Real world

Blank Maxine and I are tearing down, rebuilding, and remodeling a wall in the house I live. It's quite fortunate that we own the house in which we're doing all this work, because a landlord would probably take notice and we'd lose our security deposit.
Because of this, the may be a few less dispatches over the next week or so.
I have added some reading material on the left in the form of RSS feeds that I check everyday. They are several "social barometer" sites for me.

Repent!
The major social - political - economic - environmental transition is nigh!

Talkin' to your shoes

As usual, Boing Boing's tipped me off to something exceedingly important.

Navy Researching Vomit Beam

You never know what's going to land in your mailbox. Last night, I found a weapon that shoots an invisible wall-penetrating beam that makes people so dizzy they fall over. (It can make them puke, too, but I'll get to that in a moment.)

Now we're talking.

Invocon, Inc., one of dozens of companies expected to showcase their wares at the forum, says it'll be there to display its "non-lethal, stand-off weapon for military and law enforcement personnel that could ultimately work through walls and other non-metallic structures."

More at Wired's Danger Room
And you know Those schematics are going to eventually have an open source equivalent.

BTW...here's a list of many of our favorite names for driving the porcelain bus.

Links - Under The Hood

One quick one, but I think it might be informative/useful.
TechOnline's Under The Hood which features teardowns of various pieces of everyday tech. I think it's an absolute must for everyone if not to know how to bend the technology, at least gaze at its guts and see that inside all that THEY had made sleek, beautiful, and inaccessible externally, often has very mortal and primitive internals that any of us can master.

• TechOnline - Under The Hood

“Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs...

...the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.”
— The Drowned World, J.G Ballard, Millennium 1999, p 41.

I had read that we can expect a three to nine meter rise in sea level due to global warming.
Here's a nifty link to flood your neighborhood - Flood Maps
Flood Maps takes Googles maps and floods them to your chosen rise in sea level...from a subtle one meter to "hells-a-popping so grow gills granny!" fourteen meters.
As I said before, I'm getting boat to tie up to my new beach front property.

Before















After 9m - /It looks like MIT's gonna do ok.

Revisiting Dr. Steel

Imagine the sort of influence a celebrity could have if they weren’t simply overcompensating and looking for the world’s attention as a result of some deeply rooted feeling of insecurity. - Dr. Steel

Interview with Doctor Steel

The Four Guys interview Dr. Steel
The Four Guys set off a few days ago on a dangerous mission to find the hidden fortress of Dr. Steel, a self made master of music mystical mastery. We searched the heights of the Himalayas and the dirty streets of South Boston in search of the ultimate truth that Dr. Steel held hidden away in his dark dungeon. (More...)

Dr. Steel's website and world domination toys
Dr. Steel at Myspace

I signed up and got my card and some stickers free! Balls! A person could spend a lot of time at the website. Lots of tunes, animations, etc.

If you're curious what this guys sounds like, here's a couple of pretty neat clips.
Fibonacci Sequence

Back and Forth

Skills

I'm not a survivalist per se. I don't think there is an army of blue helmeted U.N. troops under the Rockies waiting to spring and take over the country. What I do believe is that there are skills that everyone should know to keep in touch with the earth, and therefore, reality. One thing that I truly appreciate from my time in service were the various Rangers and Special Forces that I had the privilege to work with. I learned a lot. After a several years in, I had considered going into Special Forces myself an Ops/Intel Sergeant, but I just couldn't commit to the amount of time it takes to train.

With that, here's a nifty link:

Rick F. Tscherne's Ranger Digest
From the website:
A Site Dedicated To Teaching Soldiers, Campers, Hikers, & Other Outdoor Enthusiasts "How to Survive & Thrive in the Outdoors."

As a former US Army Ranger, Drill Instructor, and an advisor/trainer to the Bosnia & Herzegovina Army (1996-97) under the US State Department approved "Train & Equip Program." I have always enjoyed sharing with soldiers my personal experiences and tips on how to survive in a military outdoor environment through field expedient know-how.

Articles, survival manuals written by Tscherne (complete with a pre-order warning about course language), and gear.

To the Tardis!

Ronald L. Mallett, Ph.D

For the strong gravitational field of a circulating cylinder of light, I have found new exact solutions of the Einstein field equations for the exterior and interior gravitational fields of the light cylinder. The exterior gravitational field is shown to contain closed timelike lines.

The presence of closed timelike lines indicates the possibility of time travel into the past. This creates the foundation for a time machine based on a circulating cylinder of light. (Ronald Mallett, "The gravitational field of a circulating light beam", Foundations of Physics 33, 1307 (2003))

For those that are a little more mathematically inclined
The Gravitational Field of a Circulating Light Beam
Ronald L. Mallett (PDF link)

And now there's apparently a search for funding by the University of Connecticut Foundation. Check out the Space-Time Twisting by Light (STL) page.

But before anyone starts packing their bags, there are questions and debates about parts of the work. What I find interesting though, is that it's about parts of the work and not the work as a whole. This makes me think that Dr. Mallett may be on to something and it might only be a matter of time (no pun intended).

Links

I'd like to be more paranoid. But alas, the sad reality is that conspiracies are usually not that well organized, agendized, or competent. The flip side to that is that while no group of people are necessarily out to get you, the systems they create might.

27B Stroke 6
The title is taken from one of my favorite movies, Brazil. This Wired Magazine blog deals with tech security and civil liberty issues.


Intelligence Meditation
Intel people I think are creative people at their core. I am. I'm also a big picture, concept kinda guy. I like finding the truth. I like the little surprises that can come along with the truth. I don't like policy people. They tend to be bureaucrats and have no sense of personal power, so they tend to bully. Most intel folks I think would recognize that most shit doesn't need to be secret, and a highly paranoid and power hungry admin/ops tends to slow the intel cycle by making information way too compartmentalized. By the time it gets disseminated, the product's gone cold or at least luke warm.

• Intel-Dump
• Counterterrorism Blog
  
• Ranger Against War

Prank the Monkey

Never trust a man in a suit
by Justin Becker
Issue 9.9
Wed, February 28, 2007

If you’ve ever wanted to punk Ashton Kutcher, receive handcrafted gift boxes from Charles Manson, or pay for highway tolls with oranges, there’s a way to do it, and it’s easier than you think: Just wear a suit.
When you wear a suit, everybody trusts you right away. ‘Why would some freeloader be wearing a suit? He must be trustworthy,’ ” says Sir John Hargrave. “That’s how these corporate criminals get away with it. They’re wearing suits.”
(more at Boston's Weekly Dig)

• A link to Hargrave's site ZUG - The World's Only Comedy Site

And I own a pretty damn good suit.
(Blank Snag @ work)

Build your own universe!

Michael Frayn speaks with Tom Ashbrook about his book "The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe" which discusses how our individual interpretations of what we perceive creates a universe that we understand.

• NPR's On Point

Tip from Blank Maxine