Saturday, June 7, 2025

The Giant Awakens

 

The Giant Awakens, a cumulonimbus cloud formation over the Sandias, Albuquerque, NM - filtered cellphone photo - 2025, DS.


"According to the legend passed down from the Quinnipiacs, a wise man cast a sleeping spell on Hobbomock and stopped his destructive rampage. He gave him plenty of sleep-inducing oysters to eat, and the giant fell to the ground on his back, where he remains to this day, still sleeping.

But someday, the story goes, the sleep spell will wear off, and Hobbomock will awaken, hungry once more."

- Regardless of how destructive the giant is described in this excerpt of text (found here), the Sleeping Giants were primarily the good guys in Native American tales. In a similar Ute tale the Giant saves the People from an ogre and, in his honor his body is surrounded by rattlesnakes which are there to protect his remains... in case he returns.

Meanwhile, Hobbomock is in reality the steward of Nature's entities - be they plants or animals - and it's only when the People disrespect his kingdom will he become a menacing figure.

***

The Giant Awakens - detail


It's monsoon season in New Mexico. It rains at least twice a day... and this is good for several reasons. One reason is that, between sudden downpours, the sky transforms into something spectacular.

This post features one cloud formation that was so bizarre, my cellphone could not capture it. Whatever I witnessed that Sunday evening hardly resembled what my device recorded. What I saw was a gigantic, ark-like cloud (visually) butting up against a nearby tree. The camera, however, saw the sequence of images found below the jump (with their time & date stamps).

(continued below the jump...)

Friday, May 23, 2025

More AI Eye-Candy: Alien Realms

 



When Alice (that is, moi) jumped down the Safe Haven portal she inevitably, but delightfully, discovered Alien Realms, the YouTube channel from which the video shown (above), Floraxis, emerged. (Also: Floraxis 2)

Well, there's absolutely no way I can resist organically designed structures so I was hooked from the very first frame. And, there's a mysterious (and lovely) alien, too... all quite delectable.

What's more, other potential worlds are also explored. Try Xylos or Vexillia. Gorgeous, gorgeous!

While Floraxis, Xylos, and Vexillia might not qualify as authentic "Safe Havens" - and I've yet to qualify the meme - they surely are worthy of a visit or two!


Thursday, May 22, 2025

Cloud Cities on Venus




Clouds seem to be an ongoing topic over at Trans-D these days. But, oddly enough, Cloud Cities have appeared on this blog before: in 2011, in a post introducing the work of Venezuelan artist, Tomás Saraceno. (But, the video (above) about cloud cities - which may or not be scientifically feasible (although NASA is allegedly involved)* - is of a different persuasion. However, art and science are conjoined in both examples... which leads us to a third Cloud City... which began as iCloud, a data storage service, but morphed into a digital real estate market. From the article:

"Indeed, the urban populace is now utterly reliant on cloud-based platforms, accessed via their cloud-connected devices, for everything from remote working to navigating transit systems, ordering groceries to finding a life partner. As these activities continue to feed into analytics and prediction platforms – in the cloud, naturally – the ultimate shape of these emergent, integrated urban systems is yet to be decided."

Somewhere there seems to be a meme developing here. However, for a different cloud experience see my corresponding post Growing Roses in the Clouds - A Safe Haven.

Also see the BBC's: The Amazing Cloud Cities We Could Build on Venus, and this Tomás Saraceno page.

____________________________________________

* (See comment section.)


Tuesday, March 25, 2025

The Crow-kins Unite! (New video link, April 13, 2025)


The Growing Resistance... (detail) - ceramic - 2025, BG Dodson.

_____________________________________________




"The “Hands Off!” rallies are taking place in more than 1,000 cities across all 50 states, and nearly 400,000 people have signed up to attend them...

'Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them,” the movement’s website states. “They’re taking everything they can get their hands on, and daring the world to stop them. On Saturday, April 5th, we’re taking to the streets nationwide to fight back with a clear message: Hands off!'"

Video (above): HANDS OFF! Chicago, IL, USA, 4/5/2025) 



Comic Relief:


NEW!


_____________________________________________


***

Everywhere around the world a rallying cry is beginning to rise... against tyranny... against censorship, against incompetency and indifference to injustice. Perhaps, it's humanity's last stand before the self-designated overlords do what overlords do best: suppress... oppress... distress.

It pays to stay one step ahead. We might ask ourselves: "where will I be a year from now?" If present global trends continue - that is, the continuing disablement of the working class* - the choices we have may be limited. This applies especially to the most vulnerable members of society. (Inset left, Dodson's Scenes from the Circus of Dreams, 2023.)

How do the powerless practice dissent? First, keep in mind, no true individual, nor group of individuals is without power. We swim in the same primordial ocean. We each have the ability - and the authority - to express ourselves. And, if, within our lifetimes our autonomy is threatened, it is our responsibility to defend it. It is our right; it is our life. And, so it goes...

(Continued below the jump)

Tuesday, March 11, 2025

The Cosmic Web & other discoveries


Cosmic Web




"Dark matter, which makes up about 85% of all matter in the Universe, plays a crucial role in shaping cosmic structures. Under gravity’s influence, it forms a vast, intricate web of filaments. At the intersections of these filaments, the brightest galaxies take shape. This cosmic web serves as the backbone of the Universe, guiding the flow of gas that fuels star formation in galaxies."

(Inset left is an image of my own which can be found here.)

______________________________________________

Credit: Florian Sterl, Sterltech Optics.


Greetings from the fourth dimension: Scientists glimpse 4D crystal structure using surface wave patterns


"A tesseract (a four-dimensional cube) and the "shadow" it casts on a plane—the quasicrystal discovered by Shechtman. According to Prof. Bartal, "The fact that a quasicrystal is a 'shadow' of a periodic crystal in a higher dimension is not new in itself. What we discovered is that the projection includes not only the structure but also topologically properties such as vortices."

______________________________________________


Scientists Uncover Colossal Underground Water Reservoir, Surpassing All Earth’s Oceans Combined

Sunrise on the moon! Private Blue Ghost lander captures amazing shot after historic lunar touchdown (photo)

World's first 'body in a box' biological computer uses human brain cells with silicon-based computing

Gemini AI tells the user to die — the answer appeared out of nowhere when the user asked Google's Gemini for help with his homework

Images Show Entire "Universe" of Circular Structure That Can Only Be Seen as Radio Signals

"It's comprised of radio sources so faint they have never been seen before."

110 years later, Einstein is still winning bets – the Euclid telescope has discovered a ring in space-time

List of top 10 eVTOL companies in 2025

"eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing)"



"A new proof extends the work of the late Maryam Mirzakhani, cementing her legacy as a pioneer of alien mathematical realms."






Wednesday, February 26, 2025

AI Eye-Candy




When it comes to AI art many artists are still on the fence. But, one argument in its favor would have to be the amazingly beautiful Surrealism found in the AI videos of Kelly Boesch.

The video featured above is just the tip of the iceberg... many more treats can be found at Kelly Boesch Ai Art.

***

Helicoid with two handles: Image credit Ulrich Pinkall.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

Found Object: A Curious Doodle

A curious doodle - ballpoint pen on notebook paper - by an unidentified artist.
(Click to enlarge.)

(This post was originally constructed - as is - in 2021. For a number of reasons, it was stalled in draft mode... but, I found it again recently and decided to let it fly.)

"Automatic drawing... was developed by the surrealists, as a means of expressing the subconscious. In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move "randomly" across the paper. In applying chance and accident to mark-making, drawing is to a large extent freed of rational control. Hence the drawing produced may be attributed in part to the subconscious and may reveal something of the psyche, which would otherwise be repressed. Examples of automatic drawing were produced by mediums and practitioners of the psychic arts. It was thought by some Spiritualists to be a spirit control that was producing the drawing while physically taking control of the medium's body."

- From the Wiki entry for Surrealist automatism. Inset right is a 1907 automatic painting by Spiritualist artist (and mystic) Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) found here.

"Austin Osman Spare (30 December 1886 – 15 May 1956) was an English artist and occultist who worked as both a draughtsman and a painter. Influenced by symbolism and art nouveau his art was known for its clear use of line, and its depiction of monstrous and sexual imagery. In an occult capacity, he developed idiosyncratic magical techniques including automatic writing, automatic drawing and sigilization based on his theories of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self."

- From the Wiki entry for Austin Spare. For more Austin Spare see the Addendum of this Trans-D post.

"The rest of Austin Osman Spare’s life was spent in abject poverty, collecting cats that he usually spent his money feeding instead of himself, and drawing portraits of South Londoners in pubs for beer money. It was during this time that he would develop his deeply personal and unique system of magick, revolving around the use of “sigils” to unlock the buried abilitiçes of the unconscious mind, and communion with otherworldly forces through the trance medium of painting itself. Spare also claimed to regularly seek to shock his unconscious mind into trances of occult power by engaging in sex with exceedingly ugly or aged women (possibly another Spare exaggeration).

Austin Osman Spare likely would have been completely forgotten were it not for Kenneth Grant, an over-enthusiastic young man who had grown up on H. P. Lovecraft books, who never shook the conviction that Lovecraft was writing codified non-fiction, and who soon undertook a lifelong pursuit of Magick. Like Israel Regardie before him, Grant came into Crowley’s orbit, becoming his secretary in the final years of his life; Crowley obliged the young man by demonstrating occult processes like ether-assisted astral travel."

- Excerpt from Jason Louv's wonderful article: The Strange Life of Austin Osman Spare, Chaos Magician. Inset left is Spare's unique interpretation of the astrological sign of Capricorn - his own birth sign - found here.

"A symbol is in a certain mystical sense identical with that which it symbolizes. A true symbol should be a perfect vehicle for the sum total of energy which goes to inform it; it is thus equal to that which it symbolizes because its energy becomes infinite when belief in it is vital. Belief, to be effective, must be vital, dynamic; it must work subconsciously even to the extent of its denial in consciousness. When it is vitalized by being sunk into subliminal depths it bypasses the ego, is suppressed by the censor and thereby forgotten; hence desire is aroused and this exhausts the conscious content of belief. Absentmindedness then becomes the means of its apotheosis."

- Excerpt from Kenneth Grants's Austin Osman Spare: An introduction to his psycho-magical philosophy.

"I am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment."

- Via the great Surrealist - and master of automatism - Roberto Marta. whose untitled work (1965) appears above, inset right. It was sourced from his amazing website. 

***

The doodle which appears at the beginning of this post was found several months ago in a book I was cataloguing for a friend. It was a tedious textbook about biological statistics entitled Biometry and the name M. Smartt was scribbled in ink on the front endpaper. My guess is that the doodle emerged in a college classroom during a particularly boring lecture, and, as for the artist, well, let's just say that he or she was compelled to escape into a more surreal, imaginal dimension. On the other hand, doodling is also known as an indirect way to concentrate and multitask.

(New text, 2/13/2025.)

The common doodle is possibly the rawest form of automatism there is. Ideally, it can bring to light the unconscious murmurings of the psyche in it's symbolic language.

For an artist or writer a doodle can be the seed for a larger creation. A good doodle is an almost magical thing, so it's not at all unusual that it would find it's way into the occult world.

As for the amazing doodle above, well, it almost seems like a narrative of a sci-fi creation myth. Not only that, you might even find bit of your own story somewhere among it's multitude of vignettes. Seriously, study it for a bit... it's teeming with symbols!

Just for fun: Doodle Art Alley.

Also see: The Garden of Earthly Delights by H. Bosch.



Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Odds & Ends

 

Credit: SciTechDaily.com.


Physicists Harness 13,000 Entangled Spins To Unlock the Power of the “Dark State”

"Quantum dots just became serious contenders for quantum networks. By stabilizing nuclear spins into a robust quantum register, researchers have cleared a major hurdle toward scalable quantum communication and computing."

- Via SciTechDaily.com.


***


Digital image, 2006, DS.


"Welcome to Enigma, the largest alert network for UAP/UFO sightings.

Share your sighting

By reporting your sighting, you’re helping thousands of scientists, researchers, and witnesses like you crowdsolve this age old mystery."

Added note (2/16/2025): I neglected to mention it, but I heard about Enigma from an unusual source. Recently, PBS, the public broadcasting television station here in the States, broadcast its first NOVA episode devoted to UFOs. See it here.


***











Wednesday, January 1, 2025

The 8th Day of Christmas





"This release features a composite image of a cluster of young stars looking decidedly like a cosmic Christmas tree! The cluster, known as NGC 2264, is in our Milky Way Galaxy, about 2,500 light-years from Earth. Some of the stars in the cluster are relatively small, and some are relatively large, ranging from one tenth to seven times the mass of our Sun."



***

December, 2024 Link-dump:















Happy New Year!



Thursday, September 19, 2024

Determining the "U" in UAP






"Although a great many unidentified sights have been seen in the skies, none have conclusively demonstrated the presence of aliens. So far."

"This is actually very robust; if you can find objects that either:
  • accelerate at hundreds of gs (or more) for several seconds,
  • that move at speeds of hundreds of thousands of km/hr (or greater),
  • or that can change their distance from you by amounts that are greater than any known rocket can travel in the same span of time,
you have evidence that you’ve observed a technology that goes well beyond the technologies that are known to humankind at present."

***

- Via a Big Think article (link above) which attempts to establish "clear evidentiary thresholds we'd need to pass to conclude that an unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) truly defies natural or terrestrial explanation."

The video introducing this post reports one account of a mysterious spiral light which appeared over Norway in 2009. A CBS report of the same phenomenon appears in the Ethan article - Spiral Phenomenon Explained - but, judging by most of the comments on the YouTube page, I'd say the explanation (a Russian missile) was not popular.

Alternative explanation? The death of Mothra.


More Fun:



***

The moon in a phi-shell. G - DS - 22024.



A belated Happy Birthday to Mac in the Multiverse!


Art connects us to the past... which is a good thing, or we might try to forget it. The artwork above and inset left is a tiny detail of a much larger religious painting, a fresco of the Crucifixion from the Visoki Decani Monestary in Kosovo, Serbia, 1350, artist unknown. The image has been all over the web, mostly misinterpreted as a medieval UAP. According to The View from the Junkyard, and with whom I agree, the two UAPs which fly in the background of the crucified Christ are, in fact, medieval symbolist depictions of the sun and moon; this detail is of the moon. That the sun and moon happen to be vehicles for UHE (Unidentified Human-like Entities)... well, let's just say, it's probably one of those Pre-Christian things. The UHE may symbolize gods... the old gods who still lingered in artist's minds regardless of what new gods they were hired to portray.

If I remember correctly, Mac Tonnies adored the old gods as a boy... along with dinosaurs and robots, of course. But, then again, artists, writers and makers of all varieties still appreciate the old gods till this  very day. Well, they were Immortals, weren't they? Oddly enough, in visual art, the celestial gods often appear in vehicles that echo the shape of the pentagonal golden ratio's spiral mechanism. Even this one does to some degree, and, so, I embellished it with a phi-shell.

For more images and info regarding ancient future vehicles (and/or the "Chariots of the Gods"), try Crystalinks, or this  Preterhuman .pdf.


Wednesday, June 12, 2024

Breaking News! The Cryptoterrestrials Reconsidered...

Screenshot of the Reference page from a recent academic research paper (see below).

"In a new paper that's bound to raise eyebrows in the scientific community, a team of researchers from Harvard and Montana Technological University speculates that sightings of "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena" (UAP) —  bureaucracy-speak for UFOs, basically — "may reflect activities of intelligent beings concealed in stealth here on Earth (e.g., underground), and/or its near environs (e.g., the Moon), and/or even 'walking among us' (e.g., passing as humans)."

Yes, that's a direct quote from the paper. Needless to say, the researchers admit, this idea of hidden "cryptoterrestrials" is a highly exotic hypothesis that's "likely to be regarded skeptically by most scientists." Nonetheless, they argue, the theory "deserves genuine consideration in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness."

- Via the June 11, 2024 Futurism news article: Harvard Scientists Say There May Be an Unknown, Technologically Advanced Civilization Hiding on Earth.

***

Well, it's been awhile, but I'm always happy to report news stories directly related to Mac Tonnies.  This one regards a research paper presented by Tim Lomas, Brendan Case, and Michael P. Masters from the Harvard Human Flourishing Program and Montana Technological University, which can be read online. See: The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis: A case for scientific openness to a concealed earthly explanation for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.

Much of it will seem familiar, but the bones of  Mac's 2011 "thought experiment" are now seen in the light of recent developments in the field of UAPs. Note: although referred to as "bureaucracy-speak," - and although I've said it before - we know UAP from another beautiful mind: Bruce Duensing. 

BTW, Nick Redfern is listed in the references, too.

In other news, I recently read 3 Big Think articles which might interest readers of this blog. Via the first article, What was it like when Venus and Mars both died?, we have the following:

"It is entirely plausible that, for the first few hundred million years of our Solar System’s history, we possessed three life-friendly worlds: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Venus most likely experienced a relatively quick death, as its close proximity to the Sun created a water vapor-rich atmosphere, which trapped enough heat to create a runaway greenhouse effect, ruining its chances for life early on. But Mars fared much better, and for 1.5 billion years, our Solar System may have possessed two heavily-inhabited planets, where single-celled life developed and took hold. It’s quite plausible that wherever life developed first — whether on Earth or on Mars — a random asteroid strike would have kicked material from that inhabited world up into interplanetary space, where primitive life forms could have been transported to the other, yet uninhabited world.

It’s possible, from that perspective, to consider that perhaps all Earthlings arose from Martians, or alternatively, that any life on Mars may have its ultimate origins traceable back to Earth. Mars’s magnetic field protected it from the Sun for all that time, allowing rivers and sediment buildup and hydrogeologic processes to take place. It was only because of its small size, which caused it to cool fast, lose its magnetic protection, and then its atmosphere, that it eventually became uninhabitable."

What goes around, comes around.

Also see: Even the smartest AI likely won’t be “alive.” Here’s why.; and  Does science fiction shape the future?


Saturday, March 30, 2024

A Lost History Retrieved

Artificial Life Form #5 (with a phi shell). 2024 - GDS - DS.



Prayer Before Birth by Louis MacNeice


"I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me, with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, my treason engendered by traitors beyond me, my life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white waves call me to folly and the desert calls me to doom and the beggar refuses my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing, and against all those who would dissipate my entirety, would blow me like thistledown hither and thither or hither and thither like water held in the hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.

Otherwise kill me."


- An intensely powerful poem discovered today, written by the Irish  poet, Louis MacNeice (1907-1963). For more of his poetry see here and/or here, where Prayer Before Birth can also be found.

In regards to the link embedded, it leads to a Saturday Night Live skit featuring an impersonation of snake-oil salesman, Donald Trump, hawking politically "enhanced" bibles; the latest in the true-life series of Don the Wan's ludicrous escapades.

I think Mac would've related to the sentiments expressed.

As for the digital image introducing this post; it is all that remains of a group of (virtual) artificial life forms first mentioned in this post. It had a full page illustration - in the form of a preliminary digital sketch: a view from a window of a strangely ochre-lit ocean, and a window ledge upon which sat a damaged glass container filled with water... a weird image which still haunts me.

So much history is lost... both real and fictional, when an artist loses large portions of their work. However, for a reason I can't remember, ALF #5's image found its way to my present digital image file.  I gave it a phi shell... and liked it so much, I decided to mentally retrieve its unwritten story. It appears below (and after the jump-break) 

***

The Lost History of Artificial Life Form # Five
(condensed)


"I'm the next act
Waiting in the wings
I'm an animal
Trapped in your hot car
I am all the days
That you choose to ignore

You are all I need
You're all I need
I'm in the middle of your picture
Lying in the reeds"

- Lyrics from the song, All I Need, 2007, Radiohead

*

The artificial life form known only as "Model Five" - or "Five" - was the most successful and advanced of the miniature cyborg life forms produced by Project 15: a coalition formed by the collaboration of several (anonymous) cyborg artists, and a rogue - "Rainbow" - biotech industrial facility (also anonymous) in the early to mid-21st century.

For the most part, Five resembled a small embryonic, aquatic animal whose body was suspended in a transparent, fluid-filled sac. In reality, the animal and the sac were one glutinous unit which could rapidly ambulate in water, a feat aided by the cluster of tiny spheres located at its flexible base. The spheres served a number of purposes. Essentially, water was the only substance necessary for Five's survival; the smaller spheres absorbed and transformed this simple liquid into a type of fuel and/or nourishment.

The larger spheres were databases, however, which were, in turn, wirelessly in communication with a central database. These tiny devices were not merely programmed to monitor Five's location and overall physical state, but, allegedly their owner's physical state as well. Some speculated that Five might monitor a great deal more, but surveillance had ceased being an issue by this time; civilization had been conditioned to accept it and, with albeit a little trepidation, overlook it.

Unlike earlier attempts regarding miniature cyborgs, Five was the first "living" Bluetooth-like device which might "warm the heart" of its owner. It had character. It possessed creature-like eyes; optical lenses interfaced with a "brain," a biotechnical marvel which its makers claimed approached the complexity of its organic rivals. Moreover, this "brain" was designed and programmed to communicate with actual organic brains provided one owned the dedicated interface app, a password and a small device implanted in ones brain via a simple injection.

There were those, of course, who imagined Five might technically be conscious, or even, perhaps, sentient. Certainly, it gave the illusion it might be "aware" of it's surroundings. However, in the last analysis, it's unlikely even its creators knew the exact nature of its cognitive abilities - let alone what its cyber-golem might be thinking - anymore than they could ascertain the full content of any living creature's mind - or, conversely, the secret life of a wristwatch. As the line began to blur between the "living" and the "not living"; "life" became a relative term.

(continued after the jump-break...)