Richard Miller & Spirituality

Think about what spirituality is: It's a deeper experience of life, where you transcendent the concept of a 'little' identity and gain the understanding that you're part of something bigger than yourself.

FUTURES

Futures is the award-winning science-fiction section of Nature. Contributions are usually commissioned, but unsolicited articles are welcome. Each Future should be an entirely fictional, self-contained story between 850-950 words in length, and the genre should, broadly speaking, be 'hard' (that is, 'scientific' SF) rather than, say, outright fantasy, slipstream or horror. Each item should be sent as a Word (.doc) attachment to futures@nature.com, including full contact details and a 30-word autobiographical note to be appended to the story if published. (Please do not send presubmission enquiries, but send the whole story.) Unsolicited artwork is not considered. Before submitting, prospective authors are advised to read earlier Futures columns in Nature and Nature Physics; selected examples are available free at http://www.concatenation.org/futuresindex.html.

Waves, harmonics, eigenfrequencies

A wave theory of god and the universe: "God is the sound of Om"; take it lieterally.
Samayama on things, persons: resonate harmonically
Samayama on own body: reduce non-harmonical frequencies.
Sayings: we're on the same wavelength.
Stable Ecosystems: decompose in harmonical (=stable) wave patterns
Origin or religion: memory of tuned-in state. Religious figures: harmonical composition? Do fourier transforms on venus willendorf, stonehenge etc.
Quantum mechanics: every particle is a wave.
Wave is energy;
Meditation: eliminating all non-harmonical wavelengths.

Deconstruction, reconstruction: the fiction

Use method to
1) reconstruct lost memories
2) enhance details of pictures
3) induce other's memories & sensations in one's own mind
get your own library of personal thoughts
extract and enhance memories of dying, comatosed etc crime victims for purpose of tracking down the murderer.
commissar haunted by images, shift of perception, personality, reality.
own wife victim: same method, but unexpected revelation?
or restoring one's own memories: strange details about own life?
or misleading information purpusfully induced in last victime through same method?

4) induce other memories for recreational purposes; spot crime:
say: bundgeejumping perception disk recorded on persons that know they will die - to obtain higher sensations.
danger of having publicity introduced.

Deconstruction, reconstruction: the science

sparse coding, histogram of wavelet filter output.
Used to analyse paintings;
use it the other way: to reconstruct, or higher the resolution of photos, nature, thoughts, dreams, memories.
a dictionary of spatial features;
the dictionary is trained on an ensemble of images. Minimum amount of elements from dictionary encode / build up a given region.
Detects spatial patterns that occur in images with higher frequency than chance, providing a snapshot of the structure contained in the data.
Neuroscientists have shown that such dictionaries, when trained on a large ensemble of natural scenes, match the receptive-field characteristics of neurons in the primary visual cortex of mammals. Sparse coding may be used by neurons for sensory representation in the cortex.

Intriguingly, all of these models are generative - that is can be used to synthesise images matching the statistics captured by the model.
Computers might be able to generate images that convincingly emulate the style of a particular artist.

Amma Sri Karunamayi

arriving early morn in extremely cold wind. Ladies direct, looking like from a refugee camp, with their layers and layers of unmatching cloths, torn away by the wind.
We struggle towards the tent like in a movie about biblical plagues.
Inside, vision like a camp for catastrophy surviors with an imminent cholera outbreak. Tent torn by the wind. Wear white was the directive, but people now where what they can get hold off, including fluffy lilac kid's scarfs and dog's plankets.
Fires are lit; with the wind they produce quickly unbearable smoke that makes our eyes burn.
Amma arrives, nonchalant, simple, with a completely yellow face.
Talks about how not to wear black, or receive black things, or eat cucumbers and what chant protects against premature boldness, toothache and bad digestion.
Lady in black gets dark looks from disciple.
Elderly lady plays tambourine, as if she publicly has to clean up doogpoo. Sometimes tries to blow a huge shell, mostly fails but inexorably goes pink-red from the effort. Indian 3D musician looks like she's ready to perform human sacrifice (Amma? herself? everyone?) and plays flute.
Other lady looks like a psychodelic witch, nose blocked with large paperstrips, huge dark sunglasses, cape over wild black hair.
Solkem oscillates like a cobra in front of the piper.
Amma burns enough food for an African village.
thinly dressed man next to fire puts frenetically wood in fireplace, resulting in much smoke that visibly causes extreme pain in the eyes of the lady who is on top charged to poor smoke-provoking oil into the fire.
Amma asks to chant incredibly complex syllables.
grey followers is extatically telling everyone the great things Amma did (poring milk over a statue, entering, walking, etc).
Solkem makes everyone sing mantras in search of HERS.

great novel says

The great novel says: 'hey, you could prevent this'.
David Brin

storyline

A contagious disease leads to human extinction, but it's a disease transmitted not by a pathogen or prion, but by behaviour only.
Aliens collecting DNA of particular Humans (human traits), to see which cause our extinction.
Alien spaceship lands in Poland and aliens speak fluent polish.

Characters

X likes to get his foot's imprints into fresh concrete, so that he'll leaves his traces in history.

Procrastination

Procrastination refers to the deferment of actions or tasks to a later time. Psychologists often cite such behavior as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting and/or completing any task or decision.[1] There are three criteria for a behavior to be classified as procrastination: it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying.[2]
Procrastination may result in stress, a sense of guilt and crisis, severe loss of personal productivity, as well as disapproval by others for not meeting responsibilities or commitments. These feelings combined may promote further procrastination. While it is regarded as normal for people to procrastinate to some degree, it becomes a problem when it impedes normal functioning. Chronic procrastination may be a sign of an underlying psychological disorder.

characters

Loren's friend always carried a huge spoon.
after having had only bad prophecies from Chinese biscuits, which realised themselves!, Guillaume refused to open them. However as he did so after a few years, he had not one prophecy, but a whole lot of them, in one biscuit.

storylines?

maybe a skewed version of the Houston chronicles?

Saw a friendly 40-something woman with light blue trousers and a lightblue polycoloured boopland top.
Saw a sheik coming out from the elevator. A genuine sheik with all necessary attributes, except for that his tunic was colored in a psychedelic mix yellow orange and blue;
K looked charming with her platinum-blond hair and orange make-up;

Got a car insurance bill over 1,300 $ to be paid before beginning of last week.

end of Ockham

Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor[1]), entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, is the principle that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity". The principle is attributed to 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham. Occam's razor may be alternatively phrased as pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate ("plurality should not be posited without necessity").[2]

make a story where this principle fails

brainstorming

what do I know best
science; lab life
bars, nightlife, parties
WWII planes, dinosaurs
tkd, yoga, jogging
Montpellier, France, Houston, Oxford, London
sense of life, evolution

what am I best in
describe funny situations
inner monologue
observing people, describing them
irony, make fun out of myself
absurd situations

Storyline

Alto Ponte: works as lab helper and at night in Epicerie de nuit.
When bike broken, takes tramway and meets boopland woman, friendly, while tramdriver waits for her (which he normally doesn't).
happy night without noticing, next day tram again? no, but day thereafter.
His struggle/task?
get a life
find his daughter/ex-wife
solve a crime (with google maps)
a ridiculous crime. maybe the activity of the monument cleaners?
danger of succumbing to iworld.

bribes?

whats next? one should do what one is best in.
Alto looked at his hands, then the ceiling.
And there was a long aching emptiness.
I franly don't think I can do anything better than the average person in the street, but probably have more defaults. Not even vices. Just defaults.
One should be honest with oneself; it's the intention, not the result.
I just want to leave. The whole place, life, me.

plot?

See something (person, crime) on google earth, and try to find it in real life.

fears

L fears clowns and midgets

Me, myself and I

I: a neurological concept that allows an organism to place itself in the context of things it perceives. To determine its place, time, relation to other objects and beings.
Since the 'I' concept is an unevenly compiled synthesis of highly limited current exterior and interior perceptions and of greatly flawed memories of past ones, it can only give a highly skewed image. Nevertheless, through adaptation, this image will be sufficiently perfect for most life situations.

ich störung

Menschen mit 'ich-störung': "Reisende unterwegs in unvorstellbare Länder, Länder von denen wir sonst gar nichts wüssten" (Oliver Sacks: 'Der Mann, der seine Frau mit einem Hut verwechselte')

Triopetra

Labyrinth made by German woman with cancer.
Maria in the labyrinth
we in the labyrinth
it is always quicker to get out of it than to enter it.
this place is the origin of an energetic arch.
Ghosts: a newcomer to a place is just sees the place, even though for others it is a scene populated with the ghosts of their memory. See us lying there at night, where others now just contemplate the sea.
The sun rises in Palermo – Maria tries to tell the story, and always gets interrupted. Two murderers, a star?
All the woman are either called Eva, or Marie.
Harris and his contemplative movie of the derwishes, involuntarily close to a Monthy python view on Sufi dances.

Drifter

In all photographies, pictures of the army, even his wedding, Hans looked into some far away point on the left; he almost never faced the camera directly, and only did so when he was particularly at ease. This however appears to be only the case of some pictures with his army Kameraden, shortly before, or at the beginning of the war. Never afterwards.
I guess that's just how he was (not)facing life and always hung out in some remote place, somewhere to the left.
Maybe I am the same.

Pistache yoga

tu ne veux pas que personne s'en mele, car c'est entre toi et ta pratique

lines of conversation

If we don't wash, hence are in a natural state, we quickly smell like fish. So I really don't know what all that fuzz about evolution is about: clearly we all come from the sea, and can't hide it.

lines of thought

Had this dream: Was sitting on a steep stairway, and was trying to sleep. but just below me, there was this tall annoying bloke that continuously tried to stick his finger into my bum. I think that that's just how life is.

Organisation

The Untergunther SS (or South Section), specialised in cleaning remote spots of unseen cultural heritage in and around Montpellier
or: Schmuttzfritz, GanzUnterGunther.

Paris by train

The only thing I can remember from my train journey, is that the map of France with train lines indicated looked like a disembodied eye with red veins coming from the pupil.

Mother Earth Food

What we need: a restaurant that serves food that is not simply healthy for us, but healthy for the whole planet. Eating there should have the least negative impact on our ecosystem, er even be beneficial.
This would include:
- a team of scientists/ecologists/etc (ideally a non-profit group with a personal interest in sustainable development) will decide on what types of ingredients will be used, depending on the season, health benefits and ecological considerations.
-Weighing the gain of biological food against the negative ecological impact of importing it from too far away. Privileging and encouraging local biological food over imports. If this choice is difficult for two equivalent products, leave the criteria of choice to the customer.
- Use seasonal food; of course this includes a reduced choice at times, but this 'sacrifice' will do us good.
- Non-vegetarian. However, provide a wide choice of vegetarian dishes and use as little meat as possible. If meet, then as 'ethical' as possible (free-range biologically fed animals), as sustainable as possible (only use fish that are not threatened by overfishing, prioritise fish from fish farms) and smaller-than-usual portions.
- encourage doggy-bags.
- provide print-outs with seasonal food choices applied in the restaurant (so that you can do it at home too)
- include a sprouts-'laboratory' with innovative sprouts.
- optionally, there could be cleansing diets (with a take home possibility) in special weeks.
- Include a small supplement (say 0.5 EUR) which will be donated to one of several official humanitarian or ecological organisations (Green Peace, MSF...). The choice of which organisation will profit from the donation will be made by the guest!
- annexes may include: libraries, conferences, expositions
- a children's yoga class

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