Category Archives: Comment

June 19, 2010 · 11:13 pm

The Music of the Sun

I read with interest that some scientists have concluded that the Sun actually makes music. What they in fact mean is that the various magnetic fields of the sun vibrate at frequencies which, if they were vibrations in an acoustic medium and they were speeded up to be audible to humans, they would indeed sound like something. The sceptical among you  will be thinking that a sound which is speeded up by an arbitrary amount can hardly be said to be the authentic music of anything: for example, if I had a note vibrating at 440Hz and speeded it up to 660Hz, I would be raising it in pitch from A to E. Do that too many times and on an inconsistent basis and that is tantamount to altering the melody of the whole song!

However, if one were to look at it not as the actual sounds in themselves but as a method of composition – by applying a consistent algorithm (algo-rhythm?) to the vibrations – one actually comes up with a piece of ambient process music of the kind that Karlheinz Stockhausen or Brian Eno would be interested in.

For those interested in hearing a WAV file of the sounds generated by the scientists from the Sun, Please click this link.

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June 7, 2010 · 9:40 am

Telepathy: Here comes the FUD

Months ago I commented on the possible use of fMRI scanners as a possible first step – but only a step – towards the goal of creating artificial, machine-assisted telepathy. Now, it seems, in a somewhat ludicrous development, the civil liberties brigade are shoving their oar in.

Apparently, so claims an academic from Edinburgh, “if left unregulated, scanners could threaten people’s privacy. They could, for instance, be used by employers to test the honesty of an individual’s CV or by commercial companies to analyse the subconscious preferences of their consumers.”

One wonders why he should feel intimidated about an employer finding out whether an individual’s CV (resume) is honest or not. Obviously he must be concerned for other people apart from himself! More seriously though, as I have said before, fMRI scanners can just about distinguish between different types of brain activity but it is not possible to discern the contents of individual thoughts. So for example, an fMRI scanner could tell if a person is thinking about something that involves spatial awareness, but would not be able to say spatial awareness of what.

Most Civil Liberties issues arise when the potential for an infringement thereof actually exists. But the so-called Institute for Advanced Studies, which is organising the conference at which these claims will be made clearly thinks that shutting the stable door before the horse has bolted is obviously not good enough. It wants to shut it before the horse is in the stable for the first place! Really, this is the kind of news story that generally arises during the silly *ahem* I mean “conference” season.

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June 1, 2010 · 5:24 pm

How to really achieve World Peace

Now I have been tough on certain Nobel Prize Winners in the past, and implied that I am perfectly willing to do as much for world peace as they have, but for less money. However, in all seriousness, I do know at least one thing about Peace and that is basically it is generally not a good idea to start a fight if you can avoid doing so.

In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, one of the five moral commandments (“Yama”) for every Yogi is Ahimsa – “non violence.” What Patanjali actually says is:

When non-violence in speech, though and action is established, one’s agressive nature in relinquished and others abandon hostility in one’s presence.

Now there is a famous saying, Roman in origin but made most famous by Metallica – “To secure peace is to prepare for war.” But the meaning of Patanjali says the opposite – to secure peace one must be peaceful. Indeed it does not take someone versed in ancient Yogic philosophy to realise that if you do not want to be challenged to a fight, it is probably not a good idea to go through life with a chip on your shoulder.

I say all this because I note in the news that Israel soldiers claimed that the deaths of the arabs on the so-called Freedom Flotilla was “self-defence.” Now of all the possible justifications for the controversy regarding the Flotilla, this must surely be the lamest. It was the Israeli soldiers who rappelled on to the ships. They were not obliged to board, they went looking for trouble, and of course they found it.

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May 21, 2010 · 12:17 pm

A UFOlogoist’s lot is not a happy one

News today of a Policeman who has compiled an online database of UFO sightings. There are two interesting things about this. Firstly – the reports are all from policemen, and hence the kind of people one would hope would be level-headed about this sort of thing. Secondly, the copper who has compiled them has managed to act like a quality-filter and brought the really interesting stories to the fore – for example, by finding several more CE2s of which I was not previously aware. This incidentally was one of my gripes against the material released by the Ministry of Defence: this and the fact that although they released all in bulk, they made no attempt to flag up any interesting bits.

What puzzles me most, though, is why UFOs – if they are indeed extraterrestrial craft – should be seen above the British Isles at all. Human rocket-scientists have found that the best place from which to launch a spaceship is as close to the Equator as possible – because then such a craft can make best use of the Earth’s rotation. This, incidentally, is why the Apollo landings took place in the Sea of Tranquility: because it lies on the Moon’s equator, this would assist the astronauts in launching from the Moon and returning to Earth.

Hence, if our extraterrestrial brethren are visiting us, one would assume they know at least as much about celestial mechanics as we do, and hence would concentrate their visits to Earth along our own Equator, the easier to make a quick getaway when it is time to leave. By rights therefore, the further away from the Equatorial regions a UFO is sighted, the less likely it is to be an extraterrestrial visitor.

This makes me think of a top-tip for speculating on real-estate on the Moon! We can assume that if anyone is going to make a go of settling on the Moon, one of the first things that will happen is that a Spaceport will be built, i.e. a permanent take-off / landing facility. This we can guess will be situated on the Luna Equator. It stands to reason therefore that the most valuable Luna real-estate will be that which is closest to the putative spaceport, i.e. nearest the Luna Equator, while the least valuable will be the most far away.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings. The website of the policeman who has compiled all the UFO reports is here.

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April 23, 2010 · 10:34 am

How to use Dreams to improve learning

You are able to make difficult tasks easier, improve the rate at which you take in, retain and understand information, and generally improve your mental capabilities – all through the power of dreaming. So says a group of Harvard scientists in a newly published study.

Of course – those who have already investigated the art of lucid dreaming must now be saying to these same scientists: “Told you so!” The fact is that these scientists are finally realising what lucid dreamers have been saying for years.

The basic principle to what the researchers are saying is this: you work on a mental problem or challenge late at night. You then go to sleep and have a good night’s rest. During the night your unconscious mind actually gets to work. In the morning when you wake up, and attempt to solve the same mental challenge – and suddenly it seems easier! The reason being, say the scientists, is that the power of dreaming frees up the power of the mind to apply itself to tasks in a way that is only “dormant” whilst you are awake.

However, lucid dreamers claim that the power of dreaming goes even further than what these scientists have been able to show in their experiments. History is replete with a number of creatively-minded people – artists, writers and others – who have attributed their inspiration to dreaming.

The author Robert Louis Stevenson consciously caused his dreams to inspire him with new plots for his novels. This is how he got the idea for “The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” as well as a number of others. In fact, Stevenson’s approach was that he characterised the powers of his unconscious as “brownies” (helpful spirits) and then told them to send him a message in his dreams – which is basically Magic by any other name.

John Coltrane “dreamed up” his masterpiece, A Love Supreme. Indeed, Paul McCartney has stated that he believes in the existence of magic simply because his greatest song, Yesterday, came to him in a dream. It is even said that many of Albert Einstein’s great ideas came to him through dreaming. So really the latest research by these scientists is not surprising at all but simply validates what many people have intuitively know for a long time.

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April 2, 2010 · 8:56 pm

Watkins Books – resurrected in time for Easter

I am indebted to the Hermetic Library for finding this news story. Apparently Watkins Books – one of London’s three leading occult bookstores – has been saved from closing. (This, if you recall, is the bookshop which I allege is the model for the one in Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books.) Had it closed it would have been disastrous for the London – and UK – occult scene (I have patronised it myself on several occasions).

Full story here.

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April 1, 2010 · 8:13 pm

The Pentagram

News today of naughty Pagan goings on in the Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire, UK.  Apparently, a local well has been the subject of a severe case of well-dressings to celebrate the Equinox. Shock, horror! Apparently St Anthony’s Well, which is the renowned for its miracle cures for skin conditions, has been haunted by several teenage delinquents who have also been leaving pentagrams nearby, much to the consternation of local Christians.

Let us gloss over for one moment the fact that Christians ought to be praising God for any teenager that ventures near a cure for skin conditions, no matter how odd. Let us also gloss over the fact that this ancient well, though supposedly a Christian site is almost certainly an old pagan one that got saved for the Lord. What – pray tell – exactly is wrong with a Pentagram?

The Pentagram is a symbol of Nature – literally. Its proportions are based upon the Golden Ratio – 1:1.618… etc – which itself is based upon the Fibonnaci series.

Now there is a curious (and not unrelated) fact – if one were to imagine that the orbits of both the Earth and the Planet Venus were circles, then the major occlusions of the Sun by Venus as seen from Earth would mark out the points of a pentagram! There is a simple reason for this: the ratio of the distance of Venus from the Sun, to the distance of the Earth to the Sun, corresponds to the Golden Ratio – 1:1.618. Because orbital speed is also proportional to its distance from the Sun, it follows as a Math that a Pentagram-like arrangement would occur.

I was chatting on this matter to some Companions of mine in the pub – where all matters of cosmic importance are always discussed.

“What I find most remarkable,” I said, “is that the planet Venus just so happens to be that particular distance from the Sun in relation to Earth.”
“Yes,” one of my Companions answered. “And we are the only planet with intelligent life to see it.”

In this sense the Pentagram is quite exciting – it is a greater argument for Intelligent Design than a lot of the tripe put forward by Bible-bashing fundies. Christians have a unique opportunity to embrace this symbol because it really does indicate that a divine being created the Heavens and the Earth – yet they shy away from it because they think it is a symbol of the occult. Pagans are smarter in that respect.

Of course there are some Christians who like to appropriate the Pentagram as a sacred symbol – simply because it is a symbol of the number 5. There were 5 wounds of Christ, and there are 5 letters in the Hebrew spelling of the Qabalistic name of Jesus – “Yeheshuah.” This, incidentally is the basis for the Pentagram ritual of the Golden Dawn, which itself has passed into the neo-pagan tradition.

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March 12, 2010 · 2:51 pm

Yet Another Step Closer to Telepathy

Just a month ago I speculated that the use of an MRI scanner in the context of PVS research could point the way to machine-simulated telepathy. Now it transpires that more scientists are claiming that an MRI scanner can be used … to machine-simulate telepathy. I presume that they had already started their research before I went public with my big idea!

Apparently, different memories produce different signals when the MRI scanner is used to scan the hippocampus. By my reckoning this is one stage more advanced than the PVS research: the former only suggested the possibility of simple yes / no responses, but this suggests that a greater range may be detected.

However there is at least two fairly major drawbacks – the first is that the researchers managed to correctly identify thoughts “more than 50% of the time” – but less than 100%. Let’s face it, a telepathic message that is 49% garbled is going to be 100% useless – if you don’t know which bits are the garbled bits and which not. The second drawback is one of the same ones that I identified in regard to the PVS research. The MRI scanner can apparently identify brain activity associated with certain types of memory, but it does not identify the memories themselves. It is the alphabet, but not the language, of telepathy. Nevertheless, it does give hope that more may be achieved if further research is carried out.

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March 4, 2010 · 12:48 pm

Royal Society

Was up at Freemasons’ Hall in London yesterday and popped in to the Freemasonry and the Royal Society Exhibition in the Library and Museum of Freemasonry. The main thrust of it is that many of the founders of the Royal Society were – and perhaps their current members still are – Freemasons, e.g. Elias Ashmole, Desaguliers, etc.

The stated origin of the Royal Society is illuminating to say the least:

The origins of the Royal Society lie in an “invisible college” of natural philosophers who began meeting in the mid-1640s to discuss the ideas of Francis Bacon. Its official foundation date is 28 November 1660, when 12 of them met at Gresham College after a lecture by Christopher Wren, the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and decided to found ‘a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’. This group included Wren himself, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Sir Robert Moray, and William, Viscount Brouncker.
History of the Royal Society

In other words, what we have here is not just a Masonic institution, but a group of individuals who attempted and succeeded to create a society based on the model of the Rosicrucians – i.e. the Invisible College.

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March 4, 2010 · 10:36 am

MOD Files – what I have learnt so far…

I have been ploughing my way through the files recently released by the MOD regarding UFOs: here are my preliminary conclusions:

  • There has only been one decent UFO sighting in the past 30 years – the “Halt Memorandum” incident, which occurred on 27th December 1980. This was a CE2.
  • The overwhelming majority of other incidents have either been CE1s, or false-alarms. Many of the false-alarms, curiously, were caused by Richard Branson – who at one time introduced the Virgin Lightship, an illuminated dirigible, to the skies of Britain, as an airborne advertising ploy.
  • Civillian UFO research organisations act as a quality filter, as far as the MOD are concerned, when it comes to reports of UFO sightings.
  • A large number of CE1s have been reported by people who admitted they had gone out looking for them, e.g. Crop-circle enthusiasts.
  • The MOD has a stock reply letter which it regularly sends out with depressing frequency.
  • CE3s, CE4s etc have not appeared in the reports I have read so far, except to the extent that the MOD doubts that they occur.

In response to the news that the MOD is going to discontinue collecting reports of UFO sightings, I have to say that from what I have read so far, we would not actually be losing much. In my opinion, the job of running a UFO hotline should be handed over to the civilian UFO research organisations – after all, it is they – not the MOD – who are actually committed to investigating the phenomena.

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