The first website I ever got lost in belonged to a rambling genius named Tony Smith, a cowboy from Georgia who’s physics theories were too radical for Cornell.  That kind of resume will definitely get a high school kid’s attention, and years later, one of the first Brainsturbator articles was a bunch of links to Tony’s site.  This is an expanded version, which quotes a lot of the material since the site has disappeared completely several times now.

Brainsturbator is here for the long haul, so I’m doing this for the good of humanity...kind of like our backup Paul Laffoley Gallery, which is also under re-construction.  (Meanwhile, check out Laffoley Archive. Like Laffoley, I honestly cannot understand a great deal of what Tony Smith is trying to tell me.  Like everyone else I consider a teacher, though, he provides so much to think about that even Not Getting It becomes an educational experience.  I hope you dig it.

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When I started Brainsturbator, I still had a lot to learn about good web content.  Most of the early material in the archives is pretty weak, and I’m gradually fixing that.  The UFO Library probably needed an update the most, because there’s not enough good information online. What I mean is, it’s very difficult to find data about UFOs, but it’s very easy to find theories about what they are.  I’m much more interested in getting people to ask their own questions, than in summarizing my opinion about what the important questions are. 

Just the same, this libary is shaped by my own biases. I see the UFO phenomenon as fundamentally unexplained, and probably involving multiple causes that human science in 2007 cannot explain or predict.  This phenomenon is real, global, weird and important.  This library is my humble effort at making it a little easier to answer your own questions.  Enjoy.

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We talk about the third dimension a lot, but most humans don’t live in it.  Abbot’s Flatland was not so much a metaphor as an operational description of the sensory world most people inhabit: a continuous, unbroken plane that, despite surface variations and wrinkles, remains a flat stage for our two dimensional lives.  This is inevitable, since humans cannot hover or fly without technology assistance, and few of us can jump higher than three feet off the ground. 

And let’s be serious, here—what is a dimension? Have anyone ever even proved they existed?  Sure, you can draw a Cartesian XYZ grid on paper, but you can also draw a unicorn vomiting angels. I’ve been digging through the concept of time for a month, and it’s a concept nobody can really define, despite the fact we all experience it.  I’ve come to realize there’s very little humans can say for sure about space, either.  The more we learn, the less we know.  Everything you were taught in school is currently falling apart—so let’s take a look at a theory that will likely be replacing all this Big Bang horseshit: the Universe is fractal and infinite at every level of scale.

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“The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.”

--St. Augustine

I’ve been working on an article encompassing these themes, but I had a revelation.  If all I’m doing is re-organizing and synthesizing the work of other humans, why do I write so much?  Rather than burden you with my own meditations on “The Illusion of Control,” I’ve decided to abandon that illusion altogether for this piece.  I’m going to keep going for three more sentences and then I will step out of the way completely.

Everything assembled here is brainfood with a purpose: triggering shifts in perspective.  When you get used to the same perspective—or “stuck”—it can be alarming to feel yourself shifting, but that’s a good thing—that’s neurons waking up, that’s muscle tissue saying THANK YOU, that’s new hormone combinations in your bloodstream.  After all, even if your conscious “self” actually was in control, you’re only driving the car—you’re only manipulating something else.

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In the last installment, a meditation on the concept of the “Chronon” and the total failure of human beings to understand and define time, I threw a ton of brainfood together and overstuffed the turkey.  Despite that, I still left out a lot of material, and I’m going to cover most if it in this “sequel,” epecially the work Jacques Vallee.  Vallee is one of my favorite authors because he precisely conveys meaningful content.  When I do that, it’s generally by accident.  You can decide if this article is worth reading in five sentences:

Time and space may be convenient notions for plotting the progress of a locomotive, but they are completely useless for locating information. What modern computer scientists have now recognized is that ordering by time and space is the worst possible way to store data. In a large computer-based information system, no attempt is made to place related records in sequential physical locations. If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing events by association. If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the space-time physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events.

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In the past century, human science has advanced beyond anyone’s wildest dreams: we’ve put humans into space, eliminated entire cities with a single bomb, industrialized the genocide process, poisoned our entire planet, and figured out how to stick over 5000 albums into a small plastic box.  We have peered billions of light years into the cosmos, we have unraveled the atom and discovered quantum weirdness, and even transcribed the human genome.  As a direct consequence of all this glittering achievement, scientists are understandably pretty cocky these days. However, I would like to pass anyone reading this the Silver Bullet to instantly deflate the ego of anyone who’s exponentially more intelligent than you are: just ask them to explain what time is.

Time is the single most universally constant of physical constants, and yet we barely know anything at all about it.  Here in 2007, we still don’t even have a working definition of what it is.

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Did you know that you have a 70% higher chance of having a heart attack between the hours of 7 and 9 am?  That’s averaged out over the full year, but if you look from a larger level of scale you’ll find that winter months are also especially high risk.  The more I dig into Chronobiology, the tenor of my investigation has changed from simple wonderment (after all, this stuff is pretty damn cool) to more sinister speculations.  Among them is the suspicion that “Daylight Savings Time” causes epidemic levels of depression, as well as a sharp increase in accidents, both on the job and on the road.

Even thought the “facts” bear my theory out more or less completely, I just mention it in passing.  We still have a lot of ground to cover, laying out the basic mechanisms and principles behind Chronobiology.  The closer I look, the more important this material seems—whether that’s a trick of perspective or a valid point is strictly up to you.

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Like most science, Biology is still struggling to free itself of the dark ages.  We live our lives in a continuum, yet most biology textbooks are still content to take a single snapshot of a human being and pretend that they’re actually discussing reality when they break that snapshot into component parts and study them.  Humans are not objects, though—we’re ongoing processes, moving around on a planet that’s teeming with organic life and orbiting around an unthinkably huge star. 

For this precise reason, I’ve been getting heavy into “Chronobiology” lately—it’s currently considered a sub-discipline but in the decades to come I believe it will take it’s place as the most accurate and useful approach to biology that we have.  There has been a lot of secular back-slapping in recent years about how totally great and amazing science is, compared to relgion—an endless stream of atheist-pundits pointing out that unlike the rigid dogmas of Faith, sceince is constantly revising itself and changing.  And yeah—when you compare scientific progress to something that doesn’t progress at all...things look pretty good.  However, the sad fact is the wheels of science turn slower than the average lifespan of a human being. 

Because of this, the notion that human organisms exist in time and are subject to cyclical changes is still considered a novelty, instead of the only sane approach. So here’s your chance to get a few decades ahead of the game—your introduction to Chronobiology.  It’s going to take us from the outer limits of the galaxy to the smallest particles in your body, and if you don’t think the ride was informative, fascinating and downright badass, you’ll get a full refund.

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Every one in a while, it’s important to remind ourselves that we live in a Universe we don’t know shit about.  Sure, we’ve figured out a vanishingly small percentage of what’s going on, and we’ve got all kinds of cultural systems to keep ourselves from thinking too much about How Much We Don’t Know—but if you really sit down outside and think about it, you have no idea what’s going on around you at any given second.  Odds are, this will not change within your lifetime.

And it’s not like I’m trying to make you specifically feel like a moron—it’s just because you’re a human being.  We’re all morons, trapped inside mental cages we can’t even see, most days.  So rather than focus on the hilariously grim nightmare apocalypse meltdown that’s going on all over the Earth right now, I’d like to take this Thursday to give you a booster shot of awe, wonder, and optimism.  It’s been a stressful few weeks for the American people—a number of celebrities have been going to rehab and prison, and there might be some other stuff going on, too. So let’s take a collective breather and look closely at some truly amazing stories that have passed under the radar and over our heads.

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When I came across Benford’s Law, also known as the Signifigant Digit Phenomenon, I was pissed off.  Because I recently turned 26, and that means I’ve spent a quarter century of my life completely unaware of what would appear to be one of the most important mathematical laws in existence.  Worse still, this particular mathematical law was discovered in 1881, and formally proven in 1935, so I am several lifetimes behind the curve.

Surprise is good—existiential shock is even better.  As we’ll see in the course of this article, being whumped upside the head by the utterly absurd and totally unexpected is the best possible way for a human being to learn—there are whole disciplines of mathematics that define Information as “the difference that makes a difference.”

And man...this is a difference that messed my head up good.

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