In honor of Star Trek’s opening weekend, here’s a sneak peak at the future of non-fictional human space exploration. This is an endeavor that seems to be solely in the hands of private entrepreneurs, such as the creator of Paypal, being interviewed here:

Here’s the trailer for an upcoming indie documentary on inventor and luminary Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is well known for his involvement in artificial intelligence development, as well as his prediction of the ‘Singularity,’ which refers a hypothetical future benchmark during which the rate technological change outpaces human ability to comprehend the changes.

Screw global warming. You want some planetary catastrophe? How about this new study released that estimates a 1% chance that Jupiter’s gravity will alter the orbit of Mercury to the point that it causes the collapse of the entire inner solar system.

Did I mention that this process is supposed to take place over the next 5 billion years? Hmm, suppose I forgot that part. That’s around the same timeframe that it will take for the sun to balloon into a red giant, snuffing out this part of the solar system anyway.

Meh. I suppose it’s not as scary as swine flu or Rhianna’s red carpet outfit, but I can dream, can’t I?

The Adrenaline ‘Dominate’ Button, Famous Gerontologist Sounds Like Crazy Russ, An Ethical Treatise on Advanced Review Copies, the Third Sign of the Apocalypse, How to Make it in the Fantasy Fiction World, Eunuch Rabbits, Quaid Discrimination, and The World’s Video – “One of the Great Moments in Human History.”

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One of my favorite classic YouTube mashups that reveals, Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith accent to be nothing more than a knock off of prolific astronomer, Carl Sagan.

Originally posted at The Fresh Scent

Spending long hours traveling back and forth to your local lab? Tired of lining up huge networks of hydroponics to get the grow houses running? Then, drop all that effort-intensive work and try some crack today! All you need to start is a microwave oven. It’s the easy, breezy way to create your very own illegal narcotics.

According to the TCPalm, Javaris Kirk, of Fort Pierce, Florida, was arrested last week after allegedly admitting to making crack-cocaine with his microwave oven. Mr. Kirk later admitted that he was a convicted felon and, as such, felt a special bond with Martha Stewart.

Authorities searching his home also found five ecstasy tablets in his bathroom, a 9mm pistol with no serial, and a homemade tea cozy crafted out of extra table cloth.

I just found this reprehensible video that is obviously full of lies. Do not let the Big Oil propaganda machine take you in with its fancy commercials and high production value. Emu oil is extracted directly from the souls of the kindest and most egalitarian emus. Those who have had their oil removed must wander the planes of emu purgatory for all time.

You will now learn more about magnetic fields than you have absorbed in your entire lifetime up to this moment… Don’t fight it.

A study featured in New Scientist this week showed that average people have a spectacular capability for short-circuiting their own judgment when in the presence of an expert.

This new data happens to fit perfectly into TMR’s 85% Theory. The theory states that since a large majority of professionals and advice-givers are incompetent, people should always take advice with a grain of salt and do their own due diligence before making decisions.

So, while I temporarily have the support of the scientific community on this one, let me preach for a moment: Don’t listen blindly to doctors, lawyers, accountants, politicians, brokers, astronauts, or clergy (or scientists). These people are just as fallible as anyone else. They are just as self-serving as anyone else. They are just as complacent and mistake-prone as anyone else.

Expert status is just as much a function of good publicity as it is of real practicable wisdom. You are almost always the most qualified advocate on your own behalf . And you always know yourself better than anyone else ever can.

In the words of Emerson,

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”

Image via Kim Richter.com

I don’t mean to be telling tales out of school, but friend and fellow Mepper, Storily Clayton, once shared with me a theory of time that I found both brilliant and strangely comforting.

The idea is as follows: If we think of time as the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun (which is how we typically measure a year), any given time is actually a very specific geographical position in the Earth’s orbit. In other words, the Earth is in a nearly identical spot today as it was a year ago. And so am I, and so are you, as are all other passengers on the giant blue sphere as it careens through space. We are constantly traveling through “time” at over 66,000 miles per hour around an orbital track over 585 million miles long.

This gives a strangely physical or spatial quality to time. And lends a lot more credence to the relativists’ notion of Space/Time as a single entity.

It also warrants a new type of observation. Are we prone to certain behaviors or actions at certain times of the year because we find ourselves in the same geographical location?

I mean, think about how returning to a formative location (a school you graduated from, a house you spent your childhood, a old familiar dive bar) affects your thoughts and brings back certain old lines of thinking, certain memories.

Now realize that visits to those locations are randomly strewn about space; each visit to the school (that wasn’t an anniversary of another visit) could have taken place hundreds of thousands of miles apart from each other (in the context of where you are in space). Relatively speaking, the only time when you’re anywhere near in the same place as you had been before, is on the yearly anniversary of a given day. Even if you are on the other side of the planet (having a circumference of about 25,000 miles) on that anniversary you’re still much closer to your location on that anniversary than a half hour later, when you’ve moved another 30,000 miles down the orbital track.

So Mr. Clayton often uses his blog as an empirical analysis of how different times tend to affect him. And I’ve begun to buy into this line of thinking. I just re-listened to Mep Report 18, an absolutely phenomenal specimen that we recorded almost exactly three years ago. And I listened to myself wrestle with life questions that have been occurring to me very recently. I suppose I can only truly be in the same mental “space” as I was for TMR 18 during this time of year.

Some food for thought.