May 2013
29 posts
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Brain Training May Help Clear Cognitive Fog Caused...
Klint Finley I’ve linked to research before casting doubt on the efficacy of “brain training” games and software (other than double n-back). But some new research reported by the MIT Technology Review is more promising:
Cancer survivors sometimes suffer from a condition known as “chemo fog”—a cognitive impairment caused by repeated chemotherapy. A study hints at a controversial idea: that...
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The Psychology of Scapegoating
Klint Finley Eric Horowitz on a recent study on scapegoating:
Rothschild and his team were interested in examining how the potential culpability of one’s own group influenced moral outrage and blame for a third-party. They began their experiment by giving participants a survey that led participants to categorize themselves as middle class rather than working class or upper class. Participants...
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Revisiting the "Crack Babies" Epidemic That Never...
Klint Finley The New York Times owns up to contributing to the crack baby scare:
This week’s Retro Report video on “crack babies” (infants born to addicted mothers) lays out how limited scientific studies in the 1980s led to predictions that a generation of children would be damaged for life. Those predictions turned out to be wrong. This supposed epidemic — one television reporter talks of a 500...
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Behind The Scenes At TEDxSummerisle
Klint Finley
Weird Shit Con co-organizer Adam Rothstein writes about his role in the TEDxSummerilse hoax:
I was never personally concerned about the potential consequences of staging of an act of violence on Twitter, because the moment anyone attempted to ascertain where precisely this violence was occurring, they would see the Wikipedia page revealing that Summerisle is a fictional locale. On...
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Humans Are Really Just Biomechanical Suit-Cities...
Klint Finley
“The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future” Matt Jones wrote in 2009, referencing Archigram‘s Walking City. As I’ve noted before we fill that same role for bacteria.
Food guru Michael Pollan has picked up on the “we’re more bacteria than human” meme and written an long, impressive New York Times article about it. He doesn’t go so far as to bring up the theory that oil is...
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Trailer for Alejandro Jodorowsky's New Film Danza...
Klint Finley
Danza De La Realidad (“The Dance of Reality”) is an autobiographical film that Jodorowsky crowdsourced. It should debut today at the Cannes film festival (or perhaps already did), along with Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary about the director’s cancelled attempt to adapt the book.
The LA Times has more:
Born to Russian Jewish émigrés in 1929, Jodorowsky studied theater and worked...
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Kiera Wilmot Won't Be Charged With Felony For...
Klint Finley Good news from the Orlando Sentinel:
Kiera, 16, was a student at Bartow High School until last month when she was arrested after she mixed toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil in a water bottle on school grounds, a police report stated. She was arrested and faced felony charges for possessing a weapon on campus and discharging a destructive device.
She also was suspended from...
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What Happens When A Drug Works For Only One...
Klint Finley From Nature:
By all rights, Gerald Batist’s patient should have died nine years ago. Her pancreatic cancer failed to flinch in the face of the standard arsenal — surgery, radiation, chemotherapy — and Batist, an oncologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, estimated that she had one year to live. With treatment options dwindling, he enrolled her in a clinical trial of a hot...
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Drugs Giants Used Communist East Germany For...
Klint Finley The Independent reports:
Leading Western pharmaceutical companies paid millions of pounds to former Communist East Germany to use more that 50,000 patients in state-run hospitals as unwitting guinea pigs for drug tests in which several people died, it was revealed today.
An investigation by the German magazine Der Spiegel said international conglomerates such as Bayer, Hoechst,...
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Mocking Hipsters In The Service Of Capital
Klint Finley Anthony Galluzzo writes:
Even as the New York Times and its ilk now use hipster-bashing to delegitimize the new political awareness among the same un- and underemployed twenty- and thirty-somethings — previously taken to task for their avoidance of politics — the same bashers employ this all-purpose dummy to ventriloquize their own refined and slightly ridiculous consumption habits.
...
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Eco-Friendly Burials: Human Composting
Klint Finley About 2.5 million people die every year in the U.S. alone. Disposing of human remains creates a serious ecological challenge. Traditional burials involve treating a body with formaldehyde and other chemicals then burying it in a wooden casket where it takes years to decompose. Cremation burns a lot of fossil fuel.
One possible alternative: a process is called promession, invented...
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Big Dada, IRL Fetish And More On Mindful Cyborgs...
Mindful Cyborgs: Contemplative living in the age of quantification, augmentation and acceleration.
Hosts: Chris Dancy and Klint Finley.
Listen or download on Soundcloud and iTunes.
Follow: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest.
Transcript, show notes and more here.
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Tunguska Event Meteorite Fragments Finally...
Klint Finley
MIT Technology Review reports:
The Tunguska impact event is one of the great mysteries of modern history. The basic facts are well known. On 30 June 1908, a vast and powerful explosion engulfed an isolated region of Siberia near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. […]
That changes today with the extraordinary announcement by Andrei Zlobin from the Russian Academy of Sciences...
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Cyberculture History: The Origin Of E-Mail
Klint Finley
Colin Berkshire writes:
The invention of email is widely credited to be Ray Tomlinson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tomlinson) in 1971. In one especially oddball webpage, VA Shiva Ayyadurai claims to have actually invented email in 1978. (http://www.inventorofemail.com). Mr. Ayyadurai mostly substantiates his claim by playing games with the definition of what email is,...
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The Source Family Documentary Trailer
Klint Finley
The Source Family is a new documentary about the far out hippie commune/cult of the same name. It debuted in New York City on May 1 and will be hitting indie theaters across the country soon. The Hairpin has a good write-up.
The film follows the book The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and The Source Family.
Previously:
Erik Davis’ intro to the book
LA...
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Awesome Column On How To Break Into The Comic Book...
Klint Finley
Jeremy Holt column “Strange Love” is a revealing and inspiring look at what it takes to break into the comics industry. Here’s the last bit form part six:
Pitching is very much its own art form, which requires dedicating time and energy to honing the craft. Each time you do it, only helps inform your decision making the next time around. This journey is part of the process and a...
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Silicon Valley Tries To Reinvent Food -- Literally
Klint Finley
I interviewed Soylent creator Rob Rhinehart for my latest TechCrunch column:
Fake meats have been around for years, but a new crop of Bay Area startups backed by tech investors think they can make meat substitutes good enough to compete with the real deal. Beyond Meat — backed by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone via their company Obvious Corp — created an eerily...
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William Gibson Reads From His Next Novel, The...
Klint Finley
Gibson recently made an appearance at the New York Public Library, and he also did a surprise reading of the first couple pages of his forthcoming science fiction novel The Peripheral. The reading begins about 80 minutes in.
The video and transcript can be downloaded here and The Awl has a good write-up of the rest of the talk.
For more Gibson, check out our dossier.
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Central Asia is already "Post-Apocalyptic"
Klint Finley
Asher Kohn writes:
You don’t need burnt pastures, bleached bones, and a trickle of muddy water in order to understand the apocalypse, as much as it may help. The apocalypse, after all, is more than the destruction of an environment. The apocalypse is the destruction of not only the world, but of the worldview. The apocalypse is the disassembly of the subconscious and the dramatic...
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Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria,...
Klint Finley Above: generative cities and architecture by Aranda & Lasch
Futurist Chris Arkenberg outlines a possible scenario for urban planning and architecture:
As complex ecosystems, cities are confronting tremendous pressures to seek optimum efficiency with minimal impact in a resource-constrained world. While architecture, urban planning, and sustainability attempt to address the...
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Teen Girl Charged With Felony For Science...
Klint Finley
Koa Beck writes:
Given all the data that is out there regarding young girls and STEM fields, ladies who demonstrate an interest in science should be culturally supported. A quick peruse of certain popular culture guarantees that they certainly won’t be getting that support elsewhere. Yet when 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot, who reportedly “got good grades” and had “a perfect behavior...
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Bruce Sterling: tech startups help the rich... →
“You’re a small elite of very young people who are working hard for an elite of mostly baby boomer financiers so that they can buy governments, shut the governments down and destroy the middle class and the nation state.”
April 2013
33 posts
5 tags
Are Homophobes Really Just Repressed Homosexuals?
Klint Finley From Ted Haggard to Larry Craig, some of the most vocal anti-gay crusaders have turned out to be some of the biggest hypocrites. Some researchers have finally decided to put it to the test: are homophobes really just repressed homosexuals? Skeptikai writes:
The researchers looked at six studies from the US and Germany involving 784 university students. The participants rated...
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Open Source DIY God Helmet Project
Michael Persinger built a device that stimulates the rain with electromagnetic waves. He claims the machine, generally known as the “god helmet,” can induce religious experiences. His experiments have never been successfully replicated, but a group is trying to build an open source DIY god helmet:
The project is in a very early alpha stage. Some of the current goals for the project include:
...
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Why So Many Scientists Are Abandoning Their Fields
Klint Finley Here’s my article for Wired about why so many scientists ended up working in the tech industry:
Tech companies are snapping up scientists with backgrounds in fields like physics, mathematics and bioscience — people we might expect to be busy curing cancer, saving the environment or discovering the origin of the universe. It’s easy to be cynical about this. “The best minds of my...
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The Psychologist Busted For Faking At Least 55...
Klint Finley The New York Times reports on Diederik Stapel, psychology’s most notorious fraudster. But the problems with psychology — and science — go far beyond Stapel’s deception:
At the end of November, the universities unveiled their final report at a joint news conference: Stapel had committed fraud in at least 55 of his papers, as well as in 10 Ph.D. dissertations written by his students....
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Full Transcript Of Secret Meeting Between...
Klint Finley Audio and transcript of a meeting between Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, from June 23, 2011.
Assange on why some countries censor speech more than others:
So you can have a lot of political change in the United States. But will it really change that much? Will it change the amount of money in someone’s bank account? Will it change contracts?...
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Understanding The Brain Of A Man With No Conscious...
Klint Finley Fascinating:
The primary problem E.P. experienced came in what we’d probably call conscious memory, or what professionals call declarative memory. This involves, as the names imply, the ability to be aware of something we know, and to state it, whether it’s a historic event or the term for an obscure object. For example, E.P. moved to San Diego shortly after his illness, but he was...
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Mindful Cyborgs Ep 1: Data Exhaust, Augmented...
Mindful Cyborgs is a new podcast (or internet radio show, if you will) hosted by Chris Dancy and me. The tagline is: “Contemplative living in the age of quantification, augmentation and acceleration.” In our first episode we talk about data exhaust, augmented dating, fractalnoia and more. You can listen to it or download it from Soundcloud or iTunes.
Show notes and full transcript here.
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3 Weird Art Machines
Klint FinleyTangible Sound Lab’s Skintimacy
The Tangible Sound Lab’s site seems to be down, so all I’ve got to go on is description of the video:
With ‘Skintimacy’ we present a skin-based interface for a collaborative musical performance. The experimental setup is intended to be both an evocative tool for interpersonal interaction and touch, as well as an alternative digital musical...
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Boeing Worker Mentors Barefoot Bandit
Klint Finley Boeing worker Jonathan Standridge is mentoring Colton Harris-Moore:
While he declined to get into some specifics about their conversations, Standridge said Harris-Moore badly wants to get a pilot’s license and hopes one day to design prototype aircraft. Harris-Moore has said he wanted to get an aeronautical engineering degree while in prison. They talk about planes, corporate...
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The Key To A Successful Creative Career: Staying...
Klint Finley
The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman explains Arno Minkkinen’s theory of success in creativity:
There are two dozen platforms, Minkkinen explains, from each of which several different bus lines depart. Thereafter, for a kilometre or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops. “Each bus stop represents one year in the life...
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Alan Moore Working on "The Watchmen of...
Klint Finley
For someone who has supposedly turned his back on the comics industry, Alan Moore sure is doing a lot of comics work. He’s currently doing the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen spin-off Nemo, the next LoEG book and a follow-up to his Neonomicon series called Providence. From an interview for The Beat:
At the moment I am swamped in Lovecraft books about – I’ve got nearly every book...
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Public Panopticon: A Collection Of Unsecured Web...
Klint Finley
Cryptogasm has found thousands of unsecured, publicly accessible webcams via Google. Lots of them are doggie day cares, some are pointed at public spaces, some are at work places and quite a few are of private residences. He’s aggregated them all, excepts ones that are pointed at children’s rooms, on a giant page.
You can view the cams here
You can also filter them by location....
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What if Your Boss Tracked Your Sleep, Diet, and...
Klint Finley I wrote for Wired:
Inside most companies, the typical health and wellness program includes regular blood pressure checks, a list of fresh foods for the office fridge, and some sort of exercise guru who shows up every so often to tell people they should work out more. If you’re lucky, you might even get some coupons designed to encourage healthier eating — and cut company insurance...
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Giving Your Love Life To Google Glass And The Hive...
Klint Finley
Tim Maly writes:
On January 20, 2013, sometime before 7:45PM, Lauren McCarthy sat down at a table. She was early. She always arrived early. Once she had a spot, she checked her setup. She kept the iPhone in her purse, its camera poking out and angled to capture the whole scene. The iPod touch was kept close at hand. The iPhone was connected to Ustream and Ustream was connected to...
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Elite Panic: Why Rich People Think All People Are...
Klint Finley Boing Boing has a short excerpt from Rebecca Solnit book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster:
Elites tend to believe in a venal, selfish, and essentially monstrous version of human nature, which I sometimes think is their own human nature. I mean, people don’t become incredibly wealthy and powerful by being angelic, necessarily. They believe...
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Predictions for 2010 from 2000
# “Ninety percent of all consumer goods will be home-delivered.” — trend forecaster Faith Popcorn
# Biomonitoring devices that look like wristwatches will continually update you on your blood chemistry, while microchips implanted in your forearm will interact with the heating and lighting systems of the buildings you enter. — World Future Society
# Animal-to-human transplants will be routine,...
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First Algae Powered Building Goes Up In Germany
Klint Finley
From the press release:
A 15-unit apartment building has been constructed in the German city of Hamburg that has 129 algae filled louvered tanks hanging over the exterior of the south-east and south-west sides of the building—making it the first in the world to be powered exclusively by algae. Designed by Arup, SSC Strategic Science Consultants and Splitterwerk Architects, and...
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When Does a Religion Become a Cult?
Klint Finley Occult America author Mitch Horowitz writes:
Many academics and observers of cult phenomena, such as psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo of Stanford, agree on four criteria to define a cult. The first is behavior control, i.e., monitoring of where you go and what you do. The second is information control, such as discouraging members from reading criticism of the group. The third is...
