One Stop Thought Shop

Across our population, the widespread use of antibiotics may have encouraged a set of bugs that increases obesity.

Roger Highfield at the Telegraph reports that there is a link between gut bacteria and obesity where antibiotics may play a significant role.

Bacteria make it possible to digest our food. The human digestive system is home to about 100 trillion bacteria – around 10 times the number of cells in the major organs (there are another 25 trillion red blood cells, plus a few trillion brain cells). “Good” bugs, such as lactobaccili, alter the way that fats are emulsified in the upper gut, making them less available to the body.

“We never dine alone: our microbes are able to sit at the dining room table together with us, consume for their own purposes the nutrients that are available, notably those we cannot digest on our own, and share the bounty with us,” said Professor Jeffrey Gordon at Washington University School of Medicine.

“This raises the question of whether differences in the mix of bacteria in our guts predispose some of us to obesity: the number of calories harvested from a serving of cereal may not be the same for everyone – some people may extract slightly more than others and over time this will add up.”

Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College London studies bacteria and fat digestion. He’s thinking that obesity could be linked to antibiotic use and misuse. “Mapping the change in population obesity in the US over the last 20 years looks rather like the spread of an infectious disease.”

Roger Highfield asserts,

“You would be nothing without these microbial minions milling around inside your large intestine, performing crucial functions that your fancy, complicated human cells haven’t a clue how to do.

“The ecology of the human gut is at least as complex as that in soils or seas.”

The University of Maryland achieved the first large-scale gene sequencing of the human gut. The findings should lead to a better understanding of how microbes in the gut contribute to health and diseases.

Most of what is known about the microbes that live in the human gut has been learned from samples grown in a Petri dish. But only one percent of bacteria is able to grow in a Petri dish. We can now look at bacteria that we couldn’t see before. By looking straight at the environment, we can see all of the organisms, even those we can’t culture.

Duty, dedication, loyalty and love are obscured in media stories about a man in Poland who awoke from a very long coma.

Hit by a train in 1988, Jan Grzebski has been in a perpetual coma and kept alive by his wife Gertruda. She was convinced that he would recover one day.

“People kept asking when he was going to die, but he is not dead,” she said.

What’s the amazing part of this story?

To prevent bed-sore infections, she changed her comatose husband’s position every hour for nineteen years!

She exclaimed to AP, “This is my great reward for all the care, faith and love.” [Times Union, Telegraph, BBC, Telegram]

Update:
physorg.com has discovered additional insight about Grzebski, now becoming known as the Polish ‘Rip van Winkle’. Commenting on the extreme nature of his 19 years, Grzebski told the news service AFP that he was conscious of what was going on around him throughout his state of — “well, call it ‘in absentia,’ if it wasn’t a real coma”.

“I heard everything around me.

“I understood everything but I could not utter a single word.

“I was like a plant.

“It was horrible, not being able to communicate.”

After the death of a secretive collector, Susannah Morris of Christies was called in to make an examination. In the laundry room, wedged between a washing machine and a tumble dryer, was a plain metal filing cabinet.

As Miss Morris delved through files, where the papers were arranged by size rather than alphabet, date or subject, her eyes grew wider.

There was a love letter by Napoleon;
a letter by Beethoven;
one by Albert Einstein;
by Isaac Newton,
Hemingway,
Frederick the Great,
Darwin,
Voltaire,
Lewis Carroll,
Pushkin,
Monet,
Churchill,
Gandhi,
Defoe,
Tchaikovsky and
Dostoevsky;
a diplomatic note to the king of France in the hand of Elizabeth I;
a letter of condolence by John Donne;
a tragic 1545 account written by John Calvin about the suicide of a friend;
a withering letter by Charlotte Brontë on male shortcomings.

She said, “It was an extraordinary find in such an improbable place. It is a history in miniature of the last 500 years of western civilization and is the most remarkable collection on the market for a generation or more.” Albin Schram, the son of an Austrian industrialist, spent half his life assembling the collection.

The most valuable item in the collection is Donne’s letter of condolence in 1624 to Lady Kingsmill the day after the death of her husband. He says that man should not judge God’s actions “although we could direct him to do them better”. [UK Telegraph]

A bit about the many, many arrangements we can find in every bucket.

Before California Assemblyman Bill Filante made a bid for Congress in 1992, we enjoyed several conversations about our culture and how poorly we understand probability.

Random numbers are misunderstood as folks buy lottery tickets of astronomical odds. The late assemblyman was staunchly against government lottery, not merely because State lotteries pilfer pockets, but because he worried about a wasting of purpose.

Government, he asserted, must never operate a program that will require ignorance of its citizens.

We must teach each other the vast difference between what’s likely and what’s random. After pulling the handle for a few coins, we must learn how ingeniously we convince ourselves that the next bet will deliver a few more coins and, as if lubricating Providence, one more bet will gift our riches and our deserved relief.

We make errors whenever we believe what we fail to measure. We too often make errors of assumption in our gambit to read trends and decipher patterns. Major policy changes and significant spending are often based on quick conjecture that we trammel into winning consensus. We easily let ourselves tweak models by removing complexity, ignoring ambiguity and failing to capture fringe events.

We trick ourselves if we do not understand probability,
because we find reasons where none exist.

Discovery is most often by accident. Many breakthrough inventions were unintended. It may be that randomness has better luck than most research.

Is it better when we try to evaluate stock markets? Known by ‘The Black Swan’ and reminding us about the unsteadiness of circumstances, Nassim Nicholas Taleb may be Wall Street’s principal dissident. [wiki]

“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know….”

Replying to eager investors, Taleb accounts for upsetting conventional views when he says, “Let us understand the true odds of financial ruin, so we can enter the markets prepared.” His book Fooled by Randomness is selected by Fortune as one of “The Smartest Books of All Time”.

Some say Taleb’s caution requires a new understanding of what we call heroic…

“The truth is that we associate the willingness to risk great failure – and the ability to climb back from catastrophe – with courage. But in this we are wrong. That is the lesson of Nassim Taleb and the lesson of our volatile times.

“There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.” – Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, April 2002

Arlene Goldarb says that Taleb’s sense of our problem is that we do not know how much we don’t know. “What Taleb has already given me are much better reasons than my own instincts to do two things I’ve been advocating loud and long: distrust predictions and question theories.”

Thinking about how we look at our historical achievements, she repeats Taleb’s assertion that ‘… almost all of the discoveries that have had tremendous impact on our culture were accidents in the sense that they were discovered while searching for something else. He’s said, “most of what people were looking for, they did not find. Most of what they found they were not looking for.”

Forbes has published an essay where Taleb reminds us again that, “Things, it turns out, are all too often discovered by accident–but we don’t see that when we look at history in our rear-view mirrors. The technologies that run the world today (like the Internet, the computer and the laser) are not used in the way intended by those who invented them. Even academics are starting to realize that a considerable component of medical discovery comes from the fringes, where people find what they are not exactly looking for.

The Economist reviews The Black Swan, noting that “Humans are bad at factoring in the possibility of randomness and uncertainty. We forget about unpredictability when it is our turn to predict, and overestimate our own knowledge.”

The Telegraph says “it turns out, we humans prefer to work with predictions and forecasts, even when they are nearly always wrong.”

The above is primarily a re-post from 2006. I’ve been thinking about whether we gamble our future and I remembered Taleb’s warnings about certainty.

As if policies are randomly drawn out of a hat to only deter criticism, I’ve been annoyed about the quickdraw corn ethanol policy that may inadvertently be causing massive increases in feed and food costs. I’ve been worrying about commodity inflation as improving living conditions around the world legitimately increase demand while we fail to install adequate productivity for our basic industries. And are we spending more to be green than living well with less?

I’ve been worried about our governments. Too many players are relying on simple popularity and I worry that ordinary majorities do not look deeply into issues and too easily can lift the foolish. To be a wise population, we need adequate knowledge and robust discussion. Otherwise, we fib about weaponry and see threats in our shoes, treat rare disease and ignore pestilence, favor the elite and ignore the desperate….

We seem to be convinced that we can fund a war against a random event. In puny numbers, ugly terrorists are costing us the budgets of centuries because their unknown steps and devious surprise is the power of their terror. It’s the old saw about the enemy we know….

We’ve shown that we do not honestly account for unknown factors.

The other night while playing remote roulette, I saw Donald Rumsfeld on television declaring there were many factors evaluated while establishing our current policies for war. He said something similar to this:

‘We have considered the known known and the known unknown.
We just don’t know about the unknown unknown.’

Pulling itself along a bootstrapped rush to modernize, China consumes about eleven times the energy to produce a dollar’s worth of gross domestic product as Japan and five times that of the United States.

This is the type of calculation that supports the theory that its struggle to develop will prolong China’s economic impact on the United States and Europe.

But others, such as Daniel Hannan at The Telegraph, see a polar switch where China quickly changes places with wealthy western players to resume its millennial privilege on top. Visiting while Shanghai seems to burst in activity, he worries that while we squabble between ourselves and thump the world’s discontents, a dynamic and inevitable giant may challenge what we think we know about industry and geopolitics. A Polish lawmaker has said, “The world we know is finished. Our children will be their slaves”.

To move toward increased efficiency and sustainability, the economic planners of China are announcing a 2008 law to force a “circular economy”. More than aggressive bargaining and global reach, China seems to be asserting an industrial ecology that will consider the ‘flow of material and energy and not just the money’. [link via lunch over ip]

Along with resource efficiency, the new law would require evaluation of the environmental friendliness of products before they enter the market. Supervising resources, engineering the disposal of waste, and setting up an accountability system for manufacturers will help “produce the maximum amount of products with the minimum resources.” [story, via chinaview.cn]

China’s 11th Five-Year Program requires low energy consumption and high efficiency, low emissions of pollutants, and minimal waste discharge, using the “3-R” principles of reduce, reuse, and recycle.

The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planner, wants an effective green economy.

The National People’s Congress has mapped out a plan to reduce energy consumption by 20 per cent and its main pollutants by 10 per cent while still maintaining an average of 7.5 per cent in GDP growth. [china daily]

More than ten provinces and municipalities have regulations on the circular economy. [people’s daily]

Worldwatch reports that this is no breakthrough. “It is very hard to see the necessity to draft a new law. Many articles in the draft are very hard to put into practice in China, like asking producers to collect and recycle packing materials. Furthermore, the draft does not include clear and tough punishment for those who violate the rules of the circular economy.”

Environmental Friendliness:
It’s New but Is It Good? New Product Development and Macromarketing,
Journal of Macromarketing [Abstract]

Links at Green3 with interesting and useful information on environmental friendliness for business managers.

Ecolabelling, where producers supply the characteristics of a commodity to the public with the aim at furthering environmental objectives and its impacts on trade and economy. University of Toronto.

Korea’s Environmental Declaration of Products – environmental-friendliness of products evaluated through Life Cycle Assessment.

Japan’s promotion of the 3Rs to further efficiency in the use of resources and energy, to integrate the reutilization and recycling of goods, and to reconsider wasteful lifestyles and customs in order to allow sound development of the economy of a new society with a reduced environmental load.

USA Federal Trade Commission’s “Guidelines for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims”, for the guidance of the public in conducting its affairs in conformity with legal requirements in labeling, advertising, promotional materials and all other forms of marketing, whether asserted directly or by implication, through words, symbols, emblems, logos, depictions, product brand names, or through any other means, including marketing through digital or electronic means, such as the Internet or electronic mail.

Everybody should have an “energy budget”, and all through the year — taking into account all energy sources, the production of goods and all activities — a person should ideally consume only 2000 Watts (the equivalent of twenty 100-Watts lightbulbs that are on 24/7).

Today, like most Europeans, a Swiss consumes on average 6500 W (about 3000 from fossil fuels, 2000 from renewables, mostly hydroelectric, and the rest imported from abroad) — Americans use some 12000 per head. – Alexander Zehnder, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

We need goodwill.

To represent us, we need bright, eloquent, vigorous and warm hearted relations around the world. We want others to know our fine intentions and our requirement for a positive and peaceful way of living together.

We appoint goodwill ambassadors to help lift respect for our nation. When an Egyptian leader asked Karen Hughes, the Administration’s Goodwill Ambassador, why President Bush mentions God so often in his speeches, she retorted by probing whether he was aware that previous American presidents have also cited God. She told him, “Many people around the world do not understand the important role that faith plays in Americans’ lives. Our Constitution cites ‘One nation under God.'” [Salon]

Injecting religion into global relations is not honoring the spirit of our nation.

“Wow ‘Em With Untruths” is a post at theAgitator illustrating the unkempt thinking we allow.

‘One nation under God’ is not in the Constitution. Our Framers took great care to exclude such language. ‘One nation under God’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 during the Cold War.

Francis Bellamy of the National Education Association composed the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. His original wording was, ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ Bellamy wrote about choosing the words:

“It began as an intensive communing with salient points of our national history, from the Declaration of Independence onwards; with the makings of the Constitution…with the meaning of the Civil War; with the aspiration of the people….

“The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the ‘republic for which it stands.’ …And what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation – the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches. And its future?

“Just here arose the temptation of the historic slogan of the French Revolution which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity.’ No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization.

“But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all….”

In the 1920s, the National Flag Conference of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution changed ‘my Flag,’ to ‘the Flag of the United States of America’. Bellamy wrote that he disliked this change. A Catholic campaign by the Knights of Columbus added ‘under God’ in 1954 altering the pledge toward a public prayer. Bellamy stopped attending church because he disliked inequality and racial bigotry that was too often ignored by religion.

Our Founders would urge us to quit promoting morality and religion in civic life.

We fail to execute the deeds of earth when we encumber ourselves with the needs of heaven.

It’s not that faith is unimportant nor should be. It’s that faith is not the task of governments. We need governments for the purpose of getting things done in our world.

Morality is the zeal that faith propels and morality is too often promoted by the immoral. It places people in positions of power. Nietzche warned about the rise of the Nazis when he noticed that morality is the ‘easiest way to lead people by the nose’.

It not that faith isn’t important. Faith is potent. Thus it must be separate from power.

What warning in today’s world will help us see our leadership more closely? Recent political leaders are first and foremost opportunists. We all know opportunists will say whatever we want to hear. What we fail to recognize is the pathology that follows. Folks that spend their time to fool you are generally greater fools.

We are not only determining good versus evil when we vote. Our leaders must convince us not merely of their morals but of their honor. This is the civic challenge that is so much different than the calling of the church.

Honor is a task of great skill that is much more than promoting conscience from a pulpit or a podium. When we look for leaders, we are determining good sense, good manners, good wit – requirements of truthfulness, fairness and vision that create good practice.

There’s excellent policy guidance for our government shown in this early sketch of the face of the Great Seal of the United States.

First in official heraldry, there’s no top on this pyramid but Divinity.

Our symbol easily points out that the American government isn’t joined to God. Government is not from Heaven, nor can be connected to it. Instead, it shall be shaped by the Constitution and restrained to the tasks of the world.

Since 1776, we are never again to be put upon by human authority acting as if God or godly. With divine approval, Annuit Cœptis, we are each bricks in the wall upon a green and pastoral earth. While through the ages, no other order is required.

America’s founders carefully and courageously wanted to provide us a very great freedom for our belief and our practice. Government was not to be involved.

Government is not to make our morality, nor to make rules from our morality, nor preach or promote our morality, nor to represent God in its relations.

Government is to be greater than that: Our government is to leave our God to us. Now, that’s Divine.

There’s untapped power in flowing water. Without building dams and reservoirs, power plant promoters are looking for ample rivers to install new ‘variable speed’ power plants on the river bank.

Spiraling water down cavity pipe to spin turbines, the trick is to match the load on the turbine-generator to the flow of the river.

General Electric says, “Run-of-river hydroelectric power is one of the most environmentally safe and commercially viable sources of electricity generation… a green method of power generation because of their small environmental footprint.” General Electric and Plutonic have permits for at least four Run-Of-River projects.

Green Power Corridor
Plutonic Power is paying attention to British Columbia, proposing 25 run-of-river projects to generate enough energy for a half million homes. Fortis is building a nonstorage plant in Central America. Ecuador is building riverbank power.

Developing non-polluting power generation from rivers may be sensible, but is it green?

Using moving water is more pollution-free. These new plants will have a smaller environmental footprint than traditional hydroelectric, but they are not small facilities. Hydro is popularly more sustainable than coal and oil, but there are other serious impacts, including hundreds of miles of new transmission corridors. Millions of tons of gases emissions are avoided, but the environment is not.

Replacing carbon intensive energy sources is smart, replacing other forms of generation which are less efficient is sensible, but we must not foolishly install hundreds of power plants on river banks.

Calling this technology “Green” might be a push. But we require electricity. Before recalculating for climate warming, merely for new air conditioners the USA requires the equivalent of 400 additional 500-megawatt power plants. That’s more than 1,000 riverbank plants!!

With new power plants on the river bank, utility agencies see untapped rivers as revenue. Now, that’s green!

Whatever else may be said about the Supreme Court’s current term, which ends in about a month, it will be remembered as the time when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found her voice, and used it.

What she is saying is that this is not law, it’s politics. She is accusing the other side of making political claims, not legal claims.” – Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor, speaking of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comment linking the outcome of the abortion case last month to the fact of the court’s changed membership.

The oral dissent has not been, until now, Ginsburg’s style. She has gone years without delivering one, and never before in her 15 years on the court has she delivered two in one term. In her past dissents, both oral and written, she has been reluctant to breach the court’s collegial norms.

Said Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, a sociologist and longtime friend,

“She has always been regarded as sort of a white-glove person, and she’s achieved a lot that way.

Now she is seeing that basic issues she’s fought so hard for are in jeopardy…“

International Herald Tribune

The scientific method is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset … a nebulous mixture of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all, curiosity, which small children possess in spades. – Sir Harry Kroto

Anti-smoking overhead has pushed Britain into spending nine times as much as all smoking related diseases. [link]

No US figures found.

I’m with the Banned
$22.99 at cafepress.

A Roomba with a metal detector.

“We’ve seen the robots that mow your lawn, save your life, hit on your girlfriend, make you an omelet, dispense Kleenex, even make abstract artwork–but where are the robots that help make you filthy rich?” [CNet’s craves via RobotGossip]

A remote controlled metal detector built by a Wiltshire man could revolutionise the art of treasure hunting. Resembling something from the TV show Robot Wars, the invention, devised by John Corney, of Corsley Heath, can climb over footballs and has an on-board camera to show its controller where it is going.

“…far better than a hand held detector because it goes at a steady speed and just generally detects more efficiently.”

Mr Corney has found hundreds of old coins and medieval artifacts with his robot. ‘John Corney Invents Treasure Hunting Robot’, Wiltshire Times via make.

High corn prices, double in one year, are already pressuring the animal feed sector to search for lower cost ingredients. Here are two ‘early innovations’.

1.) Trail Mix hog feed
Growing demand for corn-based ethanol has pushed up the price of corn, Mr. Smith’s main feed, to near-record levels. Searching for alternatives, Alfred Smith’s hogs eat trail mix…

“…they usually shun the Brazil nuts.

“Pigs can be picky eaters,” Mr. Smith says, scooping a handful of banana chips, yogurt-covered raisins, dried papaya and cashews from one of the 12 one-ton boxes in his shed.

Generally, he says, “they like the sweet stuff.” [WSJ subscription]

2.) Party Mix cattle feed
Dwight Hess, a cattle feedlot operator in Marietta, Pa., is located in the heart of snack country, near Hershey and Herr Foods Inc., a maker of potato chips, pretzels and snack mixes.

His cattle ration consists of about 17% “candy meal,” a blend of chocolate bars and large chunks of chocolate; 3% of what he calls “party mix,” a blend of popcorn, pretzels, potato chips and cheese curls; 8% corn gluten; and the remainder corn and barley he grows.

He says these byproducts save him about 10% on feed costs. Still, it costs him about 65 cents to put a pound on a steer, up from 42 cents last year. [serious eats]

Curious new ingredients?
Candy and condiments in animal feed isn’t necessarily alarming.

Compounders of feed formula often use a variety of ingredients from excess farm production. Factory food processor and restaurant wastes have also been integrated for years and years.

We should be watchful.
Desparate to reduce costs, some players may try increasingly unusual approaches in our food system where oversight is very often (ideologically) under-funded and under-regulated.

A national policy to make a new fuel market came quickly, without social, educational or research adjustment. As food crops and animal feed are diverted to producing fuel, distortion in our food supply chain is rapid.

Did we think about the affects of fuel policy changes before heralding ethanol as another global security announcement?

Wood for cooking and heating is the number one biofuel worldwide;

• the largest use of wood in India & China
  
• largest use of wood harvested in Cambodia.
• largest use of wood is fuel for cooking in Ghana
• 97 percent of all wood used in Tanzania
• The largest use of wood in Brazil is for wood fires

16 developing countries in South and Southeast Asia use most of their wood supply predominantly for cooking and heat.

The UN says that using wood as fuel is expected to increase in line with population growth. Rising demand for fuelwood and charcoal is causing a halo of deforestation around many cities, towns, and roads. [report]

Grievances are in the news almost daily when commercial firms reduce local wood by harvesting forests for global industrial or consumer uses.

But wood as a fuel is not an important cause of deforestation, because forests are not the sole source of firewood: About two thirds of the world’s firewood is collected outside the forest. (link)

Woodlands, roadside and open yards are alternative sources for collecting fuelwood; residues from logging, wood industries, and tree plantations; wood recovered from construction waste; and waste packaging….

Emerging ideas
“People are very poor and could not possibly afford to buy a normal manufactured solar cooker. There are no stores that sell them because there is no market for them. So it will be necessary to make them. These are cardboard and waste foil.”

“It would be difficult to convince women that “The cooker may take a time to cook, but think of the time you would save by not having to walk so far and so often to bring firewood.

And a cooker may cost you money you think you cannot afford, but consider asking your man to give up drinking beer for a week or two.”

They would laugh and would not be convinced. And the man would growl, “It’s traditional for women to fetch wood. That’s not my problem!” Museum of Technology Mozambique

Camelina, a plant that flourished in Europe about 3,500 years ago, could become a major source of biodiesel, and is now planted – if not harvested – on millions of acres of marginal farmland from eastern Washington state to North Dakota. Camelina can grow in arid conditions and can produce more oil from its seeds for a lower price

Targeted Growth, a Seattle biotech firm that’s working to increase camelina yields “radically.” The company hopes to produce enough seed – about one-third the size of sesame seeds – to plant 1 million acres of camelina by 2009. [story]

Steven Guy, a professor at the University of Idaho and a crop-management specialist, was quoted as saying, “This is the most exciting crop I have seen in my 30 some years in this field.” [archived 5/30]

Montana farmer John Sheldon said he believes camelina will be a huge boon for Montana agriculture. “I can easily see getting 1,000 pounds per acre.” {with a 3/64th inch screen on the combine!)

This fuel yields chart compares a long list of crops. Useable in our current fleet, corn produces about 18 gallons per acre of alcohol for fuel blending with gasoline. Rapeseed biodiesel output is as high as 127 gallons. The easier to grow, lower input camelina produces 62 gallons per acre.

Pacific states, most significantly California, have strict sulfur emission regulations. However, sulfur acts as a lubricant in diesel engines, so something has to take its place. This is why some states require a biodiesel blend. Biodiesel produces significantly fewer sulfur emissions and still lubricates diesel engines. Western states pay $3 a gallon for soybean biodiesel.

About 85 percent of the biodiesel in the United States comes from soybeans grown largely in the Midwest and costly to ship west.

Almost ten years ago I was promoting Proctor & Gamble soybean biodiesel, the nation’s largest vendor at the time. Extensive presentations to urban transit systems such as AC Transit and Golden Gate Transit were designed to start moving our nation’s fuel matrix toward a diversified domestic production.

The media overwhelmingly displays conservatives as the voice of religion.

Among the study’s key findings at Media Matters:

• Combining newspapers and television, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories 2.8 times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

• On television news — the three major television networks, the three major cable new channels, and PBS — conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed almost 3.8 times as often as progressive leaders.

• In major newspapers, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed 2.7 times as often as progressive leaders.

Plastination, invented by Dr. Gunther von Hagens in 1977, is a vacuum process whereby the body’s water and fat are replaced with reactive plastics that are initially pliable and then harden when cured with light, heat or gas.

All tissue structures are retained. Unlike plastic models, plastinated specimens are intricate, REAL displays of human anatomy – to the microscopic level. It takes an average of 1,500 hours to transform a cadaver.

BIODUR Products sells special polymers and equipment for plastination. There are now more than 400 plastination laboratories in 40 countries around the world.

Bodyworlds manages travelling exhibits of more than 20 whole-body plastinates.

Tickets seem to sell out in every city….

A good-looking man approached 120 women in a night club over a period of three weeks, and asked them to dance. It was in the name of science – the man was an assistant to the psychologist Nicolas Guegen. Remarkably, of the 60 women who he touched lightly on the arm, 65 per cent agreed to a dance, compared with just 43 per cent of the 60 women who he asked without making any physical contact.

BPS Research Digest: The power of a light touch on the arm

…when men make this light touch on the women’s arms, they are perceived as more dominant which is an attractive trait associated with status.

A wall of sand as high as 3,000 feet.

In the spring, from March to May. The season lasts for 50 days; each a few days in duration.

Called sirocco in Morocco, qibli in Libya, cheheli in the northern Sahara, irifi along the coast and ouahdy in the central Sahara, the storms of North Africa each have a special personality.

a little bit more here

There is no logical reason to use a drop of fuel, or a watt of energy, to heat or cool any home or building attached to the Earth.

Just below the surface, within reach of the average basement, is an infinite reservoir of heat that never drops below 50° F.

Link to post on my construction blog.

Link to Michael Sykes’ “Enertia” building system that trap solar energy to produce homes that heat and cool themselves.

Anybody put caffeine in cooking oil yet?

We can call it

“We’re Oil Awake”
“Cookin’ Caffeine”
“The BetterBuzz Diet”
“Gourmet a’ Go-Go”

Simply harness and clip your goat into the frame and off you go.

The human is in total control of the speed and direction of the scooter because the animal is harnessed inside of the frame and subject to its steering and braking force. This simplifies ‘choices’ and reduces the level of “training” required.

With just a few outings pulling the scooter the animal quickly learns when to feel the braking and which direction to turn by again “feeling” the side pull on the harness. No downward loads are applied.

Animal and Dog Scooters

The surge in oil prices is being driven by political factors and there is no need for additional crude supplies, Saudi Arabia’s assistant oil minister said.

‘We have always said, and OPEC has always committed itself to keep the market well-supplied and balanced. Never has this market been (more) balanced with crude than today,’ said Prince Abdul Aziz, who is assistant oil minister for petroleum affairs.

While there was no need for additional crude supplies, there is a problem with refining capacity. He was referring to what Saudi officials say is a need to invest in expanding refining capacity in consumer countries. Thomson Financial

To stimulate a bit of thinking about oil players instead of merely blaming Arabs, what’s at least 13% of British Petroleum’s reserves — nudging BP ahead of Shell, to become the No 2 behind Exxon Mobil? Russia.

via http://microart.kiev.ua