Category Archives: Of Interest

Can the Dead be Brought Back to Life?

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Is It Possible to Reanimate the Dead?

Eli MacKinnon, Life’s Little Mysteries Contributor
Date: 08 February 2012 Time: 04:02 PM ET

 

reanimation, dead

In 1999, a Swedish medical student named Anna Bagenholm lost control while skiing and landed head first on a thin patch of ice covering a mountain stream. The surface gave way and she was pulled into the freezing current below; when her friends caught up with her minutes later, only her skis and ankles were visible above an 8-inch layer of ice.

Bagenholm found an air pocket and struggled beneath the ice for 40 minutes as her friends tried to dislodge her. Then her heart stopped beating and she was still. Forty minutes after that, a rescue team arrived, cut her out of the ice and administered CPR as they helicoptered her to a hospital. At 10:15 p.m., three hours and 55 minutes after her fall, her first heartbeat was recorded. Since then, she has made a nearly full recovery.

Bagenholm was the very definition of clinically dead: Her circulatory and respiratory systems had gone quiet for just over three hours before she was brought back to life. But what was happening in her body on a cellular level during the hours she wentwithout a heartbeat? Were her tissues dying along with her consciousness? And how much longer could she have gone with no blood circulation?

Can scientists learn anything from cases like this that could help them revive people who have been “dead” for an even longer period?

These are the types of questions that preoccupy the staff of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Resuscitation Science (CRS), a team of scientists, clinicians and engineers that’s revolutionizing the way we treat cardiac arrest and nudging forward the line between life and death. It all starts by learning what’s going on at the cellular level. According to Dr. Honglin Zhou, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and an associate director of the CRS, scientists generally agree that, unlike the larger organisms they compose, there are clear ways to tell whether an individual human cell is dead.

Every cell has a tight outer membrane that serves to separate its own contents from its surroundings and filter out the molecules that are nonessential to its function or survival. As a cell nears the end of its life, this protective barrier will begin to weaken and, depending on the circumstances of a cell’s death, one of three things will happen: It will send an “eat me” signal to a specialized maintenance cell that will then devour and recycle the ailing cell’s contents; it will quarantine and consume itself in a kind of programmed altruistic suicide; or it will rupture abruptly and spill its contents into the surrounding tissue, causing severe inflammation and further tissue damage.

In all cases, when the integrity of the outer membrane is compromised, a cell’s fate is sealed. “When the permeability of the membrane has increased to the point that the cellular contents are leaking out, you have reached a point of no return,” Zhou said.

Because even a mad scientist can’t put Humpty Dumpty’s cells back together again, a real-life Frankenstein’s monster is not a possibility in the foreseeable future. But, as it turns out, it can take some cells quite a long time to die.

When human cells are abruptly cut off from the steady supply of oxygen, nutrients and cleaning services that blood flow normally provides them, they can hold out in their membranes for a surprisingly long time. In fact, the true survivalists in your body may not die for many days after you’ve lost circulation, consciousness and most of the other things most people consider integral parts of living. If doctors can get to the patient before these cells have crashed, re-animation is still a possibility.

Unfortunately, the cells that are most sensitive to nutrient and oxygen deprivation are brain cells. Within five to 10 minutes of cardiac arrest, neuronal membranes will begin to rupture and irreparable brain damage will ensue. Making revival efforts more difficult, a surefire way to kill a cell that has been cut off from oxygen and nutrients for an extended period of time is to give it oxygen and nutrients. In a phenomenon called reperfusion injury, blood-starved cells that are abruptly reintroduced to a nutrient supply will quickly self-destruct.

The exact mechanisms of this process are still not well-understood, but Zhou speculates that when cells lose blood supply they may go into a kind of metabolic hibernation, with the goal of self-preservation. When the cells are roused from this state by an onslaught of oxygen and panicking white blood cells in an environment where toxins have accumulated, they are overwhelmed with inflammatory signals and they respond with self-immolation.

Though scientists don’t fully understand the causes of reperfusion injury, they know from experience that one thing that stifles its onset is to lower a patient’s body temperature. This is why Bagenholm, who arrived at the hospital with an internal body temperature of 56 degrees Fahrenheit (about 13 degrees Celsius), was able to recover and why one of the primary areas of research for the CRS is the application of so-called “therapeutic hypothermia.”

By rapidly lowering a patient’s body temperature to about 91 degrees F (33 degrees C) using an intravenous cooling solution or a kind of ice-pack bodysuit as soon as possible after a cardiac arrest, ER doctors have found they can greatly decrease the risk of reperfusion injury as they work to revive the patient. This process sometimes allows patients who have been clinically dead for tens of minutes to make full recoveries.

Whether this kind of medical miracle qualifies as reanimating the dead is not the principal concern of doctors, but survivors of clinical death do seem to have reemerged from an interlude of profound mental absence. Said Zhou: “I’ve met with people who have recovered from cardiac arrest, and it was just totally blank in their brain what happened. The brain’s not dead, but they couldn’t retrieve anything during that cardiac arrest stage.”

This story was provided by Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.

from:    http://www.livescience.com/18379-reanimate-dead-frankentstein.html

Dogs Know Us Better than Chimps

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Dogs Understand Us Better Than Chimps Do

Jennifer Viegas, DiscoveryNews
Date: 10 February 2012 Time: 08:53 AM ET
a small dog with a baby boy
Dogs may be born with this inherent gift, since 6-week-old puppies with no major training possess it.
CREDIT: Mark Philbrick/BYU.

Chimpanzees may be our closest living relatives, but they do not understand us as well as dogs do.

The study in the latest issue of PLoS ONE. found that chimpanzees could care less when people pointed to objects, but dogs paid attention and knew precisely what the person wanted.

“We think that we are looking at a special adaptation in dogs to be sensitive to human forms of communication,” co-author Juliane Kaminski, a cognitive psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told Discovery News. “There is multiple evidence suggesting that selection pressures during domestication have changed dogs such that they are perfectly adapted to their new niche, the human environment.”

Dogs may even be born with this inherent gift, since 6-week-old puppies with no major training possess it.

For the study, Kaminski and her colleagues compared how well chimpanzees and dogs understood human pointing. The person pointed at a visible object out of reach of the human but within reach of the animal subject. If the chimp or dog retrieved the object, he or she would be rewarded with a tasty food treat. (Chimps received fruit juice or peanuts, while dogs got dry dog food.)

The chimps bombed, ignoring the human gestures, even though they were interested and motivated to get the food rewards. The dogs aced the test.

The chimpanzees failed to comprehend the referential intention of the human in the task. They did not see the pointing as important to their goal of getting the food, so they simply ignored the people during the study.

“We know that chimpanzees have a very flexible understanding of others,” Kaminski said. “They know what others can or cannot see, when others can or cannot see them, etc.”

Chimps are therefore not clueless, but they have likely not evolved the tendency to pay attention to humans when trying to achieve goals.

Kaminski explained that even wolves do not have this skill.

“Wolves, even when raised in a human environment, are not as flexible with human communication as dogs,” she said. “Dogs can read human gestures from very early ages on.”

As for cats, prior research found that domesticated felines also pay attention to us and can understand human pointing gestures. Kaminski, however, mentioned that “the researchers had to select them out of many hundreds of cats, “ suggesting that only certain house kitties are on par with dogs when it comes to understanding people.

The breed of the animal may also factor in, according to Márta Gácsi, from Eötvös University, Hungary. Gácsi worked with a team of researchers to examine the performance of different breeds of dogs in making sense of the human pointing gesture.

The scientists found that gun dogs and sheep dogs were better than hunting hounds, earth dogs (dogs used for underground hunting), livestock guard dogs and sled dogs at following a pointing finger.

“Although these results may appear to be unsurprising, there is a common tendency to make assumptions about genetic explanations for differences in comprehension between ‘dogs’ and wolves,” Gácsi said. “Our results show that researchers must be careful to control for animal breed when carrying out behavioral experiments.”

With chimps added to the study mix, researchers are now puzzled, as popular theories about communication hold that certain core abilities can be inherited. Chimpanzees are so close to us on the primate family tree, and yet they cannot seem to understand our pointing gestures. This suggests that pointing may be a unique form of human communication, but dogs challenge the hypothesis.

Kaminski said, “We therefore need to study in more detail the mechanisms behind dogs’ understanding of human forms of communication.”

This article was provided by Discovery News.

from:   http://www.livescience.com/18411-dogs-understand-humans-chimps.html

Dr. Jeff Masters on January Weather & Records

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Posted by: JeffMasters, 2:25 PM GMT on February 08, 2012 +21
It wasn’t the warmest January in U.S. history, but it sure didn’t seem like winter last month–the contiguous U.S. experienced its fourth warmest January on record, and the winter period December 2011 – January 2012 was also the fourth warmest in the 117-year record, reported NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center yesterday. The percent area of the U.S. experiencing extremes in warm maximum temperatures was 56 percent–the second highest value on record. Thirteen of the 550 major U.S. cities with automated airport weather stations broke or tied all-time records for their hottest January temperature:

Craig, CO 82°F
Bakersfield, CA 82°F
Alexandria, LA 83°F
Duluth, MN 48°F
Minot, ND 61°F
Mitchell, SD 68°F
Fargo, ND 55°F
Jamestown, ND 56°F
Huron, SD 65°F
Aberdeen, SD 63°F
Iron Mountain, MI 52°F
Alma, GA 83°F
Omaha, NE 69°F

However, extremely cold air settled in over Alaska in January, and several cities in Alaska had their coldest average January temperatures on record: Nome (-16.6 degrees F), Bethel (-17.3 degrees F), McGrath (-28.5 degrees F), and Bettles (-35.6 degrees F).


Figure 1. State-by-state rankings of temperatures for January 2012. Nine states had top-ten warmest Januarys on record, while no states had below-average temperatures in January. Records go back to 1895. Image credit: NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

28th driest January for the contiguous U.S.
The first week of January was almost precipitation-free across the entire contiguous U.S., but a series of storms over Texas, the Ohio Valley, and the Pacific Northwest later in the month boosted precipitation totals enough to make January 2012 the 28th driest in the 118-year period of record. Remarkably, Texas had its 30th wettest January on record, and was the 2nd wettest state during the month. Texas also had a very wet December, their 19th wettest December. It is very rare for Texas to receive so much precipitation during a La Niña winter. Texas had not experienced two consecutive months with above-average precipitation since January – February 2010, during the last El Niño event.


Figure 2. State-by-state rankings of precipitation for January 2012. Three states had top-ten driest Januarys on record, while no states had a top-ten wettest January. Records go back to 1895. Image credit: NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

3rd least-snowy January
According to the Rutgers Global Snow Lab, the average U.S. snow extent during January was the 3rd smallest January snow cover extent in the 46-year period of record. The National Weather Service sends out a daily “Weather and Almanac” product for several hundred major U.S. cities that we make available on underground. The February 6 statistics for those cities that reported measurable snow this winter show that only fifteen cities in the lower 48 states reported above-average snowfall as of February 6, and 155 had received below-average snowfall.


Figure 3. The new “Blue Marble” image of Earth on January 4, 2012, as seen by the VIIRS instrument on the new Suomi NPP satellite. The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s. NOAA’sAdvanced Hydrologic Prediction Service shows that only one state–Washington–had areas where precipitation accumulated more than 0.25″ on January 4, 2012, which is an extraordinary occurrence for a January day. Image credit:NASA.

Drought expands in January
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, as of January 31st, 2012, about 3.3 percent of the contiguous U.S. was experiencing the worst category of drought–called D4 or exceptional drought–about the same as the beginning of the month. However, the percent area of the U.S. experiencing drought of any severity increased from 32 percent at the beginning of January to 38 percent at the end of the month. Most of the drought expansion occurred across the Upper Midwest and the western states.

2nd most January tornadoes on record
With 95 preliminary tornado reports, January 2012 is likely to end up with the 2nd most January tornadoes since 1950 (the record is 218, set in January 1999.)

from:    http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2031

On Rupert Sheldrake, Scientific ‘Heretic’

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Rupert Sheldrake: the ‘heretic’ at odds with scientific dogma

Rupert Sheldrake has researched telepathy in dogs, crystals and Chinese medicine in his quest to explore phenomena that science finds hard to explain.

  The Observer, rupert sheldrake in Hampstead

Rupert Sheldrake in north London. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer

It is not often, in liberal north London, that you come face to face with a heretic, but Rupert Sheldrake has worn

that mantle, pretty cheerfully, for 30 years now. Sitting in his book-lined study, overlooking Hampstead Heath, he

appears a highly unlikely candidate for apostasy; he seems more like the Cambridge biochemistry don he once

was, one of the brightest Darwinians of his generation, winner of the university botany prize, researcher

at the Royal Society, Harvard scholar and fellow of Clare College.

All that, though, was before he was cast out into the wilderness. Sheldrake’s untouchable status was conferred

one morning in 1981 when, a couple of months after the publication of his first book, A New Science of Life,

he woke up to read an editorial in the journalNature, which announced to all right-thinking men and women that his

was a “book for burning” and that Sheldrake was to be “condemned in exactly the language that the pope used to

condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy”.

For a pariah, Sheldrake is particularly affable. But still, looking back at that moment, he still betrays a certain sense

of shock. “It was,” he says, “exactly like a papal excommunication. From that moment on, I became a very dangerous

person to know for scientists.” That opinion has hardened over the years, as Sheldrake has continued to operate at the

margins of his discipline, looking for phenomena that “conventional, materialist science” cannot explain and arguing for a more open-minded

approach to scientific inquiry.

His new book, The Science Delusion, is a summation of this thinking, an attempt to address what he sees as the

limitations and hubris of contemporary scientific thought. In particular, he takes aim at the “scientific dogmatism” that sets itself up as

gospel. The chapters take some of the stonier commandments of contemporary science and make them into questions: “Are the laws of nature

fixed?”; “Is matter unconscious?”; “Is nature purposeless?” “Are minds confined to brains?”

Sheldrake is a brilliant polemicist if nothing else and he skilfully marshals all the current thinking that

undermines these tenets – from apparent telepathy in animals, to crystals having to “learn” how to grow, to

some of the more fantastical notions of theoretical physics. On the morning I meet him, his book is sitting near

the top of the science bestseller list on Amazon. It has also, unlike most of his previous work – Seven

Experiments That Could Change the World, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home – been

generally reviewed respectfully. Perhaps it is something in the air.

One of the habits in nature that Sheldrake is interested in is polarity, and if he has a natural nemesis then it

is Richard Dawkins, arch materialist and former professor of public understanding of science at Oxford. The title

of his book seems to take direct aim at Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Was that, I wonder, his express intention

in writing it?

“Slightly,” he suggests. But the title was really his publisher’s idea. “It is dealing with a much bigger issue. But

Richard Dawkins is a symptom of the dogmatism of science. He crystallises that approach in the public mind,

so to that extent, yes, it is a pointed title.”

Sheldrake is the same age as Dawkins – 70 this year – and though their careers began in an almost identical

biochemical place, they could hardly have ended up further apart. If Sheldrake’s ideas could be boiled down to a

sentence, you might borrow one from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Richard, than are

dreamt of in your philosophy…”

“What we have in common,” Sheldrake says, “is that we are both certain that evolution is the central feature of

nature. But I would say his theory of evolution stops at biology. When it comes to cosmology, for example, he

has little to say. I would take the evolutionary principle there, too. I think that the ‘laws of nature’ are also prone

to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws. Much of what we are beginning to understand is that they

clearly have evolved differently in different parts of the universe.”

Sheldrake talks a good deal of the fact that, as all good Brian Cox viewers know, 83% of the universe is now

thought to be “dark matter” and subject to “dark energy” forces that “nothing in our science can begin to

explain”.

Despite this, he suggests, scientists are prone to “the recurrent fantasy of omniscience”. The science delusion,

in these terms, consists in the faith that we already understand the nature of reality, in principle, and that all that

is left to do is to fill in the details. “In this book, I am just trying to blow the whistle on that attitude which I think

is bad for science,” he says. In America, the book is called Science Set Free, which he thinks is probably a

better title. “They were aware that if they called it The Science Delusion it would be seen as a rightwing tract

that was anti-evolution and anti-climate change. And I want no part of that.”

The evolution of Rupert Sheldrake, would, you guess, be a worthwhile scientific study in itself, but one for which

you might struggle to attract funding. Like all heretics worth their salt, he started out in good faith, a true

believer, but he has been beset by increasing doubt ever since.

“I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14,” he says, with a grin. “I bought into

that package deal of science equals atheism. I was the only boy at my high Anglican boarding school who

refused to get confirmed. When I was a teenager, I was a bit like Dawkins is today, you know: ‘If Adam and Eve

were created by God, why do they have navels?’ That kind of thing.”

Over a period, he found the materialist view of the universe – that matter was all that life consisted of, tha

t human beings were in Dawkins’s term “lumbering robots” – did not accord with his own experience of it.

Sheldrake was a gifted musician and “electrical changes in the cortex didn’t seem able to fully explain Bach”.

Likewise: “To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn’t

seem to give a very full picture of the world.”

The other thing that troubled him about scientific orthodoxy might be condensed into a single word: pigeons. As

a boy in Newark-on-Trent, Sheldrake had kept animals – a dog, a jackdaw and some homing pigeons. He would

place these pigeons in a cardboard box and cycle all morning with them and then release them to marvel how

they would always beat him home. Newark happened to be a hub of pigeon racing. “Every weekend in the

season, people would bring piles and piles of wicker baskets containing their birds; my father would take me

there and the porters would let me help release the pigeons. Hundreds would fly up and circle round, then you

would see them form into little groups and head off around Britain, back home. Pigeon fanciers were mostly

plain working men, but they were fascinated by this mystery, which they did not understand.”

They were not alone. When Sheldrake won his scholarship to Cambridge several years later, he asked various

scientists how they thought this happened. The scientists talked about the sun’s position and an internal clock

and scent traces, but what “they weren’t prepared to say was that it was a total mystery”. That refusal, and

others like it, troubled Sheldrake. “There is a lot of science that you can’t directly experience,” he says, “but to

concentrate on quantum physics when we couldn’t begin to explain homing pigeons seemed to me,” he

suggests, “a great distortion.”

For a decade or so, Sheldrake kept some of these thoughts to himself, but as his career developed his doubts

about the idea that “conventional, materialist” science would one day explain everything seemed increasingly

wrong-headed. He took a job working at the University of Malaya on ferns and rubber trees and to get there

travelled for some months through India and Sri Lanka. It was 1968 and India was a very interesting place to be.

“I met people, highly intelligent people, who had a completely different world view from anything to which I had

been exposed.”

Returning to Cambridge, Sheldrake became interested in a notion of biology and heredity that shared close

affinities with Carl Jung’s ideas of a collective unconscious, a shared species memory. He was profoundly

influenced by a book called Matter and Memory by the philosopher Henri Bergson. “When I discovered

Bergson’s idea that memory is not stored in the brain but that it is a relation in time, not in space, I realised that

there might potentially be a memory principle in nature that would solve the problem I was wrestling with.”

In 1974, Sheldrake returned to south-east Asia and took a job at an agricultural institute near Hyderabad

developing new varieties and cropping systems in chickpeas. “By day, I was working on these practical things,”

he recalls, “but in the evening I was reading a lot about crystallography and the philosophy of form.” He had

become friendly with an eccentric woman called Helen Spurway, widow of JBS Haldane, the great British

biologist. She lived in a remote full of animals, with a tame jackal and wasps’ nests in the living room; Haldane’s

library was being eaten by termites; Sheldrake felt right at home.

“At around the same time,” he recalls, “I had some exposure to psychedelics, and that opened me up to the

idea that consciousness was much richer than anything my physiology lecturers had ever described. Then I

came across transcendental meditation, which seemed to give some access to that without drugs.” Alongside

that, to his surprise, Sheldrake began to realise that there was “a lot more in my makeup that was ‘Christian’

than I cared to admit. I started praying and going to church.”

Did he pray with a sense of its efficacy?

“Well,” he says, “I still say the Lord’s Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world. ‘Thy

will be done’, that sense that we are part of a larger process that is unfolding that we do not comprehend.” By

the time Sheldrake went to live at the ashram of the exiled Christian holy man, Father Bede Griffiths, he had

been confirmed in the Church of South India and was the organist of St George’s, Hyderabad. It was at about

that time, “living in a palm-fringed hut under a banyan tree”, that Sheldrake decided to set out his decade’s

worth of thinking about memory being a function of time, not matter, shared by all living things, that he called

“morphogenetics”.

Was he aware that the book would be incendiary?

“Well,” he says, “I wrote it to try to find a broader framework for biology. A more holistic one, proposing the

argument that the laws of nature were also evolving in time.”

For the first three months after it was published, the speculative book got a generally favourable reception. But

then the “book for burning” editorial was written in Nature, by its editor, Sir John Maddox, and Sheldrake’s new

life began, as a discredited scientist and bestselling author.

Far from refuting his ideas in the face of this broadside, Sheldrake went on the offensive. His research since

then has concentrated almost entirely on the kinds of phenomena that science dismisses out of hand “but

which people are generally fascinated by and made to feel stupid about”. He has a long-running experiment that

collects data about how dogs “know” when their owners are coming home; another is concerned with the

apparently strong deviations from chance in human ability to predict when they are being stared at from a

distance. He retains an interest in subjects as diverse as the mysteries of crystal formation, the efficacy of

Chinese medicine, the forces that trigger migrations of birds and animals over vast distances, and the nature of

consciousness.

None of these pursuits has enhanced his standing in the professional scientific community. Sheldrake is

unrepentant. He cites Darwin as an example. “If you look at his books, almost all the data there come from

amateur naturalists, practical breeders, gardeners. TH Huxley, meanwhile, ‘his bulldog’, was very much against

amateurs, largely because many of them were vicars and he was very anti-religious. He wanted to marginalise

anyone who saw science and faith as compatible and mutually reaffirming.”

Though he remains at best a contentious figure, and to some an irredeemable charlatan, Sheldrake sees some

evidence that this old opposition is breaking down, that doubt and wonder might be returning to science.

“I think one of the reasons why my book has – so far – been well received is that times are changing,” he

suggests. “A lot of our old certainties, not least neoliberal capitalism, have been turned on their head. The

atheist revival movement of Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett is for many people just too narrow and dogmatic.

I think it is a uniquely open moment…”

His hope is that there will be a “coming out” moment in science. “It’s like gays in the 1950s,” he suggests. “I

think if people in the realm of science and medicine came out and talked about the limitations of purely

mechanistic and reductive approaches it would be much more fun…”

The imminence of Sheldrake’s three score years and ten has made questions of mortality and consciousness

seem a little more pressing to him. He almost came face to face with his morphic energies in 2008; speaking at

a consciousness conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was attacked with a knife by a Japanese paranoid

schizophrenic. He suffered a huge wound in his thigh, which just missed his femoral artery. “Apparently,” he

says, “he was aiming at my heart and stumbled at the last moment. It certainly made death a bit more present.”

Given his speculative nature, I wonder what he imagined, as his life flashed before him, would happen next?

“I’ve always thought death would be like dreaming,” he says, “but without the possibility of waking up. And in

those dreams, as in our dreams in life, everyone will get what they want to some degree. For the atheists

convinced everything will go blank, maybe it will.” He trusts in a more colourful future for himself. After Sheldrake

shows me out, I walk to work across the heath, imagining how his dream eternity might work out: hammering

out The Goldberg Variations on his Hyderabad organ, while the jungle grows around him, wondering all the time

how

from:    http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/05/rupert-sheldrake-interview-science-delusion

Henry Miller’s Writing Commandments

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Gretchen Rubin

Writer, The Happiness Project

 11 Brilliant Writing Commandments From Henry Miller
Posted: 02/ 2/2012 12:15 pm
Cruising around Pinterest (my new toy), I came across this list of Henry Miller’s 11 work commandments, posted by Sadie Skeels. I’m astounded by how absolutely apt these commandments are for my own writing practices.

For instance, #10. I struggle with this problemall the time. And #2. I remember a conversation I had with my agent when I was writing Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill. I was so enthralled with the material that I couldn’t stop researching, and finally she said to me sternly, “No more research.” Also, #5 is terrific advice; when I can’t seem to write, I can review my notes, edit, cut… and pretty soon I’ve started writing again. I think about #11 in a different way; I struggle to make sure that writing doesn’t crowd out other things that are also important to me.

Henry Miller’s Commandments, from Henry Miller on Writing:

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”

3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!

5. When you can’t create you can work.

6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.

7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.

8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.

9. Discard the Program when you feel like it-but go back to it the next day.Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

These rules seem helpful to non-writers as well; in almost everything we do, it helps to stay focused, refreshed, and perseverant.

What work commandments would you add? And what exactly do you think that Miller meant by #6?

 

* As I mentioned, I’m really enjoying Pinterest — “an online pinboard where you can organize and share the things you love.” If you’d like me to send you an invitation, drop me a request at gretchenrubin1@gretchenrubin.com.

from:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gretchen-rubin/writing-advice_b_1247003.html?ref=mindful-living&ir=Mindful%20Living

 

Temperature Rising at Fukushima Nuclear Plant

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Fukushima Update: Temperature Rising at TEPCO Unit 2

 

 
Fukushima Update: Unit 2 Temperature Rise
by Nelle Maxey  
TEPCO increased the volume of water being injected into Unit 2 by 35%  in the early hours of February 7.
This attempt to lower the temperature has stabilized it around 70 degrees C.
But it has not lowered it significantly.
This large increase in volumes of cooling water injection also means that TEPCO is outside the limits of operation for this reactor as I noted yesterday. They acknowledge this at the very bottom of in their morning press release for Feb 7. http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/12020703-e.html
The best article on the net explaining what is going on at Unit 2 is the one from Asahi news. It has the fewest errors and omissions and also has an excellent drawing and an excellent chart which you can see at the link to the article.

TEPCO struggles to cool Fukushima plant’s No. 2 reactor

Tokyo Electric Power Co. is taking steps to prevent a possible self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

Readings from a thermometer at the bottom of the No. 2 reactor’s pressure vessel rose from 50.8 degrees at 5 a.m. on Feb. 1 to 73.3 degrees at 7 a.m. on Feb. 6.

Melted fuel is believed to have accumulated at the bottom of the reactor, but high radiation levels have prevented workers from checking the exact situation within the reactor.

After the flow of cooling water was increased to 10.6 tons per hour on Feb. 6, up from 8.6 tons two days earlier, the temperature fell to 69.2 degrees at 5 p.m. on Feb. 6. That night, TEPCO injected boric acid into the reactor to prevent criticality, the point at which a nuclear fission reaction becomes self-sustaining. Boric acid absorbs neutrons, which induce nuclear fission.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) instructed the company to consider injecting boric acid earlier in the day.

TEPCO also plans to increase the amount of cooling water by 3 tons per hour.

At a news conference on Feb. 6, Haruki Madarame, chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan, told TEPCO and NISA to keep the public informed.

“We expect them to address the public’s concerns by methodically explaining what could happen and how they plan to deal with it,” Madarame said.

A TEPCO official said there were no signs that the melted fuel had reached criticality. The official said the level of radioactive xenon, an element with a short half-life, remained below a measurable detection limit, and that monitoring devices around the nuclear power plant have not detected a rise in radiation levels.

TEPCO officials said the rise in temperatures was not steep enough to indicate that criticality had been reached.

However, a temperature of 80 degrees or more at the bottom of the pressure vessel would ring alarm bells. TEPCO has assumed a margin of error of up to 20 degrees for the thermometers in the reactor because it is not clear what damage was done to them by the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Therefore, a reading exceeding 80 degrees could mean an actual temperature of more than 100 degrees, compromising the reactor’s status as being in cold shutdown.

The rise in temperatures appears to coincide with changes in the flow of water through two separate systems for cooling the No. 2 reactor: the feed water system and the core spray system. TEPCO temporarily increased the amount of water being pumped through the feed water system and reduced the amount of water going through the core spray system as it strengthened outdoor piping in late January.

After that work was completed, it gradually decreased the amount of water flowing through the feed water system and increased the flow through the core spray system in an effort to restore flows to the setup before the strengthening.

The thermometer that has produced the high readings is located just under the feed water system. Its temperature readings rose when the water passing through the feed water system was reduced and water going through the core spray system was increased. Readings from two other thermometers at the same height in the reactor have been stable at 44-45 degrees.

The temperature may have risen because water has not reached part of the fuel since the amount of water through the feed water system decreased and the flow of water changed,” said an official at TEPCO’s Nuclear Power and Plant Siting Division.

for more information, go to:  http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/10889-fukushima-update-temperature-rising-at-tepco-unit-2.html

Marshall Vian Summers on the Allies of Humanity

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Somewhat thought provoking interview on Project Camelot (okay, and yes, Kerry drives me crazy with her comments and timing).  Who knows.  Another look at the ET thing:

Check it out here:

http://projectcamelotproductions.com/interviews/marshall_v_summers/marshall_summers.html

from the website:

..Over twenty years ago, a group of individuals from several different worlds gathered at a discreet location in our solar system near earth for the purpose of observing the alien intervention that is occurring in our world. From their hidden vantage point, they were able to determine the identity, organization and intentions of those visiting our world and monitor the visitors’ activities. This group of observers call themselves the “Allies of Humanity.”

for more, go to the website:      http://www.alliesofhumanity.org/Allies/The_Allies_of_Humanity__Revealing_the_Extraterrestrial_Intervention_and_Teaching_Humanity_about_Life_in_the_Universe.html

 

 

Rotational Rate of Earth & TIme

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TIME
Clifford E Carnicom
Jul 23 2003
Edited Jul 24 2003


Y Axis is the Difference in Time Between TA1 and UTC
TA1 is based upon atomic time. UTC is based upon the rotational speed of the earth.
X Axis is the Julian Day Number. Data begins on May 15 1976 and ends on Jul 23 2003
Source of Data : U.S. Naval Observatory

Research has been underway for several months to investigate a hypothesis that has been been forwarded to me for evaluation. The source of these propositions will remain unidentified at this time. The hypothesis purports the onset of major geophysical changes and life extinction cycles in the foreseeable and upcoming decades. The impact upon the earth and life from such events is extraordinary and beyond the realm of consideration for many people. There is also a claim of a connection between the aerosol operations and the anticipated geophysical events, and this has formed the basis for the research that is being presented herein. Additional hypotheses are under investigation, (e.g., biological and pharmaceutical) but they will not be be discussed at this point. No judgement on the veracity of these claims is being made, however, certain leads of investigation are being followed to see if they hold up to scrutiny and logic.

ONE such claim being made is that there exists a connection between the anticipated geophysical changes, the rotational rate of the earth and the aerosol operations. It has been stated that there is an attempt to use the aerosols to increase the rotational speed of the earth. This increase is viewed as an offsetting mechanism to the geophysical events which it is claimed will occur. At first response, it might appear that such a claim defies the realms of physical possibility, however, honest research does not allow such a presumption without an adequate investigation. It is also to be understood that no claim of benevolence to the general human population accompanies this description of geophysical manipulation.

There is a well known line by Mr. Carl Sagan, to the effect that, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Such is the case here. In my examination of this hypothesis, it appears to me that the central issue of examination drives toward the issue of TIME. If one were to claim that the rotational speed of the earth can be artificially affected, then a closer examination of time should reveal whether that claim has any merit. This would be the case regardless of the role, or non-role, of the aerosol operations. The rationale for this investigation is that TIME has historically evolved as an expression of that very same rotational rate of the earth. It is only with the more recent introduction of time based upon atomic standards that the issue of time has become murkier. Time is not so steady as many of us might presume, and there are now many different ways by which it can be measured. This discussion will be confined to three of these standards of time: TA1 (Atomic time), UT (based on the rotational rate of the earth) and UTC (UT adjusted periodically to keep pace with atomic time).

Small differences in time must now be considered to examine the questions which are before us. The geophysical effects of such small changes must also be considered in the future; initial research indicates that small changes in time (i.e., rotation rate) may lead to significant geophysical stress forces and their release. It also appears that our state of knowledge of earth rotational rate changes and geophysical correlations is quite inadequate.

There is, first of all, a fairly well established recent history that shows the rotational rate of the earth has been slowing down1,2,3. This rate is stated from numerous sources to be on the order of 0.7 to 0.9 seconds per year, and it seems to have held fairly steady since approximately 1900. In the interest of completeness, a graph4 depicting the history back to 1620 does show a period of increased rotational rate in contradiction to the more recent trend. To make matters additionally confusing, most sources that attribute a geophysical process of tidal actions to the slow down speak on the order of milliseconds per century, as opposed to a fraction of a second per year11. The same sources also do not appear to address the contradictions raised by the graphed data extending back to 1620. So there does appear to be many questions as to magnitude and rotational rate increase and decrease that must remain unanswered at this point.

The more immediate question is to ask whether or not it is conceivable that the aerosol operations are affecting the rotational rate of the earth. If this is the case, one would look for variance in the data beginning approximately 4 1/2 years ago as a potential indicator. The data that we should look at is the difference between atomic time (TA1) and the time based upon the rotational rate of the earth (UT). Although it required some labor to extract the data, this information is available from the United States Naval Observatory. In addition, the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) also becomes an important source of information. The graph of this difference expresses any unusual changes that may be taking place with respect to the rotational rate of the earth.

This graph is presented above for your review, and there are some intriguing findings that are to be mentioned.

1. The most recent leap second added to bring UTC (based upon rotational rate of the earth) in closer accordance with atomic time (TA1) occurred on Dec 31 1998. The lack of leap seconds (at the anticipated rate loss of approximately 0.8 seconds year) since that time is very much out of character with the preceding historical data set spanning more than 25 years. This indicates to us that the earth’s rotational rate must have actually increased in more recent years relative to the historical record. As a point of observation only, the aerosol operations are generally understood to have begun at a global level at the close of 1998 and beginning of 1999.

2. The post 1999 change is in contradiction to the numerous sources that claim a fairly steady rotational rate decrease on the order of 0.7 to 0.9 seconds per year.

3. No explanation can be found at this time by IERS as to the abrupt change in leap second additions (decline of) at the beginning of 1999. There have been no leap seconds added since Dec 31 1998, and this is at variance with the regular history preceding this announcement and as shown on the graph from the US Naval Observatory data. It would appear that a leap second addition is inevitable in the near future, after a lapse of 4 1/2 years.

4. The rate of decline (slope) shown within the graph also shows itself to be unique within the time period covered, from 1976 to 2003. The decline (slope) post 1999 is considerably less than that which has preceded.

5. The “stair -step” behavior of the decline rate since 1999 is a most interesting feature of the data. There are 4 periods (and the beginning of a fifth), fairly regularly spaced, where the rotational rate decline temporarily levels off. This pattern also does not appear within the general data set, and it does indicate the possibility of a disturbing mechanism (artificial or otherwise) to the rotation rate.


“Stair Step” Pattern Visible in Post 1999 Series
Y Axis is the Difference in Time Between TA1 and UTC
TA1 is based upon atomic time. UTC is based upon the rotational speed of the earth.
X Axis is the Julian Day Number. Data begins on Jan 01 1999 and ends on Jul 23 2003
Source of Data : U.S. Naval Observatory

6. The long term predictions issued by the IERS for the period of 1997 – 2007 indicated that approximately 7 leap seconds were anticipated to be added within the period from 1999 to 2007. However, NO leap seconds have been added (as of this date), i.e., a period of 4 1/2 years have elapsed without any additions. This is out of character with the historical record as well as at odds with the last known predictions of the worldwide time standard service.

7. Curiously, the long term time prediction service of the U.S. Naval Observatory has apparently been discontinued, at least to the public. This is apparently the case with IERS also, as no updates past 1999 for long term predictions have been found. The question is, WHY? Why would a fundamental geophysical service that is important to many human endeavors be eliminated?

8. A statistical test between the means of the daily differences (leap seconds excluded) between the post Jan 01 1999 data and the pre Jan 01 1999 data is significant at the 99.9999+% level12. This test demonstrates that the data after Jan 01 1999 is highly anomalous relative to the previous history. The slope ratio between the two data sets is on the order of 1 to 3, with the post Jan 01 1999 data decreasing at a rate of 1/3 the pre Jan 01 1999 data.
(N1 = 8245, Mean1 = -.00201 secs. / day, sigma1 = .000701; N2 = 1633, Mean2 = -.00067 secs. / day, sigma2 = .000501 : Z = 91.4)

9. If attempts have been made to decrease the rotational rate decline, an analysis of the data would suggest that it may have been only momentarily successful and delaying; a more deeply entrenched geophysical process appears to reign.

In an effort to monitor this issue, this researcher has developed independent time standards. Astronomic occultation observations have been and are being conducted8,9,10, and a digital time standard has been established. The expected error in the astronomic observations is approximately 0.5 seconds, and the digital time reference system has an expected error of approximately 0.2 seconds per month. The insertion of leap seconds can likely be detected independently with these reference frames in place. The difference between UT1 (atomic time) and UTC (based upon rotational rate of the earth and adjusted within tolerance of atomic time) continues to be available to a high level of precision through the U.S. Naval Observatory, and can be monitored by the public.

If one now considers the possibility that the earth’s rotation rate can be artifically affected, the next important step is to ask what physical mechanism can conceivably accomplish this. This will undoubtedly lead toward advanced studies in physics, and at this point I can only make a suggestion as to where such research might lead. The source behind the hypothesis being discussed has stated only that methods of resonance involving sub-atomic particles are the basis of the physical mechanism; no additional specific or detailed information is available.

Any hypothesis that merits serious consideration must stand the tests of cross-examination and hopefully is tenable within the laws of physics and science that we have adopted in this time and place. In an effort to conclude the current discussion and yet prompt the reader with an avenue for further work, I would like to mention the following area of physics which holds some promise for the consideration of resonance as a physical mechanism.

I have acquainted myself with a sub-discipline of physics that is termed “nuclear magnetic resonance”, and it appears to be worthy of additional effort. Nuclear magnetic resonance has developed to become a highly significant branch of modern physics, and is most commonly known within the medical community. The fundamental principle behind nuclear magnetic resonance, as I understand it, is this:

Certain atomic particles, when subjected to radio frequency energy in the presence of a magnetic field, will absorb that energy to cause variations in their sub-atomic spin rates, i.e., the angular rate of rotation of that particle. Energy absorption will occur at resonance if the proper frequencies are used in conjunction with a particular magnetic field strength5,6,7. (Note : the source states that nuclear magnetic resonance is only ancillary to the primary mechanisms which operate at a broader level and with variable energy forms beyond that of radio frequencies).

This principle is clearly under the domain of quantum physics, and as such much work lies before us to fairly evaluate the viability of such a mechanism to operate at a geophysical level. Readers with knowledge of the 4 1/2 years of research embedded within this site may recognize why such a mechanism is to be considered in all seriousness. The apparent anomalies with the earth rotational data, as they have been described above, provide a further impetus for the deeper study ahead of us.


Clifford E Carnicom
Jul 23 2003
Edited Jul 24 2003

for references and source, go to:    http://www.carnicominstitute.org/articles/time1.htm

Strange Find in the Baltic Sea

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Shipwreck hunters stumble across mysterious find

By Brooke Bowman, CNN
updated 8:59 AM EST, Mon January 30, 2012

Click to play
Shipwreck hunters make an unusual find

CNN) — Deep down on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Swedish treasure hunters think they have made the find of a lifetime.

The problem is, they’re not exactly sure what it is they’ve uncovered.

Out searching for shipwrecks at a secret location between Sweden and Finland, the deep-sea salvage company Ocean Explorer captured an incredible image more than 80 meters below the water’s surface.

At first glance, team leader and commercial diver Peter Lindberg joked that his crew had just discovered an unidentified flying object, or UFO.

“I have been doing this for nearly 20 years so I have a seen a few objects on the bottom, but nothing like this,” said Lindberg.

“We had been out for nine days and we were quite tired and we were on our way home, but we made a final run with a sonar fish and suddenly this thing turned up,” he continued.

Using side-scan sonar, the team found a 60-meter diameter cylinder-shaped object, with a rigid tail 400 meters long.

The imaging technique involves pulling a sonar “towfish” — that essentially looks sideways underwater – behind a boat, where it creates sound echoes to map the sea floor below.

On another pass over the object, the sonar showed a second disc-like shape 200 meters away.

Lindberg’s team believe they are too big to have fallen off a ship or be part of a wreck, but it’s anyone’s guess what could be down there.

“We’ve heard lots of different kinds of explanations, from George Lucas’s spaceship — the Millennium Falcon — to ‘it’s some kind of plug to the inner world,’ like it should be hell down there or something.

“But we won’t know until we have been down there,” said Lindberg.

The Head of Archaeology at Sweden’s Maritime Museums, Andreas Olsson, admits he’s intrigued by the picture, but remains sceptical about what it could be.

The reliability of one-side scan sonar images is one of his main concerns, making it difficult to determine if the object is a natural geological formation or something different altogether.

“It all depends on the circumstances when you actually tow the [sonar] fish after the boat,” he said.

“What are the temperature conditions, the wave conditions, how deep is your fish in relation to the sea bed etcetera and all those parameters also affects what kind of image you have in the end,” he explained.

Even Lindberg agrees the image “isn’t the best it could be.” But his crew are still planning to return to the site in the calmer waters of spring to investigate their find.

It’s a risky and expensive business, and not one that always pays off.

British maritime historian, Professor Andrew Lambert, says the costs of recovery are now too high for most.

“If you want to stand in a cold shower tearing up £50 notes, go shipwreck hunting,” he said. “Most shipwrecks are rotting away, or carrying dull things — all the romance has been taken out of it.”

It’s a problem Lindberg and his team are aware of.

“It’s a very difficult industry to be in — it’s money all the time,” he confessed. “The best thing it could be, would be 60 meters of gold — then I would be very happy.”

“This thing is very far out, it’s really off-shore, so first of all we need a bigger ship… more equipment.. and we have to do bottom sampling, water sampling, to see if it is something poisonous.”

But even if the mystery object doesn’t contain retrievable treasure the site could still prove to be a gold mine for the Ocean Explorer team, with tourists and private investors paying to see it up-close, in a submarine.

“The object itself is maybe not valuable in the sense of money it can be very interesting whatever it is, historical or a natural anomaly,” said Lindberg.

In the North Atlantic, one American salvage company is also hoping to beat the odds.

Using side-scan sonar, the team found a 60-meter diameter cylinder-shaped object, with a rigid tail 400 meters long.
Using side-scan sonar, the team found a 60-meter diameter cylinder-shaped object, with a rigid tail 400 meters long.

Odyssey Marine Exploration — a company made up of researchers, scientists, technicians and archaeologists — have at least 6,300 shipwrecks in their database that they are looking to find.

Their latest discoveries include two British war-time shipwrecks off the coast of Ireland that could be laden with hundreds of tonnes of silver.

Mark Gordon, president of Odyssey, says at least 100 ships on their watch-list are known to have values in excess of $50 million dollars.

“When you think about the fact until the mid 20th century, the only way to transport wealth was on the oceans and a lot of ships were lost, it adds up to a formula where we have billions of dollars worth of interesting and valuable things on the sea floor,” he said.

The lure of treasure has lead to an increasing number of discoveries in recent years. But one which doesn’t come without its dangers, warns Olsson.

“I think recently we’re entering a time of a lot of discoveries,” he said of the technological advancements in finding shipwrecks.

“The professional shipwreck discoverers are doing a great effort for cultural heritage management in the long run… what we don’t support is the action of actually taking up items and selling them,” he said.

from:    http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/28/world/europe/swedish-shipwreck-hunters/index.html?iref=allsearch

New Sunspot

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RING-SHAPED SUNSPOT: New sunspot AR1413 is emerging in the shape of a ring. This two-day movie from the Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the sunspot’s geometric development:

Does the magnetic architecture of this unusual spot harbor energy for strong flares? Magnetograms appear to show some mixing of polarities between the left and right halves of the ring, which could lead to explosive instabilities. So far, however, solar activity remains low.

fr/spaceweather.com