Art is dangerous to authorities

© Courtesy Thunderbolt.info

Art is dangerous to authorities
Nov 20, 2013 | No More Fake News | Jon Rappoport

Art is dangerous. It makes people move out of standard-response channels.

They don’t see what they’re supposed to see anymore. They see what they’re not supposed to see.

That’s why colleges teach brain-deadening courses in art history. Every attempt is made to codify the students’ reactions.

I’m not just talking about political art. I mean anything that truly comes out of reliance on imagination.

Those who run things—and their willing dupes—want reality to look a certain way and be experienced and felt in certain ways. These limited spectra form a shared lowest common denominator.

Even so-called spiritual experience is codified. It’s called organized religion. I call it “give money to the ceiling.” You give your money and they tell you high how the ceiling of your experience is and what you’ll find when you get there.

Art has none of these limitations. It’s created by people who’ve gone beyond the shrunken catalog of emotions, thoughts, and perceptions listed by authorities.

Art, by which I mean imagination, throws caution to the winds. It invents realities that engender new reactions, never before experienced. It blows apart old rigid perception.

The hammer blows and the soft propaganda of the common culture install layers of mind control: “See things, experience things in these prescribed ways.”

Over the years, I’ve encouraged a number of people to become artists. Aside from the work they then invented, I noticed their whole approach to, and perception of, life altered radically.

Their sense of vitality, their courage, their adventurous spirit came to the foreground.

Mind control, externally applied and self-induced, is all about putting a lid on creative power. That is its real target.

The one trap an artist—which is to say anyone who lives through and by imagination—has to avoid is thinking of himself as a victim because he is “an outsider.”

Outside is good. Outside has great strength.

When an artist invents himself as a victim, he then goes on to lash out at people who have nothing to do with the fate to which he’s consigned himself.

Authorities in any society, no matter what they call themselves, are invested in systems that will maintain a status quo of perception. They are constantly producing new systems for that purpose.

Technocrats would like you to believe that hooking your brain up to some super-brain computer will fulfill your needs and desires. They seek to prove that all invention, all creation, all art, all imagination is merely a set of calculations within a closed system.

This effort betrays their own despair. They see no way they can truly create.

It is the vacuum in which all elites live. They build up a frozen dead consciousness of models and algorithms and “solutions,” and they seek to impose it, as reality, on the minds of populations.

Essentially, they’re saying, “If we have a soul-sickness, you have to have it, too.”

It’s called hatred of life.

On the other hand, individual creative power launches from a platform of freedom and rises through layer after layer of greater freedom.

From that perspective, authoritarian power looks like a sick-unto-dying charade.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Collapsing Earth: Why Are Giant Sinkholes Swallowing Cars, Homes And People All Around The World?

Collapsing Earth: Why Are Giant Sinkholes Swallowing Cars, Homes And People All Around The World?
Aug 12, 2013 | The Truth Wins | Michael Synder

Has the crust of the earth become more unstable?  All over the planet, giant sinkholes are forming.  Many of them are so massive and are opening up so suddenly that they are actually swallowing cars, homes and even people.  So why is this happening?  Is the earth’s crust collapsing?  Is it expanding?  Is something else to blame for this phenomenon?  It seems like there is a story about another giant sinkhole in the news almost every single day now, and scientists seem to be at a loss for an explanation.  Could human activity be responsible?  Yes, the number of sinkholes in the United States definitely seems to be increasing, but we are also seeing massive sinkholes occur all over the globe – often in very rural areas.  There just doesn’t seem to be any pattern that would seem to indicate that human activity is the primary factor.  Hopefully scientists can figure out whatever is causing it, because this epidemic just seems to keep getting worse.

For example, a giant sinkhole that is 60 feet wide suddenly opened up and threatened to swallow an entire resort near Disney World on Sunday…

A 60-foot-wide sinkhole formed under a resort in central Florida late Sunday, forcing guests out of their rooms as one three-story building collapsed and another slowly sank.

Guests at the Summer Bay Resort in Clermont, about 10 minutes from Walt Disney World, called for help before the collapse, saying they heard loud noises and windows cracking. All guests inside the buildings — an estimated 35 people, authorities said — were evacuated before the first structure crumbled.

This incident was so shocking that it made headlines all over the country.  The guests of the resort were absolutely stunned as the walls of the buildings began to crumble and sink into the ground…

“You could see the ground falling away from the building where the building started leaning,” Gade said. “People were in shock to see a structure of that size just sink into the ground slowly. … You could see the stress fractures up the side of the structure getting wider.”

In one of the adjacent buildings, firefighters and police officers knocking on doors woke up Maggie Moreno of San Antonio. She couldn’t get the door to her unit open all the way.

“It sounded like popcorn,” said Moreno, who was visiting with her husband, daughter and two grandchildren. “The building was just snapping.”

And without a doubt, Florida seems to be particularly vulnerable to giant sinkholes.  In Winter Park, Florida a massive sinkhole recently opened up very suddenly and swallowed an entire swimming pool…

Insurance adjusters and geo-technicians spent Wednesday morning at the scene of a large sinkhole that opened in the backyard of a Winter Park home.

The hole, which measures 50 feet wide and 30 feet deep, swallowed a swimming pool when it opened late Monday night. No one was injured.

Orange County building inspectors declared a two-story home at 2300 Roxbury Drive and a utility shed “unsafe” to occupy as a result.

But these kinds of sinkholes are not just forming in Florida and in other places where geologists are telling us that they are “supposed” to be forming.

For example, a giant sinkhole that recently appeared out in Kansas is considered to be such an anomaly that it is actually attracting tourists…

A massive sinkhole has opened in a Kansas field, drawing tourists for an ill-advised look into the void.

A Wallace County rancher found the sinkhole on Aug. 1 on land about 20 miles from the Kansas-Colorado border. The hole is about 90 feet deep and 200 to 300 feet wide.

Landowner Dalton Hoss said his brother discovered the crater-like pit while surveying pastureland.

“He called me up, and his voice was quaking,” Hoss told KWCH 12. “He said, ‘You’ll never believe what I just seen.’”

Wallace County Sheriff Larry Sanders said the sinkhole appeared out of nowhere.

“Man had nothing to do with this,” Sander said. “This is a God thing. There’s no oil well around here, there are no irrigation wells anywhere near. This is something that just happened.”

The sinkhole out in Kansas is in an extremely rural location, but they also have been popping up right in the middle of major cities.  In fact, a massive sinkhole that recently appeared right in the middle of Montreal, Canada was so large that it was able to swallow an entire backhoe…

A section of a downtown commercial street swallowed a backhoe on Monday as city crews were getting ready to repair a leaky water main.

The backhoe had started to chip at asphalt near the corner of Ste-Catherine and Guy streets when the ground crumbled beneath it and the heavy machine tumbled in.

The driver of the backhoe was not injured but was taken to hospital to be checked out as a precaution, city officials said.

And some cities are actually being eaten alive by giant sinkholes.  For example, more than 40 large sinkholes are plaguing the city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania…

Pennsylvania’s state capital is suffering from a rash of monster sinkholes, but city officials are too broke to do anything about it.

Loose soil and leaky, century-old underground water pipes are to blame for the municipal nightmare, which came to a head on the New Year’s Eve when a 50-foot sinkhole yawned open along Fourth Street, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The eight-foot deep crater — one of at least 41 in the city — is so large, locals made it a “check-in” site on the social media site Four Square.

Some cheeky residents and the media nicknamed the hole “Super Sinkhole Walter.”

And of course we find this phenomenon all the way out on the west coast as well.  In fact, one gigantic sinkhole is threatening an entire housing division out near San Francisco, California…

Scott and Robin Spivey had a sinking feeling that something was wrong with their home when cracks began snaking across their walls in March.

The cracks soon turned into gaping fractures, and within two weeks their 600-square-foot garage broke from the house and the entire property — manicured lawn and all — dropped 10 feet below the street.

It wasn’t long before the houses on both sides collapsed as the ground gave way in the Spivey’s neighborhood in Lake County, about 100 miles north of San Francisco.

But that is nothing compared to what is happening down in Louisiana.  As you read this, the entire town of Bayou Corne, Louisiana is being swallowed by a sinkhole.

Are you starting to get the idea?

Sometimes these sinkholes appear so suddenly that people are actually being swallowed by them.  Back in February, an absolutely enormous sinkhole appeared so rapidly underneath a home in suburban Tampa that it swallowed a man while he was sleeping.  The man woke up as he was being pulled into the earth and he started yelling for help.  His brother tried to pull him out but it was too late.  His body has never been found.

Can you remember ever hearing of such bizarre sinkhole stories in the past?

This phenomenon is happening all over the nation.  This year sinkholes have caused major roads to close in New Jersey, in Arizona, and in Ohio.  It was estimated that the road that was swallowed in Ohio would be closed for months.

Over on the other side of the planet they are experiencing a similar thing.  For example, a giant sinkhole recently swallowed an entire cement truck over in China.

And a giant sinkhole opened up so rapidly in the city of Shenzen that five people died…

FIVE people have died after a 10-metre wide sinkhole opened up at the gates of an industrial estate in Shenzhen, the southern Chinese boom town neighbouring Hong Kong.


The Shenzhen Longgang district government said on its verified page on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, that five people had died and added that it was investigating the incident.

The sinkhole formed just outside the Huamao Industrial Park in Shenzhen on Monday evening, at a time when many factory workers would have been changing shifts, according to the website of Beijing-based newspaper the Guangming Daily.

The state-run Shanghai Daily newspaper said that rescuers saved one man.

In fact, many of the largest and craziest sinkholes that we have seen in recent years have actually appeared in other countries.  The following is from one of my previous articles about sinkholes…

You can see some photos of some of the craziest sinkholes in recent years right here.  It would be one thing if giant sinkholes were just appearing in the United States, but unfortunately that is not the case.

For instance, a sinkhole that appeared in the middle of Guatemala City in 2010 was about 30 stories deep.

Down in Sarisarinama, Venezuela some sinkholes have appeared in recent years that are more than 1,000 feet wide.

So what do scientists have to say about this?

Have they come to the conclusion that the number of sinkholes is increasing?

Well, the official story seems to be “we don’t know“…

The answer is we don’t know, because we just don’t have enough data. Sinkholes aren’t widespread events like hurricanes or earthquakes. They’re very localized. A lot of karst areas are agricultural, because they tend to have very good farming soil. And sinkholes happen all the time in farmers’ fields.

But there’s no national or international sinkhole database. Still, as our population grows and we develop more areas that are susceptible, we seem to be seeing more sinkholes—and more stories about humans being impacted by them.

And it is true that it is hard to find “official numbers” for sinkholes.

But there is some evidence out there.  For example, according to ABC News insurance claims in Florida related to sinkholes more than doubled between 2006 and 2009…

Hillsborough County, where Seffner is situated, is part of an area in Florida prone to sinkholes, with insurance claims associated with them more than doubling between 2006 and 2009, according to a Florida Senate report.

But that could just be a coincidence, right?

And all of the news stories about giant sinkholes that are popping up this year could just mean that people are noticing them more than they used to, right?

You can believe that if you want.  Personally, I am convinced that something very strange is going on.  I can’t explain precisely why it is happening, but it does seem clear that the size and the frequency of sinkholes are both increasing.

So what do you think?

Do you believe that this giant sinkhole phenomenon is something to be concerned about?

Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below…

About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth.  His new novel entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.

How the universe works: Clockwork and Creation

How the universe works: Clockwork and Creation
July 31, 2013 | Extinction Protocol

Scientists have discovered that our solar system is very unique. Earth is located in a star system that is by no means the norm in space. As a matter of fact, our solar system appears to be the exception. A stunning exception, in the way it’s laid out to actually foster the very conditions on Earth which makes life possible. In the universe at large, chaos, explosions, and mind-bending collisions between massive celestial bodies appear to be commonplace. After you watch this video, you may never see our little blue planet quite the same again.

Colorado town considers hunting licenses, bounties for drones

AFP Photo / John Moore

Colorado town considers hunting licenses, bounties for drones
July 17, 2013 | RT

A small town in the state of Colorado is currently weighing a new ordinance that would allow the issuance of hunting licenses for unmanned aerial vehicles, and even offer bounties for their successful takedown.

Deer Trail, a town of some 540 residents that lies 55 miles east of Denver, has drafted what might be described as hostile regulation aimed at drones, outlining the weapons, ammunition, rules of engagement and bounties involved with drone hunting, reports Denver broadcaster ABC 7News.

"The Town of Deer Trail shall issue a reward of $100 to any shooter who presents a valid hunting license and the following identifiable parts of an unmanned aerial vehicle whose markings and configuration are consistent with those used on any similar craft known to be owned or operated by the United States federal government,” reads the ordinance draft.

Read more..
 

Comment: All militant aircraft are being converted to UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles, as one crashed in Florida today, in a state they are supposedly outlawed. Looks like there will be plenty of targets.

Freak hailstorms dump tons of ice on New Mexico and Alberta, Canada

Freak hailstorms dump tons of ice on New Mexico and Alberta, Canada
July 7, 2013 | The Extinction Protocol

A storm dumped inches of hail on Santa Rosa Wednesday evening leaving a lot of ice and damage in its wake. The storm, which moved in from San Miguel County, lasted for about an hour. Thursday morning, Santa Rosa still looked like a winter wonderland from the air. Ice blanketed the streets, parks and rooftops on the Fourth of July, the morning after the storm that dumped 3-6 inches of nickel- to golf-ball-sized hail that accumulated to feet in depth in some places. “It’s funny to see the people at Park Lake all in shorts and stuff and swimming trunks, and in the snow, it seems like,” Horacio Lopez said. Santa Rosa’s fire chief said while he appreciates the moisture during the long-running drought, the storm caused dangerous conditions on roadways. “Some people I talked to were stuck for five to six hours,” Chief Gilbert Romero said. “It’s just really bad, something I’ve never seen in my 50 years of life. I’ve never seen anything like this.” Some of the original stained glass windows, dating back about 100 years, at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church were damaged by the hail. Resulting water damage also forced businesses to close including the Family Dollar as people continued to shovel hail off of roofs. “We’ve just spent the morning here trying to assess our damage,” Mario Trujillo, the owner of the Sun & Sand Restaurant, said. “Just looking at town, it’s just incredible. We’ve heard of carports falling.” Roberta Blea didn’t realize her carport had fallen on all three of her family’s cars until after the storm passed. She said the falling hail was so loud, they couldn’t hear the carport collapsing. “I looked out and it was just raining hail,” Blea told KRQE News 13. “I had never seen that happen. I just never even expected this much destruction. It’s devastating.” Forecasters with the National Weather Service said these types of hail storms aren’t uncommon, but that it’s rare for this to happen before monsoon season starts. –KRQE

 
TABER, ALBERTA: “There’s still hail sitting around now and it’s like what, noon?” said Gaylene Whitley, surveying her lawn. “It’s still sitting around. It came down in buckets.” For Taber residents, waking up to snow on the lawn is normal in the spring. But waking to snowdrifts in July has the town speechless. Friday evening, large thunderstorms rolled into Taber, with hail covering streets, lawns and sidewalks. Ice pellets blocked storm sewers, flooding residential streets and sending some vehicles floating in the water. “In some spots in town I bet you there was two feet of water on the road. It was a lot of water and hail,” said Taber resident Cody Cook. Taber RCMP say there were no reports of anyone injured, or any major damage to property during the storm. Residents are left with lawns full of mud and leaves, and of course, piles of snow. But five blocks away from these homes, there’s no evidence of a storm at all. Residents in the North end of Taber seem to have been hit the hardest. One home owner said his roof is newly re-shingled, but that didn’t stop the water from coming in. “There’s water pouring in my parent’s house. Through the roof, through the walls, through the light fixtures,” said Cook. Residents say in some areas, water came up to car bumpers. Vehicles stalled trying to break through the hail filled streets, which are now filled with people from the South end of town catching a glimpse of the destruction five minutes away. All streets in Taber are now clear of water, as well as tree branches broken in the storm. –Global News

How The Solar System is Changing

How The Solar System is Changing
June 18, 2013 | Suspicious0bservers

A Noble Lie: The Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995

A Noble Lie: The Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995
Apr 19, 2013 | SOTT | neo istheone

This is the first feature length documentary to examine the Oklahoma City bombing in the light of new and suppressed evidence that proves the official story to be false and that Timothy McVeigh was not the sole perpetrator on that terrible April 19th, 1995.

Documentary available for purchase here.

NASA denies the report that Voyager left solar system

© NASA/JPL-Caltech
Artist's concept of NASA's Voyager spacecraft

NASA denies the report that Voyager left solar system
Mar 20, 2013 | Kerry Sheridan | phys.org

The US space agency on Wednesday denied a claim made in a scientific study that its Voyager 1 spacecraft had left the solar system, describing the report as "premature."

Scientists are eagerly awaiting signs that the craft, which was launched in 1977 on a mission to study planets, has become the first man-made object to leave the boundaries of our solar system. A scientific paper that purported to describe this departure appeared on the American Geophysical Union's web site.

It said Voyager 1 "appears to have traveled beyond the influence of the Sun and exited the heliosphere," or the magnetic bubble of charged particles that surround the solar system. Researcher Bill Webber, one of the article's authors, acknowledged that the actual location of the spacecraft - whether in interstellar space or just an unknown region beyond the solar system - remained a matter of debate.

"It's outside the normal heliosphere, I would say that," said Webber, professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, according to the AGU's web site. "We're in a new region. And everything we're measuring is different and exciting." Shortly after the study appeared, NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown told AFP the report was "premature and incorrect."

The Voyager science team reported in December 2012 the craft was in a new region called the "magnetic highway," but changes in the magnetic field to show a departure from the solar system have not yet been observed, NASA said.

"The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA's Voyager 1 has left the solar system," said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. "It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space," he said.

"A change in the direction of the magnetic field is the last critical indicator of reaching interstellar space and that change of direction has not yet been observed." Voyager 1 and its companion Voyager 2 set off in 1977 on a mission to study planets.

They have both kept going, and both are on track to leave the solar system, NASA has said. For months, experts have been closely watching for hints that Voyager 1 has left the solar system and most have estimated that this will happen in the next year or two.

NASA has described Voyager 1 - now 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) away from the Sun - and its companion Voyager 2 as "the two most distant active representatives of humanity and its desire to explore."

The Voyager craft are both carrying gold-plated phonograph records and cartridges on which to play them.

They contain 115 images of Earth life, sounds made by whales, thunder and surf, spoken greetings in various languages and printed messages from former US president Jimmy Carter and former UN chief Kurt Waldheim.

Source:AFP

NASA: We May Be On the Verge of a “Mini-Maunder” Event

© Discovery.com

NASA: We May Be On the Verge of a “Mini-Maunder” Event
Jan 14, 2013 | Washington's Blog

Is a Planetary Cooling Spell Straight Ahead?

All climate scientists agree that the sun affects Earth’s climate to some extent.   They only disagree about whether or not the effect form the sun is minor compared to man-made causes.

We noted in 2011:

This week, scientists from the US Solar Observatory and the US Air Force Research Laboratory have discovered – to their great surprise – that the sun’s activity is declining, and that we might experience the lowest solar output we’ve seen since 1645-1715. The Register describes it in dramatic tones:

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening.

Scientists who are convinced that global warming is a serious threat to our planet say that such a reduced solar output would simply buy us more time … delaying the warming trend, but not stopping or reversing it.

Ad

On the other hand, scientists who are skeptical about global warming say that the threat is a new mini ice age. (Remember that scientists have been convinced in the past that we would have a new ice age, and even considered pouring soot over the arctic in the 1970s to help melt the ice – in order to prevent another ice age. Obama’s top science advisor was one of those warning of a new ice age in the 1970s. And see this.)

NASA reports this week that we may be on the verge of another Maunder Minimum (a period with an unusually low number of sunspots, leading to colder temperatures):

Much has been made of the probable connection between the Maunder Minimum, a 70-year deficit of sunspots in the late 17^th-early 18th century, and the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters.  The mechanism for that regional cooling could have been a drop in the sun’s EUV output; this is, however, speculative.

The yearly averaged sunspot number for a period of 400 years (1610-2010). SOURCE: Courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

***

The sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now.  Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest in more than 50 years.  Moreover, there is (controversial) evidence of a long-term weakening trend in the magnetic field strength of sunspots. Matt Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory predict that by the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Independent lines of research involving helioseismology and surface polar fields tend to support their conclusion.

NASA explains that interactions between the sun, sources of cosmic radiation and the Earth are very complicated, and it takes an interdisciplinary team of heliophysicists, chemists and others to quantify what is really going on.  And the Earth’s climate is also affected by cosmic radiation.

So – even if NASA’s prediction of a period of an unusually low amount of sun spots is proven correct – it is hard to know whether that will lead to a large or small reduction in temperature trends.

Earth's 10 Most Mysterious Events

Earth's 10 Most Mysterious Events
Dec 21, 2012 | HybridLibrarian

Oil and Gas Industry Set to Attack Matt Damon's "Promised Land"

Oil and Gas Industry Set to Attack Matt Damon's "Promised Land"
Dec 14, 2012 | Sharon Kelly | Alternet

Here's what has the industry so spooked.

This story first appeared on DeSmog Blog .    

Next month Focus Features releases Matt Damon’s new movie and the oil and gas industry is worried sick about it.

The movie, Promised Land , is about a Pennsylvania farm town deciding whether to go forward with shale gas drilling after a team of landmen arrives in the area.

Damon plays one of these landman, who rolls into town presenting himself as a humble flannel-wearing farmboy from Iowa. Damon’s character is an ace salesman, famously good at convincing homeowners to sign away the rights to their land. But halfway through the story, he starts having ethical pangs about his profession. Damon’s internal conflicts grow deeper as he grows closer to locals.

By Hollywood standards, it’s a small film, with a budget of $15 million. The script was written by Damon and co-star John Krasinski (best known for his role as Jim in “The Office”) and is based on a story by Dave Eggers.

The drilling industry is none too pleased about the movie’s at-times unflattering portrayal of landmen and it has already geared up its attack machine to aggressively respond.

Read more..

Was the Titanic deliberately sunk by JP Morgan?

Was the Titanic deliberately sunk by JP Morgan?
Aug 19, 2012 | wakeus777

A mind-blowing documentary about the unsinkable 'Titanic' that presents damning evidence of what really happened to the ship the night it hit the iceberg. The Titanic and its sister ship Olympic were owned by the White Star line, which was owned by banker JP Morgan. This documentary reveals that it was not the Titanic that sank that night, but its sister ship the Olympic; and that it was one of the first mass-cover ups in recent history. Watch it for yourself and decide!

Comets in Ancient Cultures

© Unknown
Figure 1

Comets in Ancient Cultures
Feb 1, 2011 | Noah Goldman

Comets have inspired dread, fear, and awe in many different cultures and societies around the world and throughout time. They have been branded with such titles as "the Harbinger of Doom" and "the Menace of the Universe." They have been regarded both as omens of disaster and messengers of the gods. Why is it that comets are some of the most feared and venerated objects in the night sky? Why did so many cultures cringe at the sight of a comet?

When people living in ancient cultures looked up, comets were the most remarkable objects in the night sky. Comets were unlike any other object in the night sky. Whereas most celestial bodies travel across the skies at regular, predictable intervals, so regular that constellations could be mapped and predicted, comets' movements have always seemed very erratic and unpredictable. This led people in many cultures to believe that the gods dictated their motions and were sending them as a message. What were the gods trying to say? Some cultures read the message by the images that they saw upon looking at the comet. For example, to some cultures the tail of the comet gave it the appearance of the head of a woman, with long flowing hair behind her. This sorrowful symbol of mourning was understood to mean the gods that had sent the comet to earth were displeased. Others thought that the elongated comet looked like a fiery sword blazing across the night sky, a traditional sign of war and death. Such a message from the gods could only mean that their wrath would soon be unleashed onto the people of the land. Such ideas struck fear into those who saw comets dart across the sky. The likeness of the comet, though, was not the only thing that inspired fear.

Read more..

There's No Tomorrow

There's No Tomorrow
Feb 11, 2012 | incubatepictures

FTF Films - The Magic of Fractals

FTF Films - The Magic of Fractals
Nov 11, 2012 | FTF1R3F1LM5

Why Is Hurricane Sandy So Big?

NASA's Terra satellite captured this image
of Hurricane Sandy at 12 PM Eastern on Oct. 28, 2012.
CREDIT: NASA Earth Observatory

Why Is Hurricane Sandy So Big?
Oct 28, 2012 | Live Science

By tomorrow night (Oct. 29) or Tuesday, winds and clouds from Hurricane Sandy could stretch across the eastern third of the United States, according to weather predictions from the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

Sandy currently has hurricane-force winds extending up to 175 miles (280 kilometers) from its center, and tropical storm-force winds out to 520 miles (835 km), according to the NHC. That's second only to 2001's Olga in terms of the size of wind field of a storm. (Olga's winds extended out 600 miles (965 kilometers).

How did this Frankenstorm get so big?

Tropical transition

The main reason is that Sandy is morphing from a tropical cyclone to an extra-tropical cyclone, said Chris Davis, a scientist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Extra-tropical cyclones, or those outside the tropics, tend to be significantly larger than tropical ones. Although Sandy is huge, its size is not unprecedented, he said. What's more unusual is the location and timing—nor'easters can get this big, but usually occur in the winter, he said.

Ad

Hurricane Sandy began as a tropical cyclone,fueled by warm water, warm, moist air and the convection these phenomena can create, Davis told OurAmazingPlanet. These hurricanes can be likened to heat engines, transferring heat from the surface of the ocean to higher in the atmosphere.  By contrast, extra-tropical cyclones are driven by a difference in temperatures over a wide area— cold air to the northwest, warm air to the southeast, which then swirls together, Davis said. This process is most efficient over huge distances, said.

Sandy is progressing into an extra-tropical cyclone as it gets farther north, and tapping into the power of the jet stream, which ferries air from west to east over North America. The jet stream, like the storm itself, is powered by this temperature difference between air masses, he said. [4 Things You Need to Know About Hurricane Sandy]

Hurricane origins

While Sandy still retains the warm core of a tropical hurricane, it's also deriving power from the movement of warm air to the north and cold air to the south, similar in some respects to the Perfect Storm of 1991.
"It's an interesting case where both these processes are going on," Davis said.

Sandy started out as a large hurricane, but not unusually large. Although it's still unclear exactly what determines the size of hurricanes, it partially has to do with the amount of moist air found in the location where the cyclone is born, he said. In Sandy's case, there was ample warm, moist air in the western Caribbean, allowing it to become big.

"As a whole, we (the tropical storms community) don't know a lot about what controls tropical storm size," wrote Clark Evans, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in an email. "We know that storms that form from smaller disturbances tend to be smaller; we also know that storms that form in drier environments tend to be smaller."

Airline pilot has nowhere to escape from wireless radiation

© Lou Veseley/For the Toronto Star
Commercial pilot Melissa Chalmers
suffers from sensitivity to electromagnetic
waves that come off communication towers.
With the number of towers popping up
across the country people like Melissa
could have no place to live.

Airline pilot has nowhere to escape from wireless radiation
Oct 17, 2012 | Richard J. Brennan

Professional pilot Melissa Chalmers has moved twice in 10 months to escape wireless radiation and worries she's running out of places to hide.

The commercial pilot of 20 years is on sick leave. She suffers from sensitivity to electromagnetic waves - the invisible waves given off by almost everything electric, in particular, those emitted by communication towers that are popping up across Canada.

Chalmers, who lives near Grand Bend on Lake Huron, may be moving again because of a new a cell tower not far from her forested home.

"They have put a tower up down the road. I'm just waiting for it to be turned on and then I will probably have to leave the home," she said.

Chalmers first noticed, about two-and-a-half years ago when she lived in London, that the nausea she felt when she was in her apartment subsided when she left.

Cellphones, cellphone towers, wireless internet routers, cordless phones and power lines have all been recognized as possible contributors to electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EMS), which is caused by significant exposure from radio waves.

Ad

EMS symptoms include poor sleep, fatigue, headache, nausea, dizziness, heart palpitations, memory impairment and skin rashes.

Dr. Riina Bray, medical director, Environmental Health Clinic, Toronto's Women College Hospital, is a leading physician on EMS and its symptoms.

"I'm just basically seeing more and more folks with electro hypersensitivity . . . there is a small fraction of the population who are hypersensitive and the WHO (World Health Organization) supports that phenomenon as being real," she told the Star.

"With the continuous onslaught of this stuff in our society it is very hard for these folks . . . to get better faster."

"If I have to move again," Chalmers told the Star, "it will be three times since Christmas, so I am getting pretty tired of moving and I really don't know where I am going to go at this point."

Critics say if Industry Canada, which has total control over telecommunications, has its way there will be no place for people such as Chalmers to live.

Industry Canada did not respond to a Star request for an interview.

Bray said the public should not have to prove harm. "It should be done by industry and government," she says.

Municipalities that have tried to control the number and location of cells towers say Industry Canada has told them it would block any attempt to usurp its powers.

The municipality of Lambton Shore near Lake Huron found out where it stood when it mused about creating a community, Port Franks, free of wireless radiation as did Oakville when it introduced its own protocol calling for a 200-metre setback.

"I went to that meeting in Oakville where it was discussed and it became very clear from Industry Canada and Health Canada that they were not going to change, they were not listening. They were there to dictate," said Frank Klegg, a retired Microsoft Canada president, who is now head of Citizens For Safe Technology (C4ST).

Klegg said C4ST wants to work with the federal government to establish so-called white zones across the country where people who are sensitive to wireless radiation can seek refuge.

Oakville Mayor Rob Burton said the federal government doesn't even consult the municipality on 95 per cent of the applications to erect cell towers and for the remaining 5 per cent he suggested the consultation is little more than lip service.

"What shocks me is the federal government pretending that we have a say," Burton said.

"Our protocol is designed to get us out of the line of fire . . . we have turned away seven or eight now (but) then the proponent then goes to Industry Canada (which) gives them the go-ahead," he said.

A Rose Like No Other: New Photo Shows Stunning Rosette Nebula

The Rosette Nebula is about 5,000 light
years away at the edge of the molecular
cloud Monoceros. Josh Knutson took
this image in Rio Rancho, New Mexico on May
27,2012. Knutson and Salvatore Grasso
collaborated on the photo’s post-processing.
CREDIT: Josh Knutson  image

A Rose Like No Other: New Photo Shows Stunning Rosette Nebula
Oct 5, 2012 | Nina Sen

The likeness of a rose appears in this beautiful night sky image of a gaseous star cluster and nebula.
Astrophotographer Josh Knutson captured this photo of the Rosette Nebula from his backyard in Rio Rancho, N.M. on May 27, 2012.

The Rosette Nebula is so named because its clouds of gas and dusts resemble the petals of a rose. The nebula is about 5,000 light years away at the edge of the molecular cloud Monoceros, or the Unicorn constellation. The nebula is a region of the Milky Way filled with glowing gas and a central cluster of hot, young stars that are only a few million years old.

Ad

Knutson used a 200mm Celestron SCT at F/2.0, Hyperstar III, and QHY-8 OSC CCD camera to take this photo. The image is made of four hours of five-minute exposures stacked together. Knutson and Salvatore Grasso collaborated on post-processing.

Editor's note: If you have an amazing skywatching photo you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com.

Quantum causal relations: A causes B causes A

© University of Vienna
A new framework for quantum mechanics
which does not assume a pre-existing
global time. It demonstrates the possibility
for two agents to perform a communication
task in which it is impossible to tell with
certainty who influences whom.

Quantum causal relations: A causes B causes A
Oct 2, 2012 | Fabio Costa

This press release is available in German.

One of the most deeply rooted concepts in science and in our everyday life is causality; the idea that events in the present are caused by events in the past and, in turn, act as causes for what happens in the future. If an event A is a cause of an effect B, then B cannot be a cause of A. Now theoretical physicists from the University of Vienna and the Université Libre de Bruxelles have shown that in quantum mechanics it is possible to conceive situations in which a single event can be both, a cause and an effect of another one. The findings will be published this week in Nature Communications.

Although it is still not known if such situations can be actually found in nature, the sheer possibility that they could exist may have far-reaching implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity and quantum computing.

Causal relations: who influences whom

In everyday life and in classical physics, events are ordered in time: a cause can only influence an effect in its future not in its past. As a simple example, imagine a person, Alice, walking into a room and finding there a piece of paper. After reading what is written on the paper Alice erases the message and leaves her own message on the piece of paper. Another person, Bob, walks into the same room at some other time and does the same: he reads, erases and re-writes some message on the paper. If Bob enters the room after Alice, he will be able to read what she wrote; however Alice will not have a chance to know Bob's message. In this case, Alice's writing is the "cause" and what Bob reads the "effect".

Ad

Each time the two repeat the procedure, only one will be able to read what the other wrote. Even if they don't have watches and don't know who enters the room first, they can deduce it by what they write and read on the paper. For example, Alice might write "Alice was here today", such that if Bob reads the message, he will know that he came to the room after her.

Quantum violation of causal order

As long as only the laws of classical physics are allowed, the order of events is fixed: either Bob or Alice is first to enter the room and leave a message for the other person. When quantum mechanics enters into play, however, the picture may change drastically. According to quantum mechanics, objects can lose their well-defined classical properties, such as e.g. a particle that can be at two different locations at the same time. In quantum physics this is called a "superposition". Now an international team of physicists led by Caslav Brukner from the University of Vienna have shown that even the causal order of events could be in such a superposition. If - in our example - Alice and Bob have a quantum system instead of an ordinary piece of paper to write their messages on, they can end up in a situation where each of them can read a part of the message written by the other. Effectively, one has a superposition of two situations: "Alice enters the room first and leaves a message before Bob" and "Bob enters the room first and leaves a message before Alice".

"Such a superposition, however, has not been considered in the standard formulation of quantum mechanics since the theory always assumes a definite causal order between events", says Ognyan Oreshkov from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (formerly University of Vienna). "But if we believe that quantum mechanics governs all phenomena, it is natural to expect that the order of events could also be indefinite, similarly to the location of a particle or its velocity", adds Fabio Costa from the University of Vienna.

The work provides an important step towards understanding that definite causal order might not be a mandatory property of nature. "The real challenge is finding out where in nature we should look for superpositions of causal orders", explains Caslav Brukner from the Quantum Optics, Quantum Nanophysics, Quantum Information group of the University of Vienna.

Publication:

"Quantum correlations with no causal order"
Ognyan Oreshkov, Fabio Costa, Caslav Brukner. Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2076.