...And then it got weird

Mixtaping, as an art, has been on the decline for some time now. Used to be, to make a mixtape, you had to sit down and listen to hours of music before you could even begin. Then if you were lucky enough to have a dual deck tape recorder, you could dub songs from one cassette to another in real time. This meant to make a 30 minute mixtape, you had to put in a minimum of 30 minutes of "work" (or at least listening to music)

Nowdays, we're much more inclined to toss random music to a cd since it's so fast, cheap, and most of all Disposable. Cd's are looked at as temporary storage for music, and most people don't put much time into things like song flow, key changes, mood, etc.

Not everyone mind you...

I'm one of those people who's anal about music, so, humbly I present my first mixtape in a very long time:

...And then it got weird

01 - Israel Kamakawiwo'ole - Somewhere Over The Rainbow
02 - Interpol - Next Exit
03 - The Killers - When You Were Young
04 - Mêlée - New Day
05 - Broken Social Scene - Major Label Debut (Fast)
06 - Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - Tell Balgeary, Balgury Is Dead
07 - Razorlight - Golden Touch
08 - Electric Light Orchestra - Evil Woman
09 - The Shins - Caring Is Creepy
10 - Ben Folds - Emaline
11 - Obadiah Parker - Where the Moon Shines
12 - Muse - Feeling Good
13 - Feist - Inside And Out
14 - Outkast - Vibrate
15 - Phoenix - (You Can't Blame It On) Anybody
16 - The Standard - The Garden (Bittersweet)
17 - At The Drive-In - Non-Zero Possibility
18 - Clint Mansell - Lux Aeterna
19 - M83 - Car Chase Terror!

Note that when burning, you need to set your gap between songs at zero seconds, otherwise it might not all fit. If you don't know how to do this, you probably don't have any business on the computer.

Beating a dead horse

No really though, this time it's important.

To think... I planned on being busy this Sunday.

Scientology vs Anonymous

Someone pissed off the internet.

If you don't read Digg, then there's a good chance you know very little about this whole anonymous vs scientology debacle. Not a debacle so much as it is a cacophony of proverbial gnashing of e-teeth and the formation cyber picket lines.

In short, about a week ago, some dude put this video online (if you're going to watch it, I highly recommend you click the "more" in the video description area for the transcript... I can't understand a single god damned thing that robot says. Here's a low bandwidth friendly gif of the transcript, sans ear crushing robot voice) and the whole internet went apeshit in unison. Maybe there was some secret hiding place where these anonymous guys met up beforehand and decided to start the shit, but however it happened, shit immediately started going down.

A few hours later, whatisscientology.org went down, as well as a few other websites. This is because people all over the world were using 1337 script-kiddie tools to perform a massive DDoS attack on their websites. Scientology.org stayed down most of the weekend, but was happily back online as of that Monday morning.

Shortly after that, some other dude (rocking a total daft punk motif) posted this lovely message to all the scientologists out there. Meanwhile, all over the shadier sides of the internet, a lot of scientology internal literature started popping online. This is pretty relevant, because usually this information is pretty expensive (I've heard rumors of some of the cd collections going for upwards of $900). Imagine if you were a Christian and had to pay $100 per chapter of the Bible. On top of that, imagine the Bible you were paying for was even sillier than the real Bible and it taught you all sorts of fucked up shit like "Jesus was a pedophile." This is obviously something you'd very much like to keep in the hands of the brainwashed legions who already believe in your little religion.

So, in care you were wondering as to the "why's" of how this all came about: there's a lot of stuff out there already that a few simple google searches can lead to, however, the first guy who posted the robot voiced video, posted another that gives a very rough outline of some of their miffs with the religion (cult, whatever you wanna call it).

In any case, a lot of people are making a big deal about this, and rightfully so I suppose, because:

1) Scientology really is a cult.

b- The internet really is pissed and it is working together to make shit happen

III: If nothing else, the sysadmin of the scientology websites that were taken down now realize that the internet is indeed Serous Business

Personally though, I'm not convinced they'll really be able to "stop" the church of scientology per se. What they've done is essentially formed a digital picket line around several of their websites, and that really didn't hold up for more than a few days or so. According to the newewst video, they apparently have something planned on 2.10.08, but I expect that much like 1.24.08, not much will really happen. Then again, we all could be surprised.

Either way, at this point I officially see the score posted as Internet (Anonymous): 1 Scientology: 0, so either way we're up by 1.

And to think, none of this would have happened if Tome Cruise wasn't so fucking crazy.

As Always
-Mikal-

Update: Oh snap!

Nice Theory Einstein

"The most important thing you can ever think is what you think about God, because it affects every dimension of your life"
-Darren Dunn-

One of the meanest questions you could ever ask a class full of fourth graders is "what is time." Because with a fourth grade understanding of the universe, it's a conundrum that you really can't fucking deal with. It's like... time is this abstract thing related to our experiences here and it's not man made, but well, only men (species not sex) use it, for animals have no concept of time (right?) etc etc etc.

So once upon a time, as a fourth grader, Miss Almond presented this question to the class and a very frustrated Mikal tried to answer. I stammered through territory I had no real grasp of and tried to get
the idea across. At the end of this little rant, my best friend looks over at me and goes "Nice theory Einstein." Being laughed at by a class full of your peers is pretty detrimental to a fourth grader. I think that moment has defined so much of how i interact with people in awkward situations, and more so, how i approach topics I do and don't know about.

So this has been more than a decade in the making, and it's not even close to done. I don't have many of the specifics of the science toback any of this up, but, not like any of you would want to read any of that anyway. Really it's just ranting and raving and speculation.

The universe, as we know it, is made of matter, light, etc. "things" we'll call them. But the closer we get to these "things" we see that the "things" break down into smaller bits of abstract energy. For what is an electron really? A negative particle? A dot that is so insignificantly small it has no real meaning to us as human beings And protons, neutorns, and electrons (which are themselves made of smaller "things" and beyond that, well, there's always string theory), make up atoms (which, by the way, have more empty space in them than they do "things", and the universe really is made up mostly of emptyness.) and atoms make molecules, molecules bond together and shazam... matter.

But the only reason any of this has any real meaning to us is because of time. It takes time for the electrons to gravitate around the protons, for the bonds to form and break down, for energy to be stored and released into these atoms, etc. (this is why Absolute Zero is impossible, when that temperature is achieved the electrons stop and "?" happens, but, it would be very similar to time stopping within that field of impossible cold)

Time then becomes the lens through which we experience the universe.

So the universe is made up of what then? Mostly it's made of empty space, but the "things" as it were all turn out to be abstract energy. Light is abstract energy that our eyes (and in turn brains) process as images that we can understand. Sound is nothing more than vibrations between air molecules that we depend on in order
to function in our daily lives, ad infinitum.

Now, where it gets really interesting is when we start looking at the relationships between these energies. Science is simply the study of these interactions. EG when light hits something black it gets warmer, when you let go of something on the surface of a planet it drops to the ground, etc. Life, as we experience it, is simply the symphony of all these energies working together. And these rules are very rigid and predictable. Even when there's "randomness" exhibited, the randomness follows some very firm guidelines, and i'm more than confident that with enough studying of the randomness, patterns will emerge that are simply too complex for our tools we have now to measure.

So onward then to the implications of all of this: Imagine if we could peel back the curtain of time what we would find behind it. It would look, more or less, like a static set of rules on a piece of paper. A very long piece of paper and it would be written in a language that we mostly couldn't understand, but the rules are there. Then you seed in some energy to pass through these rules and what you come up with is a whole fucking universe.

So time is simply God (Nature, the creator, a computer, whatever you wanna call it) working out these problems. At the onset of the big bang (the "seed" for this universe), a variable (set of variables, matrix of variables, hell it could even be the number infinity) was plugged into a set of rules and since then, the formulas have been running, passing the results back and forth to each other in unison and from our perspective, it's a universe.

And there's even a little bit of proof, or at least what i take as proof. The universe is just over 14 billion years old by our best calculations, and yet, the universe is at least 156 billion light years in diameter (and expanding). This means that either the big bang moved faster than the speed of light (not possible) or that the big bang didn't happen exactly like we picture it (starting at one point smaller than an electron and moving outward). Instead, the universe more or less started at a certain size (the seed) and has expanded and grown from there as time has passed. (or, for the religious types, God spoke the universe into existence)

This raises some very interesting and unanswerable questions.

For starters, does God make mistakes? That is, are "miracles" just things that happen that could be recreated under the right conditions, or are they simply mathematical errors?

What about free will? More importantly what is will and where does it exist? Do our conciousnesses exist outside of this universe? If so, they also exist completely outside of time. Were we there before the big bang? Were we seeded into this universe from the beginning in full understanding of all things we would experience in life and we made our decisions at that point and simply waited our turns to be born into this timeline. Or maybe we all hopped in at once and experienced it at the same "time". Or, maybe we are simply seeded from one entity; or just a few. All the connections and intangible bonds that we experience between each other... maybe that's because we're not individuals but fragments of an individual. This would help to explain reincarnation and why new ideas are so rare.

So, this picture of the universe being governed by laws "set in stone" doesn't eliminate the capacity for free will. It just means that our will exists outside of time and our actions are extensions of this will. Or God's will. This also paints a very different picture of who and what God is. If we are all connected, and are all one, then we don't have any choice but to submit to God's will. It means that our conflicts are caused by one entity encountering paradoxes within itself (assuming the one creator theory is the right one.)

And once more: what if we really COULD peel back that curtain of time? What if we had a cheat sheet that showed exactly what all of the rules were and what the initial conditions put into the rules were... We would know the future. We would have a book full of the history of the universe. I think this is where human evolution is going... Once we figure out what all the rules are and how they act (which we are reverse engineering through science), we will have the capacity to know, literally, everything.

I know that some of you have experienced something like this on a much lower level. We've all had deja vu. We've all had moments where we just KNEW something was about to happen right before it did. or hours before. Or even days before. This is basically what the shamans sought in their lives... to breach that threshold of our reality into something higher.

This is a good stopping point for now. Until next time, here's a few links that helped inspire this post and a a few more mixed in that will probably inspire future postings:

The Holographic Principle and M-theory
Albert Einstein: Quotes on God, Religion, Theology
Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
News Flash: Time May Not Exist
This Elegant Universe

As Always
-Mikal-