The Montreal Protocol

The Montreal Protocol subsumes that without human intervention the amount of ozone in the stratosphere is invariant and that a decline in ozone over time is a trend and not part of long run cyclical phenomenon. The observed depletion is thus assumed to be man-made and the causative agent is identified as CFC. As a result of these conclusions a global ban on Freon refrigerants was hastily issued. The ban and its rationale are controversial.

The Protocol has caused hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide and at the same time it has created a black market for Freon of which the news media have taken note. News reports portray the Montreal Protocol as good and the black market as bad. A close examination of the data raises serious questions as to the validity of this judgement.

The ultraviolet spectrum in incident solar radiation comes in three frequency bands. The high energy band (200-240 nanometers in wavelength) and the medium energy band (240-300 nanometers in wavelength) are harmful to living matter and are absorbed in the ozone layer while the low energy band (300-480 nanometers in wavelength) reaches the earth’s surface and causes tanning.

Ozone plays a role in the absorption of harmful UV radiation. It is both created and destroyed in the absorption process. The high-energy band UV is absorbed by oxygen molecules. The energy absorbed causes the oxygen molecule to break apart into extremely reactive oxygen atoms. A subsequent chance collision of these particles with other oxygen molecules causes the formation of ozone. The ozone thus formed then absorbs the medium-energy UV band and disintegrates back into oxygen.

The UV absorption process is a cyclical one that begins and ends with oxygen. Ozone is a transient intermediate product of this process. The reason that there is any ozone accumulation at all in the stratosphere is that, of the three reactions, the second is the slowest. Sunset finds the stratosphere with an excess of single oxygen atoms still looking for a date with an oxygen molecule. Overnight, with no radiation to destroy their product, these particles build up an inventory of ozone whose destruction will begin anew at sunrise.

There is therefore, a diurnal cycle in the ozone content of the stratosphere whose amplitude, incidentally, is of the same order of magnitude as reported ozone depletion that caused Montreal Protocol to be invoked. A longer but irregular cyclical pattern in stratospheric ozone coincides with the sunspot cycle. The period is approximately eleven years. It has been as long as 17 and as short as 8 years. High-energy band UV increases by 6 to 10% during periods of high sunspot activity but the medium-energy UV emission is largely unaffected. Therefore, high sunspot activity favors ozone accumulation and low sunspot activity is coincident with ozone depletion.

A somewhat similar pattern exists in the case of polar ozone holes. The UV induced reactions described above occur only over the tropics where sunlight is direct. Ozone is formed over the equator and not over the poles. Equatorial ozone is distributed to the poles by the polar vortexes. These are very large hurricane-like roughly circular wind formations around each of the poles. They exist only in the upper atmosphere where there is no weather but where there is ozone.

The shape and position of the vortex varies seasonally and also shifts over a longer time cycle. Under certain conditions and in certain seasons each vortex blows ozone from the equator to the pole. Under other flow patterns the vortex does not distribute ozone to the pole. The latter state of nature becomes manifest as an ozone hole. These holes come and go by cyclical changes in the polar vortexes.

CFCs or other artificial devices are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the ozone hole phenomenon. The case against CFCs is that when they get to the stratosphere by diffusion, they absorb high-energy band UV and form unstable and reactive chlorine atoms. The chlorine atom particles then participate as catalytic agents to convert ozone back to oxygen. In other words they mediate the reaction between atomic oxygen particles and ozone.

It is alleged that the destruction of ozone by this mechanism exposes the surface of the earth to dangerous levels of medium-band UV because there is not enough ozone in the stratosphere to absorb them. Although these reactions can be carried out in the chemistry lab, there are certain rate constraints that make them irrelevant in the stratosphere.

The air up there in the stratosphere is rather thin, containing less than one percent of the molecular density of air at sea level. It is not easy for a molecular particle in random thermal motion to find another particle to react with. Photochemical reactions occur instantaneously while those that require a collision of two particles take longer. This difference in the reaction rate is the reason that ozone accumulates overnight and why there is an inventory of ozone in the ozone layer.

The atomic oxygen particles that react with oxygen molecules to form ozone could in theory react with an ozone molecule instead and cause its destruction or it could react with another atomic oxygen particle and form oxygen instead of ever forming any ozone. Some of the oxygen atoms do behave in this manner but these reactions proceed too slowly to be important to the chemistry of the stratosphere. The reason is that the stratospheric chemicals in question exist in minute quantities.

One in a million particles is an ozone molecule or an atomic oxygen particle and one in a billion is CFC or chlorine generated from CFC. The accidental collision between chlorine atoms and ozone molecules or between chlorine atoms and oxygen atoms are rarer than those between two oxygen atoms or that between an oxygen atom and an ozone molecule. Therefore the latter collisions are more important to ozone depletion than those mediated by chlorine.

Considering that more than 200,000 out of a million molecular particles in the stratosphere are oxygen molecules it is far more likely that charged oxygen atoms will collide with oxygen molecules rather than with each other or with ozone. Therefore ozone rather than oxygen is formed. Ozone formation is a rate phenomenon.

Since chlorine atoms are a thousand times rarer in the stratosphere than atomic oxygen particles, it is not likely that chlorine’s mediation in short circuiting ozone generation will occur sufficiently fast to be important. Nature already contains an ozone destruction mechanism that is more efficient than the CFC mechanism but ozone forms anyway.

All of the ozone depletion and ozone hole data may be explained in terms of natural processes. The explanation offered by the CFC theorists and the Montreal Protocol is a redundant innovation and in any case it suffers from deficiencies having to do with rate phenomena. In other words, these reactions are too slow to be important. 

For empirical tests of the Rowland-Molina theory of ozone depletion please see:
https://chaamjamal.wordpress.com/2018/04/01/ozone-depletion-and-ozone-holes/

Cha-am Jamal
http://chaamjamal.com

The global warming hypothesis versus history

The Fang Zhi is kind of a government gazette that has been issued by Chinese governments for thousands of years. Data on extreme weather events and famines are included in this gazette. The data show that floods and droughts are common in China and that they are periodically particularly severe. A cyclical pattern of famines caused by severe droughts and floods may be traced back through all of recorded history in China. The period of this cycle has been estimated to be about fifty years. A peculiarity of this weather cycle is that floods and droughts can occur at the same time in China because weather in southern China is about 180 degrees out of phase with that in northern China. History has recorded many cases when the south is flooding from torrential rainfall while the north is in drought or conversely when the north is flooding and the south is dry. Much of the sociology, philosophy, literature, and politics of China have been shaped by the flood and drought cycle. Some scholars go so far as to claim that all of Chinese history is one of the people’s fight against famine caused by this calamitous cycle of weather. One of the largest infrastructure projects in history is the failed attempt to link southern Chinese rainfall with northern Chinese rainfall using a very ambitious canal network. The construction and maintenance of granaries on an immense scale has consumed a succession of Chinese dynasties while famines have been the downfall of others. The current drought in Hainan and Guangdong along with torrential rains and floods in northern China fits the known pattern of extreme weather in China. If you truncate history at 1961, however, these weather events will appear to be unusual and unnatural. An equal and unnatural cause for this kind of weather may then be assessed. In particular, those with a predisposition to the global warming hypothesis contained in the Kyoto Protocol will find in these events the kind of evidence they seek to support their position (See for example, Waiting in vain for rain that’s two years late has Hainan’s farmers fretting about their future, The Nation, June 3, 2005). Fossil fuel consumption has risen dramatically since 1961. The data also show what appears to be an irregular increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere in parallel with rising fuel consumption. At the same time we find the average temperature of the earth has been rising since 1979. It is tempting to draw a causal link from fossil fuels to CO2 and from CO2 to temperature and from there to freaky weather events. These relationships appear so convincing that no further scientific evidence is sought to support the subsumed causalities. In the Chinese weather data however, the global warming enthusiasts have been undone by the Fang Zhi. Their claim that fossil fuel consumption is to be blamed for this year’s drought in southern China and floods in northern China appears specious in light of history. http://www.chaamjamal.com 

MY OLD WEIRD BUT TRUE PAGE FROM THE 1990S 

Weird But True: The world is weirder than science. compiled and edited by jamal munshi, all rights reserved

THE FINDINGS REPORTED HERE ARE DATED FROM THE 1950S TO THE 1990S

#1: NATURE'S HACKERS: The larva that hatches from the egg that the parasitic wasp attached to her body a week ago reprograms the spider to weave a hammock where the larva may cocoon and pupate. The larva can tell when the hammock is ready and it is only then that it administers a lethal injection and eats its hammock weaver, nutrition being her only remaining utility. (William Eberhard, University of Costa Rica, November 2000.

#2: IT'S ALL IN THE MIND: If you are right handed and your left-handed penmanship is gibberish, it will also be gibberish if you close your eyes and simply imagine yourself writing with your left hand. Practice in your head until you get it right with your left, then write. Voila! you can! But why? (Misty Hyman, the gold medalist in the 100-meter breaststroke at Sidney-Australia, practiced for the event by lying in bed with a stop watch and swimming the race in her mind stroke for stroke until she got her time down to where she wanted it. The next day she repeated her performance in water - exactly.) (october 2000).

SLEEP ON IT: When you sleep, the electrical activity of your brain does not decrease, it increases. According to Robert Stickgold, we don't sleep to rest but to figure out stuff that our conscious awake-mind could not. To work smarter, take more naps. (October 2000)

NEURON REGENERATION: Did your science textbook teach you that after a certain age the brain can no longer regenerate? They've changed their minds about that. The brain not only manufactures new neurons all the time but these neurons are able to migrate to different parts of the brain and assume the needed functional form. (Elizabeth Gould, Princeton University) (1999)

DICTYOSTELIUM DISCOIDEUM: These normally single celled creatures can gather together and form a multicelled creature when the going gets tough. The new multicelled creature is a creature in every way complete with cell specialization, a reproductive system, and even self-awareness. Apply this concept to yourself; and to bee hives, schools of fish, flocks of birds, mobs, society, and the stock market. and what do you make of those textbook theories that it took millions of years for single celled organisms to evolve into multicelled organisms? (UC San Diego, 1999)

BUT WILL IT FLY? Apply all the physics and aerodynamics that we know to the weight, shape, wing design, power transmission, and control technology of a housefly and you will conclude that it won't fly. We know how to put a man on the moon but we don't know what makes a fly fly. Michael is working on it. (Michael Dickinson) 1999

GEOPHAGY: The Otomac Indians who live along the Orinoco River in Venezuela hunt for fish with bows and arrows when the water is low but for two or three months of the year when the water is too high and rapid to hunt for fish, they survive on a diet of mud balls. the mud balls do not contain any nutrient that we can recognize but these Indians remain healthy and strong throughout the dirt eating season. Alexander Von Humboldt, 1828).

DEINOCOCCUS RADIODURANS: We know that this bacterium can withstand 3000 times the radioactivity that would kill a human but we don't know the how or why of it. When radiation causes DNA damage it instantly and mysteriously effects repairs. Our preconditions for the existence of life are way off the mark.1999

AFRICAN AMERICA: As the Sahara Desert expands southward, giant dust storms carry a billion tons per year of African topsoil to AMERICA in plumes of red-brown clouds across the Atlantic. The dust is deposited in the S.E. United States, the Caribbean, and the Amazon basin. On the bahamas agriculture depends on african soil. This African dust is rich in nutrients but it also contains live insects, icroorganisms, and fungi. Red sunsets in Florida, usually in july, signal the arrival of African dust. There is a lot of Africa in America. (wind erosion research unit, Kansas State University, 1999)

THE STUFF OF LIFE: There is more to inheritance than DNA. Simple protein molecules in yeast cells can change their shape in response to an environmental change and then pass this trait on to succeeding generations of yeast without any intervention by DNA. Protein molecules mimic life in mysterious ways. (Susan Lindquist, University of Chicago, 1999)

GIANT SPHERES: In the Diquis Delta in Southern Costa Rica are a large number of ancient granite spheres up to 6 feet in diameter with no apparent clues to their origin or purpose. Ivar thinks they may be the remnants of a lost civilization. (Ivar Zapp, 1998)

DARWINISM DEBUNKED: I the origin of species lies in random mutations over millions and millions of years then why does the fossil record show sudden explosions of new species usually following cataclysmic events? Maybe it's not so random. Maybe we possess the genetic codes in dormant form to grow tails or feathers or whatever we need in response to climactic changes and it is these changes and not random mutation that drives evolution. (Stephen Jay Gould and Susan Lindquist ) in a controlled laboratory experiment of simulated climactic changes Susan Lindquist of the University of Chicago was able to cause fruit flies to undergo such changes within a few generations.) 1998

GIANT SUCKING SOUND: Imagine a sea-serpent with tentacles so large they could tear out both goalposts of a football field from the 50-yard line. No one has seen a live Giant Squid and lived to tell about it but we have seen the evidence in disgorged stomachs of whales and the scars left on these whales from the battle of behemoths in the deep. (Richard Ellis in The Search for the Giant Squid)

NANOBACTERIA: In 1997 we did not even know they existed but they have been right under our noses all along. They form more than half the living matter of our oceans and there are millions of them in our blood. These bacteria are even smaller than viruses but they are alive and they reproduce on their own. There is no known lower limit to the size of life. (Ovi Kajander, Finland: Ed Weiler, NASA: 1998)

THEM ANTS: Red harvester ants and fruit flies at the Hanford Nuclear Complex in Richland, Washington are radioactive and they are spreading the radioactivity around. (Associated Press, 1998) (BTW: Hanford is where we produce plutonium for our nuclear bombs.)

SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES: Provocative words hidden among banal text will raise your pulse and blood pressure even when you don't know what these words were.(Sean Draine, University of Washington, 1998)

THE HUMAN INTERFAFCE: Write a little program so that when the cursor moves to a different part of the screen the computer says a different word or makes a unique sound. now wire your brain to the mouse port with a neurotrophic electrode so that your brain's electrical activity moves the cursor. at first the motion will be a frenetic mess but soon you will gain control of the cursor and you will know how to make the computer make the sound you want it to make but you won't know how you do that. (Roy Bakay, Emory University, 1998)

VANISHING AMPHIBIANS:
Frogs and toads are dying off at an alarming rate and we can't figure out why. It could be pollution, or the ozone hole, or a fungus called chytrid, or all of these or none of these. (David Wake, Berkeley)

THE OLDEST PROFESSION:
After becoming pregnant with their true love female Adelie Penguins on Ross Island in Antarctica prostitute themselves to other males in exchange for rocks. They need rocks to build their nests but rocks are hard to find because horny males hoard them. (Nigel Barley, British Airways Inflight Magazine, June 1998)

THE PIONEER ANOMALY: To make the speed and trajectory of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft fit the data John had to assume a force that is slowing them down as they leave the solar system; and unlike gravity this mystery force does not diminish with distance; it exerts a constant force but it does not exist in any physics that we know. (John Anderson, JPL).

ORCAS:
The capture of the Orca "Namu" in 1965 would not have been possible without his cooperation. Namu was an intelligent and willing participant in his own capture. (Randall Eaton) (btw: according to Randall the orcas are actually sentient beings just like us; and they are not only aware of us but actively trying to make contact to form a joint stewardship of the planet.)

COSMIC RAYS:

We know that all of space exists in a continuous shower of protons travelling at almost the speed of light but we don't know where these things come from, how they got to travelling so fast, and what effect they might have on genetic material. They might turn out to be the mechanism that causes aging and the random mutations subsumed by Darwin. (John Walker, University of Chicago HEP, papers)

OLD AGE
We are a superorganism consisting of living cells that divide and die but why does the superorganism die? Leonard thinks it is because a chemical counter called Telomeres that is necessary for cell division depletes each time our cells divide. The cells eventually run out of this stuff and die and take us with them. In the limit we simply die of old age. (BTW: doctors invent medically acceptable causes of death in such cases.) (Leonard Hayflick)

LIFE AFTER THE HAYFLICK LIMIT

H Lee Sweeney isolated the gene that produces the hormone that normally maintains muscle tissue, wrapped it into a benign virus, and injected it into the muscle of laboratory mice whose muscles were wasting away either with age or muscular dystrophy and the muscles returned to youthful health and vigor. (Pennsylvania Muscle Institute, 1998)

IT'S ALL IN THE MIND:

Just as we are conditioned to survive and mate, so we are also programmed to age and die. it's software. you don't have to do it. (Deepak Chopra, 1999)

THE FIVE WEIRDNESSES:

According to Charles hundreds of carefully designed experiments have shown that humans use telepathy, clairvoyance, pre-cognition, psychokinesis, and faith-healing but we don't know how they do these things because they are inconsistent with the universe described by science. (Charles Tart)

THE HUMAN SUBJECT

Wearing t-shirt and jeans take the subject to a windowless room with a panic button and tell him that this is an experiment and if the experiment goes wrong to press the emergency panic button. He will sit there for hours without pushing the panic button and without any ill effects. But if you wear a lab coat and have the subject sign a release; then take him to the same room and inform him that this is a sensory deprivation experiment and if it starts to go wrong he must push the panic button he will do so within an hour and display symptoms normally associated with sensory deprivation. (John Lilly)

THE POWER OF PRAYER?
Grow mold in two identical petri dishes 1 and 2 and pray for dish-1 and don't pray for dish-2. The mold in dish-1 will grow bigger. 1998. (The National Institute of Health and Office of Alternative Medicine) (btw: in a similar experiment in 1986 at UCSF, 24 heart patients were randomly assigned to two groups of 12 and the group receiving prayers did better.)

FAITH HEALS

Reproducible scientific experiments carried out by Harold Koenig of Duke University show that people who have a religion, any religion, are healthier, are more disease resistant, and live longer than those who don't. (see also the book by Dale Matthews, 1998)

THE HUMAN PERSPECTIVE
According to human beings only they are capable of intelligence, design, choice, mirth, anger, anguish, love, compassion, and kindness and the other critters just carry out nature's programming. but what was the program that drove a hippopotamus to rescue an impala from the jaws of a crocodile and then try to resuscitate her? and what would you have made of it had it been a human instead of a hippo? (Stephanie Leland in "peaceful kingdom", 1998)

LAUGHING RATS

Young lab rats laugh in ultrasound when tickled and when engaging in horseplay in what appears to be evidence of mirth in the animal kingdom. (Jaak Panksepp, Bowling Green State University, 1998)

THE PRINCE OF SNAKES

Boonruang Buachan of Thailand communicates and makes friends with snakes and insects. He has been seen hanging out with king cobras and scorpions and even kissing them. (The Press Democrat)

ANGIOGENESIS:
When we need to, some of us can grow our own heart-bypass blood vessels; and now Tom says that anyone can if injected with a growth hormone that he has genetically engineered. (Thomas-Joseph Stegmann, Fulda Medical Center, Germany)

URINE HEALS

To build up your immune system or to fight off AIDS, Cancer, or Anemia, drink the urine of a pregnant woman. (Robert Gallo in Nature Medicine.)

CHEMISTRY
We are constantly communicating with each other by discharging into the air colorless and odorless chemicals that form our social glue and determine how we interact and mate. (Martha Mcclintock, University of Chicago)

BIG BANG BUSTED:

Red shift measurements indicate that the universe is falling apart against the force of gravity. Therefore there must have been a big bang and the resultant expansion should be slowing down over time due to gravity. But it isn't. It's speeding up. (Robert Kirshner, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

GENDER WARS

Witch burnings and Misogyny are left over embers from a war fought in 3500 BC in which a goddess-worshipping matriarchal culture that ruled Europe peacefully for thousands of years was defeated and subjugated by a patriarchal warrior culture from the east that worshipped male dieties. (Marija Gimbutas) (the book)

SIDS

Infants sometimes check out of their incarnation without a medical reason or clues to the cause of their death. Medical science once thought they understood SUDDEN INFANT DEATH SYNDROME but their "congenital disease" theory was debunked because their data set was tainted. Several crib death cases in a family turned out to be infanticide. When you take that family out of the sample, the family correlation disappears; but for 25 years the theory stood as text book science and was taught as fact. (Philip Hilts, AP wire)

DON'T WORRY BE HAPPY

The single strongest predicter of heart disease has nothing to do with diet, exercise, obesity, or smoking and everything to do with your attitude. When it comes to healthy hearts the don't-worry-be-happy crowd has the edge over the angry or the depressed.(Hillel Cohen, Albert Einstein College of Medicine)

DON'T WORRY BE PREGNANT

Alice Domar taught stress reduction to 174 infertile women and 77 of them became pregnant and another 68 eventually conceived. (Alice Domar, Harvard University Infertility Program, 1998)

HISTORY WE WILL NEVER KNOW

In the 1550s in Mexico Franciscan Bishop Fray Diego de Landa torched the entire collection of Mayan writings because they contradicted the Bible. The collection consisted of thousands of volumes and it took Fray Diego many years to complete the job. The Mayans also left mountains of Hieroglyphic sculptures but these were mined for gravel and destroyed. Most of history has left no trace. Our account of it is biased by the availability of data.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

Boys playing in a desert cave near Qumran in Judea in 1947 came upon thousands of bottles containing papyrus scrolls dating back more than 2000 years. As we re-write our version of the past from these scrolls we find that Jesus Christ was not the only charismatic and messianic cult leader that preached apocalypse and a second coming in that period but he was the only one that did not set a specific date for Armageddon. The others failed when the world did not end when it was supposed to end. (Michael Wise, 1999).

RONGO RONGO
In 1868 European explorers in Easter Island discovered hundreds of wooden tablets of hieroglyphs called rongorongo which the natives could not interpret and which must have been left over from a previous more literate civilization. Twenty one of these tablets have survived and an intense and enduring international effort to decipher these tablets has been waged since 1892 with many scholarly articles in the Journal of Polynesian Society, Scientific American, Nature, and American Anthropologist but to no avail. Upon scrutiny all the rongorongo theories turn out to be wrongowrongo. We have in our hands an intricate message from a previous civilization but we don't know what it says and we will probably never know. (Jacques Guy) (the fischer theory) 1999

THE JAINIST UNIVERSE

It is not possible for the universe to be limited in either space or time; therefore it is infinitely large and has no beginning and no end; therefore it could not have been created; therefore it has no creator. (Mahavira, 500 BC)

CATCH PREY AND AVOID PREDATORS

If you no longer see the paintings on your wall, re-arrange them and you will. The information processing mechanism of your conscious mind is designed for survival in the wild where only the unusual contains useful information. Once your mind decides that some pattern is familiar the pattern will be classified as background noise and discarded as a source of survival information. (Lyall Watson)

THE MISSING LINK

If we evolved from foreheadless knuckle dragging bipedal apes then where is the evidence of the in-between variety, like an ape with a developed brain, that must have existed at some time? So compelling were the Darwinian scenarios and the bipedal connection that scientific theory went ahead of the data being certain the evidence would turn up any day. But it hasn't yet. Maybe it doesn't exist. (James Burke) (btw: according to Lloyd Pye the ape lineage begot bigfoot not us. He says we are space bastards. 50,000 years ago man-like space creatures from an advanced civilization came to earth to dig for gold in South Africa and genetically engineered some miners by using genetic material from themselves and from apes; and we are the Darwinian descendents of those gold diggers.)

SPIRAL GALAXIES

We know that space is full of rotating elliptical disks with spiral arms that consist of billions of stars and star-like gaseous substances spinning around as if they are draining out of a cosmic sink. but we don't know what makes them spin. so we invented imaginary and "invisible" point masses weighing more than a billion suns called "black holes" just to make sense out of it all. it's how we make the universe conform to our equations. (Washington State university, Astronomy Lecture)

EXPANDING EARTH

Ever notice how all the continents fit together like a jigsaw puzzle? Maybe they were all stuck together once into one large landmass and then got pried apart. Karl thinks it's because the earth was smaller once and all land and then it expanded like a balloon and ripped the continents apart. (Karl Luckert)

CORONAL MASS EJECTION

Every once in a while the sun burps up a 10 billion ton ball of fire and magentism and spits it out in photon torpedo fashion at over 2 millions miles per hour. ([ORLANDO] [NASA]) (btw: according to Charles Cagle if we get hit with one of these things we will be fried or drowned in Biblical fashion)

DARK MATTER

We cannot make the motion of the galaxies fit our theory of gravity without filling 99% of the universe with imaginary stuff that exerts gravitational force but is not detectable by any other means; not unlike the angels that once carried the heavenly bodies across the heavens.

EXOTIC MATTER

Scientists believe in the principle of conservation of mass and energy according to which things don't just pop out of nothing. but particles do pop out of nothing even if for a fleeting moment. To preserve their conservation principle scientists have invented 'exotic matter' which has negative mass, claiming that a gram of negative mass is created for every gram of particle that pops out of nothing giving god a net gain of zero which is nothing. So there you have it. (Jean Cavelos, 1999)

CIRCULAR SCIENCE

The religion of a society tells us a lot about their culture and nothing about god. and so science tells us a lot about ourselves and nothing about the universe. What we "discover" about the universe is simply our perception of our own conception. We perceive what we conceive. When science has progressed the farthest, the mind has regained from nature what the mind had put into nature." (Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington). Always a good read..

THE MAGIC OF GARLIC

To avoid illness eat lots of garlic. It contains a chemical called Allicin that kills bugs even if they are resistant to antibiotics. Garlic is our last hope against the tough new resistant strains of bacteria. (Meir Wilchek, Weizmann Institute of sSience)

THE MAGIC OF MUSIC

Don Campbell had a 1-inch blood clot in an artery that led to his brain. so he hummed until the clot shrank. Don calls it "the Mozart effect". he has written a book about it. (btw: at UC Irvine Mozart's sonata for two pianos in D major increased S.A.T. scores of students by 51 points. At St.Agnes hospital, Bach, Debussy, Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Mozart are substitutes for sedatives for the critically ill. In Washington State Mexican immigrants learn English faster when listening to Bach. and Georgi Lozanov of Bulgaria found that Vivaldi makes it easier to memorize poetry.) (from USA Weekend Magazine)

MUSCULAR RESONANCE

Muscles consist of elastic tissue stretched tight by tendons attached to bones - not unlike stringed instruments - and the sympathetic vibration of these muscle strings define our individual response to music. The music that you find relaxing does indeed physically relax your muscles. (lm Boyd, 1999)

THE MAGIC OF STEM CELLS

Inject stem cells from a mouse embryo into the brain of a mouse suffering from a brain defect such as Parkinson's disease, Epilepsy, or Huntington's disease and the stem cells will: 1. fan out throughout the brain; 2. find defective cells; 3. change into the type of cell needed to fix the defect; and 4. fix the defect. (Jeff Macklis, 1999). see also (Eureka Alert, stemcell.com.)

HERDING HUMANS

If the muzak is French, supermarket shoppers in Britain buy more French wines but if it is German they prefer German wines. (Adrian North, 1997, University of Leicester)

FERAL HUMANS

Darwin said man is an animal and now Jeff Holland has proof. Mountain men, hippies, and hermits who go back to nature sometimes go too far and in their solitude become one with nature. At some point, they revert to an animal state and in fact become animals. These creatures have been observed in the red river gorge of Kentucky. There is an animal in us all and all it takes is a jungle to bring it out. (btw: at the turn of the century two little girls were found in an animal state living with wolves in india.)

GAMMA RAY BURSTS
About twice a day on average the Universe lights up in a flash that lasts anywhere from 1 second to a minute in a form of energy one billion times more intense than light and no one has the faintest idea why. (NASA Compton Observatory). (btw: not even black holes or anti-matter can bail us out here because the energy in each burst is detected simultaneously in every direction.) (btw2: the apparent source of an intense 40-second flash on dec 14, 1997 was a galaxy 12 billion light years away and for that to have been the source about 5 billion stars would have had to blow up in a few seconds. Either that is an impossibility or our physics is all wrong. it's a paradox. CalTech)

COMPOSITE HUMANS
In what appears to be life after death for organ donors, recepients of organ transplants assume some of the characteristics of the donor including personality, tastes, and cravings. (ABC TV) (something to think about before we start harvesting organs from baboons and farm animals.) (btw: something else to think about is that pig genes contain previously unknown aids-like viruses. (Fritz Bach, Harvard)

SEXIST SCIENCE

Science has a gender bias. Anthropological data are interpreted in terms of the strong dominant male hunter-provider model. In a circular logic, scientists often find support for the hunter-provider model in data whose interpretation was tainted by the hunter-provider assumption. "Lucy" could be male; there is not sufficient detail to determine gender but it was assumed to be female because of its diminutive size in comparison with larger bones found nearby. Humans may have become bipedal and tools may have been invented not so men could hunt but so pregnant women could dig for roots. (Adrienne Zihlman, (zihlman@cats.ucsc.edu)

THE VIRGINIAN

During the Great Depression, an honest, hard-working, god-fearing, bonhomme from virginia beach, virginia, found that he could slip into a sleep-like state in which he was simultaneously aware of all time and space. While in this state he exhibited healing powers and he could describe distant events as well as past and future events. His name was Edgar Cayce.

THE FIGURE HEAD

7,686,369,774,870 times 2,465,099,745,779 is 18,947,668,177,995,426,773,730 and the 43rd root of 18,947,668,177,995,426,773,730 is 3.871240336. Results like these come to Shakuntala Devi of India upon a moment's reflection and without the aid of any computational device. She can figure in her head. (India current affairs magazine)

FLYING MACHINE

One day in 1970 when an Air Force pilot flying an F106A jet fighter over Montana went into an "uncontrollable flat spin", the Aircraft took over and 1. ejected the pilot, 2. recovered from the spin, and 3. landed safely all by itself. The craft is on permanent display at the (United States Air Force museum in Dayton Ohio)

SPACE PLANE

A new jumbo jet airliner that is part plane part spaceship will travel at speeds of 6,700 miles per hour and at an elevation of 130,000 feet. (Preston Carter, Lawrence Livermore Labs, 1998) (btw: these are the things that h-bomb engineers can come up with when they run out of bombs to design.)

TINY FLYING MACHINE

If DARPA has its way future wars will be fought not with few large aircraft built for survival but with swarms of pocket-sized kamikaze flying machines called micro air vehicles. our children will fight these wars away from the battlefield and on a computer screen as if it were a video game.

PHOTON TORPEDOES

Lightning sometimes forms a ball of charge that does not disperse. the ball floats around until it makes contact with great destructive force. The DOD, not one to miss an opportunity for mayhem, has figured out how to make these things. They call them electromagnetic weapon systems or localized packets of energy. Residents of Pine Gap, Australia, where there is a USAF base, report seeing such balls of light that knocked off their power supply and dimmed auto headlights. (Linda Moulton Howe)

A DESERT FLOWER

The Northern continents are covered with ice most of the time. there are brief inter-glacial periods of warm weather. The ice persists for 100,000 years or so and the interglacial periods about 10,000 to 20,000 years but often with violent temperature swings over one or more decades. the ice periods too have volatile weather with large chunks of ice sliding out to sea and the ice thinning for a while and then getting thicker again. The current Interglacial period has lasted ten thousand years. it has been unusally calm and it is this spell of rare balmy weather that has made possible agriculture and therefore human settlements and therefore civilization and therefore the current explosion in human population. We are a desert flower. just another biological flash in the climactic pan. (btw: we don't know what causes these ice cycles. The theories are full of holes. The Milankovitch wobble theory does not work because the earth's precession has a fixed period and the ice age cycle does not. and Heinrich's warm earth theory cannot explain why the glacier flows happen at the same time all over the planet. The glaciation cycle could turn out to be nothing more than deterministic chaos.)

MIND OVER MACHINE

Suppose that you want to see picture 1 and you don't want to see picture 2. If your computer produces a random mixture of the pixels from pictures 1 and 2 your mind will force the result to be more like picture 1 than picture 2. and it's not just in your head because the picture will actually contain more picture 1 elements than is its random share. What's weirder is that without your attention it goes back to random. try it for yourself. The software is downloadable. (John Haaland). (Incidentally, the resultant picture is a fingerprint. No two persons produce the same picture.

THE ALYSON OMahoney Puzzle
When Alyson uses a computer it is more likely to fail than when it is used by someone else. in general computers crashes occur more frequently for some individuals than for others all other things being equal and we can't figure out the why of this. (NY Times, May 25, 1998)

SPITTING CAMELS

Camels spit, usually at a target, with great force and accuracy. The spitball is 200 grams of disgusting phlegm. If your camel is making weird sounds and moving his mouth around a lot get at 5 meters away. (Ellen Hess)

THE RONALD OPUS STORY

In march 1994 Ronald Opus left a suicide note and jumped from the 10th floor and as he passed his parents' apartment his father fired what he thought was an unloaded shotgun at his wife but she slipped and fell and the shot killed Ronald instead. Ronald had secretly loaded the gun to arrange his father to accidentally kill his mother and jumped when he became despondent over the apparent failure of his plot; He did not know that window washers had erected a safety net and that he could not have died from the fall.(Don Harper, The American Association of forensic sciences) (David Dixon says this story is a fabrication. he cites a 1996 LA Times story.)

THE GLORIA RAMIREZ STORY

On Feb 19 1994 a woman in cardiac arrest was brought to Riverside General Hospital. When a nurse drew blood it released a powerful stench. The nurse passed out and the rest of the medical team began to collapse. Pathologists who conducted the autopsy also became sick even though they wore space age 'Toxic Suits'. (the Los Angeles Times)

IS LIFE ON EARTH AN ODDITY?
We once believed that the universe was a vast arrangement of dead rocks and that life on earth was an oddity. but now we live in a different universe described by John Hayes of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, WHOI. He says that life is everywhere in the universe even in apparently dead rocks where it exists in a dormant form. in fact life on earth was seeded by these rocks. and that's who we are. By the way, NASA astronomer Dale Cruikshank thinks that the trillion balls of ice in the outer solar system that ocassionally visit the sun as comets contain the ingredients of life and they too could be the Johnny Appleseeds that are sowing life all over the galaxy. According to the Eurpoean Space Agency, if you look at the universe with visible-light eyes you see dead rocks but if you look with infrared eyes you see water everywhere.

COSMIC RAIN

All our water came from space. The outer solar system is swarming with house-sized ice cubes and over 40,000 of these things fall into earth and disintegrate in the atmosphere each day. This has been going on for billions of years. and that is why we have oceans and life on earth. It's still going on and not just here but on the other planets as well. We water creatures are not as much a planetary phenomenon as we are a planetary system phenomenon. (Louis Frank, University of Iowa)

EXTREMOPHILES

Our search for extra-terrestrial life widened its possibilities when we discovered micro-organisms right here on earth that live, no thrive, in boiling springs, subterranean rock formations, under the deepest ocean, and on active volcanoes. These extremophiles have shattered our previous notions about what it takes to sustain life according to John Baross, University of Washington and the University of Bath) and Thomas Gold of Cornell. These guys think that life on earth began with extremophiles deep under the ocean or in volcanoes.

THE COSMOS IS US

Not just pulsars and comets but we too are made of the stuff of the universe. We are pieces and parts of the universe. According to Gautama Buddha, understanding comes not from externalizing the universe but from internalizing the questions. All that we are arises from our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." This is what the Buddha said.

ODD CHIRALITY

Of the many amino acids possible, life on earth is composed of only 20 and all of them are of the left sided variety. Equal amounts of left and right mirror images of these molecules form in the laboratory but not in living things. Molecular leftness is part of a cosmic pattern of life according to John Cronin at Arizona State University.

MIND READING PLANTS

Plants generate electrical impulses that may be measured. Cleve Backster measured these voltages. He found that the plant became agitated when he injured it with a knife or a match; or if he even just thought about causing such an injury. Source: (The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird). And according to Robert Stone, not just plants but individual cells in your body show the same behavior and they seem to be able to recognize you.). Note also that since plants respond electrically to human presence we should be able to wire them up as burglar detectors acording to Hal Philipp whose company, Quantum Research markets just such a device. Hal thinks that the plant is just a giant capacitor and nothing more. Source: New Scientist, 25 April 1998)

FIRE FLIES IN THAILAND

All critters tend to synchronize their rhythmic activities. Women living together synchronize their menstrual cycles, crickets chirp together, and the pacemaker cells trigger your heart in unison. But the most spectacular example is that of fireflies in thailand. They completely cover a tree and at first flash in random patterns but soon synchronize their flashing so that the whole tree flashes on and off at about 1.5 hz. (H.M. Smith, Science, VOLUME 82, 1935)

LA CUCARACHA LA CUCARACHA

Behead cockroach 1 and cut the legs off cockroach 2.

Now mount roach # 2 on top of roach #1 with a tiny tube that allows their bodily fluids to comingle. now watch as headless roach#1 walks around navigating with the eyes and head of roach#2. roach#1 also knows night from day and only comes out to feed at night as is the roachian custom. (Source: Janet Harker in 'Nature', 1954)

SPIRITUAL SIGNATURE

If you showered with red dye you would leave tell-tale red marks everywhere you went, on clothes you wore, and every object you used. This is what your trail looks like to a dog's nose and to a psychic's mind. The objects and places of your life not only contain your odoriferous signature but your spiritual signature as well. You recognize your own spiritual trail; it is why you feel at home at home; and why that old hat or glove or t-shirt feels so good. They all contain traces of your essence. (Source: Lyall Watson)

PERVERSE STATISTICS

Statistics released in 1996 show that we are murdering less in america but it's not for the lack of trying. We are gunning down our fellow citizens more than ever before but high tech trauma centers are bringing them back to life. It's not that we are killing less but that medical advances are making it harder to keep them dead. (Source: Spencer Hughes, ksfo radio, San Francisco, 1996)

MYSTERIOUS BONES

What we actually know: some very large bones have been found in sedimentation layers that were formed between 220 million years ago and 65 million years ago; none before and none afterwards. and these bones don't fit any creature we see today. What we made up: Dinosaurs! And since they aren't around, their Mass Extinction. (Source: The mass extinction theory, the case against mass extinctions)

THE FOSSIL RECORD

Sedimentary rock going back hundreds of millions of years come in alternating layers of fossil counts. layers containing lots of fossils are followed abruptly by layers containing hardly any and then lots again. this is all we really know. "mass extinctions" and "life explosions" are things we made up. we have no independent evidence that they actually occurred let alone how they occurred. There are some believable mass extinction scenarios but they do no good unless they can also explain how fossil counts suddenly reverted to normal levels right after the supposedly dead period.

ANTARCTICA

This hidden continent down under contains 90% of the world's ice but it was once a balmy temperate forest teeming with life. On the Trans-Antarctic Mountain there is a petrified forest; and there are fosslizied remains of animals anywhere you look. Some are 250 million years old. William Hammer of Augustana college thinks that a cataclysmic climate change event froze antarctica. (Jamal's note: maybe the continent used to be elsewhere and simply drifted into the cold.)

THE WAR ON DRUGS

Larry Singleton raped a young girl up in Sonoma County California then hacked her arms off with a butcher knife and left her to die, He was apprehended and arrested by the police and locked up in jail. But, surprise, surprise, he was paroled after 8 years whereupon he murdered a young woman also with a butcher knife. The reason behind this premature parole is that our prisons are overcrowded with people serving mandatory sentences for drug offenses prescribed by our 'war on drugs'. When the cops were taking singleton from one outraged community to another to find him a home they were protecting us from drug dealers. If the war on drugs continues much longer our prisons will be full of drug addicts and our streets full of criminals. (Soure: Christine Kraft, KGO radio, San Francisco,CA, 1997.) BTW, in 1997, 1.7 million of us are in jail and it costs the rest of us $30 billion dollars a year to keep them there.)

THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH ORER

Of the siblings were you born first? or second? or last? It has a lot to do with who you are. Not just nature and nurture but also birth order plays a role in shaping our personalities and our lives according to Frank Sulloway of MIT. He has written a book about this phenomenon with the title THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH ORDER. A related mystery is the mystery of birth date. Could birthdate have anything to do with who and what you are? YES, says Dennis Ownby of the Henry Ford Health System. Statistics show that children born in fall face twice the risk of developing asthma than children born in summer. So far researchers have not come up with a rational explanation of these findings. By the way, Asthma inflames and narrows air passages and causes difficulty in breathing.

WHERE'S JIMMY??
Does the FBI always find their man? on July 30, 1975 JIMMY HOFFA disappeared without a trace from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield. After the most intensive manhunt in history the FBI is stumped. And so here we are and we still don't know where Jimmy is or was.

And shed a tear on Thanksgiving for Dan "DB" Cooper who jumped from a 727 with a parachute and with $200,000 over the Columbia River in Oregon on November 24, 1971 and simply vanished into thin air. The FBI is clueless.

A THANKSGIVING STORY
After thanksgiving dinner in 1984 in the small town of Pedley, CaliforniaSshannon Prock, 13, was attacked by a rapist. Cousin Danny Ostenowski, 11, came to her aid and she broke free and ran into the street begging for help from passing motorists. They just drove on by as the rapist brutally murdered danny on the sidewalk shooting him three times while he begged for his life. (archive of news stories, Los Angeles Times 1984)

AMELIA EARHART
On june 1 1936 pilot Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Miami on a Lockheed 10 'Electra' to fly 29000 miles around the world. They flew 22000 miles and reached New Guinea on June 29, 1937. At midnight between july 1 and july 2 1937 they took off from New Guinea for Howland Island 800 miles away. They maintained radio contact with the US Coast Guard cutter 'Itasca' for 6 hours and then vanished. (Source: The US Navy, Naval Historical Center). Accordiing to Joe Klaas, Amelia was actually on a spying mission. She was captured by the Japanese in the Marshall Islands and later handed over to the US forces and she lived incognito as Irene Bolam in New Jersey until her death in 1982.)

THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE

More ships and aircraft have vanished without a trace in the waters between Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico than anywhere else of equal area. The phenomenon has been extensively studied but it remains a mystery. Among its victims are the ship "marine sulphur queen" and a squadron of TBM Avengers, (Sourcee: Naval Historical Center). (BTW: In the 16th Century the sea in this triangle was thought to be evil and Bermuda was called Devil's Island. Shakespeare's "Tempest" is about the Bermuda Triangle.) (Source: Gerald Dickens of James Cook University. He says that there are frozen deposits of methane under the sea that are responsible for sudden release of gas.

TEENAGERS FROM HELL

Teenagers these days are out of control. They eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers. (Source: Aristotle, circa 350 BC.)

IMMIGRANTS FROM HELL

Immigrants of today just don't measure up to those that came before them. They are not well educated, They don't bother to learn English, and at the rate they multiply there will soon be more of them than there are of us. OMG! OMG! (sOURCE: Benjamin Franklin, 1753)

LOOPHOLES IN TIME

If ghosts are souls of our dear departed ancestors then why do inanimate objects have ghosts? Aircraft, Ships, and even Buildings have ghosts. According to Richard Senate, the ghost phenomenon reveals a property of time that we don't understand. When we see ghosts we are actually seeing through time.

WHAT WE ARE REALLY SAYING WHEN WE SPEAK

To find out, tape it and play it backwards. You will hear things the person did not say forwards. According to David John Oates, our subconscious mind put those messages there. The conscious mind decides what to say but the subconscious decides how to say it and that is how the backward messages are placed into speech. The listener's subconscious picks up these messages which constitute the intuitive component of the communication. If the person is lying the backward speech will reveal the truth. If the person is speaking the truth it will confirm it, and if the person is hiding information it will reveal it. BTW, Baby Babble is rich in reverse speech. According to David we learn reverse speech first, even before we can talk normallym and Kourosh Saberi of Caltech took digitized speech and chopped the sentences up into segments and then played them back. Subjects could understand these sentences even when he ran the segments in reverse order. (reported by AP and sent in to me by Luis Reis in1999)

BABY GRAMMAR

Children not only learn vocabulary from their parents but can "infer" grammar and then use that grammar to construct sentences that hey had never heard before. Noam Chomsky thinks we may be born with an innate universal grammar. Language acquisition by children is not well understood and it remains a paradox. (Sourc: Ray Jackendoff).

BABY TALK

A 6-month old baby has already learned the sounds of its native language. The number of words an infant hears each day is the single most important predictor of future intelligence. (Source: Patricia Kuhl, University of Washington). Jamal's note: maybe smarter infants are better at engaging adults in 'conversation'. Without controlled experiments it's hard to tell whether x causes y or y causes x or whether a third unobserved variable z causes both x and y.)

GRAPHOLOGY

Another way you unwittingly reveal yourself is by writing. No matter what language, the way you make the marks on paper captures your personality and even hidden intentions. Even things about you that you do not wish to reveal may be deduced from the way you write.

IT'S THE SOUND STUPID
According to the Vedic Rishis of India the essence of it all is sound; and sound is geometry and geometry is sound. We can now see this in a device invented by Ernst Chladni. Spread sand on a metal plate and cause it to vibrate with different notes and sounds and the sand will arrange itself into geometrical shapes of great complexity but familiar to us because they resemble shapes found in nature like the annual rings of trees, the stripes of a zebra, cells in a honeycomb, canals in a jellyfish, and turrets in shellfish. Maybe the rishis are right. Nature is not random Me Darwin. Maybe it is the way it is because of cosmic vibrations and the way they are. (Source: Lyall Watson, and Hindu scriptures). By the way, Doug Ruby studied the geometry of crop circles by cutting out cardboard models and spinning them. his insight is that 'geometry equals frequency equals energy'. he describes it in his book, 'The Gift'.)

WHAT IS GRAVITY?

We are born into it, we live in it all our lives, and we die in it, but we don't know it. Newton and Einstein thought they knew but they didn't, and now physicists at the Max Planck Institute say that a disk of super conducting material can produce a 'weak shielding' of gravity and that this phenomenon has no explanation that they know of. A prototype of the device has been built at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland by Eugene Podkletnov. He found that things weigh less above a super conducting disc than anywhere else. he described his findings in the Journal Physica C.

THE SATURNIC VERSES

NASA Scientist Dr. Bergrun has written a book about Saturn in which he says that NASA has evidence of a spacecraft about the size of earth orbiting Saturn. the craft is described in the February 1996 issue of 'SCIENCE NEWS' and also by ufologist Rich Boylan.

IT SCLICES, IT DICES

During their invasion of Panama in 1989 our forces left some cars neatly cut in half with some new weapon they were testing but won't tell us about. When asked the Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said with a straight face, "We know of no cars cut in half in Panama".(Source: The Panama Deception)

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

Colombia would not sign the Canal treaty with us so we arranged an Insurrection in 1903 and invented Panama. The new leaders of Panama that we installed did sign just the treaty that we wanted. The country's leaders even now take their marching orders from the CIA. If they don't we get rid of them. (Source: The panama deception). Another thing weird about panama is that their currency is the US Dollar.

DOCTORS ARE KILLING US
Researchers at Harvard have found evidence that doctors overprescribe medication and surgery. Could be why mortality rates drop when doctors go on strike. (noted by (Henry Jankowski, 1998) (see also Al Carney's letter in surg neurol, 46(2):191 Aug 1996) (btw: the leading cause of death in the USA is not cancer or aids or automobile mishaps. The leading cause of death in the USA is health care. The bozo factor in medicine kills more than 90,000 of us per year with miscalculated dosage, misprescribed drugs, and misdiagnosis. Source: Washington Post 1999)

LIARS

During the Manhattan Project circa 1945, the military subjected soldiers to deadly radioactivity experiments without their knowledge. They were injectedsoldiers with plutonium and otherwise exposed them to harmful levels of radioactivity. Then for fifty years the military flatly denied that these experiments took place. Recently declassified govt records show that they did.

AGENT ORANGE

A 1984 Air Force study showed high rates of birth defects and infant deaths among children of Vietnam Vets and that these effects could be causally linked to the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. So the air force altered the data until the effect disappeared and then made the report public. (sourcee: San Diego Union-Tribune, November, 1998) and Vietnam Vets.

DEPLETED URANIUM (DU)

We have over a billion pounds of depleted uranium. It is a toxic waste product of the Nuclear Weapons industry. So, intelligent minds in our military have found a way to recycle this stuff into artillery shells to pierce tank armor; and the dust from exploded shells poisoned the environment and sickened our soldiers in the Gulf War. (Source: Dan Fahey)

FUN WITH THERMONUCLEAR DEVICES

During the fifties the U.S. military exploded hundreds of nuclear bombs in Nevada to see (1) what would happen to our soldiers' vision if they observed the flash without goggles, (2) if they could be fired from a cannon, (3) if they could damage bunker walls from a mile away, (3) what they would do to a steel bridge at ground zero, (4) what they would do to jeeps, armored personnel carriers, airplanes, diesel locomotives, a glass house, an underground garage full of cars, and a pine forest, (5) whether a walk-in bank vault could take a direct hit, (6) what would happen to cattle, dogs, donkeys, naked pigs, and pigs dressed in human attire at ground zero, (7) whether a hill would deflect the blast, (8) whether they could be used to build harbors, reservoirs, and canals, (9) what damage it would do to a typical suburban housing development built in the desert just to be blown up. (1999). I was unable to find the details of their findings.

BACKYARD PHYSICISTS

Is there room for the little guy in science anymore? While corporations spend billions in failed 3-D research Elizabeth Downing, a graduate student at Stanford University, quietly built the world's first prototype on a shoestring with borrowed equipment. Ramar Pillai of india has devised a process to extract gasoline from a herbs that grow wild near his village. School kids in Minnesota have discovered the most frightening ecological changes of our time. They found that about a third of the frogs in a pond had grotesque frankenstein-like birth defects including missing limbs and extra limbs. A follow-up survey found these defects to be widespread throughout the Midwest. The cause is a mystery. Also, female fish in North Florida's Fenholloway River are developing male sex organs.

SCARY ALGAE

There is an algae called Pfiesteria Piscida. They can smell fish and when they do they change into an active amoeba-like creature which attacks and eats the fish multiplying rapidly. then they go back to their dormant algal state. Infected fish and shellfish are toxic to humans. Eating or even breathing these toxins may cause memory loss and personality changes in addition to pain, nausea, and vomiting. When the feeding and reproducing are good piscida can form coastal swarms known as red tides. (btw: p. pscida is responsible for giant fish kills in the estuaries of North Carolina. Rodney Barker has written a book about it. He thinks that the creature has been around for millions of years and was awakened by pollution from swine and turkey farms. Fish "bearing lesions and swimming in a disoriented manner" are also observed in the Chicamacomico and Pocomoke rivers in Maryland.)

GENE THERAPY

Dr. Jack Roth of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center injected the tumors of lung cancer patients with a gene that he designed. The tumors shrank.

THE SALTON SEA

Something, maybe pollutants, is killing off the fish and birds in California's largest inland sea. it is on the verge of total ecological collapse. (see this eyewitness account by eve mallett)

ITC: INTERSPECIES TELEPATHIC COMMUNICATION

Penelope Smith of Point Reyes California can communicate with animals. She uses a technique called Interspecies Telepathic Communication. She has written a book about it. Recently she had a long conversation with a runaway alligator in San Francisco. The alligator told her his name was Fred, he was lonely and scared, and he was eating ducklings but he prefers chicken. Penelope runs a training program in ITC. She is not alone. There are many others like her.

A NORMAL TEENAGER

I guess I am a normal teenager, but I have dreams that come true, I can predict a person's actions just by talking to them, I see lights that others don't, and I have walked away from two bad accidents that should have killed me. I was born on the first day of the Zodiac Calendar (March 21,1980). I was conceived even though my parents were using birth control. I have birth marks that need explanation. (SOURCE: Shaun Remyleblac@aol.com)

DEATH TO DEATH

Before you were formed in your mom's womb you were dead. So you do know what it is like to be dead. But you can't remember. but some children can and their stories of white lights and light beings are not unlike NDE accounts.. Apparently we see these things coming and going. (Tamara Long) (btw: nde = near death experience, obe = out of body experience, rv = remote viewing, pk = psychokinesis) Source: {forgot}

PRIVACY LOST
When the Feds first issued social security numbers they told us that the numbers will not be used for any purpose other than socil security record keeping.(Source: Andre Bacard). (According to Andre if you pay for anything with your ATM or CREDIT card the transaction record becomes public information. eg your Insurance company will know if you bought cigarettes or booze and how much.)

SHAMANISM AND BOTANY

The amazon Indians may look like savages but they have medical technology that is at least 50,000 years old and it is in many ways superior to ours. Our 'discovery' of a cure for herpes consisted in learning from them what they have known for a thousand years. Shaman medicine consists of plant material drawn from the rain forest. Both the shamans, that carry this knowledge, and the rain forest, that carries the medicine, will become extinct in the next thirty years at the current rate of encroachment by cattle ranchers and well meaning christian missionaries. (source: Mark Plotkin, ethnobiologist) (btw: Mark says that we think of the soil as containing nutrients and the stuff of life so we clear forests to reclaim land. but the life of the amazon is in the canopy and not in the soil. so in 'clearing the forest' we are throwing the baby out with the bath water.)

SANGRE DE DRAGA
The blood red sap of this Amazon tree can arrest bleeding faster than anythting else. Other strange health effects are claimed. sOURCE: Ashaninka.com,1998 submitted to me by Leon Paredes)

GROUP MEMORY

We carry with us our individual memories. We are conscious of that. But we also carry with us a subliminal group memory of our tribe, culture, race, species and of all living things and maybe even of the cosmos. Some more than others are in touch with this source of information perhaps even without being conscious of this connection. They share this information with us through great works of art, literature, science, and teachings of a spiritual nature. (source: Richard C. Hoagland) (jamal's corollary: if group memory is not equally received maybe it is not equally generated either; i.e. the Caesars, Napoleons, Shapespeares, Tolstoys, and Cleopatras of the world exert more than their pro-rata share of influence. This might explain why people who undergo past life regression find themselves as historical figures and why mediums seem to contact historical figures so much of the time. They are recalling group memory.)

HOMING CATS

A family in Florida left their cat with the neighbor and moved to California. The cat ran away from the neighbor's house and two years later showed up at the family home in California. Also, a cat in Portugal named Camilla became lost and walked home from a campsite 125 miles away.

HOMING PIEGONS

2,200 homing piegons competing in a race in October 1998 near Philadelphia became lost and disoriented and never made it back home. The weather was fine.(Source: The Press Democrat)

DOES THE SOUL HAVE MASS?

Duncan weighed the almost dead and the dead and he found a consistent difference of about an ounce between these weights. (Source: Duncan Macdougall)

A DRUG ADDICTION

Falling in love is phenylethylamine addiction. Heartbreak is phenylethylamine withdrawal. The person you are in love with is only an artifice in the ritual you use to cause your brain to manufacture this drug. (Source: Gary Spink, Monash University)

IT'S ALL IN THE MIND

If you think you are beaten, you are; if you think you'll lose, you're lost; It's all in the state of mind
Life's battles don't always go to the stronger or the faster
… the man who wins is the man who thinks he can
(source: The Victor by CW Longnecke)

OLAF JOHNSON

Olaf has been subjected to many controlled tests and experiments by scientists and skeptics and no one denies that he can materialize and dematerialize objects. He can also move objects as large as an end table with his mind; And he can control other people's minds to make them say things they don't want to say.(Source: Brad Steiger)

THE RAT AND THE MINER

A miner befriended a rat which one day convinced the miner, by running and squealing, to leave the mine shaft moments before it collapsed. A pet frog jumped up and down on its owner's face to wake him when the house was on fire. Brad Steiger explores the strange and mysterious world of human-animal relationships in his new book on this topic.(Source: Brad Steiger)

THE RAT AND THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

Judy Reavis of Hermes Systems has trained her rat "Rattle" to pull cable thru conduit. She knocks at the other end and rewards her rat with gummi bears.

LOOPHOLES IN SPACE??

In South Africa one night a drunken man walked out of a tavern and into Ohio. This case has been well documented but never solved. (Source: Brad Steiger)

WHAT ASTROPHYSICISTS KNOW

Not much.

According to them some parts of the universe are older than the universe.

More than 90% of the universe is something called dark matter but they can't tell you what that is;

Iin other words they haven't a clue what most of the universe is made of. And the universe got started when a small immensely dense baseball containing all the mass in the universe exploded but they don't know what made it explode; or how all the mass in the universe got into a baseball in the first place. Source: Michael Feast, University of Capetown. Michael has a solution to the age paradox and thinks the answer is that the universe is a lot older, probably 11 to 14 billion years old. hopefully 14 rather than 11 because if it is 11 we still have a problem. Michael is working on it.

WHAT SCIENTISTS KNOW

Not much. when the movie the China Syndrome was released scientists and experts all agreed that the meltdown of the core of a nuclear power generator is a scenario based on fuzzy thinking and pseudo science. Then three mile island happened.

WHAT ECONOMISTS KNOW

Not much. According to them the combination of full employment and economic growth necessarily causes inflation and recession but it hasn't (1998). (btw: they think we are fools for not behaving according to their equations and that our 'foolish exuberance' will be punished either with inflation because we are running out of workers or with deflation because we are making too much of everything; and, with any luck, a stock market crash.)

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ZECHARIA

There is another planet.

It is in a very oblique orbit.

It visits the inner solar system once every 3500 years.

It is inhabited by advanced critters.

450,000 years ago these critters visited earth and found early hominids. They used genetic engineering to implant some of their genes into one of the female hominids. That's how we got started. She of course was Eve. Since then we have had many cycles of civilization triggered by visitations from our extra planetary fathers. All of this information can be found in Sumerian writings. the aliens are described by the Sumerians as having large eyes, leathery skin, and non-specific gender definition.(Zecharia Sitchin in his new book "The Beginning of Time")( sumerian religion)

KINGKY FISH

A tropical fish found off Okinawa normally live in groups of one dominant male and several submissive females. If a larger male comes along, the dominant male changes into a subservient female by restructuring its brain and genitalia. If the bigger male leaves or dies, The once dominant male will change back to a male. The restructuring process takes four days. (source: Matt Grover, University of Idaho. )

LIVING ON TULSA TIME

European fresh water eels found in mountain streams and lakes as high as 10,000 feet above sea level begin and end their lives in the ocean. Here is their incredible story. They begin life in the Sargaso Sea (equatorial atlantic ocean) where the larvae are carried by the gulf stream to Europe. During this journey the larvae grow into little cylindrical fish. Once they get to the mouth of a river they swim upstream relentlessly even wriggling up waterfalls and crawling across meadows until they get to the lakes. There they live asexually for 14 to 20 years and then some other hormonal program kicks in. They grow big and fat and their sex organs get large; but instead of mating, they begin another epic journey apparently to return to the Sargaso sea for mating but they don't make it back. Down to the last eel, they all die trying and therefore never mate. The population is replenished by their American cousins who do make it back). these eels are apparently carrying out a life cycle program that must have worked once millions of years ago before the continents drifted apart. (source: Lyall Watson)

SPONGE

Photograph a live sponge and then grind it into a slurry. Press the slurry through a micropore strainer and you will get what appears to be muddy water. All the individual cells of the sponge have been separated from each other. Let it sit for a few days and the sponge will rise like a phoenix from the muddy water. Compare this sponge with your photograph. It's the same sponge!!!

MOUSE BRAINS

This also works with mouse brains. You can tease apart the individual cells of the brain of a laboratory mouse. If you let this soup stand in a favorable environment the brain will reform and even restructure its synapses. Somehow each cell knows how to build the whole. Source: John Hopkins University School of Medicine. (many thanks to the mouse who donated his brain to john hopkins university school of medicine. (btw: brain damaged lab mice injected with a hormone that martin developed grow new nerve tissue and the mice are once again able to remove sticky tape from their paws. proof that adult animals can regenerate nerve cells. source: Martin Schwab, University of Zurich, dept of Neuromorphology, 1998.

QUAIL BRAINS

48 hours after fertilization replace cells in the brainstem of a chicken embryo with those from a quail embryo and the chicken you get will bob its head like a quail. (source: Evan Balaban, Neurosciences Institute, San Diego)

A NOSE FOR SCIENCE

Blindfolded and with arms spread eagle bend one arm and touch the tip of your nose. everything we think we know about how our nerves and muscles work together says you can't do that, but you can. you are a mystery to neuroscience.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

Teach mouse-a to run a maze but don't teach mouse-b or mouse-c. now kill and grind up mouse-a and feed it to mouse-b and not to mouse-c. mouse-b will run the maze better than mouse-c. (Source: Art Bell, 1998)

STAR WARS

To catch moths, bats use sonar. They whistle a note above the audible range and listen for the echo. From the patterns in the reflected sound they can recognize and locate a moth. In response moths developed a sort of stealth technology - covering their body and wings with soft, non-reflective material. Bats responded by changing the sound frequency to detect the soft stuff. To counter this advance, moths developed sonar hearing and jamming devices. with these they can pick up the sonar of an approaching bat, identify its location and speed, and take evasive action and generate sound waves that will confuse the bat. In response bats developed an erratic flight pattern to overwhelm the moth's locator and jamming system. It must work to some degree because bats still catch moths. (Source: Lyall Watson)

KONSTANTIN RAUDIVE

Tune a radio to a frequency where there is no station. You will get white noise. Tape the white noise and play it back. What will you hear? When Raudive does that the tape contains hundreds of voices saying clearly discernible things many of which are relevant to raudive's circumstance. This has been checked out in many well designed experiments. It only works with Raudive and not with other people and it works anywhere on the dial as long as the radio produces white noise. Raudive is somehow putting those voices on the tape. but how? (But see also, Bill Modlin's comments about Raudive)

A WHITE NOISE EXPERIMENT

Drown yourself in pure white noise and concentrate on a single note, say f-sharp. You will actually hear a tone in that note because it actually exists in the white noise. Your brain picked it out of the babble because you told it to. (btw: if you practice you will be able to hold a note for a long time and eventually do voices and even songs. it's good exercise in concentration and meditation.)

MOUSE CRIME

You can remove the component of the genetic code that is responsible for producing nitric oxide. Laboratory mice bred in this way are violent criminals. They rape screaming females and pick fights with normal males often killing their rivals in a gruesome manner. (Source: John Hopkins University School of Medicine).

BREED LIKE RABBITS

Human females ovulate once a month. The menstrual cycle often makes conception a difficult game of musical chairs. Female rabbits do not have a menstrual cycle. They ovulate on demand. if the male is rough with her during sex a follicle in her ovary will rupture and release an egg.

YOUR CHEATING HEART WILL TELL ON YOU

Birds are monogomous but they cheat; and they do it secretly behind the bushes. Genetic studies exposed their little cheatin' hearts. (sourcee: David Hanych, Colorado College) (btw: the same scientists that once extolled the Darwinistic virtues of birdie monogamy are now extolling the survival value of birdie adultery.)

THE VISIBLE SPECTRUM

Our eyes were designed by our atmosphere. Of the spectrum of electromagnetic energy bombarding our atmosphere most are either deflected, reflected, or absorbed. The energy that gets thru to the surface is mostly in the 400 to 700 nanometer range. This frequency range contains more information about our immediate environment and the cosmos than any other. It is no accident that we developed eyes to respond to this specific frequency range. Incidentally, what's called 'optical fiber' isn't. optical fiber transmits data in 850, 1300, or 1550 nanometers. These frequencies are below the visible range. you can't see them.

KILL JOY

Dissolve a tablespoon of joy dish detergent into a cup of water and place this soapy solution into a spray bottle. now spray a fly with it (or any other insect like a mosquito or a yellow jacket). the soapy solution dissolves the oil in the insect's exoskeleton. the skeleton loses its rigidity and collapses. the insect falls to the ground and makes a desperate attempt to breathe. within seconds it dies of asphyxiation.

OLBER'S PARADOX

If there are an infinity of stars out there why is the night sky not wall to wall stars? Why is the night not lit up like a Christmas tree? Nobody knows for sure. It's a paradox. "They are too far and too dim" is not an answer because the farther out the more stars there ought to be in the same angular displacement. Marylin Savant (of 'ask marylin) thinks that the light from the other stars just hasn't gotten here yet.

LUMPY UNIVERSE

The distribution of mass in the universe is not uniform but lumpy. Even in our galaxy stars come in clusters. No one knows why. Lumpiness is not consistent with big bang or other conventional theories. Dirac conjectured that it is because gravity is not constant over time but oscillates over billions of years. the lumps are formed when gravitational forces peak.

THE REINCARNATION OF TIME

The universe started with a big bang and is expanding but will soon collapse again and then expand again as it has done billions of times before and as it will do billions of times again. Time is not linear but cyclical. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all happened before and will happen again and again. (Source: Stephen Hawking) (see also the hindu scriptures and jnan saha's note on the mathematical impossibility of the big bang.)

INDIA AND AMERICA

In the late 18th century the british, fighting George Washington in America and Hyder Ali in India, decided that they could not win both wars and must choose one. They chose India and diverted all their naval resources to INDIA. George Washington won a war that the British had decided to lose. We have not just the French but the Indians to thank for our freedom.

AUSTRALIA AND AMERICA

You know that Australia started out as a Penal Colony; but you may not know that it's our fault. The British sent their criminals to Australia after the American colonies seceded from the Empire; and after they could no longer send their criminals TO America.

.MEXICO AND AMERICA

In 1846 Mexico was bigger than the USA. Then they fought a war with us. We won and forced them to sell us California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado for $15 million. We already had Texas which we occupied after it seceded from Mexico. The USA doubled in size and Mexico halved. (btw: the war directly led us to the civil war and the abolition of slavery in america. it is also where Westpoint grads Robert e.Lee, Ulysses s. Grant, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and William T. Sherman cut their teeth in warfare. And it is how Tennessee came to be known as the Volunteer State.) (btw2: the deal was cleverly structured as a 'sale' so that we could not be accused of an illegal occupation.) (sOURCE: Steve Butler)

JAPAN AND AMERICA

On july 18th the Americans came to Tokyo with some very tough negotiators and arm twisted Japan to open its markets to American Products and its ports to American ships. Under great pressure, the Japanese caved in and signed the trade agreement. It was july 18th 1853 and the tough negotiator was Commodore Matthew Perry. Only now you know-ho the wrrrest of the story. (naval historical center)

EGYPT AND AMERICA

If it was in 1492 that columbus sailed the ocean blue and linked the old world to the new then why do ancient Egyptian mummies have nicotine in their tissue? There are other weird connections between the Egyptians and the Mayans. Pyramids, for instance. (source: the discovery channel) (btw: according to yuri korosov, mayan hieroglyphs are strangely similar to those from ancient egypt.)

CHINA AND AMERICA

AMERICA was concerned that the Europeans are edging their way into China, which could be the world's largest market and investment opportunity. He wanted an aggressive US policy in China that would leverage American firms into the Chinese bonanza. Mr. Hays is the secretary of state of the United States. his boss is President Mckinley. it is 1896.

HOW FINANCIAL FAILURE CREATED AN EMPIRE

The East India Company was bankrupt in 1773. The crown bailed it out but in the process seized control of the firm and its Indian operations. What was a trading company in Bengal soon turned into empire.

HOW THE PRINTING PRESS CHANGED RELIGION

What Martin Luther had that Huss and Wycliffe did not was the printing press. It was easier for Luther to attack indulgences because the Church was using the printing press to mass produce and mass market these things. And it was easier for Luther to get the word out by using the printing press, literally, to leaflet all of europe. (btw, an indulgence is an official certificate of forgiveness issued by the church. for a fee. Huss and Wycliffe were reformers that predated Luther. They failed and became heretics.)

How a computational error made chris a hero
The argument between Columbus and the nay sayers was not about the shape of the earth but about its radius. The nay sayers correctly estimated the radius at around 4000 miles and argued correctly that the voyage would be too long. Chris thought the earth was a lot smaller. or maybe he knew about America from Viking logs but figured China was a better sell. (btw: in those days the turks controlled the land route to china and the portugese controlled the horn of africa. Spain was thus forced to go west to go east.)

THINKING GLOBALY

When maritime powers spain and portugal could not decide which one of them owned the world pope alexander the 6th brokered a deal in 1494 giving the new world to spain and asia and africa to portugal. 48 degrees longitude was set as the line of demarcation because the new world was thought to lie entirely to the west of it. (btw: later discoveries showed that a big chunk of south america lies to the east of 48 and that is how brazil went to portugal.)

BREAD AND ROSES

in pre-industrial england the number of marriages per year was almost perfectly negatively correlated with the prevailing price of bread. (paul samuelson) (btw: the phrase 'bread and roses' comes from a labor movement in post industrial-revolution england. workers wanted more than mere subsistence and demanded a better quality of life.)

DEATH AND TAXES

For centuries after the fall of the roman empire europeans continued to pay taxes to rome. it was in the form of tithes to the vatican.

COMPLETE KNOWLEDGE

in 1895 the royal society (in england) passed a resolution to the effect that man's knowledge of the universe was complete and that everything worthwhile had been invented.

BALD NO MORE

mix together a cup of nettles (u can buy this at your natural good store), half a cup of chopped onions, and three cups of isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol) and let this concoction sit for a few days until the alcohol is green. massage a tablespoon of the green liquid into your scalp each day if you are balding. balding will cease. the recession will be over. (judy miller read this in the sf chronicle)(jamal's note: not only has my recession stopped but i am actually growing hair right in the middle of my bald spot.)

HOLY WATER?

a bunch of barley seeds were randomly assigned to plot a and plot b. two bottles of water were drawn from the same tap each day. bottle a was blessed by a healer and bottle b was not. plot a received water from bottle a and plot b received its water from bottle b. the plants in plot a all grew faster, got taller, and produced more barley than those in plot b. (bernard grad)

musical plants
plants grow faster and healthier if subjected to a daily dose of bach's brandenburg concertos. try it.

the golden mean
in many many statistical tests it has been found that we humans prefer one rectangle to all others; that whose sides are in the ratio of 1 to 1.618. why do you suppose? could have implications for marketing majors. (btw: the golden mean is the convergence of the ratio of the fibonacci series and can be approximated by 0.5(1+sqrt(5)). this ratio apparently occurs in nature more frequently than pure chance can explain.) (btw2: start with 0,1, and then generate new numbers by adding the previous two to get 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13, and so on. this is the fibonacci series. the ratios of adjacent numbers, 5/3, 8/5, 13/8, etc converges to 1.618… if you go out far enough. it has a weird mathematical property: 1.6181.618 = 1.618+1, and si ja points out that 1/1.618 = 1.618-1).

heat and temperature
hold a metallic and a wooden object both at room temperature. the metallic object will feel colder. condensing steam will feel hotter and burn more severely than water at the same temperature. we cannot sense temperature; only the rate of heat transfer.

dowsers
antelopes and wild boar have horns and tusks that are similar in shape to the dowser's forked twig. both of these species are very successful in finding hidden water sources. (lyall watson)

lady luck
if you toss a coin many times about half of them should come up heads, right? wrong. it depends on who is calling them. some people can make the coin come up heads (or tails) more often than that. this has been checked out with statistics and p-values of less than .0001 have been observed with some people. this also works with dice. (j. b. rhine)

the five senses
if you connect the nerves in your tongue to the part of the brain responsible for hearing and place a drop of vinegar on your tongue, you will hear a loud sound. hallucinogens induce this sort of cross-sensory perception. colors have texture and taste. taste has sound and color. sound has color whose hue and intensity changes with frequency and loudness. some people naturally have cross-sensory abilities. myra allen, a montana artist, paints pictures of what wines taste like. when she looks at these paintings she can 'taste' the wine again.

to touch you is to see you
in blind people the part of the brain responsible for vision does not atrophy. instead it tunes in to other sensory signals. the sense of touch for instance. (the bowman gray school of medicine)

nanotechnology
do you realize that all the while that we were building steam engines, cars, buildings, and other large euclidean things, right under our noses nature has been building stuff of incomparable complexity one atom at a time? maybe we can learn to do that too. try to imagine the implications.

wysiwyg?
you can get lenses that invert images so that everything appears upside down. for a while. if you wear these glasses for a couple of days things appear right side up again. if you take the glasses off things appear upside down again for a while. then they right themselves again. ever see the hollow face optical illusion? it looks like a face until you stick your hand into it. then you can see that it is hollow. hollow faces don't exist in your experience so your brain makes the image fit your version of reality. in other words, "we perceive only what we can conceive". kind of makes you wonder what's really out there.

chameleons
put a blind chameleon in a cage. drive it to a place where it has never been and let it out of the cage. it still changes its colors and stripes to form a perfect camouflage with its new surroundings which it has never seen.

sleepy flies
flies sleep at night. usually on the ceiling. and they sleep so soundly that you can get 'em all with a shop vac. (btw: according to makstarn, flies are unable to initiate flight while walking. if it walks swat it.)

jailer give me water
within 26 days of freedom, on average, criminals who escape from danish jails return and ask to be let back in.

doggie diagnosis
according to the santa rosa press democrat dogs can be trained to sniff out cancerous tissue.

doggie scientists
pavlov's dogs were scientists that concluded from their observations that bell chimes cause food. in a similar experiment pigeons whose feedings were randomized tried to find correlations in nature often repeating motions made prior to being fed to determine if it was that motion that caused food. (the pigeon experiment was quoted by tom landauer of colorado to the ny times.)

the mind is a terrible thing
lab mice were randomly assigned to cages marked 'smart' and 'dumb' and taken to mouse maze researchers. on average the 'smart' cage mice did better. the results were statistically significant even when, unknown to the researchers, the same mice were re-tested with the cage labels secretly switched. (lyall watson reports this in his book 'supernature' from which many of these wbt items are drawn. lyall is a biologist. supernature was published in the '70s and is out of print. incidentally it was lyall who is credited with the now debunked theory of the hundredth monkey phenomenon. this does not necessarily discredit lyall. read the hundredth monkey essay carefully.)

pyramid power
build a cardboard pyramid to exact egyptian specifications and place a used razor blade where the crypt would be and it will be sharpened. a dead animal will become mummified. this is also from lyall watson.

space invaders
(from usenet) in lifetide by lyall watson (simon and schuster, new york,1979) one finds mention of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites --they contain organic matter. it is claimed that roughly 0.1% of all matter that has fallen on our planet from space is organic. jai maharaj jai@mantra.com

pesky mosquitoes?
here's how you can get them back. the next time you see one on the back of your hand, make a fist and she will become hopelessly stuck in your tightened skin unable to feed or break free. on other parts of the body simply pull the skin tight for the same effect.

urban legends
do you buy the bob lazar story?. a guy with a junior college education runs a photo shop in las vegas and gets hired to work as a scientist in area 51 to reverse engineer the space-time-distortion propulsion engine of an alien craft and then goes public with this information? or a troubled photo developer with a broken marriage that seeks the limelight? and perhaps to profit from our ufo curiosity? then there is the the legend of the philadelphia experiment aka project rainbow aka the maontauk project. in 1943 the u.s. navy conducted an experiment in which it rendered the destroyer uss eldridge invisible by generating a magnetic field around it that was so intense that the electromagnetic spectrum from radio to visible became bent. in the process the ship actually de-materialized and became teleported from philadelphia to norfolk, va. and back again. some of the crew died, some disappeared, and the rest became disoriented and were rendered 'mentally unfit for duty'. al bielek is one of these survivors and he claims that the navy's super magnet technology goes far beyond invisibility and teleportation; they can shuttle people back and forth between the here and the hereafter and between different individual identities that may be separated by time. the u.s. navy denies that such an experiment ever took place or that any such technology exists.

slow movin'
the data transmission rate in our nervous system is relatively slow. there is a noticeable delay between the time something touches your foot and your awareness of it. and the bigger you are the longer it takes. could be why you don't see too many tall jittery folks. in a giraffe it takes 300 milliseconds for a message to get from the foot to the brain. in the same interval a tcp packet can make the round trip from penngrove, california to reading, england and back.

weightlessly falling
astronauts in the shuttle appear weightless not because they have escaped earth's gravity (if they had they would not be in orbit) but because they are in free fall into earth's gravitational pull. this is elementary and you probably knew this i but meet a lot of people that think otherwise.

stereo broadcasting
mono receivers are able to receive stereo broadcasts even though the complete message is in two different frequencies because broadcasters send the sum and the difference of the two signals. mono receivers are tuned to the sum. stereo receives both frequencies and computes the left and right signals by addition and subtraction.

as the world turns
the earth has two motions relative to the sun, it rotates on its axis and it revolves around the sun. but how many times does it rotate during one revolution? if you said 365.25 you are off by one. it has to rotate one more time to undo the rotational effect of the revolution. if it did not rotate at all the sun would rise once a year. relative to the earth, our moon has to rotate once per revolution to keep the same face toward us. btw, why is the land distribution on our planet so lopsidedly northern?

it wobbles
we measure time according to the rhythmic cycles in the movements of our planet relative to the sun. in addition to the rotation (which measures days) and revolution (which measures years) there is actually a third movement. the earth wobbles on a precise 26,000-year cycle called an epoch. within each epoch you can tell what 'time' it is by the shape and relative position of the constellations; and what 'age' it is by the constellation of the zodiac that is directly behind the sun at sunrise on the spring equinox. the age now is aquarius.

astronomical time stamping
the relative sizes and the geometrical arrangement of the great pyramids of giza form a representation of the belt of the constellation orion; not as it is today but what it looked like in 10,500 bc (see 'wobble' above). then it was the age of orion, which means that orion rose exactly due east at sunrise on the spring equinox. and that is what the sphinx is staring at. these structures are not tombs and monuments to the ego of kufku or any other pharoah and they were not built in the time of kufku (2500 bc) as we have been led to believe. they were built in 10,500 bc as an astronomical message from a forgotten civilization. the egyptian markings are mere graffiti. (bauval and hancock) (some consider these arguments to be intellectual chicanery)

it hums
if you listen very carefully with the right kind of instruments you will find that the earth emits a mysterious hum in a symphony of 50 notes ranging from 2 to 7 millihertz. (naoki suda and kaqunari nawa in the new scientist, 1999)

it's slowing down
according to our atomic clock in colorado the earth took one second longer than it should have to make all the turns it made from 1966 to 1996.

talking heads
it is a matter of historical record that many severed heads in european guillotines have moved their eyes and their lips for half a minute. could they actually see? were they aware of what had happened? can we ever find out?

shu di shu di huang huang
the chinese herb shu di huang (radix rehmanniae) touted to help your kidneys may actually induce acute renal failure.

don't hold your breath
our breathing action is on automatic control. it is triggered by the co2 level in our blood. yet we are able to seize manual control and hold our breath; or we can breathe on purpose. we can similarly take control of other automatic processes. all we need is feedback. we can raise or lower our pulse, blood pressure, body temperature, and so on if we are given some kind of sensory cue on what's going on. check for yourself the power of feedback. write with your eyes closed. or listen to your favorite song thru your stereo headphones and sing along into a tape recorder. now play it back. the horror. the horror.

night of the living dead
how would you define 'living'? are living things self sustaining and self replicating? are they things that consume nutrients from the environment and generate energy and manufacture protein? because the virus is none of these. a virus consists only of some genetic material encased in protein. it exists because it was manufactured by a living cell in a process that must be life chemistry gone haywire. once produced the virus can attach itself to another cell, chemically weaken the cell wall, and inject its genetic material into the cell. the cell manufactures many copies of the virus and the copies then proceed to weaken the cell wall from the inside and bust out ready to attack other cells. it's tough to fight these things. you can't kill them because they are already dead. all you can hope for is to interfere with the two things they know how to do and these are 1. attach to cell walls and 2. weaken cell walls.

excuse him
did jesus christ's physical body ascend to heaven? at what speed? since it is matter and has mass perhaps not faster than the speed of light? then he is no more than 2000 light years away right now. and where is heaven exactly? is it beyond our galaxy? in that case he has yet to reach his destination… excuse me … excuse me …(the reverend bernie ward, kgo radio, sf)(btw: one story has it that jesus was not in his grave because roman soldiers fed his remains to wild dogs. this story comes to us from dr frederick niedner, professor of theology, valparaiso university.)

nativity
for more than a thousand years of christianity there was no nativity - no child in manger, no star, no wise men, none of it; until 1223 ad when st. francis of assisi concocted the elaborate lie which we now celebrate as christmas. (donald soto in the hidden jesus)

the free will paradox
if god knows all then he already knew when you were born whether you would go to heaven or hell and therefore there was no reason to give you the earth test. earthly free will is inconsistent with heavenly omnipotence. (the reverend bernie ward, kgo radio)

scientific experiments
in pre-copernican astronomy scientists took data only to refine the aristotelian system. the kind of experiment we design, the data we take, and the way we interpret the data are all pre-determined by our version of reality. we may seem more refined and scientific relative to older realities but relative to our current reality we are in the same mess. for example in all of fisher's crop yield experiments the gardener was not a variable because green thumbs are not part of our reality.

mystical shapes
how well bugs work depend on the shape of the container they are in. if you age burgundy wines in bordeaux bottles or bordeaux wines in burgundy bottles they will not taste the same. barrel aging of wine in any shape other than a barrel-shape produces inferior wine. the french have determined an optimal container shape for making yogurt. beer made in angular vessels is not as good. and laboratory mice with identical wounds heal faster in round cages. (lyall watson)