More accuracy is often just real change...

• Easy equals true.
• When your brain gets the joke.
• More evidence of water on Enceladus.
• Seemingly loopy technique could dramatically improve communications networks.
• Pentagon looks to breed immortal synthetic organisms.
• Paralyzing the frown muscles inhibits the ability to understand anger and sadness.
• Which organs can I live without and how much can I get for them?
• The interconnected sun. Part One. Part Two.
• At last we will know how bright the stars really are.
• Founders of British obstetrics were callous murderers.
• A tree carving in California: ancient astronomers?
• Photosynthetic slugs.
• Electric planes could transform how we fly.
• New theory on the origin of primates.

Quote of the Day:

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

William Blake

Spring is the season that carries a lot of good things: warmer days, flowering trees —miniskirts ;)— and this year will have an added bonus, courtesy of Anomalist Books: Mac Tonnies' (1975-2009) long awaited book, 'The Cryptoterrestrials.'. From the Foreword to the book, written by Nick Redfern:

If evidence for the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis has failed to surface—despite decades of hard work and diligent investigations —then maybe we should consider the notion that we are looking for the answers in all the wrong places. Instead of looking up, maybe we should be looking around us. And, perhaps, even below us, too.

Anomalist Books has prepared a webpage devoted to the release of the book; from there we learn that it will be 128 pages long, and will include 11 illustrations by Mike Clelland. Mike is not only an incredibly gifted graphic artist — as can be perceived from the beautiful illustration below — but he himself is becoming a rising voice around the paranormal blogosphere; his own blog Hidden Experience has become an open diary where he's not afraid to graciously share his experiences with honesty & open-mindedness, and he even had the chance to become a friend of Mac's.

Our friend Mac, at the threshold of the unknown
(click on the image for a larger view)

So, yet another reason why I predict 'The Cryptoterrestrials' will become an insta-classic, and yet an even broader audience will have the luck to know the works of the mind behind Posthuman Blues.

For those that have always wanted to visit the pyramids, here's a tour that might be right up your alley. 'Alternative Egypt' author Robert Bauval (The Orion Mystery) will be hosting the All Pyramids Tour of Egypt this coming equinox (19 to 27 March 2010), staying at the world-famous Sphinx Guesthouse (which is just 300 metres in front of the Sphinx). Co-host on the tour is well-known author on 2012-related subjects, John Major Jenkins. The tour will concentrate on Giza and other pyramids close to Cairo, and will feature evening lectures from the two hosts:

Together they will host a special once-in-a-lifetime tour in Cairo, Egypt, in intellectual and spiritual preparation for the coming of 21 December 2012. Don't miss this unique event when we will visit and perform ancient rituals of rejuvenation at pyramid sites. In addition to sight seeing there will be be lectures, workshops, and round-table talks...

Note that bookings and passport details must be received before 5 March 2010 if you want to take part in this tour (and if you're keen, remember that there is a $US100 discount if you book before February 15). Full details at Robert's website.

... not to reproduce what we can already see, but to make visible what we cannot

• Hedgehenge: Evidence of encircling hedges at Stonehenge. Hence the toy hedgehog found buried with a child there recently?!
• Last speaker of Bo, one of the world's most ancient languages, dies.
• Leon Botha, one of the world's oldest Progeria survivors, talks about spirituality, identity and leaving a lasting legacy. Here's more of his work. Great counterpoint to last week's Boing-Boing-facilitated viral explosion of the mock-trash Die Antwoord project.
• Fractal universe.
• African fractals and the origins of computing.
• If the universe is a fractal, is it a program?
• The Secret of Kells - a new animated movie based on the Book of Kells, from the creators of Skunk Fu.
• 'Zen' Bats hit their target by not aiming at it.
• Adam's family jewels and the uncensored bible.
• Pretty Suicide Machine, an in-progress essay from James Curcio's Immanence of Myth anthology.
• Eternal slavery: DARPA to breed immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms’ with molecular kill-switches.
• Japanese scientists create elastic water.
• Déjà Vu, Consciousness, Time & English Pubs, from the Dark Philosopher.
• Bruce Sterling on atemporality (if you have time).
• Wanted: mystery worshippers.
• Devotees track down an unwilling Messiah via the web. 'Now listen 'ere!...'.
• Neanderthals in Poland ate cave bears.
• Glorious Gargoyles.

Thanks Rick

Quote of the Day:

The invisible & the non-existent often look very much alike.

Julia Sweeney

The following article is an excerpt (Chapter 2 in its entirety) from the best-selling book Evidence of an Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long M.D. with Paul Perry (HarperOne, 2009), reproduced with kind permission of the author and publisher. You can purchase a copy of the book from Amazon US and Amazon UK.

JOURNEY TOWARD UNDERSTANDING

Build it and they will come.
— W. P. Kinsella, Field of Dreams

The year was 1998, and I was now in Las Vegas practicing the medical specialty of radiation oncology. The nineties was the decade in which the Internet exploded. Everyone was rapidly becoming smitten with this big brain in the sky, and I was no different.

Despite the steep learning curve of building websites with primitive software and slow connections, I had decided in 1997 to build the Radiation Oncology Online Journal (ROOJ.com) as a way of sharing credible information about this medical specialty with the world. It took a tremendous amount of time and effort outside of my clinical practice to assemble this nonprofit website, which I maintain as a way of providing solid information to the public about cancer treatment.

By the time I completed the ROOJ site I was an expert in website computer code. Then the idea hit me: build a website that will collect near-death experience case studies. By doing this I could amass a large number of NDE stories from around the world. Working with a large number of NDEs is important because medical studies involving a large study group produce more reliable results than do those studying a small group of people.

I built on the curiosity and work of those who had gone before me. Over the ten years since I heard Sheila recount her personal story, I had stayed in close contact with research in the field of near-death studies. Hundreds of scholarly articles had been written on near-death experience, including publications in many of the world’s most prestigious medical and scientific journals. I read the works of many major NDE researchers, including those of Dr. Moody; Melvin Morse, MD; Bruce Greyson, MD; Michael Sabom, MD; and Ken Ring, PhD. I also found myself fascinated with some of the individual stories, like that of Betty Eadie (Embraced by the Light). All of these books relied heavily on case studies. These stories of individual NDErs fed the sense of mystery I associated with this subject.

Now I was even more interested in searching for the truth than I had been ten years earlier. The implications of these experiences were so profound that I wanted to research the subject to determine if they were truly real. ... Read More »

A weekend distraction - the excellent music video for the first single from Massive Attack's latest album Heligoland: "Splitting the Atom". Watch it all the way through for the full effect...

Samples from the rest of the album are available on Amazon. Massive Attack produce some wonderful albums, worth getting into.

One of my favourite Fortean sites on the 'net is Magonia, and one of my favourite researchers is Martin Shough. Put them together and you get a fascinating article, "A Social History of Ball Lightning". In his essay (originally printed in Magonia 81, May 2003), Martin looks at how the ball lightning phenomenon has come to be largely accepted by modern science (if not totally, then at least accepted as a topic worthy of discussion), and compares it to UFO sightings:

Back in 1967 the astronomer Gerard Kuiper dismissed a 10% residue of unexplained ‘UFO’ reports with a wave of the hand, thinking it ‘reasonable to assume’ that this testimony must be “so distorted or incomplete as to defy all analysis”. Inconsistently, however, he advocated a major Defence Department/FAA programme to research “very rare natural phenomena” such as ball lightning. Why? Because “no adequate data yet exist of ball lightning”, even though its existence had been ‘known for at least a century’.

This raises a very interesting question: How was it possible for science to ‘know’ anything with ‘no adequate data’? The answer is that science did not ‘know’, and as a whole declined to have anything to do with such stories for at least a century. Unpicking some of the reason and unreason behind this curious condition of scientific double-think is instructive.

Logically and evidentially speaking, there is precious little difference between a ‘very rare natural phenomenon’ which is unexplained and an unexplained phenomenon characterised as a ‘UFO’. Even more subtle is the distinction sometimes drawn between ‘a unique natural phenomenon never before observed’ and a UFO. Because there will always be unique combinations of natural phenomena never before observed (in practice), how is a distinction to be supported be tween such effects and UFOs?

One approach to this difficulty is to abandon hope of finding any distinction. But why does this collapsing of the phenomenological distinction not translate into a collapsing of the epistemological distinction? How can there then be ‘unexplained natural phenomena’ which we say are allowed to be distinct from mere combinations of natural phenomena never before observed, and ‘unidentified flying objects’ which are not allowed to be distinct? Is this classification a matter of sense or mere semantics?

Some excellent insights, as always with Martin's work. With your extra time on the weekend, make sure you also browse the rest of the content at Magonia, as the site is chock-full of win.

Previously on TDG:

• The Real Ufology
• UFOs and Radar Spoofing
• Excellent 'Channel Islands UFO' Report
• Magonia Online

Reality is the new myth

• Hot footage! Researcher Mike Green captures 'Bigfoot' on thermal imaging camera.
• If E.T. rings, let it go to voicemail?
• Beware of the cat. Cat predicts 50 deaths in RI nursing home. Or is it causing them?!
• 'Vegetative' patient communicates via brain scans (Original journal article here).
• Soon, everything you buy may be coated with spray-on liquid glass.
• How to teleport energy.
• The whale whisperer.
• The extinct Titanoboa, the largest ever snake, devoured crocs. Now who's the daddy?
• Some children in the UK think that sheep lay eggs, butterflies make cheese, and bacon comes from peacocks. Let's hope they don't become geneticists.
• What do you get when you cross endangered sea-life with the Women's Institute via the Institute for Figuring? Why, a crocheted hyperbolic coral reef, of course.
• What do you get when you search for the Illuminati backwards? itanimulli.com!
• Obscura Day 2010 - an international celebration of wondrous, curious, and esoteric places. Want to take part?
• Are you ignoring the news?
• Space junk on Moon to become 'World' Heritage Site?
• Is primordial soup off the menu?
• Going down on Virgin.
• The invisible man.
• 10 'false flags' that changed the world.
• And one for our resident designer in 3D, RPJ: the unhappy hipsters.

Quote of the Day:

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Alan Watts

Issue 2 of the free PDF magazine EdgeScience is now available from the website of the Society for Scientific Exploration. The latest edition has a special section on 'New Energy', including an article on the latest developments in cold fusion research, as well as a piece on healing through intention and a nice article from Peter Sturrock on the place of anomalies in science. Edited by our good friend Patrick Huyghe (The Anomalist), and with contributions from the likes of Steve Braude and Michael Grosso, it's the thinking man's magazine for scientific anomalies (no centerfolds!). If you enjoy the mag, don't forget to send a bit of love via the PayPal button to help ensure it's future (or pick up the paper version for $4.95).

Last week I posted about a new best-selling book concerning near-death experiences: Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences by Dr Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry. For more information on the book, make sure you have a listen to the latest Skeptiko podcast which features Dr Jeffrey Long discussing his research, and responding to skeptical arguments against the NDE:

While some near-death experience researchers have been reluctant to make the leap from NDEs to proof of the afterlife, Dr. Long is convinced by his research findings, “I’ve gone over every skeptic argument I can get my hands on. At the end of the day, I have no doubt in my mind near-death experience is for real. It’s a profound and reassuring message that we all have an afterlife. Every single one of us. And it’s wonderful. It is probably the greatest thrill of my life to be able to carry forward that important message to the world. I wouldn’t do it if I weren’t absolutely convinced that it’s correct.”

The conclusions of this research will be controversial, but Dr. Long stands ready to take on the critics, “I would be delighted to debate any near-death experience skeptic, any time, any place, on any media, as long as they’re scholarly, well informed, and as long as it can be a very high-level, intellectual debate.”

For those with limited download capacity, note that there is also a text transcription of the interview available.