BBC: Ant mega-colony takes over world 

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another.

The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.What’s more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.

Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops.

The Baloney Detection Kit 

NASA requests help with von Braun’s notes 

“NASA is soliciting ideas from the public on how best to catalog and digitize the collected notes of Wernher von Braun. ‘We’re looking for creative ways to get it out to the public,’ said project manager Jason Crusan. ‘We don’t always do the best with putting out large sets of data like this.’ The PDF notes are those of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the first director of NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and are typed with copious hand written notes in the margin. According to the official request for information, NASA needs ideas on what format to use (PDF), how to index the notes and how to create a useful database. The unique nature and historical value of the data, literally discovered in boxes six months ago, is what motivated NASA to ask the public for ideas.”

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman 

Well worth a read. Money quote:

Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?

Left-handers ‘think’ more quickly 

Left-handed people can think quicker when carrying out tasks such as playing computer games or playing sport, say Australian researchers. Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, a study in Neuropsychology shows.The fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli. Experts said left-handers tended to use both sides of the brain more easily. Study leader Dr Nick Cherbuin from the Australian National University measured transfer time between the two sides of the brain by measuring reaction times to white dots flashed to the left and right of a fixed cross.

Ocean hidden inside Saturn’s moon 

Astronomers have found the strongest evidence yet for an ocean beneath the icy shell of Saturn’s Enceladus, suggesting it could join the exclusive club of watery moons in our solar system.

The salty water is likely feeding jets of water-ice that spurt from the moon’s south polar region. Such plumes were first reported in 2005, and ever since, astronomers have suspected a liquid ocean might lie beneath the icy shell of Saturn’s sixth largest moon.

The new finding, published in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature, could bump this diminutive world — measuring 310 miles (500 km) in diameter (about the width of Arizona) — into a class that includes Jupiter’s Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

Henry Allingham, now the world’s oldest man, on the secret of a long life 

For someone who has seen three different centuries, six monarchs, two world wars (and 18 world cups), becoming the oldest living man is, perhaps, something of a non-event. Mr Allingham is quieter these days, but no codger at heart. In contrast to Mr Tanabe’s asceticism, he attributes his longevity to “cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women”.

Obama taps IBM open source advocate for USPTO 

President Obama has announced his intent to nominate David Kappos, a VP and general counsel at IBM, to head the US Patent and Trademark Office. This move is particularly notable not only because of IBM’s much friendlier attitudes towards open source compared with some of their rivals, but also because Kappos himself is open source-friendly: ‘We are now the biggest supporters of the open source development project,’ explains David. ‘Admittedly this policy is not easily reconcilable with our traditional IP strategy, but we are convinced that it is the way to go for the future.’ Not just a lawyer, Kappos earned an engineering degree before working in the legal field. Kappos has been described as ‘critical of the American approach to patent policy.’ Given his background, could this mean a new era for US patent policy?

An orgy of cat-drool, hypnotic gyrations, and imaginary-mouse-chasing 

The shady agendas behind 5 popular conspiracy theories 

Do you ever wonder why some conspiracy theories, no matter how retarded they sound, seem to never die? Where do these things come from, anyway?

Walter Cronkite said to be seriously ill 

Walter Cronkite, 92, the former CBS anchor once known as the Most Trusted Man in America, is reported to be gravely ill.

The news comes from Mediabistro’s blog, TVNewser, quoting unidentified sources inside CBS. The U.S. network declined to confirm reports that the legendary newsman is in poor health.

The nature of his illness is unknown, but Newsday reports that Cronkite’s memory is failing.

Aliens lose in switch to digital TV 

The United States is finally ditching analog television broadcasting, and the rest of the world is doing the same. Unless you’ve got a converter, the government has just morphed your trusty analog boob tube into an inert piece of furniture.

Mind you, this is a good thing. Digital TV (DTV) offers better picture quality. For example, the ghost images caused by signal reflections off that high-rise office building down the block will be a thing of the past. In addition, you should sleep better knowing that DTV makes improved use of the broadcast spectrum – primarily because modern digital processing can more compactly encode the picture and sound. This will offer you increased access to other essentials of your neoteric lifestyle, such as high-def, interactive television, as well as wireless internet. DTV sounds like a winner.

But there may be losers, zillions of viewers who might not have a converter box or a digital-ready TV – namely, the aliens.

That’s right: extraterrestrials who might be picking up our analog broadcasts could miss out. Ever since the Second World War, television signals (as well as FM radio and radar) have served as Homo sapiens’ emissaries into deep space. High-frequency, high-power broadcasts have filled an Earth-centered bubble more than 60 light-years in radius with signals. If there are any aliens nearby, they would have been hard-pressed to find trilobites, dinosaurs, or even the Greeks and Romans. But, thanks to “I Love Lucy,” they could find you – or at least your parents.

Evidence found for ancient Mars lake 

Researchers estimate the lake existed more than 3 billion years ago. It covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep — roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada, said Gaetano Di Achille, who led the study out of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Could Life Be 12 Billion Years Old? 

Aparna Venkatesan, of the University of San Francisco, and Lynn Rothschild, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., are using models of star formation and destruction to determine when in the roughly 13.7 billion-year history of the universe the biogenic elements – those essential to life as we know it – might have been pervasive enough to allow life to form.

We can pin down the emergence of life on Earth to somewhere around 3.5 billion years ago. Venkatesan and Rothschild want to find out what happens when you broaden the question to life throughout the universe.

“Can you blast that open? Could you really start really talking about life in the universe at 12 billion years? And that’s the question that we’re talking about,” Rothschild said.

The real trick to this, however, is that we still have not been able to replicate abiogenesis. Once we do, we’ll be able to narrow this question down far more accurately.

U.S. plans to bulldoze 50 shrinking cities 

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

How to force-quit an app in iPhone OS 3.0 

- Now there is a different way to force quit apps. now you have to hold the sleep/wake button until the red slider appears, then you press and hold down the home button to quit the app

The revolution will be tweeted 

Iranian democracy activists, meet your new pals: a masked protest movement best known for needling the Church of Scientology, and a group of file-sharers so infamous they’re facing a year in jail.

Anonymous Iran is a collaboration between The Pirate Bay — operators of the world’s largest torrent site, convicted in April of copyright infringement — and Anonymous, the protester collective dedicated to exposing Scientology’s crimes.

The new site offers tips on how to navigate online in private, upload files through the Iranian firewall, find the best activist Tweeters, and launch attacks on pro-government websites.

This week, The Pirate Bay launched its virtual private network service that promises to mask users’ indentities online. More than 180,000 people have already signed up. Earlier this month, Sweden’s Pirate Party won a seat in the European Union Parliament, after outrage about the file-sharers conviction erupted.

The Geek Atlas 

With this unique traveler’s guide, you’ll learn about 128 destinations around the world where discoveries in science, mathematics, or technology occurred or is happening now. Travel to Munich to see the world’s largest science museum, watch Foucault’s pendulum swinging in Paris, ponder a descendant of Newton’s apple tree at Trinity College, Cambridge, and more. Each site in The Geek Atlas focuses on discoveries or inventions, and includes information about the people and the science behind them.

The slow reversal of periods and quotation marks 

In the time which I’ve experimented with Linux and all manner of techie things, I’ve noticed a constant, willful violation of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style growing within the language of English-speaking geeks. Every day, this phenomenon extends further and further, it seems. Slowly in quotations, the periods and the commas are switching place with the quotation marks.

Chimps mentally map fruit trees 

Their spatial memory is so precise that they can find a single tree among more than 12,000 others within a patch of forest, primatologists have found. More than that, the chimps also recall how productive each tree is, and decide to travel farther to eat from those they know will yield the most fruit. Acquiring such an ability might have helped drive the evolution of sophisticated primate brains.

One-fifth of us have lost sight of Milky Way 

Light pollution has caused one-fifth of the world’s population – mostly in mainland Europe, Britain and the U.S. – to lose their ability to see the Milky Way in the night sky.

“The arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet’s natural heritage,” said Connie Walker, and astronomer from the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

Yet “more than one fifth of the world population, two thirds of the U.S. population and one half of the European Union population have already lost naked eye visibility of the Milky Way.”

I think one of the biggest reasons that nobody cares about space anymore is because nobody can see it anymore. Very sad.

First extra-galactic planet may have been detected 

Using a technique called Pixel-lensing, a group of astronomers in Italy may have detected a planet orbiting another star. But this planet is unique among the 300-plus exoplanets discovered so far, as it and its parent star are in another galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy, to be exact. Technically, the star in M31 was found to have a companion about 6 times the mass of Jupiter, so it could be either a brown dwarf or a planet. But either way, this is a remarkable feat, to find an object of that size in another galaxy.

Will Americans now be frozen naked? 

Attackerman worries that Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the American journalists just sentenced to 12 years of forced labor by Kim Jong Il's regime for "spying," might get the Cheney treatment:

Conditions in camps for political prisoners [in North Korea] are even harsher and feature such pleasantries as "prolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small 'punishment cells' in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; being hung by the wrists; being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse."

Sounds like Bush's America to me. Matt Steinglass relates China's role in facilitating the capture of the two sisters and invokes an inconvenient truth of extraordinary rendition.

Our primate ancestors may have been laughing for 10m years 

“Our evolutionary tree based on these acoustic recordings alone showed that humans were closest to chimps and bonobos, but furthest from orang-utans, with gorillas somewhere intermediate. And that is what you see in the well-established evolutionary tree of great apes,” said Davila Ross. “What this shows is strong evidence to suggest that laughing comes from a common primate ancestor.”

I will have to get my grubby little hands on this paper to see what other evidence they have to corroborate this, because as we (hopefully) all know, correlation does not equal causation. It is, after all, possible (although I will admit unlikely) that the various primates may have evolved laughter convergently. Still, this is very intriguing, to say the least.

Major cache of fossils unearthed in L.A. 

The largest known deposit of fossils from the last ice age has been found in what might seem to be the unlikeliest of places — under an old May Co. parking lot in L.A.’s tony Miracle Mile shopping district.

The aurorae seen from space [PICS] 

You’ve seen amazing images of the Aurora Borealis and its counterpart, the Aurora Australis here on Environmental Graffiti in the past, but now you have a chance to see them as never before: from space. If you think the view down on Earth is incredible beyond words, wait until you see what these natural light phenomena look like from the International Space Station and through the lens of the Hubble Telescope.

There’s even some pics of the same phenomenon occurring on other planets in our solar system. You’ll notice, however, that Mars is not among them. The reason? Mars lacks a planet-wide magnetosphere.

Physicists demonstrate quantum entanglement in mechanical system 

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated entanglement—a phenomenon peculiar to the atomic-scale quantum world—in a mechanical system similar to those in the macroscopic everyday world. The work extends the boundaries of the arena where quantum behavior can be observed and shows how laboratory technology might be scaled up to build a functional quantum computer.

Homeopathy kills 

Homeopathy is the antiscientific belief that infinitely diluted medicine in water can cure various ailments. It’s perhaps the most ridiculous of all “alternative” medicines, since it clearly cannot work, does not work, and has been tested repeatedly and shown to be useless.

And for those who ask, “what’s the harm?”, you may direct your question to Thomas Sam and his wife Manju Sam, whose nine-month-old daughter died because of their homeopathic beliefs.

The infant girl, Gloria Thomas, died of complications due to eczema. Eczema. This is an easily-treatable skin condition (the treatments don’t cure eczema but do manage it), but that treatment was withheld from the baby girl by her parents, who rejected the advice of doctors and instead used homeopathic treatments. The baby’s condition got worse, with her skin covered in rashes and open cracks. These cracks let in germs which her tiny body had difficulty fighting off. She became undernourished as she used all her nutrients to fight infections instead of for growth and the other normal body functions of an infant. She was constantly sick and in pain, but her parents stuck with homeopathy. When the baby girl developed an eye infection, her parents finally took her to a hospital, but it was far too late: little Gloria Thomas succumbed to septicemia from the infection.

Absolutely tragic. Let’s not mince words here: this is what you get from faith — from believing in something without evidence, and holding on to that belief even in the face of overwhelming evidence against it. The article writer summed up my views on the matter pretty much exactly:

Every time I hear about something like this — a baby dying due to “alternative” medicine, or the lies and disinformation from the antivaccination movement, or some other belief system that flies in the face of reality — a little bit of me dies as well. I held my daughter shortly after she was born, and I would have done anything to protect her, and that included and still includes protecting her against people who fight so adamantly against reality.

The reality is that the antivaxxers’ work will result in babies dying. The reality is that belief in homeopathy will result in more babies dying. The reality is that denying science-based medicine will result in more babies dying.

And I know these words will fall on many deaf ears. And I will guarantee the comments to this post will contain many loud and irrational arguments supporting homeopathy and the antivaxxers. I’ve seen it before, and I know that many of those people are completely immune to reason and logic. And if you wonder what might wake them up, the answer may very well be nothing.

The tiny robot that can crawl through your veins — and treat your tumors 

Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have developed a miniature crawling robot, called ViRob, that can crawl through your lungs, find a tumor, and zap it with drugs. The bot, which is one millimeter long and four millimeters from end to end, can snake its way through the body, slipping into blood vessels and navigating through the respiratory and digestive systems, Innerspace style.

Atheist nations are more peaceful 

What I’ve done in the figures here is to take data from the World Values Survey on the percentage of people in each country who say they are a committed atheist, and also on the percentage of people who say that they go to a religious service at least once a month.

Then I split the sample into two equal groups, based on their score on the Global Peace Index. The ones in the ‘Peaceful’ group are countries with a GPI score less than 1.8.

Sure enough, peaceful countries have more atheists and fewer regular worshippers. The difference is highly statistically significant (P=0.001 or less) - in other words it’s real, not just a chance finding.

Now, there are several possible reasons for this. It could be that people living in turbulent countries turn to religion, or it could be that religion is not a good way to structure modern society. Or it could be that some other factor or combination of factors (democracy? free speech? education? government welfare?) generates citizens who are both peaceful and non-religious.

What Obama’s “socialism” looks like 

There is a serious discussion to be had here, and I think Jon Henke is having it: Socialism, like farenheit, comes in degrees. Sure, a government that nationalizes GM is “more socialist” than one that does not, even if it doesn’t mean we’re living “under socialism.” But differences of degree shouldn’t obscure differences of kind, and as Tim Fernholz says, “it’s clear that putting the government in charge of private production is not the Obama administration’s guiding philosophy.”

If it were, 99.79% of the American corporate assets that existed at the start of the Obama administration would not remain in private hands. The differences of degree are so small that they aren’t worth mentioning. And yet, somehow, they keep getting mentioned.

Mammoths roasted in prehistoric kitchen pit 

Central Europe’s prehistoric people would likely have been amused by today’s hand-sized hamburgers and hot dogs, since archaeologists have just uncovered a 29,000 B.C. well-equipped kitchen where roasted gigantic mammoth was one of the last meals served.

NASA & Google Join Forces to Research Singularity — the “Intelligence Revolution” 

It is the best of times. Anyone who complains about science not delivering it’s promises simply doesn’t comprehend how incredible this information age truly is: you can go to the mall RIGHT NOW and buy devices which would have reshaped the world ten years ago, are reshaping it today, and technology isn’t slowing down - it’s accelerating exponentially. There are incredible innovations just around the corner and that’s the thinking behind the creation of Singularity University.

An advanced academic institution sponsored by leading lights including NASA and Google (so it couldn’t sound smarter if Brainiac 5 traveled back in time to attend the opening ceremony). The “Singularity” is the idea of a future point where super-human intellects are created, turbo-boosting the already exponential rate of technological improvement and triggering a fundamental change in human society - after the Agricultural Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, we would have the Intelligence Revolution.

“Zombie” outfit lands man in handcuffs 

Wearing all black, knee pads, a knife, grenade, a gas mask, and carrying what looked to be a machine gun, he walked into the Metro Clothing store Friday evening on Capitol Hill, which was sponsoring the zombie crawl to promote the Crypticon Horror Convention at the Seattle Center next weekend.

But apparently, someone thought a masked gunman was walking into a store, and called police. Witnesses say a dozen police cars converged on the scene and officers ran into the store, guns drawn.

“The police came in with guns and they caught the guy and I’m like, ‘Oh wait, he’s in costume,’ ” said Carl, the store’s owner.

I’m not sure why the guy won the contest, though; as far as I can tell, he’s not dressed as an actual zombie, just one of Umbrella Corp’s zombie killer soldier guys.

Armstrong’s ‘poetic’ slip on Moon 

Neil Armstrong missed out an “a” and did not say “one small step for a man” when he set foot on the Moon in 1969, a linguistic analysis has confirmed.

London’s magical history uncorked from ‘witch bottle’ 

During the 17th century, British people often blamed witches for any ill health or misfortune they suffered, says Massey. “The idea of the witch bottle was to throw the spell back on the witch,” he says. “The urine and the bulb of the bottle represented the waterworks of the witch, and the theory was that the nails and the bent pins would aggravate the witch when she passed water and torment her so badly that she would take the spell back off you.”

Stupid, stupid Christians 

Today a group of religious protesters gathered outside the E3 Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center to rally against the EA-helmed game Dante’s Inferno. The protesters’ message was simple: Play Dante’s Inferno and go to Hell. Check out the photograph below of our favorite sign bearing the slogan: “My High Score is in Heaven.”

Clearly these people have never read The Divine Comedy; because if they had, I’m sure they’d love it! I mean, come on; these are the same kinds of people who think hell houses are not only cool, but a great way to put “the fear of God” into people. They’d especially love, I would guess, the scenes involving the Suicides, the Sodomites and the Sowers of Religious Discord — and with the rampant islamophobia common with fundamentalist Christians, the punishment of Muhammad would likely tickle them pink. So for them to be so vehemently opposed to a game based off of the book is just sheer lunacy.

And I hadn’t even heard of the game until this, but now it’s pretty clear that it’s one I’ll have to pick up.

Test your news IQ 

An embarassingly simple political news quiz. The average person aged 18-29 ranks in the 28th percentile. Can you do better?

(And for the record, my score: “You correctly answered 12 of the 12 possible questions along with approximately 6% of the public. You did better than 94% of the general public.”)

Reboot Your Brain? Science Says It’s Possible -A Galaxy Insight 

Animal studies conducted at the National Institute on Aging Gerontology Research Center and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, for example, have shown that both calorie restriction and intermittent fasting along with vitamin and mineral intake, increase resistance to disease, extend lifespan, and stimulate production of neurons from stem cells.

In addition, fasting has been shown to enhance synaptic elasticity, possibly increasing the ability for successful re-wiring following brain injury. These benefits appear to result from a cellular stress response, similar in concept to the greater muscular regeneration that results from the stress of regular exercise.

Additional research suggests that increasing time intervals between meals might be a better choice than chronic calorie restriction, because the resultant decline in sex hormones may adversely affect both sexual and brain performance. Sex steroid hormones testosterone and estrogen are positively impacted by an abundant food supply. In other words, you might get smarter that way, but it might adversely affect your fun in the bedroom, among other drawbacks.

But if your not keen on starving yourself, there are other options. Another recent finding, stemming from the Burnham Institute for Medical Research and Iwate University in Japan, reports that the herb rosemary contains an ingredient that fights off free radical damage in the brain. The active ingredient, known as carnosic acid (CA), can protect the brain from stroke and neurodegeneration such as Alzheimer’s and from the effects of normal aging.

Salish Sea could unite West Coast waters under single name 

West Coast mariners could soon be sailing on the Salish Sea if a proposal by a Washington state marine biologist goes ahead.

The connected waters of Puget Sound near Seattle, the Georgia Strait near Vancouver and the Strait of Juan de Fuca near Victoria would collectively be called the Salish Sea, under the proposal, while the old names would remain in use for the individual waterways.

Why minds think alike 

You’re in a room with 10 other people who seem to agree on something, but you hold the opposite view. Do you say something? Or do you just go along with the others?

Decades of research show people tend to go along with the majority view, even if that view is objectively incorrect. Now, scientists are supporting those theories with brain images.

A new study in the journal Neuron shows when people hold an opinion differing from others in a group, their brains produce an error signal. A zone of the brain popularly called the “oops area” becomes extra active, while the “reward area” slows down, making us think we are too different.

“We show that a deviation from the group opinion is regarded by the brain as a punishment,” said Vasily Klucharev, postdoctoral fellow at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study.

Prison workers fired after shocking children with stun guns 

The incidents took place on April 23, national Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. As part of demonstrations at two prisons, children held hands in a circle, and one was shocked with the stun gun, passing the shock around the circle. At another prison, children were shocked individually.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

“If atheists ruled the world” 

Hilarious video of actors speaking lines transcribed from online Christian fundamentalist forums:

How Google’s high speed book scanner de-warps pages 

Slashdot:

Patent 7,508,978, awarded to Google, shows how the company has already managed to scan more than 7 million books. Google’s system uses two cameras and infrared light to automatically correct for the curvature of pages in a book. By constructing a 3D model of each page and then ‘de-warping’ it afterward, Google can present flat-looking pages online without having to slice books up or mash them onto a flatbed scanner. Stephen Shankland writes that the ’sophistication of the technology illustrates that would-be competitors who want to feature their own digitized libraries won’t have a trivial time catching up to Google.’ First, a book is placed on a flat surface, while above it, an infrared projector displays a special mazelike pattern onto the pages. Next, two infrared cameras photograph the infrared pattern from different perspectives. ‘The images can be stereoscopically combined, using known stereoscopic techniques, to obtain a three-dimensional mapping of the pattern,’ according to the patent. ‘The pattern falls on the surface of (the) book, causing the three-dimensional mapping of the pattern to correspond to the three-dimensional surface of the page of the book.’

Statistical proof that you hate freedom 

You not only hate freedom, but just by being in your state you’re decreasing the freedom. You’re a freedom suck. In fact, there are charts to prove it.

See there? States with the most Democratic voters are over five total freedom points down from the most Republican states. What’s a freedom point? Well, it’s just about the most important thing ever. It’s a based on a completely non-ideological study of personal freedom in the 50 states. Produced by a non-ideological assistant prof of politics at Texas State University - San Marcos whose previous work includes the non-ideological “New Yorkers shackled and chained by high cost of living and government regulations.” His partner in this non-ideological work was the non-ideological founder of the Free State Project, a favorite of the non-ideological Ayn Rand followers.

How did this dispassionate, scientific pair determine that you — yes, you over there — are bad for freedom? First, your state taxes too much. Taxes are the number one item in determining how much freedom you have. Then you spend too much. Spending is the number two threat to your freedom. Hold on now, I can hear you saying that you’re getting hit twice for the same thing. But you’re not. On this scale, if the state took your money, but didn’t spend it, you’re more free. Because… let’s move on.

Next up is education. You might think that states which offered a lot of educational opportunities — scholarships, magnet schools, that kind of the thing — would be more free. Wrong! That just shows how anti-freedom you are. Freedom has nothing to do with opportunity. Educational freedom is measured by your right to opt out of the oppressive statist public educational system. If you think your kid gets all the education he needs from Spongebob and the puzzle on the back of the Cocoa Puffs box, you’re a freedom lover. States that have such onerous burdens as universal kindergarten are one step closer to Stalin.

Then comes gun control. Naturally, states that try to regulate guns in any way get a big black mark on this. You know who rocks? Montana rocks. When a federal law was passed prohibiting handguns within 100′ of a school except for law officers, Montana passed a law that said every citizen was a law officer. Brownie points! And proof that you can get more freedom if you pass the right kind of laws to fight the power in D.C.

Labor regulation is up next. Any state that gives unions the right to interfere with good, honest business folk trying to do their job. Unfree. Likewise for any mucking around with wages, safety, etc. Does your state require business to contribute to workers compensation in case of an injury? That’s fascism, brother.

Health care freedom is next. Meaning the freedom of insurance companies to set their rates and services as they want, unfettered by stinking socialists who want to expand coverage to more people. Does your state make you provide COBRA to laid off workers? Bad. Do you require medical workers to have a license? It must always be 1984 where you live.

But to prove to you that this is a completely non-ideological study, there are also factors in there to declare states more free if they allow civil unions or medical marijuana — factors that together almost equal home schooling alone. And there’s the freedom to smoke wherever you want and the freedom to not have any smoker’s protection laws. The freedom to give as much as you want to political campaigns. The freedom to eat endangered species three meals a day. Overall, one quarter of your freedom is determined by taxes and spending. Another quarter of your freedom is regulations (a wetland program in your state, commie?)

In general, if you live in a state where your kid is required to wear a bicycle helmet, you can’t light up a stogie at dinner, medical personal are required to have a license, and workers are protected by safety laws — you have surrendered your freedom. So, you won’t be too shocked to hear that liberal hotbeds like New York and California are the least free places in America. Which explains why nobody lives there, and why the freedom center in South Dakota is so overrun.

Kind of what you’d expect when one of the study’s authors says he practices “neo-medievalism” and longs for a return to disorganized city-states. In other words, by this scale, Somalia is the ideal free society.

Move on to Mars 

According to Charles Cockell, a microbiologist at the Open University in the UK, humans could go to Mars now:

“Technically, we could go today if we wanted to,” he says, and suggests the reason humans haven’t made the journey yet is because of political concerns. “I think we are ready. As time goes on, we’re going to be more and more ready to go as technology gets better and life support systems improve.”

…

Many scientists are concerned that even with a closed system, a human colony on Mars creates planetary protection problems. Astrobiologists hope to find proof of native life on Mars, and because humans carry with them billions of bacteria, we could end up introducing Earth-life on Mars and corrupting or extinguishing any life that may reside there.

While Cockell agrees we do need to search for indigenous life on Mars, he doesn’t think these planetary protection issues are a major concern.

“Human microbes are not going to survive for very long on Mars anyway – they’ll die very quickly,” he says. “Not a lot of people would agree with my views, but I would just go there and be done with it. It’s not likely that, even if a microbe did grow, it’s going to destroy life on a planetary scale.”

Most scientists think life on Mars would have to be deep underground in order to access the subterranean water and to stay protected from the harsh surface environment. Cockell says this means we have even less to worry about in regards to contaminating Mars.

“On Earth, when you go out to do your shopping, you don’t worry about contaminating the deep subsurface biosphere 3 kilometers underneath the store,” he notes. “That’s my parallel with Mars. We’ve blown up a concern that isn’t really a concern.”

Elon Musk bets manned mission to Mars by 2020 

Nate Silver on the end of car culture 

[T]here is some evidence that more Americans are at least entertaining the idea of leading a more car-free existence. Between October 2004, when gas prices first hit two dollars a gallon, and December 2008, when they fell below this threshold, three cities with among the largest declines in housing prices were Las Vegas (-37 percent), Detroit (-34 percent), and Phoenix (-15 percent), each highly car-dependent cities. Conversely, the two markets with the largest gains in housing prices were Portland, Oregon (+19 percent), and Seattle (+18 percent), communities that are more friendly to alternate modes of transportation.

Nefertiti bust may be a fake, say art historians 

Swiss historian Henri Stierlin, author of several books on Egypt and the Middle East, claims in his new work, Le Buste de Nefertiti – une Imposture de l’Egyptologie? (The Bust of Nefertiti – an Egyptology Fraud?) that the treasure, until now believed to be 3,300 years old, could be a 1912 copy. He suggests it was made by an artist named Gerardt Marks on the orders of German archeologist Ludwig Borchardt, who is credited with digging it out of the banks of the Nile south of Cairo in 1912.

Google Books controversy heating up 

David Post:

The Google Books project has the potential to become one of the great information-gathering activities in human history — every book (just about), at everyone’s fingertips, searchable and instantly accessible from any corner of the globe. And we want to deter that?? Because that will decrease “respect for IP laws”? Talk about putting the cart before the horse!! Because it will inflict some sort of terrible “harm” on copyright holders? I’m not terribly sympathetic. Copyright, as Jefferson stressed so long ago, is a “social right” — given by society because we feel it serves useful ends (incentivizing authors to produce new creative works). When it ceases to serve those ends, it should be eliminated. The Google Books project is another example of how copyright interests, these days, do little more than obstruct useful innovations. There are 7 million (or more) out of print books that Google would like to place on-line where they can actually be accessed and read. I’m sorry if that infringes someone’s copyright, but really — in what way is society better off, exactly, from recognizing the copyright holder’s rights in this circumstance?

MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set 

But don’t do it in a cinema! The irony is so hot it could get the wrinkles out of your clothes. Stay classy, MPAA.

“The greatest man in the world” 

When I was in the Capitol Building in DC last January, the tourguide told this story about King George III’s remarks about George Washington giving up power after having won the Revolutionary War, something that not even Napoleon could bring himself to do. I’d been looking for the quote, and finally found it in Paul Johnson’s book, George Washington: The Founding Father:

The actual resignation of his command, having made peace between the civil and military powers of the new country — and, in an emotional ceremony, bidden farewell to his officers on December 4, 1783 — took place in Annapolis, Maryland, on December 23, when he formally handed back to Congress his commission as commander in chief, which they had given him in June 1775. He said he would never again hold public office. He had his horse waiting at the door, and he took the road to Mount Vernon the next day.

No one who knew Washington was surprised. Everyone else, in varying degrees, was astonished at this singular failure of the corruption of power to work. And, indeed, it was a rare moment in history. In London, George III qustioned the American-born painter Benjamin West what Washington would do now he had won the war. “Oh,” said West, “they say he will return to his farm.” “If he does that,” said the king, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”

(Benjamin West had been commissioned by the King to create portraits of members of the Royal Family, including two of the King himself. In 1772, King George appointed him Historical Painter to the Court.)

And with apologies to our British cousins, here’s another great story about Washington:

One of [Abraham] Lincoln’s favorite anecdotes sprang from the early days just after the Revolution. Shortly after the peace was signed, the story began, the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen “had occasion to visit England,” where he was subjected to considerable teasing banter. The British would make “fun of the Americans and General Washington in particular and one day they got a picture of General Washington” and displayed it prominently in the outhouse so Mr. Allen could not miss it. When he made no mention of it, they finally asked him if they’d seen the Washington picture. Mr. Allen said, “he thought it was a very appropriate [place] for an Englishman to Keep it. Why they asked, for said Mr. Allen there is Nothing that Will Make an Englishman Shit So quick as the Sight of Genl Washington.”

Solar flare could be harbinger of new solar cycle 

Solar flares rise and fall on an 11-year cycle, and last year marked what scientists thought was the solar minimum. But through the beginning of 2009, the sun stayed unusually quiet. That changed yesterday, when a major sunspot appeared on the backside of the sun, where it was captured by NASA’s STEREO instrument.

“This is the biggest event we’ve seen in a year or so,” said Michael Kaiser, research scientist with the heliophysics division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “Does this mean we’re finished with the minimum or not? It’s hard to say. This could be it. It’s got us all excited.”

Star Trek’s warp drive: not impossible 

Already some studies have claimed to find possible signatures of moving space-time. For example, scientists rotated super-cold rings in a lab. They found that still gyroscopes placed above the rings seem to think they themselves are rotating simply because of the presence of the spinning rings beneath. The researchers postulated that the ultra-cold rings were somehow dragging space-time, and the gyroscope was detecting the effect.

Other studies found that the region between two parallel uncharged metal plates seems to have less energy than the surrounding space. Scientists have termed this a kind of “negative energy,” which might be just the thing needed to move space-time.

“There is no morality without religion” 

The body of a man believed to be homosexual has twice been dug up from a Muslim cemetery in Senegal. The man, in his 30s, was first buried on Saturday before residents of the western town of Thies dug up his body and left it near his grave, police say.

His family then reburied him, but he was once more exhumed by people who did not want him buried there. His body was dumped outside the family house.

(Hat tip: Dan Savage)

Survey: Support for terror suspect torture differs among the faithful 

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Considering all the torture, slavery, genocide, human sacrifice and other immorality in the Bible itself, this is not surprising in the least.

Technorati       no www       No Tables       XHTML       CSS       RSS

Copyright © 2004–2009 Ian Adams