Album art collection

From danacountryman.com:

Man, I DO love a good album cover!
I'm a sucker for a bizarre cover, a great cheesecake cover or something that just plain is so cool that you know you'll never see it again. I have to snap these up. Partly because I want to archive as many of these kinds of covers as I can, before they disappear forever. They don't make 'em anymore, you know.

The other reason is that these big 12" X 12" pieces of art really are just that -- art. It's a crying shame that those little CD covers will never have this kind of impact.In the back of my mind, I'd someday like to put out a coffee table-style book of the greatest and strangest LP covers that ever were.

A Longhair Library

The Practical Hippie site has a wealth of articles ranging from social topics like Buy Nothing Day and PETA, to more light-hearted pop culture bits on Paris Hilton and Janet Jackson. Visitors will also find more politically charged essays on the dangers of globalization, corruption inscience and medicine, and gay marriage. This site is a great way to stay informed on a wide range of important social issues. http://www.practicalhippie.com/

Artificial clouds

Explanation:
Artificial clouds made by humans may become so common they change the Earth's climate.

The long thin cloud streaks that dominate the above satellite photograph of Georgia are contrails, cirrus clouds created by airplanes.

The exhaust of an airplane engine can create a contrail by saturating the surrounding air with extra moisture.

The wings of a plane can similarly create contrails by dropping the temperature and causing small ice-crystals to form.

Contrails have become more than an oddity - they may be significantly increasing the cloudiness of Earth, reflecting sunlight back into space by day, and heat radiation back to Earth even at night.

The effect on climate is a topic of much research.

THE YOUNIVERSE

The real story however, and one that is still on page/screen one, is the 'New Consumer': at the core of each of our and other trend watchers' mega/meta/macro trends are the new consumers, who create their own playgrounds, their own comfort zones, their own universe. It's the 'empowered' and 'better informed' and 'switched on' consumer combined into something profound, something TRENDWATCHING.COM has dubbed MASTER OF THE YOUNIVERSE. At the core is control: psychologists don't agree on much, except for the belief that human beings want to be in charge of their own destiny. Or at least have the illusion of being in charge. (Thank you, Tom Peters.) Eventually, consumers will stop at nothing to achieve and enhance their MASTER OF THE YOUNIVERSE status, and corporations have no choice but to facilitate this process. When technology, societal norms, demographics or any other fundamental force unlocks basic, deep human needs and desires in new ways, all the average company can do is to assist and serve.

Fooled by Random

bookofjoe says, "If you'd like more insight into financial markets from a decidedly unconventional, brilliant thinker, spend a little time at the website of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of "Fooled by Randomness."

And more on the subject: The problem with most stock market models is that they don't bother much with the real data; they assume, based on faulty evidence, that prices typically vary by so much - and not an iota more.

In mathematical terms, they rely on the bell curve.

In fact, financial prices behave much more wildly than the bell curve would imply.

If the standard models were correct, the odds of a one-day drop of 13% - as happened to the Dow Jones Average on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929 - would have been 1 in 10 to the 26th power, virtually impossible.

When, in 1998, Russia defaulted on its debt and markets swooned, the official odds were 1 in 20 million.

As for the worst crash in recent times - on October 19, 1987 - the chances of its happening were less than 1 in 10 to the 50th.

Says Mandelbrot: "Either we live in an improbably improbable era or the bell curve is an inappropriate yardstick for financial prices - and the standard financial models built with it are faulty."

"Let us understand the true odds of financial ruin, so we can enter the markets prepared."

How to Save the World

INVENTING A NEW HUMAN CULTURE
— If you look at the lessons of history, it's easy to conclude that:

People change only when they must, or when a change is both very easy and very compelling

When they do, reluctantly, change, people change their behaviour first, and their beliefs and values only much later, if at all

Fast, enduring change has been wrought not by political revolution (which... Read the rest
[via Kinja]

Rail Gun

Evgenij Vasiljev has created a coilgun handgun. Also known as a gauss gun, a solenoid gun, and closely related to the railgun. A normal gun uses gunpowder encased in a breakaway "fuel section" of the bullet. It detonates the gunpowder which propels the bullet down the muzzle of the gun and out the end. A coilgun however, can fire anything iron, it doesn't need bullets to be filled with any gunpowder or any chemical at all. In otherwords you could cut up and fire your own bullets really easily. This coilgun uses cut-up nails as ammo. Yep, nails. Bullets don't come much cheaper than that. It has a solenoid inside it that when powered pulls the bullet through it. This is the basic firing mechanism, it's just magnetic attraction, and is enough to propel the bullet to 33meters per second (74mph or 118kph). The bullet is accelerated very fast, considering the small length of the solenoid is all that is used.

Actually not even the whole solenoid length is used. Let me explain: If you power the solenoid up, it will pull the bullet inside of it and it will come out the other end of the solenoid. But because of the magnetic properties of a solenoid, the bullet is actually somewhat slowed down by the solenoid as it's exiting it. This slows the bullet down, and you don't want this, no sir, you want all the speed you can get with none of the slowing down. So what Evgenij has done is made a smart little arrangement (he has called the SCRS V-switch) so that the solenoid will only pull the bullet inside of itself, and then once the bullet is at a certain point inside the solenoid, the solenoid will instantly cutoff thereby stopping itself from inadvertently slowing the bullet down on it's way out.

Because of the speeds involved there was even an issue with the power not being cut off instantly enough. when the power was cut the voltage running through the solenoid would come down slowly, not instantly, and this still slowed down the bullet somewhat. But this has all been solved with the V-switch gizmo. Hurrah! With the SCR V-Switch enabled the gun can shoot bullets right through a tin can, but with it disabled it can only make a small hollowed impact on the surface. Evgenij explains the process in detail on his site, so I?ll just let you go there if you want to know more about the V-switch.

Pain makes your brain shrink

BehindTheMedspeak: Pain makes your brain shrink
By bookofjoe

No, this isn't the National Enquirer, Medical Edition: it's the bottom line of a study just reported in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Scientists at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago found that people with chronic back pain showed measurable shrinkage of their brains, as measured by MRI scans.

The gray matter of volunteers with back pain was 5%-11% smaller than in control patients. The researchers wrote, "The magnitude of this decrease is equivalent to the gray matter volume lost in 10 to 20 years of normal aging." The lead author, Dr. A. Vania Apkarian, said he had done the research hoping that it would help explain earlier findings that people with chronic back pain experienced changes in brain chemistry that affected their performance on some kinds of tests of mental functioning. "Chronic pain patients, and specifically chronic back pain patients, seem to have impairment in emotional decision making," he told New York Times writer Eric Nagourney in a story published in this past Tuesday's New York Times Science section.

The study has huge implications.

Doctors up to now have believed that changes in brain chemistry in such pain patients were temporary, and that they would go away if the pain did. It now appears that if back pain is untreated for too long, the changes in the brain become permanent and may therefore make it even harder to ease the pain. A few comments and thoughts from the bookofjoe peanut gallery.
I've seen this problem from both ends, as a patient and a doctor. As a patient, the agony I was in from a herniated disk, with pain, insomnia, and mood changes combining into a more or less steady amalgam of rage and depression, made it clear to me that decision making is the first thing that goes by the boards when the pain amps up.

I can see how one's brain could become permanently damaged and shut down as a result. As a doctor who's worked in a pain clinic, I know just how angry and difficult to treat are patients whose pain never goes away, 24/7. I found working in the pain clinic environment unendurable as a result: everyone's in a bad mood, all day, every day. It's infectious, too: by the time you go home after seeing 10-20 people with chronic pain, you feel like driving your car into a wall.
So it's not just Alzheimer's, alcohol, and drugs that rot your brain: endogenous things can have the same effects.

How can this be?

Deadly Drug Mistakes Spike At The Start Of Each Month, Suggests Pharmacy Errors
Beware not the ides but the start of March -- and April and May and every month. In the first few days of each month, fatalities due to medication errors rise by as much as 25 percent above normal, according to new research by University of California, San Diego sociologist David Phillips. Published in the January issue of Pharmacotherapy, the journal of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, the study is the first to document a beginning-of-the-month spike in deaths attributed to mistakes in prescription drugs. [via ScienceBlog]

Over 150,000 dead

[via FutureBrief] Stone-age tribes living on India's remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands not only survived the devastating December 26 tsunami - triggered by an undersea quake whose epicenter was close to their homelands - but may actually have a few lessons in reading natural early-warning systems for their less perceptive Asian neighbors, say scientists. While close to 150,000 people have been confirmed dead on the coasts of a dozen countries around the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea after being caught unaware by giant killer waves, the Onges, Jarawas, Sentinalese and Great Andamanese who live in the archipelago escaped unscathed because they took to the forests and higher ground well in time." Early reports indicate that primitive tribes weathered the Asian tsunami much better than their more "advanced" neighbors. Learn more in the Asia Times. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GA07Df05.html

Talking root cells

[From Duke University via ScienceBlog]

Clues to the puzzle of 'talking' root cells

Biologists studying the development of plant roots, a general basic model for tissue development, are uncovering new pieces of the puzzle of how one root cell sends its molecular instructions to another in the development process.Researchers have found hints that the channels by which such molecules move between plant cells may also be mirrored in animal cells. Thus, discoveries about plant development may be more broadly applicable to understanding the fundamental processes of how complex tissues develop from a few cells -- one of the central mysteries in biology.

Making new rules

Cybernetics, please.

Thinking requires reading.
Try it someday.

Tune In. Turn On. Drop Out

Aldous Huxley: Or this... When Laura sat with Aldous while he died, she used the manuscript of a book which contained instructions on how to navigate the passage between life and death. The book was later published as The Psychedelic Experience by authors Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (RamDass) and Ralph Metzner.

MDMA Study

Wired posts the following:

Rick Doblin and his colleagues at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) have put together the first FDA-approved human study in 16 years using Ecstasy (MDMA) as a therapy aide. It's the first step on a path that Doblin hopes will lead to making certain hallucinogens legal for the treatment of psychological disorders. With a PhD in public policy from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, he has managed to remain friends with the trippers while working within the extremely rigid public policies of the FDA. He's the only person who could get the FDA to approve a Schedule 1 drug for testing in sick people, many say. "He's a deeply honest and principled dude," said John Heilemann, author of Pride Before the Fall and a special correspondent for Wired magazine.

Old Car Manual Project

1963 Chrysler Turbine Car
Mark Olson, who drove one of these cars, sent us the Driver's Guide. Click here.

The Old Car Manual Project started out in 2000 on free web servers, but because those carry ads (which can be annoying) and generally don't have much space available, most of the site was moved in 2002 to our own server, an Athlon 1400 using an ADSL connection with 768K upload speed. In early 2004 the old main index page which was free-hosted on geocities became http://www.oldcarmanual.com/, which resides on a commercially hosted (yahoo) server. In June of 2004 the main site (http://www.tocmp.com/) rather badly outgrew the old ADSL connection and was moved to a commercial server. The brochures part of the site has become very popular, so it has its own site: http://www.oldcarbrochures.com/, as of early July, 2004.






Right now there are about 4 gigabytes of manuals, brochures and other materials on the site. We've been adding several megs a day, on average. A recent addition to the Old Car Manual Project is our discussion forum, where you are invited to post your queries or comments about old cars.

Water more precious than oil?

"Some call him crazy, others, a genius - but if Terry Spragg is anything, he's a believer that filling up giant ocean-going bags with fresh water and towing them to water-poor regions can slake the thirst of nations and help deliver world peace. If that seems far-fetched, consider that less than 2.5 percent of the world's water is fresh. That vital resource is threatened by pollution, waterborne disease, and shifts in rain patterns caused by global warming, recent studies show. All of which, in some eyes, leaves the world on the verge of a scramble by private companies and countries vying for rights to available water. Forget OPEC. Some experts say the next cartel will be an organization of water-exporting countries. Others see more danger in local privatization of water, which could restrict access to the poor within nations. 'Water is blue gold, it's terribly precious,' says Maude Barlow, who chairs for the Council of Canadians, an Ottawa-based citizens' watchdog. 'Not too far in the future, we're going to see a move to surround and commodify the world's fresh water. Just as they've divvied up the world's oil, in the coming century there's going to be a grab.'" Water more precious than oil? Read more at Boston's Christian Science Monitor. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1230/p13s01-sten.htm

Earth is spinning a bit, eh?

[via FutureBrief] "The devastating earthquake that struck the Indian Ocean on 26 December was so powerful that it has accelerated the Earth's rotation, geophysicists have declared. They estimate that the shockwave shortened the period of our planet's rotation by some three microseconds. The change was caused by a shift of mass towards the planet's centre, as the Indian Ocean's heavy tectonic plate lurched underneath Indonesia's one, say researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. This caused the globe to rotate faster, in the same way that a spinning figure-skater accelerates by tucking in her arms. The blast literally rocked the world on its axis, add Richard Gross and his NASA colleagues. They estimate that Earth now tilts by an extra 2.5 centimetres in the wakeof the jolt." Literally, an "earth-shaking" tragedy. Read more atBritain's Nature.com. ttp://www.nature.com/news/2004/041229/full/041229-6.html

Cognitive Simplicity

Cognitive Simplicity is the Revolution