Category Archives: Science

A Search for the Meaning of Life

In 1992, when my 25 year marriage dissolved and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, one of the projects I was determined to pursue was an attempt to understand the meaning of life, or something in the neighborhood.  I did a lot of thinking and planning about how to approach the matter in a way I considered the most likely possibility for success.

Part of the project involved learning everything I could about religions and metaphysics, and I began with an intense study of Christianity, early Christian history, pre-Nicean Christian documents, practices and beliefs at a time before anything qualified as Canon.  For a couple of years I submerged myself in the subject.

During the same time period I got up 3:30 am and spent a couple of hours watching Christian television to get a better understanding of what was going on with Christianity today.  I found I got a lot of enjoyment doing it, and I discovered one I liked particularly well and thought of almost as an old friend.

Garner Ted Armstrong.  I spent a year or so in my early 20s working for Rainbow Baking Company in Houston loading bread trucks off a conveyor belt 12 hours a day, and I filled some of the solitude listening to Garner Ted over a portable radio and earpiece.  I considered him one of the best rhetoricians of the 20th Century already when I found him preaching on television.

But what I hadn’t realized was his level of scholarship and open mindedness about Christian history.  The fact I was submerged in it at the time led me to write a letter to him asking his take on some issues I’d found ambiguous.

From that time until his death several years later, Garner Ted Armstrong and I indulged in exchanges of 20 page letters discussing the nuances of Christian history, Christian texts, the implications of the Nag Hammadi codices, news coming out of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where Christianity had been and possibly where it was going.

A truly strange time of my life, though just one of those side-trails that had little to do with my coincident search and research involving a lost gold mine, nor with understanding the meaning of life.  The former, I never found, and the latter, when I found it, didn’t need elaboration.

I still miss old Garner Ted Armstrong and those long letters.

Old Jules

UFO and Certainties About What Isn’t

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read.

We human beings love ourselves better for our certainties.  Most of us take particular satisfaction in sneering about the certainties of others when we’ve applied something we pretend is logic to prove theirs are invalid.  Pulls us up by the rhetorical bootstraps in a reality where being intelligent is considered a virtue almost as resounding as being ‘right’.

One of the areas of opinion that breaks down into sneers rapidly involves unidentified flying objects and whether creatures from somewhere else have visited this planet.  The ‘right’ side of the issue is they are fig-newtons of the imagination and declaring it to be so proves intelligence, level-headedness, education and superiority to those who believe otherwise.

The ‘wrong’, ‘stupid’, ‘irrational’, ‘illogical’ side is people who’ve experienced them.  Police, airline pilots, military pilots, lawyers, psychologists, physicians, and thousands of other people who might have been ‘right’ once, but were transported into the camp of ‘wrong’ by personal observation and experience.

A while back I posted about a visit I had with Kay’s aunt, Loretta. [An Afternoon with Aunt Loretta (Proctor)- Roswell, 1947] Loretta’s one of the folks still living who was close-enough to the Roswell UFO incident to have an opinion about it based on her own experiences and observations at the time.  I’ve got a lot of respect for the lady and value what she had to say, even though it’s just naturally ‘wrong’.

But I was backed into a corner of open-mindedness on the issue by a couple of experiences of my own.  One with a lot of other witnesses on California Avenue in Socorro, New Mexico.   The second was long-lasting and relatively close-up and personal.   Back during the Y2K time.

 

Pie Town’s located about 30 miles west of the Very Large Array [VLA] telescopes near Datil, New Mexico.  The village sits almost atop the Continental Divide, an isolated community in the middle of nowhere.

I was in the only telephone booth in Pie Town  around midnight. The town only has a couple-hundred people and there were no lights of any sort in town. Low overcast, 500 feet or less.

Whatever it was appeared above me below the overcast and stayed there while I told the person I was talking to on the phone what was happening.  It stayed maybe 10-15 minutes and gave me the willies badly enough, I got thinking I was the reason it was there.

I told the person I was talking to adios and went to the truck, took a .45 out from under the seat and racked in a round.  It moved a bit about then, not much but some, while I stood there pointing a pistol at it waiting in the dark. It moved a little more, seemed to descend — at least it got larger, and stopped again.

I decided to just get the hell out of there if I could. Cranked up the truck and drove about a quarter-mile and pulled off the highway to make sure it wasn’t following me. It sort of drifted or glided off to the north and vanished into the overcast.

The experience motivated me enough to try to find out whether objects of that particular description and configuration were common, because I’d never heard of one. I occasionally would research various UFO sighting archives on the web.

Years later I found that within a few days of my own sighting an object of almost identical description upset a lot of on-duty military personnel by behaving almost the same way at White Sands Missile Testing Range near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a couple of hundred miles SE from Pie Town. White Sands is an extremely high security area and they take it personally when something intrudes into the airspace over the place, more personally yet when it hangs around and isn’t scared.

There was [maybe still is] a squadron of F117s stationed at Alamogordo [Luftwaffe] at the time, and they scrambled. But the object removed itself before they arrived.

As for my own experience and the times involved — I’m having to best guess. The person I was describing it to on the telephone and I took a stab at it toward the end of our conversation before I decided to evacuate. But things seem longer and it mightn’t have been that long. Afterward, while I was standing there watching and pointing the .45 it’s anyone’s guess. Might have been as little as 5 minutes, seemed a lot longer.

Which is to say, I don’t know much about aliens and the things they fly around in, but I don’t put a lot of value on the speculations of people who know all about what they aren’t.   Even if they’re real smart and have a lot of school-housing.

Old Jules

 

Shiva’s Headband – Old Sol’s Magnificent Coronal Hole

http://spaceweather.com/

I mentioned the other day how Shiva the Cow Cat dropped the ball while we were praying up Old Sol.  I’m not going to say with certainty Shiva’s responsible for this, but if she is, I’m going to give her a special scratch behind the ears as a reward.

CORONAL HOLE: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is monitoring a dark gash in the sun’s atmosphere–a coronal hole. It’s the dark vertical feature in this extreme UV image taken on Jan. 13th:

Coronal holes are places where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows the solar wind to escape. This yawning hole is about 120,000 km wide and more than a million km long. Solar wind flowing from its UV-dark abyss will reach Earth on Jan. 16th or 17th, possibly sparking auroras for high-latitude sky watchers.”

Mayan calendar enthusiasts, on the other hand, choose to ignore the coincidence of Shiva’s lapse and attribute the hole to the obvious sinister consequences of the rock calendar having runned spang out of numbers.

Meanwhile, astrophysicists, unaware of Shiva’s blink, speculate it’s the work of Proxima Centauri, a hot tempered red dwarf cholla who hangs out in the same honkytonks  as Old Sol, and who has a long history with a switch-blade.

I’m leaning to Shiva doing it, but what the hell do I know?

Old Jules

  

Sweatsocks, Milo Maize and Microwaves

Morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read.

Some of you are too young to remember why microwave ovens and electricity were invented.  It’s a fact worth knowing.

The pioneers, when they invented this country, lived mostly in dugouts.  Dugout canoes in the summer, dugout houses in the winter.  Those winters tended to get them cold on their backsides and necks.  So they started growing wheat, milo maize, rice, to try heating up and putting in some warm container to throw around their necks to try to keep warm.

They tried all manner of containers, those cold natured ancestors of ours.  Tried skinning rabbits and sewing up grain inside the hides, but it didn’t take any time at all before the only benefit they were getting from it was the smell of burning hair.  So they invented sweat socks to put it in.

But they needed a way to heat it up without burning it, so they invented microwave ovens.  Trouble was, the microwaves sat there for generations full of sweatsox waiting for electricity to be invented.

Then along came Nicoli Tesla Edison with the solution.

So nowadays all you have to do is plug that mama in, that microwave, shove in a sweat sock full of grain, run it about five minutes, and you have a thingamabob you can drape around your neck when it’s cold, or stiff, or for when the old shoulder’s reminding you of a motorcycle that wrapped itself around a tree 40 years ago, and you can toss in another one for putting at the foot of your blankets to give the cats a place to get hacked off when you throw them off it and go to bed.

Got two of them in that microwave right this very moment.

Thankee universe for nicola tesla edison and joseph h. microwave and their yankee ingenuity inventions.  And thankee universe for joseph cotton’s development of sweatsocks.  Also Horatio Milo, the developer of Milo Maize.

We lucky to have this universe to provide such blessings.

Old Jules

Unforseen Consequences

That vertical rift you see on Old Sol this morning is a consequence of neglect.  While the Reiki cats and I were praying him up this morning Shiva the Cow Cat got distracted looking at the full moon still high on the other side of the sky.  She got out of harmony with the rest of us and the result speaks for itself.

Life’s full of that sort of thing here on this planet.  You can’t have any confidence you can get by with anything.  A couple of titanosaurs in Bolivia a few million years ago have themselves a secret rendezvous and next thing you know it surfaces and human beings are poking around nosing into their business.

Some Ichnogenus Gigandipus in Utah puts his foot off the designated pathway and a few million years later you’ve got the authorities swarming his footprints catching him out.

A lot of people think it’s just cameras, but that’s not right.  Do you think this guy in Kenya a million and a half years ago would have done anything different if he’d known it was going to come out someday?  He’d probably feel he pushed a stale yellow light that turned red before he got through the intersection and the camera got him.  He’s sitting out there somewhere fossilized waiting to get the ticket in the mail.

The planet and the Universe have us brainwashed into thinking we don’t leave any tracks.  But it’s a trick, and if we wake up to what we’re doing, say with our tracks of one sort, it sneaks in and preserves some other sort without our noticing it.

For instance, back when they started replacing real audience laughter and applause on television shows in the 1960s.  Who’d have dreamed they were teaching all the coming generations to be Pavlov’s dog with their emotions responses to what went on around them fed directly off a cathode ray tube?

That Santa Fe Trail on the image above is where the routes for land traffic from Saint Louis to Santa Fe converged before choo choo trains got into the act.  It’s the tracks of thousands of wagons, horses, mules and oxen branded into the landscape.

On the ground it’s abraded vertical walled arroyos a hundred yards wide.  You can follow it all the way from Santa Fe to Saint Louis if you know what you’re looking for.  And you’ll be able to do it again a thousand years from now if the mood strikes you and you have the time.

I’m just wondering what the consequences will be for Shiva the Cow Cat letting her attention drift over to the full moon.

Old Jules

 

Old Sol’s Christmas Tortilla -Second Harvest – 4th Movement

http://spaceweather.com/

Amusing himself as only he can do.  Strutting his stuff for Alpha Centauri, most likely.

I saw something that rhymed with this on a tortilla in New Mexico once, but they charged money to see it.  This one’s gratis.

Off to the right there’s this, for the eclectic tastes in the audience.

Perspective.

Old Jules

 

When Pigs Fly – US Drone or Chinese Space Launch?

“Space ball” drops on Namibia

http://tinyurl.com/7s3ovud

A large metallic ball fell out of the sky on a remote grassland in Namibia, prompting baffled authorities to contact NASA and the European space agency.

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Unnamed Pentagon sources were adamant this is not a US drone.  “We’ve made a list of all our drones and checked it twice.  We are not missing any drones.”  He went on to observe, “The workmanship and metal quality appear to be Chinese in origin.  Unless we discover we’ve miscounted our drones we’ll continue to operate on the premise this object is a Chinese Space Program launch intended for Harbor Freight.”

Some skeptics are less certain.  A news release from a popular UFO debunking site offered the following analysis:  “It’s obviously the planet Venus or a weather balloon.  People who aren’t trained to carefully observe and think clearly are always making these kinds of mistakes.”

Old Jules 

 

Sundragons and Other Serious Stuff

Good morning readers.  I’m gratified you came by for a read.  There’s a lot going on in the Universe this morning, but most of it is too big, or too little to get a gander at, so I’m going to give you an opportunity to shrug it all off as I’m doing.

If you’re the sort of person who sees herds of cattle, naked women, elephants, alligators and stagecoaches in clouds, mountains and whatnot you’ll see immediately what was on Old Sol’s mind yesterday:

Which doesn’t require any further discussion except to say:

Which also speaks for itself.  Enough said about that.

 

Unless you want to hear it in song.

But if you’re feeling more in the serious and unsmiling turn-of-mind this morning you probably won’t grasp the implications and ramifications of that.

Instead you’d probably prefer something you can’t shrug off.  For you, I suggest you have a look at the comet Lovejoy as it passed away from the sun:

http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=19&month=12&year=2011

http://spaceweather.com/images2011/18dec11/spiraltail_strip.jpg

All that wiggling and wagging it’s doing with the tail might be the most interesting thing human beings have had an opportunity to view since the invention of the camera, the rocketship, the atom and other genius gadgetry of modern life including toasters.

Lovejoy is telling you something it might take human beings a longish time to hear, if they ever get around to hearing it at all.  Which seems about equally likely.

With the possible exception of the cats, chickens, and the occasional folks out there who see it but ain’t about to say anything.

But I’m not going to say any of that.  Instead, I’ll just say I’m figuring I might post something later along more interesting lines.

Thanks for coming by.

Old Jules

Got A Holiday Greeting From The Time Department

Hawaii Konate, the people who keep me posted on what time it wasn’t over the past while, what time they think it probably isn’t now, and what time they’re middling sure it won’t be in the future sent me a nice greeting by email.

The card arrived in my hotmail email box at 3:25 AM someone’s time, maybe mine, maybe theirs, maybe hotmail’s.   I’m not sure whether that picture is of something at the Hawaii site, or whether it’s wherever they speak the language at the top of the circular they send out:  BUREAU INTERNATIONAL DES POIDS ET MESURES, ORGANISATION INTERGOUVERNEMENTALE DE LA CONVENTION DU METRE. [Muddy muddy muddy etcetera]

But even if I knew what time it wasn’t in that city where the place on the card isn’t, I still wouldn’t know what that thing is they sent me a picture of wishing me a Merry Christmas.

I generally don’t like people telling me what kind of Christmas to have, but especially I don’t like them telling me how to have a whole year.    But in this instance, they did let themselves be nailed down on the thorny issue 0f 2012.  2012, unless they’re being cunningly sarcastic, isn’t a time that won’t happen.

The card didn’t come with one of the circulars they send out telling what time it hasn’t been all over the place, what time they don’t think it is now, and what time they don’t think it will be in the future.  That would be unsettling if they hadn’t gone ahead and mentioned 2012 in the card.

So maybe there was no authoritarian motive behind telling me what kinds of Christmas and 2012 to have.  Maybe they were being subtly reassuring.

I suppose it’s probably best not to try to second-guess them.

Old Jules

Muddy muddy muddy etcetera

You’ll be happy to know Old Sol’s finally getting things under control up there.

 
That line of misbehaving sunspots that were marching across above the equator so long finally got its comeuppance.  Today there are only three honest-to-goodness ones and the litter of little peckerwoods just coming around the horizon. 
 
Astrophysicists aren’t in agreement about what was getting out of hand up there, but many now assert it might be mud and all this rain that finally got it under control.  There’s been so much rain lately every stick of firewood here’s been soaked, and even though cooling down Old Sol with wet firewood would be a big job of work, eventually it was bound to happen.  Probably the reason for this cold snap, too.
 
But the other line of thinking among Hopi Elders, surviving Mayan track-of-time keepers, and the folks at BUREAU INTERNATIONAL DES POIDS ET MESURES, ORGANISATION INTERGOUVERNEMENTALE DE LA CONVENTION DU METRE, believe there’s a more novel reason that line of sunspots dwindled.  They couldn’t stay in step. 
 
Time, they assert, is so screwed up it’s impossible to keep anything going with any regularity and the sunspots finally just got too frustrated to keep trying.
 
There might be a lot to that.  I get the email reports from the Hawaii Konate folk, and the circular always starts off with the caveat:
 
“Coordinated Universal Time UTC and its local realizations UTC(k). Computed values of [UTC-UTC(k)]   and uncertainties valid for the period of this Circular. From 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, TAI-UTC = 34 s.”
 
Those uncertainties cover a lot of ground all over the planet and the people making a living trying to keep track of what time it is send out the Circular to advise interested parties of what time it wasn’t, mostly, any given day in cities of clockwatchers.  But even telling what time it wasn’t has a considerable uncertainty factor, which they aren’t ashamed to admit.
 
I don’t know why they even keep those people on the payroll if they can’t tell us what time it wasn’t.
 
I’m going to kick this around with the cats and chickens.  See if we can’t figure out a way to get a piece of the action on this timekeeping racket.
 
Old Jules