Scatter the Exoskeleton.

-  The Wildly Ambitious Quest to Build a Thought-Controlled Exoskeleton for the Paralyzed.

“This may sound incredible, but in recent years, research on using signals from the brain to operate machines has taken great strides. Scientists have developed brain-machine interfaces that allow paralyzed humans to move a computer cursor or even use a robotic arm to pick up a piece of chocolate or touch a loved one for the first time in years. Nicolelis has set his sights even higher: He wants to get paralyzed people up and walking around. If he succeeds it could be a tremendous advance. Right now he’s still developing this technology in monkeys. There’s a long way to go.

But Nicolelis was brimming with confidence in January when I visited his lab at Duke University to see how his work is progressing. “We’re getting close to making wheelchairs obsolete,” he said.“

-  I’m going to be working on music all day today.  In fact, I’ll probably hop to it after writing this.  I’m staring at three pages from my creativity book — one ripped out — trying to discover the natural succession of songs as they should unfold in relation to what the album is about.  What it means to me.  This is easily my most personal album I’ve ever done, as it vaguely (it doesn’t beat you over the head or anything) tells the story of the hardest years of my life.  So far.  But in a meta-way, this time… this experience, is kind of what birthed the idea and the sounds that would become my current musical persona to begin with.  It likely wouldn’t exist in this way without this experience.  So it’s all a little bizarre.  About halfway through I’m remixing the very first track I did officially under the pseudo-name, in an effort to recreate the frustration of what was happening boiling over and me finally going down to the basement and making this droning, Electronic beat.  So… I’m excited.

Also… help me out.  I’m becoming obsessed with THIS reaching 10 thousand downloads.

-  I’ve got this in my headphones this morning:

That’s Doldrums new album, “Lesser Evil”, released yesterday on Arbutus Records.  Canadian (Toronto) -based Electronic music that isn’t trying to make you dance (though you probably could), but that doesn’t get weird for the sake of it.  There’s a hint of that new wave of Canadian electronics in here, the sounds we heard from Purity Ring and Grimes in 2012; those textures are supplemented with the more analog sounds of a group like, say, Black Moth Super Rainbow.  The vocals are surprisingly un-effected out (generally speaking), and there are nods of good old-fashioned storytelling inside some of these songs; but it is not afraid to use a voice as a pure and simple instrument in and of itself as well.  On top of that you’ve got these rhythmic, hypnotic back-beats that have clearly been recorded live, with a kit, in a large room with padded walls.  Definitely worth checking out.

Here’s the album in a variety of formats at Amazon.

-  I really hope Warren Ellis will be getting some amount of dough from Iron Man 3, if the movie is directly lifting his nanotechnology, biological modification, Extremis from his run on the character.

Speaking of Uncle Warren, he’s apparently been inspired by newspaper comic strips, and has been releasing single panel comics on his website of late… as part of a world he calls “Scatterlands”.  Here’s the latest:

-Sonny

Link JERSEY??

-  Hurricane Sandy as the Fibonacci Spiral/Sequence:

-  I wonder how close this is to the character from 2001…?  Someone has decided to make a HAL9000 robot for purchase and — I’m assuming — mounting on your wall somewhere?  You can preorder it for $500 right now.  LINK.

-  Then we got some what looks to be hockey jersey’s that are really fucking nerdy and awesome at GeekJerseys.com.  This Link jersey is really, really fucking awesome:

Thanks Topless Robot for the tips!

-  The Biggest Expansion of Man In PreHistory?

DNA sequencing of 36 complete Y chromosomes has uncovered a previously unknown period when the human population expanded rapidly. This population explosion occurred 40 to 50 thousand years ago, between the first expansion of modern humans out of Africa 60 to 70 thousand years ago and the Neolithic expansions of people in several parts of the world starting 10 thousand years ago.

-  Warren Ellis FAQ featuring some interesting writing questions.  Such as:

I was wondering if you had any advice regarding making ideas more important. I have pages of different events + characters that I can only develop so far because, after a time, all I can add to them are “WHO CARES?” and “WHY DOES THIS MATTER?” (I’m talking about events characters will go through. “Statues come to life all around Greece” is immediately followed by “WHO GIVES A FUCK?”) Does this ever happen to you? Thank you very much for your time, and sorry if you’ve answered a similar question!Ungh.  This is a really tough one.  There are two ways, maybe, to attack this.

1) One way of doing it, and this works okay for standard dramatic storytelling, is this: what do your characters WANT?  The secondary questions are, what stops them from getting what they want, and how far are they prepared to go to get what they want?  But start with the simple first question.  What your character wants defines how we perceive and feel about them in the story.  Find one thing they want, and see how that feels to you.

2) From a certain view, stories are two things.  There’s what the story’s about, and what the story’s REALLY about.  Wells’ WAR OF THE WORLDS is about a Martian invasion of Earth.  But it’s REALLY about something else entirely.  There’s a subtext: there’s the thing Wells wrote the story toactually talk about.  What you may be encountering is having a story that’s all surface, or a story with a subtext that isn’t working out for you.  Find out what you really want to say with your fiction.  If it matters to YOU, it’ll matter to other people.

-  PoliFact has a list of “Scariest Lines from the 2012 Campaign” up for Halloween.

-Sonny

Time-Lapse Portrait.

-  Frans Hofmeester did an unreal time-lapse portrait of his daughter growing to the age of 12 and threw it on Vimeo.  Really stunning use of technology here.  Beautiful.

(WordPress for the longest time did not support direct embedding of Vimeo videos.  They’re smart for changing that: seems to me Vimeo is the preferred upload source for any serious videographers or film buffs.)

-  ARTIST OF THE DAY is without a doubt Julian Callos.  Surreal but not overtly complex.  Very subtle and efficient use of color.  Ethereal, philosophical, a real auteur.  And you know what?  I’ve posted his art before.  But I’m going to again.  And in six months I probably will again.  Lookie:

-  Biotechnology And Its Human Tragedies In India.

“The documentary opens with a seed seller arriving in Manjusha’s village. The genetically engineered BT seeds, a product of the American company Monsanto, are being advertised, by itinerant sellers and on television, as yielding more crops and increasing profits. The farmers are skeptical but have no choice: No conventional seeds are sold in the village. Monsanto’s Indian representatives are not forthcoming about the exact differences between their genetically engineered seed and a conventional seed. They deny, for example, that the seed requires more fertilizer. Independent studies have also been restricted, but back in the villages, Manjusha’s and her neighbors’ plight illustrates the havoc that the introduction of the BT seed has wreaked on farming populations. The seed is non-renewable; it does not re-grow and must be purchased each year. It requires just the right amount of water, with entire crops wasted if rain is meager, or abundant. “

-  I think I have enough coffee in me to go record some guitar now.

-Sonny

 

Either/Or = One Big Lie.

I don’t think I believe in absolutes anymore.  Perhaps I never did.  You know: this way or that way, “with us or against us”, black and white.  I just don’t think the world works that way (oh my, I’m also realizing for the first time that I’m possibly an anti-Taoist).  I don’t believe in the “duality” of myself, or man for that matter, because I believe the sides aren’t two fold, they’re a trillion — or infinite — fold.  Nothing and no one is that simple.  The “illustrious” ying/yang Wiki-page points to a few examples of Earthly Y/y proof, like male and female (“interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn“).  Well, one little concept which is found in everything from sharks to aphids to single-celled organisms rebuts: asexual reproduction.  Also, I find quite often that those who believe fervently in right or wrong, good or evil (note: not connected to yin/yang) are often doing so to justify their own actions; actions that, ironically, are neither good nor evil and hover where 90% of human action stagnates: the gray area.

In 1965 Burroughs told a rare interviewer that the whole either/or proposition is “one of the great errors of Western thought”:

“Yes, it is unfortunately one of the great errors of Western thought, the whole either/or proposition. You remember Korzybski and his idea of non-Aristotelian logic. Either/or thinking just is not accurate thinking. That’s not the way things occur, and I feel the Aristotelian construct is one of the great shackles of Western civilization. Cut-ups are a movement toward breaking this down.“

Thank you, mister B.  You live in the gray.  We all live in the gray.

And here’s a wonderful Alfred Korzybski quote, since the above quote mentioned him:

“There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.“

Here’s a link to that entire 1965 interview with William S. Burroughs.

-Sonny

Watson: Friend, Peer, Robot.

I was watching television the other day — at work — and realized the future is nigh.  Or at least around the corner.  Some media outlets have mentioned it (from The Colbert Report to Wired): the all-too human-esque computer/robot plowing through the competition on Jeopardy.  It was a sad sight, really, glancing up to see the wide-shot of contestant’s row (is that a game show-wide term, or only The Price Is Right?)… the embattled, mere human opponents hovering around 3 or 4 grand while the Machine surpasses 35.

“Watson”, they call it.  Artificial Intelligence of the most superior kind we’ve seen developed, and still being perfected, by IBM.  It was designed to “answer questions [from simple to complex] posed in natural language”.  ”Natural Language” meaning: off-the-cuff, regular way of speech — in whatever language — of human beings, not some stiff phrases preconceived to suit the Machine’s robotic A.I.  Like all other previous forms of A.I., Watson’s “brain” (what a scary term that is in this context) is well rounded, cunning, and efficient; unlike its forefathers before it, however, Watson possesses something of a personality (albeit a robotic one).  It’s voice isn’t the dial-up voice we heard in Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier”, it’s smooth and natural.  It has it’s own way of putting words together, unlike the now ancient “Deep Blue”.  It weighs options carefully, sometimes choosing to not answer at all if it’s so unsure of itself.  Scary, scary stuff.

I’m not talking some Terminator scenario, where IBM is commissioned by the U.S. government to make a militaristic version of Watson, who then uses free thought to rebel, creating SkyNet and drops The Bomb on L.A.  No, this is a more subtle version of scary.  How long until Watson, or others like it, is developed and manufactured so efficiently that it’s (I’m using every fiber to not write “he’s”) affordable in every middle-income home across the country?  The world?  Could the notion be that far off?  10, 20 years?  Then what?  You’re drinking beers with your buddies and to solve those pesky pop culture arguments, only to ask the resident everything expert; he… sorry, IT answers and soon everyone’s giving him pounds and becoming better friends with it than anyone else.  Or you’re at home while your husband/wife is at work.  You’re jobless and the kids are in school/daycare.  No one listens to you except your Watson… who not only listens, but answers honestly and truthfully anything you ask, and carries on with you the most interesting conversations you’ve had since graduate school.  So you become attached a little; not anything crazy, just a small amount of attachment.

Artificial Intelligence with budding personality and a limitless wealth of knowledge?  Sounds scary to me.

[Relatedly: "What Watson Can Learn From the Human Brain"]

-Sonny

TrendEnding 11/18.

Trend Ending 2011:

- The video game channel’s “Attack of the Show” (nothing against the hosts, who do a decent job of being funny, but that program is one of the most formulaic of our times; no, I ain’t exaggerating) deserves some level of blame for combining the terms “epic” and “fail“.  But a pop cultural analysis of the last five years would reveal that they’re not solely to blame.  A quick Google search of the term will show just how dangerously overused the term has become.  There’s something called the FailBlog, which surely receives WAY more traffic than it should.  There’s the infamous “Epic Fail” mockuvational posters which have been overdone to no end.  There’s even an episode of TV’s House titled “Epic Fail”.  YOU GO AWAY NOW.

- I never even knew what a “lolcat” was until I Googled the previous phrase.  I’m glad I didn’t.  What’s really disturbing with this culturally is the total lack of originality with these pictures, right down to the fucking format.  Copy and paste, read and reproduce, fall in line, be clever and funny.  No one’s getting it right either: most of these feature an overuse of Z’s in the wordage.  I don’t know what the hell that’s all about, are all “lolcats” Germans trying to speak English?  Regardless, this needs to end.  It isn’t funny.  Plus, cats are cool enough on their own.  Just… just get off it.  Please.

- I’m not sure if it was before or after The Simpsons ruined The Simpsons that pop culture ruined The Simpsons’ famous “comic book guy“.  Probably after considering the former happened circa early-2000′s.  I miss the 90′s iteration.  Anyhoo, CBG was this massive douche who wasn’t even close to ever seeing the light of “cool”.  He was this sloppy, pathetic mass of a character who was never glorified in any way and the audience never came close to feeling anything for him but utter contempt.  So, I ask, why then did it suddenly become cool to utter his phrase “Worst. [Blank]. Ever”?  (Substituting “worst” with “best” is apparently acceptable; and any single lame thing one can imagine can be sandwiched in the middle)  The translation of this phrase to textual form really chaps my ass… as everyone who writes it, with the period after each word, thinks they’re clever.  I’ve got a new one… Fuck. That. Shit.

-Sonny