Fringy, science-stuff, maybe fact or fiction?

I don't know why, but this video has always creeped me out.

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 00:10 | link | comments (5)

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation will be best remembered for its blue screen of death, a randomly occuring, incomprehensible, bright blue message would appear, glibly informing you that your machine has, yet again, crashed and that you've lost all your work and you're going to have to reboot.

Microsoft is the original big company with a staggering cash bank balance, legions of marketing types and a healthy stock price. Microsoft gets rich by selling bad software to everybody, home users, businesses, even computer gamers. Most of the company's influence came about by the so-called "Microsoft Tax", where users purchasing a personal computer would pay Microsoft for use of their OS, whether or not they intended to run it.

Worse than technically inferior software is insecure software. System administrators around the world blindly installed Microsoft web servers and failed to follow up on patches designed to fix security problems. This run-of-the-mill hole allowed attackers to control and cascade viruses, bringing Internet sites to their knees during the "Code Red" virus attack. Microsoft is also to blame for spreading the "Love Bug" virus, a clever bit of code that would allow the remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on one's machine, automatically, thanks to poor choices for default values in Microsoft's e-mail client.

Microsoft effectively owns various markets including desktop operating systems, internet browsers and business productivity software in the form of word processing, spreadsheets and presentation tools. Where Microsoft has had great successes, it has also had a series of failures. Adobe Systems still sells copies of Photoshop in the shadow of Microsoft, as Claris Corporation enjoys a modicum of success with Filemaker Pro. Large companies are slow to adopt Microsoft products as server-side solutions, sticking with industrial-strength UNIX products from Sun, IBM and even free solutions such as Linux. Sure, Oracle runs on Windows NT but would you trust your career with it? Yes, you can get fired for buying Microsoft.

At best, Microsoft is capable of monkey-see, monkey-do, making knockoff workalikes of Apple Computer's desktop software, a poor clone of the ever-present mp3 format and even shamelessly copying from Sun Microsystem's Java programming language.

At the heart of Microsoft is a bowl-haired little geek named William Gates III. Fabulously wealthy and badly deluded into thinking his company has contributed good things to the world, Bill is not much of a programmer and did in fact not create Microsoft's Disk Operating System. But Bill and his flock certainly figured out how to market and bundle software. In 1980, DOS was a pale imitation of UNIX, even more difficult to use, easy to crash and only allowing a single process to run at once. These early, poor engineering decisions still haunt Microsoft to this day.

In 1983, Microsoft released the first version of Windows, what would eventually become the world's most popular operating system. Windows was, of course, simply a large graphic interface placed on top of DOS. From this year on, they figured out a clever scheme: force users to upgrade, i.e., to pay for bugfixes, every year. By 1995, "Windows 95" sold 1 million copies in the first 4 days.

Part of Microsoft's secret was to partner with not only IBM but also with Intel. Without Microsoft's Windows operating system, IBM and Intel have an less compelling product to offer. An Anti-trust action brought against Microsoft in the late 90's accused Microsoft of having used this position to place a stranglehold on the industry and stifle innovation.

In 1995, when Netscape Communications Corporation released their browser, Microsoft noticed. Eventually. It took a few years, the purchase of a smaller browser company and a series of questionable business deals, but they wrestled control of the market from Netscape. The dominating web browser in 1995, Netscape Communicator, had became a footnote in the history of computing within a few years. Netscape didn't do itself any favors by trying to compete with Microsoft, frantically making release after release, each crappier than the next. Even so, Microsoft's swift destruction of Netscape is a harsh lesson for those that want to innovate in Silicon Valley.

 

Timeline

12 Nov 1975	Bill Gates and Paul Allen's 7-person software company in Albuquerque, New Mexico adopts the name "Microsoft."
27 Apr 2000	Texas Governor George W. Bush discusses the Microsoft antitrust case with Jim Lehrer. LEHRER: Conventional wisdom, as I'm sure you're aware, Governor, is that if you are elected President and the Microsoft is still pending in some way - either on appeal or whatever - that you'll stop it. BUSH: I think those are -- that's needless speculation, and I've -- it's like the guy said -- I've got friends on both sides of the issue. And you know, Jim Barksdale is a close friend of mine and a supporter, he's a really good fellah, who is part of the reason why the case came up in the first place -- testified against Microsoft, so I think that's speculation that people should -- LEHRER: Is your flexibility compromised at all by the role of Ralph Reed, an adviser to you -- it also turned out had been hired by Microsoft to lobby you? BUSH: No. I said - we're beginning to scrimp -- I typed this speech myself -- I'm beginning to save money in my campaign and I want you to know I typed this speech. "Ralph Reed was right. Microsoft '98 is great." I didn't have any idea Ralph Reed was representing Microsoft, nor would it have mattered to me.
12 Jun 2000	Microsoft announces a partnership with DirecTV and Thomson multimedia to develop a TiVo killer it calls UltimateTV.
23 Jan 2002	Microsoft announces it has killed the UltimateTV project, their TiVo killer.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 11:01 | link | comments

Active Galaxy Centaurus A
Credit: X-ray - NASA, CXC, R.Kraft (CfA), et al.;
Radio - NSF, VLA, M.Hardcastle (U Hertfordshire) et al.; Optical - ESO, M.Rejkuba (ESO-Garching) et al.

Explanation: A mere 11 million light-years away, Centaurus A is a giant elliptical galaxy - the closest active galaxy to Earth. This remarkable composite view of the galaxy combines image data from the x-ray ( Chandra), optical(ESO), and radio(VLA) regimes. Centaurus A's central region is a jumble of gas, dust, and stars in optical light, but both radio and x-ray telescopes trace a remarkable jet of high-energy particles streaming from the galaxy's core. The cosmic particle accelerator's power source is a black hole with about 10 million times the mass of the Sun coincident with the x-ray bright spot at the galaxy's center. Blasting out from the active galactic nucleus toward the upper left, the energetic jet extends about 13,000 light-years. A shorter jet extends from the nucleus in the opposite direction. Other x-ray bright spots in the field are binary star systems with neutron stars or stellar mass black holes. Active galaxy Centaurus A is likely the result of a merger with a spiral galaxy some 100 million years ago.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 05:14 | link | comments (3)

 

NGC 4676: When Mice Collide
Credit: ACS Science & Engineering Team, Hubble Space Telescope, NASA

Explanation: These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart. Known as " The Mice" because they have such long tails, each spiral galaxy has likely already passed through the other. They will probably collide again and again until they coalesce. The long tails are created by the relative difference between gravitational pulls on the near and far parts of each galaxy. Because the distances are so large, the cosmic interaction takes place in slow motion -- over hundreds of millions of years. NGC 4676 lies about 300 million light-years away toward the constellation of Bernice's Hair (Coma Berenices) and are likely members of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies. The above picture was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys which is more sensitive and images a larger field than previous Hubble cameras. The camera's increased sensitivity has imaged, serendipitously, galaxies far in the distance scattered about the frame.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 14:16 | link | comments (1)

Climate Threat: Thawing Tundra Releases Infected Corpses

By Kristin Elise Phillips, Scienceline

posted: 27 March 2008 ET

Yards and yards of clear plastic sheeting line the cellar floor, dwarfing the corpse: headless, frail, supine. The young bony arms — covered in fine black powder from centuries of immobility in the frozen tundra — are crossed at rest, reminiscent of a ceremonial burial. Camera flashes illuminate the scene. Several dozen scientists stand around the body, murmuring in Russian and English about the find of the day.

How long do you think it was buried? Do you think it’s male or female? How did they get it back to camp? And the pervasive thought: I don’t think we should touch it. He could have died of smallpox.

Smallpox was a vicious disease before its eradication in the 1970s, but the virus is hardy and can survive long-term storage. One such storage unit is the tundra of the high northern latitudes that preserves an unknown number of bodies that could have died from smallpox. Global warming is now rapidly thawing this freezer, increasing the chance that someone could come into contact with a smallpox-infested body, thereby reintroducing the disease.

Smallpox rivals malaria as the most deadly infectious disease ever to affect humans. Throughout history, people looked for ways to combat the disease, priming their immune systems with remedies such as sniffing ground-up scabs or smearing pus into open wounds. The first true vaccine — developed in 1796 by Edward Jenner — was for smallpox.

The variola virus responsible for smallpox, which causes fever, fatigue and pustules that leave deep scars on the skin, decimated the Americas after Columbus landed in the West Indies. The disease similarly ravaged the people of the Arctic, and an estimated 300 million people died from smallpox in the 20th century alone before the World Health Organization’s vaccination campaign was completely effective. The last case from natural exposure was in the late 1970s in Ethiopia.

Today smallpox exists only in highly secure U.S. and Russian laboratories. According to Jonathan Tucker, a senior fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, “the greatest risk of smallpox infection today is from the continued scientific research with the live virus, as well as from the hypothetical existence of undeclared stocks of the virus that could pose a risk of accidental or deliberate release.” Many scientists agree that an accidental or deliberate release of the virus is a dangerous possibility, especially since vaccinations of the general population ceased in 1972. In response to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration ordered the inoculation of U.S. military and health workers so that critical operations would not be affected.

. . .

It was 20 years ago when the headless body was found at a bend in the Kolyma River and brought to camp — at the Northeast Research Station in Cherskii, Siberia. On that day the tundra was changing to red and gold, and longer nights had begun to touch the horizon. Late summer is prosperous near the Arctic Circle: Local fishermen descend on the river to plunder sturgeon, and paleontologists scan the banks by boat and foot for mammoth bones or frozen bodies of ancient musk ox and horses.

Imre Friedmann remembers the day that the body was found. He trudged into the station, finally escaping the plague of swarming mosquitoes, to be told of the body in the cellar. “Everybody avoided handling it,” he recounts in precise, accented English. Friedmann, affiliated with the NASA Ames Research Center, traveled to the Arctic to study the bacteria that thrive in the extreme climate of this region.

Other projects have been similarly affected by the fear of smallpox. Archaeologists halted work in the London crypt Spitalfields in the mid-1980s after finding smallpox scars on a corpse, and a librarian from Santa Fe, N.M., was vaccinated after finding a smallpox scab in a Civil War medical book. In these cases, the virus was no longer viable. But a construction worker in the United Kingdom did contract the disease while demolishing a building that had housed smallpox victims, and researchers in Holland found a live virus in a 13-year-old scab.

Bodies frozen in the north could be even more fertile ground as a reservoir of the virus. Smallpox is resilient when frozen. Louise Parker and James Martel of the Army Corps of Engineers reported that vaccinia, the virus used in the smallpox vaccine, survives short-term freezing and thawing as well as storage at low temperatures. And in the 1950s, U.S. Army scientists found that the variola survived three years of freezing, particularly at very low temperatures.

In the 1980s, a mass grave near Pokhodsk, Siberia, was exposed by a river and local residents demanded testing of the bodies. Researchers took all the necessary precautions of an epidemic: protective gear, antiseptic cleansing and vaccinations. But even though some bodies were well preserved after a hundred years in permafrost, “viable smallpox virus was not detected, but the virus antigen was discovered,” says Sergei Davidov, currently the assistant director of the field station in Cherskii.

Fear of frozen corpses lying beneath the tundra may even be the reason that the United States and Russia maintain stockpiles, according to Donald Henderson. Henderson, an epidemiologist currently at Johns Hopkins University, directed the World Health Organization’s smallpox eradication campaign. After hammering out an agreement between the two countries to reduce smallpox stockpiles, he was “just about ready to take this to the World Heath Assembly when a guy from Britain shows up.” This man was the head of the United Kingdom’s chemical and biological weapons program.

Henderson recalls their conversation.

How could you do that?

How could I do what?

Let me say this: Suppose you have bodies in the tundra? What would we do to protect people — we’ve destroyed the virus.

Henderson explained to the chemist that the possibility of virus frozen in the north has little to do with maintenance of laboratory stockpiles. But the chemist took his concerns to the U.S. Department of Defense, and, according to Henderson, the fear of naturally frozen virus is what led the military to withdraw from the resolution. “I can’t make it up,” he laughs.

Some life does exist in frozen soil and ice. Imre Friedmann, who had been in the research station with the body, points out that “in permafrost we find living bacteria in 3 million-year-old permafrost. So if bacteria survive, I don’t see why viruses don’t survive.” Friedmann is referring to a team from the Russian Academy of Sciences that found bacteria in ancient permafrost. Viruses have also been discovered in old ice cores: Scott Rogers of Bowling Green State University in Ohio found a 140,000-year-old RNA plant pathogen in Greenland.

Taken together — the possibility that viruses survive, the hardiness of smallpox and the expanse of frozen tundra — it seems possible that viable variola could be preserved in permafrost. “If it were going to be anywhere,” Henderson says, “if you were going to find something, [the tundra] would be the likely place.”

Global warming is thawing permafrost. In Siberia, botanists at Tomsk State University estimate that an area twice the size of California has changed from featureless tundra to a lake-dotted, slumped landscape. The decomposition of formerly frozen soil is in turn accelerating global warming because of the release of previously trapped methane gas. The northern Arctic is warming more quickly than other parts of the world, and, according to projections by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, the uppermost 10 feet of the Northern Hemisphere’s permafrost may be gone by 2100.

“Obviously the delicate relationship between climate and permafrost is going to have to find new equilibrium,” says Wayne Pollard, a permafrost specialist at McGill University in Montréal.

But what does an accelerated thaw mean for smallpox? Some experts think that climate change reduces the chance of a smallpox reintroduction because the virus cannot survive multiple days unfrozen. To Tucker of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, “the gradual thawing of the permafrost brought about by global warming [further diminishes] the likelihood of recovering infectious smallpox virus particles from the corpses of victims buried in the Arctic region.”

There is a caveat to this assumption, though. According to Pollard, there are different kinds of permafrost. The ice-rich permafrost is rapidly changing the northern landscape, but dry permafrost, on the other hand, could better preserve a body and the viruses harbored.

“It’s important to say, ‘Never say never,’ with some of these things because it’s like saying life couldn’t have arrived on Earth from an asteroid,” concludes Russell Regnery of the Poxvirus Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He thinks that the disease impact from global warming will come from the ooze of tropical diseases such as malaria and leishmaniasis into newly available habitats rather than from the release of pathogens because of permafrost melt.

. . .

The morning after finding the frozen corpse along the Kolyma River, several researchers carried it out of the Cherskii Research Station past a few scraggily evergreens. It was buried that day in 1990, just before the Soviet Union opened. Under normal circumstances, scientists might have examined an old body: one researcher thought the traditional reindeer skin clothing was about 300 years old. But the fear of the unknown — of smallpox — evaporated their intellectual interest.

But fear needs perspective. “These things don’t cough anymore,” says the CDC’s Regnery. Short of people wiping a newly exposed cadaver across their eye, it is hard for him to see how the virus could transfer. Epidemiologist Henderson adds that an outbreak of smallpox would kill people, but it could be contained. Sick people go to bed, and the disease transfers from person to person only when the pustules are obvious. Says Henderson: “There is a lot of docudrama stuff out there that is absolute poppycock.”

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 14:11 | link | comments

Seeds of Life Found Near Saturn

By Dave Mosher, Staff Writer

posted: 26 March 2008 03:45 pm ET

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 04:10 | link | comments

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 21:06 | link | comments

Another one, for Roma:

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 00:33 | link | comments (1)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:58 | link | comments

Spring is here.

Well, I've decided to share certain 'paranormal' experiences that I've encountered through my life. I'm sure these moments have led me to pursue the study of sciences. Don't get me wrong, most of my experiences I'm sure have plausible explanations, luckily I wasn't alone when they happened.

1. In 1969, or so, I was into martial arts. I was hit in the solar plexis and rendered unconscious. I went into respiratory and cardiac arrest. I had what is called a 'near death experience.' I saw myself flying through a tunnel, a gray kind of cool one devoid of color. At the end of the tunnel, as I flew towards it, there were 4 or 5 beings that seemed to be conversing, better, communicating with themselves. As I approached them, one seemed to stop its  communication  with their group and seemed irritated that I was observing them. It looked down on me and put its hand out, hitting me on my head and stopping my travel. I had the feeling it was not my time, so it was kind of pissed at me, like, "what am I doing here?" The beings are now what UFO people call the Grays. They seemed to me entities with large heads, wrap around large eyes, no facial features, and webbed 4 fingered hands. That was many years before all the UFO crap about gray aliens appeared in the media.

2. While married, my ex wife and I saw twice what seemed to me as large clumps of spider webbing, gossamer looking clumps flying through the skies. Angel hair is what ufologist call it.

3. Setting up my 8" Newtonian telescope at home, I saw a satellite crossing the sky from east to west. Then, I saw a red object, intercept the satellite and circle it, at a very high speed, and head of towards the south west. Its speed was mind boggling.

4. Another time, while setting up a telescope, I was with my ex brother in law. Jupiter was very bright but the skies were over cast by cumulus clouds. We saw 8 flying egg shaped objects that were so polished, so mirror like, flying with no sound and reflecting the city lights off their bottoms.

5. I saw about six gold colored objects one night with my friends. That same evening Miami International picked up unidentified objects on their radars. Also, State Troopers saw these objects and reported them.

Well, I've seen more crap. I'm sure there are many explanations. Do I believe?
Yes and no.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 16:41 | link | comments (4)

Another one for Romma:

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 11:13 | link | comments (6)

190 Nagle Avenue, apt. 5 E.

New York, N.Y. 10034

Tele: LOrainne 7-0586.

That was my address growing up in NYC. Nagle is located on the upper west side of the city, and is intersected by Dyckman Street. Here is a picture of the tennemants I lived in:

The light colored one, on the right in the foreground, is where I lived, on the top floor, the fifth floor. I used to play on the fire escape. I was either Napoleon Solo, or the great 007.

The neighborhood, at the time, was mostly Irish American. It was a very tough place to grow up in. I still have scars from my daily fights with Irish Gangs.

I was one of the very few Hispanics, and that led to the constant brawling. I remember walking down the stairs (no elevator in these tenements) and dodging milk containers filled with blood, spoons and hypodermic needles. The heroin junkies use to get their "fixes" on the stairway.

By that tall, brown high rise in the background, I remember one morning, while walking to school (5th. grade) stepping on something that felt like a "cigar." It turned out to be a human thumb.

These tenement were roach infested. They would crawl on me while sleeping and even use to get into my food. I remember one evening my mother made me a vanilla milkshake and by the time it reached my bedroom, roaches had jumped into it from the ceiling. At first I thought they were raisins, same texture, but when I spit them out, I realized my mistake while vomiting away in the bathroom.

My father was crippled by polio at age four, and twice I remember him falling. Once in the kitchen, and once on the stairs. Everytime he fell, he had this unusual knack for compounded fractures of his bad leg. I'd find him lying in a pool of blood with some part of a bone sticking out of his leg. I must have been between 6 and 10 years of age.

During a coal strike in the mid sixties, it got so cold in that tenement that my pet hamster froze. I buried his little body in between the tenements, where there was a small patch of earth.

What I can say about the neighborhood is that it is absoluetly stunning in both architectural diversity and, located in the Palisades valley cut by the Hudson River, topographically beautiful. Here's more pictures of the neighborhood:

 

 

I used to go swimming off the railroad bridge pictured above. This creek is called "Spuyten Duyvil." The creek conects the hudson river with the Harleem River.

The "C" stands for Columbia University.

 

My goal is to eventually move back here. I still have family that live around this section of NYC. My goal is to live out the rest of my life here in Inwood.

 

Enough of this crap, back to writing my paper. The title of which is: "Solid Phase Cap and Tag Ogliosaccaride Synthesis."

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 11:42 | link | comments (6)

Line integral

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:33 | link | comments

Lagrange multipliers

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:21 | link | comments

Green's theorem

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 09:38 | link | comments

Flintstones

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 14:58 | link | comments

Flu Pandemic of 1918

aka La Grippe, Influenza A

When you think of the great killer plagues of history, a few names come to mind -- bubonic plague, tuberculosis, smallpox... You probably don't immediately think of the cold and flu season. But you should.

In 1918 and 1919, the Spanish Flu pandemic killed more people than Hitler, nuclear weapons and all the terrorists of history combined. (A pandemic is an epidemic that breaks out on a global scale.) Spanish influenza was a more severe version of your typical flu, with the usual sore throat, headaches and fever.

However, in many patients, the disease quickly progressed to something much worse than the sniffles. Extreme chills and fatigue were often accompanied by fluid in the lungs. One doctor treating the infected described a grim scene: "The faces wear a bluish cast; a cough brings up the blood-stained sputum. In the morning, the dead bodies are stacked about the morgue like cordwood."

If the flu passed the stage of being a minor inconvenience, the patient was usually doomed. There is no cure for the influenza virus, even today. All doctors could do was try to make the patients comfortable, which was a good trick since their lungs filled with fluid and they were wracked with unbearable coughing. The "bluish cast" of victims' faces eventually turned brown or purple and their feet turned black. The lucky ones simply drowned in their own lungs. The unlucky ones developed bacterial pneumonia as an agonizing secondary infection. Since antibiotics hadn't been invented yet, this too was essentially untreatable.

The pandemic came and went like a flash. Between the speed of the outbreak and military censorship of the news during World War I, hardly anyone in the United States knew that a quarter of the nation's population -- and a billion people worldwide -- had been infected with the deadly disease. More than half a million died in the U.S. alone; worldwide, the estimates ran as high as 50 million.

There were minor outbreaks around the world throughout 1918, but the real fun didn't start until winter, when the disease broke out in force in Europe, then spread over large segments of the population in America, Europe and Africa. Media censorship kept the story out of the headlines in most countries. Spain foolishly allowed its newspapers to report on the news and paid the price -- the pandemic would be known forever as "Spanish Flu."

The deadly variant of influenza -- technically designated A/H1N1, or simply Influenza A -- had cropped up from time to time in history, but the 20th century was an era of global transportation unlike any before it. Automobiles, steamboats and even early air transportation made it easy for infected people to carry the ultra-contagious airborne virus into densely populated cities and commercial ports.

Military personnel provided one important vector for the virus, especially in the U.S., where returning World War I soldiers were among the hardest hit. Half of all U.S. military casualties in Europe died from influenza, not in combat.

Because of the media blackout, it's difficult to be sure where the first significant outbreak took place. In March 1918, several hundred soldiers fell ill at Fort Riley, Kansas. Fewer that 50 died, but the company -- numbering in the tens of thousands -- was deployed to Europe, and apparently they took the flu along with them.

The soldiers, presumably healthier than the average schmoe, were able to survive the illness better than the people to whom they transmitted it. The flu was particularly deadly for people aged 20 to 40 -- a variation on the usual pattern, which is usually lethal only for the very young and the very old. No one knows exactly why young people in the prime of their life were so susceptible to the disease, but you can't argue with a massive pile of corpses.

And the pile was historic in its proportions. The exact number is unknown, in part due to the fact that many cases of flu were misdiagnosed as pneumonia. In Europe, influenza raced through the population, then expanded into Africa, India and the Middle East with similar speed. Millions of Spaniards were infected, and unknown millions more around the Continent.

Then the U.S. Army brought the virus back to the states, where it afflicted millions more. More than 200,000 Americans died in one month. Because of the war and the pandemic combined, the medical establishment was stretched to its absolute limit, resulting in even more deaths.

U.S. authorities responded by shutting down public places where the flu might spread, including churches, bars, theaters and schools. Survivors were often reduced to skeletal shadows. Corpses were everywhere. In Philadelphia, they were piled three deep in the streets at times, where they rotted in the open air, provoking a secondary wave of illnesses. In Alaska, many were buried in mass graves under the tundra. In France, bulldozers were used to excavate massive ditches where the dead were unceremoniously thrown. In Ireland, orderlies dug pits behind hospitals to hold the remains of their former patients.

By the end of the second wave, from late summer to early winter 1918, worldwide casualties reached the tens of millions. A third wave in the spring of 1919 concluded the pandemic, for a final minimum estimated death toll between 20 and 30 million people. Most historians believe that the total was closer to 50 million dead --- all in the course of a single year, and medical researchers have recently upped the top range of that estimate to 100 million.

Even with the low end estimates, the Spanish Flu was the most lethal documented pandemic in history -- far worse than the more notorious Black Death that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages.

No one knows exactly where the killer strain originated. At the time, conspiracy theories were common. Many Americans thought the disease was a German plot, spread through Bayer aspirin. Later, some would suggest that flu vaccinations had actually caused the disease. None of these contentions ever came to more than rank speculation.

Many flu viruses originate in birds. Genetically, bird flus tend to be different from human diseases and are not directly transmittable to humans. However, pigs are susceptible to both human viruses and viruses carried by birds like chickens and ducks. When the virus jumps to a pig, it can mix up with human viruses and mutate while under attack from the pig's immune system. Occasionally, the result is a lethal virus capable of killing people.

Some theories say the "Spanish" flu started in Tibet and spread to Europe, where it was contracted by American troops and brought back to the States. During the 1990s, research suggested that the Spanish flu virus first mutated in American swine. Under this theory, it was contracted by U.S. troops, who carried the virus around the globe during their World War I adventures.

Within the last year, an even more alarming theory has emerged. Scientists studying the genetic structure of the Spanish Flu determined that the avian version was virtually identical to the human version, raising the possibility that the virus jumped directly from birds to people.

Since birds migrate from continent to continent, the ramifications of this theory are huge, suggesting that virus outbreaks could occur almost simultaneously all over the world. With no single point of origin, there isn't much anyone can do to contain such a pandemic.

Whether or not the virus can be transmitted directly from bird to human, there is still a tremendous risk that the Spanish flu -- or one of its close genetic cousins -- could re-emerge in spectacular fashion.

Modern medicine still can't cure the influenza virus, although it can treat the symptoms and often preserve life in cases that would have defeated the medical establishment of 1918. Flu vaccinations may or may not be effective against the Spanish flu variant. The merits of flu vaccinations are not universally agreed on, and not everyone gets them. Even in the best case scenario for a vaccination program, a mutated flu virus can defeat the protection of a vaccine.

There are other complications as well. Population density is much higher today than it was in 1918, especially in areas where vaccinations are not routine, and overall world population has more than tripled. In addition to those trends, the profile of international travel has changed dramatically since 1918. Tens of billions of people travel far enough to fly each each year, and many more travel more than 50 miles on any given day.

Perhaps the more things change, the more they stay the same. Balancing increased travel against improved health care, the World Health Organization estimates that the next global influenza pandemic could cause 50 million deaths or more, if the strain is as virulent as the Spanish Flu.

Scientists say those millions could be saved by a concerted, lightning fast global effort to quarantine affected areas and aggressively treat the afflicted there. Scientists also say that such an effort ain't gonna happen, because of the recurring motif of the 21st century -- "We'll burn that bridge when we come to it."

After all, in 2005, the U.S. couldn't coordinate its response to a hurricane it saw coming for days... and everyone involved in that effort spoke the same language, worked for the same government, followed the same rules and had the benefit of instant coverage by the news media. If influenza broke out in some politically inconvenient place, like China or Darfur, the chances of a coordinated global response are less than zero.

In 2005, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that a recurrence of the 1918 influenza epidemic could kill between 180 million and 360 million people worldwide. The author concluded:

 

Is there anything we can do to avoid this course? The answer is a qualified yes that depends on how everyone, from world leaders to local elected officials, decides to respond. We need bold and timely leadership at the highest levels of the governments in the developed world; these governments must recognize the economic, security, and health threats posed by the next influenza pandemic and invest accordingly. The resources needed must be considered in the light of the eventual costs of failing to invest in such an effort. The loss of human life even in a mild pandemic will be devastating, and the cost of a world economy in shambles for several years can only be imagined.

All it takes is bold and timely leadership? What a relief!

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 10:35 | link | comments

For Romma (I'm joking, but these are cute):

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 09:08 | link | comments (4)

Divergence theorem

In vector calculus, the divergence theorem, also known as Gauss' theorem, Ostrogradsky's theorem, or Gauss-Ostrogradsky theorem is a result that relates the flow (that is, flux) of a vector field through a surface to the behaviour of the vector field inside the surface.

More precisely, the divergence theorem states that the outward flux of a vector field through a surface is equal to the triple integral of the divergence on the region inside the surface. Intuitively, it states that the sum of all sources minus the sum of all sinks gives the net flow out of a region.

The divergence theorem is an important result for the mathematics of engineering, in particular in electrostatics and fluid dynamics.

Intuition

The intuitive content is simple. If a fluid is flowing in some area, and we wish to know how much fluid flows out of a certain region within that area, then we need to add up the sources inside the region and subtract the sinks. The fluid flow is represented by a vector field, and the vector field's divergence at a given point describes the strength of the source or sink there. So, integrating the field's divergence over the interior of the region should equal the integral of the vector field over the region's boundary. The divergence theorem says that this is true.

The divergence theorem is thus a conservation law which states that the volume total of all sinks and sources, the volume integral of the divergence, is equal to the net flow across the volume's bounda

 Mathematical statement

Suppose V is a subset of Rⁿ (in the case of n = 3, V represents a volume in 3D space) which is compact and has a piecewise smooth boundary. If F is a continuously differentiable vector field defined on a neighborhood of V, then we have

The left side is a volume integral over the volume V, the right side is the surface integral over the boundary of the volume V. Here ∂V is quite generally the boundary of V oriented by outward-pointing normals, and n is the outward pointing unit normal field of the boundary ∂V. (dS may be used as a shorthand for ndS.) In terms of the intuitive description above, the left-hand side of the equation represents the total of the sources in the volume V, and the right-hand side represents the total flow across the boundary ∂V.

The divergence theorem is frequently applied in these following variants (cf. vector identities):

(This is the basis for Green's identities, if .),

Note that the divergence theorem is a special case of the more general Stokes' theorem which generalizes the fundamental theorem of calculus.

Example

Suppose we wish to evaluate

where S is the unit sphere defined by x² + y² + z² = 1 and F is the vector field

The direct computation of this integral is quite difficult, but we can simplify it using the divergence theorem:

Since the functions y and z are odd on S (which is a symmetric set in respect to the coordinate planes), one has

Therefore,

because the unit ball W has volume 4π/3.

Applications

Fluid dynamics

Used to simplify the conservation of mass, momentum and energy equations.

 Electrostatics

Applied to an electrostatic field we get Gauss's law: the divergence is a constant times the volume charge density.

 Gravity

Applied to a gravitational field we get that the surface integral is -4πG times the mass inside, regardless of how the mass is distributed, and regardless of any masses outside.

 Spherically symmetric mass distribution

In the case of a spherically symmetric mass distribution we can conclude from this that the field strength at a distance r from the center is inward with a magnitude of G/r² times only the total mass within a smaller distance than r. All the mass at a greater distance than r from the center can be ignored.

For example, a hollow sphere does not produce any net gravity inside. The gravitational field inside is the same as if the hollow sphere were not there (i.e. the resultant field is that of any masses inside and outside the sphere only).

See also the shell theorem.

Cylindrically symmetric mass distribution

In the case of an infinite cylindrically symmetric mass distribution we can conclude that the field strength at a distance r from the center is inward with a magnitude of 2G/r times the total mass per unit length at a smaller distance, regardless of any masses at a larger distance.

For example, inside an infinite hollow cylinder the field vectors sum to zero.

 Bouguer plate

We can conclude that for an infinite, flat plate (Bouguer plate) of thickness H gravity outside the plate is perpendicular to the plate, towards it, with magnitude 2πG times the mass per unit area, independent of the distance to the plate (see also gravity anomalies).

More generally, for a mass distribution with the density depending on one Cartesian coordinate z only, gravity for any z is 2πG times the difference in mass per unit area on either side of this z value.

In particular, a combination of two equal parallel infinite plates does not produce any gravity inside.

 History

The theorem was first discovered by Joseph Louis Lagrange in 1762, then later independently rediscovered by Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1813, by George Green in 1825 and in 1831 by Mikhail Vasilievich Ostrogradsky, who also gave the first proof of the theorem. Subsequently, variations on the Divergence theorem are called Gauss's Theorem, Green's theorem, and Ostrogradsky's theorem.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 07:18 | link | comments

Man at gas station hits the fire button by accident

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:10 | link | comments (1)

There are four things to watch for in this video.

1. How stupid is it to try to drive a cable roll by hand up an incline.

2. When the roll crashes through the glass door, note the body expressions of the workers, especially the guy wearing yellow gloves.

3. There is a man outside that escapes certain death maybe by a few inches. He shows no reaction.

4. The security guard at his station, in the foreground.

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:05 | link | comments (2)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 14:58 | link | comments

Stupid Criminal Tricks 
1999 Honorable Mention
Darwin Awards

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:50 | link | comments (4)

Data contributes to ‘exploding digital universe’

Room to hold it all needed, but so is look at ‘digital shadows’ being cast

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 11:01 | link | comments

Tunguska

On 30 June 1908, there was an explosion in Siberia. It was caused by something that fell from the sky in a fireball.

Some sense of scale is required to fully appreciate the magnitude of this explosion.

The blast killed animals and knocked down trees over more than 800 square miles. In contrast, the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima created a zone of total destruction of just four-and-a-half square miles.

And 800 square miles was just the kill zone. The effects of the blast rattled and even broke windows more than 250 miles away. It caused atmospheric disturbances as far as Great Britain. The earth trembled all over Russia.

The explosion was the greatest devastation wrought during recorded history, and the only reason it isn't a major feature in the history books is the fact that Siberia is so damn empty. Despite the biblical scale of the destruction, only one man was reported killed (when he was thrown against a tree). Had the explosion taken place over a city, it could have killed millions and would easily have been the most deadly single event in history.

So what the fuck caused this apocalyptic scene? Alarmingly, no one has the slightest idea. Fortunately, almost everybody has an opinion.

The actual event began when a fireball was seen streaking through the air early on the morning of 30 June. An object was seen streaking through the sky from as far as 250 miles away. Witnesses generally described it as a fireball or a shooting star. Some said it had a fiery tail. Some said it was brighter than the sun.

Whatever it was (and we'll get to that in a minute), it exploded about five miles above the ground. As already related, the shock wave was historic. A black cloud covered the area and ash fell like rain. That evening, the night sky over Europe was filled with eerie light.

The question of just what fell on Tunguska that day has never been resolved, but not for lack of trying. Literally hundreds of billions of brain cells have been taxed on behalf of this subject, without a truly satisfactory answer.

The most popular theory is that the blast was caused by a meteorite, a cometary fragment or an asteroid hitting the earth. While these may all sound pretty much like the same thing, they're not quite.

The big issue surrounding any of these theories is the fact that the whatever-it-was blew up before it struck the ground. Now, it's quite likely that a meteorite or asteroid would fall apart on atmospheric entry, but an explosion isn't consistent with what you would expect. A comet is a more complicated structure, and it's a little easier to craft an explanation for why it might explode.

But all of these theories remain extremely... well, theoretical. The major problem with all three of the above theories is that the explosion of a typical astronomical object would scatter tons of space-junk all over Siberia. Numerous studies and expeditions failed to find any such debris. The comet theory has been further discredited by modern atmospheric studies which show that cometary fragments evaporate far above the surface of the earth all the time, without doing any damage.

The uncertainty around the cause of the explosion opened to the door to much wackier ideas. The comet and asteroid theories were questionable, but the next tier of scientific explanations were downright bizarre.

Faced with an indisputable mystery of incredible scale, many nonscientists embraced the idea that the explosion was caused by a UFO crash. Many scientists were appalled by this irresponsible nonsense, and they quickly moved to provide their own irresponsible nonsense as a somehow superior alternative.

For several years, a small number of scientists toyed with the theory that a hunk of antimatter collided with the earth, causing the event. The theory was first proffered in 1930, when antimatter was still a theoretical construct and before anyone had any idea about how to check for its presence.

Once technology to scan for evidence of antimatter was developed, the verdict was pretty discouraging. Background radiation levels at Tunguska were not especially consistent with the theory. Furthermore, scientists have since discovered that antimatter doesn't just float willy-nilly around the universe. In all the vastness of space, no one has ever observed antimatter occurring in nature, let alone drifting into perfectly innocent little planets in the middle of nowhere.

Despite these objections, you can easily find people who cling to the notion that antimatter caused the Tunguska explosion. They can get away with it by citing the still somewhat-ambiguous properties of antimatter (which has only ever been observed in laboratory conditions).

If you're going to indulge such increasingly baseless speculation, of course, why stop with the antimatter theory (which is still relatively plausible if extremely unlikely)? The next best idea anyone could come up with was even more improbable -- that a tiny black hole wandering through space crashed into the earth.

This notion was even more preposterous than the antimatter. The main variant of the theory suggested that this tiny black hole crashed all the way through the earth and popped out the other side. Unfortunately, there were numerous problems with this theory as well. For one thing, there was no evidence to support the "exit wound" that would presumably have been caused by this event. For another, there is no widely accepted evidence or theory to support the idea that tiny black holes even exist in nature at all.

Even then, assuming tiny black holes do actually exist, and assuming one of them did actually run into the earth, odds are it would have done a hell of a lot more damage than killing a few thousand reindeer. Don't forget that black holes warp space and time in a dramatic fashion. Realistically, such an impact would quite possibly rip the entire planet Earth into shreds, or suck it into timeless oblivion. Tunguska may have been a huge event when viewed from a human scale, but 800 square miles is hardly a blip from a cosmological standpoint.

Given the unsatisfactory nature of the "sober" scientific explanations, you might be forgiven for considering some explanations that are, well, much less sober.

You can find plenty of long treatises on the Internet that outline various theories that the Tunguska event was caused by the explosion of an alien spacecraft. While the above scientific theories are at least grounded in logic, the UFO theories are grounded in faith, and there isn't much you can do to argue with faith.

There have been plenty of different iterations of the UFO theory (without even counting fictional versions such as one featured on The X-Files). The most recent of these cropped up in the summer of 2004, when a Russian named Yuri Lavbin claimed to have found fragments of an alien craft within the blast zone.

Lavbin's fragments have been the subject of some controversy. He might just have made the whole thing up. Some historians have noted that the Soviet space program crashed a few vehicles in the region during the 1960s, and they speculate that Lavbin's find might be the remnants of a documented Soviet space probe. Of course, they could also be pieces of an alien vessel, but the lab reports haven't come back yet.

Other alien space theories are based around the observation of similarities between the Tunguska blast pattern and the blast patterns created by nuclear explosions. Under this premise, the aliens detonated a nuclear weapon over the region either by accident or deliberately. For the most part, the "on purpose" theories never clearly spell out a motive for this pre-emptive nuclear strike. As with the antimatter theory, the radiation levels at Tunguska don't especially support an alien nuke attack.

If you want to get weird without leaving the confines of the earth, you can always go with the death ray theory, which argues that the Tunguska blast was caused by Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-born pioneer who made major contributions to harnessing the power of electricity.

Unlike most of the above notions, the Tesla death ray notion has a few documented facts to back it up. At almost the exact time of the Tunguska blast, Tesla was experimenting with an invention known as the Tesla Coil.

According to the story (which is better documented than mini-black holes, just for instance), Tesla was attempting to use his Coil to broadcast a transmission to the Arctic Circle by dumping massive amounts of electricity into the earth itself. Tesla theorized that the earth would conduct the electricity as what he called "terrestrial waves." The experiment ended when the amount of current he used caused a nearby generator to blow up amid a violent and apparently man-made lightning storm.

While the timing of the experiment is interesting, and the geographical locations are suggestive, the Tesla death ray theory still lacks a coherent scientific scenario which could have caused the wanton destruction witnessed in Tunguska. There are also those pesky eyewitness reports of something falling from the sky. On the other hand, lightning is often perceived as falling from the sky when it actually leaps up from the ground.

The Rotten Library has a wacky theory about the Tunguska blast as well. We theorize that you are going to hear many, many more theories about what caused the explosion before the issue is ever resolved. Tunguska has become a magnet for the adventurous imagination, among credible scientists as well as random loonies, and that isn't likely to change any time soon.

On the bright side, we live in an age that admits to very few genuine mysteries. Tunguska is an honest-to-god mystery. It's not a matter of interpretation (like the Bermuda Triangle) and it can't be simply dismissed by the skeptics. It reminds us that for all we know, there is still a hell of a lot we don't know. If this mystery endures for the ages, would that really be so bad?

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 20:42 | link | comments (2)

As we all know, we live in a dysfunctional world. I think that the root to this modern evil begins at home. So, I was wondering, how can we return to the family values of the 1950's? I believe we should all strive to have functional, loving relationships with our significant other. I believe following these simple rules, we would all live out our lives in happy, blissful marriages.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:13 | link | comments (4)

I got the full blown flu, big time. Fever, chills, dry cough, aches and pains, you name it. So, I did a bit of research on my savior, through these hard times: NyQuil.

What's Inside: NyQuil, Fortified With Powerful Narcotics!

By Patrick Di Justo 10.23.07 | 12:00 AM

Acetaminophen
One of the many wonder-pharmaceuticals that can be derived from coal tar, acetaminophen was used for nearly a century as a painkiller and fever reducer before anyone figured out how it worked. We now know that as the drug breaks down in the body, it turns into a cannabinoid: yes, stoners, the same type of compound that makes marijuana so irresistible. Doctors also once thought acetaminophen made users more talkative and outgoing. Current research suggests this idea was half-baked.

Dextromethorphan HBr
A cough suppressant. Well, actually, in the body it becomes dextrorphan, a cough suppressant, and levorphanol, a painkiller five times as powerful as morphine. Like PCP and ketamine, DXM is also an NMDA receptor antagonist, so the National Institute on Drug Abuse lists it as a "dissociative" drug. Twelve times the recommended dose of NyQuil leads to distorted perceptions of sight and sound and produces feelings of detachment — dissociation — from the environment and oneself. For people whose bodies are unusually slow at metabolizing the drug, even low doses of DXM trigger full-blown "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" psychedelic trips.

Doxylamine succinate
Officially, this ingredient is on the label as an antihistamine. But it is equally useful as a sleep aid, providing a nice, convenient one-two... Zzzz.

Citric acid
Citric acid has proven somewhat effective as a flu killer, but only if you spray it into your nose. Because NyQuil is meant to be swallowed, not snorted, its presence here is probably to add a little tang, and possibly to act as a low-level preservative.

Alcohol
Hooch has been used as a folk remedy for the common cold for centuries (despite the fact that it doesn't work). But according to Procter & Gamble, alcohol's sole purpose in NyQuil is to serve as a solvent, keeping the top three ingredients in solution.

Polyethylene glycol and propylene glycol
Chemical cousins used as thickeners. NyQuil's consistency is somewhere between water and honey, but not because it needs to be. Drug marketers know many people prefer medicines in syrup form.

Sodium citrate
In other contexts sodium citrate is an anticoagulant; most likely it is used here as a buffer to maintain the acid-base balance of all the other ingredients.

Flavor
P&G isn't talking, but we suspect the cloyingly repulsive taste of NyQuil is to ensure that you can swallow a tablespoon or two but can't drink enough of the stuff to start seeing Jesus.

High fructose corn syrup
A dash of sugar helps that tablespoon or two go down.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:58 | link | comments

I neve inhaled, either.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 05:13 | link | comments

Sand Dunes Thawing on Mars
Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

Explanation: What are these strange shapes on Mars? Defrosting sand dunes. As spring now dawns on the Northern Hemisphere of Mars, dunes of sand near the pole, as pictured above, are beginning to thaw. The carbon dioxide and water ice actually sublime in the thin atmosphere directly to gas. Thinner regions of ice typically defrost first revealing sand whose darkness soaks in sunlight and accelerates the thaw. The process might even involve sandy jets exploding through the thinning ice. By summer, spots will expand to encompass the entire dunes. The Martian North Pole is ringed by many similar fields of barchan sand dunes, whose strange, smooth arcs are shaped by persistent Martian winds.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 09:35 | link | comments

Division by zero

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 17:13 | link | comments (1)

BOLERO-RAVEL

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 14:47 | link | comments (1)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 14:27 | link | comments (1)

Dippy Drinking Birds

The Edmund Scientific company has been selling engineering, robotic, and astronomy supplies since 1942 -- but their stand out best seller and unofficial mascot is the Dippy Drinking Bird. Dippy reached new heights of popularity in 1995, during an episode of The Simpsons in which a 300-pound Homer sets Dippy in front of his keyboard to automate the monitoring of the Springfield nuclear plant.

In 1946, thermodynamics engineer and chemical hobbyist Miles V. Sullivan filed a technical illustration with the U.S. Patent Office for his version of a bird-shaped Heat Engine. The structure of the bird was comprised of two glass bulbs: one for the head (and beak, and jaunty hat, and googly eyeballs) and another for the lower body (and shakeable tail feathers).

Originally Dippy was clamped along the side of a water glass, but the balancing mechanism would later evolve into tall, stork-like legs upon which the glass bulbs were balanced and perched. Variations included duck shapes and giraffes, but the essential mechanics of the device remained constant. A thin glass tube connecting the two bulbs from the inside extended down into the lower body, where it dipped into a reservoir of Freon-based liquid (now banned) or colored methylene chloride. This is the fluid that rises and falls to make Dippy bobble back and forth.

Most of the air is vacuum-sucked from the glass structure at the factory, after the liquid is placed inside. Although the head and upper part of the glass tube appear to be "empty", they are actually full of active, vaporous gas from the methylene chloride, which doesn't take much heat energy to turn from a vapor into a liquid, or vice versa. In the scientific community, that's called a "low latent heat of evaporation".

Methylene chloride, also called dichloromethane (CH₂Cl₂), is a volatile, colorless liquid with a chloroform-like odor. It's used in various industrial processes in many different industries -- including paint stripping, pharmaceutical manufacturing, paint remover manufacturing, metal cleaning and degreasing, and so forth. The most common means of exposure to methylene chloride is inhalation or skin exposure, i.e. your son or daughter smashes Dippy against the windowsill and drinks the holiday fruit punch inside. OSHA considers methylene chloride to be a potential occupational carcinogen: in studies, mice exposed to airborne methylene chloride developed cancers and tumors of the lung and the liver.

Anyway, if the head bulb is slightly cooler than the body bulb, a temperature differential occurs. The methylene chloride turns from a liquid to a vapor, and as it rises up the glass tube, vacuum action pulls the liquid up along with it, like a thermometer. When it nears the top, Dippy's head tips forward on the swing-leg hinges, dunks his nose into a glass of water and appears to drink. While the whole family sits around applauding and taking pictures, Dippy's red felt-covered beak, face, and head are absorbing water from the drinking glass. As the moisture evaporates from the fabric, the head becomes cooler than the body and internal pressures within the chamber are equalized.

The vapor turns back into liquid, the liquid drops to the lower bulb, and Dippy's center of gravity pivots him to his normal, natural, upright position. Under the right conditions, Dippy can tipple and topple back and forth quickly, dook-dook-dooking like there's no tomorrow. But don't try to be clever in front of your stupid friends and put alcohol-based beverages in Dippy's shotglass: the swinging pendulum motion of the body can accelerate the chaos of the liquid and vapor, and the evaporation process from Dippy's head requires liquid no heavier than water. You can, however, "trick" Dippy into drinking by positioning a lamp toward the bottom bulb. If you limit the penumbra (falloff) from the light so Dippy's head remains cool, he'll go back and forth and even drink without a water glass for hours at a time. But exercise caution: lamplight can produce excessive heat, and Dippy's glass will burst. One Dippy Bird hack involves painting the body black so the body becomes warmer more quickly than the head.

In 1966, civil engineer and logistics expert R.B. Murrow developed an abstract study recommending that the possibilities of a Dippy Drinking Bird heat engine be investigated to see if it could be further developed into a useful machine which performed low-power requirement tasks in primitive environments (such as the one addressing the Egyptian low-water-lift agricultural problem). In the report, such an engine was described in considerable detail. Direct experiment has shown that the Dippy Drinking Bird works best on small scale, and does so particularly well under the arid climatological conditions of Egypt and many other underdeveloped countries. By measuring the power output of a drinking bird, attaching it to a windglass and using it to lift heavy paper clips, scientist Don Rathjen reported the successful extraction of a nanohorsepower of work (about a microwatt).

Artist Daniel Reynolds spent six years and $20,000 developing his most brilliant work to date: a flock of fifteen enormous drinking birds filling an entire art gallery. Each is six and a half feet tall, and 3,000 times heavier than the original Dippy. The birds are made of pyrex glass, and require a special vacuum attachment so the liquid can travel efficiently. The head of the Institute of Thermodynamics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany turned over all their research and development resources to assist in the project.

Unfortunately, the art and science of Dippy the Drinking Bird were only the precursor to cheaper, gimmicky Hand Boiler devices also known as "libido detectors" -- the looped and twisted glass sculptures containing a liquid which bubbles and churns like a tempest in a teacup with the heat from your bare hand. Once the bulbous end is out of your hands, it takes a few moments for the liquid to cool down. No delightful bird shape, no pointy beak, no pretty eyes or feathers -- just another example of the dumbing down and over-pussification of America's youth. You can probably find Hand Boilers at the Hallmark store near the candles and cat calendars. Dippy Drinking Birds, while hardly extinct, are now primarily indigenous to magic shops.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 06:35 | link | comments (1)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 06:05 | link | comments (3)

 

Vela Supernova Remnant
Credit & Copyright: Robert Gendler

Explanation: The plane of our Milky Way Galaxy runs through this complex and beautiful skyscape. At the northwestern edge of the constellation Vela (the Sails) the 16 degree wide, 30 frame mosaic is centered on the glowing filaments of the Vela Supernova Remnant, the expanding debris cloud from the death explosion of a massive star. Light from the supernova explosion that created the Vela remnant reached Earth about 11,000 years ago. In addition to the shocked filaments of glowing gas, the cosmic catastrophe also left behind an incredibly dense, rotating stellar core, the Vela Pulsar. Some 800 light-years distant, the Vela remnant is likely embedded in a larger and older supernova remnant, the Gum Nebula. The broad mosaic includes other identified emission and reflection nebulae, star clusters, and the remarkable Pencil Nebula.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 05:52 | link | comments (2)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 20:08 | link | comments (2)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 11:36 | link | comments

M 104

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 09:33 | link | comments (1)

Cooper Green as a teen, earning his allowance:

                                                      

       

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:44 | link | comments (2)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 23:19 | link | comments (5)

Son of a bitch, I've found Cooper Green's true identity:

Franco American Spaghetti

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 23:02 | link | comments (4)

Hula hoop

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:47 | link | comments

Binary 'deathstar' has Earth in its sights

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 06:50 | link | comments (2)

Yogisms:

1. You can see a lot by observing.
2. Never answer an anonymous letter.
3. It gets late early out there.
4. 95% of the game is half mental.
5. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.
6. We made too many wrong mistakes.
7. It’s like déjà vu all over again.
8. If you come to a fork in the road take it.
9. No one goes there anymore – it’s too crowded.
10. He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.
11. The other teams could make trouble for us if they win.
12. The towels were so thick I could hardly close my suitcase.
13. You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.
14. If you don’t know where you are going you might wind up someplace else.
15. Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t go to yours.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 05:49 | link | comments (4)

Voodo, mafidl's cat suffers from a lack of certain digestive enzymes, mostly bile and pancreatic. This most little man-beast thing, whom I love,  has had horrible, yellowish, foul smelling  diarrhea. Us chemists first smell (listen you squeamish people) a sample by fanning certain odors so we can identify what is contained in the sample. His wastes do not contain, or if it does, not exhibit discernible solids.  I detect sulphour and some hints of amides, as well as amines. He's not metabolizing certain amino acids from the food he ingests.. Mafidl administrates, on a 1 bid cycle, enzymes thought to be beneficial just right before the 'little man-thing' eats his food. Of course the little guy (won't ever call him an animall) will seek shelter, and hide,-- hide away from fidlmath and avoid eating because of the repprecusive fear.

I decided to run a pH test today on the 'little man thing's' liquified stool, and had a pH of ~4. Very acidic.

I requested that Fidlmath contact her vets, and ask if a bicarb soultion may be warranted. The 'little man-thing' cries out everytime he uses the litter box, and I'm hedging my bets, I believe his cries are out of irritation due the acidic wastes burning his 'baby' bowels, rectum and anus. The touchy part is that sodium makes us all mamalls retain water, thus driving up blood pressure.

So:

I think I'm dosing the 'little man thin, (my fuzzy friend thru time/space) with a small amount of Bicarb. In the migs (mg) range. Geez, all aerobic creatures, as we are, need the bicarb/CO2 to use through the pyruvic acid thing, glucose catabolism pathways and citric acid cycle that eventually yeilds 2 moles of carbon dioxode, origanilly given by the bi-carb.

I love all living organsims, both repulsive and cute. We are all the same as all living organisms that share life on this planet.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 15:22 | link | comments (4)

Nikola Tesla

Don't ever say Serbo-Croatia never did anything for you. If it wasn't for Nikola Tesla, you might not be reading this now. Your cell phone would be little more than a paperweight, and the government wouldn't have lethal orbiting death ray satellites with which to ensure your safety.

The young Serbian discovered the principle that drives almost every practical use of electricity today, the rotating magnetic field. The field is what powers generators and all forms of electrical motors. Although the generator had already been discovered, it was Tesla who figured out why it worked.

Tesla's understanding of the rotating magnetic field led him to develop groundbreaking ideas about how to use alternating current, and one of his first inventions was the induction motor, a powerful device powered by AC. Tesla had big dreams of the mad scientist variety, including flying machines and other more sinister deals. As everyone knows, there's only so far a mad scientist can go in Croatia, so in 1884, it was off to America!

Tesla worked for Thomas Edison briefly, but mad scientists aren't widely known as team players, and the relationship was a bust. He was bought out by Westinghouse in 1885, when the titan of industry bought his patents for AC-driven motors. The first thing Westinghouse did with the technology was put Edison's DC-powered gadgets out of business. That's gratitude for you.

Tesla set up shop on his own and began inventing things, such as specialized lighting and a precursor to the X-ray machine. He liked to wow the marks by running electrical current through his body to light lamps. He was that kind of guy. This sort of behavior made him popular at high school assemblies and Masonic lodges.

In 1891, Tesla became a U.S. citizen, which as we all know is a free ticket to megalomania. He started to dream bigger. Within a few years, he was building massive hydroelectric generators powered by Niagara Falls. He invented the first remote control, and began researching wireless communications.

Around the turn of the century, Telsa made he considered his most important discovery even though no one has ever heard about it, it isn't discussed in classrooms, and it doesn't appear to have any practical applications except for James Bond villains.

They were called terrestrial stationary waves, and what that basically means is that you can a) transmit electrical current using the Earth as a conductor, and b) you can cause the Earth to vibrate on a frequency, much like a tuning fork. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Try to name five non-mad-scientist uses for such a discovery. Powering streetlights without wires? Yeah, OK, that's pretty cool. Beaming lethal destruction around the globe? Whoops! Manipulating the weather? Controlling earthquakes?

Tesla saw great possibilities for his TS waves, including creating a worldwide integrated system of centralized control and distribution electronics, stock tickers and all manner of not-yet-invented communications technology, with provisions for secretly encrypted point-to-point transmissions. It was around this time that the government began to really take an interest in Nikola Tesla.

In his quest to test the limits of the terrestrial waves, Tesla began a period of extensive experimentation. during which he developed the Tesla Coil, a method for delivering high-voltage current which is still used in many TVs and other applications today.

Using the coil, Tesla asked himself: If the Earth can conduct electricity, and the electricity vibrates around the world in waves through the planet, just how much electricity can the Earth hold? A reasonable question! He could think of no better way to answer that question than by dumping as much electricity as he could generate into the ground, just to see what would happen.

Many a bad science fiction movie has opened with this sort of premise. Fortunately, the outcome of Tesla's tests were more of an inconvenience than a cataclysmic world-ending event. Well, depending on your perspective anyway.

The area around his experiement became electrified, but not enough to kill anyone, and there were some very impressive bolts of man-made lightning which stopped when he blew up the town's generator and caused a blackout over several miles.

There might have been one other small side effect. At almost exactly the same time that this experiment was taking place, a mysterious explosion rocked a remote section of Siberia, to the tune of about a 15-megaton blast (40 years before the first Atomic Bomb test). The explosion has never been satisfactorily explained, although it is commonly dismissed as a meteor or comet impact (a claim which doesn't quite add up with the measured damage on the scene). Interestingly, Tesla had claimed he was trying to use to wave to send a communication to an Arctic expedition that can supposedly be located along a straight line path between Tesla's lab and the site of the explosion.

During all this, Tesla was also pushing ahead with his investigation of the uses of radio waves, particularly to remotely control robotic devices, an area in which the Serbian made great breakthroughs. His research into radio either ran parallel to Guglielmo Marconi, or Marconi ripped him off. The outcome was that Tesla was gipped out of the Nobel Prize in favor of Marconi, who won the official title of "inventor of radio" in the history books. Tesla's inventions and discoveries also formed the basis of modern robotics, radar, most forms of wireless communications, loudspeakers and more. Few of these breakthroughs are credited to the inventor, even today.

As lousy in business as he was talented in science, Tesla sank into bankruptcy and many of his projects went down with him. For years, he struggled to get by and bring his ideas to fruition, but his ideas had taken a turn toward the decidedly strange. He became obsessed with interplanetary communication, for which he was derided (even though, years later, his work is now integral to space exploration and the search for intelligent life in the universe).

He also began to make some interesting claims about his abilities and the power of his inventions. He told people he possessed the scientific wherewithal to split the Earth in two, and he told the New York Times he had invented a death ray which he called the "teleforce," which could melt an airplane's engine from a range of 250 miles. The Times, noting the massive spending on defense and military issues in the build-up toward World War II, pointed out that on a cost-benefit basis (and based on Tesla's track record), it was well worth the risk of failure to fund the project. Nevertheless, the "teleforce" was never adopted... publicly.

The "teleforce" claim would haunt the United States for decades to come. According to Tesla, he had designed a system through which a series of beam transmitters could create an impenetrable energy shield around the country. Starting to sound familiar? It was the first "Star Wars" proposal, and Tesla's claims (never verified publicly) formed the blueprint for almost all future discussions of the "Strategic Defense Initiative."

Tesla was clearly ahead of his time, a problem which would haunt his entire career. His inventions and patents for remote operation of robotic devices, for instance, were stunningly advanced but largely ignored at the time. The military inexplicably failed to understand the usefulness of remote-controlled attack vehicles and torpedoes until after Tesla's patents had expired. Even then, they began researching it over from scratch, rather than working with his established techniques.

The end result was military technology nearly identical to Tesla's inventions, but developed literally decades later and at many times the cost. Tesla never made a dime off of the discovery of the radio-controlled automation that today is the basis of a multibillion dollar aerospace specialty, responsible for the CIA drone assassin planes used in the War on Terrorism, and in every generation of the Mars lander probes.

After his death in 1943, the FBI raided Tesla's home and seized all of his scientific notes, to the tune of hundreds of pages. While a pretty fascist act, it's kind of understandable in light of his claims. Tesla's heirs eventually won the release of some of the material, but it's unknown how much is still classified or "lost." Conspiracy theorists are enamored of Tesla for obvious reasons, and there is a lot of speculation about that "death ray" and other aspects of his research.

One of the most popular theories is that Tesla's terrestrial stationary waves and "death ray" research form the basis of the HAARP Project, an alleged top-secret U.S. government experiment to control the weather and beam fiery death from the skies against enemies of the state.

Tesla's work is still of broad interest to people who are interested in death and destruction on a large scale. Members of Japan's Aum cult (notorious for a sarin gas attack in Tokyo) visited the Tesla Museum looking for ideas, and members of al Qaeda have allegedly taken an interest as well, although it appears fertilizer bombs and box cutters are about as much technology as Osama bin Laden cares about since the incarceration of his own personal mad scientist, Ramzi Yousef.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 11:59 | link | comments

Had my blood pressure taken by my doctor. Suffice to say I was lucky I didn't suffer a stroke. 200/100.

So he put me on Plendil. So, if I suddenly stop posting:

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:03 | link | comments

The Most Fascinating Prehistoric Paintings

Lascaux Caves: the prehistoric Sistine Chapel

Known as "the prehistoric Sistine Chapel," the Lascaux Caves, a cave complex in southwestern France, contain some of the most remarkable paleolithic cave paintings in the world, from at least 15,000 years ago.

The cave was discovered on 12 September 1940 by four teenagers, Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas, as well as Ravidat's dog, Robot. Public access was made easier after World War II. By 1955, the carbon dioxide produced by 1,200 visitors per day had visibly damaged the paintings. The cave was closed to the public in 1963 in order to preserve the art.

Altamira Caves: as Picasso famously exclaimed, "after Altamira, all is decadence"

The fabulous caves of Altamira are located near Santilliana del Mar in Cantabria, Northern Spain, about 30 kms. west of Santander. As is so often the case they were discovered by chance. In 1868 a hunter by the name of Modesto Cubillas stumbled across them but they were not properly explored until 1875 by a nobleman from Santander named Marcellino Sanz de Santuola but it was his daughter, Maria de Santuola who discovered the wonderful cave paintings of Altamira in 1879. However they were of such astounding quality and so well preserved that specialists doubted their authenticity and sadly the discoverer was dead before they were officially acknowledged as genuine. At the beginning of the 20th. centuary they were finally accepted as authentic after similar remains from the stone age were discovered in the area. However the cave paintings of Altamira remain the most exceptional evidence of Magdalénian culture (between c. 16,500 and 14,000 years ago) in southern Europe.

Chauvet Caves: spectacular artwork

The Chauvet Cave or is located in the Ardèche département, southern France. It became famous in 1994 after a trio of speleologists found that its walls were richly decorated with Paleolithic artwork, that it contained the fossilized remains of many animals, including those that are now extinct, and that the floor preserved the footprints of animals and humans. The Chauvet Cave was soon regarded as one of the most significant pre-historic art sites in the world.

The cave is uncharacteristically large and the quality, quantity, and condition of the artwork found on its walls has been called spectacular. It appears to have been occupied by humans during two distinct periods: the Aurignacian and the Gravettian. Most of the artwork dates to the earlier, Aurignacian, era (30,000 to 32,000 years ago). The later Gravettian occupation, which occurred 25,000 to 27,000 years ago, left little but a child's footprint, the charred remains of ancient hearths and carbon smoke stains from torches that lit the caves.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 07:45 | link | comments (1)

Green Eyes asked "where would I go?"

I'd go to anyplace that people have a bit of etiquette, a place that I can hold a door open for someone and by eye exchange, a thank you is not needed as a reply. A place that I could smile at mothers with their children, and not be paranoid to think they think I'm  some form of a psycho, a pediophile or what ever is tops on media profiles. I'd like to be in a community that knows me, and I know them also. A place that I can rush out to help, and have the reciprocal given to me, if needed.

A place that people's spiritual beliefs / religions are not knocked, but are learned form, shared, and definetly not supressed.

A place where civil laws are respected. Civil laws translate to me as mutual respect for all our neighbors, acceptance, tolerance given to others.

A place not far from the ocean, I've always loved the sea and know intellectually that my "mother" was the ocean; hell, our blood plasma is identical to sea water. Our "ancestors danced from the sea, whole." I got into so much trouble when I used to go beyond the Jersey shore, aged about 13, with older friends to go fishing.

A place with dark skys, not poluted with sodiium/mercury vapour lamps. When I feel lonely, a place I can go and look up to the stars and wonder, are there other beings looking back at earth's vector? I like astronomy and I own large telescopes.

So many places.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 18:29 | link | comments (4)

32.7%

Until last December, 32.7% of my life has been sucked out of me by a little endeavor called Aguero Enterprises, Inc. While working there, I even survived my fair amount of physical trauma, from having my left hand thumb almost completley severed to a torn Achillie's tendon. The hand scar bothers me, a constant reminder. I've played guitar all my life, and as certain bloggers who have heard me play can confirm, I'm very strong playing jazz guitar. I know this will sound disgustingly egotistical but I don't gig anymore because it is hard to find players as strong as me.

My thumb has never been the same since then, thus I lost stamina and some single line speed on the instrument. Right know, writing this post I can still "feel" the scar, and the accident happened in 1995. An employee decided to place an uncovered, new, and well greased paper guilliotine blade on a table. I was walking by it and knocked it over. The blade weighed about 30 lbs. and my natural instict was to grab it. Those things are as sharp as a surgical scapel. My father made me work, control freak bastard as he is, right after my surgery. It is very difficult to admit that my father is a self absorbed bully, who constanly abuses my mother emotionally. Top it off that my I.Q. is possibly close to 50 points higher than his. He was and will never be smart. That's possibly why he's a control freak.

So, the business was sold two months ago to a Brazillian man who doesn't speak a word of Spanish nor English. He almost ran into the ground a business that was incorporated 19 years ago.

I was supposed to inheret the business, but during the mid to late ninties my father suffered a brain aneurysm, which took 7 hours of brain surgery to fix. Also, he suffered a couple of strokes and heart attacks during that period.

His personality was affected and by 1998 had become increasingly more paranoid. That's when I realized that his promises held no substance. So I freaked out and got my ass back into school. Now that doorways are beginning to open up for me, Aguero Enterprises, Inc. rears its ugly head one more time. The company cannot function without either dad or me. Pop's too old to run it, so, being the nice guy I can be from time to time, I've gone in to help the new owner part time. Now, he's offered me the world. Well, 30% of it. The funny part is that I almost sold out. I seriously considered it. I woke up this morning feeling like a cheap street walker.

This man who happens to be extremley wealthy has even offered me airplane ticket to Brazil. He wants me to go fishing, hunting and meet his niece! He owns a huge farm land, stocked with cattle, ostrich, and even fish farms. His main business, which he has incorporated with Aguero Enterprises, Inc. deals with selling huge prining presses. He's been doing that for years. I'm telling him today that I must move on. I love academia more than money. Folks, I'm turning my back on anywhere between $400,000 to $900,000 per year.

Aguero Enterprises robbed me from a girl I was going to marry, (least she gave the ring back), my own business, Technical Support Services, and my innocence. You see, I know people lie, but to be lied to by parents, at what ever age, seems so remarkably...see, I can't even express it words. The wound is that deep. There is no way I'll remarry thau ugly bitch. The divorce was two months ago and final.

Well, the price I've paid has rewarded me by giving me a bit of academic knowledge how the mechanical universe works. And believe me, it's like trippin' on acid 24/7. Also I learned something these last few days of pain and growth. I've been making excuses for my self as why I stay in Florida. I've turned jobs down, including a teaching fellowship at UF, molecular biophysics work at FSU, even a research position at Merk labs out in California. The reason was that my parents are too old and feeble, and I have no brothers or sisters. So, I must stay in a city that I trully hate, that stresses me completly out, to take care of people that fucked me well. Well, it's time that I'm going to flash the proverbial bird back at them. I'm watching out for me. So long Miami, I'll tie a few loose ends and I'm out of here.

(Maybe I'm schizoid...err....not!)

Buck wise, I'll be okay until April.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 12:17 | link | comments (1)

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Posted by: NeutronNorman at 01:43 | link | comments

Nostradamus

Either Michel de Nostredame wrote the ultimate literary Rorschach test, or else Nostradamus accurately predicted the future course of civilization until its ultimate end. Or as the Straight Dope's Uncle Cecil puts it:

There are two schools of thought on Nostradamus: either (1) he had supernatural powers which enabled him to prophesy the future with uncanny accuracy, or (2) he did for bullshit what Stonehenge did for rocks.

Uncle Cecil votes for No. 2, but either way, the Centuries of Nostradamus are a fun and fruitless way to pass the years of your life unproductively while nevertheless maintaining a sense of high purpose.

Born in 1503, Nostradamus himself was a French doctor, who later ventured into astrology. In the former, he was noteworthy but not especially memorable. He fought the Great Plague well enough to earn a lifelong pension, after which he gave up medicine and took up prophecy.

In the latter field, he has attained an unrivaled stature. Nostradamus wrote a series of prophetic verses, known as the Centuries for their 100-line length (and not because they chronicle the coming centuries). He wrote another batch of prophecies known as the Presages or Prognostications around the mid-16th century. All of his work was written in French, as quatrains (stanzas of four lines).

Nostradamus himself believed his so-called gift of seeing the future was occultism or some form of sorcery. The technique was simple: Gathered at night in study deep I sate, Alone, upon the tripod stool of brass, Exiguous flame came out of solitude, Promise of magic that may be believed. The brass tripod supported a bowl of water or a candle, into which Nostradamus gazed in order to see his visions, a technique called "scrying." There are various accounts which describe rituals of greater or lesser complexity around this basic activity. Any one's as good as the other. You get the basic idea. According to legend, Nostradamus kept much of his work secret at first, for fear of being dragged before the Inquisition as a witch. Eventually, he decided that his gift was more important than his fear, and he published his prophecies beginning in 1555. The church did eventually condemn him as a heretic, but they had the courtesy to wait until after his death in 1566.

The contents of the Centuries and the rest have become a matter of some debate. That's not because there's any deep scholarly issue with the original manuscripts. Rather, it's because the only way you're going to be able to check the prophecies against reality is with a museum-vetted copy of the 1555 manuscript and a doctorate in Medieval French.

Starting about 30 seconds after his death, fans of Nostradamus began taking liberties with the text in order to make the passages match up better. If that wasn't bad enough, most of the material is cryptic, massively symbolic and arcanely astrological even when properly translated.

Enthusiasts explain that this obscure writing was intended to keep the Inquisitors away. That's as good a response as any. The net effect of the style is that the quatrains are... well, let's call them vague. Skeptics argue that you can twist them around to mean whatever you want them to mean. Adherents argue that the prophecies are startlingly accurate and plenty specific.

The skeptics are fighting a losing battle. Between the loose translations and the outright revisionism, the adherents have had a field day going over the many "hits" in the Centuries.

Consider, for instance, the most famous of Nostradamus's predictions: The coming of Adolf Hitler. Well, maybe. This is pretty much the Holy Grail of Nostradamus prophecies (aside from the forged 9/11 passage, of which we will say more momentarily). Erika Cheetham, author of The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus, corrects the obvious misspelling of "Hister" to "Hitler" in her translation, as Nostradamus enthusiasts are wont:

 

Bêtes farouches de faim fleuves tranner; Plus part du champ encore Hister sera, En caige de fer le grand sera treisner, Quand rien enfant de Germain observa.

Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers, The greater part of the battle will be against Hitler. He will cause great men to be dragged in a cage of iron, When the son of Germany obeys no law.

Whoa!! That sure sounds like Hitler! Of course, when skeptic James Randi translated the verse, he got something a little different. Unlike Cheetham, Randi interprets Hister as a reference to the lower Danube river, a section of which is actually named Hister. The Randi version:

Beasts mad with hunger will swim across rivers,
Most of the army will be against the Lower Danube.
The great one shall be dragged in an iron cage
When the child brother will observe nothing.

Uhhhhh.. Yeah, that's, uh, well, uh... Not so much the Third Reich. A third translation, lifted from the nonpartisan Sacred-Texts.com, splits the difference:

Beasts ferocious from hunger will swim across rivers:
The greater part of the region will be against the Hister,
The great one will cause it to be dragged in an iron cage,
When the German child will observe nothing.

Not so clear. You can't really tell from this whether Nostradamus was really foretelling Hitler. In fact, it's damned hard to figure how the idea these verse actually applied to Hitler ever came about. Actually, it's not that hard to figure. Hitler himself decided that the verses were about him and disseminated the idea for one of the most dramatic successes in the history of propaganda.

Oops.

We could go on and on, but we predict... Nay, we prophesy that others have done it before, and will do it again, without changing the minds of those whose minds were made up before they read the first word of this article. Suffice to say, it's wise to take the Prophecies of Nostradamus with a grain of salt... or maybe a whole shaker.

Especially if those prophecies seem to pertain to 9/11. One quatrain was circulated with great hysteria in the immediate aftermath of al Qaeda's attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, destroying the twin towers of the World Trade Center and damaging the Pentagon. It read:

In the City of God there will be a great thunder,
Two brothers torn apart by Chaos,
While the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb,
The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.

Theoretically, the "City of God" is New York City. Why is that? Fuck it, who cares. Maybe it's Washington, D.C., which is only slightly less godless than the Big Apple. Put that aside. The "two brothers" would then be the "twin towers," the fortress is the Pentagon, etc.

If you got this passage in an e-mail forward, you might have noticed that it was dated to 1654. This presents a problem since that date is nearly 100 years after Nostradamus died. Whoops! Turns out the "quatrain" was written by Neil Marshall, a college student, in a paper entitled "A Critical Analysis of Nostradamus."

The point of the fake quatrain was -- you guessed it -- to demonstrate how Nostradamus-style writing can be twisted around to mean just about anything.

Another variant on the "9/11 prophecy" reads as follows:

Two steel birds will fall from the sky
On the Metropolis. The sky will burn
At forty-five degrees latitude.
Fire approaches the great new city.

If you're thinking that sounds a little too good to be true, well, you're right. For one thing, NYC is at 40 degrees latitude -- something like 350 miles off. On the bright side, however, this verse is actually loosely based on the following real quatrain:

At forty-five degrees the sky will burn,
Fire to approach the great new city:
In an instant a great scattered flame will leap up,
When one will want to demand proof of the Normans.

What does it mean? Tough call. The Norse haven't exactly been a major force in the world recently. The event, whatever it was, was predicted for somewhere between 1996 and 1998, according to astrological dating and a list of popes in the Nostradamus texts, or at least that's what the Nostradamus FAQ tells us. The sky didn't especially burn at that time, or at least not so as you'd notice.

And therein lies the difficulty. We have to take someone else's word for it, because there's barely anyone qualified to intepret the Prophecies of Nostradamus, even though you can find lots and lots of people who will try anyway. Nothing happened in 1996? Hell, make it 2001, and make the 45 degrees into 40 while you're at it. Who's qualified to tell you you're wrong? Let's see their doctorate in Medieval French...

Is Nostradamus a fraud, or a visionary? There's a verse from the Centuries that sums it up best:

When the still sea conspires an armor,
and her sullen and aborted currents
breed tiny monsters, true sailing is dead!
Awkward instant and the first animal is jettisoned.

You see, all the various interpretations are the "tiny monsters," and the "sullen and aborted currents" are waves of skepticism. "True sailing" means the real understanding of the prophecies, but the animal being jettisoned is...

Oh, never mind.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 00:14 | link | comments

Naked cats.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:11 | link | comments (5)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 19:26 | link | comments (1)

The 'Wow!' Signal

There is only one scenario under which the scientific community will ever accept that we are not alone: aliens land on the White House lawn, obliterate the government with their superior proton ray weapons, and enslave all of humanity.

One wonders, then, what is the point of having a large and expensive program to Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, if scientists are simply going to ignore any results the program generates?

For instance, the SETI apparatus lit up with an incoming narrow-band radio signal from outer space on August 15, 1977 -- exactly the sort of signal the system was looking for, a signal so extraordinary that the astronomer on duty scribbled "Wow!" on the printout. And while no one knows to this day what caused the signal, any scientist will tell you it sure as hell wasn't alien life.

Of course, there is some ground for skepticism. The signal did not offer a blueprint for clean, efficient solar power. Nor did it contain a cure for cancer. Nor did it read "To Serve Mankind." No, the first thing that outer space had to say to the world was the following bit of profundity:

6EQUJ5

OK, that wasn't exactly the content of the message. It's actually a transcription of signal intensities over about 60 seconds, but that little string of characters is what prompted astronomer Jerry Ehman to write the infamous Wow! on a hard copy of the signal.

The SETI Project consists of a battery of radio antennae pointed toward outer space and listening for any sign of life out there -- whether reruns of "I Love Alien Lucy" and "Alien Star Trek", late-night alien Cinemax or a notice that the planet has been scheduled for demolition.

The problem, of course, is that aliens are not likely to speak English or send messages in conformant ASCII code. Therefore, SETI just listens for anything that sounds unnatural or out of the ordinary. Whenever something like that actually happens to pop up, SETI immediately declares it the result of radio-band interference from passing helicopters, terrorism or sunspots, then everyone goes home safe in the knowledge that there are no aliens. This costs millions of dollars per year, which, shockingly, is not underwritten by taxpayers.

The signal was received by the "Big Ear" Ohio State University Radio Observatory, which almost 20 years later was razed -- much to the future embarassment of Ohio Wesleyan University, which owned the land and is responsible for transforming the site of possibly the first ever message from intelligent life in the universe into the back nine of a nearby golf course.

That's assuming, of course, that the Wow! signal ever amounts to anything. Ehman, the scientist who immortalized himself with those three little letters (plus exclamation point), has gone over the data at some length and feels that the source of the transmission remains unexplained.

Ehman listed the possibilities that he and his colleagues have ruled out in a 1997 article marking the 20th anniversary of the signal's reception:

 

• Signal from an asteroid or planet in this solar system: None were in the right position. Plus, it would still be a spooky weird signal even if it did come from one of them.
• Aircraft or non-extraterrestrial spacecraft: Prohibited from narrow-band frequencies in the appropriate range, plus the signal would have been moving perceptibly had it originated with a local craft, and it wasn't.
• Ground-based transmitter: Banned from using the Wow! frequency, plus this was ruled out for very technical reasons having to do with the arrangements of Big Ear's antenna array. Ehman concedes that a land-based signal could have bounced off a piece of space debris. However, this possibility is, statistically speaking, roughly on a par to a bank shot off a pool table accidentally knocking an eight-ball into orbit only to have it land in the middle of the array.
• Gravity lens: A gravity lens is produced when very heavy objects far off in the cosmos warp the space around them so exorbitantly that it produces the same effect as a magnifying glass (for pretty much the same reasons a magnifying glass works). While this is possible, it doesn't actually explain the signal -- it just means it came from farther away.
• Twinkling radio waves: Like stars, radio waves sometimes twinkle because of atmospheric interference. As with the gravity lens, this could be true, but it explains little.
• Satellite: No official satellites were in the proper location at the time of the signal, and satellites are prohibited from narrow-band transmissions in the frequency. Still, a secretive military-industrial satellite could have been sending some secretive message to some secretive recipient. We note that George W. Bush met his wife Laura in August of 1977, but we are certainly not suggesting that Laura Bush is some sort of Soviet-era sleeper agent programmed to become a ticking time bomb when stimulated by a satellite radio signal produced by technology now in the hands of al Qaeda. So please, people, don't walk away from this article with that impression.

Ehman believes that the signal may very well have originated with extraterrestrials. Of course, if you had received the signal, you would want to believe that too. Other scientists have a considerably more skeptical view of the Wow! signal.

For example, in 2005, Dan Wertheimer, a SETI researcher who would himself like to be listed in the history books, told New Scientist magazine: "We've seen many signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned out to be interference." Of course, the fact that other signals have turned out to be the result of interference is not the same thing as saying you have evidence that the Wow! signal was the result of interference.

Despite all this scientific jibber-jabber, no one seems to want to talk about the elephant in the room. At the very moment the Wow! signal was received by the Big Ear, another historic event with tremendous interstellar ramifications was taking place just a few hundred miles to the South -- Elvis Presley was sitting in a dentist's chair being treated for a toothache.

Presley returned home from his appointment and "died" the following morning. Obviously, the Wow! signal was received by the King's fillings, no doubt calling him to the mountaintop where he would hitch a ride to the stars, perhaps to meet his higher destiny -- as a quaint zoo exhibit peforming three times nightly in a casino on Betelgeuse Five.

 

---

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 14:31 | link | comments (2)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:23 | link | comments

Mar 3 1863

The National Conscription Act is signed, forcing all men between 20 and 45 years of age into the draft lotteries. Except for rich bastards, who could buy their way out for $300, or hire another man to serve in his place. The inevitable result is the week-long New York Draft Riots.

Mar 3 1931

An English beer drinking song becomes the National Anthem of the United States.

Mar 3 1934

John Dillinger escapes from an escape-proof jail in Crown Point Indiana, using a wooden pistol he carved himself. It's his second escape.

Mar 3 1967

The Berkeley Barb reports that banana peels can make you high. Apparently lots of people can be fooled into thinking that the resulting "bananadine" extract is a hallucinogenic Mellow Yellow.

Mar 3 1991

Los Angles Police officers are filmed beating black motorist Rodney King with nightsticks. Television news stations repeatedly air the film nationwide. Four whites are charged with the beating on March 15, and when they are found not guilty, Los Angeles erupts in riot.

Mar 3 2006

British glam rocker Gary Glitter is sentenced to three years in a Vietnamese prison for molesting two girls, 10 and 11. His sentence also includes mandatory deportation and payment of 5m Vietnamese dong (about $315.00) to the girls' families. 61-year-old Glitter denies all wrongdoing and claims to be the victim of a tabloid newspaper conspiracy.

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:30 | link | comments (3)

 

Yup I know the fallacy, so fidlmath and pooklekufr don't give it away.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 07:52 | link | comments (2)

The Cola Wars

Famous Coke Drinkers		Famous Pepsi Drinkers
Fatty Arbuckle William G Bonin Jimmy Carter Santa Claus Bill Clinton Eisenhower John F. Kennedy George Michael Bill Cosby		Marilyn Chambers Joan Crawford Bob Dole Robert Alton Harris Michael Jackson Ludacris Madonna Joseph McCarthy Richard M. Nixon Paula Poundstone Elvis Presley Spice Girls Mike Tyson Britney Spears Ray Charles (Diet) Beyoncé Knowles (Diet)

Evidently Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Sprite drinker.

timeline

1929	Coca-Cola ends its use of Weapons of Mass Addiction, namely the drug cocaine. It never sheds the chemical agents 7X and Merchandise #5, however.
1972	Pepsi infiltrates the Soviet Union.
1975	The Pepsi Challenge commences in Dallas, TX.
1977	Pepsi annexes Pizza Hut.
1978	Pepsi annexes Taco Bell.
1984	Michael Jackson wounded by a pyrotechnic device during a Pepsi propaganda filming.
23 Apr 1985	Coca-Cola withdraws the original formulation and replaces it with New Coke.
11 Jul 1985	In a strategic retreat, Coca-Cola announces plans to bring back Coke Classic.
1986	Pepsi annexes Kentucky Fried Chicken.
12 Aug 1988	Establishing a new low in the field of propaganda, Mac and Me is released in theaters. This horrible, low-budget ripoff of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial was financed by McDonald's and the Coca-Cola Company.
1996	Arms deal gone awry: As a gag, Pepsi offers a $23 million Harrier jump jet for 7,000,000 Pepsi points. When a pool of investors coughs up 15 points and a check for $700,008.50, an apprehensive Pepsi stonewalls. The terms of the promotion permitted customers to purchase points at a rate of ten cents each. The matter soon winds up in court.
15 Sep 1997	Coca-Cola's website taken down after cyberattack.
19 Jun 2000	Coca-Cola infiltrates North Korea.
Feb 2002	Qibla Cola launched in England.
May 2002	In a surprise pre-emptive strike against the upcoming Vanilla Coke, Pepsi Blue is unleashed.
May 2002	Operation Barbarrosa: disastrous Vanilla Coke campaign begins.
27 Aug 2002	On his television show The O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly declares a boycott against Pepsi-Cola: "I'm calling for all responsible Americans to fight back and punish Pepsi for using a man who degrades women, who encourages substance abuse, and does all the things that hurt particularly the poor in our society. I'm calling for all Americans to say, 'Hey, Pepsi, I'm not drinking your stuff. You want to hang around with Ludacris, you do that, I'm not hanging around with you.'"
27 Aug 2002	On his television show The O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly declares victory in his boycott against Pepsi-Cola: "Because of pressure by Factor viewers, Pepsi-Cola late today capitulated. Ludacris has been fired."
Nov 2002	Mecca-Cola launched in France. According to the website, the drink exemplifies a "rejection of American politics, imperialism and hegemony and a protest against the Zionist crime financed and supported by America." In an interview, CEO Tawfiq Mathlouthi explains: "We are against American policy. We made it clear from the beginning. And we don't care what they will think, I mean the American administration, we are against them. We don't agree with the foreign policy of the United States. We don't agree with the American imperialism. We say it very, very clearly and in an active way, and anyone who buys a Mecca-Cola bottle is making an act of protest against the American politics and also against the crimes of Zionism."
4 Feb 2003	On his television show The O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly disclaims ever having launched a boycott against Pepsi-Cola: "I simply said I wasn't going to drink Pepsi while that guy was on their payroll. No boycott was ever mentioned by me."
28 Oct 2003	Lawrence Andrew Rodriguez is arrested in Port Richey, Florida for allegedly knocking a kid unconscious and stealing his Pepsi.
19 Nov 2003	The body of Betti Sy, commercial finance director of The Coca-Cola Export Corp., is discovered wrapped in black plastic trash bags in Parañaque City, the Philippines.
19 Nov 2003	Seeking to establish a presence in postwar Iraq, unnamed Coca-Cola executives hold meetings in Baghdad with three local soft drink bottlers.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 07:11 | link | comments (1)

i-Ching

People have a tendency to lump the i-Ching in with fortune-telling systems such as the Tarot, Palmistry or Astrology. And, to be fair, there are some passing similarities, in the same way that a Fisher-Price toy airplane has a passing similarity to a stealth bomber — it's not just a matter of scale, it's also the question of whether it flies.

i-Ching is an ancient Chinese text whose name translates as "The Book of Changes." Although it's commonly used for divination or fortune-telling, that's not its primary purpose. Some people argue that it's strictly a philosophical text, but they're also missing the point.

It's difficult to pin the i-Ching down to just one word, topic or field. But it's got more in common with physics than fortune cookies.

i-Ching is about 4,000 years old, give or take 1,000. Legend states it was written by a man named Lao Tsu, which is good enough for a Jeopardy answer, but probably not literally correct. Then again, who knows. After about 3,000 years of history, things start to get fuzzy.

The Book of Changes is based around a geometric construction called a hexagram, which consists of six horizontal lines stacked vertically. Each line is either a solid line, representing yang or a broken line, representing yin.

The first religion to outline the qualities of yin and yang was Taoism, although the principles have subsequently been adopted by Buddhism, some branches of Hinduism and tattoo lovers everywhere.

Yin is primarily characterized as flexibility, while yang is taken to be firmness. Over the course of centuries, these qualities have expanded to encompass a fairly lengthy set of descriptive metaphors, including:

Yang Male Projecting Dominant Strong

Yin Female Receptive Submissive Weak

All these may be useful for examining various elements of philosophy and components of the i-Ching itself, but they're mostly just revisionist tinkering with the original concepts. The main points to remember here are firmness and flexibility.

If you take the six lines of the hexagram, and factor in the yin and yang qualities of each line, you get a total of 64 possible combinations, each made up of a pair of trigrams with one of eight symbolic elemental associations — fire, lake, earth, thunder, water, wind, sky and mountain (the exact symbol used will vary wildly depending on who you talk to).

The actual Book of Changes itself is a dictionary of the meaning of each of the hexagrams. While it varies from translation to translation, the passages typically go something like this:

 

35. Advance Advancing, a securely established lord presents many horses and grants audience three times a day.

Advance is progress. As for the qualities of the hexagram, above is fire, luminous. Below is earth, receptive. Producing understanding is by receptivity, using understanding to practice receptivity, according with the time and according with truth, illumination grows day by day. This hexagram represents being sincere and clear-minded, advancing the firing. It follows on the previous hexagram, withdrawal, which means stilling strength and not using it lightly. If one does not use strength lightly, the mind is empty and open: When the mind is empty, it is observant and careful, not being fooled by desire for things: within black there is white. Spiritual illuminations comes of itself. ...

And so on. Now, you're probably thinking that this doesn't sound very accessible, and why should it? Based on the best estimate of the Rotten.com user profile, you're probably not a Taoist (which would be very helpful to you in grokking the above). Plus the book was written 3,000 years ago. In light of this, there are people who believe that the best way to handle the i-Ching is to boil it down to something that you might get for a penny from a machine that also tells your weight. Something like this:

 

28. Ta Kuo (Preponderance of the Great)

The present is embodied in Hexagram 28. We see a beam that is weak. Under these conditions, there will be advantage in moving in any direction at all. There will be success. There are no changing lines, and hence the situation is expected to remain the same in the immediate future. The things most apparent, those above and in front, are embodied by the upper trigram Tui (Lake), which represents joy, pleasure, and attraction. The things least apparent, those below and behind, are embodied by the lower trigram Sun (Wind), which represents penetration and following.

While this all seems pretty basic and not dissimilar from a divination system like the Tarot, in which each card has a proscribed meaning, there's actually a lot more to the i-Ching than immediately meets the eye.

For starters, the hexagram system of the i-Ching is actually the first recorded binary system of counting in history. Since we're working with yins and yangs here, it's pretty easy to see how that translates into ones and zeros.

The binary interpretation of the i-Ching opens up a can of worms — or fifty. For one thing, the system immediately falls into correspondence with the elaborate system of circuits and chips you are using to read this page, which is structured around multiples of 8, 16, 32, 48 and 64. For another thing, there just happen to be 64 "codons," or nodes of information, in the DNA which makes up your personal wetware.

The mathematical qualities of the i-Ching are extraordinarily complex and subtle, so they lend themselves to creative arrangements. A LOT of books have been written on this subject, dating back to about 800 B.C. and continuing right up through last week. The arrangements all seem to have a certain elegance about them, and usually they can be tied to the actual meanings of the hexagrams, which encourages yet more experimentation with the layout.

When people first started noting these qualities of the system in the '70s or thereabouts (the binary part was noticed earlier), there was a groundswell of excitement among the outer fringes of the scientific community, and many people rushed to start cataloging the ways that the i-Ching corresponded to the physical world. While no one's picked up a Nobel prize for such an investigation yet, there's still a lot of people working on it, to varying degrees of scientific and/or pop literature success.

The reason the i-Ching works so well in analyzing physical systems is that, at its heart, the book really sets out to provide a model of system processes. By counterbalancing firmness and flexibility in varying quantities and with line positions that each represent a state of time and/or space, the hexagrams were actually originally meant to model the process of how change takes place.

When you boil physical properties down to their most basic sorts of quantities, at the atomic, genetic or even the Quantum Physics levels, things tend toward the binary, and firmness versus flexibility can be stretched around most of the defined states you encounter. A particle exists (yang) or there is empty space (yin). A particle has position (yang) or momentum (yin). A particle is energetic (yang) or static (yin).

The i-Ching trigrams each represent a broad process or quality; the hexagrams represent the mix and interplay of the eight basic processes. Interpretations of the hexagrams like those above are, when read very literally, a detailed analysis of how these binary quantities (lines) move into the processes (trigrams) and then into a system (hexagrams).

So in any given situation, you can pick it apart in detail, break it down for the meanings of each line and trigram, and assign yin and yang to each line based on your evaluation of the facts. The resulting hexagram is intended to provide insight into the process of which you are a part.

Now, to actually perform that kind of analysis is incredibly time-consuming and requires a sound mind, a centered psyche and a certain amount of realism in addressing your place in the world. Naturally, virtually no one wants to be bothered with going to all that trouble. That's where the fortune-telling comes into it.

In lieu of a long, strenuous quest for thoughtful self-knowledge, the general practice is to randomly select a hexagram and just kind of assume it's meant to reflect your life, perhaps thanks to the vagaries of chaos theory (the i-Ching is frequently lumped in with chaos theory, in books like "The Tao of Chaos" and deranged head trips like those of Terence McKenna).

There are several methods by which one can apparently invite chaos theory into one's parlor. The easiest is that you go buy a copy of the i-Ching and randomly open it to a page. Then you read what's on the page and apply it to your life and/or your expectations for the immediate future.

The next most common method is using coins. You toss three coins, with heads representing yang and tails representing yin (or vice versa if you feel like it). Majority rules. For those interested in authenticity, you can go down to any New Age shop and pick up some genuine "i-Ching coins," but pennies will do. Advanced users can also employ this method to figure out "transforming lines." When you have two heads and one tails, it's considered yang transforming into yin and yields a few additional lines of text.

The absolute most authentic traditional approach, for the purists out there, is to pull yarrow stalks out of a bag. Yarrow is a Chinese plant with stalks. The yarrow sticks are marked for yin and yang, and you arrange them into a hexagram. Presto! You have a reading.

The absolute least authentic approach, but one which is from a pure theory standpoint no worse than any other, is using a Web site to select your i-Ching text. In addition to being the second easiest approach, it saves you the trouble of flipping through one of those oh-so-retro "books" your grandfather is always going on about (if you don't mind settling for the worst of all possible translations).

Technically, the i-Ching is not set up to tell you anything about your future, as even a casual reading of the text will quickly establish. It's more of a cosmic conscience, advising you on the correct way to live your life, based on your current circumstance. Depending on the translation, this advice comes in Taoist and Buddhist flavors, as well as in a blandified sugar-laden New Age variety.

The fact that it's not supposed to be used to tell the future doesn't mean squat of course. I mean, when was the last time the i-Ching police kicked in someone's door and demanded they stop with the fortune telling?

And lots of people do it. In fact, they've been doing it almost since the book was written, so (as the i-Ching itself would say) there is no blame. It's more intellectually sound than a palm-reading, and it's only a wee little bit crass, so knock yourself out. But do us all a favor and don't go get that yin-yang tattoo until you've bothered to learn what it means, OK?

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 12:57 | link | comments (2)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 09:26 | link | comments

Cane Toads

aka Bufo Marinus

Consider the humble cane toad. One of nature's tiny, repugnant miracles. Not only does it have a nifty amphibious skin and excellent hopping skills, but it's loaded with enough toxins to send you down the rabbit hole faster than any red pill.

Cane toads are indigenous to the Americas and the Carribean. They are ugly little bastards, with the emphasis on ugly rather than "little" -- they can grow to the size of gerbils. As an evolutionary protective measure, cane toads secrete a variety of poisons, mainly through gigantic glands on either side of its head which can spew venom several feet. The toad's skin and body are also infused with toxins. This makes the toad poisonous to most of its predators, but it has the odd side effect of making the toad hallucinogenic for people who lick it, or very carefully smoke or eat specific parts.

In addition to whatever social stigma you might incur, toad licking is a fairly dangerous activity -- the main point of poison is, after all, to kill those who ingest it. This presents a particular danger for dogs who share an ecosystem with the toads, since a dog will lick just about anything you put in front of it.

Nevertheless, the toads have traditionally used for shamanic purposes by Native Americans, and more recently used for recreational purposes by modern Americans.

The toad has more nefarious uses as well. Scientist Wade Davis, author of the voodoo classic The Serpent and the Rainbow, identified the cane toad as a primary ingredient in "zombie powder," a Haitian poison used to simulate death in its victims. The hallucinogenic toad poison helped create a sense of panic in the victim, allowing the poisoner to "raise" the victim from the "dead" subject to a form of mind control. (Other ingredients in the powder included puffer fish toxin and a variety of local plants.)

But cane toads aren't all about fun and toxicity. There's a dark side to the cane toad as well.

In 1935, the toads were introduced to Australian sugar cane farms on the theory that they would eat the greyback beetles wreaking havoc on Aussie sugar crops. The problem with this theory was simple: The beetles perch high on the sugar cane, but the toads can't jump very high.

The frogs utterly failed to eat the beetles, but instead began eating everything else in sight, growing to uncomfortable sizes and breeding like there was no tomorrow. Cane toads produce tens of thousands of eggs each time they spawn, which makes for an awful lot of toads.

Thanks to the aforementioned toxins, the cane toads were not susceptible to Australian predators. Instead, they became predators themselves. First, they starting consuming the food supply that had previously been the property of Australia's indigenous frogs. Then they started eating the frogs themselves -- and other creatures up to the size of mice.

As they spread across the continent, the cane toads' toxins poisoned everything from fish and snakes to crocodiles and people. They cut a swath through Australia's diverse and unique wildlife, tacking many species to the endangered list in the process.

Some enterprising Aussies have attempted to make the best of this, holding competitive toad races in bars, while others try to make a dime peddling cane toad leather products, as well as key chains and change purses made from whole toad carcasses, with a sales pitch based on twin appeals to patriotism and ecology.

Failing to see the humor in the situation, the Australian government is simply spending millions per year on efforts to eradicate the cane toad infestation that has everyone stonkered in a wobbly with their widgeriedoos on the barbie.

The latest bright idea is to introduce a genetically-modified disease that will kill the cane toads but leave everything else unharmed. Of course, this is the same sort of brilliant thinking that led to the cane toad epidemic in the first place. But then, you really aren't surprised that some people never learn, are you?

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:40 | link | comments (4)