NSA -- No Such Agency
NSF -- Not Sufficent Funds
NIH -- Not Invented Here
NASA -- Not a Safe Activity
DOE -- Dead on Emergence
PAC -- People Are Crazy
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
the risk of mass death like PT repeating itself
"Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them."
In the history of the past billion years, there was an event ("PT") which killed every living member of most species of life on the surface of the earth, through levels of poison (H2S) and radiation high enough to kill every human. What do you say when the world's most prominent expert on that event says we are firmly on track to repeating what happened then? It's not a simple story, but it is a serious one.
======================================
For me, the story began when the Geosciences Directorate of NSF hosted and promoted a talk by Peter Ward, author of Under a Green Sky, who told this story.
As a first step, I studied and restudied his book; I have posted a condensed summary of what it actually says here:
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2012/01/condensed-summary-of-under-green-sky.html
But being a very critical and independent scientist myself, I do not take his story at face value.
Ward basically forsees two steps, which he thinks will happen if we
let CO2 to get as high as 1000ppm (which
is consistent with current policies to expand fossil fuels):
1. Due to melting ice and rise of temperature at the poles, we may
shift the pattern of ocean currents to today's
"mixed ocean" to a "stratified ocean." Climate deniers often talk
about how CO2 was much higher at the time of dinosaurs
(really, paleozoic and mesozoic time) than it has been since mammals
started ruling the earth. That is true -- but it
also led to a stratified ocean at those times, and repeated (10 or 12)
mass extinctions due to certain instabilities in that
kind of ocean. Of course, that won't happen immediately, and those who
don't care whether everyone dies even as soon as 10 or 20
years from now would regard it as quite irrelevant to their values.
(But this is a century-off kind of risk.)
2. A "trigger," which he claims is due to the RATE of increase of CO2.
Since CO2 is now increasing at a RATE
a hundred times what it did in the past extinctions (all of which
occurred at peaks of CO2, 10 of 12 at peaks after
rapid increase of CO2), he says that will also follow as the night the
day if we get to a stratified ocean now.
In 2009, I saw his impressive graph of extinctions versus CO2 ... but
was not convinced. He said that the RATE
of CO2 matters because the ocean can buffer slow changes in CO2; rapid
changes lead to acid, a critical trigger.
But CRS said we should worry about pH as low as 7.7 (not so acid) by
2100 in the worst scenarios.
This week, I went back to the actual technical paper which is the real
origin of the kind of theory Ward was proposing:
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/33/5/397.full
Seminal work from Pennsylvania... I wish I had tracked it down in
2009, when I was working in Specter's office, attached to EPW work. And there is also a paper on the history of acidity in the
oceans which goes with it.
The bottom line: acidity isn't really the trigger here, at least not
in H2S production in the ocean.
The triggers -- once there is a stratified ocean -- are simply further
current changes, supporting anoxia and warmth, the two
triggers for greater H2S production by creatures "under the chemocline."
Anoxia is already the prime suspect in the death of coral reefs, more
than ocean acidity. We are getting lots of it from sources like
agricultural runoff,
in the age of fertilizer. That plus warming and further current
changes could get to an H2S event without waiting for a low pH.
Can we predict THEM? Or change THEM? That is not so clear.
HOWEVER -- the two URLs I cited last time are very important, too, as
I discussion.
One can find Kung's 2005 paper in google scholar (I searched on Kung
PSU, and immediately recognized
which was the relevant one, cited by Ward, whose URL I sent you yesterday).
When I did that -- google scholar lets you see links to all 158 papers
which have cited Kung's paper since then,
many giving hard data confirmation from other avenues, a few
skeptical. I read through all of them yesterday;
for some I only read abstracts because of "$30 per click", but they
seemed unlikely to change the story which emerged from the others.
It seems clear that MOST upwelling regions of the ocean suffered from
the anoxia (and then H2S) problem
Kung discussed. But not all. Kung's original paper discussed this. The
most intense skeptic (who said his model is better than Kung's) said
that that volume of H2S would not be enough to zap the ozone layer (on
top of poisoning everyone); however, he said it would cause an OH-
deficit which would result in methane causing the same effect.
As I think about the implications... if ONLY the north pole became
de-iced and warm, that should logically be enough to
allow a stratified ocean in the northern hemisphere but not the south.
That would still be a rather serious problem.
Ward talked at the end about the need for more understanding of
thermohaline currents, how they can change radically
(e.g. in older earth history)... and that does seem to be the key to
understanding when stratified oceans become mass killers.
=============
Best of luck. We need it.
In the history of the past billion years, there was an event ("PT") which killed every living member of most species of life on the surface of the earth, through levels of poison (H2S) and radiation high enough to kill every human. What do you say when the world's most prominent expert on that event says we are firmly on track to repeating what happened then? It's not a simple story, but it is a serious one.
======================================
For me, the story began when the Geosciences Directorate of NSF hosted and promoted a talk by Peter Ward, author of Under a Green Sky, who told this story.
As a first step, I studied and restudied his book; I have posted a condensed summary of what it actually says here:
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2012/01/condensed-summary-of-under-green-sky.html
But being a very critical and independent scientist myself, I do not take his story at face value.
Ward basically forsees two steps, which he thinks will happen if we
let CO2 to get as high as 1000ppm (which
is consistent with current policies to expand fossil fuels):
1. Due to melting ice and rise of temperature at the poles, we may
shift the pattern of ocean currents to today's
"mixed ocean" to a "stratified ocean." Climate deniers often talk
about how CO2 was much higher at the time of dinosaurs
(really, paleozoic and mesozoic time) than it has been since mammals
started ruling the earth. That is true -- but it
also led to a stratified ocean at those times, and repeated (10 or 12)
mass extinctions due to certain instabilities in that
kind of ocean. Of course, that won't happen immediately, and those who
don't care whether everyone dies even as soon as 10 or 20
years from now would regard it as quite irrelevant to their values.
(But this is a century-off kind of risk.)
2. A "trigger," which he claims is due to the RATE of increase of CO2.
Since CO2 is now increasing at a RATE
a hundred times what it did in the past extinctions (all of which
occurred at peaks of CO2, 10 of 12 at peaks after
rapid increase of CO2), he says that will also follow as the night the
day if we get to a stratified ocean now.
In 2009, I saw his impressive graph of extinctions versus CO2 ... but
was not convinced. He said that the RATE
of CO2 matters because the ocean can buffer slow changes in CO2; rapid
changes lead to acid, a critical trigger.
But CRS said we should worry about pH as low as 7.7 (not so acid) by
2100 in the worst scenarios.
This week, I went back to the actual technical paper which is the real
origin of the kind of theory Ward was proposing:
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/33/5/397.full
Seminal work from Pennsylvania... I wish I had tracked it down in
2009, when I was working in Specter's office, attached to EPW work. And there is also a paper on the history of acidity in the
oceans which goes with it.
The bottom line: acidity isn't really the trigger here, at least not
in H2S production in the ocean.
The triggers -- once there is a stratified ocean -- are simply further
current changes, supporting anoxia and warmth, the two
triggers for greater H2S production by creatures "under the chemocline."
Anoxia is already the prime suspect in the death of coral reefs, more
than ocean acidity. We are getting lots of it from sources like
agricultural runoff,
in the age of fertilizer. That plus warming and further current
changes could get to an H2S event without waiting for a low pH.
Can we predict THEM? Or change THEM? That is not so clear.
HOWEVER -- the two URLs I cited last time are very important, too, as
I discussion.
One can find Kung's 2005 paper in google scholar (I searched on Kung
PSU, and immediately recognized
which was the relevant one, cited by Ward, whose URL I sent you yesterday).
When I did that -- google scholar lets you see links to all 158 papers
which have cited Kung's paper since then,
many giving hard data confirmation from other avenues, a few
skeptical. I read through all of them yesterday;
for some I only read abstracts because of "$30 per click", but they
seemed unlikely to change the story which emerged from the others.
It seems clear that MOST upwelling regions of the ocean suffered from
the anoxia (and then H2S) problem
Kung discussed. But not all. Kung's original paper discussed this. The
most intense skeptic (who said his model is better than Kung's) said
that that volume of H2S would not be enough to zap the ozone layer (on
top of poisoning everyone); however, he said it would cause an OH-
deficit which would result in methane causing the same effect.
As I think about the implications... if ONLY the north pole became
de-iced and warm, that should logically be enough to
allow a stratified ocean in the northern hemisphere but not the south.
That would still be a rather serious problem.
Ward talked at the end about the need for more understanding of
thermohaline currents, how they can change radically
(e.g. in older earth history)... and that does seem to be the key to
understanding when stratified oceans become mass killers.
=============
Best of luck. We need it.
condensed summary of "Under A Green Sky"
UNDER A GREEN SKY BY PETER WARD: TECHNICAL SUMMARY NOTES
Notes by P.J.Werbos, Jan 8, 2012. Book costs $7 from Amazon.
The book begins with extensive discussion of Ward’s personal role and prior history of the field. Detailed citations by chapter are on pages 205-224.
The first four chapters discuss what led up to Ward’s theory – how we know that the PT dieoff was the worst dieoff in the history of earth, what other major dieoffs were like, and what the earlier inadequate theories were like.
Chapter 1:
Page 18 gives a graph from Norman Neville showing how many families of life were
killed off by various extinctions. PT, at the start of the Mesozoic era, was the biggest. Ward was part of the group which verified the Alavarez theory that the end-of-mesozoic dieoff (KT) was caused by an asteroid impact, but gives extensive evidence explaining the new consensus that none of the other big extinctions were caused that way.
Pages 24-25: C12/C13 isotope ratios tell us when there are big dieoffs of plant life on earth. At KT it shows a massive death of plants, but a total recovery in less than 100,000 years – a”single dip depression.”
Page 27: big “flood basalts” indicate when and where huge outbreaks of volcanoes have occurred. The big outbreaks of volcanoes match the big extinctions. The biggest of all was the “Siberian traps” (volcanoes) leading to PT. Next biggest was TJ,
the extinction which marks the boundary between the Triassic and the Jurassic, the first two of the three eras in the Mesozoic.
Page 29: Two big shelled organisms, cousins of clams, teemed in the oceans for most of its history: ammonites and nautiloids. Ward visited Zumaya, Spain, and showed the ammonites went extinct at KT, but nautiloids survived.
Chapter 2: The Overlooked Extinction:
Even after the dieoff of dinosaurs, there was a big dieoff of mammals, eliminating many basic types, at the Paleocene/Eocene boundary (P/E), and also a dieoff in the middle of the Cretaceous (late Mesozoic), which are instructive examples.
Page 43: Just as C12/C13 isotope ratios give us an historic measure of plant dieoffs, O16/O18 ratios give us an historic measure of the temperature of earth.
Page 45: Kennett/Stott report new data on P/E (Nature 1991): deep ocean warms suddenly and big dieoff of plants in deep ocean
Page 46: Kunio Kaiho 1991 says that the P/E dieoff was due to low O2 in the water. Why? Warm bottom had come from warm tropical surface waters where evaporation makes surface saltier, denser; then transported worldwide along bottom like a conveyer belt. (Not like today where cold O2 water flows to bottom at poles, from there worldwide.)
Page 49: Gingerich shows that at P/E land mammals experienced mass extinction at same time. Lots of amazing families of mammals were lost.
Page 51: At P/E, sudden increase in volcanic activity (ash) – volcanism and deep sea hydrothermal, aridity; winds reduced by factor of three, due to a lower difference in termperature between the poles and the equator, due to warming of the poles.
Page 53: SUMMARY OF what caused the dieoffs at P/E: first volcanoes and hydrothermal vents in the ocean, emitting greenhouse gasses; then warming; then warmth and resulting reduction of O2 in water O2 kills deep sea life, and some land mammals, but less than in the big 5 extinctions. Then the volcanoes slowed, and a slow return to normal.
Page 56: mid-Cretaceous: flowers blossom, ammonites mostly plentiful with clams and snails
Page 57-58: but in the geological beds of ammonites etc from that time, there is a six foot black bed of dieoff, the Cenomanian-Turonian ; Schlanger/Jenkyns showed 3 dieoffs over 20m years: ocean currents stopped, organic material rained down causing low O2 , anoxia ever higher .
Cbapter 3: Mother of all Extinctions (PT).
Page 62: South Africa, fossils dwindle gradually a million years up to PT, not sudden like KT. Towards the end, two land species survived -- Dicynodon, gorgon.
Page 64: alternation of red and olive layers right at PT boundary in the geological strata; just past that boundary of death, there were lots more fossils (recovery of life), all one species, Lystrosaurus a piggy reptile.
Page 67: At PT as many as 90% of species on earth disappeared.
Page 68 Erwin: PT took 165,000 years or less to happen, much slower than KT which was maybe only decades. O2 has been measured to be low both in shallow and in deep waters leading into the event. The low O2 killed many ocean organisms as quickly as red tides do today. Global warming and Siberian volcanoes happened at the same time.
Page 69: Erwin discussed several possible theories. Besides asteroids (now discredited unless you think they caused volcanoes), CO2 and methane from volcanoes may have caused climate change and acid rain, causing the dieoffs, as suggested by Paul Renne.
Pages 78-79: Krull/Retallack: coal formation stopped at PT, methane in air ‘way up. Temperature and sedimentation up; they say the sedimentation was due to runoff from deforrested land.
Page 79 Buick (an expert on the preCambrian extinction) proposed that PT was due to repeated insults, like maybe pulses of melting of methane hydrates, overturns of stratified oceans, volcanoes
Pages 81-82 Knoll (another preCambrian expert) proposes a theory: low O2 in LOWER ocean only, then something (volcanoes?) changes pattern, CO2 and dissolved biostuff bubbles up. Killer CO2. But models have problems with that; some shellfish die from CO2, but land animals wouldn’t be killed so easily by it.
Page 84: Ward’s data show not one extinction but several; one very big thousands of years, but several before and soon after., spread over several million years.
Page85: e.g. C12/C13 showed multiple dieoff, return, dieoff in photosynthesis levels.
Chapter 4: The Misinterpreted Extinction (refuting dumb asteroids)
Page 104: approaching Triassic/Jurassic, ammonites dwindle to zero. Clams too; a new clam, Monotis, apparently adapted to low-O2 bottoms, emerged but also disappeared in the final stage. All is dead in the Rhaetian, the last period within the Triassic, showing geological beds striped gray/black. Death in the seas and perhaps on land as well.
Page 105: Rhaetian 12 million years world dead except for oceanic plankton. (?)
Chapter 5: A New Paradigm for Mass Extinction
Page 109: Ward visits Palau (Micronesia) to study: why did ammonites outdo nautiloids at PT and TJ, but reverse and die off 100% at KT?
Page 111: he tracked nautiloids: they live at 1500 feet in day, 400-500 night to eat, stay deep and dark, versus ammonoids in more shallow. water PT and TJ were hard on deep guys, KT while killed shallow.
Page 112: Ward visited freshwater lake in island. Thin O2 rich layer at surface full of life, but below that -- no animals, no O2, purple color. Purple and green bacteria needed sunlight and sulfur. Third type(s) of life too small to see produced H2s as waste; only O2 kept them from surface.
Page 113: Lake was like Canfield ocean. (Don Canfield and Berner of Yale did classic research). Before the modern era (after preCambrian), oceans were highly toxic due to H2S saturation, vs O2-rich today top to bottom.
Page 114: Near Palau after Ward left: warm low-O2 water rose to surface, killed Palau corals, coral bleaching. Greenhouse gasses?
Page 115: We now rely on a recent breakthrough, “molecular fossils” or “biomarkers”: certain molecules like types of lipids left behind by certain types of microbes.
Page 116: We use new instruments -- gas chromatographic mass spectrometers -- to detect molecules left by bacteria which live in high H2S. Like photosynthetic purple bacerterium, today in Black Sea and Palau, which oxidize H2S and the like. They are one of the two kinds of bacteria which live in water low in O2, but high in light and H2S.
Page 117 Bombshell: Lee Kump and Mike Arthur (PSU) and Pavlov(UC) in 2005: lots of these bacteria near end of Permian, implicated in extinctions. In waters like Black Sea, purple and green live in “chemocline,” stable interface between O2 above and H2S below. But when H2S gets to the surface: “Kump hypothesis” for extinction.
Page 118: Kump shows H2S in late Permian from this source would be 2000 times more than what comes from today’s volcanoes. It is also enough to zap the ozone layer. PT fossil spores from Greenland show UV damage, verifying the ozone hole effect. Modern ocean plant biomass “rapidly decreases” under ozone holes. Also, CO2 and methane would be in the bubbles along with H2S.
Page 119: Kump used a global circulation model (GCM) to model what happened at PT. At end of Permian, sea level DROPPED, freeing phosphorus, fertilizing these bacteria in ocean from runoff. In 2006, Roger Summons of MIT showed biomarkers for H2S production at the PT boundary in nine sites.
Page 120: In March 2006, NASA hosts the world’s main meeting on astrobiology in DC astrobiology. At the extinction session, Kump model’s shows a series of burps, like actual data on extinctions, & enough H2S to kill most land life, and push shallow water life over due to H2S and acid from CO2 combined. Ward spoke too. Oceans did it, but why did they change state?
Page 123: Since the Eocene (one full period after the dinosaurs died off), O2 has been high evefrywhere in the ocean, shallow and deep, due to conveyer belt of currents driven by big temperature differences between poles and tropics. But this “mixed ocean” (like a well-stirred aquarium) is basically new in earth history.
Page 124: older oceans all had low O2 at bottom. They left lots of pyrite – fool’s gold, formed where there is high sulfur but low oxygen. Ocean was stratified by temperature, salinity, dissolved O and reduced carbon. (Like CO2..) Most of earth history was like this. O2 above, not below. This also caused formation of black shales on the ocean bottom, going back 3.5 billion years. When life in shallow water sinks to that kind of low oxygen bottom, it yields nice well-preserved fossils.
Page 125: There are wo varieties of stratified ocean – low O2 bottom, vs. almost no O2 in the bottom layers. No animals live in the deep layers either way, but really low O2 encourages more sulfur producing microbes; that’s a Canfield ocean. Before Cambrian, the microbes producing H2S also inhibited nitrogen fixation, a double killer.
Page 126. Kliti Grice et al, Science 2005, showed Canfield ocean by biomarkers at PT. TJ maybe, now (2007) being checked.
Page 127: what causes ocean to switch between mixed versus stratified versus Canfield? CHANGE between the three causes extinctions, and is driven by conveyer system. 2005: Jeffrey Kiehl and Christine Shields of NCAR used GCM, to show global warming would move the conveyer belt..
Page 128: by end of Permian, Earth had lost its ice caps. That already gives low O2 stratified ocean. WARD’S THEORY: At PT and P/E, GHG from volcanoes (1st Siberia, 2nd Atlantic Ocean) gave huge greenhouse gas emission, the trigger which changed the oceans.
Page 129: PT was bigger because there was burping of noxious gas from virtually all shallow water on earth; unlike Paleocene, rich in CO2 and CH4, the latter accelerating warming. Anthony Hallam and Paul Wignall’s book Mass Extinctions… showed that 12 of 14 included low O2 oceans.
Chapter : The Driver of Extinction (atmosphere as trigger to low O2 ocean and change in conveyer belt).
Page 133: Two ways to estimate past CO2: best a program by Berner of Yale, GEOCARB and GEOCARBSULF (for O2?) using isotope data, second measure fossil leaves. Of course, GHG explain climate changes.
Page 135-136: FIGURE: CO2 by year… all extinctions have also been CO2 peaks. Rapid rise preceded all but one or two extinctions. Rate important, not just level.
Page 136: confirmed by leaf approach. Before industry, earth was on course to C locked up, low CO2 problem.
Page 137: SUMMARY OF WARD’S THEORY: step 1, vast increase in CO2 and methane from volcanoes. Step 2: warmer world disrupts conveyer system, more low O2 bottom. Step 3: when chemocline is shallow enough for light to reach it, H2S producing bacteria go nuts. Step 4, H2S destroys ozone layer. Page 138: Wards calls it “conveyer disruption hypothesis.”
Page 139-141: green scary poetry about what it really looks like
Chapter 7: Bridging the Deep and the Near Past
Page 142: There has been remarkably little cooperation between people studying modern climate change (since the pliocene) and people like Ward studying older earth history. The most viable connection would be between the study of oceanic thermohaline conveyer currents and the study of extinctions.
Page 143: A quick swipe at the movie “Day After Tomorrow” (“ a mockery”)
Pages 144-146: Very rapid climate change has been the norm for the past 200,000 years full of unusual ice ages. See the work of Minze Stuiver, U Washington, using Greenland Ice cores. Been But the last 10,000 years have relatively calm. Average temperature would change as much as 18 degrees F in a few decades, 10 in one decade. The calm starts human civilization?
Page 147: But there wasn’t such change in the southern hemisphere (we think, but need to check more). Ward shows a poorly labelled figure on “temperature variation”. Most now believe fluctuations in the past 200,000 years are largely
due to orbital variations found by Malutin Milankovich.
Page 148: The study of orbits suggests we would normally remain calm another 10,000 years or so.
Page 149: For recent years (past 2.5 million years), people say the conveyer belt has turned on and off, not changed type. (Just in the north?) Willi Dansgaard
first, then Hans Oeschger reported this. Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles are cycles within a larger pattern, discussed by Gerard Bond. The pattern includes Heinrich events, severe icing of the north Atlantic, which happened six times in the past 100,000 years.
Page 152: turning the currents on and off cause warm periods, or v ice-versa? We don’t know, but we do know that cold fresh water melting off from Greenland has scary implications for the Gulf Stream, with some early measurements justifying (PJW: but not yet proving) worry.
Page 159: East Anglia model predicts BIGGER ice age 50K years hence, rebound from our warming, when fossil fuel is used up.
Page 160: Ruddiman has an interesting book suggesting humans have contributed to warming (and calmer climate) since 8000BC. Not just CO2; methane.
Page 164 Vostok ice cores measure CO2 and CH4 back 2 million years. 500 to 600 ppm would be equivalent to times with little or no ice.
Page 166: for most of geologic time CO2 was much higher g than today, yet acidity was mostly not so different. That’s because oceans can buffer the acidity caused by higher CO2, but BUFFERING TAKES TIME, therefore rate matters. CO2 is now rising about 100 times fast as it ever did, creating a huge risk of acidity (PJW: as was decisive in some periods of earth history)
Page 174-175 heat causes drug use and malaria
FINALE:
Interview with Battisti of U Wash.. imagine future conveyer and story…
195: clouds (recall NASA fast story)
Notes by P.J.Werbos, Jan 8, 2012. Book costs $7 from Amazon.
The book begins with extensive discussion of Ward’s personal role and prior history of the field. Detailed citations by chapter are on pages 205-224.
The first four chapters discuss what led up to Ward’s theory – how we know that the PT dieoff was the worst dieoff in the history of earth, what other major dieoffs were like, and what the earlier inadequate theories were like.
Chapter 1:
Page 18 gives a graph from Norman Neville showing how many families of life were
killed off by various extinctions. PT, at the start of the Mesozoic era, was the biggest. Ward was part of the group which verified the Alavarez theory that the end-of-mesozoic dieoff (KT) was caused by an asteroid impact, but gives extensive evidence explaining the new consensus that none of the other big extinctions were caused that way.
Pages 24-25: C12/C13 isotope ratios tell us when there are big dieoffs of plant life on earth. At KT it shows a massive death of plants, but a total recovery in less than 100,000 years – a”single dip depression.”
Page 27: big “flood basalts” indicate when and where huge outbreaks of volcanoes have occurred. The big outbreaks of volcanoes match the big extinctions. The biggest of all was the “Siberian traps” (volcanoes) leading to PT. Next biggest was TJ,
the extinction which marks the boundary between the Triassic and the Jurassic, the first two of the three eras in the Mesozoic.
Page 29: Two big shelled organisms, cousins of clams, teemed in the oceans for most of its history: ammonites and nautiloids. Ward visited Zumaya, Spain, and showed the ammonites went extinct at KT, but nautiloids survived.
Chapter 2: The Overlooked Extinction:
Even after the dieoff of dinosaurs, there was a big dieoff of mammals, eliminating many basic types, at the Paleocene/Eocene boundary (P/E), and also a dieoff in the middle of the Cretaceous (late Mesozoic), which are instructive examples.
Page 43: Just as C12/C13 isotope ratios give us an historic measure of plant dieoffs, O16/O18 ratios give us an historic measure of the temperature of earth.
Page 45: Kennett/Stott report new data on P/E (Nature 1991): deep ocean warms suddenly and big dieoff of plants in deep ocean
Page 46: Kunio Kaiho 1991 says that the P/E dieoff was due to low O2 in the water. Why? Warm bottom had come from warm tropical surface waters where evaporation makes surface saltier, denser; then transported worldwide along bottom like a conveyer belt. (Not like today where cold O2 water flows to bottom at poles, from there worldwide.)
Page 49: Gingerich shows that at P/E land mammals experienced mass extinction at same time. Lots of amazing families of mammals were lost.
Page 51: At P/E, sudden increase in volcanic activity (ash) – volcanism and deep sea hydrothermal, aridity; winds reduced by factor of three, due to a lower difference in termperature between the poles and the equator, due to warming of the poles.
Page 53: SUMMARY OF what caused the dieoffs at P/E: first volcanoes and hydrothermal vents in the ocean, emitting greenhouse gasses; then warming; then warmth and resulting reduction of O2 in water O2 kills deep sea life, and some land mammals, but less than in the big 5 extinctions. Then the volcanoes slowed, and a slow return to normal.
Page 56: mid-Cretaceous: flowers blossom, ammonites mostly plentiful with clams and snails
Page 57-58: but in the geological beds of ammonites etc from that time, there is a six foot black bed of dieoff, the Cenomanian-Turonian ; Schlanger/Jenkyns showed 3 dieoffs over 20m years: ocean currents stopped, organic material rained down causing low O2 , anoxia ever higher .
Cbapter 3: Mother of all Extinctions (PT).
Page 62: South Africa, fossils dwindle gradually a million years up to PT, not sudden like KT. Towards the end, two land species survived -- Dicynodon, gorgon.
Page 64: alternation of red and olive layers right at PT boundary in the geological strata; just past that boundary of death, there were lots more fossils (recovery of life), all one species, Lystrosaurus a piggy reptile.
Page 67: At PT as many as 90% of species on earth disappeared.
Page 68 Erwin: PT took 165,000 years or less to happen, much slower than KT which was maybe only decades. O2 has been measured to be low both in shallow and in deep waters leading into the event. The low O2 killed many ocean organisms as quickly as red tides do today. Global warming and Siberian volcanoes happened at the same time.
Page 69: Erwin discussed several possible theories. Besides asteroids (now discredited unless you think they caused volcanoes), CO2 and methane from volcanoes may have caused climate change and acid rain, causing the dieoffs, as suggested by Paul Renne.
Pages 78-79: Krull/Retallack: coal formation stopped at PT, methane in air ‘way up. Temperature and sedimentation up; they say the sedimentation was due to runoff from deforrested land.
Page 79 Buick (an expert on the preCambrian extinction) proposed that PT was due to repeated insults, like maybe pulses of melting of methane hydrates, overturns of stratified oceans, volcanoes
Pages 81-82 Knoll (another preCambrian expert) proposes a theory: low O2 in LOWER ocean only, then something (volcanoes?) changes pattern, CO2 and dissolved biostuff bubbles up. Killer CO2. But models have problems with that; some shellfish die from CO2, but land animals wouldn’t be killed so easily by it.
Page 84: Ward’s data show not one extinction but several; one very big thousands of years, but several before and soon after., spread over several million years.
Page85: e.g. C12/C13 showed multiple dieoff, return, dieoff in photosynthesis levels.
Chapter 4: The Misinterpreted Extinction (refuting dumb asteroids)
Page 104: approaching Triassic/Jurassic, ammonites dwindle to zero. Clams too; a new clam, Monotis, apparently adapted to low-O2 bottoms, emerged but also disappeared in the final stage. All is dead in the Rhaetian, the last period within the Triassic, showing geological beds striped gray/black. Death in the seas and perhaps on land as well.
Page 105: Rhaetian 12 million years world dead except for oceanic plankton. (?)
Chapter 5: A New Paradigm for Mass Extinction
Page 109: Ward visits Palau (Micronesia) to study: why did ammonites outdo nautiloids at PT and TJ, but reverse and die off 100% at KT?
Page 111: he tracked nautiloids: they live at 1500 feet in day, 400-500 night to eat, stay deep and dark, versus ammonoids in more shallow. water PT and TJ were hard on deep guys, KT while killed shallow.
Page 112: Ward visited freshwater lake in island. Thin O2 rich layer at surface full of life, but below that -- no animals, no O2, purple color. Purple and green bacteria needed sunlight and sulfur. Third type(s) of life too small to see produced H2s as waste; only O2 kept them from surface.
Page 113: Lake was like Canfield ocean. (Don Canfield and Berner of Yale did classic research). Before the modern era (after preCambrian), oceans were highly toxic due to H2S saturation, vs O2-rich today top to bottom.
Page 114: Near Palau after Ward left: warm low-O2 water rose to surface, killed Palau corals, coral bleaching. Greenhouse gasses?
Page 115: We now rely on a recent breakthrough, “molecular fossils” or “biomarkers”: certain molecules like types of lipids left behind by certain types of microbes.
Page 116: We use new instruments -- gas chromatographic mass spectrometers -- to detect molecules left by bacteria which live in high H2S. Like photosynthetic purple bacerterium, today in Black Sea and Palau, which oxidize H2S and the like. They are one of the two kinds of bacteria which live in water low in O2, but high in light and H2S.
Page 117 Bombshell: Lee Kump and Mike Arthur (PSU) and Pavlov(UC) in 2005: lots of these bacteria near end of Permian, implicated in extinctions. In waters like Black Sea, purple and green live in “chemocline,” stable interface between O2 above and H2S below. But when H2S gets to the surface: “Kump hypothesis” for extinction.
Page 118: Kump shows H2S in late Permian from this source would be 2000 times more than what comes from today’s volcanoes. It is also enough to zap the ozone layer. PT fossil spores from Greenland show UV damage, verifying the ozone hole effect. Modern ocean plant biomass “rapidly decreases” under ozone holes. Also, CO2 and methane would be in the bubbles along with H2S.
Page 119: Kump used a global circulation model (GCM) to model what happened at PT. At end of Permian, sea level DROPPED, freeing phosphorus, fertilizing these bacteria in ocean from runoff. In 2006, Roger Summons of MIT showed biomarkers for H2S production at the PT boundary in nine sites.
Page 120: In March 2006, NASA hosts the world’s main meeting on astrobiology in DC astrobiology. At the extinction session, Kump model’s shows a series of burps, like actual data on extinctions, & enough H2S to kill most land life, and push shallow water life over due to H2S and acid from CO2 combined. Ward spoke too. Oceans did it, but why did they change state?
Page 123: Since the Eocene (one full period after the dinosaurs died off), O2 has been high evefrywhere in the ocean, shallow and deep, due to conveyer belt of currents driven by big temperature differences between poles and tropics. But this “mixed ocean” (like a well-stirred aquarium) is basically new in earth history.
Page 124: older oceans all had low O2 at bottom. They left lots of pyrite – fool’s gold, formed where there is high sulfur but low oxygen. Ocean was stratified by temperature, salinity, dissolved O and reduced carbon. (Like CO2..) Most of earth history was like this. O2 above, not below. This also caused formation of black shales on the ocean bottom, going back 3.5 billion years. When life in shallow water sinks to that kind of low oxygen bottom, it yields nice well-preserved fossils.
Page 125: There are wo varieties of stratified ocean – low O2 bottom, vs. almost no O2 in the bottom layers. No animals live in the deep layers either way, but really low O2 encourages more sulfur producing microbes; that’s a Canfield ocean. Before Cambrian, the microbes producing H2S also inhibited nitrogen fixation, a double killer.
Page 126. Kliti Grice et al, Science 2005, showed Canfield ocean by biomarkers at PT. TJ maybe, now (2007) being checked.
Page 127: what causes ocean to switch between mixed versus stratified versus Canfield? CHANGE between the three causes extinctions, and is driven by conveyer system. 2005: Jeffrey Kiehl and Christine Shields of NCAR used GCM, to show global warming would move the conveyer belt..
Page 128: by end of Permian, Earth had lost its ice caps. That already gives low O2 stratified ocean. WARD’S THEORY: At PT and P/E, GHG from volcanoes (1st Siberia, 2nd Atlantic Ocean) gave huge greenhouse gas emission, the trigger which changed the oceans.
Page 129: PT was bigger because there was burping of noxious gas from virtually all shallow water on earth; unlike Paleocene, rich in CO2 and CH4, the latter accelerating warming. Anthony Hallam and Paul Wignall’s book Mass Extinctions… showed that 12 of 14 included low O2 oceans.
Chapter : The Driver of Extinction (atmosphere as trigger to low O2 ocean and change in conveyer belt).
Page 133: Two ways to estimate past CO2: best a program by Berner of Yale, GEOCARB and GEOCARBSULF (for O2?) using isotope data, second measure fossil leaves. Of course, GHG explain climate changes.
Page 135-136: FIGURE: CO2 by year… all extinctions have also been CO2 peaks. Rapid rise preceded all but one or two extinctions. Rate important, not just level.
Page 136: confirmed by leaf approach. Before industry, earth was on course to C locked up, low CO2 problem.
Page 137: SUMMARY OF WARD’S THEORY: step 1, vast increase in CO2 and methane from volcanoes. Step 2: warmer world disrupts conveyer system, more low O2 bottom. Step 3: when chemocline is shallow enough for light to reach it, H2S producing bacteria go nuts. Step 4, H2S destroys ozone layer. Page 138: Wards calls it “conveyer disruption hypothesis.”
Page 139-141: green scary poetry about what it really looks like
Chapter 7: Bridging the Deep and the Near Past
Page 142: There has been remarkably little cooperation between people studying modern climate change (since the pliocene) and people like Ward studying older earth history. The most viable connection would be between the study of oceanic thermohaline conveyer currents and the study of extinctions.
Page 143: A quick swipe at the movie “Day After Tomorrow” (“ a mockery”)
Pages 144-146: Very rapid climate change has been the norm for the past 200,000 years full of unusual ice ages. See the work of Minze Stuiver, U Washington, using Greenland Ice cores. Been But the last 10,000 years have relatively calm. Average temperature would change as much as 18 degrees F in a few decades, 10 in one decade. The calm starts human civilization?
Page 147: But there wasn’t such change in the southern hemisphere (we think, but need to check more). Ward shows a poorly labelled figure on “temperature variation”. Most now believe fluctuations in the past 200,000 years are largely
due to orbital variations found by Malutin Milankovich.
Page 148: The study of orbits suggests we would normally remain calm another 10,000 years or so.
Page 149: For recent years (past 2.5 million years), people say the conveyer belt has turned on and off, not changed type. (Just in the north?) Willi Dansgaard
first, then Hans Oeschger reported this. Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles are cycles within a larger pattern, discussed by Gerard Bond. The pattern includes Heinrich events, severe icing of the north Atlantic, which happened six times in the past 100,000 years.
Page 152: turning the currents on and off cause warm periods, or v ice-versa? We don’t know, but we do know that cold fresh water melting off from Greenland has scary implications for the Gulf Stream, with some early measurements justifying (PJW: but not yet proving) worry.
Page 159: East Anglia model predicts BIGGER ice age 50K years hence, rebound from our warming, when fossil fuel is used up.
Page 160: Ruddiman has an interesting book suggesting humans have contributed to warming (and calmer climate) since 8000BC. Not just CO2; methane.
Page 164 Vostok ice cores measure CO2 and CH4 back 2 million years. 500 to 600 ppm would be equivalent to times with little or no ice.
Page 166: for most of geologic time CO2 was much higher g than today, yet acidity was mostly not so different. That’s because oceans can buffer the acidity caused by higher CO2, but BUFFERING TAKES TIME, therefore rate matters. CO2 is now rising about 100 times fast as it ever did, creating a huge risk of acidity (PJW: as was decisive in some periods of earth history)
Page 174-175 heat causes drug use and malaria
FINALE:
Interview with Battisti of U Wash.. imagine future conveyer and story…
195: clouds (recall NASA fast story)
Saturday, January 7, 2012
An old dream about science fiction writers and Jesus
An old dream about science fiction writers and Jesus
A few months ago, I found myself eating beef brisket and drinking beer
in a barbecue place in Memphis, with one of the world’s top cognitive neuroscientists who happened to be a Christian as well. After a bit, I ‘fessed up and told an old story… and they said I had a duty to jot it down somewhere. OK. Here it is.
‘Way back in the 1970’s (1972 to 1978), I had a habit of experimenting with things
like “out of body travel” (which I concluded is quite real but quite different from what most people imagine it is). Some friends had pointed out a book called “Sanctum Celeste” in French, which proposed a particular meeting place “in the astral plane” where, they said, one could learn more about these things. if only one could get there. So one day I decide “OK, why not? I’ll try.” It involved visualizing a place a bit like a cathedral in appearance…
And so… it seemed I was floating through a kind of space, and entered
a vast unearthly cathedral. But no… not exactly what I had imagined.
As I drifted forwards, I mainly looked at the big guys moving in the opposite direction (towards the entrance to the cathedral), about twice my size, who
had warped themselves (flattened and stretched) to where they almost looked like
walking crosses with relatively small appendages for feet, hands at head,
and expressions on the face like some of those paintings of Jesus with a void
look on his face… stigmata and all that.
This wasn’t the kind of place I had intended to go to, but I kept moving forwards.
As I did so, and approached the area where one expects an altar in a Catholic cathedral… I noticed a funny little door to the left, in a wood paneled wall.
Out of some kind of curiosity… or light feeling… I decided to check it out,
open it and look to see what it was. As I opened it, a friendly voice spoke:
“Hi! I’m Jesus. I’m happy to see you. I don’t get a whole lot of visitors here these days. All those big guys out there are really too interested in themselves and their own thoughts to pay much attention to me, so I’m really glad when someone stops by.
“So let me see… how can I help you? I see you read a lot of science fiction. OK, I have some recommendations for you. Four authors… let me show you… and try to remember…
“OK, have a nice day..”
Of the four, I am most certain two were Dan Simmons and R.A. MacAvoy. I’m pretty sure Orson Scott Card was one, too… but I totally forget who was fourth.
The funny thing is… when I checked…. There were no books at all by R.A. MacAvoy
or Simmons which looked like what he showed me. That was disconcerting to me, since it seemed so real. But in fact, those books did come out in the coming years.
And they were worth reading. (For MacAvoy, it was the Damiano series; for Simmons
it was the entire Hyperion series, though I would view his Muse of Fire as
inspired too.)
I also felt a shiver up m spine when I heard the Crosby, Stills and Nash song “The Cathedral,” which sounded like the same kind of experience. I played that album a number of times when I was going to bed for awhile after I heard it.
Card’s series “Song of Earth” reminds me a bit of the major tome giving policy
for the Mehlevi Order of Sufis, which I received as a gift in the one time I went to
Istanbul a year or two ago. Among other things, it mentioned the age-old belief that certain kinds of abilities seem to run in families… to have a genetic component.
That kind of belief is easily (even routinely) abused. (I think of some of the well-meant work of Katherine Neville.) Western traditions have stressed how anyone can develop any capabilities, given the right time, motivation, preparation and effort – and that, after all, we all have souls, not only us humans but other mammals at least.
Yet at that time in Istanbul, I had been revisiting that assumption, in part because of discussions with Kurweil people. I had asked… suppose I build a computer which not only had mouse-like intelligence plus the mirror neuron kind of capabilities we see in humans… but also add second-generation quantum computing abilities… would such systems really “have soul,” really interface with what we call “spiritual reality”? It seemed unlikely… which suggested that the good old physical plant we use does have something to it… not unlike Card’s description… and not unlike those old folk beliefs we do seem to see at work.
The Mehlevi Order position now is that those who inherit such things simply do not need their training and support, because “they already have it,” while others do.
But I think this is a mistake, like the belief that those with natural talents in mathematics “will do fine anyway, so we don’t need to bother about them.” In actuality, there are cases I think of… where there WILL be an impact, yes, because of people’s inheritance, whatever that be… but the SIGN of the impact depends a lot on the environment.
I am reminded of this today, because of a guy in his 40’s who is complaining about what my generation (baby boomers) have done to the world, and is gloating about what his generation will do.
But in fact… yes… baby boomers and their thoughts have had decreasing influence since a peak somewhere between Kennedy and Clinton… but it never was 100%..
and the 40’s guys are very much on their way out too.
We made a hell of a lot of mistakes… yet in the larger history of the world, I can think of only two periods of 40 years or so of comparable peace and prosperity –
the famous “Pax Augusta” period (when Jesus was alive) and the latter nineteenth century maybe 1870-1910 or so.
What happens now?
With the new generation… the teenagers… I am reminded of the part where Jesus says something like: “When you see a lowly person or beggar, beware! It may be me
in that guise, testing you. Ask yourself how you would treat them if you knew it was me, and if you knew you were supposed to treat them as you would treat me.”
The recent Republican primaries do give some feeling for the lack of determinism,
and the groping… of the same generation which chose Obama over Hilary Clinton…
And it is coming to their turn.
Best of luck to us all…
==============================================
===============================================
Added later:
I can imagine some folks asking "Hey, what was Jesus like in this dream?
Why did you tell us about the books and not about Him?"
Fair enough.
I talked mainly about the books because that is where he was directing my attention.
He wasn't sitting there saying"worship me, worship me." In fact, he was standing pretty much the whole time, after I came in the room.
Yet... I do have something of a primary memory of him, still, even after more
than thirty years.
He was a very normal guy. In fact, he was so normal than most of the fancy folks
in Washington or on the boards of big corporations probably would filter him out, and not remember. In fact, he was so normal that it's almost strange... most people have some kind of visible abnormality, like worries or defense mechanisms. Maybe it's my own filters speaking... but he seemed unusually sane (a topic discussed at great length in my 2012 paper in Neural Networks). No weird expression of
self-flagellation (as in some of the imaginary paintings) or suffering or even distraction, nor the opposite kind of unhealthy fuzzy pleasure. Unusually clear eyes,
colored by a clear kind of benevolence and benign sense of humor. And focus on
how he could be helpful.
He was certainly friendly and inviting... but he did not have the kind of probing forceful expression of warmth that I have seen at times in the eyes of Karl Pribram.
(I remember going to a restaurant with Karl Pribram and Sam Leven and others...
and Sam later saying with great glee "There he is, this 70-year-old man, not misbehaving in any way.. and when he just LOOKS at the females in the room, they just melt all over him...the intense projection of love from his eye..." Well, that isn't
what I saw here, under these conditions... though I sense that he could have done that if he felt it would be helpful... )
In a way, he reminded me of some engineers and designers I have known, who are not ego driven but driven to try to produce things really useful to people... or to keep their companies productive despite the best efforts of some upper management to drive them into bankruptcy.
That reminds me of the question: "What WAS the fourth book he recommended?" But I don't remember...
A few months ago, I found myself eating beef brisket and drinking beer
in a barbecue place in Memphis, with one of the world’s top cognitive neuroscientists who happened to be a Christian as well. After a bit, I ‘fessed up and told an old story… and they said I had a duty to jot it down somewhere. OK. Here it is.
‘Way back in the 1970’s (1972 to 1978), I had a habit of experimenting with things
like “out of body travel” (which I concluded is quite real but quite different from what most people imagine it is). Some friends had pointed out a book called “Sanctum Celeste” in French, which proposed a particular meeting place “in the astral plane” where, they said, one could learn more about these things. if only one could get there. So one day I decide “OK, why not? I’ll try.” It involved visualizing a place a bit like a cathedral in appearance…
And so… it seemed I was floating through a kind of space, and entered
a vast unearthly cathedral. But no… not exactly what I had imagined.
As I drifted forwards, I mainly looked at the big guys moving in the opposite direction (towards the entrance to the cathedral), about twice my size, who
had warped themselves (flattened and stretched) to where they almost looked like
walking crosses with relatively small appendages for feet, hands at head,
and expressions on the face like some of those paintings of Jesus with a void
look on his face… stigmata and all that.
This wasn’t the kind of place I had intended to go to, but I kept moving forwards.
As I did so, and approached the area where one expects an altar in a Catholic cathedral… I noticed a funny little door to the left, in a wood paneled wall.
Out of some kind of curiosity… or light feeling… I decided to check it out,
open it and look to see what it was. As I opened it, a friendly voice spoke:
“Hi! I’m Jesus. I’m happy to see you. I don’t get a whole lot of visitors here these days. All those big guys out there are really too interested in themselves and their own thoughts to pay much attention to me, so I’m really glad when someone stops by.
“So let me see… how can I help you? I see you read a lot of science fiction. OK, I have some recommendations for you. Four authors… let me show you… and try to remember…
“OK, have a nice day..”
Of the four, I am most certain two were Dan Simmons and R.A. MacAvoy. I’m pretty sure Orson Scott Card was one, too… but I totally forget who was fourth.
The funny thing is… when I checked…. There were no books at all by R.A. MacAvoy
or Simmons which looked like what he showed me. That was disconcerting to me, since it seemed so real. But in fact, those books did come out in the coming years.
And they were worth reading. (For MacAvoy, it was the Damiano series; for Simmons
it was the entire Hyperion series, though I would view his Muse of Fire as
inspired too.)
I also felt a shiver up m spine when I heard the Crosby, Stills and Nash song “The Cathedral,” which sounded like the same kind of experience. I played that album a number of times when I was going to bed for awhile after I heard it.
Card’s series “Song of Earth” reminds me a bit of the major tome giving policy
for the Mehlevi Order of Sufis, which I received as a gift in the one time I went to
Istanbul a year or two ago. Among other things, it mentioned the age-old belief that certain kinds of abilities seem to run in families… to have a genetic component.
That kind of belief is easily (even routinely) abused. (I think of some of the well-meant work of Katherine Neville.) Western traditions have stressed how anyone can develop any capabilities, given the right time, motivation, preparation and effort – and that, after all, we all have souls, not only us humans but other mammals at least.
Yet at that time in Istanbul, I had been revisiting that assumption, in part because of discussions with Kurweil people. I had asked… suppose I build a computer which not only had mouse-like intelligence plus the mirror neuron kind of capabilities we see in humans… but also add second-generation quantum computing abilities… would such systems really “have soul,” really interface with what we call “spiritual reality”? It seemed unlikely… which suggested that the good old physical plant we use does have something to it… not unlike Card’s description… and not unlike those old folk beliefs we do seem to see at work.
The Mehlevi Order position now is that those who inherit such things simply do not need their training and support, because “they already have it,” while others do.
But I think this is a mistake, like the belief that those with natural talents in mathematics “will do fine anyway, so we don’t need to bother about them.” In actuality, there are cases I think of… where there WILL be an impact, yes, because of people’s inheritance, whatever that be… but the SIGN of the impact depends a lot on the environment.
I am reminded of this today, because of a guy in his 40’s who is complaining about what my generation (baby boomers) have done to the world, and is gloating about what his generation will do.
But in fact… yes… baby boomers and their thoughts have had decreasing influence since a peak somewhere between Kennedy and Clinton… but it never was 100%..
and the 40’s guys are very much on their way out too.
We made a hell of a lot of mistakes… yet in the larger history of the world, I can think of only two periods of 40 years or so of comparable peace and prosperity –
the famous “Pax Augusta” period (when Jesus was alive) and the latter nineteenth century maybe 1870-1910 or so.
What happens now?
With the new generation… the teenagers… I am reminded of the part where Jesus says something like: “When you see a lowly person or beggar, beware! It may be me
in that guise, testing you. Ask yourself how you would treat them if you knew it was me, and if you knew you were supposed to treat them as you would treat me.”
The recent Republican primaries do give some feeling for the lack of determinism,
and the groping… of the same generation which chose Obama over Hilary Clinton…
And it is coming to their turn.
Best of luck to us all…
==============================================
===============================================
Added later:
I can imagine some folks asking "Hey, what was Jesus like in this dream?
Why did you tell us about the books and not about Him?"
Fair enough.
I talked mainly about the books because that is where he was directing my attention.
He wasn't sitting there saying"worship me, worship me." In fact, he was standing pretty much the whole time, after I came in the room.
Yet... I do have something of a primary memory of him, still, even after more
than thirty years.
He was a very normal guy. In fact, he was so normal than most of the fancy folks
in Washington or on the boards of big corporations probably would filter him out, and not remember. In fact, he was so normal that it's almost strange... most people have some kind of visible abnormality, like worries or defense mechanisms. Maybe it's my own filters speaking... but he seemed unusually sane (a topic discussed at great length in my 2012 paper in Neural Networks). No weird expression of
self-flagellation (as in some of the imaginary paintings) or suffering or even distraction, nor the opposite kind of unhealthy fuzzy pleasure. Unusually clear eyes,
colored by a clear kind of benevolence and benign sense of humor. And focus on
how he could be helpful.
He was certainly friendly and inviting... but he did not have the kind of probing forceful expression of warmth that I have seen at times in the eyes of Karl Pribram.
(I remember going to a restaurant with Karl Pribram and Sam Leven and others...
and Sam later saying with great glee "There he is, this 70-year-old man, not misbehaving in any way.. and when he just LOOKS at the females in the room, they just melt all over him...the intense projection of love from his eye..." Well, that isn't
what I saw here, under these conditions... though I sense that he could have done that if he felt it would be helpful... )
In a way, he reminded me of some engineers and designers I have known, who are not ego driven but driven to try to produce things really useful to people... or to keep their companies productive despite the best efforts of some upper management to drive them into bankruptcy.
That reminds me of the question: "What WAS the fourth book he recommended?" But I don't remember...
Thursday, December 29, 2011
How I will vote in the primaries
If we feel a duty to vote, and yet admit that Romney is as electable as Kerry was, and knows as much about the world economic system as Donald Trump...
First, I can't see voting for any of those candidates. Tradition says we should
aim for the best candidate in EACH party, to make democracy work as well as possible. But it doesn't feel right to vote for someone who is a disaster of one kind or another.
Many say... well, Romney is not a disaster. Like Trump, he has made money. But he epitomizes the belief that politics can and should be a service purchased by the wealthy,
using money to pay for dishonest and distracting negative ads, with total obliviousness and myopia about how they might be disassembling the foundations and future of our nation. Romney BELIEVES that his negative ads are what took out Gingrich. As a voter,
I feel a duty NOT to reinforce those kinds of beliefs, regardless. They now offer a clear opportunity for the world economy to move from recession to depression...
What of the others?
I was looking hard at Gingrich about when others did too (40% in the polls).
What turned me off was what I saw in the debates, what he wants to do to the
judicial system. Sure, I appreciate his deep love for his present wife,
and her devotion (which she has got him into too) to her spiritual traditions. But history has shown... if you turn the courts over to the curia, life gets frozen until and unless you go through a reformation all over again. That's as scary as having to live through World War II again with nuclear weapons... (which current European economic policies have gotten me to think about)...
Perry is maybe the scariest of all of them... and so on... but a week ago I was thinking, if I were in Iowa, maybe I would vote for Ron Paul in the caucuses
as a kind of protest against what Romney and Gingrich were both doing (negative ads
and money obsession; supreme curia). And maybe I still would, but I live in another state, where we have votes, not causcuses. And Ron Paul simply abolishing EPA...
weakening governments and unions does not on balance reduce the problem of excess concentration of power, or the reduction of human freedom.
So...
I plan to write in Arianna Huffington. What the hell. Her book
"Pigs at the Trough" really goes to the heart of what's wrong with the Republican party
(and politics in general) at this time. She is the closest we have to
an authentic Teddy Roosevelt option in this field. If we don't clean out the corruption, other things are messy anyway.. So I'm really serious, that's what
I'm going to do.
I thought at first... what about writing in Stewart, that comedian who ran the rally for sanity here, biggest rally ever in DC (yes, I've looked at the local information)
for good reason. But at this point, Huffington has both far more management experience and far more experience with the Republican side on Congress, and an understanding of
the real conservative principles which she wanted to pursue. She clearly
is the most sensible choice for a write-in candidate, and that's what it's time for.
Others I know would say they would sooner vote for a dog than for the folks on the ballot now. But what dog? Write in the cat in the hat? Morris the cat?
No, I plan to write in Huffington. Maybe the story will change, but I don't see how.
I just hope we don't end up with a surly dog taking over in 2013, and biting everyone..
like the last President in Atlas Shrugged..
First, I can't see voting for any of those candidates. Tradition says we should
aim for the best candidate in EACH party, to make democracy work as well as possible. But it doesn't feel right to vote for someone who is a disaster of one kind or another.
Many say... well, Romney is not a disaster. Like Trump, he has made money. But he epitomizes the belief that politics can and should be a service purchased by the wealthy,
using money to pay for dishonest and distracting negative ads, with total obliviousness and myopia about how they might be disassembling the foundations and future of our nation. Romney BELIEVES that his negative ads are what took out Gingrich. As a voter,
I feel a duty NOT to reinforce those kinds of beliefs, regardless. They now offer a clear opportunity for the world economy to move from recession to depression...
What of the others?
I was looking hard at Gingrich about when others did too (40% in the polls).
What turned me off was what I saw in the debates, what he wants to do to the
judicial system. Sure, I appreciate his deep love for his present wife,
and her devotion (which she has got him into too) to her spiritual traditions. But history has shown... if you turn the courts over to the curia, life gets frozen until and unless you go through a reformation all over again. That's as scary as having to live through World War II again with nuclear weapons... (which current European economic policies have gotten me to think about)...
Perry is maybe the scariest of all of them... and so on... but a week ago I was thinking, if I were in Iowa, maybe I would vote for Ron Paul in the caucuses
as a kind of protest against what Romney and Gingrich were both doing (negative ads
and money obsession; supreme curia). And maybe I still would, but I live in another state, where we have votes, not causcuses. And Ron Paul simply abolishing EPA...
weakening governments and unions does not on balance reduce the problem of excess concentration of power, or the reduction of human freedom.
So...
I plan to write in Arianna Huffington. What the hell. Her book
"Pigs at the Trough" really goes to the heart of what's wrong with the Republican party
(and politics in general) at this time. She is the closest we have to
an authentic Teddy Roosevelt option in this field. If we don't clean out the corruption, other things are messy anyway.. So I'm really serious, that's what
I'm going to do.
I thought at first... what about writing in Stewart, that comedian who ran the rally for sanity here, biggest rally ever in DC (yes, I've looked at the local information)
for good reason. But at this point, Huffington has both far more management experience and far more experience with the Republican side on Congress, and an understanding of
the real conservative principles which she wanted to pursue. She clearly
is the most sensible choice for a write-in candidate, and that's what it's time for.
Others I know would say they would sooner vote for a dog than for the folks on the ballot now. But what dog? Write in the cat in the hat? Morris the cat?
No, I plan to write in Huffington. Maybe the story will change, but I don't see how.
I just hope we don't end up with a surly dog taking over in 2013, and biting everyone..
like the last President in Atlas Shrugged..
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
meditation on how the universe really works
Meditation On How the Universe Really Works
Yes, meditation. Or conversation with God, if you will.
In that space…
Think of Kahlil Gibran, the poet asks the questions, the answers come out poetic.
As the poet is not the one giving the answer, only a reporter or messenger, no claim of infallibility… only of something worth checking into.
I began with the question: “What is a fermion, anyway?”
My old work at arxiv moves a lot of the way, but leaves loose ends. The answer:
First, review the boson, which you do understand, though you can tighten up some points. Some “bosons” in quantum field theory, like the photon and like what Higgs would be if EWT were exact… (or to the extent that it is a good approximation)..
are not particles at all, just fields which may appear particle-like when people do not
understand the basics of time, as spelled out in your IJTP paper.
Of course, patching up time is the next immediate step before us. Besides the
quantum separator kind of work, which is physically difficult (because of input
issues), there is the easier but messy work of Bell’s experiments with realistic
polarizer models, to probe the difference between a singular polarizer and a real one, which exposes the approximate and local nature of traditional quantum measurement. That is in your arxiv papers on B ell’s theorem and quantum separation, the photon, the boson we know which is not a particle.
But of course, some bosons ARE particles, like many bound states of two or more fermions. They are particles in the sense that they are chaotic solitons, a concept
you have defined precisely in CSF.
But the fermion…
Review your paper on nuclear stability at arxiv. It addresses the mathematically crucial issue, the …..
Yes, your excursion was correct… the stable approximately boson particles we see
are basically all bound fermion particles, with true nonparticle bosonic glue. Heisenberg was right in his intuition that everything we see as bound particles or matter is bound fermions… but what are these fermions, your initial question…
As in arxiv… they disprove the old Makhankov Rybakov Sanyuk “theorem”
(conjecture) that chaoitons cannot exist in topologically trivial field theories
over Minkowski space. (Some ask: “hey, does God know those weird words like
Minkowski space?” I ask “what kind of idiot are you assuming God is? Not
infallible or omniscient, but not such a limited intelligence either… If your con versations are only with an idiot, what does that do to you?”) Unlike the old versions
of ‘tHooft solitons you saw before, these really are acceptable, going to zero as r goes
to infinity, and able to coexist because of the stability property. And the key thing is that the core is presently modeled as zero radius, just as today’s polarizers are
effectively modeled as perfect in Bell’s theorem analysis done today. (Imperfect polarizers may be easier to get than measurements of the core of a primary fermion
like an electron.)
How could such a simple chaoiton have statistics like an electron?
It is not the full field, or the electron field, which is fermionic. It is none of the constituent fields which has dynamics which appear anticommutative.
It is the object itself, the electron, which is fermionic… and it is precisely fermionic only in the limit as its radius approaches zero. With nonzero radius, it is not perfectly fermionic. Fermionic statistics is basically the fact that the wave function is approximately zero for “occupation number” (moments, in the P or W or Q
Representations mentioned in other arxiv papers, with citations) more than one, in describing states made up of, say, electrons and “electron glue” (the photon and its cousins). The approximation is exact to the extent that radius is zero.
And then… in the limit of radius zero for the fermion, the usual recently discovered bosonization mechanisms (which still need better exposition) give bosons as bound fermions (plus glue) which obey bosonic statistics imperfectly, imperfectly due to the nonzdro radius of the underlying boson, but even more imperfectly due to the fact that approximating them as elementary particles does not express all aspects of their composite nature, like what happens when you are close up… like when even
the dipole approximation develops measurable errors.
So that is our universe… much cleaner than you previously realized… though zitterbewegung is still there, as even these electrons can bounce around…
And then I ask:
“OK, that’s nice, but is it real? What is that REAL universe like?”
Ah, that would be telling… but OK… I can say something at least for now…
Maybe a year ago, you were saying… we need a placeholder… a place in our minds to remain open to the idea that perhaps the true universe/cosmos is a Great Mind,
to develop and above all find ways to test or look for clues to a different kind of mathematics…
And a few days ago, I reminded you of Eli Yablonovitch (and Laughlin) and the Great Crystal, whose speed of sound is your speed of light, whose space is mostly full with a few holes as what seems to you like small regions of high density (like nuclear chaoitons)… and the need to maintain a placeholder for that one as serious as the placeholder you talk about for Great Mind.
Well now consider a third placeholder…
You remember that time when you traveled out of body to a thousand years or so in the future, to a restaurant in France, where you asked a physicist of that time what they finally learned? You remember that it was a veridical one, because the primary person you visited (in Palmer Eldritch style) used an ATM in the restaurant, and ATMs basically did not exist at the time of this… and the idea of an ATM in a restaurant seemed hard to believe at your then time….
He said… eight dimensions and 16 pointer fields. So do take that seriously, if you want to know.
Of course, it is not superstring theory, but it entails many of things you have heard from people inspired into superstring theory in a subjective way. The math of superstring theory as it is today is hopelessly wrong and confused, because they do not know anything about the basics of “quantum” phenomena and even simple time… but in truth, major parts of the intuition do become manifest, once the more elementary foundations are rebuilt. Let me show you a picture…
I ask: “But hey, they know a lot about ‘condensation’ and all that. Do I have to
get into the details of how they do that..”
The response:
No… (chuckle). How could you imagine they know about condensation?
Think about it. If they do not even know what a chaoiton is, a kind of stable particle, how could they know what a universe is, a kind of stable fractalish higher order attractor?
I ask: “What should we call such emergent properties within a higher dimensional universe with pointer fields in it? Uberchaoitons or what?”
Response: Hey, you can just call them universes for now. It’s just a matter of understanding what a universe is, how it works, its so-called birth and death where
applicable, and so on.
And who are we? No, not some ubercomputers… yes, you should worry about ubercomputers and possible local things like borgs… but don’t you remember that Star Trek much later episode where there are living green beings not of your matter,
with other dimensions, who make borgs and computers look silly and weak by comparison. That is what we are and you are, and what the harvest of souls is really about. We are all just living creatures of this greater eight dimensional cosmos,
here visiting a local “attractor” type universe, as you, embodied in the three dimensions, visited an apparently one-dimensional creek when you were young…
(image projected of the Napier land, visiting with Dicky Dale)…
But yes, the mathematics of these attractor-universes like the one you are in right now is quite interesting, and the emergence of time gradients which appear different from space, locally.. though of course real mind like us is not in that temporal domain, and is more like the emergent phenomenon you described very briefly in your paper next to Prigogine’s in Pribram’s book…
on life and self-organization in the more general circumstance.
All for now. An interesting logical ordering, mainly to guide future exploration and development. And escape from local minima.
Yes, meditation. Or conversation with God, if you will.
In that space…
Think of Kahlil Gibran, the poet asks the questions, the answers come out poetic.
As the poet is not the one giving the answer, only a reporter or messenger, no claim of infallibility… only of something worth checking into.
I began with the question: “What is a fermion, anyway?”
My old work at arxiv moves a lot of the way, but leaves loose ends. The answer:
First, review the boson, which you do understand, though you can tighten up some points. Some “bosons” in quantum field theory, like the photon and like what Higgs would be if EWT were exact… (or to the extent that it is a good approximation)..
are not particles at all, just fields which may appear particle-like when people do not
understand the basics of time, as spelled out in your IJTP paper.
Of course, patching up time is the next immediate step before us. Besides the
quantum separator kind of work, which is physically difficult (because of input
issues), there is the easier but messy work of Bell’s experiments with realistic
polarizer models, to probe the difference between a singular polarizer and a real one, which exposes the approximate and local nature of traditional quantum measurement. That is in your arxiv papers on B ell’s theorem and quantum separation, the photon, the boson we know which is not a particle.
But of course, some bosons ARE particles, like many bound states of two or more fermions. They are particles in the sense that they are chaotic solitons, a concept
you have defined precisely in CSF.
But the fermion…
Review your paper on nuclear stability at arxiv. It addresses the mathematically crucial issue, the …..
Yes, your excursion was correct… the stable approximately boson particles we see
are basically all bound fermion particles, with true nonparticle bosonic glue. Heisenberg was right in his intuition that everything we see as bound particles or matter is bound fermions… but what are these fermions, your initial question…
As in arxiv… they disprove the old Makhankov Rybakov Sanyuk “theorem”
(conjecture) that chaoitons cannot exist in topologically trivial field theories
over Minkowski space. (Some ask: “hey, does God know those weird words like
Minkowski space?” I ask “what kind of idiot are you assuming God is? Not
infallible or omniscient, but not such a limited intelligence either… If your con versations are only with an idiot, what does that do to you?”) Unlike the old versions
of ‘tHooft solitons you saw before, these really are acceptable, going to zero as r goes
to infinity, and able to coexist because of the stability property. And the key thing is that the core is presently modeled as zero radius, just as today’s polarizers are
effectively modeled as perfect in Bell’s theorem analysis done today. (Imperfect polarizers may be easier to get than measurements of the core of a primary fermion
like an electron.)
How could such a simple chaoiton have statistics like an electron?
It is not the full field, or the electron field, which is fermionic. It is none of the constituent fields which has dynamics which appear anticommutative.
It is the object itself, the electron, which is fermionic… and it is precisely fermionic only in the limit as its radius approaches zero. With nonzero radius, it is not perfectly fermionic. Fermionic statistics is basically the fact that the wave function is approximately zero for “occupation number” (moments, in the P or W or Q
Representations mentioned in other arxiv papers, with citations) more than one, in describing states made up of, say, electrons and “electron glue” (the photon and its cousins). The approximation is exact to the extent that radius is zero.
And then… in the limit of radius zero for the fermion, the usual recently discovered bosonization mechanisms (which still need better exposition) give bosons as bound fermions (plus glue) which obey bosonic statistics imperfectly, imperfectly due to the nonzdro radius of the underlying boson, but even more imperfectly due to the fact that approximating them as elementary particles does not express all aspects of their composite nature, like what happens when you are close up… like when even
the dipole approximation develops measurable errors.
So that is our universe… much cleaner than you previously realized… though zitterbewegung is still there, as even these electrons can bounce around…
And then I ask:
“OK, that’s nice, but is it real? What is that REAL universe like?”
Ah, that would be telling… but OK… I can say something at least for now…
Maybe a year ago, you were saying… we need a placeholder… a place in our minds to remain open to the idea that perhaps the true universe/cosmos is a Great Mind,
to develop and above all find ways to test or look for clues to a different kind of mathematics…
And a few days ago, I reminded you of Eli Yablonovitch (and Laughlin) and the Great Crystal, whose speed of sound is your speed of light, whose space is mostly full with a few holes as what seems to you like small regions of high density (like nuclear chaoitons)… and the need to maintain a placeholder for that one as serious as the placeholder you talk about for Great Mind.
Well now consider a third placeholder…
You remember that time when you traveled out of body to a thousand years or so in the future, to a restaurant in France, where you asked a physicist of that time what they finally learned? You remember that it was a veridical one, because the primary person you visited (in Palmer Eldritch style) used an ATM in the restaurant, and ATMs basically did not exist at the time of this… and the idea of an ATM in a restaurant seemed hard to believe at your then time….
He said… eight dimensions and 16 pointer fields. So do take that seriously, if you want to know.
Of course, it is not superstring theory, but it entails many of things you have heard from people inspired into superstring theory in a subjective way. The math of superstring theory as it is today is hopelessly wrong and confused, because they do not know anything about the basics of “quantum” phenomena and even simple time… but in truth, major parts of the intuition do become manifest, once the more elementary foundations are rebuilt. Let me show you a picture…
I ask: “But hey, they know a lot about ‘condensation’ and all that. Do I have to
get into the details of how they do that..”
The response:
No… (chuckle). How could you imagine they know about condensation?
Think about it. If they do not even know what a chaoiton is, a kind of stable particle, how could they know what a universe is, a kind of stable fractalish higher order attractor?
I ask: “What should we call such emergent properties within a higher dimensional universe with pointer fields in it? Uberchaoitons or what?”
Response: Hey, you can just call them universes for now. It’s just a matter of understanding what a universe is, how it works, its so-called birth and death where
applicable, and so on.
And who are we? No, not some ubercomputers… yes, you should worry about ubercomputers and possible local things like borgs… but don’t you remember that Star Trek much later episode where there are living green beings not of your matter,
with other dimensions, who make borgs and computers look silly and weak by comparison. That is what we are and you are, and what the harvest of souls is really about. We are all just living creatures of this greater eight dimensional cosmos,
here visiting a local “attractor” type universe, as you, embodied in the three dimensions, visited an apparently one-dimensional creek when you were young…
(image projected of the Napier land, visiting with Dicky Dale)…
But yes, the mathematics of these attractor-universes like the one you are in right now is quite interesting, and the emergence of time gradients which appear different from space, locally.. though of course real mind like us is not in that temporal domain, and is more like the emergent phenomenon you described very briefly in your paper next to Prigogine’s in Pribram’s book…
on life and self-organization in the more general circumstance.
All for now. An interesting logical ordering, mainly to guide future exploration and development. And escape from local minima.
Friday, December 23, 2011
why I think cats and dogs have souls
First, an example or two, then some theoretical thinking. If you want theoretical thinking, don't worry, I'm not short of that, but for me, correct theory starts with the experience of life, with opening the eyeballs....
So let me start with a dog story.
Back in 1970-1971, I was at the thesis stage of getting a PhD from Harvard. Since I was working on a new mathematical model... I felt it would make sense for me to come back home for a year, to think in a more relaxed and human (and less expensive) environment
than the college dorms. Because my parents were recently divorced, I commuted back and forth, three days or so with my mother in Marple-Newton (a suburb of Philadelphia), and three days or so with my father along Haws Lane in Flourtown (another suburb).
One night... at Marple-Newton, in the living room, I was thinking and writing furiously into my notebook... until about 2:30 or 3AM. The whole rest of the house was
sleeping, hushed, quiet, dark. And I was certainly not making noise myself.
At a certain point... my stomach started complaining (quietly)... and I shited my thoughts for a moment to the question of food. What could I eat? I went to visualize
what I could eat, with about the same intensity as I was thinking about mathematics and brains... I visualized what might be in the refrigerator, and then.. the image of
a nice big piece of cheese came to my mind... and I decided to get up....
But before I moved even a muscle, instantly the Irish retriever of the house, Ginger, came running down at top speed down the steps from where she had been sound asleep upstairs. She went straight to me, with her tongue out, full of joy and excitement and expectation... and there was no question that the look in her face meant "yes, cheese... cheese..."
She picked the exact right moment, and she had been totally asleep.... and I had carefully been making no sounds whatsoever, down on a different floor of the house.
=================
=================
Other examples start to become a bit outre, but please forgive and tolerate...
Long ago, I learned that I have many dreams which I regard as "psychic assumption dreams." This means that I have a dream in which the protagonist (which always SEEMS like "I") is actually someone else... and sometimes I even check later and discover
it is partly "veridical." That means that I saw something in the dream which later turned out to be true, which I did not know at the time. (Sometimes I even remember Philip K. Dick's book, the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich...)
Back in 1975, I lived in a rented town house in Laurel, Maryland, with two cats belonging to the landlord. When I rented the place, I did not think the cats would be much of a problem, but then I learned about their habit of demanding attention at 5AM, which really did not fit my schedule at the time. Fortunately, the house had a nice finished basement, where their kitty litter was, and a nice rug, and the house TV,
and a sliding glass door to the outside; thus it seemed reasonable for me to protect myself by shooing them into that basement when it was time for me to go to bed. I remember that it wasn't always easy, that I had to use a broom one day to do it.
(A soft broom, but good enough.)
And that night... I had one of those assumption dreams, where I **WAS** a
cat. Struggling to reach the upper world, struggling courageously and defiantly against a gigantic evil army led by a broom...
Of course, this is not veridical. It only convinces me because I already had plenty of experience with assumption dreams which were veridical... and it really did feel different being a cat. And there was another one, maybe a bit more veridical, in another year, chasing a bird...
=============================
And a third one, even more outre...
For several years... perhaps 1972 to 1978... I had a habit to go to bed in a rather different way. (In November 1978, when I went to work for the federal government, I had to change my schedule.)
In those years, I was interested in experimenting with what some would call "physical qi," and also with out of body experience. As a result, every night I would turn
on the radio to a new age station (I really miss those stations!), turn off the regular light, hit the bed, and start "turning on the other lights" and moving around
and experimenting. Near the very start of this, I noticed a very regular poltergeist effect banging the walls of the room and such, which I experimented and played around with to some degree. In fact, the nightly poltergeist became a part of my daily routine even more than breakfast.
Lots of interesting things... but one thing that came on very early was...
it was like turning on a switch, consciously, soon after I hit the bed.
The poltergeist would start... and all the dogs within a block or so
would instantly start howling....
=========================================================
=========================================================
Since this is already long, I should be brief on the theoretical interpretation.
At www.werbos.com, I have posted my best efforts to understand what is going on here scientifically. I don't pretend to KNOW exactly; I can envision several possible models. I relay a lot on one model, which I have sometimes called "the standard model of the soul" to myself. (I figure it has more probability of bsing true in the end than the standard model of physics, which is a useful reference point of sorts despite that.) The idea is that we humans are all connected together in a kind of symbiosis
with some kind of collective intelligence, which some refer to as "Gaia."
When I say that humans "have souls," it means that we are each connected to that symbiosis in a way which really has information and identity specific to us as individuals embedded in that larger, more long-lived entity. Crudely. But it's not only humans. It seems clear that cats and dogs are connected there too.
(But not first trimester fetuses such as recently fertilized cells -- an absurd intellectual idea, due to the warped effect of convoluted hermeneutic word games
and a warped hunger for power by certain clerics. They remind me of what Jesus said, warning about those who "come in my name" who are basically just Pharisees in disguise.)
Enough for now.
Merry Christmas, folks!
So let me start with a dog story.
Back in 1970-1971, I was at the thesis stage of getting a PhD from Harvard. Since I was working on a new mathematical model... I felt it would make sense for me to come back home for a year, to think in a more relaxed and human (and less expensive) environment
than the college dorms. Because my parents were recently divorced, I commuted back and forth, three days or so with my mother in Marple-Newton (a suburb of Philadelphia), and three days or so with my father along Haws Lane in Flourtown (another suburb).
One night... at Marple-Newton, in the living room, I was thinking and writing furiously into my notebook... until about 2:30 or 3AM. The whole rest of the house was
sleeping, hushed, quiet, dark. And I was certainly not making noise myself.
At a certain point... my stomach started complaining (quietly)... and I shited my thoughts for a moment to the question of food. What could I eat? I went to visualize
what I could eat, with about the same intensity as I was thinking about mathematics and brains... I visualized what might be in the refrigerator, and then.. the image of
a nice big piece of cheese came to my mind... and I decided to get up....
But before I moved even a muscle, instantly the Irish retriever of the house, Ginger, came running down at top speed down the steps from where she had been sound asleep upstairs. She went straight to me, with her tongue out, full of joy and excitement and expectation... and there was no question that the look in her face meant "yes, cheese... cheese..."
She picked the exact right moment, and she had been totally asleep.... and I had carefully been making no sounds whatsoever, down on a different floor of the house.
=================
=================
Other examples start to become a bit outre, but please forgive and tolerate...
Long ago, I learned that I have many dreams which I regard as "psychic assumption dreams." This means that I have a dream in which the protagonist (which always SEEMS like "I") is actually someone else... and sometimes I even check later and discover
it is partly "veridical." That means that I saw something in the dream which later turned out to be true, which I did not know at the time. (Sometimes I even remember Philip K. Dick's book, the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich...)
Back in 1975, I lived in a rented town house in Laurel, Maryland, with two cats belonging to the landlord. When I rented the place, I did not think the cats would be much of a problem, but then I learned about their habit of demanding attention at 5AM, which really did not fit my schedule at the time. Fortunately, the house had a nice finished basement, where their kitty litter was, and a nice rug, and the house TV,
and a sliding glass door to the outside; thus it seemed reasonable for me to protect myself by shooing them into that basement when it was time for me to go to bed. I remember that it wasn't always easy, that I had to use a broom one day to do it.
(A soft broom, but good enough.)
And that night... I had one of those assumption dreams, where I **WAS** a
cat. Struggling to reach the upper world, struggling courageously and defiantly against a gigantic evil army led by a broom...
Of course, this is not veridical. It only convinces me because I already had plenty of experience with assumption dreams which were veridical... and it really did feel different being a cat. And there was another one, maybe a bit more veridical, in another year, chasing a bird...
=============================
And a third one, even more outre...
For several years... perhaps 1972 to 1978... I had a habit to go to bed in a rather different way. (In November 1978, when I went to work for the federal government, I had to change my schedule.)
In those years, I was interested in experimenting with what some would call "physical qi," and also with out of body experience. As a result, every night I would turn
on the radio to a new age station (I really miss those stations!), turn off the regular light, hit the bed, and start "turning on the other lights" and moving around
and experimenting. Near the very start of this, I noticed a very regular poltergeist effect banging the walls of the room and such, which I experimented and played around with to some degree. In fact, the nightly poltergeist became a part of my daily routine even more than breakfast.
Lots of interesting things... but one thing that came on very early was...
it was like turning on a switch, consciously, soon after I hit the bed.
The poltergeist would start... and all the dogs within a block or so
would instantly start howling....
=========================================================
=========================================================
Since this is already long, I should be brief on the theoretical interpretation.
At www.werbos.com, I have posted my best efforts to understand what is going on here scientifically. I don't pretend to KNOW exactly; I can envision several possible models. I relay a lot on one model, which I have sometimes called "the standard model of the soul" to myself. (I figure it has more probability of bsing true in the end than the standard model of physics, which is a useful reference point of sorts despite that.) The idea is that we humans are all connected together in a kind of symbiosis
with some kind of collective intelligence, which some refer to as "Gaia."
When I say that humans "have souls," it means that we are each connected to that symbiosis in a way which really has information and identity specific to us as individuals embedded in that larger, more long-lived entity. Crudely. But it's not only humans. It seems clear that cats and dogs are connected there too.
(But not first trimester fetuses such as recently fertilized cells -- an absurd intellectual idea, due to the warped effect of convoluted hermeneutic word games
and a warped hunger for power by certain clerics. They remind me of what Jesus said, warning about those who "come in my name" who are basically just Pharisees in disguise.)
Enough for now.
Merry Christmas, folks!
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