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We will look today at what you need in order to make a nuclear fission bomb. You need some money, as it would really help

if you were the prince, sultan or other royalty of a small, but rich state. If not, you need to know on a first name basis some evil leader with lots of cash, oil, diamonds and so on, of a small but ambitious country, with a need for revenge on the world.

Step 1 - What is a nuclear fission bomb?

Fission bombs derive their power from nuclear fission, where heavy nuclei (uranium or plutonium) are bombarded by neutrons and split into lighter elements, more neutrons and energy. These newly liberated neutrons then bombard other nuclei, which then split and bombard other nuclei, and so on, creating a nuclear chain reaction which releases large amounts of energy. These are historically called atomic bombs, atom bombs, or A-bombs, though this name is not precise due to the fact that chemical reactions release energy from atomic bonds (excluding bonds between nuclei) and fusion is no less atomic than fission. Despite this possible confusion, the term atom bomb has still been generally accepted to refer specifically to nuclear weapons and most commonly to pure fission devices.

Step 2 - What do you need?

a. The fissionable material

Plutonium239 isotope. Around 25 pounds (10 kg) would be enough. If you could find some Uranium235, that would be good, but not great. You would need to refine it using a gas centrifuge. The uranium hexafluoride gas is piped in a cylinder, which is then spun at high speed. The rotation causes a centrifugal force that leaves the heavier U-238 isotopes at the outside of the cylinder, while the lighter U-235 isotopes are left at the center. The process is repeated many times over through a cascade of centrifuges to create uranium of the desired level of enrichment. To be used as the fissile core of a nuclear weapon, the uranium has to be enriched to more than 90 per cent and be produced in large quantities.

You could try buying it from a former Soviet Republic, or from Iran, since they're trying so hard to produce it. North Korea is not ready yet, and unfortunately, Iraqi dealers retired from the business.

b. The explosive to start the nuclear chain reaction

100 pounds (44 kg) of trinitrotoluene (TNT). Gelignite (an explosive material consisting of collodion-cotton (a type of nitrocellulose or gun cotton) dissolved in nitroglycerine and mixed with wood pulp and sodium or potassium nitrate) would be better. Semtex would be good too, but it's a bit hard to get, these days.

c. The detonator

To fabricate a detonator for the device, get a radio controlled (RC) servo mechanism, as found in RC model airplanes and cars. With a modicum of effort, a remote plunger can be made that will strike a detonator cap to effect a small explosion. These detonation caps can be found in the electrical supply section of your local supermarket. If you're an electronics wiz, you should be able to make it using a cellphone.

d. The pusher

The explosion shock wave might be of such short duration that only a fraction of the pit is compressed at any instant as it passes through it. A pusher shell made out of low density metal such as aluminium, beryllium, or an alloy of the two metals (aluminium being easier and safer to shape but beryllium reflecting neutrons back into the core) may be needed and is located between the explosive lens and the tamper. It works by reflecting some of the shock wave backwards which has the effect of lengthening it. The tamper or reflector might be designed to work as the pusher too, although a low density material is best for the pusher but a high density one for the tamper. To maximize efficiency of energy transfer, the density difference between layers should be minimized.

Step 3 - How to build the nuke?

You will need to get the fissile material to the critical mass in order to start the chain reaction, which depends upon the size, shape and purity of the material as well as what surrounds the material. Your weapons-grade uranium will have to be in subcritical configuration.

First, you must arrange the uranium into two hemispherical shapes, separated by about 4 cm. Since it's highly radioactive, the best way do it is to ask the friend owning the small country to let you use one his facilities. You could use a nuclear plant, a steel factory or even a well equipped pharmaceutical installation as a disguise for your plans.

It is not sufficient to pack explosive into a spherical shell around the tamper and detonate it simultaneously at several places because the tamper and plutonium pit will simply squeeze out between the gaps in the detonation front. Instead, the shock wave must be carefully shaped into a perfect sphere centered on the pit and traveling inwards. This is achieved by using a spherical shell of closely fitting and accurately shaped bodies of explosives of different propagation speeds to form explosive lenses.

After a few careful calculations, all you need now is to carefully pack and transport your nuclear bomb to the targeted location. If you happen to be an Al-Qaeda fan, you should try to infiltrate a military facility, for the psychological effect. Watch it, though, they are usually well guarded!

Step 4 - Disguising the bomb and placing it for detonation

The smallest nuclear warhead deployed by the United States was the W54, which was used in the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle; warheads in this weapon weighed about 23 kg and had yields of 0.01 to 0.25 kilotons. This is small in comparison to thermonuclear weapons, but remains a very large explosion with lethal acute radiation effects and potential for substantial fallout. It is generally believed that the W54 may be nearly the smallest possible nuclear weapon, though this may be only smallest by weight or volume, not simply smallest diameter.

The best way to disguise it would be in the form of an ordinary appliance, like a copier, a widescreen TV set, or any other inconspicuous electronic device.

Now, all you have to do is transport it to the selected location and get to a safe distance of a few tens of miles, but not far enough to get out of the range of the remote detonator. That is why a cellphone is strongly recommended for its wide range capabilities.

compiled by Lucian Dorneanu, Science Editor,and brought to you without permission from the author

by atre for purposes known and unknown.............hope this creeps the government out....LOL

10 Amazingly Simple Tricks To Turn Your Brain Into A Powerful Thinking Machine

There are two basic principles to keep your brain healthy and sharp as you age: variety and curiosity. When anything you do becomes second nature, you need to make a change. If you can do the crossword puzzle in your sleep, it’s time for you to move on to a new challenge in order to get the best workout for your brain. Curiosity about the world around you, how it works and how you can understand it will keep your brain working fast and efficiently. Use the ideas below to help attain your quest for mental fitness.

1. Read a Book

Pick a book on an entirely new subject. Read a novel set in Egypt. Learn about economics. There are many excellent popular non-fiction books that do a great job entertaining you while teaching about a subject. Become an expert in something new each week. Branch out from familiar reading topics. If you usually read history books, try a contemporary novel. Read foreign authors, the classics and random books. Not only will your brain get a workout by imagining different time periods, cultures and peoples, you will also have interesting stories to tell about your reading, what it makes you think of and the connections you draw between modem life and the words.

2. Play Games

Games are a wonderful way to tease and challenge your brain. Suduko, crosswords and electronic games can all improve your brain’s speed and memory. These games rely on logic, word skills, math and more. These games are also fun. You’ll get benefit more by doing these games a little bit every day-spend 15 minutes or so, not hours.

3. Use Your Opposite Hand

Spend the day doing things with your non-dominant hand. If you are left-handed, open doors with your right hand. If you are right-handed, try using your keys with your left. This simple task will cause your brain to lay down some new pathways and rethink daily tasks. Wear your watch on the opposite hand to remind you to switch.

4. Learn Phone Numbers

Our modem phones remember every number that calls them. No one memorizes phone numbers anymore, but it is a great memory Skill. Learn a new phone number everyday.

5. Eat for Your Brain

Your brain needs you to eat healthy fats. Focus on fish oils from wild salmon, nuts such as walnuts, seeds such as flax seed and olive oil. Eat more of these foods and less saturated fats. Eliminate transfats completely from your diet.

6. Break the Routine

We love our routines. We have hobbies and pastimes that we could do for hours on end. But the more something is second nature, the less our brains have to work to do it. To really help your brain stay young, challenge it. Change routes to the grocery store, use your opposite hand to open doors and eat dessert first. All this will force your brain to wake up from habits and pay attention again.

7. Go a Different way

Drive or walk a different way to wherever you go. This little change in routine helps the brain practice special memory and directions. Try different side streets go through stores in a different order anything to change your route.

8. Learn a New Skill

Learning a new skill works multiple areas of the brain. Your memory comes into play, you learn new movements and you associate things differently. Reading Shakespeare, learning to cook and building an airplane out of tooth picks all will challenge your brain and give you something to think about.

9. Make Lists

Lists are wonderful. Making lists helps us to associate items with one another. Make a list of all the places you have traveled. Make a list of the tastiest foods you have eaten. Make a list of the best presents you have been given. Make one list every day to jog your memory and make new connections. But don’t become too reliant on them. Make your grocery list, but then try to shop without it. Use the list once you have put every item you can think of in your cart. Do the same with your “to do” lists.

10. Choose a new skill

Find something that captivates you that you can do easily in your home and doesn’t cost too much. Photography with a digital camera, learning to draw, learning a musical instrument learning new cooking styles, or writing are all great choices.

20 Useless Body Parts (Why Do / Did We Need Them?)

VOMERONASAL ORGAN
A tiny pit on each side of the septum is lined with nonfunctioning chemoreceptors. They may be all that remains of a once extensive pheromone-detecting ability.

EXTRINSIC EAR MUSCLES
This trio of muscles most likely made it possible for prehominids to move their ears independently of their heads, as rabbits and dogs do. We still have them, which is why most people can learn to wiggle their ears.

WISDOM TEETH
Early humans had to chew a lot of plants to get enough calories to survive, making another row of molars helpful. Only about 5 percent of the population has a healthy set of these third molars.

NECK RIB
A set of cervical ribs—possibly leftovers from the age of reptiles—still appear in less than 1 percent of the population. They often cause nerve and artery problems.

THIRD EYELID
A common ancestor of birds and mammals may have had a membrane for protecting the eye and sweeping out debris. Humans retain only a tiny fold in the inner corner of the eye.

DARWIN’S POINT
A small folded point of skin toward the top of each ear is occasionally found in modern humans. It may be a remnant of a larger shape that helped focus distant sounds.

SUBCLAVIUS MUSCLE
This small muscle stretching under the shoulder from the first rib to the collarbone would be useful if humans still walked on all fours. Some people have one, some have none, and a few have two.

PALMARIS MUSCLE
This long, narrow muscle runs from the elbow to the wrist and is missing in 11 percent of modern humans. It may once have been important for hanging and climbing. Surgeons harvest it for reconstructive surgery.

MALE NIPPLES
Lactiferous ducts form well before testosterone causes sex differentiation in a fetus. Men have mammary tissue that can be stimulated to produce milk.

ERECTOR PILI
Bundles of smooth muscle fibers allow animals to puff up their fur for insulation or to intimidate others. Humans retain this ability (goose bumps are the indicator) but have obviously lost most of the fur.

APPENDIX
This narrow, muscular tube attached to the large intestine served as a special area to digest cellulose when the human diet consisted more of plant matter than animal protein. It also produces some white blood cells. Annually, more than 300,000 Americans have an appendectomy.

BODY HAIR
Brows help keep sweat from the eyes, and male facial hair may play a role in sexual selection, but apparently most of the hair left on the human body serves no function.

PLANTARIS MUSCLE
Often mistaken for a nerve by freshman medical students, the muscle was useful to other primates for grasping with their feet. It has disappeared altogether in 9 percent of the population.

THIRTEENTH RIB
Our closest cousins, chimpanzees and gorillas, have an extra set of ribs. Most of us have 12, but 8 percent of adults have the extras.

MALE UTERUS
A remnant of an undeveloped female reproductive organ hangs off the male prostate gland.

FIFTH TOE
Lesser apes use all their toes for grasping or clinging to branches. Humans need mainly the big toe for balance while walking upright.

FEMALE VAS DEFERENS
What might become sperm ducts in males become the epoophoron in females, a cluster of useless dead-end tubules near the ovaries.

PYRAMIDALIS MUSCLE
More than 20 percent of us lack this tiny, triangular pouchlike muscle that attaches to the pubic bone. It may be a relic from pouched marsupials.

COCCYX
These fused vertebrae are all that’s left of the tail that most mammals still use for balance and communication. Our hominid ancestors lost the need for a tail before they began walking upright.

PARANASAL SINUSES
The nasal sinuses of our early ancestors may have been lined with odor receptors that gave a heightened sense of smell, which aided survival. No one knows why we retain these perhaps troublesome mucus-lined cavities, except to make the head lighter and to warm and moisten the air we breathe.

ATRE

The Universe as a Hologram

Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?

Parts of the following text can be attributed to Michael Talbott

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

A spect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

So mehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

U niversity of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram

T o understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

T he three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

T he "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

T his insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

T o enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

T his, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

I n addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected. The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

I n a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

W hat else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

A lthough Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

B ohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

I n a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

T hen in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

P ribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

S imilarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage --simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

O ur uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

T he storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.

E ncoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from bluü whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with evey other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

Creation - Holographic Universe
In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.

Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic prardigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as real as "reality".

Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson discribes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection.

Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".

Get Your Hands Dirty: 100 Killer Tutorial DIY Websites

Do you yearn for self-sufficiency? Is your time and talent larger than your bank account? Then the following sites will appeal to you, as we’ve gathered some of the best and some of the most eclectic do-it-yourself sites and tutorials on the Web for your convenience. The first category contains general DIY network sites that help you learn about any project under the sun. From there, you can learn more about anything from how to raise goats to how to wire your house for sound. In between, you can revel in the fact that you save money when you tackle parenting and herbal remedies on your own.

General DIY Networks

The following links are to sites that will tell you how to do just about anything. In other words, if you want to learn how to grow an apartment garden, you could probably find advice on how to do this at just about any site listed below. Some sites are easier to understand than others, and some sites are larger than others, so you’ll need to browse through them to discover the places that are to your liking.

1. DIY Network: “DIY Network is your television source for the best know-how and how-to when it comes to any type of do-it-yourself project.” They aren’t kidding, as you can find projects for just about any interest on this site. As for the TV portion, you can discover quickly if DIY Network comes to your viewing area, then you can plug in and watch.
2. eHow: “How to do just about everything” and every subject is presented in simple and easy-to-understand step-by-step numbered instructions.
3. eSSORTMENT: Thousands of freelance writers and researchers to write answers to commonly asked questions, from “How do I Unstick a Stuck Window” to “How to Plan a Wedding Shower.”
4. Garden and Hearth: Don’t let the name fool you, as you can learn about more than home and hearth at this site. You can tap into business and finance matters, health care, entertainment, and more at this site, and it’s all based upon frugal living.
5. How to Do Things: HowToDoThings strives to solve people’s everyday problems by compiling reliable information from experienced contributors and making it available to inexperienced readers.
6. Instructables: Instructables is a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others.
7. Pioneer Thinking: From mind and body to lifestyle, you’ll discover a plethora of information about how you can take charge of your life and your surroundings. This is one of the first family oriented DIY information websites.
8. RealSimple: This online extension of the RealSimple magazine focuses on making busy women’s lives easier, from preparing a fast, healthy breakfast to getting a good night’s sleep. Don’t hesitate to browse through this information if you’re a man!
9. Show Me: AOL’s Show Me is a new website that encourages visitors to discover and share their knowledge on everyday tasks.
10. SoYouWanna: SoYouWanna.com “teaches you how to do all the things nobody taught you in school.”
11. The Site: TheSite.org claims to be the first place all young adults can turn to when they need support and guidance through life. This site seeks to impart impartial information about all things teen, from money to makeup.
12. wikiHow: wikiHow is a collaborative writing project with the intent of becoming the “world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual.” wikiHow currently contains 22,620 articles written, edited, and maintained primarily by volunteers on every topic imaginable (and some you’d never imagine).
13. Wired How-To Wiki: Another collaborative site dedicated to the burgeoning DIY culture and recently produced by Wired Magazine online.

Auto

Do you want to learn how to change a tire or do you need to rebuild your brake system? You might find what you need at any one of the sites listed below.

14. About.com Auto Repair: Matthew Wright is your guide to auto repair at the About site. You can learn all the essentials here, including an auto buyer’s guide.
15. Auto-Facts.org: MasterTechMark teaches you how to take care of your automobile on this site. If this isn’t enough for you, then tap into Mark’s Do It Yourself Auto Repair column at Squidoo, along with that site’s other car care ‘lenses’.
16. AutoEducation.com: This site is geared mainly toward beginners, as it’s easy to understand, and it walks you through all the basics. But, you can find advanced auto repair here as well.
17. Chilton DIY: How can you mention auto repair without the mention of Chilton? Receive accurate, complete and detailed repair information on your car, truck, van or SUV. While manuals and subscriptions carry a price, it’s less than the price of a mechanic. You might find what you need in free downloads that are available at Chilton’s online.
18. IOW40: This site is collecting all the individual articles from the Web into one place and sorting them by type of problem or project. You can find all the free auto repair advice you need by checking 10w40’s huge database of auto repair articles and parts suppliers from across the web, or you can post a question on the forums to get an answer to your problems.

Beauty and Style

Forget that hairdresser and those expensive skin creams. The sites below will show you how to style it on your own.

19. DIY Hairstyles: Click on an image and you’ll learn how to re-create that particular hairstyle.
20. Erica B’s DIY Style: Share Erica’s adventures in taking standard patterns from “drab to fab” with inspiration pulled straight from boutiques, the runway and fashion magazines. Back up this site with the Budget Fashionista, and you can’t go wrong!
21. Homemade Beauty Recipes: A great mix of concoctions that you can mix up in the comfort of your own home. Think of it as from your kitchen cabinet to your face and body.
22. Make Your Own Cosmetics: Most of the recipes at this site are the original creations of Donna Maria Coles Johnson, IBN’s founder and president (Indie Beauty Network), producer and host of the weekly Indie Business Radio Show airing on Global Talk Radio.com and author of “Making Aromatherapy Creams & Lotions” (Storey Books, 2000). But, readers can also send in their recipes to be scrutinized and possibly included.
23. Prom Spot: DIY facial treatments and a Sweet Vanilla Soak from a site that covers everything that any teen would want to know about her prom.

Brew Your Own Beer

Most of the more established DIY sites listed here carry at least one article on how to homebrew beer. But, the sites below are worth a visit if you plan to build this DIY project into a hobby. A warning: This DIY project wasn’t made federally legal until 1978, and it’s still illegal to home brew beer in many states. So, before you embark on any project listed below, check to see if you live in a homebrew state. If so, have fun. If not, maybe you should move?

24. Beer Brewing Recipes: If you have a gluten intolerance, never fear - Sean Sweeney offers his recipes for gluten-free beer.
25. Homebrew How-to Page: The links provided on this page are a compilation of articles from Homebrew Adventures and from throughout the web that best describe beer brewing.
26. Homebrewed Beer Recipes (and beer in food recipes): The links on this page will take you to recipes from Chef2Chef.net and RecipeSource. Some links contain many different recipes. Say thank you to Mr. Goodbeer for this directory!
27. How to Brew Beer in a Coffeepot: Perhaps the simplest method to make beer. Brought to you by All About Beer Magazine.
28. Your First Brew: If you follow the steps in this article by Brew Your Own Magazine, you’ll make a batch of all-malt ale and bottle it.

Clean It Up!

If you own baking powder and vinegar, you probably could clean just about anything. How? The sites below will tell you, along with information about how to get organized and how to stay non-toxic.

29. 131 Uses for Vinegar: How do I use thee? Let me count the ways… Use your vinegar to polish car chrome, to clean rust from various objects, to prevent lint from clinging to clothes and more. You can back up this list with another one provided by the Vinegar Institute.
30. Non-Toxic Cleaning Kit: Care2 is a site concerned with health, human rights and protecting the environment, and their non-toxic cleaning kit is right up this alley. Most of the cleaners are made with soaps, baking powder, and vinegar.
31. Organized Home: This site is like the recovery program for a disorganized person, as it touches on just about every aspect of living. If you don’t know how to unclutter your life, this site will show you how to do it.
32. RDLiving: Reader’s Digest offers a list of just about everything you can use to clean around the house other than commercial cleaners. For instance, you can clean a toilet bowl with Alka Seltzer (think what it does to your stomach!), and you can use bread to dust your oil paintings.

County Living

The sites below are the hardcore back-to-the-basics sites you’ll need to make the move to the country. Learn about how to raise livestock, can, build a woodstove, and more.

33. Backwoods Home Magazine: This site is based upon the Backwoods Home Magazine, and it also includes author blogs and the ever-reliable “Ask Jackie” section where you can find answers to everything from how to transplant tomatoes to how to can pureed bananas.
34. Goodbye Citylife: So you want to move from the city to the country and raise goats and chickens? You can rely on this site, along with all the others listed here, to make that transition. Even if you remain in the city, there’s no reason why you can’t build a bat house or make your own soap…
35. Homestead.org: This site focuses on homesteading, but it also appeals to backwoods living. You can “Ask Aggie” about country homesteading and real estate questions, learn how to live in the country, get involved with chats, or take advantage of the long list of links to other like-minded sites.
36. Horses and Horse Information: If you want to move to the country to raise or board horses, this site will treat you to reality. You can get all the basics on horse pasture creation to forage and grazing information, equine training, breeding, and more. This is an excellent site for the wanna-be horse owner as well.
37. Mother Earth News: This site is based upon Mother Earth News magazine, and you’ll find articles here based upon organic and ‘natural’ living. Learn more about organic gardening, livestock and farming, and alternative energy sources.
38. Water Well Helpline: If you need to learn how to build an inexpensive water well, this is the place to start. Fred Dungan started this tutorial in 1997 and has added to it over the years.

Craft Projects for Kids and Kids at Heart

If you have time and kids on your hands, the following sites may save your life. Even if you don’t have kids, you’ll find some great gift ideas here.

39. All Free Crafts: Craft projects at this site are categorized by holiday and season for kids and for adults, but you can also find free craft patterns for knitting, crocheting, and sewing, and tutorials for soap making and for making birdfeed. This is one of the few craft sites that doesn’t link out to other sites for information, so you won’t encounter broken links for these projects.
40. Amazing Moms: This site aims to bring simple,fresh and practical solutions to busy families with the thought that when families do things together, they become closer. You’ll discover arts and crafts, party ideas, recipes, and more at this site.
41. Design It Yourself: This site is based upon the book, “D.I.Y. Design It Yourself,” written by Ellen Lupton. You’ll find many projects that help to demystify the technical side of small-scale publishing in various media while opening up your mind to the creative side of design. While the site contains few tutorials (mostly as downloads), the ideas may stimulate your creativity.
42. Family Fun: This is a Disney site, so you know you’ll encounter Disney-related topics here. But, this can be useful if you need to come up with slick (yet still free or very inexpensive) parties, games, and other DIY ideas. This site is an extension of Disney’s Family.com site, where you can expand your resources into parenting, travel, and more.
43. Enchanted Learning: If you want ideas on how to entertain your child with education, you’ve come to the right place. Combined with How Stuff Works, these two sites can answer all your kids’ questions (especially when you don’t have answers!).

Green DIY

The sites below are just a few of the many new “green” sites on the Web. The following sites contain practical and do-able information that you can implement immediately.

44. Build It Solar: The author for this site, Gary, is a retired airplane product development engineer who lives in Montana and who has always been interested in solar energy projects. The topics come with DIY projects as well as with information about how and why each project works. You can also find some experimental projects along with some test results. This is a great place to receive basic education on solar energy.
45. Connecticut Energy Blog: This blog’s author, Bruce Crowder, is a mechanical engineer who lives and works in Connecticut. While the focus is on that particular state, you can learn much about how to conserve energy no matter where you reside.
46. Eartheasy: This site tackles topics such as general living, gardening, eating, and recreation. More than a guide, this site offers insights into how to take control of many projects yourself.
47. How to Go Green: Some of the projects contained within this blog are easy to implement, and some will be costly to create. Either way, the ideas will help you to make your life greener.
48. d.i.y. naturally: Not only can you learn about all things green at this site, you can learn how to use salt to clean your laundry, and how to use baking powder as a beauty aid.
49. Twin Cities Green Guide: If only every American city had a site like this…The Twin Cities Green Guide covers local information, but it also provides tools and information about how to do anything green no matter where you live, from citizen action to vegan recipes.
50. Weekly DIY: Green Options provides an archive of their weekly DIY guides that show how to use green products and how to create your own.

Health and Fitness

Don’t use the sites below to substitute for your general check-up or for serious illnesses. With that said, this list contains some interesting and educational information that can do nothing but help you learn more about a healthy lifestyle.

51. Andy Weil, MD: “Your trusted health advisor,” is a man who combines alternative and traditional health focuses to produce a site that appeals to anyone concerned with health and aging. This is an informational site that focuses on how to eliminate free radicals and how to build optimal health and a preventative lifestyle. You can also “Ask Dr. Weil” about your health questions.
52. Everyday Hygiene: This is a list of “old fashioned” advice and remedies for everyday hygiene, focused mainly on oral hygiene. You can also scope out the “old fashioned” recipes for illnesses at this site, among other free/cheap/easy products used to clean the home.
53. Herbal Remedies: Organic Foodee brings interesting advice on how to use various herbs and spices as health remedies. You’ll learn that cinnamon is an antiseptic and that herbalists use oats to treat nervous exhaustion, insomnia, and “weakness of the nerves.” When you’re through with this list, browse through the rest of the site to learn more about organic foods.
54. Project Aware: An American website designed for women who have issues with menopause, HRT, osteoporosis and heart health.
55. Seven DIY Fitness Tests: The Guardian Unlimited outlines seven tests that will help you determine your physical weaknesses and strengths.
56. WebMD: Everything you’d ever want to know about fitness and physical and emotional or mental health, no matter your age.

Home Improvement

The list below contains some fairly slick and professional sites that will help you pull your home together. Unfortunately, we cannot include every site online that focuses on home improvement (like House Hacker), so you might conduct a search for specific projects that will help make your life easier.

57. Ask the Builder: This site belongs to Tim Carter, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who focuses on home improvement and construction. You can watch some of Carter’s videos on YouTube as well.
58. Bob Vila’s American Home: You probably know Bob Vila from his televised show, and this site is a recap on various home construction and improvement projects. You can learn from step-by-step instructions, videos, or ask questions on the forum or to Bob Vila directly.
59. DIYonline: DIYonline.com “raises the bar for how Do-It-Yourselfers use the Internet” to help them plan, design and implement their home improvement projects. This site goes beyond the home to help you with your yard projects as well.
60. DoItYourself.com: DoItYourself.com is the leading independent home improvement and home repair website, and it was named as one of the “‘Top 50 Sites in the World’ by Time Magazine.” You could build a house from scratch with the help of this site, as they cover electronics, plumbing, decorating, and painting. They also branch out a bit into cars, boats, and personal finance - but homes are their focus.
61. HGTV: This site is a companion to the popular Home and Garden television show, where you can learn about everything from how to sell your home to curb appeal to designing on a dime.
62. Hometime: Hometime helps you to tackle everything from landscaping, painting, and kitchen facelifts to managing new construction and major additions to older houses. The site is a companion to their television show.
63. Popular Mechanic’s Home Journal: And you thought Popular Mechanics was all about automobiles, didn’t you? The home care section on this site tackles everything from how to upgrade your thermostat to wood projects complete with free plans.

Lawn and Garden

The following sites focus specifically on your lawn and garden:

64. Backyard Gardener: You’ll find answers here to questions about everything from annuals to perennials and from cutting a concrete paving slab to mounting a cedar ladder trellis.
65. Free Landscape and Design Ideas: Get your free landscape plans here! You can also learn about principles behind great lawn design and how to use various landscape components.
66. Garden Organic: Although this is a UK site that seeks memberships, the information they provide for free online is invaluable.
67. Organic Gardening: Learn everything you’d want to know about organic gardening, including soils, landscaping, and more. You can also tap into their blog, “GoodnPlanty.” Rodale Press brings this site to you.
68. Wildlife Habitat: Create your own backyard natural habitat with these Natural Wildlife Foundation guidelines.

Menu Planning

Why buy menu-planning software or purchase costly home-delivery diet plans when others have already done the work for you?

69. Changing Shape: The home page carries some basic caloric-based menu plans. If you sign up for membership, you can also receive a ‘personal trainer’ who will help you to lose weight and get fit. The price is right - currently from $1.05 to $2.50 per week depending upon the length of contract. They also carry menu plans for vegetarians, vegans and even for high protein (low carb) dieters. Fitness Magazine, where you can learn more about fitness and health, recommends this program.
70. Healthy Menu Planning: Learn how to plan your meals through the World’s Healthiest Foods site. These plans speak to various physical ailments, from asthma to rheumatoid arthritis. Browse through the site to learn more about balanced and healthy eating from The George Mateljan Foundation for the World’s Healthiest Foods, a nonprofit foundation that offers an independent perspective that is not influenced by commercial interests.
71. Hillbilly Housewife’s Menu Planning Made Easy: Maggie (aka The Hillbilly Housewife) offers three different menu planning methods that work well when you’re on a tight budget. If you’re into Country-style Steak, Oven Fried Chicken, and Beanie Weanies, then this is the site for you.
72. Menu Planning and Recipes: The American Heart Association offers two caloric-based menu plans and enough recipes to keep you busy for at least one week.
73. Menus for Moms: You need to sign up for the menu plans, which are delivered weekly along with recipes, grocery lists, organizing tips, and more. If you don’t like the menus, simply remove yourself from the email list. What have you got to lose?

Parenting

The sites below differ widely, as some contain a focus on the typical “normal” two-parent family, and others focus on imperfect parents, dads-at-home, and more. Enjoy!

74. Family Education: The focus is on moms, and the information ranges from how to raise your kids to how to wire a wall for cable TV. This site is part of a network that includes information for teachers and kids as well.
75. Inside Fatherhood: Stay-at-home dads need as much help as anyone with parenting. The nice thing about this blog is that Steve Remington also includes many tutorials on household chores from the male perspective.
76. Kaboose: This site is geared more toward moms, with advice and DIY information on family and home life, health, and crafts.
77. Parenting: This site seeks to answer your parenting questions with resources and guidance on how to successfully raise, praise, discipline, teach and love your child.
78. The Imperfect Parent: This is a great site, as it offers advice about parenting, but it also allows parents to be adults with topics on political and social issues as well as a focus on parental health and well being with a dose of humor and a flair for imperfection.

Self-Publishing

Do you have an urge to write? The following basic tutorials and tools will get you started, and the only investment is your time and talent.

79. DIY Poetry Publishing: The DIY publishing resource links include mostly poets, poetry presses, & poetry chapbooks, focusing on individuals, very small independent operations using DIY methods, & handmade book arts.
80. PrimoPDF: Want to create an eBook, but can’t afford expensive PDF software? PrimoPDF is reliable, fast, and works as well as any PDF creator. If you don’t like this one, try CutePDF™ Writer, which is also free.
81. EbookBuilder 4: Create an eBook with this software that can be read like a normal book with a left and a right page and page navigation buttons to flip thru the book.
82. How to Create an eBook: Learn how to create an eBook for HTML or PDF, along with a template that will help you to create that book.
83. Lulu: This is the only eBook publisher that will print your book first, and bill you later through deductions from each sale. No set-up fees, no surprises, no minimum order. This company has now expanded into hardback editions, and you can also publish calendars, artwork, music, and eBooks through this company.

Stretching Dollars

You can find many “frugal” and penny-pincher blogs online, but the following sites are our favorites because they get right to the point. Not only will you gather ideas on how to save money, you’ll learn about projects that you can create easily and with very little money.

84. Free Budget Forms and Guidelines: There’s nothing like a visible budget to show how that money flies out the window. This page, offered by Living a Better Life, offers budget guidelines and free forms that range from a weekly budget worksheet to a holiday spending worksheet.
85. Frugalist: You’ll find literally hundreds of tips on this site that will help you to save money. Learn how to save on gas, how to avoid paying retail, and ten alternatives to credit cards, among other practical ideas.
86. The Frugal Life: Can you live well with what you have? If not, this site will help you as you learn how to handle everything from your automobile to your work at home worries.
87. The Dollar Stretcher: “Living better for less” was never so easy with the help provided by this Web site. Yes, you can learn how to tame debt here, but you can also learn how to live frugally.

Technology

Yes, we know about ZDNet and CNET’s Digital Home, among other tech-heavy sites. But, they aren’t as much fun as the sites listed below.

88. DIY Live: DIY Live is written by Greg Lipscomb, a former NASA employee who has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University. The Web site is geared towards providing quality Do-it-Yourself projects with the occasional technology update.
89. DIY at Engadget: A series of posts that were tagged as “DIY” at Engadget, the geeky tech gadget Web site.
90. diyAudio.com: “Projects by the fanatics for the fanatics.” Outside the numerous DIY projects listed on categorized forums, you can also participate in the diyAudio wiki, a collaborative effort to create the ultimate DIY reference site. The forums alone are fascinating, as many users include photos with their projects.
91. DIY:happy: DIY:happy focuses on DIY projects from around the net that range from building your own nuclear reactor to knitting a scarf. While the focus is on hardware, electronics, and software, you can learn how to cut your own hair as well.
92. Hacked Gadgets: If you want some crazy hacks, some human hacks, or even some normal computer hacks, visit this site. You could end up with a flying alarm clock or a pair of glasses that you wear on a special nose piercing.
93. Lifehacker: C’mon - if you don’t know about this site, you must have been living in the woods without cable. Updated several times daily, Lifehacker brings computer how-tos and more to a geek market. While the focus is on technology, Lifehacker offers tips on subjects like where to find public records online to ten things your supermarket doesn’t want you to know.
94. MAKEzine: MAKEzine brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. This site, along with HackZine, is part of O’Reilly Publishing.
95. RED Free Circuit Designs: From audio and auto to music-related circuits, you can find a circuit design here. And, you can find them for free.

Weekend Projects

What are you doing this upcoming weekend? Some of the projects listed below are just big enough to keep you busy for two days, and other projects - like the tree house - are perfect projects for a series of weekends.

96. Bird Watcher’s Digest DIY: Do you need a woodpecker box? Or would you rather build a suet feeder? Learn about birds and create your own “birdy” environment this weekend with the dozens of projects presented by Bird Watcher’s Digest.
97. Free Deck Plans: Do you need a deck, stairs, handrails, or a hot tub surround? Find free plans here, along with a materials list for each plan.
98. Guide to Building Your Own Camping Equipment: Whether you consider camping as an adventure or as recreation, this site will supply you with DIY tools that will enhance your camping experience. The camp chairs, made from branches and fabric (possibly a towel?) are awesome, and the minnow trap will save you money on bait supplies. You can even use the marine telescope in your swimming pool if the camping trip is called off.
99. Picnic Table Plans: This is definitely the primo weekend project, as it’s easy to undertake with these detailed plans and instructions. Scroll to the bottom of the page for more freebies, like plans for a modular shelf unit and plans for a child’s bench.
100. The Treehouse Guide: Need an extra room? All the information you’ll need to build a safe and frugal tree house is included in this site.

Hopefully you’ll discover a project or two in the sites above that will keep you busy for a long time. Plus, we hope you find the cost of these projects fitting for your frugal budget. But, if nothing suits you, you can always learn how to complain. That act in itself is a talent, and it doesn’t cost a red cent to lodge your disappointments.

The Ten Coolest Numbers

Cam McLeman

This is an attempt to give a count-down of the top ten coolest numbers. Let's first concede that this is a highly subjective ordering -- one person's 14.38 is another's . The astute (or probably simply ``awake'') reader will notice, for example, a definite bias toward numbers interesting to a number theorist in the below list. (On the other hand, who better to gauge the coolness of numbers than a number-theorist...) But who knows? Maybe I can be convinced that I've left something out, or that my ordering should be switched in some cases. But let's first set down some ground rules.

What's in the list?

What makes a number cool? I think a word that sums up the key characteristic of cool numbers is ``canonicality.'' Numbers that appear in this list should be somehow fundamental to the nature of mathematics. They could represent a fundamental fact or theorem of mathematics, be the first instance of an amazing class of numbers, be omnipresent in modern mathematics, or simply have an eerily long list of interesting properties. Perhaps a more appropriate question to ask is the following:

What's not in the list?

There are some really awesome numbers that I didn't include in the list. I'll go through several examples to get a feel for what sorts of numbers don't fit the characteristics mentioned above.

Shocking as it may seem, I first disqualify the constants appearing in Euler's formula . This was a tough decision. Perhaps these five ( , , , 1, and 0) belong at the top of the list, or perhaps they're just too fundamentally important to be considered exceptionally cool. Or maybe they're just so cliché'd that we'll get a significantly more interesting list by excluding them.

Also disqualified are numbers whose primary significance is cultural, rather than mathematical: Despite being the answer to life, the universe, and everything, 42 is (comparatively) a mathematically uninteresting number. Similarly not included in the list were 867-5309, 666, and the first illegal prime number. Similarly disqualified were constants of nature like Newton's and , the fine structure constant, Avogadro's number, etc.

Finally, I disqualified number that were highly non-canonical in construction. For example, the prime constant and Champernowne's constant are both mathematically interesting, but only because they were, at least in an admittedly vague sense, constructed to be as such. Also along these lines are numbers like G63 and Skewe's constant, which while mathematically interesting because of roles they've played in proofs, are not inherently interesting in and of themselves.

That said, I felt free to ignore any of these disqualifications when I felt like it. I hope you enjoy the following list, and I welcome feedback.

Honorable Mentions

• 65,537 - This number is arguably the number with the most potential. It's currently the largest Fermat prime known. If it turns out to be the largest Fermat prime, it might earn itself a place on the list, by virtue of thus also being the largest prime value of for which an -gon is constructible using only a rule and compass.
• Conway's constant - The construction of the number can be found here http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ConwaysConstant.html. Though this number has some remarkable properties (not the least of which is being unexpectedly algebraic), it's completely non-canonical construction kept it from overtaking any of our list's current members.
• 1728 and 1729 - This pair just didn't have quite enough going for them to make it. 1728 is an important -invariant of elliptic curves and modular forms, and is a perfect cube. 1729 happens to be the third Carmichael number, but the primary motivation for including 1729 is because of the mathematical folklore associated it to being the first taxicab number, making it more interesting (math-)historically than mathematically.
• 28 - Aside from being a perfect number, a fairly interesting fact in and of itself, the number 28 has some extra interesting ``aliquot'' properties that propels it beyond other perfect numbers. Specifically, the largest known collection of sociable numbers has cardinality 28, and though this might seem a silly feat in and of itself, the fact that sociable numbers and perfect numbers are so closely related may reveal something slightly more profound about 28 than it just being perfect.
• 4 - The problem with 4 is the difficulty in distinguishing between cool properties of 2 and cool properties of 4. Where, for example, should we include the (trivial, but not uninteresting) relations ? If this were all, there would be no question that 4 doesn't even belong on the Honorable Mentions list,but 4 does have a particularly poignant claim to fame: It is the unique such that admits more than one differential structure, and indeed admits uncountably many so. The space (and 4-dimensional geometry) seems to persistently crop up as a pathology in differential geometry.
• Chaitin's Constant ???. The question marks themselves form part of the reason this constant could be included, being a nice example of a number which is definable but not computable. Chaitin's constant can loosely be described as the probability that a Turing machine will halt on a randomly-provided string. There is no doubt that such a constant would represent something fundamental, but there are some unfortunate ambiguities in the definition, largely stemming from the ambiguity in ordering/encoding the set of all Turing machines. Alternate encodings define different constants, and it's difficult to say that any particular encoding is more canonical than any other.

#10) The Golden Ratio,

Thiss was a tough one. Yes, it's cool that it satisfies the property that its reciprocal is one less than it, but this merely reflects that it's a root of the wholly generic polynomial . Yes, it's cool that it may have an aesthetic quality revered by the Greeks, but this is void from consideration for being non-mathematical. Only slightly less canonical is that it gives the limiting ratio of subsequent Fibonacci numbers. Redeeming it, however, is that this generalizes to all ``Fibonacci-like'' sequences, and is the solution to two sort of canonical operations:

and

#9) 691

The prime number 691 made it on here for a couple of reasons: First, it's prime, but more importantly, it's the first example of an irregular prime, a class of primes of immense importance in algebraic number theory. (A word of caution: it's not the smallest irregular prime, but it's the one that corresponds to the earliest Bernoulli number, , so 691 is only ``first'' in that sense). It also shows up as a coefficient of every non-constant term in the -expansion of the modular form . Further testimony to the arithmetic significance is its seemingly magical appearance in the algebraic -theory: It's known that surjects onto 691.

#8) 78,557

The number 78,557 is here to represent an amazing class of numbers called Sierpinski numbers, defined to be numbers such that is composite for every . That such numbers exist is flabbergasting...we know from Dirichlet's theorem that primes occur infinitely often in non-trivial arithmetic sequences. Though the sequence formed by isn't arithmetic, it certainly doesn't behave multiplicatively either, and there's no apparent reason why there shouldn't be a large (or infinite) number of primes in every such sequence. This notwithstanding, Sierpinski's composite number theorem proves there are in fact infinitely many odd such numbers . As a small disclaimer, though it's proven that 78,557 is indeed a Sierpinski number, it is not quite yet known that it is the smallest. There are 17 positive integers smaller than 78,557 not yet known to be non-Sierpinski.

#7)

Perhaps the first striking this about this number is that it is the sum of the reciprocals of the positive integer squares:

Though the choice of here for the exponent is somewhat non-canonical (i.e. we've just noted that , where stands for the Riemann zeta function), and that this is largely interesting for math-historical reasons (it was the first sum of this type that Euler computed), we can at least include it here to represent the amazing array of numbers of the form for a positive integer. This class of numbers incorporates two amazing and seemingly disparate collections, depending on whether is even (in which case is known to be a rational multiple of ) or odd (in which case extremely little is known, even for ).

Further, there's something slightly more canonical about the fact that its reciprocal, , gives the ``probability'' (in a suitably-defined sense) that two randomly chosen positive integers are relatively prime.

#6) Feigenbaum's constant

This is the entry on this the list with which I have the least familiarity. The one thing going for it is that it seems to be highly canonical, representing the limiting ratio of distance between bifurcation intervals for a fairly large class of one-dimensional maps. In other words, all maps that fall in to this category will bifurcate at the same rate, giving us a glimpse of order in the realm of chaotic systems.

#5) The Oddest Prime:

This number caused quite a bit of controversy in discussions leading up to the construction of this list. The question here is canonicality. The first argument of ``It's the only even prime'' is merely a re-wording of ``It's the only prime divisible by 2,'' which could uniquely characterizes any prime (e.g. 5 is the only prime divisible by 5, etc.). Of debatable canonicality is the immensely prevalent notion of ``working in binary.'' To a computer scientist, this may seem extremely canonical, but to a mathematician, it may simply be an (not quite) arbitrary choice of a finite field over which to work.

Yet 2 has some remarkable features even ignoring aspects relating to its primality. For instance, the somewhat canonical field of real numbers has index 2 in its algebraic closure . The factor is prevalent enough in complex and Fourier analysis that I've heard people lament that should have been defined to be twice its current value. It's also the only prime number such that has any rational solutions.

Finally, if nothing else, it is certainly the first prime, and could at least be included for being the first representative of such an amazing class of numbers.

#4) The Monster 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000

The above integer is the size of the monster group , the largest of the sporadic groups. This gives it a relatively high degree of canonicality. It's unclear (at least to me) why there should be any sporadic groups, or why, given that they exist, there should only be finitely many. Since there is, however, there must be something fairly special about the largest possible one.

Also contributing to this number's rank on this list is the remarkable properties of the monster group itself, which has been realized (actually, was constructed as) a group of rotations in 196,883-dimensional space, representing in some sense a limit to the amount of symmetry such a space can possess.

#3) The Euler-Mascheroni Constant,

One of the most amazing facts from elementary calculus is that the harmonic series diverges, but that if you put an exponent on the denominators even just a hair above 1, the result is a convergent sequence. A refined statement says that the partial sums of the harmonic series grow like , and a further refinement says that the error of this approximation approaches our constant:

This seems to represent something fundamental about the harmonic series, and thus of integers themselves.

Finally, perhaps due to importance inherited from the crucially important harmonic series, the Euler-Mascheroni constant appears magically all over mathematics. For some idea of 's ability to pop up in unforeseen places, see the MathWorld entry on the Euler-Mascheroni constant.

#2) Khinchin's constant,

For a real number , we define a geometric mean function
where the are the terms of the simple continued fraction expansion of . By nothing short of a miracle of mathematics, this function of is almost everywhere (i.e. everywhere except for a set of measure 0) independent of !!! In other words, except for a ``small'' number of exceptions, this function always outputs the same value, dubbed Khinchin's constant and denoted by . It's hard to impress upon a casual reader just how astounding this is, but consider the following: Any infinite collection of non-negative integers forms a continued fraction, and indeed each continued fraction gives an infinite collection of that form. That the partial geometric means of these sequences is almost everywhere constant tells us a great deal about the distribution of sequences showing up as continued fraction sequences, in turn revealing something very fundamental about the structure of real numbers.

#1) 163

Well, we've come down to it, this author's humble opinion of the coolest number in existence. Though a seemingly unlikely candidate, I hope to show you that 163 satisfies so many eerily related properties as to earn this title.

I'll begin with something that most number theorists already know about this number - it is the largest value of such that the number field has class number 1, meaning that its ring of integers is a unique factorization domain. The issue of factorization in quadratic fields, and of number fields in general, is one of the principal driving forces of algebraic number theory, and to be able to pinpoint the end of perfect factorization in the quadratic imaginary case like this seems at least arguably fundamental.

But even if you don't care about factorization in number fields, the above fact has some amazing repercussions to more basic number theory. The two following facts in particular jump out:

• is within of an integer.
• The polynomial has the property that for integers , is prime.

Both of these are tied intimately (the former using deep properties of the -function, the latter using relatively simple arguments concerning the splitting of primes in number fields) to the above quadratic imaginary number field having class number 1. Further, since is the last such field, the two listed properties are in some sense the best possible. Along a similar vein, is the largest prime such that there exists an elliptic curve over with an isogeny of degree , which in turn makes the last such that the ``modular curve" has being non-empty.

Most striking to me, however, is the amazing frequency with which 163 shows up in a wide variety of class number problems. In addition to being the last value of such that has class number 1, it is the first value of such that (the maximal real subfield of the -th cyclotomic field) has class number greater than 1. That 163 appears as the last instance of a quadratic field having unique factorization, and the first instance of a real cyclotomic field not having unique factorization, seems too remarkable to be coincidental. This is (maybe) further substantiated by a couple of other factoids:

• Hasse asked for an example of a prime and an extension such that the prime splits completely into divisors which do not lie in a cyclic subgroup of the class group. The first such example is any prime less than 163 which splits completely in the cubic field generated by the polynomial . This field has discriminant . (See Shanks' The Simplest Cubic Fields).
• The maximal conductor of an imaginary abelian number field of class number 1 corresponds to the field , which has conductor .

It is unclear the extent to which these additional arithmetical properties reflect deeper properties of the -function or other modular forms, and remains a wide open field of study.