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Archive for the ‘humor’ category: Page 13

Nov 29, 2013

Life Extension on sale for Black Friday? RIOT!

Posted by in categories: humor, life extension, rants, scientific freedom

Whenever I talk about indefinite life extension, the science and tech behind its development, and the desire for individuals to have the ultimate choice of when and how long they wish to live and die, the radical left almost always resorts to the argument, “Yeah, that sounds great, but then the rich aren’t going to provide it for the 99%. They’ll only keep it for themselves and let us die off.” How is this not equivalent to the conspiracy theory that the 1% are withholding the cure for cancer to the general populace?

It’s a bullshit viewpoint, in my opinion. Yes, the 1% are greedy fucks who care more about profits than anything else, but then, I ask you, how do they expect to earn profits from an extinct species?

While you’re trying to figure out an answer for that, I also find the idea that nothing would result from this kind of oppression to be asinine. Why? Here’s a good example: Black Friday. Every year Black Friday customers gather in the hundreds and thousands in each city, literally rioting, fighting, and killing people, just so they can get their hands on consumer products that’ll be outdated by next year. So if the cure for aging is being withheld from the masses, what the fuck do you think the masses are going to do? Just go home and sob? Ha! There’d be warfare on the streets the next morning.

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Oct 9, 2013

Quantum Metamaterial and the Feasibility of Invisiblity Cloaks

Posted by in categories: engineering, futurism, humor, military, transparency

Meta-materials — materials that have been engineered to have properties that absolutely do not exist in nature — such as negative refraction — are unraveling interesting possibilities in future engineering. The discovery of negative refraction has led to the creation of invisibility cloaks, for example, which seamlessly bend light and other electromagnetic radiation around an object, though such are normally restricted to cumbersome laboratory experiments with split-ring resonators and/or restricted to an insufficient slice of spectrum.

A recent article in ExtremeTech drew attention to the world’s first quantum meta-material, created recently by a team of German material scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. It is believed such quantum meta-material can overcome the main problem with traditional meta-materials based on split-ring resonators, which can only be tuned to a small range of frequencies and not conducive to operate across a useful slice of spectrum. While fanciful applications such as quantum birefringence and super-radiant phase transitions are cited it is perhaps invisibility cloaks that until very recently seemed a forte of science fiction.

From Fiction - The Invisible Man

Breakthroughs at the National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan have also made great strides in building quantum invisibility cloaks, and as the arXiv blog on TechnologyReview recently commented ‘invisibility cloaks are all the rage these days’. With such breakthroughs, these technologies may soon find mass take-up in future consumer products & security, and also have abundant military uses — where it may find the financial stimulus to advance the technology to its true capabilities. Indeed researchers in China have been looking into how to mass-produce invisibility cloaks from materials such as Teflon. We’ll all be invisible soon.

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May 23, 2013

Comic: Rationality Matters

Posted by in categories: education, existential risks, fun, humor


Oct 27, 2012

Today, a Young Man on Acid Realized that all Matter is Merely Energy Condensed to a…

Posted by in categories: biological, complex systems, cosmology, engineering, existential risks, homo sapiens, human trajectories, humor, information science, particle physics, philosophy, physics


…here’s Tom with the Weather.
That right there is comedian/philosopher Bill Hicks, sadly no longer with us. One imagines he would be pleased and completely unsurprised to learn that serious scientific minds are considering and actually finding support for the theory that our reality could be a kind of simulation. That means, for example, a string of daisy-chained IBM Super-Deep-Blue Gene Quantum Watson computers from 2042 could be running a History of the Universe program, and depending on your solipsistic preferences, either you are or we are the character(s).

It’s been in the news a lot of late, but — no way, right?

Because dude, I’m totally real
Despite being utterly unable to even begin thinking about how to consider what real even means, the everyday average rational person would probably assign this to the sovereign realm of unemployable philosophy majors or under the Whatever, Who Cares? or Oh, That’s Interesting I Gotta Go Now! categories. Okay fine, but on the other side of the intellectual coin, vis-à-vis recent technological advancement, of late it’s actually being seriously considered by serious people using big words they’ve learned at endless college whilst collecting letters after their names and doin’ research and writin’ and gettin’ association memberships and such.

So… why now?

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Jan 16, 2012

Post Einsteinian Language?

Posted by in categories: biological, complex systems, cosmology, economics, education, ethics, evolution, futurism, habitats, homo sapiens, human trajectories, humor, media & arts, philosophy, policy, rants, scientific freedom, sustainability, transparency

Twenty years ago, way back in the primordial soup of the early Network in an out of the way electromagnetic watering hole called USENET, this correspondent entered the previous millennium’s virtual nexus of survival-of-the-weirdest via an accelerated learning process calculated to evolve a cybernetic avatar from the Corpus Digitalis. Now, as columnist, sci-fi writer and independent filmmaker, [Cognition Factor — 2009], with Terence Mckenna, I have filmed rocket launches and solar eclipses for South African Astronomical Observatories, and produced educational programs for South African Large Telescope (SALT). Latest efforts include videography for the International Astronautical Congress in Cape Town October 2011, and a completed, soon-to-be-released, autobiography draft-titled “Journey to Everywhere”.

Cognition Factor attempts to be the world’s first ‘smart movie’, digitally orchestrated for the fusion of Left and Right Cerebral Hemispheres in order to decode civilization into an articulate verbal and visual language structured from sequential logical hypothesis based upon the following ‘Big Five’ questions,

1.) Evolution Or Extinction?
2.) What Is Consciousness?
3.) Is God A Myth?
4.) Fusion Of Science & Spirit?
5.) What Happens When You Die?

Even if you believe that imagination is more important than knowledge, you’ll need a full deck to solve the ‘Arab Spring’ epidemic, which may be a logical step in the ‘Global Equalisation Process as more and more of our Planet’s Alumni fling their hats in the air and emit primal screams approximating;
“we don’t need to accumulate (so much) wealth anymore”, in a language comprising of ‘post Einsteinian’ mathematics…

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Jan 16, 2012

Electro-magnetic Vortex phenomena & Industrial Implications…

Posted by in categories: engineering, existential risks, fun, humor, physics

I wouldn’t have paid much attention to the following topic except for the article appearing in an otherwise credible international news agency (MINA).

http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/17115/56/
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_gulf_of_aden_vortex

Whilst electro-magnetic disturbances occur naturally — all the time, the suggestion that one in particular has allegedly arose through industrial practices (ionospheric research, wormhole research(??)) lends to curiosity. If anyone on one of the advisory boards for the various science disciplines has a strong knowledge of electro-magnetic vortex type features that can occur in nature, please explain the phenomena, whether there are any implications of these and whether industry of any sort (in particular directed ionospheric heating) can cause such anomalies to appear from time to time.

I understand that there can be certain fluctuations and weakening in build up to magnetic pole reversals, for example (though please correct me if I’m wrong here). That besides one may enjoy the alleged reaction of certain defense forces (surely spoof) which is at least good satire on how leaders of men can often fear the unknown.

Nov 13, 2011

D’Nile aint just a river in Egypt…

Posted by in categories: business, complex systems, cosmology, economics, education, ethics, existential risks, finance, futurism, geopolitics, human trajectories, humor, life extension, lifeboat, media & arts, neuroscience, open access, open source, philosophy, policy, rants, robotics/AI, space, sustainability

Greetings fellow travelers, please allow me to introduce myself; I’m Mike ‘Cyber Shaman’ Kawitzky, independent film maker and writer from Cape Town, South Africa, one of your media/art contributors/co-conspirators.

It’s a bit daunting posting to such an illustrious board, so let me try to imagine, with you; how to regard the present with nostalgia while looking look forward to the past, knowing that a millisecond away in the future exists thoughts to think; it’s the mode of neural text, reverse causality, non-locality and quantum entanglement, where the traveller is the journey into a world in transition; after 9/11, after the economic meltdown, after the oil spill, after the tsunami, after Fukushima, after 21st Century melancholia upholstered by anti-psychotic drugs help us forget ‘the good old days’; because it’s business as usual for the 1%; the rest continue downhill with no brakes. Can’t wait to see how it all works out.

Please excuse me, my time machine is waiting…
Post cyberpunk and into Transhumanism

Nov 3, 2007

Distraught Participants Riot at the Foresight Unconference

Posted by in category: humor


Rioting at the Foresight Unconference

AP, Nov. 3 — The Foresight Unconference announced today that scientists have discovered that there in no world below 1 nanometer. “It’s just space,” said noted scientist Eric Drexler. “We don’t know what to do!” Participants left dazed. Many decided to go back to philosophy, one attendee said.

“Like I said, It’s full of stars!” said novelist Arthur C. Clarke, reached in Sri Lanka. “There’s no there, there.”

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