George Carlin murió hace 5 días.

Yo no sabía quien era hasta que ha muerto, pero después de ver sus vídeos pienso que hay gente que no debería morir nunca:







http://mashable.com/2008/06/23/george-carlin-dead/

Tales of mere existence

I have found some youtube videos and comics from an animator / cartoonist called Levni Yilmaz . He signs this work as "...stuff you think but don't talk about"

Here's a list of his videos in youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=AgentXPQ&p=r

I recommend the titles 'Procrastination', 'How to Break up', 'How I Found Out About Girls', 'Take shoes up?'...

Hablemos en futuro... no muy lejano

En el transcurso del próximo semestre, es cuando todos los componentes de la crisis (financieros, monetarios, económicos, estratégicos, sociales y políticos) van a converger con su máxima intensidad. Se han calculado ocho importantes fenómenos que marcarán esos seis meses de manera decisiva y continuarán en los años 2009 y 2010, con sus posibles efectos:

1. El Dólar en ruina (1 Euro = 1,75 Dólares a finales de 2008): el pánico carcome la psique colectiva estadounidense por el colapso de su divisa y economía.

2. Sistema financiero mundial: Quiebre a causa su imposible subyugación por Washington

3. Unión Europea: la periferia se hunde en la recesión mientras que el núcleo de la eurozona sólo se desacelera

4. Asia: el « doble golpe de bambú » inflación/hundimiento de las exportaciones

5. América latina: aumento de las dificultades, pero un crecimiento sostenido para una gran parte de la región, con México y Argentina en crisis

6. Mundo árabe: los regímenes pro-occidentales a la deriva / 60 % de riesgos de explosión político-social en el eje Egipto-Marruecos

7. Irán: confirmación del 70 % de probabilidad de un ataque en octubre

8. Bancos / burbujas especulativas: La colisión de las burbujas

La decisión de Washington de aumentar las apuestas en lo que se refiere al plazo para el regreso del « Dólar fuerte », obligando a Ben Bernanke a montar las defensas para ello, conlleva la aceleración del proceso de quiebre del sistema financiero mundial.

En efecto, Ben Bernanke es la última muralla antes de la toma de conciencia definitiva, por los principales poseedores de divisas estadounidenses y de activos nominados USD, de que Washington no tiene más medios para sostener su moneda. Lo que, a principios de 2006 (con fin de la publicación del M3 por FED), correspondía a una política deliberada de depreciación del Dólar con el fin de tratar de reducir el déficit comercial estadounidense y de limitar el valor efectivo (para los Estados Unidos) de su deuda mundial (que está formulada en USD), se volvió contra sus impulsores y se ha transformado en una fuga generalizada al exterior de Estados Unidos (fuga de capitales, permanencia de los déficit comerciales, crecimiento de la inflación,…). La carta « Bernanke » es la última carta « psicológica » que puede jugar Washington. Su utilización muestra, hasta qué punto los dirigentes estadounidenses llegaron a las últimas instancias para tratar de retener a sus socios en el sistema creado después de 1945, fundado sobre la economía de los Estados Unidos y su divisa.

Cuando, dentro de algunas semanas (después de las reuniones de G8 y otras instancias), se confirme que es imposible organizar ninguna acción de amplitud para estabilizar durablemente la divisa estadounidense, el sistema financiero mundial estallará en diferentes subsistemas que intentarán sobrevivir lo mejor posible hasta que se organice un nuevo equilibrio financiero mundial. Comprometiéndose en esta vía que no lleva a ninguna parte, conscientemente o inconscientemente, voluntariamente o no, Ben Bernanke acaba de firmar el fin del sistema financiero actual. La vuelta al « Dólar fuerte », es un algo así como la « liberación de Irak », deseos piadosos que se transforman en pesadilla.

Por otra parte, si Washington no tenía realmente la intención de tratar de estabilizar el Dólar o más ambiciosamente, de revalorizarlo respecto a las principales divisas mundiales, habría un solo método, que constaría de dos partes: un fuerte aumento en las tasas de interés por parte de la FED, y una drástica disminución de la creación monetaria. Si las autoridades estadounidense deciden poner en ejecución esta política, su economía (efectiva y financiera) se pararía en seco a las siguientes semanas: el mercado inmobiliario caería a cero por falta de créditos asequibles y a causa de una explosión de los intereses en los hogares endeudados a tasas variables, el consumo estadounidense se tornaría negativo (es s decir, retrocedería mes tras mes), las quiebras de las empresas aumentarían de manera exponencial, Wall Street se derrumbaría bajo el peso de sus múltiples deudas, sucumbiendo por completo a la implosión inmediata del mercado de los CDS debido al default generalizados de los co-contratantes...

Estos acontecimientos, absolutamente ciertos en caso de una acción voluntarista de Washington en favor de un Dólar fuerte son, indudablemente, inaceptables para las autoridades estadounidenses. Así que, en vez de hablar y de desacreditarse aún más, no harán nada. El método tradicional de estas últimas décadas ya no es factible: nadie más aceptará comprar masivamente dólares para salvar la divisa estadounidense sin una acción muy voluntarista de Washington. Como ésta no se producirá, el resto del mundo sacará las conclusiones necesarias: desde ahora cada uno para sí. Y no debemos olvidar que a mediados de agosto de 2008, Pekín ya no tendrá más obligación de tener éxito a toda costa en los Juegos Olímpicos. Por lo tanto, muchas opciones « brutales » dejadas en suspenso hasta los Juegos Olímpicos, van a resurgir.

Después de todo este hervidero de afirmaciones sin mucho fundamento, aquí van algunas circunstancias reales, que sirven de apoyo a las predicciones:

- Para el un calendario más detallado de estas tendencias, ver el GEAB N°18.

- Por otra parte, el Banco de Pagos Internacionales se ocupa ahora del riesgo global de la Grandísima Depresión Mundial. Fuente: Banking Times, 09/06/2008

- Fuente: Euro Pacific Capital, 23/05/2008

- Fuente : ContreInfo, 21/04/2008

- Rusia se está imponiendo como el primer productor mundial de petróleo delante de Arabia Saudita, las relaciones de fuerza, en el mercado del petróleo, también están cambiando rápidamente. Fuente: Times of India, 12/06/2008

Fuente: http://www.leap2020.eu

Bacterias que cagan petróleo

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'

Some diesel fuel produced by genetically modified bugs

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London. “How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?” he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being “prerevenue”.

Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.

The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.

Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.

The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.

“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.

Are Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug excretion in their cars? “It’s not the same as with food,” Mr Pal says. “We’re putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire universe is in that tank. When we’re done with them, they’re destroyed.”

Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. “I have two children, and climate change is something that they are going to face. The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a collective responsibility to do this.”

Power points

— Google has set up an initiative to develop electricity from cheap renewable energy sources

— Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome, has created a company to create hydrogen and ethanol from genetically engineered bugs

— The US Energy and Agriculture Departments said in 2005 that there was land available to produce enough biomass (nonedible plant parts) to replace 30 per cent of current liquid transport fuels

Fuente: www.timesonline.co.uk

Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?

In the few last days, an article talking about a super-computer called Roadrunner with the ablility of simulate (with benchmarking purposes) the complete proccess of vision processing of the human brain, made me search for other "serious" projects related, and this is one of them, the Blue Brain. The article is not complete (only the first page), but I think is sufficient to get your feedback.

"In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on, the only thing you can hear is the continuous sigh of the massive air conditioner. This is Blue Brain.

The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. "This is the first model of the brain that has been built from the bottom-up," says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. "There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts about the brain and just worked from there."

Before the Blue Brain project launched, Markram had likened it to the Human Genome Project, a comparison that some found ridiculous and others dismissed as mere self-promotion. When he launched the project in the summer of 2005, as a joint venture with IBM, there was still no shortage of skepticism. Scientists criticized the project as an expensive pipedream, a blatant waste of money and talent. Neuroscience didn't need a supercomputer, they argued; it needed more molecular biologists. Terry Sejnowski, an eminent computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, declared that Blue Brain was "bound to fail," for the mind remained too mysterious to model. But Markram's attitude was very different. "I wanted to model the brain because we didn't understand it," he says. "The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch."

The Blue Brain project is now at a crucial juncture. The first phase of the project—"the feasibility phase"—is coming to a close. The skeptics, for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up." Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? "When I say everything, I mean everything," he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.

..."

And what's your opinion?

Fuente original y artículo completo: www.seedmagazine.com

Spanish for guiris

There’s always something to learn or to try, many times you need to say some phrase in Spanish, but you don’t know how to say it, don’t worry, your problems have finished, if your are a gringo and you can’t speak Spanish, we’ll be helpful in your learning. We took some common phrases, just try and you’re gonna see the difference and how easy is to speak Spanish.

1. Boy as n r = Voy a cenar = I’m gonna have a dinner
2. N L C John = en el sillon = on the armchair
3. Be a hope and son = viejo panzon = fat old man
4. Who and see to seek ago = Juancito se cagó = Little John is a chickenshit.
5. S toy tree stone = estoy triston = I’m kind a sad.
6. Lost trap eat toss = los trapitos = the little rags
7. Desk can saw = descanso = (you) rest.
8. As say toon as = aceitunas = olives.
9. The head the star mall less stan dough = deje de estar molestando = stop bugging me.
10.See eye = si hay = yes we have
11. T n s free o ? = tienes frio = are you cold?
12. T N S L P P B N T S O = Tienes el pipi bien tieso = you have an erection.
13. Tell o boy ah in cruise tar = Te lo voy a incrustar = I’m going to insert it in you.

Oceansize - A Trail of Fire

I ran a trail of fire through the meadow paths
Guided by the river banks, trees from which they'll have me hang
Keep running away from the fire
Keep running away from the light ‘til it’s gone

Are all our summers at one with the ground?
And everything I loved you for, A trail of fire from the door
That leads me to a hiding place
And locking me inside

And how loud this blade of grass, and how long ‘til eventide
The dark that shroud your loving neighbor, he's the one who lit the paper
While the reason's unexpressed and the sources undetermined
The innocent are voiceless, the voiceless are innocent
Should I cut that middleman, just dig a hole and throw me in
Say a prayer to my loving savior
He's the one who lit the paper
Say a prayer to my loving savior
He's the one who lit the paper

From them I strip the title, extinguished and misused
And all our engraved memories are unsuccessful remedies
I’m sick of papering the cracks, extinguishing the fire tracks

Though flawed by design, I’m torn from the strife
That did pile at the door but is feared no more
Though I once wedded her and her want was to play
As another's arms held took her wanting away

Questions, on top of questions
Don’t think that answers even here

It is too late for me

Unsung Untied Alive
Unsung Untied Alive
Unsung Untied Alive
Unsung Untied Alive