Category: interesting

Millions of neutrinos pass through you every second!

“A block of lead the size of our entire solar system wouldn’t even come close to stopping a cosmic neutrino,” said Eiichiro Komatsu of the University of Texas at Austin. [more at Science blog]

The DoJ asserts there’s nearly a million ‘terrorists’ in the USA.

“The absurd bloating of the terrorist watch lists is yet another example of how incompetence by our security apparatus threatens our rights without offering any real security.”

The Department of Justice, which reported that the Terrorist Screening Center had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007, and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.

As of today, the list stands at approximately 917,000 names.

ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program. [via boing boing, 1 in 300 Americans are terrorists]

On the matter of Bush, it’s time to wrap his root around a tree.

I’ve probably gummed this story 1,000 times in my life:

If you serve on a jury, and you just flat don’t like the law you’re asked to enforce, you do NOT have to enforce it. You can vote in direct contradiction of the law and in direct contradiction of the judge’s instructions — without fear of reprisal.

John Bloom at UPI’s Assignment America says we are keeping juries stupid and it’s damaging all of us.

News alert: it’s the jury’s job to decide what’s fair and what’s not fair.

It’s not the judge’s, and, contrary to popular wisdom, it’s not the legislature’s. …

Unfortunately, we’ve reached a stage in our history when the people are forced to take back the rights granted by those ancient kings, notably in the form of Amendment A in South Dakota. The so-called “jury nullification” proposal in that state would require judges to tell juries that they’re allowed to interpret the law — not just the facts — so that they can follow their own consciences if they disagree with some concoction of the legislature that shouldn’t be applied to the living, breathing human being set before them.

Oddly enough, this idea strikes fear into the heart of the judiciary everywhere. And yet it’s one of the oldest ideas in the land — almost all the Founding Fathers agreed with it — and, if you think about it, it’s self-evident. If the judge could direct a verdict, by framing a question so narrowly that you could only vote one way, then it wouldn’t be a real jury in the first place, would it?

As far as I know this is the first indication manure’s odor may be unhealthy in the feedlot concentrations we face these days, a new incentive for drying and bio-conversion.

Farm smells can cause real stink

Ammonia and other smelly gases from farm animals can attach to dust particles, forming an unpleasant and unhealthy mix…

Aside from the stink problem, the gassy particles may pose human health risks.

“Particles smaller than 10 micrometres can penetrate into the large upper branches just below the throat where they are caught and removed by coughing and spitting or by swallowing,” says Lee.

“Also, particles smaller than 2.5 micrometres can get down into the deepest portions of human lungs and can cause respiratory disease.”

BEST VOICED:

Where do we live, boys and girls?
We live in a

S
S
SS
SS
SSS
SSS
SSSS
SSSS
SSSSSY
SSSSSY
SSSSSYS
SSSSSYS
SSSSSYSS
SSSSSYSSS
SSSSSYSSST
SSSSSYSSST
SSSSSYSSSTE
SSSSSYSSSTE
SSSSSYSSSTEM
SSSSSYSSSTEM
SYSTEM
SYSTEM

SYSTEM!

SYSTEM
SYSTEM
SSSSSYSSSTEM
SSSSSYSSSTEM
SSSSSYSSSTE
SSSSSYSSSTE
SSSSSYSSST
SSSSSYSSST
SSSSSYSSS
SSSSSYSS
SSSSSYS
SSSSSY
SSSSS
SSSS
SSS
SS

SSSSSSSSSSYYSSSSSSSSTEMMMM

C’mon. It will only take a minute. Go back and try it out loud!

p.s. This poem won the Governor General’s Award in Canada maybe mid-60s.
I’ve searched hours for the original author but Google is not helpful searching for audio!

Left: All the water in the world
Right: All the air in the atmosphere

[via boing boing and Dan Phiffer]
Credit: Adam Nieman, Science Photo Library
Winner of Novartis/Telegraph Visions of Science photographic awards.

More than 6,000 veterans of the Iraq war committed suicide last year, more deaths than caused in combat.

Sorry, I haven’t found a citation except what I’ve heard on TV.

I was teasing somebody the other day about gloomy oil conspiracy theories and said, “Not to worry. We’ll grind up all the biomass at the city landfills and open a chain of gas stations called Dumpron.”

And lo:

Austria opens first cooperative biomass service station

“Imagine a day when mini-bioreactors, located under apartment buildings, are able to convert raw sewerage from flats into valuable methane gas for use in household heating, and treated water recycled back to flush toilets. Funds from my award will develop the first low-waste bioreactor which has the potential to revolutionize the way we deal with effluent,” says Professor David Stuckey while receiving his award from the Royal Society.

I’ve always thought bullies (of each sex and within families) are unrecognized and common hazards. Blind to the favors of authoritarians, we often elect bullies too:

Workplace bullying, such as belittling comments, persistent criticism of work and withholding resources, appears to inflict more harm on employees than sexual harassment. [story]

The Carlyle funded Bush Brigadiers are suiting up as we speak:

Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. read more

Moscow Times is running a multi-part series. Putin’s Legacy. This is the opening text from their story on Putin’s management of the Russian economy:

These are extraordinary times. Less than 10 years ago, Russians were looking bleakly into the future, their savings wiped out and their confidence shattered in their country’s government and banking system.

Now, amid jittery global stock markets and a dramatic reversal in fortune for most of Wall Street’s powerhouses, the shoe is on the other foot. Russia’s economy is more insulated from the rout than most of its emerging-market rivals, and the country is molding a new role for itself.

Speaking at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin rammed the point home, noting that Russia would emerge as “an island of stability” amid the gathering storm.

Rout? Gathering storm?

Not to worry.

As they say, “Been down so long, looks like up to me.”

Great line!

Sociologist Ruth Towse surveyed artists and found that on average creatives earned below poverty subsistence levels, but Kevin Kelly is suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. [via Seth Godin, remarking that this is Kelly’s best piece evah]

Science blog leaves the cushy comfort of theory vs. facts to visit plankton and discover a nugget of wisdom:

[I]f you’re ever feeling down, like life is just too much for you to handle, just remember the life of plankton. Realize that maybe the turbulence of life may be just the kind of environment that you want, even need.

Imagine dropping a single dinoflagellate into a glass of water, and then sticking a straw inside and blowing bubbles. That’s normal to them.

It’s a culture thing, based on the wonder of game theory. I think of money-grubbers not as up/down ranking, but a form of complex systems where congregations arrange themselves like biofilm near feed, lazy bunch of buggers too, in the main.

What was I thinkin’ a few years ago while trying to compare aspiration vs. guile?

cybernaut, capitalist, christian and cowboy
along the way from plankton to pulsar.

I must say, pip pip, I’ve seen two distinct responses to recent news our earth might die before we do. One is nuts and the other worried. I cannot decide. Most annoying, others have. Not one of us expected our gas taint our air to kill us. Yet millions rise to cure us, change us, some to lure us to greener things, as if the earth ain’t darker dirt and char in dirt might fix it. What fools took us here? These same fools guide us. I’ve seen two distinct responses to recent news our earth might die before we do. One is nuts and the other worried. I cannot decide. Most annoying, neither have we.

Using our best solar concentrators an area in the Sahara about 150 x 150 miles would provide all the electricity for the whole world.

Repeat:

“If you assume these 64,516 square kilometers (64 billion square meters) were to have an output of 100 watts per meter, at 7.0 hours per day at 100 watts-hours per hour per square meter, this array would throw off 45 billion kilowatt-hours per day, or 395 trillion kilowatt-hours per year.

“This imputes a constant 24-7 supply of 1,882 gigawatts, or 1.8 terawatts of electric power. The US draws about 450 gigawatts (or .45 terawatts) of electric power, or by these reckonings 24% of total global electrical output.”

Ecoworld imputes, “…sounds plausible.”

When a toddler slips, life goes on as if nothing happened, and certainly the little one is not keeping track. When a child forgets their home phone number, a teenager where they left a new cellphone, or if a college student is sleepless about an upcoming exam, life goes on as if nothing happened.

Keeping track of ourselves is an adult activity that seems to become more important with age. And with age, we become more able to keep track too.

A study years ago noticed that the memory of a college student and an older adult were similar, but older people didn’t agree. It’s an old saw that memory fails, but it’s more likely, said this study of 1,000s, that older adults merely “notice” when they forget. After all, they’ve inhabited their body and brain for awhile and have become familiar with its errors and omissions.

A new study noticed that insomniacs and normal sleepers use similar criteria to discuss the quality of their sleep, but that insomniacs use extra criteria. Insomniacs evaluate their sleep under a more exacting lens where a longer list must be satisfied before they say they’ve enjoyed quality sleep [story].

Perhaps a poor sleep isn’t, or perhaps a poor sleep is generally normal.

It might be important to wonder if memory or sleep is failing or if we’re merely more adept at ‘noticing’ and more impatient with our performance.

It might be important to reflect on youth and remember how many times we fell on our butt or woke during the night. If we forget where we put our keys and say to ourselves it’s because we’re getting old, we might only be forgetting that we’ve lost our keys before.

From today’s TED,

Mycologist Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms could be an intergalactic colonizing species. Well, almost.

He believes that fungi, and particularly the mycelium (the vegetative part of mushrooms) contains solutions for some of the Earth’s environmental and health-related problems. For instance, fungi produce strong antibiotics; they can be used against flu viruses; mycelium can be used to naturally “clean up” petroleum-saturated soils; revamp pesticides; and generate ethanol (he has patented many of these mushroom-related technologies). Preserving the genome of fungi is absolutely crucial for human health.

Musing during a commute in the future, he heard himself thinking:

“Here I am driving along on the biodiesel from about 100 million pigs, 35 million cattle, 1.6 billion turkeys, and 8 billion chickens and the ethanol in that ugly car in the lane next to me is just from dirty ol’ bushels of corn!”

Traditional corn ethanol processes convert each bushel of corn, which weighs about 54 pounds, into about 18 pounds of ethanol, 18 pounds of carbon dioxide, and 18 pounds of distillers grain of which 2 pounds is fat.

I got that ‘wheel of justice’ buzz from this headline:

While eating the brains and neurological body parts of their peers, a variation of ‘mad cow disease’ may have weakened and killed our early friends!

At the center of a snowflake, unromantically, is bacteria. Ice in the atmosphere is formed around a nuclei and 85% are bacteria. Bacteria are by far the most active ice nuclei in nature.

Bugs in the sky? Believe it.

[AP story] Brent C. Christner at Louisiana State University studies snow and ice from Antarctica, France, Montana and the Yukon and found that Pseudomonas cause moisture in a cloud to condense. Killed bacteria are used as an additive in snow making at ski resorts.

Bio-precipitation could affect many things, from agriculture and water availability to local climate and even global warming. For example, a reduced amount of bacteria on crops could affect the climate. Because of the bio-precipitation cycle, overgrazing in a dry year could actually decrease rainfall, which could then make the next year dryer.

Clipping found in Parker Huang‘s wallet.

A bank of whiteness

Is all I see. Have I

tossed away the world

or the world me? Or

is it just a single

moment that I stand on

a sheer precipice

with clouds passing

through me?

Some mists sweep the

sky. Some stars elicit

serenity. I feel that

I am gathering the

reflections of a flower

in the water and that of

the moon in the mirror—

no scent, no motion,

yet I sense eternity.

I stop breathing lest

I wake myself. From

where, of what world,

have I come here? I

turn my head and see

there are only footprints

that follow me.

It’s been difficult for me to put into words what I’ve noticed is failing in our media. This better and British arrangement of words says that we are seeing media’s “growing, industry-wide failure to be sufficiently interested in reality … the papers have succumbed to their own internal celebrity culture of columnists, most of whom make no attempt to report on the world, in favour of sermonising about it….” And it goes on.