December 2008

Dr. Zef Damen on Crop Circle Geometry

Zef Damen, Ph.D, has one of the most dazzling websites on the entire internet. On the site, he offers geometrical reconstructions of many recent crop circles. Damen is a Dutch engineer with many patents and other notable professional accomplishments. Interestingly, Dr. Damen specializes in pattern recognition, which has been a frequent topic of ours on detectovision.com. Chessplayers use pattern recognition to cut their work down over the tournament board, and sabermetric baseball analysts use historical "player template" precedents to judge the future performance of their favorite young baseball players. Damen doesn't discuss pattern recognition much on his site, that I can tell. He does, however, show a stunning talent for it with his "reverse engineering" of crop circles through geometry. ................ As a very simple example, consider the following crop circle: Dr.

The Bloop

The phenomenon known as 'The Bloop' is quite possibly one of my favorite of the great, unsolved mysteries of the world. It is such a simple thing, a mere sound, but so large it was that several different sensors thousands of miles apart were able to record it. So essentially, in the summer of 1997, a sound was registered, a loud sound and it was traced to the location of 50 degrees S 100 Degrees W, roughly off of the west coast of South America. Each time it occurred, it rose in frequency for about roughly 60 seconds on an ultra low frequency. Heard at normal speed, it sounds like nothing. At least nothing that human ears can discern. However, when sped up by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration to 16 times its normal speed, it sounds like a bubble rising in the water. Supposedly, the profile of said sound matches that of a living creature. The only problem being that according to scientists who have studied said noise have concluded that any creature able to make such a noise would have to be larger than any creature as of yet known to man or science.

Fun With the Number 273

=== Moon Over My Family Dept. ===

The Earth and Moon move together around the Sun every 365.25 days, with the Moon revolving around the Earth every 27.32 days— called the "sidereal" month. Is there any connection between these dual circular motions?

Stunningly, the reciprocals of the Earth's and Moon's orbits correspond exactly:

1/27.32 = 0.0366, and

1/366 = 0.002732

Another way to say this is that, while

The Moon's orbit around the earth takes 27.32 days

At the same time,

Dr. Peter Plichta and His Book God's Secret Formula

In Carl Sagan's "Contact," Dr. Sagan describes what he personally would view as an acceptable scientific proof of the existence of a transcendent intelligence: a mathematical design element. In "Contact," the aliens reveal that after 1,000,000 digits of the number Pi, you can "grid" them (as in a Bible Code matrix" to reveal a circle. This, to Sagan, was the type of occurrence that should constitute convincing evidence of design.

................

Dr. Plichta has multiple Ph.D's and scientific credentials in chemistry, biology, physics, and mathematics, as well as major discoveries in chemistry.

In his book "God's Secret Formula," he describes a series of purported design elements in the very nature of real numbers, the very territory that Sagan suggested. Plichta's main argument comes from his "Prime Number Cross," in which he places the prime numbers on a visual matrix to draw a cross.

Angel Hair

Reports are common, worldwide but most often in English-speaking countries, of sky-falls of silky, sticky strands that resemble spider webs or fine hair. It is easy to imagine superstitious cultures (or people) attributing this to hair lost from angels as they fly overhead, hence the name "Angel Hair." Typically these filament-like strands are glittery and translucent, and the falls can contain a high volume of the strands - often covering a football field-sized area, draping over telephone lines, etc. The strands might be 0.5 to 1.0 inches wide and from 4 inches long to 20 meters long. Angel hair is usually reported to sublimate -- to evaporate into gas while bypassing the liquid state -- as soon as they are touched.

The Fine-Tuning of G and Other Natural Constants

The gravitational constant, in terms of force, is "set" at:
G = 6.674 * 10 (-11th power) * N * (m/kg)(2nd power).
In layman's terms -- helpful, since I'm a layman :- ) -- there is a certain "amount of pull" between two objects with mass. We refer to this "amount of pull," or "attractional force," as gravity. How hard do objects pull together? It is in proportion to the products of their masses and is inversely proportional to the squares of the distance between them. In other words, the Sun would pull on Jupiter much harder than the Earth pulls on the moon, but you also have to factor in distance: Jupiter is much farther away in this comparison. This is a fairly simple relationship (not measurement) and is referred to as Newton's constant.

G and the Big Bang

For a mini-primer on the force G and other "balancings" in the universe, see The Fine-Tuning of G. ................... Dr. Francis Collins is hardly the "obscure creation scientist" that we think of when we think of Creationist spokesmen. Collins was the head of -- not a member of, but the head of -- the Human Genome Project and is one of the world's greatest geneticists. Collins, a former atheist, was not persuaded by arguments of the origin of life, by arguments against origin of species or other fundamental arguments used by theistic scientists. Why? Because, according to Collins, even if we cannot imagine how inorganic materials coalesced into the first reproducing, organic life form with 5,000 codons -- and we cannot -- it is fundamentally a "God of the gaps" argument, and therefore unconvincing. Someday, somehow, there might be a mechanism discovered that explains the leap from 0 codons to 5,000 codons in one generation. (I - jemanji - do not concur with this reasoning, but the spirit is clear.

Tunguska Explosion of 1908

On June 30, 1908, at 7:17 A.M. local time, the largest explosion in history occurred in the forests of Siberia. Though the explosion occurred in 1908, the scene was not investigated until 1930, when Soviet scientists trekked to the North of Siberia. What they found was a vast scene of cognitive dissonance. Though the explosion had obviously been unimaginable -- the yield is today estimated at 5-30 megatons (!) and remember, nobody would see even a low-yield atomic bomb for 15 more years -- the scene was full of anomalies. These are the indisputed facts of the catastrophe:
1. The blast force was in the vicinity of 15 megatons. It was the largest impact event in recorded history, including from modern nuclear testing. 2. There was no trace of any impact crater. 3. Trees at ground zero were stipped of bark -- but still standing. 4. Sampling of plants, water, and earth yielded few clues or residual matter; the clues that resulted tended to be inconsistent with the theory of a large impact. 5. Around 80,000,000 trees from 3 to 10 miles away from ground zero were knocked over, their tops falling away from ground zero.

Baghdad Battery

The first battery was invented by Alessandro Volta in 1800. Except for the ones that were used in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) around 250 B.C. Used for what? Google "Baghdad Battery" and you'll find that these are the indisputable facts of the case:
1. The Mesopotamians used devices that consisted of 5-inch-tall ceramic jars, containing copper cylinders that were sheets of copper wrapped around iron cores (!!). 1a. At the top of the jar, the iron is even isolated from the copper by an asphalt-like organic substance, while at the bottom of the copper cylinder, the iron is left open to the copper and to the air. 1b. The ceramic jar is even formed to bulge outward at the center, as (we understand) a modern chemist would design it. 2. When any electrolyte -- such as wine (!) -- is placed in the jar, an effective battery results. With wine inside the pot, electricity would be produced.
What would the Mesopotamians do with electricity?!

Antikythera Mechanism and . . . technology re-sets

Geared clocks appeared in the 1500's; watches with miniaturized, sophisticated gear systems appeared in the 1800's; computers were invented in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Except for an analog computer that was used in the Mediterranean, about 100-150 years before Christ was born. ............... In 1900, the Antikythera Mechanism was discovered in sea wreckage of Atikythera Island at a depth of about 130 feet. The "manual" on its side is inscribed with Greek characters from the era 100-150 BC. The date of the mechanism is not controversial. How the culture of that time could have obtained such technology is controversial. The mechanism contains from 30 to 70 gears, has three external dials, and is made of bronze, enclosed in a wood casing only 13 x 7 x 4 inches.

Crop Circles

The believers say that many, if not most, of the world's crop circles are indeed hoaxed. But that there are a certain number of them that could not have been, because of specific attributes. The skeptics say that all crop circles, without exception, are man-made. Hoaxers with boards on ropes walk around, flattening plants, to create the designs. The believers point out that, first of all, in an "authentic" crop circle, the plants are not broken towards the bottom the way that they are when boards are used to flatten crops. They are bent and fused over, with blown-out "nodes" that show exactly the same characteristics as if heated by microwave radiation. The skeptics are a bit challenged to come up with a reply on this, but in 2002 a group from MIT (1) flattened a design and (2) microwaved the area afterwards to produce some "blown nodes." Skeptics see this as a complete response to the "nodes" challenge.

The most puzzling crop circles

... for me, would include these: .......... The 2002 Alien Face formation. First of all, if done by aliens, why the 'scary face' image. Why, on any number of levels. If they were benevolent, slow-moving 'Prime Directive' aliens following the agenda in 'Childhood's End' and 'Contact,' why reveal their image at all at this point? Why the stern face? Certainly such aliens, at this point, would be versed in human-oriented body language and facial expression. We don't want to anthropomorphize, but neither should we assume that the Blues and the Greys are idiots. :- ) They might as well have put fangs on this thing. Remember the Balok dummy from Star Trek? ................ The disk is obviously an info-code, and when decoded in ASCII it reads,
"Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. (Damaged Word). There is GOOD out there.We OPpose DECEPTION.