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Marblog 2022
Marblog 2022
Putin’s War.
One might have expected the nation that gifted the world the Kalashnikov and the rocket propelled grenade would have realised that the military balance currently heavily favours the defensive rather than the offensive, particularly if the defenders have strong motivation, good communications kit, hand portable anti-aircraft weapons, foreign support, and cities or broken terrain to work from. Have the lessons of Afghanistan not been learned?
So why has Putin invaded Ukraine with inadequate forces to hold it?
Either Putin has become deluded and will go down in history as the last Czar after losing this war, or he has some other concealed stratagem in mind. Remember that he used to play geopolitical chess viciously but logically.
KoC recommendation: - conjure for Putin’s closest people to turn against him.
<Following positive feedback - This following message released for circulation by any available means.>
Knights of Chaos Ukraine Campaign 2022.
The KoC calls upon all magicians everywhere to join in magical attacks to: -
Turn the people closest to Putin against him.
We wish to see him disobeyed and restrained or assassinated by his own people.
To this end we call upon volunteers to circulate intelligence about, and images of, those believed to have close connections to Putin for use as Magical Links.
We call upon volunteers to create and circulate rituals and spell procedures for individual and synchronised workings.
We call upon volunteers to launch magical attacks to ‘Turn the people closest to Putin against him’ on an irregular psi-warfare basis using a variety of techniques at unpredictable times and from many locations.
We bestow an honorary knighthood of chaos on all volunteers for the duration of the campaign.
Stokastikos, Acting Marshal KoC, Chancellor of Arcanorium College.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60573261
Definitions of Magic. Some thoughts from a recent academic exchange: -
Aleister Crowley defined Magic as: -
‘The science and art of causing change in conformity with will.’
Dion Fortune defined it as: -
‘The science and art of causing changes in consciousness in conformity with will.’
I have increasingly come to regard or define Magic as: -
'The Use of Imaginary Concepts to Create Real Effects.’
I define it thus because ‘will’ seems merely a product of imagination. Summoning so called ‘willpower’ or motivation fundamentally depends on engaging the imagination or adopting the products of someone else’s imagination. To restrict Magic to merely ‘changing consciousness’ limits it to psychology and mysticism whilst ignoring its parapsychological potential for direct interface with physical reality.
Such a broad description as 'The Use of Imaginary Concepts to Create Real Effects’, implies that both religion and science also rely on a certain amount of magic. Religions depend almost entirely on imaginary concepts and a lot of the concepts in science seem more epistemological than ontological. Plus of course a great deal of what goes on in politics, art, advertising, romance, and the other arts of persuasion also depend on the use of imaginary concepts.
In chaos magic we openly acknowledge that 'gods' and 'spirits' exist as imaginary concepts that we create and invoke to create real effects in ourselves and in the world. The blasphemy gets worse, self and identity also consist of largely imaginary concepts as well.
Algebrology
Numerology often gets a bad press from the righteously rationalistic, and probably for good reason, numbers have no innate metaphysical properties in themselves. Yet numbers can show the relationships between phenomena, and indeed a considerable amount of highly reliable ‘straight’ science developed from numerological analysis; corelation does not prove causation, but it can often reveal it.
Kepler’s third law of planetary motion, the purely phenomenological observation that ‘The ratio of the square of an object's orbital period with the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit is the same for all objects orbiting the same primary’, eventually led Newton towards a more mechanistic description of planetary motion, which Einstein later improved upon.
The Dirac large number hypothesis: the purely phenomenological observation that the vast numbers 1040, (1040)3/2, (1040)2 and (1040)3 all seem to relate quantum scale phenomena to cosmological phenomena, appears as either a fantastical coincidence at this particular epoch of the universe, or as strongly suggestive of a universe hyperspherical in space and time.
Numerical ‘coincidences’ always seem worth investigating, but only if they also have ‘Dimensional Equivalence’, herein lies the weakness of numerology as a system of divination.
Numbers, the letters of the alphabet, dates of birth, and favourable or unfavourable events, do not really equate with each other, such equations do not make any more sense than asking how many seconds make a kilogram.
Algebra on the other hand demands that both sides of an equation relate to the same stuff. Newton’s celebrated force = mass times acceleration has the same ‘dimensions’ of mass times length divided by time squared on each side and Einstein’s awesome E = mc2 has ml2t-2 on both sides. So, does this mean that any dimensionally equivalent equation accurately reflects reality? No, the numerical arithmetic must work as well, and even then, we need further reality checks. However, the technique of seeking algebraic coincidences does offer a powerful form of ‘divination’ into how the universe works. Such Algebrology suggested many of the relationships in Hypersphere Cosmology, and the arithmetic seems to work within the limits of observational measurement, but it remains open to confirmation or falsification.
Herewith another item of Algebrology, this time in the quantum domain, if we give quanta the theoretical size assigned to them by Einstein Cartan theory and the intrinsic rotation theoretically assigned to all matter by Godel, we can recover the easily measurable Planck-Einstein relationship E = hf. An interesting coincidence or something more?
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/347-algebrology
The Hellgate Chronicles. Have arrived!
‘The complete collected works of The Hon. Hugo C St J L'Estrange.
His satirical spoof "The Satanist's Diary" was published as a regular column in The Aquarian Arrow between 1978 and 1992. It won many friends and admirers for its wry comments on human nature, the occult, New Age, and current affairs.
This is the first full collected addition. It includes some previously unpublished material plus colour illustrations and an appendix by Lionel Snell.’ –
- as it says on the Amazon and the Barnes and Noble sites advertising it.
I finally grasp this long awaited hellish tome in my withered old claws and cackle hideously over its ghastly existential paradoxes and vicious social commentary. Any mortal that suspects an evil satanic conspiracy runs the world will run screaming from the unspeakable revelations within its pages. I have to say that I’m enjoying it immensely and rationing it out to myself at a couple of Hugo’s articles per day. This richly hilarious fare was written to be devoured in instalments, and the entire collection seems best read in a similar way. A fuller review will thus follow in the next blog here.
Feblog 2022
Forthcoming Book. Interview with a Wizard – Ian Blumberg interviews Peter J Carroll with 365 questions.
This book covers just about everything from anthropology to xenobiology, taking extensive detours through chaos magic, the ice war, sex magic, biography, extreme travel, the knights of chaos, conventional and alternative physics, and an extraordinary lifetime of unusual ideas and experiences. A substantial appendix also presents hypersphere cosmology both in an easily visualisable and understandable form, and with its full mathematics.
Mandrake of Oxford will let us know when it comes out.
Meanwhile in the USA, Weisers have scheduled the release of the Classic Edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut for May.
Chaos Wokeism.
Chaos Magic began amongst the occultists of the tail end of the Hippy subculture of the Baby Boomer generation. The Punks and the Goths soon embraced it. Then the Wiccans, Neo-Pagans, Thelemites, Darksiders, Satanists, Thule-ists, and Ultra-Rightists all took inspirations from it. Now things seem to have come full circle with the advent of Chaos-Wokeism as exemplified by the recent works of Professor Patricia MacCormack – a Chaos Magician who embraces full spectrum radical socio-political-sexual-ecological philosophy with gothic panache. Try googling her.
The Eight-Rayed Snowflake of Chaos rises!
You know that you have created a technology and a paradigm shift rather than a cult or a religion when so many diverse rebel subcultures adopt ideas and practices from its toolkit.
Entropy. Further cosmological musings.
Most physicists believe that the second law of thermodynamics, that the entropy of a closed system cannot decrease, must apply to the entire universe. As they interpret most of the processes going on in the universe as entropy increasing processes they figure that if the universe began with some sort of expansion from a big bang, then it must have increased its entropy continuously since then and that it will end in a state of complete entropy, the so called heat-death of the universe.
Hypersphere Cosmology models the universe as a vorticitating hypersphere, finite and unbounded in both space and time, that does not expand. This hyperspherical universe has spatial and temporal horizons but no beginning or ending in space or time for observers within it. Thus, the overall entropy of the universe should remain constant despite local fluctuations and its obvious tendency to increase hereabouts where we live at the expense of a burning star.
Several processes maintain this cosmic equilibrium: -
1) Proton to Neutron conversion via the weak force interaction. Inside stars, gravity effectively forces Electrons to combine with Protons creating Neutrons. Protons then combine with Neutrons and other Protons to create elements heavier than hydrogen. Up to the creation of Iron nuclei, this process liberates energy in the form of photons and neutrinos. The creation of elements heavier than Iron during the gravitational collapse of heavy stars stores energy in the newly created elements themselves.
2) The gravitational collapse of very heavy stars can result in the creation of neutron-only matter or ‘neutronium’ and/or further collapse to form black holes containing hyperspheres vorticitating at lightspeed.
3) Neutron to Proton conversion via the weak force interaction. Free Neutrons quickly decay back into Protons and Electrons emitting energy and antineutrinos in the process. Bound Neutrons in heavier elements do so more slowly in radioactive decay.
4) Stars can explode in various ways and return matter to space. According to Hypersphere Cosmology, the hyperspheres inside of black holes return matter and energy to space not only by Hawking Radiation but more so by the overspin effect of the cosmic hypersphere on their lightspeed vorticitation.
Just which of the above general processes above increases entropy and which of them decreases it, remains an open question.
Every major process in the universe seems reversible given enough time. Energy moves back and forth between Kinetic and Gravitational manifestations and between its manifestations as Proton-Electron pairs and Neutrons.
Hypersphere Cosmology Prediction.
The so-called ‘Cosmic Dark Ages’ did not occur. According to conventional LCDM big bang cosmology, a gap should exist between the CMBR and the light from the ‘earliest’ stars and galaxies. Hypersphere cosmology predicts that galaxies with redshifts all the way to CMBR levels will exist. The James Webb space telescope may hopefully prove capable of observing this.
Book Review.
‘The Weirdest People in the World’, by (Professor) Joseph Henrich.
This book first came out in 2020 and somehow slipped under my radar, now it has appeared as a thick Penguin paperback. I found it fascinating and deeply thought provoking.
In Liber Kaos I outlined the Aeonic progression that appears to have occurred from Animism and Shamanism to Paganism to Monotheism and then to Atheism. Henrich draws upon a wealth of anthropological, historical, and sociological data to show precisely how this progression occurred.
Many modern Neo-Pagans and Magicians find monotheism unattractive and wonder how Christianity managed to supplant Animisms and Paganisms almost everywhere in the world that it encountered them, and how it won the Cultural Darwinism race. Henrich shows precisely how it did this, and how Christianity inadvertently eventually shot itself in the foot in the process and opened the door to Atheism.
The western church expanded extraordinary efforts in the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages to break the hold of extended family clans and tribes on society. It did this because it wanted the church itself to supplant the social dominance of such clans and tribes and it gradually acquired immense influence, power, and wealth by doing so. To accomplish this the church campaigned with extraordinary aggressiveness against anyone marrying any person with whom they had any family relationship. First cousin marriage became ferociously anathemised and at times nobody could marry anyone related even to the seventh degree. Divorce, monogamy, remarriage, adoption, and the whole concept of illegitimacy and inheritance became very hotly contested issues. This caused many hereditary wealth and power structures to eventually fail and many inheritances to fall to the church. Before the Reformation, the church owned one third of all land in England.
The roots of Christian restrictions on sexual activity all derive from this period. The doctrines of hell and damnation grew largely to reenforce such restrictions.
Within centuries this caused a massive shift in the psychology of the west. It stimulated individualism and voluntary association as it eroded traditional loyalties to extended family clans and tribes. The growth of Individualism eventually spawned Protestant Christianity, mass literacy, and the Industrial Revolution and a European continent full of WEIRD people. Gradually the Weird new individualism began to erode the power of the religion that had birthed it.
WEIRD because as it began in western Europe, most of the original weirds were White, and they became Educated, Individualistic, Rich (by historical comparison), and Democratic by inclination due to their rejection of hereditary and clannish authority. WEIRD because very few people had thought outside the box of extended family clan for the whole of human history.
Weird ways of thought and life have become exported to many parts of the world over the last few centuries, often by imperial force and missionary work, but sometimes they became adopted to force modernisation, as in Japan. In China, Mao’s cultural revolution primarily sought to destroy ancestral family clan structures and the way of thinking that went with it.
Weird and non-weird peoples usually have great difficulty understanding or even tolerating each other’s strange seeming loyalties, religions, gods, moralities, laws, and sexual and social mores.
I have always felt a distrust of the sociological and psychological maxim that ‘People Are The Same Everywhere’. It certainly didn’t gel with my experiences of world travel. Henrich’s book shows how cultural evolution can make such a massive difference to the way people think and behave that it almost seems to change what we think of as their ‘human nature’.
A very illustrious historian of my acquaintance cautions against reading too much into such an overarching big idea hypothesis which may depend on highly selective evidence, and which has yet to make much academic impact, but I found it a very thought provoking read.
Janblog 2022
Weird Physics.
It may take a year or more before possibly decisive cosmological data comes back from the James Webb space telescope, in the meantime back to the problems at the other end of the scale in the quantum realm: -
Three Dimensional Time?
For many years I have suspected that three-dimensional reversible time can explain the phenomena of indeterminacy, superposition, entanglement, the various characteristics of the quanta in quantum physics, and the phenomena of retroactive enchantment and probabilistic divination in magic.
Yet a problem has always remained, how can a spacetime that appears to us as having one temporal and three spatial dimensions conceal two extra ‘time-like’ dimensions - an additional plane of time that acts like a sort of ‘hidden space’?
Perhaps the answer lies here https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/343-quantum-principle-of-relativity
If so, then it does not involve any wild new speculative physics but merely a reconsideration of already known physics that physicists generally agreed to ignore, namely the superluminal solutions of Special Relativity and the advanced wave solutions of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism.
Politics and Covid.
The people elected Trump and Boris to do similar things: -
To reverse the Economic Decadence that Globalisation has caused in their First World countries through the unrestricted movement of capital and migrants, which has led to diminishing prospects for the indigenous lower and lower middle orders of their societies.
To reverse Social Decadence by reigning back the political correctness, wokeism, multiculturalism and identity politics that the political left has adopted in both countries since largely abandoning class based politics.
The people knew full well that only roguish rule-breaking characters could achieve either of these objectives and they duly elected a pair of rogues.
Covid then intervened, and the conservative-libertarian roguish instincts of both Trump and Boris led to different outcomes. Trump tried to tough out covid and it cost him his second term, even though his other policies showed strong signs of rebalancing the distorted American economy which underlies America’s social conflicts and culture wars. Boris bulldozed through the mess created by the barely decisive Brexit vote and created a viable route forward. Then he took a bold gamble on covid vaccination as his instinct to tough it out no longer seemed a viable option. As a result, Britain will likely become the first country to waive the covid restrictions that Boris so reluctantly imposed on other people.
‘Rules are for the obedience fools and the guidance of the wise’ as the old RAF saying goes.
Although fatality numbers may seem high, the number of covid Deaths per Million in the UK seems moderate by international comparison, for a nation with an old and ridiculously overcrowded population and a non-authoritarian state: -
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
I do hope that Boris manages to tough out the current media-provoked leadership challenge. Let only those without sin cast the first stone. Let’s face it, during lockdowns most people did whatever they thought they could get away with at their own discretion.
Let us hope that the economic damage of covid does not hamper the rebalancing or ‘levelling up’ of the British economy that Boris intends.
Games, Life, and Magic.
If I had to describe The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos in a few words I’d call it a game plan for a magical life. It consists of a series of psycho-mythological maps of reality, a kabala upgraded to the post-Neoplatonist esoterics of the Pandaemonaeon.
Fair Warning: -
The last few remaining copies of the first edition will soon undergo a substantial price increase to finally amortise the huge costs of printing and sales of this two kilogram package of an outsize hardcover full colour triple Grimoire and its accompanying deck of altar sized cards. Yes, the artist and I did rather overdo the design specifications and the print bill became enormous, but we made it for posterity and priced it for cost recovery only.
Lockdown provoked a few conceptual breakthroughs in boardgame design. Frontier Space War has evolved into a game so richly complex that you can play it against yourself to create a story, because, unlike chess, by the time you have examined the strategic, logistical, and tactical situation on one side of the board you will have forgotten most of the initiatives you cooked up whilst playing a turn on the other side of the board, The latest version appears here: - https://www.specularium.org/games/item/344-frontier-space-war-4
The Human’s spacecraft consist of nuts and bolts, screws and masonry fittings, and plumbing spares. The Human’s surface units were scrounged from Risk 2210 AD. The Alien’s ships consist of nuts and bolts and Milliput, and their scorpion surface units consist of woodscrews, wire and sealant/glue teased out to give an organometallic-biomorphic effect.
Life itself often seems best regarded as a game played against oneself, or between one’s selves.
Winter Solstice 2021
Winter Solstice 2021 Blog.
Seasonal Greetings.
Herewith from the halls of Chateaux Chaos the goddess Apophenia atop the festive tree.
Cosmology News
The James Webb Space Telescope should soon set off to take station 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth at a Lagrange point between Earth and Sun. It has cost about twice as much as the large Hadron Collider. I profoundly hope that it launches successfully and deploys its delicate structures as planned, as we do not currently have the ability to fly out and fix it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
I entertain high hopes that observations made by this telescope will lead to the demise of the Big-Bang expanding universe LCDM theory, and the triumph of Hypersphere Cosmology.
The JWST will take long hard looks at galaxies near to the limits of observation because the older Hubble telescope unexpectedly found a vast number of galaxies with many that looked far too well developed to fit into the official Big Bang story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLA0817g
Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that the universe always remains roughly isotropic and homogenous at all points of space and time. We should find galaxies at all stages of their circular evolution and recycling in every observable region of spacetime.
The universe is closed according to Hypersphere Cosmology, its own gravity curves it back in on itself. That same curvature creates redshift and the illusion of expansion through lensing.
Several other ‘Crises in Cosmology’ already threaten the official Big Bang model; attempts to pin down the apparent expansion rate, the so called Hubble Constant, give inexplicably different results. A recent study of the cosmic lensing of the microwave background radiation strongly indicates a closed (hyperspherical) universe.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02087
Quantum News.
With the Hypersphere Cosmology thesis now seemingly complete and awaiting confirmation or falsification, attention returns to Quantum Ontology, what the heck really goes on in the quantum realm that appears to underlie reality?
We have no shortage of Quantum Epistemology; we have the mathematically baroque description of Quantum Field Theory which gives precise predictions in some areas but only probabilistic ones in other areas. It gives very little that we can readily re-express in images or words. Thus, we have a growing suite of Interpretations about what the current mathematical epistemology could mean for the ontological structure of reality – what really exists or how does it do what it does.
We seem in a situation similar to that of the medieval alchemists struggling to understand what happens when we start experimenting with metallurgy and heating and mixing and separating substances, we have developed a very complicated set of rules of thumb but not yet any understanding of the underlying reality (in this case of atoms) which can explain the chemistry involved more clearly than ideas about green and red dragons, peacocks of antimony and phlogiston.
The current suite of Interpretations includes a rich menagerie of weirdness from the many-worlds interpretation, through pilot-wave theory, to reversible-time transactional interpretations, to interpretations with any number of extra spatial and temporal dimensions, to the alternately zen-like inscrutability, agnosticism, or cosmic nihilism of the Copenhagen Interpretation which eschews any interpretation, either because we currently cannot do so definitively, or because either no underlying reality exists, or because it cannot exist in any form that we could possibly understand.
I had wondered if my speculations on quanta as fast rotating multidimensional spinorial toroids seemed an intuitive leap too far but published it here on 2nd June anyway.
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time
Now I notice that the illustrious Gerard 't Hooft published something which seems to explore a similar line of speculation on 29th July.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.14191
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.14191.pdf
See Gerhard’s discussion of 'fast variables' and multidimensional toroids.
If god does not play Dice, perhaps she plays Roulette instead, but so fast that we cannot see it.
Azathoth seems subtle, yet more indifferent than malicious.
Magical News.
With the revisions to Liber Null and Psychonaut complete, and with the Occultaris provisionally tucked in as a 20-odd page appendix to Interview with a Wizard, work has begun on a revision of Liber Kaos for a classic edition. This will entail a few upgrades to the opening science sections where science has caught up with magic in the interim. The closing chapters which deal with the contentious matters of grades, hierarchies, temples, and orders, will receive the benefits of a lifetimes experience and some wry observations about what achievements and disasters can result from them.
And in summary of 2021…….
On the downsides, most of the powerful players copped out of their responsibilities at COP26 and kicked the can down the road. The anthropogenic climate crisis visibly worsened as did the conflicts which it creates. The globalisation of just about everything has brought with it not only creative chaos but also a seemingly uncontrollable surge in entropy. In terms of biological cultures or thermodynamics, the prospects for our current forms of overpopulated overconsuming civilisation do not look promising.
On the upsides, the pandemic has put the Scottish Independence fantasy on hold, where more careful reflection upon its multiple fallacies quietly erodes it. The same goes for anti-Brexit sentiment, the EU has responded poorly to covid, Belgium, the rotten heart of the EU, has some of the worst pandemic figures on the planet.
The pandemic has brought home to many just who and what matters to them. Introverts with a rich inner life have generally fared better than the extroverts that our culture and media favours. For many of them lockdown has proved an annus mirabilis in terms of the appreciation and production of ideas, literature, art, and science. Lockdown economics has demonstrated that we could in principle, and with a bit of redistribution, easily thrive on a lot less work and consumption.
All the best for 2022, Choyofaque, Stokastikos, Pete.
Decblog 2021
DecBlog 2021
Rebel Physics.
Hypersphere Cosmology has finally defeated LCDM Big-Bang Cosmology!
The universe has always existed, and it always will. Merry Christmas.
The final battle recently occurred on a cosmology forum where HC took the last remaining bastion of LCDM by accounting for the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation in terms of its own model.
Herewith the plan of attack used: -
Herewith the tactics in full: https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/340-the-cmbr
The fighting was brief and bitter this time, the losers ended up cancelling and no-platforming the victor.
It all had the flavour of an atheist demonstrating the non-existence of god to a theological college.
Japanese Chaoism.
I have almost no idea what sort of Chaos Magic goes on in Japan, apparently my works have appeared in translation there, but language difficulties prove a barrier to communication. Nevertheless, a group over there sent me this delightful artefact: -
It’s a magic scrying mirror that resumes both late medieval grimoire symbolism and the alphabet of desire as given in Liber Null & Psychonaut.
21st Century Catastrophe.
I’ve had a fair bit of feedback about King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man lyrics from the previous blog: -
"Poets' starving children bleed"
There's a 2-minute clip here that predicts one nasty future consequence I haven't seen described before:
https://twitter.com/ExtinctionR/status/1464494350419709953
"Blood rack barbed wire"
This report finds that the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are spending, on average, 2.3 times as much on arming their borders as they are on climate finance. This figure is as high as 15 times as much for the worst offenders.
https://www.tni.org/en/publication/global-climate-wall
I suspect that most national leaderships in powerful nations must have already calculated that in the absence of sufficient international action, national preservation takes precedence and that their populations will back them on this.
Finally, a Poem. In celebration of HC CMBR victory.
The Starlit Sky
Away from the glare of our burning cities
The sky at night looks black as pitch betwixt the stars
Olbers said that cannot be
In a universe of infinity
Yet look again with a microwave eye
And it’s all aglow betwixt the stars
Is this the relic of a mighty blast
From distant aeons in the past
Or does the light from here
Go round a cosmic hypersphere
Coming back a little tired and cold
After all, it’s very old.
Novblog 2021
Novblog 2021
Remembrance Day. In the UK, on this eleventh day of the eleventh month we traditionally stand for two minutes silence at the eleventh hour, to remember those fallen in war. This began after WW1, ‘The war to end all wars’, which somehow ushered in a century of wars instead. It seems also a time to reflect on future conflicts that now seem inevitable.
COP26 has predictably ended with universal agreement that Something Must Be Done, but that nobody needs to oblige themselves to do anything they really don’t want to.
I'm getting the feeling that, historically, COP26 will mark the beginning of serious universal appreciation of the problems but that insufficient action will follow until the problems worsen and the costs of inaction by the big players start to hideously outweigh the costs of radical action even in the short term. That seems normal for Homo Sapiens.
Our species suffers from the morality paradox. Telling others what to do and then not doing it yourself usually proves the best course of action.
I think we can now confidently make three predictions about the coming decades; global temperatures will rise well past 20C, human-made catastrophes and wars will multiply hugely in frequency, and by mid to late century, world human population will have decreased markedly from current levels. Mind the cull.
As I listened to the results of COP26, a friend put on an old prophetic 1969 King Crimson track.
Cat's foot iron claw
Neuro-surgeons scream for more
At paranoia's poison door.
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Blood rack barbed wire
Politicians' funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Death seed blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser Ansible?
Perhaps worth a try, the Elder Gods may well maintain Cosmic Indifferentism, but some lesser aliens might reply.
See here https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/338-delayed-choice-quantum-eraser-ansible
Distraction Hobbies.
Lithonian Space Navy.
The shipyards of Lithonia have closed for the winter along with our holiday lodge but working in them has provided a stimulating distraction from reading and writing during the social isolations and lockdowns of covid.
An arms race with surrounding planetary civilisations has led to the development and deployment of new classes of Lithonian warship.
Herewith the LSN Flagship Draconia and two escorting SMVs, stealth missile vessels.
The Draconia has a standard silicate hull hewn from the rocks of the metal poor beach world of Lithonia and it carries an array of long and short range weaponry forged from scavenged coat hooks, dismantled electric razors, metal scraps, and vape accessories.
The SMVs have tougher hulls selected from huge unworked slabs of seaworn vesicated basalt and they rely on speed, stealth, and rock armour to close with opposing vessels.
I can foresee a sprawling boardgame evolving out of all this in the fullness of time, it will probably require a fair area of the beach to lay it all out on.
I used to make ships from plastic kits over half a century ago but always found it more interesting to discard the instructions and create something new. Now I eschew plastic altogether and take inspiration from whatever more durable junk comes to hand and eye. Having enjoyed the first one, I figured that I may as well start on my second childhood early.
Herewith the fleet so far.
Octblog 2021
Octblog 2021
COPOUT 26
The make or break Climate Conference in Glasgow looms, and there seem few grounds for optimism because it looks set to avoid the underlying issues.
I just sat through an edition of the BBCs Question Time and in response to the question ‘The Environment or The Economy?’ all the assembled politicos predictably said ‘Both’ and then proceeded to fantasise about how we could all both eat our cake and have it. This probably reflects the attitude of most humans currently.
Unfortunately, the science and the maths say something completely different. Business as usual cannot continue for much longer. None of the technical fixes we currently tinker with or theorise about will make much difference, the economy and the environment will both decline for many generations to come now. They will do so because since WW2 everything has gone exponential in population, consumption, production, pollution, and environmental damage, and we have already overshot the limits of the resources that this planet can provide and the damage it can absorb whilst sustaining us.
Progress has failed. Analysts of ‘progress’ in terms of wellbeing and life satisfaction generally conclude that developed countries achieved a maximum of wellbeing and life satisfaction sometime in the 1970s. Since then, economic growth has begun to erode general wellbeing and life satisfaction.
Global economic activity cannot grow or even continue without provoking the environmental changes that will undermine it and cause a gradual or catastrophic decline.
Humanity has a choice. It can either choose an acceptable level of degrowth, or it can choose to see what level of degrowth becomes forced upon it by inaction.
Involuntary degrowth could easily mean returning to Dark Age or Neolithic level economies and civilisations after resource conflicts, mass migrations, and social order collapses have devastated industrial societies, and the four horsemen of apocalyptic War, Famine, Pestilence, and Megadeath have done their work.
Voluntary degrowth to a sustainable level might just prove achievable if humanity collectively aimed for something like the 1970s and preserved some but not all the technical innovations made since then. This would of course involve levelling the developing world up to that. We should for example, keep the internet as a valuable communication and information resource, but scrap social media entirely.
Imagine a world in which everyone has the basics but where long distance travel and trade have become a rarity, the burning of fossil fuels has become illegal along with private transport, a local rather than a globalised world, where very little except information moves between continents, a world in which people lead simpler material lives but work less and have richer social and cultural lives.
Interview with a Wizard.
The first series of thirteen Blumberg-Carroll email interviews came to over eighty thousand words, enough for a book.
We seem to have pioneered the literary equivalent of a late night chat show series, except that here the interviewer and the interviewee have each had at least whole day to think about each of the 365 questions, so expect some penetrating questions and provocative answers. Lionel Snell has graciously offered to write a preface.
Covid.
I wonder what casualty allowance the UK government has given itself for its current policy of relaxing Covid restrictions and precautions and relying entirely on vaccination. Scientific opinion and the political opposition have turned against it.
As the new wave of infections and deaths rises here, it does seem surprising that the government and the media do not give greater publicity to the percentage of the unvaccinated amongst the newly hospitalised and dead.
Lastly, leaf fall from the deciduous trees around here seems oddly delayed this year, and look who seems to enjoy the unseasonable climate:-
I may have done them a favour; Greece may well become too hot for their kind in years to come.
Septblog 2021
Septblog 2021
Esoteric Horticulture.
At Chateaux Chaos the Autumnal Mandrakes have sprouted surprisingly early, before autumn equinox, with Circe already a foot into the sky and Boris and Igor just getting started. This year they will have an experimental outdoor season, note the slug repellent copper wire around their new home. Let us hope that the increasingly unpredictable climate does not bring any early frosts.
Magical Book.
The world’s most illustrious academic historian of the esoteric arts has prepared a splendid preface for the forthcoming Classic Edition of ‘Liber Null and Psychonaut’, the book that initiated an epic paradigm change in magical thought. Since its first publication this book has attracted both aggressive dismissal and laudatory recommendation. A new paradigm will always make some people very angry and other people ecstatic. Weiser’s Classic Edition which includes some new material, will appear sometime next year.
Holidays.
Retirement from most of the more time demanding business activities has led to a life of concentric holidays and research sabbaticals with frequent sojourns in remote Wales where a lot of wildlife still thrives. Herewith an adder sunning itself on some concrete. Some bright spark decided that this area would provide adders with an excellent habitat and released a few hundred captive bred specimens some decades ago, now we have thousands of them here. Shoes now seem essential in the dunes, but on the upside, they do bite dogs that people don’t keep on leads.
Herewith also a friendly cricket. Until recently I could always hear their high pitched chirping at night. This year my youngest daughter, a professional ecologist, told me that they were making their customary racket, but I could barely hear them. Oddly, I found this a greater portent of mortality than my need for reading glasses, something may soon disappear from my universe forever as my faculties fade. I seem to have just eaten a pot of dog ice cream having mistaken the picture on the carton for a polar bear. I may have only few decades more to discover the remaining secrets of the universe and the quantum realm presents bizarre difficulties akin to juggling spaghetti whilst blindfolded in a hailstorm.
Quantum Chess?
During discussions of the concept of dimensions with my interviewer/biographer, the following analogy or thought experiment emerged to illustrate the possibilities of multiple time dimensions.
The record of a game of chess provides its temporal dimension, it shows what happened over time. It does not show the moves not taken. However, we could have multiple timelines in which alternatives moves occur. A player unable to decide between two moves can elect to make both of them by replacing a single piece by two smaller shadow pieces in different positions with the provisos that whenever one of the shadow pieces interacts with an opposing piece, the other shadow piece becomes removed, and a player moving one of the shadow pieces must also move the other corresponding one as well. Otherwise, all the usual rules of chess apply.
Now here comes the really strange bit: -
Afterwards, we could write a single timeline move sequence to describe the whole game that does not include the shadow pieces that became removed! However, an expert would probably notice something very odd about some of the moves chosen when looking at the record afterwards. Such a Quantum-Chess analogy can in principle explain many of the mysteries of quantum mechanics and magic. What may have happened, and what could happen, can affect what does seem, to us, to have actually happened. ‘Imaginary’ phenomena can have very real effects.
Afterthought – simply sawing each piece of a chess set down the middle and numbering the two halves the same provides an easy way of preparing a quantum chess set. The two halves of each piece begin the game on the same square.
Augblog 2021
Augblog 2021
Dragon seen in Wales. I met a representative of the dragon races in the dunes near our retreat in remotest Wales. She said that despite having to work on smaller scales and less ambitious projects than in the Mesozoic Era, she remained confident that her kind would regain world domination after hearing our IPCC report on anthropogenic global warming. Another forty gigatons of carbon dioxide per annum for a few decades more should do the trick nicely, she continued. Its not so much the seemingly minor average temperature increases but the resulting exponential increases in extreme weather events that will render your civilisations unviable as your agriculture collapses and you start to massacre each other wholesale. All this will give dragonkind splendid new opportunities, she cheerfully concluded.
Afghanistan. I went through it on the Hippy trail back in the late seventies. It seems a mistake to classify it as a nation for it consists of tribalized territories that no central authority or external power has ever really controlled. Due to western medicine its population has mushroomed far beyond the agricultural carrying capacity that the bone dry and often freezing territory offers, and cultural and religious attitudes inhibit the adoption of industrial or post industrial development. It has valuable mineral resources however, as the Chinese have noticed. A descent into dark ages barbarism and theocracy with Kalashnikovs now seems inevitable. A Taliban dictatorship seems unlikely to build a nation, more likely a fragmentation back to tribal rivalries will occur. The Brits, The Ruskies, and the Yanks all failed there. The Chinese may eventually become tempted to go in hard for the strategic minerals and they won’t shy away from eradicating the culture and as much of the population as that requires.
Lithonian flotilla. Beach detritus, DIY leftovers, and vape accessories continue to provide resources for the growing Lithonian space fleet. Note the inclusion of the Retro-Dreadnaught in this flotilla. Due to occasional relativistic navigation errors, vessels dispatched on weeklong voyages sometimes come back hundreds of years later, and the Lithonian fleet consists of vessels from many eras.
Microcosm, Psi, and Macrocosm.
The quest for a sub-quantum geometry that can explain quantum physics with gravity, and psi and their relationship to hyperspherical cosmology continues here; -
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time
At present it consists mainly of a list of qualitative ingredients for a potential description. These include Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics, my Three Dimensional Time hypothesis, Wolff’s Wave Structure of Matter, and some higher dimensional geometry.
Fitting that lot together and rendering it quantitative certainly presents a challenge, may Azathoth modulate my neurones.
Julblog 2021
Julblog 2021
Covid Strategies. I keep a close eye on the Worldometer report,
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
particularly on the Deaths per Million of population column to see how various strategies or lack of strategies tried by various governments affects mortality outcomes.
For a relatively wealthy country with a very high population density, an old population and massive connectivity to the rest of the world, the UK has not done too badly in the rankings.
Here we have just embarked on a gamble to achieve something like herd immunity through vaccinating most adults and now allowing children to acquire immunity through mild infection. Boris Johnson gambled on Brexit and then gambled on throwing vast resources at the vaccine effort and he won both times. Let us hope he has got this right. In the absence of another new variant that can jump the vaccine barrier with impunity, he probably has.
Magical News. Work continues apace on the upgrade for the Classic Edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut. From more recent anthropological and ethnographic research it has become apparent that Animism provides the wellspring from which most magical traditions arise and that Shamanism constitutes just one manifestation of animist ideas, in contradistinction to the theories of Mircea Eliade. The forthcoming classic edition will also contain upgrades to modern Chaos Magic rituals.
Conversations with a Wizard, a mega-interview with an esoteric journalist, now begins to approach book length.
The microcosm chapters of the Occultaris gradually evolve. The mutual dependency of the microcosm and the macrocosm becomes increasingly apparent. The quest for a theory of quantum gravity seems doomed within the current framework of quantum field theory and the standard cosmological model. Rather it seems that quanta and fields must have a co-fundamental mutually dependent existence and a similar higher dimensional geometry to the entire universe as in Hypersphere Cosmology. Moreover, fields must act non-locally even if waves in them only propagate at lightspeed or less. The properties of the apparent parts depend upon the whole and everything lies far more intimately connected than conventionally thought. This seems to go way beyond Mach’s Principle, Entanglement, Quantum Handshakes, and so called Morphic Fields.
Amazing Cosmology News just in: -
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01380-6
The filaments of galaxies that stretch across the cosmic voids have measurable spins that the Standard Cosmological Model cannot explain.
Hypersphere Cosmology uses the Godel metric W = 2sqrt(piGd) in which ‘Matter everywhere rotates relative to the compass of inertia with an angular velocity of twice the square root of pi times the gravitational constant times the density’.
https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/323-equation-5
This seems highly likely to supply an explanation for the new observation of the largest spinning structures ever seen.
More...
Junblog 2021
Magic
Weisers, the publishers of the first combined edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut, plan to bring out a Classic Edition next year of this paradigm shifting book of magic which has remained in print and appeared in a considerable number of other languages since its first publication. The new cover design looks great, the contents will get an upgrade, and a suitably illustrious figure has volunteered to write a foreword to the new edition.
Work progresses on The Occultaris, a treatise on Natural Philosophy. This seems likely to send shockwaves through the fields of both science and magic which have become somewhat unnecessarily estranged for the last couple of centuries. The Occultaris explores the higher dimensional geometry of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm (The Universe and The Quantum Domain) and the esoteric consequences of a new model of each.
On a lighter note, ‘Conversations with a Wizard’, or something like that, may eventually appear as a book. What started as an e-mail interview has got a bit out of hand during lockdown. It has grown to about a hundred pages of biography, travelogue, recent magical history, and a lifetime of anecdotes and observations, and we haven’t finished yet.
Sculpture
Beach detritus and DIY leftovers continue to inspire craftwork at our lockdown hideaway on a Welsh shore. Herewith the latest addition to the Lithonian task force, a hyperspace missile cruiser featuring a large bronze marine bolt which polished up nicely to form the bridge.
Politics
The EU makes an ass of itself over an UK-Eire border that nobody wants. Perhaps it seeks revenge for Brexit or to give notice that it will create trouble for any other country that tries to escape its synarchist clutches. The political capital of the EU has hit a new low with its dysfunctional response to the Covid crisis with the majority of the population of the EU now professing dissatisfaction with the entire rotten institution.
Historically, Catholicism has created a bloody fault line between Ireland and Britain. After partition, Eire became a virtual theocracy run by a viciously repressive and primitive manifestation of Catholicism that hideously maltreated countless women and children and arrested economic and social development. Thankfully, that has all become exposed now, and the clergy discredited. The Irish have turned away from ancestral faith and become a modern democratic and largely English speaking people.
The old atrocities and battles that took place between Ireland and Scotland, between England and Wales and between England and Scotland no longer influence relations between them. The war between Britain and Southern Ireland ended almost a century ago.
Does it now make political, economic, and geopolitical sense to extend an invitation to Eire to join the United Kingdom?
Alternative Physics
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time
Anyone for or against a Clifford Torus or a 3-Torus in curved three-dimensional space and curved three dimensional time as the basis for a Hypersphere Quantology without quantum chromodynamics?
Mayblog 2021
Mayblog 2021
Alternative? Physics. Muon Wobble.
The current excitement about a possible ‘fifth force’ responsible for the anomaly detected in the spin of the Muon particle may arise from a small interaction with the field associated with the X17 Boson.
The X17 boson remains unconfirmed but suspected from observations of the decay of Beryllium 8 where a putative boson of about 17 MeV decays to an electron and a positron.
In terms of the model under construction at the Physics Department of Arcanorium College this new boson would have the following configuration: -
In this model the X17 has chiral spin 0 and electric spin 0, and like all bosons it has a particle/antiparticle configuration, (Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics). As such it does not really represent a new fundamental force but rather another member of the electroweak bosons, W-, W+, and Z. In effect it consists of a Z boson with both of its half integer chiral spins (grey) going in opposite directions to yield no overall spin.
The horizontal lines represent the spin along the wz axis where z corresponds to the direction of propagation. This model uses the idea of electron bi-spinors generated by non-isoclinic double rotations in four spatial dimensions.
Does this matter? In practical terms probably not, this rare particle seems to play only a miniscule role in the behaviour of reality, however in theoretical terms it may lend some support to hyperspherical models of quanta in extra dimensions, and perhaps eventually to a fuller understanding of exoteric and esoteric aspects of the universe.
Politics.
We have just had multiple elections in the UK, both for the Scottish and Welsh assemblies that have self-designated themselves as the ‘Governments’ of their respective ‘Nations’, plus a large swathe of local government elections and a Parliamentary by-election for one seat.
The English and Scottish wings of the Labour party have performed disastrously enough to raise existential questions about the Labour party. It has lost touch with its robustly illiberal working-class roots and become the preserve of metropolitan champagne socialists and ‘woke’ activists trying to make a power base by starting culture wars and stirring up grievances.
Personally, I have always cheered on Jeremy Corbyn and Kier Starmer, they seem perfectly suited to leading the opposition.
That the Labour party did well enough in Wales comes as no surprise. Over forty percent of the Welsh work for the state in this subsidised region and the Welsh Labour leader, a verbose and reassuringly avuncular old owl, managed to get himself on television just about every day throughout the covid crisis. The Welsh nationalist party did not do well. A majority of the Welsh supported Brexit and can see no point in refusing English generosity and getting into bed with the failing superstate of the EU.
The results from Scotland give cause for deep concern.
The Scottish Nationalist leader shared the same advantage as the Welsh leader during covid and made the most of her daily television appearances. This compensated for the votes she will undoubtedly have lost over her mishandling of the crisis surrounding her predecessor. It seems unbelievable that she did not know about his behaviour for years and bit her tongue for the sake of her own career until the time seemed right to turn on him. Mischievously lowering the voting age to 16 also helped to bolster the nationalist vote. Mature voters in Scotland tend to favour continued union.
Four percent of the population of the UK now apparently want to leave the UK taking thirty two percent of its territory and none of its national debt with them. That four percent represents only half of Scotland’s population, the other half do not wish to be deprived of British citizenship.
This sounds like a recipe for a Northern Ireland situation……….
The leader of the Scottish Nationalists plays an extremely dangerous and divisive game to advance her political career.
Seven hundred thousand people from Scotland live and/or work in the rest of the UK, and many more have family ties across the presently non-existent border. All concerned should get a vote in the unlikely event that the economically, politically, and geopolitically illiterate scheme for Scotland leaving the UK and joining the EU ever gets put to a referendum.
At present every British citizen has the right to live and work in Scotland and to identify themselves as Scottish. The UK government should make it clear from the outset that these rights cannot be given away without a referendum that involves all British citizens.
I regard Ross shire, Sussex, Inverness shire, Somerset, and Gower as all part of my country, non-negotiable, and worth fighting for if necessary.
All political careers end in failure. Nicola Sturgeon would end up with her head on a pike after the implosion of an unviable Scottish state. The best she can hope for is to extract ever more subsidies and autonomy from Westminster and to eventually retire quietly to some beautiful part of a Scotland that stays British and free of Brussels.
Spring 2021
Magic.
The Chancellor of Arcanorium College confers the degree of Bachelor of Magic upon Jacob Edward Sipes, BoM.
This represents the first degree awarded by Arcanorium College since its inception.
Many have started on this demanding course, but few have had the determination to persist with the exceptionally demanding work.
The full citation appears in the Arcanorium College Department of Magic pages on this site.
https://www.specularium.org/arcanoriumcollege/item/273-arcanorium-college-department-of-magic
Alternative Science.
The Hypersphere Cosmology model now seems to have achieved its final form: -
https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
The model presents two observational tests which could show whether this model or the conventional Lambda-CDM Big Bang model best represents the universe. Unfortunately. both tests would take about forty years of observation, but presently Hypersphere Cosmology has the edge in terms of Occam’s Razor as it offers a considerably simpler and more elegant description of the universe.
All attempts to falsify this model will be enthusiastically engaged with.
In the meantime, work resumes on Hypersphere Mechanics, an attempt to rationalise the ad hoc mess of Quantum Field Theory and add some mathematical and conceptual rigor.
The ingredient list from which an improved model may evolve currently includes the following: -
A spacetime of three spatial and three temporal dimensions, and the whole metric curved by gravity into a spatio-temporal 3-3 Sphere.
Spherical rotations of various of the dimensions of spacetime itself as the basis of all fields, forces, waves, and particles.
Quanta as having some of the properties of hyperspheres. Mach’s Principle, as above so below, the quanta and the universe somehow mutually define each other’s properties.
Matter ‘particles’ and ‘anti-particles’ as the points where waves which travel right round the universe interfere, a sort of hyperspherical extension to Milo Wolff’s Wave Structure of Matter theory, but to include nuclear and gravitational effects as well.
Energy ‘particles’ as ‘particle-antiparticle’ exchanges with the antiparticle component traveling backwards in time, as in Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics.
The appearance of entanglement and superposition arising from retro-causation at lightspeed.
A possible geometrical relationship between neutrinos, photons, and gravitons.
The hypothesis that something out there might know more than we do, and that it might respond to the name of Azathoth. Common sense need not prove a limitation to imagination.
Sculpture.
Herewith the Edward Teach, Steam-Punk Pirate Spacecraft.
The hull of this vessel does not consist of a heavily decayed piece of timber, it consists of a piece of hard volcanic lava scrounged from Mount Teide on Tenerife that inspired the overall design. The assorted fittings come from the junk boxes in the sheds and outhouses of Chateaux Chaos. The policy of never throwing any interesting piece of scrap away has paid dividends during lockdown.
In the backstory the Imperium abandons a damaged robot freight vessel on a desolate asteroid. The AI that piloted it uses its droids to gradually assemble a functioning craft from the wreckage of the freighter and the material of the asteroid. The AI also reprograms itself in increasingly unorthodox ways, drawing on historical archive material in memory devices in transit, resulting in the antique design of the ship and the new rogue identity of the AI.
The Edward Teach now raids the far-flung outposts of the Imperium, relieving merchant vehicles of their cargoes, attacking some of the smaller classes of Imperium warships, and adding to its arsenal of strange and exotic weaponry.
Politics.
Regional Nationalism. Tony Blair remains one of the most reviled Prime Ministers of recent decades, we remember him mainly for the deceitful case he made for the Iraq war and the disastrous war itself. He managed to hand over power to Gordon Brown just in time to escape the economic catastrophe of 2008 that his policies during three terms of office did so much to exacerbate.
However, he also lit the fuse to constitutional crisis by setting up the Scottish and Welsh assemblies. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, Northern Ireland had been given a gerrymandered assembly to try and persuade rival factions to talk more and fight less. Scotland and Wales were given their own assemblies in the hope that it would make the Northern Ireland assembly seem less of an anomaly and that it would head off Scottish and Welsh nationalism, despite that such nationalisms had rarely risen above a hobby activity for a minority of Celtic romanticists.
It has had quite the reverse effect, both assemblies have now self-designated themselves as the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments and Governments. The Welsh had little initial enthusiasm for an assembly, but now both assemblies have filled up with left dominated representatives spending central government funds and playing the nationalism card as a career strategy. Blair created a career opportunity for a new class of regional-nationalist politicians, and they took it, pulling the wool over the eyes of their electorates.
The nationalism cards do not bear scrutiny, they have little written on them except a faux resentment of England which heavily props up both principalities economically on one side. On the other they merely say, ‘We demand ever more regional subsidies!’ Nowhere do the nationalism cards mention anything realistic about what independence would mean in practice. Economy? Central Bank? Currency? Borders? Defence? National Debt?
Bristol has a longstanding tradition of political rioting, and it now leads the way in protesting against a new parliamentary bill which restricts the right to peaceful protest. Basically, if your protest is likely to cause an obstruction or a nuisance you will not get permission for it.
History shows that peaceful unobstructive protest achieves nothing. A million people marched quietly through London against Tony Blair’s planned war in Iraq, and it went ahead anyway. A quarter of that number smashed up central London against Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax and it was immediately cancelled.
A protest that inconveniences nobody influences nobody. Expecting people to protest for the right to make a nuisance, without making a nuisance, seems a ridiculous expectation.
If he persists with it, this may become Boris’ Poll Tax moment.
Marblog 2021
Marblog 2021
Toad-spawn! Newts! I had feared that the addition of 26 tons of rubble and cement to the old carp pond to reduce its depth from seven to two feet in depth might have discouraged our annual guests for a few years, but no, they have come back straight away this spring and resumed their frolicking.
Alternative Physics
The Hypersphere Cosmology model has successfully resisted several weeks of siege on the Cosmo Quest Forum.
I took it there and challenged a panel of experts to falsify it. A fierce assault began. Running repairs and upgrades to the defences occurred during the battle.
Eventually the referee gave a red card to the self-appointed leader of the opposition for losing his temper, and I retired with the theory unfalsified and strengthened.
During the sometimes less than civil debate it became apparent that Hypersphere Cosmology needed a few tweaks and a much fuller explication of its 17 core equations. It should now appear comprehensible to anyone with basic algebra, geometry, and physics.
I now present it here: - https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
Each equation now has its own sub-page of explanation of the physical principles it uses.
We now laugh at Flat Earth theories. I suspect that generations to come will laugh at the idea that for more than a century, people believed we lived in a Flat Universe that expanded at the speed of light and began with a big bang.
I now seek higher level falsification or collaborators to take Hypersphere Cosmology forward.
‘Cosmologists are seldom right but never in doubt’ – Landau. :)
Politics
I have met older people in the UK who have reservations about accepting their Oxford-Astra-Zeneca Covid vaccine because they have come across negative information about it originating in the EU, suggesting for example that it may lack efficacy for those over 65.
That misinformation has an entirely political basis. It has absolutely no scientific basis. The Europeans put out this misinformation to try and cover their unbelievably incompetent screw up of procurement and distribution of vaccines within the EU.
Belgium, the rotten heart of Europe, has the highest death rate per million of any sizeable country on earth.
The high-level fratricide in progress within the Scottish National Party comes as no surprise. The Loch Ness Sturgeon made treasonous overtures to the EU in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote. Expansion and preservation of political power base remains her only priority.
Culinary matters.
The Full Bristol Breakfast.
The privilege of living near this international trading city brings with it access to exotic ingredients from all over the world.
A lockdown years’ worth of experimentation at the laboratories of Chateaux Chaos and at the Welsh coastal research facility have led to the development of an optimal nutritional repast now designated ‘The Full Bristol Breakfast’: -
One handful of organic porridge oats.
One tin of responsibly sourced flaked Tuna.
A couple of cubic inches of cheese, preferably Blue Stilton.
A desert spoonful of smooth peanut butter.
A desert spoonful of coconut butter.
A teaspoonful of mixed herbs.
A teaspoonful of powdered turmeric.
A teaspoonful of chili sauce.
A dozen pitted green olives.
A cupful of water.
Heat all the ingredients in a pan with constant stirring until the cheese begins to melt and the porridge thickens. Eat immediately, direct from the pan. Total preparation, consumption, and clear up time, just 8 minutes.
During consumption, meditate upon the nutritional value of the ingredients and the physical strength and mental acuity that they will stimulate, rather than upon the taste which will become more agreeable with time.
The Full Bristol Breakfast provides sufficient sustenance for an entire days’ worth of gruelling physical, mental, or magical activity.
Recommended dose – do not exceed one portion on alternate days.