antet 2

How far can we go ?

"I suppose that if we would reach the edge of the world, we would find there somebody who is going beyond."

- Henry David Thoreau –

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"Through Giving You Shall Receive"

Find out who said this, see why he said it and, then, go beyond this starting point.



2 sept. 2013

Another "mystery" has been solved !

Well, yes, they were not UFOs, but high performance military aircrafts !

Did you thing anything else? It’s ok, don’t bother, people are always served with hot topics to think about ...


PS. We wait the truth about Yeti, the monster from Loch Ness and other contemporary myths...


17 iun. 2013

Dark Matter

It is said that, in order to succeed in life, one must have not only cognitive intelligence (ie the capacity to understand what is happening around), but also social intelligence (ie the capacity to understand what the other people are expecting) and also emotional intelligence (ie the ability to postpone satisfactions). It seems that the last two abilities lacked Li Xing and the result was that, instead of becoming a great scientist, he became a suicidal killer.

Taking a real story (University of Iowa shooting case) as its starting point, Dark Matter reveals us how tough the fight of vanities can be into the world of contemporary science. When the coordinator of the cosmology research program (Professor Jacob Reisler) refuses to recognize the scientific merits of the Chinese young student and to support the continuation of his academic work, their scientific dispute turns gradually into a deaf encounter between the oversized ego of the established scientific authority and the ambition of the enthusiast but, unfortunately, impatient young man. And the result of this confrontation is, finally, a tragic one.

The main core of this confrontation is related to the "dark matter", that potential unseen component of the Universe, that Liu Xing hopes to highlight by using mathematical calculations. According to his theory, the Universe is eternal ("God and the Universe are the same thing"), without beginning or end, but this perspective is contrary to the "Reisler model”, according to which the Universe begins with the primordial Big Bang. Nevertheless, according to the view of Liu Xing, the model of his coordinator does not explain the empty spaces which can be observed with the telescope. At this point, the student’s theory comes to state that those spaces are not empty at all, but full of dark matter acting on and modelling the usual matter through gravity.

All in all, "Dark Matter" is a worth seeing film, both due to the scientific issue that is highlighted but also due to the provided insight regarding the functioning of the scientific research within the American academic system, as the film reveals its formal and informal mechanisms and the relationships that are established between the senior scientists and the young aspirants to this status.

13 mai 2013

The trans-humanist Transfer


A hypnotic novel. A postmodern novel. A hallucinating novel. A formidable novel.

Let's be honest with ourselves. How many of us wouldn’t want to temporarily migrate into other people’s bodies, as to live, even occasionally, other lives or to do things that we don’t have the courage to do in our lives ? A lot of us, most likely. But what would be the price for this experience? How many of us could resist afterwards, after the transfer ? How many of us could remain sane after founding out (due to the shelter of the false identity) the hidden misery of the human nature, being that the misery of our own or the misery of some relatives or the misery of some strangers? Undoubtedly, Transfer by Michael Hăulică is a both a cop themed science fiction but, at the same time, is also an insight into the abysses of the human soul, into its deep and cavernous areas.

The book is drafted in two writing styles that seem completely different one from the other, one being classic, simple and narrative (A huca in the wonderful Inand, for example) and another one being postmodern and full of discursive ideas, images and fragments, that intersect, mix, combine and twist with each other in an utterly hypnotic game (Weather of oppressiveness, for example). More or less similar, the story takes us into the realm of a dystopian city (Inand), where we can find an amalgamated mixture of landmarks, some of them very well known as signs of our world (evoked by a lot of multicultural quotes: from CasablancaMatrixKeanu ReevesAlain Delon, to Grigore Leşe–Cătalin Botezatu, through BecketVişniecHăulica (self-reference)Godot) and some of them looking like landmarks of a reality that seems totally surreal. As so, Gibsons’ world is described as a quite another world, almost another universe, a world of people in flesh and blood but which seems as being run by another software,  by other different parameters of existential coordination. In this world, a circus tent is not what it seems, but a quantum reality created by thoughts, an other cosmos, an inner city with strange streets and buildings, with strange people, with entrances and exits that lead to unimagined places, where dreamlike performances are happening, where drawers open themselves into human bodies, just as in Salvador Dali’s painting ... In this cyberpunk world, even the glances and the smiles finally come to be standardized, bearing evocative names of different moods (The apricot flower, The fly of the dragonfly, Edelweiss, Sunrise in Osaka, Land of snow, Harvesters at rest, the Geneva Lake, etc., etc. ...) and being used according to the need of  each arising situation...

But, beyond all this overflowing fantasy which, even indirectly, pays a tribute to the famous Canadian writer William Gibson, where the mystery and the narrative action mix with subjective thoughts - memories, impressions, perceptions, details, dreams, feelings, moods, personal reflections, conclusions - creating an atmosphere of hazy alienation, I think that the intention of Michael Hăulică is to draw our attention to something else which is not just important, but fundamental...

Into his famous work, Our Post-human Future, the famous sociologist, political scientist and social philosopher Francis Fukuyama has sounded the alarm about the impact that new technologies can bring on our own humanity, pointing out that the evolution of science can lead to a future when the alteration of the fundamental characteristics of human nature will make ourselves unrecognizable. In my opinion, this is the core of Michael Hăulică's novel:  he describes a stage, a level of this process of transformation, because, in the world of Inand, the man is no longer what we know he is or should be, but just a mask, nothing else but a mask ...

Could you tell me, please, how would you relate to reality if you would know that into the body of a stranger met in the street (and who, possibly, would address you with a "random"  curse or even more than that ...) could be your spouse, your neighbour, your colleague, your boss, or who knows what other very well-known person...? Does such a perspective give you chills on your back? Or, what would yourself be able to do if you could "rent" a body so that no one could recognize and blame you for any of your deeds ? ... A world of masks, a world of people who covertly enliven their innermost thoughts, where might that finally lead? What would be the social, the economic and the political consequences of a world where technology would enable us to do this? You will probably say that such a world is just a dystopia ... Yes, it is as so,...now. But what if this dystopia will become reality in 20 or maybe 30 years from now on ?

Just read Michael Haulică's Transfer and you will see that, sometimes, the technological weirdness may seem not only potentially truthful, but, especially, more probable than you can imagine….

28 feb. 2013

What might a dream be ?


What is a dream? What the lucid dreaming could be ? So far, science has failed to clarify this questions.

Is the dream only an electrical activity of the brain and/or a result of the motion of the eyeballs ?

Could the dream be a journey of the spirit throughout another level of reality ?

We certainly do not know the true nature of the dreams and, because of this, our curious and imaginative minds have plenty of room to play with this topic.

Starting from this premise, "Inception" challenges us to ask ourselves if we could enter into the dreams of other persons, in order to steal their ideas or to implant in their minds ideas that are not actually theirs. Could there ever be a technology allowing us to do this ?

The film is a challenge for our speculative intelligence. To those who haven’t seen it already, I do recommend to watch it. Once or even twice. For my part, only at the second view I understood (probably) all the debated ideas.

Dreams seem quite real while we are inside of them, right ? Only when we wake up, we realize that there was something strange there ...

Is true that you never remembered the beginning of a dream ? You always just found yourself there, in the middle of the action, right ? Our life works, more or less, the same…Does anyone  remember something about his own birth ? No, because we all remember our lives at a time when they had already started…

And the most bewildering question of all:

When we die, we actually wake up? Is this life only a dream, a simulation? (Even if would be as so, we shouldn’t forget that any awakening must come from an external signal or from a signal transmitted by the body and not as a result of a desire intended by the  sleeping consciousness...)

As a brief conclusion: from now on, when you fall asleep, remember to take your totem with you.

What is a totem and how to use it ? You will learn by seeing the movie.