super intelligence

super intelligence

it seems we are on the verge
of matching our brains
with machines of enormous
power and speed..
there are wary dark cautions 
that these expectations
may be fraught with danger
when independence lurks..
yes
consciousness is veiled
dualistic science
continues to forget
its role as servant..
Awaken and we might
close the gap
and bring real
advancement with
peace...

Ray Kurzweil made a startling prediction in 1999 that appears to be coming true: that by 2023 a $1,000 laptop would have the computing power and storage capacity of a human brain.  He also predicted that Moore’s Law, which postulates that the processing capability of a computer doubles every 18 months, would apply for 60 years — until 2025 — giving way then to new paradigms of technological change...

Add artificial intelligence to the advances in hardware, and you be to realize why luminaries such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates are worried about the creation of a “super intelligence.”  Musk fears that “we are summoning the demon.”  Hawking says it “could spell the end of the human race.”  And Gates wrote: “I don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”   (excerpts from article by Vivek Wadhwa, in The Washington Post)

Novel polarization

Novel polarization forms promise to radically increase data speeds

New technique allows data transmitted on a single laser beam to be scaled to terabits or even petabits

April 26, 2015

Manipulating the polarization of light into novel shapes that carry additional data (credit: CCNY)

As the world’s exponentially growing demand for digital data slows down the Internet and cell phone communication, City College of New York researchers may have just figured out a dramatic new way to increase transmission speed.

“Conventional methods of data transmission [that] use light … are being exhausted by data-hungry technologies, such as smart phones and cloud computing,” said Giovanni Milione, a PhD student under City College Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering Robert Alfano, who led the pioneering experiment conducted at the University of Southern California with collaborators from Corning Incorporated, Scotland, Italy and Canada.

“So we came up with an unconventional method.”

Unusual polarization shapes

Using special devices called “q-plates,” the researchers manipulated a laser beam’s polarization (orientation) into novel shapes, some of which Milione referred to as “radial” and “azimuthal.” “While light’s polarization (linear and circular) is used for many modern technologies, such as, 3D television, its shape is often left untouched,” he said.

The researchers showed that each shape could carry an additional data stream. While the researchers used only four shapes, in principle, the number that can be used is unlimited. “The amount of data that can be transmitted on a single laser beam can be scaled to terabits or even petabits,” said Alfano.

“This technology is potentially compatible with building to building communication (such as in NYC) or even between Google data centers.”

Their research, supported in part by DARPA, the Army Research Office, and Corning Incorporated, appears in an upcoming issue of the journal Optics Letters.

Planting

Planting

Our speaking Pastrix

looking anew at claims of many:

 not religious but spiritual I am..

Marcus Borg she had inhaled

as a gateway drug initiating  

experience of religion's truths..

She was the religious one

among her band of sinners

and spoke the funeral of

one of them in untimely death..

This seed held her tension

between church woundings

and its beating heart..

She captured the energy

implanting a church

with a growing few

 sinners yet saints..

Her message we heard:

The possibility of 

planting in springtime

of new joy and hope...

Thanks to Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber

for her presentations this weekend
at First Congregational Church, 
Colorado Springs, Colorado..

Hubble expansion

Hubble expansion

Out there and away
expansion is accelerating
so we speculate
when does expansion
accelerate to light..?
Light which can now
be understood as
both far out and in close
with vibrating variations
seeming as
entering and exiting
heavy blackness..
And new realizing:
It's all right
It's all light..!


Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science, wrote Edwin Hubble. "At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed. The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons."

During the past several years alone, the Hubble has delivered a goldmine of discoveries: from the mapping of cosmic-web of dark matter, to rich tapestries of evolving deep-space galaxies, to the very dawn of galaxies using mankind's deepest optical view of the universe, to evidence for Dark Energy in the young universe from Hubble Ultra Deep Field, to compelling evidence of monster black holes at the centers of galaxies....

Hubble's great breakthrough came in 1923 when with a fresh eye he showed that a distant cloud of that peripheral celestial gas in the Andromeda Constellation known as M31 wasn't a gas cloud, but a maze of brilliant stars, a "nebulae" (Latin for "cloud") -a galaxy a 100,000 light years across and at least 900,000 light years distant from Earth.

This discovery led to his 1924 research paper "Cephids in Spiral Nebulae" (Hubble's term for galaxy) showing that the universe -which we now know houses some 130 billion galaxies- was made up of not just the Milky Way, but a myriad of "island universes," many far more distant and larger.

Hubble then turned to the next question of equally cosmic proportions,just how big is the universe, and made an equally striking discovery: that all the galaxies except for our local cluster are moving away from us at a speed and distance that are nearly proportional. In short, the more distant the galaxy, the faster it was moving.

The concept of an expanding universe destroyed the old, longstanding notion of a static steady-state universe, the wonder of which Stephen Hawking has exclaimed, was that it wasn't obvious before that a static universe would have collapsed in upon itself.

Hubble's ignorance of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity led to his nor being able to connect the dots between a universe that was expanding evenly in all directions (the "Hubble Constant") to a geometrical starting point, a "primeval atom, a Big Bang....

The Daily Galaxy via Hubble.org and ESA

The restless, curious, ever-questioning human mind… every new door we open leads to new explorations, new questions, new discoveries, and more doors. At the heart is always being willing to question what we think we know, for as Proust would say, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” And nowhere is this more true than of the journey inward.

Ego

Here we find the center of the Perennial Tradition..

If we hear any statement 

of the spiritual 

of belief systems

of love and beauty..

And the ego

is not a participant

at least temporary

and finally illusory

we have not reached

our true Being...

Enough to Change the World

I would like to illustrate four moral equivalencies that I see as the foundational message of Jesus. This might help us understand the whole reason for non-dualistic thinking.


1. Jesus creates an equivalency with himself and the Father. “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30). Because we made Jesus different than ourselves, we thought Jesus was just talking about himself. We did not understand Christ as the corporate personality wherein he is the stand-in for all of us. He really meant for us to follow him on this same path. We are supposed to be able to say at the end of our spiritual journey that we, too, are one with the Father. 


2. The second moral equivalency is with Jesus and other people. “Whatever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me” (Matt. 25:40). This is a mystical way of knowing. A dualistic mind cannot understand this thinking because dualistic thinking usually excludes those who are “least” by my definition. With a non-dual mind we are able to see each and every person as an “Alter Christus,” another Christ. 



3. The third moral equivalency is with any person and God. “The Spirit is with you. The Spirit is in you” (John 14:17). Jesus closes the gap between God and us. As St. Paul says, “You are all temples of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit dwells in you” (1 Corinthians 3:16). This levels the playing field of humanity. Theologically, we are all of equal dignity and importance. Only a non-dualistic mind can get this, however. The dualistic mind will always make distinctions at a lower level and cannot usually get beyond them. 



4. The fourth moral equivalency is between yourself and any other person. “In everything, do unto others what you would have them do unto you” (Matt. 7:12). How you love one person is how you love every other person, and how you love other persons is how you should love yourself, and how you love yourself is how you should love other persons! 



Such non-dual seeing of everything really is enough to change the world.



---Richard Rohr

Dark not Dark

This is an approximately real-color image from the Hubble Space Telescope, of galaxy cluster Abell 3827. The galaxy cluster is made of hundreds of yellowish galaxies. At its core, four giant galaxies are smashing into each other. As the topmost of the four galaxies fell in, it left its dark matter trailing behind. The dark matter is invisible in this image, but its position is revealed by tell-tale gravitational lensing of an unrelated spiral galaxy behind the cluster, whose distorted image is seen as a blue arc. Trailing dark matter is predicted by theories in which dark matter is not perfectly dark, but feels more of the fundamental forces than just gravity.

Astronomers believe they might have observed the first potential signs of dark matter interacting with a force other than gravity. An international team of scientists, led by researchers at Durham University, UK, made the discovery using the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to view the simultaneous collision of four distant galaxies at the centre of a galaxy cluster 1.3 billion light years away from Earth.

Writing in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society today (Wednesday, April 15, 2015), the researchers said one dark matter clump appeared to be lagging behind the galaxy it surrounds. They said the clump was currently offset from its galaxy by 5,000 light years (50,000 million million km) - a distance it would take NASA's Voyager spacecraft 90 million years to travel. Such an offset is predicted during collisions if dark matter interacts, even very slightly, with forces other than gravity.

Computer simulations show that the extra friction from the collision would make the dark matter slow down, and eventually lag behind.

Scientists believe that all galaxies exist inside clumps of dark matter - called "dark" because it is thought to interact only with gravity, therefore making it invisible. Nobody knows what dark matter is, but it is believed to make up about 85 per cent of the Universe's mass. Without the constraining effect of its extra gravity, galaxies like our Milky Way would fling themselves apart as they spin.

In the latest study, the researchers were able to "see" the dark matter clump because of the distorting effect its mass has on the light from background galaxies - a technique called gravitational lensing.

The researchers added that their finding potentially rules out the standard theory of Cold Dark Matter, where dark matter interacts only with gravity.

"We used to think that dark matter sits around, minding its own business," said Richard Massey, Royal Society Research Fellow, in Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology. "But if it slowed down during this collision, this could be the first dynamical evidence that dark matter notices the world around it. "Dark matter may not be completely 'dark' after all."

The researchers note that while they appear to have observed the offsetting of dark matter, more investigation will be needed into other potential effects that could also produce a lag between the dark matter and the galaxy it hosts. Similar observations of more galaxies and computer simulations of galaxy collisions are under way to confirm the interpretation.

"Our observation suggests that dark matter might be able to interact with more forces than just gravity," said Team member Professor Liliya Williams, of the University of Minnesota. "The parallel Universe going on around us has just got interesting. The dark sector could contain rich physics and potentially complex behaviour."

Last month (March 2015), Dr Massey and colleagues published observations showing that dark matter interacted very little during 72 collisions between galaxy clusters (each containing up to 1,000 galaxies).

Today's latest research concerns the motion of individual galaxies. Researchers say that the collision between these galaxies could have lasted longer than the collisions observed in the previous study - allowing even a small frictional force to build up over time. The main uncertainty in the result is the timespan for the collision: the friction that slowed the dark matter could have been a very weak force over acting over about a billion years, or a relatively stronger force acting for "only" 100 million years.

Taken together, the two results bracket the behaviour of dark matter for the first time. Dark matter interacts more than this, but less than that. Dr Massey added: "We are finally homing in dark matter from above and below - squeezing our knowledge from two directions.

"Dark matter, we're coming for you."

The Daily Galaxy via Durham University

Not Lost

The “information loss paradox” in black holes — a problem that has plagued physics for nearly 40 years — may not exist.  That’s what some physicists have argued for years: That black holes are the ultimate vaults, entities that suck in information and then evaporate without leaving behind any clues as to what they once contained. A new University at Buffalo study finds that — contrary to what some physicists have argued for the years — information is not lost once it has entered a black hole. The research presents explicit calculations showing how information is, in fact, preserved..

“According to our work, information isn’t lost once it enters a black hole,” says Dejan Stojkovic, PhD, associate professor of physics at the University at Buffalo. “It doesn’t just disappear.”

Stojkovic’s new study, “Radiation from a Collapsing Object is Manifestly Unitary,” appeared on March 17 in Physical Review Letters, with UB PhD student Anshul Saini as co-author.

The paper outlines how interactions between particles emitted by a black hole can reveal information about what lies within, such as characteristics of the object that formed the black hole to begin with, and characteristics of the matter and energy drawn inside.

This is an important discovery, Stojkovic says, because even physicists who believed information was not lost in black holes have struggled to show, mathematically, how this happens. His new paper presents explicit calculations demonstrating how information is preserved, he says.

The research marks a significant step toward solving the “information loss paradox,” a problem that has plagued physics for almost 40 years, since Stephen Hawking first proposed that black holes could radiate energy and evaporate over time. This posed a huge problem for the field of physics because it meant that information inside a black hole could be permanently lost when the black hole disappeared — a violation of quantum mechanics, which states that information must be conserved.

In the 1970s, Hawking proposed that black holes were capable of radiating particles, and that the energy lost through this process would cause the black holes to shrink and eventually disappear. Hawking further concluded that the particles emitted by a black hole would provide no clues about what lay inside, meaning that any information held within a black hole would be completely lost once the entity evaporated.

Though Hawking later said he was wrong and that information could escape from black holes, the subject of whether and how it’s possible to recover information from a black hole has remained a topic of debate.

Instead of looking only at the particles a black hole emits, the study also takes into account the subtle interactions between the particles. By doing so, the research finds that it is possible for an observer standing outside of a black hole to recover information about what lies within.

Interactions between particles can range from gravitational attraction to the exchange of mediators like photons between particles. Such “correlations” have long been known to exist, but many scientists discounted them as unimportant in the past.

“These correlations were often ignored in related calculations since they were thought to be small and not capable of making a significant difference,” Stojkovic says. “Our explicit calculations show that though the correlations start off very small, they grow in time and become large enough to change the outcome.”

The image at the top of the page shows the black hole at the center of the super giant elliptical galaxy M87 in cluster Virgo fifty million light-years away. It is the most massive black hole for which a precise mass has been measured -6.6 billion solar masses. Orbiting the galaxy is an abnormally large population of about 12,000 globular clusters, compared to 150-200 globular clusters orbiting the Milky Way. The team theorized that the M87 black hole grew to its massive size by merging with several other black holes. M87 is the largest, most massive galaxy in the nearby universe, and is thought to have been formed by the merging of 100 or so smaller galaxies. The M87 black hole’s large size and relative proximity, astronomers think that it could be the first black hole that they could actually “see.”

In 2011, using the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, a team of astronomers calculated the black hole’s mass, which is vastly larger than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way, which is about 4 million solar masses. The black hole’s event horizon, 20 billion km across “could swallow our solar system whole.”

The Daily Galaxy via University of Buffalo

Dissolved

Dissolved

In a day

in which the hour

has passed noon..

Afternoon constrictions

arise as conflicts

with time

as all conflicts

arise with time..

So the evening

awareness arrives

a graceful coming

which bathes the 

constrictions with

growing recognition

of the seeming

power of time

illusion now and

dissolved...

April Snow

April Snow

Colorado springtime 

and a snowfall with accompanying

thunder and lightening and sun..

Our weather chose to display

all her names at once..

Yet we know

that at once

is all we

know

or can

know..!

including

May flowers..!

Forgetting the Now

Forgetting the Now

After our birth

we so soon forget

and begin life's search

for the happiness we left..

A search in the time as 

claim stands as allotted

proceeds with a powering by

 illusory free choice..

Then at some punctuation

our birth arrives again

and the miracle of Now

impinges our senses..

Past and future are

rolled into one

and new day

finds happiness

again...

Being and becoming

Being

and

becoming

This polarity in play

is the pathway of life..

Placed in polarity

life is lived

on Being's edge..

Life surges in youth

 our edge we find..

Edge is becoming

and we forget

edge also Being

 does edge.!

Now to remember

when suffering prompts

and Being light floods..

Hence our discovery:

becoming is only

vibrating Being

and we are a

child once more...

All is well

All is well

If through our practice

or very directly

we are Aware

of our true nature

as Consciousness..

That is the dawning

of a realizing

that everything

is made of

Consciousness

Happiness

Beauty

Joy..

All is well...

No Signs

No Signs

this one Question:
are we alone..?
Another research group
reports no signs 
and yes for now..
Prompting explanations of
methodology too rough
in a universe where
subtlety reigns..
The larger Question may be:
from a nondual looking
the reaches of space 
are finally realized 
as here and now..
Are we looking with
Hubble
to find ourself..?

Scientists Scan 100,000 Galaxies And See No Signs Of Alien Life. What Do E.T. Hunters Say Now?

The Huffington Post |  By Macrina Cooper-White

Just how realistic is it to believe that humans will someday find evidence of extraterrestrial life?

NASA's chief scientist recently predicted that we'd find signs of life beyond Earth within a decade or so, but a new study by researchers at Penn State -- one of the most exhaustive of its type -- isn't very encouraging.

After surveying tens of thousands of galaxies surrounding our own Milky Way galaxy, the scientists turned up no sign of advanced alien civilizations.

"These galaxies are billions of years old, which should have been plenty of time for them to have been filled with alien civilizations, if they exist," Dr. Jason T. Wright, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the university's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds and one of the researchers, said in a written statement. "Either they don't exist, or they don't yet use enough energy for us to recognize them."

Turning up the heat. For the research, Wright and his colleagues analyzed a vast catalog of observations made in 2010 by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope. The team looked at the heat emitted by the 100,000 "most promising" candidates of the all-sky catalog's nearly 100 million entries.

"The idea behind our research is that, if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring civilization, the energy produced by that civilization's technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths -- exactly the radiation that the WISE satellite was designed to detect for other astronomical purposes," Wright said in the statement.

The hypothesis that advanced civilizations could be recognized by their waste heat was first put forth by renowned theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, according to Space.com.

Time to give it up? Despite his negative findings, Wright said his study, published April 15 in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, was "just the beginning," and that further research may yet turn up evidence of alien technology.

And other experts involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) told The Huffington Post that they're far from discouraged.

Dr. Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., told HuffPost Science in an email that it's possible alien civilizations are hard to detect because they use much less energy than Dyson proposed.

Legendary astronomer Dr. Jill Tarter, the former director of the Center for SETI Research in Mountain View, Calif. and the astronomer on whom Jodie Foster's character in the 1997 film "Contact" was loosely based, agreed that efforts to find extraterrestrial life should continine.

"It's absolutely not time to stop," she told The Huffington Post in an email. "It's time to improve the sensitivity and specificity of these searches to be able to discriminate between signals produced by Mother Nature and those produced by engineers."

The Red Wheelbarrow

 The Red Wheelbarrow 

so much depends 

upon 

a red wheel 

barrow 

glazed with rain 

water 

beside the white 

chickens

--William Carlos Williams 

Not What...But How

Not What...But How...

This may be a golden key

unlocking our prison gates..

We live in an information sea

and are educated to search

to locate the illusive What..

A successful find we are told

by designers of taste

even by teachers of note

will bring the happiness

we are seeking..

But what of the How

watching the short life

of each What..

Knowing that each 

is enclosed

no..is made from

an infinite How...

Heart and Conflict

Heart and Conflict

Sitting in morning sun

 this April spring day

waiting for words of tribute

 for our teacher's departing..

 Friday trips to the Senior Center
for those twenty eight years

there wearing his exampled past..

From a lifetime of preparing 

 weekly word gifts rise and express..

Morning sun finding breeze

a bumblebee just passed and

the grass hints of green..

Our teacher's mentor spoke

of a past not dead

and not even past..
This presence of Now 
finds our heart..

And of the heart:

when writing disturbs 

the whiteness of a page
this reminds us of conflict

 the heart with itself..

The sun's warmth dispels 

April's chill and we 

remember that whiteboard

after Colleen's erasing..

With new whiteness

the heart cleansed for Now

of the words and maps
of Yoknapatapha..

Those many conflicts 

with itself..

As he departs this morning

for his Liberty Heights home

we wish him the freedom

that name implies..

Doves in the distance

spring birds chirping

a steady traffic rumble..

Perhaps we know Now

our heart's conflicts

are simply made 
of itself...

Our best wishes 
to you Jesse,
our Teacher 
and Friend...

Charlie Coon
April 24th, 2015
Friday!

(see this and other of Charlie's
writing at:  polarityinplay.blogspot.com )

Black Hole Awakening

Black Hole Awakening

More than a mystery of nature
these severe compressions show us
the extremes of the seeming separate self
of the ego triumphant..
Not separate though but as we
 embedded in consciousness whole..
The black hole waiting for evaporation
and  new awakening
as a wave in the ocean
as we in our longing 
find Real composition...

(Imagine the scene: highly advanced civilisations get enormous amounts of energy from black holes, be it extracting it from collapsed stars or making artificial mini-holes that power spaceships. How feasible might it actually be to tap these cosmic behemoths for power one day? Black holes are stars that have burnt out and collapsed under their own gravity to an infinitesimally small point in space – a singularity. Inside the so-called event horizon, even light is trapped by a huge gravitational pull. But that view evolved once Stephen Hawking and others brought quantum physics into the mix. Hawking showed in the 1970s that black holes should emit energy from their boundaries in the form of radiation produced by quantum fluctuations of empty space itself. Eventually the black hole radiates itself away – it evaporates.(excerpts from BBC article, December 3, 2013 by Philip Ball)

Window

The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window - 
Written in 1944 by Thomas Merton

Because my will is simple as a window

And knows no pride of original birth,

It is my life to die, like glass, by light:

Slain in the strong rays of the bridegroom sun.

Because my love is simple as a window

And knows no shame of original dust, 

I longed all night, (when I was visible) for dawn my death: 

When I would marry day, my Holy Spirit: 

And die by transsubstantiation into light.

For light, my lover, steals my life in secret.

I vanish into day, and leave no shadow 

But the geometry of my cross, 

Whose frame and structure are the strength 

By which I die, but only to the earth, 

And am uplifted to the sky my life.

When I became the substance of my lover, 

(Being obedient, sinless glass) 

I love all things that need my lover's life, 

And live to give my newborn Morning to your quiet rooms, 

-Your rooms, that would be tombs, 

Or vaults of night, and death, and terror, 

Fill with the clarity of living Heaven, 

Shine with the rays of God's Jerusalem:

O shine, bright Sions!

Because I die by brightness and the Holy Spirit, 

The sun rejoices in your jail, my kneeling Christian, 

(Where even now you weep and grin 

To learn, from my simplicity, the strength of faith).

Therefore do not be troubled at the judgements of the thunder, 

Stay still and pray, still stay, my other son, 

And do not fear the armies and black ramparts 

Of the advancing and retreating rains: 

I'll let no lightning kill your room's white order.

Although it is the day's last hour, 

Look with no fear: 

For the torn storm lets in, at the world's rim, 

Three streaming rays as straight as Jacob's ladder:

And you shall see the sun, my Son, my Substance, 

Come to convince the world of the day's end, and of the night, 

Smile to the lovers of the day in smiles of blood; 

For though my love, He'll be their Brother, 

My light - the Lamb of their Apocalypse.

Seamless

Seamless

Each new day brings a new sun's seamless dawn

which will be torn today in this place and that..

Planning and doing seemingly rents smoothness..

Then to recall our dawn experience

 joyful recall repairs and heals and restores

the seamless new day...

Needed repairs

Needed repairs

Present now and waiting

at Bud's Muffler 

for an axle repair

and tire patching..

The body shop laughter and cheer

seal auto wounds which appear

in the never-ending dying

of our moving machines..

Might this dying itself

be repaired by

more attention to

wind and sun...

Light of common day

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,	60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come	65
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,	70
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;	75
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day. ---Excerpt from William Wordsworth,     536. Ode. Intimations of Immortality