The plot was rather simple : Esoteric writer / futurist Felix Tonnies, who is a bit of a neat freak, is thrown out of his house by his wife, Liona Tanaka-Tonnies, and forced to move in with his friend, esoteric filmmaker Oscar Kimball, who is rather slovenly. Hilarity ensues as they debate both esoterica and living arrangements, arguing over the origins of the Pyramids and who ate the last can of Chef Boyardee (Spoiler : It was Kimball).
Time is running out to see Doing Time, a highly entertaining mystery based on a sci-fi short story by Kansas City author Mac Tonnies and adapted by the play's director Paul Kimball. It is staged in the tiny basement room of the Wired Monk Coffee Shop, which makes for a surprisingly effective space for this particular play. The story is classic sci-fi, but you don't have to be a fan of the genre to enjoy Doing Time.
There's something genuinely thrilling - and unsettling - about Semaphore Theatre's world premiere of the play Doing Time. First off, it's unapologetically hard-core sci-fi. Second, it's a stage piece more interested in ideas that character.
One could suggest it speaks to the idea that the image of that specific alien has been plucked from a large number of potentials and been promoted by a group of "priests" to become the dominant one in the current abduction "religion" (think the First Council of Nicea but with hypno-"therapists"). If we look to Vallee's work we can see the idea that a there is a lot of gray area (excuse the pun) between religion and ufology - which doesn't imply the BVM at Lourdes was an alien or that aliens are Gods but that they may stem from some kind of common root (which neither interpretation may accurately reflect) and such a fusion of imagery reflects this.
(Via The Anomalist.)
Instead of highlighting New Mexico's picturesque desert landscapes, art galleries or centuries-old culture, a new tourism campaign features drooling, grotesque office workers from outer space chatting about their personal lives.
But to increasingly vocal critics, the state-financed ad campaign is a possible threat to the well-being of the state's $5.1 billion tourism industry. In other words, while the ads may yield a chuckle or two, the joke is on New Mexico.
In other words, given that Cooper was provided with Bowen's original and not a photocopy, it does appear to be the case that someone "on the inside" had to have been behind the move to get this material sent to Cooper - since it was the Air Force that had been its original custodian.
"The intriguing question is this," Prof Krauss told the Telegraph. "If we attempt to apply quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole, and if our present state is unstable, then what sets the clock that governs decay? Once we determine our current state by observations, have we reset the clock? If so, as incredible as it may seem, our detection of dark energy may have reduced the life expectancy of our universe."
Wait a minute -- in the entire 13.7 billion year history of the universe, nobody *else* ever made these "anthropic" observations about dark energy? That's a tad *egotistical,* isn't it? And these "observers" who are shortening the lifespan of the universe -- that's not "mankind," that's just eighty, ninety anthropic cosmologists, tops, right?
Here, 100ft down and hidden from public view, lies an astonishing secret - one that has drawn comparisons with the fabled city of Atlantis and has been dubbed 'the Eighth Wonder of the World' by the Italian government.
For weaving their way underneath the hillside are nine ornate temples, on five levels, whose scale and opulence take the breath away.
Constructed like a three-dimensional book, narrating the history of humanity, they are linked by hundreds of metres of richly decorated tunnels and occupy almost 300,000 cubic feet - Big Ben is 15,000 cubic feet.
This is the start of a new series, collection of the most inspiring & hard-to-find retro-futuristic graphics. We will try to stay away from the well-known American pulp & book cover illustrations and instead will focus on the artwork from rather unlikely sources: Soviet & Eastern Bloc "popular tech & science" magazines, German, Italian, British fantastic illustrations and promotional literature - all from the Golden Age of Retro-Future (from 1930s to 1970s).
SKORPIONS are a set of kinetic electronic garments that move and change on the body in slow, organic motions. They have anthropomorphic qualities and can be imagined as parasites that inhabit the skin of the host. They breathe and pulse, controlled by their own internal programming.
Halifax will be the site of the world premiere of a new Science Fiction-themed play in the last week of November and the first day of December.
The hypothesis of advanced machine intelligence severely weakens one of the main skeptical arguments against UFOs. This is that an advanced technological civilization is not thought to have much durability. Skeptics see our own technological civilization so rapidly spinning out of control and extrapolate this feature to intelligent life elsewhere. Now, advanced technology wielded by biological entities may indeed be inherently unstable. But it is not so clear that such a condition applies equally to advanced machine intelligence. If not, the extraterrestrial hypothesis becomes much more tenable as a way to explain UFOs.
It's a remote place, this doomsday vault, located at the end of a 120-meter tunnel blasted into a mountain on what is surely one of the least accessible populated places on the planet. Long-term cooling will be maintained by natural permafrost, snow and ice, supplemented by a 10 kilowatt refrigeration system once the target temperatures are reached. With Spitsbergen now into its three month night, cooling should proceed without difficulty. As to that artwork, consider it a monument to human foresight, a marker for a resource we may hope we'll never have to use in the kind of emergency it seeks to ameliorate.
So lately many of my friends have announced that they are expecting a baby soon. Well if they can't come up with good name, you can't go wrong with one of the wonderful names from the Sci-Fi Baby Names book by Robert Schnakenberg.
A more exciting but also more speculative possibility is that alternative life-forms have survived and are still present in the environment, constituting a kind of shadow biosphere, a term coined by Carol Cleland and Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado at Boulder. At first this idea might seem preposterous; if alien organisms thrived right under our noses (or even in our noses), would not scientists have discovered them already?
This was a bug you couldn't swat and definitely couldn't step on. British scientists have stumbled across a fossilized claw, part of an ancient sea scorpion, that is of such large proportion it would make the entire creature the biggest bug ever.
(Via "There's Something in the Woods...")
In addition to cleaning, Lady Bird can engage in simple conversation with restroom users, thanks to microphones in its "antennae," speech recognition capabilities and a voice synthesizer.
Vets believe the cat, which has two mouths, two noses and four eyes, may have two brains, as one face can go to sleep while the other remains awake and it can blink independently on each one.
A girl in China is scheduled to undergo a lengthy four-stage operation to remove a "spare" arm growing from her back.
Scientists have created the equivalent of embryonic stem cells from ordinary skin cells, a breakthrough that could someday produce new treatments for disease without the explosive moral questions of embyro cloning.
Computer hardware company Alienware (a subsidiary of Dell) has been running a competition around the release of two new laptop models, where entrants must decode the same 'alien glyphs' as found in the CARET document. The competition page and hint pages also make use of the same vector illustrations found in the document. Yesterday's press conference to unveil the new laptops also made use of the glyphs (which spell out 'Alienware') - the 'logo' is also apparently inscribed on the computers themselves.
It was a journey of about ten years, during which Heard met and interviewed starry-eyed UFO contactees, grim "Earth Changes" survivalists, wannabe astral projecters, radical life extension proponents and Christian fundamentalists. The book APOCALYPSE PRETTY SOON: TRAVELS IN END-TIME AMERICA collects these stories.
Not all of the subjects of APOCALYPSE are people who believe that the end of the world is around the corner. Sure, APOCALYPSE has its share of raving delusional paranoiacs, but for the most part, the people profiled in APOCALYPSE are earnestly dealing with modern society's big issues - loss of traditional spirituality, overpopulation, pollution, anomie - in the best ways that they know how, through science or faith, and even when their solutions are wrong you have to admire their sincerity. It certainly seems like Heard does; the only people who really get skewered in APOCALYPSE are cynical money-makers and ego-trippers.
(Via The Anomalist.)
The next step for CAVEman is to allow doctors to actually reach inside of the holograms and actually feel the tissues and compare densities. They also want to add organ sounds. Eventually, they want to be able to create patient-specific models to help explain things to patients visually. It's downright remarkable.
(Via The Keyhoe Report.)
Global warming is "unequivocal" and carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere commits the world to an eventual rise in sea levels of up to 4.6 feet, the world's top climate experts warned Saturday in their most authoritative report to date.
"Only urgent, global action will do," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, calling on the United States and China -- the world's two biggest polluters -- to do more to slow global climate change.
We're in for another epidemic. You probably don't want to hear that; we've had enough with bluetongue, foot-and-mouth and bird flu in animals. We're only just beginning to calm down as the bird flu threat to humans apparently recedes, but mad cow disease seems only yesterday and our hospitals are cesspits of MRSA and C.difficile. Haven't we had enough? And how can I be so sure that we're due for more?
So, if these entities we know as the grays are not from another planet, or perhaps not even aliens after all, then what? The theories and speculations are legion. It has been postulated that primates may have not been the only of earth's species to evolve into intelligent creatures, that the grays may be the end result of the evolvement of dolphins, turtles, whales, insects, or dinosaurs-and that these evolved forms may be either terrestrially or non-terrestrially oriented.
Of course, what gets my attention is that this is what a technological civilization -- the only one we know exists -- looks like by night to an approaching spacecraft. Will we one day have interstellar probes that can make a Rosetta-style pass around a world like this in another solar system? For that matter, will we ever have the kind of spectacular close-up images that could result from advanced sunshade concepts like New Worlds, showing us the lights of alien cities?
Verschuur's research asserts that the seeds are not located on the edge of the universe at all. Rather, he says, the so-called seeds are very nearby: They're just previously unmapped clouds of "neutral hydrogen" gas located inside the Milky Way. In other words, astronomers who mistook the "seeds" for objects on the edge of the universe are like someone who looks outdoors through a window and mistakes smudges on the glass for clouds in the sky.
"Smoot said he saw the face of God. All I can say is, God lives in our neighborhood," Verschuur joked.
(Via The Anomalist.)
A team of neuroscientists from Boston University have implanted an electrode into the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been "locked in" - conscious but paralyzed - since a car crash eight years ago, in an effort to translate his thoughts into words.
Before people get too worked up about disgraced former Arizona governor Fife Symington's "disclosure" that he saw the 1997 "UFO" known as the Phoenix Lights -- the subject of a breathless segment on the Larry King Live show last week -- a few words about that phenomenon from someone who actually investigated it.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) have successfully performed the world's first high-definition image taking of an Earth-rise* by the lunar explorer "KAGUYA" (SELENE,) which was injected into a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km on October 18, 2007 (Japan Standard Time. Following times and dates are all JST.)
Sixty-five years after an American P-38 fighter plane ran out of gas and crash-landed on a beach in Wales, the long-forgotten World War II relic has emerged from the surf and sand where it lay buried.
Beach strollers, sunbathers and swimmers often frolicked within a few yards of the aircraft, unaware of its existence until last summer, when unusual weather caused the sand to shift and erode.
Sirtris Pharmaceuticals is testing a fountain-of-youth pill in humans. You won't live forever, but it may slow aging and increase lifespan. So far, it's working.
A technical breakthrough has enabled scientists to create for the first time dozens of cloned embryos from adult monkeys, raising the prospect of the same procedure being used to make cloned human embryos.
Attempts to clone human embryos for research have been dogged by technical problems and controversies over fraudulent research and questionable ethics. But the new technique promises to revolutionise the efficiency by which scientists can turn human eggs into cloned embryos.
As for what went down at the gig, well, it was an interesting and memorable event, to say the least. The big bombshell was Ryan Wood's announcement to the audience that he will be retiring from Ufology in 5 years time - if the mystery has not been solved. I asked Ryan if he was joking. He was not. He assured me that if the mystery still exists in half a decade from now, he'll be walking away from it.
An international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials called on the U.S. government on Monday to reopen its generation-old UFO investigation as a matter of safety and security given continuing reports about flying discs, glowing spheres and other strange sightings.
"Especially after the attacks of 9/11, it is no longer satisfactory to ignore radar returns . . . which cannot be associated with performances of existing aircraft and helicopters," they said in a statement released at a news conference.
The panelists from seven countries, including former senior military officers, said they had each seen a UFO or conducted an official investigation into UFO phenomena.
The welts spread across his body unchecked and soon he was left unable to carry out everyday household tasks.
Sacked from his job and deserted by his wife, Dede has been raising his two children - now in their late teens - in poverty, resigned to the fact that local doctors had no cure for his condition.
To make ends meet he even joined a local "freak show", parading in front of a paying audience alongside victims of other peculiar diseases.
(Via Reality Carnival.)
For a few magical moments black, billowing clouds of starlings are transformed into images of a penguin, cartoon characters, a shoe and even Mick Jagger's notorious pout.
To the delight of divers, and to the chagrin of fishermen, the swarms of giant Echizen kurage jellyfish (Nomura's jellyfish) that invade the coast of the Sea of Japan each autumn are back.
These photos were taken 5 meters underwater just offshore from the coastal town of Echizen in Fukui prefecture, where the jellyfish mobs began to arrive about a month later than normal.
This first installment concerns an interesting class of medications that are approved to treat something called "restless leg syndrome." That condition may sound fanciful, but it's a real problem. Something like 3 percent of Americans suffer from RLS, which is characterized by an uncontrollable impulse to keep moving your legs even when you are trying to go to sleep -- which obviously could make sleep difficult.
(Via Being Boing.)
A 22-year-old woman died during an exorcism ritual in New Zealand, drowning at a relative's home as up to 40 family members looked on, police said today.
The woman had been dead for nine hours before her family contacted police. She had been placed on a bed and was found with grazes to her upper arms, forearms and torso.
(Via The Anomalist.)
During an Ignite Seattle event earlier this year Leo Dirac gave a quick passionate presentation on the topic of our intellectual and moral responsibility to develop Transhumanist technologies before the Earths increasingly unstable makeup crumbles our currently elevated state of civilization.
Futuristic new helmets will enable fighter jet pilots to see through their own aircraft, the Ministry of Defence said today. The head gear is being developed for the hi-tech F-35 Joint Strike Fighter by MoD scientists.
Significantly, Dolan notes: "none of the sightings included descriptions of what are now called 'Grays.'" It wasn't until the 1960s, and only in the United States, that identifiably "gray aliens" began appearing in encounter records. In the years since, their image and their associate disinformation fables (Roswell and Dulce, for instance) have come to so dominate the subverted consciousness that some ufologists simply remove the ongoing and troublingly bizarre "non-gray" encounters from their ET equation. Debunkers also. Susan Clancy can make her shallow arguments for sleep paralysis and the archetypal simplicity of the gray's minimalist face, but has nothing to say about bug-eyed hairy dwarves dressed like monks, because the troubling variety has been excised by those who mean to exploit a phenomenon beyond their control and massage its perception.
Space exploration is about to enter a third age where nations will cooperate to explore the solar system.
Nicolas Peter, a research fellow at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI), told the meeting in Vienna that the era of launching space missions to bolster national prestige was long past and that new opportunities for cooperation had emerged since the end of the Cold War. He predicted that an imminent third phase of space exploration could inspire nations to work together in a spirit of discovery.
I witnessed a massive delta-shaped, craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak, a mountain range in Phoenix, Arizona. It was truly breathtaking. I was absolutely stunned because I was turning to the west looking for the distant Phoenix Lights.
To my astonishment this apparition appeared; this dramatically large, very distinctive leading edge with some enormous lights was traveling through the Arizona sky.
As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I'd ever seen. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don't fly in formation.
Those robo-dragonflies may not be the only creatures keeping an eye on you. For many years now intelligence agencies have been looking at drones disguised as birds.
(Via UFOMystic.)
There are mixed reports coming out of China on their plans to loft a space station by 2020. A Chinese aerospace engineer, Long Lehao, mentioned to journalists that the China National Space Administration was planning to build a "small-scale 20 tonne space workshop". But then space officials at the agency denied the report. So what's going on?
Application of a widely available image processing technique shows toroidal optical anomalies adjacent to both UFOs and conventional aircraft in photographs. At least one torus is always very close to each UFO, suggesting that the tori are created by alien technology. Further, there is evidence that some tori found near conventional aircraft are associated with barely visible UFOs in the vicinity. The proximity of tori to civilian and military aircraft, space shuttles, and the Hubble space telescope could mean that alien devices are monitoring the performance of our aeronautical and space technology.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and public broadcaster NHK have succeeded in capturing the world’s first high-definition video of the moon taken from lunar orbit. The 8x time-lapse video was shot using an HDTV camera aboard the KAGUYA lunar explorer, a.k.a. SELENE (SELenological and ENgineering Explorer), while in orbit 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the lunar surface.
I know it seems like we've had the space shuttle forever, and will have it forever, but the program will actually be shut down in just a few short years. What comes next? The Constellation program will continue the US human spaceflight efforts, eventually bringing people back to the Moon. As part of the program, workers at NASA unveiled a mockup of the Orion crew module.
Even as the news conference proceeds, I'm thinking we're living in the golden age of exoplanet research. I remember wondering once what it must have been like to do astronomy in the Edwin Hubble era, when the size of the universe itself was being so radically redefined and our understanding of the nature of distant objects completely altered. But this is better, with the prospect of moving from single planet discoveries to fully characterized systems ahead of us. Add the potential of space-based terrestrial planet finding missions and spectroscopic data on planetary atmospheres and I can only imagine the rush of new talent that's going to be wanting to contribute to this field.
Former President Jimmy Carter, speaking candidly on a recent episode of "The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe," flatly dismissed claims that in 1969 he witnessed an alien spacecraft. Though he did see a mysterious light in the sky, Carter described it as a UFO only because "it was unidentified, it was flying, and it was an object."
Rich nations' greenhouse gas emissions rose near to an all-time high in 2005, led by US and Russian gains despite curbs meant to slow global warming, UN data showed.
Toyota Motor is celebrating its 70th anniversary by announcing a long-term business plan that calls for the commercialization of its humanoid Partner Robots for jobs like housekeeping and nursing support.
The Toyota Global Vision 2020 plan sees robots as a core business for the leading automaker, which also plans to make hybrid technology available for its entire fleet of vehicles.
Scientists fear there may soon come a point when the amount of carbon dioxide released from the northern forests as a result of forest fires and the drying out of the soil will exceed the amount that is absorbed during the annual growth of the trees. Such a prospect would make it more difficult to control global warming because northern forests are seen as a key element in the overall equations to mitigate the effect of man-made CO2 emissions.
Ridiculed at the time, the European-born psychiatrist is largely forgotten today, and his work on what he called orgone energy remains outside the scientific mainstream.
But a small number of scientists and other believers are working to advance his studies –- and resurrect his reputation.
(Via The Anomalist.)
The use of quantum mechanics this way has been controversial for two reasons: first, this highly mathematical theory is routinely abused by charlatans attempting to explain spooky paranormal phenomena; and, second, scientists cannot even agree on a definition of consciousness, undermining any quest to explain it.
But an intriguing way to bridge the gap between reality and theory has now been put forward by Prof Efstratios Manousakis of Florida State University, Tallahassee, in a paper published online, entitled "Quantum theory, consciousness and temporal perception: Binocular rivalry."
More than a third of freshwater fish species in Europe face extinction due to overfishing, pollution and dams which have caused rivers to dry up, a scientific study said on Thursday.
The continent's 522 freshwater fish species are under a much higher level of threat than birds or mammals, according to the study "Handbook of European Freshwater Fishes", published in collaboration with the World Conservation Union (IUCN).
But, whatever the real nature of the phenomenon, it is clear to me at least, that many of the events that have been reported are without doubt staged for our benefit: it's a game, a theater-play, a charade; and we keep falling for it and marvelling at the "extraterrestrial" presence among us.
Whether this is to try and convince us that "they" are extraterrestrial, when in reality they may be something else, or whether there are reasons so bizarre that they currently defy reasoning and/or understanding, I'm not sure.
We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.
It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking -- and nearly hopeless -- dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.
(Via Reality Carnival.)
You know the science of planet hunting is getting mainstream when there's very little fanfare for the discovery of 3 new extrasolar planets with the size of Jupiter.
These days I feel lost in the immense suffering and madness of our world. Something has snapped in the spirit of the time; events have gone beyond human capacity to control, predict or even conceptualize. Those who insist they know what is happening are merely pretending, or dissembling. When novelty arises, when old structures disintegrate before new patterns reveal themselves, there are no experts.
Perhaps the best oracles we can consult are systems analysts like Erwin Laszlo. Laszlo studies chaos theory and believes global civilization is a few years away from what he calls "the chaos point." According to Laszlo, we are at a "crucial decision-window" of instability. "When we reach the point of chaos," Laszlo tells us, "the stable 'point' and 'periodic' attractors of our systems will be joined by 'chaotic' or 'strange' attractors." These "strange attractors" will propel us, like booster rockets, to evolutionary development or entropic debauch. In other words, we should prepare ourselves for the unknown and inexplicable.
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