February 2012
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Myanmar’s startling changes: Pragmatic virtues ||... →
Another day, another milestone: there appears to be no let-up in the frenetic pace of Myanmar’s political transformation. In early February, for the first time in memory, the finance minister revealed details of the government budget. In a speech to parliament (of all places: the place had been considered a joke), he also divulged how much Myanmar owed in foreign debt ($11 billion). Then, a...
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Navy Moving Ahead With Railgun Devo || Defense... →
[T]he Navy is about to take one more step toward making high-powered railguns a ship-board reality. Yup, the Office of Naval Research is about to start test firing a BAE Systems-built railgun and another made by General Atomics.
Basically, railguns use a ton of electromagnetic energy to push a projectile out of a barrel made of two long rails at hypersonic speeds (up to 5,600 miles per hour)...
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Entire genome of extinct human decoded from fossil... →
In 2010, Svante Pääbo and his colleagues presented a draft version of the genome from a small fragment of a human finger bone discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia. The DNA sequences showed that this individual came from a previously unknown group of extinct humans that have become known as Denisovans. Together with their sister group the Neandertals, Denisovans are the closest extinct...
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ObamaCare's Great Awakening || Wall Street Journal →
The political furor over President Obama’s birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn’t be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate...
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“‘Rights’ are not those things granted by the sovereign and...”
– Mark Steyn
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The Very Last World War I Veteran Has Died || The... →
A British woman who served with the Royal Air Force for the last two months of World War I was the last known veteran of the war when she died in her sleep Saturday night. Florence Green joined the RAF at the age of 17 and died just before her 111th birthday, which would have been Feb. 19. She had been a mess steward with the air force, the BBC reported, serving in two U.K. air bases after...
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Synaesthesia: Smells like Beethoven || The... →
Ms Crisinel and Dr Spence wanted to know whether an odour sniffed from a bottle could be linked to a specific pitch, and even a specific instrument. To find out, they asked 30 people to inhale 20 smells—ranging from apple to violet and wood smoke—which came from a teaching kit for wine-tasting. After giving each sample a good sniff, volunteers had to click their way through 52 sounds of...
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Alberto Contador found guilty of doping, stripped... →
Alberto Contador was stripped of his 2010 Tour de France title Monday and banned for two years after sport’s highest court found the Spanish cyclist guilty of doping.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport suspended the three-time Tour champion after rejecting his claim that his positive test for clenbuterol was caused by eating contaminated meat on a 2010 Tour rest day.
The three-man CAS...
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Puppy Bowl! Puppy Bowl! Puppy Bowl!!!
Soon. I can’t wait. It’s my favorite sporting event of the year.
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“There’s never been a more precise forecast of a giant earthquake, period....”
– Kerry Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (via National Geographic article on tsunamis)
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Government and Its Rivals || Ross Douthat, New... →
Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.
But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal...
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Who Really Stopped SOPA, and Why? || Tech Freedom →
The political philosophy of the Internet, though still largely unformed, is by no means inarticulate. The aspirations of Internet users largely reflect the best features of the technology itself—open, meritocratic, non-proprietary and transparent. Its central belief is the power of innovation to make things better, and its major tenet is a ruthless economic principle that treats information as...
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The Coming Tech-led Boom || Wall Street Journal →
In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed—along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today.
In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912—electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and the radio amplifier—would foster such...
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DNA Turning Human Story Into a Tell-All || New... →
The tip of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins.
The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone...
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Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and its record of... →
Amid new strains in U.S.-Egypt ties, some in Washington are studying the tensions and results of recent voting for indications that democracy can take hold. Those who say the Muslim Brotherhood is showing new signs of moderation should compare its message to outsiders, in English, with its message to Egyptians and other Arabs, in Arabic.
Take the Brotherhood’s official English and Arabic Web...
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Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us ||... →
This assumption—that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system—is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology. It defines modern science. In general, we believe that the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information, by our ceaseless accumulation of facts. Scientists refer to this process as reductionism. By...
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“Individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose...”
– Friedrich Hayek, Road to Serfdom
January 2012
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Evolution World Tour: Wadi Hitan, Egypt ||... →
Scientists had long suspected that whales were terrestrial mammals that had eased into the ocean over millions of years, gradually losing their four legs. Modern whales, after all, have vestigial hind leg bones. But little in the fossil record illustrated the transition—until Gingerich began excavating Wadi Hitan’s hundreds of whale fossils, finding legs and knees.
Those skeletons “are the...
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WatchArt+Com’s Kinetic Sculpture (via Wired)
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The State of His Policies || Wall Street Journal →
Meantime, as Mr. Obama begins his fourth year in power it’s a good moment to recount the economic record that he’d rather not talk about. The President inherited a deep recession, but in political terms that should have been a blessing. History shows that the deeper the recession, the sharper the recovery, and Mr. Obama was poised to take credit for the economy’s natural...
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Opportunity arrives at Greeley Haven – 5th Winter... →
NASA’s seemingly indestructible Opportunity rover has arrived at the breathtaking location where she’ll be working through her unfathomable 5th Martian Winter. The Opportunity Mars Exploration Rover has not only endured, but flourished for 8 years of unending “Exploration & Discovery” on the Red Planet despite having an expected lifetime at landing of just 3 months, way back in January...
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Profit vs. Principle: The Neurobiology of... →
Let your better self rest assured: Dearly held values truly are sacred, and not merely cost-benefit analyses masquerading as nobel intent, concludes a new study on the neurobiology of moral decision-making. Such values are conceived differently, and occur in very different parts of the brain, than utilitarian decisions.
“Why do people do what they do?” said neuroscientist Greg Berns of Emory...
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“The light we see from the moon when we look at it at night left its surface just...”
– Dr Griffin
… to the beginning of the universe
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Senate Democrats’ 1,000 Days of Debt and... →
[Today marks] a sad milestone in the history of the United States Senate: the 1,000th day since Senate Democrats last offered a budget plan to the American people. Senate Democrats abandoned their official duty to prioritize Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars and tackle our nation’s most pressing economic challenges — dealing a painful blow to fiscal progress that may be felt for some time.
...
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Supreme Court Court Rejects Willy-nilly GPS... →
The Supreme Court said Monday that law enforcement authorities might need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move — but the justices did not say that a warrant was needed in all cases.
The convoluted decision in what is arguably the biggest Fourth Amendment case in the computer age, rejected the Obama administration’s position that...
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All-news WNEW debuts as competitor to WTOP ||... →
Starting early Monday, one of WNEW’s most prominent voices will be a familiar one to WTOP’s listeners. The station’s morning traffic reporter is Lisa Baden, who called the drive-time grind every weekday for more than a decade on WTOP until early last year, when the station began using its own employees to report traffic (Baden is under contract to a company called Total Traffic).
Having...
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Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to... →
According to stunning archaeological discoveries here in recent years, the earthworks on Mr. Araújo’s land and hundreds like them nearby are much, much older — potentially upending the conventional understanding of the world’s largest tropical rain forest.
The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest:...
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Into the mind of a Neanderthal || New Scientist →
Humour is just one aspect of Neanderthal life we have been plotting for some years in our mission to make sense of their cognitive life. So what was it like to be a Neanderthal? Did they feel the same way we do? Did they fall in love? Have a bad day? Palaeoanthropologists now know a great deal about these ice-age Europeans who flourished between 200,000 and 30,000 years ago. We know, for...
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Undetectable Technology || The Technium →
Schroeder’s explanation is a re-phrasing of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous declaration that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Schroeder’s declares:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are...
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Rejecting the Keystone pipeline is an act of... →
President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his reelection that, through some sort of political...
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Don’t Cry Baby — Etta James...