Archives for June 2015

I, unlike many it seems, have access to this marvelous thing called the Internet. It allows me to experience many wonderful things. It also shows me humanity’s darkest corners. It brings me great happiness and great sorrow. From images of kittens frolicking in a meadow to images of kittens being beheaded in a meadow, it’s all there. No, I will not post links to that last one. My point is that if you know what you’re looking for, and are willing to suffer a few fools on your travels, you can find damn near anything. Never is that more true than in the land of comic book related items. For example, there is a web site dedicated to Rule 34 and it is disturbing and riveting all at once. Go ahead, click on that link, plug in your favorite comic book character and prepare to have your childhood ruined. Or your adulthood enhanced. Oddly enough, unlike other parts of the Internet, spelling counts there. So make sure you spell things right if you want to find anything.

One thing’s for sure, it will give you lots of cosplay ideas for sexy time. If that’s what you’re into.

Okay, first a couple of low key spoilers and then the big mother that will rock your world. Spider-Woman is preggers. No word on who the daddy is or why the cover art features her in costume at eight months pregnant but, hey, it’s comics so there.

Next, Guillermo del Toro will no longer direct Justice League Dark. The movie would have featured the characters Swamp Thing, Deadman, Zatanna and Constantine in a single film. Warner Brothers is looking for a new director. I hope they get it together since the Rule 34 searches on that flick would be amazing.

Okay, now might be a good time to put down the Internet and go play with a kitten.

MASSIVE MOTHERFUCKING SPOILER ALERT!

A couple of days ago on IMDB, the Internet Movie Data Base, some hapless, probably currently unemployed, intern posted the plot synopsis for the new Batman -v- Superman: Dawn of Justice film. Normally this isn’t a big deal. Film companies update plot synopsis all the time. It’s a cheap, and fun, way to keep fans in the loop.

What they don’t do, and what seems to have happened here, is post the entire plot of the film online.

Scene by fucking scene.

And, thanks to the Internet, one enterprising fan caught it and took screen caps to preserve that brief moment for all time.

For the record, as fans of our weekly radio show know, I know a couple of people who are working on this film. My attempts to confirm that this is real were met with a “Talk to the hand” response. That said, it matches closely to rumors I’ve heard and leaks that have come out.

So, without further ado, if you want to know what the film will entail, read on. If not, just click here.

Okay, I’m out of warnings. Here you go.

While the author vouches for its authenticity I have no clue who the author is so his or her veracity is somewhat of an issue. Still, as I noted above, this hews pretty close to everything I’ve heard and would clearly make for one kick ass film.

And if you think comics fans are nuts now just wait until this mother hits the screen.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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(I)t is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone. – Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness). We live as we dream, alone, is also the title of a great Gang of Four tune. What does any of that have to do with anything? Quite a lot actually. Dreams are how the mind processes data in an unfettered state. It is when the mind can access and explore all the possibilities of any given concept. You can’t fly or walk through walls while waking but you can while dreaming. In your dreams you can be a successful business person or a famous artist or a hot lover. Sometimes all of the above. On rare occasions people have been able to harness those possibilities and turn them into reality. Sadly, they make the assumption that everyone else can too so you keep hearing shit like “follow your dreams” instead of “get a fucking job.” Worse are those who see the two precepts as somehow conflicting. They aren’t. Just ask any famous actor who’s bused tables or mowed lawns or done porn. That last one no longer carrying the stigma it once did now manages to fuel dreams of a different sort.

In that vein I’ll be the first to admit that my dreams have taken me to some fun and unusual places. But not even in my wildest erotic fantasies have I thought of being raped by a pig.

According to Angie Houston of Ellis County Texas – what, you thought this happened where sane people live? – her dreams came true and the family pig knocked her up.

Angie Houston recently told Ellis County News that she expects to give birth to a baby pig.

Houston alleges that one night she came home from a night of playing miniature golf and was pounced on and raped by a 400lb boar named Pete.

“People think I’m crazy and need mental help because of my story,” Houston said. “They ask how’d the pig get my panties off to mount me? I wasn’t wearing any panties is how! This pig been hot for me for years. Constantly sniffing at my genitals. He’s tried to rape me a hundred times. This is just the first time he successfully got inside me.”

Angie’s parents are supporting her claims.

“Angie knows she can’t have sex until she’s married and she promises she hasn’t,” her father, Don Houston, said. “Pete’s always been an ornery pig, so it’s not surprising he raped our daughter. After this incident, I butchered Pete out. The bacon I made him into is helping feed Angela and her baby; after all, she’s eating for two now and needs a lot of extra meat.”

Angie has refused to see an obstetrician to check her and the baby’s health or get a sonogram to see what the potential “pig baby” might look like.

“I just want to wait and be surprised by what my baby looks like,” Angie said. “My hope is that that it’s not a mutant pig of some kind and it just comes out looking like a normal human baby, which I feel, will be the case.

This is a pic of the happy couple.

Okay, show of hands, how many of you think she’s lying?

Well, that’s all of us then so let’s move on.

But what if you’re not into pig fucking. In fact, what if you’re not human? What do you dream of then? According to Alex Hern at the Guardian, your electronic brain comes up with some very cool shit.

What do machines dream of? New images released by Google give us one potential answer: hypnotic landscapes of buildings, fountains and bridges merging into one.

The pictures, which veer from beautiful to terrifying, were created by the company’s image recognition neural network, which has been “taught” to identify features such as buildings, animals and objects in photographs.

They were created by feeding a picture into the network, asking it to recognise a feature of it, and modify the picture to emphasise the feature it recognises. That modified picture is then fed back into the network, which is again tasked to recognise features and emphasise them, and so on. Eventually, the feedback loop modifies the picture beyond all recognition.

At a low level, the neural network might be tasked merely to detect the edges on an image. In that case, the picture becomes painterly, an effect that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has experience playing about with photoshop filters:

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But if the neural network is tasked with finding a more complex feature – such as animals – in an image, it ends up generating a much more disturbing hallucination:

Ultimately, the software can even run on an image which is nothing more than random noise, generating features that are entirely of its own imagination.

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Here’s what happens if you task a network focused on finding building features with finding and enhancing them in a featureless image:

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The pictures are stunning, but they’re more than just for show. Neural networks are a common feature of machine learning: rather than explicitly programme a computer so that it knows how to recognise an image, the company feeds it images and lets it piece together the key features itself.

But that can result in software that is rather opaque. It’s difficult to know what features the software is examining, and which it has overlooked. For instance, asking the network to discover dumbbells in a picture of random noise reveals it thinks that a dumbbell has to have a muscular arm gripping it:

The solution might be to feed it more images of dumbbells sitting on the ground, until it understands that the arm isn’t an intrinsic part of the dumbbell.

“One of the challenges of neural networks is understanding what exactly goes on at each layer. We know that after training, each layer progressively extracts higher and higher-level features of the image, until the final layer essentially makes a decision on what the image shows. For example, the first layer may look for edges or corners. Intermediate layers interpret the basic features to look for overall shapes or components, such as a door or a leaf. The final few layers assemble those into complete interpretations – these neurons activate in response to very complex things such as entire buildings or trees,” explain the Google engineers on the company’s research blog.

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“One way to visualise what goes on is to turn the network upside down and ask it to enhance an input image in such a way as to elicit a particular interpretation,” they add. “Say you want to know what sort of image would result in ‘banana’. Start with an image full of random noise, then gradually tweak the image towards what the neural net considers a banana.”

The image recognition software has already made it into consumer products. Google’s new photo service, Google Photos, features the option to search images with text: entering “dog”, for instance, will pull out every image Google can find which has a dog in it (and occasionally images with other quadrupedal mammals, as well).

So there you have it: Androids don’t just dream of electric sheep; they also dream of mesmerising, multicoloured landscapes.

All right, so now you can Google for pigs and get more than you ever dreamed of. That’s kind of cool I guess. But what if you want something more specific?

According to Caroline Reid at IFLScience, the universe has your ass covered. Scientists are working on, and have developed the beginnings of, a mind reading computer.

Right now they have this modern marvel turning your thoughts into written words. Brain-to-Text they call it.

The study designed to test this new concept, published in Frontiers of Neuroscience, required participants who already had electrodes fitted in their brains. This is because external, brainwave-reading caps, which record electrical activity across the scalp, are not sensitive enough to pick up the sharp signals needed to identify individual letters. The skull blurs this sensitive information.

This limited the number of people who could participate in the trial to seven, all of whom suffered from epilepsy and already had electrodes implanted in their brain to treat it. Unfortunately for the researchers, the electrodes were only put in the regions of the brain that required rewiring, and thus were not evenly distributed everywhere.

With no way around this limitation, the participants were asked to read different passages of text aloud while their neural data was read by a computer. The passages read included JFK’s inaugural speech, Humpty Dumpty, and even Charmed fanfiction.

As the individuals spoke the words, the computer had to learn to recognize the individual sounds they were making and match it to the corresponding brain wave. Eventually, the computer was able to pick up different brain patterns and match them to sounds.

The results were encouraging. The Brain-to-Text software was consistently more accurate at classifying phonetics than a randomized model.

“This is just the beginning,” said Peter Brunner, a coauthor of the study. “The prospects of this are really endless.” The paper comments that traditional speech-recognition software has thousands of hours of acoustic data to model and refine the software, whereas Brain-to-Text has just two or three samples from seven people. With more trials and tweaking, the software can only get more accurate.

The technology can’t easily be made commercially available because when it comes to brains, one size definitely does not fit all. The brain waves that transmit phonetic data are so sensitive that every brain will need to be assessed individually. Also, there is the issue of inserting a network of electrodes directly into the user’s brain. The increase in quality of life therefore needs to be greater than the risk of brain damage or surgical complications.

I can’t wait for scientists to hard wire Angie and see what comes out.

In all seriousness the possibilities for tech like this are staggering. People like Stephen Hawking could talk in real time. The severely disabled would no longer have to rely on some random caretaker’s interpretation of their movements to make their desires known.

“That’s how Timmy blinks when he wants pudding” may not be as accurate as they hope. For all we know it’s Timmy’s way of saying “KILL THE FUCKING PUDDING PEOPLE! MAKE THEM STOP!”

This tech could clear that right up.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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I have noticed something new that’s cropped up over the last year or so. When I write about the superhero stuff here people tend to yawn. Oh, sure, there are those who do appreciate it but, in the main, those articles just doesn’t have the traction they used to. And I can see why. A few years ago this was one of the few places you could get fan info on upcoming films. Now there are hundreds of sites. More importantly they limit their articles to some click bait and a couple hundred words. Usually with one generic image. It’s enough for the ADHD world we live in. Additionally, we have added quite a few new readers from around the world and, to be polite, American pop culture doesn’t interest them as much as some might like. I exclude China from that blanket statement. This blog isn’t allowed there and they are starved for American movies, even the ones that are censored beyond recognition. That said, the inverse is true when I do the Big Wake Up Call with Ryan Gatenby every Friday on Fox Sports Radio in Aurora Illinois. The demographics are different and they love the superhero stuff. They like the fact that we know people who are actually working on various films and who can share tid bits of behind the scenes stuff with us. Not enough for an article here but plenty to fill a few minutes of air time. So I parse out my content accordingly.

Additionally, I have stopped writing about Florida (state motto: Hey Ya’ll Watch This!). Mostly because it’s low hanging fruit and, quite honestly, it depresses me. There are only so many times you can write naked, meth and Wal-Mart in the same sentence before you figure, fuck it, let the monkeys have it all back.

So to keep my sanity I moved on.

Which has turned out to be a fun move. I can do more, in depth, stuff here about our future and other subjects and people seem to enjoy them. In keeping with that, let’s kick back and chat about all the world’s knowledge.

Even the cat pics.

Mike Murphy, over at Quartz, says that scientists have figured out a way to fit all the world’s electronic data in an object that would fit in a tea spoon.

Even though it’s looking increasingly likely that humanity will find a way to wipe itself off the face of the Earth, there’s a chance that our creative output may live on. Servers, hard drives, flash drives, and disks will degrade (as will our libraries of paper books, of course), but a group of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have found a way to encode data onto DNA—the very same stuff that all living beings’ genetic information is stored on—that could survive for millennia.

One gram of DNA can potentially hold up to 455 exabytes of data, according to the New Scientist. For reference: There are one billion gigabytes in an exabyte, and 1,000 exabytes in a zettabyte. The cloud computing company EMC estimated that there were 1.8 zettabytes of data in the world in 2011, which means we would need only about 4 grams (about a teaspoon) of DNA to hold everything from Plato through the complete works of Shakespeare to Beyonce’s latest album (not to mention every brunch photo ever posted on Instagram).

There are four types of molecules that make up DNA, which form pairs. To encode information on DNA, scientists program the pairs into 1s and os—the same binary language that encodes digital data. This is not a new concept—scientists at Harvard University encoded a book onto DNA in 2012—but up to now, it had been difficult to retrieve the information stored on the DNA.

Past tests have seen gaps in retrieved information, as DNA reacts with its environment and degrades at room temperature. Robert Grass, the leader of the project at the Federal Institute, has found a new way to preserve the information: treat it like a fossil. His team encased their DNA sample in a shell made from silica—similar in structure to fossilized bones and one of the main components of glass—and stored the sample at about 140°F for a few weeks to test its durability.

When researchers recovered the sample, they were still able to read the encoded data, and Grass told the Institute’s blog that had the DNA been stored at subzero temperatures, it could potentially be read in over a million years. CDs and DVDs only have shelf lives of about 25 years, according to the US National Archives, so this would be quite an improvement on our current data storage techniques.

The event he’s talking about in his opening sentence is called the Holocene Extinction. Science is now projecting that animals are going extinct at an alarming rate and that, sooner rather than later (say in your kid’s lifetime), the food chain could become so diluted as to cause all the upper life forms (that includes us) to die. Unlike the last mass extinction which was caused, at least in part, by a meteorite, this one is strictly man made. Just because some people don’t understand the science doesn’t mean you can ignore it.

But, okay, so we can store all the world’s digital data (yes, cat pics and this blog included) but we still need a new planet or, at least, a new place to live. How do we get there? Darren Orf, over at Gizmodo, put a lot of thought into that question and came up with some answers. I’m going to bullet point them here but strongly suggest you go read his entire article. It’s well written and very educational.

1. A mobile space station… like the Death Star
Nope. It would wipe out the resources of a solar system, require way too much power to move and be far to unwieldy to steer.

2. An orbital space station… like Deep Space 9
This example is not self sustaining. That’s why each episode has visitors. Stick that baby in orbit with no lifeline and everyone dies anyway.

3. A traditional Mars base camp… like in Mission to Mars
Since we have not figured out a way to grow food in alien conditions and since bringing along greenhouses, soil and water isn’t practical, everyone would die.

You might notice a theme developing here.

4. An upper atmosphere space station… like Cloud City
Well, if you built it in low earth orbit and figured out how not to have everyone freeze to death, you’d still need supplies. On any other world you’d need air too. Otherwise, say it with me now, everybody dies.

5. Giant spaceship habitats… like in Wall-E
Let’s quote Sydney Do, a research fellow and doctoral candidate at MIT who systematically dismantled the doomed Mars One mission, since that’s what Darren did.

In the case of the Wall-E spaceship, the habitat is in deep space, so its access to any resource external to the habitat is essentially zero (for example, the habitat would have to be nuclear powered since it would be too far from our Sun or other light sources for solar power to work effectively); and it has a population of several thousands of people, all of which consume food, water and air that needs to be supplied from somewhere, and produce waste that needs to be managed.

Even if some form of biological support system were implemented, the energy-poor environment of deep space that the spacecraft is in would mean that there would be insufficient energy to support these biological processes. In short – this is one of the more far-fetched scenarios.

In other words, everybody dies.

6. A halo world… like in Elysium
Larry Niven’s Ringworld is the closest you can come to making this work but, and this is a big but, you’d need to strip one hundred percent of Earth’s natural resources to create it. That includes animals, trees, water, sea life and so on. Given that that would take decades, at best, and humans can’t really live for decades without food, everyone would die.

7. An underground base… like in The Matrix
This one gets a strong maybe. Your biggest issue would be that you’d be cut off from all communications outside of your underground world. That may, or may not, be a bad thing.

8. A carved-out asteroid…like in 2312
I’ll let Darren answer this one en toto.

So yeah this is a book but it’s a great book so I’m including it. In this novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, humans carve out an asteroid and build a type of terrarium, which uses centripetal force to create artificial gravity.

NASA expert Al Globus says one big challenge would be making sure an asteroid is airtight considering most asteroids are just giant piles of rubble. He says asteroids are also very hard to spin up and changes in center of gravity would require constant course correction.

But of all space habitats this one could actually be possible. You just got to find that special flying chunk of rock to call home, says Do.

NASA is attempting to do something very related to this concept with its Asteroid Redirect Mission.

The challenge in this is selecting the right asteroid – one with the right structure and orbit, for it to be valuable. There have been concepts where asteroids are put in periodic orbits between Earth and Mars and modified to act as crew transports between the two planets. The extra mass around the asteroid provides shielding against the harsh space radiation environment.

The main challenges associated with this concept would be moving a habitat-sized asteroid into the desired orbit (this would require propulsive capabilities beyond what we currently have), and mining and processing the materials on the asteroid, as we have no experience in doing this.

The constraints of moving such a dense object would mean that this habitat would be more suited towards a smaller crew of about 4-6 people, rather than something at the colony scale.

Asteroids, man. Who knew.

Yes, I know, it should read “Who knew?”

Also, I should note that it would take a lot of asteroids to save even a portion of the human race. So there’s a lot of work to be done and, if nothing’s done to fix this mess, it had better be done soon.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
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