Archive for August, 2011
Why Is No One Watching Porn On TV Anymore?
![[PORN]](http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/PORN-210x300.jpg "[PORN]")
The TV networks are hurting because their most profitable customers – viewers of pornography – just aren’t watching enough. Sam Schechner and Jessica E. Vascellaro report for the Wall Street Journal:
Cable and satellite television companies have a pornography problem: Their customers aren’t watching enough of it.
Companies’ revenue from highly profitable adult video-on-demand and pay-per-view services has been slipping, as the genre’s consumers spend more time browsing porn on the Web.
The trend is prompting TV executives to pull back the curtain on how porn contributes to their businesses, a topic they have been loath to discuss publicly.
On Thursday, satellite provider DirecTV cited “lower adult buys” as a cause for weaker pay-per-view revenue in its second quarter earnings. That followed Time Warner Cable Inc.’s admission last week that shrinkage in the adult category was responsible for more than a third of a $14 million drop in video-on-demand revenue. While only a sliver…
Occult Map Of New York
Last year the venerable Watkins Books published a Spiritual Sightings Map of London. The intent was always to expand the map globally and now disinformation author Gary Lachman (Turn Off Your Mind) has contributed an Occult Map of New York:
I had already been living in New York on East 10th Street for a few months when in the early spring of 1975 I was asked to play bass in a fledgling rock band that would later become fairly successful. Their name was Blondie and their bass player had quit to join another group, Television.
CBGB on the Bowery was just starting to make a name for itself and would soon become the home of an honest-to-goodness scene. Soon after joining the group I had to give up my place on East 10th, and I moved in with the singer and guitarist. Their tiny flat in Little Italy, however, quickly proved too small…
Pentagon’s Lightning Gun Sold On eBay
Photo: Cody Oliver, USMC
The Burning Man may be incinerated faster than usual this year … Noah Schachtman reports for Wired:
There was a time, not all that long ago, when the Pentagon sank tens of millions of dollars into remote-controlled lightning guns that it hoped would fry insurgent bombs before they killed any more troops. Now, disassembled parts from the one-time wonder-weapons are being sold on eBay. At least one buyer snatched up the gear, hoping to use it in his latest art project for Burning Man.
All of which would make for a funny little story, if that buyer didn’t discover that the multimillion dollar “Joint Improvised Explosive Device Neutralizers,” or JINs, were kluged together from third-rate commercial electronics, and controlled by open Wi-Fi signals. In other words, the Pentagon didn’t just overpay for a flawed weapon. On the off-chance the JIN ever worked, the insurgents could control it, too.
“This is…
Aging Brains Made Youthful?
Photo: Mieciu K2 (CC)
Can we restore our “mental sketch pads” by renewing how our brain holds memory on the neurological level? The National Geographic reports:
You can’t teach an old brain new tricks—but you can restore its ability to remember the old ones, a new study in monkeys suggests.
Chemicals given to rhesus macaques blocked a brain molecule that slows the firing of the brain’s nerve cells, or neurons, as we age—prompting those nerve cells to act young again.
“It’s our first glimpse of what’s going on physiologically that’s causing age-related cognitive decline,” said study leader Amy Arnsten, a neurobiologist at Yale University.
“We all assumed, given there’s a lot of architectural changes in aged brains … that we were stuck with it,” Arnsten said.
But with the new results, “the hopeful thing is that the neurochemical environment still makes a big difference, and we might be able to remediate some of these things.”
[Continues at National…
Most Beneficiaries Of Government Programs Don’t Know They Use Government Programs
Via Sociological Images, an excerpt from research by Cornell professor Suzanne Mettler in which Americans were asked whether they had ever benefited from or participated in specific federal programs. As it turns out, a large number of people who have benefited from various federal programs or policies do not recognize themselves as having done so. This reveals something about people’s attitudes and framing, perhaps about whom they think government social programs “help”:
Hacker Stock Photo Art
Boing Boing has a brilliant collection/dissection of the stock photography used when news websites attempt to report on “hacking” and cybercrime. Strained visual metaphors abound, and the usual suspects include disembodied hands that try to strangle you through the internet, cyber-ninja hackers, and bad teens who keep their sweatshirt hood up even though they are indoors sitting at a computer:
The color of the glow of monitor light is semiotically significant. White light, resulting in natural tones, is for victims and security experts. Blue-bathed hackers are thieves. Green-tinted hackers are exploring The Matrix. Red glows are for evil hackers, especially cyber-bullies.
________
How To Tell When You’re Drunk
Melinda Beck asks “How much alcohol does it take to get intoxicated?” for the Wall Street Journal:
Many people figure a few beers at a ballgame or a couple of glasses of wine with dinner won’t put them over the legal limit for driving. But how alcohol affects people is highly individual, with a number of factors in the mix.
Quick shots of liquor hit the bloodstream faster than slow sips of wine. Drinking on an empty stomach impairs reflexes more than consuming alcohol with food…
The Raw Food Conspiracy
Courtesy Counterthink.com/NaturalNews.com
SWAT teams assaulting farmers for conspiring to distribute raw milk? Who wrote this fantasy, Aldous Huxley? Actually, no, it’s an all too real event from California, reported by Mike Adams for Natural News:
The raid on Rawesome Foods by a combined force of agents from the FDA, LA County Dept of Agriculture, CDC and the LA County Sheriff’s office wasn’t the only SWAT-style armed raid that took place today. Sharon Palmer, a mom and owner of Healthy Family Farms was also arrested and taken to jail. A third woman, Victoria Bloch, the LA County liaison for the Weston A Price Foundation (www.WestonaPrice.org) , was also reportedly arrested, NaturalNews has learned.
Sharon Palmer is being charged with “mislabeling cheese,” NaturalNews has learned. (Yes, mislabeling cheese! This earns you an armed raid in America today, even while the real crooks in Washington run free…) This is on top of the conspiracy charge which has…
Hundreds Of Mystery Underground Tunnels Below Germany
Why were vast networks of carefully constructed “goblin tunnels” built below Bavaria during the Middle Ages? Why is there not a single written word about their purpose or construction? Der Spiegel delves into the darkness:
There are more than 700 curious tunnel networks in Bavaria, but their purpose remains a mystery. Were they built as graves for the souls of the dead, as ritual spaces or as hideaways from marauding bandits?
At least 700 of these chambers have been found in Bavaria alone, along with about 500 in Austria. In the local vernacular, they have fanciful names such as “Schrazelloch” (”goblin hole”) or “Alraunenhöhle” (”mandrake cave”). They were supposedly built by elves, and legend has it that gnomes lived inside. According to some sagas, they were parts of long escape tunnels from castles. Similar small underground labyrinths have been found across Europe, from Hungary to Spain, but no one knows why they were…
Should All Human Beings Pop the (Theoretical) ‘Limitless’ Pill?
Yes, a pop culture way to ask a “Brave New World” question. Rahul Parikh poses on Salon:
The film’s “miracle” drug may seem far-fetched, but it’s based in a medical reality: Taking certain medications, specifically those developed to treat psychiatric and neurological disorders, can boost cognitive performance in otherwise healthy people.
Many of us instinctively recoil from such an idea for moral reasons. Sculpting our brains, unlike, say, sculpting our noses, seems like cheating. But consider this: 7 percent of surveyed college students (and some 25 percent of those on elite campuses) have taken an unprescribed Ritalin — or a similar drug used to treat attention deficit disorder — to boost their performance on an exam.
And the phenomenon is not restricted to college students trying to raise their grade point averages: The military has a history of encouraging — and sometimes even ordering — soldiers to take Ritalin or Provigil, a drug that…
How The Universe (Something) Appeared From Nothing (Video)
Granted this video is a promo for the New Scientist’s recent issue on “existence”, it’s pretty interesting, if you are OK with incomplete answers. (Figuring out how the universe got so large is still a serious head-scratcher.) My takeaway after watching this, is if “something” is not really that different from “nothing” (according to our human perception) then, well, there is still much to ponder …
The Myth of Work Vs. The Reality of Abuse
Via Modern Mythology:
In the wake of yet another collosal political and social disappointment, I’d like to touch on an issue which, frankly, could be the topic of a book. And it’s a book that, if it hasn’t been written already, should be written. It needs to be written, and more importantly, it needs to be talked about.
Every culture has myths about work. What is acceptable for an employee or employer, what the nature of that relationship should be. It is in the benefit of the employer to have myths throughout the workforce that tie their very identity and sense of self worth into how well they meet that employers demands, and if there aren’t forces in place, either enforced through government oversight or the unionization of the workers in some configuration, these myths can run rampant. There is, after all, a word in Japanese for working one’s self to death. (They also apparently have a word for eating one’s self to ruin. But that’s another story.)
(Matt Damon speaks out on the importance of teachers):
This process is not inherently good or bad. As I said in the chapter on initiation in The Immanence of Myth, the prescriptive nature of indoctrination may sound ominous, but many of us know what humans become when left to be feral creatures. They can hardly be called human, at all.
However, this process can still break down in any number of ways…
‘Multiverse’ Theory Suggested By Microwave Background
“It would be a pretty amazing thing to show that we have actually made physical contact in another universe. It’s a long shot, but it would by very profound for physics” (Prof. Efstathiou). Via BBC:
The idea that other universes – as well as our own – lie within “bubbles” of space and time has received a boost.
Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these “bubble universes” may have left marks on our own.
This “multiverse” idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by.
The preliminary work, to be published in Physical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.
For now, the team has worked with seven years’ worth of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which measures in minute detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the faint glow left from our Universe’s…
The Semi-Genius Of Illusion Illusions
Is the center circle at left larger than the center circle at right? How about this: are there gray spots between the corners of black squares?
Illusions are tricks that play off of the ways our brains typically process sensory information. The problem is that many of them have become clichéd. Hence illusion illusions — illusions that play off of the illusions we’re used to seeing. See the angry-comment-provoking Flickr set.
________
In U.S., Muslims And Atheists Most Opposed To Violence
Is violence targeting civilians ever justified in the name of a worthy cause? U.S. Christians say yes, atheists and Muslims say no. Raw Story writes:
New data from polling firm Gallup shows that out of all the religious groups in the U.S., Muslims are most likely to reject violence, followed by the non-religious atheists and agnostics.
Through interviews with 2,482 Americans, Gallup found that 78 percent of Muslims believe violence which kills civilians is never justified, whereas just 38 percent of Protestant Christians and 39 percent of Catholics agreed with that sentiment. Fifty-six percent of atheists answered similarly.
The survey was designed to measure religious and non-religious attitudes toward violence 10 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Perhaps most tellingly, 92 percent of Muslims surveyed said they did not believe any Muslim in their community had sympathy toward al Qaeda terrorists.
When Gallup put the question a bit more pointedly, asking if it would…
How Shopping Malls Make You Buy
Hungry Beast offers a three-minute primer on how architecture and design elements in shopping malls have been tested and tweaked to create “scripted disorientation” and manipulate and channel our behavior. Most of us have heard of some of the consumption-encouraging tricks used within individual stores, but not necessarily those occurring on a larger level in the surrounding structures and environs. Someday businesses will perfect a method for getting us to shop for just as long as they wish us to:
Ask Not What Facebook Can Do For You, But What Facebook Can Do For Your Country…
Granted some memes will be more interesting to the Pentagon than others. David Streitfeld reports in the NY Times:
The Pentagon is developing plans to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as both a resource and a weapon in future conflicts. Its research and development agency is offering $42 million in funding to anyone who can help.
Social media will change the nature of warfare just as surely as the telegraph, the radio and the telephone did, and the Pentagon is fearful of being caught short. Some of its goals were laid out in a document being circulated among potential researchers and is to be presented at a briefing on Tuesday in Arlington, Va., at the offices of the military contractor System Planning Corporation.
As social media play increasingly large roles in fomenting unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, the military wants systems to be able to detect and track the…
No 9/11 10th Anniversary Threats
From Reuters:
There have been no credible or specific threats against the United States yet ahead of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday.
U.S. officials have been on high alert for possible plots to reprise in some form of the September 11, 2001 attacks in which al Qaeda operatives hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“We have no specific or credible threats involving the 9/11 anniversary to date,” she told reporters during a news conference on an unrelated subject…
