David Sessions has HERE put together a nice collection of things Christopher Hitchens wrote down before he donated his body to medical research.

“In November 2011, the Russian space agency launched the much-anticipated Mars probe called Phobos-Grunt (which means “Phobos dirt” or “ground”), which would go to the Red Planet, soft-land a probe on the tiny moon Phobos, and return a sample of the surface to Earth. Unfortunately, the booster that would take it from Earth orbit into a Mars-intercept trajectory failed to fire, stranding the spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. Atmospheric drag has doomed the mission; it will most likely burn up sometime in the next two weeks.

Phobos-Grunt is visible to the naked eye as a bright star if it happens to pass overhead.”

Doomed Russian Mars probe seen from the ground.

Inventor Thomas Edison captured the event on film. He would release it later that year under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. A means of killing initially discussed was hanging. However, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals protested and other ways were considered. Edison then suggested electrocution with alternating current, which had been used for the execution of humans since 1890

Topsy was fed carrots laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide before the deadly current from a 6,600-volt AC source was sent coursing through her body. She was dead in seconds. The event was witnessed by an estimated 1,500 people and Edison’s film of the event was seen by audiences throughout the United States.

When Luna Park burned down in 1944, the fire was referred to as “Topsy’s Revenge”

Article From Wired

About 40,000 state laws taking effect at the start of the new year will change rules about  getting abortions in New Hampshire, learning about gays and lesbians in California, getting jobs in Alabama and even driving golf carts in Georgia.

New laws toughen rules on abortions, immigrants, voters.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled “The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis”, Clive R Boddy identifies ways in which Corporations may be actually searching out and employing mentally deranged individuals because of their unique and savy ability to be shrewd and impersonal.

The paper has caused quite a stir and further investigation into the notion. From an article in  the Independent:

“Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.

He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”

Original research paper here

The dying art of sending messages with hidden messages in the mail by unique stamp fixation.

This a was a worldwide craze but most of the rules seem to have been written up by French and Belgian People. Apparently it’s all in the angle. There’s a great collection of literature and “how to’s” from around the world (meaning old europe) regarding use of stamp communication here.

But PepsiCo claims it’s impossible for a rodent to be present, because apparently their in house alchemists claim that prolonged exposure makes jello out of mammals

Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses – National – The Atlantic Wire.

SIX MOVIES THAT WILL HELP YOU THROUGH THE END OF THE WORLD

2012 may bring meltdown. it may bring the mothership. it may just bring 2013

whatever comes, you ought to be ready. here are a few gems from the projected retrofuture files to help you mentally prepare for an altered reality and more importantly, how to dress for it…

Lathe of Heaven: a 1971 PBS TV movie about a guy who can alter reality with his dreams. a doctor gets involved and quickly tries to upgrade his office and heal the world. Alien Turtles save the day.

Soylent Green: In the future, riot police wear American Football helmets. Charlton Heston, a strict vegan, learns that he’s been eating non-vegan all along

Quintet: The future of fashion is some kind of high Afghan renaissance. Paul Newman is a seal hunter who somehow gets duped into being in this movie about people who are addicted to a dungeons and dragons like game

La jetée: 28 minutes of French people hiding underground and trying to get in touch with their photographic memories

Darkstar: Alien Beachballs are running rampant on a spaceship while the commander has a philosphical conversation with an undetonated bomb

Zardoz:  Omphaloskepsis is reflecting on one’s navel as a means of meditation. It’s vital to yogis, Russian Orthodox priests and the storyline of this debacle. Sean Connery was convinced to do many strange things for this piece of art.

If the weather is right in the coming days, you may be able to see the Quadrantids coming around as many as 200 meteors per hour. Look north between the Big Dipper and Boötes, the plowman.

The shower is named for a defunct constellation. They do tend to come and go. If you only use Chinese astrological maps, you’ll find the shower located in the “Purple forbidden enclosure”

Apparently the Quadrantids have their own website. this one is better

Being Dependent upon things we don’t understand is nothing new.

It’s only what we are dependent upon that changes.

We used to depend on gods to bring the meat and potatoes.

Today we depend on virtual widgets collecting wireless data from weather satellites that predict the probability of rain.

1. Increasing complexity does not necessarily imply progress

2. Often complexity is unnecessary, and when it is, you can bet someone is gaining from it.

If we were all more selective with our complexities, we would be in a much better predicament.

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At MIT, Paul Griffith wrote a thesis entitled “self replicating machines”, a clever idea taken from nature.

in nature, it was the ribozyme that was believed to be the springboard to all self-replicating life. Imagine a string of data that can copy itself. And then… complexity and possibility.

Anyway back to Paul Griffith, in a recent interview, the guardian newspaper tried to nail down exactly how much energy the internet as a machine was consuming. The best estimates from independent studies is that the internet uses 1-3% of total world energy consumption.

Paul scoffed at the idea, noting all the complexities and externalities that don’t get included in the count. Says he, “Part of the reason humanity is in the situation it is with climate change is that we weren’t measuring how we were using energy and understanding the consequences.”

Notice he says humanity, not life…. life will be just fine.

Determining whether or not animals can be creative would require that we define what creativity means. In the meantime… in Thailand, elephants paint pictures and play improvisational fusion jazz. In New Guinea, male Bower birds collect tasty berries and flowers of bling to uniquely adorn their low impact love crib.

One observation of note, especially about the bower bird… or the bird of paradise… or even among men and women of leisure…

in any given habitat, as threats to survival decrease, the complexity of imaginitive creativity increases

There’s an 8 minute program from PRI available here    where you can listen to elephants rocking out and scientists being obtuse.

There is an obvious plethora of food on the move these days. Often this food arrives by tweet and is accompanied by a whole holodeck change in environment… people juggling, lights, purple clothing.

The Fojol Bros from D.C. are a good example of this phenomenon.

Judging from past food truck trends, there is an inevitable threshold reached whereupon violence escalates and trendiness goes out the window.

in the 1980′s there were a series of turf wars played out in the neighborhoods of Glasgow. It was about ice cream. It was also about drugs and balaclavas

Should you be looking into any Food truck studies programs,  Cult and paste recommends that you consider a Thesis on the rise of food truck turf wars focusing on the effects of hipsterness on outcomes.

With news that Kmart and Sears are shutting down a number of stores across the Merica,  a legitamate question is what will become of the oversized, empty shells they leave behind and how is it that cities progress?

NOTE: this is not an attack on strip malls in general. The strip mall is an unfortunate externality, a logical extension of an automobile driven community.

No this is an attack on the “anchor” stores who demand new strip mall construction and then duck out when tax laws change.  No thought is  given to the scarification of the landscape.  If the design of these strip malls were more flexible then perhaps they wouldn’t degenerate so quickly into grade b take-out restaurants, intermittent bingo halls and vitamin stores….

if anyone has need for 100′s of stadium size warehouses usually built on the border of counties and cities, there’s plenty of opportunity.

For a discussion on the history of strip malls click here

This film is an “in”credible series of intricate floor shows tied together with bright colors and an amazing fireplace.

• the cast of characters are a super human bunch
• able to telepathically “whip up” a routine in the blink of an eye
• the whole country is at their fingertips
• and the christmas-eve-summer-camp-variety-show at the lodge is just around the corner

THESE ARE THE FILMS THAT CONVEYED AMERICAN IDEALISM

AND INTERPRETED WHAT THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE

• Everyone has a perfect memory
• Everyday is a physical and spiritual preparation for the next party
• Old Generals wear leather jackets
• Horseshoes is a sport for the dying
• and the weather is governed by song

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America does so well in the movies

Introductory anecdote: How people are driven (part 1)

In Israel, parole boards usually grant parole 30% of the time on average, except after meals and breaks when they grant parole 60% of the time

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THE IRRATIONALITY OF DECISION MAKING and the art of ending up with crap you never wanted to deal with (part 2)

Up until the 1960′s we were told that bad decisions were the result of faulty emotions. Then one day Daniel Kahneman realized that making a decision is an inherently irrational process. We constantly edit and evaluate with distorted and incomplete data sets to assess losses and gains. For this “prospect theory” he was given a nobel prize in economics and went on to find out just how madly overconfident and silly we all are.

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His latest work is a collection of anecdotes on decision fatigue

Decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual, after a long session of decision making. It is now understood as one of the causes of irrational trade-offs in decision making. Experiments have shown the interrelationship between decision fatigue and ego depletion, whereby a person’s ability for self-control against impulses decreases in the face of decision fatigue.

That’s why candy bars come at the checkout counter

SIDE NOTE

“When a problem occurs, ask ‘why’ five times to try to find the source of the problem, then put into place something to prevent the problem from recurring”      

-Sakichi Toyoda (founder of Kabushiki-gaisha Toyota Jidō Shokki)

Toyota began as a Loom manufacturer. In 1924 the company went viral when they invented the Type G machine. It was such an advancement in technology because it had the ability to shut itself off when it detected a single error. In 1933 Toyota took this inventive philosophy to  the automobile market and the rest of the story is magnificent as pleather.

Ever since it’s beginnings the Toyota company has maintained an office of “sensei”s that help with problem solving and better design through Jidoka, a kind of ko’an automation exercise. This framework of business model coupled with a strong sense of responsiblity among workers has proven to be a great service to humanity.

Case in point- the Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, and Toyota’s ball of yarn.

The Hospital, hemorrhaging money and  overrun by megalomaniac doctors who always knew best, discovered that the efficiency they thought they had over their organization was in actuality just a great disservice to suffering patients.

There’s a great audio story about how the sensei’s were sought out and saved the day over at 99% invisible

Scientists at Notre Dame have developed “Paint on solar cells” using nanotechnology and the tears of the sun. This will have sociocultural effects that we cannot possibly foresee at this time. Coming soon, Solar skin… goodbye food. Details here

for importing endangered bones and reworking them into hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring attention to…. genetic engineering?

As the hermit kingdom of North Korea faces its great crisis since the invention of the hamburger. We consider another land who strove to maintain a  self imposed quarantine amidst world affairs,  Albania.

Socialism in Albania was written and directed by Enver Hoxha. The script was considered by Albanians to be the the only “true”  legitimate socialism (anti-revisionist Marxist Leninism). By declaring themselves the real deal, they closed themselves off from even the staunchest of hardline communists. USSR- washed up, Yugoslavia- sellouts, China- Mao was cool for a while but in the end, they also were considered sellouts.

What resulted is incredibly weird, tragic, unique and amazing. Being self sufficient requires a hard line, a strong sense of identity and the will of the people. When you don’t have all that to go on, you create myths and build huge electric fences… that’s exactly what Enver Hoxha did. The myths of identity linking Albanians to the ancient Illyrian civilization is more “Little House on the Balkan Prarie” than truth, but in the hearts and minds of Albanians, they are the legitimate heirs to this culture. Their DNA suggest otherwise.

The video collection below are parts of series that you can follow on the youtube. There is another, you can dig for from 1989 in German discussing how all churches and mosques were converted into museums and cinemas. I find it interesting that the solution Hoxha gives for a mixed bag of religious denominations is to Atheize them into unity.

CASE REPORT From the BMJ

A 76-year-old female, with a blameless medical history other than well-controlled depression, was referred for urgent investigation due to weight loss and diarrhoea. A flexible sigmoidoscopy demonstrated severe diverticulosis and a subsequent CT abdomen showed a linear foreign body in the stomach but no other abnormality. Her symptoms resolved spontaneously.

On subsequent questioning, she recalled unintentionally swallowing a pen 25 years earlier. While she was interrogating a spot on her tonsil with the pen she slipped, fell and swallowed the pen by mistake. Her husband and general practitioner dismissed her story and plain abdominal films done at the time were reported as normal. A gastroscopy demonstrated a plastic felt-tip pen sitting in the lumen of the stomach without evidence of any gastric damage.

The case was discussed at the gastrointestinal multi-disciplinary meeting and the consensus of opinion was that despite being there for 25 years without causing any problems, the pen should be removed as there has been at least one case report of a duodenal perforation caused by an ingested ballpoint pen. It was subsequently removed in a combined endoscopic and ear, nose and throat procedure under general anaesthetic. The pen was still in working order…”