techyum ::

The campaign of Democrat Tarryl Clark, challenging Republican Michelle Bachmann for Minnesota’s 6th Congressional seat, has married the interactive brilliance of Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle and the modular philosophies of the Goth Quote Generator with the incisive social commentary of Tina the Troubled Teen.

Tempting voters with Facebook ads, the campaign has oh-so-cleverly acquired the rights to a still image of “Jim the Election Guy,” the paid actor who stands there and accuses Tarryl of loving taxes in the now-Internet-famous Michelle Bachmann attack ad from which the above still is taken. (Either that, or they just screencapped that shit and figured no one would sue them).

See how it’s done? Plug in some random dadaist phrases and voila! Let the Web 2.0 political hilarity begin!

Just enter your info, and Jim the Election guy says something bad about you. I swear — first I peed myself laughing, and then I thought long and hard about whether Washington is really working for us or not. See if you have the same experience:

You folks remember The Honorable Michelle Bachmann, don’t you? Page through your Wing Nut files and you’ll find her marked “CUCKOO!!!!!!” right between Erich Von Daniken and Anne Heche. Bachmann is the Congressional Representative who evoked the ghost of Joe McCarthy by calling for the investigation of members of Congress to see if they were anti-American. She actually started the whole “Obama Death Panel” meme before Sarah Palin hopped on board. She suggested that AmeriCorps amounted to political-correctness “re-education camps” for young people. She also doesn’t go to debates, apparently. She’s a peach.

You pretty much get the gist of the original Bachmann ad from the screencap at the top of this post. But if you’re a glutton for punishment, it’s somewhat amusing to watch, if only for its goofiness.

Now don’t you feel like the promise of technology has intelligentized the political discourse?

Apparently having found OKCupid wanting, Xiao and Yin Lin, sisters and martial arts experts, are holding three days of combat in Foushan, China, to decide who they’ll marry.

Oh, and the awesome part? They’ll stay masked throughout.

I have to say at the outset, this whole thing smells like a hoax; I can’t say why, but it just does. If it’s NOT a hoax, it’s about six helpings of awesome. If it’s a hoax, it’s still a helping and a half.

As told in Orange News UK:

First contestants must show off their archery skills, then they must carry a heavy weight over sharpened bamboo spears, and finally they have to defeat one of the sisters in full contact combat.

Only then will contestants earn the right to remove the girls’ masks and propose to them.

“We tried dating agencies but the men we met were all too weak. We could beat them easily,” said Yin.

Okay, look, I think I see their trouble, and I’d say maybe getting a little trigger-happy in the “let’s keep the spice in our relationship” department.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the world’s most accomplished dater. In fact, I’m pretty bad at it. I’ll also admit that most of my relationships end up with me carrying heavy weights a fair amount of the time. Archery? Yes, now and then. And the full contact combat? Of course, once the baby’s-breath is ordered.

But, I mean — sharpened bamboo spears? That’s usually after-I-meet-your parents crap. It should maybe even wait till you’re in who-rents-the-U-Haul territory.

For at least the first few months, the main weapons in a dater’s repertoire should be snark, complaint, eye-rolling, nostril-flaring, snide remarks about your partner’s various exes and the vague implication that you would be dating someone else if this person weren’t here wasting your time. Silent glares are sort of a bonus round. If you can best your date in “Let’s not fight” and “Can’t we just enjoy each others’ company FOR ONCE?” then you are guaranteed a lifetime of marital-bliss smackdown. But true love takes time, people.

These girls hauled the bamboo spears out for coffee at Starbucks?

Slow it down, girls. Practice your conversational skills. Repeat after me:

“Oh, wow, you’re wearing that?”

Personally, I’ll cut zombie-whacker, Satanic Cult breaker-upper and The Starship Enterprise’s Number One Fan Simon Pegg a lot of slack simply for the fact that he occasionally stands upright and doesn’t wave his hand around constantly watching rainbow-colored trails after the gargantuan quantities of Mary Jane he must have smoked in 1999, 2000 and 2001.

But for what it’s worth, Aunt Pegg hereby lends credence to a developing law of nature known as Roche’s Celebrity Prank Dictum: Celebrities who pull pranks do so lamely. Then their non-pranks get reported as if they were news.

So let’s report this as if it were news, shall we?

In an interview with Shortlist Magazine, as related by Bloginity, Pegg related that he “pranked” his Twitter followers by implying he might have been abducted by aliens. To wit:

“I tweeted one morning that my attic was open and I didn’t know why. I did know why, it was a faulty catch. Everyone was going, ‘Oh, that’s really creepy’. So then I started to lie. I tweeted that my dog was sitting underneath it barking.

“Then I said, ‘I’m going to go up there and check it out. I’ll be back in five minutes.’ And I didn’t come back for two days.

“The only thing I tweeted after disappearing was this phrase in Ancient Greek, ‘They’re my children now and you will never see them again’.”

Okay…look, once again I find myself having to explain this. Comprehending the term “prank” does not seem like rocket science to me — but then, I am not a journalist. Were I one, maybe I would have similar ambiguity between the concepts “prank” and “not prank,” which they seem to teach you to mix up at Captain Asshat’s School of Journalism.

Tweeting that you are abducted by aliens is not a Twitter prank. Tweeting something weird — no matter how weird — does not constitute a “prank.” The phrase in Ancient Greek edges it very slightly into prank territory, but only if he actually translated it into Ancient Greek, which I’m guessing he did not. At best, the technical term for it is “sending a mildly amusing tweet,” which doesn’t seem like news, since it happens fairly often. It is not, I repeat, a prank.

Claiming to have planted bombs in celebrities’ trunks? That’s a prank. I’m not saying it’s funny or in good taste. It’s actually sort of a low-impact war crime, now that I think about it. But then, since when are war crimes and pranks mutually exclusive? It’s definitely a prank.

In much the same way, Kim Kardashian was recently lauded for another “Twitter prank” and proclaimed “Queen of Hacking” by her Queen of What Exactly? sister Khloé Kardashian after (oh my stars! Hang on to your nutsacs here! You could end up with a hernia!) Kim actually sat down at the computer and tweeted as Khloé. OMG! How did she ever think to do that?!?!?

Guess what? My sister likes me, too. When I tell knock knock jokes, she busts a gut. Let’s fire off a press release, shall we?

It’s begun, people. The end of the world is nigh. Zombies are coming for you. Better use that turn signal!

First you hear the thump of approaching party music. Then a cry from a bullhorn: “Love that right lane, people!”

A loud chorus of energetic shouts: “BIKE PARTY! Yeah!” Ding ding ding go dozens of bike bells … and a torrent of nearly 200 happy bikers begins to sweep past.

Many of the bikes are decorated with Christmas-style lights, in addition to conventional headlamps and tail lights. A few are pulling trailers with impressive portable sound systems. A couple of scraper bikes dart through the pack.

As the tide swells and continues, you can’t help but notice that many of the riders are unnaturally pale – even greenish – with sunken eyes. Some have what appear to be gaping wounds and garish splashes of blood. Then you hear the hungry haunted groans, with an occasional plea: “Brrrraaaaaaiiiinnnnssss … .”

Amy Gahran’s wonderful writeup on Oakland Local is not, despite all appearances, new media journalism from the end of the world. It celebrates this year’s East Bay Bike Party, which has a theme every year. And this year? You guessed it! It was the ever-loving dead.

There’s an awesome set of photos on Oakland Local’s Flickr stream. It looks like a very cerebrophagic time was had by all.

A story on NPR about MideastTunes.com leads me to “I Shot You Babe,” credited in the above video to “Sunni & Shia” (that’s a joke, get it?)

It’s not actually by Sunni & Shia. An electroclash nightmare remix of the Sonny & Cher song mixed up with sounds of rifles cocking and firing, machine gun blasts, explosions and bombs falling, “I Shot You Babe” is really by the mysterious Mosul-based DJ Foundation, an Iraqi artist who stays anonymous due to the controversial nature of his or her work. (Esra’a al-Shafei, 24, founder of Mideast Tunes, refers to the DJ as “he” in the NPR story). There’s a great writeup of him on the Mideast Tunes site:

With just a battered laptop and a razor-sharp outlook as weapons, Foundation conjures the ultimate 21st-century nightmare party, irresistibly fusing western and Arabic pop beats, over which he goes for the cultural jugular: throwing in audio clips of war, religion, politics, pornography and consumerism, with (apparently) scant regard for whoever might be offended.

Over two single releases, equally welcomed in print and on the dance floor, he’s evaded being pinned down to any position re politics or faith, but as evidenced by comments on his MySpace, he’s already succeeded in dividing his audience, and is ready to rule.

DJ F himself is unforthcoming on the intentions behind his work. If it’s about breaking taboos or ’saying the unsayable’, he’d rather let the music speak. He just says: “it’s music and I’m making a picture of now…and when you hear my tunes you can dance or cry and laugh. I want to cause no harm. I think music is not evil. I think war is evil. I want peace for the future. I am a musician not a fighter.”

The above-mentioned MySpace Page has more of DJ Foundation’s work, and links to the “double-vinyl download” “Paradise,” which I assume is the first album referenced at the end of the MideastTunes.com bio of him.

Mosul is described as Iraq’s “second city” in cultural terms. In 2004, it was also the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the U.S. Invasion.

In case you haven’t been following the radical life extension community lately, the movement no longer seems to be toward freezing your body, pot belly, irritable bowels, birthmark on your hip the shape of New Jersey, slightly off-kilter big toe and all. That costs $150,000, as opposed to a cool $80K for freezing just your head, and who has an extra seventy grand in these trying economic times?

But now even head-freezing is on the outs. Instead, radical life-extension commandos are speculating on information mapping. Speculation, thank God, is free.

Much of this life-extension speculation relies on the idea that as technology develops, it accelerates ad infinitum. At some point, it reaches something called “the singularity,” when a positive feedback loop will mean technology, rather than advancing faster, will advance faster than faster. Then, faster.

In considering this matter, I’m reminded of the discourses I heard in Santa Cruz, circa 1987, about the coming “ecocrisis,” and the “rise of consciousness” that humankind would attain when forced to face our worst fears about collapsing ecosystems. Which reminded me, then and now, of the Age of Aquarius. the introduction to a ’60s Asimov paperback I just picked up, in which he is induced to see the musical Hair.

Asimov’s bitchy response to people who want to groove on about the coming Age of Aquarius with him? “It was certainly very loud.”

Well, this is certainly very loud. As an enthusiastic tryer-onner of every configuration of tinfoil asshat (derby, bowler, fedora, acey-deucey, newsboy, Ming the Merciless-style headdress, Texaco gimme-cap), I was amazed to see none other than the New York Times publish a bizarrely credulous article on said singularity early this summer, entitled “In the Singularity, Humans Are So Yesterday,” which sounds like the ironic tagline of a dystopian apocalyptic thriller scripted by Charlie Kaufman and starring a very petulant Natalie Portman as the spunky wisecracking upload.

The Times article quotes futurist Raymond Kurzweil, whom it describes as “the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father.” Kurzeil told the times, “We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology. That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”

Kurzeil’s plan to “resurrect” his father is not the lightning-driven Bride of Frankenstein affair I hoped it would be; he wants to create a construct by programming all the information he can obtain about his father into an artificial intelligence. Which sounds like it might work for him, but sure as hell wouldn’t work all that well for his father; when it comes to consciousness, isn’t a copy a copy a copy? How different is this from making a sculpture of your father?

And once you have the construct, when you upload him into a flash drive and stick it in the USB of a spiffy robot body so Dad can have Christian Bale’s face and tentacles and seven boobs and a jet pack built into his ass, how different is that from filesharing an episode of Doctor Who, while the original episode sits on a hard drive in Poland, pouting? Are human beings really just information, each rendition exactly identical to any other instance of identical information?

Woah, man. Cosmic.

But, hey, far be it from me to harsh on The Singularity’s mellow. To listen to the Times, there seem to be a lot of buh-buh-buh-ZIL-lionaires in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who are quite sure that if they can go from college dropout to “visionary” tech guru in about fifteen minutes, the next logical step — to immortal being able to transcend death — should be almost as easy as getting venture capital for an online pet food retailer in early 1999. They take this stuff pretty seriously. There are also a lot of forward-thinking scientists who, as Murmansk-born, Moscow-based Maria Konovalenko, puts it, “Don’t want to age and get old, sick, ugly and frail.”

Who the heck does? It’s Konovalenko’s Twitter account that leads me to a post on her blog about a talk at TED by Sebastian Seung, Professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT.

The talk, filmed at TED in July and posted last month, concerns the “connectome,” a term for the connections between all a brain’s neurons. There’s some interesting and freaky stuff about the only time a connectome has actually been mapped — that of a worm, in a process taking 12 years. Seung then continues through the process by which the neurons of mouse brains can be mapped, which is interesting and a little scary. Theoretically, all the connections between neurons could be mapped, and Seung posits an army of nanobot cameras doing exactly that.

Konovalenko believes this is a visionary step toward immortality, in which a human’s entire consciousness can be mapped and preserved. She, and most of the other life-extension theorists putting their eggs in the information basket, believe this procedure will be feasible in this century. Damned soon, in fact, because the concept of “the singularity” means a feedback loop will accelerate technology exponentially. The progress required to go from beating another monkey on the head with a buffalo bone to watching Roomba Cat on YouTube and Facebooking Ben Bova — that’ll be nothing compared to the advances made in the next 100 years.

Or, at least…that’s what the believers say.

My opinion is that if you fileshare me, you haven’t fileshared me; you’ve fileshared a copy of me. Which is a little too Shatterday for my taste. And as for the “feedback loop?” I think getting clean water in Africa and eliminating religious violence. would be a better goal than letting uploads of the extremely rich live to see the heat death of the universe. But that’s just me.

In any event, Seung’s worm had 300 neurons; you have 100 billion. Don’t hit Best Buy for a 100-petabyte hard drive just yet. They’ll probably go on sale for Christmas, anyway, right?

Yes, it’s true. America has been surpassed as a world leader in yet another field. The crown for makers of the largest omelette has passed to 50 cooks in Ankara, Turkey, who celebrated World Egg Day by cooking a 110,000-egg omelette. The awful truth, the official notice of America’s world empire entering its twilight period, was broken to Uncle Sam with the above YouTube video, which is one of the absolute weirdest things I’ve ever seen.

What we yanks don’t realize, though, is that the scepter of world rule in the giant-omelette category slipped from our buttery fingers some time ago; according to Armenian news (Armenia is shouting distance from Turkey) the last record was held by South African cooks, who cooked up an omelette weighing over three and a half tons. If they’re referring to 2009′s legendary Capetown Omelette, however, I’m not so sure it was a legitimate record, since there were only 60,000 eggs involved.

Before that, the record was set in 2002 by a team of Ontario omeletteers, and before that, in 1994, by cooks in Yokohama, Japan. The claimed number of eggs in the Japanese omelette was 160,000, calling into question the verifiability of the Turkish claim.

I don’t want to be the one to break any of this to the owners of WorldsLargestOmelette.com, who apparently just this past summer had a go at the crown in a charity event in the Mohawk Valley near the Adirondacks of New York masterminded by Scott Tranter, The Diner Wizard at Crazy Otto’s Empire Diner. You can show your love for America (assuming you love it, or give a damn one way or the other) by watching this fine video:

Sadly, our American team used an anemic 45,000 eggs, leading a YouTube commenter to slap those New Yorkers straight:

¿Largest? You’re few littles omelettes. Realy Giant Omelettes are in Abbeville (Lousina) or Canada (Granby), France (Bessieres and Frejus) Belgique (Malmedy), New Caledonia (Dumbea, french territory near Australia) and Argentina (Pigue). Since 1974, every year in this cities.You can see some videos here in You Tube.

Doh! SNAP! But But they’ve got the URL, and in this wired era, that’s what counts. At press time, WorldsLargestOmelette.ly was still available.

Joel Brinkley, a visiting Professor of Journalism at Stanford, weighs in with an article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle about yet another nation said to be interested in developing nuclear weapons: Burma, aka Myanmar.

Just about everything about Burma is confusing to the western layperson. As you might know, the nation changed its name in 1989, following the 8888 Uprising. I just found out that in 2005, the entire nation moved its capital city, too — weird. More on that in a moment.

Anyway, back to the name: the U.S. and many other countries refuse to recognize the use of “Myanmar.” So do plenty of Burmese opposition groups both in the country and in exile, because they don’t recognize the authority of the ruling military junta to change the name of the country. The U.N., for what it’s worth, calls it Myanmar.

Read more…

Haiti has been mired in a nightmarish humanitarian situation since January’s earthquake. Many, many Haitians are still without proper shelter, food or clean water as the nation faces its upcoming elections.

As with any disaster situation, one of the biggest problems with providing medical care (besides the woeful shortage of doctors) is the lack of electricity. In the period after the earthquake, surgeons from Harvard Med School used a new device designed by MIT engineering student Danielle Zurovcik to promote “negative wound pressure therapy” without electricity.

Says Reuters:

Negative wound pressure therapy is used in hospitals worldwide to help serious wounds heal faster — especially wounds that aren’t healing well on their own. It works in part by drawing excess fluid and dead cells from the wound, by improving blood flow, and by pulling the tissues together. It also reduces pain, and helps keep wounds clean in a dirty environment. With negative wound pressure therapy, patients can have bandages changed every three days instead of every day. All of these advantages are particularly important in a disaster zone.

[Link.]

The pump utilizes “an industrial-sized toilet plunger” and plastic tubing. Rather than the $3,600-$17,000 Reuters cited negative wound pressure pumps as costing, the devices cost $3.

Described at this weeks’ American College of Surgeons meeting, the pump was spawned when second-year Brigham & Women’s Hospital surgery resident Alexi Matousek asked an engineering class at MIT to invent such a pump in response to the humanitarian need. MIT student Danielle Zurovcik made the pump her master’s thesis. MIT News described Zurovcik’s work on the pump back in April, which Gizmag also picked up on.

The information on the results is far from complete, partially because in an environment like post-earthquake Haiti it’s impossible to compare the new pumps with traditional powered ones. But inventions like this are critical for bridging the disaster relief healthcare gap.

And if you’re concerned about Haitian aid, this article on Haitian-Truth.org provides interesting reading from a Haitian perspective.

While I was immersed in the laugh-a-minute world of Argentinean chupacabra attacks, I was reminded of the brief kerfuffle this past week in the UFO community when a UFO was reported over San Juan, Puerto Rico. The sightings led to frantic posts on social networks, calls to newspapers and police, and murky YouTube videos, one of which appears above.

As it turned out, the object was helicopter toting an advertising platform. The company that operated the helicopter is Silver Wings Sky Media, has a shady URL, silverwingspr.com, that resolves to the infinitely shadier-looking http://66.40.34.126/~wings/. It’s a “general aviation center,” providing sightseeing flights and flight training as well as sky-based advertising. Their site proclaims:

If you are seeking an escape, wish to enjoy a unique hobby or are pursuing a professional career, Silver Wings is your answer. Our mission is to provide the uppermost quality aviation services while helping our pilots reach their goals in the aviation community.

Let the journey begin!

Unfortunately, most of the internal links seem to be broken. They have a promotional video on YouTube that is way creepier than any UFO footage I have ever seen: