Looks like it's that time of year!

Pat Robertson Warns Pa. Town of Disaster

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town Thursday not to be surprised if disaster strikes there because "you just voted God out of your city" by ousting school board members who favored teaching "intelligent design."

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said Thursday on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "The 700 Club."

(Via Ravynstone Abbey.)

I'm honestly surprised I snagged this before Jason did.

Are we in store for a "Green Scare"?

A Green China

Here's the good news: China's leaders and business community know it. They know that as China grows more prosperous, and more Chinese buy homes and cars, it must urgently adopt green technologies; otherwise, it will destroy its environment and its people. Green technology will decide whether China continues on its current growth path or chokes itself to death. So green innovation is starting to mushroom in China.

And what's the U.S. doing as green technology is emerging as the most important industry of the 21st century? Let's see: the Bush team is telling our manufacturers they don't have to improve auto mileage standards or appliance efficiency, is looking to ease regulations on oil refiners and is rejecting a gas tax that would help shift America to hybrid vehicles.

Information Aesthetics: "Form Follows Data."

Some UFOs for your consideration.

Neuroscientists break code on sight

"We want to know how the brain works to create intelligence," said Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor in Brain Sciences and Human Behavior. "Our ability to recognize objects in the visual world is among the most complex problems the brain must solve. Computationally, it is much harder than reasoning." Yet we take it for granted because it appears to happen automatically and almost unconsciously.

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

This is leading slowly but inexorably to one of my favorite science fiction gadgets -- an iPod-like portable dream recorder.

Decades of dumping chemical arms leave a risky legacy

The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.

A Daily Press investigation also found:

These weapons of mass destruction virtually ring the country, concealed off at least 11 states - six on the East Coast, two on the Gulf Coast, California, Hawaii and Alaska. Few, if any, state officials have been informed of their existence.

The chemical agents could pose a hazard for generations. The Army has examined only a few of its 26 dump zones and none in the past 30 years.

But wait! It gets better:

The Army can't say exactly where all the weapons were dumped from World War II to 1970. Army records are sketchy, missing or were destroyed.

OK. Say it's next year. Or the year after that or the year after that. Florida has just been hammered by yet another "freak" hurricane, and the survivors are succumbing to toxins long since consigned to the Gulf's dark obscurity. How will FEMA react to that (if at all)?

Engineering Aliens

"We may never find other life away from Earth, but we have already made aliens on this planet and we will continue to do so at an increasing pace," he said. "In the last five years we've come to realize that we can make microbial life in a lot more ways than Mother Earth did."

(Via The Anomalist.)

If life outside of Earth finds us first -- and I think there's evidence it already has -- then we should probably expect it to be engineered. A star-hopping civilization isn't likely to be satisfied with bodies made of meat; it will have long ago transcended to a neo- or post-biological state sure to challenge our very definition of "life."

Hands-down site of the day: Human Upgrades. (Take your time.)

(Tip of the hat to Blake Dinsdale.)

Here I am with cyber-hipster/discordian vortex Cap'n Marrrk at Thai Pizza Co. Between my shirt and his beard, the joint fairly glowed. We didn't talk as much as we should have, in part because I was busy shoveling big saucy chunks of tofu into my mouth. That's meatspace for you.

Organ Printer Seeks Bio-Paper for Jam

We remember hearing about "organ printing" a long time ago. It sounded like a fanciful process of precisely layering different tissues, all while keeping the cells within oxygenated and happy.

Well, progress has been made. According to Deseret Morning News in Utah, organ printers now have a substrate, or bio-paper, with which to work.

(Via Future Feeder.)

Sooner or later, "organ fabbing" will be big. Really big. Artificial intelligence may even arrive in the form of a completely fabbed brain, perhaps that of a wealthy patient seeking a surrogate form of immortality.

Astronauts propose 'tractor-pull' of asteroid

That's a 99.98 per cent chance that the asteroid will miss Earth, according to NASA.

Yet the remote chance of catastrophe has set some great minds to thinking about how to divert this celestial body.

In Thursday's edition of the journal Nature, two NASA astronauts present their idea: deploying "asteroid tractor" -- an unmanned, 20-ton spacecraft that uses gravity to pull an asteroid gently into a new, non-threatening orbit.

(Via Betterhumans.)

The Cahokia Mounds are located in Collinsville, Illinois, not far from St. Louis. They're the remaining components of a highly geometric arrangement of structures used for functions ranging from habitation to human sacrifice. And they're eerily like some of the Martian formations thought by some to have been constructed by an unknown civilization.

The largest, in particular, is intriguingly similar to the "Face," with an artificial "framing mesa" and rounded hump that reminded me of the Face's simian "muzzle." I wish I'd come here before writing my Mars book.









From the peak, the remaining Cahokia complex is clearly visible. The mounds have begun to recede into the landscape and might easily pass for naturally occurring hills if not for their strange, lingering symmetry. If the Face or Cliff formations were in Cahokia -- or anywhere on Earth, for that matter -- they would draw immediate archaeological interest.





We sat on top of the primary mound for an hour or two watching the Sun descend into St. Louis.









Check out these suspiciously similar mounds in Iran:













Finally, the Face from above:

ENCODED DIGITAL MESSAGES

We all have one or more numeric codes that follow the blueprint of Sacred Geometry. It is about the spiraling of consciousness - Phi - Fibonacci - Golden Mean Spiral - found in perfection, in the exact porportions [sic] in the Great Pyramid - as a reminder of 12 around 1 (source) that create our reality. Reality - the spiral of consciousness as if through a slinky toy - or cones - through many levels of experience - at the same time - for the soul. The spiral gives the illusion of time - but once in meditation or dream state - or beyond the slinky - your frequency is too high - moving too fast - beyond linear time and space.

When you see a repetition of numbers, your DNA is being activated on some level. You are remembering that [ . . .] you are now returning to higher frequency vibration also called the return of the Feminine Energies - Rebirth - Christ Consciousness - Return of Jesus or another Savior - Evolution of Consciousness into total awareness - and so on. Many believe awakening ocmes [sic] through healing and the creation of balance - 11.

I think synchronicity might be a crack in our universe's computational substrate. Which begs the question: Are we meant to be aware of the crack, or have we discovered a flaw?

Oh, yeah -- Malin Space Science Systems has taken -- and actually released -- yet another high-resolution photo of the Face on Mars.

Remember Mike Malin's sustained rants about how near-impossibly difficult imaging the Face with the Mars Global Surveyor would be? Paradoxically enough, MSSS continues to target the Face despite a mostly apathetic "fringe" community.

What this means, simply, is that someone in charge of the MGS is interested in the Face for reasons of his own or else taking pains to foster that impression.

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study

It has long been suspected that the government has been using satellites to read and control the minds of certain citizens. The use of aluminum helmets has been a common guerrilla tactic against the government's invasive tactics. Surprisingly, these helmets can in fact help the government spy on citizens by amplifying certain key frequency ranges reserved for government use. In addition, none of the three helmets we analyzed provided significant attenuation to most frequency bands.

We describe our experimental setup, report our results, and conclude with a few design guidelines for constructing more effective helmets.

(Via Busy, Busy, Busy.)

I'm back from St. Louis (pictures forthcoming). "Elizabeth" and I are thinking about opening a modest coffeeshop; it will have an outer-space theme (of course) and hopefully serve as a meatspace nodal point for some of the activity that colors my mental life. And yes, we'll have free Wi-Fi.

Lots of good stuff posted while I was away. Take Rudy Rucker's latest:

Computers Will Be Alive and Intelligent

So if we grant that human consciousness is a particular kind of physical process occurring in human bodies, and if we grant that physics is made up of deterministic computations, then we have to conclude that consciousness is a kind of computation.

I'm genuinely galled that sales of "The Lifebox, The Seashell and the Soul" aren't living up to Rucker's expectations (yet). Books with dialectic meat on their bones frighten readers and send reviewers positively cowering. Sometimes I wonder how "Apocalypse" would have done had I actually claimed telepathic contact with ancient Martians a la Courtney Brown's "Cosmic Voyage."*

*Not that I'd ever knowingly indulge in a literary hoax. Not only is the memesphere too precious, it's just not my thing. So if I ever do write a book about my personal dealing with Martians (or other extraterrestrials), you can be sure I'm telling the truth.

What's playing:

1.) Viva Hate (Morrissey)
2.) Franz Ferdinand (Franz Ferdinand)
3.) Reveal (R.E.M.)
4.) File Under Burroughs (various)
5.) Reality (David Bowie)

I'm in St. Louis, where I've been looking at Indian mounds and Sumerian artifacts. Lots of blog-worthy stuff, but no time to post in any detail. I'll resume regularly scheduled programming soon.

I'm always on the lookout for inadvertently comical religious websites. This one definitely fills a void. (Thanks to Boing Boing.)

Note: I'm leaving town tomorrow. Posts this week may be infrequent or nonexistent . . . but not if I can help it.

"Elizabeth" took these pictures from the parking lot of the H.M.S. Beagle. At one point the clouds were lit in a way that suggested a nuclear blast. Very scenic.









Mars has been particularly visible in the night sky lately because of its recent opposition. I can't stop looking at it.

Since I started Posthuman Blues three years ago, I've maintained a pretty strict "no-pet" editorial guideline. I've mentioned my cats a few times, but I've quite purposefully refrained from posting pictures of them or otherwise doting.

Anyway, now, for whatever reason, I'm breaking my own rule. The following are pictures of my cats, Spook and Ebe. Bear with me; it won't happen again.




Spook





Ebe


I acquired Spook in October, hence the name. "Ebe" is MJ-12 for "Extraterrestrial Biological Entity," which amuses my vet. I like to think we have a nice "family" thing going. It's amazing how nuanced cat behavior is -- I'd never really been around them before. My only previous mammalian pet (excluding various mice) was a ferret, Burroughs, who died from a mysterious stomach ailment several years ago. Burroughs was fun; he liked for me to slide him, hockey puck-style, across the kitchen floor, then return over and over again for more.

OK. Enough pet stuff.

Yesterday I went to the H.M.S. Beagle, a great science store with a healthy collection of telescopes, fossils, globes, books, you-name-it. The store is part of NASA's Mars observation project, and holds regular night-sky observations. And it looks like they're going to host a book signing to concur with my appearance on the Discovery Channel, which I was told would be early next year.




At the New Mexico Museum of Natural History in August.


I hadn't even thought of "milking" the Discovery appearance (I still don't know the name of the program), but why not? If nothing else, I get to use one of the store's stupefyingly large scopes.

In the meantime, I've been given the go-ahead for my new book, which will probably be titled "The Postbiological Cosmos." I'd been holding out for my agent to find a bigger publisher, but why wait? I suspect I need a "project" to keep afloat. And as I narcissistically reread the speculative content of this blog, I realize that I've already got some decent starting points.

French plan curfews to stop riots

Local authorities in France have been allowed to impose curfews in an attempt to end 11 days of riots, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin says.

Speaking in a television interview, he called the violence "unacceptable" and outlined measures to curb the unrest that has hit 300 towns and cities.

The spectacle of the French riots reminds me of the scenario in "28 Days Later," only the source of the violence isn't nearly as esoteric as an experimental virus. In many ways, the riots echo the "Lord of the Flies" nightmare exactingly recounted in J.G. Ballard's "High-Rise."

I really enjoyed Chris Wren's take:

I was into the whole "See how the People really live" mode of sightseeing. It wasn't the vast tracts of council project housing that I was expecting - the kind you might have seen in London or Toronto in the 70's. I'm not even sure I'd call it "housing". It was just concrete bunkers from horizon to horizon. No parks, no shops, nothing. No sense of community life, and no physical spaces for communing to happen. Just concrete boxes and vast deserted plazas done in that utterly impractical Soviet style, loftily disdainful of human scale and "sentimental" esthetic sensibilities. No joy and no possibility of hope or escape. There was no reason to aspire to joining in with French society because there was no evidence of French society to aspire to.

Glow from first stars revealed

Astronomers have detected a faint glow from the first stars to form in the Universe, Nature journal reports.

This earliest group of stars, called Population III, probably formed from primordial gas less than 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Now that's old.

I'm up in the air about immortality. Maybe it will happen. Maybe humans will seize this "Singularity" thing by the reigns and conquer aging. Or maybe some of us will opt out of meat-based existence altogether, coexisting with long-lived carbon-based humanity in the form of mind-uploads. Of course, there's always the risk that I'll die before I can take advantage of such exotic future technologies.

So what I've decided to do -- more out of sense of fun than hubris -- is to leave behind a simulation of myself. It won't be sentient. It won't pass the Turing Test. But at least you'll be able to talk to it, and if I do my part well enough, it may even fool some casual users into thinking they're conversing with an authentic human being.





The idea is essentially Rudy Rucker's "lifebox" concept -- an interactive database that encapsulates its owner's psyche in spoken or text-based format. In my case, I see no damning theoretical reason this blog can't eventually become an online version of myself, able to converse with Netizens and provide a decent-enough portrait of my mindscape. (Or even talk with me, perhaps serving as a virtual doppleganger/personal assistant.)

I can see the technology necessary to create "lifebox"-style blogs arising even if the transcendent bounty of the Singularity never materializes. After all, the "intelligence" demonstrated by a hyperlinked database is illusory -- and already we have some engaging pseudo-AIs that could serve as templates for more robust future systems.

I'm not a computer scientist, so obviously I can't shoulder the burden alone. Ideally, the "mind-blog" I'm proposing will be smart enough to take cues from my behavior, reducing the amount of time I spend deliberately entering text (or talking into a computer mic). I'm relying, in part, on trends such as ubiquitous computation and exponential processing speed. Google's purported plans to blanket the country with wireless Internet service will also help, as many of the "bloggable" insights I experience occur while on the go, without even the luxury of pen and paper.

The completed product may turn out to be an unflattering caricature or -- worse still -- plain boring. Then again, those are the same pitfalls we try to avoid in "meatspace." A more organic approach to online publishing just might enable blogs to achieve something like the fractal narrative quality we associate with "stream of consciousness" or "inner monologue."

Planet Venus: Earth's 'evil twin'

Through Venus Express, scientists hope to understand better the mechanics of climate change on our own planet.

"Earth can certainly take a very uncomfortable step towards Venus, though it's not likely to go all the way," comments Fred Taylor, Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, UK.

"The point is, we're moving in that direction and many of the constituents and mechanisms involved are the same. Even a few degrees change in temperature can be a disaster on Earth."

When asked, most politicians refute the need for space exploration because, in their opinion, the money needed to finance manned missions to the planets would be better spent directly serving the people. We're told, again and again, that there are too many problems afflicting Earth to warrant the novelty of scientific discovery.

In fact, the opposite is true. We direly need insight into how planets like Mars and Venus became the wasted worlds they are if we're to prevent Earth from succumbing to a similar fate.

This isn't a particularly difficult concept to grasp, and I suspect the politicians who diminish the need for a robust program of comparative planetology intuit this, at least on some level. But space exploration has yet to become a political issue; it lacks the seeming immediacy of more "down-to-Earth" sound-bites.

I've maintained that climate change won't become politically relevant until large numbers of people start dying. Then I realized that the dying has already begun, and that unless one regularly reads the European press, one would never imagine that global warming had migrated from the comfortable sphere of the theoretical to workaday reality, promising to drown cities and wreak havoc with our ecosphere while too many governments look on in autistic stupor.

Ultimately, my fear is that by the time crewed missions to Mars are urgently necessary in order to assess our Earth-bound climatological predicament, it will be too late. The time to launch is now, while we're not yet paralyzed by a regular seasonal parade of Category-8 storms. We're confronted with a choice: to wallow in deep shit or welcomingly accept even deeper shit -- a layer than may well smother us in the womb.

Antiaging MPrize gets anonymous million-dollar donation

An anonymous donor, recognizing the promise and potential of serious antiaging research, has added one million dollars to the coffers of the Methuselah Mouse Prize overnight. As a result, the cash prize has increased to nearly three million, far outweighing end-of-year expectations.

Web's never-to-be-repeated revolution

The web developed because we went in the opposite direction -- towards openness and lack of centralised control. Unless you believe that some invisible hand of technological inevitability is pushing us towards openness -- I am a sceptic -- we have a remarkable historical conjunction of technologies.

(Via Busy, Busy, Busy.)

An Open Letter to The Iron Skeptic

The problem with Iron is that it's inflexible - hardly the stuff of which true skeptics are made. True skeptics are more like quicksilver - always moving, always searching, always willing to look at new evidence, and always open-minded.

As Sakulich's latest reveals, "Iron" is exactly the right description for his type of "skepticism."

Sure, refuting pop "debunkers" is a little bit like drowning kittens -- but what knowledgeable ufologist can resist?

More of yesterday's photos. Note the quasi-"orb" accompanying the streetlight.





Statues frolicking in front of the Fairmont, another nice hotel down the street.





This stark industrial waterfall bridges two apartment buildings behind my own.

Last night I ducked into the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art for the final minutes of a concert/open poetry reading and some free coffee.





While looking at art, I realized I was in an ideal place to do a Lynndie, something I've been itching to do for a long time.

For the uninitiated, a "Lynndie" is an impersonation of Lynndie England, the US soldier infamous for her role in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse case. I mistakenly pointed with three fingers -- and my "thumbs up" certainly could have been cheerier -- but I suppose I got the idea across. (By the way, that's a tube of lipstick in my mouth.)





"DJ Nucleon" was performing: spoken word and improvised electronic sound effects. If I had a band, it would probably sound something like this.

(Photos by "Elizabeth.")

Lynndie links:

Doing A Lynndie

Stealth Lynndie-ing

Rudy Rucker doing a Lynndie!

I just took these. The first one involved clambering over the concrete rim of a fountain (dormant for a winter yet to actually happen) and maneuvering on my back in order to see the tangled and cobwebbed electrical infrastructure beneath the central sculpture.





This sculpture adorns the lawn of the Raphael, a nice hotel down the street.





Usually these multicolored lights illuminate a sheet of water. Now the water's off, but they're kept on anyway. (Note the drifting "orbs," known to photographers as "light flares.")

I've added a few more winning blogs to the sidebar. Here's a sampling:

Autopia: Wired's car blog. Giddyup!

Craphound.com: Author Cory Doctorow's online presence. Download free books!

The Daily Grail: Can't find enough weirdness at Posthuman Blues? Chances are you'll find what you're looking for here.

MoCo Loco: Contemporary architectural design. May induce drooling.

NuSapiens: Transhumanism to go.

Whoa! Missed this one:

Volcanoes ruled out for Martian methane

"I can't rule out a geological source of methane" because there are many conceivable mechanisms, Krasnopolsky told New Scientist, but "this makes biological methane more plausible".

White Triangle Morphs over Kaufman, Texas-10-22-05

When I finally got to see it close, it looked like a white triangle, then it started changing to different shapes. I've never seen anything like this here, but have seen some videos and pictures of objects changing shapes or morphing.

Of course, it may not be "changing shape" at all. If the UFO is a four-dimensional (or five- or six-dimensional . . .) object, we could simply be seeing three-dimensional cross-sections as it enters our 3-D spacetime.

I think so-called "morphing" UFOs deserve careful attention by researchers; they might be telling us that their origin is more esoteric than popular culture would have us assume.

Fireball Sightings

When should you look? You might see a fireball flitting across the sky any time Taurus is above the horizon. At this time of year, the Bull rises in the east at sunset. The odds of seeing a bright meteor improve as the constellation climbs higher. By midnight, Taurus is nearly overhead, so that is a particularly good time.

(Via The Anomalist.)

Life as a computer game

Of course the game is not the same for everyone playing. Some never receive the chances to score points and so their game is cut short. Others are simply more lucky than the rest. They are able to take risks and and get away with them longer, seeming to play on longer than they really should.

Interracial relationships and marriages are becoming more common

Interracial relationships and marriages are becoming more common in the United States, according to a new Cornell University study.

The number of interracial marriages involving whites, blacks and Hispanics each year in the United States has jumped tenfold since the 1960s, but the older individuals are, the less likely they are to partner with someone of a different race, finds the new study.

I bet this is exactly the kind of thing that chaps the asses of those "Prussian Blue" girls.

Europe's First Pyramid?

The pyramid is over 300 feet high and may contain several rooms. It's built of stone blocks, which, according to the Daily, "indicates the presence at the time of a highly developed civilization . . . Archaeological excavations near the surface have uncovered a part of a wall and fragments of steps."

Geologist Nada Nukic says, "Visocica hill could not have been shaped like this by nature." It's worth remembering that the extensive pyramids of the Mayan culture in Mexico and Guatemala were overgrown and "lost" to modern civilization, until natives of these areas pointed them out to modern archeologists.

It's also worth noting that symmetrical pyramidal forms on Mars have been dismissed as potential archaeological sites because they're imperfect -- in other words, we shouldn't waste our time eyeing candidate ET structures because it's assumed that "aliens" will somehow only build structures immune to decay. And we're effectively asked to take that on faith, all the while happily dishing out contributions to SETI.

Good news on the Mars front:

Methane Producing Bacteria Found in the Desert

Evidence of methane-producing organisms can be found in inhospitable soil environments much like those found on the surface of Mars, according to experiments undertaken by scientists and students from the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the University of Arkansas and published online in the journal Icarus.

The results, they said, provide ample impetus for similar "biodetection experiments" to be considered for future missions to Mars.

But wait! There's more!

Mars Express PFS spectrometer back at work

The Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft is now back in operation after a malfunction, reported a few months ago.

[. . .]

PFS was the first instrument ever to make direct 'in situ' measurements of methane in the atmosphere of Mars, and provided first indications of traces of formaldehyde, both candidate ingredients for life.

What If We Burn Everything?

If humans continue to use fossil fuels in a business-as-usual manner for the next few centuries, the polar ice caps will be depleted, ocean sea levels will rise by seven meters and median air temperatures will soar to 14.5 degrees warmer than current day.

Two words: Orbital airships.

More weather modification fun:

U.S. Military Wants to Own the Weather

In this regard, nanotechnology could be utilized to create clouds of tiny smart particles. Atmospherically buoyant, these ultra-small computer particles could navigate themselves to block optical sensors. Alternatively, they might be used to provide an atmospheric electrical potential difference -- a way to precisely aim and time lightning strikes over the enemy’s head -- thereby concoct thunderbolts on demand.

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

Hmmm. This might be just the thing to enliven the fictional sentient whirlwinds discussed in a previous post.

How to Save the Climate

You won't read it in US media, but Blair's speech on "10 ways to save the world today" was reported in detail in the Independent. They are reminiscent of the Canadian prime minister's list of ways that the average person can combat global warming.

Per Blair's speech, here's one way to help make individual buildings self-sufficient:

The technology of the Sunball is unusual, but not unprecedented. Rather than a flat panel, it uses fresnel lenses to concentrate sunlight onto an arrangement of high-efficiency cells, increasing the amount of light hitting the cells. This allows the Sunball to be less-costly than standard pv, with an estimated cost of AU$1,400 (about US$1,050) per 330 W peak unit. We've talked about solar concentrators before, but the previous examples were clearly meant for larger-scale power generation; one advantage of solar concentrator technology is that it can produce more power in a limited space than normal photovoltaic panels. What's novel about the Sunball is that it's meant for home users, particularly those who don't want to cover their rooftops with black glass panels.

Try to envision suburbs where these things are as ubiquitous as Dish TV.

Space designs from ants and squirrels

The future of space exploration could lie in biomimetics, where engineering meets biology. In effect, it steals nature's evolutionary tricks to create revolutionary applications.

Engineers like Dr Alex Ellery, head of the Robotics Research Group at the University of Surrey, are trying to find out how natural systems might inspire human-made technology in space.

(Via Vortex Egg.)

I'm imagining a future where the machinery slithers, rustles and oozes.