Derren Brown's Blog, page 24
June 28, 2011
The Ledge, a movie guaranteed to cause controversy in the US
To all the liberal minded Brits who go about their day with nothing more than a rather infrequent "be a winner not a sinner" from a Christian with a megaphone outside Oxford St Tube, a story like the one told in the movie The Ledge might seem a little over dramatic. However the idea of "coming out as an atheist" to your family is downright scary to some and focusing your movie on the topic of free-thinking is a brave move for both actors and producers alike.
According to a recent gallup 2011 poll America is still a very religious society with over 92% saying "yes" to the question "Do you believe in God?". It's a regular topic of conversation on main stream news channels and has caused outrage even when used as a topic for jokes in mainstream entertainment.
Many stories have emerged of atheists being persecuted, mostly by the Evangelical groups inside institutions such as the Armed Forces, but there also instances where non-believers have received even harsher treatment when using legal methods to oppose religious practices, such as the case of Damon Fowler and Ellen Beth Wachs.
So the release of the film The Ledge will at least be a controversial one in the US – it's being heralded as the "Brokeback Mountain" for American atheists and could cause a wave of renewed interest in the movement.
The story focuses on the lives of two people from opposing ends of the spectrum, who become enrolled in a lethal game that neither God nor the police can stop. It stars Charlie Hunnam from Sons of Anarchy, Patrick Wilson, Liv Tyler and Terrence Howard.
June 27, 2011
Indian woman cuts off attackers head and parades it through village
A 35-year old woman decided to take the law into her own hands when a man came up to her while she was gathering grass for her cattle and tried to sexually assault her. In the end, the man learned the hard way that you never, ever attack a woman using a large blade in an isolated field.
The scene from a horror movie took lace in the village of Makkapurva, which is about 170 miles south east of the city of Lucknow. When the man attacked her, she turned on him and eventually, well, cut his head off with a sickle. Not one to just let it alone, she held the trophy up high, parading it around the local market as people fled in horror.
Full story at Weird Asia
June 26, 2011
Videos of UFO's over London
Several videos have cropped up claiming to be UFO sightings over London. At the moment many are claiming it's a hoax by London visual FX specialists The Mill. The Telegraph newspaper has been quick to report it's been happening for over a week – however there is little evidence to back this up.
Other video's available here and here.
Even though the videos have only had a few thousand views the debunking has started to take place.
If other videos or theories appear please let us know in the comments.
Urban Miner scrapes over £600 worth of precious metals from cracks in London pavements
The Sunday Telegraph has collected quantities of the precious metal from cracks in the pavements outside the capital's most famous jewellers.
Our quest was inspired by 43-year-old New Yorker Raffi Stepanian, who crawls around on the sidewalks of Manhattan's "diamond district" looking for chips of gemstones and tiny pieces of gold.
The "urban miner" claimed last week to have collected a haul worth roughly $1,000 (£620) over the course of a fortnight – mostly gold fragments which are thought to rub off the clothes or shoes of jewellery workers.
The pieces can be so small that they are only recoverable when Mr Stepanian pans the scraped-up dirt using a bowl of water, like a nineteenth-century prospector.
Acoustic 'cloaking device' shields objects from sound
Scientists have shown off a "cloaking device" that makes objects invisible – to sound waves.
Such acoustic cloaking was proposed theoretically in 2008 but has only this year been put into practice.
Described in Physical Review Letters, the approach borrows many ideas from attempts to "cloak" objects from light.
It uses simple plastic sheets with arrays of holes, and could be put to use in making ships invisible to sonar or in acoustic design of concert halls.
Much research has been undertaken toward creating Harry Potter-style "invisibility cloaks" since the feasibility of the idea was first put forward in 2006.
Full Article at BBC News
June 25, 2011
Former cop says his lies wrongly sent hundreds to prison
A former undercover police officer has confessed his lies in court more than 30 years ago may have sent 150 people wrongfully to prison.
Police said they had started a criminal investigation into the activities of Patrick O'Brien after he wrote to Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias and former Police Commissioner Howard Broad, saying he was racked with guilt after carrying a "dreadful secret" for more than 30 years.
Mr O'Brien, an undercover officer during drugs operations in the 1970s, was the star witness in court trials but he later confessed he lied on oath every time he testified, the New Zealand Herald reported today.
His confession was made in November 2007 and police hired Wellington lawyer Bruce Squire, QC, to investigate.
He interviewed Mr O'Brien in July 2009 and reviewed court files, and a copy of his completed inquiry was now with police.
Mr O'Brien told the newspaper he would co-operate fully with the inquiry and plead guilty to any charges.
In his confession, he said he could not guess the number of people who were sent to prison because of his lies because he stopped counting arrests at 150, half-way through his three-year undercover stint.
He lied to the courts and juries to get convictions in every case, he said. As well, he was often high on drugs, including cannabis, cocaine, heroin and LSD – but never during trials.
Full story over at Stuff.nz
June 24, 2011
BBC Newsnight: Theta healing, the new crackpot faith healing movement
There's a new movement in what's known as Theta Healing, it's a form of faith healing and it's here in the UK. It's practitioners claim to be able to regrow parts of the body and even cure AIDS. Newsnight tries to uncover the truth.
Polly-math Parrots, smarter than you think
Parrots are even less bird-brained than previously thought, suggests a new study in the journal Biology Letters. In a series of tests, researchers have learned that some African grey parrots can use logical reasoning to uncover hidden food.
Sandra Mikolasch and her colleagues at the University of Vienna in Austria trained seven African grey parrots to find treats stashed under cups. While the birds watched, Mikolasch placed food under one cup and left an adjacent cup empty—the parrots had to choose the correct cup to get their snacks.
After training the birds, Mikolasch hid a seed and a walnut under two separate cups in front of the on-looking parrots. In plain view, she removed one of the treats and allowed the birds to choose cups again. Three of the parrots were able to correctly pick the cup with food at least 70 percent of the time. If the birds were purely guessing, they would have chosen the correct cup roughly half of the time.
Mikolasch repeated the experiment with one alteration: she masked her movements behind an opaque screen. She removed one of the treats and showed it to the birds, then had the birds choose cups. By noting which snack was removed, one of the parrots, Awisa, was able to deduce which cup still had food in 23 of the 30 trials (about 77 percent). The other parrots chose more randomly. Mikolasch suspects that Awisa was successful because she's the parrot equivalent of a "whiz kid."
Full story with examples at Discover
June 23, 2011
Svengali – Grand Canal Theatre Dublin, Tickets on Sale 24th June
The Dublin dates are March 29th, 30th, 31st 2012. Tickets will go on sale on the 24th, please don't swamp the venue with calls/emails until then.
Study suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress
Between the crowds and the noise and the pressure, city life often seems to set one's brain on edge. Turns out that could literally be true.
A study of German college students suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress, particularly social stress, than those of country dwellers. The findings don't indicate which aspects of city life had changed the students' brains, but provide a framework for future investigations.
"Whether people are exposed to noise, live near a park, have a big group of friends or not — you can do those experiments, and tease apart which parts of urban living are associated with these changes," said Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a psychiatrist at German's Central Institute of Mental Health.
Meyer-Lindenberg's findings, published June 23 in Nature, are a neurological investigation into the underpinnings of a disturbing social trend: As a rule, city life seems to generate mental illness.
Compared to their rural counterparts, city dwellers have higher levels of anxiety and mood disorders. The schizophrenia risk of people raised in cities is almost double. Literature on the effect is so thorough that researchers say it's not just correlation, as might be expected if anxious people preferred to live in cities. Neither is it a result of heredity. It's a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and mind.
What those causes are is unknown, but many researchers have speculated that urban social environments are partly responsible. After all, cities are hyper-social places, in which residents must be constantly on guard, and have mathematically more opportunity to experience stressful interaction. Too much stress may ultimately alter the brain, leaving it ill-equipped to handle further stress and prone to mental illness.
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