QUANTUM computing (see article) is not the only game in town when it comes to creating a new computing paradigm. Speaking at the American Physical Society’s annual March conference, William Ditto of the University of Florida told of his efforts to create a “chaotic computer”.
War Is A Racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
For those who have inspected the facts, it is clear that the mass media has failed to generate genuine public awareness of the nature of Western policy.
It was hot. It was dusty. It was Friday, and it was noon in the desert. But that didn’t prevent the Palenque Norte conversation with the Grey’s from being one of the best-attended daytime events of Burning Man 2003.
True stories have no beginnings and neither does the tale of PKD?s encounters with the Overmind. But we writers understand narrative economy, and for purposes of narrative economy his story seemed to him to begin with the mysterious break in and riffling of his papers that was made notorious by an article in Rolling Stone, which brought Phil long-delayed and much-deserved fame. The break-in date was 11/17/71. It was a date and a style of referring to time that Phil used frequently.
Studies by Professor Benjamin Libet at University of California San Francisco in the late 1970’s on awake neurosurgery patients suggested that the brain refers information “backwards in time”.
It was an e-mail we weren’t meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that “the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level”?this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we’re not supposed to know the National Security Council’s top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.
Saw this posted on the MAPS list, thought some of you might be interested in it. There’s a small section on the perception of time and psychedelics. Here’s the abstract:
The synchrony between the individual brain and its environment is maintained by a system of internal clocks that together reflect the temporal organization of the organism. Extending the theoretical work of Edelman and others, the temporal organization of the brain is posited as functioning through “re-entry” and “temporal tagging” and binds the wide range of possible times to a unified cognitive experience which is held in unison with the outside world. Dysfunction in this system is reflected in the temporal discord seen in cases of aging, sleep disorder, jet-lag, and shift-work, as well as in mental disorders and drug-induced changes in consciousness. The extent to which neuroendocrine structures contribute to the neurocognitive mechanisms which underlie consciousness has so far not been explored. Therefore, neuroendocrine mechanisms contributing to the temporal organization of the brain are reviewed. It is concluded that time?and its neuroendocrine correlate melatonin?is a binding principle for organizing conscious experience.
A joint Egyptian-Polish archeological team has reportedly found the long-lost Library of Alexandria. This facility was effectively the first true University, with lecture rooms for thousands of students and nearly a million scrolls for them to read. This is the place where Archimedes invented the screw-shaped water pump that is still in use today, the place where Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth, the place where Euclid wrote The Elements after discovering the rules of geometry, the place where Ptolemy wrote The Almagest, the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1,500 years.
These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD—part of a test conducted by the US government during it’s dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950’s. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.
Scientists have created a new form of matter, which they say could lead to new ways of transmitting electricity. The fermionic condensate is a cloud of cold potassium atoms forced into a state where they behave strangely.
The new matter is the sixth known form of matter after solids, liquids, gases, plasma and a Bose-Einstein condensate, created only in 1995.
On Saturday night, January 16, 1999, Terence McKenna gave one of his last lectures at the legendary Entheobotany Series by the foot of the pool at the Chan Kha Hotel near the Mayan ruins of Palenque. There were about 100 people sitting in the moonlight, listening to the lowing of cattle in the distance and the occasional chatter of the howler monkeys in the trees nearby. This was Terence doing what he did best, which was to challenge all of us to stretch our minds to their far limits and then expand them once again.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Various reports indicate that young people who use cannabis tend to experience psychological and social problems. However, there is no evidence that marijuana use is directly linked with such problems, according to the results of a study published in The Lancet.
I upgraded my copy of Movable Type to 3.0, so if you notice anything weird, send me an e-mail and let me know what happened. Touched up a few sections, added a recent picture thing, and a did few other housekeeping things.