UC Berkeley scientists have recorded the first images ever generated by a human brain. Amazing. They exposed subjects to video images while recording visual activity in their brains. When they played the recorded data back they got images corresponding closely to what the subjects had just seen. What I notice about the images in the video is that faces seem to work the best. That is interesting on many levels. Perhaps facial recognition is so hard-wired into humans that we are able to generate those images more clearly than all others.  This work opens the door to the ability to reconstruct imagery from dreams and memories. It’s a staggering achievement.  Magnificent.  I simply cannot wait to try this sometime.

Thank you to Rob Smart on Facebook.

German film director, Werner Herzog.

If you simply must hang your work in a gallery, then here is the tool you’ll need to make just the right impression on your viewing public: The Arty Bollocks Generator.

It’ll flawlessly create your entire artist’s statement for any truly serious and irreproachably artistic endeavor.

Some samples:  ‘My work explores the relationship between the tyranny of ageing and skateboard ethics.’

‘As shifting phenomena become frozen through emergent and personal practice, the viewer is left with a statement of the limits of our world.’

Please be serious, donate to a charity, write a manifesto, and for god’s sake go to a gallery for some bloody education!  Then take yourself to see a fine German movie… film, I meant ‘film.’  Okay?

Now get going.

And for further sublime examples of pretentious statement-making, try Werner Herzog’s film school!

The U.S. government wants you to keep your house tidy and clean. If you don’t, it’ll get blown up and burned to a cinder by an atomic bomb blast. Seriously. This is the entire message of this ridiculous 1954 U.S. government educational film about the effects of a nuclear blast. It seems obvious to me that if you were working for the U.S. government in the fifties you were just a drooling simpleton. This film actually goes from mind-boggling insanity to postmodern masterpiece if you squint at it in the right way. It represents nearly everything you need to know about the 20th century in America.

Egypt has begun to put out its garbage. It’s an amazing achievement for Egyptians that I have witnessed via the news video and photos coming from Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Congratulations to all the Egyptians who wanted to be free. They forced a raping, murdering, totalitarian criminal to resign his dictatorial position. The dictator Mubarak was and is an ongoing embarrassment and deep shame to the entire Middle East and to the United States that insisted on giving him respect and credibility even while he committed murder and oppressed a great civilization. Egyptians have made an incredible start to ridding themselves of the human garbage that was and is Mubarak. It remains to be seen if Egypt can become truly free and wrest control of the nation from its military.

Hopefully, the revolution in Egypt will spread to topple the rest of the governments in the Middle East which are nearly unanimous in their willingness to allow brutal thugs and criminal royal families to rule in bitter oppression. These savage despots straight out of the Dark Ages are specialists in murder, rape and complete suppression of all ideas and expression. They also have the absolute respect and support of governments like those in the U.S.

Beyond the Middle East and its ‘royal families,’ it would be astonishing and constructive to see the people of China put their own garbage out by removing their totalitarian government. Revolution is in the twenty-first century air. No one is immune.

NASA is preparing to announce today that it has discovered an entirely new form of life that is built on a different basis from any life form every known.

In other words, life does not have to be made up of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.  The new life form discovered by the space agency is built upon arsenic.

Essentially, NASA has discovered an alien life form.

This changes the entire basis of the search for life on other planets.  It changes the whole story.  Life can apparently build itself out of things we thought made life impossible.

There’s a 2:00 pm EST news conference scheduled at NASA to formally announce the world-changing discovery.

Here’s NASA’s announcement of the finding.

This is NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon who leads the team that made this discovery.

This is private space flight at its best. Luke Geissbuhler spent 8 months researching how to launch a small weather balloon with a camera that would travel to the edge of space, take video of the trip, and return the camera safely to the ground! Incredible and fascinating to watch. You’d be amazed at how many things there are to understand about a simple balloon that is constructed to stay within the legal requirements of the Federal Aviation Administration. You also won’t believe how far this thing went. The video of the Earth is like what you see from the Space Shuttle.

Fake. It should be obvious. Any twelve year old child can look at the volcano of oil and tell you that it will never fit inside a narrow pipe. This is just public relations for the sake of the video feed. President Obama should get into a military posture immediately and remove BP from the Gulf. It is time to start arresting BP employees. This is terrorism. The ideas and execution on display from BP make no logical sense and therefore must represent something beyond what we are being made aware of. Obama needs to ask Congress to convene specifically to authorize a takeover of all BP assets and physical property worldwide by the United States. They need to basically declare a state of war against a multi-national corporation. And if they refuse, then Obama needs to move without them. I’m dead serious in my opinion on this. This is one of the worst attacks ever perpetrated against the United States. The reason I call it an attack is because what started as an accident has changed now into an ongoing effort to confuse observers of the situation and mislead them into thinking that BP is trying to stop the leak. What are other BP people doing around the world right now? What is going on in their banks? Where are they moving their money? Obama is missing the big red ball here and he’s never going to recover. I think it would be wise to very quickly and quietly remove all BP personnel from any offshore oil rigs near the U.S. and shut those rigs down asap. NASA engineers need to be pulled into this emergency and the military must provide logistics and hauling support for the effort to shut the gusher down.

The entire southern and eastern coasts of the U.S. are at severe risk and the volume of oil in the Gulf is far beyond what BP or the government have stated.  This company has absolutely no concern whatsoever for what happens to the Gulf waters or the U.S. coasts.  It concerns itself only with limiting financial losses and maximizing oil profits.  Cleanup and stopping the spill are completely irrelevant to this company.  Obama needs to consider what he would do if he wakes up tomorrow and realizes that BP is falsifying the entire operation at the spill site.  What would you do, Mr. President?

Further thoughts: Extreme language and extreme action are required in this very odd situation with the Gulf disaster. I think it is only this kind of extreme, left-field thinking that will somehow break the massive inertia that is apparent in our government’s response to a major world emergency. I continue to hear high government officials, including the President, talk about what the government, military, and BP can’t do. Everyone seems to think that there’s not much that can be done that BP isn’t already doing. This thinking is very dangerous and indicates a total collapse of the nation’s intellect and general technical infrastructure. That is not the way the United States expresses itself. We are seeing what is either an anomaly or an indication of failure on a massive and existential scale. The United States that has existed up until recently would never say that it could not plug a hole 5,000 feet below the sea. Never. It would turn all of its technical, military, industrial, and intellectual resources toward filling that hole immediately. I’ve heard reports that President Obama has an IQ of 160. Really? Really? I’m not sure which test was administered to this guy, but it is quite apparent that somebody got paid a little extra to score it.

This country is bleeding out of its asshole. And our President is modeling business casual slacks on the oil-slicked shores of a destroyed southern coast.

The President should be using extreme language and taking extreme actions to get this hole filled instantaneously. He should be reacting in very much the same way he would react if a nuclear bomb had exploded somewhere on American soil. Nothing less will suffice. What is wrong with our President and what is wrong with America?

Update June 4 10:00 am: The BP robot operators are trying to close the valves on the gusher cap they installed last night.  Meanwhile, oil blasts out through those valves while some channels up to a surface ship.  It remains to be seen if by closing the valves BP can stop the uncontrolled gusher and channel all of the oil to their ships.

Update June 3 10:00 pm: It does not appear to be working.  I think BP keeps insisting on using rather narrow pipes to handle this gusher which is putting out enormous loads of pressure.  Why don’t they fit a large sewer pipe around this blowout preventer?  A large diameter sewer pipe could simply hang around the gusher without even making a tight fit.  Then the gushing oil would be gradually corralled into a somewhat narrower pipe leading to the surface.  Blockages of frozen matter seen in the original effort to put a big box around the gusher must be a product primarily of using too narrow gauge a pipe for this job.  You can’t try to push all this high-pressure oil into a narrow pipe leading to the surface.  You have to gradually ease it up into a very wide pipe.

The cap BP is trying to fit on the gusher simply doesn’t have enough weight to press its rubber gasket tight enough to the pipe, so too much oil is leaking around it.  BP’s robot operators are wonderful, but I’m having very serious doubts about the competence of its engineers.  Very serious.  It may be well past time for President Obama to get NASA involved.  There’s no way that a good engineer is going to be trying to fit a narrow pipe over a high-pressure volcano.  It’s silly.

By the way, this planetary level disaster is quite likely to wipe out most of the coast of the United States.  The greatest superpower nation on earth is about to lose most of its coastline from the south all the way up the eastern seaboard to New York.  A single company with a single 24-inch hole in the ground has done this.  It is this event, not 9/11, that is the turning point.  We have reached the end of the era of global corporations.  They are too dangerous.  Governments must retool and rethink.  Companies like BP must be destroyed, either financially or legislatively.

Original post below:

If you want a few heroes out of this horrendous Gulf Oil Disaster, you should start by watching the work of whoever is controlling the deep water submersible arms. It’s fascinating and highly educational to observe the careful thought process that goes on in advance of every single minute movement made by this machine. Remote control at 5000 feet of depth is a rare skill indeed. BP is attempting to place a cap and pipe onto the cutoff top end of the pipe that is spewing oil into the Gulf waters. So the robots will need to be carefully controlled to aim this device and place it right into the center of the gusher.

This approach has a high probability of success. But if they miss the hole and bend something, they will need to try again. This could well be one of the great feats of engineering in modern times. Well worth watching patiently.

Scientists announced today that they have created the first artificial life form in human history.

The J. Craig Venter Institute has informed the White House of the incredible achievement and the possible environmental and military repercussions are already being debated.

Researchers used computers to create an artificial sequence of DNA.  Then they inserted that DNA into hollowed-out cells which began to grow and replicate.

That’s a new form of life created by human beings.  This may be a far more important development than going to the moon.

Using IBM computers, Dr. Henry Markram is building a model of the human brain that he hopes will take about 10 years to complete. Filmmaker Noah Hutton is chronicling the endeavor in an ongoing documentary that will be finished once the brain model exists. This is one of the most fascinating and important efforts I have ever heard about in modern science.  The brain project is called Blue Brain and is located at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The idea to build a model based on minute and precise observations of how the brain synapses and cells actually work is a good one. Dr. Markram emphasizes that once you understand certain principles you can start to build models that increase in complexity and accuracy until you have have an understanding of how things work. Careful observation and exact mimicry will lead to a functioning model. Markram goes further to say that eventually you will be able to teach the model languages and watch it learn. He’s talking about artificial intelligence. He’s talking about making a machine think.

This is the modern world’s alchemy.  The simplistic understanding of Medieval alchemy is that it was the attempt to turn base metals into gold.  We are now trying to turn base metals into thinking beings.  It is a logical thing to do.  Think about it.  Every household and every pocket in almost every developed nation on earth has a small thinking machine in it.  What does that really tell you?  It tells me that our main effort on a planetary scale – a human species level – is to make machines think.  We aren’t going to the moon.  Or going to Mars.  Or trying to travel to the stars.  What we’re actually doing is trying to make metal and electricity think.  To live.

A working model of a brain is going to take us places we never thought we could go.