Bluetech - Love Songs To The Source

Mari Boine – Big Medicine (Bluetech Remix)

Weekly Song

Healing songs are rare jewels of creation. Bluetech took one and it intertwined ritualistic percussion and ghostly chanting textures into its structure. There are several other changes gleaming from the instrumental side. They all contribute to the creation of a mystical atmosphere while in the same time infusing the song with the unique ingredients that call to our body’s ancestral lust for pattern and rhythm. The result is yet another masterful creation from one of the best psybient music projects out there.

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Eye of Vatican

Catholic Church Releases “PopEye” Digital Guardian Angel

Satire, ,

Less than a month after introducing the SalveAtion Digital Assistant to the world, the Catholic Church is at it again. Wishing to expand its virtual economy, the Church has identified several key areas for improvement. Enter PopEye, a faithful’s most faithful guardian angel, designed to keep track of the user’s sins or lack thereof.

In case you haven’t been following the news, SalveAtion – launched three weeks ago – allows Catholics to purchase various Church services using a virtual currency called the innoCent. The currency can be gained by the faithful when they listen and share sermons or convert their friends to Catholicism. innoCents can also be purchased for real money. However, Vatican’s Business Intelligence division has noticed that shortly after SalveAtion went out of beta, purchases of innoCents took a nosedive. This is where PopEye comes in.

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Red Snapper - Our Aim Is To Satisfy Red Snapper

Red Snapper – Keeping Pigs Together

Weekly Song,

Experimentation is the key to progress. Music is also a subject of this simple property of intelligence. Like all forms of intelligent expression, music evolves through time, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. I like to think that this melody belongs to the first category.

It seriously caught my attention when, at around the 2 minutes mark, the song reaches its full speed in what is a panoramic show of force. Indeed, when listening to it, one may feel like being taken on a fast, dizzying flight across a landscape of wild sounds. My only complaint is that I felt like the ending is a bit over-done and might interfere a bit with the atmosphere that the artists have worked hard to create during the song.

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Kitchen 3.0

Kitchen 3.0

Futurology, Technology, ,

The age of interconnected devices and gadgets is slowly dawning. This category of communications-capable electronics has been labeled “the Internet of Things” – somewhat of a misnomer now-a-days when it is obvious that the security threat of any machine reachable from the Internet is enormous. Perhaps quantum cryptography will one day address this issue. Until then, home owners will probably be safer by using offline “smart home controllers” with manually-upgradeable firmware in what will be an Intranet of Things.

Irrespective of the name, this new wave of electronics is still barely in its infancy. Any company worth its salt has to prepare for how business will change in the coming decades. And there’s nothing more disruptive than what is basically the rise of the first mainstream generation of highly task-optimized robots. Indeed, a smart refrigerator is basically a robot focused on a certain task.

While the first robots accessible to everybody will still function very much like our current appliances, their smarts will open up a myriad opportunities for ground-breaking innovation.

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Parov Stelar - Daylight

Parov Stelar – Charleston Butterfly

Weekly Song

Nothing says “sparkling party” better than some high quality electro-swing. And there are very few artists that do electro-swing like Parov Stelar does. The instrumental is adventurous. The singing is all sorts of groovy. So, get up and let the brass loose! Throw all worries out the window and smile, smile, smile. Even though a caterpillar dies in this story, this is quite the uplifting song.

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Productivity in the Age of Mixed Reality

Productivity in the Age of Mixed Reality

Futurology, Technology, , , ,

In the past few years we’ve witnessed the launch of more than a dozen HMDs (Head Mounted Displays). Several of them are already available in large numbers. HMDs focused on entertainment (Oculus, Vive) rely on taking over visual perception completely via Virtual Reality. HMDs focused on productivity (HoloLens) mix real life with computer generated imagery drawn upon a transparent display. There are other combinations and means of mixing visual information, so all of this technology has recently been put under the umbrella term Mixed Reality.

Here are some of the things that may be accomplished in the future (productivity-wise) using Mixed Reality

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Hocico - Memorias Atras

Hocico – About A Dead

Weekly Song

Ever heard about a musical genre called aggrotech? No, it has nothing to do with agriculture. It’s an exotic combination between electronica instrumentals and metal music atmosphere and vocals. And it sounds wicked!

After the merciless instrumental kicks off, the banshee singer will soon start its rant against organized religion. Even though the lyrical content is stuck with a rather limited spiritual perspective, I can’t say that I completely disagree with the message.

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Why Boys Need Empathy Education

Boys Need Extra Empathy Lessons

Parenting,

The fact that empathy is a career-enhancing skill should give parents enough reason to instill it in their children. The fact that empathy can also stimulate a social group’s technological progress through increased collaboration and innovation should give governments enough reason to implement it throughout the educational system.

Even though we evolved emotionally quite a bit in the past centuries our society continues to often exhibit a severe lack of empathy, especially when it comes to the male demographic. Perhaps it’s time for governments to realize that empathic men are more useful than those whose emotions were twisted in order to condition them to become obedient soldiers, ready to slaughter each other to fill somebody’s coffers. Perhaps that made sense last century, but we’re past the point where we can survive a third world war, so any investment in that sort of competition is a recipe for social bankruptcy.

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