Shells And Hallucinations
Posted February 8th, 2011 byCategories: hallucinations, shells
The sound is ancient and eerie. For a palpable sense of time, blow into the sawed-off spire of a conch. Feel the ache in your lungs and hear the oceanic roar as it vibrates the hefty shell in your hand.
In the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, the warriors blew conches to announce battle. In Buddhism, the conch’s deep and penetrating drone proclaims the far reach of the dharma. Tibetan monks still use them to summon devotees.
But in the Andean sierra of South America, what did it mean when, three millennia ago, the pre-Incan residents of Chavín de Huántar raised those ornately decorated conch shells to their lips in the underground corridors of their temple?
Nobody knows for certain. But a few Stanford researchers are determined to find out. The result has led to an unusual collaboration between archaeologists and acousticians, under the auspices of Peru’s Ministry of Culture, leading into the rarified realms of psychoacoustics and archaeo-acoustics.
Seed funding for the project came from the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, a featured program of The Stanford Challenge, a fundraising campaign launched in 2006 and now in its final year.
“Conches are attention-grabbers,” said John Rick, associate professor of anthropology and part of the Chavín team. “They’re rarely used trivially. People don’t play them for entertainment. They’re ceremonial – shiny, noisy, highly labor-intensive things.
“This is something that literally has an effect on the human being, even physiologically.”
Conches figured prominently in the iconography of Chavín, a UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site about 150 miles north of Lima. “They were clearly important. They were carried in important processions,” said Rick.
L.A. Cicero 
Professor John Rick holds a conch shell similar to the ones discovered at the Chavin site.
In July 2001, Stanford archaeologists working at Chavín’s 3,000-year-old ceremonial center came across a conch buried in the dirt in one of the temple’s underground galleries. To get a sense of the scale of the discovery, remember that only a couple of decorated conches had ever before been found in Peru.
But that wasn’t all: “The first one we hit we knew exactly what it was, but we never had a clue that we’d be lucky enough to find 20 intact ones that were still playable,” said Rick. The decorated shells, about 10 inches long and weighing 3 to 5 pounds each, had been used for centuries. Their thick pink shells were worn through.
“Once we started to find them, it was imperative to know more,” said Rick.
In the unique acoustic landscape – stone-walled underground architecture, with twisting corridors, hidden alcoves and ventilation shafts – how did the conches sound? What role did they play in the ceremonial culture?
The questions weren’t new. In the mid-1970s, Peruvian archaeologist Luís Lumbreras, director of the National Institute of Culture (now subsumed into the Ministry of Culture), described the interior structures at Chavín as a set of connected, resonant chambers. He called one of the structures an “acoustic canal” that would produce a loud applause or thunder-like sound when a barrel of water was poured into it.
In other places, conch shells might have created the disorienting impression of sounds coming from several different directions at once.
“We have evidence of the manipulation of light; we have acoustic spaces where it seems that they were playing around with sound. We’ve got evidence of the use of psycho-active drugs,” said Rick. But what other effects were they using in this very early multimedia show, and why? Was it a kind of mind control using sensory manipulation exercised by the priestly elite?
Time for the acousticians to enter the picture, beginning with John Chowning, music professor emeritus, one of the fathers of computer music and the founding director of the renowned Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
The CCRMA team included consulting Professor Jonathan Abel and former CCRMA director Perry Cook.
“My chest was rattled, and I was nauseated for the rest of the day,” said Abel, who first heard Rick play a conch as he was standing in a stairwell at CCRMA. “Serious subharmonics were involved.” But he also was hooked.
As a result, “I was exposed to this incredible culture that seemed to be able to control the senses in a way through the architecture, through the features of Chavín, and, in particular, these Strombus shell trumpets,” he said.
L.A. Cicero 
Professor Jonathan Abel with a microphone array like the one used in the Chavin site.
Since the archaeo-acoustic team’s visit to Peru in 2008, CCRMA graduate student and Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship recipient Miriam Kolar, whose dissertation studies the psychoacoustics of Chavín, has been making on-site measurements in the temple complex. She is hoping to recreate “the aural experience of an ancient ceremonial center.”
Using sprays of flexible microphones, amplifiers, low distortion speakers, analog-to-digital converters and computer audio interfaces, she measures “how the architecture of these spaces affects auditory perception, which can provide clues about the site’s purpose.”
In her experiments, “participants listen, in the real acoustic context, to sounds that could have been authentic in Chavín times,” and then respond to questions about what they hear.
Supplying the support research back at Stanford, Abel explores the “auditory texture of the place” and tries to “quantify the gallery acoustics.” He and the rest of the team are in a race against time: Chavín needs conservation work that will forever alter the mysterious acoustics in the sharply twisting passages and underground alcoves.
Were the priests using these techniques to draw people into the cult? Rick said that this period marks the emergence of an elite in the Andes, a class that could issue orders and command labor and fealty.
“We don’t see the public here; this is for the elite. You don’t see anything like, ‘Thank you, St. Chavín, for saving my leg,’” said Rick. “If you’re not an aspirant or not a member, you’re probably not there.”
Perhaps it marks an early kind of capitalism, as well: “The Chavín priests are in a business. This isn’t a free cult, any more than the Mediterranean cults or anything else.”
The conches were engraved with elaborate patterns. “But whose patterns were those?” Rick asked. “At first we thought those were all Chavín designs. We started to study those and realized that they were contemporary designs to Chavín culture, but they weren’t of Chavín themselves.”
Apparently, the shells had stopped at other sites in the central Andes, in their journey from the seas off what are now Panama, Costa Rica and Ecuador, and were converted to trumpets en route. The Chavín touch was the characteristic V-shaped notch carved into the opening of the shell, which allows for bendable notes. It also possibly enabled priests in the procession to see where they were walking as they blew into the shells.
So far, Abel said, the conches haven’t lost their charm; one can make the shell sound like an animal, or the wind, or a whisper. “Let me make it sound like a jet engine,” he said. “It’s completely fun.”
Abel praises the interdisciplinary side of the project as “the only way we can make certain kinds of advances.”
“Archaeology, anthropology, electrical engineering, signal processing, acoustics, mechanical engineering, physics, music, art – it all comes together,” he said. “It’s completely fascinating. I’m learning a little bit about culture, and a lot about acoustics, actually.”
Rick, in turn, praises the “acoustic magicians” of CCRMA: “The most important thing I’ve learned is that acoustics is not some sort of soft science. Acoustics is real science. I’ve had my eyes opened time and time again by the analytical work that I’ve watched.
“You could say the acoustics people are the new priests of Chavín,” he said. [+]
Galactic Flashes = Signals?
Posted February 5th, 2011 byCategories: alien
“We’ll be looking for the occasional celestial flash,” said Joseph Lazio, a radio astronomer at JPL. “These flashes can be anything from explosions on surfaces of nearby stars, deaths of distant stars, exploding black holes, or even perhaps transmissions by other civilizations.” JPL scientists are working with multi-institutional teams to explore this new area of astronomy.
An innovative new radio telescope array under construction in central New Mexico will eventually harness the power of more than 13,000 antennas and provide a fresh eye to the sky. The antennas, which resemble droopy ceiling fans, form the Long Wavelength Array, designed to survey the sky from horizon to horizon over a wide range of frequencies.
The University of New Mexico leads the project, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides the advanced digital electronic systems, which represent a major component of the observatory.
The first station in the Long Wavelength Array, with 256 antennas, is scheduled to start surveying the sky by this summer. When complete, the Long Wavelength Array will consist of 53 stations, with a total of 13,000 antennas strategically placed in an area nearly 400 kilometers (248 miles) in diameter. The antennas will provide sensitive, high-resolution images of a region of the sky hundreds of times larger than the full moon. These images could reveal radio waves coming from planets outside our solar system, and thus would turn out to be a new way to detect these worlds. In addition to planets, the telescope will pick up a host of other cosmic phenomena.
The new Long Wavelength Array will operate in the radio-frequency range of 20 to 80 megahertz, corresponding to wavelengths of 15 meters to 3.8 meters (49.2 feet to 12.5 feet). These frequencies represent one of the last and most poorly explored regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
In recent years, a few factors have triggered revived interest in radio astronomy at these frequencies. The cost and technology required to build these low-frequency antennas has improved significantly. Also, advances in computing have made the demands of image processing more attainable. The combination of cost-effective hardware and technology gives scientists the ability to return to these wavelengths and obtain a much better view of the universe.
The predecessor Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array was also in New Mexico. It was successful in identifying radio flashes, but all of them came from non-astronomy targets — either the sun, or meteors reflecting TV signals high in Earth’s atmosphere. Nonetheless, its findings indicate how future searches using the Long Wavelength Array technology might lead to new discoveries.
“Because nature is more clever than we are, it’s quite possible that we will discover something we haven’t thought of,” said Lazio.
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DNA Molecules Can Teleport
Posted January 25th, 2011 byCategories: DNA, teleportation
A Nobel Prize winning biologist has ignited controversy after publishing details of an experiment in which a fragment of DNA appeared to ‘teleport’ or imprint itself between test tubes.
According to a team headed by Luc Montagnier, previously known for his work on HIV and AIDS, two test tubes, one of which contained a tiny piece of bacterial DNA, the other pure water, were surrounded by a weak electromagnetic field of 7Hz.
Eighteen hours later, after DNA amplification using a polymerase chain reaction, as if by magic the DNA was detectable in the test tube containing pure water.
Oddly, the original DNA sample had to be diluted many times over for the experiment to work, which might explain why the phenomenon has not been detected before, assuming that this is what has happened.
The phenomenon might be very loosely described as ‘teleportation’ except that the bases project or imprint themselves across space rather than simply moving from one place to another.
To be on the safe side, Montagnier then compared the results with controls in which the time limit was lowered, no electromagnetic field was present or was present but at lower frequencies, and in which both tubes contained pure water. On every one of these, he drew a blank.
The possible quantum effect – the apparent imprinting of the DNA on the water – is not in itself the most contentious element of the experiment, so much as the relatively long timescales over which it appears to manifest itself. Quantum phenomena are assumed to show their faces in imperceptible fractions of a second and not seconds minutes and hours, and usually at very low temperatures approaching absolute zero.
Revealing a process through which biology might display the underlying ‘quantumness’ of nature at room temperature would be startling. [+]
New Type of Entanglement: Teleportation In Time
Posted January 25th, 2011 byCategories: quantum entanglement, quantum teleportation, teleportation, time
Conventional entanglement links particles across space. Now physicists say a similar effect links particles through time.
Entanglement is the strange quantum phenomenon in which two or more particles become so deeply linked that they share the same existence.
That leads to some counterintuitive effects, in particular, when two entangled particles become widely separated. When that happens, a measurement on one immediately influences the other, regardless of the distance between them. This “spooky-action-at-a-distance” has profound implications about the nature of reality but a clear understanding of it still eludes physicists.
Today, they have something else to puzzle over. Jay Olson and Timothy Ralph at the University of Queensland in Australia say they’ve discovered a new type of entanglement that extends, not through space, but through time.
They begin by thinking about a simplified universe consisting of one dimension of space and one of time.
It’s easy to plot this universe on a plane with the x-axis corresponding to a spatial dimension and the y-axis corresponding to time.
If you imagine the present as the origin of this graph, then the future (ie the space you can reach at subluminal speeds) forms a wedge that is symmetric about the y-axis. Your past (ie the space you could have arrived from at subluminal speeds) is a mirror image of this wedge reflected in the x-axis.
When two particles are present, both sitting on the x-axis, their wedges will overlap in the future and in the past. This has a simple meaning: these particles could have interacted in the past and could do so again in the future, but only in the areas of overlap.
Conventional entanglement cuts across this world, quite literally. It acts along the the x-axis, linking particles instantly in time and in defiance of the boundaries to these wedges.
What Olson and Ralph show is that entanglement can just as easily work along the y-axis too. In other words, entanglement is so deeply enmeshed in the universe that a measurement in the past has an automatic influence on the future.
That may sound like a truism. Isn’t this is how the universe works, I hear you say. But this isn’t ordinary cause and effect; there are some interesting subtleties to this phenomenon.
To see how, imagine an experiment that Ralph and Olson describe in which a qubit is sent into the future. The idea is that a detector acts on a qubit and then generates a classical message describing how this particle can be detected. Then, at some point in the future, another detector at the same position in space, receives this message and carries out the required measurement, thereby reconstructing the qubit.
But there’s a twist. Olson and Ralph show that the detection of the qubit in the future must be symmetric in time with its creation in the past. “If the past detector was active at a quarter to 12:00, then the future detector must wait to become active at precisely a quarter past 12:00 in order to achieve entanglement,” they say. For that reason, they call this process “teleportation in time”.
But how is this different from ordinary existence? After all, we’re all time travellers, moving into the future at the same rate. What’s special about Olson and Ralph’s route?
The answer is that Olson and Ralph’s teleportation provides a shortcut into the future. What they’re saying is that it’s possible to travel into the future without being present during the time in between.
That’s a fascinating scenario that immediately raises many questions. One of the first that springs to mind is what advantage might we get from this process. Might it be possible, for example, to make short-lived particles live longer by teleporting them into the future?
That isn’t clear. Neither is it clear exactly how such an experiment might be done although. Presumably, it wouldn’t be very different to the type of teleportation that is done in labs all over the world today, as a matter of routine (in fact Olson and Ralph say that timelike entangelment is interchangeable with the spacelike version).
That means it’s only a matter of time before somebody tries it. We’ll be watching!
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Dead Birds
Posted January 4th, 2011 byCategories: anomaly
Around 500 dead birds have fallen from the sky in Louisiana, found scattered along a quarter-mile portion of highway in Point Coupee Parish, the AP reports. The discovery is approximately 300 miles south of Beebe, Arkansas, where just days earlier thousands of the same species of birds also fell from the sky. [+]
Chronesthesia
Posted December 28th, 2010 byCategories: brain, time machines
The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person’s decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as “chronesthesia,” or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences. In a new study, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of the mental time in which the metaphorical “travel” occurs.
The researchers, Lars Nyberg from Umea University in Umea, Sweden; Reza Habib from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois; and Alice S. N. Kim, Brian Levine, and Endel Tulving from the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, have published their results in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the ‘actors,’ where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future,” Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
“In cognitive neuroscience, we know quite a bit (relatively speaking) about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined space,” he said. “We know essentially nothing about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined time. When you remember something that you did last night, you are consciously aware not only that the event happened and that you were ‘there,’ as an observer or participant (‘episodic memory’), but also that it happened yesterday, that is, at a time that is no more. The question we are asking is, how do you know that it happened at a time other than ‘now’?”
In their study, the researchers asked several well-trained subjects to repeatedly think about taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future. By keeping the content the same and changing only the mental time in which it occurs, the researchers could identify which areas of the brain are correlated with thinking about the same event at different times.
The results showed that certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and cerebellum, as well as the thalamus, were activated differently when the subjects thought about the past and future compared with the present. Notably, brain activity was very similar for thinking about all of the non-present times (the imagined past, real past, and imagined future).
Because mental time is a product of the human brain and differs from the external time that is measured by clocks and calendars, scientists also call this time “subjective time.” Chronesthesia, by definition, is a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it.
Some previous research has questioned whether the concept of subjective time is actually necessary for understanding similarities in brain activity during past and future thinking compared with thinking about the present. A few past studies have suggested that the brain’s ability for scene construction, and not subjective time, can account for the ability to think about past and future events. However, since scene construction was held constant in this study, the new results suggest that the brain’s ability to conceive of a subjective time is in fact necessary to explain how we think about the past and future.
“Until now, the processes that determine contents and the processes that determine time have not been separated in functional neuroimaging studies of chronesthesia; especially, there have been no studies in which brain regions involved in time alone, rather than time together with action, have been identified,” Tulving said. “The concept of ‘chronesthesia’ is essentially brand new. (You find a few entries on it in Google, but not on Web of Science.) Therefore, I would say, the most important result of our study is the novel finding that there seem to exist brain regions that are more active in the (imagined) past and the (imagined) future than they are in the (imagined) present. That is, we found some evidence for chronesthesia. Before we undertook this study it was entirely possible to imagine that we find nothing!”
He added that, at this stage of the game, it is too early to talk about potential implications or applications of understanding how the brain thinks about the past, present, and future.
“Our study, we hope, is the first swallow of the spring, and others will follow,” he said. “Our findings, as I alluded to above, are promising, but they have to be replicated, checked for validity and reliability, and, above all, extended to other conditions and situations, before we can start thinking about their implications and applications (of which it is easy to think of many).” [+]
Animals Use Psychedelic Drugs
Posted December 27th, 2010 byCategories: psychedelic
Research scientists have used many animal species in investigating mind-altering drugs, but it may come as a surprise to learn that animals in the wild — from starlings to reindeer — also make use of psychoactive substances of their own accord.
It seems that many of these species have a natural desire to experience altered states of consciousness, and man may well have found his way to some of his favourite recreational drugs by observing the behaviour of animals. [+]
Storefront For 3D Printed Objects
Posted December 26th, 2010 byCategories: Uncategorized
.MGX, Materialise’s high end design label for 3D printed furniture and lamps, just opened the world’s first physical store for 3D printed goods. The .MGX Flagship store is in Brussels’ exclusive Sablon district. At the store people can look at and explore .MGX’s lighting and other collections. In the future .MGX will showcase new designs and exhbitions by its designers in the store. You could obtain .MGX items in other design stores world wide previously such as New York’s wonderful Moss but this is the first dedicated .MGX store. It is also the world’s first store dedicated to 3D printed items, we’re guessing it won’t be the last!
The .MGX Flagship Store is located at Rue Joseph Stevensstraat 31 – 1000 Brussels (Zavel/Sablon).
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Strange New Twist: Researchers Discover Möbius Symmetry in Metamaterials
Posted December 24th, 2010 byCategories: electromagnetism
Now a team of scientists has discovered Möbius symmetry in metamaterials — materials engineered from artificial “atoms” and “molecules” with electromagnetic properties that arise from their structure rather than their chemical composition.
Xiang Zhang, a scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and a professor at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, led a study in which electromagnetic Möbius symmetry was successfully introduced into composite metamolecular systems made from metals and dielectrics. This discovery opens the door to finding and exploiting novel phenomena in metamaterials.
“We have experimentally observed a new topological symmetry in electromagnetic metamaterial systems that is equivalent to the structural symmetry of a Möbius strip, with the number of twists controlled by sign changes in the electromagnetic coupling between the meta-atoms,” Zhang says. “We have further demonstrated that metamaterials with different coupling signs exhibit resonance frequencies that depend on the number but not the locations of the twists. This confirms the topological nature of the symmetry.”
Working with metallic resonant meta-atoms configured as coupled split-ring resonators, Zhang and members of his research group assembled three of these identical meta-atoms into trimers. Through careful design of the electromagnetic couplings between the constituent meta-atoms, these trimers displayed Möbius C3 symmetry — meaning Möbius cyclic symmetry through three rotations of 120 degrees. The Möbius twists result from a change in the signs of the electromagnetic coupling constants between the constituent meta-atoms.
“The topological Möbius symmetry we found in our meta-molecule trimers is a new symmetry not found in naturally occurring materials or molecules.” Zhang says. “Since the coupling constants of metamolecules can be arbitrarily varied from positive to negative without any constraints, the number of Möbius twists we can introduce are unlimited. This means that topological structures that have thus far been limited to mathematical imagination can now be realized using metamolecules of different designs.” [+]
Overgrow And Inundate
Posted December 8th, 2010 byCategories: cultureJam, marijuana
Overgrow The World has the same goal as most of us: “Full re-legalization of cannabis/hemp for all farmers and responsible adults around the world.” But OTW plans to achieve this goal through a unique method: planting marijuana in public, highly visible places.
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| Photo: Hawai’i News Daily |
| Ed Rosenthal planted a seed in OTW founder ElectroPig Von Fökkengrüüven’s mind |
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| Photo: GrassCity.com |
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The Ghost Of Jack Parsons Shall Prevail
Posted December 6th, 2010 byCategories: pasadena, quantum entanglement, quantum physics
Quantum anything has typically fallen into our oft-used category of ‘awesome things that’ll never happen,’ but if a crew of researchers at the California Institute of Technology have anything to say about it, they’ll soon be changing the fortunes of that segment. The team has recently demonstrated quantum entanglement for a quantum state stored in four spatially distinct atomic memories, and while that probably just blew your mind a little bit, the breakdown is fairly interesting. Essentially, they’ve uncovered a quantum interface between the atomic memories, which is said to “represent something akin to a computer hard drive for entanglement.” If extended, it could pave the way toward quantum networks, and in turn, massive webs of quantum computers. We’re obviously decades out from understanding what this all means for the common computer user, but just remember this: “for an entangled quantum system, there exists no objective physical reality for the system’s properties.” And you thought The Matrix was deep. [+]
Information as a force of nature
Posted December 4th, 2010 byCategories: information
The state has become permeable; only North Korea, secure in its hermit-like lack of connectivity, will not unwind as the power of the state erodes before a tsunami of information. Professional news organisations seem as likely to block the flow of information as to accelerate it. These blocks produce countervailing forces that end up undermining those organisations. And we, well, we get caught up in our phones and our toys and all our conversations, too busy too look up and look out at the person sitting right next to us.
This is a snapshot of a culture so connected, so in thrall with information, that it has been swept clean of its moorings. We have left the certain shore behind and are heading toward the middle of the stream, where things will move even faster. We need to be realistic, we need to understand that things as they are have changed irrevocably. We may long nostalgically for the shore, but we’ll never see it again, at least not in that form. We’ve got to get used to information as a force of nature: something that shapes us, even as we try to shape it. [+]
Just how complex is your noggin? Pretty damn complex, according to researchers at Stanford. Their new imaging technique discovered that synapses are actually more like individual microprocessors than simple on/off switches, and your brain has hundreds of trillions of them.
Their findings, reported in the current issue of the journal Neuron, are based on a new imaging technique called array tomography that stitches image slices together into a full 3D model. The video above shows tissue from a mouse’s brain, its neurons engineered to glow in neon green so the synapses could be distinguished against them.
According to Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and one of the lead researchers, the new images revealed the brain to be vastly more intricate than we had ever imagined:
One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor—with both memory-storage and information-processing elements—than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.
Yup, you’ve got the world’s craziest network right on top of yer shoulders. Researchers at Stanford’s School of Medicine have patented the array tomography technique and will now try to use it to learn even more about synapses—what happens to them when we learn new facts, what happens to them after we experience trauma etc. In the meantime, they’ve got my brain feeling a whole lot bigger. [+]
Proof of extra dimensions possible next year: CERN
Posted December 4th, 2010 byCategories: cern, dimensions
Scientists at the CERN research center say their “Big Bang” project is going beyond all expectations and the first proof of the existence of dimensions beyond the known four could emerge next year.
In surveys of results of nearly 8 months of experiments in their Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they also say they may be able to determine by the end of 2011 whether the mystery Higgs particle, or boson, exists.
Guido Tonelli, spokesman for one of the CERN specialist teams monitoring operations in the vast, subterranean LHC, said probing for extra dimensions — besides length, breadth, height and time — would become easier as the energy of the proton collisions in it is increased in 2011.
Other CERN physicists say the success so far of the world’s largest scientific project suggests that some great enigmas of the universe they have in their sights could be at least partly resolved much sooner than they thought.
“One year ago, it would have been impossible for us to guess that the machine and the experiments could achieve so much so quickly,” said Fabiola Gionotti, spokeswoman for another research team in the surveys, issued on CERN’s website (www.cern.org).
RESULTS ALL THE TIME
“We are producing new results all the time,” she added. The existence or otherwise of the Higgs, never yet spotted but believed to provide the glue giving mass to matter, should be settled one way or another by the end of next year.
The $10 billion LHC, whose operation and monitoring involves scientists and research centers in 34 countries, went into full operation on March 31, smashing protons together at near the speed of light with increasing energy.
These collisions have been creating millions of simulations of the Big Bang which 13.7 billion years ago brought into existence the primordial universe from which stars, planets and life on earth — and perhaps elsewhere — eventually emerged.
The LHC operations have been so trouble-free that at the start of this month CERN scientists were able to switch to colliding lead ions, creating temperatures a million times hotter than at the heart of the Sun.
The ion collisions, creating an amalgam dubbed a quark-gluon plasma, give the research teams another way of looking at what happened within a nano-second of the Big Bang and at the first matter produced by that mighty explosion.
CERN scientists say they have already taken research with ions further than those with gold at the long-established Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
These experiments have shown the power of the link-up of 140 computing centers around the world known as the Grid which processes the vast amounts of information that ion collisions produce.
On December 6, the LHC will be shut down for servicing and to avoid draining electricity in the depths of winter from the energy networks of France and Switzerland along whose border CERN lies.
It will start up again in February, then run at full blast, with protons, until the end of the year, when it will close down again until 2013 while engineers prepare it for running at double the energy to the end of the decade and beyond. [+]
The World’s Oldest Plant
Posted December 4th, 2010 byCategories: trees
Alive today, the 13-thousand year old Jurupa Oak lived through an Ice Age and existed before agriculture.
Scientists found the oak in an unlikely habitat: dry and hot rocky hills and found that it survives against the odds like an insane sci-fi villain: by cloning itself to continue life after being burned to death. The Jurupa Oak colony extends over twenty-five meters, expanding at a pace of two millimeters per year. Genetic analysis shows that the colony is really one organism.
The aged oaks acorns are sterile – it sacrificed the ability to reproduce for extended life (providing the psychotic drive all immortal villains need.) Instead it survives California wildfires by resprouting around burned buds. In fact, this Phoenix-like cloning is the only way it can expand, multiply reborn in fire, expanding ever-so-slowly outwards each time it happens.
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The Logic Of Not Demanding
Posted November 30th, 2010 byCategories: cultureJam
Photo by Dave Rempel
The Tea Party protests are shaking things up in conservative politics. But what have we dissenters from the left accomplished recently? Not much. We fill the streets, wave our signs and choke on some tear gas. Black bloc anarchists smash a few windows and pull off some daring stunts, but then the 24-hour news cycle moves on and we’re left feeling empty. Nothing has changed.
In a perverse way our protests may actually be reinforcing and validating the global consumerist regime. I sincerely believe that the G20 Summit leaders and organizers sigh with relief when they hear that we are once again mobilizing massive protests against them. After all, what would a successful economic summit be without thousands of angry protesters clashing with rows of automaton riot police and a few cop cars burning in the streets? Without sporadic spectacles like that, capitalism would lose its dynamic spark.
Maybe it’s time we deny them their regularly scheduled spectacles and try something new.
Next time they call an economic summit, why don’t we just ignore them? Instead of massive displays of anger, let’s give them eerily empty streets … silence … not a peep … nothing to validate their billion dollar security budgets. We refuse to react, refuse to engage, refuse to make demands. We don’t tell them what we want because they already know what we want: We want their system to die. Why make demands of the thing you want to destroy? Negotiating only grants legitimacy and continuity.
Instead we live like cats on the prowl, pulling off little acts of rebellion that frustrate their doomsday machine at every turn. Acts like cutting up our credit cards, moving our money, buying locally and spreading revolutionary memes. We meet in little groups in local indie coffee shops plotting audacious pranks and acts of civil disobedience: slowing traffic, liberating billboards, detonating stink bombs – crazy, random acts that hurt the bottom line.
Every day of the week we create weird, wild, wonderful happenings wherever we live around the globe. And we grow bolder with every 0.001 C˚ rise in the global temperature … more passionate with every 0.001 inch rise in the sea level … more defiant with every billion dollar Goldman Sachs bonus package. We attack capitalism – not at officially sanctioned protests – but like bees attacking a wounded beast with a billion incessant stings. We keep escalating our actions until the cost of doing business as usual becomes impossible to bear. And the bloodied beast finally falls to its knees.
This November’s Carnival is a good time to start: Let them have their conferences and summits … we will have our revolution of everyday life.
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Very Specific Sci Fi Predictions
Posted November 27th, 2010 byCategories: science fiction
The first manned spaceship was launched during the month of December, by the United States from a base in Florida. The ship was made up mostly of aluminum, weighed 19,250 pounds, and cost what would now be about $12.1 billion to build. After three of the astronauts completed their moonwalk, they returned to Earth. Their capsule splashed down into the Pacific Ocean and was recovered by a U.S. Navy vessel.
Why are we boring you with history? Actually, we’re not — this is the plot of an 1865 novel by Jules Verne, whose frighteningly accurate visions of space travel lead us to conclude that he had to be some kind of time-traveling space-wizard.
Survey says … “Space Wizard.”
Though it was written over 100 years before the Apollo 11 mission, Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon actually serves as a pretty damn accurate novelization of that mission, down to the scariest details. He was slightly off on the cost and weight of the rocket (but only slightly — the real stats were 26,275 pounds and $14.4 billion), and in the biggest departure from reality, Verne’s astronauts were shot out of a huge gun. But get this: Verne’s space cannon was called Columbiad, and the Apollo 11 command module was named Columbia.
The real coincidence icing on this insanity cake is this:
“The three adventurous companions were surprised and stupefied, despite their scientific reasonings. They felt themselves being carried into the domain of wonders! They felt that weight was really wanting to their bodies. If they stretched out their arms, they did not attempt to fall. Their heads shook on their shoulders. Their feet no longer clung to the floor of the projectile. They were like drunken men having no stability in themselves.”
Somehow, Verne predicted that the astronauts would become weightless in space. There was no way he could have known that at the time — it was just some crazy bullshit he made up to make the story interesting, like that time he wrote a book about going to the center of the Earth and finding dinosaurs.
And giant mushrooms.
When most people think of Mark Twain, they imagine Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn piloting a raft down the Mississippi River to find some trouble to get into. What’s less well-known is that Twain also dabbled in science fiction, so there’s probably a story out there in which Huck Finn finds a spaceship and enjoys a short career of interstellar high jinks and space piracy.
Pictured here.
It was in one of his science fiction stories, From the ‘London Times’ of 1904, that Twain dreamed up an invention called the “telelectroscope,” which used the phone system to create a world wide network of information-sharing. Basically, Mark Twain invented the Internet. Keep in mind that he wrote this in 1898, when telephones were still fairly new and rare.
But Twain didn’t stop there. His story describes “the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues.” Mark Twain is talking about goddamn social networking. He didn’t just predict that the Internet would unite the world, but also that people would immediately clog it up with trivial bullshit.
“And lots of tits.”
Now check out the description of the guy using it:
“Day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people. … He seldom spoke, and I never interrupted him when he was absorbed in this amusement.”
Pictured: Amusement
The protagonist of the story, a man falsely accused of murder and sentenced to death, is cleared of all charges in the end when he essentially gets on the Internet and finds his supposed “victim” in the crowd of an event he’s watching being streamed live from China.
Unfortunately, the story itself is terrible. So, unlike visionaries such as Jules Verne, whose predictions everybody listened to, Mark Twain goes down in history as a great writer of small-town America who should just stay the hell away from sci-fi.
[+]
Acoustic Archeology
Posted November 21st, 2010 byCategories: acoustics, psychedelic
Researchers are uncovering the secrets of ancient civilizations who built fun house-like temples that may have scared the pants off worshipers with scary sound effects, light shows and perhaps drug-induced psychedelic trips.
The emerging field of acoustic archaeology is a marriage of high-tech acoustic analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting. The results of this scientific collaboration is a new understanding of cultures who used sound effects as entertainment, religion and a form of political control. [+]
Crash JP Morgan
Posted November 20th, 2010 byCategories: corporate communist, corporate criminal, corporate motherfucker, cultureJam
This has got to be the biggest Memetic war act of our life time. William Gibson will be smiling somewhere. Finally the Cyberpunk aspect has come into full effect.
How it works thanks to Max Keiser:
1 – JP Morgan has a huge short position in Silver – tied to a huge,
extremely precarious derivatives position some estimate to represent
approximately 1.5 trillion in risk to its balance sheet.
2 – Various exchanges around the world have been caught manipulating the
price of Silver using ‘naked’ short sales; i.e., counterfeiting.
3 – Of all the actively traded commodities traded around the world, Silver
is one of the least plentiful and its supply is shrinking.
4 – Hedge funds are taking physical delivery of Silver – adding substantial
demand as well as exposing these exchange’s naked short positions – who are
scrambling to deliver – jacking prices up to multi-decade highs – and
inspiring these predatory funds to buy more Silver.
5 – There are billions of people around the world who are aware that banks
have been committing fraud and embezzlement who are upset that their
politicians seem only interested in helping the banks commit more fraud –
who are looking for a cheap way to non-aggressively fight back and
decapitalize these banks.
6 – Many of these people have the access and wherewithal to purchase 1 or
more Silver coins – thus removing even more bullion from the market –
forcing additional scrambling by dealers to fill orders – inspiring the
funds to buy and take physical delivery of more Silver – creating a colossal
short squeeze – in which JP Morgan stands to be the biggest loser.
7 – Buying Silver is how the world is monetizing its anger at the banks who
stole their wealth.
8 – Crash JP Morgan Buy Silver
Or as the Sex Pistols may have put it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwtXZ4yWhaM
And remember the point is to remove the amount of Physical Silver in the system so don’t sell your Silver no matter how high the price goes until JP Morgan is reduced to rubble. If you can’t buy physical silver you can still Google search a number of times a day the key phrase “Crash JP Morgan Buy Silver”. As the number of hits increases it should serve as a feedback loop to push the campaign further. Why should you want to help bring JP Morgan down? Well aside from the massive Fraud of Fraudclosure Gate. Or the usual highway robbery of price gouging that the Banksters have been up to of late recently the Global Banking Cartel all but admitted to being behind financing the Global Terror Networks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaA-5_IjkeE
So to wage a successful campaign against Terror CRASH JP MORGAN BUY SILVER!
To quote the Weathermen “We are bringing a pitiful helpless giant to its knees”.
[+]
E-Bike Revolutionary
Posted November 17th, 2010 byCategories: bikes
Justin Lemire-Elmore would be the first to admit he’s a bit of a revolutionary. This is a guy whose teen years included teaching himself how to build bombs in his parents’ basement.
At 14, while trying to be the first on his block to make explosives, Lemire-Elmore accidentally burned the skin off half his face.
“My sister took me to the clinic and I was all bandaged up for two weeks,” he says on the phone from his business in Vancouver, British Columbia. “My parents just figured I would take that lesson to heart and be more careful.”
Now a 29-year-old engineer and business owner, Lemire-Elmore has found himself among the vanguard of a thriving online counterculture. This group rejects traditional bicycles, and chooses to make their own bikes propelled by battery-powered electric motors. Many of them believe they’re helping to create future communities that will have fewer polluting vehicles and less traffic congestion.
See e-bikes “hacked” by CNN iReporters
The e-bike revolution is starting on the Web as people “hack together their own electric-assist bike projects,” Lemire-Elmore said. Within the next 20 years, he believes, e-bikes will change the way most city-dwellers commute to work.
At online group sites like Yahoo’s power-assist and e-motor assist or elsewhere at endless-sphere.com, parents, students, teens, tinkerers and other e-bike enthusiasts share tips on how to motorize their bicycles to achieve speeds up to 35 mph without pedaling. Some of them, for example, ask how to soup up their recumbent bikes so they can tow their children in makeshift trailers.
The underground e-bike movement is fueled by people from all backgrounds, with many different motivations behind their e-bike interests. Some of them, says Lemire-Elmore, have rejected cars after losing loved ones in deadly accidents. Others are driven by environmental concerns and have strong anti-oil sentiments.
“But for me, it comes from a sense of embarrassment in this society — this is really the best we can do?” Lemire-Elmore rails against the status quo of cities jammed with thousands of people in cars, trapped in traffic gridlock, wasting untold amounts of energy.
In China, an estimated 22 million e-bikes will be sold in 2010 alone, according to Electric Bikes Worldwide Reports. Europe will see a million e-bikes sold. Compare that to 300,000 e-bikes in the U.S.
“Gas at $10 per gallon would really spark the industry in the United States,” says EBWR publisher Frank Jamerson. “Gas prices are closer to that number in China and in Europe and that’s where all the sales momentum is in the e-bike area.”
“Chinese citizens embraced electric bikes and changed China’s plan to focus their infrastructure on autos,” says Lemire-Elmore, whose buoyant demeanor belies his tenacity about asserting electric bikers’ rights.
“A large percentage of the people doing home-built conversions are running things that blatantly violate regulations for electric bicycles,” says Lemire-Elmore. “I’m fine with that, in the sense that I’m somebody who believes very strongly in doing what you think is right rather than what is the law.”
Like Lemire-Elmore, e-bikers in the relatively bike-friendly state of Colorado are butting heads with tradition. In city halls, e-bikers are lobbying to gain access to bike lanes, bike paths and bike parks — where motorized vehicles including e-bikes are often banned.
Residents acknowledge occasional roadway confrontations between e-bikers and non-motorized bicyclists — ranging from friendly teasing to outright animosity.
Dean Keyek-Franssen, co-owner of Pete’s eBikes stores in the Colorado towns of Boulder, Aspen and Frisco, describes bicyclists with skintight bike clothing as “Lycra-bound.”
“You will have a Lycra-bound person passing an electric bike rider, telling her to get out of the bike lane,” says Keyek-Franssen. “And it’s just this elitist biking community that we have here in Boulder — and that’s great, it’s a biking community — as is Portland and Minneapolis — and it comes with the territory.”
Turned off by showroom price tags on factory-made bikes — some as high as $3,500 — many e-bike hackers are turned on by building their own rigs that are often faster and more powerful.
Gallery: e-trikes, motor kits and enclosed vehicles
Hackers are actually beneficial to the e-bike industry, says Keyek-Franssen, because they’re helping to get more electric bikes into the marketplace.
“At the same time it’s a problem because typically those bikes aren’t engineered well where some component may fail,” he says. “And that can be dangerous if they’re going too fast on a bike path.”
About a mile down Pearl Street from Keyek-Franssen’s shop is University Bicycles, Boulder’s oldest and largest bike store. General manager Lester Binegar — whose job used to be selling e-bikes — is no fan.
“The technology has come a long way and I do think they’re better than using a car — but I just think it’s lazy Americanism,” Binegar says. “It’s like we’re still trying to avoid doing some work that isn’t that hard — work that will make you feel great.”
Lemire-Elmore believes the culture at traditional bike stores can be closed-minded — which has contributed to a widespread attitude against e-bikes. “People with electric bicycles are often shunned whenever they go to bike stores for parts or for repairs.”
Experts who design community bike plans for roadway bike traffic and off-road bike paths generally don’t factor in e-bikes, says Jennifer Toole of Toole Design Group.”It’s kind of a wait-and-see approach to electric bikes,” says Toole, whose firm designed Seattle’s Bicycle Master Plan and has projects in 15 states. “If electric bikes become really popular, cities will start dealing with them.”
If that happens, she says, the result will likely be more bike lanes and a re-evaluation of whether bikes should be allowed on sidewalks.
Lemire-Elmore demonstrated the viability of e-bikes in 2008, when he rode one 4,350 miles coast to coast from Vancouver to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in just two months. During the entire journey, his super-efficient battery-powered motor used a scant $8.57 worth of electricity.
For other revolutionaries who think two electric-assisted wheels are too many, Lemire-Elmore has developed an electric unicycle.
Unicycles are harder to ride than bikes, but more portable and easier to carry onto trains or buses. By 2011, Lemire-Elmore is hoping to produce an electric-assist conversion kit for unicycles.
What’s next? How about an electric skateboard?
“It’s illegal to ride a skateboard to work in almost every city in North America,” Lemire-Elmore says. “And yet somebody riding a skateboard to work is using a fraction of the resources of somebody driving an SUV, which is fully sanctioned by the law.”
“I think there would be a strong underground culture of people that would totally embrace it regardless of whether it’s legal. I want to be one of the people who champions that.”
CNN’s Cody McCloy contributed to this report. [+]
Bubbling Resonance
Posted November 13th, 2010 byCategories: hunab ku, milky way
Two enormous, gamma-ray-emitting structures are bubbling out of the center of our galaxy. And astronomers have no idea what caused them.
These bubbles, which stretch an astonishing 25,000 light years above and below the galactic plane, are invisible to the naked eye. But astronomers working with data from the Fermi space telescope, which detects gamma rays, were able to see the structures. Though our galaxy is bathed in a light haze of gamma rays, these structures stood out sharply – gamma rays were zooming out of them at a tremendous rate, and the bubbles also appeared to have sharply defined edges.
Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was the first researcher to see the bubbles. He told NASA:
What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center. We don’t fully understand their nature or origin.
He speculates that the structures could be millions of years old.
So what caused them? According to NASA:
One possibility includes a particle jet from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. In many other galaxies, astronomers see fast particle jets powered by matter falling toward a central black hole. While there is no evidence the Milky Way’s black hole has such a jet today, it may have in the past. The bubbles also may have formed as a result of gas outflows from a burst of star formation, perhaps the one that produced many massive star clusters in the Milky Way’s center several million years ago.
“In other galaxies, we see that starbursts can drive enormous gas outflows,” said David Spergel, a scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. “Whatever the energy source behind these huge bubbles may be, it is connected to many deep questions in astrophysics.”
To Hex A Corporation
Posted November 13th, 2010 byCategories: corporate criminal
Above: A CTM-designed sticker, easily adapted for use by you.
APPLIED MAGIC(K): Hex Files
by the Center for Tactical Magic
Originally published in Arthur No. 30 (July 2008)
The Center for Tactical Magic is no stranger to controversy. Even when we’re not actively setting out to conjure a bit of mischief, the imps often make the effort to conjure us. Since our projects frequently trespass into different cultural territories, it’s not uncommon to encounter an occasional cold reception or heated debate. Typically, these center around what the Center is or isn’t. Activists? Occultists? Conjurers? Tricksters? Contemporary artists? Martial artists? Con artists? Most of the time we feel that these debates are more productive for everyone when we stay out of them and let folks figure things out on their own. However, we recently received some paradoxical antagonisms via email regarding one of our distribution projects and thought it might be helpful to clarify a few misunderstandings.
To begin, the project in question is a curse. It is a curse in the form of a sticker that is specifically designed to target corporations, institutions, agencies, and the like. And the ire that we raised from two different people couldn’t be more divergent. The first, a self-proclaimed “activist” wrote:
I like a lot of what you guys do, but some of it doesn’t seem very productive. I mean, curses? I just read your article in Arthur about the difference between “magical thinking” and “wishful thinking” and then you suggest “cursing” people in power? This seems hypocritical and/or delusional. I’m open to different people’s spiritual viewpoints, and I don’t mean any offense, but I don’t really see how a curse can be as effective as a protest or a petition.
The second critic, a self-proclaimed “Wiccan High Priestess” wrote:
I have long-admired the Center for Tactical Magic for your innovative interpretations of ancient magickal wisdom. However, I am deeply disturbed and taken aback by your “Diagrammatic Hex.” This curse clearly defies the Wiccan rede: “That ye hurt none, do what thou wilt.” Further, it beckons doom. “That which ye sendeth out, shall returneth three-fold!” This hex you have devised is of the darkest magick, and can only reap darkness in return. It is not only dangerous for you, but irresponsible towards those who would follow you down the Left-hand path to their own demise.
Before we directly address either of the aforementioned concerns, we should set the stage with a short history lesson. The origin of curses is ill-defined; yet, it’s certain that we find hexes, whammies, jinxes, the “evil eye” and all sorts of maleficia in cultures spanning time and geography. More often than not, curses have been cast over personal disputes, vindictive rages, and petty jealousies. However, there have also been instances where curses have been deployed in collective struggles.
In the Middle Ages, the peasant class had no easy avenue of representation through which they could air grievances against their feudal lords. So somewhere between total subjugation and full-scale revolt, curses became a tactic of dissent. By discretely attaching hexes to the property of the feudal lord, the ruling authorities could be made aware of the growing social distemper. While the nobility might be quick to dismiss the hexes as mere foolishness, the laborers of the manor, who belonged to the “superstitious” peasant class, could be relied upon to take the hexes a bit more seriously (and perhaps melodramatically). And unless the feudal lord took steps to remove the curse, the manor and the fief would slip into a dysfunctional mess. Of course, the way to remove the curse would involve rectifying any prevailing injustices.
It’s not too difficult to imagine that similar dramas were no doubt enacted hundreds of years later on plantations across the colonized globe. A bit of well-placed Hoodoo or Voodoo could serve to amplify the collective concerns of house slaves and field slaves alike. Even if the plantation owner took little heed of the “mumbo-jumbo” the workers would certainly make a fuss until things were set right.
Based on these precedents, as well as on our contemporary context of corporate neo-feudalism and wage-slavery, it seemed only fitting that we should revive and update this bit of mojo. As such, we suggest that the modern sticker-hex might produce several positive results:
1) The creation of a diagrammatic hex in the form of an easily applied sticker links modern street practices (like graffiti) to much older forms of magical resistance (such as the placing of curses on the property of feudal lords).
2) This user-friendly spell/tactic introduces people to a model of action: First, think through your issue to find a root cause(s). Then, find a way to physically address the offending source. This model contrasts starkly with more alienated reactions against abstracted frustrations. As opposed to feeling like the problems are poverty, or starvation, or war, we can begin to focus on financial institutions, agribusiness, or Halliburton.
3) Most people are far more superstitious than they are willing to admit. Even if the magical construction of the curse falls short, the mystical appearance of the sticker can often achieve certain desired effects. (In one instance, a cursed check sent to a credit card company went un-cashed for nearly three months!).
4) Lastly, if you have any doubts as to whether or not the curse works, just ask the folks over at Bear Stearns. (We’re not saying we’re responsible; we’re just saying…)
Hopefully that appeases our activist friend a bit. As for the Wiccan high priest, we’ll save the full conversation regarding the Black/White magic debate for a later date. In the meantime, we should be clear about our position. We are not openly advocating the cursing of individual people. Despite the fact that the Supreme Court re-interpreted the 14th Amendment (originally enacted to protect the rights of freed slaves) to grant corporations “personhood,” the inhuman conduct of some institutions, agencies, and corporations makes them worthy of any maledictions they might receive. While the Center for Tactical Magic does not ascribe to a belief system polarized into Black and White magic, it is nevertheless important to note that religious and secular circles alike largely agree that actively combating physical and spiritual injustice is a virtuous act that liberates oneself and others from the abuses of power. Even Gerald Gardner (oft regarded as the “Founding Father of Wicca”) is reputed to have organized his coven to curse Hitler and the Nazis during World War II (and we all know how that one ended).
Hopefully, the path we’re on now seems a little less scary. If not, don’t worry; we change directions all the time and often step off the path altogether. So sit tight or start a petition until we come back to our senses. For the rest of you, you too can flaunt taboos by cutting out this diagrammatic hex and following these magic words:
To cast the spell:
1) Relax. Take a deep breath. Exhale. Repeat.
2) Take a moment to reflect on the nasty policies, social ills, and community woes that need to be challenged and corrected.
3) Choose an issue that you feel particularly drawn to, and ask yourself, “What is most responsible for this dire situation? What obstacles stand in the way of a solution to this problem?” (If you’re not sure, do a little research).
4) Most likely, you will conclude that a large corporation, government agency, social institution, or other organizational entity is at least partially responsible for perpetuating the problem you seek to address. Write that name inside the red circle. (Note: this will not work against individuals, which unfortunately includes bosses, landlords, politicians, cops, etc.).
5) Close your eyes and envision the entire design, complete with the name written in the circle. Watch the name fade to nothingness. Now envision the positive results that would occur if your target’s vile actions were to disappear.
6) Open your eyes, and then, go attach the hex to the property of the encircled establishment. (you’ll need a glue stick)
7) Relax. Breathe freely. Smile. You have just completed your first act of street-level Tactical Magic by taking that difficult first step in mentally, spiritually, and physically addressing social injustice! Keep it up & let us know how it goes for you by emailing us at goodluck@tacticalmagic.org
Good Luck! [+]
Viral Game Theory
Posted November 9th, 2010 byCategories: game theory
A lot of attention has been lavished on ideas “going viral,” but this may not be the only way that ideas spread, according to an article published in PNAS last week. With some extensive theoretical work in game theory, two researchers have shown that trendy changes don’t spread quickly just because they gain exposure to a high number of people. Instead, the spread of innovations may work more like a game where players are gauging whether to adopt something new based on what others immediately surrounding them do.
The popularity growth of things like websites or gadgets is often described as being similar to an epidemic: a network with a lot of connections between people increases exposure and then adoption, as do links stretching between dissimilar groups. When the trend in question spreads to a node with a lot of connections (like a celebrity), its popularity explodes. While this is fitting for some cases, in others it’s an oversimplification—a person’s exposure to a trend doesn’t always guarantee they will adopt it and pass it on.
“It is not only the intrinsic value of a new technology (or other types of innovation) that makes it attractive. It is also the number of friends who have adopted it,” Amin Saberi, one of the authors, told Ars. In instances where there is incentive to make the same decision as people around you, the authors of the paper argue, the spread of innovations may instead follow rules of game theory, which differ in big ways from the rules of viral or epidemic trends.
To demonstrate how this is possible, the two researchers set up a theoretical scenario with several people, or nodes, connected in a network, like friends in a social group. They then instituted a game where in each round, each node had to decide whether to adopt a new innovation based only on the current behavior of their neighbors.
For example, a node/person in the game would look around and see how many of his friends were participating in a trend, say, Farmville. If none were, the odds of the node starting to play Farmville were low; if all were, odds of playing Farmville were high. The game was weighted so that imitating neighbors’ behavior had a higher payoff than going against the grain.
With only these rules, a social enclave where everyone has perfect information about what everyone else is doing would never adopt anything new. If people only made decisions based on that others were doing, none of the nodes would ever see changing as the best strategy.
To fix this, the researchers introduced some noise into the situation so many nodes had incomplete information. They weighted the decision so that a node with zero information about what his neighbors did would choose to adopt the innovation, whatever it was (this could be considered an analog to a reality where a person doesn’t care what others think and evaluates new innovations based on other factors).
When they played around with the structure of the network operating on these rules, they found nodes with local connections, as opposed to the long-range ones that facilitate epidemics, spread innovations more quickly. Nodes that weren’t as tightly integrated to the network and maintained fewer connections let change spread more quickly, while nodes with lots of connections actually slowed the spread down.
The highly connected nodes turned into roadblocks, because even without perfect information on its neighbors’ outlook, the highly connected nodes get more external pressure from their unenlightened neighbors. A highly connected node must then be extremely ignorant of its neighbors to adopt a trend, or else must be surrounded by neighbors that have switched over first. This was one of the biggest differences between the game-theoretic spread and the epidemic spread.
The model seems to apply less to individual pieces of content, where simple exposure is enough to create huge growth. On the other hand, it could explain, for instance, loyalty to sites that distribute that content, like Digg and Reddit, or to particular genres of memes. The authors say it also crops up in choices that influence social connections, like the choice between voting Republican or Democratic, or to adoption of technology, like choosing between Verizon and AT&T.
Dr. Saberi gave the following example: “the reason I am using Facebook as opposed to another social network is not just its quality… it is also because I have a lot of friends who are using it”; he notes this could also apply to operating systems. Likewise, while there are many reasons to choose one cell phone carrier or another, features like free calls or texts within a network can influence a group of friends to migrate to the same network as each other.
In the game theory model, networks trend to an equilibrium of everyone adopting the change—not terribly realistic. Still, the model shows that trends may spread quickly based on something other than the brute force of exposure. Even with a more complex, socially influenced process, the popularity of an innovation can grow rapidly. [+]
Holograms Flicker To Life
Posted November 6th, 2010 byCategories: holograms
Princess Leia’s holographic SOS. Researchers report in Nature today the transmission of moving 3D holographic images in almost real time. Photograph: PRIn Star Wars, Princess Leia records a 3D hologram of herself appealing for help from the Rebel Alliance in her epic battle against the Empire. The Emperor himself projects holographic messages to his henchman, Darth Vader. And, very soon, you too will be able to transmit messages in a similar way, whether or not you are involved in a galactic battle between good and evil.
Thanks to scientists at the University of Arizona, real-world holograms have finally started to catch up with their fictional cousins. In a paper published today in Nature, they report the transmission of moving 3D images from one place to another in almost real time. This means it may eventually be possible to communicate with moving 3D images of friends or colleagues who are on the other side of the world. Surgeons will be able to use the technology to step into virtual operating theatres in other cities, and films will become ever more immersive.
“Holographic telepresence means we can record a 3D image in one location and show it in another location, in real-time, anywhere in the world,” said Nasser Peyghambarian, who led the team behind the new technology.
Until now, scientists have been able to create holograms that display static 3D images, but creating video has not been easy. Two years ago, Peyghambarian’s team demonstrated a device that was able to refresh a holographic image once every few minutes – it took around three minutes to produce a single-colour image, followed by a minute to erase that image before a new one could be written into its place.
In his latest project, Peyghambarian’s team reduced that image refresh time to two seconds. They also showed it was possible to use full colour and demonstrated parallax, whereby people looking at the image from different angles will see different views of the image, just as if they were looking at the original object.
One of the first applications is likely to be in telepresence meeting systems. The most advanced modern telepresence systems use large, high-definition video screens to display standard 2D images. Holographic technology could be incorporated to make the people on the screen 3D.
“Let’s say I want to give a presentation in New York,” said Peyghambarian. “All I need is an array of cameras here in my Tucson office and a fast internet connection. At the other end, in New York, there would be the 3D display using our laser system. Everything is fully automated and controlled by computer. As the image signals are transmitted, the lasers inscribe them into the screen and render them into a three-dimensional projection of me speaking.”
The holographic images are captured using feeds from an array of standard video cameras, each recording the subject from a different perspective every second. More cameras mean more perspectives can be recorded, so the resulting hologram can be more detailed. The visual information is encoded into short laser pulses that write individual holographic pixels, known as hogels, on to a screen.
“If you go to a 3D film like Avatar, you’ll see only two perspectives, one for one eye and one for the other eye. In our case, we’ve demonstrated 16 perspectives, but the technology has the potential to show hundreds of perspectives. It’s very close to what humans can see in their surroundings,” said Peyghambarian. “In surgery, for example, the cameras will be around where the surgery is done, so that different doctors from different parts of the world can participate and they can see things just as if they were there.”
Whereas the image of Princess Leia in Star Wars is projected in three-dimensional space, the new technology uses a 2D screen to create the illusion of 3D. At the heart of Peyghambarian’s system is his team’s invention of a new type of plastic known as a photorefractive polymer. The material, which is used to make the screen, allows the researchers to record and erase images quickly.
The protoype described in Nature used a 10-inch screen, but the team have already improved on this with a 17-inch version.
“In terms of size, if you look at that famous hologram of Princess Leia, we are about that size,” said Peyghambarian. “It is actually very close to reality. It is no longer science fiction, it is something you can do today.”
Bringing the 3D holographic technology to market will involve reducing the size of the individual hogels to get a sharper image, and increasing the refresh rate of the image to around 30 times per second, so that it has the same smoothness as television. Even then, said Peyghambarian, the amount of data needed for a telepresence system could easily be carried by standard 2 or 3 gigabit per second internet cable of the kind already in use today. [+]
Physics
Posted November 6th, 2010 byCategories: quantum physics
Physics is weird. There is no denying that. Particles that don’t exist except as probabilities; time that changes according to how fast you’re moving; cats that are both alive and dead until you open a box.
The humanities-graduate writer of this piece would like to stress that this is his work, so any glaring factual errors he has included are his own as well. If you spot any, feel free to point them out in the comment box below.
Equally, if you feel we’ve missed any of your favourite physics weirdnesses off the list, do tell us that as well.
If the Sun were made of bananas, it would be just as hot
The Sun is hot, as the more astute of you will have noticed. It is hot because its enormous weight – about a billion billion billion tons – creates vast gravity, putting its core under colossal pressure. Just as a bicycle pump gets warm when you pump it, the pressure increases the temperature. Enormous pressure leads to enormous temperature.
If, instead of hydrogen, you got a billion billion billion tons of bananas and hung it in space, it would create just as much pressure, and therefore just as high a temperature. So it would make very little difference to the heat whether you made the Sun out of hydrogen, or bananas, or patio furniture.
Edit: this might be a little confusing. The heat caused by the internal pressure would be similar to that of our Sun. However, if it’s not made of hydrogen, the fusion reaction that keeps it going wouldn’t get under way: so a banana Sun would rapidly cool down from its initial heat rather than burning for billions of years. Thanks to people who pointed this out.
All the matter that makes up the human race could fit in a sugar cube
Atoms are 99.9999999999999 per cent empty space. As Tom Stoppard put it: “Make a fist, and if your fist is as big as the nucleus of an atom, then the atom is as big as St Paul’s, and if it happens to be a hydrogen atom, then it has a single electron flitting about like a moth in an empty cathedral, now by the dome, now by the altar.”
If you forced all the atoms together, removing the space between them, crushing them down so the all those vast empty cathedrals were compressed into the first-sized nuclei, a single teaspoon or sugar cube of the resulting mass would weigh five billion tons; about ten times the weight of all the humans who are currently alive.
Incidentally, that is exactly what has happened in a neutron star, the super-dense mass left over after a certain kind of supernova.
Events in the future can affect what happened in the past
The weirdness of the quantum world is well documented. The double slit experiment, showing that light behaves as both a wave and a particle, is odd enough – particularly when it is shown that observing it makes it one or the other.
But it gets stranger. According to an experiment proposed by the physicist John Wheeler in 1978 and carried out by researchers in 2007, observing a particle now can change what happened to another one – in the past.
According to the double slit experiment, if you observe which of two slits light passes through, you force it to behave like a particle. If you don’t, and observe where it lands on a screen behind the slits, it behaves like a wave.
But if you wait for it to pass through the slit, and then observe which way it came through, it will retroactively force it to have passed through one or the other. In other words, causality is working backwards: the present is affecting the past.
Of course in the lab this only has an effect over indescribably tiny fractions of a second. But Wheeler suggested that light from distant stars that has bent around a gravitational well in between could be observed in the same way: which could mean that observing something now and changing what happened thousands, or even millions, of years in the past.
Almost all of the Universe is missing
There are probably more than 100 billion galaxies in the cosmos. Each of those galaxies has between 10 million and a trillion stars in it. Our sun, a rather small and feeble star (a “yellow dwarf”, indeed), weighs around a billion billion billion tons, and most are much bigger. There is an awful lot of visible matter in the Universe.
But it only accounts for about two per cent of its mass.
We know there is more, because it has gravity. Despite the huge amount of visible matter, it is nowhere near enough to account for the gravitational pull we can see exerted on other galaxies. The other stuff is called “dark matter”, and there seems to be around six times as much as ordinary matter.
To make matters even more confusing, the rest is something else called “dark energy”, which is needed to explain the apparent expansion of the Universe. Nobody knows what dark matter or dark energy is.
Things can travel faster than light; and light doesn’t always travel very fast
The speed of light in a vacuum is a constant: 300,000km a second. However, light does not always travel through a vacuum. In water, for example, photons travel at around three-quarters that speed.
In nuclear reactors, some particles are forced up to very high speeds, often within a fraction of the speed of light. If they are passing through an insulating medium that slows light down, they can actually travel faster than the light around them.
When this happens, they cause a blue glow, known as “Cherenkov radiation ”, which is (sort of) comparable to a sonic boom but with light. This is why nuclear reactors glow in the dark.
Incidentally, the slowest light has ever been recorded travelling was 17 meters per second – about 38 miles an hour – through rubidium cooled to almost absolute zero, when it forms a strange state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
Light has also been brought to a complete stop in the same fashion, but since that wasn’t moving at all, we didn’t feel we could describe that as “the slowest it has been recorded travelling”.
There are an infinite number of mes writing this, and an infinite number of yous reading it
According to the current standard model of cosmology, the observable universe – containing all the billions of galaxies and trillions upon trillions of stars mentioned above – is just one of an infinite number of universes existing side-by-side, like soap bubbles in a foam.
Because they are infinite, every possible history must have played out. But more than that, the number of possible histories is finite, because there have been a finite number of events with a finite number of outcomes. The number is huge, but it is finite. So this exact event, where this author writes these words and you read them, must have happened an infinite number of times.
Even more amazingly, we can work out how far away our nearest doppelganger is. It is, to put it mildly, a large distance: 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 28 meters. That number, in case you were wondering, is one followed by 10 billion billion billion zeroes
Black holes aren’t black
They’re very dark, sure, but they aren’t black. They glow, slightly, giving off light across the whole spectrum, including visible light.
This radiation is called “Hawking radiation”, after the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University Stephen Hawking, who first proposed its existence. Because they are constantly giving this off, and therefore losing mass, black holes will eventually evaporate altogether if they don’t have another source of mass to sustain them; for example interstellar gas or light.
Smaller black holes are expected to emit radiation faster compared to their mass than larger ones, so if – as some theories predict – the Large Hadron Collider creates minuscule holes through particle collisions, they will evaporate almost immediately. Scientists would then be able to observe their decay through the radiation.
The fundamental description of the universe does not account for a past, present or future
According to the special theory of relativity, there is no such thing as a present, or a future, or a past. Time frames are relative: I have one, you have one, the third planet of Gliese 581 has one. Ours are similar because we are moving at similar speeds.
If we were moving at very different speeds, we would find that one of us aged quicker than the other. Similarly, if one of us was closer than the other to a major gravity well like the Earth, we would age slower than someone who wasn’t.
GPS satellites, of course, are both moving quickly and at significant distances from Earth. So their internal clocks show a different time to the receivers on the ground. A lot of computing power has to go into making your sat-nav work around the theory of special relativity.
A particle here can affect one on the other side of the universe, instantaneously
When an electron meets its antimatter twin, a positron, the two are annihilated in a tiny flash of energy. Two photons fly away from the blast.
Subatomic particles like photons and quarks have a quality known as “spin”. It’s not that they’re really spinning – it’s not clear that would even mean anything at that level – but they behave as if they do. When two are created simultaneously the direction of their spin has to cancel each other out: one doing the opposite of the other.
Due to the unpredictability of quantum behaviour, it is impossible to say in advance which will go “anticlockwise” and the other “clockwise”. More than that, until the spin of one is observed, they are both doing both.
It gets weirder, however. When you do observe one, it will suddenly be going clockwise or anticlockwise. And whichever way it is going, its twin will start spinning the other way, instantly, even if it is on the other side of the universe. This has actually been shown to happen in experiment (albeit on the other side of a laboratory, not a universe).
The faster you move, the heavier you get
If you run really fast, you gain weight. Not permanently, or it would make a mockery of diet and exercise plans, but momentarily, and only a tiny amount.
Light speed is the speed limit of the universe. So if something is travelling close to the speed of light, and you give it a push, it can’t go very much faster. But you’ve given it extra energy, and that energy has to go somewhere.
Where it goes is mass. According to relativity, mass and energy are equivalent. So the more energy you put in, the greater the mass becomes. This is negligible at human speeds – Usain Bolt is not noticeably heavier when running than when still – but once you reach an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, your mass starts to increase rapidly. [+]
Proving The Hologram
Posted October 30th, 2010 byCategories: holograms
During the hunt for the predicted ripples in space-time — known as gravitational waves — physicists stumbled across a rather puzzling phenomenon. Last year, I reported about the findings of scientists using the GEO600 experiment in Germany. Although the hi-tech piece of kit hadn’t turned up evidence for the gravitational waves it was seeking, it did turn up a lot of noise.
Before we can understand what this “noise” is, we need to understand how equipment designed to look for the space-time ripples caused by collisions between black holes and supernova explosions.
Gravitational wave detectors are incredibly sensitive to the tiniest change in distance. For example, the GEO600 experiment can detect a fluctuation of an atomic radius over a distance from the Earth to the Sun. This is achieved by firing a laser down a 600 meter long tube where it is split, reflected and directed into an interferometer. The interferometer can detect the tiny phase shifts in the two beams of light predicted to occur should a gravitational wave pass through our local volume of space. This wave is theorized to slightly change the distance between physical objects. Should GEO600 detect a phase change, it could be indicative of a slight change in distance, thus the passage of a gravitational wave.
While looking out for a gravitational wave signal, scientists at GEO600 noticed something bizarre. There was inexplicable static in the results they were gathering. After canceling out all artificial sources of the noise, they called in the help of Fermilab’s Craig Hogan to see if his expertise of the quantum world help shed light on this anomalous noise. His response was as baffling as it was mind-blowing. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” Hogan said.
Come again?
The signal being detected by GEO600 isn’t a noise source that’s been overlooked, Hogan believes GEO600 is seeing quantum fluctuations in the fabric of space-time itself. This is where things start to get a little freaky.
According to Einstein’s view on the universe, space-time should be smooth and continuous. However, this view may need to be modified as space-time may be composed of quantum “points” if Hogan’s theory is correct. At its finest scale, we should be able to probe down the “Planck length” which measures 10-35 meters. But the GEO600 experiment detected noise at scales of less than 10-15 meters.
As it turns out, Hogan thinks that noise at these scales are caused by a holographic projection from the horizon of our universe. A good analogy is to think about how an image becomes more and more blurry or pixelated the more you zoom in on it. The projection starts off at Planck scale lengths at the Universe’s event horizon, but its projection becomes blurry in our local space-time. This hypothesis comes out of black hole research where the information that falls into a black hole is “encoded” in the black hole’s event horizon. For the holographic universe to hold true, information must be encoded in the outermost reaches of the Universe and it is projected into our 3 dimensional world.
But how can this hypothesis be tested? We need to boost the resolution of a gravitational wave detector-type of kit. Enter the “Holometer.”
Currently under construction in Fermilab, the Holometer (meaning holographic interferometer) will delve deep into this quantum realm at smaller scales than the GEO600 experiment. If Hogan’s idea is correct, the Holometer should detect this quantum noise in the fabric of space-time, throwing our whole perception of the Universe into a spin. [+]
15 Religions
Posted October 18th, 2010 byCategories: christian cult
What crime combines billions in annual earnings, sneaky accounting, a lack of media coverage, and the good Lord himself? Religious fraud. Conning the faithful, it turns out, is a lucrative art.
Christian leaders alone stole more than $27 billion in 2009, according to one estimate. Such leaders steal more money than is spent annually on global religious missions. Narrowing it down even more, Utah, arguably the fraud capital of the United States, has a fraud industry “double the size” of its ski industry.
If you’re a slippery type, these figures represent a heck of an opportunity. Indeed, the priests, ministers and thetans below have grabbed this chrysobull by the horns, perpetrating religious swindles that put the finer tenets of their theology to shame.
15. Xenu’s Swiss Securities
Image: mrmanc/Flickr
Like a new breed of carnivorous alien, Scientology, after being conceived in the test tube of one man’s mind, grew from a sci-fi story into a cult that annually bilks hundreds of people. With illustrious types like Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Sonny Bono, and Kirstie Alley on their roster, the Scientology cult has even more power. If there’s one thing we all know, it’s that there are loads of people who will happily follow what a famous person says just because they said it.
Through another so-called “affinity” con, which brings in people linked by a common belief to act for a particular cause, more than five hundred people were ripped off during the 1980s by Reed Slatkin. If the name sounds familiar, it ought to. He is a co-founder of the Atlanta-based ISP Earthlink.
Some of his victims were Hollywood types and even fellow Scientology adherents (he himself is an ordained minister of the group). And what was it for? Non-existent Swiss securities. The great promised returns never materialized. But, even in Switzerland, the saying is still the same: “Ein Narr und sein Geld sind bald geschieden” (A fool and his money are soon parted.)
14. Mormons Bilked by the Golden Rule
Image: BullionVault/Flickr
Gold isn’t just for Bond villains and medicated powder. It’s also immensely useful for ripping off loads of well-intentioned people. Such deception works especially well if the gold doesn’t actually exist.
Henry Jones (no relation to Indiana or Jim for that matter), Robert Jennings and Arthur Simburg decided to take 735 believers to the cleaners by hatching a plan to fund their crummy little energy consortium. It consisted of a low-yield coal mine in Kentucky and 20,000 tons of gold bullion from the Middle East, to be delivered by some unnamed Arabian royal.
Seriously? 20,000 tons? That’s more gold than the US has in its reserves. But, the ace up these men’s sleeves was affinity. Most of their investors were devout Mormons who conversed regularly with one another and even prayed together on the phone. It was a tight-knit bunch who grew close in cost and cause.
If a trusted group of believers sees God’s hand at work in a thing, they see no reason to investigate the truth of it. The Tri Energy guys knew this. The Golden Rule was their main tenet: He who has the gold makes the rules.
13. Too Big to Fail?
A Christian nonprofit organization, foreign bank accounts, bribery, theft, a faux gold mine, and global fraud. It sounds a bit like a bad movie spiel, doesn’t it?
But as they say, truth is stranger than fiction. One Edward Purvis of Chandler, Arizona stands guilty of 43 counts of criminal fraud and theft, among a host of other charges.
Purvis attempted to bilk millions of dollars from his investors, whom he tried to entice into funding overseas religious work. Supposedly there was a gold mine in the South Pacific, but in actuality, the ore the New Zealand mine spat out was worse than useless and Purvis was proven to have links to several Chinese, Swiss, Australian, and Caribbean companies.
With so much going on, Purvis, who was working with a known felon and already in violation of his probation (when he was arrested for this latest scam of his), probably thought since his eggs weren’t all in one basket, he’d be safe. Not so much. This unwieldy juggernaut of convoluted criminal mischief was just big enough to take a dive right on Purvis’ head when the feds finally caught up to him. If he’s convicted, the judge will definitely have the last shot at the behemoth of criminal idiocy by sentencing him to 100 years in prison. Now there’s some divine justice.
12. The Nasty Guru
It takes all kinds. If it isn’t a child molesting priest, a swindling preacher or a tax evading church administrator, it’s something else. Well, here’s the something else.
Santosh Madhavan, setting up shop in Bahrain as a self-styled guru and calling himself Swami Amritachaitanya, conned some twenty-odd Indians into giving him investment money for a charity organization and a resort. Is this sounding familiar? Just wait, it gets better.
Three underage girls went to the authorities claiming that he sexually assaulted them. Madhaven was charged with fraud, rape, possession of narcotics, among a laundry list of other misdeeds. Despite his obvious guilt, lots of Hindus believe that he should be left alone simply because Swamis are considered by the faithful to be above the law. Even those who dedicate themselves to bottom-feeding rather than Brahman.
11. Stamping out Religious Corruption
Okay, it’s make-believe time. Pretend you are a church employee with a desire to filch from the coffers because ‘Nobody will notice.’ Pretend also that you’re absolutely gonzo about collecting expensive stuff. Like musical instruments or cars. Or…postage stamps.
Derek Klein of Norfolk did exactly this, but even a church treasurer can’t make that much, right? That’s precisely why he made off with $140,000 (£88,502) so he could indulge in his two obsessions, philatelism and gambling.
Naturally, he got caught, and did spend some time in the pokey, but rather than go back, he told the judge that he could make back the money and then some by selling the stamp collection (which is large enough to fill a small family garage) on eBay. If he tried to make off with any of the money (which wouldn’t have surprised us) or tried any other funny business, the no-nonsense Judge Jacobs was going to toss him right back in the clink.
But come on. Stamps?
10. A Case of Mistaken Immunity
Image: Steve Dufour
In the early 1980s, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon was under investigation for tax evasion and conspiracy to commit fraud and evasion. As a religious leader, this doesn’t seem all that odd, right?
Well, in this admittedly rare case, Moon is the good guy got off the hook. Unlike a lot of church officials in positions of high authority, Moon wasn’t officially found guilty of embezzling from his church or conning his faithful into giving him money that he spent on himself. (Commenter Denny [see comments below] brings up the point that Moon was indeed conning preachers by making them think the IRS was going to audit them, when in fact this wasn’t the case.)
Moon had $112,000 in earned interest in his bank account as well as $50,000 in stocks. After setting aside some of the money for his family’s needs, he held onto the rest for his church, but in his name. The IRS claimed that he was attempting to mislead them by not admitting the held amount in his filing(s).
A Senate subcommittee issued a sort of indirect apology, insinuating that what was done to him was wrong and that snap judgments were made because Moon wasn’t from the United States originally. Moon, undaunted, was able to run other shadowy operations on the side, including an up to $1 billion scam involving selling relics with supernatural powers to Japanese widows. This so-called martyr has also poured significant funds into a South Korean arms manufacturer and pouring money into the US conservative political movement, including a defense of Richard Nixon after Watergate and founding the conservative newspaper the Washington Times.
9. Rich in Pocket, Bereft of Spirit
If you want to enjoy the lively, cosmopolitan side of Brazil, you could do worse than Sao Paolo. But if you are even remotely religious, you would do well to stay away from a house of God run by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Their god is greed and the faith is thriving. Or at least it was until church founder Bishop Edir Macedo and nine flunkies were accused of embezzling billions of dollars from their flock (who are mostly on the lower end of the income scale, honestly).
Over the course of five years (though the scheme itself existed for about a decade), Macedo and his pals swiped 2 billion from the church and its congregants. Like good con-opolists, they used that money to buy up businesses, real estate and other resources. At his peak, Macedo’s ill-gotten gains netted him a large television network, three newspapers, several radio stations, a tourism agency, and an air taxi service. Now that’s diversification.
The church was investigated by the taxman in the ’90s, but the religious behemoth just shrugged it off, staying fat and happy, like a cat that got into the cream. Well, the cream has curdled and it looks like the cat has been skinned. Even so, it’s probably only a matter of time before some other greedy sot gets caught with his hand in the church’s cookie jar.
8. ORU: What Happens Here Doesn’t Stay Here
Image: mulmatsherm/Flickr
Greed and corruption are notoriously lewd bedfellows. Secular or religious, people with a yen for turning repurposed money to their own ends are as common as ladies of the evening on the Vegas strip. They’re also about as willing to do what it takes to make a buck. The larger the group, the messier it gets, and when it’s an entire board of governing officials who are in cahoots, you’ve got nothing less than a veritable orgy of avarice.
At Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, that’s pretty much what happened. The (now former) board of regents, including the school president, and the directors of the school’s various ministries basically siphoned off more than $1 billion for their own use.
Of course the one guy who knew about it (an accountant, natch) got canned because he was ‘asking too many questions’. It makes sense that they would fire the guy for doing his job a little too well. They were afraid he would blab. It’s just as well these guys weren’t the mob or they would have busted his kneecaps and shot his wife, at the very least.
Still, things are looking up. Since 2008, the school has done some much-needed pruning and ORU’s fortunes are gradually turning around.
7. Sunday Adelaja’s Bloody Sunday
Sunday Adelaja, a well-known and influential Ukraine pastor of Nigerian origin has been a popular force in his sphere of influence (a group called God’s Embassy) for fifteen years.
The complex web of intrigue woven about him concerns a group called King’s Capital, an investment company to which he compelled his faithful to ally themselves, with a nominal donation of course. He denies any wrongdoing, but would the man allow officials from King’s to address his flock from the pulpit if the man didn’t have a stake in it? Not in a million years.
It was speculated that a bank in Lagos, Nigeria, GS Microfinance, of which Sunday is a part, played host to some of King’s Capital’s money (which his congregants gave him). The bank president denies that Sunday had anything to do with the bank’s financing, but that he ‘lent his name to it to give the bank credibility’ in his home town, so impoverished Nigerians would be inclined to do business with microfinance. Right.
Even Sunday’s fellow evangelicals distanced themselves from the fiasco, like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Honestly, if you’re looking for integrity in this man’s house of worship, you won’t find it. God, much like Elvis, has left the building.
6. Harmonious Discord
Ladies and gentlemen, step right up! Come one, come all! See the amazing Li Yi as he successfully combines Chinese mysticism, chicanery, Communism, materialistic greed, and your general lack of knowledge to astound and amaze you!
After Li Yi (also known as Li Jun) became a Taoist, he probably sat and thought to himself, “Hmm. How can I make money off my fellow man in a cunning and crafty way that they will never suspect?”
A year later, he set up a temple (with government approval) and charged 9,000 yuan (€1,034 or $1,421) for week-long ‘sessions’ in which he would teach people his mystical ways. Using what amounted to little more than elaborate parlor tricks, he claimed to be able to heal the sick and perform superhuman feats like breathing underwater through his feet.
Now, there’s a lot that even the casual layperson might not know about the mystical religions of the East, but come on. If this guy wants to be a real magician, maybe he should take a cue from someone who does it for a living. Better yet, he should talk to one of the other religious swindlers in the world who haven’t been caught yet, and ask them where they hid all the money they filched. That would be a trick to see.
5 Leo the Straight Shooter
You don’t have to be a religious historian to figure out that the Vatican has a long, sordid and messy past. Over the centuries, countless pontiffs have used their elevated status as not only the head of a city-state, but as the world leader in one of the largest single religions ever to advance themselves most shamelessly.
Take Leo X, who was Pope from 1513 to 1521 (when he died). He instituted a radical and heinous ploy to fill the church coffers. Unlike modern evangelists who sucker their gullible flock into buying into some venture that slowly but gradually eats up their finances, Leo insisted that his people literally pay money for the sins they committed. One imagines a list of sins and their price tag on the wall of the Sistine chapel. It probably read something like this:
• 100 florins for murder
• 90 florins for incest
• 85 florins for covetousness
• 75 florins for theft
• 50 florins for lying
• 35 florins for bribery
Incidentally, one of the things that attracted so many people to the Reformation was Martin Luther’s extreme dislike for the Pope’s adherence to such a greedy and overt means of lining the church’s (and by extension his) pockets. No wonder this Pope hated Martin Luther and his cause so much. It meant less money for him!
4. The Rubes’ Rupees
Every year, many faithful Muslims make the required pilgrimage to Mecca. The trip is long and expensive. Some people take years to scrape together the necessary funds, thus only going there once in their lifetime. This only compounds both the gall of the guilty parties and the gullibility of the people who got taken in, believing in the goodness of man.
One particular venture claimed to provide housing for the many Pakistani Hajjis (holy pilgrims) who visit Saudi Arabia every year. The problem was that lots of the properties were in a bad way. Either they weren’t even finished being built or they were dilapidated.
Who funded this elephant in the room? The very pilgrims that the properties were meant to house. It takes a certain type of messed up person to be able to clean hapless pilgrims out like that.
3. Jim Bakker’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous
For all their pomp and bluster, trumpeting their righteous work to the millions of people who watch them every day, televangelists can be pretty corrupt. Case in point: Jim Bakker. Bakker (pronounced Baker), once front man for the failed PTL (Praise the Lord) Club, and his then-wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, not only swiped funds from their own show, but offered 9,700 hapless fans what was supposed to be a lifetime pass to the Bakker’s own religious theme park, Heritage USA. In truth, it was lodgings in a giant bunkhouse with 48 beds.
But those weren’t the only nails in the Bakker’s coffin. Tammy Faye Bakker was commercialism’s own Juliette (think Sade, not Shakespeare), and spent who knows how much of her ill-gotten gains on crap she didn’t need.
And Jim? The guy had a mistress who he paid several thousand dollars (of PTL’s money) to keep quiet.
But it gets so much better! A former Bakker yes man, John Wesley Fletcher, alleged in an interview that he and Bakker had sexual relations and that Bakker requested he find other male partners for him. Jim had tried to keep this quiet too, but the skeletons came out of the closet, so to speak.
Additionally, the Bakkers’ aides, the brothers Taggart (David and James) and PTL’s second-in-charge, Richard Dortch, were all in for a piece of the pie. All this made for one hell of a spectacle.
2. Getting Into Heaven, One Dollar At a Time
Faith is a powerful motivator. When you couple that with a healthy dose of gullibility and mix in a significantly charismatic fellow, you’ve got one big mess. Jim Jones’ Jamestown started in such a way. We all know how that ended.
While there was no spiked punch in Gerald Payne’s Ponzi scheme, there was a lot of bilking, dishonesty and greed, all in the name of God. In the 1990s, Payne and his cohorts devised a massive pyramid scheme that would ultimately divest roughly 18,000 people of between $450-$500 million. Undelivered returns of both faith-based and monetary investments finally brought the scam to a sticky halt. Despite the legal victory, many of the faithful investors never saw their money again.
1. The Vatican Bank’s Dirty Laundering
Ecclesiastes 5:10 says, “Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income. This too is meaningless.” Ettore Gotti Tedeschi clearly missed this lesson in Sunday school. Tedeschi, CEO of the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, commonly known as the Vatican Bank, is under investigation for embezzling €23 million ($31.7 milllion) through the venerable institution.
Because the Vatican can claim statehood under international law, any residents of Vatican City inclined to crime can hide from the European fuzz for as long as they want. Or until they become inconvenient for the Holy See and the Pope turns them out.
Where are all those millions of euros that the Catholic church amasses supposed to go? To religious works and charity, of course. Sounds great on paper. Maybe the two banks Tedeschi diverted the money to were really fronts for orphanages and soup kitchens.
[+]
Unlogo
Posted October 10th, 2010 byCategories: cultureJam
Unlogo is a web service, FFMPEG plugin, and AfterEffects plugin that eliminates logos and other corporate signage from videos. On a practical level, it takes back your personal media from the corporations and advertisers. On a technical level, it is a really cool combination of some brand new OpenCV and FFMPEG functionality. On a poetic level, it is a tool for focusing on what is important in the record of your life rather than the ubiquitous messages that advertisers want you to focus on.
In short, Unlogo gives people the opportunity to opt out of having corporate messages permanently imprinted into the photographic record of their lives.
It’s simple: you upload a video, and after your video is processed, you get an email with a link to the unlogofied version (example: http://vimeo.com/14531292). You can choose to have the logos simply blocked out with a solid color or replaced with other images, such as the disembodied head of the CEO of the company. This scheme is a bit ridiculous (which is kind of my style), but I like it because it literalizes the intrusion into the record of your life that these logos represent. [+]
The Network @ 1,000,000 CE
Posted October 9th, 2010 byCategories: intergalactic internet
“Over the next million years, a descendant of the Internet will maintain contact with inhabited planets throughout our galaxy and begin to spread out into the larger universe, linking up countless new or existing civilizations into the Universenet, a network of ultimate intelligence.”
Year Million -Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge
Whenever microwave towers or satellites send Internet traffic, some of the energy and data leaks unintentionally into space. The first email messages transmitted via microwave towers in 1969 by the predecessor of the Internet, ARPANET, have already traveled thirty-nine light-years so far, way past the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, four light-years away. In practice, such feeble signals are probably buried in cosmic radio noise.
In the 21st Century, NASA is planning to implement an Interplanetary Internet (IPI) that will allow NASA to link up the Internets of Earth, spacecraft, and eventually Moon, Mars, and beyond. By the Year Million, billions of “smart dust” sensors will be connected to a distant descendant of the IPI, exchanging data in real time or via store-and-forward protocol or wireless mesh on planets and in spacecraft to track asteroids, comets, and space junk, exchanging three-dimensional position location and time data (similar to GPS on Earth) via multiple hops between sensors.
As commercial public space travel becomes available, the IPI could serve as the core of an interplanetary version of air traffic control. The IPI could also become the standard communications protocol as we expand out beyond the solar system’s planets, and then beyond the stars and to other galaxies, starting with potentially habitable planets beyond the solar system, such as Gliese 581d, the third planet of the red dwarf star Gliese 581 (about twenty light-years away from Earth)
By the Year One Million, as we reach out to communication nodes orbiting more distant stars, or in other galaxies, we will need to use a lot of power-as much as the entire power of the Sun. A civilization able to do that kind of cosmic engineering is referred to as Kardashev Type II, or KT-II. By contrast, our civilization used about fifteen terawatt-hours in 2004 (a terawatt-hour is one billion kilowatt-hours) of electrical power. New York University Physics Professor Emeritus Martin Hoffert and other scientists calculate that if our power consumption grows by just two percent per year, then in just four hundred years we will need all the solar power received by the Earth (1016 watts = 10,000 terawatts). And in a thousand years, we’ll require all of the power of the Sun (4×1026 watts).
Eventually, when we have become first a KT-I and then a KT-II civilization, we will reach even farther out to supergalaxies and even to clusters of supergalaxies, which could require a Type III civilization-one capable of controlling the power of an entire galaxy, some 1036 watts. The communication latencies (transmission delays) for such a system would be millions or even hundred of millions of years.
Possibly by the Year Million engineers will solve this time lag with extreme cosmic engineering feats such as wormholes, or even communication via parallel universes. One intriguing possibility is the use of quantum entanglement-that is, allowing an entangled atom or photon to carry information across a distance, theoretically anywhere in the universe.
An experiment testing the possibility of communication using this principle is in progress in the Laser Physics Facility at the University of Washington by professor John G. Cramer. Cramer astonished physicists at a joint American Institute of Physics/American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in 2006 by presenting experimental evidence that the outcome of a laser experiment could be affected by a future measurement: a message was sent to a time fifty microseconds in the past. So in principle, perhaps one could bypass the speed-of-light limitation and have messages show up in a distant galaxy long before they could have been received by radio or laser transmission, or even before they were sent.
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