A couple of interesting articles on "Numbers Stations", short-wave radio stations that broadcast strings of numbers, presumably to be decoded by spies in the field.
Link: NPR - 2010 & NPR 2000
Link: Wikipedia on Numbers Stations
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And a curious way to look at things (which is often what is needed) - that perpetrates to explain the absence of observable dark matter in the universe.
Which is that time itself is slowing down. Read more here: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/07/is-time-disappearing-from-the-universe-radical-theory-says-yes.html
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Probably you've seen this around the net before, if you haven't I'll explain.
Looking at the picture, chances are you're seeing a couple (man and woman) in an intimate embrace.
But a young child - say, under 10 years old, will probably see a bunch of Dolphins. Look close, closer now, you can see them too....
The point of it is this: A child has no references (or most children have no references) for a couple in a similar pose, and so see the dolphins. As they get older, however, their points of reference change until they see the couple as the primary picture and the dolphins just disappear.
Which is curious, and makes one think: What pictures or patterns might exist around us, that we can't see or recognize because we haven't the perceptual frames of reference? It's hard to say, but it seems foolish to presume that because we can't see or recognize them that they're not there...
Undoubtedly there are entire layers and hierarchies of order and patterns that we can't recognize merely because we haven't the appropriate frames of reference or body of experience. How then can we imagine them?
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Like anyone with an ounce of intelligence, I'm intrigued by the possibility of life - intelligent life - beyond our solar system.
There's something in human nature that cries out for companionship, curiosity, the hope (and fear) that other alien beings are out there and may be somewhat like us.
The SETI institute (Acronym for the SEARCH for EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE) has been watching the skies for decades and not detected anything that would definitively indicate we share the universe with other sentient beings. Well, not detected anything EXCEPT for the "Wow!" signal. Which, exciting as it was, in the end conclusively proved nothing. It was non-replicable, despite repeated listening attempts it did not recur and the source of it remains an enigma.
At the time of the listening it was imagined that any sufficiently advanced interstellar civilization would use radio waves to communicate - hence the listening with radio telescopes. However times change, and in a scant few decades we've seen our own radio signature drop so much that we've become ourselves almost invisible, and we may need to consider that other intelligences may have followed the same trajectory and found other, more efficient means to communicate. We may be looking for intelligence in a very narrow window defined by our own limited technology. Other possibilities for interstellar communication might include an interstellar beacon which would, via quantum entanglement, deliver information instantaneously between stars or remote points. And as our technology we'll doubtless evolve we'll discover other possibilities.
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