“Deep in water-filled underground caves beneath Australia’s Nullarbor Plain, cave divers have discovered unusual ‘curtains’ of biological material – known as Nullarbor cave slimes.
It is thought that the periodic inundations of the Nullarbor caves by the sea occurred a number of times in the geological past and so researchers suggest that the Weebubbie Thaumarchaeota may have a marine origin.
“It just goes to show that life in the dark recesses of the planet comes in many strange forms, many of which are still unknown,” says Professor Paulsen.”
That last quote feels a little… just a little, Lovecraftian if you ask me.
“It flies over Waziristan, then to New York City and finally to the UK, asking itself philosophical questions and gradually gaining more self-awareness. However, the Freestone Drone is fated to die by getting tangled up in a washing line — the same washing line that American drone commanders use as a sign of activity inside the homes of suspects. Along the way he also gatecrashes a wedding in Paris, and even travels through time, as part of the piece’s exploration of the changing nature of warfare.”
“Were you conflicted about writing about your friend Harris’s death, about using that as a subject?
No. I see no reason not to write whatever comes to me. There was no way I was not going to write about Harris’s death. It’s like when you’re at a cocktail party and you meet someone you know you’re going to sleep with. You might as well get it over with and sleep with them. I’m talking about my former, younger life now. But. There is no point in pretending. I no longer try to avoid the inevitability of what comes to me, writing-wise.That said, there are a lot of factoids that I opted not to include in the book. This is not a book about everything I know about Harris. There are a lot of things about myself I chose not to include. I have written two memoirs but that doesn’t mean that I want to share everything. It’s hard to make it sound as if that argument holds any water at all. I don’t have a personal Facebook page. I don’t want to divulge what I don’t want to divulge.”
- Nazi Buddha ‘Came From Outer Space’. Which isn’t the official title I guess; it’s just the one to get you to click on the link. It works. Turns out this ancient Buddha statue, discovered in the 1930′s via a Nazi organized archeological dig, was carved some 1000 years ago out of a meteorite that crashed to the Earth’s surface some 15,000 years ago. This has Indiana Jones written all over it.
Also from the BBC:
- Hubble Telescope Captures One of the Most Extraordinary Views of Universe to Date. The image comes from a result of astronomers pointing the Hubble towards a very specific patch of sky for around 22 days. Letting in 500-ish hours of light to the scope. It captured around 5,500 separate galaxies, including the farthest it saw, UDFy-38135539. Just to give you an idea, that galaxy is over 13 BILLION light years away. Which is of course so mind-blowing it is almost incomprehensible…
- Hey I made a new remix! It got a little dark… yeeeaaaahhh sorry about that:
Just to give you an idea of how different it is, here’s the original:
- Mikey Mictlan of Doomtree has a new album out. And he’s offering it up for FREE (but give him a few bucks, eh):
- I’m about to dig hard into a couple songs I’ve been working on. One for the 50th Black Lantern Music release, which should be a pretty cool thing when all is said and done. The other for my wedding: a song I wrote a while ago for who turned out to be my future wife. I had never written a song for a girl before, and this one turned out sounding pretty special. It’s simple and catchy, the way a love song should be.
- Also I think I’m getting the concept down for my next LP, but who knows when it’ll be finished. Hopefully by the end of the year. I want to tell a story with an album. Cut into three parts, the way dramatic structure is. Three acts. I’m not only going to use these devices for the story, I’m also going to use them musically as well if I can. The introduction of characters (sounds/instruments), the first turning point, the rising action, the climax, the falling action, etc. I’m going to — I think — break up the album very literally into three parts: 3 long tracks clocking in around 20 minutes a piece (give or take), with “Parts” embedded into each track and also listed in the track-listing. Step two is what setting to tell such a story in, that could take time. I’m sure this has all been done before by someone somewhere.
- I got my Policavinyl in the mail yesterday. I just downloaded the digital copy it came with (which really is something everyone should do for people willing to buy brand new vinyl) and am running through the album for the first time right now. It’s darker than I thought it would be, considering what I’d heard of it. Mostly the second to last track “Wandering Star”. Which is a patient reflection on troubling times. But dang songs like “Violent Games” bring the hammer. Cover:
- This news came out a couple days ago, but is still worth mentioning. It has, of course, massive implications in terms of global hunger and environmental protection. Scientists have successfully created beef in a lab.
“Speakers said they aim to develop such “meat” products for mass consumption to reduce the environmental and health costs of conventional food production.
Conventional meat and dairy production requires more land, water, plants and disposal of waste products than almost all other human foods, they said.
The global demand for meat is expected to rise by 60 percent by 2050, said American scientist Nicholas Genovese, who organized the symposium.”
- Kurt Cobain would have turned 45 today. Probably still living in Washington, hopefully still making music. I’m confident that is the case. It’s amazing how different the industry would likely be now if he were around. And especially throughout the late 90′s/early 2000′s. If you listen to “You Know You’re Right”, you will find quite a different shade to Nirvana under the surface. Upon first listen it sounds like an above average Nirvana song, but bubbling under the surface lies noises running on a loop, fairly progressive drumming, and a surprisingly cleaner gain. I love that song; and it bums me out to no end because I’m certain that’s the direction they were heading. Granted, if Kurt were around it’s highly unlikely Nirvana would still be making music. There’s just no way that could last after they’d been received the way they were. But that doesn’t mean each member could not still be pursuing music. Perhaps Kurt would be making solo albums the way Mike Doughty does. Perhaps he’d be collaborating with any number of people (Danger Mouse?). Who knows. But I’m sure it would be something. Such a waste. Happy birthday Kurt.
- Also missing someone I lost 2 years ago today. Her favorite color was blue… I found this:
“With High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) imagery, the research team examined boulders along a fault system known as Cerberus Fossae, which cuts across a very young (few million years old) lava surface on Mars. By analyzing boulders that toppled from a martian cliff, some of which left trails in the coarse-grained soils, and comparing the patterns of dislodged rocks to such patterns caused by quakes on Earth, the scientists determined the rocks fell because of seismic activity. The martian patterns were not consistent with how boulders would scatter if they were deposited as ice melted, another means by which rocks are dispersed on Mars.”
- My monthly list of awesome things from the “Around The Net” Whitechapel thread:
Klosterman evaluates that puzzling phenomena where a good, not great, band shoots up the “indie” ladder to become one of the most talked about bands of the year. This time it’s Tune Yards (or however the hell you spell that shit; seriously… just write your name normally!!):
“When (and if) you listen to w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs, you are listening to two things: a record that’s very good, and/or a record that will someday seem way worse than it actually is. And logic suggests the latter is more likely than the former, even though that’s no reflection on the value of the artist.
I am rooting for you, Merrill Garbus. I like your record, and I hope you make many more. I want you to be a genius, and I have no reason to believe that won’t happen. But maybe don’t sell the puppets, because maybe you are doomed.”
“Robert Hooke discovered the cell, established experimentation as crucial to scientific research, and did pioneering work in optics, gravitation, paleontology, architecture, and more. Yet history dismissed and forgot him… all because he pissed off Isaac Newton, probably the most revered scientist who ever lived.
This seventeenth century polymath, who has been called the English answer to Leonardo da Vinci, almost disappeared from history entirely after his death in 1703, as even the only known painting of him was unceremoniously destroyed. It took over two centuries for his reputation to recover and his myriad of accomplishments to be properly celebrated. He’s a cautionary tale for just how dangerous it can be to find yourself on the wrong side of history.”
“It may seem like common sense that you need to get your ideas out of your head to act on them, but how many of us walk around with an always-updating to-do list in our heads only to forget one of them later? One of the basic principles of GTD and many other productivity systems is that your first step is to get your ideas and to-dos out of your head and on paper or into some system as soon as possible so you have the clarity to actually work on them. “
Here’s an awesome video of Kristoff Krane playing in a record store for some people in San Diego. He’s a wonderful performer, apparently even when there’s only like 10 people watching:
“In 1995, the head-trauma wing at a nursing home in Bensonhurst began acquiring the lost memories of Def Jam’s first rapper. Terry Keaton, a new patient at Haym Salomon hospital, had emerged from a coma unaware that he was T La Rock. Or that T La Rock had a hit in 1984 called “It’s Yours.” What was known is that the history of T La Rock — and perhaps the time of his life — had been purged from Terry Keaton’s mind with a blunt instrument.
The assailant was never caught, and Keaton spent much of his rehab listening to “It’s Yours,” recollecting lines that the rest of the hip-hop world had been quoting for the past decade. Though “It’s Yours” wasn’t exactly targeting the Yiddish-speaking Russian-granny demographic, this Def Jam moment essentially became theirs: a new memory that required an additional memory for all that excess bass. Listening to an 808 drum machine certainly beat not recognizing your loved ones.”
- And speaking of ghosts and hip-hop: one of those albums I was referring to yesterday is the oft-delayed Ghostface & DOOM record “Swift & Changeable“. Since first getting into Wu-Tang, Ghostface quickly rose to the top of those 9 rappers for me personally. I’m a big fan.
And since we’re on the subject, if you do not already have WUGAZI on your computer I’d suggest getting it. It’s free, and awesome. Now here’s more links:
“Birger Rasmussen, paleontologist with Curtin University in Perth, and colleagues have found natural samples in several sites in Western Australia, and as they describe in their paper published in Geology, it appears likely the mineral is more common here on our home planet than anyone might have surmised.
The mineral has been found in six sites in all, in various remote spots in Western Australia, and occurs in very small amounts. The samples found were actually about the width of a human hair and just microns in length, and that’s part of the reason why it’s taken so long for those that study rocks to find such samples here on Earth. Another reason is that tranquillityite is comparatively delicate and tends to break down when exposed to normal surface climatic events such as heat, rain and wind.“
- Warren Ellis: Five Predictions About The Immediate Future Of Comics. Among them: indie creators being offered deals to do their own bidding via digital storefronts/apps, more self-publishing/direct to book publishers, several of the DC staff will begin exiting the company due to the constant shifting of… everything.
“Cyberculture legend RU Sirius, editor at the Acceler8or webzine, interviewed Joel Garreau and myself about the Prevail project. (Short summary for those who missed the earlier post: Prevail is an Arizona State University-sponsored non-profit organization looking to build collaborative knowledge about transformative technologies and culture.) In a series of back-and-forth email among the three of us, we discussed everything from the logic of transhumanism to the power of the Occupy movement. “
Scientists were left scratching their heads after methane gas was detected by a Mars rover in the thin Martian air this year. The confusion steams from the fact that methane molecules are released only by living organisms, and with that they are easily blown apart by ultraviolet light from the Sun, so any methane in the atmosphere must have been released recently. It has yet too be discovered, however, what’s emitting this methane gas.
- ARTIST OF THE DAY is a guy named James Heimer. James grew up in Pennsylvania and has a background in (like many artists and designers) skate culture and hardcore. His main thing seems to be doing concert posters, but his other work is stunning as well.
- Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” (aka: Alien prequel) finally has got a poster up (the tagline reads, “the search for our beginning could lead to our end”; that statue face points towards some sort of archeology-based finding about an ancient culture… it seems):
“When we look at the black holes in the centers of other galaxies, we see them get bright and then fade, but we never know what is actually happening,” said Eliot Quataert, a theoretical astrophysicist and University of California, Berkeley professor of astronomy. “This is an unprecedented opportunity to obtain unique observations and insight into the processes that go on as gas falls into a black hole, heats up and emits light. It’s a neat window onto a black hole that’s actually capturing gas as it spirals in.”
“The next two years will be very interesting and should provide us with extremely valuable information on the behavior of matter around such massive objects, and its ultimate fate,” said Reinhard Genzel, professor of physics at both UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany.”
- So that drone that the US government “lost” in Iran? Yeah, an Iranian engineer has been interviewed about the whole ordeal. He’s claiming that the way they captured it was by jamming it’s satellite systems until it couldn’t take anymore and crashed. An opposing group is saying that is a bunch of hogwash, claiming that any amount of jamming — at least right now — could likely not ground such a device. Interesting stuff.
“I’m not a protestor. I’m not political. I take my freedom from technological solutions to creative modes of expression. Occupy Wall Street if you want, I’ll be making beats in my bedroom.“
Today, Ed Brubaker posted a gem on Facebook (I’d suggest following him, if only for his amazing insights into the opinions of a comics creator; obviously you have to be a comics fan first and foremost):
“Y’know, some days it feels like the world is falling apart. On those days, my advice is go buy a good comic and lose yourself in it.”
Then there’s the obligatory scientist’s quote from a national news source that sums up our hopes and dreams. Ha. Except, this one from Geoffrey Marcey — an astronomer working on the Keplar Telescope mission (didn’t we cancel that?), which recently discovered more than 50 extra terrestrial planets which might contain water — is a little more simple than one might imagine:
- A new international study is providing the strongest evidence yet that one of Saturn’s 62 — yeah, that’s not a typo — moons hosts a massive subterranean salt-water ocean. Enceladus is the planet’s sixth largest moon. It was discovered back in 1789 by Sir William Herschel, a German-born, England dwelling astronomer and composer who is widely thought of as the discoverer of both infrared radiation and the idea that coral is an animal not a plant. For centuries we’ve known that Enceladus’ outer shell was a layer of ice, but we never knew if that ice extended down to the core or stopped somewhere in between. Until now. Plumes in the moon’s icy crust apparently release tiny grains of ice along with water vapor into space. A drone space craft — launched all the way back in 1997 — called “Cassini” has collected some of this and it has been analyzed. The samples include sodium, indicating that at least some portion of the planet’s (it could be all of it) ice is salt-water based. This is what the process looks like:
- From the same site, an article discussing the discovery that dark matter could “help life evolve and survive on distant worlds outside of our solar system”.
“Dark matter is perhaps not the first thing that comes to mind when considering how life can be supported on another planet, but to Dan Hooper and Jason Steffen of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, dark matter could be a contributing factor in allowing life to evolve and survive on distant worlds outside of our solar system.
The scientists propose that dark matter particles could sink into a planet’s core, and through the annihilation of matter, release enough energy to keep the surface of the planet warm enough for liquid water, even outside the traditional habitable zone.”
(The Enceladus news is plastered alloverthenet. This is good news.)
There are few cooler things a famous person can do (…”famous”) than pimp out less famous people’s work. To me, a peer has less to do with success or status than content and style. In this sense, “peers” are somewhat of an apparition, ghosts that drift through the windows of time attracted to likewise individuals. Alan Moore, quite obviously, has some unearthly connection with H.P. Lovecraft; why can’t that go both ways? Liu Xiaobo and Dr. King? Hell, Robin Hood and Catwoman?? The promotion of likewise ideas and arts clearly moves upwards as well. How many websites out there dedicate themselves to promoting their favorite films, albums, artists, writers? Why, this very page almost defines this: a like-minded and dead alter-ego of an anonymous self talking about the very famous and the not so famous artisans of the world.
Few people have embraced this, and its natural relation to the Global Net, more than Warren Ellis. He used to run what he called “The 4 A.M.” frequently. It was a podcast of bands and musicians from all-over the world that caught his ear, the catch was he would ask for submissions from anyone to an e-mail account. The result was a mixture of artists with wildly different levels of “success”: a kid in his basement experimenting with synths, an ambient band who’s poised to takeover South By Southwest. His personal website is essentially a catalog for other artists he enjoys and/or would like to see become more successful. (From what I hear Slug’s Twitter feed is one big radio station for promoting other bands he likes.) Three things (out of thousands) I have Warren to thank for sharing with me:
PHYSORG.com – A wonderful website. One of the “leading web-based science, research and technology news service which covers a full range of topics. These include physics, earth science, medicine, nanotechnology, electronics, space, biology, chemistry, computer sciences, engineering, mathematics and other sciences and technologies.“
Katelan Foisy – Artist, writer, photographer, journalist, thinker, entrepreneur, blogger, gardener. Her paintings evoke textured and surreal characterization of herself, her friends, her neighbors, YOU… they dig deep into the human experience as seen through the kaleidoscope of popular culture and fantastical underbelly that lies underneath life as we know it. Her writing does a bit of the same, a throwback to the stream-of-consciousness writers and poets of the 50′s and 60′s. Make no mistake, she is good at everything she does.
More recently, Sara Gries’ FLICKR – Sara takes pretty pictures. Photos of puppets/dolls, books, time-pieces, artwork, herself, with an eye for the way things work. She is very interested in the physical: metal and fabrication and depth; one of those photographers you want to reach inside their work and prod what lies in wait, make it go. Go and touch some of her pictures.
