Click on any of the links below to see the full articles.

---

• What is SCIY (pronounced "sci-y") ?

---

• Gravity powered lamp generates as much light as 40 Watt bulb
• Japan’s Second Defeat after the Second World War
• 68: There came on her a change
• Tibet is one thing, but India and China tensions spell bigger disaster
• The Cybernetic Delirium of Norbert Wiener by Stephen Pfohl (C Theory)
• Larks are losing the ability to sing—by Graham Keeley
• Global Voices: alternative global journalism at its best
• Earth Hour 2008
• Spring comes earlier in U.S. for birds, bees and trees
• At the ends of Man: Sri Aurobindo and Michel Foucault
• A weaver of positive myths—A. Rangarajan interviews Amin Maalouf
• Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida by Joshua Schuster (Other Voices)
• 4) The Anthropic Principle: Final Letters, Susskind's #3 & Smolin's #3
• Kalam recalls Raman’s unique trait
• or Guernica Iraq!
• Guernica and/or Iraq
• China considers wetland park at Poyang Lake
• Beyond the Silence—A Poem by Sri Aurobindo
• Happy Easter! - The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene
• 67: Death in the Forest
• How to Think about Science
• Sri Aurobindo and Hinduism (a speech by Peter Heehs: Hyderabad 2006)
• The knight of science fiction: Arthur C Clarke—by Anthony Tucker
• Two Arthur C. Clarke quotes to remember
• Arlington Institute Report on Global Demographic Shifts
• $516 Trillion Deriviatives Bubble a Disaster Waiting to Happen
• "A human being is a part of the whole, ..." by Albert Einstein
• Managing climate change—by Richard Stagg
• Feather to Fire (A remarkable 6 minute video clip)
• Poems from Oaxaca - Winter 2008, by Rosita Wandellah
• First extra-solar organic molecule discovered
• Languages face peril
• Goethe and his times—by Prof Khwaja Masud
• Arthur C. Clarke, Premier Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 90
• 3) The Anthropic Principle: Leonard Susskind's #2 to Lee Smolin #2
• Muslim biology precedes Darwin—a brief note
• Thailand Princess to visit Puducherry & Auroville
• Indo-Anglian Mystic Poetry: Sethna, Nirodbaran, Themis and Deshpande—by Goutam Ghosal
• 66: Deeply she listened...
• Anandashram High School—where MV Nadkarni had his early education
• Auroville, Cynosure of the World
• Chapman’s Homer—Keats’s Sonnet
• The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter (Book Review)
• After 40 yrs, Auroville still going strong
• Hello BlackBerry, Meet the iPhone
• High Dynamic Range Imaging—from Wikipedia
• Auroville's Landmark 40th Anniversary Celebrations
• WMAP gives thumbs-up to cosmological model
• Maya May Have Caused Civilization-Ending Climate Change—by Anne Minard
• 6th grade at Yosemite in September
• Appreciating Arabic science that predates Newton—by Jim Al-Khalili
•  Artificial black hole created in lab
• 65: Savitri prays to Durga
• Situating the state in rural India—by V.K. Natraj and G.S. Ganesh Prasad
• Boriska, boy from Mars, says that all humans live eternally
• Adwaita—A Sonnet by Sri Aurobindo
• The world's most powerful optical telescope has opened both of its eyes.
• ‘I do not believe in a full decipherment’ of the Indus script—Asko Parpola interviewed by S. T. Baskaran
• Celebrating the Semicolon in a most unlikely Location—by Sam Roberts (from NYT)
• NASA Baffled by Unexplained Force Acting on Space Probes
• First Avalanche Photographed on Mars by HiRISE exp. on NASA MRO
• Mangesh V Nadkarni who became a Savitri legend for us
• The Golden Krishna—29 February 1960
• Prof Nadkarni, we do hear you—by Amartya Kumar Dutta
• 64: The world as living God
• Remembering my Uncle Dr Mangesh V Nadkarni—By Shodhan B Nadkarni
• 3) And here's Lee Smolin's Response #2 to Leonard Susskind #2
• Supramental Manifestation—The Golden Day: 29 February 2008
• 2) Smolin vs. Susskind: The Anthropic Principle: Leonard Susskind's Reply#1 to Lee Smolin
• 1) Smolin vs. Susskind: The Anthropic Principle
• An inspiring story—that things do happen for a reason!
• Last Darshan of the Mother—a Video Clipping
• “I was facing a huge and massive golden door…”—the Mother
• 63: The Unknown waited his hour
• The Diver of the Deep Sea
• Physical Transformation—the Early Beginnings
• Google $20 million lunar challenge gets under way
• It is the psychic being which will materialise itself and become the supramental
• 21 February 2008—the Mother’s 130th Birthday
• Nobel Laureate Queries Point To Postmodern Dark Matter Theory, Big Bang
• Military Hopes to Bring Down [Potentially Dangerous] Satellite
• The Mind of Light and the Yoga of Physical Transformation
• Potentially Habitable Planets Are Common, Study Says
• The Supramental Boat—the Mother’s experience narrated on 19 February 1958
• This is the American Spirit
• Superfluids could create a 'universe in a bucket'
• Laser Light Creates [first?] Black Holes In The Lab
• Colorizing metals with femtosecond laser pulses
• K D Sethna’s Contribution to the Study of Indian Prehistory—by Akash Deshpande
• New type of bird found in Nepal
• Darwin’s legacy
• The Material Basis for the Phenomenon of Man
• Akshardham Delhi—the 8th Wonder
• [Most] Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat
• 61: She beheld the many births of thought
• Supermind from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• "We Should Take the 'Posthuman' Era Seriously," by Martin Rees (Pres. of the Royal Society)
• • Towards New Age--RY Deshpande's book reviewed by Dr. Joan Price Ph.D.
• Galaxy without dark matter puzzles astronomers
• Climate experts sound grim warning
• Amal-kiran—the Fire-Worshipper
• Human DNA, the Ultimate Spot for Secret Messages (Are Some There Now?)
• SCIY's Page Views, Readership and Bandwidth all reach new highs in January 2008
• NASA to beam Beatles' song 'Across the Universe' to deep space on Feb.4, 2008
• Chandrayaan: India’s Mission to the Moon by Rich on Sun 03 Feb 2008 09:33 PM PST

• Divine Sight—A Sonnet by Sri Aurobindo
• 60: The sun before abysmal Night
• The Value of Science—by Richard Feynman
• Russia to Become an Eco-Village Nation??
• The Mother recollects the meeting with Sri Aurobindo in 1914
• Listen to Bhagavadgita Online
• Immersing Bapu’s ashes
• “Ram … Ram” were Mahatma’s last words
• A French chemist and his fragrant enterprise at Auroville
• We are in the dark about Dark Matter—Carlo Rubbia
• Are supermassive black holes the source of cosmic rays?
• Roger Anger passes away - Jan. 15, 2008
• Universe may be 4 billion years older -- possible solution to dark energy enigma
• K. D. Sethna’s Historical Vision of Ancient India—by Pradip Bhattacharya
• 2b: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as I Saw Them—by V. Chidanandam
• 59: A camp of God pitched in human time
• The Science of Living: to know oneself and to control oneself—by the Mother
• The Future Evolution of Man—by Pavitra
• Globalisation or an Integral Society?
• 2a: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as I Saw Them—by V. Chidanandam
• World food stocks dwindling rapidly, UN warns
• 58: There suddenly she met her secret soul
• Consumerism and materialism deadlier than armed occupation—by Marcus Dam
• Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million
• Image, Symbol and Myth in Sri Aurobindo’s Poetry--G. S. Pakle
• Catastrophe insurance industry losses reach $75 billion in 2007
• 1: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as I saw them—by V. Chidanandam
• New Mode of Cell Communication Discovered: Sub-atomic Protons!
• Toyota Will Offer a Plug-In Hybrid Vehicle by 2010
• "The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus & the World of Renaissance Magic and Science," a review by Erik Davis
• "Fight Global Warming Now," a DIY handbook by Bill McKibben
• The Final Days: The Mayan 2012 Calender (NYT Magazine)
• 57: The Triple Soul-Forces
• The Works of the Mother
• Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth: An Interview with Astrophysicist Janna Levin
• 'The Davos Question': A 6-minute video re Auroville, by Aryadeep
• Chandra data reveal black holes spinning near speed of light may effect new star formation
• The Works of Sri Aurobindo
• Tata Unveils the World's Cheapest Car
• 6: Sahana Devi Reminisces—Ashram life in the early days
• Intel Quits Effort to Get Computers to Children (NYT)
• One Laptop Per Child Versus Intel--Who Speaks for India and China?
• Many Biofuels Have More Climate Impact Than Oil
• 56: We are the messengers, the occult gods
• Auroville: A new way to live
• Climate Change, Courage & Celebration, by Frances Moore Lappe
• 'Tipping Points' in Global Climate Change: Latest report from AGU SF Mtg. of Dec.07
• Could Arctic summers be ice-free 'by 2013' !?
• Nanosolar begins large-scale printing of revolutionary inexpensive 'nano-ink' PV
• To walk through life—by Sri Aurobindo
• SCIY's distinct readers & MB transferred reach new highs in Dec.07
• 55: Her spirit was mute and free
• Happy New Year 2008--from the Mother

...Few of his contemporaries think of George Walker Bush as a visionary American president, unless they are using the term to imply a touch of madness. Yet early in his second term Bush launched a bold initiative to try to establish closer American ties with India, the world’s biggest democracy, in what may eventually be judged by historians as a move of great strategic importance and imagination...

Bush... has managed to cast aside 40 years of hostility and suspicion between America and India – and even agreed to start collaborating over nuclear energy – in the hope of strengthening India and its economy. And all for a special reason: the rise of China. ...   more »

4) Here are the final letters by Leonard Susskind' and Lee Smolin in their email debate re the Anthropic Principle.

Smolin: ... My main point is that string theory will have much more explanatory power if the dominant mode of reproduction is through black holes, as is the case in the original version of CNS. This is the key point I would hope to convince Susskind and his colleagues about, because I am sure that the case they want to make is very much weakened if they rely on the Anthropic Principle (AP) and eternal inflation. ...

Susskind: ... Finally let me quote a remark of Smolin's that I find revealing. He says "It was worry about the possibility that string theory would lead to the present situation, which Susskind has so ably described in his recent papers, that led me to invent the Cosmological Natural Selection (CNS) idea and to write my first book. My motive, then as now, is to prevent a split in the community of theoretical physicists in which different groups of smart people believe different things, with no recourse to come to consensus by rational argument from the evidence." First of all, preventing a "split in the community of theoretical physicists" is an absurdly ridiculous reason for putting forward a scientific hypothesis.

But what I find especially mystifying is Smolin's tendency to set himself up as an arbiter of good and bad science. Among the people who feel that the anthropic principle deserves to be taken seriously, are some very famous physicists and cosmologists with extraordinary histories of scientific accomplishment. They include Steven Weinberg [2], Joseph Polchinski [3], Andrei Linde [4], and Sir Martin Rees [5]. These people are not fools, nor do they need to be told what constitutes good science. ...    more »

Mary Magdalene has finally begun to regain her rightful place in history, after being portrayed in church history for centuries as a penitent prostitute. In 591 AD Pope Gregory pronounced that Mary Magdalene, Mary the sinner, and Mary of Bethany from the gospels were one in the same. But there has never been evidence of that, and in 1969 the Catholic Church restored them to three separate identities, ending 14 centuries of mischaracterization. ...


   more »

...the emergence of a new demographic trend has largely been ignored. Today, worldwide fertility rates are at an all time low, and in the decades following 2050 the global population is actually expected to stabilize and possibly decrease. The two factors driving this new pattern are the emergence of women’s rights on a global scale and the expectation among parents that all their children will survive to maturity.

Fertility rates, the best indicators of long term population changes, refer to the average number of children a woman will have. In order for a given population to replace itself, its fertility rate must be at 2.1 or higher. Graph 1[2] illustrates the decline of fertility rates that has occurred in the last fifty years, and shows projections for the next fifty years. ...   more »

...a massive new derivatives bubble is driving the domestic and global economies, a bubble that continues growing today parallel with the subprime-credit meltdown triggering a bear-recession...

To grasp how significant this five-fold bubble increase is, let's put that $516 trillion in the context of some other domestic and international monetary data:
• U.S. annual gross domestic product is about $15 trillion
• U.S. money supply is also about $15 trillion
• Current proposed U.S. federal budget is $3 trillion
• U.S. government's maximum legal debt is $9 trillion
• U.S. mutual fund companies manage about $12 trillion
• World's GDPs for all nations is approximately $50 trillion   more »

This is truly an inspiring video clip. It's a bit over 6 minutes long, and well worth this small investment of time. Best heard with earphones.



Thanks to Kala for this link.

The following poems were penned by a new friend of mine, Rosita Wandallah, whom I met at Burning Man 2007. She's a remarkable writer, performance artist, model, dancer, actor, community leader, project coordinator, global traveler, and international service provider. -- I am honored to know her.

We are all wells of gratitude
deep, plentiful, pure
connected to the
infinite source of all

if only we would drink
more often,
replenish ourselves
with the kinetic wisdom
of the cosmos within

For what is it to live
without gratitude? ...

Poems from Oaxaca-Winter 2008, by Rosita Wandellah

   more »

The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the first organic molecule on a planet that's not in our solar system. According to NASA, this breakthrough could be a major step toward discovering life on other planets. Scientists believe that the organic compound detected, methane, can be an integral part in the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it. ...   more »

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.

Rohan de Silva, an aide to Mr. Clarke, said the author died after experiencing breathing problems, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Clarke had post-polio syndrome for the last two decades and used a wheelchair.

From his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945, more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight, to his co-creation, with the director Stanley Kubrick, of the classic science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Mr. Clarke was both prophet and promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. ...   more »

3) Here's Leonard Susskind's #2 to Lee Smolin #2:

...The issue here is not whether the usual phenomenological inflation was of the eternal kind although that is relevant. Eternal inflation taking place in any false vacuum minimum on the landscape would favor [in Smolin's sense] the maximum cosmological constant. But for the sake of argument I will agree to ignore eternal inflation as a reproduction mechanism.

The question of how many black holes are formed is somewhat ambiguous. What if two black holes coalesce to form a single one. Does that count as one black hole or two? Strictly speaking, given that black holes are defined by the global geometry, it is only one black hole. What happens if all the stars in the galaxy eventually fall into the central black hole? That severely diminishes the counting. So we better assume that the bigger the black hole, the more babies it will have. Perhaps one huge black hole spawns more offspring than 10^22 stellar black holes.

That raises the question of what exactly is a black hole? One of the deepest lessons that we have learned over the past decade is that there is no fundamental difference between elementary particles and black holes. As repeatedly emphasized by 't Hooft [10][11][12], black holes are the natural extension of the elementary particle spectrum. This is especially clear in string theory where black holes are simply highly excited string states. Does that mean that we should count every particle as a black hole? ...   more »

Princess of Thailand Maha Chakri Sirindhorn will arrive here on March 21 on a one-day visit to the town.

The Princess would visit the Village Resource Centre (VRC) of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) at Pillayarkuppam, one of the bio-villages of the foundation, and acquaint herself with the works and activities of the centre, official sources said on Thursday.

She would wrap up her prgrammes with a visit to the Auroville, a universal township, near here. ...   more »

Travelling through a challenging and progressive path in the last 40 years, Auroville is moving towards forming a new society, a new way of living. The world is closely looking at Auroville for its efforts to find a new society, a panel of Aurovillians said on Monday.

Addressing a press conference here, member of the Outreach Media team of Auroville, Mauna van der Vlugt, said mankind is looking for a new unifying approach to tackle issues such as climatic changes and population explosion. Human unity is the first step towards a better world.

With around 2,000 residents from more than 40 countries, the Auroville community has a double role, secretary of Auroville International, Friederike Muhlhans, said. “We have to bring Auroville in contact with the outside world and bring the world in contact with Auroville,” she added. ...   more »

...if antimatter is, from a physics standpoint, the mirror image of matter, why is there so little antimatter in the universe? What happened early in the universe’s history to favor—if by only a small amount—the creation of matter instead of antimatter?

Particle physics has, like other scientific fields, its own lexicon that can be baffling to outsiders, and while reading 'The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter' one runs the risk of getting lost among terms like CP violation, J/psi particles, and leptogenesis. The authors do their best, though, to explain non-intuitive physics with plain language and analogies... For those curious about why the universe is the way it is, this book is a reminder of how much we have learned about physics at its smallest and largest scales, but also how much more we have yet to understand. ...