Albert Hofmann 1906-2008

Farewell, Uncle Albert.

Trailer: Cul-de-sac (Roman Polanski, 1966)

Cul-de-sac

Sunset in Antarctica

I've really been enjoying (.) (aka Antarctica, the weblog), lately. Best I can figure it, it's mostly the work of a guy called Jaybird who is presently posting from McMurdo Station, Antarctica, while presumably employed there as a greenhouse technician. His images and videos are worth hanging out for.














I've always been fascinated with Antarctica, whether it be real science, without ice, or At the Mountains of Madness.

I have to find a way to go there before I leave this planet.

For more fictional Antarctic weirdness see: The Antarktos Cycle. . . and I'm really looking forward to seeing this.

Who is Bryan Helm?

from this isn't happiness
via suwaowa.log

J-ville

On my way to Jacksonville for a few days. I need to get out of Savannah every once in a while.

I'll still be posting, but just a little.

I'll stop by later with a little J-ville news and a few nuggets to share.

Mexico cartels post 'help wanted' ads

photo: El Manana Nuevo Laredo/AP







The banner reads, in Spanish: "Operative group 'The Zetas' wants you, soldier or ex-soldier. We offer a good salary, food and benefits for your family. Don't suffer anymore mistreatment and don't go hungry. We wont give you instant noodle soup."

USA Today:

One of Mexico's biggest drug cartels has launched a brazen recruiting campaign, putting up fliers and banners promising good pay, free cars and better food to army soldiers who join the cartel's elite band of hit men.

What I'd want to know is, if they're offering such a killer deal, why would they have to advertise?

What could be creating such an urgent need?

I'd be a little bit suspicious.

via Marginal Revolution

Canopus Nuclear Test, Fangataufa Atoll, August 24, 1968

Canopus (nuclear test)

from SUSCITATE
via not enough memory

Elena's Chernobyl

From elenafilatova.com:

My favourite are roads that haven't been ridden for years. Sometimes, I leave a log on the road to see if someone else will travel here. When I return in a year or two, seeing my log has not been moved suggests that I still have no followers...














There are more than 2,000 dead towns and villages within a radius of 250 kms (155 miles) around Chernobyl reactor. Each year I travel, I see more and more ruined places...














Looters are superstitious folks and are afraid to rob churches. Also, nearby community members come to fix the abandoned churches every few years, so like separate islands they stand longer than all other buildings in the area...

via growabrain

Sunday Excursions: Short and Sweet

Lots going on in meatspace today, so this Sunday's Excursion is going to be brief.













photo D.L Stupski
via Ursi's Blog
---



I Met the Walrus

From Mental Floss:

In 1969, 14-year-old Jerry Levitan managed to snag a brief interview with John Lennon in his hotel room in Toronto. Using his reel-to-reel tape recorder, Levitan asked Lennon a series of questions about peace, popularity, and messages in music. The answers give us a portrait of Lennon at the end of his involvement with The Beatles.

In 2007, Levitan collaborated with director Josh Raskin, illustrator James Braithwaite, and animator Alex Kurina to produce I Met the Walrus, a short animated film featuring a condensed version of the Lennon-Levitan interview set to sprawling stream-of-consciousness animation. The resulting film has won an AFI Award and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Wise and sensible words from John Lennon. I think today's peace activists would be well served to pay attention.
---

Our buddy across the Pond, The Presurfer dropped a goodly number of gems on us this past week. Here's a couple of them:

First this:

The Museum of Unworkable Devices is a celebration of fascinating devices that don't work. It houses examples of the perverse genius of inventors who refused to let their thinking be intimidated by the laws of nature, remaining optimistic in the face of repeated failures.

and then:









The Amen Break and the Golden Ratio

The 'Amen break' was a drum solo performed by Gregory Sylvester Coleman. The drum solo is frequently used as a sampled drum loop in hip hop, jungle and drum and bass music. It is 5.20 seconds long and consists of 4 bars of the drum-solo sampled from the song 'Amen, Brother' as performed by the 1960s funk and soul outfit The Winstons.

Mathematician Michael Schneider became intrigued when he saw an image of the audio waves because he immediately recognized the Golden Ratio in the structure of its timing. And he was surprised to find an even deeper relationship to the structure of the human body.

Below is a good introduction to the history and use of the Amen Break. The video is a bit long for our purposes, but the first few minutes should give you a good idea. Listen to it all for an excellent and comprehensive profile.



---
Out

Cornelius - Music

Cornelius

J.G. Ballard - The Drowned World (Martians and Us BBC)

Martians and Us
jgballard.com
check out Ballardian
RE/Search is all over Ballard

Speaking of Ballard, if you slept on the film adaptation of Empire of the Sun, you really should go back and watch it. In my opinion, it's Spielberg's one truly great film. I believe that in a hundred years it will be regarded as his masterpiece.



Empire of the Sun

ลอยโคมยี่เป็ง (Thailand)

bugzila:

Chiang Mai Yipeng Festival

In addition, it is the great festival of Lanna duly succeeded from ancient age. "Yi Peng" or full-moon day of second lunar month of Lanna villagers is corresponding to the full-moon day of 12th month of central region during the end of raining season and beginning of cold season when the climate is very nice and fair. One tradition of Lanna other than Loi Kra Thong on the river is to light up the lantern and float up in the sky based on their belief that to pay worship to Phra Ket Kaew Julamanee in the heaven or to relief one' bad luck for more auspicious life.

via Cynical-C

Untitled

photo Erick Wilund
from FILE
via suwaowa.log

Murder Club

City after city, when they'd
find the spot where the body went in, they would find something else: The symbol of a smiley face.

From KSTP:

University of Minnesota college student Chris Jenkins was found in the Mississippi River in February of 2003...

Minneapolis Police began investigating the case, which also caught the attention of two retired NYPD detectives...

Gannon and Duarte say they've discovered a link between Jenkins' death and the drownings of at least 40 other men in 25 cities in 11 different states...

"I think it is a serial killer, but not one individual. I would just say, a group of individuals, probably located in more than one state," Duarte said, adding that he thinks they may kill again...

Screenplays are forming as we speak...

Be careful out there.

Cloned Sniffer Dogs Report for Training

Korea Customs Service shows off six Toppies, the world’s first cloned sniffer dogs, at a training center in Incheon on Thursday. They were cloned by a research team at Seoul National University. /Yonhap

Looks like they can clone cuteness, too.

story english.chosun.com
via J-Walk

IMG_0421_DxO.jpg

Image: John Henry McNulty

Photo: Hordes of Zebras, Elephants Moved to Restock Kenya Park

from National Geographic
via not enough memory

Readings 4-25-08

U.S. Spies Use Custom Videogames to Learn How to Think

In the wake of the intelligence bungles that propelled the United States into the Iraq war, it's no secret that the nation's spies have been working to improve the quality of their analysis. Now the top U.S. military intelligence agency has come up with a new tool for teaching recruits critical thinking skills: videogames.

eye-catcher:

Rapid Onset can best be described as Zen Buddhism meets the National Intelligence Estimate. It begins with the rookie analyst dreaming of meeting a white-robed guru on a mountaintop. The guru proceeds to throw him off the mountain; clinging to a rope, the analyst can only climb back up if he recites the Eight Questions of Intelligence Analysis.

Hey, whatever works.

via Danger Room
---

NTT Firmo transmits data through skin

via Pink Tentacle:

NTT has begun selling a device that transmits data across the surface of the human body and lets users communicate with electronic devices simply by touching them, the company announced on April 23.

Electronic smog? You're soaking in it.

Three certainties:
1) Someone is going to freak out about this. (read: End Times/Big Brother/EMF)
2) Some user is going to turn up with cancer and file a lawsuit.
3) Someone is going to figure out how to hack this.

One high order of probability:
1) Someone is going to find a way to seriously injure themselves with this technology.

Dystopia? You're living in it.
---

McLuhan, Web 2.0 Master

Kevin Kelly:

I recently came across a perceptive McLuhan quote via Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur:

In the 1950's Marshall McLuhan proposed a reality television show in which corporations would present their major problems to a mass audience. "For every expert idea that arises inside an organization," McLuhan advised executives, "the public has a thousand better ideas than you ever heard of."

This eerily parallels the current dogma of Web 2.0. In fact, McLuhan's statement is almost the canonical definition of crowdsourcing. The key difference, is that in McLuhan's day, the thousand of better ideas from people you never heard of were unattainable in practice. They were out there, but there was not efficient way to harness them.

---
ends

The new library fad: borrow a person

This tickled me:

The idea, which comes from Scandinavia, is simple: instead of books, readers can come to the library and borrow a person for a 30-minute chat. The human “books” on offer vary from event to event but always include a healthy cross-section of stereotypes.

(...)

First out were Social Worker (“naive”) and Immigrant (“wasting resources”) and then Muslim (“beard”) was borrowed for a quick chat, presumably about bombs and his attitude to women. The rest of us tucked into the sandwiches and pretended that we weren't at all worried about being, almost literally, left on the shelves.

I think it's a great idea, though I would go for something a little bit more free-form and less dependent on stereotypes.

via Gems Sty

Michael Jordan Shatters the Backboard

(from a 1986 Nike exhibition game in Trieste, Italy)

If there was a Hindu god of basketball, Michael Jordan would be its living incarnation.

His iconic stature has made his basketball prowess the stuff of cliché and it has become somewhat fashionable to downplay his greatness.

These people are just flat out wrong. Michael Jordan transcended basketball. He was poetry to the instruction manual prose of the NBA.

He was best known for his slam dunks, but that was only a small part of his game. If you're not familiar with his work, scan through the YouTube page where I found the above video.

Steve McCurry

From the portfolio of National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry

The Art of Juliana Peloso

Juliana Peloso is a truly fine artist living and working here in Savannah. Her paintings and mixed media pieces are outstanding.

Check out her website. It's interesting to see how her work has evolved over the years.

Traffic in Saigon

Isn't it Ho Chi Minh City?
YouTube

Readings 4-24-08

The Foreign Policy/Prospect Top 100 Public Intellectuals

Here's their bios.

Who got snubbed? Who's undeserving?

I'll start you off: Al Gore?
---

If you only read one of these items, read Tomorrow Museum's excellent Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men.

from:

Crisis happens when we fail to look at the large picture, but who is standing far enough away to see?

to:

Artist Fritz Haeg thinks we should follow Buckminster Fuller’s advice. “Basically, his theory is that the powers that be want us to be specialists,” he tells this month’s Art Review, “Because they don’t want us to see the big picture, because the more you see the big picture, the more you are apt to question things. He’s saying that decades ago, but I think its even more true today.”

and furthermore:

Public Service Announcements have always provided hackneyed obvious information (”Give a hoot, don’t pollute.”) We should have Public Education Announcements: 30 seconds of Spanish phrases, Newton’s Laws, or basic geometry theorems. Everyone would be able to explain the second law of thermodynamics as quickly as we can say “Shoulda Hada V8.”

Brava!

We need more renaissance (wo)men, omnologists, and generalists.

To navigate through this century we'll still need specialists, but as a standard, specialization is limiting. Over-specialization stems from old world guild secrets and old school paranoid nationalism. It is a defunct system and needs to be reformatted. (see)

What we're short on is people like Leonardo, Mary Somerville, Buckminster Fuller and Howard Bloom. What we're woefully bereft of is the "informed citizenry" necessary for a properly functioning democracy as well as an emerging global economy.

Fuse this with the speculative cast of science fiction and we're going somewhere. Science fiction has, collectively, been a sort of surrogate renaissance man in a society needing all the vision it can get.

It will be interesting to see how nascent fields like speculative fiction, future studies, omnology and generalism will grow, merge and transform over time. It would be helpful if more traditional disciplines were to adopt this kind of thinking and help facilitate connections. Entire new fields of study could emerge, like macro-omnology, comparative science, urban synergetics or psychohistory.

There are encouraging signs that this is already happening. Now we need to catch up with the "informed citizenry" part. Start with the kids.
---

25 leading-edge IT research projects

Some cool stuff in there, including the Dark Web*, T-rays, vocal joysticks and honeybees.

* not to be confused with Deep Web
via KurzweilAI.net
---

RFE/RL Study Explores How Al-Qaeda Exploits Internet

What it is:

"This is a study that really looks at two things," he says. "It looks at the global message that Al-Qaeda puts out and that its affiliates put out. It also looks at the network that is behind that -- and then, how...they get that [message] out to the world. What is the network that brings that [message] to people over the Internet -- because the Internet is really the primary delivery mechanism for Al-Qaeda."

very interesting:

"Al-Qaeda, which was very, very advanced and very, very impressive in its use of new technology, is, I think, a bit behind the curve," Kimmage says. "They are sort of stuck in Web 1.0. They are producing what they think is the coolest content, the best videos, the most impressive press releases. And they are creating the most sophisticated -- the best network -- to distribute it to the web. What's missing is interactivity in user-generated content -- a world in which users generate a lot of the content and in which people what to interact with others. Al-Qaeda really seems stuck in the old model.

via monochrom
---

And now for something completely different...

Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital

KINSHASA, April 22 (Reuters Life!) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

People get a bit touchy about their penises.

via Clumsy Crooks
---

Details interviews John Waters

Q: Who’s your most unlikely fan? Did Henry Kissinger ever come up to you and say, "Hey, John—I just loved Female Trouble"?
A: It’s funny you say that, because there is a picture of me and Henry Kissinger hanging on my bulletin board in Baltimore. It was taken at a magazine party. And I do send boxes full of my movies, T-shirts, and that kind of thing to soldiers in Iraq. One whole troop told me they were being bombed while watching Female Trouble.
I wrote the major back and said, "I feel like Bob Hope!" He wrote, "I promise more of them know who you are than Bob Hope!"

via Boing Boing
---
ends

A Touch of Evil moment

Hey, at least you don't work for this guy.

This is one of my favorite scenes from Touch of Evil. It may be one of the greatest pieces of sound design in film history.

People of Beneshwar Mela

by ۞ NYGUS
via FFFFOUND!

Repeat of the New Madrid Earthquake of 1811 Would be Worst Natural Distaster in U.S. History

More stuff to worry about, care of The Daily Galaxy:

If another quake of the magnitude of the New Madrid Quake of 1811 should hit the Midwest, it would be the worst natural disaster in American history. Overall the loss of life could run into the hundreds of thousands.

The 5.2 magnitude earthquake that hit the Midwest last Friday was felt from Kansas to Georgia, and aftershocks have continued over the weekend, However, according to geophysicists, the aftershocks could continue for months, emanating from the nation’s center, known to be a weird seismic locale.

Looks like we're in the periphery of the shake zone here in Savannah. Occasionally, we feel one of the tremors emanating from Charleston, S.C.. They're usually in the low threes.

I was awake during the one that hit last weekend, but I didn't feel anything.

If you're gonna go, you might as well go high

I guess it's all a matter of perspective, but I don't think it's such a bad idea. The Afghanis seem pretty well adjusted. A lot more than that British guy.

Still, it probably doesn't speak well for their effectiveness as a fighting force.

And don't try to tell me that those British soldiers aren't havin' a go, now and again.

via Danger Room

Nuclear explosions since 1945

From Radical Cartography
Zoomable
via disinfo.com

Ten beautiful roads in India

From Harish Bhatia

Very nice.

Steven Pinker: Language as a window into human nature

Steven Pinker thinks a lot about language and human nature. In this 2007 Pop!Tech presentation he explores the links between indirect speech and social relationships. He manages to break it all down in a relatively simple and lucid manner.

Indirect speech is when we don't say exactly what we mean, but veil our intentions in innuendo, counting on the listener to read between the lines to derive meaning.

It seems like a lot of people live in a world of fairly constant indirect speech. This has led me into trouble in the past. Most commonly, if you tell someone, for example, "That painting needs a little work." many will take this as sarcasm and react differently than you might expect, considering that when you said a little, you were speaking directly and meant that it just needed a little touching up. This is a simpler version of this type of misunderstanding. Others have led to far more complex and distorted exchanges over time.

It's worth the 20 minutes if you get the chance.

The Amazing Donald Roller Wilson

donaldrollerwilson.com


















Donald Roller Wilson on artnet


















From RoGallery.com:

A resident of Fayetteville, Arkansas, Donald Roller Wilson is a painter who describes his work as a "by-product of his thoughts." According to him, he spends his "days and nights pondering the meaning of life, the state of the universe, and the Home Shopping Network. . . .More than anything, my work deals with pointlessness. It takes all the arrogance out of everything you do when you know that god is so much bigger than you are. And yet everything you are and do and see is filled with god: the grass, the asphalt, and the people fighting over Aqua net at Wal-Mart...."

"Painted in China" knock-offs of his work have been spotted on eBay. My landlord has a convincing looking DRW that he bought in a second-hand shop in New Mexico. We're still trying to figure out if it's authentic.

There are a number of his paintings and prints that that I can't find anywhere on the net. Many of them far more bizarre than what you'll see in these sources.

More: The Meyer Gallery

Safety Tip #47: Why it's important to properly vent a tank car before emptying it

You Tube
via Cynical-C Blog

Honda's walking assist device

Honda is adapting some of its robotics technology for human use. One of these crossovers is a newly revealed walking assist device for disabled individuals.

via grinding.be:

The cooperative control technology utilized for this device is a unique Honda innovation achieved through the cumulative study of human walking just as the research and development of technologies was conducted for Honda’s advanced humanoid robot, ASIMO.

Applying cooperative control based on the information obtained from hip angle sensors, the motors provide optimal assistance based on a command from the control CPU. With this assist, the user’s stride will be lengthened compared to the user’s normal stride without the device and therefore the ease of walking is achieved.

I can envision an "industrial" variant that employers can use to guide their workers through time and space as needed. RFID navigation nodes would move workers through facilities hastily while providing them with instructions and information during the trip. It might prove to be a problem if one was using the restroom at the time of summons.

(Do I need a "dry-cynicism alert"?)

Child Soldiers: You’ll Have to Learn Not to Cry

From Air & Space Power Journal:

I had a friend, Juanita, who got in trouble for sleeping around. We were friends since we were civilians, and we shared a tent together. The commander said that it didn’t matter that she was my friend. She had done something wrong and had to be killed. I closed my eyes and fired the gun, but I didn’t hit her. So I fired again. The grave was right nearby. I had to bury her and cover her with dirt. The commander told me: “You did very well, even though you started to cry. You’ll have to do this again many times, and you’ll have to learn not to cry.”
—Human Rights Watch interview with “Angela” Bogotá, 2 June 2002

Small Wars Journal posted links to English translations of the Air & Space Power Journal (Spanish edition) issue on child soldiers.

There are somewhere around 300,000 child soldiers serving in war zones around the globe with close to half a million serving in countries not at war. During the last decade, approximately 2,000,000 child soldiers died during armed conflicts.

If you're relatively new to this subject, these articles will be a good primer. If you're already familiar with the child soldier problem, this will provide more valuable insight for you from a likely different, i.e. more military, perspective. Considering that this is a military as well as a social issue, important insights can be gained from this point of view.

This is one of those issues that further affirms that the human race has a long way to go before we can call ourselves "civilized" or "evolved."

Design for Despots

Image: Foster & Partners


Foreign Policy ran a brief outline of the more ambitious building projects in some of the world's "least free" countries. (There's an accompanying article, but it's subscriber only.)

Above is the Khan Shatyry Entertainment Center in Astana, Kazakhstan, due to be completed this summer. What you're seeing is a transparent, tent-like exterior meant to absorb sunlight and create summer-like conditions for an “indoor city” within the capital, where residents can gather to swim, golf, and shop during the bitterly cold Kazakh winters.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this structure is going to look like crap after a couple of years.

Running Messier's Marathon

Image: Amir Hossein Abolfath

From APOD:

Gripped by an astronomical spring fever, many northern hemisphere stargazers embark on a Messier Marathon. Completing the marathon requires viewing all 110 objects in 18th century French astronomer Charles Messier's catalog in one glorious dusk-to-dawn observing run.

Old

from aii_om
via suwaowa.log

Traffic in Iraq

This makes traffic in India look elegant in comparison.

Not sure exactly where in Iraq this is supposed to be.

YouTube
via Blame It On The Voices

A B. Kliban Moment

B. Kliban
Buy Kliban

Nabokov's Ghost saves The Original of Laura

From Kate Connolly:

Having kept the literary world in a state of suspense for years over whether he was prepared to carry out his long-standing threat to burn his father's last novel, Dmitri Nabokov has finally announced that he is prepared to save it from destruction.

(...)

From his winter home in Palm Beach, Dmitri justified his decision by saying, "I'm a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, 'You're stuck in a right old mess - just go ahead and publish!'"

via Bookninja

"Charlie Rose" by Samuel Beckett

Deep.

YouTube
via Projectionist

This is what it looks like to get waxed by a MiG 29

From Danger Room:

A Russian MiG 29 shot down what Georgians say was an unarmed drone used by the ministry of interior. And guess what? They've got video (the beauty of drone warfare). The Georgians, needless to say, are really mad.

Traffic stops of the post-apocalypse, no. 132

Just minding my own business...

via FFFFOUND!

Germany and China: The cultural differences

Informative comparisons.

via Laurent Haug's blog

Robotic Body Scooper

Didn't they have something like this in Soylent Green? Their's was much bigger, I seem to remember.

This one belongs to the Tokyo Fire Department.

From Weird Asia News:

Don’t worry if you happen to be presumed dead and picked up by Robokiyu, he has fresh oxygen pumping through him at all times for your convenience.

Robokiyu is also not above apology and will happily pour you a drink to say sorry.

That's a comfort.

20 Amazing and Unusual Weather Phenomena

From 20 Amazing and Unusual Weather Phenomena.














This one jumped out at me:

Non-Aqueous Rain

Rare and yet real, cases exist of rains of animals instead of water. This has occurred occasionally throughout history, from the Biblical times up to recent history. Meteorologists are still unsure of the cause.

via The Presurfer

Where News Breaks

via Strange Maps

Space Muffins

Plan59 has a nice selection of mid-20th-century images.

via MonkeyFilter

A doctor helps children change their gender

From The Boston Globe:

Children have cut themselves. In some cases, 9- or 10-year-old kids have staged suicide attempts. The little boys sob unless they're allowed to wear dresses. The girls want to be called Luke, Ted, or James.

Until recently, children with cross-gender feelings rarely received modern medical care - and certainly not hormone shots. After all, who would allow a child to redesign his or her body?

But in the past few years, some doctors have come to believe that kids should be allowed to have some control over how they grow up. Dr. Norman Spack, 64, argues that transgender kids tend to be much happier - and less likely to harm themselves - when they're able to live in their preferred gender role.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I entertained some pretty bizarre notions when I was a kid, especially around the ages of 10-12. When I saw Charly, I wanted to be a retarded janitor that lived in a one room apartment... for about a day and a half. (As it turned out, I ended up a semi-retarded tour guide that lives in a one bedroom apartment. Creepy.)

Now, I don't want to come off as insensitive, but we all learn valuable lessons from the mistakes of others. Case in point:

(Be careful at work)




My problem with this has nothing to do with any moral, religious or gender issue. It's just that, as a former and well accomplished kid, I know what sort of things children can obsess on. The only thing that stopped me from acting out on many of my childhood obsessions was a combination of the accumulated knowledge of what would fly and the fear of getting my ass beat.

These are different times.

via linkfilter.net

Dinner in the Sky

More at Hemmy.net

How Many Digits of Pi?

from haha.nu
via suwaowa.log

Belligerents, terrorists, gangsters and insurgents

From Politics and Soccer:

Prof. (Vanda) Felbab-Brown argues that belligerents derive political benefits from controlling illicit economies. The local population that survives on the illicit economy owes their economic wellbeing to the belligerent group (a term that includes terrorists, insurgents, gangs, etc.). The government, whether its trying to eliminate poppies in Afghanistan, trying to shut down smuggling networks in the Sahara, or trying to eliminate coca in Colombia, is trying to shut down the economies that many ordinary people's lives depend on. Thus, a belligerent group's motivations for controlling an illicit economy is not just that they are greedy (although they may be), but the desire for control over illicit economies can be to gain political power.

A few years back, I read an article comparing terrorist culture with that of American street gangs. The similarities were striking, especially in the case of the Palestinians. I'm still trying to dig up this article. I'll post it when I do.

It's no surprise, really, if you think about it. Belligerent groups have been operating much the way they do today since Biblical times. We band together. We hold territory and control economies with various mechanisms. We repel invaders and invade to assume our neighbors' wealth. We're a bit more sophisticated about it these days, in many ways, but the essential elements are still in place whether it be on a national level or in the hood. (I live in the hood and have for many years. If you pay attention, you become aware of a vibrant micro-economy and social order with distinct and observed rules and conventions. Actions have predictable consequences. The system is regulated by "what goes around comes around" and threat of physical violence. In essence, it's the same as it ever was, in particular, it's nuanced.)

via Kotare

LBJ in your face

From LBJ: The President Who Marked His Territory:

Johnson lived to dominate, and he used crass behavior to bend people to his will. At 6-ft., 3-in. tall and 210 lbs., he liked to lean over people, spitting, swearing, belching, or laughing in their faces. Once, he even relieved himself on a Secret Serviceman who was shielding him from public view. When the man looked horrified, Johnson simply said, “That’s all right, son. It’s my prerogative.”

Piotr Kamler - Coeur de Secours (1973)

UbuWeb has a selection of Kamler's work. (click on the red link for .avi)

I couldn't find much in the way of a biography on this artist, except that he was born in Poland in 1936 and the info that's available on UbuWeb.

YouTube
via PCL Linkdump

Some morning cup of weirdness with Salvador Dali

Welcome back to the workweek!

YouTube

???????????

from the archives of John Henry McNulty

Sunday Excursions: I Just Look at the Pictures

I don't feel like reading today, so we're going to look at some pictures and watch a few videos.













from Time
via FFFFOUND
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image: John Henry McNulty
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Man trapped in elevator for 41 hours

This has been all over the place this past week, but for those of you who missed it:


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Supes is 70!











image: Nick Main
from NICKBLAHG
---


















from Inspire Me Now!
via FFFFOUND!
---

Water Balloon Exploding at 2000 Frames per Second:



via Wired Science
---

Control Rooms of All Types














NORAD
via linkfilter.net
---

Johan Lorbeer, Performance Artist














from Blame It On The Voices
---

Synesthesia:

It is not just the eyes that see color. Some people see color when they hear music. This phenomenon, when a sense is stimulated and another sense experiences a sensation, is called synesthesia.

This is what Brahms Capriccio, opus 76 no. 2 might look/sound like to a synesthetic. (more or less; at least the colors if not the shapes):



via Everyone Forever
---

















Me and my dad, c. 1971
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And finally...

After all these years, this is still my favorite music video.

Röyksopp - Eple


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Have a great week, y'all!

Storyboard from The Shining, Kubrick Archive

from globalNix:

The Barbican Arts Centre recently held a Stanley Kubrick retrospective. The foyer of Cinema 1 displayed some treasures from the Kubrick Archive. This storyboard depicts a long shot exterior of The Overlook Hotel. Note Kubrick's very specific notes:

IGNORE WHAT LOOKS LIKE
A CENTRAL PATH JUST HAVE
THE SNOW SMOOTHLY AND
ROUNDLY CHANGE ITS DIRECTION
UP THE SLOPE AT ABOUT THE
POSITION OF WHAT IS
DRAWN AS A CENTRAL PATH
THE FRAME IS EXAXCTLY 1-1:85
Obviously you compose for that
but protect the full 1-1:33 area.

In order to accurately get the
central path curve, you have to
set up the shots and put stakes
in the ground so that the curve
as seen through the ground
glass corresponds to what is
drawn. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY
TO DO IT REPEAT NO OTHER
WAY exercise the greatest
care as the compositional
effect of a different path might
be BAD BAD BAD

MAKE SURE IT DOESN'T
WIND UP LOOKING LIKE
A SNOW PLOW DID IT
After you push the snow around
the wind and fresh snow fall
should keep it from looking plowed

These are most likely notes to his second unit director.

(sorry, that's the biggest version of the image available)

via FFFFOUND!

"Wow, I went nowhere there for a while"

I suppose this qualifies as fun.

What I want to know is, how much training does it take for fighter pilots to stop passing out?

via Bits and Pieces

Boards of Canada - Dayvan Cowboy

This video contains footage of Joe Kittinger's 1960 jump from 30km. He simultaneously became the first man in space and the first to break the speed of sound without an aircraft!

More on this:



Even more at Me Talk Big Noise

Building

From the archives of John H. McNulty

Stump

From the archives of John H. McNulty

Tünel (Metro Istanbul)

from NightPhotographer
via suwaowa.log

You could be driving this someday soon

From the 2008 Michelin Challenge Design website:

In urban regions and tight spaces agility counts. Beside its minimal traffic area, Snook provides maximum agility through the principle of instability in combination with an auto stabilized carefree handling system. Drive-by-wire-technology and a multidirectional engine raise all of them three, comfort, safety and joy, by allowing completely new manoeuvres such as driving sidewards and turning on a point, for fun as well as for security. The control system runs redundant, so it tangibly proves the emotional suggestion of safety of the helmet-like impression and the SUV-like seat level.

via Beyond the Beyond

Alright, if you guys pull this one off, we'll forgive you for the lack of jetpacks and flying cars.

hat tip to Posthuman Blues

A few items worth noting

Affluence is Good

Kevin Kelly nails it when he says:

My own interpretation of this research is that what money brings is increased choices, rather than merely increased stuff (although more stuff comes with the territory). We don't find happiness in more gadgets and experiences. We do find happiness in having some control of our time and work, a chance for real leisure, in the escape from the uncertainties of war, poverty, and corruption, and in a chance to pursue individual freedoms -- all of which come with increased affluence.

Also: Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All

The way I see it, money buys three essential things: time, space, and resources. Everything else is for fun or compulsion.

As far as happines goes, William S. Burroughs changed my life with this paragraph:

The only thing that could unite the planet is a united space program... the earth becomes a space station and war is simply out, irrelevant, flatly insane in a context of research centers, spaceports, and the exhilaration of working with people you like and respect toward an agreed-upon objective, an objective from which all workers will gain. Happiness is a by-product of function. The planetary space station will give all participants an opportunity to function. -- The Place of Dead Roads

Burroughs had some heavy stuff embedded in all that craziness.
---

The technology that will save humanity

Concentrated solar power looks promising, saving humanity or not.

Wherever you stand on the climate change issue, there are still a lot of good reasons to get off coal and oil. I'm not going to go into that here.

A good article though, with some informative historical notes. This caught my eye:

Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks contain many designs for solar concentrators, including some for industrial purposes, because he worried about the destruction of the earth's vast forests in humanity's search for fuel.

Uncle Leo ahead of the curve, as usual.

via linkfilter.net
---

Scientists sift clues to mysterious migration

The fate of the Anasazi has been a challenge to archaeologists for many years. Now, it seems they're making some headway, bit by painstaking bit.

From The Oregonian:

Scientists once thought the answer lay in impersonal factors such as the onset of a great drought or a little ice age. But as evidence accumulates, those explanations have come to seem too pat.

Looking beyond climate change, some archaeologists are studying the effects of warfare and the increasing complexity of Anasazi society. They're looking deeper into ancient artifacts and finding hints of an ideological struggle, clues to what was going through the Anasazi mind.

via Santa Fe Institute
---
ends

Why are all these dogs peeing?

This is a puzzler. Ortho, over at Baudrillard's Bastard requests:

My dear reader, dogs appear everywhere in the prints produced by British Americans during the War for Independence. Often, dogs pee on everything ...

I beseech you Dear Reader, please share your knowledge with me. Please share citations for texts that analyze the dogs that pee in the prints of the American War for Independence.

I've seen a few of these before, but I've never noticed the dogs peeing.

You need to go check these out, and if you have any leads, drop Ortho a line.

Self Storage, Life Logging and the Dymaxion Chronofile

From Long Views:

Long Now was invited to be part of the art exhibit “Self Storage” which transforms a storage unit in San Francisco into a library of Ephemera open to the public under the care of a librarian and indexed for consultation and handling.

The project titled Self-Storage was inspired by the historical precedent of the Dymaxion Chronofile, a system that Buckminster Fuller devised to chronicle his life.

From Stanford's R. Buckminster Fuller Archive:

The centerpiece of the collection, in many ways, is the Dymaxion Chronofile, an exhaustive journal of Fuller’s trajectory from 1920 until his death in 1983. Fuller had been collecting clippings and artifacts since he was a child. But in 1917, he began a formal chronological file which he would later call the Dymaxion Chronofile. The Chronofile was a vast scrapbook that included copies of all his incoming and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, notes and sketches, and even dry cleaning bills. Initially, the Chronofile was bound into handsome leather-backed volumes. In later years, to save space and expenses, the Chronofile was simply stored in boxes. By the end of his life, this exhaustive “lab notebook” of his life’s experiment amounted to 270 linear feet.

Fuller intended for the Chronofile to be a case study of his life in context, in which his daily activities were presented in parallel with developments in technology and society. In it, he at once traced the evolution of his own thoughts, relationships, and business ventures; and documented new inventions, trends, and technologies that were emerging on the broader level.

Bucky's is said to be the most documented human life in history.

Over the years I had collected a fair bit of my life's documents and ephemera, but a few hurricanes and floods back in my New Orleans days truncated that effort.

In late 2005, I made it a habit to record every thought, idea, dream, phrase or random fuzzy notion that crossed my mind. I also record every word, name, object, book, work of art or any other item I might be interested in. It's not so much a journal or diary, it's more of a mental scrapbook. It has been very useful and enlightening. (I'm close to filling the seventh notebook.)

On looking back at my entries, two things stand out.

One, there are many items recorded that I am certain I would not have remembered otherwise.

Secondly, the practice has helped to alleviate the illusion of time compression.* Years don't seem to zoom by so fast when I examine my recorded thoughts. It makes me realize how long a year really is and how much one can think and do during that time. It also brings to mind what was going on in my life and how much I have learned in the interim.

I'll never come close to anything that Buckminster Fuller did in that regard, but I can attest that thought and life logging is a good habit to develop. Apart from personal benefits, it could also be quite valuable and interesting to those that come after.

* The other thing I've found to defeat this is novelty. When we are kids, everything is new. Time takes forever. As we get older and fall into patterned behavior, our life tends to go into auto-pilot and this is the big time-killer, literally and figuratively. Apart from slowing the zoom down, trying and learning new things will keep you young, healthy and sane and will fill your time with something worth remembering.

See also

They're here!

Click on sources for more details.

from different waters
via FFFFOUND!

ZiL 29061: Russian screw-driven armored vehicle

Guess this guy didn't make it too far past field tests.

They sold the prototype to Race Bannon.

more here
YouTube
via Disinfo.com

Spider-Man web catches suspects like flies

From news.com.au:

A Spider-Man-style web designed to subdue belligerent suspects has been demonstrated for South Australian police.

It works by deploying a high-tensile net across a 16sq m area at 6m per second, covering a person in seconds.

They are immediately restricted by the net strings and can be pulled down to the ground, cutting off any chance of escape. The net uses compressed air – not an explosive charge or electrical current – to operate.

via Nothing To Do With Arbroath

More on echolocation

My aunt sent me an email with a related story. With her permission, I post it here:

I was looking at your blog and saw the piece on echolocation. I worked with a blind man who used it all the time. He went from the North Side to Downtown Pittsburgh and back for lunch every day by himself via echolocation. It was amazing to witness. He would make clicking noises and could tell from the feedback if something/someone was or was not in front of him. I never saw him bump into anything in or outside our offices. He was a systems analyst and fixed program bugs and was really good at it. He used special scanning equipment that translated the code into braille. Truly, he is an amazing man.

I had to share this. Too cool.

Somewhere on Earth

from Ségozyme's photostream
via suwaowa.log

Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics

For a sharp, concise summary of the emergence of the Information Age and its transformation into the era of open-source economics, this will be 17+ minutes well spent. He ties it all together nicely.

From TED2005 Oxford

(I couldn't help noticing that TED ditched the Pee Wee Herman theme at the beginning of their videos.)

Link Souffle

A few items:

Maverick academic Philip Zimbardo says we are all capable of evil. Is he right?

No argument here.

via Schneier on Security
---

Cubans Line Up for Cell Phone Service

Watch Cuba closely. It's the new frontier. Because they're pretty much starting from scratch, you'll likely see some interesting technological leap-frogging; straight from the 1950's to the 2010's.

They're blogging and Twittering, too.
---

Ray Kurzweil: Making the World a Billion Times Better

Ray Kurzweil is one the the few future thinkers that is persistently optimistic.
---

Water, the new oil

Melanie Swan hits us with a real poser: how are we going to manage the world's water situation? She has a few ideas.

Here's another one.

Back in the late seventies, Robin Williams used to joke, "Whenever I want to spend a dollar on a bottle of water, I drink Perrier." People roared with laughter. I did, too. The thought of paying for water was absurd back then.
---

How we got from one to 162 million websites on the internet.

PDQ

via Rocketboom
---

Ten weirdest computers

Maybe not so weird in a few years or decades or so.

Although, I suspect that Glooper and Mouldy computers will remain weird for some time to come.
---
ends

Japan's Underwater Pyramids

From National Geographic News:

Submerged stone structures lying just below the waters off Yonaguni Jima are actually the ruins of a Japanese Atlantis—an ancient city sunk by an earthquake about 2,000 years ago.

That's the belief of Masaaki Kimura, a marine geologist at the University of the Ryukyus in Japan who has been diving at the site to measure and map its formations for more than 15 years.

There's another article and video here.

I don't know. From some angles it looks like it could be artificial and from others, it looks like it could be natural.

Israel's Stalags

From Beyond the Multiplex:

Taking their name from the Nazi prison camps in which they were set, Stalags were Israeli pornographic paperbacks featuring Nazi themes.

How do you make a movie about a disreputable and totally defunct literary genre? That question never quite gets answered by Ari Libsker's hour-long documentary "Stalags,"

I had no idea.

I did have reservations about posting this, but frankly, I found it too fascinating to pass. Human behavior is always so surprising, unique and varied.

via Gpod

Barack to the rescue or Obama-nation?

Do you think Obama is going to come through? Or, more to the point, do you think that the Military-Industrial-Petroleum complex is going to let him do anything? They'll throw him a few bones, but in January of 2009, there is going to be a closed door meeting where the new president will be summarily briefed on the facts of life.

That's assuming he gets elected. I don't think the Clinton machine has played all of its cards yet. I suspect that they are holding back on something until the right time. That's why Hillary is still in the race. Don't underestimate the Clintons. They're players.

If Obama is elected and doesn't come through with his promises, like every president in my lifetime, many will turn on him, real quick. I give it about two years before the euphoria turns to disillusion. Sad thing is, it probably won't be his fault. You live long enough, you start recognizing these patterns.

If you think I'm a cynic, you might be right, but I'll have you know that the only president since FDR whose approval rating was higher upon leaving office than entering was, funny enough, good ol' Slick Willy.

The Whirl

Visual thinking guru, Dave Gray provides a demonstration of visual language in relation to The Whirl, which is the dense cloud of noise, signal, data and information that swarms and bundles around us in a seemingly chaotic manner. Visual language can cut through this fog and cross lingual and cultural barriers as a sort of global auxiliary language, something we'll need as The Whirl intensifies. (The Whirl is so much more euphonious and comprehensive than terms like 'ubiquitous computing' or 'information overload.')

Images are the primal language. William S. Burroughs's 'Language is a Virus' thread explores the supplanting of the visual with the verbal.

And yet still, we are highly dependent on visual information. So much so, that we often equate our thinking with it. When have you ever heard of a scientific theory based on smell or taste? Studies of sensory data are always conducted with graphical outputs. You don't have an olfactor for your computer. When we communicate verbally that we understand, we often say, "I see." It was a big jump for many of us as kids to go from looking at the pictures to reading the text. We observe holidays and monitor the situation.

As visually oriented creatures, we'd be well served by developing a more methodical and informed skill set for communicating visually. We already do this in many ways. However, as a medium that is understood, mastered and universally adopted, visual language is still in its childhood. I look forward to seeing this kid grow up.

Lost Generation

An empowering moment in Uncertain Times.

on YouTube
via Gems Sty

Blind Kid Uses Echolocation and Sound to See

I found this very uplifting. I've never seen a human use echolocation before. This is very encouraging for someone who is going to be blind some day.

You're never helpless unless you choose to be.

from Metacafe
via Dedroidify

Bottleland

from Spiegel Online
via FFFFOUND!

One virtual step for man, one honkin' big piece of hardware

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics have developed a omnidirectional treadmill that allows unconstrained walking in all directions. It was designed to be used to walk through through large-scale virtual environments.

Initially, the "Cyberwalk" treadmill will allow people to stroll through the streets of ancient Pompeii and Rome and explore buildings before they are built.

This is pretty cool, but I don't think it would fit in my living room. (some assembly required)

From PhysOrg
via KurzweilAI.net

Space debris: evolution in pictures

Objects in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) - view over the North Pole

From ESA-ESOC:

Between the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 and 1 January 2008, approximately 4600 launches have placed some 6000 satellites into orbit, of which about 400 are travelling beyond geostationary orbit or on interplanetary trajectories.

Today, it is estimated that only 800 satellites are operational - roughly 45 percent of these are both in LEO and GEO. Space debris comprise the ever-increasing amount of inactive space hardware in orbit around the Earth as well as fragments of spacecraft that have broken up, exploded or otherwise become abandoned.

Have a look at this somewhat disconcerting photo essay on the ESA's website. I don't think it's such a good idea to have all that crap floating around out there.

Check out the pie-chart and tell me just what 'unidentified' could mean.

Here's more on the ESA's space debris activities and an article on space debris mitigation.

Wikipedia has a little bit on this. I loved this part:

Other ideas include the gathering of larger objects into an orbital "junk yard", where they could be used as resources should future needs arise, while keeping them out of the way.

I wanna be a space janitor.

via Ursi

The UN in Africa

via Dark Roasted Blend

Oskar Fischinger - Seelische Konstruktionen (Spiritual Constructions) c. 1927

via

The original was silent, so you can drop the volume on the sound for the authentic experience.

Oskar Fischinger was The Don.

You can find more info here. You can order a dvd here. They say it's the first in a series, so hopefully there will be more soon.

My favorite is Muratti Greift Ein, (Muratti Gets in the Act) an uber-amazing stop-motion cigarette ad from 1934. I found a crap rip of it here. It's truly awful, but you'll get the idea.

For you aficionados out there, here's a rarity:

via

Bruce Lee Screen Test

One of a kind.

via suwaowa.log
(great blog)

Deep Web

From Wikipedia:

The deep Web (or Deepnet, invisible Web or hidden Web) refers to World Wide Web content that is not part of the surface Web indexed by search engines. It is estimated that the deep Web is several orders of magnitude larger than the surface Web.

In 2000, it was estimated that the deep Web contained approximately 7,500 terabytes of data and 550 billion individual documents. Estimates, based on extrapolations from the study entitled How much information is there?, from University of California, Berkeley, show that the deep Web consists of about 91,000 terabytes. By contrast, the surface Web, which is easily reached by search engines, is only about 167 terabytes. The Library of Congress contains about 11 terabytes, for comparison…

91,000 terabytes? Good grief.

This Wikipedia entry seems a bit dated. I'm curious as to how much of the Deep Web has been surfaced since then?

I've always wondered if there was a sort of 'under-net', i.e., secret networks hiding in the periphery of the Internet. (See: Dark internet, Darknet and Sneakernet) I'd wager there are deeper, darker, more secret nets out there that few know of, (likely home to the machinations of governments, corporations, terrorists, hackers and child pornographers.) I'd also wager that Google knows a fair bit about this.

Looks like I have a new research project. If anyone out there has any info on this, please pass it on.

from roamin
via suwaowa.log

Secret underground warehouse in Tokyo

From Pink Tentacle:

In this video, a camera crew follows a city official to a trapdoor hidden in a Tokyo sidewalk, which opens to a narrow stairway leading to a giant underground warehouse stocked with emergency supplies.

Located 20 meters (65 ft) underground, the 1,480 square meter (16,000 sq ft) space contains emergency supplies to be distributed to the public in the event of a major earthquake. Items include 5,000 blankets, 8,000 rugs, 4,000 candles, 300 cooking pots, 200 t-shirts, and emergency medical supplies. A conveyor belt system is installed to help transport the supplies up to street level.

Do you think we have something like this in the U.S.? Somehow, I doubt it. (read: Katrina)

At least, we have lots of Wal-Marts to loot.

Every Single Freaking Dude

NSFW Language alert.

Lots more at Waxy.org

Also, check out Martijn Hendriks's Give Us Today Our Daily Terror, a copy of Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds from which all birds have been removed.

via Metafilter

The Fortress of Books

That's a really cool fort!

from Perpetually on Flickr
via suwaowa.log

Sunday Excursions: Travels

Image ganked from Song to Bobby

Let's take a trip...

First, a little warm-up...
---

now, a little research...

From Financial Times:

If you had to define “globalisation” with an image, what would it be? A container ship from China stuffed with toys and T-shirts? A programmer tapping at a keyboard in Bangalore? A plane circling gloomily over Heathrow airport?

Most people’s pictures of globalisation are to do with economics, technology and business. But before markets, modems and manufacturers could do their work, political changes had to take place. The foundations of the globalised business world are political – and so are the biggest threats to the system.

---

test your knowledge...

Which U.S. state is closest to Africa?

Answer here.

via J-Walk
---

now, to pack...

The Universal Packing List. Generate a custom packing list for any journey!

via The Presurfer
---

and let's go!
















from js wright
via suwaowa.log
via FFFFOUND!
---

explore a bit...

earth album is a simpler, slicker Flickr mash-up that allows you to explore some of the most stunning photos in the world courtesy of Google maps and Flickr. To begin your journey, just click somewhere on the map, e.g. "India"

---

listen to some exotic music...



Boom Boom Satellites - Push Eject (live)

They never really surpassed Out Loud, which may be one of the greatest albums of all time.
---

head out of this world...




















CSA Images
---


out into space...

Bad Spock Drawings

via MetaFilter
---



















out of our bodies...

As a follow up to this:

Can we really transplant a human soul?
---

and back to Earth.



Le Dust Sucker - Live Intro
---

Have an Uncertain week!

R. Buckminster Fuller Digital Collection

The Stanford University Libraries, in association with the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller, welcome you to this digital collection designed to support use and study of the audio-visual materials from the historic Fuller Collection at Stanford University.

The R. Buckminster Fuller Collection documents the life and work of this 20th century polymath, and contains his personal archive, correspondence, manuscripts, drawings and audio-visual materials relating to his career as an architect, mathematician, inventor and social critic.

Interlude: Le Dust Sucker

Le Dust Sucker rocks

Internet Black Holes

Hubble: Monitoring Internet Reachability in Real Time:

Having trouble accessing a favorite Web site? Perhaps the site was taken offline, or the computer hosting it is down for maintenance. However, the cause could be something more mysterious. At any given moment, a portion of Internet traffic ends up being routed into information "black holes." These are situations where advertised paths exist to the destination, but messages - a request to visit a Web site, an outgoing e-mail - get lost along the way.

Hubble is a system that operates continuously to find persistent Internet black holes as they occur.

via Cryptome

btw,

By the way, has anyone else noticed that since GWB has been in office, domestic terrorism has trickled down to just about nothing?

How much you wanna bet that when the next Democrat president is sworn in, folks all over the country will start dusting off their turd-bombs?

I predict that the next big terror-flap will have a distinct domestic bouquet, probably with a redolence of racism. I'd also lay dollars to dingleberries that some knucklehead will find a way to tie it in with Al-Qaeda.

Terrorphobia: our false sense of insecurity

Take the time to read John Mueller's essay in The American Interest.

For this:

A few days after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there might never be an “end date” in the “struggle” against terrorism, a point when it would be possible to say, “There, it’s all over with.” More than six and a half years later, his wisdom seems to have been vindicated, though perhaps not quite in the way he intended. At least in its domestic homeland security aspects, the so-called War on Terror shows clear signs of having developed into a popularly supported governmental perpetual-motion machine that could very well spin “till who laid the rails”, as Mayor Shinn so eloquently, if opaquely, puts it in The Music Man. Since none of the leading Democrats or Republicans running for president this year has managed to express any misgivings about this development, it is fair to assume that the “war” will amble on during whatever administration happens to follow the present one.

and this:

Key to this dynamic is that the public apparently continues to remain unimpressed by several inconvenient facts. One such fact is that there have been no al-Qaeda attacks whatsoever in the United States since 2001. A second is that no true al-Qaeda cell (or scarcely anybody who might even be deemed to have a “connection” to the diabolical group) has been unearthed in this country. A third is that the homegrown “plotters” who have been apprehended, while perhaps potentially somewhat dangerous at least in a few cases, have mostly been either flaky or almost absurdly incompetent.

and this:

Our problems do not arise, then, from a national anxiety neurosis, but more from other consequences of the fear of terrorism. One is that when a consensus about a threat becomes internalized, it becomes politically unwise, even disastrous, to oppose it—or even to lend only half-hearted support to it. Another is that the internalized consensus creates a political atmosphere in which government and assorted pork-barrelers can fritter away considerable money and effort on questionable enterprises, as long as they appear somehow to be focused on dealing with the threat. In the present context, the magic phrase, “We don’t want to have another 9/11”, tends to end the discussion.

I'm having trouble seeing an end to the War on Terror. The fall of the Soviet Union pretty much ended the Communist Threat. The only thing that slowed down the ridiculously futile War on Drugs was the War on Terror. What will it take for us to cease this endless and exhausting tilting at windmills?

I'd advise not to cling to any notions that the new administration is going to pull off anything too earth- shattering. I anticipate a fair bit of disillusion in the next four years when euphoric supporters of change find that very little has changed.

It would be unfair to expect too much from the next president. All we should hope for is that this unfortunate manages the best they can with a really crap hand.

via Arts & Letters Daily

It's Bill and Hillary, man

They were so stoned in this picture.

Hillary for sure. Bill, he didn't inhale, so maybe not.

What do you say? Phony, annoying hippies, or cool, groovy hippies?

from Mixx
via FFFFOUND!

Mirador

Nice stuff from Mira Ruido
via FFFFOUND!

My favorite Python sketch

Well, one of them, anyway. Top five.

I've been watching the Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus lately.

via Mental Floss

Stickney Crater, Phobos

APOD rocks it

Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle and human evolution

(NSFW Alert: Language. He drops the f-bomb a few times.)

I love Howard. He chews off so much that sometimes I find minor flaws in a few of the details, but overall, the message takes.

In his book, The Lucifer Principle, he posits that evil is a by-product of nature's strategy and what drives us to survive, thrive and do great things is at the root of our potential downfall as a species. In the end he calls for us to transcend this by changing the wiring of our brains, how we interact and how we observe, measure and design our society. Some of this is happening on its own, some needs a little push. Becoming aware and unafraid of our hard-wired tendencies toward evil would, in itself, be a big step.

If you're an opponent of the Killer Ape theory, you won't like the message, but you should read it anyway. Chances are, many people wouldn't like his message. Leave your biases at the door.

From his prologue:

I've attempted to employ the subject of man's inborn "evil" like those who turned to the subject in the past--to offer up a restructuring of the way we see the business of being human. I've taken the conclusions of cutting-edge sciences-- ethology, sociobiology, psychoneuroimmunology and the study of complex adaptive systems, among others--to suggest a new way of looking at culture, civilization, and the mysterious emotions of those who live inside the social beast. The goal is to open the path toward a new sociology, one which escapes the narrow boundaries of Durkheimian, Weberian and Marxist concepts, theories that have proven invaluable to the study of mass human behavior while simultaneously entrapping it in orthodoxy.

As an omnologist and freelance generalist, I resonate with polymaths like R. Buckminster Fuller, Robert Anton Wilson, Ray Kurzweil and Howard Bloom, to name just a few. None of them are perfect, but the gems lie in the overall.

What comes through to me is the need for disciplines that coordinate human knowledge, in whole or in varied inter-related segments, in order to understand and manage the dynamic forces integral to large-scale human interaction and the formation of a global society, all the while providing a sort of 'connective tissue' between various specialized fields to promote better informed and integrated perspectives and strategies.

New problems will present themselves and new systems will need to be adopted in order to cope. The tools and methods of empire, as well as, nationalistic, hemispheric and racially-driven world-views will largely have to be abandoned. Specialized sectors, like information technology, have already moved on. Others are slower to adapt. A field of discipline like omnology, might help provide rudder. At least until someone like Hari Seldon shows up.

Howard Bloom's column

A good complement to The Lucifer Principle:
A Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking. This means that the potentially-integratable-techno- economic advantages accruing to society from the myriad specializations are not comprehended integratively and therefore are not realized, or they are realized only in negative ways, in new weaponry or the industrial support only of war faring.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller - Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Here's the entire interview (24 min., better quality)
Thanks to Disinformation for making this video.

More comforting news from the cyber-front: Experts hack power grid in less than a day

From Network World:

Ira Winkler, a penetration-testing consultant, says he and a team of other experts took a day to set up attack tools they needed then launched their attack, which paired social engineering with corrupting browsers on a power company's desktops. By the end of a full day of the attack, they had taken over several machines, giving the team the ability to hack into the control network overseeing power production and distribution.

Great. Not only did they pull it off, but they publicized it. I'm not sure which is more disturbing.

I suspect that all the malware and shenanigans out there might be what ultimately shuts down the wild-west days of the internet. All it will take is a digital 9-11-type event for the draconian shrieking, legislating and locking down to commence. We may, one day, look upon the last 20 years or so as a truly anomalous period. Bring on the Black ICE!

via Slashdot

On a related note, is your computer a zombie?

You have to diversify

via Matt Cutts

Interstitial: Spike Jones vs. Perez Prado

via PCL Linkdump

William Gibson: Dystopia an Optimistic Scenario

Somehow, this piece of dated matter crossed my desk, so I gave it a quick scan. Nothing earthshattering, overall, but one thing jumped out at me:

"We've forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended. So when I started writing what people saw as this grisly dystopian, punky science fiction, I actually felt that I was being wildly optimistic: "Hey, look — you do have a future. It's kind of harsh, but here it is." I wasn't going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself." (William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview)

Same here. Those of you born after 1980 might not be aware of what a euphoric sense of relief many of us felt after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. (Many young people I've spoken with have never heard of the Soviet Union or the Cold War!) Back then, I thought that The Road Warrior was a far more likely outcome than Blade Runner.

Cities at Night, an Orbital Tour Around the World

It's striking how each city has its own distinct signature.

It's good with the sound off. Unless you want to know what city you're looking at.

YouTube page
via MetaFilter

Found Images: Street Art

Nice selection of graffiti and street art

Tim Powers on Cthulhu stuffed toys

The day Thomas Pynchon sheds his mortal coil, Tim Powers will move up into the top slot on my Favorite Living Writers list.



Science fiction writer AR Yngve has a few clips of Tim speaking at the Oslo Science Fiction Festival last August. The picture quality is poor, but if you're a fan, you'll enjoy them. I've always wanted to hear him speak, just to see how it compared to his writing voice.

If you haven't read Tim Powers, I'd direct you first to The Anubis Gates. Then I'd say: read the rest. His latest, Three Days to Never lives up to the quality of his previous work. His novels have strong occult and paranormal themes and range throughout history, so at first glance, many might shy away. However, his use of fantastic elements are always convincing and relevant and his well-researched and implemented historical environment always gives one a good sense of time and place. Books like Declare, On Stranger Tides and The Stress of Her Regard explore the hidden magical struggle behind the Cold War spy game, voodoo slinging pirates, and alien vampires ala Byron and Shelley, respectively.

His protagonists are unfailingly human, his villains and incidental players are often odd, even horrifying, yet all believable. With compelling stories and characters, a great feel for narrative and emotional description, a wonderful sense of humor and the absurd, and a talent for making the fantastic and bizarre tangible, his novels always push my boundaries, such as they are.

Prices for stolen data down to bargain-basement levels

You know times are tough when criminals can't even make a living wage.

AP:

Credit card numbers were selling for as little as 40 cents each and access to a bank account was going for $10 in the second half of 2007, according to the latest twice-yearly Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec Corp. released Tuesday.

and:

Researchers said they found more evidence during the last six months of the year that Internet fraudsters are adopting mainstream tactics, including hiring teams of hackers to create new viruses and offering volume discounts on stolen data to encourage larger orders.

And then they sold the whole operation to some gangster in Russia, who now owns everybody in the world's identity.

Antarctica, no ice

From Wikipedia:

Antarctica without its ice shield. This map does not consider that sea level would rise because of the melted ice, nor that the landmass would rise by several hundred meters over a few tens of thousands of years after the weight of the ice were no longer depressing the landmass.

I'd wager there's folks that have designs on that real estate.

It makes me think of ancient legends of lands submerged, swallowed by an ocean... of ice.

via The Daily Galaxy

Sitar Hero

Sorry, had to.
Stumbled

Until Waiting Fills

via Dark Roasted Blend

Limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan would cause worldwide destruction

Two items:

One from New Scientist.

And another courtesy of Wired Science.

In a nutshell:

Apart from the human devastation, a small-scale nuclear war between India and Pakistan would destroy much of the ozone layer, leaving the DNA of humans and other organisms at risk of damage from the Sun's rays, say researchers.

My take:

There is no such thing as 'limited' nuclear war. Any use of nuclear weapons, tactical, strategic or terrorist, clean or dirty, would be catastrophic. Along with environmental damage and human suffering, the global economy, international and cultural relations and the human psyche would all likely take dark turns. You think 9-11 changed everything? Nuclear war would be a whole new kettle of steaming awfulness.

I cannot fathom how someone could consider otherwise. I can understand how scientists and strategists would need to evaluate various scenarios, but to consider any of them as a workable option is insanity.

This may be the most important message science has delivered to us in recent years. By averting nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, we seem to have dodged a deadlier bullet than we had imagined.

In this post-Cold War and post-September 11 era we need to be ever wary of attitudes and policies that might leave this door unbarred.

It is to our credit that we haven't used nuclear weapons in anger since 1945. We should be proud and somewhat amazed. Let's keep the streak, and the planet alive.

Sandstorm in Iraq

more

Man with suicide victim's heart takes his own life

From MSNBC/AP:

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. - A man who received a heart transplant 12 years ago and later married the donor's widow died the same way the donor did, authorities said: of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

also:

Grateful for his new heart, Graham began writing letters to the donor's family to thank them. In January 1997, Graham met his donor's widow, Cheryl Cottle, then 28, in Charleston.

"I felt like I had known her for years," Graham told The (Hilton Head) Island Packet for a story in 2006. "I couldn't keep my eyes off her. I just stared."

Some would contend that this is no coincidence. Proponents of cellular memory cite anecdotal evidence of patients who have received transplanted organs, particularly hearts, inheriting memories, behaviors, preferences and habits associated with the donor. Examples include love for classical music when none existed before, change of sexual orientation, changes in diet and vocabulary, and in one case an identification of the donor's murderer.

Some cry pseudoscience, but others offer compelling evidence. See this excerpt from a 2005 Nexus Magazine article, in which a number of intriguing cases are outlined.

500 years of female portraits in Western art

Metacafe page

Sunday Excursions: Sunday Papers

Sunday funnies:














From neatist on ImageShack
via FFFFOUND!
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(John) Calvin and (Thomas) Hobbes
From ~spacecoyote on deviantART
Buy a print!
via Neatorama
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We know you read the funnies first. Now for some news:

They haul rhinos, auto parts, and luxury goods in jumbo jets that date to the Nixon administration. Meet the "freight dogs" — renegade airmen who keep the global economy aloft.

via linkfilter.net






(Photo: Lu Guozhong/Xinhua Photo/WpN)
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Chinese Spy ‘Slept’ In U.S. for 2 Decades

And now he's going to be in a different kind of "sleeper cell" for another couple of decades.

via the day they tried to kill me
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Teleportation, time travel and aliens - a vision of tomorrow today

Professor Michio Kaku has ruled out time travel for at least a few millennia, but believes invisibility cloaks and telepathy could be possible this century.

via Reality Carnival Unleashed
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A DIY tip from Felonius Ramblings:

Go Green or Go Home: Wipe Your Ass w/ 1 Piece of Toilet Paper

I don't think this is what Sheryl Crow had in mind.
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Finally, from the "I'd wager your Sunday paper doesn't have video" page:

UT friendly, The Presurfer, posted this incredible video.

El Caminito del Rey is a walkway pinned along the steep walls of a narrow gorge in El Chorro, near Alora in Spain. It's in really bad shape and many have died walking it. Even though local authorities have closed off access, people still sneak in and give it a go.

I had a strong visceral reaction watching this video, but I have height issues.


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Have a great Sunday and come back fresh and ready for more Uncertain Times.

Some Saturday Morning Heavy: Alan Moore - Perception

I'm not on board with everything he says here, but he does have some thought-provoking observations.


YouTube page
via The Practical Heretic

Nature Rules

from Yeah Oops!
via FFFFOUND!

The Amazing Rubber Woman

This is almost disturbing.



No, it is disturbing.

Rubber woman make you take your junk home in a paper bag.

YouTube page
JH scores again

TSA deploys airport behavior screeners

From the AP story:

NEW YORK (AP) -- To the untrained eye, the man looked like any other traveler as he waited in line at Kennedy Airport. But something about the way he was acting caught the attention of two security screeners.

For 16 minutes, they questioned him, scanned every inch of his body twice with a metal-detecting wand and emptied his carry-on bag onto a table. Out came a car stereo with wires dangling from it.

The man was eventually found to have done nothing wrong - he said he had pulled the stereo out of his car because he was afraid it would get stolen - and he was sent on his way.

But it's the type of scene that has been unfolding on a regular basis over the past four years at the nation's major airports under a rapidly expanding "behavior detection" program set up by the Transportation Security Administration to spot terrorists or other dangerous air travelers by way of subtle clues in the way they act.

So, in other words, they're failing miserably.

Here come the Matrix-style virtual worlds

Are supercomputers on the verge of creating Matrix-style simulated realities? Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, thinks so. He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to pass the "Graphics Turing Test" are just a few years away.

Hook up your trodes, your IV and your catheter and you're outta here!

New Scientist article

via KurzweilAI.net

Here come the cyborg insects

They have a ways to go yet, but they're coming.

From New Scientist Video:



Cyborg insects will be a key component of GoogleRealitybeta.

via Danger Room

A Trip to Iron Mountain

Interesting profile of Iron Mountain from KOMO.
This is the place you saw at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.



Not quite so Top Secret now then, is it?

Thanks, Dad

Ted Turner: Global warming could lead to cannibalism

From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

If steps aren't taken to stem global warming, "We'll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow," Turner said during a wide-ranging, hour-long interview with PBS's Charlie Rose that aired Tuesday.

"Most of the people will have died and the rest