Archive for April, 2011
The Last Free People On Earth
Joanna Eede writes for National Geographic:
Deep in one of the remotest parts of the Brazilian Amazon, in a clearing at the headwaters of the Envira River, an Indian man looks up at an aeroplane.
He is surrounded by kapok trees and banana plants, and by the necessities of his life: a thatched hut, its roof made from palm fronds; a plant-fiber basket brimming with ripe pawpaw; a pile of peeled manioc, lying bright-white against the rain forest earth.
The man’s body is painted red from crushed seeds of the annatto shrub, and in his hand…
US Navy’s High Energy Laser Gun Smokes Boat (Video)
Given the U.S. Government’s propensity for starting wars in the 21st century it probably won’t be long before we see these high-energy lasers in battle.
Here’s what the Office of Naval Research had to say about the test:
Marking a milestone for the Navy, the Office of Naval Research and its industry partner on April 6 successfully tested a solid-state, high-energy laser (HEL) from a surface ship, which disabled a small target vessel…
Coffee Is Good For Your Heart. Really.
Photo: Julius Schorzman (CC)
For all your coffee addicts out there, some surprisingly good news. Too good to be true? Elane Conis reports for the Los Anegeles Times:
Looking for a reason to not give up your coffee habit? Here’s one possibility: heart health.
Numerous studies in recent years have reported that drinking coffee may be good for the cardiovascular system and might even help prevent strokes. Just last month, Swedish researchers announced results of a large study showing that coffee seemed to reduce the risk of stroke in women by up to 25%.
Not long ago, researchers thought quite the opposite about coffee and the heart, says Dr. Thomas Hemmen, director of the UC San Diego Stroke Center: “Coffee is fun and it tastes good, so people assumed for many years that it would be bad for you.”
Studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s offered little in the way of confirmation or refutation.…
Radiation Detected In Drinking Water Across The U.S.
Jeff McMahon writes for Forbes:
Radiation from Japan has been detected in drinking water in 13 more American cities, and cesium-137 has been found in American milk—in Montpelier, Vermont—for the first time since the Japan nuclear disaster began, according to data released by the Environmental Protection Agency late Friday.
Milk samples from Phoenix and Los Angeles contained iodine-131 at levels roughly equal to the maximum contaminant level permitted by EPA, the data shows. The Phoenix sample contained 3.2 picoCuries per liter of iodine-131. The Los Angeles sample contained 2.9. The EPA maximum contaminant level is 3.0, but this is a conservative standard designed to minimize exposure over a lifetime, so EPA does not consider these levels to pose a health threat.
The cesium-137 found in milk in Vermont is the first cesium detected in milk since the Fukushima-Daichi nuclear accident occurred last month. The sample contained 1.9 picoCuries per liter of cesium-137, which…
Living In A World Of Lies
Pinocchio by Jim Dine. Photo: Mrkgrd (CC)
Lies have an interesting quality. Repeated often enough, lies become accepted as truth, and it must be said that our lives and our minds are filled with them. Filled with half-truths that are also half-lies, credulously accepted though unfounded rumors, filled with the lies of advertisers sowing insecurity and selling false satisfaction. But not all lies are created equal, some lies are useful, even necessary.
Our physical perception of the world is a kind of lie. Where science tells us there are swarms of swirling electrons, protons and neutrons we see a table or a dog. Our eyes lie to us by omission, registering only a narrow spectrum of all the light streaming into them. These are what we might call necessary and useful lies, simplifications of the truth that allow us to make sense of and interact with the world around us.
But many lies…
When No Experience Pays Off Big (In a Government Job)
Brian Deschane's mugshot
Daniel Bice writes in the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel:
Just in his mid-20s, Brian Deschane has no college degree, very little management experience and two drunken-driving convictions.
Yet he has landed an $81,500-per-year job in Gov. Scott Walker’s administration overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees at the Department of Commerce. Even though Walker says the state is broke and public employees are overpaid, Deschane already has earned a promotion and a 26% pay raise in just two months with the state.
How did Deschane score his plum assignment with the Walker team? It’s all in the family. His father is Jerry Deschane, executive vice president and longtime lobbyist for the Madison-based Wisconsin Builders Association, which bet big on Walker during last year’s governor’s race.
The group’s political action committee gave $29,000 to Walker and his running mate, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, last year, making it one of the top five…
FBI Releases Utah UFO Files
Lee Davidson reports on new FBI document releases for the Salt Lake Tribune:
On April 4, 1949, FBI agents in Utah sent a cable marked “urgent” to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. It said an Army guard at the Ogden Supply Depot, a Logan policeman and a Utah Highway Patrol officer in Mantua each saw from miles apart a UFO — which they said exploded over Utah.
Under the title “Flying Discs,” the cable said they “saw a silver colored object high up approaching the mountains at Sardine Canyon” that “appeared to explode in a rash of fire. Several residents at Trenton … [reported] seeing what appeared to be two aerial explosions followed by falling object.”
That and other documents show the FBI was investigating whether UFOs were real, and it figured they could be. Such documents are now available in “The Vault,” vault.fbi.gov, a revamped FBI website for documents that have been…
Last Minute Budget Deal Only Postpones More Serious Economic Warfare
Photo: Ser Amantio di Nicolao (CC)
The Capitol Hill battlefield is still for the moment as the Easter holidays approach and the combatants get a break from the heated polemics and overnight bargaining sessions. In a last minute deal, milked by both sides for maximum drama and political advantage, the government will not shut down—at least not now—even as its budget has taken a major whack.
Each side can posture to supporters as a victor. The President, who managed the process from the shadows, posed for photos in the White House after his great compromise of 2011 was announced.
It was a media moment to be relished, as media columnist Howard Kurtz explained on the Daily Beast:
“The White House escaped most of the blame. Once the spotlight shifted from the political gamesmanship to the human impact of a shutdown—soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan not getting checks, passport offices closed, national parks off limits—everyone…
GMOs Linked to Organ Disruption in 19 Studies
From Responsible Technology via Current:
A new paper shows that consuming genetically modified (GM) corn or soybeans leads to significant organ disruptions in rats and mice, particularly in livers and kidneys. By reviewing data from 19 animal studies, Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini and others reveal that 9% of the measured parameters, including blood and urine biochemistry, organ weights, and microscopic analyses (histopathology), were significantly disrupted in the GM-fed animals. The kidneys of males fared the worst, with 43.5% of all the changes.
The liver of females followed, with 30.8%. The report, published in Environmental Sciences Europe on March 1, 2011, confirms that “several convergent data appear to indicate liver and kidney problems as end points of GMO diet effects.” The authors point out that livers and kidneys “are the major reactive organs” in cases of chronic food toxicity.
“Other organs may be affected too, such as the heart and spleen, or blood cells,” stated the…
Indonesia’s Plant-Based Birth Control Pill for Men
While the U.S. progress lags, Indonesia readies a male contraception pill. Patrick Winn writes on Global Post:
On the remote Indonesian island of Papua, tribesmen have long noticed the curious effect of a shrub called “gandarusa.”
If you chew its leaves often enough, men say, your wife won’t get pregnant. Indonesian scientists, who have transferred this folk method from the jungle to the lab, claim they can extract the shrub’s active ingredient and mass produce it as an over-the-counter pill.
If they’re right, they will accomplish what Western pharmaceutical giants have researched but failed to deliver for decades: a birth control pill for men.
“With luck, it could be released late this year, but it will probably be sold in stores early next year,” said Sugiri Syarief, the head of Indonesia’s state-run National Family Planning Coordination Board. Researchers began analyzing gandarusa in 1988, Sugiri said. Animal and human trials began in the 1990s and…
The Economics Of Happiness (Video)
I recently had a chance to attend a showing of the documentary The Economics of Happiness. It has a very strong message about the fiscal and social problems of globalization, especially its impact beyond the western world. As a solution, the film suggests a movement towards focusing on communities and localization. Here’s the trailer and a plot synopsis:
Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet, life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.
What Will People Do For Money? They Will Electrically Shock You
This reminds me a bit of the old Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures except the results are more “shocking” (no pun intended). Laura Sanders writes on WIRED Science:
SAN FRANCISCO — When faced with a thorny moral dilemma, what people say they would do and what people actually do are two very different things, a new study finds. In a hypothetical scenario, most people said they would never subject another person to a painful electric shock, just to make a little bit of money. But for people given a real-world choice, the sparks flew.
The results, presented April 4 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, serve as a reminder that hypothetical scenarios don’t capture the complexities of real decisions.
Morality studies in the lab almost always rely on asking participants to imagine how they’d behave in a certain situation, study coauthor Oriel Feldman Hall of Cambridge University said in…
Has Trump Really Sent Investigators After Obama’s Birth Certificate?
Justin Elliott writes at Salon:
Donald Trump’s claim that he dispatched private investigators to Hawaii to look into President Obama’s birth has been repeatedly printed as fact in the media despite zero evidence that he has done any such thing.
Here, for example, is how CNN is playing Trump’s comments, which he made Thursday on the “Today” show:
The CNN lead goes like this:
Self-proclaimed birther Donald Trump is now so doubtful of President Obama’s birthplace that he’s sent a team of his own investigators to Hawaii in hopes of getting to the bottom of the issue.
That’s according to Trump himself, who, in an interview with NBC, warned his investigators just might uncover “one of the greatest cons in the history of politics and beyond.”
This is stenographic journalism at its worst. The problem is that Trump has historically not been a credible source. He has a history of making disputed claims about his net worth as well…
Fish For Dinner? Bring Your Geiger Counter
Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times
I ate sushi last night at the extraordinary Japanese restaurant Sushi of Gari. Now that I’ve read this story by William Neuman and Florence Fabricant in the New York Times I’m wishing I’d brought along a Geiger counter. The photo is essential, so NYT, we hereby claim fair use:
Eric Ripert, the chef of Le Bernardin, the high temple of seafood in Manhattan, bought a new kitchen gadget a few days ago: a radiation detector.
“I just want to make sure whatever we use is safe,” said Mr. Ripert, whose staff is using the device to screen every item of food that enters the restaurant, regardless of its origin. He has also stopped buying fish from Japan, which means no high-quality, farm-raised hamachi and kampachi for raw seafood dishes.
“Nobody knows how the currents will carry the contaminated water,” he said.
Despite assurances by health officials that radiation from the…
Too Much Alcohol May Cause Cancer
Photo: André Karwath aka Aka (CC)
Just when you thought that drinking a few glasses of red wine every day was going to prolong your life comes this report in the British Medical Journal that it raises the risk of cancer. From AFP:
About one in 10 cancers in men and one in 33 in women in western European countries are caused by current and past alcohol consumption, according to a study released on Friday.
For some types of cancer, the rates are significantly higher, it said.
In 2008, for men, 44, 25 and 33 percent of upper digestive track, liver and colon cancers respectively were caused by alcohol in six of the countries examined, the study found.
The countries were Britain, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany and Denmark.
The study also showed that half of these cancer cases occurred in men who drank more than a recommended daily limit of 24 grammes of alcohol, roughly two…
Colin Powell on U.S. Involvement in Libya: ‘There May Not Be Boots on the Ground’
WASHINGTON – Bender Arena at American University was generously packed for former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s remarks Wednesday. The 74-year-old retired four-star general gave a one-hour talk at the behest of the Kennedy Political Union, and at its culmination, responded to inquiry regarding the pre-no-fly zone presence of Special Forces and CIA agents in the civil war-torn North African nation of Libya. Powell couched Barack Obama’s metonymous statement that there would not be “boots on the ground” by suggesting that the group of elite American soldiers “on the ground” would only be indirectly involved in enabling insurrection against Gadhafi’s regime.
A presidential finding leaked by various news outlets a few days after the enforcement of a United Nations no-fly zone over Libya evidences Obama’s willingness to deploy America soldiers into Libya weeks before he would tell the American people on television that they would not have to count on “boots on…
Inside Report: Fukushima’s Nuclear Evacuation Zone
Fukushima, Japan – The Japanese government issued an evacuation order on March 12 for residents living within the 20 kilometer radius of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Since then, residents have left their homes, and the “no man land” has been out of touch with the rest of the world. A Japanese journalist, Tetsuo Jimbo, ventured through the evacuation zone last Sunday, and filed the following video report.
He says that inside the evacuation zone, homes, buildings, roads and bridges, which were torn down by the tsunami, are left completely untouched, and the herd of cattle and pet dogs, left behind by the owners, wanders around the town while the radiation level remains far beyond legal limits.
Spy Gadgets Galore: The CIA’s Flickr
The CIA is attempting to amp up its public presence with a new Flickr account, created in February. It’s a fun browse, with a plethora of photos and explanations of all sorts of historical devices, costumes, and vehicles, including WWII code-breaking machines, cameras disguised as all sorts of things, robot fish, and the hollow coin and stereoscope (for viewing photos of enemy territory in 3-D) below:
College In America: What Went Wrong?
Via New Left Project, author Chris Lehman bitingly surveys the contemporary United States’ bloated, perilously off-track higher education system — from the the Ivies, which now act as “luxury goods” for the rich, to the rise of pyramid-scheme fringe colleges such as the University of Phoenix:
Most high-end and Ivy League schools spent the 1990s and early aughts pursuing a senseless binge in luxury spending so as to draw a wider pool of high-testing applicants – not because they had so many vacant spots to fill, mind you, but because wooing bigger applicant pools permitted them to reject more applicants and to continue burnishing their reputation for exclusivity in the applicant market. In 2008, lawmakers finally got wise to the scam and threatened to revoke the ridiculous tax exemptions enjoyed by massively endowed institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
By then, however, the tuition market had become so absurdly distorted and top…
