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.