47, an environmental scientist, Italian-American, married, 2 sons, originally a Catholic from Philly, now a Taoist ecophilosopher in the South due to job transfer. Enjoy jazz, hockey, good food and hikes in the woods.
“We are stardust, we are golden…” Each year nearly 40,000 tons of cosmic dust fall to Earth from outer space. Now, the first successful chronological study of extraterrestrial dust in Antarctic ice has shown that this amount has remained largely constant over the past 30,000 years, a finding that could help refine efforts to understand the timing and effects of changes in the Earth’s past climate.
How full a man’s stomach is can dictate the type of woman he will fancy, UK research suggests. A study of 61 male university students found those who were hungry were attracted to heavier women than those who were satiated. The finding is consistent with other research that found when food is scarce, the ideal of feminine beauty shifts to fuller-figured women.
Adding (environmental) insult to (military) injury: 10,000 to 30,000 metric tons of oil have spilled into the Mediterranean Sea after Israel bombed a power plant. Lebanon’s Environment Ministry says the oil flooded into the sea when Israeli jets hit storage tanks at the Jiyyeh plant south of Beirut on July 13 and 15, creating an ecological crisis that Lebanon’s government has neither the money nor the expertise to deal with. “We have never seen a spill like this in the history of Lebanon. It is a major catastrophe,” Environment Minister Yacoub al-Sarraf told Reuters.
A controversial alternative to black hole theory has been bolstered by observations of an object in the distant universe, researchers say. If their interpretation is correct, it might mean black holes do not exist and are in fact bizarre and compact balls of plasma called MECOs (magnetospheric eternally collapsing object). According to the MECO theory, objects in our universe can never actually collapse to form black holes. When an object gets very dense and hot, subatomic particles start popping in and out of existence inside it in huge numbers, producing copious amounts of radiation. Outward pressure from this radiation halts the collapse so the object remains a hot ball of plasma rather than becoming a black hole.
Nothing to see here; move along, move along: The government is failing to reduce health risks from toxic air pollution as required by law, congressional investigators said Wednesday. The Environmental Protection Agency has not met 30 percent of the Clean Air Act’s requirements and regularly misses deadlines: the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said the EPA largely has failed to regulate air pollutants from small sources, including dry cleaners and trucks. The GAO report said the EPA has not yet met 239 of the law’s requirements; of those the agency did fulfill, only 12 were met on time.
Psychologists have proven for the first time that exposure to violent video games can desensitize individuals to real-life violence. “In short, the modern entertainment media landscape could accurately be described as an effective systematic violence desensitization tool,” the researcher said. “Whether modern societies want this to continue is largely a public policy question, not an exclusively scientific one.”
And to end the week, a volcano story! A new type of miniature volcano has been discovered in the western Pacific Ocean. These volcanoes cannot easily be explained by current theories, and may be due to magma escaping along cracks in a tectonic plate.
Re: stardust. Does this mean that I am not responsible for the dust bunnies that accumulate in my house at a rampant rate of growth?
Re: flying reptile crests and preferences for full-figured women. Sex is the default explanation of so many of my scientist colleagues. See stardust comment above.
Re: black holes. My neighbor walked in just as I got to the “hot balls of plasma” line (reading this aloud). “Is this a story about Viagra?”
Re: miniature volcanos. Now we know what happens to all those volcanos kids build for science projects in elementary school.
Re: exposure to violence. Oh sure, we didn’t know this before. Right. We only know things when we see it in flesh and blood and body function changes. No matter that studies have observed this literally for decades in behavior. I’m sorry, this one blew out my humor gasket. This is not new, and not news! I suppose it would take a PET scan to prove that George Bush has a Twinkie instead of frontal lobes before we could believe that his actions – say, at the recent G9 summit – were just a bit juvenile.
Thanks for the link on the violent videogame paper. I hadn’t checked Craig Anderson’s website in a few weeks. He was my advisor for a few years at University of Missouri before he moved up to Iowa State, so I’m quite familiar with some of the videogame work that he’d spearheaded. Heck, I was quite pleased when some of the stuff we’d worked on made its way to publication a couple years ago.
Rice’s spokesman, Adam Ereli, took strong issue with an assertion by Israel’s Justice Minister Haim Ramon, who said the failure of world leaders to call for an immediate cease-fire at a summit in Rome gave Israel a green light to carry on with its campaign to crush Hezbollah.
“Any such statement is outrageous,” Ereli said. “The United States is sparing no effort to bring a durable and lasting end to this conflict.”
TEL AVIV (Haaretz) July 28 — Justice Minister Haim Ramon has been barred from making any decisions on professional matters relevant to his ministry while a criminal investigation is being conducted against him.
Haim Ramon
The decision to restrict Ramon’s activities was made Thursday night by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, following the start of a criminal investigation against the minister over allegations of sexual harassment against an officer serving in the military secretariat of the Prime Minister’s Office.
Ramon was questioned by the Fraud Squad for seven hours, and then asked Mazuz for advice on how he is expected to behave, “so that there will be no impression that I have any influence over the investigation.”
Mazuz met with State Prosecutor Eran Shendar, as well as with the police officers in charge of the investigation.
just an integral part of winning the Tour de France? Sure seems that way: AP/Yahoo
Floyd Landis was set to make a triumphant post-Tour de France appearance on the “Tonight Show.” Instead, the cyclist may end up as comedy fodder for host Jay Leno.
Landis, whose victory was put in doubt after his team said he tested positive for high testosterone levels, won’t appear on the NBC talk show Friday as planned, a network spokeswoman said Thursday.
Raw Story has this up and I’m sure many of you have seen it, but woohoo I just had to post it here.
Detainee Abuse Charges Feared
Shield Sought From ’96 War Crimes Act
An obscure law approved by a Republican-controlled Congress a decade ago has made the Bush administration nervous that officials and troops involved in handling detainee matters might be accused of committing war crimes, and prosecuted at some point in U.S. courts.
Senior officials have responded by drafting legislation that would grant U.S. personnel involved in the terrorism fight new protections against prosecution for past violations of the War Crimes Act of 1996. That law criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions governing conduct in war and threatens the death penalty if U.S.-held detainees die in custody from abusive treatment.
In light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that the international Conventions apply to the treatment of detainees in the terrorism fight, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has spoken privately with Republican lawmakers about the need for such “protections,” according to someone who heard his remarks last week.
Gonzales told the lawmakers that a shield is needed for actions taken by U.S. personnel under a 2002 presidential order, which the Supreme Court declared illegal, and under Justice Department legal opinions that have been withdrawn under fire, the source said. A spokeswoman for Gonzales, Tasia Scolinos, declined to comment on Gonzales’s remarks.
I bet that what they REALLY want is protection for Dear Leader. Oh, this one makes me smile.
.
WOW – would be a great newsline in January 2009!
To avoid prosecution within U.S. territory and being at risk of rendition by Special Forces of the EU, George accepted the invitation of Peru’s new president Ricardo Lunatico.
With congressional midterm elections less than four months away, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that candidates will be facing a public that has grown increasingly pessimistic, as nearly two-thirds don’t believe life for their children’s generation will be better than it has been for them, and nearly 60 percent are doubtful the Iraq war will come to a successful conclusion.
And there’s more pessimism: Among those who believe the nation is headed on the wrong track, more than 80 percent say it’s part of a longer-term decline.
Bush’s approval numbers are still in the toilet, Republicans are still in trouble. It often takes getting hit over the head with a brick, but American eyes are opening to the disaster that America has become. All this pessimism makes me hopeful for November.
Wrinkled faces or a life of sin is the choice facing Malaysia’s majority Muslim population after the country’s National Fatwa Council ruled that Botox contains substances prohibited under Islam, including those from pigs, it was reported today.
The council ruled during a three-day meeting after six months of research that Muslims should reject the increasingly popular anti-ageing treatment on religious grounds.
I just loved typing that headline. No other comment necessary. 😉
CRAWFORD, Texas – War protesters will have a new and bigger gathering place when they return in August to President Bush’s adopted hometown: a 5-acre lot bought with insurance money Cindy Sheehan received after her son was killed in Iraq.
«« click on pic to enlarge U.S. peace activist Cindy Sheehan is hugged by fellow Californian Michelle George on the streets of Washington. Almost a year ago Sheehan's campaign to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq began on a roadside near U.S. President George W. Bush's Texas ranch, and she has already made plans to do the same next month. Reuters/Jason Reed
Gerry Fonseca, a fellow war protester who acted as Sheehan’s agent, said he recently bought the vacant lot about a mile from downtown Crawford — and about 7 miles from Bush’s ranch — for $52,500. About half the land is pasture, and the other half is woods, he said.
“If Cindy Sheehan came to town, I don’t think anybody would have sold her any property,” Fonseca, of Eagle Rock, Mo., told The Associated Press on Thursday.
and all that I can say is Go Cindy Go! And all I can say to George is you can run and you can try to hide, but who you are and what you have done has made it a moral imperative that are never to forget who you are and what you have done!
“We are stardust, we are golden…” Each year nearly 40,000 tons of cosmic dust fall to Earth from outer space. Now, the first successful chronological study of extraterrestrial dust in Antarctic ice has shown that this amount has remained largely constant over the past 30,000 years, a finding that could help refine efforts to understand the timing and effects of changes in the Earth’s past climate.
Katrina – the aftereffects continue: A Louisiana chemist and environmental activist claims that all along the gulf coast, Katrina washed ashore sediments containing levels of arsenic well above safe levels.
Scientists say they have solved the mystery of why prehistoric flying reptiles grew crests on their heads. A rare skull specimen found in Brazil shows the crest appeared at puberty, suggesting it was used to attract attention from the opposite sex.
How full a man’s stomach is can dictate the type of woman he will fancy, UK research suggests. A study of 61 male university students found those who were hungry were attracted to heavier women than those who were satiated. The finding is consistent with other research that found when food is scarce, the ideal of feminine beauty shifts to fuller-figured women.
Adding (environmental) insult to (military) injury: 10,000 to 30,000 metric tons of oil have spilled into the Mediterranean Sea after Israel bombed a power plant. Lebanon’s Environment Ministry says the oil flooded into the sea when Israeli jets hit storage tanks at the Jiyyeh plant south of Beirut on July 13 and 15, creating an ecological crisis that Lebanon’s government has neither the money nor the expertise to deal with. “We have never seen a spill like this in the history of Lebanon. It is a major catastrophe,” Environment Minister Yacoub al-Sarraf told Reuters.
A controversial alternative to black hole theory has been bolstered by observations of an object in the distant universe, researchers say. If their interpretation is correct, it might mean black holes do not exist and are in fact bizarre and compact balls of plasma called MECOs (magnetospheric eternally collapsing object). According to the MECO theory, objects in our universe can never actually collapse to form black holes. When an object gets very dense and hot, subatomic particles start popping in and out of existence inside it in huge numbers, producing copious amounts of radiation. Outward pressure from this radiation halts the collapse so the object remains a hot ball of plasma rather than becoming a black hole.
Nothing to see here; move along, move along: The government is failing to reduce health risks from toxic air pollution as required by law, congressional investigators said Wednesday. The Environmental Protection Agency has not met 30 percent of the Clean Air Act’s requirements and regularly misses deadlines: the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said the EPA largely has failed to regulate air pollutants from small sources, including dry cleaners and trucks. The GAO report said the EPA has not yet met 239 of the law’s requirements; of those the agency did fulfill, only 12 were met on time.
Psychologists have proven for the first time that exposure to violent video games can desensitize individuals to real-life violence. “In short, the modern entertainment media landscape could accurately be described as an effective systematic violence desensitization tool,” the researcher said. “Whether modern societies want this to continue is largely a public policy question, not an exclusively scientific one.”
Mediterranean beaches may get too hot for tourists this century because of global warming and northern Europeans will find the summer balmy enough to stay at home, researchers said on Thursday… If the jellyfish don’t get them first: Sweltering temperatures sweeping Europe have brought a plague of jellyfish to Spain’s eastern seashores, forcing vacationers to stay out of the sea, the Red Cross said on Thursday.
And to end the week, a volcano story! A new type of miniature volcano has been discovered in the western Pacific Ocean. These volcanoes cannot easily be explained by current theories, and may be due to magma escaping along cracks in a tectonic plate.
“…when food is scarce, the ideal of feminine beauty shifts to fuller-figured women.”
Maybe I’ll take my next vacation at a fat farm for men. 😉
It is so much fun to respond to these.
Re: stardust. Does this mean that I am not responsible for the dust bunnies that accumulate in my house at a rampant rate of growth?
Re: flying reptile crests and preferences for full-figured women. Sex is the default explanation of so many of my scientist colleagues. See stardust comment above.
Re: black holes. My neighbor walked in just as I got to the “hot balls of plasma” line (reading this aloud). “Is this a story about Viagra?”
Re: miniature volcanos. Now we know what happens to all those volcanos kids build for science projects in elementary school.
Re: exposure to violence. Oh sure, we didn’t know this before. Right. We only know things when we see it in flesh and blood and body function changes. No matter that studies have observed this literally for decades in behavior. I’m sorry, this one blew out my humor gasket. This is not new, and not news! I suppose it would take a PET scan to prove that George Bush has a Twinkie instead of frontal lobes before we could believe that his actions – say, at the recent G9 summit – were just a bit juvenile.
Thanks for the chuckles this am … 🙂
Thanks for the link on the violent videogame paper. I hadn’t checked Craig Anderson’s website in a few weeks. He was my advisor for a few years at University of Missouri before he moved up to Iowa State, so I’m quite familiar with some of the videogame work that he’d spearheaded. Heck, I was quite pleased when some of the stuff we’d worked on made its way to publication a couple years ago.
.
Rice’s spokesman, Adam Ereli, took strong issue with an assertion by Israel’s Justice Minister Haim Ramon, who said the failure of world leaders to call for an immediate cease-fire at a summit in Rome gave Israel a green light to carry on with its campaign to crush Hezbollah.
“Any such statement is outrageous,” Ereli said. “The United States is sparing no effort to bring a durable and lasting end to this conflict.”
Justice Minister Haim Ramon Under Criminal Investigation
TEL AVIV (Haaretz) July 28 — Justice Minister Haim Ramon has been barred from making any decisions on professional matters relevant to his ministry while a criminal investigation is being conducted against him.
Haim RamonThe decision to restrict Ramon’s activities was made Thursday night by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, following the start of a criminal investigation against the minister over allegations of sexual harassment against an officer serving in the military secretariat of the Prime Minister’s Office.
Ramon was questioned by the Fraud Squad for seven hours, and then asked Mazuz for advice on how he is expected to behave, “so that there will be no impression that I have any influence over the investigation.”
Mazuz met with State Prosecutor Eran Shendar, as well as with the police officers in charge of the investigation.
≈ Crossposted from my diary —
IDF: Rome Gives Us Legitimacy to Forge Ahead In Lebanon ¶ Updated ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Two news buckets?
Is there that much going on today?
Or is this menu style: one from diary A and one from diary B?
No, KP was just ready at the same time I was…the rule is, if it isn’t up by 9 ET, it’s open to whoever wants to post it.
I deleted mine.
I didn’t know that rule. Someday when you and Knox are busy, I’d also be willing to jump in.
I’ll be on vacation next week, most likely with limited internet acccess, so if you can help out, that would be great!
No problem. I’ll make a point to check on days that I can.
Oh, I’m sorry you deleted yours! I was in a strange mood and I was going next to post a bit of useful fluff on your newsbucket just like I did here!
Damn. This means I have to actually start working.
just an integral part of winning the Tour de France? Sure seems that way: AP/Yahoo
Raw Story has this up and I’m sure many of you have seen it, but woohoo I just had to post it here.
Shield Sought From ’96 War Crimes Act
An obscure law approved by a Republican-controlled Congress a decade ago has made the Bush administration nervous that officials and troops involved in handling detainee matters might be accused of committing war crimes, and prosecuted at some point in U.S. courts.
Senior officials have responded by drafting legislation that would grant U.S. personnel involved in the terrorism fight new protections against prosecution for past violations of the War Crimes Act of 1996. That law criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions governing conduct in war and threatens the death penalty if U.S.-held detainees die in custody from abusive treatment.
In light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that the international Conventions apply to the treatment of detainees in the terrorism fight, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has spoken privately with Republican lawmakers about the need for such “protections,” according to someone who heard his remarks last week.
Gonzales told the lawmakers that a shield is needed for actions taken by U.S. personnel under a 2002 presidential order, which the Supreme Court declared illegal, and under Justice Department legal opinions that have been withdrawn under fire, the source said. A spokeswoman for Gonzales, Tasia Scolinos, declined to comment on Gonzales’s remarks.
I bet that what they REALLY want is protection for Dear Leader. Oh, this one makes me smile.
.
WOW – would be a great newsline in January 2009!
To avoid prosecution within U.S. territory and being at risk of rendition by Special Forces of the EU, George accepted the invitation of Peru’s new president Ricardo Lunatico.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Link
With congressional midterm elections less than four months away, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that candidates will be facing a public that has grown increasingly pessimistic, as nearly two-thirds don’t believe life for their children’s generation will be better than it has been for them, and nearly 60 percent are doubtful the Iraq war will come to a successful conclusion.
And there’s more pessimism: Among those who believe the nation is headed on the wrong track, more than 80 percent say it’s part of a longer-term decline.
Bush’s approval numbers are still in the toilet, Republicans are still in trouble. It often takes getting hit over the head with a brick, but American eyes are opening to the disaster that America has become. All this pessimism makes me hopeful for November.
Link
Wrinkled faces or a life of sin is the choice facing Malaysia’s majority Muslim population after the country’s National Fatwa Council ruled that Botox contains substances prohibited under Islam, including those from pigs, it was reported today.
The council ruled during a three-day meeting after six months of research that Muslims should reject the increasingly popular anti-ageing treatment on religious grounds.
I just loved typing that headline. No other comment necessary. 😉
.
Hi neighbor, look who’s here again!
CRAWFORD, Texas – War protesters will have a new and bigger gathering place when they return in August to President Bush’s adopted hometown: a 5-acre lot bought with insurance money Cindy Sheehan received after her son was killed in Iraq.
«« click on pic to enlargeU.S. peace activist Cindy Sheehan is hugged by fellow Californian Michelle George on the streets of Washington. Almost a year ago Sheehan's campaign to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq began on a roadside near U.S. President George W. Bush's Texas ranch, and she has already made plans to do the same next month. Reuters/Jason ReedGerry Fonseca, a fellow war protester who acted as Sheehan’s agent, said he recently bought the vacant lot about a mile from downtown Crawford — and about 7 miles from Bush’s ranch — for $52,500. About half the land is pasture, and the other half is woods, he said.
“If Cindy Sheehan came to town, I don’t think anybody would have sold her any property,” Fonseca, of Eagle Rock, Mo., told The Associated Press on Thursday.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
I love it!
and all that I can say is Go Cindy Go! And all I can say to George is you can run and you can try to hide, but who you are and what you have done has made it a moral imperative that are never to forget who you are and what you have done!
while I focus on never allowing George to forget who he is and what he has done.