Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Thee Psychick Bible (Part 2) from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.
Update: The embedded video isn’t working right now, so try this direct link instead.
MonthJanuary 2010
First recorded in Chicago in 1994, this previously unreleased audio session with the renowned Robert Anton Wilson has been stored away for fifteen years…and almost lost entirely. If Bob knew how many synchronicities surround the rediscovery and release of this “lost” studio session, he would be chuckling in that half jolly, half mischievous way of his. If you believe in any kind of afterlife, maybe you can imagine him laughing right now. I like that image: Bob the laughing Buddha, still having one over on us from the great beyond.
Ever since I became an atheist, I’ve been struck by the fact that, even when people believe that death is no more than a temporary separation, they still grieve deeply and desperately for the people they love, as if they were never going to see those people again. Belief in an afterlife doesn’t keep people from mourning in terrible anguish when their loved ones die. It doesn’t keep people from missing the loved ones they’ve lost, for years, for the rest of their lives. And it doesn’t keep people from fearing their own death, and putting it off as long as they can. (And for the record: No, I don’t think this makes them hypocrites. I think it makes them human.) The comfort of religion doesn’t eradicate grief, any more than the comfort of atheism does. It simply alleviates it to some extent.
But does an atheist philosophy of death offer less comfort than a religious one? Honestly — I think that depends. For one thing, I think it depends on the atheist philosophy. A philosophy of (for instance) “Yes, I’m going to die, but my ideas and the effect I had on the world will live on for a while ” will probably be more comforting than a philosophy of, “Yeah, death totally sucks, but that’s reality, reality bites, whaddya gonna do.”
Plus, obviously, it depends on the religion as well. Many true believers in a blissful afterlife aren’t actually very comforted by this belief. It’s common for believers to be tormented by the thought that, even if they’re going to Heaven, the apostates in their family are going to burn in Hell… and how can Heaven be Heaven if their loved ones are burning in Hell? And many religious beliefs about death fill their believers, not with comfort, but with terror and guilt… and many atheists who once held those beliefs say that letting go of them was a profound relief. They would much rather believe in no afterlife at all than an afterlife determined by the vengeful, nitpicky, capricious, psychopathically sadistic god they were brought up to believe in.
Alternet: Does Atheism Offer As Much Comfort in Death As Religion?
(via Disinfo)
Photographer Peter Ross has been allowed to photograph William Burroughs’s stuff from a New York apartment he once lived in.
William Burroughs lived for many years in the former locker room of an 1880s YMCA, on the Bowery in New York City. The almost windowless space was known as The Bunker. When he died in 1997, his friend and mine, John Giorno, kept the apartment intact, with many of Burroughs’s possessions sitting as they were. Part of the space is now used for Buddhist teachings, and the apartment is a wonderful mix of Buddhist wall hangings and pillows and carpets and Burroughs’ personal furniture and collections.
The Morning News: William Burroughs’s Stuff
(via Kottke)
The surprising thing is that this place exists. He lived out his final days in Lawrence, KS. Did he also keep an apartment in NYC?
Update: A few more pics here (via Metafilter)
According to a survey for the technology firm Olympus:
The average length of time a student could concentrate for in lectures was 10 minutes, according to the survey carried last month.
And a third blamed lack of sleep and being overworked for this.
Many students had been forced to take up part-time work to make ends meet.
Among the students surveyed, 13% admitted to missing up to five hours of lectures a week, while 17% said they had to prioritise their part-time jobs over lectures to be able to support themselves. […]
Nearly half of students feared they would finish with high debts and no jobs, according to the study.
BBC: Students only have ’10-minute attention span’
(via Beerken’s blog)
More than a thousand African workers were put aboard buses and trains in the southern Italian region of Calabria over the weekend and shipped out to immigrant detention centers, following some of the country’s worst riots in years.
The clashes began Thursday night in Rosarno, a working-class city amid citrus groves in Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot, after a legal immigrant from Togo was lightly wounded in a pellet-gun attack in a nearby city. It is not clear who pulled the trigger — the authorities said they were investigating whether organized crime had provoked the riots — but the consequences were severe.
Blaming racism for the attack, dozens of immigrants burned cars and smashed shop windows in Rosarno in two days of riots, throwing rocks at local residents and fighting with the police. More than 50 immigrants and police officers were wounded, none seriously, and 10 immigrants and locals were arrested before the authorities began sending the immigrants to detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy on Saturday.
New York Times: Race Riots Grip Italian Town, and Mafia Is Suspected
(via Cryptogon)
Not a figure of speech: That’s the actual spec
Radical Pentagon boffins have decided to build super high-tech binoculars or goggles which would – according to the government specifications – be able to identify and pick out “a needle moving along the surface of a haystack”.
The planned technology has been dubbed Fine Detail Optical Surveillance (FDOS), and regular readers will be unsurprised to hear that it is one of the many troubled, rather disturbing yet occasionally freakishly brilliant brainchildren of rogue US military boffin bureau DARPA. […]
The program can be described as developing the technology and systems analogous to that required for the rapid imaging and identification, without the need for scanning or focusing of the optical receiver, of a needle moving along the surface of a haystack, where the location and type of needle on the haystack is uncertain.
The Register: DARPA to build ‘needle-in-haystack’ detector goggles
(via Neatorama)
This is amazing.
Coilhouse has the rest embedded.
YouTube has stripped the sound from the last episode, but it’s easy enough to find a torrent of the whole documentary.
OK, actually, just *part* virus:
People may not be quite the humans they think they are. Or so suggests new research showing that the human genome is part bornavirus.
Bornaviruses, a type of RNA virus that causes disease in horses and sheep, first inserted their genetic material into ancestral human DNA at least 40 million years ago, the study shows. The findings, published January 7 in Nature, provide the first evidence that RNA viruses other than retroviruses (such as HIV) can stably integrate genes into host DNA. The new work may help reveal more about the evolution of RNA viruses as well as their mammalian hosts.
“Our whole notion of ourselves as a species is slightly misconceived,” says Robert Gifford, a paleovirologist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, affiliated with Rockefeller University in New York City. Human DNA includes genetic contributions from bacteria and other organisms, and humans have even come to rely on some of these genes for basic functions like fighting infections.
Wired: Human Genome Is Part Bornavirus
(via Bruce Sterling)
A promising push toward a novel, biologically-inspired “chemical computer” has begun as part of an international collaboration.
The “wet computer” incorporates several recently discovered properties of chemical systems that can be hijacked to engineer computing power. […]
What distinguishes the current project is that it will make use of stable “cells” featuring a coating that forms spontaneously, similar to the walls of our own cells, and uses chemistry to accomplish the signal processing similar to that of our own neurons.
The goal is not to make a better computer than conventional ones, said project collaborator Klaus-Peter Zauner of the University of Southampton, but rather to be able to compute in new environments.
“The type of wet information technology we are working towards will not find its near-term application in running business software,” Dr Zauner told BBC News.
“But it will open up application domains where current IT does not offer any solutions – controlling molecular robots, fine-grained control of chemical assembly, and intelligent drugs that process the chemical signals of the human body and act according to the local biochemical state of the cell.”
BBC:
Chemical computer that mimics neurons to be created
(via Swadeshine)
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