Needless to say, this has led to more aberrant behavior than all the cactus I ever took. After all, now I’m wired to the gills and I still have full use of my brain. A disturbing side effect that you’d really rather not hear about - but will anyway - is this: Despite the fact that caffeine thins out blood vessels, apparently it is in large doses more powerful than a wheelbarrow full of viagra. Maria has in fact locked me out on the balcony until “such time as my fit of priapism ends and I let her get some sleep”. Ho ho! It turns out that EVERYONE has their limits.

Except me, so long as I have coffee beans, cream, and water.

Provided I have these three things, I am invincible. The hooting and screeching of the primates around me does not bother me, and - provided I don’t look directly at it - the Dumb cannot hurt my brain. I am above it all, here upon my fortress of arrogance.

It occurs to me that if world leaders drank this shit as much as I do, that most of our problems would be solved (on way or another). Wars would be simpler. After 20 cappuccinos, Bush would have been in Iraq himself, swinging a chainsaw, surrounded by the mutilated carcasses of his foes. Well, okay, maybe not Bush. But Nixon sure as hell would. Hell, Nixon would rip them apart with his teeth. And then he’d scoop out their hearts and shit in their torsos, all for the approval of the emperor and the roar of the crowd.

As you may have figured out by now, I may have found a new religion.

HAR HAR! Are you ready for that? Are you ready for a 265 pound maniacal jackass attempting to explain his religion to you, while spitting coffee, vomit, and stomach lining all over you? Oh, yes, this upcoming decade looks to be even more fun than the last one...provided my heart doesn’t explode out of my rectum like a caffeine-powered bazooka round. And THAT might even be acceptable, depending on whom my arse is aimed at.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I have to explain this wisdom to the masses. They have all come out onto their balconies to listen. Or perhaps they have come out to see who is bellowing “Only in America” by Brookes and Dunn at the top of his voice as he types these words to you.

Or kill me.

1. David Ferrucci (IBM Watson)

2. Denny Vrandecic (Wikimedia Foundation)

3. Doug Lenat (Cyc)

4. Erez Lieberman Aiden (culturomics)

5. Gilad Elbaz (Factual)

6. Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia)

7. Larry Page (Google)

8. Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz)

9. Paul Allen (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence)

10. Paul Buchheit (Y Combinator)

11. Pavel Richter (Wikidata)

12. Ray Kurzweil (transhumanism)

13. Sergey Brin (Google)

14. Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Alpha)

15. Tim Berners-Lee (Semantic Web)

Jun 01 06:13:49 Topiary or maybe we should just pwn 2600.net itself
Jun 01 06:16:21 storm well that was fun XD
Jun 01 06:17:48 Topiary I love their little clique circlejerks
Jun 01 06:17:55 Topiary they all have a little retweet party with themselves
Jun 01 06:18:11 storm they tweeting?
Jun 01 06:19:00 Topiary yeah check out the feeds of @mach2600 @fakegregghoush @awinee and all retweets
Jun 01 06:19:15 Topiary these are the same guys who specifically went after Sabu + our crew back in Feb with HBGary
Jun 01 06:19:24 Topiary they’re a lovable bunch of scoundrels
Jun 01 06:21:10 Topiary err, madjack just disappeared :x
Jun 01 06:22:00 storm lol
Jun 01 06:25:04 joepie92 disappeared as in...?
Jun 01 06:25:33 Topiary it’s back
Jun 01 06:25:48 storm its cause it gets nulled
Jun 01 06:25:49 storm for 5 min
Jun 01 06:26:23 storm lol
Jun 01 06:26:35 storm thats the funnest shit ive done with 2 servers ^_^
Jun 01 06:26:45 storm who woulda thought 3 ircds could die to 2 boxes
Jun 01 06:27:13 Topiary well it’s good taking out 2/3, watching them scramble to the 3rd, letting them come back, then fucking the 3rd while laying off the other 2
Jun 01 06:27:19 Topiary like playing with rats and switches
Jun 01 06:27:37 storm haha
Jun 01 06:27:41 storm i could drop all 3 at once
Jun 01 06:27:45 storm if i wanted
Jun 01 06:27:50 storm just take 2 more box logins
Jun 01 06:28:05 storm but theres no fun in that ;<
Jun 01 06:28:29 Topiary * [Brainsturbator] (skully2012 at 71-23-43-101 dot war dot clearwire-wmx dot net): Agent Skully
Jun 01 06:28:29 Topiary * [Brainsturbator] #lulzsec #secnews #telephreak #2600
Jun 01 06:28:30 Topiary who is this?
Jun 01 06:28:48 storm no idea
Jun 01 06:28:58 Topiary we don’t either, hmm
Jun 01 06:30:51 storm Agent Skully
Jun 01 06:30:55 storm better watch out
Jun 01 06:31:00 storm hes an 4g3n+
Jun 01 06:31:46 joepie92 lolol

I hope your shit’s secure. I know this was a few months ago so if they were going to do anything they probably have, but if you’re going to hang around these niggas you’d better be prepared.

source: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/200307/20110818/darpa-looking-to-fund-plan-that-sends-humans-to-another-star.htm

If you’ve got a plan to send humans to the stars or the dedication to develop one, DARPA wants to hear from you and, pay you a hefty sum to make it a success.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the research and development arm of the U.S military, wants to award an organization $500,000 in seed money to begin a study that would send people to the stars.

The effort that began last year is called the 100-Year Starship study and a grant will be awarded on Nov. 11.

But that DARPA won’t babysit the chosen organization.

David Neyland, director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, told Geek.com that his agency doesn’t intend to carry it forward. Instead, it will be handing the keys over to this entity and “wish them well.”

DARPA has said the 100-Year Starship study will examine the business model needed to develop and mature a technology portfolio enabling long-distance manned space flight a century from now.

Neyland also told Geek.com that nobody is actually smart enough to know what could come of the 100-Year Starship study and added that it would be naïve to even know what the right questions would be to ask right now. That report also noted that the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 4.4 light-years away from us.

The Very, Very Strange Properties of REM Sleep

Most cognitive products of the Mind are produced by relatively straightforward activation/de-activation patterns in widely distributed neural networks of the brain. When for example, a highly complex cognitive product like a sentence or a story is produced by your mind, it generally is associated with those particular brain activation/de-activation patterns as well as mild emotional changes in your psyche and mild arousal levels in your body. Not so with dreams.

Dreams are highly complex cognitive products that are produced, as far as we can tell, by Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. While REM sleep is also composed of a series of particular brain activation/de-activation patterns, bodily and emotional arousal patterns are anything but mild.

Relative to the waking state, sympathetic nervous system activity rises dramatically during phasic portions of REM. As the average duration of REM episodes increase over the course of the night, so do the durations of sympathetic discharges giving rise to periodic REM-related sympathetic discharges or “storms.”

These autonomic nervous system (ANS) storms, in turn, may be linked to a host of negative cardiopulmonary changes that occur during REM. During all REM periods, an acceleration of heart rate occurs at least 10 beats before EEG signs of phasic arousal, and then fluctuates dramatically during phasic REM. Systemic arterial blood pressure (BP), pulmonary BP, and intracranial arterial BP all exhibit increased variability relative to NREM and waking levels. Because of the hemodynamic, ANS, and sympathetic alterations of REM, plaque rupture and coronary arterial spasm become more likely. Persons with cardiopulmonary disease are indeed more likely to die during this REM period than at any other time of the 24-hour day.

In addition, during REM oxygen desaturation levels are maximal and Cheyne-Stokes-like breathing patterns predominate. As a result of the fall in alveolar ventilation, there are changes in blood gas levels, with rises in CO2 and decreases in oxygen saturation. The natural response to lowered O2 levels is to increase inspiratory breathing, but this response (the hypoxic ventilatory response) is decreased by over 50% of normal capacity during REM. The REM-related hypoxemia and abnormal breathing patterns may cause life-threatening complications in vulnerable persons, including infants with immature lung capacity thus increasing the chance for sudden infant death syndrome.

REM also appears to involve a loss of thermo-regulatory reflexes so that it is harder for the individual to stop heat loss during REM sleep. Although brain temperature rises during REM, thermoregulatory responses such as sweating and panting do not occur in REM.

Yet another bizarre feature of REM is that phasic eye movements and muscle twitches occur upon a background of paralysis in the antigravity musculature, including the jaw, neck, and limbs. This paralysis however does not extend to the sexual organs! In males every REM period is associated with prolonged penile erections. These REM-related erections apparently even occur in infants. They persist throughout the lifespan but are not reliably associated with erotic desire. Women sometimes undergo uterine contractions and pelvic thrusting during REM, but too few studies have been done on this topic to draw any firm conclusions.

In short whenever we go into REM sleep we experience intense ANS storms, cardiovascular instabilities, respiratory impairment, thermoregulatory lapses, muscle twitching, muscle paralysis and penile erections. Now recall that the cognitive products associated with this strange set of physiologic aberrations are what we call dreams. Is it any wonder that theorists of REM sleep have despaired of ever identifying the evolutionary or physiologic functions of REM sleep?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dream-catcher/201108/the-very-very-strange-properties-rem-sleep

One note I would make is that the Gestalt Bubble reality neuro-simulator hardware we call a brain appears to run on photons, so the main function of REM itself might just be bringing light in to jump-start the holographic game engine.

Source: Page 62 of an infinite forum thread

I’ve always believed the hacker apocrypha claiming that 13 net root servers control the entire internet. First of all, it’s ubiquitous to accept without knowing I’d accepted it, and second of all, it’s dumb enough to be completely true.  However, apparently it’s not. Here’s a blog post from ICANN explaining that the 13 Illuminati bloodli....I mean, 13 root servers legend is merely mythology:

http://blog.icann.org/2007/11/there-are-not-13-root-servers/

What there are is there are many hundreds of root servers at over 130 physical locations in many different countries. There are twelve organisations responsible for the overall coordination of the management of these servers.

There is a technical design limitation that means thirteen is a practical maximum to the number of named authorities in the delegation data for the root zone. These named authorities are listed alphabetically, from a.root-servers.net through m.root-servers.net. Each has associated with it an IP address (and shortly some will have more than one as IPv6 is further rolled out).

Another thing you may hear is that some of these root servers are just copies, whilst others are the “real” name servers. The reality is that every single root server is a copy, and none of them are more special than the others. In fact, the true master server from which the copies are made is not one of the public root servers.

Uh.....well, that’s an unexpected twist. So the entire internet being covertly controlled by just 13 servers is a ridiculous rumor...because in fact, it’s all controlled by...just one? Damn.

The comment thread lays out some more valuable details, thanks to a question getting answered. (Which, despite the information superhighway hype, is exceedingly rare on Teh Interents.)

Joseph Friedman 11.19.07 at 6:29 pm

John,

David mentioned above that these “hidden master” servers are still administered by VeriSign (who administers the “A” root as well.)

So other than this change of distribution from the “A” root to the hidden master servers being of a technical nature, VeriSign still physically “controls” (for lack of a better word) the distribution of this master data, although in theory I assume IANA determines its contents.

Is this a fair analysis?

Joseph Friedman 11.19.07 at 7:21 pm

One other point worth understanding is why is VeriSign administering (as per David above) these hidden master servers as opposed to them being administered by IANA directly?

Is this service included in VeriSign’s .com/.net registry contract with ICANN? And if so, why.

Kim Davies 11.20.07 at 9:56 am

VeriSign’s role in the root publication process is dictated by a cooperative agreement between VeriSign and the US Department of Commerce. It is documented at http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/nsi.htm

More will be added very soon.

By the way, I am using the services of sharebee.com to distribute these files. They will automatically upload your stuff to various free sites, and then check on the links periodically and reupload them as needed. Extremely useful for distributing whatever you want for free - especially great combined with free wifi hotspots and super-cheap computer parts. Anyone can become an information warrior, now easier than ever.

How to Make Your Own Farm Fountain - 10,000 projects in one page:
http://www.farmfountain.com/howto/index.html

Permaculture Information Web:
http://www.permaculture.info/index.php/Main_Page

Acres USA’s Reader Toolkit:
http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/articles.htm

Plants for a Future:
http://www.pfaf.org/index.php

Australia’s Permaculture Forum - insanely great. Massive.
http://forums.permaculture.org.au/index.php

Basically, the blueprints for Growing Power: “Our Community Food Center”
http://www.growingpower.org/headquarters.htm

Metawiki: “List of Useful Plants”—actually a list of lists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_useful_plants

John Todd’s “Eco Design Mandala”
http://www.oceanarks.org/EcoMandala.htm

The Modern Homestead: operational details like whoa
http://www.themodernhomestead.us/

Great contrarian perspective on home gardens from Alternet:
http://www.alternet.org/environment/86943

Suppose that half of the land on every one-acre-or-smaller urban/suburban home lot in the entire nation were devoted to food-growing. That would amount to a little over 5 million acres (pdf) sown to food plants, covering most of the space on each lot that’s not already covered by the house, a deck, a patio, or a driveway. (And in many places it couldn’t be done without cutting down shade trees and planting on unsuitably steep slopes).

That theoretical 5 million acres of potential home cropland compares with about 7 million acres of America’s commercial cropland currently in vegetables, fruits, and nuts, and 350 to 400 million acres of total farmland. The urban and suburban area to be brought into production would not approach the number of healthy acres of native grasses and other plants that are slated to be plowed up to make way for yet more corn, wheat, soybeans, and other grains under the newly passed federal Farm Bill.

A nationwide grow-your-own wave would send good vibes through society, ripples that could be greatly amplified by community and apartment-block gardening. But front- and backyard food, even if everyone grew it, would not cover the country’s produce needs, much less displace our huge volume of fresh-food imports.

The PDF being mentioned is available here and this is a goldmine:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/EIB14/eib14g.pdf

Can sustainable agriculture feed the world?
http://www.foodfirst.org/files/pdf/backgrounders/bgr.100107final.pdf

Author discusses his findings here:
http://www.foodfirst.org/node/1778

From our food production estimate based on the 10 food categories and 160 cases in developed countries, we found that organic production could theoretically generate an amount of food equal to 92% of the current caloric availability (or a yield ratio of 0.92). This ratio is close to that found in a 1990 study by Gerald Stanhill of Israel’s Agricultural Research Organization. However, looking at the 133 examples from the developing world, our team estimated food production equivalent to an overall yield ratio of 1.80—that is, 180% of current production in the developing world on a caloric basis.

From these regional results, researchers at the University of Michigan then constructed two models, a “conservative case” and a “realistic case.” The “conservative case” applied the yield ratios of organic production to conventional production from the developed countries to worldwide agricultural production (production in both the developed and developing countries). As the yield ratios in the ten food categories were generally lower in the developed countries, applying them worldwide means that slightly fewer calories would be produced under a fully organic global system: 2,641 kcal/person/day instead of 2,786 kcal. However, this number is still above the suggested intake for healthy adults of 2200 to 2500 kcal/person/day, so even under this conservative estimate there would be sufficient food production for the current population. However, under more realistic assumptions—that a switch to organic agriculture would mean the relatively lower developed world yield ratios would apply to production in the developed world and the relatively higher developing world yield ratios would apply to production in the developing world—the result was an astounding 4,381 kcal/person/day, a caloric availability more than sufficient for today’s population. Indeed, it would be more than enough to support an estimated population peak of around 10-11 billion people by the year 2100.

Having seen a Tilapia farm up close, I came to the terms with the fact I don’t want to eat Tilapia, like, ever.  Not pleasant creatures.  Salmon are beautiful, Tilapia are gila monsters.

That said, I’m still very interested in aquaculture, mostly because:
1. Tilapia will eat anything, to the point of cleaning the tanks they’re in for food
2. Tilapia convert that food into biomass like nobody’s business, and
3. Fish make great fertilizer.

Although I do have vague moral quibbles about raising aquatic animals in tight spaces in order to use their bodies as compost enhancement, I also see the potential for a simple, effective project that would look awesome and provide hours of stoned entertainment. 

Some City Farmer datafeed about Tilapia Farming:
http://www.cityfarmer.info/tilapia-farming-at-home/

...and I’m still trying to find that magical master list of THE BEST CROPS for high-speed high yields.  I saw Vinay Gupta refer to this as “emergency permaculture,” but he didn’t find the magical master list yet, either.

The book “Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times” is on google books as a limited preview:
http://books.google.com/books?id=lbohaJCxFnAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gardening+when+it+counts

I know I’ve got a lot of random notes floating around two of my journals...I guess it’s time to start gathering them up.

Oh, and here’s Plants For A Future on their “best” picks:
http://www.pfaf.org/leaflets/top20.php

Some excellent John Robb material:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/02/rc-journal-money-garden.html

“Victory gardens” are smart way to hedge against short term system failure and as a cost cutting measure.  However, a longer term solution for decentralized agriculture needs to be much, much more productive than traditional gardening.  Subscription plots/farming, low cost sensor networks (water, light, PH, etc.), high intensity plot plans, accelerated local composting systems, lawn garden entrepreneurs, tinkering networks, etc. will be needed to flesh out an innovative ecosystem that will drive the productivity curve.  Given these innovations, its possible to see a situation were 80-90% of food consumption is locally derived and sold at a small fraction of current costs and at a much higher level of quality/freshness.  Resilience needs to be productive/affordable to become dominant.

And a comment from Massachutsetts:

We’ve been building an alternative agricultural infrastructure and economic system since the 1970s in this state. It could very easily by maximized using many of the lessons that New Alchemy Institute pioneered during that time.

Gandhi said the heart of satyagraha was swadeshi, local production. Both the spinning of thread and, more famously, the salt march were economic as well as political acts and example of that local production, swadeshi principle. Gandhi’s economics was based upon the revitalization of village (neighborhood) production and markets and its goal was full employment not larger GDP or more consumption.

I’m doing a directed reading on Gandhian economics and my raw notes are at
http://www.globalswadeshi.net/forum/topics/notes-from-foundations-of
http://www.globalswadeshi.net/forum/topics/sarvodaya-swaraj-swadeshi
http://www.globalswadeshi.net/forum/topics/gandhis-economic-thought

I will be tending this garden again and I apologize for letting it get turned into a dump.