This self reflexive,
autopoietic haiku,
is defined, then ends.

Categories: Haiku, Mu, Maths, Weird, Language, Fun, History, Nonsense

Tire Tube Communication - Mama and Neighbors

by Tatsumi Orimoto (1998)

Categories: Art, Weird, Humour, Images, Links, Culture, Japan, Human

Bush: I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free.

- E&P - Washington Post
- Crooks and Liars link (with videos of speech)

The vast conflicts inherent in various systems of 'belief' are not accounted for here. Neither are persons of differing sexual persuasion, or those members of society with no religious convictions whatsoever. Because we know Bush's stance on these issues, and because his world, and his word, are so black / white defined should we liberal types consider ourselves outside of Bush's universe completely?

...

(Discuss this and more in the Excruciatingly Large Forum)

Categories: Politics, Bush, Religion, News, USA, Society

The Excruciatingly Large Forum is ALIVE! Feed it your brain today:


• Panspermia: Seeds of Change
• Best Science-Fiction Novels
• Cultural Semiotics
• Co-evolution: shaping them as they shape us?
• Request for Nudity
• Music Absorbtion
• Thinkers Lay Out the Beliefs They Can't Prove
• What does God smell like?

COMING SOON: A major forum overhaul... I do not exaggerate when I say that the range of new features about to be unleashed there will make even teledildonics seem inhibiting...

Prepare for the revolution: Join Now!

Categories: Forum, Weird, Humour, News, Links, Reality, Science, Philosophy, Religion, Consciousness, Human, Simulacrum, Cool, Weblog, Sci-Fi, Culture, Amazing, Fun, Community

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The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subjects during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word...

William Burroughs - The Ticket That Exploded

Categories: Quotes, On The Nature of, Books, Language, Culture, Reality, People, Human

Labels: On the Nature of

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Humans like to fuck. It's a fact few of us can ignore, and even fewer of us would like to change. But, as with most activities we undertake with vigor, automation, mass production and media manipulation have turned sex into the commodity of cultures. The robots are coming:

"What is very likely to be present before 2016 would be a multi-sensual experience of virtual sex," said Julia Heiman, director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, Bloomington.

"There is a possibility of developing erotic materials for yourself that would allow you to create a partner of certain dimensions and qualities, the partner saying certain things in that interaction, certain things happening in that interaction."

A field dubbed "teledildonics" already allows people at two remote computers to manipulate electronic devices such as a vibrator at the other end for sexual purposes.

"People who use it are just blown away," said Steve Rhodes, president of Sinulate Entertainment, which has sold thousands of Internet-connected sex devices over the past three years. "This is not something that just the lunatic fringe does." - link

Are we on the brink of a revolution in 'teledildonics' or is this simply the beginning of the end of sexual automation? Afterall, we've been pleasuring each other for tens of thousands of years with various forms of inanimate object. It was only a matter of time before we completely disconnected the acts of pleasure, love and procreation.

Where does the dildo end and the robotic fuck-buddy begin?

Men who like to have sex with Dolls

Rules for the Modern Robot

Neural Networks, Thinking Machines and Animatronic Love

Categories: Future, History, Weird, Technology, Robots, Sex, News, Links, Culture, Human, Simulacrum, Society, Psychology, Sci-Fi

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There is a rather superb video doing the rounds, taken from Japanese kid's TV show Pitagora Suichi (ビタゴラスイッチ / Pythagoras Switch):

NHK’s “Pitagora-Switch”

Within our daily lives, which we go about without thinking much about the many mysteries, archetypes, themes and more varied ways of thought. For example, have you ever thought why waffles are always the same shape? Behind it all is concept of “having a shape.” There all sorts of these archetypes/shapes: in print, in mass-produced goods and whatnot. Understanding these these “shapes” let’s you grasp how these things work.“Pythagoras Switch” wants to help kids have that moment of A-HA! We want to raise thinking about thinking, to flip that epiphany switch in every child.

Watch the ingenious little contraptions do their stuff and revel in the knowledge that all that work was entirely for the pleasure of 6 year old children who speak a different language to you.

Your 9 minutes of joy can be found here. It's enough to make Rube Goldberg weep in perpetually automated pleasure...

The two dancing guys (アルゴリズムたいそう・こうしん / Algorithm Exercise March) from the same show put the rest of Japanese TV to shame as far as I'm concerned. From the translated page:

Alone, when you do, it is the movement of the body which does not know it is what, but when you do with two people, that meaning is visible clearly. "It combines" and it is interest.

"It combines" indeed...

Thanks News.3Yen.com!
Categories: Science, Weird, Humour, Video, Links, Fun, Japan

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What's the coolest way to stretch the vageries of conscious perception to their absolute limits? How about the detection of elementary particles so weakly interactive that most can pass straight through the entire planet Earth without a blip?

Welcome to the world of Neutrino detection:



Whilst you comprehend the sheer scale of Japan's Super-Kamiokande detector (set to go back online again in the near future) consider this:

For typical neutrinos produced in the sun (energy of a few MeV), it would take approximately one light year (~1016m) of lead to block half of them.

Around five million neutrinos pass through every square centimetre of your body each second, though we are neither aware nor harmed by them.

Super-Kamiokande contains around 50,000 tons of water from which the interaction between 1 neutrino and 1 quark must be gleaned.

Just ONE ton of water contains around 50,505 moles of atoms (where a mole is equivalent to 6 x 1023, or 600,000 billion).

Neutrinos generally go right through the earth unscattered, but occasionally one interacts in the Super-Kamiokande detector, typically striking a quark in the nucleus of an oxygen atom within a water molecule and snatching a plus or minus charge to become either a muon or an electron...

...Electrons are distinguished as they scatter and make fuzzier images, which can be recognized with about 98 percent accuracy. On average, Super-Kamiokande catches one atmospheric neutrino every 90 minutes.

Consciousness, it must be said, has got a whole lot more sensitive since its early inception...

Thanks Pink Tentacle!
Categories: Science, Weird, Images, News, Links, Reality, Technology, Amazing, Consciousness, Universe, Physics, Japan, Cool

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Wiki-failure?
Wiki-media...

Wiki-obscurity?
Wiki-totality...

Wiki-hyperbole?
Wiki-hyperreality...

Categories: Internet, Weird, Language, Culture, News, Links, Simulacrum, Wikipedia

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In every human brain, there are as many neurons as there are galaxies in the known universe — about 100 billion, drawn from 10,000 different cell types and woven into a three-dimensional tapestry, with threads of neural interconnections that number in the trillions.

Each one is tinder for the spark-of-life experience.

Memories are made of this gray matter. So are inspiration and imagination.

Electrochemical currents of intellect and emotion race though living labyrinths of neurons at 200 mph. When they are blocked, diverted or damaged, abilities atrophy. Personality disintegrates.

By exploring the life and death of these cells, researchers hope to learn how biochemistry becomes thought. - link

That a mass of cells bound in chemical union can produce the myriad world of forms, perpetually shifting all about us, is surely a mystery set to endure well beyond the era of mankind.

To syphon off our concentrated knowledge of this wonder of evolution and filter it into the simulated minds of our machine offspring has been the dream of science-fiction, and science fact, for as long as scientifically inspired imagination has existed. The question of 'if' machines will grow to out-compete our mental capacities is a non-sensical one. We are now in the process of imagining the machines of our future, the forms they will take, the tasks they will carry out and the breadth of their simulacra to us.

Where will the lines be drawn? What aspects of the human will never find their way into the silicon neural networks now being drafted in tech-labs across the globe?

"The brain is a three-pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred-billion light-years across". - Marian Diamond

That hundred billion light-years is about to be crammed into digital systems capable of capacities of thought far exceeding evolution's greatest accomplishments. If the proponents of Moore's Law are to be believed the time of this technological accomplishment is a mere decade or so away. Are you prepared for sentient simulacra?


UPDATE: Seems the kids ain't got no qualms about our new robot friends


Related:

Godlike Simulacra: The Hyperreal Minds of Sentient Machines

Simulaphobia: The Evolution of Technology and the Transhumanist Utopia

Neural Networks, Thinking Machines & Animatronic Love

Categories: Science, Future, Simulacra, News, Technology, Reality, Human, Consciousness, Evolution, Robots, Sci-Fi, Singularity

"With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae wasp with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.

Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can..."

Extract from a letter to Minister Asa Gray,
written by Charles Darwin, May 22, 1860

Thanks also to The Nonist!
Categories: On the Nature of, Science, History, Religion, God, Intelligent Design, Quotes, People, Nature, Evolution

Labels: On the Nature of

This was originally posted to the forum (which is really hotting up by the way). I couldn't help myself but post it again here...

Behold the next stage in human evolution, as witnessed in the faster than lightening hands of one Emily Fox:

You have to see this video to believe it!

Post your monosyllabic responses in the comments section...

Woah!

Categories: Video, Weird, Amazing, Cool, Links, Fun, Human, Evolution

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The ideal of 'the city' has stood as the most physically accessible representation of Utopia since the days of Plato's Republic; the mental playground from which philosophers and writers have played with the subject of human:

Plato (through Socrates) constructs an ideal "city in speech," a theoretical city of theoretically perfect justice. Yet Plato constructs this theoretical city not only to examine the most just city imaginable, but primarily to discover how individuals themselves should best live.

Perhaps if Plato were around today he might perceive many of The Republic's theoretical boundaries alive and well in the real world cities which power our modern lives. In these hubs of reality society finds its purpose. Each human being, replete with desires known only to their subjective selves, becomes a neuron in the cerebral matrix of the city - emergent processes casting the collective thoughts of human culture out onto the world. Yet these awesome chaotic entities in their exponential growth towards progress have changed little in their fundamental conception for thousands of years. As matters of human culture, economy and the one on one interaction between people begins to slowly re-emerge anew in the data streams of the internet, so the physical city is about to find itself superseded and replaced. Yet, the concept of 'the city' as its own entity has altered little, if at all:

"The city is a human habitat that allows people to form relations with others at various levels of intimacy while remaining entirely anonymous."

We now find this definition of the city fits equally well with communal hubs prevalent throughout the internet. As I noted in a previous post (Hyperreal Wikipedia...), active participation in these hubs by individuals from every corner of the globe is beginning to alter the nature of identity itself. Push back the hands of time as little as 10 / 15 years and the connections between members of society were relatively easy to draw. One could still 'join the dots' between people and find that physical relationships were generally mirrored by personal relationships. Yet the internet has dissolved this conception to nothing, for now the location of a human on planet Earth is in no way reflective of their connections with other human beings, with culture. The physical city as a nucleus of connectivity is under attack. Viral, hyperreal society is feeding on its substance. Yet the metaphor of the city is strong, even in virtual space:

One synthetic world, Second Life, offers no game-play as such but sells virtual real-estate that users can build almost anything on. One real-estate maven, 'Anshe Chung', a Chinese teacher based in Germany, is reported to make $150,000 a year buying, improving and reselling virtual homes in Second Life. Others have businesses designing virtual clothes or selling virtual advertising...

...When will synthetic worlds become economies worth reckoning with? They are already real, and are the fastest-growing economies in the world... - link

The inhabitants of this new breed of 'virtual world' may focus aspects of their imagination on intergalactic battles or the slaughter of orcs and demons, but when it comes to interaction with other players the ideal city is still their hub of choice. The physical constraints of our real world are merely tweaked before being reborn in cyber-realities, and players' utopian imaginations have ventured little farther than the real world cities within which they now link themselves to the internet.

If the city is being copied brick for brick into virtual space, what will be the fate of the physical, modern metropolis our hyperreal culture finds refuge in? It appears its character is about to be shifted also:

...the Third-World metropolis is becoming the symbol of the new. This is all the more thrilling for its utter improbability: surely those suffocating piles of slums and desperation are too exhausted, too moribund, to bring forth futures? But it seems to me this is exactly what is happening. If, for the better part of the 20th century, it was New York and its glistening imitations that symbolised the future, it is now the stacked-up, sprawling, impromptu city-countries of the third world. The idea of the total, centralised, maximally efficient city plan has long since lost its futuristic appeal: its confidence and ambition have turned to anxiety and besiegement, its homogenising obsession has constricted the horizons of spiritual possibility and induced counter-fantasies of insubordination, excess, and life-forms in chaotic variety. Such desires flee the Western surveillance cameras and bureaucratised consumption to find in the Third World metropolis a scope, a speed, a more fecund ecology...

...Our fast-moving media culture, groping always for any image of the new that can be used to produce more astonishment, operates in a zone slightly ahead of knowledge. The rise of China may remain for many a fantastical rumour, but as the blind sense of such large-scale shifts accumulates, it becomes possible for the media to peddle a new form of futurism: a strange and dazzling hypermodernity that bewilders western understanding but that seems to harbour the plenitude of ideas and aspiration that the west no longer finds within itself... - link

Perhaps the multilayered chaos of the 'third-world' metropolis better reflects the cultural disorder we know to exist in our internet-savy psyche. Indeed, as the media has relished to show us of late, in one such third world country the first signs of mental absolution from objective reality have started to make themselves known. China's current economic boom in the physical world is shadowed by a subclass of its subjects for whom virtual economy, virtual identity and virtual relationships have the addictive capacity to overpower their connection with 'external' reality.

Could we be heading for a time when the physical city is nothing but row upon row of internet connectivity centres, bubbling as if from the urban decay of our once proud environments?

Digital reality seems to be able to provide a closer match to the Utopian ideals of its inhabitants. Could the perfect city paradise of Plato's Republic finally find a realistic set of foundations from which to compose itself? Real world metropolies have come to far exceed the depths of vision prevalent in the ideal city of Utopian fantasy - a credit to the capacities of cultural and technological evolution to outstrip any matter of thought the human is capable of. The shallow simulations of city hubs now manifesting themselves in cyberspace and the chaotic third world urban sprawls which offer their hand out to the Western imagination are where the future economies of civilisation will be built, balanced and maintained. Whether you choose to extend your cultural self in real or virtual cities is at present a matter of choice. But in the next few years, as the virtual city comes to fruition, the malleable aspects of your personality will be forced to take on ever more hyperreal qualities in order to keep up with the encroaching tide of virtual culture.

To believe that these changes are the prelude to some transhumanist singularity is to miss the point that Utopia is what we strive towards, not something we can ever reach. Just as scholar and laymen alike glances at Plato's Republic with the arrogant foresight of 2000 years of change, so the hyperreal identities who inhabit the virtual cities of the future will stare back at our Utopian visions and laugh at our lack of imagination. If you really want to see how the future will look you only need look into the past, or reflect on the present.

Plato's ideal city begat Thomas More's Utopia begat Techno-Utopianism begat Hitler's Welthauptstadt Germania begat Post-Modern urban-design begat Ecumenopolis begat ... link ... link ... link ... link ...

You want to push us closer to a virtual realm of unimaginable paradise beyond the real? You're no different from the countless dreamers who came before you. Humans are not capable of extending beyond their capacities, imaginative or otherwise. The infinite rebirth of the ideal city is proof of that at least.

• Related forum discussion: Utopias Я' Us
• We Make Money Not Art: Virtual Lives

Categories: Society, Future, History, Reality, Culture, Utopia, Technology, Simulacrum, Internet, Human, Singularity, Philosophy, Ideas

"There's a paradox,"said Kevin White, a geneticist at Yale. "The sequences of the genomes between humans and chimps are so similar; so the genes encoded in the two genomes are so similar to one another. Yet, you have very rapid divergence in morphology and behavior and physiology between the species."

- link to full Seed article

I'll match that chimp and raise you one 43rd President of the United States...

Categories: Bush, Politics, Humour, News, Science, Evolution, Human, Nature

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Judas is back! And this time it's global news...

All this talk of The Gospel of Judas has got me thinking about the hyperreal nature of the Bible. Unlike other holy books, such as the Qur'an, the Bible was in a state of evolutionary flux for hundreds of years before it came to resemble the dusty hotel desk-drawer companion we know today. Through multiple translations, overt editing of its contents and popular cultural diversions the Bible (and the new testament in particular) resembles a copy of a simulation of a narrative which itself has very little historically verifiable content. Judas ain't so special:

Alternative histories of Christianity were about as popular 1,800 years ago as they are now. A new gospel is exciting for scholars, but it is hardly the first.

There are four gospels in the New Testament. But by the time Irenaus attacked [The Gospel of Judas], there were according to some estimates, more than 20 known Christian gospels doing the rounds.

This means there is nothing very revolutionary or scandalous in itself about another new gospel turning up. We have the Gospel of Peter, for example, in which Jesus is not hurt by his crucifixion, and the Gospel of the Ebionites in which he is a vegetarian.

There is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas where the child Jesus makes birds out of mud and they come alive, and then a boy bumps into him and he kills him.

- link to BBC News
- link to National Geographic overview

From Hebrew through Greek, Latin and Middle English the four infamous Gospels had time to fester, to spread their memes through the corruptible filters of language, culture and political manipulation. I henceforth submit that the less well known Gospels, including Judas', be submitted to The Huge Entity for a bout of Simulated Bible Evolution. Hyperreal religion got some adapting to do before it gets to sit atop any theological food chain.


UPDATE: The New York Time uncovers: 'How the Gospel of Judas Emerged' and Slate Magazine outlines 'Why the Gospel of Judas Makes Sense'...

Categories: Religion, Jesus, Christianity, Evolution, Humour, News, Links, Culture, History, Simulacrum

The second Excruciating Radio Podcast is here! And it's a wonder to behold: 26 minutes of music so intricately intermingled as to pin back the ears of reality itself.

Pleasure awaits:

Click to play in your favourite media player

Right click to download and play anytime

(The second link should also have a mini play icon to the left of it. Click it to play directly from this page.)

The full tracklist (and some more aural treats) can be found in the comments section.

Let me know how it feels in your head.

(And for anyone who missed it, here is a link to the first Excruciating Radio Podcast...)


UPDATE: Thanks to reader Justin Ruckman, I have transformed The Huge Entity into some kind of half text, half music, bowel rupturing super-beast.

Subscribe to my new podcast feed wherever you see this symbol:

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The amygdala is at it again!

...Researchers used Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans to analyze the brains of 72 healthy, right-handed adults (36 men and 36 women). The subjects were instructed to relax with their eyes closed while being scanned. When the scans were later studied, researchers found that not only was there a difference between the men and women as to which hemisphere's amygdala was more active, but also that the regions of the brain that the amygdala "talked" with were also quite different. In men, the right-hemisphere amygdala showed more connectivity with brain regions such as the visual cortex and the striatum. In contrast, the left amygdala in women was more connected to regions such as the insular cortex and the hypothalamus." - link

This isn't the first time the amygdala has cropped up on The Huge Entity (see: Whack my Bonobo! Sex, Emotion and the Female Amygdala). Thought, as it is, to be the seat of all emotion, the distinctions in amygdala activity in male and female brains says a lot to me about emotional control, or more specifically, lack of emotional control:

The amygdala (Latin, corpus amygdaloideum) is an almond-shape set of neurons located deep in the brain's medial temporal lobe. Shown to play a key role in the processing of emotions, the amygdala forms part of the limbic system. In humans and other animals, this subcortical brain structure is linked to both fear responses and pleasure. Its size is positively correlated with aggressive behavior across species. In humans, it is the most sexually-dimorphic brain structure, and shrinks by more than 30% in males upon castration.

It is now widely accepted that the right and left hemispheres of the brain play different roles in the nature of thought (known as the Lateralisation of brain function). The left brain is considered the centre of most logical, or rational activity, and the right brain concerns itself with emotional, or instinctive behaviour.

According to the research above most male amygdala activity takes place in the right brain, whereas for the female it happens in the left. Could this explain men's lack of control over the emotions? Or to define it conversely, when females experience emotion is it more in tune with aspects of rational thought than their male counterparts? When a man's amygdala kicks in it has less connections affirming a considered response - i.e. it acts upon regions of the brain defined by a more 'primitive' approach to the world. Thus men are more likely to act instinctively, maybe even thoughtlessly, when pressed into emotional situations.

The pseudo-evo-psychologist in me can imagine all manner of evolutionary reasons for this difference in the sexes. What interests me most deeply about the distinction between men and women though is how minutely different the construction of our brains is at the foetal stage of our development. Throw a handful of testosterone at a maturing foetus and sit back as life-long emotional behaviour is branded onto the brain.

I'd be fascinated to see this research extended to those members of society sitting on, or closer to, the gender fence. Hermaphroditic brains must surely reflect elements of both male and female brain function. Further still, the amygdalas of sex change patients and, possibly to a lesser degree, homosexuals would give us insight into the divergences in sexual reality.

How does your amygdala respond to all this?

Categories: Science, Sex, Consciousness, News, Links, Reality, Human

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Thanks Pruned & BLDG Blog!
Categories: Science, Space, Images, Cool, Links, Amazing

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Dwayne M. over at Weber's Polar Night poses an interesting question today, one which has me reaching for my Baudrillard with gusto:

From Wikipedia...

Colossus: The Forbin Project is an apocalyptic science fiction movie based on the 1966 novel 'Colossus' by Dennis Feltham Jones. It tells of a massive defense computer which becomes sentient and decides to take control of the world....

From Weber's Polar Night...

Watching this film my question has always been (more a thought experiment than a question really) what impact would the rise of Colossus have on religious expression around the world? Would it be seen as the fulfillment of some prophecy, the enemy of God or perhaps, a new God .... What forms of religiously inspired resistance would arise in response to Colossus' ascension?

Which illusion should one examine first?

How can we hope to draw the line separating man, machine and God when the world we strive so hard to manufacture into existence in turn becomes incorporeal by our doing so? Simulation - or simulacrum - is such a powerful, over arching concept, perhaps the idea itself is the God we should all be making praise toward.

Maybe, as if the apes were asked to contemplate the nature of their evolutionary offspring (i.e. us), it is impossible for the human to concretely conceptualise the hyperreal mind of the sentient machine. Only the machine will be capable of an understanding which it can wield to supersede itself as a mere simulated entity:

"As soul is to man, man is to machine: It is the added dimension in terms of functional hierarchy. As one of us acts godlike (gives his cloak to a stranger), a machine acts human when it pauses in its programmed cycle to defer to it by reason of a decision.

But still, we must realize that the universe although kind to us in its entirety (it must like and accept us, or we would not be here; as Abraham Maslow says, "otherwise nature would have executed us long ago") does contain grinning evil masks which loom out of the fog of confusion at us, and it may slay us for its own gain."

- Philip K Dick, Man, Android and Machine

And so, as Dwayne touches upon in his original post, it is the sense in which the machine is becoming 'Godlike' that should most interest us. For that which becomes God of the simulated realm will grow to control all the hyperreal realities it encapsulates.

The possibilities send me reeling in insanity...

Related Reading:


• A recent forum post on Religious Fanaticism
  (which examines some of these themes further)
• Simulaphobia: The Evolution of Technology and the Transhumanist Utopia
• Hyperreal Wikipedia and the Evolution of Mu-Lacra

Categories: Science, Weird, Future, Simulacrum, Human, Reality, Religion, God, Ideas, Philosophy, Technology, Links, Singularity, Consciousness, Quotes, Philip K. Dick

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Mu Haiku is back!

If infamy is a viral infection then Jesus is surely the memetic common cold, clogging up the nostrils of civilisation since year nought. This guy was such a fly in the ointment of empire that simply killing him was not enough for the Roman legions. They decided to nail his ass to a wooden cross beam, expose his manhood to the universe, and bar his virginal followers from ever touching his holy person again. Something inside me yearns for a medical exposition of this event:

The actual cause of death by crucifixion was multifactoral and varied somewhat with each case, but the two most prominent causes were probably hypovolemic shock and exhaustion asphyxia. Other possible contributing factors included dehydration, stress-induced arrhythmias, and congestive heart failure with the rapid accumulation of pericardial and perhaps pleural effusions. Crucifracture (breaking the legs below the knees), if performed, led to an asphysic death within minutes. Death by crucifixion was, in every sense of the word, excruciating (Latin, excruciatus, or "out of the cross").

- link to detailed, medical outline and another scientific perspective

If that wasn't enough, recent evidence increases the potential pain of the condemned. Male readers may find biting down hard on a wooden spoon will help them read further:

...Crucifixion methods probably evolved over time and depended on the social status of the victim and on the crime he allegedly committed...

The cross could be erected "in any one of a range of orientations", with the victim sometimes head-up, sometimes head-down or in different postures.

Sometimes he was nailed to the cross by his genitals, sometimes the hands and feet were attached to the side of the cross and not the front, or affixed with cords rather than nails.

"If crucified head-up, the victim's weight may also have been supported on a small seat. This was believed to prolong the time it took a man to die," says the study, co-authored by Matthew Masien, also of Imperial College London's medicine faculty.

- link to full article

Needless to say, the fact that early Christians did not get wind of this development in the crucifixion of genitals can only be a good thing. I wince at the range of gold plated idol jewelry now occupying my imagination. A distraction is in order...

Today's Mu Haiku (if you choose to accept it)...

The impact of Jesus' testicles on the future of Crucifixion idolatry:

How should Christian society put positive spin on the news that Jesus' nuts were nobbled to the cross? A better man than myself might write a Mu Haiku thus:

The Lord said unto
Heaven and Earth: Hallowed be
his holy gonads.

What 5 - 7 - 5 ways can you find around this problem?

Everyone knows that the mutilated testicles of Jesus will help raise humanity to their ultimate destiny beyond the clouds - but don't get too excited! When God invented masturbation, he didn't expect such a positive response:

God's birthright to us is joy, happiness, and health, and there are few moments more joyous than the moment of orgasm. Therefore, every time we masturbate, we should say a prayer of gratitude, thanking the Lord for our bodies, for sexual pleasure, and for masturbation as a means of experiencing the bliss of orgasm.

- link

Mu to that!

Categories: Religion, Weird, Humour, News, Links, History, Human, Sex, Jesus, Culture, Nonsense?, Meme, Fun, Mu Haiku, Mu

Labels: Mu Haiku

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The 37th Carnival of The Godless is up at Neural Gourmet, and it's a fat one. Apart from my very own entry to the Carnival you'll find yourself wallowing in thoughts of:

Distrust - Love - Prayer
Free-will - Hate - Mysticism

and more besides...
Abstain from all matters of belief!

Categories: Religion, God, Science, News, Weblog, Links

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