Derren Brown's Blog, page 29

Loom – incredible masterpiece of 3D

Loom is the work of specialist animators Polynoid. It took an entire year to construct this truly jaw dropping 5 1/2 minutes of excellence. If you're a little squeamish and don't like spiders, this one might give you nightmares.

Polynoid TV

'Time' not necessarily deeply rooted in our brains

(Medical Xpress) — Hidden away in the Amazonian rainforest a small tribe have successfully managed what so many dream of being able to do – to ignore the pressures of time so successfully that they don't even have a word for it.

It is the first time scientists have been able to prove 'time' is not a deeply entrenched human universal concept as previously thought.

Researchers, led by Professor Chris Sinha from the University of Portsmouth Department of Psychology, studied the way in which time was talked about and thought about by the Amondawa people of Brazil. Their research is published in the journal Language and Cognition.

Professor Sinha said: "For the Amondawa, time does not exist in the same way as it does for us. We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted, or talked about in the abstract. This doesn't mean that the Amondawa are 'people outside time', but they live in a world of events, rather than seeing events as being embedded in time."

Team members including linguist Wany Sampaio and anthropologist Vera da Silva Sinha, spent eight weeks with the Amondawa researching how their language conveys concepts like 'next week' or 'last year'. There were no words for such concepts, only divisions of day and night and rainy and dry seasons. They also found nobody in the community has an age. Instead, they change their names to reflect their life stage and position within their society, so that for example a little child will give up their name to a newborn sibling, and take on a new one.

Professor Sinha said: "We have so many metaphors for time and its passing – we think of time as a 'thing' – we say 'the weekend is nearly gone'; 'she's coming up to her exams'; 'I haven't got the time', and so on, and we think such statements are objective, but they aren't. We've created these metaphors and they have become the way we think. The Amondawa don't talk like this and don't think like this, unless they learn another language.

Full Story at Medical Xpress

 

When ninjas do card tricks

Some card tricks just require a rare kind of brute force.

When ninja's do card tricks

Some card tricks just require a rare kind of brute force.

Scientists Afflict Computers with Schizophrenia

AUSTIN, Texas — Computer networks that can't forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found.

The researchers used a virtual computer model, or "neural network," to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion.

Their results were published in April in Biological Psychiatry.

"The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance — the salience — of experience," says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. "When there's too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn't be learning from."

The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what's meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters. They start making connections that aren't real, or drowning in a sea of so many connections they lose the ability to stitch together any kind of coherent story.

Full Story at University of Texas

Adam Curtis – All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

Without a doubt Adam Curtis is one of the most important documentary makers alive today. His work isn't just ground breaking in it's messaging, the sheer volume of information and the way he delivers is food for thought itself. Using a mixture of well found retro footage and expert narration, Curtis delivers his own distinct form of sociopolitical theatre. Even if you were to completely disagree with him, it's utterly thought-provoking and entertaining. It's possibly the only reason to own a TV.

Curtis completed a Bachelor of Arts in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford, where he studied genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, politics, sociology and elementary statistics. Curtis also taught Politics there for a time.

His work has received more than a few awards to date – here's a run down of our favourites:

1992 – Pandora's Box – examines the dangers of technocratic and political rationality – BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series.

1996 - 25 Million Pounds – study of Nick Leeson, collapse of Barings Bank – Winner at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

1997 – The Way of All Flesh – The story of Henrietta Lacks - Golden Gate award.

1999 – The Mayfair Set – the climate of the Thatcher years - BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series.

2002 – The Century of the Self - Edward Bernays' development of public relations - Broadcast Award, Longman Award.

2004 - The Power of Nightmares - the rise of Islamism and Neoconservatism - BAFTA for Best Factual Series

2007 – The Trap – a series addressing the modern concepts of freedom.

Curtis has also provided many snippets of brilliance to the Charlie Brooker series Screenwipe in 2007 and Newswipe in 2009. What more you could ask for I do not know.

His current series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace is now showing on BBC 2 / iPlayer and is utterly essential watching. It is a series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.

Episode one of 3 is available now – I recommend watching it 3 times at least and take notes too.

iPlayer

Rapture: Harold Camping issues new apocalypse date

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Harold Camping, the voice of Family Radio in Oregon, USA, today announced that the rapture had in fact started, but we couldn't see it because it was "invisible".

Camping predicted that on May 21st 2011, 200 Million Christians (all American of course) would be lifted up in to heaven, the rest of us would be left on earth so that God, in all his infinite love, could spend 5 months slowly killing everyone with fireballs, earthquakes and general nastiness.

Thousands of Family Radio listeners donated money, some gave away everything they owned and the estimated $100 Million raised helped plaster billboards across the US and Europe. It also funded a fleet of elaborately emblazoned rapture vans.

Reports of people raptured on May 21 turned out to be elaborately and carefully planned hoaxes (see top image) by non-believers. Also organised were a series of "Rapture After Parties" and similar low profile events across America.

However skeptics may be in for a surprise, according to Camping they haven't yet escaped judgement. It turns out the rapture was "invisible" and we can't see it happening.

Camping, now 89 years old, first predicted the rapture in 1994, but changed his mind when it didn't happen. His third attempt is now 5 months after the 21st of May (October 21) and he is still asking for funds to help spread the word.

According to the New York Times, when asked if his organisation would return any of the money raised, Camping stated "We're not at the end. Why would we return it?".

 

As we get older our brains run out of storage space

The older we get, the more difficulty we seem to have remembering things. We reassure ourselves that our brains' "hard drives" are too full to handle the new information that comes in daily. But a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist suggests that our aging brains are unable to process this information as "new" because the brain pathways leading to the hippocampus become degraded over time. As a result, our brains cannot accurately "file" new information.

It's something we just accept: the fact that the older we get, the more difficulty we seem to have remembering things. We can leave our cars in the same parking lot each morning, but unless we park in the same space each and every day, it's a challenge eight hours later to recall whether we left the SUV in the second or fifth row. Or, we can be introduced to new colleagues at a meeting and will have forgotten their names before the handshake is over. We shrug and nervously reassure ourselves that our brains' "hard drives" are just too full to handle the barrage of new information that comes in daily.

According to a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist, however, the real trouble is that our aging brains are unable to process this information as "new" because the brain pathways leading to the hippocampus — the area of the brain that stores memories — become degraded over time. As a result, our brains cannot accurately "file" new information (like where we left the car that particular morning), and confusion results.

Full Article at Medical Express

Anyone seen my slippers?

Japanese watermelons exploding in China

Chinese farmers have been upset by the amount of watermelons exploding of recent. It's thought a growth hormone was the culprit but other farmers, who have not the hormone, have also claimed their melons were blowing up too.

more at the BBC

Should the deadly small pox virus be destroyed forever? Ministers disagree

Reuters: Health ministers are deeply divided over setting a date to destroy the world's remaining known stocks of live smallpox virus, stored in Russia and the United States, diplomatic sources said Friday.

The two powers say that more research is needed into safer vaccines against the deadly disease eradicated more than 30 years ago. They also seek guarantees that all stocks have been destroyed or transferred to their two official repositories due to fears that the virus could be used as a biological weapon.

But their joint proposal to put off for 5 years any decision on the timing of destruction has run into opposition at the annual meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO) — where the issue has already been on the agenda for the last 25 years.

"A lot of developing countries would like to see the virus destroyed, first and foremost among them Iran," a diplomatic source told Reuters.

Iran is already at odds with the U.S. and other powers over its nuclear program. Tehran denies Western accusations that it is seeking a nuclear weapons capability, saying its atomic activities are aimed at generating electricity only.

Many countries say the world's remaining smallpox virus stocks should be eradicated as the disease no longer exists and the virus is lethal. They also say technology exists to develop new vaccines and antivirals without needing to use live virus.

The U.S.-Russian smallpox resolution is formally backed by 19 other countries, including U.S. allies Britain, Canada and Japan as well as several former republics of the Soviet Union.

The 193-member WHO, a United Nations agency, takes most decisions by consensus, but rules allow for a vote. Debate has been postponed to Monday, a day before the annual assembly ends.

"We expect the resolution to be adopted," a spokesman at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Geneva told Reuters late Friday.

The WHO certified that smallpox, an acutely contagious disease, was eradicated worldwide in 1979, two years after the last case was detected in Somalia. The disease no longer occurs naturally although a woman died in Britain in 1978 after being accidentally exposed in a laboratory.

But fears have mounted that rogue states or militants could get their hands on stocks and deliberately release the pathogen.

Dr. Nils Daulaire, Director of the U.S. Office of Global Health Affairs, told reporters in Geneva this week: "Vials of smallpox have been discovered deep in freezers. This has been announced. I don't know how many more of these there might be."

Full article at NewsDaily

Smallpox at Wikipedia (Warning: some rather unpleasant imagery)