The Dematerialization Project

mars one

mars underground

Roger Swanson

Most Minnesotans have never heard of Roger Swanson. But among voyagers around the globe, he's known as the man who circled the world not once -- but three times -- on a 57-foot sailboat whose home port is listed as "Dunnell, MN."

His travels carried him from the tip of South Africa to the Arctic, winning international honors along the way. He also happened to launch a half-dozen manufacturing businesses in rural Minnesota, overseeing production of everything from snowblowers to farm equipment.

Swanson is being remembered this week as an extraordinary adventurer who lived an otherwise ordinary life in southwestern Minnesota.

"Roger Swanson was one of the greatest long-distance voyagers of this era or any other era," said Herb McCormick, senior editor of Cruising World magazine. "Few sailors have gone from the Arctic to the Antarctic and everywhere in between. He was one of a kind." He died December 25th 2012. R.I.P. Roger Swanson.

what on earth will it take ?

think for your self

The truth is like pornography...

i don't know what it is but...

i know it when I see it...










think for your self...

BOY - soufi soul - for OBERON

 

This is a photo of my son I took this weekend

I felt the compulsory need to offer it to you in response to your last post "GIRL"

Other Worlds

Working memory

It was interesting for me to see a recent study in neuroscience that supports my theory of reading comprehension ~~>[Pragmatic inferences in reading]. Bear with me while I try and explain (or you can duck out now and I won’t be offended). What they found is that working memory interacts with the senses in order to produce a stable view of our surroundings and reduce errors of perception. For one thing, it has to identify signals that are the result of actual sensory events and filter out extraneous signals that are produced by fluctuations inside the nervous system itself (like those caused by changes in activity levels, neurotransmitter concentrations, circadian rhythms, etc..). Neuroscientists refer to this as the ‘sensory orientation’ function. The visual areas in the brain must distinguish changes in actual sensory events from changes in internal activity in order to follow the ‘genuine’ action. They claim that the brain makes this estimate based on principles of ‘Bayesian inference’, which are not much different than principles of ‘Pragmatic inference’. It works something like this. Incoming signals that are considered likely to occur based on the contents of working memory are boosted, whereas signals considered less likely are held in abeyance and immediately suppressed if subsequent events don’t do anything to rehabilitate them. These findings were published in the August 26th journal PLoS One ~~> [Sensory adaptation for a changing brain]. Hah!

Is God A Mathematician?

Albert Einstein once wondered: "How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?" Indeed, Newton formulated a mathematical law of gravity which he himself could verify (given the observational results of his day) to an accuracy of no better than four percent. Yet, the law proved to be precise to better than one part in a million! How is that possible? Or take the example of knot theory – the mathematical theory of knots. It evolved as an obscure branch of pure mathematics. Amazingly, this abstract endeavor suddenly found extensive modern applications in topics ranging from the structure of the DNA to "string theory" – the candidate for an ultimate theory of the subatomic world.

And this is not all. The famous logician Bertrand Russell argued that logic and mathematics are really the same thing. "They differ as boy and man", he said, "logic is the youth of mathematics and mathematics is the manhood of logic." So how can we explain these incredible powers of mathematics? How come that stock option pricing and the agitated motion of pollen suspended in water can be described by the same mathematical equation?

At an even more fundamental level, are we merely discovering mathematics, just as astronomers discover previously unknown galaxies? Or, is mathematics simply a human invention? These (and many more) are the questions that Mario Livio is attempting to answer in "Is God A Mathematician?" The book reviews the ideas of great thinkers from Plato and Archimedes to Galileo and Descartes, and on to Russell and Gödel. It offers a lively and original discussion of topics ranging from cosmology to the cognitive sciences, and from mathematics to religion. The focus on the scientific and practical applications of the fascinating insights of great minds will appeal to a wide audience. (read more)

The Watchers

Sarcophagus lid of Pakal the Great


Genesis Chapter 6, verses 1-4

Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the LORD said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. (the Watchers)

In the Biblical Old Testament, the Book of Ezekiel tells of a flying object seen as a fiery whirlwind which when descended to the ground gave the appearance of being made of metal. It is described among other things as a wheel within a wheel containing four occupants, living creatures, whose likeness was that of man. The passage goes on to say that wherever the wheels went the creatures went, and when the living creatures were lifted up the wheels were lifted up. (read more) (see more)

Bon Appetit

Julia Child was a spy?

Google Earth

For the second time this month, Google is causing an immense amount of speculation.

Google has this time surprised its users with this crop circles logo.

Today’s logo shows a flying saucer above a series of crop circles that spell Google. Well, almost — the L has been abducted. That's similar to the last Google flying saucer logo from ten days ago, where an O was taken.

If you look at today’s logo’s file name, it’s “goog_e.gif” The URL of the logo is “http://www.google.com/logos/goog_e.gif” (there is a missing L). The last logo was go_gle.gif – reflecting the missing O. So that’s O and now L. What next?

The magic of knowing

The Big Bang

Let there be light

Walter Cronkite

"This is Walter Cronkite

And that's the way it is

July 17, 2009"

Ice Blink

Dave and Jaja spent seven years sailing around the world (1988-1995) aboard their 25-foot Cal 25 DIRECTION. Dave purchased the boat in 1985, gutted her to a bare hull, and then went to work beefing up the structure. He glassed in stringers, added keel floors and extra bulkheads, and then re-designed and re-built the interior. "I built a new rudder, re-stayed the mast, built a smaller cockpit, and then christened her with a bottle of warm Bud in an effort to get the mood right for the intended circumnavigation" is the way Dave puts it.


Dave was 22 when he started this project, and 24 when he finished. He met Jaja shortly after starting his cruise in St. John, USVI, and they finally got together in the UK (after a solo Transatlantic) in the fall of 1988. They were both 25 when they left England on their circumnavigation.


From England they headed West to the Caribbean, via the Cape Verde Islands. They were married in Barbados, then transited the Panama Canal, visited the Galapagos; and did the usual trip through the South Pacific, spending several seasons in Australia, New Zealand, and the nearby cruising paradise to the north. A trip through the Torres Straits, Indonesia, and then across the Indian Ocean had them rounding South Africa before arriving back in the Caribbean and then the States in 1995. Along the way they had two children (Chris and Holly). A third (Teiga) was born aboard DIRECTION at the end of the voyage.


The Martin family set sail again in 1997 on their 33-footer DRIVER, and have spent time in the Bahamas, Bermuda, Iceland, the Faroes, Northern Scotland, Norway, Greenland, and Newfoundland. They are currently settling down for the winter in Maine.

Percy Lavon Julian

Percy Lavon Julian (April 11, 1899 – April 19, 1975) was an African American research chemist and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants.

He was the first to synthesize the natural product physostigmine; and was a pioneer in the industrial large-scale chemical synthesis of human hormones, steroids, progesterone, and testosterone, from plant sterols such as stigmasterol and sitosterol.

His work would lay the foundation for the steroid drug industry's production of cortisone, other corticosteroids, and birth control pills. He later started his own company to synthesize steroid intermediates from the Mexican wild yam.

During his lifetime he received more than 130 chemical patents. Julian was one of the first African Americans to receive a doctorate in chemistry. He was the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, and the second African-American scientist inducted from any field.

The Time Machine

The Hubble Space Telescope is a Time Machine
It can see billions of years into the past

The Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300
61 Million light-years away

Eta Carinae Nebula NGC 3372
8 Thousand light-years away

Messier 81 NGC 3031
12 Million light-years away

The Cat's Eye Nebula NGC 6543
3.3 Thousand light-years away

The Eagle Nebula NGC 6611
7 Thousand light-years away

The Helix Nebula NGC 7293
7 Hundred light-years away

Young Stars in Magellanic Cloud NGC 346
210 Thousand light-years away

The Red Supergiant Star Monocerotis V838
20 Thousand light-years away

The Crab Nebula NGC 1952
6.5 Thousand light-years away

Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image
13 Billion light-years away

Click and enlarge this image
and see an estimated 10,000 galaxies
as they looked 13 billion years ago

The Mad Scientist

Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was an inventor and a mechanical and electrical engineer. Tesla was born in the village of Smiljan near the town of Gospić, Austrian Empire, Croatian Krajina. He was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is often described as an important scientist and inventor of the modern age, a man who "shed light over the face of Earth". He is best known for many revolutionary contributions in the field of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.
After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1894 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as one of the greatest electrical engineers who worked in America. Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, but due to his eccentric personality and his seemingly unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86.
The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field "B"), the tesla, was named in his honor (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960), as well as the Tesla effect of wireless energy transfer to wirelessly power electronic devices which Tesla demonstrated on a low scale (lightbulbs) as early as 1893 and aspired to use for the intercontinental transmission of industrial energy levels in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project.
Aside from his work on electromagnetism and electromechanical engineering, Tesla has contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio.

Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943)

Natural Law

Truth.........is the offspring

of silence and unbroken meditation

...Sir Isaac Newton...