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The Blogmanac: "On This Day" ... and much more
Think universally. Act terrestrially.
For in a hard-working society, it is rare and even subversive to celebrate too much, to revel and keep on reveling: to stop whatever you're doing and rave, pray, throw things, go into trances, jump over bonfires, drape yourself in flowers, stay up all night, and scoop the froth from the sea.
Anneli Rufus*
Is there a hidden message in the DNA coding? I've been doing some background research for 'Kill the President' and ...
I found here that this Oz scientist Paul Davies has an interesting speculation along the lines I'm working on. It's very similar, really, to a 25-year-old Tim Leary rave on (a supposed) genetically imprinted imperative to return to the stars, which in fact is an influence on my own experiment in speculative doggerel. (Leary asserts a code equivalence in the Kabbalah/Periodic Table of Elements blah blah the number 23 blah blah ... an interesting rave ...)
More ... especially read the bit where Paul Davies has his say.
If this stuff interests you, also see another New Scientistarticle by Paul Davies on a related topic.
"The world's first known piece of printed pornography, described as the 'quintessence of debauchery', is expected to reach up to 35,000 pounds ($65,040) when it is auctioned next month."
I found this educational and scary, despite what I've already read on the subject. It's fairly long so I'm posting an extract from near the end of the paper, which is a position paper of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London. It's worth reading the earlier sections on earth history, IMHO.
[Excerpt] Implications
"The threat to humanity is clear: such a disappearance of living space (with some 100 million people living less than one metre above present sea level) would represent a virtually impossible burden to a human population that is already struggling to feed itself, and is set to add another three billions to its numbers this century.
"We note that it may not be the amount of sea level rise, as its speed, which may be catastrophic for a large section of humanity. The geological record shows that the melting of icecaps does not proceed smoothly, but occurs in fits and starts. Thus, the last retreat of the great ice-sheets included at least three episodes where sea level rose some 5-10 metres within the space of a decade. This is because a modest sea level rise can destabilize the edge of a mass of land ice, causing large parts of it to rapidly slide into the sea.
"The consequences of such a sea level rise would be calamitous, comparable to (and perhaps including as a consequence) a global war. Unlike a world war, though, civilization cannot get back to normal afterwards, as much of the landscape will have been drowned, effectively forever. We consider the threat to be imminent, the timescale of the global changes seeming likely to include the lifespans of our children." [my emphasis - N]
Wikipedia's article on Firefox says: "Mozilla Firefox (originally known as Phoenix and intermittently as Mozilla Firebird) is a free web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and hundreds of volunteers. Before its 1.0 release on November 9, 2004, Firefox had already garnered a great deal of acclaim from the media, ranging from Forbes to the Wall Street Journal. With over 5 million downloads in the first 12 days of its release, Firefox 1.0 is one of the most-used open source applications among home users."
I'm one of the millions who are giving Firefox a test run. The advantage most sources quote is that virus writers are writing for MS Internet Explorer so it's safer. So far I'm pretty happy with it, and my guess is it's a bit faster than MSIE, but these are the things that would make me stick with MSIE:
1) I noticed that when I look at omniparticle's homepage in IE I can see a javascripted mouse trailer. Can't see it in Firefox.
2) I like my Favorites (Firefox calls them Bookmarks) to open in a sidebar on the left of the page. Maybe Firefox can do this but the default is a tricky thing to use and I'm searching how to change this.
3) I've had two pages load that will not show the up-down scroll bar no matter what I do.
4) When I'm in a picture-saving frenzy, some stupid "Cleanup" box pops up. WTF is that? Also, if I'm saving images off a few pages simultaneously in a hurry, it gets confused as to which page and image I'm on, and also the saving time seems awfully slow to me, compared to Explorer. On the plus side, if I have a zillion pages open, the images seem to keep downloading on most or all of them, not give up on them as MSIE quite often does.
5) When opening pages it asks if you want to open in a new window, which is fine as MSIE does that and I'm used to it. But it also asks about 'tabs', and what they are I have no idea ... it doesn't tell you.
6) I like blue and don't like orange. Hate it in Blogger too.
7) This one's a biggie for me: if I copy from a webpage and paste into Front Page 2000, it doesn't paste in hyperlinks nor pictures at all, just plain text. Baz le Tuff says it works in FP 2003 but I have other issues with that version and can't use it.
For me, the jury's still out.
Shit, I'm talking like a talking head on TV. At the end of the day ... hit the ground running ... outcomes ... I have no ambition but if the people insist ... send a message to the electorate ... just a fishing expedition ...
[A few years ago TIME Magazine did a cover story ('Teens Before Their Time', October 30, 2000) looking at what might be the possible reasons for our kids and grandkids reaching puberty at ridiculous ages. I recall that it quoted an endocrinologist in the USA as saying that they used to treat children, particularly girls, for precocious puberty as early as 8 years of age, but now patients are presenting at ages years younger.
Me, I'd come to put it down to hormones being fed to chickens and farm animals that we eat, and to plastics and other artificial products in our environment – after all, scientists tell us that now half of the fish in British rivers have changed sex because of pollutants. Consumer culture has given us an environment before testing it for safety over time.
Maybe it's those factors, and another we should consider. This was published on June 28, so please excuse that it's not 'fast-breaking news', but it seems it might be important important.]
Television watching may hasten puberty
"Children who watch a lot of television produce less melatonin, new research suggests – the 'sleep hormone' has been linked to timing of puberty.
"Scientists at the University of Florence in Italy found that when youngsters were deprived of their TV sets, computers and video games, their melatonin production increased by an average 30 per cent.
"'Girls are reaching puberty much earlier than in the 1950s. One reason is due to their average increase in weight; but another may be due to reduced levels of melatonin,' suggests Roberto Salti, who led the study. 'Animal studies have shown that low melatonin levels have an important role in promoting an early onset of puberty.'" Source: New Scientist
At school we had a teacher named Dynamite Brains Taylor. I'd forgotten all about him and his marvellous epithet until I heard this exchange on radio, which speaks volumes about the dominant ideology of our society, and which I record here from memory:
Radio jock: We have Margaret on the line, another caller in our quiz, "What is the greatest invention in history?". We've had some great nominations: the computer, the washing machine, fire, writing ... Good morning, Margaret. And what's your nomination?
Margaret: I think explosives, Brian.
Radio jock: Good one, Margaret. [Spoken sincerely] I guess without explosives we'd still be in the age of bows and arrows ...
"A New Zealand economist is promoting a massive worldwide programme of planting crops and burying charcoal to avoid catastrophic global warming.
"Dr Peter Read, a researcher at Massey University, has just convened a workshop sponsored by international agencies in Paris to stave off what he calls 'the mother of all catastrophes' ...
"He said the Kyoto Protocol, which requires most developed countries to cut back their emissions of global-warming 'greenhouse gases' to slightly below 1990 levels, might be too modest to avoid disaster.
In contrast, a massive global programme of planting crops and ploughing organic matter back into the soil could cut carbon dioxide back to pre-1800 levels -- and feed poor countries at the same time."
"Increasingly the face of AIDS is young and female"
"Women make up nearly half of the 37.2 million adults living with HIV, and in sub-Saharan Africa the proportion rises to almost 60 percent, according to a UN report released on Tuesday.
"'Increasingly the face of AIDS is young and female', said Dr Kathleen Cravero, deputy executive director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
"In every region of the globe, the number of women infected with the deadly virus has risen during the past two years. East Asia had the highest jump with 56 percent, followed by Eastern Europe and Central Asia with 48 percent.
"In sub-Saharan Africa, three-quarters of all 15-24 year olds living with HIV are female.
"'Young women are almost an endangered species in southern Africa from AIDS for several reasons', Cravero told Reuters.
"Many women have no access to education or jobs. They are often economically dependent on men and may not have the power to resist sex or ask their husband or partner to use a condom.
"Teenage girls are acquiring the virus at a younger age and from older men. Violence against women also makes them more vulnerable to infection.
"'We will not be able to stop this epidemic unless we put women at the heart of the response to AIDS', UNAIDS Executive Director Dr Peter Piot told a news conference in Brussels." [My emphasis above - N]
One can think of at least two ways of looking at Fallujah.
From one perspective, a corps of very brave American and allied men and women are defending the freedom of local townsfolk from a bunch of crazy, unprincipled terrorists with massive firepower.
Or it can be seen as a group of fearless, destitute Fallujah citizens defending their native town from an illegally occupying force of the world's richest nation that has all the self-protected state-of-the-art military hardware and billions of military dollars at its disposal.
Whichever way ones looks, innocent civilians are now the biggest victims of modern warfare.
"Ohio’s 2004 presidential vote will be challenged as soon as next week in the state Supreme Court, a coalition of public-interest lawyers announced Friday.
"The lawyers have taken sworn testimony from hundreds of people in hearings in Columbus and Cincinnati, and will use excerpts as well as documents obtained from county election officials and Election Day exit polls to make a case that thousands of votes were incorrectly counted or not counted on Election Day."
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[A few years ago TIME Magazine did a cover story ('Teens Before Their Time', October 30, 2000) looking at what might be the possible reasons for our kids and grandkids 
"A New Zealand economist is promoting a massive worldwide programme of planting crops and burying charcoal to avoid catastrophic global warming. 
"Women make up nearly half of the 37.2 million adults living with HIV, and in sub-Saharan Africa the proportion rises to almost 60 percent, according to a UN report released on Tuesday. 
