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Breaking News: The Galaxy is Rich in Small, Rocky, Earth-Sized Planets!

This really is breaking news.  More than 100 planets that are a similar size to Earth have been discovered in the past few weeks,

I have just been looking at a TED talk by a chap called Dimitar Sasselov, who announced this.  The Kepler telescope is being used to discover small planets around stars in the local region of the galaxy (a sphere with a diameter of 100 light years).  They reckon that there may be 100 million small rocky planets in the galaxy altogether.

Definitely another Copernican revolution in the offing.  I daresay we are being visited by some of our neighbours already!

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Inception and the ‘reality’ of Lucid Dreaming

Inception Movie Poster

Personally, I have only had a very few lucid dreams, but I can say that it is a fascinating experience, which is why I want so much to go and see this movie.

I came across this article on lucid dreaming on RealitySandwich.com.  If author, Robert Waggoner, is to be believed, then the spectacle that is Inception has some basis in real experiences.  He draws from his own personal experiences, and suggests that the director of the film, Christopher Nolan, may be familiar with this state of consciousness.

Posted in Consciousness, Uncategorized.


Retelling the Past, Reimagining the Future : A 2012 Dialogue with Daniel Pinchbeck & Graham Hancock

This unique dialogue brings together two leading counterculture thinkers, Daniel Pinchbeck author of Breaking Open the Head, and Graham Hancock author of Fingerprints of the Gods, Supernatural and most recently the fantasy adventure novel Entangled.

Pinchbeck and Hancock discuss many things, including the implications of the Mayan Calendar “end-times” date 2012 which Hancock first drew to the attention of his readers in Fingerprints of the Gods published in 1995.  The discussion ranges widely across some of the most intriguing evidence for an immense forgotten episode in human history, and moves on to consider the spiritual crisis of the modern age. Could a new paradigm emerge from our present state of chaos? Hancock and Pinchbeck see hope in efforts by people all around the planet to reclaim sovereignty over their own consciousness, and identify a powerful role for shamanistic visionary plants such as Ayahuasca and Psilocybin in ushering in a gentler, less toxic, more nurturing state of mind. “It does seem like when you ingest them,” says Pinchbeck, “you get a lot of messages about how to reintegrate into the larger community of life.” For further information see http://www.realitysandwich.com/, and http://www.grahamhancock.com/ . For Graham’s latest book see http://www.entangledthebook.com/

Some more about the authors:


Posted in Consciousness, Uncategorized.


Needlebase

There have been a few times in the past when I have wished for this app.  This enables smart screen scraping of data from any site directly into a normalised database.  Seems to have started out as a minor project in this company, ITA, but looks very promising.

Here’s their demonstration:

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Pirates or Revolutionaries?

This is the Ninja Video manifesto, and it is well worth listening to.

NinjaVideo Part 1

NinjaVideo Part 2

from Wikipedia:

NinjaVideo is a website linking to uploaded videos of TV shows, movies, and documentaries. Since June 30, 2010, the site has been unavailable, as a result of a multinational anti-piracy effort lead by the US federal government. At the centre of the takedown was the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) initiative, citing that they were, “targeting pirate Web sites run by people who have no respect for creativity and innovation”. According to a NinjaVideo admin, search warrants were executed at “four undisclosed locations”, with no resulting seizure of servers or information. At the time of its seizure, the site was visited more than 6 million times a month.

See also the NinjaVideo blog.

Posted in Consciousness, Uncategorized.


Lost Crops of the Incas – Update

A flower bed in my Garden…


Oca (large clump) and Ulluco (bottom and bottom right)


Achocha: a kind of small cucumber from South America


Yacon: related to the dalhia

Very special thanks to:

Posted in Permaculture, Uncategorized.


Making Lemoncello

Lemon zest, sugar, clear spirit and sunlight.

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Figment Festival: Governor’s Island, New York

In this clip from the Evolver NYC “Give It Up” Spore, festival producer ‘Not That Dave’ speaks about the ethos behind the recent ‘Figment’ festival on Governor’s Island, New York.

… and it just so happened that we stumbled on this incredible resource in New York City of Governor’s Island, that had been closed to the public for 200 years.  …  When the federal government turned over this island they put all these restrictions on it that meant that it couldn’t just be more condos, it couldn’t be just more casinos.  It couldn’t be an enclave for people with wealth or money.  It had to be something that was really held in the public benefit.  …  and nobody knew what to do with it all of a sudden … we have no model for how to develop something that doesn’t have..  you can’t put condos on!  That’s what all developers want to do – you put condos there, you open stores that’s the way it works.  So we jumped on this very early on … to work with Governor’s island to do an arts event there that was very much influenced by Burning Man.

If I have an hour, what am I gonna do with it?  …. what am I going to do that fulfils some kind of objective for me personally that satisfies something I can’t satisfy by watching more television or buying more cr@p.  What is that?  And so you can give somebody a gift or make something for someone, or do that.  You sort of unlocking a little piece of yourself as you do that.

Posted in Consciousness, Uncategorized.


Entangled: The New Book By Graham Hancock: His first work of fiction

You had better clear a block of time before you read this book, because you won’t be able to put it down very easily.

First, just a little bit about how I first became aware of Graham Hancock through his work ‘Fingerprints of the Gods’, which looks at the idea of an antediluvian civilisation of some sophistication that existed during the last Ice age.  His more recent work ‘Supernatural’ is an account of how primitive societies used various techniques, including the ingestion of psychedelic plants to achieve altered states of consciousness.  After laying a solid foundation ‘Supernatural’ goes on to examine some of the strange myths and legends present in all societies, such as the presence of ‘little people’, and ‘alien abduction’ experiences.  In ‘Supernatural’, he seriously entertains the possibility that the perceptions of people in altered states are actually of independently-standing realities in other ‘dimensions’.

Much of the knowledge he has amassed in his previous scholarly and investigative works, has been put to good use in Entangled and the result is a captivating and fantastic tale that is filled with action, as well as being thoughtful and philosophical.

From the Entangled website:

Time is not what it seems…

When a drug overdose causes Leoni, a troubled teen from twenty-first-century Los Angeles, to have a near-death experience, her soul is lifted from the modern world and flung into a parallel time 24,000 years in the past. There her fate becomes entangled with that of Ria, a young Stone Age woman fighting for her life against the ferocious Illimani, an army of evil led by the vicious Sulpa, a powerful demon determined to destroy humanity.

As the invaders annihilate Ria’s people, inflicting torture and human sacrifice, Sulpa moves ever closer to his ultimate goal: to manifest physically in the twenty-first century and condemn all of mankind to perpetual slavery. The hour is late and any chance of stopping him seems lost. But there is still hope, if Leoni and Ria can rise to the challenge fate has set them. Uniting outside the flow of earth time, they must venture forth into regions of wonder, master their own deepest fears, and fight battles they could never have prepared for, if Sulpa is to be defeated…

I am looking forward to the sequel, which is already being written.

Posted via email from davidkane’s posterous

Posted in Consciousness, Uncategorized.


Blacklight: Next Gen. Catalogue http://projectblacklight.org/

Blacklight is a free and open source ruby-on-rails based discovery interface (a.k.a. “next-generation catalog”) especially optimized for heterogeneous collections. You can use it as a library catalog, as a front end for a digital repository, or as a single-search interface to aggregate digital content that would otherwise be siloed.

See: http://projectblacklight.org/

Posted via email from davidkane’s posterous

Posted in Uncategorized.