SCIENCE (also MAN&COMPUTER)



ASTRANIMU?

ASTRANIMU - Plural for Astranimus which is Latin for "star mind". In his 1987 book,"The Selfish Gene" Richard Dawkins (Oxford Biologist) suggested the term "replicator" to refer to a thing (of whatever construction) that was able to survive in its envoirnment, and reproduce itself. Imagine a rare complex of knotted electromagnetic fields and plazma occuring in a star. If we could imagine such a complex being able to persist (perhaps like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter) then we could also imagine it being able to spawn smaller likenesses of itself (much as a huricane sometimes spawns tornadoes at its perifery). Given billions of year such electromagnetic phenomenon could have evolved much greater complexity,and even intelligence. Thus the name for these hypothetical beings, astranimu. If any of you whiz kids can come up with a believable electromagnetic/fusion "seed" phenomenon. I'd sure be excited to hear about it. jackmitchener@gmail.com



FROGMAN'S T.O.E.*

Zap! You are now a frogman. But not just any frogman. Your magic flippers allow you to walk on the surface of the water. You are now walking the water beside a yellowish glowing ball which is floating half out, and half under the surface. You must walk faster and faster because the ball is spiraling down a whirlpool. When you and the ball get to the bottom point of the whirlpool . . . you both pass thru it . . . to the other side of the surface! Your magic flippers still allow you to walk the surface, but your head is now underwater. Of course, from your perspective, your head is upright and your flippers are walking along the silvery surface of a steep conical hill. You notice that your glowing ball is spiraling down this hill at a gradualy slowing pace.
As you suspected, this is an allegory. The glowing globe is the sun. The whirlpool is the mass deformed space-time of our galaxy. When you passed thru the point at the bottom of the whirlpool, you passed thru the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. As you followed your globe on its spiral down the hill (walking the underside of the surface) . . . you were walking in an antimatter galaxy, following (in reverse time) an antimatter sun away from the white hole at the center of its galaxy. Thus black holes are merely portals between the matter/forward-time, and the antimatter/reverse-time aspects of the universe.
*T.O.E. stands for"Theory Of Everything"



INVESTIGATE US BIO-WARFARE

Please do what you can to allow UN bio weapons inspectors to examine whatever they like in the US. Try to put a spotlight on US noncompliance with international treaties against bio-warefare. A bodybuilder wants "no fat". A business manager wants "no deadwood". A tyrant wants to get rid of the lazy, the disabled, and the retired. He does not want his nation's resources used to support unproductive people (when those resources could be used to support war). Thus, many citizens fear that custom designed diseases (say like MRSA, or age targeting viruses ) might be deployed by our own government inside the USA against such populations. [This paragraph is from a winter 2007 letter to Senator Feingold.]


VISUALIZATION OF STATISTICS



GAPMINDER.ORG



One brilliant website! A Swedish professor of Public Health has achieved the great majority of what I'd wanted to achieve with my "Contender" program (see below). While mine is to be a seven dimensional, static display . . . his is a four dimensional dynamic display. (Actually, his son and daughter in law did the programming.) The site compares population and two other statistics (which you may choose from a long list) on 80 or so countries through time. While the concept is far simpler than my idea (below), the result is mind blowing! Please spend at least an hour visiting Gapminder.org. Then send them some money!

LINKS I LIKE


US HEALTH-CARE VIDEO



CONTENDER PROGRAM



Most people receive and process data best when it is presented in a visualy (graphs, etc.). Please see Edward Tufte's books on visualization of data. I developed a program (in the old BASIC language) called "Contender". A user could convert seven different common measures he had gathered about each of maybe a dozen contenders into a virtual display. Each of the contenders (say houses to buy, jobs to consider, candidates for a job, stocks, etc.) is represented by a larger or smaller clown head floating at some height, and at some X, Y location on a virtual 3D stage. (The user gets the 3D effect by moving the stage.) Location (X,Y,Z), and diameter of the clown head express 4 measures being simultaneously compared. The other 3 measures are displayed by the features on the clown's face. (Not my own idea. See "Chernov Faces".) These features are: 1. Plus or minus curvature of the mouth, 2. In/out curvature of the cheeks, and 3. Size of the eyes. (Very possibly 2 or three other features could be added.)
Unfortunatly, Contender is not ready for prime time. Right now, one program draws the Chernov faces. The other (main) program still has bugs. It is limited in how the user can move the stage. It also fails to display the first listed contender. More importantly, both programs are written in BASIC. Very few computers anymore run BASIC. You may have my work if you think you can: 1. write good OOP code, 2. Consolidate the programs, and do some debugging. Programmers with experience in coding 3D displays will be better suited to this task. Contact me at JackMitchener@gmail.com.