Grey Day

I love days such as these.

Where grey skies meet grey earth and
Clash, against a backdrop of autumn's last dying embers

Where the hollow groans of a wistful bagpipe
Echo softly throughout the world

Where light, diffused and cold,
Trickles through the ash-laden clouds, quietly,
Onto the hardened ground below.

It is a day for strong words and cold acts.
It is a cigarette day, a rusted steel day.
It is another day in this broken cycle of the machine we call our lives.

I love days such as these.

Space Goats

I've begun doing a little research on an interesting internet phenomenon known as "predictive linguistics", run by a group known as "Half Past Human". (Kudos to Jon for introducing me to this whole thing, by the way) What I learned about the project immensely intrigued me. Now, the concept of how this works is a little complicated, so bear with me.

Simply put, this technology searches the internet for specific kinds of words, usually posted on discussion blogs, forums, news sites, etc. Incredibly large amounts (we're talking terabytes of information, here) of these words are collected by programs known as "web bots", along with a snippet of their surrounding text. They are reduced to series of numbers and plotted on graphic charts as dots. These dots tend to cluster in specific areas around certain words.

Now, every word in every possible language has a meaning (barring some random, obscure, or relatively unknown dead language). In order to define meanings, one has to essentially boil a word down to its essence, what the word conveys. When broken down in such a way, we can cluster words together under common conveyances or meanings.

Okay, now that we've gotten past the "simple" parts, here comes the creepy stuff.

What the people running this project have discovered, is that for whatever reason (more detail later) certain groups of words or phrases repeat themselves in a kind of pattern over time, based on the change in the word's meaning. These patterns tend to develop around a specific event or occurrence, in the future. That's right. Using this web-searching and filtering technology, these researchers can isolate specific traumatic events in the future, based off of web chatter occurring previously to said catastrophes.

To break all of this down into a few sentences, here's a quote seen here, "It's like changes in language precede large emotional events. The larger the emotional impact of the event, the more advance notice the bots seem to give."

They use the example of a rock being dropped into a pond, creating ripples. If you approached where the rock was dropped, you would get stronger and stronger ripples the closer you came. These events tend to create "ripples" in web chatter before and (obviously) after the events occur.

Now the problem arises in that in this day and age, there is a LOT going on in the world. To continue the analogy, it's like pouring a dump truck full of gravel into a pond, then sorting through the ripples to find the biggest rocks. Not exactly an easy task.

The wonderful folks over at HPH have also separated the data into different categories, such as "terra" (ie, anything involving the earth, ground, life, biosphere, etc) "globalpop" (world population sans U.S.) "USofA" (specifically the United States) and a host of others, including "SpaceGoatFarts".

...yeah. Basically this category is for anything involving... well anything we don't understand. Things from space, the unpredictable, things we have never heard of or seen before, aliens, etc. ...and apparently, Space Goat Farts. As you can see, even the creators of this project treat it with a certain level of humor; they don't take everything they learn as the absolute word of God Himself. Yet, while their predictions are by no means completely accurate and all-encompassing, many of the timing and indicators given seem to align with real-world events fairly accurately. Here's a quote from Half Past Human's affiliates, Urban Survival:

"We have friends who have developed a groundbreaking predictive technology which we simply call "web bot" technology... The technology, which samples large portions of the public internet with an eye toward "sensing the future" based on subtle changes in language, seems to have given indications before-the-fact of a large number of major news events, including but not limited to our reports before the fact on things like:

• 9/11

• Sumatra/ Banda Aceh quakes

• New Orleans Katrina/Rita

• Cheney and his "accident"

• Degrading of Iraqi's and Iraqi youth rebellion against US

• Silver (prices) exploding, followed by Gold

• Pakistan earthquake

• Climate change (the life-changing event)

• The multiple extraordinary hurricanes (with another season coming like the last)

• The increasing unpopularity of the Bush Administration leading up to the inevitable meltdown

• Space Shuttle explosion

• The unfolding disaster in Iraq

• Commodity shortages with more coming this summer (2006)

• Emerging and ongoing, oil price increases

• Then there's the more recent China Quake warning 72-hours before events, and the forecast of a major economic crisis to arrive around October 7, 2008..."

Makes you shiver, eh? Kinda creepy. Now, by no means is this an exact science. Even the founders of the project advise people not to base decisions off of their technology. But still, the fact remains that many of their predictions have come true.

Now, how is this possible? Is there such a thing as a collective human consciousness, as some would suggest? Is it mere coincidence? Or something bigger than us? The evidence is controversial at best. Dean Radin (PhD, Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences) has conducted tests determining that human beings have the apparent capacity to see or sense a few seconds into the future (see pages 6-15). Interesting.

Oh, and by the way, apparently there's a large "tipping point" scheduled to occur on November 14th. That's this Sunday.

I leave the conclusion up to you, dear readers.

One Fist in Ten Thousand

I've been experimenting a lot musically lately, trying to broaden my horizons and sample a wide variety of sounds. Now, as a general rule, my tastes in music are widely varied. There are very few bands I genuinely dislike, and I'm always open to new genres or styles. I love music in all of its aspects (See The Trichotomy of Music for more). My music library has several days worth of listening in almost every genre imaginable. From Swedish techno to Southern rock, from Bach to the Beatles and beyond, I have a LOT of music. Yet there are a few select songs that always, without fail, get my head bobbing and my toes tapping. Here's a few:

"Supermassive Black Hole" -Muse
"Skin" -Breaking Benjamin
"The War" -Angels and Airwaves
"Holiday" -Green Day
"I Don't Care" -Apocalyptica
"Hey Jude" -The Beatles
"Sonne" -Rammstein
"Coming Undone" -KoRn
"Mr. Jones" -Counting Crows
"Bring Me To Life" -Evanescence
"Swing Life Away" -Rise Against
"Soldier" -Eminem
"Dota" -Basshunter
"Witchcraft" -Pendulum
"Blood Red Summer" -Coheed and Cambria
"Higher" -Creed
"Parallels" -As I Lay Dying
"Grace Like Rain" -Todd Agnew
"Last Resort" -Papa Roach


That's just a sampling, there are many, many more. Generally when I listen to an album from a band I like, I'll enjoy most of the songs except for one or two that just don't click with me for some reason. Without fail, every album I've ever heard has had one or two, sometimes even four or five songs that I just don't really connect with, except one: Ten Thousands Fists by a band called Disturbed.

I recently rediscovered my love for Disturbed after rifling through my CD collection and listening to this album in its entirety for the first time in a few years. Now, I've always been a huge fan of Disturbed, from about ninth grade onward. Their gritty yet smooth style, powerful vocals and complex, driving beats have eternally marked them as unique in mind. Their lyrics are strong and often emotional, compelling the listener to break free and empower themselves. The band is very outspoken against the government and the injustice and corruption inherent within, yet they support the US military with a passion that surprises even me.

I think I connected with Disturbed's music so well because I started listening to it at a really hard time in my life. Entering ninth grade with few friends and a shy personality was a tough experience for me, even though the school I attended was pretty small. I carpooled to and from school with several families in my area. The twenty minute ride to school and back gave me ample opportunity to relax and listen to music.

(Side note: now, at the time, my music tastes were heavily influenced by my brother Jon, who introduced me to such bands as Creed, Trapt, Breaking Benjamin, and Sevendust. As a result, I ended up listening to a lot of hard rock and metal, and still do to this day.)

Flash back to the carpooling for a second. I had bought Disturbed's (then) latest album Ten Thousand Fists during summer 2007 and was instantly enraptured by it. David Draiman's coarse vocals and caustic lyrics, combined with Dan Donegan's incredible guitar skills and Mike Wengren's syncopated, rhythmic drumming formed a perfect combination in my mind. Every day, without fail, when I saw the parking lot of my school approaching, I would switch to the song "Deify" by Disturbed and crank the volume as loud as possible, jamming out the whole way into school. It gave me the strength to face the day and imbued me with a sense of authority that I previously had felt I'd lacked. Disturbed was my life jacket in the turbulence of entering high school.

For that reason, to this day, I can listen to any track off that album and completely lose myself in the music. It's the type of thing that no matter where I am, whenever I hear a Disturbed song off that album, it instantly gets to me and I just want to let loose and start headbanging. I love it.