I Heart Chaos

Watch the trailer for Mindy Kaling’s new show, The Mindy...

cranberryzero — Wed, 16 May 2012 09:16:00 -0400

Watch the trailer for Mindy Kaling’s new show, The Mindy Project

The Office writer and actor Mindy Kaling has a new show in the pipe, now that it looks like The Office is wrapping up. Called ‘The Mindy Project’, her character is like a smarter and more savvy Kelly Kapoor, an OB-GYN on the hunt for love.

Daily Discussion: The most beautiful place in the world

cranberryzero — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:52:02 -0400

Of all the places in the world to be, what place do you find to be the most beautiful? Maybe it’s where you live now or somewhere you’ve lived or somewhere you’ve traveled to…

Morning music: Beastie Boys “Sabotage”, performed by...

cranberryzero — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:22:51 -0400

Morning music: Beastie Boys “Sabotage”, performed by kids

As a great tribute to Adam “MCA” Yauch, David Winters of Portland, Oregon assembled his kids and made this re-enactment of Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video.

Well yeah, okay… it’s technically sexy…

cranberryzero — Wed, 16 May 2012 03:31:05 -0400

Well yeah, okay… it’s technically sexy…

IHC After Dark short films: “Paybacker” This is a...

cranberryzero — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:31:28 -0400

IHC After Dark short films: “Paybacker”

This is a really nice film by BlackDragonFilms, a cool bunch of guys who make films over in the UK. it’s a Action Cop Thriller, a film of revenge with pretty sweet fight scenes.

So I just got a new job, and I need to decorate my office. But with what? I turn it over to you IHC, help me.

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:36:16 -0400

Dildos.

IHC After Dark: John Cleese “An Appeal for...

cranberryzero — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:53 -0400

IHC After Dark: John Cleese “An Appeal for Hell”

From 1966, here’s John Cleese as Satan, making an appeal for people to donate money to a cash-strapped Hell. This little bit, from the David Frost show launched the 26 year old Cleese to fame in Great Britain.

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Fashion thing of the day: Penis-covered pants Yes, these are...

cranberryzero — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:31:37 -0400

Fashion thing of the day: Penis-covered pants

Yes, these are real, and yes they’re covered in dicks. You can buy them here, and if you do, please submit pics.

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The long and gruesome history of using corpses in medicine

cranberryzero — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:31:38 -0400

Last week, there was a story about a large shipment of ground up baby pills from China, seized by South Korean authorities and everyone was like “ewww China”. But it’s not just China— corpses have been used as medicine in Europe and almost everywhere else in the world at some time and place. It seems like a bad idea now, but some believed in the healing power of ground up dead people.[[MORE]]

Noble’s new book, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, and another by Richard Sugg of England’s University of Durham, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, reveal that for several hundred years, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy. There were few vocal opponents of the practice, even though cannibalism in the newly explored Americas was reviled as a mark of savagery. Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts.

“The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. The answer, at first, was Egyptian mummy, which was crumbled into tinctures to staunch internal bleeding. But other parts of the body soon followed. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. And King Charles II of England sipped “The King’s Drops,” his personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol. Even the toupee of moss that grew over a buried skull, called Usnea, became a prized additive, its powder believed to cure nosebleeds and possibly epilepsy. Human fat was used to treat the outside of the body. German doctors, for instance, prescribed bandages soaked in it for wounds, and rubbing fat into the skin was considered a remedy for gout.

Blood was procured as fresh as possible, while it was still thought to contain the vitality of the body. This requirement made it challenging to acquire. The 16th century German-Swiss physician Paracelsus believed blood was good for drinking, and one of his followers even suggested taking blood from a living body. While that doesn’t seem to have been common practice, the poor, who couldn’t always afford the processed compounds sold in apothecaries, could gain the benefits of cannibal medicine by standing by at executions, paying a small amount for a cup of the still-warm blood of the condemned. “The executioner was considered a big healer in Germanic countries,” says Sugg. “He was a social leper with almost magical powers.” For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade.

Rub fat on an ache, and it might ease your pain. Push powdered moss up your nose, and your nosebleed will stop. If you can afford the King’s Drops, the float of alcohol probably helps you forget you’re depressed—at least temporarily. In other words, these medicines may have been incidentally helpful—even though they worked by magical thinking, one more clumsy search for answers to the question of how to treat ailments at a time when even the circulation of blood was not yet understood.

However, consuming human remains fit with the leading medical theories of the day. “It emerged from homeopathic ideas,” says Noble. “It’s ‘like cures like.’ So you eat ground-up skull for pains in the head.” Or drink blood for diseases of the blood.

Another reason human remains were considered potent was because they were thought to contain the spirit of the body from which they were taken. “Spirit” was considered a very real part of physiology, linking the body and the soul. In this context, blood was especially powerful. “They thought the blood carried the soul, and did so in the form of vaporous spirits,” says Sugg. The freshest blood was considered the most robust. Sometimes the blood of young men was preferred, sometimes, that of virginal young women. By ingesting corpse materials, one gains the strength of the person consumed. Noble quotes Leonardo da Vinci on the matter: “We preserve our life with the death of others. In a dead thing insensate life remains which, when it is reunited with the stomachs of the living, regains sensitive and intellectual life.”

My friend, a 20 year old college freshman, is planning to propose to his girlfriend after she graduates high school. They've been dating for a little over a year. They have not lived together. They have not slept together. How do I explain to him how stupid he's being?

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:49:03 -0400

Have they not had sex or not lived together out of religious reasons?

Kid wakes up to “Breed” by Nirvana, totally nails...

cranberryzero — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:31:11 -0400

Kid wakes up to “Breed” by Nirvana, totally nails the air drums

Yes, I do think his generation will have the world in capable hands.

How to create an incredibly inefficient IP network with xylophones

cranberryzero — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:31:05 -0400

While people generally want faster and more efficient networks, R. Stuart Geiger, a graduate student at the Berkeley’s School of Information led a team that created an incredibly inefficient IP network using human-played xylophones. The purpose of all this was simply to demonstrate the versatility of internet protocol. That, and just having fun.[[MORE]]

Geiger discussed his work at the at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which was held this week in Austin, Texas.

The experiment “gave me an appreciation for how the Internet was designed. You can really take anything and put it anywhere,” Geiger said, in an interview after the presentation.

Geiger’s network protocol, Internet Protocol over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), provides a fully compliant IP connection between two computers. His setup uses a pair of Arduino microcontrollers, some sensors, a pair of xylophones and two people to play the xylophones.

In a typical setup, the computer will send a message packet to the microcontroller in the ACSII format, which the microcontroller converts into hexadecimal code. The Arduino is attached to a series of series of LED’s. Each LED corresponds to a hexadecimal character, as well as a key on a xylophone.

As an LED lights up, the human participant strikes the corresponding key on the xylophone. Piezo sensors are attached to each xylophone, so that they are able to sense when a note is played on the other xylophone. The Arduino for the receiving computer senses the note and then converts it back into hexadecimal code. And when the second computer sends a return packet, the order of operations is reversed.

Characters are issued one every second, giving the network a throughput of one baud. Geiger used a simple pre-broadband legacy protocol called Slip to serialize the data with minimal overhead. Typically, it takes about 15 minutes to transmit a single packet at this rate — if the volunteer is patient enough to complete a whole packet, and doesn’t hit any wrong notes in the process. Such dedication and proficiency has turned out to be a rarity in trials, however. “Humans are really terrible interfaces,” Geiger said. Geiger and his team ran two public demonstrations at the University of California.

From this project, Geiger has gained a newfound appreciation of the seven layer OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model for computer communications. With OSI, each layer is encapsulated from the others, allowing new technologies to replace older ones without disrupting the system as a whole. In this exercise, humans operated layer 1, the physical layer, where the bits are physically moved from one system to another. To the two computers communicating, however, it made no difference that people were conveying the bits back and forth with their xylophones. “With a properly configured network interface and operating system, an application does not know — and does not need to know — the logistics of what is known as the physical layer,” Geiger’s paper stated.

The exercise also provided some insights into the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the focus of ACM’s conference, Geiger said. It emulates a technique HCI specialists use to design interfaces called umwelt, which is a practice of imagining what the world must look like to the potential users of the interface.

This experiment allowed participants to get the feel for what it would be like to be a circuit. In fact, Geiger even put the xylophone players in black cardboard boxes to isolate them from their surroundings, where they could concentrate only on transmitting bits.

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Watch the first full episode of Disney’s ‘Tron...

cranberryzero — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:32:23 -0400

Watch the first full episode of Disney’s ‘Tron Uprising’ animated series right now

Disney recently put the first episode of their brand new animated series ‘Tron Uprising’ on YouTube for now, so give it a peek. This first episode is called “Beck’s Beginning”, about a program named Beck who has aspirations of becoming the next Tron.

Tron Uprising premieres on Disney XD June 7 at 9pm EST.

Photos: Infinity Shred (fmr Starscream) @ Shea Stadium in NYC

andrewstclair — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:32:00 -0400

If you’re into the 8-Bit/Chiptune genre, then chances are, you’re familiar with Starscream. The band consists of George Stroud on drums, Nathan Ritholz on guitar, and Damon Hardjowirogo who controls a few devices, including a couple of Nintendo Game Boys and a Commodore 64 with a Music Maker overlay. Their sound ranges from the ethereal to the downright destructive.[[MORE]]

Thanks to some unfortunate legal circumstances, the band has been forced to shed their moniker for a new name. So, on May 12th in East Williamsburg NY, the band performed their final show as Starscream.

As it turns out, it’s not Hasbro breathing down their necks. It’s a metal band from Philadelphia called, ‘StarSkream’. StarSkeam successfully forced Starscream to either change their name to ‘Starscream NYC’ (which sounds like a franchise) or drop the name altogether. How this affects DJ Starscream, is uncertain, but the whole thing seems silly, considering that the band from Philly is essentially bullying another band over a character name from The Transformers. Furthermore, they use a Decepticon logo in their flyers and press materials. Sure, you could argue that Starskream is spelled differently. But then again, 2 Live Crew’s Luke Skyywalker is spelled differently, but Lucasfilm successfully sued forced a name change. So, make that happen, Hasbro!

But enough about that. As a last hurrah, Starscream decided to have one last blowout at a DIY space in Brooklyn called Shea Stadium. Tons of crowdsurfing and moshing Even members of fellow chiptuners Anamanaguchi got in on the action. It was a celebration of their past and future. But, it was also the release party of their new EP under the band’s new name, Infinity Shred.

Infinity Shred’s newest recording “EP 001 (Gnar Dream)” is available today on Bandcamp and iTunes. It’s well worth checking out. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll trust Bryan Lee O’Malley’s opinion.

Starscream is dead. Long live Infinity Shred.

It's just me, Hitler, your mom and Tuesday tattoo pics

cranberryzero — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:31:00 -0400

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Keep your appetite for Prometheus strong with this brand new...

cranberryzero — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:01:19 -0400

Keep your appetite for Prometheus strong with this brand new promo clip

It’s short, but sweet, but it gives you a good look at the Prometheus ship and the arrival to the alien planet. Prometheus opens June 8, and Ridley Scott better not let me down.

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George Lucas does something cool for a change... gets revenge on his uppity neighbors

cranberryzero — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:30:32 -0400

After years of wrangling with his wealthy neighbors in Marin County, California over the development of a movie studio on his extensive property, George Lucas has decided to give a big fuck you to his neighbors. He’s abandoned the idea of building a movie studio and instead, he’s going to turn that area of his property into low income housing. [[MORE]]

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, for four decades Lucas has owned a large swath of land in Marin County in the North San Francisco Bay and has spent the past few years trying to transform the ranch on it into a massive, nearly 300,000 square foot, state-of-the-art movie studio complete with day care center, restaurant, gym and a 200-car garage. His neighbors, however, have rejected it every step of the way. Despite the promise of bringing $300 million worth of economic activity to the area, the already-well off neighbors are worried about years’ worth of construction activity and the additional foot traffic it will bring into their neighborhood once completed.

The local homeowners association has been such a thorn in Lucas’ side that he’s decided to abandon the studio construction entirely, issuing this official statement about Lucasfilm’s withdrawal of the new studio:

The level of bitterness and anger expressed by the homeowners in Lucas Valley has convinced us that, even if we were to spend more time and acquire the necessary approvals, we would not be able to maintain a constructive relationship with our neighbors.

We love working and living in Marin, but the residents of Lucas Valley have fought this project for 25 years, and enough is enough. Marin is a bedroom community and is committed to building subdivisions, not business. Many years ago, we tried to stop the Lucas Valley Estates project from being built, but we failed, and we now have a subdivision on our doorstep.

So what is George Lucas going to do with his property now that he’s tired of his rich neighbors putting up a not-in-my-backyard stink? He wants to transform the property into low-income housing, naturally, ending their official statement with this zinger, “If everyone feels that housing is less impactful on the land, then we are hoping that people who need it the most will benefit.”

He’s working with the Marin Community Foundation to instead construct affordable housing for either low-income families or seniors living on small, fixed incomes. In order to smooth along the development, he’s already given them all of the pricey technical studies and land surveys Lucasfilm spent years conducting. And we think that’s just great. Because if there’s one thing rich people will hate more than having movie magic made in their backyard, it’s poor people moving in.

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Cosplay of the day: Lady Thor See more pictures of sexy ladies...

cranberryzero — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:01:46 -0400

Cosplay of the day: Lady Thor

See more pictures of sexy ladies dressed as Thor here.

Brief teaser trailer for Arkham City “Harley Quinn’s...

cranberryzero — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:31:34 -0400

Brief teaser trailer for Arkham City “Harley Quinn’s Revenge” DLC

The new DLC for Arkham City, called Harley Quinn’s Revenge, picks up where the end of the original game left off, with Harley running rampant in Arkham City with Batman hot on her tail. Communications between Batman and Robin have become scarce or non-existent, which causes the Boy Wonder to take matters into his own hands. Pursuing any leads that he can, Robin tries to find and help Batman.

The DLC pack comes out on May 29th, and will be 800 Microsoft Points.

The world's oldest known cave art may be a depiction of a lady cave

cranberryzero — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:23:31 -0400

Discovered in a cave in France, what could be the world’s oldest human etching could very well be a drawing of a vulva. Or it could just be something else, but archeologists like to see vulvas and dicks and everything. Oh wait, that’s me. Maybe they could be right.[[MORE]]

The new discovery, uncovered at a site called Abri Castanet in France, consists mainly of circular carvings most likely meant to represent the vulva. The carvings were etched into the ceiling of a now-collapsed rock shelter about 37,000 years ago, researchers reported Monday (May 14) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s quotidian art, it’s everyday art,” study researcher Randall White, an anthropologist at New York University, told LiveScience. “It’s over their heads as they’re doing everyday, banal sorts of things.”

The artists who created this ceiling décor were the first humans in Europe, a group called the Aurignicians. Arriving from Africa, they would replace the Neanderthals in Eurasia.

They were hunter-gatherers, White said, and their society was quite complex. They painted, sculpted and made carvings. Their jewelry included woolly mammoth ivory beads, pierced animal teeth and shells from both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

The Aurignicians would have spent winters at the site in southwestern France, perhaps in groups of up to 300 people, White said. These hunter-gatherers found shelter beneath a rock overhang about 23 feet (7 meters) deep and about 6 feet (2 m) tall. On the ceiling, they pecked away rock, carving multiple depictions of notched circles likely meant to represent the female genitalia. (Anthropologists still debate if the images are meant to be vulvas or something else.) Other European rock art sites have similar carvings, White said, though there are regional differences in how the symbols are drawn.

The Abri Castanet site has been under excavation since 1911, but those early archaeological explorations were not as advanced as today’s. Early on, archaeologists found evidence of carvings at the site, but they weren’t able to determine exactly where the artwork came from or how old it was. White and his colleagues excavated down from the top of the collapsed rock shelter roof. When the roof collapsed, it fell directly on the left-behind artifacts from the Aurignician residents, enabling the researchers to date the site to about 37,000 years ago — about 1,000 years older than the cave art at the Grotte Chauvet in France, the previously oldest-known art in Europe.

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