Big History Error

Just bought Cynthia Brown's "Big History" today and started reading... history from the big bang to the present day. Looks like it going to be very interesting (and better than Bill Bryson's effort). There is however a mistake in the 2nd paragraph of the 1st page!

Cynthia assumes that because the universe is 13.7 billion years old, it must be 13.7 billion light years across. In fact, logic would tell you that it'd be 13.7 billion light years in radius i.e. 27.4 light years in diameter.

That would be the case, except for the fact that the universe is stretching iself out at an increasing rate that is currently measured at 74.2 kilometers per second per megaparsec of space. This makes the 'observable universe' a sphere 93 billion light years in diameter with you in the middle. In other words, the position in space that the light left from 13.7 billion years ago to finally end up in your retina or telescope now exists billions of extra light years further away.

Zombies Zombies Everywhere: "The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!"

Saw a copy of "Pride andPrejudice and Zombies" at the local bookstore- and i was very tempted to buy it but unfortunately i do not belong either to the part of the subculture that is into Zombies- or that part that is into Jane Austen. In fact, i can imagine the Venn Diagram of the intersection of these two sets to be an exceedingly small area that includes the author and a handful of others. It would be a strange introduction to the Zombie or the Jane Austen genre and i think i wouldn't get any of the 'in' jokes. The cover is definitely the best book cover i've ever seen.

The longer you live, the more Rapamycin/Sirolimus you can eat!

We can all live forever! There's a fascinating bit on the wiki entry on the worlds oldest living (currently dead) person: Jeanne Calment-

"In 1965, aged 90, with no living heirs, Jeanne Calment signed a deal to sell her former apartment to lawyer André-François Raffray, on a contingency contract. Raffray, then aged 47, agreed to pay her a monthly sum of 2,500 francs until she died, an agreement sometimes called a "reverse mortgage". Raffray ended up paying Calment more than the equivalent of $180,000, which was more than double the apartment's value. After Raffray's death from cancer at the age of 77, in 1995, his widow continued the payments until Calment's death.^[1]"

Bin Laden: 8 years and counting...

Good article from the Guardian:

British Greed + CIA Blowback = Islamic Revolution.

Two must-listen-to podcasts from 'Rear Vision' on the history of foreign intervention in Iran:
Oil, Democracy and a CIA Coup
The Iranian Revolution

"Kermit Roosevelt was a fascinating character. He really was a true-life James Bond, and when it was decided that the United States would overthrow Mossadeq, he was the guy that the CIA turned to. They gave him the job. They told him, 'You've got to go to Iran and you've got to do everything you need to do and you've got to overthrow Mossadeq.' Kermit Roosevelt crossed over clandestinely into Iran at the beginning of August, 1953. He went to work in a basement office in the US Embassy and immediately began building a network of people, basically by bribing them. He bribed all manner of people.

One of the early plots that he came up with was that he would try to bribe enough members of parliament so that maybe they could vote a No Confidence motion to depose Mossadeq. And a number of them accepted these bribes, and they broke away from the Mossadeq coalition.

But the idea of deposing Mossadeq through a vote of No Confidence never panned out. So Kermit Roosevelt went off and did other things with his money. For example, he bribed mullahs, the religious leaders in Iran, to begin denouncing Mossadeq from the pulpit as an atheist, or non-believer, which was not true, as Mossadeq was a devout Twelver Shi'ite.

He bribed newspaper editors and reporters, to the point where he had 80% of the Iranian press in his payroll. And what that meant was that every day, Iranians would wake up to news reports and commentaries about how Mossadeq was Jewish, he was homosexual, he was a British agent, just about anything bad you could think of, would show up day after day in practically every newspaper in Tehran. So by the spreading around of money, Kermit Roosevelt was immediately going to change the public tenor and view of Mossadeq.

He also bribed commanders of military and police units, so they would be ready to help him on the day that he struck against Mossadeq. One of the things that he did, perhaps this was his most masterful idea, he went to the Tehran bazaar, where there was a group of thugs operating under a very colourful leader named Shabaan the Brainless (see photo above). And he hired Shabaan, who actually is still alive, living in California, and Shabaan's job was: get together the biggest group of thugs and gangsters you can find. We're going to pay every one of them. Find every adult male who wants to be a gangster for a day, and hire them. And what your job is, (and this is exactly what this gang did for several days in Tehran) run through the streets wildly, smash shop windows, fire guns into mosques and then shout, 'We love Communism and Mossadeq'.

So he created this mob that was very violent, that was posing as thugs for Mossadeq. But that wasn't all. Roosevelt went one step further: he hired another mob to attack that mob, the idea being he wanted to create the image, in the minds of ordinary Iranians, that Iran was in chaos."

Questions i have for this week

1. Why are there no black rock bands?
2. Why don't people brush their teeth with hot water?
3. Why/How did the French+Russian Revolutions wind up with Napoleon+Stalin?
4. Why does Rapamycin make you live longer?
5. Is it really always darkest before the dawn?
6. Was Earth's sky blue before photosynthetic plants made all that oxygen? ( this depends on the relative importance of oxygen vs nitrogen in the scattering of high wavelength light from the sun).
7. When will we start to hate Obama?
8. Why can't the world donate millions of wireless internet routers to be installed just across the Iranian border in Turkmen/Afghan/Pakistan + Azerbaijan? That way, the resistance movement can bypass state controlled internet filtering. Maybe the same can be done for China? Free Internet = Free Porn = Democracy.
9. Who invented the question mark?

It's midnight and i've just ordered some magnets

Ingredients:

Neodymium atom x 2
Iron tom x 14
Boron x 1
Method A:

Prepare by pulverizing an ingot precursor and liquid phase, sintering the magnetically aligned powder into dense blocks

then heat treat, cut to shape, surface treat and magnetize.

Method B:

Melt spin a thin ribbon of the Nd-Fe-B alloy.

pulverize ribbon into particles

mixed with polymer

either compression or injection mold into bonded magnets

... i had to buy 100 of them because they are RARE EARTH MAGNETS.

Best Elliot Smith Covers

Cranial Nerve Zero: Sex and the Secret Nerve

Now this is entirely news to me! Despite 6 years of undergraduate med school study, and two postgraduate degrees- including one in which i spent quite a bit of time learning about neurology- i have NEVER heard about Cranial Nerve Zero. I wish i was in a band because that's what i'd call it.

It apparently usually gets ripped off when the brain is removed from the skull so anatomists often miss it- but it has been described intermittently over the last few hundred years! There's a fascinating article about it in the latest Scientific American Mind magazine- particularly interesting is its postulated role in sensing pheremones.

Actually the rest of the magazine is really really good and includes fun stuff like: differences between Bonobos and Chimps, The Psychopathology of Paedophilia, The Science of Orgasm (using what i like to call the Heavy-PET Scan Studies), Arrested Development in Rapist Orangutans, Genetics of Homosexuality etc etc. I wonder if paedophilia drove the evolution of human neoteny?

Would have been even better to include general stuff on the theories of the evolution of sexual reproduction, and the theory that the brain/mind evolved as a 'conspicuous display' on the basis of sexual selection. I'm assuming these theories are dreamed up late at night by Geek Biologists- to reassure themselves that Geekiness= Chiciness= Sexiness.

If true though- everything really IS about sex- and not just the 90% of our salacious western culture that is so OBVIOUSLY about sex. Great art, poetry, literature, greed, war- it may all just ultimately be about getting laid.

What would the world be like if there was no need for lust? If humans reproduced parthenogenetically like certain species of lizards? What if you could just 'pinch off' a new little you? What would motivate you to get up in the morning?

To find out- you'd need to inteview thousands of really extraordinarily good-looking guys for whom getting laid is no problem to find out what life is like. Personally i've always had to struggle against the demotivating effects of my extreme physical attractiveness.

Electrofolk: James Yuill "This Sweet Love"

What i want to know is: was there anyone who sounded like Elliot Smith before Elliot Smith? He stabbed himself thru the heart don't you know. Crazy.

Watchmen: The Giant Blue Penis

What a terrible, terrible flop of a film- redeemed only marginally by the repeated appearance of Dr Manhattan's giant glowing uncircumcised flip-flopping blue penis.

Charlie Chaplin: The Circus

This is the 1st Charlie Chaplin film i've ever seen- and i expected to be bored after 5 minutes. Really this is (i know you probably don't believe me) extremely funny. Laughed? I nearly cried. How did he train those monkeys to bite his nose? I think the kids will love it. You can watch it all on youtube in segments.

How to Find new Music

Step:
1. Listen to NPR's "All Songs Considered".
2. Read/Listen to AURGASM for amazing stuff- download (legal/free) any tracks you like... or better yet - subscribe to the podcast. They are a little 'top heavy' on quirky jazzy french/german chanteuses- but i like that stuff.

Rachel Goodrich

Mélissa Laveaux

Princeton

Theresa Andersson

Ben Sollee

Lily Frost

Kate Schutt

Lucy Schwartz

Kitty Hoff & Forêt-Noire
Aaron Parks
Una Mas Trio

Mandelbrot Browser: Electrified, Fractalised Turtles.

Nice (Green) Mandelbrot browser- tho not particularly fast (although it's still a lot faster than the program i wrote about 20 years ago on my Atari!). What's amazing about these fractal structures is that they are 'chaotic': deterministic, yet not entirely predictable (you do keep seeing electrified turtles). In other words, the iterated equation that describes them would very easily fit on a very small T-shirt- yet the pattern it generates is literally infinite. It's almost certain that if you explore this for more than 30 clicks, you'll actually be seeing stuff that NOBODY else in the world has ever seen, or will ever see again. You're not wasting time- you're an explorer. Although it probably can't be proven- i think it'll be "turtles all the way down"..Dig that crazy Mandelbrot man... (Mandelbrot set left, Mandelbrot pastry right).

Here's also a great youtube video of a dive into the Mandelbrot (apparently): "An extremely deep dive into the mandelbrot zoom. If the final frame were the size of your screen, the full set would be larger than the known universe". (fuck that's BIG)

Sex is Really Strange

What do your dreams mean? Do men and women differ in the nature and intensity of their sexual desires? Can apes learn sign language? Why can’t we tickle ourselves? This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, religion, persuasion, love, lust, hunger, art, fiction, and dreams. We will look at how these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.

from Academic Earth - youtube for geeks... actually it's more like "TED Talks" for thhe Uber-Geek.