The Towed Martyr

“Sedona is the worst place to have a car accident because you’ll be dying in the street… and people come by and say, “Why did you create that in your life?”"
- Nassim Haramein, rogue physicist, about the conscious co-creation phenomenon

The Towed Martyr

The turd got his car towed due to street cleaning. He moved it from one side of the street where they were cleaning to the other side where they cleaned the next day. We hope that if enough of these doh/dough moments stack up then one day he may turn out all right. And yet, 5 lost cell phones and 5 new driver’s licenses haven’t yet inspired caution and forethought. We love him.

When we got to the towing joint I spied one of the crossbeam trucks and I’ve always wanted to take this picture, but it was inside the DO NOT ENTER gate. I had to ask the guy at the window and he said, “We don’t like pictures” and I told him it’d be quick and he asked the mechanic and he asked the manager and pretty soon we had six guys standing around saying, “You want to take a picture of what?” Awk-ward! The turd was very brave and one of the towing guys actually lowered the beam for us. I was devastated when reviewing the first pic, his arms and head covered the crossbeams and ruined the picture, but the second one turned out fantastico.

Crossing the Event Horizon

I’m getting this 4-DVD set. Watch the short trailer at www.theresonanceproject.org.

He is asserting that the universe is not predisposed toward entropy – where everything falls apart and turns to dust – but that the universe is a self-ordering mechanism that is striving towards more and more complex creations through evolution and that each living creation is a feedback loop whereby information is exchanged to and from the universe itself. The nature of the structure of this universe, he believes, is geometry. (Pythagoras would have agreed. He made a religious cult out of it.)

There are things that truly resonated with me when I watched his lecture because I had already discovered them on my own:
1. The universe is fractal in nature.
2. The mysterious dark matter that scientists go on about is bullshit. They cocked up their equations and rather than admit it they just keep seeking for something that isn’t there. (4% of the universe is visible matter and 22% of the universe is hypothetical dark matter and 74% is hypothetical dark energy and 100% of that is hypothetical bullshit.)
3. Infinity is still possible within a closed system; like a sphere. (See #1.) Walk half the distance in a room, then half that, then half that to infinity – you never leave the room, but we can subdivide the space of that room forever.
4. Empty space is never empty.
5. We are each the center of our own universes.

Should be interesting.

Free Spore Trial

Try the demo creature creator for free. (PC or Mac.) Or, buy the full version of the creature creator for $9.99, and get $10 off the real game when it comes out in September.

Interesting tidbit: A guy at Joystiq found an old Spore-like boardgame.

Ticket to Ride (2004)

I forgot to tell you about my new board game, Ticket to Ride.

Players: 2-5 players
Age: 8 and up (we played with an 8 year old who did quite well)
Time: An hour or more

So far we’ve played it twice and I had a good experience both times. Once was even a two player game over beers in a redneck irish bar. (Luckily we attempted no pretense of ‘being cool’ and therefore were able to have a good game in a public setting.)

In the game you collect colored train cards until you have enough to lay down a route on the board, which gives you points. You can get tickets that will give you extra points for getting a route, but those points could be deducted at the end of the game if you don’t successfully connect the two cities. You must balance your greed for extra points with your ability to succeed. Simple. Elegant. Non-gamers and gamers alike can both enjoy.

A Dog That Seems To Know When His Owner is Coming Home
Videotaped Experiments and Observations

Rupert Sheldrake and Pamela Smart
Journal of Scientific Exploration 14, 233-255 (2000)
http://www.sheldrake.org/articles/pdf/40.pdf

In this paper we describe a series of videotaped experiments and observations with a dog called Jaytee, belonging to Pamela Smart (PS).

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Basically, they tried to scientifically eliminate any way that the dog could acquire knowledge about when the owner was coming home. They had PS come home at varying times, from varying locations, via different methods of transportation (in case the dog was hearing the car.) They tried to make sure that the people in the house weren’t tipping the dog off by having PS paged at a random time to come home and by conducting the experiment both with people in the house and without. Each time the dog seemed to go to the window and wait for her as soon as she had the intent to go home. Scarily, sometimes the dog would go to the window before someone paged her to come back which inspired her intent to go home.

Interestingly, the dog went to the window more often when people were home than without; she still did it enough times without to indicate beyond statistical chance that the ‘telepathy/precognition’ was still there, but it was as if she did it more around people to indicate to the unaware humans that PS was on her way home.

Actual text from the pdf below, click read more:

(PAGE 17)

Discussion

“Normal” explanations of Jaytee’s behavior

The data presented in this paper imply that Jaytee’s waiting by the window when his owner is coming home cannot be explained in terms of any of the following hypotheses:

1. Routine. Jaytee’s anticipatory behavior when PS was coming home occurred at various times in the morning, afternoon and evening and did not depend on a routine time of return. This was apparent in the series of 30 ordinary homecomings (Figs 3 and 4) as well as in our experiments with randomly-selected return times (Figs 1 and 2; see also Sheldrake & Smart, 1998). The data from the experiments of Wiseman, Smith and Milton (1998) with randomly-selected return times replicate and confirm our own findings (Fig. 7). Moreover, in control observations when PS was not coming home Jaytee did not start waiting at a particular time (Fig. 5).

2. Hearing a familiar vehicle . In many experiments, Jaytee’s anticipatory behavior was already apparent in the pre-return periods (Figs 2, 3, 4, and 6) before PS had actually set off in a vehicle, and hence before he could have heard any characteristic sounds. When she was actually traveling home, Jaytee was waiting at the window when the vehicle was at least 7 km away, and in some cases more than 25 km. Although dogs can hear higher pitches than human beings, their general sensitivity to noise levels is similar to that of people (Shiu, Munro & Cox, 1997; Munro, Paul & Cox 1997). It is not possible that Jaytee could have heard the sounds of familiar cars at such distances against all the background noises of Greater Manchester, and in a manner independent of the direction of the wind. Moreover, Jaytee also waited for PS in a similar way when she was traveling in taxis or other unfamiliar vehicles (Sheldrake & Smart, 1998; Sheldrake, 1999a), an effect replicated by Wiseman, Smith and Milton (Fig 7).

3. Picking up clues from people at home. PS did not tell her parents or her sister when she would be coming home, and often did not know in advance herself. But perhaps in some of PS’s ordinary homecomings, her parents or her sister might have guessed approximately when she would return and consciously or unconsciously communicated their expectation to Jaytee. But this possibility cannot account for Jaytee’s behavior in the trials with randomly-selected return times (Figs 1,2 and 7) nor when he was alone (Fig. 6B).

4. Selective memory or selective reporting of data. The video recordings permitted all Jaytee’s visits to the window to be recorded, and the data presented in this paper include all the visits he made, even when these were obviously related to events going on outside, such as cats passing the window, or when he was sleeping by the window in the sunlight. The videotapes were analyzed “blind” by people who did not know the details of the experiments. Hence there was no scope for selective memory or selective reporting of data. The data from the experiments conducted with Jaytee by Wiseman, Smith & Milton (1998) also show the same pattern of behavior by Jaytee as our own experiments (Fig. 7).

5. Jaytee going to the window more and more the longer his owner was absent. The data in Fig. 4 and the statistical analysis described above show that Jaytee’s visits to the window were not explicable in terms of his going there more and more the longer PS had been absent. Nor did he go to the window more and more as time went on in the control experiments (Fig. 5). His waiting by the window was related to PS’s returns, rather than to the length of time she had been away from home.

The possibility of telepathy

Jaytee seemed to be detecting PS’s intention to come home in a way that could not be explained in terms of any of the “normal” hypotheses considered above. Perhaps he was responding to her intentions or thoughts telepathically.

The hypothesis of telepathy would not only agree with Jaytee’s waiting behavior when PS was actually on her way home, but it could help to explain why Jaytee began to spend more time at the window before she set off. In “real-life” situations when PS returned home at non-routine times of her own choosing, Jaytee’s anticipations regularly began in the “pre-return” period, before she started driving home (Figs 3,4 and 6; see also Sheldrake & Smart, 1998). This pattern of behavior is in good agreement with the telepathic hypothesis, because prior to getting into a car and driving, or being driven, PS was forming the intention to go home, and preparing to do so. If Jaytee was responding telepathically to her intention to return, he would be expected to show this anticipation before she actually got into the car.

But Jaytee also showed signs of anticipation in the experiments when PS returned at randomly-selected times, before she received the signal to go home (Figs 1 and 2). How could he have anticipated when PS was going to be beeped?

It is perhaps conceivable that Jaytee was telepathically picking up RS’s intention to beep PS from over 300 km away, but we do not take this possibility very seriously. On one occasions (on 1 July 1997) the beeping was done not by RS but by someone neither PS nor Jaytee had met, and Jaytee still responded in advance (Fig. 2). It is also perhaps conceivable that Jaytee had a precognition of when PS would be beeped. But this would involve introducing another “paranormal” hypothesis in addition to the telepathic hypothesis.

(They go on to discount precognition, but in my estimation, precognition seems to fit the bill more than telepathy here. It makes sense given that we are all part of consciousness and that the universe carries intent. -KindaGamey)