Moszjeszjaszje

allofthem @ 2008-08-12T15:57:00

2008-08-12T21:07:22Z

Sometimes listening to Sister Ray all the way through is the answer: obnoxiously long, but full of enough good moments to justify it. Rock n' Roll n' Transvestites. 18 minutes is an awfully long time, so perhaps only once a year is in order, in the background, possibly during a bowl movement, depending on the speakers' range.

Possibly a several-hour mix of obnoxiously long songs, starting with the Velvet Underground's Sister Ray, then Two Lone Swordsmen's remix of Spiritualized's Come Together, the Orb's Spanish Castles In Space, Van Morrison's Madame George, Miles Davis' Yesternow, the Beta Band's She's The One, Primal Scream's Come Together, etc....

allofthem @ 2008-08-02T12:56:00

2008-08-02T18:03:49Z

There are now computer programs that can evaluate a cell and track every single protein that a cell has floating through its cytosol, and map out projected interactions of each and every one of those proteins. Soon these projected interactions will be predicted to within an accuracy of .00000000001%, and we will have a rock-solid understanding of the behavior of a cell.

Next we will take an organism and determine every single protein interaction in every one of its trillions of cells, and determine within an accuracy of .00000000001% the future behavior of every cell. At this point we will have an understanding of the interactions between proteins, cells, and systems, and will be able to determine the viability of said organism.

When we are able to determine the viability of one organism, we are a stone's throw from determining the viability of every organism... Will we be able to judge others then? Is this when old axioms about not judging others will finally be put to death? If airtight predictions can be made about an organism, and they predict garbage, calamitous loss, and conspicuous consumption, will it be unethical to terminate said organism with impunity?

allofthem @ 2008-08-01T11:42:00

2008-08-01T16:48:49Z

MIT scientist lauds major solar power discovery.

This is a technology that has been widely discussed for years. Using solar power, it is possible to generate a current that separates water into Oxygen and Hydrogen gas (this is a process called electrolysis, and is used to separate many molecular compounds into their constituent elements), which can be stored and used to power anything that runs on electricity. It certainly looks as though the MIT people have perfected this.

Great news; perhaps we will all be living off the grid soon, and good riddance to centralized power.

The first track off of Autechre's 1999 Peel Session album is a skin-crawler called Drain, a song that will submerge itself into your brain and make you rethink your aim in life... The schumann resonances turn your brainwaves to static and melt your frontal lobes, and you suddenly remember that you're a goddamn machine with no goddamn hope... This is bliss, the time of your life when you are relieved of all obligations and given a check for putting your fingers in the right place at the right time. Let no one tell you otherwise.

Autechre are divine; the further they go along into their spatial explorations (always inward, never outward), the more melody they leave behind in their search for limitless pattern, the better off we all are. Listen to their abandonment of the familiar in an attempt to get us closer to the vast potential of complex, mathematical forms... Weep as space and time themselves are distorted in LP5's Fold 4, Wrap 5... Enough beauty to make you off yourself, if beauty weren't already abandoned and patterns left unrecognizable... There is nothing more enchanting than a vast, limitless abyss of sharp edges and terrifying empty spaces.

allofthem @ 2008-07-20T09:37:00

2008-07-20T14:50:02Z

Peter Weir's The Truman Show is a movie that came and went with very little fanfare back in 1997, which is a shame, because it's one of the more creative big-budget movies Hollywood has produced in the last few decades... The execution is a little clumsy, to be sure, but the heart was there, and the idea was fascinating.

Watching the documentary Powaqqatsi a few years later (a film made ten years before Truman), it may seem a bit strange that large parts of the Truman Show's soundtrack (as well as several shot compositions) were copped from this visual essay about how the spoils of industry are affecting life in third world countries... What exactly do the toils of poor laborers slaving away in mines have to do with Truman Burbank, a manically-depressed insurance salesman who hates his life?

Perhaps it all has to do with that horrible feeling that grows in the back of your head about the work you do benefiting others, about living your life so that fat people can grow fatter, about the loss and inexplicable anguish that tears at your soul when you live a life that isn't yours for someone that is so far removed from you that you don't even understand... People in third world countries live in hovels and pull copper out of massive mines for pennies, with a life span that is 60% of ours; their torturous work benefits a few billionaires in the usual countries, and provides materials used to build batteries and radios for fat people in the richer parts of the world... Truman works in a hellhole office and fools himself into believing he is happy, the entire time his soul eating away at him, until he realizes that he is a thirty-year-old nobody who hates his job, life, and everything he stands for.

We all have our crosses to bear...

allofthem @ 2008-07-18T16:05:00

2008-07-18T21:07:34Z

It seems as though the Mexican drug cartel is becoming increasingly high-tech...

WTF?! A submarine?! What ever happened to swallowing fifty balloons and walking across the Juarez/El Paso bridge?

allofthem @ 2008-07-18T13:24:00

2008-07-18T18:41:37Z

Holy shit, how did the Black Snake Moan Soundtrack ever fly under the radar? Even the corny, Samuel L. Jackson-as-Jules-Vincent blues covers are more than adequate (if not awesome), but when the Black Keys' "When The Lights Go Out" hit at track #4, the pants could barely be kept on... This is the raw, horny, ass-biting, tit-clawing, panty-tearing, shirt-ripping, viscious explosion that guys wish they'd lost their virginity to... Outrageous Cherry's "Lord Have Mercy On Me" is another great white-boy-blues-rock extravaganza, steeped in the traditions of Son House, but with much better production (singing into a microphone in the 1930s didn't do us any favors as far as preservation is concerned, but no matter; the likes of Son House, Robert Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins, Leadbelly, Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson, Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, etc, need no pristine lossless audio to prove their value to American Music's genes; they're as essential to the present noise as the opposable thumb is to the human body)...

Watch the Earth from 31 million miles away...

Eno's 2-2 (from Music for Airports) is that particular piece of ambient that breaks all the rules, defies all the laws, shapes itself, refuses to be classified or molded or broken down into parts... It's a simple, homogeneous cluster of stars that floats aimlessly through space, vibrates with a frequency so fundamental that it stirs, awakens something in the furthest reaches of the memory, reaches in there and confronts your deepest beliefs about what constitutes ground, what constitutes foundation, what constitutes sound and architecture and grace and good humor, tells you that while what you consider funny and beautiful and challenging may indeed be so, that it is merely a small part of a varied whole that stretches from here to the edges of space, and possibly into places we could never imagine if we tried... Something is most certainly felt here, something new and remarkable, yet older and more fundamental than may first be realized. Shapeless, formless yet logical, and always simple and effective... What everything should be, really.

allofthem @ 2008-07-14T12:42:00

2008-07-14T17:45:11Z

The sun, thanklessly falling to an equilibrium that will leave it useless and decayed, is the great energy source of the Earth, the one that stimulates the production of glucose in plants, providing us with sustenance in the form of greens and other animals that eat greens, the energy cycle that began with electromagnetic waves shot from the dying sun and ending with a billion humans squatting over a toilet, shitting the waste that we consumed but didn't use...

The plants can't use all that solar decay, all that energy... Most of it falls to the ground and does little besides raise the temperature... If we are to viably abandon hydrocarbons as a primary energy source, what better place to look besides the ubiquitous (except in Alaska) solar waves that otherwise do nothing except bake the ground?

Also tantalizing to scientists is the temperature gradient in the ocean; theoretically, anytime there are two mediums with a sizable difference in temperature, an engine could be created to harness the potential thermodynamic power that exists between the two (once again, theoretically)... Naturally occurring gradients exist in the layers of the ocean, as well as the layers of the atmosphere... How to harness them? The brilliant minds of the world are no doubt working on it, because if there ever was a time to depose of the energy pigs, now is the time to do it, when everyone is pissed off and screaming for their blood...

allofthem @ 2008-07-13T13:15:00

2008-07-13T18:23:49Z

Two were ordered to light up the crackpipe and listen to the string quartets of Prokofiev while fucking... A dozen hours later, the intensity in the room could be measured with a thermometer, the strings rushed to a haunting climax and the catcher reduced to a chaffed, beaten, sweaty catastrophe. Between the tears and the semen and the thunderous chorus could be heard an ode to the perils of the common man, a cry for the proletariat. Nothing is so intense as a Russian fucking to the pains of his forefathers.

Two were then ordered to light up the crackpipe and listen to the best of Chuck Berry while fucking... Two minutes later, the catcher leaves the room in disgust; the pitcher has fallen asleep after one 2-minute song, and had the audacity to not pull out... What is the world coming to, when self-gratification trumps even the commonest of decencies, such as at least inquiring whether the o was reciprocated? No one cares about anyone, and no one ever will. The couple will never see each other again, and are probably the better for it.

And what of Chuck Berry? Not a whole lot, really.

allofthem @ 2008-07-10T13:08:00

2008-07-10T18:09:38Z

The Rio Grande Valley is a stretch of land that encompasses the cities of the southernmost tip of Texas... It is mercilessly hot and dry for the majority of the year; the rest of the time it is just hot.

South Texas is characterized by vast stretches of nothing; flat land stretches to an ill-defined horizon in all directions. Cotton fields and orange groves rule.

Recently, the Rio Grande Valley has become boomtown; the pigs began moving in about fourteen years ago after NAFTA was signed... Now the Valley resembles some suburban shithole in parts, replete with Blockbuster Video, Applebee's, TJ Maxx, TGIFriday's, Pier 1, and other places to jerk off to shit food or buy tacky Chinese merchandise while listening to the latest in Top 40 pop.

There is nothing more lovely than the desolate isolation that is brought upon by desert, a people who band together and shelter each other in a merciless landscape and defy the pigs by living their lives away from their mindless schlock... An isolated population grows unique and beautiful over the years because it doesn't have the decaying fecal matter of American pop culture being crammed down its throat by the pigs... The Rio Grande Valley was beautiful when it was a demographically-poor, geographically-isolated area that nobody cared about. Suddenly, money is to be made by ripping off Mexicans, so the Valley is changing... Sad times.

allofthem @ 2008-07-09T11:41:00

2008-07-09T16:48:12Z

Magic Numbers:

pi: 3.14159... (ratio of circumference:diameter in any circle)
e: 2.718... (base of natural logarithmic function)
absolute zero: -273.15 (lowest temperature that can theoretically be achieved at any pressure)
gravitational constant: 6.673 x 10^-11 (constant used to find the force of gravity between two objects)
Rydberg Constant: 1.097 x 10^7 (constant used to find the energy associated with electron displacement)
Universal Gas Constant: 8.314 (ratio of pressure, volume, amount, and temperature associated with a gas)
Planck's Constant: 6.626 x 10^-34 (ratio of energy:frequency associated with a wave)

There are a host of other constants that are applied in Chemistry and Physics that are specific to certain elements and mixtures, way too many to list here... Statistical probabilities and permutations rule science, in many ways.

However, you cannot fake a ratio such as pi or e; both are universal, oddly magical numbers that govern mathematics and, thusly, natural law.

The entropy of the universe is always increasing... Substances with little entropy are ticking time bombs, ready to erupt at a moments notice when the chaos around it tears it to pieces...

Pure substances are very low in entropy... Collections of pure substances, such as the vaults of pure gold at Fort Knox, are quite low in entropy... They will be scooped up, melted, torn down eventually, because there is nothing more intoxicating and enchanting than destroying that which is pure.

Homogeneous mixtures will be destroyed; the civilizations of human beings, collections of sacks of carbon organs, will be razed, torn to shreds, because the universe doesn't crave order... Order is an insult to it; it will tear it apart, scatter it, let it melt into something incomprehensible and useless... If this is the case, why do we spend so much time building and trying to make sense of everything?

allofthem @ 2008-07-08T13:31:00

2008-07-08T18:33:10Z

And here I thought Bushwick Bill was dead... He's most certainly not.

allofthem @ 2008-07-02T09:12:00

2008-07-02T14:23:29Z

An atomic bomb utilizes the decay of fissionable material to produce what is equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, releasing 8x10^13 joules of energy in the form of heat... The hydrogen bomb is an entirely different device, being part atomic bomb and part fusion bomb (the massive amount of heat required for the fusion of lithium and hydrogen is provided by the first fission explosion), enough heat being produced to do some very serious damage...

Tsar Bomba, a Russian hydrogen bomb detonated in the 1960s, remains the most powerful device, in terms of the release of energy, that has ever been harnessed by mankind... At 50+ megatons (the design theoretically released 100 megatons, but the soviets were apparently leary of destroying the atmosphere and killing their bomber pilots), it was more powerful than all of the artillery used in all previous wars combined.

Cab Calloway's Minnie the Moocher is about a prostitute and her drug-addict friends, surprising subject matter for a 1930s jazz tune... The "Brunswick Version" of the song is quite different from the original; Mr. Calloway's nonsensical scats sound hornier and sleazier, very nice. Sweet cover by the Mystical Knights of the Oingo Boingo during the big hell scene in Forbidden Zone...

allofthem @ 2008-06-29T12:54:00

2008-06-29T18:09:01Z

There are many different kinds of chemical equations: redox, nuclear decay, enthalpy of formation, thermodynamic, electrochemical... Equilibrium equations are of particular interest in that they represent a system of chemicals that are never at rest, have a beginning but no end, and are always gradually falling back towards a central physical state. In a particular solution, reactants turn into products, but products also turn into reactants. Once the solution reaches equilibrium it will theoretically remain stable forever, unless there be tamperin'... If a human being decides to tamper with an equilibrium mixture, say by changing the temperature or introducing more products or reactants, equilibrium will be affected... However, after a few possibly violent reactions, equilibrium will be attained once more.

One is tempted to compare equilibrium reactions to Yin and Yang, a synergy between opposing forces that encompasses the whole of human physicality and spirituality... The products that are formed from reactants and reactants formed from products, a balance that must exist between diametrically-opposed sides that could not exist without the other, two poles that feed each other endlessly and that are always trying to come to rest despite the upheaval around it, reactions and decays that will happen forever under the veil of a seemingly at-rest system...

allofthem @ 2008-06-27T12:32:00

2008-06-27T17:40:36Z

Everything is a function... For example, a basketball as a sphere:

can be represented by pi*(4/3)*r^3, where r is the radius of the basketball.

More impressively, mathematics can give you the volume of that sphere if you take the integral from x = -r to x = r for the function y = pi*(r^2 - x^2)^1/2... The volumes of hundreds of figures can be accurately found using mathematics... Every figure on earth is a 3-dimensional function; though not as simple a function as a sphere or a cube, everything on earth (including human beings) can be represented in a graph of x, y, and z. Not only that, the movements and orientations of those objects can also be traced using increasingly complex mathematical functions; it follows that every figure on earth can be accounted for, identified, and manipulated using mathematics. As our abilities in magnification and nanotechnology exponentially increase in the coming years, our ability to break complex systems down into simpler functions and processes will increase, as will our ability to manipulate them to our desire (engineering is merely the use of mathematics to better control and predict the outcomes of chemical and physical processes).

So long as there is the potential to control, mankind will be there knocking at the door... This is no different. As we control more and more, we increase the likelihood that fundamental flaws in the design of humanity will be exposed... Eventually, we will reach the dilemma: build to more complexity, or raze 'til we find a suitable foundation on which to build on... Which is it?

Probably the latter... But not necessarily in a tragic way. We needn't keep adding to a perilously-assembled structure, after all... Remember the foolish man who built his house upon the sand:

And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it...

allofthem @ 2008-06-21T12:18:00

2008-06-21T17:51:18Z

This Sunday, Tom Waits will perform in Houston for the first time in 28 years... In Jones Hall, no less, one of the classier venues in the city. Tickets? $85 at face value, and they were, of course, sold out many moons ago. If you have a cool $300, you might be able to scoop some up on Ebay.

Tom Waits is a gem, one of the true great American artists of the last century (plus he stole the mantle of "Coolest American" from Bob Dylan sometime back in the late 70s, and has yet to concede it to anyone else). The man is just as comfortable singing ballads at the piano as he is shrieking over trash-can drums... With songs like Cold Water and Hold On, he even manages to pull off country music without sounding like a goddamn idiot (something I didn't even think was possible).

And the man was born the day after Leadbelly died, which I don't think is a coincidence... Although blues music has sadly turned into a wasteland, the history of blues holds the keys to American music, and Leadbelly was the man who defined that sound. Listen to him and understand where blues, and thusly Rock & Roll and hip-hop, were born. Mr. Waits certainly learned much from Leadbelly's eclectic arrangements, fierce delivery, and dramatic storytelling... He's carried the torch quite well for the last 50+ years.

Houston is boomtown these days... The run-up in oil prices has been good for it, if nowhere else. Massive construction projects are finished or underway, including the reopening of a stretch of 59-North that is straddled by several miles of moss-covered walls, the construction of Discovery Green (a large park right in the middle of downtown Houston), the beautification and expansion of all aspects of the University of Houston system, and a surge in hospital expansion/construction projects in the Medical Center (Houston is quite renowned not only for its oil & gas industry, but also for its incredible medical facilities).

Unfortunately, Houston seems to be topping a lot of these "Best Places To Live" indexes, which means that jerkoffs from other parts of the country will soon be moving in. The last thing that is needed in these parts are more whiners complaining about how hot it gets in the summertime, or how hard it is to find a good Chinese restaurant... Can't they just move to San Diego with all the other pale assholes and shut the fuck up? Keep Houston tough (i.e. for people who don't need air-conditioning blowing up their ass 24 hours a day).

allofthem @ 2008-06-13T14:04:00

2008-06-13T19:42:42Z

In order for chemical reactants to react with each other to form products, an anion from one reactant must collide with a cation from another reactant, or, in the case of a unimolecular reaction (where a single reactant decomposes to form two products), sufficient force must be supplied to the reactant to allow it to decompose... Also, two colliding molecules must be oriented in a particular way for there to be a reaction (literally, a synergic physical orientation must be realized at the exact moment that two molecules collide). And to top it all off, the reaction must take place at a particular temperature in order for it to occur at all.

Basically, a single molecule of reactant must meet a specific set of conditions (including the seemingly random event of colliding with a particularly-charged, particularly-oriented molecule) in order to react. To make matters infinitely more complicated, any mixture of a solution no doubt contains several hundred trillion such molecules (just 18 milliliters of water = 6.022 x 10^23 molecules of water)... Every single one of them must meet the particular conditions of a reaction in order for it to react.

Well, with so many molecules involved in the reaction, it should come as no great surprise to anyone that a lot of them will not react... In fact, most reactions will not even come close to converting all of their reactants to products (it is not uncommon to have 25% yields in some reactions). The reason for this is because not all of the molecules involved in a reaction will do what is asked of it (i.e. it did not meet the conditions).

Because of this, every reaction is different, and scientists have documented every aspect of every reaction imaginable (each many times over) for centuries... You, too, can share in the fruits of this vast documentation and take a gander at the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, a thoroughly exhaustive documentation of average rates, reaction values, percentage yields, molecular weights, etc., of every conceivable reaction between hundreds of elements, compounds, and ions.

The most wonderful part of it all is the appearance of that most beloved of all disclaimers: past performance is no guarantee of future results... This is, after all, a book of statistics; just because this book's presentation of average percentage yields over the past several decades predicts a yield of 22.3% for a particular reaction, doesn't mean that you will yield 22.3% product when you carry out the reaction under stated conditions... For all you know, you may very well yield 21.2%, or crazier still, 25.1%!

Understanding that chemistry is a science that is based on statistics may alarm some, as it would seem to most that science is fairly rooted in fact... But it is difficult to put faith in atoms when atoms behave like humans.

How can anything rooted in statistic be considered concrete, especially when everything we know is based on atoms we cannot see, atoms that we cannot fully control, atoms that we really know little about? How can 1 = 6.022 x 10^23? How can 18 be 1 for water, yet 1 is 32 for oxygen?

And if we build machines small enough, will we be able to force atoms to do our bidding? Is that the answer?

allofthem @ 2008-06-11T18:59:00

2008-06-12T00:08:15Z

The body thirsts for the elements... The most primal urge of the body is hunger for oxygen...

Oxygen digests glucose, among other macromolecules... Tears it apart and throws it into the Citrus Acid Cycle to recycle every last atom of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and calcium, storing them and transporting them accordingly. During each turn of the Citric Acid Cycle, carbon dioxide is expelled from the body, flowing into the atmosphere and (hopefully) to the hungry pores of plants.

Nice balancing act we have going on in this ecosystem... Those plants had best get started eating all that carbon dioxide (if only we would stop killing all of them; plant some trees and help us all survive a little longer).

No glucose = no brain function... Our brains' fuel is glucose. Eat more fruit.

allofthem @ 2008-06-08T13:55:00

2008-06-08T19:05:03Z

Beast With a Billion Backs... If Bender's Big Score did it for you, check it out.

The Futurama people really know how to do the movie thing... Perhaps not the same amount of belly laughs and pop references that the half-hour format requires, but definitely much larger in scope than I Dated a Robot. (Plus the whole individual vs. collective theme is quite the meaty one.)

allofthem @ 2008-06-07T09:18:00

2008-06-07T14:39:57Z

Regarding the recent spike in oil prices...

It's difficult to understand where the United States gets the audacity to demand that developing nations like India and China stop subsidizing oil, yet...

Who does $140-a-barrel oil hurt... The US or developing countries?

China has massive cash reserves due to the massive surplus from its exports to countries like the United States... US homes are addicted to cheap, tacky Chinese products from Bed Bath & Beyond, Target, and Wal-Mart.... Malls and strip centers are filled with stores selling shit made in sweat shops. The US has let its manufacturing base die in the quest for cheap labor, and it has created a monster: a nation full of fat, shiftless people who feel entitled to iPods, massive SUVs and 6-bedroom homes while refusing to work hard.

iPods are assembled in another country from parts that are manufactured in other countries.

Massive SUVs are probably assembled by a US company, but from a plant in Mexico. 6-Bedroom homes are assembled by Mexican nationals in the United States because most construction firms are too cheap to hire American laborers (and Mexican laborers work harder and complain less than Americans, too).

(The dependence of the United States on Mexican laborers led to one of the most hilarious bits of hypocrisy that the US population has shown in recent years: the "housing boom" that was created when fat, yuppie baby boomers realized that they had failed to save for retirement, then decided to rip off their childrens' generation with over-inflated home prices... Who constructed these homes? Ever been to a construction site? Not Americans working there, I guarantee you. Fat yuppie pricks that made a fortune ripping off 20-somethings with $400,000 homes made by illegal immigrants were the first pieces of shit to decry the state of the US immigration policy and place the blame for the perilous state of the US economy on Mexico.)

America has lost its manufacturing prowess, sad for the great expansionist, industrialist nation that America was... Now it is paying a price for thinking it could pass all of its hard work onto the people of poorer nations while growing fat working in air-conditioned offices playing solitaire for 8 hours a day.

allofthem @ 2008-06-06T13:43:00

2008-06-06T19:05:19Z

Robert Altman is dead, and although his last two decades of films were rather unimpressive (including the overrated The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park), he was quite the marvel during his prime in the 1970s. McCabe & Ms. Miller might be the most impressive anti-Western ever made (unless the rumors of Ridley Scott's upcoming adaptation of Blood Meridian are true and do not result in a collosal disappointment, a proposition that should not be counted on), and Nashville is the movie that overlong snorefests like Magnolia and Ragtime inspire to be.

Altman's most impressive accomplishment may very well be 3 Women, a movie that is a recreation of a dream Robert Altman had while his wife was in the hospital. Brooding, mysterious portrayal of the dark transformation that envelopes the lives of two women after they become roommates. Very difficult to explain the eerie atmosphere that is created within this film's walls; Roger Ebert's two reviews shed much light on the subject. The major accomplishment of the movie is not its storytelling, but the unsettling feeling that it conjures in its viewers. Bravo to the sterile cinematography, schizo sound design, and bizarro artwork throughout the film, but most of all to Robert Altman's daring, go-for-broke filmmaking.

Idea: a power plant that generates electricity through the use of simple machines, e.g. levers bent and pulled over and over by an army of temporary employees paid $5 for every 20 minutes of bending and pulling… Anyone who wants to stop by and get paid to bend and pull levers can do so. The longer one works, the more electricity one generates, the more money is given.

No doubt such devices are physically possible, as currents can be generated in rather crude ways… But can processes be developed that would actually harness and store that electricity from those devices, and do so profitably? Possibly, especially if the simple machines were developed and streamlined specifically for power generation, but there would be a bonus if the machines could actually be shown to improve cardiovascular health.

The upcoming era of laissez-faire governmental regulation on corporations (particularly big energy) and coordinated dismantling of labor unions (the government will not let organized labor scare industry to Dubai) makes this a rather attractive business model. Not only will most “employees” (e.g. those doing the pushing and pulling; such people will no doubt be labeled as “resources” rather than actual human beings) be temporary, meaning the company will not have to pick up the tab for healthcare and unemployment, but this will also contribute to a healthier America, forcing exercise and actual, physical work on our fat population, which has grown lazy in the last thirty years selling cheap, tacky Chinese-made goods in air-conditioned malls.

But should one feel guilty for using human beings as energy sources? Should an industrialist be lambasted for tapping into the potential energy of people, thus transforming the human being from individual to energy source? Is this sort of economic mindset a slippery slope that will lead to the objectification of man?

In a word, no...

"Everything is possible, nothing is forbidden."

Where there is choice, there is no blame.

allofthem @ 2008-06-03T18:51:00

2008-06-03T23:55:01Z

allofthem @ 2008-06-02T09:15:00

2008-06-02T14:51:01Z

A highly-coordinated campaign to encourage Americans to "Go Green", including a sudden 180 by the far-right? When big business and big media actually take the issue of global warming seriously, there must be something else behind it.

Possibility: Perhaps the "Go Green" is an attempt to stifle the economic advancement of China; if China is pressured into cutting greenhouse emissions, it will slow down their rapid industrialization, to the benefit of the Western economies and corporations. Sounds reasonable enough, especially when considering China is trying to build a transcontinental expressway through South America's rainforest to increase the efficiency of their trade routes (while also bypassing the traditional Panama Canal).

There comes a point when the NBA becomes nothing more than staged theater... Maybe it always has been. To anyone outside of southern California, to see the Lakers in the Finals is like watching a Jerry Bruckheimer film: different cast of prima donnas, big-budget glitz, and another yawn. Pao Gasol can join the list of great big men the Lakers have poached from other teams to win championships, Gatorade can air that same 1980s Lakers-Celtics footage that we've all seen 5200 times, whiny sports reporters can write the same trite stories about "tradition" they've been writing for decades, t-shirts stands in LA can sell an extra 100000 units, and David Stern can whack off to his marketing dollars all week long.

allofthem @ 2008-05-21T14:32:00

2008-05-21T19:40:00Z

The bacteriophage is a virus that infects single-cell bacteria. Not quite an organism, not quite living, not quite a parasite.

It even looks scary...

So small, a single cell dwarfs it... Inside its "head" is a sample of DNA/RNA. Upon latching to a host, it injects that DNA/RNA into it, the DNA/RNA becomes incorporated into the DNA of the host, and the host subsequently begins building more bacteriophages due to the newly incorporated DNA. So many are made that the cell's resources become compromised, eventually resulting in the death of the host and the release of many new bacteriophages.

allofthem @ 2008-05-20T12:39:00

2008-05-20T18:03:19Z

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian quite possibly might be the great, violent American novel. Atmospheric, blood dripping from every corner, indescribable moral horror somehow brought to life. The book takes place during the taming of the American frontier; chaos and anarchy reign in the desert, scalps are worth more than gold, teenagers shot dead in moldy bars. Really incredible shit.

The enlightenment-through-violence theme is peculiar to the American Western, mythic almost to the point of the mythology of the Holy Land (e.g. Jerusalem, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc., what we arrogantly call the "Cradle of Civilization"). Unlike the Holy Land, however, where the threat of violence tamed an entire people, there was a scorched-earth, fight-to-the-death mentality that slaughtered entire nations on American shores, from Canada all the way down to Chile, hundreds of thousands murdered in the name of economics.

[Strange how the birth of the Americas, the origins of our civilizations through the deaths of others, doesn't seem to register in the consciousness of our people, and is usually regarded with a great deal of flippancy, despite the fact that the implications live with us through this day (it was, after all, only a few hundred years ago).]

Sam Peckinpah's 1971 film Straw Dogs is one of the great examinations of violence in American cinema, the equal of Taxi Driver and Full Metal Jacket... Perhaps greater, more powerful, especially in its conclusion that not only is violence necessary to man's survival, it is perhaps its most basic upholder of truth, more so than any conceivable notion of morality or justice...

Peckinpah: Find what is yours, build an island for yourself, and form an army that can blow anyone else to the next kingdom...

allofthem @ 2008-05-16T14:04:00

2008-05-16T19:21:51Z

Technology: new ways to use old things... New ideas? No... Nothing new except the actual execution. Evolution is an .exe file, reality is a .bin file.

Idea: we are all terrified of the onset of the computer age, as it is a very radical break with the past. In twenty years, when your average desktop computer has more pattern recognition capabilities than your exceptional human being (to go with its obviously superior computational capacity), and after we have squandered the earth's oil, timber, copper, and uranium supplies, we will weigh the idea of whether to put powerful supercomputers in charge of the remainder of the earth's natural resources. After our most brilliant minds have thoroughly thought over the idea, and come to the conclusion that there is no probabilistic way that a human being could ever more efficiently manage such a vast task as a computer could, we will hand over the keys of the earth's decision-making to an all-knowing supercomputer, who will proceed to violently puree all of human civilization, as well as all plant and animal domains and kingdoms, into a fine, chunky, frothy solution, rich in nutrients, to be distributed in the most efficient manner possible by a stainless-steel, box-shaped mother-computer with a vast army of trillions of nanobots at her disposal, a cold, forever-calculating engine that will ensure the triumph of gaia over the individual, subordinate building blocks of the earth.

Smile... Efficiency and convenience trumps all. We should hope that such a destiny will play out over several centuries, but regardless of the execution, it is a format in which we must become comfortable as we hurdle towards our species' climax. Yes, we should want a centuries-long slid into obsolesence, not a several-hour puree of grotesque proportions and unimaginable horror, blood and dirt mixed together, pieces of splattered flesh lying on the ground, the smell of charred bones... Not a pretty sight. Avoid a quick descent into carnage; we should go slowly, quietly... First connect, play all day, grow fat and ostracized, as comfortable on the couch/in front of the screen/with goggles as mobile/on your feet/aware, then we will be ready to surrender our bodies to technological efficiency and the infinite beyond... We will all be dead, though.