Strangeness part 1.

I'm waiting for my new equipment to arrive, and outside the biggest storm of the winter is dumping up to 50cm's of snow on us, so I'm heading off on a different subject from beads today.

I'm sure most of us have had strange synchronicities in our lives and stopped and wondered for a moment if it means something.

Recently, I've had a few. In order for you to understand why they are especially strange to me, you need to know that for about the last eight years we have had pet rats. Our last boy Stuart died recently and we decided to take a break and not get any more. This has been hard, their cages have been moved out into the shed and the house seems like something is missing.

Ok, onto the strangeness. A few weeks back I had been looking online for YouTube videos about one of my favourite books - The Holographic Universe. It offers an interesting explanation as to how our universe works, an explanation that seems to be coming more an more inline with things science is finding out on the sub-quantum level. What the Bleep is movie that also tries to explain this phenomenon. I won't delve into that, but I did find a video that really made me stop and think about things again . Part of the video is explaining how our senses work and how, in theory, if you could isolate a brain in a tank and hook it up to a computer; you could send it electrical impulses like the ones it would normally receive from our eyes, ears, etc. The brain would be unable to tell that it wasn't in a body, experiencing all these things. Part two of the video covers this.

So without going too deeply into things, that is the start of the strangeness. A day or two later I happened upon a movie on tv. I started watching it as it seemed promising. The movie was called Possible Worlds, and starts out as a murder mystery, but quickly turns into something much more interesting! In one scene, at a laboratory one of the detectives sees a tube full of liquid with wires hooked up to something inside. The tube is part of a machine that has a flashing red light. The detective asks the scientist what this thing is. He is told that it is the brain of a rat, and that the light flashes because the brain believes it is receiving food as a reward for having completed some task. The rat it turns out is a female, and stranger still her name is Louise!

It gets stranger, but I'll save that for the next post!

** A little bead content - Corina has recently started making beads called Quarks, some of them have checkerboard murrini in them - seems also that checkerboards also have a deeper meaning than the simple game we learned as children.