Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} vidicon) wrote,@ 2004-10-11 12:41:00 |
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| Current mood: | on target |
| Current music: | Thomas Dolby - Weird Science |
World Politics v/s Weird Science
Indymedia raided by FBI, hard-drives seized.I missed this on Friday, being on a brief, but necessary, vacation from the newsweb.
Rumor has it that a sub-site of theirs hosted pictures taken of people suspected to be undercover Swiss police officers photographing protesters at a French event. Further digging has discovered hints that the subpoena to yank their Rackspace hosting drives came originally from Italy and Switzerland, and the only reason the US FBI was involved was due to a multinational agreement that calls for international cooperation on terrorism investigations. An apparent gag order prevents Indymedia from knowing exactly why their data and their host's hardware was seized.
There could easily be nothing wrong with this, but the seizure also silences an awful lot of voices of independent journalists who have something to say about recent and upcoming elections worldwide (among other things) that otherwise wouldn't make it to the outside world.
I suspect the government allies of the tamed conservative press won't be in a hurry to return Indymedia to operation.
(somewhat more legitimate source)
The United Nations is to investigate alleged irregularities in Afghanistan's presidential election.These poor bastards are going to have a busy year.
I wonder if I should leave some milk out for the vote-fraud elves on Election Day Eve.
Researchers find off-switch for cancer. No goddamn kidding.This has personal relevance to me. In a big way.
Researchers at Stanford, using concepts based on research done elsewhere—in civilized countries where medical science isn't crippled by deranged religious-based political interference—found a way to turn cancer on and off like a faucet. Liver cancer, specifically, which is a complete bastard to treat. The liver is amazingly good at regenerating damaged tissue, which is why it truly sucks when it starts replicating cancerous cells.
My oldest sister died of liver cancer not quite fourteen years ago. She was 29. She left two children that needed raising. My mom has had her own brush with breast cancer.
I participated in the 2003 Blogathon to raise money for the Association for International Cancer Research. International—where the money would not go to US researchers, students, or facilities nor provide a tax write-off—because our brain-dead President, backed by the Religious Right (and having appointed Anti-Doctor Leon Kass to his cabinet, less as a biosciences adviser and more as an "expert" to help him propagandize his otherwise inexplicable position), switched off US medical research in this arena like one would stamp an annoying bug.
All ten lines of stem cells he is pretending to fund research on are tainted and useless for medical research, and Bush knows it. Any research on untainted lines of stem cells has been banned for years. Here. Where you can see we still have the hottest teams of doctors and scientists, chomping at the bit to do whatever science it's legal to do in order to save lives.
It's quite literally sickening.
Click here to send your donations abroad. Where your money can do some good.
(More good news from stem cell research can be found here.)
New giant ape discovered in Central AfricaI expect these tribes of killer apes will be blamed for the ongoing little genocide problems in the region.
CO2 levels soaring beyond all expectationsScientists who have been studying the problem for fifty years are starting to suspect that some natural CO2 sink has become saturated and that we've reached a "tipping point" that will accelerate the problem tremendously.
Does it matter what's causing it? We should likely do something to keep from aggravating the problem.
Anyone have any old copies of SimEarth lying around?
Murphy's Law has been quantified:The chance that something will go wrong equalsA U + C + I * (10 - S) ---------------- -------------------- * / F \ 20 1 - sin | ---- | \ 10 /
where urgency (U), complexity (C), importance (I), skill (S) and frequency (F) are each given a rating between one and nine and aggravation (A) gets a number between 0 and 1.
Oliver Cromwell's Space ProgramDr. John Wilkins, brother-in-law to Oliver Cromwell, "drew up plans for what he called a flying chariot powered by clockwork and springs, a set of flapping wings coated with feathers and a few gunpowder boosters to help send it on its way."
That's not really unreasonable. Wilkin's math said that gravity petered out about 20 miles up, but Newton and company were around to correct him as necessary. If there had been a concentrated European push, however, things might have turned out very differently....
I have a novel in the works in which I try to explore how to get seventeenth century explorers into space without bending too many principles of science as we understand it. I'm thinking of a blimp-launched, mostly wooden "diving capsule" accelerated into orbit by a thermite-heated jet of steam (basically a solid-rocket booster) and maneuvered by hydrogen/liquid oxygen jets. All of this technology was technically available back then.
My theme is to explore how the past few hundred years of history would have unfolded without the Dark Ages—with religion supporting science instead of blockading it.
I need to take a month or so off of work to work on this novel. Anyone want to spot me a couple of grand to live on while I do something more socially important than data entry?
Otherwise I might have to sign up for this employment program.
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