You are about write a story. How shall it begin? Perhaps there is a single conflict that needs to be resolved. Will my story have a happy ending or a sad ending? Perhaps the conflict has one of several distinct oppositions: man vs nature, man vs. technology, man vs. god or man vs. self.

In 1894, French critic Georges Polti recognized thirty-six possible plots, which included conflicts such as Supplication, Pursuit, Self-sacrifice, Adultery, Revolt, the Enigma, Abduction, and Disaster. In 1928, dime novelist William Wallace Cook, author of Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, did him one better, cataloging every narrative he could think of through a method that bordered on madness. His final plot count? 1,462.

While still a young director in England, Alfred Hitchcock requested the book from America, and the creator of the courtroom drama Perry Mason claimed he had learned a great deal from it. In 1931, screenwriter Wycliffe Hill declared that he had invented a “Plot Robot,” which turned out to be nothing more than cardboard wheel of options that would help you choose a plot in the same way you might choose a color for your living room.

Plotto was far more complex, and despite its careful categorization, still exceedingly hard to understand. It’s a narrative Dewey Decimal System of sorts, where each character-type is given a letter: the man is A, the woman is B, their relatives, such as a father or mother, would be F-A or M-B, and anything mysterious, be it a stranger or a strange object, is given the designation X, that ultimate letter of mystery. Conflicts have their own groupings, such as Love and Courtship, Married Life, Mystery, Misfortune, Idealism, Personal Limitations, Revelation, Helpfulness, Craftiness Stimulation, Mistaken Judgement, and Deliverance.

Each narrative in Plotto begins with “Masterplots” which are made up of several beginning, middle, and end clauses (e.g. “A person in love > Falling in love when certain obligations forbid love > Pays a grim penalty in an unfortunate undertaking.”) These permutations, which can number in the hundreds, are subdivided once again according to character and conflict into specific situations, the more than 1,462 individual plots that make up the bulk of Plotto.

In a record twenty years on television, Law & Order served up 465 somewhat distinct plots. Had the writers used Plotto, they could have provided the police procedural with at least sixty years of dramatic tension.

A close-up of the one of the source books shows Jefferson's meticulous excisions. Source: Smithsonian National Museum of American History (CC)

Mitch Horowitz, perhaps the leading editor of occult books working today, ponders how The Jefferson Bible might have changed history, for CNN:

Imagine the following scenario: A U.S. president is discovered to be spending his spare time taking a razor to the New Testament, cutting up and re-pasting those passages of the Gospels that he considered authentic and morally true and discarding all the rest.

Gone are the virgin birth, divine healings, exorcisms and the resurrection of the dead, all of which the chief executive dismissed as “superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications.”

Such an episode occurred, although the revised version of Scripture remained unseen for nearly seven decades after its abridger’s death. Thomas Jefferson intended it that way.

During most of his two terms in the White House, from 1801 to 1809, and for more than a decade afterward, Jefferson – the third U.S. president and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence – committed himself to a radical reinterpretation of the Gospels.

With a razor and glue brush at this side, Jefferson lined up English, French, Greek and Latin editions of Scripture and proceeded to cut up and reassemble the four Gospels into an exquisitely well-crafted, multilingual chronology of Christ’s life.

In Jefferson’s view, this revision represented a faithful record of Christ’s moral code, minus the miracles that the Enlightenment-era founder dismissed as historical mythmaking…

[continues at CNN]

Adam Carolla & Daniele Bolelli

Disinformation author Daniele Bolelli (50 Things You’re Not Supposed To Know: Religion) is the featured guest on Adam Carolla’s podcast this week.

Carolla and his gang talk about Daniele’s strong Italian accent, even though he’s been in the States for 20 years. The guys also go through some of the book’s talking points on religion, and discuss how to start your own cult. Adam then asks Daniele about his black belt, and the guys agree on the simplicity of fighting…

The segment with Daniele starts at about 56 minutes in. Enjoy!

Podcast: Play in new window

Lucía Etxebarría. Photo: Xavier Thomas (http://photo75.online.fr)

Are things really so hopeless for writers? In Spain perhaps. Giles Tremlett reports for the Guardian (thanks to Mike for the tip):

An award-winning Spanish novelist claims that the illegal downloading of ebooks has forced her to give up writing and start looking for a new job.

“Given that I have today discovered that more illegal copies of my book have been downloaded than I have sold, I am announcing officially that I will not publish another book for a long time,” Lucía Etxebarria announced on her Facebook page.

Etxebarria told the Guardian that Spanish authors faced a difficult future as online piracy spreads from music and film to literature.

She pointed to Spain’s position at the top of the world rankings for per capita illegal downloads. “We come after China and Russia in the total number of illegal downloads but, obviously, there are a lot more of them so we win on a per capita measure,” she said.

“People are making millions out of online piracy by setting up in places like Belize, which is where the money goes,” Etxebarria said. “They are a powerful lobby and our government doesn’t dare legislate.”…

[continues in the Guardian]

The Georgia Guidestones are a collection of standing stones near Elberton, Georgia. Built in 1980, they are primarily composed of six slabs of granite: one central pillar, four “major” stones that fan out from the center, and a capstone. The capstone has engravings on all four of its sides in four different ancient languages, all of which read, “Let these be guidestones to an Age of Reason,” when translated. The major stones are each engraved on both sides, and each side contains text in one of eight modern languages asserting ten guidelines.

These guidelines have proven extremely controversial, causing speculation and rumors of conspiracy that go far beyond northeast Georgia.

The Georgia Guidestones are at once a Rosetta Stone, an astronomical observatory, and a road map for rebuilding civilization. Theories of conspiracy, occultism, and apocalypse surround this monument, and it has been called a “prism of meaning” by many who have studied it. At the heart of this confusion is the missing piece of the puzzle: who was the mystery man that designed and funded the project?

Conspiracy theorists surmise a global plot on the part of shadowy group of men to reduce and subjugate the world’s population and create a “New World Order.” Others believe that the man behind the monument was a Rosicrucian, and that the stones are representative of that group’s occult manifestos. Are the stones proof of a Satanic conspiracy or a testament to a Cold War psychology of nuclear annihilation?

Local historian and Georgia native Raymond Wiley was interviewed for The History Channel’s Brad Meltzer’s Decoded about the Guidestones and is a principal expert for a feature-length documentary currently in production. With local writer K.T. Prime he has written the definitive account of America’s most famous megalithic monument.

“I think WikiLeaks represents a very important impulse and the start of a strong movement toward anti-corporate sentiment and the demand for government transparency,” he explains in this new interview, “As ineffectual as that movement may end up being – because it started so late in the process of corporate control being consolidated…”

He moves from discussing fictional zombie-fighting to the brutal real-world military violence in neo-colonial nations around the world. And he ultimately wonders if our wireless technology-enhanced future will also include the potential for massive global disinformation.

Walter Isaacson (Jobs’ biographer): I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden one day and he started talking about God. He said, “Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50–50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of — maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on. The he paused for a second and he said ‘yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone.’ He said — and paused again, and he said, “And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”

Via the New York Times, Pagan Kennedy looks into the phenomenon of android authors, and finds that their works are already being published and sold on Amazon:

One day, I stumbled across a book on Amazon called “Saltine Cracker.” It didn’t make sense: who would pay $54 for a book entirely about perforated crackers? The book was co-edited by someone called Lambert M. Surhone — a name that sounds like one of Kurt Vonnegut’s inventions. According to Amazon, Lambert M. Surhone has written or edited more than 100,000 titles, on every subject from beekeeping to the world’s largest cedar bucket. He was churning out books at a rate that was simply not possible for a human being.

So who was Lambert M. Surhone? Just looking at the numbers, you could argue that he’s one of the most prolific creators of literature who ever lived. But was he even human? There are now software programs — robots, if you will — that can gather text and organize it into a book. Surhone might be one of them.

Whatever he was, Lambert M. Surhone worked under the auspices of a German company, VDM Publishing. In addition to selling conventional books, VDM also extrudes thousands of paperbacks every year using content available without cost on the Internet. These books, or booklike products, lie in wait for the distracted shopper, someone who might think, Oh good, I really need a tome on Spearman’s law of diminishing returns, so I’ll just go ahead and pay $84. And with one overhasty click on the “Place your order” button, the shopper can pay a lot of money for a book that turns out to be warmed-over Wikipedia.

VDM Publishing puts a notice on the cover of its books, boasting “high-quality content by Wikipedia articles!” Still, not every buyer sees the disclaimer. Librarians, for instance, report that they must be vigilant in order to avoid wasting money on the robot-books. Readers complain that the books proliferate like kudzu in online stores.

But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author?

Which brings me back to Lambert M. Surhone. Might he be a robot? Reading the fine print, I traced some of Surhone’s books to a VDM branch office in the island nation of Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. I called. As the faraway phone rang, I fantasized about what I would say to Surhone. By now I imagined him as a character in a Vonnegut novel, and so I was tempted to ask whether he hailed from Tralfamadore, the planet inhabited by robots. But I never had a chance. No one at the company answered the phone.

Then, when I least expected it, Surhone came for me. One day, a book titled “Pagan Kennedy” popped up on Barnesandnoble­.com, priced at $50. The lead editor: Lambert M. Surhone. I was both thrilled and creeped out. Reader, I ordered it. Within a few days, the book appeared on my doorstep. The cover was adorned with a stripy abstraction that looked like a beach towel. Inside was the Pagan Kennedy Wikipedia entry, and then a random collection of wiki-text tenuously connected to my path through life. (About a quarter of the book is devoted to Dartmouth College, where I worked as a visiting writer a few years ago.) Some of the text is so small you might need a jeweler’s loupe to read it. So the book was, as advertised, Wikipedia content — though it’s hard to imagine anyone would want it in this format.

Around that time, I also heard from a managing director of VDM, who responded to my badgering questions about robots. “Our wiki-books are produced by a group of about 40 editors,” Wolfgang Philipp Müller told me via e-mail. “Editors start at A and end their work at Z. Every topic that has enough content for a book is our target.” He said that last year, the company sold about 3,000 wiki-books — not a lot. Still, with prices that average around $50, it’s likely the company sees a high profit on each one.

Müller assured me that the editors are human. But many of the titles of these books suggest the mind of a machine at work. It’s hard to imagine a person signing off on, for instance, a book titled “Storage Ring: Particle Accelerator, Particle Beam, Accelerator Physics, Beamline, Australian Synchrotron, Cyclotron, Dipole Magnet, Electromagnetism.” Also, there were other robotlike errors: one of VDM’s books about the rock band the Police was paired with a cover illustration of actual police officers.

These mistakes made me wonder: Could robots ever be trusted to write original novels, histories, scientific papers and sonnets? For years, artificial-intelligence experts have insisted that machines can succeed as authors. But would we humans ever want to read the robot-books? For a serious consideration of the matter, I consulted Philip Parker, an economist and inventor who sees a bright future for the computer as author. Parker believes that A.I.-produced books, issued in a dazzling array of languages, could be crucial to the spread of literacy. Think of farmers in Malawi who lack the most basic guides to agriculture in their own language. Parker talked about the need to distribute books aimed at people who speak underserved languages like Chichewa and Tumbuka. “One thing that’s missing is the content itself — the textbooks,” Parker said, and A.I. could offer a cheap solution. In the late 1990s, he began using automatic text-generation software to produce such books. More recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has financed Parker’s use of A.I. to produce weather reports for the radio in local languages.

But Chris Csikszentmihalyi, a co-founder of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is skeptical. “Would you really want to bet your life on text generated by a robot? Imagine a book on fixing the diesel engine on your tractor. If one piece of information is wrong, you could ruin the engine. It gets even more complicated when you think about books that dispense medical advice.”

And, he added, what’s the point of using artificial intelligence to simulate the kind of work that humans enjoy? If you want to generate books in a plethora of languages, he said, “You can use the power of the diaspora from Malawi or Mozambique,” the army of highly educated volunteers who are eager to help their countrymen. “That obviates the need for A.I.”

The Internet itself offers proof of the enormous human desire to produce text — to pontificate, edit, elegize, redact, hash out, bloviate, opine and instruct. We’re spewing out billions of comments a day. VDM Publishing may have created a niche business for itself, but in the long run, I suspect, the robots will have a hard time getting a word in edgewise.

1. And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson 
   Reasons: homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group
2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie 
   Reasons: offensive language, racism, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence
3. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley 
   Reasons: insensitivity, offensive language, racism, and sexually explicit
4. Crank, by Ellen Hopkins 
   Reasons: drugs, offensive language, and sexually explicit
5. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins 
   Reasons: sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence
6. Lush, by Natasha Friend 
   Reasons: drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
7. What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones 
   Reasons: sexism, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
8. Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich 
   Reasons: drugs, inaccurate, offensive language, political viewpoint, and religious viewpoint
9. Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie 
   Reasons:  homosexuality and sexually explicit
10. Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer 
    Reasons: religious viewpoint and violence

Burying your head in a novel isn’t just a way to escape the world: psychologists are increasingly finding that reading can affect our personalities.

Researchers from the University at Buffalo gave 140 undergraduates passages from either Meyer’s Twilight or JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to read. The study’s authors, Dr. Shira Gabriel and Ariana Young, then applied what they dubbed the Twilight/Harry Potter Narrative Collective Assimilation Scale, which saw the students asked questions designed to measure their identification with the worlds they had been reading about.

Published by the journal Psychological Science, the study found that participants who read the Harry Potter chapters self-identified as wizards, whereas participants who read the Twilight chapter self-identified as vampires. And “belonging” to these fictional communities actually provided the same mood and life satisfaction people get from affiliations with real-life groups.

The psychology of fiction is a small but growing area of research, according to Keith Oatley, a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto and a published novelist himself, who details the latest findings in the area in his online magazine, OnFiction.

One of his own studies, carried out in 2008, gave 166 participants either the Chekhov short story, The Lady with the Little Dog, or a version of the story rewritten in documentary form. The subjects’ personality traits and emotions were assessed before and after reading, with those who were given the Chekhov story in its unadulterated form found to have gone through greater changes in personality – empathizing with the characters and thus becoming a little more like them.

“I think the reason fiction but not non-fiction has the effect of improving empathy is because fiction is primarily about selves interacting with other selves in the social world,” said Oatley. “The subject matter of fiction is constantly about why she did this, or if that’s the case what should he do now, and so on. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at. If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. In fiction, also, we are able to understand characters’ actions from their interior point of view, by entering into their situations and minds, rather than the more exterior view of them that we usually have. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. We usually take the exterior view of others, but that’s too limited.”

The findings could, Oatley believes, have significant implications, particularly in a climate where arts funding is under threat. “It is the first empirical finding, so far as I know, to show a clear psychological effect of reading fiction,” he said. “It’s a result that shows that reading fiction improves understanding of others, and this has a very basic importance in society, not just in the general way making the world a better place by improving interpersonal understanding, but in specific areas such as politics, business, and education. In an era when high-school and university subjects are evaluated economically, our results do have economic implications.”

The “WikiFocus” series targets obscure niches with few competing ebooks, like Hello Kitty, Aquaman, or the comic strip Archie.

“Of the 887 ebooks, all but 10 earned terrible reviews, averaging one star or less,” this article notes, “or received no reviews at all.”

A typical review? “This ‘book’ is just a word for word copy of the Wikipedia page.”

(And a least one other “author” has attempt the same trick, trying to pass off a Wikipedia page about Charlie Sheen as an $18.95 biography!)

A children’s bookstore noted that “the pie is getting cut into fewer pieces. I’d be nervous if I were an adult book publisher.” Borders bookstore has already declared bankruptcy, leaving The Daily Show to joke that bookstores should simply become “digital downloading” stations — or a “living history” museum where future generations can learn what “a magazine rack” was.”

Many books have been written about 9/11 but is there one that embodies the era that the attacks inaugurated?

When Changez, the Pakistani hero of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, watches the Twin Towers come crumbling down, he smiles.

Little Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old at the centre of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, grapples with his father’s death by creating a flip-book – 15 blurry stills, arranged in reverse order, of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Center. When he flicks through the pages, the flailing figure is restored to the top of the building – safe.

In Open City, writer Teju Cole describes Colonel Tassin – a (real) 19th Century figure – who kept count of the number of birds killed by flying into the Statue of Liberty, as many as 1,400 a night. The image is a reminder of another killing by collision, also in New York, two centuries later.

These are three books that have attempted to hew fiction from the fact of 9/11. According to Bowker’s Books in Print database, which tracks print and e-books published and distributed in the United States, 164 such works have been written so far – they either directly address the event or use it as a peg to hang greater literary concerns about love, life and loss…

[continues at the BBC]

A Yorkshire farmer has created the world’s largest spot the difference competition as a tribute to Harry Potter.

Tom Pearcy has carefully cut out two portraits of the boy wizard in his crop of maize plants at his field near York. With some subtle differences between the two images it creates the world’s largest spot the difference competition. At over 50m in diameter each head is also believed to be the largest image of Daniel Radcliffe ever created.

The images have been painstakingly carved out of over one million living maize plants. The 10km of pathways form an intricate maze for visitors to explore. The York Maze is the largest maize maze in Europe and one of the largest in the world.

Mr Pearcy said: “I’m a big fan of Harry Potter and the release of the final film this summer marks the end of an era. I wanted to do something imaginative to say farewell to Harry, so creating the biggest image of him ever made and making it a spot the difference competition seemed like an interesting way to do that.”…

[continues in the Yorkshire Post]

Hemingway’s depression and instability has been well-documented, but what is interesting is that the FBI’s monitoring of his phones, correspondence and activities contributed to his sense of fear and paranoia.

This could be the rare case of someone who’s paranoia about “being watched” is actually due to the fact that he/she is actually being monitored. A. E. Hotchner writes:

EARLY one morning, [on July 1st], while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life.

There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life.

Ernest and I were friends for 14 years. I dramatized many of his stories and novels for television specials and film, and we shared adventures in France, Italy, Cuba and Spain, where, as a pretend matador with Ernest as my manager, I participated in a Ciudad Real bullfight. Ernest’s zest for life was infectious.

Read More: NY Times

A previously unpublished diary kept by Ernesto “Che” Guevara during the guerilla campaign he fought alongside Fidel Castro has been released in Cuba.

Diary of a Combatant covers the period from 1956 until late 1958, beginning with Guevara’s arrival in Cuba aboard the yacht Granma with Fidel and Raúl Castro and going on to cover his march from the east of the island to Havana.

The book was unveiled in the Cuban capital on Tuesday on what would have been the Argentine-born revolutionary’s 83rd birthday. His widow, Aleida March, was on hand with one of his daughters to sign copies and said that the purpose of publishing the diary was “to acknowledge his thoughts, life and work”.

The book was edited by the Che Guevara Studies centre, which is directed by March, and published by Australian firm Ocean Press/Ocean Sur.

One reason why the publication of the diaries had been put off was that some of the hand-written notebooks in which they were kept were missing, a press conference was told.

[Continues at The Guardian]

The #1 city on Amazon’s list (and the top purchaser of non-fiction titles) is Cambridge, Massachusetts, while four of the top five cities are college towns. This suggests students may be shopping online for cheaper text books – another bad sign for the future of the bookstore.

But the #2 city was Alexandria, Virginia, one of three cities on the list within 10 miles of Washington D.C. — which surprisingly, was also reported by Amazon as the city which purchased the most children’s picture book.

It was visiting hour at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital and patients began drifting in to sit with their loved ones at tables and chairs that had been fixed to the ground. They were mostly overweight, wearing loose, comfortable T-shirts and elasticated sweatpants. There probably wasn’t much to do in Broadmoor but eat. I wondered if any of them were famous. Broadmoor was where they sent Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.

A man in his late 20s walked towards me. His arm was outstretched. He wasn’t wearing sweatpants. He was wearing a pinstripe jacket and trousers. He looked like a young businessman trying to make his way in the world, someone who wanted to show everyone that he was very, very sane. We shook hands.

“I’m Tony,” he said. He sat down.

“So I hear you faked your way in here,” I said. (Read More in the Guardian)

Ronson also created a video about his new project:

The year was 2081 and so many of the social problems humans had faced over the last hundred years were still a pretty big problem.  Most people were still poor, corporations still ran the government, and politicians were constantly caught with prostitutes of both sexes, living and dead.  When politicians weren’t blowing each other’s personal lives completely out of proportion for political gain, they were starting wars with other countries.  Sometimes, they would even start wars with people inside their own country, but those were usually ideological.  Perhaps the biggest and worst change was that the polar ice caps had melted and much of the Mojave Desert was now prime beachfront property.  That, and the air across the globe tasted like you were sucking on a tailpipe.

As pressing and horrible as those issues were, they really didn’t enter into the minds of John and Mildred Bates.  They were working class and average in most ways.  John worked a standard sixty hour work week and, to help make ends meet, Mildred picked up thirty-nine hours a week, part time, working at the deli counter at the local, national chain grocery emporium.

Even with all those hours, supporting their modest household and single child, John, Jr., was a difficult exercise.  After the mortgage, the bills, the poor tax, and their basic needs, there wasn’t a lot left over for leisure, though they had saved up their pennies for quite a while to afford the sizable Ramjac brand HD television that provided the centerpiece for their living space.

Each night after work, John Bates would settle into his favorite tattered easy chair that he still made regular payments on, crack open an ice cold beer, and watch his immense television.  Despite his disinterest, he seemed to watch the local, nationally syndicated-for-the-region news.  Little John, Jr., just before bedtime, would sit cross-legged in the space of carpet between his father and the television, transfixed by every image shown on the high definition display.

“Tonight, we have a special live program for you from science reporter Kurt Sanders.”

“Mildred! Can you grab another beer for me, love?”

“This is Kurt Sanders, and I’m here at the Monsanto Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, reporting live for a momentous occasion, both for science and for mankind.”

“Yes, dear!  I’ll grab another can from the ice box.”

“With me, I have Doctor Thaddeus Quentin, chief architect of Project: Humanity, brought to you by Exxon, which is launching in a rocket in T-Minus 8 minutes.”

Mildred arrived a moment later in the living room with John’s beer, putting it in his hand and leaning down, pulling the foot rest on his recliner up for him.  He sipped the head of the beer that had flowed over the lip of the can, paying far less attention to the launch than his boy was.

“What we’re doing is really quite simple.  The top minds in the world have created a sixty year plan to fix the problems of the world.  Everything that ails us: hunger, disease, war, and so forth, and they’ve committed to monetizing those solutions for their sponsors…”

John, Jr., blinked.  At seven years old these concepts were still just a bit too abstract for his innocent little mind.  He’d been hungry before, but he couldn’t understand how it could be a problem since food seemed so readily available.  And he didn’t think disease would have been a big deal because whenever he got too sick, he would be taken to the emergency room.  And war was something cool that his dad had showed him in movies.  But he was appropriately naïve for his age, like all boys his age should be.

“What we’re doing is quite revolutionary in order to solve the mortality problem and allow these brilliant minds and captains of industry to oversee their plan to the end and beyond.”

John slurped his beer, worn to the bone.  Mildred listened to the broadcast from the kitchen where the smells of a cooking dinner were all consuming.

“…and could you explain to our audience at home how you plan to conquer ‘the mortality problem’?”

“Time travel,” the good doctor said as he flashed a sparkling grin at the camera.

At the sound of the phrase, little Junior’s eyes widened and his ears perked up.  This was the sort of television that fired the imaginations of little boys the world into overdrive.

“Time travel?  How is that possible?”

“By going very far, very fast.  We’re going to blast them into space and they’re going to approach the speed of light on their way out of our solar system and galaxy.  Then they’ll sling shot back.  The closer to the speed of light they travel, the faster time on Earth goes by.  It’s the time dilation effect.  Their voyage will take about ten years for them, but we estimate about sixty years will have elapsed on Earth by the time they come back.”

Junior’s eyes were as wide as saucers and the hairs on his neck were raised on end.  “Dad, dad…” the boy turned to his father, excited.  “They’re flying to the future!”

“Eh?” the older John looked up, noticing the flashing images on the screen as Dr. Quentin introduced the audience at home to the rocket ship’s crew, the Earth’s first recorded Time Travelers.  The Captain, the crew, the science team, the business leaders, the support crew, all the families, there were a hundred and four in all.

“Each of them are heroes of the highest order, embarking on this ten year odyssey in the name of science, of profit, and in the name of humanity.”

Dr. Quentin cut in, taking the microphone from the reporter, “Make no doubts about it, Kurt, we are sending Earth’s most brilliant mind’s as a gift to the future.”

“And here we are, with one minute left.  You can see on your television the enormity of the rocket–”

“–it has to be that big, Kurt, in order to facilitate the nuclear blasts required to achieve near-speed-of-light travel.”

Both John and his son were completely entranced by the screen with a burning sensation of pride in their chest.  This was what humanity could achieve if we worked together.

“All our problems will be solved then, won’t they son?”

John, Jr., could only nod; his eyes could not leave the screen.

“While they’re gone, they’ll have a crew of ten working in the greenhouse on board, making sure the ship is well supplied with oxygen and fresh food for all hands on deck.”

“Do they have any livestock on board, Doctor?”

“Of course, they had access to some of the last remaining livestock resources on our planet.  There will be very little reprocessing for them, the ship was designed to be completely sustainable on their voyage.”

John, Sr. took long, deep gulps of his beer, paying an unusual amount of attention to the television.

“And why is it they decided to bring their families along, Doctor?”

“I think that’s rather obvious, Kurt.  They’ll be gone for sixty of our Earth years.  When they come back, they’ll be able to carry on their family lives as though they haven’t missed a beat.  They won’t return to be younger than their grandchildren.”

“Are we sure this will work, Doctor?  I mean, time travel sounds a bit far fetched…”

“The science is sound, Kurt.  The consensus of the scientific community is that this will work.  And I’ve seen the data and everything suggests complete success.”

Without realizing it, John, Jr., had been inching closer and closer to the television. In fact, he’d gotten so close that the letter boxed screen encompassed the entirety of his field of vision.  He was at a rapt state of complete attention.

“Why aren’t you going along, Dr. Quentin?”

“Well, we decided to hold one mind here in reserve on Earth, to shepherd the project along while they are gone on their momentous voyage.  There is a lot to do in the next 60 years if we’re going to fix the world, and their work needs to carry on.  They’ve given me the blueprint and I hope to get things off the ground before my time is up.  I’ll pass the torch to others beyond me, and they’ll pass that torch along until these brilliant minds return.”

“Fascinating, Doctor.  You really are onto something important here, sir.”

“I sure hope so.  We’re really putting all our eggs into one basket, so to speak.”

As the countdown to the launch began, neither John, Sr., his son realized they were holding their breath.

“Now, with thirty seconds left, we’re about to witness the launch of the fastest, most immense ship ever fired into the outer-reaches of space.”

“With twenty-five seconds left, I’m reminding myself that this is a moment we will all remember in the collective memory of society for years to come, like the first time we walked on the moon, or the September 11 attacks, or the annexation of Mexico.”

“Indeed, and it’s important to remind the audience that this is the first time humans will have left our galaxy.  But now we’re about to go to the countdown at mission control.”

“This is mission control.  We have launch in T-minus ten.

“Nine.

“Eight.

“Seven.

“Six.

“Five.

“Four.

“Three.

“Two.

“One.  We have lift off.”

In a brilliant flash of light and accompanied by the sound of rolling thunder, The Hope of Humanity was launched into space, hurtling toward the heavens.

“And there it is.  The Hope of Humanity has launched.  It’s a beautiful sight.  The rocket and all of its crew are just a few seconds from leaving the Earth’s atmosphere, not to return for another sixty years.”

And that’s when something went wrong.

With the eyes of the world watching, the rocket exploded into a fiery ball of shorn, metal debris, quite obviously killing anyone and anything inside.

The television feed cut back to the reporters, horrified looks nestled firmly on their faces.  “Uhh…  Ladies and gentlemen, it seems as though…  this is a terrible, terrible tragedy… The rocket has exploded, everyone inside is most likely dead.  The hope of the future exploded just before it left the Earth’s atmosphere.”

While Kurt and his colleagues struggled to swallow their tears and find words to describe the catastrophe that occurred on live television, little John, Jr., burst into deep, troubled sobs, trying hard to comprehend what he just saw.  A shivering thrill of excitement had run up his back, only to turn to tears and terror almost instantly.

He stood up and ran to the loving arms of his mother who walked into the room, wondering what the commotion was about.

“What happened?” she asked as she put her arms around her son while he cried into her apron.

For all the gruffness of his exterior, John was having a hard time holding back tears.  “The space ship…  It exploded…”

“Oh, dear,” she said.  The blood ran from her face as she realized that more than a hundred of the world’s brightest minds were lost in that single moment.

John couldn’t bear going to work the next day and neither could Mildred.  John, Jr. stayed home from school.  The entire world was in a state of shock and no one was faulted for closing their businesses for the day and curling up in the fetal position in front of their televisions, hoping to find some sense in such a senseless event.

For days and weeks and months and years after, pundits, scientists, and anyone in between would debate the cause of the explosion on TV, the news, and the internet, but the answer was pretty simple:  That’s just what happens when you live in a world without meaningful regulations and is run by force of profit motive: the lowest bidder always wins the contracts.

Bryan Young is a man of many talents and has worked across many different mediums. As a film producer, his last two films (This Divided State and Killer at Large) were released by The Disinformation Company and were called “filmmaking gold” by The New York Times. He’s also published comic books with Slave Labor Graphics and Image Comics. He’s a contributor for the Huffington Post and the founder and editor in chief of the geek news and review site Big Shiny Robot!

A political writer for a second rate, online news magazine, Michael Cobb is assigned by his editor to cover a sci-fi and fantasy convention in a bid to humiliate him.

Since Cobb can’t afford to turn down the job, he heads to Georgia and dives head first into the world of Griffin*Con, renowned the world over as the Mardis Gras of geek conventions. In Atlanta he finds a place that takes geeky debauchery to new heights: science fiction and fantasy, cosplay, booze, sex, comic books, drugs, slash fiction, and more.

This scene takes place on Cobb’s first day at the con:

My heart sank, killing the warmth of the drugs.  The urge for locomotion finally returned to my legs and I continued my sojourn to the elevator.

That feeling of flying high without a safety net returned as the elevator doors I’d finally reached opened with a sharp DING.

And there before me was a Darth Vader.

He was all in black, save the lights twinkling on his chest plate.  He had his laser sword swinging at his side and a boom box straight out of 1985 slung on his shoulder.

Jesus Christ almighty, I was in hell.

Run DMC was blaring, but Vader, with a thick, gloved hand, pressed pause on the tape player ceasing the music.  All was silent but for his asthmatic voice, “Party Vader ‘Vater.”

I had no idea what he said, but what else could I do? I stepped into the elevator with this evil, evil man and his entourage, dressed in costumes from half a different film fantasies.  Squeezing into the back, I thought I might just zone them out, staring out at the floors below.

As soon as the elevator doors closed, Vader once more resumed his assault on decency, filling the airwaves once more with the mingent sounds of early eighties hip-hop.  Then the rest of them joined in on the merriment.  It was as though I’d stepped into a cage for a dozen go-go dancers.

We made it up five floors before the doors opened and I wanted to scream out to those getting on, “Run!  Flee for your insignificant lives!”

But before I could say a word Vader beat me to the punch.  “Party Vader ‘Vater,” he would say, just after stopping the music.  I rolled those words back and forth in my head trying to make sense of them to no avail.

The doors closed, he restarted the music and the dance party began all over again.

By the time we finally reached the ninth floor, it was apparent to me that my heart might explode.  When the door opened I was clamoring to get out, but there was an entire boarding party of people standing in my way, expecting to get on.

They were all dressed in khaki jumpsuits, each of them had hexagonal white patches with rows of solid black lines embroidered along the inside.

It  was a shock to everyone, me most of all, when I shoved the Vader down to his knees, all while I was screaming like a madman. “Get out!  Run for your lives!  Get out while you still can!”

I made it out and hit the front most khaki clad bastard as with my shoulder as and it was as though I’d struck their ten-pin.  They all toppled over, sprawling across the floor.

That’s when my blood ran cold, as though ice was flowing through my veins, stopping me in my tracks.

He was there.

Looking at me, staring at the commotion I’d caused.

Who else but a jet-packed Abraham Lincoln?

He was coming out of a room some thirty feet away and with all of my hollering he had to notice me.  His copper-plated goggles whirred into focus, almost certainly narrowing in on me.  I wondered if his eyewear contained some sort of heads up display that had targeted me, painting a giant bulls eye on my forehead.

I didn’t have much time to actually count the different ways he could crush me with his augmented hands because I was already on my way back in to the elevator.  Clawing my way inside, I prayed that his stovepipe hat wasn’t brimmed with a steel blade, perfect for throwing like a discus and beheading me like some half-assed Bond villain from the sixties.

The Vader turned to me and, in his belabored voice, asked me, “What the fuck?”

Ignoring him, I made my way to the back of the elevator, hurrying my way past the dancers.  I went as far as I could and hit a glass wall, looking out over the lobby and turned to see if the steam powered Lincoln was still on my trail.

Lincoln seemed to have forgotten about me. He was using his meaty bionic arms to help up the guys dressed like janitors that I’d knocked over like brick houses in a hurricane.

Our eyes locked, Lincoln’s and mine.  This was a battle of titans and I was determined to stay as far away from the battlefield as possible.  Our eyes remained fixed until the doors slid shut and the dance party continued upwards.

The rap hits of the eighties began again and the walls shook from the shifting weight of the merrymakers.

The elevator shot upwards.

As I watched the dots on the floor below get smaller and smaller I was left in my own thoughts, considering the ever-expanding nature of the universe.  My brain hurt contemplating the idea that telescopes in space could see the edge of the big bang and that seeing light at immense distances was tantamount to time travel.  Perceiving the vastness of the universe while rising higher and higher into the upper bowels of the hotel made my head swim.

The intoxicating effects of the MDMA in my system were only exacerbating the ethereal pain throbbing in my head.  The people in the lobby below were shrinking, getting smaller and smaller, their lives more and more insignificant.  They were just like me.  Even though I was moving higher and higher, I was matching their insectoid size, contracting into my own original fetal state.  The galaxy was drifting further and further into the far reaches of space and our space telescopes were looking deeper and deeper into the depths of time and I could feel that swirl of emotional discomfort, like that first walk into a strange girl’s bedroom.

And there he was.

There in the void was the head of Lincoln, floating in the ectoplasm of the universe.  His mouth opened and consumed my small, floating, infantile form until I was what Vonnegut would call a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness.

And there was blackness.

And then after the blackness, there was nothing.

Bryan Young is a man of many talents and has worked across many different mediums. As a film producer, his last two films (This Divided State and Killer at Large) were released by The Disinformation Company and were called “filmmaking gold” by The New York Times. He’s also published comic books with Slave Labor Graphics and Image Comics. He’s a contributor for the Huffington Post and the founder and editor in chief of the geek news and review site Big Shiny Robot!

Existing in the liminal spaces of the cultural narrative Atlantis has been a magnet for alternative theories of history and a tool for those looking for a vision of unity in the evolutionary development of human culture. With the solidification of allegory during the Enlightenment Atlantis provided the perfect mythic capstone for rationalists in a quest for historical accuracy in their explorations of the possibilities of a perennial culture.

From the 17th century inquiries of Athanasius Kircher to the publication of Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882, the empirical search for Atlantis has provided an impetus for archaeological speculation on the unification of cultures across the globe. Where present facts show disunity, the idea of an advanced and far reaching civilization in prehistory gave momentum for theorists to develop complex models of cultural evolution using Atlantean civilization as the missing link.

[Read more]

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly — a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists — consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

I sent a screen capture to the author — who was appropriate amused and intrigued. But I doubt even he would argue the book is worth THAT much.

At first I thought it was a joke — a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each be offered for well over a million dollars. And the two sellers seemed not only legit, but fairly big time (over 8,000 and 125,000 ratings in the last year respectively). The prices looked random — suggesting they were set by a computer. But how did they get so out of whack?

Read More: it is NOT Junk

The interview includes cranks calls, ideas on the end of the world, the cowardly publishing industry and how Frey is bypassing it, art, and the last time he prayed:

Felix Dennis, the shaggy British publishing tycoon, poet and author, always seems to have wise words about getting and being rich.

In his first book, “How to Get Rich,” Dennis posited that anyone with $2 million to $4 million in assets is merely “comfortably poor.” For him, it takes $150 million to be truly rich.

He also delivered some memorable (and very true) one-liners like: “the richer you are and the more financial advisers you employ, the less likelihood there is that you can ever discover what you are really worth.”

Of spending, he wrote: “If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it.”

Dennis has a new book, called “The Narrow Road: A Brief Guide to the Getting of Money,” which is more how-to than the memoir of “How to Get Rich.” Most of the book is a life map for entrepreneurs. But he also dispenses some advice on being rich–and what money doesn’t buy.

There is happiness, of course. But Dennis writes that wealth also breeds a kind of permanent malcontent.

Large wealth, he says, “is certain to impose a degree of disharmony and irritation, if not from the stresses and strains involved in obtaining and protecting it, then from the guilt that inevitably accompanies its arrival.”

Poverty is even less fun, of course. But he says “the rich are not a contented tribe. The demands from others to share their wealth become so tiresome, so insistent, they often decide they must insulate themselves. Insulation eventually breeds a mild form of paranoia.”

He says the only people the rich can truly trust are the people they knew before they became wealthy.

“As with the onset of sudden celebrity, for the newly rich, the world often becomes a darker, narrower, less generous place; a paradox that elicits scant sympathy, but is nonetheless true.”…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

It may seem that the word “myth” has lost its meaning to us as a psychological or spiritual term. No, the situation is more drastic than that. Myth has become the opposite of fact, something that is generally accepted but untrue; “it is a myth that reading by flashlight ruins your eyesight.” The popular television show on the Discovery Channel, Myth Busters, uses this definition, attempting to disprove “myths” with something vaguely resembling science. The myths of antiquity are looked upon as quaint stories, despite the fact that they have shaped our cultural history. It is neatly overlooked that myths remain at the center of the bloody stage of modern religious, national, economic or ideological dynamics, not to mention our personal and everyday lives.

The fact that the word “myth” has become synonymous with untruth belies an underlying shift in the Western epistemological focus over the past several thousand years. This is clearly a sweeping generalization, and in these we are also inventing a myth, but bear with me. We have become, in this juncture of time and culture, a great deal more concerned with verifiable facts and less concerned with existential experiences which have little relation to fact. This progression ties into the Enlightenment focus on rationality and the scientific method, but perhaps more pervasively, we can see this following from the needs of industrialization.

This shift, though not concocted as some conspiratorial scheme, does serve a purpose. As we will see, fundamental business principles rely on actions that are easy to reproduce, and which produce similar (if not identical) results with each repetition. This cultural homogeneity promotes an economy of scale that is absolutely necessary for so-called big business. Similarly, the myths of a culture must ultimately serve the best interest of industry. The evolution of such co-related myths is often symbiotic, for instance, it is through the spread of industry as the backbone of a civilization that myths which better serve it spread. These in turn effect the further growth and spread of an industrialized infrastructure.

(Read full article on Weaponized)