Connectome

This mind blowing image depicts, in very small part, the shape of neural pathways in the brain, a visualization made possible using state-of-the are neural imaging techniques that did not exist prior to 2008, something to consider as we move further into the 21st century.

"Navigate the brain in a way that was never before possible; fly through major brain pathways, compare essential circuits, zoom into a region to explore the cells that comprise it, and the functions that depend on it.


The Human Connectome Project aims to provide an unparalleled compilation of neural data, an interface to graphically navigate this data and the opportunity to achieve never before realized conclusions about the living human brain."

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."  - Aldus Huxley

The 700 Club

700 articles, who would of "thunk" it when BRT started out almost four years ago as an attempt to intelligently discuss the impact of science and technology on civilization but here we are, still attracted to the subject matter as strongly as a moth to light on a warm summer night, a benign curse we willingly accept without reservation as we enter yet another new year filled with the same promise and uncertainty as all others, conditions never changing yet always changing, driven by the quantum, the law of initial conditions and the 2nd law of thermodynamics, principles discovered by researchers trying to better understand the vagaries of a most mysterious reality in which we all live.

In looking back, here are some of the things we've learned.

• Everything is connected. Reality consists of the transfer of information using the laws of thermodynamics to make it happen.
• Tech has no morality but we already knew that.
• Man is touching the very fabric of reality using tools that did not exist one year ago.
• As Kevin Kelly says, tech has been around forever and ... the web enables tech to evolve faster.
• We live in a fractal space; from tree branching and heart beats to galaxies in the multiverse, the hidden dimension of fractals rule.
• Nature abhors gradients.
• Transparency is key to having a free society that works. As proof, see how the web works, a chaotic system totally reliant on transparency for without it, the construct would fail without question.
• The Internet is the last bastion of freedom we have.
• Religion and nationalism are not great. Read Dawkins and Hitchens to learn why. 
• Connecting the dots is the right way to learn.
• Question everything for without it, one never learns anything.
• What we don't know dwarfs what we do. Just walk on the shore and look out at the ocean to see why.
• Following one's instinct, especially if fleeting, is an essential part of survival.
• Fear is a good thing when put in proper perspective.
• Creativity is everywhere, never to be restricted to the arts, something one learns if one has an open mind to it all.
• Never quit. It sounds trite but no advancement on any front is ever easy, Just ask the Einsteins of the world to see why.
• Questioning is hard, acceptance is easy.
• We live in a world of great invisibility as everything we interact with has a past unable to be seen.
• The future cannot be predicted due to chaos, quantum and the law of initial conditions.
• Because of the above, sh*t happens, always. 
• Energy drives reality as without it, everything stops.
• The multiverse lives. (thank you Hugh Everett)
• We all live in Pottersville, for now, a situation needing to be changed if America is to survive.
• There is no free lunch - ever.
• Creativity is the art of play.
• Research, in significant parts, is the art of farting around. 
• The discipline shapes the creative act, instinct, compulsion and the ability to connect seemingly dissimilar concepts in playful fashion makes it happen.
• Walking is the art of controlled falling.
• Reality is mostly dark.
• Life is the great exception to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
• Great ideas occur simultaneously based on individual output. 
• Writing is hard but so is any significant endeavor requiring skill, intelligence and perseverance,
• The US does not encourage excellence, something needing to be changed if we are to survive as a viable nation in the 21st century.
• The political, corporate and financial systems in the US are broken but fixable. The question is, are we up to the task to do the fixing.
• Health beats money any day,
• Humor is key to life as are family & friends. Without these essentials, we have nothing.
• Happy New Year, see you in 2011. :)

TIA Lives On...

Total Information Awareness lives on in the guise of Home Land Security with aid from the CIA, NSA, FBI and local police forces, a fact well documented in an extended series of articles from the Washington Post titled Top Secret America.

Here is just a snippet from the lead story detailing how surveillance has been expanded into an art form courtesy 9/11.

"This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described an Alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.

Today's story, along with related material on The Post's Web site, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11."

Any questions? 

Happy Holidays

Fair & Balanced

False information drives me crazy. It matters not who provides the content, if it's factually wrong, it's rejected as much as possible, something all too many people in the world fail to do because questioning the veracity of anything (religion anyone?) takes far more effort then accepting, a fact the news media takes advantage of when presenting the "news" to us 24/7. Here are some commonly accepted inaccuracies you might find rather interesting.

"In most cases those who had greater levels of exposure to news sources had lower levels of misinformation. There were, however, a number of cases where greater exposure to a particular news source increased misinformation on some issues.


Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely), most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points), the economy is getting worse (26 points), most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points), the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points), their own income taxes have gone up (14 points), the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points), when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points) and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points). The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it--though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican.


There were cases with some other news sources as well. Daily consumers of MSNBC and public broadcasting (NPR and PBS) were higher (34 points and 25 points respectively) in believing that it was proven that the US Chamber of Commerce was spending money raised from foreign sources to support Republican candidates. Daily watchers of network TV news broadcasts were 12 points higher in believing that TARP was signed into law by President Obama, and 11 points higher in believing that most Republicans oppose TARP."

After reading this, it's no wonder why network news has become such a wasteland because, as predicted by the great film, Network, news is all about the money, not about accuracy, something rather scary as an unfettered press courageous enough to do significant reporting on all things political and corporate is historically considered to be the only viable mechanism able to maintain a democracy, a notion increasingly abandoned due to the fact six corporations control over 90% of the news media in the world today.

Addendum, even though BRT has shown this clip before, it is, IMHO, the best explanation as to what the real world is all about and the role network news plays in it.

"Falsehoods not only disagree with truths, but usually quarrel among themselves."

Daniel Webster

The Multiverse Lives :)

"In the most recent study on pre-Big Bang science posted at arXiv.org, a team of researchers from the UK, Canada, and the US, Stephen M. Feeney, et al, have revealed that they have discovered four statistically unlikely circular patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The researchers think that these marks could be “bruises” that our universe has incurred from being bumped four times by other universes. If they turn out to be correct, it would be the first evidence that universes other than ours do exist."

I've always thought it strange that because our universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old, a something prior to the big bang must have existed even though creating something out of nothing is a normal part of reality as seen through the lens of  quantum mechanics.

Seems the something prior, in this case, may the multiverse, an entity forever creating universes without the limits of time or space, a concept I find far more comforting then the constrained one universe theory we have clung to since the beginning of time.

I Sing the Body Electric - Part II

The web simply amazes me with what's happening in all things technical, scientific and creative. Now comes Google's Body Browser, a freebie that allows one to peruse the human body at length. Applications for this go on ad infinitum. (App only runs on Chrome, for now)

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."  - Richard P. Feynman 

Ode to Books on a Grand Scale

On the opposite side of Ode to Books is the Google resource. Any questions?
Addendum: The NGram Viewer allows one to culture track in ways akin to scientific research using natural language queries. How cool is that?

Habius Corpus or... Dude, Where's My Mortgage?

Alternet does it again. Dude, Where's my Mortgage shows how greed and tech combined to create a disaster in the making vis a vis ownership and property rights.

"There is an unbelievable scandal in the making that threatens to subvert our four-century-old method for guaranteeing a fundamental building block of the American republic—property ownership. The biggest reason why you probably haven’t heard much about it is that it involves one of the most generic and boring company names imaginable: Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., or MERS. It is a story of deception engineered at the highest level of power for short-term gain, and another epic failure of the private sector to uphold the laws and traditions of American society, even something as fundamental as property rights."

This issue of mortgage verification also applies to CC debt as the debt collection business is booming due to the impact the depression is having on the public's ability to keep up with CC payments. When viewed in this light, it's astonishing people don't understand the fact that if the CC company cannot produce the signed contract to the debtor, the CC company cannot force the debtor to pay, a concept never explained to them (obviously), especially when the CC company sells the account to a  3rd party debt collector (often at pennies on the dollar ) while writing off the debt the CC company knows will never be repaid.

Question: How does the MERS screwup apply to people who diligently pay on their mortgage (like me) for houses they may or may not own if the MERS situation is as bad as it sounds in the Alternet article. Food for thought don't you think?

Addendum: It's against the law for a creditor to threaten a debtor with the lowering of their credit score if they request/demand proof that the creditor has in their possession the signed note (or a complete record of legally verified documents, i.e. signed, showing who owns the document and where said document(s) reside) whether it be a mortgage, cc contract or any other document pertaining to a business agreement where money goes from one party to another.

America: Why R Your Peeps So Dum?

America: Why R Your Peeps So Dum?, written by Joe Bageant, says it all in depicting how incredibly ignorant the US public truly is and how it came to be.

"If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit."

But it gets better.

"As William Edwards Deming famously demonstrated, no system can understand itself, and why it does what it does, including the American social system. Not knowing shit about why your society does what it (does -ed) makes for a pretty nasty case of existential unease. So we create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us -- those elites who run the institutions -- very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us."

Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution's members. "Hey, they're a lump. Whaddya expect us to do?"

To add fuel to the fire, click the BRT blurb  Idiot America to laugh and cry at the same time while reading Charles Pierce's ironic take on just how stupid people can be in this country.

"Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America?


Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise. And it looked like the national media simply could not help itself but be swept along. This started me thinking and, when I read a clip in the New York Times about the Creation Museum, I pitched an idea to Mark Warren, my editor at Esquire, that said simply, “Dinosaurs with saddles.” What we determined the theme of the eventual piece—and of the book—would be was “The Consequences Of Believing Nonsense.”

Idiot America sound better if you ask me. 

Last but not least, check out George Carlin's classic The Owners of This Country rant to see how our willful ignorance enables the powers at be to screw us over in ways that defy the imagination.