Gallery of 3D printed objects

These are items created by 3D printers, driven by captured or generated data. Mind blowing stuff! Thanks to Chriz for the link.

http://www.oobject.com/category/3d-printed-products/

This example is especially nice, the path of a moth around a light source, rendered as a single solid ribbon.

Lakota Sioux declare themselves a sovereign nation

This is one of the most amazing things I've ever read. The Sioux have renounced their ties with the US and declared themselves an independent nation. They are also promising that anyone may come and live tax free on their land. My profound admiration and best wishes go to these brave, brave people. If only the rest of us were so courageous...

Real-time avatar generation from Japan

Head tracking for VR with the Wii remote

It's pretty freaking neat. I think someone needs to write an SF love story about a couple who can't touch, but can see each other through such a virtual window. Thanks to Chriz for the link.

Flight Gear 1.0.0 is finally out

I've been waiting for this for a while now. Flight Gear is a free, fully featured flight sim created by volunteers. While it's not as graphically polished as the juggernaut of Flight Simulator X, it's got really good flight modeling and is quite fun. It also supports multiplayer. Check out the screenshot gallery!

You can find the download links (there are three mirrors) under "Quick Links" on the Flight Gear homepage. It's only about 175MB.

Ron Paul is kicking ASS despite attempts to hide him

Ron Paul's fans raised an amazing $6 million in a single day, December 16. That's a record amount, and a great deal more than his last fund drive which raised $4 million. All told he has about $16 million dollars saved for his campaign, which makes it one of the most well-funded of the bunch. And this is despite the mainstream media trying to ignore him when it isn't busy making fun of him.

Here's proof they're trying to find ways to cut Ron Paul people out of the polls:

A good source for up-to-the-minute Ron Paul news is the Lew Rockwell blog.

Pink tide

The title of this site is Essential World Architecture Images. But it's not the architecture that draws one's eye, it's the sheer number of nude figures draped around it. These images provoke unexpectedly deep thoughts.

Chris Crumley's underwater photography...

...includes some really lovely mermaid images. It's well worth a look, here.

HRex robot conquers any terrain with manic thrashing

This demonstration video of robotic locomotion is amusingly robust.

Thanks to Chriz for the link.

Hyperspace and evil computers

Take a leap into hyperspace It's looking more and more doable.

Top 10 Evil Computers

Thanks to Mike S. for the links.

The History of LOLcats

And you thought it all began with Happy Cat's famous "I can has cheezburger?" Well, ur rwong!

The History of LOLcats

I didn't know anyone could skate like that

SWISSPASS 2 : GRIMSELL jean yves blondeau buggy rollin

Embedding has been disabled, so you'll just have to click the link to see it. This is how elves skate. At 70mph. And passing motorcycles.

Thanks to Chriz for the link.

I didn't know anyone could play guitar this well

This fellow must be an elf, to play like that. You can see by his face it is quite an effort.

Here's another for good measure. God, I love Bach.

The top 50 dystopian movies of all time

I largely agree with this list, and those I haven't seen, I want to.

A New Marriage of Brain and Computer

This is a lecture given by Stuart Hameroff at the GoogleTechTalk series, regarding his theory on the quantum basis of consciousness. I have been increasingly swayed by the quantum-consciousness argument over the last couple decades.

New Golden Compass Trailer

My god it's a perfect adaptation of the book. I can't wait.

Official movie site

Faithless - BOMBS

Just...wow.

Teh Holiez Bibul

The Bible, translated into lolcatspeak. Need I say more? Prepare to be amused. Here is perhaps the most widely quoted passage from the New Testament, John 3:16:

16. So liek teh Ceiling Cat lieks teh ppl lots and he sez 'Oh hai I givez u my only son and ifs u beleevs in him u wont evr diez no moar, k?'
17. Cuz teh Ceiling Cat not snd hiz son 2 take all yur cookies, but so u cud maek moar cookies 4EVAR!"

The art of Mark Ryden

Thanks to MissHappen for pointing me in this direction. Ryden's paintings are beautiful and deeply disturbing. Check out the galleries on his site.

Facism

Actually, if you pay attention to the news, it kinda *is* that obvious.

Space: 1899

OMG this is a riot. Thanks to my friend Scott for the link.

Some great IMVU chats

I'm known as pebble on IMVU. Every once in a while I have a really great chat-from-hell; I savor these things, and collect them like flawed seashells. You can depend on young, horny emo guys to produce the most consistently amusing conversations.

I've heard some zingers, too:

• if i be ur neighbor or live close to you, will you let me lick you?


• wanna see something hot? it2s a long ang huge thing


• i like movies ,sport, books, computers, hot girls named pebble


• wanna see my p****?


• leans in and kisses u softly and says I like u alot


• when ur as horny as i am right now who has time for manners


• im in bed, want to join me


• So, wanna cyber? Im really hella horny


• leans in and kisses ur pouty lips sopftly

Here is a sample chat:

NONAME: hi
pebble: Hello, NONAME.
pebble: Is that a lightsaber or are you just glad to see me?
(He really was holding a lightsaber, at waist level, so that it projected forward.)
NONAME: dress like a mermaid yes is a lighsaber and im glad yo see u
NONAME: take us to a room
NONAME: any room
(He's asking for me to put on my mermaid avatar, and load another scene.)
pebble: hmmm
pebble: see, there's an ancient Jedi word of power.
pebble: it's called "please"
NONAME: please
pebble: Ah, but there's also the subtle Jedi art of gentle conversation
pebble: charming a girl.
pebble: and not just storming in with demands.
NONAME: PLEASE
NONAME: PLEASE!
pebble: that's more in the nature of a clumsy, random blaster shot, dear.
pebble: Tell me something fascinating about yourself.
NONAME: PLEASE DRESS LIKE A MERMAID AND TAKE US TO YOUR ROOM
pebble: shouting...hmm...I think that's turning the volume knob rather the wrong direction.
pebble: Tell me a joke
pebble: if you make me laugh, I'll do what you just asked.
NONAME: WHY DID THE CHICKEN TRY TO CROSS THE ROAD
pebble: um, to get Pebble to switch the room?
pebble: that's a riddle, not a joke
NONAME: THE CHICKEN IS TRYING TO GET AWAY THE FARMER BECAUSE THE
NONAME: FARMER TRY TO CUT THE CHICKEN HEAD OFF
pebble: again, that's a riddle, not a joke, and -- hmmm -- I'm not amused yet.
pebble: Try again
NONAME: KNOCK KNOCK
pebble: who's there?
NONAME: NOBODY PEACE UT
NONAME: OUT
pebble: Bye!

Here's another good chat:

ANONYMOUS: Hey there Sexy
ANONYMOUS: I mean
ANONYMOUS: that IS you're name right?
pebble: No, it's pebble.
ANONYMOUS: So, wanna cyber?
ANONYMOUS: Im Jet
pebble: Actually I don't cyber, sorry.
ANONYMOUS: Oh, thats kinda sad...
ANONYMOUS: Im really hella horny
pebble: Nope, but you just made my Hall of OMFG
ANONYMOUS: .lol
ANONYMOUS: I made a freaking Hall
ANONYMOUS: Hehe
ANONYMOUS: So, pebble
ANONYMOUS: thats a unique name
pebble: I'm more here for scintillating chat
ANONYMOUS: Hmm, big word
pebble: yes, and that's with my sesquipedalianism set to "stun", not "kill"
ANONYMOUS: Hmm, Headache
pebble: That's one of the side effects, yes.
ANONYMOUS: my suicide meter is high now
ANONYMOUS: .lol
pebble: Hmm
pebble: well I wouldn't want to dissuade you.
ANONYMOUS: this is nearly sadistic
ANONYMOUS: Well, you wount
ANONYMOUS: kinda sad you'd like to see me die
pebble: You were the one threatening.
pebble: I certainly didn't suggest it.
ANONYMOUS: Well, let me rephrase
ANONYMOUS: Its sad you would help me
pebble: I would never help you do that.
pebble: I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word 'dissuade'
ANONYMOUS: .lol
ANONYMOUS: Perhaps I do
ANONYMOUS: I meant
ANONYMOUS: WOULDNT
ANONYMOUS: help me
pebble: Well, first of all you weren't REALLY going to commit suicide
ANONYMOUS: Im confused
ANONYMOUS: .lol
pebble: I took it as more of a way of saying "this conversation sucks, I'm leaving"
pebble: which is entirely your prerogative
ANONYMOUS: Ooh, not at all
ANONYMOUS: I find this rather amusic
ANONYMOUS: 8*Amusing
pebble: Indeed it is.
ANONYMOUS: So, am I amusing enough to add t your buddy list?
pebble: You haven't yet convinced me I SHOULD'NT
pebble: but I'm still up for chatting
ANONYMOUS: So then
ANONYMOUS: this is a good thing
pebble: indeed yes. You're feisty.

Amazing laser magic

Thanks to Chriz for the link!

Naomi Wolf's 10 Steps to Fascism vs. Stephen Colbert

This is some great stuff.

Empty Walls

A couple of friends (and former coworkers) did vfx for this video. Even though I can't really abide most music videos, I like this one.

NYT article on lucid dreaming

I didn't know about lucid dreaming until 1998, when a coworker told me about them. He loaned me a book on the subject and within two weeks I had my first lucid dream. It's a remarkable thing to wake up and be fully conscious within your own dream, able to bend reality just like Neo in The Matrix.

If you've never had a lucid dream, you can learn to do it. I did, and I showed my daughter how to do it a few years ago. They don't happen very often, for me, but when they do they're remarkable. I can stay buzzed about a lucid dream for days. Just google the term and you're sure to find plenty of good instructional links like this one.

Anyway, here's the NYT link.

And now for something completely charming

Dancing is one of the most sublime human activities. Thanks to Lotus for the link and cheering me up!

Pebble's Beach Tanka Challenge -- Results

All last week I ran a contest on my IMVU homepage inviting everyone to submit one or two tankas involving a beach, or taking place on a beach. The Grand Prize would be a copy of J4SM1N3's excellent Playa Tropical beach scene, the runners-up would get something purchased off their wish-lists. Look below for the actual text of the contest rules.

I've looked over the entries and decided these are the winning beach-themed tankas. I looked for strong imagery, strong emotion, a sense of implied deeper meaning, and an x-factor which I can't label better than "it speaks to me for some reason".

Since I can't pick which of the three is best, I'll just gift all three winners with their own Playa Tropical scene. Congratulations to these three poets! The entries are listed in no particular order:

BarbieFromQuar
--------------------------
Grass gives way to sand
Sand gives way to the harsh sea
Like thunder crashing
on the jagged rocks below
I ache for my Captain’s touch

MissHappen
--------------------------
The sea breaks the moon
tears across obsidian,
perfect, pale fragments.
Lost on the beach, jealous, I
covet their intimacy.

SolsticeJune
--------------------------
Dunes hide us from sight
Grasses blown by gales of change
Sway undecided
Thin trees bend to winds desire
Violent waves devour all

As you can see, I like strong, emotionally rich words like "ache", "covet", and "devour". Maybe I'll have another contest in the future. This one was a lot of fun.

Here are all the entries I received, listed in no particular order. A huge "thank you!" to everyone who participated!

Anotherneko
--------------------------
Surfing -

Sun on my shoulders,
through unrelentless trials
with each wave crashing
and the many times I fall
you will always be right there.

JeanetteMalk
--------------------------
as fish slowly die
on oilcloth, pregnant young girl
watches solemnly.
sun sets, casts his glare till where
water ends and sand begins.

fishtail still submerged,
human torso on dry sand
basking at the sun.
her voice, which has lured sailors
to their watery grave, calls for me...

ImYourSxyM8
--------------------------
the beach sound echoes
the thrill of sea meeting sand
combined forever
But no-one to hear them meet
something heard but hides unknown

SolsticeJune
--------------------------
Universe of sand
Salty kisses upon toes
Bold pebbles submerged
Beneath the smothering surf
And the unknown will of god

NarniMustau
--------------------------
whispers from the deep
quiet urgings insistant
drag sand from the beach
and stones from near the shoreline
to far off destinations

ICEECHERYL
--------------------------
Moonlight and sunlight,
reflecting off the water
invoking deep thoughts
changing minute by minute
as does the shape of each wave.

BarbieFromQuar
--------------------------
Warm sand under foot
Pungent smell of the sea breeze
As golden warmth fades
and light gives way to darkness
twinkling stars come out to play

And thanks to J4SM1N3 for making such a wonderfully inspiring IMVU scene. It's my fave!

And finally, here was my original contest announcement:

Pebble's Seaside Tanka Challenge

I love poetry, especially non-rhyming, free-form poetry that speaks with a clear, simple voice. Recently MissHappen told me about the japanese "tanka" poem-form, which is somewhat like an extended haiku.

My challenge to you is this: write a tanka about the beach, or an experience on a beach. You may submit no more than two poems, so choose wisely. The deadline for entries is September 1st. After that date, I'll choose three people as winners, based on the entries I like best. Grand prize will be a gift of J4SM1N3's excellent Playa Tropical beach scene; for second and third place I'll probably pick something off the entrants' wishlists.

What is a tanka?

Look here for an extended discussion of the tanka form. But structurally it is a five-line poem with 31 syllables, the lines containing 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, in that order. The last two lines should have a different rhythm than the first three, but I won't be too picky about the rhythm rule.

Stylistically, traditional Japanese tanka adopts a somewhat elevated (as in detached or objective) tone, avoiding harsh epithets or vulgar language. It conveys meaning by implication. It often has a poignant or bittersweet quality, with a dash of what Richard MacDonald calls "a sense of poverty." But I think it can work with a more upbeat feeling too.

To get the ball rolling, I'll write a sample entry (which won't be included in the contest).

the waves stroke the sand,
the white beach sighs with pleasure.
their love is not rushed.
seafoam curls gently around
a small, half-buried seashell.
(Pebble whispers: I love writing erotica no one can complain about.)

So have at it! Subject matter and mood are totally up to you, but it must have a beach setting or theme, and it must be submitted by September 1st. Any poem that doesn't adhere to the 'five-lines, 5-7-5-7-7 syllables' rule will be disqualified. You may submit them as messages, and you can write the whole thing as a single paragraph -- just remember to separate the lines with a "/". (Like so: the waves stroke the sand,/ the white beach sighs with pleasure./ their love is not rushed./ seafoam curls gently around/ a small, half-buried seashell.)

pebble

Star Wizards: the vfx of Star Wars and Close Encounters

Star Wizards is AmericanHeritage.com's fascinating article on the special effects of two movies that affected me profoundly: Star Wars and Close Encounters. There were some facts that surprised me, three decades after the fact.

Sci-fi films are as dead as westerns, says Ridley Scott

And, after a moment of shock and some deep thought, I'm inclined to agree with Scott's baldly stated contention.

At the Venice Film Festival for a special screening of his seminal noir thriller Blade Runner, Sir Ridley said that science fiction films were going the way the Western once had. “There’s nothing original. We’ve seen it all before. Been there. Done it,” he said. Asked to pick out examples, he said: “All of them. Yes, all of them.”

The flashy effects of recent block-busters, such as The Matrix, Independence Day and The War of the Worlds, may sell tickets, but Sir Ridley believes that none can beat Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Made at the height of the “space race” between the United States and the USSR, 2001 predicted a world of malevolent computers, routine space travel and extraterrestrial life. Kubrick had such a fastidious eye for detail, he employed Nasa experts in designing the spacecraft.

Sir Ridley said that 2001 was “the best of the best”, in use of lighting, special effects and atmosphere, adding that every sci-fi film since had imitated or referred to it. “There is an overreliance on special effects as well as weak storylines,” he said of modern sci-fi films.

In fact, I haven't even read a science fiction novel in a good long while that stirred anything resembling interest in my breast. I'm sick to death of the old tropes, and the new post-Singularity/other-side-of-Clarke's-Law experiments are about as compelling as reading someone else's dream log. Which is to say, not at all.

We've reached the end of the line for this kind of writing, I think. No longer the red-headed stepchild genre, science-fiction is now just a niche in the overcrowded realm of general fiction. Perhaps it belongs in the "improvisational mythology" bin. The old SF myths lie in ruins at our feet. The new 'roll your own reality' stories lack solidity. The center cannot hold.

Plasma life

Hot Gas in Space Mimics Life

"Clergy Response Teams" employed by US government to quell martial law unrest

This article has to be one of the most insane things I've ever read.

The US Government will employ "Clergy Response Teams" trained to quell unrest in the event of martial law.

What.
The.
Fuck.

Wake up, people!

Homeland Security Enlists Clergy to Quell Public Unrest if Martial Law Ever Declared

Could martial law ever become a reality in America? Some fear any nuclear, biological or chemical attack on U.S. soil might trigger just that. KSLA News 12 has discovered that the clergy would help the government with potentially their biggest problem: Us.
Charleton Heston's now-famous speech before the National Rifle Association at a convention back in 2000 will forever be remembered as a stirring moment for all 2nd Amendment advocates. At the end of his remarks, Heston held up his antique rifle and told the crowd in his Moses-like voice, "over my cold, dead hands."
While Heston, then serving as the NRA President, made those remarks in response to calls for more gun control laws at the time, those words live on. Heston's declaration captured a truly American value: An over-arching desire to protect our freedoms.
But gun confiscation is exactly what happened during the state of emergency following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, along with forced relocation. U.S. Troops also arrived, something far easier to do now, thanks to last year's elimination of the 1878 Posse Comitatus act, which had forbid regular U.S. Army troops from policing on American soil.
If martial law were enacted here at home, like depicted in the movie "The Siege", easing public fears and quelling dissent would be critical. And that's exactly what the 'Clergy Response Team' helped accomplish in the wake of Katrina.
Dr. Durell Tuberville serves as chaplain for the Shreveport Fire Department and the Caddo Sheriff's Office. Tuberville said of the clergy team's mission, "the primary thing that we say to anybody is, 'let's cooperate and get this thing over with and then we'll settle the differences once the crisis is over.'"
Such clergy response teams would walk a tight-rope during martial law between the demands of the government on the one side, versus the wishes of the public on the other. "In a lot of cases, these clergy would already be known in the neighborhoods in which they're helping to diffuse that situation," assured Sandy Davis. He serves as the director of the Caddo-Bossier Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
For the clergy team, one of the biggest tools that they will have in helping calm the public down or to obey the law is the bible itself, specifically Romans 13. Dr. Tuberville elaborated, "because the government's established by the Lord, you know. And, that's what we believe in the Christian faith. That's what's stated in the scripture."
Civil rights advocates believe the amount of public cooperation during such a time of unrest may ultimately depend on how long they expect a suspension of rights might last.

"We have broken the speed of light"

This is what you get when you have the Autobahn -- no respect for speedlimits. A couple of German scientists claim to have caused light to exceed c.

We have broken the speed of light

The problem with strident scientism

In The Dawkins delusion: science good, the rest bad astrologer Neil Spencer makes some telling points on how arch-skeptics can be just as dogmatic as non-scientists. I've enjoyed Dawkins' earlier books such as The Blind Watchmaker and The Extended Phenotype, but I find his new crusade against mysticism irritating.

He rails against radical fundamentalism as the harbinger of a new dark age, without realizing he's just as radical and just as fundamentalist.

Oxford philosopher discovers the Matrix

Try not to bump anyone on the way in... The party's already underway, glad you could join us, Professor Bostrom. Grab a drink.

Our Lives, Controlled from Some Guy's Couch

Perceiving the truly alien

How much of what we see is actually based on "icons"?

"Chair", "person", "machine", "mammal", that sort of thing. I would argue a lot of our perception of the world is tokenized in this way. So what happens when you move into a world where literally everything is new, far outside our token-library?

Here's a fascinating account of one of the first deep-sea bathysphere dives, and how the view out its porthole affected the observer.

Vectors - An FSX Film

Here is the new video from Lotus! You can get the high-res download here.

"To save America we need another 9/11" WTF!?

This op-ed has to be the STUPIDEST thing I've read in a very long time.

America's fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater.

What would sew us back together?

Another 9/11 attack.

The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago's Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda.

Is there any doubt they are planning to hit us again?

If it is to be, then let it be. It will take another attack on the homeland to quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America's righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.

The unity brought by such an attack sadly won't last forever.

The first 9/11 proved that.

All I can say is "Oh My Fucking God".

Many thanks to Anonymous poster #1 who pointed me to this followup article by the same asshat who wrote the above op-ed. What a fucking moron.

Pebble's minimalist nostalgia journey

I love YouTube.

Ever since hearing about Steve Reich's music at a George Winston concert I was hooked on the minimalist movement. It's a thrill now to be able to see his stuff performed in various guises.

Here is a quintessential (which means, literally, "fifth essence") minimalist piece: Reich's Clapping Music. First, the standard version:


And now performed solo. Bravo!


I'm also fond of composer John Adams. Here are two versions of his "A Short Ride In A Fast Machine". This is the original scoring:


And here it is played on balinese gamelans. Wow.

William Gibson gives a talk in Second Life

Talk about the serpent eating its own tail: here is the man who coined the term cyberspace, now entering it as an avatar. I'm a geek. This has a kind of technorgasmic completeness that leaves me almost speechless.



There are more installments on the right sidebar.

Money, banking, and the Federal Reserve

This video clearly explains why the US economy has steadily declined over the past several decades, fueled by the devaluation of the dollar by the actions of the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve is neither a Federal agency (it's owned by private, international banking interests) nor a Reserve (they actually *lend* us the money we use in circulation (which doesn't exist in the first place), and charge us interest for its use!

You will find no clearer, succinct explanation of why our economy teeters on the edge of ruin, likely to collapse utterly....very soon.

Pebble learns a new word today

And what a lovely, lovely -- almost elven -- word it is: luthier. Do you have any idea what a luthier might be? I'll give you a hint. A luthier is to [something] as a fletcher is to arrows. Here's another hint: the most famous luthier in the world is a name almost everyone will recognize. Also, some luthiers are known by the subgroup archetiers.

Give up? Here's the definition. And here is where I stumbled upon the word.

Merriam-Webster says it's pronounced "LOOT ee er", but a friend who knows about such things swears it's the correct pronunciation is "LOOTH ee er". Which I like better anyway.

And here, as extra credit, is the blog of an experimental luthier.

Physics: Can The Future Leak Into The Present?

Here's an interesting article from MSNBC entitled Putting Time in a (Leaky) Bottle. It discusses new ways of extracting subtle information from quantum processes that seems to come from the future, without collapsing the wave function immediately.

Alter egos in a virtual world

The unplugged world is having to wrap its head around the notion of online avatars, and how they relate to the people playing them. Here is NPR's "huh, what?" piece on the phenomenon. (Thanks to Hiro Protagonist for the link.)

Oh, but look out! The online world is a big, scary place filled with crazy people, even terrorists! Better shut down all online games, just to make the world safe for our ruling elite, so they can play harmless games like "blow-up-the-WTC-to-scare-everyone-into-submission".

Fuck that noise.

These avatar-enabled explorations of identity are a sign that the real world has become deeply, inescapably un-free whether we consciously admit it or not. People have given up almost all their freedom, at this point. Why can't they be allowed this one last escape? Because it's the nature of tyranny to want more power, always more.

Derren Brown: Subliminal Advertising

What happens when subliminal advertising is used on advertising designers? Watch and be amazed. It's nice to see the tables turned on the manipulators. Now, the important lesson here is: if these fellows are that susceptible to subliminal advertising, how vulnerable are you?

Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale

The US Department of Defense is running a very-large-scale simulation of the entire world, including mathematically simulated inhabitants.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.

"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".

SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.

Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.

"The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides," said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.

As I've been saying: very big bird swarms.

Some funny stuff for a change

Some of the funniest stuff I've seen in a long time.

Quiz: Christian Heavy Metal Band or Trek Episode?

Quiz: Porn Star or My Little Pony?

Video: Tetris Examined

Video: The Impotence of Proofreading

Video: Maritess vs. The Superfriends

Bush is one emergency away from total control of the US

All he needs is a single emergency to declare himself Supreme Commander. Expect such an emergency in the next couple of months, probably fast on the heels of any sudden devaluation of the US dollar.

Bird swarms and propaganda

These amazing videos of bird swarms displaysa jaw-dropping organicity. Despite being made of thousands of birds, they behave more like amoebas or blobs in a lava light.

You've heard me talk before about mass consciousness manipulation. I believe this bird swarm is a good visual analog of how human cultures appear to the mathematical tools of those who would try to steer our collective consciousness this or that way for their financial and political benefit.

Instead of air, though, our consciousness swarms through a volume of memetics. An n-dimensional volume of ideas and paradigms which can be measured and manipulated. It doesn't require anything like total control to be effective, it only needs to be somewhat better than chance.

With the right influences, a large bird swarm can be driven in a certain direction, or even pinched into multiple clumps. Wind, obstacles, the maneuvers of certain 'leader' birds.

So it is with societies, too. A visually shocking terrorist event can induce a certain vector in the swarm of a populace. A new fashion or culture trend can induce a new bend in the vector. A barrage of inflammatory talk radio can help separate us into more usefully homogenous clumps, making later influences even more effective. One such clump is labeled "Republican", another "Democrat". Other clumps (seen more clearly with different memetic axes) are "immigrants", "smokers", "Catholics", "vegetarians," and "senior citizens". The list is near infinite.

When the Department of Homeland Security advises people to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheets, some people will be more prone to act on such advise, based on their trust in government and susceptibility to propaganda. Their frantic purchases of such materials can be tracked from ATM and supermarket-card records in near real-time, and a meaningful model can be derived of this new 'clump' of the greater populace. Once you've identified such a clump or subswarm, you can find ways to influence it more effectively than a less polarized superclump.

Again, this process doesn't have to be perfect, or anywhere close. If you can nudge a million people in a slightly predictable vector, you can reap HUGE rewards from predicting this trend. That's how I think the cutting edge of the propaganda machinery works these days.

Architect Richard Gage analyzes the collapse of WTC 1, 2 and 7

And concludes it's almost certainly controlled demolition in every case. I found his lecture quite compelling.

King Dubya destroys the Fifth Amendment

A recent executive order signed by our Dictator In Chief seems to nullify the Fifth Amendment AND grant him the power to confiscate the possessions of anyone who criticizes the war in Iraq. WTF? This asshole -- and his entire crew -- needs to be thrown in fucking prison and tried for war crimes and treason.

Here's an interesting evaluation of the new executive order.

A turn-of-the-century near death experience

The Physician Who Watched Himself Die is an article containing a fascinating excerpt from a 1903 book on psychical phenomenon entitled Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. It's remarkably consistent with what we know of the Near Death Experience: the velcro-like ripping sound a person hears as their awareness separates itself from the body, the discovery of a boundary one may not cross without losing the ability to return to the body, the notion of accomplishing a mission during one's life, etc. Amazing stuff.

If you are at all interested in Near Death Experience research, I highly recommend you visit the NDERF and www.near-death.com. There are many articles as well as reports written by experiencers themselves. You'll find that while some of the material is couched in religious terms, a lot of it is not, and is compellingly consistent in its overall description.

A trip down the memory hole

How to create an angry American? Simply recall the lies that passed for truth.

Wii Fit Parody commercial

This is hilarious! It's a real ad with new, sarcastic voiceover.

Ron Paul interviewed by Candidates@Google.com

If you are as yet unaware of Ron Paul's incredible presidential campaign, you can't go wrong watching this 65-minute interview hosted by one of Google's chief executives. This video gets my highest recommendation.

To my mind, Ron Paul is the only politician I have ever heard who spoke absolute truth. Not only doesn't he ever trip my Bullshit Meter, I usually find myself standing and cheering out loud. And a lot of other people feel this way too.

He just might be the last offramp we have on this freeway to Dictatorship.

Criss Angel videos

He does some remarkable levitation tricks. Here are two I suspect use the same basic technology:

Chriss Angel walks on water

Chriss Angel levitates from building to building

There are closeup shots in the water-walking video that suggest he's miming solid contact with the water. I don't think there is glass under there.

In the second video, pay attention to the high-speed footage of his levitation at 3:30. It has a "stepped" quality -- imperceptible in the real time footage -- that suggests he's using a computer-controlled, distributed wire rig. I'm guessing it's a specialized implementation of a flying camera system. The wires must be very thin, very lightly colored and strong, like super-strong fishing monofilaments. Notice he takes his time; the filaments can obviously take a good load so long as there are no sudden jerks.

I also like his more person-scale illusions, like walking through glass, levitating on the street (here's how he does one form of it), and pulling a woman apart in a park.

A couple of neat mermaid videos

Maybe it's my past life as a dolphin, but I've always loved mermaids.

This clip is made with scenes from a 2003 TV movie called, unsurprisingly, Mermaids.



Hannah Mermaid is a model who makes videos like this one:



If artistic nudity doesn't bother you, check out Hannah's Fiji and Torakina videos.

It's amazing how much speed they can work up with a big monofin.

3D morphable model face animation

Wow, this is neat stuff.

Zeitgeist: The Movie

Feel the urge to swallow a horse-sized Red Pill? Then watch this movie.

Swarm Behavior article on NG website

You can find National Geographic's article here. I love this kind of stuff.

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.
Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.

Penny Arcade on 80s franchise reimagining

Hahaha! This Penny Arcade comic perfectly expresses my feeling about the new Michael Bay reimagining of Transformers.

Next it'll be "Chia Pet Strike Force Alpha" or some such nonsense. Maybe "Husker Doom".

For All Mankind

For All Mankind is a wonderful documentary about the Apollo moon missions, which were an important part of my childhood.

You can watch it in 10-minute pieces by starting with the YouTube link to part 1 below, and then continuing with the subsequent parts (links included here, but also found in the YouTube sidebar). It's NASA footage you've rarely or never seen, and well worth watching. The audio commentary from the astronauts is also fascinating.

Oh, and ignore the viewer comments, they're full of "the moon landing is a hoax" nonsense. Just let yourself be mesmerized by the imagery, the words, and Brian Eno's haunting ambient soundtrack.



Part 1 (above) | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

Wind-powered sculptures

Theo Jansen is a designer who creates incredible animated sculptures, powered solely by the wind. You just have to see them to believe them.


I love the walking ones, though I wouldn't want to live downwind of this guy.

The challenge to the 'industrial gene' paradigm

The technologies we use have consequences, some of which come back to haunt us in dangerous ways. We dive in, thinking we know how deep the water is, but find out later we've waded in beyond our ability to swim. Genetic manipulation is a prime example of this. I'm no Luddite, but this is one technology we'd do well to stop tinkering with.

The New York Times has an article called A Challenge to Gene Theory, a Tougher Look at Biotech which hints at the beginnings of an awareness just how deep these waters are. They report,

Last month, a consortium of scientists published findings that challenge the traditional view of how genes function. The exhaustive four-year effort was organized by the United States National Human Genome Research Institute and carried out by 35 groups from 80 organizations around the world. To their surprise, researchers found that the human genome might not be a “tidy collection of independent genes” after all, with each sequence of DNA linked to a single function, such as a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease.

Instead, genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood. According to the institute, these findings will challenge scientists “to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do.”

This idea, called the "industrial gene" theory, operates from an assumption that each protein in the DNA sequence can be associated with a gene, which is then expressed in a deterministic way, called a phenotype. It is a useful assumption if you're planning to do your own sequencing and patent the modification. But it may not have any basis in reality.

I remember reading about how genes store data a few years ago, I think it was in Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life by Jeremy Campbell, and it was stated that the genetic code is infinitely more complex than we'd initially thought. Rather than one gene being read once for a specific function, the same DNA sequences were being read many times, in many different ways, for very different functions. For example the protein pairs might be read "left-to-right, one-by-one" for phenotype A, but also "backwards, skipping every other pair" for an entirely different phenotype B, and so on. It seems very likely the information contained within the DNA is far richer and more complex than we are used to thinking about, like a protein hologram of unimaginable complexity.

I read that years ago, and yet it's mostly been overlooked or purposely ignored because it's not convenient for biotech industries, who prefer the industrial gene model and its legal protections.

In the United States, the Patent and Trademark Office allows genes to be patented on the basis of this uniform effect or function. In fact, it defines a gene in these terms, as an ordered sequence of DNA “that encodes a specific functional product.”

In 2005, a study showed that more than 4,000 human genes had already been patented in the United States alone. And this is but a small fraction of the total number of patented plant, animal and microbial genes.

In the context of the consortium’s findings, this definition now raises some fundamental questions about the defensibility of those patents.

It's not hard to see the dangers posed by uninformed meddling, then. We can create animals with greater resistance to infection, but what other phenotypes are we unwittingly mucking up? One can't mathematically predict what these genes will do because they're only the instructions, not the machinery that acts upon the instructions. You must let the embryos grow and then hope you didn't stomp on anything important in the process.

Such hubris has serious consequences. Have you ever heard of "terminator genes"? Here's an article about it from Time Magazine, called The Suicide Seeds.

This stuff is going to get out of hand.

We don't have long to wait now

I can sense it.

Dubya now has all the "authority" he needs to take complete control of this country. All he lacks is an excuse. You can bet they've got something up their sleeve. Just like September 11, only bigger and better.

All you have to do is listen to the neocon shills to know something's afoot.

Are you ready for The Day After?

Underwater camouflage

This is fascinating stuff. I've always been mesmerized by the octopus. Imagine what kind of language they'd use if they ever attained sentience!

Lament - An FSX Video by Lotus

Here is Lotus's latest FSX video. I flew a number of the aircraft you see here. Download the high-res version here.

The 'drone' UFO hoax

This 'drone' phenomenon probably started as a gag, but it's grown into something of a phenomenon in certain UFO circles. I'm positive it is a hoax, and those who accept this stuff uncritically are going to lose a lot of face when it's revealed as such.

It started as a series of photos, then became more elaborate photos. Thankfully some people with CGI modeling and animation skills created demonstration movies (one, two, three, four) showing how easy it is to create such fakery, even with unsteady hand-held footage.

Here is a blog which purports to be leaked information from a program called CARET (here's an article about the blog) which dealt with the 'alien technology' upon which the drone is based.

This kind of visual stuff is my bread and butter and I can tell you with little doubt it's all fake. The shapes which comprise those craft are exactly the kind Lightwave, Maya, or 3DSMax are good at producing, and all professional 3D packages have render modes that can produce photoreal lighting/shading. The photographs are obviously ray-traced CGI renders using a radiosity lighting algorithm.
(Check out this tutorial on environment-based lighting with High Dynamic Range Imaging.)

Not only do the designs of the craft strike me as utterly without precedent in the realm of serious ufology, but the 'alien language samples' in the CARET document look completely specious. The terminology in the document sound impressive but it's really just fluff and nonsense.

My guess is it started as a hoax, and gained additional (and probably totally independent) contributors. As more people are duped, more incredible supporting material will be provided until it blows up eventually. Think of the process as an ad-hocratic viral meme with a self-destruct switch.

That hot new neoconservative philosopher named Plato

The neoconservative movement, based on the principles of Machiavelli and Leo Strauss, probably gets its seminal ideas from a certain reading of Plato, suggests Simon Blackburn in his book "Plato's Republic". Alex Koppelman's complete interview with the author can be read here.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Plato wrote a book called "The Republic," in which the famed teacher Socrates and his pupils discuss the ingredients of an ideal government. They decide that there is a higher realm than mere physical reality, that it is the duty of a small cadre of enlightened, elite citizens called "guardians" to become philosopher kings, and that only these rulers can grasp what is truly real and Good. Over the years, "The Republic" has been invoked to justify everything from authoritarian elitism to liberalism, but during the 20th century, neoconservative godfather Leo Strauss reinterpreted it to his own political philosophy, with its controversial assertion that it's OK for the enlightened elite to tell "noble lies" in the service of the Good. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz actually took courses on Plato from Strauss at the University of Chicago; other neoconservative hawks with Straussian genes include Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq and current ambassador to the U.N.; and Bill Kristol, neocon pundit and co-founder of the Weekly Standard.

...Leo Strauss [saw] him as in some sense endorsing the idea that it's a dog-eat-dog world. This was kind of a covert message, Strauss thought, of [Plato's] text. Strauss thought that this covert message or esoteric message was supposed to be perceived only by a number of people of special illumination, amongst which he included himself, of course. And that was the ideology that eventually became American neoconservatism, the view that the servants of the state are entitled to do anything -- to lie, to manipulate, to foment war, to destabilize neighboring states, to disguise their actions under a hypocritical cloak of goodness. So it's an extreme example of realpolitik, which I think is just a 180 degree misreading of what Plato is about. But it just shows that you can put down the clearest words on the page and it will be read saying the opposite.

The events of September 11, 2001 bear all the hallmarks of the most audacious "noble lie" ever told. It was a christmas gift tailor-made for the newly elected neoconservatives, a "New Pearl Harbor" giving them license to transform the US into an outright Empire. I can only hope people wake up from this carefully crafted deception before it's too late.

The most sacred photograph I know of

...is the image of this lone man blocking a tank column in Tiananmen Square, 1989. You can learn more about this moment in history from PBS's Frontline documentary on The Tank Man.

Spying on the Homefront: PBS documentary

Spying on the Homefront is a new PBS documentary from the Frontline series. You can watch the entire episode online.

Everybody's a suspect. And if you're good, we won't bother you. And if you look a little strange, then you might get on a watchlist.

I also re-recommend their excellent The Persuaders.

This is code written by elves

What can you pack into a 177kb executable? Magic. Download the demo here, if you have a decent 3D card. Or, if you just want to see a YouTube video of what the demo does, watch this.

Using photographs to enhance videos of a static scene

All I can say is wow. Using this technique, one could up-rez blurry, shaky, poorly-exposed video using automatic image-stitching from related digital imagery. Unwanted components of the original video can be removed seamlessly too.

The ramifications for filmmaking, art, and propaganda are mind-boggling.

On a related note, the new technology of plenoptics, or "light-field" imagery, can take specially formatted images that allow depth of field, exposure, and even position to be altered after the fact. Simply amazing!

Thanks to Chriz for these links.

Science Fiction writers sell out to the Dept. of Fatherland Security

Some of my favorite books are by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Greg Bear. But I have just read they are participating in a group called Sigma which is helping Homeland Security anticipate future threats and devise new weapons capabilities. Their motto is "Science Fiction in the National Interest." I think "Geeks kissing jackboots" is more accurate. Fuck me.

Why are they helping the Empire? In order "to save civilization," as Niven put it. Apparently you don't just need at least one technical degree to participate, you must also be susceptible to propaganda and easily lured to the dark side.

They just lost a fan.

The Human Behavior Experiments

(Many thanks to Andrew Meyer for giving me a working permalink to this documentary.)

The Human Behavior Experiments is a CBC documentary on research into how people can be manipulated into being shockingly cruel to one another. It begins with the famous Milgram experiment in 1962, in which two-thirds of the participants -- normal people -- eventually obeyed the experimenters' instructions to deliver what they believed were lethal shocks to other test subjects. Of course, the shocks and the screams weren't real. The real point of the experiment was to see how far people will go in hurting one another. Very far, it turns out.

The conditions for widespread cruelty can arise spontaneously, as was the case when many people watched Kitty Genovese get stabbled to death without coming to her aid. The conditions can also occur quite deliberately. This is what made the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps, as well as Abu Ghraib, possible. The photos from Abu Ghraib are eerily resonant with the famous Stanford Prison Experiment from 1971. Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who devised that experiment, said,

When the images of the abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib were revealed, immediately the military went on the defensive, saying, "it's a few bad apples". When we see somebody doing bad things, we assume they were bad people to begin with. But what we know in our study is there are a set of social psychological variables that can make ordinary people do things they never could imagine doing.

We take our cues from those around us, and this seems to be very deeply wired within our brains. If no one rises up to stop an injustice, it can go on for quite a while before someone wakes up and realizes the gravity of the situation. In the presence of strong authority figures very few people will rebel, especially when they see their fellows obeying orders.

I believe the technology for producing mass obedience is far more mature than people realize. Like a snake charmer, the mass media has mutated into a hypnotic mechanism of control. It's not perfect control, mind you. Certainly there is educational and nonmanipulative content on the television, radio, in magazines, etc. But make no mistake: there is just enough control to blunt any serious questioning of authority. We are given the appearance of debate, of objection, to this or that policy. But it is simply theater.

For extra credit, and for specific examples of the manipulation I'm referring to, please watch Bill Moyers' excellent documentary Buying The War, as well as Robert Kane Pappas's Orwell Rolls In His Grave. Both can be seen online at the links provided.

Then you might just want to watch They Live again, for kicks.

Now for the good news. All we have to do is wake up. That's all. Just...wake...up.

The Golden Compass is coming to theaters Dec. 2007

I greatly enjoyed Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy entitled His Dark Materials. It's one of the very few works I know of that can stand proudly beside Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The first book, The Golden Compass, is being made into a film (official website) by New Line Cinema. The trailer is incredible! The art direction and casting are perfect.

Unwritten grammar rules

There has been some interesting insight into hidden grammatical structures within English sentences, as described in this article.

Ms. Nichols reproduced a version of a chart showing a hierarchy of modifiers: determiner, quality, size, age, color, origin, material. She gives some examples: a colorful new silk scarf; that silver Japanese car. I've just been looking over a couple of other such charts, and I find that the hierarchy they list goes like this:

Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose.

Not all noun phrases have adjectives from each of these columns. But this is the order they should be in. Thus "little old lady" or "angry young man" are set phrases in the language that illustrate the idiomatic order. "Little" (size) comes before "old" (age). And "angry" is an example of what the charts call an opinion adjective – one of the modifiers that seem less essential than those referring to age or origin, for instance.

If a person uses this kind of adjectival ordering, they can avoid using too many commas and still retain clarity of meaning.

Propaganda, by Edward Bernays

Sigmund Freud's American cousin Edward Bernays was a propagandist for the US during World War I, and when that war ended he thought to use the same techniques for manufacturing consent in peacetime, both in the private sector and for government.

Here is the complete text of his book entitled Propaganda, which outlines the ways in which consent may be elicited without the public's conscious perception of the process.

And it's an eye-opener. This is quite an old work, but it is from the pen of the man who: 1. Invented the term and profession of "public relations"; 2. Got women to smoke in the 1920s despite strong cultural prohibitions, by piggybacking on the Women's Rights Movement; 3. Made bacon-and-eggs popular as a breakfast meal at the behest of the pork and poultry industries; and 4. Helped jumpstart a brutal coup, engineered partly by the CIA, of the reformist Guatemalan government by creating a fictitious "revolution". The newly-installed regime acted in ways which strongly profited the United Fruit Company. The term "banana republic" stems directly from this masterwork of propaganda. (More info here.) He also played a part in marketing the concept of mass-fluoridation of drinking water.

Here is a quote from Bernays:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind...

If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. But men do not need to be actually gathered together in a public meeting or in a street riot, to be subject to the influences of mass psychology. Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group influences. A man sits in his office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, no doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact his judgment is a melange of impressions stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought. He buys a certain railroad stock because it was in the headlines yesterday and hence is the one which comes most prominently to his mind; because he has a pleasant recollection of a good dinner on one of its fast trains; because it has a liberal labor policy, a reputation for honesty; because he has been told that J. P. Morgan owns some of its shares.

Trotter and Le Bon concluded that the group mind does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits and emotions. In making up its mind its first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader. This is one of the most firmly established principles of mass psychology. It operates in establishing the rising or diminishing prestige of a summer resort, in causing a run on a bank, or a panic on the stock exchange, in creating a best seller, or a box-office success.

Truly shocking stuff. One can only imagine the heights to which this art has grown, powered with sophisticated tools such as MRI and CAT-scan-powered neuromarketing techniques.

A reporter has her artificial sixth sense removed, misses it

This article is short, but thought-provoking: I spent fully 20 minutes mulling over the ramifications of this woman's strangely intimate experiment where a magnet was implanted in her finger, allowing her to directly experience magnetic fields.

A friend asked how an implanted magnet could impart any sensation, as there wouldn't be a direct neural connection. I assume that it'd produce feeling simply by virtue of being embedded; the deflections caused by different kinds of fields would translate to distinct vibrations or pressures, depending on whether they pulse or not, and their orientation.

TV audiences are shrinking. Yay!

TV viewership is down, reports CNN. Way down. And the experts are wondering how to explain it, but they fear it'll impact advertising profits. Well, I won't be shedding any tears.

20 Most Amazing Coincidences (and a few extras)

Oddweek.com has an article of the 20 most amazing coincidences. But I think they left a few out.

1. The pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen, an X-Files spinoff series, involved the heroes stumbling upon a conspiracy by a rogue faction of the US government planning to take remote control of a commercial passenger jet in order to fly it into the World Trade Center; spurring a worldwide demand for arms sales against a looming "terrorist" threat. The heroes are able to hack into the plane and avert a crash -- just barely in time. This program aired on 03/04/2001, over six months prior to the eerily similar events of September 11, 2001.

2. In 1986 Martin Keating, brother of then-governor of Oklahoma Frank Keating, wrote a technothriller entitled Final Jihad. Part of the story involved muslim-backed terrorist attacks upon government buildings in Oklahoma City and included a character named Tom McVay. This was four years before Timothy McVeigh presumably attacked the Murrah Federal Building in that same city.

3. Over a hundred years before the discovery of Mars's two moonlets by telescope in 1877, writer Jonathan Swift invented them for his book Gulliver's Travels (1726). He called these two moons Phobos and Deimos and gave them orbital periods of 10 and 21.5 hours respectively, very close to the actual values of 7.6 and 30.2 hours. He also got their sizes approximately correct. The moons, of course, were given the names from Swift's book as a nod to his eerie precognition.

4. This is a personal coincidence, and not all that cosmic, but I found it kinda cool. I went bowling with my family a couple of months ago. We were given lane 18. Above various lanes were placards indicating when a PGA bowler had bowled a perfect 300 game there. As it turns out, someone named Mike Reichstein had bowled a perfect game on our lane on October 18, 2006, the date of my last birthday. The individual digits of the date 10-18-2006 add up to precisely 18. And the cost of our family's game that day came to exactly $18. How cool is that?

Skepticism and the Balkanization of Epistemology

Psychedelic Salon is offering two installments of a trialogue between Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Abraham, downloadable as .mp3 files. They're really interesting.

Part 1
Part 2

Vantage - An FSX video

My friend lotus just finished his latest video. It's a doozy. I helped by flying in about half of the shots you see.



If you want to see the gorgeous high-resolution version, you can download it from this page; the link is in the grey bar near the top, on the right hand side.

If you like that one, be sure to check his YouTube page (where he goes by the name Ramasurinen) with all his other videos. I recommend Elyonim and Lucid.

Why religious groups feel threatened by near-death experience research

Dr. Neal Grossman discusses reasons for many religious groups' aversion to near-death experience research in this podcast. Basically, they worry such research may not support their notions of God and the afterlife.

I am personally fascinated by NDE research and have spent many hours poring over experiencers' first-hand accounts found on sites like Near Death Experience Research Foundation and Near Death Experiences and the Afterlife.

My own working hypothesis is that the experiences don't directly show us the landscape of existence following mortal life, but rather the interface between the two, a kind of antechamber to a wholly different kind of being. This interface is not "solid" in the way we think of our physical reality; it's extremely fluid in its specific details and yet remarkably consistent in the underlying themes. This is not unlike differently-flavored operating systems (Mac, Windows, Linux) which lie between you and the same basic hardware, customizing the look and feel of the interface to work best with your particular preferences.