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Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park, was raised in Colorado, where his father attempted to teach him Buddhism. Now, years later, Parker and his animation pal Matt Stone have brought to life the teachings of Alan Watts, the comparative religion expert and philosopher. Under the FurryCarlos Productions banner, the two tapped South Park animators Chris Brion and Todd Benson to keyframe three of Watts’ recordings, which can be viewed here.

The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. The series consists of three one-hour films, consisting mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis’s narration, which were first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and have been subsequently aired in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

Watch part 1 here. There are links to the other parts on the same page.

Courtesy of i-marco.nl

This is pretty terrifying:

You can read the story and watch a longer footage (with some blood!) here.

A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he’s working on. Mathematicians don’t answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.

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Lots of lots of piccies – some good, some awful:

http://eatliver.com/

Demonstration and Performance of the new invention of Toshio Iwai, a reputed artist of Japan, the TENORI-ON:

From 4th September, Tenori-On will be on display in the UK:

http://www.pixelsumo.com/post/tenori-on-launch

Click here to see Yamaha’s web page on TERI-ON.

In his enviro-propaganda flick, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore claims nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade. That’s been a common refrain for environmentalists, too, and one of the centrepieces of global warming hysteria: It’s been really hot lately — abnormally hot — so we all need to be afraid, very afraid. The trouble is, it’s no longer true.

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Fascinating New Scientist article (for subscribers only, but there’s a copy here) on conspiracy theories, and why we believe them:

So what kind of thought processes contribute to belief in conspiracy theories? A study I carried out in 2002 explored a way of thinking sometimes called “major event – major cause” reasoning. Essentially, people often assume that an event with substantial, significant or wide-ranging consequences is likely to have been caused by something substantial, significant or wide-ranging.

I gave volunteers variations of a newspaper story describing an assassination attempt on a fictitious president. Those who were given the version where the president died were significantly more likely to attribute the event to a conspiracy than those who read the one where the president survived, even though all other aspects of the story were equivalent.

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A new attempt to scare pot smokers in Britain alleges that smoking pot can increase the risk of becoming “psychotic.” A quick glance at the data cited reveals no such correlation.

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