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.
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”.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas—the best coffee table book of thangkas I’ve ever seen)
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!
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.”
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 LimbaughNow 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).
Wash away the horror!!!
Patrick Star by Brushcommander
(via Geekologie)
The next three installments (Tender Prey, The Good Son, Henry’s Dream) in Mute’s superbly remastered Nick Cave series came out yesterday and I’m pleased to report that they’re done to the extremely high standards established by the first batch. Each 2-disc set comes with a remastered stereo CD and a DVD-A with a choice of DTS or Dobly 5:1 surround mixes, as well as a PCM stereo version. There are ample B-sides, music videos and each set features the continuing, multi-part documentary by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard called Do You Love Me (Like I Love You) chronicling the recording of each album.
They sound fucking amazing. Tender Prey sounds especially good, with the surround versions offering total immersion in the Bad Seeds awe-inspiring swagger. Every Nick Cave album is an audiophile’s dream, but the Bad Seeds become a locomotive force of nature when experienced in these new surround versions. They sound so good, so like you’re right there in the studio with them, that it’s nothing short of exhilarating to listen to these albums at a high volume. When City of Refuge kicks in, it’s like being hit by an enraged Mack truck. My neighbors probably hate me.
The Good Son, one of my personal favorites, also unfolds remarkably in the airier surround mix. You can really hear how delicately the piano keys are being struck in The Ship Song and how hard the the xylophone is being pounded in The Weeping Song. The strings sound great and the drums really snap. It’s a great musical experience, nothing more, nothing less. These are albums that were meant to be listened to as complete song cycles and that’s how I consumed them. I highly recommend watching the docs before sinking into the album. Taken this way, it really builds anticipation for the music. The music does not disappoint.
In conclusion, now that there are seven of these sets, I’ve been listening to a lot of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds lately. I’ve owned these albums for years, I bought them when they originally came out, but as is typical, I’d listen to each for a while, then put it away, a year later the next one comes out, I’d listen to that one for a while, then I’d shelve it, etc, etc. With a solo career going back 26 years at this point, to hear all of them again, so masterfully refurbished, and so fresh sounding, I’m struck by the fact that only Nick Cave, of all of the major artists to emerge during the 1980s, has the back catalog to really deserve this kind of respect and archival treatment. Truly, Cave should be seen as one of the all time great artists of the rock era and these sets make a convincing case for that, indeed.
I’ll say it one more time: Mute really do the finest reissues of any label I can think of. You’d have to go to the recent Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 (reviewed by me here) to find an equivalent to what they’re doing here (Depeche Mode got the same treatment a few years back). Each set is a fantastic consumer value. As the compact disc format dies, Mute are still giving punters an actual reason to return to the record store. Good for their business and good for the fans, too.
Dear Glenn Beck fans, this is what God thinks of you, Witness this awesome cosmic punking!
Dozens of people who parked at the University of Central Florida for an event say they were set up after their cars were towed. They said event parking signs directed them to a lot, but more than 50 cars in that lot were towed. People said those signs and their cars were gone when they got back.
A viewer contacted WFTV after his car was towed Saturday, along with 52 others. All of them were in line to recover their cars at an impound lot and all of them attended the Glenn Beck show at UCF.
The people parked in a Kappa Sigma lot. Mike Vedder thinks they were set up. He doesn’t know if it was a dislike of the conservative commentator or money.
“Maybe the have a deal with the tow truck company or maybe they got kickbacks under the table,” Vedder said.They all said an event parking sign clearly directed them into the lot. Students at the fraternity wouldn’t comment, but WFTV caught up with the owner of Orange County Towing and Recovery, Ronald Hulbert.
“I have a lot at stake, a lot invested. I’m not going to lose it over a $125 tow, times 53, times 53, it was a good day,” Ronald Hulbert said.
Hulbert admits he’s never towed that many cars in one day before; he said it took him at least eight hours to tow all the cars. Each driver had to pay cash, netting him more than $6,600.
This is a great prank to play on the type of assholes who’d pay money to see Glenn Beck speak, isn’t it? Perfection. Whoever did this, I love you.
Thank you Scott!
For those whom the colors of nature just don’t suffice, it’s edible (?) spray paint for your comestibles. Blech ! Wonder if it’ll turn your shit gold and silver ?
via The Urban Grocer
Forget the EBay scam artists and deadbeat landlords normally on Judge Judy. This case involves a dead cat, two destroyed television sets and a guy who routinely does stuff that would make Marilyn Manson blush.
Having said that, a recent “Judge Judy” face-off between two indie rock “former friends” Kate Levitt of the band Teeth Mountain (the plaintiff) and Jonathan Coward aka gross out performer Shams (the defendant) went beyond the merely unexpected into the realm of the ridiculously untenable.
Coward is a fellow who’s known for doing some rather extreme things, onstage and off. Things puking all over a piano and that can involve dead animals. If anyone in indierockland is a likely suspect for killing a cat, it’s probably him, but I don’t think that’s what happened, at least in this case.
Maybe Levitt pulled the wool over Judge Judy’s eyes, (although you can tell she’s wondering herself), but as you watch the clip, a few things become obvious:
1.) Levitt has no picture of the dead cat itself, just the smashed TV set(s). No blood is seen, either.
2.) Who in the world would still want to be friends with someone who deliberately killed their pet?
For those two reasons alone, it seems that what went down in the courtroom was probably a bit of indie rock performance art. The episode is pretty silly to begin with, but it gets really funny during the closing credits. Note the cameo appearance by noise musician Narwhalz, who calls Judge Judy “mama” and lives to tell. That’s what really lead me to conclude the whole case was fake!
