A good question is, what if aliens have RFID devices installed on earth?

A close cousin of Clarke's aphorism that any technology that's sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic is that any technology that's sufficiently advanced and sufficiently integrated is indistinguishable from biology.

the first robot to be given sentience and a voice will do nothing but scream

have you ever noticed

have you ever noticed that Gandhi and Nosferatu have more or less the same profile?

we have not paused history

the national

I pull off your jeans, and you spill jack and coke in my collar
I melt like a witch and scream
I'm so sorry for everything

it is an ugly building

An abandoned East Central motel that has served as a magnet for drug users, prostitutes and vagrants was leveled by heavy equipment Friday morning.

Albuquerque’s Safe City Strike Force had placed the American Inn at Central and Adams on its list of problem properties four years ago.

Two years ago the city had the building condemned, but police continued to receive calls to the location.

“I’m very pleased that today is the last day of the American Inn,” said Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez, who was on hand for the beginning of the demolition.

And with this increase in security comes a concurrent decrease in personality.

link

"little sister"

Vicki Lawrence's "The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia"
They hung my brother before I could say
The tracks he saw while on his way
To Andy's house and back that night were mine
And his cheatin' wife had never left town
And that's one body thatll be found
You see little sister don't miss when she aims her gun

Elvis's "Little Sister"
Little sister, don't you kiss me once or twice
then say its very nice
and then you run
Little sister, don't you
Do what your big sister done

"where the american dream goes to die"

wanting someone to love you isn't unique or selfish

does the lack of either of those qualities disappoint you?

will.i.am = dane cook of hip hop

is irony a disguise for criticism?

"gonna shoot your face on a vacation past yer skull"
-lester bangs

No two days are alike
Except the first and fifteenth pretty much

So PETA's Offering $1MM for Vat-Grown Meat

Scientists around the world are researching or seeking the funds to research ways to produce meat in the laboratory—without killing any animals. In vitro meat production would use animal stem cells that would be placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. The result would mimic flesh and could be cooked and eaten. Some promising steps have been made toward this technology, but we're still several years away from having in vitro meat be available to the general public.

PETA is now stepping in and offering a $1 million reward to the first scientist to produce and bring to market in vitro meat.

link

I'm not a vegetarian (and even when I was one my vegetarian ethics weren't very "deep"), but this seems like a fun (?) conundrum to me.

From an animal rights perspective, vat-grown meat is appealing: If you can grow muscle disconnected from a brain, you've pretty much circumvented the problem of treating one's livestock ethically (I think).

Unfortunately it all falls apart after that:

You've still got the health problems caused by eating meat. A vat-grown burger will increase your cholesterol just as much as a burger made from meat-on-the-hoof.

You've still got environmental impact. While a a vat-meat factory presumably won't need acres and acres of grass to feed its vats-of-meat, the energy/calories have to come from somewhere, and it's safe to assume the resources necessary will be significant.

And, distressingly, vat-grown meat will be subject to intellectual property laws. It'll be patented.
I'm generally pretty bored by the IP rights issue. I don't give a shit how the music industry resolves the issue of file-sharing, for example (consider that musicians have been able to make money off their recordings in addition to their performances for less than a century). However, I'm a little concerned at the prospect of having a profit-driven organization own the rights to a basic foodstuff.

Sociological Images

Sociological Images is one of my favorite blogs of late, because they provide fodder to think about. No answers, just questions.

I love questions!

pre-1873 pistol suicides

It's my hypothesis that suicides using pistols were infrequent prior to 1873, when the Colt Peacemaker was introduced. The Peacemaker was cheap, common, and significantly more powerful than other handguns.

The details are not important. The point of this is not that the date or that it was the Peacemaker that ushered in the age of frequent self-inflicted pistol wounds.

The point of this is that, regardless of date and details, suicide by gun is a technological development.

Here's a recipe:
A spoonful of whiskey for every burden you're carrying.

somehow total history ties in closely with the "long photo" idea

like in grizzly man how herzog found most interesting the scraps of film which didn't feature treadwell or any bears

he liked those ignored bits that really only had the rustling of the wilderness as content

Total History

More on the fact that data doesn't age and it doesn't disappear:

This century we’re going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. And it’s going to go on, and on. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization — which I should note was widely predicted from August 1945 onward, and hasn’t happened yet — we’re going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on … we still don’t need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There’s no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future.

And with ubiquitous lifelogs, and the internet, and attempts at providing a unified interface to all interesting information — wikipedia, let’s say — we’re going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who’s ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.

Total history — a term I’d like to coin, by analogy to total war — is something we haven’t experienced yet. I’m really not sure what its implications are, but then, I’m one of the odd primitive shadows just visible at one edge of the archive: I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first forty or fifty years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants’ relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before.

Meet your descendants. They don’t know what it’s like to be involuntarily lost, don’t understand what we mean by the word “privacy”, and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever. They are incredibly alien to us.

link

i should have been kissing you

Shorpy

Watching the Baby: 1939

Back Seat Duet: 1938

Red Hot Chili Peppers: 1938

Refugee, 1937

Rose O'Neill: 1907

Shantytown Baby: 1936

Conclusion: Shorpy is fucking awesome.

Check this out

This is one of the first photographs made in the United States - a self portrait by Robert Cornelius, 1839, Philadelphia.

It is amazing how modern he looks: unposed in a way that, had the photograph been taken today, would suggest a sort of intentional casualness.

link

I'd like to be covered by a slow, soft avalanche.

completely forgot how awesomely primal and sexual gun club's "sex beat" is

Pacific

Pacific
Originally uploaded by genmon

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Popeye The Destroyer

Popeye is no hero. He is a barely contained force of destruction lacking moralickty and humanikity.


link

utter chaos

Utter chaos over the weekend.

The prelude of Friday is spent at home drinking vodka and watching Wristcutters: A Love Story, one of the more mediocre movies I've seen recently. It has Gogol Bordello on the soundtrack but the filmmakers have the gall to cast an ersatz Eugene Hutz. The actor isn't even Russian.

Saturday, I go to Target and steal a hat which I wear jauntily. Bad dim sum with Erin and an early start at drinking and barbequing with the usual terrors. Scotch and soda from early afternoon until midnight. I drop my phone in the toilet. Probably for the best because it was in the midst of a serious conversation, one of the things I'm worst at while drunk. I black out. Still have no idea how I got home. I wake up Sunday scratched, bruised, and smelling of charcoal smoke and with a block of rotten wood where my memory is. I spend an hour sitting outside the Co-Op nursing a smoothie, feeling stupid and afraid of finding some giant embarassment in the hole where my memory is.

Late in the afternoon I'm sitting in the backyard reading Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To The End (which, incidentally, is phenomenal - read it in one sitting) when I find that I've locked myself out of the house by accident. At first I'm too lazy to scale the fence but after an hour and a half I've got a sunburn and nothing to read, so I climb it with zero wounds. Inside, I scrape my arm against the banister and come away with searing pain and a mountain range of scraped muscle. My arms look like I've run through a rosebush by this point.

I drink a few glasses of wine much later with Jeni. She's busy and in a bad mood and there's nothing I can do about it. The hangover makes the merlot taste like iodine.

re: leap year

I would like to point out that the Earth's period of revolution is 365.26 days. Even given the provision of an extra day every four years, that stills leaves .01 day uncompensated for, meaning that our calendars will accumulate an extra day every 100 years. Given a date of adoption for the Gregorian Calendar of 1582, my calculations show that it is, in fact, April 16, 2008, not April 11, 2008, as you were likely previously informed.

heh

i'm naming my first kid davy jones

I Don't Know. When I Look at You, I Just See a Big Hole.

I'm getting spam from "The Human Project."

Why is Children of Men seeping into my life?

Love in the Time of Crocodiles

just found this out you guys

"The Hills" is a reality show?

Gary Indiana on WSB

Burroughs’ writings were useful in the sense that reading them kept you from being too deluded about what you were doing.


link

Someone burgled my car last night (using a radio transponder instead of a broken window, thankfully). Pretty unimpressed by waking up to this : as far as I can tell they stole only my CDs. This is strangely relieving, since I was really getting sick of most of them.

short li'l guy lookin' dapper

A notepad that says "GO HUG MOM"

If we didn't have a taboo on taking human life, Mythbusters would be a totally different TV show.

"And I wanna thank my little sister Chrissy, for teaching me that life is nothing if you're not obsessed."

Contra line dancing

non-western cult suicides

A big concern of mine is that my fascination with and knowledge of cult suicides is completely limited to the developed world. I know a lot about American and European cults and some about Asian mass suicides (the difficulty of figuring how the Nepalese Royal Family Massacre and Falun Gong in China fit into the "cult spectrum" is a good example of what I'm about to talk about). But I know virtually nothing about cults and cult violence emerging from non-Christian religious and social tradition. I know nothing about African cult violence or about South American cult violence.

How do I distinguish a "cult" in a culture which religious tradition I know nothing about? How do I determine destructiveness and deviance from the norm when I don't know what the norm is? Part of the problem is a lack of news, but a bigger part of the problem is a lack of cultural knowledge. Certainly the criteria by which one distinguishes a "destructive cult" from enthusiastic groups led by charismatic leaders are in question in the English-speaking community - it seems to me that making the distinction relies more on a Potter Stewart "I know it when I see it" gut feeling than on any objective set of behaviors and practices. Given the difficulty of applying the term within the West, how are we to apply the term elsewhere?

Take a place like Papua New Guinea, which until relatively recently had a tradition of inter-village warfare stemming from economic practices and ideals of masculinity that simply have no parallel in the United States.

Or take the Sudan, which, in addition to being governed by a completely foreign set of traditions, has been beset by civil war almost continually since the 1950s. In a country where war has been the norm for two generations, how do we distinguish "deviance"?

This barely touches upon the economic and social consequences of colonialism, and only just acknowledges the problems with Western perception of Africa.

Christ, this is complicated. I feel stupider than ever but at least I feel stupid instead of feeling some sort of premature intelligence and superiority: identifying a lack is the first step in filling it.

In closing, here are some color photographs of Jonestown.

"It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy."
— William S. Burroughs

Everything I've ever done that was nightmarish or beautiful or both is probably his fault.

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.

An equipment question

Which of the following should I purchase:

• One Canon PowerShot Pro Series S5 IS 8.0MP Digital Camera with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom digital camera ($300), or
• Two Cressi-sub SL Star 28" Pneumatic Spear Guns? ($150 each) in a matched dueling set?

The Mares Sten Mini Mini Speargun sells for around twenty dollars more but the consensus amongst those who've used both seems to be that the Cressi is a better value.

horse ripping

The perpetrators injure the horses systematically. 25% of the injuries are situated at the genitals and another quarter of the victims are injured at the neck or the head. There is a victim preference for female individuals, which are treated as rape. The injuries are mostly stabs or cuts. The used weapons are knives or spears. First interviews with horse rippers point out that the fixation of the victim horse is not stable. Horses could be just representative victims and the act of horse ripping just a step in a criminal career of violent crimes.

link another link wiki

charles manson

currently listening: Charles Manson, One Mind

brb

I'm investigating a string of brutal cattle motivations.

Ark of the Covenant

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to store the Ark of the Covenant in this building, the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, in Axum, Ethiopia.

cattle mutilation

During the early 1970s one of the hypothesis that emerged to explain cattle mutilations was that they were being perpetrated by shell-shocked Vietnam veterans who were recreating scenes of torture that they had either seen committed against US troops by Vietnamese guerrillas, or that they had themselves committed against Vietnamese fighters.

She hangs on my neck and buries her face into my chest and traces patterns on my hand. I kiss her and think about fluids. We sit at the table and send text messages to each other secretly. We exchange glances. It's enough to drive me mad.

spam

to: me
from: some dude
subject: i have information what women do on a farm. NEVER leave them there abandoned!

Never leave your dame on a farm unattended. She might substitute you with beasts and you will be way out of the competition for the rest of your relationship. I learned it the hard way. Here are the details:

Was Betty Boop given an oversized head so men could leer at her body without admitting it to anyone?

heh

"I've got such smells to show you."

heeeeeeeeeeelp meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

astronaut sartory

These hats are called snoopy caps.

Night of the Iguana, 1964.

just occured to me

I could write an April Fool's post, and no one would even know it was a joke.

april fool's day

Oh my god. It's like walking through a prank minefield.

First one I stepped on:Gmail Custom Time

How do I use it?

Just click "Set custom time" from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.

Is there a limit to how far back I can send email?

Yes. You'll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born -- crazy talk.

Also:
Developing a theory that Brittanny Murphy's fall from public favor mirrors the experience of seeing one's ex-girlfriend become the worst kind of drunk club trash.

Are there any yoga stances that approximate the pose in which one points an automatic pistol up under one's chin?