…maybe we all are.

What most skeptics ignore is the fact that Remote Viewing was SUCCESSFULLY used by the military. And most experiments offer statistical proof of psychic ability, as well. Just because the talking heads on the news scoff at the idea doesn’t mean it’s not true.

In 1995, the US Congress asked two independent scientists to assess whether the $20 million that the government had spent on psychic research had produced anything of value. And the conclusions proved to be somewhat unexpected.

Professor Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California, discovered that remote viewers were correct 34 per cent of the time, a figure way beyond what chance guessing would allow.

She says: “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, you have to conclude that certain psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing, have been well established.

“The results are not due to chance or flaws in the experiments.”

Of course, this doesn’t wash with sceptical scientists.

Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing.

He says: “I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do.

“If I said that there is a red car outside my house, you would probably believe me.

“But if I said that a UFO had just landed, you’d probably want a lot more evidence.

“Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don’t have that evidence.”

Could there be proof to the theory that we’re ALL psychic?

…well, Ben Franklin shocked himself with a bolt of lightning to see its conductive properties, so I suppose a guy carving himself up to turn himself into a cyborg isn’t all that far out. It’s usually people like that, that end up changing science for the better.

Let’s just hope he doesn’t seriously hurt himself.

I’m sort of inured to pain by this point. Anesthetic is illegal for people like me, so we learn to live without it; I’ve made scalpel incisions in my hands, pushed five-millimeter diameter needles through my skin, and once used a vegetable knife to carve a cavity into the tip of my index finger. I’m an idiot, but I’m an idiot working in the name of progress: I’m Lepht Anonym, scrapheap transhumanist. I work with what I can get.

Sadly, they don’t do it like that on TV. The art of improving the human is shiny and bright in the media. You see million-euro cryogenics policies and hormonal life-extension regimes that only the elite can afford. You see the hypothesis of an immortal silicon body to house your artificially-enhanced mind. You could buy that too, maybe, if you sold most of your organic body and the home it lives in. But you can do something to bring it down a notch: homebrewing.

Scrapheap Transhumanism

…you mean acting like a bunch of Type-A, self-centered assholes concerned with instant gratification and riches and bitches and the timing of your next orgasm leads to a culture prone to depression? My mind, she is blown.

In other words, a genetic vulnerability to depression is much more likely to be realized in a Western culture than an East Asian culture that is more about we than me-me-me.

The study coming out of the growing field of cultural neuroscience takes a global look at mental health across social groups and nations.

Depression, research overwhelmingly shows, results from genes, environment and the interplay between the two. One of the most profound ways that people across cultural groups differ markedly, cultural psychology demonstrates, is in how they think of themselves.

“People from highly individualistic cultures like the United States and Western Europe are more likely to value uniqueness over harmony, expression over agreement, and to define themselves as unique or different from the group,” said Joan Chiao, the lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

‘Culture Of We’ Buffers Genetic Tendency To Depression

…well, perhaps. However I hesitate to put any more power to control merchandise, let alone food, in the hands of this evil corporation. Anyone who’s worked for this company will tell you – nothing good comes out of it.

He was right. In the grocery section of the Raynham supercenter, 45 minutes south of Boston, I had trouble believing I was in a Walmart. The very reasonable-looking produce, most of it loose and nicely organized, was in black plastic bins (as in British supermarkets, where the look is common; the idea is to make the colors pop). The first thing I saw, McIntosh apples, came from the same local orchard whose apples I’d just seen in the same bags at Whole Foods. The bunched beets were from Muranaka Farm, whose beets I often buy at other markets—but these looked much fresher. The service people I could find (it wasn’t hard) were unfailingly enthusiastic, though I did wonder whether they got let out at night.

During a few days of tasting, the results were mixed. Those beets handily beat (sorry) ones I’d just bought at Whole Foods, and compared nicely with beets I’d recently bought at the farmers’ market. But packaged carrots and celery, both organic, were flavorless. Organic bananas and “tree ripened” California peaches, already out of season, were better than the ones in most supermarkets, and most of the Walmart food was cheaper—though when I went to my usual Whole Foods to compare prices for local produce, they were surprisingly similar (dry goods and dairy products were considerably less expensive at Walmart).

The Great Grocery Smackdown

…is coming!

Step one towards the Singularity, check. This opens up all kinds of doors, eventually allowing us to install computers in our brains. A scientific revolutions would then take place.

This research is the first step in examining how memories create neurological structures in the brain, and how the brain stores specific pieces of data. The researchers hope that this will lead to a better understanding of diseases and disorders that affect the brain such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, stroke, and brain injury.

Warwick comments, “This new research is tremendously exciting as firstly the biological brain controls its own moving robot body, and secondly it will enable us to investigate how the brain learns and memorizes its experiences. This research will move our understanding forward of how brains work, and could have a profound effect on many areas of science and medicine.”

Using Human “Wetware” to Control Robots

…cannot be seperated from the body.

What more proof do we need? Here we have clear evidence that the mind can influence what happens in the body. They two cannot be seperated. Mind, body, soul, are all one.

Albeit, the study involves only 15 healthy male volunteers with a mean age of 25 years and a range of 21 to 30 years. A series of systematic and highly suggestive tools were used to trick the volunteers into believing they had been administered a potent analgesic during the manipulation and test phase of the experiment. The suggestions involved the use of color coding for the fake creams and verbal suggestions relating to the anticipation of pain including the introduction of extreme heat on the forearm of the volunteers.

An MRI was utilized to scan the dorsal horn region of the spinal cord during the test phase of the experiment. In analyzing the findings, the Eippert team of scientists caution the size of experimental group may have influenced the study. However, the physical manifestations of the deceptive suggestions including “fake” creams, packaging and verbal suggestions could be detected on the fMRI as reducing pain.

In Between Mind-Body Split: Chronic Pain Relief

…didn’t create the Heavens and the Earth?

This grew to be my problem with Christianity, when I was still Christian. You have an ancient text written in several dead languages, with no clear authorship and no way to cleanly translate it. Anyone who watches Japanese Anime will tell you, the translation almost always leaves something out of the original Japanese. How can we truly know what the Bible says?

Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”.

The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth”.

God is not the Creator, claims academic

…threaten the established order.

We have already seen this, in one view. Corporations are legally individuals and they’re working towards, if they haven’t already, taking over our democratic institutions. After all, while FEMA was busy scratching it’s balls and and wondering what all the fuss on TV was about, it was corporations who were already shipping water and food and supplies down to hurricane-ravaged Louisiana. They had the power and the logistics in place to do what our cumbersome government could not.

One source superempowerment will be from winner take all economics and parasitic predation (see below for more on this term).  The top 0.01% of income earners will see have already seen their wealth accelerate faster than ever before (particularly now that their downside risk is backstopped by the coffers of morally weak nation-states).

Another driver of superempowerment stems from an ability to use systems disruption to cause economic damage.  Individuals that manage open source guerrilla networks — connectors/networks/coaches — have the ability generate economic damage at least as large (if not larger) as the most elite of income earners.  For example, the anti-entrepreneur ‘Jomo Gbomo’ manages the Nigerian guerrilla network MEND.  This network disrupts oil production by BP Shell, Chevron, and AGIP as a means to coerce the corrupt regime in Lagos into good governance.  ’Jomo’ been able to generate damage worth nearly 2x Bill Gates has generated in income.

Random Thoughts on SuperEmpowered Individuals

God Damn it’s awesome to F****** swear! Didn’t need a scientific study to know that, but this is interesting nonetheless.

In fact, so good that he wondered whether there might be something to the power of profanity—a curiosity that only increased when his wife, while participating in the miracle that is childbirth, swore like a drunken sailor.

So Stevens looked into it. And he discovered that uttering profanity may actually make one better able to withstand pain. In a study published in this month’s issue of NeuroReport, he and his colleagues put that theory to the test. They asked participants to submerge their nondominant hand in ice-cold water for as long as possible (or for a maximum of 10 minutes) while either repeating a swear word or a neutral word (one that describes a table). The volume and pace used for swear words and neutral words were kept similar. Then, the researchers compared those who swore and those who didn’t to determine the effect on the length of time that participants were able to keep their hands submerged.

Subjects who swore managed an average of 40 seconds, or about a third longer than those who didn’t—evidence that a few well-placed word bombs of your choosing actually has a protective effect.

Dirty Words, Filthy Kids, and Other Surprisingly Good-for-You Vices

…is not for all of us.

Boy, I woulda LOVED to get these two in the sleep lab to see their brainwaves.

EARLIER this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.

Both had been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder called multiple system atrophy. According to the report’s authors, Roberto Vetrugno and colleagues from the University of Bologna, Italy, the disease had damaged the pair’s brains to such an extent that they had entered status dissociatus, a kind of twilight zone in which the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness completely break down.

Are you asleep? Exploring the mind’s twilight zone

Apologies for the long delay. Life got in the way, but I decided to kick life’s ass and get back to doing what I do best – sitting in front of the computer broke while eating pizza!

To kick things off, instead of the science-y stuff I usually do, I’m going to post a vid from youtube from what has quickly become my favorite show, Better off Ted. Sadly, it looks like the show is in jeopardy as they put it on hiatus without finishing the season, so I want to do what I can to further interest in this amazing, hilarious show!

By the way, this is very much NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Do not play around your boss, little ones, or Sarah Palin. None of them have a sense of humor and they wouldn’t get it even if you explained it to them.

PS: it may help to read the episode summary from The Impertenance of Communicating.

…yes, it’s as complicated as it sounds.

Still, the field is real and holds interesting promise for humanity. We tread ever closer to becoming biomancers, masters of our own biology. No sickness, no pain, finely-tuned brains…the future looks promising.

In the summer of 2007, a team of Stanford graduate students dropped a mouse into a plastic basin. The mouse sniffed the floor curiously. It didn’t seem to care that a fiber-optic cable was threaded through its skull. Nor did it seem to mind that the right half of its motor cortex had been reprogrammed.

One of the students flipped a switch and intense blue light shone through the cable into the mouse’s brain, illuminating it with an eerie glow. Instantly, the mouse began running in counterclockwise circles as though hell-bent on winning a murine Olympics.

Then the light went off, and the mouse stopped. Sniffed. Stood up on its hind legs and looked directly at the students as if to ask, “Why the hell did I just do that?” And the students whooped and cheered like this was the most important thing they’d ever seen.

Because it was the most important thing they’d ever seen. They’d shown that a beam of light could control brain activity with great precision. The mouse didn’t lose its memory, have a seizure, or die. It ran in a circle. Specifically, a counterclockwise circle.

Algae and Light Help Injured Mice Walk Again

…were a little more real, we’d get what you see at this link.

NSFW, so keep the kiddies occupied for a few minutes.

If Cartoons Were More Like The Real World

…is preparing for it’s radical, tubular, badass, post-apocalyptic, creamy, spicy, sugar-sweet comeback!  In the meantime I’mma pimp out my good buddy Gamer Phreak’s pet project, The Stoa.  It’s a community for everyone, whether your bag is chattering on about how badass Master Chief is and how much you hated the ending to Halo Three or if you’re an Otaku who fantasizes about a three-way with Sakura Haruno and Hinata Hyuga. Sign up, check it out, and hit Chaos Seeds back ’cause 2010 is going to be a great year!

Sow the seeds of Chaos, that possibilities may flow,

Lord Khaos

…is on hold while I move. But we’ll be back with all the craziness you know and love within the next few weeks.

Sow the seeds of chaos, that probabilities may flow,

Lord Khaos