TIFI

Posted by Marcus Estes to WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.

The Scene was a television show aired in Detroit on WGPR, the first black-owned TV station in America. From 1975 to 1987 the show served as black culture’s reinvention of the “dance show” format – and looking back on these amazing tapes now it hurts to understand why it remained a purely local phenomenon.

While white America was up to god knows what on American Bandstand aired Saturday mornings across America, The Scene was publicizing and helping give birth to Detroit Techno

Check the clip.

W. Daniel Hillis for Physics Today at The Long Now Foundation:

One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.

Via Daring Fireball.

Linda Marsa in Discover Magazine:

At a handful of sites across the country, after a four-decade hiatus, psychedelic research is undergoing a quiet renaissance, thanks to scientists like Charles Grob who are revisiting the powerful mind-altering drugs of the 1960s in hopes of making them part of our therapeutic arsenal. Hallucinogens such as psilocybin, MDMA (better known as Ecstasy), and the most controversial of them all, LSD, are being tested as treatments for maladies that modern medicine has done little to assuage, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, drug dependency, obsessive-compulsive disorder, cluster headaches, and the emotional suffering of people with a terminal illness.

While Grob’s study is not complete—he has tested 11 out of a projected 12 volunteers—patients seemed to have positive experiences. “No one had a bad trip, and most derived some benefit,” he says. “It lowered their anxiety, improved their mood and disposition, and imbued them with a greater acceptance of their situation and capacity to live in the moment and appreciate each day.”

This is a fairly well written article that covers the basics of past psychedelics research, and the current minimal studies that are going on now. I have archived the article here because Discover’s site is completely broken in Safari, and hideously unusable in Firefox.

A different theory than the earlier posted Loop Quantum Gravity (”quantum bounce”), though this article does touch on that idea in it’s sum up of previous research.

Sean M. Carroll in Scientific American Magazine:

In the presence of dark energy, empty space is not completely empty. Fluctuations of quantum fields give rise to a very low temperature—enormously lower than the temperature of today’s universe but nonetheless not quite absolute zero. All quantum fields experience occasional thermal fluctuations in such a universe. That means it is not perfectly quiescent; if we wait long enough, individual particles and even substantial collections of particles will fluctuate into existence, only to once again disperse into the vacuum. (These are real particles, as opposed to the short-lived “virtual” particles that empty space contains even in the absence of dark energy.)

Among the things that can fluctuate into existence are small patches of ultradense dark energy. If conditions are just right, that patch can undergo inflation and pinch off to form a separate universe all its own—a baby universe. Our universe may be the offspring of some other universe.

Superficially, this scenario bears some resemblance to the standard account of inflation. There, too, we posit that a patch of ultradense dark energy arises by chance, igniting inflation. The difference is the nature of the starting conditions. In the standard account, the patch arose in a wildly fluctuating universe, in which the vast bulk of fluctuations produced nothing resembling inflation. It would seem to be much more likely for the universe to fluctuate straight into a hot big bang, bypassing the inflationary stage altogether. Indeed, as far as entropy is concerned, it would be even more likely for the universe to fluctuate straight into the configuration we see today, bypassing the past 14 billion years of cosmic evolution.

In our new scenario, the preexisting universe was never randomly fluctuating; it was in a very specific state: empty space. What this theory claims—and what remains to be proved—is that the most likely way to create universes like ours from such a preexisting state is to go through a period of inflation, rather than fluctuating there directly. Our universe, in other words, is a fluctuation but not a random one.

Emit fo Worra
This scenario, proposed in 2004 by Jennifer Chen of the University of Chicago and me, provides a provocative solution to the origin of time asymmetry in our observable universe: we see only a tiny patch of the big picture, and this larger arena is fully time-symmetric. Entropy can increase without limit through the creation of new baby universes.

Best of all, this story can be told backward and forward in time. Imagine that we start with empty space at some particular moment and watch it evolve into the future and into the past. (It goes both ways because we are not presuming a unidirectional arrow of time.) Baby universes fluctuate into existence in both directions of time, eventually emptying out and giving birth to babies of their own. On ultralarge scales, such a multiverse would look statistically symmetric with respect to time—both the past and the future would feature new universes fluctuating into life and proliferating without bound. Each of them would experience an arrow of time, but half would have an arrow that was reversed with respect to that in the others.

The idea of a universe with a backward arrow of time might seem alarming. If we met someone from such a universe, would they remember the future? Happily, there is no danger of such a rendezvous. In the scenario we are describing, the only places where time seems to run backward are enormously far back in our past—long before our big bang. In between is a broad expanse of universe in which time does not seem to run at all; almost no matter exists, and entropy does not evolve. Any beings who lived in one of these time-reversed regions would not be born old and die young—or anything else out of the ordinary. To them, time would flow in a completely conventional fashion. It is only when comparing their universe to ours that anything seems out of the ordinary—our past is their future, and vice versa. But such a comparison is purely hypothetical, as we cannot get there and they cannot come here.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

The Observer:

American writer Susan Sontag was terrified of death. She beat cancer in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s, but third time around she wasn’t so lucky. In a tender account of her final illness, her son David Rieff recalls how he colluded with his mother’s fantasy that she wasn’t dying – and what this ultimately cost him after she had gone.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation.

More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.

Via Justin

Tomoko Otake for The Japan Times

Nearly 300 spectators cheered wildly as disco music blared. A spotlight picked out two fighters approaching the ring to kick off a puroresu (prowrestling) event held recently in a Tokyo town hall. Then a female MC announced, in a startlingly high-pitched voice: “In the blue corner, E.T.! In the red corner, Arm Bomb Fujiwara!” Both wrestlers were physically handicapped and had to be helped or lifted into the ring. But when the starting bell rang, the men — both of them sitting and rolling around on the canvas — began punching each other with all the power and accuracy they could muster.

Blows landed thick and fast, and the crowd roared. Then Arm Bomb Fujiwara got his arm round E.T.’s neck and began to throttle him. As E.T.’s face reddened to puce and he started shaking, the referee called a halt to the bout and declared a win for Arm Bomb — who raised his fist high as the crowd laughed and shrieked.

That night, many of the dozen disabled wrestlers from the Doglegs group that staged the show in western Tokyo’s Shimokitazawa district looked truly fired up and fearless. In melodramatic contrast, the few able-bodied participants were wimps, including one going by the name of “Mushikera Goro (Worthless Goro)” who, according to the program, was a hikikomori (long-term stay-at-home recluse) with a big-time Oedipus complex. He lost out to 41-year-old “Anchi-teze” (Antithesis) Kitajima, the broad-shouldered nondisabled man who is also Doglegs’ leader.

But why stage contests in which one or both participants are so clearly disadvantaged? What is it all about?

“That’s our intention — to make people think,” said Doglegs’ leader and cofounder Kitajima — real name, Yukinori Kitajima — who makes a living not from running Doglegs but from writing fiction and computer-game scenarios.

Speaking after the two-hour event had ended, the father of two young girls said that over the past 15 years the group has performed around 70 times all over Japan, and once in South Korea. Then he explained: “We don’t want to show something for people to simply laugh at and walk away. You might get a laugh out of our matches at times, but we also want people to wonder what this all means. We want to give people a nasty aftertaste.”

See also Doglegs’ homepage (Japanese), some videos on youtube.

Via NoneMoreNegative

Steve Yegge:

Some guys at Stanford invited me to speak at their EE Computer Systems Colloquium last week. Pretty cool, eh? It was quite an honor. I wound up giving a talk on dynamic languages: the tools, the performance, the history, the religion, everything. It was a lot of fun, and it went over surprisingly well, all things considered.

Via Tim Bray.