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Time Lords Discovered in California
04.01.2010
02:13 pm
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New Scientist reports on the discovery of people literally able to perceive time—an ability called “time-space synesthesia.” (And no, the Doctor Who reference isn’t mine—that’s straight from New Scientist. Oh, English.)

Hey, I can perceive time… it’s that thing that new freaking Doctor Who series and spinoffs keep robbing me of.

Time Lords walk among us. Two per cent of readers may be surprised to discover that they are members of an elite group with the power to perceive the geography of time.

Sci-fi fans – Anglophile ones, at least – know that the coolest aliens in the universe are Time Lords: time-travelling humanoids with the ability to understand and perceive events throughout time and space. Now it seems that people with a newly described condition have a similar, albeit lesser ability: they experience time as a spatial construct.

Synaesthesia is the condition in which the senses are mixed, so that a sound or a number has a colour, for example. In one version, the sense of touch evokes emotions.

To those variants we can now add time-space synaesthesia.

(New Scientist: Time Lords Discovered in California)

(Doctor Who: The Complete Fourth Series)

Posted by Jason Louv
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04.01.2010
02:13 pm
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Dialup for Dummies
04.01.2010
01:55 pm
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Great Everything is Terrible video culled from an early 90s Internet instructional tape. My favorite part of this video is the prominently-featured book of Web addresses—remember those? Internet Yellow Pages? When you could actually buy the address of every site on the Interwebs in a book? I do. (For extra fun, see “Computer Wiz Dad”.)

(Everything is Terrible: Dialup for Dummies)

Posted by Jason Louv
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04.01.2010
01:55 pm
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John Michael Greer: Riddles in the Dark
04.01.2010
01:47 pm
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Author John Michael Greer (who concerns himself with something close to “paganomics”) just wrote this essay on the continuing decline of the American Empire—and argues that in a third-worldized America where a middle class family making $40,000 a year will likely be spending half of that on rice and beans, the labor of groups—not machines—will become the primary means of keeping society afloat.

This was pointed out many years ago by Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine. He argued that the revolutionary change that gave rise to the first urban civilizations was not agriculture, or literacy, or any of the other things most often cited in this context. Instead, he proposed, that change was the invention of the world’s first machine – a machine distinguished from all others in that all of its parts were human beings. Call it an army, a labor gang, a bureaucracy or the first stirrings of a factory system; in these cases and more, it consisted of a group of people able to work together in unison. All later machines, he suggested, were attempts to make inanimate things display the singleness of purpose of a line of harvesters reaping barley or a work gang hauling a stone into place on a pyramid.

That kind of machine has huge advantages in an world of abundant population and scarce resources. It is, among other things, a very efficient means of producing the food that fuels it and the other items needed by its component parts, and it is also very efficient at maintaining and reproducing itself. As a means of turning solar energy into productive labor, it is somewhat less efficient than current technologies, but its simplicity, its resilience, and its ability to cope with widely varying inputs give it a potent edge over these latter in a time of turbulence and social decay.

That kind of machine, it deserves to be said, is also profoundly repellent to many people in the industrial world, doubtless including many of those who are reading this essay. It’s interesting to think about why this should be so, especially when some examples of the machine at work – Amish barn raisings come to mind – have gained iconic status in the alternative scene. It is not going too far, I think, to point out that the word “community,” which receives so much lip service these days, is in many ways another word for Mumford’s primal machine.

(John Michael Greer: Riddles in the Dark)

(The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World)

Posted by Jason Louv
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04.01.2010
01:47 pm
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Hold All My Calls, I’m Too Busy Blogging!!!
04.01.2010
11:56 am
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“I’m like fucking knee-deep with shit blogging!”


(via HYST)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.01.2010
11:56 am
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Ai Otsuka: Chu lip
03.31.2010
11:04 pm
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Dangerous Minds pal, Chris Campion sent me this link to an unusual J-pop music video by Ai Otsuka with this message: “I’d probably far more impressed with Lady Gaga if she had a video that started with shit falling from the sky and a Rodney Alcala lookalike jiving next to a urinal.” He’s got a point, you know.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.31.2010
11:04 pm
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Donnie Swaggart’s got his .45 loaded and polished to take on Obama, he says
03.31.2010
10:01 pm
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Listen as Jimmy Swaggart’s son, evangelist Donnie Swaggart, calls Obama “That Philistine in Washington that is aided by the powers of darkness” and brags how he’s going to preach against the President. “Wait ‘til you hear the sermon—I got my .45s loaded and polished.” It’s like he wants to be the Glenn Beck of TV preachers. What a fucking idiot.

The only things a moron like Donnie Swaggart has going for him are his rather tarnished last name and the fact that there are people even dumber than he is willing to tithe 10% of their income to a cracker con man like him! He learned from the best, obviously. Disgraceful. Stupid and dare I say it, pretty hilarious. Love the deep voiced sidekick guy!

Via the Christian Nightmares Tumblr blog.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.31.2010
10:01 pm
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Tibetan Artist Paints Superhero Thangkas
03.31.2010
05:56 pm
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Thangkas are the primary artform of Tibetan Buddhism—and, in my opinion, the most advanced visual art form in the world. If you’ve seen these things up close—the Rubin Museum in New York City is a good place to do so—you know that Western art, outside of perhaps Hieronymous Bosch or similar artists, just doesn’t hold a candle in terms of complexity of discussing states and modalities of consciousness.

That’s why it’s particularly awesome to see them combined with that other world art form, superhero comics, in the work of Tibetan artist Gade, who swapped the Buddhas for the Hulk, Spiderman, Ronald McDonald, Ultraman and others.

The wild pop art of Tibetan artist Gade transforms famous superheroes into mandalas and religious icons. If you ever wanted to see Batman as a Buddha, this here’s your huckleberry.

Gade mixes Western comic-book heroes (and Ultraman!) and traditional Tibetan artwork to showcase the totemic status of superheroes and the effects of globalization on Tibetan culture. The below works are from his December 2008 Making Gods exhibition at London’s Rossi & Rossi gallery.

This is brilliant, and was just waiting to happen. Dear God nobody do a Twilight one, please. Please.

(io9: Superhero Thangkas)

(Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas—the best coffee table book of thangkas I’ve ever seen)

Posted by Jason Louv
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03.31.2010
05:56 pm
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Beck & co do Skip Spence - watch Nels Cline soar!
03.31.2010
03:06 pm
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Skip Spence wore many a hat—drummer for the original Jefferson Airplane, founding member of the very underrated Moby Grape and madman running through the fields to record his solo opus Oar. Released in 1969 on Columbia Records, Oar features Spence on all tracks playing each and every instrument himself. This is quite a feat considering the songs sound like a full band playing together in a room rather than a slew of overdubs, and even more noteworthy is that just a few days prior to the sessions, he went off the deep end threatening fellow Grape Jerry Miller with an axe before retreating to Nashville to blow off some steam and record his masterpiece. Though the album came and went without a trace, rumored to be one of Columbia’s lowest sellers ever, Oar has come full circle with its own tribute album and many modern artists citing Spence and Oar as an influence.

One such fan is Beck Hansen, who has recently been assembling musicians to cover long lost albums in a single day.  The recording process is documented and the finished songs are posted on to his website under the Record Club guise. Record Club featured songs from Oar redone by Hansen and his friends Feist, Wilco, Jamie Lidell and heavyweight drummer extraordinaire James Gadson. Check out their take on War in Peace to hear Wilco’s Nels Cline take you to unknown heights of guitar solo bliss. Of course, us LA natives know that Cline isn’t necessarily Wilco’s, but one of the fiercest guitarists LA has ever known!
 

Posted by Elvin Estela
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03.31.2010
03:06 pm
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A Grand Unified Theory of Artificial Intelligence
03.31.2010
02:47 pm
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Via MIT, here’s a Grand Unified Theory of Artificial Intelligence! T-1000s trying to kill your ass can’t be far behind.

As a research tool, Goodman has developed a computer programming language called Church — after the great American logician Alonzo Church — that, like the early AI languages, includes rules of inference. But those rules are probabilistic. Told that the cassowary is a bird, a program written in Church might conclude that cassowaries can probably fly. But if the program was then told that cassowaries can weigh almost 200 pounds, it might revise its initial probability estimate, concluding that, actually, cassowaries probably can’t fly.

“With probabilistic reasoning, you get all that structure for free,” Goodman says. A Church program that has never encountered a flightless bird might, initially, set the probability that any bird can fly at 99.99 percent. But as it learns more about cassowaries — and penguins, and caged and broken-winged robins — it revises its probabilities accordingly. Ultimately, the probabilities represent all the conceptual distinctions that early AI researchers would have had to code by hand. But the system learns those distinctions itself, over time — much the way humans learn new concepts and revise old ones.

“What’s brilliant about this is that it allows you to build a cognitive model in a fantastically much more straightforward and transparent way than you could do before,” says Nick Chater, a professor of cognitive and decision sciences at University College London. “You can imagine all the things that a human knows, and trying to list those would just be an endless task, and it might even be an infinite task. But the magic trick is saying, ‘No, no, just tell me a few things,’ and then the brain — or in this case the Church system, hopefully somewhat analogous to the way the mind does it — can churn out, using its probabilistic calculation, all the consequences and inferences. And also, when you give the system new information, it can figure out the consequences of that.”

(MIT: A Grand Unified Theory of Artificial Intelligence)

(Art is by Barry Underwood)

Posted by Jason Louv
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03.31.2010
02:47 pm
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Wish Rush Limbaugh a Merry Exile
03.31.2010
02:24 pm
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This petition aims to collect 1 million signatures wishing Rush Limbaugh a merry exile in Costa Rica, where he once promised he would move if healthcare reform passed. Sadly, I think it’s a lost cause: these guys are like little writhing maggot bombs dropped into the culture by El Diablo, poised on kamikaze missions to destroy everything good and humane in sight. This one’s already tapped out and drained and they’ve already got Glenn Beck up from his brimstoney summer villa to take his place. I have a better idea… let’s start a petition to have these evil fuckers locked in a room with Diamanda Galas.

Sign this petition, and your name will be added to a going-away card for Rush Limbaugh.

Rush promised that if the Healthcare Reform Bill passed, he would move to Costa Rica:
“I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now
and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go
to Costa Rica”  – Rush Limbaugh

Now that the Bill has passed, lets honor this outspoken American with a proper goodbye. Once signatures hit one million, a card will be designed, printed and mailed to Rush Limbaugh and his associates (to ensure he gets the message).

(Adios, Rush!)

(Diamanda Galas)

Posted by Jason Louv
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03.31.2010
02:24 pm
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