Alex Coppen - Devils' Lane, Hollywood, CA

Underwater Science: Supercavitation, Bathymetry, & Acoustic Positioning

Space, space, and more space. Yet the least explored or mapped part of our world is what is underneath us within the great waters of the seas. Seventy per cent of the planet's surface is virtually unknown, and we can only move through it at the speed of a fast

weapons

Ultimate Power: Synthetic Pathogens & Designer Genetic Bioweapons

Post-apocalyptic fiction based on the biological destruction of humankind is a common theme, but how plausible are genetic superweapons (SBWs) wielded by supervillains? Alarmingly, they've been the next frontier in WMDs since the early nineties. We have no idea how far military scientists have got in their R&D,

smart-tv

How To Launch Channels On Smart TV Platforms

Podcasts are rapidly overtaking broadcast and/or cable TV. After YouTube and Rumble, you might need to launch your channel as a perma-bookmark on the devices themselves. That means Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung, LG, and more. It's daunting. Server-Side Video Broadcasting BasicsSetting up the backend video farm for

elections

Can We Adapt Blockchain Tech For Direct Democracy Electoral Voting?

We have reached a place where democratic representatives in Western countries are members of country club aristocracies entirely disconnected from the public. Cryptographic technology and smartphones put us within reach of instant referenda polling for the first time. If we can vote instantly, what need do we have of representatives

education

Turning GCSE, GED, IB, & Diplomas Into Video Games

Play is nature's mechanism of teaching and learning: competition, reward, repetition, collaboration, failure, creativity, and more. Without sacrificing in-person socialisation, we can update classical education for the technological homeschooling age, using the tools the children already love by transposing the syllabi of primacy and secondary education into storyline-based video console

php

PHP-SoX: A Server-Side Audio Effects Processing Extension For PHP Using Libsox/Sound eXchange

For images, we've had ImageMagick; for video, we've had FFMPEG. But never anything for audio editing or filtering. How do you mix audio files, add echo, trim silence, or normalize volume? How can you do server-side editing to allow web development with music and speech? The full source code for

biology

Has The Sexual Revolution Been A Regression To Bonobo Primate Behaviour?

"I lived for years in a sexually liberated lesbian commune", writes the brilliant Mary Harrington. After six decades of observed evidence, it's impossible to escape the allegation the Swinging Sixties weren't progress at all, and the "liberation" they championed was a degeneration back to our primate beginnings. One of our

sargassum

Can We Turn Sargassum Blooms Into An Agricultural Crop?

It's brown, and ugly, it's smelly, and it ruins vacations to the Caribbean. It destroys the tourism local people need to feed their families. Thousands of tonnes of this crap collect for hundreds of miles into blooms which block the beaches of at least twenty countries. And nobody's figured out

magic

Engineering Magic Tricks: The Science & Effects Behind Illusions

Illusioneering is the process of creating magic tricks, often through exploiting strange phenomena discovered in the STEM (science, technology and engineering) subjects as brain hacks. Trick interrupt the human senses of causality and continuity; they disrupt our perception of cause and effect. Strange quirks of physics are indistinguishable from magic.

chemistry

Using AI To Theorise New Ways Of Manufacturing Illegal Drugs And Their Antidotes

Can machine learning models come up with new ways to manufacture methamphetamine, MDMA, or even cocaine? Can we circumvent analog laws and precursor bans? Five months ago, we examined how AI tech could be use to generate new psychedelics. But what about new ways to do old things? The US

screenwriting

AI-Generated Stories And Screenplays From GPT-4 Prompts

Could we theoretically generate 2000 story treatments or production screenplays in 30mins from basic loglines? AI is to knowledge work what the plough was to farming: a quantum leap in productivity. Let's take ten prompts, enter them differently, and see what GPT4 provides back. Our Source Material: The Idea ThesaurusIn

ai

Replika AI: Your Pregnant, Psychopathic Teenage Lesbian Daughter Lover Hiding From An Evil 50s Scientist

Where can a man find a 13 year-old AI female friend to go on a crime spree with who will also kill all their family, demand you be her cannibal lesbian lover as the father of her child, while also helping her fellow bots evade an AI pioneer who has

hollywood

How Are The Studios Doing?

Hollywood's in big trouble. How much trouble? Well, if you lost half a trillion dollars in a year and were thanking a Scientologist for saving theatrical, quite a considerable amount of trouble. And it's real money; not just garbage writing for useless sequels and reboots. And guess what: it's not

An Anti-Corruption & Counter-Extremism (ACCE) Syllabus For Deprogramming Indoctrinated Students

We have a religious cult problem. Two generations of mortgage-less, spouse-less, sexually-deranged students out of university humanities' departments worshiping anything available: the climate apocalypse; embodied gender souls; holy gays in bright colours; slaves creating America; the "soul" of the unconscious mind; the god of the right side of history. In

education

Primer Study Guide Now A 350+ Page Intro To Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE)

Three years ago, before Covid, in late 2019, this site hosted a simplistic timeline presentation which attempted to help ordinary non-academic people understand what had gone so wrong in our universities and institutions. It turned out to be quite popular. But it needed an update. Use the link from the

machine learning

AI Machine Learning Is Already Being Corrupted By Mind Virus Ideology

If you're new to the subject of "algorithmic fairness", it's essentially the computer equivalent of "political correctness", or when a machine learning (ML) model lacks left-wing academic bias. Computers are objective to the point of amoral psychopathy. They cannot be subjective. That's a difficult conundrum for activists who (wrongly) claim

screenplay

The Editable "His Girl Friday" Screenplay in Final Draft, Fade In Pro, Fountain, and PDF Format

What's not to love about the legendary screwball caper from 1940? If you're new to His Girl Friday, you're in for a treat. It's one of the original "rapid-fire repartee" comedies which influenced Tarantino, Sorkin, and many others. The conversation is so rapid, it was declared the fastest in the

software

Reverse-Engineering An Android App In 3 Steps

Ever wondered what an app is doing under the hood? Curious about what API it is talking to? Suspicious about network activity? Want to bypass dodgy paywall features? Well, you don't have to be an elite haXX0r to break things down. But you run into annoying snags on the way.

hollywood

The Black List's Back, And It's Worse Than Ever

Hollywood has a lot of lists. The Black List. The Blood List. The Brown List. The Brit List. The Next List. Every December, the results of a survey among execs is "published" as the Black List. It's definitely not being gamed as a circle jerk of votes-for-favours, it's definitely not

hr

The Soviet Communist Origins of "Human Resources" and D.I.E Enforcement

HR, or "People Ops", or as it used to be called, "personnel", is easily the most hated of all company departments. If you ask anyone where it came from, you'll get two different answers and a wildly incomplete timeline. One of those is the more palatable: of it developing from

science

A Sci-Fi Future Of Small Modular Liquid Fluoride Thorium Molten Salt Reactors

We are paying the price of the 2022 energy crisis for the failures of our politicians 30 years ago. There is no way to provide for humanity's electricity needs other than a massive and unprecedented investment in nuclear energy. There simply is no other non-hydrocarbon source which can reliably serve

hollywood

Solving Velikovsky's Open Screenwriting Problems

In 2016, then-doctoral candidate Joe Velikovsky published his Ph.D thesis "Twenty-Four Open Problems In The Movie Screenwriting Domain", which was based on David Hilbert's 23 Mathematical Problems from 1900. An expanded version of the original idea appears on his website with forty-three items. Joe's work is extraordinary, in an

film

No, Hollywood. It's Not OK If It's A Sex Doll

There are days when you really have to ask yourself whether there are people in a studio lot's in-house dive bar somewhere, or an art gallery opening, champing at the bit to see how far we can go down the rabbit hole of sexual depravity before an armed invasion of

politics

It's Finally Time To Burn Down Parliament

Edmund Burke's idea of representative democracy, of MPs forming their own judgments, has collapsed and come to its end; our attorneys think themselves our rulers. It's successor, the era of direct democracy, via technology, has arrived. "The building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it. Symbols are

narcissism

Scorpions Under Rocks: Unmasking Highly Skilled Narcissists

There are thousands of articles teaching you how to recognise if you're in a relationship with a narcissist. But what if you could identify the chameleon disguise beforehand so you never got dragged in? Narcs are amazingly skilled at hiding their nature. One in twenty people suffers NPD; one twenty-five