New SETI post. Right this way, folks.

Instead, Bracewell probes could very well outsmart their own makers and transform themselves into machines quite unlike the quaint transponders imagined in "The Galactic Club." Once the potential of nanotechnology and self-replication are accounted for, the potential for visiting ET craft appears nearly limitless. Not only could such emissaries engage an emerging technical civilization in an excruciatingly patient dialogue before alerting others, they could choose to remain chameleon-like, perhaps operating in the background like stealthy computer viruses.

Elsewhere in the post I misspell "devices." This is undoubtedly the result of writing immediately after drinking a Heineken at the bar down the street at 1:00 in the morning.

The intro to "Contact" is one of my favorite scenes of all time; when the film was in theaters I made a point to catch four or five late-night showings so that I could enjoy it on the big-screen. Watching it on YouTube isn't quite as affecting, but the sheer sense of scale is undiminished.



The sequence's stupefying rush of planets, galaxies and galactic clusters leaves me with an agreeable sense of vertigo. I want to keep gazing into the void even if doing so invites the void to gaze back. Indeed, provoking a rapport with the emptiness may prove to be part of our duty as a species.

TV-chandelier hybrid adds a cyberpunk touch to any room

If Big Brother had a chandelier, this would be it. "End of an Era" is an art project created by Ian Burns that attaches 16 small black-and-white TVs to a chandelier-ish frame. Each screen displays a live video feed (presumably received via the extended antennas in the pic), and from the looks of the screens, it's the same one on each.

(Via The Keyhoe Report.)

Make Solar Lamps Not War - Nobel Scientist

One billion people can get electricity for the first time for little more than the cost of one month's war in Iraq, said Rajendra Pachauri, the head of a Nobel peace prize-winning UN panel of climate scientists.

[. . .]

Pachauri compared the $15 billion cost of providing solar-powered lights to a billion people with a reported cost of the US-led military campaign in Iraq of $12 billion a month.

He described that perceived mis-match in resources as "one of the biggest tragedies that the world can be guilty of".

Isamu Noguchi sculpture or alien artifact?

I genuinely liked the first half of "I Am Legend." I thought the second was gratuitous and condescending.

Fortunately, this alternate ending does much to redeem the sense of loss that the first half so meticulously cements in the viewer's subconscious. No more sentimental "God makes everything OK" bullshit.

The film still ends on a hopeful note, but it's no longer a whorish appeal to the emotional lowest common denominator. In fact, it's the kind of hope I'm willing to live with (although I reserve the right to protest).

UK top cop who led CIA probe found dead

A city police chief who led an investigation into charges that Britain cooperated with secret CIA flights to transport terrorism suspects without formal proceedings has been found dead, his deputy said Tuesday.

Nothing suspicious here, folks. Move on . . .

Another reason to like Peter Watts. And I had the audacity to think I was a pretty good writer.

Microscopic 'astronauts' to go back in orbit

"Wherever people go, germs will follow," said Nickerson, who is also an associate professor at ASU's School of Life Sciences. Last fall, she completed a multi-institutional study that showed for the first time that microbes could be affected by spaceflight, making them more infectious pathogens. The results were from a payload flown onboard space shuttle Atlantis in 2006.

Spaceflight not only altered bacterial gene expression but also increased the ability of these organisms to cause disease, or virulence, and did so in novel ways. Compared to identical bacteria that remained on earth, the space-traveling Salmonella, a leading cause of food-borne illness, had changed expression of 167 genes. In addition, bacteria that were flown in space were almost three times as likely to cause disease when compared with control bacteria grown on the ground.

Oh boy, plastic aliens!

This high quality collection is based entirely upon actual documented encounters. Ten different hand-painted replicas sure to spark the curiosity of every E.T. enthusiast.

(I actually found the buxom "Nordic" in a dollar shop.)

Marie Claire robot fetish editorial (March issue). Thought you should know.

(Thanks to BB.)

Tiny Palau skeletons suggest "hobbits" were dwarfs

Tiny skeletons found in the caves of the Pacific islands of Palau undercut the theory that similar remains found in Indonesia might be a unique new species of humans, researchers reported on Monday.

The Palau skeletons, which date to between 900 and 2,800 years ago, appear to have belonged to so-called insular dwarfs -- humans who grew smaller as a result of living on an island, the researchers said.

Marginally related (albeit lame):

'Creepy Gnome' terrorises town

A town in South America is living in fear after several sightings of a 'creepy gnome' that locals claim stalks the streets at night.

The midget - which wears a pointy hat and has a distinctive sideways walk - was caught on video last week by a terrified group of youngsters.

(Via The Anomalist.)

Check out this gorgeous Flickr pool devoted to digital fabrication. I can't wait till the maturated "Diamond Age" version.

(Thanks: Beyond the Beyond.)

Forgetomori (a blog you should bookmark if you haven't already) just turned me on to this excellent video trashing the "little man on Mars" I railed about not too long ago:



And don't miss this oddly disturbing clip of a CGI Gray speaking in an appropriately alien tongue.

(By the way, you're reading this blog's 7,000th post.

Not impressed? I didn't think so.)

Konarka Announces First-Ever Demonstration of Inkjet Printed Solar Cells

Inkjet printing is a commonly used technique for controlled deposition of solutions of functional materials in specific locations on a substrate and can provide easy and fast deposition of polymer films over a large area. The demonstration confirms that organic solar cells can be processed with printing technologies with little or no loss compared to "clean room" semiconductor technologies such as spin coating. The most popular printing tool for organic electronics, inkjet printing could become a smart tool to manufacturer solar cells with multiple colors and patterns for lower power requirement products, like indoor or sensor applications.

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

Bogus Bigfoot footage leads to rediscovery of fascinating "humanzee" documentary.

Augmented reality graffiti. I should have seen this coming.



And just think of the interior decorating apps . . .

Lesbian vampire jailed for sex killing

Judge Peter Blaxell said the murder, in Perth, Western Australia, was "sexually perverse" and "evil", after the court was told the two lesbian lovers became aroused as they battered the teenage girl and then kissed while standing over her body as she lay dying.

Dude, that is so totally goth.

Could Arctic Ice Melt Spawn New Kind Of Cold War?

Unlike the first Cold War, dominated by tensions between the two late-20th century superpowers, this century's model could pit countries that border the Arctic Ocean against each other to claim mineral rights. The Arctic powers include the United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway.

The irony is that the burning of fossil fuels is at least in part responsible for the Arctic melt -- due to climate change -- and the Arctic melt could pave the way for a 21st century rush to exploit even more fossil fuels.

The stakes are enormous, according to Scott Borgerson of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former US Coast Guard lieutenant commander.

The Arctic could hold as much as one-quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas deposits, Borgerson wrote in the current issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.

Portishead. New album. April 28.

I'm excited.

Peter Watts on no-kidding mind-reading technology:

Now here comes Kendrick Kay and his buddies in Nature with "Identifying natural images from human brain activity", and if they haven't actually vindicated all those cheesy narrative gimmicks, they've made a damn good first pass at it. They used fMRI scans to infer which one of 120 possible novel images a subject was looking at. "Novel" is important: the system trained up front on a set of nearly 2,000 images to localize the receptive fields, but none of those were used in the actual mind-reading test. So we're not talking about simply recognizing a simple replay of a previously-recorded pattern here. Also, the images were natural -- landscapes and still-lifes and snuff porn, none of this simplified star/circle/wavey-lines bullshit.

The system looked into the minds of its subjects, and figured out what they were looking at with accuracies ranging from 32% to 92%. While the lower end of that range may not look especially impressive, remember that random chance would yield an accuracy of 0.8%. These guys are on to something.

I've been refining my blog tags. I've still got some work to do, but eventually surfing Posthuman Blues should be a smoother process.





In the meantime, here are a few tags worth checking out if you want to look around:

Space

Futurity

Transportation

Dieback

Design

Robotics

Transhumanism

Architecture

UFOs

Climate change

Meatspace

Biotechnology

Art

Power Shortage in the Outer Solar System?

As if we didn’t have enough trouble getting to the outer Solar System, now comes word that the US inventory of plutonium-238 is diminishing. That's what NASA administrator Mike Griffin told a House appropriations subcommittee this past week, pointing out that after the Mars Science Laboratory launches in 2009, the agency will find itself running out of the plutonium needed to fuel radioisotope power systems. Even New Horizons, on the way to Pluto/Charon, is using Russian plutonium, the periodic purchase of which has been forced by NASA's dwindling supplies.

Masdar: ecotopia or pipe-dream?



(Thanx: Communist Robot.)

It was probably inevitable: io9 discovers "Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity." (By some cosmic fluke I've never actually seen this particular quintessence of "B"-grade science fiction, but the clips are quite, um, "revealing.")

Another book for the Posthuman Blues reading pile. (Hey Trevor! How about a review copy?)

Simulated Environments for Animals

But why do we only build zoos like this? Why not suburbs or college campuses? You mold landforms out of reinforced concrete, and you install artificial waterfalls and fake rivers, and you grow rare orchids under the cover of geodesic domes. And then your grandkids can grow up in a savannah-themed suburb outside Orlando. The next town over, kids run around through giant fern trees, chasing parrots.

Perhaps themed biozones are the future of suburban design?

I went gallery-browsing today in an effort to rouse myself from what's becoming a most unwelcome bout of depression. (Lately my life has been defined by attempts to combat the petty machinations of fuckwits and the usual grinding loneliness.) It was no magic cure, but at least I filled my cellphone with pictures.









I totally neglected to get the artists' names. The sculptures can be found at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Nelson-Atkins, respectively. If you're ever in Kansas City, I unreservedly recommend both of them.

Another cat video. Featuring aliens! Don't miss it!



(Thanks, Brent!)

UFO Meeting Did NOT Take Place

Therefore, Mr. Lorant has left the FEA, and the president of that organization, Michel Ribardiere, has issued a statement to the effect that the visit was probably "fiction." Michael Salla's report of the event also came from Gilles Lorant, and has no independent source. In France, such misrepresentations are illegal, and Michel Ribardiere has issued the following additional statement, "Considering the infiltration of many foreign UFO organizations by unscrupulous individuals, who have sometimes attempted to sabotage their operations, the F.E.A reserves the right to bring this whole affair before the courts."

The only thing more shocking than if this meeting had actually occurred as described is that that the story's being retracted by Unknown Country.

Worth a look:

March Military Campaign - now that's what I call ground clearance

Okay, I'm done. I've reached the apex of pure awesomeness. Nothing I ever post from here on out will match the German NK-101 Minenraumer rolling mine exploder (which the guys cataloging the odd vehicles of the Third Reich must have missed).

Unfortunately, little seems known about it. It currently resides in the Kubinka, Russia tank museum, and the Russians captured it from the Germans after World War II.

(Via Boing Boing.)

3-D Modeling Advance

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a Web service called Make3D that lets users turn a single two-dimensional image of an outdoor scene into an immersive 3-D model. This gives users the ability to easily create a more realistic visual representation of a photo--one that lets viewers fly around the scene.

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

This could yield some fantastic applications for satellite space imagery; who could resist an immersive tour of Iapetus' equatorial "wall" or a close-up look at the Cydonia region of Mars?

Update: Bruce Sterling's posted some interesting YouTube demos. The technique is limited but still cool.

UK astronomers to broadcast adverts to aliens

Although each and every television advert already broadcast has leaked into the heavens, the caper marks the first time one is to be targetted at an other worldly market, a zone in the constellation Ursa Major that could harbour alien worlds, the snack manufacturer Doritos announces today.

*sigh*

Today's biomimetic fix:

Floppy when wet: Sea cucumber inspires new plastic

Sea cucumbers' skin is usually supple, allowing them to slide through narrow spaces between rocks and corals. But when touched a defensive reaction makes their skin go rigid in seconds, thanks to enzymes that binds protein fibres together. A second set of enzymes can break those bonds to make the skin soft again.

Sea cucumber skin can become more than 10 times stiffer in this way, but the new material can go further -- softening by more than 2500 times. Simply soaking the transparent material in warm water for 15 minutes is all it takes to complete the transformation. After drying out it is identical to its original rigid state.

New SETI post right here.

I'm puzzling over what, exactly, prompted me to post the preceding cat cartoon. Not that it was unfunny or that I don't like cats; it just wasn't usual PB fare -- insofar as anything that winds up here conforms to a theme.

Anyway, I just noticed Greg Bishop's latest post (about the enigmatic UFO "aviary") and thought I'd pass it along. Aside from offering a valuable "who's who" among ufological spookdom, it fits.

And now, since I'm exhausted, I'm going to bed -- perchance to dream of animated felines and anonymous saucer-spies.

It's come to this. I'm posting cat cartoons.



(Thanks: LiLeLa.)

Click to see the Earth and Moon from the vantage-point of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Author Peter Watts cites a scientific paper that suggests consciousness -- that ephemeral psychic narrator we equate with self-awareness and the "soul" -- doesn't have any adaptive value. Watts originally turned me onto this proposterous-seeming (yet perversely seductive) idea in "Blindsight," a dark novel of posthumanity and first contact that spawned the following meditation on alien saucer-pilots:

If we're dealing with aliens -- regardless whether or not they originate in space or on Earth -- maybe their clumsy, oblique interactions with us can be explained if they're endowed with intelligence but devoid of sentience. They could have taken an evolutionary route that bypassed awareness entirely, or they could have achieved a form of sentience only to lose it, perhaps by recklessly merging with their machines.

"Ufonauts" are often described as behaving in a military or insect-like manner, even moving in lockstep. Maybe they're interested in us because we're aware in a way they aren't, and they're determined to acquire our capacity for self-reflective thought in order to communicate with us. In essence, our interaction with the UFO intelligence could be a dialogue with a complex but myopic machine. Maybe "they" have never encountered a species like us and are genuinely baffled -- insofar as a distributed computer can be "baffled."

(Have you noticed how I've spent the last two posts quoting myself? Must be something in the air.)

Sentient Developments' recent discussion of von Neumann machines and Bracewell probes puts me in mind of an essay I wrote in response to a Centauri Dreams post on the "Fermi Paradox":

Instead of relatively limited Bracewell probes, for instance, imagine an intelligent technology capable of engaging emerging civilizations in an excruciatingly patient (by human standards) form of theater. Many UFO encounters seem less like chance sightings of extraterrestrial hardware than staged events conceived by an overarching intelligence that may have little to do with the will of perceived "occupants." Just as a Bracewell probe's agenda involves instigating a simple dialogue with an emergent civilization (or at least its technological ambassadors), the more robust capabilities and resources at the disposal of a galaxy-spanning post-"Singularity" intelligence should be more than up to the task of communicating with us.

But are we confident that such communication will be limited to electromagnetic exchanges? In light of Ray Kurzweil's amply demonstrated law of accelerating returns, perhaps it's just as likely that our first conversation with extraterrestrials will take the form of a complex psychosocial experiment (in which unconventional flying objects may play only a partial role). Although undoubtedly physical, it's an open question whether "real" UFOs are metallic spacecraft in the familiar sense (although in the early days of the phenomenon researchers quickly fastened to the idea, sensing appealing parallels with our own aerospace ventures). Dispensing with the conventional notion of "mere" ET craft allows us to view the UFO problem as a manifestation of technologies ranging from von Neumann machines to "utility fog."

If the ET intent is to test our reactions to its presence (or something more profound, as the phenomenon's impact on our mythology might indicate), quickly assembling "ships" and even "aliens" from raw materials would enable the disparity of forms seen in the sky. The flexibility of nanotech construction would allow the UFO intelligence to respond to our preconceptions in "real time," thereby ensuring a permanent foothold in the collective unconscious while maintaining plausible deniability -- at least among those tasked with policing potentially subversive memes.

I'm not much of a "Star Wars" fan. Regardless, I manage to laugh aloud every time I view the delightful alternate-universe Saul Bass intro below.



I hope "Blade Runner" gets the next faux-Bass treatment. (Any animators reading this?)

Mug! For! Aggressive! Caffeine! Addicts!

This Mug! is a mix between coffee mug and a knuckleduster. Comes in two models: Big Mug for guys, decorated with gore, and Girlie Mug, decorated with butterflies.

Sweet.

Recommended reading: Paul Kimball on Edward Condon.

A One-Way, One-Person Mission to Mars: Who Wants In?

Would you go on a mission to Mars? What about if it was a one-way mission? And you were by yourself? Yeah, that changes things a bit. Well, that's exactly what former NASA engineer Jim McClane suggests, saying that it's worth considering and removes many of the hurdles keeping us from the red planet now.

Dubbed "Spirit of the Lone Eagle," his plan would eliminate the hardest aspect of any potential Mars mission: the need to launch off of Mars to return to Earth.

Ahem. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind readers that I proposed the same idea back in 2006:

In idle moments I like to imagine ways I might get off the planet in the near-future. So far, none of them are especially probable. One idea that continues to tantalize (despite its fatalistic implications) is convincing NASA to send a one-man "experimental" mission to Mars, ostensibly to study the effects of prolonged microgravity and radiation on human physiology.

The subject? Me, of course.

I'm not asking that much, really. Just a modest capsule with life support and a way of navigating the Martian surface, even if it's just an augmented spacesuit and an inflatable tent. Once on Mars, I could continue sending NASA data on my condition, not to mention carry out geological and exobiological investigations. Given the tools and a minimum of scientific training, I figure my efforts could eclipse those of the current Mars Exploration Rovers within weeks.

Potentially suicidal? Yes.

Fun? You bet!

I'd never pegged myself for much of a "Japanese hiphop" kind of guy, but I really like this video.



(Thanks to alert reader Steve S. for the tip.)