Winston Smith's Diary

People are weird

2005-09-13T00:30:00.000-07:00

The DNA double helix can under certain conditions accommodate a third strand in its major groove. Researchers in the UK have now presented a complete set of four variant nucleotides that makes it possible to use this phenomenon in gene regulation and mutagenesis.

Natural DNA only forms a triplex if the targeted strand is rich in purines – guanine (G) and adenine (A) – which in addition to the bonds of the Watson–Crick base pairing can form two further hydrogen bonds, and the ‘third strand’ oligonucleotide has the matching sequence of pyrimidines – cytosine (C) and thymine (T). Any Cs or Ts in the target strand of the duplex will only bind very weakly, as they contribute just one hydrogen bond. Moreover, the recognition of G requires the C in the probe strand to be protonated, so triplex formation will only work at low pH.

triplex DNA

To overcome all these problems, the groups of Tom Brown and Keith Fox at the University of Southampton have developed modified building blocks, and have now completed a set of four new nucleotides, each of which will bind to one DNA nucleotide from the major groove of the double helix.¹

They tested the binding of a 19-mer of these designer nucleo-tides to a double helix target sequence in comparison with the corresponding triplex-forming oligonucleotide made from natural DNA bases.

Using fluorescence-monitored thermal melting and DNase I footprinting, the researchers showed that their construct forms stable triplex even at neutral pH.

Tests with mutated versions of the target sequence showed that three of the novel nucleotides are highly selective for their target base pair, while the ‘S’ nucleotide, designed to bind to T, also tolerates C.

In principle, triplex formation has already been demonstrated as a way of inducing mutations in cell cultures and animal experiments.²

The new set of building blocks ‘opens the way to the exploitation of the triplex approach in many areas of biology,’ said Brown.

link.

oh fuck

2005-09-12T18:03:00.000-07:00

The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

The document, written by the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs staff but not yet finally approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, would update rules and procedures governing use of nuclear weapons to reflect a preemption strategy first announced by the Bush White House in December 2002. The strategy was outlined in more detail at the time in classified national security directives.

link

UPDATE: Re: America Steals Russian lake

2005-08-13T05:32:00.000-07:00

THE world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has been crossed, triggering the melting.

Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3 °C in the last 40 years. The warming is believed to be a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical change in atmospheric circulation known as the Arctic oscillation, plus feedbacks caused by melting ice, which exposes bare ground and ocean. These absorb more solar heat than white ice and snow.

Similar warming has also been taking place in Alaska: earlier this summer Jon Pelletier of the University of Arizona in Tucson reported a major expansion of lakes on the North Slope fringing the Arctic Ocean.

The findings from western Siberia follow a report two months ago that thousands of lakes in eastern Siberia have disappeared in the last 30 years, also because of climate change (New Scientist, 11 June, p 16). This apparent contradiction arises because the two events represent opposite end of the same process, known as thermokarsk.

In this process, rising air temperatures first create "frost-heave", which turns the flat permafrost into a series of hollows and hummocks known as salsas. Then as the permafrost begins to melt, water collects on the surface, forming ponds that are prevented from draining away by the frozen bog beneath. The ponds coalesce into ever larger lakes until, finally, the last permafrost melts and the lakes drain away underground.

Siberia's peat bogs formed around 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Since then they have been generating methane, most of which has been trapped within the permafrost, and sometimes deeper in ice-like structures known as clathrates. Larry Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface worldwide.

His colleague Karen Frey says if the bogs dry out as they warm, the methane will oxidise and escape into the air as carbon dioxide. But if the bogs remain wet, as is the case in western Siberia today, then the methane will be released straight into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

In May this year, Katey Walter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks told a meeting in Washington of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that she had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia, where the gas was bubbling from thawing permafrost so fast it was preventing the surface from freezing, even in the midst of winter.

An international research partnership known as the Global Carbon Project earlier this year identified melting permafrost as a major source of feedbacks that could accelerate climate change by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. "Several hundred billion tonnes of carbon could be released," said the project's chief scientist, Pep Canadell of the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra, Australia.

Link.

North Bay inventor creates 'God Light', cures cancer too!

2005-08-09T16:11:00.000-07:00

One scientist interviewed by BayToday.ca said Hurtubise had “rewritten” the laws of physics with the God Light.

William Rieken, a PhD candidate at the Chihara Laboratory, at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), in Osaka, Japan, has co-invented the XB-2, an unmanned aerial vehicle developed for search and rescue missions.

Rieken, a computer scientist with a background in particle physics, was in North Bay Tuesday because he is considering using some Hurtubise-invented materials for the XB-2 and wanted to take back samples for further analyses.

Hurtubise also gave him a demonstration of the God Light.

“I think this is going to revolutionize physics and change the understanding of the concepts of science,” Rieken said.

“What Troy’s doing can’t be done, according to the current theories and models that we have. I know a lot of physicists in Japan who would love to get their hands on this machine.”

An idiot
Hurtubise and the German physicist, who requested anonymity, worked together on the project using a Web cam.

“First he’s got engineers doing schematics, and I said ‘buddy don’t you get it that I am an idiot with electronics,’ so he would show me what to do using the Web cam,” Hurtubise said.

The engineer and the electrician provided the expertise Hurtubise didn’t have, and some of the more specialized parts of the God Light were manufactured at various machine shops in North Bay.

The 26-foot device utilizes 67 high-end optical lenses and five different gases, while producing 80,000 lux of full-spectrum light.

Two of the nine run on pure oxygen, and four produce electromagnetic radiation in a closed chamber, Hurtubise said.

Beyond realistic expectations
When the God Light was completed, the physicist, sensing a possible use for it, put Hurtubise in touch with a Toronto cancer researcher.

Hurtubise said he knew he was onto something after two cancerous lab mice were exposed to the device.

The findings, Hurtubise said, quoting from the researcher’s notes, were “beyond realistic expectations.”

Beyond realistic expectations
One mouse, Specimen C-12, had a stomach tumour, while the other, Specimen H-27, had a brain tumour.

C-12 had been exposed to the God Light for 20 minutes and seven seconds, and H-27 for 18 minutes and 33 seconds.

The researcher, who did not reveal his name, Hurtubise said, then extracted small skin samples from each mouse for analyses.

“C-12 had a 27-per cent reduction in the tumour, the researcher told me,” Hurtubise said, adding the mouse had had prior radiation therapy.

H-27, which had had no prior therapy, Hurtubise said, exhibited a 12-per cent reduction in its tumour.

“And there was no further advancement of cancer to healthy tissue, or adverse side effects detected within a 56-hour observation period,” Hurtubise said, again quoting the researcher.

“Though test results are in their infancy with regards to strict scientific protocol, the preliminary findings are beyond realistic expectations,” the researcher had written.

Full article here.

This is why Bob Geldof sucks balls

2005-08-03T18:16:00.000-07:00

The largest concert series in history, Live 8, will only serve to legitimize the further enslavement of Africa, despite its genuinely good intentions.

The purpose of the concerts was, its organizers said, to "demand from the 8 world leaders at G8 to put an end to poverty." But as Sir Bob Geldof, main organizer of Live 8, knows, the purpose of the G8 is to provide Western corporations with profit. They do this by creating and exploiting poverty.

Unfortunately, Live 8 wasn't cheap. It needed funding to happen- corporate funding. To bring Live 8 to the world, Geldof had needed the support of the institutions that cause the poverty he's trying to eradicate.

Corporate donors don't like to fund events that expose what they do, but they do like to make a lot of money. Their purpose is to make profit, and to maximize their profits they need to advertise. Live 8 was an opportunity to reach a million concert-goers and a projected two billion viewers.

They had a dilemma. They could ignore Live 8 and miss out on the billions of potential consumers. They could fund Live 8, expose their own practices, and tell the world that to eliminate poverty we have to eliminate the corporate system, and the profit motive itself. Or they could fund Live 8, but make sure it ignored the whole point. They chose the latter.

They funded Live 8 and brought it to the world, but only because the concerts ignored the cause of poverty - the West's policies.

Many of these policies are created by the G8, which is a group of formerly imperialist nations - the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and Canada - that exists, like the IMF, WTO, and World Bank, to control and exploit the world's poorest people.

These groups and acronyms are simply non-imperialist and humanitarian facades. They're the imperialist institutions of the modern world.

Together, they provide poor nations with loans, much of which goes to Western corporations, for things the poor mostly don't need anyway. The loans are large enough so that these countries will never be able to fully repay them.

Western states give loans to create a permanent debt, which the poor pay back forever. The loans don't help the people, and payment on the debt diverts money, which would otherwise go to meet the country's needs, to the lenders. Debt is one of the main causes of Africa's poverty.

The Western states also provide what they call "aid" to poor nations. This aid also goes to Western corporations, and, like the loans, requires that poor nations abide by trade policies that enrich those corporations.

The G8 leaders require "the elimination of impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign," although they know that "not all countries will benefit in the short term from reductions in trade barriers." In the "short term" the West will benefit, just as it has in the past and will in the future.

These policies force poor nations to open their markets to foreign competition, but only if the foreign competition will win out. They require a sell-off of state-owned industries at artificially low prices. They give Western corporations access to natural resources and cheap labor, too.

The aid and loans the West gives makes poor states accept policies that they would never accept otherwise. These destroy domestic industries, increase unemployment, and cause a greater dependence on the West for everything, even things necessary for simple survival, like food.

Geldof knows this, but to raise awareness of it, he had to ignore it. You can find it on the website, but the events of Live 8, which were supposed to inform the world and promote "The Long Walk to Justice," had to ignore "justice." They had to ignore the whole point. Live 8 became an "audience builder" for corporations.

Any attempt at eliminating poverty, at achieving justice for the poor, will focus on these facts. The world's poor are not poor by accident, but by design. This should have been the focus of Live 8.

Instead, Live 8 ignored this, as it had to, and will achieve little for the poor. It will make the G8 leaders look like heroes, though.

We'll hear how Live 8 tickled the hearts of the great men of the Group of 8, who will seize the opportunity to eliminate poverty. And then they'll pursue similar policies, to achieve the same ends as usual.

Link.

Is this where science and spirtuality meet?

2005-08-01T20:51:00.000-07:00

Many questions are asked about underlying mechanism, such as whether there is an optimal speed or frequency for data collection, or whether the number of bits which are momentarily in play will matter. The short answer is that these and similar questions harbor assumptions that aren't correct. It appears that the domain for most of the effective variables is not physics but psychology, not matter but mind. So counting the events or measuring the speed are not relevant unless the counts and measures are in the non-physical realms we usually leave to poets and musicians.

So, for example, we often disregard the wisdom of the ancients, of other cultures than that of modern Western science, which Ken Wilber calls a monocultural flatland in his "A Brief History of Everything." He shows, for example, that the modern western view is shallow at best, a "flatland" incapable, because of its narrow focus on what can be located and what can be counted, even of asking the questions we know we must be able to ask about consciousness and spirit.

The GCP analyses are based on canonical statistics, and while some argue that this cannot provide "real" evidence, the implications of statistical measures can be profound. Though we don't know how an REGs behavior can be altered by thoughts and emotions or intentions, we know empirically the effects touch upon information theory and imply entropy reduction, and we think that resonance and coherence are good metaphoric descriptors for the necessary conditions. It also appears that the global consciousness effect is more than just casually related to nonlinear dynamical system models.

We find some useful points in models based on David Bohm's notion of active information (which I'll summarize below), and in Brian Josephson's recent article on String Theory, Universal Mind, and the Paranormal. One of the most coherent approaches to the evidence demanding extensions of physical models is Rupert Sheldrake's description of Morphic Fields. Abraham Boyarsky argues that any theory of mind is better than none, and uses the language of nonlinear dynamical systems and ergodic theory is to present a theoretical framework for the study of mind.

A number of correspondents suggest interesting perspectives, or make comments that can be stimulating. In this border area it is difficult to know what will turn out to be the most useful ideas, and it is worthwhile to keep an open mind. Philippe Viola offers an interesting approach with a Bioquantum Theory that addresses relevant issues, including linkage to Bohm and to Sheldrake's work. Alan Bondies offers a speculation on Universal Consciousness that touches pertinent questions.

However, most of what can be said is speculative, and not immediately useful for understanding the empirical data. We do not know how a mental state such as an intention or emotion is able to inform the physical system to affect its behavior. In addition, all of the robust measures we have providing evidence for the anomalous effects are statistical in nature, and the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. This means that we typically cannot be sure that the "signature" of an effect in any individual analysis is driven by the hypothesized influence of consciousness. The details written in the data from single instances are more likely to be chance fluctuations than consciousness effects. Only in larger concatenations, gathering the weak signals from many separate events, can we be satisfied that trends and structure represent the hypothesized effect.

After all the caveats, however, we can say that the evidence for an effect of consciousness on REGs is strong. We are driven by that evidence to infer that something like a "consciousness field" exists, and that intentions or emotional states which structure the field are conveyed as information that is absorbed into the distribution of output values of labile physical systems.

The bottom line is that the output distribution of data from the REG differs from what would be expected without the influence of consciousness. Two major questions should be kept in mind to help focus our speculations:

1) What is the physical meaning of the statistically unlikely patterns that appear in our random data?

2) What is the social meaning of the correlation of such patterns with events of importance to humans?

Full text here.

Homepage.

Early Results.

Ebola Swine flu?!

2005-08-01T02:48:00.000-07:00

The flu, pigs and ebola; why does this sound so familiar? oh yeah that's why.

Recombinomics Commentary
July 30, 2005

D: "It's alright. We ran tests on those samples and isolated the SZ77++A3231 virus."

I: "What is this SZ77++A3231 virus?"

D: "This is a strain of the Ebola virus."

I: "Would you like to comment about it?"

D: "It's rather impossible to totally explain it."

I: "I can understand so, but why is the term "less-infectious" always affixed to our version of the Ebola virus?"

D: "There are 2 reasons for doing so. First, to reduce panic among the people should it ever leak. And second, the Ebola virus has evolved in China. Re-combination has been detected. Most prominently at the portion which determines its effect on humans (very technical description, I can't describe it. sorry.). Also, abrupt breaks in the sequencing were detected, leading to changes in the incubation period. (Or possibly "changes in the incubation period were detected")

I: "How were these viruses classified then? / Could you elaborate more about the various strains?"

D: "Previously, strains of Ebola in China always had the EBO prefix. Subsequently following information leaks, the classification method was changed. We stopped using the EBO prefix. Instead, coupled with the discovery that the virus had become more virulent and lethal, we re-named the strains according to the placed where they were first discovered. For example, the strain in June became the SZ77++A3231. Sometimes, we don't even use their place of discovery, instead directly naming it the ++A3231."

I: "In that way, the Ebola virus wouldn't even be brought into the picture."

D: "Precisely, viruses such as the Ebola are national secrets."

The above comments by a physician involved in testng samples from patients in the mysterious swine outbreak in Sichuan indicate that one of the agents isolated is a recombinant Ebola virus originally isolated from Shenzen. Prior reports had listed the names and characteristics of various Ebola isolates and EB-SZ-277 was capable of infecting birds. SZ277++A3231 is a recombinant version of SZ-277 isolated from a patient. The discussion indicates China has an active Ebola project and the virus is rapidly evolving via recombination. It was not clear from earlier reports if the agent was isolated and sequenced, but this interview leaves little doubt that both isolation and sequencing of Ebola is quite active. It is unclear if the recombination is related to the region of identity between Ebola and H5N1. Ebola is considered a state secret, so there are no reports of the virus or availability of virus or sequences.

The interview also indicates that the streptococcus suis is not the cause of the illness. It is present in pigs and is merely activated by infectious agents, which include Ebola, plague, and an un-named virus which is considered "dangerous". The emphasis is on the bacteria because it can produce similar symptoms. The symptoms of the patients match pandemic flu of 1918, and H5N1 can produce such symptoms.

The interview, if accurate, would support the role of agents other than the bacteria, in the spread or progression of the illness. Streptococcus Suis does not produce the high case fatality rate, and can be treated with antibiotics, as can plague. The high case fatality rate also supports the involvement of a virus. The proximity to Qinghai Lake keeps H5N1bird flu and migratory birds on the short list of explanations for the rapid spread of the fatal disease that is resistant to antibiotic treatment.

Link.

Full interview here.

01 Aug 2005 06:44:22 GMT

Source: Reuters

Chinese authorities say all those taken ill in Sichuan had slaughtered, handled or ate infected pigs, and stressed that there had not been any human-to-human transmission of the bacteria.

However, China's death toll of some 20 percent so far is particularly worrying as previous mortality rates are not known to have gone over 10 percent.

Many who died in Sichuan died within 24 hours of showing symptoms and many bled under their skin, signs which were not typical of Streptococcus suis infections.

"The situation is extraordinary. The pattern hasn't followed previous outbreaks, there are many human infections and deaths," said infectious disease expert Lo Wing-lok.

"Could there be other factors involved? Has the organism changed? Has it mutated to become more contagious and virulent? Is there co-infection of any other virus or bacteria? These are the questions on our minds."

Full article here.

NYC doing drug trials with orphans... I think I'm going to be sick

2005-07-31T18:13:00.000-07:00

Mimi Pascual gave the children drugs every day and every night, on schedule, as the doctors ordered. She shook the children awake and popped the pills into their mouths, or squirted a syringe full of ground pill and water to the back of their throats.

She and the other child-care workers made the rounds: midnight, 3 a.m., 5 a.m. Some kids took the pills by mouth, some through nasal tubes, and some through tubes jutting out of their stomachs. The children didn't like the drugs. They'd wake up vomiting or with bad diarrhea. But Mimi and the workers at Incarnation Children's Center had to follow the regimen, or they'd be fired."The drugs had side effects, everybody knew that," said Mimi. But the workers were told the drugs were saving the children's lives. After a young girl who had just gone on the drugs had a stroke and then quickly died, and another young boy who was put on thalidomide wasted away on a respirator, Mimi stopped believing that the drugs were just saving lives. She believed they were killing the children too.

Mimi Pascual worked at Incarnation Children's Center for eight years over a nearly 10-year period, taking care of the abandoned HIV-positive children of drug-addicted mothers in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood. She started at ICC in 1995, when she was just 17. Mimi was one of two dozen neighborhood women from Washington Heights, Harlem and Inwood Heights who were hired by the Catholic nuns who ran the orphanage for abandoned babies.

...

"In the beginning we were taking care of little abandoned crack babies who had no one, but then it changed. More and more of the kids were there for compliance. They didn't want to take drugs, or their parents didn't want to give them, so they got put in ICC.

"None of us ever blamed the kids for refusing. We all saw them throw up like clockwork after taking the pills, and then the diarrhea that followed.

When the kids were all younger—babies—they couldn't tell us the drugs made them sick. But when they got older they started to tell us, 'I don't want to take this 'cause I can't go to school, I feel worse when I take it.'"

"We all had doubts about what we were doing," Mimi said. "But honestly, we did what we were told."

One of the things Mimi and the other childcare workers noticed was the constantly shifting medicine regime. "Some children got AZT, some didn't. Then it would switch. Then it was a new drug, then it was a drug that we never heard of.

"We figured it out," she said. "These were experimental treatments." Marta, another child-care worker, put it more bluntly, "This is the guinea-pig business," she said.

ICC is administered by Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and the Catholic Home Bureau. It was under ICC's first medical director, Dr. Stephen Nicholas, that the orphanage began to receive funds from the National Institutes of Health to use its wards in pharmaceutical clinical trials.

ICC claims to have stopped the trials in 2002, but children from ICC are still seen at major New York hospitals, including Columbia Presbyterian, which all continue to do trials with HIV-positive children.

...

Mimi has a paper from ICC, that she saved from Seon's treatment. "One day I got a sheet from the nurses about a drug they were going to give Seon—it said any woman who was pregnant or who was of child-bearing age should not touch the drug, even with gloves on."

"I couldn't pronounce the name, so I kept the sheet. Thalidomide. That's what they gave him."

Thalidomide was originally marketed as a safe, over-the-counter sedative and analgesic in the 1950s and 1960s throughout Europe. It caused a wave of severe deformities in children of pregnant women who took the drug and was taken off the market. In 1998, the drug company Celgene resurrected Thalidomide, with FDA approval, officially as a leprosy drug, but with intended off-label use for AIDS and cancer patients.

"They pumped Seon with it; he deteriorated fast," Mimi said. "Once day we came in and he was bleeding from every hole in his body—his rectum, his nose, his mouth. He was in such pain. He would scream when he had to go to the bathroom. They put him on a respirator. They induced a coma with drugs so they could put him on a respirator. They told us they did it so he could breathe better." Mimi said, her voice getting a little rough. "I sat with him; he couldn't talk, but he was crying-tearing from his eyes. "He got all dry and scaly; he shriveled up like a snail-and he died."

Full article here.

The solar system just got a little bigger

2005-07-29T21:12:00.000-07:00

A California astronomer has discovered what he believes is the 10th planet in our solar system, a group of NASA-funded researchers said on Friday.

The new planet, known as 2003UB313, has been identified as the most distant object ever detected orbiting the sun, California Institute of Technology astronomer Michael Brown said.

Brown and colleagues Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz have submitted a name for the planet to the International Astronomical Union and are confident it will be designated a planet. Brown did not reveal the proposed name.

The procedure for approving the new planet is somewhat hazy as no new bodies have received that designation since Pluto was discovered in 1930, Brown said.

"We hope that it's fairly noncontroversial among those who believe Pluto is a planet," Brown said. "I would say get out your pens and start rewriting the textbooks today."

The planet is located about 9.7 billion miles from the sun and is about 1 1/2 times the size of Pluto, the researchers said.

The new planet orbits the sun once every 560 years and is now at its farthest point from Earth, he said. In about 280 years, the planet will be as close as Neptune, he said.

Like Pluto, the object's surface is believed to be predominantly methane, but its size -- about 1,700 miles in diameter -- qualifies it as a planet, Brown said. Earth is about 7,900 miles in diameter.

The new planet is believed to be part of the Kuiper Belt, a large ring of icy objects that orbit beyond Neptune and are believed to be remnants of the material that formed the solar system.

Brown said the new planet was detected in January by the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego.

The Caltech team, funded in part by NASA, had been waiting to announce the find until they had completed their studies, but changed their minds after a hacker threatened to go public with their data, Brown said.

Their finding comes a day after a Spanish team of astronomers announced the discovery of another relatively large object orbiting in the solar system's outer reaches. That object, Brown said, was about three-quarters the size of Pluto.

The new planet went undiscovered for so long because its orbit is tilted at a 45-degree angle to the orbital plane of the other planets, and travels in an elliptical orbit, Brown said.

The team had been scanning the skies with the 48-inch (120-cm) telescope for five years, searching for large bodies orbiting in higher planes than that of the Earth and other planets.

The new planet is so far away that an observer standing on its surface could cover the view of the sun with the head of a pin, Brown said. It was sufficiently bright, however, for amateur astronomers to track it in the early morning sky, he said.

Link.

Japan planning to dishonour Blue Gene

2005-07-29T00:55:00.000-07:00

TOKYO (AP) -- Japan has plans to start building a supercomputer next year that can operate 73 times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer, the government said Monday.

The American Blue Gene/L system supercomputer developed by International Business Machines Corp. at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, currently holds the title of the world's fastest. That machine is capable of 136.8 teraflops, or 136.8 trillion calculations per second, according to Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Japan wants to develop a supercomputer that can operate at 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 73 times faster than the Blue Gene, an official of the ministry said on condition of anonymity.

Kyodo News reported that the total amount for the project is estimated between 80 billion and 100 billion yen ($714 million to $893 million) and the ministry will request 10 billion yen ($89 million) for the next fiscal year's budget. The ministry official could not confirm the figures, saying it has yet to reach a formal decision on the project, which is expected by the end of August.

But he said that if the budget for next year is approved, the ministry hopes to complete the next-generation supercomputer sometime in fiscal 2010, which ends in March 2011.

Japan's Earth Simulator supercomputer, introduced in 2002, had been the world's fastest until 2004, when the IBM's Blue Gene took the title, he said.

Currently, the Earth Simulator, at a speed of 35.9 teraflops, is ranked fourth after the IBM's two Blue Gene systems and NASA's Columbia system, all in the United States, according to the top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, released at the International Supercomputing Conference held in June in Heidelberg, Germany. The Earth Simulator is used to track global sea temperatures, rainfall and crustal movement to predict natural disasters over the next few centuries.

The ministry wants to use the planned supercomputer for a wider use such as simulating the formation of galaxy and the interactions between a medicine and the human body.

Link.

Bono and Geldof can't see the trees for the forrest

2005-07-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

The rock stars played for Africa in Hyde Park. Those eight men in suits met in a hotel at Gleneagles to discuss Africa’s problems. Scores of journalists and programme makers fanned out across Africa to show that not everyone on the continent was either fighting or starving. The Year of Africa would give us a new positive image of Africa. We all agreed that at least Africa would no longer be stereotyped as a dying child.

Unnoticed in Niger that was exactly what was happening. Children were starving to death. Niger is not a war-torn, collapsed state with no communications. It may be the second-poorest country on the planet but it is a democracy with a free press and a Government that is not among the world’s worst. What is more the early-warning system worked and the Government and the United Nations had appealed for help. So why was nothing done?

First of all, the context. Niger is in the Sahel, those harsh drylands south of the Sahara desert. It is a tough place. Most people live on what they can grow in the short period after rain and before fertile ground turns to hard, barren, cracked earth. When that food runs out people turn to their goats and cattle to get through the bad times. Every year, just before the unreliable rainy season, it gets tougher. If there is no food, children are the first to go without. You can always replace a child. Adults are essential to survival. That is the way it is there. Even in normal years there are many cases of severe malnutrition among children. The World Food Programme (WFP)has a permanent presence in these countries, providing food in the bad times. Many of the 26 million Africans it feeds every year live in the Sahel.

This year was particularly bad because last August the rains barely came. Instead, just as the meagre crops were beginning to sprout they were gobbled up by the worst plague of locusts in 15 years. When crops fail, people begin to move in search of food for their animals or to sell them. The next stage in the survival strategy is the search for wild plants that are a lifeline in famine times.

All these patterns of behaviour were observed and recorded last year, and in November the Nigerien Government and the WFP launched an appeal for money to buy food. In January a nutrition survey suggested that up to 350,000 children under the age of five could be suffering from malnutrition. President Mamadou Tanja, however, was reluctant to allow WFP to launch a full emergency programme. No one is quite sure why. Some talk of the power of the grain traders who gang up on the Government and insist that no extra grain is imported because it lowers the price. Others suggest that he may have been concerned about the image of Niger as a helpless country that could not feed itself. Maybe he did not realise that this was an exceptionally bad year. When he visited Washington and met President Bush earlier this year, he did not mention the famine.

Once, France, the former colonial power in Niger, would have picked up the problem and seen that aid flowed, but France is less interested in its former African colonies now. Also these are the days of African solutions to African problems, Africa taking care of itself. So where was the regional organisation, the Economic Community of West African States? And where was the African Union, the continent-wide body that proclaims lofty ideals? Both remained silent.

The rest of the world showed the usual reluctance to respond to UN emergency appeals for Africa. Further appeals for Niger were made — and ignored — in March and May. Ironically the last was made just before the G8 countries, the world’s main donors to emergencies and disasters, were finalising their plans to do something about Africa. But while they were concentrating on the bigger picture — debt, trade and aid for development — the appeal for emergency aid went unnoticed. Just before the G8 Summit the UN launched a flash appeal. Hardly anything came back.

Niger’s people have suffered from a series of interlocking failures: the Nigerien Government’s appeal was muted. It did not allow the WFP to act. The WFP did not make a fuss. No one outside the country took any notice. The donors say that appeals do not always fit their budget cycles and they cannot respond to them quickly. The cruel truth seems to be that dry figures on pieces of paper passed between officials do not produce action. Television pictures of dying children do. Immediately after the first BBC reports, planes were chartered, food loaded and camps set up. The money is flowing. President Tanja immediately paid a visit to the stricken area — his first.

Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for International Development, says that it is the system that needs changing. He says that when there is a fire the UN has to appeal for a fire engine and get someone to pay for it. But this is not strictly true. The WFP monitors the yearly hungry season in the Sahel and with the co-operation of local governments, can deliver food to most people who need it. The mechanism is in place and works. The fire engine is there. All it needs is the water — money.

And not just for Niger. Drought and locusts do not observe national boundaries. What is happening next door in Mali and Mauritania? The WFP still insists that its biggest problems lie in Sudan, and even more in southern Africa where a combination of drought and Aids has put the lives of some 10 million in danger. The image of Africa as the starving child will be with us for some time to come.

Link.

Oh sasquatch why won't you let us put you in a zoo?

2005-07-25T21:07:00.000-07:00

Wildlife geneticist Dave Coltman says it most resembles hair from a Yukon bison.

A University of Alberta geneticist says he'll begin testing Monday a tuft of hair that some residents of Teslin, Yukon say belongs to a sasquatch.

Several residents of the town, about 180 kilometres east of Whitehorse, claim a three-metre tall, human-like creature crashed through their backyards earlier this month at about 1 a.m.

Two men, Chucka Choumant and Trent Smarch, said they heard trees snapping and creaking as the mysterious figure went by. They said the creature was moving fast and left behind a huge footprint, twice the size of a human's, and a small patch of hair.

Wildlife geneticist Dave Coltman volunteered to test the DNA in the hair, but admits the hair may turn out to belong to a bison.

"I'd be very surprised if it was something different, but you can never be 100 per cent sure, so I thought we would give this a go," said Coltman.

But there's a part of the scientist that hopes the Teslin residents really did see a sasquatch. "Well that would be kind of cool, wouldn't it? We might as well have a look-see," he said.

"If it's anything known, if it's any species we've ever encountered before, we'll have a match. If it's something new, we won't have a match. So if we don't match anything, then it's potentially interesting," said Coltman.

Coltman and his colleague Corey Davis expect to have results by mid-week. After that, Coltman plans to take the hair around to schools to give kids a first-hand look at DNA testing.

Link.

White liiiiiines goin' through my miiiiind

2005-07-25T16:35:00.000-07:00

Cocaine traces have been found at the European Parliament in an inquiry by one of Germany's main broadcasters.

The Sat-1 channel sent reporters to take 46 swabs from toilets and other public areas of the Brussels buildings. Nearly all tested positive for cocaine.

A European Parliament spokeswoman said cocaine abuse was not a problem among staff working at the buildings.

A professor who analysed the samples said the amounts found were too great to have been carried in on clothing.

"It simply reflects the fact that cocaine was brought in there," Professor Fritz Sorgel of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg (IBMP) told the BBC News website.

"The amount was too high and found in too many spots. It shows it was brought in deliberately."

However, he said the results were not so surprising given the widespread use of cocaine in society at large.

As the buildings are cleaned regularly, it appeared that cocaine had been used recently in the places where the traces were found, Mr Sorgel said.

A total of 41 of the reporters' swabs tested positive for cocaine.

'Surprise' results

European Parliament spokeswoman Marjory van den Broeke said the findings came as a complete surprise, insisting that cocaine use was not a problem among staff working at the building.

"It seems the findings are in line with findings in other public buildings," Ms Van den Broeke told the BBC News website.

"It is not a problem we are aware of at all."

But given the way the tests were carried out - with reporters coming in and taking swabs in toilets to be tested at a later stage - it was difficult to say how conclusive the tests could be, she said.

The parliament may look into whether the testing was legal as it was performed without its consent or knowledge.

The broadcaster conducted the same experiment in the German parliament with similar results five years ago.

Prof Sorgel made it clear cocaine was not found in all public places - not in German high schools for example.

"Many sites have no cocaine. It's not everywhere," he said.

The producer of the AKTE 05 TV show, Ulrich Meyer, said consumption of cocaine was a problem which pervaded all of society - "bigger than many politicians are willing to believe".

"We do not wish to point our fingers at any individuals or professional groups," he said, pointing out that the European Parliament building was open to the public.

Link.

No wonder men have issues with comitment

2005-07-25T06:13:00.000-07:00

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- While it's the husband among newlywed couples who has more influence on whether the couple engages in heavy drinking, it's the wife who appears to be in the driver's seat when it comes to determining her husband's marijuana use, according to researchers at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions (RIA).
Results showed that in the first year of marriage for 20-somethings, husbands are more likely to start or resume smoking marijuana if their wives smoke marijuana. Husbands also are more likely to stop smoking marijuana if their spouses do not smoke. The reverse is not true in either case; husbands do not seem to influence their wives' marijuana smoking.

...

"Substance use tends to decline as individuals progress through their 20s," Leonard added. "This may be a part of the maturing process, but it also reflects periods of transition in life, such as marriage with its increased responsibilities."
"In this study, we found that the prevalence of marijuana use decreased for both men and women over the first year of marriage. For men, use decreased from about 25 percent to 21 percent from the year before marriage through the first year of marriage, and for women over the same period, from 20 percent to 14 percent."
In addition, they found it was common that individuals who smoked marijuana were married to other marijuana users.
"We identified one direction of influence, that is, wives influenced their husbands' initiation of marijuana use, but husbands did not influence wives' use," Leonard noted.
One potential explanation for this is that marriage alters the relationship dynamic in couples, providing more influence to women after marriage than before. According to Leonard, this raises the possibility that after marriage, wives press for changes in their husbands' behavior, and husbands, in the interest of maintaining harmony and avoiding conflict, may change in response to their wives' expectations.
Although wives appear to influence husbands' marijuana use, wives do not necessarily have that influence in other areas of the relationship. Previous research by Leonard and colleagues found that husbands' drinking influenced wives' drinking during the first year of marriage. However, from the first to second year, wives' drinking influenced husbands' drinking.
Another explanation for the gender difference with marijuana may be the patterns of socializing before and after marriage. Leonard suggests that social patterns before marriage may be more influenced by husbands and patterns after marriage more influenced by wives. Consequently, availability, opportunities and norms regarding marijuana use that are present in the social network may impact on the members of the couples.
"For both social drinking and smoking marijuana, wives influence husbands' use from the first to second anniversary," Leonard said. "Although wives influence husbands' marijuana use from before marriage to the first anniversary, they did not influence husbands' heavy alcohol use during that period."
Leonard concluded that smoking marijuana may be viewed as less acceptable and, therefore, wives may seek to exert an influence earlier in the relationship. Determining when the line has been crossed from social drinking (generally considered acceptable) into heavy drinking (considered less acceptable) on the other hand, may be more difficult. This interpretation suggests that wives may tend to provide the limits for acceptable behavior in the relationship and the timing for that influence is early in the development of the marriage.

Full article here.

How can Americans vote these people into office?

2005-07-24T16:28:00.000-07:00

"THIS IS HIGHLY usual," declared a spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee when asked this week whether the request by committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) for information from three climate scientists was out of the ordinary. He and his boss are alone in that view. Many scientists and some of Mr. Barton's Republican colleagues say they were stunned by the manner in which the committee, whose chairman rejects the existence of climate change, demanded personal and private information last month from researchers whose work supports a contrary conclusion. The scientists, co-authors of an influential 1999 study showing a dramatic increase in global warming over the past millennium, were told to hand over not only raw data but personal financial information, information on grants received and distributed, and computer codes.

Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Science Committee, has called the investigation "misguided and illegitimate." Raymond S. Bradley of the University of Massachusetts, one of the targets, calls it "intrusive, far-reaching and intimidating." Alan I. Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said that although scientists "are used to answering really hard questions," in his 22 years as a government scientist he never heard of a similar inquiry, which he suspects could "have a chilling effect on the willingness of people to work in areas that are politically relevant."

Mr. Barton's attempt to dismiss all this as turf-battling on the part of Mr. Boehlert, like his spokesman's claim that such demands for data are normal, is disingenuous. While the Energy and Commerce Committee does sometimes ask for raw data when it looks at regulatory decisions or particular government technology purchases, there is no precedent for congressional intervention in a scientific debate. As Mr. Bradley pointed out in his response to Mr. Barton, scientific progress is incremental: "We publish a paper, and others may point out why its conclusions or methods might be wrong. We publish the results of additional studies . . . as time goes on robust results generally become accepted." Science moves forward following these "well-established procedures," and not through the intervention of a congressional committee that is partial to one side of the argument.

If Mr. Barton wants to discuss the science of climate change, there are many accepted ways to do so. He could ask for a report from the Congressional Research Service or the National Academy of Sciences. He could hold a hearing. He could even read all of the literature himself: There are hundreds of studies in addition to the single one that he has fixated on. But to pretend that he is going to learn something useful by requesting extensive data on 15th-century tree rings is ludicrous; to pretend that it is "normal" to demand decades worth of unrelated financial information from scientists who are not suspected of fraud is outrageous. The only conceivable purpose of these letters is harassment. This bizarre episode deserves much wider condemnation from congressional leaders.

Link.

"Wow and just imagine all the new weapons DARPA will come up with." - Devil's Advocate

2005-07-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

Scientists at The University of Manchester have discovered a new class of materials which have previously only existed in science fiction films and books.

A team of British and Russian scientists led by Professor Geim have discovered a whole family of previously unknown materials, which are one atom thick and exhibit properties which scientists had never thought possible.

Not only are they ultra-thin, but depending on circumstances they can also be ultra-strong, highly-insulating or highly-conductive, offering a wide range of unique properties for space-age engineers and designers to choose from.

Professor Andre Geim said: "This discovery opens up practically infinite possibilities for applications which people have never even thought of yet. These materials are lightweight, strong and flexible, and there is a huge choice of them. This is not only about smart gadgets. Like polymers whose pervasiveness changed our everyday life forever, one-atom-thick materials could be used in a myriad of routine applications from clothing to computers."

The materials have been created by extracting individual atomic planes from conventional bulk crystals by using a technique called 'micromechanical cleavage'. Depending on a parent crystal, their one-atom-thick counterparts can be metals, semiconductors, insulators, magnets, etc. Previously, it was thought that such thin materials could not exist in principle, but the research team have, for the first time, demonstrated that they are not only possible but fairly easy to make.

They found that the atomically thin sheets they extracted were not only stable under ambient conditions but also exhibited extremely high crystal quality, which is what gives them their unique properties.

Dr Kostya Novoselov, a key investigator in this research, added: "Probably the most important part is that our discovery is not limited to just one or two new materials. It is a whole class of new materials, thousands of them. And they have a variety of properties, allowing one to choose a material most appropriate for a particular application.

"Although some of the applications are probably decades away, I expect to see ultra-fast transistors, micromechanical devices and nano-sensors based on the discovered one-atom-thick crystals already in a few years time."

The findings are published today (18 July, 2005) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is entitled: 'Two Dimensional Atomic Crystals'. In conclusion it reads: "We have now demonstrated the existence of 2D atomic crystals and believe that, once investigated and understood, it will be possible for them to be grown in large sizes required for industrial applications."

Link.

I wonder if the US Army can use these things as a kind of third world meals on wheels

2005-07-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

Wed Jul 20, 2:03 PM ET LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists are questioning the safety of a Star Wars-style riot control ray gun due to be deployed in Iraq next year.

The Active Denial System weapon, classified as "less lethal" by the Pentagon, fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds.
The idea is people caught in the beam will rapidly try to move out of it and therefore break up the crowd.

But New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday that during tests carried out at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, participants playing the part of rioters were told to remove glasses and contact lenses to protect their eyes.

In another test they were also told to remove metal objects like coins from their clothing to avoid local hot spots developing on their skin.

"What happens if someone in a crowd is unable for whatever reason to move away from the beam," asked Neil Davison, coordinator of the non-lethal weapons research project at Britain's Bradford University.

"How do you ensure that the dose doesn't cross the threshold for permanent damage? Does the weapon cut out to prevent overexposure?," he added.

The magazine said a vehicle-mounted version of the weapon named Sheriff was scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006 and that U.S. Marines and police were both working on portable versions.

Link.

According to this site microwaves are better than helicopter fire.

"When U.S. troops are forced with an angry mob, they only have two options at their disposal, currently: the bullhorn or the M16. Last month, a U.S. helicopter fired into a group of Iraqi crowd, killing more than a dozen."

Solar power becomming more realistic

2005-07-22T11:38:00.000-07:00

"Concentrating solar electric power is on the cusp of delivering on its promise of low-cost, reliable, solar-generated electricity at a cost that is competitive with mainstream electric generation systems," said Vahan Garboushian, president of Amonix, Inc. of Torrance, Calif. "With the advent of multijunction solar cells, PV concentrator power generation at $3 per watt is imminent in the coming few years," he added.

We have seen steady progress in photovoltaic concentrator technology. We are working with advanced multijunction PV cells that are approaching 38% efficiency, and even higher is possible over time. Our goal is to install PV concentrator systems at $3 per watt, which can happen soon at production rates of 10 megawatts per year. Once that happens, higher volumes are readily achieved," Hayden, Solar Program Coordinator at APS, said.

Growth in the photovoltaic (PV) concentrator business was reflected in the conference attendance, three times that of the 2003 version. This rapid growth was attributed to recent PV concentrator installations and sales forecasts along with excitement created by new solar cell efficiencies approaching 40%. At the conference, NREL announced a new record efficiency of 37.9 percent at 10 suns, a measure of concentrated sunlight. Soon thereafter Boeing-Spectrolab, under contract to NREL and the Department of Energy, surpassed the NREL record with 39.0 percent at 236 suns announced at the European photovoltaic conference in Barcelona, Spain. The efficiency of a solar cell is the percentage of the sun's energy the device converts to electricity.

Photovoltaic (PV) concentrator units are much different than the flat photovoltaic modules sold around the world; almost 1,200 megawatts of flat PV modules were sold last year. PV concentrators come in larger module sizes, typically 20 kilowatts to 35 kilowatts each, they track the sun during the day and they are more suitable for large utility installations.

Another highlight of the conference was the announcement by Amonix Inc. of a joint venture with Spain's Guascor which will build a 10-megawatt per year assembly plant in Spain by the end of 2005. Amonix also plans to install 3 megawatts of PV concentrator systems in the southwestern U.S. while Guascor plans to install 10 megawatts of concentrator PV systems in Spain in 2006.

Full article here.

Universe fueled by super low viscosity liquid

2005-07-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

Two views of one of the first full-energy collisions between gold ions at Brookhaven Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, as captured by the Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) detector. The tracks indicate the paths taken by thousands of subatomic particles produced in the collisions as they pass through the STAR Time Projection Chamber, a large, 3-D digitial camera.

Physicists have created the state of matter thought to have filled the Universe just a few microseconds after the big bang and found it to be different from what they were expecting. Instead of a gas, it is more like a liquid. Understanding why it is a liquid should take physicists a step closer to explaining the earliest moments of our Universe.

Not just any old liquid, either. Its collective movement is rather like the way a school of fish swims 'as one' and is a sign that the fluid possesses an extremely low viscosity, making it what physicists call a perfect fluid. In fact, tentative calculations suggest its extraordinarily low viscosity makes it the most perfect fluid ever created.

Researchers had confidently believed it would be something like 'steam', consisting of free quarks and gluons. "No one predicted that it would be a liquid," said Professor John Nelson from the University of Birmingham, who heads the British involvement in the STAR Collaboration, a multinational experiment. "This aspect was totally unexpected," said Professor Nelson, "and will lead to new scientific research regarding the properties of matter at extremes of temperature and density, previously inaccessible in a laboratory."

The Birmingham contingent is funded entirely by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The new state of matter was forged in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), situated at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. By colliding the central cores of gold atoms together, head-on at almost the speed of light, the researchers created a fleeting, microscopic version of the Universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang. This included achieving a temperature of several million million degrees (about 150,000 times the temperature at the centre of the Sun). They then detected the rush of particles that this miniature 'big bang' created. That was when things started to take an unexpected turn.

Instead of the 'every-particle-for-itself, free-for-all' that is expected from a gas, the researchers saw evidence of collective movement as the hot matter, formed at RHIC, flowed out of the collision site. This indicated stronger interactions between the particles than expected, leading to the belief that the quark-gluon plasma is behaving like a liquid.

This type of experiment furthers our understanding of what happened in the instants immediately following the Big Bang, leading to a better understanding of the earliest moments of the Universe. However, the unexpected nature of this new state of matter is leaving physicists wondering if the current theoretical models can support these surprising new experimental results.

Full article here.
RHIC website here.

Update: Is Indiana Jones about to change the world as we know it?

2005-07-21T01:03:00.000-07:00

Mark August 14, 2005 on your calendar as potentially momentous. It’s one day before Ariel Sharon’s planned removal of 8,000 settlers from the Gaza strip, a dramatic event no matter the outcome.
Providing even more drama of a coincidental kind is Dr. Vendyl Jones. With the kind of credentials that make him one of the world’s most renowned experts on Qumran and the Land of Israel, Jones last month announced on Israel National Radio that he hopes to reveal the long-hidden site of the Ark of the Covenant "by August 14."

...

Dr. Vendyl Jones’ painstaking detective work pinpoints the long lost ark as being "hidden in a secret passage that runs 18 miles south of the Temple Mount into the Judean desert."

...

By Aug. 14, Jones and Company are going to drill a borehole into the chamber which they believe contains the ark, drop a pin-camera in and, hopefully reveal the find to a watching world.

Full article here.

Drugs have never seemed less rebelious

2005-07-20T00:31:00.000-07:00

'Pleasure drugs' boom on way, says think-tank
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 14/07/2005)

Mind-altering drugs could be as common as coffee within a couple of decades to boost performance at school and at work, to "unlearn" addiction and to erase memories of distressing events such as a terrorist attack, according to a government think-tank.

Society may end up realising Aldous Huxley's vision of a Brave New World in which people take a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, Soma - though the report shies away from discussing whether future governments will be tempted to encourage the use of "happy pills" for social control.

The Foresight think-tank points out that psychoactive substances have been part of society for thousands of years. It heralds the development of new recreational drugs, some of which might be less harmful than those already costing society around £13 billion annually, mostly due to crime.

"We have not reached a ceiling for recreational drug use," it said. "Psychoactive drug use may spread more across the life course and may become more common than is currently evident in middle-aged or even older age groups."

One of the team that produced the report, Drugs Futures 2025?, Prof Gerry Simpson, of Imperial College London, said: "If there is such a thing as Huxley's Soma, that really does raise crucial questions for governments around the world about how legitimately to regulate a substance like that."

Sir David King, the Prime Minister's chief scientific adviser, who led the think-tank, said: "We are on the verge of developments that could possibly move us into a world where we could take a drug to help us think faster, relax, sleep more efficiently or even subtly alter our mood to match that of our friends."

In addition to drugs that boost pleasure and sexual performance, the report raises the possibility of drugs that cause selective amnesia, for instance of a bomb attack, after the discovery that substances called beta blockers can reduce memories of stressful situations.

But the report warns that there are potential abuses of a tool that makes people forget, "examined in a number of films such as Total Recall or The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where characters are able to forget about painful relationships".

Other possibilities would be drug testing of children before they took exams to ensure that some did not cheat with cognitive enhancers, or "cogs".

Full article here.

Frog farmers fret!

2005-07-19T22:58:00.000-07:00

Plague of locusts invades France

Record numbers of the voracious insects are devouring crops

Alex Duval Smith in Paris
Sunday July 17, 2005
The Observer

In a devastating new twist to the severe drought hitting southern Europe, France is now fighting a plague of hundreds of thousands of locusts which are devouring everything from crops to flowers in village window boxes.
The worst invasion by the voracious insects is centred on Saint-Affrique in the Aveyron region where, for the first time since 1987, hundreds of thousands have hatched in the last week.

An Aveyron cattle and ewe breeder Gérard Laussel expected them to destroy his crop of lucerne which he uses to feed his livestock.

'At the beginning they seem small, insignificant insects but they grow very quickly. They eat everything that is green, leaving only stalks, and when they have finished they leave some kind of scent so the cattle do not want to graze on what is left.'

Full article here.

ticktock*...

2005-07-18T20:46:00.000-07:00

April 11, 2002 8:30 a.m.

Could a little calf born last month in Israel bring about Armageddon? The concept would have struck many people as absurd the last time such a calf was born, in 1997, and probably makes most readers laugh today. Big mistake: Never underestimate the power of religious faith to shape events, especially in the Holy Land. Especially right now.

...

To Jews who adhere to ancient tradition, whose number include religious Israeli nationalists, the long-awaited Messiah will return to become the king of Israel and high priest of a rebuilt Temple, which can only be on Temple Mount. For Christian fundamentalists, Jesus Christ's return at the height of the battle of Armageddon, in which forces of the Antichrist clash in Israel with a 200 million-man army from the East, will require a Third Temple from which the Lord will begin a millennial reign. And for Muslims, an Antichrist figure called the Dajal will be a Jew who will lead an all-encompassing war against Islam, which will culminate in the return of Jesus (as a Muslim prophet), the Kaaba, or Sacred Rock in Mecca, transporting itself to Jerusalem, and final judgment in the valley just below the Noble Sanctuary.

...

So how does the calf recently born in Israel figure into things? As Gorenberg explains, the ashes of a flawless red heifer — an extremely rare creature — were required by the ancient Hebrews to purify worshipers who went into the Temple to pray. In modern times, rabbinical law forbids Jews from setting foot on the Temple Mount, thus violating the site where the Holy of Holies dwelled, until and unless they are ritually purified. Without a perfect red heifer to sacrifice, the Third Temple cannot be built, and Moshiach — the Messiah — will not come. Writes Gorenberg, "[Israeli] government officials and military leaders could only regard the requirement for the missing heifer as a stroke of sheer good fortune preventing conflict over the Mount."

In 1996, thanks in part to a cattle-breeding program set up in Israel with the help of Texas ranchers who are fundamentalist Christians, a red heifer was born. There was immense excitement among messianists of the Israeli religious Right, and their American Christian counterparts. The world media covered it as a joke, but it wasn't funny to David Landau, columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz. He called the red heifer "a four-legged bomb" that could "set the entire region on fire." Muslim leaders worried about the red heifer too, as they would see an attempt by Jews to take over the Temple Mount as a sign of the Islamic apocalypse.

As it turned out, during the three years of waiting for the heifer to reach the ritually mandated age of sacrifice, white hairs popped out on the tip of her tail. This bovine was, alas, not divine. But now there's a successor, and rabbis who have examined her have declared her ritually acceptable (though she will not be ready for sacrifice for three years). She arrives at a time when Israel is fighting a war for survival with the Palestinians, who are almost entirely Muslim, and a time in which Islam and the West appear to be girding for battle with each other, as Islamic tradition predicts will be the state of the world before the Final Judgment.

...

The unshakable belief in particular prophetic visions — Jewish, Christian, or Islamic — makes the art of political compromise impossible when it comes to Jerusalem. Says Weber: "There's no way to negotiate these ideas. If you believe that this is in the prophetic cards, that this is history before it happens, that this is how God is going to manipulate events to bring about the final phase of human history, then you cannot negotiate land for peace, or anything else."

Put another way: You don't have to believe that a rust-colored calf could bring about the end of the world — or that 72 black-eyed virgins await the pious Islamic suicide bomber in paradise — but there are many people who do, and are prepared to act on that belief. This is a stubborn reality that eludes many of us in the modern, secular West, particularly those who work in the media, and who are therefore responsible for reporting and explaining the world to the masses.

Full article here.

Dead wife kills husband with her face!

2005-06-18T15:47:00.000-07:00

Man eats dead wife, dies choking
17/06/2005 19:44 - (SA)

Newcastle - Two KwaZulu-Natal girls have been left traumatised after seeing their father eat the flesh off their dead mother's face on Friday morning, said police.

Captain Tienkie van Vuuren said police were called to Thembalethu Village near Mkuze in the Tugela Ferry area about 03:00 on Friday after a 13-year-old girl ran to her neighbours for help.

She said when they arrived at the house they had to force their way in the house to rescue the other girl, aged seven, who had been stabbed in the head by the father.

"Inside, police found a naked Jabulani Siphethu sitting on top of his common-law wife's body, eating the flesh from her face," said Van Vuuren.

"Only the forehead was still intact. The bone was visible where the rest of the face used to be".

Siphethu was aggressive during the arrest and threatened police with the knife he was holding. He was eventually caught and taken outside.

"There, he suddenly choked and became unconscious and died. The seven-year-old girl was taken away by ambulance together with her older sister who had escaped unharmed," said Van Vuuren.

A post-mortem will on done on Siphethu and his common-law wife.

Was it Chappelle or Rock who said only white people did crazy shit like this? HA wrong we're all fucked up! Here's the link, you might also want to check out the related articles.

This just in: Banging a virgin does not cure HIV...could this explain the prevalence of AIDS in Africa?

2005-06-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

'Child sacrifices in London'
By Richard Edwards Crime Reporter, Evening Standard
16 June 2005

Boys from Africa are being murdered as human sacrifices in London churches.
They are brought into the capital to be offered up in rituals by fundamentalist Christian sects, according to a shocking report by Scotland Yard.
Followers believe that powerful spells require the deaths of "unblemished" male children.

Police believe such boys are trafficked from cities such as Kinshasa where they can be bought for a little as £10.
The report, leaked ahead of its publication next month, also cites examples of
African children being tortured and killed after being identified as "witches" by church pastors.
The 10-month study was commissioned after the death of Victoria Climbié, who was starved and beaten to death after they said she was possessed by the devil.
The aim of the Met study was to create an "open dialogue" with the African and Asian community in Newham and Hackney. In discussions with African community leaders, officers were told of examples of children being murdered because their parents or carers believe them to be possessed by evil spirits. Earlier-this month Sita Kisanga, 35, was convicted at the Old Bailey of torturing an eight-year-old girl from Angola she accused of being a witch.

....

The report was put together by an expert social worker and lawyer for the Met after talking to hundreds of people in African communities in a series of workshops. It uncovered allegations of witchcraft spells, child trafficking and HIV-positive people who believe that by having sex with a child they will be "cleansed".
An extract reads: "People who are desperate will seek out experts to cast spells for them.
"Members of the workshop stated that for a spell to be powerful it required a sacrifice involving a male child unblemished by circumcision. They allege that boy children are being trafficked into the UK for this purpose."
It adds: "A number of pastors maintain that God speaks through them and lets them know when someone is possessed.
"It is therefore their duty to deliver the child or adult from the evil spirit.

....

Last month Scotland Yard revealed it had traced just two out of 300 black boys aged four to seven reported missing from London schools in a three-month period.
The true figure for missing boys and girls is feared to be several thousand a year.
The scale of the problem emerged through the murder inquiry following the discovery of a child's torso in the Thames in September 2001. The identity of the victim, named Adam by police, is not known but his background was traced to Nigeria. It is believed he died in a ritual sacrifice.
John Azar, who helped the police on that inquiry, told Radio4's Today programme that the known cases could be "the tip of the iceberg".
Police working on the Adam case have found children are being sold to traffickers on the streets of major African cities for less than £10 and then smuggled into the UK. The children arrive in London armed with false documents and accompanied by adults who believe they will bolster their asylum claims.
Dr Richard Hoskins, a lecturer of Theology and Religious Studies at King's College, said: "We know this through work we have been doing on the Adam inquiry. These children are ripe for people to abuse. They are easy prey."

Full article here.

Re: Mmmm ass burger

2005-06-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

Go here and find out if you have a female brain or a male brain or in my case an extremely male brain. I scored 15 on the EQ test and 45 on the SQ which, according to Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, means I might have high fuctioning autism. Pffft what does he know?!

Peruvian stores of apu's semen are disappearing...is this the end of the world?

2005-06-18T13:52:00.000-07:00

Ukukus worry about glacier

Friday, June 17, 2005
By Antonio Regalado, The Wall Street Journal

QOLQEPUNKU GLACIER, Peru -- One recent moonlit night high in the Peruvian Andes, about 200 men dressed in furry cloaks and woolen masks trekked up to a glacier whose ice is said to have magical healing properties.

In the past these men, called ukukus after the word for bear in the local Quechua language, cut and hauled down large blocks of ice to share with family, friends and livestock as part of an annual Catholic pilgrimage known as El Senor de Qoyllur Rit'i that usually draws about 40,000 worshipers to a dizzying 16,000 feet above sea level.

These days, cutting ice is all but taboo. "We used to take ice, but now it's prohibited," said Darwin Apaza Ano, a broad-faced ukuku from the province of Anta.

The bear-men say their sacred glacier is disappearing. Over a period of two decades, its edge has drawn back 600 feet along the boulder-strewn slope leading to the church in the valley below, according to people here. Even compared with last year, the glacier is noticeably smaller.

That's a worrisome portent for locals who still worship snowcapped mountains as gods, or apus. It's out of concern for the apu living here, the bear-men say, that they have decided not to take any more blocks of ice.

....

The cosmological implications of the missing snow are clear to people here. According to local myth, when the snow disappears from the tops of the mountains, it will herald the end of the world. "That's what the farmers say. But I believe it, too," said Ramon Salizar Flores, a shopkeeper in the southern city of Cuzco who last made the 10-hour trip to Qoyllur Rit'i six years ago.

Qoyllur Rit'i, which means "resplendent snow" in Quechua, likely started out hundreds of years ago as a rite to the apus, said Jean-Jacques Decoster, who teaches precolonial history at the University of Cuzco, located in the onetime capital of the Inca empire. Later, in 1780 as tradition has it, Jesus appeared on the mountain in the guise of a little blond boy.

"When Spaniards had difficulty converting the populace, they invented a miracle," said Enrique Vera Farfan, a tour guide who is also a dancer in one of dozens of troupes that parade nonstop around the mountainside, accompanied by noisy brass bands.

Today Catholic and pagan traditions are fused, an effect known as syncretism. For instance, the glacial ice is deemed to be holy water, and it is also still revered as the apu's semen, good for fertilizing Pacha Mama, or Mother Earth. "It's the same thing," Mr. Vera explained between gulps of coca-leaf tea.

....

Some longtime pilgrims don't like all the commercialism. Recently, vendors were expelled from in front of the sanctuary, but they still clog the dirt path leading to the pilgrimage site. Two years ago, several members of the sanctuary's brotherhood were expelled for stealing alms.

Mr. Vera said it's no wonder that the snow is vanishing. "It's because the apu is leaving. He's moving further from this place."

Full article here.

The nature of Pollock

2005-06-17T18:10:00.000-07:00

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist),

"It is impossible to make a forgery of Jackson Pollock's work," Time magazine critic Robert Hughes claimed in 1982. It is a telling comment that gets to the heart of Pollock's authenticity as an artist." Lavender Mist about sums up his most ravishing, atmospheric painting....Pollock used the patterns caused by the separation and marbling of one enamel wet in another, the tiny black striations in the dusty pink, to produce an infinity of tones." More here.

Great article from Scientific America on Jackson Pollock and the fractals that fill his canvas.

So this is why Christians hate abortionists...

2005-06-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

The Kansas State Board of Healing Arts unanimously voted this past Saturday to revoke the medical license of abortionist Krishna Rajanna. The vote comes two months after Krishna’s “Affordable Medicine Clinic” was shut down due to unsafe conditions.
....

Howard reports that, even more disturbingly, “the female witness went on to describe of how she and other girls actually witnessed Rajanna microwave one of the aborted fetuses and stir it into his lunch.”

Full story here.

Mmmm ass burger

2005-06-14T00:56:00.000-07:00

Genius cannot exist without mental disorder, according to a study that names George Orwell, LS Lowry and Lewis Carroll among 21 artists who suffered a form of autism.

The psychiatric portrait of some of the most imaginative minds in history claims to prove the link between madness and greatness.

Beethoven, Mozart, Hans Christian Andersen and Immanuel Kant are among the musicians, writers, painters and philosophers who have been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.

Prof Michael Fitzgerald, a psychiatrist and expert in the syndrome that affects social relationships but not intellect, claims that people with Asperger's can have exceptional artistic creativity, as well as mathematical genius.

Einstein and other engineering geniuses have already been suggested as sufferers. Prof Fitzgerald claims that some of the same genes that cause Asperger's are a source of creative brilliance.

One of the characteristics of Asperger's is thought to be an inability to engage in creative play. But Prof Fitzgerald says the syndrome almost certainly drove Orwell, Lowry and Carroll to writing and painting as a form of "self-help".

"Asperger's and creativity are two sides of the same coin - you can't get one without the other," he said.

His claims are set out in The Genesis of Artistic Creativity, which is to be published later this month, and have already won support from The National Autistic Society.

Dr Judith Gould, the director of the diagnostic unit at the National Autistic Society, said yesterday: "The theory makes sense, because one of the diagnostic criteria for Asperger's is a 'patchy' ability, where some skills are better than others.

"That is greatly emphasised in geniuses."

However, Prof John Geake, a researcher into cognitive creativity attached to Oxford University and Oxford Brookes University, was not convinced.

He said: "The truth is that most highly intelligent people are very competent at life."

Prof Fitzgerald, a psychiatrist at Trinity College, Dublin, has diagnosed more than 900 people with the syndrome since he began practising in 1974. For the study, he assessed the personalities of 21 geniuses against the criteria for Asperger's, using biographies and first-person recollections. He believes that Orwell displayed the social impairment, narrow focus, repetitive behaviour and clumsiness typical of the syndrome. And Beethoven, who was "clumsy", "emotionally immature" and "had an unusually large head" also fit the criteria for Asperger's. An expert on Beethoven, Dr Barry Cooper, said last night that he barely recognised the description of the composer.

"He was unkempt because his mind was on higher things," he said. "And I have never heard him described as emotionally immature."

Link.

Canada gets shafted by pole

2005-06-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

YELLOWKNIFE, N.W.T. - Sometime in the last year, a longtime friend turned its back on Canada and was last spotted heading for Siberia.

For centuries, the magnetic North Pole was ours, a constant companion that wandered the rolling tundra and frozen seas of our Arctic.

But no more.

A Canadian scientist who recently returned from a trip to measure the Pole's current location says it has now left Canadian territory and crossed into international waters.

"I think the Pole has probably just moved past the 200-nautical-mile limit," said Larry Newitt, head of the Natural Resources Canada geomagnetic laboratory in Ottawa. "It's probably outside of Canada, technically. But we're still the closest country to it."

....

In 1904 it was measured just off the northern tip of Nunavut's King William Island by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, and since then has moved in a north to northwesterly direction at a stately 10 kilometres per year.

But in 2001, scientists discovered that it was picking up the pace, suddenly charging ahead -- and toward the edge of Canadian territory -- at more than 40 kilometres per year.

This year, bad weather prevented Newitt from reaching the actual location of the pole, and he hasn't completed the analysis of his observations. But he got close enough to make two measurements, and says it appears the pole is farther away than expected, and moving even faster than before.

"We landed at two places at around 83 North, and it certainly appears the pole is probably closer to 84 North," he said. "That means that the pole is still continuing to accelerate."

....

Curiously, the speed with which the pole moves could be related to dramatic events like the massive earthquake that caused last December's devastating tsunami. That quake was big enough to alter the shape of Earth and jar the planet into a slightly different axis of rotation. It also had enough power to jolt the molten iron that powers the magnetic field, and could be partly responsible for magnetic "jerks" that are propelling the magnetic North Pole, Newitt said.

Scientists have also been intrigued by a weakening in the pole's intensity: It has lost 10 per cent of its force in the past few centuries. That could be a sign that the poles are preparing to reverse, a phenomenon that has occurred many times in Earth's distant history, said University of Alberta geophysics professor Moritz Heimpel.

Full text here.

New vaginal dentures to help convict African rapists

2005-06-08T19:36:00.000-07:00

A rape victim once wished for teeth "where it mattered". Now a device has been designed to "bite" a rapist's penis. The patented device looks and is worn like a tampon, but it is hollow and attaches itself with tiny hooks to a man's penis during penetration.

"We have to do something to protect ourselves. While this will not prevent rape it will assist in identifying attackers and securing convictions," claims Sonette Ehlers, inventor of the device.

....

In the event of rape, the device folds itself around the rapist's penis, attaching to the skin with microscopic hooks. It is only when the rapist withdraws that he will realise the device is clamped around his penis.

"Its design will also go a long way towards lowering HIV infection as semen is contained in the device ... as well as preventing sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies," Ehlers says.

As it is impossible to remove the device from a penis without medical help, hospitals and clinics will be able to alert police when assistance is sought.

"This will rule out any possibility of the rapist's escaping arrest and speed up conviction."

If the rapist tries to remove the device, it will only embed itself further.

"He will have to be put under anaesthetic to have it removed. He will not be able to leave it as he will be unable to urinate."

Full article here.

Re: America Steals Russian lake

2005-06-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

A new study finds 125 large lakes in the Arctic have vanished as temperatures rose over the past two decades. Many other lakes have shrunk.

The lakes once sat atop permanently frozen soil called permafrost. Other studies have shown permafrost is melting around the world, causing low-lying ground to slump and rock to fall from mountains.

"We think that climate warming is thawing the permafrost," said lead researcher Laurence Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles. "It's like pulling the plug out of a bathtub. There's nothing to prevent lake water from percolating through the soil to aquifers below."
Full article here.

I guess that old Russian broad was just being paranoid.

Re: Profit Yahweh summons UFO before ABC TV camera

2005-06-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

A false prophet has recently surfaced on the internet, he goes by the name of Prophet Yahweh.
His claims include the ability to summon UFO's on commande, and he appears to do just that. What he is doing is nothing more than a parlor trick.

It is fake. Prophet Yahweh has a confederate posted about a mile away. The confederate releases a mylar balloon, or, rarely, a colored one, filled with helium. Yahweh times it so that the balloon is released as he prays using a beeper or other digital communication device. Then, when he is finished praying, Yahweh starts looking for the balloon in the sky. It takes a few minutes, and then the balloon appears high in the sky. Sightings last until the balloon reachest a height at which the air pressure outside is low enough to pop the balloon. Then the sighting is over. At times the prevailing winds of the upper atmosphere appear to propel "the craft" in a realistic fashion.

Full text here.

It seems balloons and UFO's go hand in hand.

Isn't that the plot summary for 'The Matrix'?

2005-06-04T18:06:00.000-07:00

A duplicate universe, trapped in a computer

Consortium of scientists simulates 'cube of creation'

Tim Radford, science editor
Thursday June 2, 2005
The Guardian

Scientists have recreated a vast segment of the universe inside a computer and written a brief history of time, black holes and galaxy formation.
The Millennium Simulation - the biggest exercise of its kind - required 25 million megabytes of memory. But it tracked the 14bn-year history of creation in months and now offers a tool to explore mysterious events in galaxies far away and long ago.

"It is the biggest thing we have ever done," said Carlos Frenk of the University of Durham. "It is probably the biggest thing ever in computational physics. For the first time we have a replica universe which looks just like the real one. So we can now for the first time begin to experiment with the universe.

"Unlike people who study human behaviour, who can study many humans, cosmologists have been stuck with only the one universe. Well, from today we have more than one."

The British, German, US and Canadian astrophysicists in the Virgo consortium, led by Volker Springel of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, report in Nature today that they already knew the so-called "initial conditions" of the universe.

These were imprinted in the cosmic microwave background radiation, the embers of the Big Bang, when the universe was only 400,000 years old.

In the last few years, they have been able to determine that all the stars, galaxies, black holes and their radiation add up to a trifling 5% of the universe. Around a quarter of creation is mysterious stuff called cold dark matter. The other 70% is now known to be the even more baffling "dark energy", a kind of antigravity that is pushing the universe apart.

Prof Frenk said: "We programmed the biggest computer in Europe with these ingredients and the laws of physics and we just let it compute a universe. We let it churn away - in fact we shut down all science in Germany, we excluded all German science for a month while this very large machine ground away - and at the end we got this beautiful universe, which for all intents and purposes looks like the real thing.

Full article here.

Men driving huge cars everywhere now know why their cars are so big

2005-05-28T13:34:00.000-07:00

Unborn baby boys could suffer genital abnormalities if pregnant mothers come into contact with chemicals found in a host of everyday products, a new study has shown.

Phthalates are substances used in the manufacture of thousands of products, including plastics, lubricants and solvents. They are found in a wide range of items such as cosmetics, toys, clingfilm, plastic bags, hair sprays, deodorants, nail polish and perfumes.

It has been long known that a high level of phthalates could have gender-bending effects on male animals, making them more feminine and leading to poor sperm quality and infertility. However, until now the evidence of harm to humans has been inconclusive.

The new study, led by Professor Shanna Swan, of the University of Rochester in New York, shows a highly significant relationship between human exposure to phthalates and genital effects in infants.

It found that women with the highest levels of phthalate break-down chemicals, or metabolites, in their urine were likely to give birth to children with undescended or small testicles and small penises.

Full article here

Prophet Yahweh summons UFO before ABC TV camera

2005-05-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

Yeah I think the title is pretty self explanitory haha.

See the video here

oh and you can check out his website here

Why and how are these people meeting with out any attention?

2005-05-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

BILDERBERG MEETINGS
Rottach-Egern, Germany
5–8 May 2005

On the 2005 agenda: Iran, Iraq, The Middle East, Non-Proliferation, Asia, Economic Problems, Russia, European-American relations.

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

Honorary Chairman
B, Davignon, Etienne, Vice Chairman, Suez-Tractebel

Honorary Secretary General
GB, Taylor, J. Martin, International Advisor, Goldman Sachs International

NL, Aartsen, Jozias J. van, Parliamentary Leader, Liberal Party (VVD)

PNA, Abu-Amr, Ziad, Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council; President of the Palestinian Council on Foreign Relations; Professor of Political Science, Birzeit University

D, Ackermann, Josef, Chairman, Group Executive Committee. Deutsche Bank AG

INT, Almunia Amann, Joaquin, Commissioner, European Commission

GR, Alogoskoufis, George, Minister of Economy and Finance

TR, Babacan, Ali, Minister of Economic Affairs

P, Balsemão, Francisco Pinto, Chairman and CEO, IMPRESA, S.G.P.S.; Former Prime Minister

INT, Barroso. José M. Durão, President, European Commission

S, Belfrage, Erik, Senior Vice President, SEB

I, Bernabè, Franco, Vice Chairman, Rothschild Europe

F, Beytout, Nicolas, Editor-in-Chief, Le Figaro

A, Bronner, Oscar, Publisher and Editor, Der Standard

GB, Browne, John, Group Chief Executive, BP plc

D, Burda, Hubert, Chairman of the Board of Management, Hubert Burda Media

IRL, Byrne, David, WHO Special Envoy on Global Cornmunicable Diseases; Former Commissioner, European Commission

F, Camus, Philippe, CEO, EADS

F, Castries, Henri de Chairman of the Board, AXA

E, Cebrián. Juan Luis, CEO, PRISA

USA, Collins, Timothy C., Senior Managing Director and CEO, Ripplewood Holdings, LLC

F, Collomb, Bertrand, Chairman, Lafarge

CH, Couchepin, Pascal, Head, Department of Home Affairs

GR, David, George A., Chairman, Coca-Cola H.b.c. S.A.

F, Delpech, Thérèse, Director for Strategic Affairs, Atomic Energy Commission

GR, Diamantopoulou, Anna, Member of Parliament

NL, Docters van Leeuwen, Arthur W.H., Chairman of the Executive Board, Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets

USA, Donilon, Thomas E., Partner, O'Melveny & Myers

D, Döpfner, Mathias, CEO, Axel Springer AG

DK, Eldrup, Anders, President, DONG A/S

I, Elkann, John, Vice Chairman, Fiat S.p.A.

USA, Feldstein, Martin S, President and CEO, National Bureau of Economic Research

USA, Ford, Jr., William C., Chairman and CEO, Ford Motor Company

USA, Geithner, Timothy F., President, Federal Reserve Bank of New York

TR, Gencer, Imregul, Member of the Board, Global Investment Holding

ISR, Gilady, Eival, Strategic Advisor to Prime Minister Sharon

IRL, Gleeson, Dermot, Chairman, AIB Group

USA, Graham, Donald E., Chairman and CEO, The Washington Post Company

N, Grydeland, Bjørn T., Ambassador to the EU

P, Guterres, António, Former Prime Minister; President, Socialist International

USA, Haass, Richard N., President, Council on Foreign Relations

NL, Halberstadt, Victor, Professor of Economics, Leiden University

B, Hansen, Jean-Pierre, CEO, Suez-Tractebel S.A.

A, Haselsteiner, Hans Peter, CEO, Bauholding Strabag SE (Societas Europea)

DK, Hedegaard, Connie, Minister for the Environment

USA, Holbrooke, Richard C., Vice Chairman, Perseus

INT, Hoop Scheffer, Jaap G. de Secretary General, NATO

USA, Hubbard, Allan B., Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Director of the National Economic Council

B, Huyghebaert, Jan, Chairman of the Board of Directors, KBC Group

USA, Johnson, James A., Vice Chairman, Perseus LLC

INT, Jones, James L., Supreme Allied Commander Euope, SHAPE

USA, Jordan, Jr.,Vernon E., Senior Managing Director, Lazard Frères & Co. LLC

USA, Keane, John M., President, GSI, LLC; General, US Army, Retired

GB, Kerr, John, Director, Shell, Rio Tinto, Scottish Americal Investment Trust

USA, Kissinger, Henry A., Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc.

D, Kleinfeld, Klaus, President and CEO, Siemens AG

TR, Koç, Mustafa V., Chairman, Koç Holding A.S.

D, Kopper, Hilmar, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, DaimlerChrysler AG

F, Kouchner, Bernard, Director, "Santé et développement", CNAM

USA, Kravis, Henry R., Founding Partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

USA, Kravis, Marie-Josée, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, Inc.

INT, Kroes, Neelie, Commissioner, European Commission

CH, Kudelski, André, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Kudelski Group

F, Lamy, Pascal, President, Notre Europe; Former Commissioner, European Commission

USA, Ledeen, Michael A., American Enterprise Institute

FIN, Liikanen, Erkki, Govemor and Chairman of the Board, Bank of Finland

N, Lundestad, Geir, Director, Norwegian Nobel Institute; Secretary, Norwegian Nobel Committee

USA, Luti, William J., Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs

DK, Lykketoft, Mogens, Chairman, Social Democratic Party

CDN, Manji, Irshad, Author/Founder of "Project Ijtihad"

USA, Mathews, Jessica T., President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

CDN, Mau, Bruce, Bruce Mau Design

CDN, McKenna, Frank, Ambasssador to the US

USA, Medish, Mark C., Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP

USA, Mehlman, Kenneth B., Chairman, Republican National Committee

D, Merkel, Angela, Chairman, CDU; Chairman CDU/CSU-Fraction

SVK, Miklos, Ivan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance

F, Montbrial, Thierry de, President, French Institute of International Relations (IFRI)

INT, Monti, Mario, President, Bocconi University; Former Commissioner for Competition, European Commission

CDN, Munroe-Blum, Heather, Principal and Vice Chancellor, McGill University

N, Myklebust, Egil, Chairman of the Board of Directors, SAS

D, Nass, Matthias, Deputy Editor, Die Zeit

RUS, Nemirovskaya, Elena, Founder and Director, Moscow School of Political Studies

NL, Netherlands, H.M. tihe Queen of The

PL, Olechowski, Andrzej, Leader Civic Platform

FIN, Ollila, Jorma, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Nokia Corporation

INT, Padoa-Schioppa, Tommaso, Member of the Executive Board, European Central Bank

E, Palacio, Loyola de, President, Council on Foreign Relations, Partido Popular

GR, Papandreou, George A., President, Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK)

USA, Pearl, Frank H., Chairman and CEO, Perseus, LLC

USA, Pearlstine, Norman, Editor-in-Chief, Time Inc.

FIN, Pentikäinen, Mikael, President, Sanoma Corporation

USA, Perle, Richard N., Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

D, Pflüger, Friedbert, Member of Parliament, CDU/CSU Fraktion

B, Philippe, H.R.H. Prince

CDN, Prichard, J. Robert S., President. Torstar Media Group and CEO, Torstar Corporation

IN'T, Rato y Figaredo, Rodrigo de, Managing Director, IMF

CDN, Reisman, Heather, President and CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc.

USA, Rockefeller, David, Member, JP Morgan International Council

USA, Rodin, Judith, President, The Rockefeller Foundation

E, Rodriguez Inciarte, Matias, Executive Vice Chairman, Grupo Santander

USA, Ross, Dennis B., Director, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

F, Roy, Olivier, Senior Researcher, CNRS

P, Sarmento, Nuno Morais, Former Minister of State and of Presidency; Member of Parliament

I, Scaroni, Paolo, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Enel S.p.A.

D, Schily, Otto, Minister of the Interior

A, Scholten, Rudolf, Member of the Board of Executive Directors, Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG

D, Schrempp , Jürgen E., Chairman of the Board of Management, DaimlerChrysler AG

D, Schulz, Ekkehard D., Chairman of the Executive Board, ThyssenKrupp AG

E, Sebastián Gascón, Miguel, Chief Economic Adviser to Prime Minister

ISR, Sharansky, Natan, Former Minister for Jerusalem & Diaspora Affairs

I, Siniscalco, Domenico, Minister for Economy and Finance

GB, Skidelsky, Robert, Professor of Political Economy, Warwick University

E, Spain, H.M. the Queen of

IRL, Sutherland, Peter D., Chairman, Goldman Sachs International; Chairman, BP p.1.c.

PL, Szwajcowski, Jacek, CEO, Polska Grupa Farmaceutyczna

FIN, Tiilikainen, Teija H., Director, University of Helsinki, Network for European Studies

NL, Tilmant, Michel, Chairman, ING N.V.

INT, Trichet, Jean-Claude, Governor, European Central Bank

TR, Ülsever, Cüneyt, Columnist, Hürriyet

CH, Vasella, Daniel L., Chairman and CEO, Novartis AG

NL, Veer, Jeroen van der, Chairman Committee of.Managing Directors, Royal Dutch Shell Group

USA, Vinocur, John, Senior Correspondent, International Herald Tribune

S, Wallenberg, Jacob, Chairman of the Board, Investor AB; Vice-Chairman, SEB

USA, Warner, Mark R., Governor of Virginia

GB, Weinberg, Peter, CEO, Goldman Sachs International

D, Wissmann, Matthias, Member of Parliament, CDU/CSU Fraktion

GB, Wolf, Martin H., Asscociate Editor and Economics Commentator, The Financial Times

INT/USA, Wolfensohn, James D., President, The World Bank

USA, Wolfowitz, Paul, President designate, The World Bank

USA, Zakaria, Fareed, Editor, Newsweek International

D, Zumwinkel, Klaus, Chairman of the Board of Management, Deutsche Post AG

Rapporteurs

GB, Micklethwait, R., John, United States Editor, The Economist

GB, Wooldridge, Adrian D., Foreign Correspondent, The Economist

Is Indiana Jones about to change the world as we know it?

2005-05-19T22:04:00.000-07:00

Kabbalist Blesses Jones: Now´s the Time to Find Holy Lost Ark
12:10 May 19, '05 / 10 Iyar 5765

An unnamed Kabbalist has granted blessing to famed archeologist Dr. Vendyl Jones to uncover the Holy Ark of the Covenant. Jones plans to excavate the Lost Ark by the Tisha B’Av Fast this summer.

The famed archaeologist, the inspiration for the “Indiana Jones” movie series, has spent most of his life searching for the Ark of the Covenant. The ark was the resting place of the Ten Commandments, given to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai, and was hidden just before the destruction of the First Temple.

The Talmud says the Ark is hidden in a secret passage under the Temple Mount. Jones says that the tunnel actually continues 18 miles southward, and that the Ark was brought through the tunnel to its current resting place in the Judean Desert.

Throughout the many years of his quest, Jones has been in close contact and under the tutelage of numerous Rabbis and Kabbalists. Extremely knowledgeable in Torah, Talmud and Kabbalah sources dealing with Holy Temple issues, Jones has now received permission from both known and secret Kabbalists to finally uncover the lost ark.

Dr. Jones, who divides his time between Texas and Israel, has been here since March 9th ready to finally reveal the Ark. However, he has been waiting for both permission from the mysterious Kabbalist and for project funding to come through.

Jones’ daughter Sarah converted to Judaism many years ago, and currently lives in the Shomron. She has been in touch with a great unnamed Kabbalist from whom she requested a blessing that her father merit success in finding the ark.

As recently as last month, the rabbi, who only communicates via messenger, told Jones that the time was not yet right to discover the Temple vessels.

Last Thursday, however, Dr. Jones received a communication from the rabbi reading, “The time is right.”

Full article here.

America Steals Russian lake

2005-05-19T20:16:00.000-07:00

Thu May 19, 1:15 PM ET
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian village was left baffled Thursday after its lake disappeared overnight.

NTV television showed pictures of a giant muddy hole bathed in summer sun, while fishermen from the village of Bolotnikovo looked on disconsolately.

"It is very dangerous. If a person had been in this disaster, he would have had almost no chance of survival. The trees flew downwards, under the ground," said Dmitry Zaitsev, a local Emergencies Ministry official interviewed by the channel.

Officials in Nizhegorodskaya region, on the Volga river east of Moscow, said water in the lake might have been sucked down into an underground water-course or cave system, but some villagers had more sinister explanations.

"I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us," said one old woman, as she sat on the ground outside her house.

Philosophy 101: If a monkey jacks off with a robotic arm is that still considered masterbation?

2005-05-15T16:00:00.000-07:00

Brain-controlled 'robo-arm' hope

By Michelle Roberts
BBC News health reporter, in Washington DC

The motor cortex controls movement

Scientists in the US have created a robotic arm that can be controlled by thought alone.

Developed at the University of Pittsburgh, it has a fully mobile shoulder and elbow and a gripper that works like a hand.

In early tests, monkeys had tiny probes inserted into their brains and had their limbs restrained - but were then able to manipulate the robotic arm.

The inventors believe it could help people who have lost limb function.

The mechanical arm research was described at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held this year in Washington DC.

Full article here

Full movie here just click on 'Direct 3D Robot Control - Feeding'

I am now one step closer to realizing my dream of becomming George Jetson

2005-05-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

What goes up no longer has to come down. British scientists have developed an antigravity machine that can float heavy stones, coins and lumps of metal in mid-air. Based around a powerful magnet, the device levitates objects in a similar way to how a maglev train runs above its tracks.

...

Scientists have used diamagnetism to make wood, strawberries and, famously, a living frog fly. "That force is strong enough to float things with a density similar to water, but not things with the density of rocks," Prof King said. To make their machine more powerful, the team added an oxygen and nitrogen mixture, a paramagnetic fluid. Inside the magnet, the mixture helps objects to float.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1481009,00.html

Pictures of the floating frog here

Free radicals are bad.

2005-05-07T12:28:00.000-07:00

Aging is a process we humans tend to fight every step of the way. The results of a mouse study underscore the potential of antioxidants as a tool in that battle: animals genetically modified to produce more antioxidant enzymes lived longer than control animals did. They also exhibited fewer age-related health problems overall.
The free radical theory of aging posits that substances with unpaired electrons attack the body's molecules and cause the functional decline of organs over time. Thus, antioxidants, which neutralize free radicals, should slow this deterioration. But animal models of aging designed to test the hypothesis have so far shown contradictory results.

Full article here.

Re: Ancient Greece maybe have just become less tragic

2005-05-05T13:37:00.000-07:00

01 May 2005

A newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament indicates that, as far as the Antichrist goes, theologians, scholars, heavy metal groups, and television evangelists have got the wrong number. Instead of 666, it's actually the far less ominous 616.

The new fragment from the Book of Revelation, written in ancient Greek and dating from the late third century, is part of a hoard of previously unintelligible manuscripts discovered in historic dumps outside Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Now a team of expert classicists, using new photographic techniques, are finally deciphering the original writing.

Full article here.

Where more conventional versions of the Bible give 666 as the "number of the beast," or the sign of the anti-Christ whose coming is predicted in the book's apocalyptic verses, the older version uses the Greek letters signifying 616.

"This is very early confirmation of that number, earlier than any other text we've found of that passage," Dr. Aitken said. "It's probably about 100 years before any other version."

The fragment was part of a hoard of previously illegible manuscripts discovered in an ancient garbage dump outside the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. Although the papyrus was first excavated in 1895, it was badly discoloured and damaged. Classics scholars at Oxford University were only recently able to read it using new advanced imaging techniques.

Full article here.

Never thought I'd post an article from the Conservative Voice and yet here i am doing just that.

2005-05-03T21:48:00.000-07:00

On the evening of Saturday April 2, 2005, after receiving the Rite of Extreme Unction, Pope John Paul II passed away. At this time his chamberlain would have gone to the papal hospital bed and asked the Bishop of Rome a question, “Are you dead?” There would be no reply from the Pope. The chamberlain would then pick up a silver hammer and strike the Pope on the head and repeat his question, “Are you dead?” Again there would be no reply. The chamberlain would then thrice call out the Pope’s baptismal name. He would then declare the Pope to be dead.

This is the way the Church has determined papal deaths for centuries. This is the way of the world’s oldest monarchy.

Full article here

interesting viewpoints on the papacy, although not suprising considering that conservatives are en masse protestant.

Has-been, never-was or is he just a head of his time?

2005-05-02T16:44:00.000-07:00

Frank Stella, Bandshell (Model), 1999, Fiberglass, 12' x 14'6" x 15'. All images courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.

At the end of his workday, I met with Frank Stella in his studio/factory. We sat—he in a chaise and me in an armchair—in the middle of his cavernous second floor. There in the ever dimming late-afternoon light, surrounded by his newest works—comparatively small to mid-sized painted wall reliefs and large-scale collages of computer generated images—we spoke of his views and attitude toward his work, both past and present. What emerges is a portrait of an artist who, for 40 years, has aggressively worked to maintain and reinvigorate abstract painting. What this has meant for Stella is that not only has he expanded upon his own historicized work of the late 50s through the 70s—work that turned abstract painting into 'a thing in the world' rather than pictures or signs of thoughts or emotions—but that he also opened for himself a new conceptual and visual space. In recent years this has led him to use digital media's ability to abstract, reproduce and concretize the ephemeral and the temporal, transforming smoke into phantasmagoric images and forms. These virtual and schematic elements he pictorially combines into intense optical fields ordered by their materiality and their sensuousness, or he makes them into 3-D elements for his wall reliefs and sculptures. In the last two decades, his commitment to literal rather than pictorial space has lead Stella to an involvement with not only sculpture but architecture.

Full interview here.

CAT FIGHT!!!

2005-05-01T20:58:00.000-07:00

The North's calls for more aid, coupled with direct talks with the US, have so far been unsuccessful. It has also demanded an apology from the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, for calling it an "outpost of tyranny" this year.
Last Thursday George Bush labelled the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, a "dangerous person" and a "tyrant".
A day later the official North Korean news agency quoted the North Korean foreign ministry as calling Mr Bush a "hooligan, bereft of any personality as a human being, to say nothing of stature as president of a country. He is a half-baked man in terms of morality, and a philistine whom we can never deal with."

Oh yeah North Korea is launching missles into the Sea of Japan and planning underground nuclear bomb tests, more here.

Re: Well atleast they're not using their army to institute regime change.

2005-04-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Revolution

February 20, 2005

...

There was another critical ingredient, according to Russian political scientist, Sergei Markov. “The United States and European countries spent billions of dollars preparing this Orange Revolution. It happened not during the half of the year, but approximately the last ten years, and not only governmental funds but a lot of private funds, too.”

Conspiracy? Popular revolution? Carol Off goes behind the scenes of these three revolutions to find out.

Great documentary on the recent revolution in the Ukraine. CBC page here.

Dan Brown a plagiariser?

2005-04-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

An ancient document likened to something which could have been featured in best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code was being analysed at a top auction house for its significance today.

The manuscript, believed to date from the 17th century, contains biographical details of every person in the Bible.

It was unearthed in the depths of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth where it had been kept in storage for Llandovery College, an independent school near the Brecon Beacons. It was among about half of the school’s archive of books which were taken to the library around 50 years ago.

Full article http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=4474894

Re: Long live Pope Benedict XVI...

2005-04-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

ROME (Reuters)

...

St. Malachy was said to have had a vision during a trip to Rome around 1139 of the remaining 112 Popes. The new pope would be number 111 on that list, and is described in a text attributed to St. Malachy as the "Glory of the Olive."

To connect Benedict, a pale, bookish German, to anything olive takes some imagination. But Malachy-watchers point to the choice of the name Benedict -- an allusion to the Order of Saint Benedict, a branch of which is known as the Olivetans.

"When (he) chose the name Benedict XVI, this was seen as fulfilling the prophecy for this pope," wrote one entry on www.wikipedia.org.

Benedict said that he chose the name partly in honor of Pope Benedict XV (1914-1922), calling him a "courageous prophet of peace." On Wednesday, Benedict dedicated his papacy to "the service of reconciliation and harmony between peoples."

Full text here.

File this one under W for WTF?!

2005-04-25T00:32:00.000-07:00

BERLIN (AFP) - Hundreds of toads have met a bizarre and sinister end in Germany in recent days, it was reported: they exploded.

According to reports from animal welfare workers and veterinarians as many as a thousand of the amphibians have perished after their bodies swelled to bursting point and their entrails were propelled for up to a metre (three feet).

It is like "a science fiction film", according to Werner Smolnik of a nature protection society in the northern city of Hamburg, where the phenomenon of the exploding toad has been observed.

More here.

Well atleast they're not using their army to institute regime change.

2005-04-23T11:26:00.000-07:00

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.

Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html

CHOO CHOO All abord the globalization train!
Now I know that the governments that were "revolutionized" were corrupt but aren't all governments? I mean if corruption is reason enough to blatantly influence a country's elections I suppose anyone with deep pockets can install a government. I wonder what kind of influence that would buy you? Mmmmm don't you just love the smell of democracy (capitalism) in the morning?

Corruption is bad but since that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon the next best thing is to have the greedy and crooked compete against eachother and thus hold one and other down somewhat.

George Soros the ultimate consumer?

2005-04-23T10:48:00.000-07:00

31 March, 2004
The group [Bratstvo] accused Mr Soros of trying to repeat in Ukraine the Georgia-type "velvet revolution" of last November.

Some critics have suggested that Mr Soros' Open Society Institute played a role in the ouster of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, who was forced resigned amid mass public protests.

But Mr Soros denied such claims.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3588115.stm

3/31/2004
After landing in the Crimea, George Soros said he was surprised that Ukrainian authorities did not give him a warm welcome. He said that he was not going to make a revolution, like in Georgia, he was just promoting the idea of free, honest and fair presidential elections in the Ukraine. The official purpose of his trip is attending the conference "Human Rights at Elections" where more than one hundred human rights organizations participate.

A week ago the generous philanthropist said that he was ready to pay salaries to the entire Georgian government under the excuse of eradicating corruption in that country. Probably, George Soros came to Ukraine to learn if he could support financially Ukrainian government as well.

By visiting Ukraine, George Soros gave the start to the presidential election campaign in this country. Soros and the politicians close to him demonstrated their intention to conduct one more "velvet revolution". Ukrainian authorities frustrated the oligarch a little by ruining his expensive suit. Russia is the next to act. If Russia keeps silence, "velvet revolution" in Ukraine is inevitable. We can have one more "velvet state" on our border, and its government will get their salaries from Soros.

http://english.pravda.ru/world/20/92/370/12396_Ukraine.html

It's amazing to see how different two sides to one story can be.

Ok so I've finally found a rational explanation for those voices in my head.

2005-04-22T22:17:00.000-07:00

Elwood "Woody" Norris pointed a metal frequency emitter at one of perhaps 30 people who had come to see his invention. The emitter — an aluminum square — was hooked up by a wire to a CD player. Norris switched on the CD player.

"There's no speaker, but when I point this pad at you, you will hear the waterfall," said the 63-year-old Californian.

And one by one, each person in the audience did, and smiled widely.

Norris' HyperSonic Sound system has won him an award coveted by inventors — the $500,000 annual Lemelson-MIT Prize. It works by sending a focused beam of sound above the range of human hearing. When it lands on you, it seems like sound is coming from inside your head.
Full article here

This article explains those things I see out of the corner of my eye.

Professor Susumu Tachi of Tokyo University has made a coat that you can see through just like Harry Potter's invisibility cloak.

The cloak is covered with tiny light-reflective beads. It appears to be transparent as it's fitted with cameras which project what is in front of the wearer onto the back of the cloak, and vice versa.

MS sufferer's get reason to celebrate 4/20

2005-04-20T18:57:00.000-07:00

Canada has become the first country in the world to approve the sale of a cannabis-based prescription painkiller.

Cannabis sativa L. has won approval from Health Canada regulators for treatment of a severe form of pain common among sufferers of multiple sclerosis, but it may also find favour with those with nerve pain related to conditions ranging from shingles to cancer.

Full article here.

Long live Pope Benedict XVI...

2005-04-19T14:56:00.000-07:00

Interesting prophecy if it's not a fake.

The prevailing view today is that they are elaborate forgeries, probably perpretrated by a school of Jesuits in the 1600s. This is based on the clear relation of the mottos to the various popes until that period, and the need to find oblique references (such as the motto of the Pope's home diocese) to make the particular motto fit the particular pope. The inclusion of anti-popes would also appear to militate against the authenticity of the prophecies.

....

The most famous and best known prophecies about the popes are those attributed to St. Malachy. In 1139 he went to Rome to give an account of the affairs of his diocese to the pope, Innocent II, who promised him two palliums for the metropolitan Sees of Armagh and Cashel. While at Rome, he received (according to the Abbé Cucherat) the strange vision of the future wherein was unfolded before his mind the long list of illustrious pontiffs who were to rule the Church until the end of time. The same author tells us that St. Malachy gave his manuscript to Innocent II to console him in the midst of his tribulations, and that the document remained unknown in the Roman Archives until its discovery in 1590 (Cucherat, "Proph. de la succession des papes", ch. xv). They were first published by Arnold de Wyon, and ever since there has been much discussion as to whether they are genuine predictions of St. Malachy or forgeries. The silence of 400 years on the part of so many learned authors who had written about the popes, and the silence of St. Bernard especially, who wrote the "Life of St. Malachy", is a strong argument against their authenticity, but it is not conclusive if we adopt Cucherat's theory that they were hidden in the Archives during those 400 years.

....

266 John Paul II (1978-2005) 110 De labore Solis
(of the eclipse of the sun, or from the labour of the sun)
Hist.: Karol Wojtyla was born on May 18, 1920 during a solar eclipse. He also comes from behind the former Iron Curtain (the East, where the Sun rises). He might also be seen to be the fruit of the intercession of the Woman Clothed with the Sun labouring in Revelation 12 (because of his devotion to the Virgin Mary). His Funeral occurred on 8 April, 2005 when there was a solar eclipse visible in the Americas.

267 ??? 111 Gloria olivæ
The Benedictine order traditionally said this Pope would come from their order.

268 ???
In persecutione extrema S.R.E. sedebit Petrus Romanus, qui pascet oves in multis tribulationibus: quibus transactis civitas septicollis diruetur, & Judex tremêdus judicabit populum suum. Finis.
(In extreme persecution, the seat of the Holy Roman Church will be occupied by Peter the Roman, who will feed the sheep through many tribulations, at the term of which the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the formidable Judge will judge his people. The End.)

Full text here.

This guy is 78, John Paul III was 83 when he died. How long do they think this guy is going to be around for?

"Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face!"

2005-04-16T21:42:00.000-07:00

Great interview with Gore Vidal on 'the Undoing of America'.

City Pages: I'll start with the broadest of questions: Why are we in Iraq, and what are our prospects there at this point?
Gore Vidal: Well, let us say that the old American republic is well and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we're in uncharted territory. We're governed by public relations. Very little information gets to the people, thanks to the corruption and/or ineptitude of the media. Just look at this bankruptcy thing that went through--everybody in debt to credit cards, which is apparently 90 percent of the country, is in deep trouble. So the people are uninformed about what's being done in their name.

And that's really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat.

Full interview here

Ancient Greece maybe have just become less tragic

2005-04-16T21:38:00.000-07:00

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

Full article here

A call for a return to Upper Canada

2005-04-15T15:19:00.000-07:00



What do the Quebecois have to motivate them to sparate? Is it that they have a different language? Ha that's nothing compared to $23 000 000 000 and I'm sure Quebec would agree with me considering how they've reacted to the government's misappropriation

of a few million in realtion to the sponsorship scandal.

Ottawa is in danger of “killing the golden goose” by running a huge operating surplus while leaving Ontario to carry an increasingly heavy fiscal burden, a new report said Friday.

According to CIBC World Markets, the $23-billion federal operating surplus – the difference between what Ottawa collects in the province and what it gives back – is 10 times what it was a decade ago.

Complete Globe and Mail article here

special kind of stupid

2005-04-12T22:41:00.000-07:00

Canadian authorities may have helped avert a possible global flu pandemic by discovering that laboratories around the world had been sent mislabeled samples of an influenza virus judged to be a serious candidate to spark the next pandemic.

Globe and Mail article here

The flu testing kits were sent to some 3700 labs between October 2004 and February 2005 by the College of American Pathologists (CAP), a professional body which helps pathology laboratories improve their accuracy, by sending them unidentified samples of various germs to identify.

The CAP kits - prepared by private contractor Meridian Bioscience in Cincinnati, US - were to contain a particular strain of influenza A - the viral family that causes most flu worldwide. But instead of choosing a strain from the hundreds of recently circulating influenza A viruses, the firm chose the 1957 pandemic strain.

New Scientist article here

It's a good thing Canada still has some microbiologists.

MMMMMarburg!

2005-04-09T21:51:00.000-07:00

Nature Magazine, in its February 24 issue, reported that Henry Niman, a biologist with Recombinomics, last November was examining flu virus gene sequences that were placed in GenBank, a public database in New Mexico run by the World Health Organization. Niman found a strain of human flu virus that was created in 1940 in a London lab by scientists who were experimenting with the virus that had caused the flu pandemic of 1918. The problem is that this mutated human flu virus was placed in GenBank by researchers at Chungnam National University Daejon, South Korea. It had been obtained from a pig! This flu gene sequence doesn’t exist in nature. It had to be artificially implanted into pigs.

Full article here

A few scattered reports appeared in the Boston Globe in January 2003 that Boston University Medical Centre plans to build a $1.6 billion biological weapons research facility in the city centre. In February, a proposal went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID), the federal institution charged with developing ‘centres of excellence’ in biological defence research. These Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4) facilities - designed for research on the most dangerous pathogens, such as Ebola virus, for which there are no known cures or treatments – are the centrepieces of the Bush administration’s strategy to counter bio-terrorism.

...

There is also a danger that researchers will be trained in precisely the techniques needed for bio-terrorism. The post-September 11 anthrax attacks have been conclusively traced to the federal bio-defence laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland, according to Peter Shorrett and others.

Full article here

List of suspicious deaths of microbiologists here

I don't know what this all means but it sure raises alot of questions. It might be time to invest in Roche (makers of Tamiflu).

sniffsniff* some one reeks of desparation

2005-04-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

For the past year or so the US has been having big trouble keeping up recruiting people to go to Iraq, seems poor people don't want to go to fight terrorists and liberate Iraqis anymore. So to fill in the gaps the US has been using something called the 'stop-loss' programme, which allows the army to extend periods of enlistment.

Sgt. Emiliano Santiago signed up for the National Guard when he was 18 and still in high school. He served for eight years and three weeks before his enlistment was to expire he was told his enlistment was being extended 27 years to 2031.

Here is an article from the San Fransico Chronical about Santiago's appeals to federal court.

Maybe this is why Toronto is so fucked up

2005-04-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

This kind of shit makes me wonder what else we've been conned into becuase of our blind faith in scientists and anyone with a couple letters after their name.

This is a segment from the second part of a two part Toronto Star series from May 2, 1999 (the first part can be read here and the second can be read here).

In 1973, Dr. Richard Foulkes, then consultant to the British Columbia health minister, recommended mandatory fluoridation. It never happened, but almost 20 years later, he examined dental records and discovered that the teeth of children from non-fluoridated areas were as healthy as those of children where fluoride was added to water.

Says Foulkes today: "A child's brain is vulnerable to damage from fluoride even before birth and the result can be lowered IQ ... Fluoride in drinking water may react with aluminum, to cause Alzheimer's disease."
Over 1, 100 scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency denounced fluoridation while their employer, the EPA, continued to support it. Former EPA scientist Dr. Robert Caxton, speaking on CBC TVs Marketplace in 1992, called fluoridation "the greatest case of scientific fraud of this century, if not of all time.
Very few countries fluoridate. Several, such as Sweden, Denmark and Holland, have banned fluoride. Vancouver and Montreal never bought into fluoridation. (Limeback's research shows that Torontonians have double the fluoride build-up in their hip bones as Montrealers.)

2005-03-30T21:40:00.000-08:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Who needs voters any more?

2005-03-30T20:35:00.000-08:00

It amazes me how some one can steal two presidential elections in a row and get away with it. Makes you wonder how fair the Iraqi elections were or any election the US is involved with for that matter. This is why people around the world hate Americians: their own country is beyond fucked up and the majority of them think they know what's best for everyone else. Open your eyes and fix your home first before you start dispensing advice. It's disturbing to see 250 000 000 people (thinking they are living in the world's model of democracy) get played like a fiddle. Is this what the people of the Middle East have to look forward to?

The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm

In mid-February, Black Box Voting, together with computer experts and videographers, under the supervision of appropriate officials, proved that a real Diebold system can be hacked.

This was not theoretical or a "potential" vulnerability. Votes were hacked on a real system in a real location using the actual setup used on Election Day, Nov. 2, 2004.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

donations made by Diebold employees to GW
http://www.solarbus.org/election/articles/0330-diebold-bush.shtml

statistical analysis of Exit poll discrepancies done by Univerisity of Pennsylvania stating odds of the large difference in actual election results and exit polls in three major battleground states (Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania) are 662 000 to 1.
http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf/Documents/ExitPoll.pdf

"You're terminated, fucker." Sarah Conner

2005-03-30T16:11:00.000-08:00

I'm sure most Canadians will over look this issue because we haven't been told it's newsworthy. But the fact that this seems to be a non-issue for the vast majority of Canadians raises many questions like: why hasn't the Canadian media touched this story?

why was Canada attempting to quitely do the bidding of huge US based multi-nationals like Monsanto?

Is this a favour to the US who, hopefully by now, everyone knows is run by lobbyists?

With the global image of the US already so tarnished, the US is doing a global PR campaign, is having Canada table this their way around doing further damage?

Clearly companies like Monsanto would benifit tremendiously from the legalization of terminator seeds, so what's in it for Canada that we were pushing this at the UN?

Here's a good overview article on the subject there's lots more out there worth reading as well.

"A recent Canadian plan to do the bidding of huge transnational companies pushing bio-tech seeds -- thereby cynically abandoning millions of peasant farmers around the world -- is a case in point. The seeds in question are called terminator seeds and Canadian effort to get them approved by a UN committee has been described as sleazy, and underhanded."

http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20050324171832509

April 4th, 1984

2005-03-24T12:03:00.000-08:00

For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up.

266	John Paul II (1978-2005)	110	De labore Solis (of the eclipse of the sun, or from the labour of the sun) Hist.: Karol Wojtyla was born on May 18, 1920 during a solar eclipse. He also comes from behind the former Iron Curtain (the East, where the Sun rises). He might also be seen to be the fruit of the intercession of the Woman Clothed with the Sun labouring in Revelation 12 (because of his devotion to the Virgin Mary). His Funeral occurred on 8 April, 2005 when there was a solar eclipse visible in the Americas.
267	???	111	Gloria olivæ The Benedictine order traditionally said this Pope would come from their order.
268	???		In persecutione extrema S.R.E. sedebit Petrus Romanus, qui pascet oves in multis tribulationibus: quibus transactis civitas septicollis diruetur, & Judex tremêdus judicabit populum suum. Finis. (In extreme persecution, the seat of the Holy Roman Church will be occupied by Peter the Roman, who will feed the sheep through many tribulations, at the term of which the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the formidable Judge will judge his people. The End.)

Winston Smith's Diary

People are weird

oh fuck

UPDATE: Re: America Steals Russian lake

North Bay inventor creates 'God Light', cures cancer too!

This is why Bob Geldof sucks balls

Is this where science and spirtuality meet?

Ebola Swine flu?!

NYC doing drug trials with orphans... I think I'm going to be sick

The solar system just got a little bigger

Japan planning to dishonour Blue Gene

Bono and Geldof can't see the trees for the forrest

Oh sasquatch why won't you let us put you in a zoo?

White liiiiiines goin' through my miiiiind

No wonder men have issues with comitment

How can Americans vote these people into office?

"Wow and just imagine all the new weapons DARPA will come up with." - Devil's Advocate

I wonder if the US Army can use these things as a kind of third world meals on wheels

Solar power becomming more realistic

Universe fueled by super low viscosity liquid

Update: Is Indiana Jones about to change the world as we know it?

Drugs have never seemed less rebelious

Frog farmers fret!

*tick*tock*...

Dead wife kills husband with her face!

This just in: Banging a virgin does not cure HIV...could this explain the prevalence of AIDS in Africa?

Re: Mmmm ass burger

Peruvian stores of apu's semen are disappearing...is this the end of the world?

Ukukus worry about glacier

The nature of Pollock

So this is why Christians hate abortionists...

Mmmm ass burger

Canada gets shafted by pole

New vaginal dentures to help convict African rapists

Re: America Steals Russian lake

Re: Profit Yahweh summons UFO before ABC TV camera

Isn't that the plot summary for 'The Matrix'?

Men driving huge cars everywhere now know why their cars are so big

Prophet Yahweh summons UFO before ABC TV camera

Why and how are these people meeting with out any attention?

Is Indiana Jones about to change the world as we know it?

America Steals Russian lake

Philosophy 101: If a monkey jacks off with a robotic arm is that still considered masterbation?

I am now one step closer to realizing my dream of becomming George Jetson

Free radicals are bad.

Re: Ancient Greece maybe have just become less tragic

Never thought I'd post an article from the Conservative Voice and yet here i am doing just that.

Has-been, never-was or is he just a head of his time?

CAT FIGHT!!!

Re: Well atleast they're not using their army to institute regime change.

Dan Brown a plagiariser?

Re: Long live Pope Benedict XVI...

File this one under W for WTF?!

Well atleast they're not using their army to institute regime change.

George Soros the ultimate consumer?

Ok so I've finally found a rational explanation for those voices in my head.

MS sufferer's get reason to celebrate 4/20

Long live Pope Benedict XVI...

"Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face!"

Ancient Greece maybe have just become less tragic

A call for a return to Upper Canada

special kind of stupid

MMMMMarburg!

*sniff*sniff* some one reeks of desparation

Maybe this is why Toronto is so fucked up

Who needs voters any more?

"You're terminated, fucker." Sarah Conner

April 4th, 1984

ticktock*...

sniffsniff* some one reeks of desparation