Seriously, though, these guys are fun to see live.
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Thursday, June 12, 2008
Reverend Horton Heat - Psychobilly Freakout
This is what happens when a bunch of hillbilly punks drop acid and write a song.
Seriously, though, these guys are fun to see live.
Seriously, though, these guys are fun to see live.
Satire: Latest Cheney Tape May Contain Evidence Of His Whereabouts
The Onion is keeping an eye on the terrorism threat.
Latest Cheney Tape May Contain Evidence Of His Whereabouts WASHINGTON—Reports surfaced Tuesday that the New York–based Fox News Channel has obtained a tape which purportedly features another cryptic video message from U.S. vice president and known extremist Dick Cheney, widely regarded as the most feared man in America.
Enlarge ImageCheney calls on Americans around the world to join the fight in Iraq.
"We have analyzed the tape, and the voice on it matches up with earlier recordings of the vice president," said CIA spokesman George Little, who claimed the tape may contain valuable clues regarding the location of the elusive Cheney, who was last sighted in late 2005 along the border of Maryland and Virginia.
"Though more specific details on his whereabouts have yet to emerge, we do know two things," Little added. "Dick Cheney is still alive, and he is out there somewhere."
The tape, which is 18 minutes in length, contains grainy footage of what appears to be the vice president standing in front of a featureless brown background. Despite a history of heart problems, Cheney seems to be in good health, though he does appear agitated. Analysts said his hair is grayer than in previous tapes, and his hairline has receded by a half inch. He appears to be wearing the exact same suit he wore in his most recent video in 2004.
Enlarge ImageFederal law enforcement agencies track Cheney's movements by satellite.
Though Cheney makes no specific threats in the tape, he does issue vague warnings that the United States will soon face a large-scale attack.
"The possibility of a nuclear attack is very real," Cheney says in his speech, which he addresses to the "people of America." "It could happen tomorrow, it could happen a week from now, it could happen next year. It is not a matter of if, but when."
Cheney warns that, no matter what security measures the United States takes, the terrorists will remain determined to bring death and destruction to American soil. He goes on to insist that he will never give in, claiming that the country should be prepared for "decades of war."
"Praise be to God," adds Cheney, concluding his message.
Cheney reportedly makes reference to President Bush and the Iraq War, alludes to the 9/11 attacks 27 times, and warns eerily about Americans "making the wrong choice" in November. He also mentions current presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama by name, indicating that the tape was made recently and dispelling the rumor that Cheney died of a heart attack four years ago.
"We are closer than ever to finding the U.S. No. 2," FBI spokesman David Hart said. "Taking into account his last known whereabouts and the fact that his health condition makes it difficult for him to travel, we can say with a high degree of certainty that the vice president is still somewhere within our borders."
"God help us all," he added.
A number of experts suggest that Cheney has taken refuge in a D.C. war room, while some claim he is hiding out in an underground bunker beneath NORAD headquarters. Others speculate that Cheney crossed into Virginia two years ago and has been roaming the remote foothills of the Appalachian backwoods.
In a press conference yesterday, President Bush told reporters that he is prepared to do anything in his power to hunt down the vice president.
"This is our top priority," Bush said. "Before I make any further decisions regarding the situation in Iraq, the economy, or anything else, it is absolutely imperative that I find Dick Cheney."
Some conspiracy theorists, however, have begun to question the tape's authenticity.
"That video's a fake," said Bethesda, MD citizen Blake Bresler. "This Cheney looks fatter, and his lip snarl is on the wrong side. Also, if you look closely, those aren't Cheney's real glasses."
Whether or not the tape is legitimate, a growing number of citizens say the fact that Cheney is still on the loose can be traced back to failures by the Clinton White House.
"The only reason that this madman is still out there is because the previous administration messed up," said Richmond, VA resident Curt Meredith. "Bill Clinton should have killed him when he had the chance."
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Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Camille Paglia - Obama's Best Veep Choice
Didn't know Paglia was an Obama girl. In her new article at Salon, Camille Paglia tells us just who is Obama's best VP choice. One of the names in the news has been Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, and it seems Paglia likes her, too, although she describes the governor as possessing a "blandly generic WASPiness that has persistently defined the American power structure in business and government and that has weirdly resisted wave after wave of immigration since the mid-19th century."
Here's the whole section:
Here's the whole section:
As an Obama supporter, I of course see things quite differently. Whatever his tactical assertions in the primary trenches, Obama seems to have an open and flexible mind. He is a conciliator and synthesizer, ready to give due respect to opposing views -- a grace desperately needed in paralyzed Washington. When the camera comes close -- as it did last week when CNN's terrific Candy Crowley tenaciously grilled him about Hillary Clinton's prospects for the vice-presidency -- his deliberative thought process is plainly visible. What a deft performance under high-stakes pressure: Obama was firm, authoritative and methodical without ever losing his warmth and geniality. The guy is smart as a whip. And his administration will be as good as its appointments. As for Michelle Obama, she is formidable, representing a bold, stylish feminism more authentically contemporary than the old, bellyaching, blame-the-males style of Hillary's omnipresent cheerleader, Gloria Steinem.Given the looming importance of national security concerns, I used to think that Virginia's pugnacious junior senator, Jim Webb, an ex-Marine, would be Obama's most prudent running mate. Obama doesn't need some veteran pol like the 66-year-old governor of Ohio, Ted Strickland, who would simply make Obama look younger than he is. Arizona's ebullient Governor Janet Napolitano would certainly fill out my Italian-American dream ticket and help to nail down the Southwest. But I've come to feel that Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius is Obama's best bet. She is a polished public presence who epitomizes that cordial, smoothly reassuring, and blandly generic WASPiness that has persistently defined the American power structure in business and government and that has weirdly resisted wave after wave of immigration since the mid-19th century. An Obama-Sebelius pairing would be visually vibrant and radiant, like a new day dawning.
Hillary for veep? Are you mad? What party nominee worth his salt would chain himself to a traveling circus like the Bill and Hillary Show? If the sulky bearded lady wasn't biting the new president’s leg, the oafish carnival barker would be sending in the clowns to lure all the young ladies into back-of-the-tent sword-swallowing. It would be a seamy orgy of scheming and screwing. Hillary could never be content with second place. But neither could an alpha male like Obama. The vice-president should be an accomplished but subordinate personality. An Obama-Hillary ticket might tickle party regulars, but it would be a big fat minus in the general election. Republicans have shrewdly stockpiled a mammoth arsenal of past scandals to strafe Hillary with. Only a sentimental masochist would want to relive the tawdry 1990s.
More to the point, however, Paglia laments the resurgent male bashing that came out of the Clinton camp. Hillary tried to turn the Democratic contest into a giant gender issue, the kind of "identity politics" that conservatives love to see, since it often means an easy victory for them.
In point of fact, Hillary's sex helped her more than hurt her. What the media repeatedly claimed was her success in debate was predicated on her silencing of her male competitors, who were bullied into excess caution in dealing with a woman. Not one Democratic male dared attack or rebut her with the zest shown by all the Republican candidates jousting with each other. Hillary had to be coddled with elaborate deference -- or the delicate little woman would squawk bloody murder (as she did when she petulantly complained about always being given the first debate question). All of this rubbish was resurrected last week in the thousand mawkish excuses found by the media and her crooning acolytes for "giving her time" to withdraw from the race. No man would have been treated in that overconcerned way -- as a frail vessel of quivering emotion. Yet another blot on feminism, courtesy of Clinton, Inc.And here’s another whopping female advantage: Hillary could jet around the country with an elaborate, color-keyed wardrobe and a professional hair and makeup crew, who plastered and insta-lifted her with dewy salon uber-ointments and cutting-edge technology before every appearance. No male candidate has ever had that theatrical privilege. (John Edwards, in contrast, was heaped with scorn for his simple yet pricey haircuts.) When the mega-prep for some reason failed -- as on a frigid morning in Iowa -- the resultant photo of Hillary in realistically wrinkled 60-year-old mode caused repercussions around the world. Golda Meir, with her robustly lived-in face and matriarchal jowls, would have given ever-primping Hollywood Hillary a derisive Bronx cheer.
There can be no doubt that Hillary's travails have reignited the feminist wars, which sputtered out in the mid-'90s after the rousing triumph of the insurgent pro-sex wing of feminism to which I belong. Grab your swords and saddle up, ladies! The spectral Steinem is clinging to Hillary like a limpet. Oh, and there's Susan Faludi wispily brooding in Steinem's papoose. Get ready to rumble: Male-bashing feminism is back with a vengeance.
My latest salvo, which opens with Hillary, will be published in two weeks by Arion: "Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action, and Reform," which was the keynote address of a conference called "The Legacy and Future of Feminism," held at Harvard University in April. The article may be available on Arion's Web site by late next week.
Thank god for Paglia. The last thing we need is a return to male bashing. If Clinton had been treated fairly, like all the other candidates, she would not have stayed in the race so long, having been defeated by her own version of pseudo-feminism -- conveying to voters that they should vote for her simply because she is a woman.
But how great would it be if Obama chose a woman as his running mate, a talented, engaging, intelligent woman who is his equal. Clearly, as anyone who has seen Michelle speak would guess, he is not afraid of powerful women.
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Link Dump - Bikini Effect, the Brain, Evolution, Synapses, and Book Reviews
It's time for another link dump, so that I can clear some tabs and get Firefox back to functioning correctly. Lot's of good stuff this week, so let's dive in.
The Bikini Effect Makes Men Impulsive, by Robin Nixon, Special to LiveScience.
Why the Brain Follows the Rules, from Scientific American.
New Theory For Evolution Of Brain Power from Medical News Today.
The New York Times riffed on the same study in "Brainpower May Lie in Complexity of Synapses."
And now for a few book reviews, some psychology and some others.
From Prospect (both these books are reviewed in the same article):
Next up, two reviews from Metapsychology Online Reviews.
Review - The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, by Mark Johnson; University Of Chicago Press, 2007. Review by Tom Sparrow.
Alrighty then, that's a wrap.
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The Bikini Effect Makes Men Impulsive, by Robin Nixon, Special to LiveScience.
Bikinis and other sexy stimuli can make men more prone to seek immediate gratification — leading to blown diets, budgets and bank accounts, new research suggests.
In the study, detailed in the Journal of Consumer Research, men alternately fondled t-shirts and bras (which were not being worn during the test). After touching the bras, men valued the future less and the present more, said lead researcher Bram Van Den Bergh of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Viewing ads with women in bikinis had the same effect.
It wasn't that the men were simply distracted by their sexual arousal, which caused them to choose more impulsively. On the contrary, they exhibited improved cognition and creativity after exposure to sexy stimuli.
The researchers conclude that there is one common appetite system in the brain monitoring our desire for a host of pleasures from sweets to pretty faces, alcohol to lotto winnings. When it is stimulated by, say, a sexy picture or the smell of baked goods, we experience a general craving for anything pleasant. "Basically, you just want to be rewarded," explained Barbara Briers, a researcher at HEC Paris School of Management. Briers, who has conducted related research, was not involved with this study.
OK, they really needed a study to know that men get impulsive when they see partially-clad women? That we think more rationally is quite a surprise, however. Good study, and I'm sure the marketing folks loved it -- more bikini beer ads.
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Why the Brain Follows the Rules, from Scientific American.
People are incredibly social beings, and we rely heavily on our interactions with others to thrive, and even survive, in the world. To avoid chaos in these interactions, humans create social norms. These rules and regulations establish appropriate and acceptable ways for us to act and respond to each other. For instance, when waiting in line, we expect people also to wait their turn. As a result, we get upset when someone decides to cut in line: they violated a social norm.
But how are social norms maintained? And what makes us comply with social norms? Primarily, the answer is that, if we don’t follow the rules, we might get in trouble. Numerous studies demonstrate that, when the threat of punishment is removed, people tend to disregard social norms. The neat and orderly line disintegrates.
It remains unclear, however, how the brain processes the threat of punishment when deciding whether or not to comply with a social norm. A recent study conducted by neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer and his colleagues at the University of Ulm in Germany and the University of Zurich in Switzerland tried to shed light on this mystery. The researchers put 24 healthy male students in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to see what parts of the brain were activated during a two-person social exchange with real monetary stakes.
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New Theory For Evolution Of Brain Power from Medical News Today.
"Human intelligence has little to do with having a big brain", theThis is actually good science. The same is true in muscles. A big muscle is not necessarily stronger than a smaller muscle -- it comes down to muscle cell density.headline suggested today. The newspaper report is based on a study that compared human brains with the brains of other species. The study found that "mammals have a higher percentage of proteins" in the regions where nerves connect to each other, called synapses. The researchers found that of the 600 proteins found in mammalian synapses, half were found in invertebrates, and only a quarter in single-celled organisms, which don't have nerves.
The newspaper quoted the lead researcher as saying, "This work leads to a new and simple model for understanding the origins and diversity of brains and behaviour in all species. We are one step closer to understanding the logic behind the complexity of human brains."
This complex study contributes to knowledge about the differences in one important group of proteins between the species. This study did not compare the relative contributions of differences in these proteins and brain size to intelligence in humans or any other species, therefore it is not possible to draw any conclusions about their relative importance. The brain is hugely complex, and there will be many internal and external factors contributing to differences in behaviour and learning both between and within species.
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The New York Times riffed on the same study in "Brainpower May Lie in Complexity of Synapses."
Evolution’s recipe for making a brain more complex has long seemed simple enough. Just increase the number of nerve cells, or neurons, and the interconnections between them. A human brain, for instance, is three times the volume of a chimpanzee’s.This article is a little easier to get since it focuses on one aspect of the study.A whole new dimension of evolutionary complexity has now emerged from a cross-species study led by Dr. Seth Grant at the Sanger Institute in England.
Dr. Grant looked at the interconnections between neurons, known as synapses, which until now have been regarded as a standard feature of neurons.
But in fact the synapses get considerably more complex going up the evolutionary scale, Dr. Grant and colleagues reported online Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. In worms and flies, the synapses mediate simple forms of learning, but in higher animals they are built from a much richer array of protein components and conduct complex learning and pattern recognition, Dr. Grant said.
The finding may open a new window into how the brain operates. “One of the biggest questions in neuroscience is to answer what are the design principles by which the human brain is constructed, and this is one of those principles,” Dr. Grant said.
If the synapses are thought of as the chips in a computer, then brainpower is shaped by the sophistication of each chip, as well as by their numbers. “From the evolutionary perspective, the big brains of vertebrates not only have more synapses and neurons, but each of these synapses is more powerful — vertebrates have big Internets with big computers and invertebrates have small Internets with small computers,” Dr. Grant said.
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And now for a few book reviews, some psychology and some others.
From Prospect (both these books are reviewed in the same article):
Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate
by Kenan Malik (Oneworld, £18.99)
The Great Hall at the University of Reading is a lively piece of Victoriana: a broad neo-Romanesque structure suggestive of a nave, with a concave arched ceiling of gilt-edged rectangular sections painted a pastel green and decorated with rosettes.
The uniformity of its architectural style contrasts with the people I can see under its roof. Perhaps 200 students are at work here, and my guess, from their faces, is that between them they could trace their ancestry to Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the far east and perhaps the Indian subcontinent.
These observations collide with Kenan Malik's insistence in his new book, Strange Fruit, that there is no such thing as race: that it is nothing more than a social construct, having little to do with biology. It is true that the history of racial thinking is mostly an odious embarrassment. And using the idea of race as an assertion of abrupt or clear genetic boundaries between peoples is wrong. All of humanity shares the same genes, and we can all happily and successfully interbreed. And, contrary to the pronouncements of some well-known public figures, there is no evidence that human groups differ in the genetic factors that cause intelligence or even cognitive abilities in general. But we mustn't take this to mean that there are no differences among us. Variants of our shared genes do differ among human groups. If my ancestors were from the far east, I would have the epicanthal fold of skin above my eyes so distinctive of peoples from that region. Were I able to trace my ancestry to the Ethiopian highlands, it is likely that I would have a wiry frame and sinewy muscles. And were my ancestors from the Tibetan plateau, it is likely that my body shape would be good at conserving heat. I could go on; and the list could contain far more than morphological characters—just think, for example, of who carries genes to protect against malaria or to digest milk proteins as adults.
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Trust: Self-interest and the Common Good
by Marek Kohn (OUP, £10.99)
Co-operation among unrelated humans is a different matter. If you help someone and they don't help you back, you lose. Co-operative societies can soar to great heights, but they can cost you dearly, as when cheats take the spoils of co-operation without returning the benefits. This means that humans have evolved sensitive mechanisms to discriminate between people likely to share their co-operative values from those that do not.
Trust, the topic of Marek Kohn's book of the same name, is what arises from this discrimination—and Kohn rightly recognises that trust promotes both self-interest and the common good. As individuals, we toil to build reputations as a way of advertising our trustworthiness and of attracting like-valued people. Indeed, it is hard to overstate the importance of co-operative social systems to our psychology and social behaviour. If trust is the fuel of our co-operation, reputation is the currency with which we buy it. Apes, dolphins and ants don't feel shame or engage in honour killings.
This view of what makes humans tick also helps us to understand the awkwardness of the public debate about multiculturalism. Malik asserts that there is a tendency for what he calls the liberal left to "resurrect racial concepts" in framing their views on multiculturalism. Thus we grant authenticity, and equal but separate status, to the different desires and practices of some groups on the basis of their deep cultural heritage: consider the recent uproar over sharia law. Malik doesn't suggest these liberals are racist, just that the language they use—of ethnicity, authenticity and identity—is laden with racial baggage and reminiscent of that used by the old racists when justifying their exclusionary views.
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Next up, two reviews from Metapsychology Online Reviews.
Review - The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, by Mark Johnson; University Of Chicago Press, 2007. Review by Tom Sparrow.
Mark Johnson's book is a welcome contribution to the recent philosophical literature meant to expound the ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, and moral implications of research coming out of second-generation cognitive science. It belongs in the company of theorists like George Lakoff, Antonio Damasio, Eugene Gendlin, Shaun Gallagher, and Francisco Varela. Its specific aim is to develop and defend a theory of embodied cognition which gets beyond objectivist and dualist metaphysics, and which is intended to ground the meaning of human experience in body-environment interactions. As Johnson puts it: "This book is about meaning--what it is, where it comes from, and how it is made" (ix). This engagement with the whence and whither of meaning is situated by Johnson in the field of aesthetics, by which he means "the study of everything that goes into the human capacity to make and experience meaning" (x). Using this broadened definition, The Meaning of the Body argues for the bodily/aesthetic basis of all philosophy--as well as logic, mathematics, and language (cf. 102, 181, 195)--and for an expansive understanding of meaning as such. In Johnson's words, "meaning is not just a matter of concepts and propositions, but also reaches down into the images, sensorimotor schemas, feelings, qualities, and emotions that constitute our meaningful encounter with our world. Any adequate account of meaning must be built around the aesthetic dimensions that give our experience its distinctive character and significance" (xi-xii).Review - The Situated Self, by J. T. Ismael; Oxford University Press, 2007. Review by James Dow.
J. T. Ismael's The Situated Self provides a unique account of the relation between self and world. The book has three major parts. The first part explores an account of the situated mind with emphasis on reflexive representation-- the self is situated in the physical world through mental representations defined as egocentric maps that enable navigation through an environment. The second part employs ideas developed in the first part to address traditional problems in philosophy: Frank Jackson's (1986) argument for dualism, the problem of the inverted spectrum, and McTaggart's (1908) argument against time as an intrinsic property of events. The third part provides details for Ismael's account of the self, which is defined as "a sealed pocket of world-representing structure" (182).
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Alrighty then, that's a wrap.
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Rick Bass - Waiting on Fire
Found this at the Tricycle site, an online exclusive.
Waiting on Fire
by Rick Bass
First bellflower bloom, first twinflower, first monk's hood, a brighter purple than any king's robe. First wild strawberries, too, red as fire, and the first hawkweed, colonies and colonies of it spreading through the forests and meadows, displacing native plants, eaten by nothing, its blossoms brilliant orange, like glowing sparks. Butterflies congregate in huge swarms near any cliffside seep or spring, as water dwindles, with the swarms, the butterfly colonies, becoming larger as the heat expands. To our northwoods shade-loving selves, it feels as it does when you stoke a stove too full of dry wood, too much too fast—as if someone is throwing such wood on the sun itself—and though doubtless one of the reasons the butterflies gather in such immense numbers around the drying-out damp patches is to feed upon the saturated mineral residue left behind as the puddles and ponds evaporate, they are after the pure water too, I think, and to happen upon such a colony, while on a walk through the heated woods (trying to stay in the shade of the trees), the impression one receives at first—just before they all spring into the vortex of flight, random-chaos-swirl, disrupting all those thousands of fruit vendors' stands over in India, Morocco, and Hong Kong—is that the butterflies have been gathered at those seeps and springs, hunched over them with fluttering wings in an attempt to fan some faint coolness onto those waters, or even to provide, with the stained-glass church-windows of their wings, some glimmering protection: as if even trying, with the filter of their wings, to disguise or camouflage that water, from the consuming stare, consuming gaze, of the sun.
Almost every year, it is this way, in August—hot and dry, with the guessing game that really began back in the heart of winter, as we watched the snow fall, or not fall, coming right down to the whittled point of now. Will the fires come today, tonight, tomorrow? Later this week, or the middle of next week?
As the woods become evermore still and hot, as the last ghosts of moisture oven-bake dry from the last twig, and the last pine needles—as the green and living trees themselves begin to dry out, with some of them dying even while still standing up, browning their needles as if the fire has already passed through—the question that back in January or February might have been an if seems inescapably now a when.
Weather reports shift by the hour, and take on the immediacy of war briefings: wind directions and velocities, temperature, humidity, and storm forecasts. As the heated rock shell of the mountains grows hotter each day, like so many bricks baking in the oven, the convective updraft from those violent heatings take on the force of coal-fired bellows, or even the exhalations of a lung-heated, living thing, sending invisible towering plumes of heat straight up, pistons of unlit fire, where—thirty and forty thousand feet later—they finally cool, condensing and spreading into apocalyptic-looking mushroom clouds.
They are not yet done, in their cooling. The fire is still in them. It seeks to return to the rocks from which it was birthed—or if not yet birthed, conceived, in that August heat.
The weather reports tell us who is getting what and where, all around the state: lightning with rain, or lightning without rain. Worst of all—or rather, most frightening of all—if one is frightened of these things—lightning with no wind, accompanied by, driven by, high winds.
It comes slowly, in August—the awareness that the lush bounty of spring and green summer, the rampant growth, has now become like a sort of trap or prison, if one allows one's self to be frightened by such things—the cell walls of every living plant, every grass and forb, twig and branch and limb, leaching paper dry, kindling dry, gunpowder dry—all this botanical exuberance, all that life, surrounding you now, surrounding everything, with its husks, husks everywhere—and even if you love fire, and love the pulse of life it brings back to a landscape in its aftermath, you cannot help but be a little frightened, standing before the immensity of such a power, and waiting.
Rick Bass is an award-winning author and an environmental activist.
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Daily Dharma - The True Teaching
Today's Daily Dharma from Tricycle.
The True Teaching
The true teaching is the kind of teaching that conforms to two things: First, it is consistent with the Buddhist insight. And secondly, it is appropriate for the person who is receiving it. It's like medicine. It has to be true medicine, and it must fit the person who is receiving it.
Sometimes you can give someone a very expensive treatment, but they still die. That is why when the Buddha meets someone and offers the teaching he has to know that person in order to be able to offer the appropriate teaching. Even if the teaching is very valuable, if you don't make it appropriate to the person, it is not Buddhist teaching.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh, in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol.IV, #4
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Satire - McCain Vows to Campaign in All Thirteen Colonies
Andy Borowitz on the campaign trail.
McCain Vows to Campaign in All Thirteen Colonies
Kicks Off Contest in Dominion of Virginia
Republican presidential nominee John McCain officially kicked off his general election campaign today, promising to bring his race for the White House to “all thirteen colonies.”
At a campaign stop in the Dhominion of Virginia, Sen. McCain said that if his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, takes any of the thirteen colonies for granted, “he doth so at his peril.”
Sen. McCain made his remarks in the Dominion of Virginia, which many McCain advisers concede will be a key colony in the fall election.
But in announcing his 13-colony strategy, Sen. McCain appeared to give notice that he intends to contest such traditional Democratic strongholds as the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
In the conclusion of his remarks, Sen. McCain vowed that his campaign would employ “the latest technology” to spread his message across the thirteen colonies.
“We will use the telegraph key, the carrier pigeon, and the pony,” he said.
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008
The Woodshed PODCAST: Tech Fatigue, Part II
Check it out, over at The Woodshed:
Dan Allison, the POLYSEMY Multimedia Director, recently wrote a blog entry called “Feeling weary of the internet and technology in general“. This was cause for Dan and Matthew Dallman, our editor in chief, to discuss further issues raised in the piece, and in the course of the spontaneous discussion touch what we mean by technology, and how this relates to the creative process.Go listen. Part One is here. Part Three coming soon.This episode’s inquiry: Do we have a too-limited definition of “technology”?
Please join us in this second installment of our Tech Fatigue series. We welcome your $.02 in the Comments section, below.
Discussion participants:
Keywords: Michael Pollan, nutritionism, TED Talk, human consciousness, natural world, plant vs animal, music, dance, film, tonality, human body, God, internal logic, composing, wanting to sing, “getting out of the way”, being full, inspiration, man bias, masculine vs feminine
[Note: The sound quality for Matthew’s voice is muffled, but still audible. We will try to remedy the problem for future Woodshed Podcast Series.]
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Republicans Block Extra Tax On Oil Companies
The oil companies claim they are not making unreasonable profits. Yet their profits keep setting records, and we are paying more for gas than ever in our history. All things being fair, their profits should remain constant as the price of oil and gasoline rises. Ain't happening.
I'm posting this article from The Moderate Voice in full because it demonstrates just how cozy are BIG OIL and the GOP. On the downside, the Dems are playing posturing games, hoping to use the (guaranteed) GOP refusal to even vote on the bills in campaign ads this fall. There is no bi-partisan effort to deal with this. No one loses but the consumer.
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I'm posting this article from The Moderate Voice in full because it demonstrates just how cozy are BIG OIL and the GOP. On the downside, the Dems are playing posturing games, hoping to use the (guaranteed) GOP refusal to even vote on the bills in campaign ads this fall. There is no bi-partisan effort to deal with this. No one loses but the consumer.
GOP To The Rescue: Republicans Block Extra Tax On Oil Companies
At a time when Americans are finding they’re having to give up a host of things just to fill their gas tanks while they read news stories about record oil company profits, Republicans in Congress have moved swiftly — to protect the oil companies from extra taxes:
Senate Republicans blocked a proposal Tuesday to tax the windfall profits of the largest oil companies, despite pleas by Democratic leaders to use the measure to address America’s anger over $4 a gallon gasoline.
The Democratic energy package would have imposed a tax on any “unreasonable” profits of the five largest U.S. oil companies and given the federal government more power to address oil market speculation that the bill’s supporters argue has added to the crude oil price surge.
“Americans are furious about what’s going on,” declared Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and want Congress to do something about oil company profits and “an orgy of speculation” on oil markets.
But Republicans argued the Democratic proposal focusing on new oil industry taxes is not the answer to the country’s energy problems.
“The American people are clamoring for relief at the pump,” said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., but if taxes are increased on the oil companies “they will get exactly what they don’t want. The bill will raise taxes, increase imports.”
A good justification — but it won’t fly with many Americans. And if the Democratic party doesn’t see this as a political opening they need some of these. In fact, two energy bills, including the windfall profits tax, stalled in the Senate:
A Democratic proposal to impose heavier taxes on big oil companies stalled in the Senate on Tuesday as Republicans and Democrats offered different ideas on how to deal with soaring energy costs.
A bill, which would have rolled back some $17 billion in tax breaks and pressured major oil companies to invest in new energy sources by hitting them with a windfall-profits tax if they did not, failed to get enough votes to move forward. Fifty-one senators voted to bring the measure up for consideration, nine short of the number needed under Senate rules. Forty-three senators, most of them Republicans, voted “no.”
The oil-tax proposal was one of two energy-related bills that failed to advance. The other was a proposal to amend the Internal Revenue Code by providing “incentives for energy production and conservation, to extend certain expiring provisions, to provide individual income tax relief, and for other purposes,” as the measure to promote new energy sources was officially described. The vote to take up that legislation was 50-44, or 10 “yes” votes fewer than necessary.
Exxon fired back on the idea of a windfall profits tax after Democratic presumptive nominee Senator Barack Obama floated the idea of more taxes for oil companies:
Exxon Mobil fired back Tuesday at a proposed windfall profit tax, after the oil giant was mentioned by name in Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s call to counteract skyrocketing energy costs by hiking levies on producers.
Exxon Mobil spokesman Tony Cudmore said in an e-mail to MarketWatch that U.S. energy companies already pay record taxes, adding that the way to keep energy costs down rests with increased supplies, which require additional investment, not higher taxes.
“Proposals to increase taxes on the industry would discourage the sustained investments needed to safeguard U.S. energy security and are not in the interests of American consumers,” Exxon Mobil said.
And indeed, without maximizing these sustained investments, how will the oil companies continue to make record profits and pay their CEOs mega-bucks at a time when many Americans are looking at bicycles — and perhaps rickshaws — with interest?
To be sure, there were other political dynamics in the vote, as Congressional Quarterly points out:
Senate Democratic leaders could not muster enough votes Tuesday to keep alive an energy bill that would impose what supporters call a windfall profits tax on oil companies.
The chamber fell short of the 60-vote threshold needed to invoke cloture and end debate on the motion to proceed to the bill. The tally was 51-43.
The result came as little surprise to either party, but the debate gave both a chance to continue trading blame for the price of gasoline. The showdown appeared driven more by politics than policy, in an election year in which the price of regular gasoline for the first time topped an average of $4 a gallon.
The bill, almost identical to one Democratic leaders introduced last month, was packed with several provisions Democrats know are non-starters for most Republicans, including a tax on profits higher than 10 percent above a past average — the so-called windfall profits tax — and language to roll back $17 billion in tax breaks for oil companies.
But Democrats brought it to the floor anyway, using it as a chance to get back at Republicans for stalling debate on a climate change bill last week.
So the Demmies were doing a bit of political posturing.
During debate on the climate change bill, Republicans pointed to what they called the high cost of the legislation and blamed Democrats for high energy prices because they have blocked efforts to drill for oil and gas in U.S. coastal waters and Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The Democrats’ latest move gave them an opportunity to focus much of the blame for high prices on the oil companies and to portray Republicans as sympathizing more with industry than consumers.
But Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell , of Kentucky said the Democratic package is “not a serious response to high gas process, it’s a gimmick.”
The problems for the GOP:
(1) This is happening on THEIR watch, (2) Americans viewing the administration and the GOP see few instances of the party or administration going to bat for average Americans, while corporations are constantly defended and helped, (3) Insisting on drilling in ANWAR is a solution isn’t going to cut it with most Americans, particularly since research indicates it won’t be a quick fix or a long-term fix (and it will put more money into the brimming-with-dollars pockets of oil companies), (3) Bush talked about energy policy when he ran in 2000 in particular and just blaming it on the Democrats when his party controlled or dominated Congress for so many years simply won’t convince, (4) High gas prices is just one of several major traumas to American life that have occurred under the Bush administration — an administration in which which fingers are pointed more often than responsibility is taken.
Outlook: Look for the fact the Republicans blocked a extra taxes on oil companies to show up in Democratic campaign ads — including ads aimed at specific GOPers who are up for re-election.The biggest problem for the GOP is that the issue of high gas prices isn’t an intellectual one but an immediate pocketbook one. If they’re not seen as doing something about it at a time when oil companies report record-high profits, they are going to pay their own high prices, at the ballot box in November.
Particularly because sky high gas prices could have soared to a new galaxy by then…
Cartoon by Wolverton, Cagle Cartoons
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Sean Penn - Inside the Actors Studio
Whether or not you agree with his politics, Sean Penn is easily the best actor of his generation.
The video quality on this is poor, but the audio is good. And the discussion is very interesting. Penn's parents and their story is quite revealing.
via videosift.com
The video quality on this is poor, but the audio is good. And the discussion is very interesting. Penn's parents and their story is quite revealing.
via videosift.com
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IEEE Spectrum - The Singularity
IEEE Spectrum, an online tech magazine, has posted a special issue on The Singularity. Some of the consciousness articles are pretty cool.
Here is one of the cooler articles.
Read the rest of this article.
I think the singularity is a whole mess of wishful thinking. The human brain is so complex, and consciousness is so embedded in its culture, that any notion of uploading consciousness into a computer is both silly and undesirable. I like my body, and the knowledge that I will one day die.
For one simple refutation of the whole singularity scenario, one need only look at the emerging field of epigenetics, which demonstrates just how embedded the function of the brain is in its environment.
Here is one of the cooler articles.
The Consciousness Conundrum By John Horgan
First Published June 2008This is part of IEEE Spectrum's SPECIAL REPORT: THE SINGULARITY
Image: Courtesy Pablo de Heras Ciechomski, Ph.D. Copyright all rights reserved 2006–2008, Visualbiotech Sarl(www.visualbiotech.ch), SwitzerlandI'm 54, with all that entails. Gray hair, trick knee, trickier memory. I still play a mean game of hockey, and my love life requires no pharmaceutical enhancement. But entropy looms ever larger. Suffice it to say, I would love to believe that we are rapidly approaching “the singularity.” Like paradise, technological singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting. At first, we'll become cyborgs, as stupendously powerful brain chips soup up our perception, memory, and intelligence and maybe even eliminate the need for annoying TV remotes. Eventually, we will abandon our flesh-and-blood selves entirely and upload our digitized psyches into computers. We will then dwell happily forever in cyberspace where, to paraphrase Woody Allen, we'll never need to look for a parking space. Sounds good to me!
Notably, singularity enthusiasts tend to be computer specialists, such as the author and retired computer scientist Vernor Vinge, the roboticist Hans Moravec, and the entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil. Intoxicated by the explosive progress of information technologies captured by Moore's Law, such singularitarians foresee a “merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence,” as Kurzweil puts it, that will culminate in “immortal software-based humans.” It will happen not within a millennium, or a century, but no later than 2030, according to Vinge. These guys—and, yes, they're all men—are serious. Kurzweil says he has adopted an antiaging regimen so that he'll “live long enough to live forever.”
Specialists in real rather than artificial brains find such bionic convergence scenarios naive, often laughably so. Gerald Edelman, a Nobel laureate and director of the Neurosciences Institute, in San Diego, says singularitarians vastly underestimate the brain's complexity. Not only is each brain unique, but each also constantly changes in response to new experiences. Stimulate a brain with exactly the same input, Edelman notes, and you'll never see the same signal set twice in response.
“This is a wonderful project—that we're going to have a spiritual bar mitzvah in some galaxy,” Edelman says of the singularity. “But it's a very unlikely idea.”
Neuroscience is indeed thriving. Membership in the Society for Neuroscience has surged from 500, when it was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1970, to almost 40,000 today. New brain journals seem to spring up daily, crammed with data from ever-more-powerful brain probes such as magnetic-resonance imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation. In addition to such noninvasive methods, scientists can stick electrodes in brains to monitor and stimulate individual neurons. Researchers are also devising electrode-based “neural prostheses” to help people with nervous-system disorders such as deafness, blindness, paralysis, and memory loss.
In spite of all those advances, neuroscientists still do not understand at all how a brain (the squishy agglomeration of tissue and neurons) makes a conscious mind (the intangible entity that enables you to fall in love, find irony in a novel, and appreciate the elegance of a circuit design). “No one has the foggiest notion,” says the neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University Medical Center, in New York City. “At the moment all you can get are informed, intelligent opinions.” Neuroscientists lack an overarching, unifying theory to make sense of their sprawling and disjointed findings, such as Kandel's Nobel Prize–winning discovery of the chemical and genetic processes that underpin memory formation in sea slugs.
The brain, it seems, is complex enough to conjure fantasies of technotranscendence and also to foil their fulfillment.
A healthy adult brain contains about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons. A single neuron can be linked via axons (output wires) and dendrites (input wires) across synapses (gaps between axons and dendrites) to as many as 100 000 other neurons. Crank the numbers and you find that a typical human brain has quadrillions of connections among its neurons. A quadrillion is a one followed by 15 zeroes; a stack of a quadrillion U.S. pennies would go from the sun out past the orbit of Jupiter.
Adding to the complexity, synaptic connections constantly form, strengthen, weaken, and dissolve. Old neurons die and—evidence now indicates, overturning decades of dogma—new ones are born.
Far from being stamped from a common mold, neurons display an astounding variety of forms and functions. Researchers have discovered scores of distinct types just in the optical system. Neurotransmitters, which carry signals across the synapse between two neurons, also come in many different varieties. In addition to neurotransmitters, neural-growth factors, hormones, and other chemicals ebb and flow through the brain, modulating cognition in ways both profound and subtle.
Indeed, the more you learn about brains, the more you may wonder how the damn things work. And in fact, sometimes they don't. They succumb to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, Alzheimer's disease, and many other disorders that resist explanation and treatment.
Nevertheless, the brain is a computer, singularitarians insist. It just has an extremely messy wiring diagram. According to this perspective, neurons resemble transistors, absorbing, processing, and reemitting the electrochemical pulses known as action potentials. With an amplitude of one-tenth of a volt and a duration of one millisecond, action potentials are remarkably uniform, and they do not dissipate even when zipping down axons a meter long (yes, a full meter). Also called spikes, to reflect their appearance on oscilloscopes, action potentials supposedly serve as the brain's basic units of information.
Within a decade or so, computers will surpass the computational power of brains, many singularitarians say. They base this claim on the assumption that those spikes represent the brain's total computational capacity. If the brain contains one quadrillion synapses processing on average 10 action potentials per second, then the brain performs 10 quadrillion operations per second. At some point in the near future, some singularitarians say, computers will surpass that processing rate and leave us in their cognitive dust unless we embrace them through bionic convergence or uploading.
We've heard such prophesies before. A half century ago, artificial-intelligence pioneers such as Marvin Minsky of MIT and Herbert Simon of Carnegie Mellon University predicted that computers would exceed human intelligence within a generation. Their prophesies inspired sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clarke—creator of the cybervillain HAL—as well as younger AI visionaries like Kurzweil, Moravec, and Vinge.
But even Minsky admits that computers are still idiot savants. “I wish I could tell you that we have intelligent machines, but we don't,” he says. The world's most powerful computers, he acknowledges, lack the common sense of a toddler; they can't even distinguish cats from dogs unless they are explicitly and painstakingly programmed to do so.
Nevertheless, singularitarians are quite right that, if current trends continue, supercomputers will exceed 10 quadrillion operations per second within a decade. IBM's Blue Gene/P supercomputer, introduced nearly a year ago, can be configured to process up to 3 quadrillion operations per second, although no customer has yet ordered one with the full complement of 884 736 processors that would be needed to get that kind of a processing rate. Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, is now completing the upgrade of a Blue Gene/P that should be good for around half a quadrillion operations per second.
I think the singularity is a whole mess of wishful thinking. The human brain is so complex, and consciousness is so embedded in its culture, that any notion of uploading consciousness into a computer is both silly and undesirable. I like my body, and the knowledge that I will one day die.
For one simple refutation of the whole singularity scenario, one need only look at the emerging field of epigenetics, which demonstrates just how embedded the function of the brain is in its environment.
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