Maybe Michael Moore's "Sicko" wasn't anti American enough to win?She says people need to be informed about the actions of the US Government in the war on terrorism since 9/11.
"The current administration are a bunch of war criminals and they need to be stopped and people need to know what's been going on."
The experiment proposed in the present article is to give “foresight”, a chance of avoiding forced closure of LHC due to lack of funding or other form of bad luck,as happened to SSC.
We imagine a big stack of cards on which are written various restrictions concerning the operation of LHC, for example “allow the production of only 10 Higgs particles”. On most of the cards there should just be written “use LHC freely” so that they cause no restrictions. However, on a very small fraction of cards, there should be restrictions on luminosity or beam energy or some combination of them. One card may even have “close (shut down) LHC”.
The crucial idea of this proposal is that if our model were true, then the most likely development sol with the P(sol) ≃ e−2SI (sol) factor included would be a development involving one of the cards which strongly restricts on the Higgs particle production at LHC.
In the present article, we have proposed an experiment at LHC for determiningSounds crazy but it just might work. Alternatively, it may just be crazy.
the effect of an influence from the future as proposed in our own model. The best description may be achieved by introducing an imaginary part SI of the action S.The experiment is very primitive in as far as it consists simply of a card-drawing game arranged so that some severe restriction on the running of LHC - essentially closure - is imposed with a probability p of the order of 5 × 10−6. If indeed a restriction card which has such a low probability as p ∼ 5×10−6 were to be drawn, it would essentially mean that our model must be true!
If, however, just a normal card that gives no restriction is drawn, our theory would be falsified unless a seemingly accidental stopping of LHC occurs!It must be warned that if our model were true and no such game about strongly restricting LHC were played, or if the probability p in the game for restricting were too small, then a “normal” (seemingly accidental) closure should occur. This could be potentially more damaging than just the loss of LHC itself. Therefore not
performing (or not performing with sufficiently big p) our proposed card game could- if our model were correct - cause considerable danger.
Much higher up the course of the glacier there is evidence of a volcano that erupted through the ice about 2,000 years ago and the whole region could be volcanically active, releasing geothermal heat to melt the base of the ice and help its slide towards the sea.The consequence of a sudden increase in such activity could be pretty big, but it would take a while:
If the glacier does continue to surge and discharge most of it ice into the sea, say the researchers, the Pine Island Glacier alone could raise global sea level by 25cm.
That might take decades or a century, but neighbouring glaciers are accelerating too and if the entire region were to lose its ice, the sea would rise by 1.5m worldwide.
The story also talks about the difficulties of working there:
It is a very remote and inhospitable region. It was visited briefly in 1961 by American scientists but no one had returned until this season when Julian Scott and Rob Bingham and colleagues from the British Antarctic survey spent 97 days camping on the flat, white ice.At times, the temperature got down to minus 30C and strong winds made work impossible.
At one point, the scientists were confined to their tent continuously for eight days.
"The wind really makes the way you feel incredibly colder, so just motivating yourself to go out in the wind is a really big deal," Rob Bingham told BBC News.
Just as people love to ask astronauts about toilets in space, I wonder how they deal with this in a freezing tent in Antarctica.
...Viagra has become a widely used recreational drug. It is mixed with cocaine, for example, and is sold in clubs.I see from a quick Google that this has been going on for years, at least in Britain and Scotland. (I assume the same holds for Australia.)
“Star Wars” fans will remember Hayden Christensen as the young Anakin Skywalker, or, to be accurate, as a kind of handsome void where Anakin was supposed to be.... One day, I feel sure, the rich mantle of charisma will descend upon him, but “Jumper” is not that occasion.Manohla Dargis in the New York Times also was pretty funny:
Snow white and close cropped, Mr. Jackson’s hair in this film dominates its every scene (it’s louder than the predictably voluble actor), rising out of the visual and narrative clutter like a beacon. It glows. It shouts. It entertains. (It earns its keep.)
The thematic subjects have been intelligently chosen. They include articles on syphilis as a literary muse, the rhetoric of seduction, confession and guilt, fairy tales, science fiction, slash fiction, grisettes, somatopia and furniture. The (very interesting) article on furniture concludes as follows: “In the fin-de-siècle, eros crosses over into sickness, and the furniture is caught up in the epidemic: the chaise lounge [sic] itself is sick with desire and pleasure. As the dominant notions of pleasure changed over time, so did the furniture”.Uhuh.
I also finished my reading of these two volumes with the feeling that sex was a lot less fun than I had hitherto supposed. Even thinking about sex has become difficult and it is being made more difficult year by year. For example, the American writer Pat Califia’s work “promotes lust in all its forms and her work contributes to the growing theoretical complexity about sexuality, both in relation to queer studies and the pornography debates”. The Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s “works narrate a desire for an impossible plenitude beyond the binary oppositions and hollow conventions which structure mundane bourgeois reality”.Social conservatives like me think people should take sex seriously, in the sense that it shouldn't be viewed merely as a recreational activity. But isn't there also something wrong with taking it too seriously, as do writers who portray it as an irresistible obsessive force, and the academics who then follow in their wake with arcane analysis?
The secret of the Universe is not 42, according to a new theory, but the unimaginably larger number 10122. Scott Funkhouser of the Military College of South Carolina (called The Citadel) in Charleston has shown how this number — which is bigger than the number of particles in the Universe — keeps popping up when several of the physical constants and parameters of the Universe are combined1. This ‘coincidence’, he says, is surely significant, hinting at some common principle at work behind the scenes.Seems odd that someone from a military college is making a name for himself in pointing out some big number co-incidences. Still, it's a good read.
Try managing the equivocation of nervous colleagues who believe you should cut and run, when not so long ago they were begging you to stay. Try keeping your focus (and temper) while you and your family suffer cheap attacks fuelled by those ever-brave unnamed sources. Try maintaining your dignity while feral union activists wait outside hospitals and hotels to call you and your wife "Liberal c-ts" and tell you they wish you would die a "slow and painful death". All while your opponent coasts along, forgiven frequent errors of judgment, congratulated for the genius of his political flummery, by a largely uncritical media. Howard kept going where others would have faltered.2. Contrast John Quiggan, a lefty who does indeed run an exceptionally polite blog, who said this recently:
Yes, it would seem John needs to get out more.Throughout the last few years of the Howard government, anyone who criticised the government, or suggested that Howard was not the best person to be Prime Minister of Australia, could be sure of being labelled a “Howard hater”....
This was always silly. Perhaps there were people motivated to oppose the government because of a personal animus against Howard rather than his actions and policies, but if so I never met any.
5. While on mental health, the Washington Post looks at Paranoia magazine. At last, I can publish my expose on the secret world of horses.Study after study has shown that psychiatrists have higher rates of mental illness than the general population.
Research published in 2001 revealed that 56% of female psychiatrists have a family history of mental illness, and just over 40% have experienced one themselves - almost twice the rate of other doctors. Undoubtedly as a consequence, psychiatrists have double the rate of suicide of the general population.
A single prostate specific antigen (PSA) test taken before the age of 50 can be used to predict advanced prostate cancer in men up to 25 years in advance of a diagnosis, according to a new study published by researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and Lund University in Sweden. The findings should help physicians be able to identify men who would benefit from intensive prostate cancer screenings over their lifetime...Yet this article, which seems in need of editing, says next:
The results showed that the total PSA level was an accurate predictor of advanced cancer diagnosis in men later in life. The majority, 66 percent, of advanced cancers were seen in men whose PSA levels were in the top 20 percent (total PSA > 0.9 ng/ml). The average length of time from blood test to cancer diagnosis was 17 years.
While this data does not have any immediate implications for general prostate cancer screening guidelines...Why not? Sounds like a pretty useful thing to me.
The new materials absorb carbon dioxide in part because they're extremely porous, which gives them a high surface area that can come into contact with carbon dioxide molecules. The most porous of the materials that Yaghi reports in Science contain nearly 2,000 square meters of surface area packed into one gram of material. One liter of one of Yaghi's materials can store all of the molecules of carbon dioxide that, at zero °C and at ambient pressure, would take up a volume of 82.6 liters.
....she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day's horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
"This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.
The other asked, "What is Pearl Harbor?"
"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War," the first man replied.
At that moment, Jacoby said, "I decided to write this book."
One day we must surely get down on our knees to every lizard and frog and orchid — and weep an apology.Actually, I shouldn't be too harsh, he actually agrees with me on one point:
...I felt the wording of the apology, like the national anthem, was just a bit feeble. The spirit was there, but dulled by the cliched language of born-again motivational speeches. Mungo MacCallum lamented it was written by a platoon of public servants and not a poet...
.... he was not raised in a traditional manner and that he should receive a custodial sentence to send a clear message to the community.I would have thought the point is that, even if the boy was from a tribe that still had this initiation, there is surely no conceivable way that the judge should be able find that this could be used in mitigation by an essentially white teacher from Sydney who has had absolutely no tribal background .
"It is stated in the defence material that he was born in Sydney where he was educated to grade 12. He then went on to receive a scholarship and teach in Wollongong and undertake postgraduate studies," she said.
"He has gone on to have an illustrious and distinguished career. He is an educated man, using what he claims to be part of Papua New Guinea and Torres Strait Islander culture, that is, men's business, to explain away his offending behaviour. I have been instructed that this is not part of the culture."
President Nicolas Sarkozy and other senior French officials met here on Thursday with Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in an effort to smooth over differences between France and the agency over Iran’s nuclear program.France has taken a hard line against Iran, leading the way with the United States and Britain in pressing for new, tougher international sanctions against the country for flouting United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding that it stop making nuclear fuel......
In a speech Wednesday night to France’s Jewish community, for example, Mr. Sarkozy called on Iran to “renounce military nuclear power” and “live up to its word.” He added that Iran’s uranium enrichment program “has no civilian use.”
Dr. ElBaradei, by contrast, has said repeatedly that there is no clear evidence to support the claim that Iran intends to make nuclear weapons.
Men who eat a diet low in fat and red meat but high in vegetables and lean protein and who drink alcohol in moderation may not just be doing their hearts a favor. A new study shows that such a heart-healthy diet may also be good for the prostate.About 1/2 of all men get prostate issues by the time they are 50? That's a much higher figure than I expected. The medical recommendation is pretty encouraging, though:
Specifically, such a diet significantly decreases the risk of symptomatic benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH. The bothersome condition is associated with frequent and painful urination that affects about half of all men by the time they reach 50 and nearly all men by age 70.
Doctors often recommend routine sexual activity to men with prostatitis because ejaculations help flush the prostate clean.Logically, then, if I eat a meaty, high fat diet and drink to excess, I am more likely to have a doctor prescribe more sex. Hmmm....
Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.
The country's top judge has dealt a significant blow to a key plank of the Government's anti-terrorism legislation after he overturned the convictions of five Muslim men jailed last year for downloading and sharing extremist terror-related material.How do you obtain evidence for the 'reasonable suspicion', I wonder? In this case:
The Lord Chief Justice ruled that unless there was clear evidence of "terrorist intent" it was not illegal to read or study such literature....
Under the Terrorism Act 2000, "a person commits an offence if he possesses an article in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that his possession is for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism."
The students were arrested after Mr Raja, then a schoolboy in Ilford, ran away to meet the other four in Bradford. The teenager left a note for his parents saying he was going to fight abroad after getting to know the others via internet chatrooms.But it would appear that the problem may simply be the way the jury was directed:
Directions given to the jury did not tell them "that they had to be satisfied that each appellant intended to use the relevant articles to incite his fellow planners to fight in Afghanistan".
That seems to be overstating what the jurors should have been told about the offence.
The interesting point may be whether possession of a large amount of terrorist material of itself can lead to a reasonable suspicion that it is being looked at for "commission preparation or instigation" of a terrorist act. The appeal court seems to be saying "no". Maybe that is technically correct, but when you take into account who is looking at it, I would have thought that the reasonable suspicion may be pretty readily made out.
But this is pretty funny from the defence lawyer:
Imran Khan, solicitor for Mr Zafar, said: "My client is over the moon. He says it is surreal and he cannot see why he has spent the last two years in prison for looking at material which he had no intention of using for terrorism.
"Young people should not be frightened of exploring their world. There will always be people out there with wrong intentions, but we must not criminalise people for simply looking at material, whether it is good or bad."
And I suppose a young Muslim's world is naturally all about terrorism? Actually, I think it is a pretty good idea to make them frightened of spending all of their time obsessed with that.
Sheesh. I am not supposed to fly for holidays anymore, and now even a pleasure cruise is bad. But come to think of it, it would be kind of cool to see giant sailing ships being used for passengers and cargo again.The true scale of climate change emissions from shipping is almost three times higher than previously believed, according to a leaked UN study seen by the Guardian.
It calculates that annual emissions from the world's merchant fleet have already reached 1.12bn tonnes of CO₂, or nearly 4.5% of all global emissions of the main greenhouse gas.
The report suggests that shipping emissions - which are not taken into account by European targets for cutting global warming - will become one of the largest single sources of manmade CO₂after cars, housing, agriculture and industry. By comparison, the aviation industry, which has been under heavy pressure to clean up, is responsible for about 650m tonnes of CO₂emissions a year, just over half that from shipping.
A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed.Embracing possibilities of new solutions? How bland. I would have thought "prospects" would be the better word.
The national excitement around the event is palpable, with thousands heading to Canberra for it, and public screens being erected in most major cities for the live, national broadcast of the event.All depends what circles you move in, I suppose, but I would say there is a much more palpable degree of cynicism about the hyping of the apology in any suburb that is not inner city.
Let us resolve over the next five years to have every Indigenous four-year-old in a remote Aboriginal community enrolled in and attending a proper early childhood education centre or opportunity and engaged in proper preliteracy and prenumeracy programs.I predict it will take some very heavy handed, paternalistic tactics, exactly of the kind Labor is less inclined to take than the Liberals, to get anywhere near achieving that goal.
THE past few months could so easily have been a dream.
Who among us hasn't sat bolt upright in the middle of the night and been convinced, in the gin-clear moments for which dreams survive intact in the consciousness, that Kevin Rudd grew bushy sideburns and became prime minister and invited Dick Smith, Kerry O'Brien and the girls from Sass & Bide to Parliament House for a strategy session?...
It will be a while before, on seeing Kevin Rudd stride into the prime ministerial suite of offices, one's natural instinct stops being to call security.
In the Al Jazeera interview he explains:A senior Syrian official confirmed that a group of North Koreans had been at work at the site, but he denied that the structure was related to chemical warfare. Syria had concluded, he said, that chemical warfare had little deterrent value against Israel, given its nuclear capability. The facility that was attacked, the official said, was to be one of a string of missile-manufacturing plants scattered throughout Syria—“all low tech. Not strategic.” (North Korea has been a major exporter of missile technology and expertise to Syria for decades.) He added, “We’ve gone asymmetrical, and have been improving our capability to build low-tech missiles that will enable us to inflict as much damage as possible without confronting the Israeli Army. We now can hit all of Israel, and not just the north.”
Whatever was under construction, with North Korean help, it apparently had little to do with agriculture—or with nuclear reactors—but much to do with Syria’s defense posture, and its military relationship with North Korea. And that, perhaps, was enough to silence the Syrian government after the September 6th bombing.
So Seymour seems to agree with the common sense proposition that there is strong reason to doubt that Syria is telling the whole truth. Yet who does he appear to direct most of his criticism to? Israel:I was told two different things by various people inside Syria.
One said it was perhaps a chemical facility for chemical warfare, another one said more persuasively to me that "no, it was for missiles - short range missiles to be used in case we're attacked by Israel, we'd respond asymmetrically with missiles."
So, Syria's avoidance of the issue is mere "fecklessness"; Israel not disclosing its evidence is "hubris and arrogance".....if this article I did generates a decision by Israel to go public with its overwhelming dossier that will answer any questions well that's great ... but they have not and [I find awful] the hubris, the arrogance of thinking that you could go commit an act of war by any definition and then say nothing about it.
Syria of course compounded the problem by being hapless and feckless in response.
Q: What do you think of Bush's legacy to the world?He's done more to terrify the world than anybody I know. The world is so much more dangerous.
Worthy of Daily Kos commentary, that is.
[On Israel] it's very hard, you know in America there's just no questioning. The American Jewish influence is enormous. There's a lot of money.Does "Jewish money" affect what you write in the New Yorker, Seymour?
I'm Jewish and I'm not anti-Semitic and I'm not anti-Israel - [Israelis] understand that, just as by the way a lot of Americans don't understand that many of the leadership of Hamas and others.How very encouraging (sarcasm).
Not everyone spends their life there wanting to kill Jews, they're more willing than people would like to believe to co-exist, they just don't like the system the way it works now.
NEW DELHI: A cooler with almost 100% efficiency at preventing mosquitoes from entering it and laying eggs will now spearhead India’s fight against vector-borne diseases like dengue and chikungunya.Sounds like we are talking about evaporative coolers for domestic use. They aren't very common in Australia any more, especially in a place like Brisbane, where to feel better in summer you want to reduce humidity, not attempt to increase it. I assume they still have some benefit in Melbourne or Adelaide, though, where desert winds mean high summer temperatures are nearly always desiccating.
After over six months of research, scientists at Delhi’s National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) have developed a "Mosquito Proof Cooler" (MPC).And what startling innovation was involved?:
"A metallic barrier has been put above the tank to prevent mosquitoes from entering. Side shutters have been done away with...."So metal barriers stop mosquitoes, hey? I wouldn't be holding my breath for the Nobel prize.
acknowledges that the mistreatment of many indigenous Australians over aBeazley tried to have it changed to incorporate a direct apology. If that had been done, there was nothing else to object to the in the resolution.
significant period represents the most blemished chapter in our national
history;
(f) expresses its deep and sincere regret that indigenous Australians suffered
injustices under the practices of past generations, and for the hurt and
trauma that many indigenous people continue to feel as a consequence of
those practices; and
(g) believes that we, having achieved so much as a nation, can now move
forward together for the benefit of all Australians.
A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a 'no-go area' for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: 'The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes.There can be many reasons. The women are sent for asssessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned. She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don't you people write about this?'My interlocuter went very red and almost started to cry. Instead, she began shouting at me. I was a member of the press. 'You must write about this,' she begged.
'I can't,' I said. 'Not unless you become a whistle-blower. Or give me some evidence. Or something.'
She shook her head. 'I can't be identified,' she said. 'I would be killed. And so would the women.'
UPDATE: The Archbishop should really know he is in trouble when most of the Guardian's reader's comments are against him too.
Pure intelligence, which I'm sure the ABoC has in abundance, is a pretty useless commodity unless it can be harnessed to awareness and character. We all know people who are so intelligent they can't tie their own shoelaces.
Now if he had any practical intelligence it might have given him the foresight to realise, no matter how well meaning, how this sounds. Instead he somehow though talking on Radio 4 was the same as having a chat at High Table in Balliol.
Half of all people polled across 34 countries say that the pace of globalisation is too fast, while 35% say globalisation is going too slowly.
But concern about globalisation is strongest among the world's richest countries, where it is closely correlated with a belief that the fruits of economic growth have been unfairly shared.
In many of the world's poorest countries, however, where large majorities say that the benefits and burdens of economic development have not been shared fairly, people are more likely to say that globalisation is proceeding too slowly.
Unchanged is the suspicion hanging over Iran's nuclear intentions. Mr Ahmadinejad has never been able to explain convincingly why Iran is the first country to have built a uranium-enrichment plant without having a single civilian nuclear-power reactor that could burn its output (the ones Russia has all but completed at Bushehr will operate only on Russian-made fuel).Reuters today has a fairly long article about it too.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."Well, just start taking the idea of the multiverse seriously, and even "space" starts to look puny. As the abstract of Page's talk puts it:
Scientists have measured that what we can see of space is about a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (1081) times the volume of an average human. Inflationary theory suggests that the entirety of space is vastly larger. Quantum theory suggests that there are very many different copies of space of the same basic kind as ours (same laws of physics). String theory further suggests that there may be many different kinds of space. This whole collection of googolplexes of galaxies within each of googolplexes of different spaces within each of googols of kinds of space makes up an enormously vast universe or multiverse. Human beings seem to be an incredibly small part of this universe in terms of physical size.Page gives a potted history of the increasingly successful efforts of humans to measure the universe. Here is one blackly humorous episode:
Many countries cooperated in sending expeditions to distant parts of the earth to take these measurements of the 1761 and 1769 transits of Venus. Wars and bad weather hampered many attempts, such as the one made by the unfortunate Guillaume Le Gentil of France [3]. In 1761 he could not land at Pondicherry, a French colony in India, because the British had seized it, and he could not make his measurements from his ship that was tossing about at sea. He stayed eight years to make measurements of the 1769 transit (the last transit before 1874) and this time was able to set up his equipment on Pondicherry, which was restored to France by then. But after a month of clear weather, the sky turned cloudy on the morning of the transit, and he again saw nothing. He nearly went insane but gained enough strength to return to France, which took another two years. After being away for nearly twelve years in his fruitless mission to help measure the size of the solar system, Le Gentil finally got back home to find that his “widowed” wife had remarried and his possessions had gone to his heirs.Of course, there are still a lot of scientists around who think all talk of multiverses and the string theory Landscape barely counts as science, but this hasn't stopped the religiously inclined from starting to see if it can be incorporated into their world view. Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong notes that even the Mormons are talking about this. (But then again this is perhaps to be expected, as their idiosyncratic idea of gods who have children who create worlds to further populate may make it easier for them to incorporate the multiverse into their theology.)
