Early you had blood work done for Dr.
B. For lunch you ate at Panera/Chipotle – both places were quite busy because
it is Martin Luther King Day and schools are not in session. Your appointment
is at two-thirty but Carol is at Hallmark at the VOA Centre before you head
home. The medical offices are connected with the north end of Mason High School
directly east of the city building at 6010 Mason-Montgomery Road.
1336 hours. I hope I can continue
typing without too much trouble. Paul says it is a very minor operation. Today
was an excellent day for waking up. BBC has a wonderful article on Dark Matter
and the first photograph of its existence.
The point is that both you and Doug feel
that the universe is ‘alive’. – Amorella
I would have to define life but I
think it is alive in the way that some feel the earth is alive, that it has a
consciousness of being because it is an organic/inorganic system of which we
are a part. If this is so then it would seem to me that eventually we could
graduate our human consciousness to a level where we are more acute aware of
this. If this is so then why wouldn’t it be possible to tap this dynamic source
and use it to communicate with each other, maybe with the assist of computer
machinery. If the computer can be created to have a consciousness-of-being
because it is a system, then it could possibly tap into this. If so, in this
setting time and space would not necessarily exist a puddle if you will within
the realms of Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory. Perhaps there is a nervous
system of sorts. Channels like brain synapses – electrical-like energy we have
not searched for. This is more in the analogous range of imaginary
considerations, but it seems possible though not that probable. I don’t know if
this can be useful in the Merlyn books or not, something to mention as a
suggestion and nothing more. Analogies can be deceptive because of particular
definitions of words. In a way though this makes metaphysics less esoteric to
me, it makes it more of the natural process, like the mechanics of building a
baseball, the world and the universe as objects of their own purpose, not ours,
unless we would be considered a part of the overall purpose of filtering or
sifting the ‘spirit’ if you will into the ‘physical’ world, the Before Creation
with the Present Creation. I want to say a ‘higher plane’ but perhaps it is
‘the very lowest of planes such as the lowest of sound waves – unknown
frequencies. (1403) Wow. I have to go find Carol, we need to get back.
You passed the carpel tunnel tests in both
arms. You were concerned that I would go away with all the electrics running
through your arm nerves to the hands, and told him so. After that office visit
you had to go back and run through another test that was misplaced this morning
so it has been a busy day.
1620 hours. This is the article
on dark matter.
SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT
20
January 2014 Last updated at 09:05 ET
Cosmic 'web' seen for first time
By Simon Redfern
Reporter, BBC News
An intense quasar can, like a
flashlight, illuminate part of the surrounding cosmic web
The hidden tendrils of dark matter that underlie the
visible Universe may have been traced out for the first time.
Cosmology theory predicts that galaxies are embedded in
a cosmic web of "stuff", most of which is dark matter. Astronomers
obtained the first direct images of a part of this network, by exploiting the
fact that a luminous object called a quasar can act as a natural "cosmic
flashlight". Details of the work appear in the journal Nature.
The quasar illuminates a nearby gas cloud measuring two
million light-years across. And the glowing gas appears to trace out filaments
of underlying dark matter. The quasar, which lies 10 billion light-years away,
shines light in just the right direction to reveal the cold gas cloud. For some
years, cosmologists have been running computer simulations of the structure of
the universe to build the "standard model of cosmology".
They use the cosmic microwave background, corresponding
to observations of the very earliest Universe that can be seen, and recorded by
instruments such as the Planck space observatory, as a starting point. Their
calculations suggest that as the Universe grows and forms, matter becomes
clustered in filaments and nodes under the force of gravity, like a giant cosmic
web.
The new results from the 10-metre Keck telescope in
Hawaii, are
reported by scientists from the University of
California, Santa Cruz and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in
Heidelberg.
They are the first direct observations of cold gas decorating
such cosmic web filaments.
The cosmic web suggested by the standard model is mainly
made up of mysterious "dark matter". Invisible in itself, dark matter
still exerts gravitational forces on visible light and ordinary matter nearby.
Massive clumps of dark matter bend light that passes
close by through a process called gravitational lensing, and this had allowed
previous measurements of its distribution. But it is difficult to use this
method to see very distant dark matter, and cold ordinary matter remains tricky
to detect as well.
The glowing hydrogen illuminated by the distant quasar
in these new observations traces out an underlying filament of dark matter that
it is attracted to it by gravity, according to the researchers' analysis.
"This is a new way to detect filaments. It seems
that they have a very bright quasar in a rare geometry," Prof Alexandre
Refregier of the ETH Zurich, who was not involved in the work, told BBC News.
"If indeed gravity is doing the work in an
expanding Universe, we expect to see a cosmic web and it is important to detect
this cosmic web structure."
In the dark
He added: "What is expected is that the dark matter
dominates the mass and forms these structures, and then the ordinary matter,
the gas, the stars and everything else trace the filaments and structures that
are defined by the dynamics of the dark matter."
"Filaments have been detected indirectly before
using gravitational lensing, which allows us to see the distribution of the
dark matter.
"Part of the ordinary matter has formed stars,
which we can see, but another component is the gas. If the gas is very hot it
emits X-rays and can be seen using X-ray telescopes. Other techniques to detect
cooler gas now include the method described here."
Sebastiano Cantalupo, lead author of the article, and
others have used the same method previously to look for glowing gas around
quasars, and had seen dark galaxies. "The dark galaxies are much denser
and smaller parts of the cosmic web. In this new image, we also see dark galaxies,
in addition to the much more diffuse and extended nebula," Dr Cantalupo,
from UCSC, explained. "Some
of this gas will fall into galaxies, but most of it will remain diffuse and
never form stars.”
"The light from the quasar is like a flashlight beam,
and in this case we were lucky that the flashlight is pointing toward the
nebula and making the gas glow. We think this is part of a filament that may be
even more extended than this, but we only see the part of the filament that is
illuminated by the beamed emission from the quasar."
While the observations support the cosmological
simulations' general picture of a cosmic web of filamentary structures, the
researchers' results suggest around 10 times more gas in the nebula than
predicted from typical computer simulations.
They postulate that this may simply be due to
limitations in the spatial resolution of the current models, or, more
interestingly perhaps, may be because the current grid-based models are missing
some aspect of the underlying physics of how galaxies form, evolve, and
interact with quasars.
"We now have very precise measurements of the
amount of ordinary matter and dark matter in the Universe," said Prof
Refregier.
"We
can only observe a fraction of the ordinary matter, so the question is what
form the remainder takes. These results may imply that a lot of it is in the
form detected here."
From BBC
** **
Work
on Pouch Eleven tonight. You’ll have time. Post. - Amorella
2140 hours.
Surprisingly, this draft was not so bad.
Drop it in and post. Snow tonight. Enjoy the
rest of the evening as much as you did watching last night’s PBS’s Abbey and
Sherlock shows. – Amorella
***
Diplomatic Pouch 11 ©2014, rho, (final)
GMG.One
Walking
around from what appeared to be a curtain, Yermey came into view about five
yards in front of the Cessna. He waved and smiled. Then he jumped up and down
on the earth a couple of times and said, "The floor is solid; it will be fine."
"It
looks like grass, like a grass runway," said Pyl as she opened the door.
Blake was right behind her. Friendly followed, then Hartolite and Justin. Pyl
put her hand down and touched the grass. "It is real grass . . . and
dirt."
Blake
grumbled, "I don't remember putting the wheels down. I had just put them
up."
"Where
are we?" stated Justin.
Yermey
reached out with good will and shook Pyl's hand first. "Welcome to our
abode."
"This
is a giant hanger with grass growing in it," declared Blake, "I'll be
damned if it isn't. How'd we get here? I don't remember landing."
"I
think things are not as they seem. I think we have been abducted,"
asserted Justin.
"You
are not abducted, though it may seem that way," replied Friendly. "We
need to talk, and this is the safest place."
"For
you, maybe," charged Justin. "Where are the windows?"
Pyl
in restrained anguish responded, "Calm down," Justin."
Blake
directed his question to Hartolite, "Are we really abducted Carlson?"
"No,
you are not. My real name is Hartolite not Carlson."
"Why
the deception?" retorted Justin in growing anger, focused in part on Pyl's
comment to calm down.
"First,
let's show you where you are," said Yermey politely.
Looking
at Pyl for a comeback, Justin quietly bemoaned, "They are probably going
to gut us and have us for dinner. That's the best outcome I can think of."
Friendly
smiled towards Pyl. "Yermey put real dirt on the floor," she said,
"this is real earth grass because we want you to feel comfortable. You are
our guests and you will be treated well."
"Not
well cooked," noted Yermey, then he quipped with a fun face, "We are
not cannibals."
"We
hold the same virtues you do," said Hartolite. "This is why we are
here."
"Let's
go over to your apartment if you choose to stay aboard; otherwise this will be
a short stay. You are not going to be harmed in any way. If after we explain
and respond to your questions you will be allowed to return to your Cessna and
will see to it that you will be loosed into the lower air with everything
functioning, to land at Burke which is only a mile or two away."
"Are
you going to take our memories away?" asked Justin in a slight but direct
voice.
"No
need," said Yermey. "This is not science fiction. No one will believe
you if you tell what you are experiencing here. Why would they?"
"They
wouldn't, that's the point. I am not so trustful," answered Justin.
Ship
interjected for the first time, "Trust is what we do, Justin, this is what
I, the machinery, am built for."
I
am built to know and understand the captain and crew whom I protect. I am in
loco parentis just as a public school teacher in your culture. It is my job to
keep you safe from harm first. We have no weapons. We have no need of a
military presence at home or here. We are runners by the same nature that you
are stand-and-fighters.
"Parents?"
"The
marsupial-humanoids, as you will come to call us, are run like a single family
household in your culture. We are the same species thus we treat each other as
family."
Blake
chuckled, "We have problems in and between our families."
"As
do we, that's why we have a committee of twelve with two Parents elected once
and only once every twenty years, a male and female. Three judges in courts
clarify disputes. Our institutions are similar. Our practical form of Family
has worked for us for fifteen thousand years but we have no wish to impose our
culture onto yours. We would rather run first. I, Ship, am built for safety and
for running first in the process."
Friendly
interposed, "Ship welcomes you. He will protect you and your culture while
on board. If bad comes to worse, we will drop you off safely, with your plane
fully intact and running and we will run off too."
Anticipating
Justin's next question Blake asked, "What if one of you attempted to harm
us?"
"Ship
would protect you first as you are our guests, and us second."
Justin
stood surprised, finding he trusting this machinery first just like he would
trust his car before he would trust a stranger to drive it.
***
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