Archive for October, 2010
And So It Begins: Mysterious Illnesses Appearing Along the Gulf Coast
Map of the northern Gulf of Mexico showing the nearly 4,000 active oil and gas platforms.. Source: NOAA
Dahr Jamail reports for Al Jazeera:
Injected with at least 4.9 million barrels of oil during the BP oil disaster of last summer, the Gulf has suffered the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. Compounding the problem, BP has admitted to using at least 1.9 million gallons of widely banned toxic dispersants, which according to chemist Bob Naman, create an even more toxic substance when mixed with crude oil. And dispersed, weathered oil continues to flow ashore daily.
Naman, who works at the Analytical Chemical Testing Lab in Mobile, Alabama, has been carrying out studies to search for the chemical markers of the dispersants BP used to both sink and break up its oil.
According to Naman, poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from this toxic mix are making people sick. PAHs contain compounds that have been identified…
DARPA Continues to Refine the Art of Surveillance
DARPA is developing another successor to Total Information Awareness. Dubbed ADAMS (Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales), the project aims to sift through billions of military emails to recognize an immanent threat — homocide, suicide, or intelligence leaks. Wired’s Danger Room and CNN cover the project from different angles:
(Wired) The military is scrambling to identify disgruntled or radicalized troops who pose a threat to themselves or their buddies. So the futurists at Darpa are asking for algorithms to find and pre-empt anyone planning the next Fort Hood massacre, WikiLeaks document dump or suicide-in-uniform.
This counterintelligence-heavy effort isn’t Darpa’s typical push to create flying Humvees or brainwave-powered prosthetic limbs. But the Pentagon’s far-out R&D team has made other moves recently to hunt down threats from within.
The idea behind the Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales, or Adams, effort is to sift through “massive data sets” to find the warning signs of looming homicide, suicide or other destructive behavior. “The focus is on malevolent…
Jimmy Page Meets William Burroughs In New York City
The following is excerpted from LZ-’75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 American Tour. Copyright © 2010 by Stephen Davis. Reprinted by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
The long black limousine carrying Jimmy Page to his encounter with William Burroughs made its way down Fifth Avenue in a light snowfall. The car stopped in front of 77 Franklin Street in a dark, shabby neighborhood of vacant or abandoned industrial lofts that were slowly being reclaimed by young artists and urban pioneers. Jimmy was greeted at street level by James Grauerholz, Burroughs’s young assistant, who led Page up four steep flights of stairs to Burroughs’s loft. The sixty-one- year-old writer, dressed in a coat and tie set off by an embroidered Moroccan vest, extended his hand and offered his guest a cup of tea, which Page happily accepted. Also on hand was a photographer to…
Mr. Spock Is Now A Legal Authority in Texas
Wow, Texas just became a lot more … logical. And picking the best film from the original series, nice touch. (You’ll find the scene referred to in this ruling at about two minutes into the clip below.) Great find from Charlie Jane Anders on io9.com:
The wisdom of Spock has guided us all for years, but now it’s enshrined in Texas law. Ruling on the limits of police power, the Texas Supreme Court quoted from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Ruling in Robinson vs. Crown Cork Seal Company (PDF), Justice Don Willett writes:
Appropriately weighty principles guide our course. First, we recognize that police power draws from the credo that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Second, while this maxim rings utilitarian and Dickensian (not to mention Vulcan), it is cabined by something contrarian and Texan: distrust of intrusive government and a belief that police power is justified only by urgency, not expediency.
And there’s this footnote after the word Vulcan:
See STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (Paramount Pictures 1982). The film references several works of classic literature, none more prominently than A Tale of Two Cities. Spock gives Admiral Kirk an antique copy as a birthday present, and the film itself is bookended with the book’s opening and closing passages. Most memorable, of course, is Spock’s famous line from his moment of sacrifice: “Don’t grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh . . .” to which Kirk replies, “the needs of the few.”
Obama’s Trauma
From Open Left:
I’m a great believer in overdetermination. Virtually nothing in human affairs has a single cause. So nothing in this diary is meant to disparage, diminish or trivialize other factors. There are all sorts of socio-political reasons for Obama’s obsessive and equally fruitless mania for “consensus.” Corporate power has grown so enormously over the past 40 years that it’s grown far more daunting to oppose it straight-out, and this, in turn has given rise to a welter of reasons not to do so-not to mention the entire Versailles political culture that finds such opposition quite literally unthinkable.
But there’s more to Obama than simply going along with the political tides. There’s also the vast pretense of doing no such thing-of being someone who brings sweeping changes … by seeking consensus with the titanic forces of the status quo. Contradictions such as this should also be understood as being primarily generated…
Answers To The Chupacabra Mystery
The mythical Chupacabra has long been a favorite of fans of cryptozoology, but the attraction of this fearsome beast may fade if biologist Barry O’Connor is right about its true origins, reported in Discovery News:
Halloween stories about the ghostly “chupacabra” circulate every year, but now scientists have solved the mystery surrounding this legendary animal.
Instead of being vicious, fanged creatures that supposedly drink the blood of livestock, chupacabras turn out to be wild dogs inflicted with a deadly form of mange, according to University of Michigan biologist Barry OConnor.
The myth about chupacabras, also known as goatsuckers, started after reports of livestock attacks in Puerto Rico and Mexico, where dead sheep were discovered with puncture wounds, completely drained of blood. Similar reports began accumulating from other locations in Latin America and the U.S. Then came sightings of evil-looking animals, variously described as dog-like, rodent-like or reptile-like, with long snouts, large fangs, leathery or scaly…
Arkansas School Official Posts Anti-Gay Facebook Rant
While every school board member has the right to their own opinions and religious beliefs, it does not need to be posted on Facebook. Then again, the first amendment condones this behavior. The Washington Post reports:
A member of a northern Arkansas school board, commenting on campaign to get people to wear purple to show support for bullied gay and lesbian youth, purportedly posted on Facebook that the only way he would wear purple is “if they all commit suicide.”
The Arkansas Department of Education on Wednesday condemned the alleged posting by Midland School Board member Clint McCance.
The Advocate, a magazine that reports about gay issues, first reported about the posting on its website. The Facebook page has been disabled, but The Advocate posted a screen grab of the purported postings that it says someone forwarded to it.
McCance’s alleged posting was in response to a Facebook campaign that asked supporters to wear purple…
Why Jay-Z Uses Occult Imagery
Is Jay-Z an occultist? Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation, says “No” at BigThink.com:
He’s a genius who has a very shrewd eye for kind of oppositional imagery in our culture. And he uses these things and he understands the magnetism of these symbols. You know, symbols like the pentagram and the eye in the pyramid or astrological symbols, they do have a certain magnetic power. They have a pull on us. When people look at a crucifix or when people look at a Star of David, they feel something. There’s some kind of pull. It may just be a matter of conditioning, but the fact is, when you use the eye in the pyramid, it’s a magnetic symbol. It possesses something.
And I think when you’re using imagery that comes from the ancient world or that comes from Renaissance-era occultism, there is a little something going on there…
Cell Phone Time Traveler In Charlie Chaplin Film?
With the DVD release of Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 film The Circus, people have noticed a puzzling detail: a woman passing through the background of this scene appears to be speaking on a cellphone. Could she be a time traveler? The whole thing is even more unsettling than Chaplin’s toothbrush mustache.
Graham Hancock Presents: Elves, Aliens, Angels & Ayahuasca (Video)
Graham Hancock’s first stop on his 2010 North American book tour (for his novel Entangled) was Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Georgia. On opening night he presented his lecture “Elves, Aliens, Angels and Ayahuasca” at Eyedrum. The Disinformation Company videotaped the lecture and is pleased to present it in full for those of Graham’s readers not close to tour stops or who were otherwise unable to attend. Make no mistake, the live lectures with Question and Answer sessions are the real deal, but we hope you’ll enjoy this video nonetheless (please excuse the low lighting). For more information about his ideas and the book visit Entangledthebook.com.
The Science of the Wet Dog Shake
Scientists have finally decoded the mystery of the infamous wet dog shake! Kelly Ryan of the Herald Sun reports:
It’s not the length of the hair, it’s the size of the hound that determines how fast it has to shake to get dry.
Scientists have worked out the optimum amount of shaking that dogs and other animals have to do to dry themselves after a soaking…
‘Hundred Year Starship’ Readying For Sending Humans To Settle New Worlds
Artist concept of a Hundred Year Starship. Credit: NASA
It sounds totally sci-fi, but NASA appears to be serious about sending humans off into space to establish colonies without any hope of returning to Earth, per this report in the Daily Mail:
NASA is planning an audacious mission to send a manned spacecraft on a one-way trip to permanently settle on other planets. The ambitious idea is known as the Hundred Years Starship and would send astronauts to colonise planets like Mars, knowing they could never come home.
NASA Ames Director Pete Worden revealed that one of NASA’s main research centres, Ames Research Centre, has received £1million funding to start work on the project. The research team has also received an additional $100,000 from Nasa.
‘You heard it here,” Worden said at ‘Long Conversation,’ an event in San Francisco. ‘We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund.’ He…
Sneezing Monkey Species Discovered In Myanmar
It’s kind of hard to believe that a monkey that sneezes when it rains could have remained unknown until now, but apparently the Burmese snub-nosed monkey Rhinopithecus strykeri is new to scientists, if not hunters. BBC News reports:
A new species of monkey with unusual upturned nostrils has been discovered in north eastern Myanmar.
Scientists surveying in the area initially identified the so-called snub-nosed monkey from skin and skulls obtained from local hunters. A small population was found separated from the habitat of other species of snub-nosed monkeys by the Mekong and Salween rivers. The total population has been estimated at just 260-330 individuals.
A team of Burmese and international primatologists identified the new species of snub-nosed monkey during this year’s Myanmar Primate Conservation Program. Local hunters reported the presence of a monkey which did not match any description of species previously identified in the area.
After further investigation in the north eastern state of Kachin,…
Christian Creationism, Krishna Creationism, and the Origin of the Human Species
[The following is an excerpt from The Forbidden Archeologist: The Atlantic Rising Columns of Michael A. Cremo, reprinted with kind permission of the publisher, Torchlight Publishing.]
For a long time, Darwinists assumed that anyone who argued seriously against their theory of human evolution must be a Christian creationist. Perhaps that’s why my book Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race came as such a surprise.
In a review of Forbidden Archaeology published in Geoarchaeology (1994, 9:337-340), Kenneth Feder wrote: “The book … represents something perhaps not seen before; we can fairly call it ‘Krishna creationism’ with no disrespect intended. The basic premises of the authors are breathtaking…: The prevailing paradigm of human evolution … is wholly untenable. There is what amounts to a passive conspiracy (the authors call it a “knowledge filter”) to suppress a huge body of data that contradicts our prevailing paradigm … this purported evidence indicates that “beings quite…
Physicists Devise Way to Test Whether We’re Really Living in a Hologram
Interesting post from Sara Reardon in Symmetry (A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication):
In 2008, Fermilab particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan made waves with a mind-boggling proposition: The 3D universe in which we appear to live is no more than a hologram. Now he is building the most precise clock of all time to directly measure whether our reality is an illusion.
The idea that spacetime may not be entirely smooth — like a digital image that becomes increasingly pixelated as you zoom in – had been previously proposed by Stephen Hawking and others. Possible evidence for this model appeared last year in the unaccountable “noise” plaguing the GEO600 experiment in Germany, which searches for gravitational waves from black holes. To Hogan, the jitteriness suggested that the experiment had stumbled upon the lower limit of the spacetime pixels’ resolution.
Black hole physics, in which space and time become compressed, provides a basis for math showing that…
Vice Ventures Into Haiti In Search Of Zombies
Just in time for Halloween, VBS TV brings us a ghoulish film that follows Vice correspondent Hamilton Morris as he travels to Haiti to explore the underbelly of voodoo culture and hunt down actual Zombies.
In 1982, Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis traveled to Port-Au-Prince to investigate the ethno-biological base of the Haitian zombie. Davis left the island convinced that zombies were not fictional creations, but in fact real monsters that roamed the rural villages of Haiti. Inspired by Davis’ work, VBS correspondent Hamilton traveled to the Haitian capital last year to conduct his own zombie investigation under the guidance of a man who survived fourteen bullets to the face.
The World’s Most Corrupt Countries
Transparency International, self-described as “the global civil society organisation leading the fight against corruption,” has released its 2010 league table of corrupt countries. Guess what: about 3/4 of the world’s nations are corrupt!
With governments committing huge sums to tackle the world’s most pressing problems, from the instability of financial markets to climate change and poverty, corruption remains an obstacle to achieving much needed progress. The 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index shows that nearly three quarters of the 178 countries in the index score below five, on a scale from 10 (highly clean) to 0 (highly corrupt).
These results indicate a serious corruption problem. To address these challenges, governments need to integrate anti-corruption measures in all spheres, from their responses to the financial crisis and climate change to commitments by the international community to eradicate poverty. Transparency International advocates stricter implementation of the UN Convention against Corruption, the only global initiative that provides…
George Soros: ‘Why I Support Legal Marijuana’
Billionaire hedge fund manager and liberal philanthropist George Soros clearly doesn’t care what his establishment peers think any more — but he can still get his opinions published in the Wall Street Journal:
Our marijuana laws are clearly doing more harm than good. The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.
Law enforcement agencies today spend many billions of taxpayer dollars annually trying to enforce this unenforceable prohibition. The roughly 750,000 arrests they make each year for possession of small amounts of marijuana represent more than 40% of all drug arrests.
Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually. It also would reduce the crime, violence and corruption associated with…
The Public Twitter Booth
Via Trendhunter, a “social media kiosk” in Skolkova, Russia allows citizens to send crucial tweets when they’re away from the computer (and lack a smartphone). I can’t really visualize what a Twitter emergency might be, but I hope these will catch on as a solution to preventing them.
