Topics

http://improveverywhere.com/2011/03/06/king-philip-iv/



BRILLIANT.



I've been following the "what are we up to now" threads with interest, but I wanted the idea to gel a bit before commenting.


THIS. I want to see more of this in the world. At some point, that's going to come down to Local Action (either with a group, or coordinated separate Local Actions). The Safari idea was almost a perfect online example. We created a Spectacle, because we arrived en-mass and yet refused to follow anyone's "they're just trolls" scripts with actual in-character investigation of the social dynamics of the forums we hit.

It was a good model, but it only really worked at the beginning because we had a unified theme, and a bunch of people WOMPing up images that were in-style for everyone else to use. This dynamic of putting people together with the resources they need(or the people who can churn them out quickly) is pretty clear if you read the above article. That's one lession to take away from this OM.

Resolution Calling to Amend the Constitution Banning Corporate Personhood Introduced in Vermont
http://www.addictinginfo.org/?p=889

Damn good read.

[until you appreciate that there's in fact more than just one self.]

http://blog.beeminder.com/akrasia/

The term commitment device is from game theory and applies to strategic situations. It refers to a way of changing one's own incentives to make an otherwise empty threat or promise credible. This can be quite rational. A classic example is from Thomas Schelling, who pioneered this aspect of game theory. You've been kidnapped and you'd like to promise your kidnapper that if they let you go you won't rat them out to the police. The promise is useless because the kidnapper knows you'll have no incentive to keep it once you're free (and so they won't set you free). But if you can change your future incentives (implicate yourself in the crime, perhaps?) then suddenly your promise can carry weight. Limiting your future options by voluntarily imposing consequences on your future self can be quite valuable in a strategic negotiation or conflict.

But it's hard to characterize as rational the use of self-binding with no one but oneself... until you appreciate that there's in fact more than just one self.

GO READ IT

This is too goo not to watch.

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/sword_fighting_with_shadows_in_live_theatre/

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/07/110207fa_fact_zalewski

13 page article about del Toro, and some stuff about he upcoming Lovecraft film. Also, epic quote about how to treat source material (in reference to Tolkien and 'the Hobbit'):

"It's like marrying a widow. You try to be respectful of the memory of the dead husband, but come Saturday night . . . bam."
                       \
                        \

Del Toro, whose films include "Hellboy" and "Pan's Labyrinth," has amassed in a house outside Los Angeles an enormous collection of horror iconography. "All this stuff feeds you back," he says.

We've got a lot of martially trained people here on the forum that would seriously like this article:

http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-spartacus-live-on-al-jazeera/

["We are kind of pissed at him right now"]

How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/how-one-security-firm-tracked-anonymousand-paid-a-heavy-price.ars/

Aaron Barr believed he had penetrated Anonymous. The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code.

In a private e-mail to a colleague at his security firm HBGary Federal, which sells digital tools to the US government, the CEO bragged about his research project.

"They think I have nothing but a heirarchy based on IRC [Internet Relay Chat] aliases!" he wrote. "As 1337 as these guys are suppsed to be they don't get it. I have pwned them! "

But had he?

"We are kind of pissed at him right now"

[Love: it's all the same to the brain]

You can go throw this in.. (who's was it, snake man's?) face:

Love: it's all the same to the brain
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-brain.html

(PhysOrg.com) -- There are no differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals or between women and men in terms of the brain systems regulating romantic love, according to new UCL research published in the latest issue of PLoS One.

The study, by Professor Semir Zeki and John Romaya from the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at UCL, is a continuation of earlier work from the same lab which described brain activity in terms of romantic and maternal love.

In this latest study, 24 subjects were asked to view pictures of their romantic partners, as well as pictures of friends of the same sex as their partners but to whom they were romantically indifferent, while the activity in their brains was scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The subjects varied in age from 19 to 47, with their relationship lengths varying from 4 months to 23 years. Half of the subjects were female (6 heterosexual and 6 homosexual) and half were male (6 heterosexual and 6 homosexual). All reported being passionately in love and in a sexual relationship with their partner.

All of the study participants were asked to rate their feelings towards their romantic partners both before and after scanning and declare their sexual orientation on the Kinsey rating which includes groups ranging from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual.

The fMRI results showed a very similar pattern of activity between the different groups and involved activation of both cortical and sub-cortical areas, mainly in areas that are rich in dopaminergic ("feel good") neurotransmitter activity. These areas included the hypothalamus, ventral tegmental area, caudate nucleus and the putamen, as well as the insula, hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex. Dopaminergic activity is strongly linked to other neurotransmitter activities - such as those mediated by oxytocin and serotonin - which are thought to be important in regulating emotional relationships and bonding between individuals.

The studies also showed that there is extensive de-activation of large parts of the cerebral cortex when lovers - whether heterosexual or homosexual or whether female or male - view pictures of their romantic partners. The de-activated areas involve parts of the temporal, parietal and frontal cortex and include cortical areas thought to be critical in judgment. This may account for why we are often less judgmental about our lovers and lends credence to the old adage "love is blind".

Professor Zeki said: "Passionate romantic love is commonly triggered by a visual input and is an all-consuming and disorienting state. Previous studies have demonstrated that despite the complexity of this emotion, the brain patterns triggered when viewing the face of someone you're in love with are limited to only a few, though richly connected, brain regions".

This made it plausible to the researchers to suppose that it would be possible to detect any differences relatively easily. Given the profound similarity in the sentiment of love expressed in both opposite or same-sex contexts, the authors hypothesised that the pattern of brain activity in response to viewing the face of a romantic partner would be the same in the different groups.

Professor Zeki said that the study was influenced by a reading of the world literature of love, from Plato to Shakespeare, Dante, Rumi, Verlaine and others, in which very similar sentiments are expressed whether in the context of opposite or same sex relationships - and this ambiguity is reflected in the results.


More information: Research paper in PLoS One: http://www.plosone ... pone.0015802               

Provided by University College London

wdef writes with the lead from a story that may bring you a big sigh of relief:

"Free internet porn is not illegal. Nor is it unfairly competing with porn companies who'd rather you paid for your thrills, according to a California Appeals Court, which has dismissed a case against one free site, Redtube.com, as an unfair attack on free speech."

Interestingly, this case was brought not by anyone objecting to pornography on moral grounds, but rather by a competitor who reasons that "free" is a hard price to compete with, unless it's against the law.

Choice Comments:

lennier1 (264730) writes:
Just imagine all the "research" that went into this case...

WrongSizeGlass (838941) writes:
"Your honor, I'm afraid I need to, um, 'file more briefs'. I'll be back in a little while."

Informed Consent? We don't need no fucking informed consent.

http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/02/01/1444210/US-Authorities-GPS-Tagging-Duped-Indian-Students

tanveer1979 writes

"Indian students duped by Tri-Valley University in California have been fitted with GPS devices by US immigration authorities. Scores of Indian students were caught in a scam where the university violated immigration norms and illegally got the students F1 visa and immigration status. To keep a track on the movements of the students, the authorities have fitted them with GPS devices. This is spiraling into a major diplomatic row between India and the USA, with the former calling the practice inhuman and unwanted."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpmUM4cEcaU

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/01/2015250/Universe-250-Times-Bigger-Than-What-Is-Observable

eldavojohn writes

"The universe is only fourteen billion years old so we are unable to observe anything more than fourteen billion light years away. This makes it a bit difficult for us to measure how large the universe actually is. A number of methodologies have been devised to estimate the size of the universe including the universe's curvature, baryonic acoustic oscillations and the luminosity of distant type 1A supernovas. Now a team has combined all known methods into Bayesian model averaging to constrain the universe's size and their research is saying with confidence that the universe is at least 250 times larger than the observable universe."

Found these, didn't want to spag up the Pics thread.

















http://www.geliografic.com/

I just hit "Mark all read" here in apple talk. 

It's not your fault exactly, but the synchronicity are piling up.

I wanted to post this video about Ellen DeGeneres playing "Twister: Hoopla" on her show, and how much the game resembles something invented by one of Enrico's relatives and then 'sanitized' for the Amurkin audiences.

Again, while I'm not blaming you, exactly, I do remember the last time Roger did this on purpose and the fallout from that Event.

With the most congeniality I can muster, I must inform you that where-ever this Rabbit Hole spits me out, I'm taking you all with me.

Namaste'
-Telarus, KSC, KCC, KEZG, Episkopos Amorphous Dreams Cabal

Trip mentioned one method in another thread that would be good for this (can you re-post Trip?).


I recently came upon an article about "Geomagic Squares" (similar to Sudoku magic squares), and they seem like a really useful method to combine pre-fabed shapes together.


Right now in school I'm learning the Unreal Dev Kit, so building shapes/floorplans/3d objects with pre-fabed pieces is heavily on my mind.

Here's one:



And the story/links:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20017

http://www.geomagicsquares.com/gallery.php

http://www.fossilscience.com/research/Vikings_did_not_dress_the_way_we_thought.asp

http://blogs.plos.org/badphysics/2011/01/20/ono/

The blogger quotes the relevant points of the Mathematician's press release, and gives you a pretty good scope on what a 'partition' means in this context.

You totally got LULZ-O-FIVE'd.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/22/silhouette_illusion/

When I first encountered this, I did what I always do with optical illusions. I try for a 'no-mind' state, and see if I can get the illusion to 'flip' (see the 'young woman/old woman' illusion). This one was pretty easy to do as well, took a few 2-3 minute practice sessions. It's good to know exactly which part of my brain I had setup a feed-back loop for, the perception of looking 'down' or 'up' at something. Crazy.

I'd like to know if there are a couple of other spags willing to crawl through EB&G with me and move stuff to Cramulus' wiki...



Any takers?

Found this on Slashdot:

Undead Waffle (1447615) writes:
I know corporations are people now and everything but I find their expressions sometimes difficult to interpret. Can we ask that they include a "current mood" icon on their corporate website or something so we can all avoid potentially embarrassing situations?

GameboyRMH (1153867) writes:

I understand corporate emotions now. As soon as I read the title, I knew Capcom had plagiarized something.

So here is the corporate-to-human emotion conversion table:

Corporate --- Human (Example as used in corporate-speak)

Sad --- Remorseless denial of guilt in the face of overwhelming evidence (As seen in the title, or "we are saddened about the situation at our Chinese manufacturing plant")

Happy --- Having a Greedgasm (As in "we are happy to report record 4th quarter earnings")

Proud --- Cautiously Optimistic (as in "Microsoft is proud of the security enhancements to our latest products")

Pleased --- Cackling like a Supervillain (as in "we are pleased to be found innocent in this case")

Regret --- Polite Indifference (as in "we regret to inform you that your services are no longer needed" or "we regret to inform you that your personal information was stolen from our database")

Disapproval - Insane with Rage (as in "Ubisoft disapproves of piracy")

Remorse - Grudging, hollow, and remorseless admission of guilt (as in "BP expresses remorse at the ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico")

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/01/13/0017256/Nobel-Prize-Winner-Says-DNA-Performs-Quantum-Teleportation

"New Scientist is reporting that the joint winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2008, Luc Montagnier is claiming that DNA can send 'electromagnetic imprints' of it self into distant cells and fluids which can then be used by enzymes to create copies of the original DNA. This would be equivalent to quantum teleportation. You can read the original paper here [PDF]."

-----><-----

There is quite the back and forth of vitriol going on in the slashdot comments. Most of it seems to be dismissing this as "woo woo", but there are a few reasoned counterpoints to the real critiques of his controls and experimental setup.


Very interesting idea.


We know for a fact that then human body can emit radiation, and not just infrared 'heat' radiation, but radiation in other aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum (the japanese "blind room" studies).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helical_antenna

[Do NOT call Triple Zero (000) for non urgent matters - for life-threatening situations ONLY #QldFloods #TheBigWet]

Do NOT call Triple Zero (000) for non urgent matters - for life-threatening situations ONLY #QldFloods #TheBigWet

Too many calls are coming in to Triple Zero (000) for non-urgent matters like moving furniture. This takes time away from dealing with urgent problems.

Only call Triple Zero (000) for urgent, life-threatening matters.





http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=159789114069109&id=339665603253

http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf


Sticking this here so I can read it when I'm not all feverish.

[III(c)/5,iv;12:23:10]

I cracked it, because my girlfriend needed an official doc number for a marriage certificate for a marriage she had recently performed.

So I went here:

**link to 1st ed PD removed due to polite request from the Archivist**

And then

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/27.php

And then suddenly IT was there, like a fetid demon squatting in my head. Greg Hill's, the Polyfather's,  Official Discordian Document Numbering System..... and IT WON'T GO AWAY.



Liv's doc number was III(c)/5,iv;12:23:10 by the way.

That means:

III(c) - Issued from the Bureau of Symbols, Emblems, Certificates and Such

5,iv - Issued by a POEE Priest

12:23:10 - The date, but write it with colons so it doesn't look like a date, LULZ!
(Actually, I think Greg wrote that before coming up with the Discordian calendar, because he uses that on the few official doc numbers I've run across).

Holyshit.


IT EXISTS.

[Nergul's Vengful Limb]

I'm going to use this thread for notes and feed back on my "GearPunk/SteamPunk" conversion of the base Earthdawn setting.
You ever play Iron Kingdoms? War Machine? The old 'Arcanum' computer rpg? Yeah, that's what I'm going for.

First up, a 7th Circle (lvl) Nethermancy Spell!

Nergul's Vengful Limb
Nethermancy (Circle 7)
Threads: 3
Weaving: 12 / 20 Casting: TSD
Range: 4 yards (2 hexes) Duration: Rank rounds
Effect: WIL + 8/Physical

The fate of the elf Nethermancer Nergul is widely recorded. Having bound what he perceived to be a 'lesser' horror to his will, he began to extract the being's knowledge of spellcasting and Nethermancy. Through a series of Tests of Wills that lasted through days (and a lunar eclipse), Nergul learned dark secrets from the utter depravity of a life-hungry mind born from the dust of the void. What Nergul didn't expect was what was waiting for him after the lunar eclipse. This remains unrecorded, although some whisper about Chantrel's Horror, or even Buualgathor - the Horror Hunter. All that is known is that Nergul attracted SOMETHING's attention with all the high-mana wards and precautions.

He was found near his Bone Circle, his limbs had been removed as if from a clay figurine, skin smoothed over the remains of shoulder and hip joints. His limbs were found in disarray nearby, each having been charred by magic with rings and boot buckles melted to slag. The Chantry's Wizard pronounced cause of death from self strangulation, and multiple broken ribs and blows to the abdomen. He noted in his report that even the bruises around Nergul's neck matched his own dominant hand and set of enchanted rings.

Nergul's laboratory was then filled with a new mixture of lime, pumice, volcanic ash, and water that our Dwarven brethren have been developing and sealed with orichalcum wards out to the intersection of the nearest hallway. What is not in the official history is the Spell that was found burned into the cover of Nergul's grimoire. No one knows how other copies began to circulate, but the spell is now illegal in Throal and all aligned territories.

This spell requires moonlight to cast. After weaving the threads, the caster 'plucks' a beam of moonlight out of the air, which becomes a thin blade used to separate the target from one of his limbs. See the Damage to a Limb table for the scale of effects to use.

The 'Rebel Limb' now has a malevolent will of it's own, glowing with green and black fire. It will attack it's former owner for the duration of the spell, causing Wil+8 damage per round. If the former owner of the spell dies during the duration, the limb(s) will incinerate themselves, leaving a sulfurous stain that is nearly impossible to remove.

If the target survives the casting(s), he regains control of his limb(s) but it remains detached (and healthy) until the character can spend a Recovery test while pressing the limb against the severed joint to reattach it.

Hooverphonic : 2 Wicky

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvfRUVDDdVA

I found the references like "this is the serial number to our orbital gun" combined with the inane space-dock waiting room theme to be RIGHT ON TARGET. Also, Elvis.

Do you like FPS games? Have you ever wanted your own personal set of ballistic armor + jetpack + chaingun?



http://www.legionsoverdrive.com/










The game takes a little while to get used to, the concept of a "Z-axis First Person Shooter" is weird at first. But once you figure out some of the physics tricks, and 'skiing' (your jetpack reduces impacts and keeps you around a foot off the ground in idle when on .... combined with a huge leap, and then _down_ thrusters... and DAMN you can build up some speed).

It's like somebody let Bart Simpson design a Space Marine's kit.

Who's up for some training?

[Placebos work -- even without deception]

Placebos work -- even without deception
http://www.medicaldaily.com/news/20101223/4831/placebos-work--even-without-deception.htm

For most of us, the "placebo effect" is synonymous with the power of positive thinking; it works because you believe you're taking a real drug. But a new study rattles this assumption.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School's Osher Research Center and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have found that placebos work even when administered without the seemingly requisite deception.

The study published on December 22 in PLoS ONE.

Placebos—or dummy pills—are typically used in clinical trials as controls for potential new medications. Even though they contain no active ingredients, patients often respond to them. In fact, data on placebos is so compelling that many American physicians (one study estimates 50 percent) secretly give placebos to unsuspecting patients.

Because such "deception" is ethically questionable, HMS associate professor of medicine Ted Kaptchuk teamed up with colleagues at BIDMC to explore whether or not the power of placebos can be harnessed honestly and respectfully.

To do this, 80 patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) were divided into two groups: one group, the controls, received no treatment, while the other group received a regimen of placebos—honestly described as "like sugar pills"—which they were instructed to take twice daily.

"Not only did we make it absolutely clear that these pills had no active ingredient and were made from inert substances, but we actually had 'placebo' printed on the bottle," says Kaptchuk. "We told the patients that they didn't have to even believe in the placebo effect. Just take the pills."

For a three-week period, the patients were monitored. By the end of the trial, nearly twice as many patients treated with the placebo reported adequate symptom relief as compared to the control group (59 percent vs. 35 percent). Also, on other outcome measures, patients taking the placebo doubled their rates of improvement to a degree roughly equivalent to the effects of the most powerful IBS medications.

"I didn't think it would work," says senior author Anthony Lembo, HMS associate professor of medicine at BIDMC and an expert on IBS. "I felt awkward asking patients to literally take a placebo. But to my surprise, it seemed to work for many of them."

The authors caution that this study is small and limited in scope and simply opens the door to the notion that placebos are effective even for the fully informed patient—a hypothesis that will need to be confirmed in larger trials.

"Nevertheless," says Kaptchuk, "these findings suggest that rather than mere positive thinking, there may be significant benefit to the very performance of medical ritual. I'm excited about studying this further. Placebo may work even if patients know it is a placebo."

[News Black-Out in DC: Pay No Attention to Those Veterans Chained to the White House Fence]

News Black-Out in DC: Pay No Attention to Those Veterans Chained to the White House Fence
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/345

by: Dave Lindorff

There was a black-out and a white-out Thursday and Friday as over a hundred US veterans opposed to US wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, and their civilian supporters, chained and tied themselves to the White House fence during an early snowstorm to say enough is enough.

Washington Police arrested 135 of the protesters, in what is being called the largest mass detention in recent years. Among those arrested were Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who used to provide the president's daily briefings, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the government's Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration, and Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for the New York Times.

No major US news media reported on the demonstration or the arrests. It was blacked out of the New York Times, blacked out of the Philadelphia Inquirer, blacked out in the Los Angeles Times, blacked out of the Wall Street Journal, and even blacked out of the capital's local daily, the Washington Post, which apparently didn't even think it was a local story worth publishing.

Veterans chain themselves to White House fence to protest Afghan War

Making the media cover-up of the protest all the more outrageous was the fact that most news media did report on Friday, the day after the protest, the results of the latest poll of American attitudes towards the Afghanistan War, an ABC/Washington Post Poll which found that 60% of Americans now feel that war has "not been worth it." That's a big increase from the 53% who said they opposed the war in July.

Clearly, any honest and professional journalist and editor would see a news link between such a poll result and an anti-war protest at the White House led, for the first time in recent memory, by a veterans organization, the group Veterans for Peace, in which veterans of the nation's wars actually put themselves on the line to be arrested to protest a current war.

Friday was also the day that most news organizations were reporting on the much-touted, but also much over-rated Pentagon report on the "progress" of the American war in Afghanistan--a report prepared for the White House that claimed there was progress, but which was immediately contradicted by a CIA report that said the opposite. Again, any honest and professional journalist and editor would immediately see the publication of such a report as an appropriate occasion to mention the unusual opposition to the war by a group of veterans right outside the president's office.

And yet, the protest event was completely blacked out by the corporate news media. (Maybe the servile and over-paid White House press corps, ensconced in the press room inside the White House, didn't want to go out and brave the elements to cover the protest.)

If you wanted to know about this protest, you had to go to the internet and read the Huffington Post or to the Socialist Worker, OpEd News, or to this publication (okay, we're a day late, but I was stuck in traffic yesterday), or else to Democracy Now! on the alternative airways.

My old employer, the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, showed how it's supposed to be done. In an article published Friday about the latest ABC/Washington Post Poll, reporter Simon Mann, after explaining that opposition to the war in the US was rising, then wrote:

The publication of the review coincided with anti-war protests held across the US, including one in Washington in which people chained themselves to the White House fence, leading to about 100 arrests.

That's the way journalism is supposed to be done. Relevant information that puts the day's news in some kind of useful context is supposed to be provided to readers, not hidden from them.

Clearly, in the US the corporate media perform a different function. It's called propaganda. And the handling of this dramatic protest by American veterans against the nation's current war provides a dramatic illustration of how far the news industry and the journalism profession has converted itself from a Fourth Estate to a handmaiden to power.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26059/?ref=rss

http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/16/1423254/String-Theory-Tested-Fails-Black-Hole-Predictions

String Theory always sounded a bit _off_ to me. I wonder if this will lead to a re-structured theory, or just more wank.

Following closely on the heels of "Sweet Eris' nipples, we have Taste Buds in our Lungs", we have this intriguing story.

http://io9.com/5707352/the-size-of-your-brains-visual-cortex-determines-whether-optical-illusions-fool-you



I can force myself to correct the optical illusion by 'void-focus', or focusing through the image or on the background, and then re-focusing on both center circles at once. There was a time I couldn't do that, but nowadays, every time I run into an optical illusion, I try to "see" it both ways by conscious effort.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2010/12/worlds-oldest-computer-recreated-in-lego.html


That's pretty damn impressive.

Kinda disappointed that most of the software environments are "closed markets" that you have to get "approval" to publish on, but I'm wondering what you PD spags' opinions on the iPad and various competitors are.


?

http://www.skilluminati.com/research/entry/the_conspiratainment_complex/


If the AWS actually has it's resurrection, Justin needs to in from the ground floor.

Holyshit, this is cool.

I wonder what it was like to have your eyeballs vibrate while tripping on peyote. 

http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/acoustic-archaeology-chavin-mayan.html

I've been watching too much Animaniacs, sorry about the title.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opinion/14rich.html



By FRANK RICH
Published: November 13, 2010

IN the aftermath of the Great Democratic Shellacking of 2010, one election night subplot quickly receded into the footnotes: the drubbing received by very wealthy Americans, most of them Republican, who tried to buy Senate seats and governor's mansions. Americans don't hate rich people. They admire and often idolize success. But Californians took a hearty dislike to Meg Whitman, who sacrificed $143 million of her eBay fortune — not to mention her undocumented former housekeeper — to a gubernatorial race she lost by double digits. Connecticut voters K.O.'d the World Wrestling groin-kicker, Linda McMahon, and West Virginians did likewise to the limestone-and-steel magnate John Raese, the senatorial hopeful who told an interviewer without apparent irony, "I made my money the old-fashioned way — I inherited it."

To my mind, these losers deserve a salute nonetheless. They all had run businesses that actually created jobs (Raese included). They all wanted to enter public service to give back to the country that allowed them to prosper. And by losing so decisively, they gave us a ray of hope in dark times. Their defeats reminded us that despite much recent evidence to the contrary the inmates don't always end up running the asylum of American politics.

The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There's no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that's not nailed down.

[MORE]

[SLIDE SHOW: How important was the discovery of Eris? It was important enough to be selected as the Discovery News #4 top space story of the decade.]

http://news.discovery.com/space/pluto-might-be-bigger-but-eris-is-more-massive.html



   Analysis by Ian O'Neill
   Fri Nov 12, 2010 03:35 AM ET

Which is bigger: Eris or Pluto? Eris... right? Not so fast.

In 2005, the discovery of dwarf planet Eris started a chain of events that rocked the astronomical community and plutonites alike. Pluto was found to be smaller than Eris, causing the "ninth planet" to be demoted to a dwarf planet and be renamed with a "minor planet designator." (Although "134340 Pluto" does have a certain ring to it.)

The nine planets of the solar system became eight, astronomers argued, Illinois wrote some nutty laws, McDonalds tried to set the record straight, schoolkids went wild... In short, it wasn't pretty.

SLIDE SHOW: How important was the discovery of Eris? It was important enough to be selected as the Discovery News #4 top space story of the decade.

But! Last weekend, an extremely rare and exciting event happened, adding yet another twist in the "Is Pluto a planet?" debate. Eris drifted silently through the outermost reaches of the solar system, blocking the light from a single star, an event known as an "occultation."

Although the event was predicted by astronomers, there was some uncertainty about who would get the best view -- this is, after all, the first time an occultation has been used to measure an object so distant (Eris is twice as far away from the sun as Pluto). All they knew was that the occultation would be visible from somewhere in South America.

Right on time, the dwarf planet Eris blocked the star from view and three telescopes in Chile witnessed the star's disappearance.

The starlight blinked out for 27 seconds at the La Silla Observatory, located at the southernmost edge of the Atacama Desert. 740 kilmeters (460 miles) north, two telescopes at the San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Explorations (SPACE) Observatory saw the dwarf planet block out starlight for 78 seconds.

Now, as astronomers know the orbital velocity of Eris, by using the background star as a marker, they could deduce the dwarf planet's diameter.

(The reason why the three telescope sites measured different occultation times is that Eris is spherical and therefore saw the starlight being blocked at different locations across Eris' disk.)

It turns out that Eris could be a lot smaller than previously thought. So small in fact that it is roughly the same size as Pluto! It could even be smaller.

"I have to say I find these new occultation measurements extremely exciting," Mike Brown, professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech and discoverer of Eris, told Discovery News.

"While everyone is more interested in the 'mine is bigger than yours' aspect, the real science is the shockingly large density of Eris."

From years of observing the motion of Eris' moon Dysnomia, a very accurate measure of the dwarf planet's mass has been arrived at. When it was thought Eris was larger than Pluto, it was logical to assume that both objects would have similar densities (and therefore similar compositions). However, these new measurements of Eris' size suggest it is smaller, and therefore more dense.

"No one would have predicted that the two largest objects in the Kuiper belt would be about the same size but have significantly different densities," Brown said. "You get big objects by accumulating smaller objects, so even if there is some variation in the smaller objects, by the time you get to the biggest ones you'd expect everything to be smoothed out. This is truly weird."

Occultation measurements are by their nature very accurate, and although more precision is needed before we get a definitive answer, Eris is certainly a lot smaller than it was thought to be.

"Almost certainly Eris has a radius smaller than 1,170 km [727 miles]," Bruno Sicardy, of the Paris Observatory, said in an email to Sky and Telescope Magazine. Pluto has a radius of approximately 1,172 kilometers (728 miles). Pluto therefore has an average density of 2.03 grams/cm3 and Eris has an average density of 2.5 grams/cm3.

These new observations have thrown up more questions than answers.

"Did [Pluto and Eris] come from very different places? Did they have very different histories?" Brown asks. "Something very different has been going on. And I don't know what."

Due to Brown's implication in Pluto's fall from planetary status -- a fact that is clear from the title of his upcoming book "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming" -- he added:

"Also, on the mine-is-bigger-than-yours part, it may turn out that Pluto is ever-so-slightly bigger than Eris, but Eris is more massive than Pluto and the entire asteroid belt put together. So there."

So where does this leave Pluto? Or should I say 134340 Pluto?

Addendum: Watch a video of the the occultation (thanks to Nancy at the Universe Today!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxQ0b8p4cGY

____________________________________________________


  -Telarus, KSC

http://artorder.ning.com/forum/topics/lovecraft-creature-lab-finals

Join in the Lovecraft Creature Lab challenge and team up with Lars
Grant-West and his Creature Lab class at the Rhode Island School of
Design. For more details, see the challenge post on ArtOrder.

What is expected in this discussion thread: Your final images. Submit no larger than 2500x2500 pixels.


----------------------------------------------

First page of images:

The Dunwich Horror


The Mi-Go


Hound of Tindalos


The Ghoul from 'Pickman's Model'


High res links (and 18 more pages of Awesome) @ the original link.

http://www.umm.edu/news/releases/taste_receptors.htm
-----
Taste receptors in the lungs? Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore have discovered that bitter taste receptors are not just located in the mouth but also in human lungs. What they learned about the role of the receptors could revolutionize the treatment of asthma and other obstructive lung diseases.

"The detection of functioning taste receptors on smooth muscle of the bronchus in the lungs was so unexpected that we were at first quite skeptical ourselves," says the study's senior author, Stephen B. Liggett, M.D., professor of medicine and physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and director of its Cardiopulmonary Genomics Program.

Dr. Liggett, a pulmonologist, says his team found the taste receptors by accident, during an earlier, unrelated study of human lung muscle receptors that regulate airway contraction and relaxation. The airways are the pathways that move air in and out of the lungs, one of several critical steps in the process of delivering oxygen to cells throughout the body. In asthma, the smooth muscle airways contract or tighten, impeding the flow of air, causing wheezing and shortness of breath.

The taste receptors in the lungs are the same as those on the tongue. The tongue's receptors are clustered in taste buds, which send signals to the brain. The researchers say that in the lung, the taste receptors are not clustered in buds and do not send signals to the brain, yet they respond to substances that have a bitter taste.

For the current study, Dr. Liggett's team exposed bitter-tasting compounds to human and mouse airways, individual airway smooth muscle cells, and to mice with asthma. The findings are published online in Nature Medicine.

Most plant-based poisons are bitter, so the researchers thought the purpose of the lung's taste receptors was similar to those in the tongue – to warn against poisons. "I initially thought the bitter-taste receptors in the lungs would prompt a 'fight or flight' response to a noxious inhalant, causing chest tightness and coughing so you would leave the toxic environment, but that's not what we found," says Dr. Liggett.

There are thousands of compounds that activate the body's bitter taste receptors but are not toxic in appropriate doses. Many are synthetic agents, developed for different purposes, and others come from natural origins, such as certain vegetables, flowers, berries and trees.

The researchers tested a few standard bitter substances known to activate these receptors. "It turns out that the bitter compounds worked the opposite way from what we thought," says Dr. Liggett. "They all opened the airway more extensively than any known drug that we have for treatment of asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)." Dr. Liggett says this observation could have implications for new therapies. "New drugs to treat asthma, emphysema or chronic bronchitis are needed," he says. "This could replace or enhance what is now in use, and represents a completely new approach."

Quinine and chloroquine have been used to treat completely different diseases (such as malaria), but are also very bitter. Both of these compounds opened contracted airways profoundly in laboratory models. Even saccharin, which has a bitter aftertaste, was effective at stimulating these receptors. The researchers also found that administration of an aerosolized form of bitter substances relaxed the airways in a mouse model of asthma, showing that they could potentially be an effective treatment for this disease.

Dr. Liggett cautions that eating bitter tasting foods or compounds would not help in the treatment of asthma. "Based on our research, we think that the best drugs would be chemical modifications of bitter compounds, which would be aerosolized and then inhaled into the lungs with an inhaler," he says.

Another paradoxical aspect of their discovery is the unexpected role that the mineral calcium plays when the lung's taste receptors are activated. The study's principal author, Deepak A. Deshpande, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, is an expert in how calcium controls muscles. "We always assumed that increased calcium in the smooth muscle cell caused it to contract, but we found that bitter compounds increase calcium and cause relaxation of airway muscle in a unique way," says Dr. Deshpande. "It appears that these taste receptors are wired to a special pool of calcium that is right at the edge of these cells," he says.

"The work of this team exemplifies what it takes to make real improvements in treating certain diseases," says E. Albert Reece, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., vice president for medical affairs at the University of Maryland and dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "These researchers were willing to take chances and ask questions about an unlikely concept. Why are taste receptors in the lungs? What do they do? Can we take advantage of them to devise a new therapy? In the end, their discoveries are in the best tradition of scientific research."

Asthma and COPD together affect 300 million people worldwide. According to the American Lung Association, asthma affects nearly 23 million Americans, including seven million children, and COPD is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. The incidence of both diseases is increasing. At least half of all asthma patients have inadequate control of the disease using drugs currently available.

Two investigators from Johns Hopkins University, Steven S. An and James S. K. Sham, also contributed to some of the experiments.

This research was supported by grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

I almost spit milk though my nose when I saw this on pop up on "Community".


(Oh, gods, is this a new WOMP ark? Time will tell.)

Calling 50 pages.

I've begun to code up a "framework" for the tabletop game I play (Earthdawn) on the virtual tabletop app, MapTool (rptools.net).

Here's what I've got so far (keep in mind this is done with a macro/scripting language): Wrapped my head around multi-page html characters sheets in a frame, how to call properties from the token into the frame, how to setup lights and vision blocking

To do: figure out how to pass html forms back to the codebase (how to make the character sheet editable and set properties on the token), figure out how to auto-generate secondary characteristics, figure out an inventory system, code up a GM Screen with relevant tables, charts, etc, think about automating PC character creation.

This is the stuff I'm studying, and i think that these are some of the people really pushing the boundaries of what we usually think of as "Narrative".

Del Toro Defends Video Games As Art, Accusing Detractors Of Being 'Out Of Touch'

The film director Guillermo Del Toro, best known for his fairtytale movie Pan's Labyrinth and film adaptation of Hell Boy publicly defended video games as being an "artform" at a book reading this week.

"Video games are the comic books of our time," said Del Toro at a book reading in the U.S., currently available to view on YouTube. "It's a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia. They say, 'Oh, video games...' And most people that complain about video games have never fucking played them."

"Video games have proven to be incredibly immersive experiences, and not every game is a shooter game," the director continued. "You will see that they are an art form and anyone saying differently is a little out of touch, because they are an art form."

"Like the way they say, 'Horror movies, they make the kids delinquent! Horror comics, they make the kids criminal!' Now it's video games," he added. "It's all bulls**t."

At the book reading event the director spoke of his love for first person shooter games, despite his "entirely anti-war" politics. He cited ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, Gadget: Invention and Marathon as "masterpieces" and described BioShock as having "one of the most fully-realised worlds in any medium".

Del Toro was responding to a question about the forthcoming "Lovecraftian" video game he recently announced on MTV News. Del Toro told MTV the project's massive scale would necessitate a three-year development schedule, with the game hitting store shelves in 2013 in the "best case scenario."

Speaking at the book reading event, Del Toro promised the audience a "really big, revolutionary, very different game". He described the project as "a long-term commitment", and an idea he's been trying to green-light for the last "three or four" years.

"I expect and hope to create what I would like to see in a video game," he said. "The one thing I can say [about my movies] is that I'm doing them because no-one else is doing them. And the video game is the same thing: I want to do that video game in a way that no one else is doing."

The Death Of Linearity?

This one is a bit long, so you'll have to read it @ Gamasutra.

I'm posting during a break in my Intro to Editing class, so I'll come back and comment later.

A poster I've been working on for my sister's DJ duo 'Cheeze On Toast', Rockstarz, First Fridays, Big Island, Hawaii:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/09/segway-death/

And in honor of that completely random bit of reality, HAVE SOME MORE.

MOST EXCELLENT EXCLUSIVE: Alex Winter Confirms 'Bill & Ted 3' Is On The Way!

God tells guy to build really, really, really large treehouse

Rare Adolf Hitler paintings could fetch £150,000 at auction
(Note the perspective problems (LOL), especially the horizontal lines of the windows and the roof-line.)

The C Street Family goes global: How congressmen travel the world to preach to dictators on the taxpayers' dime.

Yes, that is a real statue

Human-Powered Ornithopter Becomes First Ever of Its Kind to Achieve Sustained Flight

Montana Woman Fends Off Bear Attack With Zucchini

Republican and Tea Partiers conspire to get voters removed from voting rolls in Wisconsin

Credit to the High Weirdness Project for most of those.

http://www.khanacademy.org/

Go. Drool. Learn.

[CIA Drones May Have Used Illegal, Inaccurate Code]

Well, well, well. I wonder if this explains some of those "collateral casualties". 


CIA Drones May Have Used Illegal, Inaccurate Code

from the fighting-terror-with-ctrl-c-and-ctrl-v dept., skids writes

"Coders hate having to rush code out the door before it's ready.  They also hate it when the customer starts making unreasonable demands.  What they hate even more is when the customer reverse engineers the product and starts selling their own inferior product.  But what really ticks them off is when that buggy, knockoff product might be used by targeting systems in military unmanned drone attacks, and the bugs introduce location errors of up to 13 meters.  That's what purportedly happened to software developer IISi, based on an ongoing boardroom/courtroom drama that will leave any hard-pressed coder appreciating just how much worse his job could get.  The saddest part?  The CIA assumed the bug was a feature.  The tinfoil-hat-inducing part?  The alleged perpetrators just got bought by IBM."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=an-ode-to-the-many-evolved-virtues-2010-09-22


WOW. Very very interesting.

http://gawker.com/5636011/stupid-california-police-warn-parents-of-pedobear-the-pedophile-mascot

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/09/05/2148248/4chan-Gives-90-Year-Old-Vet-a-Great-Birthday

Hugh Pickens writes "Members of 4chan aren't known for doing things that are cute and heart-warming and when they decide to go after someone, it's typically to subject them to ridicule. But not this time. Someone at 4chan decided that the Internet should get together and wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday, and soon Lashua's local branch of the American Legion was deluged by birthday calls from people as far away as Sweden. The account someone set up for Mr. Lashua's birthday on Facebook had 3,956 'likes' and over 500 comments, most of which wished him a happy birthday and thanked him for his military service. It's not clear how 4chan originally came across a photo of Lashua, but a member of the site posted a snapshot of a flyer that was on the bulletin board at a store in Ashburnham, Massachusetts asking for guests to attend the nonagenarian's birthday on at the American Legion hall and the post took off. In contrast to their usual behavior, 4chan members 'were giving him nice phone calls and sending him nice notes' and discouraging those who wanted to do something stupid or mean. 'They were all being.. well, shucks, awful nice.'"

Things that make you go




http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/08/31/1713210/Whisky-Made-From-Diabetics-Urine

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday August 31, @05:03PM
from the I've-tasted-this-before dept.
idle
It's doubtful that any other distillery will come up with a whisky that tastes like Gilpin Family Whisky because of its secret ingredient: urine. Researcher and designer James Gilpin uses the sugar rich urine of elderly diabetics to make his high-end single malt whisky. From the article: "The source material is acquired from elderly volunteers, including Gilpin's own grandmother, Patricia. The urine is purified in the same way as mains water is purified, with the sugar molecules removed and added to the mash stock to accelerate the whisky's fermentation process. Traditionally, that sugar would be made from the starches in the mash."

NSFW: http://s334583533.initial-website.com/gallery/

SFW: http://crispian-jago.blogspot.com/2010/08/modern-science-map.html

NSFW: http://www.goodtoknow.co.uk/relationships/gallery/9278/top-10-sex-positions/1

SFW: http://technoccult.net/archives/2010/08/18/trippy-3d-fractal-video/