On The Amazing Benefits Of Mind Uploading
Photo: Kemitsv (CC)
Music and paying the gas bill have been digitalized, so you knew this was next. How can we stop abusing the environment, give ourselves superintelligence, and live forever? H+ Magazine on the inevitable necessity of switching from spongy flesh brains to uploaded ones:
Universal mind uploading, or universal uploading for short, is the concept (I’m not sure who originated it –if you know, say so in the comments), that the technology of mind uploading will eventually become universally adopted by all who can afford it, similar to the adoption of modern agriculture, hygiene, and permanent dwellings. Some futurists, such as myself, see the eventuality as plausible by as early as 2050.
Mind uploading would involve simulating a human brain in a computer in enough detail that the “simulation” becomes, for all practical purposes, a perfect copy and experiences consciousness, just like protein-based human minds. If functionalism is true, as many cognitive…
Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity?
Illustration: Dizzy thorns (CC)
So what do you think, psychonauts? Pretty interesting article from Adam Halberstadt and Mark Geyer in Scientific American:
What would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain? Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), mescaline, and psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) work in the brain. Modern science has demonstrated that hallucinogens activate receptors for serotonin, one of the brain’s key chemical messengers. Specifically, of the 15 different serotonin receptors, the 2A subtype (5-HT2A), seems to be the one that produces profound alterations of thought and perception.
It is uncertain, however, why activation of the 5-HT2A receptor by hallucinogens produces psychedelic effects, but many scientists believe that the effects are linked to increases in brain activity. Although it is not known why this activation would lead to profound alterations of consciousness,…
‘Radioactive Man’ Pulled Over By Connecticut Police
State police cars have radioactivity detectors … Reports Amanda Cuda in the Connecticut Post:
Mike Apatow was minding his own business Wednesday, driving to an appointment for work in Washington Depot when a state police car appeared suddenly and signaled for the Milford resident to pull over.
Apatow, 42, was entering Interstate 84 in Newtown when the cruiser appeared, and he had no idea what he’d done to merit police attention. It turns out he didn’t do anything.
But earlier that day, Apatow, who’d experienced a recent spike in his blood pressure, had a nuclear stress test at Cardiology Associates of Fairfield County in Trumbull. In the test, a small amount of a radioactive material is injected into the veins and used to help track blood flow to the heart.
When Gay Marriage Was A Christian Rite
When the conservative-minded say they favor a return to the traditional Christian definition of marriage, they might want to further explore what they mean by that. Via Irish Times:
A Kiev art museum contains a curious icon from St. Catherine’s monastery on Mt. Sinai. It shows two robed Christian saints. Between them is a traditional Roman pronubus (best man) overseeing what in a standard Roman icon would be the wedding of a husband and wife. In the icon, Christ is the pronubus. Only one thing is unusual. The “husband and wife” are in fact two men.
The very idea of a Christian homosexual marriage seems incredible. Yet after a twelve year search of Catholic and Orthodox church archives Yale history professor John Boswell has discovered that a type of Christian homosexual “marriage” did exist as late as the 18th century. Contrary to myth, Christianity’s concept of marriage has not been set in…
Kuwait’s Top Book Censor Discusses Her Job
Wondering what it’s like to decide what knowledge is outlawed? The head of book censorship at Kuwait’s Ministry of Information explains how one goes about becoming a censor and defends the practice as a skilled art. The Kuwait Times writes:
The censors who are responsible for censoring books and other publications do an interesting job, which becomes harder during some periods of the year, yet it seems they enjoy it. In Kuwait, freedoms are respected yet within certain limits.
Dalal Al-Mutairi, head of the Foreign Books Department at the Ministry of Information [says]: “Many people consider the censor to be a fanatic and uneducated person, but this isn’t true. We are the most literate people as we have read much, almost every day. We read books for children, religious books, political, philosophical, scientific ones and many others.”
Working as a censor is interesting. “I like this work. It gives us experience, information and we…
Greece’s Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn
Photo: Ggia (CC)
After austerity follows fascism. Neni Panourgia writes on Al Jazeera English:
By now, nearly everybody has been exposed to the phenomenon of Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi in Greek), the neo-Nazi organisation that received almost 7 per cent of the vote in the Greek elections of May 6.After the initial shock, the question “How is this possible?” was followed by the legitimate worry: “Are Greeks becoming fascists?” Some commentators on various blogs (many of them from northern and western Europe) even left messages urging the Greek electorate to feel shame, the deeper the better, for this unsightly and frightening development.
But let’s set a few things straight. First of all, Golden Dawn, despite its recent claims, is indeed a neo-Nazi party. Their ideology, which they describe on their website as “Popular and Social Nationalism”, gives their precise coordinates within Nazi ideology.
So do the origins of their party, which was founded by Nikolaos…
A 12-Year-Old Spells Out the Fraud That Banks Are Committing Against the People (Video)
Via Public Banking TV:
12-year-old Victoria Grant explains why her homeland, Canada, and most of the world, is in debt. April 27, 2012 at the Public Banking in America Conference, Philadelphia, PA. For more information see publicbankinginstitute.org.
Can a Better Vibrator Inspire an Age of Great American Sex?
Andy Isaacson investigates the possibility that technology could end sexual repression in The Atlantic:
The offices of Jimmyjane are above a boarded-up dive bar in San Francisco’s Mission district. There used to be a sign on a now-unmarked side door, until employees grew weary of men showing up in a panic on Valentine’s Day thinking they could buy last-minute gifts there. (They can’t.) The only legacy that remains of the space’s original occupant, an underground lesbian club, is a large fireplace set into the back wall. Porcelain massage candles and ceramic stones, neatly displayed on sleek white shelves alongside the brightly colored vibrators that the company designs, give the space the serene air of a day spa.
Ethan Imboden, the company’s founder, is 40 and holds an electrical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins and a master’s in industrial design from Pratt Institute. He has a thin face and blue eyes, and wears a…
The Hidden Epidemic Of Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains
A real-life invasion of the body snatchers scenario — tapeworms in your brain are the worst, basically. Via Discovery:
Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others can’t walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures.
Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patients’ brains. Each brain contains one or more whitish blobs. You might guess that these are tumors. But Nash knows the blobs are not made of the patient’s own cells. They are tapeworms. Aliens.
“Nobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,” says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH. His best estimate is 1,500 to 2,000. Worldwide, the numbers are vastly higher.
Icelandic Parliament Member Saves Giant Boulder He Claims Is Home To Elves
Here in the United States, politics rarely places much importance on the well-being of non-human living creatures, so the Icelandic parliament’s concern for elves is quite touching. The Iceland Review writes:
MP for the Independence Party Árni Johnsen arranged for the relocation of a 30-ton boulder, which he believes is home to three generations of elves, from southwest Iceland to his home Höfðaból in the Westman Islands today.
Arni first encountered the elves’ dwelling when he was in a serious car accident in January 2010. His car overturned and landed beside the boulder.
“I had Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, a specialist in the affairs of elves, come look at the boulder with me,” recollected Árni. “It was incredible, she had never met three generations of elves in the same boulder before…She said an elderly couple lives on the upper floor but a young couple with three children on the lower floor.”
The Anti-Science Streak in Federal Marijuana Policy
Connor Friedersdorf explains in The Atlantic:
The classification of cannabis as a schedule one narcotic is among the least defensible aspects of prohibition.
Dr. Jody Corey-Bloom, director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at UC San Diego, recently helped run a study that provided multiple sclerosis patients with either a marijuana joint or a placebo that looked, smelled, and tasted like marijuana. After smoking whichever substance they were given, patients were tested to see if it reduced their muscle spasticity — an affliction, common to MS patients, that causes painful, uncontrollable spasms of the extremities. Spasticity was unaffected among the placebo patients but dropped 30 percent on average among the patients given real marijuana. The side effects? “Smoking caused fatigue and dizziness in some users,” says Reuters, “and slowed down people’s mental skills soon after they used marijuana.”
Now You Can Be Aquaman: “Dolphin Speaker” Produces Full Range of Dolphin Sounds
I wonder if the military will discover any conscientiousness objectors using this technology with the dolphins they have been training. While it is public knowledge they are used to rescue naval swimmers and locate underwater mines, the speculation remains on how many are used kamikaze-style to attack ships. As Rebecca Boyle reports in Popular Science:
Communication with dolphins is getting better all the time — they’ve been using iPads, for one thing, and humans have been working on a type of Rosetta Stone-like two-way translation device. A new gadget could improve matters even further, by allowing humans to produce the full range of dolphin sounds. The acoustics researchers who developed it call it the Dolphin Speaker.
Plenty of work is being done with dolphin sounds, but they have mostly focused on dolphin vocalizations and their hearing anatomy. Dolphins can not only hear and produce clicks, whistles and burst pulses well outside of…
DEA Leaves Innocent Student In Cell For Five Days Without Food Or Water
Is this the new War on Drugs method for teaching college kids not to smoke pot? Californian Daniel Chong was swept up by authorities in a raid of a friend’s house where 4/20 was being celebrated. His harrowing adventure began as he was then left in a DEA holding cell for five days, given no food or water, began hallucinating and lost his sanity, and shattered his glasses and slashed himself in a suicide attempt. He survived only by drinking his own urine and consuming some methamphetamine which, amazingly, he found in the cell:
Barack Obama Is Our First Gay, Female, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish President (According to the Media)
Bill Clinton only got to be America’s first “black” president. Interesting take from Eric Randall in the Atlantic Wire:
Newsweek’s cover this week declares that Barack Obama is the “First Gay President,” playing on the reader’s knowledge that Obama isn’t himself gay, but his support for same-sex marriage earns him an honorary rainbow halo. The headline obviously calls back to 1998, when Toni Morrison declared Bill Clinton the first black president in The New Yorker, which at the time was edited by current Newsweek editor Tina Brown. “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas,” Morrison wrote, laying out the formula for how to declare a President has attained the identity of someone else through actions and behaviors. Newsweek’s cover has been called “controversial” and “pretty shocking,” but it’s merely the most recent in presidential firsts that weren’t for the country’s actual first black president.
High Fructose Corn Syrup Can Make You Dumb
You have been warned (via AFP/Yahoo News):
Eating too much sugar can eat away at your brainpower, according to US scientists who published a study Tuesday showing how a steady diet of high-fructose corn syrup sapped lab rats’ memories.
Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) fed two groups of rats a solution containing high-fructose corn syrup — a common ingredient in processed foods — as drinking water for six weeks. One group of rats was supplemented with brain-boosting omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), while the other group was not.
Before the sugar drinks began, the rats were enrolled in a five-day training session in a complicated maze. After six weeks on the sweet solution, the rats were then placed back in the maze to see how they fared. “The DHA-deprived animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity,”…
Noam Chomsky on President Obama’s Performance and Occupy Wall Street (Video)
The right-wing blogospere is having a field day with Chomsky saying, “I don’t usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this ‘hopey-changey’ stuff, she was—she was right. There was nothing there.” However, he follows that statement with, “And it was understood by the people who run the political system. So it’s no great secret that the U.S. electoral system is mainly public relations extravaganzas….” which, one assumes, would apply to Sarah Palin as well.
Watch the entire interview at Democracy Now! and full transcript here.
NASA Training Astronauts for Asteroid Mission
The mission would not occur until the 2020s, so we all can rest assured that no harbinger of doom is on the way …? As Richard Gray reports in the Telegraph:
It is a space mission straight from the Hollywood film Armageddon…
A team of astronauts, however, have already started preparing for just such a mission. Among them is Major Tim Peake, a former British Army helicopter test pilot who is now the first official British astronaut with the European Space Agency.
Next month they will begin a training programme that will teach them how to operate vehicles, conduct spacewalks and gather samples on the surface of an asteroid.
While the primary goal of a mission to an asteroid will be scientific to learn more about their hostile environments, the skills needed to work on their surface could also prove invaluable should scientists discover one on a collision course with Earth…
Warren Ellis on The DisinfoCast with Matt Staggs
Warren Ellis | The DisinfoCast with Matt Staggs: Episode 08
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Legendary comics author and novelist Warren Ellis joins me on The DisinfoCast for a conversation about the future that was, artificial intelligence, the Singularity, aliens (ancient and otherwise), the legacy of Hunter S. Thompson, porn and even a little bit about comic books. Tune in.
There’s Something Strange On The Moon
Photo: Oliver Stein (CC)
[disinfo ed.'s note: Jay Weidner, described by Wired as an “authority on the hermetic and alchemical traditions” and “erudite conspiracy hunter,” will be interviewing former NASA consultant Richard Hoagland for Gaiam TV Wednesday, May 16th at 7 p.m. EST. Here he describes his feelings about Hoagland's work.]
I have to tell you from the beginning that I am somewhat prejudiced about the subject of Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA, the bestselling book by Richard C. Hoagland and Michael Bara. My own investigation of the high strangeness that exists on the lunar surface began in 1992 and dovetails with Hoagland’s search for answers.
In the mid-sixties, before the Apollo missions, NASA compiled a report of astronomers from the past who had witnessed anomalous activity on the surface of the moon through their telescopes. Titled R-277 and found here, each page of this report is filled with weirdness. Flashing lights,…
So Then Who The Hell Are We?
Dan DeWalt writes at This Can’t Be Happening:
The latest PR catch phrase from business, administration, military, state and local officials after some atrocity or other is that whatever happened, it is certainly “not who we are,” a phrase appropriately initially uttered by the Vietnam War commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, with reference to the My Lai slaughter of 400 women, children and old men, all civilians, by a group of US soldiers.
Yet if all these abominations are not “who we are,” then why do our business, police and military and government institutions generate so many examples of obscene, horrific or criminal behavior?
If we examine the culture that guides our young men and women in battle, our public safety employees in their duties, or our business class in its pursuit of profit, it’s easy to see how shameful and reprehensible episodes such as these have become as routine as they have.
Take the…
