Transmissions of a Cosmic Anthropologist is ready for your podcatching apps

The first full length episode of my new podcast is online. You can listen to it at the embed below. There’s detailed show notes over on my tumblr. It’s all about TIME and features special-guest @Wolven. You can subscribe to the podcast at the following locations: iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Feedburner I’ve opened up a feedback […]

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Origin of Egyptian mummies pushed back 2000 years

It had been assumed that before about 2500 BC, when Egyptians wanted to mummify their dead, they placed the wrapped bodies outside and let the hot, dry air and desert sand do the hard work. Deliberate mummification with preserving oils and resins was thought to be a much later development.

But the earliest known Egyptian burials date from 4500 to 3350 BC. These led some Egyptologists to suspect that mummification began early, but there was no hard evidence of this. For the first time, the bandages, skin and wadding from these ancient burials have been chemically analysed.

Stephen Buckley of the University of York in the UK and his colleagues used chromatography to identify a sticky, toffee-like resin found on linen wrappings on bodies from the El-Badari region of southern Egypt.

The resin contained “the same ingredients in roughly the same proportions” as found in much later deliberate mummifications, says Buckley. The mix of plant oils, animal fats, sugars, coniferous resins, natural petroleum and aromatic antibacterial agents would have made a poultice that repelled insects and preserved flesh.

“We knew from observation that there was artificial treatment of bodies at this early date, but what this research does do is tell us precisely what they were using”, says John Taylor of the British Museum in London, UK.

Taylor says that these early Egyptians were evidently accomplished embalmers, because they used complex mixtures of ingredients. As a result, “the beginnings of mummification could be even earlier”.

Origin of Egyptian mummies pushed back 2000 years

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A human author simply decides an interesting emotional path for the story, and the computer does the rest.

Margaret Sarlej, PhD candidate at University of New South Wales, to Phys.org. Computer writes its own fables.

We’ve written before about robots writing the news, now they’re writing fables.

Sarlej has written an application that takes 22 identified emotions used in fables, mixes and matches them with a plot, and pops out a written story.

Easier said than done. 

Via The Guardian:

Breaking stories down for a computer “involves not only encoding story elements like characters, events, and plot, but also the ‘common sense’ people take for granted”, said Sarlej. Telling a story is simple enough for a child to do, but stories are actually “incredibly complex”.

“For example, if Bob gives Alice an apple, Alice will have the apple, and Bob will not. To a person, that’s obvious, and doesn’t require explanation. If Bob punches Carl, people would generally assume Carl will be unhappy about it, but a computer doesn’t have the ‘common sense’ to make such an inference. In a computer programme, details like this must be explicitly spelled out,” she said.

Current results are fairly rudimentary but, according to Scarlej’s supervisor, computers “will be making interesting and meaningful contributions to literature within the next decade.”

(via futurejournalismproject)

the future of story writing since Death Watch (1980), and earlier elsewhere I’m sure.

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Magical activism in today’s apocalypse finds its utility in the preservation of culture and the erosion of propaganda, not picking fights with erupting volcanoes.

…

We are in the “Rivendell Phase” of the west’s decline. We all need to be the ‘The Last Homely House East of the Sea’.

…

We keep talking about ‘the economy might collapse or is collapsing’. Forget that. It’s collapsed. The old economy has collapsed and the new one is flush with the trillions that have been hoovered out of the old one.

The best advice I can give is to grid housing affordability, industrial growth and unemployment by city and move to the one that best matches.

As for keeping your head held high, speaking from direct experience, that one is indeed a toughie. It is easier said than done to locate your sense of self-worth away from the method by which you exchange your time to accrue a fiat currency but it needs to be done.

Remember that you have incarnated at the beginning of the next Industrial Revolution, as well as Peak Everything. If you are genuinely doing all that you can (including being willing to move), then you can seek solace in the simple arithmetic of a growing number of people and a diminishing number of jobs.

“A wizard’s guide to surviving the Collapse.” From http://www.reddit.com/r/occult/comments/2d3wa2/iama_gordon_from_rune_soup/

See also: http://runesoup.com/2013/08/there-is-the-rescue-mission-and-the-salvage-mission/

(via fuckyeahdarkextropian)

What I’m hearing gordonwhite is that we should be joining the Techno Mage fleet fleeing the oncoming Shadow War.

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The Traitorous Persistence of Memory

wolvensnothere:

What if you were a hero, right? But not like just any hero. Like a Jungian/Campbellian/Eliadean Archetypal Hero-With-1k-Faces Eternally Returning kind of Hero. Except your Archetype is “Deathless/The Immortal.”

You can’t die. Not only can you not die, you can’t even be killed. Innately worven…

The Traitorous Persistence of Memory

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fuckyeahdarkextropian: Shamans Among the Machines (Dark Extropian edit) Spoken in Seattle, 1999. Full length video of the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5yOaTgWu6Y talked edited down to give context for the following quotes which perfectly elaborate the core of the Dark Extropian idea. Excerpts: “It seems to be the Earth’s strategy for its own salvation is through machines, […]

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Previous studies had found that microbes could thrive at the boundary where oil and water meet in nature, helping to break down the oil. However, investigators had thought oil was too toxic for life, and that the levels of any water inside the oil were below the threshold for life on Earth.

“Oil was considered to be dead,"said lead study author Rainer Meckenstock, an environmental microbiologist at Helmholtz Zentrum München in Germany.

Now scientists have found microbes active within Pitch Lake, dwelling inside water droplets as small as 1 microliter, about one-fiftieth the size of an average drop of water. "Each of these water droplets basically contains a little mini-ecosystem,"study co-author Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University in Pullman, told Live Science.

These droplets contain a diverse group of microbial species that are breaking the oil down into a variety of organic molecules. The chemistry of the droplets suggests this water does not come from rain, but from ancient seawater, or brine from deep underground.

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/aliens-could-live-life-found-oily-goo-n175531
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