Hermenautic Circle blog

If humans can be cyborgs, why not trees? In this image, we see a future where technobotany has produced organic wind power stations - and many more plant-machine wonders.

Created by NL Architects, these windmill trees were the subject, in part, of an essay by Rob Holmes, writing at Mammoth about cyborg arboretums. He begins by describing what exactly such places might be:

This is a cyborg arboretum. That is, a collection of various plants not naturally found in geographic proximity, brought together for educational purposes, whose constituent plants happen to be cyborgs. Not augmented humans, but flora augmented by "non-hereditary adaptations".

Now, in some real and valid sense, just as we've been augmenting our own biological capabilities with technological adaptations for millenia, we've also been engaged in a massive and only semi-conscious re-shaping of the forms and functions of plants. However, that re-shaping (co-evolution, really), as fascinating as it is, has been primarily through hereditary tools - biology as technology, rather than something which exists in tension with biology, and thus is an object of interest when, in odd cases, it is married to biology.

This being a post about cyborgs, we're here to talk about those odd cases. So, with the exception of one case that I find appropriate because a plant's biology is being manipulated technologically to mimic a technological construct, this arboretum is filled only with plants which incorporate technology into their physical structure.

Want your mind rearranged pleasingly? Then read the whole essay via Mammoth

Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim brought a viciously dark sensibility to the new wave of noir urban fantasy. But with the hilarious second book, Kill The Dead, the series proves it belongs up there with Dresden Files and Felix Castor novels.

Minor spoilers ahead...

First of all, I should apologize. I read Kill The Dead back in May, when I got an early review copy, and it's a bit hazy in my memory. Which means this will be a shorter than usual book review, but also greatly reduces the risk of spoilers. So there's that.

It would be hard to spoil the plot of Kill The Dead in any case — it's even more of a whirlwind than Kadrey's first book. There are so many subplots, it feels at time like seven or eight novels jammed into one — but luckily, they're seven or eight highly entertaining novels, and the main character, Stark, and the setting — a seedy, horrifyingly decadent Los Angeles — hold everything together incredibly well. Really, these novels often feel as though they're more about Starks' dysfunctional relationship with his crappy hometown than about any of the other characters or situations — Stark's loathing for L.A. and everything it stands for never stops being entertaining.

But luckily, there is a main plot that plays nicely to the theme of L.A.'s oppressive horribleness. Lucifer, Stark's sometime benefactor (and, he suspects, his real father) is visiting, so he can supervise a new biopic of himself. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of Hollywood people whose souls belong to Satan, and they're getting together to make a sympathetic movie about his life. While Satan's in town, he wants Stark to be his bodyguard — more for show than for actual protection, he claims. Of course, almost nothing that Satan says about his visit and why he wants Stark as his bodyguard turns out to be true — he's not the Prince of Lies for nothing.

The passages where Stark and Satan are swanning around L.A. together, or hanging out in Lucifer's exclusive penthouse hotel suite, make for some of the best supernatural buddy comedy ever created. Their dynamic is a weird mixture of mentor/student, untrustworthy allies, and the only two people who see through most of the losers and monsters around them. Their dialog crackles nicely, like when Lucifer encourages Stark to start thinking things through more, and then later admits, "I liked you better when you just killed things." To which Stark replies, "So did I."

There are a ton of other things happening in this book, including a rich asshole who dies in an apparent autoerotic ritual, and a group of rich kids who are becoming something inhuman and incredibly codependent, and a type of zombie that's not supposed to exist, and a Czech porn star who turns out to have supernatural powers of her own AND is a monster hunter, and then there's the small matter of a zombie army. It's all a whirl of craziness and pop-culture insanity, and you can pretty much inhale it like candy-scented freon.

And this is that rare sequel that's actually better than the first book (which was plenty great) and manages to take several leaps forward in ways that make the main character seem a lot more fascinating than the first time around. Stark, in the second volume, faces more of an identity crisis than he did when he'd just crawled out of Hell for the first time. His horrible scars from the pit are actually healing, and he's becoming something closer to a normal human again — which horrifies and upsets him. But he also gets more in touch with his angelic heritage, and comes closer to becoming a full-fledged angel, which also turns out to be horrifying in its own way. By the time this book is over, Stark has made some defining decisions, and discovered some new truths about who he is and who his father was. There's no second-book wheel-spinning here.

And like I said, Stark's relationship with L.A. — as someone who was very comfortable in Hell — gets more amusing as it goes along, with the snark levels going up on a fairly steady basis. The writing is just as zingy and nasty as it was in the first book, like in this passage where Stark is chasing a teenage girl vampire who's on fire:

Vampires don't scream like regular humans. I don't know how they scream at all without lungs, but when they let loose, it's like a runaway train meets the screech of a million fighting cats. You feel it in your kidneys and bones. Tourists pee and puke at the sound. Fuck 'em. Eleanor still isn't going down. And the fire is starting to spread. Grease on the grills of nearby food stalls starts going up. A propane tank blows, setting off the sprinkler system. When I look back, Eleanor is sprinting out of the market back onto Broadway, still covered in flames.

Chasing a burning girl down a city street is a lot harder than it sounds. Civillians tend to stop and stare and this turns them into human bowling pins. Slow, whiny bowling pins. You'd think that on some basic animal level they'd want to get the hell out of the way of a burning schoolgirl screaming loud enough to crack store windows and the stupid son of a bitch chasing her. Not that I'm doing this for them. I'm doing this for the money, but they still stand to benefit from it.

When Eleanor runs across Fifth Street she isn't burning anymore. She's a black beef-jerky Barbie doll running on charred stick insect legs.

You gotta love writing like that.

And as with the first book, part of the tormented relationship with L.A. has to do with the layers of privilege — the ways in which some people are non-people, and others belong to the elite, especially the magical social club known as the Sub Rosa. Rubbing elbows with Hollywood scumbags working on the Lucifer biopic, and dealing with the weird schemes of the super-rich to live forever at the expense of their humanity give Stark an excellent opportunity to pass judgment on his social betters. Before slinking back to his own world of dive bars, donuts, monsters, and his friend the severed head.

Kill The Dead stands on its own remarkably well, although it helps to have read the first book. But enough hints are dropped about strange goings on in Hell, and the weird developments in Hellion politics, that you're left dying to know what happens in the third book. Which, if the trend continues, will probably make you die laughing and freak you out with its extreme, so-wrong-it's-right horror.

Kill The Dead comes out next Tuesday.

Cutie’s friend Thessaly Lerner, aka The Ukulady, wrote the OGs’ ultra-catchy theme song. She’s also a puppeteer and kids’ entertainer, and the creator of Miss Carrot & The Peas, investigative journalists. They recently caught up with Cutie to get her secrets for staying cute and dealing with fame, and caught The Cutester in an especially sassy mood. Click below to get in on the fun.

San Diego Comic Con won't have to change its name, and the guy with the Captain America costume and the goat can rest easy. SDCC announced a new deal that keeps it in San Diego through at least 2015. Here's the text of the press release:

San Diego – Comic-Con International: San Diego (Comic-Con), the largest comics convention of its kind in the world, today announced it will be staying in San Diego for the foreseeable future.

Comic-Con reached a self-imposed attendance limit at the San Diego Convention Center (SDCC) in 2007 and has had to cap attendance at approximately 125,000 people each year since. In looking at ways to better accommodate the growing demand from attendees and exhibitors, the nonprofit organization considered proposals for a move to larger facilities in Los Angeles or Anaheim after the expiration of its SDCC lease in 2012. This decision keeps Comic-Con in San Diego through 2015.

"We are grateful for the tireless efforts all three cities put into to their proposals," said David Glanzer, Comic-Con's director of marketing and public relations. "In the end, we feel this decision is the best for all those who attend Comic-Con and for the organization itself. We are happy that the community has worked with us to ensure that we remain here."

Comic-Con was first held in 1970 at the U.S. Grant Hotel, where it attracted 300 people. As the event grew, subsequent homes included the downtown El Cortez Hotel in the 1970s and the San Diego Convention and Performing Arts Center in the 1980s. Comic-Con moved to the then newly built SDCC in 1991. Comic-Con celebrated its 41st year in 2010.

The San Diego Convention Center Corporation has scheduled a press conference for Friday, October 1 at 11:45 a.m. at Lobby E of the convention center.

The curved glass facade of the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas promises a world of climate-controlled luxury. Except if you are poolside, where sunlight reflected and intensified by the building's shape has been melting plastic and burning people's hair.

According to BLDG BLOG:

The surface of the building acts like a parabolic reflector, concentrating solar heat into a specific target area. It's the future of urban thermal warfare, perhaps: hotels armed against other hotels in a robust defense posture defined by pure heat.

Apparently the building's designers knew this could be a problem, and coated the windows on the south side of the hotel with a film intended to scatter the light more evenly. It didn't work.

Hotel workers call it the "death ray," but a public affairs rep at the hotel said it should be referred to as a "solar convergence phenomenon." Apparently the plan is to fix the problem by providing more shaded areas poolside - perhaps some trees, which hopefully won't catch fire when they're exposed to the solar convergence phenomenon.

by Sholem Krishtalka

Photo by Ian Lefebvre.

It’s not merely that Julian Schnabel is a bad artist; he’s the worst artist. In fact, if you were to ask me to create some kind of stereotype of bad artist, I couldn’t do better than Julian Schnabel. He’s the kind of awful you just can’t fake – an inept painter whose every deficiency, every technical lack, every conceptual gap stands in inverse proportion to his own ego and self-satisfaction.

As if his paintings weren’t evidence of his towering horridness, consider his unique contribution to the field of premature self-congratulation: an insufferable, ruminating autobiography written at the ripe old age of 35.

All this is on eminent display whenever and wherever a painting of his is exhibited, and it’s some small wonder that the 5^th floor of the Art Gallery of Ontario hasn’t collapsed in on itself under the groaning strain of the pendulous load of Schnabel’s output. It’s difficult to describe the experience of walking through his new show there, simply because anything I can muster sounds too fun. The closest approximation I can venture is that it feels like being clobbered about the head by a pair of giant testicles. See? Too fun.

Perhaps another strand of metaphor is required. The overwhelming atmosphere of the show is bulimic: Walking through it, you are assaulted on all sides by vastness and enormity – almost all of the paintings clock in at the 20-foot mark; gargantuan things that ram their hyper-inflated claims to genius down your throat like someone force-feeding a duck for foie gras. I staggered towards the elevator desperate to somehow puke it all out of me, to wash myself clean of Schnabel’s oily presence.

Let’s be clear (because I was being coy up until now): Schnabel can’t paint. The two most difficult scales for a painter to tackle are the extremely small and the extremely large. Both highlight the importance of touch and of gesture.

In an extremely small painting, there is literally no room for clumsiness – everything has to be graceful and efficient; a weak passage in that tight an environment is disastrous. In an extremely large painting, the painter has to fill the canvas with their gesture, the entire body becoming an extension of the paintbrush. On a 20-foot scale, everything is amplified, everything is immediately available for scrutiny. And Schnabel’s gracelessness, his inability to do anything more than to stab and drag paint around in the most perfunctory way, is on full display. His marks merely and only fill space.

His conceptual capabilities are exactly on par with his technical abilities. This is a man who famously said of his plate paintings that the surfaces are meant to recall the destruction and trauma of Kristallnacht– which is why, I presume, they make an excellent support for portraits of pop stars and Beverly Hills socialites (one of his plate paintings is at the AGO: it’s garishly busy to the point of cluttered illegibility; it looks like sharp, shiny vomit).

The same staggering thematic blindness shouts at you from almost every wall in the AGO. Of a canvas stretched in the shape of a sail with nothing but the name “Jane Birkin” painted across its bottom, the didactic panel would have us believe that Jane Birkin not only evokes but summarizes Egypt. I’m sure Egyptians think so, too.

His homages to Bertolucci involve blown-up photo-transfers of surfers with a great splooge of white paint leaking down one side. I’d say this bit of oleaginous ejaculate is a recurring motif with Schnabel, but motif is too coherent a word, as this puddle appears almost everywhere, and is made to mean anything. The same 10-foot dribble appears on a painting made in immediate and heartfelt homage to his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat upon learning of his death. How much can this puddle of paint be made to signify? In the space of two rooms, it is reiterated to the point of irrelevance, celebrating the glory of Italian manhood and mourning the drug-overdose of his closest friend.

It doesn’t signify anything, of course, just as the plates don’t really mean anything. They’re bullshit nothings, lurching stabs at shorthand expressiveness from a man whose visual vocabulary is infantile at best.

Of his ego, this too is on eminent and laughable display. Painting after painting is choked with poorly disguised references to painters whom he imagines to be his peers: Goya, Bacon. Only Schnabel doesn’t actually have the wit to quote either appropriately or properly, and so it all comes off as cack-handed mimicry.

The show was mounted in cross-marketing with the premiere of Schnabel’s latest film at TIFF. And here’s the curious thing: Schnabel makes good movies. This has been owned up to by people whose critical natures and opinions I respect (one of my most impossibly demanding friends said that his movies “redeemed [Schnabel]“). I own up to it myself: I’ve enjoyed every movie of his I’ve seen.  How is this? How can he be such a horrible artist, but a good filmmaker?

I refer you to Gore Vidal’s 1976 essay, “Who Makes the Movies?” in which Vidal, drawing upon his years of experience as a “hack writer” for the Hollywood Studio system, tries to debunk the application of auteur theory to Golden Age Hollywood movies. In those times, he argues, the producer was king and the director was referred to by all and sundry as “the brother-in-law” – at best, an appendix to the phalanx of talent and business that were responsible for the picture.

The core of his point applies to Schnabel’s film career. Movie-making is not a solitary business. So here’s the question: How much can we really say that Schnabel himself is responsible for the excellence of his films? On each film, he had a cinematographer to actually do the hard craft of constructing his images; writers to draft a cogent script (though, granted, Schnabel is given a tertiary writing credit on his first two films); actors to interpret the script; editors to translate the raw footage into a cohesive film.

Even though his films are independent, Schnabel still operates at a level whereby he has a vast staff of very talented people at his disposal to construct his movies (he had enough lucre to hire Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg’s DP, to film 2007′s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

My loathing of his paintings (and my bafflement at his rise to art-stardom, even in the hysterical art world of the ’80s) makes it tempting to dismiss Schnabel the director as a mere brother-in-law, blustering and ineffectual, who, at the crucial moment, shoves everyone aside to don the mantle of singular genius, and bathe in the critical hosannas.

Still, let’s give Schnabel the benefit of the doubt, and assume that, as a director, he is perpetually present, guiding everyone at all stages, keeping a dictatorial eye over the exercise of his vision; his movies are his own. Still and all, there is a very basic fact that underscores all of this: a movie is photographed; a painting is built.

A movie involves arranging various elements (actors, locations, etc.), letting them do their thing, and recording it. Not an easy task, by any stretch of the imagination. But a painting involves not only creating those elements out of nothing, but also creating the world in which they interact, and then translating all of that from thought to gesture to image.

Schnabel cannot build paintings, but he can make movies. It’s the assaultive, egomaniacal failure of the former that compels these doubts about the latter. Still, these doubts are nothing more than conjecture (and mostly unproductive conjecture at that). So I’ll leave the question of who makes Schnabel’s movies open. But I know with certainty exactly who makes Schabel’s paintings.

Using my post yesterday on “legacy” admits as a jumping-off point, one of the two authors of Observational Epidemiology suggests that there may be legitimate reasons to give an admissions boost to alumni children–at least to those rarified few who occupy the Senator’s- son/Internet-mogul’s-daughter category.

The author’s logic has little to do with building institutional loyalty, colleges’ stated rationale for this form of affirmative action. Instead, it’s a straightforward calculation about the likelihood of future professional success. Brains and hard work are important to such success, of course, and these are the qualities stressed in the (largely) meritocratic admissions process. But personal connections play an important role in success, too:

Connections are governed by the laws of graph theory. I’m not going to delve too deeply into the subject (since that would require research and possibly actual work on my part), but as anyone who has read even the cover blurbs on Linked or Small Worlds can tell you, adding a few highly connected nodes (let’s call them senator’s sons) can greatly increase the connectivity of a system.

It would be interesting to model the trade off between picking a well connected legacy over a smarter, harder-working applicant given the objective of producing the greatest aggregate success. Because of the network properties mentioned above, it wouldn’t be surprising if the optimal number of legacies turned out to be the 10% to 15% we generally see.

Meanwhile, a contributor at Gene Expression takes the exact opposite view. The author buys the (contested) notion that attending an elite college itself leads to a lifetime of higher earnings (i.e., that the college adds something above and beyond the qualities that got you admitted). Given that lifetime benefit, he says, it is doubly scandalous that admissions would be partly based on who your mother or father is.

The Guardian insists that Darren Aronofsky is the front-runner to direct Superman, based on Black Swan's critical buzz. But Newsarama cites sources who say Aronofsky's actually adapting the profane supernatural comic Preacher. Which is it? And which would you prefer?

A new piece by me, just up on Huffington Post:

Ask any kid what Facebook is for and he’ll tell you it’s there to help him make friends. What else could he think? It’s how he *does* make friends. He has no idea the real purpose of the software, and the people coding it, is to monetize his relationships. He isn’t even aware of those people, the program, or their purpose.

The kids I celebrated in my early books as “digital natives” capable of seeing through all efforts of big media and marketing have actually proven *less* capable of discerning the integrity of the sources they read and the intentions of the programs they use. If they don’t know what the programs they are using are even for, they don’t stand a chance to use them effectively. They are less likely to become power users than the used.

Amazingly, America – the birthplace of the Internet – is the only developed nation that does not teach programming in its public schools. Sure, some of our schools have elected to offer “computer” classes, but instead of teaching programming, these classes almost invariably teach programs: how to use Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, or any of the other commercial software packages used in the average workplace. We teach our kids how to get jobs in today’s marketplace rather than how to innovate for tomorrow’s.

Just last year, while researching a book on America’s digital illiteracy, I met with the Air Force General then in charge of America’s cybercommand. He said he had plenty of new recruits ready and able to operate drones or other virtual fighting machines – but no one capable of programming them, or even interested in learning how. He wasn’t even getting recruits who were ready to begin basic programming classes. Meanwhile, he explained to me, colleges in Russia, China, and even Iran were churning out an order of magnitude more programmers than universities in the US. It is only a matter of time, he said – a generation at most – until our military loses its digital superiority.

more….

Burlesque has always had a love affair geek culture. There's something about sexy individuals dressing (and undressing) as science fiction icons that gets the pulse racing. But this month may've been the greatest scifi burlesque month ever. NSFW pics below!

Seriously, there has been so much science fictional burlesque in September, we're not sure what to do with ourselves. Including tons of performances in New York and one-offs in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Orleans. Check out the visual evidence of erotic ocular awesomeness below, on a city-by-city basis.

Los Angeles

Check out this show that Devil's Playground put on at Bordello in L.A., called Ladies of Sci-Fi Burlesque, in which they went where very few burlesque shows have ever gone before. Including a sexy (!) Alien routine featuring Ripley, an alien, and a chestburster coming out of her stomach. And an incredibly hot Barbarella in shiny silver undies. Not to mention a ridiculously hot Maria from Metropolis, and an acrobatic Pris from Blade Runner. Oh, and Samus Aran from Metroid Prime. Basically, everything.

New York

This New York-based troupe Epic Win Burlesque already won geeks' hearts with its Batman Show and its Ghostbusters show, both of which we've posted about before — although some way better photos of both shows are below.

But while Epic Win did keep doing both the Batman Show and the Ghostbusters show this past month, they also debuted Star Debate, in which the age-old Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate gets settled — with nudity! Check out a sexy Queen Amidala, a hot Data, an... interesting... Worf, and the best Darth Vader lapdance you'll see today. (Just pretend that's not Leia giving Vader a lapdance. It's some other girl in a Slave Leia costume.)

(And yes, the Batman Show is the one which featured the somewhat disturbing choice to portray Barbara Gordon's assault at the hands of the Joker, leaving her in a wheelchair. It's definitely a gutsy move, let's just say that. Good thing the rest of the show is unutterably sexy and playful.)

Check out some amazing photos by Ben Trivett for Asylum.com. More at his Flickr stream.

Also worth mentioning is Hotsy Totsy Burlesque, which just did a Doctor Who-themed burlesque show, featuring Nasty Canasta as the Tenth Doctor. We already featured Nasty Canasta's Tenth Doctor performance a while back, but here are some pics from this latest show:

San Francisco

Meanwhile, in SF, Bombshell Betty and Fromagique did an awesome Sci-Fi Burlesque show at the Elbo Room. Featuring a sexy dancing stormtrooper, a bitch fight with a robot... and a sexy Spock whose dress is apparently held together with tribbles. Just let that sink in. A Spock tribble dress.

New Orleans

Sadly, we weren't able to get pics of this one, but Ray Gunn from Chicago's Stage Door Johnnies did a Matrix-themed performance at Risque Soiree, which took place at the House of Blues in New Orleans, as part of the second annual New Orleans Burlesque Festival produced by Rick Delaup and Secrets in Lace. Gunn started out in a big black trenchcoat, and then he stripped down to a shiny black shirt and pants, before demonstrating "bullet time" by standing on one hand and doing other acrobatic stunts. You can view some pics of his performance here. (Down at the bottom of the first page.) And here's a video (thanks ParryLost!) of Ray Gunn's performance as Morpheus from last year:

““But electronica is the most urban musical genre,” he adds, “and few cities are as urban as big Chinese metropolises have now become. The rapidity of change has been incredible, brutal—which is perfectly expressed through dianzi music.” He approached electronica in 2002, “after I got my first computer. I was in a rock band at the time, but I chose to switch to electronic music because it allows me greatest independence; I can develop my own sound in complete autonomy. Of course, right now it is mainly underground. It does not have huge popularity here yet, but is growing fast.””

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In China, Musicians for the Modern Era

Short but interesting Wall Street Journal article on electronica in China.

Yesterday scientists announced the discovery of the first Earthlike planet in another solar system. Find out why colonies on planet Zarmina would have a view like this, of a huge sun always in the process of setting.

Painting by Don Dixon.

Officially known as Gliese 581g, we've dubbed the first colony on this newly-discovered planet Gloaming, a word that means "twilight." Because the planet is tidally locked to its star, only one side sees sunlight while the other is in constant darkness. The sunny side would be incredibly hot, while the dark side would be frozen - but astronomers estimate temperatures would be cold but livable at the border between. Colonies would be built in the gloaming, where light and dark meet.

The planet is also in orbit around a red dwarf star, whose light would be redder and much cooler than light from our yellow sun. Colonists living in Gloaming would be warmed by a sun that appeared much bigger in the sky than our own.

UPDATE ABOUT THE NAME GLOAMING:
I just spoke by phone with Steve Vogt, the astrophysicst at UC Santa Cruz who led the team that discovered this planet. Though he was fine with us calling the planet Gloaming, he said he preferred the name Zarmina (he added that the planet was "too pretty" to be called Gliese 581g). So I've decided that our future planetary colony should be called Gloaming, but in deference to his wishes the planet is going to be Zarmina from here on out.

That’s the best literary factoid floating around Twitter today. It comes from this two-minute snippet of an interview with Jennifer Burns, author of “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.”

The explanation has nothing to do with Rand’s affair with Nathaniel Branden. Rather, Burns says, Rand would get so immersed in creative fervor that her husband’s sudden appearance at her office door would startle her. The bell gave her fair warning.

Jennifer Burns, biographer of Ayn Rand

Via Maud Newton

Former runway-model Laura Brown and her husband Stephen van Rooyen are still fighting extradition from South Africa, for an alleged scam to provide a stem cell "cure" for neurological diseases. But one doctor who worked with them wasn't so lucky.

British doctor Robert Trossel was struck from the medical registry yesterday, and thus banned from practicing medicine, for his role in an alleged scheme that has had Brown and van Rooyen (pictured above) on the run from the U.S. authorities since they were indicted in 2006. Like other doctors who worked with Brown and van Rooyen, the panel said Trossel made outlandish, unsusbantiated claims about the effectiveness of injections of stem cells in the treatment of multiple sclerosis and other diseases, and overstated his success in treating these patients.

But the panel said Trossel also provided a bizarre additional treatment, called Aqua Tilis therapy (AQT), which involved "antioxidant steam" and "magnetic fields generators." And in the case of at least four patients, the stem cells he injected them with included "material containing bovine brain and spinal cord live cells."

Trossel is one of many doctors who were associated with Brown and van Rooyen, who operated a company in Atlanta called first BioMark International and later Advanced Cell Therapeutics. Here's a screenshot of one of their websites, via a 2007 Wired article:

A 2005 article about their alleged schemes, from the Los Angeles Times [via HealthBlog], is absolutely heartbreaking. It describes how one sufferer from ALS, aka Lou Gehrig's Disease, spent thousands of dollars and wasted his last two years of life chasing this phantom cure. BioMark tried to take advantage of a legal loophole that allows doctors to provide untested treatments to patients with incurable, fatal diseases, and made completely unfounded claims about their treatment. From the Times article:

The therapy, as advertised, was simple: an injection of 1.5 million stem cells in the abdomen. Everybody got the same type of cells, regardless of their disease. "Once in the body, cells migrate to the site of the disease and begin producing the needed cells," explained a BioMark information packet.

The company charged around $21,000 for the injection of cells, which cost about $1,000. And they had a scientific advisory board (most of whose members had no idea they were on the board.) Brown told the Times in a 2004 interview, "When something this powerful, this beautiful, is laid in your hands, in your path, you give everything you have to it." Even after they fled the U.S., they kept providing the treatments in Tijuana and Rotterdam (which is where Dr. Trossel got involved.)

As the 2006 indictment notes:

The defendants, LAURA BROWN and STEPHEN VAN ROOYEN, recruited customers with the representation that science had proven the therapeutic power of stem cells and that BIOMARK was simply making it available to the world . The BIOMARK website stated that "[a]11 ALS research now cites the promise of Stem Cells as the only answer ."... The defendants, LAURA BROWN and STEPHEN VAN ROOYEN, obtained the cells from blood banks, which shipped the cells from locations in Texas and elsewhere to BIOMARK in Florida . BIOMARK shipped the cells from Florida to their customers' homes or to the offices of medical practitioners in various localities who would perform the injections for BIOMARK customers. BIOMARK's stem cells were distributed in vials, which the defendants, LAURA BROWN and STEPHEN VAN ROOYEN, caused to be labeled as containing 1 .5 million stem cells.

According to a 2007 article by ABC News, Brown and van Rooyen (who were on the FBI most wanted list at one point) are living in Johannesburg. South Africa does have an extradition treaty with the U.S., but Brown and van Rooyen's attorneys claimed that because the treaty doesn't bear the proper signature from South African President Thabo Mbeki, it's invalid. They blamed the Bush administration's opposition to stem cell research for all of their problems. Said van Rooyen in an interview:

"We were set up in the most horrible, vindictive manner... The Bush administration supports the pharmaceutical industry, which wants smaller would-be contenders in the multibillion dollar stem cell arena to be put out of business."

Photos of Laura Brown and Stephen van Rooyen by Gallo Images/Getty Images.

Lord Berners (1883-1950): Composer, Writer, Painter by Peter Dickinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In the world out there, Lord Berners is known as a classic British eccentric, and second for his composed music.  I only know him through his memoirs and short fiction, which is remarkable.  He was also a painter of some talent, but the works strikes me a little too Sunday school painting.  But any man that has his horse in his living room is ok with me.  He also color dyed the feathers of the local pigeons around his home - which is about the size of New Jersey.  In other words he was rich, really rich, and did what we wanted to do.  For instance he liked to be driven though the local village while he wore a series of masks.


Often compared to Erik Satie (for the eccentricity as well for his music) Berners is one of those classic figures in Pre-world war 2 England.  Surrounded by servants and witty people (Cecil Beaton, Constance Lambert, etc) and a very close relationship with Diana Mitford, better known as Diana Mosley aka as Hitler's close friend.


Peter Dickinson has put together an equally eccentric book on Berners.  Mostly consist of interviews with people who knew Berners (for instance Diana Mosley - a fascinating interview) and it is interesting how one story is told through various individuals.  For instance did he have lunch with Hitler?  Some say yes, but Mosley says it didn't happen.  But people want to believe it happened!


Also interesting in this volume you get Berners record collection at the time of his death, and a list of music sheets he owned as well.  The book is almost like a Peter Greenaway obsessive piece of work.   What I found interesting is that most of his friends didn't really care for his writing as much as for his music.  But even that, they think of his work as "light."  Only the great contemporary British composer Gavin Bryars sees Berners as a subversive artist - and I think that is a correct way of looking at his work.   So as the majority  in this book sort of poo poo his writing, I totally disagree with that critical thought.


Lord Berners is an interesting composer, a so-so painter and a magnificent writer.  That's Tosh's opinion at the very least!


View all my reviews

Wall of Voodoo’s first EP came out Sep. 30, 1980. Here’s a live version of “Longarm” from that era.

Bay of Pigs’ “Addiction” single came out Sep. 30, 1980.

Asked by a New Yorker reader if he uses Twitter–he has a piece in the latest issue on Twitter’s irrelevance to social change–Malcolm Gladwell answers: “I don’t, because I worry that the time I devoted to tweeting would take time away from things with more impact and permanence.”

Like that 5,000-word piece about ketchup?

(Sorry, couldn’t resist, having just waded through it a couple of weeks ago.)

Via Romenesko

The mysterious time-traveling Doctor has been called many things, from "the on-coming storm" to "the lonely god." But watch as he calls himself something you've never heard before, in a precious snippet from the Christmas special. Minor spoilers ahead...

Here are the 17 awesome seconds from this year's Christmas special, culled from a new trailer for all of the BBC's fall and winter programmes:

So I guess this really is a retelling of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with Michael Gambon as Scrooge. Huh. That will be something. Actually, if the show is committed to doing a Christmas episode every year, the Dickens approach seems way better than just throwing some robot Santas or robot Angels into an unrelated storyline.

Here's the whole fall/winter trailer, which is honestly worth watching for all the glimpses of Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant and Matt Smith in non-Doctor Who roles. You could almost trick yourself into thinking this is the trailer for some kind of "X Doctors" special:

[DoctorWhoTV.Co.UK and Planet Gallifrey]

He yanked aside a cretonne curtain, revealing in a recess a scale model of Sullivan's masterpiece, the Transportation Building of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, rendered in a substance closely resembling fingernail pairings.

There has been much discussion in these pages of the mystery that is New World Archive, but for the first time we have inside information as to what’s going on inside the company. A reliable source close to the company has confirmed that they are indeed, as surmised here late last year by Liz, Ben and [...]

Publicity strategy deployed by many in arts communities:

Commentary on the current ubiquity of owls in hipster subcultures:

Admonition against dwelling on the idea of a dog:

IN THIS UPDATE: Ben Katchor, Stephen O’Connor.

UPCOMING EVENT: On October 9th (from 6-7 p.m. at San Francisco’s Root Division, as part of Litquake’s Litcrawl), SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS will present its first live event: An Evening of Remarkable Stories about Unremarkable Things featuring Rob Baedeker, Chris Colin, Miranda Mellis, Beth Lisick, and Katie Wiliams. PLUS: the first-ever Object Slam. Map to Venue. Confirm your attendance on Facebook!

***

1) Ben Katchor invites Significant Objects readers to check out the following events:

Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 7:30pm
Slideshow Lecture:
“The Great Museum Cafeterias of the Western World.”
Carleton College
Boliou Hall
1 N. College St.
Northfield, MN 55057

free and open to the public

October 8 – November 6, 2010
Group Exhibition: Ink Plots: The Tradition of the Graphic Novel at SVA
Visual Arts Gallery
601 West 26 Street, 15th floor
New York, NY 10001
212.592.2145

***

2) Stephen O’Connor will be reading from his new collection of stories, Here Comes Another Lesson, at the following times/places:

New York City, Thursday, October 7:
7:30 PM
Sweet! Actors Reading Writers
Three of Cups in the East Village: 83 1st Ave @ 5th St.

Brooklyn, NY, Tuesday, October 12:
8:00 PM
Reading w/ Martha Colburn & Thollem McDonas (Films & Live Music)
Issue Project Room, Old American Can Factory: 232 3rd St.
$10 ($9 advance)

Brooklyn, NY, Thursday, October 14:
Reading
Community Bookstore: 143 Seventh Avenue, Park Slope
Free

San Francisco, Saturday, October 16:
9:30 PM
Reading/Signing Writers with Drinks
Make-Out Room: 3225 22nd Street
San Francisco, California 94110

Los Angeles, Monday, October 18:
TBA
Reading/Signing Rant & Rave Reading Series
THEATRE THEATER: 5041 Pico, Los Angeles, CA
$15

Los Angeles, Tuesday, October 19:
TBA
Reading/Signing
Pilgrim School: Los Angeles (Private)

Los Angeles, Wednesday, October 20:
7:30PM
Reading/Signing
Skylight Books: 1818 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90027
Free

San Francisco, Thursday, October 21:
7:30PM
Reading/Signing
Booksmith: 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco, California 94117
Free

Berkeley, CA, Saturday, October 23
3:00-5:00 PM
PEN West
Margaret Schaffer’s house: 1 Quail Rd. (Private)

San Francisco, Saturday, October 23
8:00-9:30 PM
Reading/Signing (w/ Tsering Wangmo Dhompa & others) Bernal Yoga Literary Series
461 Cortland Avenue at Andover Street
Free

***

MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!

Any Trouble’s “No Idea” single came out Sep. 29, 1980. Here’s a live version from that era.

The original Zamboni is a Frankenstein-like amalgamation of genius, elbow grease and trash-picked military surplus parts. Frank started with a Jeep engine, the chassis from an old oil derrick, a hydraulic cylinder from a Douglas Aircraft fighter plane and a paddle-and-chain system that, in theory, would shoot ice shavings into a tank. "My dad always said if people hadn't told him it was impossible, he probably never would have tried it," says the gray-haired Richard, who, equipped with a Timex watch and a pocket protector, could pass for Joe Gibbs' brainy little brother. "He couldn't draw a straight line, but he was a determined guy, and boy did he know how to make a beautiful sheet of ice." —ESPN

Ryan Reynolds is quickly becoming superhero movies' MVP, but he's also willing to get out there and do some weird indy movies. Case in point: Buried, opening wide this weekend, in which Reynolds spends the whole film in a coffin.

While Buried isn't really science fiction, it definitely counts as heightened reality — especially when Reynolds' cell phone keeps working and has signal six feet underground. Not to mention the fact that he never runs out of oxygen. And the film comments on the ways in which the world has become incredibly small and networked, with Reynolds making phone calls all over the world to people who never think that they're talking to a man in a coffin in the desert. We saw the film a while back, and got the chance to talk to Reynolds about taking on weird acting challenges... plus the strange intruder that shows up in the film.

Spoilers ahead...

So in Buried, Reynolds plays Paul, a civilian contractor in Iraq who's been taken hostage — and his captors have buried him in a coffin, six feet under the ground. The movie starts with Reynolds already in the coffin, and we soon discover that he's been left with a cell phone so he can communicate with his captors, as well as other people in his life. Not surprisingly, it's a claustrophobic experience, but director Rodrigo Cortes manages to find enough wild camera angles to keep the film visually interesting and create a sense of movement. It's not just one long closeup of Reynolds' face, although there are a lot of those.

We caught up with Reynolds and screenwriter Chris Sparling a while back, and Reynolds told us he was excited to do another straight-up drama. "I've done a lot of dramas, they're just usually not on people's radars," says Reynolds. Cortes saw Reynolds in another small drama, called The Nines, that was "very existential and bizarre, and not very many people saw it." Reynolds adds: "I was eager to try something else, and this is the the kind of script, and project, that comes along once in a career. A lot of times, you let this go by."

This film presented a huge acting challenge to Reynolds, who's literally on screen for the entire running time:
I have to do a movie in a closeup, and you can't lie in a closeup," says Reynolds. "Everything Paul goes through in the movie, I have to do the scene." Every one of Paul's emotions takes place on screen, and the transition from one moment to the next is all right up there. Reynolds says he had to go through "the full spectrum of emotion in a closeup," without being able to cut away to another scene or a different location. But Reynolds says he doesn't think this film is gimmicky — if anything, "most normal movies are gimmicks," because they can use editing to cheat on stuff.

We're seeing what has been cobbled together in an edit room, and it's rare that you see something on screen that I like to think is truthful. I wanted every reaction that paul was having and every moment to be happening on camera.

Reynolds adds that the film is like "North By Northwest in a coffin," and "shooting it was like a fever dream," over a 17-day period.

Reynolds actually said no to Buried at first, because his Hollywood experiences led him to worry that halfway through shooting, "some asshole in a suit" would show up and say "I paid for this," and try to insist that they include some scenes outside of the coffin. "If you cut away from the coffin, that would have made the movie very small, ironically." And Sparling said that over the period of time he was pitching this script, lots of execs made suggestions, like having flashbacks, or cutting to the people that Reynolds is talking to on the phone, or having him get out of the coffin halfway through the film only to encounter new challenges.

But Cortes wrote Reynolds a long letter, which assuaged his concerns about the project, and Reynolds soon realized that Cortes wasn't going to let anybody mess this film up.

The weirdest moment in the film — spoiler alert! — is when a snake suddenly gets into Reynolds' coffin, which has previously seemed impregnable and unshakable. Sparling said that in earlier drafts, there might have been ants or spiders that were able to crawl inside the coffin. But Cortes asked if the coffin could have a hole in the side, where Reynolds could put his lighter, so he wouldn't have to be holding it all the time. And once there was a bigger hole, Sparling decided that a snake might be able to crawl inside. And as it turns out, it's a huge honking snake. According to Reynolds and Sparling, the snake is partly CG, because the real-life snake they had on set was absolutely terrified.

Buried is in limited release now, and goes into wide release on Oct. 8.

Orbiting a nearby red dwarf star called Gliese 581 are 6 planets. One of them is a rocky ball, bigger than Earth, in the "habitable zone" where water is liquid and temperatures are human-friendly. It's possible we could live there.

Unlike Earth, this planet called Gliese 581g, is "tidally locked" to its star. That means one side of the planet always faces the sun, and the other faces darkness. Temperatures on the two sides would be dramatically different, with the livable area in the "terminator" between day and night.

Living on Gliese 581g would put you in an eternal twilight, which doesn't sound bad at all. Temperatures in the terminator area might be between -24 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 to -12 degrees Celsius), which is the average temperature of the planet's surface. So things would be a bit chilly, but you could always visit the perma-sun on dayside if you needed a dose of red dwarf radiation.

According to AFP:

The planet, found by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, is orbiting in the middle of the "habitable zone" of the red dwarf star Gliese 581, which means it could have water on its surface.

Liquid water and an atmosphere are necessary for a planet to possibly sustain life, even it it might not be a great place to live, the scientists said.

The scientists determined that the planet, which they have called Gliese 581g, has a mass three to four times that of Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days.

Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet and has enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere, according to Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the leaders of the team that discovered the planet.

The researchers say the most important aspect of this discovery is that it means Earthlike worlds are probably pretty common, given that we found one that's practically in our own stellar backyard.

via AFP [PDF of scientific paper from Astrophysical Journal via Steven Vogt's website]

Image by Lynette Cook

This Thursday only—download friend & fellow Beatles-blogger Michael Gerber's new novel, Life After Death (For Beginners), for free! (More details here.) The description:

LADFB stars Tom Larkin, an impossibly famous rock icon who dies tragically at the hands of a deranged fan—or so the world believes. In reality, Tom narrowly escapes with his life. As he recuperates in a secret hospital for the super-rich, his loving but imperious wife Katrinka becomes convinced that it’s safer for everyone if the musician stays dead. Reluctantly, Tom agrees to live out his days in obscurity… until an old enemy reveals that his life is still in danger. Stripped of his former fame and access, Tom has to figure out who tried to kill him without publicly revealing his survival. His search leads him back to his old life, to the manager who made him a star; to the other three members of The Ravins, each dealing with his legacy in their own way; to his estranged daughter and the son who thinks he’s dead and of course, to Katrinka, the eccentric, devoted, public face of the Larkin myth

A few years ago, Alan Jaras told a science fiction story on Flickr, using images of crystals he'd photographed under a microscope. He called it MicroWorld. Here are a few of the breathtaking images and the incredible tale they tell.

The story is about explorers who land on the tiny world, whose laws of physics don't resemble anything they've experienced before. Oceans are solid; strange thrumming mountains slice the landscape; crystalline life forms are everywhere. Jaras tells the story of their exploration, and eventual discovery that the planet is suffering from atmospheric toxins that will be burned away by a nearby supernova. Yes, it's Golden Age stuff, and incredibly fun to read. You can read a few excerpts from Jaras' tale below, but I advise you to read the whole thing.

Read MicroWorld, via Flickr.

Abandoned
As they approached, the sound of the moving glacier grew fainter to be replaced by a quiet harmonious hum. From the distant viewpoint of the plateau the buildings had appeared to be small dwellings but now they could see them to be much larger. Roughly spherical in shape, as if built to withstand some tremendous pressure, they were arranged in a small group of about ten in number. The explorers moved closer and it soon became obvious to them that these structures had long been abandoned.

Large plates had been riveted over openings to keep 'something' out. Whether the defences were meant to repel an invading force or some pending cataclysmic event the travellers would never know.

This is a scanning electron micrograph of crystals of a complex sodium sulphate mixture forming from furnace gases. The largest 'sphere' is approx. 3 microns in diameter. The average human hair is about 50 microns in diameter.

From Above the Maze Looked Easy
Safely through the crystal mountains they gazed down on the gigantic maze. What was its purpose, to keep them out of the land which lay beyond or to keep others in? With some trepidation they began the long climb down.

Scanning Electron Micrograph of sodium sulphate recrystallized from methanol.

The Forest That Knew No Fractals
Having negotiated the maze,more by luck than by skill, our brave explorers continued in their quest. Where were the inhabitants? Are any surviving on this world where the laws of nature seemed no longer to apply? Many questions were still to be answered. The forest was their next barrier; trees with no branches , no leaves; as if stripped bare by some gigantic explosion. They pressed onward drawn by the strange light that beckoned.

Electron Micrograph (SEM) of fracture surface of silicon carbide fibre reinforced glass ceramic.

The coaster had lost its roll
Their journey through the forest had fortunately been uneventful and soon they looked down on a great plain. The remains, of what they could only imagine as a gigantic theme park, stretched out for miles. Their pulses began to race,was there a lost civilization to be found, or, like the apparent roller coaster, just a memory.

SEM micrograph of multi-layer surface coating on plastic. Shrunk , cracked, crazed and curling due to over-enthusiastic etch in plasma etcher.

The Causeway
They continued, carefully threading their way past the rock pools of gas. By now they had learnt to expect the unexpected on MicroWorld, but nothing prepared them for the sight that confronted them as the reached the end of the ocean. A shimmering interface plunged vertically downwards, the vast sea cut through and separated as if cleaved by some gigantic sword. They stood at the edge of the shore looking down at the immense pulsating wall and marvelled at the strange laws of physics that governed this world. The land too came to an abrupt end with no apparent way down while far below a crystal sea slowly heaved, creaking and groaning as each swell ground huge metallic lances against each other. They walked slowly along the cliff top desperately searching for a way forward.

Scanning Electron Microscope image of re-crystallized sodium carbonate.

Rivers of gas
The two gas layers began to mix and swirl but still seem to remain immiscible. In a strange psychedelic dance the green and purple layer of the sublimed 'snow' crystals spiralled with the pink creeping ground fog as it continued to rise and advance towards them from deep below.

Scanning Electron Micrograph of re-crystallized sodium carbonate. The width of the picture is about the diameter of the average human hair.

The Sky Began To Boil
Back in the relative safety of their craft they were once again surrounded by the familiarity of the control room. For a moment, as they sank into the long awaited comfort of the body-moulded seats, the groanings of the planet seemed somewhat distant and unreal. But there was little time to relax, the main wave of high energy particles from the supernova was almost upon them. Already large bubbles were forming in the sky above them as it started to boil. If they could survive this then the journey through the black hole back to their own galaxy should be relatively easy. Fingers danced over the control desk and the panel lights glowed to welcome them back; so far so good.

A macro shot of internal bubbles in a hand-made glass bowl.

Aliens descend onto the major cities and start just hoovering people up, in the awesomely crazy new film Skyline. But the new trailer reveals more of the mayhem, including deadly tentacles. And check out some new death-orgy-tastic images.

You have to love the carnage. And the blue face-cracking. This movie is like Independence Day with an extra helping of crazy. And hopefully less Apple.

Skyline will be in theaters Nov. 12. [via I Am Rogue]

October is a science fiction thrill ride, and here's your survival manual. The io9 calendar for October includes the returns of Caprica and Sanctuary, the launch of The Walking Dead, and Iain M. Banks' new Culture novel. Plus conventions galore!

As always, you can download the io9 calendar as a printable PDF here. And if you have any cool events for November's calendar, drop us a line at calendar@io9.com.

Amazing design and layout by Stephanie Fox, and research/reporting by Kelly Faircloth.

An article in the Wall Street Journal this week, “Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books,” has had publishing observers abuzz, and the reviews are not all positive.

The article made the case that times have become grim for literary novelists. Once, they could expect substantial advances that might carry them through two or more years of work, and decent sales after publication. Now they’re lucky if an indie house tosses them an advance of a few thousand dollars. And the pot of money available to novelists is shrinking, as inexpensive e-books are gaining in popularity and hardcover sales are slipping.

Chad Post, of Open Letter, the University of Rochester’s literary-translation publishing house, responded at epic length to the article yesterday, specifying two sources of his irritation: The article “seems to be attacking indie presses (‘they only offered a $3,500 advance! Cheap bastards!’), which is misguided, and … it’s reinforcing a publishing system that is failing.”

It is simply not feasible to return to a world in which writers routinely got $200,000 advances, Post argues. On the one hand, the number of fiction titles has–counterintuitively–risen substantially, from 25,100, in 2002, to 45,000, in 2009. At the same time, publishing revenue is on a downward arc, shrinking from $24.3 billion, in 2008, to $23.9 billion, in 2009. Given those trendlines, “something has to give,” Post says.

At the same time, the Journal makes an assumption about the effect of e-books on revenue that Post finds dubious–namely that they by definition cannibalize hardcover sales. But what if they are cutting into mainly mass-market paperbacks? Or what if word-of-mouth from enthusiastic e-book consumers is having positive but as-yet-unmeasured effects? Basically, no one knows yet.

The publisher make two points in conclusion: “First off, rather than focus on ebook pricing and the backwards slow-to-adapt struggling publishing industry, we should instead focus on audience development. We simply do not live in a culture that can support 50,000 works of fiction a year on sales alone.”

Second, “this whole ‘authors deserve $50K advances for simply putting words on paper’ argument is weird to me….”

For the state of the debate about the future of publishing, you could do worse than read these two pieces in tandem.

Ralph Vicinanza, a literary agent who specialized in foreign rights, died suddenly at his home on Saturday. For two decades, he represented such high-powered authors as Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, Carl Sagan, Robert A. Heinlein, George R.R. Martin, Terry Pratchett and Kim Stanley Robinson, primarily in overseas deals. In 1998, Vicinanza formed Created By, an L.A.-based production/management company that works mostly with science fiction. [Publishers Lunch]

Meet the micronium, the world’s tiniest musical instrument. The strings are only around a micrometer in diameter, but it’s designed so it’s still audible. Read the full story at io9.

[via annaleen]

The National Reseach Council has been announcing the imminent release of new graduate-program rankings since 2007. (The previous ones, issued in 1995, bestowed bragging rights for a decade.) While the new rankings finally came out this week, the reaction was confusion as much as anything else.

To be sure, some universities seized on them: Inside Higher Ed reports that Boston University broke an NRC embargo to crow that the the tabulations revealed “significant advancement” in 11 of the 24 B.U. programs ranked both this year and the first time around.

The 1995 rankings, however, were straightforward if highly debatable lists based on departments’ reputations. This time around, the NRC took a more sophisticated approach. A bit too sophisticated, some think. The council produced two separate lists in each discipline, one based on objective criteria, which varied from field to field, and one based on reputation. In each case, rather than assign a specific ranking, the NRC gave a range of possibilities, with a 90 percent confidence level.

“We can’t say, ‘This is the 10th best program.’ We can say it’s probably between 5th and 20th,” said Jeremiah P. Ostriker, chair of the NRC committee that prepared the rankings, and a professor of astronomy at Princeton University, according to Inside Higher Ed. The approach used is “a little bit unsatisfactory, but at least it’s honest,” he added.

But after a five-year process that cost more than $4 million, not to mention countless hours spent by professors compiling data, some people wanted firmer judgments than that. And some of the ranges are much broader than Ostriker’s example. For instance, the NRC says, with 90 percent confidence, that the communications department at the University of Texas at Austin lies somewhere, on the reputational scale, from the 2nd to the 67th best in the nation. Smoke on that, Texas A&M!

The lesson here might be that you shouldn’t have rankings done by people who fundamentally disbelieve in them. Notes Scott Jaschik, of Inside Higher Ed: “When one of the reporters on a telephone briefing … asked Ostriker and his fellow panelists if any of them would ‘defend the rankings,’ none did so.”

By now, you've no doubt heard of the Las Vegas death ray: "The tall, sleek, curving Vdara Hotel at CityCenter on the Strip is a thing of beauty," the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. "But the south-facing tower is also a collector and bouncer of sun rays, which—if you're at the hotel's swimming pool at the wrong time of day and season—can singe your hair and melt your plastic drink cups and shopping bags."

"Hotel pool employees call the phenomenon the 'Vdara death ray'," we read.

[Image: The "Vdara death ray"; illustration by Mike Johnson for the Las Vegas Review-Journal].

The surface of the building acts like a parabolic reflector, concentrating solar heat into a specific target area. It's the future of urban thermal warfare, perhaps: hotels armed against other hotels in a robust defense posture defined by pure heat.

Of course, Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall here in Los Angeles had its own "microclimatic impact," as this PDF makes clear. Back in 2004, USA Today explained that "the glare off the shimmering stainless steel curves at the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall is so bad, it's heating up nearby condos at least 15 degrees and forcing owners to crank up their air conditioners."

Oddly, though, this same heat-reflection effect came up recently in a course I'm currently teaching; a student and I were looking at a project by Sean Lally, Andrew Corrigan, and Paul Kweton of WEATHERS (previously documented on BLDGBLOG here).

That project proposed not really building anything at all but simply tapping the geothermal energy available beneath the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik to create "microclimates" around the city. "Heat is taken directly from the ground," they explain, "and piped up across the landscape into a system of [pipes and] towers."

[Image: By Sean Lally, Andrew Corrigan, and Paul Kweton of WEATHERS].

However, the question here would be: could you deliberately design an architecture without walls, using only thermal gradients—defining areas of public use and congregation solely based on heat? Could these and other parabolic reflections of solar energy be deliberately used as a tactic of architectural intervention and urban design? CTC™: Controlled Thermal Concentration.

Minneapolis-St. Paul, for instance, gets a series of strange pavilion-like stands topped with polished reflectors—and they're ugly as hell, and they make no sense at all except as bad public art, until you stand right next to them. All the snow around them has melted, you first notice, and you can actually stand there without a jacket on even in the depths of winter.

They are "buildings" without definable perimeter, shimmering with daily changes in heat—not a blur building, we might say, but a mirage. Which, I suppose, brings us back to Las Vegas...

Everybody's freaking out over this Vulcan traditional greeting hoodie, which looks like an open palm when zipped - but turns into Spock's favorite hand gesture when unzipped. What else does designer Paulo Bruno have up his sleeve?

He's done a ton of design dork shirts, but these two tees the Brazilian artist submitted to Threadless are the very essence of geek chic. Who wouldn't want an enchanted eagle zooming across their chest?

And this Pac Man optical illusion is something any 8-bit fan should be proud to wear.

That’s the view from the Soho House in Los Angeles, with downtown LA off to the southeast. I talked to James Ellroy there yesterday afternoon for a lovely book club session on the semi-outdoor terrace, which was semi-sweltering yet entirely grand. The terrace includes a reflecting pool and olive trees, which is sort of marvelously sci-fi when you’re 15, 20 — how many floors up? It’s hard to say, as when you get into the elevator to go to the Soho House there are only two buttons, the button for the club and the one to return you to the basement parking.

The bust of Beethoven isn’t always there. That was special for the event.

Thanks to Tyson Cornell for producing and Mr. Ellroy for being the one and only Mr. Ellroy.

Here are a few design competitions that might be of interest for some of you—even if "entering design competitions" is "sheer folly":

1) The "Next Generation" series, sponsored by Metropolis, stretches into its eighth year with a leap over the Rockies to Los Angeles.

This year the magazine has teamed up with the General Services Administration (GSA) for Get Zero:

GSA, one of the world’s biggest landlords, is being challenged by its Administrator Martha Johnson to achieve a Zero Environmental Footprint for its existing office buildings. She’s likened this challenge to the Apollo Space Project of the 1960s (the same decade when hundreds of new, modernist government buildings, like the one in downtown LA, were built). GSA’s colossal existing stock of buildings, over 9,600 of them in the U.S., poses an even bigger challenge: How can forward thinking-design transform backwards-looking buildings?

The specific site chosen for this is 300 North Los Angeles Street.

Get Zero "asks entrants to design “fixes” that will transform the existing building, bringing it to the highest possible level of performance in a memorable, beautiful, and original way." Read more at Metropolis.

2) "Each day, over 1.1 million people enter into the United States," says a competition calling itself seekingSHADE (not Seeking Shade, of course). "Many arrive by air, some by sea, but most cross our nation’s borders on land, through large and small ports of entry in a myriad of communities along our northern and southern perimeter."

This competition—which centers around the design of a "sun shelter" to be installed at the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry—also involves the GSA: "GSA is proud to provide the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and their agents, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), with award-winning properties that help them effectively execute their mission and properly welcome travelers to the nation," we read.

Public buildings are part of a nation’s legacy. They are symbolic of what Government is about, not just places where government is conducted. Structures as diverse in scale and location as the Capitol in Washington or a remote border crossing are monuments to the vision, leadership and commitment of the nation's [sic] that build them. Though a seemingly straightforward challenge, this sun shelter is imbued with greater meaning. For many, it may serve as their initial introduction to our country. For returning visitors, it may become a familiar landmark. Whichever the case may be, we trust your submission will reflect your hopes and aspirations for the nation.

There seem to be ample opportunities here both for practical design experimentation and for pointed political commentary, whichever direction you might choose. Read more at seekingSHADE.

3) The Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition "encourages a comprehensive, integrated approach to evaluating the larger river/park system" of the city of Minneapolis.

The ideal vision for this riverfront region, the organizers suggest:

• Establishes parks as the engine for economic development along the river;
• Knits both sides of the riverfront together with their surrounding communities, thereby transforming the river from a barrier to a connector;
• Re-focuses the city toward one of the three great rivers of the world—the Fourth Coast of the U.S.—an extraordinary environmental amenity that defines Minneapolis’s civic identity, past, present and future.

The competition thus aims for "a design-driven vision for a 21st century park system" in the city. Read more at the competition website.

4) Last but not least, the somewhat ungainly named BrickStainable design competition comes back for its second year.

[Image: From last year's BrickStainable winner in technical design, by Rizal Muslimin].

The competition "seeks integrative solutions for a building using clay masonry units (brick) as a primary material." Specifically, it hopes "to explore the potential of brick construction in the creation of an energy efficient building."

Design teams are challenged to maximize the physical characteristics of this construction in the creation of integrated design solutions utilizing the physical characteristics of this material such as thermal mass, porosity (or lack thereof), modularity, color, etc.

I've included some images of last year's award winner in the category of technical design; this is a project by Rizal Muslimin.

[Images: From last year's BrickStainable winner in technical design, by Rizal Muslimin].

Muslimin experimented with a series of "weaving rules" for his specially manufactured bricks, including segmentation, pixellation, checkered and linear arrangements.

For more info, please refer to the competition website.

Lyall Watson was a South African-born botanist, zoologist, biologist, anthropologist, zoo keeper and BBC presenter who wrote Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural (1973), among other popular books that helped usher in the Seventies’ New Age trend. Among other dubious but undeniable accomplishments, he coined the term “hundredth monkey” — referring to the hypothesis that a sudden spontaneous and mysterious leap of consciousness achieved when a species’ “critical mass” point is reached. Significant Objects hails Watson for his 1990 book The Nature of Things: The Strange Behaviour of Inanimate Objects, a Fortean account of rings that find their way back to their owners and so forth; the book helped inform our Fortean (not New Age) TALISMANS object category. Watson’s revival of the Victorian meaning of the term “notional” also helped us in our thinking about our IDOLS object category. Watson describes as notional any “inanimate object which… demands attention and exercises power over those people to whom it appeals.”

We’re a little bit late with this — he died in June 2008, but we’ve just learned about his passing. Moment of silence, please.

Over on the io9 Facebook page, we're talking about some pretty key issues of the day, like what you think about the fall TV season, and whether it would be easier for you to bring home a special friend of the vampire or cyborg persuasion. Which would it be easier for your family to accept?

Not into Facebook? You can have conversations about random topics related to science fiction, science, futurism, and general pop culture awesomeness over at io9's open thread forum called the Observation Deck. Join us there and tell us what you're geeking out about!

If you're dealing with a world where magic is real, you can just go nuts, right? Wrong, argues Shadowrise author Tad Williams. In fact, you should use magic sparingly, and keep your world as grounded as possible.

The fine line between magic and just the incomprehensibility of the universe is big with me... I never use a lot of magic in my [writing], because I think it denatures magic, to have it be like hot and cold running water, and I want every time it comes up to be something that's exciting... If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's really hard to do if you don't know a lot, at least in a basic way, about how the real world works.

The whole interview is worth checking out. [The Link]

Bradley Wray, a high-school teacher in Maryland, composed a song to help students in his AP psychology class remember some of the quirks that shape human thinking, pushing us away from pure rationality.

In a video that he’s posted, a split screen shows him playing all the parts: Dylanesque guitar, main vocals, bass, drums, and backup vocals. If you’ve read “Predictably Irrational,” by Dan Ariely, but forget some of the details, Wray’s lyrics can serve as a refresher course:

I’m biased because I knew it all along
(Hindsight bias: I knew it all along)
I’m biased because I put you in a category in which you may or may not belong
(Representativeness bias: don’t stereotype this song)
I’m biased because of a small detail that throws off the big picture of the thing
(Anchoring bias: see the forest for the trees)
I’m biased toward the first example that comes to mind
(Availability bias: the first thing that comes to mind)
[chorus]
Oh, oh, bias… don’t let bias into your mind …

Via Daily Observations, a blog of the Association for Psychological Science

There's no friend better than a megabeetle with a human brain. All the women that artist Barnaby Ward paints seem to know this, as they cozy up with octopuses and bugs of enormous size.

See more of Barnaby Ward's work on his website, Somefield.com

Captain Beefheart’s Doc at the Radar Station LP came out September 29, 1980. Here’s a smoking live TV performance of “Hot Head” and “Ashtray Heart” from that era.

A documentary crew follows "working class heroes who exterminate alien threats in deep space." Smokers sounds like a dream TV series, even before you hear it's the brainchild of Brian K. Vaughan, co-produced by Sam Raimi. Too bad it's Fox.

Smokers is based on an original idea from Vaughan, who created some of our favorite comics, including Y: The Last Man, Runaways and Ex Machina, and also wrote for Lost. It's one of three TV projects that Sam Raimi and Joshua Donen's Stars Road Entertainment just sold to major networks — in this case, Raimi and Donen sold Smokers to Fox, which presumably means a pilot will be filmed, for possible series pickup.

The good news is, Fox has a long track record of greenlighting envelope-pushing, ambitious science fiction series based on an audacious pitch. The bad news? Fox has a nasty habit of taking the sky from us. So fingers crossed!

Top image: Ex Machina volume 2 trade paperback cover by Tony Harris. [Deadline]

Starting Thursday and going through the weekend, a group of scifi-minded sex geeks will gather in San Francisco at the annual Arse Elektronika conference. Here are some highlights from the program, including contributions from a couple of io9 editors.

You can read all about the conference and performances on the Arse Elektronika website.

On Thursday, there's a nighttime performance at Chez Poulet at 9 PM:

An unobjectionable award for sex machines, orgasmotrons and teledildonics
A gala hosted by monochrom's Johannes Grenzfurthner
With a superspecial keynote by Susie Bright (All Along the SexTower: Sex on Stage in America, from Susie Bright's Reporters Notebook)
Featuring many guests stars, like Thomas S. Roche, Charlie Anders (Erotic mind control via the Internet), Rose White/Rich Gibson and Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cárdenas (virus.circus)!
Our gala will be a dignified occasion — and so we invite you to dress up properly. Surprise us with Atompunk and 1950s costumes... and maybe win a "Golden Kleene" yourself!

And on Saturday, before the coffin sex, there will be several extremely erudite presentations about sex and technology. I love this array of crazy science fiction/science/sex presentations that straddle the line between academic credibility and outright perversion. The madness starts at 12:00 noon, at Parisoma:

CONFERENCE FOR BRAINY PERVS

Saturday, October 2, 2010
12:00 noon
Parisoma

Designing Spaces for Sex: Expanding the Intimate Possibilities of the Built Environment
Ella Saitta
12:00 noon

Sex, Spaces, Feminism
Ben Dagan
1 PM

Blowing Your Load: The Office Shooting Spree as Sexual Metaphor
Philip Freeman
2 PM

"Don't Ingest": Interspecies Romance in the Mass Effect Series
Adam Flynn
3 PM

(Break)

The Interlinking Structure of Porn Sites - How Dreams, Desires and Dongs interconnect on the World Wide Web
Svenja Schroeder
4:30 PM

Casino, Automobile, Public Square: The Problems of Virtual Space
Mae Saslaw
5:30 PM

People's Pornography: Sex and Synchronization on the Chinese Internet
Katrien Jacobs
6:30 PM

On The Importance Of Having Sex With Monsters
Annalee Newitz
7:30 PM

Making Spaces for Sex: From Rituals to Parties to Playa
Hosted by Carol Queen
8:30 PM