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"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
- Winston Churchill

"I need something to constipate my mouth."
- Nadya Suleman (a.k.a. "Octomom")

This guy creates 100 fictional artists, all with different styles and ideas, and then creates their work for them. Funny stuff. One of my favorites was the collective Sober Dovermans, whose practice is, "spreading pragmatism one person at a time." Heh, their famous work involved putting warning flags on every barb of a barbed wire fence. Brilliant.

jocund - marked by or suggestive of high spirits and lively mirthfulness

Why can't everyone be jocund?

Anthony Atala is not only growing new organs, he's printing them; sometimes even directly on the patient. Although still heavily under clinical study, he's already successfully implanted an "artificial" bladder; and that was 10 years ago.

The Universe is alive, and has been comunicating with its' sound for eons.

After the U.S. lost 8.36 million jobs over a two year period from December of 2007 through December of 2009, our economy has recovered 1.12 million jobs as a result of the Federal Reserve and U.S. government spending $4.6 trillion on bailouts and stimulus programs. That is over $4 million spent for each job created. Instead of bailing out Wall Street and allowing non-productive bankers to receive record bonuses, the U.S. could have sent a check for $550,000 to each middle-class American who lost their job.
- National Inflation Association (NIA)

"Aaaaaagggh! I'm gonna Grape you in the mouth!"

Classic!

This guy is a pretty clever salesman. Although, with this product, who can't you sell to?

In 1995, Raul Cano, a 63-year-old microbiologist at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, discovered a fossil containing a variant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, known in culinary circles as baker's or brewer's yeast. The microorganisms had lain dormant since the Eocene epoch, a time when Australia split off from Antarctica and modern mammals first appeared.

Cano was able to take this ancient yeast and "re-awaken" it from it's dormant state. He then used the yeast to make a good old fashion ale: Fossil Fuels ale.

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"In an infinite fractal of rotation, how do you define the center? Every point is the center. You are the center of the universe observing the universe from your very own center. Wherever you pick a point of observation in the fractal, that point becomes the center from which you're observing the universe. That point becomes stillness. Why stillness? Because in that point now, all the spins of the universe cancel out.… You need stillness to have a frame of reference for rotation… And that's how singularity occurs. Singularity is the point at the center of your experience of the universe, that is the point of stillness from which you're observing the universe."

-Nassim Haramein

"There is a physical place inside your heart that has a singularity. Your heart has a little cavity between the two ventricular, and that little cavity has the highest electromagnetic field of your body, and can be measured up to eight feet away from you; and that's the battery of life that keeps your heart going. When you die, that singularity is no longer present, and I think that is why there is a bunch of weight that goes missing when people die. The weight is the result of that singularity curving space-time, creating a gravitational effect that we call weight."

- Nassim Haramein

Rewards narrow the mind. They narrow your focus. This talk by Dan Pink goes over the class "candle problem" of psychology. It turns out that higher incentives lead to worse performance. So much for the "justification" for all those bonuses given out to the financial execs.

The inside story on transcending the brain, with David Lynch, Award-winning film director of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mullholland Drive, Inland Empire (filming); John Hagelin, Ph.D., Quantum physicist featured in "What the bleep do we know?;" and Fred Travis, Ph.D., Director, Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition Maharishi University of Management.


Credits: producers:UC Berkeley Educational Technology Services, speaker:David Lynch, speaker:John Hagelin, Ph.D., speaker:Fred Travis, Ph.D.

Microsoft is hosting the videos of a famous lecture series given by Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman back in 1964. The lectures, which will be hosted by Microsoft Research under the name Project Tuva, are lectures that the physicist gave just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics - along with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga - for cracking some pesky problems in quantum electrodynamics.

This lecture has been credited by some (and discredited by others) as being the stimulus that started people thinking about nanotechnology. You can read a transcript of that lecture here. There is apparently a video of a follow-on lecture that Feynman gave, called Infinitesimal Machinery.

Check the videos out here!

Due to the latest settlements with Internet royalty fees in Congress, pandora has restructured their Internet Radio station to only allow 40 hrs/mo. of free listening time. Granted you can listen for the rest of the month for a measly $1, or the even more reasonable $36/yr. subscription for their premium service, I'm still going to miss the days of endless playback without having to whip out my wallet. For the sake of Performing Artists everywhere, let's hope Congress pulls through with the new Performance Rights Act (H.R. 848)

Read more from the full story on their blog here.

Philip Zimbardo, the creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment, gives a talk about temptation, and what he calls the Lucifer Effect. The root of all evil, it turns out, is…wait for it…the abuse of power. Is it really possible to not abuse power?

Wow.

For some reason this reminded me of a quote by Aldous Huxley, "A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy."



And even more appropriate a quote by Blaise Pascal, "Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?"

A brilliant speech on how emotions shape our lives, and our world, and how to use immersion and the internal drive of emotion to shape and direct our paths to a state of ultimate fulfillment.

A series of doctors discuss the field of psychiatry, and how it functions. Delving into the American Psychiatric Association, and their voting process for what constitute "mental diseases" through the DSM(Diagnostic Statistical Manual) Committee, the doctors find that psychiatry is not science, but rather an elaborate prescription fueled guessing game.



And an intersting follow-up, an experiment done in 1972, by a psychologist named David Rosenhan, convinced some of his friends to fake their way into psychiatric wards across the US. This article talks about the experiment, and a repeated followup experiment with an interesting outcome. More videos from Rosenhan on the Birth of Modern Psychiatry here.