Neal Stephenson on Science Fiction, Building Towers 20 Kilometers High ... and Insurance. Speaking before a packed lecture theater at MIT yesterday, Neal Stephenson worried that the gloomy outlook prevalent in modern science fiction may be undermining the genre’s ability to inspire engineers and scientists. Describing himself as a “pessimist trying to turn himself into an optimist,” and acknowledging that some of his own work has contributed to the dystopian trend, he added “if every depiction of the future is grim…then it doesn’t create much of an incentive to building the future.” Consequently, Stephenson is trying to make a literary course correction, and last year launched the Heiroglyph Project, with the goal of creating an anthology of plausibly optimistic science fiction.
Stephenson himself is contributing a story about a 20 kilometer high tower for launching spacecraft into orbit, based on a real engineering proposal. The response was nervous laughter.
Terence Mckenna - Schizophrenic or Shamanic? TEMPLE COMPLEX COULD ALTER THEORY OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT. As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, representing the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important -- a temple inland complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet. "This place is a supernova", says Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey’s border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here. " Behind him are the first folds of the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-colored sea, stretches south hundreds of miles to Baghdad and beyond.
The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe temple inland are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill. Compared to Stonehenge, Britain’s most famous prehistoric temple site, they are humble affairs. Gobekli Tepe - From Wikipedia Discovery. Jason Martell / AncientX.com. The Bible tells us that God created Adam and Eve just a few thousand years ago, by some fundamentalist interpretations. Science informs us that this is mere fiction and that man is a few million years old, and that civilization just tens of thousands of years old. Could it be, however, that conventional science is just as mistaken as the Bible stories? There is a great deal of archeological evidence that the history of life on earth might be far different than what current geological and anthropological texts tell us.
Consider these astonishing finds: The Grooved Spheres Over the last few decades, miners in South Africa have been digging up mysterious metal spheres. The Dropa Stones In 1938, an archeological expedition led by Dr. The Ica StonesBeginning in the 1930s, the father of Dr. The Antikythera MechanismA perplexing artifact was recovered by sponge-divers from a shipwreck in 1900 off the coast of Antikythera, a small island that lies northwest of Crete. Ancient Model Aircraft. Maxwell's Demon Converts Information into Energy. For the first time, scientists have converted information into pure energy, experimentally verifying a thought experiment first proposed 150 years ago. The idea was originally formulated by physicist James Clerk Maxwell, but it gained controversy because it appeared to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
Put in experimental terms, this law states that when hot and cold water are mixed, they will eventually reach an equilibrium middling temperature. Maxwell proposed that a hypothetical being (later dubbed Maxwell's demon) could separate the water into two compartments and reverse the process, isolating hot molecules from cold by letting only the hotter-than-average through a trap-door between the compartments.
Because mixed water is considered more disordered (i.e. of higher entropy) than separated water, the demon has converted a system from a state of disorder to a state of order, using only information (the knowledge of which molecules were hot and cold). Putting it into action. Physicists Convert Information Into Energy. Here’s a fascinating piece of work. Build a tiny staircase and place a small polystyrene bead on the bottom step (a staircase is fairly straightforward to construct using electric fields). It’s easy to see the bead being jostled around by the random motion of molecules in the surrounding air, the well-known phenomenon of Brownian motion.
Most of the time, the Brownian motion tends to knock the bead down the stairs but sometimes the jostling is powerful enough to push the bead up a step. Keep a close eye on the bead using a video camera and every time you see it go up a step, change the electric field so that it cannot drop back down again. This is like placing a barrier behind the bead. As you repeat this process, the bead will move up the staircase, driven by Brownian motion.
This is exactly the experiment that Shoichi Toyabe at Chuo University in Tokyo and a few buddies have successfully carried out. Of course, there’s more to this than first appears. But here’s the curious thing. Relating Thermodynamic Entropy to Information Entropy with Maxwell's Demon | ideonexus.com. Brownian motion, the natural vibrations of atoms not at an absolute zero temperature, has long been the strategic key for anyone looking for a way to achieve the holy grail of reversing the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that a closed system will always move toward a state of increasing disorder. I previously covered Richard Feynman’s Brownian Ratchet, which harnessed the power of Brownian motion to turn a rotor, and, as Feynman explains, wouldn’t work because the device would need to be so small that it would vibrate apart from the Brownian motion of its own molecules.
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” to quote the old adage, or “You can’t stuff the mushroom cloud back into the shiny uranium sphere,” to quote Robert Heinlein, or “Things fall apart. It’s scientific,” to quote the Talking Heads. Illustration of a Particle Rising in Potential Energy through Information Alone Credit: Nature Physics, doi:10.1038/nphys1821 Maxwell’s Demon Credit: Htkym How much energy? Entropy in thermodynamics and information theory. There are close parallels between the mathematical expressions for the thermodynamic entropy, usually denoted by S, of a physical system in the statistical thermodynamics established by Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs in the 1870s, and the information-theoretic entropy, usually expressed as H, of Claude Shannon and Ralph Hartley developed in the 1940s.
Shannon, although not initially aware of this similarity, commented on it upon publicizing information theory in A Mathematical Theory of Communication. This article explores what links there are between the two concepts, and how far they can be regarded as connected. Equivalence of form of the defining expressions[edit] Boltzmann's grave in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna, with bust and entropy formula. The defining expression for entropy in the theory of statistical mechanics established by Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Where The defining expression for entropy in the theory of information established by Claude E. Theoretical relationship[edit] Entropy in thermodynamics and information theory. There are close parallels between the mathematical expressions for the thermodynamic entropy, usually denoted by S, of a physical system in the statistical thermodynamics established by Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs in the 1870s, and the information-theoretic entropy, usually expressed as H, of Claude Shannon and Ralph Hartley developed in the 1940s.
Shannon, although not initially aware of this similarity, commented on it upon publicizing information theory in A Mathematical Theory of Communication. This article explores what links there are between the two concepts, and how far they can be regarded as connected. Equivalence of form of the defining expressions[edit] Boltzmann's grave in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna, with bust and entropy formula. The defining expression for entropy in the theory of statistical mechanics established by Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Where The defining expression for entropy in the theory of information established by Claude E. Theoretical relationship[edit] Sacred Economics. This week, with some of the RS team off the grid at the annual Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, we'll be presenting highlights from the archives.
The following article first ran on Reality Sandwich on February 22, 2010, and is a adapted from the introduction to the upcoming book Sacred Economics. The purpose of the book is to make money and human economy as sacred as everything else in the universe. Today we associate money with the profane, and for good reason. If anything is sacred in this world, it is surely not money.
From at least the time that Jesus threw the moneychangers from the temple, we have sensed that there is something unholy about money. At the same time, no one can deny that money has a mysterious, magical quality as well, the power to alter human behavior and coordinate human activity. Obviously, if we are to make money into something sacred, nothing less than a wholesale revolution in money will suffice, a transformation of its essential nature.
Ufo ? Mass Sighting. Warning: This may make you feel very very small. LUNAR LIGHTS ON A HOLLOW MOON? Nevertheless, official NASA transcripts and blatant censorship of audio transmissions don't get any more ominous. Over the past year, I have discovered that there are many mysteries in which NASA and the moon share. I've already provided some evidence of NASA obscuring certain elements during the Apollo Missions (more below) - but were they already aware and prepared for spooky things being seen or heard on the moon before the Apollo missions were even launched? Strange lights and objects have been recorded on our moon for hundreds of years. In 1787, legendary astronomer, Sir William Herschel, recorded strange lights traveling across the dark lunar surface.
On one particular occasion of that same year, he spotted 3 red lights in the darkness of the lunar surface, describing the brightest one as being brighter than a recently discovered comet. The classical Greek philosopher, mathematician and scientist Plato also reported anomalous lights on the moon sometime around 400 BC. Do trees communicate? Networks, networks… Isaiah 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. New International VersionI form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things. New Living TranslationI create the light and make the darkness.
I send good times and bad times. I, the LORD, am the one who does these things. English Standard VersionI form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things. New American Standard Bible The One forming light and creating darkness, Causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the LORD who does all these. King James BibleI form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. Holman Christian Standard BibleI form light and create darkness, I make success and create disaster; I, Yahweh, do all these things.
" International Standard Version"I form light and create darkness, I make goodness and create disaster. GOD'S WORD® TranslationI make light and create darkness. Pulpit Commentary (m) Vid. Magic mushroom’s positive effects lasting over a year, say researchers. By Eric W. DolanWednesday, June 15, 2011 16:45 EDT Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine claim to have determined the proper dose levels needed to create positive changes in attitudes, mood, life satisfaction, and behavior that persist for more than a year with the psychoactive substance in so-called “magic mushrooms.” The findings are the latest in a series of experiments done at Johns Hopkins to investigate psilocybin, a psychedelic substance contained in certain mushrooms.
The findings were published online this week in the peer-reviewed journal Psychopharmacology. “In our laboratory, weʼre working with the pure chemical psilocybin, which we can measure out precisely,” he added. “We wanted to take a methodical look at how its effects change with dosage. SIMILAR: First therapeutic study of LSD in 35 years finishes treatment of last subject “I feel that I relate better in my marriage,” one participant reported. Potential psychotherapeutic value of ‘magic mushrooms’ Semmelweis reflex. The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect" is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms.
The term originated from the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered that childbed fever mortality rates reduced ten-fold when doctors washed their hands with a chlorine solution between patients. His hand-washing suggestions were rejected by his contemporaries, often for non-medical reasons. For instance, some doctors refused to believe that a gentleman's hands could transmit disease (see Contemporary reaction to Ignaz Semmelweis). See also[edit] References[edit] SpaceCollective. Terence McKenna - How Psychedelics Became Illegal Chaîne de AlienScientist Organic Evolution. Unlearn What You Have Learned Proof that genius lies everywhere. If only we can learn to stop learning. read more America’s Obession With Violence One day after the MLK holiday, just over one month since Sandy Hook, this quote from Dr. Martin Luther King is appropriate for many reasons.
It may seem like history, but he is speaking of the present in so many ways. Petro Dollars and Escalating Wars While I might disagree that the ultimate endgame while likely result in violent struggle, this video clearly outlines current affairs in relation to the continuous wars being fought by the US military machine. The Power of the Tiny Dot Kinda mysterious, the power this tiny dot has over so many. All Aboard the Happy Carriage For all of my wonky, high-fallutin’ diatribes on evolution and the transformation of society, sometimes it’s nice to step back and realize that ‘having a shift’ can sometimes be a rather simple thing: Male Sexuality Explained Warning: this post will be blunt, if not graphic. The Solar System is Under Quarantine | Organic Evolution. This essay will plot out a theory that advanced civilizations existthey’re here as the result of a “USOP” (universal standard operating procedure) andwe’re under quarantine until we reach a state of Total Peace, i.e. the end of all conflict between nations and the use of mass-scale violence to solve disputes and seize power Advanced Civilizations Exist To state that the Earth is the only planet capable of producing intelligent life is a logical absurdism.
Even given the astronomical odds of a star system producing the perfect conditions for life to develop, it’s more likely that there are hundreds of thousands of inhabited planets with intelligent life than there aren’t, simply because of the vast numbers of stars and planets in the cosmos. Astronomers have finally come around in recent years to declare that there are likely tens of thousands of planets capable of supporting life with similar qualities as Earth.
But Why Would They Come Here? Yes, space is big. Nuclear fission. Why? RSA Animate - The Empathic Civilisation 2011-04-19-dark_science_09.jpg (960×1299) Vii. The Sphinx Mystery Robert Temple EQ12:1 (May 2009) Metamodernism.