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From Aberystwyth to Mianus people seem transfixed by the prospect of turning up in a place at a time. But this is a stern warning to all you ker-razy flashmobbers out there. Take care, it?s a bad bad world.

Wherever there?s groups of young, naïve, wealthy, bored, fashionistas to be found, scum of a different sort are bound to be close behind. FLASHMUGGERS!!! Via technicola.com

What flash mobs can do, alas, and quite readily, is make a crowd into a valuable commodity -- a point made often by the leading chronicler of flash mobs, the blog (of course) www.cheesebikini.com. The coverage there and on other blogs has been overlaid almost from the beginning with a vague sense of dread that flash mobs are going to be hijacked, most likely by consumer companies. The cheesebikini site noted that the Toys ''R'' Us gathering coincided with another planned ''mob'' in Toronto that targeted ''the same giant multinational toy-store chain. That's an ugly coincidence. . . . Participants: remember that a corporation could easily create fake flash mobs designed to spur more business to its retail outlets. Don't be a sheep!'' (reg. req.)

One morning last April, the New York Times op-ed page ran a piece by the Australian physicist Paul Davies warning readers not to be so gullible as to believe there could be more than one universe. The next month, Scientific American published a long article by the physicist Max Tegmark asserting that, to the contrary, parallel universes almost certainly do exist. Around the same time, bookstores received Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?, wherein Martin Gardner dismisses theories of multiple universes as “frivolous fantasies.” If you had seen all this, you may well have asked yourself: Is this really a matter on which I need to form an opinion? | Via Invisible College

A UFO investigator laces a conservative councillor?s toothbrush with deadly radium, a Bigfoot investigator beheads a local tourist after killing three others, welcome to the world of the paranormal killers. Martin Jeffrey of Mystery Magazine writes... | Via Contact Form

Mars is sneaking up on us this week. On 27 August the red planet will be less than 56 million kilometres from Earth, the closest it's been for 60,000 years.

Stargazers on the ground will be able to marvel at the bronze orb in the southeastern skies. Scientists are more blasé about the record-breaking encounter, but have capitalized on it to dispatch a fleet of visiting spacecraft.

Suffer the embarrassment of a meager friend pool no longer.

Finally receive the testimonials you desperately crave and so obviously deserve. | Via CoC

Since 1996, QuakeCon has been the video game industry's Woodstock, a 21st-century blend of tough games, fast computers and mostly white, teenaged boys in black T-shirts.

But changes are afoot at the event, which grew out of fans' love of the Quake line of games: visceral, violent titles in which players gather online to blow each other up as fast as possible.

Girls, older people - even entire families - are joining in the fun.

They create as much clutter as those slippery advertising inserts that fatten a Sunday newspaper and are as inescapable as humidity in August.

But just how annoying are those pop-up ads that appear unwanted on your computer screen as you cruise the Internet? How effective are they at selling stuff? And do they raise privacy issues in the same way that unsolicited e-mail does?

The popular Java Anonymous Proxy (JAP), used to anonymise one's comings and goings across the Internet, has been back-doored by court order. The service is currently logging access attempts to a particular, and unnamed, Web site and reporting the IP addys of those who attempt to contact it to the German police.

We know this because the JAP operators immediately warned users that their IP traffic might be going straight to Big Brother, right? Wrong. After taking the service down for a few days with the explanation that the interruption was "due to a hardware failure", the operators then required users to install an "upgraded version" (ie. a back-doored version) of the app to continue using the service.

via twisk

Well, it's not exactly new but it's probably news to you. Heh, and you thought solar was cool.

"The Motionless Electromagnetic Generator (MEG) has produced up to 100 times more power than was input, by extracting free energy from the vacuum. Overunity performance has been independently replicated by other researchers. US Patent awarded March 26, 2002. Invented by Tom Bearden and four colleagues."

"Researchers at the University of California at San Diego have found a way to test biological samples for the existence of protein molecules using a standard CD-ROM drive and inkjet printer. The findings could lead to the development of genetic tests that ordinary people could take in the privacy of their own bedrooms. The team released a paper this week in the Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry journal outlining the procedure."

I love when things like this happen. They're even going open-source with the project.

Humans can be trained to crave food in response to abstract prompts just like Pavlov's dogs, reveals new research.

But whereas Pavlov's dogs were conditioned to drool at the sound of a bell, Jay Gottfried and colleagues at University College London, UK, trained humans to yearn for vanilla ice cream and peanut butter at the sight of fractal-based computer images.

Importantly, the team also showed that the human brain can put a "brake" on the powerful desire for certain foods once the appetite has been sated. This system to turn the "delectable into the distasteful" may be crucial in regulating behaviour, they say. Detecting faults in this system might in future help shed light on compulsive eating disorders and substance addictions, speculates Gottfried, a neurologist.

And while we're on the subject: McDonald's Corporate Strategy Revealed To Be Work Of Aliens and SHHHHHHHHH! | Via DRT

Brian Robertson was just months away from graduation at Moore High School in Moore, Oklahoma, last year when he found the beginnings of what he thought was a short story on a school computer. He copied the file to another computer, added some paragraphs to the initial text and then promptly got arrested.

Robertson, who was 18 when he wrote the story, was charged with a felony count of planning to cause serious bodily harm or death. The story he wrote, titled "Evacuation Orders," (PDF) described preparations for an armed invasion of his school that included directions to unnamed fellow commandos to kill the senior class principal and then plant plastic explosives around the campus.

The Mountain Dew-fueled all-nighter is history. Today's supercoders work 40 hours a week. And two to a computer. It's called extreme programming - and it's revolutionizing the software world.

Extreme programming, a method of software development that emphasizes constant feedback. Traditional coding devotes a huge amount of time to up-front planning, then demands rigid adherence to that plan. XP is different. Programmers spend relatively little time planning and instead dive into the writing, making course corrections as needed and allowing better ideas to emerge after snippets of code are tested and assessed. The result is a speedy loop: plan, code, test, release, plan, code, test.

Until ten years ago, most astronomers did not believe stardust could enter our Solar System. Then ESA's Ulysses spaceprobe discovered minute stardust particles leaking through the Sun's magnetic shield, into the realm of Earth and the other planets. Now, the same spaceprobe has shown that a flood of dusty particles is heading our way. Since its launch in 1990, Ulysses has constantly monitored how much stardust enters the Solar System from the interstellar space around it. Using an on-board instrument called DUST, scientists have discovered that stardust can actually approach the Earth and other planets, but its flow is governed by the Sun's magnetic field, which behaves as a powerful gate-keeper bouncing most of it back. However, during solar maximum - a phase of intense activity inside the Sun that marks the end of each 11-year solar cycle - the magnetic field becomes disordered as its polarity reverses. As a result, the Sun's shielding power weakens and more stardust can sneak in.

In an interesting and entertaining lecture, Seamus Blackley bucked the trend of declaring how games industry revenues are bigger than the film industry, labelling such claims as “bullshit”.

However, despite his claims that the industry is unjustified in its comparison with the film industry, Blackley said that the key for the games industry to reach the potential it has, is to create original IP.

“Why is it that we’ve lost the cultural edge? The reason is that today’s games are not exploiting pop culture. We’re being willingly driven by pop culture,” he said. “We just crawl over one another to get access to IP from other media. In this light you can really start to view the games industry as a marketing arm of the film industry or of the music industry."

Also see: Better than the film, computer games are still seen as toys

Mr Wood, 34, of Ferriston, Banbury, has won backing from Official Monster Raving Loony Party leader, Howling Lord Hope, to run as an official candidate.

The Loonies were made famous by their eccentric former leader, Screaming Lord Sutch, who died in 1999.

Examples of their 'policies' include keeping guns in fridges to stop them going off...

FY04/FY05: Begin representing Genoa databases in terms of themselves, so as to begin a feedback loop of its and our behaviors into its analytic networks.

FY06: Establish "cognition-secure" zones of inference that will allow experimentation with early stage net-distributed artificial intelligence systems bred from Genoa's self-referential experiences with itself. At this point, early considerations of how to best downsize the intelligence community should begin.

FY07: Develop cognitive treaties with the first of the "Genoa Mentors," stable states of distributed (non-human) computation/cognition that can effectively reason without human intervention. The Mentors will then guide the proper government agencies as well as the presidential staff through the first stages of Consolidation.

FY08: Consolidation formally begins with the Passing of Judgement on all of the Earth's inhabitants and the selection of the proper council of humans to assist the Mentors in administration of the Final World Order. Via 21C Magazine

Most of us already know that you can mis-spell a word in the google search bar and not only discover the correct spelling, but also one can examine how many websites improperly spelled that word. Welp, get ready, cause now google.com can serve as a calculator. Yay..... (imagine the sounds of crickets and a bug zapper out in the woods)

But wait, it can do more than simple math! Here is a quote from google's "calculator info page":

To use Google's built-in calculator function, simply enter the expression you'd like evaluated in the search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button. The calculator can evaluate mathematical expressions involving basic arithmetic (5+2*2 or 2^20), more complicated math (sine(30 degrees) or e^(i pi)+1), units of measure and conversions (100 miles in kilometers or 160 pounds * 4000 feet in Calories), and physical constants (1 a.u./c or G*mass of earth/radius of earth^2). You can also experiment with other numbering systems, including hexadecimal and binary.

Another fun thing you can enter is: one ounce in grams and it tells ya "one ounce = 28.3495231 grams". How handy... (see above note for added sound effects)

During the 1994 Pink Floyd Division Bell tour, a self-described messenger (using the common Latin first name Publius) started posting to the Usenet group alt.music.pink-floyd through an anonymous contact service. The letters use the following subject line or some variation of it: ">}}}}}}}}} T H E M E S S A G E {{{{{{{{{". (The name Publius was also used as a pseudonym early in U.S. history by the writers of The Federalist Papers. John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton wrote under one name to promote discussion of an idea.) The posts continued on an irregular basis, with a mysterious tone and many ambiguous clues, inviting us to look at the new album with open minds, discuss it in the newsgroup, and solve some sort of enigma or puzzle in The Division Bell. Publius promised a unique, tangible prize.

The newsgroup was generally pretty annoyed by the posts, but on July 16, Publius told us to watch for a sign: flashing white lights, East Rutherford, New Jersey, July 18, at about 10:30 p.m. At the Pink Floyd show in N.J. that night, "ENIGMA PUBLIUS" was displayed from the foot of the stage by the lights they use during KT and ABITW. Then more people accepted that Publius was on the level and began to take the enigma more seriously, excitedly looking for clues. They believe they have found some.

The movie in question -DW

An anonymous California computer user went to court Thursday to challenge the recording industry's file-trading subpoenas, charging that they are unconstitutional and violate her right to privacy.

Hi. Here's all the Flaming Fire Bible stuff going on: We're having an installation this Saturday in Brooklyn; then Aug. 29 we'll be in Lincoln, Neb; Aug 30 and 31 we'll be in Chicago. AND Aug. 25-Sept. 1, our site administrator, Adam, will have an illustration tent set up at the Burning Man festival in Nevada. Hope you can make one of these events.
Details are below. Thanks

http://www.flamingfire.com

BROOKLYN
Sat., Aug 23, 8 pm to 11 pm, we're having a big musical party at Luxx, 256 Grand St., Williamsburg Brooklyn. We'll be performing all of
Isaiah's chapter 19 at 8:30 -- a story of Egyptian/Hebrew conflict & reconciliation -- with Brian Dewan narrating, and members from Dust
Dive, Your Team Ring, Foamula & Flaming Fire playing wall-to-wall samplers, while an image for every verse (1-25) will be projected and
manipulated by Kyle Lapidus & Tali Hinkus of Viduo. Also, there'll be musical performances by: Flaming Fire; and Chicago bands Foamula, Pinebender & Love of Everything. And a Bible Illustration kiosk will be set up.

LINCOLN, NEB.
We'll be playing music and have a Bible illustration kiosk at Duggan's Pub, 11th and K Streets, at 8 pm on Aug. 29.

CHICAGO
Aug. 30 at 7:30 pm, we'll be at Quimby's Books, 1854 W. North Ave.
Aug. 31 at 8:30 pm, we'll be at the Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western Ave., as part of the Labor Day Seasonal Social, which also features lots of music, a kissing booth run by crazy noise-rock chicks, and free haircuts

BLACK ROCK DESERT, NEVADA
Adam Mayer of the Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible will have a tent installation of the Bible project at the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock desert this year, Aug. 25- Sept. 1. Stop by, say hello, get a
glass of water, and draw a picture.

Fatima Bholat stepped into the summer sunshine, fresh from the darkened theater where she'd just seen "The Hulk." It was opening day, and the 16-year-old high school junior had rushed out with her younger brother to see director Ang Lee's moody take on the big green superhero.

Now she wanted to tell her friends all about it. She whipped out her silver-and-blue T-Mobile cell phone, pressed a button and did something that strikes terror into the hearts of studio executives:

She tapped out a message telling her friends exactly what she thought of the movie - and the verdict was brutal.

Fatima's pan was all her friends needed to convince them to stay away.

And they told their friends. Soon the chatter would end up in a girls Internet discussion group, where all the world could see what a few teenagers in Manhattan Beach thought about a movie.

Word of mouth - buzz - has long been an element in a film's success or failure. But rapid advances in technology, in the hands of an "American Idol" culture quick to express its vote-'em-off sentiments, has accelerated the pace of communication so much that Hollywood feels the reverberations at the box office almost immediately.

The most basic principle of a von Neumann machine is that programs and data can share memory as they are both just strings of bits. This is still the basis of the architecture of all commercial computers. These two concepts came together at the dawn of computer history and have tended to drift apart ever since. The COBOL programming language does not look anything like data. Object orientation brought process and data closer together but even then the storage of the two was totally different.

XML goes back to von Neumann because data and programs can both be stored in XML. In a sense XML goes further by storing input and presentation in the same format as well. To take just three examples, ebXML is data, BPEL4WS is program and XFORMS is presentation. This is philosophically and academically interesting but is it of any practical importance?

Jim Holt profiles the cosmology debate that divides scientists like Paul Davies, Martin Gardner, Andrei Linde and David K. Lewis: the search to prove the existence of parallel universes, multiverses and, possibly, counterfactual histories.

There's a strange visitor in the sky this month, a glowing orange star that is so bright even the full moon can't seem to quench its fire.

By now many people have seen it and correctly identified the visitor as the planet Mars. The realization only adds to the excitement.

Mars is visible now--spectacularly so-and as it approaches a historic rendezvous with Earth on August 27th.

Not since 59,537 B.C. has Mars looked so quite so bright.

~ Blogging towards the future - A Ubiquitous Environment Society ~
~ Everything about Ubiquitous & Pervasive Computing Technologies ~

Earth Station 5 Declares War Against The Motion Picture Association of America

In response to the email received today from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to Earthstation 5 for copyright violations for streaming FIRST RUN movies over the internet for FREE, this is our official response! Earthstation 5 is at war with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Record Association of America (RIAA), and to make our point very clear that their governing laws and policys have absolutely no meaning to us here in Palestine, we will continue to add even more movies for FREE.

Ever since I read Greg Bear's weird-ass book Blood Music back in the early 1990s, I've been pretty excited about nanotechnology. Bear imagines a future in which nanobots take over the world by rebuilding humans on a molecular level and turning them into raw materials for their bizarre, mystical new society, the noosphere.


Blood Music is great science fiction in every way: It contains a few key elements of science fact, and it toys with more universal themes. Human bodies, Bear suggests, are nothing more than a marvelous broth of independent bits that generally work together in harmony. But free a human cell from its sisters, and it will sprout little pseudopods and roam around on its own. There is nothing other than sloppy, wild evolution to keep us whole. No reason why supersmart nanothings couldn't deconstruct us cell by cell and build something even niftier than Homo sapiens.


Luddite pundit Bill McKibben seems to have bought into Bear's vision. In April he published a nonfiction book called Enough, in which he argues (among other things) that nanotechnology threatens us with dissolution as a species. He means that figuratively and literally. Too much tech stunts us as human beings, he argues, but nanotech could actually reduce us to the proverbial gray goo that haunts the nightmares of bioterror futurists and science fiction writers everywhere.

The trouble is that computer and video-game critics have never paid enough attention to gamers themselves, the people who are supposedly sitting glassy-eyed in front of their screens, soaking up harmful lessons taught by irresponsible, profit-hungry game companies. In an increasingly censorious legislative environment, where many lawmakers want to ban or restrict sales of violent games, this lack of understanding is worth pointing out.

What critics consistently miss is that gaming is very much a social and community activity. This is true every time two fifth-graders rush home from school to play "Zelda" together. But on a broader scale, gaming's socializing effects are even more evident at an event like QuakeCon or at any of the hundreds of smaller LAN (local area network) parties that spring up in suburban garages and rented hotel rooms around the world every weekend.

Gamers there play in teams, learning how to work together just as tightly as any football squad might. Many of the kids who play "Counter-Strike" or other shooting games into the wee hours of the morning wouldn't ever be voted "most popular" at any high school--but in these circles, they've found kindred spirits and a support network that might actually keep them from reacting more aggressively to the outside world.

Now retired after a 26-year career with the New Jersey State Police, Cole is leading a new group of current and former law-enforcement officials who are similarly disillusioned with the war on drugs. Called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, this nationwide organization takes as its premise that the war on drugs is, as Cole puts it, "a total and abject failure." Via AlterNet

Also see this site for more fed-up(pun intended) cops.

These things are great!! I only wish I could remember how to upload pictures! | Via K10K

Today sees the official launch of the International trailer for THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS.

QTVR - an unknown object
T’is the subject of this small project
We’ll help you along, give you a clue
Just to ensure you don’t go askew

Long ago, back in our history
There arouse a widespread mystery
For people got sick, dropping like flies
The cause of their ills - hard to surmise

Many years later, mystery solved
This poor sullied creature was absolved
But by the time an answer was found
Twenty-five million were in the ground

For in the end, t’was the small flea
Which was to blame, this black misery

"The purpose of this web site is to solicit public and science community suggestions for future high resolution images to be obtained by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC).

We are looking for excellent suggestions for pictures of areas on Mars that MOC has not previously imaged. Using this web site interface, you will indicate the location of the recommended MOC image, and you will describe, in detail, the purpose of the image. When your request is received, it will be evaluated by the Mars science staff at Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS), then put into a database for future acquisition by MOC. At some time in the future, if the MGS ground track passes over the site you suggested, and there are no pre-existing conflicts with other MOC images, the camera will be commanded to take the picture. Recent images suggested by the public will be posted on the MSSS web site once a month; if the image you suggested is among them, and if you registered using your email address, you will be notified by email." | Via The Cydonian Imperative

This is a collection of music by John Greschak (conveniently in written scores, RealAudio, and Midi), which is derived from various interesting mathematical objects.

You'll find the epic Platonic Dice, a work in progress based on, you guessed it, platonic dice. (Discordian alert: Note how many pieces this work will consist of.)

Not to be missed is Pentonimoes and The Tower of Hanoi.

How many times have we heard it said, "Oh, Lord, give me a sign!" Alas, too often the reply is vague and ambiguous: the phone rings at an opportune time, a feather falls from out of the blue, a water stain appears that resembles a religious image. We all want to know if God exists; maybe He just needs a reliable method to let us know He's here. | Via Blogdex

"BAGHDAD, August 20 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Casting new doubts on who really stands behind the bombing of the U.N. office in Baghdad and benefits from such an attack, a member of the U.S.-handpicked interim Governing Council said Wednesday, August 20, they had received intelligence on August 14 that a truck bombing was imminent in the capital said shared it with U.S. intelligence agents."

Sound familiar?

| Via IslamOnline.net

"All last week, during the grueling sandbox battles in my backyard between my GI Joes and the hideous armies of Grog, the GW Bush doll was missing. I thought it was lost for good. But then, after my GI Joes won the day and made the sandbox safe again, there the Bush doll was, front and center, looking splendid and unruffled in pristine army fatigues. Evidently it'd been playing dress-up all week with my sister's Ken doll but was right there to take the credit for the GI Joe's victory." | Via The Nation, Which is also worth reading on its own.

"Japanese researchers in robot technology are advocating a grand project, under which the government would spend 50 billion yen a year over three decades to develop a humanoid robot with the mental, physical and emotional capacity of a 5-year-old human. MORPH 3, a 38-cm-tall humanoid robot, tries to stand after being laid on its back during an experiment at the Chiba Institute of Technology in Narashino, Chiba Prefecture. The researchers believe the Atom Project, inspired by the popular robot animation series 'Tetsuwan Atom' by the late cartoonist Osamu Tezuka, would help promote scientific and technological advances in Japan, just like the U.S. Apollo Project, which not only succeeded in landing men on the moon but contributed to a broad range of technological breakthroughs." | Via GIZMODO

Yeah. There's this new meme floating around the 'net, in which one weblogger interviews another on the interviewees request. Anyhow, since I'm not one to break a meme (after all, my license plate says AYBABTU), here are the rules if you'd like to be interviewed by me:

If you want to participate, leave a comment saying "interview me."

I will respond by asking you five questions - each person's will be different.

You will update your journal with the answers to the questions.

You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.

When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Jason Ankeny
Aug 20, 2003
From Wireless Review's On the Air

Wireless has become a convenient scapegoat for lots of Chicken Little-types, fingered as the culprit behind everything from automobile accidents to harmful radiation. Now, Hollywood is faulting wireless text messaging for the failure of this summer's movie mega-bombs, effectively giving bad acting, poor screenwriting, inept direction and generally inane ideas a free pass in the process.

According to a story in the British newspaper The Independent, Hollywood has somehow managed to convince itself that the poor box office reception afforded to multi-million dollar turkeys like "The Hulk," "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" and "Gigli" is the result of teens who text their friends with harsh critiques the minute the movie lets out--sometimes from the comforts of their theater seats, no less. The evidence suggests that Tinseltown is onto something. Consider that five years ago, the average audience drop-off between a movie's premiere weekend and its second weekend was 40%; box office receipts this summer are off from one week to the next on average of 51%. In some cases, the decline has started immediately following opening night screenings, with crowds dwindling significantly by the next afternoon.

The phenomenon is yet another iteration of the Smart Mobs paradigm--i.e., people using wireless technology to coordinate collective action. No, we're not talking about political uprisings or anything truly profound here, but we are talking about people mobilizing their friends and families to effectively vote with their wallets in protest of bad movies. Where once it took at least a weekend for word-of-mouth to sink a film, moviegoers are no longer waiting to return to work or school on Monday morning to spread the word. Thanks to wireless, that new Nicolas Cage stinkbomb literally is gone in 60 seconds.

While Hollywood recognizes that the wireless masses now play a major role in the fortunes of movies, its frustration over the phenomenon seems to suggest a clear lack of understanding on how to turn the trend to their advantage. It starts with something Hollywood rarely if ever does anymore: Make movies people actually care about watching. It's no coincidence that the movies that belly-flopped so painfully this summer were also among the worst reviewed releases of the year. Conversely, it would stand to reason that entertaining, original films would be the recipients of the same kind of SMS buzz, with text messages singing their praises. Word-of-mouth works both ways, after all, and why should studios spend millions on splashy advertising campaigns when the opinions of regular folks are so much cheaper and so much more effective?

The power of that word-of-mouth is something that companies in all walks of industry, including wireless itself, should heed. Innovations like the Internet and text messaging have given consumers new opportunities to voice their opinions, and they're taking advantage. Make good movies, serve good food or deliver good wireless service, and people will spread the good word about you. But should you fail to live up to your potential, Generation Text is going to let you have it. And kids can be so cruel.

Archaeologists might have found Donner camp

Archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar might have pinpointed the site of the lower camp of the Donner Party about 30 miles west of Reno and might have found the evidence of cannibalism that has eluded researchers for 150 years.

Nothing can deflate a joke faster than the threat of a lawsuit.

In the case of parody website DontBuyMusic.com, a cease-and-desist notice forced the site to go offline last Friday.

The website, created by the online community Macteens, spoofed the BuyMusic.com website by using the same format as the original site but rewriting the text and redirecting all clicks to the Apple iTunes website. ITunes and BuyMusic.com are both online paid music services.

DontBuyMusic.com last week brought attention to the marked similarities between TV commercials for iTunes and BuyMusic (see the ads here and here).

Baby black holes gobbling hot gas in the cores of galaxies are more common today than they were ten billion years ago, a new census finds.

The discovery confirms that black-hole activity is alive and well in our cosmic backyard, rather than it being an exotic fossil of the time when galaxies first formed. It also hints that astrophysicists will need to account for the influence of black holes on modern galaxies' evolution.

Maybe they're desperately trying to be edgy. They're bleeding money and readers, and I guess the way to be noticed and get free publicity is by being an asshole. So as much as I want everyone to read the review to see how angry it is (Laura, honey, it's fiction -- cult fiction even -- it shouldn't make you this angry), I'm afraid of increasing their hits even a smidge. So if you read it and you're as baffled as me, write a letter to the editor. I think I'm going to have to as well.

I've been pulling links off the top of my head, searching the sTaRe database to make sure they haven't been posted before, and I have to say I'm surprised to see that Prescience didn't show up. Six volumes of this impressive online magazine are ready for your discovery, combining art, culture, science, psychedelics, and short fiction with a nod to Philip K. Dick.

'You want to change the tyres on your 2006 model Ford Prefect? Anything other than genuine Ford tyres -- with the genuine Ford ID chip -- will disable your car. Your Sony MP3-playing nasal hair trimmer will only work with genuine Sony batteries: don't even think about trying to make alternatives, because that'll make you a criminal. And no, you can't buy those jeans -- the RFID chip in the label says they're only for sale in America. By the way, the same RFID chips on the clothes you are allowed to buy may well be radiating all manner of things about your location: you're not allowed to find out for yourself, as possession of an unlicensed receiver is a criminal act.'

I first came across something called "dynamical systems" while I was at the University of California at Berkeley. But I hadn't paid much attention to them. I went through Berkeley very fast, and didn't have time to screw around. But when I got to Harvard for grad school, I bought René Thom's book Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, which had just come out in English. The best part of the book was the photos.

As seen on DRT and Chapel Perilous

Tonight at 11:59pm (PST) on KPFA Berkeley:

:::: NO OTHER RADIO NETWORK ::::

Tune into kpfa.org (for live internet stream)

Tonight's show features new music releases from around the Bay Area, as well as sounds from the British label Authorized Version and German label Selektion Records.

Since 1981, The No Other Radio Network has pioneered and provided a forum for underground, noise, electronic, industrial, psycho acoustic and many other genres of music, in addition to featuring live interviews and performance over the airwaves.

We welcome artists to send us their works.

Archived playlists from all ubuibi-hosted N.O.R. shows are available at ubuibi.

Just what are the ghost planes of Chicago?
No one's quite sure, but they're spooking pilots and air traffic controllers alike. Images of airplanes that either do no exist or are very far away are popping up on radar that controls traffic at O'Hare International Airport, according to reports.

Also see: Unexplained Sightings Met With Denial

Any other STARE-folk going to Burning Man this year? I don't know where I'm camping yet, but I'd love to meet any STARE readers or posters.

Also, anyone interested in guest editing Technoccult while I'm away?

To understand the man, Kofi Annan sent to represent the United Nations in Iraq, one has to look no further than his latest press conference on August 13. Sergio Vieira de Mello died today in the suicide bombing of the UN embassy in Baghdad, less than three weks before then end of his tenure.

During his appointment, de Mello was a hard critic of U.S. activities in Iraq, going as far as calling the Coalition "occupiers". His role as peace-maker and soft-spoken diplomat secured peace efforts in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, and Somalia.

For a glimpse in the incredible active and humorous mind of Sergio, check out this 2002 speech on Human Rights and World Civilizations.

If you help make me the next President of the United States, I'll give you a . . . HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS!!! That's right. Just vote for me in 2004 and I'll give you $100 million!

Even the least skeptical among you must now be viewing this absurd offer with suspicious eyes. After all, how could I even come up with all that money? I can't even raise the money I'm supposed to need to launch my much-vaunted Liberal News Network. On top of that, what proof would I have that you even voted for me?

Well, if this $100 million offer sounds ridiculous, you now have a good idea of how silly the basic plot premise of S.W.A.T. is.

Rob McGarvey is, in the lingo of the blackjack world, an advantage player. A card counter. To maximize his take, he keeps track of the cards as they're dealt, and tailors his bets based on the cards his system predicts will hit the felt next.

Card counting, of course, is nothing new. Math professor Ed Thorp scorched Vegas with his groundbreaking 1962 book, Beat the Dealer, that detailed winning card-counting strategies. It's been a pitched battle ever since, with counters and casinos each developing new systems to stay one step ahead of the other.


But to hear some tell it, the casinos' latest offensive may be its strongest yet against McGarvey and his peers. That's because of a new optical pattern recognition technology called MindPlay MP21, which is designed to automatically track and analyze the play and betting patterns of every gambler at a blackjack table in real time.

"The current state of technology in gaming had fallen way behind other industries," said MindPlay president and CEO Richard Soltys. "They're very slow to move forward. (Now) there's nothing players can do that MindPlay can't detect."

"While flying over Lake Michigan in 1981, TWA Captain Phil Schultz saw a 'large, round, silver metal object' with dark portholes equally spaced around the circumference, which 'descended into the atmosphere from above,' according to his hand-written report. Schultz and his first officer braced themselves for a mid-air collision; the object suddenly made a high speed turn and departed.

Veteran Japan Airlines 747 Captain Kenju Terauchi reported a spectacular, prolonged encounter over Alaska in 1986. 'Most unexpectedly two space ships stopped in front of our face, shooting off lights,' he said. 'The inside cockpit shined brightly and I felt warm in the face.' Despite the FAA determination that he and his crew were stable, competent and professional, he was grounded for speaking out.

In 1997, a Swissair Boeing 747 over Long Island just missed a glowing white, cylindrical object speeding towards the plane. According to a FAA Civil Aviation Security Office memorandum, Pilot Philip Bobet said that 'if the object was any lower, it may have hit the right wing.'" | Via UFOCity

ALL of Georgia was without power today, and officials in the impoverished former Soviet republic were struggling to determine the cause of the blackout.

Electricity went off at 7 am in the entire country of 4.4 million people. Periodic blackouts are common here, but it was unusual for the whole country to be affected at once.

"We are trying to figure out what's happening,'' said Medeya Kakhadze, an aide to Fuel and Energy Minister Mamuka Nikolaishvili. "We know only that an emergency shutdown occurred.'' | Via Darkblog

A new Internet worm emerged today that is designed to seek out and fix any computer that remains vulnerable to "Blaster," the worm that attacked more than 500,000 computers worldwide last week.

The new worm scours the Internet for computers already infected with Blaster and deletes the "bad" worm, according to two anti-virus software vendors. The worm then fixes the computers with one of eight software patches developed by Microsoft Corp, and it uses infected computers as a base for searching the Internet for other vulnerable systems. Blaster and the new worm both target vulnerabilities in recent versions of Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0.

To homeless children sleeping on the street, neon is as comforting as a night-light. Angels love colored light too. After nightfall in downtown Miami, they nibble on the NationsBank building -- always drenched in a green, pink, or golden glow. 'They eat light so they can fly,' eight-year-old Andre tells the children sitting on the patio of the Salvation Army's emergency shelter on NW 38th Street. Andre explains that the angels hide in the building while they study battle maps. 'There's a lot of killing going on in Miami,' he says. 'You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories.' The small group listens intently to these tales told by homeless children in shelters. | via The Journal of Speculative Diseases

Hate has a new home, and it's called the Internet. The gospel of hate is being projected worldwide, more cheaply and effectively than ever before. The documentary Hate.Com: Extremists on the Internet examines this growing movement and those who preach hate online.

Eye-opening and disturbing, HATE.COM: Extremists on the Internet examines the growing use of the Internet as a primary platform by which preachers of hate - specifically white-supremacist groups - reach out to their small but dangerous constituency.

Actress and political activist Janeane Garofalo joins 'Crossfire' as a special guest co-host from the left this week. Be sure to tune in for the heated debate.

I would be so willing to say, "I'm sorry". I hope to God that I can be made a buffoon of, that people will say, "You were wrong. You were a fatalist". And I will go to the White House on my knees on cut glass and say, "Hey, you and Thomas Friedman were right… I shouldn't have doubted you"…

"During the first week in August, 2003, Al Bielek predicted the failure of a major power grid sometime in mid-August in the United States. Bielek made this prediction on the nationally syndicated Coast to Coast radio show which features themes associated with the unexplained, paranormal and earth changes."

Right On, Unka Al!

The US military is developing a weapon based on peer-to-peer technology to take out mobile phone communications, the US Department of Defence has revealed. The system also has the capability to covertly monitor cellular traffic. | Via DRT

The Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration continues in its attempts to set up defacto internal border controls at our nation's airports.

The latest information on this, as well as information on the collaboration of Galileo, a subsidiary of Cendant, Inc. in this test of the CAPPS II system can be found at: http://www.dontspyon.us | Via Contact Form

Word thru the grapevine is that Christopher Hyatt's upcoming second edition of The Psychopath's Bible has already been banned by a few so-called "spiritual and occult" organizations. We find this amazing, since it hasn't even been completed in it's entirety. How can you advocate the banning of a book, especially one you haven't even read yet? This could very well be the first time in history that a book has been banned, before it's even been completed. Check back here for more news on this as it develops.

A futuristic looking spacecraft has taken a crucial step towards becoming the first privately funded mission to carry a crew into space by completing its first solo test flight.

SpaceShipOne is carried into the air attached to an even more exotic-looking twin turbojet airplane, called White Knight. In the test flight, the smaller craft was detached from its mother ship 14,300 metres above the Mohave Desert, while travelling at 194 kilometres per hour. SS1 glided back without power to an air base in the desert, where its pilot made a safe landing. Scaled Composites, the Californian company behind the spacecraft, says SS1 performed precisely as expected during the test. The test pilot had previously only practised flying the craft using a ground-based simulator.

In Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why.

No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about that.

The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend. | Via smartmobs

The lamps are going out all over the universe. Astronomers have found that not enough bright young stars are emerging to take the place of the old stars burning out, so, in the ultimate retirement crisis, the cosmos is simply fading away.
And we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime - by the time our swollen sun is expected to swallow the Earth in the dim and distant future, the light from the stars could be down to around half of what it is now. In time, there will be no stars left shining at all.
'The age of star formation is drawing to a close,' said the appropriately named Professor Alan Heavens from Edinburgh University's Institute for Astronomy, who helped to carry out the new study.

The first game-playing DNA computer has been revealed - an enzyme-powered tic-tac-toe machine that cannot be beaten.

The human player makes his or her moves by dropping DNA into 3 by 3 square of wells that make up the board. The device then uses a complex mixture of DNA enzymes to determine where it should place its nought or cross, and signals its move with a green glow.

The device, dubbed MAYA, was developed by Milan Stojanovic, at Columbia University in New York, and Darko Stefanovic, at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Kobi Benenson, who works on other DNA approaches at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, says the work demonstrates the most complex use of molecules as logic gates to date, and "represents a significant advance in DNA computing."

"The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has granted a national Certificate of Authorization (COA) to the U.S. Air Force to routinely fly the Northrop Grumman-produced RQ-4 Global Hawk aerial reconnaissance system in national airspace. The certificate is the first national COA granted for an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) system. The high altitude, long endurance Global Hawk currently flies in restricted airspace during take-off and landing before quickly ascending to altitudes high above commercial air traffic. The COA paves the way for it to support homeland defense missions in national airspace."

Did you know these vehicles are controlled by SkyNET?

While few pundits have taken porn-goddess "Mary Carey" Cook's run for governor of California seriously, some still aren't sure if she's serious or if it's one brilliantly planned publicity stunt. In any case, Carey makes one thing perfectly clear - she has a bone to pick with how Gov. Gray Davis has run the state.

"I don't think Davis has done a good job and we need someone who is new to come in - someone with fresh ideas. Prices are high everywhere, unemployment is high..."

And don't forget that California's exorbitantly large deficit is much, much larger than Carey's massive 36DD boobs, although, there are probably more men interested in her boobs than the size of California's budget deficit. | Via Blogcritics

"If current trends continue, it means that a black male in the United States would have about a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime. For a Hispanic male, it's 1 in 6; for a white male, 1 in 17.

The numbers come after many years of get-tough policies - and years when violent-crime rates have generally fallen. But to some observers, they point to broader failures in US society, particularly in regard to racial minorities and others who are economically disadvantaged.

'These new numbers are shocking enough, but what we don't see are the ripple effects of what they mean: For the generation of black children today, there's almost an inevitable aspect of going to prison,' says Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington.
'We have the wealthiest society in human history, and we maintain the highest level of imprisonment. It's striking what that says about our approach to social problems and inequality.'"

By most criteria we haven't got an explanation-space, let alone an explanation, for why anything exists. We can't imagine what an answer to the question would even look like. It's apt to seem so astonishing that there should be anything at all that everything else about the world can - if one is of a philosophical cast of mind - appear as trivial detail in comparison. It is not clear whether this fundamental mystery of existence will ever be solved. For we don't know how, and with what conceptual resources, we might begin to start looking for an answer. We don't even know here what the amorphous notion of an "explanation" would amount to.

Misplaced optimism that a solution can be found isn't uncommon. Sometimes it derives from verbal manoeuvres aimed at damning the question as meaningless. Sometimes it derives from a confusion with deep but conceptually distinct puzzles such as: why there is [currently] a preponderance of matter over antimatter? Or what if anything came "before" the Big Bang? The latter problem at least "feels" deeper than the origin of matter. Yet it still doesn't address the fundamental enigma. Even if a Hawking-inspired "no boundaries" conjecture is correct, and there is no "before", the central problem of why anything exists remains as intractable as ever.

You need to divert the course of a space colony in order to save your home. Someone put a lot of time and love into this, and it shows.

Here's a link to Amanita Design's main site http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/~xsvobod4/amanita/. The navigation is on the mushroom.

Every now and then, someone sends out an e-mail request for a
Dimensional Warp Generator, whatever that is. Somewhere along the line,
someone else sent an affirmative response, which suggested that the Warp
Generator would be ready for pickup on July 28, 2003 at 3:00 PM in
Woburn, MA.

(2003-08-14) -- A widespread electrical power outage affected some 20 million North Americans tonight, but none were so hard hit as writers of so-called weblogs, a kind of online journal.

With no electricity, many "bloggers" were forced to post their latest musings to the Internet by candlelight. Some resorted to using old-fashioned kerosene-fueled personal computers. Others wrote their thoughts out longhand on paper then ran through the streets reading them aloud to the passing crowds of stranded commuters.

In 1993 Dave Eggers founded the now defunct Gen-X sneer of Might magazine. After a brief stint at Esquire, Eggers returned in 1998 to the avant-garde of the magazine world with the eccentric banality of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (www.mcsweeneys.net). Eggers' first book, the bestselling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was published in February of this year by Simon & Schuster to rave reviews. The following is an email transcript of a Q&A exchange with Eggers in which he is prompted to "rant" by the mention of the phrase "selling out."

Members of the growing Friendster backlash have diverse interests including introversion, wry humor, graphic design, sexually transmitted diseases, and journalism.

Wow. Could this report on American Splendor be any less interesting? And as a sidenote: I wasn't sure Kurt Loder was still around. I figured maybe he had gone to live on a mountain or something. He's still here, still desperately trying to prove his relevance as his review shows.

Then I spotted Harvey Pekar himself. Harvey used to occasionally drop by the old MTV offices on 57th and Broadway, and I remembered him as being ... very real. Or maybe abrasive is the word. A true misanthrope. Wandering through the party, he looked as sour as ever, so I decided not to approach him. My companion did, though. She told me she walked up to him and said, 'Harvey! I'm here with Kurt Loder! MTV?' Then she came back to report Harvey's response: 'You're here with who?' She said he sounded angry. I have to admit I was hurt to hear this.

So I just found out Harvey Pekar has a blog.

We received this:
WE live in the Cleveland water area, and were told to boil the water. The water is very questionable, and I'm not sure it should be used for any reason. Is there anyone of your readers that could do a analysis of this water?
thanks worried in Cleveland

Welcome to the 56th issue of Ten Thousand Monkeys. Who knew we could keep it going this long without going totally insane. I mean, ok, granted, we are partially insane, I'll be the first to admit that, but totally, no siree bob! Well, I mean Monkey Compline does tend to have this Napoleonic thing going on, and I've got that whole multiple personality issue, and Quintus, well Quintus is still Quintus. But, none of that has seemed to effect our productivity any, so, well, maybe sanity isn't quite what it's cracked up to be.

And strangely we still seem to attract other partially insane monkeys to the fold. Go figure.