A general interest blog for weirdos, established in 2000.
Pinning down the informal economy is as tough as catching a fake Louis Vuitton vendor running from the police. But it’s huge in the United States – larger than the official output of all but the upper crust of nations across the globe. And, due to the recent recession, it’s growing.Whether that’s...
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I’ve just found a remarkable 1963 study [pdf] from the Archives of Opthalmology in which 24 blind participants took LSD to see if they could experience visual hallucinations.It turns out, they can, although this seems largely to be the case in blind people who had several years of sight to ...
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Recently, one or more of the University of East Anglia’s servers were hacked and a large number of private e-mails exchanges between researchers at Climate Research University were made public.NASA climate scientist Gavin A. Schmidt writes on his non-NASA endorsed blog:No doubt, instances o...
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The poll asked this question: “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the Presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” The overall top-line is legitimately won 62%, ACORN stole it 26%.Among Republicans, however, only 27% say Obama actually wo...
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More Images (via Disinfo) Related posts:Plan 9 From Outer SpaceCommunist Mutants From SpaceHajime Sorayama: extraordinary erotic artist profiled
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Serge Gainsbourg - animation des graffitis sur 5 ans du mur rue de Verneuil from Arnaud Jourdain on Vimeo. (via Nice Produce via Pink Tentacle)) Related posts:Mind blowing, trippy graffiti animationSound and video art from IkiprSamparkour
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Pretty good web comic. Virus Comics: not an insult (via Autumn) Related posts:Oddball comic of the dayWeird online comic‘Extraordinary Gentleman’ on big screen can’t compete with original comic series
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A study by researchers at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London has found that depression is as much of a risk factor for mortality as smoking.Utilising a unique link between a survey of over 60,000 people and a comprehensive mortal...
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It’s a play… no it’s a reading… no it’s… hard to tell. But on November 22, from noon to 6 pm, the New Museum in NYC is doing some sort of cool six hour Neuromancer thing that they describe thusly:“An ambitious new work by Brody Condon, Case is a contempo...
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The global recession isn’t just making jobs scarce and tightening spending — it’s also turning more people into thieves. According to an annual survey released on Tuesday, incidents of shoplifting rose nearly 6% over the past year, representing nearly $115 billion in losses for busine...
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Somalia’s mobile phone business is booming despite the almost daily artillery fire that flies over expensive satellite dishes and the violence that has brought misery to the population of the Horn of Africa nation.The three largest firms, Hormuud Telecom, Nation Link and Telecom Somalia, ha...
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Robin Hanson, quite the contrarian himself, offers contrarians some advice:On average, contrarian views are less accurate than standard views. Honest contrarians should admit this, that neutral outsiders should assign most contrarian views a lower probability than standard views, though perhaps ...
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John Stuart Reid proposes that sound is not actually a wave, as has been thought for centuries, but a “bubble” and that this is what creates the amazing patterns we see captured with cymatics.In his article, The Physics of Sound, Reid says that sound has previously been thought to travel as a wav...
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The hacker/performance art/activist organization Electronic Disturbance Theater has invented a new device, the Transborder Immigrant Tool:We looked at the Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and cre...
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The New York Times has an interesting interactive infographic that let’s you select your race, gender, age, and level of education and see the jobless rate for your category.For college educated white men between 25 and 44 (like me), the jobless rate is only 3.9%. College educated black men...
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We were all quite impressed when the RepRap printer managed to reproduce itself some months ago. But in fact the reproduction was only of its structural members, whereas the metal bits and electronics were not actually reproduced. No worries, it will eventually happen. [...]Xerox has invented a n...
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Brazilian Federal Police swooped in on 39 suspects in six states in the largest crackdown to date on a growing problem here: illegal hijacking of U.S. military satellite transponders. [...]To use the satellite, pirates typically take an ordinary ham radio transmitter, which operates in the 144- t...
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What are some of your favorite blogs? Related posts:My 5 favorite blogs, right nowBest comic book blogs?Technoccult reader’s favorite books
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In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circui...
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What has EsoZone meant to you? Have you met a partner or collaborator at EsoZone? What sorts of art and/or projects have you completed as a result in your participation (or lack thereof) in EsoZone? Has it changed your life in any way?I’ll go first: [...]Read more at esozone.com Related posts...
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Information is Beautiful examines several claims made by 2012 believers and finds their claims lacking.Information is Beautiful: 2012: The End Of The World? Related posts:Michael Crook Retracts False DMCA ClaimsUK psychics, mediums and magic workers may have to prove their claims1971 photo pr...
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Mary Dery writes:Pinchbeck, like New Age thinkers all the way back to Madame Blavatsky, preaches a refried gospel of ancient wisdom and mystical, supra-rational knowledge. In 2007, he told The New York Times that “the rational, empirical worldview…has reached its expiration date…we’re...
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There is a major national ad campaign, funded by the oil industry and other usual suspects, to convince the public that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and slow global warming will result in massive job loss. This ad campaign warns of slower growth and the loss of hundreds of th...
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Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to ...
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Innocent people have been branded as child abusers after malware infected their PCs, an AP investigation has discovered.Technically sophisticated abusers sometimes store images of child abuse on PCs infected by Trojans that grant them illicit access to compromised machines.The plight of those fra...
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Living with pain is stressful, but a surprisingly short investment of time in mental training can help you cope.A new study examining the perception of pain and the effects of various mental training techniques has found that relatively short and simple mindfulness meditation training can have a ...
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