11/19/2009 8:59:45 AM

by Bennett Gordon

One Nation Under CCTV

The millions of cameras currently keeping a silent watch over London have caused alarm among civil libertarians. The Orwellian police state or the unblinking panopticon of surveillance, however, has failed to materialized so far. There are currently 4.3 million cameras in the United Kingdom, but according to Jamie Malanowski in the Washington Monthly, “the practical effect on a person’s behavior is negligible.”

Rather than preventing crimes, the cameras have proven most helpful in catching perpetrators after crimes have already happened. The massive numbers of cameras are too disjointed, for now, to provide a measure of central control. Malanowski reports that police aren’t trying very hard to link them up, either. “Perhaps because bureaucracies in the UK are mighty forces for inefficiency and inaction, perhaps because abuses have been reined in by good English common sense,” Malanowski writes, “the cameras have been deployed in a largely benign way.”

One company is aiming change the disjointed nature of England’s massive surveillance infrastructure by putting crowds, rather than the government, in charge. Kris Kotarski, reports for the Calgary Herald that the British company Internet Eyes is allowing people to anonymously monitor some closed circuit televisions (CCTVs), and make money while doing it.

Internet Eyes turns surveillance into a game, where anonymous users try to spot shoplifting or vandalism on CCTVs, and then report the crimes for possible cash rewards. The company charges its viewers £20 per month and £1 per crime alert, and offers users a chance at £1,000 per month as a reward for reporting the most crime. It’s like “crowdsourcing” repressive surveillance of a country, or, as Kotarski calls it, a move toward “iPod fascism.”

Source: Washington Monthly , Calgary Herald

Image by JapanBlack, licensed under Creative Commons.

Scenes from the motion picture “2012.” Courtesy Columbia Pictures.
Written by E. C. Krupp, Director of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles Article available at NASA.gov,  reprinted from Sky & Telescope Magazine for not-for-profit educational purposes only. The publisher and the author reserve all rights. All opinions are the author’s own.
The year 2012 is acting like a badly behaved celebrity. Frightful rumors and gossip are spreading. Already more than a half dozen books are marketing, to eager fans, astronomical fears about 2012 End Times. Opening in theaters on Friday, Nov. 13, will be 2012, a $200-million disaster movie that seems designed to break all records for disaster spectacles — with cracking continents, plunging asteroids, burning cities, and a tsunami throwing an aircraft carrier through the White House. The movie’s ominous slogan: “Find out the truth.” Two other major movies about the 2012 doomsday are also reported to be in the works.

Anyone who cruises the internet or all-night talk radio knows why. The ancient Maya of Mexico and Guatemala kept a calendar that is about to roll up the red carpet of time, swing the solar system into transcendental alignment with the heart of the Milky Way, and turn Earth into a bowling pin for a rogue planet heading down our alley for a strike.

None of it is true. People you know, however, are likely becoming a bit afraid that modern astronomy and Maya secrets are indeed conspiring to bring our doom. If people know you’re an astronomer, they will soon be asking you all about it.

Here is what you need to know.

Birth of a Notion
We”ve had similar scares in the recent past, but none quite like this. The last time the world got all worked up over the mystical turning of a calendar was the false Millennium of Jan. 1, 2000. Never mind the actual Y2K computer-date bug. True-believer authors (and their imitators) published scary and/or hopeful books about the moment’s prophetic potential to catch an immense cosmic wave and change everything for either good or ill. Borrowing a forecast from Nostradamus, the 16th-century French riddler, author Charles Berlitz predicted catastrophe in his 1981 book Doomsday 1999. Berlitz (fresh off books on Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle), warned that 1999 could inflict flood, famine, pollution and a shift of Earth’s magnetic poles. He also spotlighted the planetary alignment of May 5, 2000, and warned that it could bring solar flares, severe earthquakes, “land changes” and “seismic explosions.”

In the 1990s an entire “Earth Changes” movement swelled into being as the end of the century neared, with all sorts of Millennial expectations — earthquakes, plagues, polar axis shifts, continents sliding into the sea, Atlantis rising and more. In England, the Sun tabloid predicted a “marvelous millennium of joy, peace, prosperity.”

When Jan. 1, 2000, came and went with nothing worse than ski-lift passes printing the date as 1900, the focus shifted to “5/5/2000″ several months later. Most believers in the power of planetary alignments forgot the failure of earlier lineups to induce disaster. The “Jupiter Effect” cataclysm predicted for March 10, 1982 (named for the 1974 book about it by John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann) commanded headlines but never materialized.

Throughout history, end-of-the-world movements missing their mark number in the “hundreds of thousands at the very least, says Richard Landes, historian at Boston University and director of its Center for Millennial Studies. But people eager for the world to end are not to be denied, and this time, of course, all will be different.

The Rollover
What exactly is the Maya calendar about to do? On Dec. 21, 2012, it will display the equivalent of a string of zeros, like the odometer turning over on your car, with the close of something like a millennium. In Maya calendrics, however, it’s not the end of a thousand years. It’s the end of Baktun 13. The Maya calendar was based on multiple cycles of time, and the baktun was one of them. A baktun is 144,000 days: a little more than 394 years.

Scholars have deciphered how the Maya calendar worked from historical texts and ancient inscriptions, and they have accurately correlated so-called Maya Long Count dates with the equivalent dates in our calendar. Just as we number our years counting from a historically and culturally significant event (the presumed birth year of Christ), Maya times were numbered from a date endowed with religious and cosmic significance: the creation date of the present world order. A Long Count date is the tally of days from that mythic startup. Most experts think the start point corresponds to Aug. 11, 3114 B.C.

Most of the Maya calendar intervals accumulate as multiples of 20. An interval of 7,200 days (360 × 20) was known as a katun. It takes 20 katuns to complete a baktun (20 × 7,200 = 144,000 days). Although some ancient inscriptions turn 13 baktuns into an important reset milestone, others imply that the calendar simply keeps running. For instance, it takes 20 baktuns to make a pictun.

No one paid much attention to the end of Baktun 13 until fairly recently. In 1975 Frank Waters, a romantic and speculative author, devoted a brief section to the subject in his book Mexico Mystique. He identified the 13-baktun interval as a “Mayan Great Cycle,” overestimated its duration as 5,200 years, and equated five such cycles with five legendary eras, each of which ends in the world’s destruction and rebirth. There is no genuine Maya tradition behind any of this.

Waters also miscalculated the date when the calendar would supposedly pull down the shades. “The end of the Great Cycle . . . will occur Dec. 24, 2011 A.D.,” he announced, when the world “will be destroyed by catastrophic earthquakes.” Exact date aside, the doomsday ball was now rolling.

Another book in 1975 also spotlighted the Maya calendric roundup. Dennis and Terence McKenna discussed it in The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. That book at least got the Baktun-13 end date right: Dec. 21, 2012. It also noted that the date is the winter solstice, when the Sun will be “in the constellation Sagittarius, only about 3 degrees from the Galactic Center, which, also coincidentally, is within 2 degrees of the ecliptic.” The McKennas continued, “Because the winter solstice node is precessing, it is moving closer and closer to the point on the ecliptic where it will eclipse the galactic center.” In reality this event will never happen, but it hardly matters. The McKennas linked the whole arrangement with the concept of renewal and called 2012 a moment of “potential transformative opportunity.”

Broader interest in 2012 caught on beginning in 1987. In The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology, José Argüelles (an “artist, poet, and visionary historian” according to the dust jacket) linked the 13-baktun period with an impalpable “beam” from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. According to Argüelles, the Maya knew when we entered this beam and when we would leave it, and set their 13-baktun cycle to mark our passage through it accordingly. The beam, he asserted, operates as “invisible galactic life threads” that link people, the planet, the Sun, and the center of the Galaxy. Neither Maya tradition nor modern astronomy supports a belief in any such beam. It stemmed instead from Argüelles’s personal philosophy, which emphasizes “the principle of harmonic resonance.” Argüelles also concluded that the planets are “orbiting harmonic gyroscopes” that “play a role in the coordination of the beam,” which advances the development of anything with DNA. The year 2012, therefore, will bring a rosy version of the apocalypse.

If this sounds a bit familiar, you’re right. In 1987 Argüelles and his followers predicted, with worldwide fanfare, that Aug. 16–17 of that year would bring a Maya-Galactic “Harmonic Convergence.” That event turned into a global phenomenon, with thousands gathering at Earth’s “acupuncture points” to create a “synchronized and unified bio-electromagnetic collective battery.” Unfortunately, the date passed with nothing more than colorful newspaper stories and a Doonesbury satire. (A character explains earnestly that that the alignment could bring either “mass unification of divine and earth-plane selves,” or perhaps nuclear annihilation. “Either way there will probably be a crafts fair.”)

Galactic Guessing Games
Fast-forward to 1995. That year John Major Jenkins packaged several of these themes into Maya Cosmogenesis 2012. According to Jenkins, the winter-solstice point and the centerline of the Galaxy will line up exactly on Dec. 21. Arguing that this motivated the Maya to contrive the calendar to end on that date, Jenkins concludes that it will be “a tremendous transformation and opportunity for spiritual growth, a transition from one world age to another.”

In fact, astronomy cannot pinpoint such a “galactic alignment” to within a year, much less a day. The alignment depends on the rather arbitrary modern definition of the galactic equator, and/or the visual appearance of the Milky Way. There is no precise definition of the Milky Way’s edges — they are very vague and depend on the clarity of your view. (Jenkins says that he personally established the Milky Way’s edges by viewing it from 11,000 feet, far above anywhere the Maya lived.) So to give a precise visual position for its centerline is not meaningful.

Jenkins did acknowledge that the winter-solstice Sun actually crosses the center of the Milky Way anytime between 1980 and 2016. Elsewhere he expands this approach zone to a 900-year period, and settles for an imprecise alignment to which Dec. 21, 2012, is arbitrarily and circularly assigned. Real astronomy does not support any match between the Baktun-13 end date and a galactic alignment. The advocates both admit and ignore this discrepancy.

It’s almost a sidelight that the winter-solstice sun will never actually “eclipse” the galaxy’s true center, the pointlike radio source marking the Milky Way’s central black hole. Moreover, the winter-solstice sun won’t even pass closest to it on the sky for another 200 years. What did the Maya themselves think about End Times? There is no evidence that they saw the calendar and a world age ending in either transcendence or catastrophe on December 21, 2012. Some Maya Long Count texts refer to dates many baktuns past 13 and even into the next pictun and beyond. For instance, an inscription commissioned in the 7th century A.D. by King Pacal of Palenque predicts that an anniversary of his accession would be commemorated on Oct. 15, 4772.

In all of the Long Count texts discovered, transcribed, and translated, only one mentions the key date in 2012: Monument 6 at Tortuguero, a Maya site in the Mexican state of Tabasco. The text is damaged, but what remains does not imply the end of time.

The Secret NASA Conspiracy
Some advocates for the 2012 catastrophe say that what will actually cause the devastation is an alignment of planets. There is no planet alignment on the winter solstice in 2012. Nonetheless, advocates of doom connect the fictional alignment to astrological predictions or groundless claims about a reversal of Earth’s magnetic field and unprecedented solar storms. Many internet postings and guests on all-night apocalyptic radio have elaborated on these themes.

In particular, several threads of irrational thought have created an internet phantom, the secret planet Nibiru. It’s the bowling ball, and Earth is the pin. There is no such planet, though it is often equated with Eris, a plutoid orbiting safely and permanently beyond Pluto. Some insist, however, that a NASA conspiracy is in play and that Nibiru, looming in on the approach, can already be seen in broad daylight from the Southern Hemisphere. It was supposed to become visible from the Northern Hemisphere, too, by last May, but like a fickle blind date, it stood up those awaiting it.

Others on the Web, confused about the supposed alignment of the winter-solstice sun with the Milky Way’s center, have declared that the Sun is now plummeting to the Milky Way’s center and dragging Earth with it. The predicted result? Earth’s polar axis will shift. Most of what’s claimed for 2012 relies on wishful thinking, wild pseudoscientific folly, ignorance of astronomy, and a level of paranoia worthy of Night of the Living Dead.

So maybe the Maya were on to us after all. The clock is ticking. And it’s the end of the world as we know it.

E.C. Krupp, a Sky & Telescope contributing editor, is Director of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

Deep brain stimulation, already established as a treatment for stubborn Parkinson’s disease, may also be useful as a therapy for drug-resistant clinical depression.

Probing into Depression
Research Blogging by Dave Munger, November 11, 2009

What would it take for you to allow a surgeon to probe deep into your brain to implant permanent electrodes that would administer behavior-altering electric shocks? Anyone undergoing brain surgery risks stroke and possibly death, and even if the surgery is successful there is the potential for infection, which would require even more surgery with all its attendant risks.

Tens of thousands already have electrostimulation devices implanted in their brains, and millions more may join them if the technique, called “deep brain stimulation” (DBS), gains wider acceptance. DBS was originally developed as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, and it has been remarkably effective. The primary symptom of Parkinson’s is uncontrollable body tremors that can make it nearly impossible to perform basic daily functions like eating and drinking, writing, and even walking. An acquaintance of mine who has Parkinson’s opted for the DBS procedure and now functions perfectly normally—it’s impossible for the casual observer to notice anything unusual about how he moves. He went from being nearly incapacitated to being renewed as a healthy, fully functional person. Perhaps it’s no wonder that he was willing to submit to such an invasive procedure.

In DBS therapy, one or more electrodes the size of a spaghetti strand are precisely positioned in the patient’s brain, then connected by wire around the skull and through the neck to a pacemaker-like device, a neurostimulator, just below the collarbone. The neurostimulator is activated and deactivated by a magnet that the patient carries, so if a tremor is beginning to become disruptive, DBS can be self-administered in an instant, with near-instantaneous results. A video provided by the manufacturer of a DBS device shows how it works in ideal cases.

Now new uses for the treatment are being tested. One observed side effect of DBS for Parkinson’s is excessive happiness, to the point of uncontrollable elation—the sort of unhealthy, personality-changing reaction that everyone fears when they think of electrodes being implanted in their brain. Tuning the device can minimize this side effect, but its very existence suggests that DBS might be a useful therapy for clinical depression.

The problem has been that, while researchers understand how DBS prevents tremors, they don’t really know why it might work as an antidepressant. That, too, is beginning to change. The pseudonymous UK-based neuroscientist Neuroskeptic points to a study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry in October. “Depression” was induced in rats by forcing them to swim in a cylinder of water from which they couldn’t escape. The amount of time the rats spent immobile, not trying to swim, is seen as a measure of depression. DBS was applied, and, as expected, the rats spent more time swimming and less time contemplating the futility of their situation. What was interesting about the study is that rats swam more even when the brain cells in the area where DBS was applied had been killed. The only way the researchers managed to block the effects of DBS was to deplete the rats’ brains of serotonin. Not coincidentally, many antidepressants work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain.

“Joseph j7uy5” is the pseudonym of a psychiatrist at a US community hospital, who notes that DBS has been tested on a small scale for clinically depressed patients who are resistant to drug treatments. The success rates have been remarkable: Up to 60 percent of patients indicate a positive response, with 35 percent in remission after a full year. Joseph calls these results “astonishingly good”—remember, these are people who are apparently resistant to standard drug-based forms of treatment.

One huge benefit of DBS compared to other types of brain surgery is that it is fully reversible. The electrodes can simply be turned off or even removed if they don’t work or have adverse side effects. But still, the idea of brain surgery is a frightening prospect. Walter van den Broek is a Dutch psychiatrist specializing in treating depression, and two weeks ago he pointed to a new brain stimulation technique that doesn’t require invasive surgery. Instead of implanting electrodes deep in the brain, they are placed just inside the skull—a much safer procedure than full-on brain surgery. Three of five patients responded to the treatment—a similar success rate to the more-invasive DBS.

So if deep brain stimulation isn’t necessary to treat depression, is it possible that even less-invasive procedures might work? Another therapy that is garnering attention is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TCM), which uses an electromagnet to temporarily activate or deactivate regions of the brain without any direct contact. In 2008, the FDA approved the procedure for treatment-resistant depression.

But the pseudonymous blogger at the Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry blog is skeptical, pointing out that the study purporting to show TCM’s effectiveness may have been flawed. A large number of the study participants were excluded from the analysis and results, and there were key differences between the sham TCM and real TCM procedures that may mean the study didn’t have true placebo control.

Nonetheless, the tremendous success DBS has shown as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease and its early promise against treatment-resistant depression suggests that we’ll be hearing much more about electrostimulation of the brain in the future. As scientists learn more about these treatments, look for discussion and analysis of the results on ResearchBlogging.org.

Dave Munger

Question: HIGHER BEING – Do you believe that we have a higher being that lives in a state of nirvana (nirvana being our natural state) who decided to come forth into this time-space reality as a means to experience contrast in an effort to understand our divine nature?

Answer: You are the being. Now answer the question for yourself.

-Dr Fred Alan Wolf (aka: Dr. Quantum)

Just so that nobody thinks I’ve dropped off of the edge of the world, here’s a brief update.

I’ve been pretty darned sick, so nobody’s seen much of me. Because I’ve been sick, I’ve been reading a lot, and playing with piles of new and interesting ideas. I love books that make me think, so most of my interest tends to run to non-fiction and either spirituality, science, or that lovely no-man?s land where both meet, quantum physics. I like conspiracy theories and gonzo politics, too, but that’s another day.

So, I’ve been trying to nurse my poor, sick, damaged self by curling up on the couch with chamomile tea, a little light classical playing in the background, and one of several works on alternative thought/ science/ philosophy/ new age/ occult. I just finished “Walking Between the Worlds: a Treatise on Modern Shamanism” by Phil Hine, and am currently working on Peter J. Carroll’s classic, “Liber Null”.

So, no, I’m not dead yet. It may feel that way most of the time, but I am, in fact, still alive, and will be back to normal soon… that is, I hope to be. (The hospital is still running tests.)

In the mean time, here’s my latest obsession: Dr. Fred Wolf, aka “Dr. Quantum” and his essays, available for everyone to enjoy here. (His essay on “Writing a Self-Help Book” is nothing short of fantastic.)