Love and Cosmology, Work Failures, Book Reviews

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Last Sunday Rev. Dr. David Sammons, Visiting Professor of Unitarian Universalist Heritage & Ministry, Star King Ministry, gave his a presentation on "That Confusing Word Called 'Love'". He made an extension to what is commonly called "the Unitarian-Universalist trinity" of freedom, reason and tolerance - by extending it to 'honesty' and 'compassion' which he considered to the key features of the notion of love. After the service, I led the discussion for the Unitarian Philosophy Forum which had an excellent turnout for a discussion on Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and particularly its relationship to the scientific method. We made good use of the BBC programme Most of our Universe is Missing. I have since started writing a paper on the issue and discussion, but find myself sidetracked by holographic principle.

Life at VPAC hasn't been fun for our users of late with three hardware failures on one of our storage nodes in a two-week period. Having 14 drives fail due to a faulty LSI card in the space of six minutes can be sort of scary, especially when we have to restore over twenty million files and almost 8 terabytes of data. It has meant an extended outage on our supercomputers, however users have been most understanding. On a work related topic from some years ago, the proposal that Martin McGuire of ConnectIE and I put together to convert East Timor's ccTLD into a revenue-raising international telephone directory has been taken up; but for a commercial interest and not for East Timor.

When Ticonderoga Online restarted at the very end of last year a number of my book reviews were included; The Last Witchfinder (historical fiction, entertaining, well-written, informative), Hidden Empire and A Forest of Stars (plain-vanilla space opera, somewhat unimaginative) and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (typical Phillip K. Dick - which is good). Still have a small mountain of other books I've promised to review.

Comments

[ivansun.livejournal.com]

Oh i'm very interested in discussions of Dark Matter! Shame to have missed that!

From my mearge understanding, the current set of theories about dark matter is so astonishing it could be mistaken for Sci Fi

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

I will probably watch all of that BBC program about Dark Matter. I've come across the idea of a Holographic Universe in New Scientist. The mind boggles when you combine it with the idea that we might all be part of an ancestor simulation.

Personally, I think it's a good thing that we don't know everything there is to know about the universe.

[direwolf23.livejournal.com]

I've always thought exploring the facts about space and physics gives us better insight into philosophical pursuits. ^.^ There's just so much left to learn and discover.

[zey.livejournal.com]

Typical East Timor, unfortunately. Land of wasted opportunities. A bit like Australia that way, but, they have far fewer opportunities to waste.

re: holographic principle

[geoff.livejournal.com]

i cannot more highly recommend reading

The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot (1953-1992)
http://www.amazon.com/Holographic-Universe-Michael-Talbot/dp/0060922583

Michael Talbot (1953-1992), was the author of a number of books
highlighting parallels between ancient mysticism and quantum
mechanics, and espousing a theoretical model of reality that suggests
the physical universe is akin to a giant hologram.

In The Holographic Universe, Talbot made many references to the work
of David Bohm -- an American-born quantum physicist who made
significant contributions in the fields of theoretical physics,
philosophy and neuropsychology, and to the Manhattan Project (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm ) -- and Karl Pribram -- a
professor at Georgetown University and George Mason University, and an
emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University
and Radford University. He is also a Board-certified as a neurosurgeon
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram ). It is quite
apparent that the combined work of Bohm and Karl Pribram is largely
the cornerstone upon which Talbot built his ideas.

there's a good article with a synopsis on Talbot's book at
http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html