Knowledge Brings Fear

Science Update

Neural Impulse Actuator
What a nifty name, eh?

Essentially this is a biofeedback device for gaming. Supposedly you can train your brain rhythms to control a game via this device. The more you train, the better you get.

In theory, it would give you better gaming reflexes, as you'd no longer have to communicate down the nerves to your hand.

In practice, if it works at all, it will probably just look frikkin awesome.

Plus I suppose there could be all sorts of medical uses for paralyzed people, but nobody seems to consider that in the article.

Source: Overclock 3D

HIV
New research isolating a gene that, if turned on, keeps HIV from replicating successfully.

Neat.

A cure for AIDS it probably isn't, though, because this gene is already *supposed* to be turned on by immune cells when they sense the virus. So HIV probably has a way around it.

Still, the researcher hopes to get drugs or what not to mimic the effect. Maybe the virus just moves too fast, and we can zap people better with gene therapy to turn it on, like a vaccine or preemptively.

Source: Express News

Spanking
A series of studies show that spanking children leads to violent behavior as adults.

New research by a University of New Hampshire domestic abuse expert says spanking children affects their sex lives as adults. Professor Murray Straus concludes that children who are spanked are more likely as adults to coerce partners to have sex, to have unprotected sex and to have masochistic sex.

Gee, what a surprise that physically dominating someone teaches them that they can physically dominate someone else.

Source: Raw Story

CERN Has Been Busy
So the last big piece of Europe's mega-supercollider has been put into place. They will soon fire the thing up and try to explore the early universe.

Of course there is a very, very slight chance they'll rip a hole in the vaccuum energy state of the universe and kill every living thing.

Very small.

GENEVA (Reuters) - A 100-tonne wheel, the last piece of an ambitious experiment that scientists hope will help unlock the secrets of the universe, was successfully lowered into an underground cavern on Friday.

It is the final major element in the ATLAS particle detector, the largest of four detectors being hooked up to the world's most powerful particle accelerator which the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) hopes to start up around the middle of 2008.

"This last piece completes this gigantic puzzle," CERN said in a statement.

The wheel was lowered down a 100-metre shaft and aligned within a millimeter of other detectors at CERN, the world's leading centre for particle research located at a sprawling complex along the Swiss-French border.

The ATLAS detector will measure particles called muons expected to be produced in particle collisions in the accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Take that, Muons!

Source: Raw Story

Reality TV Lies To Us?
So it turns out that your average internet sicko isn't the type to land on Dateline, but in fact, stupid teenagers are a large part of the problem. Also, MySpace isn't to blame.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The typical online sexual predator is not someone posing as a teen to lure unsuspecting victims into face-to-face meetings that result in violent rapes, U.S. researchers said on Monday.



Rather, they tend to be adults who make their intentions of a sexual encounter quite plain to vulnerable young teens who often believe they are in love with the predator, they said.

And contrary to the concerns of parents and state attorneys general, they found social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace do not appear to expose teens to greater risks.

...

Wolak said teens who engaged in risky online behaviors -- having buddy lists that included strangers, discussing sex online with strangers, being rude online -- were much more likely to be targeted.

"One of the big factors we found is that offenders target kids who are willing to talk to them online. Most kids are not," Wolak said.

U.S. state attorneys general have been working with privately held Facebook and NewsCorp's MySpace to protect users from registered sex offenders.

But Wolak said it is important for parents and children to have a clear picture of who these predators are.

"If everybody is looking for violent predators lurking in the bushes, kids who are involved in these relationships aren't going to be seeing what is happening to them as a crime," she said.

I can't believe the media would sensationalize an old, old issue (teenagers sleeping with adults) and turn it into a melodrama while blaming anything they can find on the interwebs!

Shocking!

I do have to wonder about the definition of 'being rude online', though. I've always been very rude online. What, was I not good enough to be targeted by some hillbilly with a modem?

*Sniff*

My glory days are behind me now. I feel so old.

Source: Raw Story

More Superbugs
So the UK is rapidly becoming ground zero for the superbacteria epidemic. This time there's a new culprit, a normally harmless stomach bacterium that goes berserk.

Deaths from the hospital superbug C. diff have soared to record levels in a damning indictment of hygiene levels in the Health Service.

The Clostridium difficile stomach bug killed or hastened the death of almost 6,500 patients in 2006 - a staggering 72 per cent rise on the previous year.

And since 1990 the number of people infected by the bug has risen almost 50-fold. It is a bigger killer than MRSA.

Patients' representatives and politicians said the figures highlighted the failure of numerous Government drives to halt the rise of the bug, which thrives in filthy conditions and can be combated with simple soap and water.

...

Infection experts say the soaring number of C. diff deaths is partly due to the emergence of a superdeadly strain which is particularly resistant to detergents. Since taking grip in the UK three years ago, it now accounts for more than half of cases.

C. diff exists naturally in the stomachs of many healthy adults, where it is kept under control by 'friendly bacteria'.

The problems start if the balance of bacteria is disturbed, perhaps by administering antibiotics for another infection.

Once the "friendly" bacteria are killed off, the C. diff are able to multiply and produce poisons which cause diarrhoea and, in the worst cases, a potentially fatal infection.

Well, that does indeed suck.

Maybe probiotics could help? They helped me out when I was recovering from a bad gut culture.

Source: The Daily Mail

More Proof That Florida Sucks
Why can't we just let them slide into the ocean?

(CNN) -- Preliminary results of an investigation show that Tuesday's massive power outage in Florida was caused by human error, Florida Power and Light President Armando Olivera said Friday.

A field engineer was diagnosing a switch that had malfunctioned at FPL's Flagami substation in west Miami.

Without authorization, the engineer disabled two levels of relay protection, Olivera said.

"This was done contrary to FPL's standard procedures and established practices," he said.

Standard procedures do not allow the simultaneous removal of both levels of protection.

"We don't know why the employee took it upon himself to disable both sets of relays," he added.

I suppose I should amend my earlier rant about Florida. It turns out that they do not, in fact, think it's a great idea to shut down power plants in response to overly high demand for power. Rather, they think it's a great idea to hire incompetent morons who cut the power to half a state by accident for unfathomable reasons.

Is that better? If so, how?

Source: CNN.com

American Civilization

An Excellent Idea

Bleg
Yes, this is a post about a bleg. (Begging on a Blog == Bleg). Yes, there are about a thousand of these and most of them have worthy causes.

I think this is indicative of a far larger problem though.

She was only 14 years old when she was an eighth grader, a cheerleader, a young, vibrant girl with her whole life ahead of her. She was only 14 years old, when she enjoyed her last year of life as a normal, healthy girl.

She was only 15 years old, when she started chemotherapy for Ewing's Sarcoma, a rare form of childhood cancer that attacks the bones. She lost her hair, had the cancerous bone in her pelvis removed, and then her lungs started to deteriorate.

She lived through her 16th year with an oxygen bottle her closest companion, as her lung function approached a mere 20% of normal capacity.

In May of 2007, she was only 17 years old, when she finally had a double lung transplant, to replace lungs killed by interstices lung disease, brought on by the chemotherapy which saved her from the bone cancer.

When her health insurance is canceled later this year, it will be canceled with the simple explanation that she has reached her "lifetime maximum benefits."

Maximum Lifetime Benefits, another of the charming euphemisms come up with by our healthcare for profit system.

It might as well be called 'Maximum Lifespan Benefits'.

UPDATE II - Insurance companies are constantly canceling insurance for the people who need it most, like Brittani. And then the insurance they are able to get to replace their canceled policy is usually terrible, restricting care, curtailing choice, and ultimately subject to cancellation, or "rescission," to use the industry term, once the insured person starts to make actual use of the policy.

"Blue Cross is one of several California insurers that have come under fire for issuing policies without checking applications and then canceling coverage after individuals incur major medical costs. The practice of canceling coverage, known in the industry as rescission, is under scrutiny by state regulators, lawmakers and the courts.
. . . .

Victims of cancer and other serious medical problems often are unable to get new coverage once their insurance has been rescinded and they may go without treatment when they need it most. Suddenly swamped by medical debt, some people have lost homes and businesses. -- Source, L.A. Times"

Honestly, why couldn't we have a Democrat with a spine, who would simply go out on stage at a debate and say, "You want to know a difference between myself and my opponents? I'm going to kill private health insurance. That's right. I'm going to make a single payer system and nationalize Aetna, Blue Cross, etc. There's not a damn thing they can do about it."

People hate their health insurance providers so much, that mythical candidate with a backbone would win by 30 points, guaranteed.

I guess the lobbyist checkbooks are just too hefty.

Source: Justice For None

A Shocker
This one shocked me, that's for sure. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously, on the side of workers -- and the Bush administration wanted it that way.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that individual participants in the most common type of retirement plan can sue under a pension protection law to recover their losses.

The unanimous decision has implications for 50 million workers with $2.7 trillion invested in 401(k) retirement plans.

James LaRue of Southlake, Texas, said the value of his stock market holdings plunged $150,000 when administrators at his retirement plan failed to follow his instructions to switch to safer investments.

The issue in the LaRue case was whether the Employee Retirement Income Security Act permits an individual account holder to sue plan administrators for breaching their fiduciary duties.

The language of the law refers to recovering money for the "plan" rather than for an individual, raising the question of whether a participant can sue solely for himself.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in his opinion for the court, said that such lawsuits are allowed. "Fiduciary misconduct need not threaten the solvency of the entire plan to reduce benefits below the amount that participants would otherwise receive," Stevens said.

In other words, if someone is negligent with your money, you can sue to recover it. SHOCKING

Employers were of course opposed to this, but, eh, who cares.

Source: Yahoo News

Military-Idiot Complex, the Moron Triangle
So the Seattle Times has been doing some stories about how, gee, campaign contributions lead to disgusting political favors.

Big surprise there.

Heath and military affairs specialist Hal Bernton found a disturbing trend in awards that representatives in the Pacific Northwest were handing out: Money was going towards manufacturing products that would never be used, or that nobody asked for to begin with.

One such product was Microvision Corporation's "Nomad," a helmet with a mounted computer display, meant to flash maps and relevant data to a soldier in combat. In 2001, Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA), who would later join Microvision's board, earmarked $8 million for the development of the "Nomad."

Democratic Senator Patty Murray, his successor, would appropriate a total of $11.5 million more to buy the helmets.

"Junk," one Army commander called the helmets, which have never seen combat; a contractor called Rockwell Collins was awarded the contract instead, but Senator Murray awarded Microvision $6 million for the purchase of their product anyway.

Ahh, bipartisanship! It sure gets things done.

Source: Raw Story

Florida Sucks
Seriously. They still qualify as a state?

A small fire took out the electrical grid for most of the state, including several nuclear reactors!

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- Florida authorities are investigating how a small fire and a switch failure at an electrical substation outside Miami triggered a power failure that affected millions of people.

When a nuclear power plant sensed the disruption, it shut down. In turn, the state's power grid triggered rolling blackouts Tuesday across the state.

More than 2 million people lost power at the peak of the outages, but electricity quickly was restored to most parts of the state.

Authorities said no injuries were reported.

Morons!

Olivera said Turkey Point's two nuclear reactors and a natural gas-powered generation unit automatically shut down when the plant's systems detected a fluctuation in the power grid.

"In a fraction of a second, the demand was far greater than the power plants that were online generating electricity could handle," he said. "When you have that kind of imbalance, we have a system that kicks in and it starts turning people's lights off, essentially balancing the demand with what's available."

So the official Floridian solution to demand exceeding supply (because a short is dumping all the current on a small line into the ground) is to CUT PRODUCTION, THUS CAUSING A BIGGER DEFICIT IN SUPPLY, THUS CAUSING THEM TO CUT SUPPLY, THUS CAUSING A BIGGER DEFICIT...

Yeesh. We're lucky this process didn't continue all the way back through time, until they were hunting and gathering for berries.

Source: CNN.com

More Mad Cow
It's baaaaaaaaack....

Canadian officials confirmed a new case of mad cow disease Tuesday, the second such case in two months and the 12th since the disease was first discovered in Canada in 2003.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said no part of the carcass entered the human food or animal feed chains. The cow was detected in Alberta under a national monitoring program that targets cattle most at risk for the disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

...


U.S. Department of Agriculture Deputy Secretary Chuck Conner said Canada's latest case would not affect trade with the U.S. "This is no cause for concern," Conner said.

Right, unless you really want to AVOID dying in one of the most horrifying manners imaginable.

Source: Raw Story

What is UP With Those Conservative Perverts, Anyway?

Special Ted Bundy Edition

Ted Bundy, Young Republican
A writer at the inestimable Sadly, No! (who recently had a contributor infiltrate the CPAC arch-conservative conference posing as a lobbyist from the nonexistent American Milk Solids Council) has discovered an interesting piece of history and decided it would make for the start of the next great book of political theory:

After his discovery, Bundy became a more focused and dominant person. In 1968, he managed the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller’s Presidential campaign and attended the 1968 Republican convention in Miami as a Rockefeller supporter. […]

Bundy graduated in 1972 from the University of Washington with a degree in psychology. Soon afterward, he again went to work for the state Republican Party, which included a close relationship with Gov. Daniel J. Evans. During the campaign, Bundy followed Evans’ Democratic opponent around the state, tape recording his speeches and reporting back to Evans personally. A minor scandal later followed when the Democrats found out about Bundy, who had been posing as a college student.

Dear George Soros:

Please, please, please hook me up with a book deal so I can write a 500-page masterwork showing how all Republicans are really serial killers. I swear to God it’ll be better-researched than Jonah’s crappy book. Hell, just by using Wikipedia, I’ve already drawn upon more credible sources.

Indeed. The Wikipedia article is actually pretty well researched, and contains citations to several books, Bundy's FBI file, and so forth. Bundy, it seems, really was a Republican party official.

I really am beginning to think I'm on to something here, with the Conservative-Pervert Axis of Evil.

Sadly, No! should get in on the action. If Jonah Goldberg can get a book saying that Fascists are Liberal published, surely the bar isn't set too high for character assassination books.

Source: Sadly, No!
Wikipedia

There's Something About Florida (Not Just Bundy)
Now here's a really flagrant example of Conservative pervism:

Floridians were shocked last week when police announced that the spokesman for the state's Department of Children and Families had been arrested and charged with peddling child pornography. But buried in news accounts of the case was a curious detail: the official in question had listed the state's current Republican Governor, Charlie Crist, as a reference when he applied for his post in 2005.

Yes, you read that correctly. The spokesman for the Department of Children and Families was himself a child abuser, and has the state's Republican governor as a reference to land the job!

It gets worse though.

Gov. Crist returned to the news as the nation awaited the outcome of the Republican presidential primary in Florida. The Sunshine State's governor's endorsement of Sen. John McCain late in the campaign may have helped push McCain across the finish line to take the state's 57 delegates. Crist's endorsement also contributed to ending the campaign of Rudy Giuliani, who had heavily courted the governor's thumbs up.

Just after the Florida electoral contest, Tampa Bay police announced the arrest of Al Zimmerman, the spokesman for the state's Department of Children and Families. Zimmerman, a former TV reporter, was charged with 8 child pornography counts after taking photos of two underage boys performing sexual acts. Some evidence indicates that he may have met one of the boys on the job, and that he may have had additional victims. He could face up to 120 years in jail.

Yes, that's right! They politicized his arrest, keeping it secret until after the Republican primary, which McCain needed Crist's help to win!

Crist is of course now trying to say he never knew the man... but he can't deny the recommendation, it seems:

An AP report noted that the governor, "does not recall authorizing a recommendation for Zimmerman, but added that he often is asked to give them, spokeswoman Erin Isaac said Sunday."

But according to some earlier accounts, Crist was directly aware of Zimmerman and his work as on-air talent for a Tampa-area TV station.

So, what sort of work for a tv station catches the Republican governor's eye?

Insightful politcal reporting? Wonkish analysis of tax policy?

Try a pervy sex-piece!

As a reporter, Zimmerman also made waves. According to the Tampa Tribune, a report that Zimmerman completed called "Perverts in the Park" provoked controversy when it aired in Texas in 1996. The TV report focused on a public restroom in a park in San Antonio where gay men met for trysts. And when the news item was broadcast, Zimmerman forgot to digitally blur explicit sexual images recorded with a hidden camera.

Oh yeah, he's good with a camera, isn't he, Governor?

Sigh. If the Sadly, No! guy doesn't get to it, I might just have to write my own book on this subject. 'Conservative Perverts: From Sparta to South Florida'

Sounds good to me.

Source: Raw Story

Obama Supporters Too?
Finally, just to show that I can spot an emerging pervert trend even if it doesn't involve Republicans, we have an Obama supporter's aide who turns out to be a terrible, child abusing pervert!

A top official in Gov. Deval Patrick's administration is accused of sexually assaulting a boy in the steam room of a Florida resort and has been placed on unpaid leave.

Carl Stanley McGee, the assistant secretary for policy and planning, was arrested Dec. 28 after the suspected assault at the Gasparilla Inn and Club in Boca Grande, according to the Lee County Sheriff's Office.

First Oprah runs a school full of pervert teachers, now this. Oprah of course thought the scandal was All About Her, for which I recall Keith Olbermann castigating her on MSNBC, amongst others. Patrick, who is already deeply unpopular, will probably have the same reaction.

Oh, and just because you KNOW it's going to be an issue:

McGee, who made $115,000 as a state employee, worked at Boston law firms before joining the administration. His marriage to John Finley IV in November 2005 was featured in The New York Times' Vows column.

Yes, McGee had a GAY MARRIAGE.

That surely led to this. It's the only possible explanation. After all, we never see good, Conservative men arrested for pervy or heinous sex crim---oh, wait.

We see that about once a week.

Source: Raw Story