Archive for October, 2009
Who Says the Internet is No Pun?
It had to happen, and Sean Leahy had to be the person to do it! The Internet has been sorley lacking a source for all things pun-retailated, and Mr Leahy has taken the e-bull by the horns with his fantastic thepunningman.com, some examples:
Final Word: Democrats Are WORSE Than Republicans
Nick P at Black Sun Gazette
I know. You’re totally flabbergasted and think that I’ve gone off the deep end. Well, I haven’t. You’ve just stomached so much blue covered propaganda throughout your life that the title of this entry sounds insane. But I assure you that it is not. Once again, this isn’t a question of “playing radical” and trying to be the most arch. It is an important political question. I’m not advocating that people start voting Republican, nor am I endorsing their politics. What I am advocating is that people make a clear break with both corporate parties and stop pretending that one is the nicer face. It isn’t. Keeping progressive, radical, and working class forces chained to the Democrats is the main impediment to social progress in America.
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
Ari N. Schulman writes in The New Atlantis
People who believe that the mind can be replicated on a computer tend to explain the mind in terms of a computer. When theorizing about the mind, especially to outsiders but also to one another, defenders of artificial intelligence (AI) often rely on computational concepts. They regularly describe the mind and brain as the “software and hardware” of thinking, the mind as a “pattern” and the brain as a “substrate,” senses as “inputs” and behaviors as “outputs,” neurons as “processing units” and synapses as “circuitry,” to give just a few common examples.
Those who employ this analogy tend to do so with casual presumption. They rarely justify it by reference to the actual workings of computers, and they misuse and abuse terms that have clear and established definitions in computer science—established not merely because they are well understood, but because they in fact are products…
Obama Snubs Dalai Lama To Please China
The New York Times reports:
For the first time in 18 years, the Dalai Lama is visiting Washington this week without stopping by to see the U.S. president.
Tibet’s exiled religious leader — brushed aside by U.S. President Barack Obama in favor of communist China — was saluted at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday for his work for human rights. The presentation ceremony underscored Obama’s dilemma in dealing with China, a growing power and the biggest holder of U.S. debt.
The decision not to meet the Tibetan leader was made amid efforts to improve U.S.-Chinese relations on issues from stemming global warming to reigning in North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
In a statement, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, accused Obama of “kowtowing to Beijing” by refusing to meet with the 74-year-old monk.
Global Warming Intensifies Locust Plagues
Jane Qiu reports in Nature News
Ancient records link a hotter climate to more damaging infestations.
Analysis of Chinese historical records stretching back for over a thousand years show that locust outbreaks are more likely to occur in warmer and drier weather, especially in the country’s northern provinces, researchers say.
Warmer weather in China has been linked to worse locust outbreaks.“The results are an alarm bell for yet another serious consequence of climate change,” says Ge Quansheng, deputy director of the Beijing-based Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, who was not involved with the study.
The findings, by climate researcher Yu Ge and her colleagues at the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Jiangsu province, are published in the Journal of Geophysical Research1.
In population ecology, researchers have been debating what controls the size of species populations over long time periods. Some…
EsoZone – Free, This Weekend
This is it! EsoZone is upon us. The weekly PDX0 meetup is tonight at Watershed, and then EsoZone kicks off tomorrow night, starting a weekend of mutated conversation and participatory detensing, art, and rituals.
If you want to support us, it’s not too late to donate or buy a t-shirt. Or, show up and spend money with our sponsors!
And don’t forget, after EsoZone on Saturday the one and Ivan Stang will perform along with a variety of other SubGenius at the Cyclone of Slack.
Can’t make it to Esozone? Astral Project!
Gold May Reach $5,800 Per Ounce … Soon
I just read a very interesting new article by columnist Peter Brimelow in CBSMarketwatch in which he discusses Mary Anne and Pamela Aden’s Costa Rica-based Aden Forecast, a sort of finance newsletter/tipsheet. They are famous for being right about gold in the ’70s but in fact they have a pretty good track record since then too.
The really interesting part is this: while some “experts” are saying that gold prices, now well over $1,000 per ounce, have risen too high already, the Adens are saying that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Brimelow explains:
About gold, the Adens note that “gold’s peak in 1980 at $850 is the equivalent of about $2400 in current dollars. Gold has not even approached that level yet and the situation is far more serious now than it was then.”
They conclude:
“The focus now is on the next phase of the current rise. If we continue to use proportions, the…
Artist photographs every Sizzler restaurant in America
“A dream is a dream,” says photographer Reed Fish, who’s travelling to all 206 Sizzler steakhouse restaurants with his wife.
They’ll photograph each franchise, and then publish them as a massive art installation. (”The Sizzler room,” his wife jokes…) They believe that Sizzler is Americana, and that this is conceptual art that tells us something about ourselves and our culture. “It really evokes a reaction to anyone who grew up in the United States…”
Hundreds of Sizzlers have closed since a 1996 bankruptcy, and Reed says each steakhouse closing is “emblematic of the change in the culture.” But though he thought he’d discover the sameness of franchises, he was surprised to learn that there’s individual people – and individual stories – behind each restaurant.
On her first date, she’d asked him his life’s ambition – and this was his answer. In this interview Reed reveals the saddest Sizzler in America, the most…
New York Police Now Tracking Mobile Phones
Rocco Parascandola reports in the Daily News:
The NYPD is amassing a database of cell phone users, instructing cops to log serial numbers from suspects’ phones in hopes of connecting them to past or future crimes.
In the era of disposable, anonymous cell phones, the file could be a treasure-trove for detectives investigating drug rings and other criminal enterprises, police sources say.
“It’s used to help build cases,” one source said of the new initiative.
“It doesn’t replace the human element, like debriefing prisoners, but it’s another tool to use that we didn’t have in the past.”
A recent internal memo says that when cops make an arrest, they should remove the suspect’s cell phone battery to avoid leakage – then jot down the International Mobile Equipment Identity number…
Why Do Women Have Sex?
Tracy Clark-Flory tackles a hard question in Salon.com:
Women just don’t think about sex all that much. They have sexual fantasies only twice a month. Sometimes, they have sex simply out of a sense of duty.
Disagree with any of that? Find those sweeping statements enraging? So did I, at times, while reading “Why Women Have Sex,” a groundbreaking new book by clinical psychologist Cindy M. Meston and evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss, two researchers at the University of Texas at Austin who have conducted a wide-ranging survey into the dark corners of our sexual subconscious. Still, I also found myself nodding vigorously and letting out crescendoed “mhm’s” as I read through the study of more than 1,000 women.
The standout finding, one that feels decades overdue, is that women have sex not for babies or emotional intimacy but rather for reasons of attraction and pleasure, because “it feels good.” In other words: the same reasons men have sex…
Largest Known Planetary Ring Discovered
Ron Cowen reports for Science News:
FAJARDO, Puerto Rico — A newly discovered planetary ring can run circles around all the others. The gossamer band of dust encircles Saturn and has a measured diameter of about 24 million kilometers, or 200 times the diameter of the planet.
This finding makes the band the largest known planetary ring in the solar system, researchers reported October 6 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. A billion Earths could fit inside the ring.
Calculations indicate the tenuous ring is probably even more extensive and is likely to have a diameter reaching 36 million kilometers.
Too faint to be seen from Earth, the ring extends beyond Saturn’s outer moon Phoebe. Anne Verbiscer and Michael Skrutskie of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, along with Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland in College Park, reported evidence suggesting that the ring is supplied…
CIA, International Drug Dealing, 9/11 and a cover up in Florida
Daniel Hopsicker takes a close looks at the possible cover up in Florida involving the flight school that trained World Trade Center attacker Mohammed Atta. Watch one of his videos or read one of his Blogs Mad Cow Morning News, or listen to an interview with him by “For The Record” host Dave Emory.
Too Terrifying To Even Contemplate…
Nick P at Black Sun Gazette
In lieu of writing a big long article, I present selected shorts. Today’s roundup includes dumbfuck liberals, pig cops, radical culture in need of money, Obama preparing to bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran, and scariest of all, Cokie Roberts.
Z Mag Is Broke: Starting off with the good news (kind of sort of not really) my buddy Thrash Mike reports over at Refuse To Thrive that Zmag needs money. Zmag is an indispensable source of top-notch radical left reporting. While I don’t always agree with their editorial line (big surprise) I think the world is much enriched by their reporting and investigative journalism. I know the economy sucks, but this is even more important than your favorite local mutant convergence. Reach in your pockets and dig deep.
Researchers Kill Brain Cancer Cells with Nanomedicine!
Scientists from the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy have developed the first “nanoparticles” that seek out and destroy GMB brain cancer cells!
Nanoparticles killed up to 80% of the brain cancer cells after just five minutes of exposure to white light. And researchers have also used gold nanospheres to search out and then “cook” skin cancer cells with light.
“It’s basically like putting a cancer cell in hot water and boiling it to death,” says one researcher.
And the NIH Roadmap ultimately predicts “novel tiny sensors… that search for, and destroy, infectious agents.”
The Link Between Income Inequality And Religious Fervour
On BBC Radio’s Thinking Allowed, Dr. Tom Rees explains his study on the link between income inequality and religious belief.
After examining 50 countries, Rees has found a correlation between a country’s level of economic stratification, and its religiosity. The case of the United States is fitting, in that it has both higher levels of religious belief and a greater gulf between rich and poor than most similarly developed nations.
Transmit Your Thoughts Via Brain-Computer Interface
A University of Southampton report from ScienceDaily:
(Oct. 6, 2009) — New research from the University of Southampton has demonstrated that it is possible for communication from person to person through the power of thought — with the help of electrodes, a computer and Internet connection.
Dr. Chris James demonstrating brain to brain communication using BCI to transmit thoughts, translated as a series of binary digits, over the Internet to another person whose computer receives the digits. (Credit: University of Southampton)
Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) can be used for capturing brain signals and translating them into commands that allow humans to control (just by thinking) devices such as computers, robots, rehabilitation technology and virtual reality environments.This experiment goes a step further and was conducted by Dr Christopher James from the University’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research. The aim was to expand the current limits of this technology and show that brain-to-brain (B2B) communication…
New ‘Making Of 2012′ Trailer
In the latest chapter of Sony Pictures’ massive marketing campaign for its “2012″ megadisaster movie, they’ve posted a new video on Yahoo Movies where Director Roland Emmerich and his visual effects team talk about the difficulty in creating the giant waves of water.
As a reminder to Disinformation readers, you can learn a whole lot more about 2012 on our own 2012 site than you will from watching the crazy CGI disasters!
Behind Afghan War Debate, a Battle of Two Books Rages
Peter Spiegel and Jonathan Weisman report in the Wall Street Journal:
WASHINGTON — The struggle to set the future course of the Afghan war is becoming a battle of two books — both suddenly popular among White House and Pentagon brain trusts.
The two draw decidedly different lessons from the Vietnam War. The first book describes a White House in 1965 being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead. President Barack Obama recently finished the book, according to administration officials, and Vice President Joe Biden is reading it now.
The second describes a different administration, in 1972, when a U.S. military that has finally figured out how to counter the insurgency is rejected by political leaders who bow to popular opinion and end the fight.
It has been recommended in multiple lists put out by military officers, including a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who passed it out to his subordinates.
The two books — “Lessons in Disaster” on Mr. Obama’s nightstand, and “A Better War” on the shelves of military gurus — have become a framework for the debate over what will be one of the most important decisions of Mr. Obama’s presidency…
Supermassive Black Hole Stare Down
Betsy Mason reports in Wired:
New X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory added to an image previously captured by the Hubble Space Telescope created this amazing composite image of two black holes on the verge of colliding.
The two supermassive black holes, which show up as two points of light in the center of the galaxy NGC 6240, are only 3,000 light-years apart. Astronomers think the two will eventually combine into a single, larger black hole.
Also combining to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts are the two pieces of this image, shown below. Space photos are often a combination of multiple images and sets of data, designed to bring out the details and beauty of the subject. In this case, Chandra’s X-ray data and Hubble’s optical data come together to create an image so stunning that it looks like it must be an artist’s rendering.
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