the past has been destroyed

Okay, so... I was recording a bunch of older stuff that needed finishing, and a bunch of newer stuff. I had done a lot of work.

We'll ignore the details, but the work is gone for the most part. Fucking digital shit.

To take the positive view, I was only finishing it up so I could move forth without feeling constantly pulled towards working in the/on the past. So, clean slate is had in a different way.

Fuckit. Forward movement is good even if past loss hurts.

-nn
happyhumans.org

robots and you. playing. dancing? let's do it.

Hi, I'm this guy who has made music/events in Portland for years, and occasionally does large theme based shows, occasionally does smaller conceptualizations, and sometimes just makes music wherever because one must.

Currently, I'm working on the theme of robots. And interactivity.

This isn't just about dressing up like robots (although you DEFINITELY can if you want!), or having robot themed music (although that could happen from time to time) This is about yes, music and dancing and fun, but for the earlier portions of the evening, about playing with robots.

And not just me and my friends, but YOU TOO. At least ideally.

The general idea (and this will be played many ways, but here is where ultimately I would hope it might go) is a night of music... dancing in the later hours, but in the earlier late evening, music plays while people play with robots, with an added twist: some of these robots have wireless video cameras attached to them, and are broadcasting signal to a VJ who is mixing them/effecting them live while projecting all that.

I've got near 30 robots (some walk, some roll, some bounce, some fly, some spin, etc and so forth) or so that I'd bring. 10 or so that absolutely require folks having practiced using them (meaning they're complex, they can do a lot), and the rest being something that anyone who showed up could probably have fun playing around with. I'd want any more complex/flying/video camera manned robots to be used by some folks who I have had a chance to work with as far as conceptualization, as well as learning how to work more complex robots.

SO I NEED YOU?

Perhaps... want to learn an idea and a more complex robot or few? Free to come and do this at live shows every now and again? I'd like to talk to you.

I ALSO NEED YOU

To tell me, if such a night interests you (be it the robots, the music, the video fun, the interactivity, et al)... to tell me what would interest you more and what would interest you less. Because yes this is something I want to do, but I want you to come and have fun with the rest of us. I want to find how we meet.

So. A new direction in Portland shows? Asking folks what they want and tying it in with self desire? Who knows, let's see where this goes. No, Dr Seuss has not endorsed us.

So it is hoped that you'll share....

Feel free to reply here or directly at nevynnowhere @ gmail.com (sans spaces, darn internet robots!)


Nevyn Nowhere
http://www.happyhumans.org
Sad Music for Happy Humans
(and more)

Time and Gravity make babies

The gist of this article is that time moves faster the further from the central point of gravity (nearest you) that you are.

Go short people!

QUOTED FROM "http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96095009"

Krulwich on Science
by Robert Krulwich

A Light Take On The Gravity-Time Relationship

Listen Now [7 min 18 sec] add to playlist

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Alfred A. Knopf Publicity

Theoretical physicist Brian Greene gravitates toward colorful storytelling, as he shows in Icarus at the Edge of Time. The book's illustrations include a "black hole" superimposed on an image from the Hubble Space Telescope.



Morning Edition, October 27, 2008 · Let's talk about tiptoeing right next to a black hole. Not that you could do that, because the nearest one we know of, near the center of our galaxy, is impossible to get to. Even if you could travel at the speed of light, you wouldn't be able to reach it in your lifetime.

But let's pretend.

If you traveled the distance and then hopped into a little one-person cruiser and zoomed very close to the lip of a black hole, says professor Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, the hole would not suck you into its vortex. Black holes, contrary to popular belief, are not giant sucking machines.

They only pull in whatever happens to pass directly in front of the hole. If you slip over the border, then you're in trouble. But if you hang just off to the side, if you cruise around the edge, being careful not to get into the danger zone, you will not get sucked in.

That doesn't mean you won't be affected. Albert Einstein's theories say the closer you get to a black hole, the more it will affect you. And thereby hangs a tale.

Greene has written a short (less than 40 cardboard pages) new picture book called Icarus at the Edge of Time. It tells the story of a young boy who slips off in a space ship and cruises over to a black hole, only to discover that he's made a terrible mistake: He forgot one of Einstein's fundamental observations, which is that time is not the same for everybody everywhere. But before I tell you what happened to the boy, let me pause and tell a version of this same story in New York City, which is nowhere near a black hole. But the same logic applies.

An 'Empirical' Physics Test

If you and I go to the Empire State Building and I go up to the 102nd floor while you stay down on the street, Einstein teaches that time for me will be different than time for you.

You, down there on 34th Street with the cabs and the pedestrians and the hot dogs, are a wee bit closer to the center of the Earth, while I, upstairs with the wind, the clouds and the occasional pigeon, obviously am a little farther from it.

The center of the Earth, I should remind you, is a center of gravity. That center pulls at you, which is why rain and bricks and pennies and even softballs eventually land on the ground. The Earth pulls them "home."

Einstein's theories posit that as one gets closer to a center of gravity, time will "slow down." So if you spend the rest of your life closer to the Earth's center of gravity on 34th Street while I spend the rest of my life at the top of the Empire State Building, time for you will tick a teeny, teeny bit more slowly than time for me.

Einstein meant this not poetically, but literally. If you and I each had a watch, ticking off hundred-billionths of seconds, the watch on your wrist down below on the street would tick fewer times than the watch I was wearing up in the sky. It wouldn't be a big difference — a few billionths of a second over 20 years — but it would be a real difference. If we decided after several decades to meet and compare watches, we'd see that they would literally differ, that time for the two of us had indeed ticked differently.

From Skyscraper To Black Hole

In his new book, Greene has come back to this theme, this time using the gravitational pull of black holes, not the Earth.

Black holes have enormous (and I mean enormous) gravitational pull. If you stand next to a black hole and I stand off at a distance, not only will time tick more slowly near the black hole, it will tick so much more slowly that the difference will be obvious.

From where I watch, as you approach the lip of the black hole you will appear to slow your movements, slow even the blinking of your eyes. You will look like a person in slow motion. You will feel perfectly normal. Time for you will seem as tick-tock regular as ever. But should you glance back at me — I will look frantic and agitated.

What's happening here is we are experiencing very different time sequences. We are also modeling one of Einstein's great insights: that time is not the same for everybody everywhere.

Getting A Feel For The Problem

Experiments have proved that Einstein was right, that this is literally true. But because we don't visit black holes, none of us — not even Einstein — ever gets to feel what fractured time is like. And here is Greene's motivation for storytelling.

Greene says he feels strongly that "if people recognize that science is something that can be taken in emotionally, viscerally — something that can really help frame your whole way of interacting with the world — that emotional pull of science, I think, would change the way people interact with it."

As for Icarus, the boy in Greene's story, he zings around the lip of the black hole for what he thinks has been an hour or two, until, triumphant, he turns his spaceship around. But he discovers that the reality he knew has been gone for millennia.

"Then, in a flash, it hit him. Icarus understood what had happened," Greene says. He gives voice to the character: " 'Gravity and time. Gravity and time. … I didn't take account of gravity and time.' "
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Virgin births in a material world - A shark's story

RICHMOND, Va. - Scientists have confirmed the second case of a "virgin birth" in a shark. In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female Atlantic blacktip shark in the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center contained no genetic material from a male.
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The first documented case of asexual reproduction, or parthenogenesis, among sharks involved a pup born to a hammerhead at an Omaha, Neb., zoo.

"This first case was no fluke," Demian Chapman, a shark scientist and lead author of the second study, said in a statement. "It is quite possible that this is something female sharks of many species can do on occasion."

The aquarium sharks that reproduced without mates each carried only one pup, while some shark species can produce litters numbering in the dozen or more. The scientists cautioned that the rare asexual births should not be viewed as a possible solution to declining global shark populations.

"It is very unlikely that a small number of female survivors could build their numbers up very quickly by undergoing virgin birth," Chapman said.

The medical mystery began 16 months ago after the death of the Atlantic blacktip shark named Tidbit at the Virginia Beach aquarium. No male blacktip sharks were present during her eight years at the aquarium.

In May 2007, the 5-foot, 94-pound shark died of stress-related complications related to her unknown pregnancy after undergoing a yearly checkup. The 10-inch shark pup was found during a necropsy of Tidbit, surprising aquarium officials. They initially thought the embryonic pup was either a product of a virgin birth or a cross between the blacktip and a male of another shark species — which has never been documented, Chapman said.

Tidbit's pup was nearly full term, and likely would have been quickly eaten by "really big sand tiger sharks" that were in the tank, Chapman said in a telephone interview from Florida.

That is what happened to the tiny hammerhead pup in the Omaha case.

"By the time they could realize what they were looking at, something munched the baby," he said of aquarium workers. The remains of the pup were used for the DNA testing.

Virgin birth has been proven in some bony fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds, and has been suspected among sharks in the wild. The scientists who studied the Virginia and Nebraska sharks said the newly formed pups acquired one set of chromosomes when the mother's chromosomes split during egg development, then united anew.

Absent the chromosomes present in the male sperm, the offspring of an asexual conception have reduced genetic diversity and, the scientists said, may be at a disadvantage for surviving in the wild. A pup, for instance, can be more susceptible to congenital disorders and diseases.

The scientists said their findings offer "intriguing questions" about how frequently automictic parthenogenesis occurs in the wild.

"It is possible that parthenogenesis could become more common in these sharks if population densities become so low that females have trouble finding mates," said Mahmood Shivji, one of the scientists and director of the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University in Florida.

The DNA fingerprinting techniques used by the scientists are identical to those used in human paternity testing.

Chapman, who is with the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook, was assisted in the study by Beth Firchau of the Virginia Aquarium.

Chapman and Shivji were on the team that made the first discovery of virgin birth involving the Nebraska shark.
- from http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081010/ap_on_sc/sci_shark_mystery
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SHOW on Oct 17th and FREE EXCLUSIVE DOWNLOAD, blogonly!

The show is Friday, October 17th at Plan B (se 7th and main), around 10pm, maybe even earlier if I feel like screwing around before the set, who knows. 2 or 3$, cheap stiff drinks, food, 4 bands inside, SMHH and a dark DJ afterwards outside. I've dug this space in all it's various incarnations for years. It's also Kristen's (of nostalgia, a great two piece -psychedelic bass and raging drums- from Portland, check them out here ) 33rd birthday!.


NOW for the free stuff!

In this blog only will this track be offered for free (others can only stream or pay nearly nothing, aww poor babies!), hope you enjoy!

Download Hyperspatial HERE

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Fuck MATTER, it's time to FLOW. Darkness abounds either way!

(ganked from livescience.com)
As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered.

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow."

The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.

When scientists talk about the observable universe, they don't just mean as far out as the eye, or even the most powerful telescope, can see. In fact there's a fundamental limit to how much of the universe we could ever observe, no matter how advanced our visual instruments. The universe is thought to have formed about 13.7 billion years ago. So even if light started travelling toward us immediately after the Big Bang, the farthest it could ever get is 13.7 billion light-years in distance. There may be parts of the universe that are farther away (we can't know how big the whole universe is), but we can't see farther than light could travel over the entire age of the universe.

Mysterious motions

Scientists discovered the flow by studying some of the largest structures in the cosmos: giant clusters of galaxies. These clusters are conglomerations of about a thousand galaxies, as well as very hot gas which emits X-rays. By observing the interaction of the X-rays with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is leftover radiation from the Big Bang, scientists can study the movement of clusters.

The X-rays scatter photons in the CMB, shifting its temperature in an effect known as the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. This effect had not been observed as a result of galaxy clusters before, but a team of researchers led by Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., found it when they studied a huge catalogue of 700 clusters, reaching out up to 6 billion light-years, or half the universe away. They compared this catalogue to the map of the CMB taken by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite.

They discovered that the clusters were moving nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million kph) toward a region in the sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. This motion is different from the outward expansion of the universe (which is accelerated by the force called dark energy).

"We found a very significant velocity, and furthermore, this velocity does not decrease with distance, as far as we can measure," Kashlinsky told SPACE.com. "The matter in the observable universe just cannot produce the flow we measure."

Inflationary bubble

The scientists deduced that whatever is driving the movements of the clusters must lie beyond the known universe.

A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see.

In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.

"The structures responsible for this motion have been pushed so far away by inflation, I would guesstimate they may be hundreds of billions of light years away, that we cannot see even with the deepest telescopes because the light emitted there could not have reached us in the age of the universe," Kashlinsky said in a telephone interview. "Most likely to create such a coherent flow they would have to be some very strange structures, maybe some warped space time. But this is just pure speculation."

Surprising find

Though inflation theory forecasts many odd facets of the distant universe, not many scientists predicted the dark flow.

"It was greatly surprising to us and I suspect to everyone else," Kashlinsky said. "For some particular models of inflation you would expect these kinds of structures, and there were some suggestions in the literature that were not taken seriously I think until now."

The discovery could help scientists probe what happened to the universe before inflation, and what's going on in those inaccessible realms we cannot see.

The researchers detail their findings in the Oct. 20 issue of the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Being Human

You don't have to teach people how to be human.
You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.

-Eldridge Cleaver
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