I discovered this while tripping through Wikipedia recently. It’s an old English and Norse concept of non-linear destiny called the wyrd, which adds an interesting dimension to any dualistic discussions of fate versus free will.
In a simple sense, Wyrd refers to how past actions continually affect and condition the future, but also how the future affects the past. The concept of Wyrd highlights the interconnected nature of all actions and how they influence each other. Indeed, for a true comprehension it is key for the Wyrd to be embraced as a conceptual mystery, wherein the tides and tidings of time and timelessness flow and weave always, all ways, entwining the reticulum of the fabric of being and non-being.
A shamanistic view of a hyperdimensional universe?
It’s interesting that the modern “weird,” which today refers to the strange and anomalous, derives from this ancient term.
We’ve all been in that situation before. . . It’s late at night, and the one thing you want more than anything else in the world is a nice, warm cookie, and while you would gladly kill for one, there are no warm cookie-filled people nearby for you to murder to satisfy that need. The walls are closing in on you, and the only way to get your hands on a cookie is to drive somewhere to pick one up or worse yet, bake one yourself. It’s a nightmarish fate worse than death!
And that’s why I’m a fan of Nite Owl Cookies. They’re open until 1:30 in the morning (and they have ice cream sandwiches as well). I’d be very surprised if they weren’t all billionaires by next year.
The results of the tests are interesting to see, but I wonder. . . If these experiments were done without the test subject knowing they were being tested, without the pressure of being on camera, of performing for the scientists, would the numbers be even higher?
. . .what makes Sheldrake’s theory so radical is that formative causation postulated to act in a nonlocal fashion; that is, it operates instantaneously across space and time. Once a particular form has been learned by a system, it will be more easily learned by a similar system anywhere else in the world, without any spatiotemporal contact. And, in fact, Sheldrake points out that there is already a fair amount of circumstantial evidence supporting this. For example, it is well known that it is extremely difficult to crystallize complex organic compounds for the first time, but once it has been done in any laboratory, it is more easily (more rapidly) done in others. It has also been shown that once rats learn to negotiate a particular maze in one part of the world; rats elsewhere learn that maze more rapidly. And this, according to Sheldrake, is because of nonlocal morphic resonance and formative causation.
How many universes are there? Cosmologists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California calculate that the number dwarfs the 10500 universes postulated in string theory, and raise the provocative notion that the answer may depend on the human brain.
A few weeks back, as Hillary and I were driving through Austin, we came across an interview on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory and a man who says a vision of Superman gave him healing powers.
Richard – So I was traveling every other weekend, about. . . I think it was about thirteen hours one way. And on one of these trips, I was pretty much exhausted, and I guess you could say I hallucinated, George. I. . . A woman walked in with her little daughter with a lazy eye, asked me what I could do for it, and I saw, of all things, a hologram of George Reeves as Superman standing there, very bizarre. . .
His x-ray vision, which was yellow so that I could see it, went into the little girl’s eye, and I could see an energetic blockage there. Now I know one thing for sure; there’s cranial techniques that can help eye problems like that, but if you stick your finger a little child’s mouth, they’re liable to bite, and they can bit hard.
George Noory – Oh yes they can. Sharp little teeth.
Richard – Yeah, so I wasn’t going to do that, so my only other option was to go with this visual hallucination, and so what I wound up doing is touching the area where I saw the, the “x-ray” if you will, go into her head, and when I touched it, there was a flash of light that I could see with my internal sight. And then the little girl started blinking at me, and I asked her “What’s wrong?.” and she said “There’s two of you.” Well, there’s something called binocular vision, which is how we see, and then our brains take those two fields and superimpose them to make one stereoscopic field. She was seeing normally and her lazy eye was corrected in that moment.
The next day, when I got up, everyone I touched experienced changes just from my touch. And that was the beginning of what later came to be called matrix energetics.
George Noory – You-
Richard – Now I think the hallucination was probably an archetype for x-ray vision, that’s the only thing I can figure. Otherwise Superman. . . I was a fan of Superman in the ’50s, he was my favorite Superhero. . .
George Noory – You conjured him up, Richard, didn’t you?
Richard – I think so, yeah. You could say that maybe, George, he was a guide or and angel or something, some hyperdimensional character, and that’s another possible interpretation. The point of it is though, after that event, my energy field, something happened that drastically changed the way I looked at reality.
In a 16-episode series titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” the writers pitted the Man of Steel against the men in white hoods.
As the storyline progressed, the shows exposed many of the KKK’s most guarded secrets. By revealing everything from code words to rituals, the program completely stripped the Klan of its mystique. Within two weeks of the broadcast, KKK recruitment was down to zero. And by 1948, people were showing up to Klan rallies just to mock them.
“It turns out that the human body may adapt well to Borg-like accessorization,” notes this report on experiments proving that our brain can incorporate “cyborg additions” into our body schema. (Even after using a mechanical grabber, test subjects still behaved as if their arms were longer!)
But what’s even more interesting is that apparently robots can also learn to act human.
Do you really want a deadly robotic chassis being controlled by the brain of a rat? Scientists at University of Reading do. They’ve connected a biological “brain” made of rat neurons to a robot, with a two-way link.
It gets more demented: the robot is controlled via a Bluetooth connection — which means anybody with a cellphone can probably hack its little rat cortex — and the brain is kept inside a bell jar, just like Sylvia Plath’s. The rat neurons can send instructions to the robot body, but they can also get signals back. And it has a personality, say researchers.
Another rover tackles the climbing problem with sheer dexterity. With a typically charming NASA acronym, the Lemur (Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robots) was designed to help build things in orbit. It can crawl along a segmented mirror and climb the walls in a rock gym.
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Able to leap small boulders in a single bound, this hopping robot doesn’t waste time on navigation. The prototype is so new it doesn’t have a catchy acronym yet, but it’s the latest in a long line of hopping robots, all designed to save the time and energy lost tiptoeing around obstacles. Most earlier hoppers landed on their heads and needed helmets to survive, which meant they couldn’t make long jumps or carry fragile equipment. This one deftly lands on its six spring-loaded feet. It can jump about a foot in the air on Earth, which would be six feet under lunar gravity. All six legs are also steerable, letting it take off and land at different angles. And it carries a small motorized gyroscope in its underbelly to keep it from tumbling mid-hop.
Named “Lucky Dragon,” the 15-meter (49-ft) long aluminum cruise boat is outfitted with a 7-meter (23-ft) tall mechanical dragon that moves its neck and wings, spits fire and water, and flashes glowing red eyes.
Like his predecessors, Amio’s speech and vision recognition software allow him to guess a person’s emotional state, but his fully anthropomorphic shape is more ideal for human-robot interactions. The strength of the software has been proven in several experiments, where the robots chose an appropriate conversation topic and behaved appropriately in response to human emotions. They could ask you what you are angry about and then make a joke to console you or make you laugh.
Mark wanders through Maker Faire in search of interesting robots. First, we meet Babbling Head (an animatronic skull that sings sea shanties), Froggo (a weird slimy kitschy creature ‘bot with a squid beak for a mouth), and Seeker Robot (GPS-autonomous RoboMagellan contestant), all creations of Eric Lundquist. Then, we stop by Bleeplabs, and listen to strange sounds emanating from a simple (but cute) analog synthesizer.
Developed by the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, the theatrical robots Thomas and Janet rehearse their kiss scene, part of a performance of Phantom of the Opera.
Here’s an update for those of you who, like me, eagerly await the availability of your cyberpunk implant suite – experiments with using silk as a substrate for miniaturised electronic circuits show that they can integrate with animal body tissue without any adverse effects or biological rejection. Which means we can not only make better neural interfaces, but aesthetic gadgets like LED ‘tattoos’ to live under our skin.
One of NASA’s next great adventures could take place with a raindrop-flecked camera bobbing around on extraterrestrial waves. Or at least, that’s the hope of several researchers who want to sail an unmanned, nuclear-powered capsule on Saturn’s moon Titan.
Just how much of the human body can you replace or augment: seemingly everything apart from the tadpole like remnants of the brain and spinal chord.
Bionic eyes, ears, hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, hands, feets, legs, arms and skin are now real science rather than concept designs. For this list, we have gathered together as many real devices including commercially available products rather than concept designs or imagery that appeal based on gimmick value.
Airships may be the key component in a new robotic system for exploring the celestial bodies most likely to harbor life like Mars and Jupiter’s moon, Titan.
The dirigibles would provide regional observations and autonomous command for ground-based vehicles, while maintaining contact with orbiters.
