Archive for August, 2011
What’s In The WikiLeaks Mystery File?
Is this the notorious Julian Assange “insurance” file? From AFP:
WikiLeaks released a mysterious encrypted file on Wednesday after telling its followers on Twitter to stand by for “an important announcement.”
WikiLeaks did not identify the contents of the 571 megabyte file and it could not be opened without a decryption key, which the anti-secrecy website said would be released “at the appropriate moment.”
In July of last year, WikiLeaks posted what it called an “insurance file,” which was also encrypted.
According to press reports, the 1.4-gigabyte file was intended for public release in the event of something untoward happening to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Assange is currently fighting extradition from Britain to Sweden where he is wanted to face questioning over allegations of rape and sexual assault.
The release of the latest mystery file comes just days after WikiLeaks published more than 130,000 US diplomatic cables from what it says is a cache of more…
Human Foot Found On Vancouver Beach For 11th Time In Four Years
It seems something strange is “afoot” in the Pacific Northwest. Also: why do gristly, unexplained crimes always seem to involve running gear? Via the New York Daily News:
For the eleventh time in four years, a human foot washed ashore near Vancouver – baffling investigators who are at a loss to explain the grisly trend.
The foot, which was inside a running shoe, turned up along the British Columbia coast late Tuesday, according to police. It spotted by a passerby near the Vancouver’s False Creek.
Police have no theories as to how the foot ended up in the water – but have not suggested that foul play is suspected. Since 2007, nearly a dozen feet encased in shoes have appeared on beaches in the area, including a few over the border in Washington state. The bizarre discoveries have attracted international attention – and spawned fears of a serial killer.
But cops have steadfastly denied…
9/11 Coloring Book Sparks Controversy
Via The Raw Story:
A 9/11 coloring book has emerged on the brink of the tenth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center. It is entitled “We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom,” and was published by Missouri-based Really Big Coloring Books.
The color book begins with Osama bin Laden plotting to attack the United States and ends with bin Laden being shot by a Navy SEAL. A spokesperson for the publisher said that seeing bin Laden get shot “provides closure” for children.
Dawud Walid, Michigan representative for the Council on American Islamic Relations, called the book disgusting because it portrays all Muslims as terrorists.
Camouflage And The Quest For Invisibility
The Atlantic traces the history of military disguise in the twentieth century, the breakthrough realization that pixelated, “digital”-looking camouflage patterns work better than the traditional swirly ones, and the future of making people undetectable to the human eye:
Modern military camouflage traces its origins to World War I, when the French army gathered a cadre of artists in three top-secret workshops near the western front. The blotchy smocks they created sparked the popular imagination. Camouflage was not issued widely, though, because of the high cost and low production capacity: every yard of camouflage was a hand-painted work of art.
U.S. marines in the Pacific wore industrially manufactured camouflage during World War II, but its use was limited in Europe because German paratroopers were known for their camouflage uniforms, and American officials didn’t want confusion to cause fratricide. Camo uniforms were more widely issued to U.S. troops in the early 1970s, when jungle prints…
Florida Funeral Home Unveils New Body ‘Liquefaction’ Unit
There are many things to consider when taking care of funeral arrangements: did the person want to be buried, cremated, or liquidated? This ‘alkaline hydrolysis” unit is thought to be more environmentally friendly than the traditional cremation process. BBC News reports:
A Glasgow-based company has installed its first commercial “alkaline hydrolysis” unit at a Florida funeral home.
The unit by Resomation Ltd is billed as a green alternative to cremation and works by dissolving the body in heated alkaline water.
The facility has been installed at the Anderson-McQueen funeral home in St Petersburg, and will be used for the first time in the coming weeks. It is hoped other units will follow in the US, Canada and Europe.
The makers claim the process produces a third less greenhouse gas than cremation, uses a seventh of the energy, and allows for the complete separation of dental amalgam for safe disposal.
Mercury from amalgam vaporised in crematoria is…
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life Advice Column
Could history’s greatest minds help you with your mundane daily problems? Perhaps not.
From 1957 to 1958, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. penned “Advice for the Living”, a feature for Ebony magazine in which he answered readers’ questions on everything from the atom bomb to capital punishment to dating and how to catch a nice young man. (Make sure you have the “radiating personality, a pleasant disposition, and that feminine charm
which every man admires.”)
King recommends playing gospel music rather than rock, as rock ‘n’ roll “so often plunges men’s minds into degrading and immoral depths”. He tells how to gain self confidence. His admirable strategy of love and passive resistance seems to function a bit strangely when put to use in situations such as when a friend hits you on the head with an iron pole.
Yesterday’s News Could Be Tomorrow’s Fuel
Everyday millions of newspapers are read and then throw out or, hopefully, recycled. Instead of turning those papers into other paper products, they may be able to be used for fuel. Via Discovery News:
Tulane University scientists discovered a strain of clostridia bacteria, dubbed “TU-103,” that can devour old newspapers to produce butanol, a substitute for gasoline.
Old editions of the Times Picayune, New Orleans’ daily newspaper, have been successfully used by the researchers to produce butanol from the cellulose in the paper. Cellulose is a structural material in plants.
TU-103 is the first bacterial strain found in nature (not genetically engineered) to produce butanol directly from cellulose. It is also the only strain yet found that can grow in the presence of oxygen. Keeping bacterial fermentation chambers air tight makes other strains more expensive to work with.
“This discovery could reduce the cost to produce bio-butanol,” said David Mullin, who’s lab discovered the…
Why Are Finland’s Schools The World’s Best?
The secret seems to be emphasizing art, foreign languages, and physical activity, paying teachers like lawyers and doctors, and doing away with standardized testing. A shame that the United States is trending in the opposite direction regarding all of the above. Yes, it helps that Finland is a small, wealthy country with extremely equal income distribution, but its neighbor Norway follows a more “American” education model and with inferior results. Via Smithsonian Magazine:
Besides Finnish, math and science, first graders take music, art, sports, religion and textile handcrafts. English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth. By fifth grade the children have added biology, geography, history, physics and chemistry.
Not until sixth grade will kids have the option to sit for a district-wide exam, and then only if the classroom teacher agrees to participate. Most do, out of curiosity. Results are not publicized. Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United…
Muammar Qaddafi’s 1980s Family Photo Album
Tyler Hicks of the New York Times found family pictures at the the Qaddafi residence in Tripoli, and they’re amazing. How often do images of a Third World dictator make you irresistibly nostalgic for childhood?
The Qaddafis playing soccer. Baby photos. Colonel Qaddafi as a young lieutenant in the late 1960s. Later, as a father. And finally, a bizarre figure; something of an object of ridicule. A picture of Seif al-Islam atop a horse was a glossy, poster-sized print.
U.S. Reviews Syphilis Experiment In Guatemala: Researchers Knew It Was Unethical
All too often groups of people are unknowingly infected with disease as a means of isolated experimentation. Earlier this week the Commision for the Study of Bioethical Issues reviewed the 1940s incident where the U.S. government infected Guatemalan prisoners and patients with syphilis. Via Reuters:
U.S. government researchers must have known they were violating ethical standards by deliberately infecting Guatemalan prison inmates and mental patients with syphilis for an experiment in the 1940s, according to a U.S. presidential commission.
The U.S.-funded research in Guatemala did not treat participants as human beings, failing to even inform them they were taking part in research, as was the case for a similar study in the United States, the commission said on Monday.
The United States apologized last year for the experiment, which was meant to test the drug penicillin, after it was uncovered decades later by a college professor.
President Barack Obama’s Commission for the Study of…
Oh, The Pain Of The Believer: Barack’s Betrayals Offer Lessons We Can’t Deny
Journalists are not supposed to have political opinions and yet we all do. Our “biases” are usually disguised, not blatant or overtly partisan, and can be divined in what stories we cover and how we cover them.
Even ‘just the fact’s maam,’ journos for big media have to decide which facts to include and which to ignore.
Our outlooks are always shaped by our worldviews, values and experience, not too mention the outlets we work for.
Which brings me to the challenge of seeking truth and recognizing it when you see it.
I have to admit that I was seduced by the idea of Barack Obama.
The idea of a black President, the idea of a young President, the idea of an articulate President, and the idea of a man married to such a stand up woman from a working class family was hard to resist.
Here’s a guy who seemed really smart, not just because…
Storytelling As A National Security Issue?
David Metcalfe writes on Modern Mythology:
“If I were a betting man or woman, I would say that certain types of stories might be addictive and, neurobiologically speaking, not that different from taking a tiny hit of cocaine.”
—William Casebeer of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
Despite the fact that it’s readily apparent Mr. Casebeer has never tried cocaine, DARPA’s current interest in narratives is an interesting development at an agency known for unique scientific inquiries. On April 25 and 26th DARPA held a conference called Narrative Networks (N2): The Neurobiology of Narratives. The purpose of this conference was to follow up a Feburary 26th event which sought to outline a quantitative methodology for measuring the effect of storytelling on human action.
We owe much of the early development of the internet to DARPA, along with remote viewing, remote controlled moths, invisibility cloaks and other wonders of the contemporary age. Now they’ve…
A View From The Top One Percent
Via Who Rules America?, a financial manager provides his perspective on the wealthiest one percent and 0.1 percent of Americans — i.e. his clients — regarding who they are, how they got so rich, and why he worries that they have too much power:
Membership in this elite group is likely to come from being involved in some aspect of the financial services or banking industry, real estate development involved with those industries, or government contracting.
Recently, I spoke with a younger client who retired from a major investment bank in her early thirties, net worth around $8M. Since I knew she held a critical view of investment banking, I asked if her colleagues talked about or understood how much damage was created in the broader economy from their activities. Her answer was that no one talks about it in public but almost all understood and were unbelievably cynical, hoping to exit…
Mysterious Drop In Mosquito Numbers
Photo: Arthur Chapman (CC)
Is this a good or a bad thing? Incidents of malaria are reduced, but there are less people to test treatment on. Via BBC News:
Malaria-carrying mosquitoes are disappearing in some parts of Africa, but scientists are unsure as to why.
Figures indicate controls such as anti-mosquito bed nets are having a significant impact on the incidence of malaria in some sub-Saharan countries.
But in Malaria Journal, researchers say mosquitoes are also disappearing from areas with few controls.
They are uncertain if mosquitoes are being eradicated or whether they will return with renewed vigour.
Data from countries such as Tanzania, Eritrea, Rwanda, Kenya and Zambia all indicate that the incidence of malaria is dropping fast.
[Continues at BBC News]
Disturbing Conversation Between Chatbots
Via Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab, two robots are forced into an uncomfortable conversation that touches on God and other existential matters. (Both are suspicious that the other may have android origins, but neither wants to admit it.) It’s even more disconcerting to imagine robots someday having such discussions without human supervision and coming to epiphanies concerning their robotic nature.
Chilean Students Demand Complete Transformation of Education System
Photo: Diego Grez (CC)
Who said that massive/social cultural revolutions were a thing of the ’60s? Via the Atlantic:
For the past several months, students, teachers, and their supporters in Chile have been staging chaotic demonstrations against their government.
Their goal is to transform the country’s education system. In particular, they’re seeking a referendum to significantly increase the funding and quality of public schools. Students have engaged in multiple forms of protest, from hunger strikes and sit-ins to marches and pillow fights. Smaller groups of protesters have engaged riot police directly, hurling stones and firebombs.
Chilean authorities have responded by banning demonstrations, pushing protesters back with water cannons, and offering education proposals that have been rejected. Students in the tens of thousands — with popular backing across Chile — continue to march without official permission, and public sentiment against president Sebastian Piñera continues to grow.
Collected here are some scenes from the streets of Chile over…
Astronaut Suicides
This summer’s final NASA space shuttle mission marks the end of the 30-year era of the United States’ sending live explorers into outer space. Photographers Sara Phillips and Neil DaCosta created Astronaut Suicides, a series depicting the logical conclusion of the decision to render the astronaut an obsolete relic.
Rick Perry Is a Socialist
The Washington Post reports:
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has leapfrogged to the top tier of Republican presidential candidates largely on the strength of one compelling fact: During more than a decade as governor, his state created more than 1 million jobs, while the nation as a whole lost 1.4 million jobs.
Perry says the “Texas miracle” rests on conservative pillars that he would bring to the White House: minimal regulation and government, low taxes and a determination to limit the reach of Uncle Sam.
What he does not say is that much of that job growth has come because of government, not in spite of it.
With a young and fast-growing population, a large and expanding military presence and an influx of federal stimulus money, the number of government jobs in Texas has grown at more than double the rate of private-sector employment during Perry’s tenure.
The disparity has grown sharper since the national recession hit.…
Kids’ Weight Loss Book Sparks Protests
It seems everyday there’s a new statistic about which country is fighting obesity, how school lunches and fast food restaurants are offering “healthy” options, and other stories about reducing the weight problem of current and future generations. But a new book about a fourteen years old girl going on a diet has sparked controversy. Discovery News reports:
An upcoming children’s book with the seemingly noninflammatory title “Maggie Goes on a Diet” is causing a firestorm of protest.
According to the book’s description on Amazon.com, “This inspiring story is about a 14-year-old who goes on a diet and is transformed from being overweight and insecure to a normal sized teen who becomes the school soccer star. Through time, exercise and hard work, Maggie becomes more and more confident and develops a positive self-image.”
You’d think that with one-third of American kids overweight or obese, and children experiencing unprecedented weight-related health problems including diabetes, a book…
