To recap, the Gateway Process goes like this:

• Induced state of calm
• Blood pressure lowers
• Circulatory system, skeleton and other organ systems begin to vibrate at 7 — 7.5 cycles per second
• Increased resonance is achieved
• The resulting sound waves matches the electrostatic field of the earth
• The body and earth and other similarly tuned minds become a single energy continuum.

With most San Franciscans staying at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, she decided to seize an unprecedented opportunity to study how this small, scrappy songbird responded when human noises disappeared.

By recording the species’ calls among the abandoned streets of the Bay Area in the following months, Derryberry and colleagues have revealed that the shutdown dramatically improved the birds’ calls, both in quality and efficiency.

The research, published today in Science, is among the first to scientifically evaluate the effects of the pandemic on urban wildlife. It also adds to a burgeoning field of research into how the barrage of human-made noise has disrupted nature, from ships drowning out whale songs to automobile traffic jamming bat sonar.

Today, with a net worth of roughly $400 million accrued through various enterprises, Angermayer is one of the driving forces behind the movement to turn long-shunned psychoactive substances, like the psilocybin derived from so-called magic mushrooms, into approved medications for depression and other mental illnesses.

The strangest and most daring idea mentioned in the Scientific American piece by Meghana Keshavan relates to a bizarre project for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

But their talk shifted to one of the highest priority projects at the nonprofit: An exploration of psychedelics in conflict remediation. Along with researchers at Imperial College London, MAPS plans on bringing Israelis and Palestinians together to take ayahuasca and, working with negotiation experts, sift through their respective traumas. The idea is that finding common ground in their spiritual and mystical experiences might help coax political reconciliation between the warring factions.

The researchers found that people who regularly take selfies thought that they looked more attractive and likable in their selfies than in the photographs taken by an experimenter. Other observers, however, rated them as less likable and more narcissistic in their selfies as compared with the nonselfies.

In a few different studies, researchers at Loughborough University in the UK found that when tired participants took a 15-minute coffee nap, they went on to commit fewer errors in a driving simulator than when they were given only coffee, or only took a nap (or were given a decaf placebo). This was true even if they had trouble falling asleep, and just laid in bed half-asleep during the 15 minutes.

“that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force that few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it”

Ada's remarkable merging of intellect and intuition — her capacity to analyze and capture the conceptual and functional foundations of the Babbage machine — is summarized with a historical context which reveals the precocious modernity of her scientific mind:

By 1841 Lovelace was developing a concept of “Poetical Science”, in which scientific logic would be driven by imagination, “the Discovering faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.” She saw mathematics metaphysically, as “the language of the unseen relations between things”; but added that to apply it, “we must be able to fully appreciate, to feel, to seize, the unseen, the unconscious”. She also saw that Babbage's mathematics needed more imaginative presentation.

The bill, which would restrict Tesla's ability to sell cars directly to consumers, moved out of the Assembly Codes Committee on Wednesday, one of several necessary steps on its way to a full vote.

... it sure does help to follow some actual hackers. I follow Anonymous @YourAnonNews — these folks suspected the hack of the AP twitter feed within seconds, before it was even confirmed as a hack by AP. So while the stock market was going into its temporary panic-collapse, I already knew the true story. How many brokers and hedgies do you imagine follow Anonymous?

There is, you see, no such thing as “computer knowledge” or “computer information” or “computer data.” Within a few years, everyone will understand that. The essential characteristics of information are that it is true or it is false, it is significant or it is trivial, it is relevant or it is irrelevant...Computers are going to have an impact on my life that is similar to the impact that the coming of the automobile age must have had on the professional traveler or adventurer. The car made it easier to get from place to place; the computer will make it easier to deal with information. But knowing how to drive an automobile does not make you an adventurer, and knowing how to run a computer does not make you an analytical student of the game.

DNA is one of those phenomena of Nature that can be experienced (and therefore conceived) both materially and ideationally. That is, we can see it as “stuff” — physical molecules composed of nucleotides — or as information, data, cosmic thought. In fact, it appears essential to equally maintain both perspectives on DNA; just as physicists need to work with the phenomenon of light as both photon particles and wave-forms. Even casual observers like myself are aware that the DNA of all life-forms that we know about is defined as much by its peculiar shape as by its chemical composition. That is, a relative abstraction such as shape (the famous double-helix) is as definitive to the DNA of an organism as a planet’s orbit — its relation to other spatial bodies in its movement through the space-time continuum — is to its existence within a galaxy. Nature abhors entropy.

My personal feeling is that people like the late Aaron Swartz are those who push civilization out of its potholes of stagnation and complacency and inner death. They press us forward, outward; they can usually see a horizon of change even amid a society’s deepest night. We who work or have worked in the fields of compassion and psychological support owe them our presence and our commitment. I am ready to sign up.