The Shins - Sleeping Lessons

Todays song of the day. Enjoy!

Photos

I just noticed that Yahoo has a cool collection of their most emailed photos--the fashion design ones in particular grabbed my attention, since they support my conviction that modern art and fashion is simply becoming redicadonkulous.

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Photos 3 and 7:

The Myriad Ways of Counting Money

I didn't realize there were so many:


How People Count Cash? - Free videos are just a click away

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Ween - Mutilated Lips

Todays song of the day. Enjoy!

Clocky

The alarm clock with wheels, allowing it to hide randomly after you hit snooze...I just the love the image of someone having to wake up, still in a daze, and chasing their alarm clock around their apt. in order to get it to shut-up.

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Stoned Ape Theory

So it turns out the long search for the answer as to how, exactly, human consciousness emerged was right under our noses all along...

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To summarize: McKenna theorizes that as the North African jungles receded toward the end of the most recent ice age, giving way to grasslands, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the branches and took up a life out in the open -- following around herds of ungulates, nibbling what they could along the way.

Among the new items in their diet were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing in the dung of these ungulate herds. The changes caused by the introduction of this drug to the primate diet were many -- McKenna theorizes, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.

About 12,000 years ago, further climate changes removed the mushroom from the human diet, resulting in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to pre-mushroomed and frankly brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.

The Books - Classy Penguin

Today's song of the day. Enjoy!

Science Tattoos

Carl Zimmer started a Flikr album a few months ago dedicated to science tattoos, and it turned out to be a huge success, so now he has a web page fully devoted to them. Check it out:

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Hillary loses to Obama's Asymmetric Political Campaign Strategy

Frank Rich has a good piece in the NyTimes which assesses the outcome of the Democratic horse race between Obama and Clinton and offers a number of explanations for why the latter appears to have lost.

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I found the allegory between the democratic race and the Iraq war to be pretty witty (tho perhaps a little snobbishly so):

The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn.

Streaker + Horse Race =

Reason number 6,789,874 why I am proud to be a member of the male sex:

Link (be sure to watch the vid):

A man celebrating his buck's day with 26 of his mates thought it would be funny to strip off and be first past the post at the Moruya racetrack.

Problem was a race involving real horses was tearing down the home straight when the streaker made his mad dash.

IAEA Report on Iran

Andy Grotto has an informative post over at Arms Control Wonk on the recently released IAEA report on Iran. Although the report itself is mildly comforting, the peculiar timing of the documents produced by Iran and, moreover, the past trend of Iranian behavior is still rather puzzling and therefore somewhat unsettling. There's a good discussion in the comments section and I think commenter Hass makes a very keen observation, which I largely agree with:

This isn't about nukes or nuclear power — if it was then the US would have accepted Iran's various proposals including the Iranian offer to suspend enrichment and the 2003 peace feeler. This is about regime change, and the nuclear issue presents a good pretext. The Iranians have come to believe that no matter what they do, even if they accept the UNSC suspension and even if the IAEA gives Iran a clean bill of health, something else will be ginned up. That's not an irrational conclusion.

Andrew Bird - Dark Matter

Todays song of the day. Enjoy!

Ode to the LHC

Joel Achenbach has a great write-up in National Geographic on the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator which scientists hope will uncover the Higgs Boson, the so called "God particle". The photos taken by Peter Ginter, which accompany the article, are truly stunning.

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If you were to dig a hole 300 feet straight down from the center of the charming French village of Crozet, you'd pop into a setting that calls to mind the subterranean lair of one of those James Bond villains. A garishly lit tunnel ten feet in diameter curves away into the distance, interrupted every few miles by lofty chambers crammed with heavy steel structures, cables, pipes, wires, magnets, tubes, shafts, catwalks, and enigmatic gizmos.

This technological netherworld is one very big scientific instrument, specifically, a particle accelerator-an atomic peashooter more powerful than any ever built. It's called the Large Hadron Collider, and its purpose is simple but ambitious: to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things.

The Militarization of Space: aka El Farce Supreme

Ashley Tellis is one of those people who has an inimitable knack for making informatively clarifying points which often illuminate particular aspects of issues that are vital to the United States' interests. That said, his recent article in the WSJ on the potentiality of a space arms race, can only be described as a penumbra on rational foreign policy making and diplomacy.

The introduction of weapons in space would be deleterious to global security. But the treaty unfurled by Messrs. Lavrov and Li would neither effectively prohibit their deployment, nor conclusively annul the threat of force against space objects. It would only produce the illusion of security, while doing nothing to eliminate the counterspace capabilities currently present in many countries, especially China.

So in the first sentence we have a suspicious admonition that weapons in space would be detrimental to global security (which certainly warrants a 'no shit sherlock'). Then Tellis explains why the US found the recently proposed treaty unappealing: the US is more concerned about the counterspace capabilities that states such as China and Russia wields, than it is with these two states' fears of the US expanding its military dominance--which the US undisputedly has in the realms of land, air, and sea--to the final dimension: space.

The biggest deficiency in the Russian-Chinese draft treaty is that it focuses on the wrong threat: weapons in space. There aren't any today, nor are there likely to be any in the immediate future. The threat to space assets is rather from weapons on earth -- the land- and sea-based kinetic, directed-energy and electromagnetic attack systems. The treaty entirely ignores these.

Now we have two conclusions--the deleterious nature of weaponizing space with regards to the global security environment and the lack thereof of weapons in space today and, logic permitting, ever--which seems to warrant my proposal: sign the damn treaty if it makes the Chinese and Russians happy (since based on our conclusions we have nothing to lose, besides ink) and by doing so, unless I am too young and naive to understand international dealings, effectively decrease their need for and development of counterspace capabilities by giving them their desired 'illusion of security'.

Not signing the treaty simply sends the message that the United States intends to keep the option of weaponizing space open. If that, indeed, is not our intent, than I see no need to send false signals. What can we hope to achieve with this stick, which pokes not only dangerously, but provocatively at the sleeping monster of potential disaster?