Archive for June, 2009
Water Should Be a Human Right
Brandon Keim, WIRED: Water, water everywhere, and you’re entitled to a drop. As scientists warn that the world’s fresh water supplies will soon run critically short, and companies scramble to privatize them, some researchers and activists say water should be considered a basic human right.
“Access to clean water, which is essential for health, is under threat,” write the editors of Public Library of Science Medicine in an essay published Monday. In terms of intellectual coherency, the idea passes muster. Water’s just as essential to life as food, which makes an appearance in Article 25 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
As of now, the World Health Organization estimates that inadequate water is responsible for nearly one-tenth of the world’s disease burden, and that six percent of all deaths could be prevented by universal access to safe drinking water and better sanitation.
Of course, it’s a lot easier to declare a…
Two Augmented Reality Technologies That Are About To Change The World
Annalee Newitz, io9.com: Augmented reality is a technology futurists and scifi authors like Vernor Vinge have been talking about for decades. Now the tech has matured and is entering the market. Two videos of new products show you the near future.
In a nutshell, what augmented reality does is provide you with an information overlay for your daily life. In Vinge’s latest novel Rainbows End, the sci-fi author and computer scientist imagines a world where everybody has computers networked into their glasses and clothing. These wearable computers allow people to do things like google information straight into their eyeballs while chatting on the street corner — or project a map overlay on the street in front of them, labeling every store. Or turn the local vacant lot into a wonderland filled with Pokemon characters ready to do battle. This is an augmented reality scenario.
Now our technology can actually do this, using…
Mythbuster Adam Savage Tweets His Way Out of $11,000 Bill
KI MAE HEUSSNER, ABC News: What would you do if you opened up your cell phone bill to face a dizzying five-digit charge? You might do well to follow Mythbuster Adam Savage’s lead.
When the host of the Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters” learned he had rung up $11,000 in charges from AT&T while in Canada, he headed straight for Twitter. The culprit, he tweeted, was the USB modem plugged into his laptop that was running on a wireless plan suitable for the U.S., but not for Canada.
“AT&T is attempting to charge me 11k for a few hours of web surfing in Canada. Pls RT!,” he posted to his Twitter feed Friday. Later, he wrote, “Almost forgot: Hey AT&T! I will fight this bull****.”
Still later, he added, “They’re claiming I uploaded/downloaded 9 million kilobytes (9 gigs) while in Canada. Frakking impossible.”
Before too long, thanks to many of his 50,000 followers, ‘AT&T’ became a…
Why Junk Food Really Is Addictive
Disinformation Note: More on this in the documentary KILLER AT LARGE:
Ben Leach, Telegraph: Snacks, cereals and ready meals can trigger the brain in the same way as tobacco, according to the former head of America’s food standards watchdog.
Professor Kessler, ex-commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), claims that manufacturers have created combinations of fat, sugar and salt that are so tasty many people cannot stop eating them even when full.
He argues that manufacturers are seeking to trigger a “bliss point” when people eat certain products, leaving them hungry for more.
“It is time to stop blaming individuals for being overweight or obese,” he said. “The real problem is we have created a world where food is always available and where that food is designed to make you want to eat more of it. For millions of people, modern food is simply impossible to resist.”
While at the FDA, Prof Kessler was…
Woman Kills Self to Avoid Eviction, Tweets Just Before Death
Eric Barton, Broward Palm Beach New Times: Here’s a story that brings home just how morbid this housing crisis can be: Heather Newnam of Tamarac shot herself yesterday instead of letting cops evict her for failing to pay her rent.
It’s a depressing tale, but perhaps what’s more depressing is reading what amounts to Newnam’s final public words on her Twitter account. Writing under the name rsangel04, bits of Newnam’s life played out in her posts. Then she seemed to foretell her own death in this final post at 7:04 p.m. on June 24. She sent this from her cell phone:
Rich get richer, poor get poorer, families on the street, govt doesn’t care. God bless the usa, but can He save it?
What’s even sadder is that previous posts seem to show Newnam in a better place, talking about going to the tattoo convention and watching the TV show Rescue Me. The…
McCain Adviser Called Palin ‘Little Shop of Horrors’
RAW Story: It’s well known that there were tensions between Arizona Sen. John McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin last year during their presidential run, but a new article in Vanity Fair magazine sheds light on just how serious the rift between the two camps was.
According to the article, former McCain campaign staffers suffer from a collective “survivor’s guilt” over the problem-plagued choice of Palin as vice-presidential candidate. The friction between McCain and Palin was so intense that it carried over into election night, when Palin wanted to address the Arizona crowd to whom McCain was to give his concession speech. After much back-and-forth wrangling, Palin didn’t speak that night.
But trouble had been brewing long before that. Over the course of the campaign, one close friend of McCain’s who frequently traveled with him on the trail was purportedly “heard to refer to Palin as ‘Little Shop of Horrors.’”
McCain campaign members, in…
World Problems Solved by NASA/Google ‘Singularity University’?
Ray Kurzweil answered questions at the NASA Ames Research Center for the first day of Singularity University, in an “intimate conversation” where he argued the existing IT tools for disruptive change could address the problems of humanity. (Example: using nanotechnology to harness solar power or build housing in the third world.) Backed by Google and NASA, the university ultimately had 1400 students applying for just 40 spots.
Founder Peter Diamandis explained their “benign conspiracy”, saying they were chosen because they were 1) smart, 2) leaders, and 3) interested in solving big issues. Kurzweil agreed, saying “What we’re trying to create here is a new community that will sustain itself after it’s separated
physically.” Also speaking: the president of the International Space University, saying “it’s these teams that make the world a better place, so that we can leave our cradle.”
And Kurzweil noted the wisdom of crowds harnesses inate emotional wisdom, saying the same…
Minnesota Decision: Al Franken Won, Supreme Court Says
ST. PAUL, Minn. — The Minnesota Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered that Democrat Al Franken be certified as the winner of the state’s long-running Senate race.
The high court rejected a legal challenge from Republican Norm Coleman, whose options for regaining the Senate seat are dwindling.
Justices said Franken is entitled to the election certificate he needs to assume office. With Franken and the usual backing of two independents, Democrats will have a big enough majority to overcome Republican filibusters.
Coleman hasn’t ruled out seeking federal court intervention.
Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, said the earliest Franken would be seated is next week because the Senate is out of session for the July 4th holiday.
Coleman’s appeal hinged largely on whether thousands of absentee votes had been unfairly rejected by local election officials around the state.
The unanimous court wrote that “because the legislature established absentee voting as an optional method…
High Court Won’t Hear Claims vs Saudi Arabia
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to allow victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to pursue lawsuits against Saudi Arabia and four Saudi princes over charitable donations allegedly funneled to al-Qaida.
The court, in an order Monday, is leaving in place the ruling of a federal appeals court that the country and the princes are protected by sovereign immunity, which generally means that foreign countries cannot be sued in American courts.
The Obama administration had angered some victims and families by urging the justices to pass up the case.
Before You Assume Cops Have The Most Dangerous Job …
CNN.COM – Nationwide, most employees have a miniscule chance of being killed at work. There were just four fatal occupational injuries per 100,000 workers in the United States in 2005, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That, of course, is just the average. For some workers — soldiers in combat, for example — every day is a life-threatening one. But on the domestic front, the most dangerous jobs are less obvious.
Statistically speaking, farmers — with a fatality rate of 41.1 — are more than twice as likely to die on the job than police officers (18.2) and nearly four times more likely to be killed at work than firefighters (11.5).
A New Saint in Annapolis, Maryland?
The treatment for terminal cancer that Annapolis resident Mary Ellen Heibel took at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 2004 and early 2005 worked beyond anyone’s wildest hopes, wiping out malignant tumors in her lungs, liver, stomach and chest. Her doctor did not expect it, nor could he explain it.
Surely the outcome was remarkable, but was it – in the sense applied by the Roman Catholic Church in such cases – a miracle?
In a few weeks, a committee appointed by the Archdiocese of Baltimore will begin exploring that question, examining 11 witnesses, including Heibel, pressing her doctors, nurses and friends in an attempt to understand what happened. The findings gathered at the archdiocese’s downtown offices will be shipped to Rome, and ultimately will bear on a campaign to have Francis X. Seelos, the 19th-century Maryland priest to whom Heibel had turned in prayer for help, canonized as a saint.
For only the fifth…
Swedish Software Firm Acquires The Pirate Bay For $7.7 Million
Techcrunch reports: Swedish software firm Global Gaming Factory X this morning announced it has agreed to buy file-sharing service The Pirate Bay for 60 million Swedish crowns (which currently converts to approx. $7.7 million). In addition, GGF has entered into an agreement to acquire the shares in Peerialism, a software technology company that develops solutions for data distribution and distributed storage based on new p2p technology.
The transaction is scheduled to be closed in August 2009. The Pirate Bay has confirmed the news.
Virtual Reality/Technology/Transhumanist Pioneer … Michael Jackson?
The most unusual response to Michael Jackson’s death comes from the editor of the transhumanist magazine H+, arguing Jackson’s refusal to accept his original physical body make him an early stop on humanity’s technological quest to transcend the human form altogether. “[H]e is a signpost on the road to post-humanity. I believe the future will study him from that perspective, and in some odd way, it will learn from his many mistakes.”
Of course, with the Neverland Ranch, Jackson lived in a sort of virtual reality, but there’s also his “defiance of his biological limitations in terms of his transformation of his inherited features.” (”In More Than Human, Ramez Naam predicted that during the next decade, we will be able to genetically alter our skin colors – and this would not necessarily be limited to the usual boring choices…”) Even Jackson’s style crossed gender boundaries, and he had an obvious fascination with…
Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix
Mark Frauenfelder, BoingBoing: I get about three or four review books in the mail every day. Very few interest me, but once in a great while I get a gem of a book, and Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix is one of them.
There have been a few histories of underground comics as of late, but this is the first one to really focus on the artwork of underground comics, as opposed to their cultural significance, which most histories cover. That’s not to say the book doesn’t look at the era in which these comics were made — it does, but it’s first an foremost an art book.
Most of the pages are devoted to high quality scans of original art by all the usual suspects — R. Crumb, Rand Holmes, Vaughn Bode, Robert Williams, William Stout, Art Spiegelman, Gilbert Shelton, Trina Robbins, Jay Kinney, and the rest.I love seeing…
Where Did Madoff’s Missing Billions Go?
Ian Griffiths, Guardian: One of the biggest mysteries of the Madoff affair is what happened to all the money. Federal investigators involved in tracking Madoff’s missing billions are not even sure how much they are looking for. The amount ranges from estimated losses suffered by investors of $13bn to the $70bn which Madoff has accepted was attributable to his unlawful activities.
So far Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee of Madoff’s collapsed firm, has recovered just $1.2bn on behalf of investors. It is a small return for a six-month investigation that involved the US justice department, the financial regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission, Picard’s office and the US marshals.
If Picard is to narrow the gap between asset recovery and escalating investor losses, it now seems likely that he will have to focus more on those who did business with Madoff rather than rely on tracking down his personal assets.
Although those assets…
Africa Alone Could Feed The World
New Scientist: DOOM-MONGERS have got it wrong — there is enough space in the world to produce the extra food needed to feed a growing population. And contrary to expectation, most of it can be grown in Africa, say two international reports published this week.
The first, projecting 10 years into the future from last year’s food crisis, which saw the price of food soar, says that there is plenty of unused, fertile land available to grow more crops.
“Some 1.6 billion hectares could be added to the current 1.4 billion hectares of crop land [in the world], and over half of the additionally available land is found in Africa and Latin America,” concludes the report, compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
If further evidence were needed, it comes in a second report, launched jointly by the FAO and the World Bank.…
Bill O’Reilly’s Argument For Abolishing Freedom Of The Press
KingOneEye, DailyKos: Once again, Bill O’Reilly has proven that what he said two years ago regarding his lack of journalistic standards is still true:
In his most recent editorial, O’Reilly has exposed both his ignorance and his appreciation for officially-sanctioned speech. It should come as no surprise that the top “personality” on the Fox Propaganda Network would harbor such notions given their reputation as the media mouthpiece for the Republican Party.
The column began by thoroughly misrepresenting the philosophy of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson. While any free-thinking observer of the press would keep a watchful eye on the media and retain their right to criticize it, O’Reilly flatly states that Jefferson “didn’t much like the press.” However, the truth is that Jefferson regarded the press as an essential component of a free society. He said:
“…were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without…
Giving Up My iPod For a Walkman
BBC News Magazine: When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.
My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day. He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book. When I saw it for the first time, its colour also struck me. Nowadays gadgets come in a rainbow of colours but this was only one shade — a bland grey.
So it’s not exactly the most aesthetically pleasing choice of music player. If I was browsing in a shop maybe I would have chosen something else. From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is…
