Archive for August, 2009

…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.

…is a steampunk band that mixes rock, techno, and classical in their music. Sound original? Good, because it is. Watch the vid then go buy their albums; the band’s self-employed so they need our support!

…is in trouble! Quick! Call Batman!

Opinions differ on how long the Cavendish can survive the new onslaught, and on the best way to tackle the threat. This time, unfortunately, there is no obvious back-up variety waiting in the wings. So far, banana science has provided scant few approaches for improving disease resistance. One method involves the traditional techniques of selective breeding: although banana plants are clones, very occasionally they can be persuaded to produce seeds through a painstaking process of hand pollination.

Only one fruit in three hundred will produce a seed, and of these seeds only one in three will have the correct chromosomal configuration to allow germination. The seeds are laboriously extracted by straining tons of mashed fruit through fine meshes. Research stations in commercial banana growing countries, such as Honduras, engage large squads of banana sex workers for such tasks, and to screen the new plant varieties for favourable characteristics.

The rest of this Damn Interesting article is here.

…prefer men who are taken? DEAR GOD ALERT THE INTERNETS! WHAT  A REVELATION!

Unknown to the participants, everyone was offered a fictitious candidate partner who had been tailored to match their interests exactly. The photograph of “Mr Right” was the same for all women participants, as was that of the ideal women presented to the men. Half the participants were told their ideal mate was single, and the other half that he or she was already in a romantic relationship.

“Everything was the same across all participants, except whether their ideal mate was already attached or not,” says Burkley.

The most striking result was in the responses of single women. Offered a single man, 59 per cent were interested in pursuing a relationship. But when he was attached, 90 per cent said they were up for the chase.

The rest of the completely non-surprising article is here.

…is a douchebag.

Are any of us really surprised by the contents of this article? Despite my agreeing with much of Republican politics, how they operate disgusts me beyond mortal comprehension.

WASHINGTON — Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, asserts in a new book that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he suspected was an effort to influence the vote.

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

Read the rest here, but brace yourself – you’ll be completely unsurprised.

…were really pretty cool.

Found this in an old email I had been saving, thought I’d share it to make alla-y’alls nostalgic and such.

Just because you were born in ‘97 doesn’t mean you’re a 90’s kid.

It’s not like you could remember the original Simpsons. I am sorry but three conscious years of the 90’s just wont cut it.

You’re a 90’s kid if:

You can finish this [ice ice _ _ _ _ ]

You remember watching Doug, Ren & Stimpy, Pinky and the Brain, Bobby’s World, Felix the cat, The Tick…

AAAAAAAH Real Monsters!

You’ve ever ended a sentence with the word “PSYCHE!”

You just cant resist finishing this . . . “Iiiiiiin west philidelphia born and raised . . .”

You remember TGIF, Step by Step, Family Matters, Dinosaurs, and Boy Meets World.

You remember when it was actually worth getting up early
on a Saturday to watch cartoons.

You got super excited when it was Oregon Trail day in computer class at school.

You remember reading “Goosebumps”

You took plastic cartoon lunch boxes to school.

You still get the urge to say “NOT” after (almost) every sentence . . . not

If you remember seeing hot tub bubbles make bubbly sounds before every music video on VH1.

when everything was settled by rock paper scissors..or bubble gum bubble gum in a dish…eeny meeny miney mo…and even better daddy had a donkey inky binky bonky.

You used to listen to the radio all day long just to record your FAVORITE song of ALL time.

“Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?” was both a game and a TV game show.

Captain Planet. He’s a Hero.

You knew that Kimberly, the pink ranger, and Tommy, the green ranger, were meant to be together.

You remember when Super Nintendos and Sega Genesis became popular.

You always wanted to send in a tape to America’s Funniest Home Videos . . . but never taped anything funny.

You remember watching Home Alone 1, 2 , and 3 . . . and tried to pull the pranks on “intruders”

You remember watching The Magic School Bus, Wishbone, and Reading Rainbow on PBS.

You remember when Yo-Yos were cool.

You remember those Where’s Waldo books.

You watched the gladiators on Friday nights

You remember eating Warheads.

You remember watching the 1st Batman, Aladdin, Ninja Turtles, and 3 Ninjas movies.

You remember Ring Pops.

You remember drinking Surge and Tang.

If you remember when everything was “da BOMB!”

When they made the new lunchables so that you could make pizza AND tacos.

You remember boom boxes vs. cd players

Making those little paper fortune cookie things, and then predicting your life with them.

You played and/or collected “Pogs”

You had at least one Tamagotchi, GigaPet, or Nano and brought it everywhere.

. . . Furbies.

Saved By The Bell was the coolest show ever!

You haven’t always had a computer, and it was cool to have the internet.

And Windows 95 was the best.

You watched the original cartoons of Rugrats, Power Rangers, and Ninja Turtles.

Michael Jordan was a king.

YIKES pencils and erasers were the stuff!

All your school supplies were “Lisa Frank” brand.

You remember when the new Beanie Babies and Talking Elmo were always sold out.

You collected those Beanie Babies.

Mortal Kombat was awesome–the game and the movie

Carebears

Gak was the coolest stuff invented.

Lambchop’s song never ended.

The old dollar bills.

Silver dollars, which were cool to have.

You remember a time before the WB.

You collected all the Troll dolls

You had to read Weekly Reader’s in class.

If you even know what an original walkman is.

You remember wanting to sit on the orange Nickelodeon couch.

You’ve gotten creeped out by “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”

You know the Macarena by heart.

“Talk to the hand” . . . enough said

You always said, “Then why don’t you marry it!”

You remember trying to collect all 150 original Pokemon cards but never could and if you did you thought you were all that!

You remember Highlight’s magazine.

You know the significance of the number 23.

You went to McDonald’s to play in the playplace.

You remember playing on merry go rounds at the playground.

Before the MySpace frenzy . . .

Before the Internet & text messaging . . .

Before the drama….

Before Sidekicks & iPods . . .

Before MIKE JONES . . .

Before PlayStation2 or X-BOX . . .

Before Spongebob . . .

Back when you put off the 5 hours of homework you had every night.

When light up sneakers were cool.

When you rented VHS tapes, not DVDs.

When gas was $0.95 a gallon & Caller ID was a new thing.

When we recorded stuff on VCRs.

When we called the radio station to request songs to hear off of our walkmans.

When gameboy was a brick.

When girls put sun-In on there hair for highlights

You did MASH to figure out your future

When you weren’t cool unless you had a Starter jacket.

Way back.

Before we realized all this would eventually disappear.

Who would have thought you’d miss the 90’s so much!!!!!

…is FRIGGIN’ HILARIOUS!!

Wait, you say you’ve never seen the show? Allow me to demonstrate the hilarity.

Ah, not enough? How about some bloopers?

…is the crack of the 21st Century!

OK, well, not completely. But he does raise valid points about how the brain rewards us when we find pleasant information that we like. I personally wonder, as the internet becomes more and more ingrained into our lives, how serious this addiction can be. One wonders how this could relate to gaming addiction as well, since similar neural networks would be at play.

That said, I think it’s worth qualifying this “information equals crack” meme. The brain, as we all know, is not an indiscriminate curiosity machine. Most people don’t want to know more about quantum mechanics, or the actual details of health care reform, or what’s happening in the Afghanistan presidential campaign. In other words, our craving for news tends towards the local and the personal – our curiosity is circumscribed. Why might this be? The answer, I think, has to do with the molecular details of how information triggers rewards.

This isn’t the post for another summary of computational models of dopamine activity – see here and here, if you’re interested – but suffice to say that our brain cells are finely tuned to want more information about stuff which they already know. In essence, these cells work by constantly striving to reduce their “prediction-error signal,” which is the gap between what these cells expect to happen and what actually occurs. If a monkey has been trained to get a squirt of juice everytime a bell is rung, then these dopaminergic cells quickly learn that the bell predicts the sweet reward. As a result, they want more information about that specific rewarding stimulus. What, for instance, predicts the bell? Maybe the scientist flicks a switch before ringing the bell? Or maybe he scratches his nose? Or maybe he simply enters the room? What numerous experiments have found is that our dopamine neurons aren’t interested in responding to the reward itself – instead, they want to find the first reliable bit of information that predicts the reward. This is why we crave new facts: they are means of updating our old facts, of extending our cognitive models forward in time.

The rest is here.

…is a simulation. Cue the ‘Matrix’ soundtrack!

At today’s rates of compression, you could download the entire 3 billion digits of your DNA onto about four CDs. That 3-gigabyte genome sequence represents the prime coding information of a human body — your life as numbers. Biology, that pulsating mass of plant and animal flesh, is conceived by science today as an information process. As computers keep shrinking, we can imagine our complex bodies being numerically condensed to the size of two tiny cells. These micro-memory devices are called the egg and sperm. They are packed with information.

That life might be information, as biologists propose, is far more intuitive than the corresponding idea that hard matter is information as well. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesn’t feel like we knocked into information. But that’s the idea many physicists are formulating.

The spooky nature of material things is not new. Once science examined matter below the level of fleeting quarks and muons, it knew the world was incorporeal. What could be less substantial than a realm built out of waves of quantum probabilities? And what could be weirder? Digital physics is both. It suggests that those strange and insubstantial quantum wavicles, along with everything else in the universe, are themselves made of nothing but 1s and 0s. The physical world itself is digital.

The scientist John Archibald Wheeler (coiner of the term “black hole”) was onto this in the ’80s. He claimed that, fundamentally, atoms are made up of of bits of information. As he put it in a 1989 lecture, “Its are from bits.” He elaborated: “Every it — every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, bits. What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions.”

To get a sense of the challenge of describing physics as a software program, picture three atoms: two hydrogen and one oxygen. Put on the magic glasses of digital physics and watch as the three atoms bind together to form a water molecule. As they merge, each seems to be calculating the optimal angle and distance at which to attach itself to the others. The oxygen atom uses yes/no decisions to evaluate all possible courses toward the hydrogen atom, then usually selects the optimal 104.45 degrees by moving toward the other hydrogen at that very angle. Every chemical bond is thus calculated.

If this sounds like a simulation of physics, then you understand perfectly, because in a world made up of bits, physics is exactly the same as a simulation of physics. There’s no difference in kind, just in degree of exactness. In the movie The Matrix, simulations are so good you can’t tell if you’re in one. In a universe run on bits, everything is a simulation.

The rest is here.

…is the name of the game.

• Stagnant incomes.  Median per capita income has stagnated for 30 years and is now headed lower. The only increase in household income came from adding the income of a spouse (that typically gets less than the male income earner). The value generated by mighty productivity increases over the last thirty years was routed to the financial markets (aka casinos) and not shared with American workers.
• Increased fixed expenses.  The costs and amount spent on variable consumption have fallen (clothing, food, autos, etc.) over the last thirty years — which puts the lie to the “over consumption” charge.  Instead, the median cost of housing, health, and the costs of work (childcare, two cars, etc.  brought on due to a need for sending two people to work) have skyrocketed with very little improvement in the quantity or value of the goods/services received.

The rest is here.

…is on the hate list.

They are stepping forward — from Dallas and Denver, Portland, Las Vegas, Montana — talking about what happened, to them and their friends, during their years in the Church of Scientology.

Jackie Wolff wept as she recalled the chaotic night she was ordered to stand at a microphone in the mess hall and confess her “crimes” in front of 300 fellow workers, many jeering and heckling her.

Gary Morehead dredged up his recollection of Scientology leader David Miscavige punishing venerable church leaders by forcing them to live out of tents for days, wash with a garden hose and use an open latrine.

Steve Hall replayed his memory of a meeting when Miscavige grabbed the heads of two church executives and knocked them together. One came away with a bloody ear.

Mark Fisher remembered precisely what he told Miscavige after the punches stopped and Fisher touched his head, looked at his palm and saw blood.

These and other former Scientology staffers are talking now, inspired and emboldened by the raw revelations of four defectors from the church’s executive ranks who broke years of silence in stories published recently by the St. Petersburg Times.

The rest is here.

…should be universal! Leave it to the Daily Show to show the absurdity of some of the fears behind the health care bill.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Healther Skelter – Obama Death Panel Debate
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

…Star Wars style!

Yeah, it shows my level of geek that I think this is totally awesome.

…that prove that the human body is a f****** amazing machine.

Two large studies, reported in 2003 and 2004, found that middle-aged men who had (or at least remember having) at least four orgasms a week throughout their 20s, 30s and 40s had a reduced risk of prostate cancer by as much as one-third. Some researchers speculate that ejaculations may clear the prostate of carcinogens.

See? The health of the male gender is in your hands, ladies!

The rest is here, along with some very cool pictures and the other fourteen facts.

…is back, with a gem of an article.

Heemeyer set to work on his new project almost immediately. The Komatsu D335A bulldozer that was meant to save his business was instead moved into the muffler shop, and Heemeyer began to make some modifications. He started by adding home-made composite armor–cement sandwiched between thick sheets of steel–to protect the cab, engine, and parts of the tracks. He installed front and rear cameras to feed images to monitors in the cab, and several gun ports were set around the control center. A stockpile of food and water was stored inside, as well as an air tank to help provide air circulation.

Throughout the one-and-a-half years of construction, Heemeyer documented his progress though notes and audio tapes. “Because of your anger, because of your malice, because of your hate, you would not work with me,” he stated in his tape recordings. “I am going to sacrifice my life, my miserable future that you gave me, to show you that what you did is wrong.” He received several visitors at his shop while working on his armored vehicle of vengeance, and none of them seemed alarmed at the weaponized armor shell atop his earth-mover. In his notes Heemeyer credited a higher power with “clouding their vision.” On one occasion he wrote, “I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.”

The rest is here.