Hawking rewrites history... backwards

Hawking and Hertog call their theory 'top-down' cosmology, because instead of looking for some fundamental set of initial physical laws under which our Universe unfolded, it starts 'at the top', with what we see today, and works backwards to see what the initial set of possibilities might have been. In effect the present 'selects' the past.

Tell me what you think, is it a reasonable theory?

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World scientists unite to attack creationism

The world's scientific community united yesterday to launch one of the strongest attacks yet on creationism, warning that the origins of life were being "concealed, denied or confused".

Ok, Swords drawn, mark a line in the sand, which side are you on?

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Top Ten Accidental Discoveries

Just read the title

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Einstein's Writings on Science and Religion

"The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.�

An interesting read

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What Search Engine Spiders See

Have you ever wondered exactly what those search engine spiders actually see each time they visit your website?

Wonder no more.....this useful little tool will scan your page and show you the results, as well as provide useful page data such as word density, meta keywords, links, etc.

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What Frequencies can 'you' hear?

Test your hearing with different frequencies of the same noise at the same volume. I can hear up to 20,000. How bout you?

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What's this 'scotomisation' in The Da Vinci Code?

In the current blockbuster film, The Da Vinci Code, there is an important scene where Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), and Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellan) discuss the possible hidden images in Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, The Last Supper.

Does the picture depict John the Apostle or Mary Magdalene? Are there signs that Mary and Jesus are married? Where in the picture is the Holy Grail? Is it there at all?

At one point in this scene, Sir Leigh refers to scotomisation - a word not in the current vocabulary of most film goers - and he hardly explains its meaning. Understanding this concept is one of the keys to unlocking the mystery within a mystery within a mystery: Why people perceive differently what's in The Last Supper, the artistic and historical mysteries surrounding it, and the mystery of why there's all the excitement about The Da Vinci Code book and movie.

"Scotomisation" is the psychological tendency in people to see what they want to see and not see what they don't want to see - in situations, in themselves, in anything, even in a painting - due to the psychological impact that seeing (or not seeing) would inflict.

In this case, it is one of the most famous paintings of all time and an icon in the faith of millions of Christians. The emotional power of this is considerable. It is no wonder then that The Da Vinci Code book and film have been so controversial throughout the world.

Perception involves seeing and processing information through the filter of our intellect and our emotions. That's why people often see the same thing differently. Scotomisation can be a false denial but also a false affirmation of our perceptions.

The term used in behavioral science is borrowed from the science of optics and ophthalmology. “Scotoma” is from the Greek word skotos (to darken) and means a spot on the visual field in which vision is absent or deficient.

The French psychiatrist Rene Laforgue (1894-1962) is thought to be the first to have used the term in a psychiatric sense. In a 1925 letter to Sigmund Freud, Laforgue wrote that "scotomisation corresponds to the wish that is infantile...not to acknowledge the external world but to put the ego itself into its place..."

At the time, Laforgue was talking about denial and repression in schizophrenics, but the term can have a more general application.

Psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927-1989) describes scotomisation as a process of an individual psychologically denying the existence of anything they see with their own eyes that they really don’t want to see and hence don't want to believe.

He writes in Interpersonal Perception (1966) that scotomisation is "our ability to develop selective blind spots regarding certain kinds of emotional or anxiety-producing events". So it may be a matter of faith with the evidence of The Da Vinci Code.

Seeing is believing, but not always.

Stephen Juan, Ph.D. is an anthropologist at the University of Sydney.

Build your Memory.

Who dosen't want a better memory?

Well this is a site with tons of ways to help build your memory.
How to remember names, how to remember dreams, how to master a foreign language and more.

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Build your own 1000 Watt Wind Turbine and Power your House!

We built a 1000 watt wind turbine to help charge the battery bank that powers our offgrid home. It's a permanent magnet alternator, generating 3 phase ac, rectified to dc, and fed to a charge controller. The magnets spin with the wind, the coils are fixed, so no brushes or slip rings necessary

For all you peeps who hate paying Vinlec every month and want to try their own thing, try out this project

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Is the Brain Really Necessary?

A neurologist studying people with hydrocephalus found that half of his most severe cases had IQs greater than 100, even though they had 95% of their cranial cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid. One of them was a student who had an IQ of 126 and had a first class honours degree in mathematics while having "virtually no brain."

The more you know about the brain the less you know!!!!!!

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