The story of how humans came to live in peace and plenty is a developing conversation. The initiator is David Braden, who proposes that we network, but with an additional dimension. Instead of only interacting on a flat, person-to-person basis, Braden says that we must also consider the larger system and our environment in what we do, and he calls it 3D Networking. You can get a good idea from his website 3DN Introduction, which explains three dimensional networking in its bite sized, linked pages.

David Braden, initiator of 3D Networking

One particularly interesting proposal is what Braden calls the Self-help Corporation. Today's economy does not have any place for people that aren't directly involved in making more and more profit for the corporate players. At first, these were only the people who did not have the right skills, but more and more people are being laid off because the corporation that employed them is cutting costs. It is nothing for a huge corporation to buy its competition and then start "slimming down", laying off thousands of people who thought they had secured stable employment. Thus, the ranks of those who don't fit keep swelling.

Braden's self-help corporation (this link is to an abbreviated description) is a way of balancing the needs of these individuals against the focus on profit which is a characteristic of the corporations and which does not allow giving someone a job simply because they need to make money to live.

"The self-help corporation is a simple, practical and economical way to alleviate the resulting poverty. It does not require public consensus, expensive government programs or massive charitable fundraising. One can be started now, by anyone, anywhere in the world.

Poor people are poor because they do not have skills that can be marketed in the “market economy” or their labor is valued by the market economy at a level that does not provide them adequate resources for a decent standard of living. They are not, however, without skills and resources. In particular, they possess the skills and available labor to produce basic necessities."

The question is whether such an idea has real transformative potential. Will people actually come together in solidarity and contribute their money or their skills to make it possible for a whole group to take care of basic necessities in a way that's much more economical than today's 'everyone for themselves' way of doing it.

The vision is growing and it's becoming more focused. A part of this process is documented in a discussion around The Story of How Humans Came to Live in Peace and Plenty on the "open money" Ning group.

Continue reading "The Story of How Humans Came to Live in Peace and Plenty" »

Posted by Sepp at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

An exciting and somewhat unexpected news item came across my virtual desk today. Here is the story, as published in ABC News Australia:

Boomerang returns, even in space

Boomerang by Scott Mac Millan found on Pierre Kutek's site

In an unprecedented experiment, a Japanese astronaut has thrown a boomerang in space and confirmed it flies back, much like on Earth.

Astronaut Takao Doi "threw a boomerang and saw it come back" during his free time on March 18 at the International Space Station (ISS), a spokeswoman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.

Mr Doi threw the boomerang after a request from compatriot Yasuhiro Togai, a world boomerang champion.

"I was very surprised and moved to see that it flew the same way it does on Earth," the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted the 53-year-old astronaut as telling his wife in a chat from space.

The space agency said a videotape of the experiment would likely be released later.

Doi travelled on US shuttle Endeavour on the March 11 blast-off and successfully delivered the first piece of a Japanese laboratory to the ISS.

Continue reading "Boomerang returns, even in space" »

Posted by Sepp at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the alternatives to our current economic system, which is based on money created by banks as a debt and heavily laden with a cost called interest, is what has been termed the gift economy. Few would disagree that life could be much better if everything - or at least a good part of what we need for our daily survival - were freely available just for the taking.

Silver 20-SIMEC coins issued by Italian law professor Giacinto Auriti in a monetary experiment

But alas - the current economic reality is just the opposite - scarcity rules. Everything has a price, and the more scarce something is, the higher the price. To obtain anything we need to pay that price - in other words exchange something of ours for what we wish to receive.

At times - actually I would argue more often than not - scarcity is brought about artificially to manipulate the price and therefore the "exchange value" of goods. Making a profit and paying the piper requires it.

Oil probably is sa good an example as any. Far from there being a physical shortage of oil, the price for this black gold has been successfully manipulated to raise from 10 dollars a barrel only years ago to over a hundred dollars now. The corporations that exploit our dependence on oil for energy are doing the manipulating.

But we were talking about giving.

Nature gives to us abundantly, and we have no problem accepting what is offered. We do have some problems with stewardship, with giving of ourselves to Nature. Traditional cultures included taking care of the land and other creatures. They also practiced giving as a routine economic activity. How is it that we have turned away from giving as a delightful and satisfying pastime? Genevieve Vaughan, author of For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange analyzes the reasons from a feminist and largely psychosocial perspective in her article Introduction to the Gift Economy.

She sees giving as a distinctly feminine activity, and she may be right that women are culturally more apt to give, to nurture, than men. Our culture of male domination over the female, which creates a view of the sexes as opposed to and even in conflict with each other, seems to be at the bottom of this. This patriarchal bent of society, very much stressed in the Jewish and Christian tradition, seems to have made us men less inclined to consider nurturing or giving.

So what can we do to bring more balance, short of revolutionizing society and turning to matriarchy, which seems to have its own problems? Can we, in an economy that relies on scarcity and exchange as fundamental to its functioning, make a difference at all? Can we nudge the world towards more economic justice by what we ourselves are able to do?

I believe we can...

Continue reading "The Gift Economy - Receiving stimulates giving" »

Posted by Sepp at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

While energy needs are set to grow inexorably for the next decades, production of hydrocarbon fuels is being throttled down to a trickle. The resulting shortage finds us - the consumers of energy - at a distinct disadvantage. We are paying the price for not paying attention.

The Peak Oil scenario was first announced in 1956 by a petroleum geologist - M. King Hubbert - who was at the time working for the Shell Oil company. Hubbert's prediction was that oil production would peak in the US between 1965 and 1970 and that internationally, the peak of production would be reached around the year 2000. Hubbert's peak, as the inexorable winding down of oil production has also been named, is universally recognized as a threatening reality, but is the theory based on actual physical principles?

North Sea oil rig - Image Minerals UK

There certainly is a shortage of production and transformation, enough to have driven prices above the $100-a-barrel level for crude oil. Those oil price increases have elevated the profits of oil companies to undreamed-of heights. Shell's profit for 2007 is a record 31 billion Dollars, Exxon Mobil "shattered its own record as the world's most profitable publicly traded corporation" with a yearly profit for last year of 40.6 billion Dollars and Shevron, the second largest US oil company saw its yearly profit increase to 18.7 billion Dollars. (LA Times, 2 Feb. 2008)

The German Energy Watch Group tells us in a report released in October 2007, that Peak Oil is here now, that "world oil production has peaked in 2006". Official industry and government data on oil reserves do not support that conclusion, but Energy Watch has made its own estimates to support a result that it has been actively looking for.

Not everyone agrees that we are running out of oil. Peter Jackson, who conducted a study of world oil supplies for Cambridge Energy Research Associates says oil output will continue to rise over the next decade.

Peak Oil artificial?

My argument is that there is no actual physical shortage of hydrocarbons. There is indeed a drop in oil extraction, but it seems that this is more a forced reduction of output, rather than a consequence of having exhausted liquid hydrocarbons as a resource.

Continue reading "The Peak Oil Deception: Squeezing Energy for Profit" »

Posted by Sepp at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Star formation is thought to be driven by gravity-induced accretion of material distributed in space. A recent article on space.com titled Jets Spiral in 'Reverse Whirlpool' from Star illustrates this widely accepted but mistaken concept of the formation of heavenly bodies. Space.com's Jeanna Bryner reports that

"Astronomers have observed for the first time a jet of matter spiraling outward from an infant star, as if a lengthy strand of curly pasta. The enormous jet, which shoots out in two directions, is rocketing material away from the so-called protostar and into interstellar space at more than 'supersonic speeds'."

Artist's concept of protostar HH 211, believed to be accreting material from a surrounding disk. - Credit: Change Tsai (ASIAA)

"Stars are thought to form at the center of rotating disks of hydrogen gas and dust", continues the article, describing the theory according to which gravitation is the principal star-forming mechanism. However, there is a problem: "The gas can't fall inward toward the star until it sheds excess spin power called angular momentum". As far as official theory goes, the vortices astronomers observed in HH 211, are thought to dissipate some of the energy of rotation which, it is argued, counter-acts accretion by giving rise to centrifugal forces.

That is the official theory, but this explanation of star formation has several problems.

One obvious question: where does the spin come from, that now needs to be dissipated and more importantly, what use does that spin have in star formation?

Secondly, the "jets" observed to accompany the formation of both stars and galaxies and which are described in this instance as "reverse whirlpools" would seem be a very inefficient mechanism if not entirely counter-productive in the formation of a star. Instead of accreting material, they are said to be dissipating both matter and spin.

Thirdly, where there is no accumulation of matter, gravity cannot accumulate more matter. Also, when mathematically modeled, gravitation-induced accretion does not resolve into an accretion disk but works in a spherically symmetric way.

So what are we overlooking here?

In my view, this is one of the important areas where physics has gone down the wrong path in its insistence that gravity "obviously" must be the force that holds everything together, and that thus it is the sole force responsible for the accumulation of any kind of concentration of matter in the universe.

Continue reading "Star Formation: Vortex Builds Stars, Planets" »

Posted by Sepp at 08:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

While waves normally come in a succession of oscillations, a soliton is a self-reinforcing solitary wave, a single oscillation that maintains its form and energy along its path of propagation. Such a solitary wave can, for instance, travel along a canal and remain essentially unchanged for a long stretch.

John Scott Russell, a Scottish engineer living in the 19th century, was the first to observe and describe such a solitary wave in a channel of water:

"I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped - not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour, preserving its original figure some thirty feet long and a foot to a foot and a half in height. Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles I lost it in the windings of the channel. Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance interview with that singular and beautiful phenomenon which I have called the Wave of Translation''.

John Scott Russell's Soliton Wave Re-created in 1995 by scientists at - Heriot-Watt University.

The Coanda effect, named after its discoverer, the Romanian Henri Coanda, is the tendency of a flow of liquid or gas to adhere to and follow a curved surface. Sails and airplane wings make use of this effect to efficiently convert air flow (wind) into forward motion of the boat or lift for the airplane.

Historically, Viktor Schauberger had observed how trouts are able to stand still almost without any effort in fast-flowing mountain streams and he noted how they would, at the first sign of danger, accelerate like an arrow shot from a bow, not downstream, but against it. They do this by passing water through their gills and expelling it along the sleek body. Schauberger called itt "the secret of trout propulsion" and modeled technical propulsion systems after it. One of his implementations of the principle was called a repulsine and this page shows some designs and early implementations. Unfortunately, most of Schauberger's hardware and unpublished notes were lost in the 1950s.

How a soliton in air or water and an application of the coanda effect may combine into a useful propulsion force is also the subject of a very interesting article Mike Emery recently forwarded. Tom at montalk.net describes in this article how toroidal solitons - we know them as smoke rings - and the adhesive qualities of fluids could be put to good use in aeronautic and marine engineering applications.

Continue reading "Schauberger, Solitons and the Coanda Effect" »

Posted by Sepp at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

30th Anniversary of TV hijack by extraterrestrials - November 1977 - is the headline of a little item in Nexus Magazine I read this morning. I don't really believe in coincidence as an innocent chance happening. Checking the date, I find it was exactly 30 years ago today ... so I just have to share this one.

First published on Four Winds, the story was taken up by the ALCUIN AND FLUTTERBY blog of Alcuin Bramerton and from there it found its way into Nexus.

The audio signal of a southern England TV station was hijacked during the early evening news broadcast now 30 years ago by a voice identifying itself as "a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command". The news broadcast was drowned out for about 6 minutes. The message was prophetic and it advocated peace, but from all appearances no one seems to have listened. As happens so often, we tend to lose the rare pearls in the din of all the noise...

Continue reading "Thirty Years Ago Today: Galactic Message of Peace" »

Posted by Sepp at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The idea of entropy, of the constant and irreversible winding down of the universe, was introduced with the second law of thermodynamics. This law is based on an observation of James Watt's steam machine, which was the only technological utilization of thermal energy available at the time. According to the current views of thermodynamics, there is no antidote to entropy. Once expended, energy is said to be lost forever in that giant heat sink, which we imagine the vast reaches of the universe to be.

One of the great minds of this century, an outsider to established science, has recognized the folly of this view and coined a term for the antidote. He calls it syntropy. In his book Cosmography, R. Buckminster Fuller writes: "The reader will discover that the inexorable course of the gradual running down of the energy of the universe - that is, entropy - is only part of the picture. Entropy has a complementary phase, which we designated syntropy".

I wrote these words and quoted Fuller in 1993, in an article titled A New Beginning For Thermodynamics. At the time, I had my share of opposition, together with some appreciative comments. But few physicists seemed ready to question the unconditional validity of the second law of thermodynamics at the time. It was and perhaps still is one of the untouchable principles - almost a holy cow of physics.

Now, a decade and a half later, it seems that some researchers have hit upon a way to circumvent the law, to reverse that inexorable tendency of heat to disperse from a warm place to a cooler one.

Ammonia Butane Ambient Heat Motor - David Matos de Matos.

Heat pumps have been available for quite some time. They are used in refrigerators, air conditioners and environmental heating applications. They can extract between three and four times more heat from an environmental source than the equivalent of electricity needed to produce heat in a resistance heater. Their coefficient of performance is therefore said to be about three to four. Even though they are more efficient than electricity in heating, so far no one has been able to close the cycle and use the heat thus generated to again produce the driving force for the heat pump with some power left over to do other work.

But this seems destined to change. David Matos de Matos from Angola has designed a system that can do work with compression only. He proposes to do away with the expansion valve found in fridges and air conditioners to more efficiently utilize the cycle and run a motor or turbine with the continuously pressurized working fluid. His description of a proposed two-cycle ammonia and butane compression-only motor with expansionless phase change and heat recovery is available in this blog post: Compression only heat engines - Plus phase change

Matos says the efficiency of this engine could be much increased by incorporating the Hydristor, a variable vane hydraulic pump and motor developed by Tom Kasmer, into his design. The Hydristor operates by converting shaft rotation and power into hydraulic pressure and flow, and/or the reverse. It can seamlessly merge several flows of hydraulic power with a shaft rotation.

Kasmer proposes to use the Hydristor to replace the transmission in conventional vehicles. It could be retrofitted in cars, trucks and motorcycles without much trouble and would increase the efficiency of transmission tremendously as well as use breaking energy regeneratively.

But another use Kasmer has in mind is incorporation of the hydristor in a heat pump cycle, where he says it could increase efficiency to the point of allowing the closing of the circle. One could use the accumulated heat in a stirling engine which in turn could drive a generator and produce sufficient electricity to run the heat pump with power to spare:

Continue reading "Thermoenergetics: Can Hydraulics Reverse Entropy?" »

Posted by Sepp at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Dr John Milewski is an engineer and scientist who has been researching advanced materials. He has invented a process for growing single crystal fibers of various materials which could - once available in quantity - revolutionize many technical applications, from light bulbs to energy production. Physical healing and regeneration of living organisms may be a major effect of the new technology as well.

Dr. John V. Milewski is an Internationally recognized leader and consultant in his field of Advanced Materials. He is a professional engineer, scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, writer, publisher, editor and lecturer. He is a retired staff member of Los Alamos National Labs and has worked previously as a scientific staff member at Exxon Research Center and at Thiokol Chemical Rocket Engine Div. He recently founded his own research company called Superkinetic, Inc. where he is currently working on a revolutionary new electric light bulb based on using a single crystal fiber as a filament.

Perhaps even more interesting than the research into novel materials and the possible technical applications of Milewski's work are the theoretical implications, described in an article titled SuperLight - One Source, One Force.

SuperLight is described as the opposite and complementary phase to ordinary light. While electromagnetic radiation - visible light is part of its spectrum - has a strong electric and a weaker magnetic component, in magneto-electric radiation the magnetic component outweighs its electric counterpart.

Milewski proposes a model which sees magneto-electric radiation as the source of gravity, emitted by black holes and traveling at the square of the speed of light. SuperLight has a correspondingly shorter wavelength and higher energy content than ordinary light and is the source of the energy of life, which makes for its connection to the area of healing through increased coherence in organisms.

While physics has tended to exclude life and consciousness from its equations we now have - with Milewski's model - a very real possibility to reach unification with meta-physics, generally considered the purview of faith and religion.

Continue reading "Milewski Describes Magneto-Electric Radiation and Super Light" »

Posted by Sepp at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Particles of like charge repel each other - that is one of the laws describing the interaction between single sub-atomic particles. Not in all cases, says Ken Shoulders - there are some notable exceptions, although current theory has no description for them. Shoulders, who is an experimental physicist, has been working with what he calls EVOs or Exotic Vacuum Objects for more than two decades.

"There is a fascinating new realm of physical effects not covered by present-day single particle physics description, but still very much a part of the world we live in. These effects herald some forthcoming events greater in extent than those found in the single electron world we are most aware of. This domain is the multiple electron universe where the effects of electron ensembles dominate all others."

EVOs or EV charge clusters behave like solitons. They are relatively stable, forming ensembles of large numbers of same-charge particles such as electrons or protons and they can be oriented to release their collective charge in a material target - think of a disintegrator gun (Electric Gun Effects).

Larger image

Side view of aluminium foil, coated with silicon carbide, being subjected to EVOs. The small jets seen coming from under the foil have penetrated through it. Image: Ken Shoulders

Other potential applications include the production of thermal or electrical energy and the provision of thrust without chemical propellants. Observed output power largely exceeds the power necessary to stimulate the formation of EVOs.

Although applications are admittedly still speculative, there are good indications from experiments already performed that important changes in our understanding of charged particles, their modes of interaction and their practical uses lie ahead.

One well documented potential application of EVOs is their use in eliminating the radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel and contaminated nuclear materials. This should be particularly welcome to those looking for a way to solve the problem of what to do with all the radioactive waste materials produced by reactors and other nuclear facilities.

David Yurth whose article on Y-Bias and Angularity you can find on this site, was kind enough to provide a description of the nuclear test project that proved the case of nuclear remediation through the use of EVOs.

"Shortly after Ken Shoulders was awarded his first patent for the discovery and documentation of the phenomenon known at that time as High Density Charge Objects, S-X Jin began working to test the viability of his concept as a means for remediating radioactive emissions from spent nuclear fuels. Between 1994 and 1998, Jin and his associates successfully treated radioactive emissions generated by a solution of finely particulated Thorium oxalate powder in ultra-pure water. The apparatus they developed consisted of a high voltage spark generator, a custom-designed proprietary probe, an anode arrangement to attract the charge clusters, a partial pressure vacuum vessel containing Deuteride gas surrounded by a field of permanent magnets, and a variety of detection and measurement instrumentation devices to monitor various aspects of the process while it was in progress.

Great care was taken to certify that the only constituents contained in the test vessel prior to treatment were water and powdered Thorium. This requirement was satisfied by subjecting each test sample to analysis by a gas diffusion mass spectrometer prior to the treatment protocols. Once the treatment had been completed and the instrumentation array showed radioactivity to be reduced to ambient background levels, the samples were again tested with the gas diffusion mass spectrometer – and the results of those post-treatment analytical samples contained the information which fundamentally validated the underlying thesis about the dynamic processes evidenced by the high density electron charge clusters in this application."

For a summary of the project with illustrations, see Remediation of Radioactive Emissions in Spent Nuclear Fuels using High Density Charge Cluster [EV0] Techniques.

The following article by Ken Shoulders was published in issue 75 of Infinite Energy magazine. It provides a brief overview of this new field and references to publicly available material about Ken Shoulders' work. It is well worth to dig deeper in the References section.

Continue reading "Ken Shoulders' EVOs - Exotic Vacuum Objects Challenge Particle Theory" »

Posted by Sepp at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)