I Have Nothing Interesting To Say Here
Ancient Swede
So there's a new World's Oldest Tree, which has taken the throne from those uppity Bristlecone Pines in America.The world's oldest living tree on record is a nearly 10,000 year-old spruce that has been discovered in central Sweden, Umeaa University said on Thursday.
That is oooooooooooooold.
Researchers had discovered a spruce with genetic material dating back 9,550 years in the Fulu mountain in Dalarna, according to Leif Kullmann, a professor of Physical Geography at the university in northwestern Sweden.
That would mean it had taken root in roughly the year 7,542 BC.
"It was a big surprise because we thought until (now) that this kind of spruce grew much later in those regions," he said.
Don't expect intelligent commentary here. I just got up from a nap.
Apparently this tree is way older than they thought they had arrived here, and the article mentions something about them being climate change bellwethers, so I'm guessing what they mean is that the last ice age in Sweden ended earlier than they thought, or something. It's sparse on the details. Ancient history seems to be impacted by this lonely survivor, regardless.
Source: Raw Story
Cold
The coldest star ever found has been located. It's only 660 degrees at the surface -- cooler than Venus.April 11, 2008 -- A dim, lonely, weakling star with the lowest stellar temperature yet recorded has been found just 40 light-years from Earth.
The article mentions the possibility of even colder stars, stars perhaps cool enough to have liquid water in their atmospheres.
The brown dwarf star is between 15 and 30 times the mass of Jupiter and has a surface temperature of a mild 660 degrees Fahrenheit (350 Celsius) -- about the surface temperature of the planet Mercury at the equator and much cooler than the surface of Venus.
The spectacularly unspectacular object is of special interest because it falls right smack in the middle of the final frontier that divides mega-planets from the puniest stars. Stars in that realm theoretically qualify as an entirely new stellar type -- what's called a Y class dwarf.It's likely, says Burgasser, that as more of these even cooler dwarfs are found, there likely will be some that are a couple of hundred degrees cooler than CFBDS0059. That means any water in there atmospheres will condense into droplets of water vapor, which would make these dwarfs dramatically different than their L and T dwarf brothers.
That's amazingly odd. Imagine if there is a star out there somewhere just warm enough to keep water liquid. You could have life as we know it living on a *star*.
In brown dwarf atmospheres, water is generally in gaseous state, while in giant planets it condenses into water ice. So an even cooler dwarf would truly be on the verge of being more of a hot, giant Jupiter than a star.
Wacky.
Source: Discovery Channel News
RFI-Death
So an engineer who suffered through radiation therapy thought he had a better way to do it -- and it seems like he was on to something.A promising new cancer treatment that may one day replace radiation and chemotherapy is edging closer to human trials.
Essentially, you take nano-particles of gold, coat them in a chemical that only cancer cells absorb, then inject it. The cancer takes up the chemically coated gold. Then you blast the area of the body with a radio source.. the gold absorbs the radio waves, heats up, and kills whatever cells it's in. But if you had the right chemical, it's only inside cancer. Voila! Perfectly targeted radiation therapy.
Kanzius RF therapy attaches microscopic nanoparticles to cancer cells and then "cooks" tumors inside the body with harmless radio waves.
Based on technology developed by Pennsylvania inventor John Kanzius, a retired radio and TV engineer, the treatment has proven 100 percent effective at killing cancer cells while leaving neighboring healthy cells unharmed. It is currently being tested at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
“I don’t want to give people false hope,” said Dr. Steve Curley, the professor leading the tests, “but this has the potential to treat a wide variety of cancers.”
Modern cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy have proven remarkably effective at treating many cancers, especially in combination, but are plagued with toxic side effects. These treatments kill healthy cells as well as cancerous ones.
Kanzius RF therapy is noninvasive, and uses nontoxic radio waves combined with gold or carbon nanoparticles, which have a long history of medical use.
Very nice.
Source: Wired
Chimeratech
I'd heard about a technique like this to create genetically modified animals but I guess this is the first time someone's thought about using it as a backdoor to cloning without Dolly-esque age symptoms.The mice were made by inserting skin cells of an adult animal into early embryos produced by in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). Some of the resulting offspring were partial clones but some were full clones – just like Dolly.
I fail to see the horror here. The clone would be genetically identical to their parent, or whoever donated the cells. So... what, exactly? Granted, you'll probably get some creepy Jim Jones/Koresh type making his own little Clone Army, but is that really substantially worse than the current situation, where they just marry a couple dozen 10-14 year old girls?
Unlike the Dolly technique, however, the procedure is so simple and efficient that it has raised fears that it will be seized on by IVF doctors to help infertile couples who are eager to have their own biological children.
...
The experiments on mice demonstrated that it is now possible in principle to take a human skin cell, reprogramme it back to its embryonic state and then insert it into an early human embryo. The resulting child would share some of the genes of the person who supplied the skin tissue, as well as the genes of the embryo's two parents.
These offspring are chimeras – a genetic mix of two or more individuals – because some of their cells derive from the embryo and some from the skin cell. Technically, such a child would have three biological parents. Human chimeras occur naturally when two embryos fuse in the womb and such people are often normal and healthy. Dr Lanza says there is no reason to believe that a human chimera created by the new technique would be unhealthy.
Furthermore, studies on mice have shown that it is possible to produce fully cloned offspring that are 100 per cent genetically identical to the adult. This was achieved by using a type of defective mouse embryo with four sets of chromosomes instead of the normal two.
This "tetraploid" embryo only developed into the placenta of the foetus and when it was injected with a reprogrammed skin cell, the rest of the foetus developed from this single cell to become a full clone of the adult animal whose skin was used.
From a safety perspective I oppose using a technique like this on people until we have all the bugs worked out, of course. But I can't find any ethical reason per se to hate *the clones*. They'll just be additional people. Despite what sci-fi movies might say, they won't be any more soulless or murderous than the rest of us, or at least, their donor-parent.
Source: The Independent
Bollocks
Apparently the new CEO of Virgin Media doesn't understand either the law, or the proper method to do business.Neil Berkett, the new CEO of Virgin Media (my ISP at home in London, along with BT) has announced that he considers Net Neutrality to be "a load of bollocks" and he's promised to put any website or service that won't pay Virgin a premium to reach its customers into the "Internet bus lane."
Cory Doctorow has started a campaign to switch from Verizon in response. Normally I think he's had a bit too much dandelion tea, but he's right on this issue. I'm just not sure it goes far enough.
See, telecoms are protected from being sued for what they host/serve on the basis of what's known as the Common Carrier provision. Essentially, the Supreme Court decided back in the days of big railroad that you were protected from lawsuits and a lot of regulation as to what you carried, as long as you carried cargo more or less impartially to all who asked and paid. This concept of an undiscerning, very low-barrier to entry transportation entity has been carried over to the telecoms, who can't be sued for, say, a mobster ordering a hit via cell phone, or a hacker using the net to breach a hospital's mainframe, just because they provide the service over which it was done.
Truthfully, until very recently, it was impossible to track that volume of information, so without common carrier it would have been legally impossible to run a telecom.
But here we have the big telcos who want to have it both ways; they want to be legally protected from their customers' actions, and they want to be able to regulate them too. That's just not kosher; you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're in the business of regulating your customers and what they can access, then you should be liable for their crimes, infringement, what have you. Every mp3 downloaded, every stolen program or game, all of it, your liability.
I think the EFF or ACLU should sue any telco that steps over the line for any and all illegal activity on their network. If we bloody their noses, maybe they'll realize that the old way really is the best.
Sources: Boing Boing
Wikipedia
Upas
Another plant I want to own someday: the Upas tree.Antiaris toxicaria (Upas or Ipoh) is an evergreen tree in the family Moraceae, native to southeastern Asia, from India and Sri Lanka east to southern China, the Philippines and Fiji; closely related species also occur in eastern Africa. It produces a highly poisonous latex, known in Java as "Upas", from the Javanese word for "poison".
Sadly it's apparently a large tree, so this will have to wait until my compound is complete.
...
The name of the upas tree became legendary from the mendacious account (professedly by one Foersch, who was a surgeon at Semarang in 1773) published in the London Magazine, December 1783, and popularized by Erasmus Darwin in Loves of the Plants (The Botanic Garden, pt. ii.). The tree was said to destroy all animal life within a radius of 15 miles or more.
Source: Wikipedia
Slither
This story's been going around, it even made it into Atomic Age humor last night.EUGENE, Ore. -- A 12-foot snake attacked a female employee of a pet store, prompting assistance from police, firefighters and emergency personnel Thursday.
Long story short, everybody lives, though the snake loses a few teeth when they had to pry it off. This is very odd behavior for a constrictor -- they generally are very docile sorts, and don't even consider attacking anything too big to consume. The only way they have to attack something is to grapple with it, as seen here, and if that something is too big, it could easily, say, rip them to shreds. The woman could have killed the snake herself, no problem, but didn't want to. Evolutionarily, hyperaggressive constrictor snakes are a bad move. So I sort of wonder what happened to get this poor snake so angry.
Sergeant Ryan Nelson had never tangled with a snake larger than a garter snake before Thursday.
All that changed, however, when he responded to a 911 call at 3:41 p.m. to find a woman in a Eugene pet store completely wrapped by a 12-foot Burmese python that was slowly constricting around her, police said.
Nelson saw the woman was in grave danger and feared for her life. But as he pulled out his knife in
preparation to save the woman, matters got more difficult.
She pleaded with Nelson not to injure the snake.
Source: Fox 12 Oregon
London Smells
Apparently all of London smells like crap.LONDON, England (CNN) -- A foul smell permeating London and parts of England over the past two days is due to farmers on the European continent spreading manure in their fields, forecasters and British farmers said Saturday.
There's even a monstrously boring political sideline to this story, but I can't bring myself to care, beyond the hilarity that an entire city reeks of cow crap.
The agricultural odor is inescapable in central London and smells vaguely of farmland or even garbage.
Forecasters said a stiff breeze from the east is carrying the smell across the North Sea from Belgium, the Netherlands and even Germany. They said the smell is likely to hang around through the weekend as the easterly wind continues.
"You can't say it's going to smell for two days, but the wind is coming in from the same direction," said Chris Almond, a forecaster with the Met Office, Britain's weather service.
"It's not really until Monday, Tuesday that we'll see a change in the wind direction, with a more marked improvement in air quality."
He said the smell had probably been stagnating in those countries for a few days, resulting in a more pungent aroma once the winds brought it to England.
Well, it's hilarious because I don't have to live there.
Source: CNN.com
Cold Storage
Another one of those stories about how people can survive long durations without oxygen if you get them really, really cold.CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- A gust of wind blew a 2-year-old in a stroller into Lake Michigan, where the boy remained submerged for at least 15 minutes before being pulled out unconscious but alive.
They should be thankful it was so cold. If the water had been warm and he'd been without O2 for that long he'd be a corpse.
The child's grandfather, who had been pushing the stroller on the lakeside Friday afternoon, jumped into the harbor to try to save the boy, the Chicago Fire Department said.
...
The toddler was strapped in the three-wheeled jogging stroller about 10 feet below the surface of the 42-degree water before rescue divers pulled him out.
But thanks to the miracles of hypothermia, his brain may well have survived, on ice so to speak, without the lack of oxygen killing all his neurons. That sort of thing happens with these exposure cases sometimes. Hopefully it will here too.
Man strollers are windy death traps though. Mythbusters had the same thing come up in a test of whether trains could blow/suck people on to the tracks. The stroller + dummy combo just went sailing down the rails after the train.
Source: CNN.com
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Science Update
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Pre-Dinner Science
Soon I Shall Explore the Science of Tacos
Emo Tree
What terrible force can lead a tree to such depths of depression?
We may never know.
Source: The Daily Telepgraph
Similar Features
Not an Etheridge song, but a solar system very similar to our own, if a bit small.Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own.
Pint-sized.
They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.
...
"It's a kind of scaled-down version of our Solar System. The star the planets are orbiting is half as massive as the Sun and they orbit half as distant to their host star as Jupiter and Saturn orbit around the Sun," said Dr Dominik.
The researchers hope to find Earth-like worlds soon using these techniques, which would be great. The more stuff like this we find, the further the religious fundies have to bury their heads to ignore it, and eventually they'll just wander off into their own little dreamworlds. I hope.
Source: BBC News
Creepy
A NASA office building apparently may have an astonishing rate of cancer.CLEVELAND -- There are 40 cases of cancer among people who work in the same building at NASA Glenn Research Center.
Wow. If this is right, there has to be something off about that building. I wonder what could have changed recently to make it so toxic. A chemical spill? Exposed insulation?
Dozens of the employees fear that their cancer was triggered by years of working in the developmental engineering building, NewsChannel5 reported.
The union that represents hundreds of scientists and other workers said nearly half of the 100 employees on the third floor of the building have been diagnosed with various forms of cancer in the past three to four years.
"What we've seen in the way of cancer here has just been astronomical on this third floor alone and we're just a little scared," said Dennis Pehotsky, of the Lewis Engineers and Scientists Association.
In a written statement, the head of safety at NASA Glenn said an employee survey shows cancer rates among workers are within the normal range, saying "Glenn management has no evidence of the number of cases that the union is reporting."
Union officials said they believe many employees feared reprisal for answering the survey honestly.
Source: WEWS Cleveland News
Stem Cells Again
Yet another possible cure for a heinous disease derived from stem cells or their artificial equivalents.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Skin cells re-programmed to act like embryonic stem cells eased symptoms of Parkinson's disease in rats, researchers reported on Monday in a first step toward tailored treatments for people that bypass concerns about using human embryos.
It's a big breakthrough, but wouldn't it be simpler to just create real embryos to fix people, from their own DNA/cellular material?
The experiment suggests it may be possible to take a small sample of skin and turn it into a transplant perfectly matched to patients with Parkinson's and other diseases, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It also supports the usefulness of newly created cells that resemble powerful embryonic stem cells. The stem cell experts used so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, which are skin cells reprogrammed to act like embryonic stem cells.
...
Stem cells taken from very early embryos appear to be the most malleable and the most powerful. But many people object to their use because the embryo usually must be destroyed to extract them.
Several teams have reported a way to re-program ordinary skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells by adding several genes. Jaenisch's team tested some of these cells in rats and mice. They first got such cells to take up residence in the brains of unborn mice.
...
Then they damaged the brains of rats to resemble Parkinson's, which is caused by the destruction of certain brain cells that produce a message-carrying chemical called dopamine. Patients lose abilities associated with movement, and progress from a type of shakiness to paralysis and death.
There is no cure. Transplants of cells from fetuses have offered some relief from symptoms in a few people.
In the rats, the cell transplants improved symptoms markedly, the researchers said.
...
Viruses are used to carry the new genes into the skin cells and transform them, an approach that could cause cancer.
But the researchers said their approach is equivalent to so-called therapeutic cloning, which uses cloning technology to create perfectly matched cell transplants. Last month a team at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York said they used the cloning approach to treat Parkinson's in mice.
Oh wait, we can't do that, because God in his infinite wisdom wants us to suffer and die. So sayeth the religious right.
At least until they get sick.
Source: Raw Story
Watery
Our water infrastructure is as badly off as our roads, trains, bridges, power, energy production and agriculture, it seems.The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically higher, at about $480 billion.
This isn't entirely the fault of the GOP, but their constant 'lower taxes, fewer services' mantra has hurt a lot.
Water utilities, largely managed by city governments, have never faced improvements of this magnitude before. And customers will have to bear the majority of the cost through rate increases, according to the American Water Works Association, an industry group.
Engineers say this is a crucial era for the nation's water systems, especially in older cities like New York, where some pipes and tunnels were built in the 1800s and are now nearing the end of their life expectancies.
On the brighter side, check out the amusing anecdote they start the story with.Two hours north of New York City, a mile-long stream and a marsh the size of a football field have mysteriously formed along a country road. They are such a marvel that people come from miles around to drink the crystal-clear water, believing it is bubbling up from a hidden natural spring.
People are so stupid they will drive out of their way to drink MYSTERIOUS WATER.
The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say.
The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation's cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.
Man, where's dysentery when you need it?
Source: Raw Story
Lies
So the Pentagon is issuing a new 'lie detector' to troops in Iraq, whose results will be used to help make life and death decisions.
Pity it doesn't work worth a damn and the whole thing is a con.planning to give US troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan "hand-held lie detectors" aimed at rooting out potential insurgents and terrorists. But polygraph experts doubt the system's accuracy and Defense Department memos show results of the few tests that were run were manipulated to demonstrate more success with them than was achieved, according to an MSNBC investigative reporter.
63 percent. That's the best they can manage?
"The Defense Department says the portable device isn't perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing," MSNBC's Bill Dedman reports. "The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well."
The Pentagon argues the portable polygraphs have accuracy rates up to 90 percent, but Dedman reports the military arrived at those figures by omitting some results from the tests. The Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, or PCASS, uses a hand-held computer that analyzes readings from censors attached to an interviewees hand and wrist. The computer displays "Green" if it believes the person is honest, "Red" if they are being deceptive and "Yellow" if it is unsure.
The Pentagon, in a PowerPoint presentation released to msnbc.com through a Freedom of Information Act request, says the PCASS is 82 to 90 percent accurate. Those are the only accuracy numbers that were sent up the chain of command at the Pentagon before the device was approved.
But Pentagon studies obtained by msnbc.com show a more complicated picture: In calculating its accuracy, the scientists conducting the tests discarded the yellow screens, or inconclusive readings.
That practice was criticized in the 2003 National Academy study, which said the "inconclusives" have to be included to measure accuracy. If you take into account the yellow screens, the PCASS accuracy rate in the three Pentagon-funded tests drops to the level of 63 to 79 percent.
People are going to DIE because of this device. Our guys and Iraqi civilians. We're going to see actual bombers let go and innocent people shot, all because the Pentagon wanted to roll out a shiny toy.
Shameful.
Source: Raw Story
More Hep
Basically, 'Made in China' means 'DO NOT CONSUME' these days.More than 100 people have died from taking the blood thinner heparin, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday, after imports of the drug were halted due to contamination linked to production in China.
Nice job, FDA. Nice job screening our medicine supply.
The 103 deaths reported to the FDA of patients who had been using heparin occurred between January 2007 and February 2008, the agency said on its website. Sixty-two of those deaths were reported to have involved allergic reactions.
The FDA on March 5 said it had detected an unidentified contaminant in heparin injections sold by Baxter International pharmaceuticals.
It was determined that most of the active ingredients in the drug came from a plant in Changzou, China working with Wisconsin-based Scientific Protein Laboratories, which supplies Baxter.
Source: Raw Story
Quasars
An article about quasars, which apparently dwarfed hypernovae in terms of raw power. I apologize to quasars for not paying them enough attention.
On the other hand, they apparently no longer exist, so hypernovae are still the current champs.
Source: The Independent
Polar Bear Madness
So apparently the Germans have a polar bear war on their hands.You might not think it, to look at these cuddly pictures, but the prospect of a polar bear "war" was looming large over Germany yesterday.
Honestly Germans, is there nothing you can't fight about?
Flocke, a recently born cub who caught the public imagination by being rejected by parents and raised by humans, was making a long-awaited public debut – accompanied by her keepers, including Horst Maussner (right), before a 350-strong crowd of excited press photographers, TV camera crews and cheering fans. The four month-old female, whose name translates as "snowflake", has been described by the local media as the arch rival, in the battle for Germany's public affection, to Knut – another polar bear cub, who was born at Berlin Zoo in 2006 and also raised entirely by humans.
At present, Knut can still claim the title of world's most famous polar bear (after all, a Hollywood film has been made about him), but Flocke is catching up fast. Her backers spent yesterday plastering Nuremberg with hundreds of pink posters bearing a suitably cuddly image of Flocke and the barbed message, "Knut was yesterday".
Meanwhile it seems there's a campaign against raising these bears with human keepers.While some insist that bears born in zoos have a right to human intervention to save and secure their lives, others such as the German animal rights activist, Frank Albrecht argue that they become so dependent on man that they end up divorced from nature and turn into hyperactive, disturbed freaks.
I'm not sure a dead bear is inherently better than a live one. It's entirely possible that in the wild the mother bear would have been less stressed and not eaten them.
"Knut is a problem bear who has become addicted to human beings," he said.
The German zoologist Peter Arras has described Knut as a "psychopath".
The debate has grown following the birth of three polar bear cubs at Nuremberg Zoo to two different female bears. A team of highly experienced zoologists initially argued that nature must be allowed to take its course. They allowed one of the females, which had rejected its two cubs, to kill and eat her offspring because they were too weak to survive.
But the zoo's "bear infanticide" policy coincided with television pictures designed to melt the heart of anybody who cannot help assuming that polar bears are just like human beings. They showed the zoo's other female polar bear, Vera, carrying her female cub, called Flocke or Snowflake, by the scruff of its neck through her enclosure.
Within hours of the images being broadcast, Nuremberg Zoo had performed a complete policy U-turn: a keeper was sent into Vera's enclosure and Flocke was removed "for its own safety". Amid growing fears that the last remaining cub might also be eaten the zoo promptly announced that the cub would be fed from a bottle.
"I don't think anyone could have stood it, if we had allowed our last bear cub to be eaten by its mum," said Nuremberg's deputy mayor.
In any case, Knut's mother was a disturbed circus reject. There's nothing 'natural' about that. You might as well save him as not, given the circumstances.
Finally, the article repeats the old canard that polar bears aren't in trouble.Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's Environment Minister, has adopted the bear, claiming him as a symbol of the world's endangered species. Yet evidence suggests that polar bears are not facing extinction, even if the ice caps are melting. Alaska. home to a fifth of the world's 25,000 polar bears, currently has its largest bear population in 40 years.
Sigh. From my post about Glen Beck:There is currently an estimated 20,000-25,000 polar bears worldwide who are threatened with “losing their habitat and becoming extinct over the next 50 years” because of global warming and melting sea ice. The U.S. Geological Survey predicts that without action, “11 of the 19 subpopulations will be extinct by the middle of this century, with an additional three subpopulations vanishing shortly thereafter.”
Those flakes at the USGS! You know they're just a bunch of dirty hippies.
Source: The Independent
The Independent
H Plane
So Boeing has developed a hydrogen powered plane. Sort of.The first aircraft to use only a hydrogen battery for power in the air has successfully completed a test flight. The US company Boeing said that the flight, in Ocaña, central Spain, was “a historical technological success for Boeing [and] full of promises for a greener future”.
In other words, it's a nice PR stunt. Nothing more.
The aircraft, which is capable of carrying two people and has a wingspan of 16 metres (52ft), flew at 100km/h (62mph) for 20 minutes. Hydrogen power involves fuel cells using the energy produced from the transformation of hydrogen and oxygen into water. According to Boeing, it provides a cleaner and renewable energy resource because it produces only water vapour as waste.
The director of the Boeing research centre at Ocaña, Francisco EscartÍ, said that hydrogen batteries could become the main source of energy for small aircraft, but that they were unlikely to power larger passenger aircraft.
Meanwhile of course you get the hydrogen propaganda about 'only water vapor as waste'. Nevermind that you make hydrogen by splitting water with huge amounts of electricity. Which you get from power plants.
Most of which burn fossil fuels.
Which aren't exactly clean.
Idiots.
Source: The Times Online
Advancing the Frontiers of Retroactive Cartography
It's a new field, but as with so many dubious things, the South leads the way.Lawmakers in drought-parched Georgia voted Friday to ask mapmakers to redraw their state's northern boundary in hopes of tapping the Tennessee River, in a vote that potentially escalates a conflict with their neighbor.
This instead of facing their lack of infrastructure like adults, building reservoirs and the like.
If negotiations fail, the bill would authorize Georgia's top attorney to file a lawsuit to try forcing a boundary change.
The House and Senate both approved the measure on the legislative session's final day. It now goes to Gov. Sonny Perdue, who has not said whether he supports it.
Congress in 1796 designated that Tennessee's southern borders stretch along the 35th parallel, but surveyors in 1818 were a bit off the mark. They now know that the border was placed about 1.1 miles south of where it should be.
The resolution asserts that the flawed survey mistakenly placed Georgia's northern line just short of the Tennessee River, which has about 15 times greater flow than the one burgeoning Atlanta depends on for water.
Tennessee hasn't taken kindly to Georgia's drought-inspired bid; lawmakers there have reacted with a mix of scorn and humor.
If Georgia can't solve a problem by cheating, they might have to work hard! That sucks! It would take time away from their banjo practice and moonshine distillation!
Source: Raw Story
Dimwit Analysis
So a misanthropic jerk at The Reg thinks that Al Gore's green initiatives will be bad for the public because they'll create high paying jobs.
What?Al Gore is unleashing the climate campaign you can't ignore, in the shape of www.wecansolveit.org, which will spend $300 million to sign up some millions of people who will march, write letters and like, agitate. In the face of this government and business will be forced - the plan goes - to take climate change seriously.
Because everyone wants to be a rich businessman! Nobody ever does anything for altruistic reasons, or base power, ambition and advancement!
Clearly it's all being done for the very best of reasons: no man could need more than a Nobel and an Oscar to assure him of his status. But all that money being spent to get governments to do as Al Gore thinks they should ought to give us pause for thought.
And unfortunately, there's a flaw at the heart of the plan - a failure of economic logic which rather undermines the justification for the whole campaign:
"Thousands of new companies, millions of new jobs, and billions in revenue generated by solutions to the climate crisis - this is the clean energy economy we can adopt with today's technologies, resources, know-how, and leadership from our elected officials."
Leave aside the absurdity of our (or anyone elses') elected officials being able to create jobs, companies or revenues: if they could they wouldn't be elected representatives, would they? They'd be off getting rich. Look rather at those claims that the plan will create all those jobs, all those revenues: they clearly think that this is a good idea, a benefit of the plan. But it isn't a benefit, it's a cost.But all three of them are making the same error, what Bastiat in 1850 (clearly, 158 years isn't long enough for such a simple point to sink into politicians' brains) called the Broken Window Fallacy, or as it is sometimes known, the make work fallacy. For, as I say, all those jobs, all those revenues, are properly counted as a cost of such schemes, not a benefit.
HAHA dirty hippies always end up working at McDonalds HA HA HA my 150 year old economics will shatter their dirty dreams!
When we come to evaluate a plan we need to know how wonderfully fabulous the results are going to be. I'm certainly not going to try and argue that a richer world without the threat of climate change would be less than wonderfully fabulous. But as well as that elysian future, we have to work out what it is going to cost us to get from here to there. That means being very careful in how we work out what are the costs. It might still be a good idea, just as it might not be, but this is exactly what our cost benefit analysis is designed to tell us: will it all be worth it?
Al's actual campaign will certainly be worth it: the dweebs that populate the green movement need opportunities to congregate and repopulate just as much as any other unfortunate section of society: otherwise who will the next generation buy their burgers from? But will the actions we are being urged to take be worth it?So consider what happens when we 'create' millions of jobs. Yes, certainly, millions of people then have jobs. That's wonderful for them of course, although quite why everyone insists that it is a good idea that these are 'high paying”' jobs rather escapes: that rather means that whoever is buying their products (i.e., us) is paying more than if they were low paying jobs. But much more important is what is unseen here. What would those people be doing if they weren't doing these newly created jobs? Something else, certainly, we've not just sown dragon's teeth to create these new workers now, have we? And what was it that they were doing previously?
Yes, it's better that people (other than the author of course) work cheap, so he can afford lots of cheap swag to line his apartment!
Everyone else can go fuck themselves!Things are a little different if all those who take these jobs were previously in involuntary unemployment, but mass unemployment isn't something that's all that prevalent in either the US or the UK.
Check the latest figures for the US there, Kreskin. Unemployment is up SHARPLY. A huge number of people aren't even counted on the rolls as they've GIVEN UP HOPE ENTIRELY. Meanwhile, job creation has been consistently below new job seekers for about two years.
But other than being factually wrong, please, continue.Certainly not amongst the skilled workers who would be needed to design, build and install the new glorious renewable energy systems, at least. So all of our new found workforce would have in fact come from doing something else. It doesn't really matter what else either, not to make the basic point. For we lose whatever else it was that they were doing at the same time as we gain our bright shiny new energy system. They might have been wiping babies' bottoms, stacking shelves at Albertson's or working to cure cancer. Whatever it was, that they are now not doing those things is a cost to us: smelly babies, the Great Famine that would follow Albertson's running out of food, the cancer that will get about a third of us, these are all costs.
See? You should give up your hope of gainful, meaningful employment so you can stock his shelves and wipe his baby's ass!
Or cure cancer. It's not like doctors are already a highly skilled and paid profession... oh wait. So they already DO contribute to higher costs and job defection from stocking grocery shelves!
The fiends!They might indeed be bearable costs, they might even be worthwhile costs, it might make perfect sense for us to incur them to stop Manhattan from sinking under the waves: but costs they are and as costs we have to account for them.
Yes, it's great that people get trapped in dead end, low paying supermarket jobs forever, rather than own their own stores and contribute to their local communities in the form of taxes.
Which is what makes all the willy waving so silly: what we actually want is someone to come up with a plan that doesn't create new jobs, one that doesn't cause us losses elsewhere. We actually want people to be boasting about how their plan destroys jobs, want what no man has yet done, people to boast of their micro-dicks. As, say, supermarkets themselves have:
"The New Economics Foundation has calculated that every £50,000 spent in small local shops creates one job. You must spend £250,000 in superstores for the same result."
How excellent, eh? Supermarkets use fewer resources (for the labour of a human being is most certainly a resource) but get the same job done. Our retail requirements are catered for and instead of five people working to do so, only one is. The other four are able to go off and wipe bottoms and/or cure cancer. We thus get both our groceries and fresh smelling babies (and perhaps that cancer cure will come before my Marlboros kick in). Excellent, we're richer, all of us as a society, by using less labour to complete a task.
That is why these claims of job creation should be treated as costs, not benefits, when we try to evaluate these schemes and, similarly, why the boosters of these plans are guilty of economic illogic.
We should be on our knees THANKING Wal-Mart et all for their grotesque concentration of wealth at the top! It keeps productivity up by turning our towns and cities into wastelands of misery and poverty!This is very closely related to the concept of opportunity cost: you can only use a resource, the labour of a person for example, to do one thing at one time. Which means that there is indeed a huge benefit to Al running this WE thing: if he's doing that he can't run for President again. Lucky, eh?
Oh yes, it's much better that we have a moron Texas-transplant oil man who has plunged the Middle East into a hellstorm of violence and death. What's a million Iraqi corpses as long as we don't have some DIRTY HIPPY running the country into the ground with his high paying jobs and clean energy programs?
THANK GOD WE AVOIDED THAT TRAGEDY
This is one of the stupidest, most selfish, narcissistic loads of crap I have ever read in my life. It stands as some of the rankest hypocrisy on record. What does the author do for a living, you might ask? How does he contribute to the lowering of wages and rise of efficiency?Tim Worstall knows more about rare metals than most might think wise, and writes for himself at timworstall.com, and for The Business, among others. He is a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute.
Oh, he's a web columnist, psuedo economist and writer!
For shame, Tim! You could be wiping baby ass!
Idiot. Colossally elitist idiot.
Source: The Register
Pinch
I need to get one of these.Many high-voltage electronics enthusiasts make their own devices using pulsed power techniques to produce a theta pinch capable of crushing an aluminium soft drink can by pressure of strong magnetic field. (Warning! High-voltage electric shocks may be lethal).
Of course, I'd want to use the magnetic field for evil, not can crushing.
An electromagnetic aluminium can crusher consists of four main components (1) A high voltage DC power supply which provides a source of electrical energy (2) A large energy discharge capacitor to accumulate the electrical energy (3) A high voltage switch or spark gap and (4) A robust coil (capable of surviving high magnetic pressure) through which the stored electrical energy can be quickly discharged in order to generate a correspondingly strong pinching magnetic field (see diagram below).
Source: Wikipedia
Venus
Results out of the ESA's Venus Express probe suggest that Venus lost its water too quickly to become Earthlike.In the early stages of the Solar System, Venus seems to have evolved very rapidly compared to the Earth. Data from Venus Express supports the theory that the Earth’s twin once had significant volume of water covering the surface but it appears that these oceans were lost in a very short geological timescale.
Bummer.
As a result of the loss of water, the geological evolution of the surface of Venus slowed right down because it was unable to develop plate tectonics like the Earth. Biological evolution was prevented altogether. Thus, in terms of Venus being another Earth in climate and habitability terms, it evolved too quickly at first, then too slowly.
'They may have started out looking very much the same,' said Professor Taylor, 'but increasingly we have evidence that Venus lost most of its water and Earth lost most of its atmospheric carbon dioxide.'
From what I';ve read the Earth, if it lived long enough, would die the same way, as plate tectonics constantly sips at our water supply where ocean plates plunge into the earth. Some water gets sucked down and locked up too where it lubricates the plate movement, and thus, eventually, there's no more water to be sucked, which would lock up the plates like Venus.
Of course we'll probably have been burnt to a cinder by then, so who cares much.
Source: Science Daily
First Korean Astronaut
The article focuses on fluff, but the event is worth noting. South Korea's first astronaut will be going up to the ISS soon.South Korea's first astronaut said Monday on the eve of her launch to the International Space Station (ISS) that she will celebrate arrival in space by singing for her fellow crew.
Good for South Korea, I suppose. Manned space flight doesn't accomplish much in the way of science, but there are worse ways to spend that much money.
"We will have food on April 12 on the Day of Cosmonauts and I will sing but it's a secret what is the song," Yi So-Yeon, 29, said at a press conference at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where she is set to blast off on Tuesday.
Yi, who has listed singing as one of her hobbies, said her first reaction on reaching the ISS would be to cry out: "Wow!"
She also told reporters that she hoped people in North Korea would share in the "triumph" of her mission, which starts Tuesday when she blasts up into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket.
A South Korean space official said that Yi's 12-day mission would cost South Korea around 20 million dollars (12.8 million euros) and that he hoped the flight would help further his country's manned space flight ambitions.
An official committee headed by Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, gave official approval Monday for the mission by Yi and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko.
The three astronauts spoke to the press from behind a glass screen at the Hotel Cosmonaut in Baikonur as they are being held in quarantine for fear of being contaminated ahead of their space flight.
Russians celebrate Cosmonaut Day on April 12, the day Soviet hero Yury Gagarin became the first man in space, in 1961. Yi, Volkov and Kononenko will be blasting off from the same launch pad as Gagarin.
Abstinence education, creationist museums, paying Karl Rove...
Source: Raw Story
Terror
The Japanese have come up with a bank that has a face, eats your money, and looks like The Book of the Dead from Evil Dead.
Seriously, someone should reskin and reprogram it to spout lines from the movies. It'd be sweet.
An earlier entry in this article mentions an 'AI' that learns how to control your devices and respond to voice commands.
Which could be handy for my future evil lair.
Source: PC World
Uwe Promise?
Uwe Boll, one of the worst directors alive, and sometimes called the Ed Wood of our day, has stated that he will retire from moviemaking if a million people petition him to do so.
WE MUST DO THIS FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND.
Source: /Film
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Science Post
Sciencey
Protein
New technologies might make blood tests far less routine.US researchers have identified all the 1,166 proteins in human saliva in a breakthrough which could become a new tool for diagnosing killer diseases like cancer, a study showed Tuesday.
Aside from being less... prickly, it's also likely to be cheaper and definitely less dangerous for the medical personnel.
Patients may soon be able to spit in a cup for tests for such illnesses as cancer, heart disease and diabetes thanks to the work of three teams of researchers.
"Replacing blood draws with saliva tests promises to make disease diagnosis, as well as the tracking of treatment efficacy, less invasive and costly," said the study published in the Journal of Proteome Research.
Source: Raw Story
Sun Worship
Solar power is starting to take off.NEW YORK (Reuters) - Utility Southern California Edison said on Thursday it would spend $875 million to build a network of 250 megawatts of photovoltaic solar power generation, making it the biggest solar cell project in the nation.
So between both projects you're talking 500 megawatts of solar power.
SCE, a subsidiary of Edison International, said the photovoltaic cells on 65 million square feet of rooftops in southern California would generate enough power to serve 162,000 homes.
The project, which was submitted to state regulators for approval, is an effort to meet the state's mandate that 20 percent of California's electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2010.
Utilities and power companies are increasing their portfolios of renewable energy to meet ever-increasing state demands to help reduce their output of carbon, the greenhouse gas blamed for contributing to rising global temperatures.
At 250 megawatts, the installation would be about half the size of the newest coal or natural gas-fired power generation units.
...
On Wednesday, FPL Group Inc, the nation's largest generator of wind and solar power, announced it planned to build a 250-megawatt thermal solar plant in California's Mojave Desert.
SCE said its new photovoltaic project was possible because recent advances had cut in half the traditional cost of installed solar generation in California.
The utility plans to begin installing the solar arrays immediately on to the rooftops of commercial buildings in southern California's Inland Empire, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
"These new solar stations, which we will be installing at a rate of one megawatt a week, will provide a new source of clean energy directly in the fast-growing regions where we need it most," Edison International Chairman and Chief Executive John Bryson said in a statement.
That's a lot of juice.
But still a very long way to go.
Source: Reuters
Squidy
Learning the terrifying secrets of squid brings us closer to understanding the Horror that is the Doctor."For years the razor-sharp beak that squid use to eat their prey has posed a puzzle to scientists. Squid are soft and fragile, but have a beak as dense as rock and sharp enough to break through hard shells. Scientists have long wondered why the beak doesn't injure the squid itself as is uses it. New research has just been published in the the journal Science that explains the phenomenon. One of the researchers described the squid beak as 'like placing an X-Acto blade in a block of fairly firm Jell-O and then trying to use it to chop celery.' Careful examination shows that the beak is formed in a gradient of density, becoming harder towards the tip end. Understanding how to make such hardness gradients could revolutionize engineering anywhere that 'interfaces between soft and hard materials [are required].' One of the first applications researchers envision is prosthetic limbs."
I've never seen his horrifying beak, as it is hidden behind his tentacles. No one wants to see behind that.
A bit more detail on the beak.That deadly beak may be a surprise to many people, and has long posed a puzzle for scientists. They wonder how a creature without any bones can operate it without hurting itself.
Oh, the horrors of Doctor Calimari.
Now, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, report in Friday's edition of the journal Science that they have an explanation
The beak, made of hard chitin and other materials, changes density gradually from the hard tip to a softer, more flexible base where it attaches to the muscle around the squid's mouth, the researchers found.
That means the tough beak can chomp away at fish for dinner, but the hard material doesn't press or rub directly against the squid's softer tissues.
Source: Slashdot
CBC News
Molybdenum
So apparently there may have been a 2 billion year delay in the rise of complex life because of a shortage of the metal molybdenum.Scientists from around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth’s ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. They have discovered that a deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly 2 billion years.
Apparently as the oxygen in the atmosphere rose, it leeched molybdenum out of the rocks, solving this problem. Today it seems the metal short in the oceans is iron instead.
Fascinating.
Source: Physorg
Legal Eagle
Well, there's a bit of a kerfluffle on about the Large Hadron Collider.A lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii in an attempt to hold up the start of operations by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom-smasher on the French-Swiss border.
The man in question has a colorful history, and is currently facing serious legal trouble over, err, embezzling a lot of money.
A colourful American botanist, teacher, former biologist and sometime physicist says (in outline) that the LHC may rip a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum and so destroy the Earth. He wants the US government to act now and delay the LHC's startup while a new safety review is carried out.
Walter L Wagner and his fellow Hawaiian Luis Sancho, according to a report on MSNBC, filed suit in the Hawaii federal court last Friday. The men are worried about one of several planet-busting physicists' nightmares being unleashed in the LHC's bowels deep beneath the Franco-Swiss countryside. (According to Wagner's website, as of publication, the LHC is located "near Generva, Switzerland".)
Firstly Wagner is concerned that careless atom boffins might slip up and create a miniature black hole. This would then suck in surrounding mass, gaining unstoppably in size and power in a runaway process until it had engulfed the entire Earth and packed it down inside its swelling, unescapable event horizon.
Some physicists have theorised that black holes might act as spacewarp wormhole portals into alternate universes, or something. Summarising, it appears that the boffins at the LHC - should one of them clumsily spill his tea on the controls, for instance - could easily catapult the entire world through a rift in the very fabric of space-time, into another universe which could be entirely hostile to life as we know it. (Eg, essential processes such as fermentation of alcohol, TV, pizza delivery, gravity etc might simply not work; or there could be a parallel Earth ruled by an evil victorious Nazi empire with space battlecruisers and so forth.)
That would be bad: but even if the LHC guys manage to avoid it, there are other ways in which their meddling might destroy the world.
A particularly violent game of proton billiards, for instance, of the very sort the LHC's superpowered seven trillion electron-volt atomic cues are designed to play, might lead to all sorts of trouble. Quarks might get mixed up into "negatively-charged strangelets" which would turn everything else they touched into strangelets as well. The Earth, and then perhaps the entire universe, could be turned into a fearful strangelet soup; or perhaps custard.
A related worry is that overly vigorous particle-punishing tomfoolery at the LHC could produce "magnetic monopoles", which are dicey freaks of nature. Monopoles could trigger a runaway reaction not unlike the quark-strangelet scenario, in which everything gets changed into something else. This could lead to a turn-up for the books, in which the Moon remained made of moon but the Earth was abruptly converted into cheese.
...
The boffinry community, however, pooh-pooh Wagner's fears. They say that teeny black holes might be created but would vanish right away. They also say that the strangelet-custard conversion and monopole transmutation threats, if they were viable, should have occurred already due to cosmic-ray impacts in the upper atmosphere.
Oops.Wagner is, in fact, an expert in many fields. In his first degree at Berkeley he majored in biology and minored in physics. He then attended law school for three years, and later worked in nuclear medicine and health physics before becoming a grade-school teacher. He also founded the World Botanical Gardens in Umauma, Hawaii, and is now embroiled in a bitter legal battle with the Gardens board. According to the Hawaii Tribune-Herald (free registration required), he and his wife were indicted last month by a grand jury on counts of identity theft and attempted theft relating to an alleged attempt to obtain $340,000 from the gardens company.
So he sued himself in his role as a member of the company, then paid himself off.
Wagner contends that the couple were owed the cash, having worked for free at the gardens for years. Having been let go, they then sued the company for back pay.
But the company says the pair failed to notify the directors of the action, with Wagner instead serving the papers on his wife as company treasurer - even though she no longer was. The board says that Wagner then appeared in court as a company officer. He was thus able to gain a default judgement in his own lawsuit's favour, all without the knowledge of the Gardens board. It is also alleged that phony promissory notes were drawn up in an attempt to obtain cash from the company.
Gutsy.
Source: The Register
Sodom
It seems that yet another biblical miracle may have a perfectly reasonable explanation from the real world.A Cuneiform clay tablet which for over 150 years defied attempts at interpretation has now been revealed to describe an asteroid impact which in 3123 BC hit Köfels, Austria, leaving in its wake a trail of destruction which may acccount for the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Essentially what you're dealing with here is the space equivalent of the pyroclastic flow you get from a volcanic explosion. An asteroid came in at a very, very shallow angle, tore a chunk out of a mountain and threw up a big cloud of debris which came down across the Mediterranean.
The "Planisphere" tablet (see pic) - inscribed around 700 BC - was unearthed by Henry Layard in the remains of the library of the Assyrian royal palace at Nineveh, close to modern-day Mosul, Iraq. It's a copy of the night diary of a Sumerian astronomer containing drawings of constellations and "known constellation names", but it required modern computer tech to finally unravel its exact meaning.
Alan Bond, Managing Director of Reaction Engines Ltd and Mark Hempsell, Senior Lecturer in Astronautics at Bristol University, subjected the Planisphere to a programme which "can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago". They discovered that it described "events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC", with half of it noting "planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night".
The other half, however, records an object "large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space" and tracks its trajectory relative to the stars, which "to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels".
That a large body had impacted at Köfels had long been suspected, the evidence being a giant landslide 500m thick and five kilometres in diameter. The site had no impact crater to back the theory, but the researchers now believe they have a plausible explanation for that.
The Bristol Uni press release explains: "The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth, that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit. This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels.
"The in coming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point.
"As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide). When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater."
Mark Hempsell, hinting at the possible fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, adds: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.
“The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material - including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast.“
Add this to the list of Bible stories that may be explained, along with Noah's Ark (stolen from Sumerian mythology, possibly a reference to the Black Sea's formation), the parting of the Red Sea (possible wind anomaly, not that Egypt ever lost an army there), the plague of locusts (this one's not even hard, they happened all the time in the old west -- it's a natural phenomenon), etc.
Science is awesome.
Source: The Register
Delivery Charges May Apply
So the Europeans have devised a new, automated delivery vehicle for the ISS. It hauls up food, water, supplies, what have you, without anyone on board, and is more or less completely automated.The European Space Agency's "Jules Verne" Automated Transfer Vehicle is slowly but surely creeping up on the International Space Station prior to a docking scheduled for 3 April.
This is a key stopgap measure to help cover for the retirement of the Shuttle fleet, since we don't have anything to replace them. The Jules Verne can haul up the bulky stuff and the Soyuz from the Russkies will have to haul up the people.
The ATV space truck will today strut its stuff on the second of two "demonstration days" designed to test the rendevous tech. On Saturday, a first demo proved the vessel can perform "navigation with the ISS using relative GPS to successfully and safely manoeuvre the spacecraft to a point located 3.5 km behind the ISS and at the same orbital altitude".
John Ellwood, ESA’s ATV Project Manager, explained: "Having tested very successfully on Saturday the first part of the rendezvous, in particular using the relative GPS between that on Jules Verne and on the Russian Service Module of the ISS, we now have the go-ahead to test the second part of the rendezvous which uses the [laser-based] optical sensors. This will be very interesting, but we have a lot of confidence based on the great performance of Jules Verne during the first demonstration day."
Source: The Register
Mmm, Pickled Liver
A possible cure for severe liver damage caused by booze or hepatitus.Japanese boffins believe they may have developed a means of reversing cirrhosis of the liver among rats and perhaps people, in a development with far-reaching consequences for professional cricketers, hellraising movie stars, layabout drunks, politicians, economists, Catholic priests, journalists and others whose jobs require them to drink heavily.
W00t! This is great news for Basement Boy!
...
Rather, these rodents were subjected to normally-lethal doses of dimethylnitrosamine, a deadly liver-busting chemical which was commonly found in beer and bacon sandwiches until the 1970s. Nowadays 90 per cent of the stuff has been removed from human food. However, Sato and his colleagues were able to feed distilled essence of market-traders' breakfast to their furry subjects and cause their livers to pack up almost right away, thus sparing themselves an extended period of devastating miniature murine hellraiser Oliver Reed type antics in the lab.
The boffins were then able to save - or at least "prolong the survival" of - the cirrhotic rats by treating them with "vitamin A–coupled liposomes" which delivered "small interfering RNA (siRNA)" to "stellate cells" in the liver. It is these stellate cells, seemingly, which cause cirrhosis by producing collagen in response to booze or hepatitis. The collagen then hardens up the liver and wrecks it.
But when the small interfering RNA payloads get at the stellate cells, all this stops and the liver is recalled to duty - indeed, the Japanese scientists imply that already-existing collagen can be dissolved, effectively making the the organ as good as new. This is good news, as until now the only treatment for cirrhosis has been to get a new liver from someone who doesn't need theirs - hopefully due to having died peacefully in a car crash or something, rather than having been judicially murdered by an unscrupulous government and harvested for spare parts - and who hasn't put too many miles on it already.
Source: The Register
What's Good for the Goose
Is hilarious for the gander.A hacker club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister and a staunch supporter of the collection of citizens' unique physical characteristics as a means of preventing terrorism.
This is one way to kill an invasive and pointless technology in its tracks.
In the most recent issue of Die Datenschleuder, the Chaos Computer Club printed the image on a plastic foil that leaves fingerprints when it is pressed against biometric readers.
...
"The whole research has always been inspired by showing how insecure biometrics are, especially a biometric that you leave all over the place," said Karsten Nohl, a colleague of an amateur researcher going by the moniker Starbug, who engineered the hack. "It's basically like leaving the password to your computer everywhere you go without you being able to control it anymore."
...
Schauble's fingerprint was captured off a water glass he used last summer while participating in a discussion celebrating the opening of a religious studies department at the University of Humboldt in Berlin. The print came from an index finger, most likely the right one, Starbug believes, because Schauble is right-handed.
...
The print is included in more than 4,000 copies of the latest issue of the magazine, which is published by the CCC. The image is printed two ways: one using traditional ink on paper, and the other on a film of flexible rubber that contains partially dried glue. The latter medium can be covertly affixed to a person's finger and used to leave an individual's prints on doors, telephones or biometric readers.
Nohl said Starbug has used the same film to store his own fingerprints and has successfully fooled 20 different biometric readers, including those deployed in Germany's own passport offices. The machines, made by a company known as Cross Match Technologies, are in the process of being rolled out by German customs officials at border checkpoints, Nohl said.
Schauble is a big proponent of using fingerprints and other unique characteristics to identify individuals.
“Each individual’s fingerprints are unique," he is quoted as saying in this official interior department press release announcing a new electronic passport that stores individuals' fingerprints on an RFID chip. "This technology will help us keep one step ahead of criminals. With the new passport, it is possible to conduct biometric checks, which will also prevent authentic passports from being misused by unauthorized persons who happen to look like the person in the passport photo."
The magazine is calling on readers to collect the prints of other German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bavarian Prime Minister Guenther Beckstein and BKA President Joerg Ziercke.
Source: The Register
Balmy
Saturn's moon Enceladus is both warmer and more organic than previously thought.PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft tasted and sampled a surprising organic brew erupting in geyser-like fashion from Saturn's moon Enceladus during a close flyby on March 12. Scientists are amazed that this tiny moon is so active, "hot" and brimming with water vapor and organic chemicals.
Yeah, it's really hot down there, hehe.
New heat maps of the surface show higher temperatures than previously known in the south polar region, with hot tracks running the length of giant fissures. Additionally, scientists say the organics "taste and smell" like some of those found in a comet. The jets themselves harmlessly peppered Cassini, exerting measurable torque on the spacecraft, and providing an indirect measure of the plume density.
"A completely unexpected surprise is that the chemistry of Enceladus, what's coming out from inside, resembles that of a comet," said Hunter Waite, principal investigator for the Cassini Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "To have primordial material coming out from inside a Saturn moon raises many questions on the formation of the Saturn system."
"Enceladus is by no means a comet. Comets have tails and orbit the sun, and Enceladus' activity is powered by internal heat while comet activity is powered by sunlight. Enceladus' brew is like carbonated water with an essence of natural gas," said Waite.
The Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer saw a much higher density of volatile gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as organic materials, some 20 times denser than expected. This dramatic increase in density was evident as the spacecraft flew over the area of the plumes.
New high-resolution heat maps of the south pole by Cassini's Composite Infrared Spectrometer show that the so-called tiger stripes, giant fissures that are the source of the geysers, are warm along almost their entire lengths, and reveal other warm fissures nearby. These more precise new measurements reveal temperatures of at least minus 93 degrees Celsius (minus 135 Fahrenheit.) That is 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than previously seen and 93 degrees Celsius (200 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than other regions of the moon. The warmest regions along the tiger stripes correspond to two of the jet locations seen in Cassini images.
Seriously though, yet more cool science being done by robots while people putter around a floating tin can in low earth orbit playing with (admittedly cool) giant killer robot arms.
Let's send the robots out further afield, I say, to do our work for us and avoid the whole 'hugs of death' thing.
Source: NASA
TalkieWASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. audio historians have discovered and played back a French inventor's historic 1860 recording of a folk song -- the oldest-known audio recording -- made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.
This Scott guy was trying to create, essentially, a really early oscilloscope. He didn't intend it to be played back. But the technology used to, in essence, scan early recordings like wax cylinders and so forth was used on this, to convert its record of sound waves back into audible sound. Mythbusters did the same thing with clay recordings to test a myth about ancient pottery.
"It's magic," audio historian David Giovannoni said on Thursday. "It's like a ghost singing to you."
Lasting 10 seconds, the recording is of a person singing "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit" ("By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied") -- part of a French song, according to First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists and others dedicated to preserving humankind's earliest sound recordings.
It was made on April 9, 1860, by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp, Giovannoni said.
Giovannoni said he learned on March 1 of its existence in an archive in Paris and traveled to the French capital a week later. Experts working with the First Sounds group then transformed the paper tracings into sound.
Neat stuff.
Source: Reuters
Researchers
Actual Sound
DELICIOUS
Fish are being trained that will catch themselves to be turned into delicious fish nibblers.BOSTON - Call them Pavlov's fish: Scientists are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves by swimming into a net when they hear a tone that signals feeding time.
Remote controlled fish!
If it works, the system could eventually allow black sea bass to be released into the open ocean, where they would grow to market size, then swim into an underwater cage to be harvested when they hear the signal.
What's next, teaching them to coat themselves in batter and hop inside a fryer?
"It sounds crazy, but it's real," said Simon Miner, a research assistant at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood's Hole, which received a $270,000 grant for the project from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Miner said the specially trained fish could someday be used to bolster the depleted black sea bass stock. Farmed fish might become better acclimated to the wild if they can be called back for food every few days.
...
Miner said the first objective was to see if the fish could truly be trained. He got his answer after keeping the fish in a circular tank, then sounding a tone before he dropped food in an enclosed "feeding zone" within the tank that the fish could enter only through a small opening.
Researchers played the tone for 20 seconds, three times a day, for about two weeks. Afterward, whenever the tone sounded, "you have remote-control fish," Miner said.
"You hit that button, and they go into that area, and they wait patiently," he said.
Miner is now trying to figure out how long the fish remember to associate the tone with food. He feeds the fish outside the feeding zone without a tone for a few days and then tests if they will still head for the feeding area when the tone sounds again.
Some fish forgot after five days. Others remembered as long as 10. Miner said the strength of memory seems tied to how long the fish are trained.
Source: AZ Central
Smelly
Whacky Mad Science.Know how a whiff of certain odors can take you back in time, either to a great memory or bad one? It turns out emotion plays an even bigger role with the nose, and that your sense of smell actually can sharpen when something bad happens.
ZZZERT
...
Could an emotionally charged situation make that initial cue be perceived more strongly in the first place?
The research team recruited 12 healthy young adults to find out.
Volunteers repeatedly smelled sets of laboratory chemicals with odors distinctly different from ones in everyday life. An "oily grassy" smell is the best description that lead researcher Wen Li, a Northwestern postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience, could give.
Two of the bottles in a set contained the same substance and the third had a mirror image of it, meaning its odor normally would be indistinguishable. By chance, the volunteers correctly guessed the odd odor about one-third of the time.
Then Li gave the volunteers mild electric shocks while they smelled just the odd chemical. In later smell tests, they could correctly pick out the odd odor 70 percent of the time.
MRI scans showed the improvement was more than coincidence. There were changes in how the brain's main olfactory region stored the odor information, essentially better imprinting the shock-linked scent so it could be distinguished more quickly from a similar odor.
In other words, the brain seems to have a mechanism to sniff out threats.
Ahh, to volunteer to be shocked for science. Noble.
Or more likely, they did it for beer money.
Source: Time Magazine
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Sci-Tech Megapost
From Robots to Chocolate. No Chocolate Robots Though.
Robo-Dog
From the good folks at DARPA (motto: Nothing's Too Crazy!) comes the latest public-private partnership to create our inevitable overthrow by robots: Big Dog!BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog's legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.
That's the advertising bumph. Surprisingly human and not exactly trying to sell you anything.
BigDog has an on-board computer that controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system manages the dynamics of its behavior to keep it balanced, steer, navigate, and regulate energetics as conditions vary. Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a laser gyroscope, and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge and others.
In separate trials, BigDog runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, and carries a 340 lb load.
BigDog is being developed by Boston Dynamics with the goal of creating robots that have rough-terrain mobility that can take them anywhere on Earth that people and animals can go. The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).
Then again, they already have their one and only client, and DARPA has deep pockets. Check out the video:
Sources: Boston Dymanics
Youtube
Junk Mail
Oh, Post Office! You and I were getting along so well, with my Netflixes and cheap shipping on packages! Why must you forsake me?Chris Pearson, a state legislator in Vermont, had a sense that the people were with him when he proposed a bill last November to allow residents to block junk mail.
Come on, people! Junk mail is clearly abusive, though not as bad by an order of magnitude compared with phone spam or even email spam.
He got media attention, radio interview requests and e-mails from constituents eager to stop the credit card offers, furniture catalogues and store fliers that increasingly clog their mailboxes.
Then came the pushback from the postmasters, who told Pearson and other lawmakers that "standard" mail, the post office's name for junk mail, has become the lifeblood of the U.S. Postal Service and that jobs depend on it.
"The post office and the business groups are pretty well-organized," said Pearson, whose bill remains in a committee and has not been scheduled for a vote.
Barred by law from lobbying, the Postal Service is nonetheless trying to make its case before a growing number of state legislatures that are weighing bills to create Do Not Mail registries, which are similar to the popular National Do Not Call Registry.
The agency has printed 3,000 "information packets" about the economic value of standard mail, with specific data for each of the 18 states that have considered a Do Not Mail Registry. It has dispatched postmasters to testify before legislative committees around the country.
"The Postal Service has come in and clobbered legislators," said Todd Paglia, executive director of ForestEthics, an environmental group that has collected 289,000 signatures on an online petition to Congress that calls for a National Do Not Mail Registry. "It's really a people-versus-special interest kind of battle."
The Postal Service is working closely with the Direct Marketing Association, the trade group that represents retailers and the printing industry, in its new campaign -- Mail Moves America -- which is designed to quash the Do Not Mail initiatives.
So far, their efforts appear effective. None of the states where Do Not Mail legislation has been introduced since 2007 has approved a law. And no similar legislation is pending in Congress.
You guys do such great work with packages and netflix-type applications. Don't go evil for a few bucks now.
Seriously, there's a real diminishing return here. Netflix already wants to move to all-internet based movie viewing, with no physical dvds being shipped. I use their Instant Viewer service a lot. People like me, if annoyed enough, will drop entire mediums for convenience; I don't use my landline phone for anything these days. I pay my bills online, do my banking online, never send or receive letters of consequence. I could easily move to an entirely mail-free existence, and I'm sure that a lot of other people will as well, if junk mail becomes an email or phone scale problem.
This is shooting yourself in the foot.
Source: The Washington Post
Yes Wii Can!
The Onion reports on the latest scourge caused by videogames: Effeminate Violence.WASHINGTON—Concerned parents are again blasting the Nintendo Wii for an incident of effeminate violence following a 13-year-old boy's limp-wristed attack on three of his classmates at a Cleveland-area middle school Tuesday.
THINK OF THE... yeah, you get the idea.
...
"These games are a prissy little menace to our society," said Linda Roberts, 35, a mother of three and founder of the group Parents Against Wii, which is suing Nintendo for $52 million in damages from two recent swattings. "One of these days, the red marks on our children's arms might not just go away after five minutes."
This does explain the continuing sissification of my Wii owning brother in law though.
Source: The Onion
From the Desk of Tom Morris
A racist radio tube ad!
GIANT ROBOT
Skynet gets ever closer.Yesterday SMD loaded UT1 (Ultra Trencher 1), a remote controlled submersible robot (ROV), on to a ship for delivery to CTC Marine Projects. The pounds 10m machine will be the world's largest ROV which is capable of self propelling and supporting its own weight in water.
So basically this is designed to prevent the sort of 'accidents' that led to all those internet outages recently, by sending a giant robot down to bury the pipes.
Weighing 50 tonnes and the size of small house, it is designed to bury largediameter oil and gas pipelines laid on the ocean floor.
It does this by "flying" down up to a mile deep below the surface using powerful propellers.
It then lands over the pipeline and deploys a pair of "jet swords" either side of the pipe which inject high pressure water to "fluidise" the surface. Burying the pipelines protects them from fishing, shipwrecks and natural currents. This enables oil and gas to be safely transported from the offshore fields to land to provide secure energy supplies.
Nifty.
Source: redOrbit
Comcastic!
Today when I got up I found a red light on my digital cable box under the MSGS heading. I've never seen one there before so I was wondering what was going on. Normally when a previously quiet piece of hardware suddenly pipes up with a message, it's something like 'I've got a bad part, please call Service Department' or 'I require a firmware upgrade, please follow these instructions'. You know, important stuff.
No, no, not this time. See, we used to have Insight, and they got bought by Comcast. Who are now using the hardware messages inbox on my cable box to spam me about Wrestlemania.
Sigh.
In light of that abuse, this story is even more... ominous is the wrong word, because it's just TV. Annoying?cayenne8 sends us to Newteevee.com for a blog posting reporting from the Digital Living Room conference earlier this week. Gerard Kunkel, Comcast's senior VP of user experience, stated that the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into its devices so it can know who's in your living room. Cameras in the set-top boxes, while apparently not using facial recognition software, can still somehow figure out who is in the room, and customize user preferences for cable (favorite channels, etc.). While this sounds 'handy,' it also sounds a bit like the TV sets in 1984. I am sure, of course, that Comcast wouldn't tap into this for any reason, nor let the authorities tap into this to watch inside your home in real time without a warrant or anything."
Yeah. I'm not going to allow any such thing in my house, thanks. Electrical tape is our friend (as the first response on the site indicates).
Source: Slashdot
Giant Chocolate Castle
The roommate will want to move to Croatia now.A Croatian man claimed Saturday that he has built the biggest castle made of chocolate after working for 24 hours on his candy construction in a central Zagreb square, national television reported.
The three-meter (10 feet) high construction with six-by-two-meter base was made of chocolate bars from a local producer Kras.
...
Some 100,000 chocolate bars were used to build the castle, which weighs 10 tonnes.
Source: Raw Story
OH GOD WHY
Some sick individual is creating 'real life' Simspons using CG.
The horror. The Homer.
Regen
Medicine is learning to make your body parts regrow. This is a good thing.Three years ago, Lee Spievack sliced off the tip of his finger in the propeller of a hobby shop airplane.
The article goes on to mention work on artificial throats, heart surgery using stem cells, etc.
What happened next, Andrews reports, propelled him into the future of medicine. Spievack's brother, Alan, a medical research scientist, sent him a special powder and told him to sprinkle it on the wound.
"I powdered it on until it was covered," Spievack recalled.
To his astonishment, every bit of his fingertip grew back.
"Your finger grew back," Andrews asked Spievack, "flesh, blood, vessels and nail?"
"Four weeks," he answered.
...
Emerging from an everyday ink jet printer is the heart of a mouse. Mouse heart cells go into the ink cartridge and are then sprayed down in a heart shaped pattern layer by layer.
Progress!
Source: CBS News
Clones
Another day, another scientific breakthrough opposed by Protestants and Catholics alike. Somebody shoot me.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who used cloned embryonic stem cells to treat Parkinson's disease in mice said on Sunday they worked better than other cells.
Of course, some people also think that if you create a human clone it will lack a 'soul' and be, I dunno, Damien.
The researchers were trying to prove that it is possible to make embryonic stem cells using cloning technology and use them to provide a tailor-made treatment.
...
Tabar and his team first created a Parkinson's-like disease in mice using chemicals to destroy their brain cells.
They took ordinary cells from the tails of the mice, transferred the nuclei from them into hollowed-out mouse eggs cells, and made clones of the mice. This process is called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or "therapeutic cloning."
The cloned embryos were harvested for their stem cells after a few days. The researchers grew these in the lab and coaxed them into becoming the so-called dopaminergic brains cells that are lost in Parkinson's.
They put these into the brains of the injured mice. These mice got better, Tabar said.
No one has done this before. "It's incredibly hard and it involves a series of inefficient steps," Tabar said.
...
Some people oppose using cloning technology to make human embryonic stem cells, or to creating human embryos for this purpose. It is also difficult to obtain human egg cells.
In which case, what's the problem with using it for parts? Not a lot of consistency there.
Source: Raw Story
Oak Island
Some kind of whacky hidden piratey treasure pit.
Ok, so it doesn't say anything about pirates. Still, who else buries treasure on the beach?
Weird.
Source: Active Mind
Satellite Radio
So Sirius and XM are going ahead with their merger plans. The Justice Department approved the merger on anti-trust grounds, which makes sense, as these are US corporations and subject to anti-trust laws. But the next part is interesting: the FCC has to approve it as well.
Huh?WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sirius Satellite Radio's $4.59 billion purchase of rival XM Satellite Radio was given antitrust clearance on Monday as the Justice Department concluded consumers have many alternatives, including mobile phones and personal audio players.
What I want to know is, why does the FCC get any say at all? Granted, there are ground-based repeaters for satellite radio to improve performance in cities, but aside from that, these are SATELLITE BASED signals. The FCC has no authority over space. If they want to regulate the repeaters on the ground as if they were terrestrial radio stations, fine; but the overall business is in UN regulated territory.
The deal, announced in February 2007, would combine the only two providers of satellite radio in the United States and is still being reviewed by the Federal Communications Commission.
...
The FCC must determine whether the XM-Sirius is in the public interest, and whether to enforce its 1997 order barring either satellite radio company from acquiring the other.
A source at the FCC said FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has yet to make a proposal either approving or opposing the XM-Sirius combination, but has asked the agency's staff to draft documents for different possible outcomes.
I emphasize: The United States DOES NOT OWN SPACE.
Source: Raw Story
Thanks a Lot, El Presidente
So our man-child in chief's asinine plan to build a MOON BASE(tm) has resulted in NASA running out of money for actual science.Scientists plan to put one of the twin Mars rovers to sleep and limit the activities of the other robot to fulfill a NASA order to cut $4 million from the program's budget, mission team members said Monday.
That's ok though, because in 20 years, we'll have... nothing. Nothing at all to show for this. Because there's no reason to build a base on the moon, and no practical way to do it.
The news comes amid belt-tightening at NASA headquarters, which is under pressure to cover cost overruns of a flagship Mars mission to land a Hummer-sized rover on the Red Planet next year.
The solar-powered rovers Spirit and Opportunity have dazzled scientists and the public with findings of geologic evidence that water once flowed at or near the surface of Mars long ago.
Both rovers were originally planned for three-month missions at a cost of $820 million, but are now in their fourth year of exploration. It costs NASA about $20 million annually to keep the rovers running.
The latest directive from NASA to cut $4 million means Spirit will be forced into hibernation in the coming weeks, said principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University.
"It's very demoralizing for the team," Squyres said.
Idiot.
Source: Raw Story
Message from 1986
Now if only we could send one back warning them about Dan Quayle.Merle Brandell and his black lab Slapsey were beachcombing along the Bering Sea when he spied a plastic bottle among the Japanese glass floats he often finds along the shore of his tiny Alaskan fishing village.
The article notes the changing attitudes toward these school projects; today, dumping a ton of plastic bottles in the ocean would be seen as, err, littering, and the letter attached to the bottle offers to send the recipient a picture of the little girl who wrote the it.
He walked over and saw an envelope tucked inside. After slicing the bottle open, Brandell found a message from an elementary school student in a suburb of Seattle. The fact that the letter traveled 1,735 miles without any help from the U.S. postal service is unusual, but that's only the beginning of the mystery.
About 21 years passed between the time Emily Hwaung put the message in a soda bottle and Merle Brandell picked it up on the beach.
Oops.
Source: Raw Story
Holy Bat-Tastrophe!
Not a funny story, actually.Al Hicks was standing outside an old mine in the Adirondacks, the largest bat hibernaculum, or winter resting place, in New York State.
So a mystery disease is wiping out bats in New York. They're hoping to keep it from spreading, but...
It was broad daylight in the middle of winter, and bats flew out of the mine about one a minute. Some had fallen to the ground where they flailed around on the snow like tiny wind-broken umbrellas, using the thumbs at the top joint of their wings to gain their balance.
All would be dead by nightfall. Mr. Hicks, a mammal specialist with the state’s Environmental Conservation Department, said: “Bats don’t fly in the daytime, and bats don’t fly in the winter. Every bat you see out here is a ‘dead bat flying,’ so to speak.”
They have plenty of company. In what is one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States, on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter.
Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont. Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.
Researchers have yet to determine whether the bats are being killed by a virus, bacteria, toxin, environmental hazard, metabolic disorder or fungus. Some have been found with pneumonia, but that and the fungus are believed to be secondary symptoms.
“This is probably one of the strangest and most puzzling problems we have had with bats,” said Paul Cryan, a bat ecologist with the United States Geological Survey. “It’s really startling that we’ve not come up with a smoking gun yet.”
Uggh. We need every ally we can get against mosquitos, damn it!
Source: The New York Times
Programmer Painting
So the first programmer in the world was a woman, which I did not know, by the name of Ada Lovelace, or formally, Ada Byron, Countless of Lovelace. She's something of an icon in computing circles, and there was even a character named after her in Narbonic (which I need to finish some time). The US military named a programming language after her, and Microsoft uses her image for some promotional materials.
It turns out that her image is known to the modern world from a painting. Well, a copy of a painting. The original portrait had been lost... until now.
So there you have it. The first programmer's surviving portrait ends up for sale and rediscovery via the power of the interwebs.
It was assumed that the original portrait had been lost forever, until a Canadian antique dealer put the original framed watercolor sketch on eBay. The posting would have faded into oblivion if it wasn’t for US Army Master Sergeant Robert McLaughlin.
Currently posted at the United States Embassy in dusty and remote Tajikistan, McLaughlin frequently searches eBay for Ada Lovelace-related items. In a weekly ritual, partly to keep sane and mainly to keep in touch with friends, he sends the results to “Valkyrie”, a friend in Texas. “Ada is Valkyrie’s heroine,” he told us.
The find sparked a flurry of emails, Skype messages and phone calls between fellow computer geeks, historians and antique dealers who tried to authenticate the drawing. Experts soon agreed that the portrait was done in the 1820s when Ada was approximately four-years-old. McLaughlin bid for the portrait and put in another bid with the last moments of bidding. Who would have thought that Army anti-sniper training would be so relevant to eBay bidding these days?
McLaughlin took early leave to pick up the sketch in Southern California. He and Valkyrie met us at a top-secret location (cough Starbucks cough) in Redlands, CA to show off the frame and authenticity letter. Cradling the frame like a baby, Valkyrie joked, “She looks pretty good for being so old.”
It's fitting, in an odd way.
Source: TG Daily
Ok....The Pentagon has announced that it mistakenly shipped non-nuclear ballistic missile components to Taiwan from a U.S. Air Force base in Wyoming.
I won't rant about 'how could you mistake a nosecone for a helicopter battery'; I'm an adult, I know that one big crate with a barcode on it looks much the same as another, and you don't check everything that goes out through your shipping department.
It said the items have been returned to the United States.
At a Pentagon news conference, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said the misshipped items were four nose cone assemblies for ICBMs. He also said they were delivered to Taiwan in March 2005 and had been sent instead of helicopter batteries that had been ordered by Taiwan.
...
Ryan Henry, the No. 2 policy official in the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said President Bush was notified of the mistake and the actions to recover the items. Henry called the mistake "disconcerting" and intolerable. He said the Chinese government has been notified of the error.
Henry said an examination of the site in Taiwan where the components had been stored after delivery indicated that they had not been tampered with. He said the components were "quite dated," as part of a system designed in the 1960s.
Still, you'd think that there'd be some sort of flag on parts for a NUCLEAR WEAPON DELIVERY SYSTEM. Even on the barcode sticker. Maybe, say, a big, red dot?
That'd be nice.
Source: Raw Story
