"Face" on Mars Now Shown to be Just Rocks

New close-up of rocky outcropping that created the "face."

A massive shape on the surface of Mars in the likeness of a human face spawned countless conspiracy theories in recent decades, but modern technology now confirms it is simply a large, rocky hill in a Martian desert.

Back in July, 1976, the famous "face" photo was taken by the American Viking 1 Orbiter. Within days, enthusiasts were convinced the face was man-made or had been built by Martians aeons ago as part of an ancient civilization. There were many theories about the presence of the human-like face, and nearly all concluded that NASA was part of a huge cover-up to conceal the face’s true origins.

Now a new photo ~ taken with NASA’s high-definition HiRISE camera and released last week ~ reveals the craggy rock formations that create the effect of human features.

According to the London Mail:

This is the closest-ever image of the famous outcrop which should, once and for all, scotch the conspiracy theorists who believe that the 'face' is conclusive evidence of intelligent life on Mars. 

Today's image was taken by HiRISE from on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which can pick out incredible detail from 300 kilometres above the planet’s surface. The rocky formation is known as a mesa, a large rocky outcrop with a flat top and steep, cliff-like sides. The Face’ mesa is in the Cydonia region and is a couple of miles long and a few hundred feet high. 

. . . NASA even added to the theory by referring to the picture's human likeness in the caption it added to the photo when it first released it to the general public. The outcrop looked a little like a face, complete with eyes, nose and mouth, because of the angle of the sun and its cratered surface, and NASA happily pointed this fact out.

Seeing human faces in inaminate objects is known as "pareidolia" and is why so many people see what they believe is the face of Jesus in tea leaves, clouds and even burnt toast, the Mail pointed out. Carl Sagan believed humans are 'hard-wired' to find human faces wherever possible as part of our survival instinct.

Smaller photo shows the famous Martian "face."

Click here for the complete article and a video.

Lake-Chain Plan Would Convert Deserts to Cities

Artist's conception of a chain of desert lakes.

A plan to convert millions of square miles of earth's desert into inhabitable land is being developed by Shimizu Corporation of Japan. Called the “Aqua-Net,” the plan calls for a string of manmade lakes to be built across earth’s arid regions, giving rise to a network of new cities.

According to PhysOrg.com:

The idea involves the building of interconnected lakes in the desert. These 18-mile-diameter lakes would be connected by canals fed from the ocean. The lakes would include built islands that could serve as homes for cities teeming with people. Supposedly, this would work because water from the lake would cool the cities, making them livable. There would also be arable land, theoretically, after this cooling above the desert lake islands. The cities would be powered by satellite power stations, and by the sun. 

Of course the plan is not without substantial challenges:

One of the biggest draw backs is that the lakes would be filled with seawater. While the salt water would provide the opportunities for water-based wildlife, and even for biomass development, it doesn't provide much opportunity for drinking. However, Shimizu plans that the some of the water would be desalinated, and thus made fit for human consumption and for irrigation of crops.

Shimizu is a large construction firm currently involved with a plan called the “Luna Ring” to build a wreath of solar cells around the moon to generate electricity and send it to earth via microwave transmission.

Click here for the complete article.

'Spacequakes" Disrupting Earth's Magnetic Field

Spacequakes contribute to auroras in the night sky.

Called “spacequakes,” bursts of plasma flying off of the sun are disrupting Earth’s magnetic field with the strength of a sizeable earthquake, according to new scientific evidence.

“The total energy in a spacequake can rival that of a magnitude 5 or 6 earthquake,” Evgeny Panov of the Space Research Institute in Austria tells the Christian Science Monitor. He is first author of a paper reporting the results of a study on spacequakes in the April 2010 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

NASA’s THEMIS space probes discovered the precursors of spacequakes in 2007. According to the Monitor: 

The action begins in Earth's magnetic tail, which is stretched out like a windsock by the million-miles-per-hour solar wind. Sometimes the tail can become so stretched and tension-filled, it snaps back like an over-torqued rubber band. Solar wind plasma trapped in the tail hurtles toward Earth. 

On more than one occasion, the five THEMIS spacecraft were in the line of fire when these “plasma jets” swept by. Clearly, the jets were going to hit Earth. But what would happen then? The fleet moved closer to the planet to find out. 

“Now we know," said THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. “Plasma jets trigger spacequakes.”

Research shows that the plasma jets crash into Earth’s geomagnetic field some 18,600 miles above the equator. The impact sets off a rebounding process, in which the incoming plasma actually bounces up and down on the reverberating magnetic field. The first bounce is a big one, followed by bounces of decreasing amplitude as energy is dissipated in the carpet.

Click here for the complete article.

Grief is Next Target for Antidepressants

"Grief Out of Darkness into Light" by Jozef Israels (1834-1911)

Advocates of a pharmaceutically mediated society are making strides into yet another area of human experience ~ grief, especially following the loss of a loved one ~ they now consider suitable for treatment with antidepressants.

A recent article from National Public Radio describes the debate stemming from the new draft of psychiatry’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that opens the door for grieving to be considered as major depression and treated accordingly.

On one side are the advocates for treating grief with drugs and therapy:

"I'd rather make the mistake of calling someone depressed who may not be depressed, than missing the diagnosis of depression, not treating it, and having that person kill themselves," says Dr. Sid Zisook, one of the psychiatrists who has argued for removal of the bereavement exclusion. "I mean, [pain] is a normal consequence of breaking a bone. But that doesn't mean that we don't treat the pain. We treat the pain vigorously."

Then there the opponents who see grief as a natural process:

Dr. Allen Frances, the famous psychiatrist and a former editor of the DSM, says that more and more, psychiatry is medicalizing our experiences. That is, it is turning emotions that are perfectly normal into something pathological.

"Over the course of time, we've become looser in applying the term 'mental disorder' to the expectable aches and pains and sufferings of everyday life," Frances says. "And always, we think about a medication treatment for each and every problem."

Advocates say that treating grieving people as depressed will affect about a third of the bereaved.

Click here for the complete NPR article.

In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creature flourish together,
content with the way they are,
endlessly repeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.

When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.

The Master views the parts with compassion,
because he understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn't glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged and common as stone.

Physicist David Peat

David Peat (born 1938) is one of my favorite physicist/philosopher/authors and was for many years associated with physics legend David Bohm. In this brief clip, Peat discusses Bohm's theory of the implicate and explicate orders. This theory crops up in many different disciplines and is thought by many to hold the secret of everything from ESP to a materially and spiritually unified universe, and the final uniter of Newtonian and quantum physics. Peat lives in Italy, which explains the opening slide being in Italian.

Trove of Unpublished Kafka Writings Held by Court

The writings of Czech author Franz Kafka for many years have tantalized me, and in college I did an independent study of his perplexing short-stories and novels ~ which is why I and much of the literary world watches with interest the fact that 10 safety-deposit boxes of his never-published writings now have surfaced.

According to the Associated Press:

In the past week, the pages have been pulled from safety deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich, Switzerland, on the order of an Israeli court over the objections of two elderly women who claim to have inherited them from their mother. 

The case boils down to the interpretation of the will of Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and publisher. Kafka bequeathed his writings to Brod shortly before his own death from tuberculosis in 1924, instructing his friend to burn everything unread. Brod ignored Kafka's wishes and published most of what was in his possession, including the novels "The Trial," "The Castle" and "Amerika." 

But Brod, who smuggled some of the manuscripts to pre-state Israel when he fled the Nazis in 1938, didn't publish everything. Upon his death in 1968, Brod left his personal secretary, Esther Hoffe, in charge of his literary estate and instructed her to transfer the Kafka papers to an academic institution.

Instead, for the next four decades, Hoffe kept the papers in her Tel Aviv apartment and in safety deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich banks.

"Kafka could easily have written a story like this, where you try to do something and it all goes wrong and everything remains unresolved," said Sara Loeb, a Tel Aviv-based author of two books about the writer. "It's really a case of life imitating art."

Click here for the AP article.

Impulsive Behavior Tied to Excess Dopamine

Bright areas of this brain cross-section show elevated levels of dopamine.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University say high levels of the brain chemical dopamine contribute to impulsive behaviors, creating problems in acts from shopping to substance abuse.

“Think of it as very similar to how a thermostat works,” researcher Joshua Buckholz told NPR. Sensors in the lower-middle part of the brain ~ called autoreceptors ~  tell the midbrain to start pumping dopamine or stop, but new research shows the autorecptors of highly impulsive people aren’t functioning properly.

Other researchers believe there's more to impulsiveness than the dopamine thermostat, according to NPR. “This is not a very huge effect,” says Ahmad Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. He thinks other brain chemicals with their own thermostats also play a role.

“I think that there is a circuitry of self-control that's fundamental to many, many aspects of living,” agrees Edythe London, a psychiatrist at UCLA. She says understanding the dopamine thermostat and other factors may lead to successful treatments for addiction and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Click here for the NPR article.

Touch Not Necessarily Related to Actual Body

Neuroscientists are exploring profound implications of non-locality ~ the concept that our perceptions of events and sensations are not necessarily anchored to our physical beings in the here and now ~ though further investigation into phenomenon such as the “rubber hand illusion.”

According to ScienceDaily.com:

A number of earlier studies showed that if a rubber hand is positioned such that it extends from a person's arm while her actual hand is hidden from view, and both her real hand and the rubber hand are stroked at the same time, she seems to feel the touch in the location where she sees the rubber hand being touched. This effect and the experienced 'ownership' of the rubber hand is the “rubber hand illusion.”

Now, neuroscientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, are investigating the relationship between bodily self-consciousness and the way touch stimuli are spatially represented in humans. They’ve determined that sensations of touch can be felt and mislocalised when people view “virtual” representations of their bodies.

In their previous research, Professor Olaf Blanke's lab at the EPFL found that the consciousness of one's own body (the sense of self-identification and self-location) can be altered in healthy people under certain experimental conditions, yielding similar sensations to those felt in out-of-body experiences. In this new study, Aspell and colleagues in Blanke's lab used a crossmodal congruency task to determine whether there is a change in touch perception during this illusion.

Such data reveals that brain mechanisms of multisensory processing are crucial for the “I” of conscious experience and can be scientifically manipulated in order to potentially animate and incarnate virtual humans, robots, and machines.

Click here for the complete article.

Number 57 ~ THE GENTLE

Success through what is small.

It furthers one to have somewhere to go.
It further one to see the great man.

Penetration produces gradual and inconspicuous effects. It should be not an act of violation but of influence that never lapses. Results of this kind are less striking to the eye than those won by surprise attack, but they are more enduring and more complete. If one would produce such effects, one must have a clearly defined goal, for only when the penetrating influence works always in the same direction can the object be attained. Small strength can achieve its purpose only by subordinating itself to an eminent man who is capable of creating order.

'Big Bang' Theory Being Reconsidered

Cosmologists' view of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang theory has formed the basis of our understanding of the universe's origins since Georges Lemaitre first proposed it in 1927 ~ basing it on Einstein's widely accepted theory of general relativity. Now astrophysicists Maximo Banados and Pedro Ferreira have resurrected a theory of gravity from the early 20th century and discovered that it may hold an alternative to the Big Bang.

Banados and Ferreira have reconsidered the theory of gravity proposed by Arthur Eddington, a contemporary of Einstein. Although Eddington played a significant role in developing general relativity, during the following decades he became more interested in finding a theory to unify gravity and quantum mechanics. In 1924, he proposed a new “gravitational action” as an alternative to the Einstein-Hilbert action, which could serve as an alternative starting point to general relativity.

According to Banados and Ferreira, Eddington’s theory could lead to an entirely new view of the Universe that doesn't include a Big Bang, according to PhysOrg.com. The theory predicts that, depending on the Universe’s initial density, it may have loitered for a long time at a relatively small size before growing large enough to be controlled by standard cosmological evolution. Another possibility, depending on the initial conditions, is that the Universe could have undergone a bounce, resulting from the collapse of a previous Universe.

“Taking as a starting point what is a very old idea, we have ended up with a theory that has this very interesting property of not having singularities,” Ferreira, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, told PhysOrg.com. “It was unexpected and definitely not what we were looking for.”

Click here for the complete article.

China Experiencing Revival of Various Religions

Worshippers of goddess Mazu recently celebrate her 1,050th birthday.

Collapsing communist ideology in China is leading to a massive religious revival, a situation of worldwide importance, considering China’s enormous population. According to NPR, in 2006 China conducted its first major survey of religious beliefs and found that 31.4 percent of about 4,500 people questioned described themselves as religious.

That amounts to more than 300 million religious believers, an astonishing number in an officially atheist country, and three times higher than the last official estimate, which had largely remained unchanged for years, according to NPR.

Across China, religious belief has far outpaced the government's ability to control the profusion of charismatic movements and revivals of traditional Chinese religions. Two-thirds of those who described themselves as religious in the 2006 survey said they were Buddhists, Taoists or worshippers of folk gods such as the Dragon King or the God of Fortune.

"It doesn't matter to the Chinese government whether you are a farmers' union, a Boy Scout troop, the Red Cross or the Catholic Church," says Sister Janet Carroll, a nun who has been active in China for decades. "If you gather people together, have authorities in place, financial means and some sort of organizational control over groups of people, the Chinese government wants to not only know about it, but also have a say about how it all functions."

To that end, after the communist revolution in 1949, the government recognized five official religions: Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Taoism and Islam. For each of them, associations were set up to supervise and monitor religious practice. 

Increasing numbers of younger people in China are practicing religion. The 2006 survey showed 62 percent of religious believers are 39 and under.

Click here for the complete NPR article.

Earliest Illustrated Christian Book is Saved

A page from the Garima Gospels.

A British charity has saved the world's earliest illustrated Christian book, which was found at a remote Ethiopian monestary.

The Garima Gospels are named after a monk named Abba Garima who arrived in Ethiopia from Constantinople in 494 AD. Legend has it that he was able to copy the gospels in a day because God delayed the sun from setting. The relic has been kept ever since in the Garima Monastery near Adwa in the north of the country.

According to the London Mail:

Experts believe it is also the earliest example of book binding still attached to the original pages. The survival of the Gospels is incredible considering the country has been under Muslim invasion, Italian invasion and a fire in the 1930s destroyed the monastery's church. 

They were written on goat skin in the early Ethiopian language of Ge'ez. There are two volumes which date from the same time, but the second is written in a different hand from the first. Both contain illustrations and the four Gospels.

Though occasional travelers have mentioned the texts since the 1950s, it was thought they dated from the 11th century at the earliest. Carbon dating, however, gives a date between 330 and 650, overlapping the date Abba Garima arrived in the country.

Click here for the complete article.

Arthur's "Round Table" Actually a Huge Structure

Artist's conception of Round Table from 13th Century.

Researchers exploring the legend of Britain’s King Arthur now believe his stronghold of Camelot was built on the site of a recently discovered Roman amphitheatre in Chester. The familiar legend describes his knights gathering at a round table where they would receive instructions from their King.

But rather than it being a piece of furniture, historians believe the meeting site would have been a vast wood and stone structure allowing more than 1,000 of his followers to gather.

According to the London Telegraph, the latest thinking is that regional noblemen would have sat in the front row of a circular meeting place, with lower ranked subjects on stone benches grouped around the outside. Rather than Camelot being a castle, it would have been housed within a structure already built and left over by the Romans.

Historian Chris Gidlow said: “The first accounts of the Round Table show that it was nothing like a dining table but was a venue for upwards of 1,000 people at a time. We know that one of Arthur’s two main battles was fought at a town referred to as the City of Legions. There were only two places with this title. One was St Albans but the location of the other has remained a mystery.”

Click here for the complete article.

The Astonishing "Living Camera" Draws Rome

The implications of this 5-minute video are enormous. Here, through the experiment involving Stephen Wiltshire ~ known as "the living camera" ~ we can only be amazed at the potential of the human brain.

Of Eastern Religion & Western Science

Statue of Shiva in front of the CERN scientific center near Geneva.

Mutual respect bloomed between Western science and Eastern religions throughout the 20^th century, while an unfortunate gulf continued to widen between science and Western religion due mostly to fundamentalist, literal interpretations of the Bible. Though my background was mostly Christian, I recall the thrill thirty-plus years ago of reading Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and appreciating the vital parallels he noted between what our scientists were discovering and what the Hindus, Buddhists and Taoists had been saying for millennia.

This was the topic of a brief essay last week by Philip Goldberg in The Huffington Post. I consider this to be a salient paragraph:

The interaction of Eastern spirituality and Western science has expanded methods of stress reduction, treatment of chronic disease, psychotherapy and other areas. But that is only part of the story. Hindu and Buddhist descriptions of higher stages of consciousness have expanded psychology's understanding of human development and inspired the formation of provocative new theories of consciousness itself.

Their ancient philosophies have also influenced physicists, among them Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who read from the Bhagavad Gita at a memorial service for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his landmark TV series Cosmos, Carl Sagan called Hinduism the only religion whose time-scale for the universe matches the billions of years documented by modern science. Sagan filmed that segment in a Hindu temple featuring a statue of the god Shiva as the cosmic dancer, an image that now stands in the plaza of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.

Click here for the complete essay.

Number 61 ~ INNER TRUTH

Inner truth. Pigs and fishes.

Good fortune.
It furthers one to cross the great water.
Perseverance furthers.

Pigs and fishes are the least intelligent of all animals and therefore the most difficult to influence. The force of inner truth must grow great indeed before its influence can extend to such creatures. In dealing with persons as intractable and as difficult to influence as a pig or a fish, the whole secret of success depends on finding the right way of approach. One must first rid oneself of all prejudice and, so to speak, let the psyche of the other person act on one without restraint. Then one will establish contact with him, understand and gain power over him. When a door has thus been opened, the force of one’s personality will influence him. If in this way one finds no obstacles insurmountable, one can undertake even the most dangerous things, such as crossing the great water, and succeed.

Was Cleopatra's Suicide by Lethal Drug?

Death of Cleopatra by Jean Andre Rixens, 1874

One of ancient history's most famous legends may due for revision. A new study contends Cleopatra died of swallowing a lethal drug cocktail and not from the bite of an Egyptian cobra snake called an asp. According to Christoph Schäfer, historian and professor at the University of Trier in Germany: “There was no cobra in Cleopatra's death.”

Author of a best-selling book in Germany, Cleopatra, Schäfer searched historic writings for evidence to disprove the 2,000-year-old asp legend. 

"The Roman historian Cassius Dio, writing about 200 years after Cleopatra's demise, stated that she died a quiet and pain-free death, which is not compatible with a cobra bite,” he told Discovery News. “Indeed, the snake's venom would have caused a painful and disfiguring death.”

According to German toxicologist Dietrich Mebs, a poison specialist taking part in the study, symptoms occurring after an asp bite are very unpleasant, and include vomiting, diarrhea and respiratory failure. "Death may occur within 45 minutes, but it may also be longer with painful edema at the bite site," he said. "At the end, the dead body does not look very nice with vomit, diarrhea, a swollen bite site."

Ancient texts also record that Cleopatra's two handmaidens died with her -- something very unlikely if she had died of a snake bite, said Schäfer.

The Queen of the Nile committed suicide in August 30 B.C. at the age of 39, following the example of her lover, the Roman leader Marc Antony, who killed himself after losing the Battle of Actium.

Click here for the complete Discovery News article.
(Post first appeared on my Ancient Tides blog.)

The Dalai Lama

Inner peace is the answer to personal happiness. Here the Dalai Lama stresses that point, especially comparing inner peace to the prospect of wealth, which too often in our society is sought as the key to happiness.

[My plan for these "Wisdom" clips is to provide interesting teachings that run two minutes or less. On some, the audio may be bad, others may exceed two minutes by a bit. But I hope they'll still be worth your time.]

Ancient Spores May Disprove Comet Cataclysm

The presence of tiny balls of fungus and feces in materials dating over several millennia may disprove the theory that an exploding comet 12,900 years ago ignited a dramatic drop in earth temperature called the Younger Dryas.

The Younger Dryas has been associated with the extinction of mammoths and other Ice Age mammals in North America. But the theory that a comet or asteroid explosion is behind the cooling event is wrong, according to study leader Andrew C. Scott, a paleobotanist at Royal Holloway University in London.

According to National Geographic:

For years proponents of the impact theory have cited tiny spherules of carbon found in a layer of charred sediment throughout North America that dates to the Younger Dryas period. According to the theory, these spherules are organic matter subjected to intense heat after debris from an exploded meteor rained down on Earth, sparking massive wildfires. 

The new research, however, detected carbon spherules in soil layers from before, during, and after the Younger Dryas, making it hard to argue that the particles are products of a sudden impact.

"All these particles are of natural biological origin and are not related to either intense wildfires or cosmic impacts," Scott said in an email. "The press and public are very interested in catastrophic explanations. But it is important that when evidence stacks up to show the theory does not work, then it should be abandoned."

Scott said fungal spores have similar microscopic features to nanodiamonds, which some researchers have cited as evidence of a massive comet explosion above the earth’s surface nearly 13,000 years ago.

Click here for the complete National Geographic article.
Click here for earlier post on nanodiamond theory.

Meditation Lessens the Hurt of Chronic Pain

New research shows that people who meditate regularly find pain less unpleasant. According to the LiveScience website, scientists recently recruited 12 volunteers with a diverse range of meditation experience in mindfulness meditation, which emphasizes focusing on the present. 

The researchers used a laser to zap the skin on the right forearm and induce pain in each participant. They found those with more meditation experience found the pain less unpleasant than meditators with less experience, while no corresponding age effect was seen among non-meditators.

“The results suggest that meditation doesn't change the raw sensory experience of pain, but rather reduces the emotional response that occurs when pain is anticipated,” researcher Christopher Brown, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Manchester in England, told LiveScience. “This in itself appears to be enough to reduce the unpleasantness of the experienced pain, even though the sensory experience is unchanged.”

“Meditation trains the brain to be more present-focused and therefore to spend less time anticipating future negative events," Brown added. "This may be why meditation is effective at reducing the recurrence of depression, which makes chronic pain considerably worse."

Click here for the complete LiveScience article.

Sunspots Remaining Scarce

Sunspots have occurred less frequently during the past two years than at any other period for nearly a century. “This is solar behavior we haven't seen in living memory,” according to David Hathaway, physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Sunspots and other clues indicate that the sun's magnetic activity is diminishing, and that the sun may even be shrinking, says New Scientist magazine. Together the results hint that something profound is happening inside the sun.

When sunspot numbers drop at the end of their typical 11-year cycle, solar storms die down. This “solar minimum” doesn't last long. Within a year, the spots and storms begin to build towards a new crescendo, the next solar maximum.

What’s special about this latest dip is that the sun is having trouble starting the next solar cycle. The sun began to calm down in late 2007, so no one expected many sunspots in 2008. But computer models predicted that when the spots did return, they would do so in force. This hasn’t happened.

Click here for the complete New Scientist article.

Number 4 ~ YOUTHFUL FOLLY

Youthful folly has success.
It is not I who seek the young fool;
The young fool seeks me.
At the first oracle I inform him.
If he asks two or three times, it is importunity.
If he importunes, I give him no information.
Perseverance furthers.

In the time of youth, folly is not an evil. One may succeed in spite of it, provided one finds an experienced teacher and has the right attitude toward him. This means, first of all, that the youth himself must be conscious of his lack of experience and must seek out the teacher. Without this modesty and this interest, there is no guarantee that he has the necessary receptivity, which should express itself in respectful acceptance of the teacher. This is the reason why the teacher must wait to be sought out instead of offering himself. Only thus can the instruction take place at the right time and in the right way.

Exploring the Mysterious Portolan Maps

Section of the amazingly accurate 1559 map by Mateo Prunes.

One of the most mysterious topics in world history concerns a handful of maps depicting the world’s geography with a precision that far exceeded the tools and abilities of the day’s mapmakers. The Library of Congress this week convened a conference, “Re-Examining the Portolan Chart: History, Navigation and Science” to discuss maps originating about 1275. According to today’s Washington Post:

It is a rare representative of one of the world's greatest and most enduring mysteries: Where and how did medieval mapmakers, apparently armed with no more than a compass, an hourglass and sets of sailing directions, develop stunningly accurate maps of southern Europe, the Black Sea and North African coastlines, as if they were looking down from a satellite, when no one had been higher than a treetop?

The earliest known portolan (PORT-oh-lawn) chart, the Carta Pisana, just appears in about 1275 -- with no known predecessors. It is perhaps the first modern scientific map and contrasted sharply to the "mappamundi" of the era, the colorful maps with unrecognizable geography and fantastic creatures and legends. It bears no resemblance to the methods of the mathematician Ptolemy and does not use measurements of longitude and latitude.

 And yet, despite it's stunning accuracy, the map "seems to have emerged full-blown from the seas it describes," one reference journal notes. No one today knows who made the first maps, or how they calculated distance so accurately, or even how all the information came to be compiled.

While maps such as the Carta Pisana are indeed worthy of in-depth research, I’m also drawn to even more mysterious examples, such as the Piri Reis map from 1513, which has been the topic of a couple of books, the most fun ~ even if perhaps not the most accurate ~ being Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, first published by Charles Hapgood in 1966.

Click here for the Washington Post article.

Click here for more on the Piri Reis map.

Click here for a Wikipedia overview of ancient maps.

Brain Now Found to Better Distinguish Fear

New research into the brain’s capacity for storing fear holds promise for treating post-traumatic stress syndrome, among other fears that lurk in our minds and can haunt our lives.

The new study results appear in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience. According to PhysOrg.com:

The research focused on the brain's amygdala, which has previously been shown to store fear memories. However, prior studies have indicated that the amygdala does not discriminate among the different threats it holds and processes. In other words, whether you are afraid of dogs because you were once bitten by a dog or you are afraid of pizza because you once nearly choked to death eating it, all the amygdala remembers is that both of these experiences were scary. By contrast, other brain areas, such as cortex, ensures that all other aspects of these fearful events in your life are remembered.

New evidence, however, points to the amygdala being able to make distinctions among the fear memories it holds and retrieves.

Click here for the PhysOrg.com article.

Ram Dass

Spiritual teacher Ram Dass ~ earlier known as Harvard professor Richard Alpert (born 1931) ~ here recites a well-known anecdote that captures a universal truth in which I firmly believe. That is, you can’t really tell whether an incident is “good” or “bad” until its implications have played out over a period of time.

Is Life on Earth Merely a Cosmic Fluke?

Paul Davies ~ one of the scientists involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) ~ says nothing in the laws of chemistry or physics indicate life is a cosmic imperative. Instead, he says we should consider the possibility that life on Earth is a fluke, a completely improbable event.

Davies runs Arizona State University’s Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and chairs the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup, which has developed a plan for the day we do find life elsewhere. In his new book, The Eerie Silence, Davies provides an overview of various efforts to contact aliens, and he also notes how recent discoveries have led to the widespread belief that life must be common in the universe.

According to PhysOrg.com:

Hundreds of planets have been detected orbiting distant stars, and while these planets are more like Jupiter than Earth, that’s mostly due to our detection methods. Less massive planets will likely be found by newer telescopes, and the fact that we have already found so many worlds bodes well for the potential number of habitable planets in the galaxy. In addition, life has been discovered in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, including the deep subsurface where sunlight cannot penetrate. This suggests that life is possible in all sorts of unusual places, including planets we once would have considered inhospitable to life.

“If life started more than once on Earth, we could be virtually certain that the universe is teeming with it,” Davies writes. “Unless there is something very peculiar about our planet, it is inconceivable that life would have begun twice on one Earth-like planet but hardly ever on the rest.”

Click here for the complete article.

Viktor Frankl on Idealism and Destiny

I'm so excited to find this video clip from 1972 of Viktor E. Frankl speaking on idealism and what it means for the individual.
Frankl is the author of Man's Search for Meaning, an oft-cited, powerful book stemming from Frankl's experiences as a death-camp prisoner during Hitler's Holocaust. This clip is just over four minutes.

Frankl was a founder of "logotherapy," a form of existential analysis devoted to finding meaning in life and thus a reason to continue living. He lived from 1905 to 1997.

Terence McKenna

Here American metaphysician and author Terrance McKenna (1946-2000) delivers a scathing but profound analysis of American culture ~ far different from his usual anthropologically abstract and mild-mannered talks. "Culture and language tend to become traps," he says here. "And yet they can be the platforms for enormous freedom ... if you understand what it's all about."

[My plan for these "Wisdom" clips is to provide interesting teachings that run two minutes or less. On some, the audio may be bad, others may exceed two minutes by a bit. But I hope they'll still be worth your time.]

Calculus "Is the Language God Talks"

The physicist Richard Feynman said, "It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama." 
That's by the Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Herman Wouk, whose new book "The Language God Talks" is due for release this week. 

Click here for a longer excerpt from New Scientist.

Mercury went retrograde at 12:06 this morning, Eastern time, and will remain so until May 11. Often abbreviated as "Mercury Rx," Mercury Retrograde ~ often abbreviated as “Mercury Rx” ~ is the three-week period when Mercury appears to move in reverse. This happens because Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun, and when it passes by Earth on its orbit, it seems to be going forward. When it loops back around the Sun, it appears to us be moving backward.

According to today's Tarot.com:

Since Mercury is the planet representing communication and motion, when it goes retrograde, there is a sense that movement-based things -- such as communication, travel, traffic, or business negotiations -- are interrupted and slowed. Cars break down, calls get missed, people say the wrong things at the wrong time. Energetically, it can feel as though the universe is blocking your efforts at progress.

 You can't demand life to flow more smoothly while Mercury's in retrograde. Double-check your work beforehand, set plans in advance and be willing to repeat yourself. Mercury Retrograde is a reminder that we're not as almighty as we think; peaceful surrender is the best weapon against Mercury Retrograde. Go with the flow and take each challenge as an opportunity to meditate on the unpredictability of life.

Astrologer Lynn Hayes says on her blog: “The recent air traffic problems caused by the Iceland volcano is an example of Mercury Retrograde reversals.”

A Musical Interlude ~ Lux Aurumque

Here American composer Eric Whitacre (born 1970) carries Internet communication to a heavenly level, combining 185 voices posted on YouTube clips to sing his Lux Aurumque.

The singers are from 12 countries around the world. Whitacre ~ who also is conducting this video ~ merged hundreds of individually recorded tracks to produce the beautiful finished rendition.

(If you want to see what just one of the hundreds of tracks is like, click here for Melody Myers of Tennessee.)

J. Krishnamurti

Here Indian sage J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986) explains  individual responsibility for the condition of the world's people because "we are all one."

[My plan for these "Wisdom" clips is to provide interesting teachings that run two minutes or less. On some, the audio may be bad, others may exceed two minutes by a bit. But I hope they'll still be worth your time.]

Red Book Was Jung's "Numinous Beginning"

Recent publication of the Carl Jung’s Red Book ~ a 200-page manuscript also known as Liber Novus, Latin for new book ~ is regarded as a monumental event worldwide. Jung wrote it between 1914 and 1930 during a time of personal tribulation and enlightenment, composing it in calligraphic text and providing many symbolic paintings.

Of his Red Book, Jung wrote:

The years when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.

Click here for a link to a New York Times index of articles on Jung and on the Red Book itself.

On Forgiveness

"Jacob Seeking Forgiveness of Esau," Jan Victors, 1652.

[I believe forgiveness is one of the most important functions of our spiritual life. Recently reading an excellent book on remote viewing and associated psi activities ~ Limitless Mind by Russell Targ ~ I found his thoughts on the topic of forgiveness.]

"Carrying a grudge is like carrying a red-hot rock or giving the person who hurt you a lifetime of free rent in your mind. Why would you want to do that? In some families, grievances and resentment are held for years, even decades. We forgive people who we imagine have harmed us because, for our own mental health, we want to lay down the burden of the past rather than carry it into the present.

"…. It appears that forgiveness is an essential step on the road to peace. It is not forgetting, but forgiving and letting go that heals all separations.

"… The great Hindu mystic Shankara taught that the most important thing for us to learn is the discernment of reality from illusion. We then discover that most of what we thought we were experiencing was, in fact, illusion. Furthermore the Buddhists teach that there is virtually no objective reality to our judgments, so they usually lead to errors, and often to suffering. In our personal lives, our judgment of others always separates us from the loving connection with God."

A Celebration of Resurrection

For Easter, I'd like to offer this brief musical celebration of the Resurrection. It's performed by the Serbian orchestra Stupovi as part of an effort to raise funds for reconstruction of the Pillars of St. George medieval monastery. Some of the images of children, spring blossoms and joy are simply beautiful.

Fable Number 329 ~ The Beauty Contest of the Birds

A beauty contest was held and all the birds went to be judged by Zeus. Hermes fixed the appointed day and the birds flocked to the rivers and ponds where they shed their shabby feathers and preened their finer ones. The jackdaw, however, had no natural advantages to commend his appearance, so he decorated himself with the feathers that had been cast aside by the other birds. The owl alone recognized her own feathers and took them away from the jackdaw, and she incited the other birds to do the same. When the jackdaw had been stripped bare by everyone, he went before the judgement of Zeus naked.

Moral: Adornments that do not belong to you can lead to humiliation.