jarysm

You go, Thaco, good for you.

I spent the weekend with my family it was peaceful, but it also brought some drama. Some more information on why I might be sick and prevention methods. Just worried about my health, about getting a job. About losing good friends, who have always been there for me, supported me, and treated me with kindness....going away. They eventually have to, I know...but it feels so...final. Like the end of a chapter.
I hope the next chapter isn't angst material.

For the past few months, at my families encouragement, I requested the organization I go to for therapy look into providing a Intersex Peer Support group. I dogged them, and asked numerous people, and after their diligent work, tonight we made it happen. I went to it at seven, and there were only three of us plus the group therapist.
However it was one of the most moving experiences of my life.
The people there had similar histories to me, one young man mirrored mine exactly. he was born a month before me, had PAIS, and his parents made the same gender decision. He even took Growth Hormone when he was a kid, just as I did.
This is truly amazing, I feel so blessed to have met him. For the first time in a long time I feel like I belong in a way I can't explain. I hope to see these people in next week's meeting, but I will consider it a gift every chance I get to hang out with them.
They reacted to issues...about feeling isolated, about feeling not really human, or fully male, or generally constructed in the same manner I do. When I mentioned feeling similar to Frankenstein's monster, one of them started to tear up and nod. How extraordinary!
I feel so.....good this week. it helps that I have four interviews, one of which Stephen found for me, and is exactly the kind of education job I need right now. I have been very happy with Stephen too. He's amazing.

I know my friends have often told me that there is nothing wrong with me, but nothing helps me believe it more than to see someone else in the same situation. Then you have someone to relate to. We can't all be the same, but sometimes, when you are different in a unusual way, you want to have that in common with someone.

As you will see after the jump, Barack Hussein Obama is a motherfucking badass, and slayer of the Hoary Hordes of Hoggarth. In the form of flies.

( Read more... )

Obviously the fly was Beelzebub, in sneaky fly form, trying to siphon sweet vitality from this badass. Justice was done.


In all seriousness, may the fly know peace and freedom from suffering.

Still sick with fever. hopefully will be able to work tomorrow. watching tony awards hosted by Neil Patrick Harris. Wish S were here, but not enough to want to make him sick.

This weekend was good, and very emotional.
I have been reading the book "Sabriel", because it reminds me of Sir Ophiuchus, and I want to be able to talk to him about it. There is a lot in it that makes me smile and as soon as I am done writing this I will get back to it.

This weekend was Kublacon. It started with me ACTUALLY being able to be in the Evil League of Evil LARP (drhorrible.com) and had an amazing time with my friends, and with friends I had made at earlier Cons. I played a four handed Alien who could see the future, I names myself "Forewarned". Copyrighted, I hope.
Speaking of friends form Cons past, it finally hit me this weekend how I fortunately (and unexpectedly, to me) HAVE friends from past cons, mostly from LARPS we have participated in. They aren't They aren't acquaintances. They are friends. I made friends, people remembered who I was, I remembered them, we laughed about old times, and suddenly I am inducted in the Gamer Con-scene, if only because I finally realized I was part of it. This was a pleasant realization, I no longer feel like a visitor to the scene, politely smiling while mutual friends make conversation around me, as I wonder when game will start.
Furthermore, I ran a successful half-life/FATE game, was recognized for the games I have run in the past, and reacquainted with past tabletop GMs. It's not just LARPS, I am a part of the con in a way I never saw myself to be. I am an active part of the local gamer community. Wow.

I continued to have fun, was in a slow but interesting DnD game (I fought and killed my first Beholder), and was in a VERY good "Unhallowed Metropolis " Larp, put on by an old friend of mine. Then I was invited to party with the other LARPers, and stuff happened. Definitely not bad stuff.

I will elaborate, but fist I should say that I have been extremely upset this weekend, as a base emotion. I feel trapped and doomed by my upcoming unemployment, and the weight of concern for my future followed me to Con and kept me up at night as it did here at home. I don't want to speak too much about this now. I am trying very hard to get a new job. I don't believe I am doomed, I am just afraid of it.
This fear and angst lead to something, I'm getting to it.

So at Con I began to realize that there was a girl whom I thought was very pretty, and certainly nice. We may have flirted lightly, but enough for me to wonder if she had a monogamous relationship. Turned out she did, but I found that out before I approached her, much to my relief. More of that sort of thing later.
I also was able to reach across the self imposed gap that my above realization of community put an end to, and when I need a place to sleep for the night asked a friend I had met at Con, had only known for a year or so, and seen at Con, if I could crash in her room and she said yes (conditioned to her roommate's approval immediately. I was pleasantly surprised to find that her roommate was an old Friend from the Berkeley Vampire LARP, and he ran the wonderful "Unhallowed Metropolis) " LARP. I was taken a back, because I had expected her to say no, she hardly knew me. That is part of why I realized I was part of the Con crowd.

The UM LARP was awesome. I was so bummed that I had to miss the previous night's LARP, because it specifically featured golem characters. However the possibility of a Frankenstein/Promethean character was introduced in the UM LARP, and when I asked for it, it was granted. I had SO much fun playing that character.
After the LARP, the friend I was going to room with invited me to drink with her and other people from that LARP, a further cementing of the social realization I had made, especially since so many of the people there were gamers with whom I had played with before, and a few I knew by name. I had so much fun at the party, and I even got to flirting with a certain girl, whom, like others in this blog, will go mostly unnamed. This Girl, whom I will call Lily, had gamed with me in LARPs I had been in at Cons for at least three years now. She is very pretty, and as I explained to her while we flirted (with the ease of alcohol touched lips) I had found the forwardness and sexuality of many of her LARP characters a little intimidating. She had no problem playing someone comfortable with her sexuality, and flirty, and my characters often reacted timidly around hers because I myself am timid around attractive people who are flirtatious.
She responded with "I'm intimidating? I am intimidated by YOU, you are good at role playing and really fall into these characters." We kept talking, and I was further put in my place to realize just how approachable, sympathetic, and humble she was. Serves me right to prejudge people because they are attractive, flirty.
Also in the conversation was a very striking-looking, young gentleman, who flirted with me, and we may have made out a little...and "Lily" and I made out.

This is significant for me because it made me realize how much I short sold myself to feel I couldn't approach her, and because my recent attractions towards women have been driving me crazy. I may not have spoken about it much here, but the dry spell I have experiencing after Sir Ophiuchus left, has put me in mind of how long it has been since I did anything intimate with a woman, and even though Sir Ophiuchus and I are physically open at the moment, I have done little to go out and see what it was I was missing.

As it turns out I had been focusing on the wrong thing. As I made out with "Lily", which was very satisfying, I reflected on how there was nothing missing from my experiences kissing men that was present in this experience. I had psyched myself up int thinking that, via absence, I was desiring something in women I had been without. While my time without a woman's attention may have lead to me mentally focusing my desires on them (not exclusively, Sir Ophiuchus never left my thoughts as the person I wanted physically more than anyone I could imagine), I wasn't missing women specially at all. I just missed intimacy and the spice of a kiss or such a interaction. Kissing Lily was like kissing the Young Man, and like Kissing Sir Ophiuchus , but lacking the emotional satisfaction of kissing some one with whom you are in love.

I think I got my head right, or at least more right. I appreciated the call to reality of making out with Lily. Also I can hold up the experience to my previous conceptions of myself and see how much I hold myself back, think the possible impossible.

Lily is not "out of my league", because I think she is cuter than me. I don't need to have sex with a woman to put that gender out of my head before my knight in shining armor gets here. It was a silly self-brainwashing, and I kinda knew it all along.
Just as I never was separate from other gamers just because I didn't know them or they didn't know me. I believe in the mystical all connection of compassion and yet I failed to utilize it to benefit ms self image, even when I needed it. These people are my people, and the potential for friendship was always there.

I am so freaking afraid of myself, needlessly. I often withhold action, out of fear of making mistake and hurting myself, or (worse I feel) hurting someone else. This is getting ridiculous, the actions I shy from. I am not afraid of being some angsty anti-hero. I am afraid of the action or opportunity being hard. I am afraid of being forced with the gnosis of not knowing what to do in the situation, nor if I and the people around me will be ok. I have paralysis fear. Too afraid to make a decision, I didn't pursue active friendship with most of these LARPers in the past, I didn't flirt with women in the past eight months. I didn't accept that I can't control my future, I can just labor to be employed. I can just do my best.
I am afraid to do my best, for fear it won't be enough.
No more.
I have at times impressed myself, got myself into situations I didn't think I could. I need to trust in that. Have confidence. If Lily can be so modest, but affect confidence, so can I.

Thanks, fellow Con Goers. You helped make this a very enjoyable Con for me. And I learned something about myself.
For instance, that when Sir Ophiuchus gets here I am going to be able to pursue intimacy with him unfettered by my past wondering if I still know what it's like to kiss a woman. Of course I do, I know, it's just like kissing a man. It's how you feel about yourself and that person that makes it different.

Also I ran into Alden three times in five minutes. We didn't speak, he just kept walking despite us catching eye line.
Good.

I finally got my hands on the Japanese Manga I.S. (Inter Sex), in English.
It's a very touching look at people who struggle with their gender, parents who decide not to set a gender for their baby, and feeling a lone/connecting with family over ones intersexuality.
I say touching, though because of the way the themes and quotes move memory and sympathy in me.

At first it is a bunch of case studies, about there in the first volume. In the second volume it centers around a family and their first born, who is intersexed. The family decides to let the child choose their own gender, later on.
It's very...... nice to see art that addresses this issue. Like the movie XXY, the story makes me feel both camaraderie and embarrassment to identify with something so.....unusual. People do not like the unusual, sometimes they prefer to live in a world that makes sense to them, without ever needing to wonder how much of that world is of the construction of their preferences and perspective.
a perspective I don't share.
But as I said before, these books to show me that I share a perspective with at least someone, and I like to think that the questions I ask myself late at night are of the same themes that everyone does.

Speaking of Intersex, and feeling different, modern AI philosophers have looked at the description and human reaction to the "Frankenstein Monster" in the original book, and said Shelly was describing the Uncanny valley. The look of the monster that made people reject him was probably not extreme, but just different enough to be intolerable.

According to the Telegraph:

"A top Obama fundraiser and hedge fund manager said: "I'm appalled at the anti-Wall Street rhetoric. It was OK on the campaign but now it's the real world. I'm surprised that Obama is turning out to be so left-wing. He's a real class warrior."
"

LOL "How dare you do the things you said you were going to do!" Obama may not be perfect, but that he surprises some of his greedier supporters by carrying out his campaigned ideas, I'd say he's a head above the rest when it comes to breaking political "business as usual".

Now let's see him do that with civil liberties, especially surveillance, and Torture.
Hit 'em hard Barack!
If they don't like it let's see them try their luck in a "Galtian utopia".

"Military Deeply Involved in Christian Reality Television Show PDF Print E-mail
Written by Jason Leopold
Wednesday, 06 May 2009 00:00

By Jason Leopold

The Pentagon was involved in the production of a cable program that featured two so-called “extreme” missionaries embedded with a U.S. Army unit in Afghanistan trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.

The popular reality series, "Travel the Road," aired on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and featured Will Decker and Tim Scott, two so-called "extreme" missionaries who travel the globe to “preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth and encourage the church to be active in the Great Commission.”

The other cable program green-lit by the Pentagon is “God’s Soldier,” which aired in September on the Military Channel, and was filmed at Forward Operating Base McHenry in Hawijah, Iraq. It features an Army chaplain openly promoting fundamentalist Christianity to active-duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a watchdog organization, amended a federal lawsuit it filed against the Department of Defense last year, currently in federal District Court in Kansas City, Kansas to “include these despicable unconstitutional promotions of fundamentalist Christianity in the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan,” said MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein.

Part of the second season of “Travel the Road” was filmed on location in Afghanistan and aired in April 2006, where Decker and Scott were embedded with the Army, and shows numerous scenes of the men accompanying U.S. Army soldiers on patrol. The missionaries are also filmed evangelizing the local Afghans by distributing New Testaments to them in their native Darri language.

In one scene, an Army Chaplain named Capt. Brad Hanna of the Oklahoma National Guard, talks about the possibility of a “revival” in Afghanistan and says he frequently speaks to Afghans about converting to Christianity. Hanna was made a full-time support chaplain for the Oklahoma National Guard after he returned from Afghanistan.

Additionally, Decker and Scott prominently cite SSgt. Sheldon Hoyt, who was stationed in Afghanistan with the Oklahoma National Guard’s 45th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, as playing a hands-on role in helping the missionaries facilitate their proselytizing as opposed to simply being a tour guide of sorts.

In sanctioning Decker and Scott’s work, the Pentagon appears to have committed numerous constitutional violations as well as breached military regulations such as United States Central Command's General Order 1-A, which strictly prohibits any proselytization in the Middle Eastern theater of operations.

Last year, U.S. military personnel launched a major initiative to convert thousands of Iraqi citizens to Christianity also by distributing Bibles and other fundamentalist Christian literature translated into Arabic to Iraqi Muslims.

An article published on the website of Mission Network News reported that Bible Pathway Ministries, a fundamentalist Christian organization, disclosed that the organization provided thousands of a special military edition of its Daily Devotional Bible study book to members of the 101st Airborne Division of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, currently stationed in Iraq.

The project "came into being when a chaplain in Iraq (who has since finished his tour) requested some books from Bible Pathway Ministries (BPM).”

“The resulting product is a 6"x9" 496-page illustrated book with embossed cover containing 366 daily devotional commentaries, maps, charts, and additional helpful information," the Mission Network News report said.

Chief Warrant Officer Rene Llanos of the 101st Airborne told Mission Network News, “the soldiers who are patrolling and walking the streets are taking along this copy, and they're using it to minister to the local residents.”

"Our division is also getting ready to head toward Afghanistan, so there will be copies heading out with the soldiers," Llanos said. “We need to pray for protection for our soldiers as they patrol and pray that God would continue to open doors. The soldiers are being placed in strategic places with a purpose. They're continuing to spread the Word.”

Karen Hawkins, a BPM official, said military chaplains "were trying to encourage [soldiers] to be in the Word everyday because they're in a very dangerous situation, and they need that protection."

The distribution of the Bibles and Christian literature came at the same time that U.S. Marines guarding the entrance to the city of Fallujah handed out “witnessing coins” to Sunni Muslims entering the city that read in Arabic on one side: "Where will you spend eternity?” and "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16" on the other.

But it’s the military chaplains who have been criticized for allegedly force-feeding soldiers a form of fundamentalist Christianity originating from highly controversial, apocalyptic "End Times" evangelists and their mega-churches. Evangelical Christians have become such a dominating presence in the military’s chaplain corps that the Air Force held a four-day Spiritual Fitness Conference at Hilton Hotel in Colorado Springs in 2005 for chaplains and their families.

The U.S. Constitution says the federal government is prohibited from using the machinery of the state to promote any single religion. But, disturbingly, “God’s Soldier,” produced with the full co-operation of the 2-27 Infantry Battalion "Wolfhounds,” and “Travel the Road” comes off more like an advertisement for fundamentalist Christianity and a promotional tool for the faith.

“God’s Soldier” was co-produced by Jerusalem Productions, a British production company whose "primary aim is to increase understanding and knowledge of the Christian religion and to promote Christian values, via the broadcast media, to as wide an audience as possible."

Before “God’s Soldier” aired on Sept. 10, the Discovery Channel, which owns the Military Channel, advertised the program by stating that it would feature several Army Chaplains from a wide variety of denominations discussing their work in the military.

“Follow a group of U.S. Army Chaplains from different faiths on a tour of duty in Iraq as they comfort wounded and dying soldiers, reassure panicked and depressed soldiers, as well debriefing those soldiers that return from their tours of duty," the marketing literature for “God’s Soldier” said.

Instead, “God’s Soldier,” zeroed in on one chaplain, Capt.. Charles Popov, who appears in the first scene of the program in a godlike pose looking down upon the military base and urging soldier to attend Christian Bible study.

"Hey this is God,” Chaplain Popov says. “Come to Bible study tonight at 1900. Purpose Driven Life. You only have 25,000 days in your life, and probably half of it's gone.”

The author of the book, “Purpose Driven Life,” that Popov referenced is Rick Warren, the leader of a fundamentalist mega-church in Southern California. In a recent interview with Fox News pundit Sean Hannity, Warren said, "the Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped.... In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers. Not good-doers. Evildoers."

MRFF’s research has found that “The Purpose Driven Life” is second only to the Bible itself as the most widely promoted religious book to our military.

In another scene from “God’s Soldier,” Popov is featured blessing a group of soldiers about to go out on a patrol.

"I pray that you would give them the ability to exterminate the enemy and to accomplish the task that they're been sent forth by God and country to do. In Christ's name I pray. Amen,” Popov says as he leads the group of soldiers in prayer. “Every soldier should know Romans 13, that the government is set up by God, and the magistrate, or the one who wields the sword -- you have not swords but 50 cals and [unintelligible] like that -- does not yield it in vain because the magistrate has been called, as you, to execute wrath upon those who do evil."

Popov is studying toward a Brigade Chaplain supervisory position and the rank of Major at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina's US Army Chaplain School in the Army C-4 class.

Another clip from “God’s Soldier” contains what appears to be a violation of strict regulations governing Army chapels: a large cross-shaped window covering about a third of the height of the door.

"The actions of Army chaplain Popov are abominable beyond measure even when slightly judged by constitutional standards,” said Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. “Look, damn it, let’s call it what it is. [Popov] and his approving Army superiors are the quintessential poster-child for the treason; yes treason, of aiding and abetting our enemies.

“Indeed, they are creating the most prolific recruiting weapon ever imagined for the fundamentalist Islamic terrorists comprising al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the insurrectionists and the Jihadists. Chaplain Popov and his lickspittle Army lapdogs have tragically painted the wretched perception that this conflict is between the righteous armies of Jesus against the evildoers of all Islam. This conflict of religious extermination has happened before. They called it The Crusades.”

Since he launched his watchdog organization four years ago, Weinstein said he and MRFF have been contacted by more than 10,000 active duty and retired members of the U.S. Armed Forces, many of who served or serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who identify themselves as Christians. They told Weinstein that they were “severely” pressured by their military chain of command to convert to Christianity.

Weinstein, the author of "With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military." and a former White House attorney under Ronald Reagan, general counsel H. Ross Perot and an Air Force Judge Advocate (JAG), has exposed scores of cases in which the Department of Defense has promoted and sanctioned fundamentalist Christian proselytizing among U.S. soldiers in violation of the U.S. Constitution, established federal case law and military regulations.

The most egregious case of the Pentagon’s close ties with Christian fundamentalist groups was formally investigated by the Pentagon’s inspector general, as a result of a highly publicized complaint lodged by Weinstein’s group, in 2007 in which high-ranking Defense Department officials appeared in a promotional video in uniform promoting the fundamentalist organization Christian Embassy.

In a 45-page inspector general report, Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack Catton, Army Brig. Gen. Bob Caslen, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, Maj. Gen. Peter Sutton, and a colonel and lieutenant colonel whose names were redacted were found to have "improperly endorsed and participated with a non-Federal entity while in uniform."

Caslen was formerly the deputy director for political-military affairs for the war on terrorism, directorate for strategic plans and policy, joint staff. He was reassigned to the prestigious position of West Point Command of Cadets overseeing the 4,200 cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point. Caslen told DOD investigators he agreed to appear in the video upon learning other senior Pentagon officials had been interviewed for the promotional video.

At least one senior military official defended their actions, according to the inspector general's report, saying the "Christian Embassy had become a 'quasi-Federal entity,' since the DOD had endorsed the organization to General Officers for over 25 years."

“These unconscionable efforts by the leadership of our American armed forces to portray our United States military as the avenging Army of Jesus must stop here and now,” Weinstein said. “It is directly leading to the emboldening of our enemy which, in turn, is maiming and killing brave American service men and women."
"

"The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself Stem-cell guru Robert Lanza presents a radical new view of the universe and everything in it. by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman



The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves. This insight snapped into focus one day while one of us (Lanza) was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds. advertisement | article continues below Is the web possible without the spider? Are space and time physical objects that would continue to exist even if living creatures were removed from the scene? Figuring out the nature of the real world has obsessed scientists and philosophers for millennia. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all. For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley’s argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived. These models presume the existence of one essential reality that prevails with us or without us. Yet since the 1920s, quantum physics experiments have routinely shown the opposite: Results do depend on whether anyone is observing. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the famous two-slit experiment. When someone watches a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through the slits, the particle behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities—including somehow passing through both holes at the same time. Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us. MESSING WITH THE LIGHTQuantum mechanics is the physicist’s most accurate model for describing the world of the atom. But it also makes some of the most persuasive arguments that conscious perception is integral to the workings of the universe. Quantum theory tells us that an unobserved small object (for instance, an electron or a photon—a particle of light) exists only in a blurry, unpredictable state, with no well-defined location or motion until the moment it is observed. This is Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. Physicists describe the phantom, not-yet-manifest condition as a wave function, a mathematical expression used to find the probability that a particle will appear in any given place. When a property of an electron suddenly switches from possibility to reality, some physicists say its wave function has collapsed. What accomplishes this collapse? Messing with it. Hitting it with a bit of light in order to take its picture. Just looking at it does the job. Experiments suggest that mere knowledge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to collapse a wave function and convert possibility to reality. When particles are created as a pair—for instance, two electrons in a single atom that move or spin together—physicists call them entangled. Due to their intimate connection, entangled particles share a wave function. When we measure one particle and thus collapse its wave function, the other particle’s wave function instantaneously collapses too. If one photon is observed to have a vertical polarization (its waves all moving in one plane), the act of observation causes the other to instantly go from being an indefinite probability wave to an actual photon with the opposite, horizontal polarity—even if the two photons have since moved far from each other. In 1997 University of Geneva physicist Nicolas Gisin sent two entangled photons zooming along optical fibers until they were seven miles apart. One photon then hit a two-way mirror where it had a choice: either bounce off or go through. Detectors recorded what it randomly did. But whatever action it took, its entangled twin always performed the complementary action. The communication between the two happened at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light. It seems that quantum news travels instantaneously, limited by no external constraints—not even the speed of light. Since then, other researchers have duplicated and refined Gisin’s work. Today no one questions the immediate nature of this connectedness between bits of light or matter, or even entire clusters of atoms. Before these experiments most physicists believed in an objective, independent universe. They still clung to the assumption that physical states exist in some absolute sense before they are measured. All of this is now gone for keeps. WRESTLING WITH GOLDILOCKSThe strangeness of quantum reality is far from the only argument against the old model of reality. There is also the matter of the fine-tuning of the cosmos. Many fundamental traits, forces, and physical constants—like the charge of the electron or the strength of gravity—make it appear as if everything about the physical state of the universe were tailor-made for life. Some researchers call this revelation the Goldilocks principle, because the cosmos is not “too this” or “too that” but rather “just right” for life.
At the moment there are only four explanations for this mystery. The first two give us little to work with from a scientific perspective. One is simply to argue for incredible coincidence. Another is to say, “God did it,” which explains nothing even if it is true. The third explanation invokes a concept called the anthropic principle,? first articulated by Cambridge astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1973. This principle holds that we must find the right conditions for life in our universe, because if such life did not exist, we would not be here to find those conditions. Some cosmologists have tried to wed the anthropic principle with the recent theories that suggest our universe is just one of a vast multitude of universes, each with its own physical laws. Through sheer numbers, then, it would not be surprising that one of these universes would have the right qualities for life. But so far there is no direct evidence whatsoever for other universes. The final option is biocentrism, which holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. This is an explanation for and extension of the participatory anthropic principle described by the physicist John Wheeler, a disciple of Einstein’s who coined the terms wormhole and black hole. advertisement | article continues below SEEKING SPACE AND TIME Even the most fundamental elements of physical reality, space and time, strongly support a biocentric basis for the cosmos. According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, note that all of their working models, from Isaac Newton’s laws through quantum mechanics, do not actually describe the nature of time. The real point is that no actual entity of time is needed, nor does it play a role in any of their equations. When they speak of time, they inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time. To measure anything’s position precisely, at any given instant, is to lock in on one static frame of its motion, as in the frame of a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe a movement, you cannot isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Imagine that you are watching a film of an archery tournament. An archer shoots and the arrow flies. The camera follows the arrow’s trajectory from the archer’s bow toward the target. Suddenly the projector stops on a single frame of a stilled arrow. You stare at the image of an arrow in midflight. The pause in the film enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but you have lost all information about its momentum. In that frame it is going nowhere; its path and velocity are no longer known. Such fuzziness brings us back to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which describes how measuring the location of a subatomic particle inherently blurs its momentum and vice versa. All of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective. Everything we perceive is actively and repeatedly being reconstructed inside our heads in an organized whirl of information. Time in this sense can be defined as the summation of spatial states occurring inside the mind. So what is real? If the next mental image is different from the last, then it is different, period. We can award that change with the word time, but that does not mean there is an actual invisible matrix in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things. We watch our loved ones age and die and assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime. There is a peculiar intangibility to space, as well. We cannot pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real in our view. Rather, it is a mode of interpretation and understanding. It is part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects. Most of us still think like Newton, regarding space as sort of a vast container that has no walls. But our notion of space is false. Shall we count the ways? 1. Distances between objects mutate depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, as described by Einstein’s relativity, so that there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else. 2. Empty space, as described by quantum mechanics, is in fact not empty but full of potential particles and fields. 3. Quantum theory even casts doubt on the notion that distant objects are truly separated, since entangled particles can act in unison even if separated by the width of a galaxy. UNLOCKING THE CAGE In daily life, space and time are harmless illusions. A problem arises only because, by treating these as fundamental and independent things, science picks a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality. Most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical, without the other side, the living. By inclination and training these scientists are obsessed with mathematical descriptions of the world. If only, after leaving work, they would look out with equal seriousness over a pond and watch the schools of minnows rise to the surface. The fish, the ducks, and the cormorants, paddling out beyond the pads and the cattails, are all part of the greater answer. Recent quantum studies help illustrate what a new biocentric science would look like. Just months? ago, Nicolas Gisin announced a new twist on his entanglement experiment; in this case, he thinks the results could be visible to the naked eye. At the University of Vienna, Anton Zeilinger’s work with huge molecules called buckyballs pushes quantum reality closer to the macroscopic world. In an exciting extension of this work—proposed by Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist—not just light but a small mirror that reflects it becomes part of an entangled quantum system, one that is billions of times larger than a buckyball. If the proposed experiment ends up confirming Penrose’s idea, it would also confirm that quantum effects apply to human-scale objects. Biocentrism should unlock the cages in which Western science has unwittingly confined itself. Allowing the observer into the equation should open new approaches to understanding cognition, from unraveling the nature of consciousness to developing thinking machines that experience the world the same way we do. Biocentrism should also provide stronger bases for solving problems associated with quantum physics and the Big Bang. Accepting space and time as forms of animal sense perception (that is, as biological), rather than as external physical objects, offers a new way of understanding everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for strange results in the two-slit experiment) to the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe. At a minimum, it should help halt such dead-end efforts as string theory. Above all, biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do since Einstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago. Until we recognize the essential role of biology, our attempts to truly unify the universe will remain a train to nowhere."

Sorry I haven't written in a while. Guess I didn't really feel like it.
Some highlights (not for kids):
-work is getting really vexing.
--things with the Stephmiester are great. It's guy love (between two guys).
-i didb't get the summer job I was interviewed for.
-i came out as Bi and, a few days later, as intersexed on Facebbok. So now the conservative members of my family know. I jus didn't want shyness to hold back on me being comfortable talking and writing about it.
-i love far cry 2. If you don't like it, stop playing, because halfway through or so you must start the game anew (but with all your weapons) in a brand spanking new area.
I love it, just when I had worn the old area out, awesome new content.
- I am writing again. I am writing for my book, for my Moms book. Shit's about to getting written up in here.
-wolverine is tonight, which means deadppol (!) Which means Ryan Renolds (!!)
- I love my warforged avenger in DnD. We are going to get a villa together, and live in happiness and double D20's on attack rolls. It will be magcal (technically divine).
-Jon Stewart is the man.
-this week has been very aggravatinng.

Happy birthday Stephen!
also
Bioshock two gameplay footage.
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I stepped into Borders to pick up "Turn Coat", the new Harry Dresden book. I just got the money to afford it, recently, and I have a gift card to help lower that cost. I thought the book was out in all stores, because I saw it in Borderlands, but I see that Borderlands just got it early.

So I looked though the comic tradeback section, and found that someone had turned Koontz's Frankenstein into a comic. Enchanted, I picked it up. An hour later, I put it down, my mind alight with the familiar topics of Frankensteinian philosophy.

As the bad guy of the book, Victor Frankenstein (calling himself Victor Helios in the modern world) now creates people with genetics and cutting edge science. Thinking a on these themes I found myself oddly stopping to look at covers of books on genetics and evolution on display. I looked at some of the rather limited subjects each book was devoted to and thought of the interest and passion that went into writing them. What must it feel like to be so interested in a subject that you can produce a new spin on it? I thought at first I could not imagine being so delighted with a topic, but in a moment I remembered there were such topics for me.

Nanotechnology, Ancient Sumer, philosophy of the mind, AI, robotics, magic, semiotics, information theory, conspiracies, enlightenment, Frankenstein monsters, golems, Helios/sun, Prometheus, Enki......
These subjects are all very interesting to me, and they stand out from my other interests in that I see them all as inexplicably (sometimes explicably) related. I want to write a book tying them all together, a fiction, a story that have these all as elements.

The Helios story....I should keep working on it. And while I know much of it is a steal from other ideas...I have been told by authors I respect that stealing (as opposed to borrowing) is an authors honored tool. But it's hard to get past the feelings that I have no talent for it....I mean I really care about this, what if the world would be better off without me writing it, like "The Eye of Argon". It's easy not to continue working on it, which is weird because I enjoy writing, thinking up stories, and world building.

Maybe lightning will strike.

I walk upon the knoll to meet friends spied/
Seeing my dark outfit they ask "who died?"/
not expecting to be rudely abused/
I by chance, not mood, wore the clothing choosed
And so in righteous indignation I /
Gave my iambic fifth metered reply/
"My innocence is the victim this day/
For it did die 'pon seeing this array/
Twas your visage that gave it such a fright/
I changed to better morn, by vigil light/
And so you see the cause of this dark lace/
Is the spiteful structure you call a face/"
Say not in duels of wits I come unarmed/
If true, by wit-fu fists my foes are harmed

I do what I can to to find a new and better job for the summer and fall. Hopefully a teaching job so I can graduate this winter. And afford to move out.
but no takers and to make matter more frustrating, the past three weeks have been medically painful, to literally nauseating, to emotionally difficult.
This week, it's the kids. Well my whole job, not really the kids themselves. I am trying really hard to give them the best I can, but coworkers, hours, are all being cut, which cuts off friendships, support, and makes me worry about money even more.
But the kids...well they haven't been the easiest to handle this week. Yesterday I found myself tearing up in a library sipping juice fro ma junior cup. The pressure to keep composed and on top of things while in the presence of the kids just blew the cover off me as soon as they left.
Today I had a weirdly unsettling moment when an eight year old's crush came to arguments.
The romeo, a young boy whose innocent (and a little slow) thinking causes him to weave his fingers in front of him and rock back and forth like in the old cartoons. The object of his affection, an oblivious and quickly growing irate bespectacled third grader who reacts to the romeo's tagging along with shouts, and kisses with shrieks. She does not like this kid.
And he didn't see it.
He was already yelled at by the gym teacher for trying to kiss people (the romeo is very affectionate with almost everyone), has been pushed and kicked by the target of his affection, and looked around confused when all the girls in his class whispered about him and what he wasn't grasping.
So I tried to make things easy on him by telling him she just didn't like him back. I should have expected the tears and sobbing, but I certainly didn't expect my frozen gut, deep guilt, self disgust. As he turned away from me, pushing his overly large glasses up, hands to his eyes, making that low siren sound the young are so good at, I found myself sick at what I had done. I had hurt him, in a way I had been hurt, and though he may forget about it tomorrow, I felt like I could never look at him again without knowing that I betrayed a fellow dreamer and misunderstood puppy-love producer. I had burst his bubble, brought the realization the person of his affection could never bring (try as she might. I was trying to save his dignity and keep him from doing things that would get him in trouble, and my decision was pretentious, and possibly short sighted.
poor kid, I've been there, buddy. Didn't mean to bring you there so soon.
Luckily my coworker was still on, it left me the ability to go off to another corner of the yard, and feel like shit.
now I am trying to wash my laundry and plan dinner. Wish I wasn't all by myself.

I got a haircut and I don't like it. I should have kept it long on top.

So far I like it, and find it just as enjoyable and intellectual as some of my favorite dystopia scifi novels. The attention Margret Attwood pays to the inequities of the setting flow organically from the thoughts of her main character. She does a good job with the world building as well. After playing Half Life 2 it's easy to look at and appreciate the details that sell the abrupt change in the history of the world, and the slow march to the present, with respect to culture and politics especially.
The look at the nature of liberty is believably in character too. I'm glad it's a page turner, because I have been eager to read it for a while.
Sorry Emmerific, for having it for so long, I will return it to you as soon as i am finished, which will be very soon at this rate.

I feel much better this morning. No throwing up, skillfully or otherwise. I was made lighthearted by the news that a friend survived a car mishap.
oh, and spider-man exists, he just started with not quite baseline human ability and his super powers brought him up to "normal". However I am sure that after twenty years in a wheelchair, walking feels just as miraculous as web slinging.

Paraplegic Man Suffers Spider Bite, Walks Again

Reporting
Mike Dello Stritto
MANTECA, Calif. (CBS13) ―

He has been confined to a wheelchair for 20 years. Now a paraplegic man is walking again, and his doctors call it a miracle. CBS13 went to Manteca to find out how a spider bite helped get him back on his feet.

"I closed my eyes and then I was spinning like a flying saucer," explains David Blancarte.

A motorcycle accident almost killed David 21 years ago. At the time he might have wished he was dead.

"I asked my doctor, 'Sir what happened? I can't feel my legs'," said David.

Ever since, David's been relying on his wheelchair to get around. Then the spider bite. A Brown Recluse sent him to the hospital, then to rehab for eight months.

"I'm here for a spider bite. I didn't know I would end up walking," says David.

A nurse noticed David's leg spasm and ran a test on him.

"When they zapped my legs, I felt the current, I was like 'whoa' and I yelled," he says.

He felt the current and the rush of a renewed sense of hope.

"She says,'your nerves are alive. They're just asleep'," explained David.

Five days later David was walking.

"I was walking on the bar back and forth," he said.

Now David is out of the hospital and on his feet and walking.

David basks in his glory and gives a ray of hope to other hoping to walk again. The 48-year-old former boxer and dancer is taking it in stride, knowing his best days are still ahead.

David's dream is to see his 14-year-old twin daughters grow up and get married so he can walk them down the aisle and have that first dance.

(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

So I found this list of "most controversial South Park Episodes" on Digg.com this morning. the usual internet list sort of deal.
http://tv.msn.com/controversial-south-park-episodes/

I was struck by how many of the controversies revolved around a group of people who felt the episode was disrespectful towards their beliefs. However it seems as if they are equating "not holding our beliefs as sacred, as we do" with the same sort of disrespect that civil law pays attention to, defamation.
The mental behavior I object to in specific, is the assumption that one's beliefs are universally standard, the sanctity of which is or should also be universal. While we can argue all day on what constitutes a right or tendency to hold one's beliefs universally standard (as those who hold their beliefs to be such will probably tell me "that's not unreasonable...if you are right like me"), I instead want to focus on and get reaction to the tendency to hold the sanctity of one's beliefs as universally standard.
Some might say this is strictly a religious behavior, but I have found it not to be. For instance, while I am confused at why some one might do this, I note I have done a similar thing before in the following instance:

I was walking with a friend near Japantown, we were talking about human nature. On the subject of compassion, I proposed that compassion was universal to all people, and to some extent or another everyone felt it.
My friend countered with" That's not true, I don't feel compassion. I don't even understand it."
This shocked me, and was an important factor to why we are no longer friends. I have since reconciled my beliefs about compassion to account for his experiences, but I feel as if I was banking on the idea that even if people don't experience compassion, at least everyone see's it as important.
Not so.
In the same way, I am sure Pentecostal Christians in Russia can understand that no everyone experiences Christmas reverence, but they may be assuming that it should be standard that everyone can see it is important. I suppose Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo showed them.

While many people would say this is mainly a religious thing, I find that many people assume their most treasured internal beliefs and assumptions have obvious value that everyone can see.
I had a hard time understanding how someone could live without or not even care about compassion. But I learned, and the learning experience helped explain why a supposed friend was such a terrible friend.
Some people have similar issue, but expect their beliefs to be held sanctified by a much smaller group of people than everyone, such as "all liberals can see A is true, or we should fight for A"

Does anyone want to share how they do this too, perhaps we can figure out what internal desire causes this and how we can work around it to be more understanding.

This guy's voice makes me melt, and the songs he references make me grin sheepishly.

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