Month: November 2005
U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press
This Is the Story of the Hurricane
“For too many pundits, left and right, Katrina was just another front in the culture war…” (Reason)
What’s the buzz?
An inventor claims that he has developed a sound generator that emits a high-frequency buzz that annoys almost everyone under 20 and that cannot be heard by most people over 30. Proposed strategy to disperse gatherings of obstreperous teens ‘causing trouble’ by hanging around around stores, etc. (CNET)
Partial Face Transplant Done in France
The 38-year-old woman, who wants to remain anonymous, had a nose, lips and chin grafted onto her face from a brain-dead donor whose family gave consent. ” (Yahoo! News)
Alzheimer’s Could Be Diabetes-like Illness, Study Suggests
‘Insulin disappears early and dramatically in Alzheimer’s disease,’ senior researcher Suzanne M. de la Monte, a neuropathologist at Rhode Island Hospital and a professor of pathology at Brown University Medical School, said in a prepared statement.
‘And many of the unexplained features of Alzheimer’s, such as cell death and tangles in the brain, appear to be linked to abnormalities in insulin signaling. This demonstrates that the disease is most likely a neuroendocrine disorder, or another type of diabetes,’ she added.
The discovery that the brain produces insulin at all is a recent one, and de la Monte’s group also found that brain insulin produced by patients with Alzheimer’s disease tends to fall below normal levels.
Now her group has discovered that brain levels of insulin and its related cellular receptors fall precipitously during the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Insulin levels continue to drop progressively as the disease becomes more severe — adding to evidence that Alzheimer’s might be a new form of diabetes, she said.
In addition, the Brown University team found that low levels of acetylcholine — a hallmark of Alzheimer’s — are directly linked to this loss of insulin and insulin-like growth factor function in the brain.” (Yahoo! News)
I have just heard anecdotal preliminary reports from research a psychiatrist friend of mine is doing suggesting that “insulin-sensitizing” medications improve cognitive functions in Alzheimer’s patients regardless of whether they have peripheral diabetes or not. A larger study is underway.
Water Scorpion Fossil Found in Scotland
Don’t read this if you are prone to having nightmares featuring arachnids. The recent fossil find indicates these creatures lumbering out of the water 330 million years ago were five feet long. (Yahoo! News)
George Bush Has a Plan for the Avian Flu
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“So let me get this straight. We Cabinet secretaries have to keep walking around like this for how long before the public feels confident enough that bird flu is not a danger?”
Dalai Lama Gets Meditation Lesson
Seems like a Western-centric headline from Wired:
…[But] while Western researchers are exploring the effects of meditation on physical health, Alan Wallace, a leading Tibetan scholar and one of the Dalai Lama’s translators, pointed out that when faced with physical ailments, Tibetans traditionally turned to doctors or healers, not to meditation.
The purpose of meditation, added the Dalai Lama, is not to cure physical ailments, but to free people from emotional suffering.”
When the Doctor Is in…
And while such doctors have always been part of medicine, medical organizations say they fear that they are increasingly common – doctors, under pressure to see more patients, are spending less and less time with each one and are replacing long discussions with laboratory tests and scans – and that most problem doctors apparently have no idea of their patients’ opinions of them.” (New York Times )
CDC plans flight e-tracking
In response, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials have proposed new federal regulations to electronically track more than 600 million U.S. airline passengers a year traveling on more than 7 million flights through 67 hub airports.
The new regulations, which are available on the CDC’s Web site and will be posted for a 60-day comment period in the Federal Register starting Nov. 30, would require airlines, travel agents and global reservations systems to collect personal information that exceeds the quantity of information currently collected by the Transportation Security Administration or the Homeland Security Department.” (Gov’tHealth IT)
Inside the Sect:
Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928; today, it has 84,000 members in 80 countries. For many, the group first gained wide attention when it was portrayed in Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code. The thriller depicted the group as a repository for arcane knowledge and fervent — even dangerous — belief.
Vatican reporter John Allen’s new book is Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church. The book is being billed as the first serious journalistic investigation of the highly secretive organization. Allen writes for the National Catholic Reporter; he is also a Vatican analyst for CNN and NPR.” (NPR: Fresh Air)
Blogging With a Wooden Tongue
“The result of officialdom’s embrace of the blog format is that the wooden tongue has reached blogging. You can spot a wooden-tongue blog by the following telltale signs…” (Wired News)
Patently Absurd Inventions & Patents
Seymour Hersh: Where is the Iraq War Headed Next?
Hersh is one of my heroes in journalism, from his coverage of Vietnam on through to Iraq. He has either cornered the market on most of the useful covert sources since Deep Throat or he has a vivid imagination that both makes sense of things and is prophetic. His fall ’03 New Yorker article on ‘stovepiping’, Cheney’s castration of the intelligence machinery in the service of hearing what he wanted to hear to justify the invasion of Iraq was the single most important piece on dysadministration duplicity and its roots since the runup to the invasion. It presaged exactly what people now think Bush and Co. were up to with the ‘uranium lie’, but it was two years before Plamegate shaped the country’s perceptions.
More people should have listened to him then, but of course the country didn’t read The New Yorker then, and they don’t now, as he writes about the shape of our engagement in Iraq to come. He points out that the wdespread speculation that Bush will begin troop pullouts in the face of the growing unpopularity of the war at home may be thwarted if he perceives that a pullout will impede the war against the insurgency. Bush is impervious to political pressure given his sense of religious mission to bring democracy to Iraq. He disparages any information conflicting with his sense of the purpose and progress of the war and continues to live with the belief that the American people settled the issue of what they wanted in Iraq on election day 2004, and that he need not listen to the subsequent changes in public opinion. Hersh describes one illustrative encounter:
“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”’
The institutional Army is not conferred with for troop strength decisions. Given that there is no drive toward — I would say no possibility of — increasing troop strength, Army officials say in private — but do not dare do so publicly — that it would be impossible to stay the course in Iraq without current troops doing four or five tours of duty, with disastrous consequences for morale and competency. Pentagon commanders have shared their feelings with Rep. John Murtha for decades, and Murtha’s November 17th speech which so enraged the dysadministration was filled with devastating inside information. Murtha’s speech, predictably however, only strengthened Bush and Cheney’s resolve.
Hersh reports that departing US troops will be replaced by American airpower to improve the combat capabilities of even the weakest Iraqi units and vastly decrease American casualties, at the expense of course of overall violence and Iraqi fatality levels. Count on the dysadministration to lie to the public again when it says it plans to diminish the war. Hersh dwells at length on how unhappy Air Force officials are about the idea that targeting decisions would devolve upon Iraqis and not Air Force forward air controllers. In urban areas where the insurgency is concentrated, precision laser-guided bombs must be used to avoid collateral damage, and these must be directed by lasers ‘painted’ on the target by ground units. Because there needs to be a ‘hot read’ on the ground, targets cannot be identified in advance in a preflight briefing and because the Air Force needs to maintain radio silence, there is no confirmation between the spotters and the mission pilots. “The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can’t verify. And we’re going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?”” The Iraqi penchant for targeting tribal and personal enemies with artillery and mortar fire has created “impatience and resentment” within the military. “There has to be training to be sure that somebody is not trying to get even with somebody else.”
Things will be especially ugly if Iraqi counter-insurgency efforts continue to operate as the US Army and Marines have been doing, and have presumably been training them to do — plowing through Sunni stronghold areas on search-and-destroy sweeps. Casualties would go up with injudicious use of airpower, and political scientists who study airpower say it would not necessarily be any more feasible to put a lid on the insurgency with bombing than it has been on the ground. But
Hersh reflects on the fact that American and British support is solidifying around Iyad Allawi, the former interim Prime Minister, for the December elections, perhaps with the other secular Shiite leader Ahmed Chalabi in coalition. Allawi would make a show of asking America to leave but allow continuing Special Forces covert operations, including expanding operations to Syria. Hersh’s sources describe a covert Special Forces unit ordered under stringent cover to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency over the Syrian border. The other consequence of a rapid US withdrawal will, of course, be the furtherance of the civil war which, although underreported, is already in full swing.
Gimme an Rx!
Shadows of Venus
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Few people have ever seen a Venus shadow. But they’re there, elusive and delicate—and, if you appreciate rare things, a thrill to witness.
Attention, thrill-seekers: Venus is reaching its peak brightness for 2005 and casting its very best shadows right now.” (NASA)
A Sense of Scale
A Visual Comparison of Various Distances, from the fermi to the distance to the furthest known object in the universe. When, as a child, I saw Powers of Ten, which attempts to do the same thing, I seem to recall that one of the take-away lessons was that a person, on the one-meter scale, was about equally poised between the smallest and the largest. However, either I misremember or the universe has vastly expanded, because the distances here span 41 orders of magnitude, with us standing only 15 orders of magnitude away from the bottom.
A Sense of Scale
A Visual Comparison of Various Distances, from the fermi to the distance to the furthest known object in the universe. When, as a child, I saw Powers of Ten, which attempts to do the same thing, I seem to recall that one of the take-away lessons was that a person, on the one-meter scale, was about equally poised between the smallest and the largest. However, either I misremember or the universe has vastly expanded, because the distances here span 41 orders of magnitude, with us standing only 15 orders of magnitude away from the bottom.
Just Try to Sleep Tight
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“Bedbugs are back and spreading through New York City like a swarm of locusts on a lush field of wheat.” (New York Times )
Surfing the Consensual Reality Wave
Web 2.0 Validator: “The score for http://gelwan.com/followme.html was 12 out of 20:
* Is in public beta? Yes!
* Uses python? Yes!
* Is Shadows-aware ? No
* Uses the prefix “meta” or “micro”? Yes!
* Mentions startup ? Yes!
* Refers to mash-ups ? No
* Appears to be web 3.0 ? Yes!
* Has favicon ? Yes!
* Uses Cascading Style Sheets? Yes!
* Uses Google Maps API? No
* Appears to use AJAX ? No
* Refers to VCs ? No
* Refers to Flickr ? Yes!
* Mentions Nitro ? Yes!
* Mentions Cool Words ? No
* Uses microformats ? No
* Refers to web2.0validator ? Yes!
* Mentions RDF and the Semantic Web? Yes!
* Validates as XHTML 1.1 ? No
* Mentions 30 Second Rule and Web 2.0 ? Yes!”
The 12:20 score is abit recursive, however, since just by virtue of posting this item I meet some of the “…mentions…” criteria. Originally, I was 5:18.
Here is Wikipedia’s piece on Web 2.0:
As used by its proponents, the phrase currently refers to one or more of the below :
* a transition of websites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming a computing platform serving web applications to end users
* a social phenomenon referring to an approach to creating and distributing Web content itself, characterised by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and “the market as a conversation”
* a more organized and categorized content, with a more developed deeplinking web architecture.
* a shift in economic value of the web, potentially equalling that of the dot com boom of the late 1990s
However, a consensus upon its exact meaning has not yet been reached. Skeptics argue that the term is essentially meaningless, or that it means whatever its proponents decide that they want it to mean in order to convince the media and investors that they are creating something fundamentally new, rather than continuing to develop and use well-established technologies.
Many recently developed concepts and technologies are seen as contributing to Web 2.0, including weblogs, wikis, podcasts, rss feeds and other forms of many to many publishing; social software, web APIs, web standards, online web services, AJAX, and others.
The concept is different from Web 1.0, as it is a move away from websites, email, using search engines and surfing from one website to the next. Others are more skeptical that such basic concepts can be superceded in any real way by those listed above.”
Schwarzenegger Mulls Clemency for Williams
Williams, 51, faces a lethal injection on Dec. 13 for the 1979 slayings of a Whittier convenience store clerk and three people at a Pico Rivera motel. He has maintained his innocence and has asked the California Supreme Court to reopen his case, alleging shoddy forensics wrongly connected him to three of the murders. The Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on the petition.
Two other clemency petitions have come before Schwarzenegger. Neither was granted.” (Yahoo! News)
Popcasts -beta
“An aggregator of the most popular podcasts from many different directories and ranking sites, all on one page.”
Can Satellites ID CIA Prisons?
More Good Reasons to be Polite and Civil
The man started arguing with people inside the store, WFTV-TV in Orlando reported. He then started fighting with the guards, the station reported…” (Yahoo! News)
And: a fantastic opportunity to nail just the people who deserve to pay. (Freakonomics)
Also:
And: one amusing suggestion for incivility (Life’s Little Annoyances)
"I Wish Bush Would Be (Coherent, Eschewed) For Once During A Speech"…
‘I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes,’ said one question on a quiz written by English and social studies teacher Bret Chenkin.” (HuffPo via Friends of Elvis)
Rupert’s Resonance
Michael Shermer, renowned skeptic: “The theory of ‘morphic resonance’ posits that people have a sense of when they are being stared at. What does the research show?” (Scientific American)
Sea level rise doubles in 150 years
The oceans will rise nearly half a metre by the end of the century, forcing coastlines back by hundreds of metres, the researchers claim. Scientists believe the acceleration is caused mainly by the surge in greenhouse gas emissions produced by the development of industry and introduction of fossil fuel burning.” (Guardian.UK)
Related:
Study: More CO2 Now Than Past 650K Years
“There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any point during the last 650,000 years, says a major new study that let scientists peer back in time at ‘greenhouse gases’ that can help fuel global warming.
By analyzing tiny air bubbles preserved in Antarctic ice for millennia, a team of European researchers highlights how people are dramatically influencing the buildup of these gases.” (Yahoo! News)
Torture claims ‘forced US to cut terror charges’
Mr Padilla, a US citizen who had been held for more than three years as an ‘enemy combatant’ in a military prison in North Carolina, was indicted on Tuesday on the lesser charges of supporting terrorism abroad.” (Guardian.UK)
In France, Artists Have Sounded the Warning Bells for Years
30-ft 250-lb Light Poles Are Vanishing
Daily Kos: The new map
The long march of Dick Cheney
…The hallmark of the Dick Cheney administration is its illegitimacy. Its essential method is bypassing established lines of authority; its goal is the concentration of unaccountable presidential power. When it matters, the regular operations of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department have been sidelined.
Richard Nixon is the model, but with modifications. In the Nixon administration, the president was the prime mover, present at the creation of his own options, attentive to detail, and conscious of their consequences. In the Cheney administration, the president is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent. Once his complicity has been arranged, a closely held ‘cabal’ — as Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, calls it — wields control.” — Sidney Blumenthal (Salon)
Life: The disorder
…We live in a society where it’s increasingly difficult to differentiate between adults and kids. Go to a mall, squint your eyes, and see if you can tell the difference between the alarming 18-year-olds who seem 35 and the much more alarming 35-year-olds trying to pass for 18. A case can be made that recognizing adult ADD isn’t so much an enlightened leap in Western medicine as a questionable evolution in a culture that recently welcomed the dubious word ‘adultescent’ into the 2005 edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary. ” (Salon)
Alito’s remark on strip search of girl, 10, prompts questions
“Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. was the only member of a three-judge panel who thought the 2003 strip search of the girl and her mother was legal.” (Boston Globe)
Ex-FEMA Head Starts Disaster Planning Firm
…”I’m doing a lot of good work with some great clients,” Brown said. “My wife, children and my grandchild still love me. My parents are still proud of me.”” (Yahoo! News)
Back-Up Warning
Such a stunt, a mainstay of the office party, often results in cracked glass on the copier, with 32 percent of Canon technicians claiming to have been called out to fix glass plates during the Christmas period after attempts to copy body parts went wrong. Tim Andrews, a Canon employee from London, said: ‘We always fit lots of new glass to copiers after New Year due to ‘rear-end copying.” In fact, Canon claims a shocking 46 percent of service calls are in response to non-work-related breakages.
…Partly in response to this trend–or perhaps because of the ‘supersizing’ of the western physique–Canon has now increased the thickness of its glass by an extra millimeter.” (CNET [via walker])
Painkiller may aid dementia patients
Researchers found that when they gave acetaminophen to nursing home patients who had moderate to severe dementia, the medication helped changed some of the patients’ behaviors. They tended, for example, to spend less time in their rooms and more time watching television, listening to music, reading or performing ‘work-like’ activities.
The findings suggest that unrecognized, untreated pain in dementia patients keeps them from being as active as they can be, according to the study authors, led by Dr. John T. Chibnall of the Saint Louis University School of Medicine in Missouri.” (Yahoo! News)
Spirit of 1776
Republicans used to inveigh against the Democrats as the party of ‘Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,’ but now Bacardi has the GOP in its pocket, it symbolizes the complete turnaround of political positions.” — Ian Williams, author of Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 (The Nation)
PhD in Conspiracy Theory
…The new version will not be placed in the original setting, the north Wales village of Portmeirion, or have the arty, ‘pop’ feel of the original, according to the magazine Broadcast. Damien Timmer, who has been lined up to executive produce the show, told the television and radio industry magazine that the new series ‘takes liberties with the original’. He said: ‘Although it will be a radical reinvention, it will still be a heightened show with themes such as paranoia, conspiracy and identity crisis.’
The original show, which ran on ITV for 17 episodes, has been the subject of university courses.” (This is London [via walker])
Thatcher used ‘nuclear blackmail’ to get missile codes
Rendez-vous: the psychoanalysis of Francois Mitterrand , by Ali Magoudi, who met the late French president up to twice a week in secrecy at his Paris practice from 1982 to 1984, also reveals that Mr Mitterrand believed he would get his ‘revenge’ by building a tunnel under the Channel that would forever destroy Britain’s island status.” (The Age [via the null device] )
Related: Elvis Costello’s Tramp the Dirt Down.
Conservation Refugees
Human rights groups, such as Cultural Survival, First Peoples Worldwide, EarthRights International, Survival International, and the Forest Peoples Programme argue the opposite, accusing some of the BINGOs and governments like Uganda’s of destroying indigenous cultures, the diversity of which they deem essential to the preservation of biological diversity.” (Orion)
Getting Out of Iraq
That’s what the great journalist I.F. Stone was driving at when he wrote, a few years into the Vietnam War, in mid-February 1968: ‘It is time to stand back and look at where we are going. And to take a good look at ourselves. A first observation is that we can easily overestimate our national conscience. A major part of the protest against the war springs simply from the fact that we are losing it. If it were not for the heavy cost, politicians like the Kennedys [Robert and Edward] and organizations like ADA [the liberal Americans for Democratic Action] would still be as complacent about the war as they were a few years ago.'” (truthout)
French diploma exam rocks
“When France’s high school students sit next June for the exam that determines if they graduate, culture-and-arts majors will be quizzed on a song by 1960s drugs-and-love rock icon Jimi Hendrix, according to the education ministry.” (Yahoo! News)
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Dept. of Last Taboos (cont’d.)
This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis
Hypnosis in many ways represents psychology’s dirty little embarrassment, at the cutting edge of what cannot be explained and has therefore been ridiculed, ignored or relegated to a parlor game. But it is intimately related to, as Posner says, the subjectivity of experience and the active or constructed nature of the perception of ‘objective’ reality. It is also closely related to the clinical phenomenon of dissociation, which is absolutely central to psychopathology but has not been grappled with effectively since psychoanalysis was born with Freud’s deprecation of the central role dissociation had played the theories of predecessors like Janet.
Dissociative responses are a core part of consciousness and range from the everyday to the unbelievably extreme, as in what used to be called multiple personality disorder. When not recognized, patients (usually women with trauma histories) are shoehorned into the Procrustean bed of all sorts of other psychiatric diagnoses. A psychodiagnostician will not see dissociation unless s/he has taken a major leap of faith to be open to it. The flip side of that coin is that it inspires a profound skepticism about the rigidity and self-fulfilling prophecy with which conventional psychiatric diagnosis (read: DSM-IV) is usually done. And such misdiagnosis is not just an academic issue, because the treatment approach to dissociation is very different than, say, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Patients whose dissociative symptoms are not recognized are loaded up on all sorts of medications which not only do not help them but have substantial side effects impacting quality of life and, indeed, may worsen their dissociative tendencies.
Gartner: piece of tape defeats any CD DRM
Applying a piece of opaque tape to the outer edge of the disk renders the data track of the CD unreadable. A computer trying to play the CD will then skip to the music without accessing the bundled DRM technology.
‘After more than five years of trying, the recording industry has not yet demonstrated a workable DRM scheme for music CDs,’ Gartner concluded in a newly published research note.
The use of a piece of tape will defeat any future DRM system on audio CDs designed to be played on a stand-alone CD player, the analyst said.” (vnunet.com)
Blackspot Shoes
Fix Wal-Mart
“Submit a slogan for a billboard near Wal-Mart’s headquarters and learn about other action opportunities.” (Campaign for America’s Future)
Is God an Accident?
The Suicide Bombers Among Us
The Tao of Bush
In my version of the fantasy, I take Bush to the Dongyue temple in Beijing, China, for a little fire and brimstone, Taoist style. In small halls off the courtyard of this imposing place of worship, brightly-colored, hero-sized gods preside over the 76 departments of hell. Near-life-sized sinners carved out of wood suffer appropriate punishments, the saintly reap blessings, and hell’s bureaucrats record every detail. All this is explicitly narrated on stainless steel panels bolted to each hall.
Hell doesn’t have 76 departments for nothing; it’s enough to make anyone feel that each transgression and act of kindness, great and small, makes an indelible mark on the soul.” — Morgon Mae Schultz (Utne Reader)
Mildly depressed people more perceptive than others
Their report on what is known as ‘mental state decoding’ – or identifying other people’s emotional states from social cues such as eye expressions – is published today in the international journal, Cognition and Emotion.
Previous related research by the Queen’s investigators has been conducted on people diagnosed with clinical depression. In this case, the clinically depressed participants performed much worse on tests of mental state decoding than people who weren’t depressed.
To explain the apparent discrepancy between those with mild and clinical depression, the researchers suggest that becoming mildly depressed (dysphoric) can heighten concern about your surroundings. ‘People with mild levels of depression may initially experience feelings of helplessness, and a desire to regain control of their social world,’ says Dr. Harkness. ‘They might be specially motivated to scan their environment in a very detailed way, to find subtle social cues indicating what others are thinking and feeling.'” (EurekAlert!)
Monster Scope to Dwarf Rivals
The new TMT (Thirty-Meter Telescope) will be the first of a new generation of massive Earth-based telescopes that will far eclipse today’s largest observatories. The TMT scope will be so large, it will be housed in an observatory the size of a football stadium resembling an eyeball. The TMT project will be the first realization of a new breed of super-scopes, known as Giant Segmented Mirror Telescopes. The National Academy of Sciences, in a report called ‘Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium,’ said these scopes are the top priority for ground-based astronomy…. Although a site has yet to be chosen for the behemoth, the higher elevations of Hawaii or Chile are under consideration. ” (Wired News)
Dutch Mourn Sparrow Killed in Domino Shooting
…An exterminator shot the sparrow Monday in the northern city of Leeuwarden after fears the bird could upset more of the 4 million dominoes which staff had spent weeks balancing on their edges for the record attempt.” (Reuters)
GM pea causes allergic damage in mice
Researchers took the gene for a protein capable of killing pea weevil pests from the common bean and transferred it into the pea. When extracted from the bean, this protein does not cause an allergic reaction in mice or people. But when the protein is expressed in the pea, its structure is subtly different to the original in the bean. This structural change probably caused the unexpected immune effects. The researchers are calling for improvements in screening requirements for genetically engineered plants.” (New Scientist )
10 Dumb Moments in Sci-Fi Cinema
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“It’s our stab at the 10 incredibly dumb things that occurred in otherwise really successful sci-fi movies in recent times. Don’t look for B-movies or classics here. This is where the blockbusters went wrong.” (MSN)
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The Prodigy Puzzle
‘If it glows, throw it…’
Glowing meat alarms Australians: “Australians have been told there is no need to panic after a recent ‘glow-in-the-dark pork chop’ scare.” A caller to a Sydney radio show raised the spectre of radioactive meat but authorities say the glow is called by Pseudomonas fluorescans. a species of bacteria which naturally inhabit the pork chops. However, proliferation of the bacteria occurs when it is stored at an improper temperature, so it can be an indication that it is going off. (BBC)
Lair of the Vampires
Radish recovering after murder attempt
Lie detectors may be next step in airline security
Tested in Russia, the two-stage GK-1 voice analyzer requires that passengers don headphones at a console and answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ into a microphone to questions about whether they are planning something illicit.
The software will almost always pick up uncontrollable tremors in the voice that give away liars or those with something to hide, say its designers at Israeli firm Nemesysco.” (CNET)
‘Wherever humans live, not much else lives. It isn’t that we’re evil and want to kill everything — it’s just how we live.’
It is a little bit of a sensationalization of what the group wants, but the UPI says:
The VHE is dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth, founder Les Knight told Wednesday’s San Francisco Chronicle.
With 16,000 people born per hour and a current global population of 6.5 billion, there are already more than enough people on the planet, Knight said.
A 1994 study concluded a single person born in the 1990s would be responsible during a lifetime for 22 million pounds of liquid waste and 2.2 million pounds each of solid waste and atmospheric waste, the newspaper said. He or she will have a lifetime consumption of 4,000 barrels of oil, 1.5 million pounds of minerals and 62,000 pounds of animal products that will necessitate the slaughter of 2,000 animals.
‘Wherever humans live, not much else lives,’ Knight said. ‘It isn’t that we’re evil and want to kill everything — it’s just how we live.'”
Why They Don’t Hate Us
Spell Checker
Congress’s Quiet Holiday Plans
Waiting like a ship in the night for a quick, opportunistic vote is a Republican proposal that could devastate existing campaign controls by allowing politicians to collude with big-check donors from corporations, unions and lobbying blocs to finance unlimited amounts of campaign ads on the Internet. This would signal the return to unregulated soft-money politicking that a wiser and warier Congress outlawed three years ago.” (New York Times editorial)
Which Bush Crony will be the Next ‘Brownie’?
The strange case of supernatural water
Katherine Harris, then Florida’s secretary of state — and now a member of the U.S. House of Representatives — ordered a study in which, according to an article by Jim Stratton in the Orlando Sentinel, ‘researchers worked with a rabbi and a cardiologist to test ‘Celestial Drops,’ promoted as a canker inhibitor because of its ‘improved fractal design,’ ‘infinite levels of order,’ and ‘high energy and low entropy.”” (MSMBC)
Could sneeze meters combat pandemics?
Researchers call for better ways to identify highly infectious individuals.: 80% of the contagion in a pandemic will be spread by 20% of the infected individuals — so-called ‘superspreaders.’ (Nature)
Image Overload
An End to Baldness…
Millions face glacier catastrophe
Glacial lakes in the Himalayas are filled to the brim and poised to overflow due to increased glacial melt from global warming. The short-term danger of too much water coming out of the Himalayas, however, will give way in the long run to reduced runoff from shrunken glacial volumes. As meltwater dries up, some of the world’s mightiest rivers whose headwaters are on the spine of the world — the Indus, the Yellow, the Mekong — will shrink to trickles. Drinking and irrigation water for hundreds of millions of people will disappear. (Guardian.UK)
Related:
The big thaw
“Greenland’s glaciers have begun to race towards the ocean, leading scientists to predict that the vast island’s ice cap is approaching irreversible meltdown.” (Independent.UK)
It’s Shoe Love, Pumping Up Sales
For the past two months, sales of shoes have been up sharply, for a host of reasons. Department stores, specialty chains, high-end retailers and low-end retailers are all reporting big sales increases, often in the double digits.” (Washington Post)
Lie detectors may be next step in airline security
Tested in Russia, the two-stage GK-1 voice analyzer requires that passengers don headphones at a console and answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ into a microphone to questions about whether they are planning something illicit.
The software will almost always pick up uncontrollable tremors in the voice that give away liars or those with something to hide, say its designers at Israeli firm Nemesysco.” (CNET)
It’s Your War Now
Decoding Mr. Bush’s Denials
Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.
It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.” (New York Times op-ed)
Withdrawal — From Reality
What makes the Republican ploy particularly repugnant is that it comes precisely on the same day that we learn that the top American military commander in Iraq has presented Donald Rumsfeld with a plan to begin withdrawing U.S. military troops — as soon as a handful of weeks from now.
In other words, Democrats who propose a withdrawal are aiding and abetting the enemy, even though the White House and the Pentagon are secretly drafting a plan to do the same.” (marccooper.com)
Session Exposes Political Risks Ahead for G.O.P.
What the In-Crowd Knows
Holocaust denier arrested
Mr Irving was arrested last Friday on a warrant issued in 1989 under Austrian laws that make Holocaust denial a crime. The charges stemmed from speeches he delivered that year in Vienna and in the southern town of Leoben.
…’I don’t see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz,’ Mr Irving declared in 1991 before a group of rightists and neo-Nazis. ‘It’s baloney. It’s a legend … more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.'” (Guardian.UKvia walker)
Young, Assured and Playing Pharmacist to Friends
They trade unused prescription drugs, get medications without prescriptions from the Internet and, in some cases, lie to doctors to obtain medications that in their judgment they need.” (New York Times )
WHO Meeting: Bird Flu Threatens ‘Incalculable Human Misery’
‘It is only a matter of time before an avian influenza, most likely the H5N1 strain, acquires the ability to be transmitted human-to-human,’ warned WHO director-general Lee Jong-wook. ‘The signs are that it is coming.'” (Hard To Do Any Worse)
US Patent Granted for Warp Drive
pdf document: Doesn’t anyone at the patent office read these before granting patterns to someone who is either a liar, a hoaxer or seriusly deluded? “Quantized vortices of lattice ions project… a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly.” [via Interesting People listserv]
Neurocourage?
Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless — Deactivating the gene for a brain protein called stathmin makes lab mice more fearless and less quick to learn fear responses to stimuli associated with painful outcomes. The protein destabilizes microtubule structures that help maintain neuronal connectedness. It is thought that such disruption is a basic prerequisite for learning, which occurs through the creation of new neural connections. Thus, mice that lack the protein do not learn to fear as easily. However, in case you were wondering about the obvious, the study suggests that they do not experience interference with other learning experiences because stathmin is largely restricted to the amygdala, where the fear response is thought to be controlled. The researchers said that the fearless mice were, for example, able to learn to navigate through a maze as well as control animals. How convenient to have a protein specific to the learning processes around fear. (There must have been some intelligent design, don’t you think??!! [grin]) (New Scientist)
There are evident implications for humans, if stathmin has the same role in our brain. I doubt, however, that other learning is so distinct from learning the fear response in humans. In the complex learning process that psychotherapy patients undergo in my field, for example, optimal learning is associated with an optimal level of anxiety. If anxiety is reduced too much, there is no motivation to learn, while if it is excessive, the organism is too overwhelmed to acquire, integrate and make available new information. Disrupting the ability to learn to fear certain experiences, I fear, would in humans disrupt overall learning efficiency.
Moreover, the brain’s fear circuitry is absoutely central and phylogenetically ancient. I would imagine we don’t have a clue how much else in CNS function would be disrupted if we found a way to disable stathmin in humans.
A fearless human being without much capacity to incorporate new learning might not be a problem for some, however. The military might very much like to fund some research into deactivating stathmin in humans, to prevent the fear response from paralyzing soldiers in combat. I imagine that Pentagon officials would not lose sleep at night if new learning — thinking for oneself — were concomitantly inhibited in its recruits. How much thought does one need just to follow orders? As the US’s wars get more and more dubious, it becomes harder to fight them with thoughtful people with even the slightest capacity for questioning authority. With the egregious futility adn duplicity of the invasion of Iraq, the Bush regime may have broken the bank at attracting recruits. (One can only hope.)
Some have worried since the ’50’s about the increasing efficiency and subtlety of mind control and the growing ability of powerful governments to turn their citizens into ‘a nation of sheep.’ Plausible deniability is being perfected. Since the Cold War, I have said that the US is not freer than, say, the Soviet Union was. It is just that its efforts to control its citizens (until the Bush dysasdministration’s transparent, egregious and clumsy lies, which rival those of the rather unsubtle Soviet regime) have been more subtle and refined, more difficult to counter, recognize or talk about.
But until now they have remained largely in the realm of propaganda and spin through media manipulation and co-optation of the educational system, etc. Except for small pilot programs like MK Ultra, we have yet to see it exercised on a direct neural basis, unless you believe the folks who walk around in tinfoil hats. And some say that even those are part of a government conspiracy!
Cheney ‘vice president for torture’
‘I am embarrassed that the USA has a vice president for torture. I think it is just reprehensible.’
He added: ‘He (Mr Cheney) advocates torture, what else is it? I just don’t understand how a man in that position can take such a stance.'” (Scotsman)
Fitzgerald Going Back to Grand Jury
Adding a new wrinkle in the ongoing drama surrounding a federal probe into the Plame Wilson leak, Bob Woodward, the assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, disclosed that he testified under oath this week before Fitzgerald, stating that he too was told about Plame Wilson’s CIA status in June 2003 by an administration official.” (truthout)
U.S. War Crimes Update
Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday that while white phosphorous is most frequently used to mark targets or obscure a position, it was used at times in Fallujah as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants.” (New York Times )
Ghost in the Machine: Six in the City.
I love it that FmH shares a birthday with this fine weblog. Many happy returns of the day to Kevin and a question to you: did you think when you started GitM that you would still be around at the six-year point?
Is Earth in a Space-Time Vortex?
If Earth were stationary, that would be the end of the story. But Earth is not stationary. Our planet spins, and the spin should twist the dimple, slightly, pulling it around into a 4-dimensional swirl. This is what GP-B went to space to check…” (NASA)
Ninety-five bishops from President Bush’s church Repent Iraq War ‘Complicity’
President Bush is a member of the United Methodist Church, according to various published biographies. The White House did not return a request for comment on the bishops’ statement.
Although United Methodist leadership has opposed the Iraq war in the past, this is the first time that individual bishops have confessed to a personal failure to publicly challenge the buildup to the war.” (FoxNews [sic] via kos [thanks, walker])
Five questions non-Muslims would like answered
(1) Why are you so quiet?
(2) Why are none of the Palestinian terrorists Christian?
(3) Why is only one of the 47 Muslim-majority countries a free country?
(4) Why are so many atrocities committed and threatened by Muslims in the name of Islam?
(5) Why do countries governed by religious Muslims persecute other religions?” ( LA Times op-ed via walker)
Top 10 books on cults and religious extremists
from Sam Jordison, author of the recent The Joy Of Sects – An A-Z of Cults, Cranks and Religious Eccentrics. The list starts out with Mark Twain’s neglected Roughing It, with its portrait of the early Mormon Church. (Anyone interested in the topic has either already read, or is obliged to, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, which is not on Jordison’s list.) A couple of these caught my eye and have to go on my to-read list:
In the course of his research for this novel Huysman became genuinely entangled with black magic groups. One of the few virtuous characters in La-Bas, a tireless master exorcist called Dr Johannes, was based on a priest, the Abbe Boullan. It only later emerged that this priest, who convinced the writer he was an all round good-egg, was also fond of performing rites involving orgies, incest and bestiality. The novel itself is remarkable: a trawl through the Satanic underworld of fin de siecle Paris complete with evil old cults, dark garrets, unspeakable rites and mad perversions. The prolonged and graphic descriptions of child murder make American Psycho look like Peter Rabbit. A must read – but not after you’ve just eaten.
5. Spying In Guruland by William Shaw
In the early 90s William Shaw took it upon himself to join half a dozen of the stranger British new religious movements, including the delightfully named Chrisemma, the cult of two people called Chris and Emma. I’m pretty jealous of the guts William Shaw demonstrated in getting so deeply involved with so many crazy cult groups and his descriptions of the rigours of life within the Hare Krishna organisation are unforgettable. I don’t envy him all those insanely early mornings, however.
(Parenthetically, I don’t think The Da Vinci Code really belongs on the Top 10 anything list! Jordison includes it, even though he says, “I hate this book almost as much as I love it. It’s literary crack cocaine – reading it does you no good at all, but you just can’t stop.”.) (Guardian.UK via walker)