In a couple days you're going to be able to find our Technology Issue, which has a lot of smart stories in there about sciencey and computery things that'll get your mind's rainbow wheel of death spinning for a while. We wanted to show you just how seriously we're not fucking around by featuring our interview with Ray Kurzweil first thing this morning, but how fantastic, we're having technical difficulties. (PS: all fixed. Enjoy.) Why don't you go over to VBS, where today Kurzweil's telling us more about his vision of the Singuarlity—a point around 2045 when computers will acquire full-blown artificial intelligence and technology will infuse itself with biology. His theories have all sorts of supporters, detractors, and critics, but do you even remember what life was like before three-year-olds had cell phones and you actually had to remember facts instead of relying on the internet? That was only ten years ago. If Kurzweil is right, we'll have supercomputers more powerful than every human brain on the planet combined within a few decades.
I intended to spend a tenner on my first attempt at cyber-gambling, but the rules at the William Hill Online Casino state that a minimum of three and a half times my planned budget is required. Fuck it, I thought, I’m feeling lucky so I might as well go for it. Needless to say, I am now £35 poorer.
On Friday my buddy was like, "Want to split a 60 from the jar guy?" I was like TOTALLY! You see, the jar guy is not for the masses and a close connection is required to obtain his services. The other option is the overpriced baggie of some powder that resembles cocaine but would more likely test positive for drano and baking powder. I even had an empty jar from weeks earlier sitting around for such an occasion, so splitting it up would be a breeze... unless disaster struck.
On a recent excursion to an arty-farty festival, an experience comparable to a lobotomy, we bumped into this lovely Brit who looked like something straight out of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and we were sure he’d been sent to our rescue. He wasn’t. He did however provide some much needed entertainment as we were stuck at a dreadful four hour long experimental brass performance at a horseracing track in the middle of nowhere outside of Bergen, Norway. He introduced himself as Inter Inter Inter David and claimed that the box he was carrying around was actually a computer.
Hooray. Japanese scientists are yet another step closer to reading our minds. A team of experts in Chiodo have been using an MRI machine to match the electrical activity of the brain to basic thoughts and stuff (It's really complicated).
You know when you’re having sex and you’re getting pretty boisterous and suddenly you hear a small rap-a-tap-tap from the other side of the wall? That’s your neighbor reminding you of reality: that you are not alone in the universe and that the barriers of sound do not end where you think they do. That same kind of startling revelation freaked out some German and British physicists who built a couple barn-size boxes connected to trenches that were supposed to use a beam splitter to detect gravitational waves. No such ripples were found. Instead, the beam splitter had an "extra sideways jitter," unexpected but consistently-placed noise with frequencies between 300 and 1500 hertz that may literally be the sound of the edge of reality as we know it (and if you’re curious what that might sound like, go here and start clicking around). Which could mean that our entire world is a hologram, and we’re all just a projection of some distant, unknown 2-D surface. So that’s what happens when you start fucking gravity really loudly—the universe literally comes a-knocking to show you how space-time emerges out of quantum theory, reminding you who’s boss around here.
Getting a tattoo of an asshole on your elbow is great because it basically inverts stupidity to the level of genius. But when some greaseball inexplicably winds up with one on his ribcage that’s capable of raspberrying pus (we’re calling it the lunganus), there’s nothing left to contemplate. It’s basically the Auschwitz of party jokes.
The Hubble Space telescope is a really really good telescope which was designed to be serviced by astronauts instead of robots. It has seen something like four separate servicing missions since its launch, which is like 900 servicing missions in astronaut time. It's sort of decaying in space. Two missions within its time-frame suffered explosions, it has cost NASA about $3 billion to date, and never in the same mission can a shuttle visit it and the International Space Station, meaning that at any given time it's a toss-up between having rollercoaster fun with fluid physics and replacing faulty shell/shield replacement fabric.
I was asked to write horoscopes for the Vice Australia Summer Guide this year. I figured it couldn't be that hard to make up totally erroneous bullshit with zero research into the subject at hand; you know, how music journalists write. Today I will practice by writing everyone a special one-sentence horoscope. I hope all your hopes and dreams, as well as my predictions, come true for each an everyone of you!
Trying to suss out which religion is the best is, to say the least, a chore. You can compare the number of believers on each side, but these days that automatically favors groups who won't let their believers use condoms. Similarly, war used to be a pretty reliable gauge of righteousness, but what happens when you get into the pussy--sorry, pacifist faiths who won't pick up arms? They just automatically lose? After racking our brains for hours, we decided the only way to know for sure was with a test of auras. After all, auras don't lie. They may be pseudo-spiritual New Age hoakum, but they don't lie. So we got one flaming Christian, one Satanist (technically he claims he's "a magician that deals with both sides”, but we think that qualifies), and one Buddhist to pit their auras against one another to decide once and for all whose God is right. The best aura wins, and all the rest will go to hell when they die. Or, I guess, to heaven if Satan wins. Kind of confusing.
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