Free Xeno Song: Kiss You on the Moon

The lithograph above was part of a real moon hoax.

Rough image of en:1835 en:lithograph of “ruby amphitheater” described in en:New York Sun newspaper issue of en:28 August en:1835: “Our plain was of course immediately covered with the ruby front of this mighty amphitheater, its tall figures, leaping cascades, and rugged caverns. As its almost interminable sweep was measured off on the canvass, we frequently saw long lines of some yellow metal hanging from the crevices of the horizontal strata in will net-work, or straight pendant branches. We of course concluded that this was virgin gold, and we had no assay-master to prove to the contrary.”

Other than dealing with the moon, I’m not saying this is related to the Apollo Moon Landings.

I do find it amazing that there is a big difference in our beliefs about things which are supposedly historical facts.  There are huge world changing events where we can’t even agree what really happened:  the story of Atlantis, the birth of Christianity,  Pearl Harbor,  the Roswell UFO crash, the Mothman event, the Apollo Moon Landings, Raymond Rife’s cancer cure, the attacks of 9/11 … what am I forgetting?

This is the latest incarnation of my song about the conspiracy theory that the Apollo Moon landings were faked. Here is my article on the topic written as research for the song. 

Free download. (Or you can play it with the box.net sidebar on the left.)

Kiss You On the Moon (mp3)

(c)2001-2010 by Xeno.
All rights reserved.
Distribution permitted for non-commercial use

The Georgia Guidestones, What do you think of the message?

The Georgia Guidestones is a large granite monument in Elbert County, Georgia, USA. A message comprising ten guides is inscribed on the structure in eight modern languages, and a shorter message is inscribed at the top of the structure in four ancient languages’ scripts: Babylonian, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The structure is sometimes referred to as an “American Stonehenge.”^[1] The monument is almost 20 feet (6.1 m) tall if the buried support stones are included, exactly 5.5 metres (18 ft) otherwise^[2], and made from six granite slabs weighing more than 240,000 pounds (110,000 kg) in all.^[3] One slab stands in the center, with four arranged around it. A capstone lies on top of the five slabs, which are astronomically aligned. An additional stone tablet, which is set in the ground a short distance to the west of the structure, provides some notes on the history and purpose of the Guidestones.

A message consisting of a set of ten guidelines or principles is engraved on the Georgia Guidestones in eight different languages, one language on each face of the four large upright stones. Moving clockwise around the structure from due north, these languages are: English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.

Yoko Ono and others have praised the inscribed messages as “a stirring call to rational thinking”, while opponents have labeled them as the “Ten Commandments of the Antichrist”.

The Guidestones have become a subject of interest for conspiracy theorists. One of them, an activist named Mark Dice, demanded that the Guidestones “be smashed into a million pieces, and then the rubble used for a construction project”, claiming that the Guidestones are of “a deep Satanic origin,” and that R. C. Christian, belongs to “a Luciferian secret society” related to the New World Order. At the unveiling of the monument, a local minister proclaimed that he believed the monument was “for sun worshipers, for cult worship and for devil worship”.

Another popular conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, in his 2008 documentary ‘Endgame: Elite’s Blueprint For Global Enslavement’ highlights “the message of the mysterious Georgia Guidestones, purportedly built by representatives of a secret society called the Rosicrucian Order, which call for a global religion, world courts, and for population levels to be maintained at around 500 million, over a 5.5 billion reduction from current levels. The stones infer that humans are a cancer upon the earth and should be culled in order to maintain balance with nature.

Here are the 10 guidelines. What do you think? I think 2-3 billion is more realistic…

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

via Georgia Guidestones – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Has Emily Howell Passed the Musical Turing Test?

Here is a classical sounding song written by a computer.

Emily Howell is the daughter program of Emmy (Experiments in Musical Intelligence — sometimes spelled EMI), a music composing program written by David Cope, Dickerson Emeriti Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Emily Howell’s interesting ramblings about music are actually the result of a set of computer queries. Her music, however, is something else again: completely original and hauntingly beautiful. Even a classical purist might have trouble determining whether a human being or an AI program created it. Judge for yourself:

I liked this article. Will there eventually be a Beatles of artificial song writing?  I think so.

David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music. Why are people so angry about that?

Though musicians and composers were often skeptical, Cope soon attracted worldwide notice, especially from scientists interested in artificial intelligence and the small, promising field called artificial creativity. Other “AC” researchers have written programs that paint pictures; that tell Mexican folk tales or write detective novels; and that come up with funny jokes. They have varying goals, though most seek to better understand human creativity by modeling it in a machine.

To many in the AC community, including the University of Sussex’s Margaret Boden, doyenne of the field, Emmy was an incredible accomplishment. There’s a test, named for World War II-era British computer scientist Alan Turing, that’s a simple check for so-called artificial intelligence: whether or not a person interacting with a machine and a human can tell the difference. Given its success in “the game,” it could be argued that Emmy passed the Turing Test.

Cope had taken an unconventional approach. Many artificial creativity programs use a more sophisticated version of the method Cope first tried with Bach. It’s called intelligent misuse — they program sets of rules, and then let the computer introduce randomness. Cope, however, had stumbled upon a different way of understanding creativity.

In his view, all music — and, really, any creative pursuit — is largely based on previously created works. Call it standing on the shoulders of giants; call it plagiarism. Everything we create is just a product of recombination.

In Cope’s fascinating hovel of a home office on a Wednesday afternoon, I ask him how exactly he knows that’s true. Just because he built a program that can write music using his model, how can he be so certain that that’s the way man creates?

Cope offers a simple thought experiment: Put aside the idea that humans are spiritually and creatively endowed, because we’ll probably never fully be able to understand that. Just look at the zillions of pieces of music out there.

“Where are they going to come up with sounds that they themselves create without hearing them first?” he asks. “If they’re hearing them for the first time, what’s the author of them? Is it birds, is it airplane sounds?”

Of course, some composers probably have taken dictation from birds. Yet the most likely explanation, Cope believes, is that music comes from other works composers have heard, which they slice and dice subconsciously and piece together in novel ways. How else could a style like classical music last over three or four centuries?

To prove his point, Cope has even reverse-engineered works by famous composers, tracing the tropes, phrases and ideas back to compositions by their forebears.

“Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear….Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

Cope’s claims, taken to their logical conclusions, disturb a lot of people. One of them is Douglas Hofstadter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cognitive scientist at Indiana University and a reluctant champion of Cope’s work. As Hofstadter has recounted in dozens of lectures around the globe during the past two decades, Emmy really scares him.

Like many arts aficionados, Hofstadter views music as a fundamental way for humans to communicate profound emotional information. Machines, no matter how sophisticated their mathematical abilities, should not be able to possess that spiritual power. As he wrote in Virtual Music, an anthology of debates about Cope’s research, Hofstadter worries Emmy proves that “things that touch me at my deepest core — pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages — might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul.” …
via Has Emily Howell Passed the Musical Turing Test? | h+ Magazine.

Otzi the Iceman’s Firekit – How to start a fire 5,300 years ago

If you had to make a sword in prehistoric times….

If you had to make a sword in prehistoric times, you’d need to find iron ore, clay to build a tube, and charcoal. Then you could extract the iron in this way:

Prehistoric Iron Smelting Demonstration

The hairless blue horse of South Africa

From the book From Flying Toads To Snakes With Wings (Llewellyn: St Paul, 1997)

… While in South Africa during 1860, a merchant by the name of Lashmar encountered a feeding herd of quaggas – those odd-looking relatives of zebras that were striped only on the front half of their body and which became extinct in 1883. As subsequently reported by C.O.G. Napier in the long-vanished English magazine Land and Water (February 22 1868), while observing them Lashmar suddenly spotted in their midst a strange-looking creature that was drastically dissimilar in appearance from the others, and discovered to his astonishment that it was not a quagga at all, but was instead a hairless blue horse!

Once he had convinced himself that this ethereal entity was indeed real, he was quick to recognize its great worth as an outstanding novelty for exhibition purposes, and thus lost no time in successfully capturing it – after which he was able to study its extraordinary appearance closely, recording the following details.

Its skin was smooth and delicate in texture, feeling to the touch like india-rubber, and very warm, and forming curious wrinkles when the animal moved – recalling to mind the more ornate, ostentatious creases and loose folds of skin sported by that increasingly popular breed of mastiff-related dog known as the shar-pei. Unlike the latter, however, the horse was wholly hairless, not even possessing any hair roots. In color, its skin was blue-mauve over most of its body, but with a buff face and a large patch of the same color extending over half of its back with numerous blotches. Its tail resembled that of a pig. In overall appearance and when seen at a distance, this singular steed looked as if it had been sculpted from some rare variety of oriental blue marble.

… After capturing it, Lashmar sent it to South Africa’s Cape Colony, from where it was brought over to England in 1863. There, it was broken in at Astley’s, and ridden for three parts of the season with Lord Stamford’s hounds. It was also examined by Professor Spooner of the Veterinary College, London, who delivered a lecture concerning its unique appearance to his students. Purchased by a MrÁMoffat, in February 1868 it was exhibited in London’s famous Crystal Palace, but its original blue coloration had been gradually fading ever since its capture, transforming into a rather more nondescript isabelline-grey. According to Moffat, the horse stood 14.2 hands high (i.e. just under five feet tall), was symmetrically shaped, and performed well in harness, but required warm clothing on account of its hairless nature. Moffat washed it each day, to keep it in good health.

Since its Crystal Palace days, nothing more seems to have been documented regarding this strange animal – its ultimate fate, therefore, is unknown, and prior to this present account its very existence had long since been forgotten. …

via ShukerNature: THE HAIRLESS BLUE HORSE OF SOUTH AFRICA.

Chile: Luminous Entity Spreads Panic Among Bus Passengers

The sighting of a luminous being on the shore of the region of Tarapacá caused panic among passengers of an intercity bus from Iquique to Santiago de Chile.

The brush with the paranormal took place at 5 a.m. on March 1st 2010, when the passenger bus made a stop along Route A-1, linking from Iquique to Tocopila near the Vicente Mena Beach, between Punta Gruesa and Chucumata.

At that point, one of the female passengers began mumbling in her sleep: “They’re there, outside, there’re here,” creating expectation among her fellow bus passengers. She was wakened by one of her traveling companions. Once awake, the woman reacted as she looked outside the bus, seeing a fluorescent cylindrical structure in the sea. She began screaming and and causing alarm among the other passengers.

Collective panic gripped the passengers at this point, who after a few seconds “claimed having seen a top-shaped spacecraft emerging from the sea”, according to researcher Raul Rivera.

When everyone inside the bus calmed down and endeavored to photograph the luminous structures with their cellphones, the consternation and screams made an encore. “A being standing approximately 3 meters tall, thin and with impressive flashes of light, began walking toward the highway,” explained Rivera, stating that the case is being rigorously investigated in Santiago.

Once in Santiago, the experiencers went their separate ways, “making the investigation a difficult undertaking,” according to Enrique Silva, one of the two persons in charge of the process. He says that until now “only eight eyewitness accounts exist – a paltry sum, considering that an inter-city bus generally transports between 30 and 40 passengers.”

via Inexplicata-The Journal of Hispanic Ufology: Chile: Luminous Entity Spreads Panic Among Bus Passengers.

The Great Moon Hoax of 1835

… In August 1835 the New York Sun carried the headline ‘Celestial Discoveries’ and an article about a new super-powerful telescope set up in South Africa by the British astronomer Sir John Herschel. The story ran that Herschel had pointed his new telescope at the moon and had found life! Not only that but complex and varied life comparable to that of earth.

The newspaper waxed lyrical for four columns about the vast array of plants and animals Herschel had found living on the moon. There were hoofed animals like blue-coloured unicorn goats, ball-like amphibious creatures that rolled up and down beaches, bison with flaps over their eyes to protect them from the light, birds like pelicans and cranes. After four days of rising circulation figures the newspaper printed its most shocking revelation: the moon was home to intelligent life….

This intelligent life took the form of winged, furry ape-men apparently even possessed of their own religion. So powerful was Herschel’s new telescope that the article was able to give a full and accurate description of these creatures as if the observer had been standing only a few metres away:

‘We counted three parties of these creatures, of twelve, nine and fifteen in each, walking erect towards a small wood… Certainly they were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified… About half of the first party had passed beyond our canvas; but of all the others we had perfectly distinct and deliberate view. They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs from the top of the shoulders to the calves of their legs.

‘The face, which was of a yellowish color, was an improvement upon that of the large orang-utan … so much so that but for their long wings they would look as well on a parade ground as some of the old cockney militia. The hair of the head was a darker color than that of the body, closely curled but apparently not woolly, and arranged in two circles over the temples of the forehead. Their feet could only be seen as they were alternately lifted in walking; but from what we could see of them in so transient a view they appeared thin and very protuberant at the heel…We could perceive that their wings possessed great expansion and were similar in structure of those of the bat, being a semitransparent membrane expanded in curvilinear divisions by means of straight radii, united at the back by dorsal integuments. But what astonished us most was the circumstance of this membrane being continued from the shoulders to the legs, united all the way down, though gradually decreasing in width. The wings seemed completely under the command of volition, for those of the creatures whom we saw bathing in the water spread them instantly to their full width, waved them as ducks do theirs to shake off the water, and then as instantly closed them again in a compact form.’

Needless to say, this story shocked the world and led to rival newspapers copying it or making their own versions, calls to send missionaries to the moon and the circulation of the New York Sun to sky-rocket, becoming the highest selling newspaper in the world. Not everyone was taken in by the hoax, but any scientists who came to inspect the original messages were sent across New York in a wild goose chase until they eventually gave up and went home. The stories grew increasingly wilder over the coming days in describing the society and the temples of the moon men until eventually the newspaper printed the sad story that the telescope had been left facing East and the rays of the sun had burnt out the reflecting chamber, destroying the telescope.

The stories were collected in pamphlet form by Richard Adams Locke, who had been their author all along, making some $25,000 from them before interest waned. When word of the stories eventually reached Herschel and he immediately saw the funny side before dismissing them outright. Another person who passed comment on the stories at the time was Edgar Allen Poe who said he stopped work on a sequel to ‘The Strange Adventures of Hans Pfaall’ because he had been outdone.

As cons and hoaxes go, the great moon hoax was one of a rare breed of cons, like P. T. Barnum’s ‘The Great Unknown’ and the BBC’s ‘Spaghetti Harvest’ hoax that created amusement on behalf of those that had fallen for the tall stories without any great offence or regrets.

via CRYPTOZOOLOGY ONLINE: Still on the Track: CRYPTO CONS: The Great Moon Hoax.

Swarm of Bacteria Builds Tiny Pyramid

A robotic micro-assembly process relies on several thousand flagellated bacteria acting as micro-workers to build a pyramidal structure. Work presented at IROS ’09 by Sylvain Martel and Mahmood Mohammadi from the NanoRobotics Laboratory, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada.

Holographic Images as a weapon

I have just watched this interesting video on Holographic Imagery. The suggestion is that the US government is experimenting with holographic images for military and physco-military purposes. Apparently, images and even sound can be generated and cause people to see and hear things that don’t really exist. The suggestion is that this could be a source of some UFO related incidents, such as the Phoenix lights and other mass sightings. Although this sounds plausible and perhaps even scientifically probable – It surely cannot be the basis of all UFO and paranormal events. It does sound as if this could have some serious military use and could be used to overpower and mislead an enemy, I find it hard to take that a step further to say that all paranormal events are to be explained this way. In any case – it’s worth looking at these clips and to realize that these things are possible and there is reason for caution.

via Authentic UFO’s: Holographic Images as a weapon.