From October 21st to 26th, Graz’s Elevate Festival once again stimulates new ways of thinking and listening through an extraordinary combination of electronic music, art and political discourse. Elevate highlights the role and importance of social movements as well as progressive initiatives in civil society and the importance of generating positive change in our society as a whole. At the same time, Elevate presents many live acts that offer fascinating odysseys into innovative worlds of sound far off the beaten path.
A meteor exploded in the atmosphere near Santa Fe, New Mexico just before 5 a.m. on the morning of July 31. Local amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft captured the event from his personal observatory using an all-sky optical video camera developed by Sandia National Laboratories that is specifically sensitive to the near infrared flashes that meteors create.
Memorizing patterns in random, confused noise is easier than it sounds. According to a new study, repeated listens alone are enough to teach the brain 100 percent accurate recognition.
On the night of June 14, 2010 in St. Petersburg, on the Che Guevara birthday, the Voina group painted the Dick, 65 m high and 27 m wide, on the Liteiny Bridge before it rose. At 1 am the bridge started opening up, and the huge Cosmic Dick stood up just opposite the main building of the KGB in St. Petersburg. The activists painted the Dick in 23 seconds, while running and fighting with the bridge security. The paint was poured from the cans onto the bridge roadway.
Each day the news confirm the extent to which the global systemic crisis has now entered into the phase of global geopolitical dislocation, even if the media only timidly begin to interpret the historic upheavals which unfold before our own eyes..
For LEAP/E2020, behind the « sophisticated » dissertations on the exit from the crisis and the end of the policies of support for the economy and the financial sector hides a very simple truth, but one which governments and central bankers are unable to express: they don’t know what to do? when to do it? how to do it? and if they should do it alone or with the other big global players? Indeed if the lack of preparation to the start of the crisis resulted from world leaders inability to imagine a crisis could happen, for many months now, it has been their inability to correctly judge the true situation of the world economy and the interaction of the large number of extraordinary measures taken everywhere on the planet which now condemns them to remain passive. Between now and the end of this semester, this lack of action will simply leave the place to mere reactions to social, economic and political events. All this will take place within a framework of complete disorder, reinforcing everyman-for-himself trends which have become clearer and clearer since the end of 2009.
Game playing in the village of Teci, on Yasawa Island, Fiji./Robert Boyd
Human behaviors are often explained as hard-wired evolutionary leftovers of life on the savannah or during the Stone Age. But a study of one very modern behavior, fairness toward total strangers one will never meet again, suggests it evolved recently, and is rooted in culture rather than biology.
If we are ever contacted by aliens, the man I’m having lunch with will be one of the first humans to know. His name is Paul Davies and he’s chair of the Seti (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Task Group. They’re a group of the world’s most eminent scientists and will be, come the big day, the planet’s alien welcome committee. His is an awesome responsibility, and one he doesn’t take lightly.
Jamie Dimon, chairman of JP Morgan Chase, has warned American investors should be more worried about the risk of default of the state of California than of Greece’s current debt woes.
