Posthuman Blues

Triptych #15

2009-10-18T18:57:00.003-05:00

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"As One" by Makoto Yabuki

2009-10-18T18:42:00.001-05:00

AS ONE from makoto yabuki on Vimeo.

(Thanks: Beautiful/Decay.)

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Attention, audiophiles!

2009-10-17T23:09:00.002-05:00

Did you know that Aldous Huxley's dystopian classic "Brave New World" is available on LP, narrated by the author? Neither did I. Better yet, you can download it for free.

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Link-dump #22 (space edition)

2009-10-17T00:44:00.002-05:00

Mystery Space "Ribbon" Found at Solar System's Edge

Nuclear-Powered Robot Ship Could Sail Seas of Titan

Stunning photo: Earth and Jupiter in the same shot

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Tube twins

2009-10-17T00:27:00.003-05:00

Michael Garrett sighted this example of the "tube-girl" meme at this amazing gallery*.

While a purist might argue that the structure encapsulating the twins is too wide to qualify as a genuine tube, I would argue that the presence of two women justifies the unusual proportions.

*Be sure not to miss the weaponized lobster.

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Tube-girl sighting!

2009-10-16T13:08:00.002-05:00

I found this while browsing Golden Age Comic Book Stories' collection of Andre Norton covers.

For more, click here, here and here.

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"The Lady Who Fell to Earth"

2009-10-16T00:13:00.004-05:00

Kinga Rajzak stars as a fetching ufonaut in this amusing "Vogue" editorial.

Discerning ufophiles will no doubt note that Rajzak appears to be a garden-variety "Nordic," while fellow models Masha Telna and Lily Cole show every indication of being hybridized "Grays."

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The entomological art of Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

2009-10-16T00:00:00.004-05:00

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, scientific illustrator and science artist, was born in 1944 in Zurich, Switzerland. For 25 years she worked as a scientific illustrator for the scientific department of the Natural History Museum at the University of Zurich. Since the catastrophe of Chernobyl in 1986, she has collected, studied and painted morphologically disturbed insects, which she finds in the fallout areas of Chernobyl as well as near nuclear installations.

See more of Hesse-Honegger's painstaking illustrations here.

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Skeletons in the planetary closet

2009-10-15T23:35:00.001-05:00

Chemical Archive

As the world's glaciers melt, they've begun to release an archive of banned industrial substances back into the environment, chemicals that have been locked, frozen, inside the glacial ice for up to thirty years.

[. . .]

The idea of a poisonous atmospheric archive being unintentionally released -- on a global scale -- makes me wonder what sorts of news reports we might read in several thousand years' time, when carbon tombs start to leak their quarantined contents back into the atmosphere. The buried skies of an industrial era, put to pharaonic rest beneath the earth's surface, will make their operatic reappearance in future human history.

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The Knife

2009-10-15T02:26:00.002-05:00

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That strange feeling is your head spinning.

2009-10-14T22:42:00.001-05:00

Is The Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged from the Future?

The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider's streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn't bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage them. In papers like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," they put forth the notion that observing the Higgs boson would be such an abhorrent event that the future is actually trying to prevent it from happening.

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Rise of the tumorbots

2009-10-14T01:18:00.004-05:00

I like it when bots take on organic traits, and the blob above is as good an example as any I've seen lately -- with the possible exception of this Cronenbergian mass . . .

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Link-dump #21

2009-10-12T02:33:00.005-05:00

"UFO halo" in the sky baffles Muscovites

New fears for species extinctions

Are you asleep? Exploring the mind's twilight zone

Ice confirmed on an asteroid

Exquisite Bodies at the Wellcome Collection

Russia plots return to Venus

Can Life Survive Deep Space? Let's Send It There!

Robots & Starships: Unique Playgrounds From The 70's

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I'm snot making this up.

2009-10-12T02:21:00.002-05:00

Gross Sea Mucus Blobs on the Rise

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Behind the scenes at the Singularity Summit

2009-10-11T16:32:00.003-05:00

You should have seen Kurzweil. That dude can 'bot with the best of them.

(Tip of the hat to Dangerous Minds.)

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I don't have an iPhone . . .

2009-10-11T03:07:00.003-05:00

. . . but if I did, there's a fair chance I'd have this app.

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I think it's about time for another dubious UFO video around here.

2009-10-10T17:22:00.000-05:00

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You want one, don't you?

2009-10-07T23:55:00.002-05:00

Get it here.

(Thanks to @servanti.)

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The existential implications of ufology

2009-10-07T23:51:00.003-05:00

Greg Bishop has written a wonderfully thought-provoking piece on the UFO inquiry titled "UFOs As Agents Of Deconstruction." Here's a brief excerpt:

Ostensibly, the UFO question is whether a non-human source is causing sightings, abductions, radar returns and flying saucer religions, but the intricacies of the problem impinge on so many other areas that we redefine them as well. Examples include reported physics of UFO movement, the question of cultural antecedents and perhaps how our society decides what is acceptable as serious study. That last one may be the most deconstructive effect of all. Changes in our mindset, and not any so-called "answers" may be the real reason behind the whole thing, or at least the most meaningful. There may indeed be "knowledge gained without awareness."

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This is more like it.

2009-10-07T00:59:00.001-05:00

Trips to Mars in 39 Days

Using traditional chemical rockets, a trip to Mars -- at quickest -- lasts 6 months. But a new rocket tested successfully last week could potentially cut down travel time to the Red Planet to just 39 days. The Ad Astra Rocket Company tested a plasma rocket called the VASIMR VX-200 engine, which ran at 201 kilowatts in a vacuum chamber, passing the 200-kilowatt mark for the first time. "It's the most powerful plasma rocket in the world right now," says Franklin Chang-Diaz, former NASA astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra.

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The art of Xia Xiaowan

2009-10-07T00:28:00.005-05:00

This isn't a hologram; it's a succession of glass frames meticulously tinted with colored pencil by multimedia artist Xia Xiaowan. I'd love to see this stuff firsthand.

(Hat tip to Beautiful/Decay.)

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Deja vu

2009-10-06T23:47:00.002-05:00

Twin Towers seen once more via Augmented Reality iPhone app

Mobilizy, the company from Salzburg, that brought us one of the world's first Augmented Reality browsers, Wikitude, just released a major upgrade which crosses that significant line between technology and its effects in the 'real' world. Their idea was to build a virtual memorial in remembrance of the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City. The result will be the ability to point their Android and iPhone application at the place where the World Trade Center once stood and witness a 3D rendering of the Twin Towers, once more.

(Via Beyond the Beyond.)

How long until someone develops an app that populates the New York City sky with phantom airliners and billowing CGI smoke?

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The bold new look of The Future!

2009-10-06T02:38:00.004-05:00

Now there's absolutely no excuse for missing an episode of "Leave It To Beaver." (Incidentally, the man wearing the headset is none other than science fiction editor extraordinaire Hugo Gernsback.)

More endearingly ill-conceived inventions here.

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No bachelor pad's complete without one!

2009-10-06T02:26:00.003-05:00

In the future, single men will take the sting out of alienation by tending to the needs of giant robotic maggots. Or something like that.

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You can't win.

2009-10-04T01:04:00.001-05:00

(Thanks to BotJunkie.)

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Link-dump #20

2009-10-01T18:43:00.003-05:00

Gorgeous Video of Underwater Park

850 Mostly Blind, Pale Creatures Discovered Underground

A Cavalcade of Paranormal Beer Selections

Parasitic urban housing

The River Gym - harnessing renewable energy from burnt-off calories

The Curious Case of the Snake with Foot

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Well, that didn't take long.

2009-10-01T18:15:00.005-05:00

Someone has YouTubed my recent appearance on Coast to Coast AM. The interview is posted in eleven segments.

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You've probably already seen it, but . . .

2009-10-01T18:10:00.002-05:00

We warned: once you've heard it, you can't get it out of your head.

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"Then came the great comet, Dionysus."

2009-09-27T23:44:00.000-05:00

More about "Star Maidens" here.

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New photos

2009-09-27T20:12:00.003-05:00

I've posted some new photos (taken today).

For more, see my Flickr stream.

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Ernst Haeckel remixed

2009-09-26T22:07:00.004-05:00

Gene-splice the amazing illustrations of German biologist Ernst Haeckel with the reiterations of a computer-generated fractal and the results are both elegant and unaccountably alien . . .

More here.

(Thanks to Reality Carnival.)

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Link-dump #19

2009-09-26T21:48:00.003-05:00

Joint Russian and Chinese mission to Mars slips to 2011

Mayans "Played" Pyramids to Make Music for Rain God

From Space: Huge River of Dust Over Australia

New Images Reveal "Pure" Water Ice at Low Latitudes on Mars

Iran downs strange bright craft over Persian Gulf

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This one really got my attention.

2009-09-26T21:39:00.002-05:00

The DNA Mystery: Scientists Stumped By "Telepathic" Abilities

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.

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A breakthrough to warm one's posthuman heart

2009-09-25T21:57:00.001-05:00

Remote Control Cyborg Insects Now A Reality

The awesome part is that this implant only steers the insect, and only when necessary. Once the bug is pointing in the right direction, the steering signal cuts out, and the bug self-stabilizes and gets back to the tricky business of flying, which it was just fine at before some roboticist stuck a bunch of wires into its optic lobe, thank you very much. As you can see from the video, the insect has no trouble landing itself on a vertical surface, a maneuver which would be, uh, a little bit difficult to code.

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Coast to Coast AM

2009-09-25T00:27:00.003-05:00

I will be a guest on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory this Monday on Sep. 28. Here's a preview.

(It's a four-hour spot, so you better believe I'll be drinking coffee.)

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Some recent (and semi-recent) UFO posts

2009-09-24T01:48:00.004-05:00

I've assembled the following list for newcomers to this blog curious about my attitude about UFOs. It's by no means exhaustive, but summarizes my conviction that the phenomenon is a genuine mystery with the potential to challenge our deepest cosmic and existential certainties.

While I think the UFO enigma indicates some form of intelligence, I'm not sure where that intelligence originates. Certainly it could come from the interstellar neighborhood -- but the evidence, taken in its entirety, suggests we're dealing with something substantially stranger. (Of course, we could be confronted with myriad overlapping phenomena.) In any case, we'll likely never know until the rigid definitional framework that has come to dominate discussion of all things "paranormal" is relaxed to accommodate a genuinely agnostic approach.

Sagan and the Hill encounter

UFOs: Why no "open contact"?

UFOs, aliens and consciousness

The Roswell controversy

The persistent myth of UFO "disclosure"

The "Grays" as posthumans

Do aliens smoke cigarettes?

Talking flowers and other denizens of the imaginal realm

Strange "helpers"

Little green men

Asemic texts and "alien" writing

"Proof"?

(To view all posts tagged with "UFOs," click here.)

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Drink up!

2009-09-24T00:08:00.003-05:00

It's Official: Water Found on the Moon

Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.

The new findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, come in the wake of further evidence of lunar polar water ice by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and just weeks before the planned lunar impact of NASA's LCROSS satellite, which will hit one of the permanently shadowed craters at the moon's south pole in hope of churning up evidence of water ice deposits in the debris field.

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Into the abyss

2009-09-23T23:35:00.001-05:00

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Further evidence that we inhabit a cosmic fractal

2009-09-22T23:48:00.002-05:00

Ego City: Cities organized like human brains

"Natural selection has passively guided the evolution of mammalian brains throughout time, just as politicians and entrepreneurs have indirectly shaped the organization of cities large and small," said Mark Changizi, a neurobiology expert and assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer, who led the study. "It seems both of these invisible hands have arrived at a similar conclusion: brains and cities, as they grow larger, have to be similarly densely interconnected to function optimally."

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Link-dump #19

2009-09-22T19:02:00.002-05:00

The Visible Human Project: Full Body MRI GIF

Scary alien hand in real estate listing photo?

Debunking roundup

The sexbots are coming

Roasted Crab Candy (Something the prawns from "District 9" might enjoy snacking on?)

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Transcendent machines

2009-09-22T18:30:00.003-05:00

"Someone once said plants invented animals to carry them around. Well, I think the Earth invented human beings to build machines; and those machines will be the consciousness of the Earth. Have you not noticed that these machines are made of the Earth? They are made of gold and silver and arsenic and copper and iridium. They are the stuff of the Earth, organised by primate fingers into more complex arrangements than the Earth could achieve through geological folding, glaciation, volcanism, what have you. We do the fine-tuning; but the Earth is beginning to think."

--Terence McKenna

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More Roswell "insider" testimony

2009-09-22T18:07:00.003-05:00

Former U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Supervisor Says the Roswell Object was an Alien Spacecraft

Click here to read Greg Bishop's thoughtful synopsis.

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This picture really bugs me.

2009-09-21T02:04:00.001-05:00

(Found at Crappy Taxidermy.)

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I wish I'd drawn this.

2009-09-18T23:48:00.001-05:00

More . . .

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Ever wondered what might happen if David Cronenberg designed furniture?

2009-09-18T01:32:00.002-05:00

Learn more about this piece by Ka-Lai Chan here.

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Just ignore it and maybe it will go away.

2009-09-18T00:37:00.005-05:00

Human-made Crises 'Outrunning Our Ability To Deal With Them,' Scientists Warn

"Energy, food and water crises, climate disruption, declining fisheries, ocean acidification, emerging diseases and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity," say the researchers, who come from Australia, Sweden, the United States, India, Greece and The Netherlands.

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I love a good dose of paleo-transhumanism.

2009-09-18T00:32:00.002-05:00

(Thanks to @daniel_poeira.)

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Can't afford your own private wormhole?

2009-09-18T00:22:00.003-05:00

Never fear! Thanks to augmented reality, the next-best thing is a download away!

(Hat tip: Beyond the Beyond.)

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Link-dump #18

2009-09-17T00:55:00.002-05:00

Cyborg Nation: "Outsourcing" Biological Functions

Can you see time?

Physicists propose 'Schrödinger's virus' experiment

Evidence Points To Conscious 'Metacognition' In Some Nonhuman Animals

Early 20th UFO encounters

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Skywatchers, take note.

2009-09-17T00:49:00.002-05:00

New class of UAVs look more like UFOs

Moveable flaps on sections of the lifting surface provide yaw control to allow the UAV to turn left or right. And flaps on the outside of the craft use the lift airflow to provide directional control, causing the craft to tilt and move in the direction of the tilt.

AESIR say their designs have inherent stability as a surveillance platform, thanks to a sustained hover capability, and can survive low speed impact with the ground, buildings and other fixed objects. They also have a large payload capacity when compared to similar sized fixed wing craft and have been designed to be flexible using "plug-and-play" payloads.

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A Ballardian moment

2009-09-17T00:47:00.001-05:00

Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession anchored just east of Singapore

Then I have it - his 750ft-long merchant vessel is standing absurdly high in the water. The low waves don't even bother the lowest mark on its Plimsoll line. It's the same with all the ships parked here, and there are a lot of them. Close to 500. An armada of freighters with no cargo, no crew, and without a destination between them.

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I always suspected.

2009-09-17T00:28:00.002-05:00

Reading Kafka Improves Learning, Suggests Psychology Study

Reading a book by Franz Kafka -- or watching a film by director David Lynch -- could make you smarter.

Enough said.

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Martians!

2009-09-15T02:37:00.003-05:00

Here's an astonishingly clever Disney animation depicting hypothetical plants and animals on the surface of Mars. (One of my favorites is the organic flying saucer that fries its prey before enveloping the carcass.)

(Thanks to John Shirley for the tip.)

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There are times when I feel just like this.

2009-09-13T01:56:00.000-05:00

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"Come to where the flavor is."

2009-09-12T01:05:00.001-05:00

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A ribofunk moment

2009-09-10T00:54:00.000-05:00

Nepalese Teen Invents Cheap Solar Panel Using Human Hair

Did you know that melanin, the pigment in hair, is light sensitive and can be used as a conductor? Well, that's what an 18 year old in Nepal recently discovered, and is now using human hair to replace silicon in solar panels.

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Link-dump #17 (Fortean edition)

2009-09-10T00:41:00.002-05:00

"They" Are Not "Them": A Hybrid View of the UFO Presence

Lost world of fanged frogs and giant rats discovered in Papua New Guinea

Chinese scientists 'filmed UFO for 40 minutes'

Has Jesus Christ been spotted on Mars? (I don't see it.)

A skull that rewrites the history of man

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Baby universes, white holes and parallel worlds

2009-09-04T22:41:00.004-05:00

Physicist Michio Kaku expounds on the prospect of parallel universes in this short, insightful discussion.

Could the UFO phenomenon represent visitors from parallel worlds? I find the notion at least as palatable as the more popular Extraterrestrial Hypothesis.

(Thanks to Reality Carnival.)

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Link-dump #16

2009-09-04T02:32:00.003-05:00

Reboot for UK's 'oldest' computer

Chimpanzees Develop 'Specialised Tool Kits' to Catch Army Ants

Is It Ethical To Engineer Delicious Cows That Feel No Pain?

Fuck The Fermi Paradox

We're all mutants, say scientists

LRO Sees Bouncing, Rolling Boulders on the Moon

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The future wears a gasmask.

2009-09-04T02:21:00.003-05:00

Many more right here . . .

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Synthetic landscapes

2009-09-02T02:37:00.004-05:00

The following photos are taken from this fine pictorial by Next Nature.

I like the quiet surrealism of these arboreal phantasms; my favorites are the ones that don't look like their designers cared particularly if they resembled real trees . . .

Imagine entire forests of such transmitter-laden simulacra.

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"Artificial Paradise, Inc."

2009-09-02T01:22:00.002-05:00

ARTIFICIAL PARADISE, Inc from Jp Frenay on Vimeo.

This posthuman fable is far too cool to pass up. Be sure to watch on full-screen mode.

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Today's dose of entropy fetishism

2009-09-02T01:15:00.002-05:00

Feral Houses

I've seen "feral" used to describe dogs, cats, even goats. But I have wondered if it couldn't also be used to describe certain houses in Detroit. Abandoned houses are really no big deal here. Some estimate that there are as many as 10,000 abandoned structures at any given time, and that seems conservative. But for a few beautiful months during the summer, some of these houses become "feral" in every sense: they disappear behind ivy or the untended shrubs and trees planted generations ago to decorate their yards. The wood that framed the rooms gets crushed by trees rooted still in the earth. The burnt lime, sand, gravel, and plaster slowly erode into dust, encouraged by ivy spreading tentacles in its endless search for more sunlight.

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Link-dump #15

2009-09-02T01:08:00.002-05:00

'Plasmobot': Scientists To Design First Robot Using Mould

Fleet of Wind-Powered Yachts Could Hold Off Climate Change for 25 Years

After Loss of Lunar Orbiter, India Looks to Mars Mission

A One-Way Ticket to Mars

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"Like crazy, man!"

2009-09-01T00:57:00.002-05:00

More here.

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"A Short Vision"

2009-08-30T02:41:00.003-05:00

The menacing object in the sky is beguilingly amorphic, an archetype in the process of crystallizing.

(Thanks to @ybalagian.)

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The hour is nigh.

2009-08-30T02:21:00.002-05:00

Get Smarter (Jamais Cascio)

The end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nanotechnologies -- each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation. And as good as our brains have become at planning ahead, we're still biased toward looking for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage.

But here's an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don't have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.

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"On your last trip did you discover what the Earth people eat?"

2009-08-30T00:22:00.002-05:00

I like the sound they make when they laugh.

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Link-dump #15

2009-08-30T00:16:00.004-05:00

Single molecule, one million times smaller than a grain of sand, pictured for first time

The "Great Wall" Of Space: Galactic Superclusters a Billion Light Years Away Extend for 5% of Observable Universe

Depression's Evolutionary Roots

Antenna Tree Mast Safari

Tornadoes of Fire Approach the Parthenon

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Anomaly

2009-08-29T23:26:00.001-05:00

Astrophysicists puzzle over planet that's too close to its sun

The problem is that a planet that close should be consumed by its parent star in less than a million years, say the authors at Keele University in Britain. The star Wasp-18 is believed to be about a billion years old, and because stars and the planets around them are thought to form at the same time, Wasp-18b should have been reduced to cinders ages ago.

"This planet should spiral inwards on such a short time scale that the likelihood of seeing it is very low," said Coel Hellier, an astrophysicist at Keele.

"That's a paradox," said Douglas P. Hamilton, an astronomer at the University of Maryland who wrote a commentary accompanying the report. He said there were a variety of possible explanations, none of them very satisfactory.

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Le petit prince

2009-08-28T16:15:00.004-05:00

This Little Guy Might Grow Your Tomatoes on Mars

"Le petit prince" (the little prince) is a miniature greenhouse (concept) intended to walk a plant around Mars' surface in search of optimal growing conditions -- elements from light to nutrients. Eventually the robot masters its environment, sharing growing tips with a whole swarm of bots plant-growing robots.

But the prince is not just a growing machine -- the designer and 2009 Electrolux Design Lab finalist considers the bot first and foremost as a "pet" or "silent friend" to keep a colonist company.

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Well, it's a start. (Of what, exactly, I don't know.)

2009-08-28T00:01:00.001-05:00

(Hat tip to Grinding.)

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Link-dump #14

2009-08-27T23:30:00.002-05:00

Making Babies in Space May Be Harder Than It Sounds

Last of Africa's Desert Elephants Ravaged by Severe Drought

More 'Evidence' of Intelligent Design Shot Down by Science

The Creepy World of Old-School Human Dissection

Genomic Study Yields Plausible Cause Of Colony Collapse Disorder

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The more things change, the more they stay the same.

2009-08-25T02:21:00.003-05:00

Crank up the Tibetan music, break open a carton of strawberry ice cream, and pull up a chair. It's "UFO Coverup? Live."

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UFOs and extraterrestrials

2009-08-24T03:13:00.002-05:00

Greg Bishop's latest post at UFOMystic is a distinct relief from the tedious "skeptics vs. believers" charade perpetuated by the media -- and, to a significant extent, the UFO community itself:

Just because we have been taught to assign UFO phenomena to aliens coming from other planets does not make it so. (Actually, it might, but that's another ontological can of worms.)

We are stuck in a culture that needs to settle on one way to look at things, and uncomfortable with ambiguity, for the most part. Any non-human intelligence who wanted to "conquer" us, or at least make limited contact would do well to exploit this tendency, as well as our reliance on conscious sensory input to make their presence as subtle as a light breeze on our collective consciousness. No flying saucers, death rays, or even handshakes with the President needed.

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UFO landing at 1984 Olympics

2009-08-24T01:34:00.002-05:00

Don't miss the alien at the end.

(Thanks: Alien Punk.)

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Link-dump #13

2009-08-23T17:06:00.003-05:00

10 Fascinating Bioluminescent Organisms

Party Rats: Ideal for Night Blogging!

Steampunk-Skull-Mouse

Giant 'Lunar Creature' baffles researchers

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"Proof"?

2009-08-23T16:10:00.005-05:00

UFOs and the Old Geezers (Kevin Randle)

Just recently the RRR Group posted a picture that my wife took at the MUFON Symposium in Denver and claimed that those of us on the Speakers panel were a bunch of geezers who had failed to solve the UFO question. It was time for us to get out of the way and let those younger, brighter and more enlightened take over. We had our chance and we failed.

Except we haven't failed. We solved the problem. We have the proof that some UFOs are alien spacecraft and we can make that point over and over. The evidence for that is overwhelming, but not unlike Galileo, who failed to convince the church that there were moons orbiting Jupiter, we get a bunch of people who "refuse to look through the telescope."

Come again?

I would certainly agree that researchers have succeeded in demonstrating that the UFO phenomenon is a genuine unknown, not a collective delusion. But this isn't the same thing as proving that "some UFOs are alien spacecraft," as Randle claims -- although, in my own view, we would be incredibly foolish to dispense with the possibility.

Something phenomenally weird is undoubtedly occurring, and Randle's consternation about the modern world's naysayers "refusing to look through the telescope" is well-taken. But the quickest way to convince scientific orthodoxy that its apathy is well-founded is to proclaim that the mystery has been solved. In the case of serious UFO research, science is left with a legitimate enigma that may prove to be far stranger than the "mere" comings and goings of alien spacecraft. An honest gaze through the telescope is desperately needed, but only if we're able to allow ourselves to relax our preconceptions.

Close encounter cases, for example, suggest a curious and unexpected congruence with folklore, and often feature a residue of after-effects that would seem to fall into the domain of parapsychology. This troubling strangeness can't be readily ascribed to nuts-and-bolts space vehicles; indeed, we may be confronting a phenomenon that challenges our definitions of consciousness.

"Alien spacecraft"? Maybe. "Proof" of extraterrestrial visitation? Sorry, Kevin, but we're not there yet.

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Exoskeletal

2009-08-23T01:13:00.002-05:00

(Thanks to Next Nature for the tip.)

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CTRL ALT DEL

2009-08-21T22:18:00.002-05:00

Is this the evidence Nick Bostrom is looking for?

(More crosswalk sign hacks here.)

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Hot, hot, hot!

2009-08-21T18:16:00.002-05:00

In hot water: World sets ocean temperature record

Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land, because water takes longer to heat up and does not cool off as easily as land.

"This warm water we're seeing doesn't just disappear next year; it'll be around for a long time," said climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. It takes five times more energy to warm water than land.

The warmer water "affects weather on the land," Weaver said. "This is another yet really important indicator of the change that's occurring."

Global Warming Could Actually Tilt the Earth's Axis

Scientists have long theorized that climate change could cause a negligible amount of movement in the axis, but NASA;s research shows that the problem could be much more severe than was initially thought. In fact, it could be as drastic as the northern pole shifting by 1.5 centimeters every year towards Hawaii and Alaska.

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Here we go again.

2009-08-20T02:59:00.004-05:00

Report: UFO Sightings Coincide with Popular Sci-Fi Films, TV

The British Ministry of Defense released 4,000 pages of documents detailing hundreds of UFO sightings between 1981 and 1996. A summary of the documents by UFO expert David Clarke comes as no surprise to scientists and skeptics: many of the sightings coincide with the release of popular sci-fi movies or television shows.

Frankly, so what?

There's doubtlessly a correlation between science fiction and UFO reports. But while pop culture's influence on potential UFO observers is a fascinating subject with important sociological ramifications, to flaunt Clarke's findings as a refutation of the phenomenon in general is to willfully ignore the evidence in its entirety.

UFO researchers aren't interested in "noise" cases -- the inevitable false alarms that plague efforts to study the phenomenon (whatever its origin). Indeed, scientists who have addressed the UFO problem have always been painfully aware of the disproportionately high volume of false returns. Clarke's study is a welcome reminder, but it comes as nothing particularly new to anyone even peripherally familiar with the UFO inquiry.

That the number of spurious reports rises in accordance with the popularity of alien-themed movies and TV series is scarcely surprising. Unfortunately, neither is it surprising that the mainstream skeptical establishment chooses to ignore the residue of anomaly that makes the UFO phenomenon such an enduring and woefully unremarked challenge to science.

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34

2009-08-20T00:26:00.000-05:00

I'm 34 today. Looks like I survived my "Jesus year."

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A Roswell crash debris "smoking gun"?

2009-08-19T23:51:00.001-05:00

Not quite. But this is seriously intriguing.

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NOAH

2009-08-19T00:20:00.003-05:00

NOAH: Mammoth Pyramidal Arcology Designed for New Orleans

Now, a real-life a group of ambitious designers has taken their looming pyramidal arcology and placed it smack dab on the Mississippi River as a proposal for the rebuild of New Orleans which is currently in progress. This 30 million square foot beast-building with an array of green features is aptly named NOAH (Get it? Noah and the Arcology?), and is meant to house 40,000 mostly human residents.

I first encountered the idea of arcologies in none other than Richard Hoagland's "The Monuments of Mars," in which he speculates that the pyramidal features in the vicinity of the iconic "Face" served as vast encapsulated habitats for the "Martians" -- whoever they might have been.

Perhaps the most intriguing such candidate Martian arcology is the "D&M Pyramid," a symmetrical, faceted formation that looks like it could be a heavily eroded artificial structure. Could an extraterrestrial species have constructed the D&M as a refuge from a disintegrating environment?

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Visitor

2009-08-18T23:54:00.003-05:00

I'd be willing to assume this androgynous alien comes in peace, but that vial in its hand bothers me. What the hell's in that thing, anyway?

More here.

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"The Math Book" by Cliff Pickover

2009-08-18T00:22:00.004-05:00

Luminously illustrated, Cliff Pickover's "The Math Book" promises to be the tree-based equivalent to his exceedingly popular Reality Carnival. If you're not acquainted with Cliff's abiding fascination with fractals, robots and hypercubes (and everything in between), "The Math Book" is a veritable invitation to wade into the infinite. You've been warned.

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Link-dump #12 (UFO edition)

2009-08-18T00:03:00.004-05:00

Did aliens with lemon-shaped heads land in the Midlands?

Alien Abductions, Sleep Paralysis and MUFON

UFO 'fired laser' over cemetery

The UFO Cap Umbrella

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"We do the work, you do the pleasure."

2009-08-17T22:51:00.002-05:00

Yeah, I realize that Makoto Tanijiri's Nature Factory is supposed to look arboreal. So why can't I shake the image of the rampant ductwork in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil"?

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The latest YouTube UFO clip

2009-08-16T01:05:00.003-05:00

I like the way the UFO dances around its prey before snatching it. And yes, I think this is a hoax.

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Triptych #14

2009-08-16T00:25:00.001-05:00

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Soupbots

2009-08-16T00:20:00.001-05:00

(Found at BotJunkie.)

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Fingers crossed

2009-08-16T00:11:00.000-05:00

Ares I-X space vehicle stacked for first flight

The experimental launch is called Ares I-X, and there won't be any humans on board yet -- people don't get to ride this horse until 2015. On this first test flight, NASA scientists will be simulating the first two minutes of the mission of the 1.8 million-pound vehicle, observing how well it can be controlled, demonstrating staging and separation, determining how well it holds up under aerodynamic, thermal and vehicle loads, and then testing the reentry dynamics of the first stage.

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"What is oozing out of our ground?"

2009-08-14T02:36:00.001-05:00

I found this on Boing Boing. It's the funniest fucking thing I've seen in a while.

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Quote of the day

2009-08-13T03:57:00.004-05:00

"We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat."

--Terence McKenna

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The Pitch on Stan Romanek

2009-08-13T01:42:00.009-05:00

My local "alternative" news weekly, The Pitch, has a piece on self-proclaimed alien contactee Stan Romanek (of peeking alien head video infamy) in its new issue. Romanek's testimony is predictably -- and deservedly -- dismissed, and the cloying stupidity of his adherents exposed for what it is. While I typically wince when I read debunking articles (this patently awful piece by Phil Plait* comes to mind) I found The Pitch's treatment of the "true believer" UFO counterculture disquietingly accurate. If The Pitch doesn't offer a particularly complimentary portrait of ufology in Kansas City, it's because it's like this everywhere, the UFO meme a not-so-subtle stand-in for traditional religious conceits.

The prospect that UFOs are spaceships manned by extraterrestrials shouldn't be automatically dismissed; the problem is that frauds such as Romanek serve as convenient straw men for a mass media eager for simple explanations. Thus "UFO" almost always denotes "alien spaceship," rather than a merely unidentified object. (Some researchers, painfully aware of the need for greater perceived objectivity, have argued that the term needs to be replaced with something even more innocuous.)

Ultimately, those familiar with ufology's carnivalesque trappings will find The Pitch's article at least mostly astute, while those encountering the subject for the first time will simply laugh. And with the UFO lecture circuit dominated by Romanek and his ilk, I can't entirely blame them.

*Readers can find UFO researcher Kevin Randle's rebuttal to Plait's editorial here.

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This should come as no surprise.

2009-08-13T01:34:00.001-05:00

NASA Falling Short of Asteroid Detection Goals

Without more funding, NASA will not meet its goal of tracking 90 percent of all deadly asteroids by 2020, according to a report released today by the National Academy of Sciences.

The agency is on track to soon be able to spot 90 percent of the potentially dangerous objects that are at least a kilometer (.6 miles) wide, a goal previously mandated by Congress.

Asteroids of this size are estimated to strike Earth once every 500,000 years on average and could be capable of causing a global catastrophe if they hit Earth. In 2008, NAS's Near Earth Object Program spotted a total of 11,323 objects of all sizes.

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Guns, girls and monsters

2009-08-12T13:44:00.003-05:00

A sample from Saving The Women: War And Science Fiction.

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Reality check

2009-08-12T02:30:00.003-05:00

When the human species' unnerving arrogance gets you down, I've found you can do worse than consider the unthinkable enormity of the Cosmos. If nothing else, it will clear your head of celebrity gossip, healthcare reform and the ever-pressing Twitter/Facebook debate.

(Thanks to @KateSherrod.)

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Meltdown?

2009-08-12T01:24:00.001-05:00

Glaciers a canary in the coal mine of global warming

A 50-year government study found that the world's glaciers are melting at a rapid and alarming rate. The ongoing study is the latest in a series of reports that found glaciers worldwide are melting faster than anyone had predicted they would just a few years ago.

It offers a clear indication of an accelerating climate change and warming earth, according to the authors.

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