Crossing the bridge

Probably last Scientology post for a while, but below is a good 2hr interview with Jason Beghe on his involvement and disillusionment with the cult. Like all other related materials, it's full of creepy thrills, and he's a great speaker on the topic.

Via XenuTV.

The golden age of madness

I've a free ticket to 2012 and the movie is only a 10 minute walk from my house, but I'm staying in and getting all my sci-fi / conspiracy / madness thrills from this 3hr Scientology summit from 2007 [links to Google video]. This is when Miscavige says "yeah, we've been doing it wrong all these years, but now we have the right tech." And the roomful of impoverished believers who've spent all their $$$ trying to master space / time eat it up and ask for more.

I can't enough of this crazy.

Mandelbulb

A page with lots of images from a preliminary investigation into a 3D rendering of the Mandelbrot set. Beauty abounds.

It was twenty years ago today

Argentine ant

Wonderful theory. Wrong species.

Edward O. Wilson on Marxism [quoted in The Blank Slate, p296]

No discipline, just problems

I.

[Karl Popper] wrote there there are no disciplines, just problems. So I always knew what my problem was: chance and misunderstanding of knowledge - I've had it for as long as I can remember. But I am still looking for a discipline.

Interview with Nassim Taleb

The quote about appeals for the obvious omnivorous idea, but also because you can extract the phrase no discipline, just problems, which works for me.

II.

I stayed out drinking on Wednesday night until the sun came up. I was drinking with a guy in one bar and we ended up at another place sharing a table with two women, the hours between 3am and 6 passing in a blur. Whatever happened was of no significance, but it took a long time just the same.

When the sun came up I stumbled out and rode my bicycle home. The streets were full of people starting their days, and if they saw me go by and gave it any thought they probably imagined I was a healthy early riser too, on my way to tai chi in a park.

It was a normal night for Osamu Dazai.

III.

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This is how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, p125

This is the kind of book that I'd have been crazy for as a teenager, Notes from the Underground with more sex and drink. It begins: Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. It reminds that I should've died, been badly injured, arrested, had a career or become a father several times over by now, but somehow I escaped each time and ought to be more grateful for what I half chose and half fell into, one year without a boss on December 1st.

I don't think dissipation's so romantic now, and don't aspire to getting wasted every night on a rockstar bohemian trip. I want to be as healthy as possible, so that sometimes I can do unhealthy things.

Men's nature's are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart.

Confucius

Mishima once met Dazai, and they had a confrontation. The gist of it was that Mishima (the younger man), although admiring Dazai's work, was disgusted by the weakness that he showed in throwing himself into drink, drugs and women, the general lack of masculine discipline. His friend and biographer suggests that he was really shocked by recognizing his own desire for death, quoting this passage from Mishima's account of their meeting:

Naturally I recognize Dazai's rare talent; and yet I know of no other writer who from my very first contract with him filled me with so violent a physiological revulsion. Possibly....this was due to my immediate sense that Dazai was a writer at pains to expose precisely that which I most wanted to conceal in myself.

Jonathan Nathan, Mishima, p93

Dazai killed himself at 38, while Mishima did so at 45, two paths to the same end.

Related posts:
Mishima's head on a plate [incl. picture]
All posts tagged Mishima Yukio

Breaking the clouds

Alejandro Selkirk Island, South Pacific Ocean

This small member of the Juan Fernandez Islands off the coast of Chile measure just under a mile across. But its 5,000 feet of elevation is high enough to reach the layer of stratocumulus clouds pictured above. The result is a type of flow known as a von Karmen vortex street. This striking, curly pattern of eddies can also be seen in clouds, and fluids or air moving past rounded objects such as an airplane wing. This image was taken by the Landsat 7 satellite in 1999.

Wired: Islands Seen from Space

It can only be a matter of time

Rafael Silks, above and below

Another in a series of superficially depressing posts about giving up dreams that depend on artistic success in terms of recognition + career in the cause of overall liberation and improved mental health.

Your Inner Whining Artist (IWA) is the part of you that tells you you’re a genius waiting to be discovered. If only the big bad world would sit up and recognize your talent, the IWA tells you, all your problems would be over. Audiences and critics would bow at your feet, agents would queue up to represent you, and all the people who’d ever rejected your work would be gorging themselves on humble pie. You just need to get your break, to be discovered. It can only be a matter of time …

Lose Touch with Your Inner Whining Artist

The oldest, deepest dreams may be the most distant and inapplicable now, in spirit and in practice. It's good to keep shedding skins.

Related posts:
A millionaire artist
Throw in the Towel
The myth of 1,000 true fans

My idea of fun

I'm only really interested in being interested.

Will Self: My Other Life

Fun for amateurs

I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old.

Hunter S. Thompson

Sometime in the summer I had two women ask for test prep classes, one for TOEFL and the other for IELTS. On a whim I said I'd teach former for free and I charged the latter my normal fee. Both women were [are] attractive and smart, although the TOEFL one turned out to be more motivated and hard-working, but that may've been because she had to earn her class with homework.

What happened happened very quickly - I realized that I enjoyed teaching the free class far more than the paid one. Doing it for free was fun, there was no pressure, and I was happy when things went over time. It was an interesting experiment, which I continue now by doing some work for free if the person seems like they'll make it worthwhile. Otherwise, I take the money and do the work, but this is a tiny part of my income compared to the editing + reading, hardly enough to keep me in beer. I'd rather keep teaching as a hobby than a living.

Anyway, Isabella, the student in question, is taking her TOEFL this weekend, so an online thanks for the interesting classes and a wish of good luck for Sunday.

Patterns emerging from granular matter

Patterns emerge from a rotating tube filled with colored balls of different sizes. Very cool that there are still mysterious things happening with simple objects at the macroscopic scale.

It's just a coincidence, because they used white and orange balls in the video, but it reminded me of the Turing patterns [below] in this post [which is mostly Rudy Rucker].


I've been sick a few days and even slower / more stupid than usual, sweating heavily and dragging myself through dull files. But today the recovery is taking hold, and with the gathering strength other patterns are also emerging in my life, but that's all stuff for another time.

More from Wired on the above

A millionaire artist

hugh macleod, read the post

A post a little while back that was just a link to a piece by someone else called Throw in the Towel, about when to give up your dream of being a screenwriter, although it applies well to various other [but by no means all, or even the majority of] creative pursuits with the potential to become paying gigs.

A similar article from another, more hopeful angle, that runs through all the ways to lose again and notes that you can still find yourself if you're doing it for pleasure rather than success - i.e., don't quit the day job.

Hugh MacLeod, who runs a wine business and draws on business cards, has written 40 ideas on how to become more creative. Here's the bullet points for the first 10:

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you sud­denly being “dis­co­ve­red” by some big shot, your plan will pro­bably fail.

5. You are res­pon­si­ble for your own expe­rience.

6. Ever­yone is born crea­tive; ever­yone is given a box of cra­yons in kin­der­gar­ten.

7. Keep your day job.

8. Com­pa­nies that squelch crea­ti­vity can no lon­ger com­pete with com­pa­nies that cham­pion crea­ti­vity.

9. Every­body has their own pri­vate Mount Eve­rest they were put on this earth to climb.

10. The more talen­ted some­body is, the less they need the props.

A lot more here [actually 25% of the full book].

Dominance, Politics, and Physiology

monkey trouble

Via Boing Boing:

Background
Political elections are dominance competitions. When men win a dominance competition, their testosterone levels rise or remain stable to resist a circadian decline; and when they lose, their testosterone levels fall. However, it is unknown whether this pattern of testosterone change extends beyond interpersonal competitions to the vicarious experience of winning or losing in the context of political elections. Women's testosterone responses to dominance competition outcomes are understudied, and to date, a clear pattern of testosterone changes in response to winning and losing dominance competitions has not emerged.

Methodology/Principal Findings
The present study investigated voters' testosterone responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election. 183 participants provided multiple saliva samples before and after the winner was announced on Election Night. The results show that male Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome testosterone levels, whereas testosterone levels dropped in male John McCain and Robert Barr voters (losers). There were no significant effects in female voters.

Conclusions/Significance
The findings indicate that male voters exhibit biological responses to the realignment of a country's dominance hierarchy as if they participated in an interpersonal dominance contest.

Dominance, Politics, and Physiology: Voters' Testosterone Changes on the Night of the 2008 United States Presidential Election [full paper]

Another post like this

I've got to stop starting drinking so early that by the time others show up I'm a mad dog full of bullshit and misplaced enthusiasms, wrong about almost everything. But when a void opens up it's hard not rush in there headfirst and reckless, because the movement is fun, and I like the taste of beer.

Still, it'd be great not to feel the need to write a post like this every few weeks.

Waves trapped in maze-like grooves

The icons depict the shape of the energy-trapping ridges on the disc at the center and the edges - via arXiv.org

It's not really a pocket black hole, despite the headlines- it doesn't attract mass, and when it says light in the following quote what it really means is microwave frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, not actual visible light:

....this simple metal disc uses the geometry of 60 concentric rings of meta-materials to lock up light for good. The meta-material "resonators" that make up the rings affect the magnetic properties of passing light, bending the beams into the center of the disc, and trapping them in the etched maze-like grooves.

PopSci

It is made of 60 annular strips of so-called "meta-materials", which have previously been used to make invisibility cloaks. Each strip takes the form of a circuit board etched with intricate structures whose characteristics change progressively from one strip to the next, so that the permittivity varies smoothly. The outer 40 strips make up the shell and the inner 20 strips make up the absorber.
...
Fabricating a device that captures optical wavelengths in the same way will not be easy, as visible light has a wavelength orders of magnitude smaller than that of microwave radiation. This will require the etched structures to be correspondingly smaller

Cui is confident that they can do it. "I expect that our demonstration of the optical black hole will be available by the end of 2009," he says.

Such a device could be used to harvest solar energy in places where the light is too diffuse for mirrors to concentrate it onto a solar cell. An optical black hole would suck it all in and direct it at a solar cell sitting at the core. "If that works, you will no longer require these huge parabolic mirrors to collect light," says Evgenii Narimanov [who, with Alexander Kildishev, both of Purdue University, came up with the idea behind the design].

New Scientist

It was made in China and looks like an old coin, nothing special, but to someone like me, who doesn't quite get the device or it's implications, it's full of ancient cool. Exactly what you'd want from a piece of alien tech.

Our partner in death

Manuel Manilla via the British Museum

As AEG president Randy Phillips said after [Michael] Jackson's death: "He was our partner in life and now he's our partner in death."

The Guardian

Sex in time

So imagine the edge of a huge lake, where, for whatever reason, the original community of animals tended to move clockwise. Let's say there's a hill that ends in sharp drop just where the dark gray meets the bright white line, above. So, we have a species breeding at the bright white spot, and as it moves around the lake small, local changes occur. Longer / shorter legs, variations in coloration, and so on, but all [obviously] just a slight genetic difference on average from the animals next door. At every point in the circle, a community is basically indistinguishable from its immediate neighbors, and any individual could belong to either of its neighboring groups. Interbreeding is not a problem, and can extend in both directions some way beyond the neighbors. In practical terms, for creatures of a small size and with a lake of a large size - interbreeding occurs without limits.

But stepping back and looking at the image as a whole, by the time the circle is complete the last two neighboring communities, on either side of the hill / cliff, are quite distinct - different species, despite the fact they are connected by an unbroken chain of communities who can happily mix and breed with their neighbors. This is why the idea of 'species' is not as simple as it seems, either at a point in time, or, more to my purpose, over a very long period of time

My purpose is that if all the 'species' ever extant where brought back to life there could be one unbroken chain of fucking going right back to the first creatures that invented sex. I don't know what to do with this idea, but it seems to be a passion killer.

Reduced labor costs and improved productivity

Great video, part 1, of ABB robots doing precision tricks with soda cans. You see them doing 'human things' at ridiculous speeds.



Some time later, the same test, but with three robots rather than two.



ABB have a lot of great looking machines to replace human labor, all of which are very reliable and are ideal for operating in confined spaces and dangerous conditions. I like the pancake stacker, below, but there are many more to see if interested. Sooner or later the different strands of robots are going to become more integrated, and then things'll get really interesting.

Jamming skin enabled locomotion

No robot posts in a while.

Here's one called the first steps of a robot based on jamming skin enabled locomotion, with the tech clearly explained. It's a flexible shape-shifting robot.



A few more details / links here.

Traces of thought

A computer simulation of the upper layer of a rat brain neocortical column. Dr. Pablo de Heras Ciechomski/Visualbiotech

These images, and their captions, come from an article introducing a project to simulate part of a rat's brain, to be scaled up to a whole brain and later put into a robot with legs. Excerpts below, full link at the bottom.

In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows.
...
This is Blue Brain. The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind.
...
The first phase of the project—“the feasibility phase”—is coming to a close. The skeptics, for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them.
...
In fact, the model is so successful that its biggest restrictions are now technological. “We have already shown that the model can scale up,” Markram says. “What is holding us back now are the computers.” The numbers speak for themselves. Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That’s about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers.
...
“There’s no reason why you can’t get inside Blue Brain,” Markram says. “Once we can model a brain, we should be able to model what every brain makes. We should be able to experience the experiences of another mind.”
...
“There is nothing inherently mysterious about the mind or anything it makes,” Markram says. “Consciousness is just a massive amount of information being exchanged by trillions of brain cells. If you can precisely model that information, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to generate a conscious mind.”

Full article at seedmagazine.com

An entire neocortical column lights up with electrical activity. Modeled on a two-week-old rodent brain, this 0.5 mm by 2 mm slice is the basic computational unit of the brain and contains about 10,000 neurons. Visualbiotech.

Related post: Other substrates

You could have been quite another

mogi by joi, on flickr

Ken Mogi is a brain scientist and writer whose stated aim is to solve the mind-body problem. He's not that famous outside of Japan, but very famous inside, with many popular books and TV appearances. My wife loves him.

This year he began to blog regularly in English, and his English has improved a lot. I like his blog because the entries are short and often there are small mistakes or strange uses, but they don't obscure the meaning. The real talent lies in saying a difficult thing in a simple way.

I usually take a morning stroll to a convenience store nearby, and pick up some morning goods. For the last couple of days, I have walked on to the park, and dashed up the hill that flanks the woods.

It is just a little deviation, which makes all the difference. In life, you turn 90 degrees and run from your path of everyday, and then you discover a new scenery.

It is not that difficult. All you have to do is to identify an unsearched domain. And then you delve into it. Even for a very brief time.

Within a moment the storm of contingency would rage. The conviction that you are here for no reason. You taste the throbbing sensation of knowing you could have been quite another, while loving and embracing the here and now.

Ken Mogi, Deviation

This is also the thrill of being a dilettante – no real deep knowledge of anything, but a vast field of shallowness that’s able to warp at many points and achieve connection and communion – an interesting kind of ignorance, the best that I can hope for.

Out of my head on percodan and hate

Reading Nick Tosches' Dean Martin biography. I can't believe that Jerry Lewis is still alive. I'd love to ask him some questions.

A popular idea about Buddy Love [see clip above] is that he was Lewis' take on Martin - but far more credible to me (who knows almost nothing about it) is an idea I've read in a few places that Buddy = Jerry 'in real life', off stage, turned off and taken off the monkey suit.

Devil on a leash

david hockney, rainy night on bridlington promenade
David Hockney's iPhone Passion

Alcohol sedates the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain which decides if something is a good idea or not. This effect seems to be particularly pronounced in me, not aided by the fact that even when sober I have some of the worst ideas out there.

But this is good: a free eight-song preview download of Tom Waits' upcoming live album, Glitter & Doom.

Good trip

air - sing sang sung [HD video won't embed, but much better, here]

Team DNA

Image of a fractal globule by Leonid A. Mirny and Maxim Imakaev

"We've long known that on a small scale, DNA is a double helix," says co-first author Erez Lieberman-Aiden, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology and a researcher at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and in the laboratory of Eric Lander at the Broad Institute. "But if the double helix didn't fold further, the genome in each cell would be two meters long. Scientists have not really understood how the double helix folds to fit into the nucleus of a human cell, which is only about a hundredth of a millimeter in diameter. This new approach enabled us to probe exactly that question."

3-D Structure Of Human Genome: Fractal Globule Architecture Packs Two Meters Of DNA Into Each Cell, ScienceDaily

Life is awesome.

Other substrates

Order-3 heptakis heptagonal tiling by Claudio Rocchini

When and only when such a loop arises in the brain or in any other substrate, is a person - a unique new "I" - brought into being. Moreover, the more self-referentially rich such a loop is, the more conscious is the self to which it gives rise. Yes, shocking though this might sound, consciousness is not an on/off phenomenon, but admits of degrees, grades, shades. To put it more bluntly, there are bigger souls and smaller souls.

Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, P-6,