Slavoj Žižek on Ecology as a Religion

As provoking and radical as ever: Slovene philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek on Ecology in an excerpt from the pop-philosophical documentary Examined Life (2008). Following the movie's subtitle "philosophy is in the streets", Žižek's agitation takes place in the midst of a North American dump.

Highlights:

There is no nature: Nature is not a balanced totality which then we humans disturb - nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes [and] we profit from that. (3:45)

...

Ecology will slowly turn into the new opium of the masses [...] Ecology is more and more taking over this role of a conservative ideology. (5:11)

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We need more alienation from our life world [...] we should become more artificial. (8:57)

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To recreate--if not build--an aesthetic dimension in things like this, in trash itself - that's the true love of the world.
Because what is love? Love is not idealization. Every true lover knows that: If you really love a woman or a man, that you don't idealize him or her.
Love means that you accept a person with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points and nonetheless the person is absolute for you, everything that makes life worth living [...] You see perfection in imperfection itself - and that's how we should learn to love the world. True ecologists love all this [points to the pile of trash]. (9:37)

Andy Goldsworthy - Rivers and Tides (2003)

The whole documentary on Andy Goldsworthy and his work can be found here.

Everynone's WORDS (via Warren)

WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo, supported by and featured on WNYC's Radiolab.

Pulpo Paul, the Uri Geller of Cephalopod Molluscs, and Publication Bias

Neil O'Connell has a neat little piece over at Body in Mind on what Paul the Psychic Octopus tells us about the nature of scientific truth (via Seed Magazine's "Are Octopuses Smart?")

Miracles in Nature and Science

Occurrence of the word "miracle/s" in Nature and Science over the decades (by Toril Johannessen via well-formed-data and VVork).

Hermeto Pascoal - More Música da Lagoa

As a 3-year follow-up to two previous posts:

Space & Time Travels: Mazaworld and Krautrock

Virtually feels like travelling: A 40-year old Kiwi travel buff documents his own travels and compiles interesting information about the earth on Mazalien.com. In particular his collection of travel videos (in particular Michael Palin's Full Circle with full-length episodes) is useful!

New Urban Music Blog features a cool BBC4 documentary on Krautrock (Krautrockumentary) and the awakening of German electronic music.
German Electronic Music History from Jose Rodriguez on Vimeo.

Addendum: I don't like the krautrock as david bowie's li'l brother part at the end, but it neatly shows german music in the 60s to 80s. kraftwerk electro stockhausen synthis everything

Neuroscientific Technology - Patient H.M.'s Brain Sliced (thanks, Boris)

Patient H.M., among the Top 3 of the most famous Neuroscience/ Neuropsychology patients, died one year ago. After bilateral medial temporal lobe resection due to intractable epilepsy he lost his ability to form new declarative long-term memories and thus neatly linked brain structure to brain function.
Now (that is, today it'll be finished) The Brain Observatory at UCSD is slicing up his brain (livestream!) to examine different parameters of his pathology. In addition to that the data acquired will be publicly available for the neuroscience community.
Hurry to have a look as they're already as far as the occipital lobe.

2012 on Information is Beautiful (thanks, Francois)

There is a nice wrap-up of the whole 2012 New Age hype on Information is Beautiful

Canario Cordillera - Javi on the Blogroll

"...el camino es la vida misma"
A new member on the blogroll is Javi's Canario Cordillera, which tells you in textually (Spanish) and visually of his travels along the Andes. Great guy, great photos, great adventures!

Jamie Oliver Changes Chicken Consumption

He definitely is a slick fella: In his show Jamie's Fowl Dinners, Jamie Oliver suffocated male chicks and "electrocuted" a chicken live on TV. It was all for a good reason as he wants to make us aware of the lives and deaths of the animals we eat.
Don't become a vegetarian but read his tips of improvement. In principle he advises us to definitely buy free-range or organic eggs and to cut down chicken consumption or buy the whole chicken, then using all of it.
I was already wondering how it's profitable to sell 6 chicken wings (= 3 chickens?!) for 99 Pence as they do in the incredibly many chicken takeaways in London...

Photolog Series Announcement - Japan 2008

With this aka I sooner or later had to go to Japan. Unfortunately, I was too late for the real hanami (cherry blossom watching) period but I still passed some dazzling two weeks over there!
In the following posts I will try to convey some experiences and provide some photos with a special focus on German influences in Japan.
Watch out.

Douglas Adams RIP - H2G2's 30th Birthday

One day after what would've been his 56th birthday, we'll go to the Douglas Adams Memorial lecture in the Royal Geographical Society London. It's organized by the Savetherhino Foundation and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. The lecture itself will be given by Steven Pinker and because it's the 30th birthday of "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" it'll be followed by a special performance of some of the original cast. Ahh-- really looking forward to this.

--Also check this previous post on Douglas Adams and this cool BBC production in which he describes his view on how technology changes our lives, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future.

GP's Worldwide Festival 2008

Yeah!
The year starts off with some good news:
2008's Worldwide Festival in Sète, Southern France, is going to take place from July 3-5.
Even before, there's gonna be the Singapore version on May 16-18.
For details and teasers check http://www.myspace.com/worldwidefestival and http://www.worldwidefestival.com/.
I'll definitely try again to go there.

Worldwide Festival Teaser

The Story of Stuff (thanks to Janna)

I only watched the first third so far, but I'm already convinced I should post this: The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard.
A neatly animated 20-min movie about the chain of consumption and--more importantly--its huge flaws. Watch it before the purchase of your Christmas presents and get influenced.

Environment and Planes - Update

I don't want to be a moralizer, but I saw two things I'm not sure about, given what I wrote before:

1. On flugstatistik.de (German) you can brag about how many miles and hours you already traveled by plane.
2. Tuifly.de has an 'all you can fly' flatrate for young people under 27. You pay 199€ and you can fly as much as you want until the end of October, taxes and fees already included. Check out the discussion on airliners for some downsides in addition to the environmental issues.

Email of Indulgence - Modern Global Citizens

Naturally (!), I follow the ongoing debate of how to maintain or even improve living on planet earth and I've posted on it before (a/k/a the 'whereabouts of mankind' series).

I stumbled over two modern concepts:

1. You can calculate your CO2 emissions (by plance, car, etc.) and buy a so-called terrapass that balances your impact by investing the money in projects that reduce CO2 emissions somewhere else. A comparable institution out of Potsdam, Germany, is called TheCompensators*.
2. The website with the magnificent title WorldChanging.com is set-up as a portal for ideas and tools that may change our thinking for the better. It "works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us."

Brain and Language - Talking Brains Blog

I just discovered that the two guys I mentioned in a post 3 months ago, recently launched a blog on brain and language, called talking brains.

Both are big names in the field, Gregory Hickok being Cognitive (Neuro)Science Professor at UC Irvine, and David Poeppel Biology and Linguistics Professor at the University of Maryland (and buddy of my Parisian supervisor). It was a pity that David Poeppel had to cancel his participation in the workshop I recently attended on the overlap of linguistics and neuroscience.

At first glance their blog features article reviews and job offers in the field. I guess most of it might be understandable to non-neuroscientists (cf. understandable neuroscience series).
Can't wait to see what's going to come.

Douglas Adams' God Reflection (link by Steven)

As probably the last post from Paris, I would like to forward you the nice 4min23sec reflection on the origin of the God idea by ingenious Douglas Adams. The two are probably playing cards together at the moment, giggling over the universe.

Neuroscience Videos - Pacman Bonobos and Boxing Brains

Everybody is interested in the brain, because everybody has one.

Recently, I stumbled over two both interesting and entertaining videos from the realm of understandable neuroscience:

--Steven brought this 25 minute TED talk by Susan Savage-Rumbaugh to my attention. Of course the filming is very selective, choosing the brighter moments of her Bonobo cohort, but I consider it a fascinating approach to try to embed non-human primates into--appropriate--human environments and to see how far their abilities go.



--This violent National Geographic animation gives an explanation for the legendary one-punch knockout with reference to cerebral trauma. Remark the dramatic voice and the scary burping sound effects when the brain hits the skull. Mortal Kombat neurology.