Undulating Ungulate

And here is a week of mutant thought condensed into an hour:

June’s transit of Venus will be the last in your lifetime (unless you live another 100+ years)…

More Eidolon-becoming-real news: Presence.

Also: (near) future tech article – Web 2.0 is dead, long live age of mobile: “Any company that isn’t primarily delivering its service via mobile five years from now will probably be irrelevant.”

UK aid helps to fund forced sterilisation of India’s poor. Details as nasty as you would imagine.

Nine ways to make yourself smarter. Obvious parallels to artistic and magical techniques.

As a neat companion: five effortless postures that foster creative thinking.o  These really don’t seem like they should work.

All of these studies show how the position of our bodies feeds back into the state of our minds. And it also shows how deeply metaphors are planted in our consciousness.

Things babies know. Fascinating article on baby cognition research. My question would be the power of the interactions it occurs to them to measure… which could get unethical but interesting.

“In 20 years, the most successful, happiest people will be living in resilient communities. “  Interesting claim explained.

The Institute for Dark Tourism Research aims to advance knowledge about the act of visitation to tourist sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre.

Solar power your neighbourhood.

Database of nonviolent civil resistance techniques.

And just randomly a quote from Bruce Sterling encouraging weirdness:

Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don’t read Shakespeare. Read Webster’s revenge plays. Don’t read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he’s off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don’t read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn’t come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you’re here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.

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This is pretty wonderfully mad: black holes in the bazaar.

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.)

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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.

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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.

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This week, almost by theme…

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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.)

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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Hahahaha. Here is what stuck enough to pass on in the past two hour info-dump.

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.

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The aftermath of moving, and The Hobbit, have eaten my life for the past few weeks. I haven’t really been info-trawling. Here are a handful of things that have popped up.

* Really fascinating interview about the creation of the computer by the same folks that created the nuclear bomb, and the biology of our machine future.

Besides obvious ones like computer viruses, we have large, slow-moving megafauna like operating systems and now millions of fast-moving apps, almost like microbes. Recently we’ve seen enormous conglomerations of code creeping up on us, these giant, multicellular, metazoan-level code-organisms like Facebook or Amazon. All these species form a digital universe.

* How your cat is making you crazy: Bizarre but brilliant read on a bacterial organism secreted by cats which has demonstrable (and surprisingly large) effects on humans; an interesting parallel to this old post about mind altering parasites.

* Meanwhile: 5 Kinds of Fungus Discovered to be Capable of Farming Animals!

* One of those things that should get more eyeballs on it. “The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis” So many juicy quotes.

“At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”

* This summary of US/general contempt for NZ’s geopolitical importance from the Stratfor leaks is pretty funny. Sort of.

When it comes to geopolitical importance it doesn’t get much fucking lower than New Zealand

Yup. May find the time to read online a little more this week.

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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.

Filed by billy at 10:39 pm under culture,politics,sunday mutants,technology
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This week the theme really seems to be content worth spreading; some serious high grade amazing coming below. Take the time to explore it.

First, we catch up with some best-of collections of last year, with a focus on things that should be more widely known.

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- Project Censored’s top 25 under-reported news stories of 2011 and 2012. Always worth catching up with.

- Global Voices 20 most read stories of 2011.

(For those who aren’t familiar with them:

Global Voices is a community of more than 500 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.)

- Huffington Posts lists the 18 best TED talks of 2011. Some interesting stuff in there.

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Now three really interesting and inspiring ones:

Building sustainable community – literally:

The Open Source Ecology project applies open source principles to creating tools capable of building sustainable communities using recycled and scrap materials.

The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) would lower entry into farming, building and manufacturing.

It’s perhaps best explained as Lego-like construction tools, which can be used to create entire economies. This sort of technology can be used in urban redevelopment or in the developing world.

The technology is a inexpensive, DIY, high-performance platform that enables the creation of 50 different industrial machines it would take to build a small, sustainable civilisation with modern comforts.

This seriously sounds six shades of awesome.

Here is a 2011 TED talk by the founder.

This is the free contents of their DVD explaining what they are on.

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Fascinating Guardian opinion piece linking personal debt, national debt, and banks creating money out of nothing: Yes, defaulting on debts is an option.

What really got me was this bit:

After a bit of research, I realised the debt collectors buy debts for less than 10p in the pound, after the bank writes the debt off. I also found out that under the Bills of Exchange Act 1882, the debt collector is actually paying off our debt when they buy it. I also realised how debt collectors trick us into contracts with them, by asking us how much we could pay. When you agree to one pound a month, which costs more to administrate, they now have a contract with you, where none existed.

Now, this is from England, so the same may not apply here, but that is still really interesting.

The guy’s site is Getoutofdebtfree.org. Definitely seems content worth spreading. Spreading memes along the lines that “money created out of nothing really doesn’t exist, so why pay it back with real money?” gets us closer to the actual state of things: “money only exists since we believe in it.” Which is probably still too drastic for most people to face up to.

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Introducting Yoxi:

At Yoxi, we search for amazing people who work hard to change the world, and we connect them to new opportunities by telling their stories in the most creative, compelling ways. We call these people Social Innovation Rockstars (SIRs) because they are original thinkers, creative problem-solvers, and fearless leaders who care about creating lasting social value. The world needs them to have more visibility and influence, so we do our part by helping them reach a mainstream audience. When a movement for social innovation becomes part of pop culture, we can make a real difference.

Basically, they want to hack culture and make it about awesome stuff instead of braindead stuff. (If this seems pie-in-the-sky, Yoxi’s founder brought you American Idol.)

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And a couple to make you think about the nature of reality a touch.

Technoccult interview with Douglas Rushkoff. Most interesting to me was him talking about balancing engaging with magic as a path with real world concerns (house, wife, kid). Fascinating as a metaphor in general for anyone getting older.

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Another entry in the Jodorowsky is so cool stakes: Alejandro Jodorowsky leads group of 3000 in Psychomagic ritual for casualties of the War on Drugs in Mexico. Yup.

The call made by the cult mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky said the event would seek to “heal” the country of the cosmic weight of so many dead in the drug war, by gathering for something he called the March of the Skulls.

(Context on Mexican drug violence: Mexico Violence Threatens All Sectors of Civil Society)

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Kind of by category: first, politics and economy:

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.

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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.”

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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“.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Filed by billy at 5:43 pm under consciousness,culture,politics,sunday mutants,technology,the world
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The world shifted while the moose was loose in the world. Lots of crazy shit happening ever faster in these unfolding interesting times. We missed a lot, and I’m not even going to try to summarise or catch up. But it seems like we are at least coming closer to facing reality.

Anyhow. Here are the results of my first dedicated info trawl in a long long while, scrying the emerging future in the froth of the web… Much of the best of this comes from the already indispensable Innovation Patterns, the rest from the mutants list, and generally revisiting some of my haunts.

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Michael Ventura steps into prophet mode again. Three parts, necessary reading/analysis of what the fuck is going. (Subtitle: “The Worldwide End of Capitalism and Its Replacement by a Mode of Commerce for Which, as Yet, There Is No Ism.”) Flash Mob Dance Revolution Parts One Two & Three. Two parts analysis, third part an attempt at solution.

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fighting muppetocracy: pretty brutal and punchy look at how fucked we are, well worth reading and distressingly difficult to argue against.

This show brought to you by the international community, by government, by the NGOs, by well-intentioned individuals, by the UN, and all the rest of it. The same cast of clowns that screwed up Haiti.

Get it yet? Is it landing?

We are screwed. We don’t need to speculate on how or why, but we have an absolutely clear and rational expectation that there will be no sudden, effective, global and complete transformation in our global governance systems resulting in an effective resolution to our climate crisis.

We did not do it for poverty.

We do not do it for natural disasters.

We will not do it for climate.

Everything rests on us getting a technological fix for climate, and we’re massively, dramatically underfunding research into those breakthrough technologies in favour of continuing to subsidize oil. These are the facts.

Really worth reading the whole thing for context etc.

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kind of an antidote to that: recent interview with zen buddhist master Thich Nhat Hahn :

“Without collective awakening the catastrophe will come,” he warns. “Civilisations have been destroyed many times and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

“If you meditate on that, you will not go crazy. You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.”

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Excellent Foreign Policy article about the logical limits to China’s growth, and the rise of Turkey, India, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia.

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DARPA trying to hack the neurobiology of narrative in order to bring in a whole new generation of propaganda control.

Once scientists have perfected the science of how stories affect our neurochemistry, they will develop tools to “detect narrative influence.” These tools will enable “prevention of negative behavioral outcomes … and generation of positive behavioral outcomes, such as building trust.” In other words, the tools will be used to detect who’s been controlled by subversive ideologies, better allowing the military to drown out that message and win people onto their side.

“The government is already trying to control the message, so why not have the science to do it in a systematic way?” said the researcher familiar with the project.

Um. WTF? Disturbing as fuck anyway.

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The Case Against the Spirit World Model of Psychedelic Action

Pretty fascinating/challenging read for entheogenic enthusiasts.

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Cyborg future news: A team at at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen says it’s built the foundation for devices to communicate directly with the human brain.

The researchers’ new graphene-based transistor array is compatible with living biological cells and can, for the first time, record the electrical signals they generate.

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Have you missed these posts? Or are you happier not knowing?

(Hell, for that matter, have I missed making these posts, and am I happier not knowing?)

Filed by billy at 11:48 pm under consciousness,oblivion,politics,sunday mutants,technology,the world,utopia
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