Click here to join in his wonderment at simple things.

So this year I hit the big four-oh. Society would have me believe that I can only regain the excitement and vigor of youth by buying a Harley, wearing tight jeans, loud shirts, and purchasing hair dye products. But you know what?

I can’t be bothered. Meh.

Try to catch this week’s strip without dropping a hip right here.

All rise for Matt. If you want quality dancing, look elsewhere.

http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/ – yes, he’s still going!

I wanted to take a shot of it for posterity. It’s not high art, it doesn’t have a cutting Banksy-esque message to shout out, but neither is it a mindless shitty graffito. It isn’t a wall-spanning work of spray-can mastery. What makes it so fascinating – and what makes it stick in my mind so much – is that this is the only example of it I am aware of, it has no name or tag anywhere, and seems almost meaningless. No obvious message, no obvious creator, it just is.

It’s a wonderfully and beautifully simple and evocative little piece, a perfect example of “less is more”. Why the poignantly melancholy expression? What does it mean? Who does it respresent, what is the message? Why did the artist go to the trouble of putting it on a box in the middle of humdrum suburbia?  Why is it on this little box and not the big fuck-off Cable cabinet next to it (out of shot)? It bugs me that the message and meaining are so well hidden.

Think about it – if you were going to go to all the trouble of getting a piece of card, drawing this face onto it, cutting out the holes to make a spray mask and then painting it onto something you would most likely make the message or the meaning a little obvious, do it somewhere prominent, be making it of someone recogniseable, or stick your name or tag on it somewhere. But this is so seemingly inert, so random and unique and so out of the way…it bugs me. Bugs the arse off me. It’s sits in the back of my mind like a mental hangnail.

It means something, and I want to know what. It’s like an earworm of the visual cortex.   If you recognise it (full size image here), or have seen it somewhere else in or around Manchester (or anywhere else) or know anything about it, I would like to know. I’m just interested. I certainly hope that whatever the Royal Mail have in this cabinet, they decide to leave the art where it is and don’t paint over it. It the simplest yet most striking piece of street art I have seen in a long time.

Entering a URL into a status update on Facebook usually renders a link, but in the case of www.collateralmurder.org this is not the case. Many of our readers have expressed concern that given the nature of the material at that web address it would seem apparent that an attempt to censor or restrict the user’s right to disseminate the address is being carried out by Facebook.

It would be very unfortunate for Facebook – whose profile page carries the motto “Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”  – if this turned out to be anything other than unintentional filtering or scripting glitch. We asked Facebook about this apparent restriction of free speech, and they quickly responded, advising:

“To protect our users, we have automated systems in place that block the dissemination of links to known malicious websites, including phishing and malware sites.  On rare occasions, these systems wrongly identify a legitimate link as malicious.  We have reinstated this one and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

It should be noted that  the URL www.collateralmurder.com was not restricted and that the .org address is posting into notes.

(Update:  oops, I forgot to link to the source of that image, my bad: click here )

Wikileaks has just released video it has obtained showing the killing of fifteen unarmed civilians without provocation by two U.S. Apache helicopters in Iraq in 2007.  Wikileaks further claims this exposes a military cover-up that painted the incident as a battle with armed insurgents in which civilians were killed.

The film was taken by the crew of an Apache helicopter on July 12, 2007 over New Baghdad. Two Reuters News Agency employees, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen, were out in the area, and as the film starts you can see Eldeen carrying his camera. Both were amongst the fifteen or so civilians killed, and, it seems, were the unwitting cause of the attack. More info and the film after the jump. Facebook readers, click here to see the article and the video.

The air crew misinterpret the camera as an AK47 and then further misinterpret something else carried by a different civilian – it is not clear what – as an RPG. Despite the fact that no fire was received by either of the attack helicopters – as no one was actually carrying a weapon – permission to engage was asked for and received. The two craft then proceed to deal with the perceived threat with 30mm fire. 

Saeed survives and as he tries to crawl away the air crews are heard urging him to pick up a weapon so that they can open fire on him again. As they wait, a civilian minivan arrives to pick him up – again, with no evidence of arms or threat to the aircraft – and the crew curse impatiently as they ask for permission to open fire on the van.  They eventually receive the permission.

There were two children in the van.

As ground troops arrive and take the wounded children away, the air crew are heard to remark that is “it’s their fault for bringing kids into a battle”. This was not a battle.  At no time were any shots fired at the two aircraft, nor were any weapons in play.  Throughout the film, the crews are heard to be casual and almost pissed off that permission to fire is taking so long. One is heard to laugh when an armored vehicle drives over one of the dead civilians.

There is a certain amount of leeway to be granted by the “fog of war”. You can understand the perceived threat of a crowd of people in a street where two seem to carry something that, from a helicopter,  could look like a weapon. But aren’t you supposed to have absolute certainty, or actually be fired upon before firing back?

The U.S. military initially stated that the victims died during a battle between military and enemy insurgents, and that there was “no question that coalition forces were engaged in a battle against a hostile force”. Reuters spent three years demanding the release of the film to try and verify these claims, but the U.S. military refused its release. Only now, with a leak, is it in the public domain.   The U.S. Military did eventually carry out an investigation and ruled that all was in accordance with the rules of engagement.

It takes you to a place where a very disturbing thought becomes apparent: had there not been two internationally respected journalists involved, and had Reuters not pushed for the truth, and had these just been Iraqi civilians, the “no question” statement – clearly a lie – would have never been exposed (or rather, would never even have been required). It is very easy for the troops on the ground to make mistakes and errors of judgement, and for this there is a certain amount of forgiveness. What is egregious here is how far the miltary then go to keep that quiet, and maybe just how often it happens.

Think carefully before viewing these films: you are watching a moment when, for many innocent people and the families they left behind, life simply stopped.

You can read the Wikileaks article for more information here.

UPDATE 6/4/2010:  it is now reported that an official response to the Wikileaks release and article is being planned, in light of this story being picked up by just about everybody and the mainstream media.

Controversy has surrounded the case of Binyam Mohamed, 31, who since his return to the UK earlier this year has accused his captors of carrying out acts of torture including beatings, threats, the ever controversial “waterboarding”, and having his genitals cut with razorblades. A UK citizen since 1994, Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 on suspicion of terrorism, and under the guise of the U.S. “rendition” programme was  ferried to Morocco, then Afghanistan and then finally Guantanamo Bay. He was released without charge earlier this year. Mohamed alleges that MI5 personnel provided key background informaton to his captors, advised of specific questions to be asked, and that at some points were also involved in the questioning and torture. 

Originally, Milliband reluctantly ruled that previously classified CIA documents relating to the case against Mohamed and his treatment whilst “in the care” of the U.S. government could be released to the public – but with seven key paragraphs relating to matters unkown redacted on grounds of “national security interests”. It was feared that releasing sensitive information that has passed between the UK and the U.S. intelligence services would cause irreparable harm to the intelligence relationship they share, and make the U.S. less keen to share furutre intelligence with the UK for fear it would be made public.   

Mohamed, backed by legal counsel and supported by human rights organisations, demanded that these paragraphs be made public also, as it would be more in the public interest to know if the Government was complicit and aware of acts of torture carried out on British subjects with the full knowledge of both them and British intelligence agencies. Many people felt at the time that the desire to “black out” these paragraphs supported these claims, and that the Government was putting the “special relationship” with its allies ahead of the protection and rights of its citizens.

In today’s landmark judgement at the High Court Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Lloyd Jones ruled that the paragraphs should be released for public consumption as this material and similar claims had already been released in a separate legal action in the United States, and verified as true by a U.S. Judge. It was ruled that, as the information was no longer unavailable to the public, its release could no longer be considered a threat to national security. The Government immeduately appealed the ruling.   Milliband stated:

‘At the heart of this case was the principle that if a country shares intelligence with another, that country must agree before its intelligence is released. ‘This ‘control principle’ is essential to the intelligence relationship between Britain and the US. The Government fought the case to preserve this principle, and today’s judgment upholds it.

‘It agreed that the control principle is integral to intelligence sharing. The court has today ordered the publication of the seven paragraphs because in its view their substance had been put into the public domain by a decision of a U.S. court in another case. Without that disclosure, it is clear that the Court of Appeal would have overturned the Divisional Court’s decision to publish the material.

‘The Government has made sustained and successful efforts to ensure Mr Mohamed’s legal counsel had full access to the material in question. We remain determined to uphold our very strong commitment against mistreatment of any kind.’

Interestingly, the Court they also came to a similar decision last year, but this was kept secret to allow the foreign secretary leave of appeal.

When questioned directly about the issue of collusion and torture, Milliband replied:

“Although it is not necessary for us to categorise the treatment reported, it could be readily contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of Binyan Mohamed by the United States authorities.”

He also stated to Jon Snow of Channel 4 News that it what was done to Mohamed may not necessarily be defined as torture because torture needs to be something carried out regularly. Personally, if you hack my man-parts around even once with a razorblade to extract information from me then I am pretty much 100% certain that constitutes torture.

Finally, and somewhat irnocally, despite Milliband’s assertion that “Mr Mohamed’s legal counsel had full access to the material in question”, it was soon after revealed that  a senior lawyer acting for the foreign secretary wrote to the Court of Appeal criticising some key phrases in the draft judgement without making Mohamed’s counsel aware at all. Jonathan Sumption QC suggested that certain points in the draft gave the impression that the ”Security Service does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights or abjures participation in coercive interrogation techniques” and requested they be removed.

This is a legal right – for all parties to be allowed to make recommendations on the draft of the judgement before it is finalised. However, it has become clear that  although Sumption passed this request to the Court, he did not pass it to the team working for Mohamed – which is illegal. Any recommendations made must be disclosed to all parties in the proceedings simultaneously. The Government is not permitted to have secret dialogues with the High Court, who are independent of the Government. The letter stated that it had been cc’ed to Mohamed’s barristers, when it was in fact only passed to them the next day. On the assumption that Mohamed’s counsel was aware and had raised no counter-recommendation, the Judges redacted their comments.

With the whole affair a complete shambles, the foreign secretary reduced to scrabbling over paltry arguments about “what constitutes torutre”  and fielding accusations of “nobbling the Judges”, and with MI5 and Security services coming out looking like they were aware of and participated in illegal torture of a UK citizen, it has been announced in a hilarious comedy move that MI5 are now being investigated by the police. There are also now demands for a full public inquiry into the affair. Human rights organisations are now also investigating if allegations of war crimes against both the U.S and UK governments and intelligence services should be considered.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Milliband didn’t look like the nerdy kid next door that stayed in playing D&D and practising twirly-wirly writing all day. Prat.

We endeavor to cherrypick the best examples of current thinking and put them into your immense and powerful BRAIN  to enhance your world view. To bring to you enlightenment without the hassle of going to a university and being all socially inadequate around girls and that.

Okay, well, let’s be honest, we don’t do that much, But when we see an article or a news story about THE SCIENCE! that is the equivalent of waking up and finding dinosaurs in your car, then we have to pass it along as best we can.

But, I am afraid, dear, sweet gentle readers, for the first time we have totally failed. We have today found an article of THE SCIENCE! that is so staggeringly obtuse, we have not been able to break it down. More after the jump.

We came across an article at New Scientist that, frankly, even though we have read it several times, does not go in. It does just not go in. We have tried with and without glasses, with lab coats, and we even ran it through the Google translation thingy to see if it would tranlsate it into English or something. But we were bested. The article is made up of lots of little paragraphs that, in of themselves, make sense. But considered as a whole, it makes our BRAINS shut down in a flop-sweat.

Anyhoo. As far as we can tell, the article relates to a current idea that, based on evidence gathered from the  GEO600 experiment in Hanover – a observational project designed to detect and analyse gravitational waves – our world may be nothing more than a holographic projection. Or possibly we are real, and the universe is a 2 dimensional projection. Or something. On the details, we are fuzzy, very fuzzy. But it is weird-ass SCIENCE! thinking, so we are intrigued.

It seems to also include black holes, storage of information about the black hole and its 3 dimensions in the 2 dimensions of the event horizon (that’s the hologram part) and possibly dinosaurs with lasers.* 

As an example of how fucking mind-futzing the article is, even the teaser paragraphs – the bits in the middle in a massive font that are designed to attract your attention with a simple, subject-revealing tease and HUGE quotation marks  - make your brain fart. For example:

“Incredibly, the experiment was picking up unexpected noise – as if quantum convulsions were causing an extra sideways jitter”  

Buh? WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN IN ENGLISH? Are we talking timey-wimey spacey-wacey here?

So, anyway, as we have no hope of offering any kind of useful brief summary of the article in any meaningful way, here is a totally random excerpt:

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

[dogsounds comment: that has to be one of the most awesome and random quotes ever uttered by a scientist: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram." This scientist would give Slartibartfast a run for his money at a party.]

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Go read the full article at New Scientist here. If anyone can break this down for us, comment below. We’ll take all the help we can get.

And if you like the image above, it’s from wearscience.com who sell all sorts of awesome SCIENCE! themed apparel.

*Actually, the whole “dinosaurs with lasers” part may have just been us projecting to find something familiar and comforting to latch on to. Which we totally didn’t.

So, the first and most important rule of any super-secret science team working to create Godawful aberrations of nature for who-knows-what purpose is pretty self-evident: shut the fuck up and say nothing. So it’s both amusing and disheartening to hear that the fount of all super-secret military industrial complex conspiracy theories – DARPA – announced right in it’s annual budget – it’s annual fucking budget, I shit you not – that it is working on synthetic organisms that will live for ever and, should they turn out to be harmful, contain a genetic kill-switch. WTF? More info after the jump.

Wired magazine’s DARPAwatch section revealed this scary fact. Seems that the Pentagon is fed up with the “ randomness of natural evolutionary advancement” and has directed DARPA to work on creating fully synthetic organisms that will be immortal, but that will, should the highly predictable shit-hitting-the-fan outcome that we can all see coming a fucking mile away like a train with a massive headlight all the way down at the other end of the tunnel come to pass, include a biological kill-switch – allowing the organisms to be stopped dead in their tracks.

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch: “Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism”.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Now, forgive us here for sounding a little thick, but it seems to me that there can’t be that many practical, non-weaponizeable, non-evil-plan-formed-in-a-secret-volcano-base things you can do with a synthetic organism. After all, they are not talking about building something that can do the shopping, mow your lawn, or look after grandma whilst you are out to make sure she doesn’t drop another hip or something. And quite what they mean by the “intended biological effect” we are not sure. But, after doing a lot of SCIENCE! in our brains, we are pretty sure that something that is living and breathing isn’t going to be a cure for penile warts or halitosis.

And it stands to reason that if the genetic loyalty built into this organism is intended to avoid  nefarious enemy subjugation of the organism itself, then we are talking about something here that you would be designing to use against such an enemy.

So, one one hand, we have to applaud the openness of DARPA for telling everyone exactly what mysterious secret government projects they are working on. If only the guys with capture UFO tech in Area 51 could be so forthcoming, there would be a whole lot less tin-foil hat loonies about.

On the other hand…isn’t it about time they stopped screwing around with microbes and finally got on with making laser-toting dinosaurs and nuclear dolphins and all that shit? Man, they are taking, like, for ever. You may have the greatest minds in there, DARPA, but the internets have been ahead of you for years. Just hire 300 web-literate man-children and you will have weapons that would give any military  leader a pants-tent like a flagpole. Then again, thinking about it, whilst this would give rise to armored space-jellyfish and power-armor wearing kangaroos, a weaponized Pedobear would be somewhat less awesome. Just stay away from the chans, is all we’re saying.  

Read the full article here.

The story starts with a couple on a park bench, followed by the chaotic invasion, morphing into an old widow and a memorial for unknown soldiers, ending with remembrance that “you are always near”. Turn up the volume and watch this captivating sequence full-screen: