Archive for July, 2009
Michael Jackson’s Hair On Fire During Pepsi Commercial: The Actual Footage
US Magazine: Shocking new video footage has revealed the star was severely injured when his hair caught fire from a special effects explosion. The singer was filming a TV ad for Pepsi in the Los Angeles Auditorium in January 27, 1984 when disaster struck.
Continent Drift: 650 Million Years in 1.2 Minutes, Past, Present, and Future
Kevin Kelly: This ultra time-lapse simulation of tectonic drift shows how dynamic our home planet it. The clip portrays the most recent 400 million-year geological history of the continents of Earth, and a prediction of its next 250 million years, all in 70 seconds. I love the way New York comes crashing into London in the far future.
UPDATE: My mistake. I got lost. In 250 million years NYC crashes into West Africa, not London. Much more interesting!
The Neuroscience Of An Unwanted Limb (Video)
ABC TV: For most people, having a limb amputated is one of the worst things they can imagine. But some rare people actually want their limb removed. Jonica Newby explores their strange world – and has an out of body experience while she’s at it.
Narration: One morning, Robert Vickers purchased a large quantity of dry ice, and set about destroying his perfectly healthy left leg.
Robert Vickers: Initially there was a bit of pain. But I guess knowing the outcome, the endorphins or whatever were probably running rampant through my body. And then later in the day when I thought it was just about done, I rang my wife, asked her to come and collect me. My leg was frozen stiff. So she arranged for me to be taken to the hospital. And the next time I woke up it was absolute ecstasy. The leg that I’d wanted to get rid of for…
Canadian Privacy Commissioner Says Facebook Is Full Of Holes
Robin Wauters, TechCrunch: In order to comply with Canadian privacy law, Facebook must take greater responsibility for the personal information in its care. That’s not what we said, it’s what Canada Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart says in a statement following an investigation into the social network’s privacy policies and practices.
That investigation was reportedly prompted by a complaint from the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (ahem), and identified “several areas where Facebook needs to better address privacy issues and bring its practices in line with Canadian privacy law”.
You may want to read our post on “The Looming Facebook Privacy Fiasco” for more context. We also recently reported on independent European advisory body on data protection and privacy to the EC Article 29 Working Party’s arguments that social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace need more government regulation in Europe.
The organization and Commissioner’s main concern is that Facebook provides confusing…
Houston, We Have A Problem: Original Moonwalk Footage Erased
Daniel Nasaw and Richard Luscombe, The Guardian: It was humankind’s crowning achievement, with millions around the world glued to their television sets as US astronaut Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon 40 years ago.
But in the scientific equivalent of recording an old episode of EastEnders over the prized video of your daughter’s wedding day, NASA probably taped over its only high-resolution images of the first moon walk with electronic data from a satellite or a later manned space mission, officials said today.
It means that the familiar grainy and ghosting images of Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” are all that remain from the mission, though the space agency has managed to digitally restore the footage into new broadcast-quality pictures that it released today.
“I don’t think anyone in the Nasa organisation did anything wrong. It slipped through the cracks and nobody’s happy about it,” said Dick Nafzger, one of…
Official Brion Gysin Website
The estate of Brion Gysin has created an official Brion Gysin web site with a bio, online gallery, quotes, and other info.
“I Am the Artist when I Am Open. When I am closed I am Brion Gysin.”
“Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ techniques to writing; things as simple as immediate as collage or montage.” (’Cut-Ups Self-Explained’ in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In)
Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies
A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.
Hillary Clinton: ‘CFR Tells Government What It Should Be Doing’
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s opening remarks during her speech to the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday will have done little to dampen accusations that the elitist CFR pulls the strings of the U.S. government.
Clinton effectively said that she was happy the CFR had created an outpost in Washington DC because it meant she did not have to travel as far to get her orders.
Here’s the full quote, according to the official transcript.
“I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters. I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department.”
“We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.”
Clinton’s…
Steven Pressfield on Afghanistan: ‘It’s the Tribes, Stupid’
Steven Pressfield: The “It’s the Tribes, Stupid” series launched just over a month ago. The first episode and blog entry laid out my thesis — that what we’re up against in Afghanistan is tribalism and the tribal mind-set. The comments started arriving.
Tribes, the Tribal Mindset, and the Enemy
Fabius Maximus was among the first to comment. He quoted the following from my post:
“What struck me most powerfully is that that war [Alexander's Afghan campaign, 330–327 B.C.] is a dead ringer for the ones we’re fighting today … the clash of East and West is at bottom not about religion. It’s about two different ways of being in the world. Those ways haven’t changed in 2300 years. They are polar antagonists, incompatible and irreconcilable.”
Fabius Maximus commented:
“Economist and businesspeople discuss the Competitive Advantage of Nations (as in Michael Porter’s 1990 book of that title). Social scientists and geopolitical experts discuss Samuel P. Huntington’s…
Sorcerous Freemasons Arrested in Fiji!
“A group of freemasons have had to spend a night in jail in Fiji, after local villagers complained they were practising witchcraft.
The 14 men, including eight Australians and a New Zealander, had been holding a night-time meeting on Denerau island.
The New Zealand man told reporters he had spent a “wretched” time in jail, and blamed the mix-up on the actions of “dopey village people”.
Police also seized wands, compasses and a skull from the freemasons’ lodge.
Freemasonry is a centuries-old club that practises secret rituals and has more than five million members worldwide.”
Will Today’s Brain-Computer Interfaces Spawn…
Direct brain-computer interfacing “is already a reality.” (Researchers taught a monkey to use brainwaves to control a feeding machine, and game companies are already marketing brain-computer interfaces.)
Now scientists “are exploring multiple radical brain imaging technologies, including devices involving carbon nanotubes and other nanotech-based materials, which seem to play more nicely with brain cells than conventional materials.” And in this article, A.I. researcher Ben Goertzel is finally raising the real possibility of reading abstract thoughts from brain states, and someday creating “mindplexes” of multiple participants — perhaps even augmented by an artificial intelligence!
Your Cat May Be Training You Better Than You Can Train Your Cat
PhysORG: Anyone who has ever had cats knows how difficult it can be to get them to do anything they don’t already want to do. But it seems that the house cats themselves have had distinctly less trouble getting humans to do their bidding, according to a report published in the July 14th issue of Current Biology.
The rather crafty felines motivate people to fill their food dishes by sending something of a mixed signal: an urgent cry or meowing sound embedded within an otherwise pleasant purr. The result is a call that humans generally find annoyingly difficult to ignore.
“The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response,” said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. “Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom.”…
Your Brain Will Eventually Be Used Against You
Megan, i09.com: Although every lie detector ever built has proved unreliable, scientists continue to search for that magic machine that will reveal dishonesty. Now two Harvard neuroscientists have hit on a “pre-crime” technique that reveals intent to lie before it happens.
While some people already think that brain-imaging lie detectors are a scam, others remain convinced that they’re the wave of the future. A recent study by Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton at Harvard University shows that the skeptics might be right.
Paxton and Greene bet their subjects money based on guessing a coin flip. While those who had to record their responses in advance had average success, those who didn’t have to tell their guess until after they knew the result had a high success rate, indicating they were lying. More interestingly, those people who were even interested in lying showed brain activity when just offered the opportunity to cheat, while those…
TechCrunch Defends Posting Confidential Documents Garnered by Twitter Hacker
Guardian: Technology news site TechCrunch has become the object of a furious row after publishing details of business plans, financial projections and executive notes from Twitter which it says were provided by a hacker.
The documents leaked after “Croll” used password recovery techniques (guess the answers to key questions, get the password resent to an email of your choosing) beginning with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’s Gmail account, and then spreading to his PayPal, Amazon, Apple and AT&T accounts, says Techcrunch. Williams’s wife…
Soldier Won’t Deploy Because He Believes Obama Wasn’t Born in the U.S.
Jeff Hoard, The Idiocracy Index: Have you heard of these “birthers,” they are Americans who refuse to believe that Barack Obama is American. Their main argument is that there is no proof that he was born in the United States, and claim that his birth certificate is fake, regardless of what the Hawaiian health director says.
U.S. Army Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook has decided that WND.com is the most trusted source for news, so he and his lawyer Orly Taitz have filed a lawsuit so the Major does not have to go to war and fight in Afghanistan because that would be,”in violation of international law by engaging in military actions outside the United States under this President’s command”
Seymour Hersh: The Man Who Knew Cheney’s Secret
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh raised eyebrows back in March when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that Dick Cheney ran a secret hit squad that he kept hidden from congressional oversight.
“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh said at the time. He added: “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”
“I said what I said, they can always say what they say,” Hersh told The Daily Beast. “The last time they said the government doesn’t torture, this time it’s the government doesn’t assassinate.”
Some observers accused him of rumor-mongering and a top former military official threw cold water on the…
Boys With Unusual or Feminine Names End Up In Jail
According to a new study, the more unpopular, uncommon or feminine a boy’s name is, the more likely he will be imprisoned as an adult.
A report in Social Science Quarterly analyzed 15,000 names and found that factors associated with unpopular and androgynous names “increase the tendency toward juvenile delinquency” and, eventually, criminality as an adult. Boys with such names faced ridicule from peers and subtle discrimination in the workforce, and often came from families of low socioeconomic status.
What names are most likely to lead to a life of crime? Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell, and Walter.
Kindle Comes To The Library
Amazon’s Kindle, the hand-held, 6-inch wireless reading device of the future, is coming to a library near you. From Nebraska to North Carolina, dozens of public and university libraries across the country have begun loaning out Kindles to borrowers. Is this just the tip of the iceberg as libraries go more and more paperless? So far, Amazon’s response to the trend has been ambivalent.
