The brain trust make their case for ambivalence towards eating whales, primates and genocide in general.
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UPDATE: Thanks to all who watched the livestream and helped keep score on Twitter. For the first time in this contest’s storied history we reached a dramatic tie when Hurt Locker took home best picture. 12-12. An uneasy stalemate exists for another year…
As was tradition from whence Weird Things editor and writers Justin Robert Young and Matt Finley come from, the two have picked the Oscars against the lingering spirits of the Undead. Using random human mediums, the picks were divined without human meddling.
Enjoy!
In European legends, the bite of the werewolf involuntarily turns a hapless victim into a fuzzy-wuzzy killing machine. In American pop culture, zombies prey on the flesh of living innocents who then become skulking face gnawers themselves. In mother Russia, clock punches you. All of these contemporary Western tales portray human atrocities committed by victims of circumstance – upstanding citizens who happen to get cursed, infected or punched by clock, and then go on to act as involuntary proxies for the new and accidental darkness inside them. According to certain Navajo lore, Skinwalkers – dark witches who possess the ability to, among other things, transform into animals – are former high priests who have murdered blood relatives. In other words, it’s a story of active unholy transformation knowingly catalyzed by conscious decisions.
Remember the Algonquian story of the Wendigo – the man who engaged in cannibalism and, as a result, turned into an eternally suffering flesh-craving beast? Skinwalkers are similar in that they are men (occasionally women) who undergo a monstrous transformation by way of a 
culturally forbidden act (in this case, intra-familial murder). (Granted, there are versions of the story in which Skinwalkers are simply Anakin-esque flock strayers who end up on the wrong side of the force, but I would assume that that’s equally frowned upon.) Whereas the Wendigos are forever damned to tormented lives of feral scavenging and desperate murder, Skinwalkers are powerful, deliberate and feared. Both legends, however, use the threat of once-human monstrosities to demonstrate the corruptive power of sin (“sin” meaning, in this case, culture-specific social malfeasance).
Lots of folks think that Skinwalkers are kind of like Florida’s Skunk Ape – culturally variant analogs of a familiar supernatural beasties – and regard them as Native American werewolves, but that’s totally not even close to right. Unlike werewolves, Skinwalkers transform at will, and can change into any animal of their choosing. These transformations allow Skinwalkers to travel swiftly and easily elude capture. Their shapeshifting abilities even extend to their voices, which can mimic any animal or human sound, up to and including “Sky Pilot” by human band “The Animals.” They can read thoughts, and, in some versions of the legend, even project themselves, by way of a hypnotizing stare, into their victims’ bodies, which then become mere skins in which the monsters walk (though the name “Skinwalker” actually [boringly] comes from their proclivity toward animal skin attire). As acolytes of the Witchery Way (a form of Navajo magic centered on death and corpses), Skinwalkers can use enchanted bone dust to paralyze, or even kill, their chosen victims.
Mostly, though, Skinwalkers are scary because they are self-aware, they are clever and they are malicious. They are monsters because they chose to become monsters. This Navajo legend holds individuals accountable for bringing evil into the world; werewolves and all those other stories? The excuses of desperate children pointing their guilty fingers toward the darkness of caves and the mystery of nighttime forests.
Wednesday: The boys (and girls) who cried, “Skinwalker!”
Andrew, Brian and Justin answer some listener scenarios. After revealing Brian’s deep-seated desire that the world go pantless post apocalypse, we find out how shockingly willing Brian is to switch teams and genders without actually being asked to do so. We explore the practical problems of someone who looks like Justin claiming to have a magical genii and find out about his experience in the wild frontier of Chat Roulette where he is accorded the dignity and respect he deserves for going there in the first place. We also talk about our admiration for men in leather and sometimes no leather at all wrestling and trying to kill each other.
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The trio determines what would force them to become vigilantes. Andrew describes his frightening superhero creation that involves deranged circus animals and human dismemberment. Brian tries to retcon the creation in a most horrific way.
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Deep in the Amazon researchers are exploring the remnants of a city that dates back to 200 AD. Little is known about the inhabitants and some speculate that this could have been the source of the rumors of El Dorado. Click through for the video. Scientific American
The always provocative h+ magazine surveyed the experts at the Artificial General Intelligence Conference to get a grasp of when they though machines would get really smart.
The results are very interesting:
While the median guess is the 2020’s, some are saying we won’t see any robo super geniuses for a century or more. While we can appreciate their optimism in the delay of our demise, it feels a little bit like surveys of physicists in the 1920’s about the use of atomic energy as a weapon. That was considered a far off thing too…
Researcher Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University has developed a framework by which it could be possible to teleport energy vast distances. The implications for this are pretty amazing. Could we use this to power deep space missions? Teleport power from the sun? Build a Death Star? One can dream.
He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton’s balls. Measuring the state of the first ion injects energy into the system in the form of a phonon, a quantum of oscillation. Hotta says that performing the right kind of measurement on the last ion extracts this energy. Since this can be done at the speed of light (in principle), the phonon doesn’t travel across the intermediate ions so there is no heating of these ions. The energy has been transmitted without traveling across the intervening space. That’s teleportation.
link: Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy
What’s more awesome than a giant ancient crocodile? A really giant snake that ate it for lunch.
A 60-million-year-old relative of crocodiles described recently by University of Florida researchers in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology was likely a food source for Titanoboa, the largest snake the world has ever known.
link: Ancient crocodile relative likely food source for Titanoboa, largest snake ever known
A list of recommended reading and viewing from Andrew Mayne, Brian Brushwood and Justin Robert Young as mentioned in the episode Redneck Fireworks Massacre.
Star Wars The Clone Wars: The Complete Season One (TV Series)
We explore the ethical implications of covering up your horrific crimes with science and have probably the most boring ideas about utopia ever. We then discuss our worst disaster scenarios. Finally we give unsolicited book and movie recommendations.
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Prolific Weird Things scribe Matt just posted his criticism of Avatar’s bioelectric network premise. Basically he feels that director James Cameron is trying to make it a parable of earth and our resource use – and that it’s an unfair comparison because Pandora has all sorts of nifty features like consciousness uploading that we don’t. I disagree.
The bioelectric network Matt takes exception to was just one example that Cameron was using to make a much more important point.
While on the surface Avatar seems to be have a hippy “save the rain forest” tone, it’s a lot deeper than that and has a scientific and ecological world view even a libertarian could agree with.
Resource use is a complicated issue. Cameron was trying to point out that we often don’t see the real value of the things in front of us. And he wasn’t suggesting the value of Pandora was the Na’vi’s religious beliefs – they didn’t seem to have any. A point the movie touched on a little and the accompanying Avatar field guide went into in great detail was all of the scientific knowledge of Pandora. Disease and starvation were problems facing Earth of 2154 and Pandora had solutions for that, but the government enforced monopoly of RDA (the company that runs things on Pandora) had no interest in shaking up the status quo. When the government won’t allow any competition, why change things? They had no interest in curing the problems of Earth using newly discovered Pandora science because as long as Earth was in a crisis the government backed their monopoly.
On present day Earth the difference between poor countries and rich countries has very little to do with natural resources. The countries with the highest GDPs are the ones that export information technologies and have a scientifically literate population. If your wealth comes from just pulling things out of the ground, you’ll eventually run into trouble when you don’t have anything more to pull out of the ground. Making matters worse, because your entire industry is tied up in what’s basically unskilled labor, you never develop schools and training that put you on a forward path.
Pandora, like Earth, is filled with incredible scientific knowledge with practical applications on Earth. The message of the movie was that the RDA was ignoring that because the could only see the value of one resource. Like an American car company or 90’s OS maker, they had no vision of the future other than their own.
The greatest wealth of the 21st century is probably going to come from biotech. Fuel, food, medicine and materials are going to come from us exploiting genes of various life forms on our planet. Scientist-entrepreneurs like Craig Venter are collecting vast databases of all the genetic information on our planet so they can engineer microbes that can turn CO2 into fuel or create new medicines. This is made possible by studying how life on Earth functions and then using what we’ve learned to create new technologies.
The moral of Avatar is that the greatest resource is knowledge – scientific knowledge. If the RDA saw the wealth that was around them besides the mineral they were after they would be even richer and life on Earth would be much better. The best capitalists are the ones that look to the future. Cameron, a physics major, explorer and multi-millionaire knows this and his movie reflects this value.
Immortality, plentiful resources and endless energy could happen in the 21st century – as long as we see the world around us and learn how to use its resources wisely.
Florida is under attack from giant snakes. If that’s not bad enough, in a turn fit for the SyFy channel, authorities now worry that different breeds of python may be merging together into some new kind of “super snake”. From the Sun-Sentinel:
…state environmental officials worry that the rock python could breed with the Burmese python, which already has an established foothold in the Everglades. That could lead to a new “super snake,”…
The rock python, native to Africa is know for eating crocodiles and even children. If it breeds with the more common Burmese python, the hybrid could end up being even meaner and larger than either individual species.
The semi-good news is that the cold weather is bringing them out into the open and killing a few off. The bad news is that we might be left with really hardy snakes seeking out warm places. Did we mention that Weird Things HQ is located in Florida right off a canal?
According to some scientists at the Daily Mail, the answer is yes. A long term global warming trend due to CO2 emissions doesn’t preclude the possibility of nature deciding to flip the bit at least for a few decades and make things cooler.
Even though United States and other parts of the world are experiencing record cold temperatures, climate scientists are quick to point out (and rightly so), that doesn’t change the fact that CO2 absorbs infrared energy that would normally bounce back into space and that we’re producing a lot more CO2 than ever. The big question is how much does this CO2 contribute to global temperatures and how much warming is due to other natural factors?
The debate gets sticky when people claim it’s either one or the other. Professor Mojib Latif, a UN scientists and leading member of the IPCC is a global warming scientist who fully accepts that CO2 is a contributing factor to climate change – but questions how much. Global warming proponents are critical of him for suggesting that not all temperature increase is due to man made CO2. Global warming deniers (not the same as skeptics) are upset that he still believes CO2 is a contributing factor.
His data is based upon the role the oceans play in contributing to global temperatures. He attributes the latest cooling trend to ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs). He called the current cooling temps back in 2008. His research goes on to indicate that we could be in for a several decade long mini ice age before things get warmer again thanks to nature and man-made CO2.
If this is the case, then there’s an argument to be made that we should be thankful of all the CO2 we put in the atmosphere, because the winters are going to be milder than they would have had we miraculously stopped producing CO2 in the 1990’s.
The more we study climate, the weirder it gets. A recent study mentioned here at Weird Things a few weeks ago pointed out that core sample data indicates that historical temperature changes can come a lot faster than previously thought. Frequent mini ice ages may be the norm. You can read the Live Science article here: Big Freeze: Earth Could Plunge into Sudden Ice Age
Amongst all the hubbub today about Roxxxy the new amorous robot designed to satisfy your carnal desires, comes this little tidbit buried in an article by The Money Times…
Hines inspiration for Roxxxy came from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
“I had a friend who passed away in 9/11. I promised myself I would create a program to store his personality, and that became the foundation for Roxxxy True Companion,” said Hines.
He feels his creation is not only for recreation and fun but also for people with problems of sexual dysfunction.
A lost friend on one of the grimmest days in modern American history ends with a fully functioning robot engineered to unleash primal delight. Figures.
Brett Rounsaville is special to iTricks. Follow his hobo adventure at Amtrekker.com
After nearly two years wandering America as a homeless vagrant I’m no stranger to the weird. Like a bedbug outbreak it jumps quickly from city to city, always lurking just beneath the sheets. Sometimes you have to flip over your Temperpedic and bust out the magnifying glass, but make no mistake, weird moves fast, procreates faster, and it’s just waiting for its chance to leave its itchy red marks on each and every one of us.
Beulah, MI
Fact: Northern Michigan is known the world over for three things. Cherries, unemployment and locals eager to help out a vagrant on a quest to experience weirdness first hand and create a crop circle.
Upon hearing of my desire to learn to speak the language of the aliens (a.k.a. stomp on a bunch of plants using boards and rope) Amber, Colton, Brandon and cameraman Andy contacted me with the promise of untold acres of cover crop with which I could have my way. Knowing there was a giant blank canvas of Russian Knapweed at my disposal, how could I not hightail it to Beulah?!
However, things didn’t go quite so well as one would hope.
Apparently the aliens know a few tricks I don’t.
I’m done.
Brett.
