Variable Gravitas Content

I guess we'll never know now.

2009-11-06T20:49:00.005-05:00

Recently learned of Mac Tonnies' death. Well, shit. He taught me to blog - or at least, told me how not to. He had a vision, more than anyone I've encountered thus far, of the way the web and the world is supposed to be. He was a writer both intelligent and entertaining, thoughtful and skewed. His greatest legacy will, I imagine, be The Cryptoterrestrials, a treatise on the possibilities of alien life from a perspective precious few have considered. Hopefully, it'll still get published and oviposit seeds of inspiration and weird post-insectile ideation in the minds of readers everywhere.

Vinyl Archaeology indeed.

2009-01-22T23:56:00.002-05:00

This fella figured out how to extract music from scanned photographs of vinyl discs. It's thickly interwoven with static and eerie EVP whining but the actual track is definitely audible. If some tachycognitive posthuman or a comicbook speedster were to listen to a low bit-rate mp3, it would probably sound something like this.

Consider the following:

Actual recording of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"

Sample scan

Happy New Year.

2008-11-29T00:21:00.001-05:00

Bldg Blog has been medusaheaded.

Link-salad.

2008-11-21T22:43:00.003-05:00

DNA strands become fibre optic cables: And they self-repair too? Looks like intelligence enhancement to me. A person with a few of these lining her nervous system and festooning her brain would no doubt be a couple dozen times smarter than anything we've seen.

Woman receives windpipe built from her stem cells: I really wonder why these things are hapening in Columbia and Korea and Thailand and everywhere else but America.

In more pessimistic news, there's a new species of Ebola out there -- as if the ones we had weren't bad enough.

Pearls before swine. Blind swine.

2008-11-07T04:53:00.002-05:00

I swear, a lot of Gen Xers have trouble supporting Obama because we find the positive energy of his campaign and his rallies distasteful. It reminds us of the excesses of our primal Baby Boomer oppressors. Look, it bothered me too that the pain of my youth was cloaked in an ideology of peace and love. But I got over it and decided that peace and love are good anyway. Our generational superpower is cynicism, and we need to learn to focus it like a laser, precisely where it belongs, instead of just spraying it everywhere like urine. - Ran Prieur, November 2

LOL-to-the-izzol-z.

Igbo Kwenu! Yah! Kwenu! Yah! KWEZUONU!!! YAAAAAA

2008-09-03T19:31:00.001-05:00

Nairaland has been joined and medusaheaded.

Last Days of FOXHOUND is over.

2008-06-02T22:41:00.002-05:00

Another one bites the dust. It was always going to be this way. Still hurts though. Curse you, transience-of-all-things!

2008-05-20T20:43:00.001-05:00

Arxiv.Org now has a blog. It has accordingly been medusaheaded.

Thought you knew.

2008-05-08T13:02:00.002-05:00

NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit

While detectives were offering reasons why they couldn't start an investigation, she spent nearly four days chained up in a basement only a few blocks from her home. She was repeatedly raped and tortured by two young psychopaths who eventually beat her to death on the day that the police grudgingly started searching for her. Her family's amateur investigation found her before the police did.

Besides her grief, Elle Carmichael was disgusted. The story of Svetlana Aronov was fresh in her mind. Less than two months before Romona Moore vanished in Canarsie, Svetlana Aronov, the white wife of a doctor, went missing on the Upper East Side.

The day after Aronov vanished, police launched a massive search for her and the cocker spaniel, Bim, she had taken for a walk. The NYPD called a press conference, assigned two dozen detectives to the case full-time, and went door to door, passing out flyers with pictures of Aronov and Bim on them. The cops traced the Aronovs' phone and bank records and analyzed surveillance tape gathered from stores and apartment buildings near her home. A police van emblazoned with the department's 800 tip-line number drove around her neighborhood, blaring details of her disappearance over a loudspeaker. A letter was sent to rare-books dealers, a business the Aronovs dabbled in. Detectives reportedly even consulted a psychic.

A bloodhound was assigned to track Bim's scent.

Eventually, Aronov's body surfaced in the East River. It was never determined whether she fell, jumped, or was pushed into the water.

When she's white, investigate. When she's black, procrastinate until exanimate. Thought you knew.

Hulu.com - Medusaheaded with extreme prejudice.

2008-04-27T10:50:00.003-05:00

This is too good to be true ... isn't it?

I mean, no way this is going to last. Right?

You Know, William Gibson totally called this.

2008-04-22T13:10:00.002-05:00

A technologically enhanced High Noon on Youtube, wherein the cyborg sheriff does battle with android badmen from beyond the stars.

And then there's:

This spreading, melting, flowing together of what once were distinct and separate media, that’s where I imagine we’re headed. Any linear narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we would think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as how he looks at stuff. If he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, he might idly pause to allow his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can. Because he’s always been able to. He doesn’t think about these things. He probably doesn’t fully understand that that hasn’t always been possible. He doesn’t know that you weren’t always able to explore the sets virtually, see them from any angle, or that you couldn’t open doors and enter rooms that never actually appeared in the original film.

Or maybe, if his attention span wavers, he’ll opt to experience the film as if shot from the POV of that baseball that McQueen keeps tossing.

William Gibson on Meryl Streep as a chihuahua-headed kung-fu action heroine.

"Hundred and Four: Word Science in Practice."

2008-04-21T23:57:00.004-05:00

If one is going to be serious about becoming a Real Writer, it is necessary to actually do the work. As such, I am now and have been for months now, a founding member of Hundred and Four, conceived, administered and edited by Hannibal Tabu. This shit is serious and I intend to treat it as such; my first assignment and those of my colleagues are up as we speak.

I should probably put the words "medusaheaded" in here somewhere for ease of location.

Or tag it, that also works.

With Good Reason, I must add.

2008-04-09T23:44:00.002-05:00

One Avatar, Many Worlds

An avatar, the image a person uses in a virtual world, is currently bound to the particular world in which it was created. But at the Virtual Worlds Conference 2008 in New York City last week, several companies showcased their efforts to allow people to carry their avatars from one virtual world to another, and even out onto ordinary Web pages. These developments point to a convergence between virtual worlds and social networks.

(via Posthuman Blues)

This right here is Charles Stross would call a Halting State moment.

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."

2008-03-18T22:10:00.004-05:00

Including, apparently, the books themselves. Behold MEXICA, the computer program that can write fiction.

I don't think Steven King or Catherynne M. Valente need to quit their day jobs just yet. What does bother me is what'll happen when spammers get hold of the 3.0 version of this software.

2008-03-13T15:11:00.002-05:00

Wim Hof

Lynne Cox

Long story short? The scientific establishment has a funny way of ignoring outliers. These people people are immune to fucking frostbite! Why am I not hearing more about this?

2008-03-11T23:20:00.007-05:00

Tap water's a hell of a drug!

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.

"How does it take, muthafucka!? No, I can't stop yelling, 'cause that's how I talk! DRINK, bitch!"

And that is how you change the world if you're a nigh-omnipotent xenohuman.

2008-02-07T01:14:00.000-05:00

The excellent La Muse has been medusaheaded.

2008-01-22T23:10:00.000-05:00

The online neuroscience magazine Cerebrum has been medusaheaded. Get it, "headed"? Heh. I suck but so do you.

This is the way the world ends, not in fire but in Gridfire.

2008-01-20T20:00:00.000-05:00

Extract from Iain M. Banks' Matter on Orbit Books. Oh yes.

By most human standards the woman was tall, slim and well muscled. Her hair was short and straight and dark and her skin was the colour of pale agate. There was nobody of her specific kind within several thousand light years of where she sat, though if there had been they might have said that she was somewhere between being a young woman and one at the very start of middle age. They would, however, have thought she looked somewhat short and bulky.

He likes the word "agate" a lot, I've found. That aside, this is going to be among the first books I buy in 2008.

EDIT (after reading the extract): Hahahahaha, and best part is, it's out in February!

*dances around the living room*

2008-01-09T10:34:00.000-05:00

Shadow Unit has been medusaheaded. Happy January.

Human Hibernation as Cultural Phenomenon.

2007-12-04T00:21:00.001-05:00

The Big Sleep.

Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.

In the mountains, the tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. “Seven months of winter, five months of hell,” they said in the Alps. When the "hell" of unremitting toil was over, the human beings settled in with their cows and pigs. They lowered their metabolic rate to prevent hunger from exhausting supplies. If someone died during the seven months of winter, the corpse was stored on the roof under a blanket of snow until spring thawed the ground, allowing a grave to be dug and a priest to reach the village. - via Ran Prieur

Those guys had the right idea! Of course, the capitalist juggernaut could never halt long enough to make that happen.

2007-11-24T22:45:00.000-05:00

An Indonesian fisherman who feared that he would be killed by tree-like growths covering his body has been given hope of recovery by an American doctor - and Vitamin A.
Dede, now 35, baffled medical experts when warty "roots" began growing out of his arms and feet after he cut his knee in a teenage accident. The welts spread across his body unchecked and soon he was left unable to carry out everyday household tasks.
Sacked from his job and deserted by his wife, Dede has been raising his two children - now in their late teens - in poverty, resigned to the fact that local doctors had no cure for his condition.
To make ends meet he even joined a local "freak show", parading in front of a paying audience alongside victims of other peculiar diseases.

... But now an American dermatology expert who flew out to Dede's home village south of the capital Jakarta claims to have identified his condition, and proposed a treatment that could transform his life.

After testing samples of the lesions and Dede's blood, Dr Anthony Gaspari of the University of Maryland concluded that his affliction is caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a fairly common infection that usually causes small warts to develop on sufferers.

Uh-huh, image and likeness of God right there, yeah? Suckers. I'm glad - and exceedingly impressed - he's so cool about it though. Seems like a nice guy under all that.

Paging Harry Hamlin ...

2007-11-21T10:22:00.000-05:00

Claw from 8-foot-long scorpion (now extinct) discovered.

Nowadays arthropods such as spiders and crabs are considered to be small animals but the discovery of a 390 million year old giant fossil claw, published today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, shows that they were much bigger than previously thought.

The claw - found in Germany from a sea scorpion (eurypterid) Jaekelopterus rhananine - is 46cm long. This would mean that the scorpion's body was 2.5 metres long making it the largest arthropod ever to have evolved.

OR

If your tastes run to the formalized and hyper-academic:

The fossil record has yielded various gigantic arthropods, in contrast to their diminutive proportions today. The recent discovery of a 46cm long claw (chelicera) of the pterygotid eurypterid (‘sea scorpion’) Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, from the Early Devonian Willwerath Lagerstätte of Germany, reveals that this form attained a body length of approximately 2.5m—almost half a metre longer than previous estimates of the group, and the largest arthropod ever to have evolved. Gigantism in Late Palaeozoic arthropods is generally attributed to elevated atmospheric oxygen levels, but while this may be applicable to Carboniferous terrestrial taxa, gigantism among aquatic taxa is much more widespread and may be attributed to other extrinsic factors, including environmental resources, predation and competition. A phylogenetic analysis of the pterygotid clade reveals that Jaekelopterus is sister-taxon to the genus Acutiramus, and is among the most derived members of the pterygotids, in contrast to earlier suggestions

Twice the mice is twice as nice.

2007-11-06T02:07:00.001-05:00

Supermurines succcessfully bred in the lab.

Case Western Reserve University researchers have bred a line of "mighty mice" (PEPCK-Cmus mice) that have the capability of running five to six kilometers at a speed of 20 meters per minute on a treadmill for up to six hours before stopping.

"They are metabolically similar to Lance Armstrong biking up the Pyrenees; they utilize mainly fatty acids for energy and produce very little lactic acid," said Richard W. Hanson, the Leonard and Jean Skeggs Professor of Biochemistry at Case Western Reserve and the senior author of the cover article that appeared in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, entitled "Over Expression of the Cytosolic Form of Phosphoenolpyruvate Carboxykinase (GTP) in Skeletal Muscle Repatterns Energy Metabolism in the Mouse."

The term you want to keep in mind is "PEPCK-C Enzyme". Remember it because you'll be (no doubt illegally) injecting the stuff same day real soon now.

PS
If the youtube embed doesn't work for you, there's a quicktime version. God help us all.

Carl Draper's is cooler.

2007-09-16T10:48:00.000-05:00

Innovative Visualization System: The Hyperwall

The hyperwall is a seven-by-seven cluster of flat panel screens, each mounted on a customdesigned rack. Each of the 49 screens is driven by its own dual-processor computer with high-end graphics card. Unlike large projection systems that must coordinate separate machines to tile images, the hyperwall allows each computer to process and display its own data. This essential difference enables researchers to harness that computer power and provides flexibility in displaying large data sets
Each screen can be adjusted individually or by column or row to accommodate different viewing requirements and distances.

... In addition, it makes effective use of computing resources by offering a high-bandwidth connection to NASA's Columbia supercomputer, and enables scientists to see results of calculations in real time.

Mirrors are like irony, I think. Or is that the other way around.

2007-08-22T10:10:00.000-05:00

"We will not allow the cloak of national unity to be wrapped around national blunders" - The President, Aug 22 2007 11:10AM EST at a Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention.

Don't worry, folks; this has all been a big practical joke.

"You were once shoved headfirst through someone’s vagina. Why are you acting so dignified?"

2007-08-18T17:31:00.000-05:00

Good question. xkcd has been medusaheaded.

Note to Self for Future Inference ... Reference ... Exigence ... ence.

2007-08-16T21:07:00.000-05:00

Freakangels.

August Post!

2007-08-11T12:53:00.000-05:00

via smartmobs

ON SOME night in the future a young man walking along Market Street in San Francisco may suddenly think of a friend in Rome. Reaching into his pocket, he will pull out a watch-size disc with a set of buttons on one side. He will punch ten times. Turning the device over, he will hear his friend’s voice and see his face on a tiny screen, in color and 3-D. At the same moment his friend in Rome will see and hear him.

The disc will be a telephone, a miniature model equipped for both audio and video service. Back in 1952, Harold S. Osborne, retiring chief engineer of American Telephone & Telegraph, envisioned this tiny instrument as the ultimate shape of the phone ...

The entire human race is one long - and broad - genetic algorithm. In other words, someone always gets it right -- and that's a statistical guarantee.

"Oh, that's all water under the ... um."

2007-07-22T11:43:00.001-05:00

"... scans revealed only a narrow rim of brain material."

Three years ago, a 44-year-old man was admitted to hospital in Marseille, France, complaining of weakness in his left leg. He had no idea what doctors would find to be the source of the problem: a huge pocket of fluid where most of his brain ought to be

Look closely at that picture; see the black chunk in the center? That's where his brain isn't.

Ooooh yeah. It's like that.

An new snake on the medusahead.

2007-07-20T10:53:00.000-05:00

I can has InsaneJournal? 100 Icons? Yes!? No Wai!!

The Postmodern Method.

2007-07-13T09:43:00.000-05:00

Man writes entire novel on cell-phone

Now this is worth blogging.

------------------------------------

Frogs don't really boil if you gradually heat the water, but the metaphor most definitely applies to us. Maybe frogs joke about humans not noticing as the engine of their world gets swapped out, part by part, around their ears.

2007-06-22T18:01:00.000-05:00

I just watched the fourth and fifth eps of Infest Wisely. It's lo-fi low-key no-budget scifi, with ideas and smarts behind. Little things that barely got a mention (like the self-heating paper bags from the Chinese restaurant) fascinated my ass.

Funny though: just how well can you seal yourself off from nanotech infestation? Duct-tape for the mouth, plugs for the nose and ears, goggles; yes, of course, but what about your rectum? Hell, what about your pores? Fascinating nonetheless, it’s symbolic as opposed to literal, a sartorial act of rebellion.

And if this isn't a model for post-TV TV shows, I don't know what is.

Watch it. Is good.

---------------------------------

Watched an episode of I Spy on Youtube on Monday ("A Cup of Kindness" if you must know). Fascinating stuff; I mean, Bill Cosby as a leanly muscled Rhodes-Scholar-spy with a penchant for languages and the more scientific aspects of tradecraft!? Absolutely no hint of racism or condescension of any sort? Who knew?

A thing of beauty, it is.

You have got to be kidding me.

2007-06-16T19:35:00.000-05:00

Sci-fi writers join war on terror.

Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described "deviant" thinkers: science-fiction writers.

"We spend our entire careers living in the future," says author Arlan Andrews, one of a handful of writers the government brought to Washington this month to attend a Homeland Security conference on science and technology.

Those responsible for keeping the nation safe from devastating attacks realize that in addition to border agents, police and airport screeners, they "need people to think of crazy ideas," Andrews says.

The writers make up a group called Sigma, which Andrews put together 15 years ago to advise government officials. The last time the group gathered was in the late 1990s, when members met with government scientists to discuss what a post-nuclear age might look like, says group member Greg Bear. He has written 30 sci-fi books, including the best seller Darwin's Radio.

Sigma consists of Jerry Pournelle, Arlan Andrews, Greg Bear, Larry Niven and Sage Walker.

Okay, on the one hand, I'm immenselfy turned-on by this on general principles. On the other hand, this team isn't exactly the cutting-edge of speculative fiction; I mean, Larry Niven? Sure, once upon a time. Greg Bear? Hmm, rather have Egan but okay. Sage Walker? Best known for her work on Wild Cards. Arlan Andrews? Never heard of him.

Not. Impressed.

2007-06-08T18:17:00.000-05:00

Peter Watts has been pimping these online scifi-movie shorts for a while now. Ingestible computing, nanotech, an internet-averse computer hacker ... you know, effectively porn for me.

Thus, Infest Wisely has been medusaheaded. Watching "Obsolete" as we speak.

2007-06-08T13:04:00.000-05:00

When in doubt, punch.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Session-long tensions in the Alabama Senate boiled over Thursday as Republican Sen. Charles Bishop of Jasper punched Democratic Sen. Lowell Barron of Fyffe in the head before the two were pulled apart.

The 69-year-old Bishop said he punched Barron, 65, in the head after the senator called him a "son of a bitch."

"I responded to his comment with my right hand," Bishop said.

Hahahaha!

2007-06-03T12:28:00.000-05:00

Ray Bradbury says you morons all got his book wrong. Fahrenheit-451 is not about what all you college professors, graduate students and reviewers thought it was. IN YOUR FACE, college professors, graduate students and reviewers!

--------------------

Now that's what I call Green.

----------------

Best of all, Iain (M.) Banks undergoes some Gentle Questioning on his two upcoming books: one is set in the modern day (written in Banks' M-less persona, starring the heir to a games company) *and* recently released in the UK. The other is set in The Culture universe and, as such, of somewhat greater interest to the likes of me.

Huh. I've mentioned this before, haven't I. To save you the trouble, the only new information is that it's his largest book yet and the title is officially Matter.

Thank you for your time. G'day.

Of swords and plowshares ...

2007-06-02T17:47:00.000-05:00

Religions start out embodying the best of human aspirations: peace, generosity, kindness, love -- that stuff. Then humans with ambitions notice how much power those ideas have, and they slowly move the religions around until they're all about Being Right. And the people who are not Right are Wrong, and what do we do with wrong people? We smite them! Smiting is good for them. Also, once they're smited, we get to keep their land. - Jon Carroll

I Don't Need No Man/And I Don't Need No Lovin'

2007-05-23T17:34:00.000-05:00

Female Sharks in Captivity Give Birth - sans Male Intervention.

A research team from Northern Ireland and the US at first thought she mated before capture, and then somehow stored the sperm for over three years before finally fertilising her eggs in the aquarium or that the shark had mated with a different species in the tank.

But tests confirmed the newborn's DNA only matched up with the mother's - there was none of any male origin.

Excellent. Let's get some people on this right now.

HappyNews.Com has been Medusaheaded and deservedly so.

2007-05-12T19:07:00.000-05:00

It suddenly occured (well, nothing suddenly occurs to me really but ...) to me that bad news is the only news these days. That Bad News is Good News. It's much like the state of political discourse in the United States today i.e. both sides feel that if you're not toeing the party line - and every line of that, at that - you're automatically the enemy. We'll disregard the fact that I actually have to say "both sides" because that's all there is.

But WHY is this the case? Elementary, my dear Watson, purely elementary. Extremes cannot be opposed without becoming an extremist onself. Consider Women's Rights, Civil Rights, Civil War. You can't fight fire with fire, that just creates more fire. Steam doesn't do much good either. Only *water* can fight fire. Or sand, if you really want to think laterally.

I believe, in the news, they call this phenomenon "polarizing effects". Point is, the "Right" oppose abortion, the "Left" must condone it. The "Right" want more guns, the "Left" want them all melted down and thrown into the sun. In the process, anyone with moderate opinions or who, heaven forfend, thinks abortion is a terrible idea but guns are a blight on humanity -- well, they're just shit out of luck, no?

But enough meta. I was talking about news. Good news, bad news and how people will eat shit if it's all you give them.

In that vein, I went looking for someone or somefolks who didn't believe Bad News = The Only News and sure enough, I found them: Happynews.com

It does a body good.

Yep. You're living in the future now. God help ye, my son.

2007-05-07T12:13:00.000-05:00

When even battle-hardened Army colonels (of all people!) decide they just can't stand to watch poor mine-clearing robots get blown halfway to hell for the protection and safety of the Human Overlords, you know you're damn well living in the future, flying car or no.

The article goes on to talk about soldiers in the field growing attached to their Predators and camera drones and even granting them promotions and awards :D "This is my rifle/there are many others like it but this one is mine" ain't got shit on that. Is there nothing humans won't anthromorphize? That same hyperactive aphophenia that lead our ancestors to worship the winds and sun and call them gods now leads us to name our Roombas. What really gets my goat about this little glitch in the human machine is that aforementioned robots are still under the control of twitch-gamers back at home base! I mean, what's going to happen when they start becoming more and more autonomous? Neural nets, expert systems, rat brains (emulated or organic); the how doesn't matter as much as the what.

This shit is hot, people. Pay attention.

2007-05-05T22:06:00.000-05:00

Item: Peter Watts has moved his newscrawl to Blogger. May the internet gods protect him.

----------------------------------------

Item: The word is Probiotics. Apparently, the Western World^TM has been so eager to sterilize itself, it's started to hurt the balance of useful bacteria in their/our guts. Hence probiotics, the attempt to reverse this phenomenon by ingesting bacteria in order to give yours a kickstart.

----------------------------------------

Random query into the ether: What's the next extra-Caucasian country Ian McDonald will set a book in? I'm betting on China myself.

"Don't Be Evil." Uh-huh.

2007-04-28T19:28:00.000-05:00

Just what kind of game is Google playing? They introduce Toolbar, then throw Web History at you. They give you Blogger, then suddenly make it compulsory to sign in using a Google account.

These two events accomplish the exact same goal, dragging your disparate online bits kicking and screaming back under a single thumb. Note, especially in the latter, how every time you sign into Blogger, then open Google in another window, your username/email address is in the top left-hand corner. More importanly, I guarantee you any searches you attempt while this is so will invariably be logged in Google Web History - with or without Toolbar.

Troubling.

It's Mshindo's World - You're Just Renting Space.

2007-04-26T21:29:00.000-05:00

Mshindo Brown has been Medusaheaded. Long fucking overdue, son.

2007-04-26T17:54:00.001-05:00

So. All the cool kids on the Intarweb have seen Monty Oum's Haloid by now, yes? Goooooood.

Now please to be going and watching Road Episode 3, also by Monty Oum (montyoum!^*). Where Haloid was Matrix/Halo/Star Wars/Devil May Cry/Equilibrium, this is more Advent Children/Street Fighter/MUGEN/Reservoir Dogs with a hint of Trigun^**.

(Don't be a bunch of pop culture monads.)

Thank you for your time.

*why? The search keywords, son. I'm search-enginebombing over here!

**EDIT: Oh, and Grand Theft Auto as well. And don't think I missed the Metal Gear Solid reference either. Or the Final Fantasy VII/VIII/etc. And The One too.

Googlism will pick this up in a bit.

2007-04-22T08:53:00.000-05:00

Marcelo is worth reading.

It was a horrible, decrepit, bleak house. It had to be; it was where they stashed the old spies, the one who had worked in the unsanctioned ops of agencies identified by gestures instead of acronyms. The men, women, and things who knew too much to be left outside, but also too much to be killed, in the outside chance that their knowledge could become useful some day.

And the day had come. I needed their knowledge. One man's, in particular.

That is all.

It's like something out of Sun of Suns -- which is glorious by the way ...

2007-04-15T17:56:00.000-05:00

Flying Wind Farms

Power generation: If people object to wind farms cluttering up the countryside, one answer might be to put them in the air

So, just as oil companies are drilling deeper and in more remote locations in search of new reserves, pioneer wind-power engineers are looking higher in the sky for new sources of energy. Conventional turbines will not take them there—the highest to date is just over 200 metres tall. So they are trying to invent a whole new technology for harvesting wind: electricity generators that fly.

... Mr Shepard estimates these rigs could produce power for as little as two cents a kilowatt hour. That is cheaper than the three to five cents conventional energy generation costs.

Seriously, how cool is that?

"Bored now."

2007-04-06T12:36:00.000-05:00

Why have I been neglecting this outpost?

Because I'm lazy and blogger brings out the longwindbag in me. There is no union of opposites in this corpus. One MUST FALL!!

Because I'm lazy and scrabbling around the intarweb2 for links to interesting science and singularity tidbits has lost its charm; I already know these things and what I don't know, will find me.

Because Google's decision to needlessly integrate blogger membership with google membership is annoying and *feels* Orwellian ... even if there's no practical threat I can foresee just yet.

Because Human is a stimulus-response animal and so am I. I get more feedback at other entry points and, what can I say, I'm both vain and a wanker. Mutual congratulation societies OR internet-enabled circle-jerks have an attraction I've decided not to resist.

So. This is my April Post. If there's more, feel free to qualify that with a "First."

Fucking Google.

Mathematicians Map E8.

2007-03-20T21:49:00.000-05:00

Mathematicians have mapped the inner workings of one of the most complicated structures ever studied.

248-dimensions. The surface area of Manhattan. Sixty-something times bigger than the human genome. Yes, yes, but what does it do?

2007-03-18T21:18:00.000-05:00

No. No, you bloody bastards, no. No!!

Goddamit.

2007-02-22T10:46:00.000-05:00

I am deeply annoyed - no, morally offended that Tired - Transhumanism, Wired - Clowns! is no longer online.

Dear Transhumanists and Scientific Materialists,

If you are reading this please tell everyone you know that we are no longer aligning ourselves with the transhumanist movement. We are looking to create something better. The reason is that transhumanism in its current form has become almost entirely coopted by an exclusive form of scientific materialism and reductionism. Although there are exceptions, and I counted myself among them, the overwhelming thrust is against all things not totally rooted in hard science (i.e discussions of soul, spirituality and mysticism will get you flamed beyond belief). Therefore, the label and movement called 'transhumanism' has become so dominated by those voices, that to further align with that philosophy as I've tried to do with this site, has done nothing but harm to the deeper message here. The overriding drumbeat of Transhumanism has becoming nothing more than tiresome and arrogant attempts to convert everything to materialist descriptions and computational metaphors.

So if you are one of them, please walk away, dismiss us as you would some rambling psychic reading tarot cards. If you are staying because you think you might convince one of us misguided hippies to your way of thinking, we've already walked your path. We've moved on. We're post-transhumanists now.

I had a thoroughly satisfying argument with a couple of psychedelic-futurist New Agers, including Paul Hughes himself (I was of course the Eveee-il Hardcore Scientific Materialist). Why they took it down or, alternatively, why it, of all pages, was the one to fall off the internet, we may never know.

Shoulda saved it to my hard drive when I had the chance.

yes, first thing i did was seek it out on the Wayback Machine. The link is there, but the full permalink isn't; that includes the comments. Dammit all to hell.

2007-02-14T12:15:00.000-05:00

All-Female Peacekeeping Corp Sent to Liberia from India

The group of more than 100 police women from India will stay in Liberia for six months, helping to train the local police force.

They will also carry out security duties in forthcoming local elections.

The UN currently has 15,000 peacekeepers deployed in Liberia, which is struggling to recover after a 14-year civil war.

The unit is made up volunteers drawn from across India and are experienced in battling insurgencies in Kashmir and the north-east.

You know what we've got here right? Real live Fish-Speakers. No surprise India sent them; name another country containing a religion whose goddesses are as badass, hmm? Can't, can you.

(via Hannibal Tabu)

---------------------------------------

Peer Pressure - an article by John Scalzi about the foremost anti-pirate mercenary squad on the High Seas of teh Intarweb

It doesn't have to be music, actually. You could be trying to pocket Brokeback Mountain for your collection, or just a copy of Microsoft Office for your PC. MediaDefender will declare digital war on you if you are downloading a file that contains intellectual property the company has been paid by a media conglomerate to protect.

Of course, you can try. But while you're trying, those 2,000 computers will be doing their best to jam your efforts with a host of digital head fakes. They'll serve you bogus files with the same name as the song. They'll insert bad code into the file so that when you play it, you'll hear hissing and popping. They'll cause your download client to hang there, trying to access a file that doesn't exist. They'll gang up on you in the file-sharing queue so you're the 2,001st person in line to get the song.

If MD's 2,000 computers are doing their job, your response will be, 'Oh, screw this. I'll just buy it off iTunes.' And you'll pay your 99 cents. MediaDefender, 1; you, zip. MD is the entertainment industry's special forces in the war against file sharing - and here is the creed by which they live.

MediaDefender, huh? I will remember that name. For they are the Enemy.

The Sagan Diary - Fiction in the Sonic State!

2007-02-06T15:24:00.000-05:00

As a promotional thing, John Scalzi's prequel to The Last Colony (and thus, by some strange coincidence, the sequel to The Ghost Brigades) has been put up for download on his site. The kicker is it's all in audio form, in approximately 10-14MB chunks and read by a Who's Who of scifi-writing ladies.

Enjoy.

Just cut it out, people.

2007-01-28T10:03:00.000-05:00

Damaged brain region helps some kick habit

Many heavy smokers quit immediately and permanently when a small structure deep in the brain is damaged, a finding that provides a new lead in the search for smoking-cessation treatments, a study says.

Specifically, a small chunk of brain called the insula.

------------------

And then there's this, wherein we discover you can learn skills without actually physically practicing the action. It's quite literally all in your head. (via Ran Prieur).

See? Remo Williams is not bullshit.

Alright, forget I said that. Consider, instead, the implications of this. Your brain can't even tell the difference between a martial arts kata and you fantasizing (hopefully, albeit accurately) about a martial arts kata. This, while hugely exploitable, is not necessarily a bad thing.

The mind, emergent from the brain, can turn around and rearrange the brain, thereby influencing the mind all over again. That would be you exploiting the weaknesses of your brain for your own benefit. Potentially, runaway feedback loop of self-expansion - until you run into the limits of protein cross-connection phase space. Then again, you probably wouldn't so much run into a hard limit as continue to do soft erasures and reboots of existing data, paving it over with transient towers of thought. Castles of air built in beach sand, shifting in the undertow of uncertainty.

Gödel was right ... but we can sneak a little closer to that particular vertex.

2007-01-24T19:48:00.000-05:00

Drug-resistant form of tuberculosis that kills people in TWO WEEKS?

Currently being desperately and frantically quarantined in South Africa. I've done some very rough math and Bruce Sterling is right, this is some world-killing stuff, man!

via Posthuman Blues via Beyond the Beyond

2007-01-23T09:29:00.000-05:00

Chinese Satellite-Killer Test Successful

For some reason, what I'm most curious about is the particular model/brand of missile used to do this. The impression I'm getting is that it doesn't require anything special. Worse, how long till less ... nation-state-type folks get this bright idea?

I'm not mentioning the first-order implications, on account of them being so obvious and all.

Fiction The Way God Intended.

2007-01-23T00:21:00.000-05:00

Hectowords has been medusaheaded.

She only want me for my link juice/not my link juice

2007-01-21T19:19:00.000-05:00

Diary of a goof-off: No work, no pay - Bitch, there are way smarter ways to do what you did, depressive-impressive as it may be.

I am taught in schools. Me! - psh-yeah, right. They couldn't even mention my name? It's right there - on the right!

XD

Violent Acres is so medusaheaded - This lady pwns. Must read every day.

Could My Morning Get Any More Awesome? Barring Oral Sex, I Should Think Not!

2007-01-20T11:30:00.000-05:00

Neural 'extension cord' developed for brain implants

A "data cable" made from stretched nerve cells could someday help connect computers to the human nervous system. The modified cells should form better connections with human tissue than the metal electrodes currently used for purposes such as remotely controlling prosthetics (see Brain implant enables mind over matter).

"The nervous system doesn't like nasty hard metal or plastic," says Doug Smith, who is developing the cell-based cable at the University of Pennsylvania, US. Nerve tissue can develop scarring or shrink away from contact with metal and other non-biological materials, he says.

"Nerve cells will happily grow to form new connections with new nerve cells though," Smith adds, "we want to try that as an alternative to ramming something into a nerve or the brain ...

2007-01-12T03:40:00.000-05:00

McSweeney's Monologues have been medusaheaded. Like so.

First Post of 2007 - That's All You Get.

2007-01-08T13:59:00.000-05:00

If our Gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then let us admit it must be said that our love is scientific as well - Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, 1886

If we are vehicles for our genes and the seemingly-irrational actions driven ostensibly by love make sense when we view the gene as the true center of self, is it then possible for someone of sufficient existential paranoia to 'download' erself into er genes? Such a person would presumably become a super-Lamarckian lifeform.

If the genes give the commands, then take control of the genes and decide what commands they can give.

Additional thought: someone who could do this could probably resist torture indefinitely, particularly if the stakes were properly (and of course genetically) high (say, a father being told to kill his daughter or somesuch).

"No Such Thing as Global Warming or Climate Change, Only Cutting-Edge Technology!"

2006-12-29T14:16:00.000-05:00

Ancient ice shelf breaks free from Canadian Arctic

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic, scientists said.

The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometers (497 miles) south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north.

Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake ...

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and could not believe what he saw.

"This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead," Vincent said Thursday.

Interplanetary Vegetables and Other Stories (the return of Link-Salad).

2006-12-27T11:53:00.000-05:00

COROT, the latest planet-seekersat has launched.

Happy hunting.

Nigerian oil pipeline detonates - kills hundreds.

Fuck.

Ooooh! Wikipedia Search Engine-o!

Next stop, searchable hivemind? I'm in!

I have decided that Evolving Terrorist Tactics is now one of my Interests.

2006-12-24T02:07:00.000-05:00

Completely apropos of nothing, as is my wont. In that spirit, the Washington Institute has been medusaheaded. Emily Hunt's stuff in particular is highly fascinating.

2006-12-21T13:02:00.000-05:00

Left Behind videogame catches flak from Christian Right.

Ha-HA!

Losers.

------------------------

Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'

... During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

"You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?"

Written in January 2001. The Onion, ladies and gentlemen.

Enlightened Self-Aggrandizement?

2006-12-11T03:03:00.000-05:00

More and more I'm thinking that if you can see far enough, all morals are really tactics - Ran Prieur

What is Mortal Coils About? (Also, Medusaheaded.)

2006-12-06T13:32:00.000-05:00

Eric S. Nylund has a blog. Cool.

2006-11-28T15:31:00.000-05:00

The drug is oil, topsoil, trees, metal, any resource that can be exploited. And the addiction is what we call "growth" or "progress" or, when we're really confused, "evolution." The addiction is the feeling, "not good enough, more, MORE, better, BETTER!" This is a great time for learning, because some people have billions of dollars and their craving is worse than ever. The crash will be a great time for learning because we'll see where a culture of increase leads.

I agree with Alicia that it would be wonderful to master a level of social and technological complexity above the stone age. But I don't think we're anywhere near that mastery. What that mastery will feel like is having an open liquor cabinet right next to you, and hardly ever thinking about it, and only taking a little drink now and then. What it will look like is humans all over the world keeping population, resource consumption, and technological complexity in a stable state, moving gently around a point of equilibrium, until the sun burns out, while the forests grow. - Ran Prieur, November 1 2006

Nothing further.

2006-11-13T11:25:00.000-05:00

BAE goes big on 'green' weapons

Reduced-lead bullets and recyclable explosives are among the developments being put forward by arms manufacturer British Aerospace (BAE) as part of a major investment in ecologically-sound weaponry.

The company, one of the world's biggest arms-makers, says it has been making investments in creating products that reduce the collateral damage of warfare ...

Others include landmines that break down into manure, bombs that blow up *quietly* and, hmm let's see, fuel-efficient jet fighters. Awesome.

The idea behind the lead-free bullets, for example, is that if they get lodged in the environment, they "do not cause any additional harm".

Oh, Is That Right. "Lodged in the environment," you said?

Ms Allen said that this is partly a response to people becoming more environmentally aware.

...

...

...

found via Ran Prieur

2006-11-06T14:17:00.000-05:00

Lasers is for healing.

Good news for sports stars with torn tendons. Research carried out by the US Department of Defense (DoD) shows that laser light can help heal such injuries. It could provide an alternative to glues, sutures or staples, which can all cause disfigurement and infection. And it might even be used to repair damaged eyes, its inventors claim.

DoD experts found that rose Bengal sodium, a dye commonly used to stain biological samples, absorbs light with a wavelength of 550 nanometres ...

Huh. I distinctly rememeber reading the US Navy has had some sucess with infra-red, which is of considerably longer wavelength. Still, is good either way, yes?

---------------

Oh, and just in case you were in any doubt as to the sanity of Japan ... here:

Confirmation.

via Warren Ellis

2006-11-06T08:53:00.000-05:00

Would just like to give a quick shoutout to the Japanese<->English Dictionary for being so excellent. Thank you.

2006-11-02T12:17:00.000-05:00

Hammering Shells Into Expresso Machines

In his workshop in Mekele, just 120 km from Ethiopia's border with Eritrea, Azmeraw Zeleke is turning burnt-out shells into cylinders used in coffee machines. Most of the shells are left over from the 1998-2000 war between the two countries. "The shells were dropped in Ethiopia during the war with Eritrea," Mr Azmeraw says. He uses old mortar shells, which stand about one metre high, to make his coffee machines. Azmeraw Zeleke begins with a burnt-out shell. He then transforms the cylinder to channel the water, coffee and milk.

Uhh, The Warzone finds its own uses for things?

found via Posthuman Blues

In his way, every bit as steely-eyed a dreamer as a Watts or a Brunner.

2006-10-30T13:37:00.000-05:00

I have long suspected that one of the groups of humans who stand a better chance than most of us at outliving the collapse are homeless people. They are already surviving outside the dominant heirarchical structures. They are the least dependent on those structures of any of us. I'll bet they are already the most adept at the sharing of resources and information that is crucial to navigating the collapse. - Living in a Van, Down By the River, found via Ran Prieur.

Well, whaddaya know, I've been saying the same thing since Katrina.

Finally, the best of all worlds is a peaceful primitive society, with a better day-to-day environment than any industrialized class, but enough people dying before child-bearing age to keep the genes up to date. And if you say dead kids do not equal a good environment, you're confusing quality of life with quantity of life. - Ran Prieur, October 29 2006.

He be damn.

Water! huh-yeah/What else is it good for/God only knows/

2006-10-28T12:14:00.001-05:00

New Solid Substance made from Hydrogen and Oxygen(!)

If you think we know all there is to know about water, think again. Scientists claim they have created a totally new alloy of hydrogen and oxygen molecules by splitting water.

...

Mao’s team subjected water to a pressure 170,000 times greater than atmospheric pressure at sea level. Then they bombarded it with X-rays, causing the water molecules to split and reform into a previously unknown crystalline solid made of H2 molecules and 02 molecules.

Brings to mind Masaru Emoto's unproven theories on the nature of water and, even better,

The Superionic Water Experiment from Last Year

To recreate the extreme pressure required to force water into the superionic state, Goncharov’s team used a diamond anvil cell, which squeezes the water between two diamonds, creating a pressure 470,000 times greater than Earth’s atmospheric pressure. The researchers used a laser to heat the water to the intense temperature of 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. At this pressure and temperature, the water went superionic

...
If superionic water was brought to Earth, it would explode because of the extreme pressure and temperature, but inside a giant ice planet it would be hard as steel and just a bit cooler than the weakest star, Goncharov said.

The article suggests that there may be a shitload more water trapped in gas and ice giants (in super-ionic form, that is) than we ever suspected. Which leads me to wonder, can it turned back?

2006-10-19T17:20:00.000-05:00

CNN tells me US Military spokesman Major General William B. Caldwell says that the US military policy in Iraq "has failed." I've tried ceaselessly to find an exact quote for that but all I got was the "disheartening" quote - quite the understatement, no?

In other news,

Diebold Machines easily hackable. Uh-huh, yeah.

A recent study by Princeton University that claims the panel door protecting the memory card on Diebold's AccuVote-TS voting machine can be opened with a hotel mini-bar key has triggered howls of outrage all over the blogosphere.

Blogosphere? I saw a dude demonstrate it live and direct on CNN TV. What gives?

2006-10-17T09:41:00.000-05:00

U.S. population hits 300 million

This little oh I dunno, milestone?!!, took place (statistically anyway) at 6:46AM Eastern Standard Time (11:46 GMT, fuck willing, I haven't screwed up the time-zone math).

Image stolen from jarodrussell

2006-10-13T23:25:00.000-05:00

Antimatter and matter combine in chemical reaction

Mixing antimatter and matter usually has predictably violent consequences – the two annihilate one another in a fierce burst of energy.

But physicists in Geneva have found a new way to make the two combine, at least briefly, into a single substance. This exceptionally unstable stuff, made of protons and antiprotons, is called protonium.

The feat of "antichemistry" actually took place back in 2002, but nobody had realised it until now.

*Now* I've seen everything.

(Image courtesy of matter-antimatter.com, late of the ESA Giotto Spacecraft)

2006-10-11T18:32:00.000-05:00

US population hits 300 million, but is it sustainable?

Apparently, the population of the US is going to pass 300 million sometime this week. Hmm.

You know what? Fuck it. Ran Prieur is right. Not about the hunter-gatherer state being a paradise or even close to one; that's bullshit because you still have humans and other carnivores in it, but about The Crash.

He's right. Get ready.

Meatspace is treading on my posthuman delusions, goddamit. Stop doing that, you Asshole.

2006-10-09T16:23:00.001-05:00

Google done bought Youtube, yo.

I don't know what the long-term effects of this could be - other than Google becoming an Eeevil Cyberpunk Megacorp^TM of course; I mean, that's a given now, innit - but they won't be good. So I'll rate this an Oh Snap out of ten.

Gustatoterrorism in the USizzle, y'all.

In the span of less than three weeks, E-Coli-ridden spinach has spread to include beef, lettuce and now, botulism toxin-infected carrot juice. Ohhh Snap!!

2006-10-09T02:38:00.001-05:00

Oh and just for laughs, I completely on a whim found the very first site to report the North Korean nuclear bomb test.
All credit goes to the team at Google News and, of course, Kim Jong Il.

2006-10-08T22:53:00.000-05:00

What with the breaking news that North Korea has successfully tested a nuke (it's Monday there by the way, if anyone cares), I find myself thinking more of Building T2 than of the imminent game of armed musical chairs the nuclear-club is about to play.

T2, you ask? Check it: the DMZ between North and South Korea is essentially a sixteen-inch-wide strip of concrete, lined with scowling young men with guns on their hips/backs -- and ball-bearings in their pants. Among other things, that strip bisects Building T2.

Let us go inside. Therein, we will find a room. In that room, there is a table. On that table, there is a line of studs. Those studs run precisely one table-height above the line of the concrete strip. That room, including the table, is the one point along the entire DMZ where you can cross back and forth between North and South without getting your head blown off.

Ponder with me the ridiculousness of shaved-ape geopolitics. Next to that, yet another tribe with nuclear capability just seems kind of silly.

EDIT/UPDATE: 3:21PM THE NEXT DAY
I suspected they might be bluffing ... but some dude on James Nicoll's LJ unwittingly pointed me to this wonderful earthquake tracking site (medusaheading it by the way) that says otherwise. Click on the orange dot for a tabulated breakdown of everything they know about it. Timeline fits and all that.

...

Why are we trying so very hard - and collectively at that - to destroy a world that we've gone to so much trouble to learn and study and create? What the fuck is wrong with the human species?

There's much more behind the link. Go!

2006-10-05T15:50:00.000-05:00

The "Hole-in-the-Wall" Experiment - Wherein a bunch of non-English-speaking nigh-illiterate Indian slum kids figure out the Internet from scratch.

To test his ideas, Mitra 13 months ago launched something he calls "the hole in the wall experiment." He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company's grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree.

What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.

Wet-concrete brains. We need drugs for this.

via Ran Prieur, who is second only to Russian websites in having the bestest stuff.

Click the Link. Or just Look At The Picture. Grasp my incoherence and RAGE. Share it.

2006-10-04T18:00:00.000-05:00

Oh Fuck. Oh fuck. fuckfuckFUCKFUCKGFUUUUUUCK!!!!

That's it. I'm moving to some other continent as soon as financially possible.

2006-10-03T11:35:00.000-05:00

Overused Science Fiction Tropes Must Die!

Oh, and don't forget the Insta-Medicine Trope, wherein the lesions from a horrible Space!Disease vanish before your very eyes as soon as the Last!Minute!OMG!Cure is administered.

2006-10-02T11:50:00.000-05:00

Alright! The DIY Blindsight covers (previously pimped here) are now available for download. Get 'em while they're hot!

A sample for your edification and delight:

2006-09-30T17:53:00.000-05:00

VH-1 Celebreality: Get a life. Theirs.

Wanna-stab-40-random-bystanders-nownownow? Join the club - mine!

2-Dish Link Salad.

2006-09-29T22:29:00.000-05:00

RUNNING ON EMPTY - The REAL Reason Gas Prices Went Down - chaos and butterflies and obfuscation, oh my!

We are so collectively screwed. (via Ran Prieur)

Sixth Sense? I'll Have The Magnetic Kind If You Please - Yowza. I want one of these. Does that make me a U-Man? You be the judge, you adorable geek you :)

This is Bullshit.

2006-09-28T11:02:00.000-05:00

"Ugly" Betty? I Think Not.

Normally, I don't notice this sort of thing. My threshold/definition range for beauty is exceedingly wide; for instance, I think Paris Hilton is in fact pretty and sexy. Sue me. I also think Sandra Bernhard is attractive - in the right pose, the right light, when genuinely smiling - sometimes, at any rate.

Point being: this show is being praised for acknowledging inner beauty, sticking it to the hollow, skin-deep aesthetic of the fashion world blah blah blah. Bullshit. This show is a horror. I am truly frightened for the mass psyche of America if:

is what is considered ugly these days. You fools, you dicks, you complete and utter cocks. Ever seen Not Another Teen Movie? Fine, you haven't. There's a scene where the so-called ugly nerd takes off her glasses, shakes loose her hair and is magically a hottie. The joke was that she was just as hot beforehand.

Braces or not, that girl is fine as hell. You all know it. Why, then, are the reviewers tacitly complicit with the creators of this hunter-destroyer psychological attack? Please advise, preferably before I skin my knuckles in pointless inchoate rage.

2006-09-26T19:41:00.000-05:00

And Now, For Something Completely Different.

2006-09-23T23:53:00.000-05:00

Get your Pr0n pn with Yo' Clothes On, Yo.

I want to say something insightful and intelligent here, with references to sociobiology and the inculcating effects of common media on the mass psyche etcetera etc ... but really, all I can do is stare - and stare. And Stare.

Note to Self on Emergency Survival.

2006-09-21T12:29:00.000-05:00

The bleach was for a trick I picked up in China. In remote areas there you can’t get bottled water. Even the locals stick to tea, which they boil for 15 minutes. After a while, I got tired of brushing my teeth with tea, and I learned that two drops of bleach in a liter of water makes it potable. If you put a slice of lemon or lime in it, it doesn’t taste like a city pool. Now when I travel in developing countries, I always pack a vial of bleach. (This also works for bathing—one teaspoon in a gallon of water.) - from a 2005 article by Richard Rhodes, on how he coped in New Orleans during Katrina.

Good to know.

2006-09-19T22:20:00.000-05:00

Future Hi going on hiatus.

Paul Hughes has been posting on issues of transhumanism, technology, spirituality and plain old humanism for the past five years and doing a damn good job of it too. Paul Hughes has news for you -- he is mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you people? Starvation, war, overcrowding, obesity, blinding idiocy, zero-sum capitalism, zero-sum everything -- just die already and make room for some other non-asshole species.

Okay, I'm being facetious. On a more serious note, it's been a delight to absorb his optimism and his concisely intelligent writings on ... well, on just about everything I give a crap about online. Now, he seems to be undergoing a metamorphosis of opinion, tragic for the likes of me*, but the right decision for him. To quote Hannibal Tabu, "Seek solutions." I wish him all the best on his new journey.

*now I'm stuck with Ran Prieur :D

2006-09-18T13:37:00.000-05:00

Peter Watts has, for some reason, been fictionalizing his bloggage* of his ongoing US tour. As dark as you'd expect.

*gag

---------------------

Even better, however, is that ...

Nissan will be trying out inter-vehicle messaging system come October 1st.

Japanese carmaker Nissan has announced plans to test an "intelligent transportation system" that sends wireless messages to passing cars. The company said on Friday that it plans to include 10,000 drivers in a 30-month experiment.

Messages will be beamed optically from roadside beacons to passing cars in the trial. Information received by an onboard computer will then be used to alert a driver to potential danger from an approaching vehicle or inform them of traffic congestion ahead, Nissan said in a statement.

...

The system also includes "dynamic route finder" which informs drivers of the quickest route to their destination using data collected from other vehicles. Drivers will be able to synchronise their cellphone with a car's navigation system in order to relay information about their journey to a central command system.

No, No, NO. And you were doing so well too; stop with the central command systems already!

Late to the Party (or Funeral as the Case may Be)

2006-09-13T22:24:00.000-05:00

9/11 - Five Years Later

SEPTEMBER 11 is a date forever etched in our minds. The terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 inaugurated a new era of uncertainty, fear, and hatred. For some influential sections in the West, these attacks have reaffirmed a belief in an inevitable "clash of civilisations'. Such a binary view of the world coupled with an opportunism has led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and more recently Israel's brazen assault on Lebanon. After decades of unprecedented peace, the mindless bombings in Madrid and London have introduced a new and gruesome dimension to European life. Given the political and economic preponderance of the West, the impact of these events is felt worldwide. Thus, at home, the terrible bombings of Mumbai's trains are now viewed as a part of this global menace.

Despite the disbelief of its citizens and feigned innocence of its leaders, America's international record has been far from simon-pure. It is in response to such duplicity that alert minds have reminded us of another 9/11. On the same date, in 1973, the democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown in a coup that was aided and abetted by the American Government. With Allende dead, Chile rapidly descended into a long era of darkness under the right-wing Augusto Pinochet.

----------

It's all been said. And better too. Go.

2006-09-13T09:48:00.000-05:00

The Restaurant at the End of the Future - or the End of Chicago at any rate.

Perhaps Cantu's greatest innovation at Moto is a modified Canon i560 inkjet printer (which he calls the "food replicator" in homage to Star Trek) that prints flavoured images onto edible paper. The print cartridges are filled with food-based "inks", including juiced carrots, tomatoes and purple potatoes, and the paper tray contains sheets of soybean and potato starch. The printouts are flavoured by dipping them in a powder of dehydrated soy sauce, squash, sugar, vegetables or sour cream, and then they are frozen, baked or fried.

The most common printed dish at Moto is the menu ...

Found via Schlocktroops

Let's hope nobody gets food-poisoning/cancer and spoils it for the rest of us.

2006-08-23T06:03:00.000-05:00

Dark Matter is real apparently, and not just a theoretical placeholder.

A cosmic collision has supplied direct proof that dark matter really exists, astronomers say. The collision has allowed dark matter to be separated from ordinary matter, casting doubt on the idea that dark matter could just be an illusion due to a flaw in our understanding of gravity.

The pull of gravity from ordinary matter seems to be insufficient to hold spinning galaxies together, including our own. This and several other lines of evidence point to the existence of a mysterious form of invisible matter that exerts a gravitational influence on other matter and outweighs ordinary matter by a factor of about 6 to 1.

Hmm. That's pretty damn cool. More thoughts when I don't have to dash off to work.

found via Mindmistress which you should be reading anyway if you like good comics.

2006-08-19T15:22:00.000-05:00

The Perseus Digital Library has been medusaheaded.

The World Just Gets Wackier and Wackier Around My Ears ...

2006-08-15T18:24:00.000-05:00

The President of Iran Now Has a Mo********ing BLOG!!!

I seriously doubt Babelfish has an Arabic-to-English^* option ... but oh how I wish.

*and before you even ask, yes google translate has one and no it doesn't work.

Normally, I leave the environmental stuff to Mac but ...

2006-08-13T14:16:00.000-05:00

Plasma-screen TV population threatens planet - or at least, Britain.

Britain's seemingly insatiable appetite for the latest plasma screen televisions could be posing a serious threat to the planet, a technology expert has warned.

If just half of British homes were to buy one of the flat-screen sets, two more nuclear power stations would be needed to meet the extra energy demand - with all the environmental problems that would bring.

Ooh, ooh, wait till you read this:

The new sets use up to four times as much electricity as the old-style cathode-ray tube TVs, which is where the problem lies. Even so, the sets sold fast during this summer's football World Cup, with one reportedly being sold every 15 seconds.

It's Televisions on a Island!, coming soon to a big-screen near you.

Now this could come in useful ...

2006-08-12T18:35:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia Portal:Current_Events has been medusaheaded.