Carl Sagan’s “Reflections on a Mote of Dust” essay is, in my opinion, one of the finest examples of writing in the English language. Chokes me up. Every time.
This is Braco, a Croatian gaze healer. For $8 a ticket, you can go and be gazed at and have all of your ailments gazed away.
If ghosts exist, you would expect the photographic and video evidence for them should improve dramatically as more and more people look for them with better and better equipment.The iPhone 4GS phone came out last week, each one of them has a built-in high definition 1080p camera featuring state-of-the-art optics, image stabilization, automatic lighting adjustment and other features that rival cameras used by Hollywood videographers only a few years ago.
Weird, how there is still no evidence for ghosts of any kind! Well, it is because ghosts don’t exist.
High definition provides more image information, which helps identify things often mistaken for ghosts, such as random shadows, unnoticed reflections and video artifacts. With those ghost impostors more easily dismissed, any real ghostly images should be sharper and clearer than ever before. The age of amateurs posting questionable video evidence of the paranormal should be coming to an end. Professional ghost hunters, however, might well continue using cameras that produce low-quality images. After all, that’s where the ghosts appear.
A little on the Voyager 1 and 2: “Still the only probe to reach Uranus!”
It was affixed onto the spacecraft Phoenix and launched to Mars in 2007 and is addressed to future residents of Mars. He says, “I’m glad you’re there, and I wish I was with you.”
“What’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.”
-C.S., Demon-Haunted World, 1995
Speak out against pseudoscience. Astrology does not represent any accurate description of the world we live in. The notion that position of the sun at the moment of your birth somehow affects your personality not only raises some very serious questions about free will, but it is fraud and there is no evidence in its favor. Almost everyone has been indoctrinated with the alleged characteristic of their star sign; they identify with something false about the universe. It is so weird and stupid, almost dangerous.
In actuality, we are a part of the cosmos but not in the trivial way pseudoscience would have you believe, but in the deepest ways. We are under the influence of a star, our sun! It warms us, drives our weather and makes all life possible, and the sun is only one of several hundred billion just in our galaxy. Speak out against pseudoscience!
People always ask me about “aliens” (which they mean the bug-eyes greys that haunt book covers worldwide). Those are fictional. The stories of the grey aliens and stories of medieval demons are nearly identical; just a story passed down when people don’t understand science. However much I want those to be true, they aren’t. I absolutely think that it would be improbable for life to not exist outside of Earth. Since most of life on Earth is microbial, we can reasonably expect that when we search for life outside the biosphere, we are looking for bacteria or protists.
We used to think that liquid water in the solar system was rare, that only Earth had that special formula. It now appears that gravity, geology, radioactivity and antifreeze chemicals like salt and ammonia have given many “hostile” worlds the ability to muster the pressures and temperatures that allow liquid water to exist. And research on Earth has shown that if there is water, there could be life. And by life I mean microbial life.
This is a meteorite from Mars called Allan Hills 84001, found in 1996, that contains what appears fossilized bacterial life forms. After 20 years of analytical research with increasingly more advanced tools, the team decided that, “None of the original features supporting our hypothesis for ALH84001 has either been discredited or has been positively ascribed to non-biologic explanations.” In other words, they can’t disprove the claims, nor can they produce similar features using non-living compounds. There are so many more quirks to this Martian tale, but those are stories for a different day.
Storm on Saturn.
Class snake gets blamed for most missing assignments.
