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Pele VooDoo JuJu
The several African nations' soccer teams that rely on witchcraft to give them an edge were confounded at this year's World Cup when Senegal almost made it to the semifinals after supposedly rejecting that strategy and competing solely on ability. Teams from Ivory Coast and Mali have been in the news this year for their relentless black-magic beliefs (e.g., animal parts buried on the soccer field at midnight; hexing spells by witch doctors on a team's sideline). In February, a Cameroon assistant coach was dragged off the field by Mali military personnel after he was suspected of wielding a lucky charm.

Excerpt of a interview by Christopher Michael Langan with Astronomer Tom Van Flandern
CML: Please pardon the ambiguity. In a cosmological context, “self-containment” is generally understood to mean that explanations should be intrinsic to observable reality and free of appeals to external spaces or media. For example, General Relativity appeals to nothing external, describing the geometry of spacetime using functions of the matter it contains. In contrast, modern cosmology is replete with multiverses and meta-inflationary many-bubbled hyperuniverses with respect to which observable reality plays a merely secondary role. Given your own ideas regarding the intrinsic definition of scale, is your ontological explanation of space and time intrinsic to observable reality (or is something more assumed)?
TVF: In the Meta Model, insofar as possible, nothing is assumed. The starting point is a complete void with no direct or implicit properties. Using deductive reasoning, we eventually see emerging concepts that resemble those we call “space” and “time”, yet subtly different from our usual understanding of those terms. The important point is that the concepts emerge from logical deductions from a seemingly safe starting point, rather than being themselves assumptions or being products of induction (which is intrinsically non-unique in physics).

NPR :Interview with James Glieck
Forum talks to James Gleick, author of What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier. Gleick is the author of several other books, including Chaos: Making a New Science and Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.
Interview in REAL audio.

Oo Lola! (Flash Movie)
From the makers of Hatten är din (Flash) and Ansiktsburk comes Oo Lola! Can you believe Hatten är din became one of the most popular sites in Sweden? Of course underground Flash movies have become a genre unto themselves.

Here's the original Hatten är din site.

The Drone Armies Are Coming
Dispatched on a rescue-and-capture mission, unmanned vehicles arrive at the scene in minutes, corner a potential suspect and await visual confirmation before proceeding. Star Wars 2020? It might be happening sooner than you think. Allen Moshfegh at the Office of Naval Research is the head of the Autonomous Intelligent Network and Systems (AINS), a program that aims to create an operational drone army by the year 2020.

'The Writer and the World': The Blunt Opinions of a Professional Provocateur (Free subscription required)
Over the years, V. S. Naipaul has "taken on the aspect of a professional provocateur," writes Daphne Merkin, the author of "Dreaming of Hitler." Reviewing a new collection of his nonfiction writings, Merkin says that, "in an age of mandatory multiculturalism and groupthink," it is "altogether tonic to have a writer such as V. S. Naipaul in our midst." Naipaul, the Nobel Prize-winning author of 26 books, "continues to see himself as an outsider," she writes.

On the Web, fatal errors
The idea behind the new cyber-chiller "Feardotcom,'" no matter how addled, should bring a cruel smile to any parent who has warned of addictive Internet use: A mad doctor sets up a torture-site that causes the user to hemorrhage from the eyes and nostrils and then expire from his or her worst phobia, be it water or car crash . . . or swarming digital cockroaches.

YIL | Feature -Cam Girls
They're online and underage. And they'll trade you a peek if you fulfill their Wish Lists. Are the "Cyber Britneys" a sign of the times?

Clifford Pickover's Neoreality Science-Fiction Series
Clifford Pickover, staff researcher at IBM, fractal conneissour, and author of dozens of popular science books examining the future of thought has published a new series of science fiction novels that explore the boundaries of reality.

Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick in Bookforum
You don't know Dick. Not like I do, anyway. Philip K. Dick (1928–82) is the only prolific author whose whole life's work I can justly claim to have read through twice, picayune exceptions notwithstanding. Contemporary understanding of Dick's importance is still muddled by the appeal to mysticism his late work provides. There's some whiff of cultishness no number of Fredric Jameson citations can rub off.

Wait Wait -- Don't Tell Me! Not My Job! (Listen with Real Audio)
Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Choke plays a game called "You Trashed a Four-billion-dollar Company But at Least You Threw a Heck of a Party." Three questions based on Business 2.0's "101 Dumbest Moments in Business."

SYMBOLS.com -- encyclopedia of Western signs and ideograms
SYMBOLS.com contains more than 2,500 Western signs, arranged into 54 groups according to their graphic characteristics. In 1,600 articles their histories, uses, and meanings are thoroughly discussed. The signs range from ideograms carved in mammoth teeth by Cro-Magnon men, to hobo signs and subway graffiti.

The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century
An annotation for Cory Doctorow's "0wnz0red" (page 1)
You've read Cory Doctorow's wonderful little short story, "0wnz0red", but got lost in the jargon and hacker cultural folderol. What's a layperson to do? Well, for starters, you can read my annotation...

CBS is resurrecting "The Beverly Hillbillies" as a reality series.

The MIT Press - Series - Mediaworks Pamphlets
The Mediawork Pamphlets series pairs authors with graphic designers to produce intellectually sophisticated, visually compelling, inexpensively priced short works. The pamphlets take up the themes of art, design, technology, and market economies. Series editor director Peter Lunenfeld calls them "'zines for grownups."

Blogcritics: We Are Youth Gone Wild: The Novel Twelve by Nick McDonell
This is a great novel. When I finished it I could not believe a 17-year-old boy wrote it. But when I thought about it, I realized that only a 17-year-old kid could possibly know enough about his or her environment to write something this honest and magnificently detailed without it sounding like it was written by some pseudo-hip adult who hung out with kids, as was the case with Fast Times at Ridgemont High by Cameron Crowe.

ABCNEWS.com : Sonic Bullets to Be Acoustic Weapon of the Future
Anyone who has seen Tom Cruise fire his state-of-the-art sound wave gun at his pursuers in Minority Report no doubt assumes it is a weapon from the arsenal of science fiction. But such a weapon, or at least a less-glamorous version, is scientific fact.

::: NPG MUSIC CLUB :::
A Nation of Thieves?
Who would have guessed that the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince could be so deep?

Free Will Astrology : Horoscopes
The Universe is Made of Stories
The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but of stories. The physicist Werner Heisenberg declared that the universe is made of music, not matter. And I believe that if you habitually expose yourself to inferior music and stories -- even unwittingly -- you could wind up living in the wrong universe. I bring this up now because it's never been more important for you to nourish yourself with righteous tales and tunes.

The Rejection Hotline
What is The Rejection Hotline? In a nutshell, the Rejection Hotline is a number you can give out to somebody who asks for your phone number if you just don't want to give out your real number. When they call the number, they hear our recording and they are not-so-subtly informed of your non-interest.

VICE FUND
“It is our philosophy that although often considered politically incorrect, these and similar industries and products...will continue to experience significant capital appreciation during good and bad markets. We consider these industries to be nearly ‘recession-proof.’”

salon :: :: tech :: feature :: Riding shotgun with William Gibson, By Andrew Leonard ::
In a new documentary, the archetypal cyberpunk author displays his new obsession: Media, not technology.

Salon.com Technology | "0wnz0red"
At the 2000 Hugo Awards, Cory Doctorow won the John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction writer.

'King of Porn' Empties Out His Castle (washingtonpost.com)
New N.Y. Museum Buys His 30-Year Collection.

Burning Man gets hot over steamy videos
Each year before Labor Day, thousands of artists and seekers gather in the Nevada desert to experience a world beyond the constraints of everyday life. The fete, culminating with the burning of a 40-foot effigy, is called Burning Man, and it is billed by organizers as an "experimental community, which challenges its members to express themselves."
This self-expression takes the form of art, song, dance, theater — and nudity. And where there's public nudity, there are bound to be cameras.
Enter Voyeur Video. For the past three years, the company has been filming nude women at the festival and selling the videotapes on its Web site. The organizers of Burning Man call this trespassing, trademark infringement and invasion of privacy, among other offenses, and they're suing the company. They accuse Voyeur of distributing "pornography and sexually explicit videos" while saying that Burning Man is a "social and spiritual event," according to court documents.
Voyeur's president, however, sees no harm in what his company does and does not consider it pornography.
"We just shoot what goes on. Just a bunch of happy naked videos," said the president, Jim O'Brian, a 40-year-old Los Angeles resident and self-described nudist. "Consider us a news company."

What Is Psychalking?
Psychalking is a method for paranoids to communicate with each other about dangerous mind control hot spots. By leaving special symbols written in chalk on pavements, walls, slow-moving pedestrians, and other objects found around town, a paranoid can warn his or her peers of local mind control dangers and advise on a proper means of protection.

Aerospace Consultant Nick Cook on NPR's Fresh Air RealAudio Link
This is a great interview in which Lifters, Flying Saucers, Nazi Underground Bases, Anti-Grav, and much more is described in a sober, serious manner.
Aerospace consultant Nick Cook, author of the new book, The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology.
In the book, Cook tracks down the secret history of anti-gravity research. It*s technology that defies the laws of physics. Cook discovered that during WWII, the Nazis claimed to have been close to antigravity technology. The U.S. government allegedly conducted antigravity research in the 1950s and 60s. Cook is former Aviation Editor for the military affairs journal, Jane's Defense Weekly.This riveting work of investigative reporting and history exposes classified government projects to build gravity-defying aircraft--which have an uncanny resemblance to flying saucers.
The Hunt for Zero Point explores the scientific speculation that a "zero point" of gravity exists in the universe and can be replicated here on Earth. The pressure to be the first nation to harness gravity is immense, as it means having the ability to build military planes of unlimited speed and range, along with the most deadly weaponry the world has ever seen. The ideal shape for a gravity-defying vehicle happens to be a perfect disk, making antigravity tests a possible explanation for the numerous UFO sightings of the past 50 years. Chronicling the origins of antigravity research in the world's most advanced research facility, which was operated by the Third Reich during World War II, The Hunt for Zero Point traces U.S. involvement in the project, beginning with the recruitment of former Nazi scientists after the war.

Hearing is Believing
Woody Norris wants to tell you something—and he can put the words
inside your head from 100 yards away. Is his invention sound, or
just a pipe dream?

China is prototyping new genetic ID cards.
This color genotype ID card, about twice the size of ordinary ID card, has on it data such as photo, birth date, nationality and gender. In particular it is marked with 18 internationally used genetic locus which are chosen from the long chain of human cytogenetic information carrier DNA molecules. In the combination of the 18 genetic locus, with the exception of one egg giving birth to twins, it is difficult for one to find out such a circumstance wherein two persons out of 10 billion people are completely the same.

The future of mind control
May 23rd 2002 From The Economist print edition

Joan of Arc and JFK are classmates in MTV's new animated series.
You can always count on MTV to come up with something to make channel surfing Gen Yers stop clicking the remote. MTV will begin airing a new animated teen comedy series Clone High this October. The students at Clone High aren't your average teens though. The premise of the show is that a renegade group of evil scientists extracted the DNA from some of the most famous figures in history (including Abe Lincoln, Gandhi, Cleopatra, John F. Kennedy, Joan of Arc, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe) and populated a high school with teenage versions of them. Clone High is said to deal with real teen issues but in a comedic way that spoofs the melodrama of shows such as Dawson's Creek and Beverly Hills 90210. And the writing team boasts alumni from two of animation's greats: The Simpsons and South Park. If nothing else, it'll be worth watching just to see what kind of conversation young Gandhi has with Elvis. Perhaps they'll do a duet of "Don't Be Cruel" together.