[Harald van Arkel] We updated our serial number analyzer. It is now aware of the iMac G5 Exchange Program. If you enter the serial number of an iMac, it will warn you that it is part of an Exchange Program. The analyser takes the serial number of any Mac (or other piece of Apple hardware) and tells you what exact model it is and when it was produced.
George Monbiot � A Life With No PurposeSimilar anthropologic stories have evaporated on closer inspection (the Inuit have only a handful of names for snow, Margaret Mead's cultures were very violent ...). It will be interesting to see if this one survives. Will our memes infect the Piraha? The course of that infection should be watched closely, even as it destroys all that they once were.
...Two days ago, I would have claimed that the demand for more was universal – that every society has or had its creation story and, as Joseph Campbell put it, “it will always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story that we find”.(11) But yesterday I read a study by the anthropologist Daniel Everett of the language of the Piraha people of the Brazilian Amazon, published in the latest edition of Current Anthropology.(12) Its findings could scarcely be more disturbing, or more profound.
The Piraha, Everett reveals, possess “the most complex verbal morphology I am aware of [and] are some of the brightest, pleasantest, most fun-loving people that I know.” Yet they have no numbers of any kind, no terms for quantification (such as all, each, every, most and some), no colour terms and no perfect tense. They appear to have borrowed their pronouns from another language, having previously possessed none. They have no “individual or collective memory of more than two generations past”, no drawing or other art, no fiction and “no creation stories or myths.”
All this, Everett believes, can be explained by a single characteristic: “Piraha culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of [the speaker]”. What can be discussed, in other words, is what has been seen. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, in this realm at least, to exist. After struggling with one grammatical curiosity, he realised that the Piraha were “talking about liminality – situations in which an item goes in and out of the boundaries of their experience. [Their] excitement at seeing a canoe go around a river bend is hard to describe; they see this almost as travelling into another dimension.” The Piraha, still living, watch the sparrow flit in and out of the banqueting hall.(13)
Secrets of the morgue: Baghdad's body countI would like to see some other validation of these numbers. Baghdad is a very populous city however, and there is a lot of revenge to be sated. It's not immediately clear what to do about this; I don't think more military force would help.
... July was the bloodiest month in Baghdad’s modern history - in all, 1,100 bodies were brought to the city’s mortuary; executed for the most part, eviscerated, stabbed, bludgeoned, tortured to death. The figure is secret.
We are not supposed to know that the Iraqi capital’s death toll last month was only 700 short of the total American fatalities in Iraq since April of 2003. Of the dead, 963 were men - many with their hands bound, their eyes taped and bullets in their heads - and 137 women.
... in just 36 hours - from dawn on Sunday to midday on Monday, 62 Baghdad civilians had been killed. No Western official, no Iraqi government minister, no civil servant, no press release from the authorities, no newspaper, mentioned this terrible statistic...
... Mortuary officials have been appalled at the sadism visited on the victims. "We have many who have obviously been tortured - mostly men," one said. "They have terrible burn marks on hands and feet and other parts of their bodies. Many have their hands fastened behind their backs with handcuffs and their eyes have been bound with Sellotape. Then they have been shot in the head - in the back of the head, the face, the eyes. These are executions."...
... It is clear that death squads are roaming the streets of a city which is supposed to be under the control of the US military and the American-supported, elected government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari...
Fermi Questions / Fermi Problems: '... the estimation of rough but quantitative answers to unexpected questions about many aspects of the natural world. The method was the common and frequently amusing practice of Enrico Fermi, perhaps the most widely creative physicist of our times. Fermi delighted to think up and at once to discuss and to answer questions which drew upon deep understanding of the world, upon everyday experience, and upon the ability to make rough approximations, inspired guesses, and statistical estimates from very little data.' [Philip Morrison [1]]Incidentally, I've corresponded with Stanlislaw (Stanlislav) Lem, a brilliant author, about the Fermi Pardox. Turns out he doesn't think much of it:
I am afraid Mr. Lem does not consider the Fermi Paradox an important (and particularly serious) issue.Hmm. That does give me pause ... I wish he'd say more, but I think that may be his last words on this particular topic ...
Sincerely yours,
Wojciech Zemek, Mr. Lem's secretary
Kung Fu Monkey: I Miss Republicans.Lots of smart people campaigned for that missile defense program. I'm sure they had their reasons, but I suspect the smart ones believed it would cost trillions and take fifty years to develop. Or maybe they were smart but deluded.TEST OF U.S. MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD FAILS...This test, by the way, was cancelled a few days ago [previously] because of rain. Because. Of. Rain. And please note that the previous few successes were because the target missle had homing beacons in them, tuned to the exact frequency of the intercepting rockets. Now, you may mock this, but even now, we are negotiating with Iran and North Korea to have all their missiles emit this radio frequency. So joke's on you.
An attempt to launch an interceptor missile as part of the U.S. missile defence shield failed early Wednesday in the first test of the system in nearly two years ...
This is what we get for about $100 billion up to now, with about another $100 billion more spent in the next 5 years ... for these test results.
You understand, I'm not against defense spending. I'm not going to rant about how many school lunches this could buy. I'm ranting about junk science.
$100 billion dollars against an attack mode which is literally the most inconvenient, least likely way for bad guys to kill Yanks. Terrorists don't have missiles. Terrorists have VANS. A white-panel-truck defense shield, THAT would be worth our money. Tie the INS database into the Ryder rental computer. Now we're talking science.
.... The ECFR [Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning], in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue 'so they can make an informed decision.'When I was a child, I was taught a bizarre alternate world history where the 'Children's Crusade' was a good thing. That's what the state schools (almost all Catholic) taught in Quebec in the 1960s until the mid 1970s.
'We just want the best possible education for Kansas' kids,' Burdett said.
Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein's ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.
Science News Article | Reuters.comSo what's the downside of that sort of immune system? Do crocs get nasty auto-immune disorders? It's odd that this is a press release now; the HIV work was done in 1998. I doubt there will be many practical implications; but this is great basic scienc work.
... The crocodile's immune system is much more powerful than that of humans, preventing life-threatening infections after savage territorial fights which often leave the animals with gaping wounds and missing limbs.
"They tear limbs off each other and despite the fact that they live in this environment with all these microbes, they heal up very rapidly and normally almost always without infection," said U.S. scientist Mark Merchant, who has been taking crocodile blood samples in the Northern Territory.
... "If you take a test tube of HIV and add crocodile serum it will have a greater effect than human serum. It can kill a much greater number of HIV viral organisms," Britton said from Darwin's Crocodylus Park, a tourism park and research center.
Britton said the crocodile immune system worked differently from the human system by directly attacking bacteria immediately an infection occurred in the body.
"The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes. It's like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger," he said...
Pacific Rim nations are graduating great numbers of engineers and are threatening to seize the mantle of industrial innovation that was pivotal to making the U.S. economy globally dominant. Last year, foreign nationals also won almost 60 percent of U.S. engineering doctorates.I'd read this in a local Knight-Ridder paper and decided I'd comment on it, but I had to use Google News to find a citeable source. That search also turned up a similar complaint from Australia. Bottom line, this isn't something unique to the US. It's likely also true in Canada, Germany, France, the UK, etc. I bet it's even true in Japan.
Experts warn that the U.S. lead is slipping away.
'We are being outproduced in engineering graduates - both undergraduate and graduate level - by Pacific Rim countries, and the comparison will be more extreme as the years go by,' said Richard Heckel, founder of Engineering Trends, a research consultancy. 'From an engineering standpoint, the future leaders of the world are going to come from the Pacific Rim.
That evolution erodes religious belief seems almost too obvious to require argument. It destroyed the faith of Darwin himself, who moved from Christianity to agnosticism as a result of his discoveries and was immediately recognized as a huge threat by his reverent contemporaries. In reviewing The Origin of Species in 1860, Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, wrote that the religious view of man as a creature with free will was 'utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God.'For Weisberg the truce between science and religion is a built on a 'white lie' and it's time for the old battle to rage anew.
Sometimes one wants to use a search engine to find a very specific piece of information rather than to learn about a topic. If search engines were truly intelligent, you could just pose a question the same way you would ask a person. An alternative is to get the search engine to 'fill in the blank.' So instead of asking [who invented the parachute?], you can enter the query [the parachute was invented by *]. (The blank, or wildcard, search is marked by * - an asterisk.)The tibia is a part of the *.
There is so much text on the web that this method often works well, but to make it more effective, we've improved the way results are found in response to queries containing such blanks. This includes allowing softer pattern matching, if necessary, and promoting results in which the blank filler is relatively more frequent in the context of the query.
Lynn: Air Force (Office of Special Investigations). NSA, is what I'm told, but he wouldn't show me his credentials. There were a lot of flashy badges around from lots of three-letter agencies. So they take me to a maintenance area and I'm surrounded by people ... and one of them says (to another guy), 'You've got the van ready?' I'm going, 'Oh my god.' And they go, 'Just kidding!... Oh, man, you rock! We can't thank you enough.' And I'm just sitting there, like still pale white. They all shook my hand.
I get the feeling that they were in the audience because they were told that there was a good chance that I was about to do something that would cause a serious problem. And when they realized that I was actually there to pretty much clue them in on ... the storm that's coming ... they just couldn't say enough nice things about me...
