M.J. Rose

It seems like the world is going to hell in a hand basket — but at least some forward thinking folk near the north pole are making sure the Earth’s crop diversity is protected in a doomsday vault under the ice.

Alexander Rose, the Executive Director of The Long Now Foundation, shares his experience touring the vault (he goes further in than even Jimmy Carter was allowed to go…)

From The Blog of the Long Now,

Inside Svalbard, the Doomsday Vault Saving the Past and Future of Agriculture

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is an underground repository located at 78 degrees North latitude that currently stores nearly a million seed samples to preserve crop diversity for the future. Many see the vault as a resource for a “doomsday” scenario brought on by severe climate change or other ecological disaster. Long Now has been following the Svalbard vault closely since it was first announced over a decade ago. In 02011, Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose had the opportunity to visit Svalbard with unprecedented access to the vault through a partnership with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI).

Rose’s account of the trip follows below, and includes an update on the recent surge in public interest surrounding Svalbard over the past year.

Video below —

For the entire story, click here.

The Quantum Theory of Consciousness states that the soul is maintained in micro-tubules of the brain cells. The following article gives a good overview of what this means, and what it implies about death and the afterlife.

From Peace Quarters,
Scientists Found That The Soul Doesn’t Die – It Goes Back To The Universe

“According to two leading scientists, the human brain is in fact a ‘biological computer’ and the consciousness of humans is a program run by the quantum computer located inside the brain that even continues to exist after we die.

As experts explain it; “after people die, their soul comes back to the universe, and it does not die.”

The debate about the existence of the soul and whether it is immortal or dies with the person is an endless story that for centuries has occupied the time of the great thinkers of universal history. Its mysterious nature continues to fascinate different areas of science, but now a group of researchers has discovered a new truth about it: the “soul” does not die; it returns to the universe.

Since 1996, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, an American Physicist and Emeritus in the Department of Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, have worked in a Quantum Theory of Consciousness in which they state that the soul is maintained in micro-tubules of the brain cells.

Their provocative theory states that the human soul is be contained by the brain cells in structures inside them called micro-tubules…”

For the rest, click here.

You don’t have to be a math nerd to be excited about this recent discovery. It changes everything we thought about how, when, and where this sort of math was discovered…

From the Guardian.com,

Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study
Dating from 1,000 years before Pythagoras’s theorem, the Babylonian clay tablet is a trigonometric table more accurate than any today, say researchers

“At least 1,000 years before the Greek mathematician Pythagoras looked at a right angled triangle and worked out that the square of the longest side is always equal to the sum of the squares of the other two, an unknown Babylonian genius took a clay tablet and a reed pen and marked out not just the same theorem, but a series of trigonometry tables which scientists claim are more accurate than any available today.

The 3,700-year-old broken clay tablet survives in the collections of Columbia University, and scientists now believe they have cracked its secrets.

The team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney believe that the four columns and 15 rows of cuneiform – wedge shaped indentations made in the wet clay – represent the world’s oldest and most accurate working trigonometric table, a working tool which could have been used in surveying, and in calculating how to construct temples, palaces and pyramids.

The fabled sophistication of Babylonian architecture and engineering is borne out by excavation. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, believed by some archaeologists to have been a planted step pyramid with a complex artificial watering system, was written of by Greek historians as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world…”

For the rest, click here.