Special tasting Rum

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4976754.stm

Builders find body in rum barrel

Builders who drank a barrel of rum at a house in southern Hungary had a nasty surprise when they got to the bottom and found a pickled corpse.

The man's body fell out when the workers tried to move the barrel after they had drunk it dry, a Hungarian police magazine website reported.

The website said the man's wife had stored the body in the barrel after he died in Jamaica 20 years ago.

The workers said the rum had a "special taste" and had planned to bottle some.

The website said the builders made the grisly discovery six months after the woman, who was in her 80s, died.

It said the woman had shipped her husband's body back home to the city of Szeged in the rum barrel to avoid the cost and paperwork involved in sending it back by official means.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Brazil city proposes ban on death

Brazil outlaws dying. Link here

Burn Your Brain to CD

According to the article "The wealthy will be able to download their consciousness into computers by 2050"

Personally I'd prefer to upload my brain to a computer, but if the wealthy will be foolish enough to try to download them instead who am I to argue.

Wonder how many DVDs it would take to fit my brain?

GeekInformed.com | - Digital Immortality - Download the Mind by 2050

Speech Synthesis

There's no telling how long your human voice box will hold up for. It's possible that at some point past 100 years the old vocal cords will just dry up and snap off. If that happens don't worry. There are many free voice synthesis resorces available on the web. Just type in what you want to say, choose a voice and you're set. You can even save these to wav files. Have fun.

http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/

http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html

http://www.rhetorical.com/cgi-bin/demo.cgi

http://www.research.ibm.com/tts/coredemo.shtml

We Are The Robots

According to famed inventor and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil "we are not another animal, subject to nature's whim"

He believes that within 20 years man will have accomplished immortality. He believes that millions of tiny robots will keep us young by "by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries and brain cells. Improvements to our genetic coding will be downloaded from the Internet. We won't even need a heart."

And I thought is was scary flashing the bios of my motherboard. Imagine flashing your genetic code.

Read more here http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,66585,00.html

Is Time An Illusion?

You aren't aging. It just seems like you are. Time is an illusion.

http://www.skybooksusa.com/time-travel/metaphys/istimail.htm

"JUST because we perceive time flowing in one direction, does that mean there "really is" a difference between the past and future? The old philosophical question has been re-examined by Huw Price, of the University of Sydney, in the context of quantum mechanics. He concludes that the idea that the past is not influenced by the future is an anthropocentric illusion, a "projection of our own temporal asymmetry". By allowing signals from the future to play a part in determining the outcome of quantum experiments, he can resolve all the puzzles and paradoxes of the quantum world."

"Many physicists find such ideas abhorrent, because they run counter to "common sense". They would, for example, encourage speculations like those of Henry Stapp (see Science, XX August), that our own minds can influence things that have already happened. The power of Price's approach, though, is that it offers a framework for understanding how the world can include both forward and backward causation at a fundamental level, but appear to have a unique direction of time from a human perspective."

Can Time Run Backwards?

If time does run backwards, that means the older you are, the more time you've got left. Live it up all you grampys out there. You'll be young again 80 years ago.

http://www.science-spirit.org/archive_cm_detail.php?new_id=191

According to a physicist in New York State, the Universe may contain areas where milk would stir itself out of coffee and eggs would un-break. The idea that there may be regions where time runs backwards could explain invisible dark matter. This kind of matter, invoked by cosmologists to explain the movement of galaxies, could originate in a future phase of the Universe - in which the Universe is contracting.

Black Box Predicts Future

Scientists have created a black box that can predict the future. They believe that somehow it is tapping into the universal mind. The theory is that time runs backwards and that our brains subconsciously know what's going to happen next. Read up. I believe this research will prove quite useful to our cause.

Here is the complete article:

Can This Black Box See Into the Future?

DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.

But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.

The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.

Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.