These measurements of the cosmic microwave background — a faintly glowing relic of the hot, dense, young universe — put limits on proposed alternatives to the standard model of cosmology and provide further support for the standard cosmological model, confirming that dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of everything in existence, while ordinary matter makes up just 5%.

So this means that we’re going to have to re-think the Kardashev civilization scale. 95% of the Milky Way can’t even been seen except by inference with our current tools.

There could be a type 3 civilization all around us and we might not even know it. Actually, according to the Kardashev scale, there could be 19 type 3 civilizations – A type 3 uses the ‘average’ power output of a whole galaxy, which is just the 5% we can see….

A couple proposals.

Maybe Einstein was right when he said that everything happened in an instant, and time is just how we perceive that. Maybe that ‘hidden’ 95% is the rest of the history and future of the Milky Way, in time. Since currently we only experience time linearly, we cannot test this preposterous idea with our instruments.

Perhaps string theory is right, and that other 95% are in higher or lower dimensions we can’t see.

Perhaps ‘light’ matter/energy is just like bits of data on a ‘dark’ matter/energy hard drive platter or bits in a quantum computer (qubits). Any data that exists in your computer cannot perceive the computer existing around it, though it could infer that the computer was there (assuming such things are possible, anyway – just stretching for a metaphor).

It looks like a miniature movie set. But is absolute real.

To my absolute fucking horror this morning, Comcast does this:

Comcast is now hijacking your mispelt URLs to show you ads.

Now I have to go bother my landlord to find out if they even know their login to the Comcast website, which I doubt they do. So I’ll have to call in. All to get them to stop doing something they shouldn’t be doing in the first place.

If this were like, 1999 I could see this being useful as all you would have gotten is a “URL not found QQ some more bitch,” message. But this is 2009. When you misspell something, your browser automatically searches for it, or in the case of Chrome, puts what you typed into a search box and lets you click search if you want to, or lets you figure out what you did wrong.

Comcast, this should be an OPT-IN feature, not an OPT-OUT feature. Please stop hijacking my traffic.

If this guy actually gets anywhere near popular enough to succeed in a presidential race, I have a horrid fear that he wouldn’t make it to the inauguration.

Found via Mish, talking about the death of Capitalism.

No empire has survived. None. The only question is when.

What has survived? Culture, families, cities. The idea of the rule of law. Corruption. Knowledge, both information and disinformation (see: Corruption).

Man creates and destroys nations with breathtaking swiftness in geological time. Compared to the tribe of man, nations are the blink of an eye.

The only question is when, and chances are you wont know it till it’s on you. You have to realize that, and then ignore it.

One idea that has survived a long time, the idea of democracy, has survived countless attacks over the years.

Part of the problem is “the government.” And not just the way we are governed, but even the idea of “the government.” As if it’s this… thing. This entity that’s sitting over us, like some kind of whimsical father, deciding who shall be punished and who shall be rewarded. But it’s supposed to be us. Yet all we can do is send a letter to a Congressman to be read by an aid, tallied for opinion and replied with formletter for issue X.

Hopefully we can metamorphose democracy into a new, digital, interconnected, actually-by-the-people era.

TL;DR All nations die, humans live, government dysfunctions, maybe facebook is the answer.

Deceased Albatross Chick with belly full of garbage

Any questions? They’ll be answered if you click the pic.

Found via the Tentacle of Pink of Yore. All I gotta say, for as dorky as that dude in the video looks, he sure can move. The music is okay, standard trancy fare and probably the lyrics were about love but I didn’t really listen too hard to what she was saying.

Good to see the anti-iPhone ball get rolling.

“When she awoke the next morning still affected by the drug, she found her body naked and severely bruised, with lacerations to her vagina and anus, blood running down her leg, her breast implants ruptured and her pectoral muscles torn‚ which would later require reconstructive surgery. Upon walking to the rest room, she passed out again,” the papers say.

And in America, the details of this case are kept carefully hidden from the media spotlight. The hipocracy from the Republican wing of Congress should be shocking but sadly no longer is. The incapability of the Democrats with a Senatorial supermajority to even pass a bill dis-allowing rape should also be shocking but is at this point par for the course. They can’t even pass a bill the Republicans want.

One nation, with liberty and justice for all.

I almost didn’t watch this. It turned out to be very entertaining and more than worth the while. He has a very good point on the terrible interface we have for our cars, and rightly points out the flaws, all the while is a humorous, sly manner. He even cracks wise on the invention of the internet.

This guy did invent ethernet after all, without which you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.

My Hero <3

While we may not agree on his deserving of the prize (I think there are better folk out there – hopefully he’ll at least donate the prize money to some charity) I think we all can agree this image is hilarious. Re-spammed from my old friend.

Courtesy of International Ocean Station

And it’s getting close to as large as possible with IPv4.

However, with IPv6, it can get, I think, 2^96 times larger. Whatever the difference between the capacity of a 32 bit number and 128 bit number happens to be.

Yeah, the singing robot was cool, but a talking piano? Now that’s tricky. The narration is in German but it’s caption-titled so you can get the gist of what’s going on. It’s a real, old-style mechanical piano, not a synthesizer. It requires a giant piano keyboard sized machine to play it. But really, how cool is that that it’s even possible?

It’s not perfect by any means but we’re already on our way down that slope. I gotta get myself ahold of this Vocaloid software so I can make music with computers singing love songs to one another.

Person B reads the same book and says “Wow, there’s some good stuff in here, but some ideas taken out of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, this guy may be a nutjob.”

Person C reads same and says “I noticed some ideas in this book, the same Hitler used in Mein Kampf. However, I know those happen to have originated from Nietzche, not Hitler. I would have worried about this author otherwise.”

The more you know, the better you are. If Hitler’s Mein Kampf were to be suppressed, how would you be able to tell if anyone was writing like him or using his same ideas for their modern agenda?

I dunno about you, but I’m going to find and read myself a copy of that, now that I’ve had this little Socratic dialog (invented by Plato) with myself.

… the Australian economy was the only one in the developed world to expand in the first half of 2009.

In fact, Australia managed to avoid recession, only seeing its economy contract in the last quarter of 2008.

Its government has helped the economy with major stimulus spending.

It has spent 42bn Australian dollars ($35bn; £21bn) on schemes including cash handouts for pensioners and for low and middle-income families, and a number of infrastructure projects.

Meanwhile we (the good ol’ US of A) spent trillions on handouts for the rich guys… and are still mired in a recession (and if you believe otherwise… wait, why are you reading my blog again?).

Hm. Makes you wonder.

Instead of 7.2 million net jobs lost since December 2007, the preliminary benchmark estimate suggests the U.S. has lost over 8.0 million net jobs during that period.

This is something I like to harp on, as any long-term reader of this blog can testify (raise up brother!). So it turns out the .Gov has ‘underestimated’ job losses over the last two years by nearly a million. Of course, these are just preliminary estimates.

Some guesses: This estimate will be “beat,” the revision number will be lower (by 100,000 or so) and everyone will cheer and the stock market will bump up a little bit, the .Gov will say “I told you so. Green shoots!”. Weeks or months later the number will be revised, showing everyone that things are, once again, worse than we actually thought.

I’ve noticed estimates to the upside tend to be high (optimistic) and to the downside tend to be low (also optimistic) unless you’re talking to Dr. Doom (Mr. Roubini) in which case estimates are based on actual calculations and not data seasoned with wishful thinking (also known as “talking your book” i.e. favorable to what you’re selling)

Buy this company. Buy it now. Buy it for a beelyon dollars if you have to. Give a free copy to all Windows 7 installs, downloadable over Windows Update. Sit back, watch Apple cry in the corner.

Then the real strategy begins. Put the same thing on Xbox. Start a 3d widget/app store – this part is especially important – really get on the ones with virtual stock displays so you can watch bar graphs rise and fall in real-time 3d, or for server admins to have little morphing 3d representations of the health of their networks chilling in the corner where they can keep an eye on things. Wedge it into the business atmosphere as being able to provide representational situational data for their applications/monitoring systems.

Allow this program to be further advanced and support dynamic lighting, particle effects, etc. Sky’s the limit, the desktop is now a physics toy. You will drive the sales of touch screen devices, the manufacturers will be *blanking* your *blanks* in gratitude (I have no idea what corporations do for each other? Sending their flowers?).

Think of the commercials. It will be glorious. “Yeah. Mac – OS it’s pretty. It’s shiny. But can it do this?” *high speed montage of icons flying, blowing up when they hit the recycle bin in a shower of sparks, etc etc* (Get some music by Air or Kraftwerk) “I’m a PC” *cut to a shot of mac boy crying in the shower trying to scrub himself clean.*

And I’m TOTALLY jobless. Nearest one is in Fresno though. :/

For the record, I think Moore’s kinda a douche and not always correct, but he has fairly good intentions and really pisses off people on the extreme right so I’ll probably attend a paid screening anyway.