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BS: Random Traces From All Over
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Jul 09 - 03:40 PM July 1, 2009, Der Spiegel Pina Bausch turned the dance world on its head and became one of the most internationally influential representatives of contemporary German culture. She died at 68 on Tuesday and left behind a major oeuvre. Her productions were unforgettable. It might even be just one scene branded on my memory: a woman with closed eyes, running over tables and chairs, again and again, oblivious of the pain. These were the creations of the great choreographer Pina Bausch, who died on Tuesday at the age of 68 -- people running but never getting anywhere. Repeat offenders desperately hoping for redemption. The obsessed. People from today's world. The figures in Pina Bausch' dance pieces are driven, tortured and determined. They are -- often literally -- slamming up against a hostile world. But they're depicted with a droll sense of humor and, sometimes, biting irony. In the end, though, there is a heart-warming tenderness. It's a sensibility in the artist that stems from a deep understanding of mankind's shortcomings and fragility. Pina Bausch has left behind a major oeuvre. She revolutionized dance theater. But it remains to be seen what her exact legacy will be. ... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 05 Jul 09 - 09:49 PM Subject: caught trying to fool the biometrics http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20090630a4.html NARITA, Chiba Pref. (Kyodo) Immigration authorities have successfully detected four people since January trying to enter Japan  illegally by trying to fool the biometric identity system. Officials at Narita International Airport said Monday the four had altered their fingerprints by having patterns surgically removed and stitched or even filed down. ... The four people detected at Narita were arrested and told Chiba police investigators that their fingerprints were altered with surgery performed in China, where they had paid doctors 5,000 yuan (roughly ¥70,000) for the procedure, according to the police. Police suspect possible involvement by organized human-traffickers in China. Brings up the obvious question: how many people successfully slip through? And how much is it really worth to slip into Japan? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 07 Jul 09 - 11:48 AM "The coming months will see a crescendo of anniversary commemorations of communism's end, culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. For many, Americans especially, it was a glorious moment, emblematic of the West's victory in the Cold War. It seemed to come out of the blue. But if you watched the Eastern bloc's disintegration from the ground, as I did over the course of that epic year, you know that the process was far longer and more complex than most people realize. Often, it unfolded in melodramatic little chapters, unnoticed by the rest of the world, as on that fine summer day in Bucharest two decades ago. To grasp the full dimension of that drama, you must remember how Europe was still locked in the old order defined by the Cold War—and glimpse the changes afoot that would, abruptly, transform it. Nemeth arrived on the scene in late November 1988 as a new-generation "reform" Communist in the mold of Gorbachev himself. But if his titular master in Moscow remained a committed socialist, however liberal by contrast to his old-guard predecessors, Nemeth was the real deal. Moving quickly, he had drafted a new constitution for Hungary—modeled on America's, complete with a Bill of Rights and guarantees of free speech and human rights. Then he allowed new political parties to form and promised free elections. And if the Communist Party should lose, hard-liners asked, what then? Why, said Nemeth, with perfect equanimity, "We step down." Worst, just a few months before, in early May, Nemeth had announced that Hungary would tear down the fence along its frontier with Austria. At the height of the Cold War, he cut a hole in the Iron Curtain. In the Communist world, this was heresy. It had to be punished. And so it was that the Warsaw Pact's leaders assembled in Bucharest. Seated in a great hall, surrounded by banners and the full pomp of Communist circumstance, they launched their attack. Ceausescu went first, brandishing his fists and shouting an impassioned indictment: "Hungary will destroy socialism." His "dangerous experiments" will destroy the entire Socialist Union! Honecker, Jakes, and Zhivkov followed. Only Jaruzelski of Poland sat quiet, sphinxlike behind his dark sunglasses, betraying no emotion. Nemeth had been in office for only seven months. This was his first Warsaw Pact summit. He was nervous, but he knew his enemies would act only with Soviet support. The man who could give it sat roughly opposite him, 30 feet away on the other side of a large rectangle of flag-draped conference tables. As Ceausescu and the others ranted on, calling for armed intervention in Hungary, Nemeth glanced across at the Soviet leader. Their eyes met, and Gorbachev … winked. "This happened at least four or five times," Nemeth later told me. "Strictly speaking, it wasn't really a wink. It was more a look, a bemused twinkle. Each time he smiled at me, with his eyes, it was as if Gorbachev were saying, 'Don't worry. These people are idiots. Pay no attention.' " And so he didn't. As the dogs of the Warsaw Pact brayed for his head, Nemeth went outside to smoke a cigarette. On this small moment, history turned. Nemeth flew back to Budapest and continued his reforms, dissolving the country's Communist Party and opening Hungary's borders so that tens of thousands of East Germans could famously escape to the West—and causing, four months later, the Berlin Wall to topple. Erich Honecker went home a spent political force who would be ousted in a coup d'état that began taking shape even before he left Bucharest. As for Nicolae Ceausescu, he would die by firing squad during the revolution that convulsed Romania at year's end." (Slate) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 07 Jul 09 - 11:28 PM his summer, how would you like to lean back in your lawn chair and toss back a brew made from what may be the world's oldest recipe for beer? Called Chateau Jiahu, this blend of rice, honey and fruit was intoxicating Chinese villagers 9,000 years ago—long before grape wine had its start in Mesopotamia. University of Pennsylvania molecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern first described the beverage in 2005 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences based on chemical traces from pottery in the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Northern China. Soon after, McGovern called on Sam Calagione at the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, Del., to do the ancient recipe justice. Later this month, you can give it a try when a new batch hits shelves across the country. The Beer Babe blog was impressed, writing that it is "very smooth," and "not overly sweet." But that's not the only strange brew Dogfish is shipping out this summer. Next week, the brewery will be bottling up the first large batch of Sah'tea for the general public—a modern update on a ninth-century Finnish beverage. In the fall, The New Yorker documented the intricate research and preparation that went into making the beer, which was first offered on tap at the brewery in May. In short, brewmasters carmelize wort on white hot river rocks, ferment it with German Weizen yeast, then toss on Finnish berries and a blend of spices to jazz up this rye-based beverage. Reviewers at the BeerAdvocate universally praised Sah'tea, comparing it to a fruity hefeweizen. One user munched on calamari as he downed a pint and described the combo as "a near euphoric experience." And Dogfish is also bringing back one of their more unusual forays into alcohol-infused time travel. Called Theobroma, this cocoa-based brew was hatched from a chemical analysis of 3,200-year-old pottery fragments from the Cradle of Chocolate, the Ulua Valley in Honduras. Archaeologist John Henderson at Cornell University first described the beverage in 2007 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pushing the first use of the chocolate plant back by 600 years. Dogfish first sold Theobroma in May 2008, and the next batch—made from a blend of cocoa, honey, chilies, and annatto—will be on shelves and in taps in July. The chocolate beer was apparently too sweet for Evan at The Full Pint, who writes that it contained "a ton and a half of sugary sweetness" with "an insane amount of gooeyness left behind on the roof of your mouth." (Scientific AMerican) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 08 Jul 09 - 07:12 PM (PhysOrg.com) -- Human sperm have been created using embryonic stem cells for the first time in a scientific development which will lead researchers to a better understanding of the causes of infertility. Researchers led by Professor Karim Nayernia at Newcastle University and the NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI) have developed a new technique which has made the creation of human sperm possible in the laboratory. The work is published today (8th July 2009) in the academic journal Stem Cells and Development. The NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI) is a collaboration between Newcastle and Durham Universities, Newcastle NHS Foundation Trust and other partners. Professor Nayernia says: "This is an important development as it will allow researchers to study in detail how sperm forms and lead to a better understanding of infertility in men - why it happens and what is causing it. This understanding could help us develop new ways to help couples suffering infertility so they can have a child which is genetically their own." "It will also allow scientists to study how cells involved in reproduction are affected by toxins, for example, why young boys with leukaemia who undergo chemotherapy can become infertile for life - and possibly lead us to a solution." The team also believe that studying the process of forming sperm could lead to a better understanding of how genetic diseases are passed on. In the technique developed at Newcastle, stem cells with XY chromosomes (male) were developed into germline stem cells which were then prompted to complete meiosis - cell division with halving of the chromosome set. These were shown to produce fully mature, sperm called scientifically, In Vitro Derived sperm (IVD sperm). |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 09 Jul 09 - 01:26 PM From Mars is Our Planet of Destiny in der SPIEGEL: SPIEGEL: Mr. Puttkamer, the first person set foot on the moon exactly 40 years ago. Why does NASA want to return to that barren, lifeless place? Puttkamer: The Apollo astronauts were only able to spend a couple of days up there -- that was just a quick visit. When we fly there again in 2019-2020, we'll stay much longer. The four-person team will gain experience for the real long-term goal -- the journey to Mars. We want to build a lunar station where people could live for weeks or even months, as preparation for the larger Mars project. SPIEGEL: So NASA is not preparing to populate the moon? Puttkamer: No, the lunar station won't be capable of continuous operation 365 days a year, since we'll need to supply it constantly with air, water and food from Earth, and that would be insanely expensive. But the living conditions on Mars are actually very different. There are many natural resources there, and our probe just recently discovered traces that could originate from liquid water. It's also been known for a long time that water in solid form -- in other words, ice -- exists there in large quantities. SPIEGEL: Will America fly to the moon alone again? FROM THE MAGAZINE Find out how you can reprint this DER SPIEGEL article in your publication. Puttkamer: Certainly not -- and especially not when we want to reach more distant destinations. The age of going it alone is over. The Apollo project took place during the Cold War, when we were involved in a dramatic race with the Soviets. But a lot has changed since then. We've moved away from that competitive way of thinking, and everyone is invited to take part in future missions. It functions that way already on the International Space Station, where 16 countries work together in an exemplary way. We've created a kind of United Nations in space. SPIEGEL: Yet the United States is going to build the new moon rockets alone again. Puttkamer: Unfortunately it can't be done any other way. After our shuttle fleet is withdrawn from service next year, we're going to need a new space carrier of our own as quickly as possible. To that end, we needed to commission industry to develop the new Ares rocket and the accompanying Orion spaceship as soon as possible. Then there's also the Altair lunar lander. But in any case, the European Space Agency is already very interested in helping with the construction of infrastructure on the moon later. Our Russian partners would definitely participate as well. And I personally would be very happy to also see Germany involved."... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 09 Jul 09 - 04:54 PM A group of Illinois grave diggers were charged Thursday with running a morbid scam in which they exhumed corpses in a black cemetery so they could resell the empty plots, cops said. Investigators suspect more than 300 bodies were dug up in the suburban Chicago graveyard and discarded in a pit so the ghouls could cash. "There should be a special place in hell" for the perpetrators, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said during a press conference at the desecrated grave yard. The famed Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip is the final resting place of Civil Rights lynching victim Emmett Till and his mother, as well as jazz legend Dinah Washington and bluesman Willie Dixon. While the graves of the notables were believed to be intact, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said that doesn't lessen the outrage. "All of us who were working on this for the last week were pretty distraught," Dart told the Chicago Sun-Times. Arrested in the sinister scheme were the cemetery's manager Carolyn Towns, 49, and grave diggers Keith Nicks, 45, and Terrence Nicks, 39, and Maurice Dailey, 61. They were all charged with felony counts of dismembering a human body. Dart said the schemers targeted older and unmarked graves, and kept track which ones hadn't been visited for a long time. He said the bodies were reburied - caskets, concrete vaults and all - in a massive hole at the rear of the cemetery. "There were plenty of concrete vaults that were shattered," Dart said. "More than we could count." Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/07/09/2009-07-09_four_nabbed_in_ghoulish_scheme_to_plunder_graves_in_history_illinois_cemetary.html#ixzz0KnWXzAQb&C |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 09 Jul 09 - 07:40 PM Four galaxies are involved in this pile-up 280 million light years from Earth. The bright spiral galaxy at the center of the image is punching through the cluster at almost two million miles per hour. That speeding galaxy may be what is causing the curved swath of X-rays, shown in blue near the center of the image, which were captured by NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory. The three other yellowish galaxies in the collision are optically visible and were imaged by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on the summit of the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. The fifth, bluish galaxy on the lower left of the group is actually in the foreground of the image, around 40 million light years away from Earth, and not involved in the collision. All together, the galaxies are known as Stephan's Quintet, named after astronomer Édouard Stephan who discovered them in 1877. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 09 Jul 09 - 09:30 PM An interesting study on the flow of arms into Mexico from such varied sources as the US and Yemen, and the dynamics of arms markets in general. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 11 Jul 09 - 01:00 PM (PhysOrg.com) -- Infections of wounds, pneumonia, etc. in hospitals in particular are often caused by bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Once they reach a certain density, colonies of Pseudomonas aeruginosa produce virulence factors and can enter into a slimy state, a biofilm, which prevents antibiotics from penetrating. The process of quorum sensing, which cells use to "sense" cell density, is triggered when the concentration of certain signaling compounds generated by the bacteria reaches a threshold level. A team working with Rustem F. Ismagilov at the University of Chicago has now demonstrated that the absolute number of cells is irrelevant; only the number of bacteria in a given volume plays a role. As the researchers report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, they were even able to trigger quorum-sensing processes in single cells when these were confined in extremely small volumes. The term, quorum sensing, is derived from the Latin quorum; in politics, this is the number of votes that must be cast for an election or referendum to be valid. In biology, quorum sensing is defined as a process by which cells are able to detect the accumulation of a released signal and then change their behavior when the signal concentration exceeds a threshold level. Traditionally, quorum sensing is thought to help microorganisms to coordinate processes that would be inefficient in single cells, such as the formation of biofilms. Quorum sensing can also prevent too many bacteria from colonizing too small an area. However, the work of Ismagilov's team has shown that quorum sensing is also activated by a single cell if the cell finds itself in an extremely enclosed space, which raises questions as to how quorum-sensing-regulated processes are relevant both to large colonies of cells and to single cells in confined spaces....(PhysOrg) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 11 Jul 09 - 03:17 PM String theory has come under fire in recent years. Promises have been made that have not been lived up to. Leiden (The Netherlands) theoretical physicists have now for the first time used string theory to describe a physical phenomenon. Their discovery has been reported in Science Express. 'This is superb. I have never experienced such euphoria.' Jan Zaanen makes no attempt to hide his enthusiasm. Together with Mihailo Cubrovic and Koenraad Schalm, he has successfully managed to shed light on a previously unexplained natural phenomeon using the mathematics of string theory. Electrons can form a special kind of state, a so-called quantum critical state, that plays a role in high-temperature super-conductivity. Super-conductivity at high temperatures has long been a 'hot issue' in physics. In super-conductivity, discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in Leiden, electrons can zoom through a material without meeting any resistance. In the first instance, this only seemed possible at very low temperatures close to absolute zero, but more and more examples are coming up where it also occurs at higher temperatures. So far, nobody has managed to explain high temperature super-conductivity. Zaanen: 'It has always been assumed that once you understand this quantum-critical state, you can also understand high temperature super-conductivity. But, although the experiments produced a lot of information, we hadn't the faintest idea of how to describe this phenomenon.' String theory now offers a solution. This is the first time that a calculation based on string theory has been published in Science, even though the theory is widely known. 'There have always been a lot of expectations surrounding string theory,' Zaanen explains, having himself studied the theory to satisfy his own curiosity. 'String theory is often seen as a child of Einstein that aims to devise a revolutionary and comprehensive theory, a kind of 'theory of everything'. Ten years ago, researchers even said: 'Give us two weeks and we'll be able to tell you where the big bang came from. The problem of string theory was that, in spite of its excellent maths, it was never able to make a concrete link with the physical reality - the world around us.' |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 12 Jul 09 - 11:33 AM "The sperm whale, for example, which has the largest brain on earth, weighing as much as 19 pounds, has been found to live in large, elaborately structured societal groups, or clans, that typically number in the tens of thousands and wander over many thousands of miles of ocean. The whales of a clan are not all related, but within each clan there are smaller, close-knit, matriarchal family units. Young whales are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers, including the mother, aunts and grandmothers, who help in the nurturing of babies and, researchers suspect, in teaching them patterns of movement, hunting techniques and communication skills. "It's like they're living in these massive, multicultural, undersea societies," says Hal Whitehead, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and the world's foremost expert on the sperm whale. "It's sort of strange. Really the closest analogy we have for it would be ourselves." Whitehead has even discovered distinct clan dialects using different codas, what he describes as a "Morse code-like pattern of clicks" that the whales make with their long head cavities and use to communicate with one another over many miles, reinforcing social bonds and declaring clan affiliation. Whitehead, who has been tracking and recording sperm whales around the globe since the early 1980s, has positively identified five distinct clan dialects and studied two extensively. "The regular clan," he told me in a phone conversation from his lab in Nova Scotia, "makes three to eight equally spaced clicks. And then there are the Plus-One clans. They have two to eight clicks and then a pause and an added click at the end, kind of like the Canadian 'eh.' We've also noticed that these clans ply the water differently. Regular groups move in wiggly tracks closer to shore, while the Plus-Ones swim further from shore in straight lines." ..." From this remarkable article in the New York Times. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 12 Jul 09 - 11:35 AM "He showed me an extraordinary video of sperm whales pilfering catch from fishermen's lines in Alaska, 50-foot-long, massive-jawed behemoths delicately snatching a single black cod from a longline's dangling hook, like an hors d'oeuvre from a cocktail toothpick. Fishermen are currently losing 5 to 10 percent of their yearly haul and fear the problem could become worse because whales who have mastered the technique are busily teaching it to others. The news seems to be rapidly spreading, as reports of similar fish-snatching are coming in from fishermen all over the world." (Ibid) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 12 Jul 09 - 11:51 AM Sorry, but I cannot resist: "The pangeros, for their part, have seen enough remarkable whale behavior to know better than to prejudge any explanation, however mind-bending, for what is going on in the lagoons of Baja. A 25-year-old named Alberto Haro Romero, known as Beto, told me of something he saw a month earlier while kayaking off Cabo San Lucas. A group of southward-migrating gray whales were suddenly surrounded and attacked by a pod of pilot whales. Out of nowhere, a group of humpbacks — who, like grays, are baleen whales — appeared and began going at the pilot whales, a highly coordinated counterattack. "It was unbelievable," Beto said. "One baleen whale coming in on the behalf of another. It was, like, tribal." As Beto spoke, I thought of another bit of interspecies cooperation involving humpbacks that I recently read about. A female humpback was spotted in December 2005 east of the Farallon Islands, just off the coast of San Francisco. She was entangled in a web of crab-trap lines, hundreds of yards of nylon rope that had become wrapped around her mouth, torso and tail, the weight of the traps causing her to struggle to stay afloat. A rescue team arrived within a few hours and decided that the only way to save her was to dive in and cut her loose. For an hour they cut at the lines and rope with curved knives, all the while trying to steer clear of a tail they knew could kill them with one swipe. When the whale was finally freed, the divers said, she swam around them for a time in what appeared to be joyous circles. She then came back and visited with each one of them, nudging them all gently, as if in thanks. The divers said it was the most beautiful experience they ever had. As for the diver who cut free the rope that was entangled in the whale's mouth, her huge eye was following him the entire time, and he said that he will never be the same...." (Ibid) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 13 Jul 09 - 08:21 PM I have always felt that part of the skill of assessing information is the ability to recognize relative weights and values, how important one or another bit of data is relative to others. From which perspective, three tidbits from the current mailing of Physics.Org: 1. Singapore's Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) has discovered a new environmentally friendly method to synthesize a wide variety of nanoparticles inexpensively. This new chemical synthesis has been recently published in Nature Materials. IBN researchers have developed a protocol to transfer metal ions from an aqueous solution to an organic solution such as toluene. Metal compounds that can dissolve in water are inexpensive and commonly available. Many useful metals and scarce materials that are soluble in water may now become readily employed in the synthesis of nanoparticles. This new approach developed by IBN is a simple, room-temperature process that does not produce toxic chemicals. 2. "Researchers achieve major breakthrough with water desalination system July 13th, 2009 By Wileen Wong Kromhout (PhysOrg.com) -- Concern over access to clean water is no longer just an issue for the developing world, as California faces its worst drought in recorded history. According to state's Department of Water Resources, supplies in major reservoirs and many groundwater basins are well below average. Court-ordered restrictions on water deliveries have reduced supplies from the two largest water systems, and an outdated statewide water system can't keep up with population growth. With these critical issues looming large, researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science are working hard to help alleviate the state's water deficit with their new mini-mobile-modular (M3) "smart" water desalination and filtration system. In designing and constructing new desalination plants, creating and testing pilot facilities is one of the most expensive and time-consuming steps. Traditionally, small yet very expensive stationary pilot plants are constructed to determine the feasibility of using available water as a source for a large-scale desalination plant. The M3 system helps cut both costs and time. "Our M3 water desalination system provides an all-in-one mobile testing plant that can be used to test almost any water source," said Alex Bartman, a graduate student on the M3 team who helped to design the sensor networks and data acquisition computer hardware in the system. "The advantages of this type of system are that it can cut costs, and because it is mobile, only one M3 system needs to be built to test multiple sources. Also, it will give an extensive amount of information that can be used to design the larger-scale desalination plant." The M3 demonstrated its effectiveness in a recent field study in the San Joaquin Valley in which it desalted agricultural drainage water that was nearly saturated with calcium sulfate salts, accomplishing this with just one reverse osmosis (RO) stage. 3. "(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of Yale University researchers has discovered a "repulsive" light force that can be used to control components on silicon microchips, meaning future nanodevices could be controlled by light rather than electricity. The team previously discovered an "attractive" force of light and showed how it could be manipulated to move components in semiconducting micro- and nano-electrical systems—tiny mechanical switches on a chip. The scientists have now uncovered a complementary repulsive force. Researchers had theorized the existence of both the attractive and repulsive forces since 2005, but the latter had remained unproven until now. The team, led by Hong Tang, assistant professor at Yale's School of Engineering & Applied Science, reports its findings in the July 13 edition of Nature Photonics's advanced online publication. "This completes the picture," Tang said. "We've shown that this is indeed a bipolar light force with both an attractive and repulsive component." The attractive and repulsive light forces Tang's team discovered are separate from the force created by light's radiation pressure, which pushes against an object as light shines on it. Instead, they push out or pull in sideways from the direction the light travels. Previously, the engineers used the attractive force they discovered to move components on the silicon chip in one direction, such as pulling on a nanoscale switch to open it, but were unable to push it in the opposite direction. Using both forces means they can now have complete control and can manipulate components in both directions. "We've demonstrated that these are tunable forces we can engineer," Tang said. It really is a wunnerful universe in some ways! A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 14 Jul 09 - 11:16 AM IN this remarkable story a young girl's failing heart was given a ten-year rest, by the surgical addition of a second, donor heart; during which time the original heart appears to have completely restored itself to natural full operation. THe girl, now 16, has been given a clean bill of health with the donor heart removed and the original article in full deployment. I suppose I'd be in pretty good knick after a ten year vacation, too. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 14 Jul 09 - 01:34 PM John Demjanjuk, 89, who is accused of being a guard at a Nazi death camp and was extradited to Germany from the United States in May, was charged Monday with 27,900 counts of accessory to murder, Munich prosecutors said in a statement. The accused, who denies any role in the Holocaust, was deemed fit to stand trial by German doctors, on the condition that the questioning be no longer than two sessions, each of 90 minutes, per day. Mr. Demjanjuk's family says that he is suffering from an incurable bone disease and has only about 15 months to live. The court did not say when the trial would begin. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 14 Jul 09 - 03:15 PM Tony Marshall Kimberly Anyadike is greeted after landing at Compton Woodley Airport on Saturday. She is believed to be the youngest African American female to complete the flight across the country. L.A. teenager who flew single-engine plane across the country lands in Compton By My-Thuan Tran July 12, 2009 A 15-year-old Los Angeles girl who navigated a single-engine Cessna through thunderstorms in Texas and took in breathtaking aerial views of Arizona's sunsets landed her plane to cheering crowds at Compton Woodley Airport on Saturday. She is believed to be the youngest African American female pilot to fly solo across the country. Kimberly Anyadike took off from Compton 13 days ago with an adult safety pilot and Levi Thornhill, an 87-year-old who served with the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. They flew to Newport News, Va., making about a dozen stops along the way. Anyadike learned to fly a plane and helicopter when she was 12 with the Compton-based Tomorrow's Aeronautical Museum, which offers aviation lessons to at-risk youth and economically disadvantaged students through an after-school program. The organization owns the small plane Anyadike flew. Anyadike said she loved the feeling of streaking across the sky. She told her mother that it was like a wild ride at Magic Mountain. She came up with the idea to fly across the country a few months after learning to fly. Robin Petgrave, the aeronautical museum's founder, warned her that it would take a lot of preparation. "I told her it was going to be a daunting task," he said, "but she just said, 'Put it on. I got big shoulders.' " The organization said there is no official group that tracks such records, but their research showed that her trip at age 15 is rare among pilots. Anyadike said she didn't want to make the trip to set a record or become some kind of celebrity. "I wanted to inspire other kids to really believe in themselves," she said. She also wanted to honor the Tuskegee Airmen, the U.S. Army Air Corps' all-black combat unit that served during World War II. (LAT) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 15 Jul 09 - 10:43 AM (not science) finger spray painting Remember in 1st grade when they had you crayon many colors then cover it with black crayon and then scrape off sections? This technique demands you work and think backwards sometimes but if you can stand the fumes its fun and easy. Sometimes when I do these I use chrome reflective paper. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 15 Jul 09 - 11:20 AM "I have always felt that part of the skill of assessing information is the ability to recognize relative weights and values, how important one or another bit of data is relative to others." You are right. I am currently exploring my thoughts on what I call the general theory of relationships. It is far reaching as a teaching technique and should be an essential foundation of all ongoing research. The Relationships explored are not just between bits of data but between all things and everything else. This is not a new idea but its presentation is captivating and thought provoking especially in the area of helping to decide what is safe, feasible and beneficial in applying new science as in the field of synthetic biology and nano technology. Far too often we are not considering any interconnected relationships when we release new drugs or technologies. Instead of taking a Cartesian view or relying only on a cost risk POV we need a new General Theory of Relationships. Some scientists don't even think in terms of the effect that can spread to every other "networked" system in the universe by way of 6 degrees. We stand between the very small quantum scale and very large multiverse branes. It seems that these two vastly different size scales are like two locked boxes with the key to open them in the other box. We are getting closer to being able to pick the lock of one or both boxes. As humans we may never be able to see a google moves ahead in the cosmic chess game but we damn well better get started. Even a rudimentary Relationship Theory smell test could make the difference between a wondrous advance or extinction. whadduyathink |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 15 Jul 09 - 11:24 AM the underlined links are not my own. Are they some kind of new spam technique? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 15 Jul 09 - 10:59 PM PhysOrg.com) -- The discovery of a new primate fossil in Myanmar (formerly Burma) lends weight to the hypothesis that the common ancestor of humans, monkeys and apes (anthropoid primates) originated in Asia, and not in Africa. To support the hypothesis, an international team of paleontologists, including two French researchers, has shown that these primates, which are 37 million years old and named Ganlea megacanina, had an ability observed today in modern monkeys, but not in lemurs: they pried open and ate seeds in a specific way by using their greatly enlarged canine teeth, like certain South American monkeys today. This ability is one of the reasons that justifies them being placed in the family of anthropoid primates. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 15 Jul 09 - 11:29 PM
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 16 Jul 09 - 10:44 AM Protesters are planning a second "kiss-in" near the Salt Lake City Temple to support two gay men who said they were stopped by LDS Church security after one man kissed the other on the cheek. The event will take place at noon Sunday, according to a listing on Facebook. At 12:15 p.m., organizers will sound a whistle or bell as a signal to step onto a former public easement and kiss. Supporters of Derek Jones and Matthew Aune staged a similar show of support July 12, when about 100 people gathered at Main Street plaza for "gentle" displays of public affection. Church security watched the protesters, and called police when they crossed onto the property, but there were no altercations. Jones and Aune argued with guards July 8 after they were stopped at about 10 p.m. on Main Street Plaza, and later were cited for trespassing by police. The LDS Church has said the two men were stopped for "inappropriate behavior" and treated like any other couple. Located next to Temple Square, Main Street Plaza was public land sold by the city to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about 10 years ago. The sale allowed the church to ban speech and actions it disagreed with from the area between Temple Square and the Church Office Building. lwhitehurst@sltrib.com |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 18 Jul 09 - 10:39 AM The NY Times reports: "This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned. The MobileReference edition of the novel, "Nineteen Eighty-four," by George Orwell that was deleted from Kindle e-book readers by Amazon.com. But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is "rare," but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we've been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we've learned that they're not really like books, in that once we're finished reading them, we can't resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final. As one of my readers noted, it's like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we've been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table. You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony? The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were "1984" and "Animal Farm." Scary." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 20 Jul 09 - 11:30 AM From a long-lost letter from Ernest Hemingway describing life in Madrid when it was being shelled by Franco's forces, which was eventually published in part in the New York TImes: "Something you can't put on the stage but that would be good in a picture was the first big shelling of the Florida. The hotel was packed when the shelling started just at daylight and after the first shell hit the front of the building, (seven more hit it that day and over eleven hundred were fired into the town), there was a sort of mass migration from the rooms on the side that faced the lines. Couples carrying their mattresses over their backs scuttled across the halls on every floor like a movement of the lemmings. Then in the crashing and the rolling clouds of dust Antoine de Saint Exupéry started to give away grapefruits. He had brought two bushel of them from Valencia and this was his first bombardment and he was handling it by giving away grapefruits. "Est-ce-que vous voulez une pamplemousse?" Crash. More dust. People lying under the mattresses. Screams from ladies awakened too early and abruptly. "Est-ce-que vous voulez une pamplemousse?" Crash. More dust. Strong smell of cordite and blasted granite. Pieces of masonry fall through skylight. Ladies under mattresses who have not thought of facing eternity until awakened give serious thoughts to same. The letter ends with Hemingway describing what it was like to work on a play for a change: About writing the play itself: I was excited and happy to be able to write the dialogue without having to write about places. That is you could say a place was such and so. You did not have to really make it as in a novel so that the reader can walk in and know it is true. A set designer would have to make it from your knowledge. I can write dialogue on a typewriter because it goes faster than I can use a pencil. But when I make country, or a city, or a river in a novel it is slow work because you have to always make it, then it is alive. But nobody makes anything quickly nor easily if it is any good. The making part of a play comes after the writing of it. Other people do all the great detail that you just indicate when you write. Right now I have been working steadily for a year and a month on a novel. In that no one can help you. But in a play the credit for all the really hard work goes to those who stage, direct, and act in it. I had all the fun. They had all the work. Well, that is a nice kind of an exchange for once. The one good lucky thing was that I happened to have a room in the Hotel Florida from March 1937 to May 1938 at a time when you could learn as much at the Hotel Florida in those years as you could learn anywhere in the world. I did not spend all those months in that room. But each time I came back to that room I had learned something. And the shelling and the rest of it were very good to keep you from kidding yourself about many things." (Letter text printed with the permission of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation.) (From this article. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 20 Jul 09 - 07:24 PM "Infants just 6 months old can match the sounds of an angry snarl and a friendly yap to photos of dogs displaying threatening and welcoming body language. The new findings come on the heels of a study from the same Brigham Young University lab showing that infants can detect mood swings in Beethoven's music. Though the mix of dogs and babies sounds silly, experiments of this kind help us understand how babies learn so rapidly. Long before they master speech, babies recognize and respond to the tone of what's going on around them. "Emotion is one of the first things babies pick up on in their social world," said BYU psychology professor Ross Flom, lead author of the study. Flom and two BYU students report their latest "amazing baby" findings in the journal Developmental Psychology. "We chose dogs because they are highly communicative creatures both in their posture and the nature of their bark," Flom said. In the experiment, the babies first saw two different pictures of the same dog, one in an aggressive posture and the other in a friendly stance. Then the researchers played - in random order - sound clips of a friendly and an aggressive dog bark. "They only had one trial because we didn't want them to learn it on the fly and figure it out," Flom said. While the recordings played, the 6-month-old babies spent most of their time staring at the appropriate picture. Older babies usually made the connection instantly with their very first glance." From Phys.org |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 21 Jul 09 - 06:59 PM PhysOrg.com) -- Quantum key distribution (QKD) could be the next commercial success of quantum physics, and a recent study has taken the field a step closer to this reality. Researchers from the University of Geneva in Switzerland and Corning Incorporated in New York have demonstrated a new QKD prototype that can distribute quantum keys over a distance of 250 km in the lab, improving upon the previous record of 200 km. The scientists hope that the achievement will lead to the goal of distributing quantum keys over intercity distances of 300 km in the near future. As the researchers explained, the purpose of QKD schemes is to distribute a secret quantum key between two distant locations with security relying on the laws of quantum physics. The idea of QKD was first proposed in 1984, and in 1992, scientists could distribute quantum keys over 32 cm, while the technology has improved from there. Despite these advances, the scientists say, the main challenge is still to achieve higher bit rates over longer distances. To reach their new record of 250 km, the scientists made three significant improvements to their QKD technique. First, they developed a coherent one way (COW) protocol tailored specifically for quantum communication over optical fiber networks. In addition, they used an improved superconducting single-photon detector to decrease noise, as well as ultra low loss fibers made by Corning to minimize channel loss and improve the distribution rate. By making these improvements, the physicists could distribute quantum keys in the lab at a rate of 15 bits per second over 250 km of optical fiber, or 6,000 bits per second over 100 km, with low error rates. The system is also fully automated, and can run for hours without human intervention. In the COW protocol, Alice, the transmitter, sends a pair of pulses, one empty and one non-empty (containing a mean photon number of 0.5). The bits are encoded in the pair of pulses, with the bit value define by the position of the non-empty pulse: first position = 0 and second position = 1. Bob, the receiver, uses a detector to distinguish the pulses. For true quantum communication, Alice and Bob also verify the coherence of the pulses. Bob randomly selects a small fraction of pulses, not used as data, to send to an interferometer, which measures the coherence between adjacent qubits. Due to this security measure, an eavesdropper could not perform "photon number splitting attacks," such as removing or blocking photons, without disturbing the system and being detected. ..." I had a Cow, and the Cow pleased me, I ran my Cow up to 6 K B. And the Cow went bleep, bleep, Times the root of pi r 3. I dunno. Quantum bit structure using photons means potentially huge multiples in bandwidth. We might be able to keep the MOAB going after all! A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 21 Jul 09 - 07:26 PM (PhysOrg.com) -- An analysis of Martian meteorites has led scientists to believe that Mars was molten for up to 100 million years after it formed, thwarting the evolution of early life on the planet. Ads by Google Forex Secret Exposed - 120 Million Dollar Secret Revealed 26yr Interbank Trader's Insider tip - www.andyshearman.net/Fibonacci Life Experience Degrees - Earn college credit for what you already know. Learn more today. - WorldWideLearn.com/Life-Experience The research, just published in the prestigious international journal Nature Geoscience, has shown that the red planet remained excessively hot - with temperatures in excess of 1000 degrees Celsius - for 100 million years following its formation. The team of international scientists from the USA, Belgium, and Australia, and spearheaded by workers at NASA's Johnson Space Center, studied the radioactive clocks ticking away in a particularly rare and ancient type of Martian meteorite called a Nakhlite (named after Nakhla in Egypt where the first one was found). They have made the most precise measurements yet on rare isotopes of exotic elements such as Hafnium, Lutetium, and Neodymium. These isotopes allow scientists to date ancient events deep in Mars' earliest history. "We were able to reconstruct the timescale for Mars' earliest evolution," says Macquarie University planetary scientist Dr Craig O'Neill, the only Australian scientist on the study. Contrary to the popular belief that it only took a few thousand years for Mars to cool and solidify from an initially molten ball, their study suggests that there was a thick steam atmosphere on Mars very early in the planet's history that kept the surface a magma ocean for 100 million years - and essentially sterile the whole time. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 22 Jul 09 - 10:42 AM "The typical human is home to a vast array of microbes. If you were to count them, you'd find that microbial cells outnumber your own by a factor of 10. On a cell-by-cell basis, then, you are only 10 percent human. For the rest, you are microbial. (Why don't you see this when you look in the mirror? Because most of the microbes are bacteria, and bacterial cells are generally much smaller than animal cells. They may make up 90 percent of the cells, but they're not 90 percent of your bulk.) This much has been known for a long time. Yet it's only now, with the revolution in biotechnology, that we're able to do detailed studies of which microbes are there, which genes they have, and what they're doing. We're just at the start, and there are far more questions than answers. But already, the results are astonishing, and the implications profound. Even on your skin, the diversity of bacteria is prodigious. If you were to have your hands sampled, you'd probably find that each fingertip has a distinct set of residents; your palms probably also differ markedly from each other, each home to more than 150 species, but with fewer than 20 percent of the species the same. And if you're a woman, odds are you'll have more species than the man next to you. Why should this be? So far, no one knows. But it's the bacteria in the digestive tract, especially the gut, that intrigue me most. Many of these appear to be true symbionts: they have evolved to live in guts and (as far as we know) are not found elsewhere. In providing their habitat — a constant temperature, some protection from hostile lifeforms and regular influxes of food — we are as essential to them as they are to us. And they definitely are essential to us. Gut bacteria play crucial roles in digesting food and modulating the immune system. They make small molecules that we need in order for our enzymes to work properly. They interact with us, altering which of our genes get turned on and off in cells in the intestinal walls. Some evidence suggests that they are essential for the building of a normal heart. Finally, it seems likely that gut bacteria will turn out to affect appetite, as well as other aspects of our behavior, though no one has shown this yet. (Imagine the plea: I'm sorry, sir, my microbes made me do it.) Together, your gut microbes provide you with a pool of genes far larger than that found in the human genome. Indeed, the gut "microbiome," as it is known, is thought to contain at least 100 times more genes than the human genome. Moreover, whereas humans are extremely similar to one another at the level of the genome, the microbiome appears to differ markedly from one person to the next. " Olivia Judson in the NYT |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 23 Jul 09 - 03:23 PM For centuries, scientists have puzzled over why the toucan's bill is so remarkably large - but now one team thinks it might have an answer. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers say that the toucan uses its enormous beak to stay cool. They used infrared cameras to show the bird dumping heat from its body into its bill, helping it to regulate its body temperature. The toucan has the largest bill of any bird, relative to body size. It makes up about one-third of its total body length. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 27 Jul 09 - 08:14 PM ..."In one series of experiments, the researchers watched as the beads moved up and down tiny tubes of lipid molecules by Brownian motion. In a second series of experiments, the researchers watched as the beads diffused through a porous membrane of entangled macromolecule filaments, again by Brownian motion. In both sets of experiments, there were many features in full agreement with Einstein and the bell-shaped curve; but there were also features in significant disagreement. In those cases, the beads moved much farther than the common curve could predict. In those extreme displacements, diffusion behavior was not Gaussian, the researchers report. The behavior was exponential. "These large displacements happen less often, but when they do occur, they are much bigger than we previously thought possible," Granick said. The new findings "change the rules of the diffusion game," Granick said. "Like the emperor's new clothes, now that we know the bell-shaped curve isn't always the right way to think about a particular problem, process, or operation, we can begin to design around it, and maybe take advantage of it. And, we can correct the textbooks."..." (PhysOrg) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 28 Jul 09 - 01:33 AM PM offline trivia factoid from NIH There are laws that supercede other laws in our own DNA. While elctromagnetic charges should push certain DNA strands apart...they attract. Learning by way of the interconnectedness of all things will help us understand better than the old Cartesian way of breaking things down into individual parts. A tree viewed as a partner in a system of soil, insects, atmosphere and a myriad of lifeforms far from its branches tells us more than just knowing leaves, wood and the Krebs cycle. Paul Burke in his book Connections hinted at the non liniear quality of invention itself. Gaia theory is more of a relgion than a science and the laws of 6 degrees of separation are just begging to gain credence. This is why I believe that a new theory called the general theory of relationsips may be evolving as we speak. Such a theory leading to an empirical science could aid teaching, communication, political systems and discovery of the new and unexpected. Now that we have built a massive cyber neural net called the internet we may be able to make programs that invent hypothetical inventions of its own and discover links between vast near and divergent systems that will invent the new physics for us... If we make it it will create. The results of a general theory of relationships could demonstrate that xenophobia itself is not only false, it is one of the few impossibilities in the universe. (something we might hear in a sci fi monster movie) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 31 Jul 09 - 10:20 AM # Marginal Revolution: Tyler Cowen says "the best sentence I read last night" is from a review of William Vollman's new book, "Imperial," in New York magazine by Sam Anderson: " "Imperial" is like Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" with the attitude of Mike Davis's "City of Quartz," if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee's cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau's great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac." Now THAT is a sentence. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: bobad Date: 31 Jul 09 - 09:40 PM Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event "Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus", from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009. CLICK |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 02 Aug 09 - 05:17 PM The next level of robot is currently in the research and development stage in Japan's National Institute of Information and Communication Technology. The next level of robot untethered by human omnipresence allows it to take cues from gestures and make immediate and appropriate responses. The Japanese, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology is working on a project wherein machines can learn and teach themselves what to do. Presently, robots are tethered to human commands or guided by programs in advance that operate in real time. The new level of robot will take cues from gestures and operate more autonomously through a learning process. The Institutes's Spoken Language Division is in the development stage of creating a robot that measure 155 cm and weighs 85 kg that learns through gestures, thereby creating a more autonomous robot. The Spoken Language Group´s main focus is to develop an information communication system that understands when people talk correctly and automatically takes appropriate actions to people and other machines. The actions are based on the knowledge they receive from the talk by people in their presence. According to the Institute, the current research is involved in producing stress-free unambiguous communication that a machine understands immediately and tells its understanding immediately to a person or another machine. Its primary goal is to establish a technology to give messages to network terminals by people's natural expressions, such as gestures, hand signals and body language that transcend language differences and allow for approximations. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 03 Aug 09 - 11:05 AM KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The Tennessee Valley Authority has raised its estimate for cleaning up a huge coal ash spill to $1.2 billion and partly blamed the cleanup for its third-quarter loss of $167 million. The authority, the nation's largest public utility, gave the new estimate Friday in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission. On Dec. 22, nearly 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic ash breached a holding pond at a coal-fired power plant near Kingston. No one was injured, but millions of tons of ash and sludge swept into a river, damaged two dozen homes, covered 300 acres, raised health concerns in the area and brought Congressional attention to the lack of regulation of similar sites throughout the country. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 03 Aug 09 - 10:05 PM "...A former winner of the BBC quiz show "Mastermind" recently took part in a pub quiz which came down to a tiebreaker between his team and a group of young people who were relying on BlackBerrys. Anyone familiar with quizzes these days knows that this can happen, whether it is under the table or outside in the smokers' zone; the combination of wireless internet access and Google searching is simply too powerful for some to resist and for others to prevent. In this case, happily, virtue triumphed and the team led by the Mastermind champion won. Then afterwards a young woman from the losing side came over and asked in baffled tones: "How did you get that?" So attuned was she to the idea that answering quiz questions was a task to be outsourced to the internet that she seemed not to understand the idea of general knowledge that was kept in the head." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 04 Aug 09 - 12:00 AM The Latin cōnātus comes from the verb cōnor, which is usually translated into English as, "to endeavor"; but the concept of the conatus was first developed by the Stoics (333–264 BCE) and Peripatetics (c. 335 BCE) before the Common Era. These groups used the word ὁρμή (hormê, translated in Latin by impetus) to describe the movement of the soul towards an object, and from which a physical act results.[7] Classical thinkers, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) and Diogenes Laertius (c. 235 BCE), expanded this principle to include an aversion to destruction, but continued to limit its application to the motivations of non-human animals. Diogenes Laertius, for example, specifically denied the application of the term to plants. Before the Renaissance, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274 CE), Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308 CE) and Dante Alighieri (1265–1321 CE) expressed similar sentiments using the Latin words vult, velle or appetit as synonyms of conatus; indeed, all four terms may be used to translate the original Greek ὁρμή. Around 1700, Telesius and Campanella extended the ancient Greek notions and applied them to all objects, animate and inanimate.[8] First Aristotle, then Cicero and Laertius each alluded to a connection between the conatus and other emotions. In their view, the former induces the latter. They maintained that humans do not wish to do something because they think it "good", but rather they think it "good" because they want to do it. In other words, the cause of human desire is the natural inclination of a body to augment itself in accordance with the principles of the conatus.[9] (Wikipedia article on conatus) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 04 Aug 09 - 07:41 PM General Fusion has recently raised enough financial support - $13.5 million - from public and private investors to start the project. Rather than using expensive superconducting magnets (tokamaks) like the $14-billion ITER project in France or powerful lasers like those used by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, General Fusion plans to try a relatively low-tech approach called magnetized target fusion. The reactor consists of a metal sphere with a diameter of three meters. Inside the sphere, a liquid mixture of lithium and lead spins to create a vortex with a vertical cavity in the center. Then, the researchers inject two donut-shaped plasma rings called spheromaks into the top and bottom of the vertical cavity - like "blowing smoke rings at each other," explains Doug Richardson, chief executive of General Fusion. The last step is mainly well-timed brute mechanical force. 220 pneumatically controlled pistons on the outer surface of the sphere are programmed to simultaneously ram the surface of the sphere one time per second. This force sends an acoustic wave through the spinning liquid that becomes a shock wave when it reaches the spheromaks in the center, triggering a fusion burst. Specifically, the plasma's hydrogen isotopes - deuterium and tritium - fuse into helium, releasing neutrons that are trapped by the lithium and lead mixture. The neutrons cause the liquid to heat up, and the heat is extracted through a heat exchanger. Part of the resulting heat is used to make steam to spin a turbine for power generation, while the rest goes back to recharge the pistons. The biggest challenge with the design will likely be showing that the technique actually works; no one has ever demonstrated that spheromaks can be compressed enough - while maintaining their donut shape - to create fusion. The design also takes advantage of digital control technologies that have only recently been developed, which are required to ensure that all 220 pistons strike the sphere at once. General Fusion has just started developing simulations of the project, and hopes to build a test reactor and demonstrate net gain within five years. If everything goes according to plan, they will then build a 100-megawatt prototype reactor to be finished five years after that, which would cost an estimated $500 million. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 06 Aug 09 - 01:19 PM < a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo>Breathtaking beauty at the hands of a young Russian woman. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Desert Dancer Date: 07 Aug 09 - 11:08 AM Breathtaking beauty at the hands of a young [you mean...] Ukranian woman Don't know the full info behind the story she's telling, but I'm willing to bet that nationality plays into it heavily... It is an amazing piece of work. ~ Becky in Tucson |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Desert Dancer Date: 07 Aug 09 - 11:12 AM I wrote that before I'd gotten to the very end -- 1945, she wrote. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 10 Aug 09 - 12:28 PM Denialogues Journalist George Monbiot's term for those who adopt an ideology of denial. Conceding that denial has its place, and that "without denial there is no hope," George Monbiot recently argued in The Guardian: But some people make a doctrine of it. American conservatism could be described as a movement of denialogues, people whose ideology is based on disavowing physical realities. This applies to their views on evolution, climate change, foreign affairs and fiscal policy. The Vietnam war would have been won, were it not for the pinko chickens at home. Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaida. Everyone has an equal chance of becoming C.E.O. Universal healthcare is a communist plot. Segregation wasn't that bad. As one of George Bush's aides said: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 10 Aug 09 - 01:07 PM Archaeologists are slowly unearthing the ghastly secrets of Cahokia, an ancient city under the American heartland By Andrew O'Hehir Aug. 6, 2009 | Ever since the first Europeans came to North America, only to discover the puzzling fact that other people were already living here, the question of how to understand the Native American past has been both difficult and politically charged. For many years, American Indian life was viewed through a scrim of interconnected bigotry and romance, which simultaneously served to idealize the pre-contact societies of the Americas and to justify their destruction. Pre-Columbian life might be understood as savage and brutal darkness or an eco-conscious Eden where man lived in perfect harmony with nature. But it seemed to exist outside history, as if the native people of this continent were for some reason exempt from greed, cruelty, warfare and other near-universal characteristics of human society. As archaeologist Timothy Pauketat's cautious but mesmerizing new book, "Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi," makes clear, Cahokia -- the greatest Native American city north of Mexico -- definitely belongs to human history. (It is not "historical," in the strict sense, because the Cahokians left no written records.) At its peak in the 12th century, this settlement along the Mississippi River bottomland of western Illinois, a few miles east of modern-day St. Louis, was probably larger than London, and held economic, cultural and religious sway over a vast swath of the American heartland. Featuring a man-made central plaza covering 50 acres and the third-largest pyramid in the New World (the 100-foot-tall "Monks Mound"), Cahokia was home to at least 20,000 people. If that doesn't sound impressive from a 21st-century perspective, consider that the next city on United States territory to attain that size would be Philadelphia, some 600 years later. In a number of critical ways, Cahokia seems to resemble other ancient cities discovered all over the world, from Mesopotamia to the Yucatán. It appears to have been arranged according to geometrical and astronomical principles (around various "Woodhenges," large, precisely positioned circles of wooden poles), and was probably governed by an elite class who commanded both political allegiance and spiritual authority. Cahokia was evidently an imperial center that abruptly exploded, flourished for more then a century and then collapsed, very likely for one or more of the usual reasons: environmental destruction, epidemics of disease, the ill will of subjugated peoples and/or outside enemies. Some archaeologists might pussyfoot around this question more than Pauketat does, but it also seems clear that political and religious power in Cahokia revolved around another ancient tradition. Cahokians performed human sacrifice, as part of some kind of theatrical, community-wide ceremony, on a startlingly large scale unknown in North America above the valley of Mexico. Simultaneous burials of as many as 53 young women (quite possibly selected for their beauty) have been uncovered beneath Cahokia's mounds, and in some cases victims were evidently clubbed to death on the edge of a burial pit, and then fell into it. A few of them weren't dead yet when they went into the pit -- skeletons have been found with their phalanges, or finger bones, digging into the layer of sand beneath them. Full story here: Sacrificial Virgins of the Mississippi. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 10 Aug 09 - 09:47 PM These "light-liked, spin-locked" electrons, called helical Dirac fermions, had been proposed in theory, but never before found in three-dimensional materials. By tuning the electrons to act in this way, the scientists are able to calibrate the surface conductivity of the topological insulator. "This is a major breakthrough in that they showed how you could control the material to get to the sweet spot [featuring the light-like behavior of electrons] where the surfaces are most interesting," said theoretical physicist Charles Kane of the University of Pennsylvania, who is not affiliated with the research. "Two things had to be done -- first, the bulk of the material had to be made a good insulator, and second, the energy of the surface states had to be adjusted to be precisely at the right point. By tuning the surface to the sweet spot, it opens the door to a whole host of new things you can try to do." (Phys Org) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 11 Aug 09 - 03:04 PM Here on the Nicola Peninsula in Costa Rica, the medical news that dominates headlines today is not swine flu but a mysterious affliction called grisi siknis (or "jungle madness," in the language of the Miskito). In neighboring Nicaragua, an outbreak of grisi siknis that sickened 120 teenage girls and closed three schools in the village of Kamla has apparently receded after an angry mob captured a drifter suspected of practicing black magic, bound him with rope, and nearly beat him to death. The police took the man into custody and burned his spell books in a public square, but he was soon released because witchcraft is not a crime in Nicaragua. Grisi siknis is a contagious collective hysteria that strikes indigenous people in Nicaragua, primarily young pubescent women, who fall into a trance, become manic or violent, and often imagine that the devil is sexually possessing them. Western medicine, while acknowledging the disease, has had difficulty explaining it. The American Psychiatric Association's DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) describes grisi siknis as "a psychological disorder due to stress, upheaval, and despair." According to Phil Dennis at Texas Tech University, the disorder is "a wild, orgiastic rite of sex and violence." Western physicians who have traveled to villages where grisi siknis is epidemic have been unable to help those afflicted. The Miskito believe that grisi siknis is caused by evil spirits conjured up by sorcerers, and that herbahttp://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=104378&messages=342&page=1&desc=yes#replylists and witch doctors can exorcise the spirits and cure the disease. The epidemic that just claimed 120 teenage women in Kamila, Puerto Cabezas, may be the largest on record. http://bigthink.com/paulhoffman/grisi-siknis |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 11 Aug 09 - 11:54 PM (PhysOrg.com) -- If humans ever create a lunar base, one of the biggest challenges will be figuring out how to breathe. Transporting oxygen to the moon is extremely expensive, so for the past several years NASA has been looking into other possibilities. One idea is extracting oxygen from moon rock. Recently, Derek Fray, a materials chemist from the University of Cambridge, and his colleagues have built a reactor that uses oxides in Moon rocks as the cathode in an electrochemical process to produce oxygen. The design is based on a process that the researchers invented in 2000 that produces carbon dioxide. In this design, the scientists pass a current between the cathode and an anode made of carbon, with both electrodes sitting in an electrolyte solution of molten calcium chloride, a common salt. The current removes oxygen atoms from the cathode, which are then ionized and dissolve in the molten salt. The negatively charged oxygen is attracted to the carbon anode, where it erodes the anode and produces carbon dioxide. To produce oxygen rather than carbon dioxide, the researchers made an unreactive anode using a mixture of calcium titanate and calcium ruthenate instead of the carbon. Because this anode barely erodes, the reaction between the oxygen ions and anode produces oxygen. Based on experiments with a simulated lunar rock developed by NASA, the researchers calculate that three one-meter-tall reactors could generate one tonne of oxygen per year on the Moon. Each tonne of oxygen would require three tonnes of rock to produce. Fray noted that three reactors would require about 4.5 kilowatts of power, which could be supplied by solar panels or possibly a small nuclear reactor on the Moon. The researchers are also working with the European Space Agency on developing an even larger reactor that could be operated remotely. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 13 Aug 09 - 11:08 AM Warfare on the wane Indeed, perhaps the best and most surprising news to emerge from research on warfare is that humanity as a whole is much less violent than it used to be (see our timeline of weapons technology). People in modern societies are far less likely to die in battle than those in traditional cultures. For example, the first and second world wars and all the other horrific conflicts of the 20th century resulted in the deaths of fewer than 3 per cent of the global population. According to Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois in Chicago, that is an order of magnitude less than the proportion of violent death for males in typical pre-state societies, whose weapons consist only of clubs, spears and arrows rather than machine guns and bombs. There have been relatively few international wars since the second world war, and no wars between developed nations. Most conflicts now consist of guerilla wars, insurgencies and terrorism - or what the political scientist John Mueller of Ohio State University in Columbus calls the "remnants of war". He notes that democracies rarely, if ever, vote to wage war against each other, and attributes the decline of warfare over the past 50 years, at least in part, to a surge in the number of democracies around the world - from 20 to almost 100. "A continuing decline in war seems to be an entirely reasonable prospect," he says. Most conflicts now consist of guerilla wars, insurgencies and terrorism - the remnants of war "Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history," agrees psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard University. Homicide rates in modern Europe, for example, are more than 10 times lower than they were in the Middle Ages. Decreases in the rate of warfare and homicide, Pinker notes, cannot be explained by changes in human nature over such a relatively short period. Cultural changes and changes in attitude must be responsible, he says. Pinker gives several reasons for the modern decline of violence in general. First, the creation of stable nations with effective legal systems and police forces. Second, increased life expectancies that make us less willing to risk our lives through violence. Third, increasing globalisation and improvements in communications technology, which have increased our interdependence with, and empathy towards, those outside of our immediate "tribes". "The forces of modernity are making things better and better," he says. However, while war might not be inevitable, neither is peace. Nations around the world still maintain huge arsenals, including weapons of mass destruction, and armed conflicts still ravage many regions (see our timeline of weapons technology). Major obstacles to peace include the lack of tolerance inherent in religious fundamentalism, which not only triggers conflicts but often contributes to the suppression of women; global warming, which will produce ecological crises that may spark social unrest and violence; overpopulation, particularly when it produces a surplus of unmarried, unemployed young men, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. "Humans can easily backslide into war," Pinker warns. Fortunately, understanding the environmental conditions that promote war also suggests ways to limit it. LeBlanc points out that the modern focus of human competition - and the warfare that can accompany it - has shifted somewhat from food, water and land to energy. Two keys to peace, he suggests, are population control and cheap, clean, reliable alternatives to fossil fuels. Promoting the spread of participatory democracy clearly wouldn't hurt, either. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University takes another line, and makes a case for the empowerment of women. It is well known that as female education and economic opportunities rise, birth rates fall. A stabilised population decreases demands on governmental and medical services and on natural resources and, by extension, lessens the likelihood of social unrest and conflict. Since women are less prone to violence then men, Wrangham hopes that these educational and economic trends will propel more women into government.... Full article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327151.500-winning-the-ultimate-battle-how-humans-could-end-war.html?full=true. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Paco Rabanne Date: 13 Aug 09 - 11:21 AM Fascinating! |
