Category: interesting

Unsustainable
by Ian Morley
http://www.ArchitectureWeek.com/2007/0117/environment_1-1.html

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their own needs.” This definition was written 20 years ago in the Brundtland Report, commissioned by the United Nations.

Since then, the goal of sustainable urban development has been embraced, in theory, by many officials and design professionals all over the world. But examples of meeting today’s needs seem limited to the more prosperous segments of society.

“Living conditions today in the slums of many of the world’s largest cities are appalling, and not improving.” – Editor, Architecture Week

Interesting rant post here as well:
“…if people did take a look at how complicated poverty is, it might (guess what!) implicate YOU.”

Historically, there has been scientific debate on the source of metals in the gold-copper mines of the Pacific Rim. Were the metals derived from the crust or the mantle? New work has shown that the metals are coming from the mantle, and that the crust does not play a significant role in contributing metals during ore formation.

Gold deposits are associated with volcanoes formed where portions of oceanic crust are being pulled deep into the Earth (subducted). Operating like a giant conveyor belt, these plates transport water and oxygen from the surface down into the mantle.

Water-bearing minerals in the subducted crust dehydrate, generating a plume of fluid that rises through the mantle. The fluid scavenges gold and copper from the deep mantle, transporting metals to the upper mantle where they are deposited in sulfide-rich veins. Melting of these vein-rich portions of the upper mantle creates batches of magma enriched in copper and gold, and when these fertile magmas reach the crust they are prone to produce gold-copper deposits. [ CSIRO Exploration, Australia]

Representing a new style of mineralization on the modern sea floor, large gold-rich veins have been recovered – a minimum of 600mt Au – from the top of Conical seamount, a shallow (1,050-m water depth) submarine volcano located south of Lihir island, Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea hosts several giant gold ore bodies.

Over half of the world’s known gold deposits have been formed in hydrothermal areas. Gold dissolves in water heated in the earth to temperatures over 200°C. As the water moves through channels in the rock and cools, the gold is precipitated out to form the deposit. A University of Auckland study show it only takes a blink of a geological eye for giant gold deposits to form; about 55,000 years, the same as the life expectancy of an active volcano. [sampling active gold deposition areas]

Mind Hacks reports:

It turns out that studies done on young babies, even babies in the womb, have shown that infants have got surprisingly good memory.

As reviewed by Hayne, 3-day-old infants were capable of distinguishing a particular passage (from Dr. Seuss’s “Cat in the Hat”) that had been read to them twice daily for the last 6 weeks of gestation from similar passages (matched for word count, length, and prosody).

What’s more, these infants preferred the familiar passage even if spoken by someone other than their mother, strongly suggesting that they had encoded (and retained) a relatively high-level representation of the passage’s auditory content.

Link to ‘The Myth of Infantile Amnesia’.

The 1918 flu virus has been reconstructed using genes from the tissues of victims of the great pandemic in a reverse genetics process that enables scientists to make fully functioning viruses.

The 1918 virus was indeed different from other known flu viruses.

The virus does something early in infection to trigger a devastating immune response that destroys the lungs in a matter of days. The 1918 virus is also what we see with H5N1 viruses requiring antiviral strategies to both outwit the virus and moderate the host immune response. [story]

“Cap’n Crunch,” part of an aging community of high-tech wunderkinds. Once tolerated, even embraced, for his eccentricities, Mr. John Draper now lives on the margins of this affluent world, still striving to carve out a role in the business mainstream. Although his appearance and hand-to-mouth existence belie it, Mr. Draper developed one of the first word-processing programs as well as the technology that made possible voice-activated telephone menus.

Draper – who wrote Apple’s first word-processing program – showed Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak and a friend, Mr. Jobs, how to build a device that could produce telephone tones. The pair turned the knowledge into a small business on the Berkeley campus, their first collaboration before founding Apple a few years later.

Mr. Wozniak employed Mr. Draper at Apple, where as a contractor in 1977 he designed a device that could immediately identify phone signals and lines — such as ones that made free calls — something modems were not able to do for a decade. The technology would later be used for tone-activated calling menus, voice mail and other purposes.

Other wayfaring pioneers:
John Draper calls aging veterans like himself part of an “off-the-grid” community. Steve Inness, 47, helped develop touch-screen cellphone technology and does programming work for startups. In recent years, he’s lived on the floors and couches of employers; he was last seen hitchhiking in the desert outside Las Vegas. Roy Kaylor, 68, built one of the first electric cars in the early 1970s and contributed to a government-supported effort to develop the technology. He lives in a trailer without electricity in the Santa Cruz mountains. Mr. Draper’s recent lunch host, Mr. Bengel, 61, designed an electrohydraulic machine tool and says he has worked for several Silicon Valley companies.

free article at the Wall Street Journal

Pete is not alone in his loneliness – millions of aging adults find themselves in similar situations. But, exactly how does being sad or lonely or overwhelmed affect us physically?

Researchers at Northwestern University recently found the body “knows” when you’re feeling sad at night and compensates the following morning by increasing the amount of cortisol in your system.

Cortisol is the stress hormone that regulates the body’s response to both physical and psychological stressors. Produced by the adrenal cortex, cortisol is critical in the regulation of blood pressure and blood sugar levels. The body also secretes additional cortisol to deal with short-term needs, as in the fight or flight response.

In the case of loneliness and other negative emotional experiences, scientists suggest the additional boost of cortisol in the morning prepares both the body and the mind to meet the challenges of a new day. Though not yet fully understood, it appears cortisol and emotional experiences interact in a unique interplay. Negative emotions result in higher levels of cortisol the following day – the higher levels of cortisol ease the stress and, as a result, the cortisol levels fall. The following day, the interplay begins anew.

Researchers hope their studies will offer insight into the impact of emotions on physical wellbeing.

A rare look at the physiological, social and emotional dynamics of day-to-day experiences in real-life settings shows that when older adults go to bed lonely, sad or overwhelmed, they have elevated levels of cortisol shortly after waking the next morning.

Prolonged blindness isn’t needed – just ninety minutes blindfolded can enhance your hearing ability.

Seth Godin on MLK Day
“You don’t have to experience the emotion in order to be able to respect someone who has.

Slavery was the greatest crime of the millenium. Why does it surprise marketers (politicians and otherwise) when so many people have a worldview that has been permanently altered by the legacy of abuse? It’s a worldview that doesn’t ask for charity for the individual, but one that demands respect.”

Anyone who seeks to influence legislation by lavishing campaign contributions on members of Congress is now on notice that he stands [they stand] naked before the world.

Unfortunately, the influence industry adapted brilliantly to this new environment.

When Sunlight Doesn’t Disinfect, at Slate

Civic Strategies is beginning a long-term effort to understand how important decisions are made in communities and how they can be made better.

More people in Britain think religion causes harm than believe it does good… an overwhelming majority see religion as a cause of division and tension – greatly outnumbering the smaller majority who also believe that it can be a force for good.

82% of those questioned say they see religion as a cause of division and tension between people.

link

Enough LSD to intoxicate several hundred million people… had come and gone.

Systematic testing July 1960.
It took almost three years, and an estimated 100,000 hours of professional effort by physicians, nurses, technicians and volunteers…

Excerpts From ‘Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten’

Hallucinogenic Weapons: The Other Chemical Warfare
At the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, psychiatrist James S. Ketchum was testing LSD, BZ and other psychedelic and deliriant compounds on fully informed volunteers for the U.S. military.

As well as hurting your wallet, your brain expects an expensive product to cause you pain too. Researchers have found that in terms of brain activity, whether or not we choose to make a purchase is reflected in a trade-off between regions of the brain involved in anticipating pain and pleasure.

When looking at a product, activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward centre, was associated with subsequent self-reported product preference and also predicted a purchase. Meanwhile, during presentation of the price, activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area involved in weighing up relative gains and losses, also predicted a subsequent purchase, and was related to how much smaller the actual price was than the price a participant reported being prepared to pay. Finally, also during the price presentation, increased activity in the insula, a region involved in anticipating physical pain, predicted a decision not to purchase the product.

Link

Mickey Fine Pharmacy of Beverly Hills sues Michael Jackson claiming the singer owes more than $100,000 for prescription drugs over the past two years.

Geesh, how many pills per day is this?

The Stanford Prison Experiment web site features an extensive slide show and information about this classic psychology experiment, including parallels with the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?

How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you.

Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.

Additional commentary at neurophilosophy:

When the Abu Ghraib scandal was exposed, the Bush administration insisted that the perpetrators were just “bad apples”. However, it soon emerged that, far from being an isolated case, the systematic abuse that occurred in Abu Ghraib was common-place, and had been sanctioned from above.

war is a firedrill
preparing harmony
until
light remains
past

Mr Bush says stem cell research would destroy human life in the name of science.

Dress to impress, goes the maxim.

“Dress to conceive” might be more accurate.

Women take greater care over their appearance when they are at peak levels of fertility. [study at New Scientist]

Seth Godin posts in Turning your idea into a picture

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.

I love the spectacular use of technology on this web page.

I hate the twisted use of the periodic table (because the relationships between the types isn’t natural or elegant the way chemicals are) but it’s worth it, because it will certainly inspire you to figure out how to get out of your text rut.

A new search engine geared towards Baby Boomers and other people who are old as hell has launched: it’s called Cranky.com. It was created by the people of Eon, a media group that caters to old people. The search algorithm supposedly ranks results according to their age-relevance.

Matt at netbusinessblog says,

The search algorithm supposedly ranks results according to their age-relevance. I wasn’t really sure what that meant until I did some searching on the site.

When searching the term “diapers” a normal search engine would yield results catering to parents of infants; however, at Cranky.com we get uplifting stories of how the elderly struggle with adapting to using diapers.

Here’s a blogger’s value:

Hello,
I am the marketing manager for Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster publishers. I am writing to offer you a free review copy of You Call the Shots, by 21-year-old Cameron Johnson. This charismatic young author started his first business when he was nine and made his first million before he graduated high school. By doing so, he managed to pay his way through college – almost unheard of in today’s economy. In this new book he shares the amazing story of his career so far, as well as the lessons he’s learned about success in both business and life. I think it might be of interest to you and to the readers of One Stop Thought. If you are a parent, it also might be an interesting and motivational read for your son or daughter.

If you would like to receive a complimentary copy, just send me the appropriate mailing address. Cameron is excited at the prospect of the online media, especially bloggers, and he would be more than willing to do an online Q&A. If you are interested, I would be happy to set it up.

Thank you,
Shannon
Shannon Gallagher
Marketing Manager, Free Press
Simon & Schuster

Here’s my simple answer:

Dear Shannon,
When I was young, I taught sky and brightening things… .

I appreciate your niche and the work you carry. I appreciate your community and the faith you carry. But sorry, I am not a tool. I will not use my blog in your brigade.

What goes up comes down, what goes around comes around, for each action there is a reaction, and so on. Life is intrinsically self-correcting at almost all its levels, including evolutionary, physiological, historical and genetic. This permits a limited optimism.

Wickedness and stupidity are ultimately self-destructive and self-limiting, so we need not trouble ourselves that any particular trend in that direction will go on indefinitely. Sooner or later — and usually sooner — they will be reversed.

On the other hand, the principle of self-correction also applies to love, friendship and high intellectual powers. No movement in these directions can proceed long without setting up counter-pressures against their further spread. cooperative strategies suggest long-term trends (under a broad range of conditions) toward greater cooperation, contingent on ever more sophisticated discrimination.

http://www.edge.org/q2007/q07_16.html#trivers

I must tell you about Lucky Lord Barkeley of Berkeley. Here on legs is Life. He’s not had one day without love; rubbing his longgg neck, running his firmm feet, nor more than four hours alone in his four years. He’s not had a day without running faster than his tail, leaping higher than his nose nor pretzling delight along his spine. He is a creature to help you find the first happy bicycle, the first pleasant neighbor, the decent side of the street, the thick of your heart. His sire is an Alaska champion and bitch an England champion. There are few dogs in this world better bred or better loved.

Projection describes the habit of removing our own disturbing thoughts by attributing them to someone else, whereas identification is changing ourselves to become more like someone we admire.

As we mature from late childhood into adulthood, we rely less on ‘denial’ (ignoring upsetting thoughts) and instead use progressively more ‘projection’ and ‘identification’.

BPS Research Digest

If you think in pounds and miles instead of kilograms and kilometers, you’re in the minority.

Only the United States, Liberia, and Burma still primarily use English units — the rest of the world is metric.

And now the Moon will be metric too.

Health insurers in California can refuse to cover individuals because of their jobs or because they take certain medicines…

“This isn’t cherry picking; this is ignoring whole orchards of people.”

Total groups of workers — roofers, pro athletes, migrant farmers and firefighters among them — are denied insurance, even if they’re in good health and can afford it, The Los Angles Times said Monday. According to actuary tables, certain workers are too big a risk to underwrite.

Dozens of widely prescribed medications for heart burn and asthma, for example, may lead to rejection, according to underwriting guidelines, the Times said. [story at physorg]