Archive for October, 2009
The Tiny German Village That Went Off the Grid
Jonathan Scheff writes in Discover Magazine:
In 1998, the gears began turning to convert Jühnde, a tiny village in Saxony, Germany, into a bioenergy hub that receives every bit of its electricity (and most of its heat) from biomass. The system went live in 2005, and its subsequent success has turned Jühnde into a celebrity in green circles, as well as a model for other bioenergy-seeking towns and cities.
This image shows Jühnde’s unique bioenergy plant, with its two domed fermentation silos. The biogas plant has caught the attention of international communities and organizations such as Reynolds, Indiana—a.k.a. BioTown, USA.
There are lots of photos in addition to the one shown here; review them all at Discover Magazine.
Why our brains will never live in the Matrix
In “Ghost in the Shell,” professor Athena Andreadis answers the question, “Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix,” contrasting “mind uploading” predictions with “the major stumbling block to personal immortality” — namely, that our biological software is inseparable from our hardware.
There’s practical problems. (”After electrochemical activity ceases in the brain, neuronal integrity deteriorates in a matter of seconds.”) But what we call “the mind” is also an artifact of a specific brain, and copying it “is an excellent way to leave a detailed memorial or a clone-like descendant, but not to become immortal.”
And besides, the professor argues, people visualizing an unending virtual life “invariably think of it in connection with themselves and those whom they like — choosing to ignore that others will also be around forever, from genocidal maniacs to cult followers, to say nothing of annoying in-laws or predatory bosses!”
Swine Flu Provides Foolproof Excuse for Getting Out of Just About Anything…
Melissa Dahl writes on MSNBC:
We’ve been told day after day that millions of Americans are going to be battered by the H1N1 virus this flu season — and now the germ is spreading so fast that even the nation’s top health officials have quit keeping track of the number of cases.
For a diabolical few, all of this raises the question: Who would ever know if you faked it?
After all, government officials — and even the president himself — have admonished us to stay home if we’re sick.
Companies and campuses across the country have been told to prepare for more sick days than usual; in fact, one flu-fearing county in Arizona has even told employees that they must stay home if they have a temperature of 100.4 degrees or higher, or they risk being fired.
And to make matters especially convenient for potential malingerers, we’ve been told to avoid the doctor’s office…
Secret Service Strained With Record Number of Threats
Bryan Bender writes in the Boston Globe:
The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service, according to government officials and reports, raising new questions about the 144-year-old agency’s overall mission.
The Secret Service is tracking a far broader range of possible threats to the nation’s leaders, the officials said, even as it also investigates financial crimes such as counterfeiting as part of its original mandate.
The new demands are leading some officials, both inside and outside the agency, to raise the possibility of the service curtailing or dropping its role in fighting financial crime to focus more on protecting leaders and their families from assassination attempts and thwarting terrorist plots aimed at high-profile events.
“If there were an evaluation of the service’s two missions, it might be determined that it is ineffective .…
Fast Internet Access Becomes a Legal Right in Finland
Saeed Ahmed writes on CNN:
Finland has become the first country in the world to declare broadband Internet access a legal right.
Starting last July, telecommunication companies in the northern European nation were required to provide all 5.2 million citizens with Internet connection that runs at speeds of at least 1 megabit per second.
The one-megabit mandate, however, is simply an intermediary step, said Laura Vilkkonen, the legislative counselor for the Ministry of Transport and Communications. The country is aiming for speeds that are 100 times faster — 100 megabit per second — for all by 2015.
“We think it’s something you cannot live without in modern society. Like banking services or water or electricity, you need Internet connection,” Vilkkonen said. Finland is one of the most wired in the world; about 95 percent of the population have some sort of Internet access, she said. But the law is designed to bring the Web…
Protests Against ‘Illegal Alien’ Costumes Have Driven Up Their Sales
Meredith Woerner writes on io9.com:
Immigrant rights activists are asking all Halloween retailers to stop supplying this controversial illegal alien costume — but the drama only seems to be improving their hype.
This adult Halloween costume shows an alien in a prison suit, holding a green card. Get it???!!!! The second illegal alien hat has a dark mustache and baseball cap over space alien features. And you can tell our space friends are pissed.
The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles explained that it had been receiving many complaints about the costume:
Jorge-Mario Cabrera, the director of communications for CHIRLA, said he initially thought the costume was a stab at harmless satire. But when he saw the Green Card, he realized it was an swipe at illegal immigrants.
Even though the costumes have been pulled from Target, the “drama” might be increasing the outfits attention. A Halloween costume supplier Ricky’s in NY commented…
The Daily Show’s Best ‘War on Drugs’ Moments
Matt Tobey writes on Comedy Central’s InDecision Forever:
Good news, hippies! President Obama will not be arresting medical marijuana users who comply with state laws. That’s right, the potheads are soon going to be roaming the streets, treating their cancer and glaucoma willy-nilly in some sort of warped Fear-and-Loathing-in-Las-Vegas-esque perversion of America where the sick are dealt with humanely and with reason. With that in mind, here are some of the best “War on Drugs”-themed clips from The Daily Show. Watch them with some of your kindest buds.
Enjoy the clips, one below and more on Comedy Central:
Scientists Predict the End of Aging By 2029
Spencer Kornhaber writes in OC Weekly:
Call it an anti-death panel. We just received a press release saying that the world’s top aging scientists will converge on Manhattan Beach from November 13 through 15 to figure out how to put off that whole getting-old-and-dying thing.
The scientists, supposedly, will “predict the end of aging by 2029.” Which sounds cool but … We’ll all be kinda old by then anyways. Couldn’t they get this thing done now?
The topics at the conference will include gene therapy, nanotechnology and, of course, “Organ Re-Growth and Transplantation.” Sound like science fiction? Well, yeah. They realize: “Technology has so rapidly caught up with us that what was once the domain of science fiction movies and novels is quickly becoming mainstream medicine. Medical scientists are rapidly perfecting techniques that will enable organs and tissues to be re-grown in a test tube and transplanted, without the need for powerful drugs…
Republicans Who Like Stalin
When someone quotes someone, the quote itself may be fine even if the person who said it was less than a perfect human specimen. For example, when the White House communications director recently quoted Mao Zedong, the roar of protest from conservatives was predictably deafening. Yes, Mao was responsible for the deaths of perhaps 50 to 60 million people, which is a crime which cannot be defended.
However, the quote itself — “You fight your war, and I’ll fight mine” — doesn’t seem all that controversial. If anything, the Mother Theresa quote, “Go find your own Calcutta,” spoken in response to someone asking how they could help her, sounds positively snippy. And unless the Republicans have forgotten, it was Richard Nixon who went to China, hung out with Mao, shook his hand, and engaged in diplomacy with this mass murderer. What would their reaction be today if President Obama personally went…
U.S. Government Says 47 Million Americans Below Poverty Line
MSNBC reports:
How should poverty in America be counted? The Census Bureau uses a calculation that put the number at 39.8 million last year. But a revised formula that lawmakers are considering adds more than 7 million Americans to that number.
If the revised formula is adopted, a more refined picture of American poverty could emerge that would capture the everyday costs of necessities besides food.
A change also could upend long-standing notions of those in greatest need and lead to shifts in how billions of federal dollars for the poor are distributed for health, housing, nutrition and child care.
The Census Bureau on Monday released national and regional estimates based upon the revised formula, as well as variations of the formula, because of the interest expressed by lawmakers and the Obama administration in seeing a fuller range.
The revised formula, based on recommendations from experts at the National Academy of Sciences, shows the poverty…
A New End of the World Date: Not 2012, Not 2036, Now it’s 2068!
Rachel Courtland writes in New Scientist that the asteroid Apophis, previously thought to be on course for impact with Earth in 2036, is now more likely to hit us in 2068. (As an aside, Alexandra Bruce writes about Apophis and other Near Earth Objects (NEOs) that we may like to worry about in the disinformation book 2012: Science or Superstition.) From New Scientist:
The chances of the asteroid Apophis hitting Earth in 2036 are lower than we thought. But those worried about deep impacts should add a new entry to their calendar: 2068.
When Apophis was first spotted in 2004, the 250-metre-wide rock was briefly estimated to have a 2.7 per cent chance of hitting Earth in 2029. Further observations quickly showed that it will miss Earth that year – but should it pass through a 600-metre-wide “keyhole” in space, it will return to hit Earth in 2036.
For the past several years, the…
For and Against Foreskin
In what might just might be the most comprehensive glossy magazine coverage devoted to foreskins ever, New York Magazine includes a slew of articles including:
- Would You Circumcise This Baby? Why a growing number of parents are saying no to the procedure.
- Anatomy of a Circumcision: What, precisely, does the procedure entail?
- What Your Sex Partners Think: Uncensored thoughts on the pros and cons of cut versus uncut lovers.
- One Man, Both Ways: The real difference, according to someone who’s been cut and uncut.
And, believe it or not, a whole lot more about foreskins. In New York Magazine…
Letters of Note: Hunter S. Thompson
From the great repository of correspondence Letters of Note:
The furious written rant concerned the movie adaptation of Thompson’s novel, The Rum Diary, to which Sorensen’s studio had acquired the rights. Progress had been slow and confused on their part. So slow in fact that Thompson reached boiling point.
Transcript
HOLLY SORENSON / Shooting Gallery / Hollywood / Jan 22 ‘01
Dear Holly,
Okay, you lazy bitch, I’m getting tired of this waterhead fuckaround that you’re doing with The Rum Diary.
We are not even spinning our wheels aggresivly. It’s like the whole Project got turned over to Zombies who live in cardboard boxes under the Hollywood Freeway… I seem to be the only person who’s doing anything about getting this movie Made. I have rounded up Depp, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, Nick Nolte & a fine screenwriter from England, named Michael Thomas, who is a very smart boy & has so far been a…
High-Fructose Corn Syrup Produces Toxic Chemical “HMF” When Heated
Mike Adams writes in NaturalNews:
If you know anything about the food supply, you know that honey bees are a crucial part of the food production chain. In the United States, they pollinate roughly one-third of all the crops we eat, and without them, we’d be facing a disastrous collapse in viable food production.
That’s why, when honey bees started to disappear a few years ago, scientists scrambled to find the root cause of the phenomenon, which has since been dubbed “Colony Collapse Disorder.”
The name is a bit of a misnomer, though. It’s not really a “disorder.” It’s more of a poisoning. Or at least that’s what we may be learning from new research that’s just been published in the ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
It’s been difficult, of course, trying to determine the cause of colony collapse disorder. Some of the suggested theories for explaining the phenomenon included chemical contamination…
WikiLeaks Is Overloaded By Global Interest
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you’ve got to hand it to the people who run WikiLeaks, they’re fearless. In Britain some of the most loathsome, violent modern day fascistic racists belong to the British National Party. As this report in The Guardian discusses, Wikileaks has published a detailed list of nearly 12,000 BNP members, showing names, addresses and phone numbers.
A great shame, then, that when you visit the Wikileaks site you only see this message:
WikiLeaks is currently overloaded by readers. This is a regular difficulty that can only be resolved by deploying additional resources.
They’re asking for financial help (details on the WikiLeaks site). Meanwhile, the Guardian report is worth reading:
A detailed membership list of the British National party containing names, addresses and telephone numbers was published on the internet this morning.
The list, which contains thousands of names, was published on WikiLeaks, a website that purports to be a clearing house for information to…
How The Internet Is Altering Our Brains
Fox News reports on a new UCLA study:
Adults with little Internet experience show changes in their brain activity after just one week online, a new study finds.
The results suggest Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.
As the brain ages, a number of structural and functional changes occur, including atrophy, or decay, reductions in cell activity and increases in complex things like deposits of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, which can impact cognitive function.
Research has shown that mental stimulation similar to the stimulation that occurs in individuals who frequently use the Internet may affect the efficiency of cognitive processing and alter the way the brain encodes new information.
“We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function,” Dr. Gary Small, study author and…
Noreena Hertz: The Economist We Need NOW
I’ve known Noreena Hertz most of my (and her) life. She’s always been my most mentally able friend. I don’t know what her IQ is, except that it’s off the charts. Her list of achievments at early ages is beyond prodigy. There was a risk, though, of going off the rails, and no doubt some of the more establishment politicians and economists thought that was exactly what she had done when she started writing and speaking about how the underpinnings of modern capitalist economies were unsustainable and inevitably heading towards massive crises.
Well she’s finally getting her dues, as this profile in Fast Company shows:
Not long ago, economist Noreena Hertz lived at the lefty margins of her field. But her (widely ignored) prediction of the credit crisis and her call for a more evolved form of capitalism have suddenly put her at the center of the universe.
Noreena Hertz had to seduce Bono…
Today’s Lesson in Operant Fascist Movements
From Black Sun Gazette
I don’t want to go into a huge thing right now. My feelings on American fascism have been addressed here frequently. But I did want to bring to everyone’s attention The Oath Keepers. Comprised largely of former military and police officers (rut-roh, Shaggy!) they use the most American symbolism possible and couch their opposition to legitimately elected civilian government in (what else) “Constitutionalism.”
Robot built with a human brain
British researchers created a robot controlled by cultured rat neurons. And now they’re now using a line of human brain neurons to control their robots!
As the video shows, the neurons are placed onto a multi-electrode dish that registers the neurons’ electric signals. “Every time the robot nears an object, the electrodes generate signals to stimulate the brain. In response, the brain’s output is used to drive the wheels of the robot left and right so that it avoids hitting objects. The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer — its sole means of control is from its own brain.”
