the magic of music
don campbell had a 1-inch blood clot in an artery that led to his brain. 
so he hummed until the clot shrank. don calls it "the mozart effect". he 
has written a book about it. (btw: at uc irvine mozart's sonata for two 
pianos in d major increased s.a.t scores of students by 51 points. at 
st.agnes hospital, bach, debussy, haydn, mendelssohn, and mozart are 
substitutes for sedatives for the critically ill. in washington state 
mexican immigrants learn english faster when listening to bach. and 
georgi lozanov of bulgaria found that vivaldi makes it easier to 
memorize poetry.) (from usa weekend magazine) 

gamma ray bursts
about twice a day on average the universe lights up in a flash that 
lasts anywhere from 1 second to a minute in a form of energy one million 
times more intense than light and no one has the faintest idea why. (
nasa compton observatory) 
(btw: not even black holes or anti-matter can bail us out here because 
the energy in each burst is detected simultaneously in every direction.) 


composite humans
in what appears to be life after death for organ donors, recepients of 
organ transplants assume some of the characteristics of the donor 
including personality, tastes, and cravings. (abc tv) (something to 
think about before we start harvesting organs from baboons and farm 
animals.) 

sexist science
science has a gender bias. anthropological data are interpreted in terms 
of the strong dominant male hunter-provider model. in a circular logic, 
scientists often find support for the hunter-provider model in data 
whose interpretation was tainted by the hunter-provider assumption. 
"lucy" could be male; there is not sufficient detail to determine gender 
but it was assumed to be female because of its diminutive size in 
comparison with larger bones found nearby. humans may have become 
bipedal and tools may have been invented not so men could hunt but so 
pregnant women could dig for roots. (adrienne zihlman, 
zihlman@cats.ucsc.edu) 

the virginian
during the great depression, an honest, hard-working, god-fearing, 
bonhomme from virginia beach, virginia, found that he could slip into a 
sleep-like state in which he was simultaneously aware of all time and 
space. while in this state he exhibited healing powers and he could 
describe distant events as well as past and future events. his name was 
edgar cayce. 

the figure head
7,686,369,774,870 times 2,465,099,745,779 is 
8,947,668,177,995,426,773,730 and the 43rd root of 
8,947,668,177,995,426,773,730 is 3.23970063. results like these come to 
shakuntala devi of india upon a moment's reflection and without the aid 
of any computational device. she can figure in her head. (india current 
affairs) 

flying machine
one day in 1970 when an air force pilot flying an f106a jet fighter over 
montana went into an "uncontrollable flap spin", the aircraft took over 
and 1. ejected the pilot, 2. recovered from the spin, and 3. landed 
safely all by itself. the craft is on permanent display at the (united 
states air force museum in dayton ohio) 

tiny flying machines
if darpa has its way future wars will be fought not with few large 
aircraft built for survival but with swarms of pocket-sized kamikaze 
flying machines called micro air vehicles. our children will fight these 
wars away from the battlefield and on a computer screen as if it were a 
video game. 

photon torpedoes
lightning sometimes forms a ball of charge that does not disperse. the 
ball floats around until it makes contact with great destructive force. 
the dod, not one to miss an opportunity for mayhem, has figured out how 
to make these things. they call them electromagnetic weapon systems or 
localized packets of energy. residents of pine gap, australia, where 
there is a usaf base, report seeing such balls of light that knocked off 
their power supply and dimmed auto headlights. (linda moulton howe) 

weird weather
does it appear to you that weather is getting more extreme? statistics 
agree. kevin trenbreth of the national center for atmospheric research
 thinks that global warming is to blame. even a miniscule rise in temp 
increases water evaporation rates and that would explain it. 

how global warming makes ice
non-uniform heating of the earth by the sun generates a water pump that 
transfers water from the equator to the poles. water evaporates in the 
tropics and the vapor is carried to the polar regions where it condenses 
into ice; and the hotter the tropics the faster this pump runs and the 
bigger the polar ice gets. effects of global warming) 

a desert flower
the northern continents are covered with ice most of the time. there are 
brief inter-glacial periods of warm weather. the ice persists for 
100,000 years or so and the interglacial periods about 10,000 to 20,000 
years but often with violent temperture swings over one or more decades. 
the ice periods too have volatile weather with large chunks of ice 
sliding out to sea and the ice thinning for a while and then getting 
thicker again. the current interglacial period has lasted ten thousand 
years. it has been unusally calm and it is this spell of rare balmy 
weather that has made possible agriculture and therefore human 
settlements and therefore civilization and therefore the current 
explosion in human population. we are a desert flower. just another 
biological flash in the climactic pan. 
(btw: we don't know what causes these ice cycles. the theories are full 
of holes. the milankovitch wobble theory does not work because the 
earth's precession has a fixed period and the ice age cycle does not. 
and heinrich's warm earth theory cannot explain why the glacier flows 
happen at the same time all over the planet. ice age phenomena could 
turn out to be nothing more than deterministic chaos.) 


mind over machine
suppose that you want to see picture 1 and you don't want to see picture 
2. if your computer produces a random mixture of the pixels from 
pictures 1 and 2 your mind will force the result to be more like picture 
1 than picture 2. and it's not just in your head because the picture 
will actually contain more picture 1 elements than is its random share. 
what's weirder is that without your attention it goes back to random. 
try it for yourself. the software is downloadable. (john haaland)
(incidentally, the resultant picture is a fingerprint. no two persons 
produce the same picture. this could explain, among other things, why 
some individuals win more than average and others lose more than average 
at slot machines and why some slot machines more than others work better 
for you.) 

spitting camels
camels spit, usually at a target, with great force and accuracy. the 
spitball is 200 grams of disgusting phlegm. if your camel is making 
weird sounds and moving his mouth around a lot get at last 5 meters 
away. (ellen hess) 

the ronald opus story
in march 1994 ronald opus left a suicide note and jumped from the 10th 
floor and as he passed his parents' apartment his father fired what he 
thought was an unloaded shotgun at his wife but she slipped and fell and 
the shot killed ronald instead. ronald had secretly loaded the gun to 
arrange his father to accidentally kill his mother and jumped when he 
became despondent over the apparent failure of his plot; he did not know 
that window washers had erected a safety net and that he could not have 
died from the fall. (don harper, the american association of forensic 
sciences) 

the gloria ramirez story
on feb 19 1994 a woman in cardiac arrest was brought to riverside 
general hospital. when a nurse drew blood it released a powerful stench. 
the nurse passed out and the rest of the medical team began to collapse. 
pathologists who conducted the autopsy also became sick even though they 
wore space age 'toxic suits'. (the los angeles times) 

et's r us
we once believed that the universe was a vast arrangement of dead rocks 
and that life on earth was an oddity. but now we live in a different 
universe described by john hayes of the woods hole oceanographic 
institution. life is everywhere in the universe even in apparently dead 
rocks where it exists in a dormant form. in fact life on earth was 
seeded by these rocks. and that's who we are. 
(btw: nasa astronomer dale cruikshank thinks that the trillion balls of 
ice in the outer solar system that ocassionally visit the sun as comets 
contain the ingredients of life and they too could be the johnny 
appleseeds that are sowing life all over the galaxy.) 


cosmic rain
all our water came from space. the outer solar system is swarming with 
house-sized ice cubes and over 40,000 of these things fall into earth 
and disintegrate in the atmosphere each day. this has been going on for 
billions of years. and that is why we have oceans and life on earth. 
it's still going on and not just here but on the other planets as well. 
we water creatures are not as much a planetary phenomenon as we are a 
planetary system phenomenon. (louis frank of the university of iowa) 

extremophiles
our search for extra-terrestrial life widened its possibilities when we 
discovered micro-organisms right here on earth that live, no thrive, in 
boiling springs, subterranean rock formations, under the deepest ocean, 
and on active volcanoes. these extremophiles have shattered our previous 
notions about what it takes to sustain life. (john baross, university of 
washington). 
(btw: john delaney of washington and thomas gold of cornell think that 
life on earth began with extremophiles either under the ocean or in 
volcanoes.) 

the cosmos is us
not just pulsars and comets but we too are made of the stuff of the 
universe. understanding comes not from externalizing the universe but 
from internalizing the questions. (gautama buddha) 

odd chirality
of the many amino acids possible, life on earth is composed of only 20 
and all of them are of the left sided variety. equal amounts of left and 
right mirror images of these molecules form in the laboratory but not in 
living things. molecular leftness is part of a cosmic pattern of life. 
(john cronin, arizona state university) 

mind reading plants
plants generate electrical impulses that may be measured. cleve backster 
measured these voltages. he found that the plant became agitated when he 
injured it with a knife or a match; or if he even just thought about 
causing such an injury. (in "the secret life of plants", by peter 
tompkins and christopher bird) (btw: according to robert stone not just 
plants but individual cells in your body show the same behavior and they 
seem to be able to recognize you.)

mutual synchronization
all critters tend to synchronize their rhythmic activities. women living 
together synchronize their menstrual cycles, crickets chirp together, 
and the pacemaker cells trigger your heart in unison. but the most 
spectacular example is that of fireflies in thailand. they completely 
cover a tree and at first flash in random patterns but soon synchronize 
their flashing so that the whole tree flashes on and off at about 1.5 
hz. (h.m. smith, science, v82 1935) 

la cucaracha la cucaracha
behead cockroach 1 and cut the legs off cockroach 2. now mount roach 2 
on top of roach 1 with a tiny tube that allows their bodily fluids to 
comingle; and watch as headless roach 1 now walks around navigating with 
the eyes and head of his buddy. roach 1 also knows night from day and 
only comes out to feed at night as is the roachian custom. (janet harker 
in 'nature', 1954) 

spiritual signature
if you showered with red dye you would leave tell-tale red marks 
everywhere you went, on clothes you wore, and every object you used. 
this is what your trail looks like to a dog's nose and to a psychic's 
mind. the objects and places of your life not only contain your 
odoriferous signature but your spiritual signature as well. you 
recognize your own spiritual trail; it is why you feel at home at home; 
and why that old hat or glove or t-shirt feels so good. they all contain 
traces of your essence. (lyall watson) 

perverse statistics
statistics released in 1996 show that we are murdering less in america. 
but it's not for the lack of trying. we are gunning our fellow citizens 
down more than ever but high tech trauma centers are bringing them back 
to life. it's not that we are killing less but that medical advances are 
making it harder to keep them dead. (spencer hughes, ksfo radio, san 
francisco) 

mysterious bones
what we actually know: some very large bones have been found in 
sedimentation layers that were formed between 220 million years ago and 
65 million years ago; none before and none afterwards. and these bones 
don't fit any creature we see today. what we made up: dinosaurs; and 
since they aren't around, their mass extinction. (the mass extinction 
theory, the case against mass extinctions) 

antarctica
it contains 90% of the world's ice but it was once a balmy temperate 
forest teeming with life. on the transantarctic mountain there is a 
petrified forest; and there are fosslizied remains of animals anywhere 
you look. some are 250 million years old. william hammer of augustana 
college thinks that a cataclysmic climate change froze antarctica. 
(jamal's note: maybe the continent used to be elsewhere and simply 
drifted into the cold.) 

perverse justice
larry singleton raped a young girl then hacked her arms off with a 
butcher knife and left her to die but was paroled after 8 years 
whereupon he murdered a young woman also with a butcher knife. he was 
paroled because the prisons are overcrowded with people serving 
mandatory sentences for drug offenses prescribed by our 'war on drugs'. 
when the cops were taking singleton from one outraged community to 
another to find him a home they were protecting us from drug dealers. if 
the war on drugs continues much longer our prisons will be full of drug 
addicts and our streets full of criminals. (christine kraft, kgo radio, 
sf) 

the mystery of birth order
of the siblings were you born first? or second? or last? it has a lot to 
do with who you are. not just nature and nurture but also birth order
 plays a role in shaping our personalities and our lives. frank sulloway 
of mit has written a book about this phenomenon. 

the mystery of birth date
could birthdate have anything to do with who and what you are? yes, says 
dennis ownby of the henry ford health system. statistics show that 
children born in fall face twice the risk of developing asthma than 
children born in summer. so far researchers have not come up with a 
rational explanation of these findings. (btw: asthma inflames and 
narrows air passages and causes difficulty in breathing.) 

where's jimmy?
does the fbi always find their man? on july 30, 1975 jimmy hoffa
 disappeared without a trace from the parking lot of the machus red fox 
restaurant in bloomfield. after the most intensive manhunt in history 
the fbi is stumped. and shed a tear on thanksgiving for dan "db" cooper 
who jumped from a 727 with a parachute and $200,000 over the columbia 
river in oregon on november 24, 1971 and simply vanished into thin air. 
the fbi is clueless. 

amelia earhart
on june 1 1936 pilot ameila earhart and navigator fred noonan took off 
from miami on a lockheed 10e 'electra' to fly 29000 miles around the 
world. they flew 22000 miles and reached lae, new guinea on june 29, 
1937. at midnight between july 1 and july 2 1937 they took off from lae 
for Howland Island 800 miles away. they maintained radio contact with 
u.s. coast guard cutter 'itasca' for 6 hours and then vanished. (naval 
historical center) 
(btw: accordiing to joe klaas, amelia was actually on a spying mission. 
she was captured by the japanese in the marshall islands and later 
returned. she lived incognito as irene bolam in new jersey until her 
death in 1982.) 

the bermuda triangle
more ships and aircraft have vanished without a trace in the waters 
between miami, bermuda, and puerto rico than anywhere else of equal 
area. the phenomenon has been extensively studied but it remains a 
mystery. among its victims are the ship "marine sulphur queen" and a 
squadron of tbm avengers, (naval historical center) 
(btw: in the 16th century the sea in this triangle was thought to be 
evil and bermuda was called devil's island. shakespeare's "tempest" is 
about the bermuda triangle.) 

teenagers from hell
teenagers these days are out of control. they eat like pigs, they are 
disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, 
and they terrorize their teachers. (aristotle, circa 350 bc.) 

loopholes in time
if ghosts are souls of our dear departed ancestors then why do inanimate 
objects have ghosts? aircraft, ships, and even buildings have ghosts. 
according to richard senate the ghost phenomenon reveals a property of 
time that we don't understand. when we see ghosts we are actually seeing 
through time.

what we are really saying
to find out, tape it and play it backwards. you will hear things the 
person did not say forwards. according to david john oates our 
subconscious mind put those messages there. the conscious mind decides 
what to say but the subconscious decides how to say it and that is how 
the backward messages are placed into speech. the listener's 
subconscious picks up these messages which constitute the intuitive 
component of the communication. if the person is lying the backward 
speech will reveal the truth, if the person is speaking the truth it 
will confirm it, and if the person is hiding information it will reveal 
it. (btw: baby babble is rich in reverse speech. according to david we 
learn reverse speech first, even before we can talk normally.) 

baby talk
a 6-month old baby has already learned the sounds of its native 
language. the number of words an infant hears each day is the single 
most important predictor of future intelligence. (patricia kuhl, 
university of washington). 
(jamal's note: maybe smarter infants are better at engaging adults in 
'conversation'. without controlled experiments it's hard to tell whether 
x causes y or y causes x or whether a third unobserved variable z causes 
both x and y.) 

graphology
another way you unwittingly reveal yourself is by writing. no matter 
what language, the way you make the marks on paper captures your 
personality and even hidden intentions. even things about you that you 
do not wish to reveal may be deduced from the way you write. 

it's the sound, stupid
according to the vedic rishis of india the essence of it all is sound; 
and sound is geometry and geometry is sound. we can now see this in a 
device invented by ernst chladni. spread sand on a metal plate and cause 
it to vibrate with different notes and sounds and the sand will arrange 
itself into geometrical shapes of great complexity but familiar to us 
because they resemble shapes found in nature like the annual rings of 
trees, the stripes of a zebra, cells in a honeycomb, canals in a 
jellyfish, and turrets in shellfish. maybe the rishis were right. nature 
is not random mr. c. darwin. it is the way it is because of cosmic 
vibrations and the way they are. (lyall watson) 
(btw: doug ruby studied the geometry of crop circles by cutting out 
cardboard models and spinning them. his insight is that 'geometry equals 
frequency equals energy'. he describes it in his book, 'the gift'.) 

what is gravity?
we are born into it, we live in it all our lives, and we die in it but 
we don't know it. newton and einstein thought they knew but they didn't. 
and now physicists at the max planck institute say that a disk of super 
conducting material can produce a 'weak shielding' of gravity and that 
this phenomenon has no explanation that they know of. a prototype of the 
device has been built at the tampere university of technology in finland 
by eugene podkletnov. he found that things weigh less above a super 
conducting disc than anywhere else. he described his findings in the 
journal physica c. 

the saturnic verses
one time nasa scientist dr. bergrun has written a book about saturn in 
which he says that nasa has evidence of a spacecraft about the size of 
earth orbiting saturn. the craft is described in the feb. 96 issue of 
'science news' and also by ufologist rich boylan. 

it slices it dices
during their invasion of panama in 1989 our forces left some cars neatly 
cut in half with some new weapon they were testing but won't tell us 
about. when asked the pentagon spokesman pete williams said with a 
straight face, "we know of no cars cut in half in panama".(the panama 
deception) 

mission impossible
colombia would not sign the canal treaty with us so we arranged an 
insurrection in 1903 and invented panama; and its leaders that we 
installed did sign just the treaty that we wanted. the country's leaders 
even now take their marching orders from the cia. if they don't we get 
rid of them. (the panama deception)(btw: another thing weird about 
panama is that their currency is the u.s. dollar.) 

psychic spying
edward dames offers psychic spying services. dames was spying for the 
military in 1981 when he was frustrated by his inability to crack into 
the russian biological warfare program and resorted to psychics. the 
military eventually developed the psychic technology called remote 
viewing or 'rv'. the program became discredited and ed left to start 
psitech. most recently he helped the military during the persian gulf 
war. he can train people in remote viewing. courtney brown is his 
student. he agrees with courtney that there is some kind of intelligent 
life on mars but it is underneath the surface. (btw: mars orbiters sent 
by the u.s. and russia mysteriously vanished. the last picture taken by 
the russian craft shows an object approaching the satellite. edward used 
rv to learn that the satellite was destroyed by a robot-like device sent 
from underneath the martian surface. 

war is killing us
in 1975 the dod's biological warfare crew developed a "synthetic agent" 
that attacks the immune system of the victim. between 1982 and 1989 we 
shipped this and other "biologicals" to saddam hussein who used them in 
the gulf war. when the allied troops went home they took this illness 
with them to over 20 countries around the world. the symptoms are 
aids-like. the illness is mysterious, without treatment, fatal, and 
communicable. it is spreading through blood transfusions, sex, and 
perspiration, and by contact with equipment and clothing that were 
exposed. the human race today stands at a precipice. joyce says that the 
gulf war records will prove her right. according to the baltimore sun
 the military has lost the records. (joyce riley) 
(btw: aids may be another byproduct of the 1975 "synthetic agent" 
project.)( but read this assessment of the gulf war syndrome by the nih
.) 

lies
during the manhattan project circa 1945, the military subjected soldiers 
to deadly radioactivity experiments without their knowledge. they were 
injected with plutonium and otherwise exposed to harmful levels of 
radioactivity. then for fifty years the military flatly denied that 
these experiments took place. recently declassified govt records show 
that they did. 

backyard physicists
is there room for the little guy in science anymore? 
*	while corporations spend billions in failed 3-d research elizabeth 
downing, a graduate student at stanford quietly built the world's first 
prototype on a shoestring with borrowed equipment. 
*	ramar pillai of india has devised a process to extract gasoline from a 
herbs that grow wild near his village. (another ramar pillai site). 
*	school kids in minnesota have discovered the most frightening ecological 
changes of our time. they found that about a third of the frogs in a 
pond had grotesque frankenstein-like birth defects including missing 
limbs and extra limbs. a follow-up survey found these defects to be 
widespread throughout the midwest. the cause is a mystery. (btw: female 
fish in north florida's fenholloway river are developing male sex 
organs.) 


scary algae
there is an algae called pfiesteria piscida. they can smell fish and 
when they do they change into an active amoeba-like creature which 
attacks and eats the fish multiplying rapidly. then they go back to 
their dormant algal state. infected fish and shellfish are toxic to 
humans. eating or even breathing these toxins may cause memory loss and 
personality changes in addition to pain, nausea, and vomiting. when the 
feeding and reproducing are good they can form coastal swarms known as 
red tides. 
(btw: p. pscida is responsible for giant fish kills in the estuaries of 
north carolina. rodney barker has written a book about it. he thinks 
that the creature has been around for millions of years and was awakened 
by pollution from swine and turkey farms.) 

gene therapy
dr. jack roth of the m.d. anderson cancer center injected the tumors of 
lung cancer patients with a gene that he designed. the tumors shrank.

the salton sea 
something, maybe pollutants, is killing off the fish and birds in 
california's largest inland sea. it is on the verge of total ecological 
collapse. (see this eyewitness account by eve mallett) 

itc
penelope smith of point reyes california can communicate with animals. 
she uses a technique called interspecies telepathic communication. she 
has written a book about it. recently she had a long conversation with a 
runaway alligator in san francisco. the alligator told her his name was 
fred, he was lonely and scared, and he was eating ducklings but he 
prefers chicken. penelope runs a training program in itc. she is not 
alone. there are many others like her.

a normal teenager
i guess i am a normal teenager, but i have dreams that come true, i can 
predict a person's actions just by talking to them, i see lights that 
others don't, and i have walked away from two bad accidents that should 
have killed me. i was born on the first day of the zodiac calendar 
(march 21,1980). i was conceived even though my parents were using birth 
control. i have birth marks that need explanation. (shaun 
remyleblac@aol.com)

death to death
before you were formed in your mom's womb you were dead. so you do know 
what it is like to be dead. you just can't remember. but some children 
can and their stories of white lights and light beings are not unlike 
nde accounts.. apparently we see these things coming and going. (tamara 
long) (btw: nde = near death experience, obe = out of body experience, 
rv = remote viewing, pk = psychokinesis)

privacy lost
when the feds first issued social security numbers they told us that the 
numbers will not be used for any purpose other than ss record keeping.(
andre bacard)(btw: according to andre if you pay for anything with your 
atm or credit card the transaction record becomes public information. eg 
your insurance company will know if you bought cigarettes or booze and 
how much.) 

shamanism and botany 
the amazon indians may look like savages but they have medical 
technology that is at least 50,000 years old and it is in many ways 
superior to ours. our 'discovery' of a cure for herpes consisted in 
learning from them what they have known for a thousand years. shaman 
medicine consists of plant material drawn from the rain forest. both the 
shamans, that carry this knowledge, and the rain forest, that carries 
the medicine, will become extinct in the next thirty years at the 
current rate of encroachment by cattle ranchers and well meaning 
christian missionaries. (mark plotkin, ethnobiologist) (btw: we think of 
the soil as containing nutrients and the stuff of life so we clear 
forests to reclaim land. but the life of the amazon is in the canopy and 
not in the soil. so in 'clearing the forest' we are throwing the baby 
out with the bath water and creating wasteland.)

a brief history of mars
about 150 million years ago mars was full of life. some martian 'humans' 
resemble native americans. their civilization was similar to that of the 
ancient egyptians. they built pyramids, cities, and canals. then 
something terrible happened. a large meteor grazed their atmosphere and 
started a chain of events that reduced the planet to its lifeless form 
that we know today. advanced beings called 'greys' from another part of 
the galaxy rescued the martians. the greys gave them technology that 
enabled them to live underground and to travel thru space. the martians 
are tired of living underground and a massive exodus to earth is 
imminent. some martians are already here. they live underneath a 
mountain in new mexico. courtney has seen all of this by using a 
technique called 'remote viewing'.(courtney brown)

group memory
we carry with us our individual memories. we are conscious of that. but 
we also carry with us a subliminal group memory of our tribe, culture, 
race, species and of all living things and maybe even of the cosmos. 
some more than others are in touch with this source of information 
perhaps even without being conscious of this connection. they share this 
information with us through great works of art, literature, science, and 
teachings of a spiritual nature. (richard c. hoagland) (jamal's 
corollary: if group memory is not equally received maybe it is not 
equally generated either; i.e. the caesars, napoleons, shapespeares, 
tolstoys, and cleopatras of the world exert more than their pro-rata 
share of influence. this might explain why people who undergo past life 
regression find themselves as historical figures and why mediums seem to 
contact historical figures so much of the time. they are recalling group 
memory.)

homing cats
a family in florida left their cat with the neighbor and moved to 
california. the cat ran away from the neighbor's house and two years 
later showed up at the family home in california. and a cat in portugal 
named camilla became lost and walked home from a campsite 125 miles 
away.

homing spermatazoa
spermatazoa have a sense of smell and the ovum secretes a distinctive 
scent that is their siren call.

we sleep to dream?
there is no evidence that the body needs rest. even if it did it 
wouldn't get it from sleeping. there is no evidence that sleep provides 
rest. in sleep deprivation experiments subjects function normally. in 
the limit they begin to dream on their feet. (but read this note from 
tone)

does the soul have mass?
duncan weighed the almost dead and the dead and he found a consistent 
difference of about an ounce between these weights. (duncan macdougall

"we are from the constellation known to you as ..."
a word of caution about ufo accounts that include constellation names. 
constellations are not star groupings. they only appear so when viewed 
from earth.

a drug addiction
falling in love is phenylethylamine addiction, heartbreak is 
phenylethylamine withdrawal. the person you are in love with is only an 
artifice in the ritual you use to cause your brain to manufacture this 
drug. 

it's all in the mind
if you think you are beaten, you are
if you think you'll lose, you're lost
it's all in the state of mind
life's battles don't always go to stronger or the faster
... the man who wins is the man who thinks he can
(from the victor by cw longnecker)

olaf johnson
olaf has been subjected to many controlled tests and experiments by 
scientists and skeptics and no one denies that he can materialize and 
dematerialize objects; he can also move objects as large as an end table 
with his mind; and he can control other people's minds to make them say 
things they don't want to say.(brad steiger)

the rat and the miner
a miner befriended a rat which one day convinced the miner, by running 
and squealing, to leave the mine shaft moments before it collapsed. a 
pet frog jumped up and down on its owner's face to wake him when the 
house was on fire. brad steiger explores the strange and mysterious 
world of human-animal relationships in his new book on this topic.(brad 
steiger)

loopholes in space?
in south africa one night a drunken man walked out of a tavern and into 
ohio. this case has been well documented but never solved. (brad 
steiger)

what astrophysicists know
not much. according to them some parts of the universe are older than 
the universe. more than 90% of the universe is something called dark 
matter but they can't tell you what that is; in other words they haven't 
a clue what most of the universe is made of. and the universe got 
started when a small immensely dense baseball containing all the mass in 
the universe exploded but they don't know what made it explode; or how 
all the mass in the universe got into a baseball in the first place. 
(btw: michael feast of the university of capetown has a solution to the 
age paradox and thinks the answer is that the universe is a lot older, 
probably 11 to 14 billion years old. hopefully 14 rather than 11 because 
if it is 11 we still have a problem. he is working on it.) 

what scientists know
not much. when the movie the china syndrome was released scientists and 
experts all agreed that the meltdown of the core of a nuclear power 
generator is a scenario based on fuzzy thinking and pseudo science. then 
three mile island happened.

the world according to zecharia
there is another planet. it is in a very oblique orbit. it visits the 
inner solar system once every 3500 years. it is inhabited by advanced 
critters. 450,000 years ago these critters visited earth and found early 
hominids. they used genetic engineering to implant some of their genes 
into one of the female hominids. that's how we got started. she of 
course was eve. since then we have had many cycles of civilization 
triggered by visitations from our extra planetary fathers. all of this 
information can be found in sumerian writings. the aliens are described 
by the sumerians as having large eyes, leathery skin, and non-specific 
gender definition.(zecharia sitchin in his new book "the beginning of 
time")( sumerian religion)

exploding planets
the conventional theory is that the solar system started out as a disk 
of rotating gas and smoke and the sun and the planets formed out of this 
mess. the asteroids and comets are leftover junk from the rotating gas 
days. but the orbital paths of comets are inconsistent with this theory 
and they are better explained by the existence of at least one other 
planet which exploded or which was caused to explode. the comets and 
meteors are the debris of the explosion.(tom) 

vegetarians
*	fat contains 9 calories per gram while protein and carbohydrates contain 
only 4.
*	all meat contains cholesterol; vegetable proteins contain no cholesterol
*	meat contains no dietary fiber. none. zip.
*	the average man on a meat based diet has a 50% chance of dying from a 
heart attack; the average vegetarian? 4%.
*	it takes 15 pounds of plant protein to grow one pound of meat
*	to supply the yearly food of one vegetarian requires 1/6 of an acre; to 
supply the yearly food for a meat eater requires 3 acres.
*	a day's production of food for one meat eater requires 4000 gallons of 
water; the vegetarian uses only 300 gallons.
*	10,000 acres of forest is being cut down per day to make beef pastures.
*	soybean products provide a complete protein that contains all the amino 
acids
*	the combination of brown rice and beans also provides a complete protein 
meal 
*	(excerpted from eisenberg and williams' column 'doctor doctor') 
*	note to meat eaters
*	sausages: be particularly wary of sausages and ground meat. if you like 
ground meat have it ground for you in your presence. things that have 
been found in sausages, hot dogs, and ground meat include human body 
parts, rodent body parts, hair, faeces from various sources, and 
metallic and plastic materials. 
*	chicken: if a chicken has cancerous tumors, and many do, the law allows 
the butcher to remove the cancerous portion of the bird and sell the 
rest. to protect yourself from this law always buy your chicken whole 
and not cut. 
*	fat: beware of excess animal fat in your diet. in spite of the many 
spurious statistics medical research has produced, the link between 
animal fat and many forms of cancer is too strong to ignore.
*	note to strict vegetarians: find an alternate source of vitamin b12. you 
can't get that from a purely vegetarian diet.


anti cancer diet
eat large quantities of fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. 
particularly good anti cancer foods are broccoli, garlic, tomatoes, 
berries, and soybeans. they contain chemicals that neutralize free 
radicals and remove them from the body. these chemicals are fragile and 
easily destroyed or removed by cooking. (national cancer institute)( 
btw: according to larry clark of the university of arizona cancer center
 the mystery ingredient of anti cancer foods is selenium. the best 
dietary source of selenium is brazil nuts. one small caveat: larry's 
study was partially funded by a supplier of selenium capsules.)

red wine
red wine not only lowers cholesterol and prevents heart disease but also 
contains a cancer inhibitor. a substance called resveratrol (rsv) is 
responsible. the vine produces rsv to fight fungus. since rsv is found 
in the skin of the grape red wine contains more rsv than white wine. and 
vines grown in moist regions, which are more susceptible to fungal 
attacks, produce more rsv than those grown in drier regions. (university 
of burgundy dept of enology) (resveratrol data from the american journal 
of enology and viticulture (ajev))

more on anti cancer foods (noted by jean carper of 'eat smart')

*	soybeans contain a chemical called genistein that prevents prostate and 
breast cancer. (stephen barnes, university of alabama cancer center) 
*	the humble onion is an elixir. it contains something called quercetin 
which is antioxidant, anti cancer, antifungus, antibacteria, antivirus, 
and anti blood clots. quercetin is a cousin of the chemicals in wine 
that have similar healthful effects. (thorne research) 
*	what's magic about tomatoes is lycopene which can prevent prostate 
cancer and pancreatic cancer. (harvard university medical web) 
*	a substance called lutein found in collard greens, spinach, and kale 
helps ward off macular degeneration of the eyes. (fred khachik, u.s. 
dept of agriculture) 
*	what makes garlic fight flu and other diseases is a substance called 
allicin which also lowers blood cholesterol. crushed and cooked garlic 
have different and complementary functions and they should both be 
included in your diet. (larry lawson, nature's way products) 


cough no more
cloves are a powerful anaesthetic. to stop coughing just hold a stick of 
it between your cheek and gums. 

unusual liquid
glass is actually a liquid and it flows but very slowly. this means that 
all glass windows will eventually open from the top and that very old 
windows are fatter at the bottom. (from ask marylin) 
(comments by lemmin, frye, jennings, and others are posted here) 

rattlesnake
cut off the head of an attacking rattlesnake and it will continue to 
attack with its headless stump which can apparently see. if you move the 
stump will follow and will actually attempt to bite. (observed by jamal 
at his ranch in penngrove)

catatonia
gently hold a toad flat between the palms of your hands; turn it over on 
its back and hold it there for a minute. now slowly remove your upper 
hand. and the toad will lie still with its feet in the air. although it 
is now free to run away from captivity, it is apparently in a state of 
catatonia induced by captivity. (excerpted from supernature by lyall 
watson)

chicken too
lay a 2-week chick on her side and then push her head to the ground. 
while it is thus restrained draw an imaginary line on the ground across 
its field of vision. now let go. it will remain in that catatonic state 
transfixed on the imaginary line until moved. (tage andersen, chicken 
rancher, denmark) 

herbal medicine
*	aloe vera is used to treat burns and skin abrasions and also is used to 
keep skin soft and beautiful
*	cayenne stimulates the digestive and circulatory system
*	chamomile can be used as a sedative to combat mild insomnia, 
indigestion, and flatulence
*	cranberry may be used to acidify the urine and prevent some types of 
kidney stones. it also prevents kidney infections by e. coli. 
*	echinacea stimulates the immune system and can be used to fight off 
colds and sore throats as well as to treat wounds.
*	eucalyptus oil clears sinuses and soothes the mucus membranes
*	garlic can be used to prevent colds and flus and other infections 
diseases and to lower cholesterol
*	gingko dilates blood vessels and increases circulation. it has been used 
to increase alertness and memory functions. take this before your quiz.
*	ginseng is used in asia as a tonic and to fight the effects of aging.
*	(from eisenberg and williams, 'doctor doctor') 
*	apple cider vinegar can be used to treat: cough, sore throat, nausea, 
varicose veins, arthritis, headache, burns, aching feet, sunburn, welts 
and hives, hiccups, bee stings, corns and calluses, allergies (the 
vinegar book) 


leaving sodium chloride
when you first go saltless foods are bland and tasteless. it seems an 
impossible thing to do. but if you persist, in 3 or 4 weeks the taste 
will come back and you will be unable to eat salted food. (btw: sodium 
chloride is not a 'natural' part of our diet. we adapted to it because 
we used it to preserve food.) (eisenberg and williams)

sugar
when you feel that your body is fighting off a disease you know that if 
it loses you will be sick. you can help your body win the battle by 
abstaining from alcohol and sugar. sugar weakens our immune system. 
(btw: norwegian fishermen have known for a long time the magical healing 
powers of shark liver oil which works by turbo charging the immune 
system.)

a hawaii sun tan
according to christopher lowe and gwen goodman of the university of 
hawaii, you can get a shark to tan but you can't give it melanoma. 
humans tan but humans also get melanoma when their dna becomes damaged 
by high energy solar radiation. so what do sharks have that we don't?

no calories
there is a plant native to south america called stevia rebaudiana. it's 
leaves are intensely sweet. a tiny pinch will sweeten your coffee with 
no more calories than a morning kiss. it is awaiting fda approval. 

olestra
it's the magical new fat that isn't. but what is it really? the clinical 
descriptions boil down to this: it's 30-weight motor oil. and it can 
make you just as sick. the molecules are too big to be absorbed thru the 
walls of the intestines so they go right on thru to the other orifice 
carrying with them oil soluble vitamins and nutrients that become 
hopelessly entangled in their complex molecular tree.(eisenberg and w
illiams) (btw: if you lube your xxx won't your yyy leak out? oui. it is 
one of the known side effects of olestra.)

kinky fish
a tropical fish found off okinawa normally live in groups of one 
dominant male and several submissive females. if a larger male comes 
along, the dominant male changes into a subservient female by 
restructuring its brain and genitalia. if the bigger male leaves or 
dies, the once dominant male will change back to a male. the 
restructuring process takes four days. (discovered by matt grover, univ 
of idaho)

livin on tulsa time
european fresh water eels found in mountain streams and lakes as high as 
10,000 feet above sea level begin and end their lives in the ocean. here 
is their incredible story. they begin life in the sargaso sea 
(equatorial atlantic ocean) where the larvae are carried by the gulf 
stream to europe. during this journey the larvae grow into little 
cylindrical fish. once they get to the mouth of a river they swim 
upstream relentlessly even wriggling up waterfalls and crawling across 
meadows until they get to the lakes. there they live for asexually for 
14 to 20 years and then some other hormonal program kicks in. they grow 
big and fat and their sex organs get large; but instead of mating, they 
begin another epic journey apparently to return to the sargaso sea for 
mating. but they don't make it back. down to the last eel, they all die 
trying and therefore never mate. (the population is replenished by their 
american cousins who do make it back). these eels are apparently 
carrying out a life cycle program that must have worked once millions of 
years ago before the continents drifted apart. 

sponge
photograph a live sponge and then grind it into a slurry. press the 
slurry through a micropore strainer and you will get what appears to be 
muddy water. all the individual cells of the sponge have been separated 
from each other. let it sit for a few days and the sponge will rise like 
a phoenix from the muddy water. compare this sponge with your 
photograph. it's the same sponge. 

mouse brains
this also works with mouse brains. you can tease apart the individual 
cells of the brain of a laboratory mouse. if you let this soup stand in 
a favorable environment the brain will reform and even restructure its 
synapses. somehow each cell knows how to build the whole. (many thanks 
to the mouse who donated his brain to john hopkins university school of 
medicine.

quail brains
48 hours after fertilization replace cells in the brainstem of a chicken 
embryo with those from a quail embryo and the chicken you get will bob 
its head like a quail. (evan balaban, neurosciences institute, san 
diego) 

a nose for science
blindfolded and with arms spread eagle bend one arm and touch the tip of 
your nose. everything we think we know about how our nerves and muscles 
work together says you can't do that, but you can. it's a mystery to 
neuroscience. 

mouse welfare
fred gage of the salk institute for biological studies separated 24 
'teenage' mice into two groups. group 1 mice had to run thru tricky 
obstacle courses to find food while group 2 mice lived in regular cages 
with food trays so that they could eat whenever they wanted. group 1 
mice developed bigger brains and did better in a test of learning. 

spy vs spy
bats are blind so, to catch moths, they use sonar. they whistle a note 
above the audible range and listen for the echo. from the patterns in 
the reflected sound they can recognize and locate a moth. in response 
moths developed a sort of stealth technology - covering their body and 
wings with soft, non-reflective material. bats responded by changing the 
sound frequency to detect the soft stuff. to counter this advance, moths 
developed sonar hearing and jamming devices. with these they can pick up 
the sonar of an approaching bat, identify its location and speed, and 
take evasive action and generate sound waves that will confuse the bat. 
(high speed photography show that it takes the moth about 1/10th of a 
second to do all of that. is there a computer that fast? ). in response 
bats developed an erratic flight pattern to overwhelm the moth's locator 
and jamming system. it must work to some degree because bats still catch 
moths. (lyall watson)

konstantin raudive
tune a radio to a frequency where there is no station. you will get 
white noise. tape the white noise and play it back. what will you hear? 
when raudive does that the tape contains hundreds of voices saying 
clearly discernible things many of which are relevant to raudive's 
circumstance. this has been checked out in many well designed 
experiments. it only works with raudive and not with other people and it 
works anywhere on the dial as long as the radio produces white noise. 
raudive is somehow putting those voices on the tape. but how? (bill 
modlin's comments about raudive

mouse crime
you can remove the component of the genetic code that is responsible for 
producing nitric oxide. laboratory mice bred in this way are violent 
criminals. they rape screaming females and pick fights with normal males 
often killing their rivals in a gruesome manner. (john hopkins 
university school of medicine)

breed like rabbits
human females ovulate once a month. the menstrual cycle often makes 
conception a difficult game of musical chairs. female rabbits do not 
have a menstrual cycle. they ovulate on demand. if the male is rough 
with her during sex a follicle in her ovary will rupture and release an 
egg. 

the visible spectrum
our eyes were designed by our atmosphere. of the spectrum of 
electromagnetic energy bombarding our atmosphere most are either 
deflected, reflected, or absorbed. the energy that gets thru to the 
surface is mostly in the 400 to 700 nanometer range. this frequency 
range contains more information about our immediate environment and the 
cosmos than any other. it is no accident that we developed eyes to 
respond to this specific frequency range. incidentally, what's called 
'optical fiber' isn't. optical fiber transmits data in 850, 1300, or 
1550 nanometers. these frequencies are below the visible range. you 
can't see them.

kill joy
dissolve a tablespoon of joy dish detergent into a cup of water and 
place this soapy solution into a spray bottle. now spray a fly with it 
(or any other insect like a mosquito or a yellow jacket). the soapy 
solution dissolves the oil in the insect's exoskeleton. the skeleton 
loses its rigidity and collapses. the insect falls to the ground and 
makes a desperate attempt to breathe. within seconds it dies of 
asphyxiation. (discovered by jamal)

fly vision
glass is opaque to flies. corollary: their visible range must be ultra 
violet or higher. (discovered by jamal in his tireless effort to find 
the truth about flies.)

ted serios
place a camera near ted serios and he will place a picture of an object 
on the film just by thinking about it. for example, if he is thinking 
about the sears tower you will get a photograph of the sears tower. 
hundreds of experiments with serios have failed to find an explanation 
that fits our current version of the universe.(jule eisenbud). jamal's 
corollary and conjecture: have you seen really great photography? maybe 
a great work of art made with the camera does not consist solely of 
finding the right subject and getting the light and exposure right. 
maybe this process is not so mechanical and objective. maybe the 
photographer plays a subconscious and artistic role in what actually 
comes out on the film???? 

olber's paradox
if there are an infinity of stars out there why is the night sky not 
wall to wall stars? why is the night not lit up like a christmas tree? 
nobody knows for sure. it's a paradox. 'they are too far and too dim' is 
not an answer because the farther out the more stars there ought to be 
in the same angular displacement. marylin savant (of 'ask marylin) 
thinks that the light from the other stars just hasn't gotten here yet. 
but read this note from dennis mattison. 
(btw: are there an infinity of stars? in our own galaxy there are at 
least 100 billion stars and in the universe there are billyuns and 
billyuns of galaxies. that's about as infinite as anything gets. 
besides, how can the universe be finite? what lies beyond?)

lumpy universe
the distribution of mass in the universe is not uniform but lumpy. even 
in our galaxy stars come in clusters. no one knows why. lumpiness is not 
consistent with big bang or other conventional theories. dirac 
conjectured that it is because gravity is not constant over time but 
oscillates over billions of years. the lumps are formed when 
gravitational forces peak.

the reincarnation of time
the universe started with a big bang and is expanding but will soon 
collapse again and then expand again as it has done billions of times 
before and as it will do billions of times again. time is not linear but 
cyclical. there is nothing new under the sun. it has all happened before 
and will happen again and again. (but see jnan saha's note on the 
mathematical impossibility of the big bang.) 

india and america
when columbus came here he thought it was india. the people he found 
here are still called indians and the islands in the caribbean are 
called the west indies. everybody knows that but here is the rest of the 
story. there is another weird connection between india and the u.s.a. in 
the late 18th century the british empire had two revolts on its hands; 
the revolutionary war in america and a war with hyder ali in india. they 
decided they could not win both wars but had to pick the one they wanted 
to win and forget the other. they picked india. so in a weird sort of 
way, india was responsible for the creation of the united states of 
america. jamal's corollary: the revolutionary army of george washington 
won a war that the british had decided to lose. (but read chapman's 
comments. according to chapman, the british did give up on the american 
front but it was because they were nervous about what the french-spainsh 
alliance would do to the rest of their empire while they were busy with 
the american revolt.)

australia and america
you know that australia started out as a penal colony; but you may not 
know that it's our fault. the british sent their criminals to australia 
after the american colonies seceded from the empire; and after they 
could no longer send their criminals here.

he put bangladesh on the map
bangladesh was born in 1971 out of civil war but its borders were 
actually drawn by lord curzon in 1905, then the colonial governor of 
india.

how financial failure created an empire
the east india company was bankrupt in 1773. the crown bailed it out but 
in the process seized control of the firm and its indian operations. 
what was a trading company in bengal soon turned into empire.

how the printing press changed religion
what martin luther had that huss and wycliffe did not was the printing 
press. it was easier for luther to attack indulgences because the church
 was using the printing press to mass produce and mass market these 
things. and it was easier for luther to get the word out by using the 
printing press, literally, to leaflet all of europe. (btw, an indulgence 
is an official certificate of forgiveness issued by the church. for a 
fee. huss and wycliffe were reformers that predated luther. they failed 
and became heretics.

bread and roses
in pre-industrial england the number of marriages per year was almost 
perfectly negatively correlated with the prevailing price of bread. (
paul samuelson) (btw: the phrase 'bread and roses' comes from a labor 
movement in post industrial-revolution england. workers wanted more than 
mere subsistence and demanded a better quality of life.)

rome was not destroyed in a day
for centuries after the fall of the roman empire europeans continued to 
pay taxes to rome. it was in the form of tithes to the vatican. 

complete knowledge
in 1895 the royal society (in england) passed a resolution to the effect 
that man's knowledge of the universe was complete and that everything 
worthwhile had been invented. 

bald no more
mix together a cup of nettles (u can buy this at your natural good 
store), half a cup of chopped onions, and three cups of isopropyl 
alcohol (rubbing alcohol) and let this concoction sit for a few days 
until the alcohol is green. massage a tablespoon of the green liquid 
into your scalp each day if you are balding. balding will cease. the 
recession will be over. (judy miller read this in the sf 
chronicle)(jamal's note: not only has my recession stopped but i am 
actually growing hair right in the middle of my bald spot.)

holy water? 
a bunch of barley seeds were randomly assigned to plot a and plot b. two 
bottles of water were drawn from the same tap each day. bottle a was 
blessed by a healer and bottle b was not. plot a only received water 
from bottle a and plot b only received water from bottle b. the plants 
in plot a all grew faster, got taller, and produced more barley than 
those in plot b. (bernard grad)

musical plants
plants grow faster and healthier if subjected to a daily dose of bach's 
brandenburg concertos. try it. 

the golden mean
in many many statistical tests it has been found that we humans prefer 
one rectangle to all others; that whose sides are in the ratio of 1 to 
1.618. why do you suppose? could have implications for marketing 
majors.(btw: the golden mean is the convergence of the ratio of the 
fibonacci series and can be approximated by 0.5*(1+sqrt(5)). this ratio 
apparently occurs in nature more frequently than pure chance can 
explain.)(btw2: start with 0,1, and then generate new numbers by adding 
the previous two to get 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13, and so on. this is the 
fibonacci series. the ratios of adjacent numbers, 5/3, 8/5, 13/8, etc 
converges to 1.618... if you go out far enough. it has a weird 
mathematical property: 1.618*1.618 = 1.618+1) 

heat and temperature
hold a metallic and a wooden object both at room temperature. the 
metallic object will feel colder. condensing steam will feel hotter and 
burn more severely than water at the same temperature. we cannot sense 
temperature; only the rate of heat transfer. 

dowsers
antelopes and wild boar have horns and tusks that are similar in shape 
to the dowser's forked twig. both of these species are very successful 
in finding hidden water sources. (lyall watson)

lady luck
if you toss a coin many times about half of them should come up heads, 
right? wrong. it depends on who is calling them. some people can make 
the coin come up heads (or tails) more often than that. this has been 
checked out with statistics and p-values of less than .0001 have been 
observed with some people. this also works with dice. (j. b. rhine)

the five senses
if you connect the nerves in your tongue to the part of the brain 
responsible for hearing and place a drop of vinegar on your tongue, you 
will hear a loud sound. hallucinogens induce this sort of cross-sensory 
perception. colors have texture and taste. taste has sound and color. 
sound has color whose hue and intensity changes with frequency and 
loudness. some people naturally have cross-sensory abilities. myra allen
, a montana artist, paints pictures of what wines taste like. when she 
looks at these paintings she can 'taste' the wine again. 

to touch you is to see you
in blind people the part of the brain responsible for vision does not 
atrophy. instead it tunes in to other sensory signals. the sense of 
touch for instance. (the bowman gray school of medicine) 

nanotechnology
do you realize that all the while that we were building steam engines, 
cars, buildings, and other large euclidean things, right under our noses 
nature has been building stuff of incomparable complexity one atom at a 
time? maybe we can learn to do that too. try to imagine the 
implications. 

wysiwyg?
you can get lenses that invert images so that everything appears upside 
down. for a while. if you wear these glasses for a couple of days things 
appear right side up again. if you take the glasses off things appear 
upside down again for a while. then they right themselves again. ever 
see the hollow face optical illusion? it looks like a face until you 
stick your hand into it. then you can see that it is hollow. hollow 
faces don't exist in your experience so your brain makes the image fit 
your version of reality. in other words, "we perceive only what we can 
conceive". kind of makes you wonder what's really out there.

chameleons
put a blind chameleon in a cage. drive it to a place where it has never 
been and let it out of the cage. it still changes its colors and stripes 
to form a perfect camouflage with its new surroundings which it has 
never seen. 

sleepy flies
flies sleep at night. usually on the ceiling. and they sleep so soundly 
that you can get 'em all with a shop vac. 

jailer give me water
within 26 days of freedom, on average, criminals who escape from danish 
jails return and ask to be let back in. other weird facts

doggie diagnosis
according to the santa rosa press democrat dogs can be trained to sniff 
out cancerous tissue. 

the mind is a terrible thing
lab mice were randomly assigned to cages marked 'smart' and 'dumb' and 
taken to mouse maze researchers. on average the 'smart' cage mice did 
better. the results were statistically significant even when, unknown to 
the researchers, the same mice were re-tested with the cage labels 
secretly switched. (lyall watson reports this in his book 'supernature' 
from which many of these wbt items are drawn. lyall is a biologist. 
supernature was published in the '70s and is out of print. incidentally 
it was lyall who is credited with the now debunked theory of the 
hundredth monkey phenomenon. this does not necessarily discredit lyall. 
read the hundredth monkey essay carefully.)

pyramid power
build a cardboard pyramid to exact egyptian specifications and place a 
used razor blade where the crypt would be and it will be sharpened. a 
dead animal will become mummified. this is also from lyall watson. the 
entire pyramid section from lyall's book is, believe it or not, right 
here on the www. 

lyall watson
his new book "dark nature" was published in 1995 by harper collins. the 
paperback version will be out in february 1997. here is an excerpt from 
the book.

space invaders
(from usenet) in lifetide by lyall watson (simon and schuster, new york, 
1979) one finds mention of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites -- they 
contain organic matter. it is claimed that roughly 0.1% of all matter 
that has fallen on our planet from space is organic. jai maharaj 
jai@mantra.com 

pesky mosquitoes?
here's how you can get them back. the next time you see one on the back 
of your hand, make a fist and she will become hopelessly stuck in your 
tightened skin unable to feed or break free. on other parts of the body 
simply pull the skin tight for the same effect. 

he owns the night
the sultan of weird on late night talk radio is art bell. ufo, roswell,
crop circles, area 51, conspiracy theories, militia groups, prophecies 
of catastrophic earthquakes, revisionist history, atlantis, time travel, 
inter dimensional travel, and secret fantastic technologies that the 
u.s. govt possesses. aliens and immortals call his show. my favorite 
immortal is gabriela age 100 but looks 22. she is rich and "very 
attractive". 

urban legends
do you buy the bob lazar story?. a guy with a junior college education 
runs a photo shop in las vegas and gets hired to work as a scientist in 
area 51 to reverse engineer the space-time-distortion propulsion engine 
of an alien craft and then goes public with this information? or a 
troubled photo developer with a broken marriage that seeks the 
limelight? and perhaps to profit from our ufo curiosity? then there is 
the the legend of the philadelphia experiment aka project rainbow aka 
the maontauk project. in 1943 the u.s. navy conducted an experiment in 
which it rendered the destroyer uss eldridge invisible by generating a 
magnetic field around it that was so intense that the electromagnetic 
spectrum from radio to visible became bent. in the process the ship 
actually de-materialized and became teleported from philadelphia to 
norfolk, va. and back again. some of the crew died, some disappeared, 
and the rest became disoriented and were rendered 'mentally unfit for d
uty'. al bielek is one of these survivors and he claims that the navy's 
super magnet technology goes far beyond invisibility and teleportation; 
they can shuttle people back and forth between the here and the 
hereafter and between different individual identities that may be 
separated by time. the u.s. navy denies that such an experiment ever 
took place or that any such technology exists.

slow movin'
the data transmission rate in our nervous system is relatively slow. 
there is a noticeable delay between the time something touches your foot 
and your awareness of it. and the bigger you are the longer it takes. 
could be why you don't see too many tall jittery folks. in a giraffe it 
takes 300 milliseconds for a message to get from the foot to the brain. 
in the same interval a tcp packet can make the round trip from 
penngrove, california to reading, england and back.

weightlessly falling
astronauts in the shuttle appear weightless not because they have 
escaped earth's gravity (if they had they would not be in orbit) but 
because they are in free fall into earth's gravitational pull. this is 
elementary and you probably knew this i but meet a lot of people that 
think otherwise. 

stereo broadcasting
mono receivers are able to receive stereo broadcasts even though the 
complete message is in two different frequencies because broadcasters 
send the sum and the difference of the two signals. mono receivers are 
tuned to the sum. stereo receives both frequencies and computes the left 
and right signals by addition and subtraction.

as the world turns
the earth has two motions relative to the sun, it rotates on its axis 
and it revolves around the sun. but how many times does it rotate during 
one revolution? if you said 365.25 you are off by one. it has to rotate 
one more time to undo the rotational effect of the revolution. if it did 
not rotate at all the sun would rise once a year. relative to the earth, 
our moon has to rotate once per revolution to keep the same face toward 
us. btw, why is the land distribution on our planet so lopsidedly 
northern?

as the world wobbles
we measure time according to the rhythmic cycles in the movements of our 
planet relative to the sun. in addition to the rotation (which measures 
days) and revolution (which measures years) there is actually a third 
movement. the earth wobbles on a precise 26,000-year cycle called an 
epoch. within each epoch you can tell what 'time' it is by the shape and 
relative position of the constellations; and what 'age' it is by the 
constellation of the zodiac that is directly behind the sun at sunrise 
on the spring equinox. the age now is aquarius.

astronomical time stamping
the relative sizes and the geometrical arrangement of the great pyramids 
of giza form a representation of the belt of the constellation orion; 
not as it is today but what it looked like in 10,500 bc (see 'wobble' 
above). then it was the age of orion, which means that orion rose 
exactly due east at sunrise on the spring equinox. and that is what the 
sphinx is staring at. these structures are not tombs and monuments to 
the ego of kufku or any other pharoah and they were not built in the 
time of kufku (2500 bc) as we have been led to believe. they were built 
in 10,500 bc as an astronomical message from a forgotten civilization. 
the egyptian markings are mere graffiti. (bauval and hancock) (some 
consider these arguments to be intellectual chicanery) 

it's slowing down, sir
according to our atomic clock in colorado the earth took one second 
longer than it should have to make all the turns it made from 1966 to 
1996. 

talking heads
it is a matter of historical record that many severed heads in europe 
have moved their eyes and their lips for half a minute. could they 
actually see? were they aware of what had happened? can we ever find 
out? 

shu di shu di huang huang
the chinese herb shu di huang (radix rehmanniae) touted to help your 
kidneys may actually induce acute renal failure. 

don't hold your breath
our breathing action is on automatic control. it is triggered by the co2 
level in our blood. yet we are able to seize manual control and hold our 
breath; or we can breathe on purpose. we can similarly take control of 
other automatic processes. all we need is feedback. we can raise or 
lower our pulse, blood pressure, body temperature, and so on if we are 
given some kind of sensory cue on what's going on. check for yourself 
the power of feedback. write with your eyes closed. or listen to your 
favorite song thru your stereo headphones and sing along into a tape 
recorder. now play it back. the horror. the horror. 

night of the hairy dead
your hair and nails will continue to grow even after you die.(but read 
these notes from lucy yau, jeff mullin, and Jeff Volker who say that it 
is not the hair that is growing but the skin that is receding.)

night of the living dead
how would you define 'living'? are living things self sustaining and 
self replicating? are they things that consume nutrients from the 
environment and generate energy and manufacture protein? because the 
virus is none of these. a virus consists only of some genetic material 
encased in protein. it exists because it was manufactured by a living 
cell in a process that must be life chemistry gone haywire. once 
produced the virus can attach itself to another cell, chemically weaken 
the cell wall, and inject its genetic material into the cell. the cell 
manufactures many copies of the virus and the copies then proceed to 
weaken the cell wall from the inside and bust out ready to attack other 
cells. it's tough to fight these things. you can't kill them because 
they are already dead. all you can hope for is to interfere with the two 
things they know how to do and these are 1. attach to cell walls and 2. 
weaken cell walls.

excuse him
did jesus christ's physical body ascend to heaven? at what speed? since 
it is matter and has mass perhaps not faster than the speed of light? 
then he is no more than 2000 light years away right now. and where is 
heaven exactly? is it beyond our galaxy? in that case he has yet to 
reach his destination... excuse me ... excuse me ...(rev bernie ward, 
kgo radio, sf)(btw: one story has it that jesus was not in his grave 
because roman soldiers fed his remains to wild dogs. this story comes to 
us from dr frederick niedner, professor of theology, valparaiso 
university.)

scientific experiments
in pre-copernican astronomy scientists took data only to refine the 
aristotelian system. the kind of experiment we design, the data we take, 
and the way we interpret the data are all pre-determined by our version 
of reality. we may seem more refined and scientific relative to older 
realities but relative to our current reality we are in the same mess. 
for example in all of fisher's crop yield experiments the gardener was 
not a variable because green thumbs are not part of our reality.

mystical shapes
how well bugs work depend on the shape of the container they are in. if 
you age burgundy wines in bordeaux bottles or bordeaux wines in burgundy 
bottles they will not taste the same. barrel aging of wine in any shape 
other than a barrel-shape produces inferior wine. the french have 
determined an optimal container shape for making yogurt. beer made in 
angular vessels is not as good. and laboratory mice with identical 
wounds heal faster in round cages. (lyall watson)

eternal shrimp
freeze live freshwater shrimp or crayfish in a bowl of water. when you 
thaw them out again weeks later the shrimp will come back to life

gruesome shrimp
warning: this is fairly gruesome. a dead man found frozen in ice in a 
lake in northern alberta was brought to edmonton for examination. as the 
pathologist waited in the next room for the giant ice cube to melt she 
heard chewing sounds. some of the ice had melted and the crayfish were 
feasting. (srishti nigam)

mystical places
a san francisco baker gets everything he needs to make two loaves of 
sourdough bread then divides them in half. he makes one loaf in san 
francisco and the other he makes in los angeles. the two loaves taste 
different. apparently it's in the rising. the yeast bugs know where they 
are and they prefer sf.

symmetrical darwinism
if we evolved from random mutations then where are all the asymmetric 
varieties? if none then what is the survival value of symmetry? 
(btw: the mating behavior of human females includes seeking out males 
who are symmetrical; and as a result symmetrical males are able to mate 
more often and with more females according to randy thronhill, 
university of new mexico.) 

about charles
charles darwin suffered from panic disorder and agoraphobia that left 
him a socially crippled recluse; and it was this condition that made it 
possible for the 'origin of species' to become his all consuming 
passion. we owe the theory of evolution to his illness. (tom barloon and 
russ noyes, university of iowa college of medicine) 

is this normal?
from a russian soldier fighting in chechnya: "everyone is trading 
ammunition for bread, pickles, and vodka. one hand grenade is worth a 
bottle of vodka. tell me, is this normal?" (los angeles times)

you light up my life
fires, explosions, and your car engine are strangely similar to our own 
metabolic process. the source of their energy is an exothermic chemical 
reaction that combines oxygen with hydrocarbons to produce water, carbon 
dioxide, and energy. if something goes wrong our metabolism can turn to 
fire and consume us in what is known as spontaneous human combustion or 
shc. many cases of shc have been documented and no explanation from 
mainstream science has been offered. the most well known case is that of 
dr john bentley who was suddenly reduced to a little pile of ashes. shc 
normally reduces the victims to about 5% of their weight. larry arnold 
describes this and other shc cases in his new book 'ablaze'. (btw: could 
shc be inflicted by one person on another perhaps with some voodoo-like 
technique? or perhaps even on oneself perhaps in a powerful suicidal 
moment? if shc is purely biological then where are the animal cases?)

head shrinking
another weird thing about shc is that the skull is not normally consumed 
in the inferno but shrunken proportionately into a miniature head. also, 
there appears to be a sphere of influence with a diameter of about one 
meter within which everything is consumed as if by fire and outside of 
which there is no evidence of fire. body parts of the victim outside 
this sphere survive intact.

ufo explained
according to persinger's tst theory the earth is playing tricks on us. 
stresses in the earth's crust produce an electromagnetic discharge which 
causes a luminosity which appears to dim witted peasants as space ships. 
chris rutkowski of manitoba offers a more scientific explanation of tst.

spontaneous conception
an ovum can be tricked into conception by the mere prick of a pin. the 
blessed process may also be begun by injecting daddy's dna material 
directly into the ovum.

sowing your seed
the quran draws an agricultural analogy to conception. the man produces 
the seed. the female provides the fertilizer.

you remember but you can't recall
after you drive to work i ask you to give me a count of the number of 
red cars you saw on the road. yes, you do know, and under hypnosis you 
will recall the exact number. the clutter and background noise of life 
are filtered out of our consciousness but inexplicably stored. 
(btw: memory is unreliable both ways. we forget things that happened and 
remember things that did not. (henry l. roediger iii, washington 
university, st. louis). under the right conditions and with some coaxing 
we can be made to 'remember' total fiction. (elizabeth loftus, 
university of washington, seattle) 

eat like pigs
when you castrate a pig, it will turn around and while still squealing 
with pain, devour its own testicles. (observed by jamal at his ranch) 
(btw, words such as test, testament, testimony, and testify have 
testicle as their root. in roman times apparently they reached under the 
tunic with a firm grip to discourage lying.)

coffee vs milk
subjects were randomly assigned to two groups. one group received a 
glass of milk before bed and the other group received a cup of coffee. 
the milk drinkers slept better even though the milk was laced with 
caffeine.

the magic of math
to make a circle of radius r inches with a string you will need 2*pi*r 
inches of string. to make a circle of radius (r+1) inches you will need 
2*pi*(r+1) inches of string. the difference is 2*pi inches or about 6.3 
inches of string regardless of r, whether a tennis ball, or the earth, 
the solar system, or even the galaxy.

underwater insects
lobsters are related to spiders and insects. they have a common 
worm-like ancestor.

infra sound
we can't hear vibrations at 7hz but this infra sound can cause heart 
palpitation, dizziness, loss of balance, nausea, depression, fear, and 
mood changes. the usual source of infra sound in office buildings is the 
hvac system. if you suspect infra sound touch the wall. if you can feel 
a vibration you probably have infra sound. (lyall watson)

low sperm count
our sperm count worldwide is going downhill

the chan gang
the most popular family name on earth is chan. you knew that but it's 
even more popular than you thought. the millions of 'khan's of south 
asia too are chans. the connection is genghis khan or genghis chan who 
did not have a low sperm count.

crime thrills?
does punishment deter crime? at least for some criminals it works in 
reverse. it is the risk that makes it worth doing. and the bigger the 
risk the bigger the thrill (john pine).

crime pays
there is no strong evidence that expenditure on police reduces crime. in 
fact there is no evidence that an additional dollar spent on policing 
results in at least a dollar of marginal social benefit. (steven levitt, 
national bureau of economic research) 

the tube is back
an antibiotic-resistant strain of the tubercle bacillus is loose and on 
the prowl. if the guy in the next seat is coughing up blood get off the 
train. 

tough staph
antibiotics kill bacteria but not all the bacteria; and their continued 
use is only a way of breeding resistant super bugs. in this way we have 
bred a staphylocuccus that we can't kill. you can pick one up at your 
local hospital. (center for disease control) 

designer virus
a virus designed to kill rabbits in ebola fashion is mutating and out of 
control in australia.

emerging viruses
the notion that we are at the top of the food chain is comforting but 
inaccurate. microbes are our predators and we are now engaged in a 
desperate darwinian battle for survival with them. antibiotic usage only 
creates new resistant strains. aside from that new varieties of microbes 
are emerging faster than we can cope. the ebola virus and the hantavirus
 are examples. (alison jacobson) 

from dust to dust
household dust consists largely of biological debris from our skin and 
hair and this debris supports a sizable population of mites

the spermatazoa know
the electrical activity in vial of semen responds to the presence of 
humans in the same room and goes wild if the donor is near.

a farce?
physics consists of a bunch of internally consistent principles whose 
relevance to reality is an assumption. some go so far as to call it a 
farce. there is a growing movement of dissident physicists who describe 
mainstream physics as "lies and false formalism".

about nelya
and what about nelya mikhailova? she and others like her have been the 
subject of many carefully designed experiments by physicists. no one 
doubts that nelya can move objects just by thinking but we don't know 
how she does it. is psychokinesis a glimpse of a different physics?

barbecued feet
you can make your body do seemingly impossible things if you put your 
mind to it. in nepal semi naked monks bathe in icy lakes without any 
apparent discomfort. in india sadhus chant themselves into walking on 
red hot coals or lying on incredibly sharp thorns. 

firewalking explained
a scientific explanation of fire walking: the feet absorb the heat and 
cool off the coals.

placebo
in controlled experiments not only do placebo takers get better but they 
actually develop the same side effects as the experimental group.

give them space
our bodies extend beyond their physical outline. if a stranger stands 
very close you will feel uncomfortable. he has entered your space. we 
carry around us a space that is ours. the extent of this space can be 
measured. violent individuals carry a larger space. and the discomfort 
they feel is more intense.

safe sex
in the south pacific there is a deep water fish that mates near the 
surface. to avoid being eaten during mating they send only their 
genitals to the surface where boy genital meets girl genital and they 
make baby fish. during the mating season so many of these things come up 
that the sea turns red. the islanders harvest them in great quantities 
for a feast.

the womb that jack built
the baby decides when to be born. it is also the embryo that builds the 
womb. it does so by sending out chemical commands to re-structure the 
surrounding tissue to its specifications. not unlike a parasitic larva. 
and it can do this elsewhere in the body. of either gender. 

womb reservations
many mothers report that their future children appear to them during 
dream like states; in some cases before they have conceived or even 
before they have met the father. so apparently it is the child that 
selects the mother.(teri danna) 

don't do me any favors
burning a woman to death used to be a perfectly rational and socially 
acceptable thing to do. witch burners thought they were doing the woman 
a favor and that she was grateful for what they did because the fire 
freed her from the devil. (btw, pennsylvania was the first colony to 
legalize witchcraft. in the words of william penn, "if she can ride on a 
broomstick she has every right to do so.") 

exactly what do we believe?
was jesus descended from david or not? did jesus carry his own cross or 
did simon carry it for him? did jesus ascend to heaven or stay put in 
his grave? if he ascended how long was he buried? did he ascend to 
heaven one day or one week after the resurrection? did god make the 
animals first or did he make man first? the bible is full of weird 
contradictions(btw: according to the jesus seminar of sonoma county, if 
you systematically remove all controversial statements in the gospels 
you will be left with three statements you can make for sure: jesus was 
born, jesus died, and he said "give to caesar what is caesar's". another 
curiosity of the gospels is the missing years. where was jesus between 
birth and the preaching? india?) 

early christians
miracles did not cease after jesus. the early christians are credited 
with various supernatural acts and many lived for over two centuries.

survivors survive
ever wonder why we have this insane desire to keep on living and to form 
sexual reproductive partnerships? if you didn't your characteristics 
would not survive into succeeding generations. after many generations of 
such selection we would cultivate a population consisting mostly of the 
insane. and that is who we are. we are not the most interesting 
creatures that could be. just the survivors.

border disputes
between denmark and sweden is an island that has been the subject of a 
territorial dispute between them. each claims that it belongs to the 
other. on the other side of europe greece and turkey are ready to go to 
war over a 10-acre pile of uninhabited rocks in the aegean sea.

obscene obscenity
consider two scenes in a movie. in one scene a couple is together nude. 
there is love and passion between them. their genitals are visible as 
they consummate their love. in another scene they are together fully 
clothed. there is hatred and anger between them. he draws a knife and 
attacks her in a gruesome manner. she falls screaming and dies in a pool 
of blood. in america we would find this movie to be obscene because of 
the first scene. you can kill and maim on the screen as long as you have 
your clothes on while you are doing it. 

the origin of species by c darwin
while darwin was still figuring it out a guy named wallace already had 
but instead of sending his thesis to the publisher he sent it to darwin. 
'origin of species' was not a volcanic work in isolation. darwin simply 
dotted the eyes and crossed the tees. i admire darwin not for his genius 
but for his courage. that man is an animal was a heretical idea. still 
is. 

non-terminal velocity
a three year old boy fell out of a third floor window onto a concrete 
sidewalk and suffered nothing more than some minor cuts and bruises. 
(orange county register)

the lead trap
wine has lead. so does milk. and lettuce. and so on. it got there from 
the soil. it got to the soil from tetraethyllead we used to put into our 
gasoline for years and it is trapped in the food chain. lead in soil 
goes to grass, cow eats grass. we eat burgers, we die, lead back in 
soil. (btw, children with higher lead levels in their blood are more 
violent. could lead have something to do with our ability to produce 
nitric oxide?)

extraterrestrial
all fresh water on earth contains tiny wheel-like creatures called 
rotifera which are bizarre and unearthly. if you take them out of the 
water they dry up into a speck of dust that can survive indefinitely in 
any condition including outer space. if the dust lands on fresh water it 
turns right back into rotifera. (lyall watson)

rituals
whether witchcraft, voodoo, church, or temple, rituals provide the 
visual and sensory cues that help us to achieve powerful mental states 
just like those from your lover allow you to experience a mental state 
of sexual release. in one such mental state some can cause people to 
have a choking fit simply by telepathically suggesting suffocation. 
(milan ryzl)

swallows
when it is time, mama swallow just abandons the nest. the young 
eventually fly the coop. another weird thing about swallows. when they 
sit on a wire all in a line there is exactly six inches between them. 

particle physics
the more atoms they smash the more confused they get. and the more 
confused they get the more $ they need. they had finally figured out 
that all matter consists of quarks. until they smashed the protons a 
little harder at fermilab. now they say quarks are made up of something 
even smaller. go straight to confusion, pass go, collect $200, smash 
more atoms. (btw: scientific investigation in general has proceeded 
along these lines and failed in the same manner. the harder we look the 
more detail we find and there is no convergence in sight.)

poker face
pick a playing card and stare at it while the subject guesses. random 
guesses should generate 1 correct answer out of 52 on average. but many 
individuals consistently score significantly higher. and their score 
drops if you don't see the card. when you look at the card, you somehow 
transmit the information to the subject. what's really weird is that 
this also works on the telephone even long distance. (b. yakolev)

famine parenting
in the famine of 1877 in china parents sold their daughters for the 
equivalent of $2 to $6 each. in the famine of 1790 in india parents 
killed their children and ate them.

male masturbation
old wives' tales have grains of truth. vitamin a is used to manufacture 
semen as well as retinene, a precursor to the photosensitive substance 
in our eyes and its deficiency can indeed cause blindness.

sneaky comet
a new comet has entered our solar system undetected by billions of 
dollars of observational equipment on earth and in space that constantly 
scan the heavens. it was picked up by a guy with a pair of binoculars. 
(yuji hyakutake)

reality check
albert hoffman, the sandoz scientist who discovered lsd was a very 
straight laced journeyman chemist in white lab coat. after taking lsd he 
was moved to write "what we commonly take as 'the' reality is by no 
means the only reality. there are many realities each as real as the 
others".

super organism
pesky little blackbirds in large numbers can form a giant flying ball in 
the air and this super organism harrasses large birds of prey that might 
otherwise have blackbirds for lunch. (could this be the theoretical 
basis of the 'efficient market hypothesis'? maybe the stock market is a 
super organism. kahneman, tversky, and thaler have argued that 
individual investors are not rational. but maybe the super organism is.) 


mother india
in that vestry of spirituality many a husband having collected the dowry 
sets his wife afire with kerosene

global warming
when you burn fossil fuels you are returning to the atmosphere the 
carbon dioxide that was removed from it by photosynthesis. (btw: the co2 
content of the atmosphere is self regulating to a degree. if it rises 
there will be more vegetation which will remove co2. if it falls, so 
will vegetation until a balance is reached. the earth today contains 
large areas of marginally arid areas where additional vegetation could 
bloom and absorb co2) 

phytoplankton
contrary to popular belief most of our photosynthetic co2 conversion 
does not occur in rain forests but in the ocean. the total mass of 
phytoplankton grows or shrinks to regulate the co2 cycle. and if we ever 
need to make them grow faster all we have to do is dump iron filings in 
the ocean. john martin of the moss landing marine laboratories found 
that if you give these critters a little bit of iron their population 
can explode by as much as fortyfold. 

leaving hangchow
as the japanese invasion force neared the city of hangchow the chinese 
moved it 500 miles upstream. the whole town.

population explosion
in 1965 a united nations report predicted that the world's population 
would rise to 5.7 billion by 1995. it did. 

logos
protein molecules produced in parallel evolutionary paths have exactly 
the same structure although other structures are possible. we are part 
of a cosmic pattern not random mutations. if we rewound evolution and 
ran it again we would end up with us. (lyall watson) 
(btw, this hypothesis could free anthropologists from the 'out of 
africa' model in describing human origins. the out-of-africa model is 
favored by those who believe that once a hominid appears the only way 
for others to appear is by transfer of genetic material from the 
predecessor. according to them h. sapiens evolved in africa and then 
migrated to the other continents. but if lyall is right then homo 
erectus could have evolved independently in africa and java and homo 
sapiens could have evolved independently in europe and africa. the weird 
and improbable migration stories needed to support out-of-africa are 
less likely than parallel evolution.)

evolution by script
you were once a one-celled creature, and a fish, and then an amphibian, 
and so on until you became man. gestation is evolution in microcosm. 
either evolution occurred according to a script or our dna molecules 
contain a memory of our past that spans eons. 

skim milk
if you drink skim milk to keep from gaining weight you should know that 
farmers use skim milk to fatten hogs.

big mouth
bull frogs can, and often do, swallow each other whole. 

rainy day tennis
if the courts too wet to practice your backhand or your spin serve do it 
in your mind. imagine yourself in a perfect serve motion again and 
again. your serve will improve as if you had physically practiced. 

the zone of tennis
in tennis, and in other sports i imagine, players sometimes find 
themselves in a mental state called a zone. in this state their play is 
effortless and perfect. unfortunately no one knows how to induce this 
supernatural state of mind at will.

phantom limbs
electron discharge photography, also called kirlian photography reveals 
an extra-body extension of ourselves some call the 'aura'. in kp of 
those that have recently lost a limb the missing part of the limb 
appears as a ghostly image. (btw, the light intensity in the kp aura is 
not uniform but has bright spots and these spots exactly correspond to 
the chinese acupuncture chart.)

light torture
a light flashing at the same frequency as your brain rhythm will drive 
you crazy. in some it can induce an epileptic seizure especially if the 
flashing light is triggered by the subject's own brain waves.

killer earthquakes
in the days following an earthquake the incidence of heart attacks rises 
to several times the normal rate.

brain waves
the brain constantly produces a complex electromagnetic rhythm. spectral 
analysis of this signal shows four main frequencies called alpha, beta, 
delta, and theta. the relative energy level of these frequencies depends 
on the state of the individual. delta is prominent in deep sleep, theta 
is associated with moodiness, alpha with relaxation, and beta with 
analytical thinking. if you are shown a dynamic image whose shape 
corresponds to your brain wave pattern you can deliberately change its 
shape (and your wave pattern).

britta and alice
alice and britta are identical teenage twins. without any communication 
between them they bought identical dresses in two different cities in 
denmark and wore them to their sister's graduation in copenhagen. a year 
ago they went on separate summer vacations one to spain and the other to 
slovakia. each returned to denmark with a bottle of rum and wearing a 
black blouse with white stripes. the blouses were acquired in spain and 
slovakia. their signatures are identical. they carry only one bank 
account and one credit card account between them. (hanne birgitte 
andersen) btw: does anyone have a clue about the physics of twinism? are 
they really two people? is there necessarily a one-to-one mapping 
cardinality between bodies and persons? 

alice and britta update
(march 96) this winter alice and britta bought exactly the same boots in 
different cities on the same day and around the same time. after they 
got home each called the other to tell her about the new boots. they had 
never discussed needing new boots or that they would go shopping that 
day. (btw: when they were born not even their mom could tell them apart 
so they were labeled 'a' and 'b' and that is how they got their names.) 
(hanne birgitte andersen)

the solar rhythm
our sun is a giant fusion reactor that not only radiates energy but 
sends out a constant stream of sub atomic particles that constitutes the 
solar atmosphere. we are inside this atmosphere. solar activity is not 
uniform. there are spots of solar activity called sunspots. the number 
of active sunspots varies over time in an 11-year rhythm superimposed on 
longer 45 and 90 year cycles. in addition the sun's magnetic field 
oscillates with a 22 year cycle. all these activities of the sun causes 
the aurora borealis and magnetic storms and high noise levels in our 
electromagnetic equipment. and the sunspot cycles correlate with famine, 
weather, the thickness of annual rings in trees, the number of icebergs, 
great vintage years of wine, and human behavior on earth. cyclical human 
behavior in turn causes cycles of economic boom and bust, war and peace, 
and expansion and contraction in artistic, literary, and scientific 
creativity. (sunspot data)

solar statistics
for the record, the sun has a radius of 7x10^8 meters, its mass is 
2x10^30 kg, its density is about 1.4 times that of water, and it 
consumes 4 million tons of hydrogen per second to produce 4x10^30 
megawatts of power. 

evil's number
a hydra-like seven-headed monster with horns rose from the sea. one of 
its heads had been killed with a sword but it healed. it performed scary 
miracles. it could shoot fire from the sky. another monster, this one 
goat-like also with horns, came out of the ground and was just as 
horrible. what they were after was people that would worship them. they 
would be nice to their devotees and mean to the others. to tell them 
apart the beast would put its name on the right hand and forehead of the 
devotees. the beast had a name; and the name could be converted to a 
number. the number is 666. (this is from revelation chapter 13. even the 
chapter number is scary. btw, 666 decimal is 1232 octal. in binary it is 
1010011010. you can play this by clapping on ones and not clapping on 
zeroes. you will get a haunting beat not unlike the ancient indian tabla 
rhythm called jhaptal. the binary complement of the beast's number, 
0101100101, is 357 decimal and 545 octal. one of the many bible sites is 
in louisville.)

obe=nde=cefk
according to ray fowler alien abductions (close encounters of the fourth 
kind) are similar to near death experiences and to out of the body 
experiences. he postulates that they are the same underlying phenomenon. 
death is the final abduction. humans are the larval form of the aliens 
and death is our metamorphosis to butterfly. we are them and they are 
us. he bases his theory on data obtained from abductees under hypnosis. 
(btw: sanderson's 1969 book 'uninvited visitors' also describes this 
larva model.)

magnetic navigation
you know that many animals make seasonal and carnal migrations across 
thousands of miles to precise locations. there is evidence that they do 
this with magnetic navigation. these critters are magnetically aware and 
use geomagnetism to locate precise positions on the globe. 

haarp
apparently our military is experimenting with some fanciful schemes in 
its new push into 'non lethal warfare'. the high frequency active 
auroral research program or haarp will use a 33-acre array of antennas 
in alaska to shoot a 3.6 megawatt focused beam of 2.8 to 10 mhz radio 
waves straight up into our ionosphere. weird military applications of 
haarp include earth penetrating tomography (to 'x-ray' the earth). the 
tethered satellite system may be a part of the haarp experiment with the 
tether as a giant resonating antenna in the sky for extremely low 
frequency radio waves.

ebola
there is a strange new virus (here is a mug shot) that is spreading in 
africa. apparently you get it from eating chimpanzees. blood comes out 
of your pores and you die a horrible death. the disease is highly 
contagious. they thought that they had it contained in zaire. but it has 
broken out anew in gabon (feb96).

ufo sighting?
a giant whirlwind with a bright light came from the north. it held an 
amber colored object. four humanoids came out of this object. each 
humanoid had four faces, four wings, two arms and legs, and hooves for 
feet. their bodies were like light. they could be instantly at any point 
in space without turning and without any detectable motion. they had 
something with them that looked like wheels. (ezekiel chapter 1) (btw: 
these are the good guys and they too have hooves.)

a sickening thought
you know that placebo can make sick people healthy. it also works the 
other way around. sickly thoughts can make healthy people sick. for 
example if children of patients are told that they are at risk of a 
congenital disease they get sick with it even in cases where the genetic 
connection is later found to be false. graphic depiction's of the 
symptoms and pathology of illness by advertisers of their remedies may 
actually be making us sick. flip the channel to stay healthy.

collapsing stars
has anyone actually seen a star where a black hole is now? before it 
collapsed? or is the invisible point mass of fantastic density an 
artifact we need to force the data to fit our model of the universe? 
(btw: we once thought that the heavenly bodies were carried across the 
sky by rotating crystal spheres. you couldn't see the spheres because 
they were invisible and some planets at times went backwards because 
they were attached to the crystal sphere with invisible swivel arms. 
there was no other evidence of the existence of these artifacts other 
than their usefulness in the crystal sphere theory of the universe.)

man see man do
subconsciously we are constantly imitating each other. it's natures 
algorithm that builds homogeneous and cohesive societies and cultures.

upwards and forwards
we are a progressive society. today we expect that tomorrow will be 
better and it will bring us more technology and more information. 
yesterday's knowledge is old and stale and the older the staler. but it 
wasn't always this way. in medieval europe all knowledge and technology 
came from the ancients. civilization went backwards. knowledge 
contracted. scribes scoured ancient texts for knowledge. few could read 
these texts and fewer could understand them. "everything they knew was 
old". (james burke) (btw: atlantis theorists hold that civilization is a 
lot older than we think it is because it is not linear but cyclical and 
what we think of as history is only the linear portion of this cycle.)

do you think in words?
once we could think of anything but could not communicate the thought. 
then we invented language. now we can only think what language will let 
us but we can communicate the thought. (we use music and art to overcome 
this limitation. also there is evidence that we use direct thought 
transfer with telepathy although these thoughts may or may not be 
constructed with language. we of course also communicate with scent and 
body language in ways that are sublime as they are mysterious.)

train wrecks
in train wrecks the number of passengers in damaged cars is less than 
average by so much and so often that it cannot be a chance occurrence. 
somehow we know not to get on them. (work done by william cox and 
reported by lyall watson)

spacey boxers
many boxers cannot recall all the rounds of a bout just completed. many 
a winning fighter has no memory at all that he fought the round in which 
he knocked out his opponent.

spacey reader
has this happened to you? you are reading a book but thinking about 
something else. you read page after page. you did read those pages. all 
those sentences. but you have no memory of what you read. how is this 
possible? 

smelly people
you know that you have a unique fingerprint. there is no other that is 
exactly like yours. you also have a unique smell. in scent too, there is 
only one of you. 
(btw: wherever you go, whatever you do, you leave little traces of your 
unique smell and that is how dogs can track you down. some say you also 
leave a unique psychic imprint and that is how one is able to tell so 
much about you by simply holding a t-shirt you once wore or a pencil you 
once used.)

blind vision
some blind people can describe an object by holding their hand above it 
and without touching it.

chariots of the gods
an ancient map in turkey shows the earth as it would look from space; 
there is an ancient iron pillar in india that does not rust; there are 
patterns in the plains of peru that are not discernible except from an 
aircraft; ancient texts describe chariots with wheels of fire descending 
from the sky; there are pre-historic paintings of space helmets. (erich 
von daniken) 

the value of information
laboratory mice are given a choice of path 1 or path 2. in either case 
the probability that food exists at the end of the path is 50% but once 
they commit to path 1 they get advance information about the existence 
of food. path 2 contains no information. all mice eventually choose path 
1 although on average their chances of finding food is equal down either 
path.

magnetic plants
if you place a very powerful electromagnet over some germinating corn 
seeds they will sprout with the roots going upward and the leaves 
digging into the ground. (dave krider)

mcdino burgers?
anthropologists think that our predecessors, homo habilus and erectus, 
appeared 2.5 million years ago and we, homo sapiens, have been around 
only a couple of hundred thousand years give or take. but they could be 
way off. new evidence shows that we co-existed with dinos which 
disappeared 65 million years ago. we may have been around here for 150 
million years and undergone many boom and bust cycles of civilization 
prior to this one.

aquatic mammals
fish crawled out of the water, evolved into mammals, and then crawled 
back into the water. it took land living to develop mammals because land 
living is harsh. ocean living is too easy to evolve into anything more 
complex than fish. this is the weird malthusian irony of evolution. if 
you solve all your problems you reach an evolutionary dead end. 

what did he know and when did he know it?
was the michelson-morley experiment an independent verification of 
einstein's special relativity or was special relativity a theory built 
around the mm results? the mm result was well known in europe in 1905 
when einstein published his special relativity paper. einstein claimed 
he did not know about mm when he wrote his paper but there is evidence
 he did. 
(btw: einstein studied physics at zurich polytechnic college or 
eidgenoessische technische hochschule, as they call it in switzerland. 
it's still there. from zurich main station take the number 6 tram. it's 
the same tram that einstein used to take and legend has it that it was 
on this tram that he spaced out and imagined himself riding on a beam of 
light and came up with the idea that the speed of electromagnetic waves 
was independent of the observer.) 

trimming and cooking
these are activities of some empirical researchers in science. trimming 
= modifying the data to create a false sense of precision. cooking = 
getting rid of data that don't fit the theory to be proven. a famous 
example is the shift measurements taken during the 1922 eclipse to 
support einstein's general relativity.

lost in ether
there is no ether and therefore no universal frame of reference, say the 
physicists. any frame of reference is as good as any other. therefore 
the earth is as good a frame of reference as any. we cannot know or even 
care whether the planets are going around the sun or if everything is 
going around the earth. (btw: the still earth model actually has an 
advantage over other frames of reference. it renders the 
michelson-morley results consistent with the existence of the ether. 
another btw: the initial reaction of the church to copernicus, that the 
moving earth was a mere computational convenience and not reality is 
consistent with special relativity.) 

life on mars and peace on earth
pictures taken of the martian surface by the viking orbiters in 1976 
show ruins of an ancient civilization in a plain called cydonia. these 
people just vanished or they went underground (literally) or 'we' left 
mars to colonize earth when it got too cold there. we know they looked 
like us because part of these ruins is a human face. reagan and 
gorbachev knew about this and it is this knowledge that brought about 
the end of the cold war. another secret the govt is keeping from us is 
that there are glass domes and grecian temples on the moon that were 
photographed by apollo 12 and 14 astronauts. he says they is evidence of 
an ancient civilization. these structures and the ones on mars are 
somehow related to stonehenge and to 'hyper dimensional physics'.(
richard c hoagland) (btw: exercise caution when interpreting richard for 
his is a commercial enterprise.)(btw2: here is a copy of richard's 
picture of the moon.)

hyper dimensional plants
bruce depalma planted grass on two identical platters, one fixed and one 
rotating at 78 rpm. the grass on the rotating platter grew taller. 
richard hoagland says that this experiment validates his hyper 
dimensional physics but he doesn't say how. when asked he talks about 
james clerk maxwell, edwin land, bob lazar, john wheeler, and a 
conspiracy by the government to bamboozle us into thinking that einstein 
and planck were right and richard is wrong.

mars and creation
in 1989 the russian phobos craft arrived in martian orbit and took 
pictures and made measurements and then mysteriously died. orthodox 
russian priests were invited to the phobos control center to see 
pictures of mars and discuss creation. (richard c hoagland)

hoaglandian physics
richard has invented a new physics which he says is derived from 
maxwell's equations. he calls it 'hyper dimensional physics'. maxwell 
was the guy that said that electricity and magnetism are two 
manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon. if you move a wire 
across a magnet you will get electricity in the wire. if you move a wire 
carrying an electric current you will get a magnetic field. the hoagland 
extension is that if a wire and a magnet are both moving in a 
gravitational field you will get a current without relative motion 
between the wire and magnet.

the religion of relativity
does anyone actually understand the theory of relativity? even einstein 
was not sure. for example is relativity an ether theory or a no-ether 
theory? einstein waffled on this. in the end he wrote "i consider it 
quite possible that physics cannot be based on field concepts; in which 
case nothing remains of relativity and gravitation and nothing remains 
of modern physics".
(btw: descartes is turning over in his grave. his idea was to use math 
to model the observed universe. but now the math has taken over and we 
are asked to accept palpably absurd notions about the universe because 
they fit the math.)(btw2: also read this description of relativity 
weirdness by mirza abdullah baig

like sheep
if scotsmen could clone would they clone sheep? they can and they have. 
we can now mass produce identical genetically engineered farm animals. 
it is the dawning of a new age. (btw suppose they made a clone of you. 
would it be you? would you then watch yourself grow up all over 
again?)(btw2: here's how to do it. 1. take the yet unspecialized cells 
from a 9-day old embryo and grow them in a petri dish. 2. from an 
unfertilized ovum remove the genetic material. 3. fuse ovum and embryo 
cell together with an electric current. 4. place the 'fertilized' ovum 
in a surrogate mother.)(a note from juan compos.)

geological holocaust
imagine this. utah and texas have seceded from the union and california, 
devastated by 9.0 earthquakes, has physically receded from the 
continent. all over the world volcanoes belch clouds of dust and 
sulfurous gases. there are giant storms everywhere with winds up to 250 
miles per hour. this is our future as seen by gordon michael scallion. 
he says he is an 'intuitive'. he has visions. and lately his visions 
have been of 'earth changes' of holocaust proportions.(
btw: ed dames used technical remote viewing to visit our future and 
found that an ecological holocaust is imminent. it will wipe out 80% of 
us.)

prophecy
in the 1950s jeane dixon predicted that we would go to war with the 
soviets in 1958 over some islands near china, that the soviets would 
land the first man on the moon, and that (labor leader) walter reuther 
would be president in 1964. but she was revered by the nation as a 
prophet because she also predicted that we would assassinate jfk. 

the oracle of delphi
thousands of years ago atop mt. parnassus by the sea in greece there was 
a giant temple of marble where they imprisoned a virginal young girl 
they called 'the oracle' and burned a hallucinogenic incense that made 
the girl insane. when asked questions she babbled incoherently and this 
babble was interpreted into prophecy by the priests. within a few years 
the girl died from the toxins and was replaced. the prophecy business 
brought power and fortune to the priests. (btw: their predictions were 
lousy but cleverly stated in riddles so that any outcome would be 
defensible. for example, a north african king who wanted to know whether 
to go to war was told that "there would be a great victory". feeling 
assured of victory he went to war and lost. the great victory turned to 
be for the other guy.) 

liver damage
chinese herbal medicine (chm) normally prescribed for skin ailments is 
thought to cause liver damage. analysis did not reveal any known toxins. 
it did reveal 40 different plant species, animal parts, fungus, and 
inorganic material. the common herbal ingredients in all skin ailment 
preparations are dictamnus dasycarpus, paeonia sp, and rehmannia 
glutinosa. (st thomas hospital, london, uk) (btw: other oriental herbs 
also known to cause liver damage are kinshigan (ikeda et al) and 
sho-saiko-to (kubo et al)).

frank edwards
on 9/23/1880 a farmer named david lang vanished into thin air in front 
of several witnesses in gallatin, tn, and was never heard from again. in 
'stranger than science' frank edwards supplies a large list of 
documented but unexplained weirdness

budget travel
robert monroe of the monroe institute of virginia often finds himself 
outside of his physical body. in that state robert can see his own 
physical body in a motionless sleep state. he is also able to travel 
instantly to any point in space or time but is invisible to others 
except as a wisp of gray smoke. he says he can teach anyone to do it 
using a training system consisting of numerous focus levels. a necessary 
first step is focus 10, a state where the body is asleep and the mind is 
awake and alert. this state can be induced with a sound harmonic that 
results when you play a 100 hz tone in one ear and a 104 hz tone in the 
other ear. with training and practice one can reach focus 23, the state 
in which the out-of-body-experience (obe) can occur. (btw: how much of 
our technological progress do you suppose consists of clever solutions 
to imagined problems?)(btw2: there are at least two web docs that 
describe obe techniques: one of them is referred to by its author as the 
visualization method and the other is allegedly a summary of the monroe 
technique.)

remote viewing and space exploration
according to courtney brown of the farsight institute human beings can 
be trained to project their awareness of things thru space and time. 
both the cia and the u.s. military have used this technique for spying. 
now courtney is using it for space exploration and for historical and 
geographical research. he has adapted the military's methodology to a 
'scientific' method of rv research or 'srv' in which multiple 
individuals independently corroborate a known object (the control) as 
well as the unknown object. he used srv to study mars, ufo's, et's, and 
ancient history. (courtney brown, in his book, "cosmic voyages")

the information theory of obe
according to apollo 14 astronaut edgar mitchell all the information 
about the universe is everywhere in the universe. obe (out of body 
experiences) and rv (remote viewing) are really one and the same. in 
obe, astral projection or soul travel the person does not 'travel' but 
becomes aware of the information. descriptions of the surfaces of 
planets by psychics have been confirmed by pictures taken later by 
spacecraft. as an alternate to data communication and transportation 
technology we could just log on to the cosmic database. the connection 
happens in a flash of insight which edgar calls 'a moment of knowing'. 
it happened to edgar while in outer space.(btw: both the cia and the dod 
dabble in rv) 
(jamal's corollary: edgar's information theory of rv complement's 
lyall's theory of information. according to lyall, our information 
gathering system, which is designed primarily to catch prey and avoid 
predators, filters out background noise and presents only unusual events 
to us as information. this means that if we were born with god standing 
in front of us saying 'hi i am god' continually this event would soon be 
classified as noise and discarded as a source of information. we would 
no longer see or hear him except possibly in an idle moment when our 
filtration system is out of gear. it is then that we might experience 
edgar's moment of knowing.)

newton's apple
a quaint notion in physics is that of sir isaac newton contemplating a 
falling apple to come up with the theory of gravity. in fact he stole 
the idea from his buddy robert hooke. hooke analyzed kepler's 'equal 
area in equal time' hypothesis of orbital paths and realized that a 
force of attraction between the bodies that is inversely proportional to 
distance could be used to cartesianly produce kepler's orbits. he 
explained this to newton in a letter.

the marco polo myth
old marco probably only made it as far as constantinople, then (1271 ad) 
the western frontier of kublai khan's great empire. there he came upon 
arab writings about the great kingdom. marco's stories are strangely 
similar to these accounts. it turns out old kublai kept a guest book and 
marco is not on it. (frances wood)

the power of visualization
weird mental tennis tricks that actually work. (i) before each point 
visualize how the point will be played out. (ii) also before each point 
imagine what the score will be after the next point. say this score to 
yourself. (iii) during shot preparation visualize (without looking) 
where your shot will land. (iv) after a good serve or stroke do a 
pantomime imitation of yourself.

the side blotched lizard
the sexuality of these lizards goes like this. there are three kinds of 
males. in descending order of aggressiveness and ascending order of 
intelligence they are orange males, blue males, and yellow males. 
oranges keep large harems. blues keep small harems. and yellows 
impersonate females to sneak into the harems for a quickie. the dumb 
oranges fall for this trick but the blues don't. so the population cycle 
goes like this. oranges predominate and have most of the females. 
yellows impregnate the orange harems. orange population declines and 
blues predominate and build harems that are protected from yellows. 
oranges muscle in and take over females from blues. orange predominates. 
and so on.(curt lively, indiana university, bloomington

mad cow disease
bovine spongiform encephalopathy (bse) turns a cow's brain to sponge. 
the cow becomes disoriented, foams at the mouth, and dies within days. 
it is feared that the virus has jumped species and has developed a taste 
for human brains. the disease is currently contained in the british 
isles. (btw: sheep get a similar disease known in scotland as 
'scrapies'. it is possible that cows got the virus from the sheep. 

more on bse
there have been 12 confirmed cases of cjd in britain (20jan97).there 
could be a human epidemic. millions were exposed in the 80's when cattle 
with bse were slaughtered and made into cheap processed food. cjd has a 
possible 20 year incubation period. a time bomb is ticking. cjd has 
existed in humans for centuries but the 12 cases mentioned above show 
new characteristics which have much in common with bse and the number of 
cases is in excess of what one would expect. the human symptoms are 
memory loss, a loss of personality, loss of co-ordination and muscle 
control, hallucinations, and certain death. anybody who ate infected 
meat is at risk.(jimmy topham). 

dog eat dog
in "advanced" economies these days dead and destroyed animals including 
roadkill get processed into feed for other animals. a stray dog "put to 
sleep" by the animal shelter may end up as pelletized dog food. we have 
turned our animals, including naturally herbivorous farm animals, into 
cannibals. it is one of the ways that scrapies spread from sheep to cows 
(as bse) and to humans (as cjd). 

scared shitless
if you bring laboratory mice out of the lab into an unfamiliar 
surrounding some of them will scurry around to investigate. others will 
freeze and 'defecate copiously'. it's genetic. three segments of the dna 
are responsible. (jonathan flint, john radcliffe hospital, oxford

celestial pollution
much of the outer solar system is not empty but smoky. in some parts of 
its journey galileo encountered 20,000 smoke particles per day. the 
smoke might be from volcanic eruptions in jupiter's moons but we aren't 
really sure. (eberhard grun, max planck institute of physics

the world according to lyall
life is an open thermodynamic system. it works by constant communication 
of materials and information with other living things. every critter is 
part of an intricate web and this web is a self-maintaining system that 
is inseparable from cosmic forces and rhythms. (lyall watson in 
supernature) 

nde (near death experience)
dannion brinkley of south carolina was struck by lightning so hard that 
his shoes became welded to the floor. he was dead for 28 minutes and 
then was alive again. while dead he saw light creatures and crystal 
cities. he also saw his whole life pass before him in a replay of every 
detail. he says we are really light beings and that we are more real 
there than here. death is a return to our original form. his nde left 
him with spiritual powers. he wrote a book about it. (another nde 
account)

specie jumping
microbes that normally infect certain species will sometimes mutate and 
migrate to other species as a means of survival. what's really scary is 
that we don't understand how they do it. ebola migrated from monkeys to 
humans. encephalitis and lyme disease have also successfully migrated 
from wild animals and established themselves in human hosts. recently a 
rat virus began to infect humans in arizona and southern california. and 
of course bse has made the leap from cattle to humans. something to 
think about before engineering microbes for pest control. designing bugs 
is different from designing cars. cars don't mutate.

american pigs
the epidemic that killed the most humans was not the bubonic plague nor 
cholera but a flu that broke out in 1918 and killed 20 million of us. 
the virus originated in american swine but the pigs fought back so 
viciously that the creature was forced to mutate and jump species in 
order to survive. (jeffery taubenberger, armed forces institute of 
pathology.) 

the economics of dying
are cigarette smokers a net cost to society? maybe. when they get sick 
they are unproductive and they consume medical costs. but they do us all 
a favor by dying early and not collecting as much of their social 
security benefits as they would otherwise.

how to bribe god
burn dollar bills in a furnace with a tall chimney. the smoke will rise 
all the way there and god does not mind receiving these funds in smoke 
form. this ritual is widely practiced in parts of asia except that they 
don't use real money. (domingo tavella)

beyond weird and into absurd
according to judi pope zion the french nuclear tests have opened up a 
crack in the bottom of the pacific ocean and the ocean is leaking into 
the belly of the planet. she also claims that the scallion-type earth 
changes will selectively drown the most polluted parts of the earth so 
that the ocean can heal them. she regularly communicates with pleaidians 
and andromedans and knows that a staged ufo landing will be made on or 
before november 30 1996 by aliens who want to enslave us. and if that 
does not happen then we will be enslaved by the debit card and the 'one 
world government'. (i suppose the wbt part of this item is judi 
herself.)

college graduates
many of our college graduates are unable to perform simple arithmetic or 
to write or think coherently. some survey results: 50% could not 
interpret a bus schedule. 44% could not identify the contrast between 
two opposing views in a newspaper article. 87% could not compute the 
cost of carpeting a room even with a calculator. 84% could not name the 
u.s. president at the start of the korean war. 92% could not identify 
the source of the quote 'government of the people by the people and for 
the people'. (jeffrey wallin)

biased sampling
if you feel that flies prefer white surfaces and mosquitoes like to buzz 
your ear it is because it is more difficult for you to observe the other 
flies and mosquitoes. we are not random samplers. our perception of the 
universe is biased. 

the logarithm of time
our perception of time is not linear but logarithmic. recent time 
intervals are exaggerated while distant intervals are compressed. no 
matter how long we have lived, we live mostly in the present. 

free will
if we have free will why do we so freely make predictable choices? 
eugene stanley of boston university thinks that human behavior in stock 
markets can be modeled with scaling theory. he claims that short term 
price volatility in stock markets is an unbiased predictor of long term 
volatility.

psychic dogs
your dog knows you are coming home before you get there. it's not just a 
time of day thing. test dogs anticipated their owner's arrival even when 
the arrival times were randomized. but even if it were a time thing, how 
does a dog tell time?

a time to die
statistics show that the distribution of deaths over the seasons is not 
uniform. europeans tend to wait for winter to make their exit to club 
mud and in india calls from the horizontal phone booth are more likely 
in summer. 

the power of love
is there a co-worker, neighbor, relative, or customer that is a mean 
inconsiderate moron or asshole that you hate? love this person. love all 
such persons and wish them well until you are rid of all hatred, 
acrimony, and envy. you will experience a spiritual transformation that 
will have a profound and positive impact on every facet of your life. we 
don't understand the mechanism of this process but there is considerable 
evidence of a causal connection between love and spirituality.

psychic valentina
in july 1996 i visited russia where i met a woman named valentina. we 
became friends and spent many many hours together talking constantly; we 
effortlessly communicated many thoughts and complex ideas. yet neither 
speaks or understands the other's language. when she speaks i don't 
understand the words but if i stop trying to understand the words i 
understand her. 

rube goldberg pen
in the late '60s we spent over a million dollars developing a zero 
gravity pen that works in space. the russians use pencils. 

environmental holocaust 
the ukraine dumps 19 cubic kilometers per year of raw sewage into its 
water basins 3.2 cubic kilometers of which is toxic. it discharges 9.5 
million tons of harmful substances into the atmosphere 3 million tons of 
which is sulfur dioxide. the chernobyl nuclear power plant accident has 
turned several million hectares of some of the world's best farmland 
into radioactive wasteland and 1600 villages into ghost towns. the life 
expectancy of ukranian men has gone down by 10 years; and unexplained 
deaths, cancers, immunodefiencies, and mental disorders are on the rise. 


weird economics
in 1965 you could fly from san francisco to india round trip for $1250. 
you still can in 1997. but since then the price of cars has increased 
and that of computers has decreased by an order of magnitude. it is 
possible to compute just about any value for inflation by changing the 
mix of goods to price. 

chicken little economics
it got started around 1975 and it continues unabated in 1997. economists 
are lining up to publish their particular version of the coming decline 
of america. the decline is supposed to be caused by one or more of 
these: the japanese, the european union, asia, china, the end of the 
cold war, nafta, giant sucking sounds, depletion of natural resources, 
environmental disasters, budget deficits, trade deficits, or just plain 
dry rot within. meanwhile back at the ranch america is quietly marching 
ahead and extending its considerable economic, technological, and 
military lead over all of the above. 

technology
the human race is in a pathetic condition. it all started with the 
industrial revolution. technology is to blame. what makes us tick is the 
existence of attainable goals that require effort. technology has taken 
that away; and we have sunk into an emotional abyss. leftism and 
political correctness are symptomatic of our condition. (unabomber) 

too black to sing
legendary operatic star marian anderson was barred from performing at 
constitution hall by the dar (daughters of the american revolution) 
because she was black. (btw: this is why eleanor roosevelt resigned from 
the dar.) 

close encounter
in 1989 a rock half a mile in diameter intersected the earth's orbit but 
missed us by 6 hours. we did not know about it until it had passed. it's 
hard to see rocks in space because they are non radiative. if it had 
slammed into us the total energy release would have exceeded that of all 
the nuclear weapons on earth. 

weird world
the world is getting weirder according to the fortean times 

the big bang theory of god
at first there was only god and nothing else so she was lonely. in her 
torment she blew herself up into bits. we are those bits. (courtney 
brown) 

old hippies don't die
our health, sexuality, and longevity may get a big boost if dhea does to 
humans what it has done to laboratory mice. (btw: james michael howard
 compared dhea in humans and chimps and came up with a theory that dhea 
is actually responsible for human evolution.) 

the devil and mrs chung
mrs chung of los angeles was possessed by a demon so that she would "at 
times refuse to obey her husband"; so exorcists drove the demon out by 
beating upon her body. she died in the process. (l.a. times, april 7, 
1997) 

electric cars
contrary to popular belief electric cars do not reduce pollution. they 
increase both fossil fuel consumption and pollution but they move the 
pollution out of the city (where they are) and into the hinterland 
(where the power generators are). 

rube goldberg cutting boards
trees manufacture chemicals to fight bacteria. so wood kills bacteria. 
use wooden cutting boards instead of plastic impgregnated with 
antibacterial chemicals. (bill wattenburg, kgo radio) 

shakespeare
he is now popular with the refined and cultured but in his time his was 
theater for the masses. 

spiderman
a vest made of fabric woven from spun spider webs is bullet proof. (paul 
harvey, abc radio) 

murder capital of the world
the distinction belongs to colombia where the murder rate is an order of 
magnitude higher than that in the united states. less than 2% of the 
murders there are ever investigated and a miniscule portion of those 
result in convictions. (pacifica radio, berkeley) 

virtual moon trips
if we actually did go to the moon in the apollo program then why did the 
astronauts not get fried by the van allen radiation belt and why did the 
10,000 pounds of thrust of the landing module not create a visible 
crater on the lunar surface? there are other vexing questions. for 
instance, the lunar rover does not fit in the landing module; and if 
going to the moon was such a good idea why did we stop? (james collyer 
in "paper moon") 

bureaucratic boondoggle 
in the 1970s nasa made two funding requests to nixon, a space station 
and a new winged spacecraft to 'shuttle' crew and material for building 
the space station. nixon refused to fund both and funded only the 
shuttle portion. so nasa built it anyway to continue their existence 
although, without a space station to construct, they had no idea what to 
do with it. (timothy ferris) 
(btw: according to tim, nasa's space prgram is based on a blueprint 
sketched out in 1952 by german rocket scientist wernher von braun, who 
incidentally also designed the shuttle way back when.) 
(btw2: what's really scary about nasa is that they are spending our 
money on projects whose only apparent purpose is to titillate us into 
giving them money...) 

die laughing
it is not just an expression. laughing is a form of pulmonary failure 
and if it persists it can kill by asphyxiation. (why do we do it?) 

price distortions
in bangladesh today (1997) for $5 you can have a beer or travel by train 
clear across the country in first class. 

Expensive finger slip
(1994) Juan Pablo Davila, working for the Chilean government-owned Codelco Company, accidentally types "buy" when he means to type "sell" while trading commodities on his computer. After realizing his mistake, Davila tries to rectify it with a frenzy of buying and selling, ultimately losing approximately 0.5 percent of the country's gross national product. His name has since entered the language: "Davilar," meaning "to screw up royally."