The Blue Balls Machine

Although this graphic is keyed to how a woman's mind works, :) the real power of this mesmerizing piece from ytmind is the sheer complexity of how the blue balls move though the environment to complete the insane task at hand. When viewed in this context, Blue Balls (with it's really annoying yet appropriate sound track/Pee Wee's Big Adventure) illustrates, in indirect fashion, just how interconnected civilization truly is.

Day of Reckoning

A must read to see why we are in such trouble.

"During fiscal year 2009 the U.S. Treasury is on-track to pay over $500 billion just in interest payments to finance the already-existing debt. New debt this year will likely exceed a trillion dollars. The total debt burden on the economy as a whole could reach $70 trillion by 2010, with annual interest payments for individuals, households, businesses, and all levels of government likely to reach $3 trillion out of a $14 trillion GDP that is now in sharp decline.

Financing the deficit continues to depend on whether China will still purchase Treasury bonds. This is why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said frankly during last week’s trip to China:
“We are relying on the Chinese government to continue to buy our debt.”

But neither President Obama, nor his Democratic supporters or Republican antagonists, should feel badly about what is happening. This is because the system they have been given to work with was designed to fail. The U.S. was saddled long ago with a debt-based monetary system, whereby the only way money can be introduced into circulation is through bank lending. It was the system that was instituted in 1913 when Congress gave away its constitutional power over money creation to the private banking industry by passing the Federal Reserve Act.

It was then that the catastrophe we are now facing became inevitable. It took nearly a century to get here but it finally happened. "

Click here to read about Richard C. Cook, the author of this rather interesting piece.

CEPR

Just found a terrific resource dealing with economics, government and the impact of same on people all over the world. CEPR's advisory board, populated with heavyweights like "Nobel Laureate economists Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz; Janet Gornick, Professor at the CUNY Graduate School and Director of the Luxembourg Income Study; Richard Freeman, Professor of Economics at Harvard University; and Eileen Appelbaum, Professor and Director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University." insures that the information contained within the site is timely, accurate and relevant to the uncertain times in which we live. Not a bad find as I went trolling through the web in search of something to write about. :)

Enjoy

The New Wall Street

Any Questions?

Wordsmith

Every once in a while, great research issues forth changing how man views reality and this particular finding is one of those transformative events as seen in the Physorg article titled Scientists Model Words as Entangled Quantum States in our Minds.

To whit..."Research has shown that words are stored in our memories not as isolated entities but as part of a network of related words. This explains why seeing or hearing a word activates words related to it through prior experiences. In trying to understand these connections, scientists visualize a map of links among words called the mental lexicon that shows how words in a vocabulary are interconnected through other words.

However, it’s not clear just how this word association network works. For instance, does word association spread like a wave through a fixed network, weakening with conceptual distance, as suggested by the “Spreading Activation” model? Or does a word activate every other associated word simultaneously, as suggested in a model called “Spooky Activation at a Distance”?

Although these two explanations appear to be mutually exclusive, a recent study reveals a connection between the explanations by making one novel assumption: that words can become entangled in the human mental lexicon."

All of my life, I have wondered how we connect words together to generate meaning but never knew how this mysterious process could occur. This connectivity issue becomes even more mysterious in composing music as the thought process involved radically differs from word smithing even though bringing this construct into reality follows the same entanglement process as per the word model the researchers have created in attempting to better understand the brain's astonishing ability to generate meaning out of entities, that on the surface, should be discrete and not subject to entanglement.

Now that we have tools able to tease out elements of the quantum, the integration of same into research of all kinds is changing everything we know about existence, something very cool to see in the eyes of this writer.

Faces

The New Scientist take on faces gives one pause...

"First impressions are highly influential, despite the well-worn admonition not to judge a book by its cover. Within a tenth of a second of seeing an unfamiliar face we have already made a judgement about its owner's character - caring, trustworthy, aggressive, extrovert, competent and so on (Psychological Science, vol 17, p 592). Once that snap judgement has formed, it is surprisingly hard to budge. What's more, different people come to strikingly similar conclusions about a particular face - as shown in our own experiment (see "The New Scientist face experiment").

People also act on these snap judgements. Politicians with competent-looking faces have a greater chance of being elected, and CEOs who look dominant are more likely to run a profitable company."

To give credence to this analysis, I give you Warren G. Harding, a good looking predecessor to "W".

"Behind the facade, not all of Harding's Administration was so impressive. Word began to reach the President that some of his friends were using their official positions for their own enrichment. Alarmed, he complained, "My...friends...they're the ones that keep me walking the floors nights!"

"Although a commanding and powerful speaker, Harding was notorious for his verbal gaffes, such as his comment "I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved."^[21]

Sound Familiar?

Mission Statement, Better Late Then Never. :)

There's never been a BRT mission statement. The blog just "grew" as a random walk in a digital age, musings about the impact of tech and science on reality without a care in the world but this viewpoint is changing, changing because the writers of BRT sense it's time for a call to action, a need to question the status quo and an imperative to take control of our destiny instead of leaving it to the dictates of uninformed political leaders and unenlightened financial and business types who endlessly take with little regard for the public good.

In the weeks and months ahead, upcoming posts will focus on developing possible solutions to societal problems gleaned, in part, from the hundreds of articles posted on the BRT site as we feel our generalistic approach to understanding how civilization works from the tech perspective has merit and should be leveraged in proposing different approaches to conditions that should not continue if we are to be responsible stewards to planet earth.

We want input from you, the reader, to tell us what you think we should do as we move deeper into the 21st century.

Best,

Robert E.

Graveyard

Self important to the extreme, Charles DeGaulle actually had one truly great quote. "The graveyards are filled with indispensable men." something Frank Rich eloquently paraphrased in his excellent op-ed piece titled Slumdogs Unite!, a cautionary tale about the rising anger of America regarding bailouts to the rich and connected sleazeballs who perpetrated the economic disaster our country is now facing. .."Obama’s brilliant appointees, we keep being told, are irreplaceable. But as de Gaulle said, “The cemeteries of the world arefull of indispensable men.” You have to wonder if this team is really a meritocracy or merely a stacked deck."

The irony of all of this is the fact some of the players who gamed the system are now considered to be part of the solution, something that doesn't auger well as we move out of the aughts of the 21st century.

Here's the NY Times take on the myth of the IM.

Adding fuel to the fire, here's another blurb on the O Man team.

"Only weeks ago, the political world was buzzing about a "team of rivals." America was told that finally, after years of yes men running the government, we were getting a president who would follow Abraham Lincoln’s lead, fill his administration with varying viewpoints, and glean empirically sound policy from the clash of ideas. Little did we know that "team of rivals" was what George Orwell calls "newspeak": an empty slogan "claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.

Obama's national security team, for instance, includes not a single Iraq war opponent. The president has not only retained George W. Bush's defense secretary, Robert Gates, but also 150 other Bush Pentagon appointees. The only "rivalry" is between those who back increasing the already bloated defense budget by an absurd amount and those who aim to boost it by a ludicrous amount.

Of course, that lockstep uniformity pales in comparison to the White House's economic team -- a squad of corporate lackeys disguised as public servants.

At the top is Lawrence Summers, the director of Obama's National Economic Council. As Bill Clinton's treasury secretary in the late 1990s, Summers worked with his deputy, Tim Geithner (now Obama's treasury secretary), and Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel (now Obama's chief of staff) to champion job-killing trade deals and deregulation that Obama Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg helped shepherd through Congress as a Republican senator. Now, this pinstriped band of brothers is proposing a "cash for trash" scheme that would force the public to guarantee the financial industry's bad loans. It's another ploy "to hand taxpayer dollars to the banks through a variety of complex mechanisms," says economist Dean Baker -- and noticeably absent is anything even resembling a "rival" voice inside the White House.

That's not an oversight. From former federal officials like Robert Reich and Brooksley Born, to Nobel Prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, to business leaders like Leo Hindery, there's no shortage of qualified experts who have challenged market fundamentalism. But they have been barred from an administration focused on ideological purity.

The Confidence Man cometh.

Jamuse & Museworx

Remember the words Jamuse & Museworx if you need to 1; send and receive large files and 2, get access to creative talent for solving difficult design and communication problems. It's the most innovative pair of sites I've seen for doing things like this. Tres cool to the max & yes, they are the complete package for design types of all persuasions.

Color Sense

"What colour most improves brain performance and receptivity to advertising, red or blue?

It turns out they both can, it just depends on the nature of the task or message. The study, which could have major implications for advertising and interior design, finds that red is the most effective at enhancing our attention to detail, while blue is best at boosting our ability to think creatively.

"Previous research linked blue and red to enhanced cognitive performance, but disagreed on which provides the greatest boost," says Juliet Zhu of UBC's Sauder School of Business, author of the study which will appear in the Feb. 5 issue of Science. 'It really depends on the nature of the task.' "

When you look at this amazing research, one starts to realize that perhaps bills presented to Congress should be color keyed in order to facilitate cognitive and creative thinking on the part of our "wonderful" elected leaders who seem to have lost the ability to understand anything more complex than the crucial issue of getting reelected rather than dealing with the most important issues this country has ever faced since the founding of our nation.

Addendum,: The NY Times has a followup on this very important finding. Click Reinvent Wheel? Blue Room... to see why.

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them. - Einstein