Why humans should not be trusted with dangerous toys

5,000 labs told to destroy vials of pandemic flu strain

At the urging of global health authorities, scientists were scrambling Tuesday to destroy vials of a pandemic flu strain sent to labs in 18 countries as part of routine testing.

The rush, urged by the World Health Organization, was sparked by a slim risk that the samples could spark a global flu epidemic. The vials of virus sent by a U.S. company went to nearly 5,000 labs, mostly in the United States, officials said....

...It was not clear why the 1957 pandemic strain, which killed between 1 million and 4 million people, was in the proficiency test kits routinely sent to labs...

This is what happens when one has to deal with human beings. They make silly bureaucratic mistakes. Twenty years from now it will be samples of the 1915 pandemic strain sent to high school bioengineering classes by mistake.

How the heck are we going to survive the next 100 years?

Plenty of Earths, older galaxies -- so where are the little green men?

The BBC has two science articles that update terms in the Drake Equation.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Plenty of Earths await discovery

These scenarios of past extinction and future birth increase to about two-thirds the proportion of the known exoplanetary systems that are potentially habitable at some time during the main-sequence lifetime of their central star.

and BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Telescope catches early starlight

Astronomers have seen the light coming from what could be some of the very first stars to shine in the Universe.

These ancient objects burst into life probably no more than 600 million years or so after the Big Bang itself.

The discovery, announced at the UK National Astronomy Meeting, suggests the evolution of galaxies got under way much earlier than previously believed.

Together these articles seem to reduce the likelihood of the "rare earth" resolution of the Fermi Paradox. By implication they strengthen the case for other hypotheses, such as short-lived civilizations.

Personally, I like the singularity version of the short-lived civilization hypothesis. I must note, however, that the Designer Hypothesis, of which Genesis is one version, is likewise strengthened.

PS. Wikipedia is most impressive.

Minneapolis WiFi: Panic and terror stalks St. Paul

Minneapolis envisions citywide Wi-Fi

Minneapolis is about to become an unwired city, creating a universal wireless Internet access network available to every citizen, visitor, business and municipal facility within city limits.

GYAUGHKK. I live in St. Paul. This is an outrage. The communist empire of Minneapolis is again humiliating its noble, hard working neighbor. It's bad enough that Minneapolis has a far superior set of bicycle paths and trails, yet again their light rail, yet again that our traitorous "democrat" mayor endorsed Bush, but this is the ultimate humiliation.

Impeach Kelly!!

How the mighty have fallen -- USA 2005, Japan 1945

INTEL DUMP - -

Jess Bravin had a remarkable article in last Thurday's Wall Street Journal (available for free to the public) on a set of war crimes decisions issued shortly after World War II which contain striking resemblances to the cases pending today — both cases involving alleged Al Qaeda members, and cases involving U.S. servicemembers accused of abuse.

The US government in 2005 is following the legal reasoning and policites of the Japanese dictatorship of 1945. The US government of 1945 followed very different policies, and found the Japanese dictatorship of 1945 guilty of war crimes.

Were Bush to face trial before the US government of 1945, he would have been found guilty of war crimes.

How does one survive the death of two children?

Markham's Behavioral Health: Memories live on

A father of nine loses two of his youngest children in 1993. On the occasion of the anniversary of his daughter's birth, he reflects on her loss.

Extinctions every 62 million years

Research News: Fossil Records Show Biodiversity Comes and Goes

Every 62 million years there's a collapse in biodiversity. The hypothesis is that this represents some periodic extinction event.

Muller and Rohde have been working on this study for nearly two years, and first discovered the 62 million year biodiversity cycle in November, 2003. They spent the next year trying to either knock it down or explain it. Despite examining 14 possible geophysical and astronomical causes of the cycles, no clear explanation emerged. Muller and Rohde each has his own favorite guess.

Muller suspects there is an astrophysical driving mechanism behind the 62 million year periodicity.

“Comets could be perturbed from the Oort cloud by the periodic passage of the solar system through molecular clouds, Galactic arms, or some other structure with strong gravitational influence,” Muller said. “But there is no evidence even suggesting that such a structure exists.”

Rohde prefers a geophysical driver, possibly massive volcanic eruptions triggered by the rise of plumes to the earth’s surface. Plumes are upwellings of hot material from near the earth’s core that some scientists believe have the potential to reoccur on a periodic basis.

“My hunch, far from proven,” Rohde said, “is that every 62 million years the earth is releasing a burst of heat in the form of a plume formation event, and that when those plumes reach the surface they result in a major episode of flood volcanism. Such volcanism certainly has the potential to cause extinctions, but, right now there isn't enough geologic evidence to know whether flood basalts or plumes have been recurring at the right frequency.

Or maybe that's how often the galactivc pest-control service visits our solar system. I am most annoyed that the journalist didn't bother to point out where we are in the extinction cycle.

BBC survey of Iraqi attitudes: quite positive

BBC NEWS | Middle East | After the war: Iraqis face new lives

I wouldn't make much of a set of anectdotal interviews of Iraqis, except these are BBC interviews, not FOX interviews. I read the BBC religiously, and their take on the occupation of Iraq has ranged from somewhat negative to very negative. So this series of quite positive and optimistic interviews may in fact be significant.

Millenialism and the pursuit of profit

The New York Times > Opinion > Frank Rich: A Culture of Death, Not Life

Frank Rich notes the recent passion for mega-funerals, and loops back to the new "Revelations" series ...

...No one does the culture of death with more of a vengeance - literally so - than the doomsday right. The "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins all but pant for the bloody demise of nonbelievers at Armageddon. And now, as Eric J. Greenberg has reported in The Forward, there's even a children's auxiliary: a 40-title series, "Left Behind: The Kids," that warns Jewish children of the hell that awaits them if they don't convert before it's too late. Eleven million copies have been sold on top of the original series' 60 million...

...This Wednesday the far right's cutting-edge culture of death gets its biggest foothold to date in the mainstream, when NBC broadcasts its "Left Behind" simulation, "Revelations," an extremely slick prime-time mini-series that was made before our most recent death watches but could have been ripped from their headlines. In the pilot a heretofore nonobservant Christian teenage girl in a "persistent vegetative state" - and in Florida, yet - starts babbling Latin texts from the show's New Testament namesake just as dastardly scientists ("devil's advocates," as they're referred to) and organ-seekers conspire to pull the plug. "All the signs and symbols set forth in the Bible are currently in place for the end of days," says the show's adult heroine, an Oxford-educated nun who has been denounced by the Vatican for her views and whose mission is underwritten by a wealthy "religious fundamentalist."

The great constant in American life is the pursuit of wealth. The Left Behind authors are wealthy now beyond the dreams of mortals, the Revelations series can't help but be a big winner (heck, I'd watch it if I watched TV*).

What happens when profit and a bloody-minded fundamentalism combine in a self-reinforcing feedback loop? I'm hoping the audience will burn out...

Geek's have their own armageddon, known as the Singularity. Opera lovers have the Ring Cycle. What we really need is an all-Doomsday sweeps week special, from Revelations to the Ring Cycle (Gottdamerung!) to The Singularity to (what the heck) Nuclear Terrorism and Supervolcanoes.

It's enough to turn a contrarian sort into a raving optimist.

*Update: My wife claims I wouldn't last five minutes.

Exploring British Columbia by google's new satellite imagery maps

Brian Faughnan - A Lost Person

I started at Rainbow Mountain (I think) by Whistler and navigated to the coast, then up the coast of BC to Juneau.

Stunning. Even frightening. Mostly, however, awesome.

No Black Holes? Say it ain't so Joe.

news @ nature.com -- Black holes 'do not exist' --These mysterious objects are dark-energy stars, physicist claims.

Universal time is required by quantum mechanics, but is denied by general relativity. General relativity says nothing happens at black hole boundaries, but quantum mechanics says very odd things happen.

Ooookkkkaaay.

But what if there are no back holes (and thus no science-defying singularities)? What if dark energy makes black holes impossible (except perhaps for those pion-spittling strong-force black holes we just discovered). Oh wait, pions are just positrons on a different scale (note how many letters they have in common -- that must mean something). And maybe dark-energy stars spit positrons ...

Now I get it!! Yes, it's alll clear nnoooooowwww [hiss of static, then elevator music plays from the radio].

Physics is beginning to remind me of economics.

Yahweh vs. Ganesha in the American Supreme Court

Kudos to Salon for covering a topic I've not seen mentioned elsewhere. I'm reminded by this odd silence how feeble American journalism has become, but Salon shows there are a few of the old strain left here and there.

The Supreme Court is having to rule on the practice of displaying the Ten Commandments in prominent public locations, including courtrooms. These are displayed without a competing array of, for example, the moral tenets of the Wicca or Scientology or Eckanckar. More significantly, displays also omit the conflicting tenets of the Ojibiwe, of Hinduism, of Buddhism ... Or, for that matter, Mormonism.

So this case is really not so much about the "seperation of church and state" as whether America has one state religion (and does it include the book. I thought it interesting that when Bush assembled religious figures post 9/11 he didn't include any representatives of native americans or any other non-biblical faiths. Now the story unfolds ... (emphases mine)

Salon.com | In gods we trust

Among the groups that filed a "friend of the court" brief against the Ten Commandments monument was the Hindu American Foundation, along with Buddhists and Jains.

How significant is this ranging of American non-Christians against the Decalogue? The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, discovered an America that is changing rapidly with regard to religion. In the 11 years since the first such poll (done in 1990), the number of Americans who considered themselves to have no religion increased from 8 percent to 14 percent. In real terms, these open unbelievers increased from 14 million to nearly 30 million, as extrapolated from the polls. In addition, the proportion of Americans who identified with a specific religion fell from 90 percent to 81 percent...

...The elephant-headed god Ganesha is a favorite of Hindu worshippers, especially in western India. Ganesha has come to America, too. If you visit the Web page of the Bharatiya Temple in Troy, Mich., you will find a hyperlink to the left marked "Images." In Old Testament language, it might as well say "graven images." A statuette of Ganesha is displayed there. Asian and other non-Christian religions (Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and so forth) still do not make up more than about 4 percent of the American population, but their adherents grew from about 5 million to over 7 million between 1990 and 2001 in the SUNY poll (which probably undercounts the smaller groups). As the Asian population grows in the United States, the number of Buddhists and Muslims will increase significantly. The United States adds a million immigrants a year, many of them from Asia...

...The friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Hindus and others notes, "To members of non-Judeo-Christian religions, the Ten Commandments do not merely recite non-controversial ethical maxims; several Commandments (e.g., the first, second and third) address the forms and objects of religious worship." Underlining that there are nearly a million Hindus in the United States, and some 700 Hindu temples, the brief says, "Nor can Hindus accept the First Commandment's prohibition against 'graven images.' The use of murtis (sacred representations of God in any of God's various forms) is central to the practice of the religion for virtually all Hindus." The government-sponsored posting of the Ten Commandments implies a U.S. government preference for a theology that Hindus cannot accept. As for the country's 3 million Buddhists, the brief is even more blunt: "The conception of God, or the notion of worshipping creator gods, is considered an obstacle to the enlightenment sought by Buddhists."

America has not always separated church and state, indeed I think that separation has waxed and waned over the past 4 hundred years in both British-American and America. At times the state combusted certain non-believers, at other times we added pseudo-occult non-Christian symbols to our currency.

This should be an interesting court case.

Update 7/27/07: I researched what happened to this story today. It wasn't easy to find out how it went! None of the sites that had the original story linked to the conclusion. As best I can tell, the Christians fundamentalists won this battle, though it seems the key Supreme (Breyer) decided the key factor was a relatively limited religious component to the monument.

A silent liberal majority in America? The BBC's Justin Webb thinks so ..

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Justin Webb | Schiavo case tests America

A BBC Commentation is stunned by his "discovery" of what he considers a "silent liberal majority" pushing back against the seemingly dominant forces of social conservatism (emphases mine):

...The reason the Schiavo case is so important, the reason it has Americans talking and arguing, and the reason it should, in my view, have the rest of us re-assessing our view of this nation, is that Americans were corralled but rebelled.

They were emotionally blackmailed but refused to budge, were told that their deepest held religious beliefs should push them in one direction, but thought for themselves and thought differently.

America is often portrayed as an ignorant lazy sort of place, full of bible bashers and ruled to a dangerous extent by trashy television, superstition and religious bigotry, a place lacking in respect for evidence based knowledge.

I know that is how it is portrayed because I have done my bit to paint that picture, and that picture is in many respects a true one...

...There is plenty of barminess and plenty of nastiness here if you look for it, but for me, the revelation of the Schiavo case was that there is plenty of good sense as well.

Plenty of honest disagreement among reasonable people, religious and non religious, Republican and Democrat.

And in the end a majority who value what we can call, without irony, the American way of life, and believe their politicians and the right-to-life campaigners over-reached themselves in this case...

...It is possible at least that the high watermark of social conservatism has been reached. Its limit set by the will of a silent liberal majority.

The founding fathers must be watching from their heavenly perches and wondering at the power of the constitution they created.

It is common to scoff at American attempts to export Jeffersonian democracy, but after these two weeks the scoffing should stop.

This system work.

I think he's drawing too many conclusions from a single media eruption, but I liked the conceit of a "silent liberal majority". His opinion of America is so low that he finds even modest rationality astounding. I think that's the interesting aspect of this article. The world now thinks so little of the US that we can't help but exceed their expectations.

Google Ride Finder - I thought this was an April Fool's joke

Google Ride Finder

It's not. My jaw just dropped. Google's integrated GPS sensors in some taxi companies with Google Maps. This sort of thing has been predicted for some time, but it always seemed to be "next year". Now it's hear.

This is all so pre-singularity.

American Torturing Jobs Increasingly Outsourced

WASHINGTON, DC—AFL-CIO vice president Linda Chavez-Thompson, representing the American Federation of Interrogation Torturers, released a statement Monday deriding the CIA's 'extraordinary rendition' program, under which American torturing jobs are outsourced to foreign markets. 'Outsourcing the task of interrogating terror suspects to countries like Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia is having a crippling effect on the Americans who make a living by stripping detainees nude, shackling them to the floor, and beating the living shit out of them,' Chavez-Thompson said. 'And specialists within the field—corrosive-material chemists, ocular surgeons, and testicular electricians—are lucky to find any jobs at all. How are they supposed to feed their families?' Attorney General Alberto Gonzales defended extraordinary rendition, saying the program will create jobs in the long run by fostering a global climate of torture tolerance.

Thank you, Onion.

How social security solvency problems will be addressed - through immigration law changes

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Max Sawicky Reports on Brookings

The last election cost me whatever residual faith I had in the wisdom of the nation, but it does seem that Bush is having a hard time convincing people that solvency and privatization are somehow inextricably linked. Here DeLong quotes a Sawicky summary of a recent Brookings presentation on the topic. The kicker is DeLong's comment:

Bob Gordon is--as is almost invariably true--smart. Raising immigration by 0.3% of the workforce every year wipes out nearly half of the 75-year Social Security deficit.

Ok guys, the game's over. Everyone can go home now.

If the US emulates Canada's mercenary approach to immigration (anyone who thinks Canadians are altruistic goofs hasn't studied Canadian immigration policy) then a very large chunk of the social security solvency problem goes away. The rest can be dealt with in routine and well understood ways (a bit of longer work here, a bit of tax increase there, a bit of compromise on the annual benefit increase).

This is the kind of backdoor solution that politicians will be unable to resist. It's also not a bad solution.