VII Notes
2010
Notes
[Sunday 27 June 2010 - Saturday 3 July 2010]
[Notebook: DB 69 Creation]
[page 119]
Sunday 27 June 2010
'Its a thin line between love and hate' ie one bit in the Hamming measure. The Pretenders, Hamming distance - Wikipedia
'Sic transit gloria mundi' et etiam gloria caeli! Sic transit gloria mundi - Wikipedia
The origin of distinct levels of communication opens the possibility of conflicting communication, saying one thing and doing another, which, if conscious, we call hypocrisy. If we look at Jesus' preaching, and particularly his death, we can see that at its core was the removal of the dissonance he perceived between the actions and words of the local leaders.
'Us Yellowbeards are never so dangerous as when we are dead.' And many other artists do not become influential until they are dead.
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The physical embodiment of all information explains why murder, torture and terrorism are so effective in the intellectual realm and why the system can maintain control simply by starving out the dissidents without any 'overt' violence -- kill the mind, kill the idea (unless it has already been passed on).
Its a thin line. The Roman Catholic Church has refined the misunderstanding of the ancients (convinced that they were cosmically special) to such a fine point of difference that it is only one bit away from the truth. Ie all we have to do erase the not from the predicate God is not the Universe.
I have had a traumatic relationship with the Church which has left me convinced that it was in the wrong, the foundations of its theology (at least the 'empirical' data contained in the Bible) are too weak and parochial to support a cosmology, so political power has been substituted for doctrinal truth and purity.
Darwin is very strong on the role of death and extinction (the duals of birth and creation) in the Universe, thus we may see him as a forerunner of quantum field theory.
Darwin page 317: 'On Extinction . . . On the theory of natural selection the extinction of old forms and the production of new and improved forms are intimately connected together.' Charles Darwin
'and improved' here meaning better fitted to the current
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environment.
Follow the money (as gravitation follows the energy)
The velocity of light is the universal machine infinity.
Maybe global money management can learn something from general relativity. The financial metric is subject to transformations by the money market which is moved by the attractions and repulsions between masses of money = value = cardinal{actions}.
Propaganda: all you need to win is a tiny margin over the opposition raised to an infinite power.
Wave structure is imposed by the bounded nature of the physical resources for spiritual development. Each layer is a sandwich, physics - action - pneumatology (matter : physics :: pneumatology).
We can study the spirit abstracted from its material base.
The scale invariant nature of things means that new ideas can be rapidly implemented up and down the scale. Abstract mathematics places bounds on symbolic manipulations of mathematics which derive from the transfinite numbers. In particular the Truing machine gives us (the only?) bound on processing = transformation.
TRANSFORMATION: MATHEMATICAL vs FISH FACTORY.
Institutional fidelity: my attempted MA demonstrated to me that the ACU if faithful to the letter of the Roman Catholic Church requirements. John Paul II, § 27
[page 122]
I am back to the level of confidence I had in 1987 when I did the Peace talks. A Theory of Peace Then I began with the idea of a gala dinner and a lecture at the sailing club, but eventually the thing sank without a ripple. I like to take credit for the fall of the Wall and the Soviet Union, but I have no evidence that the secret services of the world were listening to me and advised their governments of the wisdom of my words. Berlin Wall - Wikipedia, History of the Soviet Union (1985-1991) - Wikipedia . . . that is a faery story, but I am beginning to see how the propagation of The Natural might work, developing some sort of theological festivals devoted to the full bandwidth of Nature, from Initial Singularity to God.
Essence of politics = get the numbers (cardinal, mass). The system with the greatest mass (rate of action) is (prima facie) the most powerful.
I cannot go pubic until I am over my religious bitterness, accept the status quo and work on from there toward my dream. Which is? Maximum bandwidth from the symmetrization (equiprobabilization) of each instance of humanity, that is each of us. Concrete implrementation of the theories of communication, cybernetics and stability. If we hold all issues in common, we will develop solutions in common.
Stephen Prothero: God is not One Prothero
Darwin page 420: 'All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties of classification are explained, if I do not greatly deceive myself, on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with modification; . . . '
Monday 28 June 2010
[page 123]
Darwin page 455: 'Rudimentary organs may be compared with letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but useless in the pronunciation, but which serve as a clue in seeking for its derivation.
page 484:'When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.'
page 486: "Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies; and will then truly give what may be called the plan of creation.'
page 458: 'When I view all beings not as special creations but as lineal descendants of some few beings that lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to be ennobled.'
'As all he living forms of life are lineal descendants of those which have lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and natural endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.
And overcome the devastation caused by the human discovery of living and fossil fuels and the devices to use them for the destruction of the natural world for our supposed benefit.
The power of the Church lies in its marketing. At the core of this power is the ability to create belief in its product. Looking back through history, one sees that Christianity is only marginally differentiated from similar religions around the Mediterranean. But it
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must have had that little variation that selection has worked on to being it to world dominance. It claims to have the gift of absolute truth founded on the claim to be infallible. Since this claim is very probably false, we are led to question all its other beliefs.
The Evolution of Christianity. One can imagine that a new species of Christianity emerged after every Ecumenical Council. One might lobby for the [Council to rebuild the intellectual foundations of the Church].
A Letter to the Christian Bishops of the World.
Quantum field theory is an uneasy marriage of quantum mechanics and special relativity. The central difficulty seems to be that special relativity operated in 4-space (Minkowski space) and quantum mechanics operates in Hilbert space, and mapping between the two spaces is not altogether simple.
Why is this mapping required? Particle physics gets most of its data from the collisions and disintegrations of electrons, protons, atoms and other simple structures. These particles are seen to come from infinity, interact and the output particles recede to infinity. This is quite a valid view, given the tiny size of the particles and the macroscopic size of most experimental setups. Each incoming particle may be considered to be ar rest in its own inertial frame, and, due to their relative inertial motion, the particles see one another as transformed by their relative velocity, so that one electron will see another as space contracted, time dilated and mass increased. This situation remains true until the particles collide and momentarily occupy the same rest frame before the reaction products take off in their rest frames.
[page 125]
The assumption of infinite initial a final distances is tantamount to the assumption that the before and after the reaction the particles are isolated from one another and do not interact before the moment of interaction, again a reasonable assumption which depends on the ranges of the forces involved.
The actual interaction is described by quantum mechanics, which represents the input and output states by vectors which are transformed into one another by the S (scattering) matrix. This matrix is a function of the energies, spins, momenta and other quantum properties of the interacting particles.
The standard approach to particle interactions is to apply Lorentz transformations to the quantum mechanical state vectors, but this not really make sense because quantum mechanics sees only phase, frequency, energy, and is, in itself, independent of space [no memory] To Zee, it is a one dimensional field theory. Zee
Pleasure exists in the concrete.
Bernard Zuel SMH Spectrum 26-27 June 2010 page 23 reviewing Scissor Sisters Night Work 'Inverting George Clinton's funk philosophy, its free your ass and your mind will follow.' Bernard Zuel
Tuesday 29 June 2010
Is quantum field theory telling us that the Universe is a communication network? (Physical Review D).
Having more or less overcome the indoctrination that I am an original sinner, the question is how far can I go? As with Darwin, the only option is complete revision of current models. On my
[page 126]
assumption that the Universe began as a 'completely simple' system and grew from there, it should be possible to construct an intelligible model (also quite simple) of the process of complexification by variation and selection of stationary points (species) in the universal dynamics.
Woodward and Bernstein: '.. . "Plumbers" . . . investigating leaks to the news media' [ie maintaining dictatorial secrecy] Woodward
Oath of secrecy; vow
I suppose that I have always felt that I can do this, but on the other hand that it is an impossible task. My most valuable clue (I think) to date is the identification of God, the initial singularity and the isolated quantum system,and the analogy of the procession of the Word as the creation of a new degree of freedom in a network.
If I can do it, it must be done because it will help to bring humanity into equilibrium with itself and the planet and is the ultimate foundation of the green revolution, something I have felt since TEC days. TEC Now we need something like the Natural Theology Centre, NTC, an enterprise of TTC, implementing TNRP [Toward Natural Religion Project] Centre for Natural Theology, a new node in the theological network, brought into being by a creative act living on such resources as it can garner from its environment. All this process is a self conscious realization of the theology the Centre is established to develop.
From thinking to campaigning, income in, propaganda out. Money in, information out, action in, information out.
There are many trials and error in these notes, but I keep feeling that I am converging on something.
[page 127]
Birth and Death: creation and annihilation. At the physical level energy (probability of a given event) is equivalent to 'materia prima' and is 'logically conserved'.
I used to be terrified of debt, but now I am getting used to it. As quantum mechanical tunnelling suggests, one must go into debt to cross a ootential barrier to the green fields beyiond it. What is exhausting is the long run through the desert of no reward, something that can only be believed when it is seen.
An ambition to be President; to be Pope; to avoid administrative responsibility and just stick to ideas? Somewhere in between, to give life to the idea that the Universe is divine and theology a real science. A matter of slowly digging in deeper. As I sit content in sunshine and in love, all this sounds so easy, just keep chipping away.
Logic (and computer processing) work because we can make almost closed system (subroutines) of any level of complexity that can be called by name. These systems are handed a certrain input and return a certain output but their internal workings are hidden from us. In the context of the overall human process, I am such a subsystem and because U can be treated as almost closed I can be represented by a state symbol in a preoicate such as X weighs 85 kilograms.
The 'field' is a form, the algorithm governing the interaction of two particles which is measured cardinally by the energy of interaction, that is the rate at which the interaction process proceeds.
Plane waves carry no data, and so we might say that a superposition also carries no data, but this seems wrong insofar as a superposition is equivalent to modulation, and we see a precisely
[page 128]
located particle as a superposition with an infinite spectrum of spatial frequencies. Superpositions of temporal frequencies define moments in time. On the relativistic view we have superpositions of four-vectors. And these superpositions are not really defining points but localized probability distributions.
Quantum field theory has grown from the intersection of relativity and quantum mechanics, and we understand the protocol shared by both is continuous mathematics and calculus. Nevertheless, it is an irreducible fact that observed nature is quantized and particulate, and we might speculate that most of the difficulties we experience in field theory arise from the attempt to describe a discrete world with continuous functions, leading us to invent strange animals like Dirac's delta and the little bits we add on here and there to avoid zero denominators. Complex mathematical technologies (renormalization etc) have grown up to deal with these various difficulties. In our hearts, however, it seems wrong for the foundations of the Universe to be so complex. Perhaps we are looking at it all the wrong way.
The goal of physics is a theory of everything.The traditional theory of everything is theology. Although we are inclined to look down on theology as not a real science (since the traditional God is held to be a complete mystery, so our only data is the writings of ecclesiastical authorities) nevertheless some very smart theoreticians have worked in the theological field over the last few thousand years.
We work things out in the discrete domain and then generalize to the continuum, but this is possibly a mistake, because while there is information in discrete strings, there is none
[page 129]
in a continuum.
Making love very slowly, so that the total amount of live is a monotonic function. GOD is LOVE : CREATION = MAKING LOVE
The isolated fuck (actus purus) vs marriage (complex pure act).
Every tick is a stationary point in a clock and that is what we observe.
Following the Einstein path of theory of principle, we begin with some ideas about communication. Science is after all communication with the world and the aim of scientific method is to dent and receive our messages correctly, which requires that we know what the world means when it says something (like melting its glaciers).
Although people sing the praises of the Standard Model, and although it delivers some quite good numerical correlations, it is not much more consistent that traditional theology. To extract the relevant information from traditional theology we must try to tease it out of its cultural reference frame by the application of general covariance. This reveals the invariant features of theology which seem to have remained pretty constant throughout written history. God is the source of the Universe.
Fields are a form of ether, rather more abstract and dynamic than the traditional version. We see a tensor field as a manifold with a tensor resident at every point, which we may understand as an instance of a computer [communicating with computers residing at neighbouring points].
[page 130]
LEARNING vs FORGETTING. Both changes of state of memory, where we see the undifferentiated physical memory, existing prior to the loading in of particular data. Switched off, the hardware has no state, or at least a ground state. Landauer
The traditional God is the ground state of the Universe.
Globally, religions divide about 50:50 on whether God is part of the Universe or distinct from it.
Energy = velocity = distance (measured in acts) / time (seconds) = acts per second (cf metres per second).
As the momentum of a photon increases its wavelength decreases and frequency increases to maintain the constant velocity c.
Einstein first studied simultaneity and the the apparent change in the rate of accelerating clocks. Now we want to link action, time and formalism to develop a dynamic Universe with an ever increasing population of laws = algorithms (eg F = ma)
Bell's inequality requires three dimensions of space, one for non-locality, two for measurement(?)
The Universe is not bounded by space, but by consistency, by consistent motion, (conservative motion) each layer being a new symmetry to be broken by the layer above it.
BEING = BECOMING + FIXED POINTS.
The reunion of God and the world is an essential step
toward human development.
Rossano Supernatural Selection Rossano
One can see the political impact of writing in a rapid increase in the size of administrative units from tribes to empires.
The evil I want to fight is the autocratic administration of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Catholic model of God has very little to do with the Church, which simply used the philosophical ideas available to it to develop its business plan of world domination ('preach the gospel to all nations' Mark 16)
General relativity, quantum,mechanics and traditional theology give us three starting pints for the Universe, all theoretically invisible to us. Four starting points: add the inertial frame.
The problem with field theory seems to lie in this: that despite the obvious and universal discreteness of the world, we insist on trying to describe it with continuous mathematics. Let us instead introduce a new notion of continuity, logical continuity, and explore the idea that this, rather than the continuity expressed by classical mathematics, is the appropriate definition of continuity to describe the world. Logical continuity = algorithmic continuity = computer, computing machine.
Wednesday 30 June 2010
Thursday 1 July 2010
The Pope is outraged that the Belgian police should search a Bishop's house [retired Cardinal Godfried Danneels, the head of the Belgian church, Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, who was one of the clerics held and questioned last week at the ornate palace of the archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels.]. Doreen Carvajal The Roman Catholic Church claims to be above national criminal law. It claims to be the moral arbiter of the
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world entitled (like all other monarchies by divine right) to hide its crimes against humanity in house, to be hidden in its secret archives.
The Irish Government Inquiry into child abuse notices the practice of transferring offenders and even repeat offenders from institution to institution, and [one] wonders how many of the the most difficult cases were remitted to Australia, out of site, out of mind. The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse
I grew up in an Irish Catholic milieu in a small country town. I was not sexually molested, although I was small and cute and sometimes sat on a nun's knee at lunchtime. When I got to the Brothers the cane came into my life, with a certain sadism. The drill in winter was to run down to the school gate [about 600 metres] and back to warm up (and get freezing hands; gloves did not seem to have been invented then) and then those who had not done their homework got the cuts. Excruciating pain, for some reason strongest on the inside of the upper arm.
Corporal punishment leads to perversion, that is corruption of the feelings. I was reminded of this when I read a review of [Jessica Stern's]book on the motivations of terrorism in the New York Times. Charles McGrath Stern Caning became a competition. Some of us would provoke the Brothers to cane us and then discuss how high he jumped off the floor at recess.
My engagement with the more intellectual side of the Church began when I moved to a capital city boarding school run by an order of priests (clue: the motto of the Order is Veritas = truth). They also believed in the benefits of corporal punishment, although
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their caning technique was pretty piss weak compared to the Brothers. They took me in, and I joined their order and for a while stood amazed at the cosmic vision recorded in the works of Thomas Aquinas, the Creation, The Fall, the Redemption, the existence of God and all that stuff. I had been motivated to join the order because I had become so convinced of my sinful nature that it seemed necessary to do something extreme to get to heaven. It also exempted me from being drafted to go to Vietnam. Despite my tainted motives, I began to feel that I had really found my vocation.
Then a serpent entered my life in the form of Bernard Lonergan's book Insight Lonergan. The first thing a theologian must do is establish the existence of God. If there is no God, there is no theology. The Catholic Church takes special notice of the five ways to prove the existence of God [recorded by Aquinas Aquinas 13]. On closer inspection these proofs do not prove the existence of God in any absolute sense. We assume that because we are here talking about it. Instead they prove that God and the World of experience are two distinct realities.
Lonergan sets out to update Aquinas. To summarize a long and dense treatise, Lonergan asserts that the Universe is in some degree meaningless. Since God is fully meaningful, God and the Universe cannot be the same. The serpent told me this argument is wrong. I believed it, and said so. Every event in the Universe has a pedigree that stretches back to the initial singularity, a pedigree that gives each event meaning through its relationship to all the other events in the Universe.
It was not long after this that I was out of the Order walking the streets in a new suit, home to mum in a state of shock. I have had forty years to reflect on these events and
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and have come to one clear conclusion. The revelations of child abuse that have been emerging from the Church over the last few decades are just the tiny tip of a very big iceberg. They are consequences of a radical theological error on the Church. God and the Universe are not different. These two words refer to the same reality.
RossanoThe source of the error is political. One advantage of my Catholic education is that it took me deep into the past, to the ancient history of Greece and Israel and beyond. In this period one sees the consolidation of tribes into nations and empires. Top create an empire one needs a good fighting force and a belief system which justifies military conquest. This history is readily explained by the theory of evolution. See Rossano's Supernatural Selection. Rossano
The separation of God and the Universe is an essential pat of the Catholic Business plan, since they have granted themselves a monopoly on communication with God and made a collection of texts (The Catholic Bible) to prove their point. In the process they have claimed that they are infallible and need answer to no human institution. Heady stuff with feet of clay. The Papal attitude problem.
You can be pretty sure the Pope and his clergy will not give up without a fight. They have done pretty well out of their business and own a lot of valuable property. However, we can imagine that it will not hold out forever. The sexual abuse scandals have seriously weakened its numinous power and the cover ups even more so. One is reminded of Watergate. The initial break in was a relatively minor [crime]. It was the cover-up that brought the president down for claiming to be above the law.
[page 135]
So much for the tip. What about the iceberg? Here we move from the divine right of the Church to indoctrinate us to the actual doctrine, beginning with the Fall. God made the world and its people, but the people were bad. Like any ancient despot, God punished the world by condemning it to death, work, the pain of childbirth and all other evils, the consequences of Original Sin.
Later, when he had become a Trinity, God had second thoughts, but his methods were just as violent as the expulsion from Eden. He sent his only Son to be cruelly tortured and murdered, a bloody sacrifice to Himself to convince himself to forgive Creation for its sin, not now but at the end of the World, when all is restored to its pristine beauty. This product, the Redemption, is [normally] available only through the Church.
The iceberg is the Church's mission to ijkodctrinate every child on earth with this vicious faery tale. I have had experience of the emotional load placed on me by being led to belief that I was a sinful little fuckup. And mutiply that by the billions of children who have been indoctrinated over thousands opf years and you will see why I think the Catholic Church is an evil empire. None of this is to say that I do not love the women at Vinnies who keep me supplied with clothes, bedding and crocheted rugs and all the other Catholic workers who interpret the injunction to love their neighbours as a command to love their neighbours rather than defend an ancient and obsolete institution.
Can the Church be saved? Yes. First it must accept that God and the Universe are one. Then its theology can become a real science based on the premise that all experience if experience of God. As these ideas trickle down through the organization, we an see the Church become an organization based on good science, human rights and love would cease to despise the world and learn to love it an all who live in it.
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The existing Church takes the life out of the World and makes it a puppet of an alien God. The new Church would see that the Universe is the creative source of its own life, just like the God of old, but now God is everything (Written with a shivering hand.) This is what I think, anyway, and I am happy now.
Atheism, agnosticism or new theology?
Jansenism: Divine cruelty (?) Jansenism - Wikipedia
Every feature of the Universe, even the most microscopic is divine, meaningful and valuable. Some people feel a need to do great things, to move mountains and acquire and spend millions, but such activities are no more divine and meaningful that doing the dishes or changing nappies. Ultimately we must learn respect for the Universe as every scale, to minimize harm and to look lovingly at every detail, as conscientious scientists do.
A brief history of the human psyche. Once,maybe a long time ago, we were as the other animals leading instinctive lives driven by the inputs from our senses and out own needs and feelings. Then at some point, consciousness entered and we began to reflect on our situation and seek explanations for it. Jaynes Thus were born a multitude of gods, heroes, serpents, creative and destructive forces, and all the other ingredients of religion. Some time we also learnt that people could be enslaved (nothing new, insects do it) and made or induced to modify their behaviour for the benefit of their masters providing labour, sex, food and anything else that one person could extract from another. Taken to an extreme this tendency led to empires and all the other machinery needed to keep an organization like the Roman Empire functioning effectively The Roman Catholic Church is a descendant
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of this empire. It has imperial aspirations, go forth and preach the gospel . . . Gospel mean good news but it might not have always been good news to those who were preached to, even though it was to the preachers, who knew that they were gaining merit for their work, and expected instant beatitude should the unconverted be so uncouth (or wise) as to till them crowning them with martyrdom, the highest accolade for steadfast belief.
In quantum mechanics we speak of indeterminacy, but the message,when it comes is fully determinate, an eigenvalue corresponding to one of a set of orthogonal eigenfunctions. We cannot predict which eigenfunction or when, but though the future is uncertain, the past is definite.
Billions of children over thousands of years have has their lives falsified by the Church and the damage done to the human Earth is incalculable, and the evil inculcated into use has spread from humanity fro the whole devastated planet.
Inch by inch I drag myself away from the notion that all is evil. But how can there not be evil in a world of creation and annihilation? By allowing natural death. No killing.
As my old (imaginary) mate Feynman said when inquiring into a Shuttle disaster: ' For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.' R P Feynman
Friday 2 July 2010
I am going to have to carry a lot of people with me if I am going to convert the Church into a theological force for good.
As intellectuals often do, the Fathers of the Church, guided by Plato, strayed far from reality.
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The Magus Fowles: the magical power of some to control others with money, pain and rhetoric. Fowles
The thought of theological activism brings my mojo back.
'Getting into a book' = constructing a imaginative mental dynamic that is constrained by the static writing, the news, the scenes, the overall structure of the story.
Even the ancients hypostatized the life of the earth,inventing personalities as the sources of all emotions and actions, from thunderstorms through love to murder and war. Monotheism simply collected all the Gods into one big God, invisible, omniscient and omnipotent.
Emperors (and party leaders) have found that it is possible to disempower people by indoctrinating them with a completely false concept of life. We see this in the historical treatment of women and we see also the beginnings of a break out from this mould. A person with apparent certainty can have considerable power over people whose lives have been made uncertain by cognitive dissonance, by the gap between received doctrine and reality.
How do we break out of this? Einstein showed the theoretical way, general covariance. All people are equal in their own rest frames, and with adequate transformations of coordinates, can be seen to be so from all frames of reference. that is (in the human caserP all cultures. Culture = {langiuage, religion, politics, economics, design, work, heaven}.
LOVE <==> CULTURE
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The limiting resource in spiritual development is the available alphabet but the development of cleverer algorithms can overcome this limitation in the same way that position significant notation overcomes the constraints of measuring very large numbers with giant hills of beans. Earth, after all, is equivalent to about 10xx beans that represent an unimaginably large (but very real number) [a rough calculation yields xx = (diameter of earth/ length of bean)3 = 27].
One does not preach, one postulates. The Order of Preachers is founded on the fundamental arrogance of the Church, that it has the gift of absolute [ultimate] truth because it operates under the patronage of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth . . . Dominicans John Paul II, para 2
The task is to create a dual of the Catholic Church, establishing a policy on every relevant issue. So a Church is a think tank.
Fowles page 543: "'What is truth?' 'Did they happen?'"
Saturday 3 July 2010
Hee, Tears page 23: '"What are the four basic principles of the Party?" one asked. "Deification, Creed, Absoluteness and Uncoditional Acceptance," I replied automatically.' Hee
page 24: '"Congratulations, Comrade Kim Hyun Hee. You have been chosen by the Party."'
page 33: 'During the years that followed, I was occasionally permitted to visit my family, but these were sad occasions. My parents were always reluctant to see me leave, and I, at the time, somehow felt ashamed of their attachment to me, which is not what any fully indoctrinated North Korean would be expected to feel.'
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Further reading
Books
Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)
Christie, Agatha, Destination Unknown, Collins for the Crime Club; Greenway edition 1977 Amazon editorial review: 'When a number of leading scientists disappear, concern grows within the intelligence services. Are they being kidnapped? Blackmailed? Brainwashed? One woman appears to hold the key to the mystery. But she is found dead.'
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Christie, Agatha, Ordeal by Innocence, Bantam Books 1987 Amazon book description: 'Book Description Mrs. Argyle, benevolent tyrant and mother of five, is murdered with a poker. Her son Jacko is convicted of the crime but dies in prison. Two years later, Dr. Arthur Calgary comes forward to clear Jacko, but the Argyle family is not pleased. If Jacko didn’t commit the crime, who did? Suspense mounts as the family realizes that exonerating Jacko means fingering one of them.'
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Deighton, Len, Hope, HarperCollins Publishers 1996 From Publishers Weekly:
Veteran British spy Bernard Samson returns to fight further Cold War battles in this deceptively easygoing sequel to Faith (and prequel to Charity), set in 1987. ... Deighton's carefully crafted but seemingly nonchalant narration: droll, almost deadpan fits perfectly the character of Samson, a perceptive but closed-mouthed gent who is seemingly unimpressed by events like the sudden appearance of a dead body in his ex-mistress's bedroom or the bizarre theft of a severed hand. Exciting moments are handled casually, while causal conversations are given the detail expected of important ones, resulting in a version of reality that is disjointed and emotionally distanced, as a master spy's take on things may very well be. Deighton gives readers unfamiliar with Samson's troubled life plenty of background information, so newcomers as well as old series hands should take equal pleasure in this subtly intense offering by perhaps the only author other than le Carre who deserves to be known as "spymaster."'
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Deutsch, David, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes - and its Implications, Allen Lane Penguin Press 1997 Jacket: 'Quantum physics, evolution, computation and knowledge - these four strands of scientific theory and philosophy have, until now, remained incomplete explanations of the way the universe works. ... Oxford scholar DD shows how they are so closely intertwined that we cannot properly understand any one of them without reference to the other three. ...'
Amazon
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Fowles, John, The Magus, Back Bay Books: Little Brown and Co 2001 Product Description
'At the novels center is Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island. There he befriends a local millionaire, but the friendship soon evolves into a deadly game and Nicholas finds that he must fight not only for his sanity but for his very survival.'
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Hee, Kim Hyun, The Tears of My Soul, WilliamMorrow Inc 1993 'When Korean Air Lines flight 858 exploded in 1987, killing 115 passengers, international law-enforcement officials immediately started searching for the hardened North Korean terrorists who could have committed such a crime. What they found was Kim Hyun Hee, an idealistic young woman transformed by her country into an obedient killing machine. The Tears of My Soul is her poignant, shocking, and utterly compelling story.
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Humphreys, Christmas, Buddhism, 1991
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Jammer, Max, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics, Dover 1994 Jacket: 'Although the concept of space is of fundamental importance in both physics and philosophy, until the publication of this book, the idea of space had never been treated in terms of its historical development. ... Following an introductory chapter on the concept of space in antiguity, subsequent chapters consider Judeaeo-Christian ideas about space, the emancipation of the space concept from Aristotelianism, Newton's concept of absolute space and the concept of space from the 18th century to the present. ... It is essential reading for philosphers, physicists and mathematicians, but even the nonprofessional reader will find it accessible, for the author has kept the technical language and mathematical details to a minimum.'
Amazon
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Jaynes, Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Mariner Books 2000 Jacket: 'At the heart of this book is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3000 years ago and still developing.'
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Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '... Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding'
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Luke, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 'The third gospel's distinguishing quality is due to the attractive personality of its author, which shines through all his work. Luke is at once a most gifted writer and a man of marked sensibility. ... The originality of Luke is not in his key ideas (they are identical with those of Mark and Matthew) but in his religious mentality which, apart from slight traces of Paul's influence, is ovewhelmingly distinctive of Luke's personal temperament. Luke, in Dante's phrase, is the 'scriba mansuetudinis Christi', the faithful; recorder of Christ's lovingkindness.'
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Matthew, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels: '[Matthew is] a dramatic account in seven acts of the coming of the kingdom of heaven. 1. The preparation of the kingdom in the person of the child-Messiah. . . . 2. the formal proclamation of the charter of the Kingdom i.e. the Sermon on the Mount 3. The preaching of the kingdom by missionaries 4. The obstacles that the kingdom will meet from men 5. Its embryonic existence ... 6. The crisis . .. which is to prepare the way for the definitive coming of the kingdom . . . 7. The coming itself ... through the Passion and resurrection.'
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Prothero, Stephen, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World - and Why Their Differences Matter, HarperOne 2010 'Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Stephen Prothero
'On my last visit to Jerusalem, I struck up a conversation with an elderly man in the Muslim Quarter. As a shopkeeper, he seemed keen to sell me jewelry. As a Sufi mystic, he seemed even keener to engage me in matters of the spirit. He told me that religions are human inventions, so we must avoid the temptation of worshipping Islam rather than Allah. What matters is opening yourself up to the mystery that goes by the word God, and that can be done in any religion. As he tempted me with more turquoise and silver, he asked me what I was doing in Jerusalem. When I told him I was researching a book on the world’s religions, he put down the jewelry, looked at me intently, and, placing a finger on my chest for emphasis, said, "Do not write false things about the religions."
As I wrote God is Is Not One, I came back repeatedly to this conversation. I never wavered from trying to write true things, but I knew that some of the things I was writing he would consider false.
Mystics often claim that the great religions differ only in the inessentials. They may be different paths but they are ascending the same mountain and they converge at the peak. Throughout this book I give voice to these mystics: the Daoist sage Laozi, who wrote his classic the Daodejing just before disappearing forever into the mountains; the Sufi poet Rumi, who instructs us to "gamble everything for love"; and the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, who revels in the feminine aspects of God. But my focus is not on these spiritual superstars. It is on ordinary religious folk—the stories they tell, the doctrines they affirm, and the rituals they practice. And these stories, doctrines, and rituals could not be more different. Christians do not go on the hajj to Mecca; Jews do not affirm the doctrine of the Trinity; and neither Buddhists nor Hindus trouble themselves about sin or salvation.
Of course, religious differences trouble us, since they seem to portend, if not war itself, then at least rumors thereof. But as I researched and wrote this book I came to appreciate how opening our eyes to religious differences can help us appreciate the unique beauty of each of the great religions--the radical freedom of the Daoist wanderer, the contemplative way into death of the Buddhist monk, and the joy in the face of the divine life of the Sufi shopkeeper.
I plan to send my Sufi shopkeeper a copy of this book. I have no doubt he will disagree with parts of it. But I hope he will recognize my effort to avoid writing "false things," even when I disagree with friends.'
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Rossano, Matt, Superhatural Selection: How Religion Evolved, Oxford University Press 2010 Amazon Product Description
'In 2006, scientist Richard Dawkins published a blockbuster bestseller, The God Delusion. This atheist manifesto sparked a furious reaction from believers, who have responded with numerous books of their own. By pitting science against religion, however, this debate overlooks what science can tell us about religion. According to evolutionary psychologist Matt J. Rossano, what science reveals is that religion made us human.
In Supernatural Selection, Rossano presents an evolutionary history of religion. Neither an apologist for religion nor a religion-basher, he draws together evidence from a wide range of disciplines to show the valuable--even essential--adaptive purpose served by systematic belief in the supernatural. The roots of religion stretch as far back as half a million years, when our ancestors developed the motor control to engage in social rituals--that is, to sing and dance together. Then, about 70,000 years ago, a global ecological crisis drove humanity to the edge of extinction. It forced the survivors to create new strategies for survival, and religious rituals were foremost among them. Fundamentally, Rossano writes, religion is a way for humans to relate to each other and the world around them--and, in the grim struggles of prehistory, it offered significant survival and reproductive advantages. It emerged as our ancestors' first health care system, and a critical part of that health care system was social support. Religious groups tended to be far more cohesive, which gave them a competitive advantage over non-religious groups, and enabled them to conquer the globe.
Rather than focusing on one aspect of religion, as many theorists do, Rossano offers an all-encompassing approach that is rich with surprises, insights, and provocative conclusions.'
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Stern, Jessica, Denial: A Memoir of Terror, Ecco 2010 From Publisher's Weekly: 'In this skillfully wrought, powerful study, a terrorism expert, national security adviser (The Ultimate Terrorists), and lecturer at Harvard, returns to a definitive episode of terror in her own early life and traces its grim, damaging ramifications. Having grown up in Concord, Mass., in 1973, Stern, then 15, and her sister, a year younger, were forcibly raped at gunpoint by an unknown intruder; when the police reopened the case in 2006, Stern was compelled to confront the devastating experience. The police initially tied the case to a local serial rapist, who served 18 years in prison before hanging himself. Stern's painful journey takes her back to the traumatic aftershocks of the rape, when she began to affect a stern, hard veneer not unlike the stiff-upper-lip approach to survival her own German-born Jewish father had assumed after his childhood years living through Nazi persecution. Covering up her deep-seated sense of shame with entrenched silence, Stern had a classic post-traumatic stress disorder—which she was only able to recognize after her own work interviewing terrorists. Stern's work is a strong, clear-eyed, elucidating study of the profound reverberations of trauma.'
Copyright © Reed Business Information
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van Heijenoort, Jean, From Frege to Goedel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic 1879 - 1931. , iUniverse.com 1999 Amazon book description: 'Collected here in one volume are some thirty-six high quality translations into English of the most important foreign-language works in mathematical logic, as well as articles and letters by Whitehead, Russell, Norbert Weiner and Post…This book is, in effect, the record of an important chapter in the history of thought. No serious student of logic or foundations of mathematics will want to be without it.'
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Woodward, Bob, and Carl Berstein, All the President's Men: The Most Devastating Political Detective Story of the 20th Century, Pocket 2005 Product Description
'THIS IS THE BOOK THAT
CHANGED AMERICA
Beginning with the story of a simple burglary at Democratic headquarters and then continuing with headline after headline, Bernstein and Woodward kept the tale of conspiracy and the trail of dirty tricks coming -- delivering the stunning revelations and pieces in the Watergate puzzle that brought about Nixon's scandalous downfall. Their explosive reports won a Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post and toppled the President.'
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Zee, Anthony, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, Princeton University Press 2003 Amazon book description: 'An esteemed researcher and acclaimed popular author takes up the challenge of providing a clear, relatively brief, and fully up-to-date introduction to one of the most vital but notoriously difficult subjects in theoretical physics. A quantum field theory text for the twenty-first century, this book makes the essential tool of modern theoretical physics available to any student who has completed a course on quantum mechanics and is eager to go on.
Quantum field theory was invented to deal simultaneously with special relativity and quantum mechanics, the two greatest discoveries of early twentieth-century physics, but it has become increasingly important to many areas of physics. These days, physicists turn to quantum field theory to describe a multitude of phenomena.
Stressing critical ideas and insights, Zee uses numerous examples to lead students to a true conceptual understanding of quantum field theory--what it means and what it can do. He covers an unusually diverse range of topics, including various contemporary developments,while guiding readers through thoughtfully designed problems. In contrast to previous texts, Zee incorporates gravity from the outset and discusses the innovative use of quantum field theory in modern condensed matter theory.
Without a solid understanding of quantum field theory, no student can claim to have mastered contemporary theoretical physics. Offering a remarkably accessible conceptual introduction, this text will be widely welcomed and used.
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Papers
| Chaitin, Gregory J, "Randomness and Mathematical Proof", Scientific American, 232, 5, May 1975, page 47-52. 'Although randomness can be precisely defined and can even be measured, a given number cannot be proved random. This enigma establishes a limit in what is possible in mathematics'. back |
| d'Espagnat, Bernard, "Quantum theory and reality", Scientific American, 241, 5, November 1979, page 128-140. 'Most particles or aggregates of particles that are ordinarily regarded as separate objects have interacted at some time in the past with other objects. The violation of separability seems to imply that in some sense all these objects constitute an indivisible whole. Perhaps in such a world the concept of an independently existing reality can reatain some meaning, but it will be an altered meaning and one remove from everyday experience.' (page 140). back |
| Goldstein, Sheldon, "Quantum Theory without Observers - Part Two", Physics Today, 51, 4, April 1998, page 38. back |
| Goldstein, Sheldon, "Quantum Theory without Observers - Part One", Physics Today, 51, 3, March 1998, page 42. back |
| Landauer, Rolf, "Dissipation and noise immunity in computation and communication ", Nature, 335, , 27 October 1988, page 779-784. 'Reversible computers which carry out each step without discarding information can, in principle, dissipate arbitrarily small amounts of energy per step if the computation is carried out sufficiently slowly. This has caused a re-examination of energy requirements in communication and measurement. There also, it is only those steps that discard information which have a lower limit on energy consumption. Such steps can be avoided in the transmission of information.'. back |
| Liebfried, Dietrich, Tilman Pfau,Christopher Monroe, "Shadows and Mirrors: Reconstructing the Quantum States of Atom Motion", Physics Today, 51, 4, April 1998, page 22 - 28. 'Quantum mechanics allows us only one incomplete glimpse of a wavefunction, but if systems can be identically prepared over and over, quantum equivalents of shadows and mirrors can provide the full picture.'. back |
Links
| Aquinas 13 Summa: I 2 3: Whether God exists? I answer that the existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. . . . The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. . . . The third way is taken from possibility and necessity . . . The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. . . . The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. back |
| Berlin Wall - Wikipedia Berlin Wall - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) starting August 13, 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin. The barrier included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area (later known as the "death strip") that contained anti-vehicle trenches, "fakir beds" and other defenses. The Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc officially claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" in building a Socialist State in East Germany, however, in practice, the Wall served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that marked Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-World War II period.' back |
| Bernard Zuel Scissor Sisters: Night Work 'Scissor Sisters do disco. As in head-up, bum-out music to dance to; to wave a hand in the air rather than waggle a finger in your face to. Sure, there's a strain of gay pride but it's far less important than the camp humour and touches of mild transgression (Whole New Way has a couple of ooh-er lines that may well have been borrowed from Benny Hill).' back |
| Charles McGrath Private Trauma Sheds Light on Terrorism 'CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from talking to her, Jessica Stern is a renowned expert on terrorists and terrorism. . . . And at the time she thought the subject was just something she had fallen into. “But I now see that there’s a pattern,” she said, sitting in the white farmhouse, not far from the Harvard campus, where she lives with her third husband, Chester G. Atkins, a former Massachusetts congressman, and her 8-year-old son. “I’ve really been studying perpetrators and violence all my life.”
How she came to this realization is the subject of her new book, “Denial: A Memoir of Terror,” which Ecco published last week.' back |
| Dominicans Dominicans: Order of Preachers 'WWW.OP.ORG is the official international Web site of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans). The branches of the Dominican family are multiple: brothers, contemplative nuns, congregations of contemplative and apostolic sisters, lay persons in fraternities or secular institutes, secular priests in fraternities. "Each one has its own character, its autonomy. However by taking part in the charism of saint Dominic, they share between them a single vocation to be preachers in the Church (Chapter of Mexico, 1992)."' back |
| Doreen Carvajal Warning About Child Abuse Documents Led Belgian Police to Raid Its Offices 'MECHELEN, Belgium — Four days after a series of police raids of Catholic institutions in Belgium that drew sharp criticism from the pope, the reason for the unusually aggressive operation has emerged: a formal accusation that the church was hiding information on sexual abuse lodged by the former president of an internal church commission handling such cases.' back |
| Graham Chapman Yellowbeard 'Yellowbeard, a comedy cast with the all-star comedians of the 1980s, is a unique, corny spoof on pirate films. Like a Mel Brooks movie, Yellowbeard's plot is a series of ridiculous events, á la Airplane, circulating around Yellowbeard's (Graham Chapman) discovery that he has an "intellectual" son. Brain versus brawn is the film's theme, as Yellowbeard is forced to take his kid on a booty-hunt, since the pirate's ex-wife, Betty (Madeline Kahn), tattooed the treasure map on their child's head. As the bumbling British, including Harvey "Blind" Pew (John Cleese) and Gilbert Murvin (Marty Feldman), sail The Royal Navy Frigate to trail Yellowbeard's ship, The Lady Edith, The Spanish Main, captained by El Nebuloso (Tommy Chong) and El Segundo (Cheech Marin) follows in close pursuit. Three ships in constant battle on the open seas make for multiple comedic situations reminiscent of Monty Python. Directed by Mel Damski (Charmed, Lois & Clark), Yellowbeard has a made-for-TV cheesiness, though the talent of the actors, not to mention its off-kilter British humor, rescues the film from utter stupidity. --Trinie Dalton back |
| Hamming distance - Wikipedia Hamming distance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In information theory, the Hamming distance between two strings of equal length is the number of positions at which the corresponding symbols are different. Put another way, it measures the minimum number of substitutions required to change one string into the other, or the number of errors that transformed one string into the other.' back |
| History of the Soviet Union (1985-1991) - Wikipedia History of the Soviet Union (1985-1991) - Wikipedia, the free encylopedia 'The Soviet Union's dissolution into independent nations began early in 1985. After years of Soviet military buildup at the expense of domestic development, economic growth was at a standstill. Failed attempts at reform, a stagnant economy, and war in Afghanistan led to a general feeling of discontent, especially[citation needed] in the Baltic republics and Eastern Europe.
Greater political and social freedoms, instituted by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, created a bad atmosphere of open criticism of the Moscow regime. The dramatic drop of the price of oil in 1985 and 1986, and consequent lack of foreign exchange reserves in following years to purchase grain profoundly influenced actions of the Soviet leadership.[1]
Several Soviet Socialist Republics began resisting central control, and increasing democratization led to a weakening of the central government. The USSR's trade gap progressively emptied the coffers of the union, leading to eventual bankruptcy. The Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991 when Boris Yeltsin seized power in the aftermath of a failed coup that had attempted to topple reform-minded Gorbachev.' back |
| Jansenism - Wikipedia Jansenism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Jansenism was a theology and a movement, condemned as a heresy by Pope Innocent X in 1655, that arose in the frame of the Counter-Reformation and the aftermath of the Council of Trent (1545–1563). It emphasized original sin, human depravity, the necessity of divine grace, and predestination. Originating in the writings of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Otto Jansen, . . . ' back |
| John Paul II Fides et Ratio: On the relationship between faith and reason. para 2: 'The Church is no stranger to this journey of discovery, nor could she ever be. From the moment when, through the Paschal Mystery, she received the gift of the ultimate truth about human life, the Church has made her pilgrim way along the paths of the world to proclaim that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6).' back |
| John Paul II Ex Corde Ecclesiae '27. Every Catholic University, without ceasing to be a University, has a relationship to the Church that is essential to its institutional identity. As such, it participates most directly in the life of the local Church in which it is situated; at the same time, because it is an academic institution and therefore a part of the international community of scholarship and inquiry, each institution participates in and contributes to the life and the mission of the universal Church, assuming consequently a special bond with the Holy See by reason of the service to unity which it is called to render to the whole Church. One consequence of its essential relationship to the Church is that the institutional fidelity of the University to the Christian message includes a recognition of and adherence to the teaching authority of the Church in matters of faith and morals. Catholic members of the university community are also called to a personal fidelity to the Church with all that this implies. Non-Catholic members are required to respect the Catholic character of the University, while the University in turn respects their religious liberty. back |
| Mark 16 Mark 16 KJV '15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.' back |
| R P Feynman Appendix F - Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle 'PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER ACCIDENT
(Source: The Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger
Accident Report, June 6, 1986)
William P. Rogers, Chairman
Former Secretary of State under President Nixon (1969-1973), and
Attorney General under President Eisenhower (1957-1961), currently a
practicing attorney and senior partner in the law firm of Rogers &
Wells. Born in Norfolk, New York, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom
in 1973. He holds a J.D. from Cornell University (1937) and served as
LCDR, U.S. Navy (1942-1946).
Neil A. Armstrong, Vice Chairman
Former astronaut, currently Chairman of the Board of Computing
Technologies for Aviation, Inc. Born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, Mr.
Armstrong was spacecraft commander for Apollo 11, July 16-24, 1969,
the first manned lunar landing mission. He was Professor of
Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Cincinnati from 1971 to
1980 and was appointed to the National Commission on Space in 1985.
David C. Acheson
Former Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Communications
Satellite Corporation (1967-1974), currently a partner in the law firm
of Drinker Biddle & Reath. Born in Washington, DC, he previously
served as an attorney with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
(1948-1950) and was U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia
(1961-1965). He holds an LL.B. from Harvard University (1948) and
served as LT, U.S. Navy (1942-1946).
Dr. Eugene E. Covert
Educator and engineer. Born in Rapid City, South Dakota, he is
currently Professor and Head, Department of Aeronautics and
Astronautics, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Member of the
National Academy of Engineering, he was a recipient of the Exceptional
Civilian Service Award, USAF, in 1973 and the NASA Public Service
Award in 1980. He holds a Doctorate in Science from Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Dr. Richard P. Feynman
Physicist. Born in New York City, he is Professor of Theoretical
Physics at California Institute of Technology. Nobel Prize winner in
Physics, 1965, he also received the Einstein Award in 1954, the
Oersted Medal in 1972 and the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal in
1973. He holds a Doctorate in Physics from Princeton (1942).
Robert B. Hotz
Editor, publisher. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is a graduate of
Northwestern University. He was the editor-in-chief of Aviation Week
& Space Technology magazine (1953-1980). He served in the Air Force
in World War II and was awarded the Air Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster.
Since 1982, he has been a member of the General Advisory Committee to
the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
Major General Donald J. Kutyna, USAF
Director of Space Systems and Command, Control, Communications. Born
in Chicago, Illinois, and graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he
holds a Master of Science degree from Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (1965). A command pilot with over 4,000 flight hours, he
is a recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal, Distinguished
Flying Cross, Legion of Merit and nine air medals.
Dr. Sally K. Ride
Astronaut. Born in Los Angeles, California, she was a mission
specialist on STS-7, launched on June 18, 1983, becoming the first
American woman in space. She also flew on mission 41-G launched
October 5, 1984. She holds a Doctorate in Physics from Stanford
University (1978) and is still an active astronaut.
Robert W. Rummel
Space expert and aerospace engineer. Born in Dakota, Illinois, and
former Vice President of Trans World Airlines, he is currently
President of Robert W. Rummel Associates, Inc., of Mesa, Arizona. He
is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is holder of
the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.
Joseph F. Sutter
Aeronautical engineer. Currently Executive Vice President of the
Boeing Commercial Airplane Company. Born in Seattle, he has been with
Boeing since 1945 and was a principal figure in the development of
three generations of jet aircraft. In 1984, he was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering. In 1985, President Reagan conferred
on him the U.S. National Medal of Technology.
Dr. Arthur B. C. Walker, Jr.
Astronomer. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he is currently Professor of
Applied Physics and was formerly Associate Dean of the Graduate
Division at Stanford University. Consultant to Aerospace Corporation,
Rand Corporation and the National Science Foundation, he is a member
of the American Physical Society, American Geophysical Union, and the
American Astronomy Society. He holds a Doctorate in Physics from the
University of Illinois (1962).
Dr. Albert D. Wheelon
Physicist. Born in Moline, Illinois, he is currently Executive Vice
President, Hughes Aircraft Company. Also a member of the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, he served as a consultant to the
President's Science Advisory Council from 1961 to 1974. He holds a
Doctorate in Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(1952).
Brigadier General Charles Yeager, USAF (Retired)
Former experimental test pilot. Born in Myra, West Virginia, he was
appointed in 1985 as a member of the National Commission on Space. He
was the first person to penetrate the sound barrier and the first to
fly at a speed of more than 1,600 miles an hour.
Dr. Alton G. Keel, Jr., Executive Director
Detailed to the Commission from his position in the Executive Office
of the President, Office of Management and Budget, as Associate
Director for National Security and International Affairs; formerly
Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Research, Development and
Logistics; and Senate Staff. Born in Newport News, Virginia, he
holds a Doctorate in Engineering Physics from the University of
Virginia (1970).
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| Sic transit gloria mundi - Wikipedia Sic transit gloria mundi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Sic transit gloria mundi is a Latin phrase that means "Thus passes the glory of the world". . . . The phrase played a part in the ritual of papal coronation ceremonies until 1963. As the newly chosen pope proceeded from the sacristy of St. Peter's Basilica in his sedia gestatoria, the procession stopped three times. On each occasion a papal master of ceremonies would fall to his knees before the pope, holding a silver or brass reed bearing a piece of smoldering tow. For three times in succession, as the cloth burned away, he would say in a loud and mournful voice, "Sancte Pater, sic transit gloria mundi!" ("Holy Father, so passes worldly glory!") These words, thus addressed to the pope, served as a reminder of the transitory nature of life and earthly honors. The stafflike instrument used in the aforementioned ceremony is known as a "sic transit gloria mundi", named for the master of ceremonies' words' back |
| TEC Total Environment Centre 'Established in 1972 by pioneers of the Australian environmental movement, TEC is a veteran of more than 100 successful campaigns. For over 30 years, we have been working to protect this country's natural and urban environment, flagging the issues, driving debate, supporting community activism and pushing for better environmental policy and practice.' back |
| The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse 'The Commission was established on 23 May, 2000, pursuant to the “Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse Act 2000” and given three primary functions:
to hear evidence of abuse from persons who allege they suffered abuse in childhood, in institutions, during the period from 1940 or earlier, to the present day;
to conduct an inquiry into abuse of children in institutions during that period and, where satisfied that abuse occurred, to determine the causes, nature, circumstances and extent of such abuse; and
to prepare and publish reports on the results of the inquiry and on its recommendations in relation to dealing with the effects of such abuse.' back |
| The Pretenders Lyrics: Thin Line Between Love and Hate 'IT'S FIVE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING
AND YOU'RE JUST GETTING IN
YOU KNOCK ON THE FRONT DOOR
AND A VOICE SWEET AND LOW SAYS
"WHO IS IT?"
SHE OPENS UP THE DOOR AND LETS YOU IN
NEVER ONCE ASKS WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN
SHE SAYS "ARE YOU HUNGRY?
DID YOU EAT YET?
LET ME HANG UP YOUR COAT
PASS ME YOUR HAT"
ALL THE TIME SHE'S SMILING
NEVER ONCE RAISES HER VOICE
IT'S FIVE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING
YOU DON'T GIVE IT A SECOND THOUGHT' back |
| Wikipedia Sheffer Stroke 'The Sheffer stroke, also known as the NAND (Not AND) operation, is a logical operator with the following meaning: p NAND q is true if and only if not both p and q are true.' back |
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