How Goldman Sachs created the food crisis: “Frederick Kaufman’s piece for Foreign Policy examines how the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) is responsible for the increase in food prices.

[T]he boom in new speculative opportunities in global grain, edible oil, and livestock markets has created a vicious cycle. The more the price of food commodities increases, the more money pours into the sector, and the higher prices rise. Indeed, from 2003 to 2008, the volume of index fund speculation increased by 1,900 percent. ‘What we are experiencing is a demand shock coming from a new category of participant in the commodities futures markets,’ hedge fund Michael Masters testified before Congress in the midst of the 2008 food crisis.

The result of Wall Street’s venture into grain and feed and livestock has been a shock to the global food production and delivery system. Not only does the world’s food supply have to contend with constricted supply and increased demand for real grain, but investment bankers have engineered an artificial upward pull on the price of grain futures. The result: Imaginary wheat dominates the price of real wheat, as speculators (traditionally one-fifth of the market) now outnumber bona-fide hedgers four-to-one.

Today, bankers and traders sit at the top of the food chain — the carnivores of the system, devouring everyone and everything below. Near the bottom toils the farmer. For him, the rising price of grain should have been a windfall, but speculation has also created spikes in everything the farmer must buy to grow his grain — from seed to fertilizer to diesel fuel. At the very bottom lies the consumer. The average American, who spends roughly 8 to 12 percent of her weekly paycheck on food, did not immediately feel the crunch of rising costs. But for the roughly 2-billion people across the world who spend more than 50 percent of their income on food, the effects have been staggering: 250 million people joined the ranks of the hungry in 2008, bringing the total of the world’s ‘food insecure’ to a peak of 1 billion — a number never seen before.

At least the Goldman Sachs vampires have plenty of money to buy guns to shoot starving peasants who will be trying to steal heirloom tomatoes from their manor gardens.

Don’t blame American appetites, rising oil prices, or genetically modified crops for rising food prices. Wall Street’s at fault for the spiraling cost of food.

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Pinhole cameras made out of hollow eggs: “

Francesco Capponi made these beautiful pinhole cameras out of blown eggs, shooting eerie negative photos that could only been seen by destroying the camera:

Take the egg and drill it with a rotary tool (I used a Dremel) in order to obtain a square hole (2cm). At this point, usually, you will find yourself covered in egg juice. Before washing yourself be sure that the egg’ shell is empty. Wash yourself and the interior of the egg. In a dark room paint the interior of the shell with the emulsion, in order to make it light-sensitive.

Now block the opening with a wrought-brass pin-holed plate, trying to restore the natural egg-ness of the shell. With the black tape seal the structure. You’ll notice that the shell is really transparent: to avoid any problem, wrap it with the black cloth, carefully leaving out the pinhole. During each stage of this process the egg could break. Usually it does.

The Pinhegg – My Journey To Build An Egg Pinhole Camera

(via Make)

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Killer boys’ fashions from the 1970s: “

These matching boys’ belt/trouser/vest/shirt sets are pretty badass, especially that orange stripey one that looks like it came out of a bizarro-world Paul Smith showroom. I’m pretty sure there’s a Sears portrait of me wearing the checked one in 1976 or so.

Oh, to be size 3 to 7 again!

(via Neatorama)

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The Chronotune: Detroit hackerspace builds “time travel radio project”: “

[Video Link]

Members of the i3Detroit hackerspace in Detroit, MI have created ‘the Chronotune,’ which allows you to ‘dial into a year in the past, present or future to hear the sounds of the year.’ Radio shows, music and other media. ‘The entire build is custom and run off an arduino,’ says BB reader Nick Britsky.

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Boom! And a Bear Comes Out: “

I wrote a song! It has been running through my mind for a long time, and I finally said “You know what? It is time to FINISH THIS. Time to lay it down. Time to make it the PARTY HIT OF THE SUMMER.”

Boom! And a Bear Comes Out from David Malki ! on Vimeo.

(Download the MP3)

I hope you like it!

If you also have a nagging “cool thing” that you need an excuse to finish, why not submit something to the Machine of Death Talent Show? We’ve pushed back the submission deadline to April 20, and we will accept video performances from remote participants (although if you’re in the Los Angeles area, we’d love to physically put you on the stage)!

More info here. If you can’t submit something, we hope you’ll at least watch the show on the evening of April 26, either live in Los Angeles or livestreamed at MachineofDeath.net. Here’s the Facebook event!

I will tease you with this as well: everyone who’s able to attend the show in person will go home with a very special item that we’ll be unveiling the evening of.

Admission will be free, so if you can’t make it, send your Los Angeleno friends!

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#719; The Background Check: “

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Rules for golfing during the blitz: “
This sign was purportedly posted in 1940 in a north country British country club, regarding the special rules of play for bombed-out golf greens.

Stiff Upper Lip

(via Neatorama)

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The Revolution That Isn’t There: “

Fascinating post at John Robb’s about the stirrings of a supposed “Jasmine Revolution” in China. The full post is worth your attention, but I’m pulling these bits from his correspondent:

…several Chinese language, but overseas based, websites have been blogging on the creation of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China. This… appears to have no real-world substance whatsoever, to have begun as a hoax at best, and to exist only in cyberspace, and cyberspace outside China at that. But the interesting bit is the real world effect it is having inside China, and the momentum it is generating.

The blogs and websites themselves are largely invisible to ordinary Chinese as the Great Firewall keeps them out, but they can be seen by the security agencies, who have been swift to react. The organizers, whoever and wherever they are, have repeatedly called on people to gather in a range of popular and public areas in the centre of major cities across China – shopping malls and university campuses – and go for a stroll every Sunday afternoon to call for minor political change. These public areas are, at that time of day, normally filled with young people and out-of-town domestic tourists, all now potential ‘protesters’… but there are no genuine protesters, just some bemused local tourists and a lot of foreign journalists. So some young tourists get beaten up and taken away, and some journalists get smacked around.

The security forces are taking it seriously, the top leaders have come out in public to criticise the organisers for threatening social stability, and yet there is still no evidence of real-world substance to the protests, just China’s vast security apparatus chasing shadows on the streets and on the internet, and closing down large sections of China’s internet and SMS traffic…

A revolutionary movement that doesn’t exist, but still causes the kind of crackdown we associate with revolutionary movements, generated by persons unknown either to illustrate what would happen to revolutionary protestors, or to foment genuine revolutionary protest. The new fog of war.

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Mild brain shocks may improve learning and cognition: “

Around 1800, Italian scientist Jean Aldini zapped the brains of dead felons with electricity to make their bodies move. He later reported using the same technique to cure ‘melancholy.’ This sounds like the history of electroconvulsive (shock) therapy, but those were actually the first experiments in transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), tweaking the brain with very mild shocks, 1,000 times less intense than delivered by shock therapy. A resurgence in tDCS is now underway. (Experiment ‘Consent Video‘ above from the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation.) Indeed, neuroscientists at the University of New Mexico are using a tDCS device powered by a 9-volt battery to see if 2 milliamps shocks to certain regions of the scalp can improve cognition and learning. Early results are promising. (In fact, tDCS may even prime neurons to respond to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a technique we’ve posted about on BB many times in which bursts from a magnetic coil near the head alter brain activity. TMS has been tested as a potential treatment for certain severe neurological and psychological disorders. Scientific journal Nature surveys the tDCS field in its latest issue. From Nature:

Last year a succession of volunteers sat down in a research lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico to play DARWARS Ambush!, a video game designed to train US soldiers bound for Iraq. Each person surveyed virtual landscapes strewn with dilapidated buildings and abandoned cars for signs of trouble — a shadow cast by a rooftop sniper, or an improvised explosive device behind a rubbish bin. With just seconds to react before a blast or shots rang out, most forgot about the wet sponge affixed to their right temple that was delivering a faint electric tickle. The volunteers received a few milliamps of current at most, and the simple gadget used to deliver it was powered by a 9-volt battery.

It might sound like some wacky garage experiment, but Vincent Clark, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico, says that the technique, called transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), could improve learning. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded the research in the hope that it could be used to sharpen soldiers’ minds on the battlefield. Yet for all its simplicity, it seems to work.

Volunteers receiving 2 milliamps to the scalp (about one-five-hundredth the amount drawn by a 100-watt light bulb) showed twice as much improvement in the game after a short amount of training as those receiving one-twentieth the amount of current1. ‘They learn more quickly but they don’t have a good intuitive or introspective sense about why,’ says Clark.

The technique, which has roots in research done more than two centuries ago, is experiencing something of a revival. Clark and others see tDCS as a way to tease apart the mechanisms of learning and cognition. As the technique is refined, researchers could, with the flick of a switch, amplify or mute activity in many areas of the brain and watch what happens behaviourally. The field is ‘going to explode very soon and give us all sorts of new information and new questions’, says Clark. And as with some other interventions for stimulating brain activity, such as high-powered magnets or surgically implanted electrodes, researchers are attempting to use tDCS to treat neurological conditions, including depression and stroke. But given the simplicity of building tDCS devices, one of the most important questions will be whether it is ethical to tinker with healthy minds — to improve learning and cognition, for example. The effects seen in experimental settings ‘are big enough that they would definitely have real-world consequences’, says Martha Farah, a neuroethicist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

‘Neuroscience: Brain buzz‘

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The end of “rare” music and other digitizable media: “

This Rolling Stones former-rarity is easy to find online.

My consciousness was forever altered when I happened on Kamandi #3 at age 11. I wanted to read every comic Jack Kirby had created up to that point. But early issues of Fantastic Four were rare and expensive. I bought what I could afford and treasured them. Today I’m sure I could get my hands on PDFs of every issue of Fantastic Four in short order (but I don’t have to because I bought the cheap pulpy Essential Fantastic Four anthologies – the ones to get are Vol 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 — after that Kirby jumped ship for DC). Rare old comics, along with music and cult films, are no longer rare.

Bill Wyman of Slate explores ‘what it means to have all music [and other digitizable media] instantly available.’

A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it’s no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there’s very little out there you might want that you can’t find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?

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In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, the poet Dan Chiasson wrote at length about Keith Richards’ autobiography and made an interesting point near the end, about how scarcity and rarity, long ago, actually fueled artistic endeavor:

[T]he experience of making and taking in culture is now, for the first time in human history, a condition of almost paralyzing overabundance. For millennia it was a condition of scarcity; and all the ways we regard things we want but cannot have, in those faraway days, stood between people and the art or music they needed to have: yearning, craving, imagining the absent object so fully that when the real thing appears in your hands, it almost doesn’t match up. Nobody will ever again experience what Keith Richards and Mick Jagger experienced in Dartford, scrounging for blues records.

Point taken–but let’s remember it’s a small sacrifice. I have this or that fetish object–the White Album on two 8-tracks in a black custom case, for example, or a rare Elvis Costello picture disc. And I remember the joy of the find. But it’s hard to feel bad about the end of rarity; didn’t a lot of the thrill come from feeling superior when you had something others didn’t? You really want to get nostalgic about that? We’re finally approaching that nirvana for fans, scholars, and critics: Everything available, all the time. (Certainly Richards and Jagger would approve.) It’s not an ideal state of affairs for a rights holder, of course. But for the rest of us, what is there to complain about?

Lester Bangs’ Basement

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