The Golden Compass, Suppressed by Design

I watched the Golden compass, a movie that was made 11 years ago in 2007, and was intrigued by the blue plasma globes that ran all their carriages, airships, etc. The story line, for those who haven’t seen the movie, is about a man who at first is said to be the uncle of a little girl that catches the interest of a governing body called the Magisterium, that has the aim to destroy all free will in that alternative reality, and seeks to bridge universes to do that to all realities. This is kind of a kinder, gentler evil empire unlike the one in Star Wars, but still an evil empire when it really comes down to it. There are other things going on, like experimenting on children (AKA MK Ultra on this side), and trying to kill the man who is trying to make the bridge between the universes. He wants to learn from them, and the Magisterium wants to conquer and control them….big difference!

The little girl, Lyra Belacqua, has the golden compass that has what they were calling dust swirling inside of it. The “dust” interpenetrates universes, and in M theory two things do that: virtual particles and gravity. This is really heavy stuff for a children’s movie, not pun intended, but I couldn’t have simplified it and made it as understandable as Philip Pullman did. One of the weirder aspects of the movie are the animal companions that represent the soul, and is in Wiccan a familiar. Each person has one, and without it one not only loses their soul, but their free will as well, and that is what the alternate reality doctor Mengelas are working on. Sound familiar? Actually, it makes you wonder if the Magisterium is another name for the Illuminati on this end, changing the names to protect the guilty.

The “official” story for not completing the trilogy was interference from the Catholic church, which makes no sense, as they blasted several other movies and artists, and that didn’t make any difference, the most notable one being The Matrix trilogy. However, let’s detail the items that could derail and censor the project:

1. A world running on free energy. That’s a big no no, and has killed a lot of motion picture projects, and put the rest into obscurity with negative reviews, which this one also had. Has no one thought of the reviewers getting paid off? Really? Don’t believe the rot inside Rotten Tomatoes. Another movie that was suppressed, but was actually made a trilogy of, is called “Atlas Shrugged.” Why is this? It features an atmospheric electricity generator, which is free energy, and inventors that bail out of society to form their own breakaway community. Check it out. Last I checked, it was still available online.
2. A Magisterium, that is pretty much a governing body that decides what is right for humanity, but is internally corrupt, and metastasized into something that instead of protecting them, controls them quite rigidly. Deja Vu anyone?
3. Child experimentation in mind control, supported by the Magisterium above. They explain that missing children are lab rats for the Magisterium. If they came right out and claimed that in real life in this universe, no one would believe it. But removing this to a different universe and alternate reality somehow allows it to be believable. This is a common usage of storytellers through the ages to reach the masses, right down to the lowest common denominator.

So with all these reasons, it was the perfect storm to induce an apoplectic fit into the controllers, and turn public opinion against a good movie. To be sure, there have been movies that showed how public opinion is engineered, most notably “Wag the Dog”, that came out in 1997, before the Iraq war, and even though this was released within the 10 years of the event horizon of public amnesia, that war still happened even though it showed in painful detail how a war was manufactured to divert attention from real issues.

So is there any hope? Sure there is. We each need to exercise our option of free will, and use a filter of our own common sense. There are so many out there that have abdicated their free will, and allowed all that wisdom buried deep within their soul to become forgotten. It’s time to dig that up and become connected with all that you are and can become. Don’t let that spark go out, and instead fan the flame.

Yes, it takes an effort of will, and no one said it would be easy. It never is. Western civilization is not geared toward personal development. It is geared to controlling and chaining down individual will. It was always like that, and we have to open our eyes and recognize that fact. Once that is done, we can make a new concensus version of reality that allows for, and encourages individual creativity.

We can be our own golden compass.

Life Will Find a Way

I saw the video “Where Do You Draw the Line”, about the destruction of the Amazon River basin and forest by the oil companies, and it caused me to do a long introspection. They were destroying the lungs of of the planet for 8 days worth of the world’s consumption of oil. 8 days, and it would take decades to undo the damage, if not centuries.

So, we have pollution of the forest, which contains the most ecological diversity of the whole planet, and in which new species are not only being discovered, but are EVOLVING. Yes, I meant that: evolving. They are appearing and filling niches that are left by species that are going extinct. Life does that—filling in the gaps, like a machine that grows a new gear that has broken and fallen apart. It has an innate intelligence.

Millions of years ago, carboniferous forests fossilized because bacteria did not know how to break down something that was newly evolved: lignin. These fossilized forests became the coal seams we see today. For centuries that carbon was naturally sequestered, and the CO2 levels dropped. During that time, bacteria evolved to break down and metabolize lignin and cellulose. These bacteria also exist in the gut of termites, and break down cellulose into sugars that they can metabolize. There have also been instances where bacterial colonization has occurred in the human gut, and fiber has been converted in the same way leading to unexplained obesity. But to get back to the case in point:

We are putting out a substance, oil, that does not have a way of being broken down easily into an ecosystem that is intelligent enough to find that way. Does this sound like a recipe for disaster? It does to me. There was a book written years ago called “Mutant 59: the Plastic Eaters.” In that book, a scientist genetically tinkers with a strain of bacteria that metabolizes plastic. Is this far fetched? Absolutely not—in fact it is prophetic. At the moment, there are several strains of bacteria that are being developed to deal with oil slicks and spills in the ocean. Some are being carefully deployed with the knowledge that once you let the genie out of the bottle, it is hard to get it back inside. There is already a fungus that eats polyethylene, and urethane used in insulation. The really big complication is that these plastics that make up a big part of our civilization are oil based, and it is a short hop from eating oil to eating plastic made from that oil. Of course, there will be countermeasures that will be used, and we are all familiar with the methods to weatherproof wood to keep it from rotting from microorganisms that can metabolize the lignin. The same will be true for the plastics.

But in the interim we will be looking at a “plastic apocalypse” that no sci fi movie has ever addressed because it is too close to reality. What will this look like? Let’s look at one possible scenario: In the Amazon basin, an oil company has been dumping crude oil into the river in reckless behavior typical to large corporations. One of the natives sees a bubbling mass in the water, and a clean spot developing. This is the oil being broken down into carbon compounds whilst hydrogen gas is liberated along with methane. It smells like rotting vegetable matter. He sees white and green spots developing on leaves that line the shore that have been splashed with oil. The oil and tar are being broken down into constituent parts, with the carbon precipitating out. A woman moves a plastic tarp that has a hole in it, and notices it is sticky to the touch.

It has begun.

The newly mutated bacterium moves with the oil, looking for food. On land, it spreads toward the source, and finds a puddle that is in the high traffic area for the workers. One of the workers steps on the puddle, and it hitches a ride to the well head. A drop falls off the boot and into the well head, and seeps downward. It then finds a perfect growth medium. It begins multiplying. They secure the well head, and let the gas flare off instead of collecting it like they should. After a while, they notice that the pressure is rising instead of falling, and the color of the flame is changing. They do not think twice about this one, and after the flare is done, begin pumping. The oil/tar seems thicker than normal, and is heated. It is either put into pipelines, or sent to the tanker trucks, where a leak splashes onto a hose for an air line. It then finds a different food source, and mutates to accommodate that medium. The driver checks his hoses, and notices a sticky residue, as if the hose were melting. He shruggs it off and sticks the rag in his back pocket that he wiped the hose off with. It then spreads to his neoprene boots and plastic parts of his truck. He then takes it to civilization, where rain washes it off onto an asphalt road, finding another growth medium to snack on. YUM! He returns to the truck hours later to find it a mess with the upholstery, steering wheel and plastic parts looking like cooked pasta drooping down and running. The soles come off his boots, and the plastic fillings in his mouth fall out leaving a weird taste.

It takes a while to spread. The oil in the tanker infects the refinery, and all the seals begin to fall apart resulting in explosions. The refinery is shut down, and by the time they realize that it is an organism doing this, it has spread to most of the planet. Melting insulation in wiring causes power outages, and plastic computer cases melt into pools of goo. All of this is in the first week of infection. Power plants are shut down, and nuke plants that are not shut down soon enough experience meltdowns. They notice that silicon based plastics are affected the least—for now anyway. It is a carbon based organism after all. Plastic piping falls apart as the organism adapts to handle toxic poly vinyl chloride, and water leaks pop up all over. National emergencies are declared, and defense computers break down resulting in not missile launches, but explosions inside the silos because of the plastics there. A moratorium on nuclear energy is declared. Conductors are wrapped up in fabric in a stopgap measure to keep things operating. Different plastics are being formulated to replace what is breaking down that are not oil based.

A month later 50% of the oil wells are infected. Oil first turns to tar, and then solidifies. Many oil wells stop producing. The only ones that are still working are beyond the temperature tolerances for the bacillus, which are becoming extremophiles and adapting to those as well. At this time things have come to a grinding halt, and after an economic collapse the world is struggling to climb back to where it was. It will take decades to recover. This is the post-oil world. To be sure, it is still being produced from waste, and stored carefully to prevent “the rot” from taking their precious supplies. But for the most part the world is forcibly shoved into alternative energy sources, and (gasp) free energy. The possible perpetrators for this are denounced and vilified, but it doesn’t bring back the dead billion. Of course, it wasn’t a lab that did this, or a mad scientist, but nature herself.

But why did this happen? Monocultures are vulnerable structures, and are just inviting disaster. Manufacturing so much based on oil, and being horribly sloppy with the management of the raw materials at the same time, is just asking for this to occur. Monocultures fail, from the potato famine in Ireland, to wheat blights in several countries. Technological diversity gives redundancy, and if one part fails, others are there to fill that niche. We should take a lesson from ecosystems on this, and the chicken farmer that has his entire livlihood wiped out by bird flu. Living systems are intelligent and self-regulating. If they see an imbalance, an organism evolves to bring that system back into balance. Sometimes that organism is not something that we would prefer to have around, and can create a lot of destruction in its wake. Sometimes it gently fills a niche, and works together with the biological wheelwork to regain balance. It is a matter of magnitude. If the pendulum has been pushed too far to one side, it has that much farther to swing before it finally reaches the center again.

It is all up to us.

The Other Fork in the Road

I’m writing this after a conversation that some friends and I had about the tech that we had to live with, and especially microwave ovens. The story about that one is particularly important in understanding how things are decided for us, as opposed to our collective decision of what to use, and what to discard.

So consider just this one instance.

Once upon a time, in the 1960’s, there were two technologies. One was based on sound, and another was the child of the military industrial complex. I can remember a book called “The World of Silent Sound”, about ultrasonics, which at the time was called supersonics. In the book were photos of different applications of this new technology, from scrambling an egg inside the shell using a rotating field of sound waves, and cooking it at the same time to cleaning without the need for any soap, as it would alter the surface tension of water allowing the soil to easily wash off of the clothing. Also, since it was less harsh on the clothing, no fabric softener was needed either. There was also a photo of a whistle that was placed in the focal point of a parabolic dish. A short distance from that a hand held a paper tissue that you normally blow your nose in, and it was bursting into flame through molecular friction, similar to rubbing your hands together. A sonic oven was also discussed, which would put the food in a rotating sound field with transducers on 3 sides. It could cook food and emulsify gravies at the same time by matching it’s acoustic resonance frequency.

Things looked like they were going really well for ultrasonics. It could be used for breaking up gall stones, cooking food, cleaning...the applications looked endless. So what happened?

Raytheon happened. They had unlimited resources for microwave applications. Wheelbarrows full of money were thrown at them during the cold war, and they saw other applications for microwaves. The main one was for heating, as radar techs knew all too well what happened if they went into the microwave beam--they might get “cooked”. Actually, that used that term. So the corporate big wigs put two and two together, and made an oven that used the very same radiation that cooked and altered the tissue of the techs, giving them cancer in the process, to cook food. They seem to have conveniently left out the part about the cancer. That might affect the bottom line, after all.

OK, so how do the two systems differ? Well, sound works by molecular friction, like rubbing your hands together as mentioned previously. Microwaves, unlike the “domain rotation” nonsense that they promoted over the years, works by inducing voltages inside the food, and those voltages produce currents that literally electrocute the food through what is called ohmic heating. This is the same way that prisoners are electrocuted in the electric chair. They literally cook to death from the inside out—a very barbaric way to kill someone, but most governments are not famous for ethical considerations. I’m surprised they never tossed the prisoners into a big microwave oven—after all, it does the same thing.

But another problem is that non-ionizing radiation is not supposed to produce chemical changes. However, it’s not just non-ionizing radiation that we have to worry about. It’s more like electrochemistry, as you induce currents inside the food that cooks it. AHA! So we have electrochemical changes, similar to what happens when we blast food with ionizing radiation, or treat it with gamma rays. In that case, we have things called URPs, (no, not a belch). That stands for unique radiological products. These are chemical compounds that are not normally found in nature, and the body is unfamiliar with dealing with them, having a biological freakout moment when they see them.

And yes, those are carcinogens.

So we have two very separate technologies: one that induces chemical changes in the food, which can be tasted, and the other that heats through molecular friction. Since the time of its introduction in the 1960s, the microwave oven has had more and more evidence piling up that it is a really bad idea to use it for heating and cooking food. I remember a hot dog cooker from the 60’s that had two prongs that you stuck on either side of the hot dog, and then plugged that into the wall. It did the same thing, but somehow people never connected the two. Recently, there has been a study that showed when microwave treated water was used on plants after letting it cool down, that the plants either grew stunted or died altogether. It did something to the water. Now we know that the electron bond angles change when you subject water to ionizing or non-ionizing radiation, and that it is really bad news.

So after decades of going down the wrong fork in the road, are we doomed to follow that? No, in fact that tech is still there awaiting development. The lesson here is that once we have knowledge of which tech is life giving, and which is deadly, we can dump the stuff that is killing us and go back to the good stuff, similar to cancer survivors discovering that salads are a really good idea. Right now the only applications that most people are familiar with are ultrasonic nebulizers and jewelry cleaners. But it goes so much farther than that, and that is the road we must travel. I propose that we call the oven the “ultrawave”. Imagine having a washing machine that uses no soap—the same with dishwashers. You can do the same thing with shower heads, and have a shower with no soap that is also tuned to knock out pathogens, so you walk out of the shower clean on the inside as well as out. There already exist therapeutic baths that disintegrate gall and kidney stones. Not many people know about those because surgical intervention is far more profitable.

That is another lesson—we need to be aware of the motives of why certain technologies are used and promoted. If it is for the extraction of our personal resources, acting as a parasite, then we need to dump that practice or tech. If it is for self-empowerment, and independence, then it needs to be promoted.

It is all about consciousness, and self-empowerment. Let’s all be awake and aware!

Let’s Cash Our Reality Check!

One of the precepts of physics is that all energy eventually turns into heat though entropy. Heat, other than the infrared heat that we are familiar with, is also molecular motion or vibration. We are all familiar with the term “global warming”, and we are also told it is due to burning fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. This is partially correct, but not the whole story.

So let’s look at, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. If we burn gasoline in an engine, and that engine is only 19% efficient (some haggle over the actual percentages, and say it is much higher), then 81% of the energy of combustion of the gasoline goes into the environment as heat without doing any useful work. For the sake of argument, let’s say the total energy we have to spend is 100 kilowatts of energy. Then 19 kilowatts of that goes to the wheels to move the vehicle, and 81 kilowatts goes into the environment as heat. How much is 81 kilowatts of heat? Well, one kilowatt is 3412 BTU, British thermal units. Those in America are familiar with BTU ratings for furnaces. 81 Kilowatts is equal to 276,372 BTU, or the output of a typical home furnace. Now, think of all the vehicles on the road—those in front of you, and those in back. Just one thousand is equal to over 276 million BTU, which is enough to heat a stadium or a large swimming pool. This is not looking at the greenhouse gases—just the heat generated by our vehicles and machines. But we have more cars on the road than that, don’t we? If we just take 200 million vehicles on the road on the planet as an example, which is actually a pretty conservative number, this figure comes to 6.824 x 10¹¹ BTU—nearly a trillion BTU. This heat is injected into the environment, and the CO2 acts like a stopper in the bottle preventing it from leaving.

But it gets worse...far worse. You see, for every watt we put into the environment, we get 3.412 BTU of heat energy. Let’s look at power plants now (didn’t think I would let you off that easy, did you?) Let’s say we have a thousand megawatt plant. How efficient is the power plant? Let’s look at that one too. A typical nuclear reactor converts the heat of fission, which is a very wasteful way of producing heat in the first place (Einstein said it was a “helluva way to boil water.”) to steam. That steam goes to a turbine, which is about 30% efficient at converting the steam to mechanical energy to spin the shaft. It is attached to an alternator that is about 80% efficient. OK, so we can haggle over percentages, but on the average that is what we have to work with. Multiplying 0.3 times 0.8 gives us 0.24, or 24% efficiency. This is almost as bad as that gasoline engine earlier, but not by much. What this means is that 76% of the heat energy winds up going up the stack of the cooling towers. Didn’t you ever wonder how much heat those things put out? Let’s look at that to answer that question. If the power plant generates one billion watts, or 1000 megawatts, then roughly three times that amount goes up the stack as heat, or 3 billion watts of heat. Think of that space heater that you have in the corner of your office that takes 1000 watts, and multiply that times 3 MILLION. And that is just one reactor. The same applies to coal fired plants, with the exception that the mechanism for burning the coal is not 100% efficient, and you wind up with CO2 gas as a byproduct. OK, so part of the argument is that not all power plants put that heat into the atmosphere, and that goes into lakes, rivers and oceans. How do we calculate one BTU? Well, one BTU heats one pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit. At 8 pounds to the gallon, it takes 8 BTU to heat a gallon of water 1 degree F. With the 3 billion watts example, we have just a little over 10 trillion BTU, which will heat 1.2 trillion gallons of water 1 degree PER HOUR. Just for reference, the Great Lakes are 6 quadrillion gallons, or 6 x 10¹⁵ gallons. With this example, just one power plant can raise the temp of the entire Great Lakes .00166 degrees per hour, but with slow convection currents we can see temp rises locally in the range of 2-5 degrees.

That is why we see things heating up. Our inefficient energy generation methodology created that heat, and the CO2 merely kept it from escaping. Those who do not know blame the CO2 for the heating. It’s really our own fault.

How do we mitigate this? Well, wind power generation is 80-85% efficient, so less winds up as heat on the generating side, but on the user side it still converts to heat. Solar is about 20% efficient, but newer collectors use the heat in the collectors to heat domestic water for showers and cleaning. Geothermal unfortunately is only 24% efficient if we use the same turbine and generator combo, but that is coming from the interior of the planet and not generating CO2 as a byproduct.

But what does it look like globally? Get ready for some really big numbers, and exponents to make your eyes glaze over. But here goes...according to the Shift Project Data Portal, the global electricity production is 2.2433 x 10¹⁶ watt hours, converting terawatts to exponents. Using the same average of efficiency, that comes to 2.29 x 10²⁰ BTU, way past Carl Sagan’s “Billions and billions”. Actually, a billion billion is only 10¹⁸, less than a hundredth of that. That figure is enough to turn the 6 quadrillion gallons of the great lakes into a big cloud of steam. Thank goodness it is dumped into the entire volume of the oceans as a heat sink. But what does that mean?

ALERT...ALERT…exponents ahead! So how really big are the oceans? According to the source in Wikipedia, it is 332.5 million cubic miles or 3.32 x 10⁸. Each cubic mile has 1.1 x 10¹² gallons, or a total of 3.652 x 10²⁰ gallons or 2.9216 x 10²¹ pounds of water. Once again, we take the BTU figure and divide that by the number of pounds to find the temperature increase. Yes, we are doing calorimetry on a planet! No problem! What do we get? It comes to .07 degrees F increase per hour. Now, most of this tends to get radiated away, and the temp increase that is left over winds up as 1.68 degrees temp rise. So what are the environmentalists claiming? A 2 degree temp rise. Do we see a correlation here? If we include the heat trapping of the CO2, that figure comes to 1.992 degrees temp rise...close enough.

So the big problem here is not so much the CO2, as the method of power production. The first problem is that we cannot continue to generate power the way we have been. It is horribly inefficient, and created this problem in the first place. Unless it is part of a larger agenda, which it could be, but for now we will not go there. For now let’s see if there is a solution to this problem.

There have been inventors in the past that claimed to have something called “cold electricity.” That is a type of electrical energy that winds up drawing heat out of the environment instead of increasing it. These inventors have been ruthlessly suppressed, and held the answer to this global problem. There is also something called the “heat trap” technology, which is essentially a method of turning infrared back into electricity, as a kind of infrared solar cell. That has been demonstrated, but has found a shocking lack of support. We can also generate power without boiling water, as that is so 19^th century! (Albert Einstein was right!) Using the heat trap tech with solar panels can drive efficiencies close to 90%, as well as geothermal without circulating water or boiling anything. We have to use a different mindset than the one that created the problem, and think outside the box.

And finally, we have to ask the same question that Gerard O’Neill asked in The High Frontier: is the surface of a planet really a good place for a technological civilization? If not, then what the heck are we doing here? If the most energy intensive and polluting industries went off-world, would we see an increase in the quality of life and the environment? I think the answer is a resounding yes.

It is definitely something to consider.

The Holy Gospel of Linux

Yea, verily, I speak of the gospel of the sacred OS of Linux!

It has been a long journey. I began in the DOS days, where command line interfaces began. Geez, that seems like decades ago. Well, come to think of it—it WAS decades ago. I had a Challenger C4P that had a blazing 8K of RAM, with MS Basic in ROM. It made things easier to write programs for, and I wrote dozens, one after the other. I didn’t take a course on it—I just did it—as easily as breathing. My cousin, who was taking a course in it, said I was a natural, and boolean logic seemed common sense to me. I did programs for the engineering department as well. They seemed to like it, but I never got a “thank you” for it. It compressed hours of work with a legal pad and steps to put into a calculator into seconds. I have to admit I was way better at programming than anything else at the time, but after applying myself toward electromagnetic theory, that came as well.

A few years later, after the Challenger met it’s big challenge in the sky, I got a Commodore 64, which was actually only 32K of RAM. That one also ran on MS DOS, and was pretty primitive by today’s standards—not as bad as an Altair, but at least you could put programs in without knowing machine code or binary (later I would discover that my father knew how to program in machine code, a skill that I never would have guessed). Then I discovered the Apple Mac—the big beige box with the monitor inside. I was thinking of getting the next generation of Commodore, the Amiga, but decided against that after getting burned the first time. It was 1984, and that was the 128K Mac, with dual floppy drives, and no hard drive. The earlier ones had program storage on cassette tape, or a Wollensak reel to reel tape recorder. This one was going uptown with a 3.5 inch floppy—WOO HOO! The Mac OS was a graphical interface, and I got out of the command line interface world. It was a big step up. I also had a floppy disk of MS Basic, and I continued to program in that. There were upgrades after upgrades, and I kept track of every one—from 128 to 512 to 1024K. I stuck with the Mac OS, while taking trips to the Windows world from time to time. I put a book into the Mac—and did all the typesetting with Pagemaker. I learned dozens of programs, and had a whole bookshelf filled with program boxes. I sold the Mac Plus, and went to a Mac LC, the “Pizza Box” as some would call it. I had that one for a few years, upgrading to a G3, G4 and then a G5. At that time, I was running Windows 98 with an emulator when I had to, as there were still programs that only ran in the Windows world. I briefly tried loading an operating system called “Linux PPC 2000” that was a gray hair and ulcer generator, and gave up on it as the installer would crash constantly. I could never, ever get it to load. So at that time I concluded that Linux was a novelty, and nothing more. I couldn’t find many apps worth pursuing, and left it at that. By that time the G5 came along, and Apple did a major fubar.

Some would say they “screwed the pooch”.

They, in their infinite corporate wisdom, decided to change processors. They had an advanced RISC reduced instruction set processor (PowerPC), and changed it to the intel CISC (complex instruction set) processor that took more clock cycles to perform the same operations. As if that weren’t bad enough, they went from a Linux-like OS to Unix. OS 10, the Unix version was horribly buggy, and slowed things down even further. Then 10.5 came along, and they only would provide an upgrade for the intel machines. There was only one problem with that—they stopped selling the G5 machines only a couple of months earlier, so those people who got a nice and shiny G5 discovered they had to buy a whole new computer if they were going to upgrade their OS.

Saying they were not happy was an understatement.

Thus began the exodus from Mac OS. The open source community was sympathetic, and several versions of Linux popped up—Red Hat, Yellow Dog, and so forth. I think it was a backlash against what Apple did with their customer base, as all of the OSX flavors were based on cats—lion, mountain lion, leopard and the like. So they named theirs after dogs. I dabbled in Linux, and had Red Hat and Yellow Dog. I got it to work, but there were not many “packages” or apps available at that time, so I stayed with the Mac OS. Apple stumbled again. After Mavericks, they came out with an abomination they called El Capitan. It was not compatible with many of their own apps, and many did not like the slowdown in performance, let alone constant crashes. The one that came out after that was even worse, called Sierra. The ongoing joke was the next version was going to be called sayonara. Mavericks had some bugs of its own, the most serious of which was a directory fragmentation that would cause the OS to self destruct over time. A utility called Disk Warrior fixed that, but it cost a little over $100. Apple put a self destruct into their OS so that you HAD to upgrade, as they no longer supplied their OS on a DVD, and you had to go to the cloud to reinstall the crumbling OS, so if they took your OS off the cloud, you had to upgrade to a garbage OS. That was not good. It took the choice away from the user who was your customer, and treated them like an idiot for buying your computer.

There had to be an alternative.

So fast forward to a few months ago. In 2015, I was looking at Ubuntu, and different flavors. Unity was OK, although a little funky. It looked like it was designed for a tablet PC. Lubuntu, the low end, was too low for me. Xubuntu, one supposedly for the techno geeks, didn’t seem geeky enough. Ubuntu Studio was a memory hog, and sometimes crashed. I had a MacBook Pro that was in need of an upgrade, and it was a good experiment. I looked at all the flavors, and Mate (like the tea from South America, pronounced “Mah tay” instead of “OOOY Mate”). I liked it. So I did an ISO disk, and put it in the Mac. I am writing this using Libre Office, which is the open source version of Microsoft Office, and it works better. I have found almost all the apps I need in Linux, and there are a huge selection. Mate has a cool one click installer that Mac OS or Windows doesn’t have. When I flip the lid open, it takes 3 seconds to log onto the net, in contrast to one minute for Mac OS. It is at least 3 times faster. The OS was only 1.5 gigs in size, as opposed to a nearly 8 gig download off the cloud. With a slow connection, it can take hours to download the OS, and techs groan when they learn this. The Mate install took a couple of minutes, and upgrades are just as short. Apps are tiny in comparison to either Windows or Mac, and work much faster. After downloading apps like a kid in a candy store, The 250 gig hard drive had 200 gigs free. It reminded me of the OS9 days. I put Wine in, which is kind of like an emulator that translates DLL calls on the fly. I put in Windows apps such as IMVU, a chat program and Ye Aulde Microsoft Office, which worked like a champ. I was officially impressed. What did it cost me? Nothing...nada...zip. It was free. There is a huge selection of software in the open source community. Some versions are free, and others are free at the entry level, and you pay for the professional upgrade. So the total cost for my upgrade project was zero, and I tripled the speed of my computer. I did find that there was a lack of selections of 1.6:1 aspect ratios for the monitor for resolutions, so I was stuck with a higher resolution than with the Mac OS. I learned to live with that. I tried Firefox, and Chrome. They handled the video well, although the upgrades for Firefox seemed to occasionally have problems with downloading extra files. I found Skype for Linux, and used that. Libre Office had a one click export to PDF that was a nice feature. The Atril reader worked well for PDF files. I got Calibre for ebooks, and started a collection of those.

Then I tried “system tweaks.”

There were settings for “Cupertino” and “Redmond”. Cupertino puts a tray at the bottom of the screen that looks like Mac OSX, and Redmond makes it look more like Windows. I wanted an authentic Linux experience, so I chose neither, and went with the default Mate screen. I also put in a screen saver with astronomical photos that was nearly identical to the one in the Mac OS. Now, unless you looked at the top and bottom of the screen you would think it’s running on Mac OS. One other thing: the menus are customizable, so you can change the menus to suit your needs. This is gone in the Apple and Microsoft worlds, but not in Linux.

And then I HAD to go to Windows 10 for my drafting program...OMG! The wait for the whole thing to boot was almost painful. I did some high speed thumb twiddling while it loaded on the big tower computer, then made a cup of coffee, came back and it was still loading. I have to admit I am spoiled now. Once you drive a Lamborghini, a Yugo just will not do. I am a convert to the holy church of Linux. YOWZA! However, I will not be handling snakes or passing around the mason jar filled with strychnine. That is reserved for the Windows crowd.

In the past, it was said that the best selling point for the Mac OS was a lack of viruses. That didn’t last long. Right now that is a selling point for Linux, and I wonder if we will see the same problem later. Only time will tell.

Am I happy with the upgrade? You betcha! Would I recommend it? Yes, I would. The Linux world has also introduced me to a different selection of software that is not available in the Windows and Mac worlds. I got network analysis tools that were professional grade in the open source community that would normally have cost me hundreds of dollars. I had to get this for a friend that wanted some web sites traced along with a few emails. The performance was stunning, and a lot of fun! Three of my friends were constantly after me about trying Linux again, and Ubuntu in particular, and I was too cynical at the time to have an open mind. I had to find out for myself. Sure, I have done programming in the past, but I did not have to use those skill sets to install Mate. It did it all by itself.

If you never did programming, Windows and Mac OS are OK, but for those who want to get into the nitty gritty Linux is the way to go. However, if all you want is performance, it excels at that as well.

Look Ma! I took off the training wheels!

 

Metaphysics and Physics: 

Divergence or Convergence?

Many years ago I read “Mysticism and the New Physics” by Michael Talbot, and it gave me a different perspective on the universe—it opened my mind up a little bit to see other possibilities—that perhaps this solid reality was less substantial than we thought. And as I read other works that linked eastern philosophies with quantum physical concepts, I began to see a convergence rather than a divergence.

The turning point for me was reading the Kybalion, by the Three Initiates. It told about the “all within the all”, a recursive concept if there ever were one. It continued with “as above, so below”, and other Hermetic concepts. It was as if I were in kindergarten all those years, and then this dropped into my lap at just the right time. The synchronicity was astounding. I was at a friend’s house and he came over and handed me a sheaf of photocopied papers an inch thick. That was the book. He said, “You need to read this...NOW! Something told me to copy this for you. Take your time.” So I did. I put the sheaf in a zip up bag that I had, and would read it whenever I could. It resonated so strongly with me like so few books ever could. Later I would read 2150 AD by Thea Alexander, and I noted some Hermetic overtones in the Macro Philosophy.

After speaking with some scientist-philosophers, one had an interesting take on the subject. “What we perceive is dependent on our world view. Philosophy is the scaffolding...the framework of that perception. It limits us, but if our world view is large enough, then we see a little bit farther than most, and can share that vision with those that have the same level of comprehension.” I saw the truth in that.

I became just as hungry for philosophy as science. It seemed to balance things, and understood how they both would weave a tapestry of deeper perception. So I went from electronic theory to Macro Philosophy, from quantum physics to Theosophy, from the Many Worlds Hypothesis to I-Ching and Hermetic Laws of manifestation. I saw links everywhere. The all within the all was the same as the Mandlebrot theory of fractality, and the fractal universe. It all seemed to be converging. In fact, the Hermetic “all” was the same as Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenic field—a universal field of intelligence that permeates everything—the same as the “force” in Star Wars. We lived in a sea of intelligence, and matter itself was not dead, but alive. I learned psychometry—the discipline that accessed the intelligence field in matter, and could see images that were imprinted on car keys and other items. They were memories of the owner, recorded for all time. The Russians had a word for this science—energetics. In the west it was called psychotronics, and it studied the interactions of the standing longitudinal wave structures we call matter, and the longitudinal, or traveling scalar waves that connect all matter in the universe. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance” or quantum entanglement. It showed that using Bell’s Theorem, you could prove this was a very real phenomenon. So we have another point of convergence.

It explains so many things—telepathy, voodoo, psychotronics, psychometry. They are all caused by the same phenomena. We need to expand our awareness of the physical world, and quantify how these different forces work together to merge into the same cause. There is even new speculation on the physics of consciousness itself, and what it means to be self-conscious, or sentient, and self-aware.

At some point, I can see real world devices that cross the boundaries, and are triggered by the psi field directly, as in the PK switch in 2150 AD. We have something called the SQD, or superconductive quantum detector that can change state with single photons interacting with it. We also have photomultiplier tubes that can do the same thing, and so sensitive they can detect the ghost particle, the neutrino, that can pass through a sheet of lead as thick as the earth before interacting with matter, and detect it as it interacts with a single nucleus. So we are nearly there. Also, there are circuits based upon living matter, such as bacteria that can sense fluctuations in the information field. Chris Bird in “The Secret Life of Plants”, showed how this information field in all organisms connects in a kind of internet of life, and can cause eruptions in the collective unconscious such as prophetic dreams. This information field not only propagates forward in time, but backward as well to produce psychic impressions. In his paper “Quantum Entanglement in Time” Martin Jones showed how this information transfer could take place, and explain such things as deja vu, prescience, and other psychic phenomena. This takes the paranormal and makes it normal by explaining how it works. It’s only spooky if you don’t understand the mechanism. As Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any science sufficiently advanced would be indistinguishable from magic”.

In that case, what is magic anyway? It is a sympathetic resonance in the information field. Take 2 tuning forks, and strike one to begin it vibrating. Hold the other one close by, and it takes up that resonance, and begins ringing on it’s own. The community called Damanhur discovered this and called it selfics, and are using symbols that have this sympathetic resonance to preserve food, as a way to suppress bacterial growth, as well as other things. Think of the symbols as the tuning forks for the information field. So now the metaphysical concept of taking someone’s power by knowing their name becomes significant. If they identify with their name, that is their center of power. They resonate with that. This also means that the magical practice of sigils takes on a new meaning. The same would be true of photographs, as the photon pattern that made the photo is entangled with the person in the photo. Now those superstitious beliefs of some primitive tribes takes on a whole new significance, as they believed that in taking their photo you were stealing their soul. The same would apply to the taboo for graven images, as those would have their own symbolic resonance.

But there are positive aspects to all of this. Rupert Sheldrake mentioned that the amplitude of the morphic field increases to the square of those that have the same intention, and alike mind. This can explain the hundredth monkey effect. How so? Take a look at a light bulb as opposed to a laser. Both can have the same wattage, but the laser can cut sheet steel. Why is that? Because the laser is coherent, and the light coming from the bulb is not. One has a single frequency in a single phase, in a narrow beam. The other is non coherent in phase and frequency, and diverges. When people act together, their morphic fields act in coherence, like the atoms in a laser. When they are all going in separate directions, they are like the light bulb. Society is like that. When the American Revolution took place, only 3% of the population were for the separation from England, and the rest were unconcerned. Let’s take a look how that works. If we have an intentional community with a 100 people, it affects 10,000 in the neighboring territory. 1000 affects 1,000,000 and so on. This means that about 90,000 can offset the entire planet of 8 billion.

This really is the only way real change takes place, with a small coherent minority leading the way for the incoherent or noncoherent (perhaps I was right the first time) majority. This is why a church full of people can set the pattern for a whole community, or a small political movement for a whole country. But for those that want to maintain the status quo, the easiest thing to do is to keep people fighting amongst themselves, as a non-coherent populace goes nowhere and is not a threat to the elite. How do you do this? By killing or jailing anyone that is remotely associated with leading a religious or political movement, and promoting crime and corruption. Fear is a control factor, and tends to disrupt coherent thought, and crime—the fear of being robbed, raped or killed—is the best way of doing that. Another way is the fear of being robbed, raped or killed by the government, so totalitarian laws and edicts are another way of preventing coherence among the masses that they consider to be the enemy. But these diversionary tactics are symptoms that the powers that are soon not to be are themselves afraid of change.

I had a great conversation with a historian once, who considered himself an expert on political history and tactics. It’s amazing what you learn when you load them up on beer, and lend a sympathetic ear. It went like this:

“Do you want to know a dirty little secret that people like me know?” He grabbed a handful of peanuts and looked at them carefully, as if he was trying to divine something from them.

“Sure. I like to learn things from the past. Sometimes it prevents them from happening again, or something like that.”

He laughed, and looked at me oddly. “It has to do with terrorism...the real kind.”

“How many kinds are there? Is it like close encounters by a UFO...4 kinds aren’t there?”

He snorted. “I’m serious. Real terrorism is all state sponsored...” He looked at me again.

I thought he was beginning to treat me like an idiot. “Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?”

He looked at me a little pained. “No, you don’t get it. It is sponsored by the state to terrorize their own people. Look at the Reichstag fire of Germany.”

“They do it to gt their own people to do something they wouldn’t normally do?” I guess I looked surprised.

“Now you got it. That is how it happens without exception. They got that little lesson from the Mafia. You burn down the bar next to your target to shake them down for protection money.”

“Pretty insidious if you ask me...” I wrinkled my nose.

“Of course it is. But it always works that way. Do you understand now why it has been a secret all this time?”

“Yeah...yeah I can see why. But why do they keep using the same playbook?”

“Because they think the peasants are too stupid to catch on. That’s why.” He fished around in the bowl of peanuts for something, and grabbed a handful. Then after he looked at the floor for a while, he said, “I gotta go. I said too much already. I’ll deny I said any of this later, so don’t bother quoting me.”

He went out the door without looking back. I think he was ashamed. At least I would like to think so.

So we see how fear can be used as a diversion. But if the peasants “wise up”, then the game is over, and I think that we are close to that point. The good news is that it doesn’t take all of them for this to happen, as the hundredth monkey effect shows it only takes a small percentage of people acting with coherent consciousness without fear to make major changes.

The rule book that has been used for 2000 years on this planet is about to become obsolete.

Nitinol – Shape Memory Alloy

Remember the Terminator movies with the T-1000? They called it a mnemetic polyalloy. It was supposed to be made up of little nano machines that mimicked living cells, and could copy any shape it was programmed to.

Well, it turns out that is not too far from the truth. There is an alloy called nitinol, which is a combination of nickel and titanium, (with a variant being nickel, titanium, osmium and lanthanum), and it can be “programmed” to return to a specific shape on reaching a certain temperature that is determined through the proportion of nickel to titanium. For example, you can have a stent that reinforces an artery programmed to actuate at the temperature of the blood, and crush the stent so it is easily maneuvered into place, and once it is there, the temperature of the blood causes it to regain its programmed shape.

But it gets better! It turns out that it needs energy to do this, and in order to return to that shape, it draws extra energy from the environment. So it “eats” energy in order to shape shift—just like a living organism eats food to do what it is programmed to do, such as a bacterium or similar life form. So is nitinol, which is also called “bio-metal” really alive? Not really, as one of the requirements is reproduction, which so far it cannot do yet. But it is close. The metal grain structure resembles living cells, even though it cannot come close to living tissue. But it can be considered “nano tech”, as it is programmable from a molecular level. So even though nano-tech remains in the sci-fi realm, this one if very real, and has been with us since at least 1961.

So why are we not using it yet? Well we are, but the alloy is expensive, as it is not mass produced. The argument is that titanium is the culprit, and is horribly expensive. However, this is not the case either, as titanium dioxide is the base of white paint, having replaced the more toxic white lead. If their argument were true, then it would cost $100 per gallon to paint your ceiling. What is more likely is what we are looking at is an artificially inflated price for technology that “they” do not want us to use. Another point is that some researchers are finding out that the “energy eating” aspect of nitinol has a bizarre quality to it that is over unity, and it seems to lower the surrounding temp to do work, instead of the other way around. Some are saying it is negentropic, and has an efficiency way over 100%.

Whatever the case, this material is fascinating to work or play with, and will prove to be a valuable asset in the future, as it can replace hydraulic actuators without having to worry about pumps and leaky plumbing. In fact, it is so powerful it has been estimated to produce up to 20,000 pounds to the square inch of force, way beyond what hydraulic actuators could possibly produce without blowing seals in the process. It is being used in robotics, surgery for implants—as the body does not reject the alloy—and in plumbing for anti-scald shower heads and valves. The actual number of applications are staggering, as it can replace anything that actuator motors or hydraulics can do. The alternative energy applications are possible as well, as motors that can run on waste heat as a co-generation power plant.

I predict we will be seeing much more of this in the future, as the economics cannot be suppressed forever, and once it is “turned loose”, we will see amazing things with this material, such as boats that can be stored in a backpack with ice, and then when thrown into a river, self-actuates into a usable boat, or camping gear that self-actuates such as a tent with a small jolt of current from a solar-charged battery.

The applications are only limited by the imagination.