Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a…

“Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc, etc.”

–Mencius Moldbug

Not everyone was happy with the rise of the snapshot. Professional photographers were repelled by the weird, ungainly, often…

“Not everyone was happy with the rise of the snapshot. Professional photographers were repelled by the weird, ungainly, often out-of-focus shots that amateurs produced. “Photography as a fad is well nigh on its last legs,” prayed the art photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Other pundits bemoaned “Kodak fiends,” camera obsessives who carried their device everywhere and were apparently so constantly taking pictures that they would space out and miss their trains.”

–The Invention of the “Snapshot” Changed the Way We Viewed the World- page 1 | Innovation | Smithsonian

an anonymous tipster wrote to me and turned me onto this cheeky bit of naughtiness in Dawkins’ bestseller, The God Delusion. In…

“

an anonymous tipster wrote to me and turned me onto this cheeky bit of naughtiness in Dawkins’ bestseller, The God Delusion. In Chapter 5 the professor muses upon the ‘cargo cult’ phenomenon, which was so crucial in the life and work of Erich Von Daniken:

“In The Life of Brian, one of the many things the Monty Python team got right was the extreme rapidity with which a new religious cult can get started. It can spring up almost overnight and then become incorporated into a culture, where it plays a disquietingly dominant role. The ‘cargo cults’ of Pacific Melanesia and New Guinea provide the most famous real life example.”

After recounting how these cults arose out of tribal peoples’ contact with advanced technology they had no exposure to, Dawkins starts to get quite cheeky indeed:

“The entire history of some of these cults, from initiation to expiry, is wrapped up within living memory. Unlike the cult of Jesus, the origins of which are not reliably attested, we can see the whole course of events laid out before our eyes (and even here, as we shall see, some details are now lost). It is fascinating to guess that the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high speed.”

Now, it all undoubtedly slid past his readers, but Dawkins is saying here that Christianity “began the same way” as the cargo cults. Which, as he exhaustively explains in this chapter, arose from native peoples’ exposure to superior alien technology (the aliens being Europeans in this context). As he says here:

“It seems that in every case the islanders were bowled over by the wondrous possessions of the white immigrants to their islands, including administrators, soldiers and missionaries. They were perhaps the victims of (Arthur C.) Clarke’s Third Law, which I quoted in Chapter 2: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”

Now isn’t that a fascinating little juxtaposition? Quoting the author of the the world’s most acclaimed Ancient-Astronaut narrative (2001: A Space Odyssey, for those new to all of this) shortly after claiming that the cult of the god-man Jesus “began the same way” as the cargo cults! As Eric Idle once said, “Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Say no more, say no more.” And just in case you missed Richard’s inference the first time, he repeats it:

“Fourth, the cargo cults are similar, not just to each other but to older religions. Christianity and other ancient religions that have spread worldwide presumably began as local cults like that of John Frum.”

The cargo cults which- and I’ll state this until the cows come home- began when a primitive people encountered a technologically superior civilization. After making quite a bit of the cargo cults, Dawkins then writes:

“I don’t want to make too much of the cargo cults of the South Pacific. But they do provide a fascinating contemporary model for the way religions spring up from almost nothing.”

Which, as Richard goes to great pains to explain, were the result of contact with a technologically-superior alien civilization.

”

–The Secret Sun: Richard Dawkins, Ancient Astronaut Theorist?: Part 2 (viam1k3y)

I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that…

“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

–Gus Speth

Amazon is using George Orwell’s name in vain: It quotes Orwell out of context as supporting a campaign to suppress paperbacks,…

“Amazon is using George Orwell’s name in vain: It quotes Orwell out of context as supporting a campaign to suppress paperbacks, to give specious authority to its campaign against publishers over e-book pricing; and having gotten as much capital as it can out of waving around Orwell’s name, Amazon then dismisses what was an ironic comment without engaging with Orwell’s own detailed arguments, which eloquently contradict Amazon’s. This is about as close as one can get to the Ministry of Truth and its doublespeak: turning the facts inside out to get a piece of propaganda across.”

–Bill Hamilton in The War of Words Over Amazon (2014)

BLDGBLOG: Worshipping the Crash

BLDGBLOG, crash, shrine, accident, motorbike, Ballard, Rajasthan, energy, thanatos, vernacular

We didn’t stay long, unfortunately, but it felt like a scene from some black-market rewrite of Crash, rewritten for Indian readers in which holy accidents on various roads throughout the country are visited by over-enthusiastic tourists of the afterlife, intent on receiving ill-defined bursts of supernatural energy from celebrity collisions such as these. The U.S. might have its James Dean Crash Site & Memorial, and France might have the Pont de l'Alma Tunnel, but this machine-deification in the deserts of northern India showed what a rural folk tradition could do with the morbid significance of fatal crash sites and the often deeply unglamorous vehicles that enable them.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.be/2014/08/worshipping-crash.html

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality

VR, virtual reality, the virtual, the real, computing, history, occulus, steroscopes

Some people identify the birth of virtual reality in rudimentary Victorian “stereoscopes,” the first 3D picture viewers. Others might point to any sort of out-of-body experience. But to most, VR as we know it was created by a handful of pioneers in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1962, after years of work, filmmaker Mort Heilig patented what might be the first true VR system: the Sensorama, an arcade-style cabinet with a 3D display, vibrating seat, and scent producer. Heilig imagined it as one in a line of products for the “cinema of the future,”

http://www.theverge.com/a/virtual-reality/oral_history

“Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my…

“Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”

–Christopher Knight (from The Strange Tale of the North Pond Hermit)

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The Energy Report: The Guide to 100% Renewable Energy by 2050

The Energy Report: The Guide to 100% Renewable Energy by 2050

An illustrated report produced by the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) and AMO, the research wing of the architecture office OMA, presents a provocative scenario set in 2050 of a world run entirely on renewable energy. Two years in the making, the report features features maps, charts and images produced by AMO, and is bundled with a numbers-rich study by energy consultancy Ecofys. The Energy Report is unique in the way it combines rigorous scientific research and statistics with beautiful and evocative graphics, illustrating the way energy issues can—and should—be made accessible and engaging to a wider audience. The full report is available for download here.

RNA trafficking in parasitic plant systems

plants, communication, botany, patabotany, mRNA, RNA trafficking

Certain parasitic plant species form symplastic connections to their hosts and thereby provide an additional system for studying RNA trafficking. The haustorial connections of Cuscuta and Phelipanche species are similar to graft junctions in that they are able to transmit mRNAs, viral RNAs, siRNAs, and proteins from the host plants to the parasite. In contrast to other graft systems, these parasites form connections with host species that span a wide phylogenetic range, such that a high degree of nucleotide sequence divergence may exist between host and parasites and allow confident identification of most host RNAs in the parasite system.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3424422/

NSA/GCHQ: The HACIENDA Program for Internet Colonization

internet, network, security, NSA, GCHQ, exploit, 0day, ORB, HACIENDA, organized crime

every device is a target for colonization, as each successfully exploited target is theoretically useful as a means to infiltrating another possible target. Port scanning and downloading banners to identify which software is operating on the target system is merely the first step of the attack (Figure 8). Top secret documents from the NSA seen by Heise demonstrate that the involved spy agencies follow the common methodology of online organized crime (Figure 9): reconnaissance (Figure 10) is followed by infection (Figure 11), command and control (Figure 12), and exfiltration (Figure 13). The NSA presentation makes it clear that the agency embraces the mindset of criminals. In the slides, they discuss techniques and then show screenshots of their own tools to support this criminal process (Figure 14, 15 and 16).

http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/NSA-GCHQ-The-HACIENDA-Program-for-Internet-Colonization–2292681.html

Fruits and Vegetables Are Trying to Kill You

hormesis, xenohormesis, antifragility, food, vitamins, antioxidants, exercise, health, diet, excess

Implicit in the research is a new indictment of the Western diet. Not only do highly refined foods present tremendous caloric excess, they lack these salutary signals from the plant world—“signals that challenge,” Mattson says. Those signals might otherwise condition our cells in a way that prevents disease. Another variant of the hormetic idea holds that our ability to receive signals from plants isn’t reactive and defensive but, in fact, proactive. We’re not protecting ourselves from biopesticides so much as sensing plants’ stress levels in our food. Harvard scientist David Sinclair and his colleague Konrad Howitz call this xenohormesis: benefitting from the stress of others.

http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/fruits-and-vegetables-are-trying-to-kill-you

Industry officials said that mainland China’s customs agency had notified companies that they were not allowed to ship to Japan…

“Industry officials said that mainland China’s customs agency had notified companies that they were not allowed to ship to Japan any rare earth oxides, rare earth salts or pure rare earth metals, although the shipments are still allowed to go to Hong Kong, Singapore and other destinations. But no ban has been imposed on the export to Japan of semi-processed alloys that combine rare earths with other materials, the officials said. China has been trying to expand its alloy industry to create higher-paying jobs in mining areas, instead of exporting raw materials for initial processing.”

–Amid Tension, China Blocks Crucial Exports to Japan (viaiamdanw)

Confuse Students to Help Them Learn

education, confusion, clarity, teaching, intuition, presentation, learning

“It seems that, if you just present the correct information, five things happen,” he said. “One, students think they know it. Two, they don’t pay their utmost attention. Three, they don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking. Four, they don’t learn a thing. And five, perhaps most troublingly, they get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.” Confusion is a powerful force in education. It can send students reeling toward boredom and complacency. But being confused can also prompt students to work through impasses and arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the world.

https://chronicle.com/article/Confuse-Students-to-Help-Them/148385/

The Singapore Solution

Singapore, National Geographic, NatGeo, place, pyschogeography, food

Singapore can be a disconcerting place, even to the people who call it home, though they’d never think of leaving. As one local put it, “Singapore is like a warm bath. You sink in, slit your wrists, your lifeblood floats away, but hey, it’s warm.” If that’s so, most Singaporeans figure they might as well go down the tubes eating pepper crabs, with a couple of curry puffs on the side.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2010/01/singapore/jacobson-text