Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

…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

…is near.

Perhaps. I remain unconvinced we’ll transcend all of humanity’s problem within my lifetime…but then, that may be the cynic in me talking.

By the time Al Gore released his Oscar winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth“, few skeptics were left that the world’s climate was changing. Now, Ray Kurzweil — one of the most prolific inventors of the 20th century -  is releasing an eminent documentary of his own.

Many futurists, including a growing band of leading scientists, predict that by 2045 we will have multiplied the intelligence of the human-machine civilization a billion-fold and reached the Singularity.

Whereas personal computers, videogames and cellphones were the emerging technologies of the 1970’s and 1980’s, today’s include mind-reading headsets, organic computing and nanotechnology.

The rest is here.

…are so awesome. Particularly when they’re taken from images in nature.

…for Planet Earth. Man, where’s Voltron when you need him?

An unexpected, thick layer of solar particles inside Earth’s magnetic field suggests there are huge breaches in our planet’s solar defenses, scientists said.

But the winds also trigger storms that can interfere with satellites’ power sources, endanger spacewalkers, and even knock out power grids on Earth.

Read the rest here.

…the Apocalypse is near!

Two sunspots are visible on our star’s face for the first time in more than a year, possibly ending an unexpected lull in solar activity.

Solar flares rise and fall on an 11-year cycle, so scientists thought sunspot activity would pick up some time in 2008. It didn’t. And this year has been quiet, too. No sunspots have been visible on the sun for 80 percent of the days this year.

Sunspot activity is correlated with the total amount of energy we receive from the sun. If the sun’s activity were to change remarkably, it would have an influence on global climate. So, in the context of climate change, the fact that the current solar minimum has been the longest and deepest in more than a century has been of special interest.

In May, a big sunspot seemed to augur a return to normal, but it faded away and sunspotless days returned. The latest activity might not mark the end of the solar minimum, however. People have been counting sunspots since Galileo first observed one in the early 17th century. Through the 28 documented cycles, stretching from 1745 to today, some variation in cycle length has been observed.

That’s why NASA’s former chief sunspot watcher, Michael Kaiser, told us earlier this year that the minimum was “not out of the extreme ordinary.”

Read the rest here.

…if Tyler Durden would laugh at this.

I bet he would, actually.

…the Soviets were DANGEROUS. And very, very cool.

Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It’s March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.

“The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” he says. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.” He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.
Read the rest here. And tremble, Capitalist Dog, the Red Menace shall rise again!

…from the ever-brilliant John Robb.

What to remember about 9/11.  The Chicago Boyz blog points out, correctly (I made roughly the same point in Brave New War), that the only portion of the American national security system that actually worked on 9/11 was…. drum roll please….  the formation of spontaneous civilian militias.  From the counter-attack on the one plane that didn’t  hit its intended target to militias that evacuated people in NYC.  The hideously expensive agencies and departments did nothing (which is one of the reasons, as perverse as it sounds, we went to war in Iraq:  to decisively prove the utility of these agencies and departments before a global audience).

Read the whole thing here.

…is a sham, and a threat to all our well-being. But since it’s the norm I guess we can just live with it.

I finally got around to reading Paul Krugman’s takedown of modern economics, which is a lucid dissection of his own field. His core argument is that economists made the old Keatsian error, mistaking a beautiful theory for the truth:

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

That’s a lovely explanation – one might even call it pretty – but it strikes me as a little too neat. The larger problem, as I see it, is a false certainty in knowledge, which goes well beyond mere aesthetics. (The beautiful models make it easier for us to slip into certainty, but they are merely one of many factors. The history of science, after all, is filled with ugly models that persisted for centuries – just look at epicycles.) This certainty, I think, stems from our optimistic narratives of scientific progress, in which human knowledge, through the miracle of experimentation and peer-review, travels in a straight line from utter mystery to a unifying theory.

Read the rest here.

…is caused by not putting the fork down!

Seriously, did we need research on this? Did we have to spend thousands, or perhaps even millions of dollars on figuring out that an  overabundance of calories or an underabundance of calories causes either starvation or obesity?

Geeze. I’m all for the scientific method, but come on, do we have to quantify common sense?

The risk of becoming obese is 2.5 times higher for those who have double copies of the best known risk gene for overweight and obesity. However, this is only true if the fat consumption is high. A low fat diet neutralizes the harmful effects of the gene.

“This means that the critical factor is what you eat. At least in the case of the FTO gene, the most important obesity gene identified so far” says Emily Sonestedt, member of Marju Orho-Melanders research group at Lund University Diabetes Centre.

She is the main author of a study that is currently being published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Several studies have found that exercise diminishes the effect of the risk gene but this is the first study where the effect of the gene has been studied in relation to food habits. The risk variant of the FTO gene (fat mass and obesity associated) is common in the general population. 17 percent have double copies, meaning they have inherited it from both parents. Another 40 percent have a single copy.

“It is difficult to calculate how much people eat with any certainty, which is one of the reasons why no one has done this before. But we have good data” says Emily Sonestedt.

Read the rest here.

…than the picture in this link is the discussion below.

Athiest are no less guilty of hijacking quotes and historical figures than Christian Apologists – and both believe it to be the utmost evil when one does it to the other.

…of course,  we hear at Chaos Seeds endorse neither side because both are correct, and both are wrong. But that’s an article for another day.

Are they both full of it, perhaps?

Watch as Carrie Fisher delivers several deserved backhands to the good Mr. Lucas.

My bother and I always go crazy during the Easter months because that means our favorite confection – Cadbury Eggs – are sold in stores. And here we have a genius (or a guy with simply WAY too much time on his hands) figuring out the perfect way to destroy them.

…er, I mean, how to turn things invisible!

Xiang Zhang remembers the day he recognized that something extraordinary was happening around him. It was in 2000, at a workshop organized by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to explore a tantalizing idea: that radical new kinds of engineered materials might enable us to extend our control over matter in seemingly magical ways.

The goal at hand, changing how objects interact with light, seemed at first blush to be routine; people had been manipulating visible light with mirrors and lenses and prisms nearly forever. But Zhang, a materials scientist then at the University of California at Los Angeles, knew those applications were limited. Based overwhelmingly on a single material, glass, the technologies were restricted by the laws of optics described in standard physics texts. The engineers in the room hoped to smash through those barriers with materials and technologies never conceived of before. The proposals included crafting what amounts to an array of billions of tiny relays; in essence, the relays would capture light and send it back out. Depending on the specific design of the array, the light would be bent, reflected, or skewed in different ways.

What could you do with a tool like that? An amazing amount, Zhang soon discovered. For one thing, you could render objects invisible.

The rest is here.