Something Awful speculates:
“Colloidal Silver Approved for Cancer Treatment”
“Wal*Mart to Offer Low-Income Schools in 48 Stores by October”
“First-Responders to Require Citizenship Exam Before Giving Aid”
“Art Bell to Step Down”
MonthAugust 2007
The designer reality festival Esozone is just around the corner, but many primates (like myself) can’t make the event due to lack of funds, the atlantic or just general bad karmic energy.
So luckily the lovely people at Someday Lounge have put on a virtual stream that you can catch from the comfort of your own altar.
If you haven’t heard of Esozone (seriously where have you been?) then check out the fantastic website here.
Similar Diversity is an information graphic which opens up a new perspective at the topics religion and faith by visualizing the Holy Books of five world religions. Communalities and differences of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism are shown up in this datavisualization.
The visual’s basis is an objective text analysis of the Holy Scriptures, and works without any interpretations from the creators’ side. Despite – or even because of this abstraction, the artworks are not only working on an informal but also on an emotional level. The viewers should be inspired to think about own prejudices and current religious conflicts.
If you’ve been putting off buying your tickets, do it now, space is limited! http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/11610
The full schedule is now available, so start planning your weekend – http://www.esozone.com/schedule
See you soon!
A “flying saucer” that glides three metres above the ground and carries two people has gone into commerical production.
US company Moller International has begun to manufacture parts for its Jetsons-like personal flying pod, the M200G Volantor.
The M200G is the size of a small car and is designed to take off and land vertically.
Company founder Dr Paul Moller calls the craft “the ultimate off-road vehicle” as it is able to travel over any surface.
“It’s not a hovercraft, although its operation is just as easy,” said the aeronautical engineering boffin.
(via Hit and Run)
The Laboratorian:
A great deal of blather about the practices of Raja Yoga exist, and a great way to fuck someone up at worst, or impede their progress at best, is to provide them a gate into a dangerous territory then give them a sloppy map. Much of it, sadly, can be traced back to Crowley’s histrionic rubies-in-the-shit approach to writing. Look at Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising, and the confusion leaps out at anyone with experience. Wilson claims that counting the breath, a technique to aid concentration in novices, is a watered-down form of pranayama, which according to him is the real means to achieve these lofty states. He asserts that mantra, a form of concentration, is a device used for achieving pratyahara. While I respect some of Wilson’s acid-drenched project, and realize that he often claimed to have both provided disinformation and hidden messages in his texts to spurn further research (like any Joyce scholar would), I also believe that at times he simply hid his sloppiness (New Falcon was his publisher, for christ’s sake) behind these conceits. I also disagree intensely with publishing a mass-market book with disinformation-it is one thing to send a student on fool’s errands, it is another to knowingly deceive thousands with whom one has no relationship. To provide my personal example, after reading Prometheus Rising I began practicing pranayama with a mantra for ninety minutes a day, getting up at four thirty in the morning to get in the time, then hoping in the shower and going to work. I had no clue that focusing on a mantra would induce all manner of altered states, because I always assumed it was, per Wilson, the pranayama that did that. Likewise, reading a sloppy account of the actual territory of the altered states like the one Crowley offers in Book 4 helps little. The fact that a real madman, Austin Osman Spare, provides clearer instruction in doing this type of thing with his coded passages on the Death Posture-which is really just advice in what Daniel Ingram outlines as ‘Buddhist Magick 101’-should say something about just how clear the advice that the Post-Theosophist crew offer is.
Summer reading lists from Mark Pesce, Disinfo’s Alex Burns and Gary Baddely, Howard Bloom, and more.
So I’ve been using Ubuntu exclusively at home for the past 2 weeks, and at this point I’m confident I won’t be going back to Windows.
After the mess I made of my hard drive during my first installation attempt, I wiped the disk out and made 3 partitions – one for Windows, one for Linux, and one for storage.
Installation went pretty smoothly this time. I used the alternate installer and it pretty much guided me through the whole process. All of my hardware was auto detected, including my video card, sound card, and wireless card. However, I had to futz around with a text file to get it to display on my entire laptop display.
The usability of Ubuntu/Gnome is fantastic. I’m loving apt-get. Installing software is as simple as typing “sudo apt-get install applicationname” in the command line. It does all the rest of the work. It’s really just amazing. All the downloading, installing of additional software, and the installation is just done like magic. For the command line phobic, there’s the GUI package manager and Automatix. The only app I’ve had to download so far that I couldn’t get this way was Swiftweasel and I probably could have if I’d known exactly what app-name to use.
The biggest downside post-installation is probably that the out of the box software leaves a little something to be desired.
Ubuntu avoids non-free (as in speech) software, so even mp3 codecs aren’t included.
Movie Player and even VLC have some trouble playing back certain videos smoothly. Mplayer took care of that, but it’s a bit of a pain. It didn’t auto detect my video driver, I had to go into preferences (which requires right clicking anywhere on the GUI, the preference menu is completely hidden otherwise) and set it manually. It also has some odd quarks, like if you try to open a video while one’s already playing, instead of opening a second instance or interrupting the existing video, it just spits up an error message and stops playing anything. It’s not a deal breaker, but I sure miss Media Player Classic (though I think it’s the only Windows app I actually miss).
I also had problems with Firefox. Under any OS Firefox is a resource hog that leaks memory, but for some reason it was even more painful under Ubuntu. If found Swiftweasel which seems to be much better and runs my add-ons. This is the only other bit where I’ve had to muck around much. I had to download the app and install it (it had a simple Windows like installer, so it was very easy) and I had to manually turn on font rendering, which was a matter of googling around until I found a file I had to download and put in the Swiftweasel program directory.
I also followed these steps to smooth my font rendering in Ubuntu as a whole.
So those were the most “painful” bits. Not too bad, but I think the “out of the box” experience could be a little better. Still, I had imagined switching to Linux would be much more painful. I think picking up a system with Ubuntu pre-installed (like the new Dells, Koolu, or System76) would be fine for most people. There might be a little more mucking around required in the beginning than a new Vista or OSX system, but I think the pay off will be worth it to all but the most technophobic users.
Here are the other apps I’ve been using that didn’t come pre-installed:
aMule (eMule clone). sudo apt-get install aMule
Audacious (Winamp clone… I’ve never liked iTunes, but iTunes fans rave about amarok and Songbird). sudo apt-get install audacious
Comix (for reading CBR and CBZ files, though the built-in doc reader does this as well). sudo apt-get install comix
Filezilla (just like the Windows version) sudo apt-get install filezilla
Ktorrent (Azureus crashes w/o an error for me, but this works well) sudo apt-get install ktorrent
Nicotine (A Soul Seek client) sudo apt-get install nicotine
I think that’s about it… other than that I’ve been mostly just using what’s included!
Today at Hit and Run Jacob Sullum looks at last week’s “reefer madness” media scare:
By contrast, the Daily Mail waits until the 29th (and last) paragraph to note that “others questioned the link, pointing out there has been little change in rates of schizophrenia in recent years despite the rise in cannabis use and the increasing strength of the drug.” But the paper more than makes up for that concession with a sidebar on “three heavy drug users and their horrific killings” that Harry Anslinger would have envied.
My hypothesis: mainstream media makes you insane.
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