Archive for November, 2011
Parkinson’s Disease Linked To Common Chemical
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The petro-chemical industry likes to portray itself as the progenitor of our rapidly-advancing technological society, but it will come as little surprise to some that there is a price to be paid, principally to the health of our planet and our selves. Neil Bowdler reports on a new study showing a six-times greater likelihood of developing Parkinson’s disease after exposure to trichloroethylene (once used as a general anesthetic), for BBC News:
An international study has linked an industrial solvent to Parkinson’s disease.
Researchers found a six-fold increase in the risk of developing Parkinson’s in individuals exposed in the workplace to trichloroethylene (TCE).
Although many uses for TCE have been banned around the world, the chemical is still used as a degreasing agent.
The research was based on analysis of 99 pairs of twins selected from US data records.
Parkinson’s can result in limb tremors, slowed movement and speech impairment, but the exact cause of the disease…
NASA: Solar Flare Can’t Destroy Earth
Feeling the heat from 2012 apocalypticists perhaps, NASA feels the need to reassure people that we won’t be fried in 2012. Mike Wall reports on NASA’s Nov. 10, 2011 statement, for Space.com:
If the world ends in 2012, the sun won’t be to blame, NASA officials say.
Contrary to what some doomsayers would have you believe, our star isn’t capable of blasting out a solar flare powerful enough to burn our planet to a crisp, according to the space agency.
“Most importantly, however, there simply isn’t enough energy in the sun to send a killer fireball 93 million miles to destroy Earth,” NASA officials wrote…
Are Fair Voting Systems Mathematically Possible?
To American voters, it’s an all-too familiar dilemma: do you cast your lot with the candidate most likely to win, or risk spoiling the election by supporting the third-party candidate in whom you actually believe? What if, instead of choosing one candidate, voters were instead given the opportunity to rate each potential office-holder, in the same way that Olympic judges score athletes? Brian Dunning at Skeptoid takes an interesting look at the mathematics of voting systems:
In the 1969 film Putney Swope, members of the board of executives were prohibited from voting for themselves, so they all voted for the one board member they were sure nobody else would vote for. Ergo, this free, democratic election produced a chairman that no voter wanted.
In a perfect democracy, everyone gets an equal opportunity to vote, and equal representation. Therefore, we hold elections to let everyone have their say, to either vote representatives into office, or to…
Jack the Ripper’s Blade Found?
Via the Telegraph:
It was found among possessions belonging to Welsh surgeon Sir John Williams, a chief suspect in the Victorian murders. Sir John, known to his family at the time of the killings as “Uncle Jack” was the surgeon to Queen Victoria who lived in London at the time of the slayings.
He fled the capital after the murders and later founded the National Library for Wales in Aberystwyth. One of his distant relatives has now unearthed the old black-handled surgeon’s knife, which he used for operations, and believes it could be the murder weapon.
Tony Williams, 49, Sir John’s great-great-great-great nephew, has now published a book, which features the startling image of the knife, to expose his relative’s guilt.
86-Year-Old Veteran Chronicles His Life in Rage Comic
Not something you would expect from an 86-year-old. Andy Khouri writes on Comics Alliance:
“Rage comics” are a memetic phenomenon by which crude digital drawings of different facial expressions and physical gestures are remixed infinitely by countless individuals to convey the elation, despair, love and hatred of the Internet hive mind. We usually talk about these comics in ironically grandiose terms (like when a rage comic face appeared in a man’s testicular sonogram) but the truth is that many of them are genuinely hilarious reads (like the Rage Comics All Stars’ “performance” of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”), and some are even quite touching.
Because rage comics typically express primal responses to utterly mundane but often “scene”-specific experiences, it would seem unlikely that an 86-year-old man would be the author of what many Reddit users are calling the greatest rage comic ever made. Published earlier this week on the man’s birthday, the comic details…
OccupyWallStreet: Are You Concerned About ‘Zuccotti Lung’?
Matt Flegenheimer reports in the NY Times:
The chorus began quietly at a recent strategy session inside Zuccotti Park, with a single cough from a security team member, a muffled hack between puffs on his cigarette. Then a colleague followed. Then another.
Soon the discussion had devolved into a fit of wheezing, with one protester blowing his nose into the mulch between clusters of tents. “It’s called Zuccotti lung,” said Willie Carey, 28, a demonstrator from Chapel Hill, N.C. “It’s a real thing.”
As the weather turns, the protesters in Zuccotti Park, the nexus of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Lower Manhattan, have been forced to confront a simple truth: packing themselves like sardines inside a public plaza, where cigarettes are shared and a good night’s sleep remains elusive, may not be conducive to good health.
“Pretty much everything here is a good way to get sick,” said Salvatore Cipolla, 23, from Long…
The Neuroscience of Rick Perry’s ‘Brain Freeze’
I think the Washington Post is being too kind. As Joel Achenbach reports:
It was the Hoover Dam of mental blocks. Pundits referred to it as a “brain freeze” or a “gaffe.” In Internet parlance, it was an “epic FAIL.” But to neuroscientists, what happened to Texas Gov. Rick Perry Wednesday night looked like something very ordinary, exacerbated by stress: a “retrieval failure.”
It happens more often as we age. But the brain scientists say it shouldn’t be seen as evidence of an intellectual deficit or some medical problem. Instead, they say, retrieval failures offer a glimpse into how the brain does and doesn’t work, not just in the skulls of presidential candidates but for everyone else, too.
It’s impossible to know what exactly was happening inside Perry’s head at the Republican presidential debate, and the pundit class will continue to debate whether it was a neurological hiccup or a telling sign of a candidate who…
Fetuses Can Sense Mothers’ Psychological States, Study Indicates
Via ScienceDaily:
As a fetus grows, it’s constantly getting messages from its mother. It’s not just hearing her heartbeat and whatever music she might play to her belly; it also gets chemical signals through the placenta. A new study, which will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this includes signals about the mother’s mental state. If the mother is depressed, that affects how the baby develops after it’s born.
In recent decades, researchers have found that the environment a fetus is growing up in — the mother’s womb — is very important. Some effects are obvious. Smoking and drinking, for example, can be devastating. But others are subtler; studies have found that people who were born during the Dutch famine of 1944, most of whom had starving mothers, were likely to have health problems like obesity and diabetes later.
Curt A. Sandman, Elysia P.…
How The Family Circus Confronted the Web
Tuesday cartoonist Bil Keane died at the age of 89 — and one webmaster fondly remembers how Keane gracefully confronted unauthorized parodies on the internet.
Keane was a good sport about fake Amazon reviews that gushed about supposedly hidden literary themes in collections of his newspaper comic strips, and he once even drew his own characters into a “guest appearance” in a Zippy the Pinhead strip. But in 1999, Keane’s syndicate threatened legal action against the “Dysfunctional Family Circus” site, which had been re-captioning Keane’s cartoons for over four years.
Heading off a “free speech” showdown, Keane resolved the situation with a friendly phone call to the webmaster, who ultimately decided to voluntarily remove the images just because “He’s actually a nice guy.”
Texas Scientist’s Invisibility Cloak Prototype
The device created by Ali Aliev, a researcher at University of Texas Dallas, uses threadlike carbon nanotubes. When rapidly heated, they create a mirage effect similar in principle to a stretch of highway on a very hot day. Perfect for keeping a small object hidden:
Egypt Closes Great Pyramid to Prevent 11/11/11 Rituals
Weird. Has anyone been digging into this story? Reports the AP via MSNBC:
Egypt’s antiquities authority closed the largest of the Giza pyramids Friday following rumors that groups would try to hold spiritual ceremonies on the site at 11:11 on Nov. 11, 2011.
The authority’s head Mustafa Amin said in a statement Friday that the pyramid of Khufu, also known as Cheops or the Great Pyramid, would be closed to visitors until Saturday morning for “necessary maintenance.”
The closure follows a string of unconfirmed reports in local media that unidentified groups would try to hold “Jewish” or “Masonic” rites on the site to take advantage of mysterious powers coming from the pyramid on the rare date.
Amin called all reports of planned ceremonies at the site “completely lacking in truth.”
The director of the complex, Ali al-Asfar, said Friday that an Egyptian company requested permission last month to hold an event called “hug the pyramid,”…
Ohio Family Claims To Be Haunted By Ghosts Having Sex
This certainly raises all sorts of questions. CBS Cleveland reports:
An Ohio grandmother and her 4-year-old granddaughter say they have caught ghosts having sex inside their house.
Speaking to CBS Cleveland, Diane Carlisle said this visitation was the latest in a series that goes back to when she first moved to her Euclid home 12 years ago. Her photos prove it, she said.
This time, her granddaughter Kimora saw a man’s bare backside and a woman’s legs with high heels still on. At other times, they’ve seen men, women and children in various rooms and in her backyard.
Even her dog had an experience better to forget than remember. Walking up the stairs from the basement, something caught its hind legs and held them. Now, the dog avoids the basement.
The rest of the family has learned to live with them, Carlisle said.
“[My granddaughter, daughter and I] have grown with them around,” she said. “At times…
Aleister Crowley May Have Been Behind The ‘Curse of Tutankhamun’
In post-WWI London, the public’s attention was gripped by a string of mysterious deaths of people linked in one way or another to the unsealing of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Was the “pharaoh’s curse” in fact carried out by Aleister Crowley? Via the Telegraph:
Six mysterious London deaths famously attributed to the ‘Curse of Tutankhamun’ were actually murders by notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley, a historian claims in a new book. Incredible parallels between Crowley and Jack the Ripper have also been discovered during research by historian Mark Beynon.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, London was gripped by the mythical curse of Tutankhamun, the Egyptian boy-king, whose tomb was uncovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter. More than 20 people linked to the opening of the pharaoh’s burial chamber in Luxor in 1923 bizarrely died over the following years – six of them in the capital.
Victims included Carter’s personal secretary Captain Richard Bethell, who was found…
Did Coca-Cola Trash The Grand Canyon’s Plastic Bottle Ban?
It’s good to see the mainstream media calling foul on some corporate dirty work. Karin Kline writes in the LA Times:
Grand Canyon National Park was just about to impose a ban on single-use plastic water bottles — the most common form of trash found along its trails — when the plan was suddenly put on hold, the New York Times reported. The paper raises the possibility that Coca-Cola Co. was able to get a sympathetic ear at the National Parks Foundation because the company, which bottles Dasani water, is a major donor.
This isn’t a radical new idea. Zion National Park already has a ban. The park provides “hydration stations” for people to refill their reusable bottles, as the Grand Canyon park would have.
The story included a strange comment from a Coca-Cola spokeswoman, who said that bans on single-use plastic bottles are never the answer, and that recycling would resolve the…
Libya, The Real Story
Bob Powell on AboveTopSecret.com’s The Truth Is Viral show claims that,
under orders from a cabal of international bankers, the CIA trained and equipped al-Qaeda terrorists and set them on a path of revolution that ended with a new Libyan Central Bank and the black flag of al-Qaeda flying over the Benghazi courthouse. Assisted by NATO forces and Qatari Army Soldiers and supplied with weapons by the Qataris, these al-Qaeda terrorists succeeded in removing the Libyan leader from power before brutally murdering him. Now, as the “legitimate” government of Libya, the NTC is waging a genocide against black Libyans, African guest workers, members of Gadaffi’s tribe, and his supporters.
Media Roots: Occupy Oakland Historic Strike & Port Shutdown (Video)
Abby Martin of Media Roots captures some great energy and epic highlights from the day of the historic general strike in Oakland on 11-2-11. Footage includes the strike, the shutdown of the banks around town, the march to the port and the shutdown of the Port of Oakland:
