White House Memo Calls For Slashing Remaining Space Shuttle Flights





"According to a White House staffer, a memo representing official Bush administration space policy calls for no more than 15 space shuttle flights before the fleet is retired in 2010."

We are gearing up for a bleak new space age in which the only space endeavors financed by the government are those designed to kill large numbers of people.

Google the Moon!

To Icelanders, power of elves is inescapable

"Despite having seen the elf only once in 15 years -- enough time to determine that she was 'bigger than life and dressed like my grandmother, in a 1930s national costume' -- Hakonardottir, 67, has no doubt of her existence." (Via Technoccult.)

Intriguingly, a recurring motif among "abductees" is seeing dead relatives -- sometimes in an otherworldly context. Either "they" have the ability to adapt to our prevailing assumptions -- magical or technological -- or our minds readily create a contextual "reality" for nonhuman encounters based on available memes. Either way, we're not seeing behind the curtain.

I saw this white kitten in the park on the way to the museum. One brown eye, one blue. He (?) looked pretty frazzled and wouldn't come near me; instead, he/she started an ominous trajectory into the street.





I dashed out and grabbed the cat. Fortunately, a woman in a minivan was watching me and volunteered to take the kitten to the Plaza Animal Clinic. I handed her the exhausted, squirming cat and continued my hike to the Kemper.

Good luck, kitty.

I was about two inches away from this Jackson Pollock, intending to get a close-up of a bit of squashed metal, when the woman standing guard politely warned me to back off. (I've found that while my cheap camera takes awful distance shots it does OK with close-ups, and I was determined to get a picture of a canvas that actually showed some depth.)





I took this close-up of brushstrokes in another room and nobody seemed concerned.





Take that, Kemper art mavens!

I encountered a few sculptures that resembled far-flung transcended posthuman intelligences.

I took these pictures in Cafe Sebastian, a restaurant that adjoins the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Presumably the people in this picture don't know they're being photographed.





Part of the eating area is an airy, glassed-in courtyard that reminds me vaguely of the Mars base in "Total Recall."

Mind May Affect Machines

"Radin, who is not affiliated with Pear, dismisses critics who say the group isn't practicing solid science.

"'This field has received far more scrutiny and criticism than many other ordinary fields,' Radin said. 'The people who do this kind of research are well aware that their research has to be done better. The Pear lab has taken the best principles of rigorous science and applied it to extremely difficult questions and come up with some pretty interesting answers.'

"Jahn thinks that critics err in expecting the phenomena to follow the usual rules of cause and effect. Instead, he thinks they belong in the category of what Carl Jung called 'acausal phenomena,' which include things like synchronicity.

"'They play by more complicated, almost whimsical, elusive rules,' Jahn said, 'but they play.'" (Via The Anomalist.)

A future full of hopes and fears





"One certainty in an uncertain world is clear to Professor Rees: 'Whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate in the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth.'"

Demand for Their Data on Climate Chills Scientists

"In a move that many climate scientists find chilling, the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce is investigating three professors whose work suggests that the earth is warmer now than at any time in many centuries, and that greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are largely to blame.

"In highly unusual letters sent to the scientists late last month, Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, demanded detailed documentation of the hundreds of studies on which they have been authors or co-authors.

"Mr. Barton also sent a letter to the director of the National Science Foundation on the same day that requests information about the work of the three professors, as well as a list of all grants and awards the agency has made in the area of climate and paleoclimate science, which in the past 10 years number 2,700.

"Several climate scientists reached by The Chronicle expressed dismay at the investigation and described it as harassment."

Bizarre weather signals threat of monster typhoons

"It remains to be seen if the record-breaking number of typhoons that made direct landings on the Japanese archipelago in 2004 -- 10 of them -- will be exceeded. But just about everyone agrees that the seasonal weather patterns aren't what they used to be.

"'This is just the beginning of real changes in weather patterns on a worldwide scale due to global warming,' says Koji Murayama, a meteorologist who works for the Japan Meteorological Business Support Center. 'Once it begins, the common wisdom in our field is that the frequency of irregular phenomena will increase and their scale will become increasingly greater.'"

A Time of Doubt for Atheists

"It's been years, decades even, since the Almighty was so hot."

Religious devotion should be properly viewed as an historical early warning system: When religious fervor peaks, authentic hope for a sustainable human future plummets.

When the nut-cases go mainstream, it's time to be afraid.

Google Maps reveals a vague but interesting face in Peru. Looks natural to me. Then again, given the Nazca designs . . .

Simulated society may generate virtual culture

"Every character in the simulated world will need to eat to survive, and will be able to learn from their environment through trial and error - learning, for example, how to cultivate edible plants with water and sunlight. In addition, characters will be able to reproduce by mating with members the opposite sex and their offspring will inherited [sic] a random collection of their parents [sic] 'genetic' traits." (Via KurzweilAI.net.)





Here's a thought: The experiment forecasted above succeeds. So well, in fact, that more and more computational resources are put at its disposal. Flash forward 100 years -- a functional society, unaware that it's a simulation, has matured exponentiatingly from the first steps taken in 2005. While some scientists ponder shutting down the simulation, ethicists argue that the simulation's inhabitants are evidently self-aware and should be left alone. Meanwhile, a subculture of voyeuristic enthusiasts buoys interest in the simulated world by occasionally "hacking" it and disturbing the rules for reasons that seem downright Fortean to the indigenous population. Some devotees even scan their brains and migrate into the simulation, retaining some of the elevated status they wielded in "meatspace."

The result? Pretty much the world we have now. Maybe it's no accident we seem on the cusp of both technological transcendence and ecological holocaust; if we're being simulated, we might be an attempt by beings only slightly more advanced than ourselves to identify emergent threats to human existence.

But the real fun begins when the simulated society amasses the computational power to create its own simulations; this hierarchical model, taken to its logical extreme, argues that the chances of our being the "original" civilization are staggeringly low.

They're calling this one the "Confounding Formation."

It's one small step for a bug, a giant red face for Nasa





"The craft, Spirit and Opportunity, landed on Mars last year. One key task was to look for signs of life -- now it seems that if there are any organisms, it is man who has put them there. If proved, the contamination would raise concerns at possible breaches of a United Nations treaty to stop other planets being polluted from Earth."

Has it occurred to anyone that Mars and Earth exchange literally tons of each other's mass every year? So the overwhelming odds are that terrestrial microbes are already a part of the Martian biosphere -- and vice versa. If Earth life is shuttling to Mars, it certainly doesn't need our robots to do it.

Fujitsu Debuts Bendable Electronic Paper

"Electronic paper offers all of the same characteristics of paper such as being thin, flexible, and lightweight. It also boasts low power consumption in that it does not require electricity except during screen image changes, making electronic paper especially suited for advertisements or information bulletins in public places for which paper is currently used. Electronic paper is especially convenient for use on curved surfaces, such as columns. In addition, electronic paper can be conveniently used in conjunction with mobile devices as an easy-to-read and portable display device." (Via KurzweilAI.net.)

Maybe I'll download "Accelerando" after all . . .

I Cannot Yet Skin A Deer





"This all comes to mind as I realize, with increasing sense of dread and alarm and a weird sense of fatalistic ennui, that if any of the dire prognostications for the world soon comes to pass, if the oil crisis strikes as violently as predicted and/or if the eviscerated U.S. economy spirals us into a new and violent Great Depression 2.0 and/or if BushCo does indeed succeed in bringing the wrath of an angry spiteful homophobic God down upon the swarming gay-lovin' tofu-sucking heathen masses, I might not be as well prepared as I'd like."

I've been browsing Charles Stross' Singularity! A Tough Guide to the Rapture of the Nerds, a nice refresher for us meme-drenched postcyberpunk types.

Doctorow and Stross Release Latest Novels for Free

"Two prominent science fiction authors have recently released their newest novels as free downloads to coincide with their in-store releases."

The thing is, for all of my technophile bluster, I won't be happy until I have an actual book in my hands.

You've read it before. Now -- read it again!

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT by Terry Bisson

An Interview with Dr. Yvan Dutil

"The only other serious attempts was the transmission from Arecibo in 1974. Many companies claim to send interstellar messages but essentially they are no better than using cell phones or CB for this job. Even the 2000 edition of the Cosmic Call from Encounter 2001 using the Mir space station is worthless.

"The main drawback of the Arecibo message is its lack of resistance to the noise. Even at the time of the transmission it was known for a long time since Carl Sagan as pointed this out in the sixties. Also, the message is much too short and do not contain any redundant information. Therefore, it is impossible for the reader to cross-check his deductions.

"Finally, the target chosen was very bad. The globular cluster M13 is a very unlikely place to find planets and life."

Here's a gallery of paintings by author Rudy Rucker; I like them because they have a playful "claymation" quality. And the ubiquitous 1950s-style flying saucer is a nice touch.

Would some altruistic Posthuman Blues reader please buy me this car?

I can relate.

Sound waves produce nuclear fusion





"An inexpensive 'tabletop' device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions could lead to a new source of clean energy and a host of portable detectors and other applications."

Distant Prayer Doesn't Improve Clinical Outcome For Patients Undergoing Coronary Procedures

"Praying for patients undergoing heart procedures off-site or giving them bedside therapy involving music, imagery, and touch (MIT) does not measurably improve their clinical outcome, suggests a study published in this week's issue of The Lancet."

This exquisitely disturbing gallery (representing a cross between the Brothers Quay and Helmut Newton) puts me in mind of Margot Knight's recent stuff.

US wombs polluted, study reveals

"Unborn US babies are soaking in a stew of chemicals, including mercury, petrol by-products and pesticides, according to a new report."

The sheer magnitude of the above statement beggars the imagination.

Try to envision the greenhouse-ravaged world of 2040: a future of widespread genetic damage, crippling heat, a desiccated global ecology, warfare over dwindling resources, mass starvation on a scale never before contemplated, and inundated coastal cities.

I'm not looking forward to it.

NASA Scientist Finds World With Triple Sunsets

"'The sky view from this planet would be spectacular, with an occasional triple sunset,' said Dr. Maciej Konacki (MATCH-ee Konn-ATZ-kee) of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., who found the planet using the Keck I telescope atop Mauna Kea mountain in Hawaii. 'Before now, we had no clues about whether planets could form in such gravitationally complex systems.'"

I've almost finished Charles Stross' "Singularity Sky," a novel that owes a great deal of its ideological source code to Ken MacLeod, particularly his "Engines of Light" trilogy. Stross envisions a post-Singularity future governed by a complex emergent intelligence known as the "Eschaton." The Eschaton is quietly omniscient, and its overarching concern is making sure that humans (who've learned to travel back in time and thus violate causality) don't "edit" it out of existence. So while humans are free to go about their usual puny affairs, the Eschaton makes sure that any civilization that attempts to modify the past gets exterminated in a hurry and that anyone of like mind gets the message.

The idea of a god-like superintelligence aloofly setting rules for humankind isn't a new one in science fiction. In MacLeod's trilogy the "gods" are sentient comets (!) who recruit surface-bound races to do their inscrutable bidding. As in "Singularity Sky," humans are free to do whatever they like -- up to an including developing an advanced interstellar society -- so long as it doesn't infringe on the dreaded "Powers Above."

John Norman -- an author with none of MacLeod or Stross' skill -- anticipated this premise in his Edgar Rice Burroughs-like "Gor" books. In Norman's world, insectile alien "Priest-Kings" engineer an intentionally low-tech civilization on an Earth-like planet, weeding out any attempts to develop sophisticated technology by divine decree and the occasional use of force; consequently Gor is permanently mired in the Middle Ages. Jack Vance used a similar mechanism in his "Dying Earth" books, in which magic and technology are indistinguishable.

But while Vance and Norman's motives are mostly escapist, MacLeod and Stross actually wrestle with the implications of god-like alien intelligences and what it might be like to live in a Cosmos subject to their caprices. Indeed, Stross' Eschaton seems less political metaphor than a sincere technological extrapolation; we may in fact be heading toward a future in which some kind of existential restraining order is needed to keep us from annihilating ourselves in some hedonistic orgy.

Which, given the real possibility of time travel, poses an interesting question: Could something like Stross' Eschaton be in place now? Could we be under quarantine, deftly misdirected so that we don't impose on someone else's turf or else stray from some alien ideal?

I suggest the UFO phenomenon, with its documented psychosocial effects, might be an automatic process emplaced by some long-ago intelligence, a "program" designed to help sculpt -- and possibly even catalyze -- our technical and conscious evolution in ways that promise to remain unclear until we face the phenomenon squarely.

Can you make out Pamela Anderson?

(Thanks to UFO Reflections.)

No, Mars Won't Look as Big as the Moon





"There's a new rumour going around the Internet. Maybe an excited friend has sent an email about a once in a lifetime chance to see Mars. Mars is going to make its closest approach on October 30th, 2005, and look bigger and brighter than it has in two years. Unfortunately, the closest approach actually happened two years ago, in August 2003, when the Earth and Mars were closer than they had been for 50,000 years."

Amen.

Gravity doughnut promises time machine

"He says that according to Einstein's theories, space can be twisted enough to create a local gravity field that looks like a doughnut of some arbitrary size. The gravitational field lines circle around the outside of this doughnut, so that space and time are both tightly curved back on themselves. Crucially, this does away with the need for any hypothetical exotic matter."

Homer Simpson: "Mmmm . . . A donut of arbitrary size . . ."

The Great UFO Debate (by Seth Shostak)

Here we go with more porous UFO-bashing by everyone's favorite ontologically inflexible SETI guru . . .

"Sure, rather few researchers have themselves gone into the field to sift through the stories, the videos, and the odd photos that comprise the evidence for alien presence. But they don't have to. This complaint is akin to telling movie critics that films would be better if only they would pitch in and get behind the camera. But critics can compose excellent and accurate evaluations of a movie without being participants in the business of making films."

There is simply so much wrong in this essay that it fairly staggers the mind. (I find it particularly comical that Shostak's idea of ufological "research" is primly "sifting" through various "stories" rather than active investigation.) Reading Shostak's shopworn, anal ideas about the UFO inquiry is intellectually equivalent to plunging down Lewis Carroll's magic rabbit hole, where things like deductive thinking and healthy speculation cease to exist, replaced by legions of straw men, gutless pseudo-logic and fervent denial that reality might be other than that dictated by the ruling paradigm.

In this case, Shostak freely shows his absolute unwillingness -- and apparent inability -- to think like one of the aliens he claims to understand so well. Not that that's anything new.

What We Owe What We Eat

"If you value your peace of mind, not to mention your breakfast bacon, you should not read Scully's essay 'Fear Factories: The Case for Compassionate Conservatism -- for Animals.'"

Scully overlooks at least two other reasons to deplore the meat industry: its reckless environmental impact, witnessed by rain forests razed to make room for grazing pasture, and mounting evidence that we're spreading toxins and disease by meat consumption.

Meat is murder -- and it's not just the animals who are dying.

The sad thing is that this fuckwit probably enjoys a far better love life than I. So it goes.

Universe 'too queer' to grasp

"Each species, in fact, has a different 'reality'. They work with different 'software' to make them feel comfortable, [Dawkins] suggested.

"Because different species live in different models of the world, there was a discomfiting variety of real worlds, he suggested.

"'Middle world is like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see,' he said."

Dawkins is right, of course. But I can't help recoiling at the irony of a mainstream skeptic basically reciting ufologist/occultist John Keel . . .

Paul Kimball's rundown of sci-fi babes continues, and so far I don't see "Nova" from "Planet of the Apes" anywhere.

For Christ's sake, Paul, at least give Estella Warren her due for the remake.





"It's a madhouse! A madhouse!"

Weird, wild weather a new norm

"It's official: According to Environment Canada, there's no such thing as normal weather any more.

"From one end of the country to the other, Canadians have been facing extreme weather, from unusual cloudiness on the West Coast to heavy rain across the Prairies and oppressive heat in Southern Ontario and parts of Quebec.

"Fog has created chaos for the Nova Scotia tourism industry, forcing the airport to close several times this month.

"'We're out of superlatives to talk about this summer,' said David Phillips, senior climatologist for Environment Canada."

Paul Kimball is counting down the top ten sexiest women in sci-fi history. This should be good.

Fascinating . . .

Capgras (Delusion) Syndrome:

"Capgras Syndrome, named for its discoverer, the French psychiatrist Jean Marie Joseph Capgras. The person's primary delusion is that a close relative or friend has been replaced by an impostor, an exact double, despite recognition of familiarity in appearance and behavior. The patient may also see himself as his own double. Also know as Delusional misidentification, illusion of doubles, illusion of negative doubles, misidentification syndrome, nonrecognition syndrome, phantom double syndrome, subjective doubles syndrome."

'Human-brained' monkeys (includes must-see photo)

"The committee will also examine how detectable differences in the monkey's brains, for example emotional or behavioural changes, or if the monkeys developed 'self awareness', could be measured - and dealt with." (Via The Anomalist.)





I have a creeping suspicion that "dealt with" is an expedient euphemism for "killed." After all, we don't want animals getting too smart, do we? I mean, hasn't everyone seen "Planet of the Apes"?

Another (very) brief teaser from the story I'm working on. Or, more precisely, should be working on:

Something was wriggling determinedly from the recesses of her scalp, swelling as it emerged. It drooped pendulously until resting on her shoulder, a single thread of flesh linking it to mutant tangle of her brain.

Deep Impact's Top Ten Comet Crash Images

"Comets will never look the same now that NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has successfully slammed into one of the icy wanderers in full view of orbital observatories, ground-based telescopes and skywatchers around the world."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but technically didn't the comet slam into Deep Impact and not the other way around? (Sorry -- I'm spoiling the hubristic fun, aren't I?)

Could Mad Cow Disease Already be Killing Thousands of Americans Every Year?





"The recent exclusion of most cow brains, eyes, spinal cords, and intestines from the human food supply may make beef safer, but where are those tissues going? These potentially infectious tissues continue to go into animal feed for chickens, other poultry, pigs, and pets (as well as being rendered into products like tallow for use in cosmetics, the safety of which is currently under review). Until the federal government stops the feeding of slaughterhouse waste, manure, and blood to all farm animals, the safety of meat in America cannot be guaranteed."

I'm half-convinced there's a link between spongiform encephalopathy and cattle mutililations . . .