Archive for May, 2010
Scientist Says Obama Administration Policy Contributed To Gulf Coast Spill
Rick Steiner, a former professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Alaska, told the World Socialist Web Site that lack of regulation was responsible for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He sharply criticized the response of the Obama administration, saying that its energy policy was identical to that of the Bush administration.
Are Humans Really Beings Of Light?
Dan Eden for viewzone.com (at mondovista.com):
I get lots of suggestions for stories, and I really appreciate them. But some of them are too good to be true. An example of this was a story of a giant human skeleton — maybe 40 feet tall — that was discovered by a Russian archaeological team. The story had photos and links accompanying it and looked promising. But when the links were researched they went in a circle. Each link used the other link as the source. Finally the elements of the photos turned up and we recognized a good Photoshop job had fooled everyone.
I had this same experience this week when I was sent an article where a Russian (again) scientist, Pjotr Garjajev, had managed to intercept communication from a DNA molecule in the form of ultraviolet photons — light! What’s more, he claimed to have captured this communication from one organism…
Congressman Paul Discusses The Crisis In Greece
Congressman Ron Paul discusses the crisis in Greece with Megyn Kelly, and how it relates to the United States.
A Critical Look At The Personal Development Industry
Beyond Growth – Technoccult interviews Duff McDuffee and Eric Schiller:
Duff: Ok. Well, from what I understand it largely emerged in the early 20th century when New Thought religious ideas became popular and were applied to worldly success. The basic idea was contained in such books as Think and Grow Rich and As a Man Thinketh.
The notion was that you could create stuff with the power of your mind. The correlary is that if you aren’t getting what you want, you need to do a kind of mental hygeine and clean up your stinkin’ thinkin’ (to quote Zig Ziglar).
So you have people like Napolean Hill, who died broke by the way, writing books on how to get rich by visualizing and affirming one’s future wealth.
Eric: In Douglas Rushkoff’s book Life Inc. he argues that ‘personal development’ or self help found its place in corporations, in order to help the remaining staff become more efficient…
Researchers Build Evolving Brain Computer
“We have mimicked how neurons behave in the brain,” announces an international research team from Japan and Michigan Tech. They’ve built an “evolutionary circuit” in a molecular computer that evolves to solve complex problems, and the molecular computer also exhibits brain-like massive parallel processing!
“The neat part is, approximately 300 molecules talk with each other at a time during information processing…
Voyager 2 Stops Making Sense
Voyager 2 is nearly a billion miles away from the Earth right now, so repairs are a little out of our reach. Let’s hope the folks at JPL can fix these communications problems. Ars Technica reports:
Voyager 2, which has been traveling through the solar system since the late ’70s, has suffered a data formatting glitch that is preventing NASA from interpreting the content of its scientific data transmissions.
Control and diagnostic transmissions are unaffected, which should enable the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to troubleshoot the problem, provided they’re patient — it currently takes nearly 13 hours for transmissions from Earth to catch up with the probe.
According to a statement released by the JPL, the problem first became apparent on April 22nd. Data from the scientific transmission, which currently reports on the conditions at the very edge of the solar system, began coming through with improper formatting, making it impossible to…
U.S. Army Marches On Red Square (Photo)
Don’t worry, they’re just celebrating the 65th anniversary of our two countries’ tag team victory over the Nazis! Wired reports:
Source: U.S. Army Europe, via Flickr
This weekend marks the 65th anniversary of V-E Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe. In Russia, and other countries of the former Soviet Union, May 9 marks the capitulation of Nazi Germany. Victory Day (День Победы) is a major public holiday there, vested with almost sacred meaning.
But this year’s military parade in Red Square is particularly unusual: It’s the first time active-duty U.S. troops have been invited to march in the ceremony. Pictured here are soldiers of Co. C, 2nd Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, part of the 170th Brigade Combat Team, in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. They took part in the parade as part of a contingent of troops from the nations that defeated Hitler.
[Read more at Wired]
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Uncover ‘Hidden Wisdom’ With Tim Wallace-Murphy
Below is the first five chapters of Tim Wallace-Murphy’s new book Hidden Wisdom: The Secrets of the Western Esoteric Tradition available on Scribd. Here’s a quick bit about the book:
From Egyptian mythology to Jewish mysticism, Rome and Greece to the Druids and the Gnostics, Tim Wallace-Murphy exposes a fascinating lineage of hidden mysteries and secret societies, continuing through the Templars, Rosicrucians and Freemasons to our modern visionaries. This hidden stream of spirituality and that of sacred knowledge are inseparably entwined to form the single most important continuous strand in the entire Western esoteric tradition.
This tradition exerted a seminal influence on the thinking of the builders of the great cathedrals, leading teachers in ecclesiastical schools, on philosophers, playwrights and poets such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Blake and W. B. Yeats, on artists and renaissance giants such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. It is also the root from which sprang alchemy and modern…
Bill Gates Funding Weather Control Technology
Photo: Severin Nowacki (CC)
Sounds like something a comic-book super-villain would do, and Bill Gates certainly has the money to be one. Ben Webster writes in the Times:
The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.
The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate. They believe that the weak outcome of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen means that emissions will continue to rise unchecked and that the world urgently needs an alternative strategy to protect itself from global warming.
Many methods of cooling the planet, collectively known as geoengineering,…
Albinos Killed in Burundi for Belief That ‘Good Luck’ is Brought by Body Parts
Photo: Muntuwandi (CC)
Tom Odula writes on the AP:
Attackers in Burundi chopped off the limbs of a 5-year-old albino boy and pulled out his mother’s eye, killing them over the belief that their body parts would bring wealth and success, human rights activists said Friday.
Those deaths and other recent attacks in Tanzania are part of long pattern of violence against African albinos. At least 10,000 have been displaced or gone into hiding since attacks against them spiked in late 2007, the International Federation of the Red Cross says.
Since then, 57 albinos have been killed in Tanzania and 14 in Burundi, said Vicky Ntetema with the rights group Under The Same Sun.
The killings are fueled by superstitious beliefs that human albino body parts will bring others wealth and success, Ntetema said.
“Body parts are sought for their supposed miraculous powers,” she said. “Some use them as human sacrifice as advised by witch doctors.”
Read…
Chavez Uses State Funds to Hire 200 Staffers to Manage Twitter Account
Chavez may be a bit loony, but he does live in 21st century. This article from The Raw Story might be just the job posting you are looking for.
Photo: Valter Campanato/ABr (CC)
Just days after his new Twitter account became a must-read in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez said he was setting up a special office with 200 staff and public funds to handle requests supporters Tweet him.”I’ve created my own Chavezcandanga mission to answer (the messages) and we’re even going to create a fund for the mission to provide many things that are now missing and that are urgent,” Chavez said late Saturday during a televised cabinet meeting.
He said the public fund will be used to make the most needed improvements in the country that his followers bring to his attention, such as in the health care and housing sectors.
Chavez late last month opened his Twitter account and it quickly took top…
The Legendary Athens Greece Riot Dog
How long before Riot Dog starts appearing on t-shirts?
Will Shale Gas Rock the World?
Will the recent discovery of untapped shale gas resources be a boon for the world, or another cancer on the environment? WSJ reports, with perhaps too much optimism:
Photo: Ruhrfisch (CC)
There’s an energy revolution brewing right under our feet.
Over the past decade, a wave of drilling around the world has uncovered giant supplies of natural gas in shale rock. By some estimates, there’s 1,000 trillion cubic feet recoverable in North America alone—enough to supply the nation’s natural-gas needs for the next 45 years. Europe may have nearly 200 trillion cubic feet of its own.
We’ve always known the potential of shale; we just didn’t have the technology to get to it at a low enough cost. Now new techniques have driven down the price tag—and set the stage for shale gas to become what will be the game-changing resource of the decade.
I have been studying the energy markets for 30 years, and I…
‘The Daily Show’ on Britain’s Hung Parliament, Unwritten Constitution and Lack of a Prime Minister (Video)
John Oliver is great in this clip. God Save The Queen! Via The Daily Show:
Great Britain has a ludicrously arcane system for breaking electoral ties where the Queen appoints one of her Corgis as interim prime minister.
‘Zombie’ Satellite Wreaking Havoc In Earth Orbit
Didn’t know there were zombie satellites? Now you do, courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor:
An attempt to shut down the electronics payload of the out-of-control communications satellite Galaxy 15 has failed, leaving the satellite – which ceased responding to ground commands last month – still in its uncontrolled “zombiesat” drift toward orbits occupied by other spacecraft, the satellite’s fleet operator Intelsat said Tuesday.
Galaxy 15 is closing in on the geostationary orbital slot occupied by another C-band satellite, the AMC-11 spacecraft operated by SES World Skies, and with its stuck-on communications payload will be in a position to cause potentially severe interference with the SES satellite during a two-week period starting around May 23, according to Intelsat and SES estimates.
The unsuccessful attempt to shut down the so-called “zombiesat” – a satellite industry term for failed satellites in orbit – occurred on Monday.
In a Tuesday statement in response to Space News inquiries,…
New York City Studying London’s Surveillance Network
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg was supposed to show up at the CBS Early Show today, where my kid and others from his soccer team were invited to talk about the FIFA World Cup. We wondered why he wasn’t there, and now we know: he was in London learning all about the surveillance capital of the world’s methods of spying on its citizens. Via AP/Yahoo News:
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is in London to observe the network of security cameras on the city’s transport system.
Bloomberg was shown around a closed-circuit television facility at Westminster Underground station by London Mayor Boris Johnson on Tuesday.
There are 12,000 cameras on London’s subway system, and city officials tout their role in combating crime and terrorism.
Bloomberg has expressed enthusiasm for London’s network of security cameras, one of the world’s largest.
The surveillance “ring of steel” around London’s central business district was the inspiration for a 3,000-camera…
Chemical Dispersants Being Used in Gulf Clean-Up Are Potentially Toxic
Tom Philpott writes for Grist:
We finally know the main two dispersants that BP and the U.S. government are using to treat the ongoing Gulf spill.
Both, by their maker’s own admission, have the “potential to bioconcentrate,” and both have “moderate toxicity to early life stages of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks,” according to a study by Exxon, the company that originally developed them.
Their use may be the least-bad course, given the importance of minimizing oil’s effect on coastal wetlands. But a little digging into the chemical makeup of these two substances, which are being dumped in vast quantities into the Gulf, reveals that they could potentially do far more harm than good, both to the Gulf and to humans who later eat from it.
As ProPublica reported Monday, information about dispersants is “kept secret under competitive trade laws.” I’ve spent the last several days trying to confirm what many in the ocean-ecology and public health…
Lifestyles of the Rich and Clueless
Nick Pell at the Black Sun Gazette responds to Alexa Von Tobel’s article urging people to go a day without spending:
I don’t like what the ruling class of this country do. They lead oppressive, imperialist wars while driving down the living standards of an increasingly disenfranchised working class.
However, nothing quite gets my goat like the nouveau riche elements that make up the upper middle class. If you’ve ever heard me talk about it, or are just curious why anytime a well-to-do celeb chimes in on some topic they’ve gleaned illumination from atop their penthouse apartment it makes me rage hard, this recent article at HuffPo will explain it.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll retch on your shoes when you read the first three sentences.
What would be it like to go a day without spending any money? I’ve thought about this before but I’ve never considered actually trying it. I couldn’t imagine going…
Beneath the Surface: Nashville’s Flood of 2010
Almost completely ignored by the national media (eg. CNN’s big headline on May 3 was — and I cringe — “Catastrophic” Flood Being Ignored?, which was just an iReport), the flood destroyed thousands of homes and killed at least 34 people.
This is a first-hand account, posted on “Confessions of a CyberCasualty”:
JoeBot, "Disaster Tourist" (Photo: Andrew Edman)
The rain came on May Day without mercy, drenching Middle Tennessee for nearly two days. The downpour finally let up on Sunday — May 2 — immediately drawing disaster-tourists with cameras in hand.
I join them downtown on 1st Avenue, by the Cumberland River. The water marker reads 47′, and it’s climbing fast. Gawkers gather around to document the progress.
The riverfront stage is completely submerged at this point, but that doesn’t stop the show. We all watch an endless parade of municipal trashcans, propane tanks, dock stairs, basketballs, and uprooted trees floating down the river. Massive clumps of branches and…
