THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

Cherish your children, help others. That is our main purpose: forget yourself, think of others first. If the whole world did this, imagine the circle of harmony, love and plenty that would result. "It is by self-forgetting that we find. It's by dying (to selfishness) that we are born to eternal life."  ~ St. Francis

My favorite celebrity, Audrey Hepburn, doing what we are all here for. 

CalArts Mural in Choinard Hall

Calarts Chouinard Hall Mural 

Spirit Orb above my head, Dec. 2012 (4 pictures in a row turned out like this)

Producer Anselmo Martini ("The Apprentice" Brazil) , Lydia Cornell at London Hotel for
Blessings in a Backpack at Kentucky Pre-Derby party

Deborah Van Valkenburgh, Lydia Cornell at DVV's August, 2012 birthday 

Lydia Cornell, December 2012

Lydia Cornell, son Jack walking down the aisle at  Cornell's wedding to Paul H.

Lydia Cornell at London Hotel for Blessings in a Backpack, 2012

We are not material, biological beings in a state of decomposition. We are spiritual beings having a temporary human experience. 

Ancient Light

News feature: 2013-110                                                                    March 21, 2013 Supercomputer Helps Planck Mission Expose Ancient Light The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:  http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-110&cid=release_2013-110 Like archeologists carefully digging for fossils, scientists with the Planck mission are sifting through cosmic clutter to find the most ancient light in the universe. The Planck space telescope has created the most precise sky map ever made of the oldest light known, harking back to the dawn of time. This light, called the cosmic microwave background, has traveled 13.8 billion years to reach us. It is so faint that Planck observes every point on the sky an average of 1,000 times to pick up its glow. The task is even more complex than excavating fossils because just about everything in our universe lies between us and the ancient light. Complicating matters further is "noise" from the Planck detectors that must be taken into account. That's where a supercomputer helps out. Supercomputers are the fastest computers in the world, performing massive amounts of calculations in a short amount of time. "So far, Planck has made about a trillion observations of a billion points on the sky," said Julian Borrill of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, Calif. "Understanding this sheer volume of data requires a state-of-the-art supercomputer." Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant contributions from NASA. Under a unique agreement between NASA and the Department of Energy, Planck scientists have been guaranteed access to the supercomputers at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The bulk of the computations for this data release were performed on the Cray XE6 system, called the Hopper. This computer makes more than a quintillion calculations per second, placing it among the fastest in the world. One of the most complex aspects of analyzing the Plank data involves the noise from its detectors. To detect the incredibly faint cosmic microwave background, these detectors are made of extremely sensitive materials. When the detectors pick up light from one part of the sky, they don't reset afterwards to a neutral state, but instead, they sort of buzz for a bit like the ringing of a bell. This buzzing affects observations made at the next part of the sky. This noise must be understood, and corrected for, at each of the billion points observed repeatedly by Plank as it continuously sweeps across the sky. The supercomputer accomplishes this by running simulations of how Planck would observe the entire sky under different conditions, allowing the team to identify and isolate the noise. Another challenge is carefully teasing apart the signal of the relic radiation from the material lying in the foreground. It's a big mess, as some astronomers might say, but one that a supercomputer can handle. "It's like more than just bugs on a windshield that we want to remove to see the light, but a storm of bugs all around us in every direction," said Charles Lawrence, the U.S. project scientist for the Planck mission. "Without the exemplary interagency cooperation between NASA and the Department of Energy, Planck would not be doing the science it's doing today." The computations needed for Planck's current data release required more than 10 million processor-hours on the Hopper computer. Fortunately, the Planck analysis codes run on tens of thousands of processors in the supercomputer at once, so this only took a few weeks. Read about the newest results from Planck at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-109 . More information about the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is online at: http:///www.nersc.gov/ . Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA's Planck Project Office is based at JPL. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck's science instruments. European, Canadian and U.S. Planck scientists work together to analyze the Planck data. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/planck,http://planck.caltech.edu and http://www.esa.int/planck . Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov - end -

Remove yourself from this mailing.

Remove yourself from all mailings from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENA ~ MONDAY IS YELLOW: ARE YOU A SYNESTHETE TOO?

For years I've been obsessed with neuroscience, brain science, Einstein's Unified Field Theory, quantum physics, dark matter, metaphysics, the origin of consciousness, Jet Propulsion Laboratory CalTech NASA JPL, Mars Curiosity (I love Curiosity!)  the possibility of extraterrestrial life. I also am into unexplained phenomena and the paranormal. Read my upcoming blog on Art Bell and the strange Nevada site where he reigned for years via a radio signal that created the fantastic late night show "Coast to Coast AM." (I know, I know, this show can be very silly, and honestly I do not believe in Big Foot! Tee hee hee, hahaha. There are a lot of conspiracy theories on this show, including Chem Trails, which I don't actually believe in either. By now, there should be some outrage on a massive scale. But time will tell. I actually believe our thoughts create our reality, and this is an amazing way to live life. What you fear will own you. Fear is "False Evidence Appearing Real." What you focus on grows. Withdraw your attention from your enemies and they will expire from neglect. This is the metaphysical secret of the ancients and the "Christ" truth which is LOVE. Love casts out fear.  

On Science Channel they are finally talking about Synesthesia, which I've always had, but never knew the name for it. I thought everyone had it.  Maybe you have it too. Do you see letters and numbers in color? Do you smell shapes and taste colors? 

My son and I argue over our colors. I have always seen letters and numbers in color and shapes, very specific. For example, Sunday is tall and "root-beer-colored" like a tall rectangle or monolith (2001: A Space Odyssey)  Saturday is equally tall, and white. Monday is always yellow, so every man, moron or Monroe I meet is yellow at first. I can memorize lines more easily as an actress and writer since all the letters and names are color-coded. Tuesday is forest green, Wednesday is grayish-white with faint striped pattern; Thursday is brown, Friday is spinach green (cooked, not raw leaves) and the texture is sort of chaotic, faintly striped. Friday ends with a corner that closes off the week. So Monday thru Friday, the school-week/work-week is a series of colored blocks all the same height, then Friday has a corner at the bottom, which is like a cozy safe wall  

January is burgundy.  

You are encased in Friday afternoon and night has a wall on the right, which is the end of the school week. You can lean on the wall. Look up and you’ll see the next day, Saturday, which is really tall and white — but a subdued white with grayish tones. And again, Sunday is tall, root-beer colored.

Also days of the week and months of the year are different shapes and everything has a certain structure.

C is pink, E is light green, F is dark green, G is chocolate brown, H is light brown, I is white, J is root-beer colored, K is burgundy, etc. 
I only found out a few years ago that others also have this. I always thought everyone had it. I just found out my son has it too. People think I'm crazy. ~ Lydia Cornell 

__________

Synesthesia is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. (from 1 in 20 to 1 in 90 to 1 in 20,000).

___________

Richard Cytowic, MD, is one of the world's leading researchers on synesthesia, a mindblowing neurological condition in which two or more senses are linked so that you might, for example, "taste" sounds or "hear" colors. Cytowic and neuroscientist David Eagleman have a new book out, Wednesday Is Indigo Blue, about synesthesia, exploring the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy, and the subjectivity of reality. Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist and How We Decide, interviewed Cytowic for Scientific American. From SciAm:

LEHRER: What can synesthetes teach us about the nature of human perception?

CYTOWIC: Far from being a mere curiosity, synesthesia is a consciously elevated form of the perception that everyone already has. Minds that function differently are not so strange after all, and everyone can learn from them.

Synesthesia has opened up a window onto a broad expanse of the brain and perception. Younger researchers are now active in 15 countries. Because the trait runs strongly in families, it is easy to collect DNA from a large number of synesthetic relatives. This means that synesthesia may be the very first perceptual condition for which science can map its gene. This inherited quirk is teaching us that cross-talk among the senses is the rule rather than the exception--we are all inward synesthetes who are outwardly unaware of sensory couplings happening all the time.

For example, sight, sound, and movement normally map to one another so closely that even bad ventriloquists convince us that whatever moves is doing the talking. Likewise, cinema convinces us that dialogue comes from the actors' mouths rather than the surrounding speakers. Dance is another example of cross-sensory mapping in which body rhythms imitate sound rhythms kinetically and visually. We so take these similarities for granted that we never question them the way we might doubt colored hearing.

"When Senses Intersect" (SciAm) Buy "Wednesday Is Indigo Blue" (Amazon)

Previously:

                          Hearing-motion synesthesia - Boing Boing

                          These words taste blue: Synesthesia in SciAm - Boing Boing

                          Technological synaesthesia - Boing Boing

Famous People Some celebrated people who may have had synesthesia include:  Vasily Kandinsky (painter, 1866-1944)  Olivier Messiaen (composer, 1908-1992)  Charles Baudelaire (poet, 1821-1867)  Franz Liszt (composer, 1811-1886)  Arthur Rimbaud (poet, 1854-1891)  Richard Phillips Feynman (physicist, 1918-1988) It is possible that some of these people merely expressed synesthetic ideas in their arts, although some of them undoubtedly did have synesthesia. The Biological Basis of Synesthesia Some scientists believe that synesthesia results from "crossed-wiring" in the brain. They hypothesize that in synesthetes, neurons and synapses that are "supposed" to be contained within one sensory system cross to another sensory system. It is unclear why this might happen but some researchers believe that these crossed connections are present in everyone at birth, and only later are the connections refined. In some studies, infants respond to sensory stimuli in a way that researchers think may involve synesthetic perceptions. It is hypothesized by these researchers that many children have crossed connections and later lose them. Adult synesthetes may have simply retained these crossed connections.It is unclear which parts of the brain are involved in synesthesia. Richard Cytowic's research has led him to believe that the limbic system is primarily responsible for synesthetic experiences. The limbic system includes several brain structures primarily responsible for regulating our emotional responses. Other research, however, has shown significant activity in the cerebral cortex during synesthetic experiences. In fact, studies have shown a particularly interesting effect in the cortex: colored-hearing synesthetes have been shown to display activity in several areas of the visual cortex when they hear certain words. In particular, areas of the visual cortex associated with processing color are activated when the synesthetes hear words. Non-synesthetes do not show activity in these areas, even when asked to imagine colors or to associate certain colors with certain words. Synesthesia and the Study of Consciousness Many researchers are interested in synesthesia because it may reveal something about human consciousness. One of the biggest mysteries in the study of consciousness is what is called the "binding problem." No one knows how we bind all of our perceptions together into one complete whole. For example, when you hold a flower, you see the colors, you see its shape, you smell its scent, and you feel its texture. Your brain manages to bind all of these perceptions together into one concept of a flower. Synesthetes might have additional perceptions that add to their concept of a flower. Studying these perceptions may someday help us understand how we perceive our world.

Hear IT!

Synesthesia

Limbic

Synesthesia Experiment Read a list of random numbers between 0 and 9 at a rate of about one every 3 seconds. For example: 7, 9, 4, 0, 3, 8, 2, 5, 1, 6. After each number is read, ask people to write down the number and what COLOR that they associate with each number. Collect the answers. These will be called "Answers #1". Two to three weeks later, repeat the experiment, but change the order of the numbers. For example: 3, 6, 5, 9, 4, 1, 7, 0, 5, 2, 8. Collect the answers. These will be called "Answers #2". Compare Answers #1 with Answers #2. A person with synesthesia will have all or most of the same number-color pairs on both Answers #1 and Answers #2.This experiment can also be done using letters instead of numbers.

References and more information on synesthesia, see: Cytowic, R., Synesthesia: Phenomenology and Neuropsychology, A Review of Current Knowledge. Psyche: An interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness. Synesthesia Test Mixed Signals Synesthesia Links American Synesthesia Association Synesthesia and the Synesthetic Experience Richard E. Cytowic Web Site Nunn, J.A., Gregory, L.J., Brammer, M., Williams, S.C.R., Parslow, D.M., Morgan, M.J., Morris, R.G., Bullmore, E.T., Baron-Cohen, S., and Gray, J.A. Functional magnetic resonance imaging of synesthesia: activation of V4/V8 by spoken words, Nature Neuroscience, 5:371-375, 2002. Palmer, T.J., Blake, R., Marois, R., Flanery, M.A., and Whetsell, Jr., W., The perceptual reality of synesthetic colors, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 99:4127-4131, 2002. Lemley, B., Do You See What They See? Discover, Vol 20, No. 12, December 1999. Cytowic, R.E., The Man Who Tasted Shapes, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Cytowic, R.E. and Eagleman, D.M., Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009. Cytowic, R.E. Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2002. Duffy, P.L., Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their Worlds, New York: WH Freeman & Co, 2001. Mass, W., A Mango Shaped Space, Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes - Ramachandran, V.S. and Hubbard, E.M., Scientific American, Vol 288 Issue 5 (May 2003), 52-59.

REMAINING CALM IN A CRISIS

"My favorite saying is nothing can live inside me (virus wise anyway). The mind has a great effect on our health. My ex-mother-in-law had a brain tumor. Fortunately she also had lost her short term memory due to excessive drinking. She rehabbed successfully. She didn't remember the tumor from day to day so depression stayed away and eventually with treatment the tumor went away to the amazement of her doctors." ~ Mark Greune

I love this. Thank you Mark. This is so beautiful and profound and true. I almost forgot that "no virus can live inside me" and that you must not feed the bad dog, the bad thought — our small petty lizard brain, the "mortal mind" creates its own false illusions, but GOOD is constant and prevails.

AND HUMOR HEALS TOO:

How BOOBS Got Their Name From Engineers

How BOOBS Got Their Name From Engineers 

News release: 2013-075                                                             Feb. 27, 2013 NASA's NuSTAR Helps Solve Riddle of Black Hole Spin The full version of this story with accompanying images is at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-075&cid=release_2013-075 PASADENA, Calif. -- Two X-ray space observatories, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun. The supermassive black hole lies at the dust- and gas-filled heart of a galaxy called NGC 1365, and it is spinning almost as fast as Einstein's theory of gravity will allow. The findings, which appear in a new study in the journal Nature, resolve a long-standing debate about similar measurements in other black holes and will lead to a better understanding of how black holes and galaxies evolve. "This is hugely important to the field of black hole science," said Lou Kaluzienski, a NuSTAR program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The observations also are a powerful test of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says gravity can bend space-time, the fabric that shapes our universe, and the light that travels through it. "We can trace matter as it swirls into a black hole using X-rays emitted from regions very close to the black hole," said the coauthor of a new study, NuSTAR principal investigator Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "The radiation we see is warped and distorted by the motions of particles and the black hole's incredibly strong gravity." NuSTAR, an Explorer-class mission launched in June 2012, is designed to detect the highest-energy X-ray light in great detail. It complements telescopes that observe lower-energy X-ray light, such as XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Scientists use these and other telescopes to estimate the rates at which black holes spin. Until now, these measurements were not certain because clouds of gas could have been obscuring the black holes and confusing the results. With help from XMM-Newton, NuSTAR was able to see a broader range of X-ray energies and penetrate deeper into the region around the black hole. The new data demonstrate that X-rays are not being warped by the clouds, but by the tremendous gravity of the black hole. This proves that spin rates of supermassive black holes can be determined conclusively. "If I could have added one instrument to XMM-Newton, it would have been a telescope like NuSTAR," said Norbert Schartel, XMM-Newton Project Scientist at the European Space Astronomy Center in Madrid. "The high-energy X-rays provided an essential missing puzzle piece for solving this problem." Measuring the spin of a supermassive black hole is fundamental to understanding its past history and that of its host galaxy. "These monsters, with masses from millions to billions of times that of the sun, are formed as small seeds in the early universe and grow by swallowing stars and gas in their host galaxies, merging with other giant black holes when galaxies collide, or both," said the study's lead author, Guido Risaliti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics. Supermassive black holes are surrounded by pancake-like accretion disks, formed as their gravity pulls matter inward. Einstein's theory predicts the faster a black hole spins, the closer the accretion disk lies to the black hole. The closer the accretion disk is, the more gravity from the black hole will warp X-ray light streaming off the disk. Astronomers look for these warping effects by analyzing X-ray light emitted by iron circulating in the accretion disk. In the new study, they used both XMM-Newton and NuSTAR to simultaneously observe the black hole in NGC 1365. While XMM-Newton revealed that light from the iron was being warped, NuSTAR proved that this distortion was coming from the gravity of the black hole and not gas clouds in the vicinity. NuSTAR's higher-energy X-ray data showed that the iron was so close to the black hole that its gravity must be causing the warping effects. With the possibility of obscuring clouds ruled out, scientists can now use the distortions in the iron signature to measure the black hole's spin rate. The findings apply to several other black holes as well, removing the uncertainty in the previously measured spin rates. For more information on NASA's NuSTAR mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nustar . For more information on ESA's XMM-Newton mission, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/YUYpI6 . The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA. Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241 NASA Headquarters, Washington j.d.harrington@nasa.gov NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

At the Science Center when the kids were so CUTE!! And nice :) miss those days.

Okay, for no reason whatsoever, except that I keep trying to save photos onto blogs so I don't lose them in case this computer crashes -- I am posting this one of the cast of "Too Close for Comfort" -- sans Ted Knight. This was taken at our DVD release party. 

Photogapher: Jesse Leon