This is apparently the masterstroke of “a diverse group of approximately 100 individuals”. They go on to explain that they “come from various parts of our planet. Almost all of us are related to science — as researchers, engineers, artists, writers, benefactors, or graduate students.”. They are also definitely not xenophobic: “our welcome is extended to any manifestation of extraterrestrial intelligence or alien intelligence that has reached our planet. Regardless of your form, regardless of where in the universe you originated, regardless of when you arrived, regardless of how deeply different you are from us, we welcome you.” But they do understand that perhaps aliens need to be convinced that talking to us is a worthwhile project, so they list “some possible benefits for you, in case you have not already thought of all of them”. These are by and large the kind of loosely patronising concepts I’m sure well-meaning missionaries the world over are well versed in, and include such corkers as:

• Interacting with a few people in depth could help you gain a deeper understanding of human psychology, society, and relationships. As a community of people with some understanding of alien intelligence and contact, we might be useful in this venture. [Translation: I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves]
• You might enjoy the experience of interacting with humans and feeling bonded and connected with them. You might find this experience interesting, illuminating, even joyful. Two-way love and caring might transcend any differences between your form of intelligence and ours, just as they sometimes transcend enormous differences between individual humans. [Translation: If you see a link to an article about something called "World War II", please don't click on it]
• You could gain intellectual excitement and a sense of adventure as you experience the dialogue, watch our learning, and see how the interaction unfolds. Let’s experiment with contact and see where it goes! [Translation: Hey baby, nice antennae, want to grab a drink later? Maybe afterwards you can wrap your ovipositor around my... Dierdre? What are you doing here? This isn't what it looks like, I promis- ARGH! The beautiful insect queen is eating my face!]

They then encourage contact in whatever way is convenient, whether that be “email, fax, telephone, or a face-to-face conversation”. Let me tell you, if aliens arrive and contact us via fax, I will eat one of my arms. That would also raise some serious questions about how a species managed to master the art of intergalactic travel, but still relied on fax to exchange information. I imagine the rates on interstellar faxing are just brutal. They then attach for the alien’s perusal the mighty Flag of Earth. This is slightly less embarrassing than the Comic Sans:

But not by much. Anyway, you get the idea. All in all, I feel this is a stunning example of human ingenuity that would make any alien feel right at home. Then we could lure them in and steal their kidneys.

[via @ProfessorFunk]

/Luke

P.S. More alien banter over at the New Yorker. Watch those gravel reserves.

Sometimes I look about at the state of the world and it makes me long for the days of yore, simpler times all, where a man was a man, a woman was a woman and midgets were included in the food pyramid. Gone now are the days of easy utilitarianism, where the ends always justified the means because the ends were, frankly, kicking. Penicillin? Fuck yeah! Cecil George Paine just gave it to some babies and hoped for the best. And here we are, 80 years later, with the ability to cure syphilis. Thanks babies!

But none of that these days. No, these days we are mired by an excess of knowledge, a cynicism toward understanding and a seemingly endless parade of “ethical qualms”. And in few places has the magic of discovery been more actively suppressed than in the field of SCIENCE!!!!. The pursuit of scientific knowledge is one of mankind’s great strivings, one of the fundamental drives that separates us from the animals. Except, that is, when said scientific pursuit involves animals quite personally. I mean, I’m not entirely sure they always know what’s going on, but I like to think they appreciate the fact that it’s all for the greater good.

I have previously waxed lyrical about such endeavours in this rousing piece about the ongoing practice of feeding animals psychotropic substances, but today I’m striking a more nostalgic tone and looking fondly back at the glory days of mule experimentation. Well, one experiment in particular – the 1878 demonstration of the first ever instantaneous photograph. A development that, at first glance, might seem to have a pretty tangential relationship to your average household mule, but don’t forget, this was in the glory days of science. Days where a man was a man, a woman was a woman, and a mule was an integral part of new advances in the photographic sciences. From an 1881 issue of Scientific American:

“It became necessary, one day, at Willet’s Point, to destroy a worthless mule… The mule was placed in proper position before a photo camera and duly focused upon the animal’s forehead, a cotton bag was tied containing six ounces of dynamite.”

Now, “necessary” is a big call, but I think we can all be thankful that at least they stayed away from the prize mules for this demonstration of what exactly it looks like in the split second after a mule has had dynamite detonated in close proximity to its head. I’ll leave you to peruse the rest of the story/images over at Gizmodo Australia (You can probably lodge a reasonable guess as to the outcome. Gritty!), but nonetheless, I’m sure that I speak for everybody here when I declare “Thank you mighty mule! Your noble sacrifice shant be forgotten! Henceforth, every time we use our iPhones to take a photo of our naked torsos and send it to our local Members of Parliament, we shall remember that it was you who made it all possible!” Huzzah! Everybody with me?… Everybody?

Oh.

/Luke

Sometimes the simple things are the best.

To further illustrate this truism, here are Tony Shaloub and Sam Rockwell further illustrating this truism. At the 4:20 mark.

/Paul

(link via fuckyeahstartrek.tumblr.com)

Oh, hey there mouse, how you going? Me, I’m gre- HOLY SHIT YOU’RE FLYING. OH GOD. OH GOD. THE DAY HAS COME. THE GREAT MOUSE RECKONING IS HERE. QUICK, FEED THEM THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST. WE HAVE TO GET AWAYYYYYYYYYYY!

Was my first reaction to the news that scientists at NASA had succeeded in levitating a mouse using superconducting magnets. DON’T GIVE THEM THAT KIND OF POWER, YOU FOOLS! And yes, I’m quite aware that the experiment didn’t involve a mouse hooning around on a flying carpet made from Swiss cheese, but scientists, being scientists, occasionally don’t have the greatest knack for exciting photography. Witness the official pictures below:

I just don’t understand how you can make a mouse fly and then decide the best way of showing this to the world is via a top down shot. Bad NASA, bad! From the Reuters article:

“We first tried a fully conscious mouse and he didn’t like it very much, he started to spin and got disoriented,” Liu said.

“Mice like to grab onto something and so by just floating in the air it’s really different for (the mouse) to adjust to,” he said.

A second experiment was conducted with a mouse that had been partially sedated by a veterinarian, and that rodent calmed down considerably as he floated in the air.

“By just floating in the air it’s really different for the mouse to adjust to” strikes me as quite the understatement. I imagine most humans, even with a full understanding of what was about to happen to them might get “disoriented” when gravity ceased to function. Taking an animal with limited cognitive capacities and removing the Earth from underneath their feet is probably a one way trip to Freakout City. Population, Mouse. Although apparently they begin to adapt after four hours, so perhaps that gives us an insight into how long we’ll have when the mice finally do learn to fly of their own accord. Four hours. And then: revenge.

/Luke

P.S. You may think I’m overstating the threat, but I grew up on Tom and Jerry. I know what the little bastards are capable of.

So, you’ve bought your dream home. It’s huge. Like fucking huge. There’s bedrooms, master bedrooms, servant bedrooms, Presidential bedrooms and a dungeon. There’s decorative fountains, chandeliers and a super fun happy slide that goes all the way from the highest turret to the entrance hallway (oh yes, this dream house is also a fully fortified castle with moat and retractable drawbridge). There’s tennis courts, pools, badminton courts and a bungee platform. The house is, in short, pretty freaking rad. But still. Still, there is an emptiness inside your soul. A gaping hole that matches the gaping space in the corner of the living room. Every day you come into the living room to bask in the majesty of your life – and the blinding illumination of your Director’s Suite grade cinema screen – only to have your eyes drawn into the far corner, toward the one material good this earth has yet to provide you with: a fully formed and assembled T-Rex skeleton.

Does this sound like you? Yes? Then, boy howdy, do I have news for you, because this October at the Venetian casino in Las Vegas the third most complete T-Rex skeleton ever discovered is being auctioned off by auctioneers Bonhams & Butterfields. That’s right, an 83% complete T-Rex skeleton is being sold to whoever is willing to pay for it. A T-Rex. The thing is five metres high and around about 13 metres long and would be sure to make a fine addition to even the most humble of abodes. Personally, if I won, I’d turn him into a drinks cabinet. Because really, if we’re going to desecrate natural history, we may as well do it in style. Another whiskey from the top shelf i.e. the SKULL OF A FUCKING T-REX? Don’t mind if I do.

The expected price: $8-$10 million. That’s only $20 000 per regular reader of this blog! I mean, it could be a little tough to work out who gets him on any given day of the year (I bags Christmas), but on the other hand it would mean you’d have a time share in a T-Rex. So, who’s with me?

This is an artist’s impression of how awesome your life would be if we won this auction:

Rarrr!

Although, the auctioneers mention, in an off-hand manner, that at the same auction they’re also selling a three metre by three metre tooth-filled jaw thought to have come from a shark that may have been just under 30 metres long, as well as a four metre tall wooly mammoth. So, you know, there are options.

Still. A goddamn T-Rex.

/Luke

[via Wired]

I love, almost beyond my ability to describe it, the fact that there is an entire sub-genre of scientific endeavour devoted to feeding various animals psychotropic substances. Basically there is a group of scientists whose day to day job essentially involves them picking an animal and then deciding how they want to make it party. Bees on cocaine? It’s been done!

To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain.

The scientists found that bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.

Apparently when bees discover an exciting new food source they return to the nest and perform “a waggle dance” to let everyone know how awesome this new batch of pollen is. However, when coked off their tits on freebase, the bees “danced more frequently and more vigorously for the same quality food”. It may just be me, but goddamn that evokes a pretty amazing mental image. Bee discotech mother fuckers!

Another killer experiment of late has been research that suggests feeding mice copious amounts of red wine – or rather resveratrol, a constituent ingredient – actually increases their fitness and longevity:

The new research helps confirm and extend the possible benefits of the substance, resveratrol, and offers new insight into how it works — apparently by revving up the metabolism to make muscles burn more energy and work more efficiently. Mice fed large doses could run twice as far as they would normally.

But before you start mainlining the cask wine straight into your veins, the article goes on to state that in order for humans to get a similar effect they would have to “drink hundreds of glasses of wine a day”. So let that be a warning to you: if Fievel Mousekewitz ever challenges you to a drinking contest, just say no. Instead, hit him with a tennis racquet. Ain’t no amount of red wine that’s going to insulate you from that, mouse. That’s what you get for being small (Cf. Noah Baumbach in the New Yorker. Terrifying)

But, of course, this all just hails back to those experiments of the early 60s when a group of enterprising scientists decided to see what would happen to a spider’s ability to weave its web if they fed it various psychoactive substances. You can see some of the results here, but I think this video from 1960 explains it pretty well:

Makes sense.

So… anybody else kinda want to get some coke and party with the bees?

/Luke

I’ve always contended that robots were pretty much the single most disappointing thing about growing up. When you were a kid robots were Transformers, giant mechanised beings capable of both changing into a variety of vehicles and beating the living piss out of one another. And then you grew up and you realised that robotic conflict in the modern world essentially consisted of two glorified shoeboxes with buzzsaws attached being pushed into one another by fat, dateless men wielding remote controls whilst an increasingly desperate looking, post-Red Dwarf Lister commentated from the sidelines. Thank you Robot Wars.

Fortunately the Japanese seem to be one of the few remaining forces trying to make our childhood fantasies a reality.¹ In this case: domestic robots, designed to fulfil our every slothful desire! So yes, we’re not exactly talking Evangelion-grade city destroyers here, but that dude up the top does look a little bit like a Gundam outtake (coming up next: At Home with the Gundams!) so perhaps it’s a step in the right direction. This guy, rather unimaginatively named Kitchen Robot, can both pour you a cup of tea AND wash the cup afterwards. And then defend your home from rampaging cyborgs. I may have made the last bit up. Also included on “>this list are a robot that can flip pancakes, a robot that can essentially lift you out of bed in the morning and a robot that can serve drinks (I’m noticing a theme here…) as well as open doors. As you can see, the violent robot uprising is just around the corner.

Although any talk of robot violence is always a good opportunity to bring up one of my favourite Wikipedia pages: deaths caused by industrial robots. There’s only been two to date, but the more notable/exciting was the 1981 death of Japan’s (natch) Kenji Urada, who forgot to turn off a robot while performing ‘routine maintenance’ on it, which was all the opportunity the robot needed to push him into a grinding machine. Hell of a way to go. With history like that behind them, it’s amazing that the Japanese are still so embracing of robotics really.

/Luke

¹ I’m so glad that over the last 100 odd years the Japanese have gone from being an aggressive, warlike society trying to forcibly dismantle the Pacific Rim, to becoming a peace-loving country of ultra-polite introverts whose main goal in life appears to be the creation of novelty products for the rest of the world to laugh at. How times change.

Ever heard of a ‘smile check policy‘? Yeah, me neither. I once had to get my retina scanned to get into a public restroom, but the employees at Keihin Electric Express Railway in Japan actually have to smile. And no, I don’t mean they’re encouraged to, they fucking HAVE to. Facial recognition software is used to determine whether employees are entering work every morning happy enough to work soldering inanimate panels of metal and plastic, or banging away at their computers. So how does this enforced fun monster work?

The device analyzes the facial characteristics of a person, including eye movements, lip curves and wrinkles, and rates a smile on a scale between 0 and 100 percent using a camera and computer.

For those with low scores, advice like “You still look too serious,” or “Lift up your mouth corners,” will be displayed on the screen.

Some 530 employees of the Tokyo-based railway company will check their smiles with Smile Scan before starting work each day. They will print out and carry around an image of their best smile in an attempt to remember it.

I don’t know about you guys, but nothing makes me smile more than being scanned first thing in the morning by a humorless corporate fucknuckle in a booth, then carrying around a reminder of my horrible morning ordeal on a lanyard. WHEEEE!

/Paul

(Link via Geekoligie)

When I was five, way back when in the heady computing days of 1990, my father dazzled the family by bringing home our first PC – a large, grey, boxy 286 Amstrad with a DOS prompt, a 5 1/4 inch disk drive and a black and green word processor. And I loved it. Yes, even then above par wordiness, asthma and a tendency toward pudginess was gearing me up for a school career as a computer nerd par excellence. But the Amstrad was also notable for introducing me to video games, and in 1990 none captivated me more than Taito’s mighty Arkanoid, a kind of one man Pong that had you bouncing a steadily accelerating ball into a series of coloured bricks in an effort to make all the bricks explode before you dropped the ball. All in stunning 16 colour EGA. I like to think I got quite good at the game, but, truth be told, the trajectories along which you could send the ball worked on a grand total of six angles, meaning that strategy and skill in the game tended to be supplanted by panic and an ability to swing the ship back and forth along the bottom reallllllly fast. The game was also notable for its pretence at plot, which was delivered in one breathless, fully capitalised sentence:

“THE TIME AND ERA OF THIS STORY IS UNKNOWN. AFTER THE MOTHERSHIP “ARKANOID” WAS DESTROYED, A SPACECRAFT “VAUS” SCRAMBLED AWAY FROM IT. BUT ONLY TO BE TRAPPED IN SPACE WARPED BY SOMEONE……..”

WHO COULD IT BE? As you discover, the SOMEONE turns out to be a giant Easter Island head named ‘Doh’. Pre-Simpsons. Amazing.

Then you think: that was less than two decades ago. And it was massive. And while maybe it wasn’t the height of technology, it kicked the shit out of Hungry Hungry Hippos. But most of all, it felt cutting edge. I mean how could anything get better than smashing bricks with a loosely controlled ball in 16 colours?

And, well, here we are:

The game is called The Last Guardian and it revolves around the friendship between a boy and a giant wolf/eagle hybrid named Trico as they kill people and solve puzzles in a crumbling ancient city. And, more impressively, everything in that preview was created using the in-game engine. Jesus.

I mean, fuck, it’s for the PS3, which I don’t have, and truth be told am unlikely to get, but that video almost made me cry off its own bat. And as Penny Arcade points out, the game is obviously going to end with the death of either the boy or the giant wolf/eagle hybrid, so, you know, brace yourself for emotional manipulation. Like the time I made it to the penultimate level of Arkanoid with three lives remaining, only to have them destroyed in quick succession by a sequence of glitchy bounces and random clutter dropping through the ceiling. Taito you bastards! Man, I was inconsolable for hours. It was also 2002 and I was 17… and I pretty much let it go after that.

I wonder if you can still get Arkanoid online…

/Luke

P.S. It’s good to be back. I promise it shant be so long next time.

In gaming news, the World of Warcraft mount system has been significantly overhauled. Or at least it will be, in patch 3.2, the same patch which will usher in the awesome new Tauren bear/cat forms, and the horrendously gay bedazzled Night Elf bear/cat forms. Sideburns and eyeliner ftw!

Below are some of the changes involved. Prepare to get a wee bit annoyed.

* Regular land mounts trainable at level 20 (was 30)
* Epic land mounts trainable at level 40 (was 60)
* Regular flying mounts trainable at level 60 (was 70)
* Regular flying mounts speed increased to a 150% gain (was 60%)

The costs for all the training and mount purchases has been decreased outright, with the exception of the artisan riding skill (epic flying mounts). For all mount costs, faction discounts now apply.

What the release doesn’t mention is that they’re also allowing three minute hearthstone timers, and with patch 3.3, they’ll mail you your first mount for free at level ten, along with removing Outland altogether.

Sarcasm off.

What baffles me is this: who was crying about this to such a degree that Blizzard actually did something about it? Is there a large faction of players who find the act of reading quests, following the plot (even loosely) and interracting with the game enviromnent so tedious that they WANT to get to the end and have nothing more to do QUICKER? It took Blizzard about four years to fix the druid forms, and even then, you can tell it was something of a quick fix effort. Who are the crybabies that made this happen? WHO? If this is because Blizzard is actually a private girls school from the fifties and the CEO’s daughter “wanted a pony”, I’ll throw up. On her.

/Paul