23 twins

Love means never having to say you’re dead

February 9, 2007

They’re calling it the ’eternal embrace’. In a region 25 miles south of Verona, archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons, believed to be of a young couple buried 5,000 to 6,000 years ago during the Neolithic period. They appear to be locked in a tender embrace, gazing into each other’s eyes for eternity. Whatever the full explanation turns out to be, the picture seems to have a profound effect on those who look at it.

Filed under: History, Science, Spaces — Jonathan @ 7:44 am

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Bill and Steve miss the bus

January 31, 2007

So, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have appeared onstage together at the All Things Digital conference to enlighten us all on our technological future.

Gates said that in five years time, people would not depend on a single computer. They would have multiple devices, such as a tablet with “voice and ink”, along with “a phone, a pocket-sized device”. Gosh, gee willikers Mr. Gates! Tablets eh?

Funny, I would have said that in perhaps 20 years time, each of us will be relying on precisely one single computer.

Ourselves.

Filed under: Technology — Jonathan @ 9:23 pm

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Why we hate Paris Hilton more than Hitler

January 30, 2007

Why does everyone hate Paris Hilton?

It seems a good time to ask this question, since it’s only about a week until she has to report to jail to serve out her sentence for violating the terms of her probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case. (I couldn’t help but notice that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reduced her sentence from 45 days to 23 days. 23. Spooky eh?… all you RAW fans out there.) And the newspapers and web are full of the usual hatred and jokes about what they’ll hopefully do to her in jail, etc., etc.

OK everyone, let’s just establish some basic facts here. If you’re a girl, Paris Hilton is someone who is almost certainly prettier than you, unimaginably richer than you and, unlike you, has millions of guys dying to fuck her. End of story. If you’re a guy, she’s prettier than your girlfriend, unimaginably richer than both of you put together and you will never get to fuck her in a million years.

Whew! Now don’t we all feel so much better for getting that out in the open? So what does this all translate into? You guessed it. Hate. Bucketloads of the stuff. Everyone in the world, it seems, hates Paris Hilton except, of course, her close circle of friends who barely tolerate her.

Today, it’s completely respectable – no, almost mandatory – to hate Paris Hilton within a certain strata of what passes for the intelligensia. It seems to be the only thing that the political left and right can agree on. Not just nutters but respected columnists devote column yards to venting their spleen.

I decided to do a simple bit of research to try and quantify just how much we hate Paris Hilton, compared to other infamous characters. Somewhat randomly, I picked the following cast of villains:

• Adolf Hitler: Architect of World War II and the ‘Final Solution’ which resulted in the murder of up to 6 million Jews, gypsys and other ‘undesirables’ in the concentration camps
• Robert Mugabe: Current dictator of Zimbabwe who holds onto power through electoral fraud and violence against any political opposition. Has managed to completely bankrupt his own country.
• Joseph Stalin: Dictator of Russia who slaughtered an estimated 20 million of his own countrymen
• Idi Amin: Brutal dictator of Uganda who from 1971 to 1979 slaughtered around 500,000 Ugandans.
• Saddam Hussein: The ‘Butcher of Baghdad’, responsible for the repression, torture and murder of his own countrymen, as well as the gassing of 5,000 Kurdish civilians.
• Seung-Hui Cho: mass murderer responsible for the Virginia State massacre in which 32 students lost their lives, and 25 others were wounded. Officially the worst multiple murderer in US history.

and last but not least…

Paris Hilton: blonde, wealthy socialite

I simply typed “hate [name of villain]” into Google and then counted the number of results. In fairness to the villains, I used both their full name and the commonly accepted abbreviation (usually their surname). So, for example, with Hitler I would search ‘hate Adolf Hitler’ and also ‘hate Hitler’. Saddam Hussein required a unique approach, since his first name is the common abbreviation. Therefore I simply searched for ‘hate Saddam’ which, obviously, would also catch ‘hate Saddam Hussein’. The only person this doesn’t work with is Paris Hilton herself, who’s name is irreducible. It simply has to be ‘hate Paris Hilton’.

Yes, I know, there are so many ways in which this is not scientific, but here are the results anyway:

Paris Hilton 32,100
Saddam Hussein 25,100
Adolf Hitler 21,190
Seung-Hui Cho 4,433
Joseph Stalin 1,536
Robert Mugabe 1,104
Idi Amin 91

The clear winner is Paris Hilton with Adolf Hitler in third place. Idi Amin wasn’t even in the race.

So, why would we hate Paris Hilton more than Hitler? Paris Hilton’s only crime is to conspicuously be what we can never be or have. Paris Hilton is the Marie Antoinette of our times. Having said “let them eat … whatever” one too many times she now generates this level of online venom. Given the chance, we would gladly see her on that trundle, as it lumbered its way up to the guillotine. We’d jeer and spit and punch the air and scream “die bitch” but, instead of knitting like guilotine hags of yore, we’d snap the whole thing on our shiny new cellphones and beam it out to a hundred million cheering bars, clubs and parties dotted around this sad little grain of sand, circling a dying candle, lost in a vast expanding blackness.

Despite what you have been told, life does not go on.

Filed under: Culture — Jonathan @ 11:32 am

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Virtual Dali

Dalivision If you love the work of Salvador Dali as much as I do, you’ll enjoy this nice interactive overview of his vast body of work. Virtual Dali has grouped all the major paintings according to the significant periods of his life. There’s also photographs of Dali, a biography, external links and a shop.

Reminds me of the time I very nearly purchased an original Dalivision in a Hawaii gallery. Eventually common sense and impending bankruptcy prevailed.

Filed under: Culture — Jonathan @ 9:51 am

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Drugs in sport. I’ll have what he’s having.

injection Hardly a week goes by without another sporting drug scandal hitting the headlines. Someone gets caught taking steroids, stimulants or human growth hormone. The media shrieks “shame, shame” (cut to sobbing fan: “I was devastated”), the accused player/coach wrings his hands and issues a tearful mea culpa and the relevant sporting body goes into the now familiar routine of assuring us that they are seriously committed to stamping out drugs in their particular sport. In other words: better, more frequent drug tests and tougher penalties.

All doomed to failure.

For starters there’s the cost. To adequately test every player in any particular code would bankrupt the sport. Heavy penalties might chasten a few players but it only draws attention to the problem, and that surely can’t be good for business. Finally there’s the cat and mouse game of improved testing procedures vs ever better methods of avoiding detection [1].

The black market nature of procuring performance enhancers and avoiding detection also exposes our sporting heroes to scams and poor quality products that may be either ineffective or downright dangerous. This recently prompted several of the major manufacturers of human growth hormone (somatropin or HGH) to set up a website devoted to exposing the scams and providing information on HGH. [2]

It occurred to me that we’re going about this all the wrong way.

Why not simply let professional sportsmen and sportswomen use whatever drug, hormone or other medical aid they like? In fact, why not actually encourage it? Performance enhancing drug research could finally come out of the closet and get the blessing and benefit of all those sporting dollars. And there’d be a lot more of those dollars to go around without the wasteful charade of drug testing. Then there’s the charade that would have us believe all these drugs are genuinely developed for medical purposes but mysteriously ‘find their way’ into the hands of sportsmen. So let’s just turn that equation around. Let’s openly design and manufacture the drugs for sport and enjoy the spin-off medical benefits. Face it, there’s a hell of a lot more money in global sport than in kids with osteoporosis.

And what about the sponsorship possibilities? A major drug or biomedical company could sign an exclusivity deal with a team, providing funds plus supplies of their latest batch of drugs/hormones/whatever to the players. In return, they could get naming rights and their logo plastered over everything but, more importantly, the playing ground would now become one giant testing laboratory for new products and medical breakthroughs. The boost to research would be enormous.

Think about it, everyone wins. Sport, big business, medical science, kids with osteoporosis and the sport-loving public. The sight of increasingly bizarre human forms running onto the field will more than satisfy everyone’s lust for spectacle. Just imagine the Grand Final excitement as the Stallion Roids clash with the Clonaid Clones for the Cup.

1. The History of Drug Testing in Sports & How Athletes Beat the Drug Tests. From from a site that openly promotes steroid sales.

2. Hear it from the horses mouth. Here’s the website set up by Genetech, GeneScience Pharmaceuticals, NeoGenica, BioScience, AnkeBio and others to let you in on the facts about somatropin (human growth hormone). Though you can’t help wondering about their motives.

Filed under: Body+ — Jonathan @ 9:33 am

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It’s your move

January 29, 2007

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett once more goes into battle against neo-medievalism. Using the historic loss of chess champion Gary Kasparov to IBM’s ‘Big Blue’ in 1997 as his starting point, Dennett challenges the ancient but still popular belief in the ‘mysterious’ and ‘mystical’ properties of the human ‘mind’.

Personally, I just think Dennett is one awesome machine!

Filed under: Mind+ — Jonathan @ 10:45 pm

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Chronophobia and the illusion of Now

January 27, 2007

Dali soft watch For as long as I can remember, Now has been considered cool. After all, who wants to be passe, old fashioned, out of date, a relic of the past? Or, wasting time worrying about tomorrow. Recently I was reading some postings on Digg and a guy got buried for posting the same link that someone else had posted three minutes earlier (and got much kudos for). Three minutes! The poor loser was just sooooo three minutes ago! He just wasn’t … Now. So, when are you reading this? When did I write it? Did I write it on the date I claim I did – or did I write it two years earlier? You can’t really know can you? But one thing is certain – it wasn’t in your now. I wrote it in my now. And yet, at this instant, most of your mind is preoccupied with something I created in your past. I’ll say that again. Actually, no, I won’t.

The point of all this is to tackle our worship of the mythical now. Oh yes, it is a myth. And, like so many things that aren’t there, we worship it.

Years ago I read a book by Timothy Leary’s mate Richard Alpert (Ram Das) called Be Here Now. For over four hundred pages, it exhorted us to exist in the here and now because this, according to the author, was the way to spiritual enlightenment. “Where are you? Here. What time is it? Now.”

Well, far be it from me to dispute the infinite wisdom of someone who took enough acid to kill a horse but, here goes anyway…

What a load of shit.

Alpert’s book illustrates something which I’ve become increasingly aware of over the last few years. Almost all of our cherished ‘spiritual’ concepts (both eastern and western) were developed a long time ago, when virtually none of our modern scientific understanding existed. And yet, we still cling to these archaic principles as if they were handed down by some ancient wise ones. They weren’t. They were just people like you and me, muddling along with very limited information about the world they lived in.

Let’s start with the merely prosaic. If we really existed only in the here and now, virtually everything would come to a stop. In fact, it’s precisely because we don’t live in the here and now that we humans have achieved so much. Try living in the here and now and appreciating a musical melody. It’s our memory of the past and our projections into the future that have enabled us to create everything we do. Without that, we’d all be lizards. Not that I’ve got anything against lizards, mind you, it’s just that they haven’t written too many symphonies recently.

But I have a much deeper problem with the ‘here and now’. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t actually exist. What we call ‘here and now’ is only the peak of a waveform moving in spacetime. And yet, just like that wave on the water, nothing really moves. All the particles of water (or human cells, or whatever!) just go up and down in a specified order (think Mexican wave). The ‘movement’ of the wave is an illusion. Are you really in the here and now? You couldn’t possibly exist ‘here’ or ‘now’ if it wasn’t for all the ‘yous’ that form a complex waveform throughout the total spacetime occupied by your existence. Say what? Read it again a couple of times and it’ll all make sense. OK, maybe not. Let’s try another explanation: here we stand on a planet revolving and rotating around a tiny sun that’s part of a spinning galaxy that’s one of millions that are all expanding outwards at an accelerating rate within a spacetime that continuously bulges and warps and may, just possibly, be turning inside out. Repeatedly.

Here and now? I don’t think so.

Filed under: Beliefs — Jonathan @ 10:35 pm

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The joker is not moiye anymore

Is it just me, or is anyone else thoroughly fed up to the back teeth with Kath & Kim already? And we’re only up to the second episode!

When Kath & Kim jumped the shark, it must have been off camera or during negotiations with Channel 7, because none of us actually saw it. But it’s happened all the same.

I tend to shudder when things start being referred to as ‘cultural icons’ – especially Australian cultural icons, because it usually means the ossification process has set in. Australia has a long and sad history of exporting it’s aging cultural icons to a bemused world.

Comedy icons are especially tragic. Our laughter is no longer spontaneous and uncontrolled, but starts to resemble singing the national anthem. You do it because it is the right thing to do. Let’s hope this never happens to The Chaser.

Jane Turner and Gina Riley are obviously very talented writers and performers, having produced ground breaking and hilarious work for Fast Forward, Full Frontal and Big Girl’s Blouse. But, I honestly think this show is a comedic albatross around their necks.

A very lucrative albatross, of course.

Filed under: Culture — Jonathan @ 10:20 am

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Haile likely

January 26, 2007

Haile OK, I can’t resist this. Robots and drumming. Meet Haile the drum-playing robot, invention of Georgia Tech music professor Gil Weinberg. Apparently, Haile uses artificial intelligence to improvise on real drums and respond to human musicians in an ensemble. They definitely need to improve his face though. Possibly something like Kensei.

Filed under: Body+ — Jonathan @ 10:57 pm

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Iceworld

January 25, 2007

For anyone interested in the world’s frozen seventh continent, this Washington Post interactive presentation on Antarctica is a must – filled with astonishing images, sound, information and downloads. There’s a section on Mount Erebus, the planet’s southern-most active volcano, standing 3,794 metres above sea level. See surreal images of ice caves which have a temperature of zero degrees Celsius plus 100 percent humidity, resulting in large ice crystals growing out of the vapour. Set the interface to view individual images and captions, to enjoy at your own pace.

Filed under: Spaces — Jonathan @ 9:31 am

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