Tuesday, 25 March 2008

Cosmic Conciousness - Two

Pathways to Revelation or Invention
Revelation or invention are processes whereby a sentient being acquires useful information that is extremely difficult to obtain in normal circumstances. The process is so rare that a community regards such events with extreme respect whether it occurs within religious or scientific community. We often speak of revelation in the context of prophets and prophesy when they state that they have received a message or understood a message from an esoteric or exoteric source. Invention we think of as a secular event, but the process of revelation and invention are almost one in the same.
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Speculative Understandings About Joy and Mythology
Our paradox is that joy, human joy, is based on a myth. A myth is a vision and feeling that we hold of a reality that is not yet real. Our joy, and almost all joy, is an expectation of something that is not now, but that we experience in the now which says something about the future, which has all the makings of a myth.
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What Direction Are You Heading?
Its something that we often forget. Where am I heading? Do I even know where I am going? Why am I going anywhere? Heh! Stop! I want to get off. I don't want to move, do, think, experience, be, act, play, feel, sort, help, hinder, break, build, touch, see. I want to rest.
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Modern Myths
In the modern world, we have an attitude. We don't see that we have an attitude, and that is the problem. The attitude comes in three flavours: the realist, the spiritual, and the perplexed.The realist everyone will recognize because it is the attitude of those that have attended the great universities, taken social science classes, and survived. The survival, however, means that the graduate has an attitude. The attitude is that man will continue to make progress technologically and this will lead to improvements in society and economies. If the world is to be successful, then people need an education that will enable them to see it as it is. Successful people are people who see the world in all its cause and effect glory.
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The True Myth
Such a phrase seems entirely contradictory, but it has meaning nevertheless. In our Western culture, we are wrapped up in a thought world that tells us to disregard certain aspects of our reality. These aspects have been pushed into a mental box that we label 'unreal.' Because the things and concepts in the thought box are unreal, we think that we can ignore them.
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I Don't Think You Realize How Big the Universe Is
Two friends are walking through a meadow looking up at the sky and across at the hills beyond. They glance at the blossom of meadow flowers scattered joyfully around them. They watch a brown cow chewing its selection of grass. They hear the sheep in the distance on the slopes nearby. A crow caws in the distance, and a butterfly darts ahead of them through the tall grass.
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Gratitude and the Open Book Laws of Association and Relativity
In an earlier blog, I presented the notion that 'the secret' was crass commercialization and little else. It behooves me to present the open and free alternative to 'the' secret. My alternative to 'the secret' and the alleged 'laws of attraction', which incidentally do not work other than by random processes disguising advantageous associations, are the immutable laws of association and relativity. You have probably already learned of the laws of relativity from scientists of physics and cosmology and possibly from my earlier blogs.
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A Cosmos in Which Light Stands Still
You have to admit light and gyroscopes both exhibit some very strange properties. Gyroscopes seem to spin and move in ways that don't seem connected to normal laws of physics. Light seems to move in ways that don't seem initially, at least, to conform to normal laws of physics. Both light and gyroscopes are subject to processes in ways that do not easily conform to what we regard as normal reality. In fact, gyroscopes do conform to the laws of physics, but we see that we need to have a clearer idea of the nature of gravity. Light obeys physical laws, but we may be misinterpreting how. I just throw out my reservation, not because I know how, but because it is an interesting proposition, i.e. that science may have its explanation all wrong. What we experience in our reality is torque, which conveys directed energy. When we do not experience torque of any shape or form, we may not detect it. If our senses and reality are geared only to torque, we may miss the entire show around us.
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Faster than the Speed of Light
If Jay Leno is right, scientists have discovered that light is so fast that it can travel backwards in time. Oh my! Oh my! Can that be true? Is light deciding where to go before it decides where to go. That's like saying human beings make decisions before they make decisions. Can that be true? Do we decide something before we decide something? If we do, then we need to think hard and deep about the process of deciding.
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A Most Deadly Secret
The no-brainer in the notion of "The Secret" is the corollary observation that if you know a secret, or even 'the' secret, then you will most certainly attract something, or someone, to you, and it won't be pleasant. This is because there are real secrets out there and there are people who will do anything to ensure that these secrets are kept. The promise of death is what ensures the 'law of attraction'. Learn the real secrets and you will almost certainly come under the influence of the various laws of attraction. The real issue is whether you can reveal real secrets without attracting those who would destroy you.
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Researching the Ancient Past
One of my favourite activities is researching the past. It is through an attempt to reach back in time that one gains a footing that allows one to move forward in time. What one realizes is how much the realm of time is akin to an enormous tree whose roots stretch down into the rotted past and whose branches reach upward into the light of the sun and speculations as to where one's future lies. In both cases the process is an active process in which time does not have an existence other than as a marker of the present moment in a very tiny space that one thinks of as one's present awareness.
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Living to be One Thousand a Myth, Dream or Possibility?
When I first read Genesis in the Bible, I was curious about the giants and the people who lived to be a long age. Someone explained to me that the people who lived beyond five hundred years were not individual people but families. Still, the notion of living to a very old age was inspiring. We see around us trees that survive human beings and live to be well over two thousand years old. How?
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Why Didn't Someone Tell Me?
When might you ask or exclaim, "Why didn't someone tell me?" Perhaps, just perhaps, someone did tell you, but you were not listening, or you could not interpret what they were saying.In our world of advertising, we are constantly bombarded with information, or messages, in forms that are intended to distract us from thinking broadly about things. We are being loudly guided in our thoughts towards relatively narrow solutions. That is the role of advertising and most forms of paid communication. If the messages are too loud or the solutions favouring some particular group, we think of them as propaganda.
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Religion as Models of What Should Be and of Fairness
The purpose of a religion would seem to be that of giving people an ideal towards which they can direct their energies. We can search for the source of the inspiration of the 'messages' that enable a religion to form, or an individual to become receptive to an ideal or pattern within oneself or between oneself and the cosmos. It is this search process that forms the basis of the notion of pilgrimage. What happens is that some one tells some one else that they should go somewhere and if they do, they will be inspired by either the journey to that place or by the place itself. Often, it is the very act of trying that makes the search meaningful.
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What is Freedom and Time?
An aspect of our present world is that we seem to be able to extend the present instance both forward and backward in time. The obvious derivative question is whether or not this trend can continue so that in the future we will have a significantly larger present.
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The Richard Dawkins' Viewpoint of God as Delusion
Some people like to be at the center of controversy. Posit one absurdity and someone will refute it with another absurdity. Take the extreme of an argument and the response against that argument will probably be extreme. Develop an extreme science that posits an extreme view of reality and others will posit alternative extremes.
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Remembering Christ at Christmas
Jesus said that whenever two people met in his name, there he would be also.
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Lost Knowledge and the Very Real Significance of Wuh
Stonehenge and my stories of Wuh Lax are very closely intertwined hystorically. I use the term hystory to distinguish it from history, which I am claiming is further from the truth when it comes to the early period of Britain. History needs to be rewritten after it is thoroughly researched.
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We are Flying Apart in a Wuh Lax World
In my Wuh Lax vision of the universe, we are flying past each other all the time. Our world is like a giant space ship that is carrying us along. My mind then leaps to the notion that the spaceship is getting larger and larger and we inside the spaceship are getting larger and larger. This view, the Wuh Lax view of the world, is but one of many.
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The Problem Within a Speed-of-Light World
My mind just wonders why we have to see the speed of light as something. I am reading Lee Smolin's book "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity" and not really focusing on a view of the world as he sees it. Instead in my mind, I am blowing apart and light is standing still.
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The Wuh Lax Paradigm of Lost Light and Why it is Useful
In the world of Wuh Lax, or as I think of it, in the days of Wim and Wuh, some 50 years AD, the physics of the universal world was seen in a very different way. The paradigm of Wuh Lax's astra cosmic physics posits that the universe is to be interpreted differently.
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An Inside Out Universe
It may seem a simple question, but it matters a great deal whether the world is inside out. "Oh Dear," you say! "You can't be serious?" "Well yes, or is it no! I am not not serious," I reply, but "The question is definitely worth asking."
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The Nature of Art and Light
The name of the artist Lucy Willis is associated with her books on how to capture the effects of light in one's water colour painting. She won the BP Portrait award in 1992 and her work has appeared on show in the National Portrait Gallery and on the web of the NPG. In her own right, Lucy is almost a famous artist. Her siblings, her father, mother, some of her grand parents are also well known artists deriving from a common Bateman ancestry. Bateman, himself, the grandfather of Lucy is a well known cartoonist in the UK, at least, for those of us who were around when he was active more than half a century ago.
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What Really is the Speed of Light?
When we think about the speed of light, we make some very serious assumptions. What if some of these assumptions have to be revised? At one time, people thought that the earth was the center of the universe and the planets and sun revolved around the earth. We have since found that this paradigm of the earth being at the center of the universe was quite wrong.
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The Void, Spacetime, and the Curvilinear Cross
I often think that one needs a really healthy dose of imagination or image realizing abilities to understand complex relationships. Perhaps, this is only in the case of those with eyesight that is colonically rich!?My main point to make this morning is that 'modern man' is not modern at all. Ancient man had a non-linear cross that our linear cross derives from. We today have mostly branched off into what falls into my small bucket of 'linear musings'. It's a curious oddity that we have so much progressed in understanding romantic or Romanized linear relationships with so little understanding of non-linear relationships. We use symbolism as contained in our letters and words, which make up sounds and sentences, which then get added together to form paragraphs and paragraphs of hopefully reasonably well-expressed logic.
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Revision is the Nature of Life
The Immediate Problem .... Yesterday's blog was very long. Parts of the writing were more exploratory than I expected when starting different trains of thought. It was obvious when I looked at the blog later that I should do some revision and editing. Revision of one's writing is normal. Some writers will revise and revise until they have almost nothing of value. The problem is continually that when you are getting your thoughts out, you tend to have a window of opportunity in which you can follow a train of thought. If you lose the train of thought, which is a stream of ideas that translate themselves into words, you don't accomplish the goal of expressing that inner impulse.
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A Guide to Thinking - Consciousness, Omega 3 and Multiple Dimensional Exploration
When one has the quiet of the morning, it is a time when thoughts can appear within the mind unstimulated by the stimuli of action and reaction associated with the many aspects of daily life. One of the possibilities of the early morning mind is an exercise to awaken one's spirit. Exercise of the spirit is only part of the process of travelling across universes. One needs to feed the brain the best food and stay well away from chemicals or drugs that the brain does not consider as normal brain food.
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The Shedding of Form
One of the amazing creations of the life process is the ability of some forms of life to shed one form and adopt another. We commonly notice that some creatures such as butterflies that can fly great distances, and as in the case of the monarch butterfly several thousand miles, emerge from creatures that would otherwise experience a few hundred feet at the most.
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Art and Colour and the Da Vinci Code that Dan Brown Missed
It may come as no surprise that two people looking at the same painting will have very different reactions. An artist knows this before beginning a new work, and must decide on an approach in the selection of a dominant colour or in a combination of colours. The interesting thing is that an artist will in the process of selecting colours for a new painting reveal something personal that can provide the basis of a psychological profile.
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Why Religion and Science are Different Disciplines
Ever wonder what the fundamental difference between science and religion is? It is that to make a religion requires only one, while to make science requires two. When religion tries to become science, it fails miserably, and when science tries to be religion, it fails miserably. The reason is simple and is because they are mutually exclusive disciplines depending on whether one or two people are involved at the same time.
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Light, the Mind, Eternity and Higher Levels of Existence
The world is so constructed that your past, present, and future all co-exist. Time is perceived as a flow of consciousness or partial consciousness. Your conscious mind is an imperfect instrument that can only read, i.e. perceive through your senses, a portion of the universe nearest you at any one sampling. Your mind interacts with its environment by extracting information in the form of heat, light, sound. Some of these are fermions and others leptons. These are both waves and particles, and within any light particle is an infinity of information being an aspect of its nature.
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Psychology and Evolution

Possibly, Plausibly, Probably, Predictably and Practically
You know what it is like to be challenged by an idea. Well, this morning, I had to deal with the uncertainty of many ideas. It is more than obvious that facts come in different shadings. I had a list of observations in front of me. The question was what I could make of them. Fortunately, my mind is one that can enjoy many colours. Things are not black and white, nor are they various shades of grey. Happily they are usually in a wonderful array of colour. Nor am I colour blind, which means that I enjoy the fullest range of colours.
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The Psychology of Handwriting
Your handwriting can reveal many things about you that you are probably unaware. The science of handwriting analysis has progressed significantly. Practitioners of analytical techniques offer their services at a price, so the science has grown up from a past time to a full fledged approach to seeing within human personality. The fact is that everything that we do can be analysed forensically. The results may not be accurate or they may hit spot on in ways that get to the deeper sources of illness and physical conditions as well as personality traits. One has to be careful with claims that handwriting analysis is all powerful. It is still a very young science.
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Cornerstones of a Healthy Attitude
Its easy to slide into a modern attitude. One of the difficulties is that we are often lazy when it comes to searching for the meaning of life. If we try to put ourselves into the world of our ancestors, we may find that we can escape the three modern attitudes of realism, spiritualism, and perplexism.
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Horses for Courses, Courses for Horses
A former boss often used the phrase 'horses for courses.' The idea is that not everyone will find that a particular environment or a particular situation suits them. If you find yourself in such a negative or slow paced world, perhaps what is wrong is that you are misplaced in some way.
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Timelines in Volcanic Ash and Confabulation
Dorothy and Colin, you would have been proud of me. I am not sitting idle while I am on vacation. You are such wonderful role s for healthier living, being as you are so very fit at the age of 70 plus. Its because you are doing all the exercise and eating things that retired people should do, play tennis, golf, walk up and down hills, exercise and eat quality food.
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Slosh, Slosh, Slosh!
"John! What's happening to the US economy?" asked Matthew."Why do you ask?" replied John, his head still fixed towards the TV in the corner. He was more interested in the basketball game. The world of economics is far too much of a headache to discuss when there are much more exciting things to occupy our minds.
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Is Stupid a Word that Should Not be Used?
Logically, for me at least, the words smart and stupid are closely connected. What I have come to realize is how inexact the use of such words can be. I have a friend who advises me never to use the word stupid with reference to a person. The same friend constantly reminds me that whatever I say in any event is only my opinion.
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Being Mindful About What and When You Are Thinking
I have stressed the importance of thinking. What I have left out is the need to be mindful of our thinking. Being mindful of our thinking helps us to achieve a balance between thought, our physiology, and emotion.
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The Now as a Work Concept
World famous guru speaks and writes about being in 'the now'. Philosopher listens intently being an expert in 'the now'. Guru says that people need to disassociate themselves from matters that coddle ego and distance them from being in 'the now'. Philosopher ponders idea of 'the now'. In 'the now', what is, is.
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Cosmic Consciousness - One

The Cosmic Lantern
The cosmic lantern is a very strange device that has existed through several millenia. It was recently discovered by the author Arthur Lake in London, England in an antique shop. The lantern has inspired a series of books based on Lake's experiences and those of a host of people that have interacted with the people who have possessed lantern through the ages, and around the globe. Lake has researched the story of the Lantern and its association with Tintagel, Wookey, Glastonbury, King Arthur, Lancelot of the Lake and the Knights of the Round Table.
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In Search of the Miraculous - Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke
The path I took to PD Ouspenski many years ago is somewhat circuitous. I begins with my reading a book by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke on Cosmic Consciousness. It is strange to read now in the Google write up on the book that that the book was also one of the favourites of PD Ouspenski and William James. Dr. Bucke's medical research at the London Ontario insane asylum is to find an explanation of insanity occurring in his patients during the 1800's. He suspects that many of his patients are not really insane but that what appears to be insanity is the result of an evolution of the human mind. And, so Dr. Bucke's research begins.
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Strings In Cosmic Space - Are They For Real?
Scientists are pondering the irregularities of what they see as space and time. The notion of a big bang still has many followers, but there are new ideas. One of these ideas has to do with cosmic strings that are enormous entities created in the earliest period of the formation of the universe. The concept of cosmic strings derives in part from the theory that matter is ultimately made up of extremely tiny strings, string theory. Much of cosmic science is based on educated guesses and hypotheses that have yet to be proven.
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Explaining the Wu of Wooh
As readers are undoubtedly aware, the author of this blog, AW Lake, is also the author of the very successful book "Wuh Lax and the Cosmic Lantern." The leading character of the book, which is the first of a series of books featuring a large cast of characters, is Wuh Lax, who is a mythological character. I say mythological, but the irony of it is that Wuh is an archetypal hero with a very great presence. As my stories unfold, the devoted readers of the series will become aware that Wuh, the mythological individual, really does exist on an ethereal plane. This is why the books are aimed at the ethereally challenged. But, I should explained a bit about what is meant by the ethereally challenged?
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Who or What is God? Life and Laws!
You may be asked, "Do you believe in God?"If someone asks you the question its because they are not sure themselves because if they were sure then the question would be irrelevant, like asking someone if they believed in wind. The existence of wind would be obvious as would the existence of God.The fact that many people ask the question whether God exists may mean that they are unsure whether they themselves exist.
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Relax with Wuh Lax

Give yourself and your children a chance to escape with a good book. As the author of the Wuh Lax series, I can think of no better way to relax than to read the Wuh Lax story and learn what the Cosmic Lantern is all about. You will be able to sit quiety in your arm chair in the evening with a soft light over your left shoulder sipping a mug of coffee or cup of tea transported back to another period of history.
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A Snake and Ladder World, Apples and Gardens of Eden

We live in a snake and ladder world. By analogy, we experience life as a series of experiences in which we ascend and descend along the pathways that we have chosen as our preferential pathways.We prefer certain things,certain experiences, certain combinations, certain activities. The more we make these preferences specific the greater the combination of aspects that we rely on to make them possible. To become ever more specific we built supports that give us the specificity we desire.
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Entropy in an Inside Out Wuh Lax World

A number of things trouble me about the standard or received model of cosmology. I do not claim to be a physicist, but merely an artist trying to figure out my universe. My problem is with the notion of entropy which according to the second law of thermodynamics says that chaos is always on the increase. The law of energy associated with entropy also says that energy is unidirectional with respect to time in that the arrow of time always goes in one direction. It means that information is lost as we experience entropy
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What is Seven Thousand Years Historically?

What sorts of threads can link peoples over a period of seven thousand years. People raising children leave genetic markings for future generations. People raise other animals besides children and the genes of these other animals can be studied. The means by which people communicate may also survive over long periods, so that language and the origins of words can be studied. If the communities remained fairly close to where they started out and if they settled then one can study the effects of settlement, which can include all aspects of the life cycle from birth to death.
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The Mysterious Lines Running Across South West Britain

One of the great things about Google maps is that it is possible for one to verify hunches that one has had for a long time, but thought were too crazy to be true. Well, for me it appears that at least one hunch is true, and, indeed, it is very strange. This is one everyone can test out for themselves since it requires only Google and a few tools of the digital age.
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Unruh's Law in a Wuh Lax Universe or Something Deeper

Unruh's Law states that if you are an observer and you are accelerating, then you will see yourself embedded in a gas of hot photons for which the temperature is proportional to the rate at which you are accelerating.I might be forgiven, since I am not a cosmologist or physicist in wondering whether or not I am in such a universe. When I look around, I see myself surrounded by a 'gas' or relatively 'hot photons'. In fact, I do think that it is the photons from the region of the sun that are keeping me warm.
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The Science in Religion

All religion contains science, and surprisingly enough even those religions that deny the role of science probably contain a hefty amount of science hidden within them. To determine what the science is within a given religion one has to ask very specific questions. The first is to ask what the purpose of the religion really is. If the religion has no real purpose then it is not a religion. All religions have a purpose. You just have to identify what that purpose is.
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The La
w of Three Forces
Gurdjieff, the thinker and teacher of philosophy, refers to the Law of Three Forces. His work is discussed in the various issues of the Gurdjieff Review. Other books can be bought at Fields Bookstore, or if you wish, a visit to Foyles in London, England. Foyles, was once the world's largest bookstore, but is now the world most famous bookstore.The Law of Three Forces is a very ancient belief tradition. The Holy Trinity is the Christian expression of the law of three.
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Kings, Poets, Sages, Gods, Prophets and Stars - What gives?

In our earthly existence, we deal with what we know as best we can with the tools that we are offered to us or that we acquire by whatever means are open to us. We can deal with our world because of our senses and the tools these senses enable us to use. Our challenge comes when we are asked to go beyond our senses and beyond anything that we know how to manipulate with our senses. The temptation is to forgo our individual task of using our own senses and assume that we can gain by assumptions about sensations rather than the actual sensations themselves.
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Worlds Without Mass or Size

In an earlier blog, I wrote about a universe in which light did not move and everything else was moving. In our measured universe, light has zero mass and scale invariance. Light, as it happens, has many of the interesting properties of unparticles in what has been called the unparticle world by Professor Howard Georgi of Harvard University. Georgi's ideas may help cosmic model builders propose an explanation for some of the real mysteries afflicting the explanatory power of modern physics.
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The Mythological Bases of Our Respective Realities

Our respective realities are based on internalized mythologies. We are living worlds of dimensions that we hold personally and independently. You don't understand what I am saying do you! Let me explain.We see evidence of an additional dimension as a barrier that we cannot ultimately cross for whatever reason. Over time, man has broken away at the dimensions impacting on his awareness and has reduced them into known dimensions. Unlike a worm, man has eyes that can see in three dimensions, but unlike a bat cannot see in the dimension of sound. One might ask whether man can see because like a bat man emits light that returns with an image of what forms a dimension out there, outside the brain.
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Pour vous

Ces instructions sont pour les utilisateurs de Microsoft Internet Explorer. D'abord charger le Panneau de configuration en utilisant l'option de menu de votre "Menu Démarrer". Trouvez le 'Options Internet' icône. Dans la première entrée dans la boîte de type: http://woohs.blogspot.com/. Enregistrer les résultats.
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Writing and the Verbal Arts

Being on the Same Page
The expression 'being on the same page' connects at least three notions. First there is the idea that people can be together sharing what they observe, with the idea that people can comprehend what is 'on the page' in the same way, with the further idea that they can communicate meaningfully to each other that they comprehend what is on the page in a like manner. What is troubling is that with each step in the above ideas from location, to comprehension, to communication, there is an immense probability of failure.
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The Impact on my Reading and Writing of JK Rowling's Harry Potter Series
As a book writer, I can quite proudly say that my desire to writing and subsequent writing was tremendously influenced by JK Rowling's success with the Harry Potter series of books. I came across Harry quite by accident. Many times, I would visit Borders Books or Barnes and Noble at lunch time in Washington, DC. Books are my passion, and I like all kinds of books, fiction or non-fiction. I am aware that I was aware that he was being promoted. However, my interest was in series of books because I loved to read on the metro, and when I did read I would read a whole series. This was over a period of a decade, at least. There may have been three or more Harry Potter books out there before I really became aware of them.
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Dumbing down - A Verbal Art
I was at last year's London Book Fair and had sat down for a coffee and was talking to a printer from California who claimed that his paper was being used around the world and could be found in almost every book store. "You see," I said, "I am an artist, and I like to think on paper pencil in hand, and I don't like any of the papers of notepads that I am currently seeing in England. The paper is too heavy for me and not smooth enough. I once bought three notebooks in the States and they were perfect for me. I have tried high and low to find those notebooks again, but have had to give up." The man just looked at me and did not say much. "He thinks I'm a looney toon," I thought to myself.
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Taking a Bite From the Apple - Literally
My local grocery has started selling apples by the bag, but three types of apples within each bag, a bit of an apple deli. "My! They look nice," the check out lady exclaimed as I put them through, and added "I think I'll get some of those too!" Yes! They did look very pretty. Several were green, some were bright red, and some were a soft yellow. "I will start on the yellow ones first," I thought to myself."
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What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate
So often, we say things that others hear and interpret in entirely different ways from what we intended. So it is with artists that seek to be creative. When artists speak, they often do it through their paintings or pictures. Each viewer interprets the image seen in a different way. Speakers say something, but by the time it reaches the region of understanding, the content has been adjusted by uncious parts of our mind that do things at speeds that would make us shudder. And, they do things behind our back, literally, quickly, and quietly. Such is the processing that goes on in our brains that we are really lucky if we understand anything properly. Ever take classes at university and try to reconstruct a lecture?
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Ruminating - A Verbal Art
Every get that feeling that you are being watched. Well cows like to watch you. They do very little but watch you. There is just a sense of acceptance that you are there and that you are something interesting to watch. After a while, if you do not move, they turn their head away and stop watching you. This, it is important that you keep moving, but not in a way that would alarm. There is something Britney Spears about this. If she keeps moving and doing crazy things, everyone like cows, stop what they are doing and watch her, read about her, just soak up everything they can about her. Its OK if we just watch. The problem arises if we do something.
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Cudding - A Verbal Art
Cudding is what cows do, namely chewing on something verbally. Chewing one's cud is a good way to relax. Just take your time and mull something over as you chew gently. Have you ever seen cows chewing. They take their time, just like you do on the beach. In fact, a very good place to chew one's cut is lying out in the sun on a soft sandy beach with nothing to do other than chew away quietly to yourself.
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Lugubriating - A verbal Art
Don't tell me that you have never heard of lugubriating. Perhaps, you have heard of lugubrious. It's a word that you would save for a politician, n'est-ce pas! I think I have used the term for the first time in history as a verb.
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Will Ye No Come Back Again - Books as Old Friends
Books for free - The Gutenberg project offers heaps of reading for young people at the relatively low cost of downloads and re-printing. Remember that it is definitely cheaper, more environmental friendly, and perhaps easier to buy the book off the shelf if you can find a publisher and bookstore with it.
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Daily Photos of BLOGGERS from Around the Globe
The earth is a wonderful and beautiful place. Some bloggers have decided that they would share this beauty with the world each day. You will find the images on these blogs interesting and very frequently amusing, as bloggers do have a sense of humour. This list is by no means complete. I found Ann's site for Montego Bay, Jamaica particularly interesting.Can you find the guineps photo? Do you know what guineps are?
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Meandering - A Verbal Art
My image of meandering is that of a stream or really large river like the Grand River than meanders through South Eastern Ontario, or the Mississippi River that meanders down the middle of most of United States. Meanderings are winding statements that cover a lot of ground without moving in a straight line in the 'downhill' direction.
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Eruditing Philosophical - A Verbal Art
Research and study result in erudition, a state of being well versed in one's chosen fields. Once one has mastered an area of work, it becomes possible to philosophize based on what one knows.
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Weevilling - A Verbal Art
Patrick O'brien in his book, Master and Commander, now a film, once asked, "What is the worst of three evils?" I take the liberty of referring to the verbal art of finding evil in everything as weevilling. I do it sometimes myself. The weevil is a tiny creature that loves sea biscuits and enjoyed the life at sea during much of the period when huge-tall masted sailing boats were the norm.
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Mythologizing - A Verbal Art
The challenge of our reality is that it is 99 percent mythology. Some people may be shocked by this, but I can assure you that it is true. What is real has no physical basis. Deepak Chopra the author and philosophy refers frequently to the quantum world that makes up our bodies, which changes almost every atom in a contiuous inflow outflow process. More...

Wiseacreing - A Verbal Art
The world of the internet is mindboggling. Wiseacreing is what we do when we make use of stuff that we really don't understand, nor have any strong basis of understanding. The past is one of these regions of uncertainty, as is the future. When we discuss these regions we enter the world of wiseacreing because we have to speculate.
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Mugwumping - A Verbal Art
When I first heard this expression, I laughed. I was sitting in my office in Wimbledon as an employee of Ronald Brech Inc a company of economic advisers. My boss was Ronald Brech, a former editor of the Economist during the time of the Great Second War when they rationed paper, used it on me during a serious corporate discussion. He said, "Arthur! Don't be such a mugwump. I want to know what you really think. Explain yourself." I was highly amused. "What on earth does mugwumping mean," I wondered. I knew what a mug was, or thought I did. My thoughts were about the look on one's face, a look of someone silly, mistaken, or full of himself. I thought, "Well! I can't really argue with that. He has a point." But, I was wrong.
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Yarning - A Verbal Art
Telling a sea yarn is an ancient skill and pasttime. We have many of the stories that were told by the many boys and men sailing seas during the four hundred years leading up to the twentieth century. Mariners continue to spin yarns as the while away hours and days.
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We Remember Some English Authors and Illustrators

Tom Adams
John Agard
Allan Ahlberg

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Visual Art, Painting and Sketching

The Joy of Sketching
Sketching is partly serious, but mainly the mind at play. It is not simple, but it is rewarding if you persist. It is also extremely useful in any activity requiring thought. I frequently sketch just to be creative. Much of the images are exploratory, and it is often easy to get discouraged when they don't immediately take a shape that one likes. That is why it is useful to do verbal sketches as well as visual. A verbal sketch requires the same tools of a pencil and paper.
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You too can Draw and Paint Pictures

As a post graduate university level teacher, I am only too aware that everyone should learn how to draw and actually do drawings and sketches on a regular basis. There are many places to learn and you cannot begin too soon.
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Art, Mythology, and Novelling

I consider myself rather fortunate to be able to endulge in a world that has all the elements of being real while at the same time is well position in the reality of mythology. To understand my world, read the writing of Karen Armstrong who created a wonderful contribution to our understanding of religion, science or logic, and mythology in history.
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The Challenge of Our Inner Vision
We might be forgiven, if we did not know better. I have often heard the comment that so-and-so believes such-and-such, or even worse that so-and-so believed such-and-such. Who really knows what they believe when, or what someone else believed when.
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Health and Sport

Breathing, Longer Life and Better Stomach and Small Intestine Health
As the body ages many of the underlying processes of good health that we taken for granted weaken and even fail. It is important to understand that you can take a proactive stance to slow down your own aging process. Of greatest importance is your ability to breath deeply. Without strong breathing, you weaken for first line of defense against depleted health. Whenever you can, no matter what age, practice breathing. Without oxygen in your lungs to feed your heart, you will find that the body cannot do all the other things it needs to do. Oxygen to the heart keeps you alive, so breath to get the air deeply into your lungs below your diaphragm and into your back area.
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Losing weight and regaining strength - A Physical Art

Very recently, I have been losing weight, and while many people around me are sick or cold vulnerable I have never felt better. The physical art of losing weight is not a simple art. I don't assume responsibility for any of the consequences of the exercises or steps shown below. You do them at your own risk, but if you are already reasonably healthy, they will probably help you further your goes of weight loss and strength building, and possibly your sex life, as well. It has taken me many years to figure out some of the rudiments of these physical arts, and I will share them free, gratis, with you. But you do the things at your own risk and use your judgment wisely as you may not be ready if you have an existing physical problem or weakness that is lurking below the surface. Get a health checkup first, if you need one:
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Are Typhoid Fever and Cystic Fibrosis Related?

There is a mystery why so many people in Europe have the cystic fibrosis gene. Few people realize that they even have it or that they may already have children that have the gene, or that they may conceive children with cystic fibrosis. Do the math. If one in twenty have the gene then so many people who are married have the gene, and so many of the children that they have will have the gene. It's all down to probabilities, and chances are that you won't have a cystic fibrosis child because the math is working in that way, but only the math.
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Daydreaming Our Way to Better Health

One often dreams while asleep. Dreams very frequently occur just before one wakes up and sunlight is gently caressing the windowsill. We value our dreams because they transport us away from fully integrated awareness.
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Remember Its NOT How Much You Eat But How Well
One of the biggest mistakes that people make these days is to confuse quantity with quality when it comes to what they eat. The only way to get over this misconception is to actually experience the difference. My observation is that by eating quality food you will actually eat less food, and you will be better off for it. But, how do you begin?
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Coffee Mate?
For those seeking to lose weight and be wheatfree, finding something wheatfree to go with coffee can be a bit of a challenge. My own solution starts with emphasis on the Dr. Sears 'zone diet' that targets an even balance between calorific quantities of fats, proteins and carbohydrates. The zone bars sold as part of the diet are mostly free of wheat, but it is always well to just check on the list of ingredients to be sure. Coffee for me is inseparable from reading and concentrating. While at home, I will have a coffee in the morning.
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The Wuh Lax Diet: Groping Along in a World of Food Confusion
Right now, I am saying how fortunate I feel to be able to ditch wheat and flour from my list of preferred foods. Gone are the donuts, the cakes, the breads, the sandwiches, the gravies, the junk food of fast food houses. I can't eat in restaurants any more without searching deep into the menu for safe foods that do not contain the products of wheat flour that in foods is almost everywhere.
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Daily Yoga, Exercising, Meditation, Prayer and Stretching

In our world of today, it is normal for people to live beyond sixty-five years of age. What we sometimes forget is that our most flexible years probably occur within the first fifteen years before we start the process of ossification.
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Getting Serious About Finding Lost Balls
The very first principle about finding lost golf balls is that they are almost always in the rough. It is my contention that those most likely to be able to find golf balls are painters. It don't mean industrial painters, but those who can paint images in a painterly fashion. Such people are more likely to be able to distinguish small out of place blobs or pin pricks in an otherwise neat and tidy landscape. They will be able to find balls in fog, in the wet, in muck, in ponds and in tall grass along streams.
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The Art of Finding Golf Balls
Some things are more like a skill and some things are more like a science or art. The activity of finding golf balls is arguably more like a science or art. My reasoning is that many people lose golf balls, and many of these are highly skilled individuals. Their main interest is in hitting a ball towards a very specific target. The more skilled the golfer is the less likely he will lose a golf ball. When a skilled player lose a golf ball this is due to really difficult conditions. The ball is very well hidden in the more obvious places and closer to the shorter grass, and yet it cannot be found. This takes a lot of skill.
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More Exercise But Not Always Alone
Recently, my fitness instructor, directed me to the idea of a personal trainer. The idea was that even though I thought that I was getting enough exercise, she actually knew better. At first, the idea of a personal trainer seemed somewhat over the top, but I have definitely changed my mind. If you don't already have one, get a personal trainer, you may find that do this helps you more than having a family doctor, and it is much less expensive.
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Half Size Mine Please I am Trying to Live Longer
Ever think why so many people don't seem to be able to lose excess weight no matter how hard they try. Part of the reason is that busy as usual at mealtimes means eating off a big plate. Almost from birth we are conditioned to the idea and practice of three meals a day with occasional snacks in between, tea in the morning, tea in the afternoon and then tea again in the evening.
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Science and Technology

Overcoming Architectural Limitations With New Technology
The February issue of Technology Review has an interesting note by William J. Mitchell on architecture, entitled "Build from Scratch." Innovation in architecture is really possible! What we presently live in and with are building and environmental designs that with resemble hideous ideological concoctions of the worse art forms.
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Modelling the Diffusion of Technology by TNCs
It has been some time since I even thought about work on technology diffusion and competitive responses of firms moving plant and research from the US to the UK that I undertook in the early 1970s.
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Renovation or Innovation
The February "Technology Review" a magazine published by MIT since 1899 has an editorial by Jason Pontin, who some will remember for his writing in the "Red Herring." Jason's editorial focuses on the geography of innovation and he correctly points to locations of culture and methodology and innovative hubs where there has been difficulty with the innovative process. He mentions the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development as a think tank on innovation. As a former consultant to that think tank and a researcher of knowledge creation and innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, Jason's ideas caught my attention.
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Being Specific About Process and Why Things Fail
We are all guilty of taking shortcuts. It is economy to think that there may be a cheaper way to accomplish something and much to gain if we find that alternative. In our thinking we do the same, we follow a heuristical approach to problem solving using a subset of what we intuitively know is the full process. These acts of economy may have the appearance of being successful, yet at the crucial time fail to satisify all the criteria originally established as the formula for consistent success. Thus, our search for economy can lead to failure. It may mean that we are never successful even though we could be.
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Michio Kaku Makes a Timely Impression on BBC Time
My three favourite authors at this very moment are Michio Kaku, MJ Harper, and Ronald Brech. Kaku appeared on BBC 4 to tell us all about how the future of technology was going to shape the directions of change looking forward. Harper recently (2006) wrote a book entitled 'The History of Britain Revealed - The shocking truth about the English language'. Paperback or Hardcopy Ronald Brech in the 1960's wrote a book entitled 'Britain 1984 - The History of the Future' I tried to find a copy of it on Amazon, but could not find one. It would appear that the history of the future 1984 is now known and no book need predict it.
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I Lost Yesterday But Not Millions of Records
If you were like me, yesterday went by in a blur. So fast did it happen that it was over almost before it began. I was lost, yes lost! I cannot remember when I was more lost. Lost that is in disbelief, total disbelief. No I could not be hearing and seeing what I was hearing and seeing. The world had become almost surreal as though all those standards one has been given for most of one's life were thrown to the wind.
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The Religion in the Science of Energy Creation
Do you imagine that scientists all follow the scientific method? Think again. Sometimes scientists are unwilling to give up their failed ideas even though evidence shows that these ideas are somewhat inadequate.
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Learning and Discovering

Accelerated Learning - Better School Grades - An Artists Approach
Learning and discovery go hand in hand. Most of us want to discover things and some of us have unearthed ways to do that. The first thing an artist does, and there are many brilliant artists, is assign priorities in the right order. The highest priority goes to you, the learner, the young artist, the one who wants to learn. You need to get to grips with yourself as a person before you can really begin the process of accelerating your learning.
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Why it is important to make mistakes and get lost
I often get lost wandering through the many hedged lanes of Devon and Somerset. These tiny lanes are only wide enough for a small car to travel one way. The walking is not easy because the lanes go up and down hills, often very steep hills, and you can find yourself huffing and puffing. My longest walks occur when I get thoroughly lost. The sign posting is not very helpful sometimes because it directs you around in circles until you finally realize your destination is somewhere in the middle of a circle. By that time you are so tuckered out that you collapse by the side of the lane, put your feet up and fall asleep. Then, you dream while you listen to nature humming around you.
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Knowledge Creation Using the Internet
The Internet is not just a means for disseminating information, it is also a vehicle of knowledge creation. In our highly scientific world, we need verification of results of studies and experiments before we consider them to be valid.
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Merging Reality with Unreality to Produce Novelty
It seems unfair that people have much shorter lives that trees, especially the yew tree. What does man do about that?Man's reality is his mortality. Man's unreality is his having a life at all. Man's desire is to make life fair and even. Man's actions are to destroy that which reminds him of his own mortality.
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A Vision of Continuously Improving Science and Religion
In the Wuh Lax world that I envisage, the control of errors is accomplished by continuously improving on the methods of solving and coping with challenges. We sometimes forget that our world is constantly changing, that all existence whether physical, ethereal, spiritual or formal, is subject to change because everything is as an aspect of process.
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The Universe May be Like the Earliest Video Games
This is a difficult one to get your head around philosophically and conceptually, but not impossible. What if you were living in a round room and it had four doors? Two of the doors are left handed and the other two are right handed.
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The Automated Computer Virus is a New Threat
The world of safe computing is getting increasingly more difficult as malware producers paid by organized crime syndicates are stealing your information through automated Trojan horse and virus creation. That is the frightening message of an article by Brian Krebs in today's Washington Post on line.
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Researching on the Internet for News and Information
The Internet is revolutionizing the way we see and gather information about our world. It is a very effective research tool. What follows is just a sampling of the better sites that you can use to find information:
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What is Not Coincidence - Internet Use Monitoring
Probably, what you do not realize is how fast the Internet operates on light and how quickly everything that you communicate via the Internet can be stored onto tape.
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Life Sciences and Philosophy

Life Consequences of Misunderstood or Only Partially Understood Laws
We might ask who was ultimately responsible for the events of 911 in New York, and if we do we are presenting the question from the space-time world of classical physics. The tendency is to think that something was done to America, rather than to think that America attracted a negative force. The events of 911 were America's wake up call.
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Think Positively in All That you Do - A Gitomer World
One of the most positive individuals to hit the book stands in recent years, deposing Norman Vincent Peale, is an author going by the name of Jeffery Gitomer.
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The Problem with Paradoxes and Coincidences
The problem is that they occur and sometimes coincide. Such was my day. I had been thinking about the pentagon discovered in our universe that some scientists think represents the shape of the forces acting on the microwave background. It would appear that if you leave our universe in a cosmic sense, that you may enter it at the same time. The shape of things is five side and can be conceived in three dimensions, but that is only the start. The dimensions bend themselves around and come back at you in a strange way.
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What is Coincidence?
I am prompted to write about coincidence because of three events that have happened to me during the past twenty-four hours. The first is a coincidence of a 'word,' and the second is a coincidence of an event in time. The two coincidences together contrive to create an event in my mind that tells me something meaningful.
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Figuring it all out, Coincidence, Fate, Luck, God, or the Source of Being
What is the true nature of our world, or is it even a world. Who or what governs it. I am never really sure whether my friends think that it is a rightful preooccupation for anyone to try to figure it all out. That has been the bane of serious speculation through the ages. "Who are you to speculate about such unknowable matters?" "What is your authority?" Even worse, people who did come up with new ideas were called heretics. They were stoned, burned at the stake, poisoned, clubbed to death, shot, to name but a few of the awful outcomes.
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The Processes and Regions of Discovery - 1. The Self
The processes of discovery require a sense of personal awareness that we might not realize. We discover things in many ways at many times. Often, we don't realize that we have made a discovery. Then, suddenly our brain kicks in and says, "Wake Up! You have discovered something new. Be aware! Be conscious of what it is that you are perceiving!"
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The Processes and Regions of Discovery - 2. The Group
Groups, like people, engage in processes of self discovery. One of the less attractive aspects to this is that groups can be leaderless. When an individual is leaderless, we say the individual is insane. When a group is leaderless, we need to say that the group is also insane. Insanity occrus when the individual or the group despite self awareness has no leadership to limit behaviour. It is like a ship on a vast sea without a captain. The ship may or may not try to find shore. Those on the ship squabble interminably about what direction the ship should take or what allegiance it should have to what nation or people.
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'What the Bl...p Do We Know' As a Mantra
Its become sort of common place these days to denigrate established ideas with the notion that there is something within easy reach that will replace them. That this is not the case comes as a surprise to those who were not aware of the traditional views in the first place. This usually means young people.
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Do Random Events Happen?
One way to consider random events is by seeing them as events arising where there is no intervention. In the world of mathematical statistics, we have the possibility of a mathematical equation or system of equations that seemingly creates a series or wave forms that one could consider random. People even patent such generators. In the real world, and especially if the cosmos could be considered as a ginormous calculator, we have 'something or somethings' that seemingly generate what appear to be random events. Such random distributions are even said to be normal.
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Monday, 24 March 2008

Economies in Crisis

What Some People are Saying About the Credit Crisi...
History repeats itself. The story of economics is that new generations don't seem to have the capacity to learn from previous generations. Everyone seems to get wrapped up in a frenzy of greed and fear. Few people around the world will remain unaffected by what is happening in America. It is unfortunate because of the numbers of older vulnerable people on fixed incomes that will be impacted severely. They worked to reap their rewards of retirement only to find the government had not drawn up the rules of play for the banking systems carefully enough and much of their futures were under threat from inaction and complacency.
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A Review of Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nichola...
If you are a stock market investor, this is the book you should be reading if you have not done so already. It would have been easier for you had you absorbed what Taleb has to say many years ago, but now you have had a taste of the negative, you can turn your efforts into the positive. I remember attending the lectures of John Kenneth Galbraith who spoke often of stock market crashes. His ideas were based on a thorough reading and analysis of the 1929 crash. Investing in the stock market is gambling, but it may be the only way that the 'small' investor has to get a portion of the capitalist economic pie. The rewards of investing in stocks and shares can be considerable, but the small investor has always to be aware of the sharks and black holes.
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Weathering the Financial Storms Yet to Come

There are storms of many kinds: snow storms such as covered the Eastern portions of North America and financial storms that cover the globe. You might ask why the US economy when it is producing so much in the way of armaments has such a slow growth relative to other countries. The means that armaments could be taking a largish share of the productive capacity. Is military spending government spending, and who pays for it? When? And, obviously, who dies for it?
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The Roller Coaster of Speculation
The world has a lot of liquidity despite the credit crunch in America which started the process of adjustment towards a sustainable balance of opinions. What governs the economy these days is not so much anything that is solid, but which portfolio mix will satisfy your risk preferences. For better or worse, we live in a world of speculation and the roads that we normally follow are weakening and blowing away like the sands of a desert in a storm.
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Energy, Inflation, Growth, Interest Rates, Exchange ....

After a very long period when inflation seemed to be very much under control in the United States and the UK, we had better than average bursts of trading-up in the stock and property markets. The US dollar lost ground to the Euro, the Canadian dollar and the Pound. United States, the UK and Canada were economies to watch despite their seeming success at restraining inflation. All three were involved in fighting foreign wars which still are costly, and which seem to have no end.
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Is the Profit Motive for New Therapeutic Chemical ...
Who said that the profit motive works? If the profit motive worked, we would have saved billions of lives of people in developing countries who have died of disease. As it is, the children have died and we are responsible for not pushing our governments in Western economise to act more decisively and more effectively. I can think of no better solution to many economic problems that an over expansion of the therapeutic research at government expense ... forget the private sector. It has failed to deliver the goods to the third world. Why should we help the third world fight disease?
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Maximizing Value or Efficiency But Not Both
Economists can't have it both ways. On the one hand, they know that competition is imperfect, but, on the other hand, they talk about maximizing value and the need for competition. My point is that the two are incompatible most of the time because people generally do not know what is best for their environment.
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Economists Search For Equilibrium
A constant theme in economic thought has been that of equilibrium. But, the search for equilibrium was always elusive. Even Karl Marx in his Das Kapital was under the illusion that an economic system would at some time reach an equilibrium. Others knew better, and it was Joseph Schumpeter, a Harvard professor and economic historian, who was studying business cycles, concluded that the capitalist economic system, and for that matter any economic system did not linger in an equilibrium. He even felt that there was no dynamic equilibrium, and pointed to new commodities as the reason. Economies are constantly subject to innovation he wrote.
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How much will the US Fed Lower Interest Rates?
I can remember a time when the SDR value of the US dollar was above 1.00! What we have is desperate measures for desperate times. But, don't despair. What the Fed may do is responding to an opportunity provided by the Bank of Canada which lowered interest rates so as to slow down the rise in the Canadian dollar. Its one thing to have your currency appreciate by almost 30 percent, but think what that does to your competitiveness.
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Read About it - Your country is a member of the IM...
Reading about economics and economy is both interesting and may be critical to your comfort and survival. Get the Economist magazine (for an expert view), the Christian Science Monitor (for a balanced view), or the Wall Street Journal and read about what is going on in the messy economic environment that our world leaders have under the Bush administration managed to drag up.
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Investing Wisely as Exchange Rates Move Using the ...
You might have guessed that we have entered a period of financial and economic adjustment. Central banks have lowered interest rates and will lower them further as they seek to minimize the impact of unwise investments by the public and by banks. These unwise investments are imploding in value as people react suddenly to bad news.
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The Seeds of War
It used to be a joke in Montreal that the cement companies, who were controlled by certain Italian interests that had migrated from Chicago required a good project every five or so years. The price of cement was pushed up to $15 from a cost of $5, and a cement tower is added to cream more profit. Thus, we had the St. Lawrence Seaway project, EXPO 67, the Jacques Cartier bridge repair, Mirabelle Airport, Man and His World, the highways to Ottawa and Ontario, the great Hydro projects of northern Quebec, the Liberation of Quebec from Canada, the Unifying of Quebec with Canada.
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The Grand Assise
I was once a junior civil servant given the task of doing whatever I was told. It seems strange now to look back on it, but the issue of world debt has been an issue with me for much of my career in government and private industry.
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Debt as a Cause of Wars
Over the past year, I have been engaged in taking the first steps towards making a film of the Wuh Lax stories and "The Cosmic Lantern." This is an enormous challenge and theoretically beyond the budget of the most determined independent film producers. I suppose the mistake of a film producer would be to underestimate the vision that The Cosmic Lantern contains. This is not just a story but a series of stories with enormous potential. It hits at the heart of western civilization with its emphasis on performance above all else. It challenges the audience with the economics of debt which provide an explanation of why otherwise peaceful communities are drawn into war.
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America's Economic Prospects for the Longer Term
No one wants to hear the bad news. Everyone puts their head in the sands and waits for the stampede to pass. This time it won't be like that. The process of adjustment for America will be slow and arduous as it has been for countries in the Far East. We once called these countries the economic tigers of Asia. Suddenly, they became devalued and we saw goods appearing on our shelves some 25 to 50 percent lower in cost than before. America went crazy with imports and the goods from Asia flowed in like a dam burst of the ice age. Now, its America's turn. Few would recall that the Asian crisis was a result of firms in Asia locking on to the dollar and borrowing until the cows came home.
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America's Failed Economic and Political Policies
Economic policies of the United States over the years of the Bush administration threaten to push the world economy into severe recession and damage prospects for solution to many of the world's energy problems. Why be optimistic about the prospects for solving the world environmental crises when the United States, which should be leading the world forward, has made such a wonderous mess of things? Most disasterous of all is the way the unfair distribution of incomes has hit intelligent and willing people who are in need of resources to participate more effectively in the modern economic age.
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The Problem with Energy Prices
Once long ago, I did a study of European energy use and real economic growth that showed its real annual growth rate average of 6 percent, yes 6 percent, seems impossible now, was achieved by real average growth rate of energy consumption of 17 percent, also a seemingly impossibly high figure! Small wonder then that when these numbers or the real effect of these numbers were absorbed by those owning crude oil, there was a shock that eventually resulted in the oil cartel. Of course, Libya was the country providing the oil!
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Millionaires in a Row
The world is full of copy cats each one of them trying to become a millionaire, and if they do thinking that they have discovered something special about themselves that makes them in some way superior.In an earlier blog, I wrote of the weakness in the ideas about the law of attraction as put forward in book written by several authors and entitled The Secret. Obviously, publishing is one of the easiest ways to become rich. One of my former bosses used to remark that the Catholic Church became wealthy from its publications, and he is right.
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Demand and Supply of Property
It is interesting to watch the expectations of those riding off the recent boom in house prices in the US and the UK. In both countries, there has been an enormous amount of captial put into the creation and revamping of property. If the amount of such investment is excessive what results is a downswing of activity until demand picks up to bring overall demand for property in line with long term needs. Whether these needs may be somewhat higher than in the past is an interesting question. Needs are an essential ingredient to the equations that bring about a balance in supply and demand.
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The Irony of Business As Usual
Have you ever sensed that the world is in a disconnected state from its own reality. You will mainly get this feeling when you experience two very different activities of people that are going in opposite directions at once.
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On the One Hand, but On the Other Hand
At this moment, I feel very much like Larry David, when he holds out two hands. He is weighing what appear to be two alternatives, either the prescription from his doctor or the advice of his pharmacist which proposes an alternative prescription. The world is so made that we have alternatives, and it was my luck that I chose at a university age the science of alternatives, economics.
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Opinions in Passing

Really Useful Boxes - North American Distribution ...
You can't image how useful these boxes are. And, they seem to be without a North American distributor despite being offered on the Internet through various distributors.
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Canon Sets the Pace for HD Video Cameras
In my opinion, Canon seems miles ahead of the competition when it comes to digital reflex and high definition video cameras. Its all the patents they hold and the quality of design of their products. If you have a problem with your Canon camera share it with me, AW Lake. Otherwise I will continue to think that they are the greatest for creating JPG stills and MPEG-2 video files that you can share on the Internet.
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Blogging from Turtle Bay In Hawaii and the Arnold ...
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, my priorities are all a twist when it comes to golf. This morning, I walked along the coast of the North West of Hawaii's island of Oahu. Not far from where we are staying is the wonderful course designed, I understand, by Arnold Palmer. Was I attracted to the golf course first? Well no!
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Getting it Right
If you have ever speculated about anything, you will realize how difficult it is to get something right when you are working from very partial information. Recently, I engaged myself in the process of trying to understand why the Roman legion which was supposed to be in Dumnonia, the Second Augusta Legion at the time of Boudicca's rebellion, did not come to the rescue of the Romans attacked by Boudicca in the east of England near London or Colchester.
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Who was King Arthur? The Scoop
For many years, I have been reading about the British legendary King Arthur. I am even, at this very time, writing a book as part of my Wuh Lax novel series that will present the idea that King Arthur actually existed, but was lost in history. The name of my novel is Wuh Lax and the Lost King.
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The Death Portion of the Microsoft Based Software ...
One of the most difficult tasks in economics is the forecasting of destructive cycles in new technology. The economics scientist and historian Joseph Schumpeter frequently wrote about the underlying cycles within industrial society that bring about irreversible technical change. He used the term creative destruction and he saw it as a process in which capitalism contained within the very strands of motion which forced radical departures from previous industrial structures.
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Form Madness - Please Enter Zip Code
Wishing to purchase Apple iTunes software expert is asked to complete form. He is told country is United States, but has entered information for UK. He tries to change country but finds that it is the only element in form that cannot be changed.
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Install New Software No Problem
Computer guy has paid for and downloaded software from internet. He clicks on execute icon to install program and enters name, company and product ID when asked. Installation program wizzes into action and blue lines cross over computer screen as files are copied across. Suddenly, there is a beep. The installation has paused and query pops up.
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Introduction to Wim and Wooh

A SAMPLE OF PAGES


Welcome to Wooooooh's Stream
I began Wooh's blogspot in November 2007 during a coffee break from my painting and sketching. Since then I have prepared over 200 blog pages, and blogging, the daily writing that I do, covers a broad range of topics. Over several years, I have established myself as a struggling author of books for all ages. My pen name is AW Lake, and my friends call me Arthur, or Art.
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How to Make This Blogspot Your Home Page
These instructions are for Microsoft Internet Explorer users. First load the Control Panel using the menu item on your 'Start Menu.' Find the 'Internet Options' icon. In the top entry box type in: http://woohs.blogspot.com . Save the results. That's all that you probably have to do.
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The World of the Coffee Breaks and Books
The most wonderful thing about America, for me, at least, is the association of coffee with relaxing, reading books, and of absorbing books with learning. When I first lived in Washington, DC, it took me a while to get over the culture shock of the American way of packaging and presenting food.
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Burt's World of Delicious Dark Chocolat
In an earlier blog, I was praising the moments when one sat quietly with a mug of coffee and a book. A reader quite rightly pulled me up on this saying that I had omitted to mention the additional pleasure one can get by adding dark bitter sweet chocolate.
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Snowed in like Many People in North America
In case you had not noticed, it snowed again! Most people don't like the snow, but as part Canadian, I would be strange if I did not like the snow.
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The Canadian Identity - Does One Exist?
Canadians often ask the question whether or not a Canadian identity exists. Having lived in Quebec for almost a decade as I was growing up. Having lived also in Ontario for many years. Having lived in the UK for many years. And, having lived in United States for many years, I think that I am fairly qualified to answer this question looking at it from many points of view.

Au Canada, l'idéal est que des personnes soient capables de parler les deux langues couramment. Je suis coupable de pouvoir parler couramment une seule langue (anglais), et les autres langues moins couramment (français). Ce n'est pas parce que je n'ai pas essayé de parler français. J'ai vécu au Québec pendant une bonne partie de ma vie, et pendant que j'étais là, je parle français la plupart du temps. C'est avec regret que j'ai quitté le Québec après avoir obtenu son diplôme de l'Université McGill, mais l'impact du Québec sur ma façon de penser est incomparable, même aujourd'hui.
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Little Boy Big Dog
Little boy is three years old. Big dog is three years old, a loving golden lab. No one around! Little boy wants to get from garage to living room, but big dog is in the kitchen and the kitchen is in front of the living room. Little boy has to pass big dog if little boy wishes to arrive in living room!
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Friday, 21 March 2008

Welcome to Wooooooh's Stream


FROM MY DESK

I began Wooh's blogspot in November 2007 during a coffee break from my painting and sketching. Since then I have prepared over 200 blog pages, and blogging, the daily writing that I do, covers a broad range of topics. Over several years, I have established myself as a struggling author of books for all ages. My pen name is AW Lake, and my friends call me Arthur, or Art.

Over many years, I used to work behind desks in offices in buildings in big cities. This I exchanged for the joy of independent painting and sketching in a rural area away from the madding crowd. Increasingly, I have done writing for pleasure. I read a lot, and when I do I enjoy reading complete series of books, such as the Hary Potter series by JK Rowling, or the Captain Aubrey series by Patrick Obrien. I am reasonably well educated believing in continuing education as a rule of thumb. I have not always studied for degrees, but for the acquisition of new skills and for the joy of learning.

YOU HAVE REACHED WOOH'S STREAM
The Internet User's Best Kept Secret

Sketches from scratches is a provocative blogspot that has grown out of the Wuh Lax experience. It is eclectic, which means that it might consider just about anything from the simple to the extremely difficult. A scratch can be something that is troubling me or a short line on paper. From a scratch comes a verbal sketch or image sketch of the issue or subject. Other sites have other stuff that should really be of interest to the broad reader. I try to develop themes, but variety often comes before depth. ... more!