Archive for April, 2011
Turkey’s Museum Of Hair
Oddity Central examines one of the planet’s most disturbing “museums,” The Hair Museum in Avanos, Turkey. Every inch of every surface is covered in human hair, culled from tens of thousands of women and tagged and labeled. Great fun for the whole family!
The Hair Museum of Avanos, in Cappadocia, is definitely a must-see if you’re into bizarre tourist spots.
Ever since 3000 BC, Avanos has been known for its high quality earthenware, made from the mineral-rich mud of the Red River, but in recent years, the town has mostly been mentioned in relation to a unique hair museum created by skilled Turkish potter Chez Galip. The unusual establishment, located under Galip’s pottery shop, is filled with hair samples from over 16,000 women. The walls, ceiling, and all other surfaces, except the floor, are covered with locks of hair from the different women who have visited this place, and pieces of paper with…
Government To Declassify Historical Images From Spy Satellites
The public will at last get a glimpse at our government’s secretive, Cold War-era version of Google Earth. Secrecy News reports:
Millions of feet of film of historical imagery from intelligence satellites may be declassified this year, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) said.
“The NGA is anticipating the potential declassification of significant amounts of film-based imagery… in 2011,” according to an NGA announcement that solicited contractor interest in converting the declassified film into digital format.
For planning purposes, the NGA told potential contractors to assume the need to digitize “approximately 4 million linear feet of film up to approximately 7 inches in width.” The imagery is “stored on 500 foot spools, with many frames up to several feet in length.” A nominal start date of October 1, 2011 was specified for the digitization project.
The declassification of historical intelligence satellite imagery has been largely dormant for many years. President Clinton’s 1995 executive order 12951 promised…
Ocean Noise Pollution Blowing Holes in Squids’ Heads
From Discovery News:
Thousands of Humboldt squid died off the coast of Oregon in 2004 and hundreds again in 2008. The culprit was originally considered a shift in deep-sea currents, but a new study pinpoints the physical trauma noise pollution can inflict on cephalopods and raises new concerns over the incidents of squid strandings. Dolphins and whales and other marine mammals aren’t the only sea life vulnerable to noise pollution from human activities.
Earlier indications that squid might be susceptible to noise occurred in 2001 and again in 2003, when giant squid washed up along the shore of Asturias, Spain. After struggling to identify the reason, biologists eventually concluded that the deaths were most likely related to the presence of vessels using seismic air guns for geophysical prospecting of the seabed.
A new study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, has found that even low intensity noise can leave cephalopods damaged and…
Ricky Gervais’ Atheist Easter Message: ‘I’m A Good Christian’
Mr. Gervais, you are my kind of Christian. From his blog:
Last Christmas I wrote a little essay entitled: “A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I’m an atheist.” The Wall Street Journal ran it, and it caused quite a stir. I was even asked to answer some of the comments. So for Easter I thought I’d do another one. Here it is.
A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I’m a good Christian
The title of this one is a little misleading, or at least cryptic. I am of course not a good Christian in the sense that I believe that Jesus was half man, half God, but I do believe I am a good Christian compared to a lot of Christians.
It’s not that I don’t believe that the teachings of Jesus wouldn’t make this a better world if they were followed. It’s just that they are rarely followed.
Gandhi summed it up…
Ayn Rand In Congress
The National Journal has taken the time to analyze the number of times Ayn Rand has been mentioned in the last ten sessions of Congress. Only 23 times (here we go again – 23 enigma fans stand up) it turns out, mostly by Ron Paul and now his son Rand. The awful new Ayn Rand movie Atlas Shrugged that debuts this weekend will probably put a stop to it though!
Yesterday, Senator Rand Paul did what many saw as inevitable: he quoted at length from Ayn Rand, specifically from Anthem, during an Energy and Natural Sources committee meeting to make a point about individual will being squashed by a collective rules society. The speech got us wondering: before Paul the younger arrived to the Senate how often does Ayn Rand get mentioned in Congress?
A good measure, we thought, would be searching through the Congressional Record, which is the official record of the proceedings in the…
Why Are Bananas Radioactive?
F-ing Bananas! Esther Inglis-Arkell clarifies on io9.com:
The chart of relative doses of radioactivity that appeared on io9 yesterday set many minds at ease, but also raised questions. Questions like, “Why do you get dosed with radioation when eating a banana?”
The chart, created by XKCD’s Randall Munroe, was intended to show people the realistic danger of the recent leaks at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. Contact with radioactive substances is just a part of everyday activities like taking a flight, sleeping next to someone, or eating a banana. But wait. Sure, airplanes and x-rays expose people to radiation, but eating a banana? Why a banana? And how? Sure, the dose is low – one banana will only expose someone to one ten millionth of a sievert – but there must be something about them to get them on that chart.
It turns out that using bananas to measure doses of radiation has…
Mind-Reading Machines Could Soon Record Your Dreams: Will We Have Dream Police One Day?
Beware the “Dream Police” in (honor) of our U.S. ‘Tax Day”! … Will we ever have “dream police” to look forward to…? This Cheap Trick song is unfortunately ominous now. Pallab Ghosh writes in BBC News:
A US researcher has said he plans to electronically record and interpret dreams. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers said they have developed a system capable of recording higher-level brain activity.
“We would like to read people’s dreams,” says the lead scientist Dr Moran Cerf. The aim is not to interlope, but to extend our understanding of how and why people dream.
For centuries, people have been fascinated by dreams and what they might mean; in ancient Egypt for example, they were thought to be messages from the gods. More recently, dream analysis has been used by psychologists as a tool to understand the unconscious mind. But the only way to interpret dreams was to ask people about the subject of their dreams after they had woken up.
The eventual aim of Dr Cerf’s project is to develop a system that would enable psychologists to corroborate people’s recollections of their dream with an electronic visualisation of their brain activity.
Can Alcohol Help the Brain Remember? Science Now Says So!
Via ScienceDaily:
The common view that drinking is bad for learning and memory isn’t wrong, says neurobiologist Hitoshi Morikawa, but it highlights only one side of what ethanol consumption does to the brain.
“Usually, when we talk about learning and memory, we’re talking about conscious memory,” says Morikawa, whose results were published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience. “Alcohol diminishes our ability to hold on to pieces of information like your colleague’s name, or the definition of a word, or where you parked your car this morning. But our subconscious is learning and remembering too, and alcohol may actually increase our capacity to learn, or ‘conditionability,’ at that level.”
Morikawa’s study, which found that repeated ethanol exposure enhances synaptic plasticity in a key area in the brain, is further evidence toward an emerging consensus in the neuroscience community that drug and alcohol addiction is fundamentally a learning and memory disorder.
When we drink…
Mental Illness ‘In A Dish’
Cell culture in a petri dish. Photo:
Researchers are using skin cells from patients with mental illnesses, such s schizophrenia, to grow new tissue as neurons. The hope is to find a genetic based influence for mental disorders and recognize the early stages of such diseases. From Ewen Callaway via Nature News:
Before committing suicide at the age of 22, an anonymous man with schizophrenia donated a biopsy of his skin cells to research. Reborn as neurons, these cells may help neuroscientists to unpick the disease he struggled with from early childhood.
Experiments on these cells, as well as those of several other patients, are reported today in Nature1. They represent the first of what are sure to be many mental illnesses ‘in a dish’, made by reprogramming patients’ skin cells to an embryonic-like state from which they can form any tissue type.
Recreating neuropsychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using such cells…
Jesse Ventura Visits Disinformation (Video)
Jesse Ventura resumed his conversation with Gary Baddeley while visiting disinformation’s NYC offices to promote his new book, 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read.
They covered everything from joining Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential election to the fall of World Trade Center 7 on 9/11, discussing many topics along the way including Colony Collapse Disorder, fluoride in municipal water supplies, legalization of drugs, and much more.
Migrants Found In ‘Underground Town’ In Moscow
Photo: Dmitry Azovstev (CC)
110 migrants were found in an underground town in Moscow and are now facing deportation and criminal charges. The ‘town’ was fit with “bathrooms, bedrooms and even prayer rooms.” BBC reports:
Police in Moscow have discovered what they are calling an “underground town” housing illegal immigrants from Central Asia in a Soviet-era bomb shelter in the west of the city.
The discovery was made by police and agents from the FSB security agency and Federal Migration Service.
The underground area was guarded by a four-metre-high [13 feet] concrete wall and barbed wire, said Andrei Mishel of the Russia’s ministry of the interior.
It housed 110 men and women.
[Continues at BBC News]
Los Angeles Man Who Created Fake U.S. Army Unit Arrested
This takes elaborate ruses to new level. Californian Yupeng Deng used uniforms, IDs, basic training exercises, and military parades in a scam tricking Chinese immigrants into believing they had joined a “special forces reserve” of the U.S. military. The New York Times reports:
To the Chinese immigrants he recruited, Yupeng Deng was known as Supreme Commander. He offered them United States Army uniforms, conducted training exercises on Sundays, led marches in municipal parades and promised a path toward American citizenship.
The uniforms were real, but Mr. Deng’s U.S. Army/Military Special Forces Reserve unit was a sham, the authorities said.
On Wednesday, Mr. Deng, 51, was arraigned in Los Angeles County Court on 13 felony charges related to the fake military operation, which concentrated on Chinese immigrants, eager to become American citizens, in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles.
More than 100 immigrants paid upwards of $300 to join the bogus unit, the authorities…
Michio Kaku: Fukushima Is A ‘Ticking Time Bomb’
From Democracy Now!
The Japanese government is trying to calm fears about radiation levels and food safety in the region around the heavily damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, even as it has raised the severity rating of the crisis to the highest possible level. “Radiation is continuing to leak out of the reactors. The situation is not stable at all,” says Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and the City College of New York. “The slightest disturbance could set off a full-scale meltdown at three nuclear power stations, far beyond what we saw at Chernobyl.”
China Bans ‘Time Travel’ On Television
Kevin Voight writes for CNN:
Hong Kong, China – China has been cracking down on dissent of late, as the recent detainment of artist Ai Weiwei suggests.
But the latest guidance on television programming from the State Administration of Radio Film and Television in China borders on the surreal – or, rather, an attack against the surreal.
New guidelines issued on March 31 discourages plot lines that contain elements of “fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions…
ACLU Sues South Carolina Jail That Bans All Written Materials Except The Bible
It’s a violation of freedom of religion, obviously. (Jewish and Muslim prisoners were blocked from receiving their holy books.) But beyond that, isn’t it a damaging and cruel form of punishment to prevent inmates from reading books, newspapers, magazines, letters, and other printed material of any kind for years upon years? The Christian Science Monitor reports on rehabilitation, South Carolina-style:
The US Justice Department is asking a federal judge in South Carolina to allow it to intervene in a lawsuit against a sheriff who allegedly forbids prisoners in his jail from receiving books, magazines, or printed materials other than copies of the King James version of the Bible.
Berkeley County Sheriff H. Wayne DeWitt denies that restrictions imposed at the county lockup in Moncks Corner, S.C., rise to the level of a constitutional violation or violate US law.
A Jewish prisoner seeking a Torah said he was told by jail officials that the prison only…
The World Of Water Filtration
The Big Berkey
About a year ago we met filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig, director of the documentary Tapped, which outlined the ills of bottled water so effectively that we quickly decided to forgo those five-gallon jugs of water in favor of tap water at the disinformation offices, and I did the same at home.
However, while New York City’s tap water isn’t bad compared to some municipalities, it still contains plenty of chemicals that I have no intention of knowingly ingesting (fluoride, chlorine, various VOCs, etc.), so we decided to install water filters.
At the office we installed a plumbed-in filtered water dispenser from local company Cure Water Systems, and it works well in an office environment, proudly sporting one of Stephanie’s “Get Off The Bottle” stickers.
At home I installed an under-sink filter from Aquasana on the advice of super-informed science writer Terri Mitchell, who contributed a great article to the disinformation anthology You Are Still Being…
Obama’s Top Five Broken Campaign Promises
For all he has managed to accomplish in the presidency, these are perhaps the five biggest disappointments thus far. Stephen Webster of Raw Story examines Obama’s campaign promises that never came true:
1. Health care for all
Ultimately, the [health care] debate in Washington became so heated and rife with disinformation that the administration agreed to forgo the public option, using it as a bargaining chip to ensure other proposals were passed. They also gave in to Republican demands and extended the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, promising to take on the issue again in 2012. In spite of the modest legislative victory of actually getting health reform passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that even after all the elements take effect in 2014, over 22 million Americans will still lack access to basic health services.2. Close Guantanamo
As a symbol of everything that liberals thought to be wrong with the Bush-era, closing…
Scientology’s ‘Touch-Healing’ Global Disaster Response Squad: ‘Serving’ Haiti, Burma and Japan
Patrick Winn writes on GlobalPost:
BANGKOK, Thailand — After Cyclone Nargis left a trail of corpses along Burma’s coast in May 2008, foreign aid workers clamored to enter the military-controlled backwater.
Despite the world’s pleading, Burma’s paranoid generals forbade most foreign relief workers from entering the disaster zone. A frustrated U.K. threatened unauthorized air drops. The U.S. Navy was forced to float vessels loaded with life-saving supplies offshore.
But among the few who managed to access Burma’s worst-hit areas included adherents of the California-based Church of Scientology.
According to the church, miracles ensued after Scientologists touched down. Their team sought out traumatized Burmese for Scientology’s touch-healing techniques, professed to revive the spirit…
