Ghost in your Genes – PBS – NOVA

May 22nd, 2008

– I watched a PBS NOVA special tonight entitled, “Ghost in your Genes“. The NOVA series is always a favorite with us and this was no exception.

– It was about the ‘Epigenome’. The word means, ‘above the genome’. As they explained, the way to think about this is that the genome is like the computer’s hardware and the Epigenome is like the software, above, that tells the hardware/genome what to do. This wasn’t particularly new to me as I’ve been following the developments these last few years as biologists have been discovering the RNA control systems that coexists and perhaps even preceded the DNA systems within our genetics.

– What was new and scary was the idea that what happens in one generation can effect the health outcomes in another generation. They had one study where they connected whether the human grandparents had experienced famine during critical times in their development and how those events in the lives of the grandparents had affected the health of their grandchildren.

– They showed how exposure to pesticides on one generation of rats could produce effects in the next four generations of their offspring.

– I couldn’t help but think about the many thousands of untested chemicals that we humans have unleashed on ourselves and the biosphere.

– They said that if someone chooses to smoke of drink, they used to be able to say, “It’s my body, I can take the risk if I want.” But now, it may be revealed that one’s actions can reverberate down through generations of your progeny.

– I also remembered a science fiction story I’d read within the last few years wherein human fertility in the future has dropped so far that only one couple in a thousand can create a viable child. In that world, humanity is literally wasting away off the planet as old age captures the vast majority of the population.

– It’s happening to the frogs and other amphibians. Something is happening to the bees. Why do we think we’re going to be immune to the chemical havoc we’re unleashing into the biosphere.

– All of this makes me think New Zealand may not be far enough to run. Maybe the Falkland Islands would be a better choice for those who want to avoid death by chemistry.

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Former Prosecutor: ISP Content Filtering Might be a ‘Five Year Felony’

May 22nd, 2008

– If you don’t know what ‘Net Neutrality’ is then this might be a good place to tune in. For an introduction, follow this link: ➡Net Neutrality

– I’ve written/posted several times on this subject. Follow these links to see my previous posts on this: ➡ ➡ ➡ ➡

– This issue is just going to get hotter and hotter as the corporations try to capture the Internet for their own monetary profit and political power. All the other media have been co-opted; newspapers, magazines, radio, T.V. The Internet is the only free media left.

– Watch this space (because it could vanish…). Or, as Joni Mitchell says in her song, “You don’t know what you got, ’til it’s gone.”

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NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — Internet service providers that monitor their networks for copyright infringement or bandwidth hogs may be committing felonies by breaking federal wiretapping laws, a panel said Thursday.

University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm, a former federal computer crimes prosecutor, argues that ISPs such as Comcast, AT&T and Charter Communications that are or are contemplating ways to throttle bandwidth, police for copyright violations and serve targeted ads by examining their customers’ internet packets are putting themselves in criminal and civil jeopardy.

“These ISPs are getting close to the line of illegality and may be violating the law,” Ohm told conference goers at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference Thursday.

Charter’s proposed test of a system that eavesdrops on the URLs its customers visit, in order to serve them targeted ads, has already spurred a powerful Congressman to question whether the scheme would violate the Cable Act. For its part, Comcast’s heavy-handed throttling of peer-to-peer sharing by sending fake stop messages to its customers has the Federal Communications Commission holding hand-wringing public hearings over whether it should ban the practice as being inconsistent with its open network principles.

More… ➡

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Indiana Man Operates Oil Well in Backyard, Producing Three Barrels of Crude a Day

May 22nd, 2008

SELMA, Ind. —  It’s just a drop in the global oil bucket, but an eastern Indiana man is operating an oil well in his backyard in an effort to capitalize on soaring crude prices.

Greg Losh’s rig produces three barrels of crude oil a day, though he told FOX News that he hasn’t started selling it yet. For now, he and his partners are keeping it in storage containers.

He declined to say how much oil they’ve collected in the two weeks they’ve been pumping.

But as oil is going for about $127 a barrel on the international market, three daily would yield just under $400 a day for Losh on the global spot market — or 1/100,000 of the daily production increase the Saudis agreed to earlier this month.

More… ➡

 

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Imbalances of Power

May 21st, 2008

by Thomas Friedman – New York Times

It is hard to remember a time when more shifts in the global balance of power are happening at once — with so few in America’s favor.

There has been much debate in this campaign about which of our enemies the next US president should deign to talk to. The real story, the next president may discover, though, is how few countries are waiting around for us to call. It is hard to remember a time when more shifts in the global balance of power are happening at once — with so few in America’s favor.

Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications — the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy.

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break (more…) than ask the American people to drive 55 miles an hour, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from, what he called, our “addiction to oil.”

The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the US economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.

If this huge transfer of wealth to the petro-authoritarians continues, power will follow. According to Congressional testimony Wednesday by the energy expert Gal Luft, with oil at $200 a barrel, OPEC could “potentially buy Bank of America in one month worth of production, Apple computers in a week and General Motors in just 3 days.”

More… ➡

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Afghan student in torture claim

May 20th, 2008

– I wrote about this case previously back on February 1st, 2008.   I said then, and remind you now, that this is the government we (the US) put into power and are supporting in Afghanistan.

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An Afghan student journalist who was sentenced to death for blasphemy has told an appeals court that he confessed after being tortured.

Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh was convicted in January of insulting Islam.

But at the appeals court in Kabul the 24-year-old insisted he was innocent of all the charges.

He said he was tortured into confessing that he had disrupted university classes by asking questions about women’s rights under Islam.

He was also convicted of distributing an article on the same subject, and adding three additional paragraphs.

He told the crowded, hour-long appeal hearing: “As a Muslim … I never allow myself to do such a thing. These are totally lies.”

Kambakhsh’s death sentence was handed down during a closed-door trial, which drew condemnation from parts of the international community.

More… ➡

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Why Grassroots Initiatives Can’t Fix Climate Change

May 20th, 2008

A grassroots approach alone won’t make the earth stop warming

by the Editors (Scientific American magazine)

Have you heard enough already about global warming? It’s so … last year’s news! Plenty of people are “doing something” about it. Becoming carbon-neutral has gone as mainstream as Girl Scout cookies; help is on the way. Can we move on, please?

Unfortunately not. For all the consciousness-raising value of grassroots initiatives,  the world is still far from squarely facing up to the issues. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama promise on their Web sites to reduce carbon emissions to just 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2050—a laudable goal. But because what matters is the load of greenhouse gases in the entire atmosphere, reaching those numbers would be hard, to say the least, for the U.S. to do alone. John McCain’s Web site simply offers “commonsense approaches to limit carbon emissions by harnessing market forces that will … see to it that … all nations do their rightful share.”

If the candidates’ statements—perhaps out of political necessity—are short on specifics, the reason is partly that much of the electorate still finds it hard to grasp the size and urgency of the problem. Like the naive passengers on board an ocean liner, who lean carelessly over the rail as their ship drifts into an iceberg, most of us are oblivious to the magnitude of the impending disaster. The separation closes too slowly for us to appreciate the force of the coming crunch.

More… ➡

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NEW ELEMENT DISCOVERED

May 20th, 2008

Government Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to  science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant  neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2- 6 years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause  more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

– research thanks to Gertraude K. 

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Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause

May 17th, 2008

– One would hope that after all the years of racial strife in the U.S. that we might be beyond stories such as this.   But, alas, it isn’t so.

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Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana’s primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.

Here’s the worst: In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into “a horrible response,” as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.

“The first person I encountered was like, ‘I’ll never vote for a black person,’ ” recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. “People just weren’t receptive.”

For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

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West told to brace for flood of refugees

May 17th, 2008

As many as a billion people could lose their homes by 2050 because of the devastating impact of global warming, scientists and political leaders have been told.

Delegates at a climate change conference hosted by a top British think tank heard last night that the steady rise in temperatures around the planet could trigger mass migration on unprecedented levels.

Hundreds of millions could be forced to move because of water shortages and crop failures in most of Africa, as well as in central and southern Asia and South America, the conference in London was told. There could also be an effect on levels of starvation and on food prices as agriculture struggles to cope with growing demand in increasingly arid conditions.

Rising sea levels could also cause havoc, and coastal communities in southern Asia, the Far East, the south Pacific islands and the Caribbean could be submerged.

North and west Africans could head towards Europe, and the southern border of the United States could come under renewed pressure from Central America.

More… ➡

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Nuclear Fuel Recycling: More Trouble Than It’s Worth

May 17th, 2008

Plans are afoot to reuse spent reactor fuel in the U.S. But the advantages of the scheme pale in comparison with its dangers

Although a dozen years have elapsed since any new nuclear power reactor has come online in the U.S., there are now stirrings of a nuclear renaissance. The incentives are certainly in place: the costs of natural gas and oil have skyrocketed; the public increasingly objects to the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels; and the federal government has offered up to $8 billion in subsidies and insurance against delays in licensing (with new laws to streamline the process) and $18.5 billion in loan guarantees. What more could the moribund nuclear power industry possibly want?

Just one thing: a place to ship its used reactor fuel. Indeed, the lack of a disposal site remains a dark cloud hanging over the entire enterprise. The projected opening of a federal waste storage repository in Yucca Mountain in Nevada (now anticipated for 2017 at the earliest) has already slipped by two decades, and the cooling pools holding spent fuel at the nation’s nuclear power plants are running out of space.

Most nuclear utilities are therefore beginning to store older spent fuel on dry ground in huge casks, each typically containing 10 tons of waste. Every year a 1,000-megawatt reactor discharges enough fuel to fill two of these casks, each costing about $1 million. But that is not all the industry is doing. U.S. nuclear utilities are suing the federal government, because they would not have incurred such expenses had the U.S. Department of Energy opened the Yucca Mountain repository in 1998 as originally planned. As a result, the government is paying for the casks and associated infrastructure and operations—a bill that is running about $300 million a year.

More… ➡

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