Saturday 31 January 2004

Bacteria Predator Promises "Living Antibiotics"
"Impossible" Form of Matter Created
The technology of universal intelligence

"Levels of intelligence far greater than our own are going to evolve within this century. We will ultimately saturate all of the matter and energy in our area of the universe with our intelligence."
Neurosociety

Some aspects of a neurosociety include:

1. Pervasive use of neuroceuticals
2. Neurocompetitive advantage as best practice
3. New sectors like: neuroceuticals, neuroeducation and biotainment
mindreading

"We don't go to school to learn to read facial expressions. Some of us are better mindreaders than others -- we're better at reading those split-second changes in facial expression or vocal intonation, and thus better at assessing the true meaning of another person's inner thoughts and feelings.

The more you learn about the science of mindreading, the more you find yourself dividing up your friends into two camps: the mindreaders and the mind-dyslexic."
Who owns your memories?

do we have the right to erase our memories?

Is freedom of thought a fundamental human right?

A recently launched company claims to have "a simple, non-surgical technique to remove problem memories." Apparently, "the technique deconstructs memory from its core making a relapse virtually impossible."
Your Attention Please

"Jettisoning the idea of attention as a Single Unified Thing leaves you with two primary implications: if the art of paying attention is actually divided between several different modes, it's helpful to learn which of those modes are working for you, and which ones aren't pulling their weight.

the second insight operates one level up: if your attention is an interacting system of different modes, then one of the most essential high-level functions that your brain performs is switching modes. You can be the most brilliant auditory encoder in the world, but if you can't switch into auditory encoding mode when it's appropriate, your talents will be wasted.

Part of having an effective brain is possessing good tools, but an equally important part is being able to pull the right tool out at the right time."

Friday 30 January 2004

on this day 1972

bloody sunday: Army kills 14 in civil rights protest

British troops opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators in the Bogside district of Londonderry, killing 14 civilians. Seventeen more people were injured by gunfire.

The largely peaceful crowd of between 7,000 and 10,000 was marching in protest at the policy of internment without trial.

In 1998, Tony Blair's government announced a new inquiry into Bloody Sunday.

The inquiry headed by Lord Saville spent two years taking witness statements. It is not expected to report until 2004.

Wednesday 28 January 2004

on this day 1968

Radiation alert following B-52 crash

A recovery team searched for wreckage from an American Air Force B-52 bomber armed with four hydrogen bombs which crashed into the sea near the Arctic air base of Thule in Greenland.

it was embarrassing for the US to admit planes carrying nuclear weapons were regularly flying in Danish airspace.

It took 700 men over nine months to remove all the contaminated material including snow from the crash site.

America subsequently ended the airborne alert which kept some B-52 bombers in the air at all times in case of surprise nuclear attack.

Tuesday 27 January 2004

THE BOMB
Thirteen Choruses For The Divine Marquis
by Robert Anton Wilson

I dreamed I called Adolf Hitler on the phone and asked him, What was your gimmick?

"They believed it was wiser to obey anyone, even me, than to risk anarchy," he said with a ghoulish laugh.

I dreamed I called de Sade on the phone and asked him, "Jesus told me that he and you agree on at least one thing and it explains freedom. What is that one thing?"

"Quite simple," he replied, "don't be afraid of the Cross. The fear of death is the beginning of slavery."
"semiological guerrilla warfare"

with the increased privatization of truth through Corporate ownership of the newsmedia. the subsumption of an ever-larger number of publishing companies and television networks into an ever-smaller number of multinationals.

and because in an era of network news cutbacks and staff layoffs, many reporters are reluctant to pursue stories they know will upset management.

Umberto Eco proposed the need for a radical media literacy:

"The receiver of the message seems to have a residual freedom: the freedom to read it in a different way...I am proposing an action to urge the audience to control the message and its multiple possibilities of interpretation,"

"One medium can be employed to communicate a series of opinions on another medium...The universe of Technological Communication would then be patrolled by groups of communications guerrillas, who would restore a critical dimension to passive reception."
(..."semiological guerrilla warfare" imagined by Umberto Eco.)
"... a cheap holiday, in other people's misery..."

the third series of i'm a celebrity get me out of here kicked off last night with a mighty choice of specimens.

and as for anyone concerned over john lydon choosing to participate, just consider this: "he has access to say what he wants on live prime time television for up to 2 weeks. he must be in his element."

its a fast track to the national psyche. last night's 90-minute premiere averaged 10.1 million viewers - a 41.1% audience share - from 9pm, rising from 9.8 million at the start to 10.3 by the end. The peak audience was 10.9 million (46.6%) just after 10pm.

lydon, pre-jungle interview ..."It could go wrong in so many ways that I’m just too tempted! You know every damn arsehole punk is gonna go ‘Ooh that’s not what punk is about’ Yes it is! This is true anarchy! Setting myself up on rubbish like this? By doing a thing like this wrong, that’s so fucking dangerous, I could so easily fall flat on my face. With all this so called 'celebrity' nonsense there is a danger you can take yourself too seriously."
doubts about Dr David Kelly's suicide
Why Africa Should Care about Robots

"The looming elimination of human labor and roboticization of war must hasten the creation of a just economic order and strong global security"

"Until now, the questions considered by transhumanism—the coming of radical life extension, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, robotics and human genetic engineering—have been thought to be largely those of the developed world, and a distraction from the pressing health and development needs of countries in the South, such as Nigeria."

last week the Transhumanist Association of Nigeria held a 3-day conference in Lagos Nigeria with the theme ‘Robotics & Africa’.
If They Could Read Your Mind

"To a large extent, they already can. As neuroscientists hone new technologies for probing our brains, predicting our behavior and perhaps even altering our thoughts, ethicists wrestle with some troubling questions."
Just Say Yes to Performance-enhancing Drugs
"There are no good arguments for a ban and many good reasons to encourage doping."

plus: poll results Should memory-management drugs be legal?
out of 89 votes cast over 7 days, 56% said: "Yes, memories are private and personal, and government shouldn't interfere with their modification".
Genetically Modified Sperm

Sperm has been modified in a laboratory dish to produce genetically engineered animals, an achievement that researchers are calling a first and saying will have implications for modifying human genes to eliminate disease.

The researchers, from Fukui Prefectural University in Obama, Japan and the US National Human Genome Research Institute, have announced producing genetically modified zebrafish using sperm cells grown in laboratory dishes.

"To our knowledge, this is the first time that sperm cells have been cultured entirely in vitro and used to produce a transgenic animal," says study coauthor Shawn Burgess of the NHGRI. "It was a unique challenge that required creative solutions."

he new technique could speed the production of genetically engineered animals used to study human development and disease. perhaps most controversially, it could allow researchers to perform gene therapy to eliminate genetic diseases before babies are conceived, introducing genetic changes that would be passed to future generations.

Sunday 25 January 2004

zand
(via b3ta)
doodoocaca
excerpts from the phobia list

Ablutophobia- Fear of washing or bathing.

Acerophobia- Fear of sourness.

Achluophobia- Fear of darkness.

Bacillophobia- Fear of microbes.

Ballistophobia- Fear of missiles or bullets.

Cherophobia- Fear of gaiety.

Chionophobia- Fear of snow.

Chirophobia- Fear of hands.

Chorophobia- Fear of dancing.

Didaskaleinophobia- Fear of going to school.

Dikephobia- Fear of justice.

Epistemophobia- Fear of knowledge.

Gymnophobia- Fear of nudity.

Homilophobia- Fear of sermons.

Ideophobia- Fear of ideas.

Kathisophobia- Fear of sitting down.

Levophobia- Fear of things to the left side of the body.

Metathesiophobia- Fear of changes.

Mnemophobia- Fear of memories.

Nomatophobia- Fear of names.

Nostophobia- Fear of returning home.

Oneirophobia- Fear of dreams.

Psychophobia- Fear of mind.

Pupaphobia - Fear of puppets.

Rupophobia- Fear of dirt.

Spacephobia- Fear of outer space.

Symbolophobia- Fear of symbolism.

Tomophobia- Fear of surgical operations.

Tonitrophobia- Fear of thunder.

Tyrannophobia- Fear of tyrants.

Vestiphobia- Fear of clothing.

Xanthophobia- Fear of the color yellow or the word yellow.

Xenoglossophobia- Fear of foreign languages.

Zeusophobia- Fear of God or gods.
"21st century warfare is about becoming the enemy, recognizing no fundamental differences in your ideologies, seeing only the crinkly edges of complexity..."
(....helga, linguist and ontological terrorist, in grant morrison's "the invisibles")

Saturday 24 January 2004

D E S T R O Y :
...part one...

according to ladbrokes, john lydon is 3/1 favourite to win "i'm a celebrity get me out of here", which begins on monday.

john lydon once said:

'Punk became a circus did'nt it?...It ended up with people selling dresses made of safety pins for $2000. Everybody got it wrong. The message was supposed to be; Don't follow us, do what you want!...'

"Public Image was written about all the Pistols fans and others who just wanted me to carry on as before. I have never ever been interested in repeating myself, and so many people by their attitude, had completely missed the point of the Pistols. It was a mind thing not a bleedin fashion statement.'

'Lady Di...... She's a true Sex Pistol.'

john lydon luxury watches
"Welcome to my watch web site. My name is John Lydon, and I have been collecting and dealing watches since 1985. I have a very simple goal - find the best luxury watches and make them available to both my existing and future customers. Please take a moment to look at my collection of luxury watches online. I believe you will find my watches to be world class quality at very competitive prices. They express the best in excellence and individuality."
"Sacred cows make the best hamburgers."
...Mark Twain
"There is a truism that the man [or woman] in the street seems always to forget, whenever he is abusing the Anarchists, or whatever party happens to be his bete noire for the moment as the cause of some outrage just perpetrated. This indisputable fact is that homicidal outrages have, from time immemorial, been the reply of goaded and desperate classes, and goaded and desperate individuals, in response to wrongs from their fellowmen [and women], which they felt to be intolerable. Such acts are the violent recoil from violence, whether aggressive or repressive . . . their cause lies not in any special conviction, but in the depths of . . . human nature itself. The whole course of history, political and social, is strewn with evidence of this."
[Freedom Group of London: quoted by Emma Goldman]
"The State's behaviour is violence,and it calls its violence 'law'; and that of the individual, 'crime.'"
...Max Stirner
"it is the duty of the patriot to protect their country from its government"
...thomas paine
photos of people taking photos
(via giesha asobi blog

Friday 23 January 2004

Lib Dem MP Jenny Tonge: Why I would consider being a suicide bomber

the dollar addicted drone of our master's voice is as predictable as the weather and ten times as tiresome. yet again when a lone public figure dares to speak any truth, then the anti-mind choir of the mass media chastises them. Jenny Tonge told a Westminster rally that the daily "killings and the bulldozings and all the other horrible things" in the occupied territories made her understand why people became suicide bombers.

Dr Tonge, the spokeswoman on children, told a meeting of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign on Wednesday: "This particular brand of terrorism, the suicide bomber, is truly born out of desperation.

"Many many people criticise, many many people say it is just another form of terrorism, but I can understand and I am a fairly emotional person and I am a mother and a grand mother, I think if I had to live in that situation, and I say this advisedly, I might just consider becoming one myself. And that is a terrible thing to say."

its far too rare an occurence to hear an mp talking any sense and reflecting the perspective of intelligent people the world over.

now what was it that the prime minister's wife said awhile back, when she was also criticised for daring to acknowledge the hopelessness that breeds Palestinian terrorism?

oh yes, Mrs Blair said "as long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress."

its not anti-semetic to point out the truth. nor is it disrespectful to the victims and casualities of the suicide bombers. israel has the might, and of all nations the israeli people should know better. israel is fucking up big time and it seems as though they just don't care.

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION: HEALTH CONDITIONS OF THE ARAB POPULATION IN THE OCCUPIED ARAB TERRITORIES, INCLUDING PALESTINE

children in Gaza are today as seriously malnourished as children in Congo and Zimbabwe

Why Sharon is a War Criminal: An eye-witness report of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre
boytaur

a variety of online resources for boytaurs, multilimbers, shapeshifters, and their friends.
hybrid animals
conjoined crocodiles

The animals each have a head, but share a common lower body with one tail and have four legs each.
The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus an endangered species.
Liderc

In Hungarian folklore, the Liderc is a devil equivalent to the incubus for a man or succubus for a woman.

It hatches from the first egg of a black hen placed under the armpit.

It can assume the form of a chicken or human being, but one leg always has a goose's foot.

It carries out tasks such as finding treasure, but eventually grows bothersome because it demands work constantly and is always looking ahead to its next task.

To get rid of him, one must set him on impossible tasks so he quits or dies in rage.
Is it Possible to Download Knowledge into the Brain?

There is little doubt that direct brain-machine interfaces will be available in the very near future, and several methods hold promise for implanting information.
the concept of Personal Identity
10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World
Baby Gets Artificial Eye Implant

A seven-month-old baby has become the youngest person ever to receive an artificial cornea capable of restoring sight to people with damaged vision.
steve gough

after being released from prison and not being re-arrested, steve gough finally completed his walk, without clothing, from land's end to John O’Groats.

Thursday 22 January 2004

Taking an item out of a drawer

I opened a drawer by pulling it towards me. I picked up the object I needed and removed it from the drawer. Having done so I pushed the drawer with my hand, thus closing it.

Tuesday 20 January 2004

poll: Should memory-management drugs be legal?
Poll open from Monday, January 19, 2004 to Monday, January 26, 2004
Fir Darrig

The Fir Darrig is a malevolent elf and fond of playing rather nasty tricks. He is best left alone.
Designer Virus Delivers Long-lasting Gene Therapy

A designer virus has been developed for delivering long-lasting gene therapy anywhere in the body from a single injection.

Gene therapy involves the introduction of genes into a person's DNA in order to treat disease.

Currently, most techniques use viruses to carry the genes. The viruses are either harmless to humans or have their disease-causing components removed. The viruses are injected or inserted into the body where they "infect" a specific area with therapeutic genes.

Because the liver cleanses the blood of foreign material, the viruses must be delivered directly into areas to be treated. The liver sequesters anything injected into the bloodstream. This has made viral delivery systems less practical for clinical settings and many genetically based diseases.

Andrew Baker and colleagues from the University of Glasgow in Scotland, have now redesigned an adeno-associated virus that's harmless to humans so that it is not quarantined by the liver. The virus remains in the bloodstream long enough to infect cells in the body.

According to Baker, the virus has the potential for long-lasting gene expression from a single dose. In laboratory studies on hemophilia, a single dose provided at least five years of therapy—possibly longer because the studies are ongoing.

Monday 19 January 2004

CAVE MEN

an important detail in the myths surrounding the mythological leader of the new mythological super-terrorist organisation is this: osama bin laden lives in a cave (if he is alive at all).

america, the united states of corporate militarism, perpetually hyped as the world's only super power, has an equally hyped supreme enemy who directs his successful master-plan of global disruption......... from within a cave.

among a variety of associations, a man in a cave most obviously represents our earliest ancestors (unless you're a fundamentalist american who doesn't subscribe to darwinism). it represents someone hairy, primitive and wild. someone bestial, dwelling in darkness.

a man in a cave represents someone separated from, and undistracted by, the glamour of modernity and who is therefore resistant to its charms.

cave dwellers are a threat to the establishment's preferred criteria.

the membership requirements, for inclusion in early 21st century humanity, are rigid and monolithic. any transgression from the rules is punished either by law or by ridicule. there are, most notably, enforced dress codes to distinguish us from our prehistoric ancestry. we have deeply encoded taboos restricting the public visibility of our embarrassingly primitive bodies. more specifically, our shameful animal appearances must be hidden according to fixed rules. improvised concealment is not enough. wearing a cardboard box for instance, will only invoke derision from the community, whilst wearing last year's fashions will similarly stifle our chances of being wholly valued as 'individuals'. in tandem with this, there exists a powerful contemporary pressure to invest in the scrupulous removal of any body hair, from areas of our skin that might be publicly visible. we must be thoroughly de-animalised.

(an obsession with hairlessness is very american).

this homogenised social programming doesn't stop there. we are cajoled into having materialistic aspirations beyond just the compulsory garments deemed necessary to hide our sinful flesh. without money and possessions, or at least the desire and ambition to have money and possessions, we are considered to be nothing. to be merely satisfied with living in a cave marks you out as a mad person and an extremist. 'my' house, 'my' car, 'my' bank account, the latest fashions and technologies, are all essentials in order to be accepted as a legitimate member of the brother and sisterhood of humankind. i own things therefore i am.

despite all of this, the man in the cave continues to dominate our lives. for it is representative of the limbic system. our earliest reptilian brain. the darkened catacombs of the unconcious mind.

the animalistic limbic system is a powerful emotive engine of unconscious influence in our minute by minute modern realities. and as a controlling component of our selves, it is itself all too easily controlled through direct subliminal manipulation. singular mass command mediums, such as television, bypass our clever higher brained selves, to access and stimulate our basic limbic instincts.

"though we know on a conscious level it is 'only a film,' on an unconscious level we do not know, thus the heart beats faster, for instance, while we watch a suspenseful scene. Similarly, we know the commercial is trying to manipulate us, but on an unconscious level the commercial nonetheless succeeds in, say, making us feel inadequate until we buy whatever thing is being advertised or we conform towards whatever acceptable model of behaviour is being displayed. the effect is all the more powerful precisely because it is unconscious, operating on the deepest level of human response."

we are similarly unconsciously manipulated by our primitive tendency to respond better towards information delivered to us from an attractive face. therefore telly is all about the blonde leading the bland. ugly people are noticeably restricted in their roles on tv.

broadcasting is an agricultural term. a generous broad casting of seed guarantees that enough of it will take root.

(insert something about bernays here)

plato presented us with a concept of a man-in-a-cave. plato stated the likelihood that our perceived reality is nothing more than shadows cast on the wall of a cave, and humankind is shackled there as an observer of them. martin luther king revived this analogy. he said "Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see."

finally perhaps, someone living in a cave represents a stark and deliberately stripped down sentience. a contemplative meditative stance. a conscious rewind. a distinctive fork in the road of existential choices. a chance to reacquaint ourselves with our own imaginations (as opposed to the imagination of, say, disney or 20th century fox). a place to think thoughts untainted by the illusionary clutter of modern priorities or the social programming hard-wired into us at an early age by our tribal masters. this person in the cave needn't be restricted to the similarly narrow and well trodden paths of romanticism, that of the noble savage, nor the paths of neo-luddism. in fact this cave dweller needn't be limited to identifying as being human at all. instead it represents something new, perhaps unwritten, un-named. a potential being. the embryo inside of a darkened womb.

but the unknown and un-named frightens most of us even more than our wild and hairy ancestry does. we reify what is known, what is safe and secure. we prefer to constantly pick at the scabs of nostalgia. we want to party like its 1999, and we just don't have time nor motivation to sit and contemplate anything new. too many of us shuffle reluctantly into the future like zombies, with our heads twisted permanently backwards, opting by choice to only view the flickering shadows on the cave walls, now far far behind us. too frightened to look forward and beyond. oops we've just fallen off the edge of a cliff.

the only guaranteed certainty in life is change. and if we collectively abstain from participating in the imagineering of that change, we therefore leave our future in the hands of an ambitiously undemocratic minority.

the future is coming wether you like it or not. take some time out and think about it at least.

Sunday 18 January 2004

the censor blog

"The Censor Blog documents and exposes Internet censorship, blocking and content filtering world wide. It is an informal discussion of various censorship practices and technologies employed by countries and institutions and the resulting effects on freedom of speech and expression online."
The findings of the first World Internet Project report present an image of the average Net user that contrasts with the stereotype of loner "geeks".

Instead, the typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the nonuser, it says. And, television viewing is down among some Internet users by as much as five hours per week compared with Net abstainers, the study added.

"Use of the Internet is reducing television viewing around the world while having little impact on positive aspects of social life," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, the California university that organized the project.
Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism
(via many 2 many)
In the River of Consciousness
by oliver sacks

"Time," says Jorge Luis Borges, "is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river...." Our movements, our actions, are extended in time, as are our perceptions, our thoughts, the contents of consciousness. We live in time, we organize time, we are time creatures through and through. But is the time we live in, or live by, continuous —like Borges's river? Or is it more comparable to a chain or a train, a succession of discrete moments, like beads on a string?

As I write I am sitting at a café on Seventh Avenue, watching the world go by. My attention and focus dart to and fro—a girl in a red dress goes by, a man walking a funny dog, the sun (at last!) emerging from the clouds. These are all events which catch my attention for a moment as they happen. Why, out of a thousand possible perceptions, are these the ones I seize upon? Reflections, memories, associations lie behind them. For consciousness is always active and selective—charged with feelings and meanings uniquely our own, informing our choices and interfusing our perceptions. So it is not just Seventh Avenue that I see, but my Seventh Avenue, marked by my own selfhood and identity.

Christopher Isherwood starts his Berlin Diary with an extended photographic simile: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed." But we deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can ever be passive, impartial observers. Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it, know it, or not. We are the directors of the film we are making—but we are, equally, its subjects too: every frame, every moment, is us, is ours— our forms (as Proust says) are outlined in each one, even if we have no existence, no reality, other than this.

But how then do our frames, our momentary moments, hold together? How, if there is only transience, do we achieve continuity? Our passing thoughts, as James says (in an image which smacks of cowboy life in the 1880s) do not wander round like wild cattle. Each one is owned, our own, and bears the brand of this ownership, and each thought, in James's words, is born an owner of the thoughts that went before, and "dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor."
(via loom)
Two descriptions of Cyberspace

"What I loved about the Internet was its purity and swiftness, I told him, the feeling of being without a body, of flying into space in all directions at once, of becoming a stream of words going into th blue, a mind touching other minds."
Katha Pollitt, in this week's New Yorker

"The Internet will go down in history not as a democratizing force, not as a revolutionary moment in commerce ... but as the world's largest uncontrolled experiment in mass therapy."
Clive Thompson, Collision Detection
(via connected)
blog: BRAINWAVES
The Best Articles Posted on LibertyForum 2002-2003
911 Truth activists
PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES
Guerrilla gardening

Guerrilla gardening is the art of using a piece of land which you do not own to grow something. One step removed from actual guerrilla warfare, guerrilla gardening takes land not for the people, but for nature; returning misused or disused land and finding a purpose for it. Guerrilla gardeners come late in the night with watering cans, compost and gardening gloves, and turn rotting sods of grass outside some condemned building into a vegetable patch, a clump of daffodils, or a flowering rosebush.
(via kuro5hin)
Roblón

"The Big Oak". This is an evil plant from Cantabria (northern Spain) that long ago was a mere old oak, just bigger and broader than its fellows were. One day, a maid seeking refuge from a storm entered its hollow trunk. She was soaked and cold, and pressed herself against the tree for warmth. Sensing her body, the oak embraced her so tightly, that it squeezed her to death. He then absorbed her blood. Not so long afterwards, the tree started growing more and more, until one day, it discovered it could move. Since then, the Roblón has been wandering on the Earth's surface, doing great evil to the woods. Its strides shake the trees until the weakest fall, and it destroys all that lies in its path. He also absorbs all the water it can find, thus emptying the wells and drying up springs and rivers.
Leopard Slug Aerial mating
china daily: naked protest
photo of me naked in selfridges last september (with my name spellt wrong) in an article about the sentencing of steve gough.

plus:

office dress code the Dutch finance ministry has declared white socks "indecent".

An official confirmed last week that, for the ministry, white sports socks "transgress the limits of decent dress behaviour".

Staff, it emerged, are also expected to wear dark blue or grey suits so as to convey the required "reliability and professionalism".

A spokeswoman added, stressing the controls were not that strict: "People are expected to dress in accordance with their function."
bacofoil home
secret bio-experiments on american citizens

DID THE US GAS IT'S OWN PEOPLE?

A short clip from Investigative Reports - concerning biological testing on US cities (5 minutes)
Marmanhig

The living dead on the Philippines. It has the strength of ten persons and is believed to hide in attics where it preys upon humans. A marmanhig may repeat everything its victim says and can tickle him to death. A marmanhig is vulnerable to water.

Saturday 10 January 2004

flashback: 2001-09-12

OSAMA BIN LADEN CLAIMS TERRORIST ACTS IN USA WERE COMMITTED BY SOME AMERICAN TERRORIST GROUP

"Notorious international terrorist Osama Bin Laden denies his involvement in the US terrorist acts. The Pakistani Khabrein daily with reference to some Taliban sources quotes him as saying that the terrorist act was committed by some American terrorist group and that he had nothing to do with it."

plus: Sep 17 2001 abc news
anti-terrorism legislation throughout the world

From Australia to Zimbabwe, using new laws and old-fashioned brute force, governments are sacrificing human rights on the altar of antiterrorism.
flash tv
shattered

so its the shattered final. it was majorly disappointing that the makers of the show chickened out of the original experimental promise of contestants who wouldn't sleep for a week. instead they opted for allowing them 1 or 2 hours sleep a day, with the consequence that it turned into a fairly ordinairy low key slice of reali-tv.

but its been kind of enjoyable to tune in each day to a human aquarium thats entirety is contained within just one week.

i don't much care who wins out of the remaining 3 people, but if i had to choose i guess i want chris to win.

last night i dreamt i was hanging out with the show's presenter dermot o'leary. at one point i'd climbed into a bed with my clothes on and discovered that stupidly i'd taken off my glasses and put them in the back pocket of my trousers. fortunately dermot had an appropriately tiny screwdriver to help try to mend them.
Otherkin -- those who believe that they are physically or spiritually other than human.
Dale Carrico on 'queer identity and transhuman futures'

Donna Haraway, whose socialist-feminist "Manifesto for Cyborgs" is a key transhumanist text, once quipped that she "would rather go to bed with a cyborg than with a sensitive man."

For queers who are bored with a gay assimilationist vision of politics, limited to the provision of rights to marry, adopt children and join the army, I will recommend to your attention the fledgling movement of transhumanism,

For transhumanists who are looking for wider cultural contexts and connections, I will recommend to your attention a century or so of radical queer writing and activism.

Queer politics, as opposed to gay politics, is predicated on the assumption that what is not "normal" should nevertheless often be valued and celebrated. Queer sensibilities tend to be supremely suspicious of the gay vision of equality and normality, and are drawn instead to visions of diversity and proliferation.

Transhumanism as a critical project is a suspicion of all normative and ideological claims made in the name of nature and the natural

transhumanism is a hope that we can increase the sum of freedom by embracing the emerging possibilities for the genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification of our bodies

Sexual freedom advocate Pat Califia has said that "being a sex radical means being defiant as well as deviant."


(the full text of Dale Carrico's article)
yiffy queer porn

yiffy videos

beast paint

fur suit sex
gingerbread computer casing

a VIA Epia 800, hard drive, and power supply encased in a gingerbread village.
tiny helicopters
acid

9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD -- part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.
(via b3ta)
future soldiers

"Crouched in a desert trench somewhere in the Middle East, enemy bullets thudding into the sand just above his head, the wounded soldier checks his wrist-mounted thermometer. It’s a searing 43 degrees, and he’s been trapped there for two days with little water and no food at all."

"Amazingly, he’s comfortable. A microturbine integrated into his battlesuit provides power for a highly effective microclimate air-conditioning system that maintains his body temperature at a safe level. A transdermal nutrient delivery system provides just enough nourishment to keep his body going. The pain of a leg wound sustained in a firefight two hours earlier has subsided to a dull ache."

"He’s not especially worried: an integrated ultrasound system has located the bleeding wound and cauterised the blood vessels. A fractured tibia has been splinted with an exomuscular device forming part of his body armour. Stray bacteria have already been zapped by a nanoscale fabric coating inside his battlesuit, which has broadcast details of his location and physical condition to headquarters."

"Minutes later, a rescue helicopter arrives and the wounded soldier is hoisted to safety. His rescuers shake their heads: embedded in his battlesuit, their formidable kinetic energy absorbed by just a few millimetres of material, is a neat row of AK-47 bullets."


A scene from a futuristic war movie?A scene from a futuristic war movie? Not at all – much of this technology is already a fact, and it’s coming soon to an army near you.

Future Warrior was reintroduced (the original made its debut in 1999) at last year’s opening of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), a partnership between the US Army and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We wanted to showcase now the concepts they’re working on for the future,” read on.....

plus: Future Warfare and the Decline of Human Decisionmaking

"To date, most warfare has taken place within what Robert J. Bunker terms "human space," meaning the traditional four-dimensional battlespace that is discernible to the human senses.[1] In essence, war has always consisted of human beings running, dodging, and hurling things at each other, lately with the help of machinery. Even such revolutionary developments as gunpowder only enhanced our ability to throw things at enemies we could see and hear."

In this provocative article from 2002, political-military strategist Thomas K. Adams discusses how advances in artificial intelligence and robotics are likely to remove human decision making from the battlefield. Adams argues that new systems and weapons will be too small and too numerous, creating an environment too complex for humans to direct.
(via betterhumans)
Tiny Heaters Could Build Body Parts

Tiny heaters coated with a special polymer could improve the creation of body parts through tissue engineering and allow the development of new disease-detecting sensors.
The key to the approach, say its developers from the University of Washington in Seattle, lies in how the coating changes in response to temperature.

Proteins stick to the material as its temperature rises and release as it lowers. This could allow researchers to grow tissue into specific shapes.

"We can basically create shapes of cell cultures," says researcher Karl Böhringer. "Then if you switch off the heater, the attachment ends and the whole cell culture lifts off. So it may be a way of making, for example, a replacement skin graft. You grow it on the surface, prompt it to lift off, and you could transplant it."

Friday 9 January 2004

Alan Moore vs. Grant T. Morrison
(via linkmachinego)
Most read and emailed bbc online News Stories of 2003

What stories did the users of BBC News Online, read on the site during 2003? Which stories were sent to friends for them to read?
biofeedback: Wild Divine

"On my computer screen, a jewel-encrusted bow points skyward, with an arrow pulled back and ready to fire. In the distance, I can see a bull’s-eye planted in front of a Himalayan landscape."

"Slowly I lower the bow until the arrow is fixed on the target. For a second, I overcompensate and the arrow points toward the ground. I catch my breath, pull the bow up, and then release. The arrow sails across the virtual terrain and lands with a small flash at the center of the bull’s-eye."
 
"but I’m not aiming that arrow with a joystick, or a keyboard, or a mouse. I’m aiming it with my mood."

"Technically, I’m directing the arrow by altering my physical state—the electrical resistance at the tips of my fingers and my heart rate. I’m hooked up to a biofeedback system: three sensors worn like rings around my fingers and wired into an ordinary personal computer. The sensors read the galvanic skin response of my fingertips and my pulse. Increased galvanic skin response and heart rate usually accompany active states of awareness, as in the sweaty palms of the fight-or-flight instinct. Lower levels suggest relaxation."

Wild Divine’s site
article
(via my analog life)
live aid

on the telly they're reminiscing about live aid, calling it the greatest rock concert ever. for fuck's sake...... it might have had very good intentions, but that doesn't excuse the fact it was nothing more than the cream of corporate music mediocrity. a grand music spectacle for squares and people who otherwise don't give a toss about famine and global politics. its another of those major events that sums up the unrelenting drearyness of mainstream tyranny.
Picking up my pen

"I was sitting on a chair in the living room. My pen was lying on the table. I reached out my hand and picked up the pen."
tiny grow
(via geisha asobi blog)
Camera Pill

A tiny ingestible video camera is not only less invasive than conventional tools for diagnosing bowel diseases but has now proven to be vastly more sensitive.

For the technique, patients fast for eight hours and then swallow a video camera the size of a large vitamin pill.

The intestine's involuntary muscles push the capsule forward while the camera transmits a continuous stream of digital images to a data recorder patients wear around their waist. A physician then downloads the data and analyzes the images.
brainstem implants aim to tackle deafness

Two deaf women in the US have become the first people to undergo the risky procedure of having implants in their brainstems. The devices are designed to restore hearing by directly stimulating nerves.

Some deaf people have been given implants that sit just outside the brainstem, but these do not work very well. Feeding auditory signals directly into the brainstem should work better, but because the brainstem carries signals from the entire body to the brain, any damage caused by an implant could be disastrous.

The procedure is far more risky than, say, placing implants in the cortex to try to restore some vision. "If you damage the cortex it's not that big a deal. But at the brainstem level every neuron you damage could damage function," says Bob Shannon of the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles, the surgeon who pioneered the procedure. "We took 15 years to convince ourselves that this could be done safely."

Wednesday 7 January 2004

uk: The civil contingencies bill

The civil contingencies bill, unveiled today, sets out new powers to be dispensed to the police, army and emergency services in wake of a natural or man-made catastrophe.

Those powers of restriction include public curfews, banning public meetings and the seizure without compensation of private property.

It will allow ministers to issue orders barring the public from access to sensitive sites or evacuating affected areas.

The joint committee raised concerns over provisions in the draft bill which would allow ministers to amend any act of parliament in order to deal with an emergency.

But the government today said it could not envisage any circumstance in which this power would be used to alter laws of constitutional importance, such as the Bill of Rights or the Human Rights Act.

"Emergency powers should not be used to make major modifications to the constitutional fabric of the UK," said this morning's document. "Should it be necessary to make such a modification in an emergency, it is likely that it would be appropriate and ... necessary to bring forward emergency primary legislation."

Although existing powers based on the 1920 Emergency Powers Act and the 1948 Civil Defence Act already give police wide-ranging powers to take control of services and commandeer buildings and equipment, the new bill is intended to ensure their actions are legally watertight in the event of circumstances not envisaged when the laws were drawn up.

It is expected to give the government powers to rush through temporary legislation without prior parliamentary approval. Any regulations introduced in this way would have to be retrospectively approved by parliament within 30 days.

Tony Bunyan, editor of Statewatch, said: "The powers available to the government and state agencies would be truly draconian.

"Cities could be sealed off, travel bans introduced, all phones cut off, and websites shut down. Demonstrations could be banned and the news media be made subject to censorship. New offences against the state could be 'created' by government decree.

"This is Britain's Patriot Act, at a stroke democracy could be replaced by totalitarianism"
shattered

i love watching reality tv, but so far there have only been 2 shows that i'd considered actually applying for. though i never did. the first was the bbc's the experiment, a re-imagining of the classic stanford experiment, and the other was channel 4's current show "shattered", in which a group of people attempt to last a week without sleep.

i even bothered to download the application form for shattered, but it was on the actual deadline day and i couldn't open the sodding file.

watching the show this week i'm mighty glad i didn't apply. for me the whole point is the experimental endurance aspect of the show. but this has already been compromised, as the contestants are now being allowed one or two hours sleep a day. i can only assume that channel 4 was worried they might not have had a show to broadcast by the end of the week. but letting them have any sleep at all has watered down the whole promise of the show and made it utterly pointless. they might still have a show but i doubt they'll have as many viewers now.

and then theres the contestants themselves:

predictably, but no less dissapointingly, we've heard them repeatedly voicing their interest in what the papers might be writing about them. we the audience were promised unchartered telly territory and live hallucinations, and all we get is another bunch of dull and all too lucid wannabes. which could have still been fascinating if the show had stuck to its its original mindbending promise.

so whats left. spotting who you want to shag is about all really.

tonight we lost craig in the elimination challenge. i wanted craig north to win, so thats one less reason to bother watching anymore.

i guess, given the choice, i'm left rooting for claire-m, she's mouthy. while i absolutely don't want police recruit claire-s to win. but ultimately i really don't give a fuck anymore.

Monday 5 January 2004

Big Brother 'changed our world'

"Reality show Big Brother has been cited as one of the 20 TV programmes that changed our world - along with the moon landing, Monty Python and Live Aid."

"The fly-on-the-wall show was included in a Radio Times list of influential TV shows. News reports on JFK's assassination in 1963 and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 were also included."

The 1960s had the most entries of any decade, with seven shows, while the 1990s and 2000s had two entries each.

The full list of 20 programmes that changed our world:

-That Was the Week That Was - 1962
-JFK Assassination news reports - 1963
-Till Death Us Do Part - 1965
-Cathy Come Home - 1966
-Monty Python's Flying Circus - 1969
-Apollo Moon Landing news reports - 1969
-Royal Family - 1969
-The World At War - 1973
-Tiswas - 1974
-The Naked Civil Servant - 1975
-Life On Earth - 1979
-Michael Buerk's Ethiopian news reports - 1984
-Live Aid - 1985
-That's Life, launch of Childline - 1986
-Death On The Rock - 1988
-Kate Adie's Tiananmen Square report - 1989
-Gulf War news reports - 1991
-Panorama interview with Diana, Princess Of Wales - 1995
-Big Brother - 2000
-11 September news reports - 2001

Sunday 4 January 2004

some hollywood talking head just said that "critical acclaim is good, but box office is better."

which pretty much encapsulates the guiding force behind every single thing that makes this world so crap.
on this day 2000

First British women reach South Pole

The first British women to walk across Antarctica to the South Pole arrived safely, more than two months after starting their record-breaking journey.

Later that month another record was broken as a group of five British women became the first all-female expedition to reach both the North and South poles.

Saturday 3 January 2004

THE TIME TRAVEL TALE OF JOHN TITOR

Although there is debate over the exact date it started, on November 02, 2000, a person calling themselves Timetravel_0, and later John Titor, started posting on a public forum that he was a time traveler from the year 2036.

On March 24, 2001, John Titor told us he would be leaving our time and returning to 2036. After that, he was never heard from again. Speculation and investigation about who John Titor was and why he was online continues to this day.
Taking a plate to the kitchen

There was an empty plate sitting on a surface in one of the rooms of my house. I picked up the plate and carried it into the kitchen. I then deposited the plate upon one of the kitchen work surfaces.
Hildesheim

A monk from Hildesheim, an old city of Hanover, who doubted how with God a thousand years could be as one day. He listened to the singing of a bird in the forest for what he thought was three minutes, but found that three hundred years had passed in stead.
conceptual totalitarianism

"most "educated" people cannot tell the difference between a fact and an idea, the most common confusion of symbol and thing. Most believe if they collect enough facts, this will compensate for their inability to grasp the ideas behind those facts. And, because of this "poverty of ideas," most cannot work out the simplest conceptual questions."

"As a result of this educational deficit, our individually inspired sense of well-being, our direct participation in those actions that assure our continued survival, our sense that we must create our own reasons for living, have been replaced by a kind of conceptual totalitarianism, which has as its cornerstone a deliberate blurring of symbol and thing."
iraq

the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) admits to holding 5,000 Iraqi detainees , a number most suspect is a gross underestimate. Many of them are imprisoned indefinitely and without charges, as is the whim of the new world order.

Friday 2 January 2004

Japan develops robot that can translate English, Japanese

apan's NEC Corp has succeeded in developing the world's first interactive robot capable of translating Japanese to English and vice versa.

The robot, PaPeRo, has a built-in voice-recognition system that can distinguish among the voices of several thousand people and a regulatory system that identifies the correct meaning of words despite differences in pronunciation, local daily Yomiuri reported on Tuesday.

Toyota to develop workman humanoid robot by 2005

Japan's top car maker Toyota will develop a humanoid robot designed to help factory workers and provide assistance in nursing care and rescue operations.

Toyota will announce details of the project in January and plans to unveil the as-yet-unnamed robot at the 2005 World Exposition in Japan, the business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.
(via Transhuman Institute)
the ever wonderful greenfairy on an article in the daily mail

"Behold an item in the women's section of today's Mail on bosses' reluctance to employ women who don't wear make-up.. "


..."Although the politically correct view is that women should not need to concern themselves about their appearance, it is not shared by Britain's bosses."...

"Note if you will the beautifully constructed opening gambit. First the encompassing of wearing make-up within the genre of looking good - one might object to feeling like they have to wear make-up, but only the most peculiar wouldn't want to 'look good' - then the juxtaposition of that with the particular overegged to the point of meaningless bugbear of the Mail reader, 'political correctness'. Those feminists and general all-purpose commie sympathisers might object to women looking nice, but you, dear, sensible Mail readers know anything labelled 'politically correct' for what it is, a plot to undermine everything you've ever believed in ever. Put like that, you wouldn't even think about objecting to the perfectly reasonable news that..."


..."In a survey, a quarter of employers admitted that they were more likely to give a job to a woman who wore make-up than one who did not. A third thought that a woman without make-up looked like she 'can't be bothered to make an effort'."...

"An effort to do what, exactly? Make herself more attractive for you, which has no bearing whatsoever on how well she does her job? Ah no, apparently it's an effort for herself, because we all know that it is the pursuit of beauty which gives validation and a sense of happy achievement to a woman's life."


..."Beauty expert Tamsin Brand said working women should not be reluctant to express their femininity. 'If a woman puts a bit of make-up on, it makes her feel good about herself and she will do a better job as a result,' she said. 'Wearing make-up makes a woman feel more feminine and that is nothing to be ashamed of.'"...
moblog

anonymous moblogging. Send pics directly from your camera-phone to pics@mobog.com and they'll be displayed there within 1 minute.
naked

16 ordinary people answer questions about being naked and are photographed in increasing degrees of nakedness.
cliché

Have you been searching for just the right cliché to use?
dialtones

Dialtones is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced through the choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience's own mobile phones.
Cut-Out Robot Designs

Download and print the PDFs, cut out and construct your very own robots.
snake robots
black people love us

"Welcome to our website."
Freakshow in my Pocket

animations in matchbox form.
polish propaganda posters 51-57
divine interventions

home of the baby jesus butt plug and more.
The Art of Stephen Blickenstaff
ecopod

Ecopod is a revolutionary design in coffins made from naturally hardened, 100% recycled paper, designed in the shape of a seed pod.
Takahiro Kimura

The Project of Broken 1000 Faces started in October 1999. "First I tear a face photo into small pieces. Then I reconnect the pieces."
(via gmtPlus9)
dogma

January 2004 issue now available

Dogma is a monthly log of opinion, reviews, news and previews covering music, news, politics, art, protests, cinema, science, ideas and movements from independent bloggers, journalists, philosophers, artists, critics, musicians, DJs and others all over the world

the deadline for contributions to the next edition is jan 25th
on this day 1969

Murdoch wins Fleet Street foothold

Rupert Murdoch beat a rival bid to win control of the News of the World newspaper group. It was his first Fleet Street newspaper.

Thursday 1 January 2004

NAKED PROTEST DIARY: on this day JANUARY 1st 2001

(Vincent and I were talking through the heating pipes between our segregation cells.) Vincent had handed to one of the prison doctors, a written list of mental classifications he is not suffering from.

the prison doctor read it aloud and commented that John Bunyan justified his own hallucinations.

I say this may have something to do with Vincent referring to me being in the 'empty' cell next door. From which Vincent realises how true that might be. Afterall he is in fact talking to a wall space, and only hearing my voice.

Meanwhile on the prison guards table located just outside my cell door, there stands Vincents latest A4 size art statement, which reads "ALL PRISON STAFF ARE DICKHEADS."

NAKED PROTEST links