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I wanted to bring your attention to a great dancer and choreographer, Yoko Taketani. She was born in Tokyo Japan, in 1979, has been a professional dancer since 1996, and a choreographer since 2004. You can see some of her videos below and also check back at her website, where updates will be posted Shadow Factory.. Her upcoming performance is free, so you really should try to stop by:

Saturday, March 18th @ 3:30pm
Dance Theater Workshop (http://dtw.org)
219 West 19th street (between 7/8 ave)

Blue Muse Dance Project
$Free

Some great videos of Yoko’s work:
Color Mirror 1 - MOV
Color Mirror 2 - MOV
Color Mirror 3 - MOV
Color Mirror 4 - MOV

Ivan Stang is the head of the wacky and farcical Chuch of the Subgenius. He has a blog. He was interviewed recently on the RU Sirius show.

We all love those wacky menus at Chinese restaurants. This site collects some of the craziest ones I’ve seen. Who can resist “Big Bowl fresh immerse miscellaneous germ” or “Big Bowl Flavor Vegetable Pigs Living Bowel”??

Scientists think they may have found Noah’s Ark.

What are the interesting news items of the day? Well you can let a newspaper or magazine editor decide for you, you can check out a blog, or you can watch sites like Digg or Technorati regularly. Also find out about using tags too with del.icio.us.

Digg is really a collection of the most talked about articles or links, based on popularity of access. Technorati indexes blogs for keywords, and newness. And del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site, where users can collect and tag their favorite sites, and links on the internet. Powerful stuff.

The US Army is deploying robots in Iraq. I wonder if this is the first time robots have (a) broken Asimov’s first law and (b) been deployed in war?

There’s a half farcical book which you all might like called How To Survive a Robot Uprising : Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion.

I just saw this BP commercial about carbon foorprint. I’ve seen these calculators before, one by an environmental group which calculates how many EARTH’s it would require if everyone lived the way *YOU* do.

Anyway, check out this carbon footprint calculator which is educational, and helps one see where we use energy, and how we can conserve…

It seems exercise is in the news again as the biggest contributing factor to health. Even helps brain health. Makes sense, use it or lose it as they say.

It’s official, scientists are agreeing that they’ve found water on one of Saturns moons. Some microbial life is almost inevitably to follow. Once you have life on another body in our solar system, you’ve pretty much got proof that life is not fragile, not special, and not confined to our corner of the universe. See also panspermia and also deep hot biosphere.

Wired has some coverage of Shannon Larratt’s edgy body mod implants. I’ll agree with the surgeon interviewed that the people doing these mods should definitely not be playing with what they’re playing with.

But here’s the question for all of you. If we as a society are totally down with plastic surgery to look younger, breast implants, ass implants and even pectoral implants for guys, why isn’t any arbitrary artistic expression in plastic surgery valid. The surgeon Dr. Phil Haeck says

This is ritualistic scarification in a different form. I can’t imagine (a doctor) wanting to become involved in this area. This is a deviation in surgery that has no place for someone that has taken the Hippocratic Oath and wants to serve mankind.

That smacks of obvious contradiction and even prejudice…

In philosophy and religion, there has been emphasis on the sex after death idea. Also related are the hashashin a secretive m*slim cult of the sufi persuasion. They apparently were doing a little fooling around right here on earth. Also read Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey’s secrets of the assasins.

How much you got man?! Ok, this is going to disturb some of you, and it’s not a work-safe topic of site. That said, it’s not outright pr0n either. But for those twisted voyeurs, and weirdo connoisseurs out there, I give you the anatomy of bukkake.

In hacker speak, when a computer or network gets 0wned, the hacker has gained access, and total control of that network. Apparently that’s exactly what happened to Citibank’s ATM network in Canada, Russia, UK and US! For obvious reasons they’d want to block withdrawls until the problem got resolved, but think of the havoc that must have played in those customers lives, and imagine how many customers they probably lost.

This is an interesting study by Sonicwall, a provider of VPN technology, principly used by telecommuters, and the work-at-home set. It mentions 12% of males, and 7% of females work in the nude from home, and a much larger percentage don’t take showers! It also says that it has helped productivity dramatically, go figure!

There’s more talk of panspermia in the news. We mentioned it before.

So why care? Well currently science, and human-kind understand life as something special, and something only earth could create, with very specific conditions that only exist here. But really this is just an extension of religious, and pre-copernican bias, which still holds sway over people’s beliefs about life. I have held for a long time that there is LIFE ELSEWHERE in our own solar system, on Mars at the very least, but possibly on all the planets, in the form of some microbes, or other simple lifeforms.

A discovery of life on another planet, or coming from deep space, would demonstrate clearly that life is not only not-rare, it is not fragile either. Whether or not their are other mamal size or intelligent creatures somewhere, that’s another question though.

I would also check out Deep Hot Biosphere a book by Thomas Gold. His premise about hydrocarbons not running out, requires that there is this deep hot biosphere, or the first few outer miles of the earths core, being alive with microrganisms. If he’s right, this biosphere would account for more mass than all life on the surface of the planet. It would also imply that many other planets in the solar system might hold life of similar kind, below the surface. In fact it fits in very nicely to explain all the methane being found in Mars’ atmosphere.

This blog is wacked. I’ll say that in no uncertain terms. The book is wacky too. People from the midwest, not sexually edgy SF or NY, no, building sex machines, that are too bizarre to describe. Archibald, the blog + book author, seems to be a reporter and observer of these incredible proclivities. Check out the interview with him on the RU Sirius show.

Cathy O’Brien discusses government mind control, being a sex slave, and other wackiness in her book Trance Formation of America. I think the MK Ultra boys fed her a bit too much LSD in the 60’s…

No folks, this article isn’t about some shady stuff happening somewhere in the third world, it’s about some goings-on at a funeral home in Brooklyn.

You all know I love sensationalistic headlines like that one. Toxoplasma gondii parasites live in the stomach of cats. The eggs and up being eaten by rats, causing them to be less afraid of cat urine, and other signs of catness about. Although a doctor friend of mine assures me that it has no affect in humans except those already sick, and/or experiencing an immune system breakdown, scientists have found apparent connections with schizophrenia in humans.

bOINGbOING has this great piece about porn tapestries. It’s sort of cross-stitch type look, though there is some nudity, it’s sort of stylized/abstract. Not sure if that makes it work-safe for everyone.

Wow, this site has the coolest, super-detailed step-by-step howto guide for building geodesic domes out of cardboard, and simple materials.

The traditional view is that man has been a great hunter, and in fact through much of recent history humans have been. Jared Diamond talks about this in his book “Guns Germs and Steel”, that each time man came in contact with new species of large game, we hunted them to extinction. He also adds that in many cases those large animals had never seen humans before, and had no fear, thus men could walk right up to them, and go to town.

Now a different view is emerging, one of man the hunted.

You’ve heard of people living off the grid. No credit card, no national id, no listing in the phone book, maybe even no ssn. But everyone shows up on google, don’t they? Enter the mysterious world of the ungoogleables.

THe supreme court has sided with New Mexican O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal on their use of the controversial Hoasca Tea, otherwise known as Ayahuasca, containing the schedule I hallucinogenic compound DMT.

Also take a look at Clifford Pickover’s new book. Search google for “DMT”, “Ayahuasca”, and so on.

I like the idea of other magazine though I haven’t seen a copy yet. They also have a blog. Don’t fit into a neat category on the political spectrum, do you willingly break some of the proscribed rules of your subcultural group, or just plain enjoy the outsiderness?? Check other…

BTW, editors Annalee and Charlie were just feature in an interview on the RU Sirius Show…

Interestingly weird site Television without Pity, where you can read endless blather about boring American tv shows. It almost makes me wanna watch tv…

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis claims that language shapes our perceptions of reality. According to this article it does, but only for the right visual field…

I’ve thought this in recent years, finding my convictions falling in scattered patterns along liberal, radical, conservative, and libertarian lines. It seems that both Democrats and Republicans are very good at ignoring facts to line things up with their prospective party lines.

This has been hinted at in past years, but apparently there is more conclusive evidence now that two analytical or scientific parents are more likely to produce offspring with autism.

Here’s an interesting article at the Association for Psychological Science which explains how actors “remember” their lines. They actually read them off the other actors, much the same way we remember the words to music as we hear the song. It just flows…