Simplified snagged TWO Charlotte Music Awards at the red carpet event in Charlotte Thursday November 19.

Simplified won Best Rock Band and Clee Laster won Best Male Vocalist.

Congrats to the hard working guys in Simplified, Intrepid Artists, and Rockman Managment!

www.simplifiedmusic.com

Eric Bogatin’s book is for beginners. It lays down principles of the signal integrity in layman terms.
http://referencedesigner.com/blog/signal-integrity-simplified/153/

For the latest newsy pod, Carol Hills and Clark Boyd from the Big Show help me pick our top five language-related stories from the past month:

5. Some birds develop  distinct dialects based on the decibel levels of their habitats. Dialect here is a term of art. It does not mean that birds living in say, North Carolina  chirp the avian version of  “y’all.” No, it means that over time, some bird species can change the frequency, pitch and volume of their song according to their sonic environment.  The latest study, of the white-crowned sparrow (pictured) shows that urban noise appears to have a profound impact on birdsong.

There is a BBC story from a few years ago suggesting  that cows pick up on regional human accents. But, alas, the story may have been largely bogus.

4. A British translation firm is offering to provide local interpreters to companies doing business in Glasgow.  Proof that there are many, many variations of English, even on one medium-sized island. This service may be more useful at football match or a betting shop than in a boardroom: I can’t imagine that white-collar Glaswegians use terms like moroculous, laldy and maw during working hours. But it is true that Glasgow English is a massive challenge, especially for non-native English speakers. As is Newcastle, Liverpool and Swansea English.

3.The French President Nicolas Sarkozy is calling for reforms in how foreign languages are taught in schools.  Surpringly,  France lags behind many other developed countries when it comes to bilingualism and foreign language learning, as discussed in a couple of  earlier posts and podcasts. Now, doubtless spurred by The World in Words’ efforts to give this matter an airing, the French government is vowing to act. The proposed reforms  haven’t been decided upon yet, but they seem likely to favor oral skills over grammar.  Some European language-learning groups however,  are skeptical that the reforms will help much.

2. Chinese expats are doing battle over which script U.S. schools should use to teach Chinese. Schools have two options — traditional characters, favored in Taiwan and Hong Kong, or simplified characters, used in mainland China. Where there is a large expat Taiwanese community, as there is in certain parts of Los Angeles,  schools are more likely to use traditional characters. But that’s changing, as more Chinese communites outside of China (eg in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia) switch to simplified characters. And all that trade that the U.S. does with mainland China means that it makes a lot of sense to learn the script in use there.  However, proponents of traditional characters aren’t giving up without a fight, sometimes perhaps to the detriment of the kids trying to learn the language.

1.  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is going linguistically global.  This is the organization that oversees and sets certain rules for domain names. ICANN is now allowing non Latin script urls. It’s something Latin script-writers think of as a mere technicality. But if you’re not used to writing Latin script, it’s a major pain to have to. So this should make the internet accessible to even more people around the world. And who knows, the Georgian script on the banner of this blog may one day end up as part of  a domain name. (I took the photo. It’s of a billboard above a highway in central Georgia. The messages, courtesy of the government, are patriotic slogans.  Someone told me exactly what the words mean, but…sorry, I’ve forgotten.)

Listen in iTunes or here.

Is it really my return?

Forgiveness I ask and I grant myself for not posting and sharing my thoughts how rough and inconsistent they may be in terms of schedules and all that. I can’t even call myself a blogger now… It’s been months since my last post and I didn’t even finish my postings for my much-acclaimed and sought after vacation in Bangkok (I still owe you guys 5 days of it)

I really feel sad. Ashamed. Really.

It all started that I, call it neglect if you must, not anymore updating this blog since my Biggie then that later became (and was renamed) Hughie started to show some “sickness”. For those who never knew who (or rather what) was this “Biggie” that later on became “Hughie”, it’s my Powerbook (yes, Powerbook, not Macbook just Powerbook). It started to show signs days before I went for my vacation trip to Bangkok and while I was there, it’s sort of cranking up already. Thinking that probably it’s overworked or something, I let it rest and used it a few days later.

To cut the story short, it crashed on me not once but twice! Yes. TWICE. The very reason why it became a “Hughie” renaming it from Hugh Jackman whom I wish… ah, nevermind. Twice I lost my files, personal files… including my sorted photo album in iPhoto and my latest photos from Bangkok But later on, I found out that some of the last pictures I took was still in one of my compact flashes and I was able to retrieve them. But I lost energy to sort and select since I’ve done it before. (The pain… huhuhu)

Let’s just say, this might not be really a good year for me. Aside from the crashes and losses, I was diagnosed one day of having an asthma. Well, for a few months after diagnosis and a whole week of absence from work I avoided food that might trigger to coughing that then leads to sleepless nights and asthma attacks. I restrain myself from chocolates, eggs and milk or anything that had those. Until recently, I can’t help myself… but thankfully, no attacks so far

Surely you’ve read about the flash floods and typhoons that hit Philippines. Well, my family and I and some close friends of mine are victims. My old drawings and illustrations, photo albums, first publication and printed works, my airbrush and compressor to name a few were destroyed by the flood. Books of my granddaughters were ruined by it too that it breaks my heart knowing the kids cried because of it. It was hard to throw things that once you knew was yours, was intact and you loved or at lest liked. But we have to move one. A couple of days after I’m done cleaning up in my home in the province, I went to Manila to help out a friend. I shared to him my technique to make the cleaning and sorting fast. I told him to psych himself that if it was only that time (cleaning) that he remembered he had those stuff, it means you don’t need it so better throw it/them. Well, it could have worked on me or to some people. But if you see your big box of comic books you collected since way back then, dripping in muddy water… if it was mine I’d cry. Honestly, it hurts but again, all has at least a reason, a sane reason why it happened to you and it won’t be given to you if you can’t handle it well.

But I’d say, we’re still lucky for none of our families lost a loved one. God is still good to us.

A few things happened to my family. Tatay was hospitalized due to head trauma when he fell off the stairs. But prior to that, he had to go back home because no one will take care of him after he had that thing inserted in his heart (sorry, I forgot the term). But he’s fine now, recovering. But he won’t be able to come back and work in the US. Nanay, well, strong as ever. she may have tantrums or breakdowns once in awhile specially when I don’t go home but she’s a fighter. My kuyas, well, both have their families to deal with. They visit once in awhile.

And me, well, after months of no personal computer and seeing my Powerbook just being a dust collector or a paper weight beside me everyday when I report to my work post I’m pretty much ok. I guess learning and losing things we worked for or things that we knew we once had may hurt but it does take time for you to get over it. It depends actually on you. I let it go. I accepted that fact that it happened. Actually, I’m surprise myself that I didn’t violently reacted specially when I lost my files twice. It seems like I saw it coming or sort of expecting it. there were sacrifices, yes. I had to stay late in the office for me to play or watch something online or downloaded. But somehow it gave me time to think of other things to do. I now read… yes, read… novels, short stories. I try write, by hand mind you. The old school journals. Even do word hunt puzzles, the old way: bought a couple for my Tatay as his past time only thing is, one was left with me and I’m the one who worked on it. It’s easy ah! It’s addicting too… hihihi. Brain exercise for me… non-work related exercise.

So, pretty much the world continued to revolve. Either to with it or counterflow it. But why resist when you know you can manage to drive with it. Gees. What am I saying here? Oh well, Im just glad I got to write again here. But I can’t promise when again. I did plan to draw or doodle too manually, not digitally but still… I haven’t done or even started at least one of project on it. I got 3 blank notebooks, good material for illustrating as gifts from my last birthday. I guess some force is telling me, persuading me to draw or at least doodle.

I guess this is it… goodbye for now but I’ll be back but God knows when it will be or what I’ll be posting.

As for now, ta-tah… live well

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There is no doubt about it. I love Guy Fieri. The Guy has personality popping from the tips of his spiky do to the bottoms of his sandal clad feet. He likes bling. He has tattoos and drives a snazzy rag top classic car. He is inventive and unabashedly in love with cooking, eating and making others happy. What is there NOT to like?

Friday nights I watch Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.  It is my ultimate chill out from a week of wild work within the music business.

Imagine my surprise to learn Guy in my semi-hometown (I’m from a “suburb” of Charlotte, Belmont NC), The Queen City. Yesterday my pal Laurie Koster actually got to be on set at a taping of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives at Cabo Fish Taco in Charlotte. What a lucky, lucky, lucky girl.

This all ties in nicely to SIMPLIFIED’s performance Sunday November 01 at MACS SPEED SHOP, (“a quasi-dive where the parking lot mixes bikes, Beemers and Bugs. Charlotte may not be a barbecue town, but Mac’s brisket inspired Photographer and “meat-atarian” Gary Clark, to declare, “This is better’n any I’ve had in Texas.” -Southern Living Magazine 6/2008) I hope to entice Guy, if he’s still in town, to check out the band at Mac’s, a former transmission shop turned barbeque spot and one of Simplified’s best nights of music!

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 So, there are these really tiny things called atoms that consist of a centre of protons and neutrons, with even tinier electrons zooming around them like possessed bees. It’s an interesting point to note that atoms are mostly nothingness, complete void, which means that so too is everything in our world.

Some atoms are really good at attracting electrons towards them. It depends on a lot of things, such as how many shells they have (their row on the periodic table) which also affects how far from the nucleus the outermost electrons (“valence” electrons) are and how many protons they have (their atomic number). Now that you know that, I’m sure you can work out how these trends go. You’re intelligent people.

For the cheaters: More electronegative going left to right, and bottom to top, ignoring the noble gases. Fluorine is the most electronegative – and I always have a mental image of a fluorine atom telling its electrons “No, there’s no way you could do that, don’t even bother trying, you’ll just fail.” What a pessimist!

A covalent bond might be polar or non-polar. If it’s polar then one end is slightly more negative than the other end, due to the difference in electronegativities. The C-F bond is polar, but the shape of CF₄ is tetrahedral, which means it is symmetrical, so the overall molecule is not polar. But the H-Cl bond is also polar and the shape is linear, because there are only two atoms involved, so the overall molecule is polar, with differently charged ends or “dipoles”.

If you want to know about shapes, let me know. I think they’re a useless amount of memorizing. But it’s about interest here! I am the geek of the people!

Seeing as covalent bonds result in separate molecules, they have intermolecular forces (between the molecules) as well, called “van der Waals” (van de Vahls) forces.

With non-polar molecules such as CF₄ or CO₂, the buzzing electrons can concentrate in an instant in one place resulting in a temporary dipole that induces polarity in nearby molecules, resulting in a chain of temporary dipoles, attracting them for an instant. This is why, if you cool gases such as N₂ down, slowing the buzzing of the electrons right down, they form a liquid.

And liquid nitrogen can be used to make instant ice-cream, which apparently tastes just as good as the stuff that takes two hours at home. But if it freezes your hand, it will probably drop off. Be careful around very cold things. Like liquid nitrogen.

Polar molecules, like HCl, have permanent dipoles, so the positive end of one molecule attracts the negative end of a nearby molecule. This is stronger than temporary dipoles because it is constant and there is usually a greater difference between ends than in the temporary dipole.

Hydrogen bonding is like a superpowered version of permanent dipoles. When H bonds to nitrogen, oxygen, or fluorine, the large difference in electronegativity results in a near-empty hydrogen orbital. It only had one electron to begin with! Poor hydrogen… it attracts the negative end of a nearby molecules very strongly and so is the strongest van der Waals force.

The van der Waals force involved will determine the state of a non-metal covalent molecule.

This leads me to organic chemistry. Next stop, propane.

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By Annie

I’ve always wanted to get into quilting, but frankly, it just seemed like a lot more work than I was willing to do.  Fortunately, I’m a master at simplifying craft projects, and managed to make an “un-quilt” in less than three days.

The Inspiration:

Photo: Craftzine.com

This classic t-shirt quilt by Michelle Kempner is a beautiful example of what I wanted to do.  She took the time to create a pattern, measure each piece, and sew each shirt together in a color-coordinated masterpiece.

I’m not an overworked person, but I am impatient, so this really wasn’t an option for me…

Simplified:

I really wanted to make something like this for my boyfriend for his birthday, but having never made a quilt before, it seemed pretty intimidating.  Not to mention, his birthday was less than a week away by the time I actually got the supplies to begin.

My Version of the T-Shirt Quilt

So I chose a patterned fabric to use for the main area of my quilt, then cut each of the t-shirts into equal sized squares and sewed them onto the fabric.  Then, I picked out a pre-quilted sheet for the other side, sewed a border around the edge and attached the two sides.  To really save time, I used stitch witchery on the quilted side of the blanket (the one with the three X’s) since I thought that sewing them on would be a tedious task.

My Version of the T-Shirt Quilt

]]> http://blog.silex.co.in/2009/08/23/welcome-to-our-new-simplified-website/ Sun, 23 Aug 2009 02:52:48 +0000 panitha http://blog.silex.co.in/2009/08/23/welcome-to-our-new-simplified-website/

Welcome to our new simplified website!

We’ve made some significant changes to make your Silex Technologies site experience better than ever. You’ll find improved, a cleaner interface and a new Customer Show Case section. Enjoy simplicity too..

Share your thoughts with us.
We’re waiting to hear from you.

See our site:  www.silex.co.in

Cheers!

www.simplifiedmusic.com

Quote- a quote is the amount of money a group charges for services. Quotes are usually give for private events.

questions- ask a lot of them. It’s better to appear ill educated  for a moment than risk a mistake.

The Introduction to the real photography!

This is a simplified and easy to understand camera article for new DSLR users or photo enthusisast.

There are heaps of review on DSLR and what type of camera is this. I will make this article a simple and easy to understand guide. If you are reading this, you should probably consider getting one!
What is a SLR and DSLR camera? SLR is a single-lens reflex camera that uses a simple mechanical system that direct light from the lens to an optical viewfinder!
It is a camera that switch the mirror after you click the shutter release button (Shooting button) to the sensor which will expose the light sensitive sensor (for DSLR) and film (for manual SLR). The switching of mirrors happen in milliseconds! It allows you to shoot almost exactly what you are able to see in your viewfinder!

Optical Viewfinder : The tiny hole where you peek through to aim your camera!

Unless you tried shooting with a SLR camera, or else, you will not be able to tell the difference between the shooting speed of a Point and Shoot digital camera and a SLR.

If you are interested in photography, DSLRs / SLRs are the best choice you have! Of course not everyone will agree to the statement. There are a lot of other camera choices that take great photos. Not the digital point and shoot cameras but the polaroid cameras, lomography cameras and even other vintage cameras. I will also like to grab hold of the wooden frame or solid metal frame cameras too!

The main reason why shots taken by professional photographer is so much more attractive compare to what you shoot with a point and shoot digital camera is because of the color, contrast and camera settings. You can never reach that settings with a point and shoot camera! NEVER! The aperture and shutter speed control gave a huge advantage to SLR cameras as compared to other cameras.

Remember to drop any comments of questions you have!
Here is a buying guide on which DSLR suits you.
I will try my best to answer them as simple and easy to understand as possible.

Here are some videos that give a audio visual explanation of DSLR

What is DSLR camera – Part 1

What is DSLR camera – Part 2

hese are a series of short essays from the New York Times regarding traditional and simplified Chinese characters, and the evolution of the Chinese written language in general.

The Utopian Ideal in Writing

Eileen Cheng-yin Chow is an associate professor of Chinese literary and cultural studies at Harvard University.

The utopian impulses behind standardization and simplification of a living language are always understandable. Increased literacy, administrative efficiency, and ease of communication are laudable goals. But those impulses can also strip a language of its wit, whimsy, and play, not to mention its capacity to accommodate new concepts and usages.

Traditional characters and simplified characters never were two separate and autonomous language systems — they have always existed on a continuum. Many simplified characters are adaptations from common usage in Chinese cursive script; on the other hand, the inability to read traditional characters is to close oneself off to much of the Chinese cultural legacy — its history and arts — before the 1950s.

Since I grew up in Taiwan, where reading and writing in traditional characters is the norm, simplified characters were a novelty and a bit of a challenge, and perhaps, something to be sniffed at. But when my first job after college led me to Beijing to work as a literary translator, I spent the first week furtively consulting a little manual of “Simplified/Traditional Character Conversion” before I became fully comfortable with the new system, including learning to write my name in a way that was comprehensible to desk clerks. The experience taught me the follies of being a cultural purist.

Given the increasing flow of published and online materials among the mainland China, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese diasporas, a literate reader must have the ability to code-switch. Thus, the answer is not either/or, but — annoyingly for policy makers — both.

Elitism vs. Populism

Eugene Wang is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller professor of Asian art at Harvard University.

Simplifying traditional Chinese characters was a linguistic democratization and one of China’s most successful progressive programs in the 1950s. The majority of the population was lifted out of illiteracy.

Literacy had long remained a privilege and a source of power wielded by the elitist few. With the characters made easier to learn, the key to knowledge embedded in written texts was handed to a wide population.

A clash between traditional and simplified characters comes down to elitism vs. populism. A recent poll conducted by Sohu.com on whether to reinstate the traditional characters shows that more netizens oppose it. Behind the elitism/populism divide is the opposition between an archaistic nostalgia toward the illusory “purer” traditional Chinese literacy and a pragmatic and forward-looking modern drive. (Both Singapore and Malaysia, with sizable Chinese populations, also adopted simplified characters decades ago.)

Advocates for reinstating traditional characters exaggerate the break of the simplified system from the traditional orthography. Simplified characters still retain the basic structure of traditional ideographs. The structural continuity makes the switch between them easy and smooth, a skill any educated person can quickly acquire. Many of the simplified characters had been in existence for more than a millennium. Manuscripts unearthed from ancient tombs and medieval caves suggest that some simplified characters now used were already in currency then. The reform in the 1950s only officially legitimated these underground “outlaw” vernacular characters.

Aesthetic appeal is another argument made for reinstating traditional characters. Calligraphy, the quintessential aesthetic form of Chinese writing, in fact favors simplification. The running- and cursive-hand in Chinese calligraphy has always been the most radical form of simplifying characters. The six-stroke character xing (running), for instance, was reduced to a mere two vertical strokes in medieval calligraphic practice.

It’s true that computer keyboarding has now made the dreaded writing of multi-stroke-characters mostly moot. But why require schoolchildren to spend time and cognitive energy learning overly complicated ideographs in this age of information explosion, so vastly different from traditional society? Why not let them acquire the simplified form first, and if they desire, move on to master traditional characters? The first step is for efficiency; the second is for cultural refinement. That is why every society has the division of labor between bankers and poets.

The Chinese Canon, Diminished

Hsuan Meng writes a column for World Journal Weekly.

Language is about cultural identity. This is especially true in the case of the written Chinese language, which has evolved for at least three millenniums and is now used by one and a half billion people worldwide. Given the language’s long history, future Chinese readers and writers may have to live with the consequences of current decisions long after today’s powers and regimes have ceased to exist.

The advantage of traditional characters is that they offer a stronger and richer connection with the history of the Chinese language. The simplified writing system has reduced the variety and changed the nature of many character shapes, making it more difficult for people to access classical texts in their full richness.

This is more than an academic concern. Just as Shakespeare’s plays and the language he used serve as a foundation for the English language, so are the canonical writings of Confucius, Lao Tzu and countless others who had exploited the full range and expression of the traditional characters.

Proponents of simplified characters say that simplified characters are easier to learn. But I have found no rigorous study that fully proves this. Moreover, some studies have shown that the simplification process, by warping the shapes of characters, can cause confusion in the meaning of characters.

In Taiwan and Hong Kong, schoolchildren have no trouble learning traditional characters, and those regions demonstrate some of the highest literacy rates in the world. Meanwhile, in recent decades, the People’s Republic has implemented policies that implicitly acknowledge the practical, cultural and aesthetic values of traditional Chinese: some traditional characters have been restored to use, and the government permits traditional characters in the practice of calligraphy.

The push to simplify Chinese reflects contemporary political agendas more than a desire for a good solution. We should find ways to promote coexistence of both systems of writing.

This essay was translated from the Chinese by Victoria Meng.

How a Computer Might Respond

Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of KuaiXue, a software tool for learning Chinese.

The original rationale for simplification was to accelerate the learning process. But is this necessary today, given China’s much improved economic and social conditions? There may be no easy answer.

What’s certain is that converting from the simplified characters, or jiantizi, to the traditional characters, fantizi, would be a huge task, affecting everything from school textbooks to government documents to online systems. Automation of that process would present serious technical challenges.

The trouble stems from fundamental differences in the two character sets. The simplification process of the 1950s sometimes resulted in two different traditional characters becoming identical in simplified form. For instance, the traditional characters 發 (”develop”) and 髮 (”hair”) are both written as the simplified character, 发. When the software sees the latter, it must guess which of 發 and 髮 is intended. Typically the guess is made by analyzing context. Sometimes, the software can produce the occasional howler. A passage describing “loss of face” might be translated by the computer as loss of 麵 (”noodles”) rather than loss of 面 (”face”)!

So while most of the process could be automated, especially with more fine tuning in the software, much work would need to be done by hand as well.

SIMPLIFIED from Charlotte NC is one of the hardest working bands on the southeastern music scene. They travel between 20-25 days a month, so hotels are second homes to them.

The cleanliness of  hotel rooms vary from the barely tolerable to the ultra immaculate.  Whether they meet the former or latter requirements, one must remember hotel rooms are for travelers and as such they see a plethora of germs.

When you enter a hotel room, strip the comforter from the bed and toss it behind the door. Drop the remote into a plastic bag. Spray the bathroom with disinfectant spray. Spray a hand cloth with disinfectant spray and wipe the tv control buttons and lamp and light switches. Those are the objects you come in contact with most in a hotel environment.

Spray bedding and pillows or better yet bring your own pillow. Remember hotel rooms often lack humidity. Travel with a portable humidifier that uses a bottle of water as a receptacle.

Following just a few rules as you’re checking into hotel rooms can help keep you healthy on tour!

The Universe as a Hologram.
Source Link: Crystalinks

Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect’s name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect’s findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect’s findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. The “whole in every part” nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes. This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect’s discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration:
Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium’s front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect’s experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate “parts”, but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these “eidolons”, the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected. The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past. What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be — every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of “All That Is.”

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a “mere stage” beyond which lies “an infinity of further development”. Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat’s brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious “whole in every part” nature of memory storage. Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram. Pribram’s theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage–simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information. Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word “zebra”, you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like “striped”, “horselike”, and “animal native to Africa” all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information–another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature’s supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions. An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram’s theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram’s belief that our brains mathematically construct “hard” reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called “osmic frequencies”, and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions. But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is “there” is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really “receivers” floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram’s views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm. In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level. It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual ‘A’ to that of individual ‘B’ at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species’s anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman’s experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate. Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual’s consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations “transpersonal experiences”, and in the late ’60s he helped found a branch of psychology called “transpersonal psychology” devoted entirely to their study. Although Grof’s newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm. As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain — as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical. Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as real as “reality”. Even visions and experiences involving “non-ordinary” reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book “Gifts of Unknown Things,” biologist Lyall Watson discribes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then “click” off again and on again several times in succession. Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if “hard” reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is “there” or “not there” because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson’s are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality. What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams. Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry. Whether Bohm and Pribram’s holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect’s findings “indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality”.

Related Links on the Holographic Universe:

Psychedelic Adventure blogspot.

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