Dino Rossi Campaign uses Subliminal Messaging

Dino Rossi is running for Governor of Washington State right now. Watch the ad though... there's something funny going on here.

Did you catch it? I assure you, there's a subliminal message in there, about 15 seconds in.

What is it?

The woman providing counterpoint to his soundbites is saying "Dino Rossi: A New Direction".

Anyone who has studied subliminal advertising will recognize this phrase. Try saying it fast, and you'll get it - Dino Rossi: A Nude Erection.

Of course, the Democrats were also using this phrase back in 2006. And it has a long history with the Speed Seduction crowd. (Seriously, click that link back there - it's handy training if you want to make sure you don't get manipulated. It'll tell you what to look for).

Note that they're not showing you the phrase - they're saying it. It only works when said; there's ambiguity there otherwise.

These are phrases to look out for, which are designed to affect you on a base, emotional level and bypass your critical brain, to get you to do what other people want you to.

You might want to do more research on this... these sites should get you started:

Pick Up Guide- How to Lay Girls Guide - Speech patterns and how they're used to get you thinking a certain way...

http://www.pickupguide.com/layguide/quoting.htm - How quoting someone else's words makes your message easier to swallow...

Here's an important one - Anchoring - http://www.pickupguide.com/layguide/anchoring.htm - or, how people can get their message across via multimodal sensory techniques. (eg. Touching you on a shoulder when they say something nice, so that every time they touch you on the shoulder, you're expecting them to say something you'll like).

The politicians are getting smarter, and they use all of these tricks against you. Please, arm yourself against them, and think for yourself.

ps. I know that most of these links are from speed seduction sites, but seriously, that's the easiest place to learn about it. Once you read a few of the examples - no matter how you feel about why and how they are applied - you should get an idea for how pervasive this stuff is in advertising, marketing and sales. And it'll drive you batty because of it - but at least you'll be much more immune than the average person who doesn't know the techniques.

Super Cool Universe Sandbox Simulator

Digg this up and give the author some love: http://digg.com/pc_games/Fantastic_Universe_Simulator (and by the way, there's a video linked from the Digg article, so check that out too).

It's a pretty amazing project... everything is controllable via a WiiMote. I've seen this running on a huge projection screen, and it's frankly just dazzling. You could play with this for hours.

Especially the galaxies crashing bits...

Here's a screenshot of a physically accurate Saturn, with all of its moons:

Beards and Skirts ... and Sh*t Hitting The Fan

   

 
Good Economic Times - Illustrated

Believe it or not, fashion can demonstrate exactly how well a company, or a country is doing. It's a phenomenon called The Environmental Security Hypothesis. Here's how it works.

During good economic times, statistically, men will prefer blondes. Skirts will go up - literally. They'll get so short you could... well... read a girl's license plate. Men will go clean-shaven. Both sexes will prefer people with big, wide, trusting eyes. Everything's happy in the world, and (as a guy, I really appreciate this), girls will be wandering around showing more flesh than a gynecologists convention.

Why?

Well, I'm not personally sure on the hair color. Brunettes? You're economically immune. Huzzah! Red-heads? Well, the study I was reading didn't actually cover red-heads. Consider yourselves a force of nature unto your own not bound by the space-time or the economic continuum.

 
Harsh Economic Times- Illustrated

Bad news for the blondes though. In harsh economic times, all of the sudden the pendulum swings the other way. Men prefer girls with dark hair. Women prefer men with beards. (Actually, men prefer men with beards too, and by that, I don't just mean bears - that goes for hierarchies of men in society too, not just men who... well.. enjoy other men). The smaller your eyes are? The more attractive, and the more friends you'll have. Even though you have little beady eyes.

It's not just beards either. Anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and economists have all turned to that bastion of persistent cultural data - Playboy Magazine - and studied the measurements of the girls within. (I'm sure they also read the articles). The result? In times of economic strife, men prefer taller, heavier and older girls with smaller tits.

 
Playboy Magazine: The choice of anthropological
socioeconomic psychologists everywhere

I've seen this myself. We're entering a recession. We've got about a hundred people in our office - mostly young men. Statistically, according to the studies, you'd expect the preference to shift by about 3-4% towards wearing beards.

Guess how many people grew beards over the past 6 months, since the economic downturn started to really pinch?

Yep, that's right. 4 people grew beards, right in line with the study. Or got more scruffy at least. One guy has been growing a moustache since October, and he still hasn't shaved it. He looks like a 70s (the era of stagflation, Carter) porn star. That's dedication.

I Know What You're Thinking

What can you do with this information? How can we make this useful?

Well, on a micro level, look around the company you work for. Are things going well? Or badly? What does your gut tell you? What signs can you see?

How To Tell If You're About To Get Laid Off, or if the stock market is about to crash...

• Assuming you work in an industry where you're lucky enough to see women, did any women in your office get breast reduction surgery recently? Or get taller? Or both?
• Has anyone dyed their hair from blonde or brown to black recently?
• How many guys have grown beards, or grown scruffy, 80s-style George Michael stubble? (If the reason is not that the woman or man in their life is driven wild by the facial hair, count them as subliminal converters)
• Bring copies of Playboy into work. Are the models as old as your mom? Are any of the models your mom? If so, we might be experiencing economic hard times. (Or at the very least, your mom might be).
• Has anyone switched from glasses to contact lenses, giving them the "Mr. Magoo" effect where their eyes are now just tiny dots? Lasik counts.

Things Not To Do If You're CEO Of A Company And Don't Want To Freak Out Your Employees

The Unexpected CEO Beard:
A Serious Business Faux Pas

As a leader, there are certain expectations you have to uphold. You're not allowed to hold all night hooker and blow parties unless you invite most of the senior staff.  You may only have three reserved parking spots at the office for your variety of expensive sports cars, even if two of them are registered in your wife's name for tax reasons. You can't blow the morale budget on that nice set of golf clubs you saw in the Sharper Image, with the built in GPS tracker in each golf ball.

Most importantly, before calling a random all-hands meeting, you must not - under any circumstances - suddenly start sporting a full beard. Especially if you didn't have it the last time any of the staff saw you. Even stubble is out. There's a reason the bad guys in the mirror universe in Star Trek all had goatees, you know.

Public Enemy Number 1 - The Herpes Viruses as Causative Agents For Most Later-Life Diseases (part 1)

Article Navigation: Previous Article in this series - Next Article in this series

This is the story of a life-form. A very small, tiny encapsulated bundle of DNA that can replicate by itself, with the help of a host - specifically, in this case, human beings. It is also the story of its siblings - a set of viruses called 'herpesviradae' - which together form a large family of viruses which infect humans and other animals.

This is also a personal story, which touches on the death of my mother in 1996, and on the lives of other friends and family, all of whom are in some way or another inextricably tied to this virus.

And this is a story of hope. The hope that as soon as this is published, people can start taking preventative measures, and active measures against a great many diseases.

If I am correct in my hypothesis - which I hope to shore up with as much direct data as possible, along with references to many medical research papers - then I hope to prove that all of the following diseases are in some way caused by the family of herpes viruses.

If this is the case - and I believe this to be true - then there are direct nutritional and pharmaceutical measures that can be taken to stave off the progress of these diseases. Hopefully this series of blog posts will help to focus the medical community, and lead to the creation of cures, treatments and preventative measures against all of these diseases.

The diseases and symptoms I will cover in this series of posts include:

• Alzheimer's Disease
• Type-II Diabetes
• High Cholesterol, including high HDL and high triglyceride levels
• Heart disease, including atherosclerosis (aka arteriosclerosis)
• Cancer of the gallbladder (cholangiocarcinoma)
• Colon cancer
• Crohn's disease
• Multiple sclerosis
• Rheumatoid arthritis
• Arthritis
• Osteoporosis
• Multiple myeloma
• Glioblastoma multiforme
• Bipolar disorder
• Schizophrenia
• Hodkin's Disease
• Lymphoma
• Breast Cancer
• Kaposi's Sarcoma

There may also be other diseases for which I have not made this association yet.

I will also touch on:

• Parkinson's disease
• Prostate cancer

- both of which may be caused by other viruses, and as such are not as eminently treatable, but are similarly caused.

While I cannot prove a direct link between the virus and the symptomatic disease in all of these cases, I will be collecting enough papers together and also mechanisms of action that will provide enough evidence to show that we should be looking at the herpes viruses as the major causative agent (in combination with specific genetic variations) for these diseases.

When I have completed this series, I will collect the information together, remove most of the personal anecdotes, and attempt to publish in a medical journal. However, I believe that this information is important enough to publish in pieces while I put together the final paper.

The next post in this series will detail the changes in medical approaches to disease agents over the last 20 years or so, and my original hypothesis as to fungal, bacterial and viral agents being the underlying cause of non-juvenile cancers.

(If you are new to this series, you may want to read this post regarding the treatment of Alzheimer's with Etanercept, and how the mechanism of action may involve the herpes virus, and not simply be due to the action of TNF-alpha on synaptic function)

For some reason, Technorati isn't resyndicating this post. I'm trying to post it again to see what I can do on my end to fix it before I talk to their support people.

A Call for the Open Publication of Scientific Papers

Science has a long institution of collaboration; ideas flourish and multiple when they're shared, and that creates progress.

Until the 1990s, the only way to readily share that information was via published journals; an expensive, slow way of sharing information that requires the movement of little pieces of paper from place to place.

There's no reason it should be like this any more. And I argue that this is actually hurting our ability - as a species - to progress.

The Internet (and specifically Google at the time of writing) is the biggest source of information on the planet. Potentially, everything could be out there, readily accessible by everyone. It has way surpassed my wildest dreams in that.

But the information isn't itself useful (and this is where Google comes in). What's really useful is the mining of that information. The ability to enter keywords, and find related articles. The stuff that lets you take data points and connect A to B.

We are on the cusp of a revolution in science. For the first time in the history of humanity, you don't actually personally have to do experiments to test a theory. The sheer weight of numbers of other people out there, doing the research, and publishing their results removes the burden of performing those experiments themselves from the individual scientist. We're democratizing science, and making it accessible to the intelligent individual in a way that previously was only possible for the theoretical sciences. You no longer need tenure, or to be working in a research facility, to actually draw conclusions from research.

And data-mining allows that to come to the fore. In the near future, I can even imagine a world where Google itself could be mechanized. Computers themselves could draw conclusions from all of the research data, and come up with useful correlations. It's the Kurzweil singularity; at some point the system feeds off itself, and will spiral off to infinity.

But what's stopping that now?

The problem we have right now is that for most papers, only abstracts are available online. The actual detailed information is stored in academic publications, such as Phys. Review Letters A, and the Journal of Neuroimmunology - but the barrier to entry is too high for the skilled individual. It just plain costs money to read those papers. Scientific progress isn't supposed to work that way. It's supposed to be for the benefit of all of us.

That's not to say that there aren't considerable advantages to the peer review and publishing of papers. In fact, it's still an essential part of the scientific method. And it could continue, but not in the way it stands right now.

A proposal

We should change the way academic papers are published. We need to democratize this system. And partly, this has already happened. Pubmed, run by the US National Library of Medicine, and the National Institutes of Health is a good example of how to collect papers online. arXiv is another example - it's Cornell University Library's database of preprints of papers in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Statistics.

How should it work?

• All papers get published online, either in collector sites such as those mentioned above, or on the individual author's sites - preferably both, so they can be archived for the future.
• The journals take the papers, they are reviewed and refereed, and the papers which pass muster are published by them. This allows a bound archive of the best of the best work; the stuff that we know is real. It also provides an instantly accessible catalogue of verified high quality work, which those journals could charge for. What they're providing here is convenience, and a level of trust - which in an increasingly growing, polluted internet information space is becoming more and more important. (I've noticed recently that it's much more difficult to search for something on Google now, than 2 years ago... without serious AI advances, that problem is only going to get worse).
• The authors and collector sites mark the papers as "peer reviewed", and provide references to where they were published, after they are published. This means that people can still access the useful information, and still have a hope of finding out which papers are valid - or not.

Sure, the scientific publications will make less money this way. But frankly, I don't have much sympathy for them; we're way past that business model's useful lifetime (as much as I, an ex-freelance journalist, regularly bemoan that). We could entirely bypass this system by providing something like Digg for scientific publications. At least this way, they're still involved in the game.

Come on people. Let's get some science done here, and use the singularity to our advantage.