c4ss:
Physician claims prescription drugs worse than marijuana
Two doctors stood on opposing sides as the Illinois Senate was preparing to vote on legalizing medical marijuana.
Dr. Dora Dixie, an addiction specialist from Chicago, argues that marijuana is highly addictive. Dr. David Walters, a Mt. Vernon physician who has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and given 11 to 13 months to live, says most prescription drugs have more harmful side effects.
The Senate committee last week passed the House bill on medical marijuana with a 10 to 5 vote, sending the bill to the Senate floor for debate.
Opponents contend marijuana should not be considered medicine. Supporters counter marijuana is less harmful and addictive than prescription drugs such as Vicodin, OxyContin and morphine.
After undergoing numerous treatments over the last six months, Walters told the Senate committee that prescription drugs he formerly used were not as efficient as marijuana. …
Reblogged from antinwo (Originally from c4ss)
Super Moon
— June 23, 2013
Be sure to look out for the Moon these next few months as it approaches Perigee, because the full moons during these times will appear exceptionally large. The Moon will be at its Perigee, or closest approach, in July 23 and it will reach full moon only a few minutes after it passes this point in its orbit.
These ‘super moons’ not only appear larger because they are physically closer but, combined with a full moon, the mind can play tricks on you to think they are much larger. This phenomena is called the Moon Illusion. Try to catch these full moons as they rise/set because the illusion works when there is an object in the foreground, like a tree, building or mountains.
Reblogged from willbraham (Originally from the-science-llama)
![An Expanding Bubble in Space
A star 40 times more massive than our sun is blowing a giant bubble of material into space. In this colorful picture, the Hubble Telescope captured a glimpse of the expanding bubble, dubbed the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). The beefy star [lower center] is embedded in the bright blue bubble. The stellar powerhouse is so hot that it is quickly shedding material into space. The dense gas surrounding the star is shaping the castoff material into a bubble. The bubble’s surface is not smooth like a soap bubble’s. Its rippled appearance is due to encounters with gases of different thickness. The nebula is 6 light-years wide and is expanding at 4 million miles per hour (7 million kilometers per hour). The nebula is 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia. Image Credit: NASA, Donald Walter (South Carolina State University), Paul Scowen and Brian Moore (Arizona State University)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/3f69614742022bcc50f3c6e4efc821ec/tumblr_mn7c8cCJmq1rnq3cto1_1280.jpg)
An Expanding Bubble in Space
A star 40 times more massive than our sun is blowing a giant bubble of material into space. In this colorful picture, the Hubble Telescope captured a glimpse of the expanding bubble, dubbed the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). The beefy star [lower center] is embedded in the bright blue bubble. The stellar powerhouse is so hot that it is quickly shedding material into space. The dense gas surrounding the star is shaping the castoff material into a bubble. The bubble’s surface is not smooth like a soap bubble’s. Its rippled appearance is due to encounters with gases of different thickness. The nebula is 6 light-years wide and is expanding at 4 million miles per hour (7 million kilometers per hour). The nebula is 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.
Image Credit: NASA, Donald Walter (South Carolina State University), Paul Scowen and Brian Moore (Arizona State University)
(Source: spaceplasma)
Reblogged from mentalalchemy (Originally from spaceplasma)
![What is a Magnetar?
A magnetar is a type of neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field, the decay of which powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, particularly X-rays and gamma rays.1
History
On March 5, 1979, several months after dropping probes into the toxic atmosphere of Venus, two Soviet spacecraft, Venera 11 and 12, were drifting through the inner solar system on an elliptical orbit. It had been an uneventful cruise. The radiation readings on board both probes hovered around a nominal 100 counts per second. But at 10:51AM EST, a pulse of gamma radiation hit them. Within a fraction of a millisecond, the radiation level shot above 200,000 counts per second and quickly went off scale.
Eleven seconds later gamma rays swamped the NASA space probe Helios 2, also orbiting the sun. A plane wave front of high-energy radiation was evidently sweeping through the solar system. It soon reached Venus and saturated the Pioneer Venus Orbiter’s detector. Within seconds the gamma rays reached Earth. They flooded detectors on three U.S. Department of Defense Vela satellites, the Soviet Prognoz 7 satellite, and the Einstein Observatory. Finally, on its way out of the solar system, the wave also blitzed the International Sun-Earth Explorer.
The pulse of highly energetic, or “hard,” gamma rays was 100 times as intense as any previous burst of gamma rays detected from beyond the solar system, and it lasted just two tenths of a second. At the time, nobody noticed; life continued calmly beneath our planet’s protective atmosphere. Fortunately, all 10 spacecraft survived the trauma without permanent damage. The hard pulse was followed by a fainter glow of lower-energy, or “soft,” gamma rays, as well as x-rays, which steadily faded over the subsequent three minutes. As it faded away, the signal oscillated gently, with a period of eight seconds. Fourteen and a half hours later, at 1:17AM on March 6, another, fainter burst of x-rays came from the same spot on the sky. Over the ensuing four years, Evgeny P. Mazets of the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, and his collaborators detected 16 bursts coming from the same direction. They varied in intensity, but all were fainter and shorter than the March 5 burst.
Astronomers had never seen anything like this. For want of a better idea, they initially listed these bursts in catalogues alongside the better-known gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), even though they clearly differed in several ways. In the mid-1980s Kevin C. Hurley of the University of California at Berkeley realized that similar outbursts were coming from two other areas of the sky. Evidently these sources were all repeating unlike GRBs, which are one-shot events [see “The Brightest Explosions in the Universe,” by Neil Gehrels, Luigi Piro and Peter J. T. Leonard; Scientific American, December 2002]. At a July 1986 meeting in Toulouse, France, astronomers agreed on the approximate locations of the three sources and dubbed them “soft gamma repeaters” (SGRs). The alphabet soup of astronomy had gained a new ingredient.
Another seven years passed before two of us (Duncan and Thompson) devised an explanation for these strange objects, and only in 1998 did one of us (Kouveliotou) and her team find remains of a star that exploded 5,000 years ago. Unless this overlap was pure coincidence, it put the source 1,000 times as far away as theorists had thought—and thus made it a million times brighter than the Eddington limit. In 0.2 second the March 1979 event released as much energy as the sun radiates in roughly 10,000 years, and it concentrated that energy in gamma rays rather than spreading it across the electromagnetic spectrum.2
About 26 magnetars are known (see here).
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar
2 http://solomon.as.utexas.edu/~duncan/sciam.pdf](http://24.media.tumblr.com/b23b22374b79d4f49f80def23ce7221a/tumblr_mn5su7tmJ31qibnz5o1_400.gif)
What is a Magnetar?
A magnetar is a type of neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field, the decay of which powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, particularly X-rays and gamma rays.1
History
On March 5, 1979, several months after dropping probes into the toxic atmosphere of Venus, two Soviet spacecraft, Venera 11 and 12, were drifting through the inner solar system on an elliptical orbit. It had been an uneventful cruise. The radiation readings on board both probes hovered around a nominal 100 counts per second. But at 10:51AM EST, a pulse of gamma radiation hit them. Within a fraction of a millisecond, the radiation level shot above 200,000 counts per second and quickly went off scale.
Eleven seconds later gamma rays swamped the NASA space probe Helios 2, also orbiting the sun. A plane wave front of high-energy radiation was evidently sweeping through the solar system. It soon reached Venus and saturated the Pioneer Venus Orbiter’s detector. Within seconds the gamma rays reached Earth. They flooded detectors on three U.S. Department of Defense Vela satellites, the Soviet Prognoz 7 satellite, and the Einstein Observatory. Finally, on its way out of the solar system, the wave also blitzed the International Sun-Earth Explorer.
The pulse of highly energetic, or “hard,” gamma rays was 100 times as intense as any previous burst of gamma rays detected from beyond the solar system, and it lasted just two tenths of a second. At the time, nobody noticed; life continued calmly beneath our planet’s protective atmosphere. Fortunately, all 10 spacecraft survived the trauma without permanent damage. The hard pulse was followed by a fainter glow of lower-energy, or “soft,” gamma rays, as well as x-rays, which steadily faded over the subsequent three minutes. As it faded away, the signal oscillated gently, with a period of eight seconds. Fourteen and a half hours later, at 1:17AM on March 6, another, fainter burst of x-rays came from the same spot on the sky. Over the ensuing four years, Evgeny P. Mazets of the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, and his collaborators detected 16 bursts coming from the same direction. They varied in intensity, but all were fainter and shorter than the March 5 burst.
Astronomers had never seen anything like this. For want of a better idea, they initially listed these bursts in catalogues alongside the better-known gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), even though they clearly differed in several ways. In the mid-1980s Kevin C. Hurley of the University of California at Berkeley realized that similar outbursts were coming from two other areas of the sky. Evidently these sources were all repeating unlike GRBs, which are one-shot events [see “The Brightest Explosions in the Universe,” by Neil Gehrels, Luigi Piro and Peter J. T. Leonard; Scientific American, December 2002]. At a July 1986 meeting in Toulouse, France, astronomers agreed on the approximate locations of the three sources and dubbed them “soft gamma repeaters” (SGRs). The alphabet soup of astronomy had gained a new ingredient.
Another seven years passed before two of us (Duncan and Thompson) devised an explanation for these strange objects, and only in 1998 did one of us (Kouveliotou) and her team find remains of a star that exploded 5,000 years ago. Unless this overlap was pure coincidence, it put the source 1,000 times as far away as theorists had thought—and thus made it a million times brighter than the Eddington limit. In 0.2 second the March 1979 event released as much energy as the sun radiates in roughly 10,000 years, and it concentrated that energy in gamma rays rather than spreading it across the electromagnetic spectrum.2
About 26 magnetars are known (see here).
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar
2 http://solomon.as.utexas.edu/~duncan/sciam.pdf
(Source: thenewenlightenmentage)
Reblogged from n-a-s-a (Originally from thenewenlightenmentage)
THE JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCE #359 - Alex Grey
#359. Alex Grey is an American artist that specializes in psychedelic art, a self-described “mystic…
Reblogged from higherthinkingprimate
Reblogged from it8bit
‘Yes we can’ chant breaks out as Senate panel passes immigration bill →
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s passage of a sweeping immigration bill was expected. But the explosion of chants of “Yes we can! Yes we can!” and “Leahy! Leahy!” came as a surprise. The
Hungary Destroys All Monsanto GMO Corn Fields →
Hungary has taken a stand against biotech giant Monsanto and genetic modification by destroying 1000 acres of maize grown with genetically modified seeds.
While I don’t advocate wasteful destruction either, it’s important to take note that Hungary has a ban on GMOs, so that corn really needed to be destroyed in order to make sure that the GMO corn didn’t cross pollinate.
(Source: makeanewbeginning)
Reblogged from willbraham (Originally from makeanewbeginning)
Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
Alan Watts (via childrenofthetao)
Reblogged from mentalalchemy (Originally from childrenofthetao)
![santmat:
Union With God By Following the Path of Inner Light and Sound Meditation — Studies in the Sar Bachan
“I will catch hold of the Shabd [Sound Current] firmly and will elevate my Surat [soul, attention-faculty of the soul] and perceive the Nabh* — the entrance to Sahasdal Kanwal* [Thousand Petaled Lotus] — where I will notice your subtle form. Penetrating into Sahasdal Kanwal I will ring (i.e. I will hear the Sound of) the Bell and ascending to the Crooked Tunnel I will hear the stimulating Sound of the Conch Shell. From there I will go round Trikuti* and with the Sound of Aumkara I will besiege (control and vanquish) my mind. My mind now becomes wrapped up (completely absorbed and engrossed) in this Sound and I begin to recognise and discern the identity of the Surat (as distinct from my mind and body), and the subtle, abstract and recondite Sound begins to get into my ears. Thereafter I took immersion [baptism] in Mansarovar [Lake of Nectar] (the reservoir of spirituality in the Sphere of Spirit) where I became purified (shedding the impurities that I had imbibed in my upward journey through the realm of the Universal Mind or Brahman) and attained to the purified pada (i.e. Atma-pada or the Spirit-Pole).
“I went round the top of Sunn* [void] and from there I moved up and captured the fort of Maha Sunn* [great void]. Reaching the Rotating Cave [Banwar Gupha*] I heard the Sound of Sohang (Ana-hoo [Ana-HU]) and then, every instant, I picked up the Sound of Sattnaam. Ascending to Sattlok I found a resting place there (baithak) and my True or Satt Surat (i.e. my Surat that is the son of Satt Purush) became absorbed and merged into the Satt Shabd.
“Beyond it, there are the Invisible [Alakh] and the Inaccessible [Agam] spheres and beyond them is the abode of Radhasoami, the Nameless Lord.”
— Mystic Verses of Swami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Radhasoami Poetry, Book Two, excerpted from Discourse/Bhajan 5, Hymn/Shabd 5
Quintessential Discourse Radhasoami: Sar Bachan Radhasoami Poetry, Volume II; Translations into Contemporary English, Commentary and Footnotes, by M.G. Gupta: http://www.spiritualawakeningradio.com/brsarbachan.html
* To look up mystic terms, see, GLOSSARY of the Radhasoami Faith – PDF File:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/118302722/Glossary-of-the-Radhasoami-Faith](http://25.media.tumblr.com/7f8e9a5ddac0df0fccb2c1e0012edf5a/tumblr_mn7ihruag61qf6tuko1_1280.png)
Union With God By Following the Path of Inner Light and Sound Meditation — Studies in the Sar Bachan
“I will catch hold of the Shabd [Sound Current] firmly and will elevate my Surat [soul, attention-faculty of the soul] and perceive the Nabh* — the entrance to Sahasdal Kanwal* [Thousand Petaled Lotus] — where I will notice your subtle form. Penetrating into Sahasdal Kanwal I will ring (i.e. I will hear the Sound of) the Bell and ascending to the Crooked Tunnel I will hear the stimulating Sound of the Conch Shell. From there I will go round Trikuti* and with the Sound of Aumkara I will besiege (control and vanquish) my mind. My mind now becomes wrapped up (completely absorbed and engrossed) in this Sound and I begin to recognise and discern the identity of the Surat (as distinct from my mind and body), and the subtle, abstract and recondite Sound begins to get into my ears. Thereafter I took immersion [baptism] in Mansarovar [Lake of Nectar] (the reservoir of spirituality in the Sphere of Spirit) where I became purified (shedding the impurities that I had imbibed in my upward journey through the realm of the Universal Mind or Brahman) and attained to the purified pada (i.e. Atma-pada or the Spirit-Pole).
“I went round the top of Sunn* [void] and from there I moved up and captured the fort of Maha Sunn* [great void]. Reaching the Rotating Cave [Banwar Gupha*] I heard the Sound of Sohang (Ana-hoo [Ana-HU]) and then, every instant, I picked up the Sound of Sattnaam. Ascending to Sattlok I found a resting place there (baithak) and my True or Satt Surat (i.e. my Surat that is the son of Satt Purush) became absorbed and merged into the Satt Shabd.
“Beyond it, there are the Invisible [Alakh] and the Inaccessible [Agam] spheres and beyond them is the abode of Radhasoami, the Nameless Lord.”
— Mystic Verses of Swami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Radhasoami Poetry, Book Two, excerpted from Discourse/Bhajan 5, Hymn/Shabd 5
Quintessential Discourse Radhasoami: Sar Bachan Radhasoami Poetry, Volume II; Translations into Contemporary English, Commentary and Footnotes, by M.G. Gupta: http://www.spiritualawakeningradio.com/brsarbachan.html
* To look up mystic terms, see, GLOSSARY of the Radhasoami Faith – PDF File:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/118302722/Glossary-of-the-Radhasoami-Faith
Reblogged from zenhumanism (Originally from santmat)