First podcast for 2012! Sorry it’s been so long between shows – this episode took me FOREVER to edit. Blame Ira Glass.

Anyway… I’m fascinated with the long-term effects of colonialisation. We all know that colonialisation is usually a disaster for the indigenous population while the colonial power is occupying their country – but what about once they leave? Does it get better? Or worse? And why?

Today’s show has two guests – Adam Shand talking about his recent trip to Zimbabwe and Petros Kondos talking about why he and his family are emigrating from South Africa.

A few weeks ago the nice Fredu Liu from BFM 89.9 business radio in Malaysia did an interview with me about how TPN got started and our current business model. The interview is now online.

Listen here if you want to hear me get called “The Podfather”. Don’t tell Ricky or Adam.

The book is called “The Three Illusions” and it looks at science and philosophy. It’s my guide for living with what I call “permanent peace” and the philosophy in it has been the basis of how I’ve lived my life for the last 20 or so years.

Thanks for the folks who have proof read it for me over the last six months and given me notes, including Chrissy, Tony Kynaston and Russell Buckley.

Dear Melbourne IT Leadership Group,

I would like to send my sincere commendations to a member of your hosting support team by the name of “Sank”.

In the last week, I have been screwed around ROYALLY by several of your staff. Sank was the only one who seems to know what he’s doing.

On 30 November, I received an email regarding one of our domain names ‘nelsongoc.com’. The email advised “The following account has been deleted and is no longer accessible.” This is, I might add, a completely useless email. It tells me nothing about the situation. So I rang your support line and spoke to a gent (whose name I unfortunately didn’t write down) who advised me that our domain name was registered through to 2019 and that this email was only regarding our hosting service. I asked if allowing this hosting service to expire would affect our MX records on the domain, as they were pointing to Google Apps. He assured me that letting the hosting expire would not affect our MX records in any way. So we let it expire.

A week later, our email for this domain (which we use to run several businesses I might add) stopped working.

So I rang again last night (8 Dec) and spoke with someone else who told me the same thing as the gent on 30 Nov. I explained that our email had stopped working but he assured me it had nothing to do with the MelbourneIT side of our service.

After scratching my head for another 15 minutes, I rang back AGAIN and this time spoke with a gent called “Niz” who explained that everything I’d told had been incorrect and that I did, in fact, need your hosting service to re-direct our MX records to Google Apps. He offered to set up this service for me – at a cost of $219 p.a.! I asked him if there wasn’t another way to change the MX records – after all, every other domain name registration service we use has this functionality built into the domain service – but he assured me that there was no other option. So I agreed to proceed with setting up the new hosting service. He sent me an email with the new login for the service a few minutes later. However when I tried to login to the DNS section, I was asked for the login a second time but it wouldn’t work.

So I rang your support line for the THIRD time that day and spoke to a young lady who assured me that the DNS login was the same as the Hosting login and worked on her side. She advised me to send an email to the support department with the details of the MX records we needed changed and that they would do it for us. This was about 6pm Brisbane time last night.

This morning, around 9am Brisbane time, I rang Niz again to see if the MX records had been changed. He put me through to Sank.

Sank advised me that what Niz told me about needing the Hosting service was INCORRECT. He said there is a way to change the MX records on the backend of the domain. He then proceeded to walk me through how to set it up. He then put me back through to Niz to cancel the hosting service.

SO……. it took me FOUR calls to your technical support department before I actually got hold of someone who knew what they were talking about.

What kind of operation are you running in there?

Why do the Iranian people distrust the United States? Because they “hate our freedoms”, as Bush said about Al Qaida? Or do they have genuine reasons?

How many of us know the history of America and England’s involvement in the illegal and covert overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953?

My guests today are Daniel Burwen & Ash Aiwase, two of the guys behind Operation Ajax, one of the most exciting apps I’ve seen developed for the iPad so far.

Check out the trailer:

I chatted with Daniel and Ash recently about how Operation Ajax came about and how the iPad can make a dent in the Universe.

You can hear No Illusions on Stitcher SmartRadio,  Stitcher allows you to listen to your favorite shows directly from your iPhone, Android Phone,  BlackBerry  or Palm phones

On-demand and on the go!

Dont have Stitcher? Download it for free today at Stitcher.com or in the app stores.  Stitcher SmartRadio- The Smarter Way to listen to radio.

Follow @cameronreilly

Via Google Public Data Explorer

My guest today is Nikola Danaylov (who also goes by the pseudonym Socrates), host of The Singularity 1 on 1 Podcast and SingularitySymposium.com and SingularityWEBLOG.com.

He was born in Bulgaria, but moved to Toronto in 1998 where he obtained degrees in Political Science, Philosophy and Economics. About 18 months ago he started the Singularity 1 on 1 podcast and since then has interviewed major big brains, from Kurzweil and Vinge to Wolfram and Stross.

You can hear No Illusions on Stitcher SmartRadio,  Stitcher allows you to listen to your favorite shows directly from your iPhone, Android Phone,  BlackBerry  or Palm phones

On-demand and on the go!

Dont have Stitcher? Download it for free today at Stitcher.com or in the app stores.  Stitcher SmartRadio- The Smarter Way to listen to radio.

Just in case you were wondering what happened with that bill before the U.S. Senate that I mentioned in last week’s show? Well… it passed.

Via the World Socialist Web Site:

The US Senate voted Thursday night to approve a military funding bill that codifies into law the criminal state practices begun under Bush — and continued under Obama — in the name of the “global war on terror.”

It explicitly authorizes the military’s indefinite detention without trial of American citizens and mandates that all non-citizens charged as terrorists—including those arrested on US soil—be detained indefinitely by the military rather than brought to trial in a civilian court.

The legislation was part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which provides $662 billion to finance the US military machine and its multiple wars abroad. The act passed the Democratic-controlled body by an overwhelming margin of 93 to 7, underscoring once again that there exists no serious constituency for the defense of democratic rights within any section of the American ruling elite or its two big business parties.

Thrown out by this legislation is the right guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution for all those accused of a criminal offense to a “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury,” and the core provision of the Fifth Amendment declaring that no person shall be deprived of liberty “without due process of law.” It legalizes the abrogation in practice over the past decade of the bedrock principle of habeas corpus, which requires that the state bring a detained individual before an independent court and show just cause for imprisonment.

Read More: World Socialist Web Site

Here’s an interesting sidenote. When I searched for the NDAA in Google News, I was flat out finding a link to the legislation on many large news sites.

Here’s what Trotsky said about the rise of Fascism. 

At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium — the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat — all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.

From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it does not mean only that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance the patterns set by Mussolini — the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role — but it means first of all for the most part that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism….

Sound familiar?

News updates from around the globe. Includes the following stories:

Former Tasmanian MP found guilty of having sex with a 12 year old girl, but gets no jail time. 

Time Magazine Doesn’t Want To Show U.S. Citizens Pictures Of Revolution. 

U.S. Senate Are Voting On Legislation That Allows Their Military To Arrest Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime, and in Any Country. Including the U.S.A.

More US Soldiers Committed Suicide Than Died in Combat

US Military Manipulates the Social Media

U.S. Army and Psychology Largest Experiment Ever

You can hear No Illusions on Stitcher SmartRadio,  Stitcher allows you to listen to your favorite shows directly from your iPhone, Android Phone,  BlackBerry  or Palm phones

On-demand and on the go!

Dont have Stitcher? Download it for free today at Stitcher.com or in the app stores.  Stitcher SmartRadio- The Smarter Way to listen to radio.

Revolution? In the U.S.A.? It’s not happening.  It’s not happening.  It’s not happening.  It’s not happening.  It’s not happening.

Doug La Follette (born June 6, 1940) is an American academic, environmental activist, and politician from the state of Wisconsin. A Democrat, he is the current Secretary of State of Wisconsin and has served in that role since 1983. He is also a Fulbright Distinguished American Scholar and the author of the 1991 book The Survival Handbook: A Strategy for Saving Planet Earth.

I had the chance to chat with Secretary La Follette this morning for an hour about the attempts to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, President Obama’s track record in his first term and the trend of U.S. politics since Reagan.

3D printing is an amazing phenomenon. So is Kickstarter.

Brook Drumm from printrbot.com designed a new, easy to build, inexpensive 3D printer for the home. To get it into production, he needed to raise $25,000. So he created a project on Kickstarter.

Instead of raising $25,000, he’s already raised $171,000! I can’t wait to have one of these machines!

Imagine – the next time a plastic doohickey on one of your kitchen devices breaks, instead of throwing the entire unit out because you can’t get a replacement doohickey, you just download or create a blueprint for the piece and make it yourself at home!

According to Neiman Journalism Lab:

“Dan Schultz, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab (and newly named Knight-Mozilla fellow for 2012), is devoting his thesis to automatic bullshit detection. Schultz is building what he calls truth goggles — not actual magical eyewear, alas, but software that flags suspicious claims in news articles and helps readers determine their truthiness. It’s possible because of a novel arrangement: Schultz struck a deal with fact-checker PolitiFact for access to its private APIs.”

(via Bull beware: Truth goggles sniff out suspicious sentences in news » Nieman Journalism Lab.)

It’s a fascinating idea. Imagine browsers having a plug-in that is able to fact check all sorts of data using sources such as Wikipedia. It could have a huge impact on the future of news media. Imagine reading an article on, say, climate change in The Australian, and this “truth goggles” plug-in pointing out all of the inconsistencies in their reporting.

Or imagine reading Hilary Clinton ramping up the case for invading Iran because they are weaponising uranium, but have “truth goggles” pointing out that there is no evidence to support this claim.

Of course, this process doesn’t *need* to be automated with an algorithm. Chrome extensions like “Glass” allow people to comment on websites. For example, see this screenshot of a comment I left using Glass on a story in the Brisbane Times today about News Ltd corruption allegations from former QLD senator Bill O’Chee.

Could we all use tools like Glass to subvert the ability of the mainstream media and certain blogs to spin bullshit to their readers? Of course there is always the comments section of most sites these days, but perhaps they tend to get moderated and news sites promote comments by their faithful believers. Would Glass-like tools also get corrupted by flame wars? How do we keep them clean and useful? User moderation ala Wikipedia?

My wife and I were lucky enough to attend the opening night of QPAC’s performance of Pygmalion last week.

It’s a terrific show – even if I must confess that really didn’t understand the second half of the play much at all.

More on that shortly.

Let me first say that I thought the production was excellent. The sets, stage design and performances were mostly impeccable. My only concern was the performance of the actress playing the wife of the American ambassador. What the hell was that accent? My wife, an American, could barely contain her disgust. Fortunately, said actress isn’t on stage very long. Aside from that, the accents and performances were excellent.

For people like myself who have never read or seen Pygmalion before, think “My Fair Lady” without the songs or the Hollywood ending.

Written by George Bernard Shaw in 1912, it’s the story of a wealthy London aristocrat, who happens to be both an expert in phonetics and a complete dickhead of a human being, and a young, poor, flower girl. He meets the girl on the street, makes fun of her lower-class accent and manners, then jokingly suggests that within three months he could teach her to pass herself off as a princess. Much to his chagrin, she turns up on his doorstep the next morning, determined to take him up on his challenge.

Despite it’s advanced age, the play is timeless in many aspects. In a country like ours that has a Prime Minister whose accent is the topic of much discussion, your accent and how you conduct yourself can still make or break a job interview or even determine the success of a professional career.

Where the play lost me was the second half. Not QPAC’s fault at all, of course, as I’m sure they are being true to the original text. I just couldn’t understand why Eliza seemed to give two cents what Higgins thought of her. He was a complete dickhead from the moment she met him. Even though I can appreciate that she may have grown a little fond of him during their three months working and living together, he seems to have treated her like an indentured servant. Perhaps she was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? He was twice her age (at least) and didn’t seem have have any fond feelings for her, except for a regret to be losing his best student and servant. As most of the second half of the play is devoted to the end of their working relationship, it seemed to drag on a little.

Anyway, these minor complaints are probably due to my lack of understanding of the play. All in all I’d highly recommend going for yourself. Congrats to QPAC for putting on another fine show!

Researchers at the University of Texas Dallas recently demonstrated that transparent carbon nanotube sheets, which can have the density of air and the specific strength of steel, can be used to make objects invisible.

WOAH!!

This news is a couple of weeks old but somehow I must have missed it.

Their website goes on to say:

“This invisibility for light oblique to the nanotube sheets is caused by the mirage effect, in which a thermally generated refractive index gradient bends light array from a hidden object.”

Okay, so it only works on the oblique, so you’re not going to use this to sneak up on anyone anytime soon, but this still blows my mind.

Of course, the research is being funded by “Office of Naval Research, NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research”. Uh huh. Invisible battleships, anyone? I hated playing BATTLESHIP as a kid.

“… the use of the term ‘income inequality,’ from less than 91 instances in the week before the occupation started to almost 500 instances last week.”

… writes Dylan Byers at Ben Smith’s new and expanded blog via Occupy Wall Street’s big win in one graph – The Washington Post.

Building awareness and discussion. Driving issues up the priority stack in the minds of the people, the media and politicians. It’s what movements like OWS can accomplish. It’s what we can do with tools such as podcasting and Twitter. Keep in mind that OWS was started (in part, at least) by Adbusters magazine (who’s CEO, Kalle Lasn, has appeared on this show in the past just BTW).

It’s about time someone who has actually LISTENED to the new album by Lou Reed & Metallica, “Lulu”, wrote a review. I’ve now had the opportunity to listen to it a few times and I’m blown away by it’s power and majesty.

First – some background and a disclaimer.

The disclaimer is that I’ve been a Lou Reed fanboy for most of my life. While his track record certainly has a few missteps (and who doesn’t?), mostly during the late 70′s and early 80s, I’d argue that his body of work is, on the whole, brilliant. He’s up there with Dylan, Cohen and Neil Young as one of the true masters of adult contemporary rock. In particular, Reed has always tried to push the boundaries of rock as a literary medium for adults. Never content to write typical rock songs about getting laid and falling in love (although there are lots of songs containing sex and love in his catalogue), Reed has always (IMHO) tried to mine the human experience for subjects worth of serious art. The 3 minute rock song is his canvas. The rock album is his exhibition of songs, often around a theme.

“Lulu” follows in this tradition.

Now for the background. Not about Reed’s music but about Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu” plays. Wedekind was a German playwright who died in 1918. His work was considered extremely controversial during his lifetime but laid the groundwork for Expressionism and “epic theatre” and also provided the basis for one of the greatest silent films (Pabst’s 1929 “Pandora’s Box”) and operas (Berg’s 1937 “Lulu”) in history. In certain ways, Wedekind also could be said to (directly or indirectly) have influenced Reed’s own music and, as a result, influenced rock and roll via Reed’s Velvet Underground, one of the most influential bands in the ’60s. Wedekind’s discussion of topics such sex, suicide, abortion and prostitution in his plays were as dangerous in his day as Reed’s topics of heroin and S&M were in his V.U. songs fifty years later.

Both Wedekind and Reed are artists who dig deeply into the darkness and pain of our lives in order to find material for their art. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that most people shirk from the product. The general public is too busy watching scripted “reality” shows to recognise the truth of their lives when presented with it unvarnished. Their taste in music has been dumbed-down to such an extent over the last twenty years of corporock that they have the equivalent of a five-year old child’s appreciation of nuance and sinew.

Wedekind wrote two plays about “Lulu” – Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1904). They were influenced by the life of dancer Lou Salome (“Lulu, The Clown Dancer”), who seduced everyone from Neitzsche to Freud. Wedekind’s advances to Salome were turned down, so instead he worshipped and destroyed her in his plays.

In the two plays, Lulu climbs her way to the top of society through sexual manipulation (after being sexually used from the age of seven). Her various husbands die of heart attacks, have their throats slit, or get shot. At the end of the story, her abusive father reappears, dragging Lulu back into incest and the life of a street whore in London.

Not your usual rock album, then.

The first track, Brandenburg Gate, starts with acoustic guitar and Lou’s gentle vocals:

I would cut my legs and tits off

When I think of Boris Karloff and Kinski

In the dark of the moon.

Enter Sandman. Sorry, I mean enter Metallica. About 50 seconds into the first track, the masters of metal bring their bone crunch and thereby provide the story with an intensity and throbbing that reflects Lulu’s passion for life.

Over the rest of the tracks, Lou’s vocals waver and buckle under the sexual passion, betrayal and murder of Lulu’s lovers. Metallica keep up the bashing wall of sound, with the occasional waves of strings and synth lulling us into a slumbering death (such as in the final track, the 19′ 29″ second “Junior Dad”). The tracks are brutal, painful, perverse and violent. Lou’s voice contorts, rasps, pleads and taunts. Metallica just crushes everything in their path.

Like Reed’s 1973 album “Berlin”, which was originally panned universally by critics and is today lauded as a masterpiece, I suspect “Lulu” is 40 years ahead of it’s time. People will flock to this only after the 99% Movement has killed off the corporocracy and it’s bastard child corporock and we have re-grown our ability to listen to music.

This is an album that demands headphones and darkness. Turn off your iPads, get a glass of single malt and a cigar, put this bitch on and surrender. Think of it as a play or an opera. Go on Lulu’s journey. Give in to the pain.

You won’t be disappointed. But it’s not for pussies.

Honeycomb bracelet by CharlesWyattJewelery on Etsy.

Short show today, covering a few stories:

An Occupy Wall Street Founder Talks About The Origins Of The Movement And Where It’s Headed Next

Poll: Most Americans Support Occupy Wall Street

Quantum Levitation

New independent climate study confirms global warming is real

The killing of Awlaki’s 16-year-old son

Tell me what *you* think.

Google+

Twitter

Skype

Email

(Pic by Newton Graffiti)

On today’s Show:

#OccupyMelbourne busted up by police, protesters arrested, all in time for next week’s visit by The Queen.

My Retort to Greg Jericho’s blog post about the foolishness of Occupy protests in Australia

Neuroscientist David Eagleman confirms “time is an illusion”.

Steve Jobs – Why Didn’t He Get An Operation?

The Bible Geek (Robert M. Price) on “mystery religions”. 

(Here’s a Pic Link for today’s cover art.)

A bishop in the Roman Catholic Church has been indicted for failure to report suspected child abuse, the first time in the 25-year history of the church’s sex abuse scandals that the leader of an American diocese has been held criminally liable for the behavior of a priest he supervised.

The indictment of the bishop, Robert W. Finn, and the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph by a county grand jury was announced on Friday. Each was charged with one misdemeanor count involving a priest accused of taking pornographic photographs of girls as recently as this year. They pleaded not guilty.

(link)

One misdemeanor!? That’s it? That’s all a priest gets for taking pornographic photos of girls? Unbelievable. But at least the charges have started flowing upstream. I thought the first upstream convictions in the US would come from the case in Philly that I mentioned recently, but GO KANSAS CITY!

It looks like the moderators at Wikipedia aren’t sure whether or not the #Occupy protests are significant enough to allow into its hallowed halls.

I would imagine that if the protests are getting mainstream media coverage (as even the smallish Brisbane protest received yesterday) then it would be significant enough for Wikipedia.

Shownotes for today’s episode:

Here’s To the Crazy Ones by Steve Jobs

Occupy Together meetup groups

Lucian Randolph “How is the game of Monopoly won?”

Owen Flanagan and Alex Rosenberg on the significance of naturalism.

Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha

Convention says that today is my 41st birthday.

It depends on how you look at it though.

Which part of “what-I-am” is really 41 years old?

My body?

My body is made of cells which are constantly replaced. Between 50 and 70 billion cells die each day due to apoptosis in the average human adult. The whole body is comprised of totally new cells from 7 years ago. So my body isn’t 41 years old.

And by the way, most of the cells in this body aren’t even human.

According to researchers at the 108th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, the number of bacteria living within the body of the average healthy adult human are estimated to outnumber human cells 10 to 1. You might think “I am my body” but when only 10% of the cells in the body are actually even human cells…. what does that mean for your identity?

The cells themselves are made of atoms which themselves come and go from my body very rapidly. In fact, studies have shown that 98 percent of the atoms in the body are replaced every year.

The human body is roughly made up of:

• 63% hydrogen;

• 24% oxygen;

• 12% carbon.

How old are these atoms?

Most of the hydrogen in the universe was created between 3 minutes and 20 minutes after the Big Bang, which makes it about 13.7 billion years old.

The oxygen and carbon are around 4.6 or 4.7 billion years old, being the remnants of one or more supernovae that occurred just before our Sun itself formed.

So… how old am I?

If I date my age from when my body was made, I’m about a year old.

But if I date myself from when my components were themselves made, then the atoms that make up my body are somewhere between 4.6 and 13.7 billion years old. Let’s take an average of 9 billion years.

All of a sudden, 41 doesn’t sound that old.

I could argue that I’m the age of my DNA. I was formed about 41 years and 9 months ago. The pattern of my DNA has been passed on from cell to cell for 41 years and 9 months, providing a recipe for creating this particular body. So my “pattern” is 41 years and 9 months old.

But we also need to think about our concept of “time” itself.

We tend to think of time as something that flows or unfolds, moment by moment. It seems to us that the future hasn’t happened yet and that the past is long gone.

Physics, however, tells us something completely different.

Einstein was the first to realise that time and space are actually the same construct – therefore we now refer to it as “spacetime”.  Time is really just another dimension that we add to the three dimensions of space. Spacetime therefore has four dimensions: height, width, length – and time. Essentially Einstein demonstrated (and subsequent experiments have extensively confirmed) that time exists as a dimension of space. As Einstein once wrote to the wife of a recently departed friend, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”

Just as all of space exists “now”, all of time also exists “now”. How we experience time is merely a matter of our relative perspective (or “relativity”, as Einstein pointed out).

Here’s how theoretical physicist Brian Greene explains it in his excellent book “The Fabric Of The Cosmos“:

In this way of thinking, events, regardless of when they happen from any particular perspective, just are. They all exist. They eternally occupy their particular point in spacetime. There is no flow. If you were having a great time at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1999, you still are, since that is just one immutable location in spacetime. It is tough to accept this description, since our worldview so forcefully distinguishes between past, present, and future. But if we stare intently at this familiar temporal scheme and confront it with the cold hard facts of modern physics, its only place of refuge seems to lie within the human mind.

So let’s summarise.

The cells in my body come and go constantly, totally replaced every seven years.

So too the atoms in my body. And the ones in my body right now are an average of 9 billion years old.

But time doesn’t really exist. All of time exists NOW. Our “path” through time is simply a persistent illusion.

My DNA is about 41 years and 9 months old, but it’s just a pattern, a recipe.

So how old am I?