Archive for June, 2010
Video Gamers Can Control Their Dreams
Courtesy of Remedy Entertainment/Microsoft Game Studios
Jeremy Hsu writes on LiveScience:
Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control in their dreams, LiveScience has learned.
That ability to shape the alternate reality of dream worlds might not match mind-bending Hollywood films such as The Matrix, but it could provide an edge when fighting nightmares or even mental trauma.
Dreams and video games both represent alternate realities, according to Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. But she pointed out that dreams arise biologically from the human mind, while video games are technologically driven by computers and gaming consoles.
“If you’re spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it’s practice,” said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. “Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams.”
Read More: LiveScience
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Brian Butler: The Wickedest Man In LA
Good to see one-time disinfo-collaborator Brian Butler being recognized as an occult expert. He was recently profiled by Charles Russell (of The Hills fame) in the Huffington Post:
Brian Butler speaks with the soft ease and quiet smirk of someone who either knows something you don’t or simply doesn’t care. There’s some unseen force that compels him to create some of the most haunting installations employing film and music with the likes of Kenneth Anger and Vincent Gallo. He is more unflinchingly dedicated to the validity of his craft than the most rabid of people.
42 second trailer for Night of Pan directed by Brian Butler. Features Vincent Gallo and Kenneth Anger.
However, it is not today, which concerns him for he appears to exist outside the dimensional constraints of time. I sat down with him recently to discuss his new works being shown internationally, dispel the nasty rumors of him hypnotizing and hexing the masses…
Rewriting History Is Easier Than You Thought
Slate just conducted an interesting experiment in Orwellian-style rewriting of history. Readers were asked to share their their recollections of recent historical events, many of which never actually happened. That didn’t matter though; a large percentage recalled, for instance, how angry they were when Obama infamously shook hands with Ahmadinejad (which he didn’t). The lesson being, if you ask someone to remember something, they will:
In the first three days the experiment was posted, 5,279 subjects participated. All of the true incidents outscored the false ones. But the fake images were effective. Through random distribution, each fabricated scene was viewed by a subsample of more than 1,000 people. For Obama meeting Ahmadinejad, the number who remembered seeing it was 26 percent. For the Hillary Clinton ad, the number was 36 percent. For the Edwards-Cheney confrontation, it was 42 percent, just seven points shy of the percentage who remembered seeing the DeLay/Schiavo episode.
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The CIA’s Plot to Make Osama and Saddam Into Gay Porn Stars
Jeff Stein writes on the Washington Post’s SpyTalk:
During planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group kicked around a number of ideas for discrediting Saddam Hussein in the eyes of his people.
One was to create a video purporting to show the Iraqi dictator having sex with a teenage boy, according to two former CIA officials familiar with the project.
“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” said one of the former officials. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”
The idea was to then “flood Iraq with the videos,” the former official said.
Another idea was to interrupt Iraqi television programming with a fake special news bulletin. An actor playing Hussein would announce that he was stepping down in favor of his (much-reviled) son Uday.
“I’m sure you will throw your support behind His Excellency Uday,” the fake Hussein would intone.
The…
A 26-Foot-Tall Anubis Statue Installed at Denver International Airport
Via Red Ice Creations:
Ever since it was first installed at Denver International Airport, the 32-foot-tall blue “Mustang” has been the talk of the town, but a new addition is sure to get plenty of attention.
A crew is installing a seven-ton, 26-foot-tall concrete sculpture of an Egyptian god at the airport. Anubis, a statue with a jackal-head, will be built south of the Jeppesen Terminal.
Although part of the lore of the 9,000-pound “Mustang” is that its creator, Luis Jiménez, was tragically killed while making the piece, Anubis may be even more notorious. He’s the Egyptian god of death and the afterlife.
It’s being put in to preview the Denver Art Museum’s King Tut exhibit. The exhibit runs June 29 through Jan. 9, 2011, and Anubis will be standing guard during that time…
Should the U.S. Nuke the Gulf Coast Oil Spill?
Daniel Foster writes in National Review:
It was September of 1966, and gas was gushing uncontrollably from the wells in the Bukhara province of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. But the Reds, at the height of their industrial might, had a novel solution.
They drilled nearly four miles into the sand and rock of the Kyzyl Kum Desert, and lowered a 30-kiloton nuclear warhead — more than half-again as large as “Little Boy,” the crude uranium bomb dropped over Hiroshima — to the depths beneath the wellhead. With the pull of a lever, a fistful of plutonium was introduced to itself under enormous pressure, setting off the chain reaction that starts with E = MC2 and ends in Kaboom! The ensuing blast collapsed the drill channel in on itself, sealing off the well.
Snoop & Daft Punk In World Cup Star Wars Video Mashup
Following on the Star Wars theme (see my last post about the comeback of the Star Wars Kid), here’s an admittedly corporate but still excellent Star Wars Cantina mashup released just in time for the FIFA World Cup and featuring David Beckham, Daft Punk, Snoop Dogg, Franz Beckenbauer, Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown, Ciara, Jay Baruchel, and DJ Neil Armstrong. The gang at disinformation are skeptical about the benefits of the World Cup for South Africans, but on the other hand can’t wait to see the actual soccer…
French Establishment Promotes IMF Director As Presidential Candidate
By Kumaran Ira for the World Socialist Web Site:
The decision by French media and political circles to promote the International Monetary Fund managing director and leading Parti Socialiste(PS) member Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a potential presidential candidate is a stark warning to the working class. Though presented as a “left” party to the public, the PS supports the IMF’s anti-working class policies, such as the cuts carried out by Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou.
Strauss-Kahn is seen as a major potential contender against the incumbent, conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential election. He has given prominent interviews on television and in the print media. An Ipsos-Le Point poll published on May 25 found that 76 percent of right-wing voters and 66 percent of Socialist Party voters back Strauss-Kahn for the presidency. The nomination of the PS candidate for the presidential elections will be decided at a PS-organized primary election to be…
The Yes Lab for Creative Activism
Our friends Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, better known as the Yes Men, have launched The Yes Lab, a series of brainstorms and trainings to help activist groups carry out Yes-Men-style projects on their own. Check out the Yes Lab site; this is how they explain it:
Why now?
We Yes Men have been doing our thing for about 12 years. Many of our best projects have been in collaboration with activist groups—our BBC announcement on behalf of Dow Chemical came out of a collaboration with Greenpeace, for example.
Last fall, we collaborated with a coalition of groups to release a much-improved “climate edition” of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, and to launch an assault on the U.N. by sea (”Balls Across America“). Also in collaboration with activists, we visited our nation’s capital to re-brand the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, then headed to Copenhagen to successfully embarrass Canada about its terrible climate policies.
In part because of these successes,…
‘Confessions of An Economic Hitman’ in Cartoon Form (Video)
For those of you unfamiliar with John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman, this animation basically sums up the message of the book. Show it to your friends and family.
U.S. Cigarette Brands Tops In Cancer Causing Chemicals
By Miriam Falco for CNN:
Smokers of U.S. brand cigarettes may get more bang for their buck in the worst way according to a small study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Researchers found U.S. made cigarettes contain more cancer-causing chemicals than some cigarettes brands made elsewhere around the world.
“Not all cigarettes are made alike” says Dr. Jim Pirkle, deputy director for science at the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health. He says this is the first study to show that “U.S. cigarettes have more of the major carcinogen [TSNAs] than foreign made cigarettes.” TSNAs are “tobacco-specific nitrosamines,” the major cancer-causing substance in tobacco.
126 smokers in five cities – Waterloo, Ontario; Melbourne, Victoria (Australia); London, England, Buffalo, New York, and Minneapolis, Minnesota – were recruited for this study.
They were between the ages of 18 and 55 and smoked at least 10 cigarettes a day for the past year and…
Star Wars Kid To Obtain Law Degree, Last Laugh
From Roorback:
Remember the Star Wars Kid and his .002 seconds of Internet fame? He’s gone from harassed geek to community leader and young lawyer. That faint glow is coming from the cockles of my blackened heart.
The mean kids at the Internet table wreaked hell on the poor guy. Yes, the self-styled demi-gods of Gawker hate us all equally, but you can’t help but feel for the kid when you hear about the severe depressions, the lawsuits, and the hospitalizations.
But look at him now: president of a conservation society! Co-star of a documentary! Budding lawyer! Living meme! Sir, tonight I quietly drink to you. Without telling anyone I am doing so. Because that would be embarrassing for everyone.
Let’s all have a moment, shall we?
Killer At The White House!
Shawn Talbott, the nutritional biochemist behind the disinformation documentary Killer At Large, is taking his film to the White House. Here’s the post from his blog:
I’m VERY excited about my trip to Washington DC tomorrow to participate in Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to fight childhood obesity. I’m attending this event through my role as Executive Producer for the Killer At Large film and as part of the advisory board for the Chef & Child Foundation of the American Culinary Foundation (ACF).
It will be a thrill to join more than 50 chefs for the kickoff of the “Chefs Move to Schools” on June 4. This new program is part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign and will be led by White House assistant chef, Sam Kass as a way to take the message of healthy nutrition to schools across America.
For a long time, we have made the Killer At Large documentary about…
Manned Mission To Mars (Virtually) Underway
From Information Week:
An international team of researchers shuttered themselves inside a virtual spacecraft in Russia Thursday to begin a 520-day simulation of a manned mission to Mars.
The six-man team isn’t scheduled to exit their self-contained environment, which includes a mock up of the Red Planet’s surface, until November, 2011.
During their mission, the crewmembers will ‘fly to Mars’ during the first 250 days, land and explore terrain for a month, and then embark on a 230 day return flight.
Their enclosure is equipped with enough food, water, and other supplies to last through the duration of the period. It’s also armed with video games, books, and other materials designed to stave off boredom.
The project, called Mars500, is underwritten by the European, Russian, and Chinese space agencies, and operated by Moscow’s Institute for Medical and Biological Problems.
The goal is to gain a better understanding of the physical and psychological stresses astronauts would encounter…
What Would You Do with the Massive Datasets from Persistent Surveillance?
From Technoccult:
Marshall Kirkpatrick outlines the rapidly accumulating data from persistent surveillance, geospatial tracking, and massive sensor webs and poses the question: what would you do with it? Skipping to the end of his piece:
Let’s assume that real-time persistent airborne surveillance data becomes another cloud service you can pull down to leverage for your application development, just like storage, computing and some other data APIs are today. Let’s assume that in time this data becomes a commodity, even!
What on earth will people do with that? The possibilities seem nearly endless.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around – a sure sign that it’s a powerful vision of the future. I asked ReadWriteWeb research intern and resident GIS guy Justin Houk what he would do with such a service and his first answer was, “Become invisible and king of the world.” Then he got serious and settled on a dream app tracking food…
Can Hollywood’s James Cameron Fix The Gulf Oil Spill?
Yes that James Cameron, of Titanic and Avatar fame. He revealed his ideas for the Gulf Oil disaster at the All Things Digital D8 conference:
During his D8 appearance Wednesday evening, director James Cameron discusses the role of underwater cinematography in documenting the BP oil spill and how he assembled a global team of deep submergence and underwater film experts to do just that.
Bill O’Reilly Compares Gays To Al-Qaeda
From The New Civil Rights Movement:
Fair and balanced? You be the judge.
Burger Diet Boosts Kids’ Asthma Risk
From Physorg.com:
Eating three or more burgers a week may boost a child’s risk of asthma and wheeze – at least in developed nations – reveals a large international study, published in Thorax today.
Conversely, a Mediterranean diet, rich in fruit, vegetables, and fish seems to stave off the risk, the research shows.
The research team base their findings on data collected between 1995 and 2005 on 50,000 children between the ages of 8 and 12 from 20 rich and poor countries around the world.
Their parents were asked about their children’s normal diet and whether they had ever been diagnosed with asthma and/or have had wheeze.
Just under 30,000 of the children were tested for allergic reactions, to see if diet also influenced their chances of developing allergies.
Diet did not seem to be associated with becoming sensitised to common allergens, such as grass and tree pollen. But it did seem to influence the prevalence of…
