Category Archives: Amazing Things

The Live Streaming Supersonic Freefall From Space

by Cimaxion

Red Bull is a drink company that I always associate with a general low-brow, trailer trash sort of existence. Chances are if you are drinking Red Bull you are an abject fool in a tank top. Maybe you’ve got a tattoo right at the top part of your ass. You’re just a lumbering primate who thinks they need some extra energy. Okay? Deal with it.

But this former Air Force parachutist is preparing to jump out of a balloon capsule from 23 miles up wearing a pressurized suit that will allow him to survive a supersonic fall from the edge of space. That’s pretty interesting because you just have to wonder if he will make it in one piece. Can a person re-enter earth’s atmosphere from space? I’m sure one can. I enjoy this little advertising film for the live stream of the jump. Hopefully, the stream will actually show us something in the next few days since inclement weather has so far delayed the jumper, Felix Baumgartner.

The live stream of the Stratos jump will be here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zDxLl-qDy1A#!

First Video Images Ever Reconstructed From the Human Brain

by Cimaxion

UC Berkeley scientists have recorded the first images ever generated by a human brain. Amazing. They exposed subjects to video images while recording visual activity in their brains. When they played the recorded data back they got images corresponding closely to what the subjects had just seen. What I notice about the images in the video is that faces seem to work the best. That is interesting on many levels. Perhaps facial recognition is so hard-wired into humans that we are able to generate those images more clearly than all others.  This work opens the door to the ability to reconstruct imagery from dreams and memories. It’s a staggering achievement.  Magnificent.  I simply cannot wait to try this sometime.

Thank you to Rob Smart on Facebook.

 

Write Like a Pretentious Artist! The Arty Bollocks Generator!

by Cimaxion

German film director, Werner Herzog.

If you simply must hang your work in a gallery, then here is the tool you’ll need to make just the right impression on your viewing public: The Arty Bollocks Generator.

It’ll flawlessly create your entire artist’s statement for any truly serious and irreproachably artistic endeavor.

Some samples:  ‘My work explores the relationship between the tyranny of ageing and skateboard ethics.’

‘As shifting phenomena become frozen through emergent and personal practice, the viewer is left with a statement of the limits of our world.’

Please be serious, donate to a charity, write a manifesto, and for god’s sake go to a gallery for some bloody education!  Then take yourself to see a fine German movie… film, I meant ‘film.’  Okay?

Now get going.

And for further sublime examples of pretentious statement-making, try Werner Herzog’s film school!

The House in the Middle – Possibly the Most Insane Film Ever

by Cimaxion

The U.S. government wants you to keep your house tidy and clean. If you don’t, it’ll get blown up and burned to a cinder by an atomic bomb blast. Seriously. This is the entire message of this ridiculous 1954 U.S. government educational film about the effects of a nuclear blast. It seems obvious to me that if you were working for the U.S. government in the fifties you were just a drooling simpleton. This film actually goes from mind-boggling insanity to postmodern masterpiece if you squint at it in the right way. It represents nearly everything you need to know about the 20th century in America.

Egypt Celebrates First Victory in Revolution

by Cimaxion

Egypt has begun to put out its garbage. It’s an amazing achievement for Egyptians that I have witnessed via the news video and photos coming from Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Congratulations to all the Egyptians who wanted to be free. They forced a raping, murdering, totalitarian criminal to resign his dictatorial position. The dictator Mubarak was and is an ongoing embarrassment and deep shame to the entire Middle East and to the United States that insisted on giving him respect and credibility even while he committed murder and oppressed a great civilization. Egyptians have made an incredible start to ridding themselves of the human garbage that was and is Mubarak. It remains to be seen if Egypt can become truly free and wrest control of the nation from its military.

Hopefully, the revolution in Egypt will spread to topple the rest of the governments in the Middle East which are nearly unanimous in their willingness to allow brutal thugs and criminal royal families to rule in bitter oppression. These savage despots straight out of the Dark Ages are specialists in murder, rape and complete suppression of all ideas and expression. They also have the absolute respect and support of governments like those in the U.S.

Beyond the Middle East and its ‘royal families,’ it would be astonishing and constructive to see the people of China put their own garbage out by removing their totalitarian government. Revolution is in the twenty-first century air. No one is immune.

NASA Discovers Entirely New Life Form

by Cimaxion

NASA is preparing to announce today that it has discovered an entirely new form of life that is built on a different basis from any life form every known.

In other words, life does not have to be made up of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.  The new life form discovered by the space agency is built upon arsenic.

Essentially, NASA has discovered an alien life form.

This changes the entire basis of the search for life on other planets.  It changes the whole story.  Life can apparently build itself out of things we thought made life impossible.

There’s a 2:00 pm EST news conference scheduled at NASA to formally announce the world-changing discovery.

Here’s NASA’s announcement of the finding.

This is NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon who leads the team that made this discovery.