[psiga]

http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/58245-team-produces-weird-optical-phenomena-and-rewrites-the-rules-of-refr

Neeeeat. New paradigm in optical physics. Negative index of refraction now easy, they say. Although unmentioned in the piece, I suspect that it will also lead to flatter camera lenses and such.
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[psiga]

On average "we" also conform to peer pressure, if the Asch Conformity experiment and Milgram experiment are valid on a national scale. The game is broken, broken. I'd like to spend more time researching this topic, and what we may be able to do about it -- but it's just one of so many things to keep looking into, so~
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[psiga]

Just a little late, m'lady. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/02/mi5-war-on-terror-criticism

[psiga]

Keep calm and carry on.. We may be about a month away from the next financial collapse. The three sources that I've found most consistent over the past few years are all simultaneously giving their warnings:

GEAB:

"...it’s the solution to the public debt problems in some Euroland countries which will enable this reaction to reach critical mass, after which nothing is controllable; but the bulk of the fuel that will drive the reaction and turn it into a real global shock (1) is found in the United States. Since July 2011 we have only started on the process that led to this situation: the worst is ahead of us and very close!"

Denninger:

"Are you prepared yet?

No?

Well I'm sorry, because it's too late now.

I mean really, honestly too late."

Reinhardt: Legatus Annual Pilgrimage (significant market events often happen about a week after those), Oct 23rd (significant number, if you're into that shit), to be held in both England and Rome simultaneously (...significant locations for the catholic church, obviously).


There's not much that we can do, really. I doubt that any of us here are trading stocks or anything, so there's no point in saying to cash out your chips really soon and sit on the sidelines for a while. And further, this is not an existential thing like the web bot shenanigans were forecasting, so you shouldn't need to feel much more uncomfortable than you did through the 2008 crash. This is all being orchestrated by delusional, exceptionalistic consortiums of politically-correct folks wearing nice suits; as long as they aren't really plotting to starve off a chunk of the population and spiral us into a dark age or something, it'll all smooth itself out in abstruse political ways that are as far beyond our control as the causes of the crisis in the first place.
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[psiga]

Yeh, snubbed from the start. There has been coverage of it, but mostly to say that it's the usual anonarchist shenanigans rather than a significant protest. Think of the classic prohibition protest versus the million marijuana march, you know? A good litmus test: Would you show up to a career-worthy job interview dressed like this?
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[psiga]

Hey, interesting. The Wall Street occupation has escalated enough to show up on the ticker: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2727299

If the kids pulling the occupation are too unprofessional to net media attention, all it should take is for the New York Cops to act even more unprofessional to compensate for that. Oh hay, thanks for attacking unarmed white girls~




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[psiga]

OK?

Oh, I see -- you thought I thought that 'media attention' would mean people paying attention to whatever their message is. I don't even know what their message is. Nobody is going to put a dent in Wall Street except Wall Street: they have a free pass to let their own math do them in.
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[psiga]

Well that made at least one of us (until I went and read it too).

My position in the last couple posts here has been based on the non-results of previous Anonymous protest-cum-meetups, and the trajectory that their latest op was on from day one; then contrasted that with the past few years that I've been subjecting myself to things like this that I doubt most anons are acquainted with, and viewed it all in the light of whatever my gestalt sense of America's current sociopolitical climate is worth.

Which is a fairly sophisticated sub-process considering how sparse and glib my posts on the matter ended up being. The touch, the feel... of Cynicism.®
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[psiga]

Now it's on getting better, maybe.

(Edit: Actually as I read the distorted signs that the pilots are carrying, I see that the only thing unified about their message is that they want to be paid more to pilot planes. This is still a cry or two away from that prohibition photo, where people of all respectable lines of work were unified in the message of WE WANT BEER; in this case they should be saying SOUND MONEY NOW, but instead they're saying ME ME ME.)
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[psiga]

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/09/wall-street-protest-starting-to-look-like-egypt.html

5,000 people, and Fox News has set up a live stream. Coincidentally the day after the unions got involved, hm?
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[psiga]

On the topic of econ things, I came across the complete Summer report from the European financial forecasting group that I like so much.
[edited]
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[psiga]

The arch magi at Adobe have gone and figured out how to unblur shaken photographs.




Meanwhile the US Gov gets to snoop in GMail accounts. "The law allows the government to demand information from ISPs not only without a warrant, but without ever notifying the user."
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[psiga]

Completely, yeah.

In the case of blurry photographs, you're taking a full exposure over a period of time, where photons of light accumulate iteratively as sub-exposures until the full exposure is complete. Alas, because the camera has jostled a bit, these light sources are smeared into the wrong places. It's kinda like trying to take a blow torch and hold it in EXACTLY one spot for a while, but you fuck up and make a squirrely little ~ shape by mistake.

What this filter is doing is analyzing the exact shape of the ~ over time, then moving the misplaced exposure iterations back, back, back, back, back, until all of the sub-exposures are where you wanted them at the beginning, as though you didn't jostle at all.

All of the information is there in the exposure, and the challenge is to put it in the right order.

In the case of resolution limitations, there just isn't enough information to work with in the first place.
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[psiga]

If memory serves (and it may not, since it's been months since I saw this news, so I don't endorse parroting what I'm about to say), some of that 16 trillion from the fed is counted multiple times, in basically a check kiting scheme. If your stupid bank needs 10 billion dollars in order to look solvent when it's time to show your balance to regulatory agencies, then the fed will loan you that 10B, and you'll give it back right after your account clears. When time comes to show your balance again, you borrow that 10B again. On the books this looks like 20B even though it's just the same 10B used twice. Do this enough times and it looks on the fed's sheets as though you've been given hundreds of billions of dollars.

Also when they say "top to bottom" I think they meant "from December 2007 to the date the bill was signed", and it doesn't even audit all of the activities of the fed, such as the setting of interest rates (who is getting free loans, etc).
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[psiga]

[psiga]

[psiga]

I have this ongoing concern that the US right now depends on its military dominance to act as a beat cop for the rest of the OECD nations; in return we get to have the USD be the petrodollar that OPEC uses, our national bonds are (or were?) considered incredibly dependable, and so we get to enjoy [abusing the largess of] global reserve currency status.

Even after the upcoming economic crash and necessary reformation (which will happen to many more OECD nations than just the US), it may not be on most of the world leaders' agendas to completely declaw the eagle, so to speak. Not for a while, anyway. Which makes me sad, in a way or three, but that's the impression that I've gotten.
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[psiga]

Addendum to earlier post; for the record since our axe thread will probably die some day:
One day after Legatus pilgrimage ends, Vatican Calls for 'Central World Bank' to Be Set Up
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[psiga]

Yeah, we're getting into a bermuda-triangle-esque place, where I'm really not certain what's going to happen to one thing or another.

In happier news? http://singularityhub.com/2011/10/12/origos-3d-printer-could-be-the-last-toy-your-ten-year-old-will-ever-need/
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