Business hype over wikis, networks, and crowdsourcing has led to some dangerous misconceptions about the nature of network forms in counterterrorism and irregular warfare. While network forms of organization are superior to hierarchies in many ways, their strength has been substantially exaggerated. Emergent intelligences cannot formulate strategy nor sustain momentum beyond the tactical level of conflict, networks are not as invincible as commonly portrayed, and hierarchies have certain advantages worth preserving. […]

Anonymous was kind of cyber-militia, not a band of cyber-soldiers. Galled by what they saw as the CoS’ heavy-handed censorship, they attacked it for a while before retiring back to their usual activities on the 4Chan IRC channel. Americans, ornery and independent by nature, tend to valorize militias and distrust professional militaries. But we often forget that our own militias lacked the means or motivation to battle the British for extended periods of time during the Revolution. Washington found it difficult to make them battle during harvest season, and could not force them to fight far from their homes and families. He required the likes of Baron Von Steuben to mold them into a disciplined and professional fighting force through the usage of repetitive drills and training. Our tech-hype about crowdsourcing is another form of militia worship that may be admirable and egalitarian in spirit but dangerous when it is used to overestimate the strategic abilities of emergent foes.

Full Story: GroupIntel

(via Zenpundit)

A Giant Monster Will Destroy New York (Cloverfield (2008))
We Will Perfect Time Travel and Upload Our Consciousness to Computers (Freejack (1992))
Artificial Intelligence Will Run Our Lives (Silver Hawk (2004))
President Cheney Will Pass the Patriot Act III (Death of a President (2006))
Americans Will Struggle Through a Post-Apocalyptic Existence (The Postman by David Brin (1985))
The World Will Face Life Without Oil (We Were Warned: Tomorrow’s Oil Crisis (2008))
America’s Computer Systems Will Be Destroyed (Dark Angel (2000))
Humanity Will Go to War with an Alien Race (The Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982))
A New Conservative Party Will Displace the Democrats and Republicans (“From Our Point of View We Had Moved to the Left” by William Shunn (1993))
Disaster Will Strike on a Commercial Spaceflight (Orbit by John J. Nance (2006))
A Virus Will Kill 90% of Humanity (I Am Legend (2007))
The British Government Will Begin Dismantling Public Freedom (Last Rights (2005))
The Large Hadron Collider Will Cause All of Humanity to Experience a Flashforward (Flash Forward by Robert J. Sawyer (1999))
Korea Nationalists Will Try to Change the Timeline (2009 – Lost Memories (2002))
Earth Will Encounter Numerous Alien Threats (The Whoniverse (2007-2008))

Full Story: io9

(via Pickover)

While you wait for the much delayed next episode of Technoccult TV, featuring Elijah Brubaker, you can read this Wizard interview with him:

I think a lot of the problems that Reich faced throughout his life are still very real threats to anyone with so-called “crazy” ideas and I hope examining those problems through the lens of the past will shed some light on the social ills of modern life.

My less grandiose and presumptuous answer is; Reich’s life combines some of my favorite topics and themes. Human sexuality, fringe science, Nazis, political oppression, there’s even some stuff about weather-control and aliens later on. A lot of that stuff is just plain fun to draw and riff on.

Full Story: Wizard

“In an important breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language, researchers in Great Britain and the United States have imaged the first high definition imprints that dolphin sounds make in water. The key to this technique is the CymaScope, a new instrument that reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially. Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer, John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to image, for the first time, the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water. The resulting “CymaGlyphs,” as they have been named, are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin ‘picture word.’

Certain sounds made by dolphins have long been suspected to represent language but the complexity of the sounds has made their analysis difficult. Previous techniques, using the spectrograph, display cetacean (dolphins, whales and porpoises) sounds only as graphs of frequency and amplitude. The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin’s natural environment-water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time.

Within the field of cetacean research, theory states that dolphins have evolved the ability to translate dimensional information from their echolocation sonic beam. The CymaScope has the ability to visualize dimensional structure within sound. CymaGlyph patterns may resemble what the creatures perceive from their own returning sound beams and from the sound beams of other dolphins. Reid said that the technique has similarities to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. “Jean-Francois Champollion and Thomas Young used the Rosetta Stone to discover key elements of the primer that allowed the Egyptian language to be deciphered. The CymaGlyphs produced on the CymaScope can be likened to the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone. Now that dolphin chirps, click-trains and whistles can be converted into CymaGlyphs, we have an important tool for deciphering their meaning.”

(via Red Orbit)

(CymaScope’s site)

“A builder scared off a house-breaker by running at him dressed as the Norse god Thor. The terrified intruder leapt from a first floor window to escape Torvald Alexander, who was dressed as the Norse god of thunder in a red cape and silver helmet and breastplate. Mr Alexander had just returned from a New Year’s Eve fancy dress party when he discovered the man in his home in Inverleith, Edinburgh.

He said he acted instinctively to chase the intruder away, and believed his costume may have added impact. Mr Alexander, 39, said: “We were both startled but then the instant reaction was that I ran at him and he just jumped straight out of the window. “I think I would be quite scared if someone looking almost like a gladiator ran at them.”

(via Metro. Thanks DJ!)

“The snowflakes’ pictures are captured by Kenneth G. Libbrecht using a specially designed snowflake photomicroscope. Kenneth Libbrecht is a professor of physics at Caltech. His recent research has focused on the properties of ice crystals, particularly the structure of snowflakes.”

(via Zuza Fun)

(SnowCrystals.com)

It seems so long ago now. But just under five years ago, London’s nightlife found itself at the center of a seismic cultural explosion that still reverberates around the U.K indie-verse today.
As with the psychedelic scene based around the UFO Club in Tottenham Court Road and the punk movement’s Soho HQs The Roxy and The Vortex, it involved a small group of movers’n’shakers taking control of the pop apparatus to create something new, exciting and—whisper it—revolutionary.

For a short while the fat-cats of the British music business—a dismal alliance of promoters (tell me, have you ever seen a skinny one?), lazy managers and idea-free labels—were on the back foot, and oh, what pleasure it was to be alive to see it and be involved in it. In its place? A new form of night-time activity, where gigs could take place on a bus, a subway train or even, at one memorable soiree in Regents Park, up a tree, and the old ways—not least the capitalist chicanery of (yawn) advance credit card bookings—could go swing.

Ever since The Stone Roses had attempted to subvert the medium with their gig at Spike Island in 1990—deemed a failure by anyone who hadn’t actually been there—promoters in the U.K had ensured that any free expression amongst bands was brutally clamped down upon. At many venues—not least the once-prestigious The Rock Garden in Covent Garden—young bands were even forced to endure a “pay to play” policy which meant they had to cough up £50 before they could even get on a stage. Worse, it was an unspoken rule that if any band dared go beyond these preset boundaries, there would be hell to pay.

Full Story: Arthur Magazine

‘Project Bluebird: Fucking with Reality’, is a quarterly-release periodical commencing production in 2009. Project Bluebird concentrates primarily on the topics of Reality Hacking, Bio-Psionics, Neo-tantra and Modern Mysticism. Each issue of Project Bluebird features a full-color cover, with internal black and white artwork and text.

Submissions of Writing and Art are now being accepted for the first issue of Project Bluebird. Please submit all content using the Submissions Form. For more information about Project Bluebird, please contact us. Writing should be articles, narrative, poetic, or blends thereof. Other content may be accepted depending on the quality and type of submission.

Editorial Staff: Kara Rae Garland, Lillian Grace, Samm Hain, and Edward E. Wilson.

Availability: Coming 2009.
Pricing: TBA.

Project Bluebird

Not exactly what your thinking. It’s not an escort service, it’s a Library. Those crazy Brits have come up with a living library that isn’t filled with books but people, you borrow, spend time with, and return.

Pretty cool concept.

It works like a conventional library. Tables and chairs are set out for study. Librarians bustle purposefully, staffing the checkout desk.

Except these aren’t books on loan. They’re people.

Welcome to the Living Library. Here, you borrow individuals who represent stereotypes that often are the target of prejudice or hatred.

Full Story:

(via Theoretick)

With Wall Street hemorrhaging jobs, bonuses disappearing and the financial sector going through a seismic shift, some bankers and lawyers are switching lanes to more creative career paths. They are putting down their Wall Street Journals and picking up Variety as they try their hands at comedy, filmmaking and writing.

Harry B. Weiner, a partner at On-Ramps, a recruiting and consulting firm that works with financial professionals, says the economic downturn is creating a new psychology of career transition.

“People feel there’s nothing to lose in terms of taking a risk and pursuing a new direction, especially when you have a résumé that says ‘banking’ and no banks are hiring,” Mr. Weiner said.

Full Story: New York Times

(via Tomorrow Museum)

Dan Hill provides an excellent summary of The Black Swan and includes a few excepts specifically useful to designers and urban planners.

This is a book that I almost didn’t read. Like The Long Tail or Here Comes Everybody, for instance. Both books I own but don’t feel the need to read, feeling that I’ve already having experienced much of what lies inside. This betrays my own arrogance I suppose, and I’ve no doubt I’ve missed a few profound insights this way. But given the choice I prefer to read about things I don’t know, books that don’t promise to back up my existing ideas. Then there are those like Gladwell’s Blink or The Tipping Point, books whose title more or less says it all. A quick rifle through the pages of these books in an airport bookshop - in that peculiar pre-flight mode of having no time and time on your hands - is enough to get the gist, and speculate as to their point.

The Black Swan almost fell into this category, but a recommendation by Paul Schütze and a few others meant that I did pick it up - at Melbourne Airport, ironically - and consumed it voraciously.

It’s not so much a popular science book as a popular statistics book, not a genre I would’ve thought probable to emerge, and thus something of a black swan in itself.

Full Story: City of Sound.

Another good overview can be found by reading The Telegraph’s interview with Taleb

From Voice of America News (emphasis mine):

In comments to reporters after a briefing for President Bush, Rice sharply criticized Hamas, which she said has held the Gaza strip hostage since illegally seizing power there in 2007 and used the coastal strip as a “launch pad” against Israel - deeply contributing to the humanitarian crisis there.

Here’s what happened in 2007.

(Thanks to Juan Ochoa for the tip)

An Indo-Pakistani nuclear war might conceivably take a *back page* to the fiscal crisis.

I always knew the “War on Terror” bubble would go. It’s gone. Nobody misses it. It got no burial. I knes was gonna be replaced by another development that seemed much more burningly urgent than terror Terror TERROR, but I had a hard time figuring out what vast, abject fright that might be.

Now I know. Welcome to 2009! […]

As Orlov accurately points out, in the Russian collapse, if you were on a farm or in some small neighborly town, you were toast. The hustlers in the cities were the ones with inventive opportunities, so they were the ones getting by.

So the model polity for local urban resilience isn’t Russia. I’m inclined to think the model there is Italy. Italy has had calamitous Bush-levels of national incompetence during almost its entire 150-year
national existence.

Before that time, Italy was all city-states — and not even “states,” mostly just cities. Florence, Milan, Genoa, Venice. Rome. They were really brilliantly-run, powerful cities. (Well, not Rome — but Rome
was global.) Gorgeous cities full of initiaive and inventive genius. If you’re a fan of urbanism you’ve surely got to consider the cities of the Italian Renaissance among the top urban inventions of all time.

Full Story: WELL

Chris Hardwick of Hard ‘n Phirm tries Getting Things Done, Never Check E-Mail in the Morning, and The Four Hour Work Week.

Allen, Morgenstern, and Ferriss are a nicely compatible family unit: David Allen is the practical dad who reminds you not to overcomplicate things; just get the job done. Julie Morgenstern is the encouraging mom who, while hugging you, says, “It’ll be all right; you just need to focus on what’s important here.” And Tim Ferriss is the upstart kid who cries, “Think outside the box, man!” So in retrospect, it makes sense that I found it easier to cherry-pick elements from each and stitch together my own wearable cloak of efficiency. Now, I know that David Allen is the head vampire of productivity, but if you only have the fortitude to read a single book, I’m gonna throw my lithe frame behind The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss lays out a series of nimble yet perfectly legal cons to help you break out of the corporate Bastille—and work from the actual Bastille, if you want. That sly creativity best fits the rogue nature of the freelancer.

Full Story: Wired.

I recently wrote up details of my modded GTD implementation at Klintron’s Brain.

I recently read Four Hour Work Week, expecting to write a scathing review of it. But I’m actually getting a lot of mileage out of it, applying it to The Swift Fox. But I’m still a long way from quitting my day job, and I haven’t hired a personal assistant yet.

Stewart Brand, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Douglas Rushkoff, Garret Lisi and about a bazillion more weigh in on this year’s Edge question:

New tools equal new perceptions.

Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.

Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.

And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.

Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the DNA double helix, and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, recently were awarded Double Helix Awards from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for being the founding fathers of human genome sequencing. They are the first two human beings to have their complete genetic information decoded.

Watson noted during his acceptance speech that he doesn’t want government involved in decisions concerning how people choose to handle information about their personal genomes.

Venter is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. He has already announced transplanting the information from one genome into another. In other words, your dog becomes your cat. He has privately alluded to important scientific progress in his lab, the result of which, if and when realized, will change everything.
WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?
“What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

Full Story: Edge

Very nice to start the year with advice from Taleb

Via this post at WorldChanging I found two excellent older posts:

The Apocalypse Makes Us Dumb:

A subset of the rule that the Elect will survive is that survivalists survive, that bunkered individuals or remote farming communities or whatever have an edge, and that when the crazy starts, it’ll be the people holed up in the hinterlands who will survive and that the rule we can observe all through history — which is that these people are simply prey to larger, better-organized groups — suspends itself for the duration (unless a savior is needed to fight off the Humungous and his mohawked thugs or something — see #2 above).

And The futility of survivalism:

But real apocalypses are sordid, banal, insane. If things do come unraveled, they present not a golden opportunity for lone wolves and well-armed geeks, but a reality of babies with diarrhea, of bugs and weird weather and dust everywhere, of never enough to eat, of famine and starving, hollow-eyed people, of drunken soldiers full of boredom and self-hate, of random murder and rape and wars which accomplish nothing, of many fine things lost for no reason and nothing of any value gained. And survivalists, if they actually manage to avoid becoming the prey of larger groups, sitting bitter and cold and hungry and paranoid, watching their supplies run low and wishing they had a clean bed and some friends. Of all the lies we tell ourselves, this is the biggest: that there is any world worth living in that involves the breakdown of society.

A related older post: The Outquisition

I mostly look to the periphery for an idea of what dystopias will look like, so my favorite dystopian movies are movies like Salvador, Hotel Rhwanda, and City of God. One sci-fi dystopia that I like is Children of Men, because it seems to be based very much on the reality of the periphery.

“As the holiday season winds to close we’re counting down the days to the new year with a look at some of Inhabitat’s most exciting stories of 2008! It’s been an outstanding year in green building and today we’re looking back at ten of the most impressive green architecture projects of 2008. From LEED platinum superstructures to innovative recycled and reclaimed buildings to ground-breaking monuments that integrate incredible new technologies, read on the year’s best and brightest developments!”

(via Inhabitat)

“Stories of people who ruin things for everyone else…or who are accused of that. [..] A bad apple, at least at work, can spoil the whole barrel. And there’s research to prove it. Host Ira Glass talks to Will Felps, a professor at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, who designed an experiment to see what happens when a bad worker joins a team. Felps divided people into small groups and gave them a task. One member of the group would be an actor, acting either like a jerk, a slacker or a depressive. And within 45 minutes, the rest of the group started behaving like the bad apple.”

(via This American Life)

“In many South American countries, it has become a tradition to burn human shaped representations of the previous year, as a way to get rid of everything bad that the year brought, and leave way for the new. The following videos show some of these traditions and some of the controversy soome of them have sparked. The image above is from cirofono and represents Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chávez. The image is used according to Creative Commons Attribution License. In Guatemala, the burning takes place in December, on the 7th, the day when they state that the virgin defeated the devil. What they do is burn everything old, broken and useless in their houses, since they believe that the devil hides in those objects throughout the year, and on that day, when he is the weakest, they can cast him out of the houses. Many others, however, purchase piñatas or effigies of the devil to burn, to keep the tradition.”

(via Global Voices Online)

(Related: “Pagan Party: New Year’s Traditions That Hail From The Depths Of Antiquity” via The Vancouver Sun)

Self-control is critical for success in life, and a new study by University of Miami professor of Psychology Michael McCullough finds that religious people have more self-control than do their less religious counterparts. These findings imply that religious people may be better at pursuing and achieving long-term goals that are important to them and their religious groups. This, in turn, might help explain why religious people tend to have lower rates of substance abuse, better school achievement, less delinquency, better health behaviors, less depression, and longer lives.

Full Story: Physorg

(Thanks Cliff!)

While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns at the heart of the sun.

In the spring, a team will begin attempts to ignite a tiny man-made star inside a laboratory and trigger a thermonuclear reaction.

Its goal is to generate temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius and pressures billions of times higher than those found anywhere else on earth, from a speck of fuel little bigger than a pinhead. If successful, the experiment will mark the first step towards building a practical nuclear fusion power station and a source of almost limitless energy.

Full Story: Telegraph

(Thanks Cap’n Marrrrk)

The author Terry Pratchett - whose novels have sold millions of copies worldwide - has been made a knight in the New Year Honours list.

The writer, 60, who is best known for his hugely popular Discworld series of comic fantasy novels, received the honour for services to literature.

Sir Terry announced in December 2007 that he had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

He has since campaigned to raise awareness of the condition.

Full Story: BBC

(Thanks Cap’n Marrrrk!)

ATX0cculture is dedicated to providing a digital meat-mirror for Austin-Based practitioners of all forms of magick, reality bending, artistic evocation and similar subtle arts. We also meet up on the 3rd Wen. of each month at Spiderhouse, approx. 9 PM.

Austin Occulture

E-mail me at klint at klintron dot com if you’d like to have your occultural meetup group listed on the PDX Occulture Occulture group list

The savage simplicity of the bacteria is not a sign of its stupidity but a token of its long term commitment to survival. When looking at the tree of life in terms of creative ability it is clear that it is not the bacteria that are primitive; it are the branches ‘above’ them that are caged in an ancient, conservative, over-elaborate and fragile textual heritage. The lichen, that many-coloured plant-like coat of nothingness, that centrifugal furry Mandelbrot cloak spreading-out in search for a minimal splash of sunlight across otherwise lifeless mineral surfaces underscores the point that the vortex may be the ideal but that the bacterial condition is above strict obedience to even its own principles.

Full Story: Social Fiction

(Thanks Algomantra)

Radley Balko looks at the year’s good news:

Crime rates are still falling
Sex crimes are down, too
Divorce rate is at its lowest point in four decades
Life expectancy is up
We’re beating our biggest killers (cancer and heart disease)
The kids are all right
We have more leisure time

Full Story: Fox News