Shoshin-Zazen

Encountered this cute photo from National Geographic’s picture of the month.

Penguins are found in southern ice mass that is largely deviod of life. A bleak tundra of blinding whiteness and life is desolate and harsh. Yet, they thrive in these places, undoubtably untouched for thousands of years. That is, of course, until a warmer earth begets melting ice-mass. Then these penguins will lose their home.

Of course, change is mercurial in our world and our sense of time is somewhat etched into my minds as seconds and minutes. But if one could view Earth from a spaceship and magically speed up time, we will be able to observe change on a marco scale; the laws of cause and effect - upon our fragile Earth. We will be able to observe things on a greater scale such that the mind can be repioritised to think of issues that has significant bearing on our future.

Unfortunately, rather than to engage in the fight against human proclivity, some of our brothers tend to focus their energies on wealth and power. “Iran will be a World Superpower.” (Yeah, like we need another Hitler’s Germany) or “Hyundai-boss arrested over slush-fund Scandal“# are all “sorry-to-hear” news. We are just as impervious to our own short-comings as to the oxy-moron “Common sense is not so common” mouthed by the physicst, Voltaire.

But then again, we will not see the damage done to Earth today or probably over 10 years, if let’s say i throw a piece of plastic bag in the ocean. Simply because nature is a proverbail slow coach - Plastics require thousands of years to break down. However, maybe a innocent sea-gull will think it is food and hence choke and die from it. Of course, if you know the Butterfly Effect, my action will inadvertently snow-ball to glaciers and ice-cap melting. So in effect, we will not be able to see our actions of today, but this tab of ramifications will be handed down to generations to come.

Humans have brains. We can either choose to be wise and plan ahead, or play it dumb and seal our fate akin to the Dodos. Finally as Carl Sagan put it, “Who will speak for Planet Earth?”

“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”

- Travels in Alaska by John Muir

# - Actual Headlines and headings taken from my local newspaper on the 29th of April 06.

The ultra-cool sounding ‘Z’ Machine. No no, its not the new minimalistic Washing Machine by Samsung. And its neither some secret level 999 plasma gun from Unreal Tournament nor is it some crazed Pax Americana George Bush’s Jr new ’star wars’ weapon.

Its more breathtaking than that.

And it may well be a precusor to Fusion Energy - the holy grail of free energy. Hooray. But of course we have to wait, well at least very patiently for another 100 years until scientists can sustain the reaction successfully.

So whats the Z Machine? I caught sight of it while roaming on the net and it looked literally so electrifying that i decided to share it.

[1]

[2]

The Z machine is the largest X-ray generator in the world and is designed to test materials in conditions of extreme temperature and pressure. It is operated by Sandia National Laboratories to gather data to aid in computer modeling of nuclear weapons. The Z machine is located at Sandia’s main site in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The machine operates by releasing an electrical pulse and associated magnetic field. The energy from a 20-million-ampere electrical discharge vaporizes an array of thin tungsten wires and a powerful magnetic field crushes the ensuing plasma. The collapsing plasma produces X-rays which create a shock wave that bears on the material being tested. The powerful fluctuation in the magnetic field (or “electromagnetic pulse”) also generates electric current in all of the metallic objects in the room (see picture at right).

It gets its name because current travels vertically into the target, which is conventionally the z axis (x and y being horizontal, see Z-pinch).

Since the Z machine can produce temperatures about that of the Sun, scientists and engineers have tried their luck with fusion. In April 7th 2003, when physicists placed a capsule of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, at the focus of the z-pinch, they detected neutrons flying out from the implosion site – a signal that fusion reactions were taking place, as they do in the sun.

Yet, for sustainable fusion to take place, something over 1,000 trillion watts of energy have to be produced to create that stupendous amount of heat. Over the last 15 years, the electrical output of the Z Machine has been increasing - from a picayune 100,000 watts to 20 trillion watts. [3]A 60 million dollar refurbishment program was announced in 2004 that will raise the power output to 350 terawatts, about 100 times the world’s electrical power usage. However, only a small amount of electricity is consumed for each test (equal to the usage of 100 houses for two minutes). (Lucky me, if otherwise, the lights will flicker everytime those rocket scientists switch on the Z machine.)

The development of Fusion energy is more than an invention of say, the invent of flight by the Wright Brothers. Fusion energy will frog-jump the need for unsustainable oil and coal; we are talking about unlimited energy. Harnessing the awesome power of the stars will not be science fiction any more once we are able to fuse hydrogen isotopes together. Nuclear Fission will eventually surcumb to fusion because the former has undoubtably created more problems than solutions. Radioactive wastes and fisson’s nefariously volatile process (eg. Chernobyl) will be a thing of a past. And fission and other polluting sources of energy will be replaced by clean, limitless energy.

Yet, i do not believe everything has without its dangers. Time will tell.

Actually there is an interesting doom-day theory running parallel along those high-energy particle accelerators which some people say will one day create a black hole on Earth, and in a colossal gravity-defying joke, gobble everything up. But I shall leave that to the science-fiction folks.

The search for Fusion has come a long way since the 1950s and progess has been painstaking slow. Along the way, false victories like Cold Fusion saw brightened hopes fading in a second. The billons of dollars spent on research…

Yet, i believe that fusion will materialise and vindicate all the effort put it. It will be a major step forward. Of course that will not happen if, we keep hearing that Iran is nuclear armed and ready; pissing the US and the rest of the diplomats off: All it takes is just one bomb to end it all. To crudely and blithely paraphrase the primer from The Lord of the Rings’ - “One Bomb to Rule them All, and Blast Us All to Kingdom Come.”

Well, if that does not happen, we might just put fusion reactors on our intergalactic spaceships and travel to the stars.

We might just get lucky.

—
References
[1].Astronomy Picture of the Day http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060313.html
[2].Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_machine
[3].http://observer.guardian.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,416412,00.html

It was a hot afternoon and under the cool santuary of a bus-stop, there were 2 women talking; the younger one was in a school uniform and the other probably in her 20s was in casual clothes. It was not any stereotypical female small talk, but a conversation that i will probably remember for a long time.

What aroused my interest was that their voices were different from normal people; their speech were relatively slow ;Their puntuation and enunciation of their words seem strange and broken. Their speech was largely monotone and their pronounciation of some words were a little slurred. Their fluid but exaggerated hand gestures accompanied their discussion. Of course! It was then i realised they were partially deaf.

Here is a part of their conversation:

Girl said, “So how is school? Good?”

“Yes, it is good. I am quite happy,” the girl in school uniform replied.

Girl said again, “I now learning Chinese. Chinese very hard because it has 4 sounds. Very hard you know.”

“Yes. Chinese is like that.”

“I now learn some chinese words already,” the girl said with a smile on her face.

As i listened to their conversation, i felt growing and glowing admiration towards them. Just imagine if you have hearing disabilities and try learning French, Chinese or any other language, certainly not impossible; but extremely painstaking. The phrase “the impossible just takes longer” suddenly becomes a proverbial candle in the dark.

As I stood, waiting for my bus, i tried probing fruitlessly to understand how someone deaf would “hear” the world. Then i thought of the vast majority of people. People who enjoy the priviledge of hearing Santana or J.S Bach, and tolerate the obscenties spewed on television. People who, for some bigoted reason or another, engage in a bitter barrage of acrimony hidden like grass and straws, spewing anger and hate. And lastly people who talk a little too much and inherently give little thought whenever they activate their levers on their voice box - ultimately hurting someone inadvertently.

The wonderful gift of human communication? or a destructive weapon from the depths of our mind?

Maybe we should just breathe before we speak. Here is an “antidote” from Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff[1]:

The strategy itself is remarkably simple. It involves nothing more that pausing - breathing - after the person to whom you are speaking is finished. At first, the time gap between our voices may seem life an eternity - but in reality, it amounts to only a fraction of a second of actual time. Yuu will get used to the power and beauty of breathing, and you will come to apprectiate it as wel. It will bring you closer to, and earn you more respect from , virtually everyone you come in contact with. You’ll find that being listened to is one of the rares and most treasured gifts you can offer…

If you observe the converstaions around you, you’ll notice that, often, what many of us do is simpy wait for our chance to speak. We’re not really listening to the other person but simply waiting for an opening to express our view. We often complete other people’s sentences, or say things like “Yeah, yeah,” or “i know,” very rapidly, urging them to hurry up so that we can have our turn. It seems that talking to one another is sometimes more like sparring back and forth like fighters or Ping-pong balls than it is enjoying or learning from the converstaion.

This harried from of communication encourages us to criticise points of view, overreact, misinterpret meaning, impute false motives, and form opinions, all before our fellow communicator is even finished speaking. No wonder we are so often annoyed, bothered, and irrated with one another.

Of course speech is a double edged sword. Yet if our speech is a product of our mind, our ears are our receievers. How often do we treat ourselves and others with beautiful speech? But is there such a thing as beautiful speech? Sometimes, its just better to just be quiet. Be still and just listen to the surroundings. The mating crickets. The patter or rain on the roof . It does seem to me that our ears have been perennially been receieving and our mouths justifying our thoughts into audio outputs that we hardly have time to just shut up and listen to other people. We hardly listen to ourselves.

Of course, it would seem like a tinge of madness. Why you think i am Schizophrenic?

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has a wonderful pearlie of wisdom for those talkative folks. He says, about the benefits of eating watermelon seeds[2], “While your mouth is occupied crakling and chewing the seeds, you are not expected to talk. By avoiding speaking, you don’t have to worry about saying something you’ll later regret.” Of course, for the matter of eating many watermelon seeds, one would not have to worry about harming your health. Watermelon seeds never cause problems.

He writes, “Watermelon seeds teach people how to take the time to relect until they have something useful to say. They have played their part in promoting mindful speech in eople of all ages. WHen you have nothing constructive to say, you simply use your teeth to break open the seeds, while listening intently. If you know nothing about a subject, no one will criticise you if you quietly chew your seeds.”

Oh well, we live in a world no lacking of a dearth of, seemingly cacophonous man-made sounds. It is no exaggeration that the profileration of the mass media has really gone supernova. If you live in the so called “1st World” country you see TVs, ads, billboards everyday, every highway, every movie show, and on every god-damned bus and taxi. This bombardation of infomation everywhere and anywhere has led me to really think about how ironically immune we have become to this technological by-product of globalisation.

Do we really need all these adverts and useless information? We have to ask ourselves whether we want ourselves to become slaves to commercialisation? Do we want our children to grow up in a world riddened with the desire for material wealth? and to find out that everything, including love and knowledge, comes in a surreptiously packaged price-tag?

I yearn for some cathartic silence. Pause. Thank you.

—-
References
[1].Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson, PH.D. Page 135 Breathe Before You Speak. Para. 2-4.
[2].Fragant Palm Leaves by Thich Nhat Hanh.

I am blind
I cannot see.
Color is no bar to me.
I know neither
Black nor white.
I walk in night.
Yet it seems I see mankind
More tortured than the blind.
Can it be that those who know
Sight are often doomed to woe?
Or is it that, seeing,
They never see
With the infinite eyes
Of one like me?

- Langston Hughes 1902 - 1967

In case you dont know, everyone of us has a blind spot in our eyes. It is the result of an minute imperfection in the structure of the eye. (Well, i wont blame it on any intelligent creator.) This flaw occurs in the retina and is well-known point of contention between the perennially bickering evolutionist and the aspostle of ‘intelligent design’ . Well, whether you are a protagonistic evolutionist or creationist, no one can doubt the fact that “the small, circular, optically insensitive region in the retina where fibers of the optic nerve emerge from the eyeball has no rods or cones.”

Hence when light photons falls upon the area, they will go undetected.

Note: I think i gave a description in one of my previous post of the horribly complex process of how sight is achieved right from the light photons to the image we see.

Previously i was fasinated by this blind spot and would childishly ‘play’ with it. With my new found ‘poweress’ to gleefully disfigure and amputate heads and limbs of people whom i dislike from a distance. It is a curious and darn thing once you know where is it and why it happens. But its gets worse when you delve deeper into this seemingly innocous ’spot’; it heralds more than just an imperfection of the eye.

Let me give you an illustration.
source: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/blindspot1.html

Close your left eye and stare at the cross mark in the diagram with your right eye. Off to the right you should be able to see the spot. Don’t LOOK at it; just notice that it is there off to the right (if its not, move farther away from the computer screen; you should be able to see the dot if you’re a couple of feet away). Now slowly move toward the computer screen. Keep looking at the cross mark while you move. At a particular distance (probably a foot or so), the spot will disappear (it will reappear again if you move even closer). The spot disappears because it falls on the optic nerve head, the hole in the photoreceptor sheet.

My Blindspot Map

The series of blue markings are the ‘boundaries’ of my blindspot. Looks big and ominious. Heh.
Want to map your blindspot?

If you really cannot find your blind spot, perhaps this website will help you.

Once you have accquainted with your defect do have fun playing with it. However, once you get tired of it, its time to ruminate on some serious yet baffling questions about the eye and the mind.

Consider a series a test you can perform on your blind spot. Click here.

For the above test, close your right eye and slowly move towards the screen. When the blindspot is aimed at the center of the wheel, no gap is seen.

After doing the tests, one might ask, ” How does the brain know what to fill in the ‘blind spot’?”
Is it a manisfestation of a higher cognitive ability of our brain? How intelligent is this filling in process? Are they the elusive hints or clues to how our brain operates? If we move our blind spot such that it falls upon a person’s head, will it be filled with Donald Duck? George Bush?

In fact, this ‘filling in ‘ phenonmenon is not so isolated in this ‘blind spot’ test.

Take for example this picture.

[1]You will probably see a cube in the picture. No sweat. But before you dismiss this for a trick, congratulate and perhaps savour in the beauty of the inner workings of your highly sophisticated brain. (indulge in a little ego here.) Most of us have the ability to construct figures from fragmentary information. You may see a box in front of the marbles or a box behind the wall through the eight round holes. Even with limited information, the human brain is able to percieve things that are most likely to exist, even if they are not even present at all.

All these are very perplexing, but what is more interesting is when a much larger hole in your visual field - a scotoma - appears. According to a best-seller book - Phantoms in the Brain - (V.S Ramachandran, M.D., PH.D & Snadra Blakeslee), “such patients do exist and they present a valuable opportunity to study how far the brain can go in supplying the “missing information” when needed.”[2]

Some excepts from Phantoms in the Brain:

Josh was a large man with Brezhnev-like eyebrows, a barrel chest and meaty hands…Now in his early thirties, some years earlier he had suffered an industrial accident in hwich a steel rod penetrated the back of his skull, punkching a hole in his right occipital pole in the primary visual cortex. When Josh looks straight ahead, he has a blindspot about the size of my palm to the left of where he’s looking. No other part of his brain was damaged…

…First we decided to see what whould happen if we ran a little line through his scotoma, where a big piece of the visual field was missing. Would he see the line as having a gap, or would he fill it in?

But before we did the experiment, we realized we had a minor techinical problem. If we gave Josh an actual line, asked him to look straight ahead and tell us whether he saw a complete line or piece missing, he might “cheat” inadvertently… We wanted to avoid that so we simply presented Josh with 2 half lines on either side of his scotoma and asked him waht he saw. Would he see a continuous line or 2 half lines? Recall that when you tried this little experiment using your own blind spot, you saw the lins as complete.

He considered for a moment and said, “well, i see 2 lines, one above, one below and there’s a big gap in the middle.”

“okay,” I said. This was not going anywhere.

“wait!” said Josh, squinting. “Wait a minute. You know what? They’re growing toward each other.”

….He held up his right index finger vertically, pointing upward, to mimic the bottom line and his left index finger pointing downward to mimic the top line. At first the 2 fingertips were 2 inches apart, and then Josh started moving them toward each other. “They’re growing, growing.. and now there’s one complete line.” As he said this, his index fingers touched.

Not only is Josh filling in, but the filling in is happening in real time. He could watch it and describe it, contrary to claims that the phenomenon doesnt exist in people with scotomas.

Clearly some nerve circuits in Josh’s brain were taking 2 half lines, lying on either side of the scotoma, as sufficient evidence taht there is a complete line there, and these circuits are sending this message to higher centeres in Josh’s brain. So his brain could complete information across the huge, gaping hole right near his centere of gaze in much the same way that you did across your natural blind spot.

In the book, Ramachandran goes on to list a few more intriguing examples of patients who he encountered have scotomas. Some patients reportedly have “real life objects” like a car, or a book in their scotomas. Other accounts vary from one extreme to the other; like a old lady who saw cartoons in them. Others might refer them as hallucinations. According to Ramachandran, a syndrome known as the Charles Bonnet syndrome is describes the sufferer as having vivid hallucinations of “…bizarre transformations involving people with strange gazes and animals that were, flowing from his brain…”

It is perhaps a clique to say that the brain is a mysterious entity. Neurology is no less fasinating as watching meteors streak across the star-studded sky to know the brain, and its nexus of neurones, is keen to discover itself. As this century progresses i believe we will begin to understand. On the backdrop of our predecessors, we will be shocked as new discoveries and relevations are laid down on our feet; Science may have to rethink itself.

Of course, nearing the end of the 19th Century before the advent of modern day physics, many considered that the study of physics was surely a “dead science”. For it seemed to them that the basic fundamental principles governing the behaviour of the physical universe were already known. Yet, we all know today that Niels Bohr did away with Classical Physics in 1913 and postulated the Quantum Theory which inevitably gave birth to physics that would revolutionise our lives. Even a hundred years later, whenever we look at the heavens or nano-tech robots, we humble ourselves with Issac Newton’s impeccably enlightened rumination of “pebbles on the shore.”

Neuroscience will transform our train of thought in the coming decades. As one part of man probes into the physical universe, the other will yearn to look within; for the answers within us that man looks for will probably transgress any physical or chemical law or theory in the universe.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?
Come, let me clutch
thee:
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger fo the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat oppressed brain?

-William Shakespeare

—–
References
[1].http://www.nidek.com/marbles.html;Playing with Strange Marbles.
[2].Phantoms in the Brain - V.S Ramachandran, and Sandra Blakeslee. Chpt 5 Pg 85 Quote; Pg 97 Figure 5.7; Pg 97-99 Josh.