MonthFebruary 2010

It’s Official: Google Can Sell Power Like a Utility

Google Utility

The Federal Regulatory Energy Commission has granted Google Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of the search giant, the right to behave like a utility.

The order grants Google Energy the power to sell energy, capacity and services at market rates.

Why does Google want to do this? Right now, the company rakes in billions of dollars from ads and it doesn’t have to have extensive support desks and remote repair teams — i.e., the kind of people power providers must have on staff — in order to do it. Selling power is a much more hands-on business.

Google has said it wants to go carbon neutral. With the FERC order, it can now effectively erect as many solar panels and install as many fuel cells as it likes without worrying about having purchased too much capacity; the company can now sell off the extra power it generates.

GreenTechMedia: It’s Official: Google Can Sell Power Like a Utility

See also:

Google’s Addiction to Cheap Power

Searching for the best initial configurations in Conway’s Game of Life

Edna

Above: Edna, the longest living soup currently known.

The Online Life-Like CA Soup Search is a collaborative online project designed to find interesting patterns in Life-like cellular automata by watching the evolution of random initial configurations (known as soups). In particular, random soups are evolved until they stabilize, and all the resulting stable patterns are uploaded to the server and catalogued. If the initial soup lived for an exceptionally long time then it is also uploaded to the server.

The Online Life-Like CA Soup Search

(via Fadereu)

HP Invents a Central Nervous System for the Earth

hp nervous system

Just days after Cisco signaled it will horn into IBM’s turf by rewiring an aging city in Massachusetts, Hewlett Packard announced this morning the first commercial application of its own holistic blueprint–the torturously acronymed “CeNSE” (short for Central Nervous System for the Earth). Much like IBM’s “Smarter Planet” campaign, HP proposes sticking billions of sensors on everything in sight and boiling down the resulting flood of data into insights for making the world a better, greener place. But what sets HP apart from its rivals is its determination to create a smarter planet almost entirely within house, from sensors of its own design and manufacture to servers to software to the consultants who will tie it all together. And its first customer could not be less green: Shell Oil.

Fast Company: HP Invents a “Central Nervous System for Earth” and Joins the Smarter Planet Sweepstakes

(via Grinding)

Science of love – new study on love and hormones

hormones

Couples should not worry when the first flush of passion dims – scientists have identified the hormone changes which cause the switch from lust to cuddles.

A team from the University of Pisa in Italy found the bodily chemistry which makes people sexually attractive to new partners lasts, at most, two years.

When couples move into a “stable relationship” phase, other hormones take over, Chemistry World reports.

But one psychologist warned the hormone shift is wrongly seen as negative.

Dr Petra Boynton, of the British Psychological Society, said there was a danger people might feel they should take hormone supplements to make them feel the initial rush of lust once more.

BBC: Sex chemistry ‘lasts two years’

(Thanks Paul!)

See also the work of Helen Fisher.

Nick Pell on the Gspot

Nick Pell

Former Technoccult guest editor and current Black Sun Gazette editor Nick Pell on the Gspot:

Nick Pell has been a professional writer for more than half his life. He has written about culture, arts, spirituality, and politics for “Maximumrocknroll,” “Just Out,” “The Hit List,” and “Key 64.” He has also been an editor for Immanion Press and London PA.

Listen at Alterati

Open-source technologies to intelligently inhabit the oceans

Nomadic Ecosystem

Open Sailing is… well, just look at a list of their projects and check out their site:

– Instinctive_Architecture : an architecture that behaves like a super-organism, reacting to the weather conditions and other variables, reconfiguring itself.
– Energy_Animal : an independent module that generates energy from the waves, wind and sun, providing continuously off-grid energy and being a node for environment and data mesh networking.
– Nomadic_Ecosystem : engineering a mobile aquaculture to sustain human long term life at sea.
– Openet.org : forum to formulate a global standard for a purely civilian internet, an internet moderated by its users, not by the governments nor the industries nor the militaries.
– Life_Cable : a simpler unified standard for energy, water, waste, information in a complex built structure.
– Swarm_Operating_System : a customizable decision assisting software, using real-time data about global threats or personal interests.
– Ocean_Cookbook : making the experience at sea not of a survival quality but a truly yummy experience.
– Open_Politics : think tank about a possible internal organization for a new oceanic urban structure.

Open Sailing

(Thanks Nova)

Cementimental – Untitled Harsh Noise Graphic Novel

harsh noise

noise book detail

Surrealist book-object; harsh noise album in paperback form.

300 pages of pixel-noisescapes, created soley using the antique mac paint app LightningPaint.

Paperback with full colour cover, black + white interior.

Cementimental – Untitled Harsh Noise Graphic Novel

(via Fadereu)

Hypersigils reconsidered

Lain

Above: a still from Serial Experiments Lain

I’ve been thinking recently about Grant Morrison‘s “hypersigil” concept, but considering as not an occult/magical practice, but as as a cybernetic phenomena.*

It started as a conversation between my friends Nabil Maynard and Amber Case on Twitter on the subject of Serial Experiments Lain (which I haven’t seen). Amber said:

There were a ton of parallels between that show and my life, especially now, where my online presence affects offline interactions. [1]

My online presence actually creates who I am. It’s a machine that produces my identity and exists outside of me. [2]

That reminded me of hypersigils. Morrison explained hypersigils thusly:

The “hypersigil” or “supersigil” develops the sigil concept beyond the static image and incorporates elements such as characterization, drama, and plot. The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension. My own comic book series The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution. The hypersigil is an immensely powerful and sometimes dangerous method for actually altering reality in accordance with intent. Results can be remarkable and shocking.

Experiment:

After becoming familiar with the traditional sigil method, see if you can create your own hypersigil. The hypersigil can take the form of a poem, a story, a song, a dance, or any other extended artistic activity you wish to try. This is a newly developed technology so the parameters remain to be explored. It is important to become utterly absorbed in the hypersigil as it unfolds; this requires a high degree of absorption and concentration (which can lead to obsession but so what? You can always banish at the end) like most works of art. The hypersigil is a dynamic miniature model of the magician’s universe, a hologram, microcosm, or “voodoo doll” which can be manipulated in real time to produce changes in the macrocosmic environment of “real” life.

-“Pop Magic” by Grant Morrison from The Disinfo Book of Lies, pg. 20. (For more information, listen to Morrison’s talk from DisinfoCon (also available on DVD)

Invisibles

Above: an image from The Invisibles. The character in the center wearing a suit is King Mob, the character from Invisibles that Morrison identified himself with. Below: a photograph of Grant Morrison from his web site.

grant morrison

There has been extended internet-drama on occult sites regarding what does and does not count as a hypersigil. I think Morrison is clear that the hypersigil takes the form of a serial narrative – whether that be a comic series, a movie trilogy, a series of songs or albums, or what have you. But others have made a compelling argument that the definition needn’t be so limited. Nick Pell, in his essay “Beyond the Sigil: Creating YR own Mind Viruses” in Magic on the Edge, makes a compelling case for this, using Shepard Fairley‘s “Andre the Giant has a Posse” and “Obey Giant” campaigns as examples of other types of extended, non-static sigils.

However, for purposes of this essay, I’m only going to consider “hypersigils” as narrative works- but I do want to consider narrative beyond strictly fictional narratives. For example, one can create a narrative in a personal blog or Live Journal or their Twitter or Facebook updates.

After suggesting a connection between hypersigils and cybernetics, Nabil replied:

The number of ways that hypersigilism applies to the internet/cybernetics is kind of staggering when you think on it. [1]

Think about something as basic as a myspace/facebook profile, the choices we make defining the online persona [2] which creates a manifest change in the offline world. [3].

The things we choose to place on the internet reflect and magnify the awareness of self to ourselves and those around us. [4]

hypersigil feedback

Above: a diagram I made illustrating feedback loops of perception in hypersigils

The way I see it, the online persona, fictional self, or avatar one creates can create feedback loops to reinforce behaviors and perceptions and have a create significant “real world” changes in a person’s life over time. In the case of Grant Morrison, he was also shaping his persona in the letters column of The Invisibles, in interviews he gave, and his public persona at comic conventions.

Nabil says: “I know of one person who used net-anonymity to explore gender before pursuing changing gender IRL.” [1]. I suspect that’s rather common. Also, to go back to my interview with Amber from last week, in which she gives advice to liberal arts majors looking to establish a career outside academia:

Create an online presence that is ubiquitous and enjoyable to interface with. Let it be known who you want to be. Put that on your business card and on your social profiles.

Which, of course, is exactly how she came to be a “cyborg anthropologist.”

So I find myself wondering: what is and isn’t hypersigilic activity online (and off?) Is creating an avatar on an MMORG? If so, what about playing a character in a pen and paper role playing game?

I think it depends on the role of online and offline feedback involved – if playing a character (online or off) changes the way you think of yourself and *especially* if changes the way OTHER people think about you, then yes – I think it does.

*There was some discussions on cybernetics and complex adaptive systems and the occult at Esozone: The Other Tomorrow lead by Joseph Thiebes, deadletter b, Wes Unruh, and Edward Wilson but I missed them. I suspect the overlaps have been discussed elsewhere, if the curious reader wishes to look.

See Also:

The Other Tomorrow Manifesto

Hypersigil, Hyperstition, or Simply Interesting Living?

School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home

Panopticon

Horrifying:

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

Boing Boing: School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home

Crowdfunded journalism – does it work?

finding dolly

I pitched the whole world on Dolly Freed. Seriously, every magazine you can think of and a hundred more.

Nobody was interested in a profile of a woman who used to eat roadkill, make moonshine, and sit around reading Sartre with her alcoholic and probably-genius father, a woman who later went on to get her GED, put herself through college, and become a NASA rocket scientist who helped figure out the mess behind the Challenger explosion before turning her back on that world for a life that felt more authentic and invigorating.

Yeah, I can’t see the appeal whatsoever.

So after months of rejection, I bought myself a website about and used it to self-publish a long-form feature story about a month ago, called “Finding Dolly Freed.” […]

So did Radiohead journalism succeed? I guess it depends on the definition of success. In the strictest sense of the word, yes, it worked: I recovered my costs. Yet you could look at the visitor-donation ratio — 160 of more than 5,000 visitors contributed — and extrapolate that this doesn’t appear to be a sustainable model, at least not in its current form. I choose to look at it this way: 160 people sent money they didn’t have to spend, to a person they didn’t even know — that, to me, is wondrous.

Someone else may find a better way to indie journalism in this form — I hope so. I’d be thrilled to see an independent self-publishing model fly, but if you’ll allow me a dogmatic moment here, for it to be truly meaningful the journalism must be inviolable: Story and storytelling matter but so does the journalist and whether he/she has built the story on a foundation of reporting and integrity. Institutional backing confers credibility, but in the wilds of the Internet, you’re on your own; trust begins and ends with you and your standards and approach.

Wired: Dolly, Rejection and Radiohead Journalism

A few years ago Josh Ellis was able to get most of all of his expenses paid for in advance to write a longform journalism piece Dark Miracle: Trinity, The Manhattan Project And The Birth Of The Atomic Age, and still had $25. (Updated: see comments)

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