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What if Canada joined the U.S.

April 3, 2008 /

http://www.cbc.ca/trojanhorse/

I don’t watch much tv, so I missed the ads for this miniseries. It aired its first part on Sunday and the finalé airs this Sunday. If anyone can find the .torrent, let me know. Sometimes it’s a pain finding Canadian media on the interwebs. Interesting premise, though:

Tom McLaughlin (Paul Gross), former Canadian prime minister, watches from the sidelines as a majority of Canadians vote for union with the United States of America. The Canadian flag comes down and the country is redrawn into six states.

In revenge, McLaughlin — secretly backed by three key European nations — runs as an independent for President with his ex-wife, Texas Governor Mary Miller (Martha Burns) as his running mate. An assassination attempt boosts his credibility with voters. Veteran British journalist Helen Madigan (Greta Scacchi) is probing the London shooting of her adopted son –- she too gets targeted for assassination after she uncovers a computer program designed to fix the votes in the next U.S. election. She believes McLaughlin is an honest broker and she looks to him to expose the corruption in President Stanfield’s (Tom Skerritt) current U.S. administration, an administration hell-bent on invading Saudi Arabia to cut off China’s oil supply.

Review of the MMO ‘Outside’

April 2, 2008 /

I came across this via Kottke. I’ve seen bits and pieces posted about Outside over the past couple months, but this is a good review of a game everyone should be dying to try:

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game’s social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

The reviewer gives it a 7/10.

ADDITIONALLY, just reading this on the Telegraph website, which goes to show just how peculiar IRL and Outside can really be depending on what tribe you end up playing:

The Masai warriors’ guide to England
by Andrew Pierce

Six Masai warriors, who are so fierce they kill male lions with their bare hands, have been warned that surviving the perils of the African bush will be child’s play compared to what they can expect on their first trip to England. […]

"Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people — many of them just work in offices, jobs they don’t enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should."

The Masai men — who become warriors after tracking, running down and killing a male lion — may struggle with Greenforce’s interpretation of how English law operates.

"For example, if someone was to see a thief and chase after him and, when they catch him they hurt him, then the person who hurt the thief would go to prison as well as the thief."

Transcription of one of Newton’s alchemical documents

March 30, 2008 /

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/newton/alchemy.html

Historian of science Bill Newman says that Isaac Newton’s alchemical notebooks are like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. But as you’ll see as you peruse the 300-year-old manuscript at left, this puzzle is no child’s play—more like an enigma wrapped in a mystery riddled with a number of misleading clues. With Bill Newman’s help, we’ve "decoded" a page from one of these manuscripts. To orient yourself to the bewildering world of 17th-century alchemy, we recommend you first read our interview with Bill Newman before plunging into the manuscript.—Susan K. Lewis

‘Secret Worlds’

March 30, 2008 /

 

Neil Gaiman quote illustrated by the always-wonderful xkcd.

Kirlian photos of Fell’s progress through Reiki

March 27, 2008 /

I’ve been studying Reiki under two local Reiki masters here, and it’s been good so far. I’ll write more about it once I’ve progressed farther. I’ve completed my Level I and some friends and I begin Level II in a couple weeks. I’ll be studying straight through the year until the Master class.

The teachers aren’t your traditional New Age fruits. They’re more like existential yogis, but the Reiki they practise is phenomenal. As an added bonus, they begin sessions with a Kirlian camera. Now, don’t read too much into these. But interesting to see the results as I progress through sessions with them and my own studies.

The image (click image for larger size) is mirrored, so the pinky finger is associated with your connection to one’s intuition, the ring finger with one’s emotional state, middle finger with one’s physical state, and index finger with one’s mental state.

The first row of finger tips is captured as they have you in your normal state, then they ask you to embody happiness, then frustration, and then to feel as if you’re the most comfortable state with yourself as possible. They capture these four sets onto one film and voilà!

The broken lines represent a lack of connection or awareness of that aspect of your being. Beyond language and labels, just being. And as the rings grow in brightness, I believe they come to represent one’s comfort with just being a part of existence — letting the whole of the life experience wash over oneself.

I went today, and as you can see from the bottom-right image, my way of living is beginning to more wholly encompass all facets of being. It was a good session and the past year’s been good.

Might be worth looking into for those unaware of Reiki. As Saul Williams says in his song "Raised to Be Lowered":

To find the balance between all you sense and all you see
To find the patience and the strength it takes to let it be
To stand amongst the crowd and have the strength to hold your own
To throw away the pen and pad and simply be the poem
To rise above hatred to love through seeming contradiction
To seldom take a side and learn to compliment the friction.

Slavery’s staying power

March 26, 2008 /

On a different note, this is something else I came across today worth sharing:

It’s not a relic of the past; it’s here and now and ensnaring more people than ever.

By E. Benjamin Skinner
March 23, 2008

Many people are surprised to learn that there are still slaves. Many imagined that slavery died along with the 360,000 Union soldiers whose blood fertilized the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. Many thought that slavery was brought to an end around the world when most countries outlawed it in the 19th century.

But, in fact, there are more slaves today than at any point in history. Although a precise census is impossible, as most masters keep their slaves hidden, baseline estimates from United Nations and other international researchers range from 12 million to 27 million slaves worldwide. The U.S. State Department estimates that from 600,000 to 800,000 people — primarily women and children — are trafficked across national borders each year, and that doesn’t count the millions of slaves who are held in bondage within their own countries.

Read the whole article via the Los Angeles Times.

Fractal Theory of Canada

March 26, 2008 /

Heh, I’ve been getting a kick out of this for the past half-hour. Mostly cuz I have a fetish with ontology and this is like a poor man’s poetic version. Following is the original post in alt.religion.kibology, by Inflatable Space Bunny. On a completely unrelated note, here is the Canadian band known as Fractal Pattern, since I am too lazy to find an image to accompany this post that somehow reflects both fractals and Canada…

Background.

Given a community A and an adjacent community C, such that A is prosperous and populous, and C is less populous and prosperous, and nonreciprocal interest of C in the internal affairs of A, often C will need ego compensation by occasional noisy and noisome display of its superiority over A. In this case C is said to be the _canada_ of A, C = canada(A).

For example, it has been previously established that

        canada(California) = Oregon
        canada(New York) = New Hampshire
        canada(Australia) = New Zealand
        canada(England) = Scotland

The Fractal Theory of Canada.

        For all A there exists C such that

        C = canada(A)

For example,
        canada(USA) = Canada
        canada(Canada) = Québec
        canada(Québec) = Céline Dion

It would appear that the hierarchy would bottom out an individual. However an individual is actually a community of tissues, tissues of cells, cells of molecules, and so forth down into the quantum froth.

        canada(brain) = pineal gland
        canada(intestines) = colon
        …
        canada(electron) = neutrino

and so on. There is no bottom.

"My God! It’s full of Canadas!"

Cthulhu Cake

March 26, 2008 /

Link to this image’s Flickr page. There are more on raingirllori’s page, too.

supacat on sex and flirting in Japan

March 26, 2008 /

Came across this on reddit this morning. After having studied "Spirituality and Japanese Design Practise" (via Ambidextrous or the AIGA), the notion of the Japanese intuiting much more than their Western counterparts has been of interest to me. A tidbit from this interesting LiveJournal entry:

Japanese social interaction is all about intuiting the other person’s wishes without discussing them openly, at the same time that they are intuiting your wishes without discussing them openly, so that although nothing is ever verbalised, the two of you will always exist in a compromise position of equilibrium. If you like someone, that intuitive part goes into overdrive, because you should be able to understand everything about that person without them ever telling you, and you should be able to please them without ever asking how, even more than you would with a normal person.

I also can’t emphasise enough just how passive the passive partner is. The way a woman kisses is by submissively opening her mouth, not moving her tongue unless she is cued to do so; if she’s really feminine she won’t open her mouth at all, until she’s told to. Sometimes women will move around a (very) little during sex, but mostly not at all. The slang term for a woman who lies completely still in bed is maguro (tuna). For me, with my western sensibilities and preconceptions, calling someone a ‘tuna’ in bed sounds like an insult, conjuring up images of cold dead fish, but in Japan that word has a very positive connotation. Tuna’s an expensive delicacy.

Part of what was so bamboozling the first time I had sex in Japan was that I didn’t know there was a Way of Sex, with strict gendered roles, and I just was happily doing my own thing, throwing my partner into total confusion. Seiji told me much later that dating me made him feel like he was gay, because I was active in bed, and he couldn’t connect that with anything except masculinity.

Don’t think of it as a piece on sex, think of the nature of the predefined roles and how they shape life and culture there. And, more interestingly, how rebellion would come to be directed 180° from the status quo — perhaps shedding light on Japan’s peculiar sexual fantasies and fetishes as glamorised in the West through their manga and stereotyped pop culture.

The Extinct Human Species That Was Smarter Than Us

March 26, 2008 /

The superintelligent Boskops had small, childlike faces and huge melon heads.
by Jane Bosveld

Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger (Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95)

“Sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams,” says John Merrick in the play The Elephant Man. He might have been speaking for the Boskops, an almost forgotten group of early humans who lived in southern Africa between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago. Judging from fossil remains, scientists say the Boskops were similar to modern humans but had small, childlike faces and huge melon heads that held brains about 30 percent larger than our own.

That’s what fascinates psychiatrist Gary Lynch and cognitive scientist Richard Granger. “Just as we’re smarter than apes, they were probably smarter than us,” they speculate. More insightful and self-reflective than modern humans, with fantastic memories and a penchant for dreaming, the Boskops may have had “an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.” Lynch and Granger base their characterization on our current understanding of how the human brain works, describing in detail its physiology and structure and comparing it with the brains of other primates. They also explore what the Boskops’ big brains tell us about evolution (why didn’t they survive?) and about the future of human intelligence (can we engineer bigger brains?). These are questions, one suspects, that even the smallest-brained Boskop would have approved of.

via Discover

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