A straight shot west out of Boston on I-90 will carry you, in two hours or less, to Western Massachusetts, where the country still looks like it did twenty or even 40 years ago: college towns, I-91 tracing the same lazy ladder from Springfield up through Holyoke and Northampton, Amherst and Deerfield. Out there it's taken for granted that the houses will be drafty, the winters uniformly long, and that, on any given trip to the local supermarket, one might spot Thurston or Lou or Kim or J, on-and-off locals for more than twenty years. {audio}http://www.archive.org/download/DinosaurJrDrawings/07Drawerings_64kb.mp3{/audio} ... DraweringsRead More ...
By way of decrying a society that left its citizens unbearably restrained, Edith Wharton describes how in New York in the 1870s, women would order dresses from their Paris dressmakers and then leave them in tissue paper at least two years before wearing them in public; the thought of showing them "in advance of the fashion" was unforgivably vulgar. Social life has changed, but cultural life seems just as restricted now – even Animal Collective are held back by trends that seem a couple of years old (and that they helped to invent). When I think back on 2009, I’ll first remember how our impoverished aesthetic generation repeatedly scraped the resin from the cultural trash barrel. Every second person is wearing neon leggings, and the ones who aren’t rock a ‘70s aesthetic, with high-waisted jeans and moccasins. Christmas sweaters are getting impossible to find at the thrift store. Ska revival. Garage rock revival. It never ends.Read More ...
For just over 10 years, London's Guapo has been working in the world of avant and progressive rock. The band's past is a bit hard to track with its numerous lineup changes and guest musicians. The most recent change in roster was the resignation of Matthew Thompson, the founding member of Guapo, which occurred just before the release of 2005's Black Oni. The departure of Thompson has left Guapo with percussionist David Smith and multi-instrumentalist Daniel O'Sullivan. Though O'Sullivan is by no means a founding member of the band, but he was essential in honing the sound on Guapo's last two LPs: Five Suns and Black Oni. These two albums have been pivotal in building Guapo's following of fans, so it's hard not to credit O'Sullivan as an asset to the band.... {audio}http://www.neurotrecordings.com/artists/guapo/audio/Guapo-The%20Selenotrope.mp3 {/audio} ... The SelenotropeRead More ...
The Ex are one of those rare bands that, despite being around for 25 years, have neither gone soft nor stagnated. The 23 tracks on this album all date from their first decade of existence (1980-1990), and if you compare it with recent milestones like Starter Alternator and Turn, you’ll see that while many of the Ex’s virtues are long standing, much has changed. The Ex grew out of Amsterdam’s once-fertile squatters’ subculture, and have always been politically conscious; Singles. Period. includes screeds that oppose American cultural hegemony, Dutch apathy, and eugenics. Their most recent album Turn likewise includes protests against globalization, consumerism, and cultural erosion, but its lyrics are quite nuanced and in touch with the grey areas of the issues when compared with the black and white prescription of 1981’s “Weapons For El Salvador”: .............. {audio}http://www.theex.nl/mp3/The%20Ex%20-%20Trash.mp3{/audio} ... TrashRead More ...
A live album can be many things: a candid snapshot, a footnote to a scene, or even just a thrifty alternative to studio time. Antlers, a collection of live Bastro recordings from 1991, is the rarest kind of live album: it illuminates a side of the band that, in turn, casts their previous work in a new light as well.“1991 has been called the year that punk broke. Some of it broke into the mainstream, but some broke into more irregular shards.” David Grubbs’s observation, from the liner notes to Antlers, could also describe the varied musical paths that led from his former band Squirrel Bait to the disparate ’90s groups he and his ex-bandmates went on to found: Slint, Palace Brothers, King Kong, Bitch Magnet, the For Carnation, Tortoise, and of course, Bastro.Read More ...
Basic Atari Teenage Riot iPhone app philosophy by Alec Empire + London gig+ 4CD, 1DVD free download
The free iPhone app features all ATR albums and songs, all videos, a photo archive, bio, news updates and also a ‘Riotsounds Produce Riots’ audioplayer. This audio player includes all the sounds/WAV files that ATR used at the May 1st 1999 demonstration (very low sub basses, square waves, noise sounds which trigger hysteria and panic within the audience) & would make them available to every political activisit out there. The idea being that you can hook up your iPhone to a speaker system if there is a rally: Apple/iTunes is arguing that they still need to investigate further, because it is legally a grey area and ATR has been indexed in Germany before (censored).Read More ...
LIMB is an archival release of some material recorded from 1980-1983, from the early days of Foetus and pre-Foetus. Some of the pieces here have been previously released on the compilation albums. Parts have been released on various single b-sides. Some were excavated from old cassettes and some of it was reconstructed or re-edited from compositions on cassette. One piece is constructed from an organ part written in 1982, which I took the liberty of finishing in 2008. These pieces were made before the introduction of MIDI and sampling technology. {audio}http://brainwashed.com/common/sounds/mp3/foetus-limb-te_deum.mp3{/audio} ....Te DeumRead More ...
Doing justice to Nisht Azoy is a tricky affair, not least because Black Ox Orkestar stand alone, making comparisons and associations nearly impossible. The use of gypsy melodies on the later Firewater albums also comes to mind. Adopting and reinterpreting Jewish diasporic music, Black Ox Orkestar's second album moves through original songs, traditionals and compositions based on folk songs and ballads. The selections are masterful, as is the playing, whether eliciting joy with dance rhythms and singing or delving into slow, sad evocations of melancholy...... {audio}http://www.southern.net/southern/band/BLAOX/sounds/CST29_08_toyte_goyes_in_shineln.mp3{/audio} ....toyte goyes in shinelnRead More ...
Japan’s Annual Penis Festival – Celebrates Fertility
KOMAKI, Japan — It's springtime in Japan and that means one thing. Actually, two things. Penis festivals and vagina festivals. It may sound like a sophomoric gag. But these are folk rites going back at least 1,500 years, into Japan's agricultural past. They're held to ensure a good harvest and promote baby-making. Maybe they should hold more such festivals. Japan has one of the world's lowest birthrates (1.37 children per woman), which experts blame on stagnant incomes and changing gender relations.Read More ...
All world secret underground bases build for space travelers
The following material comes from people who know the Dulce (underground) base exists. They are people who worked in the labs; abductees taken to the base; people who assisted in the construction; intelligence personal (NSA,CIA,FBI ... ect.) and UFO / inner-earth researchers. This information is meant for those who are seriously interested in the dulce base. for your own protection be advised to “use caution” while investigating this complex.Does a strange world exist beneath our feet? Strange legends have persisted for centuries about the mysterious cavern world and the equally strange beings who inhabit it. More UFOlogists have considered the possibility that UFOs may be emanating from subterranean bases, that UFO aliens have constructed these bases to carry out various missions involving Earth or humans.Read More ...
These days, with all the pundits preaching doom and the impending collapse of society into some kind of Mad Max style wasteland, it's easy for us to imagine that the economy is as unhealthy as it's ever been. But any historian would give you a hard backhanded smack for even saying that out loud. History is full of economic idiocy, and here are five economic collapses that make 2010 feel like the Renaissance.Read More ...
Black-lip Rattail ............ These sorts of rattails feed in the muddy seafloor by gliding along head down and tail up, powered by gentle undulations of a long fin under the tail. The triangular head has sensory cells underneath that help detect animals buried in the mud or sand. The common name comes from the black edges around the mouth.Read More ...
German-Japanese flight to Moon and Mars in 1945-46
The moon has allways held a significant place for humanity both as a source for romantic inspiration for poets and the like to outstanding curiosity for scientists. Allthough, it is said to be a shadowy place some say of Aliens others say of Top Secret Moon Bases that are supposed to belong to The Third Reich what do you think ? It is said that in the early nineties that Nazies landed on the moon using some sort of giant flying saucer type object. These Nazi flying Saucers were said to stand about 45 mtrs high, had 10 stories of crew quaters and had a diameter of 60 mtrs. Well here is videos and texts that links that story ........Read More ...
The "Max Headroom pirating incident" is the fascinating story of the successful hijacking of two television signals in the Chicago, Illinois area on Sunday, November 22, 1987. This feat was accomplished by a mysterious person wearing a Max Headroom mask who somehow over-rode the station signals and then proceeded to perform an illegal broadcast on live television. The incident began when television broadcasts at two different stations (WTTW and WGN) were interrupted by the hijacker on the same day, only hours apart.Read More ...
What Came 'Before' the Big Bang? Leading Physicist Presents a Radical Theory
String theorists Neil Turok of Cambridge University and Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton believe that the cosmos we live in was actually created by the cyclical trillion-year collision of two universes (which they define as three-dimensional branes plus time) that were attracted toward each other by the leaking of gravity out of one of the universes. In their view of the universe the complexities of an inflating universe after a Big Bang are replaced by a universe that was already large. flat, and uniform with dark energy as the effect of the other universe constantly leaking gravity into our own and driving its acceleration. According to this theory, the Big Bang was not the beginning of time but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution, each accompanied by the creation of new matter and the formation of new galaxies, stars, and planets.Read More ...
"I forgot to remember to forget," Elvis Presley sang in 1955. I know that it was 1955 because I just Googled the title and clicked on the link to the Wikipedia entry for the song. How cool is that? Not long ago, I would have had to actually remember that Elvis recorded the song as part of his monumental Sun Records sessions that year. Then I would have had to flip through a set of histories of blues and country that sit on the shelf behind me. It might have taken five minutes to do what I did in five seconds. I almost don't need my own memory any more. That strikes many of us as a good thing: the costs low, the benefits high. We can be much more efficient and comprehensive now that a teeming collection of documents sits just a few keystrokes away.Read More ...
Learn How to Pronounce the Iceland Volcano Eyjafjallajokull and remember; When He Erupted In 1821, it lasted 2 years
The last time Eyjafjallajökull erupted, it lasted 2 years stretching from 1821-1823. It also erupted in 920 and 1612. Eyjafjallajökull's eruption usually precedes an eruption for another Icelandic volcano called Katla, as it did in 1823. Katla's eruptions are usually more violent than Eyjafjallajökul's. Due to the second activity on Eyjafjallajökull volcano since April 14, there are thousands of flights have been cancelled not only in Europe but also some flights from Asia, America and other continents. More over, it was also reportedly more than ten thousands of air travelers still stranded after a plume of ash cloud spreading across thousands of miles. No need to repeat the same news in every single post, actually there’s an interesting thing from the Iceland volcano’s name Eyjafjallajokull. Pronunciation is so difficult for some of us. Even, many people still don’t know what’s the right pronunciation of Eyjafjallajokull volcano. Did you know that?Read More ...
The Marijuana Conspiracy - The Real Reason Hemp isIllegal
MARIJUANAis DANGEROUS. Pot is NOT harmful to the human body or mind.Marijuana does NOT pose a threat to the general public. Marijuana isvery much a danger to the oil companies, alcohol, tobacco industriesand a large number of chemical corporations. Various big businesses,with plenty of dollars and influence, have suppressed the truth from thepeople. Thetruth is if marijuana was utilized for its vast array of commercialproducts, it would create an industrial atomic bomb! Entrepreneurs havenot been educated on the product potential of pot. The super rich haveconspired to spread misinformation about an extremely versatile plantthat, if used properly, would ruin their companies.Read More ...
How drug companies deceive doctors and how hire ghostwriters to produce articles
Following doctor’s orders has become synonymous with danger. Every year, FDA approved drugs kill twice as many people as the total number of U.S. deaths from the Vietnam War. Death by medicine flourishes because deceit, not science, governs a doctor’s prescribing habits. This deceit comes in many forms. Medical ghostwriting and checkbook science are the most prominent.Read More ...
9/11 has inspired a myriad of memorials who are scattered all across America. Some of them are of questionable taste, others contain strange occult symbolism while others simply piss people off. Here’s the five most offensive.Read More ...
A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution. They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.Read More ...
Hindu Nepalis celebrate the ‘great night of Shiva’ smoking hashish and marijuana
KATHMANDU: Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act forbids buying and selling of drugs in the country. The law can slap fines and an imprisonment of up to 20 years if convicted in drug related crimes. But a site at the Pashupatinath Temple area today made a mockery of the law. It was but smoke and mirrors. The holy site of Hindus smoked round-the-clock. The breeze smelled the cannabis as far away as Mitrapark and Gaushala. Some 50,000 Hindu pilgrims from Nepal and India gathered last Saturday (02/13/2010) in Kathmandu’s Pashaupatinath Temple to celebrate Mahashivaratri, the ‘great night of Shiva’. Worshippers, including teenagers, freely bought hashish and marijuana and immersed themselves in the polluted (and potentially infectious) waters of the Bagmati River.Read More ...
The international community has come out in force to condemn and declare war on the Somali fishermen pirates, while discreetly protecting the illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fleets from around the world that have been poaching and dumping toxic waste in Somali waters since the fall of the Somali government eighteen years ago. In 1991, when the government of Somalia collapsed, foreign interests seized the opportunity to begin looting the country’s food supply and using the country’s unguarded waters as a dumping ground for nuclear and other toxic waste.Read More ...
Squatting consists of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use. There are one billion squatters globally, that is, about one in every six people on the planet. Yet, according to Kesia Reeve, "squatting is largely absent from policy and academic debate and is rarely conceptualized, as a problem, as a symptom, or as a social or housing movement. In many countries, squatting is in itself a crime; in others, it is only seen as a civil conflict between the owner and the occupants. "Squatters are usually portrayed as worthless scroungers hell-bent on disrupting society." Property law and the state have traditionally favored the property owner. However, in many cases where squatters had de facto ownership, laws have been changed to legitimize their status.Read More ...
The World's First Commercial Brain-Computer Interface + history of BCI
A brain–computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain–machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a brain and an external device. BCIs are often aimed at assisting, augmenting or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor functions. Research on BCIs began in the 1970s at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) under a grant from the National Science Foundation, followed by a contract from DARPA. The papers published after this research also mark the first appearance of the expression brain–computer interface in scientific literature.Read More ...
The T2K Experiment - From Tokai To Kamioka - Where is the anti-matter?
From the beginning of 2010, the T2K experiment will fire a beam of muon-neutrinos from Tokai on Japan's east coast, 300km accross the country to a detector at Kamioka. It hopes to investigate the phenomenon of "neutrino oscillations" by looking for "muon neutrinos" oscillating into "electron neutrinos". A million pound detector has been built at the University of Warwick as part of a vital experiment to investigate fundamental particles - neutrinos.Read More ...
Seven theories of everything that pretend to describe the fundamental nature of the universe
We still don't have a theory that describes the fundamental nature of the universe, but there are plenty of candidates.
The "theory of everything" is one of the most cherished dreams of science. If it is ever discovered, it will describe the workings of the universe at the most fundamental level and thus encompass our entire understanding of nature. It would also answer such enduring puzzles as what dark matter is, the reason time flows in only one direction and how gravity works. Small wonder that Stephen Hawking famously said that such a theory would be "the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God". But theologians needn't lose too much sleep just yet. Despite decades of effort, progress has been slow. Rather than one or two rival theories whose merits can be judged against the evidence, there is a profusion of candidates and precious few clues as to which (if any) might turn out to be correct.Read More ...
The giant ALICE detector is already underway at CERN, and researchers are scrambling to add an electromagnetic calorimeter to capture jet-quenching, the newest way to look inside the quark-gluon plasma — the hot, dense state of matter that filled the earliest universe, which the Large Hadron Collider will soon recreate by slamming lead nuclei into one another. CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known mainly as the accelerator that will soon begin searching for the Higgs particle, and other new physics, in proton collisions at unprecedented energies — up to 14 TeV (14 trillion electron volts) at the center of mass — and with unprecedented beam intensities. But the same machine will also collide massive nuclei, specifically lead ions, to energies never achieved before in the laboratory.Read More ...
I STARTED collecting examples of bizarre experiments years ago while in graduate school studying the history of science. I confess I had no profound intellectual motive; I simply found them fascinating. They filled me with disbelief, astonishment, disgust and - best of all - laughter. With hindsight, perhaps there is a deeper message. These experiments are not the work of cranks.Read More ...
If you're trying to buy happiness, you'd be better off putting your money toward a tropical island get-away than a new computer, a new study suggests. The results show that people's satisfaction with their life-experience purchases — anything from seeing a movie to going on a vacation — tends to start out high and go up over time. On the other hand, although they might be initially happy with that shiny new iPhone or the latest in fashion, their satisfaction with these items wanes with time. The findings, based on eight separate studies, agree with previous research showing that experience-related buys lead to more happiness for the consumer. But the current work provides some insight into why.Read More ...
Earth's atmosphere came from outer space, find scientists
The gases which formed the Earth's atmosphere - and probably its oceans - did not come from inside the Earth but from outer space, according to a study by University of Manchester and University of Houston scientists. The report published this week in the prestigious international journal 'Science' means that textbook images of ancient Earth with huge volcanoes spewing gas into the atmosphere will have to be rethought.Read More ...
It is not science fiction. Researchers at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla have designed a machine that thinks. Today, Darwin 6 consists of a realistically designed simulation of a nervous system housed in a mobile platform called NOMAD (Neurally Organized Mobile Adaptive Device). The research is conducted in the Institute's W.M. Keck Foundation Laboratory of Machine Psychology. Established in 1998 with a grant of 1.5 million from the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles, the Keck Laboratory studies the neural bases of behavior and how the brain reacts and adapts to a changing world. Its objective is to develop a new generation of powerful models of brain activity. Unlike a robot, NOMAD is an autonomous "being," used as a tool to study how the brain controls behavior. According to neuroscientist Jeffrey Krichmar, Ph.D., NOMAD is at the behavioral level of an infant.Read More ...
All Radio music can download from "free music albums"
Homespace Secret Robotic Space Plane Launched By US Air Force
Secret Robotic Space Plane Launched By US Air Force
The United States Air Force (USAF) has launched a secret space plane into orbit, carried in the nose of an Atlas 5 rocket. The USAF is not calling the X-37B a weapon or anything else, and the classified mission was broadcast live, but only for several minutes into the flight. The plane, built by Boeing, was originally part of a NASA programme but was later abandoned and turned over to a secretive USAF unit. There are no details on how much it costs or when it is coming back to earth, but when it does return the unmanned craft will land itself, using the onboard autopilot.
There's an 80 percent chance of good weather to launch the X-37B space plane. But what it will actually do in space and when it will autonomously fly itself back down to Earth remain a mystery. The Air Force would like to keep it that way. At least for now. "Well, you can't hide a space launch, so at some point extra security doesn't do you any good," said Gary Payton, Air Force deputy under secretary for space systems, in a Tuesday teleconference with reporters. [X-37B spacecraft photos.] "On this flight the main thing we want to emphasize is the vehicle itself, not really, what's going on in the on-orbit phase because the vehicle itself is the piece of news here," Payton said.
Secrets of the X-37B
The on-orbit tests, Payton said, are classified like many Air Force projects in space to protect the nature of the X-37B's "actual experimental payloads."
But the X-37B is designed to stay in space on missions that last up to 270 days long.
For this first test flight, the Air Force wants to see if the X-37B, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, can actually launch into space, open its payload bay and deploy a set of solar panels to keep it powered for months at a time. This demonstration flight is also aimed at testing the X-37B spacecraft's ability to fly itself back to Earth and land on a runway at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The key question for the Air Force: How expensive and how much work will it be to turn the X-37B spaceship around for a second flight? If the answer is "too long and too much" it may affect when the X-37B and its sister ship – a second Orbital Test Vehicle already contracted by the Air Force – fly again, if ever.
"If that's the case, it makes this vehicle much less attractive to the future," Payton said.
Currently, the Air Force envisions launching the second X-37B, presumably the Orbital Test Vehicle 2, sometime in 2011.
X-37B's long legacy
The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle 1 was built by Boeing's Phantom Works division in Seal Beach, Calif. It is about 29 feet (9 meters) long and has a wingspan of just over 14 feet (4 meters) across. It stands just over 9 1/2 feet (3 meters) tall and weighs nearly 11,000 pounds (4,989 kg).
This SPACE.com X-37B graphic illustrates some details of the space plane and its relative size.
When compared to NASA space shuttles, which can weigh around 100 tons when fully fueled and loaded with cargo, the X-37B seems like a diminutive cousin. NASA space shuttles are 122 feet (37 meters) long and have 78-foot (24-meter) wingspans.
The X-37B has a small payload bay about the size of a pickup truck bed. Each NASA space shuttle has a 60-foot (18-meter) payload bay that can fit a large bus inside.
History
The military has been looking into the idea of an orbital space platform for decades. And the X-37 program itself has been around for quite a while. Built by Boeing’s Phantom Works division in the mid 1990s, it was first developed for NASA as a reusable space vehicle that could be carried to orbit either inside the space shuttle or using a booster rocket. The unmanned X-37 would then orbit for a period of time before launching or retrieving a payload and return to earth.
The program was transferred to the Department of Defense in 2004. Since that time the X-37 has become a classified program, raising questions as to whether or not it would become the first operational military space plane. During the 1960s, the Air Force and Boeing conducted research on the X-20 Dyna-Soar space plane. After initial development, much of it with then test pilot Neil Armstrong, the Dyna-Soar was canceled in 1963.
A vehicle such as the X-37 could be a valuable platform for intelligence gathering with the advantage of a satellite’s point of view, but the flexibility of an aircraft that can be launched relatively quickly and maneuvered in orbit much easier than a traditional satellite.
With the lack of specificity expected from a classified program, and without a translator, the Air Force described the X-37B program as “a flexible space test platform to conduct various experiments and allow satellite sensors, subsystems, components and associated technology to be efficiently transported to and from the space environment. This service directly supports the Defense Department’s technology risk-reduction efforts for new satellite systems. By providing an ‘on-orbit laboratory’ test environment, it will prove new technology and components before those technologies are committed to operational satellite programs.”
Once the current mission is over, the miniature unmanned space shuttle will be inspected to determine if it is a truly reusable vehicle. A new generation of protective tiles, similar to those that plagued early shuttle flights will be examined as well as the autonomous flight control systems that pilot the space craft. The other key component to the program, the overall time needed to prepare the X-37 for another flight, will also be closely watched. The goal is to have it flight ready again in 15 days.
