Spot the difference...

It's the World's Strongest, Most Expensive Beer - Inside a Squirrel

Our old buddies BrewDog have done it again. Not content with winning back the "strongest beer in the world" title last February with its Sink the Bismarck!, they've now upped their game with a new brew that is 55 percent alcohol by volume and carries a $765 price tag. It's called The End of History.
Oh, and did we mention that the bottles come in stuffed animals-like stuffed animals that were once alive? The 12 bottles have been made featuring seven dead stoats (a kind of weasel), four squirrels and one rabbit. James Watt, one of the two guys behind BrewDog, put it better than we ever could: "The impact of The End of History is a perfect conceptual marriage between taxidermy, art and craft brewing." Just like we've all been waiting for!
For those interested in the actual beer, it's a blond Belgian ale with touches of nettles and juniper berries -- and in order to achieve the brain-blasting alcohol content, it had to be created using extreme freezing techniques.

Alastair Plumb @'Asylum'
(Thanx Jeff!)
This one is for you Styles Bitchley!!!

Intricate Street Art Enriched in Mexican Culture

No Minister: 90% of web snoop document censored to stop 'premature unnecessary debate'

The (Australian) federal government has censored approximately 90 per cent of a secret document outlining its controversial plans to snoop on Australians' web surfing, obtained under freedom of information (FoI) laws, out of fear the document could cause "premature unnecessary debate".

The government has been consulting with the internet industry over the proposal, which would require ISPs to store certain internet activities of all Australians - regardless of whether they have been suspected of wrongdoing - for law-enforcement agencies to access.

All parties to the consultations have been sworn to secrecy.

Attorney-General Robert McClelland and part of the censored document.

Industry sources have claimed that the controversial regime could go as far as collecting the individual web browsing history of every Australian internet user, a claim denied by the spokesman for Attorney-General Robert McClelland.

The exact details of the web browsing data the government wants ISPs to collect are contained in the document released to this website under FoI.

The document was handed out to the industry during a secret briefing it held with ISPs in March.

But from the censored document released, it is impossible to know how far the government is planning to take the policy.

The government is hiding the plans from the public and it appears to want to move quickly on industry consultation, asking for participants to respond within only one month after it had held the briefings.
------------------------------------------
See the highly-censored document (PDF, 3.60MB)
See government reasons for censoring it (PDF, 3.23MB)
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The Attorney-General's Department legal officer, FoI and Privacy Section, Claudia Hernandez, wrote in her decision in releasing the highly censored document that the release of some sections of it "may lead to premature unnecessary debate and could potentially prejudice and impede government decision making".
Hernandez said that the material in question related to information the department was "currently weighing up and evaluating in relation to competing considerations that may have a bearing on a particular course of action or decision".
"More specifically, it is information concerning the development of government policy which has not been finalised, and there is a strong possibility that the policy will be amended prior to public consultation," she wrote.
Further, she said that although she had acknowledged the public's right to "participate in and influence the processes of government decision making and policy formulation ... the premature release of the proposal could, more than likely, create a confusing and misleading impression".
"In addition, as the matters are not settled and proposed recommendations may not necessarily be adopted, release of such documents would not make a valuable contribution to public debate."
Hernandez went further to say that she considered disclosure of the document uncensored "could be misleading to the public and cause confusion and premature and unnecessary debate".
"In my opinion, the public interest factors in favour of release are outweighed by those against," Hernandez said.

The "data retention regime" the government is proposing to implement is similar to that adopted by the European Union after terrorist attacks several years ago.

Greens Communications spokesman Scott Ludlam said the excuse not to release the proposal in full was "extraordinary". Since finding out about the scheme, he has launched a Senate inquiry into it and other issues.
"The idea that its release could cause 'premature' or 'unnecessary' debate is not going to go down well with the thousands of people who have been alarmed by the direction that government is taking," he said in a telephone interview.
"I would really like to know what the government is hiding in this proposal," he said, adding that he hoped that the Attorney-General's Department would be "more forthcoming" about the proposal in the senate inquiry into privacy he pushed for in June.

Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, George Brandis, said the government’s decision to censor the documents showed ‘‘how truly Orwellian this government has become".

"To refuse disclosure of material that had already been circulated among stakeholders, on an issue of intense current political debate on the ground that it might provide unnecessary discussion, shows that the Gillard government has become beyond satire," Brandis said.

Online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesman Colin Jacobs said what was released was "a joke".

"We have to assume the worse," he said. "And that is that the government has been badgering the telcos with very aggressive demands that should worry everybody."
Jacobs said that the onus was now on government to "explain what data they need, what problem it solves and, just as importantly, why it can't be done in an open process".

"The more sensitive the process and the data they want, the more transparent the government needs to be about why it wants that data," he said. "Nobody could argue that public consultation ... would somehow help criminals," he added.
"We have to turn the age-old question back on the government: if you don’t have anything to hide, then you shouldn't be worried about people having insight into the consultation.

"This is a very sensitive and important issue. It raises huge questions about privacy, data security and the burden of increased costs to smaller internet service providers. What really needs to be debated is what particular information they want, because that's where the privacy issue rears its ugly head," he said.
According to one internet industry source, the release of the highly censored document was "illustrative of government's approach to things where they don't want people to know what they're thinking in advance of them getting it ready to package for public consumption".
"And that’s worrying."
The Attorney-General's spokesman declined to comment, referring comment to the department. The department said it had "nothing to add" to the FOI letter it provided

Ben Grubb @'SMH'

♪♫ James Last - Silver Machine (For HerrB!!!)

#stupidscientology

An anagram of Scientology is "Yes, not logic".

Fact.

Q. How many Scientologists does it take to change a light bulb?

A. How much money does the bulb have?

Jon Hopkins - Vessel (Four Tet remix)

Harry Beckett RIP

Man this is sad...just had an e/mail from a friend informing me that Harry Beckett has passed away.

Crazy as I was just thinking about him last night while listening to Asian Dub Foundation's 'Conscious Party' where the live mix was by his son Louis.

Damn!

Harry was a true gentleman and one of the nicest people that I have ever met and needless to say a mighty fine trumpeter.

I was lucky enough to know him quite well when I lived in London and Amsterdam seeing him perform all over the place with the likes of Brotherhood of Breath, Jah Wobble and all the usual suspects in the jazz scene back then.

Damn, damn, damn!

Harry Beckett - Ultimate Tribute

From the On-U Sound album 'The Modern Sound of Harry Beckett' produced by Adrian Sherwood

The Complex Link Between Marijuana and Schizophrenia

Since the days of Reefer Madness, scientists have sought to understand the complex connection between marijuana and psychosis. Cannabis can cause short-term psychotic experiences, such as hallucinations and paranoia, even in healthy people, but researchers have also long noted a link between marijuana use and the chronic psychotic disorder, schizophrenia. Repeatedly, studies have found that people with schizophrenia are about twice as likely to smoke pot as those who are unaffected. Conversely, data suggest that those who smoke cannabis are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as nonsmokers. One widely publicized 2007 review of the research even concluded that trying marijuana just once was associated with a 40% increase in risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.

But here's the conundrum: while marijuana went from being a secret shared by a small community of hepcats and beatniks in the 1940s and '50s to a rite of passage for some 70% of youth by the turn of the century, rates of schizophrenia in the U.S. have remained flat, or possibly declined. For as long as it has been tracked, schizophrenia has been found to affect about 1% of the population.

One explanation may be that the two factors are coincidental, not causal: perhaps people who have a genetic susceptibility to schizophrenia also happen to especially enjoy marijuana. Still, some studies suggest that smoking pot can actually trigger the disease earlier in individuals who are predisposed, and yet researchers still aren't seeing increases in the overall schizophrenia rate or decreases in the average age of onset.

In recent months, new research has explored some of these issues. One study led by Dr. Serge Sevy, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, looked at 100 patients between the ages of 16 and 40 with schizophrenia, half of whom smoked marijuana. Sevy and colleagues found that among the marijuana users, 75% had begun smoking before the onset of schizophrenia and that their disease appeared about two years earlier than in those who did not use the drug. But when the researchers controlled for other factors known to influence schizophrenia risk, including gender, education and socioeconomic status, the association between disease onset and marijuana disappeared.

Gender alone accounted for a large proportion of the risk of early onset in Sevy's study, which included 69 men and 31 women. "Males in general have earlier age of onset of schizophrenia," says Sevy. In men, the disease tends to take hold around age 19, while in women it isn't typically seen until 22 — irrespective of marijuana use. But, typically, teenage boys are four times more likely than girls to be heavy pot smokers, which may create an illusory association between the drug and onset of the disease.

Yet past studies limited to males have found exactly such a link, associating marijuana use with earlier development of full-blown psychosis. And other research has found that ongoing cannabis use increases hospitalizations for psychotic symptoms in schizophrenic patients and decreases social and cognitive functioning. A 2008 review of the data found that relapse and failure to take prescribed medication was consistently associated with cannabis use, although, again, controlling for other factors weakened the link.

One explanation could be that the effects of marijuana vary depending on the genetics of the individual patient's schizophrenia. Marie-Odile Krebs, professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) laboratory in France, and her colleagues published a study in June that identified two broad groups of people with schizophrenia who used cannabis: those whose disease was profoundly affected by their drug use and those who were not.

Within Krebs's study population of 190 patients (121 of whom had used cannabis), researchers found a subgroup of 44 whose disease was powerfully affected by the drug. These patients either developed schizophrenia within a month of beginning to smoke pot or saw their existing psychosis severely exacerbated with each successive exposure to the drug. Schizophrenia appeared in these patients nearly three years earlier than in other marijuana-users with the disease.

Justin Sullivan @'Time'

Damn!

Why Sex With Robots is Always Wrong: The Impending Demise of the Human Species

And please note that the robot is NOT called Assimo!

Why It Makes Sense For Record Labels To Offer All Music Freely As MP3s

We've been making this sort of argument for many, many years, but it's nice to see that it's catching on in a variety of places, including the more mainstream media. Over in the UK, there's a column in the Telegraph advocating that record labels stop trying technological and legal efforts to fight unauthorized file trading online, and instead give away all their music as free MP3s, and focus on alternative revenue streams. The crux of the argument is the same one that we've made over and over again, namely (1) fighting unauthorized file trading is counterproductive, doesn't work and will never work and (2) once you free up the music, there are all sorts of compelling business models you can adopt that can actually help you make more money. The column is a bit weak on highlighting some of those business models, though there are plenty. But, it's still nice to see the concept getting more attention.

@'techdirt'