Have I posted Cyriak before? Oh well.

Can't have a blog called "Mind--Blown" without tossing in a Cyriak video every now and then. His whole Youtube channel here, and there's more of his graphically-edited nightmares at Cyriak's home page.

Baby orc for dinner, perhaps?

Startling little bit of sculpture by Evan Campbell, detailed on Deviant Art.

Manhattan Solstice

Manhattanhenge is what happens when the sun lines up perfectly with the concrete-canyon streets of New York City. Due to the angle of the city's layout, this doesn't map to our traditional times of equinox and solstice, but New Yorkers mark their own.

Need a shredded document restored? Hire a carpet weaver!

From the new York Times article 'Back Together Again':

"In its crudest form, the art of reconstructing shredded documents has been around for as long as shredders have. After the takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran in 1979, Iranian captors laid pieces of documents on the floor, numbered each one and enlisted local carpet weavers to reconstruct them by hand, said Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. 'For a culture that's been tying 400 knots per inch for centuries, it wasn't that much of a challenge,' he said. The reassembled documents were sold on the streets of Tehran for years."

The article details that shredding documents, just like encrypting electronic data, has arms races on either side to both conceal and reveal.

Perpetual motion museum - bent your mind watching people try to bend the laws of physics

"Hey, guys! I've invented a design for a 125% efficiency motor, and if you all fund my Kickstarter in return for a share of the profits in my new motor company, I can eventually build 500 of these things on a 3-ton scale and produce the world's first kinetic power generator! Who's in?"

"Hello? Anybody?"

Welcome to the world of The Museum of Unworkable Devices, a huge, engaging site documenting one of the most futile fields of study in engineering, the history-long quest for perpetual motion. Within, Donald E. Simanek serves as a James Randi of the engineering world, showing us endless attempts at overbalanced wheels, spinning magnets, wild stunts with hydraulic pressure, and machines which baffle the limits of the imagination as surely as they thumb their nose at Newton, Archimedes, and Einstein.

The site also works as an education in physics principles. For instance, did you know that the ball along the bottom ramp of this device reaches the goal first?

Be sure not to miss the FAQ, "Why won't my perpetual motion machine work?", where Simanek explains it all like you're 5. Ought to be required reading in high school science at least.

---

Perpetual motion ties into a related fallacy emerging in computing.

I've recently investigated thoroughly the latest cult, sure to usurp Scientology as the most tenacious, known to some of you already as the "Singularity". The "Singularity" is the point at which computers are supposed to surpass human brains in intellect, at which point they will continue on their own to build even smarter computers, and so on ad infinitum until we're all living in the Matrix.

I'll stop for a paragraph so you can fight the urge to puke. Deep breathing helps.

The idea of  the Singularity (which has been "just a few years from now" since about the 1700s) and the bogus search for a perpetual motion machine is evident when you consider that computers do nothing until a human writes a program for them. And it's quite daunting for a human to write a program that causes a computer to be smarter than a human, since by definition the human is not smart enough to write it. And computers really are not smarter than humans at anything, they just appear to be in certain fields by virtue of brute force and speed - for instance, they beat you at chess by calculating six moves ahead from every possible move, including the ones we would eliminate through common sense. Like the would-be perpetual motion inventors, Singularitarians seek to boost the IQ of machines by making them smarter than they are so they can write themselves, just like overbalanced wheels seek to gain infinite momentum by making objects be heavier than they are so they can push themselves.

Every time, I pin down some Singularity zealot and ask them "How could you write a computer program that was smarter than yourself?" The answer is always "We'll have a computer program write the program!" I bounce back "OK, how do you write THAT program?" "We have the computer write that program, too!" Oh, I see. We'll write a program to write a program to write a program to overwhelm common sense, just like we'll trick those nasty old laws of physics by spinning a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel...

The Great Moon Hoax of 1835

If you think modern media is rife with sloppy fact-and-source-checking and complete disregard for integrity, you should see what lulus they pulled back in the day.

In August of 1835, the New York Sun newspaper indulged in a particularly fanciful bit of tabloid reporting claiming that a new high-definition telescope was pulling in evidence of life on the moon - including unicorns, tailless beaver-like creatures, and batmen. Yes, real, flying, bat-winged batmen! Plus beaches, oceans, forests, temples constructed of sapphire, and all kinds of fanciful stuff.

While readers were presumably clued in that the whole thing was meant to be an amusing hoax, editors from competing newspapers were not so amused. As told on HistoryBuff.com:

"Rival editors were frantic; many of them pretended to have access to the original articles and began reprinting the Sun's series. It was not until the Journal of Commerce sought permission to publish the series in pamphlet form, however, that Richard Adams Locke, confessed authorship. Some authorities think that a French scientist, Nicollet, in this country at the time, wrote them."

"After a number of his competitors, humiliated because they had "lifted" the series and passed it off as their own, upbraided Day, the Sun of September 16, 1835, admitted the hoax. When the hoax was exposed people were generally amused. It did not seem to lessen interest in the Sun, which never lost its increased circulation."

Really makes you wonder if you repeated the exact same experiment today, how many would fall for it all over again. After all, according to a 2005 New York times story (if we can believe this one!), one in five adult Americans believe that the sun revolves around the Earth.

A few entries from the Limerick Dictionary

This dictionary's written in rhyme,

and the results are quite sublime.

For a limerick form,

in this work is the norm,

Just don't turn to it every time!

Some gem entries:

"A deadeye's a marvelous shot;
Deadeye Dick has a Vonnegut plot;
Plus, a deadeye, you'll note,
Is a block on a boat,
And a line can be run through its slot."

"The abacus, pearl without price:
An ancient computing device.
Sliding beads strung on rods,
One can figure the odds.
You ask: "Why's it still used?" It's precise."

"Coney Island had sideshows and rides
On its boardwalk, and plenty besides:
Boats that rode in the dark,
And, in Steeplechase Park,
An ingenious assortment of slides."

"I'm efficient—I'm sure you'll agree:
I can juggle and dance on a ski,
Blow my nose, pen a rhyme...
At the very same time!
I'm so talented. Jealous of me?"

OK, maybe it's not such a hot idea. But regardless, are they going to finish this thing or what? It's only up the the E's.

Your moment of Trekkie Zen: 3-Dimensional Chess

Find out about attempts to de-fictionalize the game of 3-D Chess from the Star Trek universe and even places that will sell you a set, if you just gotta play it for yourself. Be warned: Games thought up in fictional universes tend to look like more fun in the story than they do in real life.

The totally cosmic dolphin cult is alive and well

Just in case you were thinking that the New Age hippies had backed off from the dolphins, this LiveJournal observer has bad news:

"I hadn’t realized that among a certain segment of profitable 'eco'-tourism it is a commonly-held belief that dolphins not only have achieved higher consciousness and are intimate with the secrets of life, but also use telepathy to transmit their teachings.

"My favorite interaction with a dolphin-oriented wingnut occurred at the dump. As we threw our trash in the big stinky dumpster, a woman pulled up in her SUV plastered with hippie/new age bumper stickers. Dressed in all white, she asked us, 'Have you seen the dolphins?'

"'Not today,' I answered.

"'They’re out there right now. Did you know that humans are the only animal that fears when it doesn’t need to? Dolphins only fear when they are in danger?'"

Penn 'n' Teller's Bullshit did a whole episode on dolphin New-Age-ism, BTW:

Website featuring "Gothic Babe of the Week" since 1996 to present

I've often defined "Industrial Gothic" as a genre I sort of thought of on my own, to mean "horrors specific to the industrial age" - ghost towns, malevolent corporations, conspiracy theories, man-made monsters, haunted factories, mole people living in the sewers, and whatnot. Imagine my surprise when I poked about to discover whether the domain was taken and stumbled upon this site. Of course, "industrial" and "gothic", separately, are both genres of music and styles / cultures as well.

Gothic Babe of the Week, if its archive directory on the left bears true witness, has been in continuous business since January of 1996, making it one of the oldest surviving private websites from the pre-web-bubble era, and being a great example of a Tumblr type blog decades before anybody thought of Tumblr.

Anyway, if you like Goth gals, this person is really, really into them:

A Clever Plan To Get Help To Where It's Needed

So, say you're an underage girl who is the victim of human trafficking. You're forced into prostitution. You end up sequestered in some anonymous hotel room, where your pimp will soon send johns to use you. You know that if you try to run away with no plan, you'll be caught and likely beaten, raped, tortured, or even put to death. Where do you turn to for help?

A former sex-trafficking victim has come up with a novel idea: Give out bars of soap to hotels. But once you unwrap the soap, you'll notice that it's engraved with a phone number to a human trafficking help hotline.

The story is reported in conjunction with the revelation by the Attorney General that the Superbowl is the biggest human trafficking target in the US. And people who are already familiar with what a festival of misogyny that disgusting event represents will not be faintly surprised.

The former victim and now crusading advocate shares her blood-chilling experience and now plans to rescue others from going through the same fate as her.

Now, how clever is that? Mind--Blowing clever, that is!

The really, really BIG quasar group

Scientists discover a group of quasars out there lurking in the universe that defies all laws of physics as we know them so far, simply because it's bigger than any known scale of measurement we've ever needed. It's four billion light-years across! That's 4,000,000,000 light-years, the equal of 40,000 Milky Way galaxies side-to-side.

For now, the object is simply tagged the "Huge_LQG." There's plenty of time to fret over it, though, since it's about 9 billion years old as far as we can tell. Here is the world's fastest-talking science news reporter to explain it:

Now, before everybody goes on about how tiny and insignificant they feel because of this new revelation, let me report this old image/rant I did for my daily stupid a while back:

Swedish wooden toy plays cup-and-ball Monte, no elctronics

It's by a Swedish artist who makes wonderful and elaborate hand-crank wooden toys, see more in their gallery here.

Gene Youngblood on Media (1977)

Just listening to Ubuweb Sound and caught the Gene Youngblood interview from 1977 (listen to it here). Was this guy a prophet, or what? Towards the end when he talks about the effects of the digital revolution on modern media, he sounds like he nailed everything we know now in 2013.

Blow your mind by listening to a media theorist who called quite a few shots.

Gene Youngblood on Wikipedia.

Youngblood's book, Expanded Cinema, in PDF.

A few quotes from the lexicon of Francis E. Dec, crank

Francis E. Dec was a New Yorker who had a relatively normal life as an Air Force radio operator, Bachelor of Arts graduate, and lawyer, until he was overtaken by paranoid schizophrenia and drew out the remainder of his years as a harmless crank who wrote a series of documents detailing a vast conspiracy-theory worldview which he mailed out and otherwise shared. We're talking racism, sexism, homophobia, religious conspiracies, mind-control rays, the works.

That bein' said so, his ravings make for a fun little theme park of kooky whimsy.

He's since achieved underground cult status, with tributes popping up everywhere from the Church of the Subgenius to Discordianism to popular music, including fictionalized versions of his works and a whole fan site, seen here.

So, a few terms to know if you want to study Francis' worldview:

The Brain-Bank Cities:

Cities existing on the far side of the moon we never see and which house your moon-brain (your real brain) of the Computer God. Primarily based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, your moon-brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold Brainwash Radio inculcating conformist propaganda. As such, these cities and the moon-brains housed in them are a vital part of the Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy.

The Computer Brain Machines:

These secret machines are used by the Gangster Government for the purpose of filling out all of its paperwork, such as taxes, forms, bills, etc.  The speed of these machines is 2000 words a minute and they actually do the work which is supposedly done by Government Employees.

Infrared Crusader Priests:

These troops, created by the Computer God, were several hundred years ago responsible for the conquering and degeneration of the Slovene People, as well as for the savage butchery and experimentation upon thousands of innocents in order to perfect the process of implanting Frankenstein Controls inside the human skull. The Crusader Priests wore black robes and armor, with night-vision plastic lenses built into their helmets. They also used weapons smeared with Poison Nerve Jelly and conducted mass-exterminations by burning vast fields dusted with inflammable poison nerve gas powder Prussic Acid. Their headquarters were specially designated, fortified monasteries. Their modern-day successors include both black-robed judges and black-robed priests.

Frankenstein Slavery:

The process during which one’s own body is remote-controlled by the Worldwide Mad Deadly Gangster Computer God. Frankenstein slavery is usually most prevalent at night, when you are unwittingly operated upon by the Computer God Sealed Robot-arm Operating Cabinet. Sodomy and rape, performed upon you by your tormentors, is an added bonus.

Rumors abound of archival on Ubuweb, but I'll be hanged in Tarnation if I can find them.

The French postman who built his own rock castle

What you're looking at was all built by one man, a humble civil servant with no architectural training working only with his hands and carrying each stone home himself.

Ferdinand Cheval was a postman in Hauterives, France, a tiny community with a population all of 1500. In 1875, Cheval was making his postal rounds when he tripped over a stone (ready your psychedelic jokes) and became inspired to collect stones and build his own palace, which he called "the Palace Ideal."

He then proceeded to spend the next 33 years doing just that. Solo, without help, mixing his own mortar, carrying stones to the site with a wheelbarrow, and working by lamplight at night so as not to interfere with his day job.

Make no mistake - while Cheval had no training in art, his palace is a breath-taking structure of intricate detail mixing styles of architecture from Hinduism and Christendom. Having competed the work to his satisfaction in 1912, he sought to be buried there, but discovered that French law wouldn't allow this request. He then proceeded to build his own mausoleum in exactly the same fashion at the local cemetery, taking another eight years to finish it.

Having completed this final project, his most obstinate excellency retired to his palace for exactly one year, to be honored and recognized by such international artistic talents as Andre Breton and Pablo Picasso. Many came to visit and interview him. Then, he died in 1924, and was buried at his mausoleum. Because a man can't just sit around!

The palace is today a national landmark of France and a tourist destination. Find out more here.

Australian PSA makes wonderfully dark, cute entertainment

All this just to say "Don't do stupid things around trains!" More about it here. Watch it over a few times and catch new details by each of the cast. I'm totally going to join animator Julian Frost's cult.

The latest roundup of Scientology's weirdness

The Hole

Pictured above: "The Hole", a private prison run by the members of Scientology. This facility in Riverside, California, recently came to light thanks to an expose book by Lawrence Wright. A full story on the writing of this work is here. To quote:

"Wright’s investigations into “The Hole,” a hidden Scientology gulag in southern California where errant Church members are sent to perform menial tasks and take part in 'orgies of self-abasement,' led him to break the story of an FBI investigation—since aborted—into human trafficking."

There are also more detailed descriptions of The Hole activities at the Wikipedia page. It basically sounds like a concentration camp straight out of the Holocaust or Khmer Rouge.

The child labor camp in Australia

Here is an Australian news magazine special on the "RPF", the Rehabilitation Project Force, a sprawling complex in the middle of an Australian suburb.

Kaja Ballo

In 2008, a young girl in France who was reportedly happy beforehand voluntarily took a personality test handed out by the church of Scientology. When she got the results, they apparently devastated her and she committed suicide, leaping to her death. Some speculation has had it that the church's method of tearing people down to convince them that they'll need the church in their lives had some bearing here.

In fact, all of the above stories have the theme of "disconnection" in common, the act of severing all ties with the world outside the church, be they family, friends, or professional. This is a practice in common throughout all cults and attempts at brainwashing.

Meanwhile, this column in Esquire cautions us that none of us should be too smug; given a weak enough moment, any one of us could be sucked into Scientology.

I close with a plea: We're all more aware about the cult of Scientology and what a nasty mental virus it is - our awareness of it is growing by the day. That's a good thing. But what OTHER things could we be seeing grow more prominent today that could turn into tomorrow's cult? We should be looking at those things, too.

Creepiest mall event ever

If the 400-pound guy in the photo gives you the creepers, you don't know the half of it yet. This is James Julius Beaudrie, now in court after a nationwide manhunt, charged with multiple counts of child molestation and child endangerment, having methodically molested three of his nine children on a continuing basis.

The remarkable thing is the circumstances surrounding the incidents. In the first place, the wife of James and mother of the children, Kijua Beaudrie, was not only complicit in the molestation, but actively aided the father by, for instance, sequestering the other kids in another room while the abuse was going on. For this, she's getting 30 years in prison.

But wait, it gets creepier! Kijua actually kept a diary of the abuse while she heard her own children sobbing in the other room.

But wait, it gets even creepier! All of this was going on in the back of a store at the Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines, Iowa.

That's right here in my home town, and I and my family have been shopping there for years. The mall, as with many malls across post-recession America, has a few stores dark and empty with bleak 'for lease' signs in the windows. So now we're thinking back on all the times we've gone shopping at that mall, and not known that meanwhile, in the back of one of the rooms...

Making an Easter Island statue walk

To test a theory as to how the natives of Easter Island could have transported the massive statues that are their claim to fame, scientists used a technique involving only technology available to the islanders at the time to move the statue along a road. Read more here at anthropolgy.net, which also tells of how the island was successfully settled and farmed thanks to islander's resourcefulness.