The World's Most Photorealistic Vector Art

They mean it, too.

(Thanks to Boing Boing.)

Tonight it struck me just how reclusive I've become. I honestly wonder if there's something wrong with me -- some subtle autism -- that makes a life of entrenched solitude so deceptively easy. Too often, I feel like an anthropologist consigned to a life of unremitting field study; my privacy is absolute and imprisoning.

Shut-Ins Wanted: Russia Seeks Volunteers for Simulated Mars Mission

Russia's space agency is seeking volunteers for a 520-day 'flight' to Mars and back.

To qualify in the first round of selection, you would need to be aged between 25 and 50 years.

Being a doctor, engineer, biologist or computation instrument specialist would win you extra points during the selection process, according to an announcement posted August 3 on the web site of Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos). The announcement didn't specify how many of the five winners would need to be male or female.

After 10 years, few believe life on Mars

Of all the lines of evidence presented by the NASA scientists, it was the magnetite grains that proved most provocative. They were embedded in the carbonate along with other iron-containing minerals in such an unusual arrangement that something out of the ordinary must have put them there -- could it have been alive?

"The shape of the magnetite grains is still rather distinctive," McKay said. "If it were found on Earth it would be a very strong biosignature."

For years McKay and his detractors argued about how distinctive the magnetite grains in ALH84001 are, and whether a non-biological process could have produced them. Certainly nobody had ever produced similar magnetite grains in the laboratory.

Then somebody did. In 2001 a second team of NASA scientists, including McKay's brother Gordon and a consultant to the space agency named D.C. Golden, managed to cook up a batch of magnetite grains very similar to the ones in ALH84001. Golden and Gordon McKay were also able to incorporate the magnetite grains into balls of carbonate like the ones David McKay and his colleagues described in 1996.

"He got a little testy about the results we were getting," said Gordon McKay, whose office is down the hall from his brother's. "What we have shown is that it is possible to form these things inorganically."

What's more, their laboratory method simulated conditions ALH84001 is known to have experienced during its time on Mars.

Yet David McKay insists his brother's team has not accurately described the synthetic crystals' shape, and that they aren't sufficiently similar to the ones found in ALH84001. He also suggests that the purity of the magnetite crystals stems not from the lab process itself, but from using unrealistically pure raw materials as a starting point.

How to tell Earthlings that Martian life is here

After any Mars rocks are returned to Earth, preliminary NASA plans call for them to be isolated and quarantined in a specially constructed laboratory. They would be tested there to determine whether they pose any threat to life on Earth and, if deemed safe, released to other laboratories for further study.

The communications strategy should emphasise the scientific benefits of the sample return mission, while not ignoring public concerns about a potential biohazard, Rummel says.

A lobbying group has already formed to prevent such a mission from happening, citing biohazard concerns.

US begins building treaty-breaching germ war defence centre

The National Biodefence Analysis and Countermeasures Centre (NBACC), due to be completed in 2008, will house heavily guarded and hermetically sealed chambers in which scientists simulate potential terrorist attacks.

To do so, the centre will have to produce and stockpile the world's most lethal bacteria and viruses, which is forbidden by the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Three years before that treaty was agreed, President Richard Nixon halted the production of US biological weapons at Fort Detrick in Maryland. The same military base is the site for the new $128m (£70m), 160,000 sq ft laboratory.

The green light for its construction was given after the September 11 attacks, which coincided with a series of still-unsolved anthrax incidents that killed five people. The department of homeland security, which will run the centre, says its work is necessary to protect the country.

(Via PAG E-News.)

And after all, nothing can go wrong!

Here are some great roadside pictures by fellow Missourian Cap'n Marrrrk.

(Found at Pink Tentacle.)

ARM-RAISING FEMALE BEHAVIOR BY EARTHLINGS

Arm raising among Earthling females seems to have increased in scope and significance in 20th Century world culture, but we do not know whether this is because they did not develop the technology to document the practice before that time or whether it simply was not practiced before then.

Kirk seeks 'superman' technology watchdog to rein in scientists

This article confronts us with the following revelation:

A group called "Transhumanists" believe humanity should start to artificially improve itself, and there have already been some tentative experiments.

Sweet holy god! Who knew? Someone must stop them! Stop them now! Before it's too late!

(And "Transhumanists" is a hazy label, not an organization. Reading the "superman" article, one gets the impression we're dealing with something along the general lines of the Church of Scientology.)

Ocean Slime: Reverse Evolution

Modern human life is ruining our oceans. The "rise of slime" is causing the water to become more acidic, killing off many species, some of which may turn out to be essential to slowing down global warming. The runoff from modern life is causing a kind of reverse evolution, allowing ancient species of bacteria to flourish that haven't been seen on earth for billions of years.

Not with a bang, but a whimper?

Having a blog just isn't fulfilling enough. So I made a "lens."

Powering Up, One Step at a Time

"We can harvest between 5 to 7 watts of energy per footstep that is currently being wasted into the ground," says Claire Price, director of The Facility Architects, the British firm heading up the Pacesetters Project. "And a passing train can generate very useful energy to run signaling or to power lights."

Like solar and wind proponents, vibration harvesters argue that abundant, clean energy is all around us and goes to waste. The challenge is how to store the power efficiently so it provides a continual output even if the vibrations from footsteps or passing trains temporarily taper off.

Wouldn't it be cool to live in a world that harvested 90% or more of its wasted energy?

(One possible outcome of such steely economy is the Dyson Sphere, a collection of panels that encapsulates an entire star, making sure little or no solar radiation goes unutilized.)

One good reason to read William Gibson's blog:

"Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny."

I was concerned about my love-life. No more!

Located in historic Independence, Missouri, Girlfriends, Inc. has introduced me to a new dimension in romance.

Find the love of your life . . . at Girlfriends!

London's derelict cinemas

Here's a bittersweet gallery of derelict cinemas in London, magnificent grand dames of yesteryear since converted to discount stores and bingo parlors or merely fallen to hulking wrecks.

I love this stuff.

Random photos . . .

(Thanks, Sauceruney!)

American Madrassas (David Byrne)

The kids are around 9 or 10 years old, recruited from various churches, and are pliant willing receptacles. They are instructed that evolution is being forced upon us by evil Godless secular humanists, that abortion must be stopped at all costs, that we must form an "army" to defeat the Godless influences, that we must band together to insure that the right judges and politicians get into the courts and office and that global warming is a lie. (This last one is a puzzle -- how did accepting the evidence for climate change and global warming become anti-Jesus? Did someone simply conflate all corporate agendas with Jesus and God and these folks accept that? Would Jesus drive an SUV? Is every conclusion responsible scientists make now suspect?)

(Via Boing Boing.)

Oh, Jesus.

Oh, good lord. Whoever faked this needs to lay off "The X-Files."

Just when I thought it couldn't get any hotter . . .





. . . it did.

Here's the official website for the 2006 New Frontiers Symposium in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I'll be presenting a paper on posthuman evolution. Other attendees include Will Wise, Robert Zimmerman, Stanton Friedman (lecturing on the physics of UFOs), Paul Kimball, and Greg Bishop.

If you're tired of UFO seminars geared for true believers, this just might be the antidote.

Hope to see you in Halifax!

Peru link to Indian archaeological find?

Dr Karanth clarifies that it is too early to arrive at any conclusion.

"It could be a manmade feature or may have been formed naturally due to erosion of the hill slope along a fracture formed by the movement of earth's crust," he says.

"However structures formed naturally due to erosion generally tend to be parallel to each other. But here, all three arms are in different directions. Besides, all the ditches are almost uniformly wide and deep."

Karanth's just being cautious, but the tone of his commentary is likely familiar to followers of planetary SETI . . .

One of my favorites . . .



And here's the original trailer for "Blade Runner," featuring some highly unnecessary voice-over narration and music unheard in the actual film . . .

I got my hair cut today. To my great relief and wonderment, the woman who cut my hair refrained from engaging me in conversation; it's amazing how peaceful a haircut can be spared the usual banter.

I'd like to live in a society where, at least once a week, no one spoke. No trivial pleasantries, no public diatribes, no cellphone theatrics. Just a few times a month . . . or else the offender is quietly dragged into the back of a soundproof van and shot in the head.

Pat Robertson: I'm 'A Convert' On Global Warming, 'It Is Getting Hotter'

Yesterday on the 700 Club, evangelical Pat Robertson declared himself "a convert" on global warming. Robertson said that he has "not been one who believed in global warming in the past." But now, Robertson said, he believes "it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a build up of carbon dioxide in the air." Robertson implored, "we really need to do something on fossil fuels."

Interesting development, that.

One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures

The heart-stopping moments when Neil Armstrong took his first tentative steps onto another world are defining images of the 20th century: grainy, fuzzy, unforgettable.

But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone missing at NASA's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.

A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate to dust before they can be found.

This is like "losing" the Mona Lisa. Or somehow misplacing one of the Pyramids.

Of course, no one is likely to give a damn because an alarming percentage of the US population, steeped in religious prattle, television and enamored of hideous fetishistic vehicles, has decided that the Moon landings were staged.

Here's a relatively decent UFO video from Australia. As always, I'm betting on a fake, but it's worth noting that it was supposedly taken by an analogue camera.

An appropriately black-clad, cigarette-smoking William Gibson holds forth on Life Before:

Sorry for the scant posting; I've been busy retooling the Drake Equation to calculate the odds of discovering an intelligent female who can stand my presence.

Strange 'twin' new worlds found

A pair of strange new worlds that blur the boundaries between planets and stars have been discovered beyond our Solar System.

A few dozen such objects have been identified in recent years but this is the first set of "twins".

Dubbed "planemos", they circle each other rather than orbiting a star.

Their existence challenges current theories about the formation of planets and stars, astronomers report in the journal Science.

Big bang pushed back two billion years

"Our result hints that there may be something interesting happening with the Hubble constant," says Przybilla. But he cautions that the study reports only one distance measurement. "We need to follow this up with more measurements."

Congressman Vows to Fight Global Warming Bill

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo) has said that he will make sure that the 110th Congress will NOT address the climate problem.

*Gasp!*

He offered as his reason that "the information is not adequate," despite the fact that, as long ago as 2001, over a thousand climate experts published a report stating that "There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."

No, wait . . . Now I really am gasping becase the Amazon rainforest is on fire and there's no fucking air.

[The bill] sets greenhouse gas emissions targets that will keep temperatures below the danger point. The level of emissions is frozen in 2010 and then gradually reduced each year through 2050.

2050? OK, I feel better; we probably don't have that long anyway.

Related:

Hottest year on record; more to come

Northern California, withering under last week's punishing heat, wasn't the only hot spot in the world this year -- thermometers have spiked throughout much of the United States, Canada and Europe, and scientists are predicting more intense, longer and more frequent heat waves in the future.

While leading climate scientists have been reluctant to link regional heat waves with rising temperatures in the world's atmosphere and oceans, they say the recent weather patterns are consistent with computer projections for global warming.

Global warming beer made from melting ice-caps

A Danish brewery in Greenland is brewing beer using water from the melting Arctic ice-cap. As AccordionGuy sez, "when life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla," or in this case, "When life gives you catastrophic global warming, get drunk."

The ghostly figure in the doorway bears a remarkable similarity to me! Call George Noory!





Check out this quaintly ergonomic coffee cup-holder built into the arm of a chair. Boing Boing, this one's yours!





The following picture is smoking gun evidence of extraterrestrial visitation. Take it from here, Linda Moulton Howe!

Meme Therapy asks: "Do you think it likely that the first discovery of extraterrestrial life will be made by a rover?"





Likely? No. Possible -- yes -- but only if we redefine the role of rovers in unmanned space exploration.

Despite repeated landings (and attempted landings) on Mars, the only craft that contained the equipment needed to properly test for life -- Britain's Beagle 2 -- wasn't a rover. Alarmingly, future rover designs from JPL exclude direct life-detection capability, despite NASA's mantric insistence that its Mars exploration program is the "search for life."

More exotic "nanoprobes" slated for hypothetical future expeditions are fun, conceptually, but they also beg the question: Won't we be there by then?

I think extraterrestrial life will probably be discovered by human explorers -- if not on Mars then almost certainly among the moons of the outer solar system. We could perhaps find it sooner by using a properly equipped rover, but the scientists using rovers for Mars research are geologists with little academic interest in the prospect of life; this is debilitating and needs to be addressed. The search for life demands the inclusion of new and seemingly novel disciplines, from botany to archaeology.

Radio Signal Spawns 'Alien' Art

Though promising as an example of an extraterrestrial transmission due to its repetition, frequency and increasing strength, the signal was discarded as an anomaly and the hype surrounding it was dismissed by many experts in the field, including SETI@home chief scientist Dan Wertheimer.

"There are a lot of people that got interested in this signal when we first reported it," says Wertheimer. "We ourselves were not that interested in it."

In 2005, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats revisited the signal as part of research for a nascent project on extraterrestrial life. Keats' previous projects include copyrighting his brain, attempting to genetically engineer God, and taking a hundred-year-long exposure of a San Francisco hotel room.

(Via The Anomalist.)

And here's a significant quote from a related article cited by Unknown Country:

"If I were an extraterrestrial trying to communicate with beings elsewhere in the universe, I certainly wouldn't transmit something they already knew," he argues. "I'd try to express something about myself, as profound as possible, in the most universal language I could imagine: I'd send art."

Anyone unfamiliar with Project Orion, a unique effort to create an interplanetary -- or interstellar -- spacecraft using pulsed nuclear detonations (shelved, of course), could do worse than watch this quick video.

Captions, anyone?

The Mars Society is auctioning away original art and books. Maybe I should send 'em a signed copy of you-know-what.

US Senate backs opening protected US coastline to oil, gas drilling

The Gulf of Mexico acreage has been protected by a drilling moratorium for the last 25 years, which Congress has renewed annually, to protect the sensitive coastal environment.

Environmental groups have raised concerns about lifting the long-standing drilling prohibition, saying doing so only feeds the insatiable US demand for fossil fuel, while calling for the development of alternative energy sources.

Russians Enjoy 'Total Recall'-Style Fake Vacations

Persey Tours, a travel agency in Moscow, was a failure at offering real tours. It has achieved success in recent months, however, by offering fake vacations instead.

For just 13,460 rubles (about $500 in American currency), Persey Tours will sell you all of the stuff you would expect to have after your exotic vacation: faked ticket stubs, hotel receipts and even photos with your picture professionally superimposed on exotic landmarks.

Just give Dmitry a call; he even faked a trip to the moon for $2,000 - the fake trip of a lifetime for a Siberian gas station owner who wanted to fly to the moon on Russian space craft.

(Via UFO Reflections.)

TOXIC MARS

That's a little disappointing, but finding life on Mars wouldn't necessarily be that much of a bombshell anyway. The possibility that life was carried there on ejecta material following a major impact event here on Earth would always cast a shadow over the discovery of Martian microbes. The upside is that if Mars really is a totally dead world, then we can colonize and terraform it without any serious ethical qualms.

I still think we'll find Martian life. Probably not on the surface, but hiding deep below. Whether it will be truly Martian, of Earth origin, or from elsewhere promises to be one of the central exobiological mysteries of our time.

Plans Across the Water: California and U.K. Strike Climate Deal

California and the U.K. government are preparing to create their own climate treaty that sidesteps the Bush administration's official climate policy to create a trans-Atlantic market for greenhouse gases.

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and British prime minister Tony Blair on Monday announced their collaboration during their meeting in Los Angeles on Monday. They were joined by business leaders to announce the agreement under which Britain and California will collaborate on research into clean energy technologies and California will study the British experience of greenhouse gas emissions trading.

(Via Beyond the Beyond.)

Some things you need to know before the world ends

And if the war on terror isn't enough to put Israel on the side of the angels, John Hagee has argued that "the United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West". He speaks of "a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ."

War is hell . . . but if you keep at it long enough it's heaven.

All Together Now: Animal uplift paper complete and published

Abstract:

As the potential for enhancement technologies migrates from the theoretical to the practical, a difficult and important decision will be imposed upon human civilization, namely the issue as to whether or not we are morally obligated to biologically enhance nonhuman animals and integrate them into human and posthuman society. Precedents for intra-species cultural uplift abound in human history, providing both sobering and edifying episodes showcasing the possibilities for the instigated and accelerated advancement of technologically delayed societies. As a number of scientists, philosophers and futurists have recently argued, there is mounting evidence in support of the suggestion that these historical episodes are symptomatic of a larger developmental trend, namely the inexorable and steady advancement of intelligence. Civilizational progress necessarily implies increasing levels of organization and refinement across all realms of activity. Consequently, the status of nonhuman species and the biosphere will eventually come under the purview of guided intelligence rather than autonomous processes.

SETI urged to fess up over alien signals

"They have had numerous extraterrestrial signals," Greer said, during the radio broadcast. "They were apparently searching in a spectrum or in an area . . . where they hit the mother lode. The signals were so numerous that they began to have their systems externally jammed by some sort of human agency that did not want them to continue receiving those signals."

(Via The Anomalist.)

If Steven Greer isn't a disinformation agent -- and frankly, I doubt he is -- you really couldn't hire a better one. The man has gone to profound lengths to make the serious study of UFOs as "fringe" as possible. The more he appears on programs like "Coast to Coast" (which I pointedly never listen to) the more pronounced the "giggle factor." Or, in Greer's case, the "sigh factor."