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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: 11 Nov 09 - 12:42 PM (Umberto) Eco: Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail. SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can't be realistically completed? Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 11 Nov 09 - 02:18 PM The geek mind at play is a wonderful thing to behold. Two examples: Roomba Pacman, built by three engineers whose day jobs involve unmanned aerial vehicle systems (videos here), and Novel Chess, a system too complicated to explain here that allows works of literature to compete on the 64-square field of battle (e.g. "Nearly as exhausting is the 141-move slugfest between Benjamin Constant's lapidary tale of ennui and seduction, Adolphe (1816), and La Bodega (1905), Vincente Blasco Ibáñez's crusading proto-prohibitionist indictment of wine-drenched backwardness in Andalucía — a game that culminates in yet another triumph for Iberian social realism." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 12 Nov 09 - 12:01 PM November 10, 2009, 9:30 pm Social Medicine "Wash your hands regularly." "Cover your mouth when you sneeze." "Throw away your used tissues." These are some of the exhortations currently posted around London in an attempt to reduce the spread of flu. But one day, perhaps we'll have public health campaigns of a different kind. "Be jolly: it's catching." Or, "Eat less: do it for your friends." Why? Because "traditional" infectious diseases — those, like flu and tuberculosis, that are caused by viruses or bacteria — are not the only aspects of health that can spread from one person to another. Taking up smoking is contagious; so is quitting. Obesity is contagious. So is happiness. At least, these are the results coming in from long-term studies of social networks — the networks of friends and families, neighbors and colleagues that we all belong to. Such studies have found that one person's change in behavior ripples through his or her friends, family and acquaintances. If one of your friends becomes happy, for example, you're more likely to become happy too. If you're great friends with someone who becomes obese, you're much more likely to become obese as well. And the effect doesn't stop there. If your friend's friend becomes happy, that increases the chance your friend will become happy — and that you will too. Conversely, if you become obese or depressed, you may inadvertently help your friends, and your friend's friends, to become fat or gloomy. (Intriguingly, happiness and obesity seem to spread in different ways. Obesity spreads most easily between friends of the same sex who are emotionally close. Happiness spreads most readily between friends who live near each other: a happy friend on the same block makes more difference than a happy friend three miles away.) I should say that doing long-term studies of social networks is difficult — it means interviewing and measuring thousands of people repeatedly over many years. After all, if I want to know whether you and your friends will change weight over the next five years, I have to measure all of you now and again in five years' time. Moreover, I have to keep track of how friendships come and go, of who moves house and so on. In short, it's a massive task just to collect the data. So, while there have been plenty of studies of how pairs of people, especially spouses, affect each others' health, there have been far fewer studies of how health reverberates through large social networks. The results I'm referring to here all come from the so-called "Framingham Heart Study," which began in Massachusetts in 1948 and has continued to the present day. (Up to now, the study has involved two cohorts of several thousand people each; a third cohort has just been enrolled.) It's possible, therefore, that the results I'm talking about are specific to this group of people. However, I think that's unlikely. The details of how an attribute spreads may differ from one group to another: perhaps in some places, friends have less influence and siblings have more. But the general result — that healthy (or unhealthy) behaviors, habits and outlooks are infectious — is, I think, likely to prove robust. ... (NYT TImes science columnist Olivia Judson) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 12 Nov 09 - 12:21 PM Wednesday by Forbes. (AP) Not surprisingly, heads of state seem to get ahead. Barack Obama was No. 1 on Forbes' list of "The World's Most Powerful People" released Wednesday, with the leaders of China and Russia rounding out the top three. Obama beat out Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao for the No. 1 spot just days before the two are to meet in Beijing to discuss their economic ties and political potential. Leading a nation with a growing fiscal influence and swelling population helped Hu secure the runner-up position. "China has more people, more potential to be world-dominating than the United States does in the long run, but the United States still has the deadliest, largest military and is the world's reserve currency and has the largest economy," said Forbes managing editor Bruce Upbin. "I think Barack Obama still deserves to be No. 1. ... He was by a long shot." Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin earned the No. 3 ranking. Forbes, which created the list for the first time, scored its powerful candidates on the number of people each influence; their ability to project power; control of and access to finances' and how actively they wield power. Financial bigwigs, including Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke; Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page; and News Corp. chairman and Rupert Murdoch, also made the top 10. Pope Benedict XVI clocks in at No. 11, Osama bin Laden at No. 37 and Oprah Winfrey at No. 45 on a list that includes a 67-slot roster. ***** Forbes' "The World's Most Powerful People" list 1. Barack Obama, president, U.S. 2. Hu Jintao, president, China 3. Vladimir Putin, prime minister, Russia 4. Ben Bernanke, chairman, Federal Reserve 5. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders, Google 6. Carlos Slim Helu, chief executive, Telmex, Mexico 7. Rupert Murdoch, chairman, News Corp. 8. Michael Drake, chief executive, Wal-Mart Stores 9. Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, king, Saudi Arabia 10. Bill Gates, co-chairman, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 12 Nov 09 - 03:42 PM A telltale signature of consciousness has been detected that takes us a step closer to disentangling the brain activity underlying conscious and unconscious brain processes. It turns out that there is a similar pattern of neural activity each time we become conscious of the same picture, but not if we process information from the image unconsciously. These contrasting patterns of activity can now be detected via brain scans, and could one day help determine if patients with brain damage are conscious. They might even be used to probe consciousness in animals. "It's very exciting work," says neuroscientist Raphaël Gaillard of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. "The use of a reproducibility measure to disentangle conscious and non-conscious processes is genuinely new." Gaillard has previously shown that coordinated activity across the entire brain is one of the signatures of consciousness . Consistent signals So far, efforts to find a brain signature of consciousness have focused on the intensity of neural activity, how long it lasts, and whether signals tend to be synchronised across different regions of the brain. "We were looking for something other than the intensity and duration of the neural activity that characterises conscious neural processing," says Aaron Schurger of Princeton University in New Jersey, who led the new work. He and his colleagues hypothesised that when the brain is presented with the same sensory input – a picture, say – time after time, then conscious awareness of the picture should produce similar neural activity each time. Conversely, if the sensory input did not enter conscious awareness, it should produce different brain activity each time because there would be other subconscious processes going on at the same time. Invisible pictures To test this hypothesis, Schurger and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity in 12 volunteers who were asked to look at a series of images – some designed to elicit a conscious response, others a subconscious one. The researchers invoked conscious processing simply by showing volunteers pictures of faces or houses. To invoke subconscious processing, the researchers presented volunteers with so-called "invisible stimuli". These consist of two drawings, of either a house or a face, one shown to each eye. Crucially in each pair, one drawing is in pale orange on a pale green background, the other is the same drawing with the colours reversed. When the brain is confronted with such seemingly contradictory visual inputs it reconciles them by creating a yellow patch. So the volunteer consciously sees nothing but yellow, though the brain has subconsciously processed the face or house. Probing anaesthesia A set of fMRI recordings of subjects' temporal lobes backed up the team's hypothesis: each time a house or face was consciously processed by an individual, the resulting patterns in brain activity were similar. When the same image was processed subconsciously, the researchers found that the patterns of brain activity were much more variable. "Neural patterns were more reproducible when the drawings were seen consciously compared to when they were not," says Schurger. The team thinks that reproducibility – the replication of similar neural patterns in the brain each time it becomes conscious of the same sensory input – gives us clues as to what consciousness is. It could also be used in the future to tell if someone in a coma is conscious, or probe the consciousness of people under anaesthesia, something that also isn't well understood. (New Scntst) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 13 Nov 09 - 01:01 PM Posted in Space, 13th November 2009 17:04 GMT Free whitepaper – Dell PowerEdge server benchmarks The International Space Station's buggy urine-recycling unit has packed up again, according to reports. With the shuttle Atlantis due to visit shortly, temporarily boosting the number of people at the orbiting outpost to 12, it's feared that areas of the station may begin to fill up with containers of astronaut piss awaiting treatment. The crew of the ISS began drinking their own bodily wastes in May, following a troublesome deployment aboard the station for the quarter-billion-dollar water-replenishment system. The barrel-shaped Urine Processor Assembly in particular proved unreliable, at one point triggering a fire alarm and repeatedly breaking down. The golden barrel is critical for the smooth functioning of the station, however, as the ISS has now moved to operation with larger 6-person crews - and the US shuttle fleet is shortly to cease operation. The shuttles' fuel-cell power supplies produce clean water as an exhaust byproduct, which is then supplied to the orbital facility. Shipping water up from Earth is prohibitively expensive. Now Space.com reports that the buggy barrel, which has been serving up crystal-pure draughts of "yesterday's coffee" and keeping the station's (golden) showers supplied since May with only intermittent hiccups, has gone down again. The crowded ISS, with double the usual number of people aboard, will become even more confined as "urine bags" awaiting processing pile up. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 13 Nov 09 - 01:05 PM JUST months - that's how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated. Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or "Big Freeze". It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years. Until now, it was thought that the mini ice age took a decade or so to take hold, on the evidence provided by Greenland ice cores. Not so, say William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and his colleagues. The group studied a mud core from an ancient lake, Lough Monreagh, in western Ireland. Using a scalpel they sliced off layers 0.5 to 1 millimetre thick, each representing up to three months of time. No other measurements from the period have approached this level of detail. Carbon isotopes in each slice revealed how productive the lake was and oxygen isotopes gave a picture of temperature and rainfall. They show that at the start of the Big Freeze, temperatures plummeted and lake productivity stopped within months, or a year at most. "It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to Svalbard" in the Arctic, says Patterson, who presented the findings at the BOREAS conference in Rovaniemi, Finland, on 31 October. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 18 Nov 09 - 06:50 PM The First Religions Archaeologists excavating at Çatalhöyük, with embedded bull horns at lower left. "Imagine a great mound 70 feet high and about 750 feet wide, made up of mud-brick houses built on top of each other." That is how the archaeologist Ian Hodder of Stanford University describes the site known as Çatalhöyük (pronounced cha-tal-HU-yuk) in central Turkey. Hodder has been directing work at the Neolithic site since 1993, but over the past several years, with two major grants from the John Templeton Foundation, he has expanded his research. "We are doing something novel, bringing together people from related disciplines—anthropology, religious studies, philosophy, sociology—so that they can engage first-hand with the site, and interpret it based on their wider understanding of religion." Hodder estimates that there are some eighteen layers of rebuilt houses at Çatalhöyük, which dates back to approximately 7,500 B.C.E. Many of those layers are extraordinarily well preserved, with skeletons buried beneath the floors and parts of bears and bull horns attached to the walls. (For extensive photos of the site, click here.) Harvey Whitehouse, a social anthropologist at the University of Oxford and a member of the Çatalhöyük research team, calls the site a "time machine." Its inhabitants, he told the Templeton Report, were "all living on top of one another, literally." Every time they abandoned a house, they collapsed the walls onto the ground. "People knew where to go to find the skull of an ancestor under their floor." All of which is interesting not only from a historical point of view but from a religious one as well. As Hodder says, "When you have people who are removing skulls from their dead and keeping them, re-plastering them, painting them, and handing them down over generations, it's fairly clear that such evidence is about the spiritual." Hodder emphasizes that there is still a great deal that his team does not know about the people who lived at Çatalhöyük. "We don't have any names. We don't know what language they spoke. They were probably some form of early Indo-European, but they have no direct link with any people living today." The artifacts and pictorial evidence at the site do suggest, however, "a highly arousing major ritual" going on during the first half of Çatalhöyük's history. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 19 Nov 09 - 05:01 PM SALT LAKE CITY -- A fast-moving meteor lit up the night skies over most of Utah just after midnight Wednesday. Moments later, the phones lit up at KSL as people across the state called to tell us what they saw and ask what it was. Scientists are calling it a "remarkable midnight fireball." The source of all the excitement was basically a rock, falling from space. In addition to KSL, witnesses to the meteor quickly began call 911. "I'm currently driving, but I just saw a giant blue flash in the sky, and it came down into the city," a caller from Ogden said. A caller in Bountiful told dispatchers, "It flashed from the west, and it lit up the whole freakin' neighborhood." A Salt Lake City caller said, "Ma'am, I'm not kidding you. I am terrified." Professor David Kieda is chair of the University of Utah's astronomy department. He said the energy of the meteor coming into Earth's atmosphere was so powerful it has to be measured in Terawatts. "It's almost like the consumption of the United States all at once. It was a fraction of a second," Kieda said. When a meteor enters the atmosphere, it gives off a lot of heat and light. Folks at the Clark Planetarium say this rock was big--between the size of a microwave and washer-dryer unit. "I mean this thing lit up the sky, literally. It was like daylight." - Patrick Wiggins, NASA Solar Ambassador At exactly 12:07, people from all over the western United States watched as the bolide meteor crashed into Earth's atmosphere. In some areas, the flash of light was so bright it caused light-sensor street lamps to shut off. Clark Planetarium Director Seth Jarvis said the stony meteorite was probably traveling 80,000 miles an hour when it hit our atmosphere. He said it happened 100 miles up in the air; so despite the brightness, Utah was never in any danger. "These collisions can do damage, but they are extremely rare; and literally once in a century do you observe something that's actually doing damage," he said. Witness Andy Bailey said, "Oh, it lit up the whole sky, like almost brighter than the day. It was bright." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 19 Nov 09 - 05:18 PM Do not go to Europa, All these other worlds are yours. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 19 Nov 09 - 07:19 PM Scientists at Intel are working on developing sensors that would be implanted in a person's head in order to harness brain waves that could then be used to control computers, televisions, cell phones and other electronic equipment. Intel has already used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) machines to determine that blood flow changes in specific areas of the brain based on what word or image someone is thinking of. People tend to show the same brain patterns for similar thoughts. 'Eventually people may be willing to be more committed ... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts.' said Intel research scientist Dean Pomerleau." (Slashdot report) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 20 Nov 09 - 10:44 AM Well, this group of MIT grad students hooked up an oscilloscope and measured whether radio signals were blocked or attenuated. They found that, pretty much across the board, the change in signal amplitude was less than 10 deciBels, either in the positive or negative direction, for a very small overall change. However, there was an interesting thing that happened at just a few frequencies. In particular, at radio frequencies reserved for government use. Care to hazard a guess? Let's quote from the article: Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason. And they have graphs to back up their claims, too. Check out the reading from the oscilloscope: Oscilloscope Measurement I think the conclusion is pretty clear here. Listen to the music without your tinfoil hat, otherwise the government could influence what you're hearing! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 20 Nov 09 - 01:47 PM New Scientisat reports: "...Next time you catch a stranger's eye and feel a surge of attraction, here's something to ponder: is your ardour based partly on shared genetic ancestry? That's the intriguing question raised by a new study of Latino populations. A team led by Neil Risch and Esteban González Burchard of the University of California, San Francisco, took DNA samples from married couples in Mexican and Puerto Rican populations, examining around 100 genetic markers from across the genome. From these markers, the researchers were able to discern the proportions of Native American, European and African ancestry for each person. They found that within Mexican populations, people tended to pick partners with similar proportions of Native American and European ancestry, while in Puerto Rican populations couples had paired up based on their shared balance of European and African ancestry. The team also noted each person's socioeconomic profile to see if this explained their choice of partner as convincingly as ancestry did. But these factors couldn't explained the pairings. Sizing up What's more, the same patterns emerged for Mexicans living in the San Francisco Bay Area as for Mexicans in Mexico, and for Puerto Ricans in both Puerto Rico and New York. So presumably people had cued into subtle variations in appearance, behaviour and even odour. "I think it's fascinating," says Burchard. "People are sizing up their partners, maybe in subconscious ways." The tendency to seek genetically similar mates could confuse researchers searching for genes that affect our health in populations with mixed ancestry, warns Risch. This is because genetic markers that seem to be inherited along with a particular disease may simply be more common in a sub-group of the population in which that disease is more prevalent. It's not clear whether similar trends would be seen in less genetically varied populations, such as northern Europeans. But mate choice on the basis of ancestry may be a powerful factor for African Americans, who have a rich genetic heritage including variable amounts of European ancestry. Classic method Companies are already offering DNA tests to help people choose their partners, based on the idea that we prefer people with immune system genes that differ from our own. So can we expect DNA dating services to start trying to match people based on shared ancestry? Tamara Brown, who runs GenePartner, based in Zurich, Switzerland, says that her company has no immediate plans to introduce ancestry-based matching – although it is a possibility for the future. The researchers behind the new study are sceptical of DNA-based dating, however. "I prefer the classic method of just running into people while having a drink," says Marc Via, another member of the team...." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 20 Nov 09 - 03:30 PM MICHAEL NESMITH Artist, writer; Former cast member of "The Monkees"; A Trustee and President of the Gihon Foundation and a Trustee and Vice-Chair of the American Film Institute Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 20 Nov 09 - 04:03 PM A Bronx hospital and the city are really hearing it from a Bronx man whose ear was thrown in the garbage. Eduardo Garcia, 67, filed a lawsuit after emergency service workers tossed out his ear - which was ripped off by a dog - because they feared it was too risky to reattach it. "Now, he's got a deformity," said Garcia's lawyer, Andrew Friedman. "They deprived him of an opportunity to have treatment." A bull terrier belonging to Garcia's son bit off a large chunk of his upper ear on May 10, 2008, his lawyer said. Emergency workers packed the salvaged ear on ice in the ambulance, but when the ambulance arrived at Montefiore Medical Center, the EMS workers threw the ear in the trash, according to the suit filed in Bronx Supreme Court. Hospital records say the ear was tossed because of " the potential risk of contamination or infection" if it was reattached. Read more: here |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 22 Nov 09 - 09:52 AM New revelations of a big hole in the moon don't revive the notion that our cosmic companion is made of Swiss cheese. Instead, scientists say, the unusually proportioned feature is most likely a portal into an underground cavern that once held flowing lava. Analyses of high-resolution images taken by a moon-orbiting probe suggest that the 65-meter-wide, nearly circular feature is between 80 and 88 meters deep, says Carolyn H. van der Bogert, a planetary geologist at Westphalian Wilhelm's University Münster in Germany. Typical impact craters of this size, she notes, are less than 15 meters deep. Although the hole is located in a lunar province once home to widespread volcanic activity, a dearth of hardened lava around the hole indicates that it isn't a volcanic crater, she and her colleagues report in the Nov. 16 Geophysical Research Letters. The geology of the region also suggests that the hole isn't associated with a fault zone. The feature is likely what geologists refer to as a skylight, or collapsed portion of the roof of an underground tube that once held flowing lava, van der Bogert and her colleagues propose. If that's true, the skylight is the first such portal spotted on the moon. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 22 Nov 09 - 01:39 PM "Vital force is seen as powering the whole living world. To acquire it personally is the only sure avenue to success. Placide Tempels, in his seminal work on Bantu philosophy, tells us that for the Bantu "supreme happiness, the only form of good fortune is to possess the greatest possible amount of vital force, while the worst adversity and indeed the only real misfortune is to see a reduction in one's stock of this power." [5] Among the Baluba, vital force is referred to as 'muntu'. A powerful man is described as 'rnuntu mukulumpe', a man with a great deal of muntu; whereas a man of no social significance is referred to as a 'muntu mutupu', or one who has but a small amount of muntu. A complex vocabulary is used to describe all the changes that can affect a man's stock of muntu. All illnesses, depressions, failures in any field of activity are taken to be evidence of a reduction in this vital force and can be avoided only by maintaining one's stock of it. A man with none left at all is known as 'mufu'. He is as good as dead. [6] Tempels considers the same to be true of the Bantu in general. "The goal of all efforts among the Bantu", Tempels tells us, "can only be to intensify this vital force". And indeed, their customs only make sense if one interprets them "as a means of preserving or increasing one's stock of vital force". [7] Leopold Senghor, the poet, philosopher and former President of Senegal, considers that the goal of all religious ceremonies, all rituals and indeed of all artistic endeavour in Africa, is but "to increase the stock of vital force". [8] The same is true in Melanesia; so much so that, according to Codrington, "all Melanesian religion consists in getting this mana for oneself, or getting it used for one's benefit." [9] Vital force was not just accumulated by individuals; it is usually seen as flowing through the cosmos and concentrating in certain things and beings and in so doing, forming a pattern of power and hence of sanctity - a philosophy known as 'Hylozoism'. Paul Schebesta tells us that for the Pygmies of the Ituri forest in Zaire, vital force or megbe is spread out everywhere, but its power does not manifest itself everywhere with the same force nor in the same way. Certain animals are richly endowed with it. Humans possess a lot more of some types of megbe but less of other types. Able men are precisely those who have accumulated a lot of megbe: this is true of witch-doctors. [10]" From http://www.edwardgoldsmith.com/page181.html |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 22 Nov 09 - 02:06 PM from an L. L. Cavalli-Sforza paper, Genes, peoples, and languages. The correspondence between gene families and language families is clear. From the paper: Most patterns found in the analysis of human living populations are likely to be consequences of demographic expansions, determined by technological developments affecting food availability, transportation, or military power. During such expansions, both genes and languages are spread to potentially vast areas. In principle, this tends to create a correlation between the respective evolutionary trees. The correlation is usually positive and often remarkably high. It can be decreased or hidden by phenomena of language replacement and also of gene replacement, usually partial, due to gene flow. Genetic variation and languages are both characteristics of individuals & populations. One might imagine that gene flow between groups might be modulated by linguistic affinity between groups, or, linguistic affinity between groups might be modulated by gene flow between the groups. Cavalli-Sforza's colleague Marcus Feldman has asserted that the correlation does indeed emerge out of biases in mating patterns more explicitly of late. Language and genes are passed from parents to offspring. But, there are clearly differences in terms of the specific constraints on inheritance. When it comes to genes we have both the Mendelian abstraction as well as DNA as a concrete substrate. Parent-offspring transmission is symmetrical (from both parents), subject to mutation, segregation, recombination, etc. Though there are attempts to model language, to my knowledge there is not such robust theoretical understanding of the inheritance of language from parents to offspring, in particular the biological substrate which acquires language (I do not class the arguments about deep structure in linguistics in the same class as Mendelian and DNA models of genetics). Of course there is the reality of great differences in transmission of language and genes. In the domain of language horizontal transmission is critical to understanding its distribution & evolution (I am aware that horizontal gene transfer is important in biological evolution, but not so much in the scope and species we're talking about). One's parents may peak a different language because language acquisition and fluency is also dependent on peers in a way that genetic variation is not. Additionally, language transmission from parents need not be symmetrical, one may acquire the language of one parent but not the other. One may speak the same language as one's parents, but with a different accent (that one of one's peer group). Interestingly, the exception to this rule of accents are individuals with some socialization dysfunction, such as autism. There are also similarities between languages and genes. The molecular clock has its analogy in the lexical clock. There is also lexical admixture between languages, for example the heavy load of French-derived terms in modern English, the influence of Slavic upon the Baltic languages. A new paper in PLoS Biology leans on these last similarities to utilize the Structure framework to flesh out the relationships of the language of New Guinea & Australia, what was once "Sahul" during the last Ice Age. The author's summary from Explaining the Linguistic Diversity of Sahul Using Population Models:
From population genetics to linguistics : Gene Expression |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 23 Nov 09 - 12:46 PM GREENLAND lost 1500 cubic kilometres of ice between 2000 and 2008, making it responsible for one-sixth of global sea-level rise. Even worse, there are signs that the rate of ice loss is increasing. Michiel van den Broeke of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues began by modelling the difference in annual snowfall and snowmelt in Greenland between 2003 and 2008 to reveal the net ice loss for each year. They then compared each year's loss with that calculated from readings by the GRACE satellite, which "weighs" the ice sheet by measuring its gravity. The team found that results from the two methods roughly matched and showed that Greenland is losing enough ice to contribute on average 0.46 millimetres per year to global sea-level rise. The loss may be accelerating: since 2006, warm summers have caused levels to rise by 0.75 millimetres per year, though van den Broeke says we can't be sure whether this trend will continue (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1178176). Sea levels are rising globally by 3 millimetres on average. Half the ice was lost through melting and half through glaciers sliding faster into the oceans, the team says. "The study gives us a really good handle on how to approximate how much ice Greenland is going to lose in the coming century," says Ted Scambos of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 23 Nov 09 - 04:01 PM Rom Houbens was simply paralysed and had no way to let doctors caring for him what he was suffering. "I dreamt myself away," says Houben, now 46, who was misdiagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after a car crash. Doctors and nurses in Zolder deemed him a hopeless case whereby his consciousness was considered "extinct". The former martial arts enthusiast and engineering student was paralysed after a car crash in 1983. He was finally correctly diagnosed three years ago and his case has just come to light in a scientific paper released by the man who "saved" him. Doctors treating him regularly examined him using the worldwide Glasgow Coma Scale which judges a patient according to eye, verbal and motor responses. During every examination he was graded incorrectly. And so he suffered in silence, unable to communicate to his parents, his carers or the friends who came to his bedside that he was awake and aware at all times what was happening in his room. Only the re-evaluation of his case at the University of Liege brought to light that Houben was only paralysed all these years. Hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally. Therapy has now enabled him to tap out messages on a computer screen and he has a special device above his bed enabling him to read books while lying down. When he woke up after the accident he had lost control of his body, "I screamed, but there was nothing to hear," he says. "I became a witness to my own suffering as doctors and nurses tried to speak with me until they gave up all hope. "I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me – it was my second birth. All that time I just literally dreamed of a better life. Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt." The neurologist Steven Laureys who led the re-examination of Houben, published a study two months ago claiming vegetative state diagnosed patients are often misdiagnosed. "Anyone who bears the stamp of 'unconscious' just one time hardly ever gets rid of it again," he said. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 23 Nov 09 - 04:51 PM The Milky Way's neighbourhood may be teeming with invisible galaxies, one of which appears to be crashing into our own. In 2008, a cloud of hydrogen with a mass then estimated at about 1 million suns was found to be colliding with our galaxy. Now it appears the object is massive enough to be a galaxy itself. Called Smith's cloud, it has managed to avoid disintegrating during its smash-up with our own, much bigger galaxy. What's more, its trajectory suggests it punched through the disc of our galaxy once before, about 70 million years ago. To have survived, it must contain much more matter than previously thought, in order to provide enough gravity to hold it together. Calculations by Matthew Nichols and Joss Bland-Hawthorn of the University of Sydney, Australia, indicate that it has about 100 times the previously estimated mass (arxiv.org/abs/0911.0684). Many more such dark galaxies may be out thereMovie Camera, says Leo Blitz of the University of California, Berkeley. Simulations of galaxy formation suggest a galaxy the size of the Milky Way should feature about 1000 dwarf galaxiesMovie Camera, but only a few dozen have been found so far. Some of the missing dwarfs may be dark galaxies that are all but invisible, he says. (New Scientist) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 23 Nov 09 - 09:41 PM The cannon being pointed to it's object, or the place which it is intended to strike, the train is fired, and the flame immediately conveyed to the powder in the touch-hole, by which it is further communicated to that in the piece. The powder being kindled immediately expands so as to occupy a much greater space than when in grains, and thus dilated it makes an effort on every side to force itself out. The ball making less resistance than the sides of the piece, upon which the powder presses at the same time, is driven out by it's whole effort, and acquires that violent motion which is well known to the world. In plate VII. all the instruments necessary for charging cannon are exhibited. Besides these already described, there is the spunge, fig. 10. which is used to clean the piece after firing, and to extinguish any sparks that may remain behind. In the land-service, the handle of the spunge is nothing else than a long wooden staff; but in ships of war this handle, that usually contains the rammer at it's other end, is a piece of rope well stiffened by spun-yarn, which is for this purpose firmly wound about it. By this convenience the rammer becomes flexible, so that the piece is charged within the ship, as the person who loads it may bend and accommodate the length of the rammer to the distance between the muzzle and the ship's side; being at the same time sheltered from the enemy's musquctry, to which he would be exposed when using a wooden rammer without the ship. To spunge a piece therefore is to introduce this instrument into the bore, and thrusting it home to the furthest end thereof, to clean the whole cavity. The figures 8 and 9 represent spunges of a different kind; one of which is formed of sheep-skin, and the other of the strongest bristles of a hog. See the article EXERCISE. Plate VII The worm, of which there are also different kinds, fig. 6. and 9. is used to draw the charge when necessary. The bit, or priming-iron, is a kind of large needle, whose lower end is formed into a gimblet, serving to clear the inside of the touch-hole, and render it fit to receive the prime. The lint-stock is a kind of staff about three feet long, to the end of which a match is occasionally fastened to fire the piece. The fluctuating motion of the sea renders it necessary to secure and confine the artillery in vessels of war, by several ropes and pullies, which are called the gun-tackles and breechings, without which they could never be managed in a naval engagement. The breeching has been already explained, as employed to restrain the recoil. The tackles, fig. 18. are hooked to ring-bolts in the sides of the carriage, and to other ring-bolts in the side of the ship, near the edges of the gun-ports, and are used to draw the piece out into it's place after it is loaded. Besides these, there is another tackle hooked to the rear or train of the carriage, to prevent the cannon from rolling into it's place till it is charged: this is called the train-tackle, and is exhibited in fig. 17. In ships of war, the cannon of the lower-decks are usually drawn into the ship during the course of an expedition at sea, unless when they are used in battle. They are secured by lowering the breech so as that the muzzle shall bear against the upper-edge of the port, after which the two parts of the breeching are firmly braced together by a rope which crosses them between the front of the carriage and the port; which operation is called frapping the breeching. The tackles are then securely fastened about it with several turns of the rope extended from the tackle and breeching, over the chase of the cannon, as represented |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 24 Nov 09 - 04:43 PM C Street is home for "the Family" which is Christian evangelical assembly of Congressmen to advance their conservative ideas and a relgious state goverment agenda. Since the 1930's they have practiced a National Prayer breakfast which is now a deeply entrenched political religous ceremony designed to impress and entice people of great political influence. There are a few Democratic Congressmen who belong to the family but by in large it is a Republican entity. They have now achieved arguably their greatest coup of all. They have established a virtual Christian State Religion in Uganda through their efforts of courting an African politician since 1986. Their protoge' is now President. All the Congressmen involved are very proud. Inhoff states that his efforts in Africa are perhaps the greatest of all and that he is the greatesat friend of Africa. They take many trips to Uganda in US military planes to advise and over see the new National Prayer Breakfast of Uganda. The new legislation that the family have called upon the Ugandan President to support will be the ultimate test for all the Christian values that is currently considered to be most critical. And that would be the eradication of homosexuality in all its forms and abominations. To speak in support of homosexuality or related issues like gay marriage is to be punishable by fines and imprisonment up to and including life imprisonment. To fail to turn in people who are either gay or in support of gay issues are subject to prison sentences even if they fail to turn in thier own children or parents. Any sexual gay acts in combination with drugs or alcohol are forbidden under threat of life imprisonment. While debate to pass this law has encountered the inherent threat of violence against legislators and dissenters in Uganda there seems to be an air of a forgone conclusion that this will become the law of the land. US Congressmen who are part of the C Street family could not be more proud. Their developing plans for the criminalization of abortion in Uganda are expected to be even more Draconian. It will be interesting to see an entire country become a laboratory for every issue on the American Evangelical wish list to finally come true. (a snippet of what I heard on Fresh Air today, a program on npr that featured the author of the book C Street and the Family) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 24 Nov 09 - 10:05 PM Now for the first time, the most promising magic bullet yet—gene therapy—has been shown to safely improve vision in children and adults with rare retinal diseases that cause blindness. Penn husband-and-wife research team Albert M. Maguire and Jean Bennett have been examining inherited retinal degenerations together for nearly 20 years. Their study sought to improve vision in five children and seven adults with Leber's congenital amaurosis (LCA), which affects fewer than 2,000 people in the United States. The results even surprised them. "Children who were treated with gene therapy are now able to walk and play just like any normally sighted child," says Maguire, an associate professor of ophthalmology at Penn and a physician at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "They can also carry out classroom activities without visual aids." "It's a dream come true, really. We hope it's a cure. We'll have to wait for time to pass by to see if it is," says Bennett, the F.M. Kirby Professor of Ophthalmology at Penn's School of Medicine. Maguire and Bennett met when they were first-year medical students at Harvard. "We were dissecting partners in neuroanatomy. It was love over the hypothalamus," Bennett says. They've been married for 24 years. A shared desire to combine their unique skill sets in search of new cures for eye disease led them to begin collaborating professionally. "It was really fun. He'd come to my lab a couple of hours once a week and we'd work together, taking advantage of his surgical skills and whatever I'd concocted in the lab," Bennett says. "We tried really hard not to bring it home and make our kids listen to it over dinner. But I must confess—they had an unusual vocabulary when they were little, talking about things like electroretinograms." The roots of their scientific breakthrough reach back to the early 1990s, when scientists began unraveling the complex human genetic code and the idea of gene therapy moved from the realm of science fiction to the covers of medical journals."Twenty years ago, gene therapy was a pipe dream ... The ability to deliver genes stably and safely to the tissue didn't evolve until the late 1990s," Bennett says. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 25 Nov 09 - 04:13 PM So what would it take for humans to reach the stars within a lifetime? For a start, we would need a spacecraft that can rush through the cosmos at close to the speed of light. There has been no shortage of proposals: vehicles propelled by repeated blasts from hydrogen bombs, or from the annihilation of matter and antimatter. Others resemble vast sailing ships with giant reflective sails, pushed along by laser beams. All these ambitious schemes have their shortcomings and it is doubtful they could really go the distance. Now there are two radical new possibilities on the table that might just enable us - or rather our distant descendants - to reach the stars. In August, physicist Jia Liu at New York University outlined his design for a spacecraft powered by dark matter (arxiv.org/abs/0908.1429v1). Soon afterwards, mathematicians Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland at Kansas State University in Manhattan proposed plans for a craft powered by an artificial black hole (arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803). No one disputes that building a ship powered by black holes or dark matter would be a formidable task. Yet remarkably there seems to be nothing in our present understanding of physics to prevent us from making either of them. What's more, Crane believes that feasibility studies like his touch on questions in cosmology that other research hasn't considered. Fuel as-you-go Take Liu's dark matter starship. Most astronomers are convinced of the existence of dark matter because of the way its gravity tugs on the stars and galaxies we see with our telescopes. Such observations suggest that dark matter outweighs the universe's visible matter by a factor of about six - so a dark matter starship could have a plentiful supply of fuel. Liu was inspired by an audacious spacecraft proposed by the American physicist Robert Bussard in 1960. Bussard's "ramjet" design used magnetic fields generated by the craft to scoop up the tenuous gas of interstellar space. Instead of using conventional rockets, the craft would be propelled by forcing the hydrogen gas it collected to undergo nuclear fusion and ejecting the energetic by-products to provide thrust. Because dark matter is so abundant throughout the universe, Liu envisages a rocket that need not carry its own fuel. This immediately overcomes one of the drawbacks of many other proposed starships, whose huge fuel supply greatly adds to their weight and hampers their ability to accelerate. "A dark matter rocket would pick up its fuel en route," says Liu. A huge fuel supply hampers a spacecraft's ability to accelerate. Dark matter starships would avoid this His plan is to drive the rocket using the energy released when dark matter particles annihilate each other. Here's where Liu's idea depends on more speculative physics. No one knows what dark matter is actually made of, though there are numerous theories of the subatomic world that contain potential dark matter candidates. One of the frontrunners posits that dark matter is made of neutralinos, particles which have no electric charge. Neutralinos are curious in that they are their own antiparticles: two neutralinos colliding under the right circumstances will annihilate each other. If dark matter particles do annihilate in this way, they will convert all their mass into energy. A kilogram of the stuff will give out about 1017 joules, more than 10 billion times as much energy as a kilogram of dynamite, and plenty to propel the rocket forwards. Even less certain is the detail of how a dark matter rocket might work. Liu imagines the engine as a "box" with a door that is open in the direction of the rocket's motion (see diagram). As dark matter enters, the door is closed and the box is shrunk to compress the dark matter and boost its annihilation rate. Once the annihilation occurs, another door opens and the products rocket out. The whole cycle is repeated, over and over again. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 28 Nov 09 - 12:47 PM "The Bagobos of Mindanao, one of the Philippine Islands, offer a human sacrifice before they sow their rice. The victim is a slave, who is hewn to pieces in the forest. The natives of Bontoc in the interior of Luzon, one of the Philippine Islands, are passionate head-hunters. Their principal seasons for head-hunting are the times of planting and reaping the rice. In order that the crop may turn out well, every farm must get at least one human head at planting and one at sowing. The head-hunters go out in twos or threes, lie in wait for the victim, whether man or woman, cut off his or her head, hands, and feet, and bring them back in haste to the village, where they are received with great rejoicings. The skulls are at first exposed on the branches of two or three dead trees which stand in an open space of every village surrounded by large stones which serve as seats. The people then dance round them and feast and get drunk. When the flesh has decayed from the head, the man who cut it off takes it home and preserves it as a relic, while his companions do the same with the hands and the feet. Similar customs are observed by the Apoyaos, another tribe in the interior of Luzon. Among the Lhota Naga, one of the many savage tribes who inhabit the deep rugged labyrinthine glens which wind into the mountains from the rich valley of Brahmapootra, it used to be a common custom to chop off the heads, hands, and feet of people they met with, and then to stick up the severed extremities in their fields to ensure a good crop of grain. They bore no ill-will whatever to the persons upon whom they operated in this unceremonious fashion. Once they flayed a boy alive, carved him in pieces, and distributed the flesh among all the villagers, who put it into their corn-bins to avert bad luck and ensure plentiful crops of grain. The Gonds of India, a Dravidian race, kidnapped Brahman boys, and kept them as victims to be sacrificed on various occasions. At sowing and reaping, after a triumphal procession, one of the lads was slain by being punctured with a poisoned arrow. His blood was then sprinkled over the ploughed field or the ripe crop, and his flesh was devoured. The Oraons or Uraons of Chota Nagpur worship a goddess called Anna Kuari, who can give good crops and make a man rich, but to induce her to do so it is necessary to offer human sacrifices. In spite of the vigilance of the British Government these sacrifices are said to be still secretly perpetrated. The victims are poor waifs and strays whose disappearance attracts no notice. April and May are the months when the catchpoles are out on the prowl. At that time strangers will not go about the country alone, and parents will not let their children enter the jungle or herd the cattle. When a catchpole has found a victim, he cuts his throat and carries away the upper part of the ring finger and the nose. The goddess takes up her abode in the house of any man who has offered her a sacrifice, and from that time his fields yield a double harvest. The form she assumes in the house is that of a small child. When the householder brings in his unhusked rice, he takes the goddess and rolls her over the heap to double its size. But she soon grows restless and can only be pacified with the blood of fresh human victims. But the best known case of human sacrifices, systematically offered to ensure good crops, is supplied by the Khonds or Kandhs, another Dravidian race in Bengal. Our knowledge of them is derived from the accounts written by British officers who, about the middle of the nineteenth century, were engaged in putting them down. The sacrifices were offered to the Earth Goddess. Tari Pennu or Bera Pennu, and were believed to ensure good crops and immunity from all disease and accidents. In particular, they were considered necessary in the cultivation of turmeric, the Khonds arguing that the turmeric could not have a deep red colour without the shedding of blood. The victim or Meriah, as he was called, was acceptable to the goddess only if he had been purchased, or had been born a victim--that is, the son of a victim father, or had been devoted as a child by his father or guardian. Khonds in distress often sold their children for victims, "considering the beatification of their souls certain, and their death, for the benefit of mankind, the most honourable possible." A man of the Panua tribe was once seen to load a Khond with curses, and finally to spit in his face, because the Khond had sold for a victim his own child, whom the Panua had wished to marry. A party of Khonds, who saw this, immediately pressed forward to comfort the seller of his child, saying, "Your child has died that all the world may live, and the Earth Goddess herself will wipe that spittle from your face." The victims were often kept for years before they were sacrificed. Being regarded as consecrated beings, they were treated with extreme affection, mingled with deference, and were welcomed wherever they went. A Meriah youth, on attaining maturity, was generally given a wife, who was herself usually a Meriah or victim; and with her he received a portion of land and farm-stock. Their offspring were also victims. Human sacrifices were offered to the Earth Goddess by tribes, branches of tribes, or villages, both at periodical festivals and on extraordinary occasions. The periodical sacrifices were generally so arranged by tribes and divisions of tribes that each head of a family was enabled, at least once a year, to procure a shred of flesh for his fields, generally about the time when his chief crop was laid down. The mode of performing these tribal sacrifices was as follows. Ten or twelve days before the sacrifice, the victim was devoted by cutting off his hair, which, until then, had been kept unshorn. Crowds of men and women assembled to witness the sacrifice; none might be excluded, since the sacrifice was declared to be for all mankind. It was preceded by several days of wild revelry and gross debauchery. On the day before the sacrifice the victim, dressed in a new garment, was led forth from the village in solemn procession, with music and dancing, to the Meriah grove, a clump of high forest trees standing a little way from the village and untouched by the axe. There they tied him to a post, which was sometimes placed between two plants of the sankissar shrub. He was then anointed with oil, ghee, and turmeric, and adorned with flowers; and "a species of reverence, which it is not easy to distinguish from adoration," was paid to him throughout the day. A great struggle now arose to obtain the smallest relic from his person; a particle of the turmeric paste with which he was smeared, or a drop of his spittle, was esteemed of sovereign virtue, especially by the women. The crowd danced round the post to music, and addressing the earth, said, "O God, we offer this sacrifice to you; give us good crops, seasons, and health"; then speaking to the victim they said, "We bought you with a price, and did not seize you; now we sacrifice you according to custom, and no sin rests with us." On the last morning the orgies, which had been scarcely interrupted during the night, were resumed, and continued till noon, when they ceased, and the assembly proceeded to consummate the sacrifice. The victim was again anointed with oil, and each person touched the anointed part, and wiped the oil on his own head. In some places they took the victim in procession round the village, from door to door, where some plucked hair from his head, and others begged for a drop of his spittle, with which they anointed their heads. As the victim might not be bound nor make any show of resistance, the bones of his arms and, if necessary, his legs were broken; but often this precaution was rendered unnecessary by stupefying him with opium. The mode of putting him to death varied in different places. One of the commonest modes seems to have been strangulation, or squeezing to death. The branch of a green tree was cleft several feet down the middle; the victim's neck (in other places, his chest) was inserted in the cleft, which the priest, aided by his assistants, strove with all his force to close. Then he wounded the victim slightly with his axe, whereupon the crowd rushed at the wretch and hewed the flesh from the bones, leaving the head and bowels untouched. Sometimes he was cut up alive. In Chinna Kimedy he was dragged along the fields, surrounded by the crowd, who, avoiding his head and intestines, hacked the flesh from his body with their knives till he died. Another very common mode of sacrifice in the same district was to fasten the victim to the proboscis of a wooden elephant, which revolved on a stout post, and, as it whirled round, the crowd cut the flesh from the victim while life remained. In some villages Major Campbell found as many as fourteen of these wooden elephants, which had been used at sacrifices. In one district the victim was put to death slowly by fire. A low stage was formed, sloping on either side like a roof; upon it they laid the victim, his limbs wound round with cords to confine his struggles. Fires were then lighted and hot brands applied, to make him roll up and down the slopes of the stage as long as possible; for the more tears he shed the more abundant would be the supply of rain. Next day the body was cut to pieces. The flesh cut from the victim was instantly taken home by the persons who had been deputed by each village to bring it. To secure its rapid arrival, it was sometimes forwarded by relays of men, and conveyed with postal fleetness fifty or sixty miles. In each village all who stayed at home fasted rigidly until the flesh arrived. The bearer deposited it in the place of public assembly, where it was received by the priest and the heads of families. The priest divided it into two portions, one of which he offered to the Earth Goddess by burying it in a hole in the ground with his back turned, and without looking. Then each man added a little earth to bury it, and the priest poured water on the spot from a hill gourd. The other portion of flesh he divided into as many shares as there were heads of houses present. Each head of a house rolled his shred of flesh in leaves, and buried it in his favourite field, placing it in the earth behind his back without looking. In some places each man carried his portion of flesh to the stream which watered his fields, and there hung it on a pole. For three days thereafter no house was swept; and, in one district, strict silence was observed, no fire might be given out, no wood cut, and no strangers received. The remains of the human victim (namely, the head, bowels, and bones) were watched by strong parties the night after the sacrifice; and next morning they were burned, along with a whole sheep, on a funeral pile. The ashes were scattered over the fields, laid as paste over the houses and granaries, or mixed with the new corn to preserve it from insects. Sometimes, however, the head and bones were buried, not burnt. After the suppression of the human sacrifices, inferior victims were substituted in some places; for instance, in the capital of Chinna Kimedy a goat took the place of the human victim. Others sacrifice a buffalo. They tie it to a wooden post in a sacred grove, dance wildly round it with brandished knives, then, falling on the living animal, hack it to shreds and tatters in a few minutes, fighting and struggling with each other for every particle of flesh. As soon as a man has secured a piece he makes off with it at full speed to bury it in his fields, according to ancient custom, before the sun has set, and as some of them have far to go they must run very fast. All the women throw clods of earth at the rapidly retreating figures of the men, some of them taking very good aim. Soon the sacred grove, so lately a scene of tumult, is silent and deserted except for a few people who remain to guard all that is left of the buffalo, to wit, the head, the bones, and the stomach, which are burned with ceremony at the foot of the stake...." Frazier's Golden Bough 1922 |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 28 Nov 09 - 02:49 PM "Edmund Conway has an interesting article in the Telegraph where he analyzes where the money goes when you buy a complex electronic device marked 'Made in China,' and why a developed economy doesn't need a trade surplus in order to survive. For his example, Conway chooses a 30GB video iPod 'manufactured' in China in 2006. Each iPod, sold in the US for $299, provides China with an export value of about $150, but as it turns out, Chinese producers really only 'earned' around $4 on each unit. 'China, you see, is really just the place where most of the other components that go inside the iPod are shipped and assembled.' Conway says that when you work out the overall US balance of payments, it shows that most of the cash for high tech inventions has flowed back to the United States as a direct result of the intellectual property companies own in their products. 'While the iPod is manufactured offshore and has a global roster of suppliers, the greatest benefits from this innovation go to Apple, an American company, with predominantly American employees and stockholders who reap the benefits,' writes Conway. 'As long as the US market remains dynamic, with innovative firms and risk-taking entrepreneurs, global innovation should continue to create value for American investors and well-paid jobs for knowledge workers. But if those companies get complacent or lose focus, there are plenty of foreign competitors ready to take their places.'" |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 09 - 10:50 AM The Muppets and Bohemian Rhapsody is a world class nostalgia piece. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 09 - 11:26 AM Canaries That Hear Poor Songs As Juveniles Nevertheless Sing Rather Normal Songs As Adults ScienceDaily (June 3, 2009) — Many songbirds learn their songs early in life from a role model. In the absence of an appropriate tutor, they develop an improvised song that often lacks the species-typical song structure. However, male canaries even learn to sing normal songs when they were exposed as juveniles to tutors that lacked the features of normal canary song, as researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology have now found out. The learning of birdsong resembles the learning of speech in humans. Crucial for the process are acoustic perception and the ability to produce sound. Social isolation leads to a disturbed vocal development both in humans and in birds. When children grow up without contact to other humans they either develop no or a rudimentary form of human language. A similar scenario occurs in songbirds when juveniles are removed from their parents and are raised apart from the song of conspecifics. Although these birds develop song, it usually contains abnormalities. Whether the descendants of such birds accept these abnormal songs of their parents as a song model was investigated by researchers around Sandra Belzner and Stefan Leitner from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen on domesticated canaries. The researchers established a group of "poor"-singing tutors by raising young canaries in isolation from adult males but in contact with peers and females. When these poor singers later on sired offspring, the adult males were removed only after juveniles had reached the age of 60-70 days and thus had started song development already. Detailed song analysis showed that the juveniles did not simply copy the bad songs of their tutors, but rather developed a version that resembled more the song of normal canaries. "Apparently these birds possess an innate template for species-specific song that needs to be activated by hearing song", says Cornelia Voigt, co-author of the study. When the researchers introduced the male offspring in their second year of life to normally singing canary males, they found that their songs did not contain any changes. Only the syllable repetition rate had slightly increased, which means, their songs became faster. "This result is particularly interesting, as it shows that the juveniles, by hearing their tutors, had completed their song development after the first year. The song quality of the tutors only played a minor role during this process", concludes Stefan Leitner. In contrast, birds that do not hear songs as juveniles delay the closure of their song development phase and still make corrections when hearing a suitable model later in life". |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 09 - 12:09 PM GENEVA – The world's largest atom smasher broke the record for proton acceleration Monday, sending beams of the particles at 1.18 trillion electron volts around the massive machine. The Large Hadron Collider eclipsed the previous high of 0.98 1 TeV held by Fermilab, outside Chicago, since 2001, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, said. The latest success, which came early in the morning, is part of the preparation to reach even higher levels of energy for significant experiments next year on the make-up of matter and the universe. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 09 - 12:22 PM "How to deal with what is happening? Search for rhythms and patterns. Man is dead. The analysis moves from the study of fixed entities that are capable of ownership to the transaction of the species with environmental forces. Look to the transaction. The world about us is accessible only through a nervous system, and our information concerning it is confined to what limited information the nervous system can transmit.* The brain receives information and acts on it by telling the effectors what to do. The loop is completed as the performance of the effectors provides new information for the brain. It is a new feedback loop, a nonlinear relationship between output and input. Man always dealt with what had already happened, believing that it occurred in the present instant. What he thought was happening coincides approximately between steps two and three of the loop. Man was aware only of the past, and never aware of the activities of his brain, where there are order and arrangement, but there is no experience of the creation of that order. Experience gives us no clue as to the means by which it is organized. If the organization were produced by a slide rule or a digital computer, consciousness would give no indication of that fact nor any basis for denying it. If the brain is capable of producing such organization, then it may be considered the organizer...." Excerpt from "By The Late John Brockman" |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 09 - 02:53 PM "We can say, what should the vacuum energy have been? We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, just using what we know about quantum field theory, the fact that there are virtual partials popping in and out of existence. We can say, there should be a certain amount of vacuum energy. The answer is, there should be 10112 ergs per cubic centimeter. In other words, 10120 times as much is the theoretical prediction compared to the observational reality. That is an example where we say the universe isn't natural. There is a parameter of the universe, there is a fact about the universe in which we live — how much energy there is in empty space — which doesn't match what you would expect, what you would naively guess. This is something a lot of attention has been paid to in the last 10 years or even before that, trying to understand the apparently finely tuned nature of the laws of physics. People talk about the anthropic principle and whether or not you could explain this by saying that if the vacuum energy were bigger, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Maybe there is a selection effect that says you can only live in a universe with finely tuned parameters like this. But there is another kind of fine tuning, another kind of unnaturalness, which is the state of the universe, the particular configuration we find the universe in — both now and at earlier times. That is where we get into entropy and the arrow of time. This is actually the question that I am most interested in right now. It's a fact about the universe in which we observe that there are all sorts of configurations in which the particles in the universe could be. We have a pretty quantitative understanding of ways you could rearrange the ingredients of the universe to make it look different. According to what we were taught in the 19th century about statistical mechanics by Boltzmann and Maxwell and Gibbs and giants like that, what you would expect in a natural configuration is for something to be high entropy, for something to be very, very disordered. Entropy is telling us the number of ways you could rearrange the constituents of something so that it looks the same. In air filling the room, there are a lot of ways you could rearrange the air so that you wouldn't notice. If all the air in the room were squeezed into one tiny corner, there are only a few ways you could rearrange it. If air is squeezed into a corner, it's low entropy. If it fills the room, it's high entropy. It's very natural that physical systems go from low entropy, if they are low entropy, to being high entropy. There are just a lot more ways to be high entropy. If you didn't know any better, if you asked what the universe should be like, what configuration it should be in, you would say it should be in a high entropy configuration. There are a lot more ways to be high entropy — there are a lot more ways to be disorderly and chaotic than there are to be orderly and uniform and well arranged. However, the real world is quite orderly. The entropy is much, much lower than it could be. The reason for this is that the early universe, near the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago, had incredibly low entropy compared to what is could have been. This is an absolute mystery in cosmology. This is something that modern cosmologists do not know the answer to, why our observable universe started out in a state of such pristine regularity and order — such low entropy. We know that if it does, it makes sense. We can tell a story that starts in the low entropy early universe, trace it through the present day and into the future. It's not going to go back to being low entropy. It's going to be compliant entropy. It's going to stay there forever. Our best model of the universe right now is one that began 14 billion years ago in a state of low entropy but will go on forever into the future in a state of high entropy. " From A Conversation with Sean Carroll, physicist. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 09 - 03:00 PM On Egypt's northern coast, where the Nile delta meets the sea, there once stood two cities of such wealth and grandeur that they were famous throughout the ancient world. Today, their remains lie buried beneath a shallow bay. Around 500 BC, the ports of Herakleion and Eastern Canopus were thriving trade centres, the gateways into Egypt for Greek ships passing down the Nile. These cities were also important religious centres, their temples attracting thousands of pilgrims each year. Yet until recently, almost all that was known about them came from ancient texts. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote in the 5th century BC that they looked like the islands of the Aegean, but set amid a marsh. Inspired by such accounts, French businessman and archaeologist Franck Goddio began surveying an area a few kilometres west of the Nile delta called Abu Qir Bay. Goddio has been running underwater excavations at nearby Alexandria since the early 1990s. But Abu Qir may yield even more exciting results. In 2000, Goddio revealed the discovery of two sets of ruins, including walls, temple remains, columns and statues, buried in sand under 7 metres of murky water. The first set of ruins lies 1.6 kilometres from today's coastline. In annual excavations there since 2000, Goddio's team has retrieved coins, amulets and jewellery from as far back as the 6th century BC. A slab of black granite (pictured above), inscribed with a tax edict, names the city as Heracleion and it is signed by Pharaoh Nectanebo I, who ruled from 380 to 362 BC. The team has also identified two temples, dedicated to the Greek hero Heracles and the god Amon (the Greek version of the Egyptian deity Amun). Just to the north of the Heracles temple, the divers discovered many bronze objects, which were probably dropped into an ancient waterway as offerings. "We have found ritual deposits made by the priests in quite precise places that were known only to them," says Goddio. "We feel as if we are penetrating to the heart of the ancient liturgy." A few kilometres away, the second set of ruins has been identified as Eastern Canopus. There, divers have discovered ceramics, parts of temple doors, coins with the profile of Cleopatra, who ruled Egypt in the 1st century BC, and a black granite shrine from the 4th century BC, dedicated by Nectanebo I, which boasts a series of astronomical and calendrical inscriptions. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 09 - 03:02 PM Port Royal, located at the mouth of Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, was once the biggest English colony in the New World, with a population of around 10,000. Much of its wealth came from pirates and privateers who attacked treasure ships heading back to Europe from the Spanish Main. The city's downfall came not from its loose morals but the fact that it was built on a sand spit (pictured right), less than a metre above the water table. When an earthquake struck the area just before noon on 7 June 1692, the tremors caused the sand to liquefy. "Buildings that were once on a solid foundation are now sitting on a liquid," says Donny Hamilton, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University in College Station. "A building can drop 15 feet straight down without any of the bricks in the floor being displaced." Two-thirds of the city sank into the harbour, killing 2000 people that day. Hamilton led a series of excavations at the site between 1981 and 1990. Eel grass now coats the harbour floor, overlaying a thick layer of dead coral deposited by a hurricane in 1744. This covered the buildings, preserving many of them intact - multi-storey brick houses and shops interspersed with shabbier earth constructions, which once lined bustling streets of sand. Their contents reveal life as it was the moment the disaster hit. In one home, "we found stacks of pewter plates, iron skillets, charcoal in the hearth, knives, spoons and forks", says Hamilton. "And we found three children under the walls." Perhaps the most dramatic find at Port Royal, though, dates from an expedition in the 1960s: a pocket watch, its hands frozen at precisely 11:43 am. (New Scientist) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 09 - 04:02 PM But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human. The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help. When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in "Why We Cooperate," a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior. "It's probably safe to assume that they haven't been explicitly and directly taught to do this," said Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. "On the other hand, they've had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I think the jury is out on the innateness question." But Dr. Tomasello finds the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for teaching social rules. And helping behavior can even be seen in infant chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. For all these reasons, Dr. Tomasello concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something imposed by parents or culture. Infants will help with information, as well as in practical ways. From the age of 12 months they will point at objects that an adult pretends to have lost. Chimpanzees, by contrast, never point at things for each other, and when they point for people, it seems to be as a command to go fetch something rather than to share information. There ya go, Little Hawk. The REAL difference... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 09 - 09:37 PM her people's beliefs, according to new study published in the Nov. 30 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, led the research, which included a series of survey and neuroimaging studies to examine the extent to which people's own beliefs guide their predictions about God's beliefs. The findings of Epley and his co-authors at Australia's Monash University and UChicago extend existing work in psychology showing that people are often egocentric when they infer other people's beliefs. The PNAS paper reports the results of seven separate studies. The first four include surveys of Boston rail commuters, UChicago undergraduate students and a nationally representative database of online respondents in the United States. In these surveys, participants reported their own belief about an issue, their estimated God's belief, along with a variety of others, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Major League Baseball's Barry Bonds, President George W. Bush, and an average American. Two other studies directly manipulated people's own beliefs and found that inferences about God's beliefs tracked their own beliefs. Study participants were asked, for example, to write and deliver a speech that supported or opposed the death penalty in front of a video camera. Their beliefs were surveyed both before and after the speech. The final study involved functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the neural activity of test subjects as they reasoned about their own beliefs versus those of God or another person. The data demonstrated that reasoning about God's beliefs activated many of the same regions that become active when people reasoned about their own beliefs. The researchers noted that people often set their moral compasses according to what they presume to be God's standards. "The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing," they conclude. "This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing." But the research in no way denies the possibility that God's presumed beliefs also may provide guidance in situations where people are uncertain of their own beliefs, the co-authors noted. More information: Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs," Nov. 30, 2009, early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Nicholas Epley, Benjamin A. Converse, Alexa Delbosc, George A. Monteleone and John T. Cacioppo. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Dec 09 - 11:23 AM Last month, a murder trial was halted in Swansea after the Crown Prosecution Service accepted that Brian Thomas, a 59-year-old man from Neath in mid-Glamorgan, had not been aware of his actions when he killed his partner as he dreamed he was battling an intruder. One of those called as a defence witness for Mr Thomas was Dr Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Clinic and someone who has been involved in sleep research for more than 20 years. Tests carried out by Dr Idzikowski on the defendant confirmed that he suffered from night terrors and, as a result of this, he was in a state of "automatism" where his mind was not in control of his body when he strangled his partner. According to Dr Idzikowski, who lives in Dromore, Co Down, where he is also a co-director of the Sleep Assessment and Advisory Service in Lisburn, claiming to have attacked another individual while asleep has been a credible defence since medieval times. Moreover, he says it has long been common knowledge that some people can act violently towards others while having nightmares, but that this rarely makes it to court due to embarrassment on the part of those involved in such incidents, and because the attacks aren't usually serious enough to warrant medical assistance. (Irish Times) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Dec 09 - 01:20 PM John Cacappio of the University of Chicago and his colleagues reckon that loneliness can spread through society like an infection. Their study, published in this month's issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, draws on a large group of people living in a town in Massachusetts that had already been assigned as part of a heart health study. This group of around 5,000 were given questionnaires to assess their loneliness every four years or so, enabling the researcher to track any "spread" in this gloomy emotion. Cacappio reckons that if you're around lonely people, you're more likely to "catch" their loneliness. For example, for every day your next door neighbour is lonely, you're likely to experience around 5 hours of loneliness. The authors also come up with some interesting figures on the spread of loneliness. Perhaps it's obvious that having friends helps you avoid being lonely, but Cacioppo has put a number on the value of friendship: each friend you have apparently saves you from 2 days of loneliness a year. It's not only your friends and neighbours who can put you at risk, say the authors. In their paper, they say that you can even "catch" loneliness from your friend's friend's friend, through 3 degrees of separation. And the reason we aren't all lonely and miserable now is that we tend to drive lonely individuals out of society so they don't "infect" the rest of us, says Cacappio. Lonely people tend to cluster at the edges of their social groups as a result, shown graphically here. Chris Segrin, a behavioural scientist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study, agrees that lonely people were more likely to spend time together, and worsen each others' moods. "It's called emotional contingent, where I catch your mental state," he told ABC News. "If I'm hanging out with you and you're bringing me down, maybe what I need to do is think about a new circle of friends." Cacappio reckons that it is important to recognise loneliness before it spreads, because of the effects that the low feeling can have on health. Being lonely is thought to weaken your immune system, and Cacappio's previous research suggests that it can have the same effect on your blood pressure as smoking. Not everyone is excited about the implications of the study, though. Jason Fletcher, assistant professor of public health at Yale University, flagged concerns about the limitations of the study in an email to the Washington Post. Last year, Fletcher and Ethan Cohen-Cole warned fellow researchers that social network effects can be found very easily when environmental factors aren't fully acknowledged. In a study published in the British Medical Journal, the pair found that acne, headaches and even height seemed to have "network effects", spreading through social networks. These effects were insignificant, however, when environmental factors were accounted for. Cacappio's team all but dismiss these factors in their study. They think that the nature of a friendship makes a difference to the spread of loneliness, and that this rules out an effect of any shared lonely environment. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/12/the-loneliness-of-three-degree.html |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 01 Dec 09 - 01:34 PM The PEW Institute has released findings that we have about 1/3 fewer friends than our parents had. Virtual friends via internet connections was not seen as the cause of the decrease in "live" friendships. The average number of friends in American society stands at 2.1 down from 3.2 40 years ago. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Dec 09 - 01:48 PM I find that hard to believe. I have dozens. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Dec 09 - 03:05 PM "From Dostoyevsky to right-wing commentator Ann Coulter we are warned of the perils of godlessness. "If there is no God," Dostoyevsky wrote, "everything is permitted." Coulter routinely attributes our nation's most intractable troubles to the moral vacuum of atheism. But a growing body of research in what one sociologist describes as the "emerging field of secularity" is challenging long-held assumptions about the relationship of religion and effective governance. In a paper posted recently on the online journal Evolutionary Psychology, independent researcher Gregory S. Paul reports a strong correlation within First World democracies between socioeconomic well-being and secularity. In short, prosperity is highest in societies where religion is practiced least. Using existing data, Paul combined 25 indicators of societal and economic stability — things like crime, suicide, drug use, incarceration, unemployment, income, abortion and public corruption — to score each country using what he calls the "successful societies scale." He also scored countries on their degree of religiosity, as determined by such measures as church attendance, belief in a creator deity and acceptance of Bible literalism. Comparing the two scores, he found, with little exception, that the least religious countries enjoyed the most prosperity. Of particular note, the U.S. holds the distinction of most religious and least prosperous among the 17 countries included in the study, ranking last in 14 of the 25 socioeconomic measures. Paul is quick to point out that his study reveals correlation, not causation. Which came first — prosperity or secularity — is unclear, but Paul ventures a guess. While it's possible that good governance and socioeconomic health are byproducts of a secular society, more likely, he speculates, people are inclined to drop their attachment to religion once they feel distanced from the insecurities and burdens of life. "Popular religion," Paul proposes, "is a coping mechanism for the anxieties of a dysfunctional social and economic environment." Paul, who was criticized, mostly on statistical grounds, for a similar study published in 2005, says his new findings lend support to the belief that mass acceptance of popular religion is determined more by environmental influences and less by selective, evolutionary forces, as scholars and philosophers have long debated. In other words, we're not hardwired for religion. Paul also believes his study helps refute the controversial notion that the moral foundation of religious doctrine is a requisite for any high-functioning society - what he dubs the "moral-creator hypothesis."... David Villano writing in Miller McCune E-journal. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 01 Dec 09 - 07:08 PM A writer who said that we are indeed hard wired for religion, points to the hypothalamus as the seat of god consciousness in humans. I see little or no empirical evidence for this notion. As for the secular prosperity idea I do see a secular spreading of wealth as opposed to religion concentrating it, and in fairness, religions often doling out a portion of that wealth in highly publisized charities. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 02 Dec 09 - 11:09 AM December 2, 2009 12:45 PM Watch it live: dissection of famous brain Ewen Callaway, reporter In what must certainly be the world's first live, webcast brain dissection, scientists today will cut exceedingly thin sections of a human brain that fundamentally changed our understanding of memory. Henry Gustav Molaison - known as H. M. - lost much of a brain structure called the hippocampus during an operation in the 1950s. The procedure was meant to stop his epileptic seizures. However, the hippocampus is critical to memory formation, so the surgery left Molaison unable to form new long-term memories. The researchers who studied H. M. while he was still alive revolutionised neuroscience, by showing that the hippocampus was important for making some types of memories, but not others. H. M. could not remember day-to-day events, but he could learn new skills. Now, following H. M.'s death due to respiratory failure in 2008, scientists aim to get a much closer look at Molaison's brain. That's where the live dissection comes in. "The extraordinary value of H. M.'s brain is that we have roughly 50 years of behavioral data, including measures of different kinds of memory as well as other cognitive functions and even sensory and motor functions," Suzanne Corkin, a neuroscientist at MIT who is involved in the project, told The San Diego Union Tribune. "We know what he was able to do and not do. Our goal is to link his deficits to damaged brain areas and his preserved functions to spared areas." Watch the dissection live. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 02 Dec 09 - 02:22 PM A live dissection of a human brain. A live dissection of a 'dead' brain' I hope. If they had kept his brain alive for two years outside his body, now that would be a real horror story. Its being broadcast sonn due to the high demand to watch. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 03 Dec 09 - 10:29 AM Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade. For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world. The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture's visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta "goddess" figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society. New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of "civilization" status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe. The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, "The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.," which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display for the first time in the United States. The show will run through April 25. At its peak, around 4500 B.C., said David W. Anthony, the exhibition's guest curator, "Old Europe was among the most sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world" and was developing "many of the political, technological and ideological signs of civilization." NYT |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 03 Dec 09 - 06:47 PM The Birth of a Planet Courtesy Greaves, Richards, Rice & Muxlow At this moment, in the constellation Taurus, a planet is forming in the dust and debris surrounding the star HL Tau. The protoplanet, named HL Tau b, may be the youngest yet discovered. A team of British astronomers found HL Tau b when they noticed an extra-bright clump in a radio image of its parent star from the Very Large Array radio telescopes at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico. The young planet is believed to be only a few hundred thousand years old and 930 million miles in diameter. Because its parent star is still developing, the protoplanet won't condense into its final form—a ball of hydrogen and helium gas about the size of Jupiter called a gas giant—for at least another million years, says astronomer Anita Richards, a member of the research team. Further observations will help scientists learn how gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn formed in our own outer solar system. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 04 Dec 09 - 07:42 PM The Internet is massive. That's the 'no-duh' statement of the year, right? But seriously, the sheer volume of transactions (both economic and non-economic) is simply staggering. Consider a few factoids to give you a flavor of just how much is going on out there: In 2006, Internet users in the United States viewed an average of 120.5 Web pages each day. There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day. Social networking giant Facebook reports that each month, its over 300 million users upload more than 2 billion photos, 14 million videos, and create over 3 million events. More than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each week. There are also roughly 45 million active user groups on the site. YouTube reports that 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. Amazon reported that on December 15, 2008, 6.3 million items were ordered worldwide, a rate of 72.9 items per second. Every six weeks, there are 10 million edits made to Wikipedia. Now, let's think about how some of our lawmakers and media personalities talk about the Internet. If we were to judge the Internet based upon the daily headlines in various media outlets or from the titles of various Congressional or regulatory agency hearings, then we'd be led to believe that the Internet is a scary, dangerous place. That 's especially the case when it comes to concerns about online privacy and child safety. Everywhere you turn there's a bogeyman story about the supposed dangers of cyberspace. But let's go back to the numbers. While I certainly understand the concerns many folks have about their personal privacy or their child's safety online, the fact is the vast majority of online transactions that take place online each and every second of the day are of an entirely harmless, even socially beneficial nature. I refer to this disconnect as the "problem of proportionality" in debates about online safety and privacy. People are not just making mountains out of molehills, in many cases they are just making the molehills up or blowing them massively out of proportion. Go back to those Facebook numbers, for example. 300 million users uploading 2 billion pieces of content each week, plus 45 million user groups. Now, how many "incidents" do you hear about in the course of an entire year involving privacy and child safety on Facebook? A couple? A dozen? I doubt it's that many, but for the sake of argument, let's be preposterous and say the number of incidents is 10,000. Doing some quick math: 10,000 "incidents" divided by 2 billion pieces of content shared each week = 0.001% In other words, there would need to be hundreds of thousands of privacy or child safety "incidents" taking place on Facebook each week before one could legitimately claim the trend was statistically significant in proportion to the total volume of transactions. Of course, there's no way to be scientific about this since I can't crunch the numbers to get an exact calculation for Facebook or the entire Internet since it's hard to even define or collect info about online "incidents." And this is not to say there are never any incidents online where some harm might come to an individual or a child. Defining "harm" can be contentious, however, especially when it comes to what I regard as the conjectural theories about advertising or provocative media content "harming" us or our kids. Of course, others could claim that the sheer volume of information that we put online about ourselves is problematic for a variety of other reasons. The best argument about potential harm coming of all this information being online is that the sheer volume of data sharing and collection opens up the door to identify theft, or that some government agencies could get their hands on it and use it to do nasty stuff to us. That first problem can be a legitimate one, and deserves more attention and greater consumer education. But that latter problem should be addressed by putting more constraints on our government(s), not by imposing more regulations on the Internet. Government powers should be tightly limited when it comes to monitoring the habits of websurfers or collecting information about them. ... (Excerpt from an article on The Progress and Freedom Foundation. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 05 Dec 09 - 12:37 AM The incredible, unsustainable and insufferable Dark Side of Dubai. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 05 Dec 09 - 03:15 AM An international team of scientists that includes an astronomer from Princeton University has made the first direct observation of a planet-like object orbiting a star similar to the sun. The finding marks the first discovery made with the world's newest planet-hunting instrument on the Hawaii-based Subaru Telescope and is the first fruit of a novel research collaboration announced by the University in January. The object, known as GJ 758 B, could be either a large planet or a "failed star," also known as a brown dwarf. The faint companion to the sun-like star GJ 758 is estimated to be 10 to 40 times as massive as Jupiter and is a "near neighbor" in our Milky Way galaxy, hovering a mere 300 trillion miles from Earth. "It's a groundbreaking find because one of the current goals of astronomy is to directly detect planet-like objects around stars like our sun," said Michael McElwain, a postdoctoral research fellow in Princeton's Department of Astrophysical Sciences who was part of the team that made the discovery. "It is also an important verification that the system -- the telescope and its instruments -- is working well." Images of the object were taken in May and August during early test runs of the new observation equipment. The team has members from Princeton, the University of Hawaii, the University of Toronto, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in Tokyo. The results were released online Nov. 18 in an electronic version of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "This challenging but beautiful detection of a very low mass companion to a sun-like star reminds us again how little we truly know about the census of gas giant planets and brown dwarfs around nearby stars," said Alan Boss, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the research. "Observations like this will enable theorists to begin to make sense of how this hitherto unseen population of bodies was able to form and evolve." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 05 Dec 09 - 05:53 PM Perhaps you might feel an irony or a warm heart or a terrifying realization that roughly HALF (48%) of all the uranium fuel in US nuclear reactors today is from processed down uranium taken directly from Russian nuclear warheads that were originally designed to incinerate the USA. Misguided in light of other means for energy generation but it is progress in light of the alternative. |
