Esoteric & Design

Rulers

2007-02-27T20:34:00.000-07:00

LIGHT AND DARKNESS

Light and darkness, life and death, on the right and left,
these are children, they are inseperably together.
But the good are not good, the wicked not wicked,
life not life, death not death.
Each element fades to an original source.
But those who live above the world cannot fade.
They are eternal.

NAMES

The names of earthly things are illusory.
We stray from the real to the unreal.
If you hear the word “god,” you miss the real
and hear the unreal.
Father, son, holy spirit, life, light, resurrection, church.
These words are not real. They are unreal
but refer to the real, and are heard in the world.
They fool us. If those names were in the eternal realm,
they would never be heard on earth.
They were not assigned to us here.
Their end dwells in the eternal realm.

THE NAME NOT UTTERED

Only one name is not uttered in the world:
the name the father gave the son.
Above the name of all others is the father’s name.
The son would not be father without wearing
the father’s name.
Those with his name know it but do not speak it.
Those without his name do not think it.

TRUTH MADE NAMES

Truth made names in the world,
and without them we can’t think.
Truth is one and is many,
teaching one thing through the many.

RULERS

The rulers [Archons] wanted to fool us,
since they saw we were connected with the good.
They took the names of the good
and gave them to the not good
so with names they could trick
and rope us to the not good.
As though doing us a favour,
they took the names from the not good
and placed them on the good.
They knew what they were doing.
They wanted to grab those of us who were free
and make us eternal slaves.

The Gospel of Philip:
Nag Hammadi Codex II, 3, pp. 52,29 to 86,19
taken from The Gnostic Bible, pp. 261–2

Congratulations Brandi & Darrin!

2007-02-21T13:12:00.000-07:00

Work like you don’t need the money
Love like you’ve never been hurt
Dance like no one’s watching
Live like it’s heaven on earth!
Lova ya both! xo —Don

Islamic father killed family for being too western

2007-02-21T12:42:00.000-07:00

A father killed his wife and four daughters in their sleep because he could not bear them adopting a more westernised lifestyle, an inquest heard yesterday.

Mohammed Riaz, 49, found it abhorrent that his eldest daughter wanted to be a fashion designer, and that she and her sisters were likely to reject the Muslim tradition of arranged marriages.

On Hallowe'en last year he sprayed petrol throughout their terraced home in Accrington, Lancs, and set it alight.

Caneze Riaz, 39, woke and tried to protect her three-year-old child, Hannah, who was sleeping with her, but was overcome by fumes. Her other daughters, Sayrah, 16, Sophia, 13, and Alisha, 10, died elsewhere in the house.

Riaz, who had spent the evening drinking, set himself on fire and died two days later.

Relatives broke the news to the couple's son, Adam, 17, as he lay terminally ill with cancer at the Christie Hospital, Manchester. He died six weeks later.

Michael Singleton, the coroner, recorded verdicts that Riaz killed himself and that his victims were unlawfully killed.

Riaz, who had spent all but the last 17 years of his life in the North West Frontier region of Pakistan, met his Anglo-Pakistani wife when her father sent her to the sub-continent to find a husband.

After an arranged marriage, she developed a career as a community leader in Accrington while he, handicapped by a lack of English, took on a series of low-paid jobs.

After Mrs Riaz's father died she "suddenly felt less beholden to Mohammed", a friend said. "She started to develop her own circle of friends and allowed the girls to express themselves in a more western way."

She began to work with women who felt suppressed by Asian culture and many saw her as a role model for young Asian women.

via the Telegraph

My brother at Ayres Rock

2007-02-19T12:40:00.000-07:00

He ~~didn't~~ find any aliens.

The growth of a culture

2007-02-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

I read a lot of design sites, particularly those dealing with word-of-mouth marketing, branding, experience design, and the like. It’s interesting watching firms make attempts to engineer cultures around their brands. Some of the silliest flops in marketing history have been because some group of marketers and/or execs thought they could sell a manufactured myth. While not entirely impossible, many people seem to miss the spirit of the brand, the soul of a community or culture.

I found this recent piece from New York Magazine interesting. One quote in particular, on the development of language from necessity to full-fledged, living, breathing thing, really caught my eye:

Younger people […] are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

That’s a cool metaphor, I respond. “I actually don’t think it’s a metaphor,” he says. “I think there may actually be real neurological changes involved.”

It reminds me of a couple quotes I like:

“Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.”
—Benjamin Lee Whorf

“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”
—Charlemagne

“All men dream, but not equally.”
—anonymous

The article is about the new internet generation and their embracing the lack of privacy the people over 30 tend to convince themselves doesn’t exist (yet). They’ve embraced internet slang, mashups, and even rendered proper sentence structure to emotives and more intuitive communication structures akin to the personal interpretation prevalent in languages such as ancient Hebrew and Japanese. I think this return back to intuitive, subjective use of language is of particular importance, as it harkens back to more magical interactions with one another through a shared language — not a language predicated by the blacks and white of English grammar where our tools are defined for us, not by us so that we have a wisdom (knowledge + experience = wisdom) of what we're communicating to one another.

Of course, contemporary adults fear this. Adults fear almost everything they don't understand. I don't need to expound too much on this, but I wanted to make this post for posterity’s sake so I can refer back to it.

California as a nation-state?

2007-02-12T16:39:00.000-07:00

Quoted in its entirety from the New York Times:

Something interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure.

Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. “We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,” he recently declared. “We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.” In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, “We are a good and global commonwealth.”

Political rhetoric? Maybe. But California’s governor has also put his finger on a little discussed flaw in America’s constitutional formula. The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does “participatory democracy” mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable.

A recent study by the economists Alberto Alesina of Harvard and Enrico Spolaore of Tufts demonstrates that the bigger the nation, the harder it becomes for the government to meet the needs of its dispersed population. Regions that don’t feel well served by the government’s distribution of goods and services then have an incentive to take independent action, the economists note.

Scale also determines who has privileged access to the country’s news media and who can shape its political discourse. In very large nations, television and other forms of political communication are extremely costly. President Bush alone spent $345 million in his 2004 election campaign. This gives added leverage to elites, who have better corporate connections and greater resources than non-elites. The priorities of those elites often differ from state and regional priorities.

James Madison, the architect of the United States Constitution, understood these problems all too well. Madison is usually viewed as favoring constructing the nation on a large scale. What he urged, in fact, was that a nation of reasonable size had advantages over a very small one. But writing to Jefferson at a time when the population of the United States was a mere four million, Madison expressed concern that if the nation grew too big, elites at the center would divide and conquer a widely dispersed population, producing “tyranny.”

Few Americans realize just how huge this nation is. Germany could fit within the borders of Montana. France is smaller than Texas. Leaving aside three nations with large, unpopulated land masses (Russia, Canada and Australia), the United States is geographically larger than all the other advanced industrial countries taken together. Critically, the American population, now roughly 300 million, is projected to reach more than 400 million by the middle of this century. A high Census Bureau estimate suggests it could reach 1.2 billion by 2100.

If the scale of a country renders it unmanageable, there are two possible responses. One is a breakup of the nation; the other is a radical decentralization of power. More than half of the world’s 200 nations formed as breakaways after 1946. These days, many nations — including Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Italy and Spain, just to name a few — are devolving power to regions in various ways.

Decades before President Bush decided to teach Iraq a lesson, George F. Kennan worried that what he called our “monster country” would, through the “hubris of inordinate size,” inevitably become a menace, intervening all too often in other nations’ affairs: “There is a real question as to whether ‘bigness’ in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.”

Kennan proposed that devolution, “while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government,” might yield a “dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment.”

Regional devolution would most likely be initiated by a very large state with a distinct sense of itself and aspirations greater than Washington can handle. The obvious candidate is California, a state that has the eighth-largest economy in the world.

If such a state decided to get serious about determining its own fate, other states would have little choice but to act, too. One response might be for an area like New England, which already has many regional interstate arrangements, to follow California’s initiative — as it already has on some environmental measures. And if one or two large regions began to take action, other state groupings in the Northwest, Southwest and elsewhere would be likely to follow.

A new wave of regional devolution could also build on the more than 200 compacts that now allow groups of states to cooperate on environmental, economic, transportation and other problems. Most likely, regional empowerment would be popular: when the Appalachian Regional Commission was established in 1965, senators from across the country rushed to demand commissions to help the economies and constituencies of their regions, too.

Governor Schwarzenegger may not have thought through the implications of continuing to assert forcefully his “nation-state” ambitions. But he appears to have an expansive sense of the possibilities: this is the governor, after all, who brought Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to the Port of Long Beach last year to sign an accord between California and Britain on global warming. And he may be closer to the mark than he knows with his dream that “California, the nation-state, the harmonious state, the prosperous state, the cutting-edge state, becomes a model, not just for the 21st-century American society, but for the larger world.”

Gar Alperovitz, a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, College Park, is the author of “America Beyond Capitalism.”

Fantastic CF Recruiting commercial

2007-02-10T20:23:00.002-07:00

Every time this Canadian Forces Recruiting commercial comes on, I stop what I'm doing to watch it. I watch every clip in earnest, listening to the music, and capture every word as it comes up on the screen. Canada is a funny place, as part of the little bit of culture we can call our own is embracing and supporting our troops and peacekeepers, here and abroad.

I remember as a child, my friends and I never understood the implications of war. It was history, separate from us. I hope I'll never see the face of war. But after seeing films like Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, and the excellent Tae Guk Gi, I've been able to frame the pain and suffering.

I know little of the Canadian Forces aside from the respect they command from my perception of them. This commercial (its branding) nicely sums up how I believe they ought to be perceived. Bravo to the firm that produced it.

It also reminds me of cultural artefacts from the Canadian government which we Canadians are presented with every Remembrance Day:

Vignette: Canada Remembers

"A Pittance of Time"

Shine on ’em

2007-02-08T10:03:00.000-07:00

I watched Blood Diamond last night, and it reminded me a lot of Hotel Rwanda and an older post I made on the the disturbing reality of the Chinese fur trade (warning, disturbing imagery).

Aside from enjoying the film, though some of the literary devices were easily contrived, it brought me back to wondering about how people can relate further outside of their 3° of separation. I read somewhere that most people (Westerners) can't often put anything outside of 2° or 3° of separation into context, so it rarely affects their life choices. This is unless it reflects a lifestyle choice, which in turn is a reflection of them expressing themselves through actions. For example, you buy dolphin-safe tuna because it makes you better, not because you know much about the symbol on the tuna label, or the processes taken, whether or not it's really dolphin-safe or how they define that, et cetera. It just reflects the notion that you would think it bad to hurt dolphins (though they're the only animals aside from humans that rape for pleasure).

One of the most powerful lines I've ever heard was in Hotel Rwanda: Colonel Oliver, explaining why the world will not intervene in the Tutsis genocide, "You're black. You're not even a nigger. You're an African."

And it was true. Even while watching Blood Diamond, I couldn't help but feel a little exasperated at the African condition. (Not just through film, but through other media, too. And stories of friends that have been located in Africa. The best I can get without having travelled there myself.)

Why does the West donate so charitably to the tsunami relief fund a couple years ago, but neglect Africa? And if it's natural for us to embrace our 3°-wide environ, where is the broken link in our social fence that's preventing us from taking care of one another. Or does it start with many of us, are we broken links? Do we only make decisions based on how they make us feel? I guess this is the difference between knowledge and experience.

Our past resident asshole-in-office, Ralph Klien, made that abundantly clear when he, drunk, threw loose change at homeless people in a shelter back in 2001. Of course, I don't know if the homeless people threw loose change at Klein first, prompting the ordeal, but it's an example how one can view their case as so separate from the conditions that surround us.

I don't know where I am going with any of this. It's thoughts on why we lack the capacity to embrace a holistic civilisation.

Bev Oda, I strongly dislike you

2007-02-06T12:18:00.000-07:00

We live in a wondrous age of communications, new arts and media, and new social experimentation. But the behemoths of antiquity loom over us, every-present and perpetuating their own existence. When will it be okay for us to publicly execute politicians again? Really.

I've written two letters to Bev Oda (I highly doubt she reads them herself), expressing my distaste for her efforts to bring Canadian copyright law around to reflect the interests of corporate America. But now she's among the many federal politicians to be outed for abusing public dollars on personal, frivolous fluff, like limousines:

Documents obtained by the Liberals under Access to Information show that Oda and her staff used a private limo company 11 times in four days, ordering several cars each day and paying drivers to stand by for as long as seven hours at a stretch.

The bill, dated April 8, totalled $5,476. Documents show Oda wrote a cheque reimbursing the government for $2,226 on May 19.

"When people started asking questions, the minister’s conscience apparently got the better of her and she cut a cheque for $2,200, but when will the minister cough up another $3,200 to cover the rest of the cost of her Juno joyride?" Liberal MP Michael Savage asked in the House of Commons.

Makes me wonder, from a design standpoint, how to reprimand politicians without actually beheading them. (It's a fabulous idea, but just not savvy with the times.) It all reminds me of this Agnes Repplier quote: "The clearsighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it."

Read more on the excellent Bev Oda via Boing Boing:

Canadian Heritage Minister Oda in the pocket of recording execs

Canada's about to have a copyright disaster

Can. Heritage Minister's election was funded by entertainment co's

Canadian copyright czar forced to turn away industry bribes

Hollywood's Canadian Member of Parliament

Canadian copyright minister caught lining pockets

Hello Kitty Tarot

2007-02-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

“The cutest tarot deck you will ever own”

Click the GIFs to visit site

‘The Machine is Us,’ by Michael Wesch

2007-02-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

Absolutely superb.

via Wonderland

‘Hardwired’ to home in on six focal colours

2007-02-05T12:04:00.000-07:00

The Economist gets all misty eyed over colours, the emotions they evoke, and how this fundamental response crosses linguistic barriers. All in highly scientific and technical terms of course.

If humans really are hardwired to home in on six focal colours, then all languages should assign words around those six. Dr Regier, however, tests a subtler concept. He thinks that useful languages should allot words in order to minimise the perceptual difference between colours of the same category, and maximise it between colours in different categories. Unlike national boundaries, linguistic boundaries should form only in the valleys of his colour globe, never over the hills.

via Readymade News

Career planning may be a waste of time

2007-02-03T21:48:00.000-07:00

Since people are "poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future" (the term of art is miswanting), perhaps careful career planning is a waste of time. "The best strategy for career planning is this: make your best guess, try it out and don't be surprised if you don't like it." I've done 0 minutes of career planning and I'm happy with the results. See also The Chaos Theory of Career Development.

via kottke.org

If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t either

2007-02-03T21:44:00.000-07:00

People who are social, religious, or political conservatives tend to have more children, and that fact has profound implications for culture, for politics, and for business. In the United States, for example, fertility rates are 12% higher in states that voted for George W. Bush in the most recent presidential election than in the more liberal and secular states that supported his opponent. Indeed, if the John Kerry states seceded and formed a new nation, its fertility rate would be just 1.8 children per woman—13% below the level needed to replace the population.

This link between fertility and conservatism is found not only in the United States but in Europe, Israel, the rest of the Middle East, and elsewhere. There is a strong correlation between adherence to traditional Christian, Judaic, or Islamic values and high fertility. And as an increasing share of all children is descended from people whose conservative values have led them to raise large families, we see the emergence of societies in which the patriarchal and highly pro-natal values of the Abrahamic religions are dominant.

So what caused the rise of liberal secularism in the first place? Patriarchy, as it has traditionally manifested itself, requires a man to marry a “respectable” wife and to take responsibility for the children she bears him. In part because of these obligations, traditional patriarchy is unappealing to many men. Similarly, many women take issue with the roles a patriarchal society prescribes for them. When broad swaths of the population come from something other than a conservative upbringing—as they did in the 1960s and 1970s—patriarchy’s constraints on personal freedom can seem excessive to men and women alike. Then gender roles relax, birthrates fall, and patriarchy goes into retreat.

But patriarchy always makes a comeback, because its adherents put more genes and ideas into the future than do their secular counterparts. This process is already well under way in the United States. For example, among American women just now passing beyond reproductive age, nearly 20% are childless and almost as many have only one child. Consequently, a relatively large share of the next generation is descended from a comparatively narrow and socially conservative segment of society that places a high value on reproduction. Today we see a culture in which social conservatives and the religious-minded play a far greater role than they did forty years ago.

…continued via the Harvard Business Review

What is confidence?

2007-02-03T16:49:00.000-07:00

This is what the collective genius of Wikipedia has come up with: "Confidence: When the anxiety is at an optimum level, you are at your best. You know that negative outcomes are possible, but rather than exaggerating or minimizing it, you give it the due attention necessary (What can I do if this happens…). So perhaps a better definition of confidence is the state of balanced perceptions and preparation."

And I wrote this some time ago and continue coming back to it:

Power is how one utilises their roster of wisdoms (knowledge + experience = wisdom) to maintain their order and interpretation of reality held over any others.

Because reality requires two or more persons to define it, I want to define confidence as the state of defining the boundaries by which you establish your sovereign understanding of context(s) and your resident power over them. (Power as defined above.)

Watching managers work with their staff is often an eloquent dance of establishing limits by the manager(s) to keep staff working within expected parametres. Or when someone uses their wisdom/power to infringe themselves on an area of someone else's life, but the victim has no abstract or concept of just what this area of their life is or how it works. (Lots of poeple fear marketing for just this reason.)

So is this one of the real keys to occult power? Building up ontologies of perceptions and simply being able to impose your perceived orders — metaphysical scaffolding of understanding that one person may have over their world — over others because they haven't the experience and/or knowledge to defend themselves. In other words, the one-eyed may be the king of the blind.

Which brings me back to this quote by Daniel Goleman:

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.

Always be at least aware: there are those others out there that notice, and they can experiment with your own personal boundaries by imposing themselves upon your will to find where it's most malleable and open to influence. How can you protect yourself if you're not willing to explore yourself spiritually, your own depths to know how you've defined yourself?

Indeed, in the kingdom of the blind, the man with one eye is king.

Crazy smart

2007-02-01T14:40:00.000-07:00

I know Nerdshit posted this a while back, but I never got around to reading it. The BPS Digest has an entry on "crazy" experiences and being a genius. Lots of people walk around trying to pretend their hardcore crazy or rebels to the bone, but really… it's not as easy as you think. I long ago realised, with the aid of a background in chaos magic, that paradigms were my friends. I learned to shift perspectives — paradigm management, I called it — and in my early twenties I sometimes wanted to kill myself because I couldn't find one reality to settle on. It's hard being one's own Devil's advocate on every issue in life.

It's the people that may be a bit out in leftfield that strive to claim their normalcy, trust me. But establishing an ordered view of the world and one's reality from outside of that social norm is an achievement of no little value. I mean, really, you've wandered off the beaten path of social mores and risked your sanity and social niceties to explore — what? — reality from a ways off the beaten path? So what's the point?

Poets and artists have as many ‘unusual experiences’ as people with schizophrenia

The idea that creative geniuses might not be entirely sane isn't exactly new. But just how much do creative types have in common with people suffering from psychosis? Well, according to Daniel Nettle at the University of Newcastle, serious poets and artists have just as many ‘unusual experiences’ as people diagnosed with schizophrenia. What saves them from the disabling effects of schizophrenia is that they don’t suffer from the lack of emotion and motivation – known as ‘introvertive anhedonia’ – also associated with the illness.

Nettle asked artists and poets, mental health patients and ‘non-creative’, healthy controls to fill out a questionnaire that’s designed to detect schizophrenic-like symptoms in healthy people. Participants seriously involved in poetry or art (as opposed to mere hobbyists, or non-creative controls) reported having just as many unusual experiences as did patients diagnosed with schizophrenia – that is they tended to answer yes to questions like “Do you think you could learn to read others’ minds if you wanted to?” or “Are the sounds you hear in your daydreams really clear and distinct?”. However, in contrast, they scored lower than both patients and healthy controls on measures of lack of emotion and motivation.

“What factors moderate the development of introvertive anhedonia, and whether they can be modified during life, is yet to be determined”, Nettle said, “but is obviously of the greatest interest in terms of the prevention of suffering and the enhancement of creativity”.

Nettle also asked professional mathematicians to complete the same questionnaire. He found they reported even fewer unusual experiences than the healthy controls, but that they tended to score highly on lack of emotion and motivation – the opposite pattern to artists and poets. “The constellation of autism, systemising and science appears to be in many respects the opposite tail of the distribution to the constellation of arts, unusual experiences and affective and psychotic disorders explored in the present study”, Nettle said.

And on that note, to any naysayers who worship the stability of the status quo, Nobel Prize genius Crick was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced thedouble-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

Being out in leftfield is fine as long as you maintain regular experience interacting with your fellow peers. No man is an island, unless you're on that Zen path.

Crazy needs to be harnesses and utilised. The problem is the social checks and balances that believe that the ego — as structured by standard institutions such as family, school, and whatever else — is a unique and special thing. If we can temporarily create environs and conditions which do away with that belief, we can design experiences which will draw the mind away from its normal precepts and into uncharted waters. Here, we can build new analogies and bridges to answer more of the world's design problems. It can be done faster and more effectively, too, if semantic and social relationships are maintained without fear, censure, or prejudice. The translators have to maintain an understanding of how the psychonaut gets to where they're going so they can translate the results back to the norms of the "everyday" world.

Speaking of which, I should get around to reading The Ten Faces of Innovation. It's been just sitting here, staring at me for months now. I am sure it'll expound on some of these thoughts…

Philip Worthington’s Shadow Monsters

2007-02-01T02:39:00.000-07:00

Old news to some, I know, but I just came across this project again via the Processing site. Processing was used to code it, I presume.

Free money? What’s the catch?

2007-02-01T00:04:00.000-07:00

It’s a funny state of affairs when you think about the state of society in which we live. I found this amusing post on John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity website:

When I saw Google yesterday offering a free 10 dollars for the taking, it reminded me of an experiment on trust by my wacky friend Prof. Dan Ariely. He did an experiment where he set up a table in a public space with a bowl containing cash and a sign that said, “Free Money.” Dan found that with a pile of one-dollar bills, 10% of the passerbys would stop and take the cash; with fifty-dollar bills, only 22% took him up on his offer. His point was that “If someone is offering me something free, there must be a trick to it.”

We can be cynical in life, and assume that there really is no thing as a totally “free lunch.” To complete mis-trust everything around you can probably lead to a lonely state of being. Well, in another browser window there I am about to “Sign up to earn [my] $10 bonus.” Free money is only a click away.

Brevity: a key to finding one’s own

2007-01-31T23:13:00.000-07:00

So in a lot of recent posts, here and elsewhere, it comes down to the defining moments of one's life that — when cross-referenced — will begin to illustrate the driving dispositions in our lives. If forced to widdle down all the "complexities" of one's life, what are the remaining, driving elements. The ones that tie most of your decision-making together by theme?

Have none? Check out the "elevator pitches" as posted on Idea Sandbox for some inspiration. He reviews the opening narration from tv shows such as Star Trek and My Name is Earl:

It can be challenging to boil down what you do into a short blurb… For inspiration, I suggest paying attention to the 30-second narrations at the beginning of TV shows.

At the start of each episode producers deliver the swift backstory and premise of the show. If this was our first viewing, we would understand what makes the show worth attention.

Think about parties or those instances at the bar or meets where you briefly meet someone, and they ask about you. What do you say? Do you stumble for words? Do you define yourself by your job? Blech. I'm not insinuating that it's all about drawing attention to yourself, but it's more than that. It's about refining your observation of yourself in order to communicate with those around you more efficiently. This builds more effective networks in which you can explore. It also allows you to gauge your thoughts, actions, and future decisions against what may, in time, become a fairly accurate portrayal of what sort of human being you want to be.

The power of poetry (and design) is being able to see a context where others can't. Wrapping word around concepts by which you can easily share with others. According to Alan Moore in this video clip, this is also, by definition, one of the jobs of a magician.

Perhaps this is a key to what imbues authenticity, to what defines the gods as higher ideals by which me might devote ourselves. And perhaps this is what eludes so many people, the capability to turn one's analysis on the self in order to create a brief model which can define. This model can be tested against future actions, reduced further over time, and changed. But the further we can extrapolate a poetic model by which we act, the more we know about ourselves.

And the gods we serve.

A visual analogy of this can be seen in Neil Kandalgaonkar's digital art (coincidentally enough, he uses the online handle brevity), who was inspired by the work of Jason Salavon (whom I posted on back in September 2005). In the above image, by Neil, he uses 50 images of the Eiffel Tower, all pictured by different people and then blended together. No matter how abstract, though, in the blur of perceptions is the Tower.

I am sure most of us look within with blurred vision. These are all analogies for things spiritual and subtle, but the more time we cross-referencing ourselves with our environs, the closer we'll get to a more refined picture by way of finding similarities and dismissing the disparate.

EDIT — A lot of my posts are the antithesis to brevity, but I use this blog as an outpouring so that I might peruse it later… and then make more condensed understanding and statements about the more lengthier bits. Anhow, Logic+Emotion has this on Saying More With Less:

I didn't need to read anything else. In one word I understood exactly what it was saying. But even more meaningful was what it wasn't saying. I'm not an eco-activist by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think about the kind of world my boys will live in when I'm gone.

What if we used less words more often?

A single word. It didn't condemn me, or make me feel guilty or defensive. By not saying more it did.

What if we got back to basics and just said what we really meant--instead of using the right kinds of lingo and abbreviations?

What if we left more room for intepretation?

Rent Jesus Camp

2007-01-31T20:36:00.000-07:00

I just watched Jesus Camp. May I recommend checking it out? You can watch George talk with the directors on The Hour (from 22 Jan 2007):

A new documentary called 'Jesus Camp,' has been nominated for an Academy award. Richard Roeper — of Ebert and Roeper — called it "one of the most compelling documentaries of the year."

The film is about a camp in Devil's Lake, North Dakota where kids as young as 6 years-old are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in "God's army" to "take back America for Christ."

For more on Jesus Camp, go to the documentary site.

Fundamentalist mother’s beliefs lead to son’s suicide

2007-01-31T13:48:00.000-07:00

From Talking in Circles:

FSTDS is usually good for a few laughs. I went there expecting to waste some time reading other people’s ignorant comments… and I see this:

“Just recently my son Bobby came out to me. I had been worried for awhile. His teachers said most of his grades were slipping and he seemed depressed and withdrawn.

Bobby said he’d been hiding it for awhile because he was afraid I would reject him. I sat him down and told him that I loved him and that God loved him, but that his salvation was in danger if he did not resist his unnatural tempations. I told him how being gay would mean he would live a shorter life, and that if he couldnt change his orientation he could be celibate like most the ex-gays are. He started crying saying something along the lines of “I knew you wouldnt understand! You’re just like everyone else!” before running to his room and slamming the door.

What did I do wrong? I dont want to lose my son, but I fear I already have. I talked it over with his therapist, who had the ludicrous idea that homosexuality was unchangable and that trying to repress could lead to lots of psychological damage (I’ve dropped him and will try to be finding another therapist with more moral beliefs). I wouldnt be surprised if he’s the one who’s feeding my son all the homosexual propaganda about how its ‘ok’ to be gay. That, or how homosexuality has engulfed the media, making it seem ‘cool’ and ‘hip’ and how they were just another oppressed minority. You didnt have to worry about seeing two men making out on tv at my age! I dont want to sound like a fanatic, but Im worried what other effects will come out of this increasingly secular, immoral society obsessed with filth.

Am I too late? Or is it possible to save my son”

I checked the thread this was posted on, and the son later killed himself.

There are very few things that can bring me to hate someone. I understand that everyone has different world views, and that everything they say and do has a reason behind it. I know no one ever intentionally does something they know is wrong, and that there is motivation for even their most despicable actions. I’m against the death penalty, and I believe in giving people a second chance. I know Betty loved her son, and wanted to help him, in her own way.

I can say, after reading this, that I truly hate Betty, the mother of this child. It doesn’t matter to me how devoutly she believed what she was doing and saying was right; it doesn’t matter how much she loved him; it doesn’t matter how bad she feels now that he’s dead. She was a direct cause of his death, and she could have prevented it with a single apology. She deserved to die more than her son did.

But even more than that, I hate fundamentalist Christianity.

From the subsequent forum threads:

Betty
I'm so distraught; I can't stop crying! What did I do wrong? Is my son in Hell now for killing himself??

[Aside from obviously supportive posts — albeit largely biased, that gays are unnatural and evil — here are a couple from the user Aineo:]

Aineo
Betty, you did nothing wrong. We live in an evil world where evil men could care less about people. All they care about is their personal agendas. Gay activists have disseminated one horrible lie after another to get liberals and cheap grace Christians on their side without giving any thought to who is really being hurt; the children.

We serve an awesome God of love who understands what we go through. We will never fully understand His perfect love this side of heaven. I don't believe a loving God is going to judge and condemn a child to hell because of what evil men have done to corrupt his own self-image.

I fully believe you can take comfort from David's words after his son born of Bathsheba died. "He will not return to me, but I will go to him."

Betty
But wasnt it my fault for not accepting him? :(

Aineo
How did you "not accept" your son? Don't buy into the hateful and totally erroneous propaganda coming from the gay activists who blame Christians for every problem in the gay community and every gay teen suicide. This is simply a fallacious argument designed to make parents of gay teens fearful of what a few gay teens do.

Betty
He had been upset with me because I told him that being gay was wrong.

Aineo
Have you ever told your son that other behavior is wrong? If you can answer yes to this question why didn't he suicide because you told him other behavior is wrong?

You are not responsible for what you son did.

Blame gay activists who lie about the psychological roots of homosexuality in some, blame the homophobic idiots who call themselves pastors and the teachers of God's truth, blame our society that has turned homosexuality into a political football, but you don't have to blame yourself.

My mother blamed herself when her youngest son died of AIDS and I have never understood why.

Jeff Han’s multi-touch display

2007-01-31T00:56:00.000-07:00

New footage of his famous multi-touch display, displaying all sorts of Minority Report style goodness. Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

via Information Aesthetics

Datagraphic of global financial activity

2007-01-31T00:52:00.000-07:00

I was just mesmerised by this. Money’s so cool. So are globes.
Click the image for the link. Or here.

Avatars and Their Creators

2007-01-30T23:56:00.000-07:00

Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators (Amazon.com, .ca, .co.uk) is a cool concept book, presenting the phenomenon of the contemporary avatar-the virtual characters gamers choose and design to engage in 3D worlds online. Portraits of gamers from the United States, Europe, China, and Japan (including leading figures of the gaming world) are paired with digital images of their alter egos, graphically dramatizing the gap between fantasy and reality.

With an introduction by one of digital culture's leading observers, and a glossary of relevant terms, each of the seventy pairs of images are accompanied by detailed gamers' profiles. Sometimes hilarious and always visually exciting, Alter Ego also serves as a guide to the new world of the avatar and is a serious contribution to the debate about the future of society in the digital age.

Robbie Cooper (not pictured) is a photojournalist. Born in London in 1969, his essay about Somalia was awarded the United Kingdom's leading young photographer's prize in 1992 (the Ian Parry scholarship). He now works regularly for magazines including Esquire, GQ, Geo, Liberation, and The Sunday Times Magazine.

Julian Dibbell (not pictured) is a contributing editor of both Wired magazine and the website Feed. Author of My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (1999, described as "quite simply the best book written about the dynamics of online life"), he writes regularly for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and TIME magazine on topics such as hackers, online communities, music pirates, and the philosophical questions of the digital age. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Old BBC News article (Oct 2004) on Cooper's earlier exhibit.

via Wonderland

The disfigurines of Justin Novak

2007-01-30T23:46:00.000-07:00

The ceramic figurine has historically embodied a mainstream, bourgeois ideology, and for this reason, I have employed it in the presentation of an alternative vision; an ironic anti-figurine, or 'disfigurine'. This subversion of the genre challenges the promotion of conformism manifested in traditional figurines.

In the 'disfigurine' series, physical wounds such as bruises and lacerations serve as metaphors for injury to self-esteem and other psychological harm. Whereas the figurine has historically represented the dominant culture's norms and ideals, the disfigurines aim to expose the damage inflicted by those very same expectations.

The fine line that exists between the “tasteful” and the “grotesque” is precisely the course that I strive to navigate. It is in the haunting tension between the two that seduction and repulsion inhabit the same space, where the very function of “taste” is perhaps suspended, and the politics of these gleaming white aesthetics are laid bare.

—Justin Novak

via 1 + 1 = 1

William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition in production

2007-01-30T14:58:00.000-07:00

Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show) is set to direct the film adaptation of William Gibson’s novel. It has been adapted for the screen by Weir and David Arata (Children of Men).

The first of William Gibson’s usually futuristic novels to be set in the present, Pattern Recognition is a masterful snapshot of modern consumer culture and hipster esoterica. Set in London, Tokyo, and Moscow, Pattern Recognition takes the reader on a tour of a global village inhabited by power-hungry marketeers, industrial saboteurs, high-end hackers, Russian mob bosses, Internet fan-boys, techno archeologists, washed-out spies, cultural documentarians, and our heroine Cayce Pollard—a soothsaying “cool hunter” with an allergy to brand names. Set for release in 2008.

Pollard is among a cult-like group of Internet obsessives that strives to find meaning and patterns within a mysterious collection of video moments, merely called “the footage,” let loose onto the Internet by an unknown source. Her hobby and work collide when a megalomaniac client hires her to track down whoever is behind the footage. Cayce’s quest will take her in and out of harm’s way in a high-stakes game that ultimately coincides with her desire to reconcile her father’s disappearance during the September 11 attacks in New York.

Check out an Occulterati interview with Gibson here.

How does lifestyle and fashion relate to mysticism?

2007-01-30T01:14:00.000-07:00

Muji (無印良品, Mujirushi Ryōhin) is a Japanese retail company which sells a wide variety of household goods. Muji is distinguished by its design minimalism, emphasis on recycling, avoidance of waste in production and packaging, and no-logo policy. Products range from pens, notebooks, and clothing for men and women to food items and major kitchen appliances. Its primary business includes Café Muji, Meal Muji, Muji Campsite, florist and home furnishing; the company has recently taken steps into housing construction.

Muji is in the process of opening it's first North American stores, both in New York City.

EDIT — Just speaking with my friend Scott in Germany, and this is what he has to say about Muji:

scott says:
muji is a cheap anti-brand
not much better
hehe
dE says:
poor quality?
scott says:
yeah
anti-brand japanese brand
hehe
no lables

I live in a city where Diesel and J. Lindeberg have outsold any other city in North America per capita. Ikea is in every household, but the quality is shite and few are aware of any alternatives. And where people trick themselves out with style, they're often spending way too much for weak branded adaptations of what's already been predefined by others. (Diesel's attempts to define urban attitude and storytelling through their pre-ruined lines is ridiculous.) But people buy this stuff up in droves, as it's been defined to them. Wear Diesel, you belong to the tribe of choice. You may now chase after bimbos and top forty music.

Then are the subcultures — punk, goth, skater (the new jock) — they're all diluted parodies of what was once genuine cultural initiatives. New music, new art, and new modes of thought have been brought to the malls of suburbia. There's absolutely nothing punk about punk.

And those that forego predefined styles, for the most part, lack any sort of substance. But what does that mean? If substance is spiritual in nature, and spirituality is a depth of knowing oneself. Of course, I'll hit up Wikipedia for a notion: involving (as it may) perceived eternal verities regarding humankind's ultimate nature […] Spirituality may involve perceiving life as higher, more complex or more integrated with one's world view; as contrasted with the merely sensual.

Style is the world view defined by an élite living out the story of that aesthetic, defining it moment to moment as it happens.

Thus, the substance of those with the most integrated world view and involved dialogue with their communities command and affect the subsequent style.

Review Aristotle's three steps or "offices" of rhetoric — invention, arrangement, and style — and three different types of rhetorical proof:

ethos: how the character and credibility of a speaker influence an audience to consider him to be believable.

pathos: the use of emotional appeals to alter the audience's judgment.

logos: the use of reasoning, either inductive or deductive, to construct an argument.

We may have elements to spread trends by the popularity or respect given by idolaters, how the experience of the styles affect the followers of the trend (socially, inter-personally, and how the individual feels when alone with their chosen styles… or do the styles define their actions?), and by context (i.e., a winter jacket is more useful in winter than that cute blouse you bought over summer… however, we still see a lot of idiots out on Whyte Avenue in their mini-skirts and other sill get-ups in the dead of winter).

Occultism is the study of the inner nature of things, as opposed to the outer characteristics that are studied by science. The inability of science and mathematics to penetrate beyond the relationship between one thing and another in order to explain the "inner nature" of the thing itself, independent of any external causal relationships with other "things" is dealt with in some detail by the German Kantian philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in his treatise entitled The World as Will and Representation, in which he designates this inner nature with the term Will.

The occultist Aleister Crowley likens the approach of conventional science to the process of measuring ten yards with a stick about which we really know nothing but that it is one tenth of the ten yards in question. Every "fact" we hold true of the physical universe is merely an idea stated in relationship to other ideas, and if we try to establish any such "fact" in absolute terms we find it is impossible. If A is defined as BC, where B is DE, C is FG and so onwards the terms of dependency increase exponentially, and we even come to the point where Z is circularly defined in terms of A.

Schopenhauer also points towards this inherently relativistic nature of mathematics and conventional science in his formulation of the 'World as Will'. By defining a thing solely in terms of its external relationships or effects we only find its external, or explicit nature. Occultism, on the other hand, is concerned with the nature of the thing-in-itself. This is often accomplished through direct perceptual awareness, known as mysticism.

Mysticism from the Greek μυστικός (mystikos) "an initiate" (of the Eleusinian Mysteries, μυστήρια (mysteria) meaning "initiation") is the pursuit of achieving communion or identity with, or conscious awareness of, ultimate reality, the divine, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, or insight; and the belief that such experience is an important source of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. Traditions may include a belief in the literal existence of realities beyond empirical perception, or a belief that a true human perception of the world transcends logical reasoning or intellectual comprehension. A person delving in these areas may be called a mystic.

In many cases, the purpose of mysticism and mystical disciplines such as meditation is to reach a state of return or re-integration to Godhead. A common theme in mysticism is that the mystic and all of reality are One. The purpose of mystical practices is to achieve that oneness in experience, to transcend limited identity and re-identify with the all that is.

Express oneself and relate one's world view to these three elements: invention, arrangement, and style. Are these the elements of culture? The difference between those that define the living culture and those that have no capacity to avoid the sway of the "mystics"?

An invention is an object, process, or technique which displays an element of novelty. An invention may sometimes be based on earlier developments, collaborations or ideas, and the process of invention requires at least the awareness that an existing concept or method can be modified or transformed into an invention. However, some inventions also represent a radical breakthrough in science or technology which extends the boundaries of human knowledge.
- The classic definitions of innovation include:
  1. the process of making improvements by introducing something new
  2. the act of introducing something new: something newly introduced (The American Heritage Dictionary)
  3. the introduction of something new. (Merriam-Webster Online)
  4. a new idea, method or device. (Merriam-Webster Online)
  5. the successful exploitation of new ideas (Dept of Trade and Industry, UK)
  6. change that creates a new dimension of performance Peter Drucker (Hesselbein, 2002)
- innovation is typically understood as the introduction of something new and useful, for example introducing new methods, techniques, or practices or new or altered products and services. One emerging approach is to use these other notions as the constituent elements of innovation as an action: Innovation occurs when someone uses an invention - or uses existing tools in a new way - to change how the world works, how people organize themselves, and how they conduct their lives.

Form (Lat. forma), in general, refers to the external shape, appearance, configuration of an object, in contrast to the matter or content or substance of which it is composed; thus a speech may contain excellent arguments (the matter may be good), whereas the style, grammar, arrangement (the form) may be bad. "Form is supposed to cover the shape or structure of the work; content its substance, meaning, ideas, or expressive effects."

The term fashion usually applies to a prevailing mode of expression, but quite often applies to a personal mode of expression that may or may not apply to all. Inherent in the term is the idea that the mode will change more quickly than the culture as a whole. The terms "fashionable" and "unfashionable" are employed to describe whether someone or something fits in with the current popular mode of expression. The term "fashion" is frequently used in a positive sense, as a synonym for glamour and style. In this sense, fashions are a sort of communal art, through which a culture examines its notions of beauty and goodness. The term "fashion" is also sometimes used in a negative sense, as a synonym for fads, trends, and materialism.

One of the problems with the grouping of styles into genres is that it is a subjective process that has a lot to do with the individual's personal understanding.
- Gestalt Therapy is a psychotherapy which focuses on here-and-now experience and personal responsibility. It was co-founded by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls and Paul Goodman in the 1940s-1950s.
  
  The objective of Gestalt Therapy, in addition to helping the client overcome symptoms, is to enable the her-him to become more fully and creatively alive and to be free from the blocks and unfinished issues which may diminish optimum satisfaction, fulfillment, and growth. Thus, it falls in the category of humanistic psychotherapies.
  
  Gestalt therapy (GT) has its roots in psychoanalysis. It was part of a continuum moving from the early work of Freud, to the later Freudian ego analysis, to Wilhelm Reich and his notion of character armor. To this was added the insights of academic gestalt psychology about perception, gestalt formation and the tendency of organisms to complete the incomplete gestalt, to form "wholes" in experience.
  
  There were additional influences from existentialism, particularly the I-thou relationship as it applies to therapy, and the notion of personal choice and responsibility.

Related article: Spirituality and Japanese Design Practise.
Related post: Fashion is contemporary mask magic.

AIGA’s United Nations consultative NGO status

2007-01-30T00:57:00.000-07:00

The AIGA is an organisation I have great respect for. Aside from the following tidbit, they've also launched Design for Democracy:

Design for Democracy increases civic participation by making the experience clearer, more understandable, easier to accomplish and more trustworthy.

Design and social research professionals collaborate to enable compelling, efficient and trust-building experiences between government and the governed.

Follow this link to read the contributions of AIGA members to the American discussion on ballot design.

And from today’s AIGA Communiqué:

As previously reported, AIGA has received consultative non-governmental organization (NGO) status. The principal advantage of this status is to offer AIGA a chance to demonstrate that designers, as thoughtful, creative and resourceful professionals also have a place as citizens who can lead solutions in civil society. AIGA will be given an opportunity to comment on global issues being discussed in the United Nations and its subsidiary organizations. Most of these issues will fall in the social, economic, educational and cultural arenas.

This effort is seen as a critical contribution to several AIGA goals: to demonstrate the value of design thinking by doing valuable things; increase the global perspective of the profession; undertake socially responsible initiatives; and offer opportunities for designers to be viewed as leaders. AIGA will follow and comment on, as appropriate, the following committee agendas: aging, human rights, health, status of women, education, family, development, health and communications, HIV/AIDS, human settlements, indigenous cultures, mental health, narcotics and substance abuse, population and development, social development and sustainable development.

When an issue in any one of these areas comes up for consideration and where the design profession has a particular non-partisan point of view (e.g., the need for human-centered design solutions or the opportunity for clear and accessible information design to communicate across cultures), AIGA will submit succinct comments (usually not more the 500 words) or become involved in a conference proceeding. The AIGA board has authorized the filing of non-partisan comments that are consistent with design’s potential to advance the Millennium Development Goals of the UN or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In some cases, special task forces of members will be assembled to craft a response.

Some of the conferences or forums that AIGA, under this status, has been invited to participate in recently are: Roundtable on international environmental governance, Geneva; Forum on Health, Geneva; Challenges faced by the humanitarian relief community, Geneva; Africa Civil Society Forum, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; World Social Forum, Nairobi, Kenya; Internet Governance Forum, Geneva. AIGA would be represented at a conference only if we were prepared to be active or submit papers; in those cases, AIGA could be represented by a staff member, board member or an interested member from the design community at large. One forum that AIGA will seek to be represented in regularly is the World Summit on the Information Society.

“If you have nothing to lose, you can only win”

2007-01-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

Reading over Architectures of Control, I came across this very decent quote that I want to expound on over the course of this year with some of my own thoughts. From Karel Donk:

Today’s world, and indeed for a very very long time now, is structured in such a way where people are directed, if not forced, to become dependent. Dependent on the system, or dependent on others. When you do enough research, you will find that this is all by design. I won’t go into details in this post, but certainly will in the future. For now it’s enough to note that this is by design. The reason why things are set up in this way is of course to be able to control people and limit their freedoms. When people depend on you, you can manipulate them into behaving the way you want. Because they depend on you, they have little choice but to go along with anything you say because they fear losing what they get from you. By definition if someone depends on someone else, or something else, that person has something to lose.

Beautiful translation, from autistic to English

2007-01-28T15:27:00.001-07:00

This is a fairly long video (8:35), and the opening 5 minutes in her language (which, as someone on YouTube says, sounds like Sigur Rós) may fascinate you or weird you out, but hang on until 5:20 when she starts her translation. Another excerpt:

"Far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is going around me. Ironically, the way that I move when responding to everything around me is described as being in a world of my own. Whereas if I interact with a much more limited set of responses and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings, people claim that I am opening up to true interaction with the world."

Her YouTube index of films is here. Her personal site is here.

This is a point where decades of chomskian linguistics research might be useful: if it's a genuine language it will have to reflect the universal grammar structure. When that has been identified start mapping it to a semantic representation.

If that's not possible it's not a language.

And from her blog:

I did that video “In My Language” that I posted recently. I’ve gotten some interesting responses.

Several people said their autistic children (and one non-autistic sibling) wanted to watch it over and over again. One of them had a son who never hums at all, but hummed the tune from the video all day after he watched it. Others hummed along too. The parents described their children’s reactions as interested, mesmerized, and transfixed.

This is a common reaction between autistic people, I’ve noticed. We do have ways of communicating with things around us that are mutually comprehensible for many of us (not all of us, and not all the same things are comprehensible, there seem to be groupings in that regard). Our interests and our reactions are not random, purposeless, or useless, and are certainly not ugly things to be hidden away or trained out of.

via MetaFilter

Sweden, first country with official embassy in Second Life

2007-01-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

There are reports today that Sweden plans to open the first officially sanctioned embassy inside Second Life. Embassy officials won't be issuing visas or passports there, but they may just be wear rainbow codpieces when they offer you a Cyberian Angel Exotic Massage.

Link to Notes from Sweden blog post, here's a news article: Link.

via Boing Boing

Albertans pay for Falun Gong body parts

2007-01-27T16:04:00.000-07:00

I seriously don’t know why the Chinese government hate Falun Gong (and Tibet) so bloody much. Perhaps we should put them in a room with a room full of suburban Sunday Christians. But take some rich cowboys from Alberta to reap the benefits. Yay, Alberta! From Religion News Blog à la the Edmonton Sun:

An unknown number of wealthy Albertans have travelled to China to buy vital organs harvested from executed devotees of the outlawed Falun Gong movement, says former Edmonton MP David Kilgour.

And he wants the crimes against humanity to stop.

“There’s no doubt people are going from Edmonton and Calgary to China to get new kidneys or new livers,” Kilgour told the Sun yesterday.

He said many of the organs sell for up to $70,000.

“Only foreigners in places like Alberta can afford to pay for them.”

Kilgour, former secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific region, says he has travelled to more than 30 countries while investigating allegations that an underground network of Chinese surgeons, nurses and hospital administration staff are harvesting organs for sale.

“We call it a form of inhumanity,” he said.

Kilgour co-wrote a report on the alleged atrocities last summer with Winnipeg human rights lawyer David Matas.

The two, who spoke at a U of A forum last night on China’s illicit organ harvesting and transplant tourism industry, are set to release a revised report next week in Ottawa.

The new report reveals “a lot more proof” that this practice, which began about mid-2001, is still going on, Kilgour said.

The former Liberal cabinet minister said Albertans need to know that if they’re going to China for an organ transplant, the chances are the organ was taken from a Falun Gong practitioner who was jailed for his or her beliefs.

“These are not executed criminals,” Kilgour said.

Meanwhile, local devotees of Falun Gong are awaiting the results of a judicial review.

Yesterday, Matas and colleague Shirish Chotalia contested a Crown prosecutor’s decision to not proceed with charges against a group of Chinese diplomats.

The lawyers contend anti-Falun Gong booklets distributed in June 2004 by the Chinese consulate in Calgary constituted hate propaganda.

A written decision is expected within the next few months.

Edmonton Sun, via CNEWS, Canada
Jan. 26, 2007
Cary Castagna

David Lynch interview

2007-01-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

Interviewed by Andy Battaglia

David Lynch is a unique filmmaker, and one of the most elusive artists in any field. He created his own strange, at times unutterable, language of film in a directorial career that started with 1977's Eraserhead and expanded to include The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, The Straight Story, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr. He redefined what network TV might be capable of weathering with his series Twin Peaks. He put together a personal website full of art and video of him reading weather reports from outside his California house. Lynch's latest offering is Inland Empire, a bracing film that revisits Mulholland Dr.'s metaphysical math and carries it out a few extra decimal places. It was shot on digital video and has thus far been self-distributed — two distinctions that Lynch has described as profound changes to his method. The A.V. Club drank cappuccino and talked in rounds with Lynch when he was in New York for Inland Empire's première.

Read the interview here.
Thanks to Scott in Vancouver for the link.

EDIT — I forgot to mention, for those interested and long-awaiting, that Twin Peaks Season Two is being released to DVD on 3 April 2007! Finally. (Amazon.com or .ca.) Sorry Europe, no info on your territory as of this update.

Woman’s face visible from space

2007-01-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

In southern Alberta, near Medicine Hat, this is available in the extremely hilly terrain. Check out the Google Maps.

Just an example of how we see what we're familiar with, what makes sense to us, even if it's just chance development by nature. However, I don't know that for sure. It may be the soul of some faerie queen who once ruled that region of Alberta and Saskatchewan, forever enshrined for her glory and beauty by the resident fauns and nymphs before mankind stopped believing in them and their existence faded from memory.

Thanks to Geekologie for the map link!

EDIT — This fellow went out to the actual site to take a few pics. Link.

Identity 2.0 presentation by Dick Hardt

2007-01-25T23:40:00.000-07:00

OSCON 2005 Keynote – Identity 2.0
Dick Hardt | Founder & CEO, Sxip Identity

Watch Dick deliver a compelling and dynamic introduction on Identity 2.0 and how the concept of digital identity is evolving.

“Dick Hardt is brilliant. Watch (and copy) the style. Learn tons from the substance.”
—Lawrence Lessig

“Really captures the complexities of participating in an online world and how identity is at the center of the Web experience.”
—Dan Farber

“A barn-burner of a presentation. I loved this.”
—Cory Doctorow

“I watched it twice, and greatly enjoyed it both times.”
—Jon Udell

Ten Things to Ponder for 2007

2007-01-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

My mother forwarded me this email:

10. Life is sexually transmitted.

9. Good health is merely the slowest rate at which one can die.

8. Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see him without an erection, make him a sandwich.

7. Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks.

6. Some people are like a slinky... not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.

5. Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in the hospital dying of nothing.

4. All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

3. Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars, and a substantial tax cut saves you thirty cents?

2. In the 60's, people took LSD to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

AND THE NUMBER ONE THOUGHT FOR 2007:

We know exactly where one cow with mad-cow-disease is located among the millions and millions of cows in America, but we haven't a clue as to where thousands of Illegal immigrants and Terrorists are located.
Maybe we should put the Department of Agriculture in charge of immigration.

43,000 Americans a year will die

2007-01-23T03:48:00.000-07:00

Check out D.C. Simpson's I Drew This.
James, these are for you, buddy.

Occulterati #7: Technocculterati

2007-01-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

Occulterati #7: Technocculterati
Klint Finley and Don Eglinski join us to celebrate the anniversary of Technoccult, sacrifice live chickens.

Duration :: 00:28:36
Download :: MP3 (32.730MB)
Hosts :: Brenden Simpson, Wu

powered by ODEO

“Volume,” by United Visual Artists

2007-01-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

V&A and PlayStation present Volume, created by United Visual Artists and onepointsix as part of the PlayStation Season.

A luminous interactive installation has transformed the V&A’s John Madejski Garden this winter. Volume is a sculpture of light and sound, an array of light columns positioned dramatically in the centre of the garden.

Volume responds spectacularly to human movement, creating a series of audio-visual experiences. Step inside and see your actions at play with the energy fields throughout the space, triggering a brilliant display of light and sound.

United Visual Artists' approach combines three disciplines: art direction, production design and software engineering. Our philosophy is to tightly integrate these elements to deliver real-time, immersive and responsive experiences.

We work equally with LED, traditional lighting and projection technologies as sculptural elements; our bespoke software approach allows us to use existing technologies in new and unusual ways.

We aim to work on a diverse and expanding range of projects, drawn from the commercial and non-commercial arenas, and to collaborate with a wide range of artists and companies.

Please check www.uva.co.uk for past projects & news.

How easily others affect our perception (of sexy-yum)

2007-01-22T12:33:00.000-07:00

This BPS Research Digest post shows that context affects how attractive we find others before we even know them:

It seems beauty isn’t all in the eye of the beholder after all. Researchers have shown women rate a man as more attractive after they’ve seen another woman smiling at him. By contrast, being a jealous bunch, male observers rate a man as less attractive after they’ve seen a woman smiling at him.

Benedict Jones and colleagues at Aberdeen University’s Face Research Laboratory first asked 28 women and 28 men to rate the attractiveness of several pairs of male faces. Next they were shown the same pairs again, except this time one face in each pair was shown with a woman’s face staring at it from the side, either with a smiling or neutral expression. When the participants then rated the male faces for a second time, their ratings had changed for those male faces that had been stared at by a woman.

Female participants rated a male face as more attractive after it had been stared at by a smiling woman, but less attractive if a woman with a neutral expression had stared at it. By contrast, the male participants showed the opposite pattern, tending to rate a male face as less attractive after they’d seen a smiling woman looking at it.

The researchers said this shows our preference for a man’s face is affected by social cues we pick up from how other people look at him. Apparently a similar phenomenon occurs in the animal kingdom — for example female zebra finches prefer a male who they’ve previously seen paired with another female.

This reflects the fourth rule of seduction purported by Robert Greene in his Art of Seduction (which I've sumarised here for ease of reference):

Appear to be an Object of Desire
Create Triangles
Few are drawn to the person whom others avoid or neglect; people gather around those who have already attracted interest. We want what other people want. To draw your victims closer and make them hungry to possess you, you must create an aura of desirability — of being wanted and courted by many. It will become a point of vanity for them to be the preferred object of your attention, to win you away from a crowd of admirers. Manufacture the illusion of popularity by surrounding yourself with members of the opposite sex — friends, former lovers, present suitors. Create triangles that stimulate rivalry and raise your value. Build a reputation that precedes you: if many have succumbed to your charms, there must be a reason.

For more information, check out:

Jones, B.C., DeBruine, L.M., Little, A.C., Burriss, R.P. & Feinburg, D.R. (2007). Social transmission of face preferences among humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, published online (open access).

It’s just a word

2007-01-22T03:25:00.000-07:00

Of course it's just a word. Just. It has more than a dozen iterations listed on Dictionary.com but the use I refer to is in its most limiting sense. It came up in a movie I saw this evening. It was used a just few times, but always the same: "She's just a child… It's just a woman… It's just the wind."

Working in the service industry, years ago I had a manager that once told me to never refer to anything we served as just this or just that. Never make the customer feel guilty for not buying something pricier, such as, "Would you like a glass of wine or just some water?"

It is a word that kills magic.

To most adults, magic is just silly, just figments of our imagination, just plain stupid.

Though they'd never buy a retort like, It just is!

“Tower of Incompatibabel”

2007-01-22T03:02:00.000-07:00

Pixel artist eBoy has posted a new graphic entitled "Tower of Incompatibabel" (link) that very neatly makes the connection between DRM and proprietary formats and the dystopia that followed the fall of the Tower of Babel.

I was just writing about the problem of language, understanding, and Babel recently on Technoccult: "From Xibalba to Babel, it’s conceptual vacation time!" As has been said before, history repeats itself in one manner or another. We're wont to repeat it all over. From the peoples of Mesopotamia or the Mayan Quiché people (see linked post) to the modern struggles for proprietary digital rights management (DRM) systems. The struggle for control creates contexts which justify the ownership and we can't move ahead to work on unraveling the grander mysteries of ourselves and our world.

(Speaking of which, Ubuntu is releasing Ubuntu Studio for you open source creative media types out there!)

via Boing Boing à la Architectures of Control in Design

“I Love Life”

2007-01-22T02:54:00.000-07:00

From Wednesday Spaghetti:

The "Taking A Moment To Pause and Take Stock in Life" post made us do just that. Dan's words were incredibly touching and raised a lot of questions about what we're all doing in life, and the reasons for it too. It reminded us of a recent work that popped up in Dublin overnight. It's a beautiful piece done by our dear friends at BLuE bRIckS over the holiday season.

via the Wooster Collective

My favourite discovered quotes of 2006

2007-01-19T02:09:00.000-07:00

Ercan Akyol, Turkish caricaturist, Bak issue #5:

It is important that art is produced, but it also has to be consumed. The dynamics of producers and consumers is the motor of art.

Daniel Goleman:

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.

C. G. Jung:

In neither case should they be taken literally, for they are not to be understood semiotically, as signs for definite things, but as symbols. A symbol is an indefinite expression with many meanings, pointing to something not easily defined and therefore not fully known. But the sign always has a fixed meaning, because it is a conventional abbreviation for, or a commonly accepted indication of, something known. The symbol therefore has a large number of analogous variants, and the more of these variants it has at its disposal, the more complete and clear-cut will be the image it projects of its object.

Gerald Schueler, "Chaos and the Psychological Symbolism of the Tarot":
Jung differentiated a sign from a symbol. A true symbol can never be fully explained, while a sign can be fully explained insofar as the conscious ego is concerned. Symbols themselves are archetypal, and they are expressed verbally in terms of signs. We can say, then, that a sign is an individual's interpretation of an archetypal symbol.

James Harvey Robinson:

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

Robin Robertson, "Number as Archetype":
Time after time, we have seen how ideas gestate over a long period of time, then emerge whole, seemingly out of nowhere. But, of course, they do not really appear out of nowhere; they develop out of sight in the unconscious, only to emerge in the consciousness of a small number of supremely gifted individuals whose minds are flexible enough to stretch and include strange new concepts.

Robert Anton Wilson:

Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, "Disobedience was man's Original Virtue."

Alchemical Studies, Vol 13, para. 335 (pp. 265):

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

PS — I'm back…

Deepak Chopra and Grant Morrison, Virgin Comics

2006-08-10T16:22:00.000-06:00

via Tales from the Bookcase Forest à la Alchemically Braindamaged

(The sound is shite, but a worthy watch for those interested in storytelling and the power of myth.)

Everyone with an interest in comics should take a good look at the serious initiatives behind serial-entrepreneur Richard Branson's Virgin Comics. Based out of Bangalore, India, Virgin is tapping the huge market for myth, animation, and new storytelling… all while eschewing the cliché Western stories and retelling the tales of the East.

With Deepak Chopra as a partner in Virgin Comics, and the likes of John Woo, Garth Ennis, and (seen here) Grant Morrison getting involved, we're seeing a refreshing approach to the genre. A beautifully potent genre for storytelling, at that. I wish it would pick up in North America.

‘Imagining the Tenth Dimension’

2006-07-12T14:17:00.000-06:00

In string theory, physicists tell us that the subatomic particles that make up our universe are created within ten spatial dimensions (plus an eleventh dimension of "time") by the vibrations of exquisitely small "superstrings." The average person has barely gotten used to the idea of there being four dimensions: how can we possibly imagine the tenth?

http://www.tenthdimension.com/

Visit the site and click on "Imagining the Ten Dimensions" under the Navigation sidebar. This will lead you through an interesting Flash overview.

In other science news, I came across this article (via Mind Hacks à la 3Quarks) entitled "Science and the Theft of Humanity." This American Scientist article bemoans the division of research into schools and traditions in modern universities as counter productive, and argues that the cognitive and biological sciences are now at the forefront of combining science and art practice.

I would probably argue philosophy has always had a similarly broad outlook, but the author argues that science is where the new action is. What does this imply for occultism in general?

…but while humanistic scholars have been presuming core facts about human nature, human capacities and human being, scientists have been getting to work. One of the most striking features of contemporary intellectual life is the fact that questions formerly reserved for the humanities are today being approached by scientists in various disciplines such as cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, robotics, artificial life, behavioral genetics and evolutionary biology.

Which reminds me of my post from April, A third scientific culture.

Witchcraft ban ends in Zimbabwe

2006-07-03T00:49:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Annan for bringing this to my attention!—

Zimbabwe has unbanned the practice of witchcraft, repealing legislation dating back to colonial rule.

From July the government acknowledges that supernatural powers exists - but prohibits the use of magic to cause someone harm.

In 1899, colonial settlers made it a crime to accuse someone of being a witch or wizard - wary of the witch hunts in Europe a few centuries earlier which saw many people burned at the stake after such accusations.

But to most Zimbabweans, especially those who grew up in the rural areas, it has been absurd to say that the supernatural does not exist.

In fact, it is not hard to find vivid stories about the use of magic.

continued via BBC News…

You heard it here first: DiCaprio is the new cool

2006-06-29T16:18:00.000-06:00

I admit that if I were to immediately rove into making fun of DiCaprio, I'd be doing so out of a conditioned response. And that would make me +lame. But thinking back, he's held some pretty fucking wicked company and in all respect, he's done well for himself in his chosen profession. (Acting being one of the more spiritual crafts, imho.) I've seen reference to him in occult texts, as a friend to artists and other more underground figures and filmmakers you wouldn't expect him to.

DiCaprio has chosen to portray characters from life, from the living myth of the U.S., such as Frank Abagnale Jr (Catch Me If You Can), Howard Hughes (The Aviator), and Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), and the film Gangs of New York. Today, I came across a link on Tales from the Bookcase Forest about Dicaprio's involvement in telling Timothy Leary's story:

DiCaprio to take trip for Leary biopic

Leonardo DiCaprio is set to turn on, tune in and drop out for his next project. The actor's Appian Way shingle has tapped Obie-winning playwright Craig Lucas and Timothy Leary archivist Michael Horowitz to develop a biopic on the counterculture icon as a possible starring vehicle.

DiCaprio, who knew Leary before his death in 1996, has been looking to develop a film on the LSD advocate for several years. The film will focus on Leary's life between his enrollment at West Point in the early 1940s and his escape from prison in 1970.

Lucas, who in recent years has worked outside the Hollywood mainstream, once worked as a frustrated studio scribe. The unconventional writer-director, who made his helming debut last year with the critically acclaimed indie "The Dying Gaul," penned such films as "The Secret Lives of Dentists" and "Prelude to a Kiss," which was adapted from a play of his.

The untitled Timothy Leary project is being produced by DiCaprio, George DiCaprio and Brad Simpson of Appian Way under their first-look deal with Warner Bros. Pictures, and Hillard Elkins of Elkins Entertainment.

This comes on the heels of the news that DiCaprio and writer/director Stephen Gaghan (Traffic) are to take on Malcolm Gladwell's popular book, Blink:

How do we make decisions — good and bad — and why are some people so much better at it than others? That's the question Malcolm Gladwell asks and answers in the follow-up to his huge bestseller, The Tipping Point. Utilizing case studies as diverse as speed dating, pop music, and the shooting of Amadou Diallo, Gladwell reveals that what we think of as decisions made in the blink of an eye are much more complicated than assumed. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, he shows how the difference between good decision-making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but on the few particular details on which we focus. Leaping boldly from example to example, displaying all of the brilliance that made The Tipping Point a classic, Gladwell reveals how we can become better decision makers — in our homes, our offices, and in everyday life. The result is a book that is surprising and transforming. Never again will you think about thinking the same way.

Read more on Blink in this Fast Company article.

The Hierarchy of Customer Experience

2006-06-26T18:03:00.000-06:00

Since business seems to be an interesting topic on so many's minds, I thought I'd post this illustration by Karl Long of ExperienceCurve (or via Flickr). I posted it elsewhere in response to a comment Klint made, but here it is for all.

Anyone wanna make occult analogies, please feel free. I try to blend all my thinking over the past years. But now, I am back to work…

Again back to the occult, branding, and ad sales

2006-06-24T16:40:00.000-06:00

Hmm, so I pop over to Fantastic Planet today and this, literally, is the first page I go to. Any search will load, in time, the entry page or the archive for the month, and this seems to a larger initiative in the online occult community as of recent: the need to make money to sustain oneself.

I'm not directly picking on FP, it's is a good and often popular resource for Gnostic thought, but it's made me think. The only time I see this many ads is on porn sites. But that is just it, the brand and consequent relation I make mentally from ads to porn, to irrelevant or wishy-washy. Not that FP's content is, but in an age of .3-second site interpretation from new readers, how many click-throughs is FP losing because of his presentation. And no, it's never the fault of the user. Everything that happens in life, particularly in magical circles, is the responsibility of the individual interpreting the events. Always.

And as for business models, there's witchy self-help publisher Llewellyn at the forefront of the business (imagine Oprah and your local Native American shaman make a baby that is raised by Wiccan hippies and starts a company), and others like Disinformation (the equivalent of a gay pride parade for the counterculture), New Falcon (whose lack of spell-check makes me question the care they put into their own work, however the books are often fabulous and some of my favourites), and now the online movement. Pop Occulture is doing a remarkable job organising efforts to communicate the message of the occult to the masses, and I've read numerous comments from fans of Tim's that have thanked him for helping them find him. (Oh, and congratulations to Tim on joining the 9rules Network!) There is a market of people looking to be exposed to a message that will helm them answer their questions. That is how any market works today. Key 23, too, brings about articles and essays, which are about a third of the time relevant and not too stereotypical of what I've come to expect from a fringe counterculture. But they've got the good will and brains to bring all the particulars of proper essays to one location to make for an easy find for n00bs.

Further, the geek I am, I'm reading Pursuasive Business Proposals, by Tom Sant, and in it he points something out:

What are "professionals," anyway? Are they merely people who do for money what amateurs do for fun? That may be true to sports and romance, but not in the business world. No, being a professional means something more, something rooted in the origins of the word. […]

A professional is someone who has mastered a complex body of knowledge and who can therefore guide, advise, and tutor others in that area. A professional is somebody who can and does profess.

In as such, I do give kudos to those at Key 23, Pop Occulture, and Disinfo.com, as well as the host of other bloggers out there doing their bit. The effort seems to be in re-interpretation of the esoteric into analogies and parables understanding by a contemporary audience. This is really all the occult is, and the hardest part about it: sharing information that, until now, was really fucking hard to communicate to others. Perhaps all occultists should be putting down their books and checking out information architecture, semiotics, and the study of ontology instead. It's the same thing, but people are actually making a living in those fields. But to profess, in today's age, communication must be precise, it really has to be concise and to the point. Of course, me being me, I am not the best example of this on this site. However, this site is just my mental diarrhea outlet and I have some other stuff in the works.

It's really not so different from the modern business world, particularly a business world readily rooting itself in communications. The new focus is on innovation, better business models, and, ultimately, in providing the best service possible for one's market. The power really does lie with the people now. Like many occultists, businesses seek to iterate new labels, new interpretations, in order to survive. Often, those drawn to the occult fall into it in the first place because the current system of labels aren't currently floating their boat to begin with. So, to survive (spiritually? intellectually? fashionably?) people turn to alternative viewpoints. Dogmatic vehemence in any practise will result in spiritual suicide, but the business world is not so different and with the way things are going, I'd be surprised if the business world didn't begin to find use in occult ideas sooner than later.

But will they find innovators, designers, and artists to create and utilise these methods and insights, rendering the current occult community someewhat moot in the social order of things. Or will occultists say Fuck that and, like the shaman, put their feet back into society and immerse… to emerge as the new innovators? To help others? To help themselves?

As Ramsey Dukes posits in Thundersqueak, what is everyone so afraid of? If you don't try out the enemy it's either your afraid that they're right and you're wrong, or if you're right all along you can learn their spirit and perspectives and bring it back with you to where you started: stronger and wiser because of such.

I just watched this presentation on entrepreneurship by Guy Kawasaki, any occultists out there may want to do the same. In comparison, if you're letting the money soak through the presentation of what it is we all enjoy, it'll tarnish the whole kit-n-kaboodle. But if you set out to change the world, as Kawasaki proclaims good start-ups should focus on, we might learn a thing or two.

Because, really, all the counterculture and occultism is, is simply another approach to trying to understand the world. Whether it's the best one is very much debateable in my opinion, but at the end of the day there are a lot of people that want to be successful, make enough to get by, and help others. While occultists may be focusing on problems too deep to be adequately acted upon by their current capacity for social interaction, many brilliant thinkers out there are innovating new ways (thinking magically and manifesting intent) and aiding their communities.

And if there's one thing I was told as a malevolent youth, it was that you can't help anyone else until you've helped yourself. Ponder this, and it might show us a side of occult spirituality that many aren't willing to acknowledge. I'm not saying everyone, but I'm throwing it out there from personal observation…

Watch the Guy Kawasaki video.

Uh-oh!

2006-06-20T20:10:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Geoff for forwarding me this gem!

Steven Spielberg to explore gravity fields

2006-06-17T10:52:00.000-06:00

via I Watch Stuff!

Though an exact plot has not yet been worked out, Steven Spielberg has announced that he will direct a film based on Caltech physicist Kip Thorne's theories of gravity fields:
Based on real science, the film will explore the mind-bending territory of black holes and gravity waves and touch on some of the hypotheses that Albert Einstein chased but never could prove.

The article also notes the other projects Spielberg has offered as possibilities for his next film, including Indiana Jones IV and an untitled Abraham Lincoln biopic. I'm hoping this means that we have at least a fifty-fifty shot of seeing a time-traveling Lincoln zipping through wormholes to free the slaves and stop Booth from shooting him. Either that, or Indiana Jones and the Proposed Theory of Gravity Fields.

Stuff you don’t see in high school bio

2006-06-13T11:19:00.000-06:00

via Cliff Pickover's RealityCarnival
Maybe it's because I am a visual person, but wow these are worth taking a look at. More following the link:

http://www.burlingtonnews.net/skulls.html

‘SLC Punk!’

2006-06-12T14:27:00.000-06:00

Some more Fell goodness for you today, in relation to the previous post, You are the only enemy you will ever have. In further retrospect, one of the best films I had the pleasure of seeing over the past few months was recommended to me by Kevin at The Lobby on Whyte Avenue (for Edmontonians reading this into eclectic cinema, check it out).

The film is called SLC Punk! (trailer here) and I was surprised I'd not seen it earlier. But for anyone who grew up part of a subculture, or who still clings on to the whatever vestiges they have left, this movie is worth seeing. The end was particularly good, imho. It touches on the community felt and perpetuated by subcultures in a sardonic and light-hearted fashion. Director James Merendino fuses elements similar to David Fincher's Fight Club, making for a pleasurable viewing experience (see: above clip). But mostly, it's a good coming-of-age tale… for ex-punks… is there such a thing?

In contrast, I went to see the French film Caché last week with a friend of mine. Now, I'm not one to prevent anyone from doing anything, but let me leave you with a friendly suggestion: use those two hours of your life doing something — anything — else. Masturbation would have been considerably more worthwhile (I was with good company, however).

You are the only enemy you will ever have

2006-06-12T08:45:00.000-06:00

In a post entitled "Pavlov's Gods," Rev Max talks a bit about how Gnostics were persecuted and the small sects of previously persecuted Christians grew together and then, in time, ended up further persecuting and pretty much wiping out Gnostics altogether. Sorta like that awesome line in Munich where Jew Steve (Daniel Craig) and company are dancing and drinking wine at that outdoor café, and he blurts out in defense of their assassinations: 'Cause no one fucks with Jews! or something like that. But it was sweet. Now little does Steve remember, but Germany fucked with Jews. So have everyone else, pretty much. Except maybe the Inuit. (However, they're busy enough arguing with the Canadian government about being forced to teach Inuit children the theory of evolution in their schools. And personally, I prefer both the Jewish and Inuit versions better.)

Anyhow, let's take a little look-see at the Gnostics in light of their abstinence from partaking in the violence that is persecution:

Two millennia ago, Christians were routinely set on fire and put to the sword as casually as you and I might light a cigarette.

[…] a Christian faction called the "Orthodox" movement not only survived but flourished under persecution, eventually merging with the Holy Roman Empire and turning the apparatus of the imperial military against rival Christian groups.

Chief among the targets of the ascendant Orthodox faction were the Gnostic Christians, secretive mystics who had stridently opposed persecution and martyrdom all along. In short, the Gnostics refused to play the political power game and were rewarded with extermination.

Fast-forward 16 centuries. Most Christians today attribute the sudden disappearance of the Gnostic schools to flaws inherent in the Gnostic worldview. We are told that the Gnostics were privy to forbidden mysteries; that they "deserved to lose" because their teachings were "exclusive, elitist" and (worst of all) "esoteric."

Read between the lines of the Gnostic scriptures, however, and an amazing, alternate history stands revealed.

The Gnostics stood aloof from history because not because they were cowards but because they were wise. Even though they knew that they would lose their chance to gain power in the short run, they got to keep something even more important — their souls.

Interesting. And I agree. This non-partisan element also runs parallel to my piece on Japanese design practise, in regards to sloughing off elements of self-definition in favour of being "of the moment." And further yet: I am re-reading Thundersqueak, by Ramsey Dukes (writing as Angerford & Lea), and in it he speaks of a children's book called The Wishing Well, by Gerald Heard:

It was a parable about evolution, and began with a group of fish in prehistoric time being visited by an angel who gave them one, and only one, wish: that they could become whatever they chose. Over the aeons these fish evolved: first into land creatures, then mammals, and finally towards man. But the point was that this evolution was a gradual adaptation towards greater flexibility, it involved no specialising or extremes of function. However, at various points in time, these creatures used up their wish and became something else. Some, while still fish, chose to be fierce and voracious — to become sharks. At a later reptilian stage some of the creatures became snakes, others became birds. Later ones chose to be fierce as tigers, big as elephants, or to move in herds as buffalo, and so on. The final division before the present age was that some of the creatures, now hominid, opted to swing in trees and become apes. Those who had retained their wish, who still had the choice over their destiny, had evolved into men. All others had become specialists. […]

The same is true on the local scale of one lifetime. Anyone who specialises and becomes expert in some field, whilst a shining example in the eyes of the popular opinion, is in fact an evolutionary drop-out, a falling star.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols:—

A new creation in particular, the new Reich for instance, has more need of enemies than friends: only in opposition does it feel itself necessary, only in opposition does it become necessary… We adopt the same attitude towards the "enemy within."

Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies:—

Resemble all that surroundeth thee; yet be thyself and take thy pleasure among the living.

This is that which is written — Lurk! — in the Book of the Law.

So ambiguity and "uselessness" become ideal traits, in a sense. Again, following a train of thought I was having with Georgina in this post, it brings up the power of being undefined. The hard part is the journey from social animal to that of a self-aware entity, and a major part of that is an acknowledgement that you are just a host for a greater experience being had through you. Dukes continues:

You dream of killing me? No, as George Orwell revealed in 1984, that is not enough. You wish to torture and brainwash me until I love you, until the rebel has become a supporter. For you recognise that the enemy is not in my body, but in my mind. But if the enemy is in my mind what happens when I am brainwashed and tortured? When my body's behaviour changes to please you, how can you be sure that it was the enemy that has suffered or been destroyed; how can you be sure that it is not merely a spirit that has been driven out? You have not hurt the rebel, you have merely caused it to vacate my body. The bird has flown; but at least you used to know, or believed that you knew, where the bird was. Now it is beyond your grasp. The bird has flown.

Now I can tell you one place where that bird is secure. It is secure in your own mind. […]

As a tyrant you will spend your life pursuing potential enemies. But it will all be in vain. For the enemies that haunt you, and the only ones you will ever recognise or comprehend, are those enemeies that already exist in your mind. Destroy the whole world and they will live on within you. Reduce me to an empty body and what will you have but an empty body? The bird will have flown back to its nest in your own mind. You are the only rebel there ever was.

This is applicable to all aspects of life; every part of life is a form of projection. You are the only enemy you will ever have.

CGI meteorite collision simulation

2006-06-11T23:00:00.000-06:00

The diameter of the meteorite is slightly bigger than the breadth of Honshu Japan. The collision point is located at the 3,000 km south from Japan in the ocean. The velocity of the meteorite is 70,000 km/h. Enjoy.

Thoughts of angles and angels

2006-06-11T18:10:00.000-06:00

Aside from just absolutely adoring this band, The Knife, I got to thinking about my own actual process of thinking the other day. I was sitting over dinner with my friend, Steph, putzing over an idea I've been working on for many years, but just beginning to formulate a process by which to introduce it into the world. I've briefly spoken about it with Channel Null and Rev Max, but it seems more in order to flesh out the thoughts to the words. Steph was quick to point out the question of How, which is obviously one of the most important for any good design to work.

The video here, for their single "Silent Shout," was directed by Andreas Nilsson and drew on the work of 1930s German animator Oscar Fischinger and on Charles Burns's graphic novel, Black Hole.

What I find particularly interesting is the analogy I can make between my process of thinking — sorta what is going on my head — and the visuals of this video. Now, I would figure that magic and design have more than a few things in common, which I've touched on elsewhere, but I've always pondered how others form thoughts, how familiar they are with the process itself, and just how far from the resultant thought can they deduce the root effects. Through the years of my lazy meditations, I've become very familiar with the reduction of my analogies, in my mind, at least, to basic geometries.

Where I lack, however, and which I am again beginning to relive, is my attachment to emotions. A bit. It's not like I am a emotionally devoid husk, but I tend to not meddle in the everyday emotions of experience. But I can always seem to make geometric analogies to the events occurring in my life. The video above makes the association between the music and the movement of geometry, not unlike my process of thinking and ultimately visualising connections between phenomenon. It makes it usually easy to find kinks in ideas, and to draw sometimes sweeping observations. Sometimes I am wrong, but often it is that I lack the capacity to translate from my own thoughts to plain language for conversation.

After speaking to a designer friend of mine in Vancouver while I was there, I got the feeling that there are those that can see the designs, think in design, and then there is a large contingent that cannot. I am not claiming to be an astonishing designer, far from it, I have lots to learn yet, but I believe there is an upper-hand in being able to reduce analogies to their base forms. This resultant geometries should define the parametre by which the entire design process should flow. Colour, emotion, shape, tone, attitude… can all be deduced metaphorically to base geometries. (See: Colour theory according to Wassily Kandinsky.)

This should really lead to a deeper understanding not only of clients' needs, it defines that parametre by which all design for any particular project should proceed. And further, it introduces us to a more base understanding of the intelligence and realm by which preternatural entities, such as angels and demons, exist (whatever that means). (See: Who peers back at us from beyond.)

And on another note, I am truly curious about the etymology of the words "angle" and "angel," as most evocations of angels and demons are rooted in sigils crafted from particular angles that have subtler, esoteric connotations. The last trip we took out to the Rocky Mountains last year left me with some very intense experiences. Mark and I played with coloured rods for what seemed like hours, rearranging them into abstractions of image and shape, and while under the influence of psilocybin we continued a full on dialogue through the positioning of these rods.

I am sure I could make this process of thinking out onto a particular level of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, but what I am more concerned with is how to create a process of translation. Unfortunately, now that I think about it, this seems to be, by and large, the occult's largest issue it must overcome: creating pragmatic analogies that allow one to share esoteric knowledge with others.

Which ultimately reduces me to admitting I hate having to explain myself. Fortunately, sometimes, some people are worth it and drive me to figure out ways.

If you dig "Silent Shout," the video for their most recent single, "We Share Our Mothers' Health," may be seen via the link.

High Priest of the Church of Satan on the CBC tonight

2006-06-06T12:52:00.000-06:00

If you're visiting Occult Design from the CBC website, please feel free to peruse the rest of this blog or review some of the more pertinent material posted here, which is actually great food for thought (and not "Satanic"):

Worthwhile Posts Reviewed

Peace.

Okay, to celebrate 6/6/06, George Stroumboulopoulos has a Satan-themed episode of The Hour on CBC Newsworld tonight, airing, as always, at 8:00 and 11:00 PM EST.

As an aside, I saw George posted this on The Hour website:

Zombie Slaves
Unbelievable. The story of a man turned zombie, turned zombie slave, turned man: The story begins in 1962, in Haiti. A man called Clairvius Narcisse was sold to a zombie master by his brothers, because Clairvius refused to sell his share of the family land. Soon after Clairvius "officially" died, and was buried. However, he had been later secretly unburied, and was actually working as a zombie slave on a sugar plantation with many other zombies. In 1964, his zombie master died, and he wandered across the island in a psychotic daze for the next 16 years. The drugs that made him psychotic were gradually wearing off. In 1980, he accidentally stumbled across his long-lost sister in a market place, and recognized her. She didn’t recognise him, but he identified himself to her by telling her early childhood experiences that only he could possibly know.

Happy 6/6/06

2006-06-06T03:28:00.001-06:00

For those of you that know me personally — or care — there are more pics on Flickr there of my trip here to Vancouver. I'll be back in Edmonton later today and am looking forward to returning to Alberta. (Yes, Van is fantastic, but it's not home. Yet.) And speaking of which, I have to thank Mal & Age for taking me into their home and providing the most wonderful red carpet treatment; I had an awesome time. Thank you, both! xo

Occult Design will soon return to its regularly scheduled programming.

Petition to Support the Arts

2006-06-02T19:26:00.000-06:00

Shafraaz forwarded this to me, worthwhile for any Canadians perusing this:

The Harper government's giveaway of $500 per child to support sports activities is glaringly unfair. Why sports and not the arts? Are those who spend a small fortune on giving their children music lessons, visual art,youth writing programs, dance, film & video-production (etc.), less worthy of support than hockey, soccer or other sports parents?

Children will benefit throughout their whole lives, as will the various arts organizations, by investing in the arts.

From the note I received:
"…arts organizations, by the way, do not pay salaries measured in millions of dollars as do the sports teams."

Please sign this petition at
http://www.petitiononline.com/dbs201bl/

Note: Don't forget to add your postal code in the required address field.

‘Spirituality and Japanese Design Practise’

2006-05-31T19:13:00.000-06:00

Just arrived in Vancouver this afternoon. (Wow, this city has changed!) Arrived to some good e-mails: am now a Professional member of the International Chapter of the AIGA, United States.

Also, I didn't think they would, but Ambidextrous, the multi-disciplinary design magazine of the Stanford Institute of Design (d.school), put the last piece I wrote for them on their blog for public consumption. Thanks, Wendy!

Check the article out here!

Help me find Frater Achad in Vancouver

2006-05-30T12:19:00.000-06:00

As some of you know, I will be arriving in Vancouver tomorrow. If anyone reading this knows or knows someone that knows the location of any of Charles Stansfeld Jones's (aka Frater Achad) artefact locales in the Vancouver area, I would love to hear about them. Some time ago I lost myself to some of his writings and the man was a freaking genius.

From Wikipedia:

In late 1917 Jones was arrested in a Vancouver hotel, where he had been behaving erratically. He was imprisoned on suspicion of being a draft dodger who was pretending to be insane. He was released after three days.

Kenneth Grant, writing in The Magical Revival, claims that on Jones' return to Vancouver circa 1930, he was wearing only a raincoat, which he proceeded to throw off, and then circumambulated the center of the city as a magical operation of some sort, earning himself criminal arrest and a stay in a mental institution. This story, which Grant may have had directly from Crowley, is in all likelihood a confusion of the 1917 incident with the "insanity" of Jones' 1928 baptism and 1929 confirmation in the Roman Catholic Church.

Too bad he lost his footing and went mad. I guess that's the risk we take with the nonsense that is magic.

Speaking of which, that has been on my mind lately. After speaking to some designer acquaintances with backgrounds in esoteric theology, and being aware of the history of Achad and the Qabalah, I've come to realise that much of the talk about defining oneself is about defining one's own path through the chaos that is the potentiality of the human transcendence, which is really a developing ontology of symbolic interpretations of one's existence. Anyone with any experience in numerology, gematria, the Arabic abjad, I Ching, or any similar sorts of systems will know that everything is interrelated. No big whoop-dee-doo once your used to the notion and have experienced its beauty. To be honest, I'm reduced to tears when faced with it. (Tears of joy, so shut up.)

But for some that lose themselves to the patterns, the connections, all that which might seem all-important, they seem to be missing one important element of their own development: none of it is important. And as Stanley Kubrick said:

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. […] However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

That "light" is the power we have to define our own path towards the next level of personal development. A passion, a dream, a goal, something to fight for. But the trick is, that development can only come out of the chaos of metaphorically destroying whatever came before it. That means you (or me). Getting too caught up in the wonders of the now — the you of any moment or time — can only get you so far.

We must always be willing to destroy ourselves in order to see what it was that held us together in the first place. And to end on one more quote, by Mamoru Oshii, the writer & director of Ghost in the Shell: Innocence:

Humans can only confirm that they are humans by reconstructing themselves into something else.

Bayer willingly sells pharmaceuticals infected with AIDS

2006-05-30T09:39:00.000-06:00

This has nothing to do with the occult or design, but should be seen. I've been working on some stuff, so I will return to blogging shortly.

EDIT — After some discussion with ~~professional skeptics~~ friends of mine, I did some digging around to find more about this. It took place in 1981, but here is a further quote:

A division of the pharmaceutical giant Bayer in the 1980s sold a medicine to Asia and Latin America that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS while it was selling a new, safer product in the west, The New York Times alleged Thursday.

Cutter Biological wanted to avoid being stuck with large stores of a product that was becoming increasingly unmarketable in the United States and Europe, according to internal company documents obtained by the daily.

The company also sought to save money by honoring several fixed-price contracts with the old product, which was cheaper to produce than the new, safer blood-clotting medicine, the daily said other company records suggest.

"These are the most incriminating internal pharmaceutical industry documents I have ever seen," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, who as director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group has been investigating the industry's practices for three decades.

There is also a piece from Columbia University and The New York Times, but you need a log-in to read the latter so I'll just post it here for you:

Bayer Named In AIDS Suit
Published: March 18, 1987

LEAD: Bayer A.G., the giant West German chemical company, said today that it had been sued over its sale of hemophilia drugs that may have been infected with the AIDS virus.

Bayer A.G., the giant West German chemical company, said today that it had been sued over its sale of hemophilia drugs that may have been infected with the AIDS virus.

The news sent Bayer's shares tumbling by 12.50 marks, or about $6.90, to 292.50 marks, or $162.50, on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and pulled the whole market lower.

A Bayer statement said fewer than 20 patients who have been treated with the Factor VIII hemophilia drug have filed liability claims against the company charging that the substance was contaminated with the AIDS virus.

Factor VIII, which is essential for the treatment of hemophiliacs, is made from human blood plasma. The drug is produced by Miles Laboratories Inc., an Elkhart, Ind., subsidiary of Bayer, a Bayer spokesman said.

The liability claims, which were filed both in the United States and Western Europe, are still in a pre-court phase, said the spokesman, who requested anonymity.

He added that the drugs infected with the AIDS virus could have been produced by other pharmaceutical companies and not Bayer. But the Bayer statement did not deny that its product might have been contaminated in the past.

Since early 1985, Bayer has been screening all donated blood plasma for the AIDS virus, the company statement said, and the drug is now believed to be AIDS-free.

Unified through the lowest common social denominator

2006-05-24T10:27:00.000-06:00

Interesting. This is from last night, here in Edmonton. (Yes, the rest of the world has soccer, Canada has hockey.)

On the weekend, a friend and I were sitting at Café Select a few blocks down from the throngs of drunken sports fans and the literal block-long walls of riot police and paramedics maintaining a semblance of order on Whyte Avenue. My friend was quick to point out how disgusting the behaviour is, and we discussed it briefly with our waiter. I agree with her, but something is missing from the equation.

She pointed out that is was the projection of unity, expressed by the lowest common denominator: unification through the association of athletes, something to tie together the collective voice of a community. Not scholastic, artistic, humanitarian, or any other pursuit, but that of the so-called "jock." Really, no different from Romans watching gladiators two millennia ago.

But yet I can appreciate the force and power of the collective here (Hobbes's Leviathan coming to mind, even though I've not read it).

I am of the opinion that internet communities that build up around the likes of Slashdot, Digg, Boing Boing, et cetera, represent a new form of community. This is nothing new online, and has been discussed elsewhere at length. Smaller, more refined efforts and voices, more specialised individuals coming together under one banner or another, then disbanding till the next time.

Even though I can appreciate the force and am even in awe of the community by this display at the coliseum here in Edmonton, and want to see it flourish into the future, my friend is right, I believe, in that the mass is dying and we're moving away from such groupthink. This would imply that, as individuals, we refine more of who we are and through communications technology, are allowed the convenience of organising ourselves faster and in regards to much more specific events or causes.

Instead of a raucous crowd of cheering nationalists, we have élite cells consisting of specialists — a club thundering down versus the precision of a razor.

This makes me wonder about the so-called Thousandfold Thought as I've been pondering over the past while, as written about by R. Scott Bakker. The analogy also works for society versus secret society.

Sorry, this post is a bit vague. I find the video is quite powerful and there are so many aspects of it that I am contemplating in the back of my head, when I should really be dealing with some other matters here. :-)

EDIT — While the above video evokes respectable feelings of pride and admiration, thanks to Teri for posting the following on MySpace. These illustrate the madness that accompanies these "community events" (of course, liquor is involved). I'm not critical of the enjoyment of the game, hockey is but a catalyst to bring about this insane fervour across the whole of the city. It's the mentality that's been cultured and pretty much expected:

Here we see two jocks crawling across wires hanging across Whyte Avenue. What you don't get to see, however, is that when they fall, the crowd disperses and they smack the pavement pretty good.

And here, two girls flash the crowd. Fun, until one of them gets burned with pyrotechnics, aimed and fired at her from a metre or two away.

I know worse happens in other cities and parts of the world, but in this post's comments Rev Max puts it well:

projecting unmet needs onto mass spectacle as a means to fill and inner emptiness, for the little man crowd member to become important (via group action) the contagion of group violence, political rallies with floodlights and torchlit processions cause people to swoon, some sort of latter day mass ritual substitute political shamanism

like mysticism in the other direction, not ennobling but degrading

1st Birthday

2006-05-19T18:44:00.001-06:00

Well. I remember the first time I set up a blog, which was something like six or seven years ago. It was a LiveJournal site, right back when LJ literally just started out, before Six Apart bought them. Then, when I first started this blog, it was more of a joke by the name of Love Pretty, Hate Stupid. The great majority of the first entries were about sexuality, sex magic, and what not.

365 days. In this first year, my ideas and concepts about occultism have grown and shifted in many ways. I love the occult because it's a system of symbols, of learning to interpret, to explore the worlds within and without. That makes it perfectly fine to see the world one way yesterday, and another tomorrow. Through much work, I've come to become very comfortable in the today — as my friend Jason, Reiki master and poet, puts it: Being of the moment.

In 365 days I've met and discussed various topics, from design to the occult, and met numerous exciting and wonderful voices. I know I may not always be the easiest to get along with, but I'm more interested in stirring the debate and the process of learning than in my own ego, so I am also one of the first to apologise when I overstep the boundaries of others.

And after one year, it seems I begin a new chapter. I quit both of my jobs last week and am heading to Vancouver and Whistler for much-needed relaxing. Two partners and I incorporate our first company together in the coming weeks, a café-style pub tentatively called the Heart of Hundreds. I begin to focus more on my own freelance design work, rather than others'. I consolidated all my debt and was even allowed a credit card this year, the first since I buggered my credit back in college. My roommates and I are moving into a new house. Jennifer Emick, of altreligion.about.com, even posted a link to our humble blog and traffic spiked this morning. And my focus shifts from the spiritual to business: comfortable with my years-in-the-coming piety, I begin to appreciate the game of the business world more and more in all its regards. (I must be getting all growed-up, my subscription to the Harvard Business Review gets me quite excited now.) The wisdom I've garnered in the occult is easily translated to the business world with some work, it just takes some study and acquainting myself with the semantic of business. I find the game is the same in all systems, it's just the language and the façades of the symbols that change. I begin to see through the veneer and the structures of business are becoming ever more obvious to me.

I even broke my year-plus-long vow of celibacy last night (to the shock and awe of some)! Taking time off from the so-called pursuit of happiness and years of refining what I desire in friends led me to a woman that I immediately came to appreciate. Her knowledge of magic is practical and natural, she's smart, funny, confident and aggressive, doesn't mind that I am a bad dancer, her appreciation of Star Trek is tantamount to that of my friends, and it doesn't hurt that she's most-awesomely gorgeous. She even left her bruises upon my neck. Well worth breaking my vow for. Besides, we all know why rules were made in the first place…

Thanks to anyone and everyone that stop by to read what I've been typing. I don't know how pertinent it is, but I've received a few notes of thanks and I appreciate the community. Year #2 should prove even more interesting as I start to re-apply this next generation of experience and knowledge into practical matters!

Chuck Palahniuk on living as a story that you’ve created

2006-05-13T14:18:00.000-06:00

This is a clip from Chuck Palahniuk's documentary DVD entitled Postcards from the Future, featuring the Fight Club author. After speaking with my wonderful Kristin in Melbourne this morning, this video is for you. xo

chuckpalahniuk.net

via Technoccult

The delusion of happiness

2006-05-11T11:26:00.000-06:00

Stumbling on Happiness, a new book by Daniel Gilbert, proclaims that "more money … or a bigger house or a fancier car … won't make us happy … What gets us through life, evidently, is just the right amount of delusion — enough to fool ourselves into feeling relatively good about ourselves … but not so much as to exceed our own credulity." As Daniel writes: "If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we'd be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning … But if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we'd be too deluded to find our slippers."

The phenomenon helps explain why it's "possible that Christopher Reeve believed himself in some ways better off after he became a quadriplegic, or that Lance Armstrong is glad to have had cancer, or that cancer patients in general tend to be more optimistic about the future than healthy people, and "that conjoined twins rate themselves as happy as nonconjoined people." Apparently, the only group not stumbling into happiness are the clinically depressed, who "seem less susceptible to these basic cognitive errors. For instance, healthy people can be deluded into greater happiness when granted the mere illusion of control over their environment; the clinically depressed recognize the illusion for what it is."

I disagree with the notion that they are happy or better off because of their accidents. It was the event which led them to a shift in perception, which leads them to new focuses — more often, directing more time to instrospection and following the paths in their life that lead them to happiness. I have the documents at home, but I believe the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, goes into how the perfect balance for optimal performance (including personal drive to accomplish and personal sense of well-being) comes from setting up challenges just increments ahead of our current set of ability to easily accomplish. It's about challenges. This may be overlaid onto the Hero's Journey, or monomyth, of Joseph Campbell, in that we all require stories and a process of growth in order to be alive. The metaphor of the autonomous people, the robots, the asleep, all the words artists, poets, occultists, and others use to refer to the vulgar masses of Others, is generally out of spite and because there is no relation of one's story and tribulations to the one making the accusations.

Through the refinement of focus, upon one's life, and the personal triumph of defining one's own path, comes something beyond happiness. This is a spiritual path, a wondrous aspect of the Great Work, the path of the mystics. "Happiness," the concept, is spoon-fed to Westerners to keep them complacent. Fear is a by-product of their fragile delusions being smashed against the wall, in essence an ontological anarchy which would allow them the freedom to think for themselves. In light of this, I say Fuck happiness. Embrace the full gamut of feelings that accompany the opportunity chaos provides!

I agree with Gilbert's delusion of happiness. As such, here is a great quote from Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, by William James:

Recent psychology … speaks of the threshold of man's consciousness in general to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked. … And so we might speak of a "pain threshold," a "fear threshold," a "misery threshold," and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy minded habitually live on the sunny side of their misery line; the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension.

Does it not appear as if one who lived habitually on one side of the pain threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?

MMO funeral crashing

2006-05-08T21:52:00.000-06:00

I have nothing to say to this, other than HAHA.

EDIT— Okay, I suppose I shouldn't presume that viewers will know wtf is going on in this video. An "MMO" stands for massively multiplayer online game, in this case it's World of Warcraft, which I am sure most everyone has heard of. Beginning in Asia, I believe, years ago, when a fellow gamer would pass on in real life, her or his mates in-game would hold a funeral for them. Since many of these friends you never meet in meatspace, it only seems fitting that you can grieve over the loss of someone you cared for online in one form or another.

What we see here is a funeral in progress, and an in-game "guild" — group of players — attacking those present at said funeral. And, in turn, slaughtering everyone at the funeral. Tasteless? Yes. Funny? Of course.

Why? you might ask. Well, I have no definitive answer. I can say, however, that if you're shocked at this behavious online, I want you to ponder this: We, of the postmodern ethic, grow in number. If you find this offensive, know that we are a representation of a natural development in the coming social tapestry that is slowly embracing children the world over. You will, in time, become the minority. It's time to adapt to whatever it is we find funny.

On that note, as I am sure the Buddha said in one way or another, Learn to laugh at everything and the world holds no power over you.

Tolerance? Why?

2006-05-08T21:19:00.000-06:00

Well, I am happy Douglas Rushkoff said it, as it seems bleeding hearts all over will kick up a stink at the first questioning of the status quo. I've known many, and even lost friends, because of my so-called "anger" or "hatred." Fuck that. Maybe some of us just see through the ridiculous notion of everyone-is-equal and we base merit on one's actions, not on lofty ideals.

With leaders in the public eye like these guys, does anyone really have to wonder why and how stereotypes come to exist in the mind of the public? I mean, really. Further, as a fellow human being, I feel I have to step up just a little and take a bit of responsibility for these fucking idiots. We all come from the same monkeys, so I feel a bit obligated.

I think it's time to get serious about the role God plays in human affairs, and evaluate whether it's appropriate to let everyone in on the bad news: God doesn't exist, never did, and the closest thing we'll ever see to God will emerge from our own collective efforts at making meaning.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I no longer see the real value in being tolerant of other people's beliefs. Sure, when beliefs are relegated to the realm of pure entertainment, they pose no real danger. So, a kid believes U2 is really a supergroup on par with The Beatles or The Who. That's *his* problem, and it doesn't really do a lot of harm to anyone except those of us who still stop by MTV occasionally to see what might be playing.

When religions are practiced, as they are by a majority of those in developed nations, today, as a kind of nostalgic little ritual - a community event or an excuse to get together and not work - it doesn't really screw anything up too badly. But when they radically alter our ability to contend with reality, cope with difference, or implement the most basic ethical provisions, they must be stopped.

Like any other public health crisis, the belief in religion must now be treated as a sickness. It is an epidemic, paralyzing our nation's ability to behave in a rational way, and - given our weapons capabilities - posing an increasingly grave threat to the rest of the world.

Follow this quote up with the rest of the post:

Faith = Illness.
Why I've had it with religious tolerance.

And his follow-up post/reply to e-mails:

The Testament, My Testament

As Sun Tzu threw out there:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

The United States cannot know their enemy with ballistic missiles. Which is a reflection of their inability to know themselves. If they would truly know the passions of their "enemies," they would be able to define themselves in contrast, and vice versa. However, they do not. They live in fear and strike from afar.

In fact, I can't think of anything more dishonourable.

We are war, within and without. With every vulgar and condemning piece of myself I can excise, I may further refine — through reflection of myself — what it is with the world that destroys itself. Subsequently, my healing and initiation into higher revelations of the self act as revelatory initiations into realms of power over the world around me.

Art and the New Biology of the Mind

2006-05-08T19:05:00.000-06:00

Columbia's recent "Art and the New Biology of the Mind" forum offered different perspectives on the relationships between science and the arts and with the process of visual perception. Many of the world's leading scientists addressed how new scientific discoveries offer extraordinary possibilities to re-examine human creativity, and give a clearer understanding of the ways in which we respond to the arts.

Opening Remarks

David Freedberg
Director, the Italian Academy, and Professor of Art History, Columbia University
Real Video (3:39)

Eric R. Kandel
Nobel Laureate and University Professor, Columbia University
Real Video (17:48)

Emotion and Consciousness

Antonio Damasio
David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience and Director of The Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California
Real Video (24:52)

Raymond Dolan
Professor of Neuropsychiatry and Head of Department, Institute of Neurology, University College, London
Real Video (26:33)

Vittorio Gallese
Associate Professor of Human Physiology, Università degli studi di Parma
Real Video (21:19)

Joseph LeDoux
Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, New York University
Real Video (25:07)

Vision and Aesthetics

Margaret Livingstone
Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
Real Video (28:01)

V. S. Ramachandran
Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, and Professor, University of California, San Diego; Adjunct Professor of Biology, the Salk Institute
Real Video (24:27)

Semir Zeki
Professor of Neurobiology, University College, London
Real Video (33:49)

via Columbia University

Code, Culture, Imagination

2006-05-02T16:40:00.000-06:00

WORDS MADE FLESH
Code, Culture, Imagination
by Florian Cramer

Media Design Research
Piet Zwart Institute
institute for postgraduate studies and research
Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/

Abstract: Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.

‘New American Schoolhouse’

2006-04-29T09:39:00.000-06:00

"Voices from the New American Schoolhouse explores life outside the usual educational box. Narrated exclusively by students, the film chronicles life and learning at the Fairhaven School in Upper Marlboro, MD which practices an undiluted form of freedom and democracy that turns mainstream education theory on its head. Filmmaker Danny Mydlack enjoyed unrestricted access over a two-year period to produce this candid and unblinking encounter with kid-powered learning."

A third scientific culture

2006-04-28T21:39:00.000-06:00

I admit, I am not a scientist. I am pretty far from adhering to any empirical truth. But that the humanities as a field of study could have avoided the implications of natural sciences and biology for all this time astounds me. By creating systematic ontologies by which to tackle their understanding of the world around them, they so often trap themselves within their own devices — limited by exactly that which they would deny in their pursuit of absolute knowledge. They deny the limitations of their perspective.

This "third culture" concept is great, though. I have not read Elster's book, mentioned below, so I dunno if it's more for novelty's sake, but the fuckers should just come out and call it what it may be, or become — alchemy:

Anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, disciplines that have based their autonomy on the claim that the system of social actions and human cultures is largely independent from their biological foundation, today make way for naturalistic research programs and the methods of the natural sciences. […]

It is remarkable that the discovery of a class of premotor neurons in the brain of macaque monkeys should seem to have important repercussions on our understanding the nature of human sociality. What does, after all, the activation of a cell of the nervous system of a monkey have to do with the intricacies of our social relations?

Beyond the fascinating arguments provoked by this discovery (*), this illustrates the changes that have taken place in the last twenty years in the relationship between the natural sciences and the humanities, that is “the two cultures,” defined by C.P. Snow in his famous 1959 essay. Anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, disciplines that have based their autonomy on the claim that the system of social actions and human cultures is largely independent from their biological foundation, today make way for naturalistic research programs and the methods of the natural sciences.

So, is a third culture possible, as defined by John Brockman, in which the natural sciences take part in making sense of ourselves and our actions? […]

Thus, the third culture can be seen as a multidimensional culture, where explanations originating in different disciplines combine together without cancelling one another. As yet another example, one might think of Jon Elster’s work on emotions in his book The Alchemies of the Mind, in which neurobiology, literature, and rational choice theory come together as vectors of a causative and conceptual explanation of what is involved in feeling emotion.

Is then a third culture possible? There is a strong temptation to see in these smoothly combined approaches a new path to knowledge, a pluralistic culture that weaves together a dense plot of facts and interpretations without the ideological burden of having to reduce the ones to the others or vice versa.

full article via Edge

Total Immersion’s ‘augmented reality’

2006-04-28T15:53:00.000-06:00

This is a video from DEMO 2004 showing Total Immersion's D'Fusion technology, which was rumoured to be used in Nintendo's then-unnamed upcoming console, Revolution. (The Revolution has been renamed the Wii as of this week.)

All I can think of is… Vurt, by Jeff Noon. All thanks to Total Immersion and Nintendo!

Thanks to Scott, in Vancouver, for e-mailing me the link.

Even Bob Marley was spun for public consumption

2006-04-28T12:15:00.000-06:00

Tim Manners, of Reveries Magazine, has an interesting bit on the grooming of Bob Marley for North American (and eventual world) consumption:

Bob Marley’s transition from “local hero to global legend” was the result of a carefully calibrated marketing effort that cultivated Bob’s reggae roots to grow a rock phenomenon, as relayed in a new book, Before the Legend, by Christopher John Farley, excerpted in The Wall Street Journal (4/27/06). Bob Marley was already 27 by the time he was “discovered” by Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, which began as a Jamaican music but quickly transitioned to mainstream rock, where the money was. Chris immediately recognized Bob’s star quality, as well as the charisma of his bandmates, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. So he gave the group about $7,000 to make a record. The result was a reggae stunner, but Chris knew that it needed more of a rock sensibility if it were to sell to the masses. So, Chris asked Bob to join him in London to re-mix, overdub and otherwise rockify the tracks.

Chris started by killing two of the 11 songs, “because to me,” said Chris, “a 10-track album was a pop album. A nine-track album — that’s a rock album.” Who knew? Chris also doubled and tripled the lengths of some of the songs, again “to make it more like rock and less like pop.” As you might imagine, this tended to set Bob on edge. And you might think that Chris’s next move (bringing in white session musicians to bring a rock edge to the instrumentation) might have been the final straw for Bob Marley. But it wasn’t: “Race had divided his family. Race had divided Jamaica. Race had divided music. Race had divided the world.” Bob Marley “wanted to bring it all back together again … As a child, Bob had gotten into scuffles with bullies over his mixed heritage. Now, as a musician, he had turned his background into a marketing edge.” Thing is, the black-white collaboration was kept from fans.

Chris Blackwell wanted “to promote the image of a black group” and kept the names of the white musicians off the credits. He “realized white audiences wanted reggae that had the rough edge of rock. But they didn’t want black music that seemed like it was trying to pass for white.” He also rockified the group’s name from “Bob Marley and the Wailers” to simply “The Wailers” and when it came time for a group photo, threw a couple of black musicians who hadn’t even been on the record into the picture to make it look like more of a group. They did join the group after that, but the image was complete and the record, “Catch a Fire," won rave reviews. Bob Marley went on "to be come an international symbol of revolution and freedom." As Farley notes: "Their music made concessions to the marketplace. But they were so cool, so confident, that their credentials could not be challenged."

via Reveries Magazine

Love special: Six ways to woo your lover

2006-04-28T00:24:00.000-06:00

EDIT — Fuck it, I am posting the article in its entirety. I believe they have a tendency to bust links after it moves from their front pages and make them subscription-only.

Just read this short piece on New Scientist, entitled "Love special: Six ways to woo your lover"; with more tips via the link:

LET YOUR BODY DO THE TALKING
We all hunt for the perfect chat-up line, but in reality, our body gives away a great deal before we open our mouth. It is estimated that when you meet a stranger, their impression of you is based 55 per cent on your appearance and body language, 38 per cent on your style of speaking and a mere 7 per cent on what you actually say.

So what can we learn from the experts? There are a number of actions that signal "I like you" to another person. Adopting an open posture (no folded arms), and mirroring another's posture help create a feeling of affinity. Most people are not conscious of being mirrored, but evaluate those who do it more favourably. And it is worth adopting stances that enhance your masculinity or femininity, such as placing hands in pockets with elbows out to enlarge the chest.

You could also indulge in a "gestural dance", synchronising your gestures and body movements with those of the object of your desire, such as taking a sip of your drinks at the same time.

EXPERIENCE FEAR TOGETHER
A dramatic setting can kick-start your love life. Meeting a stranger when physiologically aroused increases the chance of having romantic feelings towards them…

It's all because of a strong connection between anxiety, arousal and attraction. In the "shaky bridge study" carried out by psychologists Arthur Aron and Don Dutton in the 1970s, men who met a woman on a high, rickety bridge found the encounter sexier and more romantic than those who met her on a low, stable one. A visit to the funfair works wonders too. Photos of members of the opposite sex were more attractive to people who had just got off a roller coaster, compared with those who were waiting to get on. And couples were more loved-up after watching a suspense-filled thriller than a calmer film. Why? No one is sure, but the adrenaline rush from the danger might be misattributed to the thrill of attraction. But beware: while someone attractive becomes more so in a tense setting, the unattractive appear even less appealing.

SHARE A JOKE
An experience that makes you laugh creates feelings of closeness between strangers. A classic example comes from experiments carried out by US psychologists Arthur Aron and Barbara Fraley, in which strangers cooperated on playful activities such as learning dance steps, but with one partner wearing a blindfold and the other holding a drinking straw in their mouth to distort speech. Sounds stupid, but love and laughter really did go together. You can read about it in "The effect of a shared humorous experience on closeness in initial encounters" in the journal Personal Relationships (vol 11, p 61). We suggest that the blindfold/drinking straw approach is best confined to the laboratory.

GET THE SOUNDTRACK RIGHT
Psychologists at North Adams State College in Massachusetts have proved what Shakespeare suggested - that music is the food of love. Well, rock music, at least. Women evaluating photos of men rated them more attractive while listening to soft-rock music, compared with avant-garde jazz or no music at all.

USE LOVE POTIONS?
Can you short-cut all the hard work of relationship-building by artificial means? People have been trying to crack this one for thousands of years. A nasal spray containing the hormone oxytocin can make people trust you - an important part of any relationship - though there's no evidence yet to suggest it can make someone fall in love. And while we wouldn't suggest you try this at home, studies on prairie voles show that injecting the hormone vasopressin into the brain makes males bond strongly to females. Illegal drugs such as cocaine or amphetamines can simulate the euphoria of falling in love by raising levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, but dopamine levels can also be increased legally by exercising. Another neurotransmitter, phenylethylamine (PEA), is tagged the "love molecule" because it induces feelings of excitement and apprehension. PEA is found in chocolate and it, too, is linked to the feel-good effects of exercise. Overall, a swift jog could be more conducive to love than anything you might find in a bottle.

GAZE INTO THEIR EYES
Any flirt knows that making eye contact is an emotionally loaded act. Now psychologists have shown just how powerful it can be. When pairs of strangers were asked to gaze into each other's eyes, it was perhaps not surprising that their feelings of closeness and attraction rocketed compared with, say, gazing at each other's hands. More surprising was that a couple in one such experiment ended up getting married. Neuroscientists have shed some light on what's going on: meeting another person's gaze lights up brain regions associated with rewards. The bottom line is that eye contact can work wonders, but make sure you get your technique right: if your gaze isn't reciprocated, you risk coming across as a stalker.

From issue 2549 of New Scientist magazine, 27 April 2006, page 46

via New Scientist

Illustrated Structure of Masonry

2006-04-28T00:11:00.000-06:00

click image to enlarge

Be genderless (and drink Campari)

2006-04-27T17:15:00.000-06:00

via Boing Boing à la Miles of Yarn

Further look at the sound of language transcribed visually

2006-04-27T11:13:00.000-06:00

Takeluma is a "sound symbolic, phonetic alphabet" by artist Peter Cho, and was his MFA thesis project (PDF) in the UCLA department of Design | Media Arts. vade was kind enough to pass this along to me, in response to some more in-depth conversations we're having about symbols.

To check out more on this sort of stuff, please check out A wee introduction to cymatics — the study of vibration — which doesn't shy away from esoteric concepts. I've recently also come across this interesting design article by Frank Armstrong, entitled "Hearing Type," which is available there on the AIGA site. From a qualitative perspective, Armstrong takes an analogous approach to typography and the four properties of sound or tone: amplitude, duration, pitch, and timbre.

102 films that form our cultural vernacular

2006-04-26T11:13:00.000-06:00

via Kottke.org

Film critic Jim Emerson recently compiled a list of 102 movies that you should see before you can consider yourself movie literate:

…they [are] the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They're the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat "movie-literate."

I have to admit, I've not seen most of these. I guess I have something to do this summer. Like Kottke, I am affixing stars to the ones I've seen. (31 32 of 102. Kottke had 40. Any of you?) Looks like I'm off to the the video store after work!

* 2001: A Space Odyssey
The 400 Blows
8½
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
* Alien
All About Eve
Annie Hall
* Apocalypse Now
* Bambi
The Battleship Potemkin
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Big Red One
The Bicycle Thief
The Big Sleep
* Blade Runner
Blowup
* Blue Velvet
* Bonnie and Clyde
Breathless
Bringing Up Baby
* Carrie
* Casablanca
Un chien andalou
Children of Paradise / Les enfants du paradis
Chinatown
Citizen Kane
* A Clockwork Orange
* The Crying Game
The Day the Earth Stood Still
* Days of Heaven
Dirty Harry
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Do the Right Thing
La dolce vita
Double Indemnity
* Dr Strangelove
Duck Soup
* E.T. — The Extra-terrestrial
Easy Rider
* The Empire Strikes Back
* The Exorcist
* Fargo
* Fight Club
* Frankenstein
The General
The Godfather & The Godfather, Pt II
Gone With the Wind
* Goodfellas
The Graduate
* Halloween
A Hard Day's Night
Intolerance
It's a Gift
* It's a Wonderful Life
Jaws
The Lady Eve
Lawrence of Arabia
M
* Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior
* The Maltese Falcon
The Manchurian Candidate
* Metropolis
Modern Times
* Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Nashville
The Night of the Hunter
* Night of the Living Dead
North by Northwest
Nosferatu
On the Waterfront
Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Persona
Pink Flamingos
Psycho
* Pulp Fiction
* Rashômon
Rear Window
* Rebel Without a Cause
Red River
Repulsion
The Rules of the Game
* Scarface
The Scarlet Empress
Schindler's List
The Searchers
The Seven Samurai
Singin' in the Rain
Some Like It Hot
A Star Is Born
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sunset Boulevard
* Taxi Driver
The Third Man
Tokyo Story
Touch of Evil
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Trouble in Paradise
Vertigo
West Side Story
The Wild Bunch
The Wizard of Oz

Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky

2006-04-25T23:03:00.000-06:00

Yup.

via Mind Hacks

Recent contemplations on causality

2006-04-25T22:27:00.000-06:00

Sometimes you just need to sit and watch it in action to really appreciate the beauty of certain philosophies. The trick is, knowing what to look for. This video was a joy to find and it compliments some of the ideas going on here, Alchemy & Design, about inhabiting symbols and their power to affect us… and vice versa…

via The Huge Entity à la News.3Yen.com

“Right In Two”

2006-04-23T11:02:00.001-06:00

10,000 Days, the forthcoming album from Tool, is excellent. Definitely going to be one to purchase as soon as it's officially released (2 May, according to Amazon.ca). This may actually be my favourite album by them so far, though Ænima will always have a special place in my heart. I'll let everyone check out the lyrics and music when they purchase the album (or read them on Tool's website, when the album is out), but because I tend to break the rules occasionally in order to help out those not willing to, here is a look at one of the new tracks. Funny, I can't call it "animosity," or "feelings," but it deals with the angels' ________ over humans and free will. Not that many of us develop free will in our lifetimes, but it's a recurrant in certain occult lit. Here it is, "Right In Two":

Angels on the sideline,
Puzzled and amused
Why did Father give these humans free will?
Now they're all confused

Don't these talking monkeys know that
Eden has enough to go around?
Plenty in this holy garden, silly old monkeys
Where there's one you're bound to divide it
Right in two

Angels on the sideline
Baffled and confused
Father blessed them all with reason
And this is what they choose
Monkey killing monkey killing monkey
Over pieces of the ground.

Silly monkeys given thumbs
They forge a blade
And where there's one
They're bound to divide it,
Right in two
Right in two

Monkey killing monkey killing monkey
Over pieces of the ground
Silly monkeys give them thumbs
They make a club
And beat their brother… down
How they survive so misguided is a mystery
Repugnant dismal creature who would squander
The ability to live, to die, and have a conscience
Brothers live inside here

Cut it all right in two (×4)

Fight over the clouds, over wind, over sky
Fight over life, over blood, over prayer, overhead and light
Fight over love, over sun, over another
Fight…

Angels on the sideline again
Been so long with patience and reason
Angels on the sideline again
Wondering when this tug of war will end

Cut it all right in two (×3)
Right in two

Right in two…

Going back to school!

2006-04-20T10:50:00.000-06:00

In case anyone gets to wondering, I'll be only lightly posting for the next five or so weeks. I am busy with a bunch of work for a resto-bar I am currently designing and some other freelance stuff. I am also enrolled in the "Chaos Magic in Business" course being offered by Robert Anton Wilson's Maybe Logic Academy. I'm very excited, as the class is taught by none other than Peter J. Carroll, one of the founders of the Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT) and the man who coined the term "chaos magic." (This is also the order that denied my entrance due to a lack of group work. Darn isolation.)

Carroll's site, Specularium, can be found here. It deals with the concept of "three-dimensional time concealed in the data of fundamental physics." (And no, I don't understand a shred of it.)

Watching the brain ‘switch off’ self-awareness

2006-04-19T22:07:00.000-06:00

via New Scientist

18:00 19 April 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Gaia Vince

Everybody has experienced a sense of “losing oneself” in an activity — being totally absorbed in a task, a movie or sex. Now researchers have caught the brain in the act.

Self-awareness, regarded as a key element of being human, is switched off when the brain needs to concentrate hard on a tricky task, found the neurobiologists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

The team conducted a series of experiments to pinpoint the brain activity associated with introspection and that linked to sensory function. They found that the brain assumes a robotic functionality when it has to concentrate all its efforts on a difficult, timed task — only becoming "human" again when it has the luxury of time.

Ilan Goldberg and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of nine volunteers during the study. Participants were shown picture cards and told to push buttons to indicate whether or not an animal was depicted.

The series was shown slowly the first time, and at three times the rate on the second run through. On its third showing, the volunteers were asked to use the buttons to indicate their emotional response to the pictures. The experiment was then repeated using musical extracts, rather than pictures, and asked to identify whether a trumpet played.

Allocating resources

Goldberg found that when the sensory stimulus was shown slowly, and when a personal emotional response was required, the volunteers showed activity in the superfrontal gyrus — the brain region associated with self-awareness-related function.

But when the card flipping and musical sequences were rapid, there was no activity in the superfrontal gyrus, despite activity in the sensory cortex and related structures.

“The regions of the brain involved in introspection and sensory perception are completely segregated, although well connected,” says Goldberg, “and when the brain needs to divert all its resources to carry out a difficult task, the self-related cortex is inhibited.”

The brain’s ability to “switch off” the self may have evolved as a protective mechanism, he suggests. “If there is a sudden danger, such as the appearance of a snake, it is not helpful to stand around wondering how one feels about the situation,” Goldberg points out.

It is possible that research into how the brain switches self-awareness on and off will help neurologists gain a deeper understanding of autism, schizophrenia and other mental disorders where this functionality may be impaired.

Journal reference: Neuron (vol 50, p 329)

“A Theory of Power,” free download!

2006-04-16T21:16:00.000-06:00

"Fascinating"
—Noam Chomsky

"Very impressive"
—Daniel Quinn

"Very rich, stimulating and ambitious… I salute your important work."
—John Zerzan

Those little quotes are awesome; such a great form of propaganda. Regardless, check out Jeff Vail's blog. There is a link to the free PDF download of his book, A Theory of Power. I've been checking out Vail's blog for some time now, and as of late with my own interest in the whole concept of power, I'm going to be delving into more of his writing. Time permetting.

www.jeffvail.net

Go read! And if you dig the blog, spend the $10 to purchase the hardcopy edition of the book. Seriously, spread the love.

Absolute power…

2006-04-15T21:24:00.000-06:00

This past week I had a conversation with an acquaintance of mine in Vancouver. We were discussing magic, and his contempt for power. Now, "power" is going to be difficult to define, both its semantics and subjective take on the word (would that be semiotics?). He assured me that absolute power did, in fact, corrupt absolutely. This stirred some thoughts in me…

Whenever someone uses that retort, I squirm in my chair. It's never sat well with me. It implied a lack of power. That the corruptible had achieved such power, in my eyes, implied that if they were not worthy of such power to begin with, then I and everyone else that allow them to hold such power were, in fact, worthy of being enslaved by this person.

In short, I have the power not to succumb.

"Occult power lies in removing the capacity for others to be able to grasp the labels and concepts surrounding you." (From a previous post.)

And I just read this, by William Drenttel, on Design Observer:

Francis Bacon once said that knowledge and human power are synonymous, and it is in this spirit that true power is perhaps ideally achieved: it is power informed by learning, collaborating and considering how the ultimate quality of our lives is made, whether in reference to our health or our schools; our environment or our foreign policy; our aspirations in science or in space; or our humanitarian achievements, as people, in war and in peace.

Is it fair for me to argue that even life itself is a prison, as purported by numerous philosophical doctrines and spiritual analogies such as Gnosticism? If so, then even clinging to the worth of one's life in the face of enslavement is an un-educated and worthless endeavour. This is living solely for living's sake.

And that's not living.

Living requires strife, sacrifice, and the willingness to change, metamorphoses. A power is exacted when a consensus is reached. Consensus poses an interesting dilemma. As William Whyte wrote in his classic The Organizational Man, "It is the price of progress that there never can be complete consensus. All creative advances are essentially a departure from agreed-upon ways of looking at things, and to overemphasize the agreed-upon is to further legitimize the hostility to that creativity upon which we all ultimately depend."

This is also the thesis behind The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom, in which he contends that "evil" is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and is woven into our most basic biological fabric. This argument echoes a very old one. St Paul proposed it when he put forth the doctrine of original sin. Thomas Hobbes resurrected it when he called the lot of man brutish and nasty. Anthropologist Raymond Dart brought it to the fore again when he interpreted fossil remains in Africa as evidence that man is a killer ape. Old as it is, the concept has often had revolutionary implications. Why? Because it has been the thread on which men like Hobbes and St Paul have hung dramatic new visions of the world.

And as I wrote elsewhere and Kylark was nice enough to emphasize: Power is how one utilises their roster of wisdoms (knowledge + experience = wisdom) to maintain their order and interpretation of reality held over any others.

Thus, if we are knowingly befallen to the power of someone or something else, it is our fault and there is a way out. Too many of us quit because it hurts too much, I suppose. Which reminds me of another quote to end this off with. William James wrote in Varieties of Religious Experience:

Recent psychology … speaks of the threshold of man’s consciousness in general to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked. … And so we might speak of a ‘pain threshold,’ a ‘fear threshold,’ a ‘misery threshold,’ and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy minded habitually live on the sunny side of their misery line; the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension.

Does it not appear as if one who lived habitually on one side of the pain threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?

So as I explore more of myself, I come to see it reflected in my perceptions of the world around me. As above, so below. As a seed, if my power grows, in whatever areas it might be — graphic design, my own ability to organize my life, womanizing, pushing tough love on my friends, encouraging in others, working on bettering my relationship with my mother — every experience I conquer is a demon quelled. I can now apply the abstractions of those experiences to further launch the new knowledge I acquire from around me, and thus grow in power.

In this, there is a system by which one can accrue enough experience to build up their personal character. Like a game, abstractions can be mastered which allow not lead to the growth necessary to tackle new challanges… the prior experiences garnered actually allow you to take notice and see the new worlds awaiting your attention. Like levels in this game, the higher realms are not readily available to the limited perceptions of players not willing to level-up.

And from up here, I see a lot of NPCs that believe otherwise.

Minister stops book talk by Environment Canada scientist

2006-04-13T22:19:00.000-06:00

via CBC Arts:

Environment Minister Rona Ambrose has stopped an Environment Canada scientist from speaking publicly about his own novel.

Mark Tushingham has written a science fiction novel called Hotter than Hell.

It is set in the not-too-distant future when global warming has made many parts of the world too hot to live in and has prompted a war between Canada and the U.S. over water resources.

Tushingham was scheduled to speak in Ottawa about his book and the science underpinning it. But an order from Ambrose's office stopped him.

"He got a directive from the department, cautioning him not to come to this meeting today," said his publisher Elizabeth Margaris of DreamCatcher Publishers in New Brunswick. Margaris had driven from New Brunswick to attend the speech.

"So I guess we're being stifled. This is incredible, I've never heard of such a thing," she told CBC Radio.

A spokesperson for Ambrose said the speech was billed as coming from an Environment Canada scientist and even though his book is a work of fiction, he would appear to be speaking in an official capacity.

Tushingham was ordered to cancel the speech because he didn't follow the proper process, the spokesperson said. He also has cancelled some TV and radio interviews about the book.

Stephen Harper says he was not aware of the details, but his government was elected on a platform that included developing a new plan to deal with climate change.

"And I not only hope, but expect, that all elements of the bureaucracy will be working with us to achieve our objectives," he said.

Harper has been criticized for the tight control he wants to exercise on what Cabinet ministers and civil servants say in public. He also opposes the Kyoto protocol, which could help slow global warming.

via DreamCatcher Publishing Inc:

Hotter Than Hell
by Mark Tushingham

"Mark Tushingham's dark novel of climate change is set in a not-too-distant future world of global warming, where straight up American soldier Major-General Walter J. Eastland is assigned to one of the states worst hit, California.

When desperation for fresh water finally becomes so critical that anarchy erupts throughout the major cities of America, Eastland is mysteriously assigned to scout Canada. The country has long resisted opening its taps of fresh water to its neighbor and ally to the south. Eastland finds both friends and adversaries in Canada. As well, he finds the world's largest supply of fresh water.

Canada's resource causes a crisis in the American-Canadian relationship until the countries are at war. Eastland thinks of himself as civilized and humane but he soon finds that violence can brutalize even the best of us until we find ourselves behaving as brutes. And then neither patriotism, nor all the economic power of the world's superpower, nor all its advanced military technology seems able to save it from itself. for the more brutish we become, the simpler our needs for short-term gains. Tushingham has forecast a disturbing possiblity of climate change which may already be upon us."

0-9739234-1-5

Tarot reinterpreted using digital aesthetic

2006-04-12T22:48:00.000-06:00

Detail of "The Fool"
mcbr crtn found via Technoccult

R. Scott Bakker’s definition of sorcery

2006-04-11T09:37:00.000-06:00

sorcery— The practice of making the world conform to language, as opposed to philosophy, the practice of making language conform to the world. Despite the tremendous amount of apparently unresolvable controversy surrounding sorcery, there are several salient features that seem universal to its practice. First, practitioners must be able to apprehend the "onta," which is to say, they must possess the innate ability to see, as Protathis puts it, "Creation as created." Second, sorcery also seems to involve a universal commitment to what Gotagga calls "semantic hygiene." Sorcery requires precise meanings. This is why incantations are always spoken in a non-native tongue: to prevent the semantic transformation of crucial terms due to the vagaries of daily usage. This also explains the extraordinary "double-think" structure of sorcery, the fact that all incantations require the sorcerer to say and think two separate things simultaneously. The spoken segment of an incantation (what is often called the "utteral string") must have its meaning "fixed" or focused with a silent segment (what is often called the "inutteral string") that is simultaneously thought. Apparently the thought incantation sharpens the meaning of the spoken incantation the way the words of one man may be used to clarify the words of another. (This gives rise to the famous "semantic regress problem": how can the inutteral string, which admits different interpretations, serve to fix the proper interpretation of the utteral string?) Though there are as many metaphysical interpretations of this structure as there are sorcerous Schools, the result in each case is the same: the world, which is otherwise utterly indifferent to the words of Men, listens, and sorcerous transformations of reality result.

Albino moose near Drayton Valley, Alberta

2006-04-10T11:49:00.000-06:00

Of course, this has nothing to do with design or the occult. Well, unless you're a shaman, maybe…

This is intended more for the Canadian readers to check out, and I've found more images here. Canadians know just how freaking huge moose are: Huge. Huge. Huge. (I know it's relative. Piss off.)

I do not know who took the photos originally, so if anyone does, please let me know. Thanks to Sheri for forwarding them to me.

Pan’s Labyrinth teaser trailer

2006-04-08T14:56:00.000-06:00

1,500-year-old pyramid discovered beneath Mexico City

2006-04-06T01:52:00.000-06:00

Archeologists have discovered a huge 1,500-year-old pre-Hispanic pyramid in a working class district of Mexico City after digging into a hill used every year to depict the crucifixion of Christ.

The unnamed pyramid has the same sized base as the giant Pyramid of the Moon at the famous archeological site of Teotihuacan, an hour's drive northeast of the capital, which is known as the "City of the Gods" and is Mexico's biggest ancient city.

…continued via Yahoo!

Chaos = Order: WUSTL physicists make baffling discovery

2006-04-05T01:14:00.000-06:00

Reposted in its entirety, via Washington University in St. Louis:

Pandemonium on demand

By Douglas M. Main

April 3, 2006 -- "Da police are not here to create disorder; dere here to preserve disorder." — Richard J. Daley, Chicago mayor, explaining to the media the role of the police during the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Police keep order. That's why, for example, they issue tickets for "disturbing the peace." Thus the only logical conclusion to Mayor Daley's famous quote above — other than dismissing it as the result of a tangled tongue — is sometimes disorder spawns order.

Sounds impossible, right?

Wrong.

According to a computational study conducted by a group of physicists at Washington University in St. Louis, one may create order by introducing disorder.

While working on their model — a network of interconnected pendulums, or "oscillators" — the researchers noticed that when driven by ordered forces the various pendulums behaved chaotically and swung out of sync like a group of intoxicated synchronized swimmers. This was unexpected — shouldn't synchronized forces yield synchronized pendulums?

But then came the real surprise: When they introduced disorder — forces were applied at random to each oscillator — the system became ordered and synchronized.

"The thing that is counterintuitive is that when you introduce disorder into the system — when the [forces on the pendulums] act at random — the chaos that was present before disappears and there is order," said Sebastian F. Brandt, Washington University physics graduate student in Arts & Science and lead author of the study which appeared in the January 2006 edition of Physical Review Letters.

Insights into other realms

The physicists' research is not only hard to grasp for non-physicists, but puzzling for physicists, too. As supervisor Ralf Wessel, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of physics in Arts & Sciences said, "Every physicist who hears this is surprised."

Research on the role of disorder in complex systems is quite new and not well understood. Wessel hopes that one day its theoretical understanding will be better than it is today.

Nevertheless, the researchers believe the model could provide insights outside the realm of theoretical physics.

Neurons, for example, have been modeled as interconnected, or "coupled," oscillators because of the way they interact with one another. In the model, coupled oscillators can be imagined as being tethered to their nearest neighbor, thus influencing their movement. Neurons, on the other hand, may display repetitive electrical activity that can be influenced by the activity of neighboring neurons.

Though it's a bit of a stretch, admits Babette K. Dellen, Ph.D, the study may help to solve previously unexplained observations. Dellen first studied the model system in a neurological context. She set the project aside and then Brandt joined the research group and became intrigued with the concept of disorder-induced synchronization and delved more deeply. Finally, the three put the paper together.

Dellen explains that neurons can exhibit synchronous activity in response to a stimulus. To this point, she said, nobody has come up with an adequate explanation. And Wessel said, "Maybe the details of the neurons are completely irrelevant. Maybe it is only a property of oscillators."

Oscillators like a child on a swing

A vital similarity between the model system and neurons is that they are both "nonlinear" — meaning that there is not a linear, or straight-ahead, correlation between the applied force and displacement. In other words, the oscillators in the model may be likened to a child on a swing. Within a small range, the child will move in constant proportion to how hard you push them — if you push twice as hard, they will go twice as far. But nearly all complex systems in nature, like the physicists' model, are nonlinear. Once the child gets to a certain height, pushing twice as hard will not make the child go twice as far.

Neurons are composed of many elements and are typically nonlinear.

"When you hear your favorite music twice as loud you don't double the pleasure," mused Brandt, explaining how one aspect of the brain — hearing — is nonlinear.

While other research has shown that disorder can create order, these studies often involved manipulating parameters within the systems such as changing pendulum length. The researchers say that their work is novel because it involves changing externally applied forces. Thus, they believe, their findings might have potential in the real world, where it would be more difficult to change parameters within the system — neurons, for example — but relatively simple to apply an external forcing.

"This is of course basic research," said Brandt. "But what you can learn from this is that complex systems... sometimes behave in a very unexpected way, completely opposite to your intuition or expectation. It will be interesting to see if the mechanism that we have found can actually be put to some use."

Secrets of the Matrix, by David Icke

2006-04-02T19:05:00.000-06:00

Secrets of the Matrix I
2 hr 11 min 57 sec

Secrets of the Matrix II
2 hr 32 min 8 sec

Secrets of the Matrix III
2 hr 7 min 13 sec

www.DavidIcke.com

Laugh to change context (or “Laugh to banish”)

2006-04-02T18:44:00.000-06:00

Okay, as annoying as I find this, it's equally as interesting. In January, my roommate, Carmen, and her mother, Danielle, ended up watching High Tension. My friend and I watched it some time prior, and we found it lived up to its name. We turned the lights out, ate pizza, and watched a scary-ass movie while it began to storm outside.

However, Carmen and Danielle, throughout the film, would continuously make jokes, spoof the film, and overall just ruin the effect which my friend and I were so eager to enjoy — hence renting it in the first place. We wanted to be frightened, to be transported to that place where we could flinch and gasp.

Carmen and Danielle ruined that effect by making their own context in which they could safely enjoy the film. In doing so, they ruined its intended effect and, ultimately, rendered the film moot.

Just this weekend, a bunch of us watched King Kong. As we'd not seen it yet, the scene with the giant insects on Skull Island obviously set us off gasping and grossing and just generally being icked right out. And again, as soon as something uncomfortable takes place, again started the sarcasm and the jokes. To make light of the poor bloke on-screen being digested alive by slug-things à la Half-Life 2, was to render the scene's power over them powerless.

If they'd remained hush and watched through, the cinematic experience gains hold and you are partially conceiving of the atrocities on-screen in a relative manner. Enough to make you squirm, at least.

This also reminds me of then I attended a screening of The Blair Witch Project years ago, and the fucking kids down in front would maintain their ruccous during the 'frightening' parts of the film. It ruined the overall effect for me, for everyone else, and kept them safe from being drawn into the film and its affects. The overall design and concept of the film would have been a wonderfully frightening time, had the dozen or so teenage twats down in front kept their mouths shut and comments to themselves.

Which in effect brings us to the concept of laughter as banishment. If I try to evoke some sort of monster… please, no laughing.

Entheogen: Awakening the God Within

2006-04-01T14:34:00.000-07:00

"Trailer of the new experimental controversial documentary on the evolution of consciousness, flow, and the collective ... all » mind. Psychedelics have been around for millenea, and unfortunately have been feared and deamonized in the West. This film explores the second wave of interest in psychedelics as the dawn of the new millenium arises. From the ancient mystery cults to 5 day trance parties in Brazilian jungle and Burning man the neo archaic revival is picking up a new momentum. psychedelic, lsd, peyote, ayahuasca, Alex Grey, MAPS, Halpern, Doblin, DMT, mushroom, divination, gaia."

Icons, power, and vulgar acceptance

2006-03-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

Remember before everyone "knew" that Desert Storm and affiliated military endeavours in the Middle East were "all about the oil." I remember talking about it and receiving accusatory looks, like I was a fucking hippie or conspiricy theorist or something. (In itself, it's too bad people are thought frauds if they're interested in conspiracies. Seriously, people have conspired for millennia. So why are those who study it apparently kooky? Anyone interested, read The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli.)

Anyhow, I came across this on RINF today: "CNN Fears 9/11 Truth"

This comes at an interesting time, as I just watched the 9/11 documentary, Loose Change: Second Edition, a couple months ago. Now, please, I urge everyone to rent, order, rip, or download the documentary torrent. The filmmakers urge you to do the same. This is not a venture for capital, it's an effort of those involved to get their truth out.

The gist of the RINF piece is that CNN was to broadcast a special dealing with the 9/11 cover-up:

Hicks, a published author on the 9/11 cover-up as well as a Green Party senatorial candidate in New York was slated to appear with Asner on the program to discuss 9/11. Infowars confirmed with sources at CNN the segment was cancelled because another guest who had agreed to appear as an opposition voice to Hicks and Asner refused to participate the interview at the last moment. The CNN source further indicated that the opposition guest was none other than a former member of the Keene 9/11 whitewash Commission.

I was unaware of it until I read this, but I guess Charlie Sheen made some comments about the 9/11 whitewash. This has spurred other celebrities:

Award winning actor, director, producer, and pioneering anti-Iraq War activist Ed Asner is scheduled to appear live on the CNN Headline News program Showbiz Tonight (6pm CST). Asner is reportedly going on to support Charlie Sheen’s bold and brave stance calling for a real investigation of the events on September 11th, 2001 as well as to raise his own questions.

Also on Showbiz Tonight on March 27, actress Sharon Stone defended Sheen and his First Amendment right to speak out saying that he is brave and that it is important to confront authority.

Asner and Sheen are just two more of many celebrities who have already come forward to question the official story of what happened on 9/11.

Actor James Woods began questioning the official fable in the first weeks right after 9/11. X-Files and Lone Gunmen star Dean Haglund has already gone public on the Alex Jones Show (December 18, 2004) questioning the official story. Actor Ed Begley, Jr. hosted a 9/11 Truth Symposium in New York City several months ago.

And we have recently confirmed that one of the world’s most popular and beloved musicians is awake to the truth about 9/11 and in the very near future may be going public.

Many more major stars who are considering going public have contacted us in recent days.

Delta Force Founder Eric Haney has spoken out in the press about the “War on Terrorism” being bogus and how there is no real threat to the United States.

So this is a further look at power. Control and sway of the census prerogative through popular opinion… or whatever. The icon, which is the celeb, represents a part of the individual that they are missing — some weird sort of puzzle piece, missing from their psyche. Or perhaps under-developed is a better term.

The icon makes a decision, and consequently the decision is made for thousands, nay millions, of others. This also happens very often within families, relationships, and groups of peers or at work.

Not altogether a bad thing, I suppose. It shows how much more similar we are to an ant hill than a society capable of free thought. (If we were capable of being responsible for our own thoughts, we'd all be chillaxing in a libertarian or anarchist society. But we don't. So stop dreaming.)

This is, simply, the basis behind celebrity endorsements. People pay to get their products onto the tables before the red carpet event at the Oscars where celebs can pick, for free, what crap they wanna carry with them in front of onlookers and paparazzi. It's intelligent from the point of view of the marketer, however, in that investing $12,000 to have one of your handbags or something appear in a photo with some celeb can instantly make for a smash sell-out hit.

That brings up another topic, whether the product was "worthy" of being a sell-out hit, or if it was just because it was seen being carried by someone who is admired by millions. I remember when Avril Lavigne appeared on SNL and she was wearing a Home Hardware shirt from some town in Ontario. The next day, that particular Home Hardware received hundreds of telephone calls from fans who wanted to buy that particular shirt. An employee's shirt from Home Hardware!

So what happens when one becomes celebrity in order to inspire change? I doubt Che Guevara intended to have his face spraypainted and turned into a product for North American youth (I once saw Che socks). But who has the chutzpah to really embolden themselves amongst the vulgar masses in order to make a change? For better? For worse?

This article is interesting in that the title sums it up:

Incompetent People Most Likely To Be Confident Study Shows

The hipster set, the popular crowds, often not the artists themselves, but their adoring fans and those at the swanky martini bars and trendy cafés, most seem unaware of their entanglement in their own ego. Don't get me wrong, ego can be fun, sure. But the ones out there brooding over the shallow vanities of the masses are only doing themselves a disservice. If we truly live among the monkeys, then why not set up shop and continue our occult studies while doing so?

In the end, I think what I might be interested in is just the ending of it all, me, them, It, et cetera. And I can't stop It until I understand It.

This image just resonates with me

2006-03-28T13:34:00.000-07:00

IQ

2006-03-27T14:43:00.000-07:00

Otherwise known as the intelligence quotient, it is not very popular these days (from what I know). Yet some scientists continue their research in the field. I found the last point here (from Maxim) particularly interesting:

Intelligence quotient

IQ test controversy

Religiosity and intelligence
Several studies on Americans focus on the beliefs of high-IQ individuals. In one study, 90% of the general population surveyed professed a distinct belief in a personal god and afterlife, while only 40% of the scientists with a BS surveyed did so, and only 10% of those considered "eminent." Another study found that mathematicians were just over 40%, biologists just under 30%, and physicists were barely over 20% likely to believe in God.

A survey of members of the United States National Academy of Sciences showed that 72% are outright atheists, 21% are agnostic and only 7% admit to belief in a personal God.

The Pew Global Attitudes Project surveyed opinions by nation with the question "How important is religion in your life—very important, somewhat important, not too important, or not at all important?" The report finds that Americans are much more religious than people living in other wealthy nations. In the U.S., 59% of people reported religion was "very important", as compared to 30% in Canada. In this way, the views of Americans are more simliar to people in developing countries than those in developed countries. The study found a correlation between the percentage of people reporting that religion was "very important" and the national per-capita GDP. It can be further stated that the nations who scored as most religious tended to have low science scores according to TIMSS. Also an inverse correlation at Nationmaster can be found between mathematical literacy and church attendance. (Although labor regulation and police per capita were far stronger inverse correlations) No significant inverse correlation showed up for scientific literacy or reading literacy however.

IQ rankings of European countries

#62 of Maxim's 100 Things You Need to Know About Women
A British study claims a woman’s chances of getting married drop by 40 percent for every 16-point rise in her IQ. The same increase in IQ for a man boosted his chances of getting married by 35 percent.