The first thing I did after I heard about the highly classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
{ John Sifton/Warscapes | Continue reading | Thanks Aaron }
Holograms of human figures are appearing increasingly often in airports as virtual assistants. And they may also be introduced in various commercial activities. […]
The woman was two-dimensional, a projection on a human-shaped glass sheet. […] She is a product by Tensator®, a “queue control and management solutions” brand. Installed in June of last year, an aviation trade publication reported she cost the airport only 26,000 dollars. The avatar runs 24 hours a day and is portable so she can be moved to other areas of the terminal. […] You will find similar holographic announcers or “airport virtual assistants” in Dubai, Washington Dulles, Macau, Istanbul Ataturk and Long Beach, among other locations. […] The next step will be to install more interactive virtual assistants, which might answer basic questions from travellers about things like flight times, gates or rental car locations. Their plan is to provide models with a touch-screen interface next to the avatar rather than Siri-style speech technology. Voice recognition, while available in the more expensive models (roughly 100,000 dollars) isn’t recommended for airports due to the likelihood of interference from background noise. […]
Musion is better known for their less practical work: reviving dead celebrity singers. Their most famous project was the digital resurrection of Tupac Shakur at last year’s Coachella Festival. The company also recreated Frank Sinatra to perform at Simon Cowell’s 50th birthday party. […] Copyright permissions and objections from various estates, in addition to the high costs, have so far prevented “resurrections” from becoming a more widespread trend.
art { Wayne White }
There are somewhere between 50 million and 100 million farms in the world (if you exclude those smaller than about three American football fields). But about half the crops produced by those farms rely on the seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides supplied by a mere dozen or so companies. Most of those crops are bought, traded, and transported around the world by another half dozen. […] And when it’s time for agricultural products to be processed and distributed to stores, that’s another dozen or so, many overlapping with the aforementioned traders and suppliers. […]
Researchers and activists have questioned the safety or long-term consequences (or both) of various Big Ag [Big Agriculture] practices, such as the use of certain pesticides, fertilizers, animal hormones, and food additives. […] Among the other specific complaints these days are deforestation and negligence. In Brazil, for example, a tripling of soybean production since 1990 has been blamed for the ongoing stripping of the Amazon basin. In the United States, ill-managed factory farms and processing plants have contributed to repeated outbreaks of food-borne illnesses that kill about a thousand people a year and sicken millions. […]
For farmers, oligopolies mean fewer choices of supplier and sometimes no choice at all about whom they will sell to. One ongoing trend is contract farming, in which farmers grow according to a food company’s specifications, with all supplies provided by the company, in return for its commitment to purchase the farmers’ output if it is acceptable.
related { The world is approaching Peak Meat, producing 7 times more than in 1950 }
photo { Kyoko Hamada }
Two notions of reconciliation exist.
The weak or thin conception is akin to “resignation.” It is sought by groups that have waged war against one another but have come to the realization neither can win. Reconciliation in this sense results from an enforced lowering of expectations.
In the stronger sense, reconciliation means a virtual cancellation of enmity or estrangement via a morally grounded forgiveness, achievable only when conflicting groups acknowledge collective responsibility for past injustice, and shed their deep prejudices by a profound and painful transformation in their identities. It is because this process is not possible without a somewhat brutal confrontation with oneself and a painful recognition of one’s own moral degradation that reconciliation is difficult to achieve.
In January 1986, 11 men went to bed in Moscow - and didn’t get up for the next 370 days. […]
Spanish neurologist Jose Delgado from Yale University used a remote control to telecommand a bull during a bull fight. […]
What happens if you bring three men together who all think they are Jesus? […]
In Summer 1978 a man approached women on the campus of Florida State University saying: “I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be very attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?” Some days later a woman went around with the same question for men. [PDF] […]
On Good Friday 1962 researcher Walter Pahnke administered 10 theology mind altering drugs before the church service. Some test subjects became priests.
China, India and Pakistan have increased their nuclear weapons by about 10 warheads each in the past year, and other nuclear states appear set on maintaining their arsenals, a Swedish think tank said Monday. […]
“It is not so much about an increase in numbers, but an increase in quality,” said researcher Pillip Schell.
BMJ Case Reports has a paper that describes two patients with Parkinson’s disease who experienced hallucinations that transferred onto photos they took to try and prove they were real. This is ‘Patient 1′ from the case report:
Patient 1 was first evaluated at age 66, having been diagnosed with PD [Parkinson’s Disease] at age 58… She complained of daytime and night-time visual hallucinations for the past one year. Most of the time she did not have insight about them. She described seeing three children playing in her neighbor’s yard and a brunette woman sleeping under the covers in one of the beds in her house. She also saw images of different people sitting quietly in her living room. […] In one instance, she saw a man covered in blood, holding a child and called 911.
Her husband, in an attempt to prove to her that these were hallucinations, took pictures of the neighbor’s yard and the bed in their house. Surprisingly, when shown these photos, the patient continued to identify the same children playing in the yard and the same brunette woman sleeping under the covers. This perception was present every time the patient looked at these photos.
screenshot { Chantal Akerman, Je, tu, il, elle, 1975 }
unrelated { PETA Wants to Sue People Who Leave Anonymous Comments }
A man pretending to be ‘Gangnam Style’ singer psy has crashed the Cannes Film Festival, working his way into a number of VIP parties. […] He was spotted at the Carlton Hotel VIP Room and Martinez Beach, and attended the “secret party” of “millionaire oil magnate and fashion designer” Goga Ashkenazi at Le Baron. He was also seen teaching fellow party goers how to do the dance for ‘Gangnam Style’.
art { Yves Klein, The Void (Empty Room), 1961 | Invisible: Art about the Unseen, 1957–2012 }
On April 7, 1994, Federal Express Flight 705, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 cargo jet ferrying electronics across the United States from Memphis, Tennessee to San Jose, California, experienced an attempted hijacking for the purpose of a suicide attack.
Auburn Calloway, a FedEx employee facing possible dismissal for lying about his previous flying experience, boarded the scheduled flight as a deadheading passenger with a guitar case carrying several hammers and a speargun. He intended to disable the aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder before take-off and, once airborne, kill the crew using the blunt force of the hammers so their injuries would appear consistent with an accident rather than a hijacking. The speargun would be a last resort. He would then crash the aircraft while just appearing to be an employee killed in an accident. This would make his family eligible for a $2.5 million life insurance policy paid by Federal Express.
art { Caleb Brown }
“Hasse” which was known in Ystad tavern circles, had a total of 146 wasp stings on the body including 54 on the genitals. He was so bloated that a neighbor thought it was a whale carcass lying on the lawn. […]
The autopsy and scene investigation revealed that “Hasse” tried to have sex with the wasp nest. They found semen on some of the dead wasps and a couple of “Hasse” pubic hair in the entrance of the nest. […]
Angry animal rights activists have reacted strongly to the event.
{ News Sweden | Continue reading | Thanks GG! }
A Manhattan fortune teller will be jailed for a year after taking more than $650,000 in cash from an Upper East Side woman by promising to “cleanse” the money.
Swindling soothsayer Janet Miller, 39, also tricked the wealthy victim into turning over paintings and jewelry as “sacrifices” to keep the devil away, and even conned her into buying and handing over a couple of Rolexes — all to exterminate “bad energy,” Manhattan prosecutors charged.
On August 31, 2012, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers on the Internet.
The titles were inscrutable. The volume was daunting: 512 pages in total. The claim was audacious: he said he had proved the ABC Conjecture, a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades. […]
The problem, as many mathematicians were discovering when they flocked to Mochizuki’s website, was that the proof was impossible to read. The first paper, entitled “Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory I: Construction of Hodge Theaters,” starts out by stating that the goal is “to establish an arithmetic version of Teichmuller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve…by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the etale theta function, and log-shells.”
This is not just gibberish to the average layman. It was gibberish to the math community as well.
A person named “John Titor” started posting on the Internet one day, claiming to be from the future and predicting the end of the world. Then he suddenly disappeared, never to be heard from again. […]
He claimed he was a soldier sent from 2036, the year the computer virus wiped the world. […]
Titor responded to every question other posters had, describing future events in poetically-phrased ways, always submitted with a general disclaimer that alternate realities do exist, so his reality may not be our own.
After checking your bank account, remember to log out, close your web browser, and throw your computer into the ocean.
[…]
For those of you using a smartphone or tablet, the process for securely closing your banking session is very similar, except that you should find the nearest canyon and throw your device into that canyon. We then recommend simply scaling down the cliff face, locating the shattered remnants of your device, and spending the next few weeks traversing the country burying each individual piece in separate holes of varying depths several hundred miles apart.
{ The Onion | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }
related { As digital data expands, anonymity may become a mathematical impossibility. }
Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims that this is the case.
images { 1. Dave Willardson, Rolling Stone, 1976) | 2. Bug, 1975 }
