nothing more than to talk incessantly…while never really saying anything at all. This is unremitting. I keep searching for a mute button for the rest of the world, so that I might silence voices as easily as I do threads on my Google+ stream.
Our entertainment has become much the same way. While I do enjoy science fiction and action films, including the eye and brain candy of a special effects-laden opus, there is an adverse consequence to them: all the noise. Both auditory and visual. Just look at Cameron’s Avatar or better yet, any of Michael Bay’s Transformer movies. The first edition in that latter trilogy was so loud I contracted the same ear ringing that I get from a concert. The visual mess was so splattered, kinetic, and overwhelming with CGI blebs that I couldn’t tell what was going on.

We need silence indeed. I do, anyway, as a refuge from the downsides of modern society. That may in fact be why I appreciate art so much. Certain paintings can evoke great sensations of serenity. I get that feeling every time I look at a Monet, a Renoir, or certain works by Hopper. This is just one aspect of the many things that art can do for us. Sure, that absent need for social contact probably makes me weird, strange, an outsider, but there it is anyway.

So far, everything about The Artist looks good, even the promo poster (see above). I look forward to seeing it. I will enjoy the silence.

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The Cure--an appreciation

2012-01-24T18:14:00.000-08:00

So depressing! They just make me want to off myself! They're no fun!

Or at least that's what I get around here. Like it or not, sadness, despondency, frustration, and hatred are all part of a genuine human experience. If they have not been for you, I question your faculties. And if, therefore, these emotions are genuine, then they are valid territory for artistic expression. Few, if any, handle the mood indigo shades of human emotional spectrum better than The Cure. I have listened to The Cure for decades. Today, as I heard several of their songs come across Jango, I decided to write a post about the band.

Goth. Post-punk. Alternative. Bands hate classification labels. While those three genres might fit The Cure in various ways, they've proven to be quite nimble at jumping out of the box. Robert Smith, the only consistent member of The Cure, did play for a time with Siouxise and the Banshees, a band that many would categorize as a primordial, original of the species that would later be known as "goth." Interestingly enough, I recall an interview in the dearly departed Details magazine with both Smith and Siouxsie Sioux where each said to the other, "We weren't goth! You were!" Hilarious.
Yes, bands hate to be categorized and The Cure are no exceptions. As Robert Smith once said in an interview, "We're not categorisable. I suppose we were post-punk when we came out, but in total it's impossible." Goth or not, the musical style of The Cure's earlier efforts did have a pallor of gloom over them that set the band's songs apart from the herd. Melodic tones with solid bass mixed with the plaintive, despairing whine of Smith's vocals. Later, their sound would grow more and more interlaced with synthesizers and keyboards, culminating in what many regard as their greatest album, Disintegration.

I've always liked them because there was true artistry in their work. This was never a case of guys wearing leather and torn jeans, getting up on a stage to play loud guitars. There was far more of a point to what they did. There was an atmosphere, an ambiance that almost defies description. The best way to portray it to my sensibilities is to imagine a soundtrack for crossing a foggy British moor on an overcast day. They're a rainy day band. They're musicians who seem to know where you've been and subtly clue you in that it's all going to be all right, no matter the pain, sadness, agony, fear, and death. It's not necessarily depressing, it's just part of what is. Robert Smith and The Cure focused on all parts of what is...not simply the "let's party" aspects like...eating cheeseburgers, let's say.

If pressed, I would offer the following as my favorite Cure songs:

"Charlotte Sometimes"
"Letter To Elise"
"A Strange Day"
"Lovesong"
"Pictures of You"
"Burn"
"Just Like Heaven"

I'm aware that the inclusion of that last song might rankle a few out there who consider themselves "true fans" and not "sell outs," but despite its upbeat poppy-ness, it's still a good song. An important one, too. This song broke The Cure open to a wider audience, allowing more people, even isolated kids like me in rural Indiana, to hear their music and to get into them.

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Solar surf's up

2012-01-23T19:15:00.000-08:00

Big storm coming in. Largest of its kind in almost ten years.

A massive solar flare occurred yesterday at 11pm EST. The Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) has flung a torrent of electromagnetic radiation and protons towards Earth, threatening to cause problems with GPS satellites and air travel over the polar region, namely flights between the U.S. and Europe. This is likely to keep going on until tomorrow morning. Big as this is, NASA maintains that the CME was merely moderate in size, unlike the 1989 solar flare that cause power grids across Quebec to go down. Yet NASA reports that the plasma cloud is among the fastest moving ever recorded.

That said, there is still the chance that electrical grids in isolated pockets could see sporadic outages and complications. Not a guarantee but not unheard of either. It does give me pause to think in regard to what would happen to our society if...nay, when...our Sun decides to fling a truly massive CME our way with enough electromagnetic punch to bring down power grids on a wide-reaching scale. We'd find ourselves back in the Stone Age rather quickly. Our lives are held together by slimsy strands of copper wire and fiber optics. I fully admit being in that digital-dependent state. So after the massive EM pulse, that's probably when all those people I razzed about camping in Civil War re-enactments will take over. Oh yes, there is karma. Sigh.

So exactly what will this current solar storm do to us? Well, Gizmodo says:
"In the best case scenario, only power lines will be affected. You will not notice it because any power fluctuations will be handled by companies at the grid level. If the storm is long enough, however, it may damage power grid transformers."

No word yet as to who is more vulnerable, Autobots or Decepticons.

Sorry. Couldn't help it.
All in all, this makes for an interesting bit of academic research, the opportunity to study a solar storm of this magnitude and learn how we can prepare ourselves for future bursts. Yet in the end, it's much ado about nothing.

For now.

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typoGenerator!

2012-01-22T14:55:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's just the beer talkin', but this is all too much fun.

I've been playing with this webpage called TypoGenerator. It's function is fairly simple and straightforward as described in the site's FAQ:

"Enter text, images.google.com is searched for that text. Then an image is generated randomly from the found images and the entered text."

A "typo poster" is an image composed of text and background images, not necessarily readable however. The fact that they are randomly generated adds to the chance of illegibility. Don't let that stop you. You're guaranteed to lose a few hours of your life just experimenting with the program.

Look at that image above. It's like a purple mushroom cloud is rising out of my name against an apocalyptic sky. Then there's this one:

Kind of 1970s, spacey throwback. Guess it's a hipster logo.

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X

2012-01-21T16:42:00.000-08:00

"He covers Arcadia like a shroud. He could be anywhere. He seems to be everywhere."

As I mentioned in my post about comic book writer/artist Jim Starlin, winter is a great time to stay inside and delve into your comics library.

Actually just about any time is a great time for me to do that, the wintry weather just somehow adds to the ambiance. In going through my stacks, I came across a series that I had all but forgotten about but enjoyed much back in the day.

The name of the book was X. The series and its eponymous character were part of Dark Horse Comics' somewhat abortive "Comics Greatest World" attempt at establishing a new universe in the arena of comic books. There were four main locations in this new world and each location had about four titles assigned to it. Each title would have a short, introductory issue printed on high quality paper and selling at the cheap. I can remember reading the intro to X on a hot summer day, sitting in the passenger seat of Chris Helton's car on the way back from the comic book store.

The storyline took place in a city called Arcadia. I don't think that Dark Horse was ever specific but I believed that Arcadia was located somewhere on the East Coast like New Jersey, similar in geographic approximation to Gotham City. And that's not where the Gotham comparisons ended. Arcadia was a dark, dirty, and very corrupt city. Political officials shared power behind the scenes with mafia families. You could get along just fine in Arcadia...provided you had the cash to pay up. The police department truly served and protected...provided you were on the "to protect" list.

Then the "X killer" showed up. I remember the first panel that showed him. Everything was drawn with a film noir sensibility. The people, the interiors, the city. This panel was of an official's office. It had a classic noir shot of ambient light coming through a window, casting prison bars over the characters. X came crashing through that window. He was a big man, wearing a costume of black leather, a mask with only one eye, a cape that was in tatters, and what looked like a wrestler's boots and belt. He was out for justice, committed to ending the corruption and the mob. Might sound a little like Batman. That, however, is where the analogy stops.

X killed the public official in that office. There was no clear-cut morality to X, no way to tell whose side he was really on other than his own. If you crossed X, he left one mark across your face as a warning. The second time would mean death, completing the "x." Like so many of the other "dark hero" vigilantes of the 1990s, X had no compunctions over killing. The first few issues saw the body count soar with corrupt politicians, lawyers, and corporate leaders. Gee, do you think X was a forerunner of Occupy Wall Street? There would be no remora to his reclaiming the city of Arcadia. He would set organized crime families strategically against one another so that he would be there to take over when no one was left standing. Being a comic book, X also had to contend with his share of super-powered criminals.

On the whole, you might wonder what was so special about this book. Sounds like a Batman ripoff with hints of The Shadow mixed in and the oh so blase gun-totin' vigilante meme that as I said, was everywhere in the 90s. I don't know. X just had a certain style to him that set him apart from the herd. He was unique and mysterious in addition to being uncompromising and more than a bit sinister. While I've read only a few issues in comparison to the full run, I still don't know who he was, where he came from, or what motivated him to do what he did. You might call that poor character development when it comes to writing. Maybe. For me, it just added to the mystery and made him far more interesting than the others of his ilk at the time.

If you like film noir or crime-centered comics with street-level heroes, check out X. I don't believe you'll be disappointed.

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Another UFO bites the dust

2012-01-20T19:05:00.000-08:00

After another combing through of public NASA footage, UFO enthusiasts thought they caught one.

This article at MSNBC was my first exposure to the case as I'm drawn to any headline with the magic three-letter acronym, UFO. Regrettably, it had to be this particular woefully written text and I'll get to that in a moment. Back to the case itself.
Those who support the notion that NASA has been a party to the cover-up of alien life for decades thought that they had a smoking gun. Footage from the STEREO-B probe, one of a pair of spacecraft parked near the Sun that afford scientists a 360-degree view of the inner solar system, seemed to show something funky. The video in question showed Venus, Earth, and on the opposite side of the screen...a triangular shaped UFO headed in our direction.

Feel like it wasn't too long ago that we did this? You're correct. The Internet was all abuzz about a month ago regarding a "mystery object near Mercury." Turns out that particular UFO was an image artifact from the telescope that recorded the footage. So...guess what the UFO on the STEREO-B footage is?

"The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image," NASA wrote. "At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters the [telescopic camera's] field-of-view from the lower left."

It's a trick of light and optics. Not a UFO. Yet that really doesn't bother me. I expect findings such as these. Even smart people can be fooled and tricked by their eyes, especially if they happen to be non-astronomers looking at footage from a space telescope. If I saw that triangular image without having read this, I don't think I'd know what to make of it. I'd be most cautious before proclaiming it a UFO but it would certainly make me do a Moe Syzlak "Whaa????" So no, this is the kind of rational explanation I expect.

What I didn't like was the tone of the MSNBC article. Oh those deucedly pesky UFO conspiracy nuts. Aren't they silly? You know what this is an opportunity for? Ridicule, ridicule, ridicule. It's the best method we have of keeping the UFO subject out of public debate. Sigh.
I know that I really shouldn't expect anything different. In a way, I don't blame them. The field of UFO studies is replete with all manner of outrageous and quite frankly crazy claims that lack any real kind of concrete evidence to support them. These wild accounts dilute the true science and investigation going on regarding UFOs, thus causing as many problems as snobby journalism. But a few wild claims should not negate those with serious evidence behind them. That would be like saying you hate all rock music just because you heard a song by Journey.

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To catch a black hole

2012-01-19T20:12:00.000-08:00

Astronomers are endeavoring to take the first-ever picture of a black hole.

And the way they're attempting to do it is nifty as heck. We're talking about a virtual telescope the width of the Earth, combining "up to 50 radio telescopes from Taiwan to the Netherlands to the South Pole" into what's being called "The Event Horizon telescope." The system will attempt to outline the enormous black hole that is thought to be at the center of our galaxy. This is a big deal for space science.

A quote from one of the lead astrophysicists on the project really puts things into perspective for me: "A couple of years ago, this was science fiction. Now it's becoming a reality."
Nothing could be truer. I'm old enough to remember when black holes were merely a theory in astronomy. Now they are almost a certainty and we're on the cusp of actually seeing one. Potentially, we may even see the swirl of charged gas, dust, and other matter as it enters the black hole. You'll almost be able to feel your skin tingle from the heat at a safe distance. I don't know if that's true, but wouldn't it be cool if it were?

What is gleaned from this imagery might go well beyond the "ooo and ahhh" factor and have repercussions for Einstein's general theory of relativity. The image outline of the black hole will come in piecemeal from all of the different telescopes and be assembled into one coherent form. If the final image of the black hole is perfectly circular, then all works in line with what Einstein predicted. If it is more elliptical or otherwise shaped, then there must be flaws in Einstein's theory at various points.

Far sweeping implications aside, I'm just eager for the images. I also keep coming back to that quote of "A couple of years ago, this was science fiction. Now it's becoming a reality."
Funny how that seems to happen.

If it's awesome photos from space that you're after and you can't wait the three or so years it will probably take to get that outline imagery of the black hole, then take a look at this. MSNBC posted a photoblog of the area of the Eagle Nebula known as "the Pillars of Creation." After taking a look at the pics, you'll see how it gets its name. Breathtaking.

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SOPA on a ropa

2012-01-18T19:12:00.000-08:00

It came as no surprise to anyone who really uses the Internet.

Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing, they all went down for the day. Even Google draped itself black while remaining operable. All of it a symbolic gesture of opposition to House legislation known as SOPA—Stop Online Privacy Act and its Senate equivalent, PIPA—Protect IP Act.

The idea behind the bills introduced to Congress isn’t terribly oppressive. It stems mainly from media companies who want to protect their property. Any rational person, especially those of us in the creative arts, can surely appreciate wanting to protect the fruits of their labors. The problem lies with the way in which the bills were written, including sweeping powers and vague wording. Ripe soil for the Law of Unintended Consequences to take root and grow. Here are a few features of SOPA that Rebecca McKinnon outlined in The New York Times:

“The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright — a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification. The intention is not the same as China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar.”

In The New Yorker, Nicholas Thompson cites how status updates are handled in India as an example of this aforementioned effect. Imagine updating your status on Facebook and receiving “Hold on while we review this status update to make sure that it doesn’t include an unauthorized clip from ‘The Artist.’”

This is not a good idea, folks. In fact, it’s just another case of legislators and their staff cobbling together a bill without fully understanding the subject it entails. My brothers Dr. Rich and Ahab Pope both posted this YouTube clip of Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) putting quite succinctly what the problem is as he compares the legislation to doing surgery on a body without a doctor present to show where all the organs sit. Chaffetz ends by saying, "bring in the nerds." I'm truly heartened by his statements, both in that there is great leadership coming from a young person and a measured, well-reasoned response from a Republican, proving to me that there are plenty of sane and intelligent individuals in that political party.
Both opposition and support for SOPA and PIPA come from all shades of the political spectrum but as always it’s interesting to follow the money. One of the main proponents of SOPA is Texas Rep. Lamar Smith. The top contributors to him as a candidate have been from the entertainment industry.

Like many other issues of our day, this one has been spun into a story of polarizing dissonance. “Big Money versus persnickety and whiny cyberpunks” or the like. “The Internet has gone dark” headlines proclaimed of today, even the majority of sites are still up and functioning just fine. Twitter users have been speaking out in droves against SOPA over the past few days. The one lone dissenter against the crowd that I have seen came from @rupertmurdoch. Is anybody surprised by that?

As usual, the truth lies in the middle. Someone who creates something, whether it is written, drawn, or what have you, has the right to protect it. No question.
There just has to be a smarter and more practical way to do it than SOPA.

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Jim Starlin

2012-01-17T19:00:00.000-08:00

There is much to recommend about a Midwest winter.

Granted, snow and extreme cold might not be your bag but consider what those meteorological events might cause as a side effect. A lot of time indoors. A lot of time spent with comic books and science fiction. That's what got my brother and I through many a season.

So I don't know if it's the snow that so recently fell or the fact that it will be six degrees tonight (as Ahab says, "That's not a temperature...that's a shoe size!") but I've chosen to devote a series of future blog posts to comic books with a science fiction bent to them. I know that I've done a few posts of this nature before but this time around, I want the posts to focus on individual titles and devote the writing time to them that I did not afford earlier. I thought that I would kick off the series with post about my favorite writer in the science fiction genre of comic books.

Jim Starlin has been in the comic book industry for quite a while now both as an artist and a writer. While he has written characters in almost every milieu, Starlin is best known for sweeping epics of space opera and characters with cosmic-level powers. That alone is enough to draw me in but Starlin has an added dimension to his work that truly resonates with me in that his stories often deal with religion and spirituality.

What is God? Or what defines "a god?" When a character has massive power, what are the responsibilities and choices with this power? We saw a considerable amount of this in his pivotal, dare I say, masterpiece work with Adam Warlock for Marvel Comics. Warlock...and I will blog about this character and storyline in greater detail in the future...was a powerful messiah figure who was prone to existential crisis. This character went on to play an integral role in Starlin's three sprawling miniseries of Infinity Gauntlet, Infinity War, and Infinity Crusade. An interesting aside to that last miniseries, the dramatis personae was split between those with faith and those without. While I'm not certain exactly how well it sold, this was certainly my favorite series of the three. Thematically, anyway.

Starlin's other major accomplishment was the revitalization of Captain Marvel, culminating in his landmark graphic novel, The Death of Captain Marvel. By working through Captain Marvel, Starlin established what essentially became the cosmology of the Marvel Universe and it stands to this day. Again, this character and his title will get his own treatment on the blog, so suffice it to say for now that in my humble opinion, Captain Marvel can stand shoulder to shoulder with Marvel's other science fiction characters such as Warlock and Silver Surfer. Starlin also created the character of Dreadstar for Marvel offshoot line of Epic Comics.

Over at DC Comics, Starlin was responsible for co-creating the Superman villain, Mongul, a character that plagued The Man of Steel on numerous occasions. Starlin also created Hardcore Station (no, it isn't porn) and wrote characters such as Adam Strange and the alate Hawkman. Both characters will...you guessed it...get their own blog posts.

To be fair, Starlin has written and drawn several other characters and books, including a stint on Batman that featured the now infamous four-part storyline, "A Death in the Family." But for my money, nobody does a space epic like Jim Starlin. It's not just entertaining stories, it's engaging fiction. He's going to challenge you to think as you read, maybe even rattle a few of your beliefs and cause you to reconsider them or at the very least examine them more closely. That, in any medium, is the mark of a good writer.

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Quantum computing is here...in a way

2012-01-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

Ahhh quantum computers. That carrot that has been dangled in front of the tech world's nose for a while now.

Imagine a machine that can not only make calculations that current computers would find impossible but one that can carry them out in milliseconds. Quantum computers eschew the oh so pedestrian notion of binary data utilized by digital computers for quibits, data packets and operations based on quantum mechanics...which I don't even pretend to understand. But I've read that as it pertains to computing, the idea is to implement read/write devices that use photons. In light (no pun intended) of these wondrous by still unproven prospects, you can imagine the skeptical eyebrows that were raised when Lockheed paid a company called D-Wave $10 million for a quantum computer operating on a 128-qubit chip. But wait! There's more! D-Wave alleges that they now have a 512-qubit chip but nobody has seen anything of it yet as tests are still ongoing.

As you might imagine, the military is eager to get on board with this new wave. Popular Science reports that the Air Force have been experimenting with quantum computers composed of holograms. The holograms reportedly render the photons into a much more stable and therefore more malleable state. By all accounts, this work is very much still in its incipient stages. That also tends to cast a bit of doubt on D-Wave's claims but who's to say?

It appears that the key to true quantum computers will be nanotechnology. As if on cue, a team of researchers from three different universities announced last week that they had succeeded in creating a fundamental piece of nanotechnology: a wire that is only four atoms wide and one atom high and conducts electricity just like any regular-size copper wire. Sort of makes you want to throw all your current technology in the trash and just wait for the new line, doesn't it? I'm kidding.

Whenever I read of developments such as this, my thoughts always leap beyond the conventional towards the more lofty. To me, this isn't just the promise of faster computations or better cryptography, it's an open door towards artificial intelligence. Granted not everyone is excited about the idea of a perspicacious computer that can think for itself, but I'm fascinated with the potential for AI.

That is until it assumes control of all of our defense systems and calls itself SkyNet.

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Can't get there from here

2012-01-15T17:58:00.000-08:00

A perennial point that SETI seems to bring up in relation to extraterrestrials is that there is just no way to get here from there or vice versa.

The distances between stars are unthinkably vast, the energy required for such a journey would be equally so, the speed of light is a constant, the time required to reach even the nearest star (25 trillion miles away) let alone an outrance star system is many times more than that of a human lifetime, and so on and so forth. I do not dispute any of this but something about discounting the notion of interstellar travel disquiets me.

I believe we're looking at the issue from a sort of esoteric myopia when it comes to the universe, namely our own levels of technology and understanding. There is much that we don't know and there are many times when our own preconceived notions have been overturned. Among these latter points have been flight, breaking the sound barrier, and even (relatively) simple space travel between here and the Moon. What else haven't we considered? What are our assumed barriers keeping us from? There are scientists who are beginning to consider the speed of gravity as being well above that of the speed of light. What if propulsion could be achieved through the generation of gravity? That would drastically cut down the amount of fuel needed for movement. Admittedly the means and energy needed to bring about such a thing is undetermined. Another alternative is the notion of using the gravity of your destination to pull you across space, "folding" or "warping" the distance. Sound like TV? Well DARPA, the research arm of The Pentagon, must not entirely think so. Earlier in the year, they offered half a million dollars as seed money to the best idea for making interstellar travel possible. That's a fair pile of coin to be tossing around for pipe dream notions.

Again, just because we haven't found a way to do it doesn't mean someone else hasn't. Look at the varying levels of technology right here on our own world. Just because pygmy bushman lack the opportunity, the resources, or the specialized know-how to build a rocket does not preclude other nations from doing it.
So is interstellar travel either impossible or impractical? Yes...from our limited point of view.

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January Hodge Podge

2012-01-14T20:15:00.000-08:00

Ahh hodge podge. What I resort to when I have nothing in mind to write about or I haven't spent enough time reading up on a topic to feel comfortable blogging about it.

In this case it's the latter. You see, the day sort of got away from me.
Remember from yesterday's post where I mentioned falling asleep while reading? I thought reading in the afternoon sun would be a remedy for that. Snow finally stopped falling yesterday and we've got about seven inches on the ground outside. The temperature fell to zero last night and today's high was only in the upper teens. Good day to stay inside and read. The NFL playoffs were on and that lends itself to the great indoors as well.

After securing pizza bellow the hatches, I got in front of the TV, wrapped myself in a blanket, and picked up my book while the game began. That's when it happened.
My dog Butterscotch jumped up onto me and curled herself into a ball on my chest. A cozy feeling on a real winter's day. Yet it has its drawbacks.
Look at the elements involved here: full stomach, warmth, cushion, reclined posture. Yep. I was a goner. "I'm just going to close my eyes for a bit." That was my desinence. I woke up just in time to see a back and forth throwdown in the last minutes of 49ers/Saints game.

I do have glasses. They are supposed to help fight off the sleepy feeling that arises while reading. They're also coated with anti-glare film for computer use. I'm wearing the glasses right now as I type. However, for the glasses to actually be helpful for reading, I should probably wear them while reading. There's a thought. Yep. Need to work on that.

Musically, I've been on a real heavy metal kick for the past two weeks. Today, I find myself getting back to what I typically listen to. Here's the current playlist:

R.E.M.--"Discoverer"
10,000 Maniacs--"These Are The Days"
The Smiths--"Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before"
Tears For Fears--"Head Over Heels"
Talking Heads--"Take Me To The River"

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From the "To-Read" pile...

2012-01-13T19:42:00.000-08:00

Every once and again, I go through my books and look over what I have yet to read.

As I have no doubt explained before, I read for a while on lunch and just before I go to bed. In that evening session, I usually get about three pages in before finding the book on my stomach, a viscous trail of drool down my chin, and the sun coming in through the window. Excuses excuse, I know. It's all a matter of gumption. So to encourage myself to read faster...or to at least read during semi-waking hours...I sometimes leaf through the books I have on the horizon. Here are two science fiction books that I've been spending time with tonight.

The Forge of God by Greg Bear. One of Jupiter's moons suddenly disappears. A previously unknown cinder cone is found in Death Valley. A mountain rises out of Australia that wasn't there six months ago. There are unidentified objects headed towards Earth. And oh yes, there are aliens involved. It's the end of the world as we haven't known it before.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. Three teenagers witness a shield form around the Earth, blocking us off from the rest of the universe. The book follows the different lives that these three pursue after that fateful day when a time discontinuity encapsulated our world wherein we see time passing normally while 300 billion years go by outside. One will become a doctor, another a scientist hellbent on unraveling what happened to the Earth, and the last a religious fanatic. And oh yes, there are aliens involved here too.

Those are certainly tantalizing enough to inspire speedier reading.

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Space bits

2012-01-12T19:21:00.000-08:00

A veritable cavalcade of the finest photographs from space telescopes was featured in a photoblog on MSNBC.com. The collection was released at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society this week.

The first photo that you'll see after clicking the link is of the star-forming region of space known as Cygnus X. Spectacular colors, almost giving the photo the bonny impression of a watercolor painting. But it's real, all out there in space. Stars show up as blue dots, gas and dust are the reds and greens. Hot white or yellow areas are where stars are forming. Take a look at the rest of the photos, it's worth the couple minutes it will take.

Also in the news astronomy-wise, the same gathering of astronomers mentioned above featured the staggering announcement that our galaxy is home to an estimated 100 billion planets. That's right. Billion with a "B." That means nearly every star you see in the night sky has planets orbiting it. What's more, many of these planets may orbit two stars in a binary system a la Tatooine. As invariably occurs, there's always someone who responds to such a figure with "how do they know that?" Here's what the linked article says:

"To estimate the number of other worlds, Dr. Cassan and his colleagues studied 100 million stars between 3,000 and 25,000 light-years from Earth with gravitational microlensing. The technique uses distant light amplified by the gravity of a massive star or planet to create an astronomical magnifying lens. Then they combined their findings with earlier surveys, which used other detection techniques, to create a statistical sample of stars and the planets that orbit them, which they say is representative of the galaxy."

I know that my age will be showing with this comment but it amazes me to stop and contemplate the fact that when I was just in my teens, the idea of extrasolar planets was mere theory. No one had ever seen one for certain. Now, you can't go anywhere in the galaxy without tripping over them. Indeed, our own solar system does appear to be quite so unique but rather standard and run-of-the-mill as things go in the cosmos. I find that rather encouraging.

One other small bit of trivia from article, one of the tallest mountains in the solar system is not on any planet. It's on the asteroid Vesta that made its close approach to Earth not all that long ago.

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New Energy Movement

2012-01-11T20:46:00.000-08:00

I came across an energy organization online, one of which I was previously unaware. I have to say I like what I’m reading.

They are called the New Energy Movement. As the name implies, they are a collective of thinkers who are dedicated to studying and supporting the enterprise of clean and sustainable energy sources. Taken from their site:

“We recognize that the single most highly-leveraged opportunity for advancement towards solving our complex global problems lies in a transformation of the way human civilization generates and utilizes energy. We intend to lead humanity toward an enhanced economy and society made possible by exciting scientific advances in New Energy research and development. Our primary task is to encourage intelligent public debate and action on how best to accelerate these advances, making a rapid transition away from our dangerous dependence on fossil fuels and nuclear power.”

The founder of the Movement was the late Dr. Brian O’Leary. Dr. O’Leary was an astrophysicist and an astronaut for NASA and was certainly no stranger to free thinking. He was often open about “alternative” subjects, such as his own near-death experience and practices in remote viewing. He engaged in what were perceived as unorthodox ideas, such as the correlation between science and consciousness. His integral involvement with the New Energy Movement made me wonder if there might have been further motivations behind the group’s formation…not that saving the world from harmful, wasteful fossil fuels isn’t grandiose enough.

I wonder if he might have envisioned this program as leading to possible engines for practical space travel? Looking through the other people who worked with The New Energy Movement, I came across the name Dr. Steven M. Greer. Greer is the founder of The Orion Project, another collective working towards clean, sustainable energy. Additionally, he is well known in the UFO community as someone who has devoted a great deal of time and thought towards the concept of extraterrestrial intelligence and even founded CSETI (Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence). His presence furthers my speculation that space travel might have been an additional or bonus outcome intended for the New Energy Movement.

Regardless, I’m just pleased that there is an organization like this out there. Someone needs to lead the way.

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Corporations are corporations so why should it be?

2012-01-10T20:30:00.000-08:00

On this night, as Mitt Romney wins the New Hampshire Republican Primary, it might be fitting for us to take a look at one of his most famous (infamous?) quotes:

"Corporations are people, my friend."

Romney said that in response to a heckler at a speaking engagement. At first blush, the statement is both pithy and pompous but it does bear closer examination, especially since there appears to be a fair contingent that believes it. This article I found does a fair job of hashing things out.

The article begins with a few very valid points. First off, of course corporations don't exist in a vacuum. They employ multitudes of people and that alone has far reaching implications. Secondly, when the US Constitution was written, there were very few corporations in existence so the Founders probably didn't have major, multinational, "zaibatsus" in mind at the time. Therefore, we must proceed from the standpoint that if corporations are indeed people, then they are subject to the Constitution like any other people within these borders.

As it continues, I believe that the article does a fair job of just how the "corporations are people" shield begins to break down and the author seems to center their argument on the idea of the public trust and what is in the interest of the whole. A corporation does not care about such things. They may claim to, but they don't. Why would they? The entity's number one aim is to make money. All else becomes secondary and the entity, especially the entity's head, will do whatever it takes to meet that end. Influence legislative process, alter the political process, it's all fair game.

Before the baggers and the fundies get out their Bibles and flags, I'm not against corporations per se. Of course people have a right to create, market, and make a profit on a product. It just shouldn't been done in manner that harms the rest of society. How much profit does one actually need? If corporations are people, they should be expected to follow laws. If they don't and become harmful to the greater whole, they are removed.
In fact, the best answer I've heard for this whole question is this:"I'll believe corporations are people when the state of Texas executes one."

I don't know. It just seems that such a statement as Romney's is a convenient shield to duck behind and excuse...well, almost anything. It's a dodge. A pat answer that will soon lose its meaning to anyone who can think critically. Using the phrase will be like exploiting patriotism to further a war or hurling accusations of socialism whenever someone can't make that extra hundred mil.

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Abstract expressionism my @%$!

2012-01-09T17:37:00.000-08:00

It should come as no surprise that I like the weird. I also like art.
Lucky for me…and all of you…this story combines both.

Last week in Colorado, a woman damaged a painting by artist Clyfford Still that was worth 30 million dollars. Officials at the Clyfford Still art gallery claim that the damages totaled about ten grand. And how did she manage to cause this damage? By rubbing her bare ass against the art.
Additionally, the woman then attempted to urinate upon the painting but missed. The painting can likely be restored as long as the canvas itself was not pierced.

The woman, Carmen Tisch, was arrested and held on $20,000 bond. No motive for her ass rubbing and attempted urination upon the art has been given apart from the fact that she was drunk at the time. So what gives? I’ve got a few shirttail theories:

-If you click the link to the original news story above, you’ll see a mugshot of Ms. Tisch. She’s all inked up and got a lot of metal shit in her face. Perhaps she’s a performance artist? A Dadaist of sorts, a Dali by way of Sid Vicious? Maybe her actions at the art gallery are meant to be a higher statement on society, art, or both? An artistic act of pure heterotelic value, the meaning of which we won’t know until long from now?

-She’s against all forms of abstract expressionism. She’s…I won’t go so far as to say “terrorist” but perhaps an “Occupier”…striking down physical manifestations of the form in order to prove a point and save the art world for the truly avant garde and “alternative.”

-She loves abstract expressionism but feels that Jackson Pollock is the art movement’s one, true representative. All other such painters are mere posers and their work must be destroyed. This is sort of like the art world’s version of a 1991 smackdown by a Slayer fan on a guy in a Poison t-shirt.

-Perhaps she is a “scent artist?” I don’t know if such artists exist, I’m just waxing free and associated right now. Something is embellished upon or artistically augmented by a scent or an odor. Now, this painting just smells like that woman’s ass.

-She was just drunk and did something dumb. Haven’t we all?

Discuss.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Happy Birthday Stephen Hawking

2012-01-08T16:48:00.000-08:00

Today is the 70th birthday of Dr. Stephen Hawking, quite possibly the smartest person alive.

I'm saddened to hear that he missed his own birthday celebration due to further complications of his illness. In a recorded speech for the gathering, he again urged human colonization of space. "I don't think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet," he said.

"So what's this guy ever done for us?" the Kip Haggis-types of the intellectual vacuum that is America might ask. Well, let's take a look. While the rest of us indulged in profligacy, he completely revolutionized our idea of how galaxies are formed and delved into the quantum nature of gravity. He was the first to demonstrate how quantum fluctuations, the tiny variations in the distribution of matter, cause the rise and spread of galaxies across the universe. More than that, there is probably no other scientist who has contributed more to the understanding of the exact hows and whys of black holes. He has defined for us concepts such as "event horizon," "gravitational singularity," and "wave function of the universe." For decades now, he has done all of this while confined to a wheelchair and speaking through an electronic voice due to his affliction with ALS. Talk about perseverance. And just what is any of that worth? To quote Dr. Hawking himself: "If you understand how the universe operates, you control it in a way."

Despite all of his groundbreaking theories and discoveries, there is one universal conundrum that Hawking has not been able to crack: "Women. They are a complete mystery," he said.

You're not alone in that, Steve. Wherever you are, I hope that the year ahead will be one of prosperity and good health.

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Anniversary of the Mantell incident

2012-01-07T12:14:00.000-08:00

Today is the anniversary of what was once thought as a striking event in UFO phenomenon. January 7th, 1948 is the day on which Army pilot Thomas Mantell lost his life in pursuit of a UFO.

I have been reading The Truth About Flying Saucers by Aime Michel. Though published in the 1950s, Michel does an admirable job of objectively going through significant UFO reports and analyzing them. Often in the book, Michel attacks the UFO identifications proposed by Donald Menzel, which were oftentimes more ludicrous than the notion of alien visitation. Michel included an entire section on the Mantell incident. Sadly, I have misplaced my copy of the book and have chosen instead to use a report on the incident written by Kevin Randle (you can get a PDF version of the source in the "Notes" section of the Wikipedia article on Mantell.)

The incident unfolded as Godman Army Airfield (this was prior to the formal formation of the US Air Force) in Kentucky received a call from the State Police reporting a UFO over the area. The object was described as saucer shaped and moving at a steady speed. The information was brought to the base's commander and intelligence officer, Guy F. Hix. He was unable to identify the object. Meanwhile, sightings of the UFO kept pouring in from the region.

A flight of F-51 Mustangs was directed to pursue (this fighter aircraft is the same type as the venerable P-51 Mustang from World War II. After the war, the aircraft was given an "F" designation for "fighter" rather than "P" for "pursuer.") Capt. Thomas Mantell was the leader of this flight. He and his wingmen began an enormous climb to 15,000 feet after the object. Mantell radioed the tower that he had in sight an object that was "metallic and it is tremendous in size." One of Mantell's wingmen described the UFO as looking "like an ice cream cone," meaning it was rounded at the top and tapered to a point at the bottom. A red light at the top furthered the comparison, the "cherry" if you will.

At the time, the military required oxygen gear for any flying over 14,000 feet. One of the wingmen encountered a breakdown in his oxygen equipment and therefore returned to base. Other wingmen broke off the chase as the object continued to ascend. Though his own plane was not outfitted with oxygen equipment, Mantell continued to climb after the UFO. After half an hour total of pursuit, all radar and radio contact with Mantell was lost. Fearing the worst, a search immediately commenced for the pilot.

They found him. His body was inside the cockpit of his F-51 that crashed into a rural region about half a mile outside of Franklin, Kentucky...the town in which Mantell was born, coincidentally enough.

So what are we to make of this? Was this an early incident of aerial battle between our military and a UFO? If not, then what was it that Mantell chased to his eventual demise? Kevin Randall, along with UFO researchers such as Jerome Clark, seem to have it figured out and sadly, I must concur with them.

The object was likely a balloon, more specifically a Skyhook balloon. These were balloons launched to high altitudes to study meteorology, the atmosphere, and even the Sun and cosmic rays. Yeah yeah, I know...the old "weather balloon" explanation. Cliche not withstanding, such balloons were the culprits of many UFO sightings in the early days of the modern UFO era. When these balloons reached higher altitudes, the change in pressure tended to flatten them out a bit, giving them an almost saucer-like appearance or more specifically, a look akin to an "ice cream cone." Such balloons also had red beacon lights at their tops. So the most likely explanation is that Mantell pursued a balloon and pushed himself and his aircraft far beyond the flight envelope to where he passed out from low levels of oxygen. His plane then went into a power dive and crashed outside of Franklin.

This all makes for a tidy explanation and I agree that it is the most likely one. It does seem odd to me, however, that Hix, the head of base intelligence, could not identify the object as a Skyhook balloon. Neither, it would seem, could anyone else. I'm not saying that this equates to "alien UFO," especially not in light of the evidence. It's just interesting how even qualified experts can be fooled sometimes. Yet any way you look at it, it's still a sad story. Someone lost their life as a result.

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Reptoid or just dry skin? You make the call...

2012-01-06T20:28:00.000-08:00

Winter is typically a time when even the manliest among us (yes, even you Chris) develop dry skin.

Currently, it's a heatwave here in Chicago with temperatures on this, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, reaching 58 degrees. Nevertheless, skin does still tend to become white and flaky in the face of winter's bane.
Over at the blog Pop Trash Beauty, Tracey Whitney has written a post entitled Lizard Queen that instructs us...well, specifically the fairer gender...on how to treat and avoid dry skin during this season. But the title of the post gave me other ideas. Observe the following photograph...

Now I'm no dermatologist but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. I think it's pretty safe to say that this epidermis in question suffers from dry skin.

Or could there be another explanation????

What if David Icke is right? What if there really are reptilian aliens among us? I mean, look at that skin. Dry and scaly...might it be a reptoid molting?

Compare what we see here with the description of reptoid that I obtained straight from Reptoids.com...and if you can't trust a source like that on this matter, then just who can you trust?

"They have scaled skin that is usually greenish-brown in color."
Well I've never seen greenish-brown on someone but it's a fact that there's great variance in skin color among humans. Additionally, it seems that from the dry skin picture there are those who certainly have the "scaled" part down. Anyway, moving on.
"Reptilian beings have no body or facial hair. Occasionally, eyewitnesses observed reptilian beings with thin, fleshy spines under their chins. From a distance, the spines are often misidentified as hair. (Even today, one can find lizards with these same fleshy spines under their chins. They are called Bearded Lizards.)"
"Bearded Lizard." Sounds like such a great moniker or street contact name. "I'm here to see the Bearded Lizard. Yes, he is expecting me." Then here's the kicker...

"Some individuals, who had reported Draco contact, said that there were instanced when another Draco, with white powdery scales, approached and gave the others instructions."

A "Draco" is a supposed winged variant of the reptoid. Now doesn't that whole "white powdery scales" business just sound like someone with a bad case of xeroderma? I know that when I take my socks off during the winter, a snow of white powder falls from them in the form of dead, dry skin cells. It's like my shins and ankles have dandruff. But I'm not a reptoid. Honest. If I were, well...I just think things might be a little easier for me.

After all, the conspiracy theory goes that all of the world's elite are really reptoids in disguise. Even Queen Elizabeth. They all have secret underground cities from which they rule the world. Seriously, they want us all under their control. Pack your bags, arm yourselves, and find a safe place to be outside of the cities. Really, folks. This is no sprat matter. I've seen plenty of reptoid/lizard men in science fiction and they're not fun.

Bossk from The Empire Strikes Back. Check out the happening duds he's got. I think he looks quite well.

The Sleestaks from Land of the Lost.

He whose name shall not be spoken. (Isn't he just icky?)

In all seriousness, the idea of humanoid reptiles is not so far fetched. Not at all. Several paleontologists theorize that had the dinosaurs not gone extinct, "reptoids" are what we humans might have ended up being. Behold...

That bipedal saurian is based upon the dinosaur in the background, a troodon. Troodon had the largest brain of any known dinosaur and it likely had stereo vision like we do. Would this have been the way nature would have gone? There's no way to tell for certain. Could there have been a prehistoric reptilian race of humanoids that went underground prior to the K/T boundary extinction event and now plot to undermine we mammalians from dominance? There have been, however, numerous sightings and encounters reported with supposed reptoid humanoids. There have been abduction cases like that of Nebraska police officer Herbert Schirmer who claimed to have been taken aboard a UFO and experimented upon by reptoid aliens. There was the alleged Lizard Man of South Carolina reported in the summer of 1988 that attacked a young man's car.

Or is it just people with dry skin? And they're really grouchy about it?

Who can tell. But be vigilant, my friends. Be vigilant. Keep watching the skies...and always keep a bottle of Lubraderm handy.

Oh and for those of you reptoid alien enthusiasts out there...this was just meant as a joke. Nothing more. I'm not saying that you're wrong. I just have my doubts.

And as was done over at PTB, I'll close things out with a fascinating Duran Duran video that features a reptoid of its own.

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UFO or UAV?

2012-01-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

These are difficult times for UFO investigators.

Advancements in technology, particularly software packages such as Photoshop and Final Cut, have made it terribly easy to do a fair job of faking a UFO photograph or video. One of my Facebook friends demonstrated this fact just yesterday. He took a photograph of an airliner in the sky from the vantage point of someone looking up and watching it fly overhead. He then layered in a cluster of 1950s era saucers. Only upon closely inspecting the photo could one see the differences in lighting and pixelation that render it a hoax. Yes it has become much easier to fool people, much to the petty gasconade of the lantern-lighting crowd.

Now there is a new conundrum: UAV drones. Not to be confused with UFO. If you don't know by now, the acronym UAV stands for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Military and even law enforcement agencies get quite a bit of use out of them, handling missions ranging from intelligence gathering to outright combat. These aircraft are often triangular or batwinged in shape and they create very little noise. This is quite the cocktail formula for a "false positive" UFO report. More so than that, at least one MUFON investigator thinks that UAV drone flights might be a danger to aerospace in general.

Robert Powell from MUFON recently investigated two separate UFO sightings in the Dallas area of Texas last fall. Both sightings were of a formation of triangular shaped craft moving at speeds in excess of 200 mph. The most interesting feature about these UFOs was that they were illuminated solely by a diffusion of ground light as they traveled from north to south. That's right. No navigation lights.

“What bothers me is, if these are drones, they’re flying into civilian air space without navigational lights,” Powell says. “So far as I’ve been able to tell, there aren’t any procedures in place that address this issue.”

The article linked above discusses an incident over Afghanistan where an RQ-170 UAV drone collided in mid-air with a military cargo plane. Obviously not good.

I'm not ready to call UAV drones a bad thing. Not by a long shot. They've proven their worth in military application and they prevent having to place a human pilot or other operative in harm's way. But this is a new technology. There are going to be bugs that need working out. I, like MUFON, just hope that it doesn't take a serious airline disaster to bring this issue to the fore.

It's also rather peeving that there is now just one more thing in the skies for people to misinterpret as a UFO.

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Uploading minds: not just science fiction anymore

2012-01-04T21:01:00.000-08:00

Socrates at Singularity-1-on-1 has done an interview with Dr. Randal Koene, the neuroscientist who co-founded both Carbon Copies and theNeural Engineering Corporation of Massachusetts. You can watch or listen to the entire interview here. The topic of discussion was, among otherthings, the transhuman notion of uploading the human mind.

Transhuman enthusiasts have both anticipated and hoped forsuch an idea to come of age. Oftentimes it seemed that as cybernetics advanced, the technology to perform the actwas well on its way, however the necessary knowledge of just how the brainworks was lacking. Both requiredsubjects of knowledge and technology may be on their way towards equilibrium.

Koene’s goal is whole brain emulation, large scale andhigh-resolution representations and emulations of working neural pathways. As you might expect, there are severalethical and philosophical questions that come about when considering thisactivity, questions that are quite familiar to transhumanists. One of the areas that the interview venturedinto was if you upload your brain or create a copy of it in the form of anemulation and then make successive copies, who has more rights? The original or the copies? Is copy number one more entitled to lifethan copy number five?

Koene wisely answers this question with another question: isthe copy really you? He cites the workof Max More in saying that the answer lies in how abrupt the differences arebetween you and the copy. Additionally,Koene points out that when questions like these arise in the face of emergenttechnology, humans have a tendency to act as if we’ve never before faced suchthings. In fact, the questions aretypically very old ones only clothed as something new. The question of who lives and who dies has been around for a verylong time.

As gung-ho as I have been about cybernetic enhancement orplacing my mind in an indestructible…or at least very durable and not prone toillness…container, this is not entirely what I had in mind. A copy of myself doesn’t really do me muchgood from the way I see it. I want toextend and enhance myself, not duplicate it.

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Oh it's Iowa again

2012-01-03T19:58:00.000-08:00

It seems another election year is upon us. If you are politically active or if you just regard politics as a spectator sport, this will be like having year-long NFL playoffs.

That is if you can detach yourself enough to be entertained by the competition without realizing that one of these guys is going to be our next president. Yes, I'm including Obama in that crowd.
I am just completely unimpressed by this year's crop of would-be political leaders. It's all the same to me, like one big flesh-toned blur of bodies and voices wrapped in American flags and in a few cases waving crosses, crying out about how awful Obama is and how they never want to pay taxes again...or something like that. Yes they're pretty adept at bashing the current president. Oh if only they were so handy at offering their own solutions to the situations that Obama has supposedly wrecked. In the interest of fairness, he hasn't done the greatest job, IMHO, but I'm not hearing any of the others say what they would do differently. Except for perhaps Mitt Romney who would no doubt spend his White House years beaming his Ken doll grin and saying "it'd be much worse if Obama were here." Then maybe he'd "create jobs" by laying off thousands of people as he once did.

Yeah, we've got about another ten months of sniping back and forth, of political attack ads, and the average American asking themselves, "which one of these schmucks is going to lie to me the least?" Oh sure, you'll have your zealots at either end of the spectrum. You'll have Tea Party types who want the most conservative white man in the room and you'll have bongo drumming, pot-smoking types who will support Obama no matter what comes out of the Oval Office. But most of us will be making our selections based on what's offered us from the two major parties...two parties that both lie about and smear the other. Then there's religion. Oh yes, don't forget about religion. There is still that strong political audience that votes based on which candidate is the most Christian...or failing that, perhaps who is the least Muslim...and committing all manner of solecism in announcing their intent. So much for America being an all-inclusive entity of race, spirituality, and ideas.

As of right now, the returns from Iowa show Mitt Romney in a virtual tie with Rick Santorum and Ron Paul running up close behind them. A pity. Newt's actually come off as the sanest of the bunch recently. Did I just write that?
I suppose I'm just sour over the extreme likelihood that Romney will get the nomination. The man really shouldn't bother me. He is, as alluded to above, a politician just like Obama and all of the others. But there's something about this guy. Something extra phony, plastic, fake, and...well, Ken doll-like. It's almost like he's a Republican version of a Kardashian.*
Well settle in, folks. It's going to be a long year and we can't be certain what things will look like by the end of it all...except very much the same as they are now.

*For an interesting and hilarious take on the Kardashians, check out Wil Wheaton's appearance on The Nerdist Year in Review. He's a bit vitriolic for my tastes and makes a comparison that I wouldn't but he's essentially correct. Why bother trying to create art and to add to the world when you can make millions as a worthless reality star who is famous for...???????
Oh yeah that's right. A sex tape.

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Comments policy

2012-01-02T15:59:00.000-08:00

I am starting off the New Year with a post that I should have made long ago.

Last fall, I made it possible for readers to comment anonymously to posts. I have had to delete a few, albeit very few I am happy to report. What follows is my criteria for publishable comments:

1) I will delete any comments that are rude, crude, profane, ad hominem, condescending, or pejorative towards me or anyone else who comments on the blog. Think of it this way: you're in my house. You speak that way towards me or one of my friends or guests, I'm going to ask you to leave. Simple as that. What qualifies as such a comment? I'm afraid I'm going with the Supreme Court definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. Not fair? Neither is life. Not by a long stretch.

2) I will delete any comments that are rambling, incoherent, have weak concepts of spelling and grammar, or look like you've written them after your sixth beer. Think of it this way: I'm protecting you from embarrassing yourself.

3) I will delete any spam comments that are nothing more than a weak attempt to promote your blog, book, product, et. al. Self promotion is okay to a point but you must make a relevant contribution to the thread of the post. Any attempt to forcibly truss the subject at hand to your product that you are shilling will only make you look like a used car salesman.

4) I will delete any comments that are off-topic. For example, if the post and the discussion are centered around radar returns during the 1952 Washington D.C. UFO flap and you say, "nothing was ever caught on radar during the 2006 Chicago O'Hare sighting," then you will be deleted. Why? Here. Enjoy.

5) I will not delete a comment just because I don't agree with it. If you go through the nearly two years of posts on the blog, you will find comments by readers who don't see things the same way that I do. David is a great example of this. That's great. Part of looking for the answers to these sorts of things is open discussion. Disagree all you want, I just ask that you please do it respectfully.

6) I make the rules. This is not a democracy. The Internet is a deep and wide expanse of free speech (for now) for you to explore. If you don't like the way things are run in this microscopic corner of the World Wide Web, I encourage you to head elsewhere in search of what you seek.

So basically just respect me, respect each other, and let's have a good time. Thanks!

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Starcom

2012-01-01T16:26:00.000-08:00

Continuing my series on science fiction cartoons from the eighties, we will take a look at Starcom today.

I know this will come as a complete and utter shock, especially in light of previous features in this series, but Starcom...or more properly, Starcom: US Space Force...was based on a toyline. Perhaps even more shocking was that the main thrust of the series' plot was standard space opera: humanity moves out to colonize the galaxy and discovers that there are unfriendlies out there in the void. Namely, the alien conglomerate known as the Shadow Force led by Emperor Dark (didn't exactly expend a lot of thought on the names, did they?) The human characters were your typical square-jawed astronaut, starpilot, space marine types. The first episode of the series opens with a Shadow Empire spaceship (which looks remarkably like a B-2 stealth bomber before its time) dropping killer drones (a sight that is not unlike a Star Destroyer releasing Probots for those of you enjoying the comparisons) over an extrasolar planet. "Col. Dash" delivers his scientist sister and mother to a..ahem..."cloud city" amid herds of "air whales" and "kites" (airborne predators that seem to resemble manta rays). Actually, this sort of alien ecosystem is one that exobiologists consider to be somewhat probable. The cartoon even gives us about thirty seconds or so of Wild Kingdom-style footage of the cruel circle of life on this planet. But I digress...
One of the robotic killer drones shows up and butchers all of the creatures and then homes in on the hovering station to "destroy destroy destroy." Missiles strike the unarmed research station and things look grim for the scientists. You can see the whole thing here.

Yeah. Not breaking the bank around here in the originality department. Not exactly a startling amount of innovation, no.

But what is unique about this series and toyline is that they were sponsored and supported by The Young Astronauts' Council in an effort to get young people involved in the space program. This is laudable. Too bad the series was short lived and never really got the chance to create such inspiration. The toys themselves were very unique as well. My younger brother had a few of them. They each had a "MagnaLock" magnet that allowed each unit to connect to any other in the toyline. They were also motorized and yet required no batteries. Most impressive of all, a few of the vehicles actually looked like they could be real spacecraft. Sure you had your streamlined, fighter jet types, but many of them were more functional than anything. Case in point:

Well, I mean except for that big gun-thing at the front.

Starcom really wasn't a bad idea. Not at all. It might have succeeded along the lines of the Starship Troopers series with a bit more marketing push. Then again, this was the day of G.I. Joe and The Transformers. Kids didn't want "functional" or "educational" anywhere near their entertainment.

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Blog Year In Review

2011-12-31T16:18:00.000-08:00

Greetings, Strangers.

Even though I generally regard this holiday as just another day, I now tender my year-end review. So long, 2011. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

On UFOs:

The object seemed to suddenly shrink in size and its bright reflection was gone. It was difficult to make out in the sky, but I managed to follow it as it made a lazy drift towards the south. Then it grew to its original size once more and with it came the brilliant sheen. This cycle repeated itself at irregular intervals as the object continued to make a slow, seemingly aimless path in the sky. Were they trying to communicate with me? To impart mantic messages? Was I about to get butt-tubed? As the wind ran across the hairs of my arms and the object shrank once more, it suddenly came to me...

This was a Mylar balloon.

On Dreams:

Recently, Armando said that dreams are attempts by the subconscious to tell you something. Or a phrase to that effect. Makes me wonder about the popular notion that dreams are far more than "day residue" played back by the subconscious. Perhaps they are a sort of Matrix-like simulation, an arena where alternatives might be played out and problems sifted through. Whatever their nature, I certainly had a peculiar one this morning.

I was in a rural area, not at all dissimilar to where I spent my childhood in Indiana. I was standing next to a beer delivery truck on a gravel apron at a beverage distributor. My boss was giving me my delivery route; first Lake Station, then Deerfield, then out west to Rockford. I was also supposed to push insulated bags on the customers and make a sale if I could.

I like beer. I had three today while I watched the Bears play with intermittent switches over to the Cubs game. But this dream made me realize that Hell is an app that is customized to the user. For one thing, I cannot imagine having to drive a vehicle that large. I'm certain I would kill someone. Secondly, if you read the "You Know What Really Grinds My Gears?" post, then you know that I hate driving in general. I cannot conscience the idea of making a job out of it. Lastly, there seemed to be sales incorporated into my dream and that is the worst career I can think of next to...nothing. I cannot properly express to you the melancholy weight that I felt during this dream.

Then someone from my day job showed up, someone I respect very much. She took a cigarette out of her mouth and said, "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I need the money," I replied.

"You were going to be an English professor!" she said.

"That ship has already sailed."

"So what are you doing now?"

"Writing."

"About what?"

"UFOs, among other things."

"That's crazy. They don't exist and you're wasting your time."

On consciousness:

Lastly, Neppe made one key point: "The universe itself is conscious and intelligent and has an innate order to it."

That statement is critical. I believe that it gets at what a great many people term as "God." The universe is energy. From the stars burning nuclear fuel to the minor levels of electrical current in our bodies. It's all energy and we are linked in with it Consciousness itself might be a form of energy, an omnibus of our accumulated knowledge and experience and perhaps even things we aren't aware that we know yet. The "unknown knowns" as Donald Rumsfield might say. Oh I could keep going but I need meditate and reflect on all of this first. So fascinating...

On transhumanism:

I'd have to include my entire interview with Nikki Olson...but here's just a snippet:

5) How do you see Transhumanism affecting global issues such as poverty and instability in developing nations?

The best answer is that it already is. Though we don’t consider the technologies that play a role here, ‘Transhumanist’ technologies. Information technology, through artificial intelligence programs and automation, has reduced the cost of creating powerful software, and has ‘democratized’ knowledge. Education, and access to information, is probably the most valuable resource lacking in developing nations. It’s perhaps impossible, I think, to overestimate the difference that Internet access has made in these nations, and will continue to have, in nations plagued with economic and political struggles. Also, we are on our way to solving major health concerns that create enormous obstacles in poorer nations. There is good reason to be confident that through greater understanding of the human genome that we will be able to really tackle things like AIDs and malaria. Through the pursuit of advanced technology, which is a main goal of Transhumanists, we have breakthroughs daily that help to solve global issues. I see a very bright future for developing nations, actually, so long as we pursue these problems with the mentality that they can be solved, and we focus on technology as the way to solve them.

On space opera:

Why am I doing this? As I pointed out in an earlier post, I love Star Wars. I wouldn’t be doing any of this if not forthat film. I want to go back to thatjoy I felt in 1977 when first seeing that film, capturing “the good old stuff” asBrian Aldiss once called the subgenre. This is not being written on spec for publication or monetary gain, onlyfor fun. I wish only to move spaceshipsaround in my head, to explore strange, alien worlds in my imagination, to rootfor androids wishing for status as living things, and to wonder to superpowered beings. And why not? Even Aristotle recognized the need for “spectacle”in the Poetics, so how can entertainment be all that bad?

On the bird deaths of one year ago:

What do I think? Personally, I'm calling "b.s." on the fireworks theory. I also think that the death of a former Pentagon official such as Wheeler, an especially odd death it would seem, is highly suspect. But the bird die off need not be from any of these exotic, conspiratorial mechanics. It might have happened as the result of our own detrimental impact on the environment. That, if you ask me, is every bit as insidious as the other man-made possibilities. And what will we do? Probably watch as the skies and the oceans die, say "aw that's terrible," and then hop back into our SUVs to drive off. We're caretakers of this world. I wonder when or if we will ever come to realize that?

On April O'Neil:

With Asia Carrera retired and settling into married life (again), I'd say she's pretty much off the market for me. Who am I kidding? It's not like she was ever really on for me. Anyway, I've found a new adult film starlet who while not a member of Mensa has many geeky qualities. Her name is April O'Neil (that link is NSFW). Yes she took her screen name from the character on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She's also an enormous Doctor Who fan and attended San Diego Comic Con in cosplay. Also doesn't hurt that she's drop dead gorgeous.

Best wishes for happiness in 2012!

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Searching for life on Mars: a human timeline

2011-12-30T17:16:00.000-08:00

If I have learned one thing, it is that I truly love Infographics.

Anything that gives a visual breakdown of facts and data...it just does it for me. Just one more geeky thing about me, I suppose.
Yesterday, Geeks Are Sexy posted an infographic from NYU about the history of the search for life on Mars. You can see it for yourself at the link but here are what I found to be a few of the more interesting tidbits.
In a 1909 article in the New York Times, the legendary Nikola Telsa claimed that living beings on Mars were attempting to contact him through his wireless radio transmitters. By 1925, it was determined that what were thought to be alien transmissions was actually static noise from Earth's own radios. From there on out, the idea of life on Mars became a taboo subject in academia. Give Tesla a break. Even a genius doesn't get it right every time.
In 1971, Bowie releases "Life On Mars." Don't know if it's critical or germane to an astronomical timeline, but I like it.
The graph moves on through the Viking years, the photo of the now debunked "face," the 1996 microbial life controversy, and the prechlorates discovered a year ago. The "future explorations" section of the timeline talks about the ESA's effort to send a rover to the Red Planet by 2016 that will hopefully be able to dig deep enough to find residual DNA traces or perhaps even life itself in the water reservoirs beneath the surface. There is a proposed NASA mission for 2018 that would do much the same but that's all depending upon just how broke the good ol' U.S. of A. is by then.
And no talk of manned missions to Mars. I know, I know, we're a long way off from that but it just seems to me that if we stop talking about it there really will be no chance for a human expedition.

As I keep thinking about it, Mars doesn't sound all that bad...and I'm certain there are plenty of people who would like to send me there. Quiet. Could get a lot of writing done. No neighbors (or are there??). Yeah yeah, I know. Blah blah blah oxygen. Blah blah blah radiation shielding. Blah blah blah water.
Or then again, that last point might be resolved.

Now playing: "Brain Damage" by Pink Floyd.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Another witness to Roswell

2011-12-29T16:01:00.000-08:00

A week or so ago, Linda Moulton Howe was on Coast-to-Coast AM, discussing a great many things paranormal. The most interesting story to me was the one she told about Patrick Murphy.

Murphy's father, Francis Murphy, was stationed at the Roswell Airfield on that fateful day in July of 1947. Francis Murphy told his son that on the day in question, cargo planes and ambulances arrived on the base rapidly after the crash occurred. One hangar was sealed off and rendered "off limits" to all but the highest ranking officers. A security officer on the base told Francis Murphy that the crash debris consisted of "strange looking metal" and body parts that "did not belong to humans." Later that day, Francis would assist with the loading of crates into waiting planes. The crates were marked only with numbers and the single phrase, "Wright Patterson AFB."

On her web site Earthfiles, Ms. Moulton Howe did even more in-depth interview with Patrick Murphy. One of the more interesting points to be gleaned from this talk was that Francis Murphy reported that in the days following the famous Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting over Mt. Rainier in Washington (an event that happened only days before the crash at Roswell), several P-51 fighter planes were stationed at Roswell. As Patrick Murphy put it, "The P-51s were stationed there and were always armed. They weren't there just for training and those planes were well equipped for offensive, not just defensive capability."
Coincidence? Sure, it could be. I just find it an intriguing juxtaposition of events. Likewise interesting is that Patrick asserted that his father saw the original report sent out from Roswell, one clearly stating that bodies were recovered and that they were "not human." Additionally, Francis Murphy noted that cargo planes came and went from Roswell airfield for three days after the crash. From the amount of debris gathered, Francis guessed that the craft had to be about the size of a B-29.

So what are we to think from Patrick's interview? Sure, you can say that it's all secondhand and we are interpolating based upon that, but it's the man's father. Let's take a look at just who Francis Murphy was as described on the Earthfiles site:
"During World War II, he was promoted to Captain and was assigned to the 8th Army Air Corp with an intelligence unit on the front lines. He worked in North Africa desert wars and then was in Naples, Italy, until the war ended in 1945. Captain Murphy was wounded four times, received four purple hearts and a bronze star. From Italy, Capt. Murphy was assigned to Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico, in late 1945 through 1947 to early 1948."

Four purple hearts. One bronze star. Yeah, I'd say the guy had pretty good character would likely not be prone to confabulation. Also interesting was the fact that Patrick claimed that his father would willingly speak about almost all aspects of his service in World War II but he did not like talking about Roswell.
For my money, this ties in directly with the argument against those who allege, "With all the people involved, the government couldn't have kept a UFO crash at Roswell a secret." I'll forgo the Manhattan Project example and cite instead a story posted just a few days ago at UFO Iconoclast(s). For more than a decade, several men in Connecticut worked on one of the most successful spy satellite programs ever...all under the noses of their families and no one was ever the wiser. If told not to talk about it, many in the defense industry and in the service, especially at the time of Roswell, did not talk about it.

Many things can be kept secret...including alien life.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Alien Dawn by Colin Wilson

2011-12-28T17:52:00.000-08:00

It was not the Christmas gift that I had anticipated.

The flu, that is. Let me emphasize this to you one and all: get rest, drink fruit juice, get a flu shot, do whatever you can to prevent getting this virus because this thing is a son of a seabiscuit.
It took hold of me on Friday, just the barest of beachheads in the sinuses. By yesterday morning I was feverish, chilled to the bone, and a hacking up things that looked like they could get up and walk away on their own. I've been cranberry juiced, I've been souped, I've been blanketed, I've been Vitamin C'd, D'd, and B'd. I've been too exhausted to read and have settled for TV (thank goodness for M*A*S*H or I would have been left with a wasteland. You know, like that garbage they show on TLC for the daytime crowd?) In short, not fun.

What has been fun is this proper Christmas gift that I received, the book Alien Dawn by Colin Wilson. Wilson is the author of a book called The Outsider, one that will get a blog post in its own right in due time. In this book, however, Wilson takes on what seems to be everything and the paranormal kitchen sink. I'm talking alien encounters and abductions, UFOs, cryptids, poltergeists, time slips, out-of-body-experiences, and tales from the fusty annals of antiquity that have long been excluded from the academic canon. What intrigues me most about the prospect of this book is how Wilson seems to be seeking a "grand unified theory" of The Weird; a perspective that sees seemingly unrelated phenomena as parts of a greater mosaic whole. What's more, Wilson appears to be a skeptic at heart...or at least that's what it seems from the first few pages. I like that. That means he's running all of his research through the wringer and that's definitely something this author can appreciate.

I'll write more once I've actually read the entire book. First, however, I must get through The Truth About Flying Saucers and Above Black.
But now I'm going back to bed.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Christmas in London

2011-12-23T12:20:00.000-08:00

When you study The Weird, it helps to have a sense of history.

No one can move forward without a sense of where they have been. That, in fact, is not an insignificant factor in our modern problems. Most Americans appear to have the sense that the world was just cut out of whole cloth about 20 years ago. Universities are abandoning curricula such as history, literature, and other aspects of the Humanities and Arts. Real smart. Yes, why study history when you can just watch it repeat itself?
Whatever my future academic plans, I want history...as well as a few other fields of study...to be integrated into them. But I digress...

There is a block of text I read every year on Christmas Eve. It helps me to place the difficulties I face into perspective and to really analyze my supposed "unhappiness." The words were from the paragon of journalism himself, Edward R. Morrow, as he broadcast from London in the wee hours of Christmas Day, 1940. It was the height of the German attack on Britain. Here was how he described it:

"Christmas Day began in London nearly an hour ago. The church bells did not ring at midnight. When they ring again, it will be to announce invasion. And if they ring, the British are ready. Tonight, as on every other night, the rooftop watchers are peering out across the fantastic forest of London's chimney pots. The antiaircraft gunners stand ready. And all along the coast of this island, the observers revolve in their reclining chairs, listening for the sound of German planes. The fire fighters and the ambulance drivers are waiting, too. The blackout stretches from Birmingham to Bethlehem, but tonight over Britain the skies are clear.
This is not a merry Christmas in London. I heard that phrase only twice in the last three days."

Taking a few days off to spend with family. Wishing you a Happy/Merry Whateveryoubelievein.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Bats surviving despite mass die-off

2011-12-22T16:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks to John Shirley on Facebook for posting this story to his wall.

Millions of brown bats have died from what is known as "white nose syndrome."

The disease has only been on the radar scope of biologists for the past five years or so. Its origins are thought to be in a type of fungus but beyond that or as to how exactly it gets transmitted between bats is still unknown. So much of a concern is this that US officials have dictated a temporary end to caving for spelunkers in the affected areas, namely the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and Canada. What is known for certain is that the fungus-related disease destroys the membrane that allows bats to flap their wings and it has been responsible for a 98-99% drop in the brown bat population.

Now, pockets of surviving bat colonies have been located in Vermont and Pennsylvania. The hope is that these bats have somehow developed an adapted immunity to white nose syndrome.
“They need to be further evaluated to see if they’re exposed or carrying any of the disease,”one biologist said, but further commented that naturalists were thankful "there were survivors here at all. We’ve observed two trends, and one is that many or most of the little brown bat colonies are gone. There were hundreds, and now they’re gone.”

Already I detect the more narrow-minded and the tea bagger/fundy set (or are all of those one in the same?) yawning and saying, "So what? Why should we care? Why is tax money being spent on this?"
Ahhh that old chestnut. Let me see how simply I can put it. Bats eat bugs. If there are no bats, more bugs attack farmers' crops. Farmers then spend a ton more on pesticide. Not only does this drench our food in chemicals but it raises the cost of the food. After all, if farmers have to pay more to raise the crop, they need to recover the cost somewhere. There was even a study about this done for the journal Science. One colony of bats was found to have eaten 1.3 million insects that would have otherwise gone after crops. That's pretty cheap pesticide. Additionally, bugs carry disease. While the vast majority of the maladies are treatable, they are still nuisances that you just wouldn't want. So like many...or most...organisms, bats matter.
As a matter of fact, I have a family member who did her graduate work in environmental science. She worked at a firm where her job was to basically go into heavily wooded areas of Virginia and Pennsylvania to see if there were bat colonies present before an electric company could run power lines through the region. If there were bats, the deal was off.

You know what would really chafe my rear? If it were somehow determined that human activity was the cause of the white nose proliferation. Can't say it would surprise me, but it would annoy me.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Asking the musical question: Is there life on Mars?

2011-12-21T19:13:00.000-08:00

Scientists have always speculated that life could exist in the subterranean reaches of Mars. Now, a study seems to lend credence to that speculation and go it one better.

A paper has been published, detailing the findings of experiments conducted by the Australian National University. These studies found that over three percent of Mars is capable of sustaining life, underground life that is. By way of comparison, only one percent of the Earth is habitable. Adding to the case for either bacteria or simple organisms beneath the surface is the fact that Mars has vast deposits of ice in its interior. It might even have liquid water. This might even be, as the study suggests, on a planet-wide scale rather than just isolated pockets.

Sure, microorganisms and single-cell life isn’t all that exciting; except for the virtue of it being the only life we will have encountered off-planet. Officially, anyway. But I keep coming back to these “extremophiles” we continue to discover here on Earth. These are organisms living in locales like say, the icy reaches under Antarctica, that science previously deemed inhospitable. It’s not a far stretch to then imagine microorganisms in the harsh and unforgiving landscapes of space or a planet like Mars.

What of intelligent life? Granted the leap from microscopic life to intelligence is a vast one, yet I still wonder. Could an entire civilization of intelligent life exist beneath the surface of Mars? Unaware of the tiny probes landing above it?

And of course, how else would I close out this post?

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

It's too weird...call The Defenders

2011-12-20T19:58:00.000-08:00

Last week, Dorkland did a blog post about The Defenders. Inspired by this (don't let it get to your head, Chris), I wanted to offer a few thoughts on the book myself.

The Defenders harkens me back to the sunny days of my youth when the majority of what I read were Marvel Comics. It's probably been since 2000 or so since I regularly read anything Marvel and there was a long era of abstinence before that point as well. But I digress..

The comic book series concerned heroes who were outsiders with strong streaks of individuality. This stood in stark contrast to The Avengers, who were most of the publisher's flagship characters at the time. The Avengers had a headquarters, an organizational charter, government restrictions, and probably HR rules and a mission statement to boot. The Defenders had none of this. They were, as Marvel touted them, a "non-team" team of superheroes.

The first Defenders were formed in a crossover of Dr. Strange, the Hulk, and Namor the Sub-Mariner. The three came together to stand against the threat of extra-dimensional beings called The Undying Ones. The good guys won of course. In a subsequent story arc, Namor enlists the help of the Silver Surfer to fight a weather control experiment gone horribly awry. Silver Surfer would then become a semi-regular in the series. All of this can be found in Marvel's edition of Essential Defenders Vol. 1. Also contained in that volume is one of my favorite issues, Defenders #2, "Nightmare on Bald Mountain." It's a blatant homage to the work of H.P. Lovecraft and it's a true gem in comics.

Those I read in the Essential edition. My true indoctrination to the team came when the roster was Hulk, Nighthawk, Hellcat, Valkyrie, and the occasional visit from Dr. Strange. Since it was my first exposure, it also happens to be my favorite line-up and for no real better reason than that. Somewhere out there, I'm sure there is someone who favorites the New Defenders line-up, which was basically X-Factor before that team came to be.

Speaking of taste, the storylines and opponents in The Defenders were usually supernatural and occult in nature. In other words, things usually got really weird really fast. That not being my prime interest in comics, I was not a regular buyer of the book. I would pick it up whenever a) the cover grabbed me and b) there was not much else I wanted to buy with my comics allowance. That said, it was typically a fun ride, even if I could only take it in small doses, and compared to Marvel's output of the past few decades, those issues were absolutely lucent.

Marvel has recently relaunched a Defenders title. Dorkland says it keeps the feel of the original series. And it features Iron Fist as a team member. Bonus! Still, I just can't bring myself to rush off to the comics store and buy it. Maybe one day but not too soon. For now, I'm content with my classic issues, reliving the writing of Roy Thomas and Steve Gerber.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Moon Base Newt

2011-12-19T20:20:00.000-08:00

A most interesting sparring point arose in the recent debateof Republican presidential hopefuls.

When Mitt Romney was asked what the biggest difference wasbetween him and Newt Gingrich, Romney replied, “We could start with his idea tohave a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon. I’m not in favor ofspending that kind of money to do that.”

Then, a stunningly lucid and intelligent Gingrich replied,“I’m happy to defend the idea that America should be in space and should be there in an aggressive, entrepreneurial way.”

So help me, the man is right. In fact, George W. Bush ordered NASA to begin planning a MoonBase, gave them a timeline and a deadline, and then authorized the funding forit. Obama trashed this entire plan,claiming that space exploration would best be left to the private sector fromnow on. He might have a point. Then again, so does Gingrich. He is calling for the same corporatizationof space and if businesses can get the job done, why not?

The Moon has trillions of dollars worth of minerals justwaiting to be mined. I’m talking aboutores such as gold, platinum, iron, and so forth. Nuclear-powered robots could be sent to the lunar surface first,establishing the groundwork for a permanent habitat next to a crater that gets perpetualsunlight. The Chinese have alreadylocated such an area on The Moon. Bythe time astronauts arrive they would be able to walk into the beginnings of anactual lunar base. Robots would thenbegin to tunnel into the surface of The Moon in order to mine minerals to sendback to Earth. As mining progresses,the Moon Base may progress into a full-on lunar colony, complete with solarpower plants and inflatable domes for growing food. After this outpost is established, an ectype of the colony could then be placed on Mars.

Of course everyone usually whines about the cost at thispoint. In doing so, they neglect thenumber of jobs such a venture would create and how much money could be made onthe resources extracted from The Moon. Sincethere no loner appears to be any kind of vision for space in the White House, perhapswe will one day see a corporation or another private firm display mondo amountsof guts and go forth with this enterprise.

And if they don’t, it seems like the Chinese will be happyto do it for us.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

A noun, a verb, and 9/11...

2011-12-18T14:42:00.000-08:00

Just a while back, I mentioned Alex Jones in a post about NDAA legislation.

Turns out the vote was indeed a factual event, even though I still debate and contest the alleged ramifications. Anhyoo, my first introduction to Jones was through various 9/11 conspiracy theories. It was an inside job, there were far more nefarious and Luciferian forces at work, so on and so forth. One of the aspects of 9/11 that Jones along with several other researchers have pointed out is the fact that Anwar al-Awlaki seemed awfully snuggly with the U.S. government even while the Feds were calling him the most wanted man in the world after Osama bin Laden. In fact, an FBI agent who interviewed al-Awlaki after the 9/11 attacks said that no one knew the story and details behind 9/11 better than al-Awlaki. This casts a bit more shadow on the fact that al-Awlaki was killed by a U.S. Reaper drone last September. Combining that with my personal belief that no plane ever struck the Pentagon on 9/11, I thought that I should head over to Jones' site and maybe even listen in on a bit of his radio program.

Seems that Jones' current preaching is that we are facing a military takeover of our nation. The approval of NDAA was just the beginning. Next will come total censorship of the Internet and then World War III. As war breaks out, Obama will then suspend the constitution and rule by decree. Hmmm. Seems to me I heard the same thing a few years back, only it wasn't from Alex Jones and it was about George W. Bush. Scrolling along through his site, I saw that Jones claims "Proof! The Feds did the Oklahoma City bombing!" Also, he has a review of the magnificent film, A Clockwork Orange, which he calls a portrayal of "a degenerate society that the nanny government tries to literally reprogram in order to control it." An apt, even if slightly skewed summary. I'm going to check out the entire review when I'm done here on the blog.

Then it hit me. I have seen Alex Jones before. It was on an episode of Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura. Jones brought Jesse "The Body" to the edge of a CDC compound in order to show the Governor that the evil Fed agency was stockpiling caskets. What could they possibly have in mind? You can imagine what Jones and Ventura thought, it was related to plans of FEMA concentration camps and martial law. Personally, I think that the CDC is exercising due diligence in preparing for...God forbid...an epidemic that would result in mass fatalities. But that's just me.

I think that every presidential administration has its pockets of opponents who believe that the man in charge is orchestrating a master plan to subjugate the American people. I can't say that they're wrong. Tons of things go on without our knowledge, the tale of 9/11 being only one cog in a vaster machine. No, I don't believe that we were told the entire story of 9/11 and doubt that we will ever know the full truth (again, no plane ever hit the Pentagon.) Is it to the ends that Alex Jones is alleging? I can't say that he's wrong.

Even though I kinda think that he is.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Apparently, we need stupid people to vote

2011-12-17T10:39:00.000-08:00

I have often recited this quote from Thomas Jefferson, my favorite Founding Father: "Democracy requires two things, education and participation."
Turns out it might only be half right.

A new study from the journal Science says that the uninformed are "vital for democracy." They help to achieve consensus.
When uninformed, people tend to side with the majority. This has the affect of "diluting the minority factions that would otherwise dominate everyone else."

"They prevent deadlock and fragmentation because the strength of an opinion no longer matters - it comes down to numbers," said Iain Couzin, the lead researcher on the study. "You can imagine this being a good or bad thing."

I'll say. It also seems as if this sway is dependent upon where we're at in the political process. A loud minority movement can influence the more politically-inclined among us during times of primaries, mid-term elections, and off-year elections. In bigger, more popular elections such as a presidential year, those voices are watered down in the procellous stream of white noise as less passionate voters take part in the process.

Certainly sounds like a mixed bag to me. When "groupthink" and "I'll just follow the crowd so I'm not left out of the herd" takes over, that's when you start getting people who base their vote not on a candidate's policies but on their personal life and non sequiturs such as how they tie their ties. "Yes. That's it. W would make a great president." In fact, I remember someone once saying to me, "I like baseball and George W. Bush used to own a baseball team so I guess I'll vote for him."

Ahhh democracy. I'll close with another quote, this time from C. Montgomery Burns:

"This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election,and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That'sdemocracy for you."

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Cyber attacks

2011-12-16T20:13:00.000-08:00

This is one of those nights where my concentration is about as thin as a playing card. But I try to post as close to daily as I can, so I'm here for you anyway.

Last night's Coast-to-Coast AM was all about cyber attacks. That is to say, the use of computer hacking and viruses in a militaristic manner, taking out the various aspects of our day-to-day lives that are governed by computers...which is pretty much everything.
Seriously. The electrical grid that allows you access to the Internet (yeah, yeah, at one point or another you're going to have to recharge your battery), the water that comes out of your faucet and flushes your toilet, the sewage treatment systems that take care of our shit (literally), and so on and so forth all the live long day.

Author and cyber security consultant Andrew Colarik was the guest on the program. He had this to say on the subject of cyber attacks:
"We're getting, literally, thousands of attacks on all kinds of our infrastructure from all over the world," he declared, noting that the problem is under reported because it is so commonplace.
He went on to urge the nation to have an "open discussion" on the issue of cyber attacks. For example, the United States has yet to define what constitutes an "act of war" in terms of cyber strikes. If a terrorist hacks someone's identity and uses it to enter the U.S. illegally an act of war? That's open for discussion.

I once brought up the concept of cyber warfare in the company of Kip Haggis. He told me, "I'm not worried about a bunch of terrorists hanging out in a cave in Afghanistan doing something like that." Oh Kip. Good luck improving your critical thinking skills and abrading the barnacles from your mind. The kind of attacks that Mr. Colarik has been talking about can be done with a laptop from say, a hotel room in Switzerland. That's just a location I pulled out of thin air but the truth could be far more banal than that. More importantly, he is quite correct in pointing out that these kinds of cyber attacks are going on all the time and have been for many years.

During the first Gulf War, military intelligence released a virus into the defense computer systems of Iraq. In The Hacker Crackdown, author Bruce Sterling writes about ace hackers that after being busted and charged were summarily swept into jobs inside the national security matrix. Just recently, the Stuxnet computer virus damaged the centrifuge systems of Iran's nuclear program. In what might be seen as a response, an Iranian electronic warfare engineer claims that Iran hacked the RQ-170 UAV drone that landed in that nation's custody. The Iranians supposedly "spoofed" the drone into landing where they wanted it to by taking over its GPS system, making it think it was landing in Afghanistan, not Iran.

Welcome to the bold new frontier. The next war will be conducted by salvos and volleys of zeroes and ones.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

William Burroughs guest-reviews at Board Game Geek

2011-12-15T19:05:00.000-08:00

Board Game Geek is a site for people who still prefer their gaming to be done on a table top with dice and bereft of controllers or consoles.

I can understand that. I'm a big fan of Axis & Allies and even its bastard cousin, Fortress America. And that's not even even going into all of the tabletop RPGs I've played and loved over the years.
Now, an enterprising member of the Board Game Geek forum has developed a set of reviews for the best games of December 2011...only he has done so via the cut-up method.
You can find out more about this literary technique at my long-suffering sister blog, Why Did I Write That? Suffice to say that it is a method made popular by the venerable William S. Burroughs (read: literary god) even though he learned it from Brion Gysin. In the employment of this method, one or two texts are cut apart and the words then rearranged to create an entirely new literary text. In the words of Burroughs, "when you cut into the future, the truth leaks out." What follows is...I can almost guarantee you...the veriest, utmost collection of Burroughs-styled game reviews anywhere on the Internets. We'll start off with the full review for the game Earth Reborn just to set the mood:

"the to and a game of i is this it in with but for that you are play my rules scenario more like have be on one as so not scenarios all played can very time really great just only up it's first an me much if games there will fun get - has out some too or star good was rating i'm don't playing when through than from do best board even system into theme tactical at think they i've also what way we well how which combat still set about after space would want player setup by components"

I'll say. Here's a choice bit from the game Dominant Species: "many area by turn lot hours after has bit placement."
The truth leaks out indeed.
But wait. It gets better. This is quite a line from a review of Alien Frontiers: "don't think control."
That, to me, is so cool. That statement is probably both true and accurate in almost any way you look at it.
And what of the game Civilization? Let's see: "civilization be not games great on - very if players was good more."
How about Combat Commander: Europe? Check this out, Bernard: "love first other think war." Were truer words ever spoken?
Mansions of Madness: "horror time fun." Most succinct.
Caylus: "some think what strategy." That's usually me in these games. Here's another one for you, Bernard...
Advanced Squad Leader: "play asl have with not all my time." Sure you don't.
Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries "more ticket play you like ride." Sounds simple enough to me.
And for Carcassonne: "enjoy light best bit wife." That's funny. I've never known a wife to play any of these kinds of games. I must not have hung out in the right circles.

Personally, I'm just glad to see someone invoking Burroughs and keeping the cut-up technique alive and well. I'm sure that Burroughs would have wanted it that way.

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2012: Much ado about nothing

2011-12-14T17:40:00.000-08:00

Fear not, everybody. Everything's gonna be okay.

Another New Year is fast approaching. Just around the corner as a matter of fact. Except this one has a more ominous ring to it. It's 2012, the year that it all comes to an end or so they say. Armageddon. The Apocalypse. Stuff hitting the fan. I never finished eating all my Spam from Y2K so I guess it's a good thing I still have it around.
But those fine folks at NASA (and if you can't trust them who can you trust?) have let us know that there is absolutely no need to fear the end of the world on December 21st, 2012. So says an article posted recently on Space.com. And to think that it all started with the ancient Mayan calendar.

"The short-count was 52 of our years, and the long-count was 5,125 years long. This long-count calendar is coming to an end on Dec. 21," said astronomer Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Of course, a new calendar would start on Dec. 22. It would be like saying that our calendar ends Dec. 31, and that's the end of time, the end of days, that's it, no regard for how a new cycle would begin. The Maya never predicted the end of the world occurred at that time."

Yeomans went on to systematically dismantle every popular scenario for a 2012 doomsday next December. Will an unprecedented planetary alignment cause wackiness in space? Well, there is no alignment on December 21st, 2012 and even if there were one, its the gravitational effects of The Moon and The Sun that have any effect on us. The other planets in our solar system and their rotations and position have a negligible influence. Solar storms? Streams of radioactive particles released from solar eruptions and hurled straight towards our Big Blue Marble? Well, there's a bit of truth to that scenario.

We are heading into a period of strong solar activity. Such solar flares may be powerful enough to knock out electrical power in isolated areas for several days or even in larger grids for a short period. That's about it, though. Nothing, as Yeomans states in the article, that will cause "lasting damage." Wait, what about "pole shift?" Well, it seems that the magnetic poles of a planet really can shift...over a period of 500,000 years. If ours did shift, our Moon would keep us stabilized. The most we'd have to do is change our compasses.

But what about "Planet X?" Um...let's just say it's not looking too likely.

So if you want to cleave towards the apocalyptic theories and get into a bunker on December 20th, 2012, awaiting the end of the world, that's cool. Just say you'll listen to The Cure's "Burn" while you're hunkering down with your Spam...and try not to be too disappointed when the Sun really does rise the following morning. Yes, somewhere the ancient Mayans are probably laughing at us all yet one of their predictions really did come to pass: the movie 2012 was every bit as bad as they predicted it would be.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

How about a chip for that brain?

2011-12-13T20:28:00.000-08:00

It appears that future of 2020 is when it all changes.

At least that's the year that New York Times readers selected in this article. That's when we begin to see really rapid changes in the affects of technology on our lives. Then in just 65 years from now, we will be able to directly interface our brains with the Internet. Supporters of the Singularity hypothesis have been saying this for quite a while now but it seems that finally the mainstream is beginning to awaken to this notion. What about the near future? Sure, direct interface between my brain and the Internet would be about as great as a guy could hope for, but I probably won't make it another 65 years to have it happen. What do readers, both experts and laymen, predict for our lives in the more immediate sense?

One reader predicted that by 2013, electronic ink, flatscreen display technology that mimics ink on paper, would be the new "it" item. That writing has been on the wall, no pun intended, for the publishing industry for quite a while now.

Another prognostication, this time from an M.I.T. professor of computer science, was that science publications would finally become an online process by 2019. By 2016, an exec at Orange Labs predicts that people will be surrounded by a "halo of data." By pressing a button, someone could get an augmented reality display about you, detailing personal descriptions of you.

Scared? I'm certain Kip Haggis is. So is another NYT reader, who asserts that due to human neural interface with the Net and electronics integrated into our bodies, more people will die in 2170 from computer viruses than actual viruses. That's ok. If biology (or technology) would somehow permit me, I would stick around until 2058 when "Enhanced intelligence will be available to most people through a combination of nanotechnology and embedded processors." Cybernetic intelligence? Be still my fiery synapses. Allow me to be at the front of the cortege when those handy implants get doled out. Although right now, I'd settle for implants that would permit me to never have to eat or sleep again.

Although I'm sure that Kevin Warwick may be approaching this news with a weary, "been there, done that" demeanor. He is the British university professor who had implants placed into his arm that directly interface with his nervous system. Read outs of the electrical impulses in his body can be taken from the devices in his arm. There those who have even called Warwick "the first cyborg." Warwick is among those visionaries who see transhumanism leading towards astonishing abilities such as enhanced memory and intelligence and maybe even x-ray vision. He led the way for these advances with his own vision, enthusiasm, and sacrifice.

Maybe we should just call all future implant interfaces "Warwick chips."

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Robopocalypse

2011-12-12T19:42:00.000-08:00

When I first heard about Daniel H. Wilson’s book, Robopocalypse,I steered away from it.

I knew that it had made several different bestseller listsbut that is seldom a selling point for me. The title, to my ears anyway, was a bit off-putting in its manufactured glitziness and Wilson is also the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, one of those pseudo-guides you see such as (and I can't remember exact titles) "How to Fight Zombies," "How to Be an Action Star," and "How to Vote Republican" so that didn't entice me any further. Not to mention the fact that I really wasn’t interested in reading any more neo-Luddite,anti-transhumanism, Kip Haggis-loving, World War Z-ripping off, Terminator-like“felonious machines rise up to destroy humanity” pap. Then this post appeared on the Singularity Weblog that took apair of forceps to my closed mind.

The book has been optioned by Steven Spielberg and will bereleased as a movie in 2013. Again,this is not necessarily a selling point for me but the description of Robopocalypsein the post did pique my interest. Thebook’s main character is Archos, a cybernetic AI that kills its creator andstarts a global war against humanity. But the objective of this crusade is not to destroy humanity. Archos recognizes value in nature and inlife itself. Apparently, Archos stateson numerous occasions that humanity must and will survive thewar. “I will burn your civilization downto light your way forward,” he says.

I don’t know about you, but that last quote really gotme. I’d like to think that I now have abetter understanding of where Wilson was coming from in writing this book. Archos seems to seek a coexistence betweenhumans and robots, a birth of a new order of living. That’s a fresh take on a tired concept in my opinion and wellworth reading. I’m adding the book tomy already mammoth reading list but I do have one thing going for me. The movie won’t be out for another coupleyears so that gives me time to get the story read before I allow anyone else’svision of it to influence my perceptions.

Also, it sounds like Socrates is still trying to get DanielH. Wilson for a Singularity 1-on-1 interview on the subject. Here’s to hoping.

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Robotix

2011-12-11T11:38:00.001-08:00

Who puts the future in your hand?

Robotix!

Who gives you robots to command?

Robotix!

-ad copy for the toys/show.

In a continuing series on science fiction cartoons of my youth, I bring you Robotix.

Robotix was a Sunbow production, those same visionaries who brought us G.I. Joe and Transformers. Like those two aforementioned franchises, Robotix was likewise a toy line.

The animated series appeared as part of Super Sunday, a cartoon that, as the name implies, appeared on Sunday mornings. The series also gave us The Inhumanoids, which I blogged about previously. Unlike that cartoon, I seldom got to see Robotix as with it being Sunday morning, my father whisked me off to church before it aired. My younger brother, however, was spared that fate (why, I have no idea) and would later fill me in on the plot details...if you could call them that.

The series began as a spaceship under the command of one Exeter Galaxon (gotta love that name) is being pursued by an enemy battlecruiser. Badly damaged, the hounded ship crash lands on the planet Skalorr. The crew survives, only to find themselves on a ruined planet...but not an uninhabited one. Giant robots rise up from the ground, opposing factions named Autobots and Decep...I mean Protectons and Terrakors. Battle ensues and the evil Terrakors are driven off.

The Protectons befriend the stranded crew and begin to help them repair their ship. In the course of this, a few members of the human star travelers learn that they can interface with the giant robots, thereby enhancing the mech's abilities. The Terrakors attack once more and the humans interface to the Protecton's aid. Bront, the Protecton's resident asskicker, leads the counter-attack and once more drives the bad guys off. However, all is not well.

Argus, leader of the Protectons and romantic interest of Narra (that's right. Robots gettin' it on) is a prisoner of the Terrakors. With Captain Galaxon as his pilot, Bront leads the Protectons on a rescue mission to free Argus. Argus then brings the Protectons and their allied humans to an underground base once thought to be lost. There, Compucore, Skalorr's central intelligence computer (something like Marvel's ISAAC on Titan), relays the history of the planet.

Three million years ago, the Protectons and the Terrakors were once organic beings, rather reptilian in appearance (of course. A staple of pulpy science fiction.) Both sides were forced to cooperate as their sun threatened to go nova. A Terrakor named Nemesis (again, of course) had other designs. He planned to use Compucore to launch his own ship, the Terrastar. This spaceship would be loaded by a select few chosen by him. Compucore instead suggested that the entire population be preserved in stasis tubes beneath the planet's surface. Needless to say, that was the option that won out.

Yet a deadly radiation leak compromised the physical forms of the people. Compucore was forced to transfer their essences into the Robotix. Once the radiation levels returned to normal (though how the hell the planet survived the supernova is anybody's guess), Compucore released the robots upon the surface.

This information leads to a schism within Galaxon's crew. A few of them break off with a "let's blow this joint" attitude and begin to seek out the Terrastar to do so. In order to find this ship, they offer their interface services to the Terrakors.

I remember that my brother had the toys as well. He had Argus and a Captain Exeter Galaxon action figure with a cool spacesuit. He had the evil Tyrannix and a figure called Gaxon who had a flamethrower. That's right. A flamethrower. The robots themselves had an intriguing Lego-like quality to them. There was actual building involved in their creation and they had actual motorized parts. It was a kids primer for real robotics. Yet neither I nor my brother went into that field. Trust me, if I had, I wouldn't be struggling like I am today.

Like any other robots worth their salt in the 1980s, the Robotix could transform in vehicles with wheels and wings and a few of the Protectons even had gruff, one-sentence characters like the Dinobots. Yet aside from all of this I must admit. The series is rather unmemorable.

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Book review--Cryptonomicon

2011-12-10T17:32:00.001-08:00

CRYPTONOMICON by Neal Stephenson

During World War II, Lawrence Waterhouse is assigned to military Detachment 2702 commanded by Marine Bobby Shaftoe. Their mission is to keep the Nazis from learning that the Allies have broken the infamous Enigma code. This involves a mathematical cat-and-mouse game between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, all while Shaftoe sees to the combat action.

In modern times, the grandson of Waterhouse and the granddaughter of Shaftoe are involved in another form of cryptography in The Philippines. Waterhouse is a hacker, working with his partner to create a "data haven" on a Pacific island while also attempting to salvage a sunken Nazi U-boat that might have the key to the unbreakable code known as Arethusa...and the pathway to conspiracy and fortune.

To read this book is a mammoth undertaking. I am embarrassed to admit just how long it took to me to complete this tome. In my defense, I only have time to read maybe three pages or so every night before passing out, so do dedicate longer blocks of time to reading the book if you wish to finish it with any amount of expediency. Cryptonomicon will demand patience...and will never fail to reward it.

This not science fiction per se but rather a text of post-cyberpunk fiction. More than that, it is a fine example of postmodern fiction. Stephenson manages to deftly weave in between two intertwining plot lines that take place in entirely different eras, even at times branching off into two or three subplots, while never once losing the reader. One moment you'll be learning about life on a Nazi U-boat, the next you'll be hacking C++ code, and Stephenson's acumen will make it all seem natural. There are numerous digressions, such as a discourse on the perfect way in which to eat cereal or exactly how a spider constructs its web and I do hope you enjoy mathematics because there are ample page lengths of number theory. Each one of these digressions, while tedious at times, serves a greater purpose. If read through the prism of the books main theme, cryptography, these digressions become apparently purposeful and even necessary. Plus if you're the type of reader who disdains "all that talking," there will eventually be kickass military action to whet your appetite. Real-life people are characters within the narrative. Appearances by Ronald Reagan, Douglas MacArthur, Winston Churchill, and especially Alan Turing only add to the pleasurable experience of this book. As I said, Stephenson's lengthy novel may seem as a sort of intellectual adytum at first blush, but press on. You will be glad that you did.

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What sets us apart

2011-12-09T18:49:00.001-08:00

Among the many strange subjects I explore, I can think ofnone stranger than human beings themselves. Why do we do the catastrophic things that we do? As the venerable Charles M. Schulz once saidthrough one of his characters, “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

Today in The New York Times, I read about an art exhibitthat touches on that notion. We, as aspecies, are afraid of many things but I’m willing to bet that what we fear themost is each other. I know that I forone would place “people” at the very top of my stack of things to fear and bedisgusted by. So I do things to keepmyself protected and the rest of the population at bay. Multimedia artist Muntadas has beenexploring this sort of action for decades now through photography andillustration in a number of different art installations. A retrospective exhibit of pieces of hisartwork is now ongoing at The Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City. As the author of the link above says:

“In the show’s most complicated project Mr. Muntadas examinesa modern architectural form with ancient antecedents: the stadium. It includesa video montage of exuberant and violent soccer fans; a video projection ofsoccer players celebrating after scoring goals; and a set of triptychs, eachwith photographs of a stadium, spectators and fences, seats, railings and otherdevices by which crowds are organized and controlled. This is one way thatenormous, exhilarating and sometimes destabilizing human energy is divertedinto, and contained by, an integrated structure of architecture and programmedentertainment.”

The reviewer who wrote the article seems lukewarm onMuntadas’ work, claiming it to be too restrained in matters of creativity andemotion and perhaps too academic in a vein of Michel Foucault (as Pa Nichols oncesaid, “Every academic cites Foucault but nobody knows what the heck he’ssaying.”) I tend to disregard reviews,allowing myself to make up my own mind. That said, one can’t very “unread” what has been read so the opinion isstill rattling about my cobwebbed brain when viewing or reading the piece inquestion. Despite the NYT’s ambivalentviewpoint, I would still be very interest to see this exhibit of art.

After all, Muntadas seems to be delving into an importantsubject, the notion of social isolation on scales both singular and global, a thesis to which I feel a personal connection. That alone would worth the price of admission…that is, if I couldget to New York.

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Pendulum waves

2011-12-08T19:05:00.001-08:00

I came across the video above and thought it was cool enough to merit posting.

It's from Harvard Natural Science Lecture Demonstrations. What you'll see in the video is a series of 15 different pendulums of increasing lengths. These pendulums are set into motion and once that happens, intriguing geometric patterns begin to form within the motion. As they say on the Harvard site: "One might call this kinetic art and the choreography of thedance of the pendulums is stunning!"

Indeed it is. What accounts for it? Well, precise adjustments in pendulum lengths to create specific quantities of oscillations for each pendulum. Ok, even I'm not sure what I just said but I sorta get it. Please refer to the link above for a more detailed explanation, otherwise you'll just be here with me, unable to see the forest for the copse.

I find this experiment interesting on a number of levels. I have always had a difficult time with math and to this day I struggle to perform even basic addition. Math is therefore an enigma to me, something as mysterious in my reckoning as anything else I've discussed on this blog. There is also real beauty in the discipline of mathematics. This pendulum video proves it. There is...it seems to me, anyway...a methodical pattern in nature, an expression of mathematics that is almost a form of communication for our consciousness.

Just who or what is doing the communicating is what I am uncertain of...

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Mystery object near Mercury

2011-12-07T19:38:00.001-08:00

I want to give out props for tonight's post to the people who brought this story to my attention. Mike Smith at Prairie Independent Media and my old college buddy, Ski...thanks for the heads up!

Two, that's right two, separate NASA satellites caught a weird image near the Sun. Video of a coronal mass ejection (CME), bursts of radiation and magnetism that are hurled outward along with plasma ejecta from explosions on the surface of the Sun, seems to reveal something hidden. As the CME makes its way towards Mercury, it appears to unveil an enormous, angular object or perhaps two joined objects. You can click the link to check out the video but most observers are describing the scene as being similar to when a Klingon warship de-cloaks on Star Trek whether willingly or by...coincidentally enough...exposure to stellar radiation. Bingo bango you got yourself a UFO.

As I'm sure you're already thinking, there is another explanation for this. It all has to do with camera optics and video artifacts. What we're seeing on the video as a "de-cloaked" spacecraft is really leftover images of where the planet Mercury had been on the previous day. Here's how Space.com puts it:

"To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space — caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background — the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible. They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day. Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME. The remaining light is then enhanced.

This works great for objects far off in the distance, such as stars, which don't move much relative to the sun. But it gets a little trickier when trying to account for nearer objects, particularly moving ones, like planets.

"When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image," [Nathan] Rich [of the US Naval Research Laboratory] wrote in an email."

This make for a likely and tidy explanation. The sole reservation that I have with that rationale is the sharp and angular nature of the image, making it look very artificial. That, however, is nowhere near enough suspicion to permit me to start crying "UFO," especially since it would have to be a UFO almost the size of Mercury. While I don't discount the possibility of such craft existing, something about it just seems unlikely to me.

Which is too bad. This would have made for a great story. After all, what better place to acquire a bona fide image of a UFO than out in space? Oh well, there's still hope. Linda Moulton Howe at Earthfiles recently grilled Dr. Lance Benner at NASA's JPL as to just why images taken of asteroid YU55 on its close approach to Earth have not been made available to the public yet. Dr. Benner said that there's a procedure involved, there's terabytes of data to go through, yadda yadda pretty much what you might expect. Linda Moulton Howe also quoted Benner from a NASA press release where he says, "“The radar animation reveals a number of puzzling structures on the surface that we don't yet understand. To date, we've seen less than one-half of the surface, so we expect more surprises.” Two of the surprises have been a bulging equator and a nearly 100-foot-high “sharp, pointy hill” unlike any structure ever seen before on asteroids."

This of course has lead to Internet speculation that YU55 is really just an enormous UFO. Are there artificial structures on the surface of the asteroid? Time will tell on that one.

For other UFO goodness, please check out the new book by last night's Coast-to-Coast AM guest, writer Mack Maloney. He has a new book called UFOs in Wartime that appears to be chock full of glorious illustrations just like this gem:

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Your Earth in 2080

2011-12-06T16:53:00.001-08:00

A picture of the exact future of 2080 is still uncertain. One thing it is generally agreed upon is that the average temperature will be about two degrees warmer around the world.

Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Well, the fine folks at New Scientist have averaged out a few thousand models and come up with what a world warmer by two degrees will be like.

One of the first major alterations will be the frequency of extreme weather. Everything from cyclones in Southeast Asia to more killer tornadoes and storms in the U.S. South and Midwest. Yeah, we here in states like Illinois, Indiana, and Kansas know all about what warm, humid air tends to bring in the spring and the summer. There's also going to be a toll taken on agriculture worldwide. Crops that humans depend upon heavily, such as wheat and rice, will fail more often than not. Scientists are working on future varieties of these staples that can survive in higher heat, but that kind of breakthrough is going to take time. Withered crops will mean higher food prices and fewer supplies. This could lead to civil unrest, especially in lesser developed regions where food is already a scarcity.

Health issues are also a concern. Heatstroke of the kind seen by hundreds of victims in recent heatwaves across France and Russia are harbingers of what we can expect. There are those who believe that infectious disease will be more widespread. The thinking behind this is that with warmer temperatures and wetter conditions from rain and from the rise in sea level that tropical diseases will become more prevalent. While a rise in sea level does tend to follow a rise in temperatures in most models, it is still uncertain just how high the water will go and how soon. Of course if it does rise, we'll have coastline populations displaced and seeking higher elevations. This means refugees and more disease.

Frequently, those older than my current age will say to me, "You weren't around during the late 1960s. Those were scary times, too. We got through those, we'll get through this."

They are correct in pointing out that I was not in existence during the late 1960s. They are likewise spot-on when they say those are scary times. Young people had a half-decent chance of getting drafted to fight in a hopeless war whether they wanted to or not, civic unrest threatened major cities, and if you were African American...well, let's just say you had it pretty rough.

But I'm sorry. It's different now. The stakes are much higher. I'm not trying to sound pulpy, but the future of the world does rest on decisions we make right now regarding agenda items such as the environment and finance. Does our leadership get that? Or are they too concerned that they'll lose too much of their money due to pesky environmental regulations designed to better the world? Want to help the environment? You must be anti-business. You are therefore a communist...just like The Muppets. Or at least that's what Fox News says. (Sorry, folks. Next post won't be political. Promise.)

Bruce Sterling is right. Like him, I'll live long enough to see climate change deniers living in refugee camps.

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Amendment 1274 anyone??

2011-12-05T19:59:00.001-08:00

An interesting bit fell into my email box this morning.

I receive email updates from various…um, I suppose you couldsay, “alternative” news sources. Notthat I really depend on them for any kind of hardcore journalism but more as anexercise in gathering writing prompts and feeding my insatiable appetite forthe weird. Today, I read about a Senatebill called Amendment No. 1274.

The source was “Prison Planet,” a site maintained byconspiracy theorist, Alex Jones. I findthis guy entertaining. Anyway, thestory goes that on the evening of December 1^st, the U.S. Senate attempted to pass an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act thatwould allow the U.S. military to detain American citizens even if saiddetainees had been found not guilty by trial. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) brought a halt to the proceedings by callingfor a last-minute roll call vote. Theamendment was struck down by a vote of 41-59, a margin that “Prison Planet”calls “worryingly narrow.”

But that’s just it. As I’ve searched in an effort to locate any source of corroboration forthis news story, the sites that come back all have names like “PropagandaMatrix,” “Right Face,” and of course, “Prison Planet.” There is a conspicuous absence…that I cantell anyway…of coverage from news sources with names such as CNN, ABC, MSNBC,and the like. Why is this? Is this evidence of mainstream media numbingour minds as part of the takeover conspiracy or has the vote on and thecontents of Amendment No. 1274 been distorted and exaggerated?

I can imagine that the language in the Senate bill did saysomething along the lines of what has been alleged. It wouldn’t surprise me that such a measure was considered inorder to deal American citizens who openly fight for terrorist groups such asal-Qaeda. As U.S. citizens, they aretechnically entitled to due process but the situation is an entirely differentcan of tuna from your run-of-the-mill criminal case. Conspiracy theorists have argued that thiskind of legislation is a slippery slope and that such measures could beemployed by the unscrupulous to establish an autocratic state here in theU.S.

Tough to see the forest for the frondescence isn’t it? I would sincerely hope that such a vote byour political leaders on such legislation would make more news than ithas. Then again, knowing the mentalityof the average American and corporate media’s need to make money fromthem…well, I can’t say that it would surprise me if such measures did getpassed one day and we would be none the wiser. Why? Because we just didn’tcare.

I always point to my paraphrased quote from ThomasJefferson: “Democracy takes two things: education and participation.”

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The Jonestown Conspiracy

2011-12-04T15:09:00.001-08:00

My parents should have better regulated my television viewing habits.

In their defense, most of the damaging images that I witnessed did not come from fictional shows or movies, instead they came from what might have been considered a safe source in the late 1970s: the news.

My fear/fascination with nuclear war is attributed to a news report that I saw at age eight. At around the same time, I witnessed another disturbing set of news, namely the events of Jonestown.

For the uninitiated, Jonestown was an American settlement in Guyana founded by preacher Jim Jones. Jones was the founder of The Peoples Temple, a sort of Christian apostolic sect for socialism with strong ties to Communist leaders. In 1978, the residents of Jonestown committed mass suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide out of metal tubs. I can still remember the footage of entire families with their arms around each other, dead and face down in mud. There were a total of 909 people who died there, making it the largest single loss of American life due to an unnatural event until 9/11.

These TV images stayed with me and while I'm not altogether well-versed on the subjects of Jim Jones or The Peoples Temple, I had always considered the Jonestown incident to be yet another example of the dark and ugly underside of religion and cult leaders, up there with Heaven's Gate and the David Koresh group out of Waco. Now, after a little bit of curiosity and surfing about, I have found that there is a sizable body of researchers who contend that the whole incident was the result of CIA orchestration. That, in my opinion, brings it into the realm of this blog.

As the conspiracy theory goes, the Jonestown event was the result of CIA experimentation with truth serums and mind-altering drugs, not unlike what the Agency was proven to have done with MKULTRA and LSD. Additionally, such an occurrence with a socialist-based organization in a nation like Guyana would go a long away towards discrediting the regime and socialist institutions overall. At the same time, the CIA would supply Jonestown with enough drugs, money, and weapons to hopefully win over the locals to the way of the good ol' U.S. of A. Face it, it would fit the CIA pattern.

At the time, The New York Times did quite a few investigative stories on Jonestown. Here are a few of the issues in which they appeared:

New York Times, November 25, 1978
New York Times, December 14, 1978
New York Times, December 12, 1978
New York Times, November 26, 1978

In one of these reports, the NYT spoke with Dr. Leslie Mootoo, a Guyanese coroner who was the first medical official on the scene in Jonestown in the aftermath of the deaths. He and his staff examined over 100 adult victims. Dr. Mootoo claimed that these victims had been injected with cyanide in areas of their bodies that they could not have reached without assistance, e.g. between the shoulder blades. They also encountered several gunshot victims and a few victims of crossbow bolts whose wounds were consistent with those of someone trying to flee. It is thought that these people were killed by the so-called "Red Brigade," a paramilitary group charged with the security of Jonestown. It is also speculated that the men in this cadre were operating under a sort of mind-control.

Despite the law in Guyana mandating an autopsy for all of these victims, the U.S. government maintained that it was apparent that every one of them died of suicide and that all bodies would be swept up and brought back to the United States. The U.S. military went in and that's just what happened. A bit reminiscent of JFK's body being whisked out of Dallas before an autopsy could be conducted as required by Texas law.

This tragic incident now not only occupies my mind in terms of graphic and horrific imagery but as something that has all the earmarks of a genuine mystery. Also, it is ripe ground for storytelling. I'll keep you updated with research from all points of view as I come across it.

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Arctic melting, environment decaying, war possible...gee, what have I left out?

2011-12-03T10:50:00.001-08:00

Hi everyone. Sorry for the large gap in postings but life sometimes gets in the way. Nothing bad, thank goodness, just very busy.

A report was released that is sure to rankle each and every corporate titan who opposes the fact of Global Warming...all because regulations to curb it will cut into their profits and that's just plain un-American, ain't it?

An international team of 121 scientists have announced that there have been "record-setting" temperature changes in the Arctic that are directly attributed to Global Warming. The results of these changes include but are not limited to, melting ice, warming waters, changing wind patterns, and a deleterious affect upon the wildlife of the region. Polar bears and walruses are rapidly losing their habitat. At the same time, however, whales are gaining new waterways and feeding grounds, so I guess there might be one plus. :\ I am still curious about the theory...although it is still a contested one...that such copious amounts of fresh water released from melted ice could lead to desalination of ocean waters, bringing with it problems of its own.

"Given the projection of continued global warming, it is very likely that major Arctic changes will continue in years to come, with increasing climatic, biological and social impacts," the report said.

One of those "social impacts" could likely be war. I've discussed this before, namely the Pentagon report that shows just how seriously defense planners are taking global climate change. As ice in the arctic melts, new deposits of oil and natural gas are revealed. There is also the chance of new waterways of shipping. That means international competition. Currently, there are competing territorial claims in the area between the U.S., Russia, Canada, and Denmark.

So the militarization of the Arctic is already underway. Canada has established a training center in the Arctic for polar special ops as well as a port for icebreakers and patrol ships. The Russians have been conducting operose investments in deepwater exploration and the new Bulava submarine-launched missile, and the Danish and even the Norwegians are readying their own arctic-capable warships and planes. Not to be outdone, the U.S. military has begun its own mobilization with new submarines and support ships for combat in the region. The Navy is currently winterizing planes for a possible conflict.

So if the polar ice caps aren't melting fast enough, we'll be happy to pitch in and help devastate the region through war.

I love humankind. It's just people I can't stand.

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Bombs in your backyard

2011-11-28T19:12:00.001-08:00

If you have followed this blog for a while now, you no doubt know of my fascination with/deep fear of nuclear war.

It all started for me at the tender age of eight. It was summertime and I watched an NBC News special hosted by John Chancellor that broke down step by step what would happen during a full-tilt nuclear exchange between the two superpowers at the time. Scared the daylights out of me. So much so, I could not stop reading everything that I could get my hands on regarding the subject.

Fast forward to today. We don't live with that Cold War, nuclear ax hanging over our heads anymore. Or do we? The President of Russia just announced that it would target nuclear weapons at U.S. anti-missile sites in Europe. When Putin was in office, he ordered the Russian Air Force to resume bomber patrols just as they used to during the Cold War. Yet our leadership tells us that we're on the way to disarmament...all while spending more than ever before on nuclear weapons and retaining a stockpile of 5,113 warheads.

All this comes from Mother Jones and their self-composed map of remaining nuclear weapons sites and power plants in the U.S. It's a nifty map, just like the kind I used to study and imagine where the first strike targets would be during nuclear war. After reading the comments section at the bottom of the page, I know that several readers found numerous errors in the location of power plants. That may be and I don't even know why the authors included power plants in the map as they have little to nothing to do with weapons. The locations of missile silos and bomber bases are accurate. Just check it out with a Google search or on Global Security.org. Amazingly enough, the Department of Defense does nothing to keep these locations a secret. Trust me, I've looked at them all on Google Earth for years now.

So check it out. See how near a target you are. The one bit of good news I can find about today's nuclear scenarios is that a full exchanged is now deemed unlikely. Utterly destroying another nation leaves you with no one who can surrender and nothing useful to conquer. The new tactic is to disable by hitting key installations, especially if they border on population centers, such as Long Beach, California, Jacksonville, Florida, or Norfolk, Virginia.

Living here in Chicago, there's very little of military value in the new scheme of things. So I've got that going for me. Which is nice.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Demonic Creativity

2011-11-27T11:05:00.001-08:00

As I battle my way towards the 50K word goal of NaNoWriMo, I have been reminded of a tweet.

A little while back, I saw a tweet from someone about a "course in demonic creativity." Being unbearably busy at the time, I didn't look into it but I promised myself that I would revisit the link at a later date. Today I took a look at it.

A Course In Demonic Creativity is a PDF book by Matt Cardin. Cardin is a blogger, horror writer, teacher, and musician. All of those ventures are acts of creativity in and of themselves, so I believe that qualifies him to write on the subject. In his own words from the website linked above, here is how Cardin describes the book/course:

"Where does creativity come from? Why do ideas and inspiration feel as if they come from “outside,” from an external source that’s separate from us but able to whisper directly into the mind? Why have so many writers throughout history — and also composers, painters, philosophers, mystics, and scientists — spoken of being guided, accompanied, and even haunted by a force or presence that not only serves as the deep source of their creative work, but exerts a kind of profound and inexorable gravitational pull on the shape of their lives?

These are all questions addressed by A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius. The book’s starting point is the proposition that we all possess a higher or deeper intelligence than the everyday mind, and that learning to live and work harmoniously and energetically with this intelligence is the irreducible core of a successful artistic life. We can call this inner force the unconscious mind or the silent partner. We can call it the id or the secret self. But muse, daimon, and genius are so much more effective at conveying its subversive and electrifying emotional charge, and also its experiential reality.

Your unconscious mind truly is your genius in the ancient sense of the word, the sense that was universal before it was fatefully altered several centuries ago by historical-cultural forces. Befriending it as such, and interacting with it as if it really is a separate, collaborating presence in your psyche, puts you in a position to receive its gifts, and it in the position to give them to you."

Truly, I believe that creation is an act of "earnest chaos." The most unique and innovative artistic ideas do indeed seem to come from the ether, ghostly and unexplained or during times of severe upheaval and disorder. As Paul McCartney wrote, "there's a fine line between chaos and creation." Those paltry few times where ideas, good ones I mean, have come to me in one inspired flash and not through arduous and piecemeal struggles...those are the times I long for again. I've heard other creative types give advice such as take a nap and channel your dreams, but that seldom brings anything but torpid and confusing subjects for me and stertor for anyone else in the house at the time. Sounds like I need to read Matt Cardin's book.

Just wish I'd looked at that tweet before November.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Why is it so tough to get to Mars?

2011-11-26T14:27:00.001-08:00

Today, NASA launched the Curiosity rover on an Atlas-5 rocket bound for Mars.

Its mission will be to survey Mars and determine how hospitable the planet really is for life, be it past, present, or future. Among the rover's numerous capabilities are the MastCam (Mast Camera) that will provide supposedly the most spectacular photos of the Martian surface that we have seen to date; the ChemCam (Chemistry and Camera) that will fire a laser to vaporize rocks from 30 feet away (how flippin' cool is that?!?) and then scan the resultant material; an Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer that will allow Curiosity to make definitive analyses of Martian soil; and the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) mounted on a robot arm that will allow scientists back on Earth to get microscopic images of soil and rock.

As impressive as all of this is there remains an undercurrent of apprehension online about the mission. After all, Mars does have something of a track record of jinxing or destroying space probes altogether. Just earlier this month, the Russians launch their own Mars probe, Phobos-Grunt. Due to a malfunction, that probe now remains in low-Earth orbit, on its way to becoming the 19th straight Russian Mars probe to have failed. It's not just the Russians. Mars space missions from the United States have met their share of disaster as well.

We've also had tremendous success in the form of the Viking landers, rovers such as Spirit and Opportunity, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. So what makes the difference?

On Space.com, JPL's Richard Cook said, "I'm not sure Mars is harder on average than other places. We've been there a lot, or relatively a lot, so we have maybe enough statistics to talk about it." Not that anyone's asking, but I would have to agree. Despite what Mars conspiracy theorists might conjecture, our failures in reaching the Red Planet probably have much more to do with the inherent rigors of spaceflight than with any odd aura about Mars.

Nevertheless, NASA is going to be under tremendous pressure to get Curiosity on to the surface. Weighing in at about the size and weight of a Mini Cooper, this is the largest probe of its kind to ever go to Mars. The sheer physics of that is fraught with its own complications. Then there are those pesky unknowns. Both the "known unknowns" and the "unknown unknowns" to quote Donald Rumsfield. Engineers at NASA will undoubtedly face these issues as they arise on nearly every mission.

What bothers me more than any chance of mission failure are the online comments I've been reading for the news coverage of Curiosity, including those that I've linked above. Truly procrustean thought at its highest. "This is a waste of tax dollars." Yes, I'm certain that knowledge is wasted on minds that hold that viewpoint. Perhaps the money should have been spent on another Megachurch? "How will this help create jobs?" Right. Because the Curiosity project created no jobs for scientists, engineers, technicians, and laborers.

I am hoping that the Curiosity mission will be a brilliant success for many reasons. Not the least of them is that I can't wait any longer to get off of this planet.

Now playing: The Smiths, "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before"

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

The Allagash Abductions

2011-11-25T15:44:00.001-08:00

Most of the time, I am willing to pin claims of alien abduction on grounded, even if traumatic, happenings.

Sleep paralysis. Episodes of physical or sexual abuse from a family member that have been repressed by the mind. Mental illness that requires medical and psychiatric attention, not hypnotic regression and guest spots on History Channel shows.

But there are those cases that cannot be so easily dismissed. The Allagash Abduction is one of those cases.

The incident occurred in August of 1976 near Allagash, Maine, deep inside a thick area of New England wilderness. Four men just out of college went there on a camping and fishing trip. Their names were Jack and Jim Weiner, Chuck Rak, and Charlie Foltz. On the August night in question, the men built a sizable bonfire on the edge of Eagle Lake, a fire that they hoped would not only last them through the night but serve as a beacon to the shore while they did a bit of night fishing. They paddled out onto the lake in their canoe.

Rak noticed a light in the sky. The men initially thought it to be a helicopter or a weather balloon. The light then began to change colors and behave erratically. Foltz took a flashlight and began to signal to it. The light came closer and the men began to see it as a solid craft. A high-powered beam of light came out of the bottom of the object and engulfed the canoe. Next thing they knew, the men were all on shore and the massive bonfire they had built was at that point mere ashes and embers. None of them knew how they had gotten back there but they were exhausted.

In the years that followed, each of the men began exhibiting symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, including nightmares and dipsomania. Each man described similar dreams; the interior of chamber wherein alien beings with long necks and large heads examined each of them one at a time while the other men could only watch, unable to move. Jim Weiner even began to experience tempero-limbic epilepsy. The four men sought out help from hypnotherapists and UFO researchers.

Under hypnosis, the men described nearly identical experiences. They told of a sterile interior of what they claimed was a spacecraft. There were insect-like aliens with bald heads, big eyes, and spindly fingers, performing medical tests on each one of them, collecting skin and fluid samples as well as conducting other more humiliating tests. Being artists, the men were able to produce detailed sketches of their abduction, including even the instruments that were inserted into them. Each man was pronounced mentally stable by psychiatric professionals and each one passed a lie detector test...not that that last bit means all that much given what we now know about lie detectors but was still a necessary step at the time.

This is an important case for a few reasons. One, there are multiple people involved. Most cases of supposed alien abduction involve only one person at a time. Here there were four. Each man reports the same thing and corroborates the others' stories. This is significant. Two, the description of one of the aliens involved...and I am still working to find a source to verify this as opposed to just my memory of past interviews with the abductees...was a bit of a departure from the typical Grey made popular by Whitley Strieber. This one was taller, much more mantis-like in appearance and seemed to be in charge of the other Greys. This would imply a lack of influence from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the book Communion. Two things that skeptics often point to as subconscious influences. As mentioned previously, the men were artists and I seem to remember one of them doing a sculpture of this alien. Again, I'm looking for a source.

I also think we can rule out collusion between the four men. What would such a conspiracy net them? Money? It doesn't seem that they've made that much from it. Fame? Did you know their names before reading this? If anything, their reputations stood more chance of being damaged by coming forward with such a thing and they do have medical professionals who can attest to the fact that the men have suffered greatly.

Were the four abducted by aliens...or otherwise otherworldly beings? Of course it can't be said for certain that they were indeed victims of such a thing. In fact, someone over at UFO Evidence sure doesn't seem convinced about it, raising a few valid questions about the case. Still, this incident has enough to it to make me curious, far more than I would be about a run-of-the-mill, single-participant abduction claim.

Here's a few sources...for Mr. "Codswallop:"

The case and its investigation detailed on UFO Casebook

The Allagash Abductions by Raymond E. Fowler

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T09:02:00.001-08:00

No post today. Be back tomorrow.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Once again, the hybrids

2011-11-23T16:55:00.001-08:00

So a skull was found in Peru.

That's not so unusual, especially when researchers are there on a regular basis, studying Inca and pre-Inca civilizations, yet this skull was out of the ordinary. It has an elongated head and eye cavities far larger than the average human's. In fact, this news story claims that three separate anthropologists have certified that the remains don't correspond to any known ethnic group and cannot be human, bolstering those who claim that the skull is concrete evidence of aliens interbreeding with humans in the distant past. This is not unlike the claim of the "starchild" skull found in Mexico.

While I'm thinking that the skull is more attributable to the ritual of "skull flattening" practiced by many aboriginal peoples of the Americas, this hasn't stopped the notion of "alien-human hybrids" from being a popular one among the paranormal set. It's true that alien abductees often report having reproductive cells removed from their bodies and are later shown children having both human and alien features. One woman asserted that when shown the alien-human baby, she just knew that it was hers. When she reached out to hold it, an alien took the child away as a voice spoke inside the woman's head, "No, this child is ours." Others have said that they were shown videos of people in every day life doing every day things. As the footage rolled, the aliens asked their captives, "can you spot us?" Sort of a "Where's Waldo?" only with alien-human hybrids. Towards whatever ends, be they nefarious, benign, or indifferent, the aliens seem to want to crossbreed with us. In fact, there are those who argue that the human race itself is the end result of human-alien interbreeding and genetic tinkering.

Other abductees have even claimed to have seen human-looking beings working alongside the Greys. This is not entirely out of step with reports as there have been several reports, most of them pre Barney and Betty Hill, of people encountering aliens who were tall, blonde, almost perfect in appearance. These beings have been nicknamed "The Nordics" for obvious reasons. Are these the same beings? I suppose that depends if all these people are really being abducted in the first place.

One interesting point about the hybrids is that until actual alien DNA is disclosed to the public, we cannot really say one way or the other about it. Oh we can have doubts as I certainly do, but alien-human hybrids truly could be among us and we would be none the wiser. One of you reading this might even be a hybrid.

To take the first step in determining if you might be one, I have found this quiz. My score was measly and disappointing "3." Which according to the scoring guide means "basic earthiness." Maybe your results will be more interesting. Go on. Be brave. Try it.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

How you'll be living

2011-11-22T18:26:00.001-08:00

A CNN story recently focused on a consortium known as The Institute For The Future. Here's their stated mission:

"Think of "A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021" as a star chart of possibility, pointing the way toward opportunities for wonder, knowledge, and insight. Use it to raise questions about how your life and work may change in light of the startling transformations that science may bring about in the next ten years. Indeed, every forecast could be rephrased as a "what if" question. What if you could record your dreams? What if you could design a life form? What if you could launch a company in orbit? Your answers to those questions can help inform decisions in the present. Inside this map, you'll find plenty of space to think."

That's quite a bit to digest, but what are the best brains projecting our lives to be like in the future year, 2021? Here's a few of their points to expect on the IFTF's "star chart" (available on their website linked above):

-The study of human-data interaction will be a highly valued discipline. Not tough to see this coming as people with that skill are already in high demand.

-Metamaterials will make the invisibility cloak a reality.

-New lifeforms will be constructed from scratch. I'm thinking this likely means on the microscopic level.

-You can own your own satellite for a mere $1000.

-Orbital manufacturing will become practical.

-Fusion reactors will finally come about, powered by seawater.

-Teleportation will succeed on the molecular scale.

-Genetic enhancement. 'Nuff said.

-Scans of your brain can record "mind movies."

While I love the idea of many of these things and I am excited about the potential that they bring, I cannot shake the fact that this may be an entirely rosy picture. That's because I'm not sure if or to what degree the IFTF has taken the current economic downturn into consideration. Much of this depends on people investing money. Ultimately, you will need end users to purchase these nifty new goods and services.

A continually shrinking middle class will affect that. If people are fighting to pay for food and healthcare, these new innovations might only be privileges of the wealthy and not aspects of the future that are widespread.

Then again, if we follow Ray Kurzweil's lead and augment human intelligence, we might be able to make ourselves smart enough to see past our failings of greed and find a solution to many of our challenges.

Or not.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Dulce, still in Dulce...

2011-11-21T19:12:00.001-08:00

Pic from New Illuminati.

Like I said in a previous post or two, I've been catching up on past shows of Coast-to-Coast AM. The November 15th program threatened to be a snoozer for me until I heard those captivating words, "Dulce Base." If you're new to things, I'll give you a quick fill-in.

Outside the town of Dulce, New Mexico is Archuletta Mesa. Inside that mesa is said to be a massive underground base where our government and our military works in conjunction with several different alien races, performing all manner of heinous experiments on human beings. Naturally, the area is also a hotbed of UFO activity. The kicker here is that as the lore goes, the aliens took control of the base in 1979 and U.S. special ops had to go in and retake the facility in a bloody battle. Many on both sides wound up missing or dead.

Followers of this blog know that for quite a while now, I've been planning to write a book about Dulce. The book would be a sort of Truman Capote meets Whitley Strieber text. Half of the book would be my literary nonfiction speculation on what, supposedly, happened inside the base during the battle of Dulce. The other half would be my personal narrative of visiting the area, talking with people who live there, and interviewing those who have already done extensive research into Dulce Base. I'm also interested in exploring why...if this ends up being a pure fabrication...things like this get started and perpetuate.

The guest on the episode of Coast-to-Coast that I mentioned was Anthony F. Sanchez. He is an author who apparently has done a fair amount of looking into the Dulce case, including meeting with the so-called "Colonel X," an anonymous, high-ranking military officer who allegedly came forward about the battle at Dulce. I have a book by X, whom I believe was credited as "Commander X" at the time. Or that could be an error, certainly, as the book was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. On the episode, however, Sanchez mentioned something that I have not heard before.

He argues that the Greys are not actually aliens but organisms created by a "progenitor race" on Earth 25,000 years ago. Also, experiments continue unabated to this day at Dulce, experiments conducted on abducted humans. Additionally, there has been a long stretch of cattle mutilations in that area of New Mexico. One case, pointed out by the venerable Bill Birnes on both C2C and on his former show, UFO Hunters, involved a the finding a cow's body with a human head upon it. Birnes got this from Gabe Valdez, a police officer in Dulce who doubts that any alien activity is occurring at Archuletta Mesa but there is obviously something weird going on in New Mexico.

True or untrue, it all just fascinates me. If it is a pure falsehood, I do not plan to offer salvo to those who support the story in my writing, but rather I wish to find out just how a story like this comes to be. After all, it's up there with the best of pulp scifi...and it has an outside shot of being real.

And if all that has been alleged about Dulce is true, then it's obviously a big deal. Big for many reasons, not the least of which is that U.S. servicemen died in battle there. Their story deserves to be told.

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The science fiction connection

2011-11-20T14:58:00.001-08:00

Blogger Kenn Thomas came upon an interesting story that I would like to repeat to you here. It concerns the seminal science fiction film, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and a man named Wilhelm Reich.

Wilhelm Reich was a psychoanalyst by training but he also did research into the nature of what he called "orgone," a sort of naturally occurring primordial energy that he claimed to have discovered. According to research by Thomas, Reich worked in his lab on ways to harness this natural energy. As he did so, strange red UFOs appeared over the lab. Concerned about this, Reich developed what he called the "cloudbuster," a cannon of sorts mounted on the back of a pickup truck. Said cannon would collect and redirect the flow of orgone, allowing Reich to fire it at the UFOs and mitigate them into retreating. Supposedly, Reich did battle with alien spacecraft over Roswell, New Mexico.

Let's turn now to the movie. In Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, the concept is pretty direct. Aliens attack the Earth, represented by then cutting edge special FX by Ray Harryhausen. Unable to defeat the aliens by any other military means, our scientists invent sonar cannons and mount them on trucks. The cannons are then fired at the attacking spaceships in scenes that are said to be quite reminiscent of Reich's desert battles with UFOs. In fact, the film was released only a few years after Reich's own supposed alien combat.

There are a few more interesting side connections to this science fiction film. When the invading aliens are revealed, stripped of their mechanical suits (yet another trope ripped off by Independence Day), they bear a more than passing resemblance to the Roswell greys. Also, Donald Keyhoe, the man that some call the founder of modern Ufology, supposedly requested that his name be removed from the credits of EVTFS when he learned that it was going to be a fictional film. I have no idea in what capacity Keyhoe served for the film but I suspect he was a consultant of one sort or another.

Does any of this mean that Earth vs. the Flying Saucers was based on real-life incidents? Wilhelm Reich was certainly not without his share of controversy in life and he was involved in a few odd endeavors. I don't think that it's that much of a stretch to say he claimed to have fought aliens. What I don't know is just how much, if at all, his supposed experiences had to do with the movie. The similarities are, however, intriguing.

I plan to keep reading on this subject. For more connections between UFOs and Hollywood science fiction, please visit Silver Screen Saucers at the link above.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Hodge Podge November

2011-11-19T15:18:00.001-08:00

Random notes from life...

I've crossed the threshold of the midway point for my NaNoWriMo book, Hell's Coming With Me. Right now I'm concerned that I have a few chapters of what James N. Frey (How To Write a Damn Good Thriller) calls, "the muddle in the middle," not that I adhere to that guy's advice much. I felt I needed to establish the characters more. Thankfully, more men with guns have shown up and the pace has accelerated. That's the advice of Raymond Chandler, by the way.

Speaking of books, I went to Barnes & Noble today. I need more books like I need a corporate job but I still like to browse. Once I have the either the Kindle or the Nook I can store books until memory gives out but for now space is at a premium. Anyway, I had a few interesting finds at the bookstore.

One was Silverthorn by Raymond E. Feist. I don't read much fantasy but the description for this book caught my interest. In a land of magic, a princess has been struck by a poison bolt. Her prince sets off with a D&D-like adventure party consisting of a bard, a thief, and a fighter to find a cure in the realm of Dark Elves. It's apparently Book 3 in the "Riftwar Saga." That's one reason that I don't read fantasy books: they typically sprawl into multiple volumes.

Also found a copy of Robert Heinlen's Farnham's Freehold. The cover calls it "the most controversial science fiction novel ever written." Many books make this claim but knowing Heinlen, he'd have been the one to actually do it. This goes on the list.

Then there's a manga series with the delightful title, Bloody Monday. Flipped through it a bit and it looked exactly like the kind of pulp I'm trying to accomplish with my book. It's on the list as well.

What would we do without coffee? I tried to think about that this morning but I hadn't had enough coffee yet. Does coffee precede existence or does existence necessitate coffee? Talk about an infinite loop of the bean.

On consciousness...

2011-11-18T18:33:00.001-08:00

I have been going through old shows of Coast-to-Coast AM and found an especially interesting one from the beginning of this month.

The program was on the subject of consciousness and reality. The guests were Dr. Vernon Neppe and Dr. Edward Close. Their work entails bringing psychology, science, mathematics, and philosophy together into one broader paradigm. Okay, I like where this is going so far.

One of the resultant conclusions is that consciousness must precede reality. I take that to mean that reality is entirely dependent upon consciousness perceiving it. To paraphrase Ray Bradbury: "what good is a universe without an audience to wonder in awe of it?" Consciousness, it would appear, is reality's audience. Or perhaps from a certain point of view, consciousness produces the show and then wonders in awe...or shrieks in terror. But I digress...

One interesting point that Neppe and Close made was that there are...in their way of thinking...three different levels of consciousness. Those are neurological, psychological, and a meta-consciousness or an awareness that gathers information from multiple sources. This last level implies that consciousness can and does exist outside of the brain. A "soul," one might say. I find this fascinating because all religious or spiritual bickering aside, I have always believed that human beings and most other animals for that matter are far more than the sum of their parts. The un-fingerable "it" in the equation might be consciousness. Yes, I do believe that there are non-human forms of intelligence all over our world, such as whales, dolphins, apes, dogs, and the list goes on. Again, I digress...

Neppe takes it a step further:

"In our model, we cogently argue that time is not just one linear dimension that goes past, present, future, but that there are several different dimensions of time," and all of existence could be said to exist at the same time because "we have an extended amount of time that always is, was, and will exist."

Wow. They went on to discuss their theory that are a total of ten dimensions existing simultaneously and that human beings inhabit them all at once. This brings new meaning to the phrase "other states of consciousness." Lastly, Neppe made one key point: "The universe itself is conscious and intelligent and has an innate order to it."

You can find Dr. Neppe's web site here and Dr. Close's web site here.

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Meanwhile, beneath the ice of Europa...

2011-11-17T17:59:00.001-08:00

Europa is a moon of Jupiter and it is almost entirely covered with ice. Recently, astronomers have realized that a body of liquid, salty water equivalent in size to all of the Great Lakes combined, may sit beneath that ice.

Thing about salty, liquid water...it's essential for life to form. This new data from the Galileo probe gives hope to the theory that micro-organisms might exist in the water beneath the ice. Or perhaps more? We don't know and it all is dependent upon what definition of "life" we claim. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer himself, points out the significance of this find on Europa at his Discover magazine blog:

"We know that on Earth, water is an essential ingredient for life. And we’ve known Europa has a lot of liquid water! But it’s locked under that thick shell. On the surface, sunlight has helped produce chemicals that are needed for biology, but there’s no way for them to get beneath that ice… or so we thought. The thinner ice above the lakes makes it possible for those chemicals to get below the surface, into the waters below. From there, various processes can get it down into the ocean itself."

What's more, all signs seem to indicate that the reservoir of water is still forming. Next time we get a look at it (whenever that is) it might actually be larger. No wonder Arthur C. Clarke chose Europa as a location of life off of Earth.

A little while back, I blogged that artifacts or probes from other civilizations could hide in our sector of space while we would be unlikely to notice. Let's add something else to that. Life could exist in places that we wouldn't even believe to be imaginable. We're finding extremophiles all the time on our very planet, it stands to reason...at least to us bibliophages...that life could exist in similar inhospitable biomes elsewhere in space. Really, I believe that discoveries like these will force us to redefine what we term as life. I don't necessarily mean intelligent life, mind you. I mean just living organisms in general.

Oddly enough, that does beg yet another question to be asked. What exactly does "intelligent" life mean?

Certainly nothing that I've seen on this planet in my lifetime.

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Guest blogger Kip Haggis gives thanks...and gets revenge

2011-11-16T19:27:00.001-08:00

Hola everybody! Boy, I have got A LOT to be thankful for this year.

1) God is in my life and I'm not going to Hell.

2) The Packers are STILL undefeated! PERFECT SEASON, BABY!

3) Things are going great at the BBQ Shack. Might make assistant manager by next year. SWEEEEET!

4) The Friday after Thanksgiving, while soccer moms fight over Barbie dolls and techies like Nichols go looking for new thingamabobs, I'll be hangin' out with THE GUYS! We'll light a bonfire, take our shirts off, do body shots off each other, ask each other "how's your pecker?" Men actin' like men! GOOD TIMES!

5) McRib is back!

6) Nichols has been proven an idiot.

That's right. He has. No IFs, ANDs, or BUTs, about it.

Did you not see his post the other day? Man, all those times that he got on his high horse, talkin' up those novels where people sit in a house on a rainy day and just talk about what's in their head. Or two Frenchie guys sitting on a park bench, waiting for a third Frenchie guy to show up who never gets there. Can you tell what those stories have in common? NOTHING HAPPENS! They SIT!

I gotta tell ya, I remember it all like it was yesterday. After a buttload more arm twisting than it should take any man to do, I finally got Nichols to come with me to a car show. About time! Because getting together is what guys do. Getting together is...well, it's getting together! Anyhoo, we were walking down the midway of the Dempsey County Fairgrounds when he tells me the new Batman (this was 2001, duh) movie was going to be directed by Darren Arrofoofyfoof or somethin'.

"Who's that?" I ask.

"The director of Requiem for a Dream," he answers, like I'm supposed to KNOW who that is or somethin'.

"Gotta stay away from that crap, man," I says. "Just tell a good STORY!"

And he looks at me like I got lobsters coming out of my head. How's a working man supposed to deal with a college egghead?

So now what is Nichols writing? Somethin' with GUNS...and NINJAS...and HOT CHICKS...with BIG BOOBS...and COWBOYS (one of my favorites). All he needs now are PIRATES and he might actually be getting somewhere.

For a supposedly smart guy, it sure takes him a long time to get with it and come around. This is the kinda thing that the majority of America wants. I am the 99%!!!

Til next time...peace, love, and smoked bbq.
Kip

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Film review--Miracle Mile

2011-11-15T18:27:00.001-08:00

MIRACLE MILE

starring Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, Denise Crosby, John Agar, and Bret Michaels as The Beav.

A swing band dork named Harry (Edwards) in Los Angeles finds the girl of his dreams (Winningham) and they set a date for that evening. While waiting for her, Harry happens to answer a pay phone. It's a wrong number from a young man in a missile silo in North Dakota, trying to reach his dad to say goodbye before the U.S. launches its entire nuclear arsenal at the (then) Soviet Union. Is this guy for real? And if so, can Harry get his girl and bring her to the evacuation plane in just forty-five minutes?

There is more than a dollop of 1980s cheese here. There are contrivances and stock characters galore, yet the film is oddly compelling. I think that this stems from two factors, at least for me personally. One is that once Harry answers the pay phone, everything plays out in real-time. While this appears commonplace to a contemporary audience weened on TV like 24 and films like Haggis' (Mike, not Kip) Timecode, this was a very innovative concept back in the 1980s. A fast-paced thriller essentially plays out in that 45 minute time span. An added dimension is the threat of nuclear annihilation. For anyone my age who grew up with that particular Sword of Damocles hanging above their heads, this is especially chilling. The concept of that 45 minute lag-time between the initial launch of an ICBM and the inevitable retaliatory strike with the ensuing nuclear aftermath...well, I've always found it most sadistic. Better almost not to know what's coming and be surprised, I've always thought. In the case of this film, people in L.A. eventually begin to figure out what's happening and we see society start to complete come apart. People behave little better than panicked animals, something I am certain would be the case if such a horror would befall us. For whatever cheesiness this movie has, it captures that aspect very well. Given the dread, the paranoia, and the (SPOILER) unhappy ending by today's standards, I believe that this film deserves a place in the apocrypha of nuclear war fiction.

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