My friends down by the state line, Buddy and Ginny, are inspired beekeepers. They harvest just a little bit of what the bees are gathering at certain opportune times. This method, called selective harvesting, keeps their bees very happy. It also maintains intact all the signature qualities of a particular plant’s nectar.
The result is not like normal “honey,” which is a mixture of many mixed floral inputs. It’s something like eating a blended Happy Meal, by comparison.
Yuk. I know, right? So, setting aside our notions about “efficiency,” one must ask “Why does so little single source honey exist since the bees capture and separate such distinct and recognizable flavors and aromas?” Bees could easily mix all the nectars when filling the wax comb and serve up a blend. So why don’t they?
Whatever the reason, the insect’s assiduous separation of plant sources leaves distinct impacts on our palate, which persists in the memory, and exceeds the flavor spectrum one finds in table wines, to give a familiar example. I think this insight could be financially valuable to anyone who recognizes the implications.
I sampled five different nectars taken from a single hive around last Father’s Day. The flavors ranged from “persimmon” to “creamy butterscotch” to “vanilla.” Then my hosts pulled out samples from their special stash, a collection spanning several years. It’s a kind of honey library.
These tastes were so evocative that I began to babble about spiritual frequencies, the Kessel spice mines of Dune, and blurted long-suppressed feelings about the trade monopoly of the East India Trade Company. “It tastes light green with violet overtones!” What plant, I wondered, could be the source of such sublimity?
I have no idea, but their wild-sourced honey is lab-certified as glyphosate free. This is important. Millions of “save the bees” believers, both in America and Europe, are demanding this guarantee of purity, bigtime. The economic and biophamaceutical implications of single source honey are instantly recognizable.
Sumac, for example, is a major honey plant. The nectar has a golden color and bitter flavor when fresh, but this disappears somewhat in time. Sumac is in the same cashew family as poison ivy, poison oak and our indigenous smoke tree, which are all minor nectar sources. Would eating small amounts of honey from these plants confer an immunity capability to people who suffer from the dermatological banes they create? One wonders.
We can add single source honey to the basket of emerging monetary and ecological futures for the Ozarks. We live on a literal ecological island, one of the most species-diverse places on our planet. The potential value of scores of source-unique products suggests a roadmap to economic revival. So much of Missouri’s landscape- everything flat and farmable below a thousand foot elevation, say- is rapidly becoming sterile, nutrient depleted, and chemically poisoned.
Our pollinators, both native and imported honey bees, are vanishing. Local honey production spells opportunity. We have a golden opportunity to tie the restoration of food freedom to eco-friendly incomes for small land owners. A high income organic bee farm could be a pathway to financial wellness and most folks need only a corner of their yard to get started.
But this honey-tasting session got me to thinking about how complex information is biologically stored and its implications. Our human mind physically processes and retains perceptual memory as information. If we take information as a static quality, it can be likened to the potential state of energy one finds in physics.
Potential energy is what is possessed by a body by virtue of its position, as stresses within itself, or electrical charges, and so on. An example would be the anvil suspended in mid-air above Wile E Coyote’s head in a typical Roadrunner cartoon. Nothing is moving but you anticipate what is coming in the next frame.
The sight of hexagonal honey comb (each new cell begins as a round shape, then it compacts) began to stir nagging thoughts about what happens to information in the structuring of space-time. Does the fractal structure of chaos keep other Herald readers lying awake at night? Everywhere I go, geometrically enquiring minds are demanding, “What’s happening in the race to discover dark matter, already?”
They say this elusive substance is holding all things together, but finding it has confounded scientists since the 1930’s when astronomers first realized galaxies needed some kind of invisible gravitational glue to hold them together. No one knows what this is, but dark matter sounds more scientific than ‘glue.’
The kicker is that the universe seems to hold more than five times as much ‘dark matter’ as it does the normal stuff. It should be literally right under our noses, should permeate and penetrate our Milky Way Galaxy, which is brimming with it.
But scientists can’t find dark matter. It is one particle or many? Is it massively heavy or wispily light? Does it only interact with other matter (and itself) via gravity, or does it interact with any forces of nature, known or unknown? Billions and billions are being spent searching for proposed particle types. This typically involves the creation of fantastic machines, fueled by burning tons of highly purified money, in order to prove competing theories and experiments.
Maybe it’s time to try a radically different approach altogether, particularly since the long winter nights are here and the universe will remain frozen until Horowitz releases the FISA abuse report Dec. 9th. Until then, I’m feeling that we should dedicate some time to reviewing everything our public education that leads us to know or suspect about the universe. It would be a couple of minutes well spent.
First, we must recognize that it is hard for scientists to break the habit of thinking of things in terms of mass, charge, time and space. They believe that dark matter must be a particle of some kind or other because, after all, they are materialists. They claim the entire universe magically appeared from a single point, from which space, time and dust bunnies formed as it expanded and cooled, and here we are.
But where is that, actually? We’re stuck with looking where it’s easier to look. This is called the Streetlight Effect, or the drunkard’s search principle. This is a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where they want to find it in advance. Unfortunately this approach is not working.
Maybe it’s time to research the mass, motion and gravitational properties of thought itself. All that missing stuff might be right between our ears. Possibly thoughts, as the energetic forms of information itself, are composed of a finer category of matter. If the brain represents an interface between two or more dimensions of “matter,” there might be some ways to empirically test this.
But for today I’ll just introduce the noosphere concept, a sphere of human consciousness and mental activity as proposed by the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin and the biochemist Vladimer Vernadsky.
Just as the biosphere is composed of all the interacting minds and genetics on Earth, the noosphere can refer to a transhuman consciousness arising from all these interactions. De Chardin postulates that evolutionary development is dominated by consciousness, the mind, and interpersonal relationships. Taken together, de Chardin calls it the Omega Point, and considers it to be the goal of history.
But thought as a kind of gravitational lensing was not considered. Though we’re often struck, hit, inspired, shaped or weighed down by thought, it’s energetic and transactional properties lie outside the applications of mainstream physics and philosophy. Yet interestingly, all the operations ascribed to the mind, as “in-formative,” or endogenous processes, strongly correlate to the “ex-formation,” or exogenous processes of the externalized observations of material physicists.
Does the noosphere have mass? It seems we must add negentropy to the equation, which is the name given to the way that life constructs its complex structures out of simple molecules and atoms. This process is opposite to the way that forms composed of matter tend to cool down and decompose. Is an information lensing function, caused by life itself, missing from the search for dark matter? More to come.