Massad Ayoob: Tips When Stopped By Police and Carrying a Firearm

Great video from a great guy about how John Q. needs to behave when he experiences a traffic stop and he’s armed.

[Watch it here.]

You might as well watch this video, also.

20% ‘Fat Tax’ Needed to Fight Obesity

Christopher Wanjek, LiveScience Bad Medicine Columnist
Date: 15 May 2012 Time: 07:38 PM ET

It’s a proposition some might find hard to swallow: a 20-percent tax on unhealthy food to improve the health of the nation.

Yet such a tax — spread across the food chain from manufacturer to consumer, coupled with changes in food policy to spur production of healthier food — is needed to reverse the pandemic of obesity and chronic diseases, researchers say.

Two articles published online today (May 15) in the British Medical Journal describe this course of action. These opinion pieces come one week before the 65th World Health Assembly, to convene on May 21 to 26 in Geneva, where diet-related diseases will be the primary topic.

[Read more about this stupid idea here.]

pgs sez: This is from the same dumbfuck nation that gave us the idea that there should be no sharply-pointed kitchen knives.

Man builds Tesla gun that can shoot 20,000 Volts of electricity

Add this to the increasing number of unusual weapons straight out of a sci-fi movie: A repurposed Nerf gun equipped with a Tesla coil that can shoot up to 20,000 volts of electricity. This electrifying gun created by Rob Flickenger was inspired by the fictional Tesla gun from the steampunk graphic novel The Five Fists of Science. It may not make as much fashion statement as this crazy-looking Tesla coil hat, but it sure looks dangerous.

[Read the rest of the electrifying story here.]

Thieving Heinie bastards steal advertising slogan!

Well, the Germans gave us two world wars, and it seems that they weren’t content to kill all those folks, they just had to go and plagiarise from our companies.

So, the next time one of those swastika kissers blats on about how BMW is “the ultimate driving machine,” let’s just see who got there first.

[See the truth right here!]

pgs sez: Take THAT Car & Driver!

Do humans dream of android prostitutes?

By Sebastian Anthony on May 11, 2012 at 11:14 am
for www.extremetech.com

In the next five years or so it will be possible to build lifelike robots. These robots will look, move, and feel like fellow humans — but, unless the technological singularity comes early, these robots won’t be excellent conversationalists. According some recent research, though, they will make fantastic prostitutes.

If you’ve ever read a sci-fi novel or spent a little time thinking about the future, the concept of having sex with a robot probably doesn’t surprise you — I mean, it’s going to happen eventually, right? If you’re like me, though, you probably thought about having sex with a cyborg, an intelligent robot that is convincingly human — something like that hot blonde from Battlestar Galactica (pictured above), or Data from Star Trek — not some dumb sexbot.

[Read the rest of this article here.]

pgs sez: Sexpot sexbot = great idea (provided that there is a mute button)

Used 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder

Price———-$ 149,999
Mileage———–11,440
Body Style——–Convertible
Exterior Color—-Rosso Vik
Interior Color—-Nero Perseus
Engine————10 Cylinder Gasoline
Transmission——6 Speed Shiftable Automatic
Drive Type——–All wheel drive
Fuel Type———Gasoline

What it looks like:

What the other folks will see in their rearview mirrors:

What the other folks will see about five seconds after they figure out what’s behind them:

pgs sez: I suspect that this will get me a girl who looks like the one in the next article…

Paige Wyatt from American Guns

Dinosaur gases ‘warmed the Earth’

Apatosaurus, formerly known as Brontosaurus, produced a lot of wind

Giant dinosaurs could have warmed the planet with their flatulence, say researchers.

British scientists have calculated the methane output of sauropods, including the species known as Brontosaurus.

By scaling up the digestive wind of cows, they estimate that the population of dinosaurs – as a whole – produced 520 million tonnes of gas annually.

They suggest the gas could have been a key factor in the warm climate 150 million years ago.

David Wilkinson from Liverpool John Moore’s University, and colleagues from the University of London and the University of Glasgow published their results in the journal Current Biology.

Sauropods, such as Apatosaurus louise (formerly known as Brontosaurus), were super-sized land animals that grazed on vegetation during the Mesozoic Era.

For Dr Wilkinson, it was not the giants that were of interest but the microscopic organisms living inside them.

“The ecology of microbes and their role in the working of our planet are one of my key interests in science,” he told BBC Nature.

“Although it’s the dinosaur element that captures the popular imagination with this work, actually it is the microbes living in the dinosaurs guts that are making the methane.”

Methane is known as a “greenhouse gas” that absorbs infrared radiation from the sun, trapping it in the Earth’s atmosphere and leading to increased temperatures.

Previous studies have suggested that the Earth was up to 10C (18F) warmer in the Mesozoic Era.

With the knowledge that livestock emissions currently contribute a significant part to global methane levels, the researchers used existing data to estimate how sauropods could have affected the climate.

Their calculations considered the dinosaurs’ estimated total population and used a scale that links biomass to methane output for cattle.

“Cows today produce something like 50-100 [million tonnes] per year. Our best estimate for Sauropods is around 520 [million tonnes],” said Dr Wilkinson.

[From our buddies at The Beeb.]

Aircraft Detection Before Radar

[Find more photos here.]

courtesy of my buddy, ddt.

How Kalashnikovs Are Made

[Check out the full article here.]

Titanic’s Wake: Shipwreck of the Century Retains Its Grip

by Simon Schama for Newsweek
Apr 2, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

The broken halves of RMS Titanic had barely settled on the ocean floor, 12,600 feet below the surface of the Atlantic, when the craving to see it at the movies began.

The one-reeler Saved From the Titanic, made by Éclair American Co. at its super-modern, glass-covered Fort Lee studio in New Jersey, was released 29 days after the liner sank and took 1,517 lives with it. In one respect at least, the 10—minute movie will never be bettered for authenticity, since its main attraction, the heavy–lidded, cushion-lipped, 22-year-old Dorothy Gibson—star of Revenge of the Silk Masks and It Pays to Be Kind, and cover girl of countless magazines—was a survivor from Lifeboat 7. Starting work a few days after landing back in New York off the rescue ship RMS Carpathia, Dorothy had only to play herself, which she apparently did with frightening aplomb. But then Gibson was one tough cookie.

Precisely a century since the calamity of the four-funneled Titanic, the ship still holds us and our shared culture in its icy grip. The spectacle of luxury punished for its own vanity, the delusions of the unsinkable power brokers, the chill hand of extinction catching the arrogant in the midst of their own sumptuous festivities—all of it reminds us of the biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah or the writing on the wall appearing to Belshazzar’s party people.

Very quickly, press reports and the Senate subcommittee hearings that began in New York a week after the disaster took on the tone of an ancient morality tale played out in modern dress. A cast of the living and the dead, in all the available human types and conditions, passed before the public gaze as if still in their evening glamour or steerage caps and skirts.

There were scoundrels (if not fall guys): above all, J. Bruce Ismay, the director of the White Star Line, who unlike Capt. Edward Smith and the ship’s guilt-stricken designer, Thomas Andrews (who was the first to realize that Titanic was doomed), got himself into a lifeboat with the women and children and never lived down the obloquy. Among the plutocracy there were stylish stoics—most notably Benjamin Guggenheim…Guggenheim saw the women into a lifeboat and then returned to his cabin to don his tuxedo. “We have dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen,”

63-year-old Ida Straus, who refused to leave her husband, Isidor, the magnate of Macy’s (“We have lived together many years; where you go, I go”), and who were last seen settling down in deck chairs to await the final wave.

Precisely a century since the calamity of the four-funneled Titanic, the ship still holds us and our shared culture in its icy grip. The spectacle of luxury punished for its own vanity, the delusions of the unsinkable power brokers, the chill hand of extinction catching the arrogant in the midst of their own sumptuous festivities—all of it reminds us of the biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah or the writing on the wall appearing to Belshazzar’s party people. Fifteenth-century Europe, chastened by unpredictable visitations of the plague, invented, in sculpture and painting, the genre of the Dance of Death, in which the grinning skeleton sweeps up with his scythe all manner of men and women: kings and bishops, knights and damsels, merchants and peasants. Somewhere inside that iceberg rising 50 feet above the Atlantic on the night of April 14, 1912, stood Death with a trident.

Very quickly, press reports and the Senate subcommittee hearings that began in New York a week after the disaster took on the tone of an ancient morality tale played out in modern dress. A cast of the living and the dead, in all the available human types and conditions, passed before the public gaze as if still in their evening glamour or steerage caps and skirts. There were scoundrels (if not fall guys): above all, J. Bruce Ismay, the director of the White Star Line, who unlike Capt. Edward Smith and the ship’s guilt-stricken designer, Thomas Andrews (who was the first to realize that Titanic was doomed), got himself into a lifeboat with the women and children and never lived down the obloquy. Among the plutocracy there were stylish stoics—most notably Benjamin Guggenheim, traveling with his valet, chauffeur, and (clandestinely) his mistress, the singer Leontine Aubert, and her maid. Guggenheim saw the women into a lifeboat and then returned to his cabin to don his tuxedo. “We have dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen,” he reportedly said, adding, “if anything happens, tell my wife I have done my best in doing my duty” (not mentioning that he did it by Leontine).

As if to compensate, there were paragons of endearing marital loyalty: the 63-year-old Ida Straus, who refused to leave her husband, Isidor, the magnate of Macy’s (“We have lived together many years; where you go, I go”), and who were last seen settling down in deck chairs to await the final wave. There were stories of unbearable heartbreak, like that of Bess Allison (wife of the Winnipeg property tycoon Hud Allison), who got separated from her infant, Trevor, in the chaos. Her husband, dressed in his buffalo coat, set her and her 3-year-old daughter into a lifeboat, neither of them knowing that the family nursemaid had got the baby boy safely into another boat. Unable to bear the strain of not knowing where her son was, Bess took little Loraine in her arms, clambered back on board, and perished in the wreck.

“Women and children first” was not a Titanic myth—although the chances of it being observed depended on which class of passenger you happened to be. Shockingly, only 30 percent of steerage children survived. But the age of the colossal machine (whether financial or industrial) was, paradoxically, also a time in which the American plutocrats who dominated the first-class passenger list wanted something more than raw riches. They wanted to be respected for a code of honor they imagined had clung to the pedigree of ancient nobilities.

Plenty of the dollar dukes went down like gents on the Titanic: an Astor, two Wideners, and a Thayer. But its real heroes were often among the crew, none more stirring than Second Officer Herbert Lightoller, who had survived one shipwreck and a cyclone before getting his position on the Titanic. He had gone off watch when the ship struck the iceberg but was the most energetic and resourceful in getting as many women and children as he could into the boats, which he knew very well would only have room for around half of the passengers and crew even when fully loaded (and many weren’t).

Told at the end to get in one himself, his reply, without irony, was “not on your life.” Attempting to make the last “collapsible” lifeboat usable, the rush of water swept him away. The force of an engine explosion brought him back to the surface, where he managed to struggle to the capsized collapsible to which 30 men were desperately hanging. Such was the brutal frigidity of the -water—28 degrees -Fahrenheit—that hypothermia did half of them in during the night.

Eventually transferred to another lifeboat, Lightoller was the very last of the survivors to board the Carpathia. He went on to serve in the First World War and took his converted yacht Sundowner to Dunkirk, where he got 130 off the doomed beach.

Lightoller gets some of his due in an upcoming ABC miniseries, which also spends some time below decks visiting the steerage passengers, albeit sentimentally and sensationally. A better sense of their world can be gotten from the biographies compiled by the exhaustive online Encyclopedia Titanica. A dive into its depths brings up steerage worlds much more fascinating and poignant in their loss than anything the big and small screen have yet contrived.

Although the Titanic was memorably characterized by Walter Lord in his classic A Night to Remember as a “small town,” it was in fact made up of villages from an astonishing diversity of cultures. There were whole communities of Lebanese and Syrian peasants and townspeople, many on their way to Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where some of their countrymen must already have settled. A community of Flemish sugar-beet farmers were headed to Ohio to work in the fields for American sugar companies. There were also Croatians and a big contingent of Finns, Swedes, and Danes.

Many had come from worlds embittered not just by poverty but by brutal class conflict: strikes, strike-breaking, and quasi-military industrial lockouts. Some of this acrimony touched the White Star Line directly and the crew closest to steerage—the stokers, firemen, and stewards—knew it. Titanic’s original master during trials at Belfast—one Captain Haddock (yes, honestly)—faced a strike precisely over the inadequacy of lifeboat accommodation on the liners: the very thing that condemned 1,500 to death.

Chillingly, the shortage of lifeboats was due to shipboard aesthetics, the concern not to clutter the promenade deck of first class.

But it was supposed by the likes of Ismay that a full complement of lifeboats would not be needed because of the sophistication of that “unsinkable” technology: the Marconi wireless equipment that in the event of an accident would send out distress messages so quickly that other vessels would be on the scene well before the ship could founder. But on the Sunday of the disaster the radio was malfunctioning almost until the iceberg hit. That might account for so little attention being paid to multiple warnings sent by a number of ships about the danger of the ice-field encountered further south than anyone could remember.

Modernity is only as good as its weakest link. Titanic boasted electrically operated steel doors that with a throw of the switch could be lowered to seal compartments below the waterline. But with seawater pouring through gaping holes in five adjoining compartments, the doors were useless. It was a pitifully brief two and a half hours from the first onrush of water into the boiler rooms to the disappearance of the broken ship.

In all of the filmed and dramatized versions of the disaster, including James Cameron’s mostly brilliant film (which is being rereleased in 3-D on April 4), two appalling moments are missing. First there is the terrible climax when the broken ship took its final plunge, preceded by the immense roaring sound of the engines, loosened from their stays, crashing through the ship, some of them exploding. This was then followed by the horrifying wails of more than a thousand souls as they were thrown into the night, hitting the water whose frigidity would kill them in minutes if not seconds. In the lifeboats looking on in horror, wrote Carla Jensen, a young Danish woman, “we sat like stone figures … What was even worse than the screams was the deadly silence that came after.”

And then there was the scene on the Carpathia, which demonstrates the difference between a rescue and a happy ending. It was only then that survivors realized who among their family—husbands, wives, parents—they would never see again. And since, disproportionately, it was women who survived, it was they whom Jensen saw “some just sitting apathetically staring out into air … others wandering around screaming their men’s names. Some were lying around just crying, and others could not handle the event, and several times we saw canvas-covered bodies being lowered over.”

Will we ever learn that the best systems, the most money, the cleverest engineers, and their most infallible designs are of no avail when it’s that imperfect thing—the human being—that drives them at a reckless speed?

[Find the original article here in its entirety.]

[Find further reading here.]

Evidence of ‘earliest fire use’

3 April 2012

Wonderwerk Cave is in the Northern Cape and was occupied by ancient human species

Scientists say they have new evidence that our ancestors were using fire as early as a million years ago.

It takes the form of ash and bone fragments recovered from Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.

The team tells the journal PNAS that the sediments suggest frequent, controlled fires were lit on the site.

The ability to use fire is regarded as a key step in human development because it gave us access to cooked foods and new technologies.

Stone tools found at Wonderwerk Cave indicate the ancestor in question may have been Homo erectus, a species whose existence has been documented as far back as 1.8 million years ago.

Establishing precisely when humans first acquired the ability to control fire has been very difficult.

There have been several claims that the skill was in existence even earlier than at Wonderwerk.

But they have all been challenged, with sceptics arguing the fire remains from open sites could have been the result of natural blazes ignited by lightning.

In contrast, the PNAS team, which consists of scientists based at US, Israeli, German and South African institutions, says statements about the Northern Cape cave are far more secure.

If correct, the Wonderwerk discovery would push the earliest indisputable controlled use of fire back by about 300,000 years.

In their paper, the researchers describe burnt remains of grasses, brushes, leaves and even bones in the cave’s sediments some 30m back from the entrance.

This makes it far less likely that what they are viewing is material from wildfires that was simply blown into the cave by wind, they argue.

The depth of the sediments also suggests fires were lit on the same spot over and over again.

Sick Ants Help Vaccinate Colonies, Study Suggests

Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 03 April 2012 Time: 05:00 PM ET

Like crowded megacities, busy ant colonies face a high risk of disease outbreaks. New research indicates such “urban ants” also know how to prevent epidemics — when an infected ant enters the colony, its nest mates carefully lick off the infecting fungus.

“This is increasing the survival of the originally exposed individual,” study researcher Sylvia Cremer, of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, told LiveScience.

And it turns out, the licking behavior may also help the doer by giving that individual greater immunity to the infecting fungus. Insects don’t have the “adaptive” immune system that mammals do, but they are still able to fine-tune their disease-fighting systems to react to specific threats.

[Read the entire article here.]

Excellent photomacrography from our Russki friends.

A hopeless romantic meets her match

Touring Greece’s antiquities, a traveler comes face to face with the temples of the ancient gods – and her childhood dreams.

By Jenny Lenore Rosenbaum / January 26, 2012

As a child, on windy nights I’d fantasize that my bedroom could disengage from our home. Like a caterpillar giddy for transformation, it would emerge as a sublime sailing ship, float with the vagabond clouds, then drift down to worlds of long ago.

I would step off the ship onto the bronze earth. Greeting me were Greek gods and goddesses – Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, and the others – smiling gently from ivory faces. My life would be adorned by their radiance, their jealousies would captivate me, and my parents would be proud I’d found such famous companions.

After a social studies unit in fourth grade on Greek mythology, anything even remotely connected to ancient Greece was irresistible. It was more thrilling, by far, than a party or a snow day off school in my Indiana hometown.

In high school, I wondered if continuing such unabashed romanticism about antiquity might prove a liability, as most of my egghead friends had a proclivity for the sardonic. Then I discovered books by poets and scholars exalting the romantic melancholy of ancient ruins. If such notables shared my passion, then I knew my infatuation must be legitimate.

One lackluster day, as I looked through routine snail mail, I found a beautiful catalog with a cover photo of an ancient Greek temple soaring above the sea. It was from a newly launched cruise line, Voyages to Antiquity. Instantly, those three words transported me to my childhood reveries.

All the ancient civilizations I’d longed to visit were in that catalog, encompassed in 25 journeys – aboard a sleek white vessel, the Aegean Odyssey.

It looked like a reincarnation of the ship in my childhood dreams. But this one sailed farther: through the entire Mediterranean world and into the Aegean, Ionian, Adriatic, and Black seas – to Byzantine Turkey, Renaissance Italy, Pharaonic Egypt, Classical Greece, even exotic ports of Asia.

Unable to resist, I chose an odyssey through the Greek Islands and Turkey, from Athens to Istanbul.

The cruise line hosted a presailing tour of the Acropolis. Our guide told how it had been sacred terrain even during the Minoan and Mycenaean periods, before Classical-era Greeks created the Parthenon there – Athena’s temple, dedicated to wisdom. Later, the guide said, the edifice became a church and mosque.

Wandering through these vast, ancient sites a few days later, it was as though Aphrodite, goddess of love, had returned to me from my childhood fantasy and whispered: “Don’t mind the others if they accuse you of being a hopeless romantic. Look at me, I’ve devoted 2,500 years to being just that.”

Back home, reimmersed in the workaday world, a friend from the ship called to commiserate about our shared malaise. “I feel bereft of ruins and all those sublime islands,” she lamented, “and can’t wait to return.” Near retirement, she was determined to experience, solo, all 25 odysseys.

“But what about your husband?” I asked. “Isn’t he a homebody with a low tolerance for your absences?”

In a heartbeat, she fired back: “If Odysseus could be apart from Penelope for 20 years, then Max can handle it.”

[Read the original article here.]

ORSIS Rifle Manufacture

Here are a couple pix from a Russian rifle maker:

[See all the photos here.]

Stanford creates wireless, implantable “Innerspace” medical device

By Sebastian Anthony
February 22, 2012 at 2:35 pm
for www.extremetech.com

Engineers at Stanford have finally managed to create a wirelessly powered and controlled device that’s small enough to travel through your bloodstream. Future versions will carry sensors and drug delivery systems, for the ultimate in pin-point accurate medicine.

The breakthrough, made by Ada Poon, is depressingly simple. Basically, for some 50 years, it has always been believed that human flesh, muscle, and bone absorb high-frequency radio waves. Low-frequency waves penetrate well, but to power a device using low-frequency waves (using induction) you need a very long antenna — something on the order of a few centimeters, which is obviously too large. Poon, who is obviously an outside-the-box thinker, decided to re-do the math — and what do you know: high-frequency radiation around 1GHz actually penetrates the human body very well. As a result, Poon’s wireless device can use an antenna that’s only two millimeters square — small enough to visit almost any portion of our vasculature.

[Read the entire article here.]

DARPA reveals Avatar program, robot soldiers incoming

DARPA, the bleeding-edge research wing of the United States Department of Defense, has revealed that it will spend millions of dollars on a project called “Avatar.” If you’ve seen the movie of the same name — the highest-grossing movie of all time — let me put your mind at rest: DARPA isn’t looking to genetically engineer blue-skinned aliens that humans can control; no, they’re developing robots.

[Read the entire article here.]

DARPA’s AlphaDog robot pack mule begins real world testing

DARPA has released the first video of its robot Legged Squad Support System (LS3) walking untethered and in the wild. Scroll down and watch in awe as a robotic quadruped scales a rocky, forested hill while carrying a heavy load on its back.

[Read the entire article here.]

You may make what you will of this photograph.

And this one, as well.

I have a suspicion that these girlies would NOT like Messr.Réard’s swimsuit.

Then again, the girl in the first photo ISN’T wearing a bikini, is she?

The girl on the bottom? She’s a girl who needs someone to put her on her bottom more often, if you catch my drift…

You may wish to visit femen.org to investigate the context.

YMMV

That’s Us, dummies.

Me, and the bro, John C. Sucilla.

In honor of our birthday, I present this picture:

Pictured on the left, in Louis Réard’s original creation, is exotic dancer Micheline Bernardini, whom Messr.Réard called upon to model his bikini swimsuit in July of 1946. He hired an exotic dancer because he could not find any model to wear his swimsuit in public.

The swimsuit was made from 30 square inches of fabric and had a thong back.

That’s right – butt floss!!!

Réard was an French engineer.

A bikini is not a bikini unless it can be pulled through a wedding ring.
- Louis Réard

Oh, the girl on the right? Eye candy.

pgs sez: I never want hear any Francophobe talk, ever!!!

MIT launches free online ‘fully automated’ course

By Sean Coughlan
BBC News education correspondent
13 Feb 2012

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the world’s top-rated universities, has announced its first free course which can be studied and assessed completely online.

An electronics course, beginning in March, will be the first prototype of an online project, known as MITx.

The interactive course is designed to be fully automated, with successful students receiving a certificate.

The US university says it wants MITx to “shatter barriers to education”.

This ground-breaking scheme represents a significant step forward in the use of technology to deliver higher education.

[Read the article in its entirety here.]

When All Is Taken Away

by Michael Daly
for Newsweek Magazine
January 23, 2012

What does it take to survive the brutal death of one’s children? How can a parent endure?

After a funeral unlike any witnessed at the century-old St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, mourners stood on Fifth Avenue early this month and wondered aloud how Madonna Badger had managed to function at all, much less step up to the lectern and speak so eloquently of the three young daughters who lay in coffins before her.

She had not been able to rescue her children from the Christmas-morning fire that swept through their Connecticut home, killing the three girls along with her parents. She had only been able to cry out “My babies! My babies!” as the firefighters tried to reach them.

Hers was a story of love for Lily, Sarah, and Grace. But there had to be more than love alone. “We can talk all day long about love, but love without service is not enough. Please keep our little girls in your hearts by showing your love with acts of pure kindness, by loving each other and finding a way to help each other every day.”

“I have been asked a million times,” she told the grieving crowd in New York, “ ‘How can you do this, how are you talking, how are you surviving?’ Because when I used to hear about people losing a child, or if a child got very, very sick, I would say, ‘I could never survive that. I could never live through that. I could never, ever, ever live through losing my babies.’?”

She paused.

“But here I am. Here all of us are.” Amen.

[Read the article in its entirety here.]

In Defense of Drones: A Historical Argument

Once upon a time, American military might was symbolized by the heavy boots of the Marine Corps, stomping ashore to reestablish order in unruly parts of the world. Today, increasingly, it is symbolized by unmanned drone aircraft, controlled from thousands of miles away, dropping bombs on accused terrorists. And to judge by the Obama Administration’s new defense plan, released earlier this month, this shift will be strongly reinforced in the years to come. The plan aims to cut troops, ships and planes while concentrating our military energies more than ever on drones, spy technology, cyber warfare, jammers, and special operations forces.

With its explicit embrace of advanced technology over traditional methods of combat, the strategy seems designed to provoke the increasingly vocal critics who doubt the morality, effectiveness, and political implications of “remote control warfare.” Notre Dame law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell, making the inevitable comparison to video games, has argued that “to accept killing far from the situation of battlefields where there is an understanding of necessity is really ethically troubling.” The Economist, hardly a bastion of radicalism, has similarly asked: “if war can be waged by one side without any risk to the life and limb of its combatants, has a vital form of restraint been removed?” And just last week in The New York Times, Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution called unmanned systems “a technology that removes the last political barriers to war”—and thereby undermines democracy—because it allows politicians to take aggressive military action without having to face the electoral consequences of young Americans coming home in coffins.

[Read the rest of the article]

Do we need spaceflight for the perspective?

An astronaut’s life-changing lesson from a moment in orbit.

By Richard Schiffman / January 20, 2012

One of my great thrills in recent years was having dinner with astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 14 in 1971, during which he spent nine hours taking samples and conducting a variety of experiments on the surface of the moon.

As a journalist, I have met plenty of celebrities, but sitting across the table from this soft-spoken astronaut was different. It wasn’t his fame that gave me goose bumps, but the fact that I was face to face with one of only a handful of humans who had actually left Earth behind and walked upon another world.

During the return journey of Apollo 14, Mitchell had an experience that would change the course of his life. In an interview with Ascent Magazine, he recalled:

“The spacecraft was rotating to maintain the thermal balance of the Sun…. [E]very two minutes, with every rotation, we saw the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun as they passed by the window. The 360-degree panorama of the heavens was awesome and the stars are ten times as bright and, therefore, ten times as numerous than you could ever see on a high mountaintop on a clear night.

It was overwhelmingly magnificent…. I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars. It wasn’t just intellectual knowledge – it was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy – a transformational experience.”

Edgar Mitchell was raised a South­ern Baptist. He knew of nothing in Chris­tianity or in science that could account for his mystical epiphany in space. But he stumbled upon a description of it in an ancient Sanskrit text, which spoke of savikalpa samadhi, an experience in which objects lose their separateness and are perceived ecstatically as being elements in a vast and borderless oneness.

I couldn’t help but think about Mitchell as I walked through “Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration,” a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, which marks the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight.

During dinner with Mitchell, he spoke of the timeless human urge to explore, to move into new places both physically and figuratively, and to enlarge our sense of awe and imagination of human possibilities. Space travel has rightly been regarded as one of the great technological achievements of our times. But is it more than this?

I was hoping that the show at the Museum of Natural History would address these larger spiritual and philosophical questions. But the exhibition, focuses narrowly on the technical challenges of the space program and the new generation of hardware that is being developed to meet them.

Is space travel a pointless luxury or a psychic necessity? How will venturing still farther into space change our view of ourselves? Are we ready to do so? I wish the museum show had explored these questions. But since it didn’t, we’ll end with the visionary words of Mitchell from an interview with The Examiner:

“[W]e will go to Mars, in due course, and back to the Moon, in due course. When we do that it’s going to sound a little foolish when we say, ‘I came from the United States, Canada, or Britain, or Germany, or Israel, or Russia.’

“No, we came from the Earth and we haven’t got our act together yet because we’re still too busy killing each other over whose god is the best god. We are not learning to view ourselves as an advanced, evolving civilization. That is what we really must learn to do … if we [are] to survive.”

[Excerpted from the original article]

Boy or Girl? Why Dads Want Sons, but Moms Want Daughters

Women strongly prefer daughters while men wants sons, a study finds. Could this lead to sex selection?

By Bonnie Rochman | @brochman | January 19, 2012

That tired truism about wanting only a healthy baby and not caring about gender? Puh-leeze. Women want daughters, and men crave sons, finds research in the journal Open Anthropology.

The results surprised even the researchers, from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, who’d surveyed more than 2,000 students, staff and faculty at the college about gender preference in offspring. They’d assumed that respondents would show little or no preference, but they found that — no matter how they worded the question — there was a “significant offspring gender preference” along gender lines.

Respondents answered the following questions:

1. What gender would you prefer your firstborn child to be (or did you hope for if you already have a child)?
2. If you were to have (or do have) more than one child, would you prefer the majority to be male or female?
3. If you were to have only one child, what gender would you prefer it to be?

Today, offspring gender preference conflicts with the ongoing mission in many nations, especially in Western Europe and North America, to pursue social and political agendas aimed at eliminating all discrimination on the basis of gender,” write the authors.

And yet, it persists. What gives?

[Read the rest of this Time Magazine article here.}

The Secrets Inside Your Dog’s Mind

Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, holds out a dog biscuit.

“Henry!” he says. Henry is a big black schnauzer-poodle mix–a schnoodle, in the words of his owner, Tracy Kivell, another Duke anthropologist. Kivell holds on to Henry’s collar so that he can only gaze at the biscuit.

{see pictures of dogs learning new tricks]

“You got it?” Hare asks Henry. Hare then steps back until he’s standing between a pair of inverted plastic cups on the floor. He quickly puts the hand holding the biscuit under one cup, then the other, and holds up both empty hands. Hare could run a very profitable shell game. No one in the room–neither dog nor human–can tell which cup hides the biscuit.

[see a video on how dogs think like us]

Read the rest of Time Magazine’s article here.

The Dog That Cornered Osama Bin Laden

When U.S. President Barack Obama went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, last week for a highly publicized but very private meeting with the commando team that killed Osama bin Laden, only one of the 81 members of the super-secret  SEAL DevGru unit was identified by name: Cairo, the war dog.

Cairo, like most canine members of the elite U.S. Navy SEALs, is a Belgian Malinois. The Malinois breed is similar to German shepherds but smaller and more compact, with an adult male weighing in the 30-kilo range.

 
[Read the entire article (and see all the great pix!) by clicking here.]

(GunReports.com) – The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said.

U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.

“There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people,” it said.

India had the world’s second-largest civilian gun arsenal, with an estimated 46 million firearms outside law enforcement and the military, though this represented just four guns per 100 people there. China, ranked third with 40 million privately held guns, had 3 firearms per 100 people.

Germany, France, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil and Russia were next in the ranking of country’s overall civilian gun arsenals.

On a per-capita basis, Yemen had the second most heavily armed citizenry behind the United States, with 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, Iraq with 39 and Serbia with 38.

France, Canada, Sweden, Austria and Germany were next, each with about 30 guns per 100 people, while many poorer countries often associated with violence ranked much lower. Nigeria, for instance, had just one gun per 100 people.

[courtesy of my sister, Margo]

45,000 lights

Science teachers and students have been gleefully rewriting Christmas carols to mark the birthday of Sir Isaac Newton on Dec. 25, 1642, as a way to lighten the tension of final exams. Here are a few examples …

“The Ten Days of Newtonmas” (sung to “The 12 Days of Christmas”)

On the tenth day of Newton,
My true love gave to me,
Ten drops of genius,
Nine silver coins,
Eight circling planets,
Seven shades of light,
Six counterfeiters,
Cal-cu-lus!
Four telescopes,
Three Laws of Motion,
Two awful feuds,
And the discovery of gravity!

“Gravity” (sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells”)

Gravity, gravity,
Keeps us on the ground.
An apple fell on Newton’s head,
What goes up comes down.
Gravity, gravity,
Mass times 9.8
Remember travel very fast
If earth you must escape.

“Deck the Labs” (sung to the tune of “Deck the Halls”)

Deck the labs with Newton’s Laws
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
You should study them because
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
They’ll be on the physics test
Fa la la, la la la, la la la.
You won’t want to say you guessed
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

“O, Gravity,” (sung to the tune of “O, Christmas Tree”)

O Gravity, O Gravity,
All Newton’s theories crowning.
Where e’er we be, land, air, or sea,
We’re subject to your “downing”
F equals G, m-one, m-two,
All over R squared, yes, it’s true.
O Gravity, O Gravity,
We cannot flee, you guarantee!

Religion News Service
by Kimberley Winston
December 17, 2011

Deck those halls with boughs of apples and top that tree with a finger puppet of Sir Isaac Newton.

At least that’s what Robin Zebrowski does at her home in Beloit, Wis., where she and her husband, Joshua, observe the birthday of the great 17th-century English scientist and mathematician, Dec. 25, 1642.

They send cards featuring a bust of the great man (inside reads: “Reasons Greetings!”), and exchange gifts that emphasize science and knowledge, including books and other “nerdy” things, Zebrowski said.

On Dec. 24, the couple and their two cats leave a plate for Newton’s ghost with an apple and a CD mix.

“My husband speculated that if Newton were really taking the place of Santa, he’d probably just rent a Prius, being environmentally conscious and unlucky enough to know that reindeer can’t fly,” said Zebrowski, 36. “Stupid gravity! We make him a mix CD each year to entertain him.”

Merry Newtonmas, everyone!

The Zebrowskis are part of small, but apparently growing, number of atheists, skeptics and other nonbelievers who make merry over Newton’s contributions to science and math—the discovery of gravity, the invention of calculus and the first reflecting telescope, to name a few.

This is the Zebrowskis’ eighth Newtonmas—neutral territory for her former Catholicism, his former Judaism and their mutual unbelief. Extended family joins the fun, too, sending presents like boxes of apples and DVDs of science shows.

“I love that it’s a sort of counterpoint to a religious holiday by celebrating science and reason instead of superstition,” she said. “But because it shares so many traits with Christmas, it’s meant more to bring people together in spite of differing belief systems rather than push back antagonistically.”

The origins of Newtonmas are murky at best. Michael E. Marotta, a technical writer in Austin, Texas, has sent Newtonmas cards for 30 years and remembers a radio commentary he gave in 1982 that highlighted the parallels between Newton and Jesus.

Zebrowski thought she invented Newtonmas, but was delighted to learn she had co-revelers when the Skeptics Society sent her a catalogue of “Newtonmas gifts”—books like “The Believing Brain,” “How to Debate a Creationist” and “Why People Believe Weird Things.”

“I just made it up back in the 1990s as a joke, just to promote items we were selling,” said Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society, which aims to debunk supernatural and pseudoscientific claims. “Everybody was giving me a hard time for calling our party a Christmas party so I said, ‘Alright, I am calling it Newtonmas.’”

Matt Blum, who wrote about Newtonmas in a 2007 post on Wired magazine’s GeekDad blog, says his high school physics teacher marked Newton’s birthday with experiments and “physics carols.”

A 1892 issue of Nature magazine bestows the carol credit on some Victorian-era English scientists.

“At Christmas 1890, or Newtonmas 248, for the first time,” the Nature article reads, “the members of the Newtonkai, or Newton Association, met in the Physical Laboratory of the Imperial University, to hear each other talk, to distribute appropriate gifts, and to lengthen out the small hours with laughter and good cheer. The Society has no President: a portrait of the august Sir Isaac Newton presides over the scene.”

Newtonmas picked up momentum—in keeping with Newton’s Second Law of Motion, of course—in 2007, when the evolutionary biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins championed it in a British magazine.

“25 December is the birthday of one of the truly great men ever to walk the earth,” Dawkins wrote. “His achievements might justly be celebrated wherever his truths hold sway. And that means from one end of the universe to the other. Happy Newton Day!”

In 2009, the holiday got a pop culture bump when television’s “The Big Bang Theory” had Sheldon, a physicist, try to place a bust of Newton on a Christmas tree. When his roommate replied with a snarky, “Merry Newtonmas, everyone,” Sheldon replied, “I sense that’s not sincere, though I have no idea why.”

In fact, like all December holidays, Newtonmas has not avoided controversy. First, Newton’s birthday falls on Dec. 25 only by the Julian calendar, which was in use in England at the time of his birth. By the current (Gregorian) calendar, he was actually born on Jan. 4.

Then there’s Newton’s religiosity. As a committed Christian, scholars note Newton wrote more about theology than science.

“Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion,” Newton said. “God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.”

There’s also Newton’s passionate pursuit of alchemy, which modern scientists consider pseudoscience. But none of that matters to Newtonmas enthusiasts.

“It’s like that episode of Seinfeld where they celebrate Festivus,” Marotta said. “It’s a holiday for the rest of us.”

from the January 2007 issue of Vanity Fair

Why Women Aren’t Funny

What makes the female so much deadlier than the male? With assists from Fran Lebowitz, Nora Ephron, and a recent Stanford-medical-school study, the author investigates the reasons for the humor gap.

by Christopher Hitchens

Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: “He’s really quite cute, and he’s kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he’s so funny … ” (If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, “Funny? He wouldn’t know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.”) However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: “She’s a real honey, has a life of her own … [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] … and, man, does she ever make ‘em laugh.”

Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

All right—try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.

Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift. Indeed, we now have all the joy of a scientific study, which illuminates the difference. At the Stanford University School of Medicine (a place, as it happens, where I once underwent an absolutely hilarious procedure with a sigmoidoscope), the grim-faced researchers showed 10 men and 10 women a sample of 70 black-and-white cartoons and got them to rate the gags on a “funniness scale.” To annex for a moment the fall-about language of the report as it was summarized in Biotech Week:

The researchers found that men and women share much of the same humor-response system; both use to a similar degree the part of the brain responsible for semantic knowledge and juxtaposition and the part involved in language processing. But they also found that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, and the nucleus accumbens … which is part of the mesolimbic reward center.

This has all the charm and address of the learned Professor Scully’s attempt to define a smile, as cited by Richard Usborne in his treatise on P. G. Wodehouse: “the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth; the curving of the naso-labial furrows … ” But have no fear—it gets worse:

“Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon,” said the report’s author, Dr. Allan Reiss. “So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it.” The report also found that “women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny.”

Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it?

his is not to say that women are humorless, or cannot make great wits and comedians. And if they did not operate on the humor wavelength, there would be scant point in half killing oneself in the attempt to make them writhe and scream (uproariously). Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence. Men will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is—or they are—extremely stupid. Women aren’t like that. And the wits and comics among them are formidable beyond compare: Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz, Ellen DeGeneres. (Though ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny?) Greatly daring—or so I thought—I resolved to call up Ms. Lebowitz and Ms. Ephron to try out my theories. Fran responded: “The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?” Ms. Ephron did not disagree. She did, however, in what I thought was a slightly feline way, accuse me of plagiarizing a rant by Jerry Lewis that said much the same thing. (I have only once seen Lewis in action, in The King of Comedy, where it was really Sandra Bernhard who was funny.)

In any case, my argument doesn’t say that there are no decent women comedians. There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. When Roseanne stands up and tells biker jokes and invites people who don’t dig her shtick to suck her dick—know what I am saying? And the Sapphic faction may have its own reasons for wanting what I want—the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.

Substitute the term “self-defecation” (which I actually heard being used inadvertently once) and almost all men will laugh right away, if only to pass the time. Probe a little deeper, though, and you will see what Nietzsche meant when he described a witticism as an epitaph on the death of a feeling. Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with—and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough. (Perhaps not by coincidence, battered as they are by motherfucking nature, men tend to refer to life itself as a bitch.) Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is. Jokes about calamitous visits to the doctor or the shrink or the bathroom, or the venting of sexual frustration on furry domestic animals, are a male province. It must have been a man who originated the phrase “funny like a heart attack.” In all the millions of cartoons that feature a patient listening glum-faced to a physician (“There’s no cure. There isn’t even a race for a cure”), do you remember even one where the patient is a woman? I thought as much.

Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit. (Men can tell jokes about what happened to John Wayne Bobbitt, but they don’t want women doing so.) Men have prostate glands, hysterically enough, and these have a tendency to give out, along with their hearts and, it has to be said, their dicks. This is funny only in male company. For some reason, women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing, which is why we admire Lucille Ball and Helen Fielding, who do see the funny side of it. But this is so rare as to be like Dr. Johnson’s comparison of a woman preaching to a dog walking on its hind legs: the surprise is that it is done at all.

The plain fact is that the physical structure of the human being is a joke in itself: a flat, crude, unanswerable disproof of any nonsense about “intelligent design.” The reproductive and eliminating functions (the closeness of which is the origin of all obscenity) were obviously wired together in hell by some subcommittee that was giggling cruelly as it went about its work. (“Think they’d wear this? Well, they’re gonna have to.”) The resulting confusion is the source of perhaps 50 percent of all humor. Filth. That’s what the customers want, as we occasional stand-up performers all know. Filth, and plenty of it. Filth in lavish, heaping quantities. And there’s another principle that helps exclude the fair sex. “Men obviously like gross stuff,” says Fran Lebowitz. “Why? Because it’s childish.” Keep your eye on that last word. Women’s appetite for talk about that fine product known as Depend is limited. So is their relish for gags about premature ejaculation. (“Premature for whom?” as a friend of mine indignantly demands to know.) But “child” is the key word. For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle. This womanly seriousness was well caught by Rudyard Kipling in his poem “The Female of the Species.” After cleverly noticing that with the male “mirth obscene diverts his anger”—which is true of most work on that great masculine equivalent to childbirth, which is warfare—Kipling insists:

But the Woman that God gave him,
every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue,
armed and engined for the same,
And to serve that single issue,
lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be
deadlier than the male.

The word “issue” there, which we so pathetically misuse, is restored to its proper meaning of childbirth. As Kipling continues:

She who faces Death by torture for
each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must
not swerve for fact or jest.

Men are overawed, not to say terrified, by the ability of women to produce babies. (Asked by a lady intellectual to summarize the differences between the sexes, another bishop responded, “Madam, I cannot conceive.”) It gives women an unchallengeable authority. And one of the earliest origins of humor that we know about is its role in the mockery of authority. Irony itself has been called “the glory of slaves.” So you could argue that when men get together to be funny and do not expect women to be there, or in on the joke, they are really playing truant and implicitly conceding who is really the boss.

The ancient annual festivities of Saturnalia, where the slaves would play master, were a temporary release from bossdom. A whole tranche of subversive male humor likewise depends on the notion that women are not really the boss, but are mere objects and victims. Kipling saw through this:

So it comes that Man, the coward,
when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council,
dare not leave a place for her.

In other words, for women the question of funniness is essentially a secondary one. They are innately aware of a higher calling that is no laughing matter. Whereas with a man you may freely say of him that he is lousy in the sack, or a bad driver, or an inefficient worker, and still wound him less deeply than you would if you accused him of being deficient in the humor department.

If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates. This is the unspoken compromise. H. L. Mencken described as “the greatest single discovery ever made by man” the realization “that babies have human fathers, and are not put into their mother’s bodies by the gods.” You may well wonder what people were thinking before that realization hit, but we do know of a society in Melanesia where the connection was not made until quite recently. I suppose that the reasoning went: everybody does that thing the entire time, there being little else to do, but not every woman becomes pregnant. Anyway, after a certain stage women came to the conclusion that men were actually necessary, and the old form of matriarchy came to a close. (Mencken speculates that this is why the first kings ascended the throne clutching their batons or scepters as if holding on for grim death.) People in this precarious position do not enjoy being laughed at, and it would not have taken women long to work out that female humor would be the most upsetting of all.

Childbearing and rearing are the double root of all this, as Kipling guessed. As every father knows, the placenta is made up of brain cells, which migrate southward during pregnancy and take the sense of humor along with them. And when the bundle is finally delivered, the funny side is not always immediately back in view. Is there anything so utterly lacking in humor as a mother discussing her new child? She is unboreable on the subject. Even the mothers of other fledglings have to drive their fingernails into their palms and wiggle their toes, just to prevent themselves from fainting dead away at the sheer tedium of it. And as the little ones burgeon and thrive, do you find that their mothers enjoy jests at their expense? I thought not.

Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman’s universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer. And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she’s just had? (“And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful.” Peaceful?)

For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical. But without tragedy there could be no comedy. My beloved said to me, when I told her I was going to have to address this melancholy topic, that I should cheer up because “women get funnier as they get older.”

Observation suggests to me that this might indeed be true, but, excuse me, isn’t that rather a long time to have to wait?

pgs sez: All the more reason to have a young one, since the middling ones are so dour.

It might seem trite and stupid, but here is the bare-bones “Guy Manual,” starting with Number 1:

That stuff about the stomach and the heart is pretty much true. (1/13)

It’s primal. It’s hard to explain. On the one hand, we don’t expect you to be Betty Crocker, at home with an apron on making coq au vin. On the other, having a partner who can cook delicious food, and is willing to do so, creates tremendous feelings of connection and well-being. A man has few defenses for a woman who cooks.

[And on to Numbers 2-thru-13.}

pgs sez: This also holds true for guys (like me) who love to cook for someone.

By SIMON BLACKBURN
December 11, 2011, 5:30 pm

Anyone admiring David Hume as I do finds much to cheer, but much to lament in the state of academic philosophy, as this year, the 300th anniversary of his birth, comes to a close. Hume was an anatomist of the mind, charting the ways we think and feel — a psychologist or cognitive scientist before his time. The cheering feature of the contemporary scene is that plenty of people are following in those footsteps. The nature versus nurture battle has declared an uneasy draw, but the human nature industry is in fine fettle, fed by many disciplines and eagerly consumed by the public.

Yet among philosophers it is not uncommon to find Hume patronized as a slightly dim, inaccurate or naïve analytical philosopher who gamely tried to elucidate the meanings of terms but generally failed hopelessly to do so. In fact, Immanuel Kant, a German near-contemporary of Hume, who is often billed as his opponent, had cause to defend him against a similar complaint more than two centuries ago. “ One cannot without feeling a certain pain,” Kant wrote in 1783, “behold how utterly and completely his opponents, Reid, Oswald, Beattie and finally Priestley missed the point of his problem and constantly misjudged his hints for improvement — constantly taking for granted just what he doubted, and conversely, proving with vehemence and, more often than not, with great insolence exactly what it had never entered his mind to doubt.” Plus ça change.

The most visible example of this is the rumpus surrounding the famous passage in which Hume declares that reason by itself is inert, and has no other office than to serve and obey the passions. The mountains of commentary this has excited include accusations that Hume is a skeptic about practical reasoning (whatever that might mean); that he is a nihilist who cannot have any values; that in his eyes nothing matters; that he is too stupid to realize that learning that a glass contains benzene instead of gin might extinguish your desire to drink from it; that he constantly forgets his own theory; and indeed, in the words of one contemporary writer — the frothing and foaming and insolence here reach a crescendo — that philosophers like Hume only avoid being “radically defective specimens of humanity” by constantly forgetting and then contradicting their own views. It is melancholy to see one’s colleagues going so far astray for it is surely sensible enough to say that practical reasoning works by mobilizing considerations that engage our desires and wishes, passions and concerns. Those facts that do not concern us indeed remain inert; but far from implying that nothing matters Hume crafts a straightforward and entirely plausible account of what it is for things to matter to us as they do.

So why the panic? Plato taught philosophers to regard themselves as the special guardians of reason: mandarins whose cozy acquaintance with the forms, or with logic, or with rationality entitles them to special authority in the deliberations of mankind. Take away the role and you destroy a whole professorial raison d’être. And reasons have become the Holy Grail of contemporary philosophy. They beam down at us, or at least beam down at the illuminati among us. They are the highest court of appeal, what William James called the giver of “moral holidays,” inescapable, inexorable and independent of us, free from the trail of the human serpent. Worldly pains are one thing, but the pain of irrationality — well, even the threat of that is a fearful thing, a Medusa or gorgon’s head to turn your opponents to stone.

I think there is something in the water that makes this self-image so seductive at present — a cultural need prompting philosophers to separate themselves as far as possible from the unwashed skeptics, nihilists, relativists or ironists of postmodernism, of which the best known American spokesman was the late Richard Rorty. These are the people who have infiltrated many humanities departments for a generation and who, curiously enough given their usual political colors anticipated today’s politicians in being unable to talk of facts or data — let alone reasons — without sneering quote marks. To be fair, however, while the postmodernists used the quotes because they obsessed over the idea that reality is capable of many different interpretations, the politicians and pundits tend to use them because they cannot bear the thought that reality might get in the way of their god-given right to simple certainties, simple visions and simple nostrums. It’s a different motivation, and Fox News may be relieved to hear that it is not really the heir of Jacques Derrida.

Perhaps the cultural situation of the West is sufficiently insecure, like that of Athens after the war with Sparta, for us to need the same defenses against the skeptical quote marks that were provided by Socrates and Plato.They taught us that we can respond to an eternal independent beacon, the heavenly structures of reason itself. The idea that down in our foundations there lie grubby creatures like desires, or passions, or needs, or culture, is like some nightmarish madwoman in the attic, and induces the same kind of reaction that met Darwin when he too drew attention to our proximity to animals rather than to angels. Surely we, the creatures of reason, are not in bondage to the horrible contingencies that go with being an animal? From their professorial eyries the mandarins fight back, reassuring each other that the Holy Grail is there to be seen, spilling into tomes and journals and conferences, e-mails, blogs and tweets, the torrents of what Wittgenstein nicely called the “slightly hysterical style of university talk.”

So does Hume actually give comfort to the postmodernists? Are Foucault and Derrida his true heirs? Certainly not, although he is well seen as a pragmatist: an ancestor of James, Dewey, Wittgenstein or even the less apocalyptic parts of Nietzsche or Richard Rorty. But it never occurred to Hume to doubt that there are standards of both reasoning and conduct. He has no inhibitions about condemning aspects of our minds that he regards as useless or pernicious: gullibility, enthusiasm, stupidity, and the “whole train of monkish virtues.” And in doing so he thinks he can stand foursquare with uncorrupted human nature, the party of mankind. This is where the authority of our moral standards rests, and the base is firm enough. Nor is it anything esoteric or surprising, since we all know when life is going well or badly, and when we hear the words people use about us, we all know whether they express admiration or aversion, praise or blame.

The pragmatist slogan that “meaning is use” directs us to look at the actual functioning of language. We then come at the nature of our thinking by understanding the ways we express ourselves. Meaning is important, as analytical philosophy always held. But it is a house with many mansions. It is not monolithically and myopically concerned with recording the passing show, as if all we can do is make public whichever aspect of reality has just beamed upon us. We are agents in our world, constantly doing things — so much so that perception, like reason, is itself an adaptation whose function is not to pick out the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but only to foreground what is salient in the service of our goals and needs. Meaning, therefore, needs to look two ways: back to the environment within which our mental lives are situated, but also forward to the changes in that environment that our desires and goals determine. Fortunately these ideas have percolated widely into areas outside philosophy: it is widely understood, for instance, that animal signals are more like injunctions telling other animals what to do, than simple registrations of elements in the environment.

Hume was able to use his pragmatism and his pluralism about the many functions of the mind to avoid metaphysics. About that he was famously a pyromaniac, advocating that we commit to the flames most of what has passed as philosophy from Parmenides to Berkeley. But people need philosophy: we need defenses against the corrosive drips of skepticism. This need surely motivates the apostles of reason to persevere at metaphysics, exploring the world of being and becoming, delineating the true and ultimate nature of reality, finding what is truly there behind the superficial appearances of things. And combined with this image of what we should be doing there comes the inability to read or appreciate anyone who is doing something entirely different. So the stark, $64,000 question in much contemporary interpretation of Hume is whether he was a “realist” or not about values and causes, or even persons and ordinary things — questions that should actually be nowhere on the agenda, since it imports precisely the way of looking at things that Hume commits to the flames.

Hume’s road is subtle, and too few philosophers dare take it. Yet the whirligig of time may bring in its revenges, as a new generation of pragmatists look at much contemporary writing with the same horror as Hume directed at Spinoza, Nietzsche at Kant, or Russell at Hegel. Meanwhile one soldiers on, hoping, as Hume himself did, for the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition

Simon Blackburn is the author of many books, including “Think,” Ruling Passions,” “Lust,” and “Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed.”

By ERIC WEINER
Published: December 10, 2011

THE holidays are upon us again — it sounds vaguely aggressive, as if the holidays were some sort of mugger, or overly enthusiastic lover — and so it’s time to stick a thermometer deep in our souls and take our spiritual temperature (between trips to the mall, of course).

For some of us, the season affords an opportunity to reconnect with our religious heritage. For others, myself included, it’s a time to shake our heads over the sad state of our national conversation about God, and wish there were another way.

For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us?

The rest of us, it turns out, constitute the nation’s fastest-growing religious demographic. We are the Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all. The percentage is even higher among young people; at least a quarter are Nones.

Apparently, a growing number of Americans are running from organized religion, but by no means running from God. On average 93 percent of those surveyed say they believe in God or a higher power; this holds true for most Nones — just 7 percent of whom describe themselves as atheists, according to a survey by Trinity College.

Nones are the undecided of the religious world. We drift spiritually and dabble in everything from Sufism to Kabbalah to, yes, Catholicism and Judaism.

Why the rise of the Nones? David Campbell and Robert Putnam, of the University of Notre Dame and the Harvard Kennedy School, respectively, think politics is to blame. Their idea is that we’ve mixed politics and religion so completely that many simply opt out of both; apparently they are reluctant to claim a religious affiliation because they don’t want the political one that comes along with it.

We are more religiously polarized than ever. In my secular, urban and urbane world, God is rarely spoken of, except in mocking, derisive tones. It is acceptable to cite the latest academic study on, say, happiness or, even better, whip out a brain scan, but God? He is for suckers, and Republicans.

I used to be that way, too, until a health scare and the onset of middle age created a crisis of faith, and I ventured to the other side. I quickly discovered that I didn’t fit there, either. I am not a True Believer. I am a rationalist. I believe the Enlightenment was a very good thing, and don’t wish to return to an age of raw superstition.

We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.

Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)

By that measure, there is very little “good religion” out there. Put bluntly: God is not a lot of fun these days. Many of us don’t view religion so generously. All we see is an angry God. He is constantly judging and smiting, and so are his followers. No wonder so many Americans are enamored of the Dalai Lama. He laughs, often and well.

Precious few of our religious leaders laugh. They shout. God is not an exclamation point, though. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called “human grace.” Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of this.

Religion and politics, though often spoken about in the same breath, are, of course, fundamentally different. Politics is, by definition, a public activity. Though religion contains large public components, it is at core a personal affair. It is the relationship we have with ourselves or, as the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said, “What the individual does with his solitariness.” There lies the problem: how to talk about the private nature of religion publicly.

What is the solution? The answer, I think, lies in the sort of entrepreneurial spirit that has long defined America, including religious America.

We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.

Eric Weiner is the author, most recently, of “Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine.”

[Find the original article here.]

By Stephanie Pappas for LiveScience.com – 2100 (CT) 2011 December 05

They may not find much meaning in the birth of Jesus Christ, but many atheists embrace religious traditions such as churchgoing for the sake of the children, a new study finds.

The research, which focused on atheist scientists, found that 17 percent of atheists in the study attended a religious service more than once a year. The atheists embraced religious traditions for social and personal reasons, they told the study researchers.

“Our research shows just how tightly linked religion and family are in U.S. society — so much so that even some of society’s least religious people find religion to be important in their private lives,” Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund, the study’s principal investigator, said in a statement. Ecklund and her colleagues reported their findings in the December issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Earlier research by Ecklund has revealed that the line between believing and not believing in God is not always bright. For example, in research released in June 2011 in the journal Sociology of Religion, Ecklund and her colleagues found that about 20 percent of atheist scientists are “spiritual,” if not formally religious.

In the current study, the researchers chose a sample of 275 participants pulled from a larger survey of 2,198 science faculty at 21 elite U.S. research universities. Half of the original survey sample said they were religious, while the other half were not. [Infographic: The World's Top Religions]

The atheist parents surveyed had multiple reasons for attending religious services in the absence of religious belief. Some said their spouse or partner was religious, and encouraged them to go to services as well. Others said they enjoyed the community that attending a church, mosque, temple or other religious institution can bring.

Perhaps most interesting, Ecklund said, was that many atheist scientists take their children to religious services so that the kids can make up their own mind about God and spirituality.

“We thought that these individuals might be less inclined to introduce their children to religious traditions, but we found the exact opposite to be true,” Ecklund said. “They want their children to have choices, and it is more consistent with their science identity to expose their children to all sources of knowledge.”

For example, one study participant raised in a strongly Catholic home said he later came to believe that science and religion were not compatible. But rather than passing that belief onto his daughter, he said, he wanted to pass on the ability to make her own decisions in a thoughtful way. So he exposes his daughter to a variety of religious choices, including Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.

“I … don’t indoctrinate her that she should believe in God,” the study participant said. “I don’t indoctrinate her into not believing in God.”

Learn how to cook these little bits of heaven.

Breakfast: It’s what’s for dinner!

Cheers for Engineers: The World’s Smallest V12 Engine
261 hand-built pieces, 1,200 man-hours of work, 1 amazing (and very tiny) working machine.

A Spanish engineer named Patelo has created what he thinks has to be the world’s smallest V12 engine. Spending more than 1,200 hours transforming blocks of aluminium, bronze and stainless steel. Into the intricate pasts needed to build this amazing V12 engine.

The tiny V12 engine is powered by compressed air which is injected into the engine at 0.1kg/sq cm. The pistons on the V12 engine measure just 11.3 mm in diameter, and with the twelve combined boasts a total displacement of 12 cubic centimetres. Watch the video after the jump to see it in action.

(Mucho gracias to my boyhood friend, Tom Zmigrocki.)

Digging into China’s nuclear tunnels

By William Wan | The Washington Post – Wed, Nov 30, 2011

The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.

For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework.

Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.

The result of their effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.

The study is yet to be released, but already it has sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, including the Air Force vice chief of staff.

Most of the attention has focused on the 363-page study’s provocative conclusion — that China’s nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than the well-established estimates of arms-control experts.

Evidence of China’s Nuclear Arsenal

“It’s not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being checked against what people think they know based on classified information,” said a Defense Department strategist who would discuss the study only on the condition of anonymity.

The study’s critics, however, have questioned the unorthodox Internet-based research of the students, who drew from sources as disparate as Google Earth, blogs, military journals and, perhaps most startlingly, a fictionalized TV docudrama about Chinese artillery soldiers — the rough equivalent of watching Fox’s TV show “24” for insights into U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

But the strongest condemnation has come from nonproliferation experts who worry that the study could fuel arguments for maintaining nuclear weapons in an era when efforts are being made to reduce the world’s post-Cold War stockpiles.

Beyond its impact in the policy world, the project has made a profound mark on the students — including some who have since graduated and taken research jobs with the Defense Department and Congress.

“I don’t even want to know how many hours I spent on it,” said Nick Yarosh, 22, an international politics senior at Georgetown. “But you ask people what they did in college, most just say I took this class, I was in this club. I can say I spent it reading Chinese nuclear strategy and Second Artillery manuals. For a nerd like me, that really means something.”

For students, an obsession

The students’ professor, Phillip A. Karber, 65, had spent the Cold War as a top strategist reporting directly to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it was his early work in defense that cemented his reputation, when he led an elite research team created by Henry Kissinger, who was then the national security adviser, to probe the weaknesses of Soviet forces.

[Read the entire story here.]

by Chris Matyszczyk November 21, 2011 9:08 PM PST

I was once introduced to a chef who believes that bacon is a fine ingredient in a dessert.

Such chefs I would describe as beyond cognitive salvation. However, Microsoft appears to suddenly believe that bacon can play an even higher social role: as the commercial equivalent of an aphrodisiac.

For, as the Seattle Times reports, the company has decided that the best way to hire engineers to its Kinect for Windows team is to offer them bacon.

Yes, free bacon.

Engineers, you see, aren’t moved by vast package full of stock options, housing allowances, or multiple-hand massages. No, no. You have to appeal to their most fundamental emotions.

So Microsoft has sent a bacon vendor to areas of Seattle where engineers prowl for food. You know, like just outside Amazon’s HQ.

You will stunned into beyond a food coma to discover that this is the brainchild of an ad agency. I know this because the hiring hard drive–no, lard drive–for engineers has a slogan: “Wake Up and Smell the Future.”

The churlish and the knee-jerking would immediately mutter that Microsoft represents the future about as much as Pat Boone represents contemporary music.

But others might see that the company’s bacon grind shows its new, more cuddly side. It understands that it needs to connect with the people. It needs to show its human face.

And what better way to show that than through the intoxicating smell of perfect breakfast meat? We will, I am confident, soon hear stories about an Amazon engineer signing a contract with Microsoft on the street, while under the influence of pig fumes.

[Find the original article here.]

After (finally) installing a DVD player (again), I was able (after three years) to (again) watch DVDs. (“Let no task be accomplished before it’s time!”)

So, I was watching the pilot show for the The West Wing, when lo and behold here is my favorite character (Toby Ziegler) having at it (verbally) with some bible-thumpers.

The conversation went something like “You liberals love the First Amendment, so just why is nothing ever said about the First Commandment, Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother?”

Toby, ever cat-like verbally, pounces on this hapless fellow and informs him that it’s NOT the First Commandment, it’s the THIRD.

Here, for all those who don’t know the skinny, are the Big Ten:

Now, keep in mind that the head writer of this series, Aaron Sorkin, is Jewish. The Ten Commandments come from the Jews.

Sorkin must not have spent much time in shul, I’m thinking.

pgs sez: Note well that this is not the incorrect Christian version!

By Lauren Neergaard, 2:17 PM, Nov. 19, 2011, Associated Press

Suspended animation may not be just for sci-fi movies anymore: Trauma surgeons soon will try plunging some critically injured people into a deep chill — cooling their body temperatures as low as 50 degrees — in hopes of saving their lives.

Many trauma patients have injuries that should be fixable, but they bleed to death before doctors can patch them up. The new theory: Putting them into extreme hypothermia just might allow them to survive without brain damage for about an hour so surgeons can do their work.

In a high-stakes experiment funded by the Defense Department, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is preparing to test that strategy on a handful of trauma victims who are bleeding so badly from gunshots, stab wounds or similar injuries that their hearts stop beating. Today when that happens, only 7% of patients survive.

Get cold enough and “you do OK with no blood for a while,” says lead researcher Dr. Samuel Tisherman, a University of Pittsburgh critical care specialist. “We think we can buy time. We think it’s better than anything else we have at the moment, and could have a significant impact in saving a bunch of patients.”

[Read the entire article here.]

pgs sez: Never underestimate the power of The Force.

By David Cardinal on November 16, 2011 at 1:30 pm

Launched as ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1958, then gaining a “D” for Defense a decade later, DARPA has been a bulwark of US invention and innovation for over 50 years. The agency was founded as part of a massive American reaction to the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite on October 4, 1957. In 1973, DARPA’s role was limited by Congress to projects with direct military applications, but as you can see from the amazing results, its efforts have had an impact far beyond the confines of the Department of Defense.

Here are some of the most important, some from just last year, but some dating all the way back to ARPA’s founding.

Cloud computing

The great-granddaddy of today’s cloud computing was the timeshared mainframe. Often belittled today, the model of a large, server computer with telecommunications linked to a large number of “dumb” terminals was a clear precursor to today’s common structure of web-based applications running primarily on remote servers. Timesharing originated with the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) project, which was sponsored by DARPA — although carried out by MIT, GE and Bell Labs, then later commercialized by Honeywell. Seminal concepts including dynamic linking were pioneered in Multics, and later became key ingredients in the success of Unix and its derivatives.

[Read the entire article here.]