Archive for August, 2009
Les Paul, Guitar Legend, 1915–2009
Guitarist and inventor Les Paul — who invented the device that made the electric guitar possible — died Aug. 13 at the age of 94.
Paul’s contributions to rock ‘n’ roll went well beyond one gadget. He designed guitars — vintage models were selling for thousands of dollars even before news of his death came — and made the first multi-track recorder. He introduced innovations that established the recording studio itself as a legitimate musical instrument. And in doing so, he shaped much of the genre’s sound.
Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme Released From Prison
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was released from federal custody Friday, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons said.
Fromme was convicted in 1975 of pointing a gun at then-President Gerald Ford in Sacramento, California.
She was released Friday morning from Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, said Felicia Ponce, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in Washington.
Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, pointed a gun at Ford a year after he became president. Secret Service agents prevented her from firing; the gun was later found to have a clip of ammunition but no bullet in the chamber.
In a 1987 interview with CNN affiliate WCHS, Fromme, then housed in West Virginia, recalled that the president “had his hands out and was waving … and he looked like cardboard to me. But at the same time, I had ejected the bullet in my apartment and I used the gun as…
NASA Can’t Land A Man On The Moon For Another 20 Years
NASA doesn’t have nearly enough money to meet its goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020 — and it might be the wrong place to go, anyway. That’s one of the harsh messages emerging from a sweeping review of NASA’s human space flight program.
The Human Space Flight Plans Committee, appointed by President Barack Obama and headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, has been trying to stitch together some kind of plausible strategy for America’s manned space program. The panel has struggled to find options that stay under the current budget and include missions worthy of the cost and effort.
The committee members will meet with administration officials Friday and will report that there is no realistic way to get Americans back on the moon by the target date of 2020, which has been the agency’s goal since President George W. Bush signed off on the “Vision for…
Salk Proves Stems Cells Can Cure Genetic Diseases!
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies just proved that genetic diseases can be cured by combining gene therapy with stem cells!
With induced pluripotent stem cell technology, they actually corrected a defective gene linked to leukemia and other cancers in cells taken from a patient volunteer. “It’s a pretty remarkable discovery that hasn’t been extensively covered in the mainstream press,” says their communications director, calling it “a major step in getting regenerative medicine from the laboratory to the clinic.”
A Salk researcher says that “If we can demonstrate that a combined iPS-gene therapy approach works in humans, then there is no limit to what we can do.”
Emory Douglas: Black Panther
An Exhibition Curated by Sam Durant for the New Museum
Some of Emory Douglas’s images are nearly forty years old, but they are still as powerful as when Douglas first created them. They are dangerous pictures, and they were meant to change the world.
Emory Douglas was the Revolutionary Artist of the Black Panther Party and subsequently became its Minister of Culture, part of the national leadership. He created the overall design of the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper, and oversaw its layout and production until the Black Panthers disbanded in 1979–80. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Douglas made countless artworks, illustrations, and cartoons, which were reproduced in the paper and distributed as prints, posters, cards, and even sculptures. All of them utilized a straightforward graphic style and a vocabulary of images that would become synonymous with the Party and the issues it fought for.
“Emory Douglas: Black Panther” includes a wide…
Woodstock’s 40th Draws Geezers, Maybe Sex and Drugs Too
It’s the 40th anniversary of Woodstock and they ought to be offering senior citizen discounts.
Ten Years After is playing 40 years later and Country Joe McDonald will be headlining: “Give me an O, give me an L, give me a D.”
In 1969, an estimated 400,000 music lovers descended on Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, N.Y. — now hallowed ground for hippies — creating the most celebrated rock festival of all time.
Despite food shortages, overflowing port-a-potties and torrential rain, Woodstock became a symbol for an entire generation — peace, love, beads and a lot of good music and drugs.
Some of the musical heroes of that drug-infused era have returned for the Aug. 14-16 retro concerts — Richie Havens, Wavy Gravy, Canned Heat and Big Brother and the Holding Company, among others — but nearly all are pushing 70.
…Drugs are not allowed, but 40th anniversary spokesman Amy Jaick confides there may be those…
Thailand’s Buddhist Monks Host The Drug Detox Treatment Du Jour
Fifteen-year-old Wanchai Nuantasiri is one of more than a dozen drug addicts kneeling in a row, vomiting violently into the gutter.
Monks in dark brown robes stand behind the sick, rubbing their backs encouragingly, while onlookers dance and clap cheerfully to an incessant drum beat.
This bizarre scene, set amid spectacular golden Buddhas and rocky mountains in the heart of Thailand, has been a daily ritual at Thamkrabok Monastery since 1959, when its monks and nuns first helped opium users beat their addictions.
Fifty years on, growing numbers of desperate drug and alcohol abusers — from Thailand and around the world — are visiting the extreme detox and rehab centre after failing to find effective conventional treatments.
British musician Pete Doherty helped raise the temple’s profile when he became a patient in 2004, despite the fact that he could not handle the challenging detox programme and escaped after just three days.
Liberal Blogger Libel: For The Nit Picker
I wanted to very briefly write something about my experience of being libeled as a right-wing activist in two local Oregon blogs, Blue Oregon and Preemptive Karma. The tone of the articles was best described by a friend as being akin to “someone’s hysterical liberal mom.”
I am very proud to have been the center piece of a discussion about journalistic integrity and the role of liberals in the broader movement. I don’t want to spend much more time talking about this, but I wanted to make an end cap statement that tallies up what I’ve learned.
The “blogosphere” is filled with hacks who engage in the same kind of “he said / she said” journalism that plagues the mainstream. Without doing any sort of fact checking it was reported, and then re-reported that I was opposed to health care reform, and engaged in fascistic tactics to that end. My rebuttal was…
‘Singularity Summit’ debates smarter-than-human IQs
This year a “Singularity Summit” in New York will include “the top names in artificial intelligence research,” but also neuroscience and nanotechnology experts.
“It will be interesting to see how — or if — their specialties influence which technology they think will first cross the line into superintelligence,” says the conference’s media director. He’s predicting a “substantial probability” of smarter-than-human intelligence within 20 to 40 years, and while speakers will include Ray Kurzweil and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, they’ll tilt toward more established academics.
They’ll all be discussing expanding intelligence (and “collective intelligence”) through science, nutrition, the internet, and new ways of online collaboration, with other topics including roboticized transportation. “The key is that their analyses have to be detailed and well argued and have to involve change of a magnitude larger than is generally considered respectable to discuss.”
Jon Stewart Replaces Cronkite As America’s Most Trusted Anchor
Why does the news suck so bad? According to the latest TIME poll, with Walter Cronkite in his grave, John Stewart is now by far America’s “most trusted newscaster,” despite being a comedian. The survey pitted him against the anchors of the nightly news shows for CBS, ABC, and NBC. That said, this was an online poll, highly unreliable and of questionable meaning, a perfect example of why not to trust establish media pillars like TIME.
Scientists Find Source Of Earth’s Hum
Wired reports:
You can’t hear it, but the Earth is constantly humming. And some parts of the world sing louder than others.
After discovering the mysterious low-frequency buzz in 1998, scientists figured out that the Earth’s hum is caused not by earthquakes or atmospheric turbulence, but by ocean waves colliding with the seafloor. When two waves of opposite direction but similar frequency collide, they create a special kind of pressure wave that carries energy to the ocean bottom. As these waves pound against the sea floor, they generate a constant vibration with a frequency of about 10 millihertz, much too low for humans to hear but easily detectable with seismometers.
Now, researchers have pinpointed the source of the Earth’s “background noise,” and it looks like it’s coming primarily from the Pacific coast of North America.
The Queens Museum of Art Presents Duke Riley’s ‘Those About to Die Salute You’
Join us in a Naval Battle Extravaganza!
Those About to Die Salute You, a battle on water wielded with baguette swords and watermelon cannon balls by New York’s art dignitaries, will take place on Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 6 pm in a flooded World’s Fair-era reflecting pool in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, just outside of the Queens Museum of Art.
Various types of vessels have been designed and constructed by artist provocateur Duke Riley and his collaborators: the galleons, some made of reeds harvested in the park, will be used to stage a citywide battle of the art museums in which representatives from the Queens Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and El Museo del Barrio will battle before a toga-clad crowd of frenzied onlookers. The event is free and open to public. Dress code: Toga. Live music by Hell-Bent Hooker. Beverages will be served.
Duke Riley…
Obama-Joker Menace Spreads To Florida
The internet famous Obama-Joker image that’s already reached official meme status, was glued to a few mailboxes outside a post office in Central Florida — a federal crime!
But unlike the versions in LA, the word “Socialist” is replaced with the URL to conspiracy theorist website Infowars.com, leading us to wonder whether the person was politically inspired or financially motivated.
Snapshots From Inside An Exploding Star
Physicists at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago have used the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer to model the extreme physics of a supernova explosion.
This visualisation shows the mechanism behind the violent death of a short-lived, massive star. The image shows energy values in the core of the supernova. Different colours and transparencies are assigned to different values of entropy. By selectively adjusting the colour and transparency, the scientists can peel away the outer layers and see what is happening in the interior of the star.
Interrogation Inc.: 2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11’s Wake
Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.
They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.
But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.
So “Doc Mitchell” and “Doc Jessen,” as they had been known in the Air Force, helped lead the United States into a wrenching conflict over torture,…
2012 Mania: Bryan Singer Joins The “Embarrassed In 2013″ Crowd
It’s not just Roland Emmerich who’s bought into the disaster-laded prophecies surrounding the year 2012; X-Men and Superman Returns director Bryan Singer is working with Syfy on a mini-series about the Potential Year Of Terror.
The series – as yet unnamed, although we’re sure that a deal can be worked out with Garrison for 2012: It’s A Disaster!!! – is described as
a thrilling action-adventure story blending scientific fact and myth with popular conspiracy theories centering on the Mayan calendar and what it predicts for mankind at its end date.
Although, with a plot that follows an “down-on-his-luck professor” as he uncovers ancient mysteries and prophecies and tries to avert global disaster, it sounds more like Indiana Jones – or, worse, Noah Wyle’s The Librarian – than anything to do with any scientific fact.
Sequoia E-Voting Machine Commandeered By Clever Attack
Computer scientists have figured out to how trick a widely used electronic voting machine into altering tallies with a technique that bypasses measures that are supposed to prevent unauthorized code from running on the device.
The method, known as return-oriented programming, has already been used to defeat security measures built into the Linux and OpenBSD operating systems.
Now scientists have used it against the Sequoia AVC Advantage machine, which is used almost universally in New Jersey and in parts of Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Colorado and Virginia, according to the Verified Voting Foundation.
Douglas Rushkoff: The Web’s Dirtiest Site
Where do the Internet’s most deadly viruses, filthiest porn, and sophomoric pranks come from? The Daily Beast’s Douglas Rushkoff goes inside the underground site Web giants can’t kill.
When AT&T recently blocked access to a hugely popular hackers’ Web site, 4chan.org, many of us Internet old-timers froze in place. It was like one of those bad Westerns, when an arrogant newcomer sits down in the saloon, and then insults the baddest, most trigger-happy gunslinger in the county. People move to the side of the room, climb under tables, and wait for the shots to fly.
The 4Chan community—a diehard, if ever-changing assortment of the Net’s most-desperate, most-anonymous, and most-wanted, well, punks—smelled censorship, top-down control, and an evil corporation trying to keep down the world’s last squat for hackers. They went batshit. The site’s founder posted a note telling his minion’s to write and complain to AT&T, and the dog whistle having been…
Video: Hitler Is Not Pleased About Facebook’s Acquisition Of FriendFeed
Seriously, these never get old. An enterprising soul has tonight re-created the pivotal Hitler scene from the movie Downfall, but done so with subtitles explaining why Hilter is so mad that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed.
This meme seems be done for just about everything on the web these days, but this one is particularly good because it’s full of good insider-y references. And it closely echoes some of the actual backlash against the news today which played out on FriendFeed.
