As part of my preparation for an intensive training I'm starting in January on the Big Island of Hawaii with the innovative physicist Nassim Haramein, I'm now reading the book The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot. I recommend this book.

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...The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left Hand. we could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. ...   more »

An asteroid similar to the one that flattened forests in Siberia in 1908 could plow into Mars next month, scientists said Thursday. -- Researchers attached to NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, who sometimes jokingly call themselves the Solar System Defense Team, have been tracking the asteroid since its discovery in late November.

The scientists, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, put the chances that it will hit the Red Planet on Jan. 30 at about 1 in 75. -- A 1-in-75 shot is "wildly unusual," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near-Earth Object office, which routinely tracks about 5,000 objects in Earth's neighborhood.

"We're used to dealing with odds like one-in-a-million," Chesley said. "Something with a one-in-a-hundred chance makes us sit up straight in our chairs." ...   more »

Thaindian News

New Delhi, Dec 20 (ANI): President Pratibha Devisingh Patil will pay an official visit to Andhra Pradesh from December 21 to January 6.

On Friday, President Patil will visit Puducherry where she will attend the inaugural function of the 34th Jawahar Lal Nehru National Science Exhibition for Children-2007.

The President will also visit the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Auroville on Saturday.

During her visit, President will tour the Andaman and Nicobar Islands from December 26 to 28 where she will be visit the rehabilitation work sites in the Tsunami affected areas and interact with the islanders.

In Hyderabad, she will attend various programmes organised by the State Government and the Ministry of Defence, including Defence Research Establishments and the Air Force Training Institute. (ANI)

This is the season for year-end lists of books in which the mainstream review media steer literate culture away from deep questions about how our world works and who we are and toward celebrations of narcissism, celebrity gossip, and literary cliques. What I wrote in 1991 in "The Emerging Third Culture", still pertains today:

A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

Given the well-documented challenges and issues we are facing as a nation, as a culture, how can it be that there are no science books (and hardly any books on ideas) on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year list; no science category in the Economist Books of the Year 2007; only Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker's list of Books From Our Pages? ...   more »

Thanks to RYD for his previous article, 'Laws of Nature, Source Unknown'—by Dennis Overbye (from NYT), which led me to this article by the same author. ~ ronjon

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Ten years ago at the AAAS, Dennis Overbye, author of the classic 'Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos', found himself on a rainy Sunday afternoon in an auditorium watching a handful of historians and physicists arguing about whether Einstein's first wife Mileva had actually invented relativity. This was an eye opener to him, to put it mildly. He was astounded that there could be any mystery about either the origin of relativity or about Einstein's life. He had just assumed that he was so famous and so recent that everything that could be known about him was known.

What followed was a 10-year investigation in which Overbye immersed himself in Einstein's life and wrote his recently published book, 'Einstein In Love'.

"Romantically speaking, Einstein always felt — and always told his girlfriends — that Paradise was just around the corner," he says," but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I've known a lot of people like Albert in my time. During this project I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, simply because I have more a sense of what he actually did — and how hard it was — than before. If he was around now, I'd love to buy him a beer ..... but I don't know if I'd introduce him to my sister." ...   more »

Thanks to Rich for recommending the excellent openDemocracy.net, in which this article appeared. ~ ronjon

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The price of oil is approaching $100 a barrel, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is accumulating faster than the most pessimistic scenarios are predicting, anthropogenic climate change is occurring. The recognition that the world's scientists, diplomats and media gathered at the Bali climate-change summit are arguing over - the necessity of moving beyond dependency on a fossil-fuelled, carbon-emission-based global economy - is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

Where is leadership in the quest for a new model to come from? The results of a BBC opinion-poll inviting the views of 22,000 people in twenty-one countries, released in November 2007, included the striking discovery that the Chinese were the most willing to change their lifestyle and accept higher energy prices in order to save the environment. ...   more »

Cancer will claim 7.6 million lives worldwide this year, and more than 12 million people will receive cancer diagnoses, according to Global Cancer Facts and Figures 2007, the newest edition to the American Cancer Society's family of Facts and Figures reports. ...

Global Cancer Facts and Figures 2007 also includes data on growing tobacco use in developing countries, warning that if current patterns continue, the number of smokers worldwide will reach 2 billion by 2030. In 2000, an estimated 5 million people died from diseases related to smoking, and of these, about 1.42 million were from cancer. Approximately 84% of the nearly 1.3 billion smokers worldwide live in developing countries, says the World Health Organization. ...   more »

Dr. Mani Bhaumik is the co-inventor of the laser technology that made Lasik eye surgery possible. His contributions to science merited the rare dual election as a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, while his successes won him a spot on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Eventually he discovered that :happiness is an inside job," and immersed himself in study of the hidden relationship between science and spirituality and the integration of mind and matter. He has published over fifty papers in professional journals and maintains a lively correspondence with other physicists around the world. His alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology, bestowed him with an honorary D.Sc. degree for lifetime academic achievements. Dr. Bhaumik is the founder of the Mani Bhaumik Educational Foundation, which currently provides full scholarships to sixty seven extremely bright but underprivileged Indian young men and women to enable them to earn a university degree in science, engineering or medicine. His US Foundation, Cosmogenics, is set up to foster research in consciousness and healing as well as mind/body integration. ...   more »

A jet of highly charged radiation from a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy is blasting another galaxy nearby -- an act of galactic violence that astronomers said yesterday they have never seen before.

Using images from the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory and other sources, scientists said the extremely intense jet from the larger galaxy can be seen shooting across 20,000 light-years of space and plowing into the outer gas and dust of the smaller one. ...

"What we've identified is an act of violence by a black hole, with an unfortunate nearby galaxy in the line of fire," said Dan Evans, the study leader at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge. He said any planets orbiting the stars of the smaller galaxy would be dramatically affected, and any life forms would likely die as the jet's radiation transformed the planets' atmosphere. ...   more »

I've taken the liberty of transcribing the following passages from the remarkable book Jesus and the Lost Goddess, by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. I highly recommend purchasing and studying this book. Reading it is like a moist vivifying breeze in the scorched lifeless desert of deadly strife between cults of religious fanatics who ea