On October 10, 2009, a Cyclone of Slack will slam into Portland bringing true SubGenius mutation back to Stumptown for the first time in a decade!

Cast aside your false profiteers and your hipster biscuits, and bask in the Yetisyn glow of true Dobbsian mutation! Experience the gene-twisting joy of a SubGenius Devival in all of its mutated glory!

* See the psychedelic sights not meant for mere Normals!
* Hear the hindbrain-boggling ranting of SubGenius Doktors directly channeling the Elder Gods!
* Smell the third-nostril opening aromas of full-bore Yetis in heat!
* Feel the tidal wave of the TRUE SLACK that we were all meant to experience

when the CYCLONE OF SLACK hits Portland!

Featuring:

REV. IVAN STANG!
DR. HOWLAND OWL!
PRINCESS WEI R. DOE!
REV. DR. ONAN CANOBITE!
THE DUKE OF UKE!
REV. CRAWFORD!

With the Musical Stylings of:

POWER CIRCUS!
NEQUAQUAM VACUUM!
CULT OF ZIR!

And:

an utter lack of NENSLO!

pdx devival

“While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus,” Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama, wrote in a book published last year.

“It was a very beautiful place and it was really green.”

Yukio Hatoyama is due to be voted in as premier on September 16 following his party’s crushing election victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Sunday.

Miyuki, 66, described the extraterrestrial experience, which she said took place some 20 years ago, in a book entitled “Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered.”

When she awoke, Japan’s next first lady wrote, she told her now ex-husband that she had just been to Venus. He advised her that it was probably just a dream.

“My current husband has a different way of thinking,” she wrote. “He would surely say ‘Oh, that’s great’.”

Yukio Hatoyama, 62, the rich grandson of a former prime minister, was once nicknamed “the alien” for his prominent eyes.

Miyuki, also known for her culinary skills, spent six years acting in the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female musical theater group. She met the U.S.-educated Yukio while living in America.

(Reporting by Colin Parott; Editing by Linda Sieg)
via: Reuters

John Hawks -University of Wisconsin anthropologist

In a fascinating discovery that counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.

The findings may lead to a very broad rethinking of human evolution, especially in the view that modern culture has essentially relaxed the need for physical genetic changes in humans to improve survival.

A team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone -dating back to the Stone Age – has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. Many of the new genetic adjustments are occurring around changes in the human diet brought on by the advent of agriculture, and resistance to epidemic diseases that became major killers after the growth of human civilizations.

“In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations,” says Hawks. “And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time.”

While the correlation between population size and natural selection is nothing new – it was a core premise of Charles Darwin, Hawks says – the ability to bring quantifiable evidence to the table is a new and exciting outgrowth of the Human Genome Project.

(the Rest: Daily Galaxy)

Last year, after a published paper found serious security holes in the way DNA data is made publicly available, health institutes in the United States and across the world removed all genetic data from public access.

“Unfortunately, that knee-jerk response stymied potential breakthrough genetic research,” says Dr. Eran Halperin of Tel Aviv University’s Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences and Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology. He wants to put this valuable DNA information back in circulation, and has developed the tool to do it — safely.

TAU

Moonbell is an automated music generator that plays musical scores based on lunar topographical data obtained by Japan’s Kaguya (SELENE) explorer during its orbit around the moon from late 2007 to June 2009.

[Launch Moonbell in a new window]

Full Story: Pink Tentacle

(the rest: Wired)

Desalinization technology has long been trapped between two competing nightmare scenarios. Without desalination, fresh water resources run out and large swaths of the earth suffer crippling water shortages. But if we desalinate on a large scale, we keep burning fossil fuels, the earth warms, the ice caps melt, and sea levels rise to wreak havoc on coastal regions.

Desalinization could theoretically solve the impending water crisis if it weren’t such an energy-intensive process; desal requires large amounts of electricity, which is primarily generated by burning fossil fuels. Call it a catch-22. But researchers at Penn State think they’ve solved the problem by creating a process that cleans wastewater while generating electricity, simultaneously removing 90 percent of salt from seawater.

(via: POPSCI

[Another potential application of this type of fuel cell is the creation of living solar panels using cyanobacteria (which can photosynthesize with limited sunlight and using the grey water from ones home to cycle through the cell as part of a purification process. ]

“Bokodes open up a whole new range of applications in the areas of tagging, user interaction, machine vision and near field communication not possible with traditional barcodes.”

Look forward to seeing more applications using bokode with augmented reality.

MIT Media Lab via: Quantum Possibility

Link to lecture videos via Edge

rest at: Heuristic England thanks LAShTAL