Archive for October, 2009

…well, maybe not.

We hear at Chaos Seeds believe the world, as we know it, will come to an end.

However, two of the thirteen voices in my head seem to disagree on how or when exactly this is going to end. The current and most popular date for the apocalypse is December 21, 2012. However, when it comes to mankind trying to figure out when it’s going to die, well golly gee, the track record doesn’t exactly speak well.

One of the oldest doomsday dates is 2,800BC, when, on an Assyrian clay tablet is written:

“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.”

Sounds like something you’d hear around the old folk’s home, isn’t it?

Then in 1284, Pope Innocent III decided that the world would end that year. You may ask yourself, did the Good Lord illuminate him in a golden aura and whisper in his ear this Divine Truth?…Well, no. He took the date the Muslim religion was founded and added 666. Not in the least bit racist, thankyouverymuch.

Jumping ahead a bit, in May 18, 1910, Halley’s Comet came ’round our neck of the woods and for some reason everybody got caught up in a tizzy. Jehova’s Witnesses decided that the coming of the comet would portend our doom. While the death of misunderstood genius Mark Twain is certainly tragic in of itself, nothing else happened.

Then, as we all know, the world was supposed to end in 1999 with the Y2K catastrophe shooting off nuclear missiles and dropping planes out of the sky and computers coming to life to eat our young…but again, we’re still here.

Notwithstanding our excellent track record at predicting our doom and then being shown just how crazy we are to predict our own doom, let’s see what’s going to happen on December 21, 2012.

Read the rest of this entry »

…to hate the establishment.

When deciding how to organize activities of questionable legal nature, it’s not always wise to choose a popular and widely available communications medium that even the police know about. When 41-year-old anarchist Elliot Madison got himself arrested in late September, he learned that lesson the hard way. Madison had been found using a police scanner and Twitter to help numerous protesters avoid police during the Group of 20 summit and has now been charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime.

Madison was found in a hotel room by Pennsylvania State Police on September 24, armed with police scanners and computers so that he could disperse critical information to protesters. According to the FBI, Madison was “directing others, specifically protesters of the G-20 summit, in order to avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse.”

Though the FBI says so, it’s not entirely clear from the complaint that Madison’s tweets were actually illegal. Madison’s lawyer told the New York Times on Saturday that he and a friend were merely “part of a communications network among people protesting the G-20.” As implied through the Times piece, Madison’s tweets merely directed protestors as to where the police were at any given time and to stay alert. “There’s absolutely nothing that he’s done that should subject him to any criminal liability.”

Read the rest here.

…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!

…UFOs!

Is Chaos Seeds turning into a conspiracy blog with warnings about the illuminati and the Holy Grail and how Alex Jones has it right?

…no.

But the phenomenon is far more interesting than most people give it credit for. Keep an open mind (but not so open bits of it start falling out.)

…is only one comic out of many you should read. Dresden Codak is one of the best-written, densely symbolic and intelligent comics out there right now. You probably won’t understand some of it (Chaos knows I don’t) but reading it should make you feel smarter nonetheless.

The comic is here. Funny stuff.

…hell if we don’t have computers lodged in our brains within the decade I’d be surprised.

Who’d have thought a decade ago that portable music wouldn’t mean a cassette Walkman or Discman? Or that the VCR would be all but obsolete? That nobody would use fax (or even dial-up modems) any more? Or CRT?

An awful lot has changed over the last 10 years, but what technology of today will become redundant over the next decade?

We got our future-gazing hat on and came up with these eight.

The rest is here.

…were certainly advanced. But do we really think they predicted doomsday? We’ll soon see!

SIT on the steps of Mexico’s El Castillo pyramid in Chichen Itza and you may hear a confusing sound. As other visitors climb the colossal staircase their footsteps begin to sound like raindrops falling into a bucket of water as they near the top. Were the Mayan temple builders trying to communicate with their gods?

The discovery of the raindrop “music” in another pyramid suggests that at least some of Mexico’s pyramids were deliberately built for this purpose. Some of the structures consist of a combination of steps and platforms, while others, like El Castillo, resemble the more even-stepped Egyptian pyramids.

The rest is here.

…holds many secrets.

Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible.

Even so, research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B, shows very clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals.

In the study, scientists observed the behavior of fluorescently tagged DNA strands placed in water that contained no proteins or other material that could interfere with the experiment. Strands with identical nucleotide sequences were about twice as likely to gather together as DNA strands with different sequences. No one knows how individual DNA strands could possibly be communicating in this way, yet somehow they do. The “telepathic” effect is a source of wonder and amazement for scientists.

Just shows how little we still understand our body.

The rest is here.

…on why brick-and-mortar stores are quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Really it can only be for the best. For a long time I’ve gone to Best Buy or Barns and Nobel, only to catch myself thinking, “You know, I can get this much, much cheaper off of newegg.com or amazon.com.” The internet makes it cheap and easy to get what you want delivered right to your house – as opposed to driving out of your way and possibly not finding what you want.

These algorithms have their limitations, but they can be useful prompts for browsing. (When I’m forced to shop in an actual physical store, which is as rarely as possible, I feel rather lost and adrift. Where is the helpful “Customers Also Bought” window?) But these software programs are missing one crucial source of data – your social network. After all, the best way to figure out what kind of music you like, or whether or not you’ll enjoy Napoleon Dynamite, is to study your friends. If they’re looking forward to the new Monsters of Folk album, then so are you; if they enjoy old kung-fu movies, then you probably do as well.

The rest is here.

…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.