Normally I don’t promote my Flickr stuff through the main articles, but on popular demand as several people asked me about these pictures yesterday, I’ll make an exception. Last night, the bands Queubus, Callgirls and Mindscape, in that order, performed in the middle of Nørrebro (Copenhagen) in Støberiet Culture House. I can tell about how awesome the performances were, but just check out the music of these bands on their respective MySpaces and look at the photos as they tell more than a 1000 words, each.
This work is in the Public Domain.
This means that there’s no copyright and you can copy this stuff and use it for your own purposes, such as posting it on websites, if you like. Like I always say: I own these pictures, but so do you! 
When Demolition Man came out in 1993, the maker of this movie has clearly been reading some George Orwell books. Some things are inevitable given the facts that we have advancing technology and our never ending need for “the easy life”. However, Demolition Man takes place in 2032 if I’m correct. Right now it’s 2009. And some Orwellian situations came over two decades earlier than expected. This is our society now. Go figure what our 2032 will really be like. Watch this video and just think about it.
For almost two years, the smoking ban has sent drinkers in England outside the pub to light up. In numerous other European countries this is quite the same. But one landlady in Barnsley has found a loophole in the law that allows her customers to smoke indoors - legally. Sky’s Tessa Chapman has been to meet her. Take notice pub owners, also outside of England - this is your chance for striking back and running a real pub or café again!
According to Gamecloud.nl, a 33 year old guy from The Netherlands, on the internet (srs bsns!) known as ‘Metal-Games’, thought it would be a good idea to cut himself a nice NES controller in one of his arms.
After this happened, Dutchy said it was hurting less than expected and it was done after only 20 minutes. See the result below. Enjoy your lunch if you haven’t been eating yet.
Boys who are born with malformed genitals, eight year old breasted girls who menstruate and men with bad semen quality. These are some of the consequences of many of the endocrine disruptors, of which we are daily exposed to.
Together they may cause a danger for our fertility, according to senior researcher Ulla Hass from the Technical University of Denmark: “It is something we must pay much attention to because it is absolutely fundamental that we can reproduce ourselves and have normal children.”
Furthermore:
clothes, electronics, toys and furniture.
Human beings. Oftenly mistaken for being the most intelligent creatures on this planet. Surely we are highly sophisticated when it comes down to technology, planning and knowledge, but *a tad* more often than sometimes we aren’t using these sophistications in a genuinely smart manner, now are we? Examples of human shortcomings are aplenty. And it gets at its worst when it involves people with weapons. The amount of weapon presence by itself is an indication, a barometer if you will, of how bad it is going with that particular area as weapons are mostly being used as a means to resolve conflicts, even though guns backfire when all sides have them, which regularly results in even extending the conflicts.
44 years The Cold War lasted. Why? There were many reasons of course, too many to mention at this time, however, in a nutshell the prime reason would be the arms race between the superpowers. The psychological motivation behind it is very simple: if one is to be locked up in a hangar with someone who may be a threatning enemy and the feelings of this person are mutual, most feel more comfortable when having a baseball bat. If the other person also has the option to choose a weapon, it’s likely that this person would pick something that makes the one holding the bat inferior in strength, like a 9mm hand gun. The 9mm bullets can be made more or less useless when one is wearing a full Kevlar suit, much like SWAT team gear. Such a suit would not protect one from a flame thrower however. And so on, and so on. You can catch my drift.
All the smaller, more local conflicts aside, the phrase history will repeat itself, commonly known, is applicable on global conflicts. Yet some of the most influential people on this planet, people most of us have voted for and put into power, hardly seem to actually look deeper into it, which is highly unfortunate as we could learn to prevent through our knowledge. But knowledge is not necessarily wisdom. Our most primal uncultivated instincts and the desire for power and superiority in weapon technology prevail over all that is wise to do when we plan, once again, things like this: spending 1½ trillion dollars on defense, increasing this weapon industry with 45% in less then a decade.
Ladies and gentlemen, I hate to be pessimistic, but developments like these are simply not classifiable as rather positive. So I’m sorry to say that we may be facing the foundations of yet another cold war. The barometer of weaponry presence in the world is indicating something very cold to say the least.
Out of over 80 bands, You Go First Mindy ultimately came in at a shared 4th place when Emergenza held their Festival Competition last February till May. Not only that, the lead singer Mads Aarby was handpicked by the jury as the best lead singer of this event.
Recorded: May, 9, 2009.
Venue and location: Vega, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Song: In Vains, which was You Go First Mindy’s opening act here.
The summer is soon to come up in the Northern Hemisphere. More and more people are taking time off from work or college and since this is the time of the year to relax yourself, why not go for a snack that’s pretty easy to prepare and makes you feel quite light in the head (and it does something about the munchies at the same time). EurØtr@sh presents: The Feel Good Pancake of the Summer.
On a personal note: this video is also a tribute for the Collective of MØGUNGER UDEN MOR and the people who lived in it.
Indications for the existence of God, I’ve met plenty of people who are convinced that God exists, but clearly that’s no proof that God truly exists. In the course of centuries many evidences of divineness were made up but the decisive argument against it is that the thinking does not decide over the being. You can get a conclusion out of reasoning, whether if that conclusion exists you should take a look at reality and in reality the existence of God cannot be proven. Why is religion so obstinate? That question should be asked in reversed order: Why is it that we’re living less and less with religion? Almost every community – perhaps even all the communities in the World — always had some form of a religion, often very differently, but you can’t find a tribe of savages or they have an idea of how the transcendention works.
Only since the French Revolution people figured out that it perhaps works without a God and even that we could understand the world better if we do not explain it out of an idea of God. Gradually that continued, science is very involved in that – we unriddled all kinds of riddles that were previously explained as an act of God, that’s one of the reasons why people find the idea of God becoming less likely. Secondly is probably that after the French Revolution the concept of equality and democracy aroused while religion always has been a part of hierarchical communities, where not only God stood above the people, but the leader of the community with all his power and influence acted as an extension of God. So authority was connected with God and therefore it got a divine status, confirming the hierarchy of the community. As communities are getting less hierarchic, in western societies that clearly changed after the 60’s, is the plausibility of a God which all people are subordinated to less obvious.
For the cohesion of society it’s necessary that people have as much common belief as possible, you have to pump that into people and that’s what happened. Nearly all beliefs, whether if it’s Catholicism, reformed religions, communism, fascism or national socialism, they all taught their children from the moment they could understand something they was told indoctrinated with these beliefs. The consequences are that later on in life when the children become adults still believe in what them is taught as a child. All children in western societies are raised with
the concept of Santa Claus, and that never gets entirely erased. When you come across a Santa Claus it’s for most people impossible to say “hello sir”. In stead you have to say “hello Santa”.
That’s the indoctrination of believing in Santa Claus, people are actually content with it, one finds it always great if coming across a Santa, even still. The glory, the beam of pleasure of Christmas eve, for a moment you re-live that once again. And I think that with religious people, people who are raised churchly, it works pretty much the same way, the symbolic, the magnificence and splendor of the church, the teachings, it all maintains some form of emotional value, even for those who are disconnected from their religion, something that unbelieving people will never get to know. You only believed in Santa Claus for two years on average, so having faith in God is even stronger anchored. Santa Claus proves how little is needed to change the mind of a child, permanently.
Can that indoctrination also have damaging consequences, religion for children? That depends on what you teach them. For example it’s known that reformed religions who are teaching that mankind has only evil tendencies and no good ones, that within these reformed communities more depressions occur than within the average western population. It’s also more or less a depressing apprenticeship, so the amount of damaging within children depends on the type of teachings. Are there also other aspects with religion that can cause that? When for instance is taught that homosexuality is a mortal sin and you are born as a homosexual, you’re suffering under that religion. When you are a woman with a energetic character who wants to make it in this world but you learn that women are subordinate to men and have to take the second place, you’re suffering under that religion.
It also turned out with the emancipation of women that how many women suffered because of the place they got through religion and society within their families. Something as celibacy, what consequences could that have for a human being, the association with sexuality, the oppression of it? Sexuality has been a big central problem within many religions, that had to be leaded properly and activated in order to conceive souls, within marriage, what also was, and still is a God given institution.
People have a need for the absolute truth, there has to be an answer to everything. Since mankind is able to think it finds it very difficult to see the problems where there’s no answer for, to be felled subjected to a world with bad endings for people and powerless to do something about it. So making up a helping and supporting God is useful for that, religion has a very distinctive function for individuals. How is it possible that
people stubbornly keep on believing while it rationally conflicts with everything logical and real?
The thought that humans are rational creatures is a mistake, people are in fact animals and they live forward by feelings, their impulses and preferences. If they have to make something up along with it, they will do it then, there are theologians to explain the antithesis’s. Those theologians explain from the immovable assumption that the explanation has to come from a God. There are very few theologians who say “that’s not correct, therefore God does not exist.”, and they are no longer theologians then. Animals also have a consciousness, it’s clearly visible on every dog that it knows what’s going on in his world. Animals have principally a different kind of consciousness than a human being, the difference is naturally also intelligence, but primarily it’s a given that humans have a consciousness of their consciousness, a human has reflection, a dog does not and a dog lives – in the ideal of eastern teachings — in the here and now, even though this is with humans, with the exception of certain moments, never to be completely shut down.
People are very gullible, that shows when you take a look at what people have believed throughout the centuries, in a hundred gods or one god, a god that is sacrificing his son, that women are subordinated to men, that mankind is good, that mankind is evil, you basically can think of just about anything and people have believed it convincingly. The difference between superstition and religion is that superstition is the religion of someone else, every religious person thinks that other religions are superstitions, not a single religions concludes out of it that their religion is probably also superstition. An unbeliever sees the spectacle and wonders how it’s possible that their religion is also a superstition, at least that’s my personal opinion as an unbeliever. Religion scares a lot of people, yet people don’t renounce their selves from it.
Religious people who are afraid of God choose the path of submission, else they’d be vanished out of religion. Submission to God is also encouraged by religions, that’s the way how to deal with God, so handling the fear for God can be done by living according these rules, then you’re an honest believer again. If the religion is very strict you’ll make mistakes very quickly, then you can only pray for forgiveness, believers already have answers for it, we don’t have to worry about that, they got everything under control. One of the problems with believing in God is that in a social sense it often presents itself as being the one and only truth, and that truth is supposed to apply to all people, throughout the centuries people who couldn’t accept the truth were murdered by fire and by sword. There were religious wars, heretics were burned, unbelievers were banned out of the community, the absolute claim of truth has lead to great misery for those who didn’t quite agree.
We are our brain, so everything we do and think is controlled by our brain. The rest of our body is merely to move our brain around, to supply us with food and oxygen and to make through our sexual organs new brains. What already is determined in the womb is for instance the gender and also questions at hands – transsexuality, children who are born as a boy and knowing from the age of 5 that they were born with the wrong gender. Our sexual orientation is also determined in an early stage in the womb. I see the spirit as the product of hundred billions of brain cells we have, that are working together and are connected, every brain cell has contacts with about thousand to several hundred thousands other cells and the whole machine is functioning and provides as a product the spirit. Our brain is particularly excelled in recognizing patterns, processing images and associating information. That can go wrong. In fact, that goes wrong all the time. You make connections that shouldn’t suppose to be there, our brain just keeps on trying to make connections and those connections are often false. Children grow up with making connections and even experience magical connections by associating walking three footsteps and things that are happening in the outside world. Then they’re trying to walk three footsteps again thinking the action will repeat itself again. We are built on that.
The brain is forming during our development, our brains form under influence of information from the brain itself, information from our body like the sex hormones of the child, information from the mother, nutrients and other materials that are circulating, materials from the outside world provided through the mother, they all have influence on the developing brain and when the child is born the social environments are influencing the brain then. For example it forms the spoken language, you are born in a certain language environment and that forms the brain in such a manner that you’re speaking the local language, often even with a dialect. As for religion the same applies as the language development, that forms within a social context, the social environment where someone gets raised and basically it gets imprinted in the brain circuits. Much like a language it’s very difficult to get it out, if you’ve always learned that the world works in a manner as the religion has told you so, then principally it’s that very baggage you’ll carry for the rest of your life.
There are syndromes where epileptic activities are caused between very local electrical brain activities, that can lead to an epileptic attack. But when that happens in the area of the hippocampus then there are people who have extremely religious experiences. They see God, they
speak with God, they get messages from God and therefore we think that it’s an important marker in religious movements, the experiences
regarding religion are manifested within the hippocampus.
Of several people who were momentous figures within religious movements similar epileptically histories are known. Jeanne d’Arc was one of them who had epilepsy. It’s also described with Mohammed. And Dostoevsky described with many details about his experiences that are typically temporary epileptic, and he also says that these experiences are so fantastic and fascinating that he wouldn’t have missed it for the world, that’s how special he think it was. Also epileptics were known from the apostle Paul. It would be a great profit situation for western religions if someone in China or Japan with such epileptic activities would see Christ or Mary in front of their eyes. But that doesn’t happen. It are always experiences that are connected with the environment, culture and the upbringing that people have been going through.
People are afraid of death, they cannot imagine that it’s all over at some point. I think that a lot of people find themselves so important that they can’t imagine that when it’s over the world just keeps on spinning around without them. Also it would be nice to see the people you’re fond of. Tedious would it be to see people you don’t like as well, but you never hear about such things, the disadvantages of eternal life.
There has been spoken about how heaven or paradise should look like, to me it seems very boring to wonder around there for eternity, but if you take a look at all those different religions who are excluding each other with entering paradise or heaven you can be very assured: no one will enter. 
Technology develops rapidly and even though the advancements of last 20 years in home technology are astonishing, we did still basically had the same stuff as we have today… but different.
Here an overview of ten everyday items from respectively 1989 and 2009. The differences:
1989 Macintosh Portable
Apple’s first portable computer. 16 Mhz processor and 1 Mb of RAM. It’s bulky, briefcase size, it’s 7.2 kilograms. And most of all, it was $6,500.
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2009 Macbook
Specifications became a concern of secondary value, looks and design is Apple’s trade now. Nevertheless, Macbooks have awesome specifications. Used by pros who work in graphics media. Still expensive, but not entirely unaffordable.
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1989 Motorola phone
This analog brick was the first mobile phone with a “flip”. And unlike a lot of other phones in those days, it had a LED display. By today’s standards it looks like a toy for toddlers.
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2009 Motorola phone
The things you can do with mobiles nowadays… calling is merely a feature on these things now. They’re more like small computers really. And everybody has one, including children.
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1989 personal computer
In order to own one of these, you had to be some kind of super nerd with way too much money to spend. And what could you do with a computer in 1989, truthfully? Mainly office administration, your occasional 2D game and sending text messages to other rich super nerds. The price you see in this ad are in 1989 dollars mind you (still no keyboard and mouse for that price).
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2009 personal computer
But thanks to those super nerds, computers became highly powerful and cheap so that even homeless people can manage if they want to. And today’s computer users still have more power at their disposal than the U.S. Army did back in ‘89.
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1989 VCR player
This particular model was the first SVHS system. Which was still VHS of course, even inferior to the older Betamax system, but…. VHS was favored because it had porn. Despite its poor technology and being obsolete due to DVD and Blu-ray, plenty of people still use it today though, mostly to tape something really quick for temporary use (or simply to watch old porn).
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2009 Blu-ray player
On a single Blu-ray disc it’s technically possible to store 400GB of data. That’s enough for the entire collection of Rocky AND Rambo movies in full quality, including the whole making-of and interviews. This particular Blu-ray player model, the Samsung BD-P4600, is wall-mountable, 1½ inches thin and has got wireless access to video and music streaming services.
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1989 Sony TV
This line of televisions, the Trinitron, was quite common in the late eighties. I guess you still might find them in a lot of bedrooms today in an effort to not waste anything, awaiting to become useless and extinct as no one buys CRT anymore.
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2009 Sony TV
The WEGA is a line of televisions following up the Trinitron line, and it’s fairly common in the late half of this decade. Because of the high definition, it goes pretty well with Blu-ray and you can easily connect your computer to it. A television has basically become a monitor with a tuner.
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1989 printer
The dot matrix printer, notable for making a hell of a lot of noise, and that could go on for minutes as it took that long to print out a full page. Using ordinary A4 paper was also out of the question, often these printers required some weird thin paper with holes on the side, which you had to tear off afterward. And every now and then you would mess up a page while doing so.
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2009 printer
Much like today’s cell phones, it can do so much more than just the original purpose. A printer like the one above replaces also a copier, a fax, a phone, an answering machine, memory card devices…. and it can communicate wirelessly in several ways. The only thing it doesn’t do is to make you coffee….. yet.
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1989 “digital” camera
Well…. it wasn’t really digital, this Canon RC-250 for example was an analog device, but it did store pictures in a format much like VHS, except it was on a disk. Then a digitizing system would make sure you could put it on a computer. The best option would be an Amiga as it had more colors than a PC (max 4 colors simultaneously) or a Mac (monochrome!) back then.
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2009 digital camera
This thing here is 12.1 megapixels, enough to take a picture of people’s faces on the street (provided they look up) while you’re standing on top of a 20 story building, but no one is that surprised by it anymore really. It easily fits in most pockets as well and you can upload it in no-time pretty much everywhere, where there is a computer through either USB, memory card readers or Bluetooth.
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1989 data storage
Though the CD-rom was already existing, the vast majority of computer users worked with 3½ inch “floppy” disks (which were not floppy anymore). Capacity: 1,440KB. Data speed: typically around 8KB/sec.
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2009 data storage
Memory cards can be as small as a 1 eurocent coin and these Micro SD cards can store up to 16GB of data. In comparison: IT’S OVER 9000 of the aforementioned floppy disks.
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1989 Sony Discman
This particular Discman would still be pretty useful by today’s standards. Perhaps even more than back in 1989 as plenty of people rather invested in the cheaper Walkman and thus CD’s were not that mainstream yet. Still, even the best Discman can’t carry more than 80 minutes of music on one CD.
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2009 iPod Touch
Very stylish and very versatile the iPod Touch is. You can put thousands and thousands of songs on it. Still need more? Then use the device to download music (videos) from the web. While you’re at it you can download applications as well…. there are over 35,000 of ‘em, and that’s just at the Apple Web Store. Private and independent communities are into it as well. It’s an entire PC (or a Mac in this case) in your pocket.
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1989 Nintendo Entertainment System
Of course the NES was on the market for a couple of years, but I’d say the NES’ popularity was at its height at around 1989. Half the people that are in their late twenties or early thirties owned one. Now pretty much only retro games cognoscenti are into it. Mostly by emulation as original NES consoles are in extinction. Because of this though varieties on existing games appear on the web. Try SMB 31Dæmon for example!
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2009 Playstation 3
Everything on a Playstation 3 looks bloody realistic. It uses a Blu-ray technology so because of its disc reading capacities, games can be huge (and you can watch a movie in full HD afterward). Besides network gaming, you can even convert this thing into a Linux PC if you know how to do it. This thing is a monster.
So that makes the 10th comparison…
Sure… it’s fun to laugh at how primitive some of the 1989 items are/were, but in 2029 people are very likely going to laugh their RFID-chipped asses off about our 2009 items.
In 20 years from now, home computers will have such high capacities, we are likely to measure them in PB (Petabytes) and Thz (Teraherz). Our phones/personal media devices/portable computers might be nothing more but an earpiece which will not only be able to be voice activated but also be voice responsive, making you able to have two way conversations with your gadgets, and that includes troubleshooting. Blu-ray will become a thing for hobbyists as optical discs eventually become entirely obsolete as wireless memory cards (containing Terabytes) are likely to become the standard and are playable on every screen, big or small, portable or stationary. LCD and plasma will be what CRT is now: old news.
So in that sense it’s not weird to think that screens will be visible floating light particles, much like a hologram but far more advanced, conducted by some ultra high frequency wireless transmitter to their right respective locations, all at least 100 megapixels of them. And when it comes down to computer games…. playing Second Life alike applications could become so intense and realistic, as we will be literally surrounded by audiovisual effects combined with our nervous systems connected to computers, some people might eventually have difficulties with telling these applications apart from real life.
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