Tired out,
not a miracle in days
oh yeah
Deciders for the lonely
Whispering tears
You try out for nothing then you drop dead
Not a miracle in years
Leisure for the lonely
Whispering [this this this] unecessary, unless [this this this] you’re in.
Die and succeed
I say it out loud but you just don’t care
Farewell well well well well well well, til you know me well
Farewell well well well well well well, til you know me well
Girlfriend
We are far from home, I am with you now
I am longing you, I am longing us two
Who bought a miracle sells these fortune tears
December’s death or glory how you want it?
No not a miracle in years
Deciders for the lonely
Wishing death death death, wishes death death death unless
Die and succeed
I say it out loud but she just don’t care
Farewell well well well well well well, til you know me well
Farewell well well well well well well, til you know me well
Girlfriend
Die and succeed
I say it out loud but you just don’t care
Well well well well well well…
Girlfriend
A phoenix is a mythical bird with a colorful plumage and a tail of gold and scarlet (or purple, blue, and green according to some legends).
It has a 500 to 1,000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of twigs that then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix or phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again. The new phoenix is destined to live as long as its old self.
One of the most interesting things we learned in Artificial Intelligence is that what we consider hard, like chess and multiplication, is easy for a computer. What we consider easy–like recognizing emotions on faces, or visually distinguishing between a dog and a cat–a computer finds quite difficult. What is hard for us, is only because we know the right answer, and know how difficult it is to do the logic in our head. Most thoughts we take for granted are really quite complex, yet because we can’t even begin to write down how we do it, we do not realize it.
The most audacious burglary gang in recent Hollywood history–accused of stealing more than $3 million in clothing and jewelry from Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and other stars–appears to be a bunch of club-hopping Valley kids, motivated by vanity and celebrity-worship.
‘The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war.’ –John Lyly, Euphues, 1578.
All’s fair in love and war, we hear at a tender age. Though this is tempered by schoolboy concepts of fair play and never hit a man when he’s down. Fair play is reasonable if you don’t mean to win at any cost and the other guy doesn’t mean to kill you, but all that goes by the board in any genuine confrontation.
A new mathematical model of hurricane formation finally solves one of the outstanding puzzles of climate change but also predicts dramatic increases in the number of storms as the world warms.
The great hope of transplant surgeons is that they will, one day, be able to order replacement body parts on demand. At the moment, a patient may wait months, sometimes years, for an organ from a suitable donor. During that time his condition may worsen. He may even die. The ability to make organs as they are needed would not only relieve suffering but also save lives. And that possibility may be closer with the arrival of the first commercial 3D bio-printer for manufacturing human tissue and organs.
The new machine, which costs around $200,000, has been developed by Organovo, a company in San Diego that specialises in regenerative medicine, and Invetech, an engineering and automation firm in Melbourne, Australia.
What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar.” When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account.
It’s with some courage that Melanie Glenwright and Penny Pexman have chosen to investigate the tricky issue of when exactly children learn the distinction between sarcasm and irony. Their finding is that nine- to ten-year-olds can tell the difference, although they can’t yet explicitly explain it. Four- to five-year-olds, by contrast, understand that sarcasm and irony are non-literal forms of language, but they can’t tell the difference between the two.
It is amazing that out of the countless trillions of ways molecules can be arranged, only a few million ways result in things that can reproduce themselves.
The biologist E.O. Wilson estimates there are about 13 million species, broken down as follows:
Insects 9 million
Bacteria 1 million
Fungi 1 million
Viruses 0.3 million
Algae 0.3 million
Worms 0.3 million
Plants 0.2 million
Protozoa 0.2 million
Echinoderms 0.2 million
Mollusks 0.2 million
Crustaceans 0.2 million
Fish 30 thousand
Reptiles 10 thousand
Birds 10 thousand
Amphibians 5 thousand
Mammals 5 thousand
It has been estimated that since the Pre-Cambrian Explosion 540 million years ago, during which the predecessors of most of these species arose, upwards of 90% of all species are extinguished each 100 million years due to environmental catastrophes. Hence, even counting the ways life might have been organized in the distant past, not more than a few hundreds of millions of molecular patterns have worked.
In comparison, a practically infinite number of molecular patterns are possible given the dozens of atomic building blocks nature has to work with and the astronomical number of possibilities for stringing these atoms together in three-dimensional space. (…)
Life owes its improbable existence to an exceedingly rare kind of code. This life-code does two things unique to life.
First, it enables self-replicating order to be structured out of disorder. Second, it enables that order to be maintained (for a while) against all the forces that make things fall apart. Wow yourself with this: life-codes are merely a mathematical sequence, like a formula, that shazam-like transforms randomness into purpose and entropy into organization.
Dignity is apparently big in parts of ethics, particularly as a reason to stop others doing anything ‘unnatural’ regarding their bodies, such as selling their organs, modifying themselves or reproducing in unusual ways. Dignity apparently belongs to you except that you aren’t allowed to sell it or renounce it. Nobody who finds it important seems keen to give it a precise meaning. So I wondered if there was some definition floating around that would sensibly warrant the claims that dignity is important and is imperiled by futuristic behaviours.
1 out of every 10 electrons you consume in America comes from dismantled Russian warheads. Half the uranium we consume comes from a program called Megatons to Megawatts. And 20% of our electricity comes from nuclear. Hence 10% of all electricity in this country comes from post-Cold War weapons dismantling. Bombs once pointed at your cities now power them—from swords to ploughshares, indeed.
Back in the real world, of course, most major espionage activities look more like farce than anything else. I mean, the Bay of Pigs? Oliver North? Accidentally murdering suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and then removing the corpses’ throats because, hyuk! hyuk!, gee nobody’ll notice that?
Clearly, the real secret of intelligence is that these people aren’t Machiavellian geniuses. They’re bumbling shitheads, just like most government functionaries—or, for that matter, most people.
In the emergent “panspectric” order, human society is seen in terms of “information traffic.” (…)
The purpose of the article is to reassure readers: cold and inhuman “traffic flows” that circulate through various channels, “regardless of who or what”, is quite different from “an individual”, “a specific actual person” – the human subject. However, Tolgfors’ reasoning avoids a crucial point: more and more actors – the security services and large companies, but also academics and activists – have started to see human society as nothing more than “flows” of influences. The more information channel flows are logged in detail, the better insight we gain into people’s psyches. (…)
According to Deleuze, in emergent societies of control, we are dispersed individuals: “We no longer find ourselves dealing with the ‘mass-individual’ dyad. Individuals have become dividuals and masses, samples, data, markets, or banks.” The computer is more interested in finding patterns in the huge amount of data currently generated by the human multitude: increasingly extensive areas of our everyday analogue experience are being transferred and stored as digital data.
Where will the next food crisis strike and how to face it? (…)
Satellite observation is the key instrument that will allow to double in 2010 the number of countries monitored in real time for detecting first indications of adverse agricultural outcomes. (…)
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 1 billion people go to bed each night with an empty stomach.
Evolution, the theory goes, guarantees survival to the fittest. But we can blame evolution for some of today’s most pressing health problems, such as cancer, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
A 2009 Gallup poll found that 44% of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form within the past 10,000 years. Many of them also think the human body is perfectly designed.
But most scientists—including biologists, anthropologists, paleontologists and geneticists—see the 21st century human body as a collection of compromises, jury-rigged by evolution as our ancestors adapted to changing conditions.
“In many ways, we are maladapted for modernity,” says Stephen Stearns, a Yale evolutionary biologist.
Over the last 30 years, the US financial system has grown to proportions threatening the global economic order. This column suggests a ‘doomsday cycle’ has infiltrated the economic system and could lead to disaster after the next financial crisis. It says the best route to creating a safer system is to have very large and robust capital requirements, which are legislated and difficult to circumvent or revise. (…)
The doomsday cycle has several simple stages. At the start, creditors and depositors provide banks with cheap funding in the expectation that if things go very wrong, our central banks and fiscal authorities will bail them out. Banks such as Lehman Brothers – and many others in this past cycle – use the funds to take large risks, with the aim of providing dividends and bonuses to shareholders and management.
Through direct subsidies (such as deposit insurance) and indirect support (such as central bank bailouts), we encourage our banking system to ignore large, socially harmful ‘tail risks’ – those risks where there is a small chance of calamitous collapse. As far as banks are concerned, they can walk away and let the state clean it up. Some bankers and policymakers even do well during the collapse that they helped to create.
Graduates prefer cats. According to press reports of research at the University of Bristol, households with graduates are 36 per cent more likely to have cats than their academically uninstructed counterparts. Most reports attribute the difference to discrepant brain power. “Clever people are more likely to own cats than dogs,” says the Press Association version of the findings.
The newspapers have diffused the same message. Jane Murray, who led the research, is credited with a rival explanation: “It could be related to longer working hours,” which leave graduates with less time to care for pets than the implicitly idle dog-lovers. (…)
I like cats. (…) The real difference between cat-lovers and dog-lovers has nothing to do with income, education or habits of work. It is, I suspect, a matter of morals. Dog-lovers are good. Cat-lovers are morally indifferent or actively evil.
Doctors warned of a potentially dangerous method of cocaine abuse–injecting the drug directly into the urinary tract–a practice that led to complications costing one man his penis, nine of his fingers and parts of his legs. (…)
Perry said the man was admitted to a New York hospital for a problem with his penis, which had remained erect for three days resulting in a painful inability to urinate. (…)
On his third day in the hospital, the man’s erection suddenly went down, but blood leaked into the tissues and coagulated under the skin of his feet, hands, genitals, back and chest over the next 12 hours.
