All posts by Mike Zonta

Alfred Cortot – Chopin Waltzes (1934)

Alfred Cortot plays Chopin 14 waltz, rec 1934.

Op. 18 in E-flat major – 00:00

Op. 34, No. 1 in A-flat major – 04:40
Op. 34, No. 2 in A minor – 09:30
Op. 34, No. 3 in F major – 13:50

Op. 42 in A-flat major – 16:06

Op. 64, No. 1 in D-flat major – 19:54
Op. 64, No. 2 in C-sharp minor – 21:36
Op. 64, No. 3 in A-flat major – 24:44

Op. 69, No. 1 in A-flat major – 27:44
Op. 69, No. 2 in B minor – 30:53

Op. 70, No. 1 in G-flat major – 33:50
Op. 70, No. 2 in F minor – 35:53
Op. 70, No. 3 in D-flat major – 38:22

E minor, Op. posth – 41:09

Team Of Vatican Geneticists Successfully Clone God (theonion.com)

The Holy See’s geneticists say they’re pleased by how quickly the juvenile God clone created beings in His own image.

VATICAN CITY—Describing the groundbreaking work as a major step forward for theological research, a team of Vatican geneticists held a press conference Tuesday at the Apostolic Palace to announce they had successfully cloned God.

The team of ordained scientists from the Catholic Church’s Order of Holy Genomics confirmed they had, after decades of concerted effort and numerous failed attempts, finally succeeded in creating a genetically identical copy of the Almighty. The newborn God clone #8RR19, which the team has nicknamed “Marvin,” has reportedly survived for over seven weeks since emerging from an incubation vat in the basement laboratory of St. Peter’s Basilica.

“By artificially producing a fully functional God who possesses all of the divine traits of the original, we now have the ability to conduct hands-on research on the Lord,” said Father Giancarlo Bertinotti, who first conceived of fertilizing a Supreme Being embryo by extracting sublime DNA from a skin cell of the Hand of God and injecting the holy genetic material into a donor egg cell. “It may now be possible to answer some of our greatest questions about our Creator, such as whether there are any observable boundaries of His love, if He is incapable of forgiving certain sins, and how exactly He comes to dwell inside all of us.”

“This breakthrough marks a new chapter in our quest to quantify precisely how great and good God is,” Bertinotti continued.

According to team leaders, the experimental project to recreate God first achieved success in 1995, when researchers cloned a cherub, the least complex of all Heavenly forms. During the winter of 2004, the team is said to have finally succeeded in growing a cluster of divinely radiant cells in a petri dish, a research milestone that helped secure the additional Vatican funding required to proceed to the final stage of bringing a cloned God to life.

The newborn Marvin, who has reportedly only grown to one one-hundredth the size of a fully adult God, is the 31st fertilized embryo created by the lab, but just the first clone to survive past the first week of infancy. Recalling the long and frustrating period of trial and error involved in the cloning process, the scientists noted that the initial Gods that were created suffered from a variety of health and developmental problems, such as an inability to see all things, difficulty passing divine judgment, full-body hairlessness, and fallibility.

The scientists reported they were especially pleased to see Marvin had developed infinite benevolence unlike His predecessor from 2009, Tom III, whose excessive wrath threatened to destroy the entire universe until the geneticists resorted to euthanization.

“Based on our medical evaluations, we believe Marvin can expect to enjoy a healthy, holy life for all of eternity,” said Bertinotti, who added that the exact genetic copy of God was currently being monitored in a secured habitat enclosure designed to replicate the natural, blissful conditions of His Divine Kingdom. “Early performance tests suggest that He possesses complete omniscience, and even at this early age, we have observed Him beginning to transcend space and time, something none of our previous specimens came close to achieving.”

“Furthermore, repeated testing suggests that His ability to create something where there was once nothing matches the performance benchmarks of our original God of Heaven,” Bertinotti continued.

Despite numerous clinical trials, scientists conceded that Marvin has yet to successfully impregnate a virgin woman, leaving open the possibility that the clone specimen is sterile.

“Now that we have successfully cloned God, the possibilities are truly endless,” said Bertinotti, suggesting the Church may choose to grow a supply of usable divine internal organs as potential replacements should God’s ever begin to fail. “Our new technique also provides us with the power to recreate God should the naturally occurring population of our Heavenly Father ever go extinct.”

“I can also say that going forward, we hope to explore whether gene therapy could inhibit God’s intense feelings of jealousy and finally control his urges to smite,” Bertinotti continued.

Kevin Kelly: 12 Inevitable Tech Forces That Will Shape Our Future


In a few years we’ll have artificial intelligence that can accomplish professional human tasks. There is nothing we can do to stop this. In addition our lives will be totally 100% tracked by ourselves and others. This too is inevitable. Indeed much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends which are already in motion, and are impossible to halt without halting civilization. Some of what is coming may seem scary, like ubiquitous tracking, or robots replacing humans. Others innovations seem more desirable, such as an on-demand economy, and virtual reality in the home. And some that is coming like network crime and anonymous hacking will be society’s new scourges. Yet both the desirable good and the undesirable bad of these emerging technologies all obey the same formation principles.

The True Meeting of Science and Spirituality (SAND)


A Taste of Science and Nonduality Gathering http://www.scienceandnonduality.com

“This is the place where big questions ‘Who am I?’, ‘What is life?’ can be explored utilizing all lenses.”

“No question is off limits, every question is worth asking.”

“Is there a basis for what we perceive in the manifest world as spiritual? The answer without a doubt is “Yes”, but what that is, is what has been explored here.”

“What is the truth about Reality?”

“What is the Truth of my experience at this moment?”

“The ultimate science is not the science of physics, but science of consciousness.”

“The only absolute knowledge there is, is the knowing of our own being.”

“When all the talking is over, when all the questions have been asked, when there is clarity of understating about thought and metal processes and you live this truth in the world…”

“There is so much love and openhearted wisdom coming from the mouths and minds of all these people. I guarantee you, at least one person will touch you in a way that will change your life forever. Like a pebble in a pond, it ripples out. This is what SAND will do for you.”

The mission of Science and Nonduality (SAND) is to forge a new paradigm in spirituality, one that is not dictated by religious dogma, but rather is based on timeless wisdom traditions of the world, informed by cutting-edge science, and grounded in direct experience.

“The Dawn of Life” by J.H. Rush

DawnofLife

KIRKUS REVIEW

This is a study of life — its beginnings, its essential substances, its chemistry — life on the earth and its possibility in the universe. What distinguishes life from the non-living, what are the theories advanced for the origin of the earth, what was the state of the earth before life began — these are among the questions examined. The contributions of the men of science are compared and knowledge to date is summarized always with the thought that conclusions must be tentative and dogma is folly. Although non-academic, this effort is not for the beginner.

Memorable lines from “La Belle et La Bete” (1946)

LaBelle

Beauty and the Beast (French: La Belle et la Bête) is a 1946 French romantic fantasy film adaptation of the traditional fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and published in 1757 as part of a fairy tale anthology (Le Magasin des Enfants, ou Dialogues entre une sage gouvernante et ses élèves, London 1757). Directed by French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, the film stars Josette Day as Belle and Jean Marais.

Avenant:  Don’t be scared.
Ludovic:  I’m not scared.  I’m thinking.
Avenant:  Same thing.

Beast:  Love can turn a man into a beast.  But love can also make an ugly man handsome.  Are you happy?
Beauty:  I’ll have to get used to it.  Where will you take me?
Beast:  To my kingdom.
Beauty:  Is it far?
Beast:   We’ll fly through the air.  You won’t be frightened?
Beauty:  I don’t mind being frightened . . . with you.

Schrodinger’s book: “What is Life?”

WhatisLife?

What Is Life? is a 1944 science book written for the lay reader by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The book was based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943, under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. The lectures attracted an audience of about 400, who were warned “that the subject-matter was a difficult one and that the lectures could not be termed popular, even though the physicist’s most dreaded weapon, mathematical deduction, would hardly be utilized.” Schrödinger’s lecture focused on one important question: “how can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?”

Biography: Parmenides

Parmenides

Parmenides of Elea (late sixth or early fifth century BCE) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia (Greater Greece, included Southern Italy). He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides describes two views of reality. In “the way of truth” (a part of the poem), he explains how reality (coined as “what-is”) is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, necessary, and unchanging. In “the way of opinion,” he explains the world of appearances, in which one’s sensory faculties lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful.