Beautiful: Hebes Chasma on Mars

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/marsexpress/377-260208-2149-6-co-01-HebesChasma_H1.jpg

Go With Your Gut

I've spent the last dozen years of my life learning to trust my gut. It never lies, even when your eyes and mind don't want to see the truth. I don't regret a single thing that's happened in my life, but I would have avoided a bad marriage, a bad job, and some bad friends.

“People usually experience true intuition when they are under severe time pressure or in a situation of information overload or acute danger, where conscious analysis of the situation may be difficult or impossible,” says Prof Hodgkinson.

He cites the recorded case of a Formula One driver who braked sharply when nearing a hairpin bend without knowing why – and as a result avoided hitting a pile-up of cars on the track ahead, undoubtedly saving his life.

“The driver couldn’t explain why he felt he should stop, but the urge was much stronger than his desire to win the race,” explains Professor Hodgkinson. “The driver underwent forensic analysis by psychologists afterwards, where he was shown a video to mentally relive the event. In hindsight he realised that the crowd, which would have normally been cheering him on, wasn’t looking at him coming up to the bend but was looking the other way in a static, frozen way. That was the cue. He didn’t consciously process this, but he knew something was wrong and stopped in time.”

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/go-your-gut-intuition-more-just-hunch-says-research-15620.html

I Am Legend

Decent enough rendition of of the 1954 novel with the same name. A little special effects heavy, but very well done. Worth a watch, even though the ending is a little too religious for me.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/

Entangled Minds

This is a very interesting read.

I wouldn't call myself a scientist by any means, however I do think that this book collates and describes that a statistically significant, yet very small, psychic effect has been repeatedly measured and verified.

By significant, how about odds in the neighborhood of 10^34:1 that it's real. But small, almost insubstantial. Like increasing your odds at guessing coin flips by .1%.

Dean Radin's done an excellent job presenting the findings, the arguements, and counterarguments for the reality of psi. And why this fits in with quantum mechanics.

Many people believe that such "psychic phenomena" are rare talents or divine gifts. Others don't believe they exist at all. But the latest scientific research shows that these phenomena are both real and widespread, and are an unavoidable consequence of the interconnected, entangled physical reality we live in.

Albert Einstein called entanglement "spooky action at a distance" -- the way two objects remain connected through time and space, without communicating in any conventional way, long after their initial interaction has taken place. Could a similar entanglement of minds explain our apparent psychic abilities? Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, believes it might.

In this illuminating book, Radin shows how we know that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis are real, based on scientific evidence from thousands of controlled lab tests. Radin surveys the origins of this research and explores, among many topics, the collective premonitions of 9/11. He reveals the physical reality behind our uncanny telepathic experiences and intuitive hunches, and he debunks the skeptical myths surrounding them. Entangled Minds sets the stage for a rational, scientific understanding of psychic experience.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Entangled-Minds-Extrasensory-Experiences-Quantum/dp/1416516778/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206737062&sr=8-1

Have Scientists Discovered a Way of Peering Into the Future?

The Global Consciousness Project looks very cool. It's basically a set of true random number generators that keep logging "random" numbers all day, every day. Except sometimes, like on Sept 11 2001 the randomness becomes less random. In fact, a few hours before the planes hit.

Dr Nelson's Global Consciousness Project - originally hosted by Princeton University - is one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. It aims to ‘sense' whether all of humanity shares a single unconscious mind that we all tap into without realising it. Some might refer to it as the mind of God. But the machine has also thrown up another tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future.

http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/paranormal-unexplained/have-scientists-discovered-a-way-of-peering-into-the-future.html

RIP Arthur C Clarke

 

 

 

Arthur C Clarke meant a lot to me as a kid. Not just books like "Childhood's End" or "Rendezvous With Rama," but really cool stuff like his "Mysterious Universe" show.

The guy invented communications satellites. Enlightened the world with Kubrick with 2001. And showed a little kid in small town Alberta that there's a whole universe out there.

http://trekmovie.com/2008/03/18/rip-arthur-c-clarke/

Lego Discovery from 2001

 

 

This is awesome. Simply awesome.

http://www.truedimensions.com/lego/customs/2001/index.htm

Required Stuff

Got a new laptop at work today. The old T41 gasped it's last breath after only 18 months of use. I'm pretty hard on laptops I guess.

Got a newer T61 that's a little better. Weird screen aspect ratio but I can get used to it.

Here's a list of stuff I had to put on it to make it workable again:

1. Firefox (portable version for those of us without admin access) with these extensions:
   
1. Adblock Plus. Once you've gotten rid of the ads, you can't go back.
2. Google Notebook. Allows you to clip and save links. You have to use it to get it.
3. Google Gears. Lets you take Google Reader offline.
4. Stockticker. Unobtrusive little extension that shows Suncor's stock price in green when up and red when down.
5. Google Sync keeps all my machines lined up with the same bookmarks. Nice.
6. ForecastFox gives you real-time weather updates in a quiet way.
7. GSpace uses your gmail account as a 6+Gb file share.
2.  Launchy lets you run almost anything without having your hands leave the keyboard.
3. JDarkRoom is a really minimal text editor.
4. FreeMind is an open-source mind mapping tool.

Stochastic Resonance

My life is great. Seriously. I enjoy a life that I couldn't have imagined when I was young.

As a boy growing up without a father, in a trailer park in a small town, I just couldn't imagine my future. How could I? What point of reference could I have? I could never have imagined that the amount of effort put in by my family -- including all the aunts and uncles -- would have opened my eyes to moving to a big city, getting an education, and a good life.

I remember cleaning other people's floors as a child, something that may shock others, but helped formulate me as a person. You see, it taught me the value of work, and the value of thinking for a living rather than doing manual labor. And we were saving up to travel. How could I know then that seeing the world would open my eyes to the possibilities and potentialities outside our little rural oil patch town?

Who could've thought that mom would marry and the family would move to a bustling metropolis and that I would go to school. I remember being fascinated by technology as a child; now I make a living doing what I could've only dreamed of back then. And a good living too. Seriously, I make more than I ever dreamed, more than I ever thought possible. This doesn't mean much in and of itself, but it sure opens up possibilities for my family.

I couldn't have thought then, nor after my first failed marriage, that I could ever be this happy or have this family. Never in a million years would I have imagined having three kids or such an amazing partner. Who knows what life will bring? Am I just incredibly lucky?

This leads me back to the idea of "stochastic resonance." This is the idea that injecting specific kinds of noise into an ordered system will help generate desired results. Like how slightly mis tuning an AM radio sometimes results in richer sound. Imagine a pool table with one ball close to one of the pockets. The pool table is covered and you want to find out what pocket the ball is close to. How do you do it? Jiggle the table. Chances are, if you align things in the general direction you want to go, randomness over time will line up just right to achieve your goal. Maybe even in ways you couldn't have imagined.

So I think a powerful metaphor for life could be stochastic resonance. You can carefully set stuff up as best you can but life always makes other plans. You can try to act against this random noise or use it. I've been very lucky to have just the right kind of noise in my life.

Gabes Stitches

Gabe had to get four stitches put in Monday after hitting his head on a windowsill at preschool. Poor kid. He was very brave though and was good for the three hour wait at the emergency room and sat very still for the doctor while he put the stitches in.

Was tough too, the gel they put on for anasthetic kept running in his eyes so it didn't deaden the pain that much. They couldn't use the skin glue either, as the gash was too wide.

Go Home Productions

Absolutely killer mashups of stuff like U2, The Doors, Bowie, Blondie, and more. All available as .mp3's for downloading. My fave so far is the "Sixx Mixx"

 

http://www.gohomeproductions.co.uk/

Parapsychology researcher Dean Radin on ESP...

Interesting article on psi research with Dean Radin. I'm about to read one of his books and I happened to come by this article.

 

We've all probably had more than a few moments in our life where we spontaneously had strange premonitions about the future that came true. Certainly there's some "confirmation bias" happening here but Radin's work seems to be teasing out a very small, but significant effect here.

Do you think people can predict events that will occur in the future?

Predict is a little bit too strong. I think that sometimes people have experiences that turn out to be true, and they know it in advance, but prediction implies that I'm going to sit down and figure out what is going to happen. I don't think that the phenomenon is exactly like that. But the fact that people can gain information about future events, of that I'm nearly convinced.

What is the most compelling evidence, in your view, that people can sense what might happen?

I would say that the experiments that I've done which I call "presentiment experiments" are among the most compelling, primarily because the results are more robust than what you typically see in these kinds of experiments.

Can you describe what those are?

They're a class of experiments where you don't ask the participant to consciously try to do anything. You just measure their body's response as a way of detecting that something is happening. So we measure skin response, pupil dilation and things like that.

We ask a person to sit in front of a computer and look at a blank screen, then push a button. A few seconds go by, and then the screen makes a random decision to select a stimulus that is either calm or emotional, and then it goes away after maybe 10 or 15 seconds. And then this process is repeated again and again. The analysis looks at what's happening while you are waiting for the computer to make that random decision about which picture to show. We are wondering whether people would get an unconscious sense of what their future is about to bring them.

When you do this experiment with lots of people on lots of trials, what you end up with is evidence that people significantly show different physiological conditions or states just before emotional pictures are shown as compared to calm pictures, and in the direction that you can predict, as if in fact they were somehow aware of what their future was about to bring.

Do you think that we all have some extrasensory abilities?

I think we do in the same way that we can all play golf, but we are not all going to win the Masters.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/02/25/findrelig.DTL

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder

A Perfect Mess is a great book, and a counterpoint to the covey-esqe organization books and philosophy that I also love. Turns out there's a "perfect mess" where disorder and order balance off to the peak efficiency possible.

For example, I use what I call a surface organizational system. My computer desktop is clean. My desk is clean. All papers and documents are tucked away -- but in one spot where I can find it all. For paper, it all goes into a basket. When the basket gets full, I dump it all in the trash unless I need it. For my computer, everything goes in one folder, where "find" can find what I need. That's it.

There's also a good blog article on the book where the following is noted:

Messiness in Western society is associated with a lot of negative things. Clutter, disorder, messiness is associated with dirt, disease, and filth. Messiness is considered inhuman, uncivilized — remember Mom telling you your room was a “pig sty”?

It’s also associated with laziness, the greatest of sins in a Western mindset guided by the Protestant work ethic. While we might feel that our work takes priority over cleaning up, there’s a part of us that will always feel that we should be doing it all — that not cleaning up is a sign of sloth, no matter how much other work we’re getting done in the meantime.

Messiness is also a class issue. Middle-class reformers have always advocated lives of zen-like simplicity to their working-class charges. (In the 1910’s and ’20s, they would set up model homes in poor tenements showing workers and immigrants how a “proper” home should be kept — plain furniture, no curtains, open cupboards, hardwood floors, and bare walls were the norm, in contrast to the mish-mash of overstuffed furniture, cheap posters and wall calendars, heavy curtains, and multiple rugs the immigrants and workers preferred.) Wealthy people look down on the nouveau riche who stuff their homes with Baroque furniture, Persian rugs, and glod-trimmed everything. Non-clutter is the foundation of Apple’s success — among well-off, professional, upper-middle-class social elites (and their emulators).

But there’s a cost for this kind of neatness, a point of diminishing returns beyond which more time spent organizing and cleaning means less time spent getting work done. This is especially true when workers (and I’m including the work of family, home life, and hobbies here as well as the work we do for our jobs) “borrow” systems that are advocated by professionals as “gospel” but do not truly reflect the individual’s working life or personality. As it happens, a great many highly organized people are no more able — and even less able — to find the things they need, when they need them, than the chronically messy.

Key points:

• Organization is expensive. Use it sparingly.
  
• Allow for randomness to creep into your environment. It allows for the unexpected to happen.
• Messiness in some situations -- like brainstorming -- is extremely useful.
• Let organizational structures self-assemble if possible. For example, with a stack of paper, the most used page will always tend to drift to the top because it's most used. Many things in life are like that.

http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Mess-Disorder-How-Cluttered-Fly/dp/0316114758/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204835594&sr=8-2

JDarkRoom

Embrace the darkness. JDarkRoom is a great, very simple java-based text editor. Takes up the full screen with a default green-on-black color scheme. Reminds me of the old days hacking out code in the basement of the math sciences building.

Great for distraction-free writing or taking notes during meetings. Open source and multiplatform. 

http://www.codealchemists.com/jdarkroom/

Tron Sequel Alive Again?

 

 

Looks like the Tron 2.0 sequel may have been resurrected...

Men in day-glo body suits could battle in a virtual world again soon. Jeff Bridges says he's eager to do a Tron sequel. For a while, Disney was talking about a remake instead, but Bridges says he expects to be pitched a sequel in the near future. And he's excited to do Tron 2, because he's heard the special effects will be as "innovative" as the original's were in its day. It could be unbearably cheesy, or it could be the next Matrix.

http://io9.com/322998/tron-sequel-will-feature-cutting+edge-special-effects

9 Inch Asus Eee PC Available Soon

I've been holding out buying the 7 inch model for six months now, and I can't wait for this baby to come out.

ASUS tells us the screen is 1024 x 600, and it looks to be almost the exact same pixel density as the 7-inch version. The computer was being shown in both Linux and Windows XP versions, so it looks like you'll be able to have your choice of OS when the 9-incher is released later this year.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/04/asus-9-inch-eee-pc-now-with-living-pixels/