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Technorati Profile

Dearborn teens create antigravity machine?
Three Dearborn teenagers are among the first high school students to develop an "antigravity machine." The Dearborn High School students have been working on the project for several months and plan to enter it in the Detroit Science Fair in May. According to its creators, the lightweight, triangle-shaped craft defies Newton’s third law of gravity and flies without the aid of fans, jets or even an engine. Many people have doubted that the boys’ machine can fly, saying it must be magic, have strings attached or be done with smoke and mirrors. But they say it’s not so. With a combination of a power supply, a positive line and a negative line, the power transfers, lifting the machine up into the air. Via Weblogsky

Who is Obtainium.net?
We're an online community of constructively creative folks who exchange ideas, stuff, and services. We're always thinking about the mechanics of the creative process, and we think that a crappy economy shouldn't be an impediment to the fulfillment of creative visions. The Obtainium.net community is a great place to talk about what you need for your art, structures, furnishings, vehicles, robotics, rocketry, and your sound, lighting and weird-ass kinetic sculpture projects. We want to hear about what, how, and where you got your gear for less. And if your older creation has run its course and you're done with it, tell us so we can turn your old crap into a giant fire-breathing fish on wheels. Via Die Puny Humans

the DALI universe
"The only difference between Salvador Dali and one crazy man is...Salvador Dali is not crazy at all!" - Salvador Dali : A Soft-Self Portrait (with Orson Wells)

--28DAYSLATER--
The film frenzy that surrounded Trainspotting (1996) may start again once director Danny Boyles' latest film, 28 Days Later, is released (already released in the UK, a US date is yet to be confirmed, although there is talk of a limited release early 2003). Although many thought 28 Days Later was a continuation of Trainspotting, apart from the director and the deep feeling of desperation that is evoked in the movie, there is little the same.
28 Days Later is set in London 28 days after a virus released from a British research facility has infected the world. The virus, that is impossible to contain, puts people into a permanent state of killing rage. The film focuses on a small group of survivors who try to protect themselves from the infected, but realize that it is the survivors who are their greatest enemy.
This film is as timely as the Zombie films were in the 1960's and 1970's when people first feared biological war. However, the premise here is more of a psychological virus that leaves people very violent. Boyle explains that intolerance is one of society's biggest issues at the moment, and 28 Days Later deals with this phenomenon. It's hard to say whether the film will go as mainstream as Trainspotting; but the film and the lead actor Cillian Murphy are bound to create quite a buzz.

Vice Magazine
What started out as a few Montreal drug addicts scamming welfare make-work programs back in 1994 has become a global empire of hedonism known simply as VICE. From a 16 page newspaper about punk bands and violence to: stores, a clothing line, VICE Films, VICE TV, VICE Records, viceland.com, etc., VICE has become much more than a way for three guys to get laid. It’s become a lifestyle; a degrading and disgusting lifestyle of sex and drugs and rock and roll and death. This site is a collection of the irreverent, hilarious and downright scary gonzo journalism that brought three losers from the crack houses of Le Plateau to the deluxe apartments of Manhattan.

Bin Laden's Oxford days

Bin Laden (far right) was said to be "deep" for his age

Photographs of Osama Bin Laden on a visit to Oxford in 1971 have come to light after their owner recognised him in widely-publicised pictures from the same year.

Craig and Company Expose Bush
Yeah, we already know what you're thinking! "Git yer mind outta the gutter pardner!" incuBLOGula posse member Craig Ellenwood and company give us an artistic dose of "Dubya." Yeeha!

Diane di Prima is in da house!
incuBLOGula poet laureate, Diane diPrima has a new website. Chock full of information about upcoming readings, books, reviews, workshops, we urge you to check it out whether you are familiar with Diane's work or not.

Massive database dragnet explored - ANTI-TERRORISM PROJECT ALARMS PRIVACY ADVOCATES
Its name is Orwellian, its head has a notorious past, and its goal has civil libertarians and computer-privacy advocates in a frenzy: Let the government troll vast databases of credit-card transactions, medical records and other personal information for signs of terrorist activity. As more is becoming known about the Total Information Awareness System, a Pentagon research project headed by former Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter, more people are becoming alarmed about the implications.

Dr. Frankenstein please report to the OR...
Geneticist J. Craig Venter is making headlines once again today, this time for his efforts to create an artificial lifeform. Working with Nobel laureate Hamilton O. Smith, Venter - who founded both Celera Genomics and the Institute for Genomic Research - hopes to create a single-celled, partially man-made organism with the minimum number of genes necessary to sustain life. If he succeeds, the organism will begin feeding and dividing to create a population of cells unlike any that have ever existed. "We are wondering if we can come up with a molecular definition of life," Venter told The Washington Post. "The goal is to fundamentally understand the components of the most basic living cell." The project, of course, raises innumerable philosophical, ethical, and practical questions. Do scientists have any moral right to create new organisms? If a man-made organism is able to survive and reproduce only in a petrie dish, can it really be considered life? And more importantly, if a man-made life form based on M. genitalium - a minuscule organism that lives in our genital tracts and is known to contribute to urethritis, a painful inflammation of the urethra - escapes from the lab and makes a bee-line for our urethras, how do we kill it? Venter has already convened a panel of scientists, ethicists and religious leaders to address those very questions. "I'm less worried about the minimal genome project taking off and creating some kind of monster bug than I would be," said Mildred Cho, a bioethicist at Stanford University, "partly because I have a sense that the scientists are aware of the possible risks of what they're doing."

Software aims to put your life on a disk
Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write - in fact your every memory and experience - into a surrogate brain that never forgets anything.

U.S. Military Admits to Plan to Create a "Warfighting" Cyborg
Augmented Cognition
by Dylan Schmorrow, Ph.D
(NOTE: This comes from the Information Processing Technology Office - a branch of DARPA--Retired Admiral John Pointdexter's(convicted felon) outfit, whose Total Information Awareness project is quickly becoming the ultimate Orwellian nightmare. Read on...)

Drivin' for Jesus
Drivin' for Jesus
Makin' all the lights...
-George Carlin

A broad coalition of religious groups is preparing a grass-roots campaign linking fuel efficiency to morality, with some ads going so far as to ask: "What Would Jesus Drive?" (via)

The Anti-SUV President?
Adding an antiterrorism theme to this movement against big SUVs and hefty pickups might persuade more Americans to think twice before putting lifestyle ahead of country.

How much will Bush, the antiterrorism president, buy into it?

O Lord, won't you buy me a holy roller
...by the way, how come no one's asking "What Would Allah or Buddha Drive?"

Out Comes the Evil

by Stranger at blah3.com

Ebook Mobile? 10,000 public domain kids' books online soon
The International Children's Digital Library launches tomorrow, filled with over 200 books in 15 languages. The Library collects public domain texts and makes them available in a variety of formats, suitable for screen-reading and printing. The curators hope to build it up to 10,000 books before long. Via BB

Hi-Ho! Hi-Ho! It's Underground We Go!

Conspiracy theories go mainstream
This year, The New Statesman compiled a list of recent international opinion polls revealing that an extraordinary number of people believe that world events are being controlled by shadowy off-stage elements. Among the revelations: A near-majority of the Arab world believes that Jews were warned of the World Trade Center attacks; an actual majority believes that the Princess of Wales was murdered because she had a Muslim boyfriend; more than 50 per cent of all black Americans believe that the Central Intelligence Agency approves of widespread drug use in their community because of its pacifying effect, and one-fifth believe that the AIDS epidemic was introduced by the CIA; 80 per cent of all Americans believe that the U.S. government is deliberately concealing the true explanation behind Gulf War syndrome. Via NWD

Ah one and ah two and ah three...uh...and ah four...
Four from Post Atomic:

• Many Still Believe Profound Events Are a Media Hoax
  ...I do love conspiracy theories. But to make them plausible, you have to do more than assert that the government manipulates information. You have to make government a puppet dancing on the strings of international financiers or something. Oops, bad example. That really happens.


• Conspiracies, Plots and Other Anti-democratic Notions
  While the corporate media is narrowing its content, with news reports often looking very much the same, the public's access to the vastland of the internet is amplifying, and informational snippets and unanswered questions leading to conspiracy beliefs are increasingly available on-line.


• Conspiracy Theorists Are An Embarrasment to the Left
  Now I've been reading a lot of nonsense lately from the tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists, who argue that it(s) those of us who seriously doubt the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone was assassinated by a right-wing cabal taking orders from the White House must disprove he was murdered. This kind of debating tactic by the conspiracy theorists is an act of desperation by some people on the left who only have innuendo and suspicion to support their baseless accusation.


• Shatter the Paradigm of Fear with Humor and Love
  Wouldn’t the truth about U.F.O.’s, genetically modified foods and lifeforms, the World Trade Organization, the I.R.S., profoundly transform everything, if people really understood those issues?” Maybe, and people who are passionate about those issues, should continue their work...via Post Atomic

Paging Dr. Menlo, Dr. Benway, Dr. Menlo!
Currently Dr. Menlo is very proud to be a frequent contributor to Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse--former and present publisher of such notable authors as William Burroughs, Tom Robbins, Paul Bowles, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg and many more. The good doctor is also a posse member of incuBLOGula. Blogula comment: We is just so proud to have the good Doctor on board! Why he once performed an appendectomy with nothing but a rusty sardine can!

The Great Internet Conspiracy : Meme-O-Licious
IN the days before the Internet, when rumors had to make their way by boat and horseback instead of by waves and wire, it took perseverance to assemble the pieces of a really good conspiracy theory. Without so much as an America Online account, Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University two centuries ago, learned of an evil plot -- hatched in France by Freemasons hopped up on Enlightenment philosophy -- to overthrow the United States Government. A Bavarian secret society called the Order of the Illuminati was also involved. Unable to access alt.conspiracy or even a good E-mail program, Dwight had to resort to public speaking to spread the word.

Zines, Zines are Good For Your Heart!
Before there were blogs, before there was the Web, there were zines. Most MeFi folk know this - right? - but it seems to be astonishing news to the Washington Post. Maybe not everybody here was part of the zine scene back in the 80s and early 90s, but I bet a lot of you were. My question: Am I just an out-of-touch curmudgeon or is it insulting to do an article like this on a "Zine Guide" (which I haven't seen - I haven't touched a zine in about five years, probably) without even mentioning the Alpha and Omega of the genre, Mike Gunderloy's Factsheet Five? BLOGula comment: This very blog that you are reading is a zine, in pixels intead of xerox. We've come a long way baby! Discuss

You've Got Spies!
The Central Intelligence Agency has come to stay in an area near you. In 1999, the CIA opened up a venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, on Sand Hill Road -- the heart of Silicon Valley's venture capital community. It was supposed to be a five-year experiment into the risky business of funding start-ups and a way to acquire commercially viable technologies that enhance national security at the same time. Since Sept. 11, though, In-Q-Tel has acted more like a permanent resident. "It's no longer an experiment, says" In-Q-Tel Chief Executive Gilman Louie.

Mothman festival takes flight in Mason
This quiet river town’s first Mothman Festival on Saturday did not cause the same stir the mysterious winged creature did when it was first sighted here on Nov. 15, 1966. But for a first-time event pulled together in just the past two weeks, organizers were happy with the turnout and have high hopes for next year.

The Ðëòxÿríßøñµçlëìç HÿÞêrdïmèñsîøñ
"We must discover new frontiers... People have been standing for centuries before a worm-eaten door, making pinholes in it with increasing ease. The time has come to kick it down, for it is only on the other side that everything begins." - Raoul Vaneigem

For those interested, deoxy keeps an excellent forum on the subjects of Novelty, Temporary Autonomous Zones, Spaceship Earth, The Poets of Chaos, Hyperspace, Omega, Incunabula , Shamanism, & Political Corrections.

CIA releases new 'Noah's Ark' documents
The CIA has released two new documents that indicate the search for ''Noah's Ark'' reached the level of the White House, according to a report in Insight Magazine. The release of the documents comes two years after Insight published an exclusive story on the search for the biblical Noah's Ark.The magazine teamed with Space Imaging to use its IKONOS satellite to zoom in on an anomaly in Turkey located at 39 degrees 42 minutes north latitude and 44 degrees 16 minutes east longitude. The result was the public's first glimpse of high-resolution photographs of what some say is Noah's Ark.

Holy Reformation, Batman!
In about 50 years, probably fewer, the region of Palestine and Israel will look more like Nagasaki during World War II than the "Holy Land" it is purported to be. When the Palestinians have run out of eager teenaged suicide martyrs and the Israeli tanks have run out of the gas that American Sports Futility Vehicles have savagely sucked away, the U.S. Government, Inc. will be happy to step in, at no charge, and "atomically alter" the landscape. (Free "Nuke ’Em!" stickers to the first 100 patriots to fly an American flag in their front yard!)

Need a new tailor? Don't forget Hats and Shoes. Via memepool

God Is the Machine
IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS 0. AND THEN THERE WAS 1. A MIND-BENDING MEDITATION ON THE TRANSCENDENT POWER OF DIGITAL COMPUTATION.- By Kevin Kelly
That life might be information, as biologists propose, is far more intuitive than the corresponding idea that hard matter is information as well. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesn't feel like we knocked into information. But that's the idea many physicists are formulating. The spooky nature of material things is not new. Once science examined matter below the level of fleeting quarks and muons, it knew the world was incorporeal. What could be less substantial than a realm built out of waves of quantum probabilities? And what could be weirder? Digital physics is both. It suggests that those strange and insubstantial quantum wavicles, along with everything else in the universe, are themselves made of nothing but 1s and 0s. The physical world itself is digital. The scientist John Archibald Wheeler (coiner of the term "black hole") was onto this in the '80s. He claimed that, fundamentally, atoms are made up of of bits of information. As he put it in a 1989 lecture, "Its are from bits." He elaborated: "Every it — every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, bits. What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions." - DW

Class of 91
An on-line NovelBlog by NWD's Jason Lubyk.
The emergency ward was busy. An old man sat with a oily rag pressed against his forehead, blood caked on his face. A couple skinny security guards ran into one of the observation rooms.
"Fucking let me go! Awwwgh! Awwwgh!" screamed a voice from the room that the guards ran into.
Mandy walked up to the information desk and asked a pudgy middle aged nurse with glasses that were in style when she was in her early twenties what room her brother was in.
"3345." She wrote down the number on a little white piece of paper and handed it to Mandy.
"Is that on the third floor?"
"Yes it is."
"Awwwgh! Let me go! I thought this was a free country! This isn't Russia! Take me to the hospital!"
"You are in the hospital sir."

What's up with the Denver Airport?
A dead African- and Native American woman in a coffin, burning cities, kids sleeping on piles of bricks, a looming military figure ina gas mask brandishing a sword, a dead Jewish girl clutching a bible... sub-basements, odd low-frequency sounds making peoplesick, air vents coming out of the surrounding land from nowhere and the workers who were fired so not too many would know what was being built ... Welcome to Denver! This mural in question is titled, "Harmony With Nature". Some say the Airport is a coverup for a massive underground military base and some very weird things are going on there. Yet another underground US Military base. A future "New World Order" detainment center.

NO FUTURE?
Remember When we said, "No Future?" Well, this is it. Via memepool

Missing Links and Magic Eight Balls?
Ian Stewart writes an interesting article in this issue of the New Scientist.
1, 2, 4, 8... What comes next? Nothing. If we're talking numbers, the obvious next term is 16. But if we're talking a particular kind of algebra, there is no next term. And it turns out that this is highly significant. The ultimate number - the humble 8 - lies at the heart of a mathematical system known as the octonions, and this system appears to be the key that will allow physicists to fit quantum theory and gravity together. Strange as it may seem, the number 8 may provide us with a "theory of everything".
You can register for a free 7 day trial to access this article on-line, or some schmoe may have a text copy lying around somewhere.

The Thresher-Flailing at Current Events
The Thresher, a print political journal: When we started working on The Thresher, we expressed our intentions to potential writers thusly; "Everybody knows that the next political paradigm is post- ideological, an unpredictable hybrid of all the influences on human thought and behavior. The smartest among us are looking for interesting ways to crossbreed left, right and center; mainstream and subculture; individual liberty and community; straight and queer; spirituality and critical intelligence; high technology and zero emissions; speed and permanence; rebellion and problem-solving; Caucasian and everybody else; ad infinitum. We're not talking dialectics. We're talking complexity. The Thresher will attempt to navigate its way through the tangled mess that is early 21st Century politics." Well, things have changed. For the moment, the only realistic goal seems to be to preserve the freedom to dissent, to question authority, to express even a bit of skepticism. In the words of George Clinton (the only Clinton that matters); "Think. It ain’t illegal yet."

From Alien Abductions Via MKUltra to an Implanted Cyber-Situation
Recently some alien abductees have said that they have been kidnapped by military/intelligence personnel and taken to hospitals and/or military ground/underground research facilities, where they were examined, interrogated and sometimes implanted with tiny devices. Such experiences are called MILABS-covert military abductions of alleged alien abductees. Not many of the popular books on the subject of alien abductions mention these experiences. In fact it seems that well known alien abduction researchers like Budd Hopkins, Prof. David Jacobs and Prof. John Mack ignore such cases, although they know about them. Expect the reported abductee trend to grow now that Steven Spielberg has sunk his JAWS into the subject. Expect some dissent among the ranks though...

Truth is another country
Literature is created on both sides of the frontier that divides fact from fiction, and it is crossed by writers quite casually. But, argues Timothy Garton Ash, this is a border that should be defended. The frontier between the literature of fact and the literature of fiction is open, unmarked. Some very fine writers stray across it quite casually, as one does when travelling in the Masai Mara - no border posts, same shrubland, same dust, same lions, but suddenly you are in Tanzania, not Kenya. These frontier crossings come in many forms. In the reportage of that master traveler Ryzsard Kapuscinski, we find haunting claims that would certainly not survive the attentions of a fact-checker at an American magazine. (I open his Shah of Shahs at random, and read: "The Iranian Shiites have been living underground, in the catacombs, for 800 years.") With Kapuscinski, we keep crossing from the Kenya of fact to the Tanzania of fiction, and back again, but the transition is nowhere explicitly signalled. It may seem a grave limitation for any writer to leave the facts as facts, but self-limitation is a key to art. On this frontier we should stand
Others disagree. When it comes to words, it can all get a bit fuzzy.

Monarchs and Marionettes
Here's a strange little subculture of the Mind Control brigade. The "survivors" of this program claim to have been programmed sex slaves for such notables as Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Bob Hope and a bevy of other notables. Although Mark Phillips and Cathy O'Brien are the undisputed "patient zeros" of this quirky little movement it seems that their progeny have developed a penchant for bad clothes, duty on Mars, reptilian rape (speaking of lizards) and bush league diva syndrome. Maybe that was part of their programming?

MetaMachine to be Released as Opensource
A white paper is currently being drafted that outlines the specifics of MetaMachine architecture along with reccomendations for updates to the individual components and enhancements such as integration of distributed networking capabilities (such as the SETI project utilizes). Future announcements will be made via this homepage.