Tuesday, 29 November 2011

Aphex Twin's Remote Orchestra

Richard James came up with the idea of controlling a 48 piece string section and a 24 strong choir by remote control, using midi controllers, lots of headphones and some remote visual cues, after being commissioned to write some pieces for the European culture congress in Poland.
There was only one opportunity for a rehearsal to see if the idea worked, it was in the morning, the day of the concert!
This is the result.
See the other Aphex Twin edits for this show here = http://vimeo.com/album/1735255
See all other performances from the show here
http://www.youtube.com/user/fixedmachine#grid/user/CFB3F7A0029A764C
Visual interface design by weirdcore
Via

The Occupy principles of solidarity broken down

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Steal This Record

'Unfortunately, we at www.elviscostello.com find ourselves unable to recommend this lovely item to you as the price appears to be either a misprint or a satire.'
System of a Down LOL!

This is a joke. Ja?

Egyptian officer suspected of being 'The Eye Hunter,' shooting protesters

It's just a book. About cannabis. For children

Clubbers should be able to test their ecstasy

Media reports of two deaths at the weekend in the same party venue have once again been accompanied by police suggestions that the drug responsible is ecstasy that may be from a "contaminated" batch. Speculation as to the cause of these tragic deaths is unhelpful, and recent experience with mephedrone has shown such preliminary comments are often quite wrong, we will know the truth only when toxicology results are reported.
Users of club drugs are exhorted to attend hospital casualty departments if they feel ill; this is good general advice for anyone that is feeling ill after taking drugs, whether legal or controlled. While deaths from MDMA are now quite uncommon following the instigation of health-promotion regulations such as free water and chill-out rooms in dance clubs, they are still very regrettable and hugely distressing to family and friends. So is there anything that could be done to reduce risks to the users of this and other recreational drugs?
This is a topic the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) has considered at some length over the past years, and on which we have taken evidence of good practice elsewhere. We need to abandon the current government approach that relies on fear of harms underpinned by ignorance of what drugs users are taking as the prime approach. This has failed, and will continue to do so, for young people are relatively uninterested in possible threats to health. It may even make things worse as often young drugs users are fearful of seeking medical help for themselves or their friends because of the real threat of police prosecution.
We should replace it with a knowledge-based approach to their keeping safe. This should be based on the Dutch Drugs Information and Monitoring System (Dims), a nationwide network of hospital-based labs that will analyse substances with no questions asked. Users – or those considering use – can have their purchases analysed free from any risk of prosecution. The turnaround time is in the order of days and when they collect the information on their purchase they are told about its nature and given advice on its dosing, adverse effects and safety. This then reduces the risk to the user (provided they take the advice) and, vitally, also provides the government with information on what drugs are being used. In this way, trends in purity can be quickly established and new entrants to the market detected very early.
Sadly in the UK, we do not apply anything so sophisticated and logical. Instead, we rely on a few test purchases and some amnesty bin surveys to gather information – and no clear personalised guidance can be given. The UK coroners system is slow, often taking months after the death for the analysis of drugs in the body to be completed and usually it's months before the final coroner's assessment of the contribution that these made to the death is reported. The current proposed reorganisation of coroners and the disbanding of the Forensic Science Service that provided much of the analytical tools for drug detection will make the situation even worse. The new early warning system announced as part of the new drugs bill has not since been formulated and, without investment in a structured approach, is unlikely to be useful except in retrospect.
When I was chair of the Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs I wrote to the then home secretary, Jacqui Smith, suggesting that the UK might benefit from a conversation with the Dutch experts about their system and the evidence base that has emerged from it over the past decade, I received a very clear message that the government had no interest in this approach.
Perhaps the coalition might like to rethink?
David Nutt @'The Guardian'

Why Are People Still Afraid of Atheism?

A landmark 2006 study, analyzing data from a large survey of Americans, found that atheists “are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious and other minority groups.” Writing in the American Sociological Review,researchers noted that “while rejection of Muslims may have spiked in post-9/11 America, rejection of atheists was higher.”
So why are atheists “among the least liked people … in most of the world,” in the words of a research team led by University of British Columbia psychologist Will Gervais? In a newly published paper, he and his colleagues provide evidence supporting a plausible explanation.
Atheists, they argue, are widely viewed as people you cannot trust.
“People use cues of religiosity as a signal for trustworthiness,” the researchers write in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.Given that “trustworthiness is the most valued trait in other people,” this mental equation engenders a decidedly negative attitude toward nonbelievers.
Gervais and his colleagues approach this phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective. “A number of researchers have argued that religious beliefs may have been one of several mechanisms allowing people to cooperate in large groups, by in effect outsourcing social monitoring and punishment to supernatural agents,” they write.
Religion, in other words, has served a specific function throughout much of human history (beyond assuaging existential fears): It keeps people in line, discouraging them from engaging in selfish acts that hurt the larger community. Gervais and his colleagues point to recent research that bears this notion out; several studies have found people engage in less-selfish behavior “when reminded of watchful supernatural agents.”
If you believe – even implicitly – that the prospect of divine retribution is the primary factor inhibiting immoral behavior, then a lack of belief in a higher power could amount to a free pass. A 2002 Pew Research Center survey found nearly half of Americans feel morality is impossible without belief in God.
There is no actual evidence backing up the assumption that atheism somehow leads to a decline in morality. In a 2009 study, sociologist Phil Zuckerman argued that “a strong case could be made that atheists and secular people actually possess a stronger or more ethical sense of social justice than their religious peers,” adding that they, on average, have “lower levels of prejudice, ethnocentrism, racism and homophobia” than the much larger population of believers.
He adds that “with the important exception of suicide, states and nations with a preponderance of nonreligious people actually fare better on most indicators of societal health than those without...”

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