How the Universe Works: Black Holes

Here are five incredible things about black holes that may blow your mind:

(1) A new black hole is discovered every day from telescopes on Earth, making it appear that black holes are actually not rare, and that there are billions of them scattered across the cosmos. (How do we see "black" holes in deep dark space? We see gamma ray bursts and quasars, the two most powerful concentrations of energy and light in the universe, and infer from their existence the presence of black holes.)

(2) Because the gravity beyond the event horizon (the threshold between a black hole and the rest of space) becomes exponentially more immense, if you were to fall in feet first, your toes (the part closest to the black hole) would get stretched must faster than the rest of you (the parts farthest from the hole). This would turn you into an odd looking disproportionate piece of spaghetti (not to mention resulting in a medieval style demise).

(3) The sands of time become suspended as if in glass once you have crossed the event horizon. So, from the perspective of the outside observer, nothing is ever actually consumed by a black hole. That is, whatever is moving into the hole just freezes in perpetuity at the event horizon. But, from the perspective of the object entering the hole, although time technically stops, it keeps moving into a world of which we know absolutely nothing.

(4) When a black hole sucks in tons of gas and star dust and the like, where does it go exactly? Some physicists are now speculating that on the other side of black holes are "white holes" that burst out all of the matter and energy which are flooding into the black hole at any given moment. So, if you could somehow place this entire process in a single image, you might see a black hole gobbling up matter on one side, while spewing it out at unfathomable speeds on the other. If this is true, it might mean that there are as many independent universes existing as there are black holes (look back to number 1)! Even more compellingly, it may suggest that the Big Bang which begat our universe might be a white hole, and thus our flesh and blood may originate from a black hole in another universe possible inaccessible and unknowable to us.

(5) The moon revolves around the earth, the earth revolves around the sun...and the sun revolves around? Yes, you guessed it - our sun, and our solar system for that matter, spin around a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Scientists now maintain that many of the galaxies out there contain at their hearts a black hole of some size (from 20 miles across to millions of times the mass of our sun), which is also the progenitor of the galaxy itself.

So, are black holes the builders or the destroyers of our reality? It would appear that actually they are both, murdering all matter within their sphere of influence, while sporadically breathing vitality into old dead star particles in perhaps both this universe and the next.

Sources and related reading:

How the Universe Works, Discovery TV series
Life inside a black hole
Black holes: Dark and deadly
Universe is not a black hole

The Crux Upon which Free Speech in America Depends

Looking IS Healing: Nature

"Demonstrating that we have a biologically programmed positive response to nature is more difficult, because we don’t respond as dramatically to something that’s not a threat.

But numerous studies since the 1970s suggest the subtle power of natural scenery to heal both body and mind. Texas A&M researcher Roger Ulrich, for instance, has shown that people who watch a calming nature video after a stressful experience have markedly lower muscle tension, pulse, and skin conductance activity after less than five minutes. This translates into significant medical benefits.

Ulrich monitored patients after gallbladder surgery and found that those assigned to a room looking out on trees needed far fewer painkillers than patients in rooms that faced a brick wall.

Heart surgery patients in rooms with nature scenes on the wall experienced less anxiety and smoother recoveries than patients with blank walls or abstract art.

Likewise, cosmonauts confined for months in outer space quickly lose interest in video programs and other diversions. They prefer to stare out the window at the untouchable Earth."

Source: The Natural History of Art

Over Half the World Now Considered Middle Class

“We expect a lot from the middle classes,” say Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, of the Poverty Action Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following the historical examples of Britain and America, they are expected to be the dominant force in establishing or consolidating democracy. As a group, they are meant to be the backbone of the market economy. And now the world looks to them to save it from depression. With the global economy facing the biggest slump since the 1930s, the World Bank says that “a new engine of private demand growth will be needed, and we see a likely candidate in the still largely untapped consumption potential of the rapidly expanding middle classes in the large emerging-market countries.”

In practice, emerging markets may be said to have two middle classes. One consists of those who are middle class by any standard—ie, with an income between the average Brazilian and Italian. This group has the makings of a global class whose members have as much in common with each other as with the poor in their own countries. It is growing fast, but still makes up only a tenth of the developing world. You could call it the global middle class.

The other, more numerous, group consists of those who are middle-class by the standards of the developing world but not the rich one. Some time in the past year or two, for the first time in history, they became a majority of the developing world’s population: their share of the total rose from one-third in 1990 to 49% in 2005. Call it the developing middle class.

Using a somewhat different definition—those earning $10-100 a day, including in rich countries—an Indian economist, Surjit Bhalla, also found that the middle class’s share of the whole world’s population rose from one-third to over half (57%) between 1990 and 2006. He argues that this is the third middle-class surge since 1800. The first occurred in the 19th century with the creation of the first mass middle class in western Europe (see chart 1). The second, mainly in Western countries, occurred during the baby boom (1950-1980). The current, third one is happening almost entirely in emerging countries. According to Mr Bhalla’s calculations, the number of middle-class people in Asia has overtaken the number in the West for the first time since 1700.

At a certain stage it starts to boom. That stage was reached in China some time between 1990 and 2005, during which period the middle-class share of the population soared from 15% to 62%. It is just being reached in India now. In 2005, says the reputable National Council for Applied Economic Research, the middle-class share of the population was only about 5%. By 2015, it forecasts, it will have risen to 20%; by 2025, to over 40%.

Homi Kharas, of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC, argues that the point at which the poor start entering the middle class in their millions is the “sweet spot of growth”. It is the moment when poor countries can get the maximum benefit from their cheap labour through international trade, before they price themselves out of world markets for cheap goods or are able to compete with rich countries in making high-value ones. It is also almost always a period of fast urbanisation, when formerly underemployed farmers abandon what Marx called “the idiocy of rural life” for the cities to work in manufacturing, boosting their productivity many times over. Eventually this results in a lessening of income inequalities because the new middle class sits somewhere between the rich elite and the rural poor.

Marx on the Phenomena of the Middle Class:

"Historically it has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations…It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals…The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country…All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life-and-death question for all civilised nations…In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes…National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation."

Source: Burgeoning bourgeoisie
--

Implications

The great rising of the middle class as now the dominate class worldwide, and no longer the poor is indeed one of humanity's most profound triumphs. The progress which an achievement highlights is ever-more intriguing in noting its exponential nature.

Now that they world is more middle class than ever before, more people than ever are getting BAs, MAs and even PhDs. What impact is this Intellectualization having on social activism, art,

More and more people now know more and more...what is done with all of this, to what end...just to get paid more, go skiing every other weekend and have a vacation spot in the topics?

Is this monumental social mobility creating anything other than just more superficial, mindless pleasure seekers...sybarites? If not why, and will it eventually?

If so, WHAT is emerging...for it is this very EMERGING that will define human progress for many decades to come...and studying this may lead to some great research that helps humans understand what's happening in this vast almost imperceptible flash of change, and as a result, learn to harness the goods and make them great.

Also, is all of this sustainable, or are we just reaching this burgeoning point that will cause the collapse as modern society and capitalism as the world's fulcrum??

And then what?

Turning Brilliance into Barbarism

Utilities Turn Their Customers Green, With Envy

Stickers for Green Behavior

A frowny face is not what most electric customers expect to see on their utility statements, but Greg Dyer got one.

He earned it, the utility said, by using a lot more energy than his neighbors.

“I have four daughters; none of my neighbors has that many children,” said Mr. Dyer, 49, a lawyer who lives in Sacramento. He wrote back to the utility and gave it his own rating: four frowny faces.

Two other Sacramento residents, however, Paul Geisert and his wife, Mynga Futrell, were feeling good. They got one smiley face on their statement for energy efficiency and saw the promise of getting another.

“Our report card will quickly get better,” Mr. Geisert wrote in an e-mail message to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.

The district had been trying for years to prod customers into using less energy with tactics like rebates for energy-saving appliances. But the traditional approaches were not meeting the energy reduction goals set by the nonprofit utility’s board.

So, in a move that has proved surprisingly effective, the district decided to tap into a time-honored American passion: keeping up with the neighbors.

Last April, it began sending out statements to 35,000 randomly selected customers, rating them on their energy use compared with that of neighbors in 100 homes of similar size that used the same heating fuel. The customers were also compared with the 20 neighbors who were especially efficient in saving energy.

Customers who scored high earned two smiley faces on their statements. “Good” conservation got a single smiley face. Customers like Mr. Dyer, whose energy use put him in the “below average” category, got frowns, but the utility stopped using them after a few customers got upset.

Does it work?

When the Sacramento utility conducted its first assessment of the program after six months, it found that customers who received the personalized report reduced energy use by 2 percent more than those who got standard statements — an improvement that Alexandra Crawford, a spokeswoman for the utility, said was very encouraging.

The approach has now been picked up by utilities in 10 major metropolitan areas eager to reap rewards through increased efficiencies, including Chicago and Seattle, according to Positive Energy, the software company that conceived of the reports and contracts to produce them. Following Sacramento’s lead, they award smiley faces only.

The Motivation: Competition over Common Sense

Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, studies how to get Americans — even those who did not care about the environment — to lower energy consumption. And while there are many ways, Dr. Cialdini said, few are as effective as comparing people with their peers.

In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged the residents to conserve energy to save the earth for future generations; another emphasized financial savings. But the only kind of message to have any significant effect, Dr. Cialdini said, was one that said neighbors had already taken steps to curb their energy use.

“It is fundamental and primitive,” said Dr. Cialdini, who owns a stake in Positive Energy. “The mere perception of the normal behavior of those around us is very powerful.”

Source: Utilities Turn Their Customers Green, With Envy

Hunet S Thompson Interviews Keith Richards

"...there'd be no Stones without the Beatles..."

Have the Courage to Use your Own Understanding

When a man starts to learn, it happens very slowly—bit by bit at first, then in big chunks. And his thoughts soon clash. What he learns is never what he pictured, or imagined, and so he begins to be afraid. Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly. His purpose becomes a battlefield.
— And what can he do to overcome fear?

The answer is very simple. He must not run away. He must defy his fear, and in spite of it he must take the next step in learning, and the next, and the next. He must be fully afraid, and yet he must not stop. That is the rule! And a moment will come when his first enemy retreats. The man begins to feel sure of himself. His intent becomes stronger. Learning is no longer a terrifying task.

(Carlos Castaneda)

CONVERGING while Expanding

Take our pills and drive our cars and
shut the fuck up.
But I'm getting ahead of myself,

bang
expansion
clustering and
gravity, mass and
fusion, star birth and
supernovas, planet vs. planet,
restoring tabula rasa, cooling,
acid rain, ocean, php balance, single
cells, mitosis, photosynthesis, fish, feet,
dinosaurs, mammals, upright, opposable thumbs, big brain,
religion, agriculture, bartering, wheels, seamen, Mesopotamia, Money,
Greece, Jesus, Rome, Medieval Ages, printing press, DaVinci, 1492, Williams
Shakespeare, heliocentrism, Cartesian Doubt, Newton's apple, electricity, life,
liberty, pursuit of, honest Abe, Evolution, light blub, unconscious, E=MC2, crash, TV, Potato
Head blues, Hitler, Nagasaki, fall out zones, tv dinners, 1984, suburbs, ARPA, Howl, Beatles, the
moon, million man march, Berlin, video games, PC, mobile, iPod, 9/11, Deoxyribonucleic acid, CERN, Obama -

YOUR MIND NOW.

the whole of 13.7 billion years evolution
weighing on our 3 lbs brain at this very moment
simultaneously...
...an unfathomable lapse of
time condensed into
one set
of neural firings that gives us
January 18th 2009 4:01AM...

The Extended Mind

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?

The mind appears to be adapted for reaching out from our heads and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.

This concept of the extended mind was first raised in 1998, right around the time Google was born, by two philosophers, Andy Clark, now at the University of Edinburgh, and David Chalmers, now at the Australian National University. In the journal Analysis, they published a short essay called “The Extended Mind” in which they asked a simple question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?”

Most people might answer, “At the skull.”

But Clark and Chalmers set out to convince their readers that the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.

Clark and Chalmers asked their readers to imagine a woman named Inga. Inga hears from a friend that there’s an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She decides to go see it. She thinks for a moment, recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, and starts walking that way. She accesses her belief that MOMA is on 53rd Street from its storage place in her brain’s memory network.

Now imagine a man named Otto, who has Alzheimer’s. His memory is faulty, and so he keeps with him a notebook in which he writes down important details. Like Inga, Otto hears about the museum exhibit. Since he can’t access the address in his brain, he looks it up in his notebook and then heads off in the same direction as Inga.

In the view of Clark and Chalmers, Inga’s brain-based memory and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same. Inga’s mind just happens to access information stored away in her brain, while Otto’s mind draws on information stored in his notebook.

The notebook, in other words, is part of his extended mind. It doesn’t make any difference that Otto keeps his notebook tucked away much of the time. After all, Inga tucks the memory of MOMA’s address out of her conscious awareness most of the time too.

Clark and Chalmers concluded that real people are actually more like Otto than like Inga: We all have minds that extend out into our environments.

Accepting Wall-less Minds as Natural

Eleven years later, this argument continues to trigger fierce debate among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. There is no doubt that the extended mind is a weird concept.

One reason it seems so strange is that our minds feel as if they are really totally self-contained. We innately believe, for example, that as we walk down a street, we are continuously filming a detailed movie of our surroundings and using that mental movie to decide what to do next. But like many beliefs we have about ourselves, this movie is an illusion. Our awareness is, in fact, remarkably narrow.

One of the most spectacular demonstrations of how oblivious we can be was carried out by psychologists Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher Chabris at Harvard University.

They asked people to watch a video of students weaving around each other and passing a basketball. Half the students wore white shirts, the other half black. The subjects had to keep track of how many times the ball was passed by members of one of the teams. In the middle of the game, a gorilla (rather, a student in a gorilla costume) sauntered through the scene.

Many subjects later reported that they never saw the gorilla; their brains discarded it as extraneous.

Inside our heads, instead of making a perfect replica of the world, we focus our attention on tiny snippets, darting our eyes from point to point. We extract only the information we need for whatever task is at hand, whether we’re sorting the laundry or climbing a mountain.

What’s even more remarkable about our brains is that they actually search for new things to make part of this feedback system.

Imagine you are poking a stick into an animal’s burrow. As you poke away, you are aware of what the far end of the stick is touching, not the end you’re holding in your hand. This kind of extended sensation appears to be the result of a reorganization of the brain.

Scientists have found that when test monkeys spent five minutes learning how to use a rake, some of the neurons in their hands began behaving in a new way. They began to fire in response to stimuli at the end of the rake, not on the monkey’s hand. Other neurons, in the brain, respond to things that appear to lie within arm’s reach. Training the monkeys to use the rakes caused these neurons to change—reacting to objects lying within rake’s reach rather than arm’s reach.

Natural-Born Cyborgs


The eagerness with which the brain merges with tools has made it possible to create some stunning mind-machine interfaces.

For instance, Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University and his colleagues put electrodes in the brains of monkeys to link them to a robot arm. The monkeys quickly learned how to move the arm around with pure thought; their neurons reorganized, establishing a new feedback loop between brain and robot arm.

Humans are proving just as good at this merger of mind and machine.

The U.S. Navy has developed a flight suit for helicopter pilots that delivers little puffs of air on the side of the pilot’s body as his helicopter tilts in that direction. The pilot responds to the puffs by tilting away from them, and the suit passes those signals on to the helicopter’s steering controls. Pilots who train with this system can learn to fly blindfolded or to carry out complex maneuvers, such as holding the helicopter in a stationary hover.

The helicopter becomes, in effect, part of the pilot’s body, linked back to his or her mind.

Results like these, reveal a mind that is constantly seeking to extend itself, to grab on to new tools it has never experienced before and merge with them.

Some people may be horrified by how passionately people are taking to their laptops and GPS trackers. But if you think about it, it would be surprising if we didn’t.

We are “natural-born cyborgs.”

Conclusions

The extended mind theory doesn’t just change the way we think about the mind. It also changes how we judge what’s good and bad about today’s mind-altering technologies.

There’s nothing unnatural about relying on the Internet—Google and all—for information. After all, we are constantly consulting the world around us like a kind of visual Wikipedia. Nor is there anything bad about our brains’ being altered by these new technologies, any more than there is something bad about a monkey’s brain changing as it learns how to play with a rake.

Neuroscientists will soon be able to offer fresh ways to enhance our brains, whether with drugs or with implants. To say that these are immoral because they defile our true selves—our isolated, distinct minds—is to ignore biology.

Our minds already extend out into the environment, and the changes we make to the environment already alter our minds.

Source: I edited How Google is Making us Smarter
—
Questions left to Answer

As a result of advanced machine-brain connecting technologies, will more people embrace minds as completely unbounded entities encouraging the Hyper-Evolution of Self-Evolution?

When the mind and the internet fully unite as THE Extended Mind, do we become Ubermenschen?

Is the mind really only what the brain does, and in context of this article, employs? Or is it more?

Music as Morphine?

Recent research suggests there is some evidence that playing music for patients who've undergone painful medical procedures may help mitigate their sensation of pain.

The problem in the research comes in identifying the kind of music to play. Some researchers have focused on finding the ideal type of music for all patients -- "anxiolytic" music that is supposed to reduce anxiety and relax patients.

But different people have different music preferences. Music that Jim finds relaxing seems obnoxious and grating to me. Music that I find relaxing seems obnoxious and grating to Greta.

People nowadays are used to creating their own personal audio environment on their iPods. Wouldn't it make sense to let them choose their own music as a way of distracting them from medical pain?

A team led by Laura Mitchell recruited 80 people to bring their favorite song to the laboratory, where they would be paid to dip their hands in frigid water for as long as they could tolerate it. The musical selections they chose ranged from works by Johnny Cash, to The Verve, to Rancid.

The volunteers first dipped their hand in warm water to bring it to a consistent 32°C. Then they held it in a circulating cold water bath at 5°C -- close to freezing! This was repeated three times -- once while listing to their favorite song, once while staring at a blank wall, and once while looking at a work of art they selected from 15 chosen by the experimenters.

They were told to hold their hand in the water as long as they could stand it, or five minutes, whichever came first. Did listening to the music affect their ability to tolerate pain?

Here are the results:

As you can see, people held their hands in the water significantly longer while listening to the music and they also perceived significantly less pain. Viewing the artwork had no effect on these results -- the difference between pain ratings for art-viewing and no-distraction conditions was not significant.

But the artwork did have one interesting effect. The participants were also asked to rate how well they were able to distract themselves from the pain. Now the effect of viewing art was significant:

While listening to music was best, participants who viewed the artwork rated their ability to distract themselves from the pain as significantly higher compared to when there was no distraction (again, on a scale of 0-100).

The researchers also point out that there are some limitations to their study. If you undergo a surgery procedure or are experiencing chronic pain, there's no way to escape it. If you're a real patient, you can never just remove your hand from the frigid water to remove the pain, and in these circumstances music may have a different effect.

But in any case, it seems clear that allowing patients to choose their own music while experiencing pain does indeed go a long way toward mitigating that pain. For it certainly makes intuitive sense that putting patients in a pleasant environment where they have some degree of control would be a good start to helping reduce their experience of pain.

Source: Music, Art & the Perception of Pain

Classic Donovan & Bob Dylan

God is a Verb

Here is God's purpose-
for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law.
not academic dogma, not ecclesiastic canon.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.
And there is born unheralded
a great natural peace,
not out of exclusive
pseudo-static security
but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.
Naught is lost.
Only the false and nonexistent are dispelled.

-Buckminster Fuller-

The Auto Engine of the Future?

Why not make it a condition for the Big Three to have to invest a certain percentage of their income to ideas such as these which show real promise and are already set for testing?
--
Brickley Engine, The

By CLIVE THOMPSON

The auto industry worldwide is scrambling for ways to make cars consume less gas, but mostly it pursues the same few concepts — like making cars lighter and smaller, using alternative fuels or creating hybrid designs that use electricity. Mike Brickley has another idea: why not rethink the internal-combustion engine itself?

Five years ago, Brickley, a self-taught “engine inventor” in Austin, Tex., decided to give it a try. He realized that one of the biggest drags on engine efficiency is friction: whenever two parts interact with each other, they generate heat and drain energy out of the system. So he began designing a new type of engine that reduced friction by doing away with several traditional parts. In the Brickley Engine — as he calls it — there are no piston skirts and several fewer crankshaft and crankpin bearings.

Thomas Porostocky

What’s more, the cylinders are connected through a pinned joint that rotates a comparatively small amount. The resulting device has a curious, flattened appearance: two sets of pistons face away from each other and punch in opposite directions, joining in the center to drive the engine’s shaft.

This configuration produces 35 percent less friction than a regular engine. Brickley projects that this would give the engine up to 20 percent better mileage than a regular car.

If you were to burn diesel fuel in the Brickley Engine, it would use almost 50 percent less fuel than a normal gas-powered engine, with greatly reduced emissions. “It’ll work in anything that burns fuel — trains, tractors, automobiles, you name it,” he says.

A nation of Brickley-equipped vehicles could satisfy the Kyoto Protocol’s demands for greenhouse-gas reduction several years in advance.

Brickley received a patent for the engine last year and this year began working on a prototype to place in a compact car — to prove that his design performs as well as his calculations predict

But one big question remains: Can Detroit really embrace such a weird new engine — especially when the Big Three are collapsing? “It’s not great timing,” Brickley admits. In the quest for fuel efficiency, the real engineering challenges may not be physics but politics.

Source: Year in Ideas 2008

A Bright Future? What to Expect from the Next 40 Years on Earth

A brief summary of ideas laid out in a new futurist book, Technology’s Promise: Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business and Society, by William E. Halal:

2010: The World Online. The decade should continue to focus on intelligent advances in information systems and e-commerce. The world in 2010 is almost certain to be smarter, faster, and fully wired, setting the stage for the breakthroughs to come.

2020: High-Tech Arrives. This decisive period should see major breakthroughs in high tech. Green business, alternative energy, and other practices are likely to ensure ecological sustainability. AI should permeate life, and the next generation of quantum/optical computing will permit huge advances in telemedicine, virtual education, and e-government. Biotech should mature, providing personalized medicine, genetic therapy, cancer cures, and other advanced health care.

2030: Crisis of Maturity. Industrialization will reach most developing nations at this point, with as many as 5 billion people living at modern levels of consumption. Although technological powers will be vast, intercultural conflict, weapons of mass destruction, and threats of environmental collapse are likely to grow into such challenges that they force a global shift in consciousness.

2040-2050: Global Order. Civilization has withstood the Fall of Rome, World Wars I and II, and threats of nuclear holocaust, and it will probably survive globalization. The challenges facing civilization are likely to be resolved to form a modernized, fairly harmonious globe, somewhat like a far larger and more diverse version of the United States or European Union. Local wars, ecological disasters, and other mishaps will continue, of course, but limited to the normal dysfunctions of any social system.

Source: Will Technology Create a Wiser World?

What you Don't Know about Money

Money is government issued fiat currency.

It is supposed to represent a resolution of both public and private debts.

However, since it is not redeemable for gold, silver, or anything else which actually exists, but rather for itself only - 95% of the money in circulation DOES NOT REPRESENT ANYTHING.

A mere 5% of money on the planet represents value.

Money gains its power through its consideration as legal tender by the courts. That is, the law will not enforce other forms of debt resolution, if money has been offered.

By removing currency from a gold standard format, money has now become the representation of debt, and thereby synonymous with debt. Money is debt and debt is money.

Money therefore only represents money other people owe banks or the government because they are the only ones who can issue debt.

And, since governments and banks are the sole lenders, they therefore are the sole producers of money.

People are used to hearing about the government printing money, but the banks in practice do the same thing millions of times every day.

Moreover, how much money (debt) can be issued, that is, if it is entirely in the hands of the government and banks to do so?

Well, if there is nothing tangible, like the amount of gold it has to be based on, even loosely - what could the limits be?

Furthermore, the amount of money in the world is never the same at any given moment because if money is debt, then every time someone takes out a loan or opens up a credit card account, creating debt, more money is generated - yes from nothing.

There are thus no limits to the amount of money that can be issued.

As a result, the calculable number of money in existence is in constant flux, always on the rise whether lending occurs or loans are defaulted (except when no lending occurs across the board. But, this has never happened because central government banks are always lending, even when banks are hard-pressed).

This places the world economy is an incredibly unstable position.

For, this means that 95% of the loans which are issued by banks are based solely on promises of other borrowers to pay back their loans - and it is THIS promise that the entire world economy depends on for its survival.

The wormhole continues.

An important result of this is that when people are asking for loans, and banks are lending them, a lot of money is being created (albeit out of thin air). More money grows the economy and when the economy grows people's quality of life improves.

In this scenario, the modern day money system seems quite brilliant. We are simply growing prosperous out of our own will to become prosperous!

However, there are three fundamental flaws in an economy where money is debt and debt, money.

For our modern-day economy to exist people cannot pay off all their debts.

This is because the debt is used as leverage to produce loans and credits that are the core source of money. If no one had debt, the economy would shrink to only 5% of its current size (remember that 95% of all current money represents debt). Without debt - there would be virtually no money.

However counterintuitive this may be, because shedding debt is good for personal finances - this is not the case for the economy as a whole.

The second flaw is people cannot pay off zero of their debt either.

If everyone defaulted on their loans, banks would replace borrower's debt with lender's debt. It is not sustainable for money to be manufactured by the bank on the basis of money the bank owes itself. It cannot be leveraged to create loans. Banks wouldn't be able to lend and the government could only last so long on its own. New money would effectively disappear (though the demand for it certainly would not).

The final flaw is our economy cannot sustain itself unless people are lending and consuming debt, perpetually and at an ever-increasing rate - and sometimes this just doesn't happen.

People deposit their money in the bank under the belief that it will be safe at all times. But, if other people who the bank is lending to cannot pay back their loans, this threatens the the banks liquidity, or cash reserves, which although the federal government covers up to $250,000 of deposits, can eventually leave banks unable to lend without risking their very existence and directly impeding economic growth.

Now, it is inevitable that at some time large numbers of people will both default on loans and yank their money from the bank.

This leaves banks with little to no issuable debt, and because debt is money, little to no money.

When vast sums of money vanish in a matter of days banks cannot lend and the economy is left in tatters.

Ergo, it seems, to have a profitable economy a magic balance must be stuck between some debt being paid, some debt not being paid, and there being an extraordinary faith that consumers can cover and bankers can issue more debt than the day before, and way more debt than could ever be paid off at once, everyday.

To add salt to the wound, it is worth noting that most debt carries with it interest as well as the principal balance.

Since the amount of money in existence is only based on the principal, new debt must be manufactured to pay for the interest off the old debt.

This has to occur because without interest, banks could not cover operating costs, and could not lend.

So debt is created to pay for debt. And because that debt ALSO carries with it interest, the cycle never ends. It is incessant.

Our position is thus an ever precarious one: Debt or Poverty.

Or, in the words of the Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Georgia:

This is a staggering thought.

We are completely dependent on the Commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar in circulation, cash or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve.

We are, absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is.
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For more watch this: What Money Is.

Dream for Computers to Process at the Speed of Light Renewed by Brazilian Beetle

"Researchers have been unable to build an ideal 'photonic crystal' to manipulate visible light, impeding the dream of ultrafast optical computers. But now, University of Utah chemists have discovered that nature already has designed photonic crystals with the ideal, diamond-like structure: They are found in the shimmering, iridescent green scales of a beetle from Brazil.

'It appears that a simple creature like a beetle provides us with one of the technologically most sought-after structures for the next generation of computing,' says study leader Michael Bartl, an assistant professor of chemistry and adjunct assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah. 'Nature has simple ways of making structures and materials that are still unobtainable with our million-dollar instruments and engineering strategies.'

Researchers are seeking photonic crystals as they aim to develop optical computers that run on light (photons) instead of electricity (electrons). Right now, light in near-infrared and visible wavelengths can carry data and communications through fiberoptic cables, but the data must be converted from light back to electricity before being processed in a computer.

The goal -- still years away -- is an ultrahigh-speed computer with optical integrated circuits or chips that run on light instead of electricity.

'You would be able to solve certain problems that we are not able to solve now,' Bartl says. 'For certain problems, an optical computer could do in seconds what regular computers need years for.'"1
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When computers gain the ability to process data at 186,00 miles per second, the question then becomes:

Will we have reached the roof of the speed at which anything can travel, atom or AVI?

Or, will we manifest a schema for breaking Einstein's cosmic constant, the speed of light, bringing humanity to a level of interaction beyond the known laws of today's physics?

1Diamond-Like Crystals Discovered In Brazilian Beetle Solve Issue For Future Optical Computers

What Happen's When a Crocodile, Herd of African Buffalo, and 6 Lions Tussle?

Battle at Kruger is one of the most popular videos on Youtube, with 31,750,375 views to date, but if you have not seen it, it is most certainly worth your eight minutes. Such extraordinary interspecies battles are seen, if one is lucky, once in a lifetime. Enjoy.

You Think it is Bad Now...

The New York Times reports that "Oil prices have nearly doubled in a year," and furthermore, "As demand continues to outpace the growth in oil supplies, analysts expect little relief in prices. A shortfall in supplies over the next two years will probably send oil to $150 to $200 a barrel, Goldman Sachs said in a new report.

Analysts’ forecasts for the price of gasoline over the next few years run as high as $7 a gallon."

This sounds pretty ominous. I am praying that they are overestimating. But, I know in my heart analysts, economists, and reporters typically underestimate these numbers. One can only hope that this time we experience the exception rather than the rule.

However, evidence for such positivity is scarce. For according to the above quoted NY Times article published just six days ago, "the government said it expected gasoline prices to peak at a national average of $3.73 a gallon in June, just as the summer driving season kicks off." And yet, we're barely half way through May and we've already hit that mark.

The Times also reports that "Some private analysts have gone beyond the Energy Department’s forecasts, predicting that gasoline will surpass $4 a gallon this summer." But at the rate we're currently going, I think we're primed to be there before summer even begins (June 21st)!

I think I have chosen the most expensive summer to travel across America...smart.

Read the NY Times article

See the AAA's national gas estimates

McDonalds hamburger & fries virtually unchanged since they were served 4 years ago!

Wow this is grotesque. I may never have fast food again...or at least for a very very very long time.