http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57494899/the-suns-strange-shape-revealed/
'the sun is slightly too round to agree with our understanding of its rotation'
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The Pontifical Sexagesimal Nativity Address 2013.
From His Pestilence Stokastikos the First; upon the eve of his 60th birthday.
Fellow earthlings, firstly let me say to the majority of you who haven’t got there yet that 60 seems far more agreeable than I had anticipated. Perhaps as a result of self-employment, walking everywhere (acute Apophenia suggests I don’t drive), occasional punishing exercise, and a couple of books a week, I still have my own hair and teeth, a 32 inch waist, and still enough IQ to understand the limitations of IQ. I will perhaps live till 84, for a Uranus return. So the brief time remaining leaves me a hell of a lot to do, what with the global situation looking pretty shite, the Big Bang delusion still infecting cosmology, particle physics still in a state of confusion, a coherent theory of magic still in its infancy, my country still ensnared in the corrupt and undemocratic EU synarchy, EPOCH, the Esotericon and Portals of Chaos to complete, starships not yet invented, Svalbard and New Zealand amongst many places as yet unvisited, and grandchildren perhaps on the horizon in maybe 3 years time and maybe 10 years time.
You may have noticed that the world failed to end on the recent winter solstice. As a precaution I sent someone down into the vaults of Arcanorium College to dust off the old Achroniser and give the faintly glowing ruby reset button a good whack, this sent the entire universe exactly 63,081,429 years backwards in time, yes, the entire universe, lock stock and barrel, normal service of course resumes instantly, we usually only do this when the Jehovah’s Witnesses start playing silly buggers, but seriously..........
The survival of human civilisation, as we know it, for the next 24 years seems far from certain though. During my lifetime the world’s human population has almost trebled, a critical dependency on fossil fuels has developed, westernised economies have become addicted to growth, developing nations with huge populations now embark on the same course, and the climate has begun to go awry with the strong possibility that it will go much more seriously awry sooner rather than later.
The older westernised economies now seem likely to have few growth prospects for the next decade at least, and little appetite to invest wealth in remedying the medium term ills of the global situation. Everywhere the pressure to maintain if not increase fossil fuel and resource consumption remains paramount.
All in all, the situation looks very fragile. A modern city may look very solid and grand but its continued existence depends on inputs of resources from singular or highly interdependent sources. Any interruption to its supplies of power, or fuel, or food, or information, would now reduce it to smoking rubble in a week.
Unless economic consequences force policy changes first, mega-deaths may have to occur before the socio-political will to address the problems of overpopulation, overconsumption, and climate change arises. A few billion untimely deaths would not in themselves matter much to the survival of our species, but a substantial loss of knowledge and technology could set the human adventure back several centuries or millennia into a new dark age. This planet lies littered with failed human civilisations and abandoned cities, but in the past failure tended to remain local, recovery from global failure would prove far more challenging. Save some real books, don’t commit everything to electronic media. Consider joining The Knights of Chaos, First Earth Battalion, we conjure actively against global catastrophe.
On a brighter note, two new courses begin on Arcanorium College in the 3rd semester of out glorious seventh year. www.arcanoriumcollege.com
Semester 3. 16t January – 27th February 2013
Dave: The Dragon-Eagle Working: Northern Magic models of energy and ecstasy.
Kite: Oracular Magic: Divination, Enchantment, Evocation
My own course, ‘Physics for Mystics and Magicians’ draws to a close after an intensive look at the questions implied by such established and speculative phenomena as holographic universe ideas, quantum-neuroscience, panpsychism, and the Drake equation.
Amongst the many books I received during the festive season I can recommend:
The Starry Rubric – Seventeenth Century English Astrology and Magic. By Alexander Cummins (Head of the Department of historical Magic at Arcanorium College) and Doctoral researcher at Bristol University.
This book really gives the reader an insight into how people actually used astrological and magical ideas practically in the 17th century, and how much such ideas and practices affected people’s personal lives and even the destiny of the nation during the turbulent period including the English civil war. Deeply researched and brilliantly narrated.
Hadean Press. ISBN 978 907881 21 3.
By some strange coincidence I also received a 1783 copy of a Cornelius Agrippa and Peter de Abano book of 1555, in English, resuming the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Geomancy, and The Arbatel of Magic, still in readable condition; this has proved a fascinating accompaniment to Al Cummings book above.
Also I must recommend ‘Antifragile’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, published by Random House (USA), Penguin-Allen Lane (UK) ISBN 978 1 846 14156 0
The Sunday Times called him ‘The hottest thinker in the world’; they may well have a point.
In English, ‘Intellectual’ has strong connotations of ‘effete arts based leftie with head in clouds or up own arse, probably French, and best ignored by sensible pragmatic thinkers’. Taleb does not fall into this category. Rather he comes across as a muscular renaissance style polymath who has seen a lot and done a lot, and put his money where his mouth is, making a personal fortune in the process. Readers may remember his Black Swans and Fooled by Randomness books. He writes of living in a world of fundamental unpredictability, but a world in which we can at least respond, not by attempting to predict events, but by creating structures at all levels that improve rather than break under stress. He provides an illuminating swathe of examples of fragility and anti-fragility in everything from biology and evolution to personal and societal health, through engineering to economics and politics, with enlightening asides from classical philosophers to modern ones, and from a couple of characters that may well represent poles of his own extensive personality. He extols the virtues of chaotic inputs to various systems and pours vituperative scorn upon the ’fragillistas’ who end up wrecking things by trying to create false stability. All in all he has produced some thoughts of great practical value; some of them might just get the world beyond a number of its current crises.
Despite my attempts to remain animageous in the public domain, (I do not wish for disturbance whilst reading on public transport, or neighbors with brands and pitchforks, so I decline to confirm or deny that any of the confusing array of images purporting to portray me actually do so.), yet someone found a copy of a video interview I gave in the nineties in LA. Well it’s about 20 years old now and I’ve since redesigned my facial topiary, so I’ve let it pass. Perchance that the video interview contains any errors due to the jet lag under which we conducted it, I gave the publisher of it a long e-mail interview for edition 5 of his Chaosphere magazine, see magazine and video at:
May I wish you a survivable Pandaemonaeon, as we move into the ‘interesting times’ of globalization and hyperscience, and towards perhaps some largely unpredictable mixture of enlightenments and catastrophes.
Pete, 7/1/13.
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Seasonal Greetings for the Mayan end of the world on 21/12/12, and for the festive season thereafter on 25th December to mark the birthdays of Horus, Jesus, Mithras, and various other minor deities.
I have made no plans to immolate my children and livestock with an obsidian knife atop a pyramid in the grounds of my estates, and I note with relief that the Druids here plan to celebrate Solstice here on Sunday 23rd, as we prefer weekends. As an act of faith I’ve also booked a trip to Guatemala next year to see what all the fuss WAS all about, hopefully it will be completely tourist free by then.
Nevertheless I have prepared an e-Christmas card entitled Miskatonia for the edification of any aliens visiting this planet post-apocalypse. It shows all the most popular interstellar tourist destinations and saucer landing sites: - Thule, Stonehenge, The Great Pyramid, Arkham, Agarthi, Shambala, Atlantis, R’yleh, Puma Punku, The Mountains of Madness, Uluru, Dogon-ville, and Mount Shasta in relief, all connected by appropriate planetary ley lines. Acrylics and mixed media on canvass. Note that for aesthetic reasons I’ve shown the long route from R’yleh to the Mountains of Madness in the trans-Antarctic range
It seems unlikely that we shall have either immediate apocalypse or enlightenment on 21/12/12. Overpopulation and Anthropogenic Climate Change seem to offer a far greater threat to civilisation and the survival of humanity than anything currently in view of our telescopes. However we can perhaps hope that enlightenment about this slow burning apocalypse will become universal after 21/12/12. If you must immolate something on this day then stick some pins in the images of family planning opponents and climate change deniers.
It looks like the mouldy old C of E has done a deal with the government, women bishops in return for gay marriage exemption. It won’t last you know, sooner or later someone will mount a challenge in the infernal European courts where the State Religion of Political Correctness trumps all other forms of belief. After that, activists will solicit a refusal of marriage from a Mosque and go to Europe over that and win. Then we shall have some entertaining and invigorating riots in our northern cities. We can only make our own laws stick if we quit the blasted EU.
A gay has held the Britannic Archbishopric of my old order, and a woman currently holds it now; for true liberalism and theological flexibility choose Neo-Paganism.
Heaven only knows why women and gays want involvement with the ghastly genocidal tyrant of the monotheist god anyway; He hates women and gays, just read His appalling book. It all went terribly wrong for Him when He split up from his missus, the Israelite goddess Asherah.
Well I’ve had a tumultuous year, married off my eldest daughter to a fine highlander, acquired a factory and moved operations there, started converting the old commercial premises into a block of flats, visited Italy, un-solved the Pioneer anomaly, given a couple of courses on Arcanorium College, wrote half the Esotericon, and surfed rather badly as usual in Wales. It’s amazing what you can do if you don’t watch television.
All the best for a chaotically creative 2013. Regards, Pete.
Note that this blogsite uses the pioneering new protocols of anti-social media, you cannot reply to it. The last time I tried an open site it attracted over a thousand mad people within a week. Send serious enquiries to the email address in the contact section.
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A few oddments.
Obama Wins, Apocalypse probably Averted. Let us celebrate the triumph of the lesser of two evils, barking mad religious nut case backed by financial- military-industrial faction fails to become POTUS. My thanks for all supporting conjurations from all KoC First Earth Batallion Sorcerers.
Scottish Independence War rages in my household. My eldest has married into the highlands and gone native with all the passion of a recent convert. Little but tartan romanticism makes some Scots want 'freedom' from the UK and err, independent EU membership, this sounds patently barmy. Scotland would gain more freedom as part of a United Kingdom that freed itself from the non-democracy of the EU Totalitarian Synarchy.
All arguments for the EU seem either defeatist of fatuous. The argument that it will end wars in europe seems the most absurd of all. We no longer have wars in europe because european countries have become democracies and democracies do not fight each other. However the apallingly non-democratic EU seems designed to create internal strife.
The previous 'Pioneer Anomaly Un-Solved' post here two posts ago seems to have hit a nerve and attracted a great many reads. The Nasa team could have saved themselves a great deal of work on those telemetry tapes if they had simply looked at experimental photon thrust research.
Commencing 12th November I shall lead a course entitled 'Physics for Mystics and Magicians' on www.arcanoriumcollege.com a course by Sorror Res, entitled "The message of the medium: Exploring the magick of memoires through the aeons" , will accompany it.
I went on a cultural tour of Italy a couple of weeks ago. The Medici stuff in Florence impressed me greatly but the Vatican struck me as the most grandiose pile of bad taste on this planet, I felt moved to write a little poem......
Vatican Willies
I went to the Vatican
To see the Pope’s art
It was all very grand and over the top
An orgy of marble and porphyry and paint
The Christian material looked really quite ghastly
All simpering saints and suffering sinners
And bits of dead people in gaudy gilt boxes
But the classical stuff looked heroic and grand
Warriors and gods and legendary beauties
Strutting their stuff as nature intended
But their willies were missing; the popes cut them off in the past
The guides speak guardedly
Of occasional mysterious restorations
So maybe there lies in some secret chamber
The Pope’s private penis collection.
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Quarks.
Our current understanding of the atomic nucleus looks pretty incomplete and messy. In particular the explanations of why u and d quarks with a mass of just a few MeV each combine to form protons and neutrons with masses of nearly a thousand MeV don’t look particularly convincing.
The HD8 hypothesis suggests that particle generation arises from a particular type of higher dimensional ‘spin’ or vorticitation.
Now we commonly observe particles that appear to have come from a state of superposition immediately prior to the observation or measurement that kills the superposition. (HD8 assigns these superpositions to extra time dimensions.)
We have observed that neutrinos appear to fluctuate between three generations whilst in flight, or alternatively that any one generation of neutrino could perhaps consist of a superposition of various amounts of all three generations.
Thus perhaps, whilst confined in nucleons what we call d quarks actually consist of a superposition of various amounts of d,s and b quark, and that u quarks actually consist of superpositions of various amounts of u,c, and t quarks.
The second and third generations of matter would then appear not as bizarrely exotic and apparently unnecessary components of the universe but as entirely integral to it, for without some contribution from the generational spin components of say bottom and top quarks, protons and neutrons would not have much mass at all.
Conventional provisional hypotheses of light valence quarks surrounded by heavy clouds of virtual quarks and gluons seem rather baroque.
At the moment this remains a bit of a handwaving idea, the maths may follow eventually.
Aha, I just noticed that the Bottom Sigma baryon (ddb) has a mass of 5815 MeV, whilst the Bottom Xi baryon (dsb) has a mass of 5790 MeV.
How come the replacement of a down quark by a heavier strange quark lowers the mass?
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Above see Yog-Sothoth as rendered by the Artist for our forthcomming Esotericon and Portals of Chaos (EPOCH)
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The above article covers recent space based observations of the shape of the sun. Any large spinning object tends to bulge out at its equator, the earth's equatorial diameter for example exceeds its polar diameter by about 13 miles.
The sun seems to have less of an equatorial bulge than we would expect from basic theory.
This may actually offer supporting evidence for Vorticitating Hypersphere Cosmology which predicts a general fillip to orbital velocity of
Vo = (Gm/r - rA)^1/2
Where A = Anderson decelleration.
This has the same effect as an increase in 'centripetal force' at large distances and could well lead to less oblateness in stellar sized rotating bodies.