Mattalyst

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Axis Mundi

Dr. Sergio Canavero wants to become the first surgeon to perform a human head transplant. But is the plan, which captured headlines everywhere (including here) all an absurdly complex marketing stunt for the upcoming Metal Gear Solid V video game?

As if the original narrative— that Canavero plans to transplant the head of Russian Val Spiridonov onto a donor body in 2017—couldn't get any weirder, a member of the ​NeoGaf forum pointed out earlier this week that the doctor in the upcoming blockbuster video game looks exactly like Canavero.

There are other similarities and weird coincidences. But let's get this out of the way up early: I've gotten my hands on a sworn affidavit that Canavero filed with Italian police that formally denies he has anything to do with Konami or Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. In the report, Canavero swears to tell the truth or face perjury charges.

That said, this thing has gone into full-on internet conspiracy land,  ​complete with Imgur albums full of crisscrossed arrows point out the similarities between the game and Canavero's real life.

Kotaku has a nice rundown, but head transplant truthers point out that MGS creator Hideo Kojima said that this game will "challenge a certain type of taboo" and that Kojima has found "an ally who would support [him] in that risk." Canavero has done work on "phantom pain," the name of the upcoming game. People also suspect that Solid Snake may get some sort of head transplant in the game.

In the police report, Canavero swears he has nothing to do with Konami.

OK, that all sounds really weird. But Canavero has been talking about this head transplant for years. He's written many scientific papers, including several on GEMINI, his proposed head transplant procedure (contrary to some reports about the conspiracy, his procedure is not called HEAVEN—which has significance in MGS). Canavero's ideas may be out there, and what he wants to do may be controversial, but he is a real doctor.

I have spoken at length with Canavero and with Spiridonov (​listen to our podcast, please). Both were emotional about the amount of attention the proposed procedure has gotten, and Spiridonov, in particular, has been constantly hounded by press and naysayers who have chastised him for his decision. He's got a horrible degenerative muscle condition, and sees the head transplant as his only way to live a normal life.

But why the heck does Canavero look exactly like the surgeon in the MGS5 trailer? He has no idea, and he's not thrilled about it.

Canavero didn't have time to talk to me specifically about the allegations of conspiracy, but referred me to his lawyer, Stefano Ponte, who sent me a police report Canavero filed with Italian police.

"Dr. Canavero was totally unaware of the use of his image and allusions to his research into the video game," Ponte told me in an email.

In the police report, Canavero swears he has nothing to do with Konami.

"On April 19, 2015, I received in my email inbox an email coming from the UK from the account [redacted], containing a link which directed to the trailer of the upcoming video game Metal Gear Solid V Phantom Pain, produced by Konami in Japan," the report reads. "The trailer features a video with a doctor with my physical likeness and a series of very violent scenes, some computer generated (presumably, they used an authentic video of me, which was then digitized, probably obtained from one of my TED Conference talks)."

"I do not have any suspects," he added. "I have nothing else to add except to declare my willingness to proceed against the people responsible for the facts explained here, which the judicial authority will observe as crimes."

The similarities are striking, and there is the possibility Canavero’s head transplant plan is a publicity stunt—but it doesn’t seem to be because he wants to promote a video game. He is more focused on promoting his work. I spoke with Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University medical school, about what Canavero is trying to do. He believes Canavero’s surgery is never going to happen.

"I think there's a little bit of a PR angle here," Caplan said. "I think there's hype here, that he's drawing attention to himself, enjoying the limelight. If he were serious, he wouldn't be going about it this way, he wouldn't be recruiting a human patient or making promises to desperate people. He'd be in the lab saying, I have a new way to fuse the spinal cord, let me test it on animals."

We surely haven’t heard the end of this. I’ve reached out to Italian copyright lawyers for their take on it, and have asked Canavero to talk more about it. A weird story keeps getting weirder. Canavero is set to “unveil secrets” about the procedure at a conference in Annapolis, Maryland in June. I wouldn’t count on the presentation to be a Metal Gear Solid trailer. 

Denuncia Canavero

Don’t struggle

Mad Decent is the label brainchild of popular electronic music mastermind Diplo. Since 2005, they've been one of the only reasons white kids listen to moombahton or Brazilian funk music. Daktyl is one of Mad Decent's star artists, cooking up killer electronic music that shifts from reflective ambient to bed-breaking sexy R&B to tasteful club banger at the drop of a hat. He's got a new album out, Cyclical, and Mad Decent has kindly given us first access to a preview stream. Check it out.

Listen to more Daktyl on his Soundcloud and pre-order the album, dropping 4/21.

scificity:

80’s style cyberpunk

​My feed is full of stories I don’t believe.

Scrolling through Facebook every day, I come across Onion headlines, clickbait articles, and propaganda with passably authentic mastheads shared by my friends and family, all resonating half-truths within the echo chamber of my filter bubble. 

Introduce into this environment of perpetual factual ambiguity ​Clone Zone, a new tool that makes it easy to edit any web page on the internet. Pick your canvas of choice—it’s as simple as entering a URL. Clone Zone immediately creates an editable copy. Upload your own images, drop in your own text, and share. With Clone Zone, anyone can treat themselves to a New York Times byline or the announcement of a lucrative round of funding on TechCrunch. With this tool, the whole internet is instantly and totally customizable.

Clone Zone is the brainchild of ​Slava Balasanov and ​Analisa Teachworth, two artists who run a creative studio in New York called ​4Real. Analisa and Slava have ben tinkering with Clone Zone, letting their community of artists and web-researcher types into the private beta in order to observe, in a preliminary way, how the tool might be used before it goes live to the wider public. ​Which happens today.

Analisa Teachworth and Slava Balasanov's April Fool's clone of TechCrunch.

Earlier this month, on April Fool’s Day, Analisa and Slava ​made a “clone” of TechCrunch and fake-announced closing a $1.8m seed round of venture capital investment. They shared the cloned site to their personal networks, and immediately the likes and reposts came pouring in, along with congratulations from friends and strangers. According to Analisa and Slava, the story was even being passed around the ​Genius offices—an actually well-funded startup whose core product is in many ways similar to Clone Zone—along with murmurs about the necessity of acquiring this competitor.

Clone Zone has no such VC investment. And even though Analisa and Slava’s cloned copy of TechCrunch has a Clone Zone URL and is conspicuously footed by the Clone Zone logo (itself a ripoff of the Google logo, because of course), their false story began to be believed by the very people who could make it become true. The ambiguities between art and commerce, here, are manifold: 4Real emerges from within ​NEW INC., a tech incubator and coworking space led by the ​New Museum in New York, where creative workers are given both museum resources and entrepreneurial support. 4Real does design and interactive work for commercial clients while Slava and Analisa maintain their art practices.

They consider Clone Zone to be an artwork, for both legal and conceptual reasons. As an art piece, it definitely has predecessors. In 1998, the Italian artists ​Eva and Franco Mattes gained notoriety for buying the domain name vaticano.org and using it to undermine the Catholic Church’s official website; they later cloned the websites of their contemporaries and exhibited them as their own works. ​The Yes Men, a culture-jamming collective, have created and maintained plenty of fake websites—for George W. Bush, Dow Chemical, the World Trade Organization, and the New York Times—in their ongoing attempt to impersonate and lampoon figures of authority.

​

The Clone Zone homepage, which borrows liberally from Google. Explains Teachworth: "it’s just so easily accepted that nobody even thinks twice when they look at it. It has all the colors, it has all the fonts."

The main difference between these works and Clone Zone is that Clone Zone is a public-facing tool, designed for use by artists and non-artists alike. It’s a direct response to the way that information propagates through social networks, and the clones it produces are designed to be shared via Facebook and on Twitter. “We’re really interested in modern-day social networks and what it means to be part of a social network,” Teachworth explained to me over Google Hangout, “in how you can communicate with others, and how that’s changing—from the beginning of Facebook to what we use Facebook for now, and how we interact and how we feel towards each other. The Clone Zone is a place where people can create with each other.”

Teachworth wants to see more creativity online; she hopes 4Real, as an agency, will create new tools to encourage such creativity in the future, software tools more fluid and open-ended than just plonking an image onto a Tumblr page. 

Still, tools are powerful. Something like Clone Zone has the capacity to cause all manner of disruption, small and large, depending on how it's used—Balasanov told me that an ideal use case scenario would be a clone with an impact on the real world, a wildly-circulated clone believed by everyone. 

Well, everyone who doesn't take an extra second to check the URL, that is. 

But as browsers and Twitter shares show us less and less of the actual URLs of the websites we’re visiting, even Clone Zone’s fairly obvious tells can be easy to ignore. A "fake" website generated by Clone Zone could wield the same power as a "real" one, especially in the window of time before people get wise. 

Is there such a thing as a “real” website? A website is just a website—we just trust some websites more than others to give us the objective truth. Which, of course, is a fairly subjective experience.  "We decide what is a reputable source and what is not. It’s not absolute," says Balasanov. "Probably what you read on the New York Times is more true than what you read on Fox News. There’s all these relative things. But a website’s just a website."

To some extent, our trust in journalism in the age of the social feed has been reduced to an understanding that certain design and branding features convey authenticity: when see the venerable New York Times "T"  (or the Fox News logo, for those of a different persuasion) on a website, we read headlines with confidence. But when anyone can grab the New York Times’ page layout, edit it, and share the cloned version on social media, where the details are more likely to be skimmed by readers, the inherent vulnerability of that trust is laid bare.

In which the author gives herself a New York Times byline on a story about a bombing in Yemen.

Of course, hackers have been creating dupes of trusted websites to phish passwords and propagate malware since we started transacting online. Website forgeries are among the most common phishing scams, and because of this, there are tools in place to distinguish "real" from "fake" websites. We're growing more accustomed to using them, scoping address bars for the little green locks vouching for a website's SSL certification, particularly when online banking or following dubious-seeming links. 

As more and more disinformation populates our feed and falls into our inboxes, it’s up to each individual to approach the internet with a greater measure of skepticism. At the same time, we are being constantly bombarded with conflicting and simultaneous versions of the truth, and the critical tools we need to assess veracity are changing rapidly. Untruths are easy to discover, but truth requires labor. Truth requires more clicks.

Our old assumptions don’t quite hold. Buzzfeed does incisive journalism and sponsored listicles in the same page load. So do most of the sites we regularly consult. Add to all of this the general stranger-than-fiction quality of life in the 21st century, and frankly, I begin to wonder if anything I read online is true at all. 

“As users, because the way we get information is changing so rapidly, we really have to be conscious of what the sources are,” says Balasanov. “There’s already so much fake stuff on Facebook. A flood of nonsense. Being able to wade through that and figure out what is important, and what is valuable, is a necessary skill for everyone.” Adds Teachworth, “if anything, we want to make people more aware. Make people more conscious, not less.”

Teachworth and Balasanov don't know what's going to happen with Clone Zone. They can't anticipate, today, how the tool will be used in the future, particularly if it goes wide. With a few exceptions, the clones made by the beta community have been mostly trials, jokes, and formless experiments reminiscent of the early days of any social platform. What (and who) Clone Zone is for hasn't quite been determined, invented, or formed. So Teachworth and Balasanov are worried about the outcome of unleashing Clone Zone into the world—if only they could be certain what that outcome is. "The first thing is to see how people use it and go from there," says Balasabov.

Adds Teachworth, "the lawyer’s advice has just been, 'don’t do it.' But we’re doing it. It’s already happening."

For a sense of what Clone Zone can do, check out this cloned version of Motherboard:

toastoat:

rebel6:

by SAM DUNN

The Washington Post published a story so horrifying this weekend that it would stop your breath: “The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.”

As disgusting as that may be, she's not the only one who should be ashamed: the enablers who promote this crap deserve condemnation, too. Read the rest

Thanks!

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists working in the area of pancreatic cancer research have uncovered a technique that sees cancerous cells transform back into normal healthy cells. The method relies in the introduction of a protein called E47, which bonds with particular DNA sequences and reverts the cells back to their original state. The study (abstract) was a collaboration between researchers at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, University of California San Diego and Purdue University. The scientists are hopeful that it could help combat the deadly disease in humans.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

John Kilar Photographs the Wild at Heart.

Photographer John Kilar’s works perfectly encapsulate the spiritual ideal of “wild and free” that is often associated with the areas he photographs.  The visuals he presents are a juxtaposing documentation of humanity experiencing total freedom alongside the confines of modern society and the ills of leading a life trying to escape them.  I’ve featured only a very minuscule amount of John’s photographs - be sure and check out his Website and Instagram for even more.

You can also continue below to see more:

John Kilar: Website | Instagram

Say you're putting on a huge public event. And maybe there's a very real security concern, which causes you to ban anyone using remote-controlled drones along the route of said event, just to be cautious. Read More

Fake buttons are more common than you might think

seiya234:

artbywannabeanarchist:

･*｡ﾟo｡INFORMATIVE ANCIENT EGYPT COMICS MASTERPOST･*｡ﾟo｡

PSSSSSSST the-tao-of-fandom

“Nothing aired by WikiLeaks could possibly be more destructive to Sony’s reputation than the release of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, the sort of movie that goes beyond mere mediocrity to offer possible evidence of a civilization in decline.”

- The Variety review of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 (via allnewdaredevil)

-teesa-:

A 2014 study shows that despite the wealth of talented actresses in Hollywood, women still remain grossly underrepresented when it comes to major film roles. Here to give us her take, a one-dimensional female character from a male driven comedy.

sixpenceee:

A Bismuth Geode. The bismuth was cooled and crystallized inside an eggshell.