News Briefs 29-10-2012

Sorry the news is late. It seems there are a multitude of glitches in the matrix today.

• The island where people forget to die.
• Hors d’Oeuvre for the Milky Way.
• Gigantic invisible cocoons of dark matter may suck up rogue stars.
• Tying knots in light.
• Researchers are developing a cognitive engine for artificial intelligence that will recognize human activities through a surveillance-camera feed, predict what a person will do next, and sound an alarm if their actions are not permitted.
• The Consequences of Machine Intelligence: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?
• Seismic signs of escaping methane under the sea.
• The photographer at Auschwitz: Wilhelm Brasse was forced to take chilling images of inmates which haunted him until his death this week at age 94.
• Why are human brains so ridiculously big?
• The human brain appears to have an area solely devoted to recognizing faces -- the fusiform gyrus.
• What is war good for? Ask a chimpanzee.
• Habitat loss may be to blame for an apparent spate of violent attacks by chimpanzees on humans.
• Seven Sumatran orangutans saved as their tiny patch of forest is bulldozed to make way for a palm oil plantation by an industry group responsible for protecting their habitat.
• The terrifying threat of collective suicide if the Brazilian government takes the land of an Indian tribe.
• Is our capacity to abuse other, more vulnerable, living things part of the human condition? Is evil in our wiring? Our rearing? Can we overcome it?
• Animal magic: How a specially trained dog is helping a young boy with autism to cope with his fears.
• Fox steals handbag, but can't handle the guilt.
• Keep your kitty cats inside, where they may learn to eat from a plate with a fork, rather than outside, where they could be caught and eaten by an owl.
• Tired? Your dog is yawning right along with you.
• We're all holograms ruled by reptiles: Thousands flock to David Icke's 11-hour lecture at Wembley Arena. (Msm review.)
• If David Icke is Mad then 'God' help the rest of us. (Attendee's review.)
• Two 15-minute video-extracts from Icke's 11-hour lecture, Remember Who You Are: One & Two.
• Scientists can now decode the contents of dreams.

Quote of the Day:

Dream sex, dream flight, creative control—we novices wanted some of that. But either nobody was talking or we weren't getting any. Not much. Not yet. The key for us — as Stephen LaBerge discovered as a young Ph.D. candidate at Stanford's sleep lab, under the gun and needing to lucid dream on demand -- would be memory. Simple, mysterious memory, the brain's ability to remember to remember to do something. And memory training, along with the science of sleep and consciousness, has been the main thrust of the seminar. We've made lists of personal dream signs -- bits of recurrent bizarreness -- to try to remember to recognize and thus use to trigger lucidity. I once owned a horse, for example, that shows up pretty regularly in my dreams, still angling for the crippling kick; I've been on the lookout for that brute. And all week we've been playing a memory game in which every time someone in the group hands you something, you must wink or tap your brow—I remember!—or else get a flower sticker on your name tag. We've made countless ‘state checks’ during the day, asking ourselves, ’Am I dreaming?’ trying really to examine the nature of waking awareness, making little hops to see if gravity is operational, so that the question will become habitual and the likelihood that we will remember to ask ‘Am I dreaming?’ while dreaming goes way up. And then we'd try to fly. For in the dream, to ask is to know, sometimes; but to fly is to dream, nearly always.

In short, we've cultivated at our leisure an absurd obsession. And I remember it was starting to work.

Bucky McMahon, Adventures N My Bed, Esquire Magazine, February 2003.