Reading the Lattice Without the Legend: Grinberg, Syntergy, and the Argument for Real Entry

A scientist walks out of his office in Mexico City on December 8, 1994, and never walks back in. The man is Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, forty-eight years old, a UNAM-trained neurophysiologist with a doctorate from New York Medical College, the author of a stack of monographs on consciousness, and the last serious researcher to claim that the human brain could be wired into a holographic substrate of reality he called the Lattice. He had spent years measuring electroencephalographic correlations between separated human subjects. Two months before he vanished, he published a paper in Physics Essays arguing that pairs of subjects, separated inside semisilent Faraday chambers fourteen and a half meters apart, showed brain activity that mirrored stimulation given to only one of them. Then he was gone. The laboratory was found. Several notes were missing. His wife, who had cause to suspect him of an affair and a documented history of violence, became a person of interest and was never charged. Mexican press cycled through the story for years. Mystics and conspiracy theorists folded the disappearance into the theory, as if the man had stepped sideways into his own hypothesis.

Continue reading → Reading the Lattice Without the Legend: Grinberg, Syntergy, and the Argument for Real Entry

Case of the Half-Boiled Toad

I’m sure you know the fable of the slow-boiled frog. If you drop a frog into a boiling pot of water, the frog will leap out to escape the heat. If, however, you place a frog in a pot of lukewarm water, and then slowly bring the pot to boil, the frog won’t sense the slow temperature change and will stay in the pot of rising, boiling water, until the frog is cooked, and dead.

Continue reading → Case of the Half-Boiled Toad

The Sorry Legend of the Great Bootsock

The Legend of the Great Bootsock is a sorry homily for the rest of us who have talent, but zero gumption to keep fighting the hard fight against time and condition and geography.

The Great Bootsock got his name as the star of his small-town high school football team.  As the true freshman quarterback of his team, he won the first game he ever played by diving over a goal line scrum — even though one of the opposing players had grabbed his sock and was pulling him back from the score.

When the sock pulled away from the aggressor’s grasp, it wrapped around the heel of the great Bootsock’s cleats, sticking there like a flag of immediate infamy and respect, and the Legend of the Great Bootsock was born.

Continue reading → The Sorry Legend of the Great Bootsock