Science and Technology

Applied Black Hole Technology

2008-12-09T02:08:00.001-08:00

Mars Surface Life on the Margins

2008-07-06T22:06:00.000-07:00

Thirty two years ago, Viking landers conducted three experiments to test for life on the surface of Mars, the results were inconclusive.

The gas exchanger (GEX) experiment attempted to detect changes of the makeup of gases in a test tube indicative of biological experiments.

The labeled release (LR) experiment provided radioactively labeled nutrients for biological organisms and then detected gases emitted by these organisms.

The pyrolytic release (PR) experiment attempted to detect the uptake of radioactive carbon by cooking it out of potential organisms.

For these experiments there was also a control in which the soil was first precooked at 320F to sterilize it. If the sterilized control sample produced the same test results, non-biological activity must be responsible.

The GEX and PR experiments provided positive results, but the control experiment was also positive indicating some non-biological process was at work.

The LR experiment provided positive results for the non-sterilized sample but not for the sterilized sample. When the labeled nutrients were first injected there was a rapid release of labeled gas, but subsequent injections of nutrients caused an initial decrease followed by a slow rise. The decrease was unexpected causing the results to be interpreted as ambiguous.

It was believed that the experiments were the result of unusual soil chemistry involving super oxides and materials which could catalyze some of these results. The exact chemical reactions that could explain these results are unknown. There are life forms that utilize a mixture of water and hydrogen peroxide, H2O2 in their cellular fluids which could produce exactly the results seen in the Viking life experiments. On Earth the soil bacterium Acetobacter Peroxidans is such an example. This article on Mars Daily provides additional details.

The Phoenix lander did not find unusual soil chemistry. The soil it found would be friendly to life, so much so that they say you could grow asparagus in it (but not strawberries because it is somewhat alkaline).

In 2004, Methane and Ammonia were detected in the atmosphere of Mars. Because methane and ammonia are not stable in the Martian environment, something has to be replenishing it. Known mechanisms are either volcanism or biological processes. No active volcanoes have been detected on Mars. In 2005, Vittorio Formisano, chief scientists for the ESA Mars Express Planetary Fourier Spectrometer, found formaldehyde in the martian atmosphere at levels that he believes are too great to be explained by volcanic origin.

Rather than being omnipresent, life may exist in discrete niches on the surface of Mars where atmospheric pressure is unusually high allowing liquid water to exist during the warm season. The average atmospheric pressure is between 6-9 millibars depending upon the season but may approach 10 millibars in low lying locations.

At 10 millibars, the boiling point of water is 45F, so in the depths of some of the craters and trenches there is the potential for liquid water to exist for at least part of the Martian year. Phoenix also found a salt in the soil and this would extend the temperature window over which water may remain a liquid.

What the Phoenix lander failed to find in the Martian soil is fixed nitrogen and organic carbon compounds. On Earth, there are some bacteria capable of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere and some which are capable of photosynthesis. The Martian atmosphere is only about 3% nitrogen but this may be sufficient for properly adapted microbes.

The argument is also made that high levels of UV light would sterilize the surface, however, bacteria present on the surface of equipment we left on the moon were found to be viable after being exposed to direct sunlight in the lunar environment for a year and since our moon is closer to the Sun than Mars and has no atmosphere at all, the UV levels reaching the surface are even higher than on Mars.

Bacteria in nuclear reactors have evolved that survive high levels of neutron and gamma radiation and have even evolved a form of melanin that can absorb and utilize energy present in gamma rays for the organisms energy needs.

It is not inconceivable that organisms on Mars may have evolved with pigments capable of protecting them from UV radiation and even utilize this energy for their own biological purposes.

Based upon this conjecture, I searched ESA photographs from Mars Express of locations below average terrain elevation, having the potential for liquid water, for anything which may be of biological origin and found items of interest.

Nepenthes Mensae

Note the dark coloration tends to diffuse out of a central area but does not correspond directly with geological objects, rather it tends to flow over everything but only below a certain critical depth.

Mamers Valles

Here in Mamers Valles we see a similar discoloration, and again, it seems to flow out from the center rather than being blasted and splattered, with diffuse but fairly well defined borders.

Maunder Crater

This sure looks like a colony of something. It has a strong resemblance the things grown on bread that I've left sitting too long in the cupboard. Nasa describes these features as Barchan dunes, but that doesn't explain why they are so sharply contrasted in color to surrounding features. Gullies along the upper side of the trough in the center of the crater are believed to have been caused by liquid water.

Gusev Crater

The hairs or filamentary structures present are interesting. I believe I heard someone from NASA suggest these were dust devil trails while totally neglecting to indicate why they only formed over the dark material and did not displace the lighter material in a similar manner. I suppose it could be argued that the darker material absorbed more sunlight and provided more heat for the formation of dust devils. The material has the appearance of something biological in nature even if dust devils distributed it.

Deuteronilus Mensae

I have lightened this image considerably because in it's original form the dark material was so dark that detail below it was obscured and you couldn't see the apparent flow and variability in color and saturation. Note how the flow seems to be semi-radial outward from the center rather than linear as one might expect if this were simply wind blown dark material. This resembles more an organism arising at one spot and them propagating outward.

Noctis Labyrinthus

The colors here suggest multiple colonies of different organisms with quite different pigments. The patterns of rocks to the lower right look like something in a flood plain where mud has washed up around them. The thickest deposits of pigmented material appears to center around a crack in the crust. Perhaps there are nutrients or organisms that were brought up from depths at this location. It's impossible to eliminate some interesting non-biological chemistry here but it sure reminds me of some of the colorful bacterial colonies around Yellowstone hot springs. Those bacteria are thermophiles that are adapted to hot water but the patterns seem very similar.

Hebes Chasma

Hebes Chasma is extremely interesting anyway you want to look at it. There is no inflow or outflow, no surrounding debris field. Where did this chunk of crust go? The feature in the center also is raised. The presence of the central plateau is unique to this structure. This is about 8000 meters deep.

I believe there is a combination of mineral and biological processes responsible for the pigmentation in this structure. You can see some pigments follow geological structure very cleanly, but others appear to be a more diffuse substance overlying multiple structures.

The 8000 meter depth would allow for higher pressures which in turn would allow for water to remain liquid. The reflection off of the walls would tend to amplify heat and the dark pigments would also tend to capture more of the suns energy resulting in warmer temperatures conducive to liquid water.

Juventae Chasma

This looks more like a terraced Chinese rice field than something you would expect to find on Mars. The terraced walls suggests erosion of sedimentary rock, but for sedimentary rock to form on that scale would require huge amounts of water over a long period of time. Or maybe it's an alien strip-mine.

What actually caught my interest is the green area near the bottom of the image. It bears a strong resemblance to the algae growth.

Crater Ice

And I'll close with this image cropped from a frozen lake in a Martian crater. This is cropped from a much larger image to show a feature at the north end of the frozen lake where it appears to me to be partially thawed, and where it appears dark blue green colonies of something are growing at the borders. There also appears to be some lighter greenish colonies of something on or below the ice.

That's my case for life on the surface of Mars.

The Evolution

2008-05-22T19:05:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about a little tiny piece of the universe today of which I have a particular degree of familiarity because I worked for the local telephone company for 17 years between 1978 and 1995, and my mother worked for the telephone company in 1947. She worked as an operator when they had cord-boards to connect customers to their destination telephone numbers.

Manual operator connections of telephone calls were replaced with automated mechanical technology, first panel and step-by-step switches, where dial pulses directly moved selectors and there was really no intelligence built in to the hardware.

Later #1 and #5 cross-bar switches where the functions were more divided and abstracted and there was some degree of intelligence built-in but it was a wired intelligence that couldn't be changed except by physically re-wiring the switch.

Later then program controlled mechanical switches, like the AT&T / Western Electric #101 ESS, 2BESS, #1 and #1AESS, and GTE / Automatic Electric's #2 and 2B ESS. These operated on the basis of stored programs that could be reprogrammed changing the functionality of the hardware that the computer controlled.

Then computer controlled digital switching hardware, #4ESS, #5ESS, DMS100/200s, etc. These replaced mechanical switching hardware with digital electronic switching hardware controlled by computers. The digital hardware was more reliable, versatile, smaller, much more efficient in terms of energy usage, but what it could do was still constrained by the physical hardware design.

Now we are seeing soft switches in which rather than controlling switching hardware, computers are emulating it. Since the hardware doesn't physically exist, besides programmable I/O interfaces, it is emulated by computers running software that behaves like physical hardware, the flexibility of this generation of switch is enormous since virtually every aspect of the emulated hardware is programmable. Soft switches are extremely cheap and energy efficient since the only real hardware is the computer doing the emulation and I/O hardware interfaces, everything else is software.

So what we've seen in the evolution of telephone switching is an evolution from biological entities, humans, with their human intelligence controlling their physical body to complete physical circuit connections to make calls, to the replacement of that body with a machine, physical hardware, overtime artificial intelligence was added to the machine and hardware replaced by that intelligence emulating what used to be physically implemented in hardware.

I'm really writing about this not to draw specific attention to telephone company switching technology but rather to provide an example of what I think is a general trend.

Humans invent something, a way to communicate for example, a telephone. They first implement it with minimal hardware and relay to a large degree upon human intelligence and physical labor for the functionality of what we have invented.

Then over time we replace the labor with mechanical labor; and then we eventually replace the intelligence with artificial intelligence; and then we replace a good portion of the machine and labor with intelligence.

I think there is a general trend where pure thought, intent, 'The Word", was the prime mover of the universe, to where it moves through a physical energy intensive phase, and then back eventually to where it is once again driven by information and intent, "The Word" all over again.

While the example I just provided was relating to telephone technology, I can see it in so many other areas, for example, travel, at first by foot, and then we learn to harness the power of domesticated animals, and then various natural forces, the wind, and then we build machines that fly; all of this is very energy intensive; but then we develop the Internet and we virtualize much of what used to be done physically.

Music has art of various forms have take a similar path; and although much of it is created physically, it is displayed, sold, and enjoyed to a large degree virtually, with nothing more than information being moved.

It seems that where we might go on a spiritual plane; we are also trying to get to on a physical plane, but eventually that seems to be a situation in which everything is connected, information, thought, non-local, instant, there seems to be some kind of a circle to the evolution of everything rather than being a linear path.

As physics explores the subquantum realm and hyperdimensions and multiple parallel universes, maybe an infinity of universes, a multiverse, it seems clear these trends that affect every aspect of our reality are going to continue. I feel like we are just on the verge of entering that reality that was portrayed in one episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation, in which The Traveler took the Enterprise into a place so distant and different than thoughts created reality; I've experienced elements of this myself though some might dismiss it as mere psychosis, but I really feel like we're making a consensus entry into that reality and the potential seems unlimited.

CERN Caused China Quake, Chile Volcano?

2008-05-14T02:18:00.000-07:00

All over the Internet one can find articles suggesting that a spray of anti-quarks from CERN caused the Chile volcano and the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in China.

To be sure CERN is a powerful collider and as man-made devices go is capable of concentrating an extreme amount of energy into a very small space and time. Even so, the amount of energy that CERN, or that anything man-made represents is so tiny compared to a volcanic or large seismic event that short of magic there is essentially no possibility that this is the case. Great earthquakes and volcanoes existed before we built any particle colliders.

A week prior to the explosion of Mt. St. Helens, I went with some friends to a location on Spirit Lake to photograph the mountain shooting off steam. We were around 15 miles or so from the mountain. The area was lush with vegetation and wild life.

A week later the mountain blew up and as it happened a news helicopter flew over the exact spot that we had parked. I recognized it only by the geography, the very highway we had taken was broken up, not a living thing was left, only a lifeless gray moonscape, and this fifteen miles from the volcano.

People really need to see something like that in order to really understand the scale of energy involved in natural events. It is a scale that is off the extreme end of what is familiar to humans.

The largest underground thermonuclear test at Amchitka produced a 7.0 magnitude quake, the recent Earthquake in China was a magnitude 7.8, nearly ten times as powerful. Hopefully this provides some indication of the relative scale of human verses natural energies.

I can't rule out new formerly unknown physics, however, for an large Earthquake to occur where two plates are colliding, the same process that formed the Himalayas, or an existing, known to be active volcano on the Pacific ring of fire, to erupt, is not unexpected or strange.

There are to be sure some "strange" things happening on this planet recently, but these two events require no unnatural explanations, they are well within what is normal for the geophysical processes of the regions involved.

Arthur C. Clarke Passed

2008-03-19T03:00:00.001-07:00

Arthur C. Clark has passed away yesterday at age ninety of breathing trouble. I feel a sense of loss much like I did when Isaac Asimov died in 1992, and that seems like just yesterday.

Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov are two people who, through their writings, instilled a sense of wonder and curiosity about the universe that has stayed with me through the decades. There were only a handful of people who affected my view of the world more; and the others were people I knew personally.

I hope that some day we can stop fighting over power, wealth, and limited resources and realize the potential that I believe Arthur saw in the human race and I still believe exists. However, to realize such a future, it takes thinkers and visionaries and I don't know how we are going to be able to teach our children to think and feel and be open to the possibilities the universe has for us when we have television, politicians, and fifteen second sound bytes to contend with.

The Expanding Solar System

2008-03-12T01:02:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school we knew about nine planets in our solar system, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto.

Since that time it was discovered that Pluto had a moon, Charon, about half the size of Pluto (1170km verses Pluto 2270km) and really could be considered a double planet system. Two more moons of Pluto were discovered in Hubble images, but they are tiny, between 60-200km in diameter.

Ceres which orbits between Mars and Jupiter, discovered in 1801, was considered to be an asteroid, but with a diameter of 950km, a spherical form, and differentiated core and mantle, it really shares characteristics that normally would be attributed to a planet.

Vesta, about 538km in diameter, also orbits between Mars and Jupiter, and has a basaltic surface indicating that it once had lava flows and a molten core. It has many features resembling our moon and the terrestrial planets.

Then there is Eris, originally 2003 UB313, slightly larger than Pluto at about 2500km in diameter, and on an orbit that is more elliptical. At it's closest approach (280 years from now), it's orbit takes it just inside of Pluto's orbit, but presently it is about 2.6 times further out. The spectrum of light reflected off of Eris is nearly identical to that of Pluto, suggesting a surface largely made up of frozen methane, but Eris is more reflective. Eris has a moon, Dysnomia, estimated to be about 150km in diameter. I preferred Xena and Gabrielle myself, but the IAU had to ruin that.

Quaoar is about 1250km in diameter and has a similar orbit but with an inclination almost opposite that of Plutos relative to the orbits of the major planets. Part of Quaoar's orbit brings it inside the orbit of Pluto and part of the time it is outside of Pluto's orbit. The orbit of Pluto is in a 3:2 resonance with Neptune, but this is not the case with Quaoar. While Pluto and Eris have relatively high albedos (reflectivity) of .68 and .86 respectively, Quaoar is very dark with an albedo of only .1 suggesting less surface ice.

Orcas has a diameter of about 1600km, and has an orbit almost identical to Pluto. Like Pluto, it has a 3:2 resonance with Neptunes orbit, and nearly the same degree of eccentricity as Pluto. The diameter of Orcas isn't known precisely yet because it's albedo has not been precisely determined.

Varuna, orbiting at a distance of approximately 43 AU, is believed to have a diameter of around 900km. It is not very reflective with an albedo of only .07 indicating very little surface frost.

Ixion has an orbit very similar to Plutos, but where Plutos perihelion (the point in it's orbit closest the sun) is above the ecliptic, Ixion's is below. Like Pluto and Orcus, Ixion is in a 3:2 resonance with Neptune. It's diameter is estimated at 800km, and albedo at .15. It has a reddish color.

2003 EL61 is undoubtedly one of the strangest objects out there, it is cigar or egg shaped even though it's length is nearly 2000km, it has not collapsed to a spherical state like other similarly sized and even much smaller bodies have. 2003 EL61 also has two moons, one approximately 300km in diameter and one approximately 150km in diameter.

In addition to the large asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, there are numerous objects between the orbits of the gas giants, most of them have diameters of 200km or less, and then many objects out in the vicinity of Pluto in the Kuiper belt, the major ones noted above, there is now believed to be hundreds, thousands, and perhaps even tens of thousands of minor planets in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of space extending about a light year from the Sun. Based on statistical analysis it is believed that there may be as many as a dozen frozen Earth sized objects in this region and perhaps even some gas giants. There is some speculation that there may even be a brown dwarf solar companion out in this vast region.

I find the whole situation very fascinating. We, humanity, if Bush doesn't go and invade Iran and start WW III, are very close to harnessing hydrogen fusion. With such an abundant source of energy at our disposal, we might be able to thaw some of these distant worlds and make them livable.

Prior to knowing these worlds existed, I had dreams of traveling to minor planets in our solar system that were in the process of being terraformed. In my dreams they were at a state where there was an atmosphere that was breathable but not ideal, where the temperature was survivable but less than ideal, and where it was possible to grow food crops but other than cultivated vegetation the land was largely barren.

Now with the 7th (and last before a commercial level power reactor for naval propulsion) Bussard polywell reactor is built and in the processes of being tested, with the discovery of all of these minor planets, this no longer seems like an impossibility.

The density of these minor planets often lies between that of ice and dirt suggesting a mixture of the two. I wonder how long it would take to defrost these small planets sufficiently to grow something. There is a hint that some of these may already contain liquid interior oceans due to tidal forces or the decay of radioactive elements.

If there are tens of thousands of these objects and they extend a quarter of the way to the nearest star, then there is a lot of real estate available to advanced civilizations. There is some evidence that advanced civilizations may have arisen on Earth in the past and I can't help but wonder if some of these distant minor planets might already be colonized by our ancestors.

Ionosphere, Magnetosphere, Earth

2008-03-10T02:47:00.000-07:00

I have had an interest in radio all of my life and things which affect the propagation of radio signals. One of the most significant things that affects the propagation of many radio frequencies is a portion of the Earth's atmosphere known as the ionosphere which is an area high enough up that shorter wavelength ultraviolet and even shorter wavelength radiation strips electrons from atoms and the atmosphere is tenuous enough that they don't immediately recombine.

I find it fascinating in ways that go beyond it's effect on radio propagation. I've always had a fascination with the plasma state of matter. I had a particular fondness for arcs and sparks and things you could do with high voltage since my early teens that has not abated, though time to pursue that interest is hard to come by.

Plasma, doesn't act the same way a normal gas does, the way charged particles interact with magnetic field lines produces an array of behaviors that at times seem organic. Anyone who has observed an auroral display will have some understanding of this. Even though I live at a latitude that is far enough south that strong auroral displays are relatively rare (just north of Seattle), I've seen them maybe half a dozen times here and every time I've seen them they've been different.

One display I saw consisted of a single narrow stream of light that went from the northwest to the southeast. It appeared white in color, it was a narrow concentrated beam that looked like a giant neon, or more properly argon, light across the sky, except that it wriggled about and was full of kinks and bends instead of being straight. It lasted about ten minutes then diffused and faded. I have seen many pictures of auroras, but never saw one like that.

Another one that I saw looked as if you had taken a point light source, shined it off of ocean waves, and projected it onto a giant screen in the sky, the waves moving like ocean waves in real time.

I've also seen the more typical displays, the green sheets, patches of red, but seeing it in real time, seeing the motion, gives it a whole different character than looking at a static photograph.

I've had the sense that something has been changing for a long time. I get this both from my experience with a hobby of radio and TV DX'ing, and from the aurora. I've lived in this area all of my 49 years, but almost all of those auroral displays I've seen on the last five years.

This last solar cycle was the most intense on record. That in part accounted for the frequency and intensity of displays recently. The solar cycle is something that historically does change from cycle to cycle. There are periods in history where there have been very few or no visible sunspots, and there have been periods of high solar activity. This last cycle was the most active on record; but at the same time there are other factors.

Cosmic rays also have been on the rise; nobody seems to know why but the average cosmic ray flux has been on the increase in recent years. This two is something that varies and all the factors are not well understood.

One additional factor; the Earth's magnetic field has been weakening. My understanding is that it has weakened by approximate 50% over the past hundred years. The Earth experiences periodic reversal of the magnetic poles (this is not the same as a physical pole shift, nor has it been associated with mass extinctions or high rates of mutation in the past). We may be headed into a magnetic pole shift; it's really impossible to say until it happens because sometimes in the past the field has weakened, and then strengthened without reversing.

So we've got all these things happening, what does it mean to us? Recently, a study found that there is a correlation between cosmic rays reaching the Earth's surface and cancer rates; the cancer rates are increased by increased cosmic radiation but there is a 25 year lag between the higher cosmic rays and higher cancer rates. So one thing it means to us is that as more cosmic rays bombard the Earth and more reach the Earth' surface, 25 years later we'll see increased cancer.

A greater danger is that to our satellites upon which we are dependent. There is a minor pole in the southern Pacific, that is a magnetic pole that is opposite in polarity to the main south pole, known as the southern Pacific anomaly. At times recently, this has become almost as strong as the main south pole. The Earth's magnetic field tends to sweep up cosmic rays and particles from the Sun and direct them to enter the atmosphere at altitudes above the Arctic Circle.

On average, the latitude at which cosmic rays enter the atmosphere has decreased by seven degrees over the last 100 years. All of the above factors probably play some role.

I believe the following changes will occur as these changes continue:

We will experience more disruptions in long distance AC power transmission lines. A fix for this that would simultaneously upgrade transmission capacity making it possible to use higher mix of renewables would be to convert lines longer than 300km or so to DC transmission. Only long lines are subject to induction of low frequency currents that destroy transformers. Only the longer lines have significant AC power loses. And DC transmission becomes more economical than AC transmission on lines longer than 300km, so it makes sense to convert only these longer lines.

We will see a high failure rate of our satellites when they appear outside of the regions presently protected by the Earth's magnetosphere. Already we are seeing this with satellites that go over the Southern Pacific anomaly. There are a number of steps we could take to partially mitigate this effect. We can rely more on terrestrial fiber optics and terrestrial wireless for communications. We can take steps to harden our satellites against radiation. This can include the use of special integrated circuits that have higher radiation tolerances, shielding, and equipping the satellite with it's own magnetosphere in the form of strong superconductive magnets that deflect high energy charged particles. We can use more redundancy. One area that I feel will be particularly troublesome is the loss of global positioning satellites which we have become so dependent upon for navigation during a time when we also will not be able to depend upon a simple compass.

We will see weather anomalies caused by changes in high level cloud cover and by heating of the upper atmosphere. Cosmic rays entering the atmosphere leave an ionized trial in their wake that serve as a nucleus for condensation encouraging cloud formation. Cosmic rays can also significantly heat and expand the atmosphere. These effects will alter our weather in some ways that are hard to predict.

Radio propagation will be further impacted. We will see increased absorption at lower radio frequencies limiting the range of medium wave signals, increasing atmospheric noise at these frequencies, but higher shortwave frequencies will become usable and we will see the maximum usable frequency rise into the VHF bands more frequently. The highest I have ever seen the MUF rise to was around 200 Mhz, but I expect that we will see new record high MUF's with noticeable defraction perhaps extending all the way into the visible light portion of the spectrum.

I believe we should be preparing for these changes by fortifying our energy supplies with renewables that we can utilize without causing further problems, so that we have the ability to adapt to changes that come our way.

Orange Titles

2008-03-07T01:30:00.000-08:00

When you see orange titles at the top of articles, that means the title is a link that you can click on, usually to an external site, for more information.

Another Approach to Aneutronic Fusion

2008-03-07T01:19:00.000-08:00

I ran across this article in Progressive Engineer by Eric Lerner entitled, "Stop the Suppression of an Alternative Energy Source!" and discovered that there is yet another potential fusion technology that I have been totally unaware of.

This isn't my first encounter with writing by Eric Lerner. Years ago, I read a book he authored entitled, "The Big Bang Never Happened". While not perfect, it was a very well written book that provided an alternative to big bang cosmology which I believe is much more consistent with observation than big bang cosmology.

Being familiar with this, I know Eric Lerner to be both capable of thinking outside the box as well as just thinking. This article gives some insight as to how these technologies are squelched.

Calculator Edge

2008-03-05T05:56:00.000-08:00

I heard about an interesting site for those who might either be math challenged or lazy, it's called Calculator Edge, and basically it's like having a programmable calculator with a whole bunch of formula for various applications pre-programmed in so all you have to do is punch in the numbers.

Be careful though, I did find some of the formulas are broken, particularly at extremes.

Telluric Currents

2008-02-25T18:44:00.000-08:00

Telluric currents are electrical currents flowing within the Earth or ocean water. I first stumbled upon the phenomena in the late 70's when I experimented with something known as a ghost line. This was a method of sending telegraphy without wires by using the Earth itself as a conductive medium and two sets of parallel electrodes like so:

At the sending station, a battery was keyed into two set of ground rods that were separated as far as practical and were perpendicular to the direction that it was desired to send the signal. At the receiving station, a similar pair of ground stakes was connected to a sensitive relay or other sensitive detecting device. The earth being partially conductive then acted like a voltage divider and a portion of the battery voltage keyed into the first set of ground rods, 1-2, would appear at the second set 3-4.

This was used during WWI to telegraph messages to a location inside of enemy lines. It wasn't practical to run wires across enemy lines because they could either be cut or followed to your location.

I was experimenting with sending audio this way rather than just keyed DC voltages, but one thing I discovered early on was that I could measure a voltage between the two ground rods I had places in our back yard. This couldn't have been due to battery action because both ground rods were copper so there were no dissimilar metals.

The voltages and currents involved where small but still I found it fascinating that current would come out of the Earth. Also, the current would vary from day to night and also in seemingly random manner.

Today it is thought these currents are induced into the Earth as the result of short-term changes in the magnetosphere, conductive ocean water moving across magnetic lines of force, and leakage currents from the Earth's internal dynamo.

Atmosphere to Earth currents are not considered because it is thought that they have a low value of only 1000-2000 A. I believe this to be incorrect and I believe there is evidence to support this. In spite of mainstream science insisting that Auroras are 50+ miles up, there are many many accounts on the part of Alaskans of the Auroras coming down to Earth, including crackling sounds and the smell of ozone. I have read accounts of a writhing electrical snake taking lives. I have read an account by a chemist of such coming through his laboratory and doing a great deal of damage as well as leaving him with sunburn like burns. I believe these things do happen and that this also contributes to telluric currents.

At any rate; the phenomena is still not entirely understood today although major contributing factors are understood, there are still rapid changes that are not well understood.

Journey By Starlight

2008-02-12T06:01:00.000-08:00

I ran across an interesting blog, Journey By Starlight, that deals with science in a way that is interesting. It is decidedly mainstream in the views expressed, a product of big-bangers' and relativistic gravity, and I don't mean to disrespect Einstein, but like Newton before him, his theories are incomplete; and honestly I expect that's the way it will always be.

Personally though I've discarded the "Big Bang" years ago because despite all of the dogma, it just doesn't agree, even with all the ad hoc fudge factors that were added to try to make it agree, with observation. I could provide a long list of discrepancies with observation but suffice it to say that I don't believe the Big Bang theory.

Relativity also runs into a few problems, particularly in the realm of gravity. Gravity is better explained, in my view, through shadow theories, for the simple reason that they predict some phenomena which do in fact manifest themselves in nature.

For example, take the three body system of the Sun, Earth and the Earth's moon. If bending of geodesic space-time coordinates were the explanation, then nothing special should happen when the Moon passes between the Earth and Sun. But in fact, during a solar eclipse, at totality, there is a slight dip in the gravity felt by the earth from the Sun and Moon. This is predicted by shadow gravity theories, but not by relativity.

Still, I think it's useful to know the old theories and what lead up to what is current; and the old theories still make accurate predictions in most ordinary cases. We can use Newtonian physics for the majority of every day engineering tasks because, unless we approach the speed of light, it's sufficiently accurate for engineering purposes.

Similarly, relativity fails at the quantum level, and as it happens also at the large scale universe level. However, it's still useful for many near light speed but relatively local phenomena such as what happens in particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, atom bombs, laser communications systems, etc.

So I'll just say take a look at this site; if you're a mainstream big-banger you'll love it, and even if you're not it's hard not to find the writing style fun, entertaining, and easy to comprehend.

Bussard Fusion Reactor Progress

2008-01-24T04:35:00.000-08:00

As you may know by now, Dr. Bussard passed away after losing a battle with cancer, but his reactor lives on. Continued development is now being done by a five member team calling itself EMC2 fusion, with a navy contract (the navy funded the original research).

The next in the series after the WB-6 (originally to be called the WB7) has been built, and in preliminary testing, it has produced energy in accordance with Dr. Bussards calculations. So far, everything is going according to plan. It has not been operated at the full design power levels yet however.

If this unit lives up to expectations, the next reactor built will be a commercial power level reactor. The advantage of Dr. Bussards polywell inertial electrostatic confinement design is that only electrons have to be magnetically confined, and because they have 1/2000th the mass of a proton, this is much easier to accomplish. It does not require superconductive coils or exotic materials as with a Tokamak and the machine is physically much smaller and about 1/1000th the cost.

Further, it can operate with aneutronic fuels such as Be-11/Hydrogen and in so doing eliminate the need for heavy shielding and the neutron activation that comes with neutron producing fuels such as deuterium-tritium used in most other approaches to fusion.

That WB6's successor is so far living up to design specifications provides optimism that inexpensive clean and abundant fusion energy may soon be available to the world. The small physical size of the machine will make it suitable for some transportation applications such as ships, trains, and possibly even large aircraft.

The economics of the machine will make cheap unlimited fusion power available even to the poorest nations on Earth. This single technological development may completely revolutionize life on this planet.

Gravity for the Masses

2008-01-09T03:13:00.000-08:00

I ran across, "Gravity For The Masses", doing a semi-random Google search looking for the latest and greatest in scientific breakthroughs.

I like this site; it's kind of half-baked, but half-baked in a good way. A lot of thought in progress, which for me at least has the pleasant side effect of stimulating my own thoughts. I find myself agreeing with some things, disagreeing with others, but mostly I find myself thinking.

He seems to be on to some ideas, using completely different terminology, and actually some very different views, but some ideas that parallel some thoughts I've had.

For example, I think his take on how energy is connected, these connections are truly fundamental, well, I've had some thoughts along those lines but not exactly the same.

For example, the photon, usually it connects to electrons changing orbits; maybe billions of light-years apart. But, from the photons standpoint, it's traveling at the speed of light, it sees infinite time compression, infinite length compression, so from it's perspective, these two electrons are touching, and the time to get from one to the other is zero. From our perspective, maybe billions of light-years distance and billions of years time. So here is an area where I have had a similar concept though I'm sure I arrived at it entirely differently and we certainly differ in the details.

We are limited in our thinking by our perspectives, but a handful of people have been afforded the opportunity to step out of their ordinary perspective and I think that's where breakthroughs come from. It's probably also where psychotic behavior comes from and often there does seem to be more than a casual connection between the two.

As George Bernard Shaw said, "Reasonable men adjust themselves to their environment. Unreasonable men attempt to change their environment to suit themselves. Therefore, all progress is the work of unreasonable men."

An unfortunate truth is that unreasonableness in and of itself does not guarantee progress, else this last seven years would have been presidential bliss.

I do feel this person's site, "http://www.starpulls.com/", is a positive contribution, it provides some new perspectives. So go have a look, lots of reading material there, and regardless of the scientific accuracy, and I think those who think they can judge that accurately are terribly egotistical, it's thought provoking.

Asteroid and Mars

2007-12-26T03:36:00.000-08:00

I first heard from someone that an asteroid had a 1-in-5 chance of hitting Mars on Jan 5, 2008, that it was the size of the asteroid that impacted Earth 65 million years ago.

Just went to look for details; far less exciting than that, the asteroid is the size that exploded over Tunguska in 1908. It would have been bad if you happened to be directly under the impact; but as it happens it was a remote region that mostly flattened a lot of trees. Not the major planet changing event of 65 million years ago.

The asteroid is also scheduled to possibly hit on January 30th, not January 5th, and the odds of an impact are 1-in-75 not 1-in-5. I am so disappointed but I imagine there might be some relieved Martian bacteria.

Fringe -> Mainstream

2007-11-29T16:35:00.000-08:00

I've heard guests on Coast to Coast AM (formerly Art Bell Show) suggest that solar activity could increase the likelihood of earthquakes, that is where you have a fault that is stressed to the point where it's ready to fracture and slip, a solar event could be a trigger. I've also heard guests suggest that HAARP or similar operations could induce earthquakes.

I used to dismiss these people as loony-bins but now I don't know. I dismissed these things because of the magnitudes involved, HAARP operates with gigawatts of power, and even solar events perhaps terrawatts, but given the volume of Earth, that amount of energy seemed so minuscule compared to the masses involved that it seemed impossible for them to have any significant effect.

But today I ran across this article entitled, "Telluric currents add stress to siesmoactive zones and regulate earthquake activity". I would have not thought the effects of telluric currents could be so great, and telluric currents are very much affected by things happening in the ionosphere. The ionosphere in turn is very much impacted by solar events, but can also be affected locally at least by HAARP and it's ilk.

So all of the sudden what I thought was seemingly absurd now has a physical connection and plausible cause.

Telomeres

2007-11-16T05:49:00.000-08:00

DNA strands have non-encoding ends called telomeres. Telomeres are a non-encoding G-rich repeating sequence of base units that tells the cellular DNA replicative machinery that it's reached the end of the DNA strand and prevents the ends of different DNA strands from being fused together. In humans and all functional vertebrates, that sequence is TTAGGG.

You can read about the details of nucleic acid synthesis here. One of the DNA strands can not be copied sequentially. Instead, primers are attached and replication happens backwards from that location. The resulting DNA segments are stitched together by another enzyme. This method can not replicate the very end of the DNA strand. Were it not for telomeres, coding DNA would be lost with each replication.

The telomeres perform another function. If it were not for some marker, enzymes that repair double strand DNA breaks would confuse the ends of two different chromosomes for a broken DNA strand and fuse them. Normally, when telomeres are shorted beyond a critical point, replication stops. Occasionally this type of DNA mutation happens.

Telomerase is an enzyme that adds additional base units back on to telomeres restoring their length. Telomerase is not active in normal somatic cells. DNA which codes for telomerase is present in every cell but transcription is prevented by methylation of that section of DNA. However, telomerase is active in germ cells and in proliferating cells such as the bone marrow stem cells that produce red blood cells. Actually this oversimplifies things greatly, the regulation of telomerase is actually quite complex involving other genes and proteins and is not a simple all or nothing proposition.

Initially life involved either self-replicating proteins or single strand RNA. Double strand DNA offered a form of checksum. It offered additional genetic stability that probably gave it a competitive advantage. Initially, DNA was probably in the form of a ring which allowed full sequential copying of both strands. Telomeres evolved allowing limited copying of non-circular strands of DNA. Eventually telomerase evolved providing a method of restoring the length of the telomeres.

The lack telomerase in some cells evolved not to promote the survival of the individual by providing a barrier to cancer, but rather to provide for programmed death and higher mutation rates giving our species an ability to more rapidly adapt to a changing environment. If the individuals lived significantly longer and the mutation rate was lower, genetic adaptation of our species would be slower. The suppression of telomerese in most cells was an additional evolutionary step promoting the survival of the species in a rapidly changing environment.

That our genes would posses sequences that promote the survival of the group over that of the individual is nothing new, we see examples of that in our behavior which is also genetically determined. We have a set of behaviors designed to promote the survival of the individual which we often consider primitive and which corresponds with the label, "The Id", and we have a collection of behaviors that are geared towards the survival of the group which corresponds with the label, "The Superego".

DNA which has the highest tendency to propagate successfully survives. Any quality that enhances the likelihood that a given DNA sequence will be propagated to future generations selects for that sequence. By programming the death of an organism, it can increase the survival fitness of the group, and thus itself.

Sharks have telomerase, an enzyme which lengthens telomeres, active in every cell in their body. Their telomeres don't shorten and sharks do not have a genetically programmed life span the way humans do. Sharks keep growing throughout their entire life. The limit to their lifespan is the fact that they must keep moving in order for water to circulate through their gills so that they get oxygen they need to survive. Sharks rarely get cancer. Sharks also are exceptionally genetically stable, having changed very little in hundreds of millions of years.

In humans, telomerase is active in germ cells so that each new generation begins with a full length set of telomerese. The stem cells in the bone marrow that produce red blood cells has telomerase activity allowing them to reproduce the large number of generations necessary to replace cells that only live on average three days.

If the function of telomeres was to prevent cancer by limiting the number of cellular generations, we would expect to die within about a week of birth from leukemia, both because that protection afforded by telomere shortening is not present and because blood cells reproduce extremely rapidly. Telomerase introduced into human tissue cultures to allow the cell lines to reproduce indefinitely did not cause cancer.

Telomeres do protect against cancer by preventing the ends of DNA strands from being recognized as a double strand DNA break and fused with other DNA strands. It is also possible that the competition between telomerase and telomere shortening during reproduction provides a competition that limits the rate that cells containing telomerase can reproduce as opposed to an absolute limit on generations, and in that way limit potential cancer growth.

Leukemia and other blood cancers are relatively rare. Lung, stomach, co-rectal, prostate, liver, bladder, esophagus, and oral cancers are all more common than leukemia. In addition, in humans, we also find that as we age and the telomeres get shorter, DNA transcription errors increase and mutations and cancer rates increase with them.

If the cancer protectant theory of telomeres were correct, shorter telomeres would have the effect of putting the brakes on sooner, reducing the likelihood that a cell with a defect enabling uncontrolled replication would mutate into one in which the genes for telomerase was expressed and turning into full blown cancer. If not here to protect us from cancer, why then do most of our cells have the genetic machinery for creating telomerase turned off?

Picture this; there are groups of mammals, one group develops a mutation that suppresses the expression of telomerase maybe not entirely but to the point where it's less efficient than others. This causes the individuals of this group to live a finite lifespan, where members of the other group live indefinitely save for accidents, predation, or starvation. That is to say the other group has no programmed lifespan.

The group with the telomerase suppression also has more mutations, more birth defects. The group adapts to these changes by reproducing at a higher rate enabling the group to maintain it's population against environmental limits just as the group without the mutation does.

Now, imagine a rapidly changing environment. The group without the mutation live longer and have a slower reproductive rate. A generation takes more years to pass. They have lower mutation rates so adaptive mutations take more generations to occur.

The group with the mutations, new generations come more frequently and adaptive mutations occur more frequently. In a rapidly changing environment, they out compete the more stable group.

This, in a nutshell, is why I believe we have the genetic code that disables telomerase evolved, it provided a competitive advantage to the group, even though it limited the lifespan of the individual.

Arcs and Sparks from Marx

2007-11-08T16:42:00.001-08:00

On that page I stumbled across the Marx generator. The Marx generator is a method of generating a high voltage pulse. It works by charging a number of capacitors in parallel (through resistors) and discharging them in series (through spark gaps).

This page from Penguins Lab has a good description and photos. Unfortunately, he does not specify where he obtained the capacitors from. A cursory search with Google didn't yield positive results. I think it would be interesting to build one of these with a couple of hundred stages instead of twenty.

The question becomes one of where to get the necessary components, and what to use as a support to build it on because few things are effective insulators when you're talking several megavolts.

Also, this unit used 1 NF 20 KV capacitors:

The resulting unit takes approximately two seconds to charge and produces a relatively weak spark. I think I would like to use larger capacitor values so the resulting spark would be higher current and not so weak, lower value resistors and a higher current source so the charging of someone larger capacitors wouldn't take forever.

Dealing with higher currents on the input side of coarse means you need to be real cautious. The amount of current you're going to get from a computer monitor flyback like the setup shown on the Penguins Lab page is trivial and while capable of providing some physical pain, is not sufficient to be lethal and the only real injury threat is what you might smack when you rapidly withdraw your hand after getting zapped. Neither does the amount of energy stored in a 1NF capacitor represent a significant hazard but upscaling would change that.

Still, to scale this up to the megavolt range and use larger capacitors, if they could be afforded, is hard to resist.

Arcs and Sparks

2007-11-08T02:13:00.000-08:00

I stumbled across, "More Arcs and Sparks", which has some fantastic photos and videos of very long high voltage electrical arcs and an exploding substation transformer. If you like high voltage electrical discharges, this page is a must see.

Nasa Tether Experiment Video Follow-up

2007-08-26T13:25:00.001-07:00

This is a follow-up regarding a NASA tether video I had posted earlier.

After the tether broke, this video gives the impression of living things swarming the tether. They seem to have internal structure, and they appear to be huge, given that the kilometer long tether is 88 nautical miles away by this time.

However, this video, which is widely distributed, is an excerpt of a longer video and in that longer video there is a point where the focus shifts from the tether far away to up close, at which point the dust particles come into focus and can be seen for what they are, then it shifts back to the tether.

The video when seen in full proves that NASA's rather mundane explanation for these objects, that they are simply out of focus dust particles, is the correct one.

I am curious as to the nature of the cameras they use on the shuttle. I haven't seen artifacts like that created by any camera I have ever used.

Earth's Ionosphere, Magnetosphere, Auroras, LDE's

2007-07-27T02:57:00.000-07:00

I've been fascinated by radio since I was a young child. Radio seems to be a connection between our physical world and some sort of ether world outside of physical existence.

Speak into a microphone, modulate a transmitter, and if the signal is a high enough frequency to make it through the ionosphere, it goes out into space forever. Millennia after I'm gone from this worldly plain, signals, modulated with my voice, will still be traveling through space.

If the frequency isn't high enough to make it through the ionosphere, well there is where some truly interesting stuff happens. There the signal may be absorbed, and since we know energy can neither be created nor destroyed, that means the signal is simply converted into some other form of energy. Or, the signal may be refracted back to Earth.

People commonly say the ionosphere "reflects" signals, but more properly it "refracts" them. The actual mechanics involve the interaction of an electromagnetic wave with free electrons in the ionosphere. In real terms the difference is that above a certain critical angle, the electromagnetic wave will not be directed back towards the Earth's surface and there is phase shift and absorption. In the simplest of terms though it acts like a reflection if the frequency isn't too high or the angle isn't too steep.

There was a certain sense of immortality involved in radio. My voice will live on after I am long gone. There are phenomena involved that seemed to me, still seem to me, mystical and magical. One such phenomena that I occasionally encountered was something known as long delayed echo. Basically, one here's an echo of the transmission delayed more than a simple reflection from the ionosphere can account for.

When I was operating my pirate radio station back in the mid 1970s, the frequency we normally ran on was 1200 Khz. At that time, there were a number of clear channel assignments, AM frequencies that only one station was permitted to transmit on at night, allowing reception of that station pretty much anywhere in the country (and many areas outside of the United States borders).

The only other station on 1200 Khz at the time was WOAI in San Antonio, Texas. We chose that frequency because WOAI's signal was extremely weak in the Seattle area allowing our 100 watt signal to be heard over a fairly substantial distance. I never did receive any reports of it being received via skip however.

LDE, the phenomena of long delayed echoes is a truly strange one. When we operated our bootleg radio station, we had an off-the-air monitor (radio) to monitor our broadcast and make sure things were sounding good. When we'd turn the transmitter off, the AGC on the receiver would bring the gain up and you'd then here whatever noise was present on the frequency. Occasionally, I'd hear the last fraction of a second of our own broadcast repeat.

What made this possible? I don't know but the ionosphere, magnetosphere, their interaction with each other, and with the solar wind, are all much stranger than commonly though. However, I do know that we received no reports of skip. Even if the signal had been strong enough to be reflected back to us, a trip around the Earth only takes about 1/7th of a second, the ionosphere and back only a few milliseconds, not long enough to account for the phenomena.

If not ionospheric, then what else could it be? One theory of LDE's is that, under the right conditions, a signal is converted into acoustic energy in the plasma of the ionosphere, travels some distance as an acoustic wave (which travels at the speed of sound in the ionosphere), and then is converted back to an electromagnetic wave. Mmm, maybe...

I should add all of this was happening before we had HAARP muddying the waters further. A funny thing about HAARP, I have heard and read all sorts of rumors about it's capabilities being far greater than originally documented. Originally, HAARP was looking at using RF "heating" of the ionosphere, to intensify ionization in a region, to allow the bouncing of VHF and UHF signals that normally would not be reflected, back to the Earth's surface. This would allow things like over the horizon radar and military communications over the horizon.

Recently, it was discovered that acoustic waves, sound, within the Sun, is coupled into the Sun's magnetic field lines. It is these sound waves propagating in the magnetic field lines heat the chromosphere to 20,000 °C, and the corona one to two million °K, and during extreme activity as high as 3.6 million °K.

Many of the Suns magnetic field lines loop back upon themselves, but some do not and travel out into space and past our planet. They interact with the Earth's magnetic field lines, and charged particles of the solar wind traveling along the Sun's magnetic field lines couple into the Earth's and travel along the Earth's magnetic field lines, entering the atmosphere near the poles, exciting atoms in the upper atmosphere causing them to glow which is the phenomena we know as the Auroras.

I believe this system allows the coupling of the acoustic waves into the Sun all the way into the Earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere, and atmosphere, and even into the planet itself.

Image from Wikipedia Commons
This image is in the public domain.
Derived from an image created by NASA.

Because protons and electrons in the solar wind have the same magnitude of charge (opposite polarity) but differ in mass by a factor of 2,000, the electrons spiral along magnetic field lines more tightly than protons. I believe this creates a separation of charge that is the root of the charge between the ionosphere and the Earth rather than lighting. Lightning, I believe, is actually discharging this potential not charging it. That is evidenced by the increase in lightning activity during solar maximums.

What all this is leading up to is that I believe the Earth's magnetosphere and the Sun's are intimately
connected, and that coupling adds energy to the planetary system that results in climate changes as well as internal activity. I believe it is probably the this complex system that somehow accounts for LDE's.

Some of the things I've seen on the net, like a proposal to alter the ionosphere to protect low Earth orbiting satellites during a high altitude nuclear explosion or a extreme solar event, suggest that our military knows a lot more about the workings of the ionosphere and it's interaction with the Sun than the civilian sector.

Because the ionosphere is a non-linear medium, it is possible to transmit to high frequency signals, the difference of which is the desired frequency to be created, and by doing so create signals in the ELF range. The military sees this as a possible method of communicating with submerged submarines since ELF penetrates the oceans. It also penetrates land, and is a potential method of seeing underground structures.

The most interesting low frequencies are near the Schumann resonance where the resonant cavity formed by the ionosphere and Earth tend to amplify certain frequencies.

An interesting aspect of frequencies near the Schumann resonance is that these are also frequencies close to those of human brain waves, and it has already been shown that external fields will entrain the brain and by extension affect states of consciousness. It is possible to entrain the brain to a low frequency and induce relaxation, lethargy, or sleep, or to higher frequencies, and induce alertness, anxiety, excitation, and irritation.

The creation of these low frequency signals of high amplitude can also effect the Earth's magnetic field lines, and in turn steer where particles from the solar wind penetrate the atmosphere. This has the potential to be used as an extremely destructive weapon.

Another potential use, and I can't help but wonder if the military isn't exploring this although I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, is the potential to extract huge quantities of energy from the ionosphere in the form of a DC electric current.

In short, the ionosphere is conductive, the Earth is conductive. A charge of between 100 v/meter and
300 v/meter exists between the ionosphere and ground. The interesting thing here is that it is also claimed that the ionosphere has a potential to ground of about 300KV. The problem here is if this were true then the ionosphere would only be 1-3 kilometers above the Earth, so something is wrong with one of those figures. Either the field strength has to be lower, or the total potential higher. If one could create an ionized column from the ground to the ionosphere, a huge current would discharge through that ionized column. The amount of energy involved would be unimaginably huge.

Well, just a few thoughts, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this subject. There is so much more I could say about this subject, and will say in the future, but I've got to do some work so can't spend all night writing.

The Scientific Method

2007-07-26T04:30:00.000-07:00

The Scientific method does not lend itself well to the examination of phenomena which are transient in nature are are not repeatable upon demand or perhaps at all.

It annoys me that mainstream science dismisses out of hand anything which it can not address. Mainstream science can't make an extraterrestrial space craft appear, nor can it make a predictive vision or dream happen on demand. Cold fusion can't be reproduced with 100% success. Gravity shielding can't be reproduced at the same level that Podklenov claimed.

There are phenomena in nature that just don't lend themselves to production on demand, either because we don't understand all the circumstances necessary for their production or because we can not produce the circumstances necessary for their production.

If you've experienced one or more of these phenomena then, to the degree you trust your own sanity, you know they are real, but a third party will tend to have less faith in your sanity than you. Until and unless enough people experience a phenomena for it to become part of our consensus reality it won't be accepted by the scientific community unless it can become scientifically proven, which again phenomena which are not repeatable upon demand do not lend themselves to.

I think in part this is due to arrogance in the mainstream scientific community who are largely under the mistaken belief that they already know 99% of everything there is to know. I don't think we, as a species, are anywhere close to understanding ourselves or the universe of which we are apart. I believe there is still much to be learned, and that the best position from which to learn is one of not assuming what we think we know is absolute truth.

I try to look at all of our existing knowledge as models that make useful predictions about reality not as an absolute explanation of reality. I think this is a healthier approach that leaves more open to learning and discovery than the more common dogmatic approach.

I try to gather the data that doesn't fit, hoping enough data might eventually point to a new better theory that makes more accurate and complete predictions about our reality.

Meteor

2007-07-22T18:36:00.000-07:00

If you hadn't had enough coffee that day, this would wake you up.

NASA Tether Video

2007-07-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

This has been out for a while but I still don't know what to make of it. I'd post on the forum but haven't figured out how to make phpbb3 allow html yet.

The tether is supposed to be eighty miles away at the time this is filmed. These circular objects are dismissed by NASA as being ice crystals. Yet, you can see them pass behind the tether in the video which would make them several miles in diameter.

Viewzone Magazine

2007-07-22T14:36:00.000-07:00

I added a new site, Viewzone Magazine.

There is a difficulty in the field of science. On the one hand, there are 6.4 billion individuals on this planet, many of them have very active imaginations, and many of those have access to the Internet. You can't believe everything you read, a very large percentage is bogus.

On the other hand, if you stick to peer reviewed journals like Nature, you'll only rarely find anything printed which contradicts established theories and thus very little progress is possible.

Viewzone has a lot of questionable material, but they also have a lot of leading edge, you won't hear about it elsewhere, material. As fringe science sites go I think this site has quite a lot of good information in the mix. But you have to exercise some critical thinking and responsibility when you read this site.