From the English Russian: “This Russian animal was born numbered. It’s still is and the owners search for some good sports player who uses the number “10? to sell the goat to him.”
More pics: the English Russian
(Thanks Danny)
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I just came down from flavor tripping and boy is my palate tired. Also, I’m a bit drunk. I wasn’t trying to get a bit drunk, but that’s what happens when you hit the Miracle Fruit. The stuff basically rewires your tongue, erasing your ability to taste sour and bitter flavors for a short period of time. The upshot of the whole thing is that a lemon tastes like candy fruit and balsamic vinegar tastes like a high fructose fruit drink.
But what about booze? Well, let’s start with Trillium Absinthe. This stuff can be quite bitter if you don’t hit it with ice water and a smidge of sugar, but under the influence of Miracle Fruit, it’s all anise, all the time. It’s kinda like choking on the strongest black liquorish rope you’ve ever put in your mouth. But strangely, if you add a bit of rice vinegar, the whole thing mellows and turns into this almost nutty tasting, light anisette liquor with a touch of salt. Yes, I added rice vinegar to absinthe, which is not half as adventurous as some of the crap I’ve mixed at home at 4am after a vicious bender.
Full Story: r6xx, where you can buy miracle berries.
Disclaimer: r6xx was a sponsor of Esozone in 2008, and I’ve been paid to write for r6xx.com in the past. I am not currently being paid to promote r6xx.
“The developers of a conceptual, ergonomic 9mm handgun — designed for people crippled by arthritis, muscular dystrophy, or similar conditions that render them too weak to operate normal handguns — hope it will eventually be considered a Class 1 Medical Device. The single-shot gun, dubbed the Palm Pistol, is “an adaptive tool that allows someone otherwise incapable of handling a revolver or semiautomatic weapon to operate one,” said Matthew Carmel of Constitution Arms, the New Jersey-based company developing the gun.
If the gun were designated as a medical device, doctors could eventually write prescriptions for it and then be reimbursed by Medicare. The proposed Daily Activity Assist Device would be symmetrical, ambidextrous, and made largely of stainless steel. For the gun to be fired, two mechanical safeties must be depressed with the fingers on either side of the barrel before the trigger, located on the top and bottom of the gun, is pressed by the thumb. A three-digit combination lock is set opposite to the loading button to help prevent accidental discharge.
The Palm Pistol would hold a single cartridge, loaded by pressing a button in the middle of the combined stock and receiver, which swings to the side. “A single shot means it’s clearly for self-defense,” said Carmel. Depending on sales of the single-shot version, he says a multiple-shot version could be possible.”
(via Discovery.com)
In January 2001, the security branch of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency began to receive a number of peculiar reports from DEA field offices across the country. According to the reports, young Israelis claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale had been attempting to penetrate DEA offices for over a year. The Israelis had also attempted to penetrate the offices of other law enforcement and Department of Defense agencies. Strangest of all, the “students” had visited the homes of numerous DEA officers and other senior federal officials.
As a pattern slowly emerged, the DEA appeared to have been targeted in what it called an “organized intelligence gathering activity.” But to what end, and for whom, no one knew.
(via Honky Tonk Dragon)
It’s a long story, but here’s the take-away: no one knows what was going. There’s various speculation, and this sounds most likely to me (for what little my opinion is worth):
Theory No. 3, the Art Student as Agent as Art Student Smoke Screen. It has major problems, but let’s roll with it for a moment. This theory contends that the art student ring was a smoke screen intended to create confusion and allow actual spies — who were also posing as art students — to be lumped together with the rest and escape detection. In other words, the operation is an elaborate double fake-out, a hiding-in-plain-sight scam. Whoever dreamed it up thought ahead to the endgame and knew that the DEA-stakeout aspect was so bizarre that it would throw off American intelligence. According to this theory — Stability’s “Victor/Victoria” scenario — Israeli agents wanted, let’s say, to monitor al-Qaida members in Florida and other states. But they feared detection. So to provide cover, and also to create a dizzyingly Byzantine story that would confuse the situation, Israeli intel flooded areas of real operations with these bumbling “art students” — who were told to deliberately stake out DEA agents.
Here’s another possibility: they were part of some sort of well organized, well funded prank. (Or, like Honky Tonk Dragon said – “Life imitates Illuminatus”)
Anti-retroviral drugs used to treat HIV/Aids are being bought and smoked by teenagers in South Africa to get high.
Reports suggest that the drugs are being sold by patients and even healthcare staff for money.
Schoolchildren have been spotted smoking the drugs, which are ground into powder and sometimes mixed with painkillers or marijuana.
Aids patients themselves have been found smoking the drugs instead of taking them as prescribed.
(Thanks Ulysses Lazarus)
“According to a fascinating report printed in the London Telegraph in 1880, a man was buried “?in a condition of apparent death’ for 40 days and survived. No tricks or tomfoolery were involved, so how did he do it? It’s often the case that when someone professes to be able do something remarkable, that great gift of human nature kicks in – skepticism. So when Maharajah Ranjeet Sing heard from an Indian fakir who claimed he could come back to life after being buried for several months in an apparent state of death, the Maharajah could only reply with one statement – proof or it didn’t happen.
At once, the fakir, named Haridas, was summonsed before the Maharajah – who regarded the idea as possibly fraudulent – to act out exactly how he could accomplish this amazing feat. In full view of the Maharajah and nobles of the court, within a short time, the fakir appeared comatosed. One of the witnesses at the time, an Honorable Captain Osborn, made his own account of the event:
“When every spark of life had seemingly vanished, he was … wrapped up in the linen on which he had been sitting, and on which the seal of Ranjeet Sing was placed. The body was then deposited in a chest, on which Ranjeet Sing, with his own hand, fixed a heavy padlock. The chest was carried outside the town and buried in a garden belonging to the Minister; barley was sown over the spot, a wall created around it, and sentinels posted.”
So was the mistrust of the Maharajah.”
(via Environmental Graffiti)
I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or reality of this vast connectivity. What’s uncertain is, what is it? Is this global web of computers, servers and trunk lines a mere mechanical circuit, a very large tool, or does it reach a threshold where something, well, different happens?
So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. I’ve decided to treat the idea of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.
My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation with its own emergent behaviors.
(via Grinding)
Funny thing about DNA science: when huge breakthroughs get proclaimed, they generally only lead to more questions and collapse into hype upon any serious scrutiny.? Likewise, when baffling new mysteries are announced, they tend to point the way towards a fuller understanding of the DNA cipher. Case in point — this weekend’s headline, Mysterious DNA Found to Survive Eons of Evolution.
The precise term is “ultraconserved sequences,” and as one observer on the RI forum eloquently summarized it, “this mutation-free DNA has shared eveolutionary benefits through out the entire class Mammilia without producing a visible or identifiable shared characteristic.” More meat from the article itself:
…about 500 regions of our DNA have apparently remained intact throughout the history of mammalian evolution, or the past 80 million to 100 million years, basically free of mutations. The researchers call these mystery snippets “ultraconserved regions,” and found that they are about 300 times less likely than other regions of the genome to be lost during the course of mammalian evolution.? “These regions seem to be under intense purifying selection – almost no mutations take hold permanently,” said researcher Gill Bejerano.
Technoccult readers might also be interested in the lucid heresy of Dr. Andras J. Pellionisz, author of the Fractogene website. This new discovery connects quite perfectly with the Pellionisz theory that genes aren’t a sequential list of instructions but rather a fractal and iterative template for organic growth. I would also highly recommend the work of Chris King, who’s been making the same assertion about the fabric of the entire universe.? He recently published a dense but readable 7 page summary of his work, Why the Universe is Fractal, that’s worth printing out and chewing over.
“Dan Brown’s hugely popular book, and the subsequent film starring Tom Hanks, depicted the Roman Catholic order as a religious cult which would stop at nothing – including murder – to cover up the ‘truth’ that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had married and had a child.
Most damaging for Opus Dei was Brown’s fictional character Silas, the self-flagellating and serial-killing albino monk, said to be a member of the organisation – despite the fact that it is not a monastic order and has no monks. Opus Dei has recently embarked on a public relations campaign to try to dispel its image as a powerful but shadowy off-shoot of the Roman Catholic Church.
The mini-series and cartoon are the latest initiatives in the charm offensive. They were announced on the 80th anniversary of the organisation’s founding by a Spanish priest, Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer, who died in 1975. The cartoon is in the production phase by Mediaset, the media company owned by Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The mini-series is being developed by Mediaset’s public broadcaster rival, RAI. They are intended to show that Opus Dei (Latin for The Work of God) has nothing to hide, said spokesman Pippo Corigliano.”
(via The Telegraph)
“Jim Denevan makes freehand drawings in sand. At low tide on wide beaches Jim searches the shore for a wave tossed stick. After finding a good stick and composing himself in the near and far environment Jim draws– laboring up to 7 hours and walking as many as 30 miles. The resulting sand drawing is made entirely freehand w/ no measuring aids whatsoever. From the ground, these drawn environments are experienced as places. Places to explore and be, and to see relation and distance. For a time these tangible specific places exist in the indeterminate environment of ocean shore. From high above the marks are seen as isolated phenomena, much like clouds, rivers or buildings. Soon after Jim’s motions and marks are completed water moves over and through, leaving nothing.
In 2005 Jim Denevan had his museum debut the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California. Also in 2005 Jim Denevan’s work was shown at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California. In the summer of 2007, Jim had a show at PS1/MOMA in New York City. Jim’s work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Elle, GQ, The Surfers Journal, and Outside, as well as in many other national and international publications.”
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