Archive for April, 2009

Come along you ‘hep cats’ and ‘lol’ along with us and watch this right-nifty flick!

…someone please shoot me I’m loosing my mind…

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

Or, er, actually, it could have all been done by hand.

I had a teacher who once said that we tend to underestimate the ingenuity and strength of ancient people’s ability to create wonders. I totally agree – no telekinesis or UFOs were needed to build that wonder – just simple human brain power. (Well, that and a little muscle.)

Stolen from Mac Tonnie’s Posthuman Blues, which he borrowed from Paranormal Musings.

…or:

Magicians utilize holes in our perception to fool us into thinking they’re preforming magical acts, when in fact it’s all fake.

But then Teller pivots so the audience can see him from the other side. He goes through the same set of motions, except this time everything is different: Much of what just transpired, the audience now perceives, was a charade, a carefully orchestrated stack of lies. He doesn’t stamp out the first cigarette—he palms it, then puts it in his ear. There is no second cigarette; it’s a pencil stub. The smoke from the first butt is real, but the lighter used on the pencil is actually a flashlight. Yet the illusion is executed so perfectly that every step looks real, even when you’re shown that it is not.

Penn and Teller demonstrate the seven basic principles of magic.

The trick is called Looks Simple, and the point is that even a puff on a cigarette, closely examined, can disintegrate into smoke and mirrors. “People take reality for granted,” Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. “Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn’t mean it is simple.”

The rest is here.

Important talk about our biotech future.

It can’t come soon enough, in my opinion.

Jim Gaffigan on bacon.

Let the hilarity commence.

Hahahahaha!…

XKCD delivers uncomfortable truth. (Take that, Cult of Kurzwiel!)

http://xkcd.com/568/

Moving him one step closer to world domination, my buddy Gamer Phreak over at Video Game Life has successfully completed a biotechnological experiment involving insemination of a willing female partner for the purposes of fielding an army of genetic clones.

This is the face of your future oppressor. FEAR THEM!

(Congrats, buddy.)

Not sure if this is the most brilliant thing that’s ever been invented, but I do have to admit that my curiosity is piqued.

P.S.: Actual, real article coming soon! Perhaps…sooner than you think!*laughs manically*

A breath of fresh air. If only there was hope for even a third of these to be implimented…

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

The rest is here.

This may very well be Dark Roasted Blend’s best article yet. A taste:

Another gem from John Robb:

Essentially, it shows how the post-WW2 social contract that linked productivity improvements to median income gains was shattered in 1974.  Since then, the value created by a doubling of productivity went to global capital markets instead of doubling incomes for employees.  Nominally, this decision was made under the assumption that this money would be more efficiently allocated by the global financial network than individuals.  In reality, it was likely parasitic predation by a relatively small network that found out how to co-opt the economic system’s core functions, in a process that is identical to how cancer co-opts the host’s systems of cellular metabolism to grow rapidly (for more on how this works, read my earlier brief on “Bow-Tie Control Systems“).

The rest is here.

…now has a neurological correlate. Everything has a neurological correlate.

Experts have pinpointed the part of the brain that guides people when they are battling with difficult moral dilemmas, according to a study.

Highly-sophisticated brain scans show that the response is linked to certain areas usually associated with primitive emotions of sex, fear and anger.

…

Professor Jeste admitted the possibility that wisdom and free will are based on the make-up of someone’s brain rather than metaphysics is unsettling.

But he said: ‘Knowledge of the underlying mechanisms in the brain could potentially lead to developing interventions for enhancing wisdom.’

The rest is here.

A thought – we can induce religious experiences with magnets, alter our perceptions with drugs, and can even give the average person idiot-savant abilities.

The nervous system is the conduit of spirituality.

Seems Disney got into the habit of plagiarizing itself, rather than everyone else.