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Amateur Astro-photographer takes largest interactive image of night sky
05.04.2011
04:39 pm
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This is the largest true color photograph of the night sky ever created. It was shot by first time astro-photographer, Nick Risinger, a 28-year-old from Seattle. This is not just one view of the night sky but a 360-panorama composed from 37,000 individual photographs, taken by Risinger during his 60,000 mile trek across the western United States and South Africa.

“The genesis of this was to educate and enlighten people about the natural beauty that is hidden, but surrounds us,” Risinger said.

The project began in March 2010, when Risinger and his brother took a suite of six professional-grade astronomical cameras to the desert in Nevada. By June, Risinger had quit his job as a marketing director for a countertop company to seek the darkest skies he could find.

Every night, Risinger and his father set up the cameras on a tripod that rotates with Earth. The cameras automatically took between 20 and 70 exposures each night in three different-color wavelengths. Previous professional sky surveys (including the Digitized Sky Survey of the 1980s, which is the source for the World Wide Telescope and Google Sky) shot only in red and blue. Including a third color filter gives the new survey a more real feeling, Risinger said.

“I wanted to create something that was a true representation of how we could see it, if it were 3,000 times brighter,” he said.

Risinger sought out dry, dark places far from light-polluting civilization. Most of the northern half of the sky was shot from deserts in Arizona, Texas and northern California, although Risinger had one clear, frigid night in Colorado.

“It was January and we were hanging out in Telluride waiting for the weather to clear in Arizona or Texas,” he said. “Finally we realized the weather was hopeless down south, but it was perfectly clear where we were.” They drove an hour away, set up near a frozen lake, and sat in their car with the heat off for 12 hours as the temperature outside dropped to minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit.

“I would have loved to turn the car on for heat, but I was afraid the exhaust would condense on the equipment and make a shutter freeze or ice up the lenses,” Risinger said. “Certainly it was the coldest I’ve ever been, but I’ve still got all 10 toes and fingers.”

The southern hemisphere was captured in two trips to South Africa, not far from the site of the 11-meter Southern African Large Telescope. While there, Risinger and his father stayed with a sheep farmer who also watched the skies with his own amateur telescope.

Back in Seattle, Risinger used a combination of standard and customized astrophotography software to subtract noise from the cameras, stack the three colors on top of each other, link each picture to a spot on the sky and stitch the whole thing together. He taught himself most of the techniques using online tutorials.

Risinger plans to sell poster-sized prints of the image from his website and is looking for someone to buy his cameras, but otherwise has no plans to make money from his efforts. He wants to make the panorama available to museums and planetariums, or modify it for a classroom tool.

“When Hubble shoots something, it’s a very small piece of the larger puzzle. The purpose of this project is to show the big puzzle,” he said. “It’s the forest-for-the-trees kind of concept. Astronomers spend a lot of their time looking at small bugs on the bark. This is more appreciating the forest.”

A giant zoomable high-definition version can be seen here.
 
Via Wired
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.04.2011
04:39 pm
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Why Intelligent People Use More Drugs
05.04.2011
04:02 pm
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Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist at LSE and the coauthor of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (a book, I highly recommend, no pun intended). He also has a great blog on Psychology Today’s website.

Kanazawa has a theory, which he calls the “Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis” which goes something like this: “Intelligence” evolved as a coping mechanism of sorts (maybe stress-related?) to deal with “evolutionary novelties”—that is to say, to help humankind respond to things in their environment to which they were previously, as a species, unaccustomed to. An adaptation strategy, in other words.

Translation: Smart folk are more likely to try “new” things and to seek out novel experiences. Like drugs.

How else to explain toad licking? Someone, uh, “smart” had to figure that one out, originally, right? Someone intelligent had to come up with the idea to synthesize opium into heroin, yes? Yes.

But to be clear, and not to misrepresent his theories, Kanazawa clearly states (in the subtitle) that “Intelligent people don’t always do the right thing,” either…

Consistent with the prediction of the Hypothesis, the analysis of the National Child Development Study shows that more intelligent children in the United Kingdom are more likely to grow up to consume psychoactive drugs than less intelligent children.  Net of sex, religion, religiosity, marital status, number of children, education, earnings, depression, satisfaction with life, social class at birth, mother’s education, and father’s education, British children who are more intelligent before the age of 16 are more likely to consume psychoactive drugs at age 42 than less intelligent children.

The following graph shows the association between childhood general intelligence and the latent factor for the consumption of psychoactive drugs, constructed from indicators for the consumption of 13 different types of psychoactive drugs (cannabis, ecstasy, amphetamines, LSD, amyl nitrate, magic mushrooms, cocaine, temazepan, semeron, ketamine, crack, heroin, and methadone).  As you can see, there is a clear monotonic association between childhood general intelligence and adult consumption of psychoactive drugs.  “Very bright” individuals (with IQs above 125) are roughly three-tenths of a standard deviation more likely to consume psychoactive drugs than “very dull” individuals (with IQs below 75).

 
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Shit, I must’ve been pretty smart because I purt’near crossed almost everything off this list (except for the sleeping pills) by the time I was seventeen!

Kanazawa concludes:

Consistent with the prediction of the Hypothesis, the analysis of the National Child Development Study shows that more intelligent children in the United Kingdom are more likely to grow up to consume psychoactive drugs than less intelligent children. ... “Very bright” individuals (with IQs above 125) are roughly three-tenths of a standard deviation more likely to consume psychoactive drugs than “very dull” individuals (with IQs below 75).

If that pattern holds across societies, then it runs directly counter to a lot of our preconceived notions about both intelligence and drug use:

People—scientists and civilians alike—often associate intelligence with positive life outcomes.  The fact that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume alcohol, tobacco, and psychoactive drugs tampers this universally positive view of intelligence and intelligent individuals.  Intelligent people don’t always do the right thing, only the evolutionarily novel thing.

Speaking for myself—and I wasn’t a very innocent child by any stretch of the imagination—I was already trying to smoke banana peels (“They call it ‘Mellow Yellow’) and consuming heaping spoonfuls of freshly ground nutmeg when I was just ten-years-old. I got the banana peels idea, yes, from reading about the Donovan song and its supposed “hidden meaning.” The nutmeg idea came from the infamous appendix of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, which I was able to pick up at the local mall (When my aunt, visiting from Chicago, caught wind of what my 4th grade reading material was, she was shocked—and told my mother so—but little did she know that I was already at that age actively trying my damnedest to get my hands on some real drugs).

This study explains a lot, I think. An awful lot!

Why Intelligent People Use More Drugs (Psychology Today)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.04.2011
04:02 pm
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There’s a riot goin’ on: The Stones create havoc in the Netherlands, 1964
05.04.2011
03:51 pm
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In 1964 The Rolling Stones played at Kurhaus concert hall in the Netherlands and all hell broke loose. The concert lasted less than a half an hour as kids went nuts, throwing chairs, rushing the band, moshing in the pit and stage diving. The joint was wrecked. Keith Richards later said that girls underwear was hanging from the chandeliers. That’s what I call fucking punk rock!

In this amusing video, Bill Wyman watches the riot footage for the first since the day of the concert and comments on what it was like to be there.
 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.04.2011
03:51 pm
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Roky Erickson throbblehead: Bouncing on the dashboards of absolute reality
05.04.2011
02:17 pm
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I expect to see Aggronautix new throbblehead bouncing on dashboards all over Austin. Roky is a local hero and lord knows every hero deserves a throbblehead. At $19.95, it’s affordable for slackers, hipsters and heads alike.

Roky Erickson, founding father of psychedelic rock gods The 13th Floor Elevators, has been immortalized in the throbblehead kingdom.

This figure capturing Roky’s look circa 1980, or “The Evil One” era, is limited to 1000 numbered units, stands at 7 inches tall, and is made of super strong polyresin.

Displayed in a window box, Roky is accurately sculpted right down to the grizzly beard, wild hair and Vanson jacket.

In the video, Roky receives his plastic likeness at SXSW. With all that has gone on with Roky’s head, this is the first time its been throbbled. But he looks like nothing could surprise him.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.04.2011
02:17 pm
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Adam Curtis on the death of Bin Laden
05.04.2011
01:01 pm
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Regular DM readers will know by now that we are big fans of the documentary maker Adam Curtis. He deals with current events and how they fit into a broader scheme of social and political history. Just the other day Richard posted the trailer for his upcoming documentary “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” which is to air on the BBC soon.

Curtis yesterday published an article through the Guardian about the death of Osama bin Laden, and what that means for the global political spin-machine. In it Curtis addresses the bogey-man status of Bin Laden and how his death will impact on the ongoing Western cultural narrative of “Goodies” vs “Baddies”:

Journalists, many of whom also yearned for the simplicity of the old days, grabbed at [the Bin Laden story]: from the outset, the reporting of the Islamist terror threat was distorted to reflect this dominant simplified narrative. And Bin Laden grabbed at it too. As the journalists who actually met him report, he was brilliant at publicity. All three – the neoconservatives, the “terror journalists”, and Bin Laden himself – effectively worked together to create a dramatically simple story of looming apocalypse. It wasn’t in any way a conspiracy. Each of them had stumbled in their different ways on a simplified fantasy that fitted with their own needs.

The power of this simple story propelled history forward. It allowed the neocons – and their liberal interventionist allies – to set out to try to remake the world and spread democracy. It allowed revolutionary Islamism, which throughout the 1990s had been failing dramatically to get the Arab people to rise up and follow its vision, to regain its authority. And it helped to sell a lot of newspapers.

But because we, and our leaders, retreated into a Manichean fantasy, we understood the new complexities of the real world even less. Which meant that we completely ignored what was really going on in the Arab world.

Curtis neatly sums up, in one statement, just why there is so much distrust for politics and the media in this day and age, be it from the right or the left, the fringe or the more mainstream:

One of the main functions of politicians – and journalists – is to simplify the world for us. But there comes a point when – however much they try – the bits of reality, the fragments of events, won’t fit into the old frame.

The article is highly recommended reading and you can view the whole thing here. I especially love Curtis’ work on the effect of the media in propagating certain cultural memes, particularly oldstream media, which tries to pretend it has no effect on politics and society even though it has a huge impact on how we think and function. If you’re not aware of Curtis’ work and his sharp insights (or even if you are) here’s a segment he produced for Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe on media and political paranoia:
 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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05.04.2011
01:01 pm
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The great lost Vin Diesel / Arthur Russell collaboration
05.04.2011
08:15 am
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No, this is not a joke. An old audio clip has been unearthed of a teenage Mark Sinclair (aka Vin Diesel) rapping over a beat by legendary NY avant-dance composer Arthur Russell under the name Second Edition. This is bizarre not so much for the music, but for the idea itself. Diesel, the lug head, $20 million action star and Russell, the stoned, gay, downtown disco bohemian trying their hardest to make a primitive rap tune work. It seems like a match made in an alternate universe, but no, it definitely comes from this dimension. It has been discovered on tapes owned by renowned guitarist Gary Lucas, who has this to say on his Soundcloud page:

Fragments of an aborted recording session at Battery Sound NYC in 1986 which brought together fledgling rapper Mark Sinclair—today better known as the actor Vin Diesel—and avant composer/dance music maven Arthur Russell in a project midwifed by Gary Lucas, who discovered Mark Sinclair rapping and break-dancing on the streets of the West Village, and greenlighted by Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records and Barry Feldman of Upside/Logarhythm records.

“I’m the Man of Steel” the teenage Sinclair asserts, foreshadowing his stellar ascent as a worldwide action movie hero (“Triple XXX”, “Pitch Dark”, and most recently the #1 box office hit “Fast Five”)—but even Diesel is no match for Arthur’s crafty diabolical beats, which keep dropping “the one” out from under him, breaking up Sinclair’s delivery and eventually rendering the session useless.

“It’s the white part of me fucking it up!”
—Mark Sinclair at the recording session

Unfortunately embedding has been disabled, but if you really are curious to hear it (it’s not amazing to be honest) you can do so here.

Thanks to Steven Hall
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Previously on DM:
Arthur’s Landing: ‘Love Dancing’

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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05.04.2011
08:15 am
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Morningstar Commune and the roots of cybernetics
05.04.2011
04:06 am
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A photo of Morningstar Ranch featured in Time Magazine in 1967.
 
By the time I visited Morningstar Ranch (aka The Digger Farm) in 1968 it was becoming a suburb of the Haight Ashbury. Young hippies, like myself, were drifting through the Sebastopol commune not quite knowing why we there but feeling we needed to be there. It felt less like an actual community than a halfway house for people yearning for community. None of us were actually ready to settle down yet. We were too fucking young. The idea of going back to the land was nice in theory, but we were still digging what the cities had to offer: rock clubs, bookstores, Love Burger on Haight St., hot water and supermarkets.

Lou Gottlieb founded Morningstar Ranch in 1966. A former member of the folk group The Limelighters, Lou had a spiritual epiphany and felt compelled to explore alternatives to the status quo approach to living. Morningstar was Lou’s experiment in communal living, a work in progress that wasn’t really work but some kind of joyous attempt at re-defining how we lived as neighbors, lovers and caretakers of planet Earth.

Morningstar had an anarchic spirit. It was literally open to everyone. What you did when you got there was up to you. I don’t remember any rules. Most of us didn’t have the discipline or patience to become active members of Lou’s wild dream. We were either too lazy, too restless, or both. There was a core group that kept the place functioning as a community, but for the most part nomadic flower children passed through the place on their way to something called the future.

In nearby Palo Alto, the beginning of virtual realities were stirring in the shadows of mainframe computers.

Long before he co-founded The Hackers Conference, The WELL (considered by many to be the first online social network) and the Global Business Network, Stewart Brand was staging acid tests with Ken Kesey and his ragtag band of Merry Pranksters. Brand, who popularized the term personal computer in his book II Cybernetics Frontiers, took his first dose of acid at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in 1962.

The proto-cybergeeks conjuring electric magic in what would eventually be known as Silicon Valley were dropping Owsley and conceiving realities in which brain meat interfaced with machine and the mind could perceive itself in its true limitless state. Many of these bearded outlaws from computerland were Gottlieb’s close friends and early pilgrims to Morningstar.

We - the generation of the ‘60s - were inspired by the “bards and hot-gospellers of technology,” as business historian Peter Drucker described media maven Marshall McLuhan and technophile Buckminster Fuller. And we bought enthusiastically into the exotic technologies of the day, such as Fuller’s geodesic domes and psychoactive drugs like LSD. We learned from them, but ultimately they turned out to be blind alleys. Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control. But a tiny contingent - later called “hackers” - embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation. That turned out to be the true royal road to the future.”  Stewart Brand (founder of The Whole Earth Catalog).

In this short clip from Canadian television, Lou envisions a cybernetic world where machines do the work while humans have all the fun.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.04.2011
04:06 am
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Mosfilm offering classic Russian cinema for free online
05.04.2011
01:35 am
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Russian film studio Mosfilm has started offering classic and contemporary Russian cinema with English subtitles on their Youtube channel. The site is in Cyrillic so if you can’t read Cyrillic it’s initially a bit of a challenge to select films. I was able to find movies I wanted to see by a process of hit or miss. Click on a film thumbnail and see what you come up with. As soon as the film starts the title will appear in English as a subtitle. Or copy and paste the Cyrillic title into Google search and you most likely will find an IMDB link. So far, everything I’ve viewed on the site seems to be sourced from high quality digital re-masters.

Here’s the scoop as reported by the St. Petersburg Times:

Russian film lovers can explore a treasure trove of Soviet films as legendary movie studio Mosfilm has posted dozens of its most famous films on YouTube for anyone to watch for free.

The films, legendary for many Russians but often little known in the West, include the comedies of Georgian-Russian director Georgi Daneliya, “Gentlemen of Fortune” and “Mimino”; “The White Sun Of The Desert,” a much-loved adventure story set in Central Asia that is always watched by cosmonauts before a space launch; and classic melodramas such as Eldar Ryazanov’s “A Cruel Romance” with Nikita Mikhalkov and “A Railway Station for Two” starring the late Lyudmila Gurchenko.

Every week, the studio will upload five new films onto the channel, the studio said in an official press release, and expects to have 200 by the end of the year.

Other films uploaded include “Andrei Rublev” and “The Mirror,” two works by one of Russia’s greatest art-house directors, Andrei Tarkovsky.

“For us, the YouTube project is very important and interesting,” Karen Shakhnazarov, director of Mosfilm, said in a statement on the studio’s web site.

“The aim is to give users the possibility to legally watch high-quality video material and prevent the illegal use of our films,” he said.

The studio has worked with YouTube to remove pirated versions of their films uploaded onto the site.

“Most of the films will be uploaded with subtitles in different languages so people from different countries can watch Mosfilm pictures,” Shakhnazarov said.

The 1970 film ‘The White Sun of the Desert’ is an adventure story that is always watched by cosmonauts before a launch.

At the moment, nearly all the films are up with subtitles in English, with only a couple found without any. The 1991 film “Tsareubiista,” or “Assassin of the Tsar,” starring English actor Malcolm McDowell as an insane asylum patient who claims to have killed the Tsar and Oleg Yankovsky as a doctor, is up in both English and Russian versions.

The channel has had more than 170,000 views since it started last week, and as of Monday, almost all of the films had more than 1,000 views. A few films see noticeable drops in viewing when the film is in two parts. Tarkovsky’s critically acclaimed 3-hour, 25-minute film about the great 15th-century icon painter Andrei Rublev saw 2,156 views of its first part and only 414 of the second part.

The most popular film so far is “Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession,” a 1973 comedy starring acclaimed actor Yury Yakovlev that sold 60 million tickets when in Soviet cinemas and has had more than 15,000 views on YouTube already.

The channel is already in the top 50 of Russian channels on YouTube.

This is great news for film buffs. Visit Mosfilm’s Youtube channel and check out their cinematic treasures.

Here’s one of my favorites, Viy. Directed by Alexander Ptushko in 1967, Viy is based on a short story by Nikolai Gogol. A colorful tale of witches and demons that achieves an almost hallucinatory delirium, Viy has achieved cult status for good reason.

This re-master looks gorgeous.
 
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Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.04.2011
01:35 am
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Rapture less than three weeks away!
05.03.2011
09:18 pm
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A kooky believer that the Rapture will happen on May 21, 2011 is interviewed (where else?) on Hollywood Blvd. It’s fitting that this takes place with the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum in the background…

As per the “prophecy” (and creative mathematics!)  of 89-year-old religious radio magnate, Harold Camping Jr., there is no way—NONE—that this guy has any doubts that he and his mates will still be here on May 22. Dude is seriously pumped for the end of the world, yo, and yet he’s still not willing to hand over his credit cards and PIN numbers to the interviewer. What’s up with that?

I sure hope that there are several documentarians working on getting footage of these folks both before and after “the end of the world.” Fascinating stuff (even if that drumming is annoying. Eventually it stops).
 

 
Via Joe.My.God

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.03.2011
09:18 pm
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Creative Writing 101 with Kurt Vonnegut
05.03.2011
08:31 pm
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Short, wry lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the “simple shapes of stories.”
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.03.2011
08:31 pm
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