x-rays from scotch tape?!?!

this is very very cool….very very interesting….come on, what’s in that scotch tape?

Peeling Scotch Tape Powers X-Ray Machine (from Discover.com, 10-22-08)

"Peeling a roll of ordinary sticky tape can generate 100 milliwatt pulses of X-rays, enough to capture a human finger on X-ray film, according to a new study by UCLA scientists. …"

 crazy, no?

disappearing aircraft and other flying oddities

a couple years ago i noticed some weird goings on. of course, i’m always noticing weird goings on, but i like to look upwards and check out what the aircraft is doing from time to time. i have a lot of chances to witness their activity. by the way, i’m in a quiet zone and some high altitude commercial flight paths with an occasional military “game”……

the constant goings on include chemtrail spraying. sometimes they let up and allow us a sunny day or two. the best are seeing the unique patterns of the chemtrails (swastikas!?!?! upside-down peace signs!?!?!). and yes these trails are rather different from the normal contrails. i’ve even seen two planes near each other, one with a short, quickly dissapating contrail and the other with a long long long chemtrail that stays in the sky and slowly spreads out (typically to meet other slowly spreading out chemtrails, thus blanketing the sky and blocking sunlight). the other thing i’ve witnessed the chemtrail-spewing planes do is finish their dump, there’s a break, than the contrail starts up with it’s normal short distance behind the plane that quickly dissapates. interesting, no?

but back to this one summer (2005). i just happen to be outside during the afternoon. it’s bright. clear skies (for once). i’m walking up the drive and look up. for no reason really, except maybe habit. i’m surprised to notice two shiny silver planes near each other. i was surprised because i didn’t hear them. you can always hear the planes around here, even through the walls, even when they are at their highest altitude. and oddly, these two planes were much lower than most of the planes i hear & see. then another anomaly catches my attention: there are no chemtrails and no contrails. nothing. i watch them for a bit, never hearing anything, nor seeing any trails. i look away for a second and they disappear on me. which is kind of weird as they had a ways to go before being blocked by trees. there were no visible markings that i could see. i have this odd feeling that what i was seeing wasn’t really what i was seeing.

ok. another day. again (and oddly) a decently sunny afternoon. i’m inside. washing dishes if i remember rightly. i hear this high-pitch whine. it’s really bizarre, so of course i want to investigate. the back door is about 15 feet from where i was standing, so i leap across the floor, swing open the door, and look up. flying so low i could have seen faces in the darkened windows had there been any to see, is a white plane. no markings, flying very slowly. it’s front tip is just passing over the roofline. right next to the door (which is open) i have a table with my camera on it. i look away to grab the camera and look back. couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. but when i look back, the plane is gone. i thought for sure i could have caught an image of the tail end before it passed the roof. oh well, i quickly dash to the front door. about 5 quick leaps across the floor (yes i live in a small place) and i dash out the front door expecting to see the plane passing over the front yard, or at least down the road. it had quite a ways to go before it should be out of view at the speed it was going. but it was no where. this incredibly low plane was no where to be seen. oddly i still heard the high-pitch whining. i just could never see anything. so how does a plane vanish from sight within seconds, but still can be heard? and for that matter, since when did a plane ever make a high-pitch whine like what i heard? i’ve never heard a plane make that sound before and i’ve never heard it again. so what the heck was that?

military jets have flown so low before i thought i could hit them with a rock. they are very very noisy (thunderous roars you hear a while before they come and after they leave) and they fly extremely fast over you. the plane i saw was crawling at a snail’s pace in comparison.

and then there was that night in january of 2004 when that odd light flashed on me while i was walking towards my home, flashed at my home (witnessed by those inside through a window), and then just disappeared. and when it was on me i had such a hard time moving, concentrating, speaking, thinking….and had this odd idea that a dark brown boxy car with dark-tinted windows was pulling up the driveway, until i realized that the light was coming from behind me and not from the driveway, and that there was no car coming up the driveway. there was a full moon that night as well–you could draw a triangle between it, the light, and the driveway points, yet that moon illumined no dark shape behind the light, even though it was just above the treeline and i could see the dark shape of the trees. like maybe a helicopter to which a search light might have been attached. and everything so eerily silent. but when i turned to look at the source of the light is when it flashed to the house and disappeared. very odd. slowly i regained proper functioning of my motor skills with the dawning realization that something completely unordinary and just a bit frightening had occurred. i wish i could write this off to some sort of imbibed substance, but i was unfortunately sober at the time and had been for a long while before and a long while after. not much of an unsober person i suppose.

so….strange aircraft.

Climate Change is Natural

i get this depressed little laugh when people are so swayed by manbearpig’s global warming creation.

that’s not to say it doesn’t feel a little warmer than when i was a kid; however, i just don’t think people are the solitary reason for it. nor do i feel that it’s a trend that will last forever. in fact, this summer has been rather cool compared to last summer.

i find it silly to think that the earth herself cannot go through cycles. everything else does. i’m not saying to use that as an excuse to be wicked to her. she’ll get you eventually. but when i think about all these wealthy bigwigs leaving way more of a “carbon footprint” than i ever could expecting me to front the cash to make the world a better place…….hey, i already use way less utilities than the average person. i’ve lived without utilities. i don’t just drive to town on a whim…..and if i lived in a city i wouldn’t be using a car. but you really can’t afford solar paneling or other really cool get-you-off-the-grid-but-still-have-power-to-run-your-laptop-for-work-and-communication-etc devices when your earnings are poverty level. and guess what, i receive no benefits or aid from the government/taxpayers either.

and florescent bulbs aren’t the answer. they contain mercury. and blow just as quickly as incandescents in my house. sometimes quicker. and i know they do better in “turn them on leave them on” areas. they still blow. i’m lucky to get a few months use out of them, and i hate the type of light they give off too. so unnatural. gave me massive headaches every single day when i started middle school (went from an old elementary school without florescents to a brand new middle with nothing but…)

but here is something interesting i came across some weeks back to demonstrate the fads of science:

in the june 1965 issue of National Geographic, that’s Vol. 127 No.6 on pages 794-795 they have this large picture of Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska. but it’s the caption that really interests me:

“Tortured ice pinnacles 60 to 100 feet high dwarf visitors at the face of the Mendenhall, a glacier that melts faster than it moves forward. Scientists predict that the face may begin advancing again toward the end of the 20th century. By then, as their study of climatic cycles indicates, colder temperatures and heavier snowfalls will have replaced the relatively warm and snow-scant winters now prevailing along the Alaska coast. Mendenhall Lake, 115 feet deep near the glacier, did not exist when this century began.”

science has fads too. it has philosophies. it has its own religious fundamentalists. i really don’t believe we know much more than the ancients did. we have a lot more technology…but since when did technology improve us as humans? it made some things easier, but have we truly changed for the better? have we truly become more intelligent, or have we merely altered our culture, our language so that we are merely different today–not better. big words and big machines do not a genius make.

gods & gurus

the simplest way to express my feelings on religions/cults/philosophies (including those “anti-religious” paths of science/politics/sociology/etc) is that i don’t worship anything. you could call that my “belief system” i suppose…the belief that absolutely nothing, no matter how wicked or wonderful, is worth my mindless and utter devotion. and why isn’t it? well, i see no justification for denying myself to give it all to something a) that’s just like me or b) that isn’t like me. nothing in existence, known or unknown, could ever prove to me that it needed me to belittle myself for it. really, if i was some omniscient, omnipotent being i certainly wouldn’t be going around begging other beings to bow down to me. that kind of desire seems to only come from some weird need for a power/ego-trip…which if you truly were so omniscient/etc, i don’t think you would need. (so, why was yahweh so jealous of all those other “gods”……hmmm? remember, he was only “god of the mountain.”)

granted, some people may just be in that kind of mental/emotional state of development where they actually have some need to blindly devote themselves to something seen or unseen–perhaps to learn that they really don’t need to be doing that. it just seems to me that worship & devotion of any nature makes you completely forget yourself. at that moment, you stop developing. you as a person no longer exist nor can you grow because you have traded yourself for the worship of another being. i prefer to keep the freedom of my own being. to be able to discern life without the colored glasses of any one set of dogma. some might find that selfish i suppose, that the whole point of life is to deny yourself–to “altruistically” give of yourself. but i think if you take a good look, you’ll see that most of the time there is no actual “altruism” occurring….and if you’re giving yourself away just because that’s what someone else or some book told you to do, well…remember, you can’t help anyone else until you’ve helped yourself. your issues don’t just disappear because you’ve devoted yourself to someone/something….in fact, they tend to come back quite a bit more powerful and problematic because you denied yourself for your object of worship.

then there is always the struggle to unlearn social conditioning…to cease merely reacting to everything because that’s how your family/peers/society does it. so many people nowadays speak about a global worldview, but i do not find the concept possible if we are all simply reacting to everything because that’s how the generation before us reacted. i myself am not immune from reaction. i’m much better at recognizing it than 10 years ago and, albeit not as often as i would like, better at consciously choosing an action. i don’t find it an easy to task to undo the conditioned aspects of oneself, but in the long run it’s the only way to global improvement–and that global worldview. how can one respect another and coexist peacefully if we all are just reactive creatures, with little actual thinking and slaves to our emotions/beliefs/gods/gurus? and i’m an emotive person too! i’m all for recognizing a feeling, but you really need to combine some mental thought with all that emotional reasoning to come up with an action and not just a reaction. i will have to admit that the balance of daoism has something going for it. (and no, buddhism is not an answer. it forces a lot of denial/repression especially in westerners, and has had quite a violent history. to me it’s no different than any other religion as much as they try to say it’s not.)

so, i don’t worship anything. even the trees i love so much, even the earth, the forces of the universe….nope, nothing. doesn’t mean i won’t hand out some respect where it’s deserved, but i won’t grovel before anything. i’ll shake hands, look it in the eyes (if it has either of those), but i won’t kiss its feet. and it better not try to kiss mine. that’s so annoying!

stop watching television already

so there used to be one show that i would adjust the antenna for…alas no longer as it has truly passed into the realm of “every other show on television”…….but this isn’t my actual point.

what i really wanted to mention, was that in waiting for that show a couple weeks back, i was so lucky to catch the grainy tail-end of that wonderful piece of drivel called grey’s anatomy. the part where they wax “philosophical.” it was absolutely infuriating. their main point was that what makes humans different or better than their animal instincts is humans can think & feel. obviously none of the writers or actors must have animal companions. even chickens have distinct personalities.

and these commercials i’ve caught that make it seem cute that the dog is owned by a human…..

animals definitely are different from humans, but it is ludicrous to assume they cannot feel or think. it is so obvious that they do, i live with enough of them to know. and yes, though chickens can be rather pea-brained most of the time, they can learn, they do exhibit intelligence….and when given a decent home, you can even see that each chicken is distinct. they aren’t all carbon copies of one another, they actually have individual distinctions in their characters. but our culture certainly prefers to prevent that from being known, or even from occurring. of course in those wretched overcrowded chicken farms, cattle pens, too quickly fattened on corn and other animals……concentration camps for animals. of course they appear to have no identity, how could they in such an environment? what do you think happens to a person’s sense of self after a lengthy imprisonment in war camps, concentration camps????

and back to the antenna-adjusting….i wonder what is in those little black boxes they want everyone to buy now besides just a digital TV receiver/converter…? you know, with the right equipment your current television can be used to see/hear you whenever plugged in (doesn’t matter if it’s on or off)….and i would have to say that any electrical wiring can be used similarly, for hearing at least. kind of creepy. like those electric meters that automatically read your KWH but don’t actually tell you what that amount is…nor can you tell if your electricity is completely turned off, like you could tell on the older models. odd odd odd.