God Awful Things

You know what I hate? Soul Music.  It all is just fucking terrible, and I can’t tell any of it apart. Now maybe I’m just being a grumpy old man, but I think old men like soul.. A large reason for my rage against soul music is people who like it LOVE it, and want you to love it to, and they have no problem dancing in your face to encourage you to love it.. BAH!!!

Some nerds over here at the University of California, Los Angeles have an answer to that question.

*Drum Roll* and here it is!

This is your brain not on drugs

Behold in all its glory!

Those yellow triangles are pointing out clusters of green which:

The increase in green fluorescence represents the imaging of local translation at synapses during long-term synaptic plasticity.

Far out, man.

There is a nice little video making its way around the internet showing some cats getting funked up on catnip.  The one thats foaming at the mouth got the most reaction here at work..

Wow, someone should show those cats how to make an earth bong!

When I was a youngster, we had a couple cats, a calico named Felicity, and a siamese named Lazuli (her name taken from the semi-precious stone, which her eyes matched).  I’m not sure what happened to them when we were forced to relocate to Iowa whilst my mom got her bone marrow transplant, but that was it with me and cats.. until 15 years later, when I would encounter Bubs!

Now, the old cats in Missouri, they loved the catnip, they couldn’t get enough of it, but Bubs! being a curious cat, seems to have little to no reaction, oh sure, she’ll sniff it, but she gets nothing like those cats in the video.  The chemical that really gets the cats going is called Nepetalactone.

As 4aα,7α,7aα-nepetalactone it is the active chemical in Nepeta cataria that causes its characteristic effect on cats. Around 75% of cats are affected; susceptibility is gene-linked. The chemical interacts as a vapour at the olfactory epithelium. The compound only mildly affects humans: it is a weak sedative, antispasmodic,febrifuge, and antibacterial. In high doses it also has an emetic effect. Nepetalactone also has an effect on some insects, repelling the cockroach and mosquito,[1] but it is poisonous to some common flies and a sexpheromone to aphids.

Also of interest, it is revealed on the Nepeta (the catnip genus) wiki page..

Catnip and catmints are mainly known for the behavioral effects they have on cats, particularly domestics.^[8] When cats sense the bruised leaves or stems of catnip, they may roll over it, paw at it, chew it, lick it, leap about and purr, or heavily salivate. Some will growl, meow, scratch or bite the hand holding it.

Two thirds of cats are susceptible to catnip. The phenomenon is hereditary; for example, most Australian cats do not react to it.^[9] There is some disagreement about the susceptibility of lions and tigers to catnip.

Interesting Catnip Fact: “Cats which have a genome originating in geographical areas where catnip is not indigenous, like Southeast Asia, typically do not respond to catnip.”

Now this is providing some answers, see, Bubs! was not a domestic cat.  It is my theory that she is actually a pygmy tiger, and raised on the streets at that.  But there is one thing that really gets her riled up… jeans on the floor.

As a side note, the last track on the new Neko Case is 30 minutes of spring peepers and such, I can hardly wait to play it at the bar.

One of my earliest dreams I can remember would have to be dreaming of playing Wasteland on the ol’ Apple ][e, even to this day I can remember trying to figure out the Citadel, this would also progress into dreaming about Ultima V, I never did beat that game, but I remember playing hours and hours trying to figure out puzzles and what not.

Later in life I would dream of geometric shapes, usually perpetually zooming into shapes to see they were made up of the same object, or zooming out.  This usually resulted in me waking up and barfing.

Now it is just your typical dirty dreams (and nontypical dirty dreams), dreams of songs, dreams of friends, dreams of the dead, and unfortunately, sometimes work.

Well, over at the BBC they have an article on a collection of things discovered from dreams.  From the melody of the Beatles “Yesterday”:

“I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th – and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically.”

To the perfect golf swing:

“Wednesday night I had a dream and it was about my golf swing. I was hitting them pretty good in the dream and all at once I realized I wasn’t holding the club the way I’ve actually been holding it lately.”

To Frankensteins monster:

In the introduction to the book, she explained what she saw: “With shut eyes, but acute mental vision, I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”

I used to dream of my brothers doll named Sheila Atkins (sp?), she was so disturbing, and more than just for the fact that my brother had a baby girl doll.  When I would go to school I would pull out a hair and place it on her to see if she moved whilst I was away.  I hated that doll.

I apologize for a distinct lack of updates.. I blame this solely on the shoulders of work, whom have kept me busy rather than trolling the internets for fun facts.. So to tide you over, here is another brain buster.  Brought to you by the same chap responsible for the classic post “Top Down, Face up, That’s the Way We… LOLWHUT?!”

I give you… The Ames Window!

Sorry for the downtime folks, had some minor billing issues.
everything is cleared up now and we will resume with our regular updates of mind blowing facts & fun.

So, a common question gentlemen callers have of their lady friends (whom have boyfriends) “how can I sex her up?”, fortunately over at Batteries Feel Included “So, you’re in love with one of your friends, but she has a boyfriend and probably wouldn’t have sex with you anyway.”

Well, I am pleased to report that it is a pretty decent plan that I highly recommend if you’re looking for that advice.. here is my personal favorite moments..

Step Four: Remove all your clothes and break into your friend’s house.

Always solid.

Step Eleven: Pause for ten seconds to allow the incrediblness of the situation to sink in. There will be no reason for her to doubt your claim, because your beard will make you appear many years older and your cuts would add weight to the idea that you’ve come from a post-apocalyptic future where a war is currently taking place.

I was smiling by this point.

Step Thirteen: Now comes the hard part – The monologue. In your own words you must give a speech in which you mention all of these key points:

a) You are married to each other in the future
b) Her current boyfriend is dead
c) The world is coming to an end. It’s up to you to pick a reason, but I would recommend a war against machines. This whole situation will be backed up by the Terminator franchise
d) In the future your relationship is not going well
e) You’ve come back in time because you can’t help but feel that she would have been happier with her current boyfriend if he hadn’t been killed
f) Her current boyfriend is going to be hit by a bus on a day six months from her present. She should stop him going to work that day
g) If she does exactly what you say this current version of yourself will be erased and you will never get married. If she questions this flaw in your time travel logic, because you cannot change the past, simply reference Back to the Future

Anyway, give it a read, it’s good.. my own personal version of this is a bit more complicated..

Step 1 is to get her to break up with the boyfriend, or have doubts about their relationship.. this only works if you are in it for the long haul and willing to run the risk of being Mayor of Friendsville, Population 1.

I usually like to casually point out any weirdness in their relationship, which there always is something weird, like “what do you mean he doesn’t let you spend the night?”

Then wait a year or 2, then step 2. get a bottle of tequila.. the end!

I’m just about sure everyone have seen this classified ad before, but if not.. here it is in all its glory.

I could link to some really interesting time travelers famous on the internet but I haven’t the time before leaving work, but if you’ve never read up on time travelers on the internet, it is highly entertaining.

Instead, I link you to Discover Magazine: Rules for Time Travelers

It is, of course, a interesting read.. and here are my personal favorites.

Traveling to the future?

1. Traveling into the future is easy.

We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world — either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we’re talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It’s coming back that’s hard.

This is in regards to the difficulty of traveling back in time.

From your own personal, subjective point of view, you always more forward in time — more technically, you move on a timelike curvethrough spacetime. But the large-scale curvature of spacetime caused by gravity could, conceivably, cause timelike curves to loop back on themselves — that is to say, become closed timelike curves — such that anyone traveling on such a path would meet themselves in the past.

Oh this is good..

What people want to do with time machines is to go into the past and change it. You can’t. The past already happened, and it can’t un-happen.

Of course, my whole arguments with Spolans is what if it can un-happen.. blow your mind much?

But thankfully, wrapped up in a way this stuff can happen..

9. Unless you go to a parallel universe.

Parallel universes — the kind we contemplate in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (MWI) — provide potential loopholes for some of the above rules. According to the MWI, there exist different “branches” of the wave function of the universe, distinguished by different observed outcomes for the measurement of quantum events. In the celebrated Schrödinger’s catthought experiment, there is a “universe” where the cat is alive, and one where it is dead. Some imaginative (but respectable) physicists, especially David Deutsch, have speculated that we could combine this idea with the possibility of closed timelike curves to contemplate travel into the past of a different universe. If time travel is unlikely, this idea is (unlikely)², but it’s not inherently paradoxical.

If you could travel to the past in a different branch of the wave function, then we are allowed to contemplate changing that past in a self-consistent way, because it’s no longer really “your” past. So almost all cinematic invocations of time travel — where they are constantly mucking about, changing the past in crucial ways — would have to appeal to something along these lines to make any sense. But even if you can change what you thought was the past, all of the rules of continuity and sensibility still apply — no flashing lights, no disappearing, no sudden changes in the future, no re-writing of your memories, etc.

So, over at HowStuffWorks they have an article about the Top 5 Unsolved Brain Mysteries.  I found the first 4 to be fairly boring, but was very pleased to see the 5th, as it is something I frequently contemplate and bar room philosophize over.  That being… the conundrum of consciousness.

This section might just “blow your mind,” to use a common expression. But do you even have a mind? Scientists don’t know where the brain ends and the mind begins. Are they the same thing? What about souls? Are these located in our brains? What is responsible for all of the unique thoughts and feelings that make us who we are? Everyone from philosophers to physicists has taken up this question of consciousness and come up empty.

Whoa, man.

Scientists are also trying to figure out the relationship between conscious and unconscious experiences. There are some things — like breathing and maintaining a regular heart beat — that we don’t have to think about. How are these unconscious actions wired differently than the conscious ones? Is there any difference at all? We like to think we make our own decisions, but one recent study shows that we may not even do that. This study found that by using brain scanners, researchers could predict how a person was going to act a full seven seconds before the person knew that a decision had been made [sourceKeim]. Our consciousness might just be an illusion.

That’s what I’m saying.. I can’t be held responsible for my decisions, it wasn’t me, it was my brain!

There is an article over on Wired about academics who study paranormal activity.. here are my personal favorites..

Daryl Bem

Professor Emeritus of Psychology
Cornell University

Object of Study
Precognition

It’s dèjé vu in advance: In conventional psychological tests, subjects recall words they’ve had a chance to study better than words they’ve seen only briefly. Bem reversed the usual order of events and found that his subjects were significantly more likely to recall words they would study later than words they wouldn’t study at all. Extroverts show the most precognition.

Garret Moddel

Professor of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering,
University of Colorado at Boulder

Object of Study
Telekinesis

Aiming a beam of light at a glass slide in 2006 and 2007, Moddel asked test subjects to use their brainpower to increase the amount of reflected light. Expected reflection: 8 percent. Measured reflection: 8.005 percent. This represents a tiny but significant demonstration of mind over matter, Moddel says. Asked to decrease the amount of reflected light, subjects had similar success.