Learning

Offbeat & Very Casual: Beating Off with Offbeat Boox & Comix! Enough with the long Myrant flashbacks: time for the here-and-now, to share some of what I’ve been reading of late. Spring is here, the Center for Cartoon Studies Class of 2013 graduation was this past Saturday (congratulations, grads, you made it! Now, get to work!), and I’m in overdrive at the drawing board, the keyboard, while glutting out on reading and writing and no ‘rithmatic, save what I have to tackle for taxes, insurance, and planning retirement. Recommended Reading: Books * My favorite new book to drift into my massive mitts came sailing in from the good folks at Headpress, tapping a vein of lifetime viewing pleasure and research obsessions I share with its authors and editor of note. Judging film books by the “buy now/to find” lists they generate for me, the brand-spankin’-new Julian Upton (editor, co-author) book OFFBEAT: BRITISH CINEMA’S CURIOSITIES, OBSCURITIES AND FORGOTTEN GEMS (Headpress, 2013) is the best of its breed since Jonathan Rigby‘s STUDIES IN TERROR: LANDMARKS OF HORROR CINEMA from last year. That’s a recommendation from me, folks, and I gleefully devoured this book (amid a very busy week) in short order—then blew money I didn’t really have to spend on some of the movies Julian and his cronies whet my appetite for. With the clearly stated intent of illuminating British gems, sleepers, and curios circa 1955-1985 other studies have ignored or overlooked, Upton (who crafted Fallen Stars for Headpress some nine years ago) and his fellow contributors (including Darrell Buxton, Sam Dunn, Mark Goodall, Graeme Hobbs, David Hyman, Martin Jones, Sarah Morgan, James Oliver, Gary Ramsay, David Sutton, Andrew Syers, Phil Tonge, Jennifer Wallis, the great Kim Newman and Headpress co-founders David Kerekes and David Slater) fill the bill nicely. Per usual, the book design is attractive and alluring stem to stern, and my only real complaint is: more, I want more! I was delighted to find I’d in fact seen many of the titles covered herein as I was growing up. Surprising, really, given the paucity of access to movies growing up in Vermont, but late-night TV and local theaters and drive-ins really did play a lot of these gems over the years. Thankfully, many are in my vhs/DVD library, but for every one I’d seen or could so easily revisit there was another I’d missed or never had the opportunity to see (and that aren’t available in any format anywhere in the world). For every title I thought “really?,” there were two or three I agreed fit the bill perfectly: The Mark, Yellow Teddy Bears, The Unearthly Stranger, The Strange Affair, Emmanuelle in Soho, The Squeeze, Sitting Target, Quest for Love, The Black Panther (a particularly blunt slice of true-life crime, served cold, and just resurrected on DVD by the British Film Institute Flipside label) and the like demonstrate a pretty wide net being cast and a healthy catch, with a preference for the odd crime, sordid insavory & saucy curios, baseline rock, and borderline horror fare. Thankfully, a few that were impossible to see as Upton & company scribed and compiled this book are now in reach (i.e., the Warner Archives release of The Squeeze and Sitting Target, Sony/Columbia releasing The Reckoning on DVD-R, etc.), but there’s much here one can only hope BFI Flipside or some other label resurrects once OFFBEAT makes the rounds. For instance: alas, Roy Ward Baker‘s bizarre British proto-spaghetti western The Singer Not the Song isn’t available in its proper widescreen format anywhere I’ve ever found, though at least the complete running time makes the UK release on DVD the one to get just now (here ya go, and you’re welcome). I particularly savored the interstitial overviews of genres and subgenres, including a tantalizing overview of the Children’s Film Foundation and the two chapt

Here's a simple example of how to make your own brush to create a signature you can easily add to your photos.

These days, there arent that many places you can go to escape seeing Iron Man - the armoured avenger is everywhere. Heck, the old lady next door to you probably has Iron Man bedsheets! In fact the only place you can avoid his emotionless mask of justice is by staring into a cup of hot comforting java... or at least that used to be where you could go, until Japanesse coffee artist Nowtoo Sugi did this frothy number on the left.How does Nowtoo get such a red? Well watch this vid that takes you behind the scenes of Nowtoo's other pop-culture tastes, just by licking... umm clicking, play. What do you think?

<p><a href="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130519.html"><img src="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/calendar/S_130519.jpg" align="left" alt="What on Earth is that? " border="0" /></a> What on Earth is that? </p><br clear="all"/>

The discovery of representations as negentropically entangled states defining approximate invariants under quantum jump sequence and defining "Akashic records" and the idea about reading these representations using interaction free measurements have meant a dramatic progress in the understanding of TGD inspire theory of conscioiusness progress. There are two basic objections against quantum theories of consciousness. How it is possible to have conscious information about invariant under quantum jumps if only change is experienced continuously? The outcome of state function reduction in standard quantum theory is random: how can one understand freedom of choice and intentional behaviour in terms of state function reduction? NMP and possibility of negentropic entanglement imply that TGD based quantum theory is not equivalent with the standard one, and this allows to circumvent the objections. There are however two further questions, which I cannot answer yet. Can one really assume that the notion of interaction free measurement continues to make sense in TGD framework? Could NMP allow to make this notion exact or make it impossible? Are the invariants or at least their existence experienced directly without interaction free measurement? The experiments carried out to test whether 40 Hz thalamocortical resonance is correlate for conscious experience suggests that the resonance is present only when a new pattern is discovered, not when it has become a memory. The TGD inspired interpretation would be that the resonances accompanies negentropy gain and quantum jump is necessary for conscious experience. However, the reports about higher states of consciousness (and also my own experiences) suggest that the invariants can be experienced directly when all thoughts (interaction free measurements) are eliminated. This experience cannot be however communicated: one understands does not know what one understands. Therefore also the original vision that negentropic entanglement corresponds to conscious experience - experience of pure understanding, which is not communicable - and in apparent contradiction with the basic hypothesis about quantum jump, would be correct after all! For details see the new chapter Comparison of TGD Inspired Theory of Consciousness with Some Other Theories of Consciousness or the article with the same title.

Newer shots are safer, but not as effective as older ones

The sandygautam cognitive Daily is out! ? Top stories today via @neuroghetto @msprevak @BrainEthics

this is an amazing skill that i would practice it i had an appropriate pot!

A new undersea gold rush could be coming soon with the rising cost of minerals and advancements in technology opening the seafloor to mining.

I had been debating whether to blog about Angelina Jolie’s announcement last week in a New York Times editorial entitled My Medical Choice that she had undergone bilateral prophylactic mastectomy because she had been discovered to have a mutation in the BRCA1 gene that is associated with a very high risk of breast cancer. On the one hand, it is my area of expertise and was a big news story. On the other hand, it’s been nearly a week since she announced her decision, and the news story is no longer as topical as it was. Also, I’ve already written about it a couple of times on my not-so-super-secret other blog, making the division of blogging…problematic. So, if some of this is a bit repetitive to those who are also fans of my more—shall we say?—insolent persona, I apologize, but try to be patient. I will be doing more than just rehashing a couple of posts from last week (although there will unavoidably be at least a little of that), because there have been even more examples of reactions to Jolie’s announcement that provide what I like to consider “teachable moments.” I will start by asserting quite bluntly that in my medical opinion, from the information I have available, Angelina Jolie made a rational, science-based decision. How she went about the actual mechanics might have had some less than scientific glitches along the way (more about that later), but the basic decision to remove both of her breasts to prevent breast cancer associated with a BRCA1 mutation that she carried was quite reasonable and very defensible from a scientific standpoint. One advantage of waiting nearly a week to write about this story is that it provided me with the opportunity to sit back and observe the reactions that Jolie’s decision provoked. One thing that I really didn’t expect (although in retrospect maybe I should have) is the pure denialism on display that genes have any effect whatsoever on cancer. I say “in retrospect I should have” because I’ve written at least a couple of times before about how quacks use and abuse the term “epigenetics” in the same way that they abuse the word “quantum” and how they seem to believe that wishing makes it so (through epigenetics, of course!) to the point where they believe that genetics is irrelevant to cancer. Indeed, they go far beyond that, asserting that, in essence, environment is all. From what I’ve been reading thus far, the second strongest strain of reaction to Jolie’s announcement (after revulsion at the “mutilation” of women that it represented to certain quacks) is pure denial that mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes portend such a high risk of ultimately developing breast cancer. This denial is often accompanied by conspiracy mongering about BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations being a “conspiracy” on the part of the “cancer industry” and Myriad Genetics & Laboratories, the company that holds the patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2, to increase genetic testing and preventative mastectomies. Myriad happens to have a complete monopoly on BRCA1 and BRCA2 testing because of this patent and has been criticized for its high prices and stifling of competition. There is currently a case before the U.S. Supreme Court regarding whether human genes are patentable under the law. I’m not a big fan of Myriad, and I’ll tell you why later. (Not that it matters; I’m stuck with them for now.) My personal distaste for Myriad Genetics aside, this sort of conspiracy mongering is part and parcel of the quack approach to denying the significance of BRCA1 mutations. This denial is usually coupled with confident blather that Angelina Jolie didn’t need to undergo “disfiguring” surgery to prevent BRCA1-associated breast cancer but instead could have achieved the same—or even better!—risk reduction if only she had used this magic herb or that miracle supplem