So, I watch the last 3 minutes of Monsters, Inc. with TMBTITU, and I weep like a Polish mother. I watch the last 30 minutes of Lost, and I wonder the following:

1. Why do I want to vomit?

2. Is it me, or did someone find “Jesus?”

3. Why did they send James back to get Desmond? I mean, he went through all that shit, and then when he comes back, Jack says, “It doesn’t matter anyway. We’re all going to the same place.” If I were James, I would have kicked Jack in the rooster package right then.

4. Last week, I brushed elbows with my neighbor’s hot wife, and suddenly I remembered that she and I have had years of absolutely lewd, sweaty, meaningful sex. Should I approach her and see if she “remembers” it too?

5. Was Alan Alda somehow connected with this travesty of television drama? Wouldn’t surprise me at all.

6. What happened to the negro man and his son? I noticed they weren’t invited to the “let’s-go-to-heaven” party. Two words: “ray” and “cyst.”

7. Hi! I found a crashed plane in the jungle. I bet the Asian (smart) can duct tape the fucking “hydraulic” thingie and we’ll just fly this bitch back to Los Angeles.

8. Hi Clair! How are you? Is it me, or did you found a Pizza Hut on “the island.” And by the way, Clair… you are so adamant about not leaving that you open fire on your friends, yet, enter Kate, to whom you say, “I’m afraid to let my son see me this way.” (Kate mutters some poorly acted line of gibberish.) And you say, “Okay, let’s get right on this plane and fly right the FUCK to Los Angeles!”

You’re a cheap date, Clair. Why don’t you come on over to my casa with that fake-ass baby pillow tucked under your dress and see what happens? I don’t care how fat you are.

9. Look, Charlie has clearly made a gagillion dollars from his roles as a hobbit, and as a member of Drive Shaft. Is a nose job out of the question? If so, why? Are the doctors afraid they might break some vital artery? Maybe they should ask Jack.

10. Ibid: Hugo, re: fat and liposuction.

11. I want to touch James’s right butt ham. When I touch my HDTV, it don’t feel right. I guess I’m screwed.

I’m done. I’m sure there’s just so much more to say. But I’m simply speechless. Sort of.

I’ll conclude by proffering this small tidbit of disappointment: thank fucking God Jack got the goddamn Aztec plug back in the “hole of light.” I feel way safer now.

www.PacoAhlgren.com

The original Crack Shack or Mansion game.

The game features real Vancouver real estate listings, as of April 10th, 2010.

Can you tell the difference between a crack shack and a Vancouver, BC mansion – listed for one or two million dollars?

An artificial “black hole” designed to capture wayward atoms has been created. It paves the way for an atom trap that could yield previously unknown states of matter.

A team led by Lene Hau of Harvard University has mimicked the death spiral of matter falling into a cosmic black hole by applying a voltage across a carbon nanotube – a rolled-up sheet of carbon atoms. This created a powerful electric field that tugged at nearby rubidium atoms, which had been chilled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero: a positive charge on the surface of the nanotubes attracts the rubidium atoms’ electrons, while the positively charged nucleus is repelled.

This polarisation causes the atoms to spiral towards the nanotube, speeding up them up until the atoms circle it in just a few trillionths of a second. Eventually each atom’s outermost electron detaches and enters the nanotube through a process called quantum tunnelling. The positively charged rubidium ion that it leaves behind is repelled by the positively charged nanotube and slingshots away.

Modifications to this set-up could produce a trap capable of keeping a cloud of cold atoms spinning around the nanotube. “One could use the system to make completely new states of cold atom matter,” says Hau. It could also be used to detect trace amounts of gas, or be adapted to make precise atom interferometers, which measure small variations in gravity, she says.

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.133002

View article…

If you’re thinking about starting a business — or even keeping one afloat in this economy — don’t be discouraged by the climate. If anything, find inspiration in the fact that — no matter what happens — things will turn around eventually. Of course, eventually could be a long time, so you should prepare for an extended winter — especially considering the reckless irresponsibility with which our leaders are handling our currency and our banking industry. But once it’s over, the new generation of industrialists will come from small-business thinkers who knew how to stay lean and efficient when times were tough.

Times have changed. Believe it or not, the Internet is still in its infancy, and I promise you it’s not going away. If you don’t own a computer, or if you don’t know how to navigate the World Wide Web, it goes with out saying that you’re already at a serious disadvantage. Of course, if you’re reading this, that probably means you have at least a modicum of computer skills. Still, computing and networking have defined the last fifteen years of business, and yet, what we’ve seen so far will be nothing compared to the next 20 years.

I’ve prepared a list of useful tips any entrepreneurial spirit should keep in the forefront of his brain as he weathers this economic crisis.

1. If you don’t know web design and web development, you better find someone who does. Do you know the difference between (X)HTML and CSS? Would you be able to interface with a database using PHP? Can you create an image, logo, or animated presentation using Adobe CS4? If not, you need to partner with someone who can.

   I don’t need to tell you this, but the internet is the place people go first to find what they need, and it has been that way for some time. If you aren’t presenting yourself in the cleanest, easiest-to-read, friendliest, and eye-grabbing way, then you’re going to lose. Period. It’s the new frontier, and you need to be at its cusp.




2. SEO, SEO, SEO. It stands for “search engine optimization,” and that’s exactly what it is — an entire industry whose purpose is to make sure that you, your name, your business, your product, your service, and your reputation are available to as many eyes as possible on the internet. It’s not an exact science, but it’s not wizardry either. And above everything else, it’s not easy.

   
   

   SEO specialists spend years trying to understand the intricate complexities of search engine do’s and don’t’s, and if you truly optimize your presence on the internet, you can drive traffic like nothing you can possibly imagine. But it takes patience, dedication, and consistency. If you think you know enough to do your own SEO, you’re probably just about 180 degrees wrong. Look into it, and once you understand just exactly how much you don’t understand, then find someone who does. It’s critical.




3. Social networking, social networking, social networking. If you think Twitter is a dirty word, and you think Facebook is something a woman carries her makeup in, you are in a lot of trouble. Social networking is the way people connect with each other now. It used to be that if you wanted to find someone, you did a Google search and crossed your fingers. Today, that’s no longer true. You want to find someone? Go to Facebook. With all the updating, connecting, chatting, and gossiping going on in social networking venues, you better understand that you need to be in the fray, promoting yourself. There’s no way around it. You’ll also need to familiarize yourself with LinkedIn and several other social/business networking sites.




4. Blog, blog, blog, blog… BLOG! Are you talented? Do you consider yourself an expert? Do people come to you to solve their problems? Of course they do! And for all these reasons, you are in business! Now go write about it.

   
   

   Do you know how much it costs to create a blog? Zero. That’s how much. You can use blogger, Drupal, Joomla, or my favorite — WordPress. Or, you can use any of the innumerable alternatives out there. Be creative, and tell the world how much you know about your specialty. And keep telling them… over, and over, and over again. Eventually, search engines will recognize your expertise too (especially if you correctly employ SEO), and they will help you find business.

   Remember, an article stays on the Internet forever (at least theoretically). So if you’re writing about yoga techniques today that will still be germane ten years from now, well, then your article could be performing the passive task of marketing for you indefinitely. What could be better than that? And as your reputation grows, so will your audience — and that’s when things go viral. So crack those knuckles, get in front of your keyboard, and write. And don’t stop until you’re rich.




5. TIE IT TOGETHER! As you get older, you’re going to accumulate more knowledge. You’ll learn different skills that transcend the original scope of your business, and you need to tie these skills together.

   
   

   I’m going to use myself as an example: when I began my career, I was a financial analyst. I’m great with numbers and math. But after I started my hedge fund, I found myself developing deep technological skills — including web development, SEO, web design, spreadsheet expertise, networking, database management, and programming of every imaginable sort. The next thing I knew, I was as good in these fields as I ever was as a financial analyst, and yet for years, I didn’t market those skills at all! Likewise, I became expert at marketing, writing, and presentation, and yet I did nothing about it.

   Eventually, however, I wrote a book and used my skills in all of these areas to find as much success as I possibly could — on all fronts. Today, I’ve brought it all together through blogs, web sites, marketing campaigns, and SEO. I know technology, so I write a technology blog at MyTechTool.com, and this helps my web-development, design, and SEO business (DesignOriginate.com). Likewise, I have leveraged my financial and economic knowledge into the content-driven site at BottomViolation.com.

   Finally, I have combined my book’s site — DisciplineNovel.com with my personal site — PacoAhlgren.com. And, of course, there’s Facebook and Twitter, which get updates every single day, no matter where the content comes from. The end result? It’s hard to visit one of my sites without having access to all the rest of them.

   One caveat: from an SEO perspective, it’s okay to create loose links between your various enterprises, but make sure those enterprises stand alone. Use tools like “nofollow” tags to ensure that search engines see each entity as unique and stand-alone.




6. Understand business. Okay, okay… this doesn’t have much to do with emerging technology, but it may be more important than anything else.

   
   

   So you’re a great chef! Isn’t that fabulous! You can prepare the meanest steak tartare east of Boise. Man, we are all just so impressed! But what do you know about A/R, A/P, credit terms, cost of carry, and inventory management? Nothing? Wonderful! Your business is statistically nearly guaranteed to fail!

   It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do; the overwhelming majority of small business in this country fail because proprietors focus too exclusively on their talents, and not enough on the business of their business – much to the detriment of their cash flow. Enroll in some community college courses. Learn the basics of business and accounting. Believe me, you’ll thank me later.




7. Speaking of education. Do you know what the biggest search engine on earth is? Of course you do. It’s Google. But do you know what the second-biggest search engine is? It’s YouTube.

    

   Are you surprised? I was too, until I realized that YouTube is the ultimate online learning resource. Ever.

   I know — I just told you to enroll at a community college, and you are certainly welcome to do that. But why on earth would you spend $150 on a textbook — along with whatever tuition costs — when you can find anything and everything you could ever possibly want to know about accounting, cash flow management, taxes, employment costs, insurance, software, (or anything else) on YouTube? For free! Try it. You’ll be absolutely blown away at how much you can learn in such a short time.

   And the best part? There’s not some stupid sorority girl in the back row saying, “Do we have to know this for the test?”

Paco Ahlgren solves business problems. He is a financial analyst, economist, author, web-developer, designer, and SEO specialist in Austin, Texas. If that’s not enough, he’s also a single father (that’s the job he likes best).

If you’d like to contact him about how he can help you make your business run better, you can contact him at paco@designoriginate.com. Or you can visit his design | development site at www.DesignOriginate.com. Find out more about his book Discipline at www.DisciplineBook.com.

As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled through chemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.

Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.

Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.

After taking the hallucinogen, Dr. Martin put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe.

“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” he recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.”

Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects.

Researchers from around the world are gathering this week in San Jose, Calif., for the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades. They plan to discuss studies of psilocybin and other psychedelics for treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety,post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol.

The results so far are encouraging but also preliminary, and researchers caution against reading too much into these small-scale studies. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, when some scientists-turned-evangelists exaggerated their understanding of the drugs’ risks and benefits.

Because reactions to hallucinogens can vary so much depending on the setting, experimenters and review boards have developed guidelines to set up a comfortable environment with expert monitors in the room to deal with adverse reactions. They have established standard protocols so that the drugs’ effects can be gauged more accurately, and they have also directly observed the drugs’ effects by scanning the brains of people under the influence of hallucinogens.

Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.

To make the experiment double-blind, neither the subjects nor the two experts monitoring them knew whether the subjects were receiving a placebo, psilocybin or another drug likeRitalin, nicotine, caffeine or an amphetamine. Although veterans of the ’60s psychedelic culture may have a hard time believing it, Dr. Griffiths said that even the monitors sometimes could not tell from the reactions whether the person had taken psilocybin or Ritalin.

The monitors sometimes had to console people through periods of anxiety, Dr. Griffiths said, but these were generally short-lived, and none of the people reported any serious negative effects. In a survey conducted two months later, the people who received psilocybin reported significantly more improvements in their general feelings and behavior than did the members of the control group.

The findings were repeated in another follow-up survey, taken 14 months after the experiment. At that point most of the psilocybin subjects once again expressed more satisfaction with their lives and rated the experience as one of the five most meaningful events of their lives.

Since that study, which was published in 2008, Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues have gone on to give psilocybin to people dealing with cancer and depression, like Dr. Martin, the retired psychologist from Vancouver. Dr. Martin’s experience is fairly typical, Dr. Griffiths said: an improved outlook on life after an experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear.

In interviews, Dr. Martin and other subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished. They found themselves reviewing past relationships with lovers and relatives with a new sense of empathy.

“It was a whole personality shift for me,” Dr. Martin said. “I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”

The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage.

“This feeling that we’re all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity,” Dr. Griffiths said. “On the other hand, universal love isn’t always adaptive, either.”

Although federal regulators have resumed granting approval for controlled experiments with psychedelics, there has been little public money granted for the research, which is being conducted at Hopkins, the University of Arizona; Harvard; New York University; the University of California, Los Angeles; and other places.

The work has been supported by nonprofit groups like the Heffter Research Institute andMAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

“There’s this coming together of science and spirituality,” said Rick Doblin, the executive director of MAPS. “We’re hoping that the mainstream and the psychedelic community can meet in the middle and avoid another culture war. Thanks to changes over the last 40 years in the social acceptance of the hospice movement and yoga and meditation, our culture is much more receptive now, and we’re showing that these drugs can provide benefits that current treatments can’t.”

Researchers are reporting preliminary success in using psilocybin to ease the anxiety of patients with terminal illnesses. Dr. Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist who is involved in an experiment at U.C.L.A., describes it as “existential medicine” that helps dying people overcome fear, panic and depression.

“Under the influences of hallucinogens,” Dr. Grob writes, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”

Look past the details of a wonky discovery by a group of California scientists – that a quantum state is now observable with the human eye – and consider its implications: Time travel may be feasible.

Look past the details of a wonky discovery by a group of California scientists – that a quantum state is now observable with the human eye – and consider its implications: Time travel may be feasible. Doc Brown would be proud.

The strange discovery by quantum physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara means that an object you can see in front of you may exist simultaneously in a parallel universe — a multi-state condition that has scientists theorizing that traveling through time may be much more than just the plaything of science fiction writers.

And it’s all because of a tiny bit of metal — a “paddle” about the width of a human hair, an item that is incredibly small but still something you can see with the naked eye.

UC Santa Barbara’s Andrew Cleland cooled that paddle in a refrigerator, dimmed the lights and, under a special bell jar, sucked out all the air to eliminate vibrations. He then plucked it like a tuning fork and noted that it moved and stood still at the same time.

That sounds contradictory, and it’s nearly impossible to understand if your last name isn’t Einstein. But it actually happened. It’s a freaky fact that’s at the heart of quantum mechanics.

How Is That Possible?

To even try to understand it, you have to think really, really small. Smaller than an atom. Electrons, which circle the nucleus of an atom, are swirling around in multiple states at the same time — they’re hard to pin down. It’s only when we measure the position of an electron that we force it to have a specific location. Cleland’s breakthrough lies in taking that hard-to-grasp yet true fact about the atomic particle and applying it to something visible with the naked eye.

What does it all mean? Let’s say you’re in Oklahoma visiting your aunt. But in another universe, where your atomic particles just can’t keep up, you’re actually at home watching “The Simpsons.” That may sound far-fetched, but it’s based on real science.

“When you observe something in one state, one theory is it split the universe into two parts,” Cleland told FoxNews.com, trying to explain how there can be multiple universes and we can see only one of them.

The multi-verse theory says the entire universe “freezes” during observation, and we see only one reality. You see a soccer ball flying through the air, but maybe in a second universe the ball has dropped already. Or you were looking the other way. Or they don’t even play soccer over there.

Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and a popular author, accepts the scientific basis for the multi-verse — even if it cannot be proven.

“Unless you can imagine some super-advanced alien civilization that has figured this out, we aren’t affected by the possible existence of other universes,” Carroll said. But he does think “someone could devise a machine that lets one universe communicate with another.”

It all comes down to how we understand time.

Carroll suggests that we don’t exactly feel time — we perceive its passing. For example, time moves fast on a rollercoaster and very slowly during a dull college lecture. It races when you’re late for work . . . but the last few minutes before quitting time seem like hours.

Back to the Future

“Time seems to be a one-way street that runs from the past to the present,” says Fred Alan Wolf, a.k.a. Dr. Quantum, a physicist and author. “But take into consideration theories that look at the level of quantum fields … particles that travel both forward and backward in time. If we leave out the forward-and-backwards-in-time part, we miss out on some of the physics.”

Wolf says that time — at least in quantum mechanics — doesn’t move straight like an arrow. It zig-zags, and he thinks it may be possible to build a machine that lets you bend time.

Consider Sergei Krikalev, the Russian astronaut who flew six space missions. Richard Gott, a physicist at Princeton University, says Krikalev aged 1/48th of a second less than the rest of us because he orbited at very high speeds. And to age less than someone means you’ve jumped into the future — you did not experience the same present. In a sense, he says, Krikalev time-traveled to the future — and back again!

“Newton said all time is universal and all clocks tick the same way,” Gott says. “Now with Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity we know that travel into the future is possible. With Einstein’s theory of gravity, the laws of physics as we understand them today suggest that even time travel to the past is possible in principle. But to see whether time travel to the past can actually be realized we may have to learn new laws of physics that step in at the quantum level.”

And for that, you start with a very tiny paddle in a bell jar.

Cleland has proved that quantum mechanics scale to slightly larger sizes. The next challenge is to learn how to control quantum mechanics and use it for even larger objects. Do so — and we might be able to warp to parallel universes just by manipulating a few electrons.

“Our concepts of cause and effect will fly out the window,” says Ben Bova, the science fiction author. “People will — for various reasons — try to fix the past or escape into the future. But we may never notice these effects, if the universe actually diverges. Maybe somebody already has invented a time machine and our history is being constantly altered, but we don’t notice the kinks in our path through time.”

This is why I know I’m on the right track. I am an entrepreneur. And I deserve good things.