If only this could have been predicted.
“No-one’s done this before. It’s very difficult to find another measure. There’s nothing in engineering terms that allows you to extrapolate from what you have today.”
It’s a good thing we don’t just ram new technologies through anymore!
Knock back another timeline 200 million years.
I’d heard that an uncontacted tribe had been photographed in the Amazon recently. But one reason why this is so remarkable is:
Peruvian officials and energy interests have publicly expressed doubt that uncontacted tribes exist in the Amazon. (See “Oil Exploration in Amazon Threatens ‘Unseen’ Tribes” [March 21, 2008].)
A statement by Survival International, a tribal rights group, quoted Jos Carlos dos Reis Meirelles of FUNAI as saying the photo was taken to “show they are there, to show they exist.”
The group’s statement referred to comments made last year by Peruvian President Alan Garcia, as well as top officials at the country’s oil agency, PeruPetro, casting doubts on the existence of the uncontacted native groups. (PeruPetro did not respond to interview requests for this story.)
In response to the photos, an umbrella group of native rights organizations in South America called CIPIACI on May 30 asked Peruvian authorities to stop native displacement, which it said is caused largely by illegal logging and evangelists.
IT’S hardly unusual to find things flashing into your head as you fall asleep, but as Christer Fuglesang was settling down on his first night aboard the International Space Station it happened quite literally. It was December 2006, and as the European Space Agency astronaut floated, eyes closed, in his sleeping bag he suddenly saw a spot of white light surrounded by a faint halo. It vanished in an instant but Fuglesang realised immediately what it was. “I had heard about these things and so was very happy to have finally experienced one,” he says.
Since Buzz Aldrin and Neil Amstrong first reported these flashes during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969, dozens of astronauts have seen them.
True Tales of the Italian CIA Rendition Trial.
Probably the best video giving a summation of the history of fluoridation.
This guy spent 10 years researching the history and politics surrounding
it. This is a video summary of his book, same title. Keep in mind this
video almost aired on a mainstream news network in New Zealand before
the ADA and other pro-fluoridation people used their Orwelllian tactics to pressure
the news outlet NOT to air it. They claimed the video was just false propaganda!
A zany roundup courtesy of Cracked.com
While other so-called heroes run around saving useless things like kittens and “civilians,” John Paul Stapp looked at jet fighter pilots and thought, “Those poor guys need my help.” Yes, the manliest profession in the world since “Grizzly Bear Rodeo” was outlawed, and World War II veteran Dr. Stapp was the man who saved them.
He served as a flight surgeon in WWII, and after the war performed critical research on the effects of sudden deceleration on the human body. His human body. He used a rocket armed with four rocket engines and a total thrust of 6,000 pounds. The wider scientific community believed the human body could not survive more than 18 Gs of deceleration–Stapp hit 35. Because he goddamn could.
Update: Space Plumbers Are On The Case
“Amphibian horror” isn’t a movie genre, but on this evidence perhaps it should be. Harvard biologists have described a bizarre, hairy frog with cat-like extendable claws.
Trichobatrachus robustus actively breaks its own bones to produce claws that puncture their way out of the frog’s toe pads, probably when it is threatened.
David Blackburn and colleagues at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, think the gruesome behaviour is a defence mechanism.
The researchers say there are salamanders that force their ribs through their skin to produce protective barbs on demand, but nothing quite like this mechanism has been seen before.
Nifty yet kind of gross.
Part 2: The master taking you back to school, Andres Segovia. Extra special thanks to Jim Richardson for giving me the opportunity to share this with you. Hi Al!
George Monbiot writes to the King of Saudi Arabia:
King Abdaullah of Saudi Arabia
Your Majesty,
In common with the leaders of most western nations, our prime minister is urging you to increase your production of oil. I am writing to ask you to ignore him. Like the other leaders he is delusional, and is no longer competent to make his own decisions.
You and I know that there are several reasons for the high price of oil. Low prices at the beginning of this decade discouraged oil companies from investing in future capacity. There is a global shortage of skilled labour, steel and equipment. The weak dollar means that the price of oil is higher than it would have been if denominated in another currency. While your government says that financial speculation is an important factor, the Bank of England says it is not, so I don’t know what to believe. The major oil producers have also become major consumers; in some cases their exports are falling even as their production has risen, because they are consuming more of their own output.
But what you know and I do not is the extent to which the price of oil might reflect an absolute shortage of global reserves. You and your advisers are perhaps the only people who know the answer to this question. Your published reserves are, of course, a political artefact unconnected to geological reality. The production quotas assigned to its members by Opec, the oil exporters’ cartel, reflect the size of their stated reserves, which means that you have an incentive to exaggerate them. How else could we explain the fact that, despite two decades of furious pumping, your kingdom posts the same reserves as it did in 1988?
You say that you are saving your oil for the benefit of future generations. If this is true, it is a rational economic decision: oil in the ground looks like a better investment than money in the bank. But, reluctant as I am to question your Majesty’s word, I must remind you that some oil analysts are now wondering whether this prudence is a convenient fiction. Are you restricting supply because you want to conserve stocks and keep the price high, or are you unable to raise production because your fabled spare capacity does not in fact exist?
I do not expect an answer to this question. I know that the true state of your reserves is a secret so closely guarded that oil analysts now resort to using spy satellites to try to estimate the speed of subsidence of the ground above your oil fields, as they have no other means of guessing how fast your reserves are running down.
What I know, and you may not, is that the high price of oil is currently the only factor implementing British government policy. The government claims that it is seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, by encouraging people to use less fossil fuel. Now, for the first time in years, its wish has come true: people are driving and flying less. The AA reports that about a fifth of drivers are buying less fuel. A new study by the Worldwide Fund for Nature shows that businesses are encouraging their executives to use video conferences instead of flying. One of the most fuel-intensive industries of all, business-only air travel, has collapsed altogether.
In other words, your restrictions on supply — voluntary or otherwise — are helping the government to meet its carbon targets. So how does it respond? By angrily demanding that you remove them so that we can keep driving and flying as much as we did before.
James Kunstler rocks the Washington Post :
Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for “solutions.” This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.
I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our “Happy Motoring” utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system — or even a fraction of these things — in the future. We have to make other arrangements.
The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the “peak oil” story. It’s not about running out of oil. It’s about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:
The way we produce food
The way we conduct commerce and trade
The way we travel
The way we occupy the land
The way we acquire and spend capital
And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.
As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What’s more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.
Skeptical crusader James Randi has got cold feet about debunking Rupert Sheldrake’s psychic dog claims.
Del Mar, CA, May 14, 2008 –(PR.com)– James Randi has a reputation of taking on challengers who claim psychic abilities, but his recent negotiations with a team of researchers investigating whether dogs are telepathic has ended in a stalemate. According to Skeptiko host and research sponsor, Alex Tsakiris, Randi’s about-face came as a surprise:
“…this is exactly the kind of independent research, by a major university, James Randi has been calling for. We even agreed to forgo the million dollar prize he offers in order to secure his involvement and resolve this question scientifically, but he refused.”
Tsakiris’ negotiations with Randi began in September of 2007, when Randi appeared on the Skeptiko Podcast and called for an independent investigation into claims of canine telepathy. In April of 2008, Skeptiko released a video showing the successful results of their first trial.
Update: Correspondence on the kerfuffle
Psychic Dogs are going to get you James Randi AND THEY KNOW WHEN YOU’RE COMING HOME.
This is the first installment in a series of videos of what I consider to be highly influential musicians. Although not exactly science oriented, I consider music to be the highest form of performance/artistic expression and, as you’ll find, quite a few of these are definitely gonzo. First up, Big Black live in London on the Pigpile tour. Enjoy!
“It looks like seafaring capabilities and seafaring technology have a much greater antiquity than conventional wisdom among archaeologists would lead one to expect,” says James O’Connell, an archaeologist at the University of Utah.
…As the evidence for Ice Age mariners mounts in Australia, Asia, and the Americas, researchers are now peering further and further back in time for traces of seafarers. When and where, they ask, did humans first journey over the water? One highly controversial piece of evidence surfaced a decade ago during an excavation at Mata Menge on the island of Flores in Indonesia. There Michael Morwood, an archaeologist at the University of New England in Australia, recovered several stone tools as well as the bones of crocodiles and stegodonts—extinct elephantlike animals—beneath a layer of volcanic ash. Geologists dated the finds to some 800,000 to 880,000 years ago—a time when early humans known as Homo erectus wandered parts of Southeast Asia. To Morwood, the remains at Mata Menge pointed to a remarkable human journey. More than 800,000 years ago, he theorized, H. erectus crossed 12 miles of ocean to reach Flores.
I found this article linked to over at The Field, itself located in our top links.
You’ve probably come across the expression “peer-reviewed” a lot recently, especially in discussions on GM food, mobile phones, or organic farming. It’s almost always used as part of a sentence that begins “There is no peer-reviewed evidence for …” or “There is nothing about this in any peer-reviewed journal …”What you’re meant to understand by that is: “there is no credible evidence for whatever it is, and you can safely ignore anything you’ve heard about it.” When the question is about safety, as it often is, it means the regulatory authorities are not going to look into it.
Its about fucking time they acknowledge this stuff. Preaching
to the choir, but:
The more we learn about mercury amalgams the more we have to question why the ADA and most dentists still insist that mercury amalgams are safe to put in our mouths. The Center for Disease Control has gone so far as to say that mercury amalgams do emit small amounts of mercury vapors that are absorbed and the EPA has said that dental clinics are major environmental polluters via the release of amalgam laced waste waters.
Link to article here.
Link to submissions page here.
The possibility that there could be more forms of life beneath the surface than above it suggests that they have different and effective ways of surviving – ways that could be independent of light and oxygen. And if these “new” forms of life exist on Earth, they could exist on other planets too.
…[Jim here breaking in, but the fact that the above linked-to New Scientist article doesn’t mention Thomas Gold’s “Deep Hot Biosphere” theory is a mystery - he’s been saying this kind of stuff since 1979 and this finding lends enormous support to his hypothesis. Apparently Soviet science independently arrived at the same conclusion even earlier, behind the iron curtain. One implication: oil might not be “fossil” fuel at all, but produced by single-cell organisms at great depth and pressure. So one thing going on here is that Gold is a heretic and that’s why they don’t mention him, even when the latest finding clearly supports him. More.]
Ah, the beloved truth of an amazing plant.
In strict medical terms marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. For example, eating tenraw potatoes canresult in a toxic response.
I love referencing this stuff when debating with irrational
anti-marijuana people, who probably have cupboards full
of dangerous drugs and alcohol in their own homes.
New theory: Infrasound is involved.
Mysterious bands of shadow which sometimes pass across the ground during an eclipse might be produced by sound pulses, according to a new theory.
….Stuart Eves thinks that demonstrating a role for infrasound might explain some other puzzling phenomena associated with eclipses.
For example, long period Foucault pendulums - designed to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth - have been known to swing wildly during eclipses.
Some researchers have proposed that gravitational effects may be responsible.
But Dr Eves thinks the disruption to pendulums may be caused by infrasound pulses causing the ground to vibrate, disrupting the pendulum’s rhythm.
In addition, animals, and in particular birds, have been seen to exhibit unusual behaviour. In the case of birds this includes premature roosting and apparent signs of distress or alarm.
Birds have auditory ranges that extend well beyond those of humans, and might be affected by low frequency sound pulses.
Science at Play in the Fields of the Lord
The new Monsanto has clearly come to dominate the American food chain with its genetically modified (GM) seeds. It’s a master at enforcing its 674 biotechnology patents, using tyrannical and ruthless tactics against small farmers. This new Monsanto has also moved into the production of milk with it artificial growth hormones, seeking to dominate the dairy industry as effectively as it has the seed business. Has this new corporate image made us forget about the old Monsanto’s decades long history of scorched earth and toxic contamination?
Over 15,000 scientists nationwide are telling corpolitical interests to stop stifling good research.
Amazingly, at least 1,191 scientists who are employed at nine federal agencies have reported that they fear retaliation from superiors if the results of their research are perceived as threatening to corporate or other interests. When certain programs produce research results that are considered inconvenient or negative, they are being penalized by having their funding cut.
Based at the agency’s Clinical Center, its huge hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, the programme will enlist the expertise of more than 25 senior NIH doctors with a wide range of specialities, from endocrinology to genetics.
Although tricky medical cases have long been referred to the NIH, those patients have been directed to individual clinics with specific areas of expertise. This was unfortunate for patients who didn’t neatly fit into one of those categories. The new programme will allow consultants in diverse fields to share their expertise when dealing with puzzling individual patients.
Looking at the patients in this multidisciplinary way could finally provide a long-awaited diagnosis, the programme’s backers hope.
Let’s get something like this going in astronomy too.
Which technology with no public health warnings will win the Gonzo Science Award for being the New Asbestos?
Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded.
Or carbon nanotubes?
Carbon nanotubes, the poster child of the burgeoning nanotechnology industry, could trigger diseases similar to those caused by asbestos, a study suggests.
…They are already known to be incorporated into products such as tennis rackets, bicycle handlebars and baseball bats, where they are used because of their strength and light weight.
Other undocumented products may also make use of them, the researchers said, but companies did not have a duty to report their use.
These represent recent science we stumbled across in the press between January 29 - May 20, 2008.
Cell Phone Users Get Less Sleep.
Cell Phone Use Lowers Sperm Count.
Cell Phone Use Linked to Cancer of the Salivary Gland.
Cell Phone Use Linked to Brain Tumors.
Researcher: Health Risk Comparable to Asbestos, Smoking.
Cell Phone Use Damages Unborn Children.
This equals more than one adverse health effect being discovered or confirmed per month. (Remember these risks include all cordless phones and wireless internet devices.)
It’s funny but just because cell phones are so ubiquitous, I feel like it is extremely unfashionable to advocate this common-sense precaution, but children really should not be using cell phones.
The latest scientific research to show adverse physical effects from cell phone use - previously thought to be physically impossible. There’s been a lot of similar findings lately. [Discover Magazine doesn’t like the hype surrounding this study, but the best they can do against it is to dismiss the bad news by lumping it together with other things that are bad for developing fetuses that mothers supposedly should do nothing about. Our view: the bad news in this study is all too believable, as is the dismissive attitude of mainstream science outlets like Discover.] Anyway:
Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with behavioural problems, according to authoritative research.
A giant study, which surveyed more than 13,000 children, found that using the handsets just two or three times a day was enough to raise the risk of their babies developing hyperactivity and difficulties with conduct, emotions and relationships by the time they reached school age. And it adds that the likelihood is even greater if the children themselves used the phones before the age of seven.
The results of the study, the first of its kind, have taken the top scientists who conducted it by surprise. But they follow warnings against both pregnant women and children using mobiles by the official Russian radiation watchdog body, which believes that the peril they pose “is not much lower than the risk to children’s health from tobacco or alcohol”.
The research – at the universities of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Aarhus, Denmark – is to be published in the July issue of the journal Epidemiology and will carry particular weight because one of its authors has been sceptical that mobile phones pose a risk to health.
This technology was rushed to market, but now that the health effects are coming into focus, seemingly with every new study, warning labels are appropriate.
Remember that mobile phones are as bad as cell phones if not worse, since their base stations are on all the time. For sure don’t sleep with one by your head or baby bump. And your wireless connection is the same way - disable it when not in use to minimize your exposure.
This is shaping up to be the next asbestos.
Who won that night in Estonia, August 2004? They each had four shots - but the eyewitness says Hillary won - so it sounds like McCain tapped out after that.
