In the last two days I got two beautiful powerpoint presentations from friends in Spain, one with photos from a journey to Tibet (3 MB), another with most delicate motives from China (5.9 MB). Have a look at them, if you like to make a journey in your imagination.

The European edition of the US weekly mewsmagazine Time has chosen Linus Torvalds, father of the Linux system, on its list of heros of the last 60 years. By giving away his software, the Finnish programmer had earned a place in history, Time writes. They chose him in the category “Leaders and Rebels”. He was just 21 when he changed the world by writing the kernel of a new computer operating system called Linux. He posted it for free on the internet and invited anyone interested to help improve it.

“Today, 15 years later, Linux powers everything from supercomputers to mobile phones around the world, and Torvalds has achieved fame as the godfather of the open-source movement, in which software code is shared and developed in a collaborative effort rather than being kept locked up by a single owner”, Time writes.

The power of giving is a central spiritual principle. You can read more about it in the issue on Giving and Taking of the Good Will in Action.

A beautiful new photo of the Hubble space telescope looking like a modern painting shows the Orion nebula in an explosion of infrared, ultraviolet and visible-light colors. It was “painted” by hundreds of baby stars on a canvas of gas and dust, with intense ultraviolet light and strong stellar winds as brushes.

This morning I saw in the customer magazine of the “BKW Energie” an article about the Swiss artist Urs-P. Twellmann, who is creating beautiful artworks in nature – circles, spheres, spirals… He is working mainly with wood and ice. You might like to have a look at his website:

Yesterday I came across an article in the NZZ (New Zurich Newspaper) about the missing co-operation between doctors and building biologist (in English they also use the word Baubiologie, as the word was coined in Germany). Often general practitioners don’t recognize morbid environmental influences and see the causes of unspecific functional pains as psycho-somatic diseases. The people don’t fimd themselves taken seriously and turn to paramedicals or building biologists. There is a whole spectrum of possible influences, from asbestos, radon to electromagnetic pollution, which building biologists take into account. Electromagnetic pollution, from mobiles, computer micro-waves and the like is much disputed and the pro-advocators of mobiles see the symptoms of diseases often just as existing psychiatric diseases.

In Switzerland an association of doctors for environmental protection has just been formed who is trying to sensitize medical practices in the whole of Switzerland for the questions of building biology. If you would like to know more about the spiritual dimension of buildings you might read the issue on “Body and House” (pdf) of Good Will in Action.

Yesterday while surfing in the noon pause I came across a note on the Computerbild-website, a German computer magazine, telling that there will be compatibility problems between older and the new version of Microsoft “Office 2007”, which will be launched probably next February (for enterprises: from end of November 06 on).

Documents produced in the new version of the software are saved in a file format which normally cannot be read by old versions of word, excel or powerpoint. Therefore Microsoft has now published a free “Office Compatibility Pack“. The software can be inserted in “Office 2000”, “Office XP” and “Office 2003”. After the installation loading and saving of Office 2007 documents is possible.

Remembering well the problems I had with the documents of the recent 2003-version, when I still had the older 2000 version, I immediately installed the file (27,1MB) and informed my friends about the problem. I hope that Microsoft doesn’t have more “surprises” for other or older system users hidden in the new Office and Vista versions, with their quasi market monopoly.

Today is Scorpio Full Moon. The full moon time is very auspicious for connecting with more subtle energies through meditational work. Observing the monthly rhythms of the moon and its annual movements through the zodiac gives you a sensation of the changing qualities of time. Here you can see the moon phase, which are now also to be found in the right sidebar of the blog:

(Oh, it caused problems with showing up in the middle column, so I just left a static picture, it works only in the right sidebar.)

If you would like to know a bit more about the inner work with the qualities of time, please see the Lunar Messenger on “Working with the Key of Time” (PDF).

Yesterday I came across the NASA-website of SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which is now observing the sun since 11 years. There you find a page with near realtime images of the state of the sun.

And on the site N3KL you find a solar activity monitor showing the state of the ray eruptions from the sun, as it is at the moment:

Solar X-Rax:

Geomagnetic Field:

It is inspiring to see how our sun is a living, pulsating being, giving us light and life since billions of years.

Yesterday pictures of the fastest moving matter waves ever photographed were presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the division of plasma physics in Philadelphia, USA. The waves have nearly the speed of light, of 1 billion miles per hour. The waves, known as wakefields, are generated in the wake of an ultra-intense laser pulse. They are travelling oscillations in a sea of electons known as a plasma, giving rise to enormous electric fields. The electron “surfs” on the electric-field that accompanies the plasma wave, and accelerates almost instantaneously to near-light-speed.

Researchers from the University of Texas designed a holographic-strobe camera to take the pictures. Their method, called Frequency Domain Holography, sends two additional laser pulses though the plasma along with the ultra-intense pulse. The pulses are sent into a spectrometer where they interfere holographically and are subsequently analyzed to produce images of the wave structure in real-time, revealing theoretically predicted but never-before-seen features.

If you would like to know more about the nature of light and colours from a spiritual view and for the inner work, you might have a look at the Lunar Messenger on Light and Colour.

In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (New Zurich Newspaper) there was yesterday an article on Praise of Silence, a talk of the author Ralf Rothmann, who received the Max-Frisch-Price of the Town of Zurich. In the text there were some interesting statements, one allegedly by Max Frisch: “You have to aspire for the perfect, otherwise you go crazy.” And another by Mahatma Gandhi: “The mission of every man towards the world is to become a saint, not more and not less.” Even if we don’t succeed, our endeavour has to go into this direction. Rothmann adds: “For you cannot exist without the real feeling of unity with all, that is with the cosmos, you become a cripple with body and soul, and nothing helps if you don’t realise it your whole life long. We have to want the perfect, otherwise you go gaga. And even if it cannot be successful, if our thoughts and works will never become perfect – or endeavour can be so.
And about creativity Ralf Rothmann said: “What really wants to come to light, you don’t have to press. It happens, it grows, it flourishes – everyone who writes or paints or composes has this experience. It is really grace, it comes to us – most beautifully when we don’t think of it, when we forget our ideas and concepts for a moment and, for example, peel an apple. It comes to us out of silence, out of quietude, for you have to desist from speech in order that the world speaks again with you. This might seem to be paradox, especially when a writer says this, but we are conditioned up to the most tiniest, we are even still framed if we ‘go overboard’, and our materialistic basic attitude, which doesn’t even spare language, has made us forget that nothing, really nothing has a name, that there is in reality neither inside nor outside and that the body lives in the soul and not the other way round. Only silence teaches us this.”

See also the post on Experiencing Silence.