Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Ross MacManus RIP
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Massive WWI Human Sculptures
(Click to enlarge)
It's almost impossible to comprehend the scale of these historic photographs by Englishman Arthur S Mole and his American colleague John D Thomas, who were commissioned by the US government to take the pictures as a way to raise morale among the troops and raise money by selling the shots to the public during WWI. In the photo above, "there are 18,000 men: 12,000 of them in the torch alone, but just 17 at the base. The men at the top of the picture are actually half a mile away from the men at the bottom," explains Arthur's great nephew Joseph Mole, 70.
Mole and Thomas were the first to use a unique technique to beat the problem of perspective after they devised a clever way of getting so many soldiers in the pictures. Joseph explains: "Arthur was able to get the image by actually drawing an outline on the lens, he then had the troops place flags in certain positions while he looked through the camera. It would take a week to get all the outlines right, but just 30 minutes to move all the men into position to take the shot. It must have been amazing to watch."
What's makes the story even more fascinating is that instead of profiting from the sale of the images produced, the photographers donated the entire income derived to the families of the returning soldiers and to this country’s efforts to re-build their lives as a part of the re-entry process...
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MetPoliceCO11 Metropolitan Police
I only ended up in this job because of my youthful fascination with the music of Sting and a truly terrible misunderstanding.
I only ended up in this job because of my youthful fascination with the music of Sting and a truly terrible misunderstanding.
WTF??? Drug-sniffing dog aids family interventions
DJ Smith works with Xanax the dog in a search for drugs at a Santa Monica sober living home on Nov. 18, 2011. (John McCoy/Daily News Staff Photographer)
As DJ Smith watched Xanax, a drug-sniffing dog, search for narcotics around a sober living home, he couldn't help but think how a dog like the eager Belgian Malinois might have changed his own life. Smith, 23, had become addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol at age 16. His family suspected, but they never knew the extent of his problem. Nor did they find the pills he'd hidden in innocuous over-the-counter medicine bottles or disguised in other ways.
So the Agoura Hills family constantly worried if and when Smith would come home at night, or if he would survive his latest hospitalization.
"Unfortunately, I didn't have a service like this," said Smith of Narc with a Bark, a North Hollywood-based business that uses Xanax the drug detection dog to find drugs in private homes and rehab facilities, and doesn't involve law enforcement.
"A service like this would have intervened a lot quicker," Smith added.
Now nine months sober and training to become Xanax's handler, Smith likes the fact that the service is geared not toward catching people with drugs in order to report them to police, but to offer solid proof of use to those interested in helping them recover.
"It's not to get anyone in trouble," said Smith, who is now working on a counseling degree. "It's not like a bust, it's not to get you expelled from school. It's strictly for gaining more information for a family that is worried and doesn't know what's going on..."
Protesters Storm British Embassy in Tehran
“Dozens of Iranian protesters screaming ‘death to England!’ stormed the British embassy compound in Tehran on Tuesday, tore down the British flag and ransacked the offices, according to officials in London, Iranian news dispatches and images broadcast live on Iranian state television.
“The assault came a day after Iran’s Islamic leaders moved to downgrade relations with Britain because of harsh financial sanctions imposed by the West — and Britain in particular — over Iran’s suspect nuclear program, and it appeared to be the most serious diplomatic breach between the two countries in more than 20 years of troubled relations.”
@The New York Times
♪♫ Jamie Woon - Lady Luck
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
♪♫ Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes faturing Teddy Pendergrass - If You Don't Know Me By Now
Lead singer Teddy Pendergrass died of respiratory failure on January 13, 2010
errolmorris errolmorris
People are too stupid to effectively conspire to do anything, but not too stupid to come up with conspiracy theories.
People are too stupid to effectively conspire to do anything, but not too stupid to come up with conspiracy theories.
FuckingMorgan Anthony Morgan
Your self indulgent trance inducing chanting does not heal the fucking planet. I don't care if you do it, just don't say it is helping.
Your self indulgent trance inducing chanting does not heal the fucking planet. I don't care if you do it, just don't say it is helping.
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
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
Steal This Record
System of a Down LOL!
Clubbers should be able to test their ecstasy
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?
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...”
Continue reading
Tom Jacobs @'AlterNet'
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