Today I came across a spectacular photo on the ESA-website showing the transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis in front of the Sun on 17 September 2006, taken by amateur photographer Thierry Legault. It is taken from Mamers, in Normandy (FR).

If you click on the picture on the ESA-Website, you can see a larger version of the image.

On 8th of September, professor Shuji Nakamura, the inventor of the blue, geen and white LED (Light emitting diode), got the Millenium Technology Prize 2006, the world’s largest prize for technical inventions (1 million Euros), which have a favourable impact on the quality of life and wellbeing.

Professor Nakamura has invented a new revolutionary light source, of which he says: “Using LEDs for lighting could halve the amount of electricity consumed for this purpose.” This is of particular interest for developing countries. The LEDs can also be used for water processing in the Third World or for purifying the air or proving the presence of biological weapons. White LEDs are also used for handy displays and blue, green and red LEDs in TV-liquid crystal screens. From next year on white LEDs will be used for car headlights and for the lighting of houses. And there are more applications on the way.
The Millenium Technology Prize is awarded every second year by a Finnish foundation for life improving innovations and as a support for humane technological development. The first prize was presented to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, in 2004.

Improving the quality of life through innovative technology is really an expression of good will, for the advancement of humanity.

Yesterday I was at an interesting presentation on accessibility of websites, by Namics, internet specialists from Zurich. For many a handicapped person present websites offer difficulties, in navigation, in transporting the content to screenreader-softwares or in the contrast used for the sites. There exist definitions of the web-consortium about accessibility, which are in a process of updating, because many new technologies have appeared in the last years. Somebody of this consortium hold a talk at the meeting, explaining what they are talking about, when they try to define how a website should be for disabled persons to have free access to it.
Very interesting was a presentation of a deaf person from Gebärdenwerk in Hamburg, giving a 30 min talk about the special problems of deaf persons. At my table there were two translators transposing the talks into sign language (which in Germany is recognised as a separate language besides German) for a few disabled persons in the audience.
There exist a number of aids for disabled persons, but when the site is not well done, it is hard to get the right access. The Swiss Government websites have t be barrier-free until the end of this year, and for my office we are also thinking of making our site accessible. I wonder I find the time and know-how to renovate the good-will website according to the accessibility standards…
Most impressive for me was a talk I had at the end of the meeting with a blind man, who had been a high school teacher and later lost his eyesight and now is teaching again, and he is publishing a tape newspaper together with pupils and volunteers. He had such a commitment to sensitise organisations and people to the needs of visually handicapped or blind people and to render help to persons concerned.

We are using a lot computer or other electronic equipments, but don’t think much about what is in it – or what is being done with the toxic waste products at the end.
Greenpeace is now publishing a ranking about the global policies and practices of leading mobile and PC manufacturers, what they do about eliminating harmful chemicals and or taking responsibility for their products once they are discarded by consumers.
So the Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics might help deciding what products to buy and what better not – think that often the old machines land in some 3rd world deposits…

Two days ago my son installed a free program on my laptop changing its outlook from a Windows to an Apple – with the design transformed in all nooks and corners of the system. Even the start/shutdown button is now decorated with the biten apple, new sounds, and the programs coming dancing down from a new toolbar.
It looks nice – a real metamorphosis, a butterfly from a caterpillar. Oh, the inside stayed the same, even if the apple shows up at the startup and the explorer has other folders – it’s just a label change much like when you take to a new body at birth, where the label changes, but the being inside has the same core reincarnating.

Already since several years you can see photos in virtual reality on the web, which give you the impression of looking around in 360 degrees.
Now you can get your body even scanned in a 3D way and get a counterpart of you, either in polymer gypsum, metal or marble. “3D Culture” has developed a high-tech 3D-scanner “Scanguru” which digitally seizes the surface relief of your head or your body. From this the laser-scan is processed to a 3D data model, then a computer-controlled machine makes in many hours a gypsum-blank out of the 3D-model, from which at the end an artist might form a stone scupture in the classical way.
On the site you can even get 3D-pdfs where you can hover around in all directions.
Though there is still quite a way to beaming oneself from one place to the other, it is an interesting approach of combining hightech and art.

Since last sunday the world seems to be no longer the same – at least my computer-world. After a lot of time and energy spent in trying to restore the old PC (even with installing a new harddisk) and a lot of tips from the support team of my office, which I all tried without success, I finally had to agree that the PC-patient was about to die, or better the “lost data-continent” to sink. So I packed everything I could into the ark of a newly acquired external harddisk drive and set off to the new world, a new laptop. (As per the spiritual dimension of such a migration you might read the Lunar Messenger about “Dissolution and Creation“…)

And so the laborious process of the re-incarnation of the data to a new “baby”-laptop started (which however wasn’t tabula rasa, but already filled with a lot of impressions in form of programs.)
Long hours of work and installing the programs from the old PC yesterday ended in a start-up blockage, not allowing me any more to enter the windows program. The freshly burned emergency-CD proved to be unable to render out its data to the PC, only when stopping this process windows decided to give me entry into the new world (not to tell of other problems on the way, with printer, scanner, pdf-program….)
Using the try and error-method with different ways finally lead me to the report page of the laptop-producer, a well-known, world-leading enterprise. First I scrupulously filled out a registration form and error-report, in German, and when at the end I pressed the “send”-button, it turned out that all was done for fresh air: “Page not found”. The system was so kind to lead me to the corresponding English American page, where I started the process again, filling out all about my experiences with the high-tech deadlock of my new machine, hoping that since the laptop is from an American firm (though the machine is “made in China” – of course, the Chinese getting hold of the American market…), the webpage will work better in that language. The result however was the same: “Page not found”. Fine, I thought, this gives you a good lesson of detachment, overcoming my PC-addiction.
But there was the other voice saying: Try it with the support, try it with the support tomorrow, maybe they show you a way back to your pc-paradise. Looking up the stars in the astro-calendar, time seems to be auspicious: Mercury has stopped his retrograde movement yesterday (and when he, the ruler of communication and inter-connection is retrograde, electronics seem to run havoc – my PC at my office also stopped working last week, and I have other experiences of this weird influence, making me nearly superstitious….) and now things should start working again. So I’ll phone them tomorrow – fearing that they tell me to reset the entire harddisk, or to send in the laptop to the service…
If you don’t see any posts in the weblog over the next days, you can suppose me sweating, not from the sun, but from trying to restore the PC…

Yesterday I read a fascinating article in the NZZ (New Zurich Newspaper) about the uncalculable vaccum, why empty space racks the brains of particle physicists and cosmologist. After resuming the historical past of assumptions about the vaccuum, the author summed up the opinion of modern physics saying: “So the vaccum is not nothing, but a complicated physical object, in which electromagnetic fields and elementary particles keep on being created and destroyed. From this results that eavery cubic centimetre contains a certain energy: the vacuum energy, to which each virtual elementary particle gives a contribution.”
This statement about the vacuum energy is absolutely in tune with the teachings of eternal wisdom, where creation is described as being a manifestation from seeming nothingness to aparent something. In the Secret Doctrine Helena P. Blavatsky is fighting against the concept of the vacuum as a volume of space that is substansively empty of matter, (as� said in Wikipedia), and she ironically says that “empty space” is only existing in the brains of the scientists (of her time).
In the Vedas there is a formula of creation, “Purna Madah Purna Midam…”. Purna stands for fullness and nillness, fullness as the apparent manifestation, nillness as seeming nothingness. In the book “Mantrams. Their Significance and Practice” Dr. Kumar gives the meaning of the Vedic expression in mathematical terms: “THAT (the unmanifest) is zero, THIS (the manifest) is zero. When zero comes out of zero, zero remains.”
In the NZZ article the author describes latest findings of astrophysics, from observations of star explosions that there seems to be some kind of dark matter having a repulsive energy, which might be associated with the energy of the vaccuum. However, it seems that the ensuing results are such that either the scientists have made wrong calculations and the universe is incredibly exploding, or their concepts of the universe are totally wrong.
He ends up saying that the vacuum is not empty but contains everything which gives a great worry to the scientists.

In the Aquarian Age everything is becoming lighter in weight – the material of houses, the fabrics of clothes, the bodies of people. The keynote of electronics is miniaturing things and getting them lighter. Here a news in this trend:
OmniVision has just launched the smallest camera of the world, just 2,1×2,3 mm thin. It is a camera sensor which a patient can swallow as part of a pill and which then allows doctors/surgeons to navigate to the desired location for a better diagnosis. Science fiction is becoming a reality.

Want to have a look into the cosmos? The NASA-site “Astronomy Picture of the Day” just shows today the moving moons of Saturn, a time-lapse movie created by the� Saturn-orbiting robotic Cassini spacecraft over a period of about 40 minutes.
More about the spiritual side of Saturn you find in the book “Saturn – The Path to Systematized Growth” by Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar.