Self Evolving Minds & Machines

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had ever supposed (William James).

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

One.org: The Potential is Astounding

What Can be Done

Never before could one so easily help to alleviate the unjustifiable
suffering that is so rampant throughout the world.

With just a few clicks one can give power to one of the most
effective philanthropic organizations to ever exist.

The following is a One.org email I received today.

Please read it and then go to www.one.org.

The email:

Dear James,

The momentum around the international affairs budget has shifted in the last 24 hours. Now, rather than fending off a devastating cut to poverty-fighting funding in 2009, we are poised to achieve a huge victory. But we need your help.

Late last night, Senators Biden (D-DE) and Lugar (R-IN) introduced a new amendment.

This amendment would restore the $2.6 billion we have been working toward, but also would add an additional $1.5 billion to the international affairs budget.

It is worth noting that the Bush administration has requested, and is likely to receive, $647 billion for the defense budget.

It's going to take everything that we've got to get this amendment over the top. If there was ever a moment to pick up the phone and call your senators, this is it.

Call your senators today and tell them to support this critical amendment.

To find out your senators' contact information click here or call 202-224-3121.

While speaking to your senators' staff, make sure to tell them:

1. You are a constituent and a ONE member.
2. You want them to support the Biden-Lugar amendment to restore $4.1 billion to the international affairs budget, to match the president's budget request.

Budgets are written through a series of choices, and those choices have consequences. When they vote on this amendment, senators will be making a choice that can mean life or death for millions of people around the globe. Call your senators and urge them to make the right choice [bold & added].

THANK YOU FOR BEING A GOOD HUMAN.

"Against the onslaught of laughter, nothing can stand" (Mark Twain)

I've been "in it" recently,
and well I've been saved
yes by music,
music is the beauty that numbs sadness,
music is soulfood,
music is the oar
when you are in an open ocean
alone,
music stands more epic than
the buildings,
the mountains,
and even the egos,
yes music has been there for me
more than I've been there for me,
you could say I am the music I love -
but this time it was not entirely music
that ebbed the madness -
it was the holiest thing I know -
and if there are gods
it must be what they're made of -

Laughter.

Here's a piece of the good stuff, the best stuff, the stuff good lives are made of and the stuff that makes good lives.

RIP Mitch Hedberg.

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Paul Wesson

...there is a way for you to live inside a black hole: find one that has five dimensions. Life inside a 5D black hole is known to be rather more sustainable than it is in the 4D version. In the 4D case, you would experience 'tidal' forces that vary so vastly over short distances that your body would be pulled apart. But in the 5D case, there is no physical plughole, and the tidal forces are negligible, so you could happily explore without fear of dismemberment. And, according to the results of my research, you may be doing that right now. A mathematical analysis says that our universe may well be a 5D black hole...So next time you stare up at the night sky, stop and consider the fact that you may actually be surveying the star-speckled interior of a five-dimensional
black hole.

V.S. Ramachandran

The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organized structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or "neurons" which are the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe.

Sourish Dutta

The model associates dark energy with something called vacuum energy. Like a number of existing theories, it proposes that space itself is the source of the repulsive energy that is pushing the universe apart. For many years, scientists thought that the energy of empty space averaged zero. But the discovery of quantum mechanics changed this view. According to quantum theory, empty space is filled with pairs of "virtual” particles that spontaneously pop into and out of existence too quickly to be detected.

Stephen Cass

Love letters, business contracts, holiday snaps, spam, petitions, emergency bulletins, pornography, wedding announcements, TV shows, news articles, vacation plans, home movies, press releases, celebrity Web pages, home movies, secrets of every stripe, military orders, music, newsletters, confessions, congratulations—every shade and aspect of human life encoded as 1s and 0s. Taken together, they weigh roughly the same as the smallest possible sand grain, one measuring just two-thousandths of an inch across.

The weight of the Internet adds up to just about 0.2 millionths of an ounce.

Charles Bukowski

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs. And maybe your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance. Of how much you really want to do it. And you'll do it, despite rejection in the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. You will be alone with the gods. And the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.

Jack Kerouac

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify them, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Becasue the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Philip Roth

What was astonishing was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup.

Jill Bolte Taylor

Philip Roth