Faith based currency
The Latin term “fiat” roughly translates to “there shall be”. When we refer to fiat money, we are referring to money that exists because the government declares it into existence. It is not based on production or earnings, and not backed by any commodity. It is solely based on trusting the government. Fiat money is exchanged in the economy as long as there is faith in the government that issues it.
Hippies Overrun Vancouver, 1967
TV’s “Evening Magazine” takes a 2008 look at hippies in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, in the Summer of Love, 1967.
Stephen Hawking’s explosive new theory
Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today.
Big bang expansion
The new theory believes original estimates of Big Bang expansion are wrongAstronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures.
They have proposed a process of rapid expansion of neighbouring regions, with similar cosmic properties, to explain this growth spurt which they call inflation.
But that left a deeper mystery: why did inflation occur in the first place?
Hackers Crack London Tubes Ticketing System
Dutch security researchers rode the London Underground free for a day after easily using an ordinary laptop to clone the “smartcards” commuters use to pay fares, a hack that highlights a serious security flaw because similar cards provide access to thousands of government offices, hospitals and schools.There are more than 17 million of the transit cards, called Oyster Cards, in circulation. Transport for London says the breach poses no threat to passengers and “the most anyone could gain from a rogue card is one day’s travel.” But this is about more than stealing a free fare or even cribbing any personal information that might be on the cards.
Reality-tunnel: How beliefs and expectations create what you experience in life
What is a reality tunnel?
Your reality-tunnel is being constructed during the course of your life by your experiences, thoughts and belief-systems. Your thoughts and belief-systems are basically based on language. Try to think without using internal language! Thinking and all your belief-systems are hence built upon language:
The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.
(Terence Mc Kenna)
Timothy Leary coined the term reality tunnel and it was then popularised by Robert Anton Wilson. It refers to the concept that with a subconscious set of filters formed from their beliefs and experiences, everyone interprets this same world differently, hence “Truth is in the eye of the beholder”.
Is there objective truth?
This is not necessarily meant to imply that there is no objective truth; just that our access to it is mediated through our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. The individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel. The term can also apply to groups of people united by beliefs: we can speak of the fundamentalist Christian reality tunnel, the scientific materialist reality tunnel, or the libertarian reality tunnel.
Once the fiction of one ‘reality’ dies as a concept, and the operational fact of ‘realities’ (plural) becomes generally recognized, we might all discover that human beings can actually live together without constantly making war over who has the ‘real reality’.
You create one reality-tunnel at a time out of a phalanx of possible reality-tunnels. You can learn to change your reality-tunnel. You can experience many reality-tunnels.
(Robert Anton Wilson in ‘Cosmic Trigger; Volume 2′)
Link: Reality-tunnel: How beliefs and expectations create what you experience in life