Archive for September, 2009

…can suck my anarchist dick.

However, I do want to see the new Michael Moore movie. I admittedly haven’t seen any of his other movies but I’ve been following the Wall Street corruption bullshit for some time, and it seems like this movie kind of encapsulates most of the thoughts out there. Well, not the whole ‘burn Wall Street to the ground’ thoughts, but the other stuff.

An excellent review on www.aintitcool.com:

For two months straight I received e-mail every single day without fail about that review. Half of it was derisive hate mail that accused me of being, as one reader put it, “a goose-stepping, Fox watching, brown shirt.” The other half, in equal measure, accused me of being something far more sinister: a champion of the people. “A brave voice standing alone against Liberal Hollywood.” Another direct quote. I learned a lot from that piece. For a few brief moments I understood what it was like to be in the shoes of a Hannity or an Olbermann. That piece got more traffic than anything else I’ve ever written, before or since. I also learned that I never, ever wanted to be that guy again. At the time we thought it would be the hundred umpteenth review calling the film out for its agenda. Turns out it wasn’t. And knowing what I know now, if I could go back, I would have written a very even handed explanation of my beliefs about the dangers of propaganda marketed to children – no matter whether I believe in the message or not.

So when I see fire and brimstone newscasters lobbing accusations back and forth, I understand the attraction. But I also detest it. I look around and see our nation’s leaders being shouted at by the people (a good thing) who don’t understand anything that they’re actually talking about (a bad thing) and are merely just repeating what they’ve heard on TV (a REALLY bad thing.) I see knuckle heads pulling over to pick fights with protesters, even when they don’t know what the protesters are actually protesting (true story – guy got his finger bitten off. He thought a health care rally was an anti-war protest and objected to being called an idiot when he accosted them.) And I see Rupert Murdoch lobbying congress to abolish anti-trust laws so he and allied news organizations can get together and price fix online news so he can begin cornering the internet market the same way he dominated the print industry.

And I think: what the world needs now is a hero. What the world needs now is Michael Moore.

No, not that Michael Moore. Not the Michael Moore that campaigns for democrats and long ago traded away his credibility for a seat at the table. That was the Michael Moore picked in 2004 by USATODAY to cover the Republican National Convention in an experiment to send someone from “the other side” into the belly of the beast. Who was the person USATODAY picked to go to the Democratic National Convention? Ann Coulter. You see? The Michael Moore we all know today is someone USATODAY equates with Ann Coulter. That Michael Moore won’t do.

No, we need 1989 Michael Moore, the Michael Moore who made ROGER & ME, a film so powerful that high school economics teachers used it as a teaching tool throughout the 90s’ (which is how I first was exposed to Moore’s films.) We need 1996 Michael Moore, the man who wrote DOWNSIZE THIS and made a film in which he lambasted ALL the political candidates in what he called a contest of “the evil of two lessers.” We need the Michael Moore who isn’t the tool of a large political machine, but rather the one who campaigned for Ralph Nader because he wanted to get out a message about The People. That’s who we need right now. An independently minded Michael Moore.

And that is almost the guy who showed up to direct CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY.
Read the rest here. Long, but well written and interesting.

…uh oh?

Interesting vid here.

…are among us?

We hear at Chaos Seeds (and by we, I mean the alien parasite nestled in the center of my frontal lobes and I) are undecided about the UFO phenomenon. On the one hand, the image of Gray Aliens has become so ubiquitous on this planet that it seems obvious that most of what people experience during supposed ‘abductions’ is little more than sleep paralysis coupled with hallucinations.

On the other hand, one cannot explain away the entirety of photographic footage that has accumulated over the years. And the eyewitness testimony of trained pilots, policemen, military officials, people whose very jobs it is to observe and report, cannot be explained away either.

Something is visiting us.

For many years I was skeptical of the UFO phenomenon. I was persuaded by SETI pioneers like Carl Sagan: It’s pretty certain that the universe is full of intelligent civilizations, but the vast interstellar distances and the vast timescales involved in traversing them made the notion of an alien presence in our skies seem (to me) silly. I tended to agree with science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, particularly the view put forth in his great novel Fiasco. Civilizations will pass through a very brief “window” of maybe a couple centuries duration when they simultaneously have the technology required to communicate with other civilizations and still have an interest in doing so. After this, they will either have destroyed themselves/exhausted their resources or will have become “lotus eaters,” having solved all problems of material scarcity and retreated into virtual worlds of pure imagination, no longer caring who else is out there. Given the limitations on the speed of interstellar travel coupled with the fact that different civilizations’ histories will be wildly out of sync with each other, radio transmissions might be sent and received, but any actual two-way contact between different technological civilizations will be a tremendous statistical rarity despite the vast number of such civilizations that must arise.

I held to the view, in other words, that we would probably never make contact with an alien race, except perhaps by eventually finding its million-year-old ruins or fossils on some long-dead planet. The alternative, Star Trek-like universe teeming with roughly similarly advanced civilizations with similar agendas seems to defy both what I believed and, really, what I thought was most awe-inspiring: a sense of profound cosmic aloneness, despite infinite worlds and minds spread across unbridgeable distances.

As I’ve come to delve into the UFO stuff over recent months, however, I’m convinced that my old view requires revision. The evidence is overwhelming that Earth is being surveyed by alien craft. They are seen all the time, by perfectly sober and sane people. I saw them on two occasions, less than a month apart, this summer, and dutifully made my reports (obviously, this was a big factor in my revisiting the whole question). They are seen particularly often by pilots, astronauts, police, and people in the military. The latter four groups, for decades under explicit or tacit gag rules, are finally starting to talk openly about their experiences. It is becoming clear that the superpowers have gathered a lot of data that they have suppressed—for the very sensible reason that political control and social stability rest on governments seeming to be in control of their people’s security and destiny, an appearance that evidence of more advanced cultures in our airspace irrevocably punctures.

Many good points. Read the rest here.

…is back!

Is it the best show on TV? Well…depends on who you ask. But with consistently good writing, excellent stories, excellent characters and a great smartassy sense of humor, it really ranks up their, in our collectively-mad opinion.

Here’s the season 4 trailer. Watch and enjoy.

…and the Fight Club reference is pure genius. You know it is.

…no, it’s not the title of a gay porn, it’s a freaky-weird-cool scientific discovery.

While the light show adds a level of exoticism to the fruit in our eyes, and serves to attract a host of potential consumers in the eyes of insects and other animals who can appreciate the UV, the display is equally exciting to chemists. Because the glowing molecules occur in close proximity to dying tissue, they promise to be a literal beacon for the further study of the way organisms cleanse themselves of dying cells, or programmed cell death. A well known and poorly understood condition in which programmed cell death malfunctions is cancer.

Turro and his colleagues describe how ordinary brown spots that form on bananas as they transition from ripe to rotten, each show a glowing blue halo in UV, caused by the congregation of chlorophyll breakdown byproducts. Their research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

The rest is here.

…needs to change.

I have a brother going to Purdue University, and he’s spending close to $10,000 a semester for the education.

Chaos knows where the school thinks we’re going to get that kind of money, but for the majority of middle-class yahoos such as he and I, we have to borrow and dig ourselves into debt to do it. Sure, even though he’s getting into an industry that will help drive the American machine, let’s just punish him for having that passion. And once I get myself and the thirteen voices in my head back into school, I’ll need a doctorate for the field I want to get into. (Neuroscience, bee-yatches!) I don’t want to think about the loan repayments for that.

Is a college education really like a string quartet? Back in 1966, that was the assertion of economists William Bowen, later president of Princeton, and William Baumol. In a seminal study, Bowen and Baumol used the analogy to show why universities can’t easily improve efficiency.

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can’t cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then — before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world’s largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world’s largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.

“The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros,” says Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton. Education, he says, “is the biggest virgin forest out there.” Ferreira is among a loose-knit band of education 2.0 architects sharpening their saws for that forest. Their first foray was at MIT in 2001, when the school agreed to put coursework online for free. Today, you can find the full syllabi, lecture notes, class exercises, tests, and some video and audio for every course MIT offers, from physics to art history. This trove has been accessed by 56 million current and prospective students, alumni, professors, and armchair enthusiasts around the world. “The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field,” says Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who in her former role at the Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding for MIT’s project. “We’re changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge.”

Change can’t happen fast enough.

The rest is here. Long, but worth the read.

…courtesy of Dark Roasted Blend.

The rest is here. Trust me, you don’t want to miss out on this one.

…is still a killing weapon, no matter the power of guns these days.

Hours earlier, someone had broken into John Pontolillo’s house and taken two laptops and a video-game console. Now it was past midnight, and he heard noises coming from the garage out back.

With the 3- to 5-foot-long, razor-sharp weapon in hand, police say, Pontolillo crept toward the noise. He noticed a side door in the garage had been pried open. When a man inside lunged at him, police say, the confrontation was fatal.

Bastard got what he deserved, as far as I’m concerned. You take your life into your own hands when you break into someone’s house and steal.

The rest is here.

…are cute.

…is integral to learning.

Kind of a “well duh” moment, I guess, but here’s the science to back it up.

Mammalian sleep occurs in two discrete stages, slow wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. One of the many ways in which SWS and REM sleep differ is in the level of synchronous firing in the hippocampus. Previous research has suggested that coordinated activity between the hippocampus (a brain area critical for memory formation) and the neocortex (where long-term memories are stored) may be critical for memory formation.

“Given the importance of synchrony and spike timing in synaptic plasticity, and given the putative role of sleep in learning and memory, a key question is whether consistent spike timing relationships exist across cortico-hippocampal circuits during sleep, and whether these differ in SWS versus REM sleep,” explains senior study author, Dr. Athanassios G. Siapas from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Siapas and colleagues used sophisticated recording and computational techniques to examine the activity of neurons in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in sleeping rats.

As a Polysomnography Technologist, I do feel the need to correct one thing here – sleep is not divided into REM and SWS. You have four distinct stages of sleep – Stage One, Stage Two, Stage Three (also known as Slow Wave Sleep) and then Stage REM. Stage Three is the only stage that has the activity that denotes it as SWS.

Just a nitpick.

The rest is here.

…or proof positive of evolution?

Dean Qiongxiu, 66, said she discovered the reptile clinging to the wall of her bedroom with its talons in the middle of the night.

“I woke up and heard a strange scratching sound. I turned on the light and saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw,” said Mrs Duan of Suining, southwest China.

Mrs Duan said she was so scared she grabbed a shoe and beat the snake to death before preserving its body in a bottle of alcohol.

The snake – 16 inches long and the thickness of a little finger – is now being studied at the Life Sciences Department at China’s West Normal University in Nanchang.

The rest is here, along with a really creepy pic of the critter.

…is back, with new images!

The rest is here.

…can suck my ass.

If you need proof that America is a nation of lazy good-for-nothings who think child rearing is all about media crusades and worshiping the supposed purity of TBN, then look no further:

Every three months the Federal Communications Commission comes up with its Quarterly Report on indecency complaints, and we sit around scratching our heads. How come the latest stats, in this instance for the first quarter of this year, show the viewers relatively calm at 578 complaints in January, then 505 in February, followed by 179,997 in March?

179,997? Um, did we miss something? Did television really get that much more indecent in March? No worries. In these situations, we know what to do. We go over and check out the Parents Television Council’s website. And sure enough, there’s a plausible instigator—a PTC viewer action alert crusade against a March 8 episode of the animated comedy show the PTC just loves to hate, Fox TV’s Family Guy.

Read the rest here.

And oh yes, the FCC is on the Hate List.

…that we waste more time online than on TV these days.

I weep for humanity.

One exabyte is a billion gigabytes. It’s one quintillion bytes. And yes, “quintillion” is a number so large, it almost seems made-up. But that’s how much online video will be consumed by 2017, according to new reports from U.K.-based research firm Coda. Actually, to be precise, they’re claiming that mobile broadband users accessing the net via laptops and netbooks will consume 1.8 exabytes of video. Per month.
Mobile Broadband Video Forecast

The reason why Asia Pacific comes in so high is because, in many countries, mobile broadband is often the sole option for internet connectivity. Another forecast states that two-thirds of the global traffic will be via LTE (Long Term Evolution), a 4G wireless technology, where Asia Pacific will consume just under half (45%) of LTE traffic. In Europe, 80% of traffic will be LTE-based and in North America, 75%.

The rest is here.

…is down the shitter.

Yeah, as if any of us really thought we were going to get back to the moon any time soon. The public at large doesn’t give a crap about the possibilities that being a space faring nation would offer; instead we drown our sorrows in reality TV and Halo. Thanks, America.

NASA’s human spaceflight program appears headed on an “unsustainable trajectory” under its current budget, according to a committee charged with reviewing the US space program for the Obama administration.

While NASA has big plans to retire the Shuttle Program in 2011, de-orbit the ISS in 2016, and begin a fresh round of lunar surface exploration, there simply isn’t enough money to go around. “It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursing goals that do not match allocated resources,” the Review of US Human Flight Plans Committee report stated.

As if the government could get us there anyways. If there were any smarts in the White House we’d sell off NASA to private ownership. Throw the space race into the public domain fully; capitalism, not national mandates, will get us there quicker.

The rest is here.