Saturday, September 29, 2007
OUR ALIEN MASTERS
Potentially deadly games of cat and mouse went on for hours around the barbed-wire barriers in a city terrified of a repeat of 1988, when the army killed an estimated 3,000 people in crushing an uprising.
Few Buddhist monks were among the crowds, unlike in previous days, after soldiers ransacked 10 monasteries on Thursday and carted off hundreds inside.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
OCEAN METHANE
Scientists have found a series of vents in the Nordic Seas that may have burped enough methane to cause massive global warming 55 million years ago.
The early Eocene Period witnessed a dramatic increase in temperature, which was triggered by a sudden surge of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
But just where these gases came from has been something of a mystery.Nature magazine reports the discovery of gas vents dating from the right time and which could represent the source.
THE QUICKENING
Methane trapped as hydrates in ocean floor sediments represents an important reservoir of carbon, an untapped energy source, and a potential “time bomb”. There is growing evidence that this methane has been and could again be released during times of rapid climate warming.
Now, using a new biomarker to examine historical records, researchers from the University of Bremen in Germany suggest that continuous and widespread methane release could have a profound and lasting effect on aquatic ecosystems and the carbon cycle.
FAIR COP
New Zealanders have been given the chance to write their own laws, with a new online tool launched by police.
The "wiki" will allow the public to suggest the wording of a new police act, as part of a government review of the current law, written in 1958.
Police say they hope to gain a range of views from the public on the new law before presenting it to parliament.
DICK HEAD
The head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has told the BBC he believes some European-made condoms are infected with the HIV virus deliberately.
Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claimed some anti-retroviral drugs were also infected "in order to finish quickly the African people".
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
YELLOW SQUARE
Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes
The invention that prefigured email, hypertext, and the digital revolution.
HOT IDEAS
1. The Peltier–Seebeck effect, or thermoelectric effect, is the direct conversion of thermal differentials to electric voltage and vice versa.
Related effects are the Thomson effect and Joule heating. The Peltier–Seebeck and Thomson effects are reversible (in fact, the Peltier and Seebeck effects are reversals of one another); Joule heating cannot be reversible under the laws of thermodynamics.
2. A voltage exists between two ends of a metal bar when a temperature difference exists in the bar.
3. A compass needle is deflected when a closed loop is formed of two metals with a temperature difference between the junctions. The metals respond differently to the temperature difference, which creates a current loop, which produces a magnetic field.
4. There's a lot of water in the air. It rises to a height of almost 100km. You feel it in high humidity, but there's almost as much invisible moisture in the air above the Sahara or the Nullarbor as there is in the steamy tropics.
Whisson Windmill
The water that pools beneath an air-conditioned car, or in the tray under an old fridge, demonstrates the principle: cool the air and you get water. And no matter how much water we might take from the air, we'd never run out. Because the oceans would immediately replace it.
Using the sun and the wind to extract water from the air
Sunday, September 23, 2007
CRYPTOZOOLOGY
An estimate based on official documents gives over 198 attacks, including 36 wounded and 88 dead.
The creature's reported method of killing was unusual for a predator, often targeting the head, and ignoring the usual areas targeted by predators, including the legs and throat. Often the head was crushed or removed. It also seemed to target people over farm animals, reportedly having an aversion to cattle; many times it would attack someone while cattle were in the same field.
The Beast's preference towards women and children is perhaps due to their working the country-side farms in pairs or even alone, making themselves easier targets. Men, however, tended to have objects that could be used as weapons and often worked the fields in groups.Blogged with Flock
LIFE, JIM
Hegel claimed to proceed by making implicit contradictions explicit: each stage of the process is the product of contradictions inherent or implicit in the preceding stage.
For Hegel, the whole of history is one tremendous dialectic, major stages of which chart a progression from self-alienation as slavery to self-unification and realization as the rational, constitutional state of free and equal citizens.
The Hegelian dialectic cannot be mechanically applied for any chosen thesis. Critics argue that the selection of any antithesis, other than the logical negation of the thesis, is subjective.
Then, if the logical negation is used as the antithesis, there is no rigorous way to derive a synthesis. In practice, when an antithesis is selected to suit the user's subjective purpose, the resulting "contradictions" are rhetorical, not logical, and the resulting synthesis not rigorously defensible against a multitude of other possible syntheses. The problem with the Fichtean "thesis — antithesis — synthesis" model is that it implies that contradictions or negations come from outside of things.
Hegel's point is that they are inherent in and internal to things.
HOW IT WORKS
The Global Elite controls the Brotherhood and the world using what Icke calls a "pyramid of manipulation," consisting of sets of hierarchical structures involving:
business
the military
education
the media
religion
drug companies
intelligence agencies and
organized crime.
Icke cites the Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of events financed and organized by the Global Elite.
British journalist Simon Jones writes that, according to Icke, "Ordinary people are being massively duped into believing that the ordinary course of world events are the consequence of known political forces and random, uncontrollable events. However, the course of humanity is being manipulated at every level.
These individuals arrange for incidents to occur around the world, which then elicit a response from the public ('something must be done'), and in turn allows those in power to do whatever they had planned to do in the first place." Icke refers to this as problem-reaction-solution, a variation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's "Hegelian Dialectic".
Saturday, September 22, 2007
PICTURE THIS
Lomos: New take on an old classic
a bizarre-sounding meeting in 1995 between Mr Putin and a group of Austrian photography experimentalists today underpins a growing photographic movement that occupies the narrow space between the worlds of art and commerce.Then mayor of St Petersburg, the man who would soon be Russian president gave an audience to the Austrians to hear their pleas.They had recently started selling refurbished Soviet-era cameras from the Leningrad Optics and Mechanics Association (Lomo) to enthusiasts around the world.
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr
The Flickr Founders
Tom Sawyer got it right. Why paint a fence when you can get your friends to do it for you for free? He would have been the perfect new-media mogul. Spending time and money creating content on the Internet is so hopelessly dated, so dotcom, so very, very 1.0. The secret of today's successful Web 2.0 companies: build a place that attracts people by encouraging them to create the content—thereby drawing even more people in to create even more stuff. The poster child of this Sawyeresque business model is the photo-sharing site called Flickr.
Caterina Fake, 37, an art director turned marketing whiz, and her Web designer husband Stewart Butterfield, 33, hatched the idea after an engineer at their fledgling online-gaming company devised a cool hack that let anyone share a photo on the Web fast and effortlessly.
Shedding light on Flickr
A global gallery was not what the Flickr founders intended, but Fake sees how events like Hurricane Katrina can lead to instant photo collections that are visible worldwide.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
TORTURED MINDS
Its makers claim this infernal machine is the modern face of warfare. It has a nice, friendly sounding name, Silent Guardian.
When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings. It can throw a wave of agony nearly a kilometre.
Anyone in the beam's path will feel, over their entire body, an agonising sensation. In tests, even the most hardened Marines flee after a few seconds of exposure. It just isn't possible to tough it out.
Perhaps the most alarming prospect is that such machines would make efficient torture instruments. They are quick, clean, cheap, easy to use and, most importantly, leave no marks.[The word "medieval" is shorthand for brutality. The truth is that new technology makes racks look benign.]
ANDROMEDA STRAIN
The meteorite, which left an impact crater 20m wide and 5m deep, is causing a wave of illness.
Peru meteorite crash 'causes mystery illness'
A meteorite has struck a remote part of Peru and carved a large crater that is emitting noxious odours and making villagers ill.
A fireball streaked across the Andean sky late on Saturday night and crashed into a field near Carancas, a sparsely populated highland wilderness near Lake Titicaca on the border with Bolivia, witnesses said.
The soil around the impact crater appeared to be scorched, with what appeared to be chunks of lead and silver around the site, and there was a "strange odour", a local health department official, Jorge López, told Peru's RPP radio.Later the farmers complained of headaches and vomiting. Police who went to investigate the crater were also stricken with nausea, prompting authorities to dispatch a medical team that reached the site today. At least 12 people were treated in addition to seven police officers who required oxygen masks and rehydration.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
MONKEY BUSINESS
The Indian Government says it will go ahead with a controversial plan to build a sea lane in the Bay of Bengal despite a storm of protest from Hindus who say it will destroy a sacred site.
The project would allow ships to navigate the southern tip of India instead of skirting around Sri Lanka, cutting the journey between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal by more than 30 hours.
It would mean dredging sand banks that the Hindu epic Ramayana says were built by an army of monkeys to allow the god Ram to cross the narrow strip of sea between India and Sri Lanka and rescue his kidnapped wife.
WHIPPED BRAIN
The Medical Journal of Australia has revealed a young woman recovering from a heroin addiction has been paralysed by sniffing nitrous oxide from whipped cream charger bulbs.
Dan Lubman from the Orygen Youth Health Centre says most users on the party scene consider the use of the bulbs, or 'nangs', to be safe.
He says it is tragic that the woman, who was on a methadone program and malnourished, was badly hurt by her 20-bulb-a-day habit.
ANOMYMOUS POLICE
New South Wales police officers who took off their identification badges during APEC protests will escape punishment after a police inquiry found they feared the pins on the badges could be used against them.
Photographs taken during the main APEC protest on Saturday, September 8, showed officers wearing badgeless uniforms.
The revelation sparked public criticism, including suggestions police were told not to wear their name tags so protesters could not identify them.
MERCENARY ATTITUDES
US probes Blackwater shooting amid Iraqi fury
US officials will investigate a shooting incident in Baghdad involving the US security firm Blackwater in which eight people were killed, the State Department said.
The move came after Iraqi authorities cancelled the operating licence of the North Carolina firm, which offers personal security to US officials working in Iraq.
On Sunday, a US diplomatic convoy protected by Blackwater was involved in a shootout in Baghdad's Al-Yarmukh neighbourhood which killed at least eight people and wounded 13.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned what he called the "criminal" response of the convoy's Blackwater guards. The US embassy said the convoy had been been attacked by insurgents.
"The interior minister (Jawad al-Bolani) has issued an order to cancel Blackwater's licence and the company is prohibited from operating anywhere in Iraq," interior ministry director of operations Major General Abdel Karim Khalaf said.
"We have opened a criminal investigation against the group who committed the crime."
CLOAK AND DAGGER
The Russian wanted by Britain on suspicion of killing Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko says he will stand for election to parliament and would like to become president of Russia.
Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB security service officer, said he would represent the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), which is headed by ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
He denied seeking the immunity from prosecution that election to parliament would give him. Russian prosecutors have said there was no basis for a criminal case against him, he said.
British prosecutors want to extradite Lugovoi from Russia to face trial in London for the murder of Mr Litvinenko, who died in a London hospital on November 23 last year after receiving a dose of radioactive polonium-210, a rare and highly toxic isotop.
