that is a problem.

for others than just the beholder.

thru life experience have found bright, reasonable pleasant, and competent humans - that have death grips on untested beliefs.

what is unsettling, is how many more of these people hold positions that are untenable. thoughts that have no reasoning behind them. beliefs like maggots being laid into torn flesh.

many just placed there and accepted.

became acutely aware after a course where the instructor challenged, ridiculed, and taxed his students' values. it was a course in cognitive dissonance (not many made it thru). drove home how many of our beliefs were 'gifted' and never 'opened'.

'tho like to think am not unaffected but less infected, it takes effort to keep one's mind tidy. that's where being open to the idea that you're wrong helps. w/o evidence there's no trial, and w/o a trial there is no conviction or judgment.

...or at least that's my theory.

Ever try to trick a dog w/the fake stick toss? Even they stop and scan to find evidence. (ours learned the ruse quickly)

spins my gourd that folks are SO EASILY misled by these fairy tales of teachers indoctrinating kids (yet, they can't get them to sit still, stop talking, or return materials on time); fears of giving citizens PSTD with known history (but explaining why 'person. woman. man. camera. tv' is NOT unsettling); or libraries can't be trusted to be run by librarians but the by the government (what were Ben Franklin and Andrew Carnegie thinking?)

look, boy! go get the stick! (no wonder all the anger. can't find it. but it has to be here!)

BTW: Roy and Silo thing is nuts. (not mentioned but peripheral involved) rather listen to John Oliver analyze "Air Bud". a lot less loopy.

Funny thing is, I actually don't mind the anime eyes. They do look weird and unsettling, but I feel like that actually works in the context of the story (or at least, the little I know of it from the trailer).

I'll probably watch it on streaming if the reviews are good.

But how different is telling a drone "kill the person with this face" to telling a missile "fly here and blow up". The video seems to show ez-assassination technology (tm) being used by "the wrong" humans, not AI going rogue and deciding who lives and who dies on its own.

To me, the video is scary not because of AI, but because of how easy and inconsequential it portrays murder. It makes you wonder if that isn't sort of the end goal of advanced warfare technology - the more surgical it becomes the further it deviates from our idea of what war is - this is drone warfare and it's nebulous legality taken to the very extreme.

What I perhaps find unsettling in myself is that I find this somehow worse than open warfare - as if its not the loss of life that bothers me, but the sinister efficiency of it. Is that really a valid criticism? Why is it "more ok" to fly a plane to drop a bomb on some foreigner than for a drone to do it - is it because it simply costs/risks us more, that technology like this cheapens human life?

The AI takin over is scary too. I just hope they work out in time that the only winning move is not to play.

CRISPR-Cas9
Bring me a gene
Encoding for a specific protein
Make a few snips at this coded locus
You work so well inside a streptococcus
Cas9
I'm so alone
Without your scissors in my chromosome
Cut me up and do it clean
CRISPR-Cas9 bring me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9
Keep me a gene
A viral sequence you've already seen
Chopped into bits and stored as genomic
With clustered repeats
That are palindromic
Cas9
Bind with this code
Use it to target infections of old
Immunized like a vaccine
CRISPR-Cas9 keep me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9
Cut me a gene
With a precision that I've never seen
Unzip a strand and interrogate it
Seek out your sequence until you locate it
Cas9
Lock into place
And do your job as endonuclease
Chop just like a guillotine
CRISPR-Cas9 cut me a gene

Snip snap!
CRISPR-Cas9
CRISPR-Cas9

CRISPR-Cas9
Bring me a gene
By commandeering my repair routine
A strand to match your severed location
For some homologous recombination
Cas9
Cheap and precise
Rewriting genomes from microbes to mice
And soon the humble human being
CRISPR-Cas9 bring me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9
Give us a gene
Give us a miracle like that one Nazarene
‘Cause giving the lame their legs and the blind their sight is
In view for dystrophy and retinitis
But CRISPR-Cas9
What if you fall
Outside our power and inside us all
That really could incite a scene

When this terrible wonderful power unsettling
Opens the door to unethically meddle
Is ev’ry congenital malady bettered
Sufficient to warrant genetics unfettered
To modify man in the manner of Gattaca
Raise up a mammoth or make a rattata
Dramatical medical means to eradicate aging
Or cancer or make a fanatic
A mass epidemic a weapon nefarious
Single mosquito to wipe out malaria
Send in a viral infection to ferry a
Cure to the cells of an HIV carrier
Freed of disease as we're free to uncover
What nature and accident failed to discover
And free to be other than
All that we ever have been

CRISPR-Cas9
CRISPR-Cas9

Oh CRISPR-Cas9
Bring us a gene
You wondrous ribonucleoprotein
You have the power to vanquish or save us
Who would have thought that the microbe that gave us
Cas9
S. pyogenes
The source of strep and flesh-eating disease
Housed this marvellous machine
Full of uses great and obscene
CRISPR-Cas9 bring us
Please don't sting us
Cas9 bring us a gene

With adenine
And thiamine
Incite a scene
Cas9 bring us a gene!

Had a very unsettling moment while watching this, as i mentally scolded this guy for not wearing a helmet... I suddenly realized in my head i was repeating 'lessons' from my parents... yikes.

If I was rich and had time to prepare, I'd hire clowns to my funeral. Not just to unsettle the people attending itz but also to be an asshole to the clowns.

Fuck clowns.

Man, Nabokov's prose could punch the balls off of anything Dickens ever wrote. You're seriously gonna hold up the language of Dickens as a shining example? The guy who wrote such memorable purplitudes as:
"And in this particular period, the skiey influences seem to tincture the animal life with their own mysterious and wayward spirit of change. The birds desert their summer haunts; an unaccountable inquietude pervades the brute creation; even men in this unsettled season have considered themselves, more (than at others) stirred by the motion and whisperings of their genius. And every creature that flows upon the tide of the Universal Life of Things, feels upon the ruffled surface, the mighty and solemn change, which is at work within its depths."

These comments are fun. Sounds like a bunch of old men, sitting on the porch yelling at the kids on the street.

"Stop foolin' around with that wood out there. Don't jump your bicycles over that! Get out of the road!!"

Take risks when you're young because the negative consequences are mostly restricted to your own stupid self. Later in life you'll have too many responsibilities and obligations. We've given up a lot in our modern societies. By sanitizing and padding our life experiences, we've lost the connection to the deep animal part of our brain.

There are still places in the world, even first world industrialized nations, where public ritual includes personal risk. Community celebrations that tap into our hidden animal instinct with displays that overwhelm all the senses. This is a powerful way to build a deep sense of tribalism and community, to draw people together into a supportive whole.

Tomorrow many of us will enjoy the July 4th celebrations. Sitting comfortably in our folding chairs with portable BBQs and coolers; behind ropes and guard rails designating a safe area to stand...emergency response vehicles in attendance. We'll enjoy our safe, convenient family activity then curse the traffic on the way home, inside steel boxes with triple air bags. Later on we'll feel slightly unsettled by the neighbor kids setting off bottle rockets around the block. Somewhere else in the world, they'll light a bonfire the size of your house and sing songs while they watch the young people trying to see how far they can walk into the flames. They'll feel the heat, see the light up close, sense danger and ultimately give up a piece of themselves to the crowd and the untamed thing that lies below sensibility.

I'll take the bonfire please.

Anyone else notice the unsettling 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque music?

This isn't an exercise in engineering so much as marketing.

The pneumatic motor is limited by the extreme lack of energy stored in compressed air. All inneficiencies in translating that stored energy into motion are failures in the system. The goal is to carefully remove all unnecessary sources of energy loss from the motor.

So there's an interesting engineering challenge in making this work 'at all' using Legos. There are design compromises that must be made, given the restrictions on form imposed by available parts; as well as the stress limitations of the material. It's like someone giving you a pile of reeds and asking you to build a Manhattan 5-Story Walkup. Can it be done? Is there enough stress resistance in the material for something of that scale? A fun challenge with no practical implications. Manhattan low-rises have been built before, you're not innovating architecture and you're definitely not contributing anything to the future of construction.

The question is, does it require a "technology genius" to accomplish? Someone tell me what a "technology genius" is first. Whatever it is...I suspect you don't need one on your team in order to search the internet for pneumatic piston motor schematics and copy/paste a parallel series of 256.

This exercise is inspiring and fun...until you add the marketing entrepreneur, casting hyperbole around and spending other people's money. It is unsettling to think that the new generation of capitalists are chasing the specter of Elon Musk; self promoting egotists who create nothing and take credit for everything. As a longtime member of the internet in good standing, I reject every stealth intrusion of marketing and entrepreneurship into my sandbox.

Hooray for Raul Oaida, engineering buff and hobbyist. Down with Steve Sammartino, marketer, entrepreneur, "brainchild" originator, keeper of secrete locations, crowd funder, project contact and fathead.

This struck me odd as well. It seems so strange that the news still describes it as 'teens playing a game' of sorts (to paraphrase). I feel like they should be saying something straight up like 'teens randomly attacking strangers' or 'teens brutally assaulting people in public'. There doesn't seem to be a reasonable level of gravitas around the reporting of this, which is unsettling.

@criticalthud
Yeah, I've been accused of that, but I blame that on the "arguing on the internet" aspect of things, rather than my actual mindset. For instance, as much as I talk up Medical Science, I still don't trust doctors, and in the last 10 years, have only visited to A) get a Physical Examination required by a job, B) get a prescription for a PT, C) Get innoculated for one of the bird/swine flu, as I had been sick for a week after spending a weekend at a "Gamer Convention" (PAX), where there were many confirmed cases.

But, while I don't trust doctors, I actively campaign against "Alternative Medicine", as I've seen many people hurt by it. I've seen one person poison themselves after getting food poisoning, because "like cures like", and I've had one friend commit suicide after they were convinced that the anti-psychotic medicine they were taking wasn't "natural", and quit it.

Whenever I think of alternative medicine practitioners and their criticism of Proper Medicine, I have one quote that sticks in my head, courtesy of The Big Lebowski:
"You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole"

Sure, Medical Science can be improved. But you can't improve it by removing the science. You improve it by removing the politics. Remove the kickbacks from big pharma. Remove the groveling and begging for research funds. Remove the Actual Politics of Insurance and Medicare and Medicaid and VA Benefits. Remove the Actual Politics of the 'War on Drugs".

Those are the problems in our current medical community. But rather than attempting to solve the actual problems that we all agree on, most naturopaths are just treating the symptoms... working on the edges of society, and contributing to the distrust of the individual doctors, rather than the overhaul of the entire system.

And there are certainly many types of naturopaths. Of those that I've met (my wife spent three years in a "Traditional Western Herbalism" school, so I've met quite a few), most have problems differentiating between an idea and a fact. An unsettling amount believed that herbalism is effective because the ancient aliens that brought us to earth also brought us a dramatic and intelligent plant-system which was created to diagnose and treat all of our illnesses.

They believe that through meditation, they are able to connect to this awareness, and this awareness is what will tell them what to give their patients.


It's not the individuals I have a problem with, it's their poor education that I have a problem with. Some NPs can overcome the disadvantage of their environment that de-values scientific method and fact-gathering. Many MDs can overcome the disadvantage of years of de-valuing their own intuition.

But acknowledging the similarities between the two ignores the actual harm that is caused by alternative medicine. Alternative medicine shares the same risks as Proper Medicine, with the same chances of mis-treatment.... but it removes any chance of surgery or active treatment to cure issues. It removes the huge base of shared understanding, and replaces it with a very small base of folklore that has been accumulated through "give the patient this plant, if they don't die, it must have cured them".

Yes, what a great and completely unsettling way to demonstrate the properties of the sigourney weaver dummy