Collection of rare Robert Anton Wilson essays.

Borders: weird hour long Robert Anton Wilson TV thing from 1989, starring a young Steve Buscemi, with lots of interesting people cropping up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The excessive speeds being sought to enable financial transactions at every tinier fractions of a second for trading advantage are approaching a level where fluctuations from gravity and other limits of physics may appear.

(For context on this, see this TED talk about algorythms being used to run trade and reshape the world.)

Billionaire Google Founders and James Cameron investing in space mining company.

This was news when I first read it. Oh well. Ho ho ho. Mostly keeping it in to note: Anyone else read Stephen Donaldson’s Gap series? Shades of the UMC. Can you see these dudes as the Dragon?

Is Russia building super weird weapons?. (And even if it is just propaganda, as Time hilariously makes it out to be without ever questioning what it reports from its own government sources, is this any weirder than the shit DARPA claims to be doing anyway?)

101 spectacular nonfiction stories. This is a pretty awesome curation. Really worth trawling through.

The rape of men as weapon of war. Startling and disturbing.

Dau sounds like the most insane way to make a movie ever. Shooting for several years now in an enclosed city-set recreating a Stalin era world. Just berserk. Assuming it is real.

Life is short. Cute, feel good.

EO Wilson on the origins of the arts. Interesting insight from sociobiological perspective.

Fun and interesting set of definitions of science from smart people.

***

And also, if you have not seen episode one of Black Mirror (it is a standalone thing) and don’t know about it, then seriously acquire a copy and watch it, without spoilers if at all possible.The single best piece of television I have seen in years. Extraordinary.

* 48 psychological facts about yourself worth knowing

definitely worth the read. far from the usual sort of guff.

* Chris23 summarises the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2011.

well worth reading. short clear but excellent summary of where shit is at, current pressure points in the world system, etc.

* Reality as failed state

interesting analysis of the disconnect between different actors in the world

* old maps online

the largest collection of old maps online

* a downloadable archive of all of the amazing Grey Lodge online magazine

Grey Lodge was one of the first and greatest sources of underground, avant garde, occult culture. some absolute gems in their collection.

* future of publishing news: freemium, a fascinating funding model for writing from China

basically serialised online fiction. free at first. as it gets more popular, you have to pay. seems to be working for some people.

* BBC reports that implanted wireless devices are hackable by McAfee… ie if you have an insulin pump, it can be turned off, or made to release all its contents at once, by external signals…

And, as a follow-up to the last post on economics, here is a nugget from the awesome Nils Gilman:

Stat of the day: Sustaining a 2.3% growth rate to the year 3500 would require us by then to be capturing the entire energy output of the Sun

Capitalism cannot work.

(lots of todays stuff came from catching up on technoccult and URBEINGRECORDED for the first time in ages)

This week, almost by theme…

***

An unexpected clump of data on prisons:

Analysis of incarceration and death rates (abstract) turns up some weird nuggets :

Black male prisoners, however consistently exhibited lower death rates than black male nonprisoners did.

Cue this tweet from Nils Gilman: “Stat of the day: More black men are disenfranchised today (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than when the 15th Amendment was ratified”

(Oh, and there are now more Americans in jail than there were in Stalin’s gulag archipelago.)

***

All about information:

* A universe of self-replicating code – Brain food from George Dyson.

* Fascinating short piece with graph revealing that lots of books written in the 20th Century have effectively vanished/no longer available due to being copyrighted: the missing 20th century

* Apparently there’s been an explosion in the number of retractions in scientific journals.

 ***

Randomness from around the world:

Chinese wedding with a 6 ferrari dowry and 70 million overall price-tag.

Micro-chip embedded intelligent t-shirts used to track student truancy in Brazil.

(Man school uniforms are going to be fun in the future.)

***

And a wee dose of utopian future, almost: Free ebook of Lester Brown’s World on the Edge – How to prevent economic and environmental collapse.

Introducing FYI – a site which helps you make and browse Official Information Act requests. Now that is useful. (via norightturn)

Tatjna collects a long scary list of statistics and right wing quotes about the drug war. This will not make your day happier, but it is fascinatingly awful.

Cryptogon notes that in 2011, the Federal Reserve Purchased a Stunning 61% of U.S. Debt. Broken. So broken.

Aimee sent this… thing in. It is self explanatory. At least I am not going to try to explain it. Just look at it. And keep looking. I think that is what it is for.

Click here to view the embedded video.

anyway. here is some stuff.

* America under Obama still galloping towards fascism:

President Obama signs Executive Order allowing for control over all US resources.

On March 16th, President Obama signed a new Executive Order which expands upon a prior order issued in 1950 for Disaster Preparedness, and gives the office of the President complete control over all the resources in the United States in times of war or emergency.

The National Defense Resources Preparedness order gives the Executive Branch the power to control and allocate energy, production, transportation, food, and even water resources by decree under the auspices of national defense and national security.  The order is not limited to wartime implementation, as one of the order’s functions includes the command and control of resources in peacetime determination.

Between that and the NDAA stuff (By signing into law the NDAA, the president has awarded the military extraordinary powers to detain US citizens without trial.) there’s not much left. They can lock you up and take anything they want and tell you to do whatever they want, and it is all legal.

It is a sadly tired comparison, but seriously, that is a definition of totalitarian dictatorship.

(Seriously, the fact that these two have gone through under Obama – this most recent as an executive order – really overshadows anything positive he may have achieved.)

Bye, America.

(By the way, is this news to you?)

* Amazing article about the importance of libraries. Actually, it is a really long comment on a post. But it is exceptional.

* Fascinating guess at how China will develop: along Nordic socialist lines.

* The heart has consciousness. Mostly posting as a reminder to myself to read that.

* Cool post-apocalyptic short film: concept ruin

First, quite a bit of webby stuff:

An opensource decentralised darknet p2p is here, now: retroshare. This is probably important.

Who is tracking you online? Collusion for Mozilla shows you.

Found in this long but interesting article about advertising and privacy online.

the top 25 viral news sources on twitter and facebook.

Thinky stuff:

Six animations teaching logical thinking to kids. And adults.

free ebook: the future we deserve. 100 essays on the future.

Obama, explained. Epic article analysing Obama’s performance and psyche.

Other stuff:

New evidence suggests climate change wiped out the neanderthals, not conflict with humans.

Wade Davis continues to be jaw-droppingly awesome. (photo of his writing work-space)

Anonymous, for what it is worth, declared war on the US government.. One of those things that seems like I should have heard of it already, even if it is just rhetoric.

Hmm. Where has time gone? Here’s a handful of worthies:

*  Complete genius skewering of right-wing american thought:

Hammering on this contradiction is a core wedge issue: if you don’t think the government can be effective in a wealthy, stable country that we know intimately — like, say, the United States — how on earth can you believe that the US government has any hope of being effective in a benighted, godforsaken place like Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, or Somalia?

Seriously. So clear once pointed out.

* Learn almost anything, free: Khan Academy.

* Amazing short video - 500 years of Female Portraits in Western Art

* Possibly the most amazing piece of art I have seen on the internet.

Totally unique and fairly indescribable. For those who inhale, it will blow your mind as you grok it. For the rest, it will still blow your mind.

The Citigroup Plutonomy memos quite bluntly assess the size and power of the wealthy minority in the world economy, and how this distorts a number of economic indicators. Basically argues that companies servicing the rich will continue to do well, since they have all the money, so invest in them.

In 2005 and 2006, several analysts at Citigroup took a very, very close look at the economic inequalities within the USA and other countries and wrote two memos which were addressed to their very wealthy customers. If there is one group of people who need to know the truth about what is really going on within the society and the economy, minus the propaganda, then it’s businesspeople who have a lot of money to invest, and who want to invest wisely.

Fascinating. Apparently these have been fairly successfully suppressed, yet are reasonably available online. The trick is to know to look for them. Particularly relevant in terms of the Occupy 1% – 99% dialogue.

Footnotes to a changing world: Brazil has overtaken Britain as the world’s sixth largest economy.

Saber rattling between Iran and USA

A senior Iranian official on Tuesday delivered a sharp threat in response to economic sanctions being readied by the United States, saying his country would retaliate against any crackdown by blocking all oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for transporting about one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.

This would actually lead to war, so it will be interesting to see who backs down and how.

*

A quick few interesting tech tools:

“I’m getting arrested” android app – alert lawyers and loved ones with one click when you are being arrested. Evolved from OWS/protestors needs.

Tasker. Total automation for your android. Looks real high powered, but overkill for casual users.

Okay, this looks like it has really interesting potential: if this, then that: an automation tool for online stuff. Basically lets you automate repetitive online tasks between different programs you use daily, and more.

Also looks really interesting: hypothes.is.”The Internet, peer reviewed.”

*

A few kinda nerdy notes:

Some surprising uses of wolfram alpha for word-professionals.

Large Hadron Collider discovers its first new particle

This is quite fascinating, on a philosophical/thinking level:  answers to the question “what it’s like” to have an internalized sense of very advanced mathematical concepts“.

*

A few tracking the nasty weird future coming soon/now:

The Future of Drone Warfare – deeply weird and fascinating extrapolation on the likely direction of drone warfare. For bonus points, introduced me to the fact of Bonjwas.

System D – the 10 trillion dollar black market global economy – Foreign Policy article by the excellent Robert Neuwirth (author of Shadow Cities).

More on the emerging warlords of our near future: Mexico’s cartels build own national radio system. (via @nils_gilman / @deviantglobal)

Tracking this stuff is pretty relevant to what things are going to look like when things fall apart more openly: empowered non-state actors doing it themselves.

*

And some random shit:

How to open a padlock with a coke can

Mad monks shut down by Pope

“a renowned monastery in Rome where monks staged concerts featuring a lap-dancer-turned-nun and opened a hotel with a 24-hour limousine service has been shut down by the pope.”

Global Drug Commissioner Richard Branson (huh?) on lessons from Portugal after a decade of decriminalistation.

*

And to go out on: Wax, Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees

By all accounts about the most impossibly weird film ever.

Watch it free online here.