“I am a mathematician, and I would like to stand on your roof.” That is how Ron Eglash greeted many African families he met while researching the fractal patterns he’d noticed in villages across the continent.
Watch the video at Ted.com or below.
October 21st, 1965
3:45 A.M. - Telephone rings
“Hello, Dr. Richard Feynman? May I congratulate you on the Nobel Prize.”
- “Look, this is a heck of an hour–”
“But aren’t you pleased to hear that you’ve won the Prize?”
- “I could have found out later this morning.”
“Well, how do you feel now that you know that you’ve won it?”
- “Look, some other time…”
And so Richard P. Feynman, Ph.D., FRS, and Richard Chase Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, first sleepily learned that he was an awardee of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.
(source)
Hundreds of insect species spend much of their time underwater, where food may be more plentiful. MIT mathematicians have now figured out exactly how those insects breathe underwater.
When I read things like this I think of theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman and his theory of self-organizating biological systems which seems magnificently true.
Now this is interesting stuff… BBC News has a story about a woman called Delia Derbyshire who produced the theme song of the famous Dr. Who science fiction television series. Paul Hartnoll from the techno outfit Orbital is quoted…
“You want to listen, you can’t hear; you want to speak, you are dumb; you want to call out, you cannot; you feel you are dying, dying; you want to run away. You piss with fear in your sleep.”
So I’ve been sleeping a little bit irregularly lately and I’ve been having some strange dreams because of that. The dreams feel like they’re real and they always end with me trying like hell to wake up but being unable to do so because I can’t move my limbs or open my eyes! Pretty strange and scary stuff. It’s like I’m a prisoner of my own body and I can’t do nothing about it. Hallucinations are a direct result of it and they’re scary but fascinating nonetheless. I’ve had this kind of dream (or extended hallucinations) before so I decided to google around for it. Pretty soon I stumbled on a phenomenon called ’sleep paralysis’ and it’s really interesting.
There’s people who write about it on their blogs and stuff, and ofcourse there’s a wikipedia article on it which was an eye-opener for me. It seems it’s closely related to lucid dreaming (another interesting kind of dream I’ve had before), out-of-body experiences and even alien abductions (which you can read about on this excellent page). Basically life makes a little more sense now.
I’ve looked around for some (popular) scientific writings on this subject and I’ve found a few, like ‘The Terror That Comes In The Night‘ by David Hufford and ‘Wrestling With Ghosts‘ by Jorge Conesa, excellent stuff if you’re into horror movies; there’s lots of scary folklore going round about it.
So if you’ve ever had the terrifying feeling that you can’t move your limbs or open your eyes, don’t sweat it. Although some people get it a little too often, it’s perfectly natural, a slight brain glitch which does no harm except scare the shit out of ya. Nothing supernatural or mystical about it, although a lot of people (used to) think so. I think it’s another interesting layer of reality which needs to be explored more; this specific area of research is still pretty young.
It might even be a nifty gateway to some serious lucid dream explorations… Wooo…
Na negentig rondjes om de zon is deze absolute grootheid naar de maan. Dit is zijn laatste boodschap aan de wereld.
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
~ Carl Sagan (source, book)
Sherwin Nuland, the surgeon and author, talks about the development of electroshock therapy as a cure for severe, life-threatening depression. Midway through, his story turns personal. It’s a moving and deeply felt talk about relief, redemption and second chances.
More ideas worth spreading…
Jewish American historian Norman Finkelstein argues in his explosive new book, “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering” that Holocaust remembrance has been exploited by the Jewish establishment.
In his book he contends that a greater threat to the memory of the Holocaust than Holocaust deniers is what he calls ‘The Holocaust Industry’.
He accuses those who exploit the Holocaust of telling lies and of naked greed. He argues that the ruthless industrialization of the Holocaust has encouraged the rebirth of antisemitism in Europe and the United States.
The son of survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and concentration camps, he says, “I do care about the memory of my family’s persecution. The current campaign of the Holocaust industry to extort money from Europe in the name of “needy Holocaust victims” has shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom to that of a Monte Carlo casino.”
