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RE : Bob's Media Ecology - Let BOB Monitor Your Kids TV Time

If your child is spending too much time in front of the TV or playing video games -- and what kid isn't -- you might want to have BOB monitor them. BOB is a time management tool that attaches to an electronic device and keeps track of how long it's used. You set the time limits; once they're reached the device automatically shuts off. Only the user with the PIN code can set and override the time limits. Personally, we think there is no substitute for good old-fashioned parenting, but we're all for anything that gets kids outside more and playing with gadgets less, lest they become just like us.

RE : "... We live science fiction" - HMM

"Sarfatti claims that the Einstein-Cartan set of four TETRAD fields emerge from the Goldstone phases of the coherent 'WORLD HOLOGRAM' (Susskind & t'Hooft) in the same way that the superfluid helium velocity field emerges from the coherent macro-quantum phase of the superfluid order parameter."

[Jack Sarfatti (born September 14, 1939) is an American theoretical physicist and the author of a number of popular works on quantum physics and consciousness. He is known for his iconoclastic ideas, and is interested in what he sees as the breakdown of the paradigm that posits science and the humanities as separate disciplines, arguing that physics < which he calls "the Conceptual Art of the late 20th Century" < [1] has replaced philosophy as the unifying force between science and art. [2]

Sarfatti's main interests lie in space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension.[3] His views include speculation that UFOs may be of extraterrestrial origin or could be "terrestrial time ships" originating from our own future; that parapsychological phenomena may be real; that faster-than-light communication may be possible; and that space travel could be achieved by warping spacetime.[4]

He is the author of Super Cosmos (2005), Destiny Matrix (2002), and Space: Time And Beyond Ii (Dark Energy) (2002), and co-author with Fred Alan Wolf and Bob Toben of Space-Time and Beyond: Toward an Explanation of the Unexplainable (1982). He is a frequent contributor to Usenet [5] and has set up a website where he discusses his ideas. [6] Some of his views on fringe topics are not accepted by the mainstream physics community. Sarfatti, rightly, wrongly, or, perhaps, not even wrongly, or perhaps correctly, is unique in making a very bold conjecture about the nature of physical reality that builds upon John Archibald Wheeler's "IT from BIT" to which Sarfatti adds "BIT from IT", i.e. a "two way relation" (Bohm and Hiley's term in "The Undivided Universe") giving a "spontaneously self-organizing feedback-control loop" ("Destiny Matrix") between Bohm's "pilot wave" and "hidden variable". This, according to Sarfatti, happens in macro- quantum open systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e. "living matter" and is the origin of "consciousness" or "qualia". Sarfatti claims that this model obeys all the criteria for a physics of consciousness set forth by David Chalmers in his 1995 Scientific American article. Sarfatti further claims that the recently discovered cosmic repulsive anti-gravitational field "dark energy" accelerating the expansion of the universe is controllable by advanced ultra-terrestrial intelligences or "metric engineers" like "Q" in "Startrek". Michio Kaku has the same idea and calls them "The Masters of Hyperspace." Sarfatti's theories of emergent gravity called "mathematical nonsense" by his old admirer Waldyr Rodrigues, Jr who brought Sarfatti to UNICAMP, Brazil as a full professor in 1984 come from this set of ideas that Sarfatti calls "Making Star Trek Real." Sarfatti claims that the Einstein-Cartan set of four tetrad fields emerge from the Goldstone phases of the coherent "World Hologram" (Susskind & t'Hooft) in the same way that the superfluid helium velocity field emerges from the coherent macro-quantum phase of the superfluid order parameter. The difference with Rodrigues is second order on the formal details of how to implement that intuitive physical idea. The Einstein-Cartan tetrad fields are like the supersolid elastic distortion fields but in 4D under the action of local general coordinate transformations. In this way we see a continuity in the development of Sarfatti's "supersolid" thoughts in 1969 to his present conjectures on the origin of gravity and the megaverse in 2006.]

RE : Experts create invisibility cloak
A US-British team of scientists has successfully tested a cloak of invisibility in the laboratory.

The device mostly hid a small copper cylinder from microwaves in tests at Duke University, North Carolina.

It works by deflecting the microwaves around the object and restoring them on the other side, as if they had passed through empty space.

But making an object vanish before a person's eyes is still the stuff of science fiction - for now.

We've opened the door into the secret garden - Prof John Pendry, Imperial College London

The cloak consists of 10 fibreglass rings covered with copper elements and is classed as a "metamaterial" - an artificial composite that can be engineered to produce a desired change in the direction of electromagnetic waves.

Like visible light waves, microwaves bounce off objects, making them apparent and creating a shadow. But at microwave frequencies, the detection has to be made by instruments rather than the naked eye.

RE : New essay : THE TORONTO SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATIONS by Donald F Theall

"This may seem to move far from the Toronto School as one of the earliest steps towards media ecology. Yet the combination of the poetic and the satiric had been specifically directed in the case of James Joyce, McLuhan’s prime literary influence, at the individual’s encounter with the environment of the contemporary city in Ulysses and with the transformation of the world resulting from the new technologies and the modes of living that they had created in Finnegans Wake. Such works apart from their artistic merit were profound examples of cultural ecology. (In this Joyce would be followed by many later writers such as Pynchon, Burroughs and Vonnegut as by many ecologically conscious SF writers such as Brunner, Lem, Leguin and Gibson). What McLuhan and to an extent Carpenter did was to turn the devices used in satiric fiction into meditations on the actual life and conditions of their contemporary world. Like the Menippean satirists he admired ,McLuhan felt that all “moralization” should be implicit and should arise from the way the sensitization to percepts and affects intensified the individual’s awareness of the contemporary maelstrom of a society nearly totally dominated by technologies managed by a few. So the style of McLuhan and of Carpenter was one that intensified perceptions and contextualized them in an affective ambience of comic critique."

My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them 'theories' is to miss my satirical intent altogether.