WORMHOLES
I feel like this is a bigger deal than just some Collgehumor video.
Electronic Tattoo Display runs on Blood
Remember getting your mind really blown by new technology?
Clive Thompson on Science Fiction
"If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."
Have you ever wondered what space smells like? Yeah, me neither.
NASA beams the Beatles into space
NASA broadcast "Across The Universe" into outer space using the Deep Space Network. Asked to comment, Paul McCartney wisely noted, "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens."
The Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE) is a $2.3 million project funded by NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets Program. It's autonomous underwater vehicle designed to swim untethered under ice, creating three-dimensional maps of underwater environments, and ostensibly is a test for exploring Europa, the icy Jovian moon that just might harbor life.
The Archive of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences: as amazing as it sounds.
Literally!
I love it when the New York Times gets all tripped out on science stuff.
Hugest Black Hole Ever Discovered
18 billion times the size of our sun!
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Archived From May 20, 2006 (5) Comments
The drive from Los Angeles to El Cajon doesn't take more than two hours, excluding traffic. Although the scenery along the way is generally bleak, as it is on most stretches of the I-5, there is something meditative about driving along the Pacific Ocean. Once you hit El Cajon, a town which can be most flatteringly described as "nestled in the San Diego foothills," you may be put off by its monochromatic wash of strip malls, its half-abandoned downtown, or the unremitting hum of the freeway. Do not be forsaken, however, because you have come here for a reason. You don't know what to expect, but you have come to visit the Unarian Academy of Sciences, right here in inauspicious El Cajon.
Unarius has been quietly running its visitor's center on this arbitrary stretch of suburbia for years. Though wedged between a Salvation Army thrift store and a gas station, the building is far from unassuming. It's bedecked by a massive mural depicting the sunken city of Atlantis flanked by shining UFOs; a large display window containing a costumed dummy of the inventor Nikola Tesla faces the otherwise anonymous street. Residents of El Cajon walk placidly by, clearly accustomed to Tesla's presence. You, however, are not. You look him in the eyes, which are hand-painted a crystalline blue, and wonder what he could possibly be doing here, a stone's throw from San Diego.
Pushing open the oak doors and stepping inside the Unarian Academy of Sciences doesn't particularly explain the maligned Polish inventor's role in the whole affair. It does, however, lead you to a visual assault of plastic flowers, Roman statuary, semi-functional dioramas, and an overwhelming amount of cultish marginalia. A diorama of "Earth's Future City" lurks by the entryway; a triumph of hot glue and kaleidoscopic plastic beads, it gathers dust under a sign reading "Welcome Space Brothers." The model supposedly represents what cities will look like on Earth once we receive enlightenment from extraterrestrials. If you ask an employee to turn it on for you, Christmas lights embedded in the plastic structure flicker to mild effect.
Let's rewind, though. Why are you here, gaping at this electric ornament? Perhaps your curiosity was piqued after you caught a sci-fi-chedlic Unarius cable access program on afternoon television. Maybe you somehow ran across a brochure advertising the "Infinite Concept of Cosmic Creation," or any of the other series of books written by the Academy's founder, Ernest L. Norman. You might be someone interested in eccentric Americana, New-Age philosophy, flying saucers, or you might just have wandered in off of the street. You might, like myself, be an unemployed science writer with not much else to do.
Who knows, you're here now, and Carol Robinson of the Unarian Academy -- who signs her emails "In Light, Carol Robinson" -- is walking up to you with a UFO pin on her lapel, and you're going to have to pretend to buy it.
Not that pretending to buy it is going to be a difficult thing to do. Unarius, fortunately, has something in its catalogue for almost everyone; if you're not particularly interested in the 32 planets which comprise the Intergalactic Conclave of Eternal Light (represented in a "star map" made of ping-pong balls and glitter), you might appreciate learning about the lost civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis, or of the "truth about Mars." Do you believe in past lives? Unarius proudly advertises past-life therapy as one of its myriad services, and has published autobiographies of both Jesus and Napoleon written by their present incarnations. If you don't buy that, then the paintings flocking the El Cajon visitor's center, many painted by students channeling the higher mental energies of Leonardo DaVinci, might interest you.
In fact, almost everything at the visitor's center is the product of mental channeling; all of the 90 self-published books and monographs, as well as the countless video programs and impossibly psychedelic paintings, are said to come from direct mental contact with advanced intelligent beings presently living in extraterrestrial civilizations. Unarius qualifies all of its claims by citing as "scientific" evidence these mental transmissions. Turns out, it seems, that aliens are channeling the minds of middle-aged Southern Californian women in turquoise sweat suits. And it turns out, in a pure coincidence, that aliens are way into rainbows, crystals, and tiaras.
I am interested in people who give themselves the appelation of "scientists" in their practice of a discipline outside of the traditional boundaries of Science. Whether or not they know it, they are the only ones truly exploring the porous nature of the line between the sciences and everything else: the arts, the perverse, the literary, the religious. The women at the Unarian Academy of Science are such people. Their crystal rainbow aesthetic, furthermore, is a pure articulation of how misunderstanding the original gestures of science inevitably leads to an entanglement in art. Even the channeled DaVincis, in their folly, are incredible monuments of outsider art.
Incidentally, how do you know when you are channeling a higher mental energy? If the tenets of Unarian science rely so profoundly on these transmissions straight from the mouths of the aliens themselves, then there must be a way of measuring, quantifying, the process. If you ask Carol Robinson, whose eyes gleam a crystal blue, she may point you to the water coolers dotted around the room.
"You get thirsty," she says.
12:00 AM | Permalink | (5) Comments
Unarius Lives and Universe Live
Archived From May 15, 2006 (2) Comments
Growing up, I watched a lot of television. Not the good stuff, mind you: rather, I would gambol home from elementary school to watch hours of Designing Women re-runs and then laugh uproariously at Step By Step while enacting my early OCD tendencies in elaborate Lucky Charms marshmellow seperation projects. In retrospect, I realize that I could have been playing soccer or going to sleep-away camp. My bearing witness to the worst television programming of early 1990s, however, has probably shaped me in ways I am yet to fully understand.
For example, I am haunted to this day by a "Cablevision" public-access show that I would often chance upon during my manic commercial-break channel flipping. The program in question is incredibly hard to describe: it was cultish and hosted by a ludicrous blond woman named Uriel, who appeared to be the Tammy Faye Baker of New-Age occultism. Uriel, in a floppy purple hat, would ramble incoherently about something called "the interplanetary conclave of light" while tripping out to ethereal synthesizer music and 8-bit video animations of glowing pyramids, iridescent comet tails, and UFOs bearing "love and understanding." The aesthetic was similar to the kind you see in Jehovah's Witness pamphlets about heaven: lots of rolling hills, utopian cornucopias of fruit, people in white robes stroking lions, and ringed planets setting in the sky. In short, a total mind-fuck for an already sugar-high eight-year old.
The show was a truly psychedelic and aesthetic experience for me, years before I even knew what that meant. It was, I have since discovered, the primary proselytizing arm of the Unarian Academy of Sciences, a New-Age Science movement based (appropriately) outside San Diego. Unarius, (UNiversal ARticulate Interdimensional Undestanding of Science) founded in the early 1950s by Ernest and Ruth Norman, claims to study the "interdimensional psychodynamics of the mind," under the auspices of being a nonprofit scientific and educational foundation. Since its inception, the Unarian Academy has been tirelessly printing hundreds of books with titles like The Infinite Concept of Cosmic Creation and The Last Inca: Atahualpha, all written by students channeling inspiration from higher energies. Although the Unarians had a heyday in the 1990's under the guidance of Ruth Norman -- who, at this point, was wearing flamboyant space costumes and calling herself Uriel -- the organization has recently struggled after the failure of a prophesized space-fleet landing which was supposed to occur on the ruins of Atlantis in 2001.
Why am I bringing this up? Because Science is a broad categorization, my friends, one that often finds its seemingly indomitable legitimacy battered, shifted, or radically reevaluated. If you consider science to be just one manner of explaining the world around us, then the Unarians have just as legitimate a claim to it as anyone else does. Certainly, this shatters the notion of scientific objectivity, its hallowed separation from the dubious realm of belief. But, hey, the increasingly fantastical developments of modern quantum physics often blur the lines between philosophy and science too, while theology is constantly -- especially these days -- butting heads with scientific research. In any case, connections between the occult and the reasonable are always wheedling their way in and out of popular conception, or hiding, clad in purple hats, in places that you would never expect.
For example, I recently picked up a largish and fairly dry book of the patent applications of the much-maligned inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla, as I'm sure you know, invented the AC current, the Tesla coil, the radio, and about 400 other essential technologies of the 20th century, and died poor and alone in a New York hotel, his reputation shattered, after he became convinced that his sensitive electro-magnetic receivers in Wardenclyffe, Long Island, were picking up signals from Mars. Although he was as famous as Edison in his day, he became obsessed in his later years with the number three and began to follow the Vedic philosophy of Swami Vivekananda. Tesla now glumly lingers in a second or third tier of historical notoriety. Still, his early work was fully legitimate and dictated the shape of electricity in the United States in the early century. In any case, as I was browsing the biographical notes in my stuffy tome of Tesla inventions (Dynamo Electric Machine, Alternating Current Electro Magnetic Motor), I came across a passage which, without breaking from authorial sincerity, stated:
"What the hell?" I thought to myself, thrilled with anger, delighted at having found in this seemingly sensible place something so greatly weird. I rifled through the rest of the book and found similarly casual allusions to time travel ("Perhaps Tesla went on into the future, and has already returned to the past!"), pyramids on Mars, underground cities, and teleportation. Who could be responsible for such erroneous nonsense? I turned to the bibliographic information page.
I should have seen it coming...
Copyright 1993, The Unarian Academy of Science.
The Unarian Academy is two hours away from Los Angeles, on a strip mall in El Cajon. How could my curiosity not be piqued? I'm working on an eight-part historical docudrama about my recent visit to the Unarian Academy of Science and the conversations I had therein. The project will be documented in a completely sincere Power Point presentation on Thursday, May 18th at the Taix Lounge in historic Echo Park, Los Angeles, as part of the LA Alternative and the Historical El Ey Boys and Girls Society's Talk. Talk? Talk! series.
12:03 PM | Permalink | (2) Comments
What Am I Up To?
Archived From May 9, 2006 (6) Comments
Re: Video programs Inbox
UNARIUS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE to me
Dear Claire:
We would be most happy to meet with you at the Unarius Center
when you have the opportunity to make the trip from Los Angeles.
We are open from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Saturday.
As you may have discovered on our web site
http://www.unarius.org/, we have classes on Wednesday and
Sunday evenings from 7:00 PM until 9:00 PM
May we suggest that you participate with us online for Sunday
evenings past-life therapy classes that are being audio-streamed
live from about 7 to 9 PM PDT. To listen, go to the Unarius Web
site and click on the link to listen to classes at the top of the
homepage which will take you to the streamlink page with the
direct links to listen to the audio stream of the Sunday classes.
With AOL Instant Messenger, you can e-mail questions that will be
read and answered during the classes
In Light,
Carol Robinson
For the Academy
This is a teaser. The full results of the First Universe Research Expedition to the Unarian Academy of Science will be revealed next week. Blow your minds.
6:13 PM | Permalink | (6) Comments