Autheticist

I love misspelling 'authentic' and running an image search.

Because you know all that sh*t is fake as hell.

Relativistic Authenticity

It's like when you're an American looking for news about America on BBC. You know all big media these days is corrupt and manipulated and biased, but it is, nonetheless, done in the service of manipulating a specific population. BBC, then, can only spin so much of the full volume of data processing through their apparatus, (and in a way that does not exhibit a perceptible contradiction - in an imaginary newsmedia that spun all information relative to all potential viewers, the  overall contradictions would cancel its legitmacy and believabilty), and so you have to ask, which data points would be more likely to be tweaked? Those points that are significant/meaningful to the mass British psyche, that's what. So as an American, if I want news that is less corrupt, relative to me, it makes sense that I would go to another country's national news-source? They aren't trying to brainwash me, I'm an American (sure they might like to, but at some point it becomes unreasonable to do so, for the reasons above). So isn't BBC then more authentic to me than CNN?
authetic

World Trade

You can't make this stuff up.
I bring to you, Internet, today's headlines, these two are right alongside each other.
If you don't see the humor in this, you're already dead:

Four sentenced to death over $2.6bn Iran bank fraud
30 July 2012

Four people have been sentenced to death for their roles in Iran's biggest-ever bank fraud scandal.
Two other defendants received life sentences, while 33 more will spend up to 25 years in jail, the chief prosecutor was quoted as saying.

The scandal involved forged documents reportedly used by an investment company to secure loans worth $2.6bn.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19045737

HSBC raises mis-selling and money laundering provisions
30 July 2012 

HSBC has put aside $2bn (£1.3bn) to cover potential mis-selling claims and money-laundering fines as it announces a sharp rise in first-half profits.

Pre-tax profit for the first six months of 2012 was $12.7bn, up 11% on the $11.5bn the bank made a year ago.
bbc.co.uk/news/business-19044245

Chef Prometheus

Cooking with fire is a form of predigestion, and changed the human genome 200,000 years ago.
-wider variety of edible/digestible food
-smaller teeth and jaw muscles
-supplemental stomach
-artificial organ

Our genes have coevolved with our inventions. In the past 10,000 years alone, in fact, our genes have evolved 100 times faster than the average rate for the previous 6 million years. … We have domesticated ourselves. … Technology has domesticated us. … If all technology – every last knife and spear – were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotic with technology. (p37)

What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
2010

Memetic Transmission as explained by a Meme

Conspiracy Keanu, like a boss.

Accelerating Change

Canon's Mixed Reality System may speed design cycles
June 23, 2012 by Nancy Owano, phys.org

Canon this week announced a new augmented reality system—headset and software. The new system is to allow virtual prototypes to replace physical ones. Mixed Reality (MR)

“As product lifecycles grow progressively shorter, it has become increasingly necessary for the manufacturing industry to introduce products to the market in a timely manner,” says the company press release; the system can be a support tool for quicker evaluation of design and operability. “The system can reduce the number of prototypes required and can contribute to minimizing costs.”
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-canon-ar.html


Now referencing What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly, p141:

Time Horizon for patents is 20 years, says Jay Walker of Walker Digital Labs:
"Most invention is a matter of time...when, not if."


The time it takes to go from idea to market is strictly limited by the time it takes to make and test prototypes.


Because we no longer have to 'make' prototypes, does that mean we can speed up the cycle?

Culture Fail?

^Memesis - Neil Degrasse Tyson x Aliens

Aliens = (Science + Religion) / Science

I was afforded the experience last night to watch Ancient Aliens (the History Channel documentary) with some friends. After many attempts to conjure Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit, I was faced with a stark reality: It’s not a person’s belief in aliens that should frighten us, it is the consistent, thought-disarming default solution to complex phenomena. Aliens in the [memetic*] sense has been re-calibrated by the Internet as a kind of dead-end, dysfunctional thought syndrome that is still prevalent in many, many people in The West.

*search “alien meme”

Now don’t get me wrong, I like Aliens. I like to dream about what they look like, where they come from, how they get here, and what they want out of life. Stranger in a Strange Land is on my bookshelf, no doubt, albeit right next to Asimov’s The Universe. I also love H.G. Wells’ galvanizing memesis of “little green men” (though he did not actually describe them as such), but am more endeared with its hysterical effect, and meta-effect in the dispute over the extent of the hysteria, on population when presented by Orson Welles via radio broadcast in 1938; disregard, or not, the confusing Wells/Welles coincidence herein.

So, for the record, I come in peace.

Check the history of the word “aliens”, in the extra-terrestrial sense; the word’s inception is quite recent. I will fuzz-it-up here, for the sake of effect, as well as for mnemonic purposes, and place this inception date of the word (but more importantly the concept) in the public psyche, as concurrent with our entrance into the atomic age, the modern era, the postwar world – the second half of the 1900’s. It would be interesting to see what correlates here join with the fall of the influence of Christianity in Western society.

Though it should be argued that a primary “goal” of religion is to guide us in the ways of things we yet understand (not in understanding, of course, but in coping with not-understanding), it also provides answers; that is, it helps to satisfy the awakening of the rational mind of our more animal-inclined selves. “Aliens” (in the conventional sense, not the internet-meme sense) delivers us an equitable service. For a world where the “legitimacy” of Religion* comes under increasing scrutiny, it seems natural that something like Aliens would appear in the popular culture. 

*I use quotes here because  the authenticity of religion is ultimately non-rational in nature, and thus impervious to scrutiny and hence delegitimization.

Respective to the Christian narrative, they [aliens] are more significant in a new world of space travel and aeronautics and unprecedented organization at super-national levels (which queries for the presence of even higher levels of organization, below God, perhaps, but above the Axis powers, for example). "Aliens" also functions as an unintentional reservoir for the misplaced confusion and unresolved conflict of religiously skeptical yet patriotic American citizens exposed to the "if you're not Christian then you must be Communist" idea of their Coldwar culture.

And so, finally, it is funny how the possible supplanting of Religion by Aliens, comes via undeniable consequences of Science on society (via advances in aeronautics, space exploration and communications technology), and yet those who believe can only do so in denial themselves of the basic tenets of science.

Okay, forget it; just watch the damn video! (link directly below)

“You shouldn’t believe anyone based on authority.”

“You want to have a mind open enough to accept radical new ideas, but not so open that your brain falls out.”

–Michael Shermer invoking Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit



somehow related:
from the New Yorker's Sci Fi issue
IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
Jon Michaud; May 28, 2012

BONUS
greatest conspiracy theory website ever, created by robots, for robots:

Verified Facts
http://www.verifiedfacts.org/

>>>
Pope Francis says he would baptise aliens: 'The doors of the Catholic Church are open to everyone'
May 14 2014