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.

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.

This is a link to a very good 10 minute video of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist explaining that most of the popular conception of the left hemisphere vs right hemisphere split is very distorted and wrong, and goes on to explain what differences they do actually seem to have quite usefully.

I am particularly pleased to see this since the left/right thing has seemed a stupid and gross oversimplification for a long time, and actively frustrates discussion about mind and consciousness.

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.

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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.

* 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)

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: The principles, you know, of an economics which should be are based in five postulates and one fundamental value principle.

One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy.

Two, development is about people and not about objects.

Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth.

Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services.

Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible.

And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.

(yoinked in full from here)

Full interview with Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef here.

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.

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