November is

November is a misnomer.  The “Nov” part once meant it was the 9th month of the year, just as the “Oct” in October was the 8th month and September was the 7th month.   You will find more than you probably ever wanted to know about our calender system at the Wiki site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar

November is “National Novel Writing Month” or “NaNoWriMo” for short.  The object is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words beginning Nov 1st and ending November 30th.   Like many people, I have gathered bits and pieces of novel ideas over the years but they had always remained just that – parts of some larger notion, threads to be woven into a story.   Earlier this year an acquaintance mentioned that National Novel Writing Month was in November and I decided to check it out.  You can too at http://www.nanowrimo.org/ I looked into the site, I signed up and began writing a novel on November 1.  I am at 3,500 words so far and hope to cross the finish line of this particular 50K run.

November is also a time – for most people east of the Mississippi – when foliage changes and “Fall” is truly visible.  I live where there are only small patches of autumn.  For that reason I enjoy traveling to the East Coast in late October – early November whenever I can afford to do so.

At Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California, November is the beginning of the rock-climbing season.   In part because of cost but also because of a couple recent PBS documentaries I ended up spending a few days in Joshua Tree.  http://www.nps.gov/Jotr/index.htm I saw several climbers getting started there.  The cacti and Joshua trees (members of the lily family by the way) are green.  Parts of the high desert reminded me of the Australian Outback and African Serengeti.  If you look closely you will see two climbers in the picture below:

November is a time of celebrating my anniversary, birthdays of friends, acknowledging and remembering our veterans and giving thanks for the blessings we have.   As the temperatures cool (in the Northern Hemisphere) and holidays approach, more of my friends begin baking and roasting.   Diets with low calorie intake are hard to keep to.   Flames in fireplaces invite us to stay inside and perhaps to read a book, listen to music or meditate.   And now I am thinking I should be adding words to my novel count rather than blogging about what November is for me.

Dream a little dream…

Monday October 12, 2009

Sometimes I think everything that can be said has been set to music.  Today, from a piece of my memory, Mama Cass sings part of a refrain to me: “Dream a little dream…”  When I first decided to write about dreams, I had a flood of thoughts about them.  My dream thoughts swim past me like a school of fish and I am reaching for the closest ones to catch and describe.

The first dream I recall was from when I was about five and was living in the Mojave Desert.  I remember only a single vision from it:  a wind circled the house behind the one we lived in, and, in the whirlwind were some sand, a small crucifix and a lawn chair.   From that time throughout elementary school I learned to cultivate my dreaming.   My family moved a lot.  I changed schools six times by the time I was ten.  Building and keeping friendships was difficult for me.  I was not a big reader but I loved to draw and dream.   I would nap when I got home from school so I could go to my own internally created movies.  Dreams had become free entertainment for me until I turned about 13.  From then on, even ‘til now, I don’t sleep just to dream.  However, I do still dream when I sleep.

Around high school age I started sharing the content of my dreams with friends.  After awhile I could see their eyes glaze and body language change as their interest was lost.   The very things that made the dreams so amazing to me were so boring to my poor friends.  I mean they might be fascinated by bits but my recollection would often be so detailed and complicated.   In one dream I was attending a Calculus class which turned into a Broadway-like musical with all the singing in Spanish!  A couple friends bought me books on dream interpretation and I even bought a software program for dream analysis.  For a while I wrote my dreams down – but it often seemed a waste of time to me.  I had taken the attitude that my dreams were fascinating to me alone and just beautiful or dramatic for what they were on the surface.

An Australian friend of mine bought me a book called “The Dreamtime” which describes what dreams signify to the aboriginals of that country.   I began to perceive dreams as a separate reality instead of symbolic of things or events in my waking life.   I don’t always remember going to my dreamtime world when I wake up but I feel certain that when I am there it is as real to me then as this waking life is to me now.   I love my dreamtime and often wish I could take my “waketime” friends there so they could also experience the colors, the landscapes, the music, the sounds and the abilities we would find there.   Many times I wake up longing to return to a dreamscape.  Sometimes I actually do.   Funny thing though,  I don’t recall ever wanting to return to my wakeful existence when I’m in a dream – it is as though my dreamtime doesn’t know this part of my life exists.

We are stardust…

A glimpse of tomorrow’s devotional topic  + someone’s belief we cease to exist after death + my sense of living in eternity + a line from a Joni Mitchell song …

“We are stardust, billion year old carbon…” Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock

I started off today with a little Yoga stretch and a cup o’ joe – opened up my daily reading – Today was on the Brandenburg Concertos.  Did you know that JS Bach composed those for someone he never played them for?  I read the heading for tomorrow’s reading “Arguments for the Existence of God” and thought of someone I love very much.

She believes in a “supreme being”, as do I, and she also believes that when she dies she will cease to exist – in any form.  That notion makes me sad.   My first experience of something that could be called a supreme being happened when I had just started kindergarten.  I was out alone at night on the deserted street in the Mojave where we lived.   I felt deep loneliness and hurt.  I had the startling knowledge that something was listening to my thoughts.   I knew I was not alone.    The something did not have human or any form that I could describe – it was just there and with me in those few moments.    I call the entity that was with me “God”.

Believing in God does not necessarily require belief in an afterlife.  This is what my friend contends – and I do agree with the premise.  Unlike her, however, I do believe in an “afterlife” and a “beforelife”.  This is where I hear Joni Mitchell’s words sing in my head: “We are stardust…”, and recall a piece of video from a DVD I have called Cosmic Voyage where someone is telling a group of people that ALL of the matter in the Universe is believed to have been compressed into a mass no larger than the size of a baseball before the “Big Bang” happened.   That means you and I were around before the bang that created everything else.

Joni continues the song with “Billion year-old carbon.”   Mass and energy – in our case a lot of carbon atoms! – is what we are made of and, I believe, we existed billions of years before we were human.   In that vein I think that we will continue to exist long after humanity as we know it has become extinct.   One day when I was in my thirties I had another life-transforming experience:  I felt myself as being “in eternity”.   My earth-bound life was a mere blip on my personal time-line that extended forward and backward ad infinitum.   I do not recall what my pre-human existence was like and I have no idea what my post-human one will be like.   When I am there I may very well not recall humanity or even the Earth or the Milky Way.   But those things do not mean I will cease to exist.  I look forward to this grand adventure of being created and I am sad my friend perceives life as finite.   I suppose I should take solace in the fact that she does not fear death and sees it as the endless peace of nothing.   As she would say, like a preacher by a graveside: “Dust to dust…”.

2009 October 7: A weekday morning.

I have begun a daily habit that begins around 7 or 8 in the morning with a cup of coffee: drip method, two big teaspoons of unflavored powdered creamer and a shot of sugar-free french vanilla syrup.

Then I set myself in my recliner and read the days entry from The Intellectual Devotional compiled by David S. Kidder & Noah D. Oppenheim.  Today’s bit of wisdom is about the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci in 1505.  The reader is still left with the question “Who really is Mona Lisa?”

I followed that with a couple of pages from True Work by Michael Toms and Justine Willis Toms.  I have found it to be so concise that I am bound to find a gem or two of insight or thought-provocation in a single page.  For example, today I find “Living with a sense of wonder about the mystery of life creates an atmosphere of possibility.”  I think my Mom would love that line.  It is followed by “A whole new world of work awaits you if you’re willing to open yourself to your deepest longings and purpose.  It requires letting go of what you think things are supposed to look like.  Learn to expect the unexpected and move forward with radical trust in the process.”   As for me, I dream of painting pictures no human eyes have yet seen.  I dream of writing a novel to take the reader not to the far reaches of my imagination but to the point of opening up possibilities for her.  I try to figure out how to reconcile – synergize these dreams with my reality-based work that pays the mortgage and puts food in my tummy.

Did I mention I’m unemployed?  Unemployed sounds like such a silly word to me these days.  It makes me think of someone who is not being industrious – which is not the case for me.  Often I feel I have more things to do without a company giving me a paycheck than when I was actually employed by someone else.  Maybe that’s what it should be called “not working for anyone for free”… Maybe I just have issues with “employment”.

Somewhere before or after my coffee and readings I would have done a 20 minute Yoga or Tai Chi routine with my (also unemployed) partner.  We are surviving on government unemployment insurance payments and our own savings and investments.

Unless I’ve got my Mickey Mouse Ears or my Professional Cap on, I will normally fix both of us breakfast and have a cup of hot cocoa.   That will be my 2nd and final cup of caffeine for the day.

Today I put my mouse ears on.  It’s a signal to my room-mates that I’m attempting to do some creative writing – or at least pondering it deeply.  It means “please don’t interrupt me because my train of thought is so very fragile a moment’s hesitation could derail it completely.”   I began a re-write to a short story I began in July.

The “Professional Cap” is a white baseball cap with the name of my former employer on it.  If I’m studying accounting, taxation, financial planning or working on my professional website – that hat goes on.  That’s a sign that I can have limited interruptions.   That train of thought is not as fleeting as the one my artist rides on.

My mind just wandered to my coffee table and a book we got recently “The Cabin Book”.   I’ve barely skimmed it but know that it describes a state of consciousness just as much as it describes a number of cabins in the United States.   It’s 11:45am and today I want to remember often that line from True Work that encourages me to let go of thinking what things are supposed to look like.

Population Growth Driving Climate Change?

What is the main driver for climate change?
How about global population growth?  What do you think?

Below are some 2009 statistics followed by a couple population growth charts and a global temperatures chart.

The population in the United States and the next six countries / areas combined are almost equal to the population in China alone.

The gap between number three, the United States, and number two, India, is 850 million or just under 3 times the population of the United States.

Countries and Areas Ranked by Population: 2009
Rank Country or Area Population
1 China 1,338,612,968
2 India 1,156,897,766
3 United States 307,212,123
4 Indonesia 240,271,522
5 Brazil 198,739,269
6 Pakistan 174,578,558
7 Bangladesh 156,050,883
8 Nigeria 149,229,090
9 Russia 140,041,247
10 Japan 127,078,679

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, International Data Base

The scale of world population growth doesn’t look as dramatic if we look only at the last 100 years…

but then when we look at it compared to the last 200 or 300 years and:

Notice the huge upswing – increase in growth rate – just after World War II.  We have heard the term “baby boom” used frequently but it obviously wasn’t just happening in the United States (who comprises  around 4% of the total global population in 2009).

Here is a chart on Global Temperatures:

Predictions in 1984 novel: Neuromancer

Neuromancer at 25: What It Got Right, What It Got Wrong
The novel, published on July 1, 1984, predicted the World Wide Web, cyberspace, and a lot of other things. Which of William Gibson’s predictions have come true, and which still seem far off?
Mark Sullivan, PC World
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 06:50 PM PDT

The tantalizing question about William Gibson’s ideas in his novel Neuromancer involves their relationship with the course that the Web took and continues to take as Neuromancer’s publication date–July 1, 1984, 25 years ago today–recedes farther into the past. In his afterword to the 2000 re-release of the book, novelist Jack Womack suggests that Neuromancer may have directly influenced the way the Web developed–that it may have provided a blueprint that developers who grew up with the book consciously or subconsciously followed. Womack asks “what if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?”

I’ll take a stab at discussing Neuromancer’s major tech inventions, including the ones that are already coming true, as well as some that seem unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Click here for the full story.

Thanks to Xen for the link

Faster than the Speed of Light!

From Wikipedia:
Cherenkov radiation (also spelled Cerenkov or Čerenkov) is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through an insulator at a constant speed greater than the speed of light in that medium. The characteristic “blue glow” of nuclear reactors is due to Cherenkov radiation. It is named after Russian scientist Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, the 1958 Nobel Prize winner who was the first to characterise it rigorously.

From NASA:

Air Cerenkov telescopes represent an interesting and challenging type of gamma-ray detector technology. While a typical detector must be flown with a balloon or on a satellite above the Earth’s atmosphere to avoid absorption of the gamma-ray photon, the Air Cerenkov telescope nullifies this problem by making the atmosphere part of the detector! Gamma-rays interacting in the atmosphere create what is called an air shower. This describes the process of the original photon undergoing a pair production interaction high up in the atmosphere, creating an electron and positron. These particles then interact, through bremsstrahlung and Compton scattering, giving up some of their energy to creating energetic photons, which in turn pair produce creating more electrons which then bremsstrahlung…, well, you get the idea. The result is a cascade of electrons and photons which travel down through the atmosphere until the particles run out of energy.

Bank for Int’l Settlements calls for Reforms

From the Financial Times:
BIS calls for global financial reforms
By Chris Giles in London

Published: June 29 2009 22:43 | Last updated: June 29 2009 22:43

Financial products should be regulated like medicine in future, the Bank for International Settlements, said on Monday as it advocated sweeping reforms to financial instruments, markets and institutions.

The central bankers’ bank had previously given the most accurate warnings about the impending financial crisis.

In its annual report on Monday it called for an overhaul of financial regulations, economic policy and the structure of the global economy.

It advocated big reforms to markets to limit bilateral trading between banks and instead introduce central counter parties, with trading on regulated exchanges.

It said institutions, particularly banks which posed a risk to the financial system, should also be subject to higher requirements to hold bigger buffers of capital against a future crisis. The authorities should strive to increase those buffers in good times.

It also recommended “a scheme analogous to the hierarchy controlling the availability of pharmaceuticals”, with a sliding scale topped by the safest products available for everyone to purchase, and tailed by financial instruments deemed illegal.

Although the BIS was clear that these reform suggestions were for the future, it said it was vital that thought be given to the ongoing structure of the financial system while the patient was still on life support. Efforts so far, it concluded, had been a “messy mixture of urgent treatment designed to stem the decline, combined with an emerging agenda for comprehensive reform to set the foundations for sustainable growth”.

It highlighted two main risks: first, that not enough will be done to ensure a durable recovery from crisis; and second, that the emergency action to stabilise the financial system will undermine efforts to build a safer system.

The report was particularly scathing in its assessment of governments’ attempts to clean up their banks. “The reluctance of officials to quickly clean up the banks, many of which are now owned in large part by governments, may well delay recovery,” it said, adding that government interventions had ingrained the belief that some banks were too big or too interconnected to fail.

This was dangerous because it reinforced the risks of moral hazard which might lead to an even bigger financial crisis in future.

Outside the financial system, the BIS warned that economic management also needed to change. The huge increases in public deficits were “at serious risk of overshooting even in the economies with the most room for debt expansion” and would be difficult to restrain.

The authors of the report also had little confidence in central bankers’ ability to raise interest rates quickly enough when recovery comes. “Because their current expansionary actions were prompted by a nearly catastrophic crisis, central bankers’ fears of reversing too quickly … increase the risk that they will tighten too late,” they said.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Algae Farm Aims to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel

June 29, 2009
Algae Farm Aims to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel
By MATTHEW L. WALD

Dow Chemical and Algenol Biofuels, a start-up company, are set to announce Monday that they will build a demonstration plant that, if successful, would use algae to turn carbon dioxide into ethanol as a vehicle fuel or an ingredient in plastics.

Because algae does not require any farmland or much space, many energy companies are trying to use it to make commercial quantities of hydrocarbons for fuel and chemicals. But harvesting the hydrocarbons has proved difficult so far.

The ethanol would be sold as fuel, the companies said, but Dow’s long-term interest is in using it as an ingredient for plastics, replacing natural gas. The process also produces oxygen, which could be used to burn coal in a power plant cleanly, said Paul Woods, chief executive of Algenol, which is based in Bonita Springs, Fla. The exhaust from such a plant would be mostly carbon dioxide, which could be reused to make more algae.

“We give them the oxygen, we get very pure carbon dioxide, and the output is very cheap ethanol,” said Mr. Woods, who said the target price was $1 a gallon.

Algenol grows algae in “bioreactors,” troughs covered with flexible plastic and filled with saltwater. The water is saturated with carbon dioxide, to encourage growth of the algae. “It looks like a long hot dog balloon,” Mr. Woods said.

Dow, a maker of specialty plastics, will provide the “balloon” material.

The algae, through photosynthesis, convert the carbon dioxide and water into ethanol, which is a hydrocarbon, oxygen and fresh water.

The company has 40 bioreactors in Florida, and as part of the demonstration project plans 3,100 of them on a 24-acre site at Dow’s Freeport, Tex., site. Among the steps still being improved is the separation of the oxygen and water from the ethanol. The Georgia Institute of Technology will work on that process, as will Membrane Technology and Research, a company in Menlo Park, Calif. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an Energy Department lab, will study carbon dioxide sources and their impact on the algae samples.

Algenol and its partners are planning a demonstration plant that could produce 100,000 gallons a year. The company and its partners were spending more than $50 million, said Mr. Woods, but not all of that was going into the pilot plant. The company had applied to the Energy Department for financing under the stimulus bill, but would build a pilot plant with or without a grant, he said.

With a stimulus grant, he said, the division of spending would be slightly more than 50 percent from the private sector, although the normal level was 20 percent. The project would create 300 jobs, he said, adding that Algenol and Dow were “incredibly hopeful” of getting the grant, partly because they had a combination of an innovative start-up company, a major company with extensive experience in industrial processes, a university and a national laboratory.

At Dow, Peter A. Molinaro, a spokesman, said that the ethanol was “intriguing to us as a feedstock, because the chemistry is simple.” Dow is already working on using ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane as a replacement for natural gas as an ingredient in plastics.

When Congress created a tax subsidy for ethanol, it raised the price for nonfuel users like Dow, he said. “We’re looking at options, and this is one,” he said.

Spaceport America

Workers to break ground on New Mexico spaceport

By TIM KORTE, Associated Press Writer Tim Korte, Associated Press Writer – Tue Jun 16, 5:59 pm ET
UPHAM, N.M. – The wide-open desert of southern New Mexico has long been a key passageway: Spanish conquistadors used it to settle North America, and wagon trains and railroads rattled through on their way to California.
Today, New Mexico is hoping the forgotten stretch of cattle ranches and mountain ranges will become a gateway to space.
Gov. Bill Richardson and others are preparing to break ground Friday on construction of a terminal and hangar facility at the world’s first commercial spaceport built with the idea of launching private citizens into space for profit. Some 250 people are lining up to pay $200,000 each to take the trip as early as next year.
It’s called Spaceport America, a $200 million taxpayer-funded project where the sky is not the limit. From the 10,000-foot runway, spacecraft will take flight attached to an airplane, then break free and rocket 62 miles into space before returning to the facility. The flights will last about two hours and include five minutes of weightlessness.
Science fiction? Not by any stretch.
“It’s real,” said Steve Landeene, the spaceport’s executive director. “You’re not talking about things drawn on paper anymore. The boondoggle factor has started to disappear.”
The spaceport will operate like an airport, offering a location where aerospace companies can lease building and hangar space. Virgin Galactic, a company owned by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, will be the spaceport’s anchor tenant.
Competitors such as XCOR Aerospace and Armadillo Aerospace are developing spacecraft for $95,000 flights. And as flights become more routine, costs should drop.
Similar spaceport ventures are proposed in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma and elsewhere. Besides New Mexico, Virgin Galactic also hopes to ferry tourists to space from northern Sweden.
Spaceport America is about more than space tourism. Landeene said the facility will also tap other business ventures such as medical research and communication projects.
State officials say the site will provide 500 construction jobs over the next four years and spark economic development, education and tourism for generations.
“It will bring jobs, give our students the opportunity to have careers in math and science here in New Mexico and create tourism and other long-term economic activity,” Landeene said.
Virgin Galactic and American aerospace designer Burt Rutan are building a craft that will take passengers on the thrill ride from New Mexico’s spaceport. In 2004, Rutan’s SpaceShipOne became the first privately built manned craft to reach space.
SpaceShipTwo, under development at Rutan’s facility in California, will be carried aloft by a mothership called White Knight Two, unveiled last summer. The smaller craft will separate and rocket into space.
Spaceport America’s runway is slated for completion next summer. The terminal and hangar should be ready for tenants in December 2010, when Virgin Galactic hopes to begin taking tourists aloft.
Five miles from the terminal is a launching pad for 20-foot rockets used mostly for science experiments. It’s been operational for the past two years.
Judy and Phil Wallin and their daughter, Amanda, live in a ranch home about a mile from the launching pad.
“What’s it like to see it go up? It’s ‘chick-koom,’ and it’s gone,” Judy Wallin said. “It is exciting.”
Asked if he would consider taking a ride into space, Phil Wallin laughed and said, “I want a guaranteed round trip before I go up.”
Judy Wallin added: “We want to go on the one that has a straight vapor trail, not the one with a corkscrew trail.”
___
On the Net:
Spaceport America, http://www.spaceportamerica.com/
Virgin Galactic, http://www.virgingalactic.com/