This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Lord only knows I’ve talked plenty of shit about the not funny comedian turned not funny but actually astonishingly reasonable US Senator Al Franken, and I’m probably not done. But credit where credit is due – the guy can draw one hell of a map of the United States from memory. Which doesn’t really sound that impressive, until you see it happen and realize there is no fucking way you could do it. Observe:

 

In Which We All Get A Little Closer To Creepy, Creepy Immortality

Dr. Henry Markram of Switzerland’s Brain Science Institute has suggested that we could see the first fully functioning computer model of a human brain in as little as 10 years. “I absolutely believe it is technically and biologically possible. The only uncertainty is financial,” said Markram.

If Markram is right, we could be just a decade away from an unparalleled tool for understanding the most opaque inner workings of the human brain and diagnosing and treating neurological disorders. Not to mention the means to keep our greatest mad scientists alive and terrorizing the planet with killer robots for centuries to come.

For those of you playing along at home – Ray Kurzweil just got a boner.

 

In Which The Going Gets Weird

One of the weirder corners of the cryptozoology/Fortean phenomena world concerns occasional encounters with the terrifying menace of phantom clowns, which are exactly what they sound like. In the early 1980s, and again in the early ’90s, rashes of phantom clown encounters cropped up across the United States, with some reported in the UK as well. A typical phantom clown encounter involves a clown, either on foot or in black van, acting in a menacing fashion towards passers by. Phantom clowns typically try to kidnap children, attack people, or chase them around. They then drive off or escape into overgrowth, always managing to elude later detection or capture. Being that these are presumably people dressed as clowns, making themselves inconspicuous is not exactly a simple task.

And now, as if times weren’t troubled enough, we may be seeing the beginnings of another rash of phantom clown attacks. A man in South Bend, Indiana, just miles from where I grew up, was chased by a clown who then disappeared into the woods early in the morning on August 11th. The threatening harlequin was never found by police.

This means one of two things: either there are evil clowns with eerie supernatural powers out there who are intent on harassing us, or the juggaloes are simultaneously becoming more aggressive and improving their stealth technology. Neither of these things could even remotely be classified as ‘good news.’

 

Bitch Be Cool!

Hey, St. Louis! Chill the fuck out!

Look, I’m glad that Democrats are starting to show up at these town halls and show Republican nut job protesters that they don’t have a patent on being loud and disruptive. It’s nice to see some backbone out of the lefty base, after all. But seriously, shit’s about to get really real in St. Louis, with anti-health care reform protesters encouraging one another to bring firearms to townhall meetings and hurt their pro-reform adversaries “badly.” By the way, Twitter asshole Scott Oskay – carrying a gun, even with a permit, to a meeting of a government body is a crime under Missouri law. Thanks for inciting!

And if that’s still too classy or subtle, give a listen to this number in which a woman from Oregon threatens the SEIU.

Extra points for ending a phone call threatening to cap motherfuckers with the phrase “stop the violence” aside,  lets’ just hope someone is keeping an eye on these whackadoos who, make no mistake, are threatening to come to public meetings to shoot people. There’s a lot of fringe right whackos out there right now who seem to feel that the best thing they can do for their country is shoot up an abortion clinic or a museum – hold a good thought that we don’t have to add townhall meeting to that sad list.

 

Worst. Headline. Ever.

Oh, BBC, you’ve put me in a wicket that is ever so sticky.

On the one hand, I’m as ready as anyone for a serious rethinking of how we use Predators and other UAVs in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s particularly important in the latter theater, where civilian casualties caused by drone strikes play a major part in turning public opinion against US and NATO forces. The fact of the matter is that we don’t win the war against the Taliban in the region until we end public perception that we are the enemy, and we don’t end that perception until we stop killing civilians. Because frankly, until we stop killing civilians, we are the enemy to the vast majority of people on the ground in Afghanistan.

Since I’m on record as feeling this way, I couldn’t be happier to hear that Professor Noel Sharkey, who has been talking for years about the need for a reconsideration of whether the new face of modern warfare is a net improvement. For the soldiers who get to control these heavily armed automatons from half a world away, it certainly seems like it. But if we’re unable to distinguish civilian from combatant – a task that’s often difficult enough for a soldier on the ground – then are we really making wars more winnable? Or are we just making the rules a little different?

America - Are You Going To Let A Robot Fight Your Battles For You?

Maybe, by their definition, there’s no such thing as a safe weapon. But there’s a clear line between weapons that are ready to be used safely and ones that aren’t. And it’s time for a serious conversation about where UAVs and other robotic weaponry are in that process. Are they highly advanced? No doubt – technology has made undeniable strides from the days when all that robot warriors could do was rock ’em and/or sock ’em. But are they fool proof? Hardly, and when they’re not, the results are disastrous. So yeah, I’m happy that the media is giving the subject some love.

But really, BBC – did you have to run Jason Palmer’s excellent story on the matter under the headline ‘Call for debate on killer robots‘?

 

Boldly Going…

Best of luck to David Farrier and his compatriots as they set out across a vast and unforgiving dessert in search of  an animal that, if it exists, is as strange and dangerous as any on the face of the planet.

Farrier and his team begin trekking across the Gobi today in search of the Mongolian death worm. Depending on who you believe, this legendary monster is a red, segmented snake or worm, up to seven and a half feet long and resembling a length of cow intestine. Unlike a cow intestine, however, the death worm can spit a lethal venom, and is also capable of killing from a distance with what is apparently some sort of electrical discharge.

Farrier isn’t foolhardy enough to go in search of such a deadly creature unprepared, though, so he’s doing what any sane, thinking person would do – bringing along lots and lots of explosives. Ostensibly, the explosives are meant only to create vibrations, which supposedly cause the creature to surface so expedition members can capture images of it on film. But to be fair, anyone who goes looking for this thing and doesn’t keep a grenade handy is in dereliction of duty. Short of a large hydraulic piston and a pair of metal hooks, it’s the only responsible thing to bring along on an expedition like this.

 

In Which Troubling Comparisons Are Drawn

Virologists at the University of Wisconsin – Madison have completed a detailed study of the H1N1 swine flu virus, and the news is…well, it’s less than good.

The virus, which has demonstrated a filament shape unusual in flu viruses, has the potential to be much more severe than most researchers have thought so far. That’s because, in addition to being more apt to reproduce itself within lung tissue, the H1N1 virus has demonstrated an ability to infect cells deep within lung tissue far beyond that of a standard seasonal flu virus.

This capacity for infiltrating further into the lungs distinguishes the H1N1 virus, according to researchers, including study leader Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka, who stated that “There is clear evidence the virus is different than seasonal influenza.” Where most flu viruses only affect the upper respiratory system, the H1N1 bug can go much deeper, bringing about pneumonia, bronchitis and possibly death.

The truly unnerving thing to note about this study, published this month in the journal Nature, is that the ability to penetrate deep into the lungs is something we’ve seen before. The trait was also expressed in the 1918 flu pandemic that killed tens of millions worldwide. The fact that people born before 1918 seem to have antibodies against the H1N1 swine flu further suggests that we’re looking at a flu virus whose closest corollary wiped out significant swaths of humanity almost a century ago, when passing flu from one community to another was significantly more difficult.

In other words – this could be a bad one. And while most people seem to have stopped worrying about it, I’m staying at a Level Orange Alert (at least while we still have one) on the matter of a swine flu pandemic. Not every disease du’ jour is going to be the next big thing in global health crises (see also, SARS, bird flu, West Nile virus) but eventually, something is going to break big, and the current H1N1 strain is a pretty likely candidate for doing some real damage. Add to that the fact that a serious outbreak (deaths, high fear of contagion, etc.) during  flu season in the US this year would deliver a hammer blow to a global economy still struggling to get it’s feet, and set back progress on that front at a time we can ill afford it?

Sound like a worst case scenario? It is. But it’s not at all one that’s outside the realm of possibility right now. And I know I may sound unreasonably doom and gloom, but hey, a paranoid is just someone who has all the facts, right? I’m not saying the sky is falling, but the common consensus seems to be that this thing is no cause for concern, an I just don’t buy that line.

The study does have a silver lining, in that anti-viral drugs seemed to be an effective first line of defense against the virus. But with a working vaccine probably unavailable until the end of the year, they’re also the only line of defense at this point.

 

Every Breath You Take

During my misspent youth, it was something of a running joke between my hooligan friends and I that, should any of us be unfortunate enough to be saddled with the burdens of fatherhood, that the resulting child’s life would be best turned over to social experimentation in their early years.

So ill-prepared would we be for the perils of child rearing, we knew, the only responsible choice to make would be to devote the developmental stages of our offspring to the rigors of science. In this way, our hypothetical children could make some small contribution to the world, one no doubt greater than the dissipated life of crime, substance abuse, grift and general no-goodery for which any young minds turned over to our incapable hands for parenting would doubtless be bound.

As often as we heckled one another about the strange fates of our descendants, no one really believed it. And even though we demonstrated time after time that we were, in point of fact, terrible, terrible human beings, none of us really considered that, in the regrettable event that any of us ended up breeding, we would make guinea pigs of our babies.

We didn’t know anybody, in short, like MIT researcher Deb Roy. This is a guy who sticks to his motherfucking guns. The director of MIT’s Cognitive Machines group, Roy’s research has focused on language interaction in a variety of  physical and social contexts, as well as language acquisition in children. It’s this second line of thinking that led Roy to record his child’s entire life for the past three years.

The research, known as the Human Speechome Project, saw Roy install 11 cameras and 14 microphones in his home, represents the pinnacle of embarrassing home video technology, capturing every waking moment of  his son’s young life. After three years, Roy is done recording via the legion of hidden cameras throughout his home and he and his team have moved on to the work of analyzing the resulting quarter million hours of audio and video, working with advanced software  to find the points where the babbling of infants turns into genuine human language.

 

In Which The Swarms Descend

Creepy crawlers of all sorts have been in the news this week, starting with the emergence of crowds of enormous eastern tarantulas. Known as “birdeating spiders” despite the fact that they don’t typically dine on  avians, the huge arachnids have become troublingly prevalent in the small Australian town of Bowen. Today saw officials attempting to put a happy face on the matter after an initial media freakout at the notion of a city overrun by giant tarantulas effectively shut down tourism in the town. Apparently, the thought of hairy spiders as big as your head that can sicken humans and kill dogs with their venomous bite is bad for business. Local pest controller Audy Geiszler, for one, is doing his part to quell rumors of a ful blown spider invasion by concentrating on the good news – for example, says Geiszler, the town has seen “no cases of them eating children or anything like that.” Which is good news, I guess. But someone should tell Mr. Geiszler that the next time he’s trying to calm a worried public, he might want to pause before he plays the ‘No Children Have Yet Been Consumed By Enormous Spiders’ card. 

Meanwhile, farmers in China’s Xinjiang province are under siege by legions of unidentified worms. The thorny, green, inch long beasties, are going through grassland like a giant organic lawnmower, turning pasture into brown soil acres at a time. Found in densities of up to 3,000 creatures per meter of soil, the creatures have descended on the village in such numbers that 50 families have had to flee their homes, which were also overrun.

 

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Following the first casualty in the United States attributed to swine flu and the first case of the disease in someone who has not travelled to Mexico in Spain, the World Health Organization today raised it’s alert level regarding swine flu to five – one short of a full blown pandemic.

What does that mean? A level five alert indicates that self sustaining outbreaks of the virus are present in two or more countries, and that a pandemic is in the offing. In my neck of the woods, swine flu seems to be regarded as a novelty at best, and a high grade irritant to friends who work in the health care sector and find themselves in the unenviable position of talking down people who travelled to Mexico for spring break a year ago and are now convinced that they are plague ships.

But while the news media continues it’s patented freakout, people on the ground seem relatively calm. Even as the situation grows more grave across the world, swine flu has become a running gag, something halfway clever to say when someone sneezes, or an excuse to call in sick to work. Every one seems to be convinced that this is not going to be the end of the world. And I mostly agree. Most cases of swine flu remain farily mild, and drugs seem to keep it under control. But the thing that gnaws at me is this – eventually, there is going to be an outbreak of flu that we can’t do much about, and in a world as interconnected as ours, it’s going to be a real bad one. That’s less a matter of if than when.

But when it does crop up, no one’s going to buy it. We were supposed to be scared of SARS, and we got scared, and nothing happened. Avian flu was supposed to wipe out humanity, and we all shook in our boots, and nothing happened. Now swine flu has reached the highest pandemic alert level ever set by the WHO, and though the media is abuzz, people on the street can barely manage a shrug. Whether it’s because we feel invincible after the last couple of high profile disease scares, or just that we’re tired of being afraid, people just seem to take for granted that there’s nothing to worry about, not really, even though every indication is that the spread of the virus is going to get worse before it gets better, with a coming level 6 alert, denoting a full fledged pandemic, practically a foregone conclusion.

I’m not saying that swine flu is definitely going to be the end of the world. But at some point, something is go to be. So, why not this?

In lighter news, the U.S. GDP  numbers came in today, and the news looks grim at first glance – the overall economy shrank by a worse than predicted 6.1% in the first quarter of 2009. 

But the numbers might not be as bad as they seem at first glance. A lack of government spending and inventory draw downs (companies selling stock on hand rather than ordering more items to put on shelves) pushed the number down artificially. More importantly, the report indicated good news for one of the bellwethers of an economic recovery – consumer spending was up a better than expected 2.2%. This perceived upswing in consumer confidence has some analysts betting on a brighter than expected second quarter, but with the savings rate continuing to rise (inexplicably) alongside consumer spending, that may be an overly rosy scenario. 

Even if this is a bottom, it may not be the bottom, as analysts are predicting that this recession will make a  W shaped recovery, with a false recovery arriving in the middle, just before another, albeit more shallow, crash. And even if this is the beginning of an actual and factual period of growth, the things that most people associate with financial well being – like steady employment – won’t recover for quite a while yet, with unemployment numbers likely to continue trending upward. But for right now, it may be best to concentrate on the good news. Celebrate a little – go buy yourself something pretty. At least until the stimulus package starts working it’s way through state legislatures in earnest, the economics of happy thoughts may be all we have to keep us warm for a while.

 

Life’ll Kill Ya

An Oklahoma man is in police custody after making posts to his Twitter account that are even less intelligible than standard tweets.

Daniel Hayden, aka Citizen Quasar was arrested after trying to make way too big of a deal of the April 15th Teabagging protests, attempting to incite fellow Oklahomans to violent rebellion against the government and the New World Order. Most of the material in question was posted on the evening of April 11th, when Hayden, who may have had a few too many, transitioned almost seamlessly from posting Alice Cooper videos and misattributing Conan quotes to full blown dangerous whack jobbery,  like this

START THE KILLING NOW! I am wiling to be the FIRST DEATH! I Await the police. They will kill me in my home.

Luckily, the police didn’t have to go quite that far, arresting Hayden later that week. So, for those of you playing along at home, here is the current list of things not to do on Twitter:

1) engage in name calling with fellow professionals

2)threaten to decapitate people on the steps of a state capitol building

That is all.

But hey, credit where credit is due – Hayden didn’t actually hurt anyone. That’s more than can be said for way too many people recently, and with the economy finally seeming to settle to the bottom, the recent and tragic string of familicides is probably going to get worse before it gets better.

 

Must Stop… Spider!

From the Department of  Things You Didn’t Really Need Another Reason to Be Scared Of, comes this surprising factoid on arachnid physiology. 

French researcher Julien Petillon knew that spiders were hard critters to drown, but he quite reasonably wanted to find out just how deep this defense against grim aquatic death ran. So, Petillon did what any reasonable person would do and started drowning wolf spiders.

Now, the fact that the marsh dwelling spiders took a full 24 hours of submersion to drown should be unnerving enough to send any right thinking person into a fit of the heebiest jeebies. But what happened next is an episode woven from strands of pure nightmare. From Discovery News:

As they lay drying in Petillion’s laboratory at the University of Rennes in France, something odd happened: the ‘dead’ spiders began to twitch. First one small movement, then another — before long the salt marsh spiders were skittering about as though nothing had happened.

Just something to think about next time you try and flush an eight legged home invader down the drain.