Sunday, November 20, 2011

Radiohead- "TKOL RMX 1234567"

Turkish Psych Compilation

From the magazine Wire
Stream it

Tennis- "Origins"

Origins by tennisinc

Stuart Kauffman and the Embrace of Emergence

I meant to post this over a week ago but was distracted with SFN meeting preparation. Stuart Kauffman at MIT discussing his and his co-author, Giuseppe Longo's ideas, on the natural world and biology. Kauffman also writes at the NPR blog, 13.7 and there you can find the ideas discussed in the video as long form blog post. NECSI, one of the hosts of Kauffman also has the video below accompanied by text on their site.

NECSI & MIT/ESD Seminar: Stuart Kauffman on "The End of a Physics Worldview: Heraclitus and the Watershed of Life" from NECSI on Vimeo.

You can find a recent article by Kauffman and his views on the human mind here [PDF]

Ethics of Space Exploration

Ronald Bailey in Reason
While still in the early stages of space exploration, it makes sense to try to prevent the inadvertent introduction of terrestrial life to other worlds while researchers pursue their search for extraterrestrial life. But others argue that sometime later in this century, humanity should begin the process of terraforming other worlds, most probably beginning with Mars. British planetary scientist Martyn Fogg provides a good definition of terraforming as “a process of planetary engineering, specifically directed at enhancing the capacity of an extraterrestrial planetary environment to support life. The ultimate in terraforming would be to create an uncontained planetary biosphere emulating all the functions of the biosphere of the Earth—one that would be fully habitable for human beings."
Mars as it is is not a promising home for Earth life; its average temperature is -60°C, well below Earth’s average of 15°C; the pressure of its carbon dioxide atmosphere is one-hundredth that of Earth’s; and it lacks an ozone layer so its surface is blasted by DNA destroying UV rays from the sun. Can it be made more hospitable? Science fiction author Jack Williamson coined the word terraforming in a 1942 short story in Astounding Science Fiction. Arthur C. Clarke further developed the idea of terraforming in his 1951 novel The Sands of Mars. In 1973, young astronomer Carl Sagan devised a proposal for melting Mars’ South Pole by darkening it. This would boost carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect, which would warm the planet and allow water to flow.
In a research review in 1998, Martyn Fogg evaluated various suggested technical means to begin terraforming Mars. A runaway greenhouse effect releasing carbon dioxide might be jumpstarted by pumping potent man-made greenhouse gases like perfluorocarbons into the atmosphere or by directing extra sunlight onto the South Pole using a space mirror 250 kilometers in diameter. Once started, Fogg estimates it would take 100 years to build up a thick atmosphere and warm the planet enough so that anaerobic Earth life could successfully colonize the planet. Candidates for pioneering terrestrial microbes include the dessication-resistant cyanobacterium Chroococcidiopsis, the lime-boring cyanobacterium Matteia, and the ionizing-radiation resistant heterotrophic bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. In addition, the Planetary Society is flying 10 hardy organisms as part of its Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE) aboard the Phobos-Grunt mission. They will be returned with soil from Phobos to see how they fare in long exposure to space.
Bailey then links to a pdf discussing "The Ethics of Terraforming" [PDF]

Monday, November 7, 2011

Pakistan/American Relations

Interesting article from Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder over at The Atlantic on Pakistani/American Relations.
Much of the world, of course, is anxious about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, and for good reason: Pakistan is an unstable and violent country located at the epicenter of global jihadism, and it has been the foremost supplier of nuclear technology to such rogue states as Iran and North Korea. It is perfectly sensible to believe that Pakistan might not be the safest place on Earth to warehouse 100 or more nuclear weapons. These weapons are stored on bases and in facilities spread across the country (possibly including one within several miles of Abbottabad, a city that, in addition to having hosted Osama bin Laden, is home to many partisans of the jihadist group Harakat-ul-Mujahideen). Western leaders have stated that a paramount goal of their counterterrorism efforts is to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of jihadists.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Ekoclef- "G Major severn"

Stream "Replica"

On Mexican Summer's SoundCloud, stream all of the new Oneohtrix Point Never LP Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica by Mexican Summer

Wednesday, November 2, 2011