Real Name: Ben Underwood
Superpower: Super Echolocation
That’s a fancy way of saying he can “see” with sounds. Basically he’s Daredevil, minus the girlfriends who become porn stars in Mexico, getting killed by ninjas and being Ben Affleck. So much, much better when you think about it.
More, courtesy of Cracked.com
Previous posts on real-life superheroes
Lets not forget kung-fu finger guy
We need these guys too
New data on the domestication of corn-
Now, in addition to more traditional macrobotanical and archeological remains, scientists are using new genetic and microbotanical techniques to distinguish domesticated maize from its wild relatives as well as to identify ancient sites of maize agriculture. These new analyses suggest that maize may have been domesticated in Mexico as early as 10,000 years ago.
And here’s a gem about what traditional Mexican farmers are up against-
In a debate that pits sovereignty against science, grassroots networks of peasant groups and their allies in academia are challenging the top-down strategies of corporate farming and biotechnology for feeding the world.Researchers such as Kathleen McAfee, an assistant professor in international relations at San Francisco State University, are weighing in on the side of small-scale farmers who want the U.S. to stop exporting its subsidized crops to poor countries, displacing native varieties of those same crops and the people who grow them.
They call it “food sovereignty.” Farmers with fewer than five acres of land say they could raise their families and communities out of poverty, not with cheap imports or genetically modified seeds, but with home-grown crops and seeds that are passed on from generation to generation - if only their governments would invest in rural areas.
Update- The Impossible Coexistence of Transgenic and Organic Corn
Call it Peak Oil. There are only a few elements of it you need to know. 1.) that demand has now permanently outstripped supply; 2.) that new discoveries are too meager to offset consumption; 3.) That under under the circumstances, the systems we rely on for daily life are crumbling. I’ve called this situation The Long Emergency.
Our chances of mitigating this, and of continuing our current way-of-life is about zero. I’ve tried to promote the idea that rather than waste remaining resources in the futile attempt to sustain the unsustainable (i.e. come up with “solutions” to keep suburbia running), that we should begin immediately making other arrangements for daily life — mainly by downscaling and re-scaling everything from farming to commerce to the way we inhabit the landscape — but my suggestions have proven unpopular even among the “environmental” elites, who are too busy being entranced by new-and-groovy ways to keep all the cars running.
So where we are at now is the equivalent of standing in the slop by the ocean shore under a gathering hundred-foot-high wave that is about to come crashing down on our heads. Since I sure don’t know everything, I can’t say how this will all play out in the months ahead, especially with the presidential election coming at the exact moment that voters will be turning on their furnaces for the cold and dark winter beyond. I would venture to say that so far our society as a whole has done a piss-poor job of comprehending the situation. But there is still the possibility, with four months of politicking left, that the nature of our predicament can be articulated in a way that few can fail to understand, the way Mr, Lincoln articulated the terms of the Civil War on the eve of its fateful outbreak.
The operation to recover hundreds of bodies inside a sunken Philippine ferry has been suspended after a highly toxic pesticide was found to be on board.
Ten tonnes of endosulfan were illegally in the cargo, destined for a Del Monte pineapple plantation, officials said.
Whether the ferry operator, Sulpicio Lines, knew of the toxic cargo is unclear, though a senior official warned it could face prosecution.
Only 56 of more than 850 passengers are known to have survived the disaster.
There must be more of these - shipped improperly by “mistake” - darn regulations!!!
Scientists flabbergasted. File under “could have been predicted.” I’m pretty sure Tom Van Flandern’s not surprised.
Positively Velikovskian.
NASA says it was leftover space debris.
Tom Van Flandern says a planet exploded in Mars’ face.
You decide.
Under normal circumstances this extreme rock climber would be worth watching. But what makes his effort even more remarkable is that he happens to be blind. Born with retinoschisis, a rare disease akin to macular degeneration, Erik Weihenmayer was sightless by age 13. Even so, he continued to pursue his dream of mountaineering, and he succeeded: In 2001 he became the first—and to date the only—blind climber to summit Mount Everest. Today he is climbing with the aid of a tool that allows him to “see” in a new way—with his tongue.
The World According To Monsanto
Enjoy this interactive map about the mortgage crisis. Did I mention that I hate predatory lending with a passion?
Suffering from shady lending practices by your bank? Call these bad ass motherfuckers.
Chlorinated Water Damages Your Brain
Water treatment hasn’t changed much since 1908 when chlorine first was introduced. What has changed is our awareness of the hidden dangers of the chemical itself. Even so, chlorine still is used extensively to kill bacteria in municipal water supplies. Almost from the beginning, chlorine has had its critics. Concerned biologist and environmentalists have been on the trail of carcinogens in disinfected drinking water for a long time, but only in the past 20 years have such investigations gained national attention.
Most medical researchers were led to believe that chlorine was safe, but they now have learned that, while in the process of preventing epidemics of typhoid, cholera, and dysentery, we have created others. According to Joseph M. Price, M.D., author and noted chlorine researcher, “Chlorine has become the greatest crippler and killer of modern times, and the cause of an unprecedented disease epidemic, which includeds cancer, heart attacks, senility, sexual impotency, and strokes.”
Right-to-life Congressman is alleged to have paid for his girlfriend’s abortion, and his local Right to Life group says “We believe her.” Better sue them for libel, dude!
Stories on the epic failure of the U.S. propaganda machine in the Middle East. Your tax dollars at work.
Some say that the UFO sightings are encouraged (by the CIA for example), as they help to hide the secret technology that is being used. This is very possible, there are a lot of very advanced crafts flying around, and the military would certainly prefer that the public think these are Alien, rather than secretly funded man-made machines.
Logic dictates that the possibility of Alien life in our, or other galaxies, is almost a certainty, but we have been conditioned into believing that such Aliens would probably be hostile. If such “hostile” Aliens exist, what are they waiting for? Maybe they paid us a visit and saw how successful Bush was in Iraq and said to themselves “Let´s not mess with these guys”?
If and when this happens, I will be outside on a lawn chair sipping a beer and smoking some grass watching the fireworks. If these “aliens” were so hostile, why would they wait to mount a global attack until just the right moment of when we have the technology to fight back? If they could get here, they most likely would have been able to get here before the ironic date of our technological leaps and bounds, and just wipe us out when all we had was horse and buggy’s.
I really hope this doesn’t happen, but won’t be surprised if it does.
A controversial decision to halt commercial and recreational fishing across vast areas of the Great Barrier Reef has proven remarkably effective for reviving coral trout numbers.
“Everyone is a little surprised,” admits Garry Russ, a marine biologist at James Cook University in Townsville.
Related Stories-
Scientists shocked to find mixture of dirt and water creates mud
Scientists surprised by transformation of bread into toast. Said one surprised scientist “It turns out toast is just toasted bread.”
Military officials surprised by absence of people blown to shit after hiatus in bombing runs
Connection between logging ban and reforestation still mired in controversy
Halting time honored tradition of shitting where you eat allegedly reduces level of dookey in ones diet allege shocked scientists
The parallel universe of the financial world is showing the strain of all this oil anxiety — since, after all, oil is the primary resource for running industrial economies. It has been some time since the banker boyz embarked on their fateful venture to alchemize a new mutant strain of investment instruments to replace the tired old stocks and bonds which represented the hope for production of surplus wealth from industrial activity — now mooted by the oil story. The idea of the mutant investments was to produce wealth with no real wealth-producing activity. This old trick, formerly known as Ponzi finance or a “pyramid scheme,” was naturally self-limiting, and in a way that would prove ultimately very destructive to society as a whole. In fact, it has fatally undermined the legitimacy of the entire financial system, and a state of comprehensive nausea has set in as we all witness the dissolving foundation of the US economy under a tsunami of debt that will never be repaid.
James Kunstler nails it every time. Like our man Giordano, Kunstler’s bluntness shines like a freaking lighthouse in our era of massaged truth.
George Carlin, R.I.P.
Established methods for estimating the human cost of war typically underestimate by a factor of three, say researchers who have developed a more accurate method for assessing fatalities.
Accurately estimating the death toll from wars is notoriously difficult, and usually depends on a mixture of eyewitness reports and media coverage.
A database of such estimates covering the entire 20th century is kept by Uppsala University and the Peace Research Institute in Norway. However a new study suggests that for some periods the deaths recorded could have been up to three times higher.
Ziad Obermeyer and colleagues at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, Washington, looked at death toll estimates gathered by the World Health Organization for selected countries.
The WHO figures are extrapolated from telephone interviews in which individuals are asked about family members who have died and are considered more accurate.
If the number of war dead in the 20th century gets tripled think of all the additional outrage anti-war campaigners will have to muster. Maybe if the Norwegians were a little more involved in slaughtering people and a little less preoccupied with counting corpses the Global War on Everything would have been won by now.
The world is a less funny place today. Carlin devoted his life to lancing the insane boils of American life and with his passing the rest of us are just a little bit more full of shit.
Carlin on Natural Disasters.
Trophy hunting is a multi-billion dollar industry, where large white-owned safari outfits charge rich white people thousands of dollars to hunt rare wildlife in Africa. A typical trophy-hunting safari in Tanzania, for example, costs between $40,000 and $60,000. Little, if any, of this money stays in Tanzania. Most of it goes to the outfitters, which are often owned by American, European, or South African companies. For example, the Gellini outfitting company of Italy promises its clients “exclusive camps near the favorite hunting areas of Ernest Hemingway, led by first class professional hunters. Our luxury camps feature the best Italian cuisine served by waiters dressed in crisp whites, carrying fresh drinks.” According to one survey, more than 60 percent of the clients of American safari outfitters are millionaires.
The typical safari hunt is neither exhausting nor dangerous. Most African elephants are shot from trucks near the borders of national parks. The favored method of hunting leopards and lions is to shoot them from blinds at night, as the animals are attracted to bait (usually zebra or impala) hung from trees. Bright spotlights are flashed on the cats to freeze them before the hunter makes the kill.
Many of the trophy imports into the United States come from South Africa, where endangered species, such as African lion, bontebok, and elephants are slaughtered on large privately-owned game ranches, some of which are more than a half million acres in size. Many of the rare animals offered for hunting in these places are trapped from the wild and then transported to enclosures in the game reserves. The Kido Game Ranch in South Africa advertises the opportunity to kill scimitar-horned oryx ($4,500), letchwe Kafue ($1,600), addax ($4,700), and Pere David deer ($1,650)—not including taxidermy and gratuity.
…and proponents of the release of genetically modified organisms continue to do the same stupid things in clever new ways.
Which is to say, it may seem like a really, really good idea at the time, but I really don’t think things are going so well for the environment that we can just go around taking chances with it. Find another way that doesn’t involve something environmentally irrevocable, and yes I know malaria is a big problem.
What science needs is more Red Teams.
WASHINGTON - An outbreak of one of the most contagious animal diseases from any of five locations the White House is considering for a new high-security research laboratory would be more devastating to the U.S. economy than from the isolated island laboratory where such research is now conducted, says a new report published Friday.
The 1,005-page Homeland Security Department report said chances of such an outbreak — with estimated loses of more than $4.2 billion — would be “extremely low” if the research lab were designed, constructed and operated according to government safety standards.
Still, it calculated that economic losses in an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease could surpass $4 billion if the lab were built near livestock herds in Kansas or Texas, two options the Bush administration is considering. That would be nearly $1 billion higher than the government’s estimate of losses blamed on a hypothetical outbreak from its existing laboratory on Plum Island, N.Y.
What could possibly go wrong?
A NSFW French ad that explores the deep seas of sexuality. It’s an ad promoting safe sex from the European HIV/AIDS non-profit AIDES, and it just won a Bronze medal at the Cannes International Advertising Festival.
Scientific misconduct, notably including falsification of data, may be far more common than suspected, according to the authors of a new survey of more than 2,000 scientists.
Sandra L. Titus and colleagues at the Office of Research Integrity of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Rockville, Md., surveyed 2,212 scientists at 605 institutions. They found that nearly 9 percent believed they had seen potential research misconduct in the previous three years.
The findings are published in a commentary in June 19 issue of the research journal Nature.
The results suggest as many as 2,300 observations of misconduct, 1,000 of them unreported, occur each year in the larger research community funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Titus and colleagues wrote. They added that it’s unlikely such behavior is confined to the United States.
Survey participants described misbehavior ranging from scientists’ changing numbers to make results look more definite than they really were, to more creative fabrications. One participant told of a colleague using Photoshop to tweak results of chemical tests that appear as blots on sheets of paper.
December 21, 2012, is coming in hard with multiple threats, and conflicting theories being actively debated on any and all forums that offer media time to the fringe and the fantastic. One marketplace of such ideas is George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM syndicated radio show. As the successor to the legendary Art Bell, Noory maintains the same format of paranormal and paranoid talk radio that gave Bell the highest ratings in syndicated nighttime talk. Call-in listeners warn of 12.21.2012 bringing an instant extinction of our current reality, much in the manner of the last episode of The Sopranos, but encompassing the entire universe. Alternative scenarios range from the conventional – exploding volcanoes, boiling oceans, shifting tectonic plates, and/or alien invasion, to a more metaphysical bonding that will bring humanity closer to a functioning, Jungian-style planetary mind, enabling us to clean up the mess we’ve made with our rugged individualism. (Noory added his own spike of drama to the mix when he announced he would only extend his current Coast to Coast AM contract until 2012, so he could see out the significant date on air. Later, however, pragmatism kicked in and his deal now runs to 2017.)
At the core of the flourishing furor over 2012 is the Mayan calendar. A circular replica of a Mesoamerican calendar stone has hung for years on the wall behind my desk, a flat ceramic disc the green of corroded copper. Right now a version of the same calendar stone, in the form of a spring-loaded spinning top, is currently being given away by Burger King with Kids Meals as part of a promotion for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Both are actually copies of the huge Aztec calendar stone preserved in the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City. Aztec rather than Mayan, but close enough for discomfort when it’s also used on Web pages explaining how the Mayan calendar supposedly predicts that the Fat Lady’s Terminal Aria will sound, dead on the Winter Solstice of 2012.
That the “Long Count” of the Mayan calendar mysteriously appears to come to an end in 2012 has been discussed in the counterculture since writer and supposed mystic José Arguelles promoted his concept of the Harmonic Convergence in 1987. Before Arguelles raised the hackles of skeptics by extending his idea of an earth-changing planetary alignment beyond Mayan mathematics to claims of telepathically received prophecies, the Book of Revelation, and a race of “galactic masters,” we learned that the Mayan calendar was incredibly complicated, dated back to the sixth century B.C., and functioned on mind-snapping multiples of synchronized and interlocking cycles. A 260-day sacred year is combined with a more conventional 360-day solar year, plus a lunar calendar, and the notorious Long Count that starts from the Mayans’ concept of the dawn of time – around 3114 B.C. – and runs to its calculated termination at the Winter Solstice of 2012. Just to add to the difficulties for those who aren’t Mayan scholars, the calendar also reflects the Mayans’ belief that time was not only cyclic, but its cycles involved the regular destruction and rebirth of the universe.
Full Disclosure- I was quite keen on all this 2012 business at one point until it became obvious that Jose Arguelles (see above) was drifting further and further into prophecy of the “Take-My-Word-For-It” variety. The Mayan Calendar is enigmatic as hell and while no one would rather catch the next Galactic Syncronization Beam to The Singularity than me, this is a good case to invoke the Gonzo Science maxim Do Your Own Research.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have an appointment to get my chakras aligned.
UPDATE - Let’s not forget Dennis McKenna told us up front that his brother Terence Mckenna fudged the numbers to get his Timewave theory to match up with the Mayan Calendar:
Dennis said Terence in essence fudged the end date of the Timewave to match up to the end date of the Mayan Calendar, confirming that it wasn’t the incredible coincidence Terence claimed in the books. Dennis recollected that the Timewave end date was somewhere close to the Mayan calendar end date, close enough that Terence decided that on the timescale of billions of years, it was “close enough,” and deliberately conflated them.
Although some lung damage from smoke, Absence of lung cancer link dumbfounds researchers.
Kos throws down the gauntlet and threatens to target Dems who cave to Bush on civil liberties.
I may be more anti-Republican than I am pro-Democrat, but I can definitely work within this paradigm.
Maybe it was one of Daily Kos’ other bloggers, but I believe it was Kos who said, “If we can’t get the Congress out of Iraq, we can at least get the Iraq out of Congress.” Kick their asses Kos - the country’s been run so far to the right that we need to grab the ball and run it as far left as we can. The Blue Dog Dems want to run it only as far as the fifty-yard line - which itself has been moved to the right over the years. So Kos is correct - we don’t just need more Democrats, we need better Democrats. I like my civil liberties. And I’m calling my Congressional and Senate representatives to let them know if they let AT&T off the hook for caving to Bush, I will support primary challenges against them. Fucking bedwetters.
…Here’s some Kos diaries covering Obama’s Solomon-esque attempt to split the baby on this one.
Religious whackjob parents discipline son by tying him to a tree for 2 nights, beat him too. Boy dies. Parents charged with 1st degree murder. Don’t the courts believe in religious freedom?!? Damn secular humanists!!!
(hat tip to patriotboy)
ScienceDaily (Jun. 19, 2008) — Claims that a large increase in the strength of cannabis over the last decade is driving the occurrence of mental health and other problems for users are not borne out by a study of the worldwide literature, say researchers at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) and the National Drug Research Institute (NDRI), both from Australia.
Exaggerated? Imagine that.
…Or they will gleefully post your hysterical emails, and you will deserve it. Al Giordano, the man with so much authenticity that he even told Project Censored to stuff it, is surely not about to take any crap. Al Giordano, we salute you.
Some thinkers conjecture that there will be a point in the future when the rate of technological development becomes so rapid that the progress-curve becomes nearly vertical. Within a very brief time (months, days, or even just hours), the world might be transformed almost beyond recognition. This hypothetical point is referred to as the singularity. The most likely cause of a singularity would be the creation of some form of rapidly self-enhancing greater-than-human intelligence.
The concept of the singularity is often associated with Vernor Vinge, who regards it as one of the more probable scenarios for the future. (Earlier intimations of the same idea can be found e.g. in John von Neumann, as paraphrased by Ulam 1958, and in I. J. Good 1965.) Provided that we manage to avoid destroying civilization, Vinge thinks that a singularity is likely to happen as a consequence of advances in artificial intelligence, large systems of networked computers, computer-human integration, or some other form of intelligence amplification. Enhancing intelligence will, in this scenario, at some point lead to a positive feedback loop: smarter systems can design systems that are even more intelligent, and can do so more swiftly than the original human designers. This positive feedback effect would be powerful enough to drive an intelligence explosion that could quickly lead to the emergence of a superintelligent system of surpassing abilities.
The singularity-hypothesis is sometimes paired with the claim that it is impossible for us to predict what comes after the singularity. A post-singularity society might be so alien that we can know nothing about it.
Update: Scientific American podcast on highly speculative Singularity related weirdness.
