Variable Gravitas Content

I guess we'll never know now.

2009-11-06T20:49:00.005-05:00

Recently learned of Mac Tonnies' death. Well, shit. He taught me to blog - or at least, told me how not to. He had a vision, more than anyone I've encountered thus far, of the way the web and the world is supposed to be. He was a writer both intelligent and entertaining, thoughtful and skewed. His greatest legacy will, I imagine, be The Cryptoterrestrials, a treatise on the possibilities of alien life from a perspective precious few have considered. Hopefully, it'll still get published and oviposit seeds of inspiration and weird post-insectile ideation in the minds of readers everywhere.

Vinyl Archaeology indeed.

2009-01-22T23:56:00.002-05:00

This fella figured out how to extract music from scanned photographs of vinyl discs. It's thickly interwoven with static and eerie EVP whining but the actual track is definitely audible. If some tachycognitive posthuman or a comicbook speedster were to listen to a low bit-rate mp3, it would probably sound something like this.

Consider the following:

Actual recording of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"

Sample scan

Happy New Year.

2008-11-29T00:21:00.001-05:00

Bldg Blog has been medusaheaded.

Link-salad.

2008-11-21T22:43:00.003-05:00

DNA strands become fibre optic cables: And they self-repair too? Looks like intelligence enhancement to me. A person with a few of these lining her nervous system and festooning her brain would no doubt be a couple dozen times smarter than anything we've seen.

Woman receives windpipe built from her stem cells: I really wonder why these things are hapening in Columbia and Korea and Thailand and everywhere else but America.

In more pessimistic news, there's a new species of Ebola out there -- as if the ones we had weren't bad enough.

Pearls before swine. Blind swine.

2008-11-07T04:53:00.002-05:00

I swear, a lot of Gen Xers have trouble supporting Obama because we find the positive energy of his campaign and his rallies distasteful. It reminds us of the excesses of our primal Baby Boomer oppressors. Look, it bothered me too that the pain of my youth was cloaked in an ideology of peace and love. But I got over it and decided that peace and love are good anyway. Our generational superpower is cynicism, and we need to learn to focus it like a laser, precisely where it belongs, instead of just spraying it everywhere like urine. - Ran Prieur, November 2

LOL-to-the-izzol-z.

Igbo Kwenu! Yah! Kwenu! Yah! KWEZUONU!!! YAAAAAA

2008-09-03T19:31:00.001-05:00

Nairaland has been joined and medusaheaded.

Last Days of FOXHOUND is over.

2008-06-02T22:41:00.002-05:00

Another one bites the dust. It was always going to be this way. Still hurts though. Curse you, transience-of-all-things!

2008-05-20T20:43:00.001-05:00

Arxiv.Org now has a blog. It has accordingly been medusaheaded.

Thought you knew.

2008-05-08T13:02:00.002-05:00

NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit

While detectives were offering reasons why they couldn't start an investigation, she spent nearly four days chained up in a basement only a few blocks from her home. She was repeatedly raped and tortured by two young psychopaths who eventually beat her to death on the day that the police grudgingly started searching for her. Her family's amateur investigation found her before the police did.

Besides her grief, Elle Carmichael was disgusted. The story of Svetlana Aronov was fresh in her mind. Less than two months before Romona Moore vanished in Canarsie, Svetlana Aronov, the white wife of a doctor, went missing on the Upper East Side.

The day after Aronov vanished, police launched a massive search for her and the cocker spaniel, Bim, she had taken for a walk. The NYPD called a press conference, assigned two dozen detectives to the case full-time, and went door to door, passing out flyers with pictures of Aronov and Bim on them. The cops traced the Aronovs' phone and bank records and analyzed surveillance tape gathered from stores and apartment buildings near her home. A police van emblazoned with the department's 800 tip-line number drove around her neighborhood, blaring details of her disappearance over a loudspeaker. A letter was sent to rare-books dealers, a business the Aronovs dabbled in. Detectives reportedly even consulted a psychic.

A bloodhound was assigned to track Bim's scent.

Eventually, Aronov's body surfaced in the East River. It was never determined whether she fell, jumped, or was pushed into the water.

When she's white, investigate. When she's black, procrastinate until exanimate. Thought you knew.

Hulu.com - Medusaheaded with extreme prejudice.

2008-04-27T10:50:00.003-05:00

This is too good to be true ... isn't it?

I mean, no way this is going to last. Right?

You Know, William Gibson totally called this.

2008-04-22T13:10:00.002-05:00

A technologically enhanced High Noon on Youtube, wherein the cyborg sheriff does battle with android badmen from beyond the stars.

And then there's:

This spreading, melting, flowing together of what once were distinct and separate media, that’s where I imagine we’re headed. Any linear narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we would think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as how he looks at stuff. If he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, he might idly pause to allow his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can. Because he’s always been able to. He doesn’t think about these things. He probably doesn’t fully understand that that hasn’t always been possible. He doesn’t know that you weren’t always able to explore the sets virtually, see them from any angle, or that you couldn’t open doors and enter rooms that never actually appeared in the original film.

Or maybe, if his attention span wavers, he’ll opt to experience the film as if shot from the POV of that baseball that McQueen keeps tossing.

William Gibson on Meryl Streep as a chihuahua-headed kung-fu action heroine.

"Hundred and Four: Word Science in Practice."

2008-04-21T23:57:00.004-05:00

If one is going to be serious about becoming a Real Writer, it is necessary to actually do the work. As such, I am now and have been for months now, a founding member of Hundred and Four, conceived, administered and edited by Hannibal Tabu. This shit is serious and I intend to treat it as such; my first assignment and those of my colleagues are up as we speak.

I should probably put the words "medusaheaded" in here somewhere for ease of location.

Or tag it, that also works.

With Good Reason, I must add.

2008-04-09T23:44:00.002-05:00

One Avatar, Many Worlds

An avatar, the image a person uses in a virtual world, is currently bound to the particular world in which it was created. But at the Virtual Worlds Conference 2008 in New York City last week, several companies showcased their efforts to allow people to carry their avatars from one virtual world to another, and even out onto ordinary Web pages. These developments point to a convergence between virtual worlds and social networks.

(via Posthuman Blues)

This right here is Charles Stross would call a Halting State moment.

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."

2008-03-18T22:10:00.004-05:00

Including, apparently, the books themselves. Behold MEXICA, the computer program that can write fiction.

I don't think Steven King or Catherynne M. Valente need to quit their day jobs just yet. What does bother me is what'll happen when spammers get hold of the 3.0 version of this software.

2008-03-13T15:11:00.002-05:00

Wim Hof

Lynne Cox

Long story short? The scientific establishment has a funny way of ignoring outliers. These people people are immune to fucking frostbite! Why am I not hearing more about this?

2008-03-11T23:20:00.007-05:00

Tap water's a hell of a drug!

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.

"How does it take, muthafucka!? No, I can't stop yelling, 'cause that's how I talk! DRINK, bitch!"

And that is how you change the world if you're a nigh-omnipotent xenohuman.

2008-02-07T01:14:00.000-05:00

The excellent La Muse has been medusaheaded.

2008-01-22T23:10:00.000-05:00

The online neuroscience magazine Cerebrum has been medusaheaded. Get it, "headed"? Heh. I suck but so do you.

This is the way the world ends, not in fire but in Gridfire.

2008-01-20T20:00:00.000-05:00

Extract from Iain M. Banks' Matter on Orbit Books. Oh yes.

By most human standards the woman was tall, slim and well muscled. Her hair was short and straight and dark and her skin was the colour of pale agate. There was nobody of her specific kind within several thousand light years of where she sat, though if there had been they might have said that she was somewhere between being a young woman and one at the very start of middle age. They would, however, have thought she looked somewhat short and bulky.

He likes the word "agate" a lot, I've found. That aside, this is going to be among the first books I buy in 2008.

EDIT (after reading the extract): Hahahahaha, and best part is, it's out in February!

*dances around the living room*

2008-01-09T10:34:00.000-05:00

Shadow Unit has been medusaheaded. Happy January.

Human Hibernation as Cultural Phenomenon.

2007-12-04T00:21:00.001-05:00

The Big Sleep.

Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.

In the mountains, the tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. “Seven months of winter, five months of hell,” they said in the Alps. When the "hell" of unremitting toil was over, the human beings settled in with their cows and pigs. They lowered their metabolic rate to prevent hunger from exhausting supplies. If someone died during the seven months of winter, the corpse was stored on the roof under a blanket of snow until spring thawed the ground, allowing a grave to be dug and a priest to reach the village. - via Ran Prieur

Those guys had the right idea! Of course, the capitalist juggernaut could never halt long enough to make that happen.

2007-11-24T22:45:00.000-05:00

An Indonesian fisherman who feared that he would be killed by tree-like growths covering his body has been given hope of recovery by an American doctor - and Vitamin A.
Dede, now 35, baffled medical experts when warty "roots" began growing out of his arms and feet after he cut his knee in a teenage accident. The welts spread across his body unchecked and soon he was left unable to carry out everyday household tasks.
Sacked from his job and deserted by his wife, Dede has been raising his two children - now in their late teens - in poverty, resigned to the fact that local doctors had no cure for his condition.
To make ends meet he even joined a local "freak show", parading in front of a paying audience alongside victims of other peculiar diseases.

... But now an American dermatology expert who flew out to Dede's home village south of the capital Jakarta claims to have identified his condition, and proposed a treatment that could transform his life.

After testing samples of the lesions and Dede's blood, Dr Anthony Gaspari of the University of Maryland concluded that his affliction is caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a fairly common infection that usually causes small warts to develop on sufferers.

Uh-huh, image and likeness of God right there, yeah? Suckers. I'm glad - and exceedingly impressed - he's so cool about it though. Seems like a nice guy under all that.

Paging Harry Hamlin ...

2007-11-21T10:22:00.000-05:00

Claw from 8-foot-long scorpion (now extinct) discovered.

Nowadays arthropods such as spiders and crabs are considered to be small animals but the discovery of a 390 million year old giant fossil claw, published today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, shows that they were much bigger than previously thought.

The claw - found in Germany from a sea scorpion (eurypterid) Jaekelopterus rhananine - is 46cm long. This would mean that the scorpion's body was 2.5 metres long making it the largest arthropod ever to have evolved.

OR

If your tastes run to the formalized and hyper-academic:

The fossil record has yielded various gigantic arthropods, in contrast to their diminutive proportions today. The recent discovery of a 46cm long claw (chelicera) of the pterygotid eurypterid (‘sea scorpion’) Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, from the Early Devonian Willwerath Lagerstätte of Germany, reveals that this form attained a body length of approximately 2.5m—almost half a metre longer than previous estimates of the group, and the largest arthropod ever to have evolved. Gigantism in Late Palaeozoic arthropods is generally attributed to elevated atmospheric oxygen levels, but while this may be applicable to Carboniferous terrestrial taxa, gigantism among aquatic taxa is much more widespread and may be attributed to other extrinsic factors, including environmental resources, predation and competition. A phylogenetic analysis of the pterygotid clade reveals that Jaekelopterus is sister-taxon to the genus Acutiramus, and is among the most derived members of the pterygotids, in contrast to earlier suggestions

Twice the mice is twice as nice.

2007-11-06T02:07:00.001-05:00

Supermurines succcessfully bred in the lab.

Case Western Reserve University researchers have bred a line of "mighty mice" (PEPCK-Cmus mice) that have the capability of running five to six kilometers at a speed of 20 meters per minute on a treadmill for up to six hours before stopping.

"They are metabolically similar to Lance Armstrong biking up the Pyrenees; they utilize mainly fatty acids for energy and produce very little lactic acid," said Richard W. Hanson, the Leonard and Jean Skeggs Professor of Biochemistry at Case Western Reserve and the senior author of the cover article that appeared in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, entitled "Over Expression of the Cytosolic Form of Phosphoenolpyruvate Carboxykinase (GTP) in Skeletal Muscle Repatterns Energy Metabolism in the Mouse."

The term you want to keep in mind is "PEPCK-C Enzyme". Remember it because you'll be (no doubt illegally) injecting the stuff same day real soon now.

PS
If the youtube embed doesn't work for you, there's a quicktime version. God help us all.

Carl Draper's is cooler.

2007-09-16T10:48:00.000-05:00

Innovative Visualization System: The Hyperwall

The hyperwall is a seven-by-seven cluster of flat panel screens, each mounted on a customdesigned rack. Each of the 49 screens is driven by its own dual-processor computer with high-end graphics card. Unlike large projection systems that must coordinate separate machines to tile images, the hyperwall allows each computer to process and display its own data. This essential difference enables researchers to harness that computer power and provides flexibility in displaying large data sets
Each screen can be adjusted individually or by column or row to accommodate different viewing requirements and distances.

... In addition, it makes effective use of computing resources by offering a high-bandwidth connection to NASA's Columbia supercomputer, and enables scientists to see results of calculations in real time.