Archive for April, 2011
Last Two Fluent Speakers of Dying Language Refuse To Speak To Each Other
Jo Tuckman writes in the Guardian:
The language of Ayapaneco has been spoken in the land now known as Mexico for centuries. It has survived the Spanish conquest, seen off wars, revolutions, famines and floods. But now, like so many other indigenous languages, it’s at risk of extinction.
There are just two people left who can speak it fluently – but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other’s company.
“They don’t have a lot in common,” says Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist from Indiana University, who is involved with a project to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco. Segovia, he says,…
Morgan Spurlock’s Fully-Financed Via Product Placement Film: ‘The Greatest Movie Ever Sold’ (Video)
Egyptian Blogger Maikel Nabil, Critical of Military, Jailed By New Egyptian Government
Via BBC News:
A military court in Egypt has sentenced an internet activist to three years in jail for criticising the armed forces. Maikel Nabil was arrested last month for blogs that criticised the army’s role during anti-government protests.
The 26-year-old is thought to be the first blogger jailed in Egypt since the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak.
Activists said the trial set a dangerous precedent at a time when Egypt was trying to move away from the alleged abuses of the Mubarak era. Lawyers representing Maikel Nabil have criticised the conduct of the military court.
“We are in a state of shock because [on Sunday] they told us the decision would be on Tuesday, so the family and lawyer left. Afterwards the court announced its decision,” said Gamal Eid, a lawyer who heads the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information.
Mr Eid said the trial was unfair because the court did not even consider…
How the Ancient Romans Made MSG
Some researchers contend this food habit helped influence the decline the Roman Empire. Here’s a balanced look at MSG from Esther Inglis-Arkell on io9.com:
Monosodium glutamate is a food additive that enhances flavor. Although it’s frowned upon today, the ancient Romans loved it and ate it with almost every meal.
There’s been some debate over what exactly monosodium glutamate does to people. Some people say it gives them severe headaches, numbness, weakness, and even heart palpitations. Scientists could confirm that it does give some people short-lived reactions, but no tests showed that it had long-term health effects. Some say that it’s an addictive substance which causes people to crave it repeatedly if they try it too often. Others say it’s just a flavor enhancer, and people crave it because it makes things taste better.
The chemical is listed as ’safe’ by the FDA, although they do require it to be clearly listed as…
GE’s Fake Plan To Pay Taxes Causes Massive Stock Price Drop
Our friends the Yes Men are once again deftly mocking the shady practices of ethically-challenged business executives. Why large corporations and the mainstream media that cover them (sorry USA Today) keep falling for their ruses, I don’t know, but you gotta love it. Morgan Clendaniel reports on the activists’ latest shenanigans for Fast Company:
Today, GE appeared to put out a press release noting that it had decided to do the right thing and pay the $6.3 billion taxes that it owed for 2010. And all the thanks it got was a quick drop in its stock price. If GE’s paying the government, that’s less money for shareholders. We can’t have that.
Remember the story that GE paid no taxes last year–and in fact, got money back from the government–despite making $11 billion in revenues (though, as with all tax law, the story was maybe a little more complicated than that). Pick your jaw up…
Tobacco Smoke Promoted As Cancer Cure In Indonesia
Photo: Andrew Magill (CC)
Agence France-Presse via the Raw Story reports:
An Indonesian woman exhales cigarette smoke into the mouth of a gaunt, naked patient at a Jakarta clinic, where tobacco is openly touted as a cancer cure.
The Western patient is suffering from emphysema, a condition she developed from decades of smoking. Along with cancer and autism, it’s just one of the ailments the Griya Balur clinic claims it can cure with cigarettes.
“I missed this,” says the woman, a regular customer, with an American accent, as Phil Collins?s “I Can Feel It” blares in the background.
Griya Balur would be shut down in many parts of the world, but not in Indonesia, one of the developing-country new frontiers for big tobacco as it seeks to replace its dwindling profits in the health-conscious West.
Long traditions of tobacco use combined with poor regulation and the billions of dollars that flow into government coffers from the tobacco…
Madison Activists Push Resolution To Deny Constitutional Rights To Corporations
Wisconsin activists seek support in the belief that corporations don’t deserve the same constitutional rights as citizens. Isthmus reports:
Kaja Rebane wants Dane County residents to send a message that corporations aren’t people and money isn’t speech.
The UW-Madison grad student helped organize a successful effort to put referenda on the April 5 ballot in both the city of Madison and Dane County. It ask voters whether they believe corporations and people, and money and speech, should be considered distinct.
The local movement, spearheaded by South Central Wisconsin Move to Amend, is part of a national one that aims to amend the U.S. Constitution, to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s Jan. 21, 2010, decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That controversial ruling, passed 5-4, found that the government could not restrict corporate spending on independent political advertisements, saying this violated the First Amendment.
While organizing on this issue is being done nationwide, Dane County…
More Than 50% Of Americans Take Dietary Supplements
Photo: Ragesoss (CC)
The proliferation of vitamins and diet supplements is healthy for the companies that flog them, but is it really beneficial for the hundreds of millions of people consuming them? Madison Park (real name, apparently, as I write a stone’s throw from Madison Square Park in NYC) reports for CNN:
As more than half of U.S. adults are popping vitamins and supplements, the question remains — has it made Americans healthier?
That depends on whom you ask.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that more of half of U.S. adults use dietary supplements — including multivitamins, minerals and herbs.
That rise, from 42% in 1988 to 53% in 2006, has fueled the growth of the supplement industry to a $27 billion behemoth, according to Consumer Reports.
Dietary supplements are not regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the same way as drugs. The makers do not have to prove…
Stephen Colbert, Inspired by Senator Jon Kyl’s Big Planned Parenthood Lie, Introduces Twitter’s #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement
I think Stephen Colbert has found a great use for Twitter. A quick background on this from MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:
Remember in Friday’s “Rewrite” when we showed you the big lie Sen. Jon Kyl told on the Senate floor about Planned Parenthood? The lie that “well over 90%” of Planned Parenthood’s services go to abortions?
The lie that Sen. Kyl’s staff later said “was not intended to be a factual statement” — a remark Lawrence [O'Donnell] called “one of the strangest clarifications in Senate history?” Well, we weren’t the only ones who took notice. So did Stephen Colbert.
New Brain-Control Interface Uses Thoughts To Make Phone Calls
Photo: University of California, San Diego
After years of forgetting your friends’ numbers because they were saved on your cellphone, new technology allows you to make calls by simply thinking the phone number. Via MIT Technology Review:
Researchers in California have created a way to place a call on a cell phone using just your thoughts. Their new brain-computer interface is almost 100 percent accurate for most people after only a brief training period.
The system was developed by Tzyy-Ping Jung, a researcher at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues. Besides acting as an ultraportable aid for severely disabled people, the system might one day have broader uses, he says. For example, it could create the ultimate hands-free experience for cell-phone users, or be used to detect when drivers or air-traffic controllers are getting drowsy by sensing lapses in concentration.
Like many other such interfaces,…
63% Of People Killed In Iraq War Were Civilians
Xinhua reports:
U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been causing huge civilian casualties with 63 percent of some 109,000 people killed in the Iraq war being civilians, according to a report on the U.S. human rights record released on Sunday.
The figures were quoted from a WikiLeaks trove by the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2010, which was released by the Information Office of China’s State Council in response to the country reports on Human Rights Practices for 2010 issued by the U.S. Department of State.
Figures from the WikiLeaks website also revealed up to 285,000 war casualties in Iraq from March 2003 through the end of 2009, according to the report.
“The U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and other regions have also brought tremendous casualties to local people,” said the report.
The report cited the notorious case on a “kill team” formed by five soldiers from the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade,…
Automated Tattoo Machine Picks Your Religion
Torn over which faith is the true path to follow? Strap yourself in and receive a “randomly” (i.e. divinely) selected tattoo of a religious symbol on your forearm. Via Make Magazine:
Chris Eckert created a CNC tattoo machine with a twist. Auto Ink is a three axis numerically controlled sculpture. Once the main switch is triggered, the operator is assigned a religion and it’s corresponding symbol is tattooed onto the person’s arm. The operator does not have control over the assigned symbol. It is assigned either randomly or through divine intervention, depending on your personal beliefs.
Silicon Valley Start-Up To Mine The Moon
A new lunar gold rush? Via Phenomenonica:
A Silicon Valley start-up, founded by an Indian-American entrepreneur, plans to mine the moon and is in the process of building robotic rovers that will search the lunar surface for precious metals and rare metallic elements.
Moon Express Inc or MoonEx, co-founded by Naveen Jain, is building the robotic rovers alongside scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Centre near San Jose, a report in the Los Angeles Times said. “MoonEx should be ready to land on the lunar surface by 2013,” Jain said.
While there is no guarantee that the moon is “flush” with these materials, MoonEx thinks it “may be a gold mine of so-called rare earth elements.”
“From an entrepreneur’s perspective, the moon has never truly been explored,” the report quoted Jain, chairman and company co-founder, as saying. “We think it could hold resources that benefit Earth and all humanity.”
MoonEx’s machines are designed to look for materials…
New Bill To Kill Ham Radio?
New York Republican Peter King has made national headlines in 2011 with his congressional hearings on the (dis)loyalties of Muslim-Americans. However, that is not the only trouble he has been stirring up. The media largely missed his recent introduction of House Resolution 607, which would auction off for commercial use the frequency bands used by amateur radio operators (for the purpose of funding the use of other frequency bands by the police in emergencies). The American Radio Relay League fumes:
On February 10, 2011, Rep. Peter King (R-NY), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, introduced H.R. 607, the “Broadband for First Responders Act of 2011,” which has been referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee (which handles telecommunications legislation).
The Bill provides for the allocation of the so-called “D-Block” of spectrum in the 700 MHz range for Public Safety use. HR 607 uniquely, provides for the reallocation of other spectrum for auction…
Smokers Believe ‘Silver’, ‘Gold’ and ‘Slim’ Cigarettes Are Less Harmful
ScienceDaily reports:
Despite current prohibitions on the words ‘light’ and ‘mild’, smokers in Western countries continue falsely to believe that some cigarette brands may be less harmful than others. In fact, all conventional brands of cigarette present the same level of risk to smokers, including ‘mild’ and ‘low-tar’ brands.A study published in the journal Addiction polled over 8000 smokers from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the USA. Approximately one-fifth of those smokers incorrectly believed that “some cigarette brands could be less harmful than others.” False beliefs were highest among US smokers.
Current research shows that smokers base their perceptions of risk on pack colour, believing that ’silver’, ‘gold’ and ‘white’ brands are less harmful to smoke than ‘black’ or ‘red’ brands. The reason for those beliefs may lie in the history of cigarette branding. Cigarettes used to carry labels like ‘light’, ‘mild’, and ‘low tar’, and in some places they still do. But…
Real Rate Of Inflation In U.S. Is Near 10%
Paul Volcker
“Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” comes to mind. John Melloy reports for CNBC First Money:
After former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker was appointed in 1979, the consumer price index surged into the double digits, causing the now revered Fed Chief to double the benchmark interest rate in order to break the back of inflation. Using the methodology in place at that time puts the CPI back near those levels.
Inflation, using the reporting methodologies in place before 1980, hit an annual rate of 9.6 percent in February, according to the Shadow Government Statistics newsletter.
Since 1980, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has changed the way it calculates the CPI in order to account for the substitution of products, improvements in quality (i.e. iPad 2 costing the same as original iPad) and other things. Backing out more methods implemented in 1990 by the BLS still puts inflation at a 5.5 percent rate…
Students: You Are Exploited Debt-Serfs
Charles Hugh Smith writes on OfTwoMinds.com:
Students and parents, wake up: your only salvation lies in political engagement and action.
Of all the exploitative systems in the U.S., none is more rapacious than the Education Cartel. Like the proverbial frog that is unaware that it’s being boiled because the water temperature rises so gradually, college students and their parents are unable to recall what higher education was like before students were herded into debt-serfdom.
Apologists for the Education Cartel like to blame Corporate America or the banks, but the reality is that the Federal and State governments and the employees of the Cartel are willing partners in the exploitation and fraud. How did we get to the boiling-water point where students are expected to take on $100,000 or more in debt to attend college–even a mediocre one?
Answer: immensely profitable Government-backed loans. If the Central State wasn’t partnered with the Education Cartel, today’s debt-serfdom…
Scientist Warns That Roundup Ready GM Seeds Could Cause Crop Collapse
The Institute of Science in Society’s Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reports that a USDA senior scientist has sent an “emergency” warning to US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack regarding a new plant pathogen in Roundup Ready GM soybean and corn that may be responsible for high rates of infertility and spontaneous abortions in livestock:
An open letter appeared on the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance founded and run by Judith McGeary to save family farms in the US [1, 2]. The letter, written by Don Huber, professor emeritus at Purdue University, to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, warns of a pathogen “new to science” discovered by “a team of senior plant and animal scientists”. Huber says it should be treated as an “emergency’’, as it could result in “a collapse of US soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies.”
The letter appeared to have been written before…
‘My Car is My Lover’ – Meet the Mechanophiles
In this clip (via eBaum’s World) from the BBC documentary “My Car is My Lover,” two mechanophiles visit a car show and bond over their shared…enthusiasm. The one in the hat is Edward Smith, who counts the Airwolf helicopter as one of his most intense sexual conquests:
