If we don't kill ourselves out, the next 50 years are going to be incredibly interesting... it's worth just shutting the fuck up and stopping all wars just to see what amazing things we come up with. Well, we should really do that anyway. Our technology has become so incredible it's worth living just to see what we can create now. There's no longer a need for service-based economies, with our science we can truly exist as resource-based societies. We should look to begin the transition immediately, if we want to truly see the potential of the human mind begin to blossom.
SCIENCE - FTW.
Read this great article by Ray Kurzweil:
Ray Kurzweil sees a radical evolution of the human species in the next 40 years. The merger of man and machine, coupled with the sudden explosion in machine intelligence and rapid innovation in gene research and nanotechnology, will result in a world with no distinction between the biological and the mechanical or physical and virtual reality.
read more | digg story
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Friday, November 21, 2008
The evolution of the benevolent alien
In its bid for our ticket-buying dollars, Hollywood has long sought to reach into our pockets by giving us films that appeal to our current sense of hopefulness or fearfulness.
Over the years, one of the most reliable mechanisms for doing that has been the alien, the evil, destructive invaders hell-bent on laying waste to everything we hold dear (The War of the Worlds, say) or the inquisitive visitors curious to make our acquaintance and see what they can learn from us and our experience (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, maybe).
And to many, the extent to which these film aliens have been friend or foe has had a great deal to do with our general emotional state of mind.
"I think that it goes in waves," said Yair Landau, the former president of Sony Pictures Digital. "There was a wave of benign aliens around E.T. and Starman...Then there was a wave of, 'They're out to destroy us' aliens, like in Indepdence Day and the remake of War of the Worlds. It depends on whether we're looking for fear or reassurance as a society."
In 1951, Twentieth-Century Fox released director Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. In that Cold War-era film, we meet an alien, Klaatu, who has come to express, in the most soothing terms possible, that if we proceed with our nuclear weapons proliferation and are seen by the galactic consortium Klaatu represents as presenting a threat beyond our own atmosphere, we will be destroyed.
Even as he delivers this mortal threat, Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, comes across as sympathetic, even benevolent, as he really, really wants to give us humans some say in what happens to us. He seems really to care, as expressed by his budding friendship (would it have become romance?) with Helen Benson, played by Patricia Neal, and the urgency with which he strives to deliver--even in the face of a belligerent U.S. military--his message that we have some say in our fate.
Next month, Twentieth-Century Fox will release a remake of the film, this time directed by Scott Derrickson and starring Keanu Reeves as Klaatu.
This time around, Klaatu is here to tell us that the galactic consortium has had it with humans' mistreatment of our own planet, and he has come to explain that, effectively, his colleagues have taken the side of the Earth over the humans. Large-scale explosions and destruction ensue.
Why would these beings from outer space care so much about the health of the third rock from the sun? That's not entirely clear, said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute who worked for a time as a scientific adviser on the film.
"The (aliens) come down...trying to save the planet, but saving the planet requires them to obliterate the problem threatening the planet," Shostak said, "and in this case, that's not just SUVs and coal-fired plants."
In the 57 years between versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still, aliens covered a lot of evolutionary ground, so to speak, in how they've been portrayed. Some of that ground has had to do with the world's emotional makeup and some has had to do with what has been possible from a technological perspective.
For example, the look and feel of the aliens in a film like the remake of The War of the Worlds have almost nothing in common with those of the original. What originally had to be built using crude models and special effects is now done to exacting detail with computer graphics. And these advances put a lot of pressure on filmmakers today to keep the audience's attention with a story while those in the old days could do so much more with the novelty of on-screen aliens, no matter how rudimentary they looked.
"Anything you can conceive of can be (computer generated)," said Landau. "Just blowing stuff up, or just having an alien creature itself, is not very compelling...We're (now) able to give aliens a much higher complexity, so you can imbue them with character...Now you can make us believe almost any physical destruction you can think of and you can make us believe in any sort of 3D CGI environment. So it's all about whether you can drive compelling story and performance."
Our friends the aliens
Further, as Landau put it, the story has to fill in gaps left by the fact that people view aliens--who have long stood in for foreigners, or the "other"--as less threatening. And while that presents writing challenges to filmmakers, it also opens doors to a whole new era of stories in which aliens can more easily be presumed to be friendlier than in the past.
An example of that might be Contact, the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film in which Jodie Foster plays a scientist scanning the skies for intelligent life. Upon discovering a far-away civilization, Foster interprets messages sent to us as instructions on building a monumental transporter that will allow us to travel to the aliens' distant world. And while the film gives a nod to the inevitable military suspicions of the aliens' motives, it is the optimistic view that carries the day.
"Aliens in fiction are exaggerations of our hopes and fears about ourselves," said Mike Kuniavsky, a co-founder of the ubiquitous computing device company ThingM. "If they were genuinely alien, they wouldn't be particularly interesting because we wouldn't be able to understand them."
To Allan Lundell, a co-founder of the DigiBarn computer museum and a former editor of Byte magazine, the question of how aliens are depicted has very much to do with the financial considerations involved in how people's fears and hopes resonate at any given moment in time.
"Arnold Schwarzenegger was popular as a good Terminator, keeping us safe from the evil sentient machines and the ever-present Skynet," Lundell said. "But soon, he will be facing serious competition from a new hero, Ramona, a sentient cybernetic being hatched from the inventive mind of Ray Kurzweil, in his upcoming feature release, The Singularity is Near. Much cuter than Arnie, she saves the world from a nano grey goo attack while showing us what love beyond biology is all about."
The question here, Lundell poses, is whether an artificial intelligence construct can be considered an alien. Given that the term "alien" in this context is generally assumed to be a creature from another world, that's open to debate. But his point is a good one, as Ramona, as Lundell described her, is certainly the other.
Yet even as cybernetic others will be increasingly making their way onto the silver screen, it's almost certain that malevolent aliens of a traditional kind will also be making regular appearances, despite the fact that we, as a people, are becoming more and more comfortable around those with whom we aren't familiar.
And why?
"Aliens have a bigger role today as bad guys in film," Shostak, of the SETI Institute, said, "because once the Soviet Union collapses, who are you going to make as bad guys? You can make certain (nationalities be) bad guys, but it's a little hard because everybody's so culturally sensitive. And aliens don't have any advocacy organizations that are going to protest (outside) your theater if you make them the bad guy."
Today, it seems, Hollywood has decided to apply that approach even to well-worn stories like The Day the Earth Stood Still.
For where the Klaatu of 1951 adopted a concerned facial expression as he explained to humanity that he wanted to save us, Reeves' 2008 Klaatu seems content to dispense with us as the only way to save our planet.
And while there might be some truth to that conclusion, it's not very benevolent, at least from the humans' perspective.
Perhaps, suggested Lundell, that's because we haven't been in a very optimistic mood the last few years, an idea backed up by opinion polls showing that vast majorities of Americans, at least, think things have been going very badly. But if things begin to look up, then perhaps the benevolent alien will return in force.
"From my perspective," Lundell said, "ultimately the greatest revelation about aliens is that 'they' are 'us.' It's just that some of us don't quite know that just yet."
source:
Over the years, one of the most reliable mechanisms for doing that has been the alien, the evil, destructive invaders hell-bent on laying waste to everything we hold dear (The War of the Worlds, say) or the inquisitive visitors curious to make our acquaintance and see what they can learn from us and our experience (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, maybe).
And to many, the extent to which these film aliens have been friend or foe has had a great deal to do with our general emotional state of mind.
"I think that it goes in waves," said Yair Landau, the former president of Sony Pictures Digital. "There was a wave of benign aliens around E.T. and Starman...Then there was a wave of, 'They're out to destroy us' aliens, like in Indepdence Day and the remake of War of the Worlds. It depends on whether we're looking for fear or reassurance as a society."
In 1951, Twentieth-Century Fox released director Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. In that Cold War-era film, we meet an alien, Klaatu, who has come to express, in the most soothing terms possible, that if we proceed with our nuclear weapons proliferation and are seen by the galactic consortium Klaatu represents as presenting a threat beyond our own atmosphere, we will be destroyed.
Even as he delivers this mortal threat, Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, comes across as sympathetic, even benevolent, as he really, really wants to give us humans some say in what happens to us. He seems really to care, as expressed by his budding friendship (would it have become romance?) with Helen Benson, played by Patricia Neal, and the urgency with which he strives to deliver--even in the face of a belligerent U.S. military--his message that we have some say in our fate.
Next month, Twentieth-Century Fox will release a remake of the film, this time directed by Scott Derrickson and starring Keanu Reeves as Klaatu.
This time around, Klaatu is here to tell us that the galactic consortium has had it with humans' mistreatment of our own planet, and he has come to explain that, effectively, his colleagues have taken the side of the Earth over the humans. Large-scale explosions and destruction ensue.
Why would these beings from outer space care so much about the health of the third rock from the sun? That's not entirely clear, said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute who worked for a time as a scientific adviser on the film.
"The (aliens) come down...trying to save the planet, but saving the planet requires them to obliterate the problem threatening the planet," Shostak said, "and in this case, that's not just SUVs and coal-fired plants."
In the 57 years between versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still, aliens covered a lot of evolutionary ground, so to speak, in how they've been portrayed. Some of that ground has had to do with the world's emotional makeup and some has had to do with what has been possible from a technological perspective.
For example, the look and feel of the aliens in a film like the remake of The War of the Worlds have almost nothing in common with those of the original. What originally had to be built using crude models and special effects is now done to exacting detail with computer graphics. And these advances put a lot of pressure on filmmakers today to keep the audience's attention with a story while those in the old days could do so much more with the novelty of on-screen aliens, no matter how rudimentary they looked.
"Anything you can conceive of can be (computer generated)," said Landau. "Just blowing stuff up, or just having an alien creature itself, is not very compelling...We're (now) able to give aliens a much higher complexity, so you can imbue them with character...Now you can make us believe almost any physical destruction you can think of and you can make us believe in any sort of 3D CGI environment. So it's all about whether you can drive compelling story and performance."
Our friends the aliens
Further, as Landau put it, the story has to fill in gaps left by the fact that people view aliens--who have long stood in for foreigners, or the "other"--as less threatening. And while that presents writing challenges to filmmakers, it also opens doors to a whole new era of stories in which aliens can more easily be presumed to be friendlier than in the past.
An example of that might be Contact, the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film in which Jodie Foster plays a scientist scanning the skies for intelligent life. Upon discovering a far-away civilization, Foster interprets messages sent to us as instructions on building a monumental transporter that will allow us to travel to the aliens' distant world. And while the film gives a nod to the inevitable military suspicions of the aliens' motives, it is the optimistic view that carries the day.
"Aliens in fiction are exaggerations of our hopes and fears about ourselves," said Mike Kuniavsky, a co-founder of the ubiquitous computing device company ThingM. "If they were genuinely alien, they wouldn't be particularly interesting because we wouldn't be able to understand them."
To Allan Lundell, a co-founder of the DigiBarn computer museum and a former editor of Byte magazine, the question of how aliens are depicted has very much to do with the financial considerations involved in how people's fears and hopes resonate at any given moment in time.
"Arnold Schwarzenegger was popular as a good Terminator, keeping us safe from the evil sentient machines and the ever-present Skynet," Lundell said. "But soon, he will be facing serious competition from a new hero, Ramona, a sentient cybernetic being hatched from the inventive mind of Ray Kurzweil, in his upcoming feature release, The Singularity is Near. Much cuter than Arnie, she saves the world from a nano grey goo attack while showing us what love beyond biology is all about."
The question here, Lundell poses, is whether an artificial intelligence construct can be considered an alien. Given that the term "alien" in this context is generally assumed to be a creature from another world, that's open to debate. But his point is a good one, as Ramona, as Lundell described her, is certainly the other.
Yet even as cybernetic others will be increasingly making their way onto the silver screen, it's almost certain that malevolent aliens of a traditional kind will also be making regular appearances, despite the fact that we, as a people, are becoming more and more comfortable around those with whom we aren't familiar.
And why?
"Aliens have a bigger role today as bad guys in film," Shostak, of the SETI Institute, said, "because once the Soviet Union collapses, who are you going to make as bad guys? You can make certain (nationalities be) bad guys, but it's a little hard because everybody's so culturally sensitive. And aliens don't have any advocacy organizations that are going to protest (outside) your theater if you make them the bad guy."
Today, it seems, Hollywood has decided to apply that approach even to well-worn stories like The Day the Earth Stood Still.
For where the Klaatu of 1951 adopted a concerned facial expression as he explained to humanity that he wanted to save us, Reeves' 2008 Klaatu seems content to dispense with us as the only way to save our planet.
And while there might be some truth to that conclusion, it's not very benevolent, at least from the humans' perspective.
Perhaps, suggested Lundell, that's because we haven't been in a very optimistic mood the last few years, an idea backed up by opinion polls showing that vast majorities of Americans, at least, think things have been going very badly. But if things begin to look up, then perhaps the benevolent alien will return in force.
"From my perspective," Lundell said, "ultimately the greatest revelation about aliens is that 'they' are 'us.' It's just that some of us don't quite know that just yet."
source:
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Dear Red States,
If you manage to steal this election too we've decided we're leaving.
We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us.
In case you aren't aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all theNortheast.
We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California. To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.
We get stem cell research and the best beaches.
We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood.
We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.
We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.
We get 85% of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs.
You get Alabama. We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.
We get two-thirds of the tax revenue; you get to make the red states pay their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22% lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families.
You get a bunch of single moms.
Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once.
If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals.
They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home.
We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.
With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80% of the country's fresh water, more than 90% of the pineapple and lettuce, 92% of the nation's fresh fruit, 95% of America's quality wines, 90% of all cheese, 90% of the high tech industry, 95% of the corn and soybeans (thanks Iowa!), most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plusStanford, Cal Tech, Berkeley, UCLA and MIT.
With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92% of all
U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100% of the tornadoes, 90% of the hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.
Additionally, 38% of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62% believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws, 44% say that evolution is only a theory, 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61% of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals than we lefties.
Finally, we're taking all the good pot, too.
You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico
Peace out,
-- the Blue States
source: http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/80714812.html
We inten
In case you aren'
We belie
We get stem cell resea
We get the Statu
We get Intel
We get Harva
We get 85% of Ameri
You get Alaba
We get two-
Since
You get a bunch
Pleas
If you need peopl
They have kids they'
We do wish you succe
With the Blue State
With the Red State
U.S. mosqu
Addit
Final
You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexic
Peace
-- the Blue State
source: http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/80714812.html
Friday, October 24, 2008
Iraq Vet Crushed by Police Horse at Presidential Debate
Shocking video shows former Army Sergeant Nick Morgan at the moment his head is crushed to the sidewalk under the hooves of a police horse. Morgan lost consciousness immediately as bones shattered in his face. Visibly bleeding, he was tugged, dragged, arrested, and thrown in a police van, where other arrested veterans say he was denied medic...
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Short Circuit
yes... I'm sad/mad to report, the rumors are true.
everyday a piece of my childhood is stolen, repackaged and sold away as reconstituted garbage...
Thursday, September 18, 2008
TwitterKeys: ♥ ✈ ☺ ♬ ☑ ♠ ☎ ☻ ♫ ☒ ☤ ☹ ♪ ♀ ✩ ☠ in Twitter!
How I added ♥ ✈ ☺ ♬ ☑ ♠ ☎ ☻ ♫ ☒ ♤ ☤ ☹ ♪ ♀ ✩ ✉ ☠ ✔ ♂ ★ ✇ ♺ ✖ ♨ ❦ ☁ ✌ ♛ ❁ ☪ ☂ ✏ ♝ ❀ ☭ ☃ ☛ ♞ ✿ ☮ ☼ ☚ ♘ ✾ ☯ ☾ ☝ ♖ ✽ ✝ ☄ ☟ ♟ ✺ ☥ ✂ ✍ ♕ ✵ ☉ ☇ ☈ ☡ ✠ ☊ ☋ ☌ ☍ ♁ ✇ ☢ ☣ ✣ ✡ ☞ ☜ ✜ ✛ ❥ ♈ ♉ ♊ ♋ ♌ ♍ ♎ ♏ ♐ ♑ ♒ ♓ ☬ ☫ ☨ ☧ ☦ ✁ ✃ ✄ ✎ ✐ ❂ ❉ ❆ ♅ ♇ ♆ ♙ ♟ ♔ ♕ ♖ ♗ ♘ ♚ ♛ ♜ ♝ ♞ to Twitter.com and what happened in the first 48 hours...
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
Friday, September 12, 2008
Top 5 Tips For Success on Digg
So, you know submitting articles to digg can bring hordes of traffic to your site. You know it’s relatively easy to amass a few hundred friends by adding everyone you come across and you’re probably aware that you can spam the crap out of your friends using “shouts”. These are some of the tools you have at your disposal as a member of digg’s community but in order to truly be a success on digg, you’ll need more than a spammer mentality and a blog especially if you’re looking to get that zerg diggrush of traffic to your submission’s site.
(Disclaimer: Poorly edited pics - I'm at work and used what I had)
The following five tips should help you become a successful, contributing member of the digg community:
1. Stop digging every story you come across.
2. Stop adding everyone.
3. Don’t leave spam comments.
4. Participation is key.
5. Stop shouting at me.
(pic unrelated)
Seriously. If you shout at me one more time about Ron Paul’s Parrot Reciting The Constitution After Discovering The Cure to Cancer While Riding a Beagle Backwards Through a Mac Factory, I’ll shit bricks. Keep your shouts to a minimum. I know you’re excited about the pic you found of an Kevin Rose doing surgery on a pregnant Albino Penguin but if I’m interested, I’ll check it out when I get around to it. Your submission and shout will not disappear but if you keep shouting, you’re going to be un-friendified faster than tits reach the Front-page, that’s no bullshit.
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