Swooklet

One of Fergus Murray's animated thingamees.

Man of many talents: Fergus Murray

Recently I received an email to Cycles Research Institute from Fergus Murray. He was suggesting that the CRI Wikipedia index should include resonance, and it should. He is active in another project similar to Wikipedia called everything2.com.

Fergus' own site contains photography (see the kites above), poetry, writing on many issues and his pet project is making animated mathematical functions. These include ones with many dials that can be twiddled to see what happens. Lots of fun!

Vipassana meditation and the Buddha's teaching

Quoted from S N Goenka (shown in picture) when asked about the Buddha's teaching of Vipassana:

"When I began to learn Vipassana meditation, I became convinced that Buddha was a not a founder of religion, he was a super-scientist. A spiritual super-scientist.

When he teaches morality, the point is, of course, there that we are human beings, living in human society, and we should not do anything which would harm the society. It’s quite true. But then—and it’s as a scientist he’s talking here—he says that when you harm anybody, when you perform any unwholesome action, you are the first victim. You first harm yourself and then you harm others. As soon as a defilement arises in the mind, your nature is such that you feel miserable. That is what Vipassana teaches me."

See http://www.dhamma.org for more information about Vipassana and the 100 centres around the world where 10-day courses by S N Goenka are taught.

Let there be light - another good T-shirt

Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism (light) for on a T-shirt http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1351074&lastnode_id=1433012

Multiples of a week show up in orbital periods

Now that so many moons have been discovered around the other planets there is quite a decent sample, when included with the planets, to look for any tendency to quantisation or periodicity.

The method used is by Kotov. Test values are used to find values that are most nearly multiples or fractions of the values known. The Y-axis shows how well the data fit to the test value. In this graph, test values from 10 to 1000 days are used and show that moons and planets prefer to orbit in multiples or fractions of values near 14, 28, 84 and 252 days and others. Note that these periods are 2, 4, 12 and 36 weeks, a nice set of harmonics.

It seems that an underlying 7 day period pervades the solar system.

Ray

You are here

Many years ago I had a T-shirt with this on the front. I wore it until there really was empty space between the stars because I liked it so much. It would often attract comments from passers by such as "I come from there too!"

There are Two types of people - humour

"You say there are two types of people?" "Yes, those who separate people into two groups and those that don't."

"Wrong. There are three groups: Those who separate people into three groups. Those who don't separate people into groups. Those who can't decide."

"Wait a minute, what about people who separate people into two groups?"

"Oh. Okay, then there are four groups."

"Aren't you then separating people into four groups?"

"Yeah."

"So then there's a fifth group, right?"

"You know, the problem is these idiots who can't make up their minds."

I look like my dog - humour

The results of a competition to find the person who most looks like their dog: http://ganns.com/Humor/ILookLikeMyDog/ The picture shows sixth place.

SPAM and Suggested Government action

This is an email that I sent 2 years ago to the NZ Government. Not much has changed since then.

From: Ray Tomes To: Minister of Communications and Information Technology of New Zealand Government Date: Apr 23 2003 - 5:09pm

Dear Minister of Communications and Information Technology

I write to you on two matters relating to internet and email which I consider require attention by the government of New Zealand.

The first is the distribution of vast quantities of unsolicited junk mail and in particular pornographic and illegal fraudulent activities mail which may be sent to children and other incredulous people. The second matter is in a following email.

In general, any child can expect to begin receiving such email and for it to rapidly increase in volume over several years who does any of the following harmless activities :- set up a web site with an email address on it; post a message to a usenet group (it might be on the subject of a hobby or a school subject); join any other discussion forum.

Also, adults of below average intelligence or common sense, or just motivated by a little greed can fall prey to many fraudsters. In my view we should be protecting such people as much as possible from such activities, and more importantly bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Recently I changed my email address because I was receiving 10,000 unsolicited junk email per year and I was sick of wading through it all for my real email. This is no exaggeration, and the rate was steadily climbing. In itself this is a very annoying problem worthy of some government attention, but is not the main purpose of this email. My concern is that a very large proportion of these email are sent by pornographers, especially child pornographers, fraudsters and various other people with bad intent.

The reason that I receive so many of these email is simply that I have been on the internet for a long time, have a web site with my email address on it, have posted messages to usenet discussion groups (not related in subject matter to these email in any way), and belonged to several other public discussion groups.

These parasites on society have programs to comb the web, usenet groups and other frequently used facilities for email addresses and build large bases of addresses. The longer one is on internet the more one gets attacked by these people. Any child having a web site or posting a message to a public group (it might be on the subject of homework) will be added to these address lists and can receive the same content as I do in the analysis below.

The actions that I believe the government should be taking are:-

1. Make it illegal (if it is not already) to send unsolicited email offering pornography, gambling, investments & finance, drugs, and fraud schemes. I am not trying to stop people having access to pornography, gambling etc if that is what they want. I am trying to stop people being pressured by fraudsters and and these other classes of low life.

2. Make sure that such emails are not being sent from NZ by requiring that all ISPs must be sure of the real person and address of all customers (I think this is probably already the case) and prosecuting people who send illegal email from NZ. If the ISP cannot supply the real person's details then they should be prosecuted.

3. Encouraging other countries to do the same and to make international agreements that stamp out these activities. They are only going to get worse with time at a very rapid rate. I believe that the volume of these emails shows that people with bad intent are already fleecing the NZ public of many millions of dollars each year.

4. Make it the responsibility of the police to act positively in doing something about these illegal activities.

I analyzed 7 days of these emails from my old email address and make some comments about the content and trend of these email. In only 7 days I received email as follows:

65 pornography including many email with graphic images in them and many offers of "naked girls 6-12 years old", "horses cocks in tiny teens pussies" and "gay sex".

1 offer to increase my penis size by 1/4 to 3". Usually there are more of these and some offering to increase my breast size too. I would have to permanently take a wheel-barrow with me for my huge penis and breasts if I took up a fraction of these offers.

6 nigerian/zimbabwe offers to send me millions of dollars, known as the nigerian letter, but in many forms. These are fraudsters that steal thousands of dollars off each of many gullible people.

25 offers to purchase drugs on-line, including commonly viagra, human growth hormone and all sorts of wonder drugs.

17 saying my mortgage or loan was approved (when I never applied) or other offers of finance. 11 investment offers disguised as being advise from investment firms. 3 offers to remove bad credit ratings.

8 gambling and casinos encouraging betting on their sites. 4 you won $xxx which are possibly gambling sites.

4 offers of email lists of millions of people. This is so that you too can start annoying people and sending them all sorts of lies.

4 offers to get a "quick" degree

21 sales offers ranging from legitimate to dodgy looking ones.

27 various other, some in foreign languages or incoherent and obviously the first efforts of poor fools who bought the email lists and didn't know what to do next.

So altogether I got 196 annoying email in 7 days, or 28 per day or about 10,200 per year. I did not especially pick the above period it was just a random 7 days.

Yours sincerely

Ray Tomes

Some thoughts on Pope John Paul II's greatness

Although not a catholic, It did think that Pope John Paul II was a great man. Many world leaders said so too, but their reason was often to do with the fall of communism. My reasons are quite different - he did three things that earned my respect:

Pardoned Galileo who was quite correct in his scientific views on the Earth going around the Sun and had been persecuted by the Church. I saw this as a kind of peace-making with, if not an actual apology to, scientists.

Apologised to Jews for the inquisition and was the first Pope to visit a Synagogue.

Apologised to Muslems for the crusades and visited a number of Muslem countries.

Through these acts he acknowledged some of the darkest acts of the Church. This is a kind of confessional for the Church itself and makes clear the intention to be more respectful of other people's views in the future.

There are other cases of the Church acting in a similar way to the above three. Whether Pope John Paul II was aware of these I do not know, but suspect that he would have addressed them if he was aware and had the opportunity. One such is the treatment of Buddhists, particularly Buddhist Monks, in South East Asia. For example, Portugese Catholics burried Buddhist Monks in the earth up to their necks and ran ploughs over their heads. This is very far from proper behaviour as taught by both Jesus Christ and the Buddha who both taught us to love all, including your enemies (that is, have no enemies).

May the new Pope carry on, as he has already stated he will, to have a friendly and understanding relationship with other faiths and beliefs.

May all be happy

Buddhist Monk from Myanmar

Old pagodas in Bagan in late afternoon.

Finding a Buddhist Monk's blog page at http://palithought.blogspot.com/2005/01/what-i-am-and-why-i-am-here.html I sent the following reply:

Dear Bikkhu

Several years ago I visited Myanmar with my Vipassana lay teacher S N Goenka and another 500 of his students. We visited the sites of the chain of teachers from which he comes, U Ba Khin, Sayagi Thetgi, Ledi Sayadaw, and other important Buddhist and Vipassana sites.

The people of Myanmar are very friendly and kind in spite of the difficult circumstances in the country. It was wonderful to travel with so many people commited to Dhamma. We were received with great kindness and respect in many places and I wish for happiness and prosperity for the people of Myanmar.

One comment about your interests. If you put "pali, abhidhamma, python" instead of the phrases that you have, then they will act as links to other people with similar interests.

I also have an interest in all three of these things. I would be happy to discuss them all with you.

Metta Ray Tomes

Towards a new theory - NON-LINEARITY

Dear Members of the Yahoo group Physics_Frontier, Given that the aim of this group is to abandon difficulties with physics and cosmology, I want to put forward some views that I think can take us a long way towards a new theory. Such a new theory should hopefully unite previously disconnected branches of knowledge. NON-LINEARITY The most important part of a new theory is the recognition of the part that non-linearity has to play in it. When understanding matter and e/m it is impossible for an ultimate theory to be linear. That is because when we add the wave forms of things together, if they are all linear then there cannot be interaction. This follows simply from the fact that in a linear system F(a+b)=F(a)+F(b) and it makes not a tiny bit of difference to light that matter exists if the universal equations are linear. In fact, under GR (which I think is mathematically essentially correct) e/m is non-linear because all energy gravitates or distorts space-time. That means that the above equation is not true in GR. That means that light and matter must interact in GR. That is very good, because we know that they do, but they interact a lot more than just what GR says. That leads to QM. The problem with QM is that there are a vast number of hidden assumptions. To do physics properly we need all the assumptions out in the open. That is Einstein's great contribution, and before him we may mention Euclid who made all his assumptions clear as axioms and then deduced everything else from these. This is a model for us all. Some of the assumptions of QM seem to be that particle masses are constant over time. This has been questioned by Narlikar, Hoyle, Arp, Burbidge etc. and there are alternative physics / cosmologies where this assumption is not made. I believe that they are closer to the truth. Later, I will argue a lot further from the simple starting point today. All I want to establish now is that ultimate theories must be non-linear or else we would never observe anything. The senses depend on interaction that changes the otherwise continued development of e/m (and other) waves. Interaction in this sense absolutely means non-linearity. After any discussion on this post, I will move on to showing that if non-linearity is accepted as a premise then particles must develop over time. This will lead into Le Sage theory of gravity, particle mass change, Cosmological red shift, and my own personal work of the Harmonics Theory. This theory gives many answers, including quite a few that no-one ever asked. See http://ray.tomes.biz/maths.html Regards Ray Tomes

The 8 year cycle in NZ currency

There is an 8 year cycle in currencies, particularly relative to the New Zealand dollar. The US dollar takes the opposite extreme with other currencies in between.

The graph shows the present high in the Kiwi.

The violent stuff at the start was when the NZ$ was first floated free from government control.

A similar cycle exists in NZ terms of trade and in building activity. It probably starts from a primary produce cycle and flows through.

Ray Tomes http://ray.tomes.biz/

Wonderful quote by Jung

"I might, perhaps, content myself by referring to Columbus, who, by using subjective assumptions, a false hypothesis, and a route abandonedby modern navigation, nevertheless discovered America"
C. Jung, 1933 p.84

Solar 5 minute wave comes in 7s

The sun has some oscillations called 5 minute oscillations and the graph shows that they come in groups of 7 just like the ocean waves. Ray Tomes

Google desktop

There is a wonderful program by google that allows searching within your own computer. I have hundreds of thousands of files and emails and group discussions so it is really useful.

Previously it didn't work with my email client which is Mozilla, but I got a new version yesterday and it does. This means that I can much moreeasily find all my notes and email discussions on every topic.

-- Ray Tomes http://ray.tomes.biz/