The gooey, golden stuff that builds up inside your ears should stay there, according to national guidelines on earwax removal released today.

“[Earwax] is not intrinsically evil stuff, and consequently does not have to be removed merely because it’s present,” said Peter Roland, an ear, nose and throat doctor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. “In fact, it serves a function and so if you don’t need to take it out, you should just leave it alone.”

The antenna of my cell phone fits perfectly into my ear. D’you suppose that might be bad somehow?

August 30, 2008

CALIFORNIA LEGISLATURE PASSES BILL PROTECTING FARMERS AGAINST
“MONSANTO LAWSUITS”
First State Bill Regarding Genetically Engineered Crops
Awaits Governor’s Signature

August 30, 2008 - A landmark piece of legislation protecting California’s
farmers from crippling lawsuits was passed through both legislative houses
this week in an end-of-session flurry. The Senate voted 23 - 14 to support
it, and the Assembly was unanimous in their support. The bill, AB 541
(Huffman, D-Marin/Sonoma),  is now headed to the Governor’s desk for his
signature.  Sponsored by diverse organizations, some of whom are
traditionally opposed on farm issues, AB 541 is the first bill passed by the
California legislature that brings much-needed regulation to genetically
engineered (GE) crops.

“I am very pleased that my office, working with the stakeholders on both
sides of this historically divisive issue, was able to find common ground
and pass California’s first legislation on genetic engineered crops,” stated
Assemblymember Huffman. “While there is still work to be done on other
aspects of genetic engineering, AB 541 is an important step in establishing
basic protections for California’s farmers.”

AB 541 enacts protections against lawsuits brought against California
farmers who have not been able to prevent the inevitable - the drift of GE
pollen or seed onto their land and the subsequent contamination of their
non-GE crops. Currently, farmers with crops that become contaminated by
patented seeds or pollen have been the target of harassing lawsuits brought
by biotech patent holders, particularly Monsanto. The bill also establishes
a mandatory crop sampling protocol to prevent biotech companies that are
investigating alleged violations from sampling crops without the explicit
permission of farmers.

AB 541 has the support of organizations traditionally on opposite sides of
the GE issue, and its sponsors are confident that the Governor will sign it.
The bill was sponsored by a thirteen-member coalition including Community
Alliance with Family Farmers, Earthbound Farm, California Certified Organic
Farmers, United Natural Foods Inc., as well as California Farmers Union and
the California Farm Bureau, and several others.

 ”AB 541 is a move in the right direction,” stated Renata Brillinger,
director of the Genetic Engineering Policy Project, the coalition of organic
and conventional farmers, food industry, environmental, and faith
organizations sponsoring AB 541. “It provides much needed protection for
farmers who typically lack the resources to fight lawsuits brought by
biotech conglomerates.”

The fascinating world of the weiner-dog racing underground

So I went to bed pretty early last night, say 8pm. My phone rang, I didn’t answer it, but it was someone I wanted to talk to so I called them back. A few minutes later, as I was trying to fall back asleep, I heard a strange noise, like a jet taking off. It became higher pitched and louder, and started to become very loud. I opened my eyes in time to see my room lighting up (kind of like when a car turns around and the headlights pan through your room), so I strained my neck to look up and out the window, only to see a wing shaped array of lights going by at a relatively slow speed. No red lights, but white, yellow, and green, and it was only a split second before it was out of my line of sight.

OK. So it was a plane, right? That’s the obivous statement. Why the hell was a large jet flying about 300 feet above rural Esko, MN? And the light in my room wasn’t anything else, I live on 10 acres in total darkness, no other  roads or driveways within view of the west side of my house.

Whoa.

Also….personal status..

mostly awake, no alcohol, 8 hours since any illegal substance intake.

5 Scientific Experiments Most Likely To Destroy Earth 

Go NASA!

The laptops carried by astronauts reportedly do not have any anti-virus software on them to prevent infection.

Buncha rocket scientists can’t install anti-virus software? It ain’t gonna install itself…

Is this maybe a sliver of the same mindset that allows nuke plants to be built on fault lines? What can go wrong, it’s high-tech!!

Barrett’s Privateers by Stan Rogers. Regular readers will be shocked by my posting something as fucking wholesome as an acapella shanty by a dead Canadian folk singer but goddammit its catchy. Just the hair and fashions alone make this video worthwhile.

A three-metre (10-foot) python has killed a student zookeeper who let the snake out of its enclosure in Venezuela while working a night shift at the zoo.

Horrified employees at the Caracas zoo discovered the Burmese Python as it tried to swallow its victim’s head, local media reported.

Gadzooks.

Check out the detachable jaw on this freaky Goblin Shark.

A bunch of white supremacist meth-heads with lots of guns etc.

Ah, the right wing of our country.

Kos Diary on the subject.

…And, yet another skinhead plot.

…Newsweek: Threats to Obama rose during the McCain/Palin “stoking the rabid crowds” era, according to the Secret Service.

AP: Rightwing racist nutjobs in a real lather now that he’s their President.

…Another whacko popped.

…Yet more nutjob freepers calling for violence.

Dogs are becoming more intelligent and are even learning morals from human contact, scientists claim.

They say the fact that dogs’ play rarely escalates into a fight shows the animals abide by social rules.

During one study, dogs which held up a paw were rewarded with a food treat.

When a lone dog was asked to raise its paw but received no treat, the researchers found it begged for up to 30 minutes.

But when they tested two dogs together but rewarded only one, the dog which missed out soon stopped playing the game.

Dr Friederike Range, of the University of Vienna, who led the study, said: ‘Dogs show a strong aversion to inequity. I would prefer not to call it a sense of fairness, but others might.’

Religious whackjobs pray for rain to come at Obama’s acceptance speech. If it doesn’t rain, then, God wants Obama to win and they become Democrats?

UPDATE: They lose, God either does not exist or favors Democrats.

Its funny because its true

File under “already knew this,” but good to get these reminders out there.

The frogs are not the only vic­tims in this mass ex­tinc­tion, Wake added. Sci­en­tists stu­dying oth­er or­gan­isms have seen si­m­i­larly dra­mat­ic ef­fects. “Our work needs to be seen in the con­text of all this oth­er work, and the news is very, very grim,” Wake said.

This one outside New York City. Is anyone keeping track of these?

Or better yet, is anyone who is planning to build a new nuclear plant looking really hard for fault lines first?

Drops boulders along sea bottom to discourage illegal trawling.

More like this please.

A population of wild dolphins have learned tail-walking from a dolphin who was briefly in captivity years ago.

My first thought is, can we then teach one to import the dolphin-word for “Danger! Tuna net!” to a wild population?

I believe Carl Sagan speculated about the idea (was it in Dragons of Eden?) of teaching sign language to chimps and then releasing them into wild populations. I may be wrong about that.

I can imagine these plans going awry pretty easily though - releasing non-native ideas into a mental environment not equipped to receive them.

Some fuckin’ Hardy Boys/ Nancy Drew shit right here-

Up to a quarter of fish in stores and restaurants in New York City was mislabelled as a more expensive variety, according to samples collected by two US teenagers and tested with genetic “barcoding” methods.

In the worst cases, two samples of filleted fish sold as red snapper, caught mostly off the southeast United States and in the Caribbean, were instead the endangered Acadian redfish from the North Atlantic, according to the tests, revealed on Friday.

“We never expected these results. People should get what they pay for,” said Kate Stoeckle, 18, of the project with Louisa Strauss, 17.

The two classmates from New York’s Trinity school collected and sent off 60 fish samples to the University of Guelph in Canada. Of 56 samples that could be identified by a the DNA barcoding identification technique, 14 were mislabelled.

MIT engineer breaks down WTC 7 demolition.

I am posting this in response to the NY Times piece claiming that WTC 7 is the first building ever to be brought down by fire and fire alone. They don’t exactly explain any of the science behind it, probably because the science would end up refuting what they are claiming.

The investigators determined that the fire that day was fed mainly by office paper and furnishings.

Oh, ok, so a 450 degree fire broke the back of a 30 story building so as to make it perfectly implode, fracturing steel beams and support structures throughout the building at once, creating what was a visually indecipherable implosion that would be unrecognizable as anything out of the ordinary when viewed alongside other imploded buildings?

Not to mention that Larry Silverstein admitted on camera to “We decided to pull it”!!

Or how about the Windsor building in Madrid, Spain which burned for almost a full day and did not collapse.

I know I am preaching to the choir, but we cannot let this event fade to black lest we want to live in a nightmare future that George Orwell himself could not have even predicted.

Visa Parviainen’s jetpack variant, the jet-boot assisted wingsuit.

Jetpack Man.

Folks have probably caught wind of this absurd tale-

Lett said he met with two men the night of Aug. 14 in the Justice Center parking lot, where the two men signed a “transfer release agreement” to sell the frozen remains of Bigfoot, a gorilla-like creature that some people claim to have seen in wilderness areas throughout the nation. Lett said he handed over $50,000 in cash.

Lett said he then followed the two men to a house on nearby Poston Road, where another person was “standing guard” over a freezer that held the alleged remains. Lett said the freezer, which weighed almost a ton, was loaded onto a trailer towed by his GMC Yukon Denali.

Once Lett returned to Indiana, the thawing process began, and the creature turned out to be a Halloween costume, he said. Lett said he has tried without success to contact the men to get his money back.

Mind boggling.

you really just need to watch this.

I don’t believe it’s from 1982.

• Radio-frequency identi­fication (RFID) tags are embedded in a growing number of personal items and identity documents.
• Because the tags were designed to be powerful tracking devices and they typically incorporate little security, people wearing or carrying them are vulnerable to surreptitious surveillance and profiling.
• Worldwide, legislators have done little to address those risks to citizens

In a report scheduled for presentation here today at the 236th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, scientist Michael G. Tordoff, Ph.D., and colleagues with the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia describe research they say demonstrates that a taste for calcium exists in mice. With mice and humans sharing many of the same genes, the findings suggest that people also may have such a taste, which could have a range of practical applications.

Short version: Magpies (in the crow family) have been shown to recognize their reflections in mirrors, the only non-mammals to do so.

From the BBC article:

Until relatively recently, humans were thought to be uniquely self-aware.

…by humans.

The magpies have managed this feat without possessing a neocortex, the brain area previously believed necessary (by humans, who have one) for such a feat.

I kind of have to call bullshit on the theory of mind. If it’s so rare in the animal kingdom to understand that others have intentions, then why do animals try to escape from predators? I think animals know that the predators want to eat them. And thus animals have “theory of mind.” QED.

EPA- “Chemical companies send us a card on Christmas while all these damn honeybees do is fly around and pollinate plants.”

Classic tale of corporate science acting predictably.

Link here. Money quote:

“What Sibel revealed to us, and has been revealing little by little since January, is that she has heard that there was a nuclear procurement ring operating inside the US to procure nuclear designs and parts for the AQ Khan network, and it was done not through Pakistani intelligence directly, but through the Turkish embassy.

Turkish businessmen who got the information and gave it to Turkish military attaches, who then turned it over to the ISI, and from there went on to the nuclear black market. To procure these parts and designs, high government US officials helped facilitate Turkish-Israeli PhD students to get into nuclear facilities in the US, they worked with the RAND corporation as well, some moles with RAND to help get this information. There was at least one American company, Giza Technologies, that was helping with parts, probably there were others, and this thing went on from 1995 at least until 2002, and it could still be going on - when this operation was shut down by the Dept of Defense and the State Dept.

Now, Sibel tells us that high government officials inside those two departments - Defense and State - were involved in this ring. She has named them on her website - at least, she has not named them, she has photographs of people - other bloggers have named them.”

Richard Scarry set to the Beastie Boys. Not quite the masterpiece of Bert and Ernie’s Gangsta Rap, but close.