The Day The Earth Smiled

from Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA

On July 19, 2013, in an event celebrated the world over, NASA's Cassini spacecraft slipped into Saturn's shadow and turned to image the planet, seven of its moons, its inner rings -- and, in the background, our home planet, Earth.
With the sun's powerful and potentially damaging rays eclipsed by Saturn itself, Cassini's onboard cameras were able to take advantage of this unique viewing geometry. They acquired a panoramic mosaic of the Saturn system that allows scientists to see details in the rings and throughout the system as they are backlit by the sun. This mosaic is special as it marks the third time our home planet was imaged from the outer solar system; the second time it was imaged by Cassini from Saturn's orbit; and the first time ever that inhabitants of Earth were made aware in advance that their photo would be taken from such a great distance.

With both Cassini's wide-angle and narrow-angle cameras aimed at Saturn, Cassini was able to capture 323 images in just over four hours. This final mosaic uses 141 of those wide-angle images. Images taken using the red, green and blue spectral filters of the wide-angle camera were combined and mosaicked together to create this natural-color view. A brightened version with contrast and color enhanced (Figure 1), a version with just the planets annotated (Figure 2), and an annotated version (Figure 3) are shown above.

This image spans about 404,880 miles (651,591 kilometers) across.

CLICK TO ENLARGE!



The outermost ring shown here is Saturn's E ring, the core of which is situated about 149,000 miles (240,000 kilometers) from Saturn. The geysers erupting from the south polar terrain of the moon Enceladus supply the fine icy particles that comprise the E ring; diffraction by sunlight gives the ring its blue color. Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers, across) and the extended plume formed by its jets are visible, embedded in the E ring on the left side of the mosaic.

At the 12 o'clock position and a bit inward from the E ring lies the barely discernible ring created by the tiny, Cassini-discovered moon, Pallene (3 miles, or 4 kilometers, across). (For more on structures like Pallene's ring, see PIA08328). The next narrow and easily seen ring inward is the G ring. Interior to the G ring, near the 11 o'clock position, one can barely see the more diffuse ring created by the co-orbital moons, Janus (111 miles, or 179 kilometers, across) and Epimetheus (70 miles, or 113 kilometers, across). Farther inward, we see the very bright F ring closely encircling the main rings of Saturn.

Following the outermost E ring counter-clockwise from Enceladus, the moon Tethys (662 miles, or 1,066 kilometers, across) appears as a large yellow orb just outside of the E ring. Tethys is positioned on the illuminated side of Saturn; its icy surface is shining brightly from yellow sunlight reflected by Saturn. Continuing to about the 2 o'clock position is a dark pixel just outside of the G ring; this dark pixel is Saturn's Death Star moon, Mimas (246 miles, or 396 kilometers, across). Mimas appears, upon close inspection, as a very thin crescent because Cassini is looking mostly at its non-illuminated face.

The moons Prometheus, Pandora, Janus and Epimetheus are also visible in the mosaic near Saturn's bright narrow F ring. Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers, across) is visible as a faint black dot just inside the F ring and at the 9 o'clock position. On the opposite side of the rings, just outside the F ring, Pandora (50 miles, or 81 kilometers, across) can be seen as a bright white dot. Pandora and Prometheus are shepherd moons and gravitational interactions between the ring and the moons keep the F ring narrowly confined. At the 11 o'clock position in between the F ring and the G ring, Janus (111 miles, or 179 kilometers, across) appears as a faint black dot. Janus and Prometheus are dark for the same reason Mimas is mostly dark: we are looking at their non-illuminated sides in this mosaic. Midway between the F ring and the G ring, at about the 8 o'clock position, is a single bright pixel, Epimetheus. Looking more closely at Enceladus, Mimas and Tethys, especially in the brightened version of the mosaic, one can see these moons casting shadows through the E ring like a telephone pole might cast a shadow through a fog.

In the non-brightened version of the mosaic, one can see bright clumps of ring material orbiting within the Encke gap near the outer edge of the main rings and immediately to the lower left of the globe of Saturn. Also, in the dark B ring within the main rings, at the 9 o'clock position, one can see the faint outlines of two spoke features, first sighted by NASA's Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s and extensively studied by Cassini.

Finally, in the lower right of the mosaic, in between the bright blue E ring and the faint but defined G ring, is the pale blue dot of our planet, Earth. Look closely and you can see the moon protruding from the Earth's lower right. (For a higher resolution view of the Earth and moon taken during this campaign, see PIA14949.) Earth's twin, Venus, appears as a bright white dot in the upper left quadrant of the mosaic, also between the G and E rings. Mars also appears as a faint red dot embedded in the outer edge of the E ring, above and to the left of Venus.

For ease of visibility, Earth, Venus, Mars, Enceladus, Epimetheus and Pandora were all brightened by a factor of eight and a half relative to Saturn. Tethys was brightened by a factor of four. In total, 809 background stars are visible and were brightened by a factor ranging from six, for the brightest stars, to 16, for the faintest. The faint outer rings (from the G ring to the E ring) were also brightened relative to the already bright main rings by factors ranging from two to eight, with the lower-phase-angle (and therefore fainter) regions of these rings brightened the most. The brightened version of the mosaic was further brightened and contrast-enhanced all over to accommodate print applications and a wide range of computer-screen viewing conditions.

Some ring features -- such as full rings traced out by tiny moons -- do not appear in this version of the mosaic because they require extreme computer enhancement, which would adversely affect the rest of the mosaic. This version was processed for balance and beauty.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 17 degrees below the ring plane. Cassini was approximately 746,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Saturn when the images in this mosaic were taken. Image scale on Saturn is about 45 miles (72 kilometers) per pixel.

This mosaic was made from pictures taken over a span of more than four hours while the planets, moons and stars were all moving relative to Cassini. Thus, due to spacecraft motion, these objects in the locations shown here were not in these specific places over the entire duration of the imaging campaign. Note also that Venus appears far from Earth, as does Mars, because they were on the opposite side of the sun from Earth.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Thanks, Boing Boing

'Beat this!: a Hip-Hop History'. The 1984 Hip Hop documentary film.

‘WE ARE NOT BLACK FLAG. WE ARE FLAG’: LIVE AND HARDCORE IN NEW YORK CITY

here's fifteen minutes from the show I attended back in September… look closely and you can probably spot me on stage acting a fool :-) taking some photos like these two below as well. That was a great evening



from Dangerous Minds

When you rip away the white noise of controversy over the competing Black Flag reunions what you’re left with is the music and in this case Flag, featuring Keith Morris, Dez Cadena, Bill Stevenson, Stephen Egerton and Chuck Dukowski deliver a mighty roar that, with or without a name, is farking awesome. Punk rock’s midlife crisis is an amazing thing to behold.

Here’s 15 minutes of Flag performing at New York City’s Irving Plaza a couple of months ago.

Punk Freedom of Information Access ninja learns how to beat FBI obfuscation, so they shut him out

from Boing Boing

Mike sez, "In Mother Jones, Will Potter profiles Ryan Shapiro, a punk rocker-turned-PhD student who wanted to study how the FBI monitors animal-rights activists. Through trial and error, and a lot of digging, he devised a perfectly legal, highly effective strategy to unearth sensitive documents from the bureau's 'byzantine' filing system.

In short, he got too smart for the feds, so they've cut him off. Now Shapiro has sued the FBI to release some 350,000 documents he's requested under FOIA. If the court buys the FBI's argument here, open-government groups say it could make it harder for scholars and journalists to keep tabs on federal agencies. Potter explains:"

Evoking a legal strategy that had its heyday during the Bush administration, the FBI claims that Shapiro's multitudinous requests, taken together, constitute a "mosaic" of information whose release could "significantly and irreparably damage national security" and would have "significant deleterious effects" on the bureau's "ongoing efforts to investigate and combat domestic terrorism."

So-called mosaic theory has been used in the past to stop the release of specific documents, but it has never been applied so broadly. "It's designed to be retrospective," explains Kel McClanahan, a DC-based lawyer who specializes in national security and FOIAlaw. "You can't say, 'What information, if combined with future information, could paint a mosaic?' because that would include all information!"

Meet the Punk Rocker Who Can Liberate Your FBI File (Thanks, Mike!)

(Photo: Stephanie Crumley)

dig the Dischord T-shirt!

Skateboard Sense - a vintage skateboarding safety video!

A good night's sleep is like a deep clean for your brain

One reason sleep is so important: It's the time when your brain "cleans house", collecting and disposing of the waste products that build up in your head during the day.

from Nautilus:

or humans, sleep is an absolute requirement for survival, almost on par with food and water. When we don’t get it, we not only feel terrible, but our cognitive abilities go downhill, and in extreme cases sleeplessness can lead to seizures and contribute to death. And while we share with many other animals this intense commitment to spending much of our lives unconscious, we don’t really know why we do it. A paper published in Science last month suggests that the answer may lie in part with a recently discovered plumbing system that drains waste from the brain. Scientists essentially found that the brain likes to wait till sleep comes before taking out the garbage.

The study follows up on the discovery last year by the same team, based at University of Rochester, that the brain’s waste is removed by a network of channels that run alongside blood vessels. The channels work like the lymphatic system that operates in the rest of the body, collecting and draining what isn’t needed, but they are made of brain cells called glia, instead of the membrane cells that form lymphatic vessels. The channels were effectively invisible to biologists until the development of methods to watch a living brain under the microscope—mouse brains, in these experiments. The discovery of these channels suggested that diseases like Alzheimer’s, in which waste products build up in the brain, might be linked to problems with drainage.

The team wondered whether this system of channels, whose constant pumping action requires a lot of energy, might be responsible for the observation that the sleeping brain uses as much as energy as a wakeful one. To see how the volume of cleaning fluid circulating in the brain changed during sleep, they injected fluorescent molecules into the brains of mice and watched them circulate through waking, sleeping, and anesthetized animals. They even got to see how the flow changed in real-time, as mice emerged from sleep, by gently touching their tails to wake them up.

Remarkably, unconsciousness had a dramatic effect on how much fluid swept through the brain. The sleeping and the anesthetized mice had a 60% increase in the volume of fluid, apparently because brain cells actually shrink to allow more space in the channels. When the researchers woke the mice up, the flow of fluid into the brain abruptly slowed. Further, when the group watched for the removal of beta amyloid, the waste product that gums up the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, they found it left twice as fast in the brains of sleeping mice. The results indicate that the drainage system is particularly active during sleep.

Though things might work differently in human brains, and this waste-management system is not yet well studied, these findings give a tantalizing glimpse of one possible explanation for why sleep is so restorative. Maybe the fresh, new feeling we have when we awake really is a kind of cleanliness, as the byproducts of the previous day’s cogitations have been washed away.

Thanks Boing Boing

Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee Has Abolished $13.5 Million in Medical Debt, Owned by 2,693 People, in 45 States & Puerto Rico

via The Sparrow Project

Strike Debt, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, announced this morning that since the launch of the group’s Rolling Jubilee effort one year ago, it has abolished $13.5 million worth of medical debt owed by 2,693 people across 45 states and in Puerto Rico. This is the third announcement by Strike Debt in the last year which to date has abolished over $14.7 million dollars of medical bills through its Rolling Jubilee project.



The Rolling Jubilee campaign relieves debtors (by buying debt for pennies on the dollar) while building a debt resistance movement. This project highlights the injustice of having to go into debt for basic needs that should be publicly provided, like education and healthcare. “We have been honored to facilitate this effort but understand Rolling Jubilee is a spark, not a solution” said Andrew Ross, a fellow Strike Debt organizer. “Being forced into debt for basic social services is a systemic problem that will require a collective response.”“No one should have to go into debt or bankruptcy because they get sick,” said Laura Hanna, an organizer with Strike Debt, noting that 62% of all personal bankruptcies have medical debt as a contributing factor.

“Debt is the tie that binds the 99 percent,” says Strike Debt member Ann Larson. “Whether you are a student who is delinquent on your student loans, a parent struggling to pay healthcare bills, or living in a community that is cutting vital social services because your city is bankrupt, debt affects everyone.”

Strike Debt chapters in New York, the Bay Area, Austin, Portland and elsewhere are planning celebrations and debtors’ assemblies on Nov 15th.

Strike Debt is working towards building a new kind of collective power in order to challenge exploitation by the financial industry. “Debt is the way we cooperate with Wall Street,” said Thomas Gokey an organizer with Strike Debt, “With the Rolling Jubilee, we’ve demonstrated how little your debts are actually worth. Now that you know this, it’s time to use it as leverage. It’s time to fight back. The Rolling Jubilee needs to roll into larger forms of resistance and outright non-cooperation with Wall Street’s unjust debts.” Looking forward, Strike Debt is laying the groundwork for a debtors’ union capable of collective debt refusal.

In the Crossfire: Nuclear Energy (CNN)

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader questions the national security aspect of having nuclear power plants. Watch how nuclear energy supporter Michael Shellenberger, who was featured in the film, Pandora's Promise, responds.


FUCK NUKES!

Action Now magazine for television Early 80's

They may have been ahead of their time in some ways, no doubt…. But production like this made sure it was doomed to fail. This program never actually made it past the test stages. How sad it was… Could have been real, that's how it goes sometimes…

‘The Ghosts in Our Machine’ A new documentary

THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE illuminates the lives of individual animals living within and rescued from the machine of our modern world. Through the heart and lens of acclaimed animal photographer Jo-Anne McArthur we become intimately familiar with a cast of animal subjects. Each story and photograph is a window into global animal industries: Food, Fashion, Entertainment and Research. All part of an epic photo project called We Animals, McArthur has documented the lives of animals around the world with heart-breaking empathic vividness. THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE charts McArthur’s efforts to bring wider attention to a topic that most of humankind strives hard to avoid. Are non-human animals property to be owned and used, or are they sentient beings deserving of rights?

With the exception of our companion animals and a few wild and stray species within our urban environments, we experience animals daily as the food, clothing, animal tested goods and entertainment we make of them.
This moral dilemma is often hidden from our view.

U.S. SCREENINGS and Events

Thanks Sparrow Media

NASA's Kepler spacecraft sends home data suggesting odds of space life are better than we thought

from our friend Xeni at Boing Boing



READ:

Dennis Overbye, in the New York Times: "Astronomers reported that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable Earth-size planets in the galaxy, based on a new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft."

Skateboarding kids in Mongolia

"The Uukhai Documentary," dir. Odmandakh Bataa]

THE UUKHAI DOCUMENTARY travels time to bring you the past, present and future of skateboarding in Mongolia. As it is a brand new sport and lifestyle, success is inevitable. Original and local skaters of the city of Ulaanbaatar, explain their perceptions of skateboarding on how it changed their lives and what it could do for the young guns to come follow in their footsteps. Step into their lives and get a firsthand look of what it takes to be an upcoming skateboarder in the dusty, rugged and cold streets of the historic country that is Mongolia.

thanks to Boing Boing check out the original story for more information.

Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A Comin'on PBS' American Masters

UPDATED WATCH ENTIRE PROGRAM HERE NOW!



CHECK YOUR LOCAL LISTINGS - SHOWING NOW!

from PBS

Hear My Train A Comin’ unveils previously unseen performance footage and home movies taken by Hendrix and drummer Mitch Mitchell while sourcing an extensive archive of photographs, drawings, family letters and more to provide new insight into the musician’s personality and genius.

A pioneering electric guitarist, Hendrix (Nov. 27, 1942 — Sept. 18, 1970) had only four years of mainstream exposure and recognition, but his influential music and riveting stage presence left an enduring legacy. Hear My Train A Comin’ traces the guitarist’s remarkable journey from his hardscrabble beginnings in Seattle, through his stint as a US Army paratrooper, unknown sideman to R&B stars such as Little Richard, Joey Dee and the Isley Brothers and his discovery and ultimate international stardom.

Presented as part of a year-long celebration around his 70th birthday year, the two-hour Hear My Train A Comin’ uses Hendrix’s own words to tell his story, illustrated through archival interviews and illuminated with commentary from family, well-known friends and musicians including Paul McCartney, band members Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell, Billy Cox, long-time sound engineer Eddie Kramer; Steve Winwood, Vernon Reid, Billy Gibbons, Dweezil Zappa and Dave Mason.

The film also features revealing glimpses into Jimi and his era from the three women closest to him: Linda Keith (the girlfriend who introduced Jimi to future manager Chas Chandler), Faye Pridgon (who befriended Hendrix in Harlem in the early 1960s) and Colette Mimram (one of the era’s most influential fashion trendsetters who provided inspiration for Hendrix’s signature look and created such memorable stage costumes as the beaded jacket Hendrix famously wore at Woodstock). The film details the meteoric rise of the Experience, the creation of his groundbreaking music, the building of Electric Lady Studios, his state-of-the-art recording facility in Greenwich Village and concludes with poignant footage from his final performance in Germany in September 1970, just 12 days before his death at age 27.



Among the previously unseen treasures in Hear My Train A Comin’ is recently uncovered film footage of Hendrix at the 1968 Miami Pop Festival. The first-ever major rock festival staged on the East Coast, the May 1968 Miami Pop Festival at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale, Fla., was the first event promoted by Woodstock organizer Michael Lang and Ric O’Barry (dolphin trainer for Flipper TV series), who were inspired by the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, where Hendrix made his U.S. debut and famously set fire to his guitar.

Two-time Grammy-winning director Bob Smeaton, whose credits include Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child, Hendrix: Band of Gypsys, Hendrix 70: Live at Woodstock, Festival Express and The Beatles Anthology, shows a side of Hendrix less frequently explored in Hear My Train A Comin’. Smeaton explains, “Jimi loved two things: women and playing guitar and that’s what Linda, Faye and Colette all told us. These women shed a totally different light on him than the guys who saw him onstage.”

On the same day as the film’s premiere, Experience Hendrix LLC and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, will release the expanded home video edition of the American Masters documentary, with never-before-released special performance features, on DVD and Blu-ray.

Blue sky billboard in smoggy Beijing - China's Toxic Sky

from The Atlantic

Since the beginning of this year, the levels of air pollution in Beijing have been dangerously high, with thick clouds of smog chasing people indoors, disrupting air travel, and affecting the health of millions. The past two weeks have been especially bad -- at one point the pollution level measured 40 times recommended safety levels. Authorities are taking short-term measures to combat the current crisis, shutting down some factories and limiting government auto usage. However, long-term solutions seem distant, as China's use of coal continues to rise, and the government remains slow to acknowledge and address the problems. * Starting with photo #2, a four-part set of these images is interactive, allowing you to click the photo and 'clear the air', viewing a difference over time. (31 Photos here)

In Fragmented Forests, Rapid Mammal Extinctions

from The New York Times


An isolated forest in the Chiew Larn reservoir. A Thai government project to supply hydroelectric power to the area transformed 150 forested hilltops into islands.

In 1987, the government of Thailand launched a huge, unplanned experiment. They built a dam across the Khlong Saeng river, creating a 60-square-mile reservoir. As the Chiew Larn reservoir rose, it drowned the river valley, transforming 150 forested hilltops into islands, each with its own isolated menagerie of wildlife.

Conservation biologists have long known that fragmenting wilderness can put species at risk of extinction. But it’s been hard to gauge how long it takes for those species to disappear. Chiew Larn has given biologists the opportunity to measure the speed of mammal extinctions. “It’s a rare thing to come by in ecological studies,” said Luke Gibson, a biologist at the National University of Singapore.

Over two decades, Dr. Gibson and his colleagues have tracked the diversity of mammals on the islands. In Friday’s issue of the journal Science, they report that the extinctions have turned out to be distressingly fast.

“Our results should be a warning,” said Dr. Gibson. “This is the trend that the world is going in.”

Tropical forests are regularly cleared for logging, farming and cities. In most cases, the only original tree cover is reduced to isolated patches. Many of the original species of plants and animals may still survive in those fragments, but they experience new stresses. The edges of the fragments are no longer dim and humid, for example.

The small size of the surviving populations also creates problems. Over the course of a few generations, a small population can accumulate harmful mutations that make them less fertile or more vulnerable to diseases.

Scientists have hypothesized that many species will gradually decline in forest fragments until they become extinct. Reducing a vast carpet of jungle to isolated patches thus creates a so-called “extinction debt” that nature will sooner or later collect.

After the Khlong Saeng river was dammed, David Woodruff of the University of California at San Diego recognized that the islands in the reservoir would be good places to study how quickly nature calls in that debt. The islands were all formed at the same time, they were all isolated by water and they were surrounded by a vast forest preserve that was still brimming with biological diversity.

Between 1992 and 1994, Woodruff’s team visited a dozen islands, setting a 150-yard line of traps on each one. Each day for a week they visited the traps, tagged any mammals they found and released the animals. The researchers also set the same traps in the forests surrounding the reservoir.

>>> check out Isolated Forrest MAP HERE

Just five years after the dam was built, they could see a difference. Several species were more rare on the islands than on the mainland.

Dr. Gibson returned to the same 12 islands in 2012 and repeated the survey. He started on a 25-acre island. The first survey had found seven species of mammals. Dr. Gibson spent a week checking traps on the island and found only a single species: the Malayan field rat.

This was a startling find for two reasons. One was the drastic crash in diversity. The other was that the Malayan field rat wasn’t on the islands when they first formed. Malayan field rats thrive around villages and farms and other disturbed habitats. The rats Dr. Gibson trapped must have come from the surrounding rain forests, where they still remain scarce. When they swam to the islands, they found fragmented forests that they could dominate.

“I thought, ‘Wow, what if this trend holds?'” said Dr. Gibson. “And it did.”

On most of the islands, all the native species were gone, replaced by the rats. Only on a few islands did some species still cling to existence. Dr. Gibson surveyed an additional four islands and found they also had just one or two species, suggesting that all the islands were suffering massive extinctions in about 20 years.

“No one expected to see such rapid extinctions,” said Dr. Gibson.

Dr. Gibson suspects that the small size of the island forests makes them particularly vulnerable to invasion by the rats. The diversity of mammals he trapped in the mainland forests was the same as in the first surveys in the 1990s.

“This study confirms for mammals what we’ve long known for birds,” said Stuart L. Pimm, the president of Saving Species and a professor at Duke. In 2003, Dr. Pimm and his colleagues studied records of birds from forest fragments in the Amazon and found species going extinct at a comparable rate.

Dr. Pimm and Dr. Gibson agreed that the fast pace of extinction in forest fragments gives an urgency to conserving the large swaths of tropical forest that still remain. “Our study shows we may need to do that very quickly,” said Dr. Gibson.

for your sunday viewing pleasure Videos of entire long-distance train journeys

from Boing Boing

YouTube has been an existence-proof of forms of video that were lurking in potentia, unable to come into existence due to limitations of the distribution channel. The two-to-three-minute video has now been firmly established as a genre (with the six-second video hot on its heels), but there's plenty of room at the long end of the scale. Case in point: subculture of YouTubers who post full-length train journeys, hours and hours' worth -- and if that's not long-form enough, how about 134-hour sea crossings?

Given the modern vogue/panic about short-reads being mere "linkblogging" and the practice of spinning out a few hundred words into a "serious, long-form journalism" wheeze that is split across eight or more screens, this may just be the video form for our age (and please let it be a short one!).

I was thrilled to learn, via an excellent Metafilter post, about a small online subculture of resistence to the attention-frittering trend: the existence of scores of YouTube videos documenting entire train journeys, some many hours long, from the perspective of the driver in the cab. The video above is nine hours and 53 minutes long – it's available in spring, autumn and winter versions too – and while I won't claim to have watched it all, I've spent some pleasant work breaks in Brooklyn watching Scandinavian scenery go by. But perhaps you'd prefer Glasgow to Fort William and Mallaig in Scotland? It's every bit as rainswept – and bleakly beautiful, especially in its latter stages – as you'd imagine:

Life too exciting? Enter the calming world of full-length train journey videos [Oliver Burkeman/The Guardian]

The Psychological Power of Satan

from Scientific American

How a belief in “pure evil” shapes people’s thinking

By Piercarlo Valdesolo

Justice Antonin Scalia [scumbag] and Keyser Soze agree: the greatest trick the devil could ever pull is convincing the world he didn’t exist. Fortunately for them, the devil does not seem to be effectively executing this plan. Some 70 percent of Americans, according to a 2007 Gallup Poll, believe in his existence. This personification of evil has implications beyond the supernatural, influencing how we think about what it means for people to be “pure evil.” And as we prepare to playfully celebrate the wicked and depraved on Halloween night, it’s worth pausing to reflect on some of the psychological and behavioral consequences of these beliefs.

Evil has been defined as taking pleasure in the intentional inflicting of harm on innocent others, and ever since World War II social psychologists have been fascinated by the topic. Many of the formative thinkers in the field — Kurt Lewin, Stanley Milgram , Solomon Asch — were inspired by their experiences with, and observations of, what appeared to most people at the time to be the indisputable incarnation of pure evil. But what many saw as a clear demonstration of unredeemable and deep-seated malice, these researchers interpreted as more, in the words of Hannah Arendt, banal. From Milgram’s famous studies of obedience to Zimbardo’s prison study, psychologists have argued for the roots of evil actions in quite ordinary psychological causes. This grounding of evil in ordinary, as opposed to extraordinary, phenomena have led some to describe the notion of “pure evil” as a myth. A misguided understanding of human nature deriving both from specific socio-cultural traditions as well as a general tendency to understand others’ behavior as a product solely of their essence, their soul, as opposed to a more complicated combination of environmental and individual forces.

The issue of whether “pure evil” exists, however, is separate from what happens to our judgments and our behavior when we believe in its existence. It is this question to which several researchers have recently begun to turn. How can we measure people’s belief in pure evil (BPE) and what consequences does such a belief have on our responses to wrong-doers?

According to this research, one of the central features of BPE is evil’s perceived immutability. Evil people are born evil – they cannot change. Two judgments follow from this perspective: 1) evil people cannot be rehabilitated, and 2) the eradication of evil requires only the eradication of all the evil people. Following this logic, the researchers tested the hypothesis that there would be a relationship between BPE and the desire to aggress towards and punish wrong-doers.

Researchers have found support for this hypothesis across several papers containing multiple studies, and employing diverse methodologies. BPE predicts such effects as: harsher punishments for crimes (e.g. murder, assault, theft), stronger reported support for the death penalty, and decreased support for criminal rehabilitation. Follow-up studies corroborate these findings, showing that BPE also predicts the degree to which participants perceive the world to be dangerous and vile, the perceived need for preemptive military aggression to solve conflicts, and reported support for torture.

Regardless of whether the devil actually exists, belief in the power of human evil seems to have significant and important consequences for how we approach solving problems of real-world wrongdoing. When we see people’s antisocial behavior as the product of an enduring and powerful malice, we see few options beyond a comprehensive and immediate assault on the perpetrators. They cannot be helped, and any attempts to do so would be a waste of time and resources.

But if we accept the message from decades of social psychological research, that at least some instances of violence and malice are not the result of “pure evil” — that otherwise decent individuals can, under certain circumstances, be compelled to commit horrible acts, even atrocities — then the results of these studies serve as an important cautionary tale. The longer we cling to strong beliefs about the existence of pure evil, the more aggressive and antisocial we become. And we may be aggressing towards individuals who are, in fact, “redeemable.” Individuals who are not intrinsically and immutably motivated by the desire to intentionally cause harm to others. That may be the greatest trick the devil has ever pulled.

NYPD tries to stop longboard skaters during Broadway Bomb, fails miserably

The Broadway Bomb brings together more than 2,500 longboard skaters each year in New York City to push eight miles through Manhattan, from West 116th Street to the Charging Bull in the Financial District. Since it’s inception in 2000, the NYPD has tried to hamper the event by hassling skaters, blocking roads, and even handing out tickets. This year the NYPD busted out the orange netting to try and corrall the skaters. They failed miserably. It was so bad that someone set the folly to the music from Benny Hill and it couldn’t be more appropriate.

halloween ...

incredible promotion of "micro banking" in Uganda with lip synched music video

from MicroBanker:

The video we made with 500 of our microfinance borrowers in Uganda has now been viewed over 100,000 times! This 'greatest lipdub of Africa' was shown on BBC East Africa and Al Jazeera UK, was featured in Huff Post and one.org articles and praised by Jessie J. We've received hundreds of touching, inspiring, and incredibly encouraging comments from all around the globe.

More than one hundred people have already become microbankers on this website. They have selected selected a business plan they found particularly interesting, and can now follow the weekly repayments of the women, ask questions to 'their client' directly, and use the repayments to give out more loans. It's amazing to see that amongst the >100 microbankers, there are people from 21 different countries, as diverse as the USA, Germany Trinidad and Tobago, Malaysia and Australia.

There are still hundreds of women waiting for a chance to set up a small business and work for a better future. We'd like to grow to 3,000 loans in the near future. Please help us by donating for a business plan on this website, and share the video and our message to as many people as you can!

So this is a shot behind teh scenes of the largest lipdub of Africa, with 500 women dancing to Jessie J's 'Price Tag' ft B.o.B. song. Every single one of these strong and resourceful women has started a business of her own. Their dream is to show you and Jessie J how this has impacted their lives!

In the largest lipdub of Africa, 500 women dance to 'Price Tag' by Jessie J ft. B.o.B. Every single one of these strong and resourceful women has started a business of her own. Their dream is to show you and Jessie J how this has impacted their lives! For more info go to http://www.microbanker.com. Like us on http://www.facebook.com/microbanker, follow us on http://www.twitter.com/microbankieren

Thank you

Directed by: Ivan Mikulic
Camera: Berta Banacloche
Choreography: Mexim Janzen
Project management: Duko Hopman

So this is right after our shoot for the largest lipdub of Africa, with 500 women dancing to Jessie J's 'Price Tag' ft B.o.B. song. Every single one of these strong and resourceful women has started a business of her own. Their dream is to show you and Jessie J how this has impacted their lives!

For more info go to www.microbanker.com

Bicycle Anecdotes from Amsterdam

from TreeHugger.com

Where bikes are like water to a fish...

Amsterdam is widely considered to be one of the very best cities for cyclists in the world. That didn't happen by accident, and seeing images from a few decades ago when the city was choked with cars really brings the point home. The locals took some very specific steps to get to where they are today, something that many other cities around the world could learn from.

But enough from me. You have to check out this video. It provides some of the best images of what it's like to actually live in a city where biking is not a sub-culture.

Kurt Cobain on Identity | Blank on Blank PBS Digital Studios

Sunday Documentary: If a Tree Falls, A Story of the Earth Liberation Front

Introducing Le book

tech support?

World Health Organization: Outdoor air pollution a leading cause of cancer

from The RAW Story (published last week)

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday classified outdoor air pollution as a leading cause of cancer in humans.

“The air we breathe has become polluted with a mixture of cancer-causing substances,” said Kurt Straif of the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

“We now know that outdoor air pollution is not only a major risk to health in general, but also a leading environmental cause of cancer deaths.”

The IARC said a panel of top experts had found “sufficient evidence” that exposure to outdoor air pollution caused lung cancer and raised the risk of bladder cancer.

Although the composition of air pollution and levels of exposure can vary dramatically between locations, the agency said its conclusions applied to all regions of the globe.

Air pollution was already known to increase the risk of respiratory and heart diseases.

The IARC said pollution exposure levels increased significantly in some parts of the world in recent years, notably in rapidly industrialising nations with large populations.

The most recent data, from 2010, showed that 223,000 lung cancer deaths worldwide were the result of air pollution, the agency said.

The data did not enable experts to establish whether particular groups of people were more or less vulnerable to cancer from pollution, but Straif said it was clear that risk rose in line with exposure.

In the past, the IARC had measured the presence of individual chemicals and mixtures of chemicals in the air — including diesel engine exhaust, solvents, metals, and dust.

Diesel exhaust and what is known as “particulate matter” — which includes soot — have been classified as carcinogenic by the IARC.

The latest findings were based on overall air quality, and based on an in-depth study of thousands of medical research projects conducted around the world over decades.

“Our task was to evaluate the air everyone breathes rather than focus on specific air pollutants,” said the IARC’s Dana Loomis.

“The results from the reviewed studies point in the same direction: the risk of developing lung cancer is significantly increased in people exposed to air pollution,” he added.

The predominant sources of outdoor air pollution were transport, power generation, emissions from factories and farms, and residential heating and cooking, the agency said.

“Classifying outdoor air pollution as carcinogenic to humans is an important step,” said the IARC’s director Christopher Wild.

“There are effective ways to reduce air pollution and, given the scale of the exposure affecting people worldwide, this report should send a strong signal to the international community to take action without further delay.”

The IARC said that was set to publish its in-depth conclusions on October 24 on the specialised website The Lancet Oncology.

40 police photos of dapper criminals from the 1920s

from Boing Boing:

The Justice & Police Museum of Sydney, Australia has a collection of "special photographs" of criminals from the 1920s. Curator Peter Doyle explains:

These ‘special photographs’ were mostly taken in the cells at the Central Police Station in Sydney and are of men and women recently plucked from the street, often still animated by the dramas surrounding their ‘apprehension’. Compared with the subjects of prison mug shots, the subjects of the special photographs seem to have been allowed – perhaps invited – to position and compose themselves for the camera as they liked. Their photographic identity thus seems constructed out of a potent alchemy of inborn disposition, personal history, learned habits and idiosyncrasies, chosen personal style (haircut, clothing, accessories) and physical characteristics.

Caption for above photo: Although no record for Fay Watson is found in the NSW Police Gazette for 1928, the Sydney Morning Herald (26 March 1928, p. 12) reports her arrest in a house in Crown Street, Darlinghurst, and subsequent conviction for having cocaine in her possession, for which she was fined ten pounds.

Giant floating purple finger flips the bird at Czech government

from Dangerous Minds

As parliamentary voting gets going in the Czech Republic this week, artist David Cerny is sending a message to President Milos Zeman by floating a HUGE purple “f*ck you” finger on the Vltava River pointed directly at Prague Castle.

Alrighty then…



 

 

Via Nerdcore

Our music tastes change as we get older to match the shifting social circumstances of our lives, according to a new study

from the Telegraph (UK)

Why young punks grow to like classical and jazz in older age

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

Teenagers who dispair of their parents' music tastes should beware - their own musical preferences are likely to follow the same path.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge believe they unravelled how a preference for Teenage Kicks can evolve into a love for Moonlight Sonata.

They have identified three distinct musical ages that people pass through as they mature – intense, contemporary and sophisticated.

For example, teenagers use “intense” music such as punk and metal to establish their identity, but as their lifestyles change, so do their music choices.

As they move into early adulthood, interest in intense music decreases and a preference for “contemporary” music such as pop and rap rises.

This corresponds to a shift in lifestyle to where people are socialising far more in bars, clubs and at parties where uplifting and danceable music tends to be played.

However, the preference for contemporary music plateaus in early middle age and individuals start to like sophisticated music like jazz and classical.

The scientists say this marks a shift to a more solitary expression of our intellect, status and greater emotional maturity.
They also found that tastes became less pretentious with far more older people liking country, folk and blues music.

“There is a tendency for young people to prefer music that their parents cannot stand or find obnoxious, so there must be some developmental changes that take place as we get older,” said Dr Jason Rentfrow, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Cambridge.

“Teenage years are often dominated by the need to establish identity.

“‘Intense’ music, seen as aggressive, tense and characterised by loud, distorted sounds has the rebellious connotations that allow adolescents to do this.

“While the first musical age is about asserting independence, the next appears to be more about gaining acceptance from others.

“What we took away from the results is that these forms of music reinforce the desire for intimacy and complement settings where people come together with the goal of establishing close relationships – parties, bars, clubs and so on.

“As we settle into ourselves and acquire more resources to express ourselves – career, home, family, car – music remains an extension of this.

“There are aspects of wanting to promote social status, intellect and wealth that play into the increased gravitation towards ‘sophisticated’ music.

“For many this life stage is frequently exhausted by work and family, and there is a requirement for relaxing, emotive music for those rare down times that reflects the other major ‘life challenge’ of this stage – that of nurturing a family and maintaining long-term relationships, perhaps the hardest of all.”

The research, which is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, drew on musical preference surveys that have been completed by more than 250,000 people over a ten year period.

It examined how musical preferences differed with age and compared these to “life challenges” that have been identified as playing key roles as people mature.

The findings seem to challenge the idea that our music tastes stay the same and it is just culture that overtakes us as we get older.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found that people actively changed the music they liked.

“Of course there are not hard boundaries as people in later life do still enjoy listening to the rock and roll then enjoyed when they were younger,” said Dr Rentfrow.

“But the reasons for listening may change. We use music for different reasons and there may be more nostalgia involved as we get older.”

It is not just listening tastes that change, but also the tastes of those who are creating music.

The researchers point to musicians such as Sting and Paul McCartney, who personified the rebellious youth culture of their time, who are now producing classical and folk albums.

“The project started with a common conception that musical taste does not evolve after young adulthood,” said Arielle Bonneville-Roussy from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology, who led the study.

“Most academic research to date supported this claim, but - based on other areas of psychological research and our own experiences - we were not convinced this was the case.

“I find it fascinating to see how seemingly trivial behaviour such as music listening relates to so many psychological aspects, such as personality and age.”

The Right to Remain Silent. a short film by By Phil Brown

The film covers the mass arrests of nearly 2000 peaceful protesters during the COP 15 in Copenhagen (environmental meeting), whilst following effected activists and discussing the wider ramifications of the growing trend around the world of criminalizing protests.

MC5: A True Testimonial MUST WATCH!

this is fucking great, don't miss it!

from Dangerous Minds:

The absolutely terrific documentary MC5: A True Testimonial was made in 2002 but never had a theatrical run and has never been released on DVD. Other than screenings at film festivals, the movie has mostly gone unseen despite receiving stellar reviews. The reasons were legal entanglements that often cripple or doom rockumentaries to obscurity, the details of which I’m not going to get into because they involve friends I don’t want to piss off.

Here’s a rare chance to see MC5: A True Testimonial. It may not last long on YouTube so I suggest watching it now. A finer film on the Motor City 5 will doubtlessly never be made. Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!

Update: Yes, I know the film was booked briefly in NYC and a booking or two in Michigan. But, to me, that doesn’t constitute a “theatrical run.” For all intents and purposes, and I’m sure the film makers would agree, the film was never released in any significant way to theaters.

The History of Movie Popcorn

from Boing Boing

Popcorn really took off in North America in the mid-1880s, but it would take 50 years for it to become a favorite food at movie theaters. According to Andrew Smith, author of Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn, "movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn’t want popcorn being ground into it.” Then the Great Depression happened and movies took off as popular cheap entertainment. Popcorn vendors set up outside to provide an equally cheap snack. By the early 1930s, a Kansas City entrepreneur named Julia Braden convinced theaters to allow her to bring her popcorn kiosk into the theater. Of course, eventually the theaters established their own concession stands. This week, both Smithsonian and the New York Times looked at the history of movie popcorn.

"Why Do We Eat Popcorn at the Movies?" (Smithsonian)

Who Made Movie Popcorn? (NYT)

Food Will Win the War: Disney's most surreal war propaganda cartoon, 1942

from Dangerous Minds

Not just a potato twice the height of the Rock of Gibralter… a sexy potato twice the height of the Rock of Gibralter

You may be familiar with Disney’s most famous World War Two propaganda, Der Fuehrer’s Face, in which Donald Duck dreams of an alternate life under Nazi rule. It’s weird, but not nearly as weird as Food Will Win the War. During both World War One and Two, the slogan, “Food will win the war,” was bandied about to both discourage food waste and encourage an increase in agricultural yields; the idea was that the U.S. needed to remain war-ready with a food surplus. In the film, however, the slogan is invoked more as a morale booster, and the result is a confusing mish-mash of messaging.

Instead of telling farmers to produce more and families to waste less, the narrator emphasizes our current glut of food, which is really counterintuitive to a message of prudence and industriousness. It’s as if the writers got so carried away with nationalist boasting, that they forgot the actual purpose of the film. Even more strangely, they demonstrate our surfeit of food by means of very strange scale comparisons.

For instance, did you know that if we had made all our wheat from 1942 into flour, we could bury every German tank in it? And if we had made it into spaghetti, we could weave from it a fashionably nationalistic sweater-vest to clothe the entire Earth! Why would you aspire to do such a thing, you ask? Why would we knit a celestial spaghetti sweater?!? Who cares! We’re America, fuck yeah!

BANKSY continues... "Better Out Than In"

This New York Residency may go down as one of the greatest artistic endeavors of our time. Banksy is killing it on the daily here in NYC. Go to his web page for for more details, audio accompaniment to some of the pieces, the continuing daily updates, videos and exposures.

Disney World is your worst nightmare: Watch the amazing "Escape from Tomorrow" trailer

from our friend Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds



Obviously this is not meant to be any sort of review—I just stumbled across this movie myself and I haven’t seen it—but after watching the trailer for Escape from Tomorrow, which [came] out on Friday in theaters and on VOD, I cannot fucking wait to see this film.

But don’t take my word for it, here’s what some folks who have, you know, actually seen Escape from Tomorrow had to say:

“It is not possible that this film exists.”- Drew McWeeny, Hitfix

“Its cult status will remain immortal.”- Rob Nelson, Variety

“Intensely engaging. A daring attempt to literally assail Disney World from the inside out. Conveys a phantasmagorical nightmare on par with something Terry Gilliam might have dreamt up in his ‘Brazil’ days.”- Eric Kohn, Indiewire

“A mind melting vacation from hell. You’d hardly believe us if we tried to describe it.”- William Goss, The Playlist

“Just the fact that it exists at all is a miracle.”

- Chris Bumbray, JoBlo

“Easily the most jaw-dropping film I’ve ever seen at a film festival. The film is like a bad acid trip version of ‘National Lampoon’s Vacation’, but with Wally World substituted by the real thing.”- Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker Magazine

“A subversively satirical attack on the totalitarian nature of mass entertainment. Randy Moore’s film does deliver something new, being a bravura leap into the unknown and a testing piece of surrealism in its own right.”- Damon Wise, The Guardian

The plot involves a father who loses his job, but doesn’t want to tell his family while they’re at “the happiest place on Earth.” Apparently things go downhill from there…

Escape from Tomorrow was shot guerrilla-style, on the sly, at Disney World and elsewhere over a 45 day period. They returned to the amusement park several more times for pick-up shots.

At this moment I’m more excited about seeing Escape from Tomorrow than I was about seeing the final episode of Breaking Bad...



 

Piracy isn't killing big content; government needs to be skeptical of entertainment industry claims, according to London School of Economics

Copyright and Creation, a policy brief from a collection of respected scholars at the rock-ribbed London School of Economics, argues that the evidence shows that piracy isn't causing any grave harm to the entertainment industry, and that anti-piracy measures like the three-strikes provision in Britain's Digital Economy Act don't work. They call on lawmakers to take an evidence-led approach to Internet and copyright law, and to consider the interests of the public and not just big entertainment companies looking for legal backstops to their profit-maximisation strategies.

“Contrary to the industry claims, the music industry is not in terminal decline, but still holding ground and showing healthy profits. Revenues from digital sales, subscription services, streaming and live performances compensate for the decline in revenues from the sale of CDs or records,” says Bart Cammaerts, LSE Senior Lecturer and one of the report’s authors.

The report shows that the entertainment industries are actually doing quite well. The digital gaming industry is thriving, the publishing sector is stable, and the U.S. film industry is breaking record after record.

“Despite the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) claim that online piracy is devastating the movie industry, Hollywood achieved record-breaking global box office revenues of $35 billion in 2012, a 6% increase over 2011,” the report reads.

Even the music industry is doing relatively well. Revenue from concerts, publishing and digital sales has increased significantly since the early 2000s and while recorded music revenues show a decline, there is little evidence that piracy is the lead cause.

“The music industry may be stagnating, but the drastic decline in revenues warned of by the lobby associations of record labels is not in evidence,” the report concludes.

Piracy Isn’t Killing The Entertainment Industry, Scholars Show

Microsoft Word considered harmful

from Boing Boing:

Charlie Stross really, really hates Microsoft Word. So much so that he's written a 1600-word essay laying out the case for Word as a great destroyer of creativity, an agent of anticompetitive economic destruction, and an enemy of all that's decent and right in the world. It's actually a pretty convincing argument.

As the product grew, Microsoft deployed their embrace-and-extend tactic to force users to upgrade, locking them into Word, by changing the file format the program used on a regular basis. Early versions of Word interoperated well with rivals such as Word Perfect, importing and exporting other programs' file formats. But as Word's domination became established, Microsoft changed the file format repeatedly -- with Word 95, Word 97, in 2000, and again in 2003 and more recently. Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program. If you had to exchange documents with anyone else, you could try to get them to send and receive RTF — but for the most part casual business users never really got the hang of different file formats in the "Save As ..." dialog, and so if you needed to work with others you had to pay the Microsoft Danegeld on a regular basis, even if none of the new features were any use to you. The .doc file format was also obfuscated, deliberately or intentionally: rather than a parseable document containing formatting and macro metadata, it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures used by word, with pointers to the subroutines that provided formatting or macro support. And "fast save" made the picture worse, by appending a journal of changes to the application's in-memory state. To parse a .doc file you virtually have to write a mini-implementation of Microsoft Word. This isn't a data file format: it's a nightmare! In the 21st century they tried to improve the picture by replacing it with an XML schema ... but somehow managed to make things worse, by using XML tags that referred to callbacks in the Word codebase, rather than representing actual document semantics. It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident ...

Why Microsoft Word must Die

Stan Lee on Superhero Science

Premiering on PBS next Tuesday, Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle is a three-part series about the history of comic book heroes and their impact on culture. There's also a hardcover companion book, titled Superheroes!: Capes, Cowls, and the Creation of Comic Book Culture, featuring full color art and interviews with Stan Lee, Michael Chabon, Grant Morrison, Adam West, and dozens of other icons and insiders. In the above clip from the PBS documentary, Stan Lee talks about the science of superheroes.

Thanks, Boing Boing

Sirens of the lambs Banksy doin' NYC cont.

I want to know is Banksy vegan or what?



from the Gothamist:

Banksy just posted photos of his latest piece... which IS the stuffed animal truck we were wondering about yesterday. The truck—which had the street artist's 1-800 number on it—was spotted around South Brooklyn yesterday afternoon—around 1 p.m. a tipster had told us, "It was so loud. Not sure but i think someone was in the truck banging as if the animals were trying to escape." Disturbing indeed — he calls the piece The Sirens Of The Lambs.

As of 11 a.m. [friday] the "slaughterhouse delivery truck [was] touring the meatpacking district," and then will tour citywide. - In the meantime, above is the video Banksy posted on his YouTube yesterday, showing some reactions to the truck.

‘Christianity Was A Hoax’ And Scholar Claims He Has The Proof!

from Dangerous Minds:

To the question Was Jesus Christ a real person? American biblical scholar Joseph Atwill says, “The short answer is no.”

Oh boy! This ought to be fun.

On October 19 Atwill will present some provocative new findings in London. Atwill’s thesis is that the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats who fabricated the entire story of Jesus Christ. Per Atwill: “The Caesars committed a crime against consciousness. They reached into the minds of their subjects and planted false concepts to make them easier to control.” Atwill claims to have iron-clad proof of his claims.

Atwill’s most intriguing discovery came to him while he was studying “Wars of the Jews” by Josephus—the only surviving first-person historical account of first-century Judea—alongside the New Testament.

I started to notice a sequence of parallels between the two texts. Although it’s been recognised by Christian scholars for centuries that the prophesies of Jesus appear to be fulfilled by what Josephus wrote about in the First Jewish-Roman war, I was seeing dozens more. What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of [Emperor] Titus Flavius as described by Josephus. This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern. The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar.

Here’s a promo video about Atwill and his findings:

Good News for Head bangers of all types: Scientists discover possible cure for noise-induced hearing loss!

from The Positive:

Scientists have found a potential cure for permanent deafness caused by loud noise exposure, infection and toxic drugs, using a drug that stimulates the inner ear.

Until now, it has been regarded as impossible to restore the sensory hair cells responsible for hearing once they have been lost, and the type of deafness often suffered by musicians and DJs was assumed to have been incurable.

However, a drug codenamed LY411575 brings about the regeneration of the crucial sensory hair cells and in tests was able to restore hearing to mice that had been deafened by loud noise.

This discovery, which was reported in neuroscience journal Neuron , suggests that the same may be possible in humans, although more research is still needed.

LY411575 works by suppressing proteins called Notch — which prevent stem cells from becoming new sensory hair cells within the cochlea, the auditory area of the inner ear.

According to charity Deafness Research UK, over one million Britons are exposed to potentially damaging noise levels in the workplace and 87 percent of deafness at all degrees of severity results from damage to the sensitive hair cells within the cochlea.

“We’re excited by these results because they are a step forward in the biology of regeneration and prove that mammalian hair cells have the capacity to regenerate,” lead researcher Dr. Albert Edge of Harvard Medical School said.

“The significance of the study is that hearing loss is a huge problem affecting 250 million worldwide.”

Government Shutdown - THE REIGN OF MORONS IS HERE

from Esquire

by Charles P. Pierce

Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

What is there to be done? The first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. There is no compromise to be had here that will leave the current structure of the government intact. There can be no reward for this behavior. I am less sanguine than are many people that this whole thing will redound to the credit of the Democratic party. For that to happen, the country would have to make a nuanced judgment over who is to blame that, I believe, will be discouraged by the courtier press of the Beltway and that, in any case, the country has not shown itself capable of making. For that to happen, the Democratic party would have to be demonstrably ruthless enough to risk its own political standing to make the point, which the Democratic party never has shown itself capable of doing. With the vandals tucked away in safe, gerrymandered districts, and their control over state governments probably unshaken by events in Washington, there will be no great wave election that sweeps them out of power. I do not see profound political consequences for enough of them to change the character of a Congress gone delusional. The only real consequences will be felt by the millions of people affected by what this Congress has forced upon the nation, which was the whole point all along.

Among other things, the Library Of Congress is closed as a result of what the vandals have done. Padlock study and intellect. Wander aimlessly down the mall among the shuttered monuments to self-government. Find yourself a food truck that serves monkey brains. Eat your fking fill.

Dead Boys @ CBGB October 1977 (video 4 Songs)

Some good quality footage of the Dead Boys at their peak in October 1977 at CBGB.
'Sonic Reducer','All This And More','Caught With The Meat In Your Mouth','High Tension Wire'.

Rebel rocket attack Banksy NY

Indie bookstores on the rise

good news...

from Boing Boing:

The number of members of the American Booksellers' Association is slowly creeping up, a welcome sign after a steep decline from 5500 members in 1995 to 2191 in 2002. ABA is comprised of indie booksellers, and though the dominant narrative has it that the indies were slaughtered by Amazon, the numbers suggest that the decline had more to do with the rise of the big-box chain-stores (ironically, these are dead [Borders] or dying [B&N] and were almost certainly killed by Amazon).

More interesting is why the number of indie bookstores is growing:

Amazon doesn’t do author events or signings, their discoverability is still atrocious compared to a physical location, and their promotions with smaller publishers are nearly nonexistent. If Amazon is successful in driving physical bookstores out of business (which is their ultimate goal, let’s be realistic), it is highly likely that a smaller-name author would see a drastic drop in sales.

Amazon Slayed a Negative 77 Indie Bookstores in 2012 [Nate Hoffelder/The Digital Reader]

Elvis Costello and his fun with being banned from "SNL" in '77 and again in '98 w/ Beastie Boys

from OpenCulture.com

One of the defining moments in Elvis Costello’s career happened on December 17, 1977, when he appeared on Saturday Night Live. Costello was 23 years old. His debut album, My Aim Is True, had just come out in America a month earlier. When the Sex Pistols were unable to appear on the show as planned (see their last live concert here), Costello and his recently formed band, the Attractions, got their big break.

They were supposed to play his single “Less Than Zero,” a catchy tune about a loathsome politician in England. But only a few bars into the song, Costello put a stop to it. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “but there’s no reason to do this song here.” At that point he and the band launched into “Radio Radio,” a song that takes a jab at corporate-controlled broadcasting. Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels was furious. According to some reports, he raised his middle finger at Costello and kept it up until the unapproved song was over. Costello was banned from the show for nearly 12 years. You can learn more about the incident by watching this video from the Daily Guru:

The rift between Costello and Michaels eventually healed, and Costello was invited to appear again on Saturday Night Live in the spring of 1989. Ten years after that, on SNL’s 25th anniversary show, Costello went on the show again and parodied his notorious 1977 appearance by bursting onstage while the Beastie Boys were playing “Sabotage” and ordering them to stop. He and the Boys then launched into a raucous version of “Radio Radio”:

In an interview this month with Details magazine, Costello talks a little about the 1977 incident. “They’ve run that clip forever,” he says, “and every time anybody does anything outrageous on that show, I get name-checked. But I was copying Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix had done the same thing on the Lulu Show, when he went into an unscheduled number. I remember seeing it and going, ‘What the hell’s going on?’” To see for yourself what Costello is talking about, visit our post, Jimi Hendrix Wreaks Havoc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From BBC.

BNE X PAK NUR: THE REAL STREET ARTIST

another from OBEY GIANT

Through his global travels, BNE has developed a strong empathy for those who struggle to find access to life’s basic necessities. Water is paramount. Check out this video of BNE and an Indonesian artist who is homeless. The artwork and ideas are powerful and beautiful.

-Shepard Fairey

WORLD WATER CRISIS

from ObeyGiant:

Please join our campaign to bring clean, safe drinking water to India!
It’s really easy and takes only a minute to literally change the life of someone in need.
Just click this link to join the campaign: http://my.charitywater.org/bne-x-shepard-fairey

Jon Stewart and Senator Warren on the Government Shutdown

Photojournalism: The Life Magazine Way ...(video)