evitablefate:

Adam Curtis (in an interview with The Register)

At a time when there isn’t anything to give you confidence beyond yourself - you live in the “empire of the self” - then it is inevitable that you will seek those like you, because it will give you a sense of collective purpose. It will give you a sense of collective security.

And that’s exactly what the internet is about - “If you like this book, others before you have bought these books…” And it works to create those little circles. All those little radio stations which tell you, “If you played this, other people have played this…”

On the internet, you’re constantly monitoring other people’s choices to see what those people who you think are like you do, and they say, “OK I’ll do that to be like that”. And what that leads to, again, is Balkanisation.

And it’s what advertisers rather like, because it gives them a definition.

The Century of the Self, parts 1 - 4

two new re-released papers from the great Vallee:

• on the probabiliity of extraterrestrials
• the dynamics of long term growth

Like Joe Stack and Amy Bishop, J.Patrick Bedell’s story goes deep into the weird. After Coleman’s mention of Bedell’s reading habits and interests he goes on to make the very important note of the ridiculous politicizing and right wing co-option of the shootings:

• Wikipedia appears to have already taken down Bedell’s self-authored page; however Bedell’s web footprints are being gathered by some rightwing bloggers who are trying to tie Bedell’s actions to a bizarre brand, in their thoughts, of “liberal” mindset (e.g. here, here, and here).

Settled: Dinosaurs done in by asteroid

• What killed off the dinosaurs?
• Thirty years ago, UC Berkeley geologist Walter Alvarez offered his revolutionary answer to that question and incited one of the liveliest controversies in modern science.
• Now, an international team of scientists says today the issue is settled: Alvarez was right.
• In 1980, Alvarez and his colleagues at Berkeley theorized that a monstrous asteroid 10 miles wide slammed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula about 65 million years ago and dug a crater 60 miles wide and 15 miles deep. The impact sent up a huge cloud of ash, soot, pulverized rock and sulfurous steam that darkened the skies for years like a nuclear winter, dooming more than half the world’s life on land and in the oceans - microorganisms, plants and animals.
• The dinosaurs, those iconic beasts that had ruled the world for 160 million years, also vanished in that long-lasting cataclysm, the Alvarez team maintained.

Now, what will kill off the humans?

Did a coronal mass ejection cause the Chile earthquake? | Technoccult

Above: image of the coronal mass ejection on February 26th, 2010 from NASA

Van’s Hardware Journal points out that the 2010 Chile earthquake was preceded by a Coronal mass ejection.

(via Fadereu)

Space.com’s FAQ states “The question of a solar disturbance/magnetic field change related to earthquakes has been thoroughly investigated and found to be unproven,” and cites the conclusions of a 1996 conference on the subject.

However, Russian and Chinese scientists continue to study the possibility of a connection.

As you’ve probably already heard, this earthquake altered the axis of the earth. So, if it IS true that this earthquake was caused by the sun (and I’m not saying that it was), that means that the sun actually caused a change in the earth’s axis.

The FederalJack Free Ebooks Archive.

Declassified Federal Docs, FOIA Requests, Fiction and Non-Fiction Books, Survival Manuals and more.

Stock up, 2010 is going to be a bumpy ride.

• Dr. David Lewis Anderson has entered the public arena to widely disclose the existence of nothing less than time control and related technologies (including a time reactor that taps into the “free” energy created by the earth’s frame-dragging through space time).  This may be the most powerful technological development humanity has so far constructed.  He and other groups around the world have been perfecting these technologies for some years now.  An international Time Race has been secretly underway.  Public awareness of such technologies, as well as the governmental, military, and corporate interest in exploiting them, may be the most important issue we deal with as a species since the discovery of atomic power.  Though this might sound like science fiction to most people, on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell, Dr. Anderson has assured the public that it isn’t.

UHM…wha?

Different Life Forms in Front of Us: Scientists Predict the Possibility of a Shadow Biosphere

The possibility of strange forms of alien life seems to have just got a whole lot closer to home. Astrobiologists from Arizona State University, Florida, UC Boulder, NASA, Harvard and Australia have recently theorized about a “shadow biosphere” – a biosphere within a biosphere where alternative biochemistry may be thriving in a way that we haven’t yet thought to examine. Such “weird life” may have had, for hundreds of millions of years, their own ecologies right here in our own backyard.  Indeed, like Dark Energy and neutrinos, “weird life” may be all around us even now, only in a non-obvious way. Some astrobiologists are now suggesting that “weird life” is just as likely to be found here on Earth as it is in the Martian regolith, the seas of Europa , or certainly the complex bio-hadronistry on the surface of a neutron star.

I have included a link to their full article here: Davies_etal_Astrobio2009.pdf

Now, while I think that shadow organisms and shadow biospheres are certainly cool enough to blog about, please allow me to take the logical next step by citing yet another intriguing astrobiology paper that came out of the Santa Fe Institute. Published nearly a decade ago in an astrobiology related Nature commentary article titled, “Where are the dolphins?” scientists Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart realizedblackbodySETI for example) we will likely mistake it for being just a regular old hot rock! (and showed mathematically that it’s already happening here on Earth) that as a civilization advances they begin to use the available electromagnetic spectrum for communication more fully and efficiently until ultimately their radiative emissions are indistinguishable from radiation.  In other words, when we look out into space with telescopes to search for signs of alien life  ( So either three things must be true to find life through a telescope: 1. The civilization is at a very precise moment in its development,2. The civilization wants to be found and so sets aside some broadcast space for a message, 3. We know their decompression algorithm and what frequency band to apply it to.

It’s this last possibility that relates to the shadow biosphere in a philosophical sense. Unless we know how to interpret the signs of such life, we may not be able to distinguish it from the natural background.

• Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.
• That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.
• Crete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning that the toolmakers must have arrived by boat. So this seems to push the history of Mediterranean voyaging back more than 100,000 years, specialists in Stone Age archaeology say. Previous artifact discoveries had shown people reaching Cyprus, a few other Greek islands and possibly Sardinia no earlier than 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
• The oldest established early marine travel anywhere was the sea-crossing migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens to Australia, beginning about 60,000 years ago. There is also a suggestive trickle of evidence, notably the skeletons and artifacts on the Indonesian island of Flores, of more ancient hominids making their way by water to new habitats.
• Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch, they conceded, but the tools resemble artifacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean, which originated with prehuman populations in Africa.

Giant sculptured Mayan Head Found

Archaeologists from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Valencia in Spain recently found the sculpture in the Chilonché ruins in the jungle-covered Petén region. The team are experts in stuccoed artifacts and their restoration and conservation. They have dated the giant head to the early Classical period of 300-600 AD, which is considerably older than other artifacts found at the site, and means the site is older than thought previously. The find is in excellent condition and some of its original colors have been preserved.

One of the archaeology team, Professor Gaspar Muñoz Cosme, said the find was “spectacular” and the sculpture could be linked to Mayan mythology, and possibly represents an imaginary being such as a Mayan god, or an underworld figure. He said the discovery provides important scientific data that helps us understand the architecture of the Mayans of the time. The team hopes to find similar heads at the site, since the Mayans often built and arranged multiple items symmetrically.

The Petén region is close to well-known Mayan cities such as Tikal and Nakum. It contains dozens of Mayan ruins, but the site at Chilonché has not been excavated to a great extent, largely because the thick jungle region is home to poachers, looters looking for artifacts to sell on the black market, and drug smugglers carrying cocaine to nearby Mexico. The giant head was found inside one of the tunnels built by looters at the site. As soon as the find was located, the archaeologists contacted Guatemalan authorities to ensure security around the site was tightened because of the significance of the find.

the rabbit hole of strangeness from Braintree goes very deep. Part II - just like Balloon Boy?

• CAIRO – Egypt’s famed King Tutankhamun suffered from a cleft palate and club foot, likely forcing him to walk with a cane, and died from complications from a broken leg exacerbated by malaria, according to the most extensive study ever of his more than 3,300-year-old mummy.
• The findings were from two years of DNA testing and CT scans on 16 mummies, including those of Tutankhamun and his family, the team that carried out the study said in an article to be published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
• It also established the clearest yet family tree for Tut, indicating for the first time that he was the child of a brother-sister union.
• The study said his father was most likely Akhenaten, the pharaoh who tried to revolutionize ancient Egyptian religion and force his people to worship one god. The mummy shown by DNA to be that of Tut’s mother also turned out to be a sister of Akhenaten, though she has not yet been identified.
• Tut, who became pharaoh at the age of 10 in 1333 B.C., ruled for just nine years at a pivotal time in Egypt’s history. While a comparatively minor king, the 1922 discovery of his tomb filled with stunning artifacts, including the famed golden funeral mask, made him known the world over.