Dance of Saturn’s Auroras.
ultraviolet and infrared images of the auroras of Saturn recorded by Cassini and Hubble.
Dance of Saturn’s Auroras.
ultraviolet and infrared images of the auroras of Saturn recorded by Cassini and Hubble.
Aldous Huxley’s contribution to the COSMIC ANTHROPOLOGICAL TOOLKIT (by m1k3y)
“Not only is the material universe larger and stranger than we used to give it any credit for, but the mental universe is also larger and stranger than we give it credit for. We carry about inside skulls an extraordinary world, a visionary world, a mystical world…”
The Independent nuclear powered Republic of Disney breakaway civ futcha. It’s a legit possibility. They do have planning permission after all.
A retrofuturistic monster mickey mouse stomping on the future, carving an empire from a shattered amerika.
Drop in a chinese made thorium reactor. Build a wall. Smells about right.
Let’s talk about the future of work. Let’s talk about Hacker Culture. Let’s talk about the radical democratization of knowledge and the near infinite possibilities available combining the tons of once cutting edge prohibitively expensive tech now sitting idle gathering dust available for nominal cost via a website this one guy and his pals used to literally bootstrap themselves into space.
Because we’ve managed to keep stumbling forwards, however much a mess we’ve made along the way. And there’s more aluminum sitting in rubbish dumps than mines, they say. Because we keep building new things. And then discarding them; throwing into drawers to rot objects that were for a moment the very highest of technology.
These are the moments I long for The Collapse. Apart from the mass deaths. Obviously.
What can we build when we stop trying. And start playing.
Scrapheap space programs. Fuck yeah.
MI5 Spook turned Whistleblower in the late 01990s speaks out against the Military Industrial Complex and the Forever War. Declares her audience of hacker folk The Resistance.
Afronnauts by Frances Bodomo
teaser trailer from the film
http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Long-range_communication_stone:
Long-range communication stones are palm-sized, triangular devices with rounded edges and intricate designs on the top. They work by forming a psychic link to the last person to make physical contact with them. A second link is established with a nearby stone if applicable, allowing the two users to share thoughts, either conscious or not. The link from the stone to its user requires close range, not being able to extend much further than an adjacent room, but the link between two stones has much greater range, at least a few thousand miles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlocality
In physics, nonlocality or action at a distance is the direct interaction of two objects that are separated in space with no perceivable intermediate agency or mechanism. Regarding the unexplained nature of gravity, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) considered action-at-a-distance “so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”. Quantum nonlocality refers to what Einstein called the “spooky action at a distance” of quantum entanglement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_theories_of_consciousness#Cemi_theory
The starting point for McFadden and Pockett’s theory is the fact that every time a neuron fires to generate an action potential, and a postsynaptic potential in the next neuron down the line, it also generates a disturbance in the surrounding electromagnetic field. McFadden has proposed that the brain’s electromagnetic field creates a representation of the information in the neurons. Studies undertaken towards the end of the 20th century are argued to have shown that conscious experience correlates not with the number of neurons firing, but with the synchrony of that firing.[9] McFadden views the brain’s electromagnetic field as arising from the induced EM field of neurons. The synchronous firing of neurons is, in this theory, argued to amplify the influence of the brain’s EM field fluctuations to a much greater extent than would be possible with the unsynchronized firing of neurons.
McFadden thinks that the EM field could influence the brain in a number of ways. Redistribution of ions could modulate neuronal activity, given that voltage-gated ion channels are a key element in the progress of axon spikes. Neuronal firing is argued to be sensitive to the variation of as little as one millivolt across the cell membrane, or the involvement of a single extra ion channel. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is similarly argued to have demonstrated that weak EM fields can influence brain activity.[citation needed]
McFadden proposes that the digital information from neurons is integrated to form a conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) field in the brain. Consciousness is suggested to be the component of this field that is transmitted back to neurons, and communicates its state externally. Thoughts are viewed as electromagnetic representations of neuronal information, and the experience of free will in our choice of actions is argued to be our subjective experience of the cemi field acting on our neurons.
McFadden’s view of freewill is deterministic. Neurons generate patterns in the EM field, which in turn modulate the firing of particular neurons. There is only conscious agency in the sense that the field or its download to neurons is conscious, but the processes of the brain themselves are driven by deterministic electromagnetic interactions. The feel of subjective experience or qualia corresponds to a particular configuration of the cemi field. This field representation is in this theory argued to integrate parts into a whole that has meaning, so a face is not seen as a random collection of features, but as somebody’s face. The integration of information in the field is also suggested to resolve the binding/combination problem.
In 2013, McFadden published two updates to the theory. In the first, ‘The CEMI Field Theory: Closing the Loop’ [10] McFadden cites recent experiments in the laboratories of Christof Koch[11] and David McCormick[12] which demonstrate that external EM fields, that simulate the brain’s endogenous EM fields, influence neuronal firing patterns within brain slices. The findings are consistent with a prediction of the cemi field theory that the brain’s endogenous EM field – consciousness – influences brain function. In the second, ‘The CEMI Field Theory Gestalt Information and the Meaning of Meaning’,[13] McFadden claims that that the cemi field theory provides a solution to the binding problem of how complex information is unified within ideas to provide meaning: the brain’s EM field unifies the information encoded in millions of disparate neurons.
Susan Pockett[1] has advanced a theory, which has a similar physical basis to McFadden’s, with consciousness seen as identical to certain spatiotemporal patterns of the EM field. However, whereas McFadden argues that his deterministic interpretation of the EM field is not out-of-line with mainstream thinking, Pockett suggests that the EM field comprises a universal consciousness that experiences the sensations, perceptions, thoughts and emotions of every conscious being in the universe. However, while McFadden thinks that the field is causal for actions, albeit deterministically, Pockett does not see the field as causal for our actions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake#Origin_and_philosophy_of_morphic_resonance
Among his early influences Sheldrake cites The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Sheldrake says the book led him to view contemporary scientific understanding of life as a paradigm, which he called “the mechanistic theory of life”. Reading Kuhn’s work, Sheldrake says, fixed his focus on how scientific paradigms can change.[7]
Although there are similarities between morphic resonance and Hinduism’s akashic records,[114] Sheldrake says he first conceived of the idea while at Cambridge, before his travel to India where he would later develop it. He attributes the origin of his morphic resonance idea to two influences: his studies of the holistic tradition in biology, and French philosopher Henri Bergson’s book Matter and Memory. He says he took Bergson’s concept of memories not being materially embedded in the brain and generalised it to morphic resonance, where memories are not only immaterial but also under the influence of the collective past memories of similar organisms. While his colleagues at Cambridge were not receptive to the idea, Sheldrake found the opposite to be true in India. He recounts his Indian colleagues saying, “There’s nothing new in this, it was all known millennia ago to the ancient rishis.” Sheldrake thus characterises morphic resonance as a convergence between Western and Eastern thought, having originated in the West and developed in the East.[6][115]
Sheldrake has also noted similarities between morphic resonance and Carl Jung’s collective unconscious with regard to collective memories being shared across individuals and to the coalescing of particular behaviours through repetition, described by Jung as archetypes.[6] However, where Jung assumed archetypal forms were transmitted through physical inheritance, Sheldrake attributes collective memories to morphic resonance and rejects any explanation of them involving what he terms “mechanistic biology”.[10]
It’s purely for the rare moments like this that I persist with Falling Skies.
Also: alien mechs. Who am I kidding?!
The county road finds its own uses for things: hunting wild pigs with drones in Louisiana.
More here at The Economist.
Rural Pursuits: Death by Dehogaflier
WILD pigs are rooting around in a field in the dark. Partly hidden by tall grass, their tails wag happily as they snuffle around for roots and insects. A shot rings out and the biggest pig is down. The rest scatter quickly; yet a shooter picks them off one by one with uncanny accuracy.
Pigs are clever and hard to hunt; it can take a day to stalk one. But they are no match for an aerial drone such as the “dehogaflier” operated by Louisiana Hog Control, a pest-extermination firm. It is a remote-controlled aircraft with a thermal-imaging camera and a laser pointer. It easily spots the pigs’ warm bodies from 400 feet and points them out to a hunter on the ground wearing night-vision goggles, who then shoots them.
Each year America’s 6m feral pigs cause an estimated $1.5 billion of damage to crops, lawns and wildlife. In May The Economist reported that Texans were trying to shoot them from helicopters under the state’s “pork chopper” law. This turns out to be ineffective. Helicopters are noisy; pigs quickly learn to hide from them. Drones, by contrast, are quiet. Cy Brown of Louisiana Hog Control guesses that, working on weekend nights over the past six months, he and his partner have dispatched around 300 porkers to hog heaven.
We could have gone to space…