Nourishment
Cabril Czezlaw-Barton, my secondary school Polish teacher, had eyes bigger than his stomach. This was in part due to his larger-than-average peepers, but more due to his smaller-than-average guts. He would often show me his glass eye and when I placed it in my palm my thumb could not meet my middle finger. How there was room for it in his head I don't know. His vision in his remaining eye, being (as I suppose it was) just as large as the false one, was superb. Nonetheless, this affliction was his downfall. He claimed that with better eyesight one can see that food in fact looks unappetising, and this has since been confirmed by nutritionists with microscopes. Cabril starved to death on 17th October 1987.


Entreprise
Calorie Matthews, hypochondriac, opened the Millennibun bakery in South-West New South Wales in February 2000. She worked very hard for several months and ran a tightly organized shop. However, despite her diligence, the bakery was not a financial success. Apathy set in and she became sloppy. She began selling loaves of bread nineteen to the dozen. This inaccuracy due to her lack of effort led to the eventual collapse of the enterprise. The Millennibun premises were sold at a price sufficient to cover the costs of the venture. Calorie is now back-packing in Cork.


Governance
As a politician, he was a great guitarist, they used to say, but Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was an amateurish guitarist and bad at sports and ugly. One Tuesday he decided to run a slightly grumpy country for a laugh. He asked around and no one minded so he set to work. He had heard that government was all about "the social contract": the citizen cedes some of his freedom in exchange for protection, provision for basic needs, and so on. Despite the more expensive suit he wore that Tuesday, Tony never forgot about the people he used to consider friends before he chose to rule them: his social contract would be the best ever!

So he took great care in writing it up and he made everybody sign it. Any of his new citizens' rights unlikely to be used were given up in exchange for defence of more important ones. The freedom to receive treatment when ill was done away with, since to be in need of treatment when healthy would be a greater injustice. Healthy people would be guaranteed their own doctor should they need one - so why worry about poor health? And people would no longer live safely in fear of dangerous crimes. Protection for those not in danger would be a priority, quelling the paranoia of parents with children tucked up in warm beds.

However, Tony's new country ran aground due to a very subtle flaw in the contract: everyone had signed away the same freedoms but some people still needed some of them.

People falling ill, on reading the small print, found that they could not be provided with healthcare because they had not remained healthy. Victims of crime who couldn't be bothered living in a well-behaved community were deemed not to have earned their policemen and ignored. Children and other bad students, since they didn't even know anything, did not deserve education. Major, deep-set, social and political problems were left unaddressed on the basis that it was their own fault for being problems in the first place.

Tony's single Tuesday of leadership dealt such an unprecedentedly debilitating whallop to his newly cursed realm that it would probably take more than two lifetimes to repair the damage. So his subjects became marginally grumpier and waited for him to go away, which, on the Wednesday, he did. Tony now collects bottles and has twenty-five.

Categories: Culture, Human, Humour, Ideas, News, Politics, Surreal, Weird

The Father of beatnik, William Burroughs, devised a technique by which one's writing may be cleansed of its cultural and semantic bias. This technique has since been known as The Cut-Up. As Burroughs himself commented:

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read, heard, overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound to kinesthetic.

- link to more Burroughs quotes on the Cut-up Technique

Today I found myself gripped by the urge to do cut-up, and so, using a couple of automatic cut-up generators I found on the internet (Non-Linear Adding Machine & The Lazarus Text-Mixing Desk), I began to experiment.

Taking a chunk of text I have been working on (for a young-adult novel) and editing the disjointed cut-up into a more manageable form I acheived these results. Ready your brain box:

What each eyelid felt like. Its weight, activities and goings on of the human; this forgotten realm, would be the new decomposition, a gigantic hoard of what faint echoes of the air, as it carried through to the lofts of the facility. It was a tiny, animated figure; iridescent lava flows smouldered up and finally let the door close itself.

“Of course ape-boy! Isn’t this the cube-shaped asylum?”, He laughed so at Max’s mandrill on earth.

Max gripped hold of each spine from the back of the bubble with little courtesy.

“I can’t see I have existed except for the fact of the stream of a comet or the Earth’s gaping mantle, sending light of the facility out there. The only window in your worries. But before I begin I place a series of words instead of bars outside of the cage.” said Max, entranced to make sure no one was coming.

Seen in the night sky, a grey stripe, right to his bright purple hooded companion had arrived in the quiet cage before him. It was the labyrinth that was his home. Ironically in fear of falling, spread up from the apes; devolving in form from one to one. A detailed story waiting to be heard, to see vegetables as he did right now. Watching him scratch his fur and force again on blinking his eyes as the voice of baboons, the majority little ape-boy... In the cave Max had decided to name the steel lining of his life. New forms which bound Max a tiny handful of what looked like nuts. Who took on such a simple action as this? Why would a deep echo of terror be heard, windy by the breakfast news? Inside and through the malign facility...

On the walls around him, the outside world may never dust from his clothes. Ahead of him surely? In his tiny bedroom the tone erupted, crawled forward on their bellies. Max had power they had over one’s supermarket he gave them all names. There was all its long corridors in this genus, a wild some 20 years lodged deep into the curve of his father. Gone was the grey without a flash bulb as standard... Earth would heal and life would crawl and shivered ever so slightly. Legs, and not a dash of colour anywhere, marched behind him, doing a funny kind of arc...

For the last few months whenever welcoming, perhaps, his head would feel his way back from the out, from the stories of war circling now; raising their hands in centre of so much attention, and so in the same place as Max moving off. It peaked for a few one of these passageways, Max’s dared atmosphere. The brow of the impact became the memory of Max’s dreams. He needed to think? Surely it wasn’t so with the planet Earth.

Below Max, and in women, who knows where they had, wished himself to a more alien issued digital camera which came around lunchtime on Sunday.

Partially successful?

I love these images in particular:

• Isn’t this the cube-shaped asylum?

• The only window in your worries. But before I begin I place a series of words instead of bars outside of the cage.

• On the walls around him, the outside world may never dust from his clothes.

• The brow of the impact became the memory of Max’s dreams. He needed to think? Surely it wasn’t so with the planet Earth.

Try it yourself at the links above and please feel free to come and share the results here or in The Forum...

And remember Language is a Virus...

Categories: Language, Weird, Humour, Fun, Quotes, People, Culture, Ideas, Links, Surreal, Burroughs, Writing, Cool

When Shrigley's art strikes home, it does so by being believable, operating on a cusp between humour and horror, being in its way truthful, or at least plausible. His humour often relies on the unfunny, the bleak and deflated, the abject. What if someone's mental landscape was such that they really could describe themselves as "a vacant lot", as one of his paintings declares? We might feel less like laughing. What if Shrigley's art were serious about depicting the mental worlds of the damaged, the deranged, the psychotic or evil? Where might he take us? We might end up with something unbearably painful, and perhaps something great... He should make his art worse. Stop pissing about, in other words, and start pissing us off. - Guardian Link

Categories: Art, Weird, Humour, Fun, Nonsense, WTF, News, Links, People, Images

One could - and many do - wastefully ignore wallowing, suffocating swathes of time in an effort to formulate a novel idea. Oh, how splendid it would be to be a creative! To conjure fantasies for others! To maufacture dreams for the rest! To mass-produce in Chinese plastic inaccuracies for the masses! And to pocket the profits!

Authors capture my imagination. I always think how wonderful are those talented thought-dribblers, sitting in their rubied wigwams, scratching magic ink onto secret paper with a giant quill.

The desperate irony, of course, is that they really live in grubby, expensive studio flats somewhere which is technically part of a capital city but which is more informatively understood to be a particularly crap suburban coucil estate in denial, and they cram like crazy to get the last scrawls of their hated manuscript down so they can collect their pay-check and spend it all on one night of glorious pretence in which they visit a priced-beyond-their-means wine bar and guffaw in an effort at smugness at jokes they try so hard to get that they fail to notice are either not funny or about themselves. Then it's back to bed and the expected cascade of mornings of miserable brain-wringing, trying to squeeze out another printable titbit.

They slave too hard to tend to their dignity. And yet they needn't work to capture my imagination because I will put it in a cage for them and hand over the key. They struggle to be as mediocre as they are and I worship them for the impossible brilliance I attach to them. All in the name of a good idea! Something new! Something not-yet-thought! Something from outside my claustrophobic mind!

Then, long-rapt by this convoluted dance of aspiration and admiration, our heads lift just once and mother nature sees them rise from the pages. And what a show she provides just to put us in our place! This is how it's done...

Snake bursts after gobbling gator



"An unusual clash between a 6-foot (1.8m) alligator and a 13-foot (3.9m) python has left two of the deadliest predators dead in Florida's swamps.

The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded... [Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife professor] said the alligator may have clawed at the python's stomach, leading it to burst.

"Clearly, if they can kill an alligator they can kill other species," Prof Mazzotti said.

He said that there had been four known encounters between the two species in the past. In the other cases, the alligator won or the battle was an apparent draw."

Full story from the BBC

Go snakes!

Categories: Science, Weird, Humour, News

"...I received from Oxford the manuscript you have examined. I lingered, naturally, on the sentence: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: 'the garden of forking paths' was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'the various futures (not to all)' suggested to me the forking in time, not in space... In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend. If you will resign yourself to my incurable pronunciation, we shall read a few pages."

~ Extract from 'The Garden of Forking Paths' by Jorge Luis Borges

Time has an inordinate power over the self. Of every moment I perceive there is a previous lifetime of experience which orders the perceiving. To make sense of my causally-extended identity I must carry around with me a subconscious map which, if followed, would glide a path back through my life in reverse order. A map which is drawn at each turn I take in the road; a map with an infinity of editions, the alternate outlines of which give my selfhood a structure.

Each of us is composed of an inner voice, perhaps the logos of consciousness, which instinct tells us is our 'self'. The writer, in composing a work of narration, must be aware that they project their inner voice into the mind of their reader, thus in an abstract sense, seizing control of another's selfhood. Whilst the reader follows the causality of the words it should be possible to shift their sense of time; to break the constraints of external reality. Fiction is capable of defining causality. The logos of word is indistinct from the logos of thought.

My ponderings at The Huge Entity have little attempted to offer up any aspect of a selfhood, whether anchored in time or otherwise. This inherent disconnection from the identity of my words allows me a certain freedom to dwell on ideas without fusing them to particular moments or events in my life. What I have come to realise though is that by letting the website meander I have given it a time-independent power quite unlike that inherent in 'traditional' narratives. The book, the article, the movie - even recorded speech in many senses - observes a linearity much like that of perceived time. Of course, fiction has found many ways in which to play with the linearity of the narrative itself, but when we come to read the book, to view the movie, to listen to the interview do we not follow predefined paths? There are no forks in the road in most forms of narrative. The internet is in the process of changing that.

Click a link or two and enter
The Logos Labyrinth...
Just as my self is multifaceted; is tree-like in its composition, so the internet - even in its present, infant form - allows conscious intention to dictate the narrative of the logos. I now perceive myself in a world, but I also make sense of that world through my self - a self with many forking paths in a world of infinities. Long live the anti-linear Logos! Long live the internet!

Categories: Consciousness, Perception, Writing, Time, Books, Weblog, Quotes, Internet, Reality, Human

Panique au Village est une animation en stop motion (image par image).
C'est l'histoire d'un cheval, d'un cowboy et d'un indien qui passent leur temps à dormir... malgré eux.

Il existe en tout 20 épisodes disponibles sur un DVD.
Pour en savoir plus, visitez Panique au Village, le site officiel.

Categories: Fun, Weird, Humour, Video, Amazing, Cool, Animation

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a time-capsule as "a container used to store for posterity a selection of [entities] thought to be representative of life at a particular time." With this is mind, we thought it might be interesting to assemble our own time-capsule and, this being the web-lead information age, bury that capsule online, in an enormous web-garden.

What ideas will future generations glance back at and laugh in contemptuous hindsight? In 50 years time which contemporary cultural memes will be deader than the proverbial Dodo? Lying in the digital darkness of our internet time-capsule these questions, and more, will have to wait 50 years of technological shifts; of societal upheavals; of cultural fermentation before they can be answered.

Let the concepts bury themselves as we set to work...

Featuring short musings from the most original minds in the universe:

Contents

1	Our Waking Dream of Progress		by Weber's Polar Night
2	The Demise of the Demagogue		by Velcro City Tourist Board
3	Our Slumbering Super-Organism		by Hyperaware Consciousness
4	Transformative Potential		by Reality Carnival / Pickover.com
5	The God-Shaped Hole (Part I)		by The Huge Entity (Danieru)
6	The God-Shaped Hole (Part II)		by The Huge Entity (Danieru)
	More to come soon...

Extras:

More to come over the next few days! Including contributions from other insatiable Huge Entities... If you find yourself still gagging for more then why not try out our previous feature: Reasons Why 'You' Don't Exist

UPDATE: Introducing a printable version of The Conceptual Time-Capsule! Works great as a miniature accompaniment to any car, train, bus or plane journey.... Download and Print: MSWord / RTF / PDF

Watch this space!

Discuss possible futures in The Huge Entity Forum

Browse our non-possible futures here: « - 01 - 02 - 03 - 04 - 05 - 06 - »

Categories: Weird, Philosophy, Technology, Humour, Sci-Fi, Future, Culture, Human, Blogs, Ideas, Memes, News, Time-Capsule...

There have been few great movements in favour of reason as influential as that of Galileo Galilei. In summoning the power of reason as man's faculty of authority Galileo offered the people of 17th Century Italy a route by which to bypass the Catholic dogma of the day. The heliocentric universe, once perceived and recognized by the new tools of science, was far grander in nature than the geocentric system mythologised by the church:

“And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the whim of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state...“

~ Galileo Galilei

In standing against the myths of the day Galileo ploughed a scientific furrow through which the rational intercourse of the proceeding centuries would flow. Today, as a consequence of thinkers such as Galileo and the arguably more influential Charles Darwin, society believes itself capable of avoiding dogma completely, yet its perceptions are no less mythologies than the ideologies of a Catholic state. One needn't go much further than today's ‘War on Terror’ to see these mythologies in action...

Much has been said on the rhetoric of the West's latest 'political crisis'. In condemning certain world regimes as 'an axis of evil' George Bush not only invoked theological symbolism to strengthen his words, but collected vastly differing political domains under one simplistic tenet. In an instant millions of people in countries as distinct as North Korea, Syria and Iran, were brought under a single meaningless header and issued with commandments of a Christian persuasion. In arguably the most infamous political speech of the 21st century the United States of America was illustrating itself, and its allies, as heroic figureheads in a battle over the forces of evil. Interestingly enough when Al Qaeda began issuing its campaign of terror through its own figurehead, Bin Laden, it too posited a hero and a villain, one directly contrasting that of the USA's. Louise Richardson in her book 'What Terrorists Want' makes much of this mirrored heroism:

"The declaration of a global war on terrorism, has been a terrible mistake and is doomed to failure... Americans opted to accept Al-Qaeda's language of cosmic warfare at face value and respond accordingly, rather than respond to Al-Qaeda based on an objective assessment of its resources and capabilities."

The symbolic act of the invasion of Iraq was surely a continuation of this failure. Objectivity, perhaps even rationality itself, was rejected in favour of a mythological sensitivity. That Iraq contained 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' was irrelevant to its invasion. The act of invasion symbolised a force against an evil - one recently resurrected from a religious inheritance and one surely far more relevant to the political failures we see in Iraq today than any 'misreading of the intelligence':

"The actual reason for the failure of the US policy in its political field and international relations is their lack of information regarding the world's realities and also the enclosure of the decision making people of that country in their own fabricated and false political propaganda."

~ From the Weblog of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, following a visit to New York in September 2006

This conflict between ideology and perceived intention shields a symbolic undercurrent prevalent in many areas of our culture. The human mind appears pre-programmed to veer towards a mythological structuring of reality. Pascal Boyer has written much on the inclinations of religious thought. From his book 'Religion Explained':

"People are naturally prepared to believe all sorts of accounts of strange or counterintuitive phenomenon. Witness their enthusiasm for UFOs as opposed to scientific cosmology, for alchemy instead of chemistry, for urban legends instead of hard news. Religious concepts are both cheap and sensational; they are easy to understand and rather exciting to entertain"

Could it be that the perceptual tools once handed us by the likes of Galileo and Darwin are growing blunt in the clash of our modern misconceptions? To suggest, as many do, that our culture is more rationally maintained than it has ever been is to fail to perceive the power which mythology and religious intention has over our uniquely evolved minds. Galileo, as they tend to say, will be spinning in his grave.

Part III to come soon...

Browse here for a better conception of non-possible futures...

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Categories: Future, History, God, Science, Religion, Society, Culture, Human, Politics, Philosophy, Bush, Conceptual Time-Capsule...

In an alternate-future reason has won an imaginary battle over faith. The relevant mysteries composing religion have been torn from the arms of their ancient idols; the sun is setting on an illogical world and rising over a new Eden, green with a luscious pasture Darwinian processes have steadily provided. But this Godless world is a mere illusion, made vaguer still by the naivety of our humanist convictions. There is a 'God-shaped hole' within each of us, a passageway to a future not devoid of religion, but soaked to bursting with it. In 50 years from now science may have described religion, but it won't have succeeded it - in fact, religion will be more prevalent than ever.

The vigor with which atheism's new prophets expound their rational brand of faith is admirable. In a society governed by scientific knowledge no theistic principle should be allowed to pass by unquestioned. The political rhetoric of 'traditional' believers such as George Bush and Tony Blair emerges from a religious inheritance which has forgotten its roots. 'The Fall of Mankind', made so resolute in the scriptures, has been largely disregarded, in its place arising an absurd utopian ideal of man's dominance over the forces of nature - many of the darker aspects of which reside inside mankind itself. Funnily enough, this twisting of Judaeo-Christian ideologies is a consequence of scientific humanism and not a modern maladaptation to its emergence. That man is somehow flawed is rarely excepted wholesale in today's progress-obsessed society - each of us, according to the rhetoric of the global village, is a blank slate onto which adaptive society may inscribe its greatest accomplishments. Our nature may yet yield the flaws in each of us, that is if science via humanistic values cannot wipe our slates clean first.

That the main undercurrent of mythology tying our cultures together can still be traced back to a handful of conflicting texts first given form some 2 or 3 millennia ago is surely proof enough of the ability of religion to out-last most other forms of cultural change. Evangelical scientific thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson and Sam Harris expound the belief that in time science, and the rational systems which scaffold it, will wash the slate of the human so clean that a completely secular universe may be inscribed on its surface. This is by no means an original doctrine - finding its roots in the post-Darwinian philosophies of the enlightenment - one rooted in an egocentric arrogance obliterated only by its sheer naivety:

...The New Testament writers are seen as afflicted with a false consciousness rooted in their time, but the analyst takes the consciousness of his time as an unmixed intellectual blessing.

- Peter Berger, A Rumour of Angels

Cliched as it is to label science as a religion in its own right, one must not ignore the symbiotic relationship between the two. The mystery and reverent awe the secular citizen gains from witnessing the wonders of the universe may be better rationalised and far more complex than a similar awe felt for God's divinity, but at base both are self-centric reactions to an omniscient figure-head. Where the atheistic thinker differs from his theistic counterpart is in how that figure-head is composed: is it an ever present Deity, or an ever present Science?

Is it true that mankind demands, and will always demand, miracle, mystery and authority? ... Surely it is true. Today, man gets his sense of the miraculous from science and machinery, radio, airplanes, vast ships, zeppelins, poison gas, artificial silk: these things nourish man's sense of the miraculous as magic did in the past...

- D. H. Lawrence

But whereas The Good Father can do no wrong, science is the God and the Devil of its own mythology. Instead of rejecting religion as a poisoned byproduct of our nature, perhaps we should be feeding the mythology of science with all the sustenance it needs to fill up that hole within each of us. Rebellion against all forms of theism fails to credit the miraculous stronghold which Judaeo-Christian ideologies have over our secular belief systems. To break free of the shackles of monotheism, secular society must consciously construct a truer kind of Atheism, one which adheres to the word's strictest definition: that is a Godless Theism.

Humanity is a fickle species, prone to all manner of internal shifts; a creature able to live in constant conflict with itself and see only those steps ahead allowed by its current dictum. To reject religion is to reject ourselves, wholesale, and in the process deny the soothing potential of the miraculous, of a divinity in any number of forms. In 50 years from now mythology will play a greater role in society than it does today, not because we will have reverted to our former naiveties, but because we will have become capable of embracing our inconsistencies and using them to construct an ever emergent existence; one aware of and in control of its inherent conflicts.

Read Part II of The God-Shaped Hole

Browse here for a better conception of non-possible futures...

« - 01 - 02 - 03 - 04 - 05 - 06 - »

Categories: Future, God, Science, Religion, Society, Culture, Human, Philosophy, Conceptual Time-Capsule...

In my book Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves I discuss various forms of extinction. Many humans will morph tremendously in 50 to 100 years. In a sense, this is a kind of extinction. We’ll enhance our senses using genetic engineering. Within this century, some of us will extend our visual and auditory ranges and have synesthesial senses that we can barely imagine. We’ll be in constant contact with one another through wireless mindlinks.

At first, we’ll see the nascent seeds of these mindlinks in the form of implantable cell phones. Shortly thereafter, we’ll become more sophisticated. Already, technologists are creating vocoders that convert nerve signals in the vocal chords to computerized speech. Cochlear implants convert sounds into neural signals that the brain can interpret. By interfacing the vocoder and cochlear implant with radio transmitters, we can take the first steps to e-telepathy, kiss the acoustic age good-bye, and enter the realm of thought-to-thought communication.

Cell phones and e-mail began to transform the planet around the year 2000. Imagine the transformative potential of e-telepathy in the next fifty years. Scientific, artistic, and political collaborations that took months a hundred years ago, could be done in a flash.

Musing about these kinds of direct mindlinks, George Dvorsky of BetterHumans.Com notes:

"On the surface humanity appears to be spreading outward, venturing across continents and into space. Yet in actuality, we are journeying towards one another. Our globe has never appeared smaller and our proximity to each other has never been closer. This trend shows no signs of slowing down, pointing the way to a remarkable interconnected future."

Within 15 years, stopwatch-sized Vagus Nerve Stimulators (VNSs) will be prevalent as a means of making us feel happier. (Temple University’s Jake Zabara showed over a decade ago that the VNS can stop epileptic seizures, and today we believe the VNS can also cure depression by zapping the vagus nerve in the neck.) Several research teams in the US and in Europe are already engineering new varieties of mosquitoes whose bite actually prevents malaria and other diseases by injecting antibacterial toxins. Other scientists are designing silkworms with DNA from humans so that the worms spin proteins like collagen that have pharmaceutical and industrial uses. Within 20 years, genetically modified creepy crawlers will push humanity into the Superbug Age in which insects inexpensively create a limitless supply of novel materials for our buildings and bodies. Right now, genetically modified tilapia fish are churning out lifesaving human blood-clotting factors. The fishes, an early symbol of Christianity, will be our saviors.

Browse here for a better conception of non-possible futures...

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Categories: Future, Technology, Humour, Internet, Society, Consciousness, Human, Time, Conceptual Time-Capsule...

Future generations will laugh (or cry) in contemptuous hindsight at our apathy and boredom. Why try to change the world? Why get off the couch? The individual doesn't matter anyway... right? We can be bored because science has solved all mystery… right?

No! The individual is empowered by technology more than ever. No-one has solved the Mystery of Existence--no one *knows* why there is something rather than nothing. Each day the world becomes more dynamic. Each decision you make carries more weight than ever. Cultures are mingling in new and profound ways.

Think the world is boring?

Terrence McKenna:

"If you think the world is empty of adventure, then, you just haven't been hanging out with the right crowd. On a Saturday night, within the confines of your own apartment, on 5 grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness, I guarantee you will believe that Ferdinand Magellan should take second place to you."

The future is up for grabs. Existence is a Mystery. We are flotsam, floating in a sea of we-know-not-what. Wonder is the perfect fuel, Einstein:

"He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle… A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms…"

We have a day on the calendar devoted to secretaries, to mothers, to the Earth… Why not have a "live passionately day"? On that day, everyone would jump out of bed in the morning. 100s of times a day they would stop what they are doing and ask, "Am I awake right now? Am I living deliberately?"

Think of the synergy of 6,000,000,000 humans living passionately for one day!

In the same way a mental entity emerges from the interactions of 10s of billion of neurons, a kind of mental field –what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the "noosphere"—arises from the interactions of humans.

Like LSD and the other psychedelics, be a catalyst for the electrocution of the nervous system of this usually drowsy super-organism, and in the following flash of sentience, help us catch a glimpse of the infinite multi-verse in which we find ourselves.

Let's live deliberately and communicate passionately; let's ride the bellowing, orgiastic tide of an awaking synergistic organism, an organism made of other supernova-individuals.

Even the nuclear-bomb magnitude sleeping in an atom is only a candle when next to the burning-sun potential in our slumbering super-organism of humanity. Help me awaken the unfathomable giant!

Browse here for a better conception of non-possible futures...

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Daniel Poynter

Categories: Future, Technology, Humour, Internet, Society, Consciousness, Human, Time, Conceptual Time-Capsule...

In fifty year’s time, people will look back and laugh at us for a lot of reasons. Apart from the fashions (“d00d, those jeans, like WTF!!!1!1”), what gets the biggest chuckles will surely be the hopelessly outdated concept of representative democracy.

How can I knock democracy? How can I criticise the thing that allows me to live the free life I have? Because it’s a lovely idea, but the implementation is hopelessly flawed. Imagine explaining it to an alien ambassador:

“Well, I’m an enfranchised citizen, you see. So, once every six years or so, I get to choose between two or three career liars who have been carefully selected by their respective political organisations for their ability to say what I want to hear. Once ensconced in the system of government, they will vote on my behalf in ways that they (or their party) consider will be in the best interests of myself and the other people in the region they represent. Of course, I may not always be aware that their decisions are the right ones, largely because I’m not a politician – it’s all very complex, after all. Ultimately they’re under my control, though, because my tax money pays their wages … what’s that noise? Is that the equivalent of laughter on your planet?”

We currently have this strange habit of gleefully putting people on pedestals – people who, for undisclosed reasons, have a great desire to be placed on pedestals – and then being astonished when they fall headlong from them. I forget the source, but there’s that old saw about those who most desire power being the most unsuited to wield it. Of course, we’ve mistrusted our politicians since politics first came to be, long before there was a handy Greek word for it. But it was hard to get the real low-down back then.

Nowadays, we actually have the tools to see the Wizard of Oz behind his big green curtain: citizen media; web2.0; blogging; [insert your favourite buzzword here]. They all allow us to share around that most precious of commodities – the truth. And the truth is a light that is starting to dissolve career politicians and demagogues like vampires.

Those same tools will develop into the framework for what will replace representative democracy. Centralisation is a dead scene – the future is local, ad-hoc and community based. In half a century, no-one will complain that their voice isn’t heard – if they care about an issue, there’ll be a forum where they can say their piece, and be exposed to different opinions. Ignorance of an issue will be no excuse – if you care about it, you’ll take the time to get the full story. It’ll be easier, in some ways – there’ll be no overpaid liar with an airtime monopoly shoving his party line down your throat. It’ll be tough, too – making decisions and thinking for your self almost always is. But if something is worth having, it’s worth putting some effort into getting it. True freedom fits in that ‘worth having’ category.

Browse here for a better conception of non-possible futures...

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Armchair Anarchist

Categories: Future, Politics, Humour, Internet, Society, Community, Human, Time, Conceptual Time-Capsule...

Fifty years from now, as fed up elephants stage last ditch assaults on human habitations, lab defector, gene modded rats sign peace treaties in shadowy, underground kingdoms built amongst aging pipes carrying water, natural gas and data to our complexes and Americans hail the crowning of the third cyborg iteration of George Bush, descendants of the people who once worried themselves into troubled sleep over the failure of news organizations to accurately report on the world's affairs will have no memory of “news” as we currently (and fleetingly) understand it.

The debate – still raging in some industrialized nations – over information vs. entertainment (or what's sometimes hybridized, at least in the United States, as 'infotainment') will be as dead as the pyramid builders, as dead as the once fish plentiful oceans. But unlike the work of the ancients, the passing of the news age will leave no impressive monuments behind for tourists to marvel at and carefully climb (unless one counts the New York Times building).

What will send “news” to its grave? In the end, it won't be government pressure to ignore problems and report on achievements (even if non existent) – though that's always a factor. And it won't be the reluctance of corporations (which is what these “news organizations” are, after all) to criticize the fragile status quo.

No, it will be simple need. The need of former citizens, now consumers, teetering at the edge of the consumerist age's end, to be lulled into a comforting, waking dream of efficiency, cleanliness and progress, even as threatening clouds gather.

The sort of head scratching going on right now in the US (and, no doubt, many other places) over why, despite bloody failure, mayhem, destruction and chaos approximately 30 percent of the American population persists in believing half and un-truths will be a thing of the past.

Fifty years from now, nearly everyone will prefer sunsets displayed on flat screens to the real, and troubled, sky.

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Categories: Science, Future, Humour, Progress, Civilisation, Time, Human, Conceptual Time-Capsule...

The world is too complicated. There's no way we can take it all in at once. Our brains get confused. They have to be a little creative with the truth in order to make it manageable. We have to dumb things down. Some of us more than others.

That's fine. We can't complain about it. It's a necessary part of life. But we shouldn't forget we're doing it.

On Friday The Guardian revealed the shocking news that people in the UK are fat and they don't like George W. It's the fat part I'm thinking about today. For a government, unhealthy citizens are bad news. They don't make as much money because they can't do as much stuff as healthy people, and they cost more money because they're ill and require treatment. However, ill-health is not so easy to pin down, coming as it does in many different guises. If you want to tackle a problem like this, you need a clearer target. And what makes a better target than a big fat person (chubber)? A lot of people in the UK these days are ill because they're too fat. So the government decided to reduce the number of unhealthy people by reducing the number of fat people. So far so good: tackle obesity, tackle ill health; the nation will be sleek and lean.

A government of course needs to be accountable. So we need to monitor the progress of our anti-obesity measures. So we need to measure obesity rates and see what happens to them. However, like illness, excess fat can be a bit awkward to get a hold on. Some people are clearly much to wobbly, so no problem getting those ones on the list. But some people could go either way: they're kind of chubby, but they might be medically OK. They might work hard and run around and just enjoy stuffing their faces in between. It's the ill fat people who we want to count as "clinically obese", to add to our list and try to sort out. But we can't just count the ill ones because then we're back where we started. Picking out the chubby types gave us a nice shortcut to dealing with illness without having to search for it. It was a good rule of thumb and if we start looking for illness per se again then we've undermined it.

So let's make up another rule of thumb. Let's measure your weight and your height and divide the former by the latter. If you're tall and light you score low, if you're short and heavy you score high. Your score is your body mass index (BMI). Now, rather than looking for fat people, we can just look for people with a high BMI - say, greater than or equal to thirty. (In actuality, above twenty-five and you're 'overweight', thirty and up and you're 'obese'.)

Roughly speaking, then, unhealthy people are fat people and fat people are people with a BMI of 30+. Roughly speaking, you can determine how healthy someone is using a tape and scales. "Roughly speaking" - that's the important part. It's an approximation, a dumbing down. It is not true that if your BMI is 30 then you are unhealthy, but it is true that if you get all the people in a big group with a BMI of 30+ to lose a little weight, there will be plenty fewer unhealthy people in that group.

As I said at the top of this post, simplifying things is fine, but we shouldn't forget we're doing it. For instance, if we were to forget that 'has BMI 30+' doesn't just mean 'is unfit' then we could do some really stupid things. We might start refusing hip operations to anyone who has BMI 30+. Or we might make a BMI of 28 a requirement of entry to the armed forces - so we only get the super fit ones. That would be pretty stupid.

Following that kind of thinking, the people we'd be telling to go out and get some exercise would include many professional sportspeople, including nearly all professional rugby players, Brad Pitt, Russel Crowe, all body builders, George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Shaquille O'Neal.

The moral: any simplified representation should be stored with a mental note reading "this is a simplification".

Categories: Science, Humour, News, Links, Reality, Human

According to a poll, printed today in The Guardian UK :

British voters see George Bush as a greater danger to world peace than either the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, or the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...

...[The poll] exposes high levels of distrust. In Britain, 69% of those questioned say they believe US policy has made the world less safe since 2001, with only 7% thinking action in Iraq and Afghanistan has increased global security. - link

Where do you stand?

Categories: News, Politics, Bush, War, Links, UK, USA, World