The Deep Mid- Winter

A colleague at my (new! 3 months only!) place of work mentioned this week that there were only 12 weeks until Spring.

Being the new girl in the district, I hesitated to make a 'thing' of it - although I was tempted.

You see, it's one of my triggers : how we mark the seasons of the year. It irritates me that many people can't see how beautifully simple it is.

We have 52 weeks in a solar year, with 4 seasons. That's 13 weeks per season

When each season starts appears to vary from person to person. Here in the southern hemisphere, the Winter Solstice is celebrated on or around June 21st. Now here comes the nub of the whole "season" matter:

If you call this day "MidWinter", you have just fixed a point around which you will have to configure all the other seasons.

I have no idea what's so hard to understand about "mid" and "Winter" coming together in one word. It's the mid-point of Winter, right? So in another 6 and a half weeks it will be the end of Winter, right? That's around the first week in August, and I get to call it Imbolc.

Unfortunately for me, most Seffricans believe that Spring starts either at the beginning of September, or else on the Vernal Equinox, around 21st September.

But how can that be? Unless you are counting Winter as starting either at the beginning of June or at the Solstice...which we've agreed to keep calling Mid-Winter, OK?

"Mid" does not mean "start". It means the bloody middle, people.

So, figuring from this fairly rock solid premise (and assuming 4 seasons of roughly equal length, unlike the Celts, who really only had Summer and Winter), the Vernal Equinox would be the middle of Spring, the Summer Solstice the middle of Summer (or MidSummer!) and the Autumnal Equinox on around March 21st would be the mid-point of Autumn.

That leaves 4 points as ending/starting days for each of the seasons. And as luck would have it, many Pagans already celebrate on these days - Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnassad and Samhain. The start of each season.

So pardon me while I revere the very depth of Winter - when the apparent Sun reaches its lowest point in the heavens as seen from Earth - as MidWinter. That's in just one week from today.

And Imbolc, the start of Spring, a scant 6.5 weeks later, in the first week of August.

Makes frighteningly proper sense to me.

More sense-making goodiness here.

Powerful

Happy Wesak, Happy Full Moon in Scorpio and Happy Partial Lunar Eclipse!

From South Africa, you can catch the eclipse starting just after 8pm, continuing to just after midnight, with the point of greatest coverage occurring a little after 10pm.

This eclipse happens along the Taurus-Scorpio axis, for more astrologically-minded people, and I've always found it to be a very powerful configuration. Not always comfortable, but powerful.

Saturn is still doing its retrograde thing in Scorpio, of course, and with the retro Pluto in Capricorn, I think we're all feeling some dark cthonic energies running through our souls.

May this Full Moon focus and then dispel the demons we have been feeding.

Image courtesy of Blue Light Lady

Earth Lights?

Every so often (on about an 11 year cycle, as near as we can figure it) the sun goes through a period of producing massive flares, arising from magnetic anomalies in the corona.

Sometimes - as often as several times a day, when it's really hectic - these flares hurl a mass of coronal matter off the face of the sun and into space.

 If the earth is in the path of one of these coronal mass ejections, we experience a geomagnetic storm down here - a results of the coronal particles interacting with the earth's magnetic field.

You can track these events at places like SpaceWeather.com

One of the effects of such a geomagnetic storm (and I've been trying to correlate other, less material effects in my own soul for the last few years) is that it tends to deflect the normal cosmic radiation which sleets in from deeper regions of the cosmos onto the earth at other times.

Now, some enterprising scientists at the University of Tokyo and the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute have correlated an absence of solar-prompted magnetic storms with an increase in volcanic activity.

That is, they have found a definite propensity for volcanoes to erupt at times when the solar flare activity is low.

The reason seems to be that the muons in the cosmic radiation, blocked when the sun is having a little moment, create nucleation of magma particles inside the volcano.

Go have a read of the abstract, it explains it better than I can.

But I'm also wondering - alongside my weird conviction that both solar wind and cosmic radiation could, in fact probably does interact with our physical and non-physical beings - if we could find a similar correspondence between other phenomena and solar activity. Like, for instance, earthquakes?

The New Inquisition

Five hundred years ago we had the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith aka the Inquisition wandering the Earth, poking their noses into humanity's very thoughts, burning people and generally, you know, making complete arseholes of themselves. And us.

The guardians of the faith admitted of no contrary view. Heresy was having a thought which didn't accord with their dogma. They were quite sure that they had the right of it, and smugly set about lighting fires under people they considered to be not-right.

Today we have the "New Atheists". The arch skeptics and debunkers who wander the Earth sniffing out heresy in the form of thoughts which do not accord with their dogma. Their very narrow, non-negotiable definition of what is true by way of "science".

Instead of burning people alive, however, these latter-day inquisitors have to settle for cajoling public broadcasters into taking down videos of talks by people they don't agree with.

People like PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, James Randi, Richard Wiseman and that other Dick, Richard Dawkins, never seem to tire of frothing at the mouth whenever they spy someone behaving heretically. Someone like Graham Hancock or Rupert Sheldrake, whose talks on TEDx have been marked for deletion after complaints by these whiny fundamentalist evangelists of the Only Way.

My gods - and all the Dicks are God, too - I'm killing myself laughing here. No need to light a fire under me.

No Words

There are no words for this , except: Pan-Starrs.

Fish And Water

It's International Women's Day and here in South Africa, a woman is killed by her intimate partner every 8 hours. 

It's International Women's Day, and female scientists are still earning considerably less than their male peers.

It's International Women's Day, and women are being killed as "Witches" in higher numbers than ever before. Never mind the "Burning Times". We have a real, present holocaust on our hands here.

The reasons? Doubtless they are many, or could be presented as many by people far more qualified than I in social science matters. But, for my own curiosity, I have a one-word catchall answer to the why of it: the Patriarchy. You're stewing in it, and have been for thousands of years, so that you often don't see it for what it is.

The patriarchy: that ignoble structure which has its roots deep in the big monotheistic religions of today, as well as in agriculture, civilization and city-building, and of course the Wetiko disease.

The patriarchy: whose reign degrades and hurts men as well as simply killing women.

It's not going away any time soon. Not so long as most of us are as unaware of it as a fish is of water.

Indelible Mark

There's a new comet in town.

Comet C/2011 L4, popularly known as Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, the observation array attached to the University of Hawaii - and shame on you, Albany Herald, for calling it the Institute for Astrology), is presently appearing in the skies of the Southern Hemisphere.

An Argentinian observer has estimated its brightness at magnitude 2.8, which is considerably better than the down-graded estimates were predicting - although still worse than some of the media fanfare.

For this one - and it's a non-periodic comet, so this is a once-in-eternity visit - those of us in the Southern Hemisphere get a chance to see it before our Northern Hemisphere friends. Here's a great Java applet which shows that the comet crosses from South of the plane of the Ecliptic to North of it in about 10 days' time. So UK and US comet watchers be prepared!

I stepped out into my front garden a half hour ago (best viewing time is roughly 30 minutes after sunset) quite forgetting the welcome rain and thunderstorms we've been experiencing in Gauteng these past 2 days. Horizon-to-horizon clouds prevented me seeing anything but bats flitting across the dome of the sky. Sigh. 

Well, this looks like it might be an interesting sight, at least. I am transported back to my late teens, working with Jack Bennett and Johannes Wolterbeek-Muller, scanning across the dark skies low on the horizon, sweeping for comets old and new. What has changed in me? Much, but the love of the skies seems to be an indelible mark in my soul, and I fear I shall never totally eradicate it.

Diameter Of A Proton

Once upon a time, we thought that the Universe worked like a clockwork mechanism.

This was thousands of years after we had mostly given up the belief that the Universe ran on Spirit, and a couple of centuries before we started to lose our absolute conviction that we know how the Universe runs at all - which is the place we are now, of course.

In the arena of 20th Century Physics, there was an eerie uniformity of theory. What we were taught in school and university was what the best minds believed, and all the best minds, to a large extent, agreed with one another. I was taught Physics in an era of monolithic theory. Never mind that Quantum Mechanics had been studied for decades - all the Best Minds agreed on how to understand it, and that was via the Copenhagen Interpretation. The few outlier theories, while acknowledged, had no real grip on the community of physicists and were used for illustrative comparison, not serious consideration.

It's only in the last couple of decades - and I, alas, have not been a practising Physicist for that long - that fundamental theories of many differing hues have been seriously and continuously held by more than a few scientists. The strength of the minds holding divergent views has  become much greater. And so things like this have started happening.

The diameter of the Proton may not, I admit, be  a thrilling concern for most people in the world today. But the huge disparities between measurements (yes, in the sub atomic world 4% is a huge disparity) is a clear testimony that many great minds are lined up, not only on opposite sides of this question, but on many different sides. And that's something we haven't seen for a good couple of centuries at least.

And so, just as in Copernicus' time, the fabric of our understanding of the Cosmos appears to be wavering.
There is no longer one dominant mode of thought on the nature of reality, even -or especially - at the level of Theoretical Physics. Shifting, sliding and melting in many colours and possibly infinite dimensions. Because as humans, what we think and strongly believe does have the power to shake the foundations of the World. And we are starting to see that in action.

What will we do with this awareness of Our awesome power?

This train of thought brought on by Christina's latest podcast on Complementary Dualism. Many thanks Christina.

End Of The Star Child?

Waking up at one o'clock in the morning is not always a lot of fun. Unless you get to watch 2001 -  A Space Odyssey , of course.

As I watched, I was reminded of how much those early-ape-people had scared me as a child. The film came out in 1968, and I think I first saw it when I was about 9 years old.

The next time I saw it was in a film club screening at Wits , probably in 1978. I remember being very impressed, then, by the psychedelic visuals near the end, and literally waltzing out of the room and down the corridors of Senate House to the closing credits with a couple of my friends.

This morning, I was a bit more grumpy-cynical. I don't think the film got the  hominids-on-the-plains-of-Africa quite right, for example, and I found myself actually questioning the premise that humans are born war-makers. And I still think those ape suits are scary.

Also, what was up with the twinkling stars in the backdrop of the Jupiter mission? Stars only twinkle when seen through a filter, such as a planetary atmosphere. Or a veil of tears.

But I did enjoy the experience - all the time wondering where's my flying car?

For I'm old enough to well recall the hopes and dreams those of us born into the early space age had, once upon a time. You know, we were supposed to have a colony on Mars by now, not to mention an established Luna City. Sigh.

It strikes me that that particular narrative was, and remains, way off base. This article and others like it abounded on the internet yesterday, and appears to address some real problems with an interplanetary -never mind interstellar - future for Homo Sap.

See, it seems that the unprotected human is truly a naked ape when outside of the Earth's atmosphere. Mother Gaia protects us from a large percentage of high-energy particles which probably cause neurological damage, such as Alzheimer's Disease , in the brain. At least, it does so in mice.

This is not good news for all us ageing space cadets.

Is it possible that we will never be able to leave the planet of our evolution? And if so, how will we alter the human story to accommodate this devastating blow? We've grown up with this narrative, many of us. It's kind of hard to face its possible lack of truth, now.

However, I am certain that we do know - on the deity level - what we're about. If this planet is to be both cradle and coffin, it is only so to the physical body. The spirit of Life is, I believe, abundant and irrepressible both on-planet and between the planets.

But we're going to have to do something about our tendency to trash and poison the physical matrix, first, before we allow ourselves into the wider reaches of the cosmos.

Lunar Bombing Tonight

So, at about half an hour after midnight South African Standard Time tomorrow, we're going to sacrifice two Lunar Gravitational Orbiters.

By crashing them into the moon.

The two orbiters have outlived their usefulness  but will go down helping to validate our theoretical models of fuel consumption in such craft.

Part of me - a tiny, long-ago piece of me which thought it was the greatest achievement to be a Physicist - finds this really interesting and even commendable.Why waste the probes, after all? Let's get them to give us some last transmissions of data.

A larger part of me, however, is shocked and dismayed by this wanton, machine-culture desecration of a symbol of all that's numinous.

The moon is one of the greatest inducers of the mystical in the human - and has been so for as long as we've been walking upright, at least. Our sister planet, she has inspired us and conspired with us when we breathe the air of pneumos, spirit unbound.

What would I have us do differently? Nothing, I suppose. I just shudder at the culture which has bound us to such soulless effectiveness, most of the time.

Oh, and yes, this is not the first time we've done this. Or considered it.

Pic: Crater Goldschmidt, near the Moon;s North Pole, site of tonight's crash landings.

Update: We've named the crash site after the late Sally Ride.

Todd and Susy

Some (increasingly rare) down time at work this afternoon, and I found myself listening to Todd Rundgren's 1972 album Something/Anything while reading about how Supersymmetry is on the ropes and looking groggy.

I didn't know that Something/Anything made the list of 500 most influential albums of all time. But it's not such a stretch. From the infectious ditty I Saw The Light to Hello It's Me and the (apparently) highly influential Couldn't I Just Tell You, it's an album I first bought in 1972 or '73, when I was 12 or 13, and which I'm enjoying again today - not without the almost obligatory time travel, though.

So, I'm temporarily 12 years old, and reading about how the Large Hadron Collider has just about dissed the idea of Supersymmetry (affectionately known as SUSY) being responsible for all that Dark Matter. In fact, the idea of Dark Matter is in question, too. Pretty radical.

Then I come across this paper, which postulates the idea that good old homo sap. is in fact getting stupider.

Couldn't I Just tell You. I've been remarking on it for the last 10 years, godsdammit.

Back to Todd, and the slipping away of more than 40 years' worth of Time.

Oh, and don't forget the transformative power of the solar eclipse in Scorpio tonight!

Pic: Todd Rundgren, musing on Susy.

Ada Lovelace

Today is Ada Lovelace Day

What a lovely idea.

(I really like that picture of her.)

Sacred Smell

This study at Macquarie University in Australia seems to suggest that people who exhibit the traditional psychopathic personality traits also have an impaired sense of smell.

Since my partner Warren quite famously can't smell very well, this has led to all sorts of jokes in this household. And it had me wondering, not for the first time, if I would actually recognise a psychopath if he or she bit me.

Because I find it surprisingly hard to process the idea that some people may just be born rotten.

 I tend towards saying, with Neil Kramer, that "there are no bad guys, just disturbed guys". I do find it difficult to accept the idea of ground-in evil. I've even flirted with the thought that perhaps the reason why I can't identify psychopaths is because I am one. But that makes no real sense.If I were a psychopath I would be denying the reality of genetically callous people, not wondering why I can't spot them.

Wouldn't I?

Well, this impairment of olfactory senses in those who show a complete lack of empathy resonates with a  sort of reason outside of the scientific explanation of some kind of damage to a specific part of the brain. It speaks of a tightly-throttled input of some essential data which makes us normal, feeling humans. The sense of smell, it is said (by Douglas Adams in one of his Dirk Gently novels, if I recall correctly) is one of the very last to leave us as our bodies disintegrate. It's certainly a powerful stimulator of memory. It may be that we pick up clues which aid our feeling-with toward other beings through our noses (and our skin) which bypass the neo-cortex all together and act directly on some more essential part of our spirit. Thus not having access to this information could produce humans who have no idea of what it's like to suffer as another.

And me? My sense of smell, even though I smoke fairly heavily, is pretty acute, thank you very much. Gives me that much less of an excuse and prods me to open my soul even wider to the myriad ways of being and creating, suffering and rising above which marks this space out as such a sacred place to inhabit at any time - and especially now.

Pic: Basil, a sacred smell to me

No Code Needed

Well, this is interesting.

Rich Terrile has put forward a theory which says that the entire Universe is code running on some extra-universal programmer's computer:

Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?

On one level, it seems to be riffing off the world-as-Maya principle.;it's all illusion.

I don't have a big hairy problem with that idea.

The difference between the ancient Buddhist insight and Terrile's proposal lies in who is generating that illusion.

For on another level, this appears to me to be the cyber-age's version of the clockwork universe theorem beloved of industrial western civilisation and Richard Dawkins. It's all ultimately understandable, you see, and moreover it's amenable to our dissection and analysis - if only we keep probing Nature for Her secrets, we will uncover them eventually.

That must be very appealing to the scientific worldview. A great program, rather than a clockwork mechanism, about which we can learn all there is to know if we just keep going.
Nope, nothing ineffable here.

I stepped out onto the balcony. Urban birds were squabbling noisily in the background. Or were they running code loops? And was I?

 The huge bloody cellphone mast rose white against the blue sky.

A sudden flash of red against the blue, the white made me look up: a Red Winged Starling had taken flight from the mast, displaying the colour of blood. Showing me the vividness of life even within the would-be sterile city.

In that moment, I knew that although I can never prove it, this Universe is not a stored procedure in some cosmic simulation.; that Life contains it's own willfulness, its own bloody-mindedness, and its own inexplicable beauty.

And that those elements often interact with my own sense of Being in a way not explicable by appeal to some external code hacker.

It's the one  thing I do know, although how I know it I don't have a clue: that we all, from granite hillside rock to salmonella enterica to birch to starling have conscious being that is not pre programmed. And that it is We All who are responsible for our lives, both separately and collectively, both creating and destroying, both Being and passing out of Being.World without end. No code needed.

That Old Television Analogy

No matter what evidence is put in front of them, certain sections of the neuroscience community continue to hold fast to the idea that consciousness is created in the brain.

The latest case to come under the spotlight is that of a certain Patient R, critical parts of whose cortex were destroyed by disease, who yet retains self awareness.

There have been other cases, too - not the least of which were those individuals born with apparently no brain at all, who grew up to be functioning, and in some cases highly intelligent members of society.

A faction of the neuroscience community, you see, is convinced that functional neural imaging - in which the brain "lights up" under specific conditions of consciousness - is proof that the brain is producing the consciousness.
 I expect it makes them feel more in control of , well, stuff, to be able to point to an area of the brain and say that all our wonderful mind workings are produced right there.

I don't have to trot out the old television analogy, do I?

Oh, very well. I imagine we may seem like some "primitive" tribe, unexposed to "modern" technology, who insist with their last breaths that the orchestra is somewhere inside the radio.

"..Without Form, And Void..."

Fascinating.

"Think of the early universe as being like a liquid," Melbourne University theoretical physics researcher James Quach said.

  "Then as the universe cools, it 'crystalises'.

"The reason we use the water analogy is water is without form.

          "In the beginning there wasn't even space, 
           space did not exist because there was no form."

Quantum graphity is a new one to me. I can barely understand it. But I can visualise the pre-existance of the Universe as akin to a rapidly cooling liquid which crystallizes.

Around what did it crystallize, I wonder?

Jumping Through Hoops

"Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when."

Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (New York, Basic Books, 1995)

 I'm finally ready to call bollocks on this ...this way of thinking.

I'm not disputing that science has created some wonderful toys for us, or that it predicts the consensus reality to a T- almost every time.
 But that's just it, you see - the consensus reality is scientific materialism. And if you don't go along with the consensus, well you're obviously mad.

 Science, lest we forget, is a method - one we created and have used for the past few centuries. Or 6,000 odd years, if you prefer. It is a way of interrogating the 3-D world so that the answers seem to make sense, justify our equations,and repeat themselves on command.

 It's a collapsed waveform. Or, as Derrick Jensen puts it, a gun held to our heads.

I'm not saying that truth is relative. I think that there are many kinds of truths, and many levels for them to operate on. But once a truth is accepted generally (and by generally I'm tending to the mathematical usage of the word , meaning universally) on a level, it will hold on that level - and maybe on a level or two in close proximity to it - for as long as that acceptance goes unchallenged.

And while it holds, those of us cleaving to that level of reality will maybe find something of the rock-solid comfort of fundamental religion in statements like Dawkins'. I know, for I have been there, too.

But when the consensus is challenged - by any of us starting to remember Who we are for example - the truth seems not to hold quite as firmly. Other truths start breaking through and touching us deeply on entirely different planes of Being.

Plants communicate with us, in dreams or waking consciousness. Beloved family members come to say goodbye as they are dying. Birds become comic geniuses. Ancestors speak.

And we realise that we are not, as the distortion would have us, off our rockers. We are not making all this up, or hallucinating (an odd concept in scientific materialism!) or trying to fool others or ourselves.
These pure personal experiences - these knowings, these gnoses - are the marks of wider realms and other levels knocking on the doors of our souls.

We can cling to the arrogance of materialism and believe we are cracking up, and so never get up to answer the door, or we can open up, explore these other states with all their richness of communication, and leave the kindergarten of science(with all its wonderful toys) behind.

Pic: from Total Translucency

Au Revoir Sally

Off to your rest, Sally Ride.
Her picture was the only one of a human being adorning my first-year university room's walls.The rest were of bikes, galaxies and planets.
One of my heras.
And she was less than nine years older than me.

To be absolutely and completely honest, I didn't follow her career closely after about 1987. I think I mostly shut down on the NASA program after, holding an infant Shevek in my arms, I watched Challenger blow up. On telly. All those tears will never bring them back as they were. And Dr Sally....I'm so glad you gave yourself space to be the woman you were meant to be, eventually.

Get Out Of My Eighth House

We don't get to see the transit of Venus live in South Africa, unless we live on the extreme east coast of KwaZulu Natal.

But here's a shot from the live webcam at (urrgh) the CocaCola Space Science Centre in Alice Springs, Oz.
It's purple because of the em wavelength it's viewing the event in - in this case, the hydrogen calcium K line.

OK Venus? Had your moment? Now get out of my eighth house, would you?

Infinite Field, Endless Light

The Vasiliev Theory , first proposed by  Mikhail Vasiliev and Efin Fradkin in the 1980s, is a take on the structure of spacetime which people have been pretending not to understand for over 30 years now.

What we see as the material universe is "made up" of  various particles which have an inherent quality which we chose to call spin. It's roughly like the amount of symmetry a particle has.

The interactions of these particles within their fields constitutes what we see as physical reality.

What Vasiliev and Fradkin are saying is this:

• The spin numbers are endless and so, therefore, are the fields.

• Time can be seen as the result of the interaction of  higher-dimensional field sets with the "normal", 3-dimensional field set.

• Along the way, it neatly backhands String Theory into the gutter it belongs in.

And there you have it, folks: Infinite Field, Endless Light.

As I have been saying.