Obama’s early pieces primarily played with structure: Our Long-Term Strategy In Afghanistan employs Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique to reorder the words in a major speech on foreign policy, eventually creating a shocking sound collage that, according to the White House, reveals “a truth previously buried beneath layers of intent.” [...]

Nonetheless, a number of critics have embraced Obama’s edgier productions. Artforum magazine referred to Obama’s oeuvre as “a winking indictment of the institution of the presidency from none other than the president himself,” and cited in particular his wildlife conservation video Meat Play as “the direction the office needs to go in if the executive branch is to remain relevant.”

The Onion: Obama’s Weekly Video Addresses Becoming Increasingly Avant-Garde

(Thanks Jillian!)

I haven’t read any of these yet, but some of them sound intriguing:

1. Sophisticated Buildings Will Be Made Of Mud
2. Coral Reefs Will Be Devastated
3. The Catch of the Day? Jellyfish
4. New Cars Will Be Given Away, Free
5. Industry Will Generate Energy In Space
6. Oysters Will Save Wolves From Climate Change
7. 2,000 New Mammal Species Will Be Discovered
8. It’s Curtains For The World’s Rarest Dolphin
9. Farmers Will Plant Spinach In Tall Buildings
10. The Nation Will Meet The Tests Of The Century Ahead
11. The Heartland Will Rise Again
12. The Top U.S. Social Problem? Upward Mobility
13. By 2050, One Out Of Three U.S. Kids Will Be Latino
14. World War III Will Begin. In Space
15. Most Americans Fear For The Planet’s Health
16. Unless We Conserve, More People Will Go Hungry
17. An Ancient Grain, Fonio, Will Fight Starvation
18. Afghanistan Risks Turmoil For 40 Years
19. Glowing Squid Will Lead To New Antibiotics
20. Health Workers Will Eradicate Malaria
21. Science Could Enable A Person To Regrow A Limb
22. Astronomers Will Discover Life Beyond Earth
23. How Will We Avert The Dinosaurs’ Fate? Telescopes
24. Brain Scans Will Illuminate The Infant Mind
25. Artists Will Run The World
26. Novelists Will Need A New Plot Device
27. Everyone Will Make His Own Music
28. Secrets Will Reveal If Young JFK Was “Vacuous”
29. James Cameron Will Still Be Making Movies At 96
30. Stand-up Comedy Will No Longer Kill
31. Native American Youths Will Revive Their Culture
32. U.S.-Muslim Relations Will Improve
33. Evolution Will Continue In Reverse, Humorist Says
34. A Medical Lab Will Fit On A Postage Stamp
35. Viruses Will Help Build Machines
36. Goodbye, Stereo; Hello, Hyper-Real Acoustics
37. Electricity Will Be Harvested From Your Skin
38. Crucial Energy Will Be Generated With Mirrors
39. Your Refrigerator Will Talk To You
40. Reading Will Become An Athletic Activity

Smithsonian: 40 Things You Need to Know About the Next 40 Years

(via Theoretick)

Above: actual promotional image for iDoser’s affiliate program. What a bunch of scrumbags!

We’ve covered I-Doser before, but the ridiculous fears about it are back:

Kids around the country are getting high on the internet, thanks to MP3s that induce a state of ecstasy. And it could be a gateway drug leading teens to real-world narcotics.

At least, that’s what Oklahoma News 9 is reporting about a phenomenon called “i-dosing,” which involves finding an online dealer who can hook you up with “digital drugs” that get you high through your headphones.

And officials are taking it seriously.

“Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places,” Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs spokesman Mark Woodward told News 9.

Threat Level: Report: Teens Using Digital Drugs to Get High

I-Doser could be the worst drug since Jenkem. Be afraid. Very afraid.

Silliness aside, I-Doser does seem to be a pretty scummy company. I-Doser is actually based on the open-source application SbaGen, and it used SbaGen’s code without permission. That’s on top of its shady “per dose” pricing for its bunk “product,” which makes mp3 DRM seem reasonable. There’s a torrent available of I-Doser files ported to SbaGen, so please: don’t let your friends use iDoser.

More:

Wikipedia: Binaural Beats

Gnaural – another open-source binaural-beat generator

Regular readers of this site may have noticed a large number of posts on this site credited to “Social Physicist” – the Twitter handle of Kyle Findlay (and yes, you could be forgiven for confusing our names). Kyle works for a group within one of the world’s largest market research companies, which he describes as a “mini-think tank” with the purpose of exposing people to new ways of thinking and doing things. Having enjoyed his Twitter stream for the past year or so, I got in touch with Kyle Findlay to ask him about the practice of “social physics.” He talked to me by instant message from from his home in Cape Town, South Africa.

Klint Finley: What, as a “social physicist,” do you actually do?

Kyle Findlay: Well, at the moment I’m on my own in this “field,” if you can call it that. It just seems like the best description of what I do and what interests me so hopefully it sticks.

Basically, my interest is in understanding how people act as groups. As emergent entities that have their own (hopefully) predictable and describable topological forms. That’s the lofty idea anyway. And the tools of chaos theory, systems theory, network theory, physics, mathematics, etc. help describe this.

Do you have a background in physical sciences?

None at all. I studied “business science” at the University of Cape Town. My first job was for a company with a strong academic background, started by a professor of religion and a statistician. They used a 5-dimensional catastrophe cusp model to describe people’s relationships with ideas.

The moment I was exposed to this thinking, something clicked. A lot of contradictions that I saw in the world around me were resolved. Ever since I have had an insatiable desire to understand these areas. Which led me to interact with experts in many disciplines from neuroscience to economics, math, physics, AI, ecology, biology, etc. Every field has a piece of the puzzle. I am lucky to work in an environment that gives me free rein to indulge my passion.

Sketch: Fractal Zoom by Kyle Findlay

Do you think what you do is different from systems thinking or social cybernetics?

They are definitely components. Systems thinking is a broad umbrella term. Cybernetics definitely helps us to understand and describe the patterns and multi-dimensional shapes that society creates. But I think that you need the hard sciences like math and physics to really get at the heart of it. Which is why I am feverishly trying to catch up on many years of missing education.

Do you think there are any dangers in applying models designed for physical systems to human behavior?

Yes there are – you will always be at least slightly wrong. There are a lot of parallels between the way people act in groups and other types of particles. But you also have the same problems of predictability in complex systems: sensitivity to initial conditions, 3-body problem, etc. It’s kind of the paradox of it all, something I am still trying to come to grips with.

What’s the most surprising insight you’ve discovered since you started studying this?

Everything is the same and everything is just information. The universal nature of nature is astounding. You see the familiar signs everywhere: from the atomic through to the cosmic level. It makes me think that there really is only one true science or line of inquiry and that most specialised fields are just facets of this. The more fields I delve into, the more commonalities I discover. It’s become par for the course for me now I think. But in the beginning, it really blew my mind.

Sketch: Man’s Part in the System by Kyle Findlay

Have you been able to apply this stuff in any interesting ways? For example, I know you’ve prepared presentations on network theory and power laws for work.

Those have gone down really well within the silos I work in. People have really been amazed when I’ve shown them these kinds of things. It gets their minds racing.

I’m also doing some work applying systems theory to sports science, which can really benefit from changing the way they view the human body. Music is another area that makes a lot more sense from this point of view.

One of my favourites is understanding how human attention works and how to synchronise communication so that it becomes internalized, but that is very theoretical and could be seen as slightly Machiavellian so I won’t go there.

Also, I’ve been having some interesting chats with a neuroscientist around decision-making, attention, etc. The applications are really endless, it’s just where you choose to focus you own attention.

An Introduction to Network Theory View more presentations from Social Physicist.

How would you suggest someone interested get started studying social physics?

Well, considering I’m not 100% sure what falls into the bounds of the field myself, it’s difficult to say. There’s no university course for it as far as I know. I would say that you need to have an intense desire to understand why people do what they do. And a slightly perverse fascination with the human condition. Looking at life from a systems perspective is a good start. Understand that patterns are formed internally, that change is the only constant. You can then use tools like network theory, noise analysis, entropy, etc. to understand these ebbs and flows.

Are you familiar with Stephen Wolfram? He wrote a book called a New Kind of Science.

Yes, I know of Stephen Wolfram from his software and Wolfram Alpha. I’ve been intimidated by the size of his book, though. I struggle justifying devoting so much time to one book, which probably says more about me…

Yeah, I haven’t picked it up yet either.

He sounds like a really bright guy. I think I watched a talk of his at the Singularity Summit or somewhere similar, but to be honest, can’t remember much of it.

Most of my reading is in the scientific literature, interspersed with a good book or graphic novel.

Speaking of which, do you know of any works of fiction that demonstrate the principles you’re interested in?

Good question. Not too many spring to mind. A classic is Flatland by Edwin Abbot – the quintessential metaphor for perceiving multiple dimensions. The guy wrote a book about perceiving multiple dimensions in the 1800s! Impressive.

A recent book that blew my mind was Accelerando by Charles Stross. He has a great worldview but his insights were more in terms of extrapolating the directions technology is going in.

Yourself? Any suggestions?

Snow Crash seems like it might be relevant. Or the film Run Lola Run.

I am ashamed to admit that I haven’t read Snow Crash. Why do you say Run Lola Run? Time? Sensitivity to initial conditions?

Yep. It shows how tiny changes in a system can have far-ranging results. A starting delay of only a couple of seconds radically changes things for several characters in the different timelines.

True. I’m not going to mention Back to the Future 2 or The Butterfly Effect (although I just did).

Have you heard of the 1990 film, Mindwalk?

No.

It was co-written by Fritjof Capra and consists of several characters discussing the nature of the world from a systems perspective. I have to admit that i fell asleep during it… but I was very tired.

That sounds pretty amazing though.

Yeah – good credentials right there.

My personal favourites are any films or books that push society’s limits. Subversive materials rule in my book (no pun intended). Anything that helps me push back my pre-conceptions and shatter my expectations. They were great at that in the 70s, in music, film and literature. Probably a side-effect of the 60s experimentations. I’m a big fan of exploitation flicks.

Let’s see, what else… I haven’t read Alan Moore’s Big Numbers. But Moore seems to have a pretty good grasp on complexity, judging by Watchmen and From Hell.

I haven’t read Big Numbers either. What elements do you think he draws on in those books?

Watchmen itself seems to be very mathematical – the use of symmetry and so on. In terms of themes, maybe it doesn’t touch on this stuff much, apart from some of Dr. Manhattan’s comments.

Yeah, he definitely weaves a non-linear richness into his tales that is admirable. The way he weaves the various threads of a story together.

I forget why I thought From Hell was relevant. Maybe it’s not.

Also, he calls himself a chaos magician. Watching an interview with him a while back, I could actually identify with a lot of what he was saying.

I wasn’t going to go there, but… have you studying chaos magic or the occult at all?

No I haven’t. That Moore interview is probably as far as I have gone. It’s just not a direction I feel I can go in and remain “grounded” if I want other researchers to take me seriously. But I can definitely see how he got there.

Well, I have and I think you’re better off studying natural sciences, systems, and complexity IMHO.

[Laughs] Cool, thanks for the advice.

But the book Techgnosis by Erik Davis examines a lot of parallels between information theory and cybernetics and mysticism and the occult. I think it stands up pretty well, even if you’re not interested in magic.

I think you have to have a certain detachment to take a step back and observe the world. And when you start seeing everything as inter-related and part of the same thread it becomes easier to start imagining that you can define the tapestry with your perceptions. I guess I don’t want to open that Pandora’s Box. In my view it untethers you. Again, talking from an inexperienced point of view in this area.

Davis’ book sounds interesting though.

From an interview with Manuel DeLanda (who you might be interested in) -conducted by Davis, incidentally:

As Deleuze says, “Always keep a piece of fresh land with you at all times.” Always keep a little spot where you can go back to sleep after a day of destratification. Always keep a small piece of territory, otherwise you’ll go nuts.

Yeah exactly. I find that the concepts I deal with in my day job challenge me enough, and that’s all based on empirically grounded ‘fact’ in the scientific literature.

Most people work very hard to maintain their reality, but I do think that you have to have an affinity towards detachment. A certain world view that is open to having your illusions shattered and actually enjoying that experience. And the cutting edge of science delivers those experiences in spades.

More Info

Kyle on Twitter

Kyle’s Slideshares

Kyle’s Flickr

MTV: Where do things stand with “The Pekar Project” now? How far ahead did Harvey work on the scripts?

NEWELT: There are still a bunch of comics yet to come out on “The Pekar Project” that we have in the can and done. [...]

MTV: I know Harvey had been working on a few other books, too. Were you involved with any of those? Do you know what their status is?

NEWELT: The first branch-off of “The Pekar Project” is coming out this year. He was working on a graphic novel called “Cleveland,” which comes out during the summer of 2011 from this company called Zip Comics. The script was ready for that. It’s one-third history of Cleveland, one-third Harvey’s experiences there, and one-third biographical sketches of Cleveland characters. It’s drawn by Joseph Remnant, one of the definitive Pekar artists.

MTV: ‘The Pekar Project’ Editor Explains What’s Next For Harvey Pekar’s Unpublished Work

(via The Breaking Time)

The first of a series of articles on futurism for GOOD Magazine:

When we transform our notion of “the future” into visions of alternative futures, we transform our relationship to the very idea of change. We move from thinking we are heading toward an inevitable destination to seeing the world as a dependent, contingent, and therefore actionable, possibility space for us to design. Pluralizing “the future” makes us both more empowered and more responsible for our ultimate outcomes. It may seem like a semantic triviality, but it represents an important shift in thinking.

Even though we can’t predict exactly what will happen, we can make reasonable assumptions about what potential futures might look like, and in doing so we can begin to make choices today that can help us bring about the changes we hope to realize in the world.

GOOD: What Futurists Actually Do

(via Chris)

See also:

Interview with Chris Arkenberg interview of IFTF

Interview with David “Pesco” Pescovitz of Boing Boing and IFTF

Wired Guide to Personal Scenario Planning

Times article on IFTF

I’ve covered this problem before, but it’s good to see it getting more traction – whether it will do any good remains to be seen.

We often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.

Jay Rosen draws attention to the slight difference in behavior between self-identified liberal and conservatives:

The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

I also thought this was particularly interesting:

A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.

Boston Globe: How facts backfire

(via Jay Rosen)

It’s not all doom and gloom, but I’ll let you read the article for the few rays of optimism. One thing not mentioned in the article: fact checking articles are becoming more popular (but I suppose they might not actually change people’s minds).

NPR covered this today as well, but I was disappointed in the portion of it I heard.

See also: Birthers and the Democratization of Media.

Further problem: getting people to act on information once they have it and accept it.

Photo: James Jordan / CC

A researcher at the University of Amsterdam has concluded that synaesthesia might not be merely genetic:

To test the idea, they gave seven volunteers a novel to read in which certain letters were always written in red, green, blue or orange (see picture). Before and after reading the book, the volunteers took a “synaesthetic crowding” test, in which they identified the middle letter of a grid of black letters which were quickly flashed onto a screen. Synaesthetes perform better on the test when a letter they experience in colour is the target letter.

The volunteers performed significantly better on this test after training compared with people who read the novel in black and white.

Seven is a really small sample size. This needs to be reproduced with larger samples to be accepted.

New Scientist: Can you teach yourself synaesthesia?

(Thanks Nova!)

Here’s a Game of Life app made in HTML5.

(via Kottke)

Related posts:

1. First Replicating “Creature” Created in Game of Life
2. Conway’s Game of Life generates a city
3. Searching for the best initial configurations in Conway’s Game of Life

Metaverse One (creator of that awesome AR anatomy education app) gives us a preview of an upcoming issue of Retinex by 3Satva featuring an augmented reality reality app created by SpiralConcepts. Metaverse notes that there have been comic that have used AR before, this is the first use he’s seen that actually integrates AR into the story.

Metaverse One: RETINEX – an Augmented Reality Comic Book

You can view some preview pages of the comic here here and buy 3Satva’s previous comic Triad Sphere (no AR) here.

Related posts:

1. Augmented reality tattoos
2. Augmented reality for the blind
3. Augmented Reality diving application

I’ve been aware that Moore doesn’t use the Internet for several years now (though he recently admitted in the page of Dodgem Logic that he’s now seen the Dodgem Logic web site but it’s the first and only site he’s ever seen), and I’ve always been curious as to why not. He explains:

I’m practically Amish when it comes down to it. I practically mistrust any technology that came after the buggy. What I tend to think is that the internet is fine for everyone else in the world. I can see that it may have some disadvantages. In fact, I can see a few problems arising from it, but, by and large… everybody in the entire world apart from me uses the internet and seems to get on quite well with it. For my part, I don’t want to be connected to that all-pervasive kind of cyber culture any more than I want to be connected to the physical world that is around me, more than I can help it [laughs]. I’m largely a solitary creature, just by nature and by my work. That said, I venture out into town, but I very seldom leave Northampton.

He also talks a little bit about hypersigils (but of course doesn’t use the term):

We look into the place, but it’s more an excavation of Steve’s peculiar life which crosses into all sorts of different areas and crosses over with my life to a certain degree. It was certainly an odd little story that was self-referential. I’ve often found that if you write self-referential stories that feedback into your actual life then all sorts of weird things start to happen, or at least appear to start happening.

And:

Working as a writer, one of the reasons I got into magic was because you start to notice this feedback between the writing and real life. It might be entirely in my head, but it seems significant. I mean, there was a conference last weekend in Northampton called Magus. It was academics coming from all over the world to talk about me and my work. So I went down with Melinda. They were nice people. One of the academics at this conference was saying that he was working on a book which was about Watchmen as a post-9/11 text. I can see what he means to a degree. One of my friends over there, Bob Morales, said he’d been talking to some people on Ground Zero on September 12, 2001 and he was asking them if they were alright and what it had been like. Two of them, independently of each other, said that they were just waiting for the authorities to find a giant alien sticking half way out of a wall.

The Quietus: Hipster Priest: A Quietus Interview With Alan Moore

(Thanks Josh)

Related posts:

1. Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie Interview at Academic Alan Moore Conference, John Dee Opera Canceled
2. Alan Moore interview from Vice
3. Alan Moore collaborating with the Gorillaz, and more

A new collection Brion Gysin’s work is appearing in the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City.

But Laura Hoptman, the museum’s senior curator and the organizer of the show, said the departure in Gysin’s case made perfect sense because his work remains largely unknown to the American public and his influence — the kind that eluded him during his lifetime — now seems to be everywhere in the contemporary art world.

“I knew about him, and then six or seven years ago it felt like I started hearing his name from everyone,” Ms. Hoptman said. “I kept trying to figure out all the ways they had arrived at Gysin.”

New York Times: The Unknown Loved by the Knowns

(via Re/Search)

Related posts:

1. Guardian Launches Search Engine for Government Data from Around the World
2. Russians: the world’s hardest writers
3. Third World solutions to First World problems

Harvey Pekar, writer of the autobiographical comic series American Splendor, is dead.

Pekar, 70, was found dead shortly before 1 a.m. today by his wife, Joyce Brabner, in their Cleveland Heights home, said Powell Caesar, spokesman for Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller. An autopsy will be conducted to determine the cause of death. Pekar and his wife, Joyce Brabner, wrote “Our Cancer Year,” a book-length comic, after Pekar was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1990 and underwent a grueling treatment.

Cleveland Plain Dealer: Cleveland comic-book legend Harvey Pekar dead at age 70

(Thanks Audrey)

Here’s Pekar’s famous appearance on Letterman:

Here’s an excellent piece Pekar wrote about the experience under a pseudonym.

Pekar’s most recent and perhaps last work was his online series The Pekar Project.

Related posts:

1. Douglas Rushkoff Interviews Harvey Pekar – in Comic Form
2. New online comic by Harvey Pekar
3. The Strange Case of Lee Harvey Oswald

Unlike the tiny, mouse-sized leather jacket vat grown from mouse and human cells I posted about a few years ago, this jacket is grown from bacteria and green tea and can apparently fit a human.

Ecouterre: U.K. Designer “Grows” an Entire Wardrobe From Bacteria

Biocouture

(via Boing Boing)

Related posts:

1. Human Bones Successfully Grown In The Lab
2. Computer-Controlled Swarm of Bacteria Builds Tiny Pyramid
3. Mice Make Music, Crickets Act, Ghost Microscopes, Slime Mould Paintings – The Art Of Gail Wight

Great stuff on value of creativity, its neuroscience, and how it can be taught:

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.” [...]

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Newsweek: The Creativity Crisis

See also:

The 6 Myths Of Creativity

Teachers hate creativity?

The Neuroscience of Jazz Improvisation

Related posts:

1. Teachers hate creativity?
2. Research Shows the Importance of Imagination in Children’s Cognitive Development
3. Darkness Increases Dishonest Behavior, Study Shows

According to the AP, Colton Harris-Moore has been arrested in the Bahamas, where he continued his crime spree after crashing a stolen plane near Great Abaco Island.

Colton’s mother retained the high profile lawyer John Henry Browne this morning. Browne says Colton faces 7-15 years in prison if he’s convicted on a package-deal for his various crimes. (Assuming they can hold on to the slippery kid!)

Browne said various members of the Harris-Moore family have contributed to Colton’s defense fund, but the attorny – perhaps best known for defending Ted Bundy – said he’s not too concerned about money.

(Thanks for the heads up Bill!)

Related posts:

1. Colton Harris-Moore Manhunt Goes International
2. Is ‘Barefoot Bandit’ Colton Harris-Moore in South Dakota?
3. Vice on Colton Harris-Moore

Fascinating article on the history of AA and some research on why, even though it doesn’t usually work, it does occasionally work.

Here’s an interesting social-cybernetic insight:

To begin with, there is evidence that a big part of AA’s effectiveness may have nothing to do with the actual steps. It may derive from something more fundamental: the power of the group. Psychologists have long known that one of the best ways to change human behavior is to gather people with similar problems into groups, rather than treat them individually. The first to note this phenomenon was Joseph Pratt, a Boston physician who started organizing weekly meetings of tubercular patients in 1905. These groups were intended to teach members better health habits, but Pratt quickly realized they were also effective at lifting emotional spirits, by giving patients the chance to share their tales of hardship. (“In a common disease, they have a bond,” he would later observe.) More than 70 years later, after a review of nearly 200 articles on group therapy, a pair of Stanford University researchers pinpointed why the approach works so well: “Members find the group to be a compelling emotional experience; they develop close bonds with the other members and are deeply influenced by their acceptance and feedback.”

Wired: Secret Of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works

The article covers AA’s effectiveness briefly, and finds that studies of its effectiveness are inconclusive. I’ve posted before about one study that found 12-step programs no more or less effective than other treatment programs.

I have absolutely zero problem with people using religion or whatever else works to improve their lives and get over the devastating effects of addiction, court mandated 12 step programs are clearly a breach of the seperation of church and state. (And There’s evidence to suggest that mandating treatment doesn’t work anyway.)

See also John Shirley’s “The Forgotten Solution.”

Another thought: The EsoZone Protocol is similar to the structure of AA.

Related posts:

1. Twitter works on technology to evade censors in China and Iran
2. Celebrating 30 years of Laibach
3. Study: Brain Exercises Don’t Improve Cognition

Update: Another reason that it’s so incredibly horrible: The vast majority of the Exxon Valdez cleaners are now dead, with an average life expectancy of 51 years. (Thanks to Wade for the reminder)

My wife Jililan explains why the BP oil spill is worse than we think:

1. THEY KNEW IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.
2. THEY ARE NOT “ONE BAD APPLE”
3. WE WILL CONTINUE TO HEAR EMPTY PROMISES OF GREENING UP OUR ENERGY PROBLEMS, AND YET WASHINGTON WILL CONTINUE TO DO NOTHING.
4. BOYCOTTING ONE GAS COMPANY DOESN’T DO A THING.
5. EVEN IF WE DRIVE LESS, OUR LIVES ARE INEXTRICABLY LINKED TO PETROLEUM.
6. BP IS DUMPING MORE TOXIC WASTE INTO THE GULF AS PART OF THEIR “CLEANUP”
7. THE GOVERNMENT HAS DONE EVERYTHING IT CAN TO MAKE SURE BP COMES OUT ON TOP OF ALL OF THIS.
8. SO… HOW MUCH OIL IS REALLY GUSHING INTO THE GULF OF MEXICO?

Each point is expanded upon, with references.

Prime Surrealestate: The BP Spill and Why It’s Worse Than We All Think

See also: Some Oil Spill Related Articles Worth Your Attention

Related posts:

1. Some Oil Spill Related Articles Worth Your Attention
2. The new right-wing media mogul in town
3. Alvin Toffler, Jamais Cascio, and more weigh in on the “Next Big Thing”

After I posted that article about technical analysis a couple people commented that it reminded them of the film Pi, about a renegade mathematician somehow using Pi to search for patters in the stock market with a homemade supercomputer in his crummy Manhatten apartment.

Technical analysis was probably the inspiration for the stock market portion of the film, but did you know that the part about renegade mathematicians building supercomputers in their living rooms to calculate Pi is actually based on a true story? Aronofsky almost certainly took the inspiration from this 1992 New Yorker story:

Gregory Volfovich Chudnovsky recently built a supercomputer in his apartment from mail-order parts. Gregory Chudnovsky is a number theorist. His apartment is situated near the top floor of a run-down building on the West Side of Manhattan, in a neighborhood near Columbia University. Not long ago, a human corpse was found dumped at the end of the block. The world’s most powerful supercomputers include the Cray Y-MP C90, the Thinking Machines CM-5, the Hitachi S-820/80, the nCube, the Fujitsu parallel machine, the Kendall Square Research parallel machine, the NEC SX-3, the Touchstone Delta, and Gregory Chudnovsky’s apartment. The apartment seems to be a kind of container for the supercomputer at least as much as it is a container for people.

Gregory Chudnovsky’s partner in the design and construction of the supercomputer was his older brother, David Volfovich Chudnovsky, who is also a mathematician, and who lives five blocks away from Gregory. The Chudnovsky brothers call their machine m zero. It occupies the former living room of Gregory’s apartment, and its tentacles reach into other rooms. The brothers claim that m zero is a “true, general-purpose supercomputer,” and that it is as fast and powerful as a somewhat older Cray Y-MP, but it is not as fast as the latest of the Y-MP machines, the C90, an advanced supercomputer made by Cray Research. A Cray Y-MP C90 costs more than thirty million dollars. It is a black monolith, seven feet tall and eight feet across, in the shape of a squat cylinder, and is cooled by liquid freon. So far, the brothers have spent around seventy thousand dollars on parts for their supercomputer, and much of the money has come out of their wives’ pockets. [...]

Pi is by no means the only unexplored number in the Chudnovskys’ inventory, but it is one that interests them very much. They wonder whether the digits contain a hidden rule, an as yet unseen architecture, close to the mind of God. A subtle and fantastic order may appear in the digits of pi way out there somewhere; no one knows. No one has ever proved, for example, that pi does not turn into nothing but nines and zeros, spattered to infinity in some peculiar arrangement. If we were to explore the digits of pi far enough, they might resolve into a breathtaking numerical pattern, as knotty as “The Book of Kells,” and it might mean something. It might be a small but interesting message from God, hidden in the crypt of the circle, awaiting notice by a mathematician. On the other hand, the digits of pi may ramble forever in a hideous cacophony, which is a kind of absolute perfection to a mathematician like Gregory Chudnovsky. Pi looks “monstrous” to him. “We know absolutely nothing about pi,” he declared from his bed. “What the hell does it mean? The definition of pi is really very simple—it’s just the ratio of the circumference to the diameter—but the complexity of the sequence it spits out in digits is really unbelievable. We have a sequence of digits that looks like gibberish.”

New Yorker: Mountains of Pi

Since the publication of that story, the Brothers Chudnovsky have apparently turned their attentions to applying their expertise in supercomputing to other domains. Richard Preston, author of the original piece, wrote a follow-up for the New Yorker in 2005.

You can learn more about them on this NOVA page.

Reading all of this reminded me of a story I read earlier in the week about someone who claims to have “cracked the code” in Plato’s writings:

The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea – the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. [...]

However Plato did not design his secret patterns purely for pleasure – it was for his own safety. Plato’s ideas were a dangerous threat to Greek religion. He said that mathematical laws and not the gods controlled the universe. Plato’s own teacher had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death. Encoding his ideas in secret patterns was the only way to be safe.

Manchester University: Science historian cracks “the Plato code”

(via Social Physicist)

Related posts:

1. Google’s new data center uses nature instead of AC
2. Photographs of William S. Burroughs’s stuff
3. First Replicating “Creature” Created in Game of Life