Biggest things and the smallest things in the Universe

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Sorted Into: BLURB

Dr Ritz said that such “indirect” dark matter detections in far-flung parts of the cosmos could complement the kind of searches for never-before-seen particles that are going on at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider.

In fact, the motions of charged particles in extreme magnetic fields that give rise to many of the gamma rays that Fermi sees are just like particle accelerators.

“It’s one of the things I like about this field – the biggest things and the smallest things in the Universe are neatly tied together in surprising ways.”

Fermi gamma-ray image updates ‘extreme Universe’ view

The Best Pop Video Ever

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Sorted Into: BIZARRE, FUCKED-UP, FUNNY, VIDEO

The Cramps live at Napa State Mental Hospital
Bryan Gregory in all his glory, someone reading a newspaper, the man in the dress, the man in the suit miming along.
“Somebody told me you people are crazy – but I’m not so sure about that”

Domino:

Drug Train:

[Read more…]

Memetic Contagion: Darkstar’s Gold Video

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Sorted Into: ANATOMY, VIDEO

Found via Street Anatomy:

Sembler, a design group “focused on sound and vision in a spatial context,” created this music video for Darkstar’s “Gold” off their new album, North. They used a combination of specialized 3D lighting, “Gold” code, and data from the Visible Human Project to represent the concept of an idea infecting multiple hosts. The “idea” is represented by gold particles in the music video.

From Sembler’s website:

Titled ‘Gold’ the video is an artistic representation of the concept of memetic contagion i.e. an idea as something that you can catch, that finds a host in the mind of a person.

Weirdly enough, being a Human League completist I bought the 12″ of Mirror Man – not my favourite of their tracks – a couple of weeks ago mainly because of the dub of the B-side “You Remind Me of Gold“, which is great [youtube clip here] – and which this Darkstar track is based on:

The Human League track was given to me by a friend, he used to play the dub at 33rpm instead of 45 so the break would be real slow and crunchy, he lent me the tune and i put the flip on 33rpm too, the vocal line was how you hear it in the single, the original is much quicker and it’s a pretty obscure one from the Mirror Man ep. The Human League are great. We paid more attention to them after making the track, throughout the album we listened to four or five albums regularly and Travelogue was one of them. I’m not sure if we are real fans to be honest, I listen to some of it and think that it’s brave but sometimes they get it so right. They’ve obviously got a strong vision to create a sound so uncompromising. Even though they were consistently in the charts it’s a very particular way of writing, mixing and arranging. I don’t think I’ve heard anything like it before or since. I don’t neccesarily enjoy listening to it a lot of the time. It interests me though.

[see halfway down the interview here]

3 stages of Death

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Sorted Into: INSPIRATION

From WNYC Radiolab program “After Life”:

An idea of death / the afterlife from David Eagleman that there are 3 stages of death: the moment your body dies, your funeral / when you are put into the ground and people gather to remember you, and lastly, the last time that anyone remembers you or mentions your name.

This means that after you are phyisically gone, the only way you exist is in other people’s minds – “since you only exist in other people’s minds you lose control of yourself and become who they want us to be” – maybe an amalgam of people’s memories of you and physical things you left behind (but always other people’s perception of you though the objects they are observing, or your thoughts or creative works that they are reading / observing).

See also the hundreds of cheesy dedications (Puff Daddy / Biggy), and exploitation by close family which would surely have repulsed them in their lifetime; ie John Lennon Citroen ad.
From here:

Pretty tasteless, but not the end of the world. Son Sean Ono Lennon defends it, saying it’s “hard to find new ways to keep dad in the new world,” and “you wouldn’t believe how many teenagers ask me who the Beatles were.” So, the answer to that can now be “that old-fashioned dude in the car commercial.”